“THOSE TEARS ARE WONDERFUL,” LORI CHRISTOPHER SAID. “ARE THEY painted on?”
“Tattooed,” Meryem said.
“Ah. What does Sebastian think of them?”
“He hasn’t seen them.” Meryem told her what had happened between her and her husband.
When she was finished Lori said, “Are you pregnant?” “No.”
“You’re sure?”
“You sound like Sebastian,” Meryem said. “I had proof on the train.”
“You’re quite sure you want to keep this marriage a secret?” “Yes. Even from Hubbard.”
Lori hesitated. “He already knows,” she said. “Sebastian wrote to him.”
They were seated together on a sofa in the Christophers’ apartment in the neighborhood of Berlin known as Charlottenburg. Lori poured tea from a misshapen pottery vessel. “Our Dada teapot,” she explained. “Hubbard loves it.” The walls were covered with abstract paintings and gross caricatures of Berliners.
“Hubbard bought all these pictures on the advice of a White Russian before I met him,” Lori said. “They were a great bargain. The teapot, too. And this apartment. He had American money at a time when you needed eighty billion marks to buy an egg. One U.S. dollar was worth two trillion Reichsmarks.”
“How many eggs was that?”
“Who knows? Twenty-five? Twenty-five hundred? Two and a half? That was the whole point of inflation. When the money collapsed, nobody was sure of anything. It was like God had died.”
“You sound like Sebastian again.”
Lori took her hand. “For a while everybody will sound like Sebastian to you,” she said.
“What a fate,” Hubbard said, overhearing Lori’s words as he came in from the park with Paul on his shoulders.
“Who won?” Lori asked.
“Tie game,” Hubbard said. “Two to two. Paul scored in the last second.”
The knees of his trousers were covered with grass stains; when he and Paul played football, Hubbard played on his knees, to make the game fairer. He put Paul down, and the little boy shook hands with Meryem. Hubbard inspected the tea tray and spread butter and jam on a piece of black bread and gave it to Paul. He poured himself a cup of tea before sitting back on another sofa with his tremendous long legs spread out before him. Meryem thought, as she did every time she encountered Hubbard, that she had never seen such an untroubled, contented person, or such a large one.
“Those tears!” he said, smiling at Meryem. “Wait until Zaentz sees them.”
“Who’s Zaentz?” Meryem asked.
“A painter friend of ours. You’ll meet him at dinner; he’s usually here.”
“Did he paint these?” Meryem indicated the revolutionary pictures on the wall.
“No. Zaentz is a gentle soul,” Hubbard said, “something like Sebastian. How is your secret husband?”
“Gone to America,” Meryem said. “His father died.”
“No!” Hubbard said. “He dreaded the day this would happen. They’ll put him in the vault—that’s how he always described it. He’ll never escape.”
“Does he want to escape?”
Hubbard gave her a searching look. “Of course he does. Everyone does.”
But he asked her no more questions.
THE CHRISTOPHERS KEPT OPEN HOUSE, A HOLDOVER FROM THE TIME of the great inflation ten years before when money meant nothing to Hubbard. Half a dozen people dressed in leather and corduroy straggled in as twilight began to fall, including Zaentz the artist, who came late, and Otto Rothchild, who was the first to arrive. Otto was accompanied by a blond young man who seemed to be very ill at ease.
Even then Otto was eager to teach, and when he saw Meryem’s tears he said, “You know what God said about tattoos, don’t you? He said, ‘You will not tattoo yourselves.’ “
“Where is that written?” Lori Christopher asked.
“In Leviticus, where God sends Moses down the mountain to tell the Israelites not to rend their clothes or gash their flesh when mourning the dead.”
The blond young man laughed.
“Franz thinks I just told an anti-Semitic joke,” Otto said. “All you have to do in Berlin to get a laugh these days is speak the word ‘Jew.’ “
Lori regarded Otto and his friend with undisguised loathing. She said, “I wish you wouldn’t bring your Nazi friends here, Otto.”
“I know,” Otto replied, “but Hubbard needs them for his writing. Besides, Franz isn’t a Nazi, are you, Franz?”
The young man shook his head. “Not at all,” he said.
“Not yet,” Lori said. “What are you in the meantime?”
“I believe in the revolution of youth,” Franz said. “The values of our parents’ generation are shit. They must be shoveled out and replaced with the clean new values of youth. Germany will be saved by discipline and willpower, not by the corrupt, vile system invented by the capitalist, anti-national force which is ruining the Fatherland.”
“What capitalist, anti-national force is that, exactly?” Lori asked.
“You mustn’t get the wrong idea,” Otto said. “Franz is one of the Wandervögel. He and his friends are idealists. They sing the wonderful old German folk songs, go on hikes in Lederhosen through the German forest, rediscover the old German gods, make friends with the peasants, commune with the German soil. Quite harmless.”
“It’s good to have your reassurance about that, Otto,” Lori said. “What is your family name, Franz?”
“Stutzer,” Otto replied. “But Franz is not one of the real Stutzers. He’s one of the new Germans.”
