Dark Star (10 page)

Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped to create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets—workers' councils— ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szara and the rest it didn't matter. He'd put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years—until 1929, when Stalin finally took over—he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.

It could not last. Who
were
these people, these Poles and Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians, these people with little beards and eyeglasses who spoke French down their big noses and read books? asked Stalin. And all the little Stalins answered,
We were wondering that very thing, only nobody wanted to say it out loud.

The steady rain beat down on Berlin; somewhere in the house the landlady's radio played German opera, the curtains hung limp by the window and smelled of the dead air in a disused attic room. Szara put on his belted raincoat and walked through the wet streets until he found a telephone box. He called Dr. Julius Baumann and managed to get himself invited to dinner. Baumann sounded suspicious and distant, but Nezhenko's telegram had been specific: the information was wanted by 25 November. There was no Soviet press bureau in Berlin, he'd have to file through the press office at the embassy, and 25 November was the next day. So he'd given Baumann a bit of a push—sometimes finesse was a luxury.

He walked slowly back to the tall house and spent the afternoon
with the Okhrana,
DUBOK,
the Caspian Oil Company, and thirty-year-old
treffs
in the back streets of Tbilisi, Baku, and Batum. They wanted him to be an intelligence officer and so he was. Fearless, heroic, jaw set with determination, he read reports for five hours in an anonymous room while the rain drummed down and he never once dozed off.

The Villa Baumann stood behind a high wall at the edge of the western suburbs, in a neighborhood where gardeners pruned the shrubbery to sheer walls and flat tabletops and architects dazzled their clients with turrets and gables and gingerbread that made mansions seem colossal dollhouses. A yank at the rope of a ship's bell by the gate produced a servant, a stubby man with immense red hands and sloping shoulders who wore an emerald green velvet smoking jacket. Mumbling in a dialect Szara could barely understand, he led the way down a path that skirted the Villa Baumann and ended at a servant's cottage at the rear of the property, then tramped off, leaving Szara to knock at the door.

“I take it Manfred showed you the way,” Baumann said dryly. “Of course this used to be his”—the cottage was small and plain, quite pleasant for a servant—“but the new regime has effected a more, ah, even-handed approach to domicile, who shall live where.”

Baumann was tall and spare, with thin, colorless lips and the face, ascetic, humorless, of a medieval prince or monastic scholar. His skin was white, as though wind or sun had never touched it. Perhaps fifty, he was hairless from forehead to crown, which drew attention to his eyes, cold and green, the eyes of a man who saw what others did not, yet did not choose to say what he saw. Whatever it was, however, faintly displeased him, that much he showed. To Szara, German Jew meant mostly German, a position of significant hauteur in the Central European scheme of things, a culture wherein precise courtesies, intellectual sophistication, and quiet wealth all blended to create a great distance from Russian Jews and, it was never exactly expressed, most Christians.

Yet Szara liked him. Even as the object of that jellyfish stare down a long, fine, princely nose—
who are you?—
even so.

They were four for dinner: Herr Doktor and Frau Baumann, a young woman introduced as Fräulein Haecht, and Szara. They ate in the kitchen—there was no dining room—at a rickety table covered by a dazzling white damask cloth embroidered with blue and silver thread. The porcelain service showed Indian princes and thick-lipped, gold-earringed princesses boating on a mountain lake, colored tomato red and glossy black with gold filigree on the rims. At one point, the tines of Szara's fork scraped across the scene and Frau Baumann closed her eyes to shut out the sound. She was a busy little pudding of a woman. A princess with a dowry? Szara thought so.

They ate poached salmon fillets and a rice and mushroom mixture in a jellied ring. “My old shop still serves me,” Frau Baumann explained, the unspoken
of course
perfectly audible. “During the hours of closing, you understand, Herr Szara, at the door in the alley. But they still do it. And they do cook the most lovely things and I am enough the domestic to reheat them.”

