Free The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler Page B

Dwarf, weeping, to the door. "Good night, Korner."
    "G'night," sobbed the Red Dwarf.

    of our dining room one warm summer night and landed at my mother's feet. The note said simply: "Cowards should be shot." Father and I rushed to the window, but there was nothing to see.
    "You are a danger to us all, not just to yourself!" my father began to shout, his eyes bulging, the veins at his temples throbbing. "You must leave Germany right away, immediately!"
    "But Ludwig—" began my mother.
    "Frieda, leave this to me. He must get out of here." He began to pace up and down. "Intolerable!" he said. "Intolerable!" But whether the word was directed at me or at the note that he still held in his hand, it was impossible to say.
    "But where will he go?" asked my mother.
    "Switzerland," said Aunt Manya.
    They were talking now as if I were not there to hear them. My sister, Lola, sat on the sofa, silent, frightened, staring wide-eyed at her adored brother, who seemed to have done something truly shameful, unmentionable.
    "Don't you think, Father—" I began.
    "Silence!" he screamed. "You have nothing of any interest to say. You will go to Switzerland. But not to moon about with the other loafers, the good-for-nothings sitting out the war. No more poetry rubbish, thank you! You will study something that might be of use to you in a future career, useful eventually to the firm, useful perhaps in time even to the Fatherland."
    "But Ludwig, Otto is a good boy, never a day's trouble from him. Why are you so angry with him? He can't help it that he can't fight. What has he done?"
    My mother's tearful rebuke brought my father up short. In a softer tone he said, "Some good may come of this. In Switzerland he can also act as the firm's agent with America and the other nonbelligerents. That should count for something, cut through some of the red tape." He ran from the room and locked himself in his study.

    I do not condemn my poor father for his outburst. He was distraught, fearful for his womenfolk—the stone through the window had terrified my mother—fearful for his standing in the community, fearful even for me. Perhaps, too, he had had some glimmering of the truth: the weakness of the foundation upon which he had built his trust in the Enlightenment and the Emancipation, the bacillus of anti-Semitism bred in the very marrow of the Volk y the essential capriciousness of German toleration. Like all the impotent, he vented his frustration on the innocent.
    Later he knocked very softly on the door to my room. "Its not your fault, Otto," he said, reaching up to pat me on the head. "Never mind, my boy. Soon the war will be over, and you will return to us." He meant to be kind, of course; this was as close as he had ever come to an apology. In the order of things, parents do not apologize to their children. But his words stung just the same. Far better, it seemed to me then, to be unjustly accused of cowardice than to be treated as a child.
    As A SMALL BOY I once watched a beetle trying to climb out of a glass bowl: up the slippery walls he went, up, up, and then— hoppla!—down he fell on his shiny back, his little legs waving frantically in the air. Turn him over and he would start again, up, up, and then hoppla! How he wanted to get out!
    The Contessa would not have liked Zurich. This was no place for a claustrophobe. In Zurich, surrounded by the oppressive mountains, the Contessa would have felt like that beetle. But during the Great War this claustrophobic atmosphere was much increased. There was a tension almost palpable in the air. One lived in the eye of the storm, the peaceful dead center, while all around the battle raged, the guns thundered, the mines blew young limbs to bloody shreds, and a world, a way of life, was dying.

    I arrived in Zurich (as I have elsewhere noted) in mid-September 1915, a month before the university term was to begin, time enough to get settled, to find my bearings. The city was bursting with refugees and exiles,