Free An Infinity of Mirrors by Richard Condon Page A

estates we have, which is why we are quite poor and perhaps why the men of the family have been soldiers in an almost unbroken line. What we did not have the wit to do with a plow we have done most gloriously with a sword.”
    It was an idyllic honeymoon. Paule felt that they had been lifted into the peace of heaven.
    They returned to Berlin on the 27th of July, 1932, and on the 28th Veelee returned to duty. It was three nights before the national elections. The National Socialists had sent their storm troopers into the streets to demonstrate destruction, and the carnage was more appalling than anything Germany had ever seen. In an army staff car Paule and Gretel were being driven through the center of Berlin when the uncomprehensible brutality began all around them. The car could move only at snail’s pace through the rioting Brown Shirts. Women were knocked down and kicked, and bricks were flung through shop windows as young men shouted for the death of all Jews; the car moved sedately, as if reviewing the spectacle. Truncheons were used on the aged; children were flung into the gutters and under cars. They made their way to Paule’s flat as quickly as they could. Gretel was retching so badly that Paule stretched her out on the tile floor and held her stomach. There was a doctor in the building; he came at once and gave Gretel sedatives.
    When the doctor had gone and her sister-in-law had been put to bed, Paule stood at the window of the room and watched the people beneath run back and forth like ants under a threat.
    â€œI cannot believe what I saw. I can’t, I can’t,” Gretel said. “How can you be so calm, Paule?”
    â€œI am a Jew. That makes a difference. You see it as a German and wonder what is happening to your people. I see it as a Jew and I wonder what will happen to me.”
    â€œNothing will happen to you, Paule. You are a von Rhode now.”
    â€œWouldn’t you have said that what you saw could not have happened to your people—to your industrious, kind, cheerful, good people?”
    Martial law was declared after seventy-five people had been killed and two hundred and eighty-five had been maimed and shattered. But the force which the Germany Army, as ordered by General von Rundstedt, had sent out to enforce the state of martial law against four hundred thousand exultant, blood-drunk storm troopers was a lieutenant and twelve men who were ordered to make the “necessary arrests.”
    For the first time since she had come to Germany, Paule felt dazed and ill. The German Army was Veelee and Veelee was the army. The army was encouraging the murder of Jews in the streets. She pushed the thought down and down into her mind, to suffocate it. Her father was gone. Veelee would understand. All she needed to remember was that she loved Veelee and that he loved her; the fact of these terrible events could not change what she felt for him and needed from him, nor what he felt for her. She began to read the newspapers with the avidity of an opposition editor. She read them all, and she took a morbid fascination in the tiny outrages as well as the massive murders. The Nazis won two hundred and thirty seats in the Reichstag, and though they lacked a majority, they were the largest party represented. On the day of the elections, after three days of rioting throughout the country, she got a long, ebullient, loving, and passionate letter from Veelee at the cavalry school at Wuensdorf. Among other things, he pointed out that the election campaign had made one thing clear: the Nazis were not against the Jews as everyone had supposed. All inside army information—the only reliable information since the newspapers were owned by a pack of Socialists and union radicals—showed that the riots had only been against the Communists and some Catholics. As a German, he felt he should thank God that there was some force which could openly attack the Communists; the army’s