The Best American Essays 2013 (12 page)

It makes sense that these mountains have been—for centuries—a place for people who want to hide from the rest of the world, people who believe in boundaries and in drawing imaginary lines along a piece of earth and not only calling it theirs but believing firmly in the right to defend that piece of earth, and convinced that anyone who crossed that boundary had committed a crime that justified the firing of bullets or buckshot in someone’s general direction. This is not to say that all or even most people in the mountains will shoot trespassers, or that mountain people are not, on the whole, friendly or kind or generous or selfless, but it is to say that there are many people who seek out remote coves and hollows and other secret places with the explicit intent to do things that are not done within the sightlines of others, and that these mountains have had a reputation for attracting people with strange ideas. Take Nord Davis, for instance—the leader of a Christian militia who not only believed that the Holocaust was a fabrication devised in part to create sympathy for the Jews but who also believed, thanks to a rather acrobatic interpretation of the book of Genesis, that Adam and Eve were white-skinned and blond-haired, that dark-skinned people were animals without souls, and that Jews were the literal spawn of Satan, who had possessed one of these dark-skinned people and beguiled (or, in Davis’s interpretation,
impregnated
) Eve. Mr. Davis, who is now dead, also apparently took credit for ending the Vietnam War and ran a 130-acre military training facility not far—as the crow flies, anyway—from where the Nazi’s castle now stands.

The Nazi’s garage door—like the front gate—opened automatically, by some unseen force, and after it slowly retracted itself, my father and I entered. Seconds later another door opened, and the man himself—the Nazi—appeared. I’d been nursing the image of a slight man with pale skin: a malnourished weakling with a head of dark and greasy hair. But this guy was not small. He was tall and hearty, with a head of dirty blond locks cut in a quasi bowl cut, with long bangs that flapped around when he moved. In a lineup of possible Nazis I would not have chosen this man—a fact that probably reveals my own naive, preconceived notions about Nazis and their possible permutations. His wife, on the other hand, looked like she might’ve been created in a laboratory funded by the Third Reich: her hair—so blond it was nearly white—fell in a luminous sheet down her back. She was tall and wide-eyed, her lips crimson. She introduced and immediately excused herself, and our tour began.

The interior of the Nazi’s home could not have been described as regal, but it was without a doubt immaculate. Not only had it recently—if not immediately prior to our entering—been cleaned, but it was also completely clutter-free. There were no stacks of bills or mail on the counter, no dish of change, no stray pens, no stacks of coasters, no knickknacks on the windowsills, no stained-glass butterflies affixed to the windowpane above the kitchen sink. No family photographs—no photographs of any kind—hung from the walls. Papers and pictures and notes and calendars had not been affixed via magnets to the fridge, whose door remained utterly blank. Empty tabletops—devoid even of napkin holders or salt and pepper shakers—gleamed. The place felt sanitized, sterile. Here, at the home of the Nazi, a person seemed unlikely to catch any sort of disease. Rooms had been reduced to the bare minimum. Stuff—if stuff existed here—lived behind closed doors.

I’d expected the Nazi to be effusive, perhaps even charismatic. I’d been told on several occasions that the Nazi had enjoyed seeing photographs my father displayed in his dental office of my towheaded, fair-skinned son, and that he, the Nazi, had jokingly and not-so-jokingly congratulated my father for laying claim to a grandchild with such striking Aryan features. Today, though, the Nazi didn’t mention my son, made no inquiries concerning my family or me. The Nazi was not, it appeared, interested in small talk. He knew why we’d come, understood the nature of our visit, which had less to do with the sharing of personal information and more to do with viewing “the collection.” And so, immediately after exchanging lukewarm pleasantries, the Nazi led us out of the kitchen.

In the living room, as we stood upon plush white carpet, the Nazi cleared his throat and began pointing to various objects as he spoke—an oil painting of a Prussian king, an innocent-looking set of china that, upon closer inspection, revealed swastikas orbiting the rims, and a mantel into which some apparently profound sentence—in German—had been engraved. Meanwhile, the Nazi was giving a history lesson, explaining how the founders of the Third Reich had taken it upon themselves to do away with the Catholic Church and ignite a renaissance, to pay homage to their true heritage, which was pagan.

