The Last Supper by Charles McCarry Read Free Book Online

imagination. Paul had his mother’s face as well as her eyes, but an American
body, strong and loose and made for sport. He had inherited his father’s temperament, joyful and forgiving. He walked at ten months and his first connected words were in English, though Lori
always spoke to him in German.
    For three seasons of the year, in Berlin, Hubbard wrote every day from six in the morning until noon. He published his books, novels and poems, in the United States, and as they were never
translated into German he was unknown to the Berlin intelligentsia. He was little better known to most of his own countrymen. “They tell me you’re a writer, Mr. Christopher?”
American women would say to Hubbard at the Fourth of July party at the Embassy. “How interesting. What sort of things do you write?” With his instinctive good manners, Hubbard would
begin to reply. Lori would interrupt. “Not the sort of things you read, obviously,” she would say in withering tones. She never stopped believing that Hubbard was a genius.
    The Christophers spent summers at Berwick. Exercise and conversation were the family pastimes. By the time he was six, Paul could climb any cliff on Rügen. He was a strong swimmer who knew
the treacherous island tides. He woke every morning at five-thirty, drank a cup of hot milk and ate a piece of black bread, and went for a two-mile walk through the beech forest with Paulus. Before
the boy learned to read, Paulus told him about Rügen, its flora and fauna and history.
    Others had told him about Paulus, heroic tales. Paulus had commanded a regiment of lancers at the Battle of Tannenberg. When the Russian center broke, at about six in the evening on August 28,
1914, Paulus had pursued the flying rabble of the Russian 15th Corps through the forest of Grünfliess, putting two hundred enemy to the spear in a brisk skirmish on the shores of a lake and
setting their bivouac on fire. During a saber fight with a Russian officer, conducted from the backs of heaving chargers, Paulus had severed the right hand of his enemy. Incredibly, the maimed
Russian had turned his horse and galloped into the lake, shouting to rally his routed troops. Paulus, seeing his wounded foe fall from the saddle, spurred into the water and rescued him. Dragging
the unconscious Russian into the burning camp, he thrust the spurting stump of his wrist into a fire, cauterizing the wound. The Russian, treated by Paulus’s regimental surgeon, survived.
    “Did Uncle Paulus meet the Russian again, after the war?” Paul asked Hilde.
    “He invited him to Berwick, but he never came. He must have been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks, like your grandfather.”
    Paul received little Christian instruction from Paulus, his German godfather. “Bismarck was a Christian, he was very vocal about it,” Paulus said, “and a greater bastard never
lived. Memorize the Sermon on the Mount; I advise you to live by it even if you don’t have a single spark of religious faith.”
    Conversation was an addiction of the Buechelers. During their long banishment under Bismarck, the family learned to get along without outsiders. To avoid turning into a family of bores, they had
kept their minds fresh by learning new facts, new languages, new skills. Even now, guests were a rarity at Berwick. Anecdotes were forbidden. Stories withered the mind, Paulus said; new talk had to
be invented every day. This required a great deal of reading, and there were hundreds of books in the house. The hours between lunch and dinner were set aside for reading; at the beginning of June,
twenty books were placed in Paul’s room, and he was expected to read them all by the end of August.
    “Admirable,” said Hubbard, “but Paul ought to get in more sailing.”
    Hubbard was a great believer in sailing. With the meager royalties from his writings, he bought a white-hulled yawl and named it Mahican , after the tribe of Indians that had lived on his
family’s land in the