The Keeper of the Walls Page 54

  “Just make sure there’s no spilled garbage, and that this old lady doesn’t start a fire in the kitchen, as some old folks do, burning their cereal.” And she closed the door.

  * * *

  Maryse Steiner had gone each Wednesday to Compiègne, by train, bringing fruit and vegetables that she’d purchased on the black market, for Wolf. But the German guards refused to let her see the prisoner. There was a strict rule by which no one was permitted an interview with the inmates, and in spite of her charming smiles, and of the crisp bills that she unfailingly slipped to the security SS officer, she was repeatedly turned away.

  Yet, undaunted, she would repeat her trip, leaving love letters from herself and Nanni for her husband. Once, in the fall of 1941, she had been allowed to glimpse Wolf from a distance, across glass paneling and barbed wire. She’d told the guard that her husband’s mother had passed away, and that she wished to relay this news to him personally. For five hundred francs, a note had been taken to Wolf, and he was brought one hundred yards away.

  She’d seen him, but wondered if he had seen her. He’d been between two guards, his shoulders hunched, his hair considerably thinned out, his face strangely jaundiced and bony. Always, Wolf had been slightly plump, with the face of a good child; and to see him now, looking far more than his forty-nine years, and weighing forty pounds less than when the Gestapo had taken him away, had shocked Maryse so profoundly that she’d fallen back on her wooden chair, unable to force a smile to her lips.

  His mother had died, and the guards had not allowed him to ask about her, nor to seek comfort for the first time in six months simply by being able to hold his wife’s hands in his own. And so Maryse had gone home, and hadn’t seen him since. Now it was already August, and more than fifteen months had passed since his incarceration at the detention camp.

  When Maryse arrived that Wednesday, with her basket of goods, the SS officer informed her that Dr. Steiner would be leaving, along with all the other foreign attorneys, for a camp in Poland. “Resettlement,” he called it; she knew it to be deportation. She felt glued to the ground, unable to move. “They’ll be leaving the fifteenth of this month, at seven in the morning,” he told her. “If you wish to see him, come with the other wives to the Compiègne station.”

  “Will they let us talk to our husbands?”

  “I doubt it. But at least you’ll see him.”

  Maryse fumbled in her purse, her fingers icy as she slipped the twenty-franc note into the officer’s uniform pocket. “I just wish to know one thing,” she pleaded, her voice vibrant with despair. “Is my husband well?”

  The German touched his mustache, rubbed his chin. “Your husband is the psychiatrist, isn’t he? From Vienna?”

  “That’s right.” She supposed that among the hundreds of prisoners, few were doctors as well as lawyers.

  “He’s been ill. He’s had an ulcer, and some form of colitis. But be there on the fifteenth, if you want to see for yourself.”

  Maryse returned in tears, unable to function. Claire put her to bed and pressed cold, wet washcloths to her forehead, holding her like a daughter. Maryse had never been alone. All her childhood, her parents had surrounded her with warmth, love, and support. Then it had been Wolf’s turn. And these past fifteen months, waiting for him to finally be released, had eroded her core of resistance, which had never been strong, like Lily’s or Claire’s. And now she’d learned that she’d been living for a dream that was the opposite of reality: Wolf, instead of coming home, whole and complete, was about to be deported, his digestive system already destroyed.

  On the night of the fourteenth, Lily came to Paris and spent the night in Claire’s guest room, in Maryse’s bed, hugging her as the tears emptied silently out of her friend. And Lily thought with gratitude that Mark had left France safe and sound, and that Misha was in New York, with their son. She was alone with Kira, but none of the men she had loved was in the hands of the Nazis. She hugged Maryse, feeling a twin fear for the man she had depended on and loved, and whom she now felt helpless to rescue.

  At five the next morning, they arose, dressed, and fed a quick breakfast to Nanni. At twelve years of age, she had become a handsome girl with a quick mind and was a comforting, steady presence for her mother. She was old enough, Lily had felt—making all the decisions for a distraught Maryse—to see her father off, for God only knew how long.

