Secret Father (45 page)

"This is Mr. Krone," I said. "He is with me."

"But, I—"

I cut him off, trying to deflect him. "The hearing will go quickly. And then we will be out of here. And then—"

"Where is she?" he demanded.

"She is in West Berlin, Rick. With your father."

"My father?"

"I mean your stepfather."

"Why? What is
he
doing here?"

"He's not here. He's in West Berlin. We will see him later."

"He cannot be in Berlin! Nowhere in Berlin! Because of his job! Why is he in Berlin?"

"Because of—everything. Everything that has happened, and that is still happening."

"But his job—"

"The rule about his job does not apply anymore."

"Why?"

I could not think of what to say, how to answer. I wasn't going to lie to him. I said nothing.

But Rick pressed. "Did he stop my mother from being here? He kept her from being here, didn't he?"

"No, he didn't. Try to calm down, Rick."

"Dad," Michael put in, "his name is Ulrich. Ulrich, for God's sake."

I might have taken Michael's point, should have finally, but Rick was what Charlotte had called her son, and so it was how I had to think of him.

Rick was about to speak again, angrily, when Major Stahl came in behind him. "Excuse me," he said.

The boy stepped aside. The major entered, pulling the door after him, but the blue-uniformed German appeared suddenly, and he held the door open simply by standing there. The major looked at me, so I said, "This is Major Stahl from the U.S. judge advocate general's office at Berlin Command. He's here to make sure the proceedings are kosher. Right, Major?"

"Correct. Things should go smoothly. This is not a big deal, since the minister is ready to dismiss the case as BND mischief, which—who knows?—maybe it was." The officer grinned. I saw that his boyishness was at the service of a disarming technique. "I'm not authorized to speak for you in there, but they have agreed to let me serve as your interpreter."

"
Ich möchte keinen Dolmetscher haben!
" Rick said, a statement I recreate here using a dictionary. "No interpreter for me!"

Major Stahl did not hesitate. "
Nicht so schnell, Herr Healy.
" And then he barked another two sentences in German. Stahl sternly waited for Rick to reply. When he didn't, the major looked at the other two youngsters. "I am your insurance in there. For one and all.
All.
" He faced Rick again. "So when I put the questions to you in English, you will hear how I want you to answer, get it? Instead of saying, 'Did you have the currency in question?' I will say, 'You didn't have the currency in question, did you?' And you answer, 'No, sir, I did not.' Like that. At home we call it leading the witness.
Verstehen Sie?
"

"Yes, sir," Katharine said, and Michael nodded. Rick only stared back at him.

Major Stahl consulted a briefing sheet. "So you are Katharine Carson? Dependent daughter of Master Sergeant Earl Carson, USAF?"

"Yes, sir."

To Michael he said, "And you are Michael Montgomery, dependent son of USGS-19 Paul Montgomery?"

"Monty," Michael said, the name I thought he hated as much as I.

"And you are Rick Healy—"

"Ulrich," Michael put in.

"—dependent son of Major General David Healy, USAF."

"Not 'son.'"

Major Stahl's expression softened with a kind of willed sentimentality, a variation on that forced boyishness. The shift set off an instinctive alarm in me, but too late. The major said, "I'm sorry about your mother, son."

"What?"

"I'm sorry—" The major reddened and glanced at me helplessly.

"What about my mother?" Rick demanded. And he swung toward me like a fighter. "Did my stepfather—?"

"Your stepfather had nothing to do with it," I said.

"With what?"

What could I do? Or not do? I wanted desperately to honor Healy's wish, but I was not going to lie to this boy. I could not keep from him—as once I had from my own son—news of his mother's death.

"Your mother is dead, Ulrich," I said. And I started to add "I'm sorry," but before I got those words out, he grabbed me by the coat.

"No!" he said. "No!"

I tried to hold him, but he pushed out of my embrace. "How?" His fierceness was overwhelming.

"It was an accident."

"What kind of accident?"

"Ulrich, we can do this later. The important—"

"Tell me now! What accident?"

"A gunshot."

"Because of the film? At the train?"

