Second Generation (34 page)

"Delighted."

"Will I be able to ask questions? To have more than a few minutes of conversation?"

"Alas, it is not my charm that draws you."

"I am afraid not entirely," Barbara said bluntly. "As you remarked, I am a journalist."

"I shall make your opportunities." He studied her thoughtfully. "May I call you Barbara?"

"Yes."

"Then you will call me Franz, never by that ridiculous name that Lady Pleasance must have informed you of. Barbara, I will call for you then, day after tomorrow, seven o'clock—" He was looking at her blouse and sweater.

"I will not wear my walking shoes," she said, smiling.

He took his leave after lunch, apologizing for the pressing demands his work made on him. It was a line afternoon, with a cool breeze taking the edge off the summer's heat, and Barbara decided to explore the city further. She drifted along without plan or purpose, down Unter den Linden to the Tiergarten, where she watched children playing and listened to the music of a barrel organ, forgetting for a little while where she was and what she was there for. Back at the hotel, she finished a meticulous description of her experience up to this point, had a sandwich and coffee in her room, and then spent the evening working out a series of questions that she would put to whatever leader of the Third Reich Harbin arranged for her to question. At the same time, her thoughts wandered to what she felt was an inevitable moment in the future when Harbin would attempt to make love to her. She was neither innocent enough nor sufficiently unaware of her own attractiveness to doubt that this would happen, and the very thought of it sent cold shivers up and down her spine. Nor could she analyze this response on her part as other than a total response to the existence of Nazi Germany. She had spent two days in a clean, well-run, and in parts very beautiful city. No one had been ungracious to her, and Baron Von Harbin had on every occasion been the soul of courtesy, concern, and impeccable behavior. Barbara was a very independent and self-confident young woman; she knew and accepted this quality in herself; and she also knew that she was very different today from the wide-eyed college student who five years ago had embarked on the Twentieth Century Limited for the journey back to California. But she also knew that since she had arrived in Berlin, there had been an undercurrent of fear in her that she simply could not shake off.

She went to bed without contriving any solution to the Harbin problem, telling herself that when it surfaced, she would deal with it. She awakened early the next morning, discovered that she was ravenously hungry, and ate an enormous breakfast of sausage, eggs, fried potatoes, rolls, and coffee in the hotel dining room. Well, she had eaten almost nothing the day before, bereft of her appetite by the presence of the Baron and then content with a sandwich in her room. She felt more normal now, and, filled with purpose, telling herself, "Devil take the consequences. I said I would do it and I will," she strode along Unter den Linden to Friedrich Wilhelm University. There was nothing wrong, nothing curious, nothing suspicious, in what she was doing. Professor Schmidt had published two books,
Race and Religion
in 1936 and
Aryan Philosophy
in 1937. Neither book was obtainable in Paris, but she knew that
Aryan Philosophy
had been translated and published in New York, and she had read a scathing review of it in the files of the Paris
Tribune.
The reviewer had found Schmidt's attempts to connect the Bhagavad-Gita with Hitler's theories of the master race and with the half-baked theology of Bormann, Rosenberg, and Himmler both childish and tasteless. Barbara's own impression was of a man undertaking an exercise in self-preservation, but this was only a guess, since she had not read the book. However, the book had created sufficient furor for her to be justified, she felt, in interviewing him.

At the office of the university, hidden in a Gothic maw, she found, happily, a young woman who spoke French well enough to explain that Professor Schmidt was not teaching the first summer semester. The young woman thought he could possibly be found in his apartment, which was on a street called Kurfiirstendamm. If Barbara desired to walk, it was about three kilometers, off Unter den Linden onto Hermann Goring Strasse, then onto Potsdamer Strasse, and then it would be on her right. But the Fraiilein, she was told, would be better advised to find a taxicab. -

Barbara decided to walk. It was the only way to really see a city, to get the feel of it, and the day was still young. Past the looming bulk of the Kaiser Schloss, past the gardens and public buildings on Goring Street, past the chancellery, it was like walking through a dream oi iiao the pages of a horror tale, yet it was all perfectly ordinary. Then she was in a street of shops, and there was a shop boarded over, and scrawled on the wooden boarding,
JUDE;
and how very strange and chilling that was, the first indication of the things she had read! She thought to herself, They are so competent and clean. They keep things out of sight.

Kurfiirstendamm was a street of apartment houses. She had an odd sense of familiarity; there were streets exactly like it in Paris. She began to read the numbers, looking for the professor's building.

Then Barbara saw a small crowd on the street in front of her, and a barrier that diverted traffic into a single, narrow line. There were two men in the white uniforms of sanitation workers. They were standing by the barrier. On the sidewalk, a dozen onlookers watched in silence. Out in the street, a group of men and women were sweeping what appeared to be the remains of sewage, the overflow of what Barbara guessed might have been a broken or malfunctioning sewer line. As she approached the group, the strong smell of the sewage increased, and she could see on the street the damp residue of what appeared to be human feces, dark clumps and streaks of unidentifiable refuse that had apparently backed up out of the sewer. About fourteen or fifteen men and women were sweeping the offal into several piles. The men and women were not young. Most of them appeared to be in their fifties and sixties, some older; one woman was white-haired, very old, apparently feeble. They were decently dressed in suits and dresses, and several of the men wore spectacles. If she had met these people in the ordinary course of things, Barbara's impression would have been of a group of professionals and their wives—doctors, lawyers, storekeepers, teachers. Their work was being directed by four men, heavyset men who wore belted raincoats and hats in spite of the early summer weather. These four men shouted commands at the sweepers, pushed them, and snarled at them when their pace slackened. The two sanitation workers stood in silence, as did the onlookers on the sidewalk. Beyond the group, a sanitation truck and two black sedans were parked.

