Erlenbach, Switzerland
20 Mai, 1938
I AM SORRY TO trouble you, particularly so since you had taken care of everything so precisely already. But the Consul in Zurich states that he must hold up our immigration visas until he should receive from you a notarized copy of your Federal and state income-tax returns. Perhaps the Consul in Zurich likes to make things more formal, for I understand from friends here that the Consul in Vienna has always considered the photostat copies of the canceled income-tax checks themselves adequate. In all logic they seem more conclusive than the tax return. But the Consul in Zurich seems of another mind.
So could I beg you to copy off the official returns, have them notarized, and send them to me here? We are assured that once they are in the Consul’s hands, the matter of visas will go easily. Again, we all thank you so sincerely for your help and collaboration, and hope to meet you soon.
Vera read the letter, in the spidery foreign script she had already seen twice in letters from Franz Vederle—once to thank her in advance for helping them in Mrs. Willis’ stead, and again to report the arrival of the registered letter with all the documents. She liked the way Dr. Vederle wrote, very simply, somehow touching in his almost but not quite perfect English and its slightly reserved gratitude to her, a stranger.
But this letter irritated her. So they weren’t en route by now, as she had imagined whenever she thought of them the past weeks. In all truth, she had thought little of them as specific persons; the rising, pitching crisis in the Sudetenland riveted the attention of everyone. Just this week, Nazi troops were marching on Czechoslovakia; reports were that Hitler had ten divisions mobilized along the Czech frontier. The Anschluss movie being run off again. Only the end might differ. War this time?
War or no war, one thing was sure: in still another country a new mass of humanity was already swirling along to the borders. Who would help these new ones? If there were indeed to be another world-enveloping war, then this would be one of the issues, perhaps buried beneath many other issues, but alive, burning with the roaring anger of decent people everywhere. This, the fact that men and women no longer could live where they chose, work as they chose, think and worship and study and sing as they chose. Yes, it would be one of the monstrous issues, and men would fight and men would die rather than sit forever disinterested and inert at the evil force that could create it.
She rang for Miss Benson.
“Benny, get out the file copies of my income-tax statements for 1936 and 1937, please. Federal and state. See if you can get some fresh blanks for those years. Copy them off; I have to send notarized copies of the forms themselves. It is stupid nonsense, but let’s get it off right away.”
“Yes, Miss Marriner.”
“Get Mrs. Willis for me, would you?”
What could one do, how could one fight now? Affidavits for one family, one well-known family—it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough.
“Ann, the Vederles haven’t left yet. The Consul there wants more stuff about my income taxes. Have you run into this kind of thing?”
“Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. It depends on the Consulate—some places you get the quickest kind of response, other places you strangle in delay.” Her big voice sounded apologetic. “I’m sorry you’re being bothered, Vee.”
“It’s no bother. The red tape gets me mad, that’s all. If you want me for any new affidavits—you know, Czech ones or something—”
“Oh, Vee, I have some new cases. I’ve been racking my brains—”
“I’ll take on somebody. I know the ropes now. Who is it?”
“I’ve got three, actually. You don’t suppose Jasper would take on one or two? I’ve been wondering whether to ask him.”
Vee didn’t answer immediately. Jasper and affidavits? It would never occur to her to ask him.
“Why, look, darling,” she could almost hear his voice saying to her, so rational, so convincing. “I’m giving everything I’ve got—my mind, my ability, my future—to starting a thing that might make the world better and safer for millions of people. I just mustn’t get off the path for this individual or that. Don’t you see the danger of diverting your energies?”
“Oh, Ann, I don’t know about Jasper,” she said slowly into the phone. “I imagine he’d agree instantly if you did ask him, only he’s so taken up now with the network—”
“I know. I just got wondering, because I’m so desperate about whom to turn to all the time. I—oh, I guess I’ll- not try it. I hate getting a turndown.” She hesitated. When she spoke again, contempt edged her words. “Humanity in headlines is his dish, not just a couple of poor slobs in trouble. I’ve always thought that about Jasper Crown and now I’ve said it.”
