War and Remembrance (35 page)

“Father Martin, our minister is an able and tough-minded man. He’ll face up to hard facts, if I can provide them.”

“What hard facts? What would your minister accept as authentication, Herr Slote? How can one argue with the will not to believe? Supposing I persuaded a certain man in the German legation to meet him face to face? Do you appreciate the risk? The Gestapo net spreads all through Bern. It might mean the man’s death. And what would be gained? Your minister suspects he has seen fake papers. Well? Won’t he simply suspect he has talked to the faker?”

“I could identify a man from the German legation. You’d better tell your man that all the risk so far has been in vain. Tell him Americans say about the document, ‘Incredible contents. Dubious origins.’ ”

The priest let go of his arm, opened the garden door, and peered out. “Good-night. Straight on beyond the park, outside the Café William Tell, you will find a taxi stand.”

“You won’t help me any further?”

“Herr Slote, I have asked my Provincial to transfer me from Bern.” The priest’s voice was shaking badly. “You must not approach me anymore. You Americans really don’t comprehend Europe. And in the name of God do not bring in the Aschers again.”

August Van Winaker poked his head into Slote’s office a few days later. “Hi. I’ve just been having a long hot session with a friend of yours. He’d like to say hello.”

“Certainly. Who is it?”

“Dr. Jacob Ascher.”

In a black homburg, and a black suit that hung loose on his bowed shoulders, Dr. Ascher looked like an invalid forced from his bed by an emergency. But his handshake was surprisingly strong.

“Well, I’ll leave you two lovebirds together,” Van Winaker said with a jolly wink. “I’m sure you have lots to talk about.”

“I have only come for a moment,” Ascher said, “and I beg you to join us.”

Wagging a finger at him Van Winaker replied in sing-song, “Ah-ah. Two’s company, thre-e-e’s a crow-w-wd, ta-ta,” and he danced out, gaily winking.

Dr. Ascher sat down heavily in the chair Slote offered him. “Thank you. We are going to America earlier than planned. In fact, next Thursday. This has involved the hurried execution of some complicated international contracts. That is why I was seeing Mr. Van Winaker.”

“Has Augie been helpful?”

“Oh, yes.” The look from under Dr. Ascher’s heavy gray eyebrows was veiled. “Most helpful. Well!” Ascher looked hard at Slote, with eyes sunk in terrible dark hollows. “I seldom ask a personal favor of any man. Yet I’ve come to ask such a favor of you, sir, though I hardly know you.”

“Please!” Slote returned.

“We leave only eight days from now. If my daughter Selma should happen to telephone you during this time, I ask you not to see her.” Slote quailed before the stern face of the old Jew. “Is that a very difficult request?”

“I happen to be hard pressed with work, Dr. Ascher. I couldn’t see her anyway.”

Painfully, Dr. Ascher rose, holding out his hand.

“I wish you happiness in the United States,” Slote said.

Ascher shook his head. “It has taken me sixteen years to feel at home in Bern. Now I’m going to Baltimore, a place I don’t know at all, and I’m seventy-three. Still, Selma comes first. She is a brilliant and good girl, though all girls are difficult at times. Since my son is an old bachelor, her future is the only future I have. Good-bye, sir.”

Slote went back to work. He had the Vichy France assignment in the
legation. A treaty was in the works for continuing three-way trade, despite the war, between Switzerland, the United States, and occupied France. For their own practical reasons, the Germans were allowing this. But it was tricky business, and a mountain of paper had accumulated. Slote was pushing through a draft for a meeting that afternoon when his telephone rang.

“Mr. Leslie Slote?” The aged high voice was very British. “Treville Britten here. We met at the home of the Aschers.”

“Of course. How are you?”

“Splendid. We had some interesting talk that evening, didn’t we? Ah, Winston Churchill will broadcast tonight, you know, and ah, my daughter Nancy and I thought if you cared to join us for dinner — it’s frugal vegetarian fare, but Nancy does it rather well. We might listen to Churchill together. Discuss the new developments.”

