Chapter 9

There was no military bus waiting at the Maximilian Platz, nor any sign of Benjamin Grossman. There was, however, a wrecking crew piling rubbish onto a truck from what had been an office building, from the looks of the debris. The military bus? Of the Americans? Oh, that had pulled out a few minutes ago; it had made room for their truck, as a matter of fact. Another bus? The next day, they thought; or possibly not. They had no idea. Possibly he could get the information at the Hauptbahnhof; the American Military Police had a desk there to help their soldiers traveling by train. It was right where you went into the station from the Bayer Strasse.

The MPs were unable to help him. Whatever military bus was in the habit of either starting or stopping in the Maximilian Platz had nothing to do with their department. To get to Konstanz? There were, of course, trains—but Max had left his prisoner garb at the camp, and without his striped shirt or cap, he would have to pay. And the money he was carrying was not meant for chasing foolish Jews halfway across Germany in order to help them get into Switzerland; it was meant for the far more important job of getting desperate people into Palestine to find safety.

Max Brodsky stood and stared at the jagged holes in what had been the curved glass roof of the railroad station, thinking. He carefully reviewed all of Morris Wolf’s arguments, considered the monetary aspects of his chase in all their ramifications, carefully meditated on the chances of finding Grossman, and then discarded all his conclusions and walked into the information room and up to a clerk. There was a train in several hours that went to the Bodensee, yes; not to Konstanz, but to the Bodensee. It was the Alpine express, newly back in service, and it went through Friedrichshafen on its way to Lindau, Chur, and eventually Italy. By getting off at Friedrichshafen, he could catch a bus—whose schedule was admittedly arbitrary—and with luck get into Meersburg by early evening. It would be a long trip, the clerk admitted, but there was no doubt he would arrive. The ferry from Meersburg to Konstanz, the information clerk thought, had never ceased to function, but he was not sure. The ferry, after all, the clerk explained, did not run on rails and was therefore no responsibility of his.

Brodsky thanked him, added up all the disadvantages of his pursuit once again—and then went out and bought a ticket. As he waited for the train to arrive, he promised himself that when at last he caught up with Benjamin Grossman, he would pound on his friend’s thick German skull until it rang like the glockenspiel at a Polish wedding.

The clerk had not exaggerated; it was, indeed, a long journey. In compensation for having wasted Mossad money on the transportation, Max forwent both lunch and dinner, and as the ancient bus lumbered north along the clear waters of the Bodensee, with the Swiss Alps clearly visible in the transparent afternoon air, he wondered for the hundredth time exactly what he thought he was accomplishing by the trip. The chances that he could encounter Grossman had to be astronomical. After all, Konstanz was not exactly a crossroads village; and besides, he had never been there before. He would not only be searching for a needle in a haystack, but it would be a foreign haystack, at that. Besides, for all he knew Grossman could be planning on making his attempt in a hundred towns other than Konstanz; the man was not above being devious, and the fact that he had mentioned Konstanz might well mean it was the one place he would not try to cross the frontier. How could he hope to locate the man under those conditions? And even if he found him, how could he possibly help him? What did he know about crossing borders? He was an idiot; that was the answer. He was a fool; that was what he knew about crossing borders.

The day wore on, seemingly endless. Max intermittently napped and tried to think of other things besides the meals he had missed. It had been many months now since Belsen had been liberated, and he had become accustomed in that time to regular meals. The bus lurched on and on.

At seven o’clock the tired vehicle finally made it into Meersburg, dropping him off at a newsstand that served the small village as bus station. It was a short block to the ferry slip, and Max just managed to catch the ferry as the landing plate was being dragged aboard by the two-man crew. By now, of course, Max was merely completing an assignment simply because it had been started; it was obvious he was wasting his time, but he could scarcely turn about and go home at this point. That would have been even more foolish than his having started out in the first place, and God knew how stupid that had been!

