Chapter Nineteen
The Long March Continues
In 1932 Sami had made ill-advised investments in a Bayonne bond corporation that declared bankruptcy one year later, precipitating financial crisis, the collapse of the government, the disgrace of the Radicals, the supposed suicide of the financier Alain Stavisky, and financial disaster for Sami himself. Stung by accusations from right-wing deputies, he resigned his seat in the Assemblée. Rioters pelted his Delahaye with bricks as he drove away from the Palais-Bourbon. François Rocque, the Fascist leader, derided him, calling him “Herr Goldenstein.” Leaflets bearing the star of David and caricatures of Semitic noses fluttered in his wake.
“Your friends,” muttered Sami to Stefanie. “The damned fascists. Everywhere. They say the whole business was our fault. And who killed Stavisky?”
“He killed himself.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
Gaston Doumergue, ex-president, stepped in and spread the balm of his blandness over the roiling political seas. The Third Republic got shakily to its feet, preserved to collapse with finality another day. Sami watched from the sidelines, unshaven, beset by indigestion and headaches, usually garbed in his dressing gown until late morning, smoking Gauloises and drinking five to eight petits Ricards a day and seated, in clement weather, on the balcony. On rainy days he dressed and went downstairs to the Café Gueuze and harangued the barman, a Communist, on the contemptible corruption of France’s Right and Left alike. Also, Sami those days was an inattentive, even indifferent lover (and who could blame him?), and every letter or newspaper from Germany inspired a small diatribe of incomprehension.
“My God, he’s the damned Chancellor of the Reich now, isn’t he. Well, why aren’t you by his side? Now’s the time. Off you go. Go on, away with you to Berchtesgaden. Who’s romping in his bed now?”
In fact, most letters Stefanie received from Germany came from Fritzl’s wife Lotte. Although he had had a prosthetic arm fitted, Fritz was sinking seriously into beer and despair. He had found a job as assistant shift manager at the Bavarian Motor Works, quite a comedown for him but a job was a job, it was a question of self-respect as much as anything else. Of course, there were all kinds of new restrictions now, with the new government, and Fritz had run into a bit of trouble because of his Jewish background, which in his usual blockheaded fashion he continued to deny. This only made matters worse, of course. There were all kinds of nosy people in uniforms at work these days, and one or two had even stopped by the house when Lotte was out and chatted with the boys, tried to find things out behind their parents’ backs...it was contemptible. Fritz hadn’t lost his job yet, but she, Lotte, felt that it was only a matter of time. And by the way, speaking of the new government...They had heard rumors about Cousin Stefanie, but being well-bred did not want to come right out and ask. Still, there was a great deal of nosing around, of delicate sniffing at the edges. Was she back in Paris for good? Did she plan any trips to Germany? Say, to (ahem) the Alps, near Salzburg?
The combination of deference and indignation in these letters was unique in Stefanie’s experience. Finally she sat down and wrote a reply.
“Dear Fritz and Lotte,
“How are you? How are the boys? I am well. Ignace has started his second term at the Académie Werfel, so I can say he is getting the best of French and German culture.
“How kind of you to inquire about me. Yes, I have returned permanently to Paris. My sojourn in Germany was an extraordinary interlude in my life. I do not regret it; quite the contrary. It made clear several things. One, that politics has no place in my life. Two, that faith in God transcends all else. Three, that I do not tolerate heights well. Four, that Adolf Hitler is a great man, but that greatness does not mean goodness.
“Meanwhile, I make a living at my son’s school. ‘Will you be my teacher?’ he asked me, the day before he started school. ‘Only in the upper forms,’ I replied. That gives us seven or eight years!
“Although my flat is small, I am sure I could arrange to accommodate you if you decide to visit me here in Paris. God bless. Stay in touch.
“Kisses from your loving cousin!
“Steffi.”
Lotte soon replied. Fritzl, it seemed, had finally been taken in for questioning by the police after arriving at work drunk and, in an about-face, loudly proclaiming his Jewish heritage while insulting his colleagues as “stupid Swabian swine.” Lottle said he’d been knocked about quite a bit, and threatened with imrpisonment. It was lucky, she said, that it had been the police and not the Gestapo. However, young Willi and Kurt had again been interrogated, this time after school at a local konditorei by the father of one of their schoolmates, a Herr Liebnitz, “a sallow man who affects a leather trenchcoat,” who was either in the state security police or worked as an informant for that grim agency. He had bought Willi and Kurt strawberry tarts and chocolate milk and, after bland commentary on childish things such as electric trains and carrousels, had proceeded to question them closely on the customs and beliefs of their parents, notably their father; was he a Jew? an observant Jew? Did he have Jewish friends? Did he attend a synagogue? Which one? Herr Liebnitz had promised the boys greater inducements than strawberry tarts, going as far as mentioning uniforms and air guns and rides in the country if they agreed to cooperate by writing him, Herr Liebnitz, weekly “letters” reporting their father’s comments, conduct and movements, especially if they agreed to join the new youth organization called Hitler-Jugend; he would even make efforts to ensure that (in view of Lotte’s impeccable Aryanness) their polluted ancestry was overlooked, or reclassified, as was being done in so many areas, some too high to name...
Fully as disturbing as the invidious anti-Jewishness and gross interference in privacy was the revelation that both boys had cooperated in the persecution of their own father. It had only been Lotte’s discovery of one of Willi’s “letters” to Herr Liebnitz that had brought the whole matter to light.
“I found the man’s address and went to see him, to accost him, to accuse him, to present him with the tokens of his evil. He was at home (he lives in a respectable suburban villa in Au). He himself has two children, girls, as sweet as can be. I was embarrassed with them standing around—I saw no sign of a wife—but obviously he has them trained. He was nauseating, Steffi. This is the kind of man who will thrive under your Hitler. Utterly without morals. Only concerned for his own welfare. I thrust the note under his nose. ‘How dare you turn my children into spies?’ I said. He feigned ignorance! ‘I do not consort with young boys,’ he said. ‘Are you accusing me of perversion?’ All this in front of his daughters, too. I was so sickened I merely stood and stared at him, torn between fury and fear, real fear, because this man is the type of the new man, he has no compunction about destroying lives, he does it as nonchalantly as you or I might squash a bug...”
The upshot was twofold emigration, the boys being sent to stay with their Grandpa Ernst in Vienna, and Fritzl and Lotte coming to stay in the already-cozy apartment on the Rue Soufflot. In spite of the cramped quarters Fritzl’s arrival had a noticeably cheering effect on Sami’s spirits. The two men had found each other congenial during Sami’s brief visit to Munich ten years earlier, and although Fritzl was stouter, more florid and louder than ever, and Sami more melancholy and embittered, their friendship matured, via shouts of “You Old Jew” and “You Fat Boche” and several weeping evenings of wine and beer downstairs at the Gueuze. Sami was disgusted by Fritzl’s troubles and the sinister tale of Herr Liebnitz, but in a perverse way the whole affair gave him the satisfaction of having been absolutely right about a regime whose advent he, Sami, had long predicted, and he couldn’t resist saying so to the former mistress of that regime’s progenitor.
“It sounds like the new way in Germany is pretty much the old way of, oh I don’t know…Vlad Dracul? Eh, Steffi?”
Eventually, after lengthy discussions with Sami and some of his friends in various government ministries, Fritzl and Lotte decided to settle permanently in France. Through contacts in the government Sami got Fritzl residence papers and found him a job as a security guard at the Dewoitine airplane works, despite his two obvious handicaps: the prosthetic arm and his fractured French.
“One real arm is enough,” said Sami. “As long as you can salute. As for your French, if you can say ‘bonjour,’ ‘oui,’ ‘non,’ and ‘vos papiers’ you’re all right.”
Sami himself at last, reluctantly, returned to work in early ‘36, first as a file distribution manager at the Ministry of Agriculture, then as a full-fledged Huissier in the Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. Both positions necessitated regular hours and a daily shave. He quite missed his sodden, self-pitying days, but welcomed the chance to wear a clean shirt again.
“There,” he said. “I have arrived. Look at me. Another indentured drone in an office, cultivating his hemorrhoids.”
Eventually, after lengthy correspondence and shouted telephone conversations had satisfied their parents that the Herr Liebnitz episode was not necessarily a harbinger of the future, Willi and Kurt arrived from Vienna and moved with their parents into a small semi-detached house in the working-class suburb of Montrouge. In the spring of ‘36 the boys began attending the Académie Werfel with Ignace, who was wary of them, although they seemed to be the soul of friendliness, eager to learn French, getting high grades on their lessons, joining in other students’ soccer games, canoeing on the Seine on Sundays. It was far from an ideal situation, but things had been worse. Fritzl was alive, at least, and drinking less; and Stefanie was satisfied that the family was safe and reasonably content, for the moment.
Her own state of mind was restless and dour, and she awoke every day with a knot in the pit of her stomach, as if in dread of some nameless event. In the early mornings, as the street sweepers swept and the lorries rattled and groaned, she walked the streets of the Latin Quarter. Cafés in which men sat smoking and reading papers over the early-morning verre de blanc were opening for the day’s business. Clochards, many of them war veterans, gathered on the steps of St. Sulpice and passed around a bottle. On the boulevards, taxis puttered by, shopkeepers raised their shutters, bookcases were wheeled onto the freshly hosed-down pavement, and everywhere there were smells of roasting coffee, gasoline fumes, and Caporal smoke mingling in the air. On sunny mornings Stefanie would end her morning walk with a stroll around the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, the so-French order and design of which so contradicted the disorder and illogic of everyday life; but the French happily live with the illusion of order. Abstraction rules in a country where theorizing has the weight and illusion of reality, a country where theories have even found themselves translated into reality, as in the Luxembourg Gardens, or Versailles, or even the Maginot Line . . . unlike the Germans, who were less cerebral and (like everyone else) resented the French for their cultural confidence and sheer ability to live well under any circumstances. Stefanie brooded much about Germany. A strange addiction bound her to that nation, and her own connection with Hitler, and Fritzl’s recent experiences, only bound her tighter. Germany overshadowed the world. The Germans were entering a new Age of Empire that future generations would look back on with amazement and wonder. All Europe would under their sway. Stefanie’s former lover and teenage swain would, like Louis XIV, stamp the age with his name; like Bismarck, he would move boundaries as it suited him; like Charlemagne he would fundamentally change the world he found.
In part of her mind she was a prisoner of Berchtesgaden, subjugated to the power of he who was now a colossus on the stage of the world.
Classes at the academy generally kept her focused on the day-to-day, and Ignace, in the upper forms, was turning into a stalwart young man and outstanding student; but in the evenings and on weekends Stefanie wrote, dwelling inwardly on thoughts she found as incredible as the events that had given rise to them. In the background was the muttering of the great city and, usually, the sound of RTF on the radio. Sami was seldom at home. He played bridge at Fritzl’s, or visited “friends” Stefanie suspected of being unattached and female. Her sojourn with Hitler had opened up a chasm between them that would be forever unbridgeable, she feared; under the courteous commonplaces they were indifferent, cold, mutually finding fault. More: she wondered if he hated her.
As for her, she was ashamed, but too proud to admit it.
Blum
But in 1936 Sami and Stefanie came together again, reunited in body and spirit by (as Stefanie said) “of all things,” politics: the New Dawn of the socialist-communist alliance and its victory in the May elections and the renewed, if short-lived, hope it inspired, not only among the Reds, many of whom were suspicious of these “boudoir radicals,” but also in the ranks of the moderate left-leaning and the antifascists, among whom Stefanie counted herself. Sami was ecstatic beyond all reason, certainly beyond the straited skepticism that was his usual response to world events.
“At last!” he roared in the Gueuze, the evening the news of the new government was announced. “Vive la République! Vive la France! Vive la gauche! A republic we can live for! Drinks all round! Pastis, please!”
A month later Léon Blum was named Prime Minister. He was an old friend of Sami’s. They had been fellow book-reviewers for Le Matin and (sporadically, on Sami’s part) fellow travelers in the Socialist Party Blum had done so much to revive after the murder of the great Jaurès on the eve of the ’14-’18 war. Yes, they’d been friends then and were friends now, said Sami, although he conceded to the lesser intellect and the greater disposition to debauchery at the time (“Léon was always at his books, always”) but professed equality when it came to literary essays and the like, Blum having stumbled in his judgment, reckoned Sami, at around the time of Proust’s first rejection by Gallimard’s reader, young André Gide, while he, Sami, had snared the absinthe-bibbing Apollinaire for an interview in Ces Vents Qui Soufflent, an interview that was still talked about, in certain (admittedy narrow) circles…
“Pah, that’s all past.”