Humanity in headlines. That was cruel. And perceptive? Her own doubts—“the little people”—these last weeks she thought and pondered over Jas only in the intimate realm of their shared, secret. Now Ann had led her back to that other impersonal realm, and the old doubts foamed in her mind. If she herself were to ask him—no, she couldn’t risk it.
“I think you have him wrong, Ann,” she said. “Anyway, to get back to what you’d like me to do—”
“This is a woman of about fifty-five, name’s Rosie Tupchik. She’s poor, and Jewish, and pretty sick by now. She makes brassieres.”
“Makes what?”
“Bras, to order, you know. Oh, and bathing suits with concealed bra and girdle-gadgets. She’d make a living here, if we could get her over. She’s got a daughter here, Bronya. She came over a year ago. The mother lives in Karlsbad, that’s in the Sudeten area.”
“Czechoslovakia? Oh, can the daughter …?”
“No. The daughter’s working as a scrubwoman in Gimbel’s. Couldn’t get anything else. She’s got a year-old infant that she boards out, while she’s scrubbing toilets. She used to teach science in a Berlin school.”
“Dear God.” An educated woman, a teacher of science, scrubbing toilets. “Well, that means passage money, too. O.K., Ann. Send me the dope, will you? I’ll start right away.”
“This is the opposite number to the Vederle kind of case. Might be tough going.”
“I don’t care.”
The full copies of her income-tax returns were mailed the next day. And before they were well out to sea, another letter came from Dr. Vederle.
I am embarrassed to bother you even again. But at the American Consul today, they added still more requests.
They say they must also have answers to the points on the enclosed, and in particular to paragraphs a, b, and d. I know this will put you to great trouble, dear Mrs. Stamford, and my wife, with me, we thank you in advance. It seems to us such an unaccustomed role to have to rely so on others. Everyone here in Zurich, and it was also so in Basel, also is so dependent now on some good friend in another country.
He signed it, “In deep gratitude, most cordially yours,” on two separate lines. An unexpected lump jammed Vera’s throat. Here was a renowned, respected doctor now become an embarrassed supplicant. She felt embarrassed herself, as though she had impertinently snooped into a private unhappiness.
The enclosure was yet another mimeographed form, probably used by all American Consulates everywhere.
Each affidavit of support will be accompanied by independent evidence of the truth of the statements made concerning financial resources of the affiant as follows:
a. Letter from the affiant’s employers stating specifically how the affiant is employed, how long he has been in his present employment and what wages or salary he receives;
b. Letters from the affiant’s bankers certifying to the amount of his savings and current funds;
c. Evidence as to the ownership and present market value of bonds and securities held by the affiant;
d. Letters from life-insurance companies stating the present cash surrender value of life-insurance policies held by the affiant…
It went on to e, which wanted evidences of real property claimed, appraisals of its value by some “readily identifiable person,” and then on to f , suggesting to any affiant with a business of his own that he “present an analysis and statement of his net worth from a public auditor…”
She slapped the sheet away from her. A moment later she reached for it in meek defeat. All right, all right. She’d send these statements, too. Redundancies did not seem to embarrass the consulate mind. Was this going on in all the consulates of all the countries—this repetitiveness, this carping piling up of still new requirements? It was maddening to anybody with a tidy mind.
But apart from that, the delay—the weeks of needless, pointless delay. The human beings back of each such delay, families waiting, unable to continue their voyage to their new beginnings; children asking “When will we get there?” Men and women greeting each day with new hope, ending it with the shoulder sag of disappointment.
From Ann’s many descriptions, she could visualize Dr. Vederle’s tall figure turning away from some crisp young clerk in the Consulate at Zurich; could see his dark, fine eyes suddenly deepen in rage at this procession of new requests and demands; could see, apology tighten his lips as he sat down at some strange desk in a strange house, to ask still another favor of her.
Impulsively, she wrote:
Dear Dr. and Mrs. Vederle,
You must be getting exasperated. As fast as possible I’ll send still more documents for you to present to our fine Consular officials. They sound absurdly foolish and it’s dreadful that any American representative abroad should give you so bad an impression of your new country-to-be. We’re not all like that.
Do not ever feel guilty about bothering me. It is a privilege to be able to help you, for I begin to feel as though we really know each other already.
