The Keeper of the Walls Read online

  Then he remained glued to the ground, his hands poised over the heads of his mother and father. The first band of looters was coming through the side gate, into the garden. He hadn’t expected this. He’d been so sure that they would be in a hurry to continue down the Schwindgasse on their trail of destruction, that he’d taken it for granted that here, the Steiners would be safe from harm. Mina’s mouth was still open, but no sound emerged. He saw that she had wet the earth with her fear, the fear of an animal at bay, knowing it would not escape the bloodhounds on its trail.

  “Look!” one man cried, pointing to the gazebo. “Israel and Sarah had their little nesting place, too! Let’s see what we can do to all of this!” And then a group of them ran forward, torches first. When the blaze began, they danced up and down, hurling broken pieces of the stone statues into the fire, crazed laughter emanating from mouths that seemed demented, out of proportion, like demons’ lips.

  The fire crunched on, and the looters remained one step ahead of it, taunting it to swallow up the entire garden. Wolf knew that if they stayed where they were, they would be burned alive, along with the bushes. He cursed himself, and with the desperation of self-preservation, whispered to his father: “We’ll have to run for the street, and hope that if we keep to the shadows, they won’t see us. Because they’re not expecting to find us here.”

  But his father wasn’t moving. Wolf, horrified, recognized once more the signs of deep shock, and knew that he would not be able to reason with Isaac. Pulling his mother up, he held her hand firmly, and said in the lowest of voices: “You heard me, Mama. You’ll have to try to make it alone. I’ll have to carry Papa—he’s not responding. . . . Now, when I tell you: run!”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw his mother scramble forward, hugging the darkness of the hedge. He lifted his father into his arms, and followed, quickly. But his mother’s foot had caught on something, and in her terror, she let out the smallest of cries as she fell forward on the ground. Suddenly there was an enormous shout, and Wolf knew that they had been found out, that the end had come. He bent down then, and, with the most infinite of gentleness, pulled his mother up and toward him with one arm, cradling his father to his breast with all the strength left in his other arm. The crazed men were now surrounding them completely, yelling obscenities, and he guessed that this would be the last moment of his freedom. He felt the strange, repulsive hands pull Mina away, and wrench the limp body of Isaac from his arms. And then he was pushed down, headfirst, onto the gravel.

  For a single moment, Wolf imagined that they would leave the Steiners to perish in the fire. But no, they were now shoving them out into the street. He felt blows around his head and ears, and all over his body. “God, give me strength,’ he begged. Ahead of him, they were throwing stones at his father, who was barely crawling on his knees. Wolf’s eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t cry out, for he knew that this would only incense them more. But he continued to pray for his father and mother.

  Then he heard the voice. “Keep the young one for later,” it said, in the accents of authority. “And the old bitch. She isn’t going to last the night, the way she looks. But the old geezer will have to go. He’s done enough to fight our presence in Vienna.”

  Only at this moment did Wolf use his voice. It was early dawn, and he could see that the street was littered with millions of shards of broken glass, like shining crystals in the roseate light. Wolf asked, “Where are you going to send my father? He’s never hurt anyone in his life.”

  “He helped pollute the earth with his vile Jewish body,” another man replied. “He’ll be going with the rest of the political prisoners to Dachau. We know all about you Steiners. You plotted against the Reich, and paid money to keep us from power.”

  “Why can’t you send me, instead of him?”

  “Because,” the authoritative voice came back, sardonically, “you’ll lead us to the rest of the money. He’s too old and decrepit to have known where you put it.”

  Somewhere near him, he heard his mother cry out as Isaac was pushed into a crowd of malevolent faces and hands. Only once did the old man turn; and then, Wolf saw that the shock had passed, and that he was in complete control of his senses. His magnificent brown eyes bore into him, filled with their love and unconditional understanding. And then, his father disappeared between two large, fierce men.

  He couldn’t see his mother, but Wolf knew that from this moment on, they would have to think only about the two of them. Isaac Steiner had passed into another existence, from which they, helpless victims also, would not be able to extricate him.

