Secret Father (15 page)

I pictured him, a lost boy, hour after hour in one base theater after another, watching
Gone With the Wind,
which was in permanent release at military movie houses overseas; watching a dozen other movies like it—
Picnic, Giant, Casablanca, Red River, Rebel Without a Cause.
I saw a boy in the dark studying and memorizing; proving that he wasn't British; trying not to be German; taking the measure of the way Americans walk and hold their cigarettes and knot their neckties; listening acutely to the way Americans onscreen talk to one another, preparing to talk that way himself when the time came. The surprise, I saw, was that it had come so soon.

Ulrich resumed studying his watch, leaving me to wonder which of his accents was real. And that led me to wonder, in the swaying clack-clack of the hypnotizing train, how I had come to think of this stranger as my friend. Ulrich had put on display the mystery of accent and its relation to identity, especially for those made self-conscious by the way they talk. Then I realized that Kit, with her drawl, would have been Ulrich's tutor, a thought that made me wonder about their relationship. They weren't acting like boyfriend-girlfriend now. Why was Kit sitting next to me?

I thought of asking Ulrich about that film canister, then admitted to myself that whatever it was—whatever had made him afraid—I didn't want to know. And this was well before mysterious rolls of film had become clichés of movie thrillers.

A few moments later, Ulrich tugged the window shade down and, with a flourish, let it go. The shade snapped up to its rod, flapping around twice, letting harsh sunlight flood the compartment. The landscape outside flashed by in a blur.

"Rick!" Kit protested, uncoiling from her corner like a spring. Her accounts book fell to the floor.

"Ten minutes, the captain said. Ten minutes is up."

"You're pushing it, Rick. You shouldn't be pushing it."

"They're the ones who pushed, Kit. Not me. You saw that guy with his gun."

"You asked for it. Don't be so damn irresponsible."

Kit's direct challenge to Ulrich surprised me. She was pissed, but there was also a core of self-possession in her, unusual in one so young; unusual, I would have said then, in a girl.

"What is irresponsible?" Ulrich asked. "A hair trigger is irresponsible. Incompetent Americans playing games at the border are irresponsible. What would have happened if the Soviets back there were as wild as the
Schwarz?
"

"
Schwarz!
" Kit said. "What the fuck! Don't call him
Schwarz!
"

"Black? He
is
black."

"You know what I mean, Rick.
Schwarz
is Kraut for 'nigger.' And I won't have that."

"I won't have 'Kraut,'" he retorted angrily.

"It's 'nigger' I can't stand," Kit said. "I've a mind to get off this damn train right now."

Ulrich laughed, gestured at the flashing window. "Be my guest, my dear."

Kit glared at him.

He said, "And stop calling me Rick."

"Whatever you say," she replied with sudden resignation. She leaned down to get her accounts book and sat back against her corner, pulling her shoeless feet under, stretching her black stockings at the knees so they showed white. She glanced at me with shy embarrassment and whispered, "I can't believe this," which I took to mean, I can't believe I'm in a fight with him. But then she added, still under her breath, "Can't believe there's racist bullshit here, too." A white southerner who hated the word "nigger."

I touched her foot with my left hand. "Ulrich," I said, "what does that guy's being Negro have to do with anything?"

"Everything, Monty," he said, but calmly. "Everything. The only reason those assholes are on duty at the border is because they're Negro—especially the NCO. Obviously underqualified for the motor pool, much less the checkpoint. Negro giants, that's why they are there. We are supposed to believe all Americans are bigger than us, all are frightening Nubians. How stupid do they think we are?"

"We?"

"We Germans. We Krauts." He looked at Kit. "The bigotry here is yours, not mine." Ulrich turned away, as if this declaration ended the argument. He pressed his forehead against the glass, inviting a change of mood, inviting us all to stare out at East Germany. This was what we'd come to see.

