Secret Father (21 page)

She fell silent again. After some moments, I said, "Knock, knock."

"Who's there?" Not mere pleasure in her voice now, but true delight.

"The little old lady."

"The little old lady who?"

"You don't know it?"

"The little old lady
who,
big guy!"

"And when Mr. Faulkner answers the door, you tell him you are good mountain folk, which is why you can yodel.
Liddle-oldle-ladee-whoo!
"

"Jesus, Michael, you are
good.
I'm great, but you are good."

"And you can tell Mr. Faulkner that you've been to damn Berlin!"

"Even
East
Berlin, if we get away with it tomorrow. Can you believe we were behind the Iron Curtain today? The damn Iron Curtain, Michael!"

"We're still behind it, Kit."

"Could you believe Rick at the border? That asshole."

"Talk about obedience of a corpse. I'll tell you something—I was scared there for a minute."

"For a minute? Jeez, big guy, I'm still scared."

And we laughed again, hard. A couple of kids at camp after lights out, scaring each other, creating the potent intimacy of night secrets, our confessions to each other. Two kids admitting to being scared. And then, in the good silence that follows laughter, waiting to see what else we would admit to.

But the silence thickened, and I thought, with sudden if regretted weariness, that we might be going to sleep now.

But there came her voice again, floating in the darkness. "What about your mother?"

"What?"

"You said your mother before, I heard you." She paused before adding, "I know she's dead, Michael."

I had to stop. Hadn't she been the one to bring mothers up? With her crack about raincoats? If she knew my mother was dead, then was her reference a deliberate opening, the sly offhand remark, say, a shrink might make to help? Wizard of Oz, wizard ofpity—was she someone, really, to trust?

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"Ulrich told me. He told me not to tell any of the other kids. He told me you don't like people to know about it. I haven't told anybody."

"I don't want people feeling sorry for me. I hate that."

"Nobody does."

"Yes, they do."

"Because of your legs, you mean? Okay, I take it back. You're right on that one. How can people not feel sorry for you because of that. Of course we feel sorry for you, Michael. You're crippled."

I was hardly breathing as she said this. It was the first time anyone, even including blunt Ulrich, had used that awful word with me. Awful word, yet the truth. The sound of it in that dark room brought an unbounded feeling of relief. "I do okay," I said.

"You sure do," she said.

After a long moment, in a different voice, she said, "Knock, knock."

"Jesus, Kit. What's with you?"

"Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"Mahatma."

"Mahatma who?"

"Mah hat 'n' mah cane! I'm goin' for a walk."

I didn't know how to react.

"Get it?"

"Cane."

"I forgot today, Michael. Completely forgot. That you have it. Your cane. Like it's disappeared. Because of the way you are. You are amazing."

"Polio has its advantages, believe it or not."

"Like what?"

"Like ... like it made me really close to her."

"Your mother?"

"She took care of me. She ... took ... really ... good care of me."

"You must miss her."

It wasn't at all horrible to me that my eyes spilled over then. Tears coursed down my temples into the wells behind my ears. Unbounded relief, yes—even if made possible by this girl's not being able to see me. I hadn't cried in months, and never, since Mom, in another's presence. Not even my father's.

Now, as I write this, looking back through the years at the figure of that boy, bereft in a strange bed, I wish I could do for him, across time, what the girl across the room had no way of doing—reach through the dark and only touch him, to let him know that the pointed chaos of such feelings is what we were put here not to withstand, but to express. What I did know was that the shedding of tears in response to her, even if she did not understand, was what I had come to Berlin to do.

Lying there completely motionless, my legs as if paralyzed, my arms at my sides, my head flat, without a pillow—I flashed back to those first months in the pulmonary unit of St. Luke's Hospital; my life in an iron lung, a time when I was certain I would spend
all
of my life in an iron lung. I had been able to imagine that prospect only by imagining also that my mother would be always there beside me, to wipe the streaks from my temples, to smooth back my damp hair, to sponge my forehead with her hand. The wetness on my face now brought back the consolation of her presence, as if she were the one in the room with me here.

"I miss her a lot," I said, yet felt consoled for the first time since hearing from my father of my mother's death, a consolation mediated by the gorgeous girl across from me. "Why does it help to say so?"