  When the political prisoners, many of them still in their nightshirts, were pushed outside the sealed train, they saw before them barbed wire, and a hedge of uniformed bodies. As they lifted their eyes to those bodies, they discerned long, corded whips in every hand. On either side of the barricade, a double row of men armed with whips was guarding the entrance to the camp outside the city of Dachau.

  Isaac Steiner was among the first to be sent out into the live hedge. On his back was only a thin cambric shirt; on his lower part, the remains of serge suit pants. He felt the immense fist going into the small of his back, hurling him face forward into the raised whips. The sky was suffused with a dusky sundown, and the strips of leather, curled into the clouds, made a funny swirling pattern against this dusk. Isaac had no time to think before he felt the slashes, burning into his already pummeled body like live flames, cutting into his skin to the muscle, through the blood veins and right down to the bone. He was sixty-eight, and had never, even as a child, experienced any physical punishment.

  Other men were coming behind him, pushing him ever forward, bent in half and only semiconscious, into the live hedge. The ground was spattered with blood—his blood, he knew, but still he felt himself being propelled farther. Was there to be no end to this pain, so excruciating that now he could no longer see the ground before him? “Jehovah, sweet Lord of my people, save me,” he whispered, or thought that he was whispering as he fell, and the wind was knocked out of him. And then, the pain miraculously ebbed away. Isaac’s face, in the rictus of death, could not erase his own responsive smile.

  God had saved him from the gates of Dachau.

  The next day, Wolf and Mina were released from the SS prison where they had been taken, and they were told that Wolf’s old friend, Hans von Bertelmann, had paid fifty thousand schillings for each of them. With hundreds of other Jews, dressed as they had been taken, Wolf and his mother were forced into the streets and made to clean up the remains of the damage. Shards of glass pierced their hands, and boots kicked their legs as they were bending down to do their slaves’ work. On the streets, remnants of their normal lives stared at them, ripped apart to the point of disfigurement. They had been born children of God; and now they had lost their humanity.

  Wolf and his mother had no house of their own in which to take refuge. And so, when darkness came, they directed their footsteps, cautiously, to the main thoroughfare of the Ringstrasse, where their friend Count von Bertelmann resided. The row of trees, bare-limbed and white with snowy crystals, seemed a painful, almost ironic reminder of the previous night. But here, for the most part, the damage had been minimal; not many Jews lived in these tall stone mansions full of Old World style and character.

  Hans von Bertelmann was a stately middle-aged man who had been Wolf’s friend for time immemorial. They had met at university, and had continued a close friendship thereafter. Von Bertelmann was a poet; he had been born to sufficient riches to indulge his pleasures, and so he wrote odes and ballads that he published himself, and distributed to his acquaintances. He was an elegant, fair man, who had never been married; and, with Wolf, he had fought to uphold the Social Democrats against the rising power of the Nazis. He’d believed in saving his country from Hitler. And so now, afraid of reprisals, although there wasn’t a drop of Jewish blood in him, he lived discreetly, out of the public eye, in his ancestral home.

  Wolf, not wishing to
incriminate his friend further, knocked quietly at his back door. Within seconds, it seemed, it opened. A young maid let them in, and in the hallway, Hans himself met them, hands outstretched. “I alerted Helga to your coming,” he stated.

  Wolf, pressing the strong, good hands, could only murmur, “It was dangerous, Hans. Terribly dangerous to go out on a limb for some Jews. By the way—how did you know where we were being held?”

  “I knew you had to be somewhere. To determine exactly where only required a certain persistency and diligence. No genius, I’m afraid.” Dropping his tone, he added: “The girl’s okay. But you’ll have to live in the wine cellar for a few days until I can make arrangements to get you out. Every day, it seems, I get some unexpected visitors . . . checking to see if I’m up to something they could pounce on to deport me. My name is too old, too well-known for them to send me away for something other than high treason—and so they’re hoping to indict me for that, if they can catch me.”

  “Why don’t you leave the country?” Wolf asked. “Your parents aren’t alive . . . you have no ties.” His own eyes welled up with tears, remembering Isaac.

