Secret Father (16 page)

Marcuse, Christ. It was the last conversation I wanted to have. I glanced back at Kit. Her pen had fallen into her lap, her accounts book closed beside her. Her face was turned into the corner. Still asleep.

Instead of launching into one of his political tutorials, Ulrich fell back against his seat, abruptly weary and, it seemed to me, sad. No Marcuse for him, either. "Those people we are seeing there," he said. People at yet another country crossroads, people not waving, not even the children waving. "They are prisoners. As I myself would be were it not for my mother, who..."He let his voice trail off.

"Who what?"

"Carried me out. From Leipzig to Berlin. Do you have any idea how far a hundred and eighty kilometers is when you are walking, carrying a child, carrying a bundle that holds all that remains to you? All that remains of a once great family of Saxony? Do you?"

"No," I said, hardly breathing.

"She cleared rubble in Berlin. The
Trümmerfrauen.
You know that word?"

"No."

"The rubble women. She got us to Berlin, but with nothing. The two of us alone. She would sit me in the pram nearby, then work with the other women, picking up debris, wreckage. My earliest memory is sitting beside a mountain of paving stones, hearing the stones click against each other, the click, click, click of stone striking stone as the
Trümmerfrauen
added to the pile." Ulrich fell silent, staring out the window.

I imagined the sound of those clicking stones, could hear it, and I knew that my own equivalent memory was far less harsh: the sound of my mother's humming as she massaged my legs.

He looked over at me. "You know her hands? You have seen my mother's hands?"

"Yes." An old woman's hands.

"She ruined her hands clearing the rubble of Berlin for a few pfennigs a day. My memory of my mother is that she was always hooded, always cloaked with coarse cloth, as if she was a Turkish woman. Only later did I understand that she was too beautiful. Women with her beauty became prostitutes to survive, but my mother—no. In every way she could, she made herself like a hag so that the Russians would not rape her." He glanced toward Kit, who had not moved, then added more quietly, "But I think they did."

I could say nothing to this The click-click of stones—yes, I could imagine that. But this other—no. Rape? My mind jumped away from the word. And how could a baroness have become a rubble woman? Looking back now, I recognize the infinite gap that stood between me and Ulrich at that moment as an instance of the gap separating innocent Americans from Europeans who had been crushed and crushed again, and then again. We Americans, astride the world, knew nothing.

Out of the silence, and looking for a way to help him past the impossible thought, I asked, "When did your stepfather—"

He cut me off. "Eventually, she was employed as a translator for the Americans. She stopped dressing like a Turk. She began to wear perfume; I remember that. She let her hair grow back. She found her American officer. She thought him kind. Compared to the Russians, he was. He divorced his wife for her. A simple letter to the States and that first marriage ended. He has a child older than me, and he never sees her. I have never met her, my
Stiefschwester.
My mother married such a man because in Berlin in 1949 there were no German men. She married him because she thought I needed a father."

"Maybe you did."

"Yes, a
father.
" There was such depth of feeling in this dismissal that I could not imagine how to respond. I thought of shifting, to ask what he knew about his biological father, but that was an impossible question, dragging in others—questions about the war, the fate of a pretty woman in a time of pillage, shame, the real father never mentioned because never known? Impossible.

When I said nothing, Ulrich, too, fell into a weighty silence. We gave ourselves over to the click-click not of paving stones but of the iron wheels hitting the joints of the tracks.

After a while I remembered what I'd started out before to ask, and I asked it now, quietly. "What about Kit, Ulrich?
Was ist los?
"

"Loose?" He grinned. He glanced toward her.

"What gives?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Between you two?"

He stared at me, then smiled broadly. "Oh, Monty, Monty."

I hated myself for blushing. I sat there embarrassed and transparent. Simply to do something, I lifted my cane, twirled it once, let it fall back into its corner.

"Oh, Monty, you sweet man," he said, then glanced at her again. From the bright surprise in his expression, I knew I had to turn and look, too.

To my complete horror, Kit's eyes were open. She was looking at me.

Without moving from her corner, Kit said coldly, "Why are you asking him?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why do boys think they can bargain with each other over girls, as ifwe are cows?"

