The ramshackle farmhouse was where he remembered it, abandoned and umninded as per his cabled instructions. Even in those terrifying and confused days the instructions of the SD were properly attended to. They changed clothes in the car and with the help of the driver dragged their stores of potatoes and turnips into the shallow vegetable cellar. When the car had turned about and sped away for the border, they cut small holes in some of the potatoes, secreted their small stock of cut diamonds inside, and replugged the holes. These potatoes they scratched for identification, and buried them at the bottom of the ragged jute sacks. After that they had only to wait for the front to pass them, which was much simpler than attempting to pass the front.
December saw them settled in a refugee camp outside of Paris: M. Jules Richereau and his wife Jeanne. There they stayed for over six months, waiting for papers permitting them to emigrate to Portugal. Erick read in the papers, in black headlines, that Buchenwald had been liberated, and some of the inmates had been transferred to hospitals and camps in the Paris area, but fortunately these were not assigned to the same camps that held rehabilitated French. Monica stayed close to camp; Erick went into the city on very rare occasions, and then only to check on their exit request. The other inmates of their camp considered the couple morose; the aura of hatred that surrounded Erick was visible for all to note. However, since everyone felt the hatred to be directed against the Germans, the strange couple were sympathetically left in peace by their neighbors.
In July of 1945 they were finally notified that their papers were ready, and directed to appear at an office which had been established by the Portuguese Embassy to handle such requests. The office was located in the center of the city, and they made their way there as quickly as possible. The papers were ready; they had only to sign them, get their copies, and leave. On their return to the camp, they passed a long line of ragged people standing forlornly before the Refugee Committee Headquarters; the same long line that had stood there in desperate hope every day for wearisome weeks. The sudden glimpse of a blue-eyed corpse staring blindly in their general direction sent von Roesler stumbling in sudden terrified fright around the corner, dragging Monica with him, expecting every moment to hear a scream of denunciation and the terrible threat of pounding feet. Of all the inmates of Buchenwald, the blue-eyed one was probably the only one that von Roesler could remember or recognize, possibly because of that startling contrast between the so-Aryan face perched precariously on top of that Jew-concentration-camp skeleton body. One of the survivors of the Hamburg trip, von Roesler also remembered as he hurried away, suddenly seeing again the flame-scarred wreckage of Hamburg and the tattered, blue-eyed prisoner lining up each morning to go out with the Decontamination Squad. How had that one ever survived? He pulled Monica along roughly, his terror communicating itself to her through the urgency of his sweating hands; the thought of falling into the claws of that mob filled him with nausea. But there was no outcry behind him; they returned to camp, frightened but safe.
They spent almost seven years in Portugal, at a small town called Trafaria, across the Tejo from Lisbon. It was a place where the presence of strangers was not so unusual as to excite constant surveillance. Still, it was safely away from the standard trail of refugees who constantly beat their bewildered way across the world through the portals of Lisbon. His trips to the capital were rare, and then mainly to exchange one of his dwindling stock of cut diamonds for money, an operation that caused neither surprise nor suspicion in that city of international barter.
In Trafaria, he read of the Nuremberg trials, and noted with calm indifference that Eichmann and Bormann had also managed to escape. The details of the depositions and sentences of the others did not interest him; whatever they got, they deserved; they had betrayed the Third Reich. He folded the paper to the sports section and sipped his aperitif as he read of the prowess of Real of Madrid. In February of 1952, they finally became citizens of Portugal, and in March of the same year they emigrated again, this time legally and safely, to Brazil.
The second time that Erick von Roesler saw Brazil was in April of 1952, from the second-class deck of a second-class steamer of the Companhia Sul Americana de Navigação. Monica was below in the stuffy cabin, tying their belongings into shabby bundles; he was alone on deck, peering ahead through the early dawn. They crept into Rio de Janeiro through a low fog, as on his first visit; the faint outlines of the tug pulling them appeared ghostly at the ship’s side. Brazil was always my destiny, he thought, his fist tightening against the smooth, damp railing. Here the betrayals shall be punished; here we shall build anew with no mistakes, for we shall base our building on the honest and sweet fact of hatred.
He stared ahead at the city he could faintly hear but not see. Brazil was the same; it had not changed, but Erick von Roesler was older, more bitter, the lines of his face etched in the acid of his thoughts, his hair sprinkled with streaks of white, his tall figure beginning to stoop. I shall never leave Brazil, he thought. Here I shall stay. Brazil has not changed, nor has my hatred on which I live, and on which I shall grow...
Preludio Sostenuto and Andante Carioca
Chapter 1
The small, dumpy man woke sharply, the ever-present trembling slowly subsiding, the deep throb of the plane’s huge motors returning through the frightening dreams to his consciousness. The tiny pillow had slipped from his shoulders, his head had fallen against the window frame; the briefcase chained to his wrist had twisted and the latch was cutting into the back of his hand. He pulled it back into a comfortable position and yawned deeply. Sunlight slotted the pulsing cabin, creeping in through the half-closed curtains, but the other passengers still slept soundly. A dead planet in orbit, high in the thin air; a satellite morgue, he thought, and glanced at his watch. Five A.M.; four hours to Rio de Janeiro.
Below, the jungle had disappeared during the night. The mottled stained green carpet that had shamed their noisy passage with mysterious silence was gone with his fleeting memory of it. Now there were splotched-brown oddly shaped hills, sewn to the endless plain with blue threads of winding watercourses. The reflection of the sun winked from one to the other; from twenty-five thousand feet up it was impossible to tell if they were small creeks or large rivers, or if the higher dull mounds were respectable hills or low hummocks.
Relativity, he thought, amazed as always at the odd fare his mind served up for inspection. Einstein always explained things horizontally; he should have explained them vertically. At least airplane passengers would have understood. His eye, searching the earth for diversion, caught and followed a beaten road twisting below, leading in the distance to a lonely house — a tiny block, a toy, lost in the vast isolation. And why, he began to wonder, would anyone live out here; and then suddenly smiled wryly. Let us assume a fugitive, he thought; one with either a flair for stupidity or a wonderful sense of humor, hiding in plain sight, safe from all dangers except the all-watching eye of passing planes, or the more punishing desolation of his endless solitude. A shadow crossed his mind; let us think of something else, he thought. There are many things I shall have to learn about fugitives and their ways, but all in good time.