In This Hospitable Land (4 page)

“Yes, yes,” Pinkus replied halfheartedly, removing a snappy red handkerchief from the breast pocket of his gray herringbone suit jacket and dabbing at the droplets of sweat appearing on his brow. “I understand. But I have faith that life in Brussels will not prove as difficult as I know you expect. You plan to leave, but where would a man as set in his ways as I am go? And if everyone readied themselves to flee like you, where would Belgium be? What would happen to our dear university? What about our responsibilities?”

“As long as there is a free Belgium and a Free University,” André informed his superior, “this is where you will find me. But once freedom is gone I shall be gone too. With my family.”

“I spoke to the rector,” Pinkus said, blinking rapidly, his watery blue eyes magnified disturbingly by his pince-nez. “Were I you I would assume the university will remain in session until further notice.”

“What about my students?” André asked, resuming his polite tone. “It would be a kindness to allow them to return to their families.”

“As you see fit, professor,” Pinkus said neutrally, turning back to his work.

André might have felt offended but understood there were far larger forces affecting Alexandre Pinkus than himself.

Dismissing his class, André told them he expected to see them back as usual the next day. Then he exchanged his lab coat for his suit jacket and also left the university.

The streets were more chaotic than before. Initially stunned, the populace was now panicked. André wasn’t, yet he decided to return to Le Coq even though he usually didn’t until after classes Saturday. But this was no ordinary day. He had no idea whether the trains were running but was determined to try to catch one.

Hurrying to the streetcar stop, clambering aboard the arriving tram and struggling toward one of the last open seats, André realized he had forgotten to phone his family. Nothing he could do about that now. Besides, the only way his family would be fully reassured of his well-being would be to see for themselves that he was safe.

Involuntarily he recalled the harsh if well-intended words of an old family friend who had fled for America in September, when the Sauverins had moved to Le Coq: “Don’t kid yourself, André. The Belgian constitution forbids government archives from hinting at your ‘historical affiliation,’ but the Nazis will still be able to do their dirty work. It’s your neighbors you must worry about. They might prove deadly when the Brownshirts come with questions and demands. You believe they respect and even love you. Maybe that’s so. But people say and do terrible things if they believe betraying others will keep them safe.”

Heading toward the Gare du Midi the crowded streetcar passed through the city’s heart, where André was astounded to see a steady stream of refugees from the east, identifiable by the possessions on their backs. How had these unfortunates arrived in the capital so soon after the attack? How quickly might the Brussels André knew fade away as if a dream? Would Saint-Michel protect Brussels against the Nazi devil and his bombs? Or would the Grand Place be reduced to rubble as had happened before? And would this be the end of Mannekin Pis? If only that fine famed infant could urinate once more, putting out the flames threatening to engulf the world.

At the ever-impressive train terminal André felt himself pulled into the great swirling crowd and the turmoil of a rapidly changing situation. Hundreds of men and women bustled about frantically, none really knowing what was going on. Even government officials seemed uncertain what was happening, as overwhelmed as everyone else by the sudden German onslaught.

Some trains were still running. André battled the crowds, trying to see if his regular train to the towns along the North Sea was listed on the big board of arrivals and departures. His seaward train confirmed, André struggled out onto the crowded platform past excited newsboys waving their newspapers overhead with the single headline, WAR!

The steam engine puffed smoke insistently from its shiny black stack, the smoke diffusing as it drifted up against the roof of the great shed. The sky shone beyond, sunlight still bright against the darkening shadows of the spires and taller buildings of the central city. The deep green of the train’s four carriages, new after the Great War but rather worn now, and the gold lettering on them, faded but clean, proffered a reassuring familiarity.

Confirming the imminent departure for Ostend, the conductor stood by the last carriage, checking his pocket watch against the large clock above the station waiting room, his whistle at the ready. André clambered up the several steep black steel steps of the third car, pushed open the heavy metal door, and hastened to one of the few available seats of plush green velvet in the center—a window seat, its view obscured by streaks of soot on the outside, dried after trailing down to the sill during a recent rain.

A rush of last-minute passengers crammed in as the conductor blew his departure-signaling blast, followed by a shrill piping from the engine. The car jerked and latecomers stumbled as the power of the steam thrusting into the pressure cylinders drove the train out of the station and across a switch, onto the rail line leading north and west, toward Alost.

Suddenly André remembered that the next day was his sister-in-law’s twenty-eighth birthday. He had meant to get her a present before returning to Le Coq, but perhaps, given the situation, Geneviève would understand and forgive.

Staring out the dirty window André could discern through the darkening sky smoke still rising from distant installations bombed many hours earlier. Was it possible this was still the same impossible day?

