her skirt and lifted her to a sitting position. She was conscious but stunned, and greenish pale. In a minute or two her color returned, and life and amusement flowed back into her eyes. She shook her head. “Ye gods, I really saw stars, Byron. I thought I’d broken my silly neck.” She put her head on his shoulder. “Glory, what a scare. I’m all right, help me up.”
She limped; her left knee bothered her, she said. She took his arm with an abashed grin and leaned on him. Byron had tried to keep her from climbing the decayed staircase, and her grin was her only apology, but it was enough. He was worried by the injury, and still angry over her casual disclosure that she had been with Slote until dawn the day before. However, to have this girl leaning on him, in a sunlit orchard full of apple scent by a river, seemed to Byron almost all the pleasure he wanted in the world. Just holding her like this was sweeter than any delight any other girl had ever given him. Whatever it was that made a girl desirable — the enigmatic look in the eyes, the soft curve of a cheek, the shape of a mouth, the sudden charm of a smile, the swell of breasts and hips under a dress, the smoothness of skin — Natalie Jastrow for Byron was all composed of these lovely glints, all incandescent with them. That she stemmed from the strange Jews of Medzice, that she was, by all evidence, the mistress of a dour man ten years older than himself, that she was only a solid and human girl — indeed very heavy leaning on him and limping — with a stubborn streak and some unattractive, almost coarse tomboy bravado: all these drawbacks just made her Natalie Jastrow, instead of the perfect girl he had been dreaming about since his twelfth year. The perfect girl had in fact been a blonde, and something of a sex fiend, like the dream girls of most boys. She was gone now, and this prickly Jewish brunette held her place. And here they were alone on a riverbank in south Poland, in golden sunshine, a mile from any house, amid apple trees laden with ripe fruit.
“This will be slow work, getting back,” she said.
“I can try to carry you.”
“What, a horse like me? You’d rupture yourself. I’m fine if I keep my weight off it. It’s just such a bore.”
“I’m not bored,” said Byron.
They passed an old abandoned scow half full of water. “Let’s use this,” he said, tipping it to empty it out.
Natalie appreciatively watched him heave up the scow unaided. “No oars,” she said.
“We can float downstream.”
He guided the scow with a long rough plank that lay in it, using the plank as a rudder and as a pole. The river was very sluggish, almost oily, calm and brown. Natalie sat on the bow edge of the scow, facing Byron, her shoes in the seeping water. She said as they floated past the cemetery, “That’s where all my ancestors are, I guess. The ones that aren’t buried in Palestine.”
“Or Egypt or Mesopotamia,” Byron said.
Natalie shuddered. “I don’t know. It’s a godforsaken place, Briny.”
“Medzice?”
“Poland. I’m glad Grandma and Grandpa got the hell out of here.”
He banked the scow near the village. She climbed out and walked slowly, not limping. There was no doctor here, she said, and she didn’t want to generate a crisis around the injured American cousin. She would have her knee taped in Cracow tomorrow. None of the villagers noticed anything the matter with her.
Byron tried to find out the war crisis news. There was one working radio in Medzice, and several broken- down ones. The priest had the working radio. The rabbi told Byron, in Yiddish tortured into a barely comprehensible kind of German, that the last broadcast from Warsaw had been encouraging: the Prime Minister of England had gone to his country home for the weekend, and the crisis seemed to be passing. “Henderson, Henderson,” the rabbi said. “Henderson talked to Hitler.” And he winked shrewdly, rubbing one hand over the other to pantomime a money deal.
The wedding made Byron wish over and over that he were a writer and could record it; a Jew, and could comprehend it. The mixture of solemnity and boisterousness baffled him. In his training, decorousness was the essence of a wedding, except for the shoes-and–rice moment at the very end, but the Medzice Jews — though arrayed in their best, the women in velvet dresses and the men in black satin coats or formal city clothes — did not seem to know what decorum was. They crowded, they chattered, they burst into song; they surrounded the veiled, silent, seated bride and discussed her vehemently; they danced, they marched here and there in the houses and in the streets, performing strange little rites; one and then another stood on a chair to speak or to sing and the guests wildly laughed and wildly cried. The pallid bridegroom, in a white robe and a black hat, looked on the verge of fainting. Byron accidentally learned, by offering him a plate of cakes at the long men’s table where the American visitor sat in a place of honor beside the groom, that the weedy boy had been fasting for twenty-four hours, and still was, while everybody around him continuously ate and drank with vast appetite.
Byron, eating and drinking with the rest, and feeling very good indeed, was not sure for hours whether the marriage ceremony had or had not taken place. But near midnight a sudden gravity fell on the guests. In a courtyard, with the bright moon and a blaze of stars overhead, in a series of stern and impressive acts — including solemn incantations over silver goblets of wine and the lighting of long tapers — the bride and groom were brought together for a ring ceremony and a kiss, much as in a Christian union, under a hand-held canopy of purple velvet. Then the groom ground a wineglass to bits under his heel, and jubilation broke out that made everything before it seem staid and pale.
Byron almost became the hero of the evening by putting on a black skullcap and dancing with the yeshiva boys, since there was no dancing with the girls. All the guests gathered to clap and cheer, Natalie in the forefront, her face ablaze with fun. Her knee healed or forgotten, she joined in the girls’ dances; and so she danced, and Byron danced, inside the house and outside, far into the morning hours. Byron scarcely remembered leaving the bride’s home and falling asleep on the feather mattress on the floor of the rabbi’s house.
But there he was when a hand shook him and he opened his eyes. Berel Jastrow was bending over him, and it took Byron a moment or two to recall where he was and who this man was, with the clever, anxious blue eyes and the long gray-streaked brown beard. All around him the yeshiva boys were sitting up and rubbing their eyes, or dressing. The girls were hurrying here and there in their nightclothes. It was hot, and the sun was shining into the room from a clear blue sky.
“Yes? What is it?” he said.
“
“Huh? What?”
“De Chormans.”
“Byron sat up, his voice faltering. “Oh, the Germans? What about them?”
“Dey comink.”
Chapter 9 — World Empire Lost
by General Armin von Roon
(adapted from his
Victor Henry
Translator’s Foreword
I never expected to translate a German military work. For years, like many flag officers, I planned to write up my own experiences in World War II; and in the end, like most of them, I decided against it. It was said of the late Fleet Admiral Ernest King that, if it had been up to him, he would have issued a single communique about the Pacific war: “We won.” My war memoirs boil down more or less to this: “I served.”
Upon retiring from the Navy, I become a consultant to a marine engineering firm. On my last business trip to Germany, in 1965, I noticed in the windows of bookstores, wherever I went, stocks of a small book called
