Secret Father (47 page)

He wore a shapeless dark corduroy suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. He had a tan, which seemed odd. But with dark circles under his hollow eyes, he looked anything but rested. About the only thing that fit him for the role of heroic resisting professor were his wirerim spectacles. More Lennon than Lenin, I thought. I remembered Ulrich's quip of years before: More Groucho than Karl.

When Kit threw herself on him, Ulrich was clearly ready for her, returning her embrace with every ounce of feeling she put into it. They held each other for a long time. When at last they pulled back to look at one another, Ulrich said, "
Du bist sehr schön, Kit. Immer noch.
"

Kit fell back against him, and I knew how relieved she was, not at the compliment, but at his use of
du.
It would have crushed her if he'd said
Sie.

Ulrich looked across Kit's head to us, first to me, then to my father, who now stood next to me. I sensed each small quake in Ulrich as he took in how time had touched us—my wheelchair, my father's age. Kit released Ulrich and led him into the room by the hand. He leaned down to me and hugged me so gracefully it seemed impossible he didn't do it every day. Then he shook my father's hand with warmth and firmness. "You are
all
beautiful," he said, and broke into a broad smile. I heard a hint of his British accent, from his school days in England. Looking more closely at him, I realized that his elegant leanness was actually a shocking gauntness, and that the tan of his complexion was in fact the tinged pallor of illness.

My father offered drinks, and everyone sat. In this well-appointed room in prosperous West Berlin, it was inconceivable that only yesterday this spot had been on the very edge of the earth's abyss. And why shouldn't our conversation have begun slowly, with disjointed half-sentences, awkward laughs, unfinished thoughts? Ulrich had a bad cough, which cut into everything he tried to say.

We were on an edge of time's abyss, too. How much time Kit, Ulrich, and I had lost—that was the feeling as we each tossed up jagged memories of H. H.Arnold High School, as if only that could anchor our time together now. But, for all our reminiscences, we could not capture the essence of what we'd been and been through, a failure caught by Kit when she cracked, "Nostalgia—it's not what it used to be."

I turned the conversation to the Wall. Ulrich summarized the exhilarating events in Berlin over the past weeks, "our return from the cave of shadows," he called it. That remark led to talk about his own career, and he settled into the self-effacing mode of a man telling a story he finds less than interesting. He had published work on Plato's critique of tyranny in
The Republic,
which, he said, the dull-witted despots of "free Berlin" had regarded as harmless because the subject predated the glorious revolution. But in lecture halls, he said with a smile, he brought Plato up to date.

After a century of intellectual passivity in the face of the various totalitarianisms, he said, there had come the great Solzhenitsyn, whose challenge to the right and left both had lodged like a virus in the minds of the young. "I have been racing to stay even with the ones I have been teaching," he said. A modest statement, yet I could see through it, because I recalled the thrill it had been to listen to him think out loud—Marcuse, Sartre, Camus. When had ideas ever been more exciting to me?

Still speaking of his students, he added, "And we made each other pregnant." Ulrich smiled at this metaphorical jump from virus to seed. He looked at Kit. "In a world of ugliness, we have been waiting to beget what is beautiful, and now we have."

Kit nodded. "And literally? Do you have your own children?"

"Yes. A son. Isaiah. He is three. He is Jewish, like his mother. I, too, am Jewish."

That statement brought a moment's hesitation, then Kit moved on to tell of our children. It fell to me to explain how Kit and I had stayed in touch through college, finding it impossible to let go of each other and of what we had been through together—with him.

At one point, Ulrich reached into his coat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, coughing as he did so. "With permission?" he said. As my father went to find an ashtray, Ulrich offered his pack to me and Kit. When we declined, we all laughed. "In the East," he said, lighting up, "lung cancer is the last thing we worry about." The shock of his statement was in its revelation: he himself had the disease.

Ulrich turned to me with a nod at my chair. "And you, Monty?"

No one had called me that in years, and it brought me right back to what I had found irresistible in him. Also, I welcomed the deflection from the subject of his own illness. I recited the short-form saga of my amputation. I remembered that he was the first friend I ever had for whom the polio had registered as something other than the primary fact of my existence. And was that how he felt now about his cancer?

