Six
Rachel awoke in her drape-darkened bedroom and stared up at the ceiling’s gilded plaster curlicues, lit by the morning light that leaked in above the valance. The previous night’s embers glowed in the corniced fireplace. The embers struggled to warm the room against the chill, brought by the morning of January 31, 1933, to the Bavarian Alps. Her bedroom, and the country house to which the Bergman family fled on weekends and holidays to avoid Munich’s grime and bustle, hadn’t changed since her parents had the place built, when she was four.
Well, one thing had changed.
She rolled onto her side and buried her nose in the pillow next to hers, still warm, and redolent with the scent of shaving soap and new husband.
“Are you ready to greet your first morning as Mrs. Winter?” Peter Winter was already out of bed, standing next to the brocade-draped window, with one hand on the drawcord. Barefoot and bare chested in his pajama bottoms, he grinned at her in the half light.
She clutched the duvet and her negligee to her breasts and pantomimed a shiver. “Look at you. It’s freezing in here. Will our children be half polar bear?”
“Better half beast than half gentile.”
She blinked, and his smile faded. He returned to the bed, laid beside her propped on one elbow, then kissed her forehead. “Stupid joke. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “No. Mother really did say that once. And worse. If she had lived to see her daughter married to a gentile, she would have locked herself in her bedroom and stayed there until we left for the train. She could be as stubborn as a goat.”
“So you inherited more than her nose?”
“I am not!”
Rachel Bergman’s mother had died three years earlier. As intolerant of gentiles as any Nazi was of Jews, the irony was that somewhere in Esther Bergman’s lineage was a very un-Jewish ancestor. Who had passed on to Esther Bergman a turned-up button nose, and alabaster skin that contrasted spectacularly with her raven hair. Which Esther had, in turn, passed on to her daughter.
Rachel’s mother had been the only one in the family unaware that her daughter was keeping company at university with a boy who was, as her father observed, “as Jewish as a pork knuckle.”
Rachel smiled and threw back the duvet. Then she climbed across her day-old husband, stood barefoot on the cold stone floor while she fumbled with her slippers, and dropped them. When she bent, shivering, to retrieve them, Peter grabbed for her bare bottom and she hopped away.
She slid on her robe while she walked to the window, then turned to him. He sat on the bedside, hands clasped in his lap and feet dangling. Like a bad boy who still expected dessert, rather than like a newly titled Doctor of Physics.
After the civil wedding ceremony in Leipzig, and the train ride, it had been dark when Rudolph the driver had collected their party and luggage in Munich. And on the drive up into the Alps light snow was falling. So, Peter had yet to really see the place.
She took the drapery drawcord in her hand and crooked a finger at him. “Come stand here by me and I’ll show you the best view in Bavaria.”
He stood beside her, arm around her waist, and kissed her hair. “You already showed me the best view in Bavaria when you dropped your slippers.”
Her room faced east, out across the house’s forecourt. As she drew back the drapes, the sun shone above the jagged peaks at the valley’s end. The sky was electric blue, and the land still, and gleaming white. Bare trees, as well as the evergreens, were frosted, as though sprinkled with diamonds. The hand of man was barely visible in the valley.
He whispered, “God. This place is magic.”
As they stood together, silent, Milton the stable man led Willi, Father’s black stallion, saddled and with breath steaming from his nostrils, across the ankle-deep snow into the forecourt.
Father, bundled against the cold, stepped out through the front doors a story below them. He tugged on gloves as he limped, right leg stiffened by the steel rod inside it, to his waiting horse. He spoke to Milton, patted his shoulder, then with a boost from the stable man swung up into the saddle.
Peter said, “Your father still rides?”
“Every day that he’s in residence up here. Sometimes even in the parks down in the city. Regardless of weather or his physical limits. Obviously.”
“How did he—?”
“When the war started, the army said he was too old to join the cavalry. Even though he was a champion equestrian. So, he commissioned a cavalry troop out of his own pocket, then trained recruits himself. Before the first class graduated, there was a jumping accident. According to Mother, Father’s head injuries and depression frightened her worse than his leg. There were days when he said he would rather have died, charging the French trenches, than live with his failure to defend his homeland. The government awarded him a citation for his civilian service to the nation. But I think he still feels he did too little.”
“Is he as hard on his children, and his customers, as he is on himself?”
