Mother Night (14 page)

They were neatly dressed, wore suits and white shirts and neckties. All that identified them as guardsmen was a little piece of gold ribbon run through the buttonhole of the right lapel of each.

I would not have noticed this odd detail of buttonholes on the right lapels, lapels that conventionally have no buttonholes, if Dr. Jones hadn’t pointed it out to me.

“It’s a way they have of identifying each other, even though the ribbon isn’t worn,” he said. “They
can see their ranks growing,” he said, “without anybody else noticing it.”

“They all have to take their coats to tailors and insist on buttonholes in the right lapel?” I said.

“The mothers do it,” said Father Keeley.

Keeley, Jones, Resi, and I were sitting on a raised platform facing the guardsmen, our backs to the furnace. Resi was on the platform because she had agreed to say a few words to the boys about her firsthand experiences with communism behind the Iron Curtain.

“Most tailors are Jews,” said Dr. Jones. “We don’t want to tip our hand.”

“Besides—” said Father Keeley, “it’s good for the mothers to participate.”

Jones’ chauffeur, The Black Fuehrer of Harlem, was now on the platform with us, hanging a big canvas sign behind us, tying its grommeted ends to steam pipes.

This is what it said:

“Get plenty of education. Lead your class in all things. Keep your body clean and strong. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

“These are neighborhood kids?” I asked Jones.

“Oh, no,” said Jones. “Only eight of them are even from New York City. Nine are from New Jersey, two are from Peekskill—the twins—and one comes all the way from Philadelphia.”

“Every week he comes from Philadelphia?” I said.

“Where else can he get what August Krapptauer was offering here?” said Jones.

“How were they recruited?” I said.

“Through my paper,” said Jones, “but they really recruited themselves. Worried, conscientious parents were writing to
The White Christian Minuteman
all the time, asking me if there wasn’t some youth movement that wanted to keep the American bloodstream pure. One of the most heartbreaking letters I ever saw was from a woman in Bernardsville, New Jersey. She’d let her boy go into the Boy Scouts of America, not knowing that the true name of the B.S.A. ought to be ‘the Boogies and Semites of America.’ And the boy got to be an Eagle Scout, and then he went into the Army, went over to Japan, and came home with a Japanese wife.”

“When August Krapptauer read that letter he cried,” said Father Keeley. “That’s when he knew, tired as he was, he had to get back to working with youth again.”

Father Keeley called the meeting to order, had us all pray. His prayer was a conventional one, asking for courage in the face of hostile hosts.

There was one unconventional touch, however, a touch I had never heard of before, even in Germany. The Black Fuehrer stood over a kettledrum in the back of the room. The drum was muffled—muffled, as it happened, by the simulated leopard skin I had worn
earlier for a bathrobe. At the end of each sentence in the prayer, the Black Fuehrer gave the muffled drum a thump.

Resi’s talk on the horrors of life behind the Iron Curtain was brief and dull, and so unsatisfactory from an educational standpoint that Jones had to prompt her.

“Most devoted Communists are of Jewish or Oriental blood, aren’t they?” he asked her. “What?” she said.

“Of course they are,” said Jones. “It goes without saying,” he said, and he dismissed her rather curtly.

Where was George Kraft? He was sitting in the audience, in the very last row, next to the muffled kettledrum.

Jones introduced me next, introduced me as a man who needed no introduction. He said I wasn’t to start talking yet, because he had a surprise for me.

He certainly did.

The Black Fuehrer left his drum, went to a rheostat by the light switch, and dimmed the lights gradually as Jones talked.

Jones told, in the gathering darkness, of the intellectual and moral climate in America during the Second World War. He told of how patriotic, thoughtful white men were persecuted for their ideals, how, finally, almost all the American patriots were rotting in federal dungeons.

“Nowhere could an American find the truth,” he said.

The room was pitch dark now.

“Almost nowhere,” said Jones in the dark. “If a man was fortunate enough to have a short-wave radio,” he said, “there was still one fountainhead of truth—just one.”

And then, in the darkness, there was the crackle and susurrus of short-wave static, a fragment of French, a fragment of German, a fragment of Brahms’ First Symphony, as though played on kazoos—and then, loud and clear—

And so on.

There were fifteen minutes of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the free American, there in basement darkness. I do not mean to suppress my infamy with a casual “and so on.”

The Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals has recordings of every broadcast Howard W. Campbell, Jr., ever made. If someone wants to go over
those broadcasts, wants to cull from them the very worst things I said, I have no objection to those culls being attached to this account as an appendix.

I can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn’t believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying.

The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I’d said, didn’t shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I’ve always known what I did. I’ve always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind—schizophrenia.

There was one adventure in the dark worth reporting, though. Somebody put a note in my pocket, did it with intentional clumsiness, so that I would know the note was there.

When the light came on again, I could not guess who had given me the note.

I delivered my eulogy of August Krapptauer, saying, incidentally, what I pretty much believe, that Krapptauer’s sort of truth would probably be with mankind forever, as long as there were men and women around who listened to their hearts instead of their minds.

