Leslie Slote, ashen and distraught, came up with two hands full of documents and introduced himself to Victor Henry. “I’d like to call on you at the embassy tomorrow, sir,” he said, “once I’ve straightened things out a bit.”
“Come in any time,” Pug Henry said.
“But let me tell you right now,” Slote said over his shoulder as he left, “that Byron’s been a real help.”
Dr. Neustadter politely emphasized that Byron could go off in his father’s custody now and pick up his documents some other time; or he himself could look after Byron’s papers and drop them at Commander Henry’s office. “After all,” Neustadter said, “when it’s a question of a son rejoining his parents, red tape becomes inhumane.”
Rhoda sat beside her son as they drove to Grunewald, happily clutching his arm while complaining how awful he looked. He was her secret favorite. Rhoda had thought of the name Byron at her first glimpse of her baby in the hospital: a scrawny infant, blinking big blue eyes in a red triangular face; clearly a boy, even in the rolls of baby flesh. She thought the child had a manly romantic look. She had hoped he would be an author or an actor; she had even unclenched his tiny red fists to look for the “writer’s triangles” which, she had read somewhere, one could see at birth in a baby’s palm wrinkles. Byron hadn’t turned out a writer, but he did actually have, she thought, a romantic streak. Secretly she sympathized with his refusal to consider a naval career, and even with his lazy school habits. She had never liked Pug’s nickname for the boy, Briny, with its smell of the sea, and it was years before she would use it. Byron’s switch to fine arts at Columbia, which had thrown Pug into black despondency, she had silently welcomed. Warren was a Henry: the plugger, the driver, the one who got things done, the A student, the one with his eye on flag rank and every step up toward it. Byron was like her, she thought, a person of fine quality, haunted and somewhat disabled by an unfulfilled dream.
She noticed the scar on his temple, touched it in alarm, and asked about it. He began narrating his odyssey from Cracow to Warsaw, interrupting himself now and then to exclaim at things he saw in the streets: red vertical swastika banners massed around a statue of Frederick the Great, a band of Hitler Youth marching past in their brown shirts, black neckerchiefs, and short black pants, nuns bicycling down the Friedrichstrasse, a band concert in a park, a turning merry-go-round. “It’s so peaceful, isn’t it? So goddamned peaceful! Dad, what’s happening in the war? Has Warsaw surrendered? Have the Allies gotten off their tails yet? The Germans are such liars, you never know.”
“Warsaw’s still holding out, but the war there is really over. There’s a lot of talk about peace in the west, too.”
“Honestly? Already? God, will you look at that cafe? Five-hundred Berliners if there’s one, eating pastry and drinking coffee, laughing, talking. Ah, to be a Berliner!
“Where was I? Oh yes. Well, anyway, at this point, see, the water pump gave out and the fan belt broke. The German planes never stopped going by overhead. The bride was having hysterics. We were twenty miles from the nearest town. There was a cluster of farmhouses about a mile down the road, but they’d been bombed to pieces, so—”
“Farmhouses?” Pug broke in alertly. “But the Germans keep claiming loud and clear that the Luftwaffe is attacking only military targets. That’s a big boast of theirs.”
Byron roared with laughter. “What? Dad, the military targets of the Germans include anything that moves, from a pig on up. I was a military target. There I was, above the ground and alive. I saw a thousand houses blown apart out in the countryside, far behind the front. The Luftwaffe is just practicing on them, getting ready for France and England.”
“You want to be careful how you talk here,” Rhoda said.
“We’re in the car. That’s safe, isn’t it?”
“Sure it is. Go on,” Pug said.
He was thinking that Byron’s story might turn into an intelligence report. The Germans were indignantly complaining about Polish atrocities, and publishing revolting photographs of mutilated “ethnic Germans” and Wehrmacht officers. By contrast, they offered photographic proof of happy captured Polish soldiers eating, drinking, and doing folk dances; pictures of Jews being fed at soup kitchens, waving at the cameras and smiling; and many photographs of German guns and trucks rolling past farmhouses and through untouched towns, with jovial Polish peasants cheering them. Byron’s tale cast an interesting light on all this.