That very hour she put in motion the task of collecting the new evidence as per a, b, and d. For good measure, she threw in testimony on c.
By the time she had the proper documents from her bank, her broker, her insurance companies, and the store, and had sent them off to Switzerland, June was half done. The crisis over the Sudetenland had blown over after all, the fear of war drifted gratefully out of men’s minds, and from thirty-two nations, delegates were converging to the great international conference on refugees. It was to be in Evian-les-Bains in France; Switzerland, fearing German displeasure, had refused to allow it within her borders. Of all the countries invited by President Roosevelt, Italy alone had refused to attend. But three of the British Dominions had been added and the conference would represent virtually the whole of the civilized world.
Vera watched the New York papers for news of it, and knew that the Vederles and all their unknown comrades in flight were watching even more eagerly the Swiss and French and English papers. “The refugee problem” was a problem indeed. It seemed, each uneasy month, to be spreading, widening like the endless waters of a flooding river laughing at its puny shores.
But it was a man-made problem, not a natural scourge like flood or famine or hurricane which left one futile and helpless. Evil and brutal men had created this disaster; generous and decent men could solve it. There was nothing insurmountable about it.
It was a man-made problem. In Austria, less than two months after Anschluss, the men who wrote, edited, and published the Vienna edition of the Völkisscher Beobachter celebrated in their news columns the cleansing of Austria’s universities, her literary world, her press, her music, and her scientific laboratories.
They were not too specific in their celebration, these joyful men. News of suicides and arrests were proscribed by the new laws. No triumphant story appeared to tell that already, in Vienna alone, nearly 50,000 people had been imprisoned, of whom 26,000 were Jews and the rest Protestants and Catholics. No news story told how many executions had taken place, how many Gestapo inquisitions, how many Austrians had already fled or tried to flee. But here and there, in this police dossier, in that small obituary, from this mourning relative, one could piece out the tale, not perhaps of the obscure, but at least of the famous.
Dr. Sigmund Freud, eighty-two years old, left Vienna for London in early June. His family, his manuscripts and scientific papers, migrated with him, expatriates all.
Professor Otto Loewi, Nobel Prize winner for physiology and medicine in 1936, who conducted pioneer investigations on the transmission of nerve impulses, was first jailed, then managed to get abroad. His notes and plans for further experiments and research crossed the borders with him.
Professor Erwin Schredinger, Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1933, and Professor Victor G. Hess, the 1937 winner in cosmic-ray research, were removed from their university positions..
Professor Ferdinand Blumenthal, internationally known cancer specialist, who had already fled to Austria from Germany, was arrested. His colleagues were seeking his release and emigration.
Professor Heinrich Neumann, world-known ear specialist, was arrested and imprisoned. In London, colleagues and friends rushed affidavits and visa applications for him.
More than half the assistant professors and instructors on the medical faculty of the University of Vienna were summarily dismissed, Jews and Aryans alike. These included:
Professor Egon Ranzi, director of the Surgical Clinic
Professor Leopold Arzt, dermatologist
Professor Ernst P. Pick, pharmacologist
Dr. Arnold Durig, physiologist
Dr. Otto Kinders, psychologist
Professor Otto Marburg, noted neurologist
In Austria’s other universities twelve hundred professors, teachers, research workers were ousted or arrested. Most of them sought visas to other lands. These included:
The President of the Austrian Academy of Science, Professor Oswald Redlich
Dr. Armand Kaminka, founder of the Vienna Maimonides Institute
Dr. Julius Schnitzler, professor of surgery
Dr. Ernst Straussler, criminologist
But some of Austria’s leading scientific men escaped the ousting, the arrests, the pleas for affidavits and visas. They, for their personal reasons, for their secret reasons, chose suicide instead.
Professors Nobl and Oscar Frankl, the brother physicians of the University of Vienna, chose it instead. Dr. Gustav Bayer, of Innsbruck, and his daughter chose it. Professor Ismar Boas, Albert Smolenskin, mathematician, Dr. Gabor Nobl, dermatologist, Professor Denk, head of the Second Clinic of Medicine, all chose it. And also Egon Friedell, author, playwright, and actor, Marianne Trebitsch-Stein, writer, and Dr. Kurt Sonnenfeld, editor of the Neue Freie Presse. These also chose it.