“A small premium is entailed,” Baumann added. He had a deep, hollow voice that would have been appropriate for the delivery of sermons.

“Naturally,” Frau Baumann admitted, “but our cook …”

“A rare patriot,” said Baumann. “And a memorable exit. One would never have supposed that Hertha was capable of giving a speech.”

“We were so good to her,” said Frau Baumann.

Szara sensed the onset of an emotional flood and rushed to cut it off. “But you are doing so very well, I haven't eaten like this …”

“You are not wrong,” said Baumann quietly. “There are bad moments, too many, and one misses friends. That more than anything. But we, my family, came to Germany over three hundred years ago, before there was even such a thing as Germany, and we have lived here, in good times and bad, ever since. We are German, is what it amounts to, and proud to be. That we proved in peace and war. So,
these people
can make life difficult for us, Jews and others also, but they cannot break our spirit.”

“Just so,” Szara said. Did they believe it? Perhaps Frau Doktor
did. Had they ever seen a spirit broken? “Your decision to stay on is, if I may say it, courageous.”

Baumann laughed by blowing air through his nose, his mouth deformed by irony. “Actually, we haven't the choice. You see before you the Gesellschaft Baumann, declared a strategically necessary enterprise.”

Szara's interest showed. Baumann waved off dinnertime discussion of such matters. “You shall come and see us tomorrow. The grand tour.”

“Thank you,” Szara said. There went filing on time. “The editors at
Pravda
have asked for material that could become a story. Would it be wise for a Jew to have attention called to him in that way? In a Soviet publication? ”

Baumann thought for a moment. “You are frank, Herr Szara, and it is appreciated. Perhaps you'll allow me to postpone my answer until tomorrow.”

Why am I here?
“Of course, I understand perfectly.”

Frau Baumann was breathless. “We must stay, you see, Herr Szara. And our position is difficult enough as it is. One hears frightful things, one sees things, on the street—”

Baumann cut his wife off. “Herr Szara has kindly consented to do as we wish.”

Szara realized why he liked Baumann—he was drawn to bravery.

“Surely, Herr Szara, a little more rice and mushroom ring.”

This from his left, Fräulein Haecht, obviously invited to balance the table. At first, in the little whirlpool of turmoil that surrounds the entry of a guest, her presence had floated by him; a handshake, a polite greeting. Obviously she was nobody to be interested in, a young woman with downcast eyes whose role it was to sit in the fourth chair and offer him rice and mushroom ring. Hair drawn back in a maiden's bun, wearing a horrid sort of blue wool dress with long sleeves—somehow shapeless and stiff at once—with a tiny lace collar tight at the throat, she was the perennial niece or cousin, invisible.

But now he saw that she had eyes, large and soft and brown, liquid, and intense. He knew her inquiring look to be a device,
worked out, practiced at length in front of a dressing table mirror and meant to be the single instant of the evening she would claim for herself.

Said Frau Baumann: “Oh yes, please do.”

He reached for the platter, held delicately in a small hand with bitten nails, set it beside him, and served himself food he didn't want. When he looked up she was gone, back into cover. It was the sort of skin, olive toned, that didn't exactly color, yet he thought he saw a shadow darken above the lace collar.

“… just the other day … the British newspapers … simply cannot continue … friends in Holland.” Frau Baumann was well launched into an emotional appraisal of the German political situation. Meanwhile, Szara thought,
How old are you? Twenty-five?
He couldn't remember her name.

“Mmm!” he said, nodding vigorously at his hostess. How true that was.

“And one does hear such excellent news of Russia, of how it is being built by the workers. War would be such a waste.”

“Mm.” He smiled with enthusiasm. “The workers …”

Finished eating, the Fräulein folded her little hands in her lap and stared at her plate.

“It cannot be permitted to happen, not again,” said the Herr Doktor. “I believe that support for the present regime in the senior civil service and the army is not at all firm,
that man
does not necessarily speak for all of Germany, yet the European press seems blind to the possibility that—”

“And now,” the Frau Doktor cried out and clapped her hands, “there is crème Bavarienne!”

