The Keeper of the Walls (48 page)

T
he next day
, Wolf and Mina were released from the SS prison where they had been taken, and they were told that Wolf's old friend, Hans von Bertelmann, had paid fifty thousand schillings for each of them. With hundreds of other Jews, dressed as they had been taken, Wolf and his mother were forced into the streets and made to clean up the remains of the damage. Shards of glass pierced their hands, and boots kicked their legs as they were bending down to do their slaves' work. On the streets, remnants of their normal lives stared at them, ripped apart to the point of disfigurement. They had been born children of God; and now they had lost their humanity.

Wolf and his mother had no house of their own in which to take refuge. And so, when darkness came, they directed their footsteps, cautiously, to the main thoroughfare of the Ringstrasse, where their friend Count von Bertelmann resided. The row of trees, bare-limbed and white with snowy crystals, seemed a painful, almost ironic reminder of the previous night. But here, for the most part, the damage had been minimal; not many Jews lived in these tall stone mansions full of Old World style and character.

Hans von Bertelmann was a stately middle-aged man who had been Wolf's friend for time immemorial. They had met at university, and had continued a close friendship thereafter. Von Bertelmann was a poet; he had been born to sufficient riches to indulge his pleasures, and so he wrote odes and ballads that he published himself, and distributed to his acquaintances. He was an elegant, fair man, who had never been married; and, with Wolf, he had fought to uphold the Social Democrats against the rising power of the Nazis. He'd believed in saving his country from Hitler. And so now, afraid of reprisals, although there wasn't a drop of Jewish blood in him, he lived discreetly, out of the public eye, in his ancestral home.

Wolf, not wishing to incriminate his friend further, knocked quietly at his back door. Within seconds, it seemed, it opened. A young maid let them in, and in the hallway, Hans himself met them, hands outstretched. “I alerted Helga to your coming,” he stated.

Wolf, pressing the strong, good hands, could only murmur, “It was dangerous, Hans. Terribly dangerous to go out on a limb for some Jews. By the way—how did you know where we were being held?”

“I knew you had to be
somewhere.
To determine exactly where only required a certain persistency and diligence. No genius, I'm afraid.” Dropping his tone, he added: “The girl's okay. But you'll have to live in the wine cellar for a few days until I can make arrangements to get you out. Every day, it seems, I get some unexpected visitors . . . checking to see if I'm up to something they could pounce on to deport me. My name is too old, too well-known for them to send me away for something other than high treason—and so they're hoping to indict me for
that,
if they can catch me.”

“Why don't you leave the country?” Wolf asked. “Your parents aren't alive . . . you have no ties.” His own eyes welled up with tears, remembering Isaac.

Hans touched his shoulder, sympathetically. “We'll do all we can to find him,” he assured them. “But I
do
have ties. To my country. I'm not going to allow Hitler to destroy Austria. I have to stay—if for no other reason than to help the Jewish underground.”

He led the way to a small, recessed staircase, and Wolf held his mother up so that she could go down. After her bout with pneumonia, the events of the past forty-eight hours had reduced her to a weak, wobbly state, and her cheeks were slack, her eyes glazed, her chin trembling. Downstairs were three enormous cellars, very cold and damp, and entirely lined with bottles of exquisite vintage wines. Mina started to weep, against her son's shoulder.

Against one of the walls of the last cellar, two cots had been placed. A small oak table stood between them, laden with fruits forbidden to the Jews. “I'll raise the temperature of the whole house,” Hans told them. “That should help. And I'll come down whenever possible.”

“No one will look for us here?” Mina asked, her voice hollow with fear.

“Not at this point. None of my visitors has come this far. The house is very quiet, and I appear to lead a most uneventful existence. And of course, this is the first time I shall be hiding anyone.” He added, grimly: “But I'm sure not the last.”

Mina touched his sleeve, imploringly. “Please, Hans. I can't leave . . .without Isaac. And if ...the worst has happened, then I don't want to continue living. We've been together all our adult lives. I can't survive without him.”

In the cavernous cellar, her voice rang out, echoing her heart. Hans only said: “My dear Mina, I'll do what I can. You know I will. But you must do something for
me,
too. You must listen to me, and when I have completed the preparations for your departure, you must go. Isaac will follow you. I'll make myself responsible to you on this matter.”

“Do you suppose we'll be able to get out legally?” Wolf asked.

