The Trespassers (6 page)

Affidavits were interesting. Some sailed right through; others became challenges to your own persistence. With Jill growing up, and Fred off so often to the Coast on his big legal work for one of the large moving-picture companies, it was good to have new interests coming into your life. She was forty years old—“with a matronly figure and a mannish voice,” she thought to herself and smiled wryly. She might as well be busy with things and keep from drooping boredom. Anyway, she did the affidavits, from whatever motive. That’s what mattered.

Vee would be different about it. Vee probably would never mention it to anyone. She would go through the boring details and red tape without self-conscious approval of what she was doing, but merely because somebody needed help and she would want to give that help.

Swiftly she wrote a cable to Montego Bay:

ON RETURN HOME HOPE YOU’LL UNDERTAKE AFFIDAVITS FOR VEDERLE. MY LAWYER JUST BLACKBALLED ME. LOVE. ANN.

And another, to Vienna:

OF COURSE. WRITING. WILLIS
.

Dr. Vederle would know that everything was under way. As soon as she had seen Vee, and got her consent, she would write him and explain why it was not herself but the stranger, Vera Marriner, who would be responsible for the first step in the Vederles’ long journey to freedom.

There they were, the Vederles separated by an ocean from Ann Willis, Ann separated by ocean and great sea from Vera Marriner. And bridging those oceans already was the thin, fine filament of human need and human response.

In France, in England, in the Low Countries, in South America, in nearly every land were people undertaking this new responsibility, this new kinship with the ones in flight. The foreign consulates in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia were flooded by the mounting tide of requests, pleas, cries for help. The quota lists of every foreign land were filling, quota numbers were pledged, often for months, sometimes for years in advance.

Each new political crisis was like a depth bomb released into the bottomless seas of humanity, exploding disaster in a widening circle of life. And it was the foreign consulates that were the small, inadequate lifeboats to which the stricken rushed for possible rescue.

In Vienna, the American Consulate was besieged on the first day after
Anschluss
, and every day thereafter.

Dr. Vederle stopped by on the ninth day. There was danger in the very act of entering; he could not know whether he would be observed by some member of the Gestapo. The new Nazi rulers must not suspect that he was arranging a
permanent
exit from Austria. There was as yet nothing in Austria comparable to Italy’s devilish law of 1926 which made a crime of “abusive emigration.” But surely any such voluntary departure as he planned, an exit of protest and disgust, would measure on the Nazi yardstick as treason to the new glory.

Yet the risk must be run. Perhaps he could put in reservations for quota numbers even before the affidavits arrived.

It was a calm and sunny afternoon, the twentieth of March. Walking toward the American Consulate, Franz Vederle’s spirits unaccountably rose. The moist, hopeful feel of spring lay softly over the streets, birds sang, free and untroubled, in the blossoming trees, the heart lifted in response to the season. The letter was on its way, the heavyhearted decision had been made and well made, and what lay ahead for him and his family, change, adjustment, a new start in an unknown land, would be handled as it developed, bit by bit.

Inside the consulate crowded the distraught, the desperate. Snatches of conversation came to him, questions asked and answered, eager voices, faltering voices.

“You have your birth certificate with you?”

“Yes, yes, here.”

“Passport pictures? Four for each person.”

“Yes, oh, of course.”

“The fee for each visa is fifty-two schillings.” “Have you received your affidavits from America?” “Have you arranged your passage?”

Dr. Vederle looked at the faces about him. Some were old, wrinkled, with the thin lips tightly indrawn of the aged and toothless; some were young, vital faces, eyes strong and clear; there were the alert faces here of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, the simple, uncomplicated faces of farmers, the fresh, delicate faces of young business girls, the tearstained faces of old women.

Dr. Vederle looked at them all, trying to guess, trying to fathom in those faces the hundred secret emotions, the thousand fears.

He started toward one of the clerks who seemed to be looking directly at him, but the clerk called out a name, and an old man, who reminded him of Johann Webber, started eagerly from the bench where he had been huddled.