"That's not what we were doing," I said weakly.

"You were asking him if I was already taken."

I glanced at Ulrich, who was grinning, enjoying this, the bastard. I was on my own.

I looked back at Kit. "I guess I was asking that," I admitted.

"Then why not ask me?"

"Well, are you?"

"No," she said with an easy glance at Ulrich. "I'm not taken, am I, Rick?"

"She calls me Rick. I spurn her." He grinned. Whatever it was between them, it was different now.

"
Ulrich,
then," she said. "Ulrich von Neuhaus." She looked at me. "Y'all know what Neuhaus means, don't you?"

"New house?"

Her face lit up. "Casanova!" Her drawl thickened when she added, "He's my bratwurst Casanova." Then she laughed hard. So did we all.

When our fit passed, she touched my leg. "No, Michael. I am not taken." Then she added, "Are you?"

I laughed out loud again—and felt myself blushing once more. "No, Kit," I found it possible to say. "I am not taken."

"In that case," she said, "I reckon I'll join you in a smoke, Michael."

"What?"

"A smoke. Or do you dip snuff?
Habst du ein Rauch,
big guy?" She mimicked smoking, pressing two fingers in a V to her lips, as if we were strangers who just met. But she had called me
du,
not
Sie.

I retrieved my pack from the inside pocket of my blazer and offered her a cigarette. I held my Zippo for her, and she leaned into the flame. "Light in May," she said, blowing smoke.

"What?"

She put her accounts book in her bag, took another book out, and held it up for me to see:
Light in August
by William Faulkner. She opened it and pretended to read aloud, but she was quoting by heart. "If they are not innocent of sin, at least they sin in innocence." She gave me a sweet smile, then curled over the book to read.

About an hour later, just as the light of day was fading, the train began gearing down. We hadn't spoken much. Kit's calm self-possession had centered us. We had passed from isolation back into the solidarity of companionship, the three of us.
Du und Sie
—in point of fact, Kit used the intimate form with both Ulrich and me.

S
HACKS AND TUMBLEDOWN HUTS
in the shadows of dusk one moment, a bejeweled early evening skyline the next: to come out of the postwar wasteland of Soviet Germany into the frantic brilliance of West Berlin was to cross a line on the earth. To see that demarcation of the world-historic argument was to glimpse the edge of a trench into which each side was poised to plunge. Ofsuch instants is the structure of a mind made, and after that I was a sucker for dualism, if in nothing but politics.

But here is the odd thing: I arrived in West Berlin, with its propped opulence, prepared to see it as I'd been told to, as a showcase of freedom. Berlin was the urban proof-text of free enterprise.
From each according to his ability, to each according to what he can grab.
It is not as if I did not link arms with Kit and Ulrich, our triune phalanx advancing on the train platform in an exuberant spirit of American arrival, the exhibitionism of the entitled young. But the human tide against which we pushed pushed back, forcing us out of our little bubble to see—really
see.

All around us was the bustle of far more complex comings and goings. This train station was the terminus ofmajor supply routes for the island city. Raw materials were offloaded in the yards outside, but here along each platform, and on the broad terrace into which each platform ran, were stacked hundreds of pallets holding cartons, bundles, and mailbags. Moving among all that were throngs of travelers, not giddy like us but grim-faced, eyes fixed, coursing to and from trains with the air of those for whom transit itself was the thing to survive. Greeters and senders-off clutched handkerchiefs, some weeping openly. Vendors stood at sawhorse benches and pushcarts selling wurst, newspapers, bottles of milk. Their customers included roughly dressed women and men mystified by the currency they held—a crowd that reeked, as one creature, of body odor. Later I would understand that many of these people had come down from the elevated train platform above, the S-Bahn line that ran from East Berlin to West Berlin, stopping first here at the
Hauptbahnhof.
These were refugees who, as fugitives, had just dared to step off the city train in this forbidden sector, part of the tide of thousands that the Wall would break in August.