“I don't think so. Since Hitler's seizure of Austria, the friendly countries have been deluged with Jewish refugees. Australia and the United States are refusing to accept more than five thousand. Brazil, just a few thousand. Britain and France will only take children. And the Reich is allowing each Jew to take with him ten deutsche marks; that's two hundred French francs.”

“Maryse's waiting for us in Paris,” Wolf murmured softly. His chest felt tight with a strange lump that wouldn't dissolve. Mina had sunk down on one of the cots, and lay weeping silently, her body curved like that of a small child.

Seeming to read his mind, Count Hans von Bertelmann looked into Wolf's eyes, and said: “You're going to see them again, my friend. Maryse, and your small Nanni. Thank God that they are safe.

“I'm not quite sure how we'll get you out, nor to which country you shall have to be sent. But get you out we will. And you'll be safe, like Maryse and Nanni, and able to join up with them somewhere.”

Long after he had departed, Wolf kept hearing Hans's word,
somewhere.
It rang cold and indefinite, chilling him infinitely more than the temperature of the cellar. But for the moment, he and his mother were safe. That was all that counted.

For Wolfgang Steiner realized that if the Reich were to flourish, it could do so only over the slaughtered corpses of the Jewish people. They had escaped, this time, because the Nazis had gone easy on them, releasing them for a fortune in gold. He was certain, then, that such had not been his father's good fortune. Isaac had been one of the first casualties of the Nazi ordeal. Just as the night of November 9, baptized the Night of Broken Crystal in memory of all the broken glass shattered throughout the cities of the Reich, symbolized only the beginning.

But he would have to keep these thoughts to himself, if he expected his mother not to fall apart.

T
hroughout November and December
,
Maryse Steiner waited for her husband. A flow of legal and illegal Jewish refugees was pouring into Paris. Raïssa Sudarskaya burst in on Claire, to beg for clothes for an old lady who had arrived with only her nightgown on her back. The refugees, who had been professionals of standing in Germany and Austria, were arriving in droves, two hundred francs in their pockets, or none at all if they had been smuggled out. The Night of Broken Crystal had left no hope of justice under Hitler, and so the Jews who came, as beggars, were glad just to have escaped intact. Many had left members of their family in concentration camps. This term had come to signal terror in every German-speaking Jew.

They came, telling tales of such ghastly horror that those who listened felt their tears brimming over, and hackles rising on their skin. Only Maryse's face stayed carved in perfect, clear lines of immutable hardness. She listened, but she did not weep. She had pushed out the immediacy of her pain and thought only of Wolf's agony, and of his parents. For him, she had to stay whole; and for him, she had to contain her own anguish. She simply waited for him. He'd promised to come to her, and she knew he would. But in the meantime, she didn't sleep, and hardly tasted the food that Claire insisted she order. Every minute of every day, she sat, taut and expectant, waiting for word of Wolf. She didn't even know where he might be, at this point. But she prayed for his safety, for the preservation of his life. This was the only meaning to her own existence: to know he had survived.

And so the new year came, wrapped in a cloud of unknowing. Lily wondered how Maryse could stand it. They never spoke out loud about their fears and hopes. But every time word came about a man who might have been Wolf, or of two older people who might have been Mina and Isaac, Maryse's eyes would light up with intensity, and she would lean forward, hoping. Only to have her hopes dashed down by the discovery that it hadn't been her husband or his parents, but somebody else's husband, somebody else's parents.

Holding Nanni in her arms one evening, Kira said, a strange, faraway intonation in her young voice: “I know how hard it is to be without your Papa. But at least, when you go to sleep, you know that wherever he is, he loves you. My father's gone, just like yours, and we don't know where he is. But he left because he didn't love us enough—because we weren't that important to him.”

She was thirteen, already five feet three inches tall, with hard young breasts that pushed through her school's uniform, and the long legs of a ballerina. Many times, strangers had thought she was sixteen. But the look of pure hurt on her triangular face was the look of a wounded child. She had crossed a threshold, from adoring daughter to rejected child, from still hoping to resigned. Nicky heard and saw her, and the look he gave her was one of sheer empathy. Now she could understand where he had been for the last year, and stop condemning him for not keeping the fires burning.