"Yes. At the train. Your mother destroyed the film. Agents wanted her not to. KGB agents, I think. There were weapons. There was gunfire."

Rick was backing away from me He stumbled against a chair Michael was at his side, trying to take his arm, but Rick shook him off. "Whose gunfire?"

"It doesn't matter."

"She died to destroy the fucking film?"

"Ulrich—"

"The Russians killed her?"

"No."

He stopped. I could see a terrible new question coming into his mind. "It was not the Russians?"

"It doesn't—"

"Then who?"

"An American MP. An accident, Ulrich."

"American?" He looked away, his glance happening to fall on Major Stahl, who had watched with horror all that followed from his callow, unthinking remark. A look of pure hatred crossed Rick's face then, and he turned and bolted from the room. Michael went after him.

As I started to follow, the German officer stopped me. I faced Major Stahl. "Can we get this thing over with? Let's get these kids out of here."

"Yes, sir," Stahl said. He gestured toward Kit, who was standing in a corner with her notebook pressed against her breast. She went by without looking at me, out into the hallway, with the major right behind. The German closed the door. When I faced Krone, he had the stunned expression of a man who had witnessed a terrible accident, yet another.

 

It was not until some thirteen weeks later that Walter Ulbricht, pressed by Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the overnight construction of the Berlin Wall—shutting down that refugee flow in an instant. Yet in my memory, that pivotal political event of August 13 has always come twinned with the intensely private catastrophe of May 3. Indeed, the one anticipated the other—my personal Berlin Wall, which, brick by brick, I have been dismantling here.

When the door to the room in which Krone and I were waiting was finally thrust open, it was Michael standing there with an expression of agonized dismay distorting his face. "Dad!" he said, a child again, turning to me to make it better.

I stood. "What?"

"It's Ulrich," Michael said. "Ulrich is defecting."

Such an odd word for my son to use, is the way it strikes me now, but it was very much a word of the time. There had been numerous high-profile defections from West to East—Burgess, Maclean, and Philby—that would be matched on the other side by the likes of Nureyev and Baryshnikov, not to mention a dozen political figures whose names we could never remember. The verb "defect" implied the noun "defect," and even we knew that the idea was a sign of a pervasive Cold War corruption—corruption of us all. But to this news of Rick's defection my son and I reacted the way Philby's intimates must have, or Nureyev's: this can't be so, not someone of ours, not Ulrich, not Rick.

"What do you mean?"

"The magistrate let us go. They said we can go. But Ulrich said he wants to stay. He wants to stay in East Germany. The major is in there arguing with them."

I pushed past Michael into the corridor just as Major Stahl was coming out of the hearing room. He had Katharine by the arm, and she was sobbing. Two
Vopos
accompanied them, one ahead, one behind.

"What happened?" I asked.

Major Stahl shook his head. "The Healy boy has requested asylum, formally requested political asylum. The magistrate ordered him held pending a ruling by the Ministry for State Security."

"He's an American citizen!" I said. "They can't—"

"He claims he was born in Leipzig. Is that true? Leipzig is GDR."

"Yes, it's true, but—"

"He speaks fluent German,
native
German. He
is
German. Why wasn't I told this?"

"Major, go back in there—"

"Forget it. If he's German, from Leipzig, then this is simple repatriation. There are no obstacles in any of the Four-Power Agreements to his returning to what legally counts as his native land."

"He's a minor child! He can't—"

"He's eighteen years old."

"Yes, but—"

"That's not a minor. Not here. I talked to the kid. In German. He refused to speak English. He says he is staying. I ordered him to come with me, and he said that would be
Kadavergehorsam.
"

"What the hell is that?"

"'Obedience of a corpse,'" the major said, shrugging. "He says his mind is made up."

"Do you understand what his father's position is?"

The major stared at me. "Not his father, Mr. Montgomery. The boy himself just said it in there: his father is dead. Now his mother is dead. From this point on, it will behoove us to be very clear about this particular fact: the general is not the boy's father. This boy is German. This is a German matter." The lawyer was speaking with an authority he had not displayed at first. His counterfeit callowness was completely gone. "The boy is acting freely. I saw that myself. The U.S. military has no stake in this. I am sure the general will agree."