At dinner Franz Stutzer ate in silence while the others talked. The main dish was spaghetti with tomato sauce; he was still bourgeois enough to watch the others to see how it should be eaten.
“You should like this dish even if it isn’t German, Franz,” Otto said, lifting a fork wrapped with strands of pasta. “It’s Herr Hitler’s favorite food. He always orders it in his favorite restaurant in Munich, and then cuts it up into little bits. That way it goes straight down into his stomach. He’s far too busy thinking, of course, to be able to chew at the same time.”
“I thought you said this fellow isn’t a Nazi,” Lori said. “He isn’t. But he admires Herr Hitler.”
“Like so many others.”
All this table talk was in German. At first Meryem had trouble following the staccato Berlin usage because she had only spoken the language with her teacher, a drawling Austrian. But as the evening wore on she found that she understood most of what was said. In the case of Lori, she often knew what the words would be before they were spoken.
Zaentz sat opposite her, a bearish man with a cropped white beard and oil paint smeared on his trousers. When he finished his spaghetti he wiped the plate with a slice of bread, then leaned across the table and said, “I’d like to paint you and Meryem together, Lori.”
Hubbard was triumphant. “What did I tell you?”
“Why not just Meryem?” Lori said. “You’ve done me a dozen times.”
“Yes, but there was always something missing.”
“Wait a minute,” Hubbard said. “What about the Madonna of Charlottenburg?” He meant the ethereal drawing Zaentz had made of Lori when she was pregnant.
“That turned out all right because Paul was hidden in the picture,” Zaentz said. “But this will be better. These two are one. They complete each other.”
“You mean you want to paint them as a single woman?” Hubbard said. “This is getting interesting.”
“Possibly,” Zaentz said. “I won’t know until I start painting.” Otto interrupted. “How can you paint Meryem?” he said. “Islam forbids images. Isn’t that so, Meryem?”
“On the Judgment Day, according to Moslem teaching, those who make images will be called upon to breathe life into them,” Otto said. “If they can’t do so they’ll be punished.”
“Then the risk is all mine,” Zaentz said. He turned to Meryem.
“Will you pose?”
“If Lori will.”
Otto was talking again. “The teardrops are exquisite,” he said.
“Do they mean anything?”
“They’re just teardrops,” Meryem said.
“I wonder if they’d be considered an image on the Day of Judgment,” Otto said. “If so you’ll have those tears to answer for at the final trump, when, as the Holy Koran says, the world is rolled up like a scroll and the children’s hair turns gray.”
WHILE POSING FOR ZAENTZ’S PAINTING, MERYEM AND LORI SAT SIDE by side in identical costumes beneath a huge tilted window set into the roof of the artist’s attic studio. Zaentz painted very slowly. He was capable of spending an entire morning working on one square inch of canvas. Because he had no interest in politics, he had not followed the Berlin fashion and become an abstractionist or a cartoonist. There was more light in his painting than in his studio: he painted as the young Velazquez might have painted if he had lived after the invention of electric light. His pictures were so naturalistic, so accurate in every detail, that they were sometimes mistaken for photographs. However, they did not lie, as photographs often do, by capturing a single isolated facial expression. Zaentz’s subjects had faces in which many other faces were visible, depending on the light and the angle at which they were viewed: later in life Paul Christopher looked every day at a copy of the picture of Lori that his father called the Madonna of Charlottenburg and never saw the same person twice.
Every afternoon at about one o’clock, after he finished writing, Hubbard brought lunch in a picnic basket. In fair weather the four of them ate in Schiller Park, but when it rained, which was often in Berlin in autumn, they spread the food on a table beneath the big window. One day the rain was heavier than usual.
“You can’t go out in this downpour,” Zaentz said. “Let’s play a game of whist.”
Card games were unknown among the Ja’wabi, and Meryem had never handled cards. Hubbard explained their values and suits and the rules of the game. They began to play. As the cards were played, Meryem began to see pictures. There were so many of these at first—visions of the Ja’wabi in the desert, a scene in which Sebastian sat in a shadowy room with four silent women Meryem recognized as his mother and sisters, and indistinct images of people she did not know—that she could scarcely register them.
Lori held a very strong hand in diamonds, and as she played the ace and then the face cards, winning trick after trick, Meryem saw a sailing boat in a storm at sea. Lori, wearing a long sleeveless coat, was knocked overboard by the boom. She did not resist the water but sank helplessly to the bottom of the shallow sea, among large rocks bearded with seaweed. Paul, a much older Paul than the one she now knew, swam down to her, but was unable to save her because the long coat was holding her down.
Zaentz had been watching Meryem. When he saw the look in her eyes he threw down his hand and took her by the hand.
“Come over here and sit,” he said, leading her toward the easel. “Don’t change, don’t speak, don’t think of anything new.”
HUBBARD’S NOVEL THE ROSE AND THE LOTUS WAS NEVER PUBLISHED in German, so he thought it was possible that Heydrich, who appeared in it under his own name, did not know of its existence. Heydrich knew about Zaentz’s picture, however.