  At the train station in Compiègne, at six thirty, several hundred women and children were parked behind a grillwork from which the platform of the special German train could be observed. Lily, taller than most, determinedly edged her way through the crowd, to find them a place toward the front, from which the diminutive Maryse would be visible. She pushed her friend in front of her, holding on to Nanni’s hand as she forged them a path.

  At the grillwork, she turned to Maryse. “No tears,” she declared. “He has to see that you’re strong, for him. You must stand on your tiptoes, and smile, and wave. It’s the only farewell he’s going to get.”

  Maryse nodded, almost catatonic. Lily pressed against the fence, straining to see. But it was not until a quarter to seven that noises were heard, and that SS officers marshaled forward these attorneys who had been imprisoned fifteen months. Most of them were thin, pale, and tripped as they were pushed onto the platform by their guards. “My God,” Maryse whispered.

  The other women were calling out names, and husbands were turning to catch a final glimpse of a beloved face. The sudden note of hope on these resigned features sent a thrill of compassion through Lily. These men, herded like sheep, deprived of their humanity, would remember a smile and a shouted farewell all during their voyage.

  “Aunt Lily,” Nanni said quietly. A skeleton of a man, his head completely bald, was being shoved forward by a bayonet, held in the arms of a rigid SS lieutenant. Lily’s instinctive intake of breath was filled with horror, and she had a moment of difficulty before being able to grasp Maryse’s shoulders. “Now, Mari,” she whispered.

  Tears, though forbidden, were streaming from Maryse’s eyes. Lily pushed her against the grillwork, and yelled out: “Wolf! Wolf! Look at us, for God’s sake!”

  Nanni, sobbing, was screaming too: “Papa! Papa!”

  For a moment, it seemed as though the human skeleton, who looked a hundred years old, was searching through the crowd. But the eyes were vacant, glazed. And then he fell. Many others had tripped, but this man, Wolfgang Steiner, merely keeled over like a door falling off its hinges. Maryse screamed. But the man on the platform remained down, and it was only after all the others, every last one, had been shepherded inside the ominous, dark railway cars that two SS officers returned to the fallen human vestige, and seized him under the arms and at the ankles. He was the last to be thrown aboard. Then the Germans descended, and the engine sounded, and the cars departed, like consecutive hearses.

  “I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help myself.” Maryse was sobbing, holding on to Lily with the tenacity of a drowning woman to her savior.

  “It’s all right,” her friend replied, her voice low and strangely devoid of tonality. “He wouldn’t have seen you, just as he didn’t hear Nanni and me.”

  With a sudden hope painted on her small face, Maryse asked: “Do you think he’ll die on the way . . . today?”

  Nanni cried out: “ Mama! How can you say this?”

  “Because,” Maryse replied, all at once calm and forceful. “If he dies, and I pray he does, then he won’t have to suffer through the rest!” She turned to Lily, and asked, her voice hard but steady: “Will you sit shiva with us? It’s only supposed to be the family, but you were so close to him! And will Jacques say the kaddish for him?”

  “Papa’s still alive,” Nanni countered, outraged.

  Lily put an arm around both their shoulders, and stated: “We’ll pick up Jacques, and Mama, and go to the synagogue today . . . spies or no spies. And Rabbi Weill will lead the prayers.”

  * * *

  New York, this fall of 1942, was a
strangely populated metropolis, for all the young men had gone to war, and the immigrants thronged the streets and the coffee shops. Nicky looked one last time at his reflection in the mirror, and scrutinized the shadow of the beard he had just finished shaving around his jawline and chin, and the trim brown mustache, which he’d let grow to give himself more countenance, at seventeen. He felt pleased with the poise of his face ...just the right poise for an encounter with his father.

  Nicky pulled on the lapels of his square-shouldered blazer, and checked to see if his round-toed shoes were well polished, and his cuffless slacks pressed on the bias. Then he glanced around the small apartment that he shared with Charley Blum, a young Belgian Jew whom he had met shortly after his arrival, nine months ago. Charley was handsome, secure, and a ladies’ man, which meant that the dapper apartment in the Oliver Cromwell Building, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, was often Nicky’s alone. Charley was older and more sophisticated, and, had he been less honest and a “good guy,” Nicky would have compared him to a younger version of his father. But he liked his roommate too much to hazard this comparison.

