E. P. Beaumont

And so in the fullness of time it came to pass that Elsa got her transport, thanks to the chatty young officer in charge of the deportations, and she got her pass to the Jewish quarter, and help with hauling the photographic equipment.  It was the fruit of weeks upon weeks of maneuvering, and she even managed an orderly whom the officer gave her and told to take orders from her as from his military superior, and all was well.

She briefed the young man, on the way there, in the fine art of being an anthropological assistant, which is to say, invisibility.  She’d told his officer to send him in civilian clothes, because while the imprimatur of the occupying authority was of great importance politically, it didn’t do to stir things up further with the subjects.  There were large families, in their warrens, mothers and fathers and ten to twelve children—quite marvelous, and a soon to be passing thing, for this prolific stock was to be pruned back, and this phenomenon would be documented for the histories of the Government General as well as for its own intrinsic interest.  

The young man was most helpful, and silent, as he carried the photographic equipment into an outbuilding and helped her to set up a primitive photographic studio, complete with a grey army blanket by way of backdrop, to which she affixed the dressmaker’s tape she carried by way of a reference rule, for use in later measurements on the photograph.  

Like this fellow, for example, the one to whom she owed nominal obedience as a soldier to his officer.  Yes, she understood the necessity of obedience and discipline; she had been schooled in those notions since childhood, but now she understood as well her mother’s canny female view, expressed not in words but in glances out of sight of the menfolk, that one had to choose husbands carefully, lest one find oneself owing obedience to a fool.  Elsa looked at her superior, her officer in the intellectual armies of the new order, and saw a beanpole of a fellow, pale except for a bit of sunburn across his nose—which showed, after all, that he’d been out in the sun but for a brief time and not with due prudence—with pale, thin hair and steel-rimmed spectacles, with a sardonic mouth and a nose that might not be quite Aryan enough (she wondered what admixture of the East had tainted his Baltic ancestors), with eyes pale enough to be Nordic but somehow watery… 

All the things that might be listed in the inventory of the proper Nordic male, but which did not add up to the splendid specimen in the posters.  To take but one example: the lips were thin enough, no hint of Africa or Arabia about them, no suspect ruddiness or excessive curvature, but instead of making his face that of an ubermensch, he looked rather like… a fish.  Yes, Elsa smiled to herself, rather like something you might turn up in a fish-market on the North Sea, and subsequently fillet and pickle, to serve with a nice sour cream sauce. 

And there was the other thing, as well.

He had looked her up and down—well, not quite as blatantly as the soldiers eyeing up the Polish girls—with his pale blue eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles, and asked in a light tone if she mightn’t have done the Reich a better favor had she foregone the doctorate and become the mother of warriors, as the future needed fine mothers of her make and she was of good Nordic stock.   

She had replied just as lightly that what was done was done, and she was here to do work for which she was uniquely trained.  And as a loyal servant of Party and Reich, no doubt he was ready to make rational use of the resources placed at his disposal.  She had drawn up the list, as well, of the places to which she desired access; her equipment was ready and she awaited only the necessary resources to begin the study.  

There followed days and weeks of fencing over escorts, over days and times, over the work of Aryanization, which necessarily took precedence over mere sentimental study of what was to be swept aside. 

There’s the motorized roar and the background roar of the sea.  There’s the greyed-out horizon, and the signs for the upcoming exits, Iceland coming up in a few hours and beyond that Denmark and Norway.  

It’s a dream, of course, because in real life there is no highway across the empty waters, over and past the sea-roads trodden by Vikings, by slavers and by pirates who called themselves explorers.  There is no road that passes over the ghost road of the Middle Passage,  no exit for the West Indies or for Ireland.  

It’s real, because the book says there is such a place, and there’s a slowing as the clouds clear and an improbably blue sky breaks overhead, a baroque Mediterranean heaven, and the Utopian consul steps on board to look at her papers and to ask her the purpose of her visit.  What is the answer to that question?