“I saw it before I saw you that day at the Adlon Hotel,” he told Meryem. “After I danced with you, the amazing reality from which the picture came, I knew that I must have it, that I must know everything about it. I want you to come and see it.”
“I’ve already seen it a thousand times,” Meryem said.
“But not for a long while. You will be astonished by it. I’ve had it put into a beautiful gold frame with an electric light shining on it. It’s the jewel of my collection. You must come see it.”
“No, thank you.”
“You can bring along your pretty baroness as chaperone. She too will be astonished by it.”
Years had passed since Meryem first came to Berlin; she came every fall and stayed all winter. By now Adolf Hitler was in power, and despite his youth Heydrich was a Nazi notable, seen every-where in Berlin in his SS uniform. He was wearing it now because he had leaped out of his staff car when he saw Meryem walking down the Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where his headquarters was located. According to Berlin gossip, as merchandised by Otto Rothchild, Heydrich had made his name as an imaginative killer in those very headquarters. He had led an assassination squad of five SS men who locked Gregor Strasser, one of Hitler’s critics within the Nazi party, inside a cell. The condemned man was known for his wit and intelligence. While Strasser scrambled frantically from wall to wall, the SS men fired at him through the bars with pistols, laughing uproariously as they fired and shouting, “Tell us another one, Strasser!” When Strasser still showed signs of life even though he had been shot some forty times, Heydrich went inside the cell and finished him off by firing a bullet into the back of his neck.
“Will you come?” he said to Meryem. “Six o’clock. I’ll send my car for you and your friend.”
“I’m sorry,” Meryem said, “it’s impossible.”
Heydrich gave her his brilliant smile; except for his broad, feminine hips, he was an ideal Aryan type—so perfectly blond and blue-eyed, in fact, that his chief, Heinrich Himmler, suspected that he must be concealing a Jewish ancestor inside this genetic disguise.
“You’re maddening,” Heydrich said, touching Meryem’s chin with a gloved index finger. “I warn you, I will never give up.” He smiled again, then lowered his voice to a stage whisper: “You are in danger.”
The next morning Meryem and Lori were arrested by the Gestapo after they returned to the stables after their ride in the Tiergarten. The arresting officers, two men in soft hats and long black leather coats, loaded them into a Mercedes, all four of them on the backseat with the secret policemen on the outside and the women in the middle. Their hips and legs were crushed together, but because of the leather coats the intimacy was reduced. “What is the meaning of this?” Lori asked. “Where are you taking us?”
The men did not answer. Lori leaned forward and turned her head to study their impassive faces. They stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact.
“Seized by the Gestapo—it’s like a Communist propaganda movie,” Lori said. “Why didn’t you see this in the cards, Meryem?”
The secret policemen seemed interested in this remark. Lori lifted her eyebrows and stopped talking. She was perfectly calm—even contemptuous. Although she was guilty many times over of crimes against the Reich, specifically of assisting Jews to escape from Germany, she was not frightened. Like every other member of her family, she had been raised to believe that fear was a bad habit that could be conquered like any other. Her father had been killed by a mob because he had conquered fear; her cousin Bartholomdus had saluted the American who sent him down in fiames because he had conquered it. She was teaching her son to conquer it.
The shades were drawn in the Mercedes. After a rapid passage through city streets and a lengthy ride along wooded roads, the car turned into a drive, tires crunching gravel, and stopped. The secret policemen, still silent, escorted them up the steps of a hunting lodge and showed them inside.
“What is this place?” Lori asked, gazing at the stuffed heads of stag and wild boar that crowded the walls.
No answer. It was still only seven-thirty in the morning, and the interior was chilly. The smell of coffee filled the air.
“I think I know,” Meryem said.
A door painted with flowers opened and Heydrich appeared, wearing a silk dressing gown and a white aviator’s scarf over the black riding breeches and gleaming black boots of his SS uniform.
“Dismissed!” he shouted.
The secret policemen clicked their heels, released their grip on the women’s arms, and departed. Heydrich continued down the stairs.
“Good morning, dear ladies,” he said. “I see that we are all dressed alike. Three people in breeches and boots, up early in the beautiful German morning. Smell that! Come, have some coffee with me.”
“We prefer to leave,” Lori said.
“Baronesse, please,” Heydrich said, using the title by which the unmarried daughters of barons were addressed. “Surely you won’t refuse a cup of coffee?”
“Please do not address me in that way. I am a married woman.”
“Unlucky day! But I’m married too, you know, with two splendid children. My wife never comes here. Come. I’ve promised to show Fräulein Meryem something.”
The painting was displayed on an easel. “I designed the frame myself,” Heydrich said. “The lights are controlled by a rheostat. See?” He adjusted the lamp. “Bright, normal, dim at the touch of a finger. If only the artist were still in Germany I would have him redesign the picture. Alas, he was smuggled out of the country by enemies of the Reich.”
“Redesign the picture?” Lori said.