Franz Werfel, novelist, was already in exile.
Gina Kaus, biographer of the Empress Catherine, escaped to Switzerland.
Siegfried Geyer, author and translator of Molnár, was jailed. So too was Ludwig Hirschfeld, the witty publicist. Richard Bermann was captured as he tried to escape, but he tried again and succeeded. Anton Kuh escaped to Prague. René Kraus, and the essayist, Alfred Polgar, escaped also.
The Vienna Opera dismissed half its orchestra players for “tainted blood.” Dismissed too were its featured singers, Else Flesch and Margit Bokor, its director, Lothar Wallerstein, and its conductor, Josef Krips.
Fritz Lohner, who wrote librettos for Franz Leháor, was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau.
The Vienna Philharmonic ousted Dr. Hugo Burghauser, its chairman.
Hermann Leopoldi, composer of comic songs, lighthearted and merry, got his visa in time and fled; so too did Bruno Walter.
Dr. Ernst Lothar, who leased Reinhardt’s Josefstadter Theater, managed to emigrate; Friedrich Rosenthal, director of the Burg Theater on the Ring, was dropped, as were also the Burg’s featured players, Hans Wengraf and Franz Strassni. Albert Basserman escaped, but Rudolph Beer, head of the Reinhardt School of Acting, wrote some farewell notes and killed himself.
From museum walls certain canvases were banished, from the keys of Austrian pianos and the strings of Viennese fiddles certain melodies were outlawed, from the pulpits in Austrian churches many voices now spoke only in parables.
Celebrate the cleansing. Celebrate, Völkischer Beobachter, celebrate. Austria is whole now.
And on a breakwater in the Danube, fifty-one Jews crowded together, watching the waters, watching the skies. The night before, Austrian storm troopers had brought them there, left them without food, money, water, or identification papers. There was, obviously, nothing else to do. All three of Austria’s neighboring countries, Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, had refused to give them even transitory admission.
Celebrate, celebrate.
Dr. Vederle reread the letter from America. She must be a very understanding person, this Vera M. Stamford. Ann Willis had done them a good turn in her choice of a substitute.
“…so bad an impression of your country-to-be. We’re not all like that. Do not ever feel guilty about bothering me…feel as though we really know each other already.”
It was kind of her to offer this small personal assurance of continuing interest. As if she were saying, ‘What does it matter if April and May and half of June have already gone by and we are still not successful with the visas? I am not going to turn away in boredom; how could I, since we are in this together? The Consulate is behaving badly, we must humor them, but we shall succeed before long…”
He wondered what she was like actually, what she looked like, this woman who had become so important to himself and Christa and the children. It was strange not to know whether she was tall or short, homely or beautiful; he knew her age, knew of her education and marriage and divorce, of her work and success, for all that was in the affidavit. But the face? The eyes and mouth, the smile, the tone of voice, all the features and mannerisms and timbres that described the contents of a human being? He was beginning to be curious about her as a person.
Affidavits should really be less austere, more gossipy and informative. He chuckled to himself.
“Deponent is a pretty blonde, with blue eyes and appealing feminine charm.” Now, that’s the way an affidavit really ought to read; that would give ne something to go by in one’s attempts to visualize the person to whom one owed so much. “Deponent has a soft, low voice, a warm and ready smile; she is a woman men admire. Deponent is tall and willowy, with charming legs like Dietrich’s. She loves music, she owns a Bechstein piano, no, no, a Steinway, and is an admirer of the Beethoven sonatas and the Schubert
“What are you smiling over, Franz?”
Christa came out to join him in the small garden.
They were living in a small summer chalet, east of the lovely town of Erlenbach. The town was only nine miles from Zurich, and their own chalet only a few minutes’ walk from the slow crescent curve of the lake. The whole region smiled in beauty, cradled by the Zurichberg and the Ütliberg, not very imposing mountains but all the friendlier, for that, in contrast to the regal snow-tipped Alps in the farther distances.
