By four P.M.— the last bit of winter light outside—Grumblethorpe glowed brightly in each room from dozens of candles, the parlor, kitchen, and nursery had been nicely warmed by the glowing kerosene heaters, and Vincent had been working for three hours digging out the tunnel and transporting the dirt to a far corner of the backyard under a massive ginkgo tree. It was dirty, difficult, and possibly dangerous work, but it was good for Vincent to work on such a task. Some of his pent-up fury found release in these labors. I had known that Vincent was very strong— much stronger than his lean body and slumped posture would ever suggest— but now I discovered the true extent of his wiry strength and almost demonic energy. He almost doubled the length of the tunnel in that first afternoon of digging.
I did not sleep at Grumblethorpe, not that first night, but as we were snuffling the candles and shutting off the heaters in preparation to leave, I went alone to the nursery and stood there with only a single candle burning, the flame reflected in the button eyes of the rag dolls and the glass eyes of the life-size boy.
The whispers were louder now. I could sense the gratitude in the tone if not the actual words. They were wishing me goodwill— and bidding me to return.
Vincent removed half a ton of dirt on Tuesday, the day before Christmas Eve. After clearing another twelve feet of passage we found that much of the remaining tunnel was intact except for small amounts of loose rock and dirt that had collapsed over the past two centuries. On Wednesday morning he unblocked most of the exit just short of the alley that bordered the yards and the backs of row houses on the block behind us. He set boards over the exit and returned to Grumblethorpe. Vincent was a sight; filthy, the old clothes he had worn for the work torn and muddy, his long hair untied and hanging in filthy strands over a streaked face and staring eyes. I had only one large thermos of water with me that day at Grumblethorpe; I had Vincent strip and sit near the heater in the kitchen while I walked back to Anne’s house to clean his clothes in her washer and dryer.
Anne had been working all afternoon on a special Christmas Eve meal. The streets were dark and almost empty. A single trolley rumbled past, its yellow interior lights glowing warmly. It was beginning to snow.
Thus it was that I found myself walking alone, undefended. Normally I would never have walked even a single city block without the company of a well-conditioned companion, but the day’s work at Grumblethorpe and a strange tone of warning in the nursery’s whispers had preoccupied me, made me careless. Also, I was thinking about Christmas.
Christmas always had been important for me. I remembered the large tree and even larger dinner we would have when I was a child. My father would carve the turkey; it had been my job to hand out small presents to the servants. I remember planning for weeks ahead of time the exact wording of the brief sentences of appreciation to the staff of mostly older colored men and women. I would praise most of them, gently chastise a few for lack of diligence through a careful omission of key phrases. The finest presents and warmest words were invariably saved for Auntie Harriet, the aging, bosomy old woman who had nursed me and raised me. Harriet had been born a slave.
It was interesting how, years later in Vienna, Nina, Willi, and I could each trace such common elements of our childhood as kindness to servants. Even in Vienna, Christmas had been an important time for us. I remember the winter of 1928, sleigh rides along the Danube and a huge banquet at Willi’s rented villa south of the city. It is only in recent years that I have not celebrated Christmas as thoroughly as I would like. Nina and I had been discussing the sad secularization of the Christmas spirit just two weeks earlier at our last Reunion. People do not know what Christianity means anymore.
There were eight boys, all colored. I do not know how old they were. They were all taller than me; three or four of them had black fuzz above their large upper lips. They seemed to be all noise and elbows and knees and raucous obscenities as they came around the corner of Bringhurst Street onto Germantown Avenue and directly into my path. One of them carried a large radio that blared toneless noise.
I looked up, startled, still distracted by my thoughts about Christmas and absent friends. Still not thinking, I paused, waiting for them to step off the curb, out of my way. Perhaps it was something in my face or proud posture, something too unlike the cringing deference whites habitually assume in Negro sections of northern cities, that caused one to notice me.
