Nothing So Strange (27 page)

I couldn’t help smiling. “My poor father! If he knew that he’d have to add
Framm to the list of all the other people who disappointed him…. Just for
curiosity, have you any idea what my father
did
pay?”

“My whole salary.”

“Good God! So all the time—”

“Yes, all the time I was in Vienna I was costing Framm nothing.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. But I was thinking also that if the
arrangement was for my father to pay your salary, then my father was a bit
responsible for you being underpaid.”

“Or else generous for offering to pay for me at all.”

“Perhaps…. It’s odd, though, how much easier it is to forgive Framm for
exploiting you totally than to excuse my father for not putting up a few
extra dollars. Particularly as….”

I stopped in time. It had been on my tongue to say: “Particularly as he
had a reason to get you out of the way.”

“Go on,” Brad said.

“Particularly as he’s so rich,” I answered. But perhaps it sounded as
improvised as it was.

“Shall we start going down?” he asked, and we tramped a mile or more
before he spoke again.

We had cached a thermos of coffee at the old picnic place and it made a
pleasant excuse for another halt. But we were tired now, exhausted in nerves
and bones; the feeling came on suddenly while we were lying on the grass. We
smoked cigarette after cigarette and, as the afternoon progressed, rolled
over in deep lassitude to stay in the sun.

“What exactly did you do in Berlin?” I asked, lazily. “Routine work for
Framm, you said. But wasn’t there anything you did on your own?”

“Not so much. Now he knew I was good and he was paying me himself he kept
me busy most of the time. But of course his work and mine weren’t so far
apart. Electromagnetism links up with the entire field of quantum
mathematics.”

“But didn’t you have any personal life? Any fun? Didn’t you go
anywhere?”

“Berlin wasn’t a gay city in those days.”

“But there must have been a few places—theaters, movies….”

“Yes, I went to a few.”

“Didn’t you visit anybody’s home? Of course I remember what you were like
in London….”

“That was different. I was shy then. I wasn’t shy in Berlin. But I didn’t
go anywhere—except once to a party Framm gave.”

“Oh? At his house?”

“Yes. I wanted to see what it was like. He had a big villa in
Charlottenburg. His wife was all right—quite pleasant—the
gracious hostess— probably what we should call in America a socialite.
But domestic also. The place was swarming with little Framms. Kids of all
ages from two to twelve. It was a big party—professors and professors’
wives, and the kind of half- professors they call
Privatdozenten
. All
very Nazi, of course. And nobody packed the kids off to bed, as they should
have, and the more they romped and misbehaved the more Framm seemed to enjoy
it.”

“Just one happy family.”

“Maybe … if you can work that in with the fact that Framm was notorious
for his affairs with other women. I’d known that in Vienna, but I didn’t meet
his family there, so it hadn’t looked like such a paradox. To see him playing
silly games with those kids, who obviously adored him, when all the time one
knew what a swine he was….”

“Did you ever visit his house again?”

“No, I’d had enough. Perhaps he’d had enough too—I wasn’t asked. But
he’d introduced me very charmingly to everybody. Of course they knew what had
happened in Vienna—who I was, and about Pauli. I was his American
specialty— the young mathematician for whom the privilege of working
with Hugo Framm outweighed all personal and private complications…. Or
no—perhaps that’s going too far. I don’t know what was in his mind
about me. He had an air of showing me off as a novelty, but then I
was
a novelty. Not many Americans studied in Germany after the Nazis came to
power.”

“Of course they must have thought you were sympathetic.”

“Sure. I wanted them to think so. It was part of my plan…. You’d better
let me tell you the whole story consecutively….”

The Technische Institut was outside Berlin, a functional
edifice,
deliberately unacademic in style; different branches of science were housed
floor above floor, and as in London, Physics was at the top, not from any
symbolic recognition of its importance but for the opposite reason that more
favored sciences chose the more accessible space. Brad, however, did not mind
that. To ascend by the slow elevator through the sounds and smells of so much
practical experimentation in other fields, most of it geared for war, and to
reach finally the quietude of his own room under the roof gave him a feeling
that he was in, but not of, the hive.