In any event, the “Blum coup,” as the rightists called it, sent a chill through the ranks of the establishment, which despised all republics, of course, as being of suspect Judeo-leftist origin (like Blum himself, incarnation of their darkest fears) and preferred the more solemn, hewn-of-granite, racially pure idea of The Nation, with its square pillars, solemn visages, and worship of technology. But for a moment it seemed as if the Right was in retreat. Blum’s government started a second revolution.
“Oh, it’ll have them shitting their pants, the monarchist bastards,” said Sami, gleefully. “Long live Léon!”
“Better Hitler than Blum!” retorted the Right; but in most households, and across all of industrial France, not least (reported Willi and Kurt with the air of savvy correspondents at the front) in the depressed backways and nineteenth-century alleys of industrial Montrouge and adjoining Billancourt. Indeed, a desperate relief was in the air, as if the country had broken a bad fever. Stefanie read the papers with greater pleasure than usual, and even her sullen charges at the Académie Werfel reacted to the news. Then the strikes began, first at the Breguet works in Le Havre, then across the industrial North. Workers long accustomed to being utterly ignored were now being grudgingly given a voice, and long-pent-up anger spilled over into industrial action, although most of the strikes were so good-natured that the workers more often sang Auprès de ma blonde than The Internationale (except for the Cusinberche fiasco in Clichy, in which an Arab immigrant was shot dead). Finally, settlements were reached; and joy of joys, the workers’ demands were met, paid vacations and a 40-hour workweek were suddenly on the agenda—as well as nationalization of the Bank of France and, rumor had it, votes for women...
“Vive Blum,” said Stefanie. “Vive Léon.” As if in penance for her past sins, she desperately wanted France’s first Jewish leader to succeed. At school she conducted civics classes crisply and unsentimentally, but with a decided bias.
“Blum must prevail,” she said one morning.
“But M. Blum, he is a Jew,” observed one Manfred Dieselmann, son of the Austrian attaché.
“Yes!” exclaimed others, responding, like dogs to the odor of a cat, to the ambient anti-Semitism of their households and nations.
“Yes,” said Stefanie. “But he is a Frenchman first. And we should give credit to his country for upholding the spirit of the Enlightenment.”
“Vive la France,” mumbled the kids.
“But he is still Jewish,” muttered Dieselmann, obstinately. “And a Bolshevik.”
On a drowsy day in September Sami rushed into Stefanie’s classroom, waving his hands briskly at the students.
“Class dismissed,” he shouted. “Run along, all of you.” Beaming, he seized her by the arm. “Come,” he said. She gaped. “To meet Léon,” he said. And without further word he had propelled her before him to the street, to a taxi, then across town to the Restaurant Drouand, a large public dining room with high ceilings like a salon, incongruously located on the third floor of an office building behind the Opéra. It was a food- and coffee-redolent room in which floated a dim haze of cigarette smoke barely penetrable by the light of sun or lamp, a room abuzz with the clamor of hearty lunchtime voices, the din of commerce, the newspapers, politics, a room that was the forum and clearing-house for anything alive and kicking and making money in central Paris: art buying, car and horse trading, haggling, smuggling, prostitution (discreet, of course), commodity trading: all co-existed at the Druouand, cheek-by-jowl with the confits and foie gras and pichets de rouge on its tables d’hôte.
The Prime Minister of France, officially known as the President of the Council of Ministers, was seated with a young man with a round face made owlish by round spectacles. This was the new Education Minister, Jean Lussac, as Stefanie knew from Le Matin of that very morning. They were at a long table covered with notepads and briefing papers, in the corner directly opposite the entrance; a strategic placement, Stefanie thought, and said so to Sami, who ignored her, intent as he was on capturing the Prime Minister’s every glance. He strode across the room, hand upheld in salutation.
“Mon vieux, or should I say Monsieur le Président? Dear old Léon, anyway, arrived at last.”
“But where, mon ami? On a precipice, I fear. It feels like 1914 all over again, doesn’t it? And I am no Clemenceau. I don’t even look like him, as you do. I am an armchair revolutionary leading a revolution in pearl-grey gloves, as Daudet said, eh? But how are you, mon cher? Would you like a job in my cabinet? No, I should say: Would you like my job? Ha ha. You know, this is the first time in about three months I have been able to schedule a lunch meeting. So many things, my dear Samuel. What an age. But we are here to lunch, not to talk politics. And this is Madame…?”
“This is Stefanie von Rothenberg,” Sami added to the tail end of many more effusive greetings exchanged with Lussac, whom he had known in the Assemblée as one of his firmer supporters. Stefanie inclined her head.
“Monsieur le Président,” she said, suddenly painfully aware of her sex, her dubious situation, her accent…but with gallant nonchalance Blum rose to his feet. He was tall, slightly stooped, dressed in an elegant charcoal-gray suit, his black hair neatly combed over and a heavy mustache half-concealing a weary smile. His gaze, behind a pair of thick, round spectacles, was cautious and steady, like a conscientious bank manager’s.
“Enchanté, Madame!”
Blum settled into his seat and he and Sami conferred, and Jean Lussac uncoiled himself silently and snapped his fingers for a chair—and got one within seconds—and joined in the conference in gruff undertones that was punctuated with great snorts of derision and explosive clouds of blue Caporal smoke. Blum and Lussac at first regarded Stefanie with a combination of indifference and wariness, which she attributed to her sex and her Germanic name; but when the conversation began to cartwheel uncontrollably out of control—“Ethiopia”; “Mussolini”; “Herriot”; “the nationalizations”; “Daladier”; the “Comité France-Allemagne”; and yes, inevitably, “Hitler”— and she was beginning to feel as out of place as a rose in a mire, Léon Blum leaned forward, signaling silence to his companions by so doing, and smiled, proposing lunchtime delicacies. Stefanie decided on a salad, Sami on a cassoulet and liter of rouge; but Blum proved to have the tastes of an epicure, and recited the menu with expertise.
“Caille farci aux raisins verts,” he said. “It’s my choice. For once in our lives, Sami, let’s overdo it.”
“Ha! Once in our lives? Speak for yourself. You don’t mean a drink, do you? Leon the dry?”
Blum smiled with his eyes, not his lips, although his heavy mustache did seem to twitch at its extremities.
“Not entirely dry, my dear Sami. A good ballon de rouge with dinner, generally nothing more. One needs to be alert, these days, if one is to be a truly subtle Talmudist.” All present knew he was quoting the Jew-baiting Xavier Vallat in the Assemblée: “We welcome the subtle Talmudist,” he had said, upon Blum’s ascension. “Exercise, eh? But I leave all that to Jean here, with his holiday colonies and fresh-air Fridays.”
“Fridays now,” said Lussac, with a half-smile. “But every day soon enough, when we get the legislation written. It’s not only the fascists who respect physical fitness, you know.”
“Ah, so you are an abstainer as well, Jean?” inquired Sami, with a shade of disdain.
“Not at all. Even the contrary. I am from the Loire, where we are raised on the world’s best wine.”
“Pah! Best? Compared to Burgundy?”
“Oh, but absolutely. Our Bourgeuil; our Vouvray…”
“An excellent idea,” boomed Sami. “One of each, and a Burgundy for purposes of comparison. Waiter!”
“I knew this would happen if I let you order the wine,” said Blum, with mock sorrow. “Now my Minister of Education and my future personal private secretary will get into a drinking contest and possibly fisticuffs and the government will be disgraced and go the way of the 101 other governments of the Third Republic.”
“Personal private secretary?” echoed Sami. Blum, eyes twinkling, repeated himself, and elaborated: a job for a man of vision, a radical like himself, a man of the left; but also a confidant, a friend, one worthy of trust. “And I know none better. What say you?”
“I am honored, Monsieur le Président. And let me also say: It’s a wise decision, mon ami. My loyalty will be second to none.”
“It’s true,” blurted Stefanie. “He will be your best.” She was pleased for Sami, but more than slightly resentful of the masculine clubbiness that quite firmly kept her at arm’s length. The University came to mind: Herr Professor Schnitzel; the jibes; “does your father have a telephone number we can call?”…
Blum gave her a nod in acknowledgement.
“Messieurs?” The wine steward, deferential, menu bearing, loomed. Sami ordered.
“Good thing I’ve made a second career out of ordering wine. Not that I ever overdo it, please understand. As for yourself, speaking of overdoing it, I think you already have, Monsieur le Président,” said Sami, smiling. “With your 40-hour week and paid holidays and collective bargaining et j’en passe.”
“Our 40-hour week, mon cher,” said Blum. “Our 40-hour week, our paid holidays. Our collective bargaining. All that is now the property and right of every Frenchman. And woman. This is my pledge. And if I commit errors it will be because of being not enough of a leader, not because of being too much of one.” A propos of women’s rights, he courteously turned his attention to Stefanie. Was she, he wondered, German; and if so, acquainted with the works of Goethe? No, she replied; and yes.
“Ah, but you must know Goethe, then,” he said, in one breath. Sami leaned forward, eager to interject, like a teenage boy with a hot secret.
“Leon wrote a book about Goethe once,” he said. “Brilliant.” Blum raised a dismissive hand.
“Brilliant it may have been, it is not for me to say. But with all the copies unsold I could build a bridge from here to Narbonne. Still, Goethe was, and remains, my great passion. His Faust! His Werther! How sad that the murderous trivialities of a bully boy like Hitler should insult such genius,” the Prime Minister said. “Hitler represents the very opposite of culture. But it is necessary for all of us to examine our consciences in the face of such a catastrophe. Especially we French, who have been so, ah,” he waved a hand in the air while searching for the word (but kept his steady gaze on Stefanie all the while), “vengeful in our demands, post-Versailles. It’s crazy, my friends. Crazy.”
Sami looked significantly at Stefanie and raised his eyebrows, as in query. She, catching his look, shook her head. No, she would not parade her acquaintanceship with the bully boy of whom Blum spoke, not for lunchtime entertainment, not for anything (she who had studied men so closely was fairly certain the Prime Minister spoke with earnest spontaneity and not out of any calculation to draw her out on the subject of his nemesis across the Rhine). Would she do it for France? wondered Sami, and then wondered what, exactly, were his lady’s feelings for his country; after all, an Austrian, a fellow countrywoman of Hitler’s, an ex-mistress…he shook his head to dispel this last, this smokepot that would forever befoul their lives together.
Meanwhile, Blum was talking.
“Actually, I spent some time in Weimar,” he said, seeming to be under the impression that Stefanie was, after all, German. “The town of Goethe’s Lotte, of course. I had a rewarding time. I learned some German, at least! Ein bisschen, ja? Of course, I knew some Yiddish from my youth.” He considered her, gauging her reaction, as a presumptive German, to his bold Jewishness. She smiled pleasantly. He went on: “The people were most welcoming, despite my, shall I say, double burden of nationality and religion? Yes, I must admit I was never confronted there as I have been here in my own country—in a physical sense that is.” Both Sami and Stefanie knew he was referring to the previous year’s Camelots du Roi incident, when he was pulled from his car and brutally beaten by the extravagantly named Fascist thugs.
“Filthy swine,” said Jean Lussac, who had otherwise been smoking slowly and meditatively and jotting items on a notepad.
“Well, we got rid of them, Jean,” said Blum. “We legislated them out of existence. Poof! Like that.” He snapped his fingers. A waiter hurried over. “No, no, monsieur, thank you very much,” said Blum, with elaborate courtesy, seeking to not embarrass the man. “Merely a gesture of emphasis, you know.”
“Monsieur le Président.”
The man retreated at a half-bow. A small encounter, thought Stefanie, but deeply illustrative of character. Already she saw the very opposite of Hitler in this Blum, the two countervailing forces on the continent. Der alte Jude, das ist der mann, as Bismarck had said of Disraeli. Would Hitler ever say the same of Blum? How ironic, she thought, if the two of them should turn out to be the great force of Europe and its opponent, Blum’s Jewishness only adding spice to the irony (a man who had been bar miztvah’d, who had attended a shul, who observed the Jahrzeit, all of this grist to the fascists’ mill); how could Hitler ignore him? Premier of France, legislative leader of the other great European power, Mussolini notwithstanding…?
