War and Remembrance (25 page)

“Are you in difficulties?”

“I myself? No. My family left Germany when I was a child. We’re Swiss citizens. People thought Hitler was a joke then, but Papa was not amused.” She tossed her head, and her tone changed. “Well! Tell me about the girl I resemble. But first, please, get me more soda water with lemon peel.”

At the bar he paused to throw down a hooker of gin. When he returned, Selma Ascher stood at the globe, arms crossed, one hip and leg thrust to a side, outlining a delicious thigh under the slim blue skirt; an old Natalie pose. “Well, about this girl,” he said, “she’s the niece of Aaron Jastrow, the author — if that means anything to you.”

“Oh? A
Jew’s Jesus,
and A
Jew Named Paul?
Of course. I didn’t much care for the books. They’re brightly written, but rather shallow and atheistical. So she’s Jewish! How did you meet, and where is she now?”

She avidly took in his story about Natalie. Selma Ascher could focus her pellucid brown eyes like a light beam. Slote’s eyes kept going to the strong pulse beating in her white throat above a lacy blue blouse. High nervous energy here.

“But what a strange business! Why didn’t she abandon this leech of an uncle, famous or not?”

“She was gradually sucked in. When it was too late she frantically tried to get herself and the baby out. The Pearl Harbor attack trapped her.”

“And where is this young Gentile naval officer now, the father of her baby?”

“On a submarine in the Pacific.”

“Most peculiar! I feel sorry for her, but her judgment must be very bad. How do you know she’s in Siena?”

“I’m working on the exchange of interned nationals. That’s where Italy’s housing our journalists. She’s on the list with Dr. Jastrow.”

“Does she know you’re trying to effect her release?”

“I hope so. The Swiss legation in Rome transmits our messages, and I’ve written to her.”

“Will you get her out?”

“I don’t know why not. Her uncle’s published magazine articles, and she’s been his researcher. A lot of Italian journalists are caught in my country. It’ll take time, but there shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“Perfectly fascinating.” Selma Ascher offered her hand. “You must write her about the girl you met in Bern who resembled her.”

“Let me take you home.”

“I have my car, thank you.”

“But I’d very much like to see you again.”

“Oh, no, no.” Her eyes rounded in ironical amusement. “I’d only depress you, reminding you of your lost love.”

With a swing of hips as pleasant as waltz music, she left the library.

“Then you think the Soviet Union will hold out?” said Dr. Ascher, a plump man with heavy gray hair and a big hooked nose. He sat at the head of the table, his deathly tired face sagging on his chest.

Slote was disconcerted by the bald question, much as he had been by the unlooked-for dinner bid, and by the wealth of the Ascher home. They were dining off heavy gold-trimmed china. On the panelled walls two Monets glowed in pencil-beams of light from ceiling apertures. Selma smiled across the table at Slote. “Papa, you’ll never get such a flat commitment from a diplomat.”

She sat between a red-faced priest in clerical garb, who was eating and drinking with lusty appetite, and a tall stringy old Englishman with an ugly wart on his nose, who accepted only vegetables and left them almost untasted. There were ten at the table, all strangers to Slote but Selma. The father and Selma’s brother, a prematurely bald little man, wore black skullcaps. In all his travels, Leslie Slote had never before dined with Jews who wore caps at table.

Selma’s mother touched Slote’s hand. On her slim fingers red and blue fire danced in two large diamonds. “But you’re fresh from Moscow. Do tell us your impressions.”

“Well, things were at their worst when I left in November. They’ve somewhat improved since.”

Slote slipped smoothly into his monologue on the winter counterattack: generals’ photographs in
Pravda
over victory headlines, sheepish officials streaming back to Moscow from Kuibyshev, improved food supply, fading air raids, columns of unshaven gaunt Germans marching down Gorki Boulevard in the snow under Red Army tommy guns, wiping snotty noses on their ragged sleeves. “ ‘Winter Fritz,’ the Russians call these fellows,” Slote said, and his hearers laughed and looked happy. “But here it is mid-January. The Germans gave some ground, but Hitler still holds western Russia. The counterattack looks to be petering out. One can’t be too optimistic. Except that
the Russian people do impress me with their stamina, patriotism, and sheer numbers.”