The girl stood up quickly and assisted in clearing the table and making coffee while the Herr Doktor rumbled on. The blue dress descended to midcalf; white ribbed stockings rose to meet it. Szara could see her lace-up shoes had gotten wet in the evening rain.

“The situation in Austria is also difficult, very complex. If not handled with delicacy, there could be instability …”

By a cupboard in the far corner of the kitchen, Frau Baumann laughed theatrically to cover embarrassment. “Why no, my dearest Marta, the willow pattern for our guest!”

Marta.

“… there must be rapprochement and there must be peace. We are neighbors, all of us here, there is no denying it. The Poles, the Czechs, the Serbs, they wish only peace. Can the Western democracies be blind to this? Yet they give in at every opportunity.” He shook his head in sorrow. “Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936, and the French sat behind their Maginot Line and did nothing. Why? We cannot understand it. A single, determined advance by a French company of infantry—that's all it would have taken. Yet it didn't happen. I believe—no, frankly, I know—that our generals were astounded. Hitler told them how it would be, and then it was as he said, and then suddenly they began to believe in miracles.”

“And now this terrible politics must be put aside, Herr Szara,” said Frau Baumann, “for it is time to be naughty.” The Bavarian cream, a velvety mocha pond quivering in a soup plate, appeared before him.

As the evening wore on, with cognac served in the cramped parlor, Dr. Julius Baumann became reflective and nostalgic. Recalled his student days at Tübingen, where the Jewish student societies had taken enthusiastically to beer drinking and fencing, in the fashion of the times. “I became a fine swordsman. Can you imagine such a thing, Herr Szara? But we were obsessed with honor, and so we practiced until we could barely stand up, but at least one could then answer an insult by challenging the offender to a match, as all the other students did. I was tall, so our president—he is now in Argentina, living God only knows how—prevailed on me to take up the saber. This I declined. I most certainly did not want one of these!” He drew the traditional saber scar down his cheek. “No, I wore the padded vest and the full mask—not the one that bares the cheek—and practiced the art of the épée. Lunge! Guard. Lunge! Guard. One winter's day I scored two touches on the mighty Kiko Bettendorf himself, who went to the Olympic games the following year! Ach, those were wonderful days.”

Baumann told also of how he'd studied, often from midnight to
dawn, to maintain the family honor and to prepare himself to accept the responsibility that would be passed down to him by his father, who owned the Baumann Ironworks. Graduating with a degree in metallurgical engineering, he'd gone on to convert the family business, once his father retired, to a wire mill. “I believed that German industry had to specialize in order to compete, and so I took up that challenge.”

He had always seen his life in terms of challenge, Szara realized. First at Tübingen, then as an artillery lieutenant fighting on the western front, wounded near Ypres and decorated for bravery, next in the conversion of the Baumann business, then survival during the frightful inflations of the Weimar period—“We paid our workers with potatoes; my chief engineer and I drove trucks to Holland to buy them!”—and now he found himself meeting the challenge of remaining in Germany when so many, 150,000 of the Jewish population of 500,000, had abandoned everything and started all over as immigrants in distant lands. “So many of our friends gone away,” he said sorrowfully. “We are so isolated now.”

Frau Baumann sat attentively silent during the discourse, her smile, in time, becoming a bit frozen—
Julius, my dearest husband, how I love and honor you but how you do go on.

But Szara heard what she did not. He listened with great care and studied every gesture, every tone of voice. And a certain profile emerged, like secret writing when blank paper is treated with chemicals:

A courageous and independent man, a man of position and influence, and a patriot, suddenly finds himself bitterly opposed to his government in a time of political crisis; a man whose business, whatever it really was, has been officially designated
a strategically necessary enterprise,
who now declares himself, to a semiofficial individual of his nation's avowed enemy, to be
so isolated.