“Yes, indeed. Wonderful as it is, it has a flaw. I’ve always thought the figures should be in a natural state.”
“ ‘A natural state?’ What do you mean by that?”
“Nude.”
“And perhaps holding a pair of snow-white pigeons?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Heydrich said, “but you have a point. One dove could have green eyes, the other gray like the German sky, a mirror image of the girls. If we ever see Zaentz again I’ll tell him about your idea. But I don’t think we will see him, do you?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Lori said.
“How reckless you are!” Heydrich said. “I admire that.”
The Christophers had smuggled Zaentz to Denmark in the Mahican only a few weeks before because of a rumor that he was going to be arrested. They assumed that the police were after him because he was a Jew, but now Lori wondered if Heydrich had been behind it. Had he wanted to put him in a cage in order to watch him undress Meryem with his brushes?
“I’m surprised you’re so interested in Zaentz’s work,” she said.
“I see your point, but of course he doesn’t paint like a Jew,” Heydrich said. “I defy anyone to look at this picture and identify it as the work of a Jew.”
“Even the FÜhrer?”
“I mean any ordinary person like you and me,” Heydrich replied. “If Zaentz had chosen any other subject I would not have been interested, but this particular painting has me in its power. The easel is on casters, so I can take it with me from one room to another. I look up from my study desk late at night, or from one of my lonely suppers, or from my bed when I wake, and there it is.”
“But how did you acquire it? I understood it had been sold to someone else.”
“The picture was seized from a bankrupt Jew for unpaid taxes, and I was lucky enough to have the chance to purchase it at auction.”
“You must have got a wonderful bargain,” Lori said.
“Astonishing. I could hardly believe my luck, dear lady.”
A male servant with a military haircut came into the room with a trolley.
“Ah, the coffee!” Heydrich said. “This is real Italian roasted coffee, straight from Rome. I always say there is no aroma like it.”
He poured the coffee himself into gilded porcelain cups and offered one to Lori.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“But you must have some,” Heydrich said. “Also some of these delicious pastries. I won’t let you go unless you have some.”
He smiled yet again. “I really mean that.”
Lori and Meryem each took a pastry.
Heydrich popped an eclair into his mouth. “It makes me so happy that you enjoy the same things I do,” he said.
They rode back into Berlin in Heydrich’s car. He sat between the women on the leather seat with his boots crossed at the ankles and propped up on the jump seat. He smelled of boot polish, brilliantine, and strong shaving lotion. Beyond a glass partition, the servant who had brought in the coffee sat in the front seat beside the driver. He now wore the uniform of an SS private, with a machine pistol slung across his chest. The Mercedes in which Lori and Meryem had been brought to the villa followed the staff car, and another, identical Mercedes led the way.
“You’re well protected,” Lori said. “You must be quite precious to your leader.”
“The enemies of the Reich are everywhere and they tend to be cowardly—they specialize in ambushes with smuggled arms,” Heydrich said. “Smuggling is a terrible problem. And you’re right. The Führer himself is concerned about it. Which means that soon there will be no problem.” He winked. “Smugglers should beware, dear lady.”
They were approaching the Opera House, a few blocks away from the Christophers’ apartment in Goethestrasse. Heydrich rapped on the glass partition and the car stopped. He picked up Lori’s hand, then Meryem’s, and kissed them one after the other.
“For the sake of your reputation I’ll let you down here,” he said. “Who would believe in our innocence if you got out of such a long motorcar as this one so early in the morning, right in front of your house? Your husband might be looking down from the windows and then what? What if he became suspicious? I tremble at the thought. After all, the pen is mightier than the sword.”
He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk with them.
Watery light filtered through a rank of linden trees planted along the street. “What a lovely neighborhood to live in,” Heydrich said. “But now that you’ve seen my house perhaps I can persuade you to come again. I hope so!”
The three black cars sped away.
THE APARTMENT WAS QUIET. HUBBARD WAS WRITING; PAUL HAD GONE to the park.
“I think we won’t mention this episode to Hubbard,” Lori said.
“You think it will make him angry?”
“Possibly. But it will certanly make him write about it. I think he’s written enough about Heydrich. The question is, what to do about you?”
“What about me?” Meryem said.
“That lunatic is obsessed by you. I think you should leave Germany.”
“Where would I go?”
“What does it matter? This isn’t the end of Heydrich. It’s only the beginning. You can go to Paris, or to the Id&ren Draren, or even to America.”
“Only if we all go. Sebastian will be in Paris next month.”
Each June Sebastian came to Paris and Meryem went there to join him for a month. Then she returned to the Id&ren Dr&ren for the summer.
“No,” Lori said. “Hubbard can’t be interrupted now.”
“He can write anywhere.”
Lori shook her head. “Not with these creatures in charge of Germany. I really must have a bath. Then we’ll talk again. I think you should go at once. God knows what Heydrich might do the next time. Arrest you, declare you’re a Jew, lock you in a room and keep you as a pet. He’s mad.”