"I don't know, Michael. I've never lost anybody. But I know in other things, it helps to say so. That's why I write my little novel."

"Don't call it little."

"Well, it's not big." She laughed self-deprecatingly. And then, with her sense of what was needed to break me from grief, Kit told me how she had started writing because of Faulkner, who taught her, she said, that the most interesting people are the ones who are broken inside. The brave ones are at war not with the world but with themselves. She was speaking with a forced literary self-consciousness, a girl wiser from books than from life. But I could have listened to her forever.

Finally I said, "Will you tell me?"

"What?"

"About your novel. What's it about?"

"I don't know you well enough."

"Writers read their work to strangers all the time."

"I know, but you're not a stranger, either. You're sort ofin between. I would need you to like it, but I don't know if you would."

"I would."

"Don't say that. If you automatically liked it, what good would that be?"

"So who is incurable? Tell me that, at least."

"That would be telling you all of it."

"Is it about you?"

"It's about my mother. That's all I'm gonna tell you. Don't ask me anything else. And no, you can't read it."

"Okay, okay."

"It's why I felt so ... when you brought up mothers."

But I had not been the one to do that, I was sure.

"Michael?"

"Yes?"

"
This
is sort of like what writing does. This talking. It's new to me, to talk like this."

"Not even with Ulrich?"

"Especially not. I like Rick, but he makes me nervous when he gets mad."

"I get mad, Kit. At my dad."

"That doesn't count."

We laughed.

Then I said, "Being here in this room in the middle of the night with you. Talking like this. I've never done this before either. It feels right, Kit. But it feels illegal."

After a further silence, she said quietly, "I know."

It helps to say so—wasn't that what she had just told me? What I wanted to say then seemed absolutely and utterly unspeakable, illegal,
verboten.
How to say "I like you, Kit"?

Except, of course, by saying it. I said nothing.

I let my face fall to the right, away from her.
Human culture, Monty, assumes man's alienation from his sexuality.
I let my eyes drift in the undifferentiated light outside the window, light defined only by the floating mist, tiny drops of water carried by specks of cinder and ash that remained in the air of Berlin.

Unconsciously, I had lifted my left hand up and out of the blanket—perhaps a way of not touching my erection. I became aware of my forefinger softly rubbing the left side of my face until it was dry. I imagined my finger as if it were Kit's, as if she were the one—not an angel, not my mother—to come to me. And with that, or something soon after—more fleeting thoughts of Ulrich quoting Marcuse, of my father, of Tramm, of Kennedy and Khrushchev, of Elvis, even, singing "GI Blues"—I went to sleep.

When I woke to a noise and a jolt of my cot, my first thought was, Kit, you have come to me.

But it was Ulrich. He bumped past me and fell heavily onto his cot, fully clothed and still clutching his bag. The stench of vomit poured off him. Almost immediately he began to snore.

I lay rigidly on my side, my face in the foul wash of his exhalations. I did not move. I sensed someone standing motionless at the foot of my cot—Tramm. I did not turn to look at him. He made no sound, and I knew somehow that he was watching me. In the diffused light from the street, I was as visible to him as Ulrich was to me. An old hand at paralysis, I knew I could make him think I was dead asleep.

Tramm then came into my field of vision, a stone-sober man moving quietly with intent. Ignoring me, he stopped over Ulrich. He lifted Ulrich's hand and started, I thought, to remove his watch. Jesus. A simple thief.

But that was not it. Tramm was removing the strap of the bag Ulrich had clutched to himself. The strap was entwined in Ulrich's arm, like a child's sleeping-toy. Tramm could move it only so far, but soon he had it free enough to open the bag's zippered side pocket.

That was the pocket with the roll of film that the MP had made such a fuss over in front of the Russian at Magdeburg. Tramm had to have been directed to that pocket, as he had to have been told of our supposed interest in the high school. There was no way his knowing that was a coincidence. So Tramm now knew from us tonight that the melodrama in the train compartment at the border, with Ulrich announcing us as the debating club, the roll of film as the yearbook photos—knew that we had lied. He knew we didn't give a shit about the high school.

