The Winds of War

Natalie was enchanted with this imaginative little conceit, and read it over and over.

Slote only thinks he’s going to marry you. He had his chance.

By the way, I’m more than one-third through Slote’s list of tomes about the Germans. Some of them aren’t available in English, but I’m slogging along with what I can get. There’s not much else to do here. The one reward of my isolation in this godforsaken town is the one-man seminar that A.J. is conducting with me. His view is more or less like Slote’s, and I’m getting the picture. The Germans have been the comers in Europe ever since Napoleon, because of their geographical place, their numbers, and their energy, but they’re a strange dark people. All of these writers Slote listed eventually come out with the pedantic destructiveness, the scary sureness that they’re right, that the Germans have been gypped for centuries, that the world’s got to be made over on their terms. What it boils down to so far for me is that Hitler is, after all, the soul of present-day Germany — which is self-evident when you’re there; that the Germans can’t be allowed to rule Europe because they have some kind of mass mental distortion, despite their brilliance, and can’t even rule themselves; and that when they try for mastery, somebody’s got to beat the living daylights out of them or you’ll have barbarism triumphant. A.J. adds his own notion about the “good Germany” of progressive liberals and the “bad Germany” of Slote’s romantics and nationalists, all tied in with geographical location and the Catholic religion, which sort of loses me. (Wonder if any of this will get past the censors? I bet it will. The Italians fear and loathe the Germans. There’s a word that passes around here about Mussolini. They say he’s the monkey that opened the tiger’s cage. Pretty good.)

Getting A.J. out of here seems to be a bit of a project, after all.

There was a minor technical foul-up in his naturalization, way, way back. I don’t know the details, but he never bothered to correct it. The new consul general in Rome is a sort of prissy bureaucrat and he’s creating difficulties. All this will straighten out, of course — they’ve said as much in Rome — but it’s taking time.

So I won’t abandon A.J. now. But even if your plans aren’t clear by mid-April, I must come home then and I will, whether A.J. does or not. Aside from my brother’s wedding, my father’s on fire to get me into submarine school, where the next officer course starts May 27. The course lasts six months, and then there’s a year of training in subs operating around Connecticut. So even in the unlikely event that I do enroll — I’ll only do it if the war breaks wide open — we could be together a lot.

Siena’s gotten real dumpy. The hills are brown, the vines are cut to black stumps. The people creep around the streets looking depressed. The Palio’s off for 1940. It’s cold. It rains a lot. But in the lemon house, anyway, the trees are still blooming, and A.J. and I still have our coffee there. I smell the blossoms and I think of you. I often go in there just to take a few breaths, and I close my eyes and there you are, for a moment. Natalie, there has to be a God or I wouldn’t have found you, and He has to be the same God for both of us. There’s only one God.

I love you,

Briny

“Well, well,” Natalie said aloud, as tears sprang from her eyes and dropped on the flimsy airmail paper. “You miserable chestnut-haired devil.” She kissed the pages, smearing them orange-red. Then she looked at the date again — February 10, and this was April 9 — almost two months for an airmail letter! There was no point in answering, at that rate. He might be on his way back now.” But she seized a pad and began writing. She couldn’t help it.

Natalie’s father was listening to the radio in the garden. They had just eaten lunch and her mother had gone off to a committee meeting. As Natalie poured loving words on paper, a news broadcast came drifting in on the warm air through the open window. The announcer, with rich dramatic doom in his voice, spoke words that arrested her pen:

“The phony war has ended. A fierce air, sea, and land battle is raging for Norway. NBC brings special bulletins from the war capitals that tell the story.

“London. In a lightning attack, without warning or provocation, Nazi Germany has invaded neutral Norway by sea and air, and German land forces have rolled into Denmark. Fierce resistance is reported by the Norwegian government at Oslo, Narvik, Trondheim, and other key points along the coast, but German reinforcements are continuing to pour in. The Royal Navy is moving rapidly to cut off the invasion. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared this morning, ‘All German vessels entering the Skagerrak will be sunk.’”

Putting aside the pad and pen, Natalie went to the window. Her father, sitting with his back to her in blazing sunshine, his grizzled head in a white cap tilted far to one side, was listening with motionless intensity to this shattering development.

“Paris. In an official communique, the French government announced that the Allies would rally to the cause of democratic Norway, and would meet the German onslaught quote with cold steel unquote. Pessimistic commentators pointed out that the fall of Norway and Denmark would put more than a thousand additional miles of European coastline in German hands and that this would mean the collapse of the British blockade.

“Berlin. The propaganda ministry has issued the following bulletin. Forestalling a British plan to seize Scandinavia and deny Germany access to Swedish iron ore and other raw materials, the German armed forces have peaceably taken Denmark under their protection and have arrived in Norway by sea and air, where the populace has enthusiastically welcomed them. Oslo is already in German hands, and the life of the capital is returning to normal. Scattered resistance by small British-bribed units has been crushed. The Fuhrer has sent the following message of congratulations to…”

Natalie came out into the garden to talk to her father about the shocking news, and was surprised to find him sleeping through it, his head dropped on his chest. The radio was blaring; and her father usually hung on the news broadcasts. The shadow from his white linen cap obscured his face, but she could see a queer expression around his mouth. His upper teeth were protruding ludicrously over his lip. Natalie came to him, and touched his shoulder. “Pa?” He did not respond. He felt inert. She could see now that his upper plate had worked loose. “Pa!” As she shook him his head lolled and the cap fell off. She thrust her hand inside his loose flowered sport shirt; there was no heartbeat under the warm clammy skin. In the instant before she shrieked and ran inside to telephone the doctor, she saw on her dead father’s face a strong resemblance to Aaron Jastrow that in his lifetime she had never observed.

She walked through the next weeks in a fog of shocked grief. Natalie had stopped taking her father seriously at about the age of twelve; he was just a businessman, a sweater manufacturer, a temple president, and she was then already a brash intellectual snob. Since then she had become more and more aware of how her father’s sense of inferiority to Aaron Jastrow, and to his own daughter, permeated his life. Yet she was prostrated when he died. She could not eat. Even with drugs she could not sleep. Her mother, a conventional woman usually preoccupied with Hadassah meetings and charity fund-raising, for many years completely baffled by her daughter, pulled out of her own grief and tried in vain to comfort her. Natalie lay in her room on her bed, wailing and bawling, almost constantly at first, and in spells every day for weeks afterward. She suffered agonies of guilt for neglecting and despising her father. He had loved her and spoiled her. When she had told him she wanted to go to the Sorbonne for two years, that had been that. She had never even asked whether he could afford it. She had felled him with her bizarre misadventures and had experienced no remorse while he was alive. Now he was gone, and she was on her own, and it was too late. He was unreachable by love or regret.

The radio news — disaster on disaster in Norway, German drives succeeding, Allied landings failing, the remnants of the Norwegian army retreating into the mountains where the Germans were hunting them down — came to her as dim distant rumors. Reality was only her wet pillow, and the stream of middle-aged sunburned Jews paying condolence calls, and all the endless talk about money problems.

She was shocked back into her senses by two events, one on top of the other: Byron’s return from Europe, and the German attack on France.