But there was a conciliatory softness in Blum and the opposite in Hitler.
“No, Leon. They’ll be back, calling themselves political parties,” said Lussac. “It’s all coming from across the Rhine, these days, anyway, n’est-ce pas? Everything bad and obnoxious. The Right is flexing its muscles. We’re the last hope.” His fist landed softly on a pile of papers. His spectacles flashed blindly in a random sunbeam from the windows. “Maybe for all Europe.”
They had lunch, an expansive old-fashioned bourgeois spread with three courses and a bottle per course, followed by the cheese, the brandy, the coffee, the cigarettes, and one cigar (Sami’s). Spain came up, and the Rhineland, and the prospect of an alliance with Russia against Germany—Blum’s pet project in foreign policy—and again and again the name “Hitler.” Stefanie resisted the temptation to say “But I knew him when he was just a,” whatever he was, “little shabby painter,” and what he’d become, “and I was his mistress for a month,” which was a nice way of saying it…. in any case, she noticed Jean Lussac staring at her.
“What do you think, Madame?”
Flustered, she retreated into the reserve proper to a well-brought-up Austrian girl.
“Oh I don’t have any thoughts on the subject, Monsieur Lussac,” she said. “It’s all politics.” A bark of laughter came from Sami.
“I can hardly credit that, Madame,” said Lussac. He was a man who understood seriousness, Stefanie thought. Distress had already found a home in his eyes. “But I respect it.”
After the lunch, and the hasty departure of the Prime Minister and his aide amid the salaams and jeers of the crowd outside, Stefanie and Sami took the Metro home and strolled up the Rue Soufflot to the Pantheon in the gray evening light.
“I’m very pleased M. Blum made you that offer, you know,” said Stefanie, feeling somehow the need to remind Sami that he mattered, that she cared. “You’ll be wonderful.”
“Oh I don’t know,” he said. Head bowed, frowning, lines of weariness on his face, Sami looked very Jewish, like an aging rabbi from the Auhofstrasse in Vienna. “As long as it lasts, my dear Stefanie. As long as it lasts.”
As long as anything lasts, she thought, but said nothing as they stood outside the sepulcher of Voltaire and Rousseau, aliens both, in a way, yet by adoption, by sympathy, by culture, scions of a culture that had lasted, one way or another, for a thousand years…
“God I hope there isn’t a war,” said Stefanie, who had just felt the first shiver of one.
“Oh there will be,” murmured Sami. “There will be. The question is, when? Tomorrow or the day after?”
Brüder Hermann
Walking along the Rue Vaugirard to the Prime Minister’s residence one night early in March 1938, on the eve of a crucial debate in the Senate on Blum’s plan to reopen the border with Spain (“steady on, Leon,” said Sami, and reported to Stefanie that his old friend, out of power in ’37 but now Prime Minister again, had only replied, “time’s running out, mon cher; I have business to take care of before the Right kicks me out for good”), on the Rue de Medicis at the corner near the gates of the Luxembourg gardens Sami crossed paths with a group of ex-Croix de Feu agitators on their way to the Palais des Sports for an anti-Blum rally organized by the Camelots du Roi and Action Française and their allied entities. One of the mob, Didier Buecher, a former fellow-pastry chef from Strasbourg, recognized Sami and stepped into his path as officiously as a policeman, broadcasting alcohol fumes and belligerence.
“Oy, Shmuel Schoen, Rabbi Blum’s poodle,” he said. “How many businesses has the Old Yid confiscated today, Monsieur ‘Lebel’?”
“Well, well, Buecher,” said Sami. “All grown up but still smelling like dogshit on a hot summer’s day, God that stink brings back memories.”
“Watch it, jewboy.”
Circling like jackals, the others started alternating chants of “Better Hitler than Blum,” with “Down with Yids,” “Blum Blum Ka-Boum,” and other witticisms. Sami, as untrained in the fine art of self-control as he was in the arts of self-defense, rushed at Buecher and the pair of them exchanged wild flailing body blows, neither inflicting any real damage on the other until Buecher’s comrades heroically piled on top of the despised Jew and gave him, as he later said, “the Gentile baptism of a lifetime.”
Summoned by a phone call from Jean Lussac from the bedside of the influenza-afflicted Ignace, whom she had left in the care of his uncle Fritzl (“give my regards to Sami, now”), Stefanie spent the taxi journey to the Salpêtrière hospital cursing the violence and bitterness of the age and calling upon…not God, of course, but the adjunct and comforting holiness of Mary, to manifest herself, for once, in response to humanity’s need for understanding, if not peace…or at least to show the way. Or at least to show herself to Stefanie, again, and reassure her all was not lost; but no manifestations occurred in the taxi, which was, mused Stefanie, probably just as well, in her current state of mind, with a perky Marseillais driver who insisted on telling her how tasty the shrimp were at this time of year down in Marseilles and how he was planning to take advantage of the new two-week paid vacation—“and all thanks to that Monsieur Bloom, there are plenty of people who’d shoot him just because but I, I salute him, he’s a man of courage, Madame”—to take out his old fishing boat at Stes. Maries de la Mer and make some real money, as he said, catching shrimp to sell to the rich foreign visitors farther along the coast at Juan-les-Pins and Cannes…
Stefanie got out of the taxi on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital at one of the side entrances of the Salpêtrière, that immense campus of prison-like buildings, between the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes, which turned its back on the world, like a convent. In one of the hospital’s long, gray, dimly lit corridors a reporter from Paris-Soir wearing a hat with his press card tucked into the rim lunged at Stefanie, camera and notepad at the ready; but Jean Lussac, looking as gangsterish as the reporter and his ilk always described him, in his pinstriped suit and Borsalino hat, was there to intervene.
“Not now, Monsieur from the press. Allez.”
“Are you M. Lebel’s wife, madame?” insisted the reporter.
“We’ve said enough to the press,” said Lussac. “Take yourself off now, and give my regards to the readers of Paris-Soir.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Lussac,” said Stefanie when the reporter had gone.
“It’s the least I could do.” Lussac removed his hat. He looked unshaven and underslept, and smelled of cigarettes. “Leon sends his best wishes, of course, but he’s in the fight of his life at the Senate tonight, so he couldn’t leave. But I know he misses not having your…Monsieur Lebel at his side.”
A sister told them they could go into the Emergency Ward.
“But be quiet,” she whispered. “Poor Monsieur Lebel! Truly, these people will do anything. Happily, he looks much worse than he is. Just be sure not to excite him, overly.”
Stefanie wondered, irrelevantly, if the sister knew Sami was Jewish. Lussac immediately expressed the same thought, somewhat cynically, with the harshness of the age in his voice.
“Would she be as concerned, do you think, if she knew she had a youpin on her hands?”
“She is a ‘good sister,’ Monsieur Lussac, and one hopes she has good Christian feelings.”
“Peut-être, Madame,” said Lussac, with a twisted smile, “Peut-être.”
In fact, Sami was fairly alert, or as alert as he could be under the circumstances. A glucose drip was attached to his left arm. His lips were swollen and chapped, like those of a burn victim. His left eye was a welter of purple turning black, his right cheek a maze of broken veins overlaid with blackish bruises. Stefanie took hold of his unbandaged hand, but let go when he winced.
“Hello, Steffi. Lussac, is that you? What the devil are you doing here? Get on with you, man, Leon needs you more than I do. God, I wish I weren’t stuck here.”
“You are right, my friend, but I only wanted to come as a gesture of solidarity, to express my disgust at these fascist mobs. We’ve all suffered at their hands, and I fear it’s only beginning. But you’re right: I must go, and I will,” said Lussac.
“Yes, Leon’s had it,” said Sami. “They’ll lose the vote tonight, there’s no doubt. God, I’ve had it with this country,” he mumbled. “They kicked the shit out of me, you know,” he said with some effort to Stefanie. “Buecher, an old right-winger from Strasbourg. Of all people. A pastry chef, for God’s sake. A good one, too, more’s the pity. Oh, Stefanie, I’ve had it. It’s had it. The whole country. The whole continent. Between the Buechers and the Doriots and your friend across the Rhine, Corporal fucking Parsifal. So I’ve had it, well and truly. As soon as I get out of this bed I’m off.How does it go?” He licked his dry, swollen lips. Stefanie couldn’t understand a word, then she realized why: Sami was speaking, in Hebrew, the age-old vow of the exiled Jew.
“L’shana ha’ba-ah b’Yerushalayim.”
“Next year in Jerusalem?”
“Good, Steffi. Good. Well, not next year, no thanks. How about next week? Care to join me? How about you, Lussac? After all, you’re half Jewish, and a half equals two full parts to those guys, I can tell you.”
“Oh God,” said Stefanie. Sami, adrift in self-absorption, gazed up through his good eye at the glass globes of the ceiling lamps.
“Yes,” he said. “They’ve the upper hand, all right. It’s really too late for the rest of us, so all I can say is, Time to go, because we’re all fucked right up the...”
Partly to stem the coarseness in which Sami always indulged in his moments of Weltschmerz, Stefanie blurted, “But Sami, Leon—I mean M. Blum—needs you. I need you. Ignace needs you.”
Sami turned and looked at her. His good eye blinked nervously, repeatedly. His bad one stirred under its swollen lid.
“You aren’t listening, Steffi. Nobody needs me,” he said. “You haven’t needed me for ages. Ignace has you and you’re all he needs. And who cares? You’re not Jewish. And with your connections….” He snapped his fingers. “Anyway, we all know Leon’s had it, too, and with him go,” he coughed, “any chances of democracy in this Godforsaken…” His tirade dissolved into coughs. Lussac leaned forward and gently touched him on the shoulder.
“None of that is true, mon ami,” he said. “Of course you feel this way now. I understand absolutely. In fact, I remember Leon saying the same kinds of things after the Camelot incident. Only he wanted to emigrate to America, where, I believe, he has cousins. But he stayed, and look! What a difference he has made already to the lives of the workers of this country. Anyway, if he is out of office soon—and you may be right—he needs your support more than ever. You’re a combattant, Sami. And you know your way around parliament. Believe me, our hour is coming, mon vieux.” His eyes for a moment were fanatically intense. He looked like a mad fakir. “Believe me, Sami.” He glanced at his watch. “I must go. So, what shall I tell Leon, then? That you are moving to Palestine? Or that his old comrade stays and fights on?”
Sami groaned.
“Ah, my God, Lussac, once you get a bone between your teeth…”
“Good. We’ll talk later, when you have recovered. Au revoir, Madame.” Jean Lussac popped his hat on his head, nodded and was gone, nimbly sidestepping on his way out two sisters pushing a cart full of bandages. One looked after him and said something to her colleague, who nodded; then both glanced at Stefanie.
“Ah du Gott der Gott,” muttered Sami, closing his eyes. Suffering for his Jewishness seemed to bring out his Jewishness to a degree Stefanie had never witnessed: this talk of next year in Jerusalem, the degree of Jewish blood possessed by Jean Lussac, the remark that she “wasn’t Jewish”…absurdly, she felt slighted, even insulted. Excluded. Because the political sympathy that had united them again was now on the verge of disappearing, along with so much else. And despite everything, to be perfectly honest (well, perhaps to be less naïve, for a change), she had never really seen people as Jews or Gentiles or Moslems or whatever they happened to be, not even her own Jewish relatives, or her own half-Jewish son; not really, not any more than so-and-so was a postman, or a driver, or a schoolteacher, and so on, and so what? But with a downward spiraling of dying hope she realized that in the brave new world of Adolf and his kind these identities were all that mattered. And the flip side of this coin of the day was the way Jews like Sami, long indifferent or even hostile to the idea of being Jewish, suddenly reawakened to their identity and set their sights on Palestine or America—two places, incidentally, that held no appeal for Stefanie (well, New York perhaps, and the towering California forests)…but realistically, just in case Sami was serious: She was a European. For better or for worse.
Sami turned his ravaged face to her and opened his good eye wide.
“Hello, Steffi. Still here? Give me a cigarette, will you.”
“Oh, Sami. I forgot to bring any.”
“Ah never mind. You run along home now. I expect my nephew your ex will be coming by, if he can spare the time from his latest concert at Pleyel. He’ll have smokes with him. You don’t want to run into dear Arthur, do you?”
“Ach Sami, I don’t mind.”
