Secret Father (38 page)

I was grateful for the kindly air with which my father nodded at her. "We've talked to some people, Katharine."

"Her name is Kit, Dad."

"Kit. What they tell us is that for now this is better handled according to the set procedures. Mrs. Healy and I are here as a matter of parental concern. If your father and mother were in Germany, they could be here, too. We're just parents, Kit—which is best at this point. The U.S. government is aware of what's happening, but if this became a formal matter outside procedures already set by the Four-Power Agreements, it would become political. We want to keep it in the confines of Berlin, Kit. Not Washington. Not Moscow. Berlin. East Berlin, West Berlin, a mother, a father, some kids in a jam. That's all."

"Not innocent of sin, but sinning in innocence," Kit said. She said it with a totally straight face.

"Whatever you say, Kit," my father answered, but warily. And then he added, "So far it's a small matter. We have to keep it that way. Do you understand?"

"Small potatoes," Kit said.

"Don't misunderstand. I mean, just for—"

"No, I get it. Small matter. Mox nix."

"For the sake of the dismissal we expect tomorrow."

"She understands, Dad."

"And if you have a phone number for him, I'll call your father. I'll call him right away, this afternoon."

"No," she said emphatically.

"No need for that, Dad," I put in.

But he was studying Kit.

I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of her. She was staring back at my father with clear, firm eyes. Her courage was what I saw, and her resolve. I imagined her facing down her own father like that. Great white father. Fathers were put here to be pissed, she had said. She was put here to stand up to them.

Looking at my father then, I saw that bewilderment. Her old man whips her, Dad, I thought ofsaying, let's leave him the hell out of this. But what did my worried father know? I was sure he had never hit anyone. Suddenly I felt sorry for him. A dead wife. A kid who tells him nothing. Worse—a kid who lies.

To get him off Kit's case, but also in a rush of my own guilt, I said, "I'm sorry." He looked at me with surprise, and I went on quickly so he would not think I was sorry for staying with Ulrich. "About the car, I mean. Sorry for taking off in it."

And then, seeing the rank irrelevance of my confession, I laughed. To my relief, so did he. "Not to worry, Michael. You'll be happy to know the car is safe where you left it in Helmstedt. Although you left the rear window down." He grinned the old shit-eating grin, the parent who knows everything.

"All is finished here," the man in the dark suit said, and he clapped his hands once. My father jumped, a reflex that shocked me and made me admit the awful knowledge that my father was afraid of that man. Really afraid.

Ulrich leaned forward, not reaching to his mother but to my father. "Please," Ulrich said, "make them put me back with Monty and Kit. They are keeping me alone. I cannot be alone again. Please."

Kit and I found each other's eyes behind Ulrich. I saw a shining depth of feeling in her, the same gratitude I felt for what had passed between us. The simple intimacy of the night before was not to be repeated, and that was all right. Smoke rings. Perfect for a moment. Gone.

My father said, "I will make a point of it, Ulrich."

And apparently he did, because when they returned us to the same house that afternoon, the house within earshot of a railroad crossing, Ulrich would be in the room with me and Kit.

Late at night, with Kit asleep on the day bed by the wall, Ulrich would begin by thanking me for what my father had done, but he would also express resentment toward his stepfather, who had done nothing for us, and toward his real father for being absent forever. In my whispered response, I would ask him to tell me both their stories, and he would answer it was impossible, impossible. "Later," he would say. "Later. I will tell you everything." Given what happened the next day, it was a promise he would not keep.

 

We stood up, the three of us, on our side of the table, and Mrs. Healy and my father on theirs. Only then, as I gripped the back of one of the chairs for balance, did he notice that my cane was nowhere in sight. "Where's your stick?" he asked.

I looked at him helplessly. Please, Dad, I wanted to say, but did not.

My father turned to the Russian. "My son carries a cane. Where is his cane?"

While the man looked from me to my father uncomprehendingly, the door behind my father opened. Someone listening from another room knew that we were finished. The door swung wide and I saw another man in uniform, this one with ribbons and braid and red boards on his shoulders, some officer. He was a short, thin man whose bald head and sharp nose made him look like Adolf Eichmann.