A crisp official motioned Vederle to be seated at the back of the crowded benches. There were a hundred people ahead of him. He waited half an hour, saw how slowly the turns came for those before him. It would be hours before he could be taken. Anger nipped at him. Better to come back in the morning before the doors opened.

He went out again into the sunny afternoon.

He looked up into the serene sky. It mocked the agitated scene behind him. There should be more propriety in nature—a tortured sky, jagged through by lightning, shocked by thundercracks, should canopy Austria these perilous days. He smiled at his own naïveté. The sky, he thought, was often serene over the bloodiest battlefields human hate could devise.

“God protect Austria.”

(At that very moment, half a world away from the untroubled skies above Vienna, a silver Clipper was taking off from the enameled blue waters of the Caribbean, at Kingston, Jamaica. With an exultant crescendo of its own sure power, the plane lifted into the thin light of earliest morning. Its starboard wing spread out toward the low hills and the tall mountain line beyond them to the east; its port wing spread out toward the incessant seas to the west; its four glinting, unseeable propellers cut their sure circles into the north.)

“S
URE,
A
NN.
You know I will.”

“That’s right. I was sure you would want to—even though you don’t know them,” she said. Her gruff voice had a matter-of-factness in it, but there was gratitude, too. So many people wriggled away from the strange responsibility of affidavits. She had been right to bank on Vee. “I think you won’t have much trouble over this one, anyway. This letter from Vederle, you keep it; it has all the dope, names and birthplaces and all.”

“I didn’t know they could take money out with them.”

“I don’t know about that part; but he writes here about the forty thousand Swiss francs he’s been piling up; I imagine that’s O.K., anyway, because it was never inside Austria.”

“You know—when your cable came,” Vee confessed, “I wondered for a minute whom you meant. I’d never seen their name spelled. I guess I expected it to be F-a-y-d-e-r-l-y, the way you say it.”

Ann had some notes and papers ready. It was the very day Vee had returned from her month’s holiday. Ann had driven out to the airport to meet her, suddenly a little guilty and uneasy at the days already lost. Vederle’s letter, written right after he had cabled, had arrived that morning. He had given it to a trusted friend of his to be mailed in London, so he had written freely. There was immediacy in every line of it. There might even be actual danger to him soon because he had always spoken out against the German Nazis. She hadn’t thought of actual physical danger.

At the airport, Ann was vaguely disappointed to see Vee descend from the plane, followed by Jasper Crown. They both looked so glowing dark, Vee’s a much deeper-laid tan, Jasper’s redder and newer. She wanted Vee to be alone; she felt a vague disapproval that she was not.

She drove them both back to town. The talk in the car was strange; Jasper kept pumping her as if she were his secretary.

“What about CBS and NBC?” he asked almost as soon as they were settled in the front seat. “They do a job on Vienna all week, or did they drop it after last Saturday?”

“A job on Vienna?” She was startled at the question.

“I heard some of it down there—but I wanted to get away from the whole thing—”

“Oh, it’s been terrific here all week, people hanging at their radios all day, news every hour or so, breaking into programs and—”

“Never mind,” he said brusquely. “I’ll get it all at the office. The day I left, I ordered them to keep a record of every word from Europe.”

He fell silent. For the rest of the trip, they fell into vacation talk, people, climate, generalities. Both Vee and Jas were vague about their being together and Ann asked nothing; it was even possible that they had been apart and met only in Miami on the way back. But she was too experienced to believe that, really.

At last they were alone, dropping Jasper at the hotel. She went along to Vee’s apartment, and over a midmorning breakfast, she explained about the Vederles. She was rewarded by Vee’s readiness—indeed, eagerness—to help, to become involved.

“Every time I ever heard of anybody doing affidavits,” Vee said, “I’ve thought
there’s
something I could do. Only I never was asked to do one.”

“This won’t be one of the maddening ones,” Ann said. “Like the ghastly thing I’m on for a girl named Trudi Bechler. She’s here, pregnant, and her husband is in Sachsenhausen, that’s one of the worst concentration camps, and she wakes up screaming every night, dreaming she’s right there while they torture him…”

“Oh, God.” Vee gripped her jaws together. “Why did they arrest him?”