On and on Byron talked. At the Grunewald house they went into the garden. “Hey, a tennis court! Great!” he exclaimed in the same manic tone. They sat in reclining chairs, drinks in their hands, as he described the siege of Warsaw with extraordinary clarity, picking out details that made them see and hear and even smell the whole thing — the dead horses on the streets, the tank traps and the menacing sentries at the corners, the unflushed toilets at the embassy when the water main broke, the gangs trying to put out roaring fires in a whole block of buildings with buckets of sand, the taste of horsemeat, the sound of artillery, the wounded piled in the hospital lobby, the facade of a synagogue slowly sliding down into the street, the embassy cellar with its rows of canvas cots, the eerie walk across no-man’s-land on a quiet dirt road dotted with autumn wild flowers. The blue-gray Berlin evening drew on, and still Byron talked, getting hoarse, drinking steadily, and losing no coherence or clarity. It was an astonishing performance. Again and again the parents looked at each other.
“I get famished just talking about it,” Byron said. He was describing the startling feast laid out by the Germans in the Klovno railroad station. “And there was another spread just like it when we got to Konigsberg. They’ve been stuffing us ever since on the train. I don’t know where it all goes to. I think in Warsaw I must have digested the marrow out of my bones. They got hollow and they’re just now filling up again. Anyway, when and where and how do we eat?”
“You look like such a tramp, Byron,” Rhoda said. “Don’t you have any other clothes?”
“A whole big bag full. Mom. It’s in Warsaw, neatly labelled with my name. Probably it’s ashes by now.”
They went to a small dark little restaurant off the Kurfurstendamm. Byron laughed, pointing to the flyspecked curling cardboard sign in the window: THIS RESTAURANT DOES NOT SERVE JEWS. “Are there any left in Berlin to serve?”
“Well, you don’t see them around much,” Pug said. “They’re not allowed in the theatres and so forth. I guess they’re lying pretty low.”
“Ah, to be a Berliner,” Byron said. “Warsaw’s alive with Jews.”
He stopped talking when the soup came. Apparently his own voice had been keeping him awake, because between the soup and the meat course his head nodded and dropped on his chest. They had trouble rousing him.
“Let’s get him home,” Pug said, signalling to the waiter. “I was wondering how long he’d last.”
“Wha? Less not go home,” Byron said. “Less go to the theatre. The opera. Less have some civilized fun. Less do the town. Ah, to be a Berliner!”
Pug said, after they had put Byron to sleep and were strolling in the garden, “Quite a change in him.”
“It’s that girl,” Rhoda said.
“He didn’t say much about her.”
“That’s my point. He said nothing about her. Yet he went to Poland because of her, and got caught in Cracow on account of her. He lost his passport, for heaven’s sake, protecting her relatives. Why, he was talking to her uncle when that synagogue all but fell on top of him. Seems to me he did almost everything in Poland but become a Jew.” Pug looked coldly at her but she went on unheedingly, “Maybe you can find out something more about her from this man Slote. It’s a strange business, and she must be some girl.”
Topping the pile of letters on Pug’s desk the following morning was a pale green envelope, almost square, engraved in one corner: THE WHITE HOUSE. Inside he found on a single sheet, similarly engraved, a slanted scrawl in heavy pencil.
You were dead right again, old top. Treasury just now informs me the ambassadors got hopping mad at the very idea of our offering to buy their ocean liners. Can I borrow your crystal ball? Ha ha! Write me a letter whenever you get a chance, about your life in Berlin — what you and your wife do for fun, who your German friends are, what the people and the newspapers are saying, how the food is in the restaurants, just anything and everything that occurs to you. What does a loaf of bread cost in Germany today? Washington is still incredibly hot and muggy, though the leaves have started turning.
FDR