I got a nice round of applause from the audience, and a drumroll from the Black Fuehrer.

I went into the lavatory to read the note.

The note was printed on lined paper torn from a small spiral notebook. This is what it said:

“Coal-bin door unlocked. Leave at once. I am waiting for you in vacant store directly across street. Urgent. Your life in danger. Eat this.”

It was signed by my Blue Fairy Godmother, by Colonel Frank Wirtanen.

M
Y LAWYER HERE
in Jerusalem, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, has told me that I would surely win my case if I could produce one witness who had seen me in the company of the man known to me as Colonel Frank Wirtanen.

I met Wirtanen three times: before the war, immediately after the war, and finally, in the back of a vacant store across the street from the residence of The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Only at the first meeting, the meeting on the park bench, did anyone see us together. And those who saw us were no more likely to fix us in their memories than were the squirrels and birds.

The second time I met him was in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the dining hall of what had once been an officers’ candidate school of the Engineers Corps of the
Wehrmacht
. There was a great mural on the wall of that
dining hall, a tank coming down a lovely, winding country lane. The sun was shining in the mural. The sky was clear. This bucolic scene was about to be shattered.

In a thicket, in the foreground of the mural, was a merry little band of steel-helmeted Robin Hoods, engineers whose latest prank was to mine the lane and to implement the impending merriment with an anti-tank gun and a light machine gun.

They were so happy.

How did I get to Wiesbaden?

I was taken from a Third Army prisoner-of-war pen near Ohrdruf on April 15, three days after my capture by Lieutenant Bernard B. O’Hare.

I was driven to Wiesbaden in a jeep, was guarded by a first lieutenant whose name is unknown to me. We didn’t talk much. I did not interest him. He spent the entire trip in a slow-smoldering rage about something that had nothing to do with me. Had he been slighted, insulted, cheated, maligned, grievously misunderstood? I don’t know.

At any rate, I don’t think he would be much help as a witness. He was carrying out orders that bored him. He asked his way to the camp, and then to the dining hall. He left me at the door of the dining hall, told me to go inside and wait. And then he drove off, leaving me unguarded.

I went inside, though I might easily have wandered into the countryside again.

Inside that melancholy barn, all alone, seated on a table under the mural, was my Blue Fairy Godmother.

Wirtanen was wearing the uniform of an American soldier—zippered jacket; olive-drab trousers and shirt, the shirt open at the neck; combat boots. He had no weapon. Neither did he wear any symbol of rank or unit.

He was a short-legged man. When I saw him sitting there on the table, he was swinging his feet, and his feet were far off the floor. He must have been at least fifty-five then, seven years older than when last I’d seen him. He was bald, had put on weight.

Colonel Frank Wirtanen had the impudent, pink-baby look that victory and an American combat uniform seemed to produce in so many older men.

He beamed at me and he shook my hand warmly, and he said, “Well—what did you think of
that
war, Campbell?”

“I would just as soon have stayed out of it,” I said.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You lived through it, anyway. A lot of people didn’t, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “My wife, for instance.”

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“I found out she was missing the same day you did,” he said.

“How?” I said.

“From you,” he said. “That was one of the pieces of information you broadcast that night.”

This news, that I had broadcast the coded announcement of my Helga’s disappearance, broadcast it without even knowing what I was doing, somehow upset me more than anything in the whole adventure. It upsets me even now. Why, I don’t know.

It represented, I suppose a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about.

At that climactic moment in my life, when I had to suppose that my Helga was dead, I would have liked to mourn as an agonized soul, indivisible. But no. One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made.

“That was vital military information? That had to be got out of Germany at the risk of my neck?” I said to Wirtanen.

“Certainly,” he said. “The instant we got it, we began to act.”

“To act?” I said, mystified. “To act how?”

“To find a replacement for you,” said Wirtanen. “We thought you’d kill yourself before the sun came up again.”

“I should have,” I said.

“I’m damn glad you didn’t,” he said.

“I’m damn sorry I didn’t,” I said. “You would
think that a man who’s spent as much time in the theater as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die—if he was to be a hero.” I snapped my fingers softly. “There goes the whole play about Helga and me, ‘Nation of Two,’” I said, “because I missed my cue for the great suicide scene.”

“I don’t admire suicide,” said Wirtanen.

“I admire form,” I said. “I admire things with a beginning, a middle, an end—and, whenever possible, a moral, too.”

“There’s a chance she’s still alive, I guess,” said Wirtanen.

“A loose end,” I said. “An irrelevancy. The play is over.”

“You said something about a moral?” he said.

“If I’d killed myself when you expected me to kill myself,” I said, “maybe a moral would have occurred to you.”

“I’ll have to think—” he said.

“Take your time,” I said.

“I’m not used to things having form—or morals, either,” he said. “If you’d died, I probably would have said something like, ‘Goddamn, now what’ll we do?’ A moral? It’s a big enough job just burying the dead, without trying to draw a moral from each death,” he said. “Half the dead don’t even have names. I might have said you were a good soldier.”