Dear Natalie:
I sent my daughter home three months ago to have her baby. Her room is empty, her husband works in the embassy, and all of us miss her so much!
If you can get home from Switzerland, nothing could be better. Otherwise, please consider coming here, where at least you would eat well, and the baby would be born on American “soil,” so to speak, among your friends. We would love to have you.
On this same morning, Bunky Thurston telephoned. Lufthansa had come across with an early reservation, as a special courtesy to him: one seat to Lisbon, September 17, four days off. No opening existed on Pan Am, he said, but they had put her high on the long Lisbon waiting list, and she would get any early vacancy.
“I’d suggest you go straight to the Lufthansa office on the Bahnhofstrasse, just two blocks down from the hotel, and grab yourself this ticket,” Thurston said. “There are various forms to fill out, which I can’t do for you, otherwise—”
“Wait, Bunky, wait.” Natalie was having trouble following him. She had awakened with a sore throat and a fever of over a hundred; she was groggy from the aspirins and depressed by her uncle’s letter, which had thrown her into a vortex of indecision. “I have a letter from Aaron. Can you spare a moment?”
“Shoot.”
She read him the letter.
“Well! They really got hot, didn’t they? Natalie, I can’t presume to make your decision. I know what Leslie Slote would say. Byron too.”
“I know. Play it safe, go straight back to Rome.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re wrong about Byron. Byron would tell me to get on Lufthansa.”
“Really? You know him better than I do. Whatever you decide, let me know if there’s any way I can help you,” Thurston said. “I hear Francoise honking. We’re spending a day in the country.”
Of all things, Natalie did not want to go back to Rome. It was the fixed idea she clung to. Heavily, dizzily, she dressed herself and set out to walk to Lufthansa. She kept swallowing, her throat rasping like sandpaper despite the aspirins. All the airline offices were in the same block. Air France, Pan American, and BOAC were closed and shuttered, the paint of their signs fading. The gilt of Lufthansa’s eagle, perched on a wreathed swastika, shone bright in the sun. The swastika made Natalie hesitate outside. Through the window she saw behind a bare counter in a hospital-clean office a tanned blonde girl in an azure and gold uniform, perfectly groomed, laughing with very white teeth. A tanned man in a checked sports jacket was laughing with her. Wall posters showed castles on river bluffs, and girls in Bavarian costume, and fat men drinking beer, and busts of Beethoven and Wagner hovering over a baroque opera house.
They saw her looking in at them, stopped laughing, and stared. Shivering a little from the fever, Natalie entered the Lufthansa office.
“Good afternoon,” Natalie said hoarsely. “The American consul, Bunker Thurston, has made a reservation for me to fly to Lisbon on the seventeenth.”
“Oh? Are you Mrs. Byron Henry?” The girl switched smoothly to clear English.
“Yes.”
“Fine. Your passport?”
“Do you have the reservation?”
“Yes. Let me have your passport, please.”
The girl held out a manicured, scrubbed hand. Natalie gave her the passport, and the girl handed her a long form printed on coarse green paper. “Fill this out, please.”
Natalie scanned the form. “My goodness. What a lot of questions for an airplane ride.”
“Wartime security regulations, Mrs. Henry. Both sides, please.”
The first page asked for a detailed accounting of the passenger’s travels in the past year. Natalie turned over the form. The first question at the top of the page was
GLAUBUNG
A nerve spasm swept her. She wondered why Thurston had not warned her of the risky snag. Here was a quick decision to make! It was simple enough to write in “
The street outside seemed far away and inviting. Natalie’s head swam and her throat seemed to be choking shut with bits of gravel. She dropped the green form on the counter. The Lufthansa girl was starting to write a ticket, copying data from the passport. Natalie saw her glance in puzzlement at the form, then at the man in the sports jacket, who reached into a pocket and said to Natalie in German, “Do you need a pen?”
“Give me my passport, please,” she said.
The girl’s eyebrows arched. “Is there something wrong?”
Too rattled to think of a deft answer, Natalie blurted, “Americans don’t ask people’s religion for travel purposes, and don’t give their own.”
The man and girl exchanged a knowing look. The man said, if you want to leave that blank, it is up to you. It is quite all right, Mrs. Henry.”
They both smiled slow queer smiles, the smile of the SS officer in Konigsberg.
“I’ll take my passport, please.”
“I have started to write your ticket,” said the girl. “It is very hard to get passage to Lisbon, Mrs. Henry.”
“My passport.”
The girl tossed the maroon booklet on the counter and turned her back.
Natalie left. Three doors down, the Swissair office was open. She went in, and booked a flight to Rome the following morning. It was as Aaron Jastrow had said. Going back was as easy as descending a greased slope.
Chapter 49 — The March on Moscow
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
The Geography of Barbarossa
In war, the event is all, and Germany lost the war. This has obscured her victories in the field. Her enemies never won such victories; they overwhelmed her in the end with numbers, and a cataract of machines.
Defeat also, quite naturally casts doubt on the conduct of the war by the loser. Thus we have wide agreement among military historians, regrettably including noted German generals like Guderian, Manstein, and Warlimont, that our plan for the invasion Russia was “vague” or “patched-up” or “without a strategic objective.” What is accomplished by this historical fouling of our own next, except a self-exculpation which should be beneath a soldier’s dignity? It is bad enough that we lost the war, and world empire, by a heartbreakingly slender margin. There is no reason to describe ourselves, in our greatest national effort, as unprofessional dolts into the bargain.
