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,
“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
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.”
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, Fraulein 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,
“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 Fraulein 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,
“And now,” the Frau Doktor cried out and clapped her hands, “there is creme 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!”
“… 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 Tubingen, 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 epee. 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 Tubingen, 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-
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
This added up to only one thing, Szara knew, and the rather dubious assignment telegram from Nezhenko began to make sense. What he’d written off as a manifestation of some new, hopelessly convoluted political line being pursued in Moscow now told another story. The moment of revelation would come, he was virtually certain,