“I know,” Meryem said. “But, Lori, it isn’t me he’s obsessed by. I’m just the pretext. It’s you.”
THEREAFTER MERYEM AND LORI WERE ARRESTED ONCE OR TWICE A week by Heydrich’s men. The pattern never varied. They would be seized in the Tiergarten at about seven o’clock in the morning, after their ride through the park. The same two secret policemen, wearing the same black fedoras and the same black leather coats, always made the arrest, showing their credentials and repeating the same words. Then came the ride across Berlin in the Mercedes, coffee and pastries in the hunting lodge with Heydrich, and the return to the city in his staff car.
They did not change their habits because it was obvious that Heydrich had the power to find them wherever they were. He knew all about their activities between arrests. Drinking coffee and munching on little frosted cakes and fruit tarts, he would say, “Did you enjoy your dinner party on Tuesday with the Hornbläser-Lottmanns? She’s quite delightful, but he’s a bit compulsive, don’t you think? All that telephoning!” Or, “It’s such a pity your son has no friends among German boys, Baronesse. They say he’s a philo-Semite, and of course that makes him stand out, especially since he has an American father and the President of the United States is a Jew. Children are so cruel—but so honest and so just!” He always called Lori “baronesse,” as if bestowing reinstated maidenhood upon her; she had given up correcting him.
These encounters took place while Hubbard was writing. Although Lori had never before kept a secret from her husband, he knew nothing about the arrests. While working, as he did every day from six in the morning until noon, Hubbard was oblivious to the world around him. By the time he emerged from his writing room the two women had returned, and the three of them had lunch together. After that Hubbard read aloud from his work in progress, and sometimes they had an outing—a drive through the Grunewald or a visit to an art gallery or a book store. Sometimes they sat in the park and talked.
On the advice of a friend in the American Embassy, the Christophers only discussed the Hitler government and the Nazi Party in the open air. “They’ve planted microphones everywhere, by golly!” their friend said. “I’d bet dollars to doughnuts your walls are full of them, considering who your friends are—or were.”
The Christophers’ noisy Bohemian dinners were a thing of the past; almost nobody came except Otto Rothchild, who still turned up once or twice a month. Most people they knew had left the country, many of them as clandestine passengers on the Mahican on one of its night sails to Denmark.
Most afternoons Hubbard and Paul played catch in the Schlossgarten. One evening they were an hour late coming home. Lori was not alarmed: father and son were not predictable—sometimes they went to the Kurfürstendamm for pastries, sometimes Hubbard took a model of the Mahican with him and he and Paul stopped to sail it in the Schlossgarten’s ornamental lake.
When the doorbell rang at six o’clock she thought it was Hubbard, who often forgot his key. But when she opened the door, Heydrich stood in the corridor holding a silver bucket containing a bottle of champagne. He wore civilian clothes, a dark suit with a silk necktie. Two SS troopers stood behind him, their arms laden with white roses, boxes tied with ribbons, and a tray covered with a linen cloth.
“I thought it would be pleasant to spend the evening together,” Heydrich said. “I’ve seen your picture in all lights, but the models in the flesh only in the morning.”
“Spend the evening together?” Lori said. “That’s completely impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible when the will is strong enough,” Heydrich replied. “We won’t be interrupted until I give the word. Have no fear. Your husband and son were arrested in the Schlossgarten about an hour ago.”
“Arrested?”
Heydrich waved a finger. He was wearing dove-gray gloves. “Their behavior was quite suspicious,” he said. “They were sailing a model boat in the lake. For all I know there were toy Jews hidden in the hold. I have just assigned a new man to the island of Rügen, where you keep your wonderful sailboat, and he is anxious to talk to someone who knows about sailing small boats on the Baltic. So am I. Can you guess why?”
“No.”
“Because I, too, have bought a house on an island in the Baltic. I’m an enthusiastic sailor, just like you. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll meet on the water. Possibly we could have a picnic, all together.”
Heydrich set the wine bucket down. His men arranged the flowers in a vase and laid out the things they had carried upstairs on trays.
“Nothing but the best,” Heydrich said. “The SS has an excellent courier service: roses from Italy, Russian caviar from the Black Sea, goose liver from Strasbourg, and the champagne is Krug ‘09. And two beautiful hats from Paris. Please try them on, ladies. I can’t wait to see you in them.”
Lori and Meryem did so. Heydrich leaned back in his Savile Row suit and admired them. “How I would like to have a picture of that!” he said. “Alas, there is no camera.” His servants passed a tray of champagne glasses and another of food.
“Go now,” Heydrich told them. “Watch the door.” He smiled at Lori. “I’m posting guards in case your husband escapes. But I don’t think he will. I think you know the new man in Rügen—Franz Stutzer. He’s very competent, one of my favorites. He came here to dinner as a boy with your husband’s pushy Russian friend, the one who calls himself Rothchild. Do you remember Franz?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll be very pleased. He was absolutely dazzled by you.”
Heydrich asked Lori to play the piano. “Sit beside her on the bench, please, Fraulein Meryem,” he said.
