The Last Supper (8 page)

Stutzer’s eyes were fixed on the milk cart. It was drawn by a dog and a peasant woman. It was a common sight in Rügen, and elsewhere in rural Germany, to see peasant women harnessed
with a dog to a cart or yoked with an ox or a cow to a plow. This woman had heavy bare legs, chapped bright red. She was leaning into the harness, pulling hard to haul the load up a slight hill.
Her husband, smoking a curved pipe, walked along ahead of the cart.

Stutzer wasn’t looking at the woman. He was gazing instead at a drunk who staggered along behind the cart, clowning. Everyone in Rügen knew the drunk; his name was Heinz and he had
lost his mind in the war. In the buttonhole of his ragged coat he wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross, first class. Heinz came to the café every afternoon at coffee time to steal cream. The
coffee came with little porcelain pitchers filled with cream. Heinz crouched on the pavement, watching the tables. As soon as a coffee drinker had taken as much cream as he wanted and put his
pitcher down, Heinz would dart to the table, snatch the pitcher, and drink the teaspoonful of cream that was left. He made a kind of music-hall act out of his raid: watching for his chance with
exaggerated craftiness, pouncing quickly, looking to left and right before he drank, then scuttling away to await another victim.

Stutzer the Dandy beckoned the waiter and ordered a second cup of coffee. While he waited for it to arrive, he went back to reading his dossiers; it seemed that he had lost interest in Heinz.
Meanwhile, Heinz stole cream from two or three tables. As the Dandy’s coffee was served, he watched, licking his lips.

The Dandy poured cream into his cup, put down the pitcher, and lifted the coffee to his lips in a gloved hand. Heinz darted to the Dandy’s table, seized the tiny pitcher, and tossed off
the cream. The Dandy watched him drink. Then, holding his cup in one hand and the saucer in the other, he stood up in his Gestapo costume and swung back his right leg in its polished boot. As he
took a sip of coffee, he drove the toe of his boot into Heinz’s head. It made a sound like two blocks of wood being struck together.

The whole café had been watching this comedy. The sound of the Dandy’s boot striking Heinz’s skull extinguished every smile. As if on a signal, everyone except Lori and Paul
stared into space, as if neither the Gestapo man nor his victim existed.

Lori put down her own coffee cup, rose to her feet, and strode to the fallen drunk. Blood ran from Heinz’s nose and mouth. Lori knelt beside him and felt for his pulse.

“Napkin,” she said.

The waiter, standing behind Lori, put a napkin into her hand. Lori wiped Heinz’s face and turned him on his side so that he would not strangle on the blood that was filling his mouth. Paul
took off his jacket and covered him.

The Dandy took a new document out of his briefcase and read from it, absorbed, as he sipped his coffee.

Lori moved Heinz’s slack jaw. “Fractured,” she said. “Perhaps the skull also. Put him in the back of the car.”

Paul and the waiter carried Heinz to the car. Blood dripped from Heinz’s mouth, leaving a spotty trail on the cobbles. The Dandy took no interest in these activities. He went on reading
his documents and sipping coffee.

“Stutzer,” Lori said.

The Dandy lifted his eyes momentarily at the sound of his name, but did not respond. He turned a page, lifted a gloved finger, and with eyes fixed to the next page, took another sip of
coffee.

“Stand up,” Lori said, in her clear voice.

The Dandy stood up. He was perhaps twenty-five, a sallow man with soft pink lips and a triangular face. He put a hand, the hand of an equal, on Lori’s sleeve. He began to smile. After all,
what had he done to Heinz that any German officer would not have done to a commoner who had insulted him and his class?

Lori did not bother to remove the Dandy’s hand from her sleeve. She raised her own gloved hand and struck the Gestapo chief of Rügen on the face, a tremendous blow with the back of
her fist, like a saber cut. The Dandy’s black fedora flew off his head and scaled across the room, spilling a cup of coffee on another table.

Lori turned on her heel, got into the car, and took the wheel. “Sit in back with that man, Paul,” she said. “Hold his head in your lap. Mind he doesn’t choke.”

As Lori turned the car around, reversing in one precise arc, changing gears and going forward in another, the Dandy, still hatless, was standing where she had left him. The wind lifted a lock of
his brilliantined hair so that it stood up like a feather.

Twenty people sat in the café, but Paul’s eyes were the only ones looking at Stutzer the Dandy.