But after this outburst of lucidity—Arthur, Arthur’s concert, the smokes—Sami was overtaken by weariness and mumbling and was half-asleep when Stefanie, in great agitation of spirit, left the room, hoping, despite herself, that Arthur wouldn’t suddenly appear. The sister who had shown her in was standing outside the door to the ward, arms folded, a gatekeeping gesture that conveyed a change in her demeanor and vindicated Lussac’s skepticism—or perhaps Stefanie was overly-aware of such things now.
“Bonne soirée, ma soeur,” she said.
“Bonsoir,” said the sister, ostentatiously omitting “madame.” Stefanie felt a sudden flare-up of fury: How dare that condescending bitch…!? Who was she to…? If only she knew…!!
Knew what? Vanity of vanities. Stefanie von Rothenberg, visionary? Lover of powerful men? The Joan of Arc—the Teresa of Avila—the Saint Catherine Labouré of her age? No; it was an anxious mother, an ineffective teacher, a despairing exile, and a failed wife who passed by the glaring sister and through the corridors stretching off into an infinity of grayness and globe lamps, until she finally find herself at the main doors of the Salpêtrière and caught the No. 57 bus from the Boulevard de l’Hôpital back to the Pantheon.
The streetlights were dark. Another temporary blackout, explained the bus driver when Stefanie got off.
“It happens all the time nowadays, as you know. But what do you expect, Madame? The lunatics are running the asylum.”
On the Rue Soufflot, lights from gas lamps and candles glimmered inside the cafes. It was a mild evening for early March in Paris, except for the occasional chilly gust of wind, and the tables outside were full. No one seemed to mind the blackout; in any case, thought Stefanie, the bus driver was right: the electricity went off a couple of times a week these days, so everyone was used to it, although whether Leon and his “lunatics” were to blame was doubtful. More likely the electrical workers’ unions. They were all communists who hated Blum as much as the fascists did. The real lunatics, in other words.
Cigarettes glowed red in the semi-darkness outside the Gueuze. Glowing, too, was the polished finish of a sleek black car parked outside the café with its running lights on. Stefanie noticed the diplomatic license plate: CD 75. Coming closer, she recognized the car as a Mercedes, with the long hood and three-pointed star. A stocky man in a chauffeur’s uniform sat at the wheel, reading the Volkischer Beobachter. He looked up and leaned across to roll down the window when Stefanie paused alongside. A cheery, jowly, Bavarian face. It was Johann Kohler, the number-two driver from Berchtesgaden.
“Frau von Rothenberg?”
“Ja. Herr Kohler? Grüßgott!” She switched to German. “Himmel! What are you doing here? Is this your car?” she asked, aimlessly.
He grinned.
“Nah, bless you. It’s the Embassy’s. I’m still the same old car jockey, been one for years but all I get out of it is a five-year-old Peugeot. Listen, I hope you don’t mind me coming round like this, I got your address from the embassy. I mean, I don’t want to impose, but if you have a sec, there’s one or two things I wanted…”
“Of course. I just have to go upstairs for a minute.”
He pointed to the Gueuze. “Soon as I stash this barge somewhere less conspicuous, I’ll meet you in that café.”
After checking on Ignace, who was in his bed asleep and snoring lightly, with his Uncle Fritz also asleep, and snoring loudly in an adjoining armchair, his prosthetic arm held firmly across a sprawled-open copy of Le Parisien shouting “Blum Goes Down Again” on the front page, Stefanie touched herself up in the hall mirror and went downstairs. She found Kohler sitting at a table with a Kronenbourg in front of him. He seemed paler than before, almost washed-out; then she realized the café lights had come on again.
“Pros’t,” he said, raising the glass. “Who’d have thought the Frenchies would make the best beer around?”
After assuring anxious M. Juliot, the café proprietor and ardent Communist, of the good prognosis for recovery that awaited Sami, who had, after all, been one of his best customers over the years, Stefanie had a ballon de blanc and a pair of quenelles, then another pair as her appetite awoke. Her curiosity followed suit.
“Well, Herr Kohler! It’s so good to see you here! Ja! You’re looking well, too.”
“And you too, Frau von Rothenberg, if I may say. Maybe Paris agrees with both of us, eh?”
There was the hint of a lubricious, or tipsy, glow in his eyes, and she remembered him as the kind of fellow whose happy-go-lucky deviltry would be quite appealing in the grim surroundings of Berchtesgaden but less so in the real world outside. In any event, their ages—he was, if anything, ten years her senior—and the situation rendered any further thoughts along those lines quite absurd, and he at least had the sense to see this. The glow died, enabling Stefanie to get down to business.
“Now, Herr Kohler. Your news…?”
“Ja. Well, I lost my job at the Obersalzberg when you know who moved up to Berlin most of the time and left the day-to-day running of things to Frau Angela, that bitch. She hated me from the word go. So before things got worse, I mean you never know what can happen in Germany these days, on a whim I packed up and brought the family out here. I always wanted to see Paris. Now I’ve been here a couple years, chauffeuring for Count von Welczek, the Reich ambassador. My dad was his cousin’s chauffeur, you see, and my auntie was the cook at their estate in Baden…well, anyway, strings were pulled, as they say, and here I am. It’s a living, and I get to live in Paris. Not actually in the city, I’m out in Passy, rue Gros, across from the gasworks. But it’s a nice house, with a garden and a garage for the Peugeot…”
She let him ramble on for a few minutes. He was clearly a man (on his second beer already) in need of an audience, the kind whose wife had heard it all too many times; but suddenly he interrupted himself and leaned forward, eyes darting melodramatically from side to side.
“Anyway, Frau von Rothenberg, what I wanted to say was this…you know I get to hear a fair amount at the Embassy. So. Well, I recently had the honor of driving…well you’ll never guess who.” He drained his beer. A pair of motorcycles and a bus rumbled past outside, causing the metal ashtrays on the café tables to vibrate and drowning out Kohler’s words.
“He’s well shall I say not slim. Drugs, they say. Riding accident or something. But it can’t be all drugs, you should see him eat. We went to Fouquet’s. Count von Welczek suggested Maxim’s, but the Ministerpresident—or shall I say Reichsjagermeister? He has so many titles now. Well, he insisted. Fouquet’s is where the film stars go, he said, and he especially wanted to meet what’s her name, Arletty. Sure enough she was introduced, and you could tell by the look in his eye…well. Anyway, he…”
Kohler ordered another Kronenbourg in stiffly Teutonic French. Stefanie had another ballon de blanc and kept the man company for want of anything better to do. He resumed his meandering account of the very important person he had been assigned to chauffeur around the city. It slowly dawned on Stefanie, who until that point had been too uninterested or too tired to inquire, that he was talking about Hermann Goering, who, she knew from the papers, was now the Reich Minister of something or other (the Luftwaffe?) as well as being the Prime Minister of Prussia and half a dozen other things, including “a real art-lover” according to Kohler, who added, finally getting to the point,
“Well, what I wanted to tell you was that I overheard him speaking your name. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met,” she murmured, knowing full well that Kohler knew when, and where.
“Of course. Up there? Ja. As I thought. So anyway one evening last week, just before he went back to Berlin, I heard him say ‘Does anyone know a Frau Stefanie von Rothenberg, a charming Austrian lady who lives here in Paris? I told her ages ago to come and see me any time,’ but then he went into another room and that was it. But it was enough, it got me to thinking about you and how you’d been. So. Tell me. Have you received any messages from Bruder Hermann?”
She had not, of course, until now, and told Kohler so; but the reminder of her encounter with Goering at Berchtesgaden (“it is of capital importance to us to have friends—collaborators—compatriots—sympathizers, call them what you will”) chilled her, as did so many recollections of her year in that place that was in retrospect more and more like a fairy tale rewritten by a lunatic… with a jolt, she realized that Kohler was looking at her now with an entirely different kind of ardor, that of political impatience..
“Well, let me tell you, gnädige frau, he didn’t need to actually spell it out to me. We all know you’re connected. Word has it you’re best friends with this Jewish prime minister they’ve got here, this Blum. Oy oy! There can’t be too many like you, best friends with both Hitler and Blum, eh? Hey, here’s an idea, why don’t we invite them both to a cocktail party? Think they’d hit it off? Ha ha ha. Anyhow I’d say that makes you a pretty ah. Valuable commodity, Frau von Rothenberg.”
“Oh I don’t think so. You know, I’ve had no contact with Germany or Austria in awhile,” Stefanie replied, stiffly. With Kohler, as with all unsubtle people, she had no idea how to put things plainly without being rude. He was clearly a boorish type, and probably a devoted Nazi. “My life is here now.”
“Well….” He grinned. “Yes and no, eh? You’re here, but as for Austria, now. You still have a relative or two in Vienna, I believe. Not to mention your dear old home town. Salzburg, mein liebchen.” His grin disappeared as he suddenly leaned across the table and rapped the marble surface with an urgent knuckle. “Listen to me. Here’s a tip from me to you, lady. Those relatives of yours. Call them tonight. Get ‘em out of dear sweet little Austria. Especially that old Jewish gentleman in Vienna. Your Baron Kahane. Or…” He made the sensationalist’s beloved gesture denoting violent death, the flat of the hand across the throat, and sat back with grin restored. Fear trickled coldly down Stefanie’s spine.
“God,” she said. “You mean anschluss, don’t you? They used to talk about it all the time, but I haven’t heard much recently. Anyway, it was the left who wanted it in the old days, not the right.”
“Well, left or right big things are in store for little Austria, believe you me. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.” He tapped one side of his nose. “You can take it to the bank.”
“I don’t doubt it, Herr Kohler. How much time do I…how long would you say…?”
“What’s today? The seventh? About a week. Probably less.”
He finished his beer and sat back again, his pudgy frame jolting with after-belches.
“So! Maybe you should let Bruder Hermann know you’re still around, willing and able, ha ha. He’s not a bad fellow, the Reichsminister. He’ll repay you. Eh?”
So this was the message from Goering. It was more subtle than she’d have expected, delivered this way; but on second thoughts she remembered being struck by the man’s intelligence, if not by his goodwill. He was offering help on the one hand; on the other, making a threat. But she’d ignore the latter. She had no choice if her family were in danger. She’d simply do as advised.
Kohler accurately read her glance at her watch.
“Ja, they might be still up. Unless she’s like my old mother. She’s in bed by seven, especially in winter.”
“But,” she began, then fell silent. It was none of his business, and anyway the boring old sex hunger was stealing back across his now-flushed features. She could have written his next line for him.
“So you live here alone, do you, Frau von Rothenberg, here in Paris?”
“Actually, no. Come, Herr Kohler, do you mean you don’t know that?”
She got up, having had enough of everything on offer: him, wine, the cafe. He sprang to his feet and assisted her with the chair. She took out her purse, but he frowned and wagged a finger.
“Allow me.”
She allowed him, or rather the German Embassy, to pay the bill, although M. Juliot briefly and feebly suggested it might be on the house, given the sad circumstances of “M. Lebel’s injuries”—“ah yes,” said Kohler, who claimed to know so little about her living arrangements, in his Germanic French, “the gallant Jewish monsieur, he is recovering, I trust?”—but Stefanie was tired and the thought of her mother and uncle and Austria itself was pressing upon her like a bad dream. Kohler tipped, as she expected, with vulgar excess, and walked her outside. A cool breeze had sprung up and was amusing itself by propelling a newspaper across the street in fits and starts. Stefanie extended her hand.
“Tschuss then, and thank you.”
“Ja. Tschuss.” Kohler looked serious, and stiffened slightly as he spoke. “Remember that I’m available, if you need anything from, or via, the Embassy,” he said. “I know I’m only a lousy chauffeur, but you’d be surprised where I get to go, and what I get to hear. I keep my lines of communication open, you know.” He took a step back and clicked his heels. “Gnädige frau.”
“Vielen dank, Herr Kohler.”
And she meant it. She murmured an after-thought prayer of thanks as she rode the creaking lift upward. It was a double blessing, if true; and the fact that Kohler was undoubtedly on two payrolls, as both Embassy driver and low-level intelligence agent, i.e. a hired snoop (and the corollary fact that Goering himself was probably behind the evening’s message), in no way detracted from the importance to Stefanie of the service he’d rendered.
Indeed, she returned to the apartment with an odd, smug feeling of vindication. Kohler’s warning—“big things in store for little Austria”—had only confirmed her deepest feeling: that her artist-madman wouldn’t stop. Onward, devil, onward! She remembered him pouting in a Linz tearoom and wanting the world.