They had moved there after only a fortnight in Basel. Visas were not issued in Basel, they found, but only in Zurich, a two-hour trip by train. Aside from that, Basel was oddly depressing. Hotel life restricted Paul and Ilse to much, the bustling city, with its baroque and Gothic houses, seemed to have no place for them. And, though it remained an unspoken thought, there was a curious need for being nearer to the American Consulate in Zurich. They felt like drawing close to it, as one does to a friend who offers understanding and help in a troubled time.
So far, the understanding and help had been leisurely and impersonal, but one knew of the constant pressure on all the consulates and could forgive some delay. The very first day after he and Christa had rejoined each other at Basel, they and the children had gone to Zurich. The Americans in the Consulate were polite and efficient, their papers and Mrs. Stamford’s affidavits and other documents were given quick preliminary examination, and their applications for reservations on quota numbers were entered in the books.
The whole thing had taken little more than an hour. Apart from their own excitement over the very act of applying in person for American visas, there was almost no incident to mark the visit. For a moment, it seemed there might be one.
“Budapest? You were born in Budapest?” the young man interviewing them asked Christa, in very passable German.
“Yes. My parents were Austrian citizens, but they were there just then. I have always lived in Austria.”
“Yes, I understand. The country of birth, though,” isn’t Austria, but Hungary. The Hungarian quota—”
Christa looked quickly at Franz.
“Among German friends, heard we—we heard often,” he offered helpfully in English, “that all the wifes go on the quota of the husband’s country.” The pleasant young man smiled and replied in English.
“Yes. There has to be a discretionary ruling on each case.”
Franz was not completely clear about what this meant, but the voice was reassuring. Apparently it was a routine matter, for the young man was going on through the rest of the documents. Over each paper or statement, he nodded his head in some affirmation.
When it was over, they felt in a holiday mood. They spent the rest of the day sight-seeing around the famous lake. Later, when they first thought of exchanging Basel for some more appealing surroundings, there was not a moment’s doubt where it should be.
The little house pleased them all, though it was old-fashioned and inconvenient in many ways. An old Swiss woman, Thilde, came in twice a week to do the heavy cleaning; for the rest Christa insisted that it would help the days along if she marketed and cooked and cleaned herself. Paul and Ilse thought this a capital way to live. They loved going to market every morning with their mother; it was a new and exciting pastime. There was a small tennis club and Paul took his first lessons. And the lake—that was best of all, with the sight-seeing steamers, the rowboats for hire, and the swimming. Paul was sure America could offer nothing as good as this. It was a million times better than their summer place at the Traunsee.
Franz liked the small house, too. It was a pleasant way in which to wait until their visas would be in their hands. Even though it seemed impractical for so short a time, he had rented a piano, and each day he practiced for two or three hours. It had been years since he had had free time for this, his restoring and gracious hobby, and one by one he worked back to his old proficiency on his best-loved Beethoven sonatas, Schubert impromptus, Brahms ballades, and Bach preludes and fugues.
The steady practicing was deeply good for him, and Christa often said that she enjoyed the sound of the great German music more than she had ever before enjoyed it or any other music. She said it tentatively, as though Franz would laugh. He felt it too, though, and did not laugh or wonder. All that had happened had been unable to prevent their carrying this beauty across the frontiers with them. There were things the Nazis and their decrees and Secret Police could never confiscate or proscribe. For as long as men in prison could whistle a few bars of the verbotene Mendelssohn, or say over in their minds the verbotene Heine’s Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen, they had the untouchable at their command, they could know themselves still defiant and unvanquished.
Now Franz rose eagerly to meet Christa as she came through the trellised door to the garden. Her question saddened him; she herself smiled rarely these days, and today particularly she felt slightly ill. It was as though she found him heartless to be able to find amusement in anything.
“I was smiling over a foolish notion I’ve been entertaining myself with,” he answered. “About affidavits—it’s no matter. How do you feel now, Christl? Better?”
“Oh, yes, it was nothing. A headache is so boring, though.”
“I don’t like it that you have one so often.”
“It’s silly, I know you must think they are only neurotic.”
“The pain is just as painful—”
“Oh, Franzi, isn’t it too bad an analyst cannot take his wife for a patient? I suppose it would do me good now. Couldn’t you pretend to have a proper objectivity with me, as if I were just someone you’d never seen before.”
