Chapter 6
When she finally left I went through the deep relaxation ritual again, this time with considerably more success. After twenty minutes of it I got dressed and went downstairs. I found a handful of books that looked interesting, including one in Czech; I could speak the language well enough but hadn’t read it intensively in some time, and wanted to brush up on it before we went to Prague.
There was an old atlas, too, and I carted it upstairs with the rest. Assuming that we managed to liberate Kotacek, we still had the problem of getting him out of the country and back to Lisbon. The short way would take us through either Germany or Austria, through the Iron Curtain and into the sunshine. That was the fastest way, but the more I thought about it the less I liked it. Those were the borders the Czechs would guard at once. They would seal them up tight, and slipping Kotacek through would be just slightly more difficult than threading a needle with a camel.
Even if we took advantage of the element of surprise and rushed past the German border, we wouldn’t be ahead of the game by any means. He’d be as hot in East Germany as in Czechoslovakia, and, as a war criminal, wouldn’t exactly get a hero’s welcome in West Germany either. And I didn’t even want to think about the problem of getting him across the West Germany border. Or, God forbid, of chucking him over the Berlin Wall.
The plan, then, would be to work our weary way south and east. There were little pockets of Slovak autonomists who would hide us in the first dark days after the rescue. South of Slovakia, in Hungary, there were political extremists of various persuasions upon whom I could call in an emergency. Most of them would cheerfully slit Kotacek’s throat if they knew who he was, but I could coach him to play whatever part the circumstances demanded.
From Hungary we could go to Yugoslavia, in many ways my favorite country. I was sure I could establish an underground railroad that would carry us all the way to the Greek border with a minimum of effort. And Greece was no particular problem. There were Macedonians in the northern hills, anarchists and such around Athens, even a Stuart legitimist on the island of Corfu.
From Athens, a plane to Lisbon. And in Lisbon I could work some devious miracle, get access to Kotacek’s records, and abandon him to his past and future sins.
It was comforting to plan the escape route. In outline form, it appeared easier than I expected it to be in actual practice. Moreover, by concentrating on the escape I could postpone thinking about the rescue itself. Janos Kotacek was in a castle tower in Prague, and my Nazi nymphomaniac would be my sole assistant in getting him out, and the less I thought about that, the better I felt.
I opened the atlas, hoping to trace a tentative exit route on the map. I located a double-page map of Europe and looked for Pisek, and then for Prague, and then stopped, and squinted in puzzlement, because there was no Czechoslovakia on the silly map. There was just one big Germany, spreading from France to Russia, and…
Of course. The damned atlas had been printed in Frankfurt, in 1941. And Europe had looked rather different at that date, especially when sighted from that particular point of view.
It was pointless to look for escape routes. Out of curiosity I thumbed through the atlas and checked out other continents, other countries. Africa was carved up among Britain and Spain and France; Ghana was still the Gold Coast; the Congo still belonged to Belgium; and Liberia was the only independent country on the continent. The map of Asia showed such items of nostalgia as French Indo-China, British India, Portuguese Goa, and Tibet. No Laos, no Cambodia, no Vietnam. No Pakistan. Large slabs of China and Korea were shown as Japanese possessions. Manchuria was labeled Manchukuo.
Rather far-reaching changes in only twenty-five years. I wondered what new changes would come in the next quarter-century – which countries would be larger and which ones would shrink or disappear, which new countries would emerge, which old ones would cease to exist. Perhaps there would be an autonomous Slovakia by then. Perhaps the Irish would win over the six Northern Counties, perhaps a Stuart would sit on the throne of England and a Bonaparte on the throne of France.
Perhaps Macedonia would be free, and Armenia, and Croatia, and Kurdistan, and all those other pockets of patriotism that clamored for freedom. Perhaps all the lost causes to which I wholeheartedly subscribe would find fulfillment. It seemed impossible, but the old atlas proved that the impossible had a disconcerting habit of happening in spite of all rules of logic.
I closed the book. It hadn’t helped much, but it had done wonders for my state of mind.
The day went quickly. I breakfasted with Neumann and Greta. I won three games of chess from him, and he left the house for a few hours, and Greta and I went to my room. I told her I would have to save my strength for our work in Prague, but she found a way to change my mind.
She was gone all afternoon, perhaps searching for a Jewish lover, and I spent the time reading, loafing, soaking in a hot tub. We had venison steaks for dinner; a friend of Kurt’s had shot a deer in one of the government forests, and Kurt had bought three filets to celebrate my speech to the Bund.
“We must celebrate in advance,” he said, “because you and Greta will want to leave immediately after.”
We walked to the Bund meeting around seven-thirty. It was held in the basement of a Lutheran church about half a mile from the Neumann house. We slipped in through a back entrance, marched single file down a long darkened flight of stairs, and emerged in a room full of old Germans.
It was a shock. I had expected a beer hall full of bristling young Storm Troopers, and instead I found myself in what looked like an old folks’ home in Yorkville. The median age was somewhere between fifty-five and sixty. Around seventy-five men and women sat in straight-backed chairs and talked companionably to one another in German, pausing now and then to refill their glasses from the beer keg at the rear of the room. They reminded me, more than anything else, of the American Communist Party – a handful of old fossils living on dreams of past glory, and about as much of a revolutionary force as a librarians’ conference in Emporia.
“Evan? You seem surprised.”
“It is nothing, Herr Neumann.”
“Perhaps you expected more younger members? Not at the Bund, I am sorry to say. Of course we have the German Youth League for our schoolchildren. They go hiking and camping and win prizes for physical fitness. No Hitler Youth by any means, but we do what we can.”
I took a seat near the back of the room, with Greta on one side and her father on the other. We were close to the beer keg, which was fortunate, because the first hour of the meeting was intolerable. There was an insufficiently brief speech of welcome by the chairman, a reading of the minutes of the previous meeting, a secretary’s report on correspondence with other Bunds, a treasurer’s report on the state of the organization’s finances and the lethargy of some members in paying their annual dues, and, finally, a long address by a doddering white-haired gentleman on the current state of the German business community in Mexico City. Some relative had written him an overlong letter on the subject, and the old fool stood up there and read it to us, inserting his own parenthetical remarks from time to time.
Throughout all of this ritual, the audience paid only cursory attention to what was going on in the front of the room. Everyone was drinking and nearly everyone was chatting, with individuals pausing from time to time to assure themselves that the meeting was still officially in progress. At first it was comforting to note that Nazism wasn’t quite the menace nowadays the Police Gazette might give one to understand, but as the evening wore on I began to grow annoyed at the towering wave of apathy which flowed over everyone in the room. If they were going to be Nazis, I thought, they at least ought to work at it.