The Great Perhaps (21 page)

The radio began to hiss, the transmission now lost. Henry, horrified at the thought of missing the ending, began to shake the antenna violently. Private Faulk tweaked the tuning knob, and then, just as suddenly, from somewhere along the internment camp’s perimeter, a loud, powerful siren began to sound. Private Faulk, startled, looked up, standing hurriedly, opening the metal door of the equipment shed.

“An air raid? It sounds like it’s an air raid or something,” he muttered to himself. He flung on his helmet and grabbed his rifle, which had been resting against the shed’s unlocked door. Lifting his left hand to his eyes, squinting in the direction of the strange siren, the young soldier saw what it was.

“It’s a fire. There’s a fire near the storehouse.”

Without glancing back, Private Faulk hurried off toward the shouts and clamor of panic. Henry, looking down at the useless radio, crept close to the equipment shed’s door and watched as the storehouse, one of the largest buildings in this part of the detainment facility, instantly broke out into a bright explosion of red-yellow flames. The hastily built structure, mostly wood and canvas, filled the twilight sky with a striking black cloud of ash. Henry gaped at it, still safely hidden in the shadows of the metal equipment shed. A dozen soldiers, then a dozen more, began passing buckets full of water to each other in a long line, from the nearest well to the borders of the fire, but it was of little use.

In only a few moments the fire had engulfed the storehouse, and now, seething with flames, the blaze began to spread. The nearest building, set aside for administrative offices, was another impermanent wood structure, and beside the administration building was the first line of family bungalows, stretched out along the Japanese side. One by one, each of the buildings began to smoke, the heat igniting the cheap boards, the awful crackle of split wood, the stink of melted plastic, the sooty smoke of the burning camp blowing through the air. Henry, terrified, watched as the administrative building collapsed, one of its walls falling forward, like something out of a silent movie, crushing four or five soldiers in a wave of deadly flame. The rest of the structure folded like a house of cards, the ceiling and other walls tumbling sideways, toppling the bungalow next door. Japanese children rushed from the adjacent houses and began to scream as fathers and mothers hurried them to safety. The soldiers hooked up a hose to a distant water tank, but, undermanned, untrained for such a catastrophe, they were unable to contain the fire. Four or five Japanese girls, trapped inside one of the burning bungalows, began to scream. Henry, hiding in the shadows, could not make out their words, but felt their awful terror as the buildings turned into bright white flames.

As the nearby houses began to burn one after the other, Henry watched through blurry eyes as the first of the wounded soldiers was pulled from the wreckage. There were four of them altogether, all coal-black and blistered, covered in ash, dragged from their places beneath the burning wall. One of them, his bluish eyes the only color in his face, choked, gasping for air, clutching at his own throat. As he was carried away, his darkened helmet came tumbling off; Henry could see that his blond hair, recently shorn, nicked above his ears, looked exactly like Private Faulk’s. The soldier’s fingers tugged at his windpipe, while his other hand dragged in the dirt. Henry gasped, then backed away, cowering in fear. It had been his father, him and Mr. Horner, who had done this, he was sure of it now. With his quick hands and hasty little laugh, Henry could almost see Len standing there, hidden somewhere in the shadows, entirely faceless, the tiny fingers of his hand clasping and unclasping each other with vulgar pleasure.

And then, from somewhere, a frightening scream: a Japanese mother, held back by her husband and two American soldiers, began to wail as their bungalow was quickly engulfed in flames. Henry did not need much time to recognize the woman’s sharp-looking face: it was the mother of the two twin girls, who, it seemed from her baleful screams, had somehow become separated from her two tiny daughters. Henry closed his eyes as their house tumbled apart, a cloud of dust and ash rising high from the pile of twisted lumber, climbing past the woman’s sore voice, past the low-slung stars, higher and higher, the two girls, surely ghosts now, drifting up farther and farther away, past the solace of the empty sky to the bright, familiar light of the moon.

I
T WAS TWO DAYS
later, when the fire had finally been defeated—half of the Japanese section of camp had been destroyed—that Henry, reading the official announcement that had been posted near the camp’s gates, saw the truth in typescript on a pulpy white page: Private Douglas Faulk of Beaumont, Texas, along with seven soldiers and twenty Japanese detainees, was dead. Henry, standing behind the long silver fence, watched as the construction brigade used bulldozers to clear the wreckage. Seeing the disastrous remains, Henry once again thought of his father, of what he and Mr. Horner had done, imagining his tireless, scheming hands, trying to forget his drawn, featureless face.

A
FTER ANOTHER WEEK
of not spotting the twins, Henry was sure that they, too, were dead. Henry’s world, the world of his imagination, had been razed overnight. The war, which had roared for years now in lands both distant and impossible, was strangely close. Henry’s dream of flight, of airships and imaginary planets, had all been ruined by what he had so long ignored on the covers of newspapers and in the peaked, frightened transmissions of the radio.