  The beds were made, the dishes stacked in the strainer on the small kitchen counter. Nicky closed the front door and locked it, went down the elevator, and walked out into a hazy sunshine.

  He liked this teeming monster of a city, so different from his native Paris that at first he had felt sure that he would hate it here. Paris was cultivated, elegant, and old; New York was unchecked, young, and bursting with energy. Nicky had been surprised at how fast he had grown to enjoy it, to find its challenge exactly what he needed.

  And he also didn’t miss his schooling. As soon as he’d arrived, Misha had declared that he would enroll him in a top Ivy League men’s college in the fall, giving him a semester at the French Lycée to pass his bac. Nicky had felt a quick anger rising. He hadn’t wanted Misha’s help, hadn’t wanted the advantages that his father could easily have offered him. For Prince Mikhail Brasilov, now a United States citizen, had passed the New York bar examination and now practiced law in a small but elegant office on Wall Street. The profession he had prepared for but never exercised, in his early youth, had, ironically, opened up for him in this new country. And, slowly but surely, the glamour of his name as well as his quick, adaptable mind, had generated a small but steady clientele.

  Nicky stepped onto a bus, and let the scenes change as the driver took them from 72nd Street to 56th. There, he stepped down, and took the crosstown bus a short way to Fifth Avenue. Even with wartime shortages, this most elegant part of New York still reeked of an unheard of luxury, comparable, Nicky thought, only to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré or the Rue Royale, in Paris. One day, he thought, Kira and my mother will come, and I shall put them up at the Plaza, or the St. Regis.

  It was at the St. Regis Hotel, on Fifth Avenue, that he was due to meet his father. Any coffee shop or Horn & Hardart self-service cafeteria would have been fine, Nicky thought—but Misha was still trying to impress his son with his success, and woo him back with offers of the same, if the young man reentered the fold. But Nicky would never do that. He would make his own success, and he felt certain that he would do so.

  His first disappointment had been with the Free French army, which had rejected him because of the discovery of a small heart murmur. Later, the United States Army Recruiting Office had sent him away with a 4-F classification, for the same reason. He knew that his father had been relieved; but he had wished to fight, and had felt humiliated at this double rejection. He hadn’t come to New York to be a coward.

  He and Charley had talked, when they’d first met, at a party. With both Belgium and the Netherlands out of commission, a great need now existed in New York for diamond cutters. They had decided to become partners, twenty-year-old Blum and seventeen-year-old Nicky, and they had each paid three hundred dollars to an old timer on 42nd Street, to teach them the business. Nicky had been forced to accept at least this much financial aid from his father. They had gone to work in a large gem-cutting workshop for three months, then had felt confident to open their own, tiny shop—again, with a minimum of financial help from Mikhail Brasilov.

  But now, earning the incredible amount of two hundred to two hundred twenty-five dollars a week, Nicky had a check in his pocket to reimburse part of this debt. He had called Misha to arrange the encounter, and Misha had told him to meet him for breakfast at the main dining room of the stately old hotel.

  Nicky had mixed emotions about this meeting. It would be the first time he and his father would actually share a meal together since his first days in the United States. Until now, the young man had refused to have the slightest social contact with Misha. They’d met in his father’s office, because Nicky hadn’t wanted any intimacy to permeate their relationship. He’d pushed Misha out of his thoughts, not wanting to feel anything but the old anger, the old hatred that had replaced the love and trust he had felt as a boy for this magnetic, controversial man who was his parent. But now, too, there was the grim satisfaction of one-upmanship: he’d be meeting Misha to pay his debt, and to show him, once and for all, how unimportant he had become in his grown son’s existence. It was a victory of sorts, and one that the young man was not above savoring, like an old battle scar to prove that the old soldier had fought in, and survived, the war.

  His father, a snap-brim felt hat on his gray head, walked in two minutes after Nicky, and waved, his leonine face suddenly creased in smiles. Nicky stood up, formally, and let the older man embrace him. He could sense a slight, though numb, pain, feeling the strong arms, and the scent of his father’s cologne. “You look good, Nicolas,” Misha said.