“I’d be charmed,” said Slote, thinking that few invitations could be less attractive, “except that I must work straight through the night, pretty near.”

The hemming and hawing ceased. “Mr. Slote, I’m not going to take no for an answer.”

Slote caught a professional hardening of the elderly voice that was a signal. This was a British Foreign Service man, after all. “How nice of you to insist.”

“Pension Gafen, 19 Tellenstrasse, apartment 3A. About seven.”

Perhaps there were two gray Fiat roadsters like Selma Ascher’s in Bern, Slote thought that evening, seeing the car parked in front of the pension, a dismal-looking house in a dilapidated part of Bern. Question: did his promise to Selma’s father bind him not to go up to the flat and see? Doing rapid mental casuistry, he mounted the stairs two at a time. Selma had not telephoned him. He wasn’t sure that she was in the Britten apartment. He had accepted the dinner invitation in good faith. In short, the worried old Jewish father be damned! For all Slote intended to do, Selma Ascher would leave Bern
virgo intacta.

There she was in a dowdy blue frock, little more than a housedress, with her hair carelessly pinned up. She had a tired unhappy air, and her greeting was anything but flirtatious; offhand, rather, and faintly resentful. She and the English girl worked in the kitchen while, in a small musty study crammed with old books and magazines, Britten poured very stiff whiskeys. “How fortunate that alcohol is a vegetable product, what? If it were distilled from animal corpses, all my principles would have to give way. Hee hee.” Slote felt Britten had made this joke and giggled this way a thousand times.

The old man was eager to talk about Singapore. Once the Japanese had landed in Malaya, he explained, the obvious strategy had been to lure them all the way south with a fighting retreat, to within range of Singapore’s terrible guns. The news meantime had been depressing, but now the turnabout
was surely at hand. Winnie obviously had something exciting to impart tonight about Singapore.
“The will not to believe,”
thought Slote; what an egregious example was here! Even the BBC was broadly hinting that Singapore was falling. Yet Britten’s crack-voiced optimism was utterly unfeigned.

It was a strained, impoverished meal. The four people crowded the small table. The peculiar mock-meat puddings and stews that the daughter served were insipid stuff. Selma ate little, scarcely looking up, her face sullen and withdrawn. They were starting on a dessert of very tart stewed rhubarb when Churchill’s cadences began to roll out of the shortwave radio. For a long time in his sombre talk he did not mention Singapore. Britten conveyed to Slote, with reassuring winks and gestures, that all this was quite in line with his prediction. The great disclosure was coming.

Churchill paused, and took an audible breath.

And now, I have heavy news. Singapore has fallen. That mighty bastion of Empire, which held out so long against insuperable odds, has honorably surrendered to spare its civilian population from further useless slaughter…

The old man’s wrinkled face wilted into a pained smile, getting redder and redder, his watery eyes taking on a queer gleam. They listened in silence to the very end of the speech:

…
and so let us go on, into the storm, and through the storm.

Shakily Britten reached over and turned off the radio. “Well! Bit mistaken on that one, wasn’t I?”

“Oh, the Empire’s gone,” said his daughter with vinegary satisfaction. “High time we all faced that, Father. Especially Winnie. What an obsolete romantic!”

“Just so. Night falls. A new world order cometh.” Britten’s voice fell into the rhythms of Churchill, a reedy grotesque echo. “The Hun will join hands with the Mongol. The Slav, the born helot, will serve new masters. Christianity and humanism are dead creeds. The thousand-year night of technological barbarism descends. Well, we English fought the good fight. I have lived my life. You young people have my sympathy.”

He was so obviously distraught that Slote and Selma left almost at once. On the staircase she said, “Is it really that bad, the fall of Singapore?”

“Well, to him it’s the end of the world. It may spell the end of the British Empire. The war will go on.”

On the street she seized his hand, twining the fingers in hers. “Come into my car.”