“Don’t ever tell Jacob I admitted it, but compared to him I get away with murder. Look who Father let me marry. Father’s not hard on customers, especially if they’re veterans. He reviews their loan applications personally. Even the worst risks get approved. I think that’s why he’s more hopeful about the Nazis than a sane Jew should be. Hitler was gassed at Ypres, you know.”
“And all this time I thought Hitler was born a lunatic.”
As they watched, Sheldon Bergman cantered his horse out across the snow, toward the rising sun. He rode leaning left, to compensate for the stiff right leg that extended from his mount’s flank. The stallion’s hooves kicked up snow. As horse and rider shrank in the distance, it appeared that they floated toward the peaks atop a cloud.
The sun climbed, the land further brightened, and the every-other-day delivery arrived. The village grocer, reins in hand, drove a jingling, red-painted sleigh, pulled by a grey mare. It negotiated the unplowed and unpaved road to the Bergman house better than the grocer’s usual chugging van.
Traudl, who was both the cook and the wife of Rudolph the driver, bustled out. She hugged her husband’s old army greatcoat around her thick middle, as she handed a steaming mug up to the grocer. He handed down a crate piled with produce, fresh fish, and the recent newspapers.
The isolated country house had been designed as the Bergman’s island of respite from the modern world. Father had allowed a telephone line only after a decade. Mail was not delivered, but collected when, and if, staff went into town. Music was always available, from the conservatory’s grand piano, or from the phonograph. Like most posh modern phonographs, its console included a sensitive radio receiver. But tuning in the news, rather than music, was frowned on.
Traudl and the grocer shared a laugh. Then, sleigh bells on the mare’s harness a’jingle, he turned back toward town and vanished.
Peter shook his head. “You said it was a country weekend house. I expected a log cabin. Not a fairy castle. With twelve bedrooms, riding stables, a billiard room, a Rubens hung in the foyer, electric lights, and servants.”
As she stepped toward the suite’s bathroom she pointed at the bedroom door. “There should be a basket of firewood and a breakfast trolley to the left of my door. When I’m here at the house Rudolph leaves them as part of his morning rounds.”
Peter wrinkled his forehead as he clicked on the bedside lamp. “Does he leave the electricity, too? Because I didn’t see any power lines.”
“In a way, he does. He fills up our generator’s gasoline tank every morning.”
Peter cocked his head. “The Bergmans make their own electricity? Why? One of the biggest hydroelectric stations in Germany is just over at Lake Walchen.”
“Overhead lines would’ve spoiled the view. To muffle the noise, the generator’s in an abandoned salt mining shaft under the house. Father says all south Bavaria is good for is views, silence, and salt mines. He had the telephone line buried, too.”
“You do understand, Baroness Rothschild, that on an assistant physics professor’s salary you won’t be able to reshape the world to your whims, anymore. We won’t be able to afford even a party line telephone.”
“Oh, stop. I would happily live in a salt mine to be with you. Just pull the trolley in here while I make myself beautiful.”
He poked his head out the door and called back. “There’s wood. But just coffee.” He dragged the linen-draped trolley into the room. “Can’t we get dressed? And go down for breakfast?”
She glanced back from the bathroom doorway. “If that’s what you’re hungry for. Or when I finish in here I can show you the best view in Bavaria again.”
* * *
On mornings like this one, Traudl served breakfast in the conservatory, where the glass walls and ceiling let in the sun, and the Alpine views.
Father, still wearing his riding jacket, sat at the lace-clothed table’s head. His gray eyes peered at the other diners through pince-nez spectacles, clipped on his very Jewish nose. When Rachel was a child, he had led the table conversation, as German patriarchs did. Since his wife’s death, he more and more followed the discussion, rather than led it.
At the table’s foot Rachel’s older brother, Jacob, attacked a soft-boiled egg.
At Father’s left-hand Uncle Max slumped, red of eye and nose, bald, with a day’s supply of unlit cigars bulging from his robe’s breast pocket.
Across the table from Uncle Max sat the morning’s only non-family guest. Fresh-faced, wavy haired, he was turned out for breakfast in jacket, white shirt, and tie.
Max Bergman was forty-two, but looked fifty-two. The guest was thirty-two, but looked twenty-two.
Uncle Max drew an unlit cigar, then stabbed it at the guest, who had been a civil witness to the marriage at the previous day’s ceremony in Leipzig.