He soon realized that it was a political as well as a scientific hive.
Within the aggressively Nazi framework of staff and student bodies there were
continual interdepartmental struggles—for government appropriations,
extra personnel, and that continuance of political favor on which very
existence depended. Framm spent at least half his time and energies on these
exhausting battles, and usually he won them. He was utterly unscrupulous, a
wily tactician, a dangerous enemy and a false friend; but Brad had to admit
that, so far as dealing with the higher authorities was concerned, these
attributes were necessities of survival. It was when they showed in his
treatment of subordinates that Brad hated him with a pure intensity that
nourished his own personal decision.

He had wondered at first how his co-workers would accept him into their
midst, but he found he had so little contact with them, professional or
personal, that problems of behavior rarely arose on either side. He had been
at the Technische Institut for weeks before he exchanged more than a
good-morning with anyone except Framm and Framm’s secretary.

Then for some reason this girl gave up her job and another arrived one
morning in her place. She was friendly, and since Framm happened to be away
most of her first day, she used her conversation on Brad, who would not have
encouraged her but for a curious circumstance which he soon
discovered—that the girl knew what had happened in Vienna, but did not
yet connect Brad with it. And she was most anxious to chat about her new
employer, for whom she had already conceived the ardent admiration that women
so readily felt for Framm. Wasn’t he wonderful? Such a brilliant mind … and
his eyes—they seemed to bore through you. And so pale—perhaps he
didn’t have good health. She had heard he nearly died after that madwoman
attacked him in Vienna.

Brad thought this as good a method of exploration as he was likely to
find. He said “yes” in answer, and added a few details to whet her eagerness
both to give and to take. Presently she said: “Of course you know what was
really behind it all?”

So the accusations Pauli had made against Framm were common gossip, Brad
reflected; he wondered how that would help or hinder the accomplishment of
his purpose. He said: “No? What was it?”

Then she said something that so utterly shocked and amazed him that even
the girl, who had expected to create a small sensation, was surprised at the
larger size of it.

What she said was this: that Pauli had been Framm’s mistress and that when
the Nazi movement in Austria began to flourish, Framm got rid of her because
she was a quarter Jew.

Brad had known this latter fact, which had meant nothing to him, but the
suggestion of her relationship with Framm was shattering, even though he was
aware that the girl might only be repeating untrue gossip. Nor did he know
quite what it shattered. Not his faith in Pauli; nor his hatred of Framm,
which in many ways it accentuated. Eventually he decided it must be something
inside himself that had nothing to do with either.

Later in the same day the girl came to him, full of apologies and
embarrassments; doubtless during the interval somebody had told her who
Framm’s assistant was. He patted her arm and said it didn’t matter, it hadn’t
been her fault; but they talked no more on any subsequent occasion, and soon
Framm’s temper and temperament made her quit as had her predecessor.

Brad found that coming to terms with the new idea, true or not, put Framm
in perspective, made the focus of his own observation almost fascinatingly
sharper, so that he accumulated data with less impatience. When he saw
Framm’s ruthlessness in trampling opposition he felt more certain than ever
that the man had been responsible for Pauli’s death, yet he was also willing
to wait longer till he discovered some final clinching evidence. For this
reason he welcomed and even relished every fresh display of Framm’s malice;
each instance added a fragment to the mosaic of indictment. There was a
clever young biologist who had criticized some administrative scheme that
Framm was trying to put over—sound criticism, since afterwards Framm
changed his scheme accordingly. But he could not forgive the instigator, and
had him hounded from a minor university post on a racial count. Not that he
believed in the prevalent nonsense about Aryanism, but he found the nonsense
useful. If one of his subordinates were part Jewish, a good scientist, and
also subservient to him personally, he would protect him, but if he weren’t
good or showed any sign of independence, then the racial angle provided a
weapon. The way he used it against the biologist was typically improvised; he
spread the story that the man was a Jew when actually he wasn’t. In all such
maneuvers Framm had no conscience, no hesitation, and no pity. He despised
the mob and the Nazi mob as much as any other, but he was willing to pay it
all the necessary kinds of lip service.