Meryem said, “But I don’t play.”
“I know. It’s the picture I want to see, the two of you side by side.”
“What would you like to hear?” Lori asked.
“My tastes, as you know, are simple. I prefer Strauss. Perhaps ‘The Merry Widow Waltz.’ Do you know that one, Baronesse?”
“That’s by Franz Lehár.”
“Is it really? What a lot you know about everything! And I hope you’ll teach me every bit of it.”
After listening to the piano for an hour, sometimes beating time with his champagne glass, Heydrich turned to Meryem.
“Strange as it seems, Fräulein, we have never discussed the most famous thing about you.”
“And what is that?”
“Your second sight. Such tales have we heard about your predictions! I don’t think you realize how famous you are. Everybody in Berlin thinks you’re infallible. Even the Führer has heard about you. He is, in a manner of speaking, a clairvoyant himself—albeit on a very, very high plane. Do you read palms?”
“No,” Meryem said.
“Too bad. I’ve always wanted to have my palm read, but each time I try the fortune-teller looks at it for a moment, then refuses to go on. Absolutely refuses! I can’t tell you how often this has happened. If not palms, then what is your method?”
“Cards.”
“Then we must have cards.” Smiling again, he reached into his pocket and brought out a new deck, still in cellophane. “Let’s begin at once. Is there a table?”
Meryem asked him to shuffle and cut. Heydrich divided the cards into four piles as instructed, holding a Havana cigar between the fingers of the hand that handled the cards.
“Do I ask questions?” he said.
Meryem had not yet picked up the cards. “What questions do you want to ask?”
“None. Whatever you tell me about the future I will believe absolutely.”
Meryem picked up the cards and looked at them. She was very still. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” she said.
Heydrich banged his fist on the table in mock anger. “Again! But this time I’m in a position to insist. Tell me what you see.”
“It’s not clear,” Meryem said. “Cut the cards again.”
Heydrich did so. “If you see love, tell me at once,” he said.
“I saw that before, but in the past,” Meryem said. “You once loved a person with a birthmark.”
Heydrich was staggered. “Dear God, yes!” he said. “What shape was the birthmark?”
“Like a petal.”
“Like a tear—like your tattoo! Nobody knew about that. This is positively amazing. What do you see now?”
Meryem looked at the cards spread out on the table before her. She seemed reluctant to touch them.
“You will have a kingdom of your own and rule over it,” she said.
“A kingdom! What kingdom? Where?”
“In the east,” Meryem said.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“What else?”
“That’s all I can tell you now.”
Heydrich was beaming. “No wonder the other fortune tellers wouldn’t tell me the truth,” he said. “A kingdom! Who would have believed such a thing?” He swept the cards into a pile. “I’m going to keep these,” he said, putting them back into his pocket. “No one else must use these cards.”
The two SS men came upstairs at eleven o’clock and cleared away the bottle and glasses and the other things Heydrich had brought, even the hats and the roses. “You can keep these chez moi,” he said. “We must be discreet. Next time you come to me you can put on the hats and my photographer will make pictures.”
At the door he kissed their hands one after the other. “I must say goodnight,” he said. “Duty calls. We’ll meet again quite soon— and, remember, I hope you will both come to see me in my kingdom in the east.”
Suddenly he saw something over Lori’s shoulder. A lamp was burning in Hubbard’s study and something inside caught his eye. He strode down the hallway and entered the room. Zaentz’s nude study of Lori hung over the desk. He gasped as he looked at it.
“Wunderschön!” he cried.
After he was gone, Lori went into the bathroom and vomited. When she came back to the sitting room, pale and haggard, she found Meryem sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up beneath her. Lori opened all the windows and stood in front of one for several moments, breathing deeply. Then she sat down beside Meryem.
“What did you really see in the cards?” she asked.
“What I said—Heydrich ruling over a kingdom.”
“God knows anything is possible. But you didn’t tell him everything. I saw it in your face. What else did you see?”
“Death.”
“A war?”
“Worse than war. I don’t know what it was.”
“What else?”
“Heydrich, dying. He dies first, before the others.”
“Not soon enough.”
“No,” Meryem said. “Not soon enough. Lori, get Paul away from him.”
Lori rose to her feet and went to the open window. In the street below, Hubbard and Paul were alighting from a large black automobile.
“I wonder what he’ll want in return?” she said. “You know, Meryem, it’s very odd, but even before he was born I thought Paul was in danger. I’ve known this day would come. But how? I’m not you. How could I possibly have known?”
Hubbard’s key turned in the lock and he and Paul came into the room.
“Well, you two,” Lori said, smiling brightly. “It’s about time.”
AFTER PAUL WENT TO BED, HUBBARD RECOUNTED THE DETAILS OF their encounter with the secret police. “There wasn’t much to it, he said. “We were arrested by two men in leather coats in the Schlossgarten and taken to Gestapo headquarters. There the Dandy awaited us.”