Uncle Max said, “Einstein’s a Jew. So, this ‘relativity’ is ‘Jewish Physics.’ Lenard and Stark aren’t, so their work is ‘German Physics.’ You’re not a Jew, Professor Heisenberg, but your ‘quantum mechanics’ is also ‘Jewish physics’? It’s nonsense to me.”
Werner Heisenberg smiled and shook his head, then lectured like the professor he was. “Nonsense, yes. But explicable. Max, before this century physics, like most sciences, investigated and explained the universe by hypothesis, followed by experiment. For example, Galileo hypothesized that gravity accelerates different masses at the same rate. Legend says that he proved this by dropping two identical balls, one filled with lead, and the other with soap, from the Tower of Pisa.”
Heisenberg sipped from his cup. “But in this century, Einstein and others of us have proved hypotheses with mathematics. Then left the experiments to others.”
Max said, “I don’t need to place two balls on a table, then count them, to prove that one plus one equals two?”
Heisenberg nodded. “Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are as certain as one plus one equals two. Traditional experimental physicists, like Lenard and Stark, roll up their sleeves and experiment in the laboratory. They see theoretical physics as lazy, at best, and dishonest at worst.”
Jacob looked up from his egg. “And Jews by nature are assumed to be both?”
Heisenberg said, “Jacob, you and I know that’s rubbish. But professional courtesy bars a physicist who has not won a Nobel Prize from arguing the morals of those who have. And both Lenard and Stark have.”
Peter, standing beside Rachel in the conservatory’s doorway, waved a hand. “Werner, professional courtesy doesn’t require endorsement of bigotry. And if the rest of us in the physics community keep pretending Lenard and Stark are arguing scientific method, we’ll all pay for it, eventually.”
Heisenberg, Jacob, Max, and Rachel’s father turned to the new arrivals.
Her father’s face softened when he saw her, and he and the rest of the men stood. She stepped around the table, kissed his cheek, then stood behind him as she pushed him back down into his chair.
As Uncle Max sat, he jerked a thumb at Peter and said to his brother, “This is your new son-in-law, Sheldon? He doesn’t sound like a Nazi’s nephew.”
Rachel’s father glared over his pince-nez at his younger brother. “Max, Peter is now part of our family. Professor Heisenberg is our guest. In my house, on this day, we celebrate the marriage of my daughter. Your niece. Today there will be no talk of Jews. There will be no talk of Nazis. Today, we are all Germans. On every day, we are all Germans.” He peered around the room. “Do I make myself clear?”
Silence.
Traudl bustled in and refilled coffee cups.
Rachel’s father looked around the table, then said, “Traudl, would you kindly go upstairs and be sure Rachel is out of bed? That girl must not sleep in on such a beautiful, sunny morning.”
The silence deepened as everyone stared, open mouthed, and watched Rachel’s father sip his coffee while his daughter stood close behind him.
* * *
Later that morning, Peter cleaned up in Rachel’s bedroom, after Jacob took his new brother-in-law out for a ride. As Rachel descended the staircase, she heard Chopin being played on the conservatory piano. Heisenberg sat at the keyboard.
When he saw her he paused. “Sorry. Has my banging disturbed you?”
She shook her head. “You play beautifully. Peter says if the Nobel doesn’t come through, you can survive by playing boogie-woogie piano. But Peter says the prize is certain when the 1932s are announced.”
Heisenberg shrugged. “In physics only the speed of light is certain. I’ll keep practicing.” He smiled. “Peter asked me to play something at the little party this afternoon. Does his new bride have any requests?”
She shook her head. “You’ve already done so much for Peter—for us. He wouldn’t marry me until he could support me. So, in hard times the assistantship means everything. I’m very grateful.”
Heisenberg smiled again. “If you’re so grateful then he didn’t tell how little physicists are willing to work for.”
“Oh, he did. Why do you think a physicist is our piano player?”
Heisenberg laughed, then glanced around the gilded room. “Rachel, your family could have afforded a symphony orchestra, not just a civil ceremony and a family dinner.”
Rachel ran her hand along the antique Bechstein’s ebony lid. “Yes. We’re very fortunate. But the only family Peter has left is his grandmother, and she’s too ill to travel. Marrying a gentile obviously doesn’t bother the Bergman family anymore. My mother was the rabid Jewess. But Peter in a yarmulke would have been awkward for some of my mother’s friends. And a banker’s lavish wedding would have embarrassed my father, when his depositors are struggling through a depression.”
