Blood Ties (20 page)

When I discovered I was pregnant, we celebrated by tying a
little red ribbon right here. On the tip. And I covered the head with lipstick.
The Baron and his sister were overjoyed. Having imagined that he had done his
duty, he went off to go about his business. I have not yet told you about his
business. No. I won't. It is not relevant. Feeling Konrad's child growing in me
only increased my thirst for him.

"There were other joys as well. Karla's two sons were
killed in action. You think I am being beastly. I already told you about hate.
Hate is marvelous. Any death in their line was just. And he was so proud that
it was a boy. I mean the Baron. We called the little one Siegfried and he was a
Baron. 'You have made me a Teutonic Baron, Konrad.' He was a positively awful
gardener. It was a scary business, sneaking about, but that is the mother of
invention. I suddenly developed a profound interest in horticulture. And Konrad
could see his son. We were quite a contented little menage. It wasn't long
before we made another little Baron. They are only fourteen months apart. Rudi.
I often wonder what might have happened to me if I had not found Konrad.
Providential, don't you think? Who would think after what the Baron had done
that I would be capable of such fertility? It was quite obvious that the Baron
was sterile. No, he would never submit to any tests. How could he ever have
faced that reality?"

Somewhere around this part a poignant moment might ensue.
Helga would look into the man's eyes. "Have you any children?" If the
nod was affirmative, she would continue swiftly, "So you know the power of
procreation. After all, what is the purpose of it? Merely pleasure. God
provided that pleasure for a reason." If the answer was negative, she
would pause, perhaps sigh. "By design." Actually, it was a confusing
interrogation, since it never mattered whether the men were single or married,
widowed or divorced. She would urge the man to continue now, guiding his
mounting of her, as if conception was the necessary result, rotating her body
to summon from both him and her a long lingering climax. Resting again, the
myth would take a strange turn in the telling. She would lay flat now, not
touching, watching the ceiling, talking upward. "A third little Baron came
in early 1944. By now, we had acquired a regular brood. Naturally, the Baron
had imagined his duty had been done. There were brief submissions, a kind of
backdating. But we had been so successful in our subterfuge that it must have
made us reckless. Somebody, a servant perhaps, might have seen me enter the
gardener's hut. You never know how such a thing occurs. Finally we were caught
in the act and Konrad was taken away. It was all so pedestrian in the end. And
he was taken so quickly, there was hardly any discussion. Was I supposed to
tell the Baron? I have always wondered about that. Someday perhaps. At the
right moment. Everything in life awaits the right moment, don't you
think?"

The myth always ended with a closing door, sometimes gently
shut, sometimes slammed. She had by then obliterated her real name. There were
broad hints, of course, but the men were, after all, here for other purposes
than investigation. Perhaps she had become known as the odd creature who needed
this confessional to spur her sexuality. What she had left out was any characterization
of Konrad, the real Konrad, the gentle dreamer, from whom sweetness poured like
syrup from a maple tree. That was hers to covet. But even that memory had grown
static against the relentless power of her hate.

The telling of the myth sustained her for half a decade,
but by then she had become a kind of amusement park diversion, a roller coaster
ride, perhaps, good for thrills the first time out, even a little illusion of
danger, a charge or two of excitement and fini. "It's an experience,"
they might snicker behind her back, she suspected. "You'll get your
jollies but you'll have to listen to the whole bloody mess." "But is
it worth it?" "At first, but it has a diminishing return."

So one day, fed up with the ikons of the Old Order, the
transient lovers who passed her flesh around like a bouncing ball, and the
diminishing interest in her myth, she packed it up and emigrated to the United States. There had always been that, the escape valve. When all else failed, there
was always the United States to wash you clean of the old filth. The stipend
was, she found, easily transferrable, although, like the myth, it was
diminishing in value rapidly.

