The Keeper of the Walls Read online

  “Wolf knew,” Lily said softly. “I had to confide in someone, and so I told him, in Vienna.”

  “Then that was why he decided to teach me Hebrew!” Nicky exclaimed. “I’d assumed it was because I was so curious, and loved languages. Mama—I’d no idea.” Then he added, shyly: “But . . . I’m glad. All those evenings when we sat at Aunt Mina’s Sabbath table . . . they meant so much to me. From somewhere deep inside. I like the Jewish religion. Frankly, now that I’m not afraid to admit it, Catholicism always made me feel cold. I mean . . . it’s so forbidding. Confession and the priests and all the stark whiteness of everything—d’you know what I mean? It’s like being in a hospital. You think you’re never going to get out.”

  Lily smiled. She could see Maryse grinning too, and Claire’s eyes, so gentle upon her grandson. Then Kira said, her voice very cold: “But I don’t want to be a Jew.”

  The silence prolonged itself, and the shock on the four adult faces. Nanni asked: “Why not, Kira? I’m Jewish, There’s nothing wrong with being Jewish.”

  Nicky turned to her, his face at once curious and protective. He touched her on the neck, a strangely adult gesture, and said: “I think we should be proud that we’re partly Jewish. It’s Grandma’s part, and that’s the best we’ve got inside us. Don’t you see?”

  Unexpectedly, Kira buried her face into her brother’s chest, and started to sob. Nicky murmured to Nanni, whose great blue eyes stood wide open with shock, “Kirotchka didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Or anybody’s. It’s just that it’s . . . hard without our father.”

  “With Hitler around the corner, it’s all at once become most important to know what to do about it,” Jacques broke in. “Right now is hardly the moment to tell our acquaintances about this. There’s been a curious reversal in political attitudes these last few months. The Right, which was always fiercely antagonistic of any foreign effort to walk on France’s toes, has been oddly placating of Hitler; and the Left, always the peace-loving element of society, has stopped wanting to yield all in order to avoid war. Because the Left has been from time immemorial the opponent of Fascism, Nazism, and the like. We can’t tell which side will win, but if it’s the Right, France, too, will grow unkind to its Jews.”

  Claire added: “It’s better to keep very quiet, my children. At the moment, I don’t want Claude to know anything about this. He . . . well, he goes around with some people I definitely feel afraid of. Archreactionaries. And besides, it would be difficult to ... explain it to him.”

  Lily nodded, remembering Rirette’s threats six years before. But Jacques was saying: “Let us at least say a prayer for our people. It’s the start of a new year, and maybe, after all, things will smoothen out. Tell me, Nicky—do you remember enough Hebrew to say the words aloud with me?”

  And in the hush that followed, the thirteen-year-old boy rose and took his place by his step-grandfather. They began to intone the magic words by which millions of Jews, for thousands of years, had been committing their fates into the hands of their God. Claire’s voice joined in, and then Maryse’s, and finally Lily’s. Instinctively, Maryse held her hand out to her friend, and clasped Lily’s strongly in hers. They prayed with tears in their eyes, and when they stopped, they saw, in the corner, Nanni and Kira standing together, the older girl’s two arms brought down over the little one’s shoulders.

  “Happy New Year,” Maryse said.

  On Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of September, Madame Antiquet received an official visitor from the Foundation of Auxiliary Shelters. He had come to examine the building, to see whether it might qualify as a possible bomb shelter. Lily accompanied them to the attic, with which he was pleased, because its floor was made of concrete. “You’re going to have to remove all the papers and bolts of material,” he announced. “But you can keep the trunks.” In the basement, he told them that more space needed to be cleared out, to be able to fit more people in.

  In the afternoon, the handyman came with three others to bring down the excess furniture from the attic. “If there’s a bombing, nothing loose can be left up there,” Madame Antiquet said to Lily. “It could clatter around like an old man’s false teeth.” Then, with a resigned shrug, she added: “But the house is an old Parisian house, with concrete everywhere. You’d think that would make a difference if a bomb should hit it square in the face. But watch: it won’t matter a pin. It’ll just topple down like a house of cards, and we’ll be crushed alive, concrete or no concrete.”