Under other circumstances, Max might have enjoyed the brief twenty-minute ferry ride across the blue waters of the Bodensee from Meersburg to Staad, the docking area for the Konstanz ferry. The sun was setting now over the huge mountains to the west; the snowcapped peaks rose majestically from the sloping plains that bordered the lake. The growing shadows made the narrow valleys that slotted their way between the ranges a deep blue, matching the dark waters of the lake. There was a freshness in the air, a promise that here in this part of the world which had been spared the devastation of war, one might find peace. Here one could forget the bombings; here one might even learn to forget the horrors of the concentration camps.

How different, he thought, from the land I worked so hard on as a boy, working for the farmer Kolchak, while my parents slaved over their hot irons in the tailor shop in town that was permitted to make clothes just for Jews—who had no money to pay. How different this paradise from the barren soil of Palestine on the kibbutz, growing everything the hard way! Maybe Grossman was right. What was wrong with wanting to enjoy this peace, this beauty? What was wrong with preferring to live here among these great quiet peaks, in the wide green valleys, rather than struggling with the heat and the discomfort of the Palestinian deserts? What was wrong with wanting to live in peace with your neighbors rather than struggling against an inhospitable land in constant war with both British and Arab?

Then his mind cleared and he smiled. Those struggles, he said to himself, made me strong enough to live through the camps—and to bring others through with me, Grossman included. And besides, Grossman was wrong. For any Jew one square meter of Palestinian soil, owned and brought to fruition by his own hand, his own sweat, had to be worth the whole of any country on earth.

The ferry pulled into Staad and docked with a great rush of water into the slip, bouncing jarringly against the straining planks, and settling down only when lashed into growling obedience by the dockside davits. And as Max Brodsky swung along the short road leading to Konstanz itself, he tried to seriously analyze exactly why he was undertaking this obviously useless trip. He decided it had to be because he had too much time and effort invested in bringing Benjamin Grossman through Bergen-Belsen to lose him now. He also decided he had changed his mind as to what he would do when and if he found his friend. Rather than pound on that thick German skull, he would strangle the man with his bare hands, and then toss his dead body across the border into Switzerland, if that was where Benjamin Grossman wanted to go so badly.

It was a comforting thought and kept his mind from food as he marched along.

The seventy-odd miles from Munich’s Maximilian Platz to Leipheim on the Ulm road had been covered in a scant two and a half hours, a tribute to the bus driver’s utter lack of caution or good sense on the unrepaired road. As Grossman climbed down and watched the bus tear off again, he wished he had waited at least until after breakfast before taking off on his journey. Or had not been so stubborn about accepting a few cans of food before taking off; even a lunch of Spam would have tasted good at the moment. The little money Max had given him—which would have been more if Max had not been so Jew-stingy—he had to save for more desperate times. He crossed the road and started to wave down the trucks that were passing in a steady stream, churning up dust.

As he stood there he felt a fine sense of freedom, simply for being alone. He had always been a loner, and that had been difficult if not impossible in either the camps or at Felsdorf. He was also pleased he had made the decision to leave, certain it had been the right one, even if arrived at on the spur of the moment.

A truck pulled up, interrupting his thoughts, and the driver motioned him to join him in the cab. He climbed in, slammed the door behind him, shoved the striped cap into his pocket, and leaned back, completely at peace with the world. And Brodsky and Wolf had thought there would be some trouble in getting to Konstanz! Here he was, well on the way to his goal, and it was only eleven in the morning! Maybe he could get the driver to buy him some lunch at a roadside inn; or maybe the driver had rations with him. All these Americans seemed to be loaded with chocolate bars, as if they grew them in their back yards.

His thoughts were interrupted and it was a moment before he realized he was being addressed in Yiddish. In surprise, he looked over at the driver, actually seeing him for the first time. It was an American soldier with two stripes on his arm, a corporal, a smallish man far older than one would expect for that lowly rank. He wore thick glasses and his uniform seemed too big for him. He kept wetting his lips as he spoke.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m trying to get to Konstanz, on the Bodensee,” he said, speaking pure German. There were enough rides to be had on this road without having to cater to the language tastes of some Jew corporal, probably from New York. Wasn’t that where all American Jews lived?

