Chapter 10

A forested plain lay before them, dipping toward the east, with a scattering of houses and farms, and three widely separated church spires. Puffs of smoke out there, Byron realized, came from German artillery. Panting from the little climb, the ambassador and the officer talked volubly, gesturing at the church spires. The ambassador scrawled notes and translated bits to Byron. On the terms of the cease-fire, he said, the neutral refugees would cross unescorted from the Polish to the German lines, heading for the farthest church, where Wehrmacht trucks would meet them. Colonel Rakowski feared that some refugees might wander on the poorly marked dirt roads, head for the wrong church, and find themselves between two fires when the truce-for which the Germans were granting only two hours-was ended. So he had asked the Swedish ambassador to come out and study the route beforehand. "He says," the ambassador observed to Byron, closing his notebook, "that the best view is from that observation tower. You can make out the different roads, all the way to the Kantorovicz church." Byron looked at the spindly wooden tower erected close by in the school's play yard. A narrow ladder led to a square metal-shielded platform, where he could see the helmet of a soldier. "Well, I'll go up, okay? Maybe I can make a sketch." "The colonel says the tower has been drawing quite a bit of fire." Byron managed a grin. With a paternal smile, the ambassador handed him the notebook and pen. Byron trotted to the ladder and went up, shaking the frail tower as he climbed. Here was a perfect view of the terrain. He could see all the roads, and all the turnoffs of the brown zigzags across no-man'sland, to the far church. The soldier on watch glanced away from his binoculars to gawk, as the young American in an open shirt and loose gray sweater sketched the roads in the ambassador's notebook, struggling With the pages as they flapped in the wind, marking all the wrong turns with X's, and crudely picturing the three churches in relation to the route. The soldier nodded when Byron showed him the sketch, and slapped his shoulder. "Ho kay," he said, with a grin of pride at his mastery of Americanese. Natalie leaned in the open doorway of the cottage, arms folded, as the limousine drew up. She hurried to the car, followed in a moment by Slote, who first said good-bye at the door to a kerchiefed old woman in heavy boots. As the car drove back toward Warsaw, the ambassador recounted their visit to the front, including Byron's venture up the tower. Meantime Byron worked on the notebook in his lap. "Think four copies is enough?" he said to the ambassador. "Plenty, I should think. Thank you." The ambassador took the notebook. "We may have timeto run off some mimeograph copies. Very well done." Natalie clasped Byron's hand and pulled it to her lap. She was sitting between him and Slote. She pressed his fingers, looking seriously at him, her dark eyes half-dosed. Through her light green dress, he felt the flesh of her thigh on the back of his hand, and the ridge of a garter. Slote repeatedly glanced at the two hands clasped in the girl's lap as he calmly smoked, looked out of the window, and chatted with the ambassador about assembling and transporting the refugees. A muscle in Slote's jaw kept Inoving under the sidn of his white face. In the embassy all was scurry and noise. The mayor's office had just sent word that the ceasefire was definite now for one o'clock. Polish army trucks would take the Americans to the departure point, and each person could bring one suitcase. The rush was on. The Americans still living outside the embassy were being summoned by telephone. A smell of burning paper filled the building, and fragments of black ash floated in the corridors. Mark Hartley occupied the cot next to Byron's in the cellar, and Byron found him sitting hunched beside a strapped-up suitcase, head in hands, a dead cigar protruding from his fingers. "Ready to go, Mark?" Hartley uncovered a drawn face, the eyes frightened and bulging. "Horowitz is the name, Byron. Marvin Horowitz." "Nonsense, how wig they know that?" Byron pulled from under the cot his old torn bag with the sprung hardware. Hartley shook his head. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I must be crazy. I never once pictured that anything like this would happen. I don't know what I thought. Maybe that Roosevelt would fly us out in Army planes. Something like that. I've never been so goddamned scared in my life. We're going to the Germans. The Germans." 'Put that in your bag," Byron said, tossing a worn black book to him as he packed. 'And cheer up. You're an American. That's all. An American named Hartley." 'With a Horowitz face and a Horowitz nose. What's this? The New Testament? What's this for?" Byron took the book, which had a gold cross stamped on the binding, and carefully tore out the flyleaf with his own name written on it. "Make a good Christian of you. Here, put it away. Don't sit around and worry. GO help Rowlandson burn papers." 'I wish I had my own Bible or prayer book," Hartley said dully, unstrapping his bag. "I haven't been inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah. An old smelly Hebrew teacher made me memorize a lot of gibberish. I did it to please my mother, but that was the end. I never went back once.