At each station as many got on as off, with seated passengers shouting for the newcomers to reveal the latest, though they had nothing better than new rumors to add to the incessant ill-informed chatter about German attacks. André did his best to block out the noise, deep in his own thoughts as he watched automobiles racing along the roads. He peered over at the villages the train passed through, the lights coming on in the cozy-looking homes. It all seemed so normal, a Friday evening like any other. Yet he imagined the fevered, frantic fighting taking place in the eastern part of the country.

The train pulled out of Alost, a stop André hardly noticed, and continued northwest toward Ghent. The land exuded a peaceful serenity, flat and green, with small farmhouses of weathered brick and red-tile roofs built alongside ditches cut into the rich, dark soil to drain water from the fields. Willow trees planted along the water courses, their tops cut off to allow the new growth to spring out from strong brown trunks as the weather warmed, stood thick and mottled with vertical ridges replicating, in nature’s way, the classic columns of the Greeks and Romans. The sturdy, browsing Charleroi cattle seemed so placid.

Then André recalled again the December day of his American odyssey when, on a commuter train departing New York’s Pennsylvania Station for Princeton, New Jersey, he had heard a gentleman ask politely in English as heavily accented as his own, “Is this seat taken?”

Looking up André had been dumbfounded to see that wild gray hair framing the world’s most famous face, Albert Einstein. André had previously run into the epochal figure at one of the famed Solvay conferences and had been profoundly affected watching the great man in action. That conference had brought André into direct contact with virtually all of the most important scientific minds of his intellectually tumultuous time, but none had impressed him as much as Einstein.

And on the train in 1930? Incredibly, Einstein too was there to attend that night’s celebratory dinner at the brand-new Institute for Advanced Study.

On the train in 1940 the Belgian conductor announced Bruges as the next stop. André was very far away, inside his memories.

“Herr Einstein,” André had said humbly, switching to German, which was more comfortable for them both than English. “You wouldn’t remember me but…”

“Of course I remember you! I refuse to forget you!”

“I was at the Solvay conference when you debated Bohr…”

“In October?”

“No, the fifth Solvay. Three years ago.”

Einstein chuckled, his devilish eyes sparkling with joy. “You would have loved it this time. I really gave it to Bohr. One of my thought experiments stumped him, poor man. Which strengthened my faith that the theories of quantum mechanics are far from conclusive…”

“I wish I could have been there.”

“But you had important work to do at the Research Foundation, no?”

“You know I’m a fellow there?”

“You think I would accept an invitation to this dinner without doing background research on guests of honor such as yourself?”

“Guests of honor:” the phrase on Einstein’s lips had made André’s heart thump wildly. He couldn’t believe he deserved to be in such company as Einstein’s, let alone at the head of the table. And to find himself discoursing privately with the most influential scientist since Newton…

Einstein had been neither stuffy nor proud. He had worn his greatness lightly and had seemed genuinely interested in the comparative youth he called “my dear colleague.”

“All these ceremonies and honors,” Einstein had sighed, “are not for me. I always feel like a trained monkey in my tuxedo. Imagine a Jewish pacifist monkey: Hitler’s nightmare!”

Though many details of this decade-old conversation had faded away, the substance remained vivid to André. In addition to discussing the latest scientific advances, André had been anxious to learn firsthand whether Einstein believed Hitler a threat to the world generally and to scientists like Einstein particularly.

“You mean to a Jew?” Einstein had retorted chillingly with an odd, twisted smile on his face. He had taken the Nazi threat seriously from the first, having fled Berlin for Leiden in the Netherlands as soon as he had learned about the Beer Hall Putsch. Subsequently he had returned to Germany only reluctantly, because Max Planck had urged him to and because Berlin was still the center of modern physics.

As the North Sea train entered the station in Bruges, André understood how Einstein had felt. Though he wasn’t yet sure what the next hour, let alone the next day, would bring, it pained him to leave behind his much-loved Brussels, one of the world’s great cities and arguably the best place for the pursuit of chemistry.

Einstein and André had also spoken of their mutual devotion to pacifism. What Einstein had had to say about peaceful resistance to tyrants had been as much an encouragement to André as his scientific accomplishments. Einstein’s thoughts had seemed altogether consonant with the
Peace Testimony
of William Penn, which had had a formidable impact on André, reshaping his personal philosophy. André remained deeply interested in the Friends. But he had yet to meet a Quaker.

After another blast of whistles the train moved slowly out of medieval Bruges, along the Boudewijn Canal, and past low fields surrounded by ditches. Simple single-storied whitewashed farmhouses, their roofs pitched to shed the constant rain, stood forlorn along narrow roads. André could barely make out the carefully kept green pastures blending into the dark of the indistinct horizon as the train jogged a little south and then swung wide to the west, beginning the half-hour leg leading to the end of the line at the coast.