“Konstanz. On the Bodensee,” said the corporal, frowning, and then understood. “Oh,” he said in English. “Constance. On Lake Constance.” He glanced over at Grossman and then brought his attention back to the road, changing to halting German. “I thought—I guess we all have the idea that all camp inmates were Jews. And you look …” He let it fade away. Grossman made no attempt to enlighten the man. “What camps were you in?” the corporal asked, trying to pass over the brief silence.

“Maidanek, Buchenwald, and Belsen.”

The corporal’s eyebrows raised. “Good Lord! You’re lucky to be alive!”

“I suppose.”

“What was it like in the camps?”

The nosy Jew bastard!

“It was like something I don’t feel like talking about.”

“Oh.” The corporal’s face turned fiery red. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have realized … I didn’t mean …” As if in compensation for the faux pas, he said slowly, “Constance … I’m on my way to Freiburg with medical supplies. I’m a medic, you see-well, a dental technician, actually, but they were short of drivers and I said I’d go. I think I go near there, though …”

He pulled from the road, set the brake, and drew a map from the glove compartment, studying it, constantly pushing his glasses into position as they slid down his nose.

“I go through a place called Tuttlingen. Constance is off the road quite a bit, but I guess I could take you at least partway to Constance from Tuttlingen …”

“There’s a good road from Tuttlingen to Singen,” Grossman said.

“Singen … yes …” said the corporal. He put the map away and got the truck back on the road, after which he concentrated on his driving, saying nothing.

A typical Jew, Grossman thought with disgust. All nosy and pushing as long as you let them; all fawning and toadying once you put them in their place. Although it was true that Brodsky wasn’t that way, and to call Wolf fawning was ridiculous. Well, there were exceptions to every rule, and Brodsky and Wolf merely proved it. This little Jew was as standard as they came; he would not only take him where he wanted to go, but he would buy all the meals en route, as well. Grossman would have bet on it.

At Singen the border was only three miles away, at a small village called Thayngen, but Grossman knew the border there would be loaded with guards. According to the stories he had heard at Felsdorf, they constituted half the population of the small town, and the huge dogs they had constituted most of the remaining half. No, Thayngen was not the place to cross any more than Konstanz itself was. Let Wolf and Brodsky think that was his goal; let them think what they would. Grossman knew where he was going to cross and had since he had made up his mind so quickly to make his attempt at last. It made him wonder why he had waited so long.

They had lunch at Ehringen, dinner at Stochach—both meals paid for by the diffident corporal almost as if it were a compulsion—and then under Grossman’s direction they took a winding dirt road down to Radolfzell on the Zellersee, only twelve miles from Konstanz. Here Grossman had the Jew corporal turn south; he was giving orders now, no longer asking. They passed through Allenbach, less than four miles from Konstanz, and on the far side of the small town he had the corporal stop the truck and drop him off. He started to give perfunctory thanks and then remembered something. It never hurt to be sure of things. He got back up on the running board and leaned in the window.

“Do you have a tool kit?”

“A tool kit?”

“Yes,” Grossman said impatiently. “Tools. To fix things. To change a tire if you have to.”

“Oh. I—why, yes. Under the seat. Why?”

“Let me see it.”

“I really don’t think—” the corporal started to say, and then sighed. He climbed down, brought out the tool kit, and opened it. Grossman leaned over, studying the tools, and then selected the largest screwdriver in the set as being best suited to his needs. He tucked it into his belt, jumped down, and waved.

“Thanks.” He backed into the darkness, watching the truck make a difficult turn in the narrow road and flee back toward Radolfzell as if pursued by the hounds of hell. Grossman laughed. Typical! I could have taken the truck from him, he thought; I could have told him to drive me over the border somewhere along the line, and the poor fool would undoubtedly have tried it! We were wrong to try and wipe the Jews from the earth; we should have used them for slaves. They would have made excellent slaves.