Now I wish I remembered the prayers. Any prayers." He glanced around at the bustling cellar. 'So help me, this hole looks to me now like home sweet home. I'd give anything if I could just stay here. Do you think we'll ever play bridge again one day, the four of us? In New York, maybe?" "Sooner than you think." 'From your mouth in God's cars. That's what my mother used to say." The army trucks came snorting and rattling up to the embassy at half past eleven; loose wobbly old machines so caked with mud and rust that their gray paint was scarcely discernable. At their arrival, more than a hundred Americans milling inside the fence on the lawn, set up a cheer and began singing "California Here I Come" and such ditties. The Poles of the staff, mostly girl secretaries, were sadly passing out coffee and cake. "They make me feel ashamed," Natalie said to Byron. Two of the Polish girls bearing trays had just gone by with fixed forced smiles and glistening eyes. "What's the alternative?" Byron, famished, bit into the coarse gray cake and made a face. It tasted of raw dough and paper ashes. "There's no alternative." Byron said, "Mark Hartley is scared stiff of the Germans. How about you?" Natalie's eyes flashed. "What can they do to me? I have an American passport. They don't know I'm a Jew." "Well, don't tell them. I mean don't become all brave or defiant or anything, okay? The idea is just to get the hell out." "I'm not an imbecile, Byron." A Polish officer shouted, the gate opened, and the Americans began piling into the trucks. Some people were too old to climb up, some were trying to take extra luggage, the Polish drivers and officers were urgent and short-tempered, and nobody was in charge. Yelling, complaining, weeping, and fist-waving went on, but most of the people, hungry and uncomfortable though they were, felt so happy at starting out that they continued to sing and laugh. The trucks clanked off in single file. A black Chevrolet with American flags on its fenders brought up the rear, carrying Slote, his three highest-ranking assistants, and the wives of two of them. Outside the gate the Polish secretaries stood and waved, tears running down their faces. Byron and Natalie jolted along in a truck, clasping each other's waists. Slote had offered her a place in the Chevrolet. She had shaken her head without a word. The bombardment was going on as heavily as ever: the distant HRUMP! HRUMP! HRUMP! of the artillery, the blasting explosions of bombs from three small Vs of German planes passing slowly in the hazy midday sky, and the popping and stuttering of the Polish antiaircraft guns.
The convoy crawled, stopped, and crawled through the shattered streets, the canyons of yellow-patched structures, careening up on sidewalks to avoid holes and tank traps, once backing out of a boulevard blocked by a newly fallen building. At the bridge across the Vistula truck convoys flying various embassy flags were converging. The bridge was jammed to a standsde with refugee trucks. There were more than two thousand neutral nationals in Warsaw, and every one of them evidently meant to get out. Byron kept glancing at his watch. The traffic started to move again, but so slowly that he feared they might not reach the departure point by one o'clock. German shells kept whistling by, and splashes like geysers boiled up in the river, The Germans clearly sometimes showering the bridge and the trucks. thought it all in the game if they Uled nine-tenths of the neutrals on the bridge, fifteen minutes before the cease-fire. The convoys ended in a stupendous pileup at the schoolhouse with the stone goose. Colonel Rakowski and the Swedish ambassador stood together in the road, shouting instructions to each truckload of descending passengers and handing out rrameographed instruction sheets. With some pride of authorship, Byron noticed that whoever had traced his sketch on the stencil had faithfully copied it, even to his crude pictures of the three churches. Guns in the woods all around the school were thundering away, but at five minutes to one the bombardment began to fade down. At one o'clock the guns fell silent. The loudest noise was the chattering of refugees in many languages along both sides of the road. Byron could hear birds, too, and the strumming of grasshoppers. It struck him that the noise of grasshoppers was the most peaceful sound on earth. A loudspeaker bawled final instructions in one language after another. Groups of neutrals, picking up their suitcases, began to walk down the sloping road. Finally came the English in a heavy Polish accent, "Please keep together. Do not make wrong turns. The German command has stated it will accept no responsibility for anybody who is not at the Kantorovicz church by three o'clock. Therefore the Polish command can accept no such responsibility. It is an easy hour's walk even for an old person. The enemy will undoubtedly recommence hostilities at three. We will return the heaviest possible fire at the first shot. Please, therefore, hurry. Good luck to you all. Long live America. Long live Poland." At this, the Americans took up their luggage and walked into no man's-land. For two or three hundred yards it was no different than the rest of Praha, but then the asphalt road narrowed and trailed off into a dusty, rutted, one-lane cart track. They passed ruined houses. The barnyards had no animals, except for an occasional abandoned chicken wandering and clucking, and some slinking jumpy cats. The road entered woods where sunlight slanteddown in green-yellow bars through the leaves. The leader of the Americans, a tall gray Episcopalian minister in a black suit and turnaround collar, checked Byron's sketch at each