War and Remembrance (33 page)

“A true philosopher,” said Beck.

“Well, I could live like that, too.” Jastrow waved a hand around at the walls. “When I bought this place with the book-club money for A
Jew’s Jesus,
I was fifty-four. It was my fling. I can leave with a cheerful shrug and never look back.”

“You too are a philosopher,” said Beck.

“Then again I can always get my niece angry” — Jastrow’s glance at her was sly and tipsy — “by suggesting that she and the baby go home while, like Berenson, I ride it out at anchor.”

“I’m enjoying my coffee,” said Natalie sharply.

“And why should you do that?” said Beck.

“Because a philosopher is above worrying about concentration camps,” said Natalie. Jastrow shot her a vexed look. “Is that discourteous? I have trouble making Aaron face realities. Somebody must.”

“Perhaps not all Germans, either, are enthusiastic about concentration camps.” Beck’s voice was kindly and sad. His fat cheeks reddened.

“And what about the stories coming out of eastern Europe, Dr. Beck? Stories that your soldiers have been massacring the Jews?”

Jastrow stood up, raising his voice. “We’ll have brandy and more coffee in the sitting room.”

That they were unendurably on each other’s nerves was all too evident. “I take it, Mrs. Henry,” Beck said, settling into a corner of a sofa in the other room, carefully lighting a cigar, and making his voice easy and conciliatory, “that your question was not merely provocative. I have standard replies to standard provocations. I can also give you an honest opinion about your uncle’s safety, if he should elect to stay on.”

“Can you?” She sat tensed on the edge of the sofa, facing Beck. Jastrow
stood at a window, brandy glass in hand, glowering at her. “How much do you really know about what’s happening to Jews?”

“In Italy? Nothing is happening.”

“And elsewhere?”

“The Foreign Service does not operate in the Occupied Territories, Mrs. Henry. The army governs the combat areas. Drastic measures are imperative there, and life is hard for both occupiers and the occupied.”

“Worse for the Jews, no doubt,” said Natalie.

“I don’t deny it. Anti-Semitism is rife all through eastern Europe, Mrs. Henry. I’m not proud of our own excesses, but the Jews had to be rounded up for their own safety! Of that I assure you. They would otherwise have been plundered and murdered en masse in places like Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine. The local hooligans were amazed, when German forces arrived, that they didn’t want them to join in straightway to rob and kill the Jews. They expected an ‘open season,’ as one might say.”

Jastrow cut in. “What excesses by your own forces?”

“Professor, our police units are not always the highest types,” Beck replied, looking unhappy. “Scarcely the representatives of an advanced culture. There has been rough handling. The Jews have passed a bad winter. There were outbreaks of disease. True, in the snow outside Moscow and Leningrad our soldiers have also suffered terribly. War is a vile business.” He faced Natalie and his voice rose. “But when you ask me, Mrs. Henry, whether the German army is massacring Jews, I respond that this is a lie. My brother is an army officer. He has spent much time in Rumania and in Poland. He assures me that the army has not only refrained from atrocities, but has at times interfered to protect the Jews from the local population. That is God’s truth, as I know it.”

Aaron Jastrow said, “I was born and grew up in eastern Europe. I believe you.”

“Don’t let me gloss things over. Our regime will have much to answer for.” Werner Beck spread his pudgy hands, puffed at his cigar, and drank brandy. “Even in victory decent Germans are not going to forget, I promise you. This is excellent brandy, Professor. Your friend Berenson again?”

“No.” With a pleased look, Jastrow passed his glass under his nose. “I’m rather a fancier of French brandy. I had enough foresight to lay in several cases of this stuff back in 1938.”

“Yes, my brother told me some fantastic things. Strangely enough, one can visit these wretched ghettos. Imagine that! The elegant Polish ladies and our officers sometimes enjoy a night of slumming among the Jews. There are even grotesque little nightclubs. Helmut went several times. He wanted to see conditions for himself. He tried to do something about improving supplies. He’s in the quartermaster corps, and he had some success in Lodz. But the whole thing remains bad. Very bad.”

“Has your brother visited concentration camps?” Natalie inquired very politely.