Barbara reached the group and stopped and watched, resisting the urge to avert her eyes and walk past quickly. She was trembling; she felt sickened; yet she could not tear herself away. She had read numerous accounts in the Paris newspapers of Jews summarily pulled out of their homes to clean streets, yet the fact was hideously different from the written account. It was not what they were doing that filled her with a kind of numb horror, but the blank-faced silence of the onlookers and the two sanitation men; and this, together with her inability to understand anything of the shouts and imprecations hurled at the sweepers by the burly men in raincoats, increased her sense of having stepped into a nightmare.

Now most of the offal had been swept into piles. The elderly men and women paused in their work, and one of the men in raincoats said something to the sanitation workers. In response, they walked over to the truck and returned with two empty metal cans, which they set down close to the mounds of garbage. They started back to the truck and were stopped by an order from the man in the raincoat. Then an exchange of dialogue. It appeared to Barbara that they were arguing with the man in the raincoat. Suddenly he raised his voice and shouted. The two sanitation men shrugged and walked to one side.

Now some of the onlookers turned and walked away. Other pedestrians walked past without pausing, without even glancing at what was going on. Some instinct told Barbara to go, to leave it alone, to get away before whatever was going to happen happened; a stronger force held her there. She had forgotten for the moment that she was on her way to find Professor Schmidt; she had forgotten everything except the drama that was being played out in front of her.

Now the same man in the raincoat who had argued with the sanitation workers turned to one of the sweepers. This was a man who appeared to be close to seventy; he was stoop-shouldered, scholarly in appearance, with a fringe of white hair around his bald head, and neatly dressed in a brown suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie.

The man in the raincoat pointed to one of the piles of refuse and gave an order. The old man looked at. him without moving or replying. Raising his voice, the man in the raincoat gave the order again, pointing at the same time to one of the metal cans. His meaning was obvious. The old man was to pick up the filth in his barehands and put it in the can, and now Barbara realized that the sanitation

men had probably been going to the truck for shovels when

they were stopped.

All sound, all movement on the street, stopped. Onlookers, sanitation men, sweepers—all of them stood frozen, watching the man in the raincoat and the old man. Now the three other men in raincoats moved toward the old man.

Again the order, this time quietly and coldly. The old man shook his head and sighed. The man in the raincoat took a step and swung his open hand across the old man's face, and the old man went down on the pile of filth. As he tried to pull himself away, the man in the raincoat kicked him so that he sprawled in the filth again, then he bent, dragged him to his feet by his collar, and drew back his hand to strike him again.

Barbara could stand no more. "Stop it!" she cried. "Stop it, you animal!"

The man in the raincoat paused with his arm drawn back for the blow, still clutching the trembling old man by the collar. He looked at Barbara. Everyone else stared at Barbara. The man in the raincoat grinned, disposed of the grin, and snapped at her in German. Then he struck the old man.

Afterward, Barbara had no clear memory of what happened in the next few seconds. She had never before in her life engaged in an act of violence, never been in a fight, never struck a blow or had a blow struck at her; so what she did was totally a response, without thought or premeditation. She flung herself at the man in the raincoat, swinging the leather handbag she carried at his head. The old man, whom he still clutched by the collar, was between him and Barbara, and the man in the raincoat was unable to ward off the blow. It caught him on the side of the head and staggered him. The three other men in raincoats leaped at Barbara and grabbed her; and then all reason departed, and she fought like a wildcat, biting at their hands where they held her, scratching, kicking. The fourth man in the raincoat let go of the old man, swearing and pressing his hand to his eyes. Then he joined the other three and managed to slap Barbara across the face, a heavy stinging blow, yet one that she hardly felt at the moment.

Then the fit passed, the rage drained out of her, and she stopped struggling and stood trembling and sobbing in the grasp of the three men; yet even in that moment of anguish and indignity, she noticed that no one moved a step to help her. No one but the men in the raincoats moved or spoke, not the two sanitation workers, not the onlookers, not the old people with the brooms. They watched in silence as the man she had hit with her purse raised his hand to strike her again. One of the men who held her barked at him, let go of Barbara, and pushed the fourth man away. He then turned to Barbara, speaking quickly and angrily.

"I don't speak German," she managed to say.

The fourth man in the raincoat, the one who had been beating the old man—who now had collapsed on the pavement, blood running from his nose-—the fourth man walked up to Barbara until his face was only a few inches from hers. One of the men holding her said something to him. He shook his head and smiled. Then he spat in Barbara's face.

The act had an electrifying effect upon her. She stopped trembling, stopped sobbing. She felt that something deep inside of her had turned into ice, and she said, slowly and precisely, "You filthy Nazi pig. I am not afraid of you. Not afraid of you at all. Do you understand me?"

His companion pushed him back and spoke to the other two. Then he turned to the sweepers and barked at them. The two men who held Barbara began to lead her off toward where the black sedans were parked. At first she held back. Then, rather than submit to the further indignity of being dragged across the filthy street, she walked with them to the cars. They opened the back door of one of them and motioned for her to get in. She felt cold, tired, weak, used up, but no longer half-hysterical, no longer afraid. One of the men got in next to her. The other went back to where her purse had fallen on the street, picked it up, and, returning, gave it to her. Then he got into the car and they drove off.

She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped her face, then she looked at herself in her hand mirror. There was a red welt on her cheek where she had been struck, but her eye just above it was not bruised or swollen. Both the man beside her and the driver were silent. It was no use asking them where they were taking her. They either did not speak English or refused to. She leaned back in her seat, bereft of emotion. There was nothing she could do but wait.