Kingdom of Shadows

seen a man standing at a bar, the night before, who took a razor from his pocket and cut his throat.

“Was there no warning?” Morath said.

“Anti-Semites in political office,” the man said. “But you don’t sell your house because of that. A month ago, more or less, a few people left the country.” Of course there were some, he added, who’d gotten out in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He’d said, in Mein Kampf, that he meant to unite Austria with Germany. Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer! But reading the political future was like reading Nostradamus. His wife and children he’d put on a Danube steamer to Budapest, thank God, the last week in February. “It was her brother who did that. He came to the house, said we should leave, insisted. There was an argument, my wife in tears, bad feelings. In the end, I was so angry I let him have his way.”

“But, you stayed on,” Morath said.

“I had patients.”

They were silent for a moment. Outside, boys with swastika flags were running down the platform, screaming some kind of rhymed chant, their faces wild with excitement.

Polanyi and Morath sat on a bench in the gardens. It seemed very quiet there. A few sparrows working at the crumbs of a baguette, a little girl in a coat with a velvet collar, trying to play with a hoop and a stick while a nursemaid watched her.

“In the town of Amstetten,” Morath said, “just outside the station, they were waiting at a road crossing so they could throw rocks at the trains. We could see the police, standing around with their arms folded, they’d come to watch. They were laughing, it was a certain kind of joke. The whole thing had, more than anything, a terrible strangeness to it. I remember thinking, they’ve wanted this for a long time. Under all the sentiment and Schlag, was this.”

“Their cherished Wut,” Polanyi said. “You know the word.”

“Rage.”

“Of a particular kind, yes. The sudden burst of anger that rises from despair. The Germans believe it lies deep within their character; they suffer in silence, and then they explode. Listen to Hitler speak-it’s always, ‘How much longer must we endure …,’ whatever it is. He can’t leave it alone.” Polanyi paused for a moment. “And now, with Anschluss, we will have the pleasure of their company on our border.”

“Will anything happen?”

“To us?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt it. Horthy will be summoned to meet with Hitler, he’ll bow and scrape, agree to anything. As you know, he has beautiful manners. Of course, what we actually do will not be quite what we’ve agreed to, but, even so, when it’s all over, we won’t keep our innocence. It can’t be done. And we will pay for that.”

For a time, they watched the people walking along the gravel paths, then Polanyi said, “These gardens will be lovely, in the spring. The whole city.”

“Soon, I hope.”

Polanyi nodded. “You know,” he said, “they fight wars, the French, but their country, their Paris, is never destroyed. Do you ever wonder how they do that?”

“They are clever.”

“Yes, they are. They are also brave. Foolish, even. But that’s not, in the end, how they save what they love. That they do by crawling.”

The eleventh of March, Morath thought. Too cold to sit in a garden, the air damp in a certain way, sharp, as though chilled in wet earth. When it began to sprinkle rain, Morath and Polanyi rose and walked in the covered arcade, past a famous milliner, a store that sold expensive dolls, a dealer in rare coins.

“And the Viennese doctor?” Polanyi said.

“Reached Paris, long after midnight. Although he did have trouble at the German border. They tried to send him back to Vienna, something not quite right with his papers. A date. I stood next to him throughout the whole filthy business. In the end, I couldn’t keep out of it.”

“What did you do, Nicholas?”

Morath shrugged. “Looked at them a certain way. Spoke to them a certain way.”

“And it worked.”

“This time.”

4 April 1938.

Theatre des Catacombes. 9:20 P.M.

“Know him? Yes, I know him. His wife makes love to my wife every Thursday afternoon.”

“Really? Where?”

“In the maid’s room.”

Lines not spoken from the stage-would that they had been, Morath thought-but overheard in the lobby during intermission. As Morath and Cara worked their way through the crowd, they were noticed, the glances polite, covert. A dramatic couple. Cara’s face was not her best feature-it was soft and plain, hard to remember. Her best feature was long, honey-gold hair, beautiful scarves, and the ways she found to make people want her. For an evening of avant-garde theatre she had added a Gypsy skirt, with appropriate hoop earrings, and soft leather boots with the tops folded over.

Morath seemed taller than he was. He had black hair, thick, heavy, combed back from the forehead, a certain tightness around the eyes, “green” on his passport but very close to black, and all that darkness made him seem pale, a fin-de-siecle decadent. He’d once met a film producer, introduced by a mutual friend at Fouquet. “I usually make gangster films,” the man told him with a smile. “Or, you know, intrigue.” But, at the moment, a costume epic was soon to go into production. A large cast, a new version of Taras Bulba. Had Morath ever acted? He could play, possibly, “a chieftain.” The producer’s friend, a scrawny little man who looked like Trotsky, added, “A khan, maybe.”

But they were wrong. Morath had been eighteen years in Paris and the emigre life, with its appetizing privacy, and immersion in the city, all passion, pleasure, and bad philosophy, had changed the way he looked. It meant that women liked him more, meant that people didn’t mind asking him for directions in the street. Still, what the producer had seen remained, somewhere, just below the surface. Years earlier, toward the end of a brief love affair, a French woman said to him, “Why, you’re not at all cruel.” She had sounded, he thought, slightly disappointed.

Act II. A Room in Purgatory-The Following Day.

Morath shifted his weight, a pointless effort to get comfortable in the diabolical chair. Crossed his legs, leaned the other way. Cara clutched his arm-stop it. The row of seats, fixed on a wooden frame, went twelve across. Where did Montrouchet get them, he wondered. From some long-dead institution, no doubt. A prison? A school for horrible children?

On stage, the Seven Deadly Sins were harassing a gloomy Everyman. Poor soul, seated on a stool, wearing a gray shroud. “Ahh, but you slept through her funeral.” This well-meaning woman, no longer young, was probably Sloth-though Morath had been wrong two or three times when he’d actually tried watching the play. They had soft edges, the Sins. Either the playwright’s fault or Satan’s-Morath wasn’t sure. Pride was greedy, it seemed to him, and Greed upstaged Envy every chance he got. But then, Greed.

On the other hand, Gluttony wasn’t so bad. A plump young man, come to Paris from the provinces, trying for a career in theatre or the movies. Trouble was, the playwright hadn’t given him much to do. What could he say to poor, dead Everyman? You ate too much! Well, he made the best of what had been given him. Perhaps a prominent director or producer would come to watch the play, one never knew.

But one did know. Morath looked down at the program in his lap, the only permissible distraction to the white fog that rolled in from the stage. The back cover was given over to promotion- the critic from Flambeau Rouge, red torch, had found the play “Provocative!” Below that, a quote from Lamont Higson of The Paris Herald. “The Theatre des Catacombes is the only Parisian theatre in recent memory to present plays of both Racine and Corneille in the nude.” There followed a list of sponsors, including one Mlle. Cara Dionello. Well, he thought, why not. At least a few of those poor beasts in Argentina, trudging down the ramp to the abattoir, added more to life than roast beef.