Memoir From Antproof Case (24 page)

No way in the world existed to put all the bombs on one spot. The variables of inexact release, wind, mutual interference, and other high-school physics type of things meant that they would disperse. The later you pulled up from a dive, the less they dispersed; the earlier, the more.

I pointed my nose down, and, hardly breathing, aimed for the carousel. Were I lucky, when my bombs spread I would hit three or four of the five or six guns. I hated the g-force going down. It made my nose run afterward and gave me headaches. It was hard to operate the controls with several bodyweights' worth of me pinning my reflexes to the seat.

Diving at almost five hundred miles an hour toward the source of explosive shells aimed in my direction, I was trying to keep a tiny circle in my bomb sights, hardly able to breathe, with what felt like two huge wrestlers sitting on my chest. Eyes wide and teeth clenched, I emitted a steady stream of what newspapers call
expletives.
(You would think that, expletives themselves being so vivid, the word for them would have a little more punch, that it would sound like something other than part of a medieval windmill.)

Shaking, pressed, and hurting, I released the bombs, all of them, and pulled up. The g-force maximized in the trough, and then, I thought, I floated out of danger. I rolled upside down to check the damage, and, looking back, saw that though the park was all smoked-up and exploding, one gun still fired. Its crew was undoubtedly bloody and dirty, riding high on defiance. Undoubtedly their teeth were clenched and they were suffering the concussions of their gun.

They were persistent and lucky. Their shells were set for exactly the altitude of the target, and the target—me—was flying upside down, vulnerable parts exposed.

One shell burst so close that I thought it had actually hit the plane. Maybe it had. Every other bomber pilot had a story about a shell actually bouncing off his plane, or a plane he was watching, or a plane flown by someone he knew.

The first thing I felt was absolute surety that I was going down. Such a determination is not always easy to make, and can require half an hour of listening to dying airframe components and the implausibly complex engine. Much like medical diagnosis, the process depends not so much upon science and logic as upon experience that may not exist.

My plane, however, did not need four months in a sanitarium. No rare or elusive disease tantalized my sense of mystery. To use a medical analogy, the plane had had its head blown off.

The fuel line had been severed and was flaring like a gas plume atop an oil well. The engine, of course, had ceased to function. My canopy was blown away. The cockpit was full of vaporized fuel whistling through the shattered framework that had held the glass, I had a huge hole in one wing, and no doubt that the wing would fail.
My body was
stinging from shrapnel wounds. I prayed that nothing was deep, and I felt like a man undergoing an alcohol rub after running through a bramble patch.

Taking a chance that the wing would hold, I rolled back to level flight in one smooth movement. Though the wing bounced, it didn't separate. The propeller had already been feathered. "Who did that?" I asked the wind that flapped my lips as I spoke. I had probably done it myself without knowing it, for, after all, no one else was with me.

I wanted rather badly to glide over our lines, as I was fairly sure that if I parachuted into the German portion of the Göt-terdämmerung they would just shoot me. At the end, and this was the end, it gets incomprehensibly ferocious.

On the other hand, the plane was going to explode, I was already burned, and I didn't know exactly where the lines were. I held on for as long as I could, slowly climbing out of my seat, slowly hooking one leg over the bulkhead, checking the parachute to make sure it wasn't on fire, which would have presented additional difficulties, and trying hard to breathe.

I was dazed enough to have stayed with the plane until it exploded, but I realized that I was headed down, and, wanting to have enough air to fill my parachute, I stepped into the sky.

As I did, or an instant after I did, the plane blew up. I had gone out backwards, and was looking at it. An almost perfectly round orange-yellow fireball exploded in the ether—who knows how far from me—as I fell. It blinded me and then pushed me back, limbs trailing like a comet's tail, taking my breath away, punching my heart like a fist.

My parachute opened, but I hadn't pulled the ripcord: the force of the explosion had done that for me. The lightest, finest moment of my life, a moment of promise and elation, was, inexplicably, the instant when, falling through the air, I was blinded by unbearable light and hit by an almost unbearable shock. These traveled through the emptiness and came very close to killing me. My clothes were singed on their edges like the pages of a book that has come through fire.

