The Last Supper (9 page)

— 5 —

Paul spent the following summer in the Berkshires. His American godfather, Elliott Hubbard, met him in New York and drove him in a yellow Chrysler convertible to the Harbor, 150
miles to the north. Elliott never drove at less than sixty miles an hour, leaving a huge plume of dust behind as they roared over the dirt roads that led to the Berkshires.

They arrived at midnight. In the morning, Paul asked Alice Hubbard, Elliott’s new wife, to show him Indian Joe’s grave. They climbed together through the pasture above the Harbor to
the Hubbard burial ground, a mossy plot surrounded by a tumbling stone wall. Five generations of the family were buried in a circle, feet pointing inward.

“When the Hubbards arise at the Last Trump, they’ll be facing one another,” Alice Hubbard said. “Opening their eyes upon the elect of God, they’ll see nothing but
Hubbards. No boring outsiders.
That’s
called the Hubbard heaven.”

“What about Indian Joe?”

“Here he is.”

Paul found the granite boulder, marked with the words the second Aaron had chiseled into it.

“Very advanced about Mahican Indians, the Hubbards were,” Alice said. “It must have been guilt; they never got over the shame of stealing their land from the poor savages. They
name everything for them. Is your father that way, too?”

“Our boat is named
Mahican
.”

“Of course it is. Imagine! Indian Joe’s ghost, sailing around in the Baltic.”

Alice thought that her husband’s family, so close-knit and so proud of its history, was comical.

“What you really must understand, in order to understand the Hubbards, is the Hubbard brides,” she said. “They’re all here.”

Moving from one tilted headstone to the other, Alice read off their ages. “You see?” she said. “All the Hubbard women die young, right down to the last generation. They were
buried every one before they were forty—here’s your grandmother, snuffed out at thirty-four, and Elliott’s mother, dead at twenty-five. What a tragic history, what a mystery, or
so I thought until Elliott shanghaied me into this summer in the country among his pals. Now I understand: all these women died of boredom.”

As she spoke, the pure silence of the country morning was shattered. One of Elliott Hubbard’s houseguests, an Italian tenor, had come onto the lawn of the Harbor to sing his morning
scales. Alice and Paul could see him, far below them, his portly body wrapped in a white bathrobe, as he projected his voice against the stony mountainside. The Harbor, a sprawling white clapboard
structure with innumerable ells and wings, stood on the banks of a brook in a mowing between two mountains. The brook was cold and as gray as a trout’s back; the mowing, planted in timothy
and redtop, was silvery green; the mountains were blue. Before the tenor began to sing, it had been possible to hear the sound of the brook. Now, as he sang the first few bars of “Una furtiva
lagrima,” a whitetail deer that had been grazing among a herd of Jersey cows lifted its head. Its horns were in velvet.

Elliott Hubbard was a collector of houseguests. Everyone was interesting to him, and he invited everyone who interested him to stay at his country house. In the room next to Paul’s, a
playwright composed dialogue, reading his lines aloud far into the night and crumpling up sheet after sheet of paper as he failed to achieve the effect he wanted. In the barn, a retired
professional lightweight named Battling Jim Cerruti gave Paul boxing lessons. At the end of the summer, he made his report to Elliott: “The kid’s fast and he’s not afraid of
getting hurt; he won’t back off. He’s going to get his bell rung a lot as he goes through life.”

Alice said, “Elliott is like the college boy who sent his mother a telegram from New Haven:
Bringing 16 for Easter
. She had beds made up for sixteen guests. Her son got off the
train on Good Friday accompanied by the entire Yale Class of 1916. Is your father like that, Paul?”

“He brings a lot of people home.”

“What sort of people?”

“All sorts. Painters, writers, actors . . .”

“No actresses?”

“No.”

“Elliott doesn’t bring them home, either. Who else? Any bank robbers? Elliott brings clients home; we had a man who dressed up to rob banks. He’d be a monk, then an admiral,
then a nun. Mostly it was ecclesiastical. He said he liked the costuming; he wasn’t in it for the money. Elliott thought he was fascinating. He got him off with only a year in jail.
You’ll probably be just like them when you grow up. It’s the Hubbard enthusiasm.”