crossroad. This strange slow walk between two silent enemy armies took a full hour by Byron Henry's watch. As he remembered it later, it was like a stroll in company in peacetime through a fragrant autumnal forest. Many fall flowers, blue and orange and white, dotted the dirt road and the woods; the birds chirped and twittered; and the wonderful song of the grassIL hoppers filled the air. He also remembered becoming very dry-mouthed and thirsty from tension, so thirsty that his legs felt weak. Two other memories stayed with him: the diplomats' black cars going by, honking the walkers out of the road, with Slote laughing in the front seat and waving at him and Natalie; and then, near the end of the trek, at the bend of the road where the Kantorovicz church appeared, Mark Hartley coming up beside him, slipping his hand through his elbow, and saying, "My name is Mark Hartley, and oy, am I a good Christian!"-smiling at Byron, his face dust-caked and terror-stricken. All at once, there were the German guns and the German gun crews in the woods. The howitzers were bigger than the Polish artillery pieces, with an appearance of better, newer engineering. Watching the walkers, the soldiers stood quietly at their weapons, in their neat field gray and formidable Wehrmacht helmets. Byron peered at the German soldiers with immense curiosity. The helmets gave them a beetling warrior look, but most of them were young and had the same German faces he had seen in Munich and Frankfurt. Many wore glasses. It was hard to believe that these were the villains who had been pouring flying steel and fire on Warsaw, setting pregnant women aflame, blowing children's legs and hands off, and making a general shambles of a handsome metropolis. They were just young men in soldier suits and stern helmets, standing around in the shady woods amid the pleasant noises of birds and grasshoppers. From the first, the Germans handled the refugees better than the Poles had. A mule-drawn water cart-a large olive-painted cylinder on wheels-stood by the road near the church, and soldiers waited with tin cups to herd the thirsty people into a queue. From the water tank, other soldiers guided them toward new clean gray trucks, with thick black deeply treaded tires, so different from the Poles' dirty deteriorated machines. Wehrmacht officers in tailored long military coats and high peaked caps were talking amiably, though with marked condescension, to the arriving diplomats near a table by the roadside. As each national group came to the trucks, its ambassador or charge gave a typed roster to a bespectacled soldier behind the desk. He called off names, and one by one the people entered the vehicles, which unlike the Polish trucks had wooden seats. The Poles had not troubled with rosters. There was no bunching up, no disorder. Soldiers stood by with little stools to help up the elderly and to hand the few children to their mothers with a laugh and a playful little swing. At a field ambulance marked with a red cross medical orderlies gave restoratives. Two soldiers with movie and still cameras roamed the scene, recording all this good treatment of the neutrals. The loading was not quite over when the gunsnear the church all at once shot off a salvo that made the ground shake. Byron's watch read a minute past three o'clock. 'Poor Warsaw," Natalie said. 'Don't talk," Mark Hartley said in a low hoarse voice. "Don't say a,Nothing till we're out of this." They sat with Byron on the last bench of a truck, from which they could look out. Natalie said, 'Look at Slote, will you? Taking a cigarette from a German, for crying out loud, and laughing It's just unbelievable. All these German officers with their long coats and pushed-up caps. There they are, just like their pictures." "Are you afraid?" Byron said. "Not any more, now that it's actually happening. I don't know why. It's sort of dreamlike." 'Some dream," Hartley said. "It should only be a dream. Jesus Christ. That officer with Slote is coming here." Hartley gripped a hand on Byron's knee. The officer, a blond young man with a good-natured smile, came straight to Byron, speaking with a pleasant accent, slowly and precisely. "Your charge tells me that your father is American naval attache in Berlin." 'Yes, sir, he is." 'I am a Berliner. My father is in the foreign ministry." The officer fingered the binoculars around his neck. His manner seemed not very military and rather self-conscious. Byron thought he might be feeling compunction of a sort, and he liked the German better for that. "i believe I had the pleasure of meeting your parents in August at the Belgian embassy, and of dancing with your mother. What on earth have you been doing in Warschau?" 'I was sightseeing." "Well, you saw some unusual sights." "That I did." The officer laughed, and offered his hand to Byron. "Ernst Bayer," he said, putting his heels together. "Byron Henry. Hi." 'Ah, yes. Henry. I remember the name. Well, you are comfortable? Can I offer you a ride in a staff car?" 'I'm fine. Where are we going?" 