All my life I have had a recurring dream from which I wake with gratitude. It is a bright June day on the beach at Amagansett, in the time of my youth, when nothing was there but the wild. I am weightless, held a few feet above the breaking waves and white froth. The wind is strong and, arms spread, I twirl in the sun, circling above a crucible of foam, bathed in gold.

Compared to what happened over Germany, at what I took to be the end, my fine companion dream is pedestrian. Had I not been in the frail and protective air, I surely would have died. And I am sure that, even were it only for an instant, I crossed into the world of light.

(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

 

I
AWOKE IN
utter moonlight this morning, at half past the terrible hour of four, fully awake and blinded by brilliance as if in the middle of the day, as if I were not old and the moon were not ghostly silver.

The Brazilians profess to know the seasons here, but not I. My lack of sensitivity to the particular waxiness or lack of waxiness in the evergreen leaves of the omnipotent brush that covers the hillsides, or to the impotent declinations of the sun as winter approaches, or to the appearance or disappearance of certain flowers, is evidence of my upbringing in a place of four explosive seasons, each of which sought you out like an expertly aimed shotgun blast, broke the world, and ushered you into a new life. Winter to me is a frozen landscape glazed in white under deathly blue winds, not the shift in back-coloration of a seasonally nauseated tree frog.

Here, I also have no sense of where the moon should be or when it will appear. Even at home I found its motions confusing, but I was seldom taken aback by its presence as I am in Rio, where it seems to spring from nowhere, especially on nights that are inexplicably clear and temperate. When this morning I opened my eyes and it was shining in them through the upper window like a burglar's flashlight, I felt as if I were receiving a message.

Not from God or nature or anything like that, but from my own simple failures and regrets. Of course, I did feel the presence of God, as I often do and always have, but I believe that if He were there it was only because of the presence of truth. He cannot resist truth; it is what lures Him near.

The truth in this case was a simple and homely memory: my route to school. In my eightieth year, I awake in a blaze of cool silver, gravely going over the paths and roads that led to my school more than seven decades before. I do not remember each blade of grass, each rut, each smooth and dusty reach of white earth, but I do remember every alleyway, long prospect, and major turn.

But why? Why such a small thing? After all, I was captured by the retreating German armies as they compacted upon their center in Berlin. Each soldier was a Dürer, so firmly and savagely engraved, so tired, tragic, and clear, that I felt myself made ignorant by my own victory. I was taken to the courtyard of a ruined building and held in the open for two days and nights without protection from artillery or air bombardment. The score or so of Russians, Czechs, Khazars, and who knows what else said that as soon as the space filled up we would be shot. I believed them, and I am sure they were right.

But Berlin fell before the courtyard filled, and I was saved yet again by some unaccountable grace of timing. During the two days that I awaited execution the moon rose through the clear nights as if, with its brilliance, to escort us out. The moon appeared insistently and with unchallengeable beauty through rivers of smoke and dust that had risen with the day's bombardments and run silently on the still night air. This moon was a great comfort in what we took to be our last hours, the calming emissary of another world.

Why then, when I woke many years later, did the same light shine not upon the fall of Berlin but upon my walk to school? You would think that with so many memories of great events such a thing would long ago have been forgotten. The whole world watched Germany fall, but no one's eyes ever followed a lonely child to school, at least not this one.

I cannot explain it, but first memories, first sensations, first loves—when life was clear and unburdened—are what awaken you at night when you are old. Perhaps it is because now I am weak again as I was when I was a child, and without means.

Just as I had done almost three quarters of a century before, I awoke this morning in moonlight, dressed quickly, and, with paper and pens in a (now antproof) case that I carried at my side, went on dark paths through the woods, alone. At that time in the morning the birds have not yet begun to sing, but they are about to. I remember the moment. It was a very good time indeed, full of expectation. And, if I remember correctly, for a seven- or eight-year-old, walking on those dark paths took some courage.