  The waiter came to bring menus. Nicky waited, then answered: “Thank you, Father.”

  Misha’s suit of Saxony tweed was cut perfectly over a Brooks Brothers shirt, and a silk tie adorned its front. For some reason, this latest business fashion looked remarkably good on the tall, broad Russian, and Nicky felt a familiar, gnawing resentment. His father’s success irked him, angered him, as he thought of Lily and Kira standing in line at five each morning, in Paris.

  They ordered, and made polite conversation until their steaming scrambled eggs and sausage were delivered with a flourish, with freshly pressed orange juice and aromatic coffee. Nicky was ashamed, eating this way during a war. But he was also very hungry. Neither he nor Charley was a good cook, and the places where they went for dinner were usually inexpensive and served ersatz, tasteless meals. This was an unaccustomed treat.

  It was only over his second coffee that Nicky withdrew his billfold, and laid the thousand-dollar check in front of his father. “I told you I’d have it before the New Year,’ he said proudly.

  “And I told you, Nicky, that it wasn’t necessary ever to repay me.”

  An awkwardness permeated the air between them. “I’m not a charity case,” the young man said tightly, only too well aware that he was mouthing the worst of clichés, like a bombastic teenager.

  “I’m your father.” Misha’s face, his still gleaming green eyes expressive and magnetic, appeared to wince, and, leaning forward, he said, gently: “I know why you hate me. But adults should learn to forgive their parents, Nicky. If you want to be a man, then you must forgive like one, too.”

  “Like Jesus Christ?” Nicky snapped, sarcastically. How he detested himself for falling into the trap, and becoming mean and churlish, like a peckish boy! But where Misha was concerned, a raw nerve always lay at the edge of his skin, ready to be touched off.

  “Why not? Have you anything against Him, son?”

  Nicky breathed in, and touched his mustache. “I’m not a Christian, Father, and you know it,” he said at length.

  If Misha felt the blow, his face did not reveal it. “So you’ve been telling me over and over again, these past nine months,” he replied. “But you know I didn’t know Lily was half Jewish. I had to learn it from you, when you came here.” Then, regarding his son, he forced himself to add: “At your age, I had chosen m
y way. I wouldn’t try to influence you.”

  “You wouldn’t succeed! I might only have toyed with Judaism, had it not been for this war! But the Occupation forced me to define my choice. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kira, too, didn’t adopt our grandmother’s religion.”

  He had planned to shock his father with his last words. And this time, Misha did drawback, his face a silent wound. “You left us,” Nicky murmured, his voice insistent and low, like a gentle yet pressing hum. “And when you left us, the three of us had to grow up ... my mother, too. We each made our own way.”

  Misha closed his eyes and bowed his head. Then, looking once more at his son, he said, fervently: “I’ve told you how my letters were returned, how I tried to find out where you had moved to. More than anything, I hoped to get you all out here, away from the carnage. I wanted us to be together again.”

  “Madame Dalbret always knew where we were.”

  “But my letters were returned! You know how Vichy has seen fit to interfere with all mail. You’re not being fair, Nicky. What else could I have done? Besides,” he added, “Varvara had her own skin to save. I couldn’t have asked her for more than what she did.”

  Nicky’s anger surfaced again. “She helped plenty. But if you’d never left in the first place . . . we’d have stayed a family, and my mother and sister would be safe and protected! You thought only of your own wounded pride, and left Mother the bad debts and hardly any means of support.”

  “Don’t you suppose I had the money to send her? But I couldn’t locate you! And you know yourself that we can’t send money to Occupied France!”

  Nicky read the desperation on his father’s face. Suddenly, he felt very young and helpless. “Look,” he declared, “leave Mother and Kira to me from now on. Kira’s in love with Pierre Rublon, my best friend . . . and if he survives this war, I’m sure they’ll get married. But you may as well forget about Mama. She’s your wife in name only. Your claims to her ended the day you walked out, without so much as a farewell. I want Mama to come, too: but to be with me ... and with the others here, who love her.”