Secret Father (10 page)

 

Our separate thoughts had become a wall between me and Mrs. Healy. When I focused on her face again, it seemed once more the impassive face of the burnished icon—suspended, aloof. Surely I was dreaming, as I had so often dreamt of the
Stephen Case,
that torpedo slamming out of nowhere.

But her steady, cold voice said otherwise. "When my husband's colleagues left our house last night, assigned the mission of recovering his bag while rescuing our son, David and I were made to confront how we are different. Not in our wishes or fears, but in our situations, and therefore in our feelings."

"The boy is
your
son," I said. The eyes of the icon above us were hidden, while this real woman's eyes were light brown, flecked with green. Her eyes were clear, steady. Feelings, yes. But no question of her not coping. "And your husband," I said, "is playing golf this afternoon."

"Do not misunderstand that," she said. "David has no choice. He would go to Berlin himself, would be in Berlin already, but East German agents track him everywhere, and he knows it. Clerks at Lindsay are Stasi or KGB. Drivers. Gardeners. Cooks. David must do nothing to draw attention to the fact that his son is missing, much less that his son is almost certainly in Berlin, soon to be in
East
Berlin. David has no choice but to entrust to those others a task he would much rather keep for himself. Out of love."

As she spoke, an emotional undercurrent ran in the opposite direction from what she was saying. I sensed that I was hearing the reiteration of an argument, justifying a reasonable course of action that to her was utterly to be rejected. "If David were to go to Berlin himself, it would worsen Rick's situation—and Michael's and Kit's—making them more likely to be noticed by the Stasi, making them more vulnerable to accusations if they are noticed."

"Accusations?"

"Our children, if they are taken, can be taken for spies."

"Which is preposterous, of course. As we would quickly establish."

"Perhaps," she said, even more coldly. "Perhaps not."

She left it to me to see the problem, the one with which we'd begun. "The bag," I said. "The bag and whatever is in it."

"Which is my husband's concern. And as he points out, our children are not children. Still, they, and they alone, are my concern. My husband has two concerns. I have only one. And my husband is condemned to wait by the side, and condemned is his word. Because he is well known to the Russians, to the Stasi. I am not."

"Nor am I."

"That, Mr. Montgomery, is what we have in common. It is why I am here."

My mind went all at once to the Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin, the broad shopping street that showcased capitalism deep behind the Iron Curtain. Chase, under my predecessor, had provided financing for the Lindenhof, the newest building on the avenue, the tallest in the city, and I had been there for the gala opening in December. The happy crowd that had thronged the ceremony had struck me, in its enthusiasm for the glittering new Berlin, as a version of the crowds one imagined cheering at the openings of the ponderous edifices Albert Speer built for Hitler. The question of their former enthusiasms was one we never raised with our German colleagues, but it lodged ominously below the surface of our collaboration, and it could jump out at unexpected times.

"I am going to Berlin," I said, adding to myself,
where Michael needs me.

"Once I met you this morning," she replied, "I saw that if you knew what was happening, you would go." Nothing demure in this woman. Nothing soft. No question now of downcast eyes. Her son, too, in need. That was all. "And I," she said, "am going with you."

W
HAT MY FATHER SAW
in me as need was simple readiness. Yet I am now a little past the age that he was then. I have my own grown children, and I begin to see things from his side as well as mine. Teenagers have a way of making parents both wise and crazy, and so, naturally, my own teenage years look different now. In my case, alas, the crazy reasons to worry were real. If my youthful naiveté had been only that, but the context made my actions thoughtless beyond measure, and if they had ended tragically, they would have been unforgivable. For a long time, they did seem so. It was only your father, before he died, who made a final forgiveness possible; only he, given what had happened, who could have offered it—to himself as much as to me and Kit. Someone had said to the three of us, "Don't you be the thing that brings a hair-triggered weapon out of its holster." But we were that thing.

