The Story of Henri Tod (16 page)

“And I'll take it from you, Leonid.”

“You get half, Felix.”

“We must get Tod,” Ustinov turned to Gouzenko. “We most certainly must. That business Saturday on Aristophe Spender. The gall of it! And leaving word at the bar. They might as well have left calling cards.”

“We nearly got one of them.”

“What good does it do
nearly
to get someone?”

“Good for the morale, sir.”

“Yes, I suppose. Good for the morale. Check with me as soon as you get back from Vienna.”

17

Henri Tod sat on the large fore-and-aft sofa, its back to one of the train's windows, his left forearm lightly slung, his arm wrapped snugly to his side by the dressing that went right around his chest. It was Thursday and nearing seven in the evening. He and Caspar were listening to the little shortwave radio. It featured, in the local news, Ulbricht's speech to the GDR parliament, in which he announced that henceforward the border crossers, the hated
Grenzgänger
, the East Berliners who worked by day in West Berlin, would be required to register with East Berlin authorities and obtain permission to continue working in West Berlin.

The foreign news spoke of an interview Khrushchev had granted to the English ambassador in which Khrushchev had warned pregnantly of the awful dangers of nuclear war. Khrushchev had, meanwhile, publicly announced that the next scheduled phase in Soviet demobilization had been postponed indefinitely, and that he planned to increase the Soviet military budget by one third. Tod switched to the BBC World News, which mentioned the two Khrushchev items, and also that Chancellor Adenauer planned to visit West Berlin in a few days and had made a statement to the effect that the East German government was showing signs of panic because of the thirst of its own people for freedom. The BBC went on to sports events, and Henri turned the radio off. It had been a strenuous passage to the relative serenity they now experienced.

By the time Claudia had got back to Berchtesgaden, well after midnight of that Saturday, the wounded visitor had begun to show signs of mounting fever. He ranted and he sweated and he tossed about on the Führer's ample bed. Caspar was at his side when Claudia entered with a wet towel, stroking his head and occasionally using force to keep Tod from ejecting himself from the bed.

“He's gotten a lot worse, Claudi,” Caspar whispered.

“I have a thermometer, and penicillin, and something Margret gave me to help the stomach. But how will we take his temperature? He will bite the thermometer in two.”

“Let's see if we can get it under his arm. I'll hold him down.” Caspar put his whole weight on Tod's good shoulder. For a moment he lay quiet, but as Claudia was about to insert the little glass cylinder in his armpit, suddenly Tod swung his wounded side over. Quickly she withdrew it.

Caspar said. “We might be able to do it up his backside. But listen, Claudia.” He reached over and took the thermometer from her hand and put it back on the side table.

“What really is the point? We know he has a fever. We have the only medicine he's going to get—the penicillin. Unless we take him to a hospital. And if we take him to a hospital, it may be that we are only curing him for the purpose of getting him shot. So let's forget about the temperature until he has cooled down or—” Caspar no longer looked like a grown boy. “If we cannot save him we cannot save him. You know how to give the injection?”

Claudia nodded.

Together they turned him around. Caspar lowered Tod's shorts, and Claudia inserted the needle. For another hour Tod thrashed about in bed. Caspar and Claudia resolved on a watch system. She went off to the salon to sleep on the settee. Caspar, a book in hand, sat on the edge of the bed, alternately reading and wiping the perspiration off Tod's face. Once he changed the sheets. At four in the morning, he woke Claudia.

It had been so for nearly twenty-four hours. Late on Sunday they succeeded in taking his temperature. It was 105 degrees, and he was delirious. They resolved that on the Monday, Caspar would take sick leave; on the Tuesday, Claudia would do so. Their parents need not know, as they never called to speak to their children at work. They forced themselves to discuss the possibility that the man would die, and even focused on the problems of removing his corpse. It was a long two days.

When on Tuesday afternoon Caspar returned to Berchtesgaden, he found Claudia beaming. “Oh, Caspar, he's come out of it! His temperature is down to 101! And he is talking. Just a little. And he took some soup. His eyes are very sad, and he looks afraid.”