A
FINAL IMAGE
,
remembered so many years later, spun from the sadness of that awful night. One evening, Henry, a month or two after the fire, stood staring through the wire gaps of the fence at the demolished buildings, when he spotted a giant white moth. The creature was hovering just above the wreckage, and then, like smoke, it was gone. It soon reappeared, alighting gently right along the wire fence. Henry stared at it, surprised by its enormous size—certainly it was as big as his hand, or even bigger—its delicate white wings silently flapping, its antennae nervously twitching, the minute, dull hairs along its rounded back, the segmentations of its lower half dazzlingly apparent. Henry watched the creature for a long time, studying it. He was pretty sure it was watching him as well.

“You are the King of the Night, aren’t you?” Henry whispered.

The giant moth seemed to flap its wings as a dignified response.

“You’re on the side of my father. And the Nazis. You and Mr. Horner and him. You killed my friend? You killed those two girls?”

The moth quickly went still.

“I’m going to kill you and end this war once and for all,” he murmured, then slowly, as slowly as he dared, he leaned over and grasped about blindly for a rock. Still keeping careful watch on his foe, Henry raised his hand back and threw, without taking aim. The tiny rock struck the fence with a dull ping. Given a sudden moment to escape, the frightened moth flew high into the darkly lit night, its wide shape quietly vanishing.

A
FTER THE TERRIBLE
events of that April, Henry returned to his silence, growing over the next two years into a tall, awkward shadow. By early spring 1944, the Casper family, like a number of other German families interned at Crystal City, had been offered a choice: further internment or repatriation, whereby the family members would be sent across the Atlantic, back to Germany, in exchange for American prisoners. Afraid of what the future would hold for him and his family in the States—other than further shame—Len quietly agreed to be sent back to Germany. Henry, now sixteen, finally broke his silence. He demanded that he be left with the family in the adjacent bungalow, the Worsteins, an elderly couple from Buffalo, New York, who had been charged with sedition. Len, acknowledging his son’s fierce resentment and ignoring his wife’s protests, left the boy in the care of the Worsteins, bestowing on Henry the last of the family’s remaining possessions—some photographs and a lovely black suit, which Len had stitched from black market linen. Henry refused to wear it. Then, like so many other figures in the young man’s life—Mr. Miner, Private Faulk, the twin girls—his family disappeared, crossing on a ship named the
Gripsholm
, returning to a country that was soon to vanish itself.

I
T DID NOT UPSET
Henry Casper to be alone in the least. By then his father had become a shade, a villain, a shadow, a coconspirator in his fabulous nightmares. His mother and younger brother, Timothy, had also disappeared from his attentions. Lost in his own imagination, Henry ignored their familiar faces until, like those dramatic moments atop his bicycle back in Chicago, or hiding in the equipment shed listening to the failing radio, they were gone as well.

E
IGHTEEN YEARS OLD NOW,
having finished his last two years of high school in the internment camp with exceptional grades—the camp remained in operation for two years after the official end of the war—his teachers remarking upon “how committed, how astute, how clear-thinking” he had become, Henry applied for entrance into the Air Force but was denied. He returned to Chicago, finished an engineering degree at the University of Illinois, where he received a modest scholarship, and soon after, he gained an entry-level position at a midlevel aeronautics company. Henry quickly rose through the ranks on the strength of his wildly inventive sketches. He radically reimagined the first modern jet fighter, with wings, landing gear, and nose cone all borrowed from his own childhood ideas of space rocketry.

H
IRED BY
M
C
D
ONNELL
D
OUGLAS
at the age of twenty-six, Henry moved to their headquarters in St. Louis and maintained his composed silence well into his courtship of Violet Brecht, a second-generation German girl who worked in the company’s administrative offices and shared with Henry a fondness for silence, and also epic adventure movies. One year later, in 1955, the couple were married at city hall in a very quiet civil ceremony.

A
YEAR AFTER THAT,
in 1956, as a new war was beginning overseas in Asia, their first and only child, Jonathan, was born. By the boy’s fifth birthday, it was obvious there was something quite wrong: Violet, having baked a cake in the shape of a lovely blue sky, with mountainous clouds of white frosting, watched in horror as the birthday boy collapsed, falling from his chair, landing on the tile floor, crushing his blue paper party hat.

T
HISBE LOOKS UP
and sees her grandfather has finished writing. He folds each white page into its own envelope, then licks each gluey flap, firmly pressing it closed. Finally he searches his bureau drawer for a stamp, scribbling down the same address on each letter. When he is finished writing, he hands the envelopes to his granddaughter without so much as murmuring a word.

“Would you like me to mail these for you?” she asks.

Her grandfather nods curtly. She takes the envelopes from his hands and then stares down at him shyly. “I’m sorry I chickened out,” she whispers. “Please don’t be mad at me. I’m just not good at doing things I’m not supposed to.”

Henry nods, still refusing to look her in the face.

“Well, maybe we can try again tomorrow? I can come after school, and we can try then. Or if I can’t make it tomorrow, maybe the day after that?”

Henry nods, glancing up at the soft symmetry of his granddaughter’s young face.

He nods at her and then gently kisses the back of her hand.