Heisenberg nodded, lips pressed together. “Your father has a generous heart.”
It was a tactful way for Peter’s mentor to avoid mentioning her father’s mental lapse.
She said, “So have you. Our wedding trip wouldn’t be possible without my father’s generosity. But also, not without the time off you granted Peter.”
“Rachel, Peter worked harder for his doctorate than any student I’ve had. The time off between jobs wasn’t a favor. He earned it. He needed it. And the job offer was purely selfish. I snapped him up before someone else did.”
“The Depression hasn’t hurt the market for physicists?”
Heisenberg shook his head. “Only for the bad ones. I’ve worked with Arnold Sommerfeld, Max Born, Niels Bohr. I now have the good luck to number many of the brightest young lights in physics among my graduate students. Peter visualizes abstract concepts as well as any of my mentors and colleagues, and as well as any of my students. And Peter sees the world practically, and clearly. Which, frankly, we theoreticians rarely do.”
“I think practicality had less to do with staying than his pleasure working with you did.”
Heisenberg shrugged. “But Peter won’t stay long. The world won’t let him. In physics, the future arrives earlier than in other professions. Peter’s twenty-four. Einstein turned twenty-six in 1905, while working as a Swiss patent clerk pending his doctorate. In that year, Einstein published four papers. In the aggregate, they changed mankind’s understanding of the universe forever. We call it Einstein’s ‘Miracle Year.’ I was twenty-six when Quantum Mechanics came to me.
“At this moment, Peter Winter is even less known than Einstein was before his ‘Miracle Year.’ But one morning soon I will wake to find Peter gone. Perhaps to a chair of physics elsewhere. Perhaps to more practical and important things. And I will be overjoyed. A teacher’s greatest reward is his students’ success.”
Jacob ran into the room from the foyer waving a folded newspaper. “The grocer brought yesterday’s paper.”
Rachel said, “He always does. Why are you whispering?”
“Father said no politics today.”
Rachel said, “What’s happened?”
“Hitler’s chancellor. Hitler! On January thirtieth! Can you believe it?”
“Hitler? No. I can’t. Jacob, give me that!” Rachel snatched the paper. Before she unfolded it, she said, “The Nazis didn’t win a majority. Those buffoons in the Reichstag have done nothing but argue about forming a coalition government for months.”
Heisenberg stood and read over her shoulder, eyes wide.
Peter trotted down the stairs, buttoning his jacket and raised his eyebrows when he saw them.
Uncle Max wandered in from the billiard room, still in his robe, and swirling brandy in a snifter. “What’s the fuss?”
Jacob said, “The Nazis have taken over!”
Max said, “Oh. That. Not precisely. The president appoints the chancellor, and Hindenburg remains president. He appointed Hitler yesterday. But the cabinet will be drawn mostly from other parties. The Communists will have more ministers than Hitler will. If the Nazis expect to pass anything, they’ll have to compromise. Life will go on in Germany without radical changes.”
Peter said, “Unless something radical upsets the balance.”
Rachel said, “And ruining this day for my father won’t change anything in Berlin.” Rachel took Peter’s arm. “Therefore, we all have a marriage to celebrate. With no talk about politics. Then Mrs. Winter and her husband have a train to catch.”
* * *
Rachel, wearing sandals, dark glasses, and a woolen sweater with slacks, sat on the ferry slip’s planking and leaned back against her overstuffed trunk.
The view east toward Greece, across the azure Ionian Sea, was less spectacular than from the hilltop villa where she and Peter had passed the last month. But both they, and either of the views, were a world away from Germany. The locals grumbled that February on Zakynthos was cold and rainy. But, compared to the snows of Leipzig and Bavaria, the last month had seemed sun-drenched and warm.
Although a month with nothing on her mind but Peter, and what wine would best accompany dinner, would have been heaven anywhere.
Beside her Peter slouched, hat brim shading his eyes.
She ran her finger over his ear and whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No. Just wondering why, now that this place is finally warming up, we’re leaving. We get back to Leipzig on March second. Do you know how many days it snows in Leipzig in March?”
“Too many.”
“It was your idea to get married as soon as Werner hired me.”
“Because it was your idea not to sleep together out of wedlock. I would have been perfectly happy to live in sin. Everyone is doing it these days.”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh? Uncle Max—”
“Is hardly everyone. Which has been our good luck. Renting the villa would have cost my first year’s salary.”