  “But presumably, we’ll already have run into the basement,” Lily countered.

  “People have died in basements, too,” the plump landlady grumbled. “Of suffocation, like helpless swine.”

  Lily didn’t sleep all night, wondering which God to pray to, the Jehovah of the Jews, or the Father of the Holy Trinity.

  On the twenty-ninth, the Brasilovs went to the Ritz, to listen on Jacques’s radio to the results of the Munich Conference. The French, the British, and the Italian heads of state were meeting with Hitler in an effort to avoid a major European catastrophe. The Soviets, conspicuously left out, had not even rearmed. But in Paris, Maurice Thorez and his Communist party had staged a noisy campaign against Nazism and Germany. Through the early evening, the TSF put off its report, announcing that the powers were still in conference. Finally, at 10:00 p.m., the broadcaster came through, jubilantly declaring that an agreement had been reached. Lily sighed, packed up her tired children, and went to bed, where she slept, though fitfully, dreaming of Wolf and his parents, and of her own children. In the early morning, she awakened as if hit by a bolt of lightning. Kira and Nicky were asleep, each dark head on its own pillow. And Lily crossed herself, as always when a danger had been narrowly avoided.

  The next morning, the weather was so clear and the sky so blue, that her heart soared when she pulled the drapes aside. But the morning newspapers were still not carrying the full story.

  In the afternoon, Madame Antiquet came to pull her away from some handiwork, and together they rushed out to the Champs-Élysées, to watch the procession of cars to the Èlysée Palace: Daladier returning triumphant, on his way to receive his laurels from President Lebrun. The crowds were thick, and it was difficult to see. Women were throwing flowers that splintered off into a rainbow of petals as they hit the black cars; men chanted the Marseillaise in voices half drunk with the sheer exhilaration of relief. Finally, long after the passage of the procession, Lily and her landlady turned away and walked the short distance home.

  Kira and Nicky were waiting for her, their young faces bright with excitement. Their friends from school, Jacqueline and Pierre Rublon, had invited them to watch from the balcony of their father’s firm, which stood on the great tree-lined avenue. “It was better than Bastille Day!” Kira cried.

  But still, Lily had not read the confirmation of this day’s events, and last night’s signed agreement in Munich. She longed for the details in an afternoon daily. Kira went to the nearby stand and bought a batch of different ones, and came bounding in, like a light-hearted young doe, brandishing them. “Look, Mama!” she exclaimed. “The headlines are all the same: ‘Peace!’ ”

  Lily took the first one from her daughter, and skimmed the front page rapidly. “The agreement was signed at one thirty-five a.m.,” she said. “And look: here are the pictures of the returning ‘heroes,’ Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier. They were all received with ovations.”

  “So there won’t be war,” Nicky remarked, peering over her shoulder.

  In the evening they listened to a broadcast of the return of the three chiefs of state. But the Poles were disturbed, and the Hungarians and Soviets were complaining. “Everywhere else, however, a veritable delirium of joy is raining down,” the newscaster said, his voice concluding on a definite lilt.

  “Those other countries are so far away, they hardly seem to make a difference, do they?” Kira commented brightly.

  “Czechoslovakia was their neighbor,” her brother reminded her. “And the Soviet Unio
n is a monster. Remember what our father used to say? ‘Russia is like the Hydra: cut off its head, and it will grow two back again.’”

  “I thought you put Papa’s ideas alongside those of madmen and children,” Kira said ironically.

  “Maybe I’ve learned to sort through them for their reality,” the young boy said. Although his voice was devoid of the pomposity of youth, it vibrated with a new self-confidence. Lily gazed at him, reminding herself that he was not yet fourteen, and was surprised, as always, by his strange maturity.

  “May Kira and I go outside to ride our bicycles?” he asked, his eyes suddenly bright and hopeful. Claire had given both children shining new cycles for the resumption of school, so that they might ride together to the lycée and not hinder their mother’s piano-teaching schedule.

