I N NEW YORK, I LIVE IN a small hotel on the East Side. It is a pleasant hotel; the management advertises it as “continental.” But I like it for its American details — closets and showers — no luxury in this country, of course, but I cannot help being pleased by them.
I have bought a tremendous quantity of cookies, candy, and some small white dice called marshmallows — sweet, tough, as elastic as rubber, and a little like Turkish delight. I tried one, and nothing could induce me to go on. But I bought the candy against the visit I am expecting, not for myself. There are going to be two guests to eat these cookies and candy: two boys who go to school in Connecticut and are spending this week-end with an aunt in New York. They are seven and eight years old, and came over alone from Germany eight weeks ago.
I saw the smaller one when he was two, in Germany; all I know about him is that he is called Till and that his mother worships him. The larger boy was good-looking and robust, a dark boy named René after a French uncle. Their mother was French, before she married a German lawyer, and both parents (who had been divorced before, around a lot, and had wide knowledge of the world) were deeply disturbed about their sons’ future. The mother said to me as I left Germany, “I wish you could take us with you — or, at least, take the boy!”
And now the boys are here. Their parents separated voluntarily from them, and at enormous sacrifice fought with the Nazi authorities for permission to send their sons to America. “It couldn’t go on any longer,” my last letter from their mother said, “it couldn’t be looked at…. Look after the kids a little — ah, Till is still so small! And let René tell you stories, he’s bright and very grown-up for his age.”
Will he like marshmallows?
The telephone rings, and a small voice asks, in English, “Can we come up?” That must be Till; and I answer in German, “Yes, of course, come up!”
The first one must be René; then, unrecognizable, little Till; and, behind him, a third boy comes forward slowly. His bare head is covered with dark curls; deep blue eyes watch from his face that is tender and sensitive, although his brown skin and his healthy appearance are not delicate; he is broad-shouldered although of course a little thin, and holds himself a little in restraint. As I look at him, Till holds out his hand, and I realize that the boy I thought was René is not he at all, but a friend of theirs. He is American, and is wearing a kind of scout’s uniform; he turns his cap in his hands — the scratched hands of the sort of boy who plays Indian; he looks like a child Lindbergh. Till is tiny for a seven-year-old; he might be five, except for the shrewdness of his look. His hair is smooth and silky, and hangs halfway over his ears in a pageboy cut. Under his bangs, his tilted, bright eyes give his face a Slavic touch, and with his broad cheekbones and wide, finely-cut mouth, he might be Russian or even Finnish — and he is the son of a North German and a Frenchwoman. He is the man of the world among us, and introduces the little American to me. “This is Bruce Findley,” he tells me, glancing at him admiringly, “and this,” he says to Bruce, “is the lady who (in English), as we hoped, is going to take us to the movies tonight.” Bruce nudges him and they look around at René, who has been wandering around the room, and has stopped in front of my desk. He is staring at the portrait of his mother, very like him except for the brown eyes, and without taking his eyes away from it, he says, “When it hooted, everyone had to get off the boat. Mother stood below in the crowd, and I hid behind a post. But we didn’t sail for a long time.” His voice is husky; this is the first time I have heard it. “I waved,” interrupts Till, “ I didn’t cry….” He has discovered the marshmallows. “Sailings are always sad,” I say to René, with my hand on his shoulder. “Here, let’s have some chocolate.” Bruce is showing his consent. He nods and rattles off, “ Schnitzelbank, Grüss Gott, Heidelberg, gemütlich, auf Wiedersehen! ”
‘That’s his German,” Till explains. “He can say five things.”
Till and Bruce concentrate on the candy while I make hot chocolate. René is looking around the room. “Nothing but American books?” he asks. “Don’t you read German books any more?”
I tell him how much I like to read German, but that it is very important for me to get to know American books now. Till agrees, with his mouth full, “I only read American books!” he says.
René laughs. “And he can’t speak German any longer!” he exclaims, with a curious mixture of contempt and envy. “Imagine forgetting so fast!”
But Till will not let that go by; he comes back defensively, “René drags his Hitler dagger around with him,” he accuses, “and he’s got his armband on, someplace, too!”
I look across at René’s lowered head. “Why do you do that?” I ask him. “Did you like the Jungvolk so much?” He shakes his head, very hard.
“Oh, it’s not his dagger,” Bruce cuts in, explaining for him, and trying to shut Till up. “It’s Gert-Felix’s dagger, and armband, too.”
“Yes.” René looks up. “And Gert-Felix was my friend.”
Till’s mouth is still full. “But he’s dead!”
“Yes,” René repeats, “he’s dead. The doctor said he must have died a minute or two after the shot.” I begin to remember a story of their mother’s about an accident during night practice. “It was really almost murder,” René is going on, “no matter what the paper said.” Bruce’s arm is around his shoulder; it is hard to believe that the little boy with his toughness and his scratches can be so solicitous. “Everyone was supposed to bring rifles or pistols,” René says, “but Gert didn’t have any, and neither did I, so we brought flashlights, they were next best. Our leader was practicing aiming in the dark. We would hold up the flashlights and he would try to hit them. He was a fine shot, and it went very well at first. Then he went off his aim, and hit August in the knee. August didn’t cry when he fell down; it was probably just a nick. We tied it up with our armbands.”
“What did the leader say?” I asked. Bruce was listening to the German version of a story he must have known by heart in English as if it were a Wild West adventure.
