The Last Supper (4 page)

“Your father is also dead?” Hubbard said. He did not know why he had asked such a question; maybe the bluntness of his hosts was contagious. Lori was not startled.

“Yes, dead,” she said. “Since 1918. Like your father, he was murdered by fools. A gang of Bolsheviks beat him to death in the Tiergarten. He was out for a Sunday walk. They
tore off his epaulets, broke his sword, trampled on his decorations, the entire ritual.”

“Why?”

“They were killing officers that day. It’s said that he laughed at them. It’s the curse of the Buechelers, blurting out the truth and laughing at the wrong time.”

They had arrived at the shore of an unruffled pond, deep in the wood.

“Here is the Borg, as it’s called,” Lori said. “We can sit down for a moment and look at the water.”

Old stones lay scattered near the edge of the dark water. Lori sat on one of them and waited for Hubbard to take his place on another. As he settled his bony body on a stone, Lori grinned at
him.

“Is this more comfortable than the horsehair chair?” she asked.

“Considerably,” said Hubbard.

“There is a reason why the furniture at Berwick is so uncomfortable,” Lori said. “For forty years there were not many visitors. In the summer of 1860, Bartholomäus von
Buecheler, the son of the builder of Berwick, invited Otto von Bismarck to dinner. Bartholomäus adored Bismarck’s wife, Johanna, because she was a woman who had absolutely no sense of
humor and was therefore indecently amusing. He sat himself next to her and got her onto the subject of adultery. Bartholomäus had heard that Bismarck wrote letters to his wife about his love
affairs, and he wanted to confirm the existence of these dispatches from the field. After an illuminating conversation, during which a lot of champagne was drunk, Bartholomäus called a
question down the table to Bismarck. ‘Prince, your wife has just been telling me that in your letters from France you wrote her every detail of your love affair in Biarritz last summer with
that Russian woman, Ekaterina Orlova,’ he bellowed. ‘An excellent principle. Now that you are back in your wife’s bed, do you write to Orlova as well, describing your conjugal
exertions?’ Bismarck was an egomaniac, as you may know; insults drove him into fits of hysteria. He mistook Bartholomäus’s joke for an insult and threw one of his tantrums. Without
taking another sip of wine, he rose from the table and dashed out of the house. On the way, he tipped over all the suits of armor in the hall; you can see the dents in some of them still.
Thereafter, the Buechelers dined alone at Berwick until official mourning for Bismarck ended.”

Hubbard laughed. Lori, seated on her broken stone, seemed to be pleased that she had made him do so. In the dim atmosphere of the forest, her prettiness, intensified by the amusement in her
face, gave off a kind of light.

“Your ancestor wasn’t a very good politician,” Hubbard said.

“Not a very good
politician?
What a commentary.”

“You don’t believe in politics?”

“No. Don’t tell me you do.”

“I don’t,” Hubbard said. “You’re quite safe with me. What are these stones?”

“In olden times, this was a temple to a pagan goddess called Hertha. Waldemar, the king of Denmark, scattered the stones when he conquered Rügen in 1169
A.D.
Waldemar was a Christian. Hertha is mentioned by Tacitus.”

Lori leaped to her feet and strode off among the beeches once again. Hubbard fell behind, so as to gaze without embarrassment at her moving body. He had no lustful motive. Hubbard
loved—had always loved —the prettiness of women and their gracefulness. He hadn’t the knack of imagining them naked when they were clothed; the sight of Lori in her tweed skirt
and leather jacket, russet hair bouncing and opening like a fan at every firm step, was pleasure enough for him.

They walked on. The forest grew thinner. Lori, a few steps ahead, passed out of the trees and stopped. Her skirt billowed in the wind. Beyond the edge of the wood, Hubbard glimpsed the sea,
frothy with whitecaps in the fading light. It was the same color as the bark on the beeches. He lengthened his stride and, lost in the beauty of this observation, walked out of the forest. He saw
where he was just in time to keep from plunging over the edge of a towering chalk cliff.

Lori pointed downward. “One hundred twenty-eight meters,” she said, the wind thinning her voice.

Large flakes of chalk had broken off the cliff; Lori picked up two or three and scaled them over the edge. The wind blew them back over her head like kites. She lifted her arm above her head and
let it go limp. The wind moved it. She turned her solemn face toward Hubbard.

“I think the wind is strong enough,” she said.