  “Don’t go far,” Lily answered, but they had already raced out the door. She moved to the small window, and peered out. Nicolas and Kira, hand in hand, were carrying two bicycles from the house to the pavement, setting them down, and eagerly mounting. Kira’s long hair, loose on her back, gleamed in the glow of the setting sun. They were children yet, she thought, with a pinching of the heart: children, in need of her protection, whose father had abandoned them as orphans. And she was swept by bitterness, wondering if, in that other country so far away, he had even considered what this September had done to them all.

  On Monday, November 7, a young German Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, whose parents had been living in Hanover for forty years, shot the first secretary at the German Embassy, Ernst vom Rath. Two days later, on Wednesday, the ninth, vom Rath was dead.

  The Grynszpans were tailors, who had lived well. But since the advent of Hitler, they had been obliged to close down their shop, and were buying secondhand clothes that they repaired at night, in order to resell them in the morning. Two of Herschel’s brothers had died, one in front of his eyes, mowed down by a car. His mechanic brother and his typist sister had been fired from their jobs the previous year. He, just seventeen, had been advised to spend a year with an uncle in Paris, but he had been unable to find work there. When, at last, he had received his notification of expulsion from France, he had lost his head and gone to the embassy. All doors had been left open, as if the Germans had been awaiting just this kind of incident. He had not been stopped on his way to vom Rath, and when he had shot him, nothing could have forewarned him that by his incensed action, he would be giving the Reich its first martyr.

  And so, because a traumatized young Jewish boy had fought back against the very thought of being forced to return to a Nazi hellhole, a flood of rage was set loose in all the cities of the German Reich. Since the shooting, Wolf and his father had transported their beds to his office at the back of the house, and sat huddled near the illegal wireless set that they kept hidden in the basement. As Jews, they were more afraid now than ever since the Anschluss. But they thought that if anything were to happen, they would be safer in the office than in the spacious apartment giving right onto the thoroughfare of the Schwindgasse.

  Wolf hadn’t spelled out to Maryse how he had bribed every official in Vienna to retain his house, and how, in spite of the millions of schillings he had distributed, the Nazis had reduced their living quarters to the office, and half the former apartment where his parents had lived. Upstairs, where he and Maryse had resided, and where Lily and her children had spent a year, Austrian Aryans had moved in. Daily, Mina wrung her hands at the thought of the fineries she had been forced to leave behind; strangers were drinking from her Steuben crystal, and eating from her Meissen porcelain. Strangers were sleeping in her Louis XIV four-poster, and bathing in her marble bathtubs. And each day, when she peered out into her precious garden, she would see the children of others trampling her flowerbeds.

  Isaac, resigned, seldom complained. Always conscious of his wife’s well-being, he wanted only to spare her as much pain as possible. Her recovery from pneumonia had been slow; she’d been fearful of opening the windows, afraid that passersby would take this opportunity to taunt her or even to step through and pilfer from the apartment. Next door, where the living room had been, a family of peasants had taken over the premises, and kept her up half the night chanting martial tunes. And, of course, fresh produce was no longer available on the Jewish ration cards. Sometimes, Wolf managed to bribe one of the other tenants into bringing back an extra apple or cherry. For a single cherry had become the ne plus ultra of luxuries.

  The night of November 9, Isaac didn’t want to go to sleep, as his son had suggested. Since the seventh, they’d been expecting the worst, and stayed up all night. They tucked Mina into her bed, and dosed all the blinds in the house. At this moment, Wolf felt a sharp stab of guilt. Why hadn’t he thought to move his parents right out of the house, where it was known that the richest Jews in Vienna had been residing for centuries? His shirt lay against his skin like a wet cloth, and he realized that perspiration had formed on every part of his body. Some inner premonition told him that tonight would be the night of the Reich’s vengeance. Across from him, his mother lay, her eyes closed; and on the other side, sitting hunched over on the analysis couch, his father, suddenly a very old man, held the radio in hands that trembled. “They’re going to want our blood for this vom Rath’s life,” Isaac intoned, but his voice held no strength, and was quivering.

  “Our bags are packed,” Wolf reminded him. “If there’s the slightest sound of a mob, we’ll awaken Mama and run from the side door.”

  “Where they’ll be waiting for us,” his father cut in.

