The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER II

I REMEMBERED THAT I had come into McKinley Hall in the first place to see if there was any mail for me, and climbed the stairs to the English office on the third floor. The secretary was gone and the door was locked and I had left my keys in my apartment. I thought of using my knife on the lock as I had once or twice before, but decided it would be too much trouble. I went downstairs and out the front door, and crossed the street to the coffee-shop on the other side.

When I went in, I saw Hunter sitting by himself in a booth at the back. He raised his hand and I sat down opposite him and ordered coffee.

“Is it the right girl?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s coming here to-night.”

“You look excited.”

“I am. She’s a wonderful woman. You’ll meet her.”

“I hope so. She’s an actress, you say?”

“She was when I knew her. Apparently she studied under Schneider before he left Germany. She never mentioned him to me so far as I can remember.”

“You told me to remind you to tell me about her some time. How about now?”

“All right.” I told him about Ruth Esch and the month I spent in Munich in 1937 and how it ended.

I was twenty-three that year, and still a student. I was travelling on a fellowship and gathering material for my doctoral dissertation. After a couple of months in London, where I wore out the seat of a pair of pants in the reading room of the British Museum, I went to Munich at the beginning of November to do a month’s work there. I didn’t get as much work done as I expected to. I found better things than libraries in Munich, and worse things.

My second day in Munich I was looking for the American Express Company to change some traveller’s marks into money, when I saw a huge crowd lined up on one of the main streets. I joined the crowd to see what was up, and heard people talking in tones of delighted awe about Der Führer. Great square banners of red silk marked with black swastikas hung high above the road on wires, and gasoline torches flared on square red pillars at every corner. Along the curbs like a human fence there were lines of black-helmeted elite guards standing at attention, each second guard facing the crowd.

It looked to me as if Adolf Hitler was going to come down that street shortly, and I stayed where I was. I filled and lit a briar pipe which I had bought in London, and waited for the circus to begin.

Sudden music blared from loudspeakers on the lampposts, and the crowd’s hum died into staring silence. The music sounded like an obsolete popular song to me, but the crowd liked it and the Germans are a music-loving people. I went on puffing at my pipe.

Before six bars of music had been played, something happened to my pipe. It was whisked from my mouth and shattered on the pavement at my feet. A fat man beside me shook his jowls and growled at me in low, intense German. I gathered that he objected to the aroma of tobacco. It seemed that a lot of other people did, too, because a little circle of my German neighbors were glaring at me as balefully as hell. I felt uncomfortable and started to move out of the circle.

The fat man gave me a petulant push and I pushed him and he sat down against a woman’s legs. The woman stepped around him and I saw that her legs were beautifully made.

A man’s voice said, “Ruhe!” in a rasping whisper, and I looked up and saw the nearest elite guard stalking me with his eyes. I wanted to get away but the crowd had closed around me and the fat man was getting up panting with rage. The woman he had fallen against stepped between us and said something to him about an Auslander. Red hair flared under her black lamb hat like gasoline fire, and even in German I liked the sound of her voice.

She turned to me and I liked her face: it was calm and beautiful, with no mob-hatred in it.

“Come with me,” she said in English, and put a black-gloved hand in the crook of my arm. She said, “Bitte,” and the crowd made way for us. At the risk of breaking up the party, I went with her.

When we reached the edge of the crowd, she turned to me. “Don’t you know the Horst Wessel song? You mustn’t smoke in the presence of sublime music.”

She didn’t smile. I looked for irony in her eyes, which were green and cool as the sea, and saw it flickering deep down near the sea-floor.

“I’m afraid I didn’t realize the seriousness of my offense,” I said, trying to match her irony. “Thank you for intervening.”

“Not at all.” She smiled, so that she suddenly looked like a young girl. “I’d be jolly sorry to see anybody torn limb from limb.”

“Are you English?” I asked. She spoke English with a slight German accent, but her tone and idiom sounded English to me. English people who have lived abroad for years sometimes acquire a foreign accent.

“No. I’m German. I had an English governess. You’re an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But I don’t even know how you knew I was an Auslander. I was so surprised when that fat fellow knocked my pipe out of my mouth I didn’t even think of trying to explain.”

