Secret Father (13 page)

"You must come with me to Berlin," he said.

"Berlin!"

Now when I looked at Kit, she said, "He just told me."

I said, "Why would I go to Berlin?"

"For the reason," he answered firmly, "you would have gone to Spain in 1937. Russia in 1917. Paris in 1789. Lads into the breach, my man. The bloody breach. Berlin is where we belong. Berlin is where words mean what they claim to mean. A blow for true justice, solidarity, the cause! Willy Brandt, the SPD, the only city in West Germany where Socialists are in charge! Going to Berlin is how we declare ourselves."

"Going to Berlin is crazy," I said.

At last Ulrich broke into his familiar grin. "Which is the other reason we must go there."

Kit shook her head. "I'm not going. Not a chance. I thought we were fixing to go to a Grand Prix race somewhere. He didn't tell me it was Berlin until just before you came in. Specially not Berlin. Crawdaddy would kill me."

"Who?"

"My old man. Great white father. Sergeant Buck Carson."

Kit spoke with the accent of the Deep South. When in English class she had recited verses from Eliot's "Prufrock," it sounded like the ruminations of a Confederate widow: "Let us go then, you and
ah
..." The lost world was not of the Somme, but of Shiloh. That stunning performance, two or three months before, had created an impression of fatal worldliness, adding Kit's name to the list of girls I assumed would never notice me. But now, suddenly, she seemed as young as I, and a bit of a hick.

I shook my head, too, but I was determined not to sound like her. "It isn't that my father would kill me," I said. "It's simpler than that. I made a deal with him. He trusted me with the car this week. I'm not going to let him down."

Ulrich nodded sagely. "So your hesitation is not about algebra class."

"Not hesitation, comrade. Refusal."

He looked at Kit. "And you,
Fräulein?
"

"No. I could care less about algebra. I ain't going to Berlin, that's all. Berlin is way off-limits." She swung toward me. "Why are you calling him comrade?"

Her question brought me and Ulrich together in a laugh. "Just a joke between us," I explained, and, pathetically enough, I was pleased to see that in this one sphere I had more going with Ulrich than she did.

"Joke?" she said. "As in, Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"Comrade."

"Comrade who?"

Kit began to sway in her seat, floating her hands, singing with pizzazz, "Come raht along, come raht along, to Alexander's Ragtime Band!"

"Alexanderplatz," Ulrich corrected, a reference that escaped me. That he'd cut her off deflated her. "Berlin is not the forbidden city, you two," he said. "Haven't you seen the billboards? 'Come to Berlin!' Young people going there pay lower taxes, and get help to find a place to live. They
want
people our age in Berlin."

"German people," I said.

"
And
Yanks," he countered. "There is a high school in Berlin, an American school like ours, named for General Patton. There are sons and daughters of American military, same as here. Thousands of Americans, all under orders to live as if everything is normal. Us, too. The Wiesbaden football team goes to Berlin. The debating team. We could be the debating team. H. H. Arnold versus George'S. Patton. You could be the team captain, Kit. Look bloody well on your precollege curriculum vitae."

She shook her head firmly. The girl had become increasingly uncomfortable. She had made a perfect rectangle of her powdered sugar.

"I vote for Kit Carson," Ulrich announced suddenly. "What about you, Monty? Kit for team captain!"

"This isn't funny, Ulrich."

"Of course it isn't funny!" He slammed his hand down on the newspaper that was spread before him. "
Kadavergehorsam! Kadavergehorsam!
That's how Eichmann justified himself. The obedience of a corpse! That is what he owed his superiors. 'A good soldier acts with the obedience of a corpse'!"

The others in the café fell silent at this outburst, but like the timid occupation-era Germans we Americans knew so well, they made a point not to look our way. A roomful of people tidying up their powdered sugar.

"What are you talking about?" I asked in a voice several notches quieter than the one he had used.

"Eichmann. The trial." He pushed the newspaper around so that I could see its photo right side up. The man in the booth was no quiz show contestant. He was Adolf Eichmann, whose trial had begun in Jerusalem earlier that week. A few weeks before, the actual debating club, speaking of that, had argued before the whole school the question of whether Israel had been justified in kidnapping Eichmann from Argentina. The contrary had prevailed.