As often happened, the discussion of my infirmity led to an interlude of silence. In that silence I became aware that so far my father had said almost nothing. Ulrich shifted in his seat, just enough to draw him in.

And what my father said was "We came to Berlin today by train."

Ulrich waited.

"And it put me very much in mind of your mother. I have never forgotten her, Ulrich."

Ulrich nodded, sensing, perhaps, as Kit and I did, what an understatement that was.

"And I think she would have wanted me to tell you something." My father leaned forward, his forearms falling onto his knees. "Does the name von Siedelheim mean anything to you?"

"No," Ulrich said.

My father sat back. "Then there is something I want to explain. It has to do with what happened to your mother."

"I know what happened to my mother."

"Perhaps not everything, Ulrich. I thought I knew, too. But I did not. Not until several years ago. In the fall of 1983, I received a phone call at my office in New York from a woman who said she was calling from the hospital at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, just outside of Washington. She told me to come. General Healy, by then long retired, was dying. He died of lung cancer."

My father stopped. The words hung in the air. Lung cancer. I had not heard my father speak of this telephone call, and I sensed, from exchanging a look with Kit, that neither had she. We waited for him to resume.

Finally, he did. "General Healy wanted to speak to me, the woman said. So, just before he died, I went to see him."

"You
saw
General Healy?" I asked.

My father glanced at me, but his business here was with Ulrich. "And the first thing the general said was that someday I might find it possible to talk to you, and he wanted you to know—" My father stopped, visibly having to deflect an inrush of emotion. Then he went on, "General Healy told me this only because he hoped that someday I could tell you."

Ulrich exchanged glances with Kit, then me. Each of us conveyed that this was stunning, astonishing news. I knew my father, I thought, and I didn't know this?

Ulrich said, "Tell me what, Mr. Montgomery?"

My father leaned forward. "In 1945, Wolf von Siedelheim was a Wehrmacht major in command of Moabit prison, on Lehrter Strasse here in Berlin."

"I know Lehrter Strasse," Ulrich said. "I have heard of the prison."

"Then you know it is long gone," my father said, and with a firm but neutral voice, he recited a narrative as if he had rehearsed it. "Moabit was where the Nazis kept political prisoners, which meant mainly Communists, KPD. On the first of May 1945, with the Russians closing in on the city, and with the Nazi high command having collapsed, Major von Siedelheim had to decide on his own authority what to do with his prisoners. There were thirty-one of them. He could have opened the doors and let everyone walk away, but he did not. He ordered them executed, each one shot in the nape of the neck, which was how the Nazis put Communists to death—each enemy group its signature execution."

I felt as if I were hearing the voice-over of a Cold War documentary. How to square what was being said with the solemn narrator's being my father?

"One man survived," he was saying. "A man named Friedrich Sohlmann. His bullet went through his neck and jawbone, but it did not kill him. Pretending to be dead, lying on the ground of the prison courtyard, he witnessed the massacre. I say massacre, because it wasn't just KPD members who were killed. Apparently von Siedelheim was a man devoted to the exact fulfillment of procedure, and by that late in the war, Nazi policies aimed at rooting out Communist traitors included the so-called
V und V
tradition. Do you know that?"

"No."

"Forgive my German—something like '
Verhältnis und Verwandten!
"

"What, 'relatives and family'?"

"'Kith and kin, we say in English. It meant that not only KPD members were to be executed; their families were too. It was a function of brutal Nazi enforcement, but also, apparently, an extension of the Nazi racial myth, the belief that evil had biological sources. Eliminate the evil by eliminating the biological strain—the families of the undesirables. Von Siedelheim, left in charge of his Communist prisoners and the family members in his custody, carried out the 'kith and kin' executions.
V und V.
Perhaps he was an SS fanatic. Perhaps he was only an order-following martinet..."

Kadavergehorsam,
I thought.