'Klovno. It's the nearest working railroad junction, and there you will all transfer to a special train for Kenigsberg. It's more than a threehour trip. You might enjoy it more in an automobile.""Well, I've been travelling with these folks, you know. I'll stay with them. Thanks a lot." Byron spoke cordially, though this polite chitchat with a German felt exceedingly strange after all his anger at them. Slote said to Natalie, "We can still make room for you in the Chevy. That wooden slat's going to get kind of hard." She shook her head, looking darkly at the German. "Give my best to your mother," said the officer, with a casual glance at the girl and back at Byron. "She was really charming to me." "I sure will." Several guns fired in succession nearby, drowning out something the officer said. He grimaced, and smiled. "How are things in Warschau now? Very distressing?" "Well, they seem to be hanging on pretty well." Half-addressing Natalie as well as Byron, Bayer said, "A bad business! The Polish government was completely irresponsible, running off into Rumania and leaving the country without leadership. Warschau should have been declared an open city two weeks ago. This destruction is pointless. It will cost a lot to repair. The mayor is very brave, and there is a lot of aration here for Iiim, hue,-he shrugged-"what is there to do but finish it off? This will be over in a day or two." "It may take longer than that," Byron said. "You think so?" Bayer's pleasant smile faded. He bowed slightly and walked off, toying with the glasses. Slote shook his head at Byron and followed the officer. "Why the hell did you get him mad?" Hartley whispered. "Oh, Christ! Blaming the Polish government for the siege!" "He meant it," Natalie said, in a wondering tone. "The man was absolutely sincere." With some shouting in German, snorting of motors, honking of horns, waving by the soldiers, the convoy departed from Kantorovicz, a haet of half a dozen wooden houses around the church, intact but abandoned. Since leaving the schoolhouse, the refugees had not seen a living Pole, nor a dead one. The trucks wound along one-lane dirt roads, passing burned-out barns, blown-apart houses, overturned windmills, broken churches, schoolhouses without windows or roofs, and much tornup, shell-plowed ground and charred tree stumps. Still the scene was not at all like battlegrounds in movies and books of the last war: gray wastes of barren dead muck, tangles of barbed wire, dark zigzagging trenches. These fields and woods were green. Crops were still standing. Only the inhabitants were eerily absent. It was almost as though H G.
Wells's invaders from Mars had passed through in their perambulating metal tripods, atomizing or eating the people and leaving only slight trails of their transit. The first Poles who came in sight, far behind the German lines, were an old man and his wife working in a field in late sunshine; they leaned on their implements and solemnly watched the trucks go by. As the trucks travelled farther from Warsaw, more peasants began to appear, going about their fieldwork or repairing damaged houses, either ignoring the trucks or watching their passage with blank faces. Nearly all were old people or children. In this back country, Byron saw no young men, and only two or three kerchiefed, skirted figures that from their slimness and supple movements might have been girls. Yet more striking, he saw not one horse. The horse, and the vehicles it pulled, were the trademark, the very life, of rural Poland. On the way from Cracow to Warsaw, there had been thousands of horses, clogging the roads, working in the fields, carrying soldiers, dragging heavy loads in the cities. Behind the German lines this animal seemed extinct. The ride was too bumpy for conversation, and the refugees were still tired, and perhaps frightened by the deepening awareness of being in the hands of the Germans. Hardly a word was spoken in the first hour or so. They came out on a tarred road, narrow and primitive enough, but by comparison with the cart tracks of the back country, a glassy highway. The convoy stopped at a knoll of smooth green lawns and flower gardens topped by a brick-walled convent, and the word passed for women passengers to dismount and "refresh themselves." The ladies happily went off, the men scattered among the trees or urinated by the roadside, and when the convoy rolled again everybody was much more cheerful. Talk sprang up. Natalie brought back gossip from the ladies' room. All the neutrals, she said, would be offered a choice of flying to Stockholm, or else of taking German trains to Berlin, and thence going out via Belgium, Holland, or Switzerland. "You know," the girl said, with a mild glint in her eye, "I'd sort of like to see Berlin myself." "Are you crazy?" said Hartley. "Are you absolutely crazy? You must be kidding. You go to Stockholm, baby, and you just pray they let you go to Stockholm. This girl has a screw loose," Hartley said to Byron. Byron said, "Berel's message to A.J. goes for you, too. Lekh lekha." "Lekh lekha." She smiled. Byron had told her about this. "Get out, eh? Well, maybe." "In the name of God," Hartley muttered, "stop with the Hebrew." The ride stretched out to four and five hours of grinding through farmland and forests. Alltraces of war faded from the landscape. Houses, churches, whole towns were untouched. The inhabitants looked and acted as they had in the peacetime countryside. There were few young people, no horses, and very little cattle and poultry. In the towns a red swastika flag flew over the main square, either on a flagpole or from the town hall, and German soldiers stood sentry or patrolled on foot or on motorcycles. But the conquered land was at peace. The absence of livestock and young folks gave it a dead look, the peasants seemed somewhat more dour and sullen, perhaps, but life was going on exactly as before, except that the Germans were in charge. The sun sank behind the distant Hat horizon in a brief glow of pale orange. The trucks rolled on into the night. The passengers quieted. Natalie Jastrow put her head on Byron's shoulder and took his hand in hers. They both dozed. Commands shouted in German woke them. Lights blazed. They were in a square before a wide railroad station, and people were streaming down out of the lined-up trucks. The lower half-door of their truck was still closed, but two helmeted Germans came along and opened it with a clank. 