“You look like an American, and you act like one.”

“How does an American look and act?” I said, for the sake of continuing the conversation.

“Well, tall and healthy and quite – neither beautiful nor ugly.” The color on her cheek-bones deepened faintly and she laughed with some embarrassment. “And you Americans have a certain blue-eyed look. It’s not immaturity, exactly. A kind of naïveté I suppose, as if the world weren’t such a bad place after all–”

“Is it?”

She stopped smiling and looked at me. “How long have you been in Germany?”

“One day,” I said, and changed the subject: “How does an American act?”

“As if the world weren’t such a bad place after all,” she retorted. “As if a single man could cope with any difficulty, and fists were effective weapons. If an Englishman were pushed and had his pipe broken, he’d appeal to the nearest bobbie.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed him,” I said as I felt my ears turn red. “It was a childish thing to do.”

“I’m glad you pushed him,” she said, and her eyes danced like ripples in sunlight. “I felt like kicking him. He was very officious, a very kickable type.”

The music had stopped and her laughter tinkled in the silence like a bell. We were standing clear of the crowd against a building, but several people turned and frowned at us. I wondered if laughter was verboten in the Third Reich.

“We mustn’t talk,” she whispered.

Noise flooded from the loudspeakers as if somewhere a dam of sound had burst, and broke in waves over the street.

“Wagner,” the girl beside me whispered. “That means he’s coming.”

The waves of music swept the street bare of everything but sound and power, flattening the individual will like ocean combers rolling on the pavement. When the sound receded, it left a throbbing vacuum for Der Führer to fill with his presence.

A little man in a brown raincoat came down the center of the street with his peaked nose thrust out like a brown rat walking in a dry riverbed. At his right a fat stoat, bloated with the blood of stolen chickens, waddled in step with the leader, and at his left a rabbit with a twisted foot limped along. Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, triumvirate of the new order that was to be in Europe.

The crowd was humming like viols and low drums, like bees around the queen. I felt vaguely embarrassed as if I was witnessing a sexual act, and looked at the girl beside me to see how she was taking it.

She was standing on tiptoe with her chin raised to see, her breasts high and pointed under her taut black coat. Her upper lip was twitching as if there was a nerve of hate there that she couldn’t restrain, and I saw her take her lips between her teeth. Her face was pale and drawn tight over the delicate bones of her cheeks and jaw. There had been a gay and youthful beauty in her face, but now it was pinched by a bitter interior wind. Then and there I wanted to take her with me out of Germany.

After the strange triumvirate marched a little group of generals whom I did not recognize, and then a troop of SS guards like a mechanical black snake made of men. A brown caterpillar of storm troopers crawled behind them with breeches and leather leggings on its hundred legs. Then came a company of goose-stepping soldiers in army uniform, kicking out stiffly in unison as if they were all angry at the same thing and to the same degree. I had a grotesque vision of radio-controlled robots in field grey, marching across a battlefield towards smoking guns on pointed toes like ballet dancers and bleeding black oil when they fell down dead.

The girl beside me touched my arm and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here.”

I turned to her and she seemed smaller. Her mouth looked soft and defenseless, and was pale where she had bitten it. Her face was as white as a pearl and her black lashes shadowed her eyes. She looked very tired.

The circus was over and the crowd began to break up. We moved away with it, she leaning lightly on my arm.

“What’s your name?” I asked. “Mine is Robert Branch.”

“Ruth Esch.”

“Will you have tea with me? You look as if you could do with some tea.”

“I’ve never learned to like tea,” she said, “even when I was in England.”

“Have you been in England? I just came from there.”

“Did you? I have been there often with my mother. She had friends in England.”

“You speak English almost like an Englishwoman.”

“Thank you,” she said and smiled, more to herself than to me.

“If you won’t have tea, will you have coffee with me?”

She hesitated. “Well, I really have an engagement with Thomas, you know. He’ll be expecting me. On the other hand, he’s not likely to go away.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had an engagement. Don’t stand anybody up for me.” I wondered who Thomas was and felt jealous of him already.

