Pursuit (18 page)

“A twenty-mile stroll,” Wolf observed. “Just the thing to work up an appetite before dinner.”

“I don't have to get there early,” Grossman went on, continuing to address Brodsky, ignoring Wolf. “In fact, I don't want to get there until very late. By morning I'll be well inside Switzerland, far from the border.”

“Be sure and get there after the guards knock off for the night,” Wolf suggested. “They work only twenty-four hours a day.”

Brodsky shook his head hopelessly. “Do you have any money?”

“Who has money?”

“I do,” Brodsky said simply, and dug into his pocket. “It's from the Mossad, for our group. You'll need some.”

“Don't give him paper money,” Wolf advised. “It'll only get wet when they throw him into the lake.”

Brodsky paid no attention. He peeled off several notes and thrust them at Grossman. They were American ten-dollar bills, money accepted in any country in those confused times. Grossman didn't refuse; he folded them into a small wad and slipped them into his watch pocket. He had suspected the Mossad might have given Brodsky some cash for the intended trip; it was like the Jew not to mention it before.

“Thanks,” he said dryly.

Brodsky looked at him, puzzled by the tone. Wolf raised his eyebrows, his one good eye glancing up at the ceiling in supplication and then down again. “Better get some sleep, all of us,” Brodsky said. “What time are you leaving in the morning?”

“As soon as it's light,” Grossman said, and started to strip off his trousers. Max flipped off the light and started to undress in the dark. He slid into bed and glanced across the darkened room.

“Good night, Ben.”

“Good night.”

But Wolf had the last word.

“Good night, all,” he said, “and Grossman, I hope you know how to swim!”

Dawn had just started to lighten the eastern sky when Grossman rolled over, considered the now visible windowpane, and then silently swung his feet to the floor. He winced slightly at the dampness of the bare wood and quickly pulled on his socks. His trousers followed, then the British fatigue blouse, then the heavy shoes “organized” at Belsen, and finally the little striped cap. He came to his feet, staring down at the sleeping men. They were Jews it was true, but actually not as bad as most Jews. He had spent a full year with them; Brodsky had been helpful during that time. In a way he would miss seeing him each day; in a way he would even miss Wolf's sardonic humor, biting as it could be at times. But they were now as much of the past as Maidanek and Mittendorf, or Buchenwald and Schlossberg, or Bergen-Belsen and the dead Kapo, Soli Yaganzys. The future was ahead, when he was inside Switzerland. It was time to go.

He walked as quietly as he could to the door, opening it silently, and tiptoed down the steps to the ground floor. There was a faint click as the outside door of the barracks closed behind him. Across the room Max Brodsky sat up and climbed silently from his bed. In the half-light Wolf pushed himself up on one elbow.

“What are you getting up for?”

Brodsky looked sheepish. “I can't let him go alone …”

Wolf stared in disbelief. “You're going to
Switzerland?
”

“No, no! I'll be back. It's just—well, he may need help in getting across the border …”

Wolf snorted.

“For this he'll need more than the great Max Brodsky. He'll need the American Seventh Army, plus a declaration of war against the Swiss. You think they really need people like Grossman? The man's a nut. He's a menace. Let him go. Let the Swiss worry about him.”

“He's my friend,” Brodsky said quietly. “He's also neither as strong as he thinks he is, nor as self-sufficient. He didn't think this out; he made up his mind at the spur of the moment. He'll need help.” He shrugged. “What's it cost to help a friend?”

“Let's hope it doesn't cost you getting to Palestine,” Wolf said somberly. “Or your life.” He didn't sound like the usual sardonic Wolf; he was deadly serious. “Max, let him go. I mean it. Grossman's a strange person. I don't think I like him.”

“You don't understand him.”

“I don't understand alligators, either, but I don't chase them. I think maybe I do understand Grossman and you don't,” Wolf said. “He's the German kind of German Jew.”

Max was pulling on his trousers, buttoning them.

“Now I don't understand you. What kind of a German Jew are you?”

“A different kind,” Wolf said quietly. “Grossman's a German first, then—maybe—a Jew.”

Brodsky smiled. “I thought Hitler removed that distinction.”

Wolf shook his head; he was deadly serious.

“Max, you don't understand. Some of the German Jews, I'm ashamed to say, mostly from the north, from Hamburg, from Berlin, from Prussia—they always wanted to prove they were more German than the Kaiser. Yiddish was a language they deplored; Russian Jews were all Litvaks even if they came from Odessa; Zionism was a dirty word. It meant there was a country somewhere, a certain place on earth, that had a greater claim on the Jews than Germany did, and those flag-waving patriots couldn't explain that. And since they couldn't explain it, they obviously couldn't accept it.” He shrugged. “I've known more than one German Jew who bragged about his saber cut from Heidelberg, can you imagine?”

“In Poland,” Max said, putting on his blouse and buttoning it, “we thought all German Jews were like that.”

“No,” Wolf said seriously, “not all. Oh, there were Jews in Germany who had no real objection to Hitler when he first came along. They even thought he was going to be good for Germany—until he started to kill them personally, of course. He had told them exactly what he planned to do in
Mein Kampf
, when it was first published back in 1925, but I guess they thought he was just using poetic license. Even after
Kristallnacht
in November of '38, when the synagogues went up in flames, when all the Jewish shops were demolished and twenty thousand Jews were dragged from their beds and beaten in the streets and then put in prison—even then these Jews, these superpatriots, these extra-German Germans, claimed that it wasn't Hitler's fault. It was the fault of his subordinates. Or, even if Hitler knew about it and condoned it, it was a temporary aberration on his part that would pass. With castor oil, maybe, it would pass.” His voice was bitter. “After all, how could Germany exist without its Jews? Its liberated, educated Jews? Its scientific, cultured Jews? Its rich and comfortable—and German—Jews?”

Max suddenly thought he understood.

“You were a Communist …”

“That was the charge when they beat me up and threw me into Dachau back in 1936,” Wolf said quietly. “I was one of the founding fathers of that camp, they owe me a medal. Was I a Communist? No. What I was, was the secretary of our union. What I wasn't was a rich, influential Jew. I was a cook in a cheap restaurant in a working-class neighborhood in Munich. Not that it helped the rich, influential Jews very much; the ones who stuck around waiting for Hitler to change, ended up going up a chimney, someplace. Me, I'm still alive at least. And if I can't get a job as a cook in Palestine, I can always get a job in a side show of a circus with my face.”

“In Palestine you can cook, farm, do what you want.” Max was tying his shoe laces.

“Max,” Wolf said in desperation, trying to continue the conversation in order to delay Brodsky's departure, “before the camps, before Dachau and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, I don't suppose I was much of a Jew. I don't know how much of a Jew I am today, certainly not a religious Jew, if believing in your kind of God is necessary. But I know that Germany is not for any Jew. I know that Germany is not for me. But Grossman—Germany is for him.” He looked at Brodsky in despair as the large man walked to the door. “Max, don't go. Believe me, Grossman isn't worth it.”

Brodsky paused and looked back.

“Every Jew is worth it,” he said quietly. “There aren't all that many of us left.”

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?