“No, I couldn’t even pretend it if I wanted to.”
He smiled at her, and now she returned his smile. But he was concerned. Christa woke often in the night and lay tossing and tense. She ate unevenly; sometimes for days she was entirely uninterested in meals, only to change to an almost wolfish appetite. Often she spoke sharply to the children, and then her remorse afterward was too great, disproportionate to the offense. She was oversensitive to being spoken of as a “refugee.” Emigration was never easy; but with Christa he began to see it was more of a horror than it need be.
Sometimes he tried to speak about it, to help her accept it. Then she only felt a new guilt, that she was somehow betraying his entire profession by behaving in this strange manner. As though an analyst’s wife should, by some unheard-of osmosis, absorb the analytic process into her own being! He explained the folly of this guilt to her and she always nodded in complete acceptance and understanding. But she went right on feeling it.
“It will be easier for you when we have the visas and start for America,” he said. “Shall we take the children out on the lake?”
“Oh, yes, let’s. We’ll have a picnic supper on the shore or in the woods. It will be so nice.”
They took a cab to the near-by town of Küssnacht, and boarded one of the small lake steamers. They found seats up forward, and the children immediately plastered their slight bodies to the railing, to watch the prow-rolled water. Christa and Franz sat in close silence, their eyes turning always to the mountains in the clear high skies.
Soon Christa leaned her head back, closed her eyes. The little boat was rather crowded; voices and laughter came at one from all directions; it was soothing and friendly to lose one’s identity in a crowd of sight-seers and vacationers.
“…ist überfremdet.”
“Jawohl, die Überfremdung in der Schweiz ist so furchtbar, dass…”
The voices drifted to her from a near-by group of talkers. They talked in the special Swiss-German dialect, but she had already become familiar with it. She glanced at Franz; he had not heard. She turned angry, wary eyes toward the loud-voiced speakers.
“Überfremdet.” An insulting word, a heartless and arrogant word. “Overaliened.” A newly coined word, to express a newly felt scorn. And the answer, the disgusted agreement. “Yes, indeed, the overaliening in Switzerland is already so dreadful that…”
She sat forward sharply, trying to see the enemies. A moment ago they had seemed merely pleasant fellow passengers on a friendly little ship. Now their very faces were threats to her pride, her sense of equality. Her sudden movement caught the eye of one of them, a flabby-bosomed woman in an embroidered blouse, a full plaid skirt, with red sandals over wide bare feet. Their eyes held for a moment. Then with the grotesque exaggeration of a third-rate actor “expressing scorn,” the flabby one raised her eyebrows and the shoulder nearest Christa. She turned away, said something un-catchable to her companions, and a laugh assaulted the sunny air.
Christa gripped the arms of the deck chair, started to rise, then helplessly sank back again. Sick anguish twisted inside her, and a hatred. How did these contemptuous strangers know that she and her family were foreigners; did she and Franz bear some mark on their foreheads that stamped them to all the world as aliens?
“Aber in Wien…” Ilse’s high vice drifted back to her. Of course, the children, prattling about Vienna, the Traunsee, Döbling in their Viennese accent.
Oh, that made it even worse; that these strangers should listen to children, to her and Franz’ children, and know only disgust and reluctance for their presence.
“Franz—” His eyes opened. Instantly concern filled them.
“You are ill, Christl? The motion of the boat?”
“No, oh, please don’t be so ridiculous,” she answered, irritated inexplicably. “I’m not a baby to get seasick from this.”
He made no reply. He saw her tight lips, saw the high color still rosying her throat, though above it her face was quite pale. His glance wandered about, in search of the cause for this sudden change in her.
“I—I’m sorry I spoke so,” Christa said quickly. “My foolish nerves play tricks. I am not seasick, Franz, I just heard those horrible people there…”
He listened, nodding in sympathy. A dozen times a week, in a dozen different places, came this small attack on their dignity. When they had joined each other in Basel, Christa had told him that in Italy her Austrian passport had stamped her everywhere as an inferior being; only foreigners with German passports were treated there with respect. He had not been surprised; that was Italy. Here in Switzerland, in democratic, international-minded Switzerland…But soon he found that even here, no day ended without its small deposit of contempt.