Then I noticed his empty sleeve, an amputated arm. An arm ripped from its socket by Nazis? Or by Stalin? An arm lost, in any case, to evil, to war, to the violence of men. Not to a virus just ahead of the vaccine, the lucky bastard.

My father had turned back to me, seriously agitated now. "What happened to your stick, Michael? What are they doing—"

"It's all right, Dad. Never mind. Jesus."

During this brief commotion, with the room's attention on the officer's arrival and on my goddamn missing cane, Ulrich and his mother had circled to the foot of the table and were embracing. Suddenly all eyes went to them. The one-armed officer and the Russian exchanged sharp words I did not understand. Ulrich had his mouth to his mother's ear and was whispering. It was so obvious that I expected the apparatchik to bark an order at them, or the officer to step between them, but each one remained where he was, watching, as the mother listened to her son.

Kit banged her chair against the table, and I knew she was trying to draw attention to herself. "Mr. Montgomery," she said loudly. "Something else. Would you help me with something else?"

We all looked at her, all but Ulrich and his mother.

"They have my accounts book. Would you make them give me my accounts book back? I need it."

"Your accounts book?"

"I really need it." Kit had her left thumb inside her right fist and was gesturing like an agitated child. I thought she was going to say it had her novel, the story of her soul, an incurable woman whose disease is a man. But she surprised me. "It has my letter to Faulkner in it," she said. "I'm writing to William Faulkner because I am going to be his page next year." Kit turned toward the man in the dark suit and spoke to him in German, a sentence constructed around the words "William Faulkner." The man only stared at her, but the point was, he was no longer staring at Ulrich and Mrs. Healy, to whom, in fact, he had never barked "No whispering!"

My father said, "I'll ask about it, Kit. I'm sure you'll get it back."

"I need it now. I have to set down some things."

"Kit's a novelist, Dad," I said, as if that explained her urgency. To my knowledge, my father had never met a novelist. My father hadn't a clue, even, that I myself had begun to imagine a life as a writer. Kit would get her accounts book back, but not until the next day. Still, it would be time enough for her to do something precious with it.

Ulrich pulled away from his mother's embrace. She took him back for the instant required to kiss him firmly on the cheek, a cheek that had the moisture of his tears.

I looked out the window at the afternoon light. I wanted to memorize the light, not imagining that it would fade, but understanding that the sky would never look this clear again. Even then I knew it was
right here
that I had learned who I was, had become who I am, and that whatever happened now, I would never be the same again.

"What about your stick?" my father asked. They had him halfway out the door.

I felt pity for him then. What a burden it was to be such a worried father. "It's not important, Dad." Not my stick, of course. I was speaking of my very legs.

T
HIS WAY
, Charlotte." I took her elbow. We had just crossed from the stairwell to the round entrance foyer, its walls—now I saw it—the color of smoke. Hans Krone and our escort, the gaunt, bespectacled Russian, were close behind.

Krone, seeing my detour, stopped the Russian with an innocuous question, giving us a moment's opening. Charlotte had no idea where I was leading her until we stopped in front of the bronze tablet, "
Moabiter Märtyrer.
"

"I wanted you to see this," I said. "I saw it yesterday."

She looked at the lines of text, afloat like tea stains on a plaque the color of a caramel apple. Out of the margins and the spaces between the letters, as out of silence, rose the list of names, the explanatory paragraph, the date—May 1, 1945.

She slowly backed away, gloved hand to her mouth, forefinger knuckle between her clamping teeth. This, or something like it, was what had kept her from Schloss Pankow yesterday. She would not be here today except to see Ulrich.

She turned from that one particular name to cast an accusing look at me, a look full of hate and defiance. Then she moved rapidly across the foyer, through the door, and out into the bright afternoon. Her skirt flared at her calves with every clipped step she took.

I caught up with her in the broad, grassy courtyard. A squad of gray-uniformed soldiers was moving through its drill a few dozen yards away. Aware of the difficulty in closing those last few inches between my grasping hand and her sleeve, like that old Greek paradox of the arrow never reaching its target, I lunged, took her arm, and forced her to slow down. "Show nothing," I said. "You are showing too much."