“Oh, he swore, of course. August was holding his light too low, anyhow. Then it was Gert’s turn. He was good and afraid, and held his light as high as he could. The leader was a little afraid, too, I guess. He shot to the left, and that was where Gert’s forehead was. The light didn’t go out. Gert didn’t move at all. But the sound was different, as if it had hit a tree. Gert started to sway a little.”
Till goes on with the story as though it were his turn. “Then he fell over,” he recites. “First they put handkerchiefs on the wound, and when they were all covered with blood, they tried sticking moss in. He didn’t speak or groan again; the army surgeon said that was a good sign.”
“You weren’t there.” René speaks as if anybody who had not seen it knows nothing at all about life, and ought never to open his mouth again. “It was a very small hole,” he says, “and there was hardly any blood, just a little at the eye. We didn’t think it was anything. But Gert was dead by that time.”
“And guess what happened to that leader!” Bruce challenges me. “He was just transferred to another group! And what do you suppose they did to Gert’s father? They locked him up, because he complained, they stuck him in one of those concentration camps!”
“The papers said it was an accident: ‘Our dear son met with an accident in the service of our fatherland.’ ” He puts the rusted knife on the table. We all look at it, at the white strip of cloth on the handle, with its red swastika.
“D’you keep that because it’s Hitler’s junk?” Till asks, with his sideward look.
“Because it’s my friend’s; and I’m going to keep it forever.” Till is satisfied with that; he puts the last marshmallow slowly into his mouth.
The skyscrapers stand against a tall, pale sky. I want them to think of something else, and I propose the movies. Snow White is around the corner. “It’s a German story,” I tell René, trying to answer his reproach about German books, “and you can see how American it is now.” But Bruce has seen it already; and Till is occupied, twirling the globe, tracing frontiers with his finger. “France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria,” he spells out.
“Austria,” repeats René. “You’ll have to buy a new one.”
“United States of America,” Till reads.
“Want to be Americans?” asks Bruce. Till travels around Mexico with his finger.
“Well, yes, I’d like to,” René answers, “but I can’t quite imagine it. After all, I’m still German — I suppose.”
Till pushes across the South Seas. “Sure I’m going to be an American!” Bruce welcomes him with a charming little bow and a smile of extraordinary nobility, as if he had the power to give citizenship. “We’ll be glad to have you!” he says.
“What do you mean, we?” René asks, leaning on the window sill next to Bruce, half a head taller than the American boy, but slighter and less firm. “Who’s we? ”
“We Americans,” he says. “We, the people.”
“What about your government?”
“The government does what we want,” says Bruce. “If it doesn’t, out it goes!”
Till is delighted. But René looks a little startled at all this audacity. Bruce is going on, enjoying himself, declaiming:
“…Our government is here to serve us. We chose it ourselves, and we obey it because we think it’s right, and not because we’re afraid. It’s there to make us a happy, rich, and peaceful people. We don’t want anyone to attack us, but we don’t want war. And we won’t stand for injustice anywhere—” he checks himself, embarrassed, and modifies, “that is, too much injustice. So if I shoot you I get punished; but I couldn’t, anyhow, because there’s no night practice, and there aren’t any leaders, and besides I haven’t got a rifle.” René doesn’t smile. He accepts the assurance.
We’ll send “the family” a line before the boys leave. “ You write,” I tell them. My long, detailed report will be made later. Till writes in English, drawing in a confused mixture of German letters and the Latin ones he is learning here. When he finishes with “Much love, from your dear son, Till,” René sits down, and fifteen minutes of phonograph-playing passes. We listen to the records while he writes, and at last I read;
“Dearest Mama, “Today was a fine day, I think I’ll get used to it here, but please come whenever you can. Everything here is very different, I can’t explain just how. We are learning a lot, not so much about world theory and less about war. I like school pretty well. I’m practically never afraid any more. I have a friend, that’s why I have to learn English fast now. It is dark outside already, you can see stars over the skyscrapers, but they are a little pale. Please come soon, “to your son “René”
There is a sudden scene before Bruce has his turn. The armband has been lying beside the dagger on the table, and the American has put it on. He throws his arm up. “Heil Hitler!” he cries, at attention.
René goes dark, then very pale. “Stop it!” he shouts. “Take it off, please, Bruce, take that off!”
Bruce rips it off without a word, and sits down at the desk. René is apologizing for his violence. “I don’t know why, but I can’t look at it,” he says, asking forgiveness. “It looked like Gert, and suddenly that night practice, and the cry Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler! ” He is terribly pale; he trembles, terribly. “I won’t see another, I don’t want to see another swastika!” With a sharp movement, he reaches for the armband and tears it to shreds. For a moment, there is nothing but the sound of ripping.
“Now, now,” I say, from across the room, “really!”
But Till is at his side, and sweeping the bits happily into the waste-paper basket. Bruce goes back to his writing. Crossing to the desk, René, quieted, lays the dagger before him on the sheets of the finished letter. “Here, it’s yours!” he says gently.
Bruce looks at it without saying thank you; he looks at the knife as if it were extraordinarily beautiful, a delicate, rare, fragile thing.
“I know,” Till laughs, and says in his little chirping voice, with its high child’s twitter, “I know what you’re writing! Schnitzelbank, Heidelberg, auf Wiedersehen! ”
But Bruce is finished. Close to the curlicues of René’s childish signature, his name stands, and below it, in brackets, to explain to the mother who is so far away and waiting for the letter, and who cannot know what “Bruce” means: “René’s American friend, forever.”