Mary Russel - Dreamers of the Day

Some of us here are famous. Did you know Saint Francis visited the Holy Land? I’d never heard that, but it seems he traveled from Assisi to Jerusalem, hoping to make peace with the Muslims of his day. On his way back to catch a boat from Alexandria to Italy, he waded through the Nile and fell in.

I was less surprised to meet Napoleon Bonaparte because I knew he’d been to Egypt. He introduced me to Ptolemy XIII, who drowned in the Nile during a naval battle with his sister Cleopatra. “We were Greeks, you know,” Ptolemy told me. “I never believed in the Egyptian gods until I arrived here. My body was never found, so I was not properly prepared for the afterworld.”

General Bonaparte was convinced that the Sphinx held him responsible for letting French artillerymen fire on its nose. Francis refuses to believe in the power of a false god like the Sphinx, but despite his own unwavering faith in Jesus, here he is.

It is a matter of some debate why some of us fade away so quickly while others linger for centuries. There may be validity to General Bonaparte’s theory. “As long as your name is remembered, you are not truly dead” is what he thinks. Francis and Ptolemy certainly fit that notion, but who’d remember Agnes Shanklin all these years? It’s possible that one of my fifth graders still thinks of me, I suppose, or that someone recalls the Library Lady who used to read to children on Saturday mornings, but maybe it’s Karl Weilbacher’s daughter who remembers me.

I had a letter from her in 1938. When I first saw her name on the envelope, my stomach lurched at the thought that my sins had been discovered and I was at last to be held to account. Such little fears in such a dangerous time …

Instead, Fräulein Weilbacher reported that her father had recently been arrested in the middle of the night—roused from bed in his pajamas, dragged into the street, hurled into a car. Despite the open and increasingly shrill denunciations of Jewish influence in Germany, the Weilbachers hadn’t seen this catastrophe coming. Karl had retired from his government position in 1931, his daughter told me, but he had many contacts inside the new regime, old friends who helped him and his family during the Depression. Life was hard, but it was hard for everyone.

“Papa couldn’t believe that the Germany he had loved so well would fail to value his long service, but you must know how bad things are for people like us these days,” Fräulein Weilbacher wrote. “He sent word to my mother and me that he was lost, but that we must look for help. I am writing to you because your name and address were in his papers. Please, for the love of God and in my father’s memory, is there anything you can do to make it possible for us to emigrate to America? I would not trouble you if there were anyone else to whom we could appeal.”

That was the moment when I truly regretted the loss of my wealth. If only I had the cash I’d spent on hairdressers during the twenties, or on fashionable shoes, or theater tickets! I might have been able to buy passage out of Germany for Karl’s small family.

As it was, I could only contact ladies from my stock market days, hoping one of them had made it through the Crash in better shape than I. Could they lend me money for a good cause, one that might actually save lives? Failing that, did they know someone who might have influence at the State Department, or in the visa offices? No, and no, and no …

So I wrote to our representative in Congress and to Ohio’s senators. I even wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, who seemed much more alive to the plight of people overseas than her husband was. Nothing came of my pleas. Eventually, one evening, I set myself the awful task. In the morning, I would write to Fräulein Weilbacher to tell her that all my efforts on her behalf had failed.

I went to bed that night and almost wept to think of how Karl’s nation had repaid him. Then it came to me, and I sat bolt upright in bed. Rosie awoke, annoyed by the disturbance. “Palestine!” I told her. “Maybe they could get to Palestine!”

Of course, by then the British had closed the protectorate’s borders to the desperate German Jewish refugees whose influx had triggered the sort of riots I’d seen in Cairo and Gaza. At the same time, I remembered the hospitality I’d experienced in Jebail. Surely, I thought, such generous people would not turn away a poor widow and her daughter.

I rose from my bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and picked up my pen to write. The question was, Whom did I know? Who was still in a position to help?

Gertrude Bell was long gone. She had indeed become a valued adviser to Lawrence’s friend Feisal, who was acclaimed king of Iraq shortly after the British saw to it that there were no other pretenders to the new Iraqi throne. If Feisal was grateful to the British, he was subtle in showing it, and not the puppet they expected him to be. He reigned with some success until his death in 1933, which I suppose was a sort of vindication of the Cairo machinations; on the other hand, he was the only ruler of Iraq to die of natural causes for generations, so there you are.

Miss Bell herself died in 1926, so she didn’t live to see what happened to the nation enclosed by the boundaries she drew, but she had her triumphs in her last few years. Terms were concluded for a treaty with post-Ottoman Turkey, granting Mosul to Iraq. This denied the Kurds a nation of their own, as Karl had feared, but established Iraq as a reliable source of oil for the British Empire, for a few decades at least.

The last official function Gertrude Bell attended in Baghdad was the opening of a new archaeological museum—the very one that was looted in your time. When her passing was reported, the newspaper included a photo of her on that gala evening. Her slimness had become fragility and her dress remained resolutely old-fashioned, but it was bedecked with ribbons of honor from two nations. She was found dead a few weeks later—a suicide by sleeping pills, it was rumored, but I don’t believe that. Like so many Britons of her generation, Gertrude Bell was a great letter writer. There are thick volumes of her collected correspondence, still studied in your day, but she left no farewell note. It seems unlikely that she’d have allowed anyone else to write her obituary if she’d known she was going to die that night.

Given his hopes for Jewish settlement in Palestine and his connection to Karl—whatever it may have been—I think Colonel Lawrence might well have helped the Weilbachers, but he, too, was gone by 1938.

When I met him in ’21, Lawrence was still running on nerves, but the strain of the war was catching up with him. He worked himself like a sharecropper’s mule, writing that war book of his. Then the original manuscript was lost—lost! just imagine!—but he bore down and wrote it all again. When Seven Pillars of Wisdom was finished, he was out of money and desperately tired—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Many were puzzled by his decision in 1924 to leave both academe and diplomacy behind and to live instead as an enlisted man in the ranks of the Royal Air Force, but I was not very much surprised. Like Miss Bell, he was a great letter writer, you see, and to my delight he had found it worth his while to correspond with me. There were hints of his plans in his letters.

To his misfortune, the predatory paparazzi of your time are really nothing new. The press discovered Lawrence in the R.A.F. and hounded him relentlessly, shouting questions, photographing every move. The situation became impossible, and the R.A.F. asked him to leave. Close to despair, he changed his name and prepared to go more deeply underground in the Royal Tank Corps. Fearing rediscovery, he sent printed postcards to warn his correspondents that he would no longer be writing many letters.