Secret Father (19 page)

At the end of the hallway, Frau Hess withdrew a key from somewhere in the ample folds of her shapeless dress, and she opened a last door. She reached into the room for a wall switch. As tube lighting flickered on, she stood aside. We saw a small room with six aligned cots protruding from one wall, leaving a narrow aisle between the wall and the ends of the cots. Each cot held a thin mattress. Each was neatly covered with a dark brown wool blanket tucked in crisply at the corners. The room, apparently, was unoccupied.

I recognized the blankets as the same Army issue we had at the dorm at Wiesbaden, war surplus blankets stamped
U.S.
It was a good omen, and I led the way in. A large mahogany wardrobe beside a window on the far wall was the only other piece off urniture.

Frau Hess and Kit exchanged a few sentences in German, and once more I marveled at Kit's fluency. The older woman pointed back through the doorway, down the corridor—instructions, I took it, about the WC and washroom. Kit thanked her and offered her hand to shake. Only then did the woman soften. She took Kit's hand warmly and smiled. "
Machen Sie es sich bequem!
" Make yourself at home. She handed Kit the room key and left.

Kit closed the door and turned to me and Ulrich. She said with relief, "It's just us, at least for tonight."

Ulrich walked the length of the room and flopped down on the bed nearest the window. "Great! Great!" He grinned at us triumphantly. "Is this not great?"

"This is a female workers' bunkroom," Kit explained to me, "but they don't get that many women—'bachelor women,' as she said. This could be just ours for both nights." Kit dropped her bag on the cot farthest from the window, leaving four cots between her and Ulrich. She took her jacket off and dropped it on the bed, too, an act so natural that it pulled me instantly into the fantasy of her removing that sweater as well.

I had a mad impulse to take the cot next to her, but squelched it. I crossed to drop my bag, my stake, on the one beside Ulrich's, leaving Kit an end of the room to herself, the closest thing she would have to a girl's privacy. I was, of course, thrilled just to be sleeping in the same room with her—until it hit me that I hadn't brought a bathrobe or even pajamas. Unless I slept with my trousers on, she would see my legs.

"So, did I not tell you?" Ulrich crowed. But his satisfaction, I saw, was made up mainly of relief. He had his hands clasped behind his head, his feet propped on his overnight bag at the end of his cot. The skin on his cheeks, just above the edge of his beard, was flushed with pleasure, his eyes wide with anticipation of my response. His pleasure would be incomplete if mine failed to match it. In his longing for my affirmation, I glimpsed the deeper meaning of our friendship, and it was in that, more than in our arrival, that I could join him in feeling relieved. I leaned over to punch his arm, the friendly blow, then sat on my cot. Kit took a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste from her bag and disappeared from the room.

About two feet separated the cots, and my knobby knees pressed close to Ulrich's leg. "Only one problem," I said.

He gave me a weird look. "No pillows. I cannot sleep without a pillow."

"Not the problem I'm thinking of."

"What?"

"Josef."

"What about him?" Exasperation and warning laced Ulrich's voice:
Do not fuck this up with worry, you asshole.

"He's downstairs," I said as casually as I could. Was it because I was the only one not fluent in German that I, alone apparently, sensed something moving below the surface appearances? "He's waiting for us."

"And how, old chap, is that a problem? Josef is our ADC."

"Our what?"

"Aide-de-camp. Every general officer has one." Ulrich grinned. "Josef will open doors for us, already has."

"You don't think he's a little...?"

"What?"

"I don't know."

"Monty." Ulrich threw an arm toward the ceiling, the room. "Look what he's done for us already, beginning with that black market character at the station."

"Maybe
he's
black market." But I said it without conviction, lacking language with which to express my suspicion.

"Selling what? Josef does not want anything from us. The new socialism, Monty. The family of man. This is what I have been telling you. This is what
ersten Mai
celebrates, the way
Rosenmontag
celebrates the coming of spring."

"
Rosenmontag
celebrates the coming of Lent. Big difference."

"And Josef honors the airlift. I was here, remember? Berliners love Americans. It is that simple, my friend."

"I just have a funny feeling. You don't?"

"Not on your life."

