and asked to speak to her alone. For a heartstopping moment she thought he was about to go down on one knee and propose, but instead he told her, pale with anguish, that he had been transferred to Moscow.
“They cannot keep us apart,” he vowed, seizing her hands, kissing her again and again. “No distance can diminish our love.”
She wanted to believe him, and they parted with promises to arrange rendezvous in France or Switzerland as often as possible. But almost as soon as Boris left Berlin, Martha sensed that their last embraces had been infused with a desperate sorrow, a defiant refusal to accept the inevitable.
Chapter Twenty-eight
January 1935
Mildred
Mildred and Arvid welcomed the New Year in a new flat on the third floor of Woyrschstrasse 16, two blocks south of the Tiergarten and about five kilometers northwest of their old place. For more than two years they had enjoyed living in Neukölln, but the neighborhood had come under increased scrutiny by the Gestapo due to its long-standing hospitality to workers, immigrants, and Communists. When forced to choose between ending their study groups and salons or moving to a more discreet neighborhood, they had bidden a sad farewell to Neukölln.
Their new flat was small but modern, with a spacious front room, a galley kitchen, an en suite bath, and a balcony with just enough room for a table and two chairs. There were two bedrooms, but when Mildred and Arvid set up the smaller one as an office, they made none of the usual optimistic predictions that it would make a fine nursery someday. After more than eight years of marriage, countless attempts, and fleeting hopes and crushing disappointment, Mildred could no longer bear to arrange her home or her life around a dream that seemed unlikely to be fulfilled.
There were days she found some consolation in reflecting that perhaps it was better not to bring an innocent child into a world that had turned so ugly, so full of fear and hatred.
Even without a child, their lives and hearts were full. She and Arvid had each other. They had many dear friends, although their once vibrant salons had diminished with the emigration of so many gifted writers, editors, and scholars. They had fulfilling work. Arvid was busy practicing law and studying for the arduous exams that would qualify him to work in the civil service. Mildred continued to write by day and teach at the Abendgymnasium at night, avoiding as best she could the ubiquitous scrutiny of the National Socialist German Students’ Association.
In recent months she had struggled to publish anything of significant academic value, a problem that had plagued her colleagues and writer friends for more than a year, ever since Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Chamber of Culture had issued a multitude of regulations intended to impose Aryan uniformity on all publishing in Germany. Mildred had managed to slip a few subversive pieces of literary criticism past the censors, including an essay in the Berliner Tageblatt that deftly ignored the Nazi reverence for Blut und Boden by offering a sympathetic analysis of racial issues in Faulkner’s fiction, but for the most part she had been restricted to picturesque reminiscences of her Wisconsin girlhood. Her most promising long-term project was a translation of Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s biographical novel of Vincent van Gogh. Since Universitas Publishers had already accepted the manuscript, she had reasonable expectations that the book would see print, but she knew an overzealous censor could quash the project at any time.
Once Mildred had hoped that this sort of quiet resistance would be enough. Enlightening her students, inoculating them against Nazi propaganda, writing essays that inspired a better vision of humanity—these dangerous activities would earn her the outrage of the Nazis if she were exposed. She could lose her job, or face arrest or even deportation. Yet the severity of the punishments she faced seemed wildly out of proportion to the damage she was inflicting upon the Nazi regime. She felt as if she were stubbornly flinging pebbles against a vast stone fortress—a nuisance, nothing more. Only when she helped Jewish friends escape the Reich did she feel that she was accomplishing any real good.
Arvid shared her frustration, that infuriating sense of powerlessness before the Nazi juggernaut. Quietly, obliquely, he spoke with friends who shared their antifascist beliefs, hoping to build a discreet opposition network, sharing ideas and information. “There is strength in numbers,” he often said, “and power in knowledge.”