“Did you ask him what the police want him for, Claudi?”

“Oh no, I wouldn't do that. Come and speak to him.”

She took Caspar by the hand down the corridor, past the staff quarters, to the bedroom. Caspar entered it. Henri Tod was lying in bed, his eyes intelligent for the first time since he had fainted.

Henri began to speak. “I wish to … thank—”

Caspar interrupted him. Tod was speaking with difficulty. “Be quiet, friend; it is not right for you to make an effort. Not yet. You are getting better. Just tell us. What shall we call you? What is your name?”

For a moment Henri Tod's eyes narrowed suspiciously. But then, his head sliding back on the pillow, he whispered, “My name is Heinrich. I am pleased to meet you.” With that effort, he closed his eyes, and was asleep.

On Wednesday morning Henri was talking, his temperature down to 100, and he assured them that he could easily look after his needs while they went off to work. They left a thermos of hot soup for him at his bedside, and reminded him to take the extra pills Margret had given Claudia. When they returned in the late afternoon Tod was asleep, but it was a serene sleep from which he woke instantly, announcing that that night he wished to join them at dinner. Claudia insisted on taking his temperature again, and when she read it she did not restrain her yelp of joy. It was very nearly normal.

They helped him from his bed, and for the first time in four days Henri Tod ate, however lightly. He did not have the strength to participate energetically in the conversation. He listened to them, and listened to the radio, and sometimes he smiled. He said he was feeling at once very weak and very much better. Caspar offered to massage him and he submitted, stretched out on the settee. Claudia volunteered to catch him up on the news developments of the past few days, and attempted to do so from memory. It was while she was reciting the litany that it came to her suddenly, with unmistakable clarity, that the young man in Berchtesgaden with them was Henri Tod. The most wanted man in East Germany; undisputed leader of the most fervent movement of mostly young Germans, East Germans and West Germans, in the recent history of the divided country. This was the man the paper and the radio had said was mysteriously missing, and might perhaps be hiding out in East Berlin.… She looked at Caspar, who was massaging as close as he could come to the back of Henri Tod's shoulder without causing pain. He looked up at her, acknowledging her signal. She pointed to the bedroom.

“I'll be right back, Heinrich. Getting some oil that will help.”

“What is it, Claudi?” Caspar whispered, the door to the bedroom closed.

“Caspar,” she hissed, muting her excitement. “Do you know who Heinrich is? He is Henri Tod.”

Caspar's eyes widened. “How do you know?”

“I know.”

During the next three or four days, Henri Tod was half the time asleep, half the time talking and lounging with Caspar and Claudia. From five on Friday through the weekend, they were both there uninterruptedly. It was some time during the long conversation on Saturday night that he perceived that his identity was known. By then the public flurry was considerable, and reading between the lines it was clear from radio announcements that the East German authorities suspected that Tod might well be hidden in East Berlin, that it was he who had been wounded the preceding Saturday. The possibility was even hinted at that Henri Tod had been killed. In anticipation of any move to make him a martyr and to keep alive the Bruderschaft in his memory, much radio time was given over to disparagement of Henri Tod, his background, his work, his associations, his methods. To these screeds the three would listen, mostly in silence. Occasionally Henri would say, after the broadcast was terminated, that he really felt obliged to tell them the truth about this Tod person and these allegations. But after two or three days of intensifying horror stories about what he had done, Claudia intervened. “Henri”—as they now called him—“you don't have to explain who it is that you are. We both know you now.”

And they did know him, as few others did. Henri Tod recalled one night that he had never experienced sickness before. Much had happened to him, in a relatively young life, but never before had he spent a single day in bed. “I even still have my tonsils and appendix.” The unexpected leisure, the sense of security in a little womb surrounded by hostile forces, caused him to be preternaturally relaxed, and even talkative, and so he recounted his thoughts, spoke about the past, about the years in the coal mines.

“Why did you go to the mines, Henri?” Caspar wanted to know.