"But he did it. One hundred and twenty-seven relatives of the already executed thirty-one—their wives, children, siblings, parents—were murdered on the same day. These relatives were kept in a large converted warehouse adjoining the prison. They were herded into the courtyard, where already corpses were piled. They were forced into the back of a large truck, which was then shut tight, and the truck's own exhaust was piped into it. They were gassed."

My father's voice had become devoid of affect, except for the way he paused now and then, as if unable to remember what words to use.

"Among those killed in this way," he said, "were Sohlmann's wife and two small children." Another pause.

"Once the Russians took over Berlin, von Siedelheim was captured. He was quickly tried by a Soviet military tribunal—one of the show trials, to make the political point. Sohlmann testified against him. Von Siedelheim was found guilty and executed by firing squad. But that was not enough for Sohlmann. Not nearly enough.

"He swore his own 'kith and kin' revenge. As a KPD leader who had survived in resistance, he immediately became an East German hero and a man with power. He was a founder of what would become the Stasi. He recovered from his wounds, but was apparently terribly disfigured. As soon as he could, with a small, trusted group of henchmen, he launched a search for von Siedelheim's kith and kin. The von Siedelheims were a prominent Leipzig family who mostly had little knowledge of the major's wartime function. They were taken by surprise, his father and mother first. Sohlmann's personal death squad, established as a Stasi unit, systematically tracked them down. Seventeen family members were murdered in Leipzig, Berlin, even in Brussels, between 1946 and 1950—all with a bullet to the neck. Relatives who escaped Sohlmann's campaign went into hiding. One of them, fleeing Leipzig, was your mother, who knew nothing of what her husband had become during the war, or what he had done."

"Her husband?"

"Your father."

Ulrich had moved forward in his chair, was leaning most of the way out of it. Now, like an air toy deflating, he sat back. His eyes never left my father. He said quietly, "Continue, please."

"Your mother brought you here when the danger in Leipzig became apparent. Von Siedelheim's sister had been shot dead in front of her, and Charlotte narrowly escaped with you. For obvious reasons, she and you were at the top of Sohlmann's list. Your mother went into hiding, first in the mass of displaced refugees, and then here, as a rubble woman. She was determined to find out why von Siedelheims were being murdered, and it was General Healy—Colonel Healy—who helped her. He learned from Soviet files about the Moabit prison, and eventually he discovered what Sohlmann was doing.

"Colonel Healy went secretly to Leipzig, burglarized the
Rathaus,
and destroyed the records of your parents' marriage. He also wanted to destroy any record of your birth, but that, it appeared, had already been taken. He went to the church where you were christened and destroyed the baptismal records. But your missing birth certificate gnawed at him.

"With Healy's help, your mother invented a new past—the story you were brought into. That she had been raped, a wartime victim; that your biological father was someone she never knew—a shameful past, but not as shameful as the truth. Healy married your mother and adopted you to seal your new identities. He brought milk to you, she told me once, and I think this is what she meant: he gave you a way to live when she, by herself, could not.

"It was clear to me, Rick, when the old general was telling me this, how very much he loved your mother. And he told me that he always knew she married him because of the protection he offered, not because of love. Which was enough for him. And I was able to tell him what she had said once, a line of Dostoyevsky's—that love, compared to fantasy..."My father had to stop here, overcome by feeling. Then he continued, "...can be harsh, dreadful, while being love nonetheless.

"All of this might have been safely in the past, but then, even before you, Michael, and Kit chose to go to Berlin that day in 1961, something happened to make it all terribly, dangerously fresh. On April 26, early in the week of that May Day, a man named Markus von Siedelheim was shot in the back of the neck in Frankfurt. As it happened, I was there, a meeting of bankers and financiers and government ministers. This von Siedelheim, having left Germany in 1947, had made a career in Third World development, based in Liberia. People assumed that he had fled a Nazi past. This meeting was his first high-profile return to Germany. By then Sohlmann was director of
Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.
Did I say that right? I gather he was in charge of running spies in Bonn, but his personal 'kith and kin' vendetta remained unfinished. That day it resumed, as I saw with my own eyes, although not understanding at all.