An Honorable German (19 page)

Oskar, a cook’s helper with a broken leg, was the first to die—not from the infected leg, Max thought. He simply gave up.
They rolled Oskar into the sea, and though all the men were sitting or kneeling in the boat, Max ordered them to salute, something
one normally did only while standing. It was late afternoon, the sunlight had softened, and with Max leading, they began to
quietly sing “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden”:

I had a comrade

None better have I had

The drum called us to fight,

He always on my right,

In step, through good and bad.

A bullet it flew toward us,

For him or meant for me?

His life from mine it tore,

At my feet a piece of him,

As if a part of me.

Max dropped his head and put his hands over his eyes so his men would not see the tears that rolled down his face, though
he could not hide the trembling of his body. In his mind’s eye he could still see Dieter being incinerated by the burning
oil.

His hand reached up to hold mine.

I must reload my gun.

“My friend, I cannot ease your pain,

In life eternal we’ll meet again,

And walk once more as one.”

Max thought back to his first week in the navy when he had met Dieter and how he disliked him in the beginning, thinking him
a braggart and a blowhard. But over time Dieter proved to be a true comrade—Max never had a better one. Dieter was also the
most audacious person Max ever knew. If there were a prank, Dieter was behind it—in the middle of a January night at the Marineschule
Mürwik, they had driven a cow up sixteen flights of stairs to the very top floor of the main building. The cow would go up
the stairs, but not down, so it had to be butchered right there, an act that earned the entire crew a fifteen-minute cursing
out from the commandant. They glued the boots of the riding instructor to the floor, short-sheeted beds, put salt water in
the water pitchers in the officers’ mess.

In song he was my comrade,

None better you could find,

His voice he dedicated

To our choir and elated

Our hearts with song and kind.

Max remembered the times Dieter spoke to him of the father he never knew; of how it felt to be the one who found his father’s
body hanging from the noose, a picture he was never able to drive from his constant nightmares.

Now rest your bones, my singer,

All woe and pain is past.

Sing with the angels up above

In praise of God and His love,

My friend, at peace at last.

Soon we will also follow

You through that heavenly door,

It’s there that we shall meet again

To harmonize our old refrain,

With you, my friend, once more.

Max continued to weep quietly until exhaustion overtook him and he slept.

For those who died in the following days, there was no song, no salute—just the grunts of exhausted men as they rolled the
bodies into the sea. If no breeze came up, the corpses would float beside the lifeboat far too long, the living staring into
the bilge to avoid looking into the eyes of the dead. By the fifth day they were down to twelve, the youngest among them proving
the most vulnerable. They’d never faced a crisis before. They gave up and they died.

Max hung on, clinging to life with a part of himself that had been a stranger but now came to the fore with a strength he
had never known. If anyone survived, he knew it would be him. There was so much he still wanted: to put his hands on Mareth
again, to feel her body against him, to have his life with her; to take revenge on the English for Dieter, to protect his
country; and he wanted to see his father at least once more. “You would understand if you had been at Verdun,” was something
his father had often said to him. And now he did understand. It wasn’t anger, or love or desire or even fear that kept him
alive. It was simply his primal will to survive; an independent force within him, bound neither by logic nor by reason; a
force few ever discovered in themselves. He wished it would go away.

By the ninth day his limbs were bloated, his joints ached, his skin blistered. He lay in the bottom of the boat, lips parched,
tongue swollen to twice its normal size, his breath short and ragged against his broken ribs. How many alive now? Eight? Nine?
Each day for the last seven he had taken a sun sight at noon and then made the men row the boat to their original position,
but Max understood now that it was hopeless. The sun beat down till he wanted to scream from the pain. He desperately wanted
to immerse himself in the cool sea but knew if he went into the water he would die there; he’d never have the strength to
pull himself back into the boat. Then night came and, with it, cold so piercing that his teeth chattered and he curled up
with the other men for warmth, all of them piled together in the bilge like dogs.

In a half-sleep, barely conscious, Max often dreamed of home, of his father, of his mother, of waltzing with Mareth on top
of the Brandenburg Gate; of playing poker with the English and winning one of their ships; of Dieter burning alive in the
sea; of things that had happened and things that had not. And now most of his life seemed this way: unfathomable, dreamlike,
an indistinct line between what was real and what was not. But as he lay in the bottom of the lifeboat, he knew from the terrible
pain of his burning skin that this travail was not a dream but a reality from a world beyond the worst nightmares he had ever
known.

Two more lay dead in the lifeboat on the tenth morning, staring up with sightless eyes. One of them was Harslager. Max wondered
if he should have shot him after all. It would have turned out to be merciful. Their food and water were three days gone;
another two died that night.

Four men were alive the next day when
U-329
found them.

PARIS GERMAN-OCCUPIED FRANCE

TEN MONTHS LATER

4 NOVEMBER 1941

O
N A BRILLIANTLY SUNNY DAY IN EARLY
J
UNE OF 1929, WHEN
M
AX
was fourteen, his father took him aboard the warship
Emden
during the annual Kiel Week celebration, a maritime festival that attracted ships and visitors from around the world. Everything
Max saw that day fascinated him: the clipper ships still being used to haul wool from Australia; the modern freighters going
into service for Norddeutscher Lloyd; the new high-speed patrol boats built for the navy. But it was his tour of the warship
that stayed with him, etched into his memory as sharply as the clean lines of
Emden
herself. He remembered everything: the outline of the cruiser sharp against the blue sky as she towered above the dock, the
pride of the men in their starched uniforms, the order and precision of their movements, the power of the ship, the size of
its guns, the coils of thick rope, the smell of the sea. On that day Max decided to become a naval officer. His desire was
so strong that his father enrolled him in the Marine Bund, an organization devoted to instilling in young men the virtues
necessary to make them good citizens and future officers. The closest branch was in Kiel, twenty kilometers from Bad Wilhelm,
but Max’s father drove him to every meeting. The Marine Bund taught Max many of the skills he would need to win a coveted
place at the Marineschule Mürwik: Morse code, signal lamp, marching, semaphore, nautical science, sailing. He mastered them
as fast as anyone in the group.