She fell into step with me, but only because I was right.

Leaving the squad to its maneuvers, we crossed the courtyard, ahead of Krone and the Russian. We passed the sentry and entered the shadow of the archway that led through the front wing of the palace. In that disappointed tunnel, the air became wind, a last pressure against us, and together we bowed slightly into it—to get out, out into the crescent-shaped parking lot with its thin herd of dwarf autos.

Krone's Mercedes was there waiting for us, an incarnation of escape. The uniformed driver, in the universal chauffeur's cap, was at the wheel. When he saw us approach, he hopped out and came around, but Charlotte was at our door ahead of him. She opened the door, flung it wide, got in. I followed.

Even as she made room for me on the seat, sliding away, her right hand shot back toward me, poking the air near my face. "Silence!"she commanded. "Do not speak!"

Krone, following behind, was stooping to join us, aiming for the jump seat on which he had ridden before, but I stopped him. "Hans, ride in front, will you?"

He stared at me. "There are things to discuss." He then let his eyes flit briefly toward the Russian, who was watching us from a dozen yards away. Krone said, "That one is KGB, from the
Kommandatura.
Erhardt is terrified."

"Later."

"But I—"

"And turn on the radio, Hans. Turn it on loud."

He looked at me with the disappointment of an unneeded hunting dog, then nodded brusquely. He closed our door, then hoisted himself into the front seat with an awkwardness that made it clear he had never ridden there before. The driver got behind the wheel and, without so much as a glance at Krone, started the engine. As we began to move, I leaned forward. "The radio, Hans."

He pressed the dashboard button and an operatic chorus poured into the air, something of Bach's. I pressed the button on my armrest that raised the partition between front and back seats.

When we were sealed off, I turned to Charlotte, but her shoulder was angled away from me. She was staring out the window, as if the landscape of the wrong side of Berlin might hold some interest. Rubble nostalgia? I could see the whorl of her ear, its pearly shimmer. I could see the line of her cheekbone, the luster of skin without makeup. But I could not see even one eye.

"Charlotte."

She ignored me. What had Krone said?
Kommandatura?

The car had come quickly to speed, and the stucco wall of the nearby hospital flashed by like unspooling ribbon. I glanced out the rear window. No one. From what I saw, ours was the only moving car in East Berlin.

Turning back to Charlotte, I asked, "Who is von Siedelheim?"

She whipped around toward me. "Silence!" The order came in a hiss now, and her eyes darted forward to Krone, to the driver.

All that had gone before, every revelation—her life as a rubble woman, Healy's rescue, even Healy's film in the bag that Ulrich took—was nothing compared to this. Von Siedelheim.
Moabiter Märtyrer.
Wolf. Bullets to the back of the neck. Tied in this knot were threads of the secret of secrets, twisted into the rope of the noose around the neck of her only son, and therefore around the neck of mine.

"No," I said quietly but firmly. "The time for silence is past. No more silence between us."

She stared at me helplessly, then once again her eyes went to Krone.

"He can't hear us," I said. The choral passage on the radio filled both cavities of the limousine. "Listen," I said. "It's Latin.
Deposuit potentes.
'He hath put down the mighty.' It's the
Magnificat,
your Virgin icon. We are as safe here as we were in her presence in the Russian Chapel." Only the day before, yet the chapel now seemed to give us a shared history, that first instinctive coming together that drew its energy from what we could not put into words. When language fails, longing takes over, a thing I knew from Edie. Indeed, it was Edie who had made me listen to this exuberant canticle until it was mine, too. Not religion, but music. "'He hath exalted the humble and the meek,'" I translated.

Charlotte nodded. "Bach wrote this for Leipzig. I heard it sung in Leipzig every Christmas."

"You hear it now." Flutes, drums, strings. Voices. "So do they." I indicated Krone and the driver. "Which means we can talk."

For the first time, she brought her eyes directly to mine. Her eyes were fluid, enormous, searching mine.