when I’ll ever see you again. I only know you’re sailing away Thursday in that damned submarine. Why don’t we tear up those Portuguese documents? Let everything be as it was. My God, if we ever find ourselves in a human situation, and if we still care, we can get properly married. This was a farce.”
“No, it wasn’t. It’s the only thing I’ve wanted since I was born. Now I’ve got it. We’re not tearing up any papers. You’re my wife.”
“But God in heaven, why have you gone to all this trouble? Why have you put yourself in this mess?”
“Well, it’s like this, Natalie. Married officers get extra allowances.”
She stared at him. Her taut face relaxed, she slowly, reluctantly smiled, and thrust both her hands in his hair. “I see! Well, that makes a lot of sense, Briny. You should have told me sooner. I can understand greed.”
Mouth to mouth, they fell back on the bed, and the lovemaking started to go better, but the telephone rang. It rang and rang and rang, and the kisses had to stop. Byron sighed, “Could be the S-45,” and picked up the receiver. “Yes? Oh, hello. Right. That’s thoughtful of you. Nine o’clock? Wait.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Thurston apologizes for intruding. He and Slote thought we might conceivably want to have dinner in a special place. Best food in Lisbon, best singer in Portugal.”
“Good heavens. Old Slote is uncovering a masochistic streak.”
“Yes or no?”
“As you wish.”
Byron said, “They mean to be nice. Why not? We have to eat. Get away from the black raincoats.”
He accepted, hung up, and took her in his arms.
The restaurant was a brick-walled low room, illuminated only by table candles and the logs blazing in an arched fireplace. Jews, many in sleek dinner clothes, filled half the tables. Two large British parties side by side made most of the noise in the sedate place. Directly in front of the fire a table for six stood empty, longingly eyed by customers clustering in a small bar. The four Americans sat at another favored table near the fire. Over Portuguese white wine, Bunky Thurston and the newlyweds soon grew merry. Not Slote: he drank a lot but hardly spoke or smiled. The firelight glittered on his square glasses, and even in that rosy light his face looked ashen. “I don’t know if you youngsters are interested in the war, by the way,” Thurston said over the meat. “Remember the war? There’s news.”
“If the news is good I’m interested,” Natalie said. “Only if it’s good.”
“Well, the British have captured Tobruk.”
Natalie said, “Is Tobruk important?”
Byron exclaimed, “Important! It’s the best harbor between Egypt and Tunis. That’s mighty good news.”
“Right,” Thurston said. “They’re really roaring across North Africa now. Makes the whole war look different.”
Slote broke his silence to say hoarsely, “They’re fighting Italians.” He cleared his throat and went on, “Byron, did you actually read the list of books I gave you in Berlin? Natalie says you did.”
“Whatever I could find in English, yes. Maybe seven or eight out of ten.”
The diplomat shook his head. “Extraordinary heroism.”
“I don’t claim I understood them all,” Byron said. “Sometimes my eyes just passed over words. But I plowed on through.”
“What books?” Thurston said.
“My darling here became slightly curious about Germans,” said Natalie, “after a Luftwaffe pilot almost shot his head off. He wanted to know a little more them. Slote gave him a general syllabus of German nineteenth-century romanticism, nationalism, and idealism.”
“Never dreaming he’d do anything about it,” Slote said, turning his blank firelit glasses toward her.
“I had all this time in Siena last year,” Byron said. “And I was interested.”
“What did you find out?” said Thurston, refilling Byron’s glass. “You couldn’t get me to read German philosophy if the alternative were a firing squad.”
“Mainly that Hitler’s always been in the German bloodstream,” Byron said, “and sooner or later had to break out. That’s what Leslie told me in Berlin. He gave me the list to back up his view. I think he pretty well proved it. I used to think the Nazis had swarmed up out of the sewers and were something novel. But all their ideas, all their slogans, and practically everything they’re doing is in the old books. That thing’s been brewing in Germany for a hundred years.”
“For longer than that,” Slote said. “You’ve done your homework well, Byron. A-plus.”
“Oh, balderdash!” Natalie exclaimed. “A-plus for what? Repeating a tired cliche? It’s only novel to Byron because American education is so shallow and because he probably didn’t absorb any he got.”
“Not much,” Byron said. “Mostly I played cards and ping-pong.”
“Well, it’s very evident.” His bride’s tone was sharp. “Or you wouldn’t have gone boring through that one- sided list of his like a blind bookworm, just to give him the chance to patronize you.”
“I deny the patronizing and the one-sidedness,” said Slote. “Not that it matters, Jastrow — I guess I’ll have to call you Henry now — but I think I covered the field, and I admire your hubby for tackling the job so earnestly.”
“The whole thesis is banal and phony,” Natalie said, “this idea that the Nazis are a culmination of German thought and culture. Hitler got his racism from Gobineau, a Frenchman, his Teutonic superiority from Chamberlain, an Englishman, and his Jew-baiting from Lueger, a Viennese political thug. The only German thinker you can actually link straight to Hitler is Richard Wagner. He was another mad Jew-hating socialist, and Wagner’s writings are all over
“I’m aware of that,” Slote said. Abruptly he splashed wine into his glass, filling it to the brim, and emptied it without pausing for breath.
“Your veal’s getting cold,” Byron said to his bride. This unexpected edgy clash between Natalie and her ex- lover was threatening to get out of hand.
She tossed her head at him and impatiently cut a bit of meat, talking as she ate. “
“University gas is good, my dear,” Slote said, “and I’ll accept it.” He touched his spread fingertips together, slouched in his chair, regarding her with a peculiar smile at once superior and frustrated. “In the sense that in any time and place the writings of the philosophers are a kind of exhaust has of the evolving social machinery — a point that Hegel more or less makes, and that Marx took and vulgarized. But you can recover from an analysis of the gas what the engine must be like and how it works. And the ideas may be powerful and true, no matter how produced. German romanticism is a terribly important and powerful critique of the way the West lives, Jastrow. It faces all the nasty weaknesses.”
“Such as?” Her tone was mean and abrupt.
A rush of argument broke from Slote, as though he wanted to conquer her with words in Byron’s presence, if he could do nothing else. He began stabbing one finger in the air, like exclamation points to his sentences. “Such as, my dear, that Christianity is dead and rotting since Galileo cut its throat. Such as, that the ideas of the French and American revolutions are thin fairy tales about human nature. Such as, that the author of the Declaration of Independence owned Negro slaves. Such as, that the champions of liberty, equality, and fraternity ended up chopping off the heads of helpless women, and each other’s heads. The German has a very clear eye for such points, Natalie. He saw through the rot of Imperial Rome and smashed it, he saw through the rot of the Catholic Church and broke its back, and now he thinks Christian industrial democracy is a rotting sham, and he proposes to