My father and I are alike in understanding history as the frame within which our quite personal story unfolds. We are telling it all these decades later because once again Berlin has been in the news, beginning with the long-overdue breach of the Wall that brought us all together again. The Wall went up, in the first place, not long after the fateful two days in which everything happened.

Oddly, the literal breakthrough of the Wall on November 9, 1989, the end of an era if ever there was one, occurred on the fifty-first anniversary of
Kristallnacht,
the Nazi savaging of Jewish shops and synagogues. I say oddly because
Kristallnacht
was of course the beginning of the era, but also because, speaking personally, the Shoah and what led up to it has been a focus of my work. I write for the
Atlanta Constitution,
and have published three books on politics and history, the most recent an account of artworks stolen from Jews, how the great museums of the world took full advantage of the genocide.

I am conditioned, perhaps, to see the shadow of that past everywhere, and so, regarding Berlin, the coincidence of dates struck me less as odd than as inevitable. The flukes of history make us love it, but also fear it. That first diabolical Novemberfest seemed fittingly reversed when hundreds of thousands of young Germans, grandchildren of the perpetrators, took to the streets to smash not glass but drab concrete. They danced on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate, monument to Prussian glory. But Prussian glory had been swamped by the twentieth century, which only goosed the frenzied happiness of the young democrats who scaled the Wall, of the accidental graffiti artists who splashed the cement barrier with whatever paint came to hand, an anarchy of color released upon the gray monotony of a prison that had passed itself off as half a city.

The destruction of the Berlin Wall, as it happened, was also the destruction of a wall in my memory, the events that divided our lives into the before and after of who we were and who we became. And because your father was there with us at the start, helping to create the people we are, it is crucial that you know ofhim as he was, taking this remembrance as a measure of what he then accomplished with his life. We misunderstood his reaction all those years ago, thinking it foolish, when, as history shows, it was noble.

You were too young last year ever to have your own memory of the Wall coming down, so let me tell you. Tens of thousands of men and women rushed through the hole that opened when the
Volkspolizei
chose not to fire at the first doof us to hoist himself up to the ledge atop the Wall,jitterbugging and calling back to those who'd egged him on,"
Aufkommen!Aufkommen!
"'Within days, the once omnipotent Erich Honecker resigned as East German party chief, Hungary and Czechoslovakia declared their borders open, and Mikhail Gorbachev, watching from Moscow, shrugged. And once again, after the rude interruption that lasted three decades, the massive tectonic shift from East to West resumed, the largest movement of people ever to occur in Europe.

That movement had begun in 1944, with the mad flight of panicked Prussians, Silesians, and Sudeten Germans ahead of the onrushing Red Army. "Feet," as they say in Atlanta, "do your thing." At war's end, the migration quickened as if the central plain of Europe had been tilted on its side from the Urals toward the Atlantic, spilling westward women, children, and what men survived. Between 1945 and one night in August 1961, almost five million Germans fled from the East through Berlin, the boldest of them marching under that same chariot-crowned Brandenburg Gate. The gate was the emblematic transit point marking the continental divide, but at the time of our May Day visit to the city, a few weeks before the Wall went up, there were something like eighty places where the momentous border crossing could be made. I read later that three thousand East Germans, mostly young and skilled, were then making it every day.

After August 13, there were seven crossing places in Berlin, and they were ruthlessly controlled by
Vopos
whose authority was as absolute as the armor of Soviet tanks with engines idling not far away.
Republikflucht
was defined as a major crime against the Socialist state, and guards were authorized to prevent flight by shooting to kill, which they did more than two hundred times.