"Why did you take your father's tag off your bag, then?" I gestured toward his feet where the bag was.

Ulrich looked at me sharply, but did not answer.

I pressed. "Why? Why the phony Dixie accent? Why aren't you telling Josef the truth? Telling him who you are—that
you
are from Berlin? You signed in at the desk as Rick Healy. What the hell happened to Ulrich von Neuhaus, if you think everything is so cool?"

Instead of answering, Ulrich let his eyes drift toward the ceiling, then across it. Was he looking for hidden microphones?

When at last he spoke, it was softly, calmly. "Did it ever come to your mind that a guest whose name carried that 'von' would be less than welcome at the Free Workers' Hall?"

"So what about your father's tag?"

"My stepfather's."

"So don't give me shit about my having a funny feeling, okay?"

"Josef is good, Monty. Relax. He will make everything possible for us tomorrow."

I flopped onto my back, suddenly exhausted. "I know. I know."Exhausted and hungry. "I need some soup. I need some bread."

"Now you are saying something." Ulrich stood up with an athletic swing of his feet. "Where is the wonderful Kit?"

"The john, probably. The WC. You go ahead. I'll wait for her. We'll be down in a minute."

"Okay." Ulrich hoisted his bag, the strap on his shoulder, and he turned for the door.

"Why are you taking that?" I asked. I sat up.

He looked baffled for a moment, then his eyes looked uneasily from the bag to me and back. "I would just rather bring it, that is all." He tugged at his beard, that phony gesture he had used with Tramm, now using it with me.
Jesus
.

"The door locks, Ulrich. The lady gave a key to Kit. We should leave our bags here."

"Not mine."

"Why?"

"Because." A distressed look came into his eyes. A moment of proletarian insecurity after all. "Because I should not have brought it." Not proletarian—adolescent. "My stepfather would—" And then he just stopped talking, stopped cold.

"The chocolate bombardier," I said.

"Yes."

"And we are the
Edelweisspiraten.
"

"Yes."

"And you don't have a funny feeling. Not on my life."

He shook his head. "See you downstairs, Monty." All we're after, his manner said, is a weekend's diversion, the adventure story we'll get out of it. So far so good. "Let's have some soup."

"And then go 'on the city.'"

He laughed. "Oh, and Monty, my good man—you should be calling me Rick."

 

After soup and bread in a big room furnished in greasy plastic with a counter holding a large jar of pickled pigs' feet, which looked like fetuses in formaldehyde and from which only Josefate, we did indeed go out. Not quite on the town but on the neighborhood—to a small basement jazz club about two blocks away. The air outside had turned damp with a threat ofrain, and in the crowded lounge the air was thick with smoke. There were small round tables, low backless stools for jazz buffs to sit on with knees hunched, and a bossa nova trio consisting of guitar, bass, and drums. Of the forty or fifty people squeezed into the place, perhaps a dozen were American servicemen, including several blacks, which made it seem safe.

German girls wearing garish makeup draped themselves on the GIs.
Goldliebchen,
Josef called them in whispered good humor, as if the girls were nothing more than another manifestation of the gratitude of Berlin. Tramm, like the other Berliners in the room, seemed to accept the fact that white girls clung to the necks of blacks. I didn't know what to make of it, except as part of a scene that drew me in at once. I sought out Kit's eyes, thinking of her rejection of "nigger," but what would a girl from the Deep South make of this? She refused to look at me.

In fact, whites-with-blacks added to the bohemian air, embodied what Europeans cherished as the pure and primitive energy of the American jazz scene. In the States, 1961 was the year of Chubby Checker, who, in a famous remark of Eldridge Cleaver's, taught white men how to dance. But it was jazz that Berliners would always prefer to American rock, and so would I.

Music defined my generation, but in that regard, as in others, I was already on the margin, where I would remain even when the Beatles made their splash later that year. My taste in music was rooted in my permanent problem. Jazz was meant to be listened to, not danced to. Subtle movements of the head, a little toe-tapping—no twist and shout for me. Or anyone else that night, thank God.