Today I found myself in the; garden so much earlier than usual that I had to wait for the light. While I was there the moon went very low and was quashed in the sea, and the stars pulsed lightly for a few minutes afterward.

Though I was happy to contemplate the stillness, I was there at that hour in service of a kind of spycraft. I was varying my route and time in response to a certain ineffable pressure, a tension unidentifiable to the senses. When assassins come, they are preceded by faint waves as delicate as starlight. Death comes lightly, but if you are listening, you can hear it even far away.

I had altered my route and arrived in the garden before the light so that if anyone came later I would see him first—unless I were bent over these pages. My eyes now take about a minute to change focus from small print to a freighter on the horizon or an assassin at the garden gate. I wish I knew how to speed the focus. There must be some kind of oil, or an exercise. Ah, but it's too late.

Soon after the light, just as the sun was getting hot, my heart jumped, I straightened in my seat, and I saw something that took sixty heavy years from my shoulders—a child running up the path, skipping like a ram, his little legs moving underneath him more rapidly than an eggbeater (do they make eggbeaters anymore? I haven't used one since the sinking of the
Lusitania).

Upon seeing the child, I thought he was my own. And he was. Funio had been sent by Marlise to bring me a message on his way to school. No one could climb the mountain faster or more easily. When he reached me he was hardly out of breath even though he had run all the way.

His schoolbag was strapped to his shoulders and he was in his customary shorts and shirt. No longer is he in that state, as once he was as a baby, when he would suddenly forget everything in the world, drop what he was doing, and embrace me. Now embraces are only for arrival or departure, and his eyes get watery because he knows that, soon, he's going to lose me.

But he forgets that, and his eyes flash as he begins to chatter like a chipmunk, in English or in Portuguese, whatever you please.

Most children of his age would be given a written message to pass on, but not Funio, who remembers every detail, and conveys any length transmission either verbatim, in précis, or in code. If you gave him the American Constitution he could read it, run up the mountain, and deliver it word for word.

Once, Marlise had him carry a series of account numbers from her branch to another. He memorized them. To be sure that if he were captured by Indians and tortured he would not betray the depositors, he divided the numbers by 7.35 if they ended evenly, and by 11.14 if they ended oddly. With this store of information he sped through the streets, reprocessing the information at his destination.

"Mama says to tell you that the barber told her a man was looking for someone."

"In Niterói?"

"In Niterói. The barber followed him back to the city. He's staying in a hotel. He's very ugly and he has a pony tail, and lots of hair in his nose, and his nostrils are flat and he has an earring and big bones. Oh, he has a Turkish passport."

"Turkish passports can be bought in vending machines," I said.

Because he understood about assassins, little Funio began to cry.

"Funio, Funio," I said, putting him on my knee. "I have no fear. Look."

I held out my hand, and it was rock steady. Though I am eighty years of age, I have no tremor. "You just stay out of the way," I told him, "and I'll take care of everything."

He was not consoled.

I drew the Walther and put it in his hands. "Funio, I was in the war, and much more. I know how to use this. I'm not afraid. It even gives me a strange kind of happiness, because fighting has been so strongly intertwined with my life...."

"Still," he whispered.

What could I say? I kissed him, and he ran off to school, skipping down the long path. I have never been able to tell him how much I love him, though that is perhaps the way it should be, because words could not express what I feel, and actions, too, would come up short. Someday, as sons do, he will come to understand me.

Meanwhile, I must be vigilant.

So I sit in this garden trying to be alert to the present as the comforting force of memory brings me back. I can relive a day in a moment or a year in a day, and for someone with not so much time remaining, this makes great sense. In revisiting what I have left behind I can sit on this bench and feel waves of affection, awe, and sadness, which in combination with the richness of the garden, the warmth of the sun, and the blue of the sea, makes my life full. Though I have no choice and I must write this down, I had no idea it would be so easy.