He hesitated, but only briefly. “I went because I needed total distraction when I learned that my sister had been killed.” He told them then that he had not permitted himself to think about his past, thinking only about what was expected of him as a physical laborer, and at night pursuing the thought of philosophers. “When you wrestle with Hegel you are too exhausted to concern yourself with your own thoughts. However,” Henri said, sitting relaxed in the candlelight, on one of the armchairs opposite Caspar and Claudia on Hitler's side of the salon, “I became so much absorbed that I decided to go to Cambridge and pursue my studies under supervision. It was there that philosophy brought me to the conclusion that I needed to be politically active. I abhorred politics, but then—I remember the day, it was an afternoon, coming out of the Trinity College library, and I saw this young girl with books in her hand and two little pigtails coming into the library from the warm, moist freshness of spring, and I nearly froze, because for one moment I thought I was looking at Clementa grown up. It was an illusion, but I thought then that, of course, there's a sense in which Clementa
is
alive. Because there are other girls who are alive, of her age, perhaps even of a degree of her sweetness. And they are victims now, and will be victims tomorrow, of the identical passions that killed Clementa. I recognized then that there was nothing about Nazism in any sense distinctive. That its peculiar obsessions, the racism especially, were really only crotchets of the central disease—and that, of course, is the passion to govern others and to regulate their lives. That's when I decided I'd have to go back to Germany, the country that caused so much suffering, to try—
in
Germany—to help people to see that Nazism continues, only under another name.”

Claudia was surprised to find that the effect of Henri on Caspar was to wake in him, for the first time since they had been together, something like a sustained interest in the political situation. Henri of course was startled to learn that his host at Berchtesgaden was not only the nephew of Henri's principal enemy, Walter Ulbricht, but that Caspar worked in such close quarters with Walter Ulbricht. There was an evening during which Henri yearned to ask whether Caspar would go so far as to cooperate with the Bruderschaft. The same evening during which Caspar, yearning to do so, wondered whether it would be inopportune for him to proffer his services to the Bruderschaft. It was that same evening that Claudia told her story, and the bond that annealed the three took shape, so that by Sunday night they recognized that even if the words they had spoken had not been spoken, they were joined together in a common enterprise of which Henri Tod was the leader.

From that moment on, until the following Thursday when Henri Tod left, the time they spent together was, for Claudia and Caspar especially, a time of exhilarating moral excitement. They had now an entirely engrossing vocation. Henri felt their excitement and shared it. Every day they would listen to the news and comment on it, and discuss plans and contingency arrangements and means by which those who needed help could be helped. Henri warned that they must, soon, come to West Berlin to live, that they could not count on living forever at Berchtesgaden.

“Couldn't you arrange to hijack this car into the West for us, Henri?” Claudia leaned over to pick up Henri's empty plate. “You have the reputation of being able to do everything!”

Henri laughed. “If ever things go finally right in Germany,” he said, contriving a synthetic solemnity in his voice, “I will build you a private railroad car. Like this one, if you wish. But not
this
one. This one will be exhibited in a museum. On either side of it, we will have displays of … the railroad cars that traveled to Auschwitz and Belsen and Ravensbrück—cars the owner of this railroad car had built when he was not preoccupied with building himself a private railroad car.” Henri then looked up, and smiled.

“On the other hand, if ever it could be said that something has been exorcised, it could be said about Berchtesgaden that you two have rid it of its evil spirit.”

“How was it today, Caspar?” Henri asked.

Caspar was at the other side of the polished table, wearing an apron. While listening to the radio, he had been helping Claudia with the potatoes. The smell of the pea soup in the galley aft, near the staff quarters, permeated the snug and luxurious drawing room.

“Pretty frantic,” Caspar said, slicing the potatoes. “Uncle Walter had in three of the top people to rehearse how to clamp down. The idea is to start by chopping off only ten percent of the work permits, then begin turning the screws. They figure that the fuss generated by ten percent will be containable, and they can decide how far and how fast to go from there, depending on the level of public resentment.”