Stained Glass (10 page)

Oakes was late. The others were seated in a second living room, this one lined with panels describing a boar hunt in dark greens and blues and reds—the countess was having dinner with an old friend in her favorite room, leaving the dining hall to her son. The talk during a meal of trout, veal, fruit and cheese, as expected, was of the analysis being made throughout the country of the meaning of the court's decision. No analyst was quite yet attempting a projection of the number of voters who would be won over by the Reunification candidate in November, but everyone agreed that the maneuver to eliminate Wintergrin by constitutional amendment had backfired.

“Did you catch the piece by old Razzia?” Himmelfarb asked.

Wintergrin smiled. But Erika Chadinoff said in her deep, energetic voice that she had not seen the column, and asked what Razzia had said. Himmelfarb drew himself up and delivered an imitation of the writer, whose mannerisms were widely known, and widely caricatured, because of his depressing ubiquity: he was a syndicated columnist, a television host, an author, editor of his own magazine, and had now announced he would also write novels!

“The court's decision in favor of Count Wintergrin,” said Himmelfarb, imitating the tired, tiresome archness of Razzia and his euphuistic style, “is a tergiversation for the German people. We are afraid to learn from our own mistakes. Afraid to show the courage to amend our constitution in such a way as to save us from the possibility of such an embarrassment as history will deplore when it has examined all the evidence, notwithstanding the sophists who misconstrue it …”

But the room was already rocking with laughter—even Wintergrin laughed, a rare sight. Himmelfarb had perfectly captured the convolutions of the ubiquitous Razzia. Oakes had arrived and, still smiling, they rose and Wintergrin introduced him to Erika Chadinoff, who took his hand and smiled warmly at him. Wintergrin signaled the waiter for wine.

It was a pleasant evening, devoted to a progressively intense exploration, led by Wintergrin, of the problems that lay ahead. The following Monday he would formally launch his campaign at the party convention to be held in the famous Paulskirche in Frankfurt. On that occasion, he said, he would unveil more specifically than he had done heretofore the approaches his government would take in pursuit of East German liberation.

“Will it frighten us all, Count Wintergrin?” Erika Chadinoff asked.

“I cannot say whether it will frighten
you
, Erika,” said Wintergrin. “It is certainly designed to frighten the Russians.”

“How much of it will be bluster, Axel?” Only Roland Himmelfarb, who treated Wintergrin like a protective brother, would thus have addressed him or, for that matter, would have put such a question to him in the presence of others.

“That much of what I say that makes me sound like Gandhi will be bluster. Gandhi was right—like the Bhagavad-Gita—in saying that the whole of one's resources must be mobilized to consecrate a purpose. He was wrong in supposing that no human being is finally monstrous enough to run a locomotive over the incremental resister. The Communists are. That is why we shall have to be prepared to do more than Gandhi was ever prepared to do.”

Oakes's heart began to pound.

“Who says A must say B,” Wintergrin said, quoting Trotsky. And interrupted himself in mid-thought. “Have you read James Burnham's
Machiavellians?
Anybody? Spread it around.” He pointed his finger at Himmelfarb, among whose responsibilities was the distribution to the inner guard of books and articles that attracted Wintergrin's attention.

“You were about to say, Count Wintergrin?” Erika Chadinoff said. She had violated Blackford's self-imposed protocol: never to push Wintergrin toward sensitive subjects, even by redirecting his own train of thought. Let him say things as he chose.

“Oh yes”—Wintergrin looked distracted—“it follows that we shall have to rearm.”

There was silence. Wintergrin proffered nothing more. Himmelfarb smoked. Erika Chadinoff looked into the fireplace. Blackford noticed her hair as if coming to life, and the blue liquid eyes, and the inscrutable set of full red lips that pouted with curiosity and passion. Blackford leaned over and picked up the countess's cat, stroking her.

Wintergrin broke the silence. “I am glad, Erika, that you made your suggestions well before next Monday. Please thank your father for advancing so shrewd a point. It will prove very, very helpful. I shall let you have the draft of my speech well ahead of anyone else.” He rose and, as the others did, turned to Blackford, but his words were addressed equally to all.

