Secret Father (35 page)

"Me too, Monty. I wasn't kidding about my boobs. It ain't polio, but it still bugs me. If your mama was here, wouldn't she tell us both to get over it?"

"Yes."

"Well, then." Kit leaned forward and pulled the blanket away from my legs. Her nakedness hit me again, and I had an erection again.

"Let me look," she said. Then added, "Mother, may I?"

"It's dark."

With that she got up and went over to my pants. She came back with my Zippo and flicked it. She sat next to me and held the flame before our faces, so that I would look at her. She was entirely in earnest, knowing this could not be a game with me. In the light, I saw how small her breasts really were, but I was right. They were beautiful.

"So, may I?" she asked.

"Yes."

I watched her, a silhouette moving down the length of my body, the lighter flame making a halo at her burnished face. She ignored the bulge in my underpants and moved the flame to my legs—my real private parts. First she examined the smooth skin of my left thigh, the bony protrusion of my knee, and then, moving slowly, the gnarled flesh below my knee, the web of purple veins, white scars, red welts, the uneven ridge of my shin bone—the most familiar terrain I knew. It silenced me to watch someone else explore it.

Unfamiliar, impossible to keep on the margin of my concentration, were her breasts, each flowing forward around its nipple as she bent over me. Each was shaped to fill a champagne glass. Breasts, I thought. I could never call them boobs, tits, knockers—crudities that had never seemed, despite Kit's ease with them, more profane to me.

I reached to touch her, setting my fingers at play, lightly, in her hair.

I studied the shape of her long, thin neck—Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, a swan. I watched the flickering glow of the Zippo flame as it washed back onto her face. A diamond of light danced in the green cone of the one eye I could see. Her expression, a tender curiosity, reminded me of a certain nurse who had, one summer, regularly changed the dressings on that leg, but she had always exclaimed, as the pasty skin appeared from under the peeled-back bandage, "Oh, good! It looks good!" She had said that even when I knew that that part of me looked dead, ready to be burned.
Oh, dead! It looks dead!

Would Kit say "good" when it wasn't good? No. Kit was looking at my leg not with medical detachment but with the interest of a patient examining her own leg, trying to find the spot that had been hurting her.

But then, for an instant, I was afraid she would do something equally sentimental as saying "good," something condescending—like kiss me there on my bitter flesh, touch me on the sharp edge of my bone.

She did no such thing. Yet in examining me, her face was close enough to my leg that I could sense her warm breath on my ever sensitive scars.

Looking back, I know what I could not have known then, that it was indeed the moment, as she'd said, of my getting over it. My legs would still be ugly, a permanent curse, a disability. But never again, not for one second, would I ever wonder if they defined me.

She closed the cover of the Zippo with that hollow snap, and for an instant, without the light, she disappeared. But she came back, bringing her face to mine, drawing the blanket forward as she did, covering us, clothing our nakedness. She put her mouth by my ear and whispered, "Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"I love you, Michael."

The surprise was that I was not surprised.

I touched her cheekbone without seeing it because her face remained close to my ear. "I love you, Katharine."

And then silence for a long time, a deep, consoling silence in which I listened to her breathing.

After a while, I freed my right arm from the blanket and reached to her. My hand found her cheek, and with the back of my fingers, I rubbed it softly. To my amazement, her cheek was wet. "You're crying?"

"Not with sadness. With feelings. Lots of feelings."

"Intense emotion."

"You betcha. All of them."

"You're okay now, Kit. We're taking care of each other."

"You sure are taking care of me, Monty. I'd be cooked by now without you."

"'Then your great transforming will happen to me,'" I recited, completing Rilke's stanza, "'and my great grief cry will happen to you.'"

"It just did," she said softly.

I let my hand caress the back of her neck, and without consciously deciding to, I gently drew her head to mine. We lay together like that in silence, her face nestled between my cheek and shoulder. Later, I would wonder what this embrace, this whole encounter, had to do with sex, but not then. Knowledge, carnal knowledge—not the same thing. The naked intimacy was all we wanted, all we needed. And it turned out to be as true of her, despite her sexy moves, as of me.