“Thank Father, not Uncle Max. Father did a large favor for the Swiss banker who Max horse-traded for the loan of the villa. Uncle Max’s talent lies in wheeling, dealing, cutting legal corners, twisting arms, and cashing in the favors Father’s earned.” She stretched. “Regardless, I have a modest proposal. Let’s stay here. Forever.”
“And live on what?”
“You’re a theoretical physicist. You said Einstein developed his theory of general relativity by thinking in his bedroom for two weeks. You can mail your work to Werner. And the Swedes can mail you back your Nobel Prize.”
“Einstein didn’t have you in his bedroom.”
“I’ll inspire you.”
“They don’t give Nobel Prizes for that kind of inspiration.”
Rachel peered at boats bobbing alongside the wharf. “Alright. I’ll buy a fishing boat. I’ll catch our dinner every day, while you think. After dinner, I’ll join you in the bedroom and you can tell me everything you thought of. As long as it doesn’t include other women.”
“A fishing boat? When we came across on the ferry the sea was glass, and you still vomited over the rail.”
“Very well. You catch our dinner. I’ll buy a typewriter and create racy novels. If they’re really trashy I’ll make us a fortune.” She propped herself on her elbow and turned to him. “Would it bother you if I worked?”
“Depends on the profession. Based on the last month, you could make a fortune as a call girl.”
She slapped his chest. “Seriously, does it bother you that my family has money—”
“While my dowry is a doctorate in a field with no practical application, and a dead Nazi uncle I wish had never existed? I would think the bothered party would be you.” He stood.
“Are you going to rent our new villa?”
He shook his head. “To buy the ferry tickets. And there’s a coffee stand over there that sells German papers. They’ll relieve boredom on the train.”
She stretched back so the sun warmed her face, waved her hand like Garbo, and sighed. “Bring me back an espresso, and I’ll teach you a better way to relieve boredom on the train.”
* * *
Peter was back in three minutes, taut and unsmiling.
She sat upright, and pushed her glasses up on her forehead. “No espresso? I suppose this means the honeymoon’s over.”
He handed the newspaper down to her as he said, “During the night on February twenty-seventh somebody set fire to the Reichstag building. The Nazis claim it was the Communists, and that it was part of an ongoing plot to trigger a revolution. Hindenburg’s signed a decree suspending most of the constitution.”
She stiffened.
Whatever the Weimar Republic’s practical shortcomings, its constitution guaranteed civil liberties that even the American and French constitutions barely matched.
She said, “For how long?”
“That’s unclear.”
“Obviously the Nazis did it.”
Peter shrugged. “Most people seem to accept that the Communists had a hand in the fire. Violent revolution is their portfolio. And at this point it hardly matters who did it.” He frowned as, in the distance, the ferry’s hoot announced its approach. “Rachel, should we stay here? Abroad, that is? Werner would write me a recommendation I’m sure. With it I could get a position anywhere. Even in your beloved America.”
“He would. You could. And you would each cry for a week when you left. Don’t be silly.”
She held out her arm, and he pulled her up to stand alongside him. They stared at the sea.
Peter said, “The Nazis now have the power to arrogate more power. And they will. And when they have it, they’ll use it. It could become uncomfortable at best, and deadly at worst, to be a German Jew.”
“Spoken like a naive German gentile. Peter, it’s been uncomfortable to be a Jew anywhere since Pharaoh kicked us out of Egypt. Even a Jew with a button nose, who can barely pronounce ‘Hanukkah,’ and whose married name is ‘Winter.’ I can survive it.”
Peter placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Rachel, you think you can survive anything.”
“Because I can. Anything except choosing between my homeland and my family, and you.”
Peter frowned. “You understand, that fire didn’t just burn a building? Germany itself may go up in flames, literally and figuratively. And perhaps all of Europe before it’s done.”
Arm in arm they peered northeast across the blue Mediterranean toward mainland Europe.
She said, “All the more reason that staying abroad is out of the question. When your house is on fire you try to save it. You don’t run away and let it burn.”
“I expected you’d say that. I hoped you’d say that.” He held up his hand, which was closed around something. “I went ahead and bought ferry tickets.”
She opened his hand with her fingers and peeked at the pasteboards in his palm. “As long as you bought two. Because we’re equal partners in this until the end.”