Was he any different now?
In 1932 Sami had made ill-advised investments in a Bayonne bond corporation that declared bankruptcy one year later, precipitating financial crisis, the collapse of the government, the disgrace of the Radicals, the supposed suicide of the financier Alain Stavisky, and financial disaster for Sami himself. Stung by accusations from right-wing deputies, he resigned his seat in the Assemblée. Rioters pelted his Delahaye with bricks as he drove away from the Palais-Bourbon. François Rocque, the Fascist leader, derided him, calling him “Herr Goldenstein.” Leaflets bearing the star of David and caricatures of Semitic noses fluttered in his wake.
“Your friends,” muttered Sami to Stefanie. “The damned fascists. Everywhere. They say the whole business was our fault. And who killed Stavisky?”
“He killed himself.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
Gaston Doumergue, ex-president, stepped in and spread the balm of his blandness over the roiling political seas. The Third Republic got shakily to its feet, preserved to collapse with finality another day. Sami watched from the sidelines, unshaven, beset by indigestion and headaches, usually garbed in his dressing gown until late morning, smoking Gauloises and drinking five to eight petits Ricards a day and seated, in clement weather, on the balcony. On rainy days he dressed and went downstairs to the Café Gueuze and harangued the barman, a Communist, on the contemptible corruption of France’s Right and Left alike. Also, Sami those days was an inattentive, even indifferent lover (and who could blame him?), and every letter or newspaper from Germany inspired a small diatribe of incomprehension.
“My God, he’s the damned Chancellor of the Reich now, isn’t he. Well, why aren’t you by his side? Now’s the time. Off you go. Go on, away with you to Berchtesgaden. Who’s romping in his bed now?”
In fact, most letters Stefanie received from Germany came from Fritzl’s wife Lotte. Although he had had a prosthetic arm fitted, Fritz was sinking seriously into beer and despair. He had found a job as assistant shift manager at the Bavarian Motor Works, quite a comedown for him but a job was a job, it was a question of self-respect as much as anything else. Of course, there were all kinds of new restrictions now, with the new government, and Fritz had run into a bit of trouble because of his Jewish background, which in his usual blockheaded fashion he continued to deny. This only made matters worse, of course. There were all kinds of nosy people in uniforms at work these days, and one or two had even stopped by the house when Lotte was out and chatted with the boys, tried to find things out behind their parents’ backs...it was contemptible. Fritz hadn’t lost his job yet, but she, Lotte, felt that it was only a matter of time. And by the way, speaking of the new government...They had heard rumors about Cousin Stefanie, but being well-bred did not want to come right out and ask. Still, there was a great deal of nosing around, of delicate sniffing at the edges. Was she back in Paris for good? Did she plan any trips to Germany? Say, to (ahem) the Alps, near Salzburg?
The combination of deference and indignation in these letters was unique in Stefanie’s experience. Finally she sat down and wrote a reply.
“Dear Fritz and Lotte,
“How are you? How are the boys? I am well. Ignace has started his second term at the Académie Werfel, so I can say he is getting the best of French and German culture.
“How kind of you to inquire about me. Yes, I have returned permanently to Paris. My sojourn in Germany was an extraordinary interlude in my life. I do not regret it; quite the contrary. It made clear several things. One, that politics has no place in my life. Two, that faith in God transcends all else. Three, that I do not tolerate heights well. Four, that Adolf Hitler is a great man, but that greatness does not mean goodness.
“Meanwhile, I make a living at my son’s school. ‘Will you be my teacher?’ he asked me, the day before he started school. ‘Only in the upper forms,’ I replied. That gives us seven or eight years!
“Although my flat is small, I am sure I could arrange to accommodate you if you decide to visit me here in Paris. God bless. Stay in touch.
“Kisses from your loving cousin!
“Steffi.”
Lotte soon replied. Fritzl, it seemed, had finally been taken in for questioning by the police after arriving at work drunk and, in an about-face, loudly proclaiming his Jewish heritage while insulting his colleagues as “stupid Swabian swine.” Lottle said he’d been knocked about quite a bit, and threatened with imrpisonment. It was lucky, she said, that it had been the police and not the Gestapo. However, young Willi and Kurt had again been interrogated, this time after school at a local konditorei by the father of one of their schoolmates, a Herr Liebnitz, “a sallow man who affects a leather trenchcoat,” who was either in the state security police or worked as an informant for that grim agency. He had bought Willi and Kurt strawberry tarts and chocolate milk and, after bland commentary on childish things such as electric trains and carrousels, had proceeded to question them closely on the customs and beliefs of their parents, notably their father; was he a Jew? an observant Jew? Did he have Jewish friends? Did he attend a synagogue? Which one? Herr Liebnitz had promised the boys greater inducements than strawberry tarts, going as far as mentioning uniforms and air guns and rides in the country if they agreed to cooperate by writing him, Herr Liebnitz, weekly “letters” reporting their father’s comments, conduct and movements, especially if they agreed to join the new youth organization called Hitler-Jugend; he would even make efforts to ensure that (in view of Lotte’s impeccable Aryanness) their polluted ancestry was overlooked, or reclassified, as was being done in so many areas, some too high to name...
Fully as disturbing as the invidious anti-Jewishness and gross interference in privacy was the revelation that both boys had cooperated in the persecution of their own father. It had only been Lotte’s discovery of one of Willi’s “letters” to Herr Liebnitz that had brought the whole matter to light.
“I found the man’s address and went to see him, to accost him, to accuse him, to present him with the tokens of his evil. He was at home (he lives in a respectable suburban villa in Au). He himself has two children, girls, as sweet as can be. I was embarrassed with them standing around—I saw no sign of a wife—but obviously he has them trained. He was nauseating, Steffi. This is the kind of man who will thrive under your Hitler. Utterly without morals. Only concerned for his own welfare. I thrust the note under his nose. ‘How dare you turn my children into spies?’ I said. He feigned ignorance! ‘I do not consort with young boys,’ he said. ‘Are you accusing me of perversion?’ All this in front of his daughters, too. I was so sickened I merely stood and stared at him, torn between fury and fear, real fear, because this man is the type of the new man, he has no compunction about destroying lives, he does it as nonchalantly as you or I might squash a bug...”
The upshot was twofold emigration, the boys being sent to stay with their Grandpa Ernst in Vienna, and Fritzl and Lotte coming to stay in the already-cozy apartment on the Rue Soufflot. In spite of the cramped quarters Fritzl’s arrival had a noticeably cheering effect on Sami’s spirits. The two men had found each other congenial during Sami’s brief visit to Munich ten years earlier, and although Fritzl was stouter, more florid and louder than ever, and Sami more melancholy and embittered, their friendship matured, via shouts of “You Old Jew” and “You Fat Boche” and several weeping evenings of wine and beer downstairs at the Gueuze. Sami was disgusted by Fritzl’s troubles and the sinister tale of Herr Liebnitz, but in a perverse way the whole affair gave him the satisfaction of having been absolutely right about a regime whose advent he, Sami, had long predicted, and he couldn’t resist saying so to the former mistress of that regime’s progenitor.
“It sounds like the new way in Germany is pretty much the old way of, oh I don’t know…Vlad Dracul? Eh, Steffi?”
Eventually, after lengthy discussions with Sami and some of his friends in various government ministries, Fritzl and Lotte decided to settle permanently in France. Through contacts in the government Sami got Fritzl residence papers and found him a job as a security guard at the Dewoitine airplane works, despite his two obvious handicaps: the prosthetic arm and his fractured French.
“One real arm is enough,” said Sami. “As long as you can salute. As for your French, if you can say ‘bonjour,’ ‘oui,’ ‘non,’ and ‘vos papiers’ you’re all right.”
Sami himself at last, reluctantly, returned to work in early ‘36, first as a file distribution manager at the Ministry of Agriculture, then as a full-fledged Huissier in the Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. Both positions necessitated regular hours and a daily shave. He quite missed his sodden, self-pitying days, but welcomed the chance to wear a clean shirt again.
“There,” he said. “I have arrived. Look at me. Another indentured drone in an office, cultivating his hemorrhoids.”
Eventually, after lengthy correspondence and shouted telephone conversations had satisfied their parents that the Herr Liebnitz episode was not necessarily a harbinger of the future, Willi and Kurt arrived from Vienna and moved with their parents into a small semi-detached house in the working-class suburb of Montrouge. In the spring of ‘36 the boys began attending the Académie Werfel with Ignace, who was wary of them, although they seemed to be the soul of friendliness, eager to learn French, getting high grades on their lessons, joining in other students’ soccer games, canoeing on the Seine on Sundays. It was far from an ideal situation, but things had been worse. Fritzl was alive, at least, and drinking less; and Stefanie was satisfied that the family was safe and reasonably content, for the moment.
Her own state of mind was restless and dour, and she awoke every day with a knot in the pit of her stomach, as if in dread of some nameless event. In the early mornings, as the street sweepers swept and the lorries rattled and groaned, she walked the streets of the Latin Quarter. Cafés in which men sat smoking and reading papers over the early-morning verre de blanc were opening for the day’s business. Clochards, many of them war veterans, gathered on the steps of St. Sulpice and passed around a bottle. On the boulevards, taxis puttered by, shopkeepers raised their shutters, bookcases were wheeled onto the freshly hosed-down pavement, and everywhere there were smells of roasting coffee, gasoline fumes, and Caporal smoke mingling in the air. On sunny mornings Stefanie would end her morning walk with a stroll around the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, the so-French order and design of which so contradicted the disorder and illogic of everyday life; but the French happily live with the illusion of order. Abstraction rules in a country where theorizing has the weight and illusion of reality, a country where theories have even found themselves translated into reality, as in the Luxembourg Gardens, or Versailles, or even the Maginot Line . . . unlike the Germans, who were less cerebral and (like everyone else) resented the French for their cultural confidence and sheer ability to live well under any circumstances. Stefanie brooded much about Germany. A strange addiction bound her to that nation, and her own connection with Hitler, and Fritzl’s recent experiences, only bound her tighter. Germany overshadowed the world. The Germans were entering a new Age of Empire that future generations would look back on with amazement and wonder. All Europe would under their sway. Stefanie’s former lover and teenage swain would, like Louis XIV, stamp the age with his name; like Bismarck, he would move boundaries as it suited him; like Charlemagne he would fundamentally change the world he found.
In part of her mind she was a prisoner of Berchtesgaden, subjugated to the power of he who was now a colossus on the stage of the world.
Classes at the academy generally kept her focused on the day-to-day, and Ignace, in the upper forms, was turning into a stalwart young man and outstanding student; but in the evenings and on weekends Stefanie wrote, dwelling inwardly on thoughts she found as incredible as the events that had given rise to them. In the background was the muttering of the great city and, usually, the sound of RTF on the radio. Sami was seldom at home. He played bridge at Fritzl’s, or visited “friends” Stefanie suspected of being unattached and female. Her sojourn with Hitler had opened up a chasm between them that would be forever unbridgeable, she feared; under the courteous commonplaces they were indifferent, cold, mutually finding fault. More: she wondered if he hated her.
As for her, she was ashamed, but too proud to admit it.
Blum
But in 1936 Sami and Stefanie came together again, reunited in body and spirit by (as Stefanie said) “of all things,” politics: the New Dawn of the socialist-communist alliance and its victory in the May elections and the renewed, if short-lived, hope it inspired, not only among the Reds, many of whom were suspicious of these “boudoir radicals,” but also in the ranks of the moderate left-leaning and the antifascists, among whom Stefanie counted herself. Sami was ecstatic beyond all reason, certainly beyond the straited skepticism that was his usual response to world events.
“At last!” he roared in the Gueuze, the evening the news of the new government was announced. “Vive la République! Vive la France! Vive la gauche! A republic we can live for! Drinks all round! Pastis, please!”
A month later Léon Blum was named Prime Minister. He was an old friend of Sami’s. They had been fellow book-reviewers for Le Matin and (sporadically, on Sami’s part) fellow travelers in the Socialist Party Blum had done so much to revive after the murder of the great Jaurès on the eve of the ’14-’18 war. Yes, they’d been friends then and were friends now, said Sami, although he conceded to the lesser intellect and the greater disposition to debauchery at the time (“Léon was always at his books, always”) but professed equality when it came to literary essays and the like, Blum having stumbled in his judgment, reckoned Sami, at around the time of Proust’s first rejection by Gallimard’s reader, young André Gide, while he, Sami, had snared the absinthe-bibbing Apollinaire for an interview in Ces Vents Qui Soufflent, an interview that was still talked about, in certain (admittedy narrow) circles…
“Pah, that’s all past.”