I felt the moisture of Kit's tears puddling at my clavicle. Despite her "big guy" breeziness, she was weeping again.
Incurable.
She continued to do so, almost soundlessly, until she drifted into sleep.

B
Y THE TIME
the
Hausfraus
key turned in the lock the next morning, Kit and I were dressed and sitting on our separate sides of the room. Kit wore her black turtleneck under her father's jacket. I was safely buttoned into my blazer and tie. The
Hausfrau
wore the same brown sweater over a shapeless dress and the same sturdy shoes. Now she smelled of cooked cabbage, which seemed odd so early in the morning.

But what time was it? Daylight was filtering in through the cloudy high window, and my watch said eight o'clock, but the dependable flow of minutes and hours had been interrupted. I could not trust the clear signs that it was morning. If the woman had said "
Guten Abend
" I would not have been surprised. In fact, she said nothing.

And if she had conveyed a hint of sympathy the day before, today she seemed only irritated. She stood in the threshold staring at us, a thick pillar of disapproval. Did she assume we had betrayed her laxity by huddling together under the one blanket? Would she believe that our intimacy had been, if not chaste, not sexual? But why would she care? The woman was no nun. And what were Communist morals in any case? Had she been privy to our time together, she would have laughed at us pregenital puppies, wildly short of understanding who, overnight, we had become.

Without having planned to, I blurted, "Where is our friend?
Wo ist—?
"

Kit finished my question, "
Unser Freund?
"

The woman looked blankly at me, then at Kit, who spoke several sentences in German. Except for the word "American," I missed it. When the woman still did not reply, Kit said to me, "I told her we demand to see the American ambassador."

"Consul general," I said. "In Berlin, it's the consul general."

Kit mouthed the word "asshole" at me, and I felt stupid and crushed. She grabbed her bag and went to the door, having understood ahead of me that our mute matron was waiting for us to go down the hall to the WC.

While Kit was gone, I made one more stab at learning something. "
Unser Freund, sie gemütlich, ja?
"

Her dismissive look made it clear that I had used a word wrong, but she knew what I was asking, and she still did not answer. I tacked, spoke in English, unable to believe that she really could not speak it. "Ulrich's father is an important American. You should tell your bosses that. You shouldn't be messing around with that kid. You'll be sorry." Even I nearly laughed at my thin threat, a boy reduced to the intimidation of the playground.

By the time, after Kit, I returned from the bathroom, she was wearing her bandana neckerchief, a small stylish touch. I wanted to wink at her, a bit of style myself, but she would not look at me.

A simple breakfast of warm milk and toast had been set on the table, and we ate it greedily. Then the woman took the dishes away, and once more locked the door behind her when she left.

The absence of visible guards made me wonder if we had made a mistake in not trying to escape. Then the image of a broad, roughly plowed field crossed my mind, as if the house beyond the cement wall were surrounded by farmland—the picture of a hobbling boy in a blazer, the girl having to waiting for him, dogs giving chase, gunfire, helicopters, tanks. Then what? Kit finds a branch for me to use as a cane? Kit risks her own survival to hang back, lending me her shoulder?

I looked at her. Though we were alone now, she still refused to meet my eyes. No one had ever warned me about the morning-after
tristesse
of lovers, even lovers who stopped short. But here it was. She sat facing away from me, immobile, as if there were something in the wallpaper to decipher.
Knock, knock—no one home.

All at once I began to feel afraid again, really afraid. Afraid of what had happened to Ulrich; of what would happen to us; of my father, how pissed off he'd be; of Kit's father, how he would hit her. Then I realized that her version offear like this was what had taken Kit away from me. There was no speaking of it. There was only sitting there, an ocean of anxiety in us and between us.

An hour, perhaps two, elapsed after the key had turned in the lock, but when the lock clicked again and the door opened, it was not the
Hausfrau
but two green-uniformed
Vopos.
At their brusque order, we gathered up our things. They ushered us out of the room and down the dim corridor. As I steadied myself against the wall, one of the
Vopos
poked me to hurry me along, prompting Kit to snap at him in German. "It's okay," I said, loping. I smiled at her, hoping for a smile in return, but not getting it.