Only then did it hit me that we were now fully behind the Iron Curtain. The train was flying, as if to cover the enemy territory as fast as possible, the right idea. We were passing through a country town, and I glimpsed a man on a tractor, then a man in a white apron, a baker, then a man standing by a sign, which I missed, but barber popped into my head. Farmers, bakers, barbers—a town like any other in the world. A generic town in Soviet Germany, with a generic population—women and men working, laughing, loving, dying, caring for their children and their elders, looking back at us and wondering if we are different. Such were my first impressions of the enemy.

I moved closer to the window, opposite Ulrich, intending to focus on particular objects to undo that sense of the generic. I saw a rusted corrugated-iron roof, then I saw the crack splitting a cinderblock wall. I saw a church steeple that had been shorn off, blunted like a broken sword, bomb damage from the war. Then, instead of singly, I began seeing objects grouped: vacant houses, carts without wheels, herds of emaciated cows, chicken coops clustered around weed-ridden ponds.

When our train careened through crossroads villages, people were gathered behind lowered pikes: women in babushkas holding the hands of children, the children with one thumb held firmly in their mouths. They must have come to the crossings to watch us pass, but no one waved.

I saw derelict railroad cars at sidings, rusting in place but not quite abandoned. They had sackcloth curtains on their windows or, if they were boxcars, sackcloth curtains in the doorways, indications that these railroad cars had been claimed for houses.

Even at high speed, the scenes I glimpsed were striking for their drabness. The trees had the sharp green of spring, and the sky was as blue as it ever was in what we so blithely called the free world, but the human things seemed devoid of color: the gray of the buildings, the dried mud of the roads, the washed-out pallor of housecoats and shawls. Railroad workers wore black overalls. The smock coats here, unlike the bright blue of the West German workers', were the color of dishwater.

Soon it seemed I could make out the very eyes of those who watched us pass. No color there, either. What an exception we must have been in our flashing, carefully painted cars behind the sleek locomotive. Now I understood why the Army had polished its fittings and scrubbed its wheels as if the train were a ship, so that even in the few seconds it took to pass through the vision of any one Communist, the American train would cut the arc of a figment shooting through a dream.

Shooting stars, I thought, cutting through the night sky—me, as a boy, sitting beside my father on the dock at our lake in the north woods, my father whom I loved. And now it struck me: the harshness of our last moments together earlier that week, how I had resented him, how pissed off he was, even as he had let me take the goddamn car.

I looked back at Kit, expecting her, too, to be transfixed by the sight of what we were passing through. Not so. She had fallen asleep. Her foot was only inches from my hip—a perfectly shaped foot, joined to a trim ankle and leg tucked away inside the flare of her father's field jacket. I took advantage of the moment to stare at her. I timed the rising and falling of her small but alluring breasts, measuring her breathing in and breathing out against my own.

Her accounts book had fallen to her side, toward me, and it was open. The letters were tiny but so carefully made that I had no trouble taking them in, one clean paragraph:

You made her set with you on the veranda, and you tole her it was incurable, incurable! And the hot breeze on her face pushed hair acrost her eyes, so you could not make out what she reckoned of what you said.

I could have read more, but I stopped because it seemed wrong, and I found myself wanting to ask about that word "set," about "acrost," and about "incurable." Who was "you"? And who was "her"? But already I knew what a violation it would be to ask about what I'd just read, even that.

I looked at her sweet sleeping face.
Where are you from? Georgia? Virginia? Is that your father's jacket? Whose bandana? And incurable what?
Polio, I wanted to tell her, is incurable, but it doesn't need to kill you.

To get away from those thoughts, I faced Ulrich. He was so intent, looking out the window, that I felt I shouldn't interrupt him. But with Kit asleep, and my thickening questions about her, I knew I had to. Her presence next to me on that velvet bench, her foot only inches from my leg, the sweet aroma of her body, its sly movement with each breath—it all combined to spark in me physical sensations I knew very little about and a quite unphysical longing that felt intensely familiar.

"So, Ulrich,
wie geht es Ihnen?
"

"
Sehr gut,
" he answered quietly, not turning toward me. Then he added, under his breath, "
Natürlich.
" He was aware of my watching him, of my waiting. So then he did look at me. "
Und Sie?
"

"I'm okay. Although to tell you the truth, I wasn't so sure back there." I'd calibrated my voice so as not to wake Kit. I was desperate not to wake her. "At the border," I said, to distinguish from the uneasiness I'd felt during the flare-up over
Schwarz.

