Dark Star

Palestine alive.

“Then, just lately, there is something more. As you know, emigration to Palestine is called by the name Aliyah. The word has the sense of return. The British entry certificates permit a few thousand people a year into the country, and there is a Jewish organization to administer the details-travel, reception, and so on. But there exists within that group, in its shadow, another. There are only ten of them at the moment, nine men and a very young woman, who call themselves the Mossad Aliyah Bet, that is, the Institute for Aliyah B-the letter indicates illegal, as opposed to legal, emigration. This group is now in the process of leasing ships-whatever derelict hulk can be found in the ports of southern Europe-and they intend to bring Jews out of danger and effect clandestine landings on the coast of Palestine.”

“Will they succeed?”

“They will try. And I am in sympathy with them. A moment comes and if you wish to look upon yourself as human you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune. Weizmann, however, makes an interesting point. After Kristallnacht he said to Anthony Eden that the fire in the German synagogues may easily spread to Westminster Abbey. So the self-congratulatory souls may one day have their own moment of reckoning, we shall see.”

“And you, Monsieur de Montfried, what is it that you do?”

“I invite you to the Renaissance Club of Neuilly, among other things. I somehow happen to meet Monsieur Bloch. I have a few friends, here and there; we try to spend money wisely, in the right places. When I can, I tell important people those things I believe they ought to know.”

“A group of friends. It has, perhaps, a name?”

“No.”

“Truly?”

“The less official the better, is what we think. One can be without structure of any kind and still be of enormous help.”

“What kind of help, Monsieur de Montfried?”

“There are two areas in which we have a very special interest. The first is simple: legitimate emigration certificates above and beyond the publicly stated number allowed by the British foreign office. Each one represents several lives saved, because they can be used by families. The second area is not simple, but can be of far greater impact. Shall we call it a demonstration? As good a word as any. A demonstration that groups sympathetic to Jewish settlement in Palestine are a source of assistance that the British cannot ignore.

It’s a way of buying influence-as NILI did, as Weizmann did, by serving the interests of the governing nation. It’s what, finally, the British understand. Quid pro quo. The White Paper will be debated in Parliament, where there are those who want to help us; we’d like to make it easier for them. The only way to accomplish that is with concrete acts, something definite they can point to. Not in public. Nothing happens in public. But in the halls, in the cloakrooms, the gentlemen’s clubs, the country houses-that’s where the serious business is done. That’s where we must be represented.”

“Can the emigration certificates be produced privately?”

“Forged, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Of course it’s tried, and if one can be proud of forgers, Jewish forgers are among the best, though they have been known to go off on their own and produce the occasional Rembrandt.

“Unfortunately, the British have a tendency to count. And their colonial bureaucracy is efficient. The weakness in the system is that the civil servants in their passport offices are underpaid, a situation that leads only one place. Bribes have been offered, and accepted. Also discovered. The same situation is present in many embassies: Argentine, Liberian, Guatemalan-Jews are turning up as citizens of virtually everywhere. There are also instances where passport officers just give in to compassion when confronted with the unbearable condition of certain applicants-the horrors of this thing simply multiply the more you look at it. But forgery and bribery and whatever else occurs to you do not begin to create the numbers we need. What we have in mind is quite different, a private arrangement that produces real certificates.”

“Difficult. And sensitive.”

De Montfried smiled. “Monsieur Bloch has great faith in you.”

“Theoretically, in what way would a Soviet journalist involve himself in such matters? “

“Who can say? It’s been my experience of life that one does not try to control influential people. One can only present one’s case and hope for the best. If on reflection you find yourself in agreement with what has been said here this evening, you’ll find a way, I suspect, to bring your abilities to bear on the situation. I myself don’t know the solution, so I seek people out and pose the problem. But if I could believe that you would go home tonight and think about these matters I would be frankly overjoyed.”

Gently, and by mutual agreement, the conversation was allowed to drift off into pleasantries and, just in time for de Montfried to attend his “beastly charity thing,” they parted. Outside the little library, a club member with a bright red face and white hair greeted de Montfried effusively, pretending to pull an engineer’s whistle cord and making the French sound for toot, toot. De Montfried laughed heartily, the most amiable fellow imaginable. “We’ve known each other forever,” he said to Szara. They shook hands in the downstairs hall and the steward returned Szara’s umbrella, which had apparently been dried with a cloth.

January 1939.

08942 57661 44898

And so on, which turned out to mean S novym godom and S novym schastyem-happy new year and the best to you all-cold and formal wishes from the Great Father Stalin. During his week in Berlin, Szara had found himself in the neighborhood of the storage building that held the painting with the DUBOK dossier secreted behind the canvas. It had seemed to him remote, and very much beside the point. This is a lesson about time, he thought. With the surge of German power into Austria and Czechoslovakia, Russia assumed the role of counterweight, and if Stalin had been vulnerable when he decimated the military and intelligence services, he wasn’t now. Hitler was driving the world to his door. Stalin’s murders were achieved in basements; Hitler’s work was photographed for the newspapers. Russia was weak, full of starving peasants. Germany built superb locomotives. The Okhrana dossier had best remain where it was.

In early January, Szara suddenly ran a terrible fever. He lay amid soaked sheets; saw, when he closed his eyes, the splashing in the moonlit river Havel and heard, again and again, the scream for mercy. It was not delirium, it was a sickened memory that refused to heal. He saw Marta Haecht dancing in the yard of a thatched-roof cottage in some Ukrainian ghetto village. He saw the eyes of people who had stared at him in Berlin, a long tile hall, the broken face of a Wittenau policeman, the room in the narrow house. It had no name, this sickness; that was its secret, he thought; it fed deep, where words and ideas didn’t reach.

He tried the writer’s time-honored cure: writing. Unshaven, in wrinkled pajamas, he spent a few mornings at it, producing journalistic short stories in pursuit of the German character. Brutal, nasty stuff. He attacked hypocrisy, cruelty, fulminous envy, an obsessive sense of having been wronged, grievously, and misunderstood, eternally. Rereading, he was both horrified and pleased, recalled Lenin’s wondrously sly dictum that “paper will stand for anything you write on it,” and thought for a moment he might actually seek publication. But it was not, he came to realize, the blow he needed to strike. All it would do was make them angry. And they already were that, most of the time. It was not something he’d accused them of, yet in some ways he saw it as their dominant characteristic- he had no idea why, not really. One morning, as a fall of thick, wet snowflakes silenced the city, he tore the stories up.

Schau-Wehrli was his January angel, crisscrossed the icy streets of Paris and made his treffs with Valais, paid the concierge to bring him bowls of thick, amber soup, and sat on the edge of his bed when she had a spare moment. He came to understand, eventually, that the possibility of feverish babbling made them nervous-they didn’t want him in the hospital. Nobody quite said anything about it, but a doctor from the medical faculty at the Sorbonne, a sympathizer, suddenly made house calls to a man with a bad fever. A professor with a grand beard, peering down at him from the heights of professional achievement to say “Rest and keep warm and drink plenty of hot tea.”

When Schau-Wehrli stopped by they’d gossip-like himself, she really had no one to talk to. After the meeting in the Berlin theater, she told him, Tscherova had apparently redoubled her efforts, joining the rather lively circles of