The Wall became the defining symbol of the Cold War, for us in the West as well as for your people. In the rhetoric of Western leaders from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, it was simply evil. Yet to citizens throughout Berlin, beginning early on, the hulking concrete and wire construction, running 103 miles through the city and in a full circle around its western half, was informally known as the Peace Wall. Your father told me that at the time of our reunion. In the West, there would be a journalistic obsession with the "death strip" as the very symbol of demonic totalitarianism, but in fact the barrier represented a practical solution to a vastly destabilizing problem. The Wall stopped the East-West refugee flow in its tracks, effectively saving the eastern provinces of the nation for an eventually reunited Germany, while defusing the terrifying confrontation that had turned Berlin into the Cold War "flashpoint." In one day, each side implicitly redefined its commitment in Berlin, with the Soviets yielding their claim to the whole city and with the Allies equally abandoning the East. The Wall did this. If the Soviets had not thrown it up, there were reasons why the Americans could have. Indeed, despite all their public protests, Americans not only valued the Soviet Wall, but had, in deep secret, encouraged it. What a country.

That surface enemies were subtle partners in maintaining what was necessary for peace is one of the great untold stories of the Cold War—and it is the hidden assumption of the story my father has begun, and that I pick up. The clandestine collusion between Washington and Moscow eluded us at the time, of course, but it was very much to the point of what happened when I joined Ulrich as a counter-refugee, bucking the flow to go from West to East. What know-it-alls we were. We knew nothing.

Subtle collusion between Washington and Moscow does not mean that their confrontations were less than terrifying, and the spring and summer of 1961 were, until the Cuban missile crisis the following year, the worst of it. It is hard to remember now, with Russia in social and economic free fall, but in those days the Kremlin seemed the center of a nation of evil geniuses. At the slightest whim of their madness, so we felt, they could blow us to smithereens. Only weeks before we took off for Berlin from Wiesbaden, for example, the Soviets had demonstrated their superiority by launching the first man into space. The name Yuri Gagarin was on everyone's lips that month. And only weeks later, Nikita Khrushchev would humiliate John Kennedy at their summit in Vienna. A shaken Kennedy came home from that encounter to announce on television it was time to build bomb shelters—a month's anticipation of the drab concrete of the Wall, but this concrete was to be poured in the cellars of American schools, factories, places of business, and homes. For the first time, a U.S. president was openly warning of nuclear attack, and in response, we the people began to stock up on canned goods. "Berlin is the testicles of the West," Khrushchev declared. "When I want to make the West scream, I squeeze."

 

When I was a kid using the guest bathroom at my mother's parents' house, a mansion on the North Shore of Long Island, I was always drawn to the tidy stack of back issues of an American magazine that sat on the cool porcelain shelfof the toilet tank. It was called
Reader's Digest,
and its pages were laced with pithy oddities that I loved. One was a feature called "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met." The stories of resolute amputees, say, or of prostitutes-turned-nuns made it seem a particular achievement—not to be unforgettable, but merely to have encountered someone who was. The Unforgettables: it became a category against which I measured teachers, doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. My mother, once she died, epitomized unforgettability, but she hadn't while alive. All too soon, certainly by that spring of 1961, I found myself unable to recall with precision what she looked like, which was why I took to carrying her picture in my wallet, as if she were my girlfriend.

So unforgettability was my standard of measurement when I met Rick Healy not long after starting at Wiesbaden. We became friends when we did what none of our other classmates presumed to do, which was to ask each other one awkward but simple question. What happened to your legs? Why do you speak with that accent? Beginning then, because he told me to, I stopped calling him Rick, although everyone else continued to. Even before the events of that spring, I'd already begun to understand Ulrich as
Reader's Digest
material, and I actually thought of composing an article about him—the first of my ambitions as a writer.

On the magazine's scale, Ulrich might have been unforgettable simply by being a German-born postwar adopted son of an American Air Force general, but how much more so by his being the son of a German baroness. It seemed an impossible claim, doubly so when he urgently swore me to secrecy. If his mother was a noblewoman, then what did that make him? We were sitting alone in the cafeteria, having lingered through the lunch hour. Beyond the wall of plate glass windows beside us, a soft autumnal light washed the air. Bluesmocked workers were wiping down the tables with ammonia, but he seemed not to notice them. Ulrich had lit a cigarette, which was forbidden in that room, and I could not decide whether his defiance ofsuch rules made what he'd just told me less believable or more.