The Winds of War

She leaned her head on her hand. “Oh, dear. Must I start thinking?”

“Look, Natalie. Why not send Aaron a wire that we’re married, and go straight home?”

“I can’t do that.”

“I don’t want you going back to Italy.”

Natalie raised her eyebrows at his flat tone. “But I have to.”

“No, you don’t. Aaron’s too cute,” Byron said. “Here, let’s finish this wine. As long as you or I or somebody will do the correspondence and dig in the library and keep after the kitchen, the gardeners, and the plumbers, he won’t leave that house. It’s that simple. He loves it, and he doesn’t scare easily. He’s a tough little bird, Uncle Aaron, under the helplessness and the head colds. What d’you suppose he’d do if you sent him that wire?”

Natalie hesitated. “Try to get me to change my mind. If that failed, make a real effort to leave.”

“Then it’s the best favor you can do him.”

“No. He’d make a mess of it. He’s not good with officials, and the stupider they are the worse he gets. He could really trap himself. Leslie Slote and I together can get him on his way in short order, and this time we’ll do it.”

“Slote? Slote’s en route to Moscow.”

“He’s offered to stop off in Rome and Siena first. He’s very devoted to Aaron.”

“I know who he’s devoted to.”

Natalie said softly with a poignant look, “Jealous of Leslie Slote, Briny?”

“All right. Sixty days.”

“What, dear?”

“Go back there for two months. No more. That should be plenty. If Aaron’s not out by April first or before, it’ll be his own doing, and you come home. Book your own transportation, right now.”

Natalie’s wide mouth curved wryly. “I see. Are you giving me orders, Byron?”

“Yes.”

She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him with surprised eyes. “You know, that feels pretty good, being ordered around. I can’t say why. Possibly the delicious novelty will wear off. Anyway, lord and master, I’ll do as you say. Sixty days.”

“All right,” Byron said. “Let’s get dressed and see Lisbon.”

“I’ve seen Lisbon,” said Natalie, “but I’m all in favor of coming up for air.”

Dropping the key at the desk, Byron asked for their passports. With a heavy-lidded look, the swarthy short clerk disappeared through a door.

“Look at those fellows,” Byron said. Half a dozen Germans, in belted black raincoats despite the sunshine, were talking together near the lobby entrance, looking hard at everybody who came in and went out. “They might as well be wearing boots and swastikas. What is it about them? Those raincoats? The big brims on the hats? The bronze sunburns? How do they have time for sunbathing?”

“I recognize them with the back of my neck. It crawls,” Natalie said.

The desk clerk emerged from the door, busily shuffling papers. “Sorry, passports not ready yet.”

“I need mine!” Natalie’s tone was strident.

The clerk barely lifted his eyes at her. “Maybe this afternoon, madame,” he said, turning his back.

After the languors of the bedroom, the cold sunny outdoors felt bracing. Byron hired a taxi to drive them into and around Lisbon. The city was no Rome or Paris for sights, but the rows of pastel-colored houses — green, pink, blue — perched along the hills above a broad river made a pretty picture. Byron enjoyed himself, and he thought his bride was having fun too; she clung to his arm and smiled, saying little. The peculiar mixture of Moorish and Gothic styles in the churches, and in the great fortress commanding the city’s highest hill, brought back to Byron his dead- and-gone fine arts drudgery. They left the cab to descend arm in arm the steep, narrow, extremely small streets of the Alfama, where ragged children swarmed in and out of cracking crazy houses hundreds of years old, and open shops the size of telephone booths sold fish, bread, and meat scraps. It was a long wandering walk.

“Where did the cab promise to meet us?” Natalie spoke up in a strained tone, as they traversed an alley where the stinks made them gasp.

“Everything all right?” he said.

She wearily smiled. “At the risk of sounding like every stupid woman tourist in the world, my feet hurt.”

“Why, let’s go back. I’ve had plenty of this.”

“Do you mind?”

She said not a word as they drove along the river road back to the hotel. When he took her hand it was clammy. Entering the hotel, she pulled at his elbow. “Don’t forget — passports.”

It proved unnecessary. With the key, the desk clerk, showing large yellow false teeth in an empty grin, handed him two maroon booklets. Natalie snatched hers and riffled through it as they walked to the elevator.

“Okay?” he said.

“Seems to be. But I’ll bet anything the Gestapo’s photographed it, and yours too.”

“Well, it’s probably routine in this hotel. I don’t think the Portuguese are denying the Germans much nowadays. But what do you care?”

When she went into the bedroom of the suite to put away her coat and hat, Byron followed, took her in his arms, and kissed her. She responded, she held him close, but her manner was apathetic. He leaned back with a questioning look.

“Sorry, she said. “I have a thundering headache. Burgundy for breakfast may not be just the thing, after all. Luckily I have some high-powered pills for this. Just let me take one.”

Soon she came back from the bathroom smiling. “Okay. Proceed.”

He said, “It couldn’t work that fast.”

“Oh, it will. Don’t worry.”

They kissed, they lay on the bed, Byron was on fire to make love and tried to please her, but it was as though a spring had broken in Natalie. She whispered endearments and tried to be loving. After a while he sat up, and gently raised her. “All right. What is it?”

She crouched against the head of the bed, hugging her knees. “Nothing, nothing! What am I doing wrong? Maybe I’m a little tired. The headache’s not gone yet.”

“Natalie.” He took her hand, kissed it, and looked straight into her eyes.

“O)h, I guess nobody can experience such joy without paying. That’s all. If you must know, I’ve been in a black hole all afternoon. It started when we didn’t get our passports back, and those Germans were standing there in the lobby. I got this horrible sinking feeling. All the time we were sightseeing, I was having panicky fantasies. The hotel would keep stalling about my passport, and you’d sail away in the submarine, and here I’d be, just one more Jew stuck in Lisbon without papers.”

“Natalie, you never turned a hair all through Poland. You’ve got your passport back now.”

“I know. It’s sheer nonsense, just nervous depletion, too many wonderful things happening too fast. I’ll get over it.”

He caressed her hair. “You fooled me. I thought you were enjoying Lisbon.”

“I loathe Lisbon, Briny. I always have. I swear to God, whatever else happens, I’ll regret to my dying day that we married and spent our wedding night here. It’s a sad, painful city. You see it with different eyes, I know. You keep saying it looks like San Francisco. But San Francisco isn’t full of Jews fleeing the Germans. The Inquisition didn’t baptize Jews by force in San Francisco, and burn the ones who objected, and take away all the children to raise them as Christians. Do you know that little tidbit of history? It happened here.”

Byron’s face was serious, his eyes narrowed. “Maybe I read it once.”

“Maybe? If you had, how could you forget? Anybody’s blood should run cold at such cruelty. But somehow what’s happened to Jews in Europe over the centuries is just a matter of course. What was Bunky’s pretty phrase? Fish in a net.”

Byron said, “Natalie, I’ll do anything you want about the religion. I’ve always been prepared for that. Would you want me to become Jewish?”

“Are you insane?” She turned her head sharply to him and her eyes had an angry shine. She had looked like this in Konigsberg, giving him a rude abrupt good-bye. “Why did you insist on getting married? That’s what’s eating me. Just tell me that. We could have made love, you know that, all you wanted. I feel tied to you now with a rope of raw nerves. I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t know