Reference no: EM133303162

Assignment: Read the excerpt from "The Betrayal" From THE BETRAYAL By Henry Kreisel

The narrator, Mark, is relating the story of Theodore Stappler as Stappler recalls it to him. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, Stappler had entrusted his life and his mother's life to Joseph Held. The excerpt begins with the narrator describing the day that Stappler discovered Held had betrayed him.

1. He looked at his watch and saw that the train was due to leave in fifteen minutes, and he began to run and felt the pain in his side again, though not so severe as it has been before, but in any case, he paid no attention to it but kept on running. Then he came to the main street again, and here the crowd was so dense that he had to slow up, and then at last he saw the station and looked at his watch and saw that he still had ten minutes left. Unless, of course, Held had already been there before him. He began to run again, pushing his way through the crowd. As soon as he entered the station, he saw that it was filled with uniformed men, soldiers, policemen, and stormtroopers in their brown shirts, and he was suddenly afraid.

2. It was, said Theodore Stappler to me, impossible for him to describe the dreadful panic that came over him. I thought back to the moment when we had first hit the beach in Sicily, and I understood what he meant. For I, too, had known fear and even panic. But I was in the company of friends and comrades, and we had drawn strength and sustenance from each other's fear and so had conquered our fear. But he was utterly alone, dependent solely on himself. I looked at him as he sat there, in my comfortable apartment, his face now almost ashen-white, drawn in remembered pain, and I knew all at once that he had failed to rise there in that station, that his fear had conquered him, and that it was this knowledge he had had to live with since that day.

3. I knew and my heart went out to him, and I leaned forward and touched his knee lightly with my hand. He seemed to understand what I meant by the gesture, for a fleeting smile crossed his grave face. "I was also afraid once," I said. "Everybody is afraid," he answered harshly. "But that is not an excuse." "You judge too harshly," I said. "Wait," he said. It seemed suddenly to be unbearably hot in the apartment, and I became aware of sweat under my armpits and at the back of my neck, and I wished he would get the thing over with and tell me at once the brutal facts which I already surmised, already knew in my heart, as one foresees the destruction of a tragic hero and sits in horrid fascination and longs to cry out a warning, but knows it would be pointless. "I know now, knew of course very soon after," Theodore Stappler continued his account of that crucial event, "that I had five minutes to run out on the platform and rush to our carriage and get six people off the train. It would have been enough time.

4. But I did nothing. I stood paralysed. Because a policeman stood at the gate leading to the platform and I was afraid. Yet when I finally moved, he didn't even attempt to stop me. "But listen, Mark!" he cried out to me, "Listen! When I finally moved towards him, he didn't do anything to stop me. He just moved aside and let me go past the gate. But it was too late. Because when I got on the platform, I saw a group of policemen coming through another entrance, and they were led by the same officer who had sat with Held, and with them there was Held himself. They were ahead of me, and cut me off from the carriage. And Held walked with them, he led the way. He walked with them!"

5. Theodore Stappler's voice rose and he was quite beside himself. He jumped up from his chair and began to pace about the room, like a caged animal. He closed his hands and opened them, closed them and opened them. And then he stopped by my chair and seemed to tower over me, and his finger jabbed the air and pointed towards me, as if he were trying to accuse me, as if I, in fact, were Held, although it was also clear to me that his fury was really directed against himself as much as against Held. "The traitor!" he cried. "He walked with them!" I tried to calm him, and I touched him gently on the arm, but he brushed my hand aside.

6. In a low voice, hoarse with emotion, he went on to tell how he had watched them march along the platform, and when they came to the carriage where his mother and the others were, Held stopped, and the detachment stopped, too, but Held alone entered the carriage, to carry out the last step of whatever infernal bargain he had made. Outside, on the platform, the policemen waited. Time passed. The train should already have left, but clearly there had been orders that it should not leave. What was happening inside the carriage? Quickly, as if they sensed that there was some sport afoot, a crowd gathered. They joked and shouted and jostled against each other. Men picked up children and sat them on their shoulders, so that they might see better whatever it was that was about to happen.

7. And Theodore Stappler stood at the back of the crowd and watched helplessly. All at once Held appeared and got off the train, and behind him the others. Theodore Stappler's mother came last. As soon as they were all on the platform, and as if by a prearranged signal, the policemen surrounded them and began to push them on. One of the women began to scream hysterically and nearly fainted, but one of the policemen propped her up and half dragged her along the platform. The crowd, suddenly aware that people were being arrested, began to shout and hoot at them.

8. One of the policemen put his arm on Theodore Stappler's mother, but she shook him off with such an imperious gesture that he withdrew his hand in surprise. And she walked on between two policemen, with pride and with her head held high, and when Theodore Stappler saw this he tried to cry out, to shout to her, but his throat was so constricted, as if a man's fist were choking it, that he could make no sound. Only a weak moan came from him. Did she see him there, standing on the platform? He would never know. For suddenly, he felt himself go limp; his knees buckled under him, and he dragged himself to the back and leaned against the stone wall there and closed his eyes and prayed that the earth would open and swallow him up. Then they were gone.

9. There was a blast from the engine whistle, and the train began slowly to move on towards the French border and to Paris beyond. The crowd dispersed. And Theodore Stappler heard, vaguely, as if in a dream, a man say to his child that this was how spies were caught, and that that was how the country was protected. Now these people would not be able to take their secrets and give them away to their nation's enemies. Then, in a sudden rush, Theodore Stappler ran out of the station, into the street, thinking that perhaps he might yet see them. But they were gone. And forever after he would have to live with the knowledge that he might have saved them or at least might have shared their fate. "But could you really have saved them?" I asked him. "Would you not have been found?" "Not necessarily," he said. "I did after all save myself. We could have hidden somewhere. I don't think they would have gone searching for us. Not at that time. But all that is idle speculation. I did not anything. I just lost my nerve and stood by while all this was going on."

10. The account of these events had completely drained him. His face looked pale and drawn. He walked slowly back to his chair and sat down and buried his head in his hands. And so, he sat, for a long, long time. I wanted to say something, but I could think of nothing that would not seem fatuous (silly, pointless, purposeless). For nothing I could say would alter a particle of what had happened on that hot and desperate afternoon. And sympathy, I sensed, was the last thing he wanted at this moment. I sat helpless, not knowing what to do, when suddenly a line of poetry that I had heard or read once, but whose source I could not immediately recall, forced itself into my consciousness. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? I almost said it aloud but checked myself at the last moment. I didn't want to judge them, neither Theodore Stappler nor Joseph Held.