The S-Bahn was the easiest way to flee the East, and if there were grave expressions on the faces of certain of the men and women around us, it was not for the danger they were in, but for the sure jeopardy into which they had just plunged their relatives at home. For those left behind, there would be loss of jobs, loss of housing, possible arrest, or banishment to the distant countryside near Poland. In that time and place, the supremely selfish act was defection.

Others of those around us were arrivals from the West, disembarking trains that had come from Hamburg and Munich and Düsseldorf. These were the young men looking for draft exemptions and training slots at Telefunken and Siemens, industrial giants that had made West Berlin the electronics center of Europe. They were girls coming for the artificially high-salaried jobs in hotels and offices. They were continental beatniks coming for the jazz clubs and cafés. And that evening, they were young Social Democrats coming for the May Day celebrations that would take place the next day on both sides of the city. All had come, in one way or another and however gravely, for what in America we thought of as the thrill of the frontier. Us, too.

To get our bearings, Ulrich, Kit, and I took up a place near a welcome desk that was manned by several people in religious garb, the men in clerical collars, the women in austere black clothing with crosses hanging from cords around their necks. Standing there, we watched the bustle before us, awed by it.

At one point Ulrich elbowed me, then pointed at the granite blocks of the wall above us. The stone was pockmarked and chipped, and a massive wooden beam also had rough marks, like those from a pole climber's cleats.

"What?" Kit said, instantly attuned.

"Bullet holes," Ulrich answered.

"Jesus H. Christ," she said, and took my arm.

"I doubt it," I said, but she gave me a look.

Ulrich repeated himself: "Bullet holes."

I felt the cold blast of a large second thought, not fear, exactly, and not regret at having come here, but about the oversimplified impression with which I had anticipated this arrival. It wasn't physical dread holding me back, but an unexpected feeling of sympathy for the worn-down world of East Germany through which we had passed. It was a feeling like nostalgia, perhaps akin to what Ulrich had conveyed as he'd looked out on alien territory that nevertheless made a native claim on him.

But what claim could it have made on me? We stood there long enough in silence for me to know. I had seen the East as a truncated nation on the losing side of history. Shot by history—no, crippled by history. I myself was no gleaming city alight with beauty, no polished locomotive—no true rebel, either, on an authentic quest. What I had seen looking out the train window was a world improperly aligned with itself, where no tree stood in right relation to any other, where roads failed to meet except at jarring angles, where hills had connections neither to the valleys before them nor to the hills beyond, as if iron curtains had fallen everywhere
within
this realm.

But that wasn't all I had seen. I had caught glimpses of my own reflection, wild flashes of disconnection there as well. I saw the line of my cheek as the defining line of my mother's face, and then, with a snap change of focus, I saw her perfect mouth outlined in a wispy cloud, smiling in the sky even there. But Mom was dead. Incurably dead.

Confronted now by the wrack line of desperate characters in front of me, and by evidence of mortal violence in the stone above, I realized why Kit had mostly slept in the train. She had put the harsh truth of this world off until now, and she was pressing my arm. To calm her, I almost said, Not incurable, Kit, and no bullets lately. But I said nothing.

Behind the welcome desk, a dozen yards from where we stood, was a pair of phone booths, and I suddenly wanted to call my father. I wanted to tell him that I had seen Mom's face outlined in a cloud. I wanted to say I was all right with this sadness, that he didn't need to worry about me anymore. But at eight in the evening, it was more than two hours after he would have expected me home with the car, and by now he would be nuts with worry. Worry and anger, the double whammy.

My heart sank. How the burden of his love bent me. And anyway, I could never tell him where I was without his thinking that I needed him, which I surely did not. Or so I told myself, squelching what little remained of the impulse to call.
Sorry, Dad.

 

Above the welcome desk a poster read, "
Evangelisch Gemeinschaft.
" Ulrich was talking to one of the religious women. Kit and I drew near behind, and to my surprise I heard him speaking English, even though the woman was less than fluent in it. He had dipped his voice in the syrupy southern accent he had used in the train compartment with the MP. As I listened, I realized that below the shift in what we think of as accent, he had altered the very beat of his sentences, no longer speaking with a German rhythm that jumps at open sounds, stops at consonants. Yes, syrup.