The Christophers called Heydrich’s man Franz Stutzer “the Dandy” because that was what his surname meant in English and because he was always dressed entirely in black, like an actor playing Death in an arty movie—black Gestapo leather coat, black fedora, black kid gloves, black jacket, black breeches, black riding boots, black tie.
“What did he want?” Lori asked.
“It was very odd,” Hubbard replied. “I expected a lot of questions about night sails to Denmark with forbidden cargo. But all he wanted to talk about was Paul’s passport.”
“What about it?”
“He said that Paul’s American passport had no validity under German law. He kept repeating the same phrase over and over: ‘This child was born in Germany of a German mother, therefore he is a German citizen who must have German papers.’ “
“And what did you say in reply?”
“I asked him how anybody who was half American could be a German under the racial laws.”
“Oh? And what did he say to that?”
“He said that was a dangerous question because the racial laws applied to Jews. It made him wonder if there was Jewish blood on the American side.-‘That would explain a great deal,’ he said. Really, it was a comedy—the windowless room, the bright light on the desk shining in our eyes, Stutzer lurking in the shadows, the guard outside the door, the pointless questions. He kept saying the same things over and over again, as if he was killing time.”
“Maybe he was. What else did he say about Paul?”
“I told you. He only had one thing to say: His American passport is not valid in the eyes of the government of the Reich.”
Lori went to the open window and looked down into the street. Because it was very late, there was no noise at all, nothing for the ear to apprehend. Lamplight glowed through the linden trees, casting dappled shadows that created the illusion that they were living in an underwater city. Goethestrasse seemed to be empty. But was it? It was impossible to be sure.
“I think we should go out to dinner tomorrow night,” Lori said.
Because hardly anyone went there at night, they dined at the Swedischer Pavilion, in the Grunewald, with Paul and Hubbard’s friend from the American Embassy. He was another classmate of Hubbard’s—they seemed to be everywhere—and he knew Lori well. Though he was no relation, Paul called him “Uncle.” This had been the man’s idea. “Uncle What?” Paul had asked. “Just ‘Uncle,’ “ the older man said, “I’m the only one you’ve got, so there’s no need for formality.”
Hubbard repeated the story of his arrest.
“Have you done something to annoy this man Stutzer?” the American asked.
“Lori smacked him in the face a while ago in front of fifty people,” Hubbard said. “That may have upset him.”
“Did she, by George? Draw any blood?”
“A little, from the nose,” Hubbard said. He told the story—how the old drunk, a shell-shocked veteran everyone knew and tolerated, drank cream from the little pitcher that came with Stutzer’s coffee at the outdoor table, how Stutzer had swung his boot, how Lori slapped him so hard that his black hat flew off, how they had taken the victim to the hospital.
“That would be enough,” the American said. “In the eyes of American law, this man is wrong about Paul’s citizenship. The fact that he was born abroad to a foreign mother means nothing. He’s a full-fledged American citizen. If the Germans claim him too, he could be subject to German military service. And obviously there could be other inconveniences.”
Lori said, “You’re saying you couldn’t protect him?”
“It could be difficult. Even if his citizenship was undisputed, he’s subject to German law like anyone else as long as he lives in Germany no matter what his parentage may be.”
“German law?” Lori said. “What’s that? These people do whatever they like.”
“True,” the American said. “This is no country to live in if you want to go around slapping the Gestapo in the face.”
“What’s done is done,” Lori said.
“True again.” The American patted her hand. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m sailing to New York next Monday. I’d be glad to have Paul’s company.”
“I’ll cable Elliott,” Hubbard said.
The American smiled his casual smile. “Why don’t you let me do that from the Embassy?” he said. “Nosey Parker is the postmaster here. I’ll book Paul’s passage, too.”
Paul was sitting on his mother’s right. He took her hand under the table. It was almost identical to his own, with long tapered fingers and limber bones. Because Lori had been playing the piano every day since childhood, her hands were very strong. She laced her fingers into his and wove their two hands into a single fist. Her eyes smiled when she looked at him. Squeezing Paul’s hand until the skin turned white, she drew in a long shuddering breath and shook her head, as if to rid herself of a bad memory. Aboard ship, and for years afterward, Paul wondered what the memory might have been, if memory it was.
IN TIFAWT, AQUARTER OF A CENTURY LATER, WOLKOWICZ SAID, “SO what’s the rest of the story?”
“You know the rest,” Lla Kahina replied. “Lori disappeared.”
“Not for another two years. What happened in the meantime?”
“Heydrich got worse. It was like a game of dolls—sit here, wear that, say this, eat some more pastries. Sometimes he’d ask me to read the cards.”
“What did you see?”
“I always told him he was going to rule over a kingdom in the east. That was what he wanted to hear.”
“You were right. Hitler made him Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. To all intents and purposes he was king of Czechoslovakia.”
“That was after my time in Germany. Lori and Hubbard got me out of the country in 1939—took me to Denmark on the Mahican.”
“How could they get away with that without Heydrich knowing it? He ran the whole Nazi secret police operation.”
