Secret Father (14 page)

What seemed a bare instant later, the door to our compartment slid open, banging into its slot. An extremely large black soldier stormed in on us. His olive fatigues were crisply pressed, his boots gleaming, his helmet shimmering white with the black letters
MP
in stark relief. He had his sidearm drawn, and once in with us, he pointed the gun at Ulrich, who sat alone by the window on the bench opposite me and Kit. "What are you trying to do?" the MP demanded in a shrieking voice close to panic. "You had the fucking shade up. Didn't you get the orders?"

I thought he was going to shoot Ulrich. Ulrich, splayed against the bench, thought so, too.

Before Ulrich could answer, a brown-uniformed Soviet officer with a gangster-style machine gun under his arm burst in behind the MP, who swung around. "I'm handling this! This is mine!" And then he said something I did not understand, presumably in Russian.

Behind the Soviet officer, pressing in from the train corridor to fill the threshold, were a blue-uniformed
Volkspolizei
officer, also with a pistol, and, squeezing in beside him, another overlarge black MP. Very tall black men, I would later learn, were regularly assigned to East-West checkpoints in Europe, as they were to North-South checkpoints in Korea. Intimidation was the idea, as I understood full well. It wasn't only the first MP's skin color and size that were frightening. With his gun leveled at Ulrich, he seemed on the edge of craziness, as if taking Ulrich's act as a personal affront. I sensed that the Russian and the East German were giving the MP his leeway exactly because he seemed dangerously close to losing control of himself.

I pushed back into Kit, the two of us huddled together. The second MP forced his way into the compartment, gently pulling the Russian aside and reaching toward his agitated colleague. "Okay, Sergeant," he said, taking the sleeve of the first MP, "I got it." This man seemed calmer, and it was a relief when the first one yielded to him. The second MP had captain's bars on his collar. His sidearm was still in its holster. "Wait in the hallway, Sergeant. Cover us." The sergeant backed out, taking up a place behind the Russian, beside the German. He did not put his gun away, though, which kept everyone nervous.

I clutched my cane, which the captain made a first point of sizing up, as if deciding whether it was a weapon. His glance fell to my legs, then up to my eyes, and I saw an abbreviated version of the familiar pity I knew so well from strangers. He turned away from me, to Ulrich.

"Did you take pictures?" he asked. "Do you have a camera?"

"No, sir," Ulrich answered quickly. That he was completely intimidated shocked me, underscored my fear.

The captain unsnapped the cover of his holster, as if to draw his weapon, but as he did so, he said, "Well, now we have to let these gentlemen satisfy themselves that there is no camera. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"These are the rules, bud. You do as I say or they take you off the train, and I let them."

"Yes, sir."

"Stand up. Arms out."

Ulrich did as he was told. In the cramped space, his outstretched hands brushed each side of the compartment. He turned this way and that. No camera hanging from his neck. No camera on the bench where he'd been sitting. In the adjacent space was his bag. The captain picked it up, unzipped the main pocket, and upended it so that Ulrich's toilet kit, fresh underwear, and shirt fell out. No camera.

The captain glanced back at the Soviet officer, who was watching like a supervising surgeon. He said something in Russian, his voice a bulldozer. The captain unzipped the side pocket of the bag and again upended it, shaking. But now, out fell a small aluminum canister, larger than a thimble, obviously a film container.

I shot a look at Ulrich and saw the surprise in his face—a film canister he had never seen. I knew to mark the moment.
Oh, Jesus.

"Oh, Christ," the captain muttered as if reading my mind. He stooped and snagged the canister before the Russian reacted to it. "The fuck is this?" he loudly demanded of Ulrich, holding the bright metal cylinder between thumb and forefinger right in front of Ulrich's nose. Under his breath, he added, "Make it good."

To my astonishment, Ulrich did. "That would be the yearbook pictures," he explained with what I recognized as a forced calmness. "We deliver it from our high school in Wiesbaden to the American high school in West Berlin. All the Defense Department high schools in Europe have a combined yearbook".