With one
Vopo
leading and one trailing, we went through a door and down the creaking wooden stairs we had ascended the day before. We found ourselves in the same basement garage, the chilly stench of it. A windowless van like the one that had brought us there sat waiting.

When I followed Kit into the van, I heard her yelp of pleasure before seeing what prompted it. Ulrich was there, huddling in the far corner, his knees drawn up into his arms. Kit went right to him, stooping to put her arms around him. I wasn't jealous at all—I loved Ulrich, too.

He sat with what for him was an extraordinary impassivity, accepting Kit's embrace but not returning it. Otherwise, he seemed all right, no signs that he had been beaten again. When the guards slammed the van door shut behind us, we were plunged into darkness. Like before.

I pulled my lighter out, made its flame our center.

"Where the hell have you been?" Ulrich said, and I was relieved to see him grinning.

"Were you in this house here?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Someplace else, I think. I've been in here for an hour at least, and they've been driving. But they could be fooling us."

"Are you okay?"

He nodded.

The van lurched as the engine started, and we bounced against one another when it began to move. Kit was still holding on to Ulrich. The noise of the motor vibrating through the sheet metal made it seem safe to talk. I snapped my lighter shut, as if darkness would guarantee our privacy. I leaned closer to Ulrich. "Did they interrogate you?" I whispered.

"For a long time. Through most of the night."

"About what? We've got to get our stories straight. They didn't ask us about hardly anything."

"The yearbook. Did they ask you about the yearbook?"

"Yes," Kit said. "But we stayed with the story."

"The film, Ulrich," I whispered. "What the hell happened to the film? That's what they want."

"And what is it, anyway?" Kit asked.

"Do not do this to me," Ulrich pleaded. The anguish in his voice was more pointed for coming in the darkness. "You are asking me like they asked me."

"But we only have a few minutes here," I pressed. The fear was swooping in again. "You fucking
have
to tell us what is going on."

"I do not know!"

"Monty," Kit said, and I felt her hand on my shoulder. I sensed that she had a hand on each of us.

I said, "In a few minutes we're going to be separated again, probably in front of that magistrate, and each of us won't know what the others are saying. Come on, guys."

"Not the magistrate," Ulrich said. "It is Sunday."

"Jesus Christ, Ulrich," I said, "they're Communists. They don't care about the Lord's day."

Ulrich pushed back against my agitation by replying with dead calm, "The magistrate is tomorrow. They are taking us somewhere else today. They have until tomorrow to do what they want with us."

"Do they know who your father is?"

"My stepfather, Monty. My fucking stepfather."

"Oh, fuck you, Ulrich, with that crap. Father, stepfather, you know what I mean."

"Nevertheless, the distinction is not unimportant."

And then, like that, a new question came to me: What about his actual father—was he in this too, somehow? But I didn't know how to ask.

Kit squeezed my arm, which I took as a signal that she and I were together. Yes, in a way we
were
interrogating him.

"Well, either way," I said, "do they know? That's what I'm asking you. Do they know?"

"Of course!
Natürlich!
"

"Then that's why the yearbook doesn't fool them. I saw Tramm going through your bag for the roll of film. The film is why Tramm set this whole thing up."

"Did you give it to them?" Kit asked.

"I do not have it," Ulrich answered. "I do not know what you are talking about."

"Hey, Rick," I said. "It's us. Kit and Monty.Jesus, man."

"I have no film. I do not know about film."

Despite its dullness, there was a desperate edge in Ulrich's voice that doubled my alarm, a hint of how little I knew of what he'd gone through—not just last night, but over the years.

Kit was still pressing my arm. She said quietly, soothingly, "Okay, Rick. Good enough. But we have to keep our story straight. If there's no film, why is there a yearbook? Why are we the debating club? Maybe we should just go back to the truth. May Day. The Red Army parade. Marcuse."