A
GLORIOUS WHITE HORSE COSTS
B
ERNARD
C
ASPER
his life. His hands bound with rope behind his back, a gray blindfold covering his beady gray eyes, he is led to the center of town by a group of German soldiers, who disregard the enormity of the event, smoking their cigarettes, cursing, spitting, and joking loudly. Bernard’s clubfeet, badly malformed, drag bare in the mud. As a prisoner convicted of sedition, he is marched through the dirty street toward the town square—a collection of cobblestones and weedy roses—where three other traitors have already been executed, shot in their heads and hearts and stomachs, all left bleeding near the town’s only statue, a terrible rendering of King Wilhelm in limestone, the seditionists wilting at his whitened feet like so many dead flowers. It is fall 1869. The Franco-Prussian War carries on. The townspeople of Wissembourg, a grimy little hamlet along the French and German border, come to their doors, parting their threadbare curtains to watch the prisoner stumble forward, tripping as he goes, shoved back and forth between unclean, rough hands, cowering at the filthy language of the young German soldiers. The prisoner knows he is about to die. He has urinated on himself once already.

A
T THE CENTER OF TOWN,
the prisoner’s back is shoved against the great stone base of the statue and a cigarette is placed hastily in his mouth. The soldiers forgo the courtesies of a more formal execution—their bearded lieutenant is drunk, busy elsewhere in a whore’s bed, unconcerned with the rigorous virtue of a seditionist’s death—and ask if the prisoner wants his blindfold removed or not. Bernard says he does. He says he would like to see the sky before he is to be shot. A young soldier, once a musician, a violinist with nimble fingers, unties the prisoner’s blindfold very carefully.

Another group of soldiers, also drunk, drag Bernard’s gigantic white horse up the street, the horse struggling and whinnying, before they kick it and tie the skittish animal to the statue of the king. Bernard Casper frowns, lowering his head. The horse, once his, then sold, will now be his partner in death. It begins to clomp the muddy earth, equally frightened. Bernard sees the horse’s breath in the early morning air, twin clouds of blue smoke. The horse does not seem to recognize him. A sergeant with a round face and a silver saber approaches Bernard slowly. With his serious demeanor, he does what he can to try and invoke some sense of ceremony.

“Is your name Bernard Casper, sir?”

“
Ja.
”

“Is it you who sold this horse to a French officer, thus aiding his escape?”

“
Ja.
”

“Is there any evidence you’d like to offer at this time that may clear you of this crime?”

“
Nein
. It was only a mistake, a terrible mistake. It happened because I do not know which empire we are subjects of. One day it is the Germans, the next it is the French. One month we are told to fly a flag of one color, the next month it is something else. I sold the French officer the horse because I had had enough of not knowing which country I would be in when I awoke each morning. So I decided, once and for all, it would be France.”

“And in doing so, in declaring allegiance with the French, you have provided aid to our enemy. For crimes against the king, you have been sentenced to death. Do you have any final words?”

“
Nein.
”

“
Nein?
”

“
Nein.
”

The sergeant nods, raising the saber, marching stiffly toward the group of seven soldiers. He lowers the saber and the soldiers form an inelegant line, raising their rifles to their glimmering eyes. The sergeant raises his saber again, pointing at the horse. “
Zuerst, das pferd
,” he announces, turning to face the unstill animal. Bernard closes his eyes too late. The sergeant’s saber drops, and the hollow echo of seven shots ring out, the great beast rising in its final moment, so much like a statue itself, rearing up as if to climb the clouds of gun smoke directly into the sky and then it falls to its side. The horse snorts once or twice more, its head unmoving against the muddy ground, its one visible eye blinking once, then again, once more, before a cloud of steam slowly rises from its open wounds.

The sergeant lowers the saber and turns toward the prisoner, muttering, “
Und jetzt der mann.
” The soldiers reload their rifles, some quickly, some clumsily, and turn and face Bernard. Bernard Casper, now shivering, has begun to weep. He weeps without embarrassment. His cowardice is well known. In this moment, it feels like a gift. The sergeant raises his saber. It looks golden in the sudden light of the sun. The saber falls. Seven shots ring out, all at once, each round delivering certain death. But one, a single bullet, tears through the gray wool of Bernard’s pants, cutting hard across the bones of his hip, puncturing what has always been most important to all men, his scrotum, then continuing on, the bullet screaming through the open doors of a barn, cracking the front windowpane of the Edel family, the town’s only tailors, passing through a gray cloth curtain to where a young girl named Elsie Edel is, at that moment, precariously balancing on the edge of a zinc bathtub. The single shot pierces the soft fruit of her navel and impolitely imparts her womb with the impossible mystery of life.

Though the wound is not very deep, it is this, this second and more final act of cowardice, that results in the mysterious birth of a boy who, by many accounts, never would have been conceived if not for his father’s first act of treason. Elsie Edel, choosing the disgrace of the dead over the disgrace of the living, gives her child the name Jacob Casper. The town watches as the boy grows quietly into manhood, following closely at his mother’s unsullied skirts. No one is surprised when, at the age of five, it is revealed that both of the boy’s feet are hopelessly clubbed.