“Stand anybody up?” she said gravely like a child repeating a lesson, but there was laughter in her eyes.

“Break a date, call off an engagement,” I said. “Americanese.”

“Oh, Thomas wouldn’t really care so much. Even when you stand him up, his arms still reach to the floor.”

“What?”

She laughed at my surprise. “He lives in a cage at the Zoological Gardens. He’s a chimpanzee and I go to see him nearly every day.”

“Are you interested in animals?”

“I like Thomas,” she said. “He’s so very human. The Nazis haven’t thought it worthwhile to indoctrinate him.”

“Are you an anti-Nazi?” I asked. “You look like one.”

“Dankeschön. We won’t speak of it, if you please. By the way, are you a scholar?”

“A sort of one. Why?”

“Are you quite poor? Most scholars are.”

“Not particularly,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good scholarship. In fact, I seem to be quite rich in German money.”

“Then you may give me coffee over here.” She pointed to the plate-glass front of a restaurant across the street.

I said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it. She spoke and moved with the independence and dignity of a woman who could not be easily picked up. I felt that my one-guinea pipe had been broken in a good cause.

We crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The air inside had a hothouse warmth and was laden with the scent of expensive perfumes and expensive cigars. The men and women at the tables looked well fed and well dressed. Most of the women wore Paris dresses and had the slightly unreal, glazed look of the too perfectly groomed, the look of orchids and rich men’s wives and daughters and top-flight politicians’ mistresses. The rich men were there in clothes cut in Savile Row and Bond Street, and the officers in black SS uniforms and brown shirts were the top-flight politicians. At the far end of the room, a string orchestra in Hungarian peasant costume whined and throbbed and lamented. A faint sweet odor of dead and rotting Babylons came up through the cracks in the wainscoting, but the expensive cigar-smoke covered it over.

A waiter led us to a table and we had thick Turkish coffee in tiny cups.

“Oriental splendor,” I said. “Are you by any chance a beautiful Armenian slave-girl?” Without her coat, Ruth Esch was more beautiful than before. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved tunic of black wool above which her skin shone starkly. Her shoulders were wide for a woman but slender and delicately curved. Her bright hair burned steadily around her head like downward flames.

She said with a little laugh, “I’m not Armenian exactly. I’m a Troyan.”

“Troyan? Do you mean Trojan?”

“Shakespeare says Troyan. I’m playing Cressida this week.”

“Shakespeare’s Cressida? Really? Are you an actress?”

“A sort of one.” She was mimicking me. “The leading lady at the Repertory Theatre is under the weather this week, and they’ve given me her part. I was to play Cassandra.”

“I can’t see you as Cressida,” I said, and recognized the blunder as soon as I said it.

“Oh. Warum denn nicht?” She was enjoying my confusion.

I blundered on: “She’s a wanton, a light, giddy weathercock of a girl. You’re not, that’s all.”

“Must an actress commit murder to play Lady Macbeth? Anyway I’m much giddier than you think.”

“It was a silly thing to say. I take it back.”

“It was silly,” she said, “since a boy played Cressida in Shakespeare’s day. You might at least reserve your comment until you see me act.”

“Is there a performance to-night?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come and see you to-night.”

I had never seen Troilus and Cressida acted on any stage. It is one of the least popular of Shakespeare’s plays because it handles love and honor with gloves off, and calls a spade a dung-fork. Achilles is a treacherous and perverted boar, Troilus a love-sick fool, Helen of Troy an international courtesan, Cressida a two-bit floozie. But Ruth played Cressida with an understanding that gave the play a quality I did not know it had. Her Cressida was a brainless, warm-blooded girl who could not resist the flattery of a handsome lover. She didn’t try to gloss over Cressida’s weakness with tragic effects, but gave her a certain pathos as a victim of environment and her own character. Moving about the stage in her tight bodice and flowing skirts, she was the image of feminine grace without dignity, and affection without consistency or restraint.

The image depressed me: with a girl who could act like that, you’d never know where you were at. But my depression didn’t prevent me from going to her dressing-room after the final curtain to ask her to have supper with me. I wasn’t the only one who went. The small bare room was full of people laughing and talking in German, and there were masses of flowers on both sides of the dressing-table where Ruth was wiping off her grease-paint.