“What the fuck you lookin’ at, lady?” asked a tall boy with a red cap. His face held all of the gap-toothed denseness and contempt bred into his race by centuries of tribal ignorance.
“I am waiting for you boys to move aside and let a lady pass,” I said. I spoke softly, politely. Normally I would have said nothing, but I had been thinking of other things.
“Boys!” said the one in the red cap. “Who the fuck you calling boys?” The others gathered around me in a half circle. I stared at a point above their heads.
“Hey, who the fuck you think you are?” asked a fat one in a grimy gray parka.
I said nothing. “Come on,” said a shorter but less crude-looking boy. He had blue eyes. “Let’s go, man.”
They started to turn away, but the Negro in the red cap had to make a final point. “Watch who you be tellin’ to get out your way, old broad,” he said and made as if to prod me on the chest or shoulder.
I stepped back quickly to avoid being touched. My heel caught in a crack in the sidewalk and I lost my balance, flailed my arms, and sat down heavily in the area of snow and dog excrement between sidewalk and street. Most of the Negroes roared in laughter.
The shorter boy with blue eyes hushed them with a wave of his hand and stepped forward. “You OK, lady?” He held out his hand as if to help me up.
I stared, ignoring his hand. After a second he shrugged and led the others off down the street. Their vile music echoed off storefronts and silent shops.
I remained sitting there until the eight of them were out of sight and then I tried to stand, gave it up, and turned to crawl on my hands and knees until I reached a parking meter that I could use to pull myself to my feet. For some time I stood there leaning on the meter and shaking. Occasionally a car would pass— perhaps someone hurrying home on Christmas Eve— and tires would throw slush at me. Once two heavy young Negro women hurried by, chattering to each other in plantation voices. No one stopped to help me.
I was still shaking by the time I arrived at Anne’s house. Later I realized that I could easily have had her come out to help me, but at the time I was not thinking clearly. The cold wind had caused tears to form, fall, and freeze on my cheeks.
Anne immediately drew a hot bath for me, helped me out of my sodden dress, and laid out a dry change of clothes while I bathed.
It was nine P.M. by the time I ate— alone while Anne sat in the next room— and by the time I had finished the dessert, cherry pie, I knew precisely what must be done.
I brought my nightgown and necessary things. I had Anne bring a bed-roll for herself, a change of clothing for Vincent, some extra food and drink, and the pistol I had borrowed from the Atlanta cabdriver.
The walk back to Grumblethorpe was brief and uneventful. It was snowing heavily now. I looked away from the place where I had fallen.
Vincent was sitting where I had left him. He dressed and ate ravenously. I was not worried about Vincent missing a few meals, but he had been burning thousands of calories over the past two days of digging and I wanted him to replenish his energy. He ate like an animal. Vincent’s hands, arms, face, and hair were still filthy, caked and streaked with red mud, and the visual and auditory effect of his feeding was truly animal-like.
After eating, Vincent set to work with the whetstone, sharpening both the scythe and one of the spades Anne had bought at a hardware store on Chelten Avenue two days before.
It was almost midnight when I went upstairs to bed in the nursery. I closed the door and changed into my nightgown. The dusty, bright glass eyes of the boy-mannequin watched me in the flickering ca
ndlelight. Anne sat downstairs in the parlor, watching the front door, content, smiling slightly, the loaded .38 caliber pistol comfortable in her aproned lap.
Vincent left through the tunnel. Mud and moisture further streaked his face and hair as he dragged the scythe and spade through the black passage. I closed my eyes and saw clearly the snow falling past a dim alley light as he emerged near the garage, dragged the long implements out, and scuttled off down the alley.
The air smelled clean and cold. I could feel Vincent’s heart pounding strong and sure, feel the jungle inside his mind whip and ripple as if to a strong wind as the adrenaline surged through his system. I felt the muscles around my own mouth move in sympathetic response as I realized that Vincent was grinning widely, very widely, in a feral snarl.