She moved around the States, ever westward, further from
the geography of her past. The money continued to follow her, but by the time
she reached Fargo, North Dakota, in the early fifties, it was badly in need of
supplementing. Men would anchor her briefly. She could no longer remember their
faces. They would move her around in their cars from place to place, motel to
motel, bed to bed. To them, she knew, she was an illusion, a reflection in a
shattered mirror. They were welcome to do anything with her body. I am
everywoman with a thousand faces, she would tell herself. And she carried with
her that marvelous secret, her private treasure. It was comforting to note that
she held that much power over the von Kassels, a name she had long discarded,
although she still clung to her old Nazi passport, well hidden among her meager
portable possessions. It was, after all, the only tangible proof of her real
identity.

She was Hilda Kent by the time she reached Fargo, the bed
and drinking companion of a ladies underwear salesman who used her for a model
as they moved from town to seedy town along the Great Plains. She had met the
man in a Chicago bar.

His name was Alex. It was one of the few names she would
remember from those years and he chomped cheap cigars, told dirty stories,
laughed a lot, drank constantly from an ever present supply of cheap bourbon
which he kept in the trunk of his car. She had acquired a taste for that very
American booze by then. He called her "Fraulein," and had contrived a
very elaborate amusement to sell his wares, in which she was the centerpiece.
There was always a coterie of sleazy male shop-owners along Alex's well-worn
trail who would overbuy based on a little extra provision in the sales pitch.

He would invite them up to his hotel room in ones or twos
and let her model the goods in front of the buyers. She had even developed a
little routine, some rather clumsy gyrations as she stepped in and out of
little panties and brassieres.

"You like my Fraulein, Ned?" he would squeal,
patting her on the rear and cupping her breasts.

"Not bad," the buyer, already vastly motivated,
would reply. Then he would hand him a pile of Hershey bars and refill his
glass.

"Like all Frauleins, she'll do anything for Hershey
bars. Won't you, Hun." He would jab the fellow in the ribs. "Get it,
Ned? Hun. H-U-N." They would all roar with laughter. She could remember all
that with amusement. She liked it. She even liked the Hershey bars. Sometimes
Alex would watch her provide the buyer with the extras and she liked that, too.

"She sure does like to fuck. Don't you, Hun?"

She would nod to that, smile broadly, and concentrate on
her activity. Sometimes there were two buyers at once, and she could handle
that deftly with Alex as the cheering section.

"You're one helluva salesman, Alex," the men
would say after the "showing" and they would get down to serious
drinking.

But in Fargo the long hegira came to an end, and they were
raided like some common house of prostitution, a charge on which she was
actually booked, fingerprinted, and jailed for one night. She could remember
the smell and the cockroaches most of all, but inside, in the core of herself,
she felt protected by the old myth. Nothing could ever destroy the old hate.
Who could ever match what the Baron had done to her?

She actually met Martin first in the jailhouse. He was a
young cop then, pleasant, and shiny as a new penny, and he seemed interested in
her. He called her "Miss" when he processed her for release. The
underwear salesman had paid her bail, then had disappeared. She never cried
over things like that. They had happened too often and were expected.

But she was stranded in Fargo. She had instructed the bank
to send her check along to Butte, which was their final destination, which
meant that now, without Alex, she was dead broke with only two dollars to her
name.

There was a coffee shop across the street from the
jailhouse and she sipped a number of cups of coffee watching the entrance for
Martin to come out. Of course, she suspected her pregnancy by then, although
the actual father was of dubious origin. It was the reality of this new child
that challenged her sense of survival. She could look back on nearly ten years
of rolling tumbleweed. Inside of her still lurked the silly little princess
with neither the judgment nor wisdom to come out of the rain. Her courage was
leaving her. She was getting older. She was frightened and in Fargo, North
Dakota, eons away from the refuge of her old uncle's house.

When Martin came out, she went to him. She simply opened
her net and he fell in. His name was Barber and she was Helen Barber nearly
twenty-five years, German-born Helen Barber who had an accent.

She had decided in Fargo to go into a kind of hibernation,
like a bear, to let events elsewhere shape themselves. Time was of little
consequence when you had determined your patience in advance. Biding, she
called it to herself. Martin was endurable. He was a big man, soft spoken, even
polite. If he felt deluded or betrayed, he never mentioned it, accepting
Midge's premature seven pound, seven month birth as nature's aberration.

"My stuff works faster than most," he kidded his
buddies who dutifully showed up for the christening. But their wives knew how
to count to nine.