“I regret to say that beginning tomorrow we shall be instituting, a formal security system. I put it off as long as possible, but Jürgen Wagner is of course right. He is the chief security officer, and he is justified in saying that security officers should have something to say about security … so, it has to be done.

“Beginning at six a.m. tomorrow there will be guards at the entrance to the courtyard, in addition to guards here, outside the castle. The telephone people will be here tomorrow to install extra lines, including a line to the new guardhouse. External security—outside St. Anselm's, on the road—will be supplied by the federal government. On top of everything else, Wagner has persuaded me to admit an amiable young gorilla into my entourage, a young man devoted to our cause who has taken a leave of absence from the police academy at Dortmund to serve as my bodyguard. His name is Wolfgang something-or-other—I have not met him, but Wagner promises me he is humorless, discreet, literal, and will not grow taller than his current height, which is six feet four. The type, I gather, who will not allow me into my own headquarters unless I prove I am myself. I mention this because he will arrive tomorrow, and I do not wish to frighten you if you should find him—a, line from Milton, Oakes? Did you, at Greyburn, study with old Potpot? He read us all of
Paradise Lost
. I remember only a few lines:

Whence and what are thou, execrable shape
,

That dar'st, though grim and terrible, advance

Thy miscreated Front athwart my way

To yonder Gates?

Wintergrin grinned with pleasure and, his friends now warned about the terrible Wolfgang, turned, businesslike once more, to Blackford:

“Would you, Oakes, drive Miss Chadinoff back to the inn? I must go with Roland to the study. I shall see you tomorrow at the chapel, two p.m. Goodnight.” He bowed slightly to both of them and walked away, leaving Himmelfarb to show them to the door.

Would Erika care for a drink before retiring?

Of course.

They settled in the corner table in the near-empty
Bierstube
at the Westfalenkrug, forlorn, always, on Monday evenings. She wore a dark-blue skirt and a turquoise blouse and a commanding scent Blackford never knew before, which he reminded himself to ascertain the name of, to send his mother, whose only indulgence was exotic perfumes. She spoke to the waiter in preemptively fluent German. In the dim light they were silent for a moment.

“He is something, isn't he?” she began.

“He certainly is. I hope he doesn't turn out to be ‘somebody' in the sense that Gavrilo Princip was ‘somebody.'”

“Who?”

“The guy who started the First World War at Sarajevo by knocking off the Archduke.”

“You don't really think that, do you, Mr. Oakes?” “Call me Black. Do I really think so?” He thought it prudent to retreat. But cautiously …

“Of course I don't
think
so, in the sense that I predict Apocalypse. On the other hand, unless somebody does a lobotomy on Stalin he isn't going to hand over East Germany to our hero on account”—Blackford here imitated the well-known accents of Greta Garbo—“of his beautiful blue eyes.”

“You sound like a cynic.”

“I'm
not a
cynic! I profoundly
believe
in the sincerity of Stalin's evil intentions.”

Erika paused, began a smile, then suppressed it. “How long have you known him?”

Black explained that he was by profession an engineer, commissioned by the Marshall Plan people to preside over the recreation of St. Anselm's chapel, and had met Wintergrin only a month or so earlier.

“Isn't it unusual, at your age, to be put in
charge
of something like this?”

Blackford wondered whether Erika's curiosity on this rather delicate point reflected something she had heard from Wintergrin or his associates. He decided on hyperbole, as against the alternative of a pompous recitation of his formal credentials.

“I'm older than Alexander was when he conquered Persia,” Blackford said, in exaggerated dejection. “I'm embarrassed they gave me the chapel at St. Anselm's to rebuild instead of the cathedral at Cologne.” She didn't answer, so he seized the initiative.

“What brought
you
to our leader's staff?”

“Blackford, in Germany we do not use that expression.”

“Sorry. What brought you to our hero's staff?”

“It was my father's idea. You … know about my father?”