Dr. Ascher wearily nodded. “Yes, yes. But without ninety percent of her heavy industry, how can the Soviet Union go on with the war?”

“They moved factories behind the Urals all during their 1941 defeats. It was a superhuman job.”

“Mr. Slote, Hitler’s factories didn’t have to be moved. They’re the best in the world, and they have steadily been grinding out mountains of arms. He’ll start a big new offensive as soon as the mud dries from the spring thaw. Can those transplanted factories give the Russians enough arms?”

“They’re also getting Lend-Lease supplies.”

“Not enough,” snapped the old Englishman. “Not for them, and not for Britain.”

“What I fear,” said Ascher sadly, “is that if he takes the Caucasus in 1942, and Leningrad and Moscow are still cut off, one can’t exclude a separate peace.”

“Precisely what Lenin did in 1917,” said the Englishman. “Communists will sell out their allies at the drop of a hat. They’re total realists.”

Selma’s mother said, “That would be the end for the Russian Jews.”

The priest, his small eyes darting at Slote, paused in his vigorous attack on half a duck. “What’s the condition of those Jews in Russia now?”

“Behind the German lines? Probably fearful. Elsewhere, tolerable. The regime shunts them about like cattle, but that’s how Russia more or less handles everyone.”

“Are the stories coming out of Russia and Poland true?” said Dr. Ascher. Slote did not answer. “I mean about the big massacres.”

Hard stares at him, from all around the table.

“Such things are difficult to prove.” He spoke hesitantly. “It’s wartime. The world press is shut out of those areas. Even the German press is. Massacre victims can’t talk, and of course the murderers wouldn’t.”

“Drunkards talk, and Germans drink,” Selma said.

Mrs. Ascher touched his hand again. The strands of gray in her hair, the pretty bone structure of her wrinkled face, the long-sleeved black dress buttoned to the throat, all gave this woman of sixty or so a stately charm. “Why did you say conditions behind the German lines are fearful?”

“I saw some documentary evidence before I left Moscow.”

“What kind of documentary evidence?” The question came sharp and fast from the priest.

Less and less comfortable, Slote evaded. “Pretty much the sort of thing one hears about.”

The Englishman cleared his throat, rapped the table with a knuckle, and spoke in a rheumy voice. “Bern is such a gossipy small town, d’you
know, Mr. Slote? One’s told you were sent from Moscow to Switzerland by your State Department for being too concerned about the Jews.”

“There’s no truth in it. My country’s State Department itself is very concerned about the Jews.”

“One’s told, in fact,” persisted the Englishman, “that you disclosed your documentary evidence to American newspapermen, and so incurred the displeasure of your superiors.”

Slote could not handle this probe smoothly. “Gossip
is
seldom worth discussing,” was all he said.

In the long silence that fell, a maid put small prayer books by each diner’s place. Dr. Ascher and his son solemnly intoned a grace in Hebrew, while Slote, feeling awkward, turned pages of German translation. When the men and women went to different sitting rooms for coffee, Selma cut Leslie Slote off in a hallway, putting both her arms on his. Her black velvet bodice half-revealed pretty breasts smaller than Natalie’s. Glancing around and seeing nobody else, she leaned to him, and gave him a little cool kiss on the mouth.

“What’s that for?”

“You are so skinny. We must feed you up.” She rushed away.

An entire floor of the house was Dr. Ascher’s library: a long dark room with floor-to-ceiling rows of volumes, most of them leather-bound. The smell was heavy, bookish, musty. On the wall behind a broad cluttered desk hung signed pictures of politicians and opera stars. A wooden stand nearby displayed a war map of the world full of colored pins.

“You’ve been listening to Radio Berlin again, Jacob!” At the map, the Englishman rapped shaky fingers on the Malay peninsula. “The Jap has been stopped much farther north than this.”

Ascher said to Slote, “You see, I am fool enough to bring the war into my spiritual retreat.”

“You’ve a better picture here than we do at the legation. We tend to forget the Pacific entirely.”

“But, Herr Slote, it’s the key, isn’t it? If Singapore should fall, that starts a slide” — he raked spread fingers down across India to Australia — “which may not end short of world chaos. “ He swept the fingers up to the German front in Russia, a wavy north-south row of red pins from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. “Look at what Hitler holds! The Soviet Union is a cripple without arms or legs.”