I was a stranger and a foreigner and I felt like a fish out of water. But she greeted me gaily and familiarly as if I was an old friend, smiling at me in the mirror.

“Was I giddy enough, Mr. Branch?”

“You were wonderful,” I said. “You still are.”

“Even with grease on my face? Incredible.”

“You’re incredible, too. Will you have supper with me?”

“But I’ve just dined with you.”

“Will you?”

“Please go away, everybody,” she said in German. “I must change my clothes. Mr. Branch, you may wait for me in the hall if you wish.”

I waited in the dim hall outside her door and in ten minutes she came out dressed for the street.

She looked happy and excited, with bright color in her cheeks and flashing eyes. Though the play as a whole had not been liked and the theatre had not been full, her performance had been well received. Especially by me.

“I think you did a marvelous job,” I said.

“Thank you. But let’s not talk of it now. I am finished with work for to-day.”

“I’d like to go some place and celebrate. Where could we go to celebrate?”

“Celebrate what?”

“Meeting you. I thought German girls were dull and had thick ankles.”

“We’re a very giddy lot,” she said. “Giddy, giddy, giddy. I thought American men had long grey beards like Uncle Sam.”

“I shave mine off every morning but it grows again during the night. Like mushrooms.”

She laughed, and we went out the stage-door into a side street.

“I know where we’ll go,” she said.

She took me to a cabaret where the wine was very good. We were served at a table in an open booth like the booths in American restaurants. In the centre of the long low room, a tall black-haired man stood against an upright piano, playing an accordion and singing a German song about Hamburg on the Elbe. He was very pale in the bright light, and his heavy black beard sprinkled his shaven jowls like black pepper on the white of a fried egg.

He had a rich baritone, though Schnaps had raised slivers on its surface.

“That singer should be able to sing blues,” I said to Ruth.

“Buy him a glass of beer and ask him for St. Louis Blues,” she suggested.

“Does he know St. Louis Blues?”

“Try him.”

When he had finished chanting about Hamburg on the Elbe, I ordered him a glass of beer and asked for St. Louis Blues. He sat down at the piano and sang it in English. For three or four minutes I found what every American abroad is unconsciously looking for, the illusion that he’s at home. I forgot that the great city around me and the girl on the other side of the table were mysterious and alien to me. I was an American college boy out on a date and the world was my oyster and there was an R in November.

A thin young man with a long nose and corrugated fair hair came past our booth before the singer had finished.

Ruth said, “Hallo, Franz,” and the fair young man turned and smiled at her with teeth that were too good to be true.

“Why, Ruth,” he said in German, “it’s good to see you again.”

“I’d like you to meet Mr. Branch,” she said. “Mr. Branch, this is Franz.”

I rose, and he gave me a hand like leather-covered wood and clicked his heels. He looked about my age but there was something faded about his eyes that made me wonder if he was older.

“How are you,” I said. “Won’t you join us?”

“Delighted,” he said in English and sat down on the long seat beside me. “You’re American, are you?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your last name.”

“Franz has repudiated his last name,” Ruth said with a smile. “He’s an Austrian baron but he refuses to admit it.”

“I’ve enough personal crimes to answer for without assuming responsibility for the crimes of my ancestors,” Franz said, smiling like a precocious boy. “My ancestors were in the aristocracy racket.”

“And you’ve been in the United States,” I said.

“Apparently I still talk United States adequately. Sure, I lived in California for several years. They deported me for being a Wobbly. That’s one of my crimes.”

“A Wobbly? You’re older than you look.”

“And younger than I feel. Thanks. How have you been lately, Ruth?”

“Very well, I–”

Two young men in black uniforms went by the open end of the booth. They looked in but neither spoke. Ruth turned pale and bit her lip.

Franz got up and said, “I must be going. I hope I have a chance to talk with you some time, Mr. Branch. I haven’t been in the States for ten years. Auf Wiedersehen.”

He was gone almost before Ruth could say, “Good night, Franz.” As he went out, I saw the deep wrinkles on the back of his brown neck and the leather patches on the elbows of his shiny suit.