Josef and Ulrich quickly downed several beers, as if to catch up to the other patrons. Kit ordered a Coke, then another, while I nursed a single beer. I found it impossible to talk over the music, and knew better than to do so in any case. But the bossa nova could not keep Tramm from a steady loud patter addressed, embarrassingly, to the three of us. The genius of Brazilian and American music, the technical perfection of Telefunken amplifiers, the hot-club scene in West Berlin—on and on Tramm pontificated. To my surprise, neither the musicians nor our fellow patrons seemed to care. As usual, the disturbance was imagined, imagined by
me,
a function of my masterly uptightness. Soon Tramm was expounding on the Marshall Plan, funding for 180 new bridges within the city limits of Berlin alone. He had gone from being our tour guide to our professor. As the evening wore on, I half listened to him and half let my mind drift.

Ulrich would not have liked where my mind drifted. I watched with disguised interest as a leggy German girl at the next table fondled her GI. Her amazing legs were shaven, but the hair in her armpits wasn't, a sight that made me embarrassed for her. The girl clutched a shot glass in one hand and let the other rest in the soldier's lap, occasionally applying gentle pressure, making him groan. The unsought image in my mind, meanwhile, was of Ulrich's mother behaving in such a way, in just such a place, with her Yank, David Healy. When he groaned, did he think it was love?

I hated the idea of Ulrich's mother as a
Goldliebchen,
ordered it out of my mind, but no use. Every German girl in the room, seemingly at foreplay, made me think of her. The association was an offense, but I couldn't shake it. Finally I decided to go. I raised an eyebrow at Kit. She nodded.

Ulrich and Josef were speaking loudly to each other in English. Ulrich—Rick—had succeeded in seeming only American, although several other young men in the room were long-haired and bearded, and they were German. Was it a German style, I wondered, and not particular to Ulrich? The waiter brought a fresh pair of ceramic beer steins to the table just then, and so neither Josef nor Ulrich hesitated to let me and Kit go.
Auf wiedersehen.

Outside, it had begun to rain, a soft midnight drizzle, which felt clean. We linked arms to walk, taking the rain as only the young know to do. We turned our faces to it, licking the air, laughing.

"Do you know what a raincoat is?" Kit asked suddenly.

Because half my mind was still back with the leggy German girls, I thought at first she meant some euphemism for condom, but no, not Kit. "What?" I said.

"It's what your mama makes you wear when she's afraid
she'll
get wet."

I laughed with her and said, "Come to think of it, they never explain what's so great about staying dry."

Getting wet in the middle of the night seemed just then to be precisely the point of coming to Berlin, and the best part was having no need to say so. As we walked along, I was aware of her hip by mine, mine bumping at each step. For once I stopped hearing the click of my braces, almost forgot what they were for. The feeling was, if I could have, I'd have skipped, skipped gleefully through the gathering puddles, Gene Kelly singin' in the rain.

But who was the dead opposite of Gene Kelly if not me? In those days, too, the opposite of Paris was Berlin. Instead ofskipping, I channeled my exuberance into a cocky twirl of my cane. I wished we could just slow down so that these moments together would last longer.

We paused under the overhang outside the Workers' Hall. We were alone. "What did you make of it back there?"

"Nice guitar," she said.

"I mean the couples."

"The girls with the GIs? Good thing my pa wasn't there. Great white father. Emphasis on white."

"He would have—?"

"My daddy started out as a mill worker in Montgomery. Best thing the war ever did, it did for him, even if he's too thick to know. The Army got him before the Klan could. But some things he won't abide. He'd kill me if he knew I was even in there."

"So you're from Alabama?"

"Yep."

Despite our damp clothes, the chill, I wanted to stay out here with her, pretend this was a date. But I could not think of the next thing to ask.

Kit said, "What else do you want to know?"

"Your folks are in Turkey?"

"Ankara. Pa's a flight-line mechanic at the air base. Ma hates it there. Base housing is Quonset huts."

"You going back there after graduation?"

Kit shook her head. "They think I'm going home to Montgomery, to live with my granny, work as a carhop at the A&W."

"But you're not?"

She shook her head again and turned away from me. She stared out into the rainy dark, leaving it to me to ask more. "What then?"

"Rick didn't tell you?"

"No."

"It's what we did together. Him at Brandeis, me at Ole Miss. Rick helped me work up the nerve."