“Have you anything to identify yourself, sir?” The teller at the bank, so courteous, so affable. Then the Austrian passport slid over the marble counter, and the subtle change would come.
“Austrian? Yes, of course.” The voice a shade cooler, the eye a touch evasive. Vederle had been amused at first, then he had been angry, found himself constantly en garde in advance in any public place. He finally had achieved the armor of partial indifference. But it was, after all, only partial.
The same subtle attack came at one from the post-office clerks, the credit manager of the piano store, the registering officers at the police, even the librarian at the Municipal Library.
“It is maddening, my darling,” he said in a low voice to Christa, when she finished, her hot eyes burning into the oblivious back of the bloused and skirted woman. “You know, it is nothing new, this hatred of the foreigner. ‘Xenophobia,’ the ancient Greeks called it—‘fear of the stranger.’ That describes it more closely than ‘hatred.’ ”
“Fear? Why should they fear us? Why should they fear anyone who has had to leave his own country and come begging to a country that doesn’t want him? If any human being could be weaker, less to be feared—”
“It’s confused, most fear is. Some of it is that the alien might earn a few marks or francs or pounds that you feel belong to you. Some of it is fear of the different, the unknown.”
“How stupid, how provincial.”
“Yes, but calling names doesn’t change it. I even think these nations around Germany fear refugees because they fear the future for themselves.”
“You mean they’re afraid that someday Hitler or Franco—”
“Exactly. So the refugees are armies of Cassandras. They predict to each person, ‘Maybe you’ll be next.’ “
She nodded, and her eyes asked the next question before her lips could.
“Will it be the same in America?”
Just then the wash from a bigger boat slapped into the portside of the little steamer. Ilse had loosed her hold on the deck rail, and the sudden tipping made her lose balance. She fell to the deck in a sprawling mass, her tanned legs shooting up in the air.
Paul laughed cheerfully as he stooped to help her up. She waved him off, angry at his laughing, and reached out for the first support she could find. This handy prop turned out to be a fat knee covered by a plaid skirt. With the simplicity and trust of childhood, she began to hoist herself up along it.
The woman did nothing, until Ilse had regained her feet.
“Thank you,” Ilse said. “I fell down.”
The woman made no answer, disengaged the small hand still resting on her knee, and gave Ilse a small push away from her. For one appalled second, the child stared at her.
“Mommy, she pushed me, that woman shoved me,” she cried, and ran to bury herself against Christa’s skirts.
“Yes, darling, I saw.”
She wanted to strike the woman’s crass face, she wanted to shout horrible things in a public fishwife scene. But all her training, all her inhibitions, held her back.
She led Ilse to where Franz sat, leaning forward watching; she beckoned to Paul and he followed, looking over his shoulder with open curiosity at the woman in the blouse and plaid skirt. The woman stared back at him placidly.
“Daddy, what’s the matter with that woman?” he asked.
“She pushed me, she shoved me away from her,” Ilse repeated.
Franz shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe she’s one of those strange people that don’t like children much,” he offered calmly. “There are people like that, you know—I am always sorry for them.” The children stared in disbelief. “Or maybe she never met any people from other countries, and she thinks that Englishmen and Americans and Austrians and Frenchmen aren’t as nice as the Swiss. That could be it, too.”
“But why, why aren’t they as nice?” Ilse was fascinated by this new idea.
“They are, of course. But sometimes when somebody has never traveled much, or met other kinds of people, they get the funniest ideas about them; Paul, don’t you remember you giggled so when that English doctor visited us?”
“And he always wanted tea for breakfast, remember, and he was funny about his knife and fork.” Paul was amused all over again. “And in his bathrobe—oh, don’t you remember?—he used to wear a scarf around his neck with his bathrobe on.”
Christa remembered. When Mr. Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe stayed at their house, she was secretly uncomfortable most of the time. She strained to understand his German through the impossible accent that he seemed blissfully unaware of; she could never talk to him naturally. She worried about the meals she offered him, about the customs and habits of the house. In spite of all her will to be friendly and hospitable, that visit had brought her only uncertainty and strain. And in the end, she was relieved when the day of his departure arrived, and sighed in secret pleasure that the difficult guest was gone.