In the evening, when Elliott’s guests came down to dinner, the conversation ran on until well after midnight. Usually Alice was the only female present. Whatever she may have said in the
graveyard, she never seemed to be bored, but she did like to go to bed with her husband at a reasonable hour. When she wanted to end the jovial male conversation she would cry,
“
Bones!
” and Elliott’s Yale friends would get up and leave the room, as members of Skull and Bones, the university’s secret society, were obliged to do on hearing
that word spoken aloud. The others, respecting a mysterious ritual they did not understand, would follow.

— 6 —

“This is not the time to educate a boy in Germany,” Paulus said.

Lori agreed, but she could not send Paul as far away as America again. When he returned to Europe at the end of the summer, he went to school in Switzerland. The school, a former monastery
standing among vineyards on a knoll above Lake Geneva, was the coldest place in which Paul had ever been. From October to April, the sun disappeared, a bitter wind scoured the playing fields, and
the lake was hidden behind a perpetual cloud bank. The school was as much like a prison as it was possible to make it. In the vaulted dining room, the boys ate thin soup, root vegetables, pasta,
and salt fish, never meat, while in a loud voice a prefect read elevating passages from French literature. There were two huge paintings in this room, portraits of Saint Joan and St. Cyr, darkened
by candle smoke, and these were the only pools of color in the whole gray place.

There was no mercy. In lightless classrooms, the students memorized facts and learned how to speak the French language; even the French boys were obliged to start over, to eliminate bad habits
of speech and ugly accents. War with Germany was approaching. The younger masters, most of whom were officers in the French reserves, seemed eager for it to begin. They assured the boys that France
would win because she was the stronger of the two powers. Paul, half American and half German, the worst possible combination of blood from the French point of view, maddened his masters by never
forgetting anything while French boys stumbled over their lessons. It was clear to him from the first day that the only useful thing he could take away from this place was its language. After the
first few weeks, he made few errors in French, but when he did mispronounce a word or commit a grammatical error, the masters struck him on the backs of his fists with the baton, a thin hardwood
wand, raising red welts on chapped skin. During these beatings, the doubled hands had to be held, rigid and immobile, over the desk; it was a sign of defective character to move them. Paul did not
move his hands.

Paul was called
Boche-Boche
. Soon after his arrival, four older boys with overgrown adolescent noses came into his room (a cell, really: iron bed, chair, desk, dresser, chamber pot,
striped curtain over the window, writhing china Christ on a varnished pine cross) and found him wearing his sailing sweater as he studied. This was a violation of good form. The sweater was
fastened at the shoulder with a row of bone buttons. While three of the boys held Paul down, the fourth, Philippe by name, cut off the buttons with a penknife and attempted to force Paul to swallow
them. Paul clenched his teeth and, though Philippe broke off the corner of an incisor, refused to eat the buttons. Fighting all four of the boys at one time was beyond Paul’s capability, so
he let them walk away.

His revenge came soon enough. Sport at this school meant soccer, played every afternoon from two to five-thirty. After the soccer master watched him practice, Paul was put into a team with older
boys. One of his opponents was Philippe. Dribbling toward the goal, Paul ran into Philippe at full speed and broke his nose. The next day he ran into him again and knocked him to the wet turf.
Philippe leaped up and threw a wild punch at Paul. Paul ducked. Philippe swung his fist again. As Battling Jim Cerruti had taught him, Paul blocked it and hit Philippe with four straight lefts on
his swollen nose and a right cross that broke a front tooth. Philippe put his hands over his bleeding face and howled in pain. After that, Paul was left in peace.

— 7 —

Paul returned to Rügen in the summer of 1939, the year of his fifteenth birthday. There were E-boats in the harbor and sometimes, looking down from the cliffs in the early
morning, he could see German submarines, like great black fishes that had been thought to be extinct, cruising again on the surface of the Baltic. Otherwise, the island seemed unchanged. Life at
Berwick was just as it had always been: the conversation, the long walks, the reading, the swims from the shingle beach.

The Christophers sailed much less, but sometimes Hubbard and Lori went out alone at night. Paul, a light sleeper, would wake at dawn and hear their footsteps on the gravel as they hurried toward
Mahican
’s mooring in order to get aboard before the tide began to run. They never asked him to come along as crew. He never asked them why.