'Bitte rausi Alle im Wartesaall" Their manner was brisk, not hostile, and they stood by to help down the women and old men. It was a cool moonlit night and Byron was glad to see darkness and stars overhead once more, instead of a smoke pall and a fiery glow. The refugees gathered in a confused mass in the waiting room, still blinking at the light. Double doors opened at one end of the room, and soldiers shouting in German shepherded them through, bearing along Byron and Natalie. Byron carried their suitcases and Hartley clung like a child to His elbow. They entered a dining hall full of long plank tables on trestles, laden with food. It was the most dazzling banquet that Byron had seen in his life-or so it seemed in the first thunderstruck seconds, famished as he was after the long ride and the three weeks of wretched food in besieged Warsaw. There were platters of smoking sausages and sauerkraut, there were many whole pink hams, there were mounds of boiled potatoes, piles of fried chicken, stacked loaves of fresh bread, pitchers of beer, immense whole yellow and orange cheeses. But it seemed a mockery, a cruel Nazi trick, a Barmecide feast, because the soldiers herded the neutrals along the walls away from the tables. There they stood, hundreds of them, staring at the distant food, and in the space between stood a few alert German soldiers with lowered tommy guns. A voice spoke over a loudspeaker in clear conversational German: "Welcome/ The German people are your hosts. We welcome the citizens Of the neutral countries in peace and friendship. The German people seek peace with all nations. Relations with Poland have now been normalized. The treacherous Smidgly-Rydz regime, having met its just punishment, Im ceased to exist. A new Poland will rise from its ashes, cleaned up and abiding, wire everybody will work hard, and irresponsible politicians no longer provoke disastrous foreign adventures.
The Fuhrer can now seriously pursue a peaceful settlement of all outstanding questions with Great Britain and France and aafterward Europe u,-ill enter on a new order of unparallelled mutual prosperity. Nowwe ask you to sit down and eat. H appetite!" A dozen smiling blonde girls in white waitress uniforms made their entrance, almost like a theatre chorus, carrying jugs of coffee and stacks of plates. The soldiers smiled and walked out of the space in front of the tables, making inviting hospitable motions with their lowered guns. There was an awkward, shocked moment. First one and then another refugee hesitantly stepped out of ranks to cross the space. Others followed them, a few sat on the low benches reaching for food, and a noisy break and rush began. Like the rest, Byron, Natalie, and Hartley dived for places and gorged themselves on the richest, sweetest, most satisfying meal of their lives. Almost the best of it was the coffee-ersatz though it was-hot, all they wanted, poured again and again by willing cheery buxom girls. Over the loudspeaker, while they stuffed, came a cascade of brass band musicStrauss waltzes, marches, and jolly drinking songs. Many of the neutrals began singing, and even the watching soldiers joined in. Du, du, liegst mir im Herren, Du, du, liegst 1wr im SinnByron himself, relaxed by the beer and carried away by the ecstasy of a full belly, the lift of the music, and the outburst of relieved high spirits all around him, swung his stein and sang: Du, du, mackst mir viel Schmerzen, Weisst night u7ie gut which dir bin ja, ia, ja, jal Weisst night uie gut which dir bin, and Mark Hartley sang right along too, though his eyes never ceased rolling at the German soldiers. Natalie, silent, regarded them both with a satirical motherly look. Returning to the waiting room, stuffed and dizzy after this incredible, this visionary &wt, they saw crudely lettered placards around the brown E. They went and tile walls: BELT-MN, BULGAr-tMN, KANADA, NMD stood under the vEREiNIGTE STAATEN Sign. Laughing, chattering, the refugees sorted themselves out, gay as though returning from a picnic. Men in black uniforms entered the waiting room. Conversation died among the Americans and the cheery noise faded throughout the station. Slote said soberly, "Listen, please, everybody. Those are the SS. I'll do any talking to them that has to be done." The men in black fanned out, one to each group of neutrals. The one who headed for the Americans did not appear sinister. Except for the operatic black costume, with its silver double-lightning-flash insignia, he looked like an American himself, perhaps a young insurance salesman one might sit next to on a train or plane. He carried a black leather portfolio. Slote walked out to meet him. 'I'm Leslie Slote, first secretary of the United Statesembassy and acting charge d'affaires." The SS man bowed, heels together, both hands on the case. "You have a gentleman named Byron Henry in your party?" His English was smooth. "This is Byron Henry," Slote said. Byron took a step forward. "Your father represents the American Navy in Berlin?" Byron nodded. "This message is forwarded to you via the foreign ministry." Byron put the yellow' envelope in his breast pocket. "You may read it now, of cours'. "Thanks. I'll look at it later." The SS man turned to Slote. "I am to collect the American passports." His tone was brisk and cool, his blue eyes distant, almost unfocussed on the Foreign Service man. "Let me have them, please." Slote was very pale. 