Dark Star

a time and watched the reflections of the neon signs, bending and bowing with the motion of the black water.

To Seneschal, dead because of his, Szara’s, ignorance and inexperience, he could only give a place in his heart. He wondered if he’d ever learn how the Germans had managed it-the discovery of the surveillance, the tracking of the Renault while remaining invisible. Technically, they were simply more adept than he was-only the chance decision to use the Tolbiac Metro had saved his life- thus Seneschal was gone, and he was the one left to stare into the dead waters of the canal and think about life. His sentence was to understand that, and to remember it. To remember also, forever, the driver of the Panhard, a dim shape seen at a distance, barely the form of a man, then the savage kick, a spasm of useless rage. Sudden, without warning; like the blow that had knocked him to the floor of a railway station buffet in Prague. He watched the wavering signs in the water, red and blue, recalled what Seneschal had said about his girlfriend, the one who threw nothing away, the one for whom anything could be made to last a little longer.

8 July.

He took the night train to Lisbon.

Sat up in coach, saving money, anticipating the cost of lovers’ feasts: iced prawns with mayonnaise, the wine called Barca Velha, cool from the cellar of the taberna. Then too, he did not want to sleep. Somewhere out on the ocean, he imagined, Marta Haecht was also awake. Avoiding the ghastly end-of- voyage parties she would be standing at the rail, watching for a landfall glow in the distance, only dimly aware of the Strength through Joy revelers braying Nazi songs in the ship’s ballroom. In her purse she would have the letter, carefully folded, something to laugh about in Portugal.

Nothing so good for a lover as a train ride through the length of the night, the endless click of the rails, the locomotive sometimes visible in the moonlight as it worked its way around a long curve. All night long he summoned memories-Is there a place I may undress? The train pounded through the vineyards of Gascony at dawn. He stood in the alcove at the end of the car, watched the rails glitter as they swept below the coupling, smelled the burnt cinder in the air. It was cold in the foothills of the Pyrenees; the scent of pine resin sharpened as the sun climbed the slopes. Falangist Guardia in leather hats checked the passports at the Hendaye border crossing, then they were in Franco’s Spain all day long. They passed a burned-out tank, a raw lumber gallows standing at the edge of a town.

The haze shimmered in the hills north of Lisbon. The city itself was numb, exhausted in the faded summer light of evening. The carriage horses at the station barely bothered to flick their tails. Szara found a hotel called the Mirador, with Moorish turrets and balconies, and took a room above a courtyard where a fountain gushed rusty water over broken tiles and heavy roses lay sodden in the heat. He put his toothbrush in a glass, then went out for a long walk, eventually buying a pair of linen pants, a thin white shirt, and a panama hat. He changed in the store and a Spanish couple asked directions of him on the way back to the hotel.

He spotted a Russian emigre newspaper at a kiosk, then spent the night reading to the whirr of cicadas and the splashing of the cracked fountain. Stalin the Murderer! Prince Cheyalevsky Presents a Check to the Orphans’ League. Mme Tsoutskaya Opens Milliner’s Shop. At dawn, he forced the ancient shutters closed, but he could not sleep. He had not asked Goldman’s permission to leave Paris- he doubted it would have been granted; Seneschal’s death had everybody on edge-nor had he told Schau-Wehrli where he was going. Nobody knew where he was, and such freedom made it impossible to sleep. He wasn’t seriously missing, not yet. He gave himself a week for that; then they’d panic, start calling the morgue and the hospitals.

Walking back to the hotel, he’d happened on a family of Jews: ashen faces, downcast eyes, dragging what remained of their possessions down the hill toward the docks. From Poland, he suspected. They’d come a long way, and now they were headed-where? South America? Or the United States?

Would she go? Yes, eventually she would. Not at first, not right away-one didn’t just walk away from one’s life. But later, after they’d made love, really made love, then she would go with him. He could see her: head propped on hand, sweat between her breasts, brown eyes liquid and intense; could hear the cicadas, the shutter creaking in the evening breeze.