From the way he was now sliding his hand inside the unzipped pocket, back and forth, back and forth, I realized that the film canister was not there.

Tramm urgently opened the bag's main compartment and felt inside it, pushing his blind hand into the clothing. No roll of film. It was as if I were watching a movie, the villain outsmarted by the good guy. Ulrich had been ahead of me all day. Was he even now only seeming to be conked out?

But no. His breath was so foul, his snoring so grotesque, way too much, he couldn't be faking.

Tramm sank to one knee at Ulrich's cot, remained motionless for a long moment, staring at Ulrich. What boss would Tramm report this failure to? He craned his neck forward slightly, and I sensed that he was about to frisk Ulrich, his clothing. The prospect alarmed me, as if I, too, had a part to play in the hide-and-seek of the film canister, whatever it was. Instinctively, I groaned and tugged at my blanket, a warning, as if my waking up would threaten Tramm—which apparently it would have. He froze again. He was looking at me.

I smacked my lips, twice, then settled again. When, seconds later, I peered through the slits of my eyes, Tramm was closing the zippers of the bag. He tucked it back into Ulrich's side. I half expected him to sleep on one of the vacant cots between me and Kit, but I heard a click, the door opening, and click, softly closing. Tramm was gone, although it took me a full five minutes to dare to roll over and look. Yes, gone.

I brought my left wrist up to my face, to see my watch. Fifteen minutes before three. I made myself wait a full thirty minutes more. Then I threw my blanket back and found my trousers at the foot of my cot, folded but damp from the rain. I clutched the trousers in one arm. In my bare feet, without my braces or cane, I moved haltingly to the door. Yet I made my way soundlessly through it. Along a bright hallway, I steadied myself on the wall as I went. In the stairwell, I found the pay phone. I let my trousers fall out of their fold, fished in the pockets for the coins I knew were there, and dropped them into the telephone slot. I inserted four, a guess at the cost of a long-distance call. I dialed the number of our house on Mosbacher Strasse, knowing already, with no conscious planning, exactly what to say.

I was going to tell him that I was sorry about calling so late, sorry about our argument, sorry about the breach of trust with the car. I was going to explain that I would have called sooner, but I had not been ready to apologize, had not been strong enough—and now I was.

I was going to tell him that I was in Berlin, afraid of what I was doing here, but also that I was more alive with this adventure than I had ever been before. I was going to tell him that with Ulrich von Neuhaus I was safe, that we had a game going, and that we were winning.

I was going to tell him that, yes, tomorrow I would cross the forbidden border—and everything from then on, I was certain, would be different. And above all, I was going to tell him about Kit Carson, that for the first time in my life, in wishing for a woman, it was not Mom.

The phone rang and rang, in that strange German way, and my father never answered. I did not imagine what he was doing, already, to come after me.

W
E WERE IN
a refitted DC-3, the airplane that had become iconic in the haze behind Bogart and Bergman, how it had seemed to be nosing upward even while still on the ground. C-47 was the military designation—C for cargo—but the plane I had booked through colleagues in Frankfurt was owned by the Bank of America, the San Francisco bank whose European holdings made Chase Manhattan's seem like chump change. Bank of America openly controlled several dozen companies in West Germany, not counting its even more extensive silent partnerships with German banks. They had a small fleet of DC-3s and -4s based at Rhine-Main, halfway between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, and it had been a simple matter to tag one on short notice that morning.

The plane's appointments were meant to impress, and normally the plush swivel seats, arranged in cocktail-lounge style around small Formica tables, would have held investors, union officials, or government ministers. Today General Healy's wife and I were the only passengers.

The jovial pilot, a retired Army Air Corps veteran, had told us he averaged four flights a week to Berlin, but during the airlift he had flown four roundtrips a day, and could still hit Tempelhof blind. Mrs. Healy and I boarded the plane barely more than two hours ago—less than three hours after we left the Russian Chapel—and as we did, the pilot saluted as if we were the commander and his lady.
Bank brass, Army brass—what's the diff?
The youthful copilot had doubled as our steward, and reappeared in the cabin only moments ago to lock down our swivel chairs, help us with the seat belts, and collect our coffee cups.