One night, soon after his return, he heard the sound of boots on the gravel beneath his window. He looked out, but there was no moon and he could see no one. The sound of footsteps continued,
pacing back and forth on the gravel. Paul looked at his watch. It was three-thirty, nearly dawn, and he smiled, imagining Paulus striding back and forth in the darkness, waiting for Paul to wake at
sunrise. Sometimes the old man did that; on chilly mornings he would put on a long sheepskin jerkin that he had worn in the Russian campaign, wearing this garment over his old-fashioned
ankle-length nightgown.

Paul dressed and went outside. He used the kitchen door and walked around the house on the soft grass, hoping to surprise Paulus. It was a windless night; there were no stars. Paul walked in the
blackness toward the sound of the footsteps. Suddenly, he smelled cigarette smoke. Paulus did not smoke; no one in the family smoked.

“Who is that?” Paul asked.

The footsteps ceased, but Paul could still hear the man’s feet shifting in the gravel. The man switched on a powerful flashlight and shone it in Paul’s face. Shielding his eyes, Paul
could make out a leather coat and riding boots. The man did not speak. The flashlight went off. A lighted cigarette spun through the darkness and landed on the gravel in a shower of sparks. Brisk
footsteps moved away, over the gravel.

Paul ran after the man. He confronted him. “Who is that?” he asked again. There was no answer. The man turned on his flashlight again and shone it into Paul’s face. Paul jumped
to one side, out of the light, and as the man searched for him with the beam of the electric torch, he saw that it was Stutzer, the Gestapo dandy, who had been standing in the darkness, watching
Berwick.

Stutzer finally located Paul with the flashlight beam. Still he did not speak, but stood silently in the black, starless night, running the light up and down Paul’s figure for several
moments more before switching it off and then marching away over the gravel.

When Paul told this story at breakfast, Lori smiled.

“Ah,” she said, “the Dandy. We should have warned you. He lurks about a lot. You never know when you might run into him.”

“Lurks? Why?”

Lori shrugged. “I think he thinks we’re smugglers. He’s always searching the boat. We hardly ever sail anymore, it’s such a bother to have him come aboard and turn
everything inside out.”

“Can’t you do something about that?”

“Maybe someone can give him another crack on the head.”

Hilde von Buecheler cut a piece of cheese and gave it to Paul. “Don’t joke, Lori,” she said. “Don’t teach Paul to joke about these things.”

Paulus was silent; he had been silent all summer.

— 8 —

Paul and Lori, on a morning in August, set off for a walk in the forest. It was an invigorating day, with the smell of fall already in the air. A stiff wind blew in from the
Baltic and the sky and the sea were the same luminous shade of gray, the sign of a storm.

It was gray inside the forest, too. They were approaching the Borg, where they always paused to eat their lunch, when Lori sniffed loudly. “Cigarette smoke,” she said. “It
can’t be the Dandy at this time of day. He’s a night creature.”

Lori scowled; intruders were common in the tourist season and she was cordial to them, but tobacco smoke annoyed her. She quickened her step, as if determined to drive this intruder, and the
fumes of his cigarette, out of the wood.

The cigarette smoker, legs crossed, lounged indolently on one of the temple stones, reading a book; he might have been sitting in his own living room, so much at home did he seem in this forest.
He drew deeply on a long cigarette; the smoke hung motionless for a moment in the heavy air, then found a current of wind and vanished. The man caught sight of Lori and Paul; He smiled, stood, and
watched them approach, cigarette poised in his left hand. It was a Russian cigarette, a cardboard tube.

The intruder was Otto Rothchild. He stripped off his right glove and held out his hand.

“Baronesse; young Paul. What a surprise. I was just reading some poetry. Really these trees should be Russian birches, but your beeches are rather nice. One
can
get used to these
drab colors; they go with the German light.”

Lori glanced down at Rothchild’s book, a limp volume of Pushkin, bound in leather. “Ah, yes, Hubbard’s Russian,” she said.

Just as she had predicted, Lori had never learned to like Otto Rothchild; she never called him anything but “Hubbard’s Russian.”

“I thought you had left Germany,” Lori said.