He had money. Barely enough, but enough. They’d go to the American consulate and request visitors’ visas. Then they would vanish. What else was America but that, the land of the vanished.

At ten the next morning he watched the docking of the liner Hermann Krieg-a Nazi martyr, no doubt. A crowd of German workers streamed down the gangplank, grinning at the brutal white sun they’d come to worship. The men leered at the dark Portuguese women in their black shawls, the wives took a firm grip on their husbands’ arms.

Marta Haecht was nowhere to be seen.

That summer, the heat spared nobody.

And while London gardens wilted and Parisian dogs slept under cafe tables, New York positively steamed. ANOTHER SCORCHER, the Daily Mirror howled, while the New York Times said “Temperatures Are Expected to Reach 98deg Today.” It was impossible to sleep at night. Some people gathered on tenement stoops and spoke in low voices; others sat in the darkness, listened to Benny Goodman’s band on the radio, and drank gallons of iced tea.

It was bad during the week, but the August heat wave seemed to save its truly hellish excesses for the weekends. You could take the subway to Coney Island or the long trolley ride to Jones Beach, but you could hardly see the sand for the bodies much less find a spot to spread out your towel. The ocean itself seemed warm and sticky, and a sunburn made everything worse.

About the best you could hope for on the weekends was to own a little house in the country somewhere or, almost as good, to have an invitation to stay with somebody who did. Thus Herb Hull, senior editor at the magazine trying to make space for itself between the Nation and the New Republic, was elated to receive a Tuesday morning telephone call from Elizabeth May, asking him to come down with them on Friday night to their place in Bucks County. Jack May ran one of the Schubert box offices in the West Forties theater district, Elizabeth was a social worker at a Lower East Side settlement house. They were not Hull’s close friends, but neither were they simply acquaintances. It was instead something in between, a sort of casual intimacy New Yorkers often fell into.

After the usual misadventures-a traffic jam in the Holland Tunnel, an overheating problem in the Mays’ ‘32 Ford outside Somerville, New Jersey-they reached a sturdy little fieldstone house at the edge of a small pond. The house was typical: small bedrooms reached by a staircase with a squeaky step, battered furniture, bookcase full of murder mysteries left by former guests, and a bed in the guest room that smelled of mildew. Not far from Philadelphia, Bucks County had summer homes and artists’ studios up every dirt road. Writers, painters, playwrights, editors, and literary agents tended to cluster there, as did people who worked at a great range of occupations but whose evenings were committed to books and plays and Carnegie Hall. They arrived on Friday night, unloaded the weekend groceries (corn, tomatoes, and strawberries would be bought at roadside stands), ate sandwiches, and went to bed early. Saturday morning was spent fussing at projects that never got done-you just weren’t enjoying the country if you didn’t “fix” something-then the rest of the weekend drifted idly by in talking and drinking and reading in all their combinations. At Saturday night parties you’d see the same people you saw in Manhattan during the week.

Herb Hull was delighted to spend the weekend with the Mays. They were very bright and well read, the rye and bourbon flowed freely, and Elizabeth was a fine cook, known for corn fritters and Brunswick stew. That’s what they had for dinner on Saturday night. Then they decided to skip the usual party, instead sat around, sipping drinks while Jack played Ellington records on the Victrola.

The Mays were charter subscribers to Hull’s magazine and avid supporters of the causes it embraced. Not Party people but enlightened and progressive, fairly staunch for Roosevelt though they had voted for Debs in ‘32. The conversation all across Bucks County that night was politics, and the Mays’ living room was no exception. In unison, the three lamented the isolationists, who wanted no part of “that mess in Europe,” and the German- American Bund, which supported them, de facto encouragement to Hitler. Sorrowfully, they agreed that there was no saving the Sudetenland; Hitler would snap it up as he had Austria. There would eventually be war, but America would stay out. That was shameful, cowardly, ultimately frightening. What had become of American idealism? Had the grinding poverty of the Depression gutted the national values? Was the country really going to be run by Westbrook Pegler and Father Coughlin? Did the American people hate Russia so much they were going to let Hitler have his way in Europe?