It was true about the combined yearbook, but otherwise what he said was utter fabrication. Yet what really stunned me was that Ulrich was speaking in a flat, unfamiliar accent with a firm hint of Dixie, like Kit's. There was nothing German in his way of speaking, no guttural curl, no vestige of the Gothic script I often imagined in balloons above his head. His British mimicry was familiar—"Monty, my good man"—but never American. Like most Americans, my assumption was that, the Deep South apart, our unaccented speech could not be mimicked.

"That film," he was saying, "has the pictures of our debating club. We're the debating club from H. H. Arnold in Wiesbaden." He pronounced "Wiesbaden" with a
w
sound, not a
v,
like any old American ignoramus. He blithely concluded, "They need our negatives at Patton High for the yearbook layout." Then he turned his most shit-eating grin to the Russian.

The captain turned to him, too, and spoke several sharp sentences in Russian. That might have been the end of it, but just then the
Vopo,
the East German in the doorway, put in a question, still in Russian.

The question made the captain turn back to Ulrich and ask, "What's the German word for yearbook?"

Ulrich's eyes widened. He shook his head.
German word? Me?

I did not know why it was important for Ulrich not to be taken for a German. I did not know why a roll of film should spark such invention and deceit. I assumed that if there were problems tied to Ulrich's father, they involved his rank, which was, as I would later learn, the least of it.

There was an awkward silence in the crowded compartment, and it was just beginning to feel dangerous when Kit, her voice muffled against my shoulder, said, "
Jahrbuch.
"

We looked at her. In her lap was the pale green notebook I had noticed at the Zimmertal. It was open, and something made me take it in more carefully now. Lined paper. Neatly printed paragraphs separated by space breaks. The book seemed more than half full of writing.

The
Vopo
spoke again, in what language I had no idea, but he was still asking. To my further surprise, Kit replied, "
Bericht, Denkerschrift, Memoiren.
"

I thought of her in algebra class, her sharp answers, her readiness to risk being taken by other kids as smart. Now I realized she was more than smart. Advanced German. A rebellious kid, but brilliant.

The
Vopo
reached down and snatched the notebook out of her hand.

"Hey!" she said, but then regretted it and shrank back. The East German flipped the pages as if looking for what she'd read. "
Was ist das?
" he demanded.

"
Mein Tagebuch, mein Seelebuch,
" she answered. The story of my soul.

"Like Rilke," I put in, and instantly felt stupid.

Kit put her hand out for the book. "It's right private," she said. I sensed her anxiety in the plaintive tone with which she then said, "
Bitte schön.
"

The
Vopo
handed the book back, nodding like a satisfied teacher, which the captain took as an opening to bend down and gather Ulrich's belongings, folding them carefully back into his bag, as if only now aware of the general's stars on the tag. Drawing no further attention to the film canister, the captain slipped it back into its side pocket, which he zipped shut. He turned back to the Russian and, with a broad sweep of his hand, gestured him and the others out. With a last, hostile glance at Kit, of all people, the
Vopo
departed. Then, brushing roughly by the other MP, the sergeant in the threshold, so did the Russian with his machine gun.

Beads of sweat were streaming down the sergeant's face, and his gun was still leveled at Ulrich, his hand unsteady.

"Holster that, Sergeant," the captain ordered. The MP did so, and when he exhaled, his relief was large. He looked at his superior gratefully. I realized how young the sergeant was, and how irrelevant to him was his own mammoth physique. I identified with his obvious feeling of being in way over his head. "Go tell the trainmen to get us moving," the captain ordered. Without another glance at us, the sergeant disappeared.

I sensed the release of tension in Kit's body, the way her hipbone settled into mine, and only then noticed how I had pressed myself against her. Or was it she pressing me? Who is this girl, I wondered. I moved away from her slightly, back toward the center of the velvet bench.

Now that the others were gone, the American captain stepped away from the seat by the window so that Ulrich could resume it. The MP's voice was almost kindly when he asked Ulrich, "Do you think your old man got where he is by acting like an asshole?"

"No, sir," Ulrich said.

"If I write up a dependent, the charge goes to the father's CO, not the father. Did you know that?"

"No, sir."