'I'm reluctant to surrender them, for obvious reasons." "I assure you it is quite routine. They are to be processed on the train. They will be returned to you before you arrive in Kenigsberg." "Very well." At a motion from Slote, an assistant gave him a thick red portfolio, which he handed to the man in black. "Thank you. Now your roster, please." The assistant held out three clipped sheets. The SS man glanced through them, and then looked around. "No Negroes in your party, I see. How many Jews?" Slote took a moment to reply. "I'm sorry, but in our passports we make no record of religious affiliation." "But you do have Jews." The man spoke off handedly, as though discussing doctors or carpenters. "Even if there were Jews in the party, I would have to decline to answer. The policy of my country on religious groups is one of absolute equality of treatment." "But nobody is suggesting that there will be inequality of treatment. Who are these Jews, please?" Slote looked silently at him, touching his tongue to his lips. The SS officer said, "You have mentioned your government's policy. We will respect it. Thepolicy of my government is simply to maintain separate records where Jews are concerned. Nothing else is involved." Byron, a couple of paces forward from the group, wanted to see how Natalie and Hartley were behaving, but he knew it would be disastrous to glance at them. Slote did look around at the whole party in a glance of caution, appeal, and great nervousness. But he produced a calm professional tone when he spoke. "I'm sorry. I just don't know if anybody here is Jewish. I'm not personally interested, I haven't asked, and I don't have the information." "My instructions are to separate out the Jews," said the officer, "and I must now do that." He turned to the Americans and said, "Form a double line, alphabetically, please." Nobody moved; they all looked to Slote. The SS man turned to him. "Your party is in the custody of the Wehrmacht, in a combat zone under strict martial law. I call this to your attention." Slote glanced out toward the waiting room, his face harried. In front of several parties-the Swiss, the Rumanian, the Hungarian, the Dutch -a few miserable Jews already stood separated, heads bowed, with their suitcases. "Look here, for your purposes you can assume we're all Jews." His voice was starting to shake. "What next?" Byron heard a shrill woman's voice behind him. "Now just a minute. What on earth do you mean by that, Mr. Slote? I'm certainly not a Jew and I won't be classified or treated as one." Slote turned and said angrily, "I mean that we all must be treated alike, Mrs. Young, that's all. Please cooperate as I asked-" "Nobody's putting me down for a Jew," said a man's voice from a dill erent direction. "I'm just not buying that either, Leslie. Sorry." Byron recognized both voices. He turned around as the SS officer addressed the woman: "Yes, madam. Who are you, please?" "Clara Young of Chicago, Minois, and I'm not Jewish, you can be dam sure of that." She was a dried-out little woman of sixty or so, a bookkeeper in the American movie distributor's office in Warsaw. She giggled, glancing here and there. "Would you be kind enough to point out the Jews in your party, madam?" "Oh, no, thank you, mister. that's your business, not mine." Byron expected that. He was more worried by the man, a retired Army officer named Tom Stanley, who had been selling heavy machinery to the Polish government- Stanley was given to saying that Hitler was a great man and that the Jews had brought all their trouble onthemselves. The SS man asked for Stanley's name aind then said to him in a cordial man-to-man way, '"Who are the Jews here, please? Your party can't leave until I know. You seem to understand this matter better than your charge." Stanley, an old turkey-cock of a man with hanging jowls, a wattled throat, and a brush of gray hair, grew quite red and cleared his throat several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his loud green-andbrown sports jacket. all the Americans were staring at him. "Well, I'll tell you, friend, I'd like to cooperate, but so far as I know there aren't any. Not in this party." The SS officer shrugged, ran his eyes over the group, and stopped at Mark Hartley. He flicked two fingers forward. "You. Yes, you, the one with the blue bow tie, step this way." Again he flicked the fingers. "Stay whvre you are,-Slote said to Hartley; then, to the officer, "I would like to have your name and rank. I protest this procedure, and I warn you that this incident will result in a written protest from my government if it continues." The SS officer gestured around the waiting room, and said in a reasonable tone, 'The officials of all the other governments are cooperating. You see for yourself. This is nothing to protest. This is a simple matter of confomjing to local regulations. X"at is your name, you there?" 'Mark Hartley." The voice was steady enough, steadier than Slote's. "Mark Hartley, I see." The SS man smiled a peculiar, chilling smile, his eyes wide and serious. It was the smile of the Polish soldier on the road to Warsaw, who had yanked the beard of the taxi driver. "Hartley," he repeated. "And under what name were you born?" 'That name." "Really! What were your parents?" 'loth Americans." "Jews?" Byron said, "I happen to know him, sir, we've been going to church together all the time in Warsaw. He's a Methodist like me." The tall silver-haired minister, standing near Clara Young, ran his fingers inside his clerical collar. "I can vouch for that. I conducted services when Mr. Hartley was present. Mark is a devout Christian." The SS officer, with a disagreeable, puzzled grin, said to Slote, "This one is certainly Jewish. I think a little physical examination would-" Slote broke in, "I would report that as personal violence. In America circumcision at birth is routine." "I'm circumcised," said Byron.