Now, when I recognized Eichmann's picture, the glass booth made no sense to me. Only later would I understand it as his bulletproof cage. Once Ulrich saw that I had taken the image in, he said, "There is the meaning of obedience. Good German obedience. The obedience of corpses."

I shook my head, offended. "This has nothing to do with what Kit and I are talking about. We're just not going to Berlin with you, that's all."

"Do you know what day is tomorrow?"

"Saturday."

"It is May Day, Michael.
Ersten Mai.
The workers' festival. Workers of the world, unite! The greatest fest in Europe will be in Berlin."

"
East
Berlin," Kit put in urgently, and to me. "He said
East
Berlin."

"Not
just
the East," Ulrich said. "Willy Brandt is mayor of West Berlin, the Socialist mayor, the only Socialist mayor in all of West Germany. The SPD always celebrates May Day, claiming the holiday for trade unions, not only Communists."

"He wants to go to the Communist parade," Kit insisted. "He told me."

"Of course we will go to the Communist parade—to protest it! To stand for true socialism. Workers' Day belongs to workers, not to the state. SPD, yes. KPD, no. USSR, no."

Ulrich was grinning again. He was pronouncing the various acronyms in the German way, and I followed only with difficulty, which he must have sensed, because he slowed down to explain. "The SPD is the party that last opposed Hitler. Then, after the war, they stood up to the Communists—the KPD. But they did so precisely for Marxist principles, which the KPD betrays. May Day is the perfect day to see the
real
difference between East and West Berlin—not the difference as imagined by shallow Americans who condemn everyone on the left."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," I said, and I put a hand on Kit's forearm to let her know I was with her. "How do you go to East Berlin?"

"By going to West Berlin, how else?"

"Not by driving."

"By driving to the
border,
Monty. From the border by taking the train, the
American
train, which requires no visa, not of two Yank princes and a princess. Traveling by this train allows no interrogation by border guards. Being on this train is like being at the American embassy, immune. And I told you. We are the debating club. We have a debate tournament at Patton High School. Hip Hip High versus Blood and Guts."

It had taken until now for me to see that he was entirely serious, and what made me really nervous was how possible he made it seem. With his broad smile and perfectly straight white teeth, he sat waiting for me to declare myself. I was to declare myself in the light of his unstoppable manic air, his display of cleverness, how easily he would answer the questions of the military police as we boarded the Army train, GIs barely older than we were.

And now I saw the point of that blue shoulder bag on the bench beside him. I glimpsed its tag, and sure enough, there were the two silver stars of his father's bottomless privilege in the world of the occupation. An Army train, a general's son, an easy transit. He was right: no sweat. And I saw, with Kit, what there was to fear—that we could actually do as he proposed. I said nothing.

The waitress arrived with my coffee. When she was gone, the mood had changed. "Then drive me to the train," he said quietly. "Skip your classes and drive me to the train."

"I don't think you should do this, Ulrich. East Berlin is not a place for fun and games. Especially if your father—"

He raised his hand abruptly, cutting me off. "He is not my father."

I knew what he meant, that the general, strictly speaking, was his stepfather. Still, the declaration shocked.

"You are not to refer to him as my father." He smiled oddly. "Here you see the disobedience of a living body," he said. Only the thinnest veneer of levity carried his voice now. I sensed beneath it desperation and hurt such as he had never shown me. In his bitter bravado, I heard a pronouncement that the time had come for him to act on all that he had been telling me for months. I heard, that is, the stifled cry of a friend, and I knew at once, as the friend I wanted more than ever to be, I was bound to answer.

"Disobedience," he explained, "is how I know that I am not dead."

I faced Kit. "We can take him to the border, right? To the train?" When she agreed, I think that she, too, knew that the train that mattered was already moving, and we were on it.