“He’s a surprising sort of person,” I said to Ruth. “How old is he?”

“Over forty,” she said.

“Really? He looks about twenty years younger.”

“Danger keeps some men young. It destroys some but it keeps some men young until they die.”

“What kind of danger?”

“There are many kinds of danger,” she said, “especially in the Third Reich. … I’m sorry, but I think I must ask you to take me home.”

“Of course,” I said and got up. “I haven’t offended you, have I?”

“No.” She touched my arm. “No, you haven’t offended me. It’s just that I’m suddenly tired.”

I helped her on with her coat and we went out to the street. We had to walk blocks before we found a taxi near the Bahnhof, and then it was a run-down affair standing high on its wheels like a horseless buggy.

When we got in, she leaned back against the worn leather seat and sighed before she gave the driver her address. The motor spluttered and the rickety cab moved away.

“We Germans are a poor people,” she said as if in apology.

“There are things more important than automobiles, Fräulein Esch, and you Germans have many of them.” My words sounded wooden in my ears.

“Please don’t call me Fräulein. I hate that word. Will you call me Ruth?”

“I’d like to. If I may see you again.”

“I want to see you again. There are so few people I can talk to any more.”

“You haven’t talked much to me.”

“I will,” she said. “I’m fearfully – loquacious. Giddy and loquacious.”

“To-morrow for lunch?”

“If you wish.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you. I’m afraid I’ve spoilt your evening, and now you’re inviting me to spoil your luncheon.”

“That’s the first giddy thing you’ve said. You’ve lit up my evening like a Christmas tree. Is there something the matter, Ruth?”

“No, I’m just tired.”

“Who were the SS boys that passed our table? You looked as if you didn’t like them.”

“Did I? I must cultivate a dead – is it dead face?”

“Dead pan,” I said. “Poker face. Your man Hitler has one most of the time.”

“He’s not my man Hitler,” she said sharply. The driver cocked an ear. She changed her tone: “He’s not my man. Der Führer belongs to all of us.”

The driver stopped the cab and smiled at us benignantly as we got out. “Heil Hitler,” he said.

“Heil Hitler,” Ruth replied.

She turned and gave me her hand, which was slim and cold.

“Heil Ruth,” I said under my breath. “When and where to-morrow?”

“Well, I’ll be working here in the morning–”

“May I call for you here? At twelve, say?”

“That would be very nice,” she said. She looked so soft and sweet in the lamplight I thought of kissing her, but she turned and ran up the steps with a wave of her hand and the massive paneled door closed behind her.

Before taking the cab back to my pension, I got out my new map of Munich and marked the location of her apartment in two colors, with the street and number in large block capitals.

Next morning after breakfast, I set out for the Englischer Garten to kill two birds with one stone. I was supposed to be studying English romantic influence on the Continental garden, and it happened that Ruth’s apartment house overlooked the Englischer Garten. I walked around the great park all morning and thought more about Ruth than I did about English romanticism.

At five minutes to twelve I was in her street scanning a tall row of blank-eyed stone houses with faintly Asiatic tilted eaves. Her number signaled in brass from above an arched doorway, and I knocked on the locked door. It opened immediately.

“Mr. Branch! I’m so very glad you’ve come.” She looked glad. “Kommen sie nur’rein.”

She motioned me in and I passed her in the doorway. Her morning freshness made me think of lilies of the valley.

“Lilies without, roses within,” I said to myself.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was just quoting a little verse. It comes over me all of a sudden and I have to quote verse. You’re looking very well.”

“So are you,” she said as she led me down the hall.

“I feel well, I’ve been walking in the Englischer Garten all morning.”

“Have you? Did you see the water-birds – the water-fowl?”

“Yep. And the pagoda, and the Greek shrine on a hill. Is it by any chance a shrine of Venus?”

“What a funny question. Why do you ask?” She opened a door and stood aside to let me enter.

“Because I said a brief prayer to Venus there, invoking her aid.”