We moved quickly down an alley, paused at the entrance to a slum street of blackened row houses, and ran along the south side where the deepest shadows lay. We paused and I had Vincent raise his head in the direction the eight had disappeared. I could feel Vincent’s nostrils flare as he sniffed the night air for the scent of Negroes.
It was snowing very hard now. The night was still except for the distant peal of churchbells announcing the birth of our Savior. Vincent lowered his head, raised spade and scythe to his shoulder, and scuttled off into the blackness of an alley.
Upstairs in Grumblethorpe I smiled, turned my face to the nursery wall, and was vaguely aware of the sibilant rush of whispers rising around me like the sound of an inrushing sea.
NINETEEN
Washington, D.C.
Saturday, Dec. 20, 1980
You know nothing about the true nature of violence,” the thing that once had been Francis Harrington said to Saul Laski.
They were walking east along the mall, toward the Capitol. Cold shafts of evening sunlight illuminated white granite buildings and white wisps of vapor from bus and car exhausts. A few pigeons hopped gingerly near empty benches.
Saul felt tremors in his stomach muscles and upper thighs and he knew it was not just reaction to the cold. A great excitement had seized him as they had left the National Art Gallery. After all these years.
“You fashion yourself an expert on violence,” said Harrington in German, a language Saul had never heard the boy speak, “but you know nothing of it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Saul in English. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. His head was constantly moving, looking at a man coming out of the East Building of the National Gallery, squinting at a lone figure on a distant park bench, trying to see through the polarized windshield of a slowly moving limousine. Where are you, Oberst? The thought that the Nazi colonel might be nearby made the muscles in Saul’s diaphragm constrict.
“You treat violence as an aberration,” Harrington continued in flawless German, “when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.”
Saul forced himself to pay attention to the conversation. He must draw the Oberst out . . . find some way to free Francis from the old man’s control . . . find the Oberst himself. “That’s nonsense,” said Saul. “It’s a common failing, but it is no more the essence of the human condition than is disease. We are eradicating diseases like polio and smallpox. We can eradicate violence in human affairs.” Saul had slipped into his professional tone. Where are you, Oberst?
Harrington laughed. It was an old man’s laugh, jerky, full of phlegm. Saul started at the young man next to him and shivered. He had the terrible thought that Francis’s face— short reddish hair, freckles on high cheekbones— looked like a mask of flesh drawn down across another man’s skull. Harrington’s body under the long raincoat looked strangely blocky, as if the boy had put on rolls of fat or was wearing multiple layers of sweaters.
“You can no more eradicate violence than you could eradicate love or hate or laughter,” said Willi von Borchert’s voice from Francis Harrington’s mouth. “The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.”
“Nonsense,” said Saul. “Nonsense?” repeated Harrington. They had crossed Madison Drive onto the mall below the Capitol Reflecting Pool. Now Harrington sat down on a park bench facing Third Street. Saul did also, turning to scan every face in sight. There were not many. None looked like the Oberst.
“My dear Jew,” said Harrington, “look at Israel.”
“What?” Saul swiveled to look at Francis. It was not the same man he had known. “What do you mean?”
“Your dear, adopted country is famed for its prowess at delivering violence to its enemies,” said Harrington. “Its philosophy is ‘An eye for an eye,’ its policy one of sure retribution, its pride is at the efficiency of its army and air force.”
“Israel defends itself,” said Saul. The surreal quality of this discussion made his head spin. Above them, the dome of the Capitol caught the last rays of light.
Harrington laughed again. “Ah yes, my faithful pawn. Violence in the name of defense is always more palatable. Thus the Wehrmacht.” He stressed the Wehr— defense. “Israel has enemies, nicht wahr? But so did the Third Reich. And not the least of those enemies were the very vermin that postured as helpless victims when they strove to destroy the Reich and now posture as heroes as they wreak violence on the Palestinians.”
Saul did not respond to this. The Oberst’s anti-Semitism was a childish provocation. “What do you want?” Saul asked quietly.
