Dark Star

Szara sighed. “You refuse to help us. Or yourself.”

Something flickered in Baumann’s eyes-a strange kind of sympathy? Then it was gone. “Please,” he said, “you must not ask too much of me. I am less brave every day. Going to the stone wall for the message is an agony, you understand? I make myself do it. I-”

The telephone rang.

Baumann was paralyzed. He stared through the doorway into the kitchen while the phone rang again and again. Finally Frau Baumann picked up the receiver. “Yes?” she said. Then: “Yes.” She listened for a time, started to exclaim, was evidently cut off by the person at the other end of the line. “Can you wait a moment? ” she asked. They heard her set the receiver down carefully on a wooden shelf. When she entered the living room she was holding both hands lightly to the sides of her face.

“Julius, darling, do we have money in the house?” She spoke calmly, as though drawing on a reserve of inner strength, but her hands were trembling and her cheeks were flushed.

“Who is it?”

“This is Natalya. Calling on the telephone to say that she must return to Poland. Tonight.”

“Why would she …?”

“It has been ordered, Julius. The police are there and she is to be put on a train after midnight. They are being very polite about it, she says, and are willing to bring her here on the way to the station.”

Baumann did not react; he stared.

“Julius?” Frau Baumann said. “Natalya is waiting to see if we can help her.”

“In the drawer,” Baumann said. He turned to Szara. “Natalya is her cousin. She came here from Lublin six years ago.”

“There isn’t very much in the drawer,” Frau Baumann said.

Szara took a thick handful of reichsmarks out of his pocket. “Give her this,” he said, handing it to Baumann.

Frau Baumann returned to the telephone. “Yes, it’s all right. When are you coming?” She paused for the answer. “Good, then we’ll see you. I’m sure it will be straightened out. Don’t forget your sweaters, Polish hotels … Yes … I know … Twenty minutes.” She hung up the phone and returned to the living room. “All the Jewish immigrants from Poland must leave Germany,” she said. “They are being deported.”

“Deported?” Baumann said.

His wife nodded. “To a place called Zbaszyn.”

“Deported,” Baumann said. “A sixty-three-year-old woman, deported. What in God’s name will she do in Poland? ” He stood up abruptly, then walked to a bookcase by the window, took a large book down and thumbed through the pages. “What is it called?”

“Zbaszyn.”

Baumann moved the atlas under a lamp and squinted at the page. “Warsaw I could understand,” he said. “I can’t find it.” He looked up at his wife. “Did she think to call ahead for a room at least?”

Szara stood. “I’ll have to be going,” he said. “The police will …”

Baumann looked up from the book.

“I think you should get out,” Szara said. “This must involve thousands of people. Tens of thousands. Next they’ll find someplace to send you, it’s possible.”

“But we’re not Polish,” Frau Baumann said. “We’re German.”

“We’ll get you out,” Szara said. “To France or Holland.”

Baumann seemed dubious.

“Don’t answer now. Just think about it. I’ll have you contacted and we’ll meet again in a few days.” He put his raincoat on. “Will you consider it? “

“I’m not sure,” Baumann said, evidently confused.

“We’ll at least discuss it,” Szara said and, looking at his watch, headed for the door.

Outside, the still air was cold and wet. A rickety ladder got him to the roof of the shed; from there he mounted the wall, hung by his hands to decrease the distance, then dropped the few feet to the ground. His exfiltration time was 10:08, but the forced exit had made him early, so he waited in the woods as he’d done before. In the silence of the Grunewald neighborhood, he heard what he took to be the brief visit of the cousin: opening and closing car doors, an idling engine, muffled voices, doors again, then a car driving away. That was all.

29 October.

Szara decided that calling Marta Haecht on the telephone was a bad idea; a conversation necessarily awkward, difficult. Instead he wrote, on a sheet of Adlon stationery, “I’ve returned to Berlin on assignment from my paper. I would like, more than I can say in this letter, to be with you for whatever time we can have. Of course I’ll understand if your life has changed, and it would be better not to meet. In any case your friend, Andre.”

He spent a listless day, trying not to think about the Baumanns. There was no Directorate plan to take them out of Germany, and he had no authorization to make such an offer, but Szara didn’t care. Enough is enough, he thought.

The following morning, Szara had an answer to his letter, in the form of a telephone message taken at the Adlon desk.

An address, an office number, a date, a time. From Fraulein H.

31 October.

Szara stood by the open window and stared out into the Bischofstrasse, shiny with rain in midafternoon, wet brown and yellow leaves plastered to the sidewalks. The damp air felt good to him. He heard Marta’s heavy tread as she moved across the room, then felt her warm skin against his back as she hid behind him. “Please don’t stand there,” she whispered. “The whole world will see there’s a naked man in here.”

“What will you give me? “

“Ah, I will give you that for which you dare not ask, yet want beyond all things.”

“Name it.”

“A cup of tea.”

They walked away from the window together and he sat at a table covered with an Indian cloth and watched as she made tea.

The room was a loft on the top floor of an office building, with large windows and a high ceiling that made it the perfect studio for an artist. Benno Ault. So the name read on a directory in the great, echoing marble lobby below, vestige of a lost grandeur. Herr Benno Ault, Room 709. And he was? According to Marta, “a university friend. Dear, sweet, lost.” An artist who now lived elsewhere and rented her his studio as an apartment. His presence remained. Tacked to the walls-painted an industrial beige many years before, now water-stained and flaking-was what Szara took to be the oeuvre of Benno Ault. Dear, sweet, and lost he may well have been but also, from the look of the thing, mad as a hatter. The unframed canvases writhed with color, garish yellows and greens. These were portraits of the shipwrecked and the drowned, pink faces howled from every wall as saffron oceans pulled them under and they clawed at the air with grotesque hands.

She brought him tea in a steaming mug, standing by his chair and spooning in sugar until he told her to stop, the curve of her hip pressed against his side. “It’s sweet the way you like?” she said, innocent as dawn.

“Just exactly,” he said.

“Good,” she said firmly and arranged herself in a nearby armchair, a huge velvet orphan that had seen better times. She spread a napkin across her bare tummy-a pun on decorum, as though she were a Goya nude minding her manners. When she sipped her tea she closed her eyes, then wiggled her toes with pleasure. The background for this performance was provided by a giant radio with a station band lit up bright amber, which had played Schubert lieder since the moment he’d walked in the door. Now she conducted, waving a stern index finger back and forth. “Am I,” she said suddenly, “as you remember?”

“Am I?” he said.

“Actually, you are quite different.”

“You also.”

“It’s the world,” she said. “But I don’t care. Your letter was sweet-a little forlorn. Did you mean it? Or was it just to make things easy? Either way it’s all right, I’m just curious.”

“I meant it.”