This Shared Dream (20 page)

Brian found the chain that turned on the two rows of lightbulbs that his father had installed years ago. Their light was discouragingly sparse. He rested his hands on his hips and tried to decide where to start. He was looking for something quite specific.

He and his sisters had given different forms to the contents over the years. It was a malleable medium. Megan’s month-long attempt to organize it one summer, sweating gallons and emerging in the evenings streaked with dirt and coughing, had fallen to the forces of entropy. Her avenues, lanes, and paths became obscured as her brother and sister tossed objects this way and that in search of something or other—a croquet set in a once fine, now cracked black leather case that they would set up on the flat front lawn and that became a neighborhood attraction on summer evenings. Fragile bagpipe records; Jill’s favorite strategy for a rainy afternoon was to put one on the living room record player and turn it up loud. Within minutes Bette would appear in the doorway, a pained look on her face, and suggest that they go to the Uptown on Connecticut for a movie, her treat. Megan, Brian recalled, actually liked them, and danced along in her own interpretation of a Scottish reel—which lent a touch of authenticity to the purely avaricious intent of Jill and Brian. Yes, there were many useful objects in the attic, and it was a source of endless wealth. There was always a new quadrant to explore, a new source of object wonder.

But today, Brian’s search was not fueled by serendipity. He was looking for his dad’s nickel-plated saxophone. Something—he did not know what—had put it into his mind. Maybe just being back in the house.

The area under the eaves was most promising. He pulled his flashlight from his pocket and cast its beam over dark mountains of nearly a century’s worth of junk, and moved into the suburbs, the most recent deposits.

As he roved, he recalled the life they had made up for the fictional family they imagined had lived in the house at one time. They were Russian. Some of their silk dresses hung on a dowel near the front of the house. They never exactly fit the girls, but that hadn’t mattered. For Brian, there was a moth-eaten tail coat and a water-damaged silk top hat. They’d had a lot of fun up here.

He stepped on a board that rocked beneath his foot and was a bit surprised. He moved back carefully, thinking that it must be something on top of the board, but no; it was the board itself.

He caught one end with his fingertips and pulled it up. There was indeed a hollow place beneath—an imperfect hiding place, given that he had found it just by accident. But it was empty.

He reached around inside it and came up with a little bobble of stuff, kind of like gum. Yuck. He was about to toss it back in when he decided to be a good guy and throw it in the garbage later. That’s what he’d tell his kids to do. He wrapped it in a nearby shred of paper, stuck it in his pocket, and replaced the board.

The mere fact of the space tugged at his mind with insistent gravity. This was important. But why? And then he became irritated that he could not remember.

He had drunk quite a bit the year that they had given up on finding his father. When he began blacking out, after he and Cindy left the Peace Corps and moved back to Washington, he realized the magnitude of his problem—particularly when Cindy gave him the ultimatum. This mystery made him flat-out mad at himself. There were missing pieces. This was one of them.

Maybe Jill would know what had been in the vacant space.

There was no point in lingering on it right now. He’d pass out from heat exhaustion, not alcohol, if he didn’t find what he wanted soon.

He headed for the northwest corner of the house, where his mother had cleared out a space for more current storage. It took some poking, but after another fifteen minutes he scored not only his dad’s saxophone, but a trombone as well.

As he made his way back to the door, carrying his finds, he noticed an open cardboard box that contained composition books. Setting down the instruments, he turned on the flashlight on the box.
IN WAR TIMES
was written on the cover on the flap, in his father’s neat engineer’s print.

There were five such boxes. He sat on a rolled-up carpet, and plucked the first composition book from the top.

He brushed grime from the cover. Written on it was “Notebook #11.” So there was an order. Glancing inside, he saw that it was about Sam’s time in Germany.

He’d had no idea that his father had kept a war diary. It was fascinating. And, apparently, abandoned.

If they had known about this before they went to Germany …

He wanted to read more.

Downstairs, he would be inundated with kids and chores. If he read just a bit up here, infernolike as it was, he could have a few moments of privacy with his father.

He settled back and began to read.

As Brian did so, he felt as if he assumed the personalities of Sam, his father, and his buddy Wink. His awareness of the hot, dusty attic faded: He was in Germany, in a little town called Mönchengladbach, just a bit east of the Rhine, in March 1945, several months before Germany surrendered on May 8.

Brian absorbed it all: the long, dark wait in Britain as the Invasion was planned and Company C assembled jeeps, guns, radar equipment, and … something else, it seemed. Something secret.

He fell into the world of Sam and Wink, into the chaotic end of the Third Reich, through which the two men were ordered to travel.

It was April 1945. Their assignment was to go to the town of Merkers and present their passes to the CO, where they would get more information about their assignment. It was about thirty miles south, in the mountains, on the other side of the Ruhr.

*   *   *

“Has this area been liberated?” Sam asked Hap, their CO.

“More or less.” He spoke against the dull, thudding background of shelling along the Rhine, where occupying forces moved steadily northeast. “Here’s a map.”

It was a German road map of the area, printed in 1936, illustrated with a colored drawing. A happy Aryan family motored through fields of wildflowers; in the background were mountains toward which the road wound.

Sam and Wink left immediately, and within five miles were stuck behind a tank battalion. “We won’t get through this town till tomorrow morning,” a sergeant told them when they wanted to get past.

Sam got out the map. “Think we can get around this way?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. But watch out. There aren’t many resisters, but the ones who are still fighting are about thirteen years old and in control of mortars. Call themselves Werewolves. Savage little shits. They shot at us in a village this morning. So we called for air support and held back while they pulverized the place. Whole goddamned town had to suffer because of these zealot kids. Hitler’s done a great job with them. Just get ’em when they’re young, that’s all you gotta do.”

Sam and Wink returned to a well-marked crossroads and took the road to Erkelenz. One of the marvels of Germany was that the road signs were intact, and that nobody even thought to turn them around. “They must have thought they would never be invaded,” said Wink.

“They love us,” said Sam.

“They love food and cigarettes and not being forced to die for Hitler.”

So, generally, their map worked. If they were lost, Germans willingly and correctly redirected them. They found such behavior just this side of unbelievable. No self-respecting boy in the U.S. could resist sending someone down the wrong road—particularly an enemy, which they were, because Germany was still at war.

It was easy to blunder into a battle or run into diehard SS patrols, so they were hyperalert. After being shot at by snipers, they looked down the road onto which they were to turn and saw billowing black smoke. “Alternate route,” said Wink, who was presently navigating. It was growing dark, and they decided to stop as soon as they saw a likely place.

Suddenly they passed a sign, and entered a town. Wink halted at sight of a white flag hung from the top window of an intact building.

Another white flag emerged from the cellar.

“What say we take the surrender?” asked Wink.

Before Sam could tell Wink not on your life, rifles flew through a shattered window and landed in the street. The front door opened, and out marched a file of Wehrmacht, their hands in the air.

“Damn,” breathed Wink. “Think it’s a trick?”

“We surrender,” one of them shouted in English. “We are unarmed.” And then from all around, Germans emerged from cellars, all of them surrendering, putting themselves at