She drove to a busy boulevard and parked at the curb with the motor running. “Father Martin gave me a message for you. Here are his exact
words.
’It is arranged. Wait for a visitor in your flat at six o’clock Sunday evening.
“

Immensely surprised, Slote said, “I thought he didn’t want you involved.”

“He was at the house last night. Papa told him we’d be gone by next Thursday. I suppose he decided that I’m a safe messenger, since I’ll be gone so soon.”

“I’m sorry you had to disobey your father.”

“Did you mind Nancy’s horrible food?”

“It was worth it.”

She stared at him and turned off the motor. “I suppose you had an affair with this Natalie girl?”

“Of course I did. I told you that.”

“Not in so many words. You were very diplomatic. Do you imagine you could possibly have had an affair with me?”

“I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”

“Why not? I thought I was like her. How am I different? Not sexually exciting?”

“This is a stupid conversation, Selma. Thanks for the message.”

“I can’t forgive my father for going to you. It’s so humiliating!”

“He shouldn’t have told you.”

“I got it out of him. We had some bitter words. Well, you’re quite right, this
is
a stupid conversation. Good-bye.” She started the motor, and held out her hand.

“Ye gods, Selma, your circulation must be bad. Your hands are always icy.”

“Nobody but you has ever mentioned that. Well — what do the English say? ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ “ She leaned to him and kissed him hard on the mouth. The sweetness of it shook Slote deeply. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “There! Since you find me so exciting, remember me a little. I’ll remember you always.”

“And I you.”

She shook her head. “No, you won’t. You’ve had so many adventures! You’ll have so many more! I’ve had my one, my very little one. I hope that you get your Natalie back. She’d be happier with you than with that Navy fellow”— Selma’s expression turned darkly mischievous —“as long as she insists on having a Gentile husband.”

Slote opened the car door.

“Leslie, I don’t know what your business with Father Martin is,” Selma exclaimed, “but take care! I have never seen a more frightened person.”

Nobody came to Slote’s flat on Sunday evening. The front page of the Zurich
Tageblatt,
lying on his desk Monday morning, had a spread of Japanese
photographs about the Singapore victory, furnished by the German news service: the surrender ceremony, the hordes of British troops sitting on the earth in a prison compound, the celebration in Tokyo. The story about Father Martin was so short that Slote almost missed it, but there it was at the bottom of the page. The truck driver, who claimed that his brakes had failed, was being held for questioning. The priest was dead, crushed.

(excerpt from Aaron Jastrows manuscript)

A
PRIL
23, 1942.

American bombers have raided Tokyo!

My pulse races as it once did when, an immigrant in love with everything American, infected with baseball fever, I saw Babe Ruth hit a home run. For me America is the Babe Ruth of the nations. I unashamedly confess it. And the Babe has come out of his slump and “hit one over the fence”!

Strange, how Allied airplane bombs infallibly fall on churches, schools, and hospitals; what a triumph of military imprecision! If Berlin radio speaks the truth — and why should Germans lie, pray? — the RAF has by now flattened nearly all institutions of worship, learning, and healing in Germany, while unerringly missing all other targets. Now we are told that Tokyo was unscathed in the raid except for a great number of schools, hospitals, and temples demolished by the barbarous Americans. Most extraordinary.

My niece calls this “Doolittle raid” (an intrepid Army Air Corps colonel of that name led the attack) just a stunt, a token bombing. It will make no difference to the war; so she
says.
What she
did,
when the news came through on the BBC, was to entrust her baby to the cook, rush down to the Excelsior Hotel where our fellow journalists are housed, and there get joyously drunk with them. They are drunk nearly all the time, but I have not seen Natalie inebriated in years. I must say that when her chief local admirer, a banal-minded Associated Press reporter, brought her back, she was full of amusing raillery, though scarcely able to walk straight.

Her mood was so gay, in fact, that I was tempted to disclose then and there the grave secret I have been harboring for two weeks, not even entrusting it to these pages. But I refrained. She has suffered enough on my account. Time enough to reveal this bombshell when the fuse has burned down to the danger point. This it may never do.