James Salter - All That Is

At dinner they talked about books and a manuscript by a Polish refugee named Aronsky who had somehow managed to survive the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto and then of the city itself. In New York he had found his way into literary circles. He was said to be charming though unpredictable. How, the question was, had he gotten through? To this he answered he didn’t know, it was luck. Nothing could be predicted, a thing as small as a fly could kill a mother of four. How was that? If she moved to brush it away, he said.

They’d been joined by another couple, a wine writer and his girlfriend, who was small with long fingers and hair that was thick and absolutely black. She was lively and wanted to talk, like a wind-up doll, a little doll that also did sex. Kitty was her name. But they were talking about Aronsky. His book, as yet unpublished, was called The Savior .

“I found it very disturbing,” Diana said.

“There’s something wrong with it,” Baum agreed. “Most novels, even the great ones, don’t pretend to be true. You believe them, they even become part of your life, but not as literal truth. This book seems to violate that.”

It was an account, almost official in its tone and lack of metaphor, of the life of Reinhard Heydrich, the long-headed, bony-nosed SS commander who had been second only to Himmler and one of the black-uniformed planners of the so-called Final Solution. As head of the police he was as powerful and feared as any man in the Third Reich. He was tall and blond with a violent temper and an inhuman capacity for work. His icy but handsome appearance was well-known, along with his sensual tastes. There was an episode when, coming home late at night after drinking, he had suddenly seen someone in wait in the darkened apartment, pulled his pistol and fired four shots that shattered the hall mirror in which it was he who had been reflected.

The truth of his past had been carefully hidden. In the town where he was born, the gravestones of his parents had mysteriously disappeared. His schoolmates were afraid to remember him, and his early records as a naval cadet had vanished, there was only the story that he’d been dismissed over trouble with a young girl. What was concealed, incredibly, was that Heydrich was a Jew, his identity known only to a small circle of influential Jews who relied upon him to both inform and protect them.

In the end, he betrays them. He betrays them both because he is perhaps not Jewish and because he ends up as they do, in death, all engulfing. He has been made governor of occupied Czechoslovakia and is ambushed in his touring car near Prague, an act ironically encouraged by unknowing Jews in England, where the assassination was planned and organized.

The book was compelling in its authority and in details that were hard to believe had been invented. The floor of the hospital he had been taken to and the naked torso of Heydrich on the operating table as they tried to save him. Hitler had sent his own doctor. There was chilling authenticity. The Czech assassins who had been parachuted in escape but do not survive. They are trapped in the basement of a church and, surrounded by overwhelming German forces, take their own lives. The village of Lidice is selected for reprisal and all of its inhabitants, who had nothing to do with it, men, women, and children, are executed. There was no sound on earth, wrote Aronsky, like a German pistol being cocked.

Baum did not believe it, or if he did it was with reluctance. It was not that he had heard guns being cocked himself, which he had, but that he suspected the motive. He hadn’t met Aronsky, but he was troubled in a deep way by the book.

“Its neatness,” was all he managed to come up with.

“Heydrich was assassinated.”

“I simply don’t believe that he was Jewish. The book never makes it clear.”

“One of Hitler’s field marshals was partly Jewish.”

“Which one?” Baum said. “Von Manstein.”

“Is that really a fact?”

“So it’s been said. He’s supposed to have admitted it in private.”

“Perhaps. The thing is, I believe the book can confuse a lot of readers. And to what end? It can have a long existence even if it’s eventually exposed as fiction. My feeling is that, especially on this subject, you have to respect the truth. Someone is doubtlessly going to publish it, but we’re not going to,” Baum said.

They went home in a taxi. Bowman was exhilarated.

“Did you like Diana?” he asked.

“She was nice.”

“I thought very nice.”

“Yes,” Vivian said. “But the wine guy…”

“What about him?”

“I don’t know if he understood we were married. He was making a pass at me.”

“Are you sure?” Bowman said.

He had a feeling of satisfaction. His wife had been desired.

“He thought I had fabulous cheekbones. I looked like a Smith girl,” she said.

“What did you say?”

“Bryn Mawr , I told him.”

Bowman laughed.

“Why’d you say that?”

“It sounded better.”

Dinner at the Baums’. It was admittance into their life, to some degree, into a world he admired.

He was thinking of many things but not really. He was listening to the small sounds in the bathroom and waiting. Finally, in familiar fashion, his wife came out, switching off the light as she did. She was in her nightgown, the one he liked with crossed straps in back. Almost as if unaware of him, she got into bed. He was filled with desire, as if they had met at a dance. He lay still for a moment in anticipation and then whispered to her. He put his hand on the swell of her hip. She was silent. He moved her nightgown up a little.

“Don’t,” she said.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he whispered.

It was impossible that she did not feel as he did. The warmth, the satisfaction, and now to complete it.

“What’s wrong?” he said again.

“Nothing.”

“Do you feel sick?”

She didn’t reply. He waited, for too long it seemed, his blood trembling, everything going bitter. She turned and kissed him briefly, as if dismissing him. She was suddenly like a stranger. He knew he should try to understand it but felt only anger. It was unloving of him, but he could not help it. He lay there unwillingly and sleepless, the city itself, dark and glittering, seemed empty. The same couple, the same bed, yet now not the same.

It had snowed before Christmas but then turned cold. The sky was pale. The country lay silent, the fields dusted white with the hard furrows showing where they had been plowed. All was still. The foxes were in their dens, the deer bedded down. Route 50 from Washington, the road that had been originally laid out in almost a straight line by George Washington when he was a surveyor, was empty of traffic. On the back roads an early car with its headlights came along. First the trees, half-frosted, were lit, then the road itself, and finally the soft sound as the car passed.

They had Christmas at George Amussen’s—Beverly and Bryan were not there, having gone to visit his parents—and the next day was to be dinner at Longtree, Longtree Farm, more than a thousand acres running almost to the Blue Ridge. Liz Bohannon had gotten Longtree in the divorce. The house, that had burned down and been rebuilt, was named Ha Ha.

Late in the afternoon they drove through the iron gates that were posted with a warning that only one car at a time could pass through. The long driveway led upward with evenly spaced trees on either side. At last the house appeared, a vast facade with many windows, every one of them lit as if the house were a huge toy. When Amussen knocked at the door there was a sudden barking of dogs.

“Rollo! Slipper!” a voice inside cried and then began cursing.