“I think he did know. He had that man Stutzer in Rügen to watch the Christophers, but Stutzer never tried to prevent them from sailing. He’d search the boat after they got back and make accusations, but that was all. I think Heydrich wanted them to commit these crimes. It gave him power over Lori. If she didn’t do as he wanted he could put Hubbard in prison—kill him, even. He had the power of life and death over everyone in Germany.”
“Did he really think you were a Jew?”
“What did it matter? I was just part of the decor. It was Lori who fascinated him because she was so far above him. He was hypnotized by that nude drawing that Zaentz made of her when she was pregnant with Paul. He’d come and look at it when Hubbard wasn’t there. One day he came in disguise when Hubbard was there.”
“In disguise?”
“Gray wig, beard, even a false nose. He said he was the Reich Inspector of Paintings. He made a terrible scene, shouting at Hubbard. ‘Why do you have all these Jewish paintings?’ he said. ‘Look, you let a Jew draw a picture of your wife in the nude! All this shit will be confiscated and burned!’ But he loved the picture. ‘I must have it!’ he’d say to Lori. ‘If I took it your husband would find out about us. But if I confiscate it …’ ”
“Hubbard never suspected any of this?”
“Why should he? They loved each other.”
“But she let this happen.”
“What was she supposed to do about it? Hubbard and Paul were Heydrich’s hostages.”
“There was more to it than that.”
“That’s possible,” Lla Kahina said.
Twilight was falling. Next door, the muezzin called the salat al-maghrib.
“The only thing the Christophers took with them besides their clothes when they finally tried to get out of Germany was that drawing of Lori,” Lla Kahina said. “The Gestapo confiscated it when they arrested Lori. It was never seen again. Neither was she.”
Lla Kahina saw someone behind Wolkowicz and smiled. She opened her arms in a gesture of love. Zarah Christopher came into the courtyard and kissed the old woman on the cheeks. Lla Kahina took her onto her lap and stroked her thick blond hair.
“La belle dame sans peur,” Lla Kahina said. “The beautiful lady who wasn’t afraid of anything.”
WOLKOWICZ DEPARTED THE NEXT DAY AT DAWN. NERVOUSLY, CATHY gave her permission for Zarah to ride with him toward the mountains as far as the Ja’wabi date tree.
“Just remember your promise,” Cathy said to Wolkowicz. “Not a word about Paul and the rest of them.”
“Okay,” Wolkowicz replied. “But I don’t know what you’re so worried about. He’s gone, sweetheart. The kid will never lay eyes on him.”
“You’re sure of that? They’d find each other if they knew about each other. Nothing ever stopped Paul, and she’s just like him.”
“What if they did? They’re father and daughter. Are you jealous of your own kid?”
“I want her to be happy, that’s all. I want her to be free. There’s a curse on the Christophers.”
“Okay. I’ll keep it impersonal.”
Until now Wolkowicz had not mentioned Christopher’s name to Zarah. It was not necessary. Wolkowicz was the one who had informed her, in the first words he spoke in her presence, that her father existed. Thereafter, as he confided the details to Cathy and Lla Kahina he relied on the child’s ingenuity.
Just after dawn they dismounted—Zarah from her mare, Wolkowicz from his donkey—and ate their breakfast beneath the date tree. The village lay below them, mica walls scattering the rays of the early morning sun. In the other direction the snowy peaks of the Idáren Dráren caught the same horizontal light. If Wolkowicz appreciated this unique spectacle, he gave no sign.
“I think you should learn Chinese,” he said.
“Chinese? What for?”
“You may have to go to China someday.”
“Why?„
“Who knows? To visit relatives, maybe.”
Zarah was peeling an orange, turning it against the knife so as to make a long continuous spiral of the skin. She finished what she was doing, divided the orange in two, and shared it with Wolkowicz. He ate it slowly, section by section, then took the child’s hands in his.
“Time to say goodbye,” he said. “Before I leave I want you to know that I came here to see you, nobody else. I did it because I knew I could trust you to remember something. I’m your father’s friend. Whatever you may hear in the future, whatever other people may try to tell you, that’s the truth. Remember that. When you see him, and I know you’re going to find him someday, tell him what I told you.”
He released her hands. “Open the book I gave you to page one hundred,” he said. Zarah did so and found a brand-new American hundred dollar bill. Wolkowicz said, “Tear it in half.” Without hesitation Zarah folded the crisp banknote in half, creased it, and tore it neatly along the seam. “Keep half and give me the other half,” Wolkowicz said. Once again Zarah obeyed.
“Don’t lose your half,” Wolkowicz said. “Someday somebody may give you the other half. If it matches, you’ll know that whoever gives it to you is your father’s friend, just like I am, and that I told that person something I want you to know—something that’s important to your father. Even if I’m dead, whatever the person with the other half of the hundred tells you comes straight from me. Got it?”
Zarah nodded.
“Good,” Wolkowicz said. He gave her a boost onto her horse, and when she looked down from the saddle into his broad homely face, he grinned at her.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “I’m counting on you.”