It was a dark night, with a sliver of a moon trying halfheartedly to peer through the banks of curdled clouds. He realized this was pure luck; when he had made his impulsive decision to try for the border he had not even considered the phase of the moon. Maybe it augured well for his mission; it was time things went right for him. Still, while he had not considered the phase of the moon, the place of his crossing had occurred to him almost instantly. He had spent many a weekend with girls of various standards of morals here on the Zellersee when he had been at the university in Munich. He remembered well the small rowboats that had been rented out to lovers at the dock below Allenbach, boats one could use to row to Reichenau Island in the lake and there enjoy all the privacy a lover could desire. It was a long row, but certainly within his power to make, for he would not only have to reach the island, but would have to row around the tip to the edge facing the Swiss shore.

He calculated it would take three hours to bring him into the proper position on Reichenau. Then possibly another hour of rowing, but after that it meant a swim, since he could not risk the noise of oarlocks near the shore. But he would still have the boat for support. An hour out of Reichenau he would strip, place his clothing in the boat, and paddle behind the boat to Switzerland. It would be a long job, but it would be the sure safe way to get there; the shore from Steckborn to Gottlieben had to be as deserted as any section of the border. Of course he could row down from Allenbach to Stomeyersdorf in the swamp area above Konstanz and cross there; that was only a few hundred yards wide—but that portion of the border would be heavily patrolled.

No; his way was best. The water would be chilly, and his bad arm would be a problem on the long row, but it was the proper method of getting into the country. Then, once inland, over the low hills to Pfyn and on to Frauenfeld. It was an area he knew well, and he was sure he could get by. There were many out-of-the-way farms in the district, and from them he could get less identifiable clothing, and even—with his money—a ride to Zurich by some farmer pleased to be earning ten American dollars. And in Zurich, once the banks opened, everything would be resolved.

He cautioned himself not to dwell on the future so much, but to concentrate on the immediate requirements of the plan. The small dock with the rowboats had been about a mile east of the town; he was sure they would still be there. This part of Germany and the world had been untouched by the war, people still came here for vacations. The boats might be chained, of course, which is why he had required the screwdriver, but no chain was going to stop him at this point. He hitched the screwdriver into a more comfortable position in his belt and started down the road.

Deiter Kessler had never enjoyed the war, even in those heady days when the armies of the Third Reich were sweeping all opposition easily before them. Deiter Kessler was by nature a peaceful man, as many large powerful men are peaceful, and while he had been forced at times to kill, he had never done it with the obvious pleasure of some of his companions. And as the war continued, Deiter Kessler enjoyed it less and less. But when the war was over, he found that peace had dealt him worse blows than the war ever had. For when he returned to Konstanz, whence he had been called to arms, it was to find that his wife had gone off with another man, taking not only their children but the furniture as well. The factory where he had been employed was no longer in existence, a fire having reduced it to hot bricks and a hole in the ground while he had been away. It never occurred to Deiter Kessler to leave the area; it was his home and the only solid recognizable thing in a world rapidly shifting beneath his feet. In order to live, therefore, Kessler was reduced to taking a job guarding the small boat dock near Allenbach.

It was not too bad a job. It required almost no labor and allowed much time for thinking, although few of Deiter Kessler’s thoughts were pleasant. It also paid very little; on his salary it was difficult to find a boardinghouse he could afford. And, of course, the distance from Konstanz made it impossible to pay for daily transportation back and forth. But there was a small boathouse on the dock where oars were normally kept at night, and here Deiter, therefore, had arranged a cot where he could sleep on cool nights. On pleasant evenings, though, he preferred to sleep in one of the boats, lost in its shadows, stretched out on the duckboards with his arm for a pillow, lulled by the pleasing motion of the water. There was an additional advantage of sleeping among the boats; it made it unnecessary to unship and store the oars each night, as well as not having to bring them out again each morning.