In any event, the “Blum coup,” as the rightists called it, sent a chill through the ranks of the establishment, which despised all republics, of course, as being of suspect Judeo-leftist origin (like Blum himself, incarnation of their darkest fears) and preferred the more solemn, hewn-of-granite, racially pure idea of The Nation, with its square pillars, solemn visages, and worship of technology. But for a moment it seemed as if the Right was in retreat. Blum’s government started a second revolution.
“Oh, it’ll have them shitting their pants, the monarchist bastards,” said Sami, gleefully. “Long live Léon!”
“Better Hitler than Blum!” retorted the Right; but in most households, and across all of industrial France, not least (reported Willi and Kurt with the air of savvy correspondents at the front) in the depressed backways and nineteenth-century alleys of industrial Montrouge and adjoining Billancourt. Indeed, a desperate relief was in the air, as if the country had broken a bad fever. Stefanie read the papers with greater pleasure than usual, and even her sullen charges at the Académie Werfel reacted to the news. Then the strikes began, first at the Breguet works in Le Havre, then across the industrial North. Workers long accustomed to being utterly ignored were now being grudgingly given a voice, and long-pent-up anger spilled over into industrial action, although most of the strikes were so good-natured that the workers more often sang Auprès de ma blonde than The Internationale (except for the Cusinberche fiasco in Clichy, in which an Arab immigrant was shot dead). Finally, settlements were reached; and joy of joys, the workers’ demands were met, paid vacations and a 40-hour workweek were suddenly on the agenda—as well as nationalization of the Bank of France and, rumor had it, votes for women...
“Vive Blum,” said Stefanie. “Vive Léon.” As if in penance for her past sins, she desperately wanted France’s first Jewish leader to succeed. At school she conducted civics classes crisply and unsentimentally, but with a decided bias.
“Blum must prevail,” she said one morning.
“But M. Blum, he is a Jew,” observed one Manfred Dieselmann, son of the Austrian attaché.
“Yes!” exclaimed others, responding, like dogs to the odor of a cat, to the ambient anti-Semitism of their households and nations.
“Yes,” said Stefanie. “But he is a Frenchman first. And we should give credit to his country for upholding the spirit of the Enlightenment.”
“Vive la France,” mumbled the kids.
“But he is still Jewish,” muttered Dieselmann, obstinately. “And a Bolshevik.”
On a drowsy day in September Sami rushed into Stefanie’s classroom, waving his hands briskly at the students.
“Class dismissed,” he shouted. “Run along, all of you.” Beaming, he seized her by the arm. “Come,” he said. She gaped. “To meet Léon,” he said. And without further word he had propelled her before him to the street, to a taxi, then across town to the Restaurant Drouand, a large public dining room with high ceilings like a salon, incongruously located on the third floor of an office building behind the Opéra. It was a food- and coffee-redolent room in which floated a dim haze of cigarette smoke barely penetrable by the light of sun or lamp, a room abuzz with the clamor of hearty lunchtime voices, the din of commerce, the newspapers, politics, a room that was the forum and clearing-house for anything alive and kicking and making money in central Paris: art buying, car and horse trading, haggling, smuggling, prostitution (discreet, of course), commodity trading: all co-existed at the Druouand, cheek-by-jowl with the confits and foie gras and pichets de rouge on its tables d’hôte.
The Prime Minister of France, officially known as the President of the Council of Ministers, was seated with a young man with a round face made owlish by round spectacles. This was the new Education Minister, Jean Lussac, as Stefanie knew from Le Matin of that very morning. They were at a long table covered with notepads and briefing papers, in the corner directly opposite the entrance; a strategic placement, Stefanie thought, and said so to Sami, who ignored her, intent as he was on capturing the Prime Minister’s every glance. He strode across the room, hand upheld in salutation.
“Mon vieux, or should I say Monsieur le Président? Dear old Léon, anyway, arrived at last.”
“But where, mon ami? On a precipice, I fear. It feels like 1914 all over again, doesn’t it? And I am no Clemenceau. I don’t even look like him, as you do. I am an armchair revolutionary leading a revolution in pearl-grey gloves, as Daudet said, eh? But how are you, mon cher? Would you like a job in my cabinet? No, I should say: Would you like my job? Ha ha. You know, this is the first time in about three months I have been able to schedule a lunch meeting. So many things, my dear Samuel. What an age. But we are here to lunch, not to talk politics. And this is Madame…?”
“This is Stefanie von Rothenberg,” Sami added to the tail end of many more effusive greetings exchanged with Lussac, whom he had known in the Assemblée as one of his firmer supporters. Stefanie inclined her head.
“Monsieur le Président,” she said, suddenly painfully aware of her sex, her dubious situation, her accent…but with gallant nonchalance Blum rose to his feet. He was tall, slightly stooped, dressed in an elegant charcoal-gray suit, his black hair neatly combed over and a heavy mustache half-concealing a weary smile. His gaze, behind a pair of thick, round spectacles, was cautious and steady, like a conscientious bank manager’s.
“Enchanté, Madame!”
Blum settled into his seat and he and Sami conferred, and Jean Lussac uncoiled himself silently and snapped his fingers for a chair—and got one within seconds—and joined in the conference in gruff undertones that was punctuated with great snorts of derision and explosive clouds of blue Caporal smoke. Blum and Lussac at first regarded Stefanie with a combination of indifference and wariness, which she attributed to her sex and her Germanic name; but when the conversation began to cartwheel uncontrollably out of control—“Ethiopia”; “Mussolini”; “Herriot”; “the nationalizations”; “Daladier”; the “Comité France-Allemagne”; and yes, inevitably, “Hitler”— and she was beginning to feel as out of place as a rose in a mire, Léon Blum leaned forward, signaling silence to his companions by so doing, and smiled, proposing lunchtime delicacies. Stefanie decided on a salad, Sami on a cassoulet and liter of rouge; but Blum proved to have the tastes of an epicure, and recited the menu with expertise.
“Caille farci aux raisins verts,” he said. “It’s my choice. For once in our lives, Sami, let’s overdo it.”
“Ha! Once in our lives? Speak for yourself. You don’t mean a drink, do you? Leon the dry?”
Blum smiled with his eyes, not his lips, although his heavy mustache did seem to twitch at its extremities.
“Not entirely dry, my dear Sami. A good ballon de rouge with dinner, generally nothing more. One needs to be alert, these days, if one is to be a truly subtle Talmudist.” All present knew he was quoting the Jew-baiting Xavier Vallat in the Assemblée: “We welcome the subtle Talmudist,” he had said, upon Blum’s ascension. “Exercise, eh? But I leave all that to Jean here, with his holiday colonies and fresh-air Fridays.”
“Fridays now,” said Lussac, with a half-smile. “But every day soon enough, when we get the legislation written. It’s not only the fascists who respect physical fitness, you know.”
“Ah, so you are an abstainer as well, Jean?” inquired Sami, with a shade of disdain.
“Not at all. Even the contrary. I am from the Loire, where we are raised on the world’s best wine.”
“Pah! Best? Compared to Burgundy?”
“Oh, but absolutely. Our Bourgeuil; our Vouvray…”
“An excellent idea,” boomed Sami. “One of each, and a Burgundy for purposes of comparison. Waiter!”
“I knew this would happen if I let you order the wine,” said Blum, with mock sorrow. “Now my Minister of Education and my future personal private secretary will get into a drinking contest and possibly fisticuffs and the government will be disgraced and go the way of the 101 other governments of the Third Republic.”
“Personal private secretary?” echoed Sami. Blum, eyes twinkling, repeated himself, and elaborated: a job for a man of vision, a radical like himself, a man of the left; but also a confidant, a friend, one worthy of trust. “And I know none better. What say you?”
“I am honored, Monsieur le Président. And let me also say: It’s a wise decision, mon ami. My loyalty will be second to none.”
“It’s true,” blurted Stefanie. “He will be your best.” She was pleased for Sami, but more than slightly resentful of the masculine clubbiness that quite firmly kept her at arm’s length. The University came to mind: Herr Professor Schnitzel; the jibes; “does your father have a telephone number we can call?”…
Blum gave her a nod in acknowledgement.
“Messieurs?” The wine steward, deferential, menu bearing, loomed. Sami ordered.
“Good thing I’ve made a second career out of ordering wine. Not that I ever overdo it, please understand. As for yourself, speaking of overdoing it, I think you already have, Monsieur le Président,” said Sami, smiling. “With your 40-hour week and paid holidays and collective bargaining et j’en passe.”
“Our 40-hour week, mon cher,” said Blum. “Our 40-hour week, our paid holidays. Our collective bargaining. All that is now the property and right of every Frenchman. And woman. This is my pledge. And if I commit errors it will be because of being not enough of a leader, not because of being too much of one.” A propos of women’s rights, he courteously turned his attention to Stefanie. Was she, he wondered, German; and if so, acquainted with the works of Goethe? No, she replied; and yes.
“Ah, but you must know Goethe, then,” he said, in one breath. Sami leaned forward, eager to interject, like a teenage boy with a hot secret.
“Leon wrote a book about Goethe once,” he said. “Brilliant.” Blum raised a dismissive hand.
“Brilliant it may have been, it is not for me to say. But with all the copies unsold I could build a bridge from here to Narbonne. Still, Goethe was, and remains, my great passion. His Faust! His Werther! How sad that the murderous trivialities of a bully boy like Hitler should insult such genius,” the Prime Minister said. “Hitler represents the very opposite of culture. But it is necessary for all of us to examine our consciences in the face of such a catastrophe. Especially we French, who have been so, ah,” he waved a hand in the air while searching for the word (but kept his steady gaze on Stefanie all the while), “vengeful in our demands, post-Versailles. It’s crazy, my friends. Crazy.”
Sami looked significantly at Stefanie and raised his eyebrows, as in query. She, catching his look, shook her head. No, she would not parade her acquaintanceship with the bully boy of whom Blum spoke, not for lunchtime entertainment, not for anything (she who had studied men so closely was fairly certain the Prime Minister spoke with earnest spontaneity and not out of any calculation to draw her out on the subject of his nemesis across the Rhine). Would she do it for France? wondered Sami, and then wondered what, exactly, were his lady’s feelings for his country; after all, an Austrian, a fellow countrywoman of Hitler’s, an ex-mistress…he shook his head to dispel this last, this smokepot that would forever befoul their lives together.
Meanwhile, Blum was talking.
“Actually, I spent some time in Weimar,” he said, seeming to be under the impression that Stefanie was, after all, German. “The town of Goethe’s Lotte, of course. I had a rewarding time. I learned some German, at least! Ein bisschen, ja? Of course, I knew some Yiddish from my youth.” He considered her, gauging her reaction, as a presumptive German, to his bold Jewishness. She smiled pleasantly. He went on: “The people were most welcoming, despite my, shall I say, double burden of nationality and religion? Yes, I must admit I was never confronted there as I have been here in my own country—in a physical sense that is.” Both Sami and Stefanie knew he was referring to the previous year’s Camelots du Roi incident, when he was pulled from his car and brutally beaten by the extravagantly named Fascist thugs.
“Filthy swine,” said Jean Lussac, who had otherwise been smoking slowly and meditatively and jotting items on a notepad.
“Well, we got rid of them, Jean,” said Blum. “We legislated them out of existence. Poof! Like that.” He snapped his fingers. A waiter hurried over. “No, no, monsieur, thank you very much,” said Blum, with elaborate courtesy, seeking to not embarrass the man. “Merely a gesture of emphasis, you know.”
“Monsieur le Président.”
The man retreated at a half-bow. A small encounter, thought Stefanie, but deeply illustrative of character. Already she saw the very opposite of Hitler in this Blum, the two countervailing forces on the continent. Der alte Jude, das ist der mann, as Bismarck had said of Disraeli. Would Hitler ever say the same of Blum? How ironic, she thought, if the two of them should turn out to be the great force of Europe and its opponent, Blum’s Jewishness only adding spice to the irony (a man who had been bar miztvah’d, who had attended a shul, who observed the Jahrzeit, all of this grist to the fascists’ mill); how could Hitler ignore him? Premier of France, legislative leader of the other great European power, Mussolini notwithstanding…?