“Let’s change the subject,” said Jastrow.

“Mrs. Henry, those are secret political prisons.” Beck gave a miserable shrug.

“But that’s where the worst things are happening.” The studied patience of his manner was impressing Natalie, for all her rising irritation. She regretted having started this topic, but why had Aaron brought up his fatuous maddening notion of remaining in Italy?

“Mrs. Henry, dictatorships use terror to keep order. That is classic politics. What forced the German people to submit to a dictatorship is a long, complex question, but the outside world — including America — is not guiltless. I have never so much as seen the outside walls of a concentration camp. Have you ever visited an American prison?”

“That’s not a reasonable comparison.”

“I’m comparing only your ignorance and mine about penal institutions. I’m sure that American prisons are very bad. I imagine our concentration camps are worse. But —” he passed a hand across his forehead and cleared his throat. “We began with the question of your uncle’s safety, if he should stay in Italy.”

“Never mind!” Jastrow knit his brow fiercely at his niece. “We asked Werner here to give him a good dinner, Natalie. It’s not his problem. Bernard Berenson is a very shrewd and worldly man, yet he too —”

“Damn Berenson!” Natalie exploded, and she thrust a demanding finger at Beck. “Supposing Germany occupies Italy? Is that so impossible? Or supposing Mussolini decides to ship all Jews to the Polish ghettos? Or just supposing some Fascist bigwig up and decides that he’d like to live in this villa? I mean it’s so incredible, so childish, to even
think
of taking such risks —”

“It would be I, only I, taking those risks,” Aaron Jastrow burst out, slamming down his glass so that the brandy flew, “and frankly I’m getting sick of this. Werner is our guest. You and your baby are alive because he rescued you. Anyway, I never said I wouldn’t leave.” Jastrow jerkily, noisily threw open a casement window. Cool air streamed in, and a patch of blue moonlight fell on the Oriental rug. He stood with his back to the window, and picked up his glass in a badly shaking hand. “One crucial difference between you and me, Natalie, is that you’re hardly Jewish. You know nothing about our culture and our history, and you’re not interested. You married a Christian without turning a hair. I’m a Jew to the core. I’m a
Polish
Jew!” He said this with a proud glare. “A Talmud scholar! I could resume the study tomorrow if I chose. All my writings turn on my identity. My nerve ends are antennae for anti-Semitism, and I detected it in George Santayana before we’d been in the same room five minutes.
You
needn’t warn
me
about the hazards of being Jewish!” He turned to Dr. Beck, “You haven’t an anti-Semitic
bone in you. You serve a detestable regime, and whether you should be doing that is another and a very large question — one you and I should discuss another time — but —”

“Professor, this was for me, and still remains, a radical ethical dilemma.”

“I should think so. What your government has done to the Jews is unforgivable. But alas, how far back it all goes! There are anti-Jewish rules in Aquinas’s
Summa
that make your Nuremberg laws look mild. The church has yet to repudiate them! We’re the eternal strangers, the outsiders in Christian Europe, and in times of breakdown we feel the impact first and hardest. It happened to us during the Crusades, it happened in the plague years, it has happened during most wars and revolutions. The United States is the modern liberal oasis, full of natural wealth and protected by the oceans. We’re able and we’re hard workers, so we’ve done well there. But Natalie, if you think we’re any less strangers there than in Germany,
you’re
the childish one, not I! If the war should take a bad turn, a defeated America will be uglier than Nazi Germany. Louis will be no safer there than here, and perhaps less so, because the Italians at least love children and are not very violent. These are simple truths you can’t grasp because your Jewish blood runs so thin.”