Thereafter, nobody on the island of Rügen would look Lori or any of her family in the face. The waiters at the café would bring coffee, the butcher would cut meat, the baker would
deliver bread, they would all say thank you and run to open the door of their shops, but they did all this with averted eyes.

According to the doctor who treated him, Heinz, the drunk, recovered. But it was decided by the medical authorities that he required institutional care. He disappeared.

— 4 —

This happened in 1936, the summer that Paul was twelve. One night, toward the end of the summer, Paul, unable to sleep, looked out his window and saw a boat standing offshore.
She was signaling with a light. Then she sailed around the point. Paul put on his clothes and went outside, thinking that he could run through the beech forest and see the boat again. It would be
something to tell his parents the next day.

It was a moonless night and the wood was very dark, but Paul knew the way perfectly. In part, he was guided by a sense of smell: approaching the Borg, he could scent the cold mist rising from
its dark surface.

Then, to his surprise, he heard a man and a woman speaking in low tones. They were standing among the stones of the old temple. Drawing closer, Paul recognized his mother’s voice. He
expected to hear Hubbard’s voice next, as his parents were always together, but the man with Lori spoke in a tenor, not in Hubbard’s deep baritone, and he had white hair, visible as a
patch of movement in the darkness. Paul realized that the man with Lori was Zaentz, the artist who had made the nude drawing of Lori that hung in their sitting room in Berlin. Paul wondered what he
was doing in Rügen: the Christophers’ Berlin friends never came to the island.

“We must climb down the cliff in the dark,” Lori’s voice said. “It’s not difficult. The cliff is white, so you’ll be able to see, and there are plenty of
places to hold on.”

As Paul had seen her do dozens of times before, Lori led the way to the cliff, swung over, and clambered to the bottom. Zaentz, after giving a short, nervous laugh, went over the edge, too. Paul
followed them down. Below him, he could hear the brisk sound of his mother’s boots, kicking into the brittle face of the cliff, and Zaentz’s heavy breathing. From time to time, Lori
spoke to Zaentz, telling him where to put his feet.

The grown-ups did not hear or see Paul; he had learned about stealth from Hubbard’s tales of Mahican woodcraft. On the beach, Lori and Zaentz took off their clothes and hid them in a
crevice in the chalk. They were wearing bathing suits. From the boat that Paul had seen from his window, a light flashed once, from a point about a half-mile off the headland. Paul realized that
the boat was
Mahican
.

As soon as she saw the light, Lori plunged into the sea and started to swim with her strong crawl toward the light, which blinked regularly on a count of ten. Zaentz, swimming less well,
followed her, his white hair gleaming.

Paul took off his clothes and hid them in the crevice with the others’. Then he, too, began to swim for the boat, lifting his head every twenty strokes to locate the light. A strong tide
was running out, and he moved swiftly with the frigid water. As he got farther from shore, the swell grew higher, so that sometimes he had to wait to be carried to a crest before he could see the
light flashing from
Mahican;
rolling onto his back to rest, he could see the chalk cliffs, phosphorescent in the black night, far behind him.

Mahican
’s white hull was only ten feet away when Paul saw it at last. He gripped the rudder and, hidden in the darkness, looked upward at his father, who was holding Lori’s
hand as she climbed up the ladder. She was shuddering with cold. Hubbard threw a blanket around her and wrapped her in his long arms.

Zaentz, water pouring from his stout body, heaved himself aboard. Hubbard reached out and shook hands with him. Lori’s head was pillowed against her husband’s chest. Paul swam
silently to the ladder and, still undetected, climbed aboard too. For a long moment, he stood close to his parents, naked, wet, and shivering.

Suddenly, as if she felt his presence, Lori’s eyes opened. She wore an expression that Paul had never before seen on her face: for the first time in his life, his mother was not glad to
see him. There was fear in her eyes. It lasted only a moment. Then, as if he were standing by her bedside and she had just awakened, Lori smiled and said, “Paul. I didn’t know you were
joining us.”

“Where are we going?”

“For a sail with Zaentz,” Lori said. She felt his skin. “You’re freezing. Go below and get dry. Put on warm clothes from the locker.”