They played with the Rublon children, Pierre and Jacqueline. They took Nanni for walks, and exclaimed over birthday presents. They were still children, but Lily often wondered for how long. Nicky, in particular, had skipped that wonderful, carefree part of childhood that she'd wanted for him; at fourteen, he was the best student in his ninth form. He was taller than his mother, topping her at five feet eleven inches; he shaved, although not every day. And his voice had deepened, acquiring a resonance that made her think, at the oddest moments, of Misha. This boy who had never resembled his father at all, now had his rich, Russian voice, with its enchanting, melodic, powerful timbre. She could close her eyes and hear her son, and think again of the days when Misha had courted her, reliving those halcyon days, much better forgotten, with poignant clarity. For it was infinitely easier not to see one's own unhappiness when one didn't compare it to a better life.

At the end of January 1939, Barcelona fell to General Francisco Franco's Fascist troops. Daladier halfheartedly permitted about half a million Spanish refugees to flood into France. By the end of February, those who had sought refuge in the city of Perpignan had behaved in such a despicable fashion that the damages to the host city had risen to two million francs. Wood placed at their disposal for the construction of barracks had been set afire, and the pumps that had been set up were now plugged up and impossible to use. But it looked as if the war was winding down to a close, and many of the renegades were returning home. How different from the German and Austrian Jews, who would never see their homeland again!

On March 2, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who had been Pope Pius XI's secretary of state, was elected in a single day to become the new Pope Pius XII. Lily felt an old stirring of excitement. The Catholic Church, with its myriad traditions that dated back far beyond the Middle Ages, could still grip her soul. On the tenth, she listened to a broadcast of his five-hour consecration; forty thousand of the faithful had crowded into the cathedral to watch, and he came out for the coronation, that the many more who were gathered outside might witness this holiest of moments. She leaned against the little radio, captivated, and remembered that when she'd been sixteen, she had thought, with some seriousness, of entering a convent. Now she was thirty-three, at the midpoint of her life, and hadn't been to church in eleven years.

It was actually strange, but she felt more and more Jewish, hearing the stories of those who had escaped death at the hands of the Nazis; and less and less a Catholic, even in those moments when, alone, she lay in bed and thought about God.

On March 15, Hitler's army moved into Prague, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia was on. On the eighteenth, the Führer confiscated all the Jewish money in the banks of Prague. That same day, a Viennese couple came to the Ritz, to see Maryse. Their name was Schwarz, and they had been no more than vague acquaintances. They came with some small paintings that, obviously, could have been worth no more than a hundred francs each. Maryse gave them money for their hotel, and waited, her lips parted, for them to tell her something . . . anything at all concerning Wolf.

But Herr Schwarz merely shook his head, and bit his lower lip. “We hear so little,” he told her, his voice low and trembling. “Sometimes, a tidbit. A man told me that your husband was alive, that he and his mother had been hidden somewhere by a Viennese
goy
—an aristocrat.”

“Hans? Count von Bertelmann? Was it him?”

Embarrassed at the fire of hope, so naked and glowing, in Maryse's eyes, Schwarz raised his hands palms up, helplessly. “I can't say. But the old lady—
i
ƒ it's your mother-in-law—isn't well, and isn't fit to travel. Yet the longer they stay . . .” His sentence hung in midair, ominously sinking in. Maryse nodded, her face numb, her heart knocking wildly inside her.

“And the old man? Herr Isaac Steiner? You didn't speak of him.”

“There was no old man, from the small snatch of news that reached my ears. But of course, I can't be certain of the accuracy of what I've told you.”

Maryse reached into her small alligator bag, and withdrew a checkbook. Silently, she wrote out a check, handed it to Schwarz. If what he'd said was true, then it was likely that Hans von Bertelmann had saved Wolf and Mina. But what of Papa? she thought, the tears coming at last in a rebellious spurt. Where could he be now?

“There are still good gentiles in the Reich,” she said, thinking of the tall, fair poet who had shared his university days with her husband.

After that, she began to live somewhat more easily, believing that Wolf lived, breathed, existed somewhere: it didn't matter where. When news came that two hundred fifty Czech officers had committed suicide, and that twelve thousand Jews of Prague had been sent to concentration camps, she almost didn't pay attention. But she wept at the fate of the children who would be reared as slaves to the great German Reich.

The night of March 29, Édouard Daladier spoke to the French people. He announced that he would not give a single acre of French land, nor one right over it, to the Italians, and he commended the Moslems of Tunisia for upholding their religion and their civilization. He said that France was strong, and united, that she would do all for peace, but that if the need came, she would rise in one movement to defend her rights and her freedom.