"So am I," said the old clergyman. In the rest of the waiting room the process of sorting out the Jews was over. People were glancing at the Americans, pointing and whispering. The SS were gathered at the entrance,allexceptastout baldone with goldleafin hisblacklapels,w(men) ho now approached the American party, pulled aside the officer, and murmured with him, glancing at Hartley. The officer, without a word, pushed through to Hartley, took his suitcase, and undid the straps. Slote said sharply, 'Hold on, sir. This is not a customs point, and there's no reason to search personal belongings-"-But the officer, down on one knee, already had the bag open and was rummaging in it, spilling its contents on the floor. He came on the New Testament, turned it over in his hands with an expression half-astounded, half-sneering, and brought it to his superior officer. The bald man examined it, handed it back, and threw his hands in the air. "So," he said in German, "in a hundred Americans, maybe not one. Why not? Any Jew would have been an idiot to come to Warsaw this summer. Come. The train is being delayed." He walked off. The SS man tossed the black book with the gold cross in the open bag, and rudely gestured at Hartley to pick up his belongings, stepping over the pile as though it were garbage. Scanning the other faces in the group, he stepped up to Natalie Jastrow and gave her a long amused scrutiny. "Well, what are you looking at?" she said, and Byron's heart sank. 'You're very pretty." "Thank you." "Rather dark. Your ancestry?" "I'm Italian." "What is your name?" "Mona Lisa." "I see. You step forward." Natalie did not move. The officer grunted and began turning the pages of the roster. eL Slote quickly said, "She's my fiancee. We'll be married next month." The bald officer shouted from the entrance and waved at the SS man, who roughly handed the roster to Slote. "Very well. You love your Jews. Why do you refuse to take in ours? We have swarms." He turned to Byron. "You're the son of a naval officer, and yet you lie about a Jew! That fellow is a Jew." "He's not, honestly," Byron said. "I think Mark sort of looks like Dr.
Goebbels. You know short, dark, with a big nose." "Dr. Goebbels? So." The SS man glared at Hartley and Natalie, broke into a nasty laugh, and walked off. A loudspeaker called out in German, "All Jews to the restaurant. Everybody else to trark seven and board the train." The refugees went crowding out to the dark tracks. The Jews, a forlorn little group, straggled back to the dining room, with men in black surrounding them. Soldiers halted the crowd at the train to allow diplomats aboard first. Slote muttered to Byron, "I'll take a compartment. You'll see me at the window. Bring Natalie and Mark, and by all means Reverend Glenville and his wife." Soon, through billowing steam, Byron could see the charge waving from inside the dimly lit train. Byron came aboard with the four others, in a suffocating crush, and found the compartment. 'Thanks," Hartley whispered when they were all seated and Slote had slid shut the door. "A million thanks. Thanks to all of you. God bless you. "Leslie Slote is the man," said the minister. "You did nobly, Leslie." 'Nobly," said Natalie. Slote looked at her with a hangdog smile, as though not sure she was serious. "Well, I was on pretty good ground. They tried to get that information from me at Kantorovicz, you know, and couldn't. They got it from all the others. That's why the separation went so fast here. But why the devil did you make that Mona Lisa joke?" 'It was very risky," the minister said. 'Idiotic," Hartley said. They were talking in whispers, though the corridor was buzzing with loud talk, the stationary train was hissing and clanging, and a public address system outside was bellowing in German. 'How about Byron and Dr. Goebbels?" Natalie said with a grin. "That was pretty neat, I thought." "Neither of you seems to understand," Hartley said, 'that these are murderers. Murderers. You're like kids, both of you." Reverend Glenville said, "I'm not willing to believe that, Mr. Hartley. I know the German people. They have had a cruel, unjust system imposed on them, and one day they'll throw it off. At bottom they are good.""Well, Stockholm ahoy," Natalie said. "I admit one thing. I've lost all curiosity about berlin." "You've got to get your part back first," Hartley said. His jolly face was carved in a hundred lines and creases of tragic bitterness. He looked extraorcunarily old, inhumanly old: the Wandering Jew, in an American sports jacket. The train started with a wrenching clang. Byron now pulled out the yellow envelope. The message, on a Wehrmacht official form, had these few English words: GLAD You'RE OKAY. COME STRAIGHT TO BERLIN. DAD. The long string of cars squealed into the Friedrichstrasse terminal Tin clouds of white vapor, clanking, slowing. Rhoda clutched Victor Henry's arm and jumped up and down, to the amusement of the uniformed foreign ministry man who had escorted them to meet the train from Kenigsberg. Pug observed his smile. 