 

And that was pretty much it. General Healy did whatever he did. I never knew. In fact, when we returned to West Berlin that day, I never saw him. Some days later, I requested an appointment with him in Wiesbaden, but he refused to meet me. I did not see him again for many years, and the sealing of the border guaranteed that we would not see Rick, either. I always assumed he went back to Leipzig, but who knew? If he had a change of heart about making his life in the East once the Wall went up—when the Brandenburg Gate became the uncrossable border of what the Communists then called the "free city"—it no longer mattered. With thirty million other Germans in the East, Rick was stuck.

That day, I turned away from the major to find Michael and Katharine standing behind me. When they saw the defeat in me, the girl fell into Michael's arms, not quite knocking him off balance. She sobbed against him, and he held her. My son's depth of resolve was not news to me—he had survived the disease—but I had never imagined his strength in helping someone else. I saw him not as a boy with a girl, but as a man with a woman.

As we started to leave the building, I was on one side of Katharine, Michael on the other, each of us holding an arm. At the vestibule, I stopped her. "Kit," I said, "your notebook." It was gone.

She looked up at me. "I gave it to Ulrich. When he said he wasn't coming, I gave it to him. He said he would only borrow it."

Michael looked over at me. "We told him we would come back. We would see him again. We promised."

"And you keep your promises," I said.

"And Kit's book is a sign of it."

I put my arm around Katharine and squeezed. No one of us imagined at that moment how a wall would trump the pledge-token of a would-be writer's jottings. "That was good of you, Kit," I said.

Michael said, "I gave him my cigarettes. I wish I had something real to give him."

"But you did, Monty," I said. I guess I was fending off the air of presumption by using his chosen nickname. I stepped around Katharine to come between them, putting an arm around each one. I had come here to rescue my son, but even with this staggering outcome, I could see that he had done more rescuing than I. Yet only to a point. Rick, after all, was lost. Charlotte was dead. And the dream we'd had of our-selves was gone forever.

Given all that, it was a relief when Michael leaned into me, accepting my support as if I were one of his friends. A small thing. And didn't that prove, at last, how little he needed it?

N
EARLY TWO HUNDRED
people were shot dead attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in the twenty-nine years that stand between us now, a year after the Wall's collapse, and the day not long after Kit and I bade Ulrich farewell, when the Wall went up. As we promised, we have returned here, with my father, and it is in the glorious context of the Wall's demise that we were drawn back into this story.

So much of that summer of 1961 was bent to the service of falsehood. In June, President Kennedy met with Khrushchev, who seemed ready for war over Berlin because of the border issue that had become so personal to us. In July, Kennedy warned Americans of the possibility of nuclear attack and advised families to build fallout shelters. What he did not tell us was that the real threat was coming from his own generals' pressing for a preemptive strike against Moscow. We came closer to nuclear war that summer, perhaps, than we would over Cuba a year later, but what we Americans didn't understand and still don't is that the nightmare would have begun, in the name of prevention, with us.

The Berlin Wall, which Kennedy and every U.S. president after him derided as a grotesque symbol of Soviet evil, was in fact what preserved the peace, which is why Kennedy did nothing to stop its erection. By ending the mass outflow of refugees from East to West, the Wall took the pressure off Berlin, and therefore Khrushchev, and therefore Kennedy. Our young president did not want to yield to his trigger-happy generals, although by August he showed every sign of preparing to do just that. The fallout shelters he wanted Americans to build were to protect against the radioactive cloud spawned by our bombs, not Moscow's. It may not be too much to say that the detested Wall saved the world.

But by sealing off its only outlet, the Wall made a vast prison of Soviet-occupied Europe. The conventional wisdom in the West was that the Wall would come down only as a consequence of ultimate war. The Soviet enemy, a reification of the intractable obstinacy of absolute tyranny, as the "totalitarian school" of U.S. Sovietologists defined it, was incapable of change from within, and would be undone only through force of arms. Moscow matched us all the way in accumulating those arms, until between us we had the power to destroy the earth a thousand times over. "Mutual assured destruction," an unironic Robert Strange McNamara called it. MAD.