I tried to listen, to take it all in, so I could remember it later—I had a movie camera in my pocket, a digital HD recorder the size of a cell phone, but I was too timid to ask if I could take pictures and too chicken to attempt to capture footage surreptitiously. I kept zoning out, trying to figure out how I could ask my most burning question, which was, basically, “So, like, are you
really
a Nazi?” Only I couldn’t think of a polite way to word it. Also, I knew that the artifacts in the living room were just the tip of the iceberg, and I wanted him to hurry up and get to the good stuff, which, as my father had told me before we arrived, was downstairs.

In order to go down, we had to go up. That is, we had to climb to the second floor, to a balcony overlooking the living room. Up there, the Nazi opened an impressive wooden door—all the doors in the house were arched and hinged with wrought iron—to reveal yet another door, this one constructed from what appeared to be bomb-shelter-grade metal, and upon whose surface the words
Danger: High Voltage
had been emblazoned. The Nazi unlocked and then swung open this hatchlike door, and we descended a steep spiral staircase, passing near the top a recessed statue: a sculpted head of a soldier wearing an SS helmet. Down, down, down we went, around and around we wound, so far in fact I could feel a significant change in temperature. Once we’d reached the bottom, the Nazi unlocked an iron gate and swung it open.

Until I’d entered the Nazi’s house, the only genuine Third Reich artifact I’d seen had been the one I owned, the one my grandfather, who’d served as a major during World War II, had given to me. I could no longer remember the occasion—my grandfather was long dead and now buried in the family plot in the woods behind my parents’ house—but somehow and under some circumstance—perhaps he was cleaning out a drawer in my presence—he had given me a button, upon which the Totenkopf, or death’s-head skull, had been engraved, and which, as the story went, my grandfather had plucked from the field jacket of a dead Nazi. Now the button lived, as it had for the past couple of decades, in a black plastic box with crimson felt lining, a box that once housed a Remington Micro-Screen Rechargeable Electric Razor. Now the box held a bunch of coins that my missionary relatives had brought back from foreign countries, a smooth stone that I’d picked up from the Mauthausen concentration camp, which I’d visited with my family as a teenager, on a trip through Europe, and the Totenkopf button. Over the years I had opened the box and I had held the button in my hand, and I had imagined my grandfather yanking it off the coat in which the dead body lay, and I had thought to myself,
This came from a real Nazi
. It wasn’t just a button. It was a relic from an evil empire—the guys who, in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, had gotten their faces melted off because they wanted to see something they shouldn’t have. They had—in Hollywood and real life—gone too far, wanted far too much.

The Nazi flipped a switch. The resultant
clack
reverberated. Light flooded the room, revealing a cathedral-like space with thirty-foot-high ceilings and a marble floor bearing the image of a sun wheel, which, if you aren’t familiar with sun wheels, resembles a swastika whose ends appear to have been lovingly bashed in to give the thing, overall, a more rounded shape.

At one end of the room hung a massive tapestry bearing the image of the Tree of Life, which had, the Nazi claimed, as a pre-Christian pagan symbol been important to the founding members of the Third Reich. Beneath this, a pulpitlike table displayed two wooden boxes, each bearing lightning-shaped
S
’s. These boxes, the Nazi had explained, had been made especially to hold copies of
Mein Kampf
and served as gifts for SS officers on their wedding days: a token of the Führer’s appreciation.

Elsewhere: glass shelves of Hitler Youth daggers, polished and dangerously sharp; an SS officer’s ring, into which had been carved a grinning Totenkopf; ceramic platters embossed with Runic symbols; a hand-carved wooden plate depicting the Wewelsburg Castle, where Himmler hoped to reconvene the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table; a chair from the same castle’s great hall, leather bolted to its back and seat; a set of silver, whose handles had been engraved with Sig runes, and which had purportedly come from the Eagle’s Nest—the alpine chalet presented to Hitler on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.

My father glanced over his shoulder at me and emitted a wheeze-burst of laughter—an exhalation intended to express disbelief. He had led me to an underground vault containing the artifacts of the last century’s most brutal regime, and he now seemed downright giddy. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think or what to say. I found it difficult to process what any of this meant. That is, I didn’t know why it was here, how it had gotten from where it had been made to where it was now. Were we in the presence of some kind of monster? Or had he created this space for stuff he deemed historically significant, buried it in a moisture-controlled vault because he fancied himself one of history’s unbiased curators? Was this the product of an obsessive and sympathetic mind, one which interpreted the mainstream records of history as having been unduly cruel to the Third Reich, which had been a movement, in his eyes, about nationalism, about ancestors, about revering and honoring the past? I didn’t know. And, honestly, I was afraid to ask.