“Nonsense! Plain nonsense!” Natalie shot back. “Nazi Germany is a freakish monster of history. Not Christian, not Western, not even European. To equate it with America, even in defeat, is just drunken babble. As for my Jewish blood —”

“Why? What’s so freakish about Hitler? Why are the Germans more wrong, in trying for world mastery, than the British were two centuries ago when they succeeded? Or than we Americans are, for making our own bid now? What do you suppose this war is about, anyway? Democracy? Freedom? Fiddlesticks! It’s about who rules next, who fixes the currencies, who dominates the markets, who gets the raw materials and exploits the vast cheap labor of the primitive continents!” Jastrow was wound up now, and his wine-loosened tongue flew; not at all blurrily, but with the clipped edged classroom accents of an enraged professor. “Mind you, I think we’ll win. I’m glad of that, because I’m a liberal humanist. Radical nationalism like Hitler’s or Stalin’s tends to crush free thought, art, and discourse. But I’m honestly not sure at this late hour of my life, Natalie, whether human nature is happier under tyranny, with its fixed codes, its terrorized quiet, its simple duties, or amid the dilemmas and disorders of freedom. Byzantium lasted a thousand years. It’s doubtful whether America will last two hundred. I’ve lived more than ten years in a Fascist country, and I’ve been more at peace than I ever was in the money-chasing hurly-burly back home. I really fear an American 1918, Natalie. I fear a sudden falling apart of those unloving elements
held together by the common pursuit of money. I foresee horrors in defeat, amid abandoned skyscrapers and grass-grown highways, that will eclipse the Civil War! A blood bath with region against region, race against race, every man’s hand against his brother, and all hands against the Jews.”

Werner Beck made a gesture and wink at Natalie as though to say,
Don’t stir up the old fellow any more.
He took a soothing, almost unctuous tone. “Professor, you surprise me with your penetrating insight about America. Frankly, when I was in Washington I was shocked. Some of the best-connected persons whispered in my ear total approval of the Führer’s position on the Jews, never supposing that I might not agree.”

“Ah, upper-crust anti-Semitism is epidemic, Werner. Elites always detest gifted and nimble outsiders. Who made the British policy to turn back the refugee ships, but old-school-tie anti-Semites? The upper-crust anti-Semites who run our State Department have closed all the Americas to refugees. Why am I still here? Only because of obscure sabotage of my papers.”

Natalie said, striving for a calm note, “You were dilatory, Aaron.”

“Granted, my dear. Granted.” He sank into an armchair.
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
But it’s done. The question is, what next? I quite understand that those bored newspaper soaks down at the Excelsior Hotel can’t wait to get out of Siena, and I know that you want to take Louis home. But I believe there may be a negotiated peace this year, and I for one would welcome it.”

“Welcome it!” Natalie’s face and Beck’s showed almost the same degree of astonishment. “Welcome peace with Hitler?”

“My dear, the best chance for mankind’s survival is simply for the war to stop. The sooner the better. The fabric of civilization has been shaken loose already by the industrial and scientific revolutions, the collapse of religion, and two mechanized world wars. It can’t stand much more of a pounding. In a bitter way I almost welcome the fall of Singapore —”

“It hasn’t fallen —”

“Oh, that’s a question of days,” put in Beck. “Or for all we know, hours. The British are finished in Asia.”

“Let’s face it,” said Jastrow, “the Japanese belong there and the Europeans don’t. The Russian front is at a stalemate. The Atlantic front is at another stalemate. A negotiated peace would be the best thing for the world, for America, and certainly for the Jews. It’s much more desirable than a vengeful five-year crusade to destroy the have-nots. I suppose if we marshal all our industrial power we’ll crush them, but to what purpose? They’ve shown their mettle. The hegemony can be shared. The British and the French learned to do that after centuries of bloodletting. It will have to be shared in any case with the Russians. The longer the war goes on, the worse
things will get for Jews behind the Nazi lines, my dear, and if we do crush Germany, the end of it will merely be a Soviet Europe. Is that so desirable? Why shouldn’t we hope instead that the bloody madness will stop? And if it does stop, how silly I’ll look to have uprooted my whole life for nothing! Nevertheless, you won’t go without me, so I’ll leave. I’ve never said otherwise. But I’m not a soft-headed old fool to consider remaining, and I’ll not have you take that tone with me again, Natalie.”

She did not answer him.

“Mrs. Henry, I find your uncle’s vision of the war lucid and inspiring,” said Werner Beck excitedly. “He gives all this stupid carnage a theme, a direction, and a hope.”

“He does? Peace with Hitler? Who can believe a word Hitler says, or have faith in a paper he signs?”