The boat in which Deiter Kessler chose to sleep this particular night was chosen because it was the dryest and would remain dry throughout the night, which could not always be said of all the others. As he lay down, Deiter was looking forward to dreaming a dream he often had, of coming home from the war to find his buxom wife there to greet him, kissing him passionately with promise in the kiss, with his son and daughter there, the house all bright and shining, the odor of his wife’s excellent cooking even edging into his dream to make him hungry. It was a nice dream, a good dream, and even though when he woke it was always to feel more depressed than ever, he still looked forward to his recurring dream. For that brief period, at least, he was happy.

This night, though, there was an inexplicable variation in the dream. When he came home from the war it was to find the door of his house locked, and to discover he had no key. He started to shake the door, using his great strength, and the lock sprang open, but there was a chain inside, holding the door closed, and he realized his wife must be home to have put up the chain. She not only was home but he could see her inside, talking to some strange man, laughing, paying no attention to her husband. It made him furious. He started to shove the door against the chain, making it rattle, but to no avail. When at last he stood back to consider some other means of entrance, for some unknown reason the chain continued to rattle.

He shifted slightly on the hard duckboards of the boat and came awake, momentarily relieved it had only been a dream, and that the security of his normal fantasy had not been breached. But some of the fury was still in him. And then he became aware that he was still hearing a chain rattle, softly but insistently. He raised his head slightly, peering over the shadow of the gunwale. Someone was trying to pry the ring loose that held the chain coupling the boats; someone was trying to steal the boats! My God, hadn’t he enough trouble in his life? He couldn’t even have a decent dream without someone interrupting! Now that someone was trying to get him into more trouble by stealing the boats in his charge!

Deiter came to his feet silently, balancing his large frame with practiced ease against the dipping of the boat. He silently unshipped an oar and raised it over his head, determined to give this one a lesson! He started to step to the dock, but the movement threw his boat against the others, making them all bump the dock, and the man turned, startled. In the little light there was, Deiter saw the glint of steel in the man’s hand, and any compunction he might have felt for merely challenging the thief disappeared. With a lunge he brought the oar down as hard as he could.

The man did his best to avoid the blow, but the heavy oar caught him on his shoulder and threw him from the dock. The tool in his hand went flying, disappearing with a slight splash in the lake. There was an almost audible snap as his leg crashed against the edge of one of the boats, and then he was in the water, floundering.

In an instant the anger Deiter Kessler had been feeling changed to compassion. What had he done? The man had been trying to steal the boats, it was true, but was that any reason to try to kill him? Was the crime of theft now to be punished by death? Had he become an animal? The water at the dock was shallow, little more than the draft the boats required; he stepped down into the water and raised the man in his arms.

“Are you all right?”

“My leg—” There was tight pain in the voice.

“Let’s get some light.”

Deiter carried the thin figure in his arms easily, bringing him to the shack, squelching along the dock in his sodden boots. He put the man down as gently as he could, and went inside. He brought out a kerosene lantern and lit it, studying the man on the dock with curiosity. Grossman’s eyes were shut, his breathing ragged. He opened his eyes and then shut them tightly against the glare of the lantern.

“My leg—it’s broken …”

It was evident he was telling the truth; the leg poked out at an odd angle, not disguised by the soaking trouser leg. Deiter tried to think what to do. He had no ability to set the leg himself, and he knew from his wartime training that the man should not be moved unless there were trained people to do it. But there was no hospital in Allenbach; there was not even a doctor, or even a nurse as far as he knew. The closest help was in Konstanz, three or four miles away, and he had no transportation. There was a barrow nearby he could borrow, but he could scarcely haul the man three or four miles in a barrow; he could be dead from shock long before they arrived. And the lone constable on duty in town only had a bicycle—

But the constable did have a telephone!

Grossman was shivering violently, although the evening was warm. Deiter took off his jacket and wrapped it about the injured man, wincing as the other winced, sorry he did not have any schnapps to ward off the shock that was coming. “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll go for help,” and he started off at a gallop.

