Stained Glass Read Free

wondered whether the chivalrous pair of Polish soldiers was prepared to challenge the entire Nazi Army, rape being the sport in which, at this point, he assumed the German Army to be substantially engaged. He even considered the possibility that he would be apprehended and hanged as a rapist.
    So they left the main road and traveled cross-country. As they came closer to the coast Axel’s well-disciplined face brightened, even as Zinka’s grew pensive and sad. He was moving away from the Nazis, she would return to their most recently occupied European capital. At the garage near the commercial pier she extended her hand, but her eyes looked down. Axel took it, bent his head formally, touching his lips to her graying hair, and, in English, said, “Goodbye, Zinka. I will never forget you.”
    Axel made his way through Sweden to Norway, where he presented himself to Norwegian intelligence. After the Nazi invasion of Norway he joined the resistance. For five years he made no effort to be in touch with his mother or any other relatives in Germany or England: he would not risk retribution against his family. When the war was over he received from the Norwegian monarch the highest decoration for bravery in a simple ceremony to honor all the surviving heroes of the resistance. “Like lining up for food stamps,” one veteran grumbled. Axel returned to Germany with an undetailed story of detention in Sweden, whither he said he had escaped after a brief period of captivity in Poland and where he was held incommunicado. The story was routinely, indeed listlessly, accepted by a society crushed under the events of recent months. In such a season Marco Polo could not have commanded an audience of six people to hear out his exploits.
    Axel resumed his studies, pursuing philosophy at Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers, and receiving an advanced degree after three years, working long days in the library and long afternoons in the gymnasium, where he boxed with some success as a middleweight. He was serious, but not fanatical or even obsessive in his pursuits, and though he led an apparently carefree life it was true—as later was widely remarked when every commentator in Europe undertook the definitive portrait of Axel Wintergrin—that strain was etched into a face otherwise that of a healthy twenty-eight-year-old: the calling card of Gestapo torturers in Norway who, pity the poor innocents, never even discovered that the man they were mutilating was a German. But he could smile through his calcified sadness, though nobody could quite remember when last Axel had been seen laughing. This is a very serious world, he told his closest friend Roland Himmelfarb, who as one of the few surviving German Jews—he sat out the holocaust in the strangest, strongest sanctuary of them all, serving undetected in the records department of the Gestapo in Berlin—hardly needed advertisement of the fact. Indeed, in his circle no one disagreed with him, because no one applied to Axel the conventional criteria. It was not expected of Count Wintergrin that he should join in beer-drinking contests or take his turn entertaining his associates with accounts of bawdy adventures or attend the games to cheer on his university team. Even as a boxer, he fought with a certain detachment. Although he was first-rate, adversaries and acute spectators got the impression he had a disinterested concern with the sport: often he eschewed the opportunity to cripple his opponent after maneuvering to do so—rather like throwing back into the stream the trout you have labored so hard to land. And after the match, though always affable and sportsmanlike, he would leave rather than stay on to see the other matches or join the team at refreshments. He would return to his studies, or write a letter to his mother or a friend, or write in his journal, which he never shared with anyone. His desultory romantic life was of concern to his mother, since Axel was