“Strong enough for what?” Hubbard asked.

“Watch.”

Standing at the very edge of the cliff, Lori spread her arms, closed her eyes, and leaned forward into the wind. It filled her clothes, spread her hair, and suspended her slight body, as if she
were soaring, more than four hundred feet above the stony beach below.

Hubbard seized Lori’s outflung arm and pulled her back to safety. Her eyes flew open. They were filled with anger.

“Why did you do that?”

“You were going to fall.”

“Why should I fall? Take your hand off my arm. Do you think I’m so stupid that I would fall off a cliff into the sea?”

Hubbard let go of her. “Well?” she said.

“I was just trying to protect you,” Hubbard said.

“Protect me? Protect me?” Lori spun on her heel, put a hand on the turf, and sprang over the edge of the cliff. Hubbard leaped forward, hand outstretched, but she was gone. He looked
down. Her skirt swinging, Lori was already fifty feet below, clambering down the precipice, the toes of her boots creating little clouds of dust as she slammed them into the soft chalk.

Hubbard went after her. The cliff was not perfectly vertical and there were plenty of places to hold on. Over the centuries, the copious rain that fell on Rügen had carved furrows in the
chalk, so that climbing was fairly easy.

Hubbard was at the bottom in less than five minutes. Lori waited for him, her hand to her mouth, sucking a cut she had got on the chalk. When she took her hand away, the chalk dust left a white
mustache on her upper lip.

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “No other person, above all no man, will make rules for me or take precautions on my behalf. I will dispose of myself as I judge
best.”

Hubbard held up his hand, palm outward, the universal gesture of peace. Lori had never seen such a tremendously tall young man, or one who was so little interested in hiding his thoughts. She
turned and walked away. The beach was a carpet of smooth round stones. They rolled under Lori’s boots and she lost her balance and fell heavily, uttering a shriek.

Hubbard seemed to think that this was funny. He laughed loudly. Then, giving Lori a delighted smile, he walked on by, leaving her sprawled on the shingle. Lori was furious. A German boy would
have given her first aid. Hubbard picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. Lying on the stone beach, rubbing her bruised hip with her wounded hand, she opened her mouth to call out
for help, but then she remembered herself and struggled to her feet alone.

Watching Hubbard as he sauntered away, such a tall careless figure, so ridiculously strange, Lori began to smile. She was angry at herself. Why was she smiling? It was inexplicable, but she
could not stop. She limped after him, floundering, unable to control whatever it was that caused her to grin like a fool.

— 3 —

On the train to Berlin, Lori bombarded Hubbard with questions about his work.

“Whose work does your writing resemble?” she asked.

“Why should it resemble anyone else’s writing?”

“You must have a model. Only geniuses are original at twenty-one. Stephen Crane,
The Red Badge of Courage
, Herman Melville,
Typee
,
a Peep at Polynesian
Life
.”

“Melville was older than twenty-one when he wrote that.”

“Twenty-seven. But he was captured by cannibals at twenty-two. Surely that was a form of writing. Experience
is
art; copying it down is just the last stage.”

“Then I have the cart before the horse, writing before being captured by cannibals.”

“Don’t be so sure. Berlin is full of cannibals—like your Russian who knows how to eat forever at Horcher’s on one twenty-dollar bill.”

In her prim traveling clothes, Lori looked like a schoolgirl, but she had completed her formal education. She was Teutonically at home in the country of facts and figures. Like most German girls
of her class and generation, she knew the history and literature of her own country by heart. Also, she was fluent in French, English, and Latin and was familiar with the literature written in
those languages. Literature was her passion, especially poetry.

“Do you write poetry?” she asked as the train passed among the blue lakes of the Mecklenburg plain.

“I haven’t yet fallen in love,” Hubbard said.

“Ah,” said Lori, with a laugh. Hubbard had never before met a girl who thought that love was a subject for mirth.

Back in Berlin, Hubbard commenced a summery courtship. He took Lori to galleries and concerts and plays. They rode in the Tiergarten, boated on the lakes and canals, drank tea and danced in the
afternoon at Kempinsky’s Hotel, dined at Horcher’s, lunched at outdoor restaurants.

One Saturday noontime at the Swedischer Pavilion by the Wannsee, Hubbard watched Lori’s hands, deft and tanned with scrubbed unpainted nails, as she slit a smoked trout along its spine,
butterflied it, removed the bones, picked up the first mouthful on her fork, and touched the pinkish flesh with creamed horseradish. She lifted her eyes, but not to look at Hubbard. After two weeks
in his company she was used to having him stare at her and she no longer paid much attention.