"And in your case, that's just a little farther up the chain of command than I care to go. At that altitude, my nose bleeds, son. And when my nose bleeds, I get mean."

"Yes, sir."

"You're not just an Army brat. You're the son of the brass. You have a reputation to uphold, young man." The MP said this sternly, but with something like affection, too. I had seen this deference a few times before—the U.S. Army as a kind of
in loco parentis
for the children of soldiers and officers alike—but it had never relieved me as it did then. The MP said, "And speaking of upholding your old man's reputation, you should get your hair cut. Shave that beard. You look like a bum."

"Yes, sir," Ulrich said. The obedience of a corpse. After a bout of real fear, Ulrich was chastened.

"Give it ten minutes after the train moves out," the MP ordered, "before you lift the shades. Okay?"

Ulrich nodded. The officer said mournfully, "It's some damn fool thing like this that's going to start World War Three. You know that, don't you?"

Ulrich straightened his shoulders. "That sergeant shouldn't have been threatening me with a gun."

"Oh, really? He's what kept the Reds off of you, son. The hair trigger is what keeps the Reds in line. Didn't you know that?"

Ulrich couldn't quite bring himself to answer, but I could see that his anger was trumping his fear. His face above his whiskers was red. I couldn't believe he was daring even to begin to challenge this man. I wanted to yell, Shut up!

The officer seemed unperturbed. He said, "Don't you be the thing that brings a hair-triggered weapon out of its holster. Who's to blame for what happens then? Why don't you kids debate that."

None of us answered. It was a debate we would not have, because our being to blame would be so crystal clear.

He gave us each a last once-over. Locking eyes with me, he said, "Debating club, huh?"

"Yes, sir," I said, aware of binding myself to the lie.

"Good for you."

Only after he'd slid the compartment door shut behind him did I realize that the MP was thinking of my legs, the gumption it would take for a crippled kid to stand on a stage and give a speech from note cards. In another circumstance I'd have felt condescended to, but right then I was grateful to be included in the sweep of his affirmation. I was sorry he was gone.

 

There was so much to say once the train had begun rolling again, but in the weighty aftermath of what quickly seemed an unreal incident, speech seemed wrong. Instead, the clack-clack of the iron wheels hitting the rough joints of the tracks—rougher than ever, the first sign of inferior East German maintenance—began to pulse in the air like an amplified heartbeat.

Kit buried her nose in her accounts book, her draftsman's pen rising and falling as she worked to keep her letters smooth despite the jostling railroad car.

I sensed that we would each settle now into the solitude of transient contemplation, depriving me of the chance to ask Kit my questions: What are you writing there? And hey, how did your German get so good? Or to ask of Ulrich, conversely, Why did you pretend not to know German? I wanted to ask him about the stark fright I had seen in his face when the film canister fell out of his father's bag. But that his lies had worked made the lies seem appropriate, and it felt almost true, what we had claimed—the debating club, the yearbook.

Ulrich's lies, for the moment, had made our trip seem mundane, safe, sponsored. I briefly found myself looking forward to our arrival at the high school in West Berlin, checking in at the principal's office, being shown to rooms in the American dormitory, doing a microphone check at the podium in the high school auditorium, practicing our topic:
Resolved: That World War Three will be started by some stupid kid lying to his father.

That thought made me shut the lid on the free association of a traveler's brooding, and also on the thin consolations of the falsehoods Ulrich had constructed. Our purpose was not a return to the protection of the American cocoon, but adventures in the anti-Wonderland of the Socialist state, the first of which we'd just had. The lies, in fact, were part of our rebellion. But I knew I would be in trouble if I was left alone to follow such a train of thought in rhythm with a train crossing forbidden country. So I leaned toward Ulrich. "How did you learn to speak like that?"

He ignored me, staring at his wristwatch.

"Hey, Rick," I said, a pointed refusal to call him by his German name, "how'd you learn to talk like that? Come on, I want to know."

He lifted his gaze to meet mine, but very slowly. "Frankly, my dear," he began, and of course I knew the inflection. In three words, he'd nailed Rhett Butler. "I don't give a damn." And then he let his face fall into that same shit-eating grin.
That's how, asshole.