“Nothing except being a Jew, and having a small lumber business they wanted. But the Vederles ought to be easy. They’re not Jews, and they’re not in business or anything the Nazis could steal, except, I suppose, whatever money they have in Austria. It should be easy all around.”

“Easy.” On the word, Vee’s voice dipped down for its lowest notes. Always when she was moved, her voice deepened so. “Easy. Oh, Ann. Sometimes I try to think how I’d feel if I suddenly had to go off, say, to Brazil or the Argentine, not just to visit, but for the rest of my life. Start all over among people who spoke another language, had different jokes and songs, and newspapers and menus—all those small things. I don’t think it’s easy to become a foreigner, ever.

Her voice edged off into silence; her eyes looked off into space. She was seeing what it could be like, the strange teeming wharf, the uncaring customs officials, the minutely different colors and gestures and facial expressions of the people in a new land. When one traveled for a short holiday, these new flavors and tones and sounds were caressing. But when one was a refugee, longing for home?

“I just meant it ought to be easy, officially, for you to get these affidavits,” Ann said after a moment. “It’s so frightfully hard when they’re in prison, or too poor to buy passage, or unknown and ill. The Vederles ought to be a cinch. Easy, that way.”

She handed over a mimeographed page of legal foolscap, covered on both sides with single-spaced typewriting. It was letterheaded
DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON,
and bore an official seal, with the admonition to address official communications to The Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.

Vera glanced quickly down the long, formidably solid text, which was titled
GENERAL INFORMATION REGARDING VISAS FOR IMMIGRANTS.

It seemed to be in eight parts, this general information, starting with the
APPLICATION AT AMERICAN CONSULATE,
going on to
DOCUMENTS TO BE PRESENTED,
which were “personal documents” and “evidences of support,” and “other documents,” then proceeding to
PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION OF DOCUMENTS, NONQUOTA STATUS FOR CERTAIN RELATIVES OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN, FIRST PREFERENCE QUOTA STATUS, SECOND PREFERENCE STATUS, INFORMATION REGARDING THE STATUS OF A VISA CASE
, and ending with a terse paragraph, headed
REFUSAL OF VISA.

Vera read rapidly. Confusion grew in her mind at all the technicalities of language, of locution; uncertainty grew in her heart at the calm, bald officialdom behind those eight paragraphs.

She made a motion, asking patience and time from Ann, who sat watching her, and began again with the first paragraph:

“APPLICATION AT AMERICAN CONSULATE.

“An alien desiring to immigrate into the United States should communicate with the nearest American consular office…”

“An alien desiring—” The words brought to mind a news picture she had seen somewhere a few months ago, a picture probably smuggled out of Germany. It was of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, the old embassy, before the remodeling was begun on the old Blücher Palais on the Brandenburger Tor, and the Hermann Göring Strasse, and the Pariser Platz—“How,” Vera’s mind cross-examined her, “do you know these details of the new embassy and the very names of the streets bounding it? You’ve been paying more attention than you consciously knew—maybe you have realized all along that it was inevitable that you would get caught up in this awful human push…”

The news picture, though, was one of the old embassy building. There was a queue of people waiting for the doors to open in the morning. It was an orderly enough queue, like the line at a theater’s ticket window, or at the Yankee Stadium, or something happy and ordinary like that. Only, in this queue, the faces were not the same. These—the old woman, clearly weeping, a handkerchief pressed against her lips, the little boy behind her, clutching at her skirt, the young man towering above him, looking out at the world from snarling eyes; the old, the tired, the angry, and the resigned were all there in that extraordinary news picture.

Only the happy were missing. Not one face was gay, uplifted, expectant, or content.

Vee shook her head sharply to get the old picture out of the way of the smeary mimeographed writing. Once again she took her attention and pinned it to the instructions facing her.

“Don’t bother with all that,” Ann said. “It drowns you in technicalities. I’ll phone Larry Meany—he’s the lawyer I always use on affidavits. He’ll do the whole thing—you just sign some papers.”