"You sure that's mine?" he would ask looking at
the tiny face in the cradle.

"She is like her father between the eyes and her
mother between the thighs." He was susceptible to that kind of humor.

But "biding," while it sustained her, was not a
science. Knowing when to set the time bomb for maximum destruction was quite
another matter. From surreptitious correspondence with an old Baden-Baden
friend, re-routed to a box number, she kept tabs on the von Kassels. She knew
that the Baron was ailing. She knew about the family reunions. She was provided
with sketchy details on the progress of her sons. The money continued to be
paid through the reliable chain of the international banking system, although
inflation had all but destroyed its value.

Yet, she mused now, watching herself in the mirror,
attempting a valiant repair job on the ravages of years, she might never have
pursued the final act if Midge hadn't finally thrown her back on the old
loneliness. The reality of the last quarter century was that Martin Barber had
settled her, warmed her, cared for her, protected her. It was her fantasy that
it was all a temporary thing. Actually, it was the most permanent thing in her
life. She hadn't expected Martin's sudden death to throw her into morbidity
again. He had simply expired one night of a heart attack in his sleep.

"You're so goddamned depressed. Life goes on. Snap out
of it," Midge entreated as she sat, usually in her torn bathrobe, peering
vapidly and unseeing into the television set. She still followed certain
habits, like treks to the post office box for the now infrequent letters from Baden-Baden. "I am so arthritic, Helga, and this hurts," the messages pleaded.
"I don't know how long I can continue." She absorbed what little
information there was to impart. Age had dampened curiosity as well.

So she just sat there in her daughter's living room day and
night. Her bed was the couch. Midge's husband was also a cop, like Martin, big,
with tatooed arms from Navy days and, by then, they had already had two kids.

"You're driving us all crazy, Mama." It was
Midge's incantation. Then it became a chorus.

"You got to get her the fuck out of here,"
Midge's husband would whine. He liked to sit around in his shorts, drinking
beer, switching off her programs for the sports as if she didn't exist. She
existed, all right. At first, they had been modest, quiet in their
remonstrances, sanitizing their bitterness about her behind closed doors. She
heard, of course.

"She's my mother."

"She's a shit. Get her out of here."

"I'll talk to her."

"Talk don't do no good. Blast her loose."

She heard it, but ignored the warnings, which became both
strident and blatant.

"You can't just sit around, Mama."

"I'm making plans."

"You're driving us crazy."

"I'll be out soon."

"When?"

"Soon."

But the sense of transiency was not the same as when Martin
was alive. Finally, Helga was out and wandering again. And the life with Martin
had become another temporary episode. She moved eastward. As always, her checks
followed. As long as she lived, the Baron had promised. Von Kassels were
fanatics about their word. She was no longer attractive and the kindness of
male friends was a thing of the past. Following the trail eastward, she
meandered in Chicago, then Minneapolis, finally New York. Mostly, she watched
television, went to the movies and kept to herself.

In New York, she lived in a broken down hotel in the
forties whose halls stank of urine and whose guests consisted of prostitutes
and drifting addicts. Mostly, they left her alone. Occasionally she was taunted
as the "nutty" lady. It didn't bother her. She was invisible.

It was when the letters from Baden-Baden stopped coming
that she felt the anxieties begin. She needed this as fuel to sustain her hate,
to contemplate a course of action. It was one thing to continually plan, but
quite another to act. Act how? And what of proof? All she had was the old Nazi
passport and the evidence of her stipend. They would think her mad, a convict
with a life sentence who will do anything for freedom. So she lived in the
empty puff of her little vacuum, reading nothing, rarely talking, watching
endlessly the little tube of her portable black-and-white television set. And
in the hours when the tube was blank she restitched the myth in her mind, like
a constantly recreated giant tapestry. She wrote no letters. She received no
letters. Occasionally her daughter called, but even that finally came to an end
as time went on. Someone, long ago, had lit a fuse and she was simply waiting
for it to run its course and explode. It did not lessen her anxiety to think in
these terms. Besides, she was not certain that the explosion would mean her
death. Hate does not expire like love. She had paid a great price for such
wisdom.