The Nazi handed me a black German helmet and explained why it was rare: all helmets of this particular kind, once the war started, had been recalled and painted in field colors. To find one that remained unaltered was exceedingly uncommon. And
exceedingly uncommon
translated into
quite valuable
. The helmet, if the Nazi saw fit to sell it, might fetch upwards of $30,000.

Normally, my father explained, as if to help me better appreciate the objects before me, collectors of Third Reich militaria collected one—or mostly one—kind of artifact, attempting to amass an assortment of one specific relic. The Nazi nodded. Some collected knives, some helmets, some field jackets, some medals. The difference in this collection was that it wasn’t a collection of only one thing. It was a collection of many things. The scope of this collection was greater. And therefore it was more singular.

For example, there were the mannequins.

There were four mannequins, actually, each dressed in a different uniform. The uniforms included field jackets, pants, medals, shoes, knives, and belts. Apparently, the Nazi had purchased these mannequins from various department stores and carted them back to his castle, where he sawed off the heads. He then fashioned new heads—the Nazi, in another life, had worked in advertising and was something of an artist—and then, as if they were his own personal life-sized dolls, he’d dressed them in SS uniforms.

But the thing about the mannequins was that each represented, as far as was possible, a painstaking reconstruction of a particular soldier. That is, the Nazi had found a uniform and tracked down as many records of the actual soldier to whom it’d belonged as he could find. He’d identified and tracked down other possessions that belonged to the solider. He knew the soldier’s rank, his shoe size, his hair and eye color, knew exactly how many medals that particular soldier had received as well as the occasions upon which they had been awarded. The Nazi could tell you what this soldier’s favorite food had been, whether he’d been sick or injured or killed, and whether he’d suffered disciplinary action.

I would like to say that I was disgusted, that the sight of the Nazi clothing and gear stirred some powerful revulsion, but down there, underground, I felt the seductive pull of visual design. The clarity and symmetry, the contrast of the red and white and black, the crisp lines and borders, the mysterious symbols, the glossy belts, the gleam of polished buckles—these uniforms, tools, weapons, helmets, and flags had been put together by intelligent artists from the finest and heartiest earthly materials. I hated to admit that these things were beautiful, but I had no other choice.
Not
to say they were beautiful would be to diminish the sense of their power. And their power—however awful—demanded to be recognized.

“This,” my father said, “is history.”

That is, he might’ve said, “This is history.” I don’t know. My memory can’t be trusted. I know I was there at the Nazi’s house; I know I went up and then went down; I know that I wandered in a cathedral-like space and looked dead mannequins in the eye and feared that they would, if I continued to stare, awaken. But I can’t remember everything—or, honestly, much of anything—that was said. What struck me more was the mood. The mood of my father: gleeful, reverent, inquisitive. The mood of the Nazi: not cheerless and not cheerful but rather, despite being intently focused, coolly detached. I do know that my father had said, as the Nazi retrieved for us some glittering knife or piece of china, that “it always makes me nervous” when he, the Nazi, reaches in and takes something out of the case—meaning that he worried that one of these artifacts might be harmed. But the Nazi did not approach these objects with reverence. He didn’t need to. The space in which they existed had already assured their status as objects to be revered.

Before we left the Nazi’s sanctuary slash museum slash dungeon and ascended to the kitchen, where the Nazi’s wife poured us coffee and offered us a platter of cookies; before the Nazi took a cookie, saying they never kept this kind of stuff—meaning sweets—in the house; before the Nazi’s wife reminded us that there had also been concentration camps in America, that it had been a time of war, that of course the camps had been such terribly awful places, but awful things had gone on in so many places the world over; before any of that happened—the Nazi wanted to show us one last thing. This last thing was kept inside a glass case with a glass lid, which the Nazi opened. He secured the lid so that it wouldn’t fall, then opened an old leather-bound book and began flipping through its yellow pages. It was a ledger of sorts, and inside it were the names of hundreds of SS officers. Finally he pointed to a column of names. The surname was the same as the one that belonged to my father and me. The Nazi didn’t say, “Looks like your Uncle Walt was an SS man.” He didn’t say, “See, you do have Nazis in your family.” He just tapped the name with his finger. It was as if he wanted this—the fact that people with the same surname as ours had served under Hitler—to sink in on its own. To show us that whatever we might think about the Nazis, we were in fact connected, by the very name that I’d thought, as a child, separated our family from everybody else’s.