Sometimes, overhearing in Framm’s office half of a telephone talk that
revealed either the lip service or the ruthlessness, Brad would be unable to
keep back a look that told plainly enough what he thought; and Framm would
catch the look, interpret it correctly, yet seem by no means displeased.
Gradually Brad came to realize that these interpretations did not put to
hazard a relationship which, on the surface, he still wished others to take
for one of close friendship; on the contrary, Framm at times seemed to derive
perverse enjoyment from the situation. And perhaps because of this, and also
because Brad was an American, Framm was less guarded in what he said in front
of him. He agreed that the division of science into good Germanic and bad
Jewish was sheerly idiotic; he had admitted this, freely and cynically, when
Brad had argued the cause of the biologist. And when he saw the look in
Brad’s eyes, he said: “You’ll probably kill me one of these days, Bradley,
but I know you won’t peach on me.”

In this fantastic way he trusted Brad, and no less when Brad’s hostility
became outspoken. He too became then more outspoken; he began to make Brad an
audience whenever he had trouble with the authorities or with his rival
department heads. He would rehearse an argument, or conduct a post-mortem on
one; he would unleash his wits in dangerous territory after carefully making
sure that the doors were closed and that his secretary was at lunch. He was
capable of referring to Hitler as “that inspired
Quatschkopf
into
whose hands God has entrusted the destiny of the world.” He confided in Brad
all the details of his continuous and frustrating feuds with the Nazi
higher-ups, he would read over his briefs in defense of theoretical work; and
then, less tactfully, he would let loose a devastating blast against the
intelligence of certain persons in authority. Nor could anyone be much more
devastating than Framm when he was in vitriolic form. His voice and gestures
were of such excellent acting quality that Brad once asked why he wasted them
on a single hearer. Framm replied: “They are not wasted—they are
indulged in.”

As for the work, that too progressed so well that it reached many an
abstract discussion point. Framm would enter Brad’s laboratory after some
tigerish outside struggle in which he had bested an opponent, placated a
superior, or sacrificed an underling; and for very relief he would launch
into an expounding of his own scientific philosophy—a synthesis of the
practical and theoretical in which, at the higher levels, there was no
necessary basis of deduction from observed facts, but the mere waving of
theory, like antennae, to set a course for later experimentation and possible
discovery. The mathematician, he was fond of saying, could construct a field
theory for the unknowable as well as the unknown; and he was also fond of a
quotation from (of all persons) G.K. Chesterton to the effect that “the
difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to
get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the
heavens into his head.” Good, Framm commented, except that there was no
fundamental difference between the two behaviors, and he would scribble some
half-impish equation on the blackboard to illustrate.

Brad’s habit was to do his own experimental work mostly in the mornings;
but later in the day, when he had his graphs and computations to assemble, he
would move into a world of pure symbol-expression; and sometimes then a
curious trancelike ecstasy would take possession of him, an ecstasy that
Framm’s hand on his shoulder did not disturb.

What
was
disturbing, whenever he was outside his own workroom, was
the whole bludgeoning atmosphere of Nazi domination during that last year
before the outbreak of war. He was in Berlin during the period after Munich,
and on a March day in 1939 he heard Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech over
Framm’s special radio. When the storm troopers marched into Prague and Memel,
Framm’s exultation had been unbounded. Brad realized that beneath the skin of
derision which was no more than a privately intellectual arrogance, Framm was
a perfect Nazi. That
Quatschkopf,
as he put it, had been inspired
again. Presently there would be moves on Danzig, then Poland. The European
democracies would not fight, because they had no fight left in them. And as
for America, Framm added contemptuously….