T
WELVE HOURS LATER
, just coming on dusk, we three comrades disembarked from the Army train in the cavernous new
Hauptbahnhof
in the bustling heart of West Berlin. Our arms were linked. Kit was in the middle, I was on the right so that I could use my stick, but in fact she, too, was taking my weight, enabling me to match the sprightly pace as we marched out into, unquestionably, the most exciting city in the world.

Every way but verbally, Kit and I asked each other, How could we have hesitated even for a moment? Both of us were shouldering a small bag, for without actually declaring a change of heart, she and I had returned to the dormitory from the Zimmertal for our passports and a weekend's change of clothes. "Just to the border," we had both been saying, and then, hell, we'd each grabbed bags—"just in case." I put on a necktie and blazer. Kit came down from her room wearing a belted khaki tunic, a standard item of an airman's uniform, the equivalent of a civilian's safari jacket. It was far too large for her, but she wore it with panache over her black skirt and tights. The belt was knotted at her narrow waist. And she was wearing gold hoop earrings.

Her stylishness hit me, and I saw then the trick of her pixie haircut, what was called an Italian boy—how it displayed her long thin neck, not a boy's neck at all. The earrings drew attention to the sensual line of her throat, which was set off further by the red bandana she wore loosely around her neck, knotted above her breasts. Her getup qualified as an outfit, marked by the way she turned up the collar of her jacket. On her, the airman's jacket was sexy. And I noted the ghostly outline on each sleeve marking the places where a sergeant's stripes had been removed. So as Ulrich pointed to his father—stepfather—by carrying his bag, Kit pointed to her daddy by wearing his uniform tunic. I pointed to mine, I suppose, with that blazer, purchased with Dad the summer before at Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue.

To my surprise, I sensed that the shift in Kit's willingness to come on this adventure was tied to the shift in mine, as if my being a companion in Berlin was what would make it safe. As I had gunned the blue convertible out of the chapel parking lot, the top down, I was excruciatingly aware of the pretty girl pressing close next to me, an all-time first. Her willowy leg was against mine, and I felt no impulse to pull back. I did not kid myself about why she was so close. All three of us were squeezed into the front seat, Kit pressed as close to Ulrich on her other side as she was to me.

It was then I recognized that I had overcome my qualms as much in relation to her as to Ulrich. This was a girl I wanted to be with, that was all. So completely had I become preoccupied with these two that, hitting the road, I never gave a further thought to my father, or to my promise.

At Helmstedt, we boarded the Army train in giddy high spirits, helped by beers we had downed at lunch in a wasp-ridden garden restaurant. The MPs who checked our passports, dependents' credentials, and tickets were, as Ulrich predicted, only friendly. But that would change. A short while after the train began to move, it approached Magdeburg, the first city inside East Germany and the effective border crossing, the place where the Communists usually halted the train.

The American guards had warned all passengers to sit quietly in our compartments with the window shades drawn. Once through the checkpoint at Magdeburg, we could lift the shades and look out, they said, but doing so before or at the border was strictly forbidden.

The train slowed to a stop, the engine shut down, and an eerie silence settled on the snug, velvet-upholstered compartment. With the shades drawn, deep shadow enclosed us. We three had the space to ourselves, which had seemed a stroke of luck on boarding, but which now, for me and Kit, became the opposite of luck, because of the license Ulrich took from our isolation. Outside, the East German border guards were presumably checking the roster of passengers. We didn't know it, but they routinely demanded to board the train, and equally routinely, the GIs refused to allow them to board—a power they could exercise in the absence of any irregularity as defined by the detailed protocols of the Four-Power Agreements.

All we knew, inside our stuffy, dark compartment, was that the procedures were taking a long time. Ulrich became increasingly agitated, and, finally unable to restrain himself, he lifted the lower edge of the window shade. He raised it no more than two or three inches, just enough to bend down and peek out. A wedge of light sliced down onto the floor.

"Tanks!" he whispered. "Machine guns! Red stars! My God, the soldiers are Russians!"

"Rick!" Kit hissed. "Holy shit, Rick! Close it!" Kit had made herself even smaller, scrunching as far into the distant corner of the cushioned bench as she could. "Please!" Her insistence was absolute—a girl with a will. Ulrich honored it, dropping the shade. The light was gone.