Her eyes passed over me like a cool wave as I entered the room. “That’s rather a compliment, I suppose. A very courtly one. I didn’t know Americans–”

“Were capable of courtliness? You should see me with the powdered wig and ruffles that I wear around the house when I’m at home.”

She laughed for no good reason and said, “Won’t you sit down?”

I sat in an armchair by the window and she sat down facing me on a straight chair beside a desk. There was a typewriter with paper in it on the desk. Beside us two tall windows with the shutters thrown back opened on the air. Venetian blinds hid the room from the street.

“I saw you in the street,” she said.

“I wondered how you got to the door so fast.”

She blushed and I said, “I like this room.”

It was lovely and strange like the green-eyed woman. Chartreuse walls with Chinese bird-prints, pale green curtains the color of new leaves on a willow-tree, dark green leather chairs. Noon light seeped through the curtains and filled the room like quiet water. I felt like a fish at the bottom of a pool, a little strange but I liked it. Her hair shone steadily in the underwater light like an inextinguishable aureole.

“Do you live here by yourself?”

“Yes, I am a bachelor girl.”

“I have no family, either.”

“Oh, I have a family. My mother is dead, but my father lives on his estate near Köln.”

“And you left him for a career?”

“No, not exactly. I am not eager for a career. I do what I can. My father is a deputy in the Reichstag and I have not seen him since 1934.”

“Because he supports Hitler? Hell, I sound like a questionnaire. Ask me some questions.”

“I don’t mind your questions,” she said. “I think I can trust you. You’d be much more subtle if I couldn’t.”

“You can trust me all right, but that’s no reason why you should answer my questions.”

“I like to. There are so few people I can trust. My father would not be a member of the rump Reichstag if he wasn’t a Nazi. He was a member of von Papen’s Herrenklub, and he has supported Hitler since 1933, like many other rich men in Germany. He has been afraid of the people since the Revolution of 1918, afraid that the Communists would gain control of the country and seize his estates. Now he still has his estates but he has nothing else. Nothing at all.”

“Not even you,” I said.

“He has my brother Carl.”

“What does he do?”

“He was a student.”

“Was?”

“He is not any more.” There was a look of complete loneliness on her face as if she was an alien in a strange country. Two days in Germany had given me the same feeling but it was superficial compared with hers. Germany was not the only country I had.

She didn’t want to talk about her brother and got up to offer me wine. We had Chianti out of a bulbous bottle with a long neck.

Then we went downtown on a streetcar and had lunch together, and after that we went to the basement of the Hofbrauhaus for beer. I drank a couple of liters out of huge crockery mugs. I was feeling jolly and she was as light-hearted again as a young girl. I felt very jolly and forgot about Hitler and loved all the jolly, sweating Germans who were drinking beer and eating pale sausages in the basement of the Hofbrauhaus.

I said to Ruth, “Munich is a wonderful city.”

Something about my enthusiasm brought the ice age back to her eyes. “You’re fortunate to be able to think so. You don’t have to live in Germany. There is insane anger in this city, and all over Germany. Last summer I saw a group of teen-age boys kill another boy by beating his head on the sidewalk, because his father happened to be a Jew. When I tried to stop them, they drove me off with stones, and there was nothing I could do.”

“Why don’t you leave Germany? You could get a job in America, or anywhere.”

“Because I am a German and I can’t escape being a German. I am going to stay here.”

The jolly faces seemed suddenly to glisten satanically along the tables and the pale sausages to wriggle like worms. We got up and left the rathskeller. As we came into the street, a regiment of boys went by at the double, looking to neither left nor right. Above the stone buildings, a single bomber circled, learning to understand cities from the air.

For a month Ruth and I were together almost every day. We walked in the Englischer Garten and went to the opera. We took a bus to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and skied in the mountains. We went riding along the Isar on rented horses, and I learned how female centaurs carry themselves. I was in love and young enough to forget, or almost forget, about Hitler and the certainty of war, but I don’t think she ever forgot. There was always a secret strain in her face as if she was carrying a weight hidden under her clothes.

By the second week I was urging her to marry me and come to America. She wouldn’t leave Germany. By the fourth week I was desperate. She hated the Nazis, yet she wouldn’t leave Germany and to me there was no sense in it.