'We haven't seen our boy in over a year," he shouted above the train noise. "Ah? Well, then this is a great moment." The train stopped, and people came swarming out. "My COD!" exclaimed Rhoda. "Is THAT him coming down those steps? It CAN'T be him. He's a SKELIRTON." "Where? Where?" Pug said. "He disappeared. Somewhere over there. No, there he is!" Byron's chestnut hair was very long and curly, almost matted; the bones stood out in his pale face and his eyes looked bright and enormous. He was laughing and waving, but at first blink his father almost failed to recognize this long-jawed sharpnned young man with the shabby clothes and raffish air. "It's me. This is me," he heard Byron yell. "Don't you even know me, Dad?" Pug plunged toward Byron, holding Rhoda's hand. Byron, smelling of wine, embraced him in a tight, fierce, long hug, scratching his father's face with a two-day growth of bristles. Then he hugged and kissed his mother. "Gad, I'm reeling," he said, in a swooping note like Rhoda's but in a rough baritone voice. "they've been feeding us on this train like hogs going to market. I just finished a lunch with three different wines. Mom, you look beautiful. About twenty-five." "Well, you look ghastly. Why the devil were you running around in Poland?" The foreign stry man pulled at Byron's elbow. "You do feel you have been treated well, Mr. Henry? Dr.
Neustiidter, foreign ministry," he said, with a click of heels and a crinkly smile. "Oh, hi. Oh, irreproachably, sir, irreproachably," Byron said, laughing wildly. "That is, once we got out of Warsaw. In there it was kind of rough." "A", well, that's war. We'd be pleased to have a little note from you about your treatment, at your convenience. My card." Leslie Slote, ashen and distraught, came up with two hands full of documents and introduced himself to Victor Henry. "I'd like to call on you at the embassy tomorrow, sir," he said, "once I've straightened things out a bit." 'Come in any time," Pug Henry said. 'But let me tell you right now," Slote sad over his shoulder as he left, "that Byron's been a real help." Dr. Neustiidter politely emphasized that Byron could go off in his father's custody now and pick up his documents some other time; or he himself could look after Byron's papers and drop them at Commander Henry's office. "After all," Neustadter said, "when it's a question of a son rejoining his parents, red tape becomes inhumane." Rhoda sat beside her son as they drove to Grunewald, happily clutching his arm while complaining how awful he looked. He was her secret favorite. Rhoda had thought of the name Byron at her first glimpse of her baby in the hospital: a scrawny infant, blinking big blue eyes in a red triangular face; clearly a boy, even in the rolls of baby flesh. She thought the child had a manly romantic look. She had hoped he would be an author or an actor; she had even unclenched his tiny red fists to look for the 'writer's triangles' which, she had read somewhere, one could see at birth in a baby's palm wrinkles. Byron hadn't turned out a writer, but he did actually have, she thought, a romantic streak. Secretly she sympathized with his refusal to consider a naval career, and even with his lazy school habits. She had never liked Pug's nickname for the boy, Briny, with its smell of the sea, and it was years before she would use it. Byron's switch to fine arts at Columbia, which had thrown Pug into black despondency, she had silently welcomed. Warren was a Henry: the plugger, the driver, the one who got things done, the A student, the one with his eye on flag rank and every step up toward it. Byron was like her, she thought, a person of fine quality, haunted and somewhat disabled by an unfulfilled dream. She noticed the scar on his temple, touched it in alarm, and asked about it. He began narrating his odyssey from Cracow to Warsaw, interrupting himself now and then to exclaim at things he saw in the streets: red vertical swastika banners massed around a statue of Frederick the Great, a band of Hitler Youth marching past in their brown shirts, black neckerchiefs, and short black pants, nuns bicycling down the Friedrichstrasse, a band concert in a park, a turning merry-goround. "It's so peaceful, isn't it? So goddamned peaceful! Dad, what's happening in the war? Has Warsaw surrendered? Have the Allies gotten off their tails yet? The Germans are such liars, you never know." "Warsaw's still holding out, but the war there is really over.