On the night of April 2, the sound of a bugle, and a broadcast on the radio brought the news, at eleven fifteen, that the Spanish war had ended. And on April 5, in Versailles, Parliament reelected Albert Lebrun President of the French Republic. But on Good Friday, Mussolini invaded Albania. That month, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, sent a message to Hitler and Mussolini, demanding that they cease their invasion of independent peoples, and begging them to promise not to touch thirty-one independent nations, and to begin at once to speak of disarmament and the resumption of international trade. Hitler reacted with anger, and Italy was silent. But the British started a register of volunteers twenty and twenty-one years of age, which yielded three hundred ten thousand soldiers-to-be; and, in Chateau-Thierry, in France, a general mobilization was set in motion.

Finally, after thirteen days of tension, Hitler answered Roosevelt. He had announced that only on the twenty-eighth would he make his reply. The world stood on tenterhooks, but for some reason, not the French. In fact, when Lily and Nicky tried to hear the speech on the radio, they discovered it had not even been broadcast. But in the evening, the newspapers were full of his good intentions. He said he wanted peace, the liberty of states, and that he wished to open talks with Great Britain. General amazement met his words. Maybe, then, there wouldn't have to be a war. And Lily was thankful, thinking with sudden anguish of her almost fifteen-year-old son: in three years, he would be called up to defend his country. It was better that this country not have to be defended, like that of the Steiners.

Relaxation was short lived. On May 22, the Axis pact was formally consolidated. The French newspapers spoke of “Italy's subordination to Germany.” Nicky took his mother's hand, his dark eyes troubled. And then he said in a strangely adult voice: “This time there is no going back. Eventually, he'll have to be stopped. And it's better that it happen soon. This war, Mama, isn't going to be ‘civilized,' like the last one when you were a girl.”

It's you who should be in America, my strong, brave young son, she thought. It's you, my Nicky, who needs to be protected, in a country that will not go to war again to save her European allies. And she wondered once more, as she had so many times, why her husband had left her, why life had turned against him—and why he'd never said good-bye.

“
W
hy
Cuba
?”
Mina Steiner implored, her brown eyes filled with fear. “It's so far away, and we know no one there—and Isaac, when he gets out, won't know where to find us!”

Wolf was very tired. Since the Night of Broken Crystal, he had lost twenty pounds. His mother, however, had completely wasted away. All his life, he'd watched her, plump, rosy, bursting with liveliness, full of opinions and of joie de vivre. Her round face ringed with auburn curls had soothed away, by its mere presence, hundreds of youthful hurts. Now she weighed one hundred pounds, and her cheekbones jutted out below huge, bloodshot eyes that were afraid, all the time afraid.

And for good reason, Wolf thought. He stood on the lower deck of the medium-sized German ship
Saint Louis,
watching the infinity of ocean spread before him, and he blessed the memory of his friend Hans. Slowly, Wolf closed his eyes, allowing himself to remember the days spent like rats in that damp cellar, and his mother's recurring illness. Hans had somehow managed to sneak a doctor—a real doctor, with medicines—down to visit her. At length she'd started to improve, but every day, every hour, it seemed, she'd wailed for Isaac, branding that cherished name into his brain like molten iron. Because he'd known, after a few months, that it was useless to hope. Either his father had already died at Dachau, or he would soon do so. Isaac was frail, a gentle man; and Wolf knew the Nazis well enough to understand that they would have no mercy.

But he couldn't voice his opinion to his mother. He had to keep her alive until they were reunited with Maryse and Nanni. After that, his little daughter would give her a new reason for living. Wolf wondered now, with an acute anguish, when he would see his loved ones again. There was no way of communicating with them. Hans had tried, through the underground, to send news, but he hadn't been at all confident that it would reach Maryse in Paris.

Finally, then, Mina had felt well enough to travel. But the only hope of immediate refuge that Hans had been able to arrange for them had been on this old ship, bound for Cuba. Nine hundred eighteen Jews were aboard, because the Cuban authorities had granted them permission to land. Their visas were legal; Wolf remembered with horror how they had been forced to cross into Germany, to board this ship in Hamburg. Most of the other emigrants were German Jews. But Hans had planned well, and the trip from Vienna had gone smoothly enough. And now, they were on their way to freedom.