"Nor was I." Ulrich matched my tone. "You did well at the border, Michael."

I deflected his compliment with a slight recoil of my head. "Me? You're the one who pulled it off. You were great."

"I was a fool. As the MP said, an asshole." He glanced at sleeping Kit, and I sensed that he felt like an asshole in relation to her, too.

"He didn't call you an asshole."

"He said my father
wasn't
one. My stepfather."

"That's not—"

"World War Three, he said. It is possible I was wrong to want to do this."

His voice had fallen back into the edgy rhythm of a German speaking English, a hint of a
v
in "want." A German speaking English well, but as a guest in the language, not an owner of it. I had to stare at him hard to be sure there was no punch line coming. How could Ulrich be having second thoughts when I myself was—I hadn't the word for it then, but now I would describe my state as one of quiet exhilaration. The border crossing had frightened me, but deliciously so. What fear I had felt before, in hospitals, had been smothered by my parents.

"Why didn't you want them to know you are German?" I asked.

"A normal American kid. I could not have them looking a second time at me." He saw the incomprehension in my expression, so he added, "Because of my stepfather."

I thought of debating the point with him:
Actually, he's your adoptive
father, not your stepfather.
Instead, I indicated his bag. "But he's your ticket. The rank is what makes them jump."

"But if they knew more than what rank he is..."

"Like what?"

"Like what he does. What he is in command of."

"Which is?"

"Intelligence."

Nothing suggests the innocence of those times like my prior assumption that the word "intelligence" meant only the ability to think and learn. I could see it in Ulrich's eyes when he realized that he had to explain the word to me.

"Military information," he said. "
Auskunft.
Secrets. Major General Healy is in charge oflearning about the plans and activities of the enemy. He is what you call a spy. He is the chief of spies."

This was a long time ago, remember. Before spies and rolls of film had become the stuff of pulp fiction and movies. So I was only mystified by what he was saying. I let my eyes go to the window, the vista flashing by, a lake, trees in the distance, the ordinary world. I held fast to the sight and said, "If it's secret, how do you know?"

"You know what your father does, do you not?"

"Yes."

"Because he tells you?"

"Not exactly."

"Because you know, that is all."

"But your father—"

"He is not my father."

I brought my gaze back from the passing scene to look at him. "Your adoptive father, your stepfather, whatever he is, the guy who raised you..."Suddenly it hit me, a whole new context for understanding what we were doing. "And you're going to Berlin? You're going to the May Day parade in East Berlin, and your father is a spy?"

"Not my father," he said patiently. Then he smiled, a certain satisfaction in his expression: even I could see the outrage of what he'd done. And now I understood the meaning of his second thought.

"You
are
an asshole, Ulrich." And we grinned at each other. I thought of that film canister dropping from the general's bag, but had no idea what my question about it should be.

After a moment, he shrugged. "But also, for me," he said, "this is a kind of going home. I lived in Berlin as a child. It was where my mother and I came when we were refugees." He gestured at the window. "That is my home country. Not Germany.
East
Germany. And look, look at it, Michael." He hunched closer to the window and pointed. "Have you been seeing this? How there is no glass in the windows? Look there. The roof with tiles missing. The edge of the roof with no gutter. Do you see?"

The buildings were going by too fast. I had to consciously adjust my eyes to take in first one building, then another. We were passing a farming town. A barn. A silo. A building without gutters.

"There are no gutters in East Germany. The copper has all been stolen. Pillaged by the Russians. Since the war, and still. Look, there, see. Roof tiles again. Missing roof tiles. Even glass. See the horse carts. Why are there horse carts? Because the tractors are all gone. Stolen by the Russians! In Bonn, they say it is communism that keeps the DDR in poverty, but it is not communism. It is Soviet theft. Those gutters and roof tiles are on the houses of commissars in Minsk and Leningrad. It is what Marcuse says. There it is. Communism has not been tried."