Harrington raised his eyebrows. “What is wrong with looking up an old acquaintance to have an interesting conversation?” he said in English.
“How did you find me?”
Harrington shrugged. “I would say that you found me,” he said in a strange, throaty rumble that was not Francis Harrington’s voice. “Imagine my surprise when my dear pawn arrives in Charleston. My young Wandering Jew is very far from Chelmno.”
Saul began to ask, How did you know me? but stopped. Those hours almost forty years ago when the two of them had shared Saul’s body had created a foul intimacy more long-lasting than words could convey. Saul knew that he would recognize the Oberst at once— had recognized him— in spite of the erosion of time. Instead, Saul asked, “You followed me from Charleston?”
Harrington smiled. “It would have given me great plea sure to hear one of your lectures at Columbia. Perhaps we could have debated the ethics of the Third Reich.”
“Perhaps,” said Saul. “And perhaps we could debate the relative sanity of a rabid dog. Still, there is only one solution to such an illness. Shoot the dog.”
“Ah yesss,” hissed Harrington. “The final solution in yet another form. You Jews were never a subtle race.”
Saul shivered. Behind the calm voice and the human puppet was a man who had directly murdered scores— perhaps thousands— of human beings. The only possible reason Saul could think of that the Oberst would have sought him out, followed him from Charleston, was to kill him. Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert, a.k.a. William Borden, had gone to great efforts to convince the world that he was dead. There was no reason to reveal himself to perhaps the only person in the world who knew his identity unless it was the final play of a cat and mouse game. Saul felt deeper in his pocket and closed his hand around a roll of quarters he kept there. It was the only weapon he had carried since the Forest of the Owls in Poland, thirty-six years ago.
If he did manage to knock Francis out— a much harder feat than suggested by television and the movies, Saul knew— what to do then? Run. But what would keep the Oberst from entering his mind? Saul shuddered at the thought of experiencing that mindrape again. He would not have to be the victim of an assault, merely another statistic, an absentminded professor who had wandered into busy Washington traffic just after dusk . . .
He would not leave Francis behind. Saul closed his fist around the quarters, began slowly withdrawing his hand. He did not know if the boy could be brought back— one look at the mask of a face in front of him made Saul think he could not— but he knew he must
try. How does one transport an unconscious body along the mall for a block and a half to one’s rented car? Knowing Washington, Saul suspected that it had been done at one time or another. He decided that he would leave the boy on the bench, make a dash for the car, and drive quickly to Third Street, stop at the curb, and throw the tall young man’s body in the backseat.
Saul could think of nothing he could do to protect himself from being taken over by the Oberst. It did not matter. He casually removed the fist with the roll of quarters from his pocket, blocking the sight of it by the position of his body.
“I want you to meet someone,” said Harrington. “What?” Saul’s heart was pounding so fiercely that he could barely speak.
“I have someone I want you to meet,” repeated the Oberst, having Harrington stand up. “I think you will be interested in meeting him.”
Saul sat where he was. His arm vibrated with the tension of his clenched fist.
“Are you coming, Jew?” The German words and tone were almost identical to those the Oberst had used in the Chelmno barracks thirty-eight years before.
“Yes,” said Saul and rose, put his hands in his coat pockets, and followed Francis Harrington into the sudden winter darkness.
It was the shortest day of the year. A few hardy tourists waited for buses or hurried for their cars. They walked down Constitution Avenue past the Capitol and stood by the exit to the parking garage to the Senate Office Building. After a few minutes, automatic doors opened and a limousine glided out. Harrington hurried down the ramp and Saul followed, ducking as the metal door slid down. Two guards stood staring at them. One, a red-faced, overweight man, marched their way. “Goddammit, you’re not allowed in here,” he shouted. “Turn around and get out of here before you get your asses arrested.”
“Hey, sorry!” called Harrington, his voice sounding like Francis Harrington’s. “The thing is, you know, we’ve got passes to see Senator Kellog, but the door he said to use is locked and nobody answered when we knocked . . .”