Voices were singing in the Grunewald, a great many voices. The music grew louder as the singers approached. Hubbard could not place the tune.

“Is that the ‘Marseillaise’?” Hubbard asked. “In Berlin?”

Lori put down her fork and composed herself. Her eyes were fixed on the edge of the woods, which ran down nearly to the edge of the lake.

“No, not the ‘Marseillaise,’ ” she said.

Out of the trees marched a straggling line of young people. They were carrying flowing red banners and when he saw these, Hubbard recognized the tune. The marchers were singing the
“Internationale.” They wore broad red bands on their left arms and carried a thicket of placards demanding justice for the workers. They were not themselves workers: they had the pale
skin, the long hair, the haunted defiant faces of intellectuals. Young women pushing baby carriages trudged along beside their men, singing too; their faces were radiant with righteousness, like
the exalted countenances of members of an evangelical sect singing a particularly rousing hymn.

“The Red Front,” Lori said. “I don’t want to see this.” She kicked Hubbard under the table and he took his eyes off the marchers. “Look straight at me until
they’re gone,” Lori said.

She smiled a bright artificial smile, as if she were making conversation with a stranger at a dinner party.

The singing stopped and the sound of angry shouting buffeted the air. The waiters ran to the railing overlooking the lake in order to watch whatever was happening on the beaches. Hubbard’s
eyes wandered.

“No,” Lori said, rapping on the table; “keep looking at me.”

But Lori’s own eyes lifted and she frowned. Someone had come up behind Hubbard; he could feel the presence of another person at his back. A jovial hand fell on his shoulder.

“Really, Hubbard, you must come and see this,” a male voice said in easy but accented German.

Hubbard stood up. “Otto,” he said. “Baronesse von Buecheler, may I present Mr. Rothchild.”

Rothchild, a wiry man impeccably dressed in an unwrinkled linen suit, inclined his head. He had the posture of a fencer.

“You must be Hubbard’s Russian,” Lori said. “The twenty-dollar deposit at Horcher’s.”

By the shore of the lake, a woman was screaming, one long piercing shriek after another.

“Forgive me,” Rothchild said, “but you’re missing a rehearsal for the next war. The Stahlhelms have ambushed the Communists. Come.”

Rothchild took Hubbard’s arm and pushed him toward the railing. He crooked his arm for Lori and gave her an inviting smile.

Lori remained where she was, her back to the commotion. Rothchild bowed and joined Hubbard at the railing. He threw an arm around Hubbard’s waist.

“Look,” he said, “what luck.”

Men wearing steel helmets were fighting with the Red Front marchers. The screaming woman was holding with furious strength to the handle of a baby carriage. One of the Steel Helmets gave it a
kick and the baby flew into the air and fell into the milling crowd. The woman, shrieking in terror, crawled among the stamping feet of the fighting men, reaching for her baby, who tumbled over the
fine brown forest dirt like a football. Finally she seized the child and curled her body around it. Sweating and cursing and howling in pain and anger, the brawlers trampled on the woman. She
stopped screaming. The fight moved away from her and down into the shallow edge of the lake. Men wrestled each other into the water. A Steel Helmet, wearing two Iron Crosses on his civilian jacket,
darted into the lake, making a row of explosive splashes as his boots punched the water, and seized the weedy young man who had been at the head of the Red Front parade. He wrestled the weaker man
down and held his head under the surface of the lake. Every ten seconds or so, he would pull the man up and let him breathe, shouting furiously into his face. Then he would push him under the water
again. The woman lay quiet on the beach. She wore a bright green polka-dot dress; the skirt had been thrown up so that her lacy black drawers were exposed.

“Look, black underwear,” Rothchild said. “The flag of free love.”

The woman lay so still that Hubbard thought that she must be dead. Abruptly, the fight stopped. The Steel Helmets climbed onto the beach, fell into platoon formation, and marched off into the
Grunewald, singing “Die Wacht am Rhein.” The Red Front crawled out of the lake. The woman in the green polka-dot dress sat up. Her baby uttered a series of loud shrieks. The woman took
out one of her breasts and fed the child as her comrades threw themselves down on the ground, groaning and cursing, among their fallen posters and red banners.