On the last day of the last week we were sitting together in her apartment, and I said for the twentieth time, “Marry me and come to America.”

“Marry me and stay in Germany,” she mocked me.

“It isn’t the same. I have a living to make. My life is in America.”

“My life is in Germany. The people are angry and wild, they’ve let the nightmares out of the inside of their minds. I must stay here because I am not insane. Is that egotistical of me, Bob?”

“It’s the truth,” I said, “but sane people aren’t going to be happy in Germany. You’re not happy now.”

“What regard Americans have for happiness. I have no wish to be happy. Nobody is happy. I wish to stay where I’m needed.”

“What can you do for Germany?” The question sounded cruder than I intended.

Her throat and mouth were still as marble. I thought if the Winged Victory of Samothrace had a head it would be her head, serenely proud and brave. “I can remain myself,” she said.

With the abstract part of my mind I couldn’t argue against her, but the rest of me was twenty-three and wanted to carry her out of the country on a white charger. I stood up and put out my hands for hers and pulled her up to me. When I kissed her, she kissed me back but the firm body against me did not yield. There was an integrity of will in her that could not give in, and even in passion she seemed remote, though her lips were soft and opened under my kiss and her hand was cool on the nape of my neck.

I could think of no more arguments and said, “I suppose it’s time we were going to Frau Wanger’s.”

A friend of Ruth’s who lived in a flat near hers had invited her to tea and asked her to bring her American, me. I was flattered by Frau Wanger’s invitation because she lived by herself with a dachshund and her small daughter and had very little to do with men. She was a political widow. Like some other decent German women she had left her husband when he turned Nazi, and had lived since by tutoring foreigners in German.

By the time Ruth and I reached her flat the little drawing-room was crowded. When I was introduced, there was a good deal of heel-clicking and bowing from the waist, but there was no satanic flicker in the eyes, and neither insane anger nor South German sentimentality in the cool tones of the conversation. Franz was there and gave me a dazzling smile. Several of the other men were like him, younger-looking than their eyes and quick-moving when they moved. The women looked intellectual and tough as if they had laid aside their sex. Several of the names were Jewish. Frau Wanger’s friends were not Nazis.

On the contrary. While we were drinking our tea, there was a series of scrabbling taps on the door of the apartment. The dachshund squealed and jumped into Frau Wanger’s lap, and Ruth got up and opened the door. A heavy, grey-haired man staggered in, one side of his face glistening with blood from a gash over the eye.

“Dr. Wiener, you are hurt!” Ruth exclaimed.

There was complete silence in the room and we could hear the old man’s quick breathing. He opened his mouth to speak but his jaw shook and he could not. Some drops of blood fell from his stained beard onto his shabby black vest. Ruth helped him down the hall to the bathroom to tend his wound. Franz cursed once between his teeth and the room filled with low sounds of excitement and indignation.

“This is terrible, terrible,” Frau Wanger said to me in English. “What will you tell Americans of our country when you return home?”

“I’ll tell them about you and Ruth and Franz,” I said. (I’m telling them now.) “What happened to the old gentleman, do you know?”

“Dr. Wiener is a Jew,” she said.

In a few minutes Ruth came back into the room holding Dr. Wiener’s arm. His head was bandaged and his face was washed as pale as the bandage. He shook in his chair and could not hold his cup of tea. Ruth held it for him.

There was only one thing to talk about but nobody would talk about it in front of the injured Jew. The party broke up and the guests went home. Several of the women apologized to me for Germany when they said good-bye. The men held their tongues but there was a look of firm humility on their faces, more impressive than pride or anger. Only Franz sat on in a corner by himself, composed and self-contained.

Dr. Wiener went on trembling in his chair, trembling with rage and humiliation, trembling with terror. SS men had attacked him at the head of the street, he said, and flung him down in the gutter. They had kicked him like a dead dog in the gutter, him! a respected physician before they took away his practice, a scientist and a family man and a veteran of the last war. He spluttered with rage.