“At Yale, engineers are taught to recognize the names of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Chadinoff.”

She actually blushed, and added, “I didn't mean it that way.”

“Oh, come on. I know you didn't. There are plenty of people who don't know who your father is, but I'm not one of them.

You see, I'm crazy-mad about bees. I hang on every word your father writes about them.”

Erika was amused, and relaxed, and she smiled her pleasure at the conversation, and at the company. Her father would especially have enjoyed the exchange. Dimitri Chadinoff was famous as an apiarist, as one would say da Vinci was famous as a biologist. After leaving Russia in 1917, her father had come, if not to dominate, to figure hugely in the world of critical letters in three languages and in three countries. His works of imagination, evocation, and playfulness were grist for what sometimes seemed half the critics and graduate students of the world. From his eyrie in Switzerland—he despised the atmosphere at the level of the sea, and confessed, at a moment of singular candor with a visitor, that he thought the air pressure at sea level spiritually as well as metallurgically corrosive—he vouchsafed to the world one book per year, and always in its interstices one could experience the passion with which he scorned the political, social, and artistic work of the Communists in Russia.

Erika said, “In my father's other life—away from the bees—he has achieved a certain reputation as a verbal precisionist. He felt Wintergrin needed some help at this level.”

“I don't understand you.”

“You remember what
Pravda
did with his Heidelberg Manifesto in 1948? Wintergrin said,
‘Germans must embrace their fellow Germans.'
That got translated into Russian as
‘Germans must hang their fellow Germans.'
And appeared under the headline: ‘German Warmonger Demands Execution of Democratic Germans'—and story after story was broadcast in East Europe playing this line. My father's feeling is that although there is no way to prevent the Russians from distorting what Wintergrin says, we should at least try to make it
hard
for them. The idea is to send out exact translations from the German several hours before he delivers his speeches. Send out translations in Russian and Polish as well as in English, Italian, and French. In the Western languages there isn't as much to fear in the way of
intentional
distortion. But accuracy is terribly important …”

“So your job?”

“Is to supervise the translations. As a matter of fact”—her voice affected academic pomposity, effective except that laughter broke out—“my Polish is a little rusty.”

Blackford whistled. “You mean, you can handle all the other languages with—precision?”

“Yes,” she said. “You do know that I am a translator by profession?”

“Well, sure,” Black said. “Rubinstein is
a musician
by profession. But he isn't expected to perform on the bass fiddle,
and
the piccolo,
and
the harp.”

Erika nodded to the waiter, and pointed to her empty glass. Blackford, without looking away, raised his glass too, which the waiter removed, coming back in due course with replacements.

She said, “I shall retain one, perhaps two assistants to help. I gather from Himmelfarb that up to now Wintergrin has spoken mostly extemporaneously. If he continues to do so our job will be more difficult. We can rush out authorized translations, but the misconstructions get out ahead of them. He promises that beginning Monday at Frankfurt he'll try to get us his speech twenty-four hours ahead. That will mean round-the-clock work, getting that speech into seven languages.”

“Let me know if you need any help with some of his tricky German words,” Blackford said.

“I will.” Erika's face lit up. “I'd offer to help
you
with the stained glass, but I know what an expert you are on it.”

Blackford smiled at her suggestively and twirled his glass in his hand. What in the hell does she mean by that, he wondered. And repressed the thought. Hell, a few more years in this business and he would be suspicious of Shirley Temple. Come to think of it, how account for that sequence of miscegenative suggestiveness between Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson? Ah! Could that have been one of the scripts of the Hollywood Ten! To start all that commotion in the South! Senator Bilbo was right!

“What are you smiling about?” Erika asked him.

“Oh, just a little fantasy. I was entertaining myself … er, playing with myself.” He looked up, and his smile was to the point.

“Tell me.”

“Well,” said Blackford, “I wondered whether maybe you were a spy from the camp of Konrad Adenauer, and whether you would make it your business in your translations to make our leader—our hero—sound hungry for the roar of tanks and the smell of death. But I put it out of my mind, because I'm the trusting type.”