The small sidewalk cafe on Saarland Strasse gave a view down Konstanz Strasse as well as down Kreutlingen Strasse to the fence that constituted the German-Swiss border, as well as to the two guard positions that allowed passage on the two roads between the countries to be monitored. At that hour of the night there was little traffic, and the occasional truck that came along was thoroughly searched and the driver’s papers well studied. Brodsky had come to the cafe after watching the railroad cars along the tracks on Schiller Strasse undergo a search at the gate he knew would be sufficient to prevent any passage by that route. If Grossman seriously considered crossing into Switzerland from the town of Konstanz, he was obviously wasting his time.

As if in answer to the thought, there was a soft voice behind him.

“Forget it. It’s impossible—”

Max turned in surprise; it was the waiter who had served him his coffee, his only concession to his growing hunger and to the responsibility he felt for the funds he carried.

“Were you talking to me?”

The waiter chose to answer in another fashion. He was an old man with a stoop and with sad eyes set in a seamed face; his worn shoes had been sliced with a razor blade to give his corns room. His black uniform was shiny with age, but his paper dicky was spotless.

“They come almost every day, lately,” the waiter said. “Before the war they came as tourists, for the lake, for the rest, to cross into Switzerland for the scenery. Now they come like you. They sit and have a coffee, or a Kuchen, or sometimes a schnapps to build up their courage or to hide their disappointment, I suppose. But mostly they just sit here awhile, staring up the street to the fence; and then they mostly go away and forget it. Like you should go away and forget it. Pardon me if I speak out of turn, but crossing into Switzerland is not easy.”

“You say, mostly they go away,” Max said, interested. “Do some of them try to cross?”

“Not many, but some.” The old man flicked his towel at a fly who merely circled and returned. The old man sighed; the fly seemed to represent the inevitability of his failures. “They try to swim around the end of the fence out in the lake, mostly. Sometimes they drown. Sometimes they get shot. There was one just tonight …”

“There was one tonight?” Max sat more erect. “What happened?”

The old man shrugged. “That one was shot …”

“They killed him?”

The old man looked surprised at this vehemence at a normal event.

“I don’t know if they killed him,” he said slowly, wanting to be as accurate as possible with this huge and menacing man now on his feet and towering over him. “There were shots down by the lake; they must have seen him in the floodlights. I’m pretty sure they hit him, because they came and took him away in an ambulance. I mean, they brought him back to the Konstanz side,” he added, as if to prove that even the ploy of getting shot would not guarantee entrance into the forbidden land.

“Where did they take him?”

“To the Municipal Hospital, I suppose.”

“And where is that?”

The old man shuffled to the doorway and pointed.

“On Leiner Strasse. Up Robert Wagner Strasse three blocks, then left. Of course they might have taken him to the Sisters across the river, but—”

He was speaking to empty space. He sighed and picked up the small coin Max had left for the coffee, tucking it into his change purse and laboriously putting the purse into his pocket. They came and they came, and all they got for their trip was getting shot, or going to jail, or just going back where they came from, disappointed.

The dead man was a stranger, but he was as familiar to Max Brodsky as if they had known each other all their lives. The thin body, the army clothes too large, the sucken cheeks, the hair growing back in patches, the tattoo on the arm that signified a period in Auschwitz-Birkenau on his way here to death beside the Bodensee. Max sighed in pity for the poor soul, and shook his head at the morgue attendant. The morgue attendant pulled the sheet back over the dead face and led Max back to the main corridor of the hospital.

Well, at least it hadn’t been Ben Grossman. It seemed a cruel thought, a denigration of that man who lay in the morgue and the value of his existence, but that was the way of life. He paused to allow a wheeled litter to pass. It was carrying a pale-faced man whose leg had just been set in plaster of Paris; the leg jutted from a wrinkled trouser leg, still damp, that had been neatly cut with surgical scissors just above the knee. The man’s slate-blue eyes flickered open a moment, and then stared in total amazement.

“Max! What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to take you back to Felsdorf,” Brodsky said softly, and walked along beside the litter as the attendant wheeled it toward the emergency entrance, quite as if they had met by appointment. He frowned as he walked. Had they met by appointment? His frown changed to a smile. Coincidence? He didn’t think so.

What had Wolf said about God?