He went on trembling with terror. He must not venture forth on the streets of this accursed city, this doomed Sodom, in the light of God’s day. He must move in darkness, skulk in back streets, live underground like a rat in a tunnel, because he was the unchosen of the chosen of Moloch. He wept with humiliation and trembled with terror. He was afraid to go home.

“I will take you home, Dr. Wiener,” Ruth said and put her hand on his arm.

“I’ll come, too, if I may,” I said.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Franz said from his corner, smiling as if at a personal joke. “I think those SS men are looking for me.”

“Stay with me as long as you wish,” Frau Wanger said. “Both of you.”

“Vielen Dank,” Franz said. “Until dark.” He stayed in his corner, relaxed but ready like a boxer between rounds.

Dr. Wiener said, “You are very good. But I must go home to my wife. She must not be left alone.” As night fell in the German cities, Jews were safer in the streets and less safe in their houses.

He got up and walked slowly to the door on knees that were bent with age and weakness. Frau Wanger said Auf Wiedersehen with anxiety in her voice, and Ruth and I went down the long stairs with Dr. Wiener between us, each of us holding an arm.

He walked slowly and heavily but bore most of his own weight. We went out into the street and along the deserted sidewalk. The brown stone buildings looked ancient and obtuse. The lighted windows seemed to hum with a mad, inner fire consuming a doomed city.

I said to Ruth, “Why are they after Franz?”

“He’s a worker for the Austrian Sozialdemokraten. He came to Germany to fight Anschluss. He should not have come.”

“You must not stay,” I said. “Will you marry me and come to America?”

She spoke across Dr. Wiener, who was moving like a sleepwalker, lost in the old melancholy dreams of the Jew. “I love you. When all this is over, I will go with you if you want me to. Now there is work to do in Germany. It will take years. It may take all my life.”

“You’re going to stay, then?”

Before she could answer, four men in black uniform came out of an arched doorway at the head of the block and approached us walking in step, their polished belts shining dully in the lamplight. Their black metallic bodies were like the products of a foundry and lent no humanity to the street. We stood still and watched them come. Ruth took two steps towards them and stood still again. We moved up behind her. The four SS men passed under a streetlight and their shadows lengthened towards us on the pavement.

Their heels clicked on the concrete like four metronomes synchronized, and they came to a halt facing us, as if somebody had pressed a button. The smallest of the four, a slim, elegant job with a baby face whose works alone must have cost a fortune in marks, spoke to Ruth in German:

“An Aryan lady promenading with a Jew. How charming.”

In the face of what he feared, Dr. Wiener had stopped shaking. I felt his arm stiffen under my hand.

“A von Esch promenading with Nazi cut-throats,” Ruth said. “Equally charming.”

“You treacherous whore,” said the beautiful young man. “Get out of my way and go home.”

She struck him across the face and he seized her arm and twisted it and flung her into the road. She fell on her hands and knees.

I stepped in front of the old man and hit out at the officer. He stepped back and raised his stick in the air. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ruth get up from the road with blood on her torn stockings and run towards us. The stick came down across the side of my face and my left eye seemed to burst in my head. I struck wildly at the white sneering face and jarred my arm on flesh with bone and teeth under it. I heard a live skull thud on the pavement.

Something hit me over the head and I saw black swastikas swarming in a red sky.

The first thing I saw when I came to was a framed and enlarged photograph of Der Führer accepting a bouquet of flowers from a little girl in a white dress. It moved me deeply.

I raised my head and the shifting weight on top of it and looked around me. I was lying on a bench against the wall where the photograph hung, in a long, dimly lit room. Most of Dr. Wiener was lying on the next bench, but parts of his head and face were missing. I went over to him but he did not say anything because he was dead. I felt his cold hand.

Ruth was not there but several officers of the law were. I had attacked a Nazi officer, Captain von Esch, and they suspected me of worse crimes. They questioned me all night. They would not answer my questions about Ruth Esch. I would not answer their questions about Ruth or Franz or anyone else.

In 1937, the Nazis were still leery of mistreating American citizens, although they had killed one or two and imprisoned and deported several newspaper correspondents. In the morning, two Gestapo men in plain clothes collected my luggage, took me to the Bahnhof and put me on a train for Switzerland. I didn’t see Ruth after that.