She opens her little bag, and pulls out a leather case. “This is why,” she says, unfolding the leather photograph frame, with its six pictures.
I look at the baby in his poses, laughing, shouting, crying, waving his hand, making a little fist. “His name is Franz,” his mother says, setting the frame up, on the table before us.
“I beg your pardon,” I venture, “but I don’t quite understand. Is it because of him that you want to leave? But your little Franz is an Aryan; everything will be easy for him, all doors opened. You see, we on the outside aren’t so much in favor of emigration,” I have to add, seeing her surprise. “It’s worse than you expect when you go away — harder, less friendly — and then, we think — you will understand — that those who can stay in the Reich safely should stay. Especially if they are not in accord with the godforsaken brainlessness about them. “It is so important that a little intelligence and reason should remain within the country.”
I look away from the pictures. But Mrs. M. is speaking without her hesitation, now — volubly, clearly, her smooth forehead lined by two deep lines of anger and decision.
“No,” she disagrees, “he wouldn’t have an easy time at all — he would be miserable. Reason! I’ve had four years of that, and I’m through with that kind of reason. I can’t even get chicken soup for the child, or stewed fruit, or a good broth. There’s no chance of buying reasonable food in those war-camps of cities. Not even hominy!” she cries, “nor rice!” accusingly. “There’s a shortage of eggs today, and tomorrow it will be butter. And it’s so much worse all the time — everything’s grown worse in four-and-a-half years — food, clothing, laws and spies. No one lives in safety in our country.” She shakes her head indignantly. “Not even the most harmless people know what it’s like not to be in constant danger — of arrest at any moment, denounced by anyone who finds it worth his while, for some unfortunate remark he may or may not have made. If my husband has to press a Nazi patient for his bill, we live in fear of his saying we’ve made fun of the Führer, or joked about the Minister of Propaganda. And if that happens, we’ll both be arrested with no one to ask why — and our son would have to manage for himself.”
I like her, standing beautiful and defiant, looking down at the pictures of her son who will have to manage, and who cannot have his hominy, and will not have his rice tomorrow. I pretend to know less than I do, and seem more ignorant to find out what this woman really thinks and feels. I need to discover the reason driving her out of her country after four-and-a-half years of “reason.” So I tell her that I know she is unhappy and worried by material lacks. But it isn’t so different from wartime. “I was a child during the War,” I argue, “we really had hardly a thing to eat, but we were gay, alert children.”
Mrs. M. interrupts me here. Her voice trembles with impatience. “What are you talking about? As if you didn’t know the difference! As if you didn’t know how sensible things were, comparatively, during the War! Germany was really threatened then, from the outside, and we did without things then for a good and sufficient reason. But now, in peacetime, so that we may threaten and bluster and our fine Herr Führer may rattle his saber and act like a madman until the world is in panic? Really, it isn’t the lack of butter that makes me decide — it’s all the other things. I want the child to become a human being, a good and decent man who knows the difference between lies and truth, aware of liberty and dignity and true reason, not the opportunistic reason ‘dictated by policy’ which turns black white if it’s useful at the moment. I want the boy to become a decent human being — a man and not a Nazi!”
Our drinks arrive: gentian brandy, from the big healthful mountain gentians — tasting like the meadows and pastures of the mountain country that is our home country, this woman’s and mine.
“To the young gentleman,” I drink the toast, “to Junker Franz — may he become a human being!”
We will have to go, soon; she, so simply, back to Munich (I feel it in the pit of my stomach and in my knees), and I “home” to Zurich, where my parents are now living. But I want to hear more from her, and the afternoon is advancing. I pretend ignorance, a little ashamed to be asking her questions that are not entirely frank, ashamed to subject her to these questions, now that her angry determined look has passed, in this late light, to helplessness and tenderness and perplexity before the meanness and injustice she is remembering. I ask her how much she can expect to influence Franz when he is a little older. She has admitted that she is afraid of the schools’ influence — the new schools, which teach that the German people are 100,000,000 strong (generously including all the German-speaking population, Dutch, Austrian, Polish, or even American), and that one is German by the grace of God and the State, and in God’s name by the grace of the Führer of the Third Reich and his Archangels, the Leaders of the Third Reich.