be beaten to the ground again, he wrote; and even if they gained the rule of the earth, they would in the end be tamed and subdued by their subject peoples, as their ancestors, the Goths and Vandals, had been tamed to turn Christian. Fanatic or barbaric despotism had only its hour. It was a recurring human fever fated to cool and pass. Reason and freedom were what all human history eternally moved toward.
The Germans were the bad children of Europe, Jastrow argued: egotistic, willful, romantic, always poised to break up faltering patterns of order. Arminius had set the ax to the
The “Palio” of Europe, wrote Jastrow, the contest of hot little nationalisms in a tiny crowded cockpit of a continent, a larger Siena with the sea for three walls and Asia for a fourth, was worn out. As Siena had only one water company and one power company, one telephone system and one mayor, instead of seventeen of these in the seventeen make-believe sovereignties called Goose, Caterpillar, Giraffe, and so forth, so Europe was ripe for the same commonsense unification. Hitler, a bad-boy genius, had perceived this. He was going about the breakup of the old order cruelly, wrongly, with Teutonic fury, but what mattered was that he was essentially correct. The Second World War was the last Palio. Europe would emerge less colorful but more of a rational and solid structure, whichever side won the idiotic and gory horse race. Perhaps this painful but healthy process would become global, and the whole earth would be unified at last. As for Hitler, the villain of the melodrama, he would either be hunted down and bloodily destroyed like Macbeth, or he would have his triumph and then he would fall or die. The stars would remain, so would the earth, so would the human quest for freedom, understanding, and love among brothers.
As he typed repeated drafts of these ideas, Byron wondered whether Jastrow would have written such a tolerant and hopeful book had he spent September under bombardment in Warsaw, instead of in his villa overlooking Siena. He thought “The Last Palio” was a lot of high-flown irrelevant gab. But he didn’t say so.
Letters were coming to Natalie from Leslie Slote, one or two a week. She seemed less excited over them than she had been in the spring, when she would rush oft to her bedroom to read them, and return looking sometimes radiant, sometimes tearful. Now she casually skimmed the single-space typed pages at her desk, then shoved them in a drawer. One rainy day she was reading such a letter when Byron, typing away at the Palio book, heard her say, “Good God!”
He looked up. “Something the matter?”
“No, no,” she said, very red in the face, waving an agitated hand and flipping over a page. “Sorry. It’s nothing at all.”
Byron resumed work, struggling with one of Jastrow’s bad sentences. The professor wrote in a spiky hurried hand, often leaving out letters or words. He seldom closed his s’s and o’s. It was anybody’s guess what words some of these strings of blue spikes represented. Natalie could puzzle them out, but Byron disliked her pained condescending way of doing it.
“Well!” Natalie sat back in her chair with a thump, staring at the letter. “Briny-”
“Yes?”
She hesitated, chewing her full lower lip. “Oh, hell, I can’t help it. I’ve got to tell someone, and you’re handy. Guess what I hold here in my hot little hand?” She rustled the pages.
“I see what you’re holding.”
“You only think you do.” She laughed in a wicked way. “I’m going to tell you. It’s a proposal of marriage from a gentleman named Leslie Manson Slote, Rhodes Scholar, rising diplomat, and elusive bachelor. And what do you think of that, Byron Henry?”
“Congratulations,” Byron said.
The buzzer on Natalie’s desk rang. “Oh, lord. Briny, please go and see what A.J. wants. I’m in a fog.” She tossed the letter on the desk and thrust long white hands in her hair.
Dr. Jastrow sat blanketed in the downstairs study on the chaise lounge by the fire, his usual place in rainy weather. Facing him in an armchair, a fat pale Italian official, in a green and yellow uniform and black half-boots, was drinking coffee. Byron had never seen the man or the uniform before.
“Oh, Byron, ask Natalie for my resident status file, will you? She knows where it is.” Jastrow turned to the official. “Will you want to see their papers too?”
“Not today,
Natalie looked up with an embarrassed grin from rereading the letter. “Oh, hi. What’s doing?”
Byron told her. Her face sobering, she took a key from her purse and unlocked a small steel file by the desk. “Here.” She gave him a manila folder tied with red tape. “Does it look like trouble? Shall I come down?”
“Better wait till you’re asked.”
As he descended the stairs he heard laughter from the study, and rapid jovial talk. “Oh, thank you, Byron,” Jastrow said, breaking into English as he entered, “just leave it here on the table.” He resumed his anecdote in Italian about the donkey that had gotten into the grounds the previous week, laid waste to a vegetable patch, and chewed a whole chapter of manuscript. The official’s belted belly shook with laughter.
In the library Natalie was typing again. The Slote letter was out of sight.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of a problem,” Byron said.
“That’s good,” she said placidly.
At dinner that night Dr. Jastrow hardly spoke, ate less than usual, and drank two extra glasses of wine. In this household, where things were so monotonously the same day after day, night after night, the first extra glass was an event, the second a bombshell. Natalie finally said, “Aaron, what was that visit about today?”
Jastrow came out of an abstracted stare with a little headshake. “Strangely enough, Giuseppe again.”
Giuseppe was the assistant gardener, whom he had recently discharged: a scrawny, lazy, stupid old drunkard with wiry black hairs on his big knobby purple nose.
Giuseppe had left open the gate through which the donkey had entered. He was always committing such misdemeanors. Jastrow had lost his temper over the destroyed chapter and the ravaged vegetable beds, had been unable to write for two days, and had suffered bad indigestion.
“How does that officer know Giuseppe?” Byron said.
“That’s the odd part. He’s from the alien registration bureau in Florence, yet he mentioned Giuseppe’s nine children, the difficulty of finding work nowadays, and so forth. When I said I’d rehire him, that ended it. He just handed me the registration papers with a victorious grin.” Jastrow sighed and laid his napkin on the table. “I’ve put up with Giuseppe all these years, I really don’t mind. I’m rather tired. Tell Maria I’ll have my fruit and cheese in the study.”
Natalie said when the professor was gone, “Let’s bring the coffee to my room.”
“Sure. Great.”
Never before had she invited him there. Sometimes in his room above he could hear her moving about, a tantalizing, faint, lovely noise. He followed her upstairs with a jumping pulse.
“I live in a big candy box,” she said with a self-conscious look, opening a heavy door. “Aaron bought the place furnished, you know, and left it just the way the lady of the house had it. Ridiculous for me, but -”
She snapped on a light. It was an enormous room, painted pink, with pink and gilt furniture, pink painted cupids on a blue and gold ceiling; pink silk draperies; and a huge double bed covered in frilly pink satin. Dark Natalie, in the old brown wool dress she wore on chilly evenings, looked decidedly odd in this Watteau setting. But Byron found the contrast as exciting as everything else about her. She lit the log fire in the marble fireplace carved with Roman figures, and they sat in facing armchairs, taking coffee from the low table between them.
“Why do you suppose Aaron’s so upset?” Natalie said, settling comfortably in the large chair and pulling the long pleated skirt far down over her beautiful legs. “Giuseppe’s an old story. Actually it was a mistake to fire him. He knows all about the water connections and the electric lines, much more than Tomaso. And he’s really good at the topiary work, even if he is a dirty old drunk.”
“A.J. was coerced, Natalie.” She bit her lip, nodding. Byron added, “We’re at the mercy of these people, A.J. even more than you and me. He owns property, he’s stuck here.”
“Oh, the Italians are all right. They’re not Germans.”
“Mussolini’s no bargain. Berel gave A.J. the right advice. Get out!”
Natalie smiled: “