  Irritated, Wolf shrugged slightly. It was nearing midnight. He felt tired, bone weary, in fact; but tension kept him up, like the old man. They sat looking at each other, silent, pretending to listen to the radio. But in their bones, they felt the dread of which they were afraid to speak.

  Wolf had almost decided to go to sleep for an hour’s quick nap, when, near two in the morning, he heard a noise. It was the sound of glass shattering, and of men’s voices raised. Electrified, he sat bolt upright, and ran to shake his mother awake. She was breathing heavily, with difficulty, and so, as he shook her shoulders, he felt enormous compassion. “We have to go now, Mama,” he said urgently.

  Slowly, as if in a dream, Isaac rose too, and together they helped Mina to her feet. She cowered against her son. “Where are they coming from?” she asked.

  “Everywhere. We’d better run now, through this door—”

  Now the screaming had risen to a wild, swimming roar, and Wolf could feel the floor beneath his feet starting to shake. The noise of breaking glass seemed to be coming from this very house, although he knew that this could not actually be so. But he surmised that thousands of crazed men were coming through the Schwindgasse, thousands of men whose blood-lust for the Jews had taken possession of their very humanity. It was going to be worse than he had even anticipated.

  To his horror, Mina had started to weep, refusing to move. Wolf opened the door, pushed the suitcases out, and went back to his parents. “We could hide in the garden, between the bushes,” he murmured. “They won’t think to find us there. But we don’t have a second to lose.”

  Mutely, Isaac’s face stared up at him. On the intelligent bearded face, a stunned expression was painted. Wolf recognized the signs of shock, and took over. Firmly, he seized his mother and father by the arms they were holding linked together, and pushed them out onto the small side street. Around them the din had become deafening, and he knew that every Jewish house along the way had been brutally destroyed. But it didn’t matter, compared to the preciousness of their three lives. He propelled his parents to the small gate of the garden, and pushed them through. Then, directed by starlight and memory, he guided them to the far back, where some tall, manicured bushes loomed large and sheltering. He pushed his mother and father down into a crouching position, between two large shrubs, and squeezed behind them.

  The hordes of frenzied Nazis were singing the Troopers’ marching song, and bits and pieces of others. Now, for sure, Wolf
knew that they had reached his house. He whispered, “Maybe they won’t be so rough, because Aryans have been living here too.” But he realized that he was just trying to reassure himself that this was a nightmare that would pass, and to bring some paltry comfort to his weeping, frightened parents.

  And then they saw them. Or, more precisely, they saw blazing torches, and barely human forms discernible in their lights. Mina opened her mouth, and immediately Wolf clamped his hand down over it. The cry was muffled. Their bodies frozen in horror, they listened as windows were broken, as furniture was hurled out the windows, as priceless objets d’art were crunched beneath the feet of the looters. Aghast, they saw, from the light of the torches, a medieval tapestry being ripped apart. “Let Judah die!” the shouting came, ferocious, like the roaring of a hundred mountain lions let loose inside a fragile, age-old cathedral.

  Mina Steiner, crouching like a fugitive, watched as savages she’d never met literally lifted the beams off the ceiling of the house she had come to as a bride. And Isaac, in a hushed whisper, said, stupefied, “For centuries, Steiners have been born here, and Steiners have died here. I wanted you to have a son, Wolfgang, so that he, like I, and like yourself, might one day bring his bride to live in this house . . . my house.” There were tears streaming down the seams of his proud old face, and he held his wife’s hand tenderly in his own, understanding that her thoughts, as always, had been synchronized with his.

  Wolf, viewing the destruction of his birthplace, found himself unable to speak. He thought of Maryse, her beautiful eyes so filled with love, anxiety drawn into her small features, as he had last seen her at the train station. His own bride, for whom, during the past thirteen years, he had thanked God each bright morning of his life. He wondered then, for the first time, if he would live to hold her again in his arms, and if he would be granted the privilege of watching his Nanni grow into the full bloom of womanhood. With the terror of death, a great calm was taking over his senses. If he was to die, then so be it. He was strong enough to face the end. But for his parents, he whispered a prayer. God, he knew, would shield them.