“Singapore won’t fall,” said the Englishman.

“And a sovereign nation can grow new limbs,” Slote said. “It’s a rude tough form of life, like a crab.”

Ascher’s whey-pale face wanly lit up at the comparison. “Ah, but Germany is so strong. If only she could be struck from behind!” The fingers
jumped to the Atlantic coast. “But now the slide in East Asia will drag America and England in the other direction.” Ascher heavily sighed, and dropped on the brown leather sofa beside Slote.

“That jolly well mustn’t happen!” The Englishman, perching himself in a high-backed chair, began to needle Leslie Slote about the U-boat sinkings off the Atlantic shore. Couldn’t State’s countrymen exert enough self-discipline, even in wartime, to black out their coastal cities? Radio Berlin was openly boasting that the glow set up for the U-boats their easiest hunting of the war. The BBC had just confirmed appalling German figures for December sinkings off the American coast. At this rate the Allies were lost.

Furthermore — the old man was almost jumping from his chair, in worked-up indignation — why were the Japanese advancing so rapidly on Luzon? The British army was stretched all over the earth, and it had been at war for over two years; small wonder Singapore was threatened. But American forces in the Philippines had had two precious extra years of peace to prepare, and the United States wasn’t fighting anywhere else in the world. Why ‘weren’t the invaders being thrown into the sea? If America could not pull even
that
much weight in this war, well, then England would save civilization alone, and then confront the Russian bear afterward. But it would be a damned long haul. America had the resources, but it wanted the will to fight.

The tirade did not much anger Slote, for the manner and the cracking voice were senile. A peaceful nation needed time, he calmly returned, to get into the war mood. England under Chamberlain had showed that. But he had a question or two also. How did it help the British war effort to shut out of Palestine the Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler? How could a supposedly civilized democracy force women and children to keep sailing hopelessly around the Mediterranean in dangerous old hulks?

“There are reasons — reasons of regional policy, reasons of state —” the Englishman’s eyes watered, and he dashed a hand across them. “Empire brings responsibilities and dilemmas, you know — one’s sometimes between the devil and the deep — excuse me.” He got up and bolted from the room. In a moment his unpainted and unattractive daughter appeared and said, “We must be leaving.” With a reproachful look at Slote, she turned on her heel and went out.

“I’m sorry,” Slote said to Ascher.

“When Treville was on duty here in the legation,” Ascher said firmly, “he was our good friend. He’s unwell, he loves his country, and he’s old.”

So the party broke up. Slote and the priest went out together into a freezing windy starlit night. Putting up his collar, Slote said he would walk to his flat. The priest proposed to accompany him for the exercise. Slote thought the fat small cleric might hold him back, but it was he who had to
hurry, as they strode under bare-limbed trees and past dry fountains. In the quiet night Slote could hear the priest’s hard even breathing. Vapor jetted from the broad nose as from a little steam engine. They did not exchange a word, walking about a mile.

“Well, here we are,” Slote said, halting outside his apartment house. “Thanks for the company.”

The priest looked straight in his face. “Would further documentary evidence about what is happening to the Jews interest you?” This was said abruptly in crisp German.

“What? Ah — certainly my government, as I said at dinner, is concerned to alleviate the sufferings of the Jews.”

The priest’s hand waved toward a gloomy little children’s park across the street, where swings and seesaws stood amid empty benches. They crossed the street and walked once around the park in silence.

“Frightful. Frightful. Frightful.” The words burst from the priest in a tone so different, so grief-stricken and intense, that Slote halted, shaken. The priest looked up at him, his face distorted in the light of a distant street lamp. “Herr Slote, I am Bavarian by birth. I watched this pile of filth, Adolf Hitler, make speeches on street corners to twenty people in Munich in 1923. I saw him make insolent speeches at his trial in 1924 after the putsch. At the 1936
Parteitag,
I saw him speak to a million people. He has always been the same pile of filth. He has never changed. He hasn’t to this day. The same hand on the hip, the same shaking fist, the same vulgar voice, and dirty language, and stupid primitive ideas. And yet he is Master of Germany. He is the evil genius of my people. He is a scourge sent by God.”