But there was a conciliatory softness in Blum and the opposite in Hitler.
“No, Leon. They’ll be back, calling themselves political parties,” said Lussac. “It’s all coming from across the Rhine, these days, anyway, n’est-ce pas? Everything bad and obnoxious. The Right is flexing its muscles. We’re the last hope.” His fist landed softly on a pile of papers. His spectacles flashed blindly in a random sunbeam from the windows. “Maybe for all Europe.”
They had lunch, an expansive old-fashioned bourgeois spread with three courses and a bottle per course, followed by the cheese, the brandy, the coffee, the cigarettes, and one cigar (Sami’s). Spain came up, and the Rhineland, and the prospect of an alliance with Russia against Germany—Blum’s pet project in foreign policy—and again and again the name “Hitler.” Stefanie resisted the temptation to say “But I knew him when he was just a,” whatever he was, “little shabby painter,” and what he’d become, “and I was his mistress for a month,” which was a nice way of saying it…. in any case, she noticed Jean Lussac staring at her.
“What do you think, Madame?”
Flustered, she retreated into the reserve proper to a well-brought-up Austrian girl.
“Oh I don’t have any thoughts on the subject, Monsieur Lussac,” she said. “It’s all politics.” A bark of laughter came from Sami.
“I can hardly credit that, Madame,” said Lussac. He was a man who understood seriousness, Stefanie thought. Distress had already found a home in his eyes. “But I respect it.”
After the lunch, and the hasty departure of the Prime Minister and his aide amid the salaams and jeers of the crowd outside, Stefanie and Sami took the Metro home and strolled up the Rue Soufflot to the Pantheon in the gray evening light.
“I’m very pleased M. Blum made you that offer, you know,” said Stefanie, feeling somehow the need to remind Sami that he mattered, that she cared. “You’ll be wonderful.”
“Oh I don’t know,” he said. Head bowed, frowning, lines of weariness on his face, Sami looked very Jewish, like an aging rabbi from the Auhofstrasse in Vienna. “As long as it lasts, my dear Stefanie. As long as it lasts.”
As long as anything lasts, she thought, but said nothing as they stood outside the sepulcher of Voltaire and Rousseau, aliens both, in a way, yet by adoption, by sympathy, by culture, scions of a culture that had lasted, one way or another, for a thousand years…
“God I hope there isn’t a war,” said Stefanie, who had just felt the first shiver of one.
“Oh there will be,” murmured Sami. “There will be. The question is, when? Tomorrow or the day after?”
Brüder Hermann
Walking along the Rue Vaugirard to the Prime Minister’s residence one night early in March 1938, on the eve of a crucial debate in the Senate on Blum’s plan to reopen the border with Spain (“steady on, Leon,” said Sami, and reported to Stefanie that his old friend, out of power in ’37 but now Prime Minister again, had only replied, “time’s running out, mon cher; I have business to take care of before the Right kicks me out for good”), on the Rue de Medicis at the corner near the gates of the Luxembourg gardens Sami crossed paths with a group of ex-Croix de Feu agitators on their way to the Palais des Sports for an anti-Blum rally organized by the Camelots du Roi and Action Française and their allied entities. One of the mob, Didier Buecher, a former fellow-pastry chef from Strasbourg, recognized Sami and stepped into his path as officiously as a policeman, broadcasting alcohol fumes and belligerence.
“Oy, Shmuel Schoen, Rabbi Blum’s poodle,” he said. “How many businesses has the Old Yid confiscated today, Monsieur ‘Lebel’?”
“Well, well, Buecher,” said Sami. “All grown up but still smelling like dogshit on a hot summer’s day, God that stink brings back memories.”
“Watch it, jewboy.”
Circling like jackals, the others started alternating chants of “Better Hitler than Blum,” with “Down with Yids,” “Blum Blum Ka-Boum,” and other witticisms. Sami, as untrained in the fine art of self-control as he was in the arts of self-defense, rushed at Buecher and the pair of them exchanged wild flailing body blows, neither inflicting any real damage on the other until Buecher’s comrades heroically piled on top of the despised Jew and gave him, as he later said, “the Gentile baptism of a lifetime.”
Summoned by a phone call from Jean Lussac from the bedside of the influenza-afflicted Ignace, whom she had left in the care of his uncle Fritzl (“give my regards to Sami, now”), Stefanie spent the taxi journey to the Salpêtrière hospital cursing the violence and bitterness of the age and calling upon…not God, of course, but the adjunct and comforting holiness of Mary, to manifest herself, for once, in response to humanity’s need for understanding, if not peace…or at least to show the way. Or at least to show herself to Stefanie, again, and reassure her all was not lost; but no manifestations occurred in the taxi, which was, mused Stefanie, probably just as well, in her current state of mind, with a perky Marseillais driver who insisted on telling her how tasty the shrimp were at this time of year down in Marseilles and how he was planning to take advantage of the new two-week paid vacation—“and all thanks to that Monsieur Bloom, there are plenty of people who’d shoot him just because but I, I salute him, he’s a man of courage, Madame”—to take out his old fishing boat at Stes. Maries de la Mer and make some real money, as he said, catching shrimp to sell to the rich foreign visitors farther along the coast at Juan-les-Pins and Cannes…
Stefanie got out of the taxi on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital at one of the side entrances of the Salpêtrière, that immense campus of prison-like buildings, between the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes, which turned its back on the world, like a convent. In one of the hospital’s long, gray, dimly lit corridors a reporter from Paris-Soir wearing a hat with his press card tucked into the rim lunged at Stefanie, camera and notepad at the ready; but Jean Lussac, looking as gangsterish as the reporter and his ilk always described him, in his pinstriped suit and Borsalino hat, was there to intervene.
“Not now, Monsieur from the press. Allez.”
“Are you M. Lebel’s wife, madame?” insisted the reporter.
“We’ve said enough to the press,” said Lussac. “Take yourself off now, and give my regards to the readers of Paris-Soir.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Lussac,” said Stefanie when the reporter had gone.
“It’s the least I could do.” Lussac removed his hat. He looked unshaven and underslept, and smelled of cigarettes. “Leon sends his best wishes, of course, but he’s in the fight of his life at the Senate tonight, so he couldn’t leave. But I know he misses not having your…Monsieur Lebel at his side.”
A sister told them they could go into the Emergency Ward.
“But be quiet,” she whispered. “Poor Monsieur Lebel! Truly, these people will do anything. Happily, he looks much worse than he is. Just be sure not to excite him, overly.”
Stefanie wondered, irrelevantly, if the sister knew Sami was Jewish. Lussac immediately expressed the same thought, somewhat cynically, with the harshness of the age in his voice.
“Would she be as concerned, do you think, if she knew she had a youpin on her hands?”
“She is a ‘good sister,’ Monsieur Lussac, and one hopes she has good Christian feelings.”
“Peut-être, Madame,” said Lussac, with a twisted smile, “Peut-être.”
In fact, Sami was fairly alert, or as alert as he could be under the circumstances. A glucose drip was attached to his left arm. His lips were swollen and chapped, like those of a burn victim. His left eye was a welter of purple turning black, his right cheek a maze of broken veins overlaid with blackish bruises. Stefanie took hold of his unbandaged hand, but let go when he winced.
“Hello, Steffi. Lussac, is that you? What the devil are you doing here? Get on with you, man, Leon needs you more than I do. God, I wish I weren’t stuck here.”
“You are right, my friend, but I only wanted to come as a gesture of solidarity, to express my disgust at these fascist mobs. We’ve all suffered at their hands, and I fear it’s only beginning. But you’re right: I must go, and I will,” said Lussac.
“Yes, Leon’s had it,” said Sami. “They’ll lose the vote tonight, there’s no doubt. God, I’ve had it with this country,” he mumbled. “They kicked the shit out of me, you know,” he said with some effort to Stefanie. “Buecher, an old right-winger from Strasbourg. Of all people. A pastry chef, for God’s sake. A good one, too, more’s the pity. Oh, Stefanie, I’ve had it. It’s had it. The whole country. The whole continent. Between the Buechers and the Doriots and your friend across the Rhine, Corporal fucking Parsifal. So I’ve had it, well and truly. As soon as I get out of this bed I’m off.How does it go?” He licked his dry, swollen lips. Stefanie couldn’t understand a word, then she realized why: Sami was speaking, in Hebrew, the age-old vow of the exiled Jew.
“L’shana ha’ba-ah b’Yerushalayim.”
“Next year in Jerusalem?”
“Good, Steffi. Good. Well, not next year, no thanks. How about next week? Care to join me? How about you, Lussac? After all, you’re half Jewish, and a half equals two full parts to those guys, I can tell you.”
“Oh God,” said Stefanie. Sami, adrift in self-absorption, gazed up through his good eye at the glass globes of the ceiling lamps.
“Yes,” he said. “They’ve the upper hand, all right. It’s really too late for the rest of us, so all I can say is, Time to go, because we’re all fucked right up the...”
Partly to stem the coarseness in which Sami always indulged in his moments of Weltschmerz, Stefanie blurted, “But Sami, Leon—I mean M. Blum—needs you. I need you. Ignace needs you.”
Sami turned and looked at her. His good eye blinked nervously, repeatedly. His bad one stirred under its swollen lid.
“You aren’t listening, Steffi. Nobody needs me,” he said. “You haven’t needed me for ages. Ignace has you and you’re all he needs. And who cares? You’re not Jewish. And with your connections….” He snapped his fingers. “Anyway, we all know Leon’s had it, too, and with him go,” he coughed, “any chances of democracy in this Godforsaken…” His tirade dissolved into coughs. Lussac leaned forward and gently touched him on the shoulder.
“None of that is true, mon ami,” he said. “Of course you feel this way now. I understand absolutely. In fact, I remember Leon saying the same kinds of things after the Camelot incident. Only he wanted to emigrate to America, where, I believe, he has cousins. But he stayed, and look! What a difference he has made already to the lives of the workers of this country. Anyway, if he is out of office soon—and you may be right—he needs your support more than ever. You’re a combattant, Sami. And you know your way around parliament. Believe me, our hour is coming, mon vieux.” His eyes for a moment were fanatically intense. He looked like a mad fakir. “Believe me, Sami.” He glanced at his watch. “I must go. So, what shall I tell Leon, then? That you are moving to Palestine? Or that his old comrade stays and fights on?”
Sami groaned.
“Ah, my God, Lussac, once you get a bone between your teeth…”
“Good. We’ll talk later, when you have recovered. Au revoir, Madame.” Jean Lussac popped his hat on his head, nodded and was gone, nimbly sidestepping on his way out two sisters pushing a cart full of bandages. One looked after him and said something to her colleague, who nodded; then both glanced at Stefanie.
“Ah du Gott der Gott,” muttered Sami, closing his eyes. Suffering for his Jewishness seemed to bring out his Jewishness to a degree Stefanie had never witnessed: this talk of next year in Jerusalem, the degree of Jewish blood possessed by Jean Lussac, the remark that she “wasn’t Jewish”…absurdly, she felt slighted, even insulted. Excluded. Because the political sympathy that had united them again was now on the verge of disappearing, along with so much else. And despite everything, to be perfectly honest (well, perhaps to be less naïve, for a change), she had never really seen people as Jews or Gentiles or Moslems or whatever they happened to be, not even her own Jewish relatives, or her own half-Jewish son; not really, not any more than so-and-so was a postman, or a driver, or a schoolteacher, and so on, and so what? But with a downward spiraling of dying hope she realized that in the brave new world of Adolf and his kind these identities were all that mattered. And the flip side of this coin of the day was the way Jews like Sami, long indifferent or even hostile to the idea of being Jewish, suddenly reawakened to their identity and set their sights on Palestine or America—two places, incidentally, that held no appeal for Stefanie (well, New York perhaps, and the towering California forests)…but realistically, just in case Sami was serious: She was a European. For better or for worse.
Sami turned his ravaged face to her and opened his good eye wide.
“Hello, Steffi. Still here? Give me a cigarette, will you.”
“Oh, Sami. I forgot to bring any.”
“Ah never mind. You run along home now. I expect my nephew your ex will be coming by, if he can spare the time from his latest concert at Pleyel. He’ll have smokes with him. You don’t want to run into dear Arthur, do you?”
“Ach Sami, I don’t mind.”