  Hans touched his shoulder, sympathetically. “We’ll do all we can to find him,” he assured them. “But I do have ties. To my country. I’m not going to allow Hitler to destroy Austria. I have to stay—if for no other reason than to help the Jewish underground.”

  He led the way to a small, recessed staircase, and Wolf held his mother up so that she could go down. After her bout with pneumonia, the events of the past forty-eight hours had reduced her to a weak, wobbly state, and her cheeks were slack, her eyes glazed, her chin trembling. Downstairs were three enormous cellars, very cold and damp, and entirely lined with bottles of exquisite vintage wines. Mina started to weep, against her son’s shoulder.

  Against one of the walls of the last cellar, two cots had been placed. A small oak table stood between them, laden with fruits forbidden to the Jews. “I’ll raise the temperature of the whole house,” Hans told them. “That should help. And I’ll come down whenever possible.”

  “No one will look for us here?” Mina asked, her voice hollow with fear.

  “Not at this point. None of my visitors has come this far. The house is very quiet, and I appear to lead a most uneventful existence. And of course, this is the first time I shall be hiding anyone.” He added, grimly: “But I’m sure not the last.”

  Mina touched his sleeve, imploringly. “Please, Hans. I can’t leave . . .without Isaac. And if ...the worst has happened, then I don’t want to continue living. We’ve been together all our adult lives. I can’t survive without him.”

  In the cavernous cellar, her voice rang out, echoing her heart. Hans only said: “My dear Mina, I’ll do what I can. You know I will. But you must do something for me, too. You must listen to me, and when I have completed the preparations for your departure, you must go. Isaac will follow you. I’ll make myself responsible to you on this matter.”

  “Do you suppose we’ll be able to get out legally?” Wolf asked.

  “I don’t think so. Since Hitler’s seizure of Austria, the friendly countries have been deluged with Jewish refugees. Australia and the United States are refusing to accept more than five thousand. Brazil, just a few thousand. Britain and France will only take children. And the Reich is allowing each Jew to take with him ten deutsche marks; that’s two hundred French francs.”

  “Maryse’s waiting for us in Paris,” Wolf murmured softly. His chest felt tight with a strange lump that wouldn’t dissolve. Mina had sunk down on one of the cots, and lay weeping silently, her body curved like that of a small child.

  Seeming to read his mind, Count Hans von Bertelmann looked into Wolf’s eyes, and said: “You’re going to see them again, my friend. Maryse, and your small Nanni. Thank God that they are safe.

  “I’m not quite sure how we’ll get you out, nor to which country you shall have to be sent. But get you out we will. And you’ll be safe, like Maryse and Nanni, and able to join up with them somewhere.”

  Long after he had departed, Wolf kept hearing Hans’s word, somewhere. It rang cold and indefinite, chilling him infinitely more than the temperature of the cellar. But for the moment, he and his mother were safe. That was all that counted.

  For Wolfgang Steiner realized that if the Reich were to flourish, it could do so only over the slaughtered corpses of the Jewish people. They had escaped, this time, because the Nazis had gone easy on them, releasing them for a fortune in gold. He was certain, then, that such had not been his father’s good fortune. Isaac had been one of the first casualties of the Nazi ordeal. Just as the night of November 9, baptized the Night of Broken Crystal in memory of all the broken glass shattered throughout the cities of the Reich, symbolized only the beginning.

  But he would have to keep these thoughts to himself, if he expected his mother not to fall apart.

  Chapter 18

  Throughout November and December, Maryse Steiner waited for her husband. A flow of legal and illegal Jewish refugees was pouring into Paris. Raïssa Sudarskaya burst in on Claire, to beg for clothes for an old lady who had arrived with only her nightgown on her back. The refugees, who had been professionals of standing in Germany and Austria, were arriving in droves, two hundred francs in their pockets, or none at all if they had been smuggled out. The Night of Broken Crystal had left no hope of justice under Hitler, and so the Jews who came, as beggars, were glad just to have escaped intact. Many had left members of their family in concentration camps. This term had come to signal terror in every German-speaking Jew.