When Paul came on deck again,
Mahican
was running on the tide without lights, sailing due west. Paul knew then that their destination was Falster. He joined his parents in the cockpit.
Hubbard gave him the tiller. There was very little wind. In the still night their woolen clothes smelled of lanolin. Lori opened the wicker picnic basket and poured a hot drink from a thermos. It
was coffee instead of the usual chocolate, as Paul had not been expected. When Paul had finished his drink, Lori sent him below with food and a hot drink for Zaentz. He sat on a bunk, a blanket
wrapped around his bare torso. The hair on his chest and shoulders was white, too, and as thick as his spade beard.

“You’re quite a swimmer,” Zaentz said, sipping coffee and eating bread and sausage. “Weren’t you afraid, swimming out to the boat?”

The question surprised Paul. He had known that he could swim to the boat. He had also known that, if he missed the boat, he would never be found. “Control, control,” Paulus was
always saying. “Do only what you know you
can
do. When you’re afraid, it’s because you have gone beyond your capabilities.” Swimming to the boat, Paul had had the
flashing light and the cliffs to guide him, and he swam as naturally as he walked. Even at the age of twelve, Paul knew that it was useless to explain oneself. He had never been afraid. He smiled
at Zaentz. The artist, who had always liked him, pulled off Paul’s knitted cap and ruffled his hair.

Mahican
dropped anchor off Falster just as dawn was beginning to show. Zaentz came on deck for the first time since they had sailed from Rügen.

“I heard the anchor go down,” he said. “Is this Denmark?”

“It is,” Lori said.

Zaentz had always been full of jokes. But now he was weeping behind the tinted lenses of his round steel spectacles.

Just before the Christophers had left Berlin for Rügen that summer, Zaentz had come to the apartment in Charlottenburg, bringing all his pictures with him. When Paul woke in the morning,
Zaentz’s pictures, dozens of them, were strewn around the apartment, propped up on the furniture, leaning against the walls. Except for the drawing of Lori during her pregnancy, the pictures
were brutal caricatures of German faces twisted by greed or lust or hatred.

“Why is the one of Mutti so much like her?” Paul had asked.

“The others are like themselves also,” Zaentz replied. “I draw what I see.”

Aboard
Mahican
, he hugged Lori long and hard and kissed her repeatedly.

“I’ll never forget,” he said.

Lori patted his bearded face. “It will be over soon,” she said.

Zaentz shook his head. The gesture was like a shudder.

Hubbard brought the dinghy alongside and Zaentz climbed in. Hubbard pulled the cord on the dinghy’s motor and headed for shore. It was low tide, and Paul watched through the boat’s
binoculars as Zaentz walked over the wet sandy beach, strewn with kelp, and then climbed the dunes and disappeared. He was wearing a rucksack. At the crest of the dunes, he turned and waved, first
at Hubbard, who waited in the bobbing dinghy just offshore, and then to Lori and Paul aboard
Mahican
.

Lori, standing behind Paul, wrapped her arms around him. The morning star was bright above the sun.

“Put down the glasses,” she said. “Look at the morning star.”

The east grew brighter. Lori put her cheek next to Paul’s. “Paul,” she said, “you know that Zaentz is a secret, don’t you?”

Paul nodded. He looked toward shore again; the footprints Zaentz had left as he walked over the wet beach were clearly visible.

“Good,” Lori said. She kissed his ear and turned his face toward the rising sun; she hadn’t done such a thing since he was a small child.

The first crescent of the sun was pushing above the tundra. The morning star grew dimmer. Then it vanished. Lori tightened her embrace.

“An angel has died,” she said. “That’s what my mother used to tell me when the morning star went out.”

When they returned to Berwick, Paulus was waiting for them.

“The Dandy has been here,” he said. “He brought these.”

The clothes Lori and Zaentz and Paul had left on the beach, hidden in the crevice in the cliff, lay on a table in the hall.

“I told him you often swam from the cliffs,” Paulus said. “He asked if you swam with a friend. These clothes obviously don’t belong to Hubbard.”

Paulus held up the shirt Zaentz had been wearing. It was an old shirt, one he had worn while working in his studio, and it was smeared with paint.

“The Dandy held this shirt up to his nose,” Paulus said. “ ‘Do you know,’ he said to me, ‘that Jews smear themselves with goose grease at the beginning of
winter, and then their women sew them up in their underwear, not removing it until spring? Even turpentine won’t kill that smell,’ the Dandy said; ‘it penetrates the skin and
squeezes out through the sweat glands.’ ”