That’s how people felt about foreigners, always and inevitably. Now, for years, every time she spoke to an American, she would remember that difficult straining to understand in spite of the accent, and know that o it was she who had the accent. Now, it would be she and her family who would seem full of odd, curious little mannerisms and tastes. They would be the aliens, they would be the foreigners.
A sudden longing for home swept bitterly through her. Franz and the children were talking together, cheerful again and apparently untroubled. She must learn to feel that way, she must, she must.
But she could not help the way she felt.
Surely it would be easier, once this waiting was over, and they were actually in America. There would be many things to do, a new house to find, new things to buy, new schools to chose for the children. She would busy herself with all these dear, ordinary matters, and perhaps soon she would feel ordinary herself.
Until then, she must never let Franz guess the depth of her fear about everything that lay ahead. If there were any way out—but there was none. She probably was only homesick for Döbling, for the easy, lovable ways of Vienna …oh, God, Döbling…home…the slabbed path through the garden, the small chair she sat in by the bedroom window, her heart at rest and the very air so tranquil about her…
The steamer was docking. Christa sprang up eagerly, gathered together the children’s sweaters and the wicker basket that held their picnic supper. It was always better when there was some immediate and specific task to be done, some ordinary, everyday schedule to be followed. Then the thinking stopped, the mind turned gratefully to simple and practical matters and let thought alone.
“Can we swim before supper?” Paul asked.
“I can swim,” Ilse said to the world at large.
“You’ll be swimming very well in a little while,” Franz said, “and not even have to hold on with one hand under the water.”
“She just bluffs about swimming,” Paul declared. “Doesn’t she, Daddy?”
“Oh, no, that’s the way you learned, too.”
“But I didn’t say I could really swim when I had to hold on.”
Christa laughed. She remembered so well the sturdy little back, sunburned and square-looking, lurching jerkily through the shallow water.
“Yes, you did, Paul,” she said. “You told me once very positively that even Olympic swimmers held on with one hand or they sank right down in the mud.”
On the lake shore, they spread their picnic supper. The thinnest, silkiest crescent moon was already high above them in the afternoon sky. Peace filled Christa’s heart, mysteriously stealing in as she brought out the paper-wrapped sandwiches, the thermos of icy milk, the dark, ripe cherries. This was her world, really, these two beautiful children she had borne, this tall, dark-haired man she loved and trusted. Franz was right, he was wise and strong when he told her that as long as they were together no harm could befall them. Austria or America—what difference, after all, did it make in a woman’s heart as long as her husband and children were with her?
For the hundredth time, she resolved to be braver from now on. Suddenly she reached out and squeezed Franz’ hand. He looked at her, questioning.
“Nothing,” she only said. “I feel happy again. I don’t know why.”
“I’m so happy,” Ilse cried. “I love jelly sandwiches.”
They all laughed, the sudden burst of merriment that is the special property of a family that knows harmony and love, the private joke, the meaningful catchword that outsiders cannot understand.
Laughter under a summer sky, the spread picnic supper, the father and mother great with their inner knowledge that they have fine children, the children flushed with their own vital youth, secure in the knowledge they are wanted and loved .
These are the things. These are the eternal things, Franz thought.
Flight, change, difficulties, and delays, they do not make the fiber of life, no, not even when they seem, momently, to be the whole warp and woof of existence. They only seem so. The day will come when they are only remembered tribulations, only the stuff for reminiscing, and even enjoyable in the recalling.
For the children, at any rate, the difficulties and delays are not serious, even the sense of change, of momentary insecurity and rootlessness, for them at least all this is not deeply harmful. The children are young enough so they will not be too deeply wounded, and as for us, the older …
In another fortnight, at the most, the new documents would come from Vera Stamford. He had calculated carefully, he was more experienced now, he knew it took time to prepare formal statements. But surely by the end of June they would be in his hands. They would be complete in every detail, for she had shown that she was like that. All the a, b, c, d demands on the mimeographed sheet he had been given at the Consulate would be meticulously answered, he would take them immediately into Zurich, and then surely the last of the delays would be done.