  They came, telling tales of such ghastly horror that those who listened felt their tears brimming over, and hackles rising on their skin. Only Maryse’s face stayed carved in perfect, clear lines of immutable hardness. She listened, but she did not weep. She had pushed out the immediacy of her pain and thought only of Wolf’s agony, and of his parents. For him, she had to stay whole; and for him, she had to contain her own anguish. She simply waited for him. He’d promised to come to her, and she knew he would. But in the meantime, she didn’t sleep, and hardly tasted the food that Claire insisted she order. Every minute of every day, she sat, taut and expectant, waiting for word of Wolf. She didn’t even know where he might be, at this point. But she prayed for his safety, for the preservation of his life. This was the only meaning to her own existence: to know he had survived.

  And so the new year came, wrapped in a cloud of unknowing. Lily wondered how Maryse could stand it. They never spoke out loud about their fears and hopes. But every time word came about a man who might have been Wolf, or of two older people who might have been Mina and Isaac, Maryse’s eyes would light up with intensity, and she would lean forward, hoping. Only to have her hopes dashed down by the discovery that it hadn’t been her husband or his parents, but somebody else’s husband, somebody else’s parents.

  Holding Nanni in her arms one evening, Kira said, a strange, faraway intonation in her young voice: “I know how hard it is to be without your Papa. But at least, when you go to sleep, you know that wherever he is, he loves you. My father’s gone, just like yours, and we don’t know where he is. But he left because he didn’t love us enough—because we weren’t that important to him.”

  She was thirteen, already five feet three inches tall, with hard young breasts that pushed through her school’s uniform, and the long legs of a ballerina. Many times, strangers had thought she was sixteen. But the look of pure hurt on her triangular face was the look of a wounded child. She had crossed a threshold, from adoring daughter to rejected child, from still hoping to resigned. Nicky heard and saw her, and the look he gave her was one of sheer empathy. Now she could understand where he had been for the last year, and stop condemning him for not keeping the fires burning.

  They played with the Rublon children, Pierre and Jacqueline. They took Nanni for walks, and exclaimed over birthday presents. They were still children, but Lily often wondered for how long. Nicky, in particular, had skipped that won
derful, carefree part of childhood that she’d wanted for him; at fourteen, he was the best student in his ninth form. He was taller than his mother, topping her at five feet eleven inches; he shaved, although not every day. And his voice had deepened, acquiring a resonance that made her think, at the oddest moments, of Misha. This boy who had never resembled his father at all, now had his rich, Russian voice, with its enchanting, melodic, powerful timbre. She could close her eyes and hear her son, and think again of the days when Misha had courted her, reliving those halcyon days, much better forgotten, with poignant clarity. For it was infinitely easier not to see one’s own unhappiness when one didn’t compare it to a better life.

  At the end of January 1939, Barcelona fell to General Francisco Franco’s Fascist troops. Daladier halfheartedly permitted about half a million Spanish refugees to flood into France. By the end of February, those who had sought refuge in the city of Perpignan had behaved in such a despicable fashion that the damages to the host city had risen to two million francs. Wood placed at their disposal for the construction of barracks had been set afire, and the pumps that had been set up were now plugged up and impossible to use. But it looked as if the war was winding down to a close, and many of the renegades were returning home. How different from the German and Austrian Jews, who would never see their homeland again!

  On March 2, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who had been Pope Pius XI’s secretary of state, was elected in a single day to become the new Pope Pius XII. Lily felt an old stirring of excitement. The Catholic Church, with its myriad traditions that dated back far beyond the Middle Ages, could still grip her soul. On the tenth, she listened to a broadcast of his five-hour consecration; forty thousand of the faithful had crowded into the cathedral to watch, and he came out for the coronation, that the many more who were gathered outside might witness this holiest of moments. She leaned against the little radio, captivated, and remembered that when she’d been sixteen, she had thought, with some seriousness, of entering a convent. Now she was thirty-three, at the midpoint of her life, and hadn’t been to church in eleven years.