Yet to become a Reichsmarine Seekadett was a difficult process—less than three percent of applicants were accepted. Candidates
had to pass a series of rigorous tests, some written, some physical, some psychological. The most important was the Mutprobe,
the Courage Test, which involved grasping two metal bars through which a steadily increasing electrical current was run.

When the day came for him to take the Mutprobe, Max’s will to succeed was overwhelming. Having made the commitment to become
a naval officer, he dared not disappoint himself or, worse, disappoint his father. He had pledged to himself that no force
on earth would be enough to make him let go of the bars; he’d repeated this fact to himself over and over as he practiced
holding on to a pair of bicycle handlebars in his room, imagining the force of the current. He stood in line on the morning
of the test, watching as other boys wilted in the face of their pain, whispering to himself that he would not let go, he would
not let go. He did let go, but only after blacking out.

But with his life in the balance, Max would not let go at all. He remembered nothing of his three weeks aboard the U-boat,
save a few hazy moments of the doctor’s care. He was fortunate
U-329
even carried a doctor. Most U-boats didn’t—their loss rate was too high, the supply of doctors too limited. But
U-329
had a naval physician aboard because she was on the backside of an extraordinarily long voyage—to Japan to exchange one thousand
flasks of mercury for crude rubber, a material Germany needed desperately. The doctor tended the wounded men with the greatest
of care, but only Max and a seaman first class named Klaus survived.

“I’m not sure how you managed it,” the chief physician at the base hospital in La Rochelle told Max. “Three broken ribs, dehydration,
punctured lung, fracture of the upper right humerus, infected scalp, sun poisoning, exposure, starvation. You should be dead.”

Max shrugged his shoulders. Well he wasn’t dead, now was he?

But it had been a race closely won. For many weeks after his admittance to the base hospital in Lorient, his survival had
been in doubt. Only after two months had passed did the doctors even allow Max to be taken by ambulance to the main Kriegsmarine
hospital in Paris where the navy’s top specialists could look after him.

Mareth came as soon as she got his telegram. She arrived on his third afternoon in Paris, wearing a simple blue dress with
white lilacs printed on the fabric. The fedora on her head might have been a man’s; she wore it with a feather in the band,
like Marlene Dietrich.

“Max,” she whispered from the doorway. He opened his eyes and they each simply looked upon the other. Late afternoon sun poured
through the window, cut by the blinds into strips of gold. Her hair was a little shorter; she smiled with her small, perfect
teeth. She looked the same yet took his breath away. But he could tell from her expression that he still must look a fright,
pale as death and thin as a pikestaff.

“Come here,” he tried to say, but his voice wouldn’t work. He motioned her closer with his hand.

She came to the edge of the bed, glanced down at his bony legs beneath the sheet, then back up to his face, pale and rough
as the new skin grew in. “Max,” she whispered again. He reached out and she took his hand. Feeling her touch, tears came to
his eyes and ran down his face.

She took his hand in both of hers and kissed his fingers. “I’m going to be fine,” he said, voice cracking. “If you help me,
I’ll be fine.” He smiled as best he could and Mareth began to cry as well, but she was smiling, too. She took her hands and
put them on his face, cradled his head lightly, and brushed her lips across his forehead.

“I missed you,” she said. “You can’t imagine the way I missed you.”

“I can,” Max said in a hoarse whisper. “I can.”

_________

He fought night and day to regain his strength, and toward the end of the seventh week he woke one morning with a violent
erection. Mareth had fallen asleep beside him in a chair, as she did from time to time. He gently shook her awake, pointing
to where the bedsheet was tented. She laughed and pounced onto the bed, slipping under the sheet and straddling him, leaning
forward to kiss his mouth.

“Maybe we should take this one step at a time,” Max whispered.

She covered his mouth with her hand. “Maybe you should be quiet and follow orders, sailor.”

Max hadn’t been with a woman for more than two years, except for three drunken trips to a private gentlemen’s club in Buenos
Aires, where Dieter was welcomed like a conquering hero by the madam and her girls, a welcome they extended to Max as Dieter’s
friend. He still felt guilty about those three evenings. He had actually gone to confession in Buenos Aires, but the priest
took a broad view of these matters.

“It is wartime and you are a young man. Say one Hail Mary and God forgives you.”

“That is all, Father? For three trips to a house of prostitution?”

“Then say the Hail Mary three times,” the priest said sternly, not partial to negotiating with penitents. “Ego te absolvo
a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti Amen.” Catholicism in Argentina was different than in Germany.

Max was inside Mareth for all of thirty seconds before exploding with a groan. She kissed him again as the tension drained
from his body, her tongue polishing his teeth. Then she laughed and nestled down beside him on the narrow bed. “Now I believe
you’re getting well,” she said.