But after this outburst of lucidity—Arthur, Arthur’s concert, the smokes—Sami was overtaken by weariness and mumbling and was half-asleep when Stefanie, in great agitation of spirit, left the room, hoping, despite herself, that Arthur wouldn’t suddenly appear. The sister who had shown her in was standing outside the door to the ward, arms folded, a gatekeeping gesture that conveyed a change in her demeanor and vindicated Lussac’s skepticism—or perhaps Stefanie was overly-aware of such things now.
“Bonne soirée, ma soeur,” she said.
“Bonsoir,” said the sister, ostentatiously omitting “madame.” Stefanie felt a sudden flare-up of fury: How dare that condescending bitch…!? Who was she to…? If only she knew…!!
Knew what? Vanity of vanities. Stefanie von Rothenberg, visionary? Lover of powerful men? The Joan of Arc—the Teresa of Avila—the Saint Catherine Labouré of her age? No; it was an anxious mother, an ineffective teacher, a despairing exile, and a failed wife who passed by the glaring sister and through the corridors stretching off into an infinity of grayness and globe lamps, until she finally find herself at the main doors of the Salpêtrière and caught the No. 57 bus from the Boulevard de l’Hôpital back to the Pantheon.
The streetlights were dark. Another temporary blackout, explained the bus driver when Stefanie got off.
“It happens all the time nowadays, as you know. But what do you expect, Madame? The lunatics are running the asylum.”
On the Rue Soufflot, lights from gas lamps and candles glimmered inside the cafes. It was a mild evening for early March in Paris, except for the occasional chilly gust of wind, and the tables outside were full. No one seemed to mind the blackout; in any case, thought Stefanie, the bus driver was right: the electricity went off a couple of times a week these days, so everyone was used to it, although whether Leon and his “lunatics” were to blame was doubtful. More likely the electrical workers’ unions. They were all communists who hated Blum as much as the fascists did. The real lunatics, in other words.
Cigarettes glowed red in the semi-darkness outside the Gueuze. Glowing, too, was the polished finish of a sleek black car parked outside the café with its running lights on. Stefanie noticed the diplomatic license plate: CD 75. Coming closer, she recognized the car as a Mercedes, with the long hood and three-pointed star. A stocky man in a chauffeur’s uniform sat at the wheel, reading the Volkischer Beobachter. He looked up and leaned across to roll down the window when Stefanie paused alongside. A cheery, jowly, Bavarian face. It was Johann Kohler, the number-two driver from Berchtesgaden.
“Frau von Rothenberg?”
“Ja. Herr Kohler? Grüßgott!” She switched to German. “Himmel! What are you doing here? Is this your car?” she asked, aimlessly.
He grinned.
“Nah, bless you. It’s the Embassy’s. I’m still the same old car jockey, been one for years but all I get out of it is a five-year-old Peugeot. Listen, I hope you don’t mind me coming round like this, I got your address from the embassy. I mean, I don’t want to impose, but if you have a sec, there’s one or two things I wanted…”
“Of course. I just have to go upstairs for a minute.”
He pointed to the Gueuze. “Soon as I stash this barge somewhere less conspicuous, I’ll meet you in that café.”
After checking on Ignace, who was in his bed asleep and snoring lightly, with his Uncle Fritz also asleep, and snoring loudly in an adjoining armchair, his prosthetic arm held firmly across a sprawled-open copy of Le Parisien shouting “Blum Goes Down Again” on the front page, Stefanie touched herself up in the hall mirror and went downstairs. She found Kohler sitting at a table with a Kronenbourg in front of him. He seemed paler than before, almost washed-out; then she realized the café lights had come on again.
“Pros’t,” he said, raising the glass. “Who’d have thought the Frenchies would make the best beer around?”
After assuring anxious M. Juliot, the café proprietor and ardent Communist, of the good prognosis for recovery that awaited Sami, who had, after all, been one of his best customers over the years, Stefanie had a ballon de blanc and a pair of quenelles, then another pair as her appetite awoke. Her curiosity followed suit.
“Well, Herr Kohler! It’s so good to see you here! Ja! You’re looking well, too.”
“And you too, Frau von Rothenberg, if I may say. Maybe Paris agrees with both of us, eh?”
There was the hint of a lubricious, or tipsy, glow in his eyes, and she remembered him as the kind of fellow whose happy-go-lucky deviltry would be quite appealing in the grim surroundings of Berchtesgaden but less so in the real world outside. In any event, their ages—he was, if anything, ten years her senior—and the situation rendered any further thoughts along those lines quite absurd, and he at least had the sense to see this. The glow died, enabling Stefanie to get down to business.
“Now, Herr Kohler. Your news…?”
“Ja. Well, I lost my job at the Obersalzberg when you know who moved up to Berlin most of the time and left the day-to-day running of things to Frau Angela, that bitch. She hated me from the word go. So before things got worse, I mean you never know what can happen in Germany these days, on a whim I packed up and brought the family out here. I always wanted to see Paris. Now I’ve been here a couple years, chauffeuring for Count von Welczek, the Reich ambassador. My dad was his cousin’s chauffeur, you see, and my auntie was the cook at their estate in Baden…well, anyway, strings were pulled, as they say, and here I am. It’s a living, and I get to live in Paris. Not actually in the city, I’m out in Passy, rue Gros, across from the gasworks. But it’s a nice house, with a garden and a garage for the Peugeot…”
She let him ramble on for a few minutes. He was clearly a man (on his second beer already) in need of an audience, the kind whose wife had heard it all too many times; but suddenly he interrupted himself and leaned forward, eyes darting melodramatically from side to side.
“Anyway, Frau von Rothenberg, what I wanted to say was this…you know I get to hear a fair amount at the Embassy. So. Well, I recently had the honor of driving…well you’ll never guess who.” He drained his beer. A pair of motorcycles and a bus rumbled past outside, causing the metal ashtrays on the café tables to vibrate and drowning out Kohler’s words.
“He’s well shall I say not slim. Drugs, they say. Riding accident or something. But it can’t be all drugs, you should see him eat. We went to Fouquet’s. Count von Welczek suggested Maxim’s, but the Ministerpresident—or shall I say Reichsjagermeister? He has so many titles now. Well, he insisted. Fouquet’s is where the film stars go, he said, and he especially wanted to meet what’s her name, Arletty. Sure enough she was introduced, and you could tell by the look in his eye…well. Anyway, he…”
Kohler ordered another Kronenbourg in stiffly Teutonic French. Stefanie had another ballon de blanc and kept the man company for want of anything better to do. He resumed his meandering account of the very important person he had been assigned to chauffeur around the city. It slowly dawned on Stefanie, who until that point had been too uninterested or too tired to inquire, that he was talking about Hermann Goering, who, she knew from the papers, was now the Reich Minister of something or other (the Luftwaffe?) as well as being the Prime Minister of Prussia and half a dozen other things, including “a real art-lover” according to Kohler, who added, finally getting to the point,
“Well, what I wanted to tell you was that I overheard him speaking your name. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met,” she murmured, knowing full well that Kohler knew when, and where.
“Of course. Up there? Ja. As I thought. So anyway one evening last week, just before he went back to Berlin, I heard him say ‘Does anyone know a Frau Stefanie von Rothenberg, a charming Austrian lady who lives here in Paris? I told her ages ago to come and see me any time,’ but then he went into another room and that was it. But it was enough, it got me to thinking about you and how you’d been. So. Tell me. Have you received any messages from Bruder Hermann?”
She had not, of course, until now, and told Kohler so; but the reminder of her encounter with Goering at Berchtesgaden (“it is of capital importance to us to have friends—collaborators—compatriots—sympathizers, call them what you will”) chilled her, as did so many recollections of her year in that place that was in retrospect more and more like a fairy tale rewritten by a lunatic… with a jolt, she realized that Kohler was looking at her now with an entirely different kind of ardor, that of political impatience..
“Well, let me tell you, gnädige frau, he didn’t need to actually spell it out to me. We all know you’re connected. Word has it you’re best friends with this Jewish prime minister they’ve got here, this Blum. Oy oy! There can’t be too many like you, best friends with both Hitler and Blum, eh? Hey, here’s an idea, why don’t we invite them both to a cocktail party? Think they’d hit it off? Ha ha ha. Anyhow I’d say that makes you a pretty ah. Valuable commodity, Frau von Rothenberg.”
“Oh I don’t think so. You know, I’ve had no contact with Germany or Austria in awhile,” Stefanie replied, stiffly. With Kohler, as with all unsubtle people, she had no idea how to put things plainly without being rude. He was clearly a boorish type, and probably a devoted Nazi. “My life is here now.”
“Well….” He grinned. “Yes and no, eh? You’re here, but as for Austria, now. You still have a relative or two in Vienna, I believe. Not to mention your dear old home town. Salzburg, mein liebchen.” His grin disappeared as he suddenly leaned across the table and rapped the marble surface with an urgent knuckle. “Listen to me. Here’s a tip from me to you, lady. Those relatives of yours. Call them tonight. Get ‘em out of dear sweet little Austria. Especially that old Jewish gentleman in Vienna. Your Baron Kahane. Or…” He made the sensationalist’s beloved gesture denoting violent death, the flat of the hand across the throat, and sat back with grin restored. Fear trickled coldly down Stefanie’s spine.
“God,” she said. “You mean anschluss, don’t you? They used to talk about it all the time, but I haven’t heard much recently. Anyway, it was the left who wanted it in the old days, not the right.”
“Well, left or right big things are in store for little Austria, believe you me. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.” He tapped one side of his nose. “You can take it to the bank.”
“I don’t doubt it, Herr Kohler. How much time do I…how long would you say…?”
“What’s today? The seventh? About a week. Probably less.”
He finished his beer and sat back again, his pudgy frame jolting with after-belches.
“So! Maybe you should let Bruder Hermann know you’re still around, willing and able, ha ha. He’s not a bad fellow, the Reichsminister. He’ll repay you. Eh?”
So this was the message from Goering. It was more subtle than she’d have expected, delivered this way; but on second thoughts she remembered being struck by the man’s intelligence, if not by his goodwill. He was offering help on the one hand; on the other, making a threat. But she’d ignore the latter. She had no choice if her family were in danger. She’d simply do as advised.
Kohler accurately read her glance at her watch.
“Ja, they might be still up. Unless she’s like my old mother. She’s in bed by seven, especially in winter.”
“But,” she began, then fell silent. It was none of his business, and anyway the boring old sex hunger was stealing back across his now-flushed features. She could have written his next line for him.
“So you live here alone, do you, Frau von Rothenberg, here in Paris?”
“Actually, no. Come, Herr Kohler, do you mean you don’t know that?”
She got up, having had enough of everything on offer: him, wine, the cafe. He sprang to his feet and assisted her with the chair. She took out her purse, but he frowned and wagged a finger.
“Allow me.”
She allowed him, or rather the German Embassy, to pay the bill, although M. Juliot briefly and feebly suggested it might be on the house, given the sad circumstances of “M. Lebel’s injuries”—“ah yes,” said Kohler, who claimed to know so little about her living arrangements, in his Germanic French, “the gallant Jewish monsieur, he is recovering, I trust?”—but Stefanie was tired and the thought of her mother and uncle and Austria itself was pressing upon her like a bad dream. Kohler tipped, as she expected, with vulgar excess, and walked her outside. A cool breeze had sprung up and was amusing itself by propelling a newspaper across the street in fits and starts. Stefanie extended her hand.
“Tschuss then, and thank you.”
“Ja. Tschuss.” Kohler looked serious, and stiffened slightly as he spoke. “Remember that I’m available, if you need anything from, or via, the Embassy,” he said. “I know I’m only a lousy chauffeur, but you’d be surprised where I get to go, and what I get to hear. I keep my lines of communication open, you know.” He took a step back and clicked his heels. “Gnädige frau.”
“Vielen dank, Herr Kohler.”
And she meant it. She murmured an after-thought prayer of thanks as she rode the creaking lift upward. It was a double blessing, if true; and the fact that Kohler was undoubtedly on two payrolls, as both Embassy driver and low-level intelligence agent, i.e. a hired snoop (and the corollary fact that Goering himself was probably behind the evening’s message), in no way detracted from the importance to Stefanie of the service he’d rendered.
Indeed, she returned to the apartment with an odd, smug feeling of vindication. Kohler’s warning—“big things in store for little Austria”—had only confirmed her deepest feeling: that her artist-madman wouldn’t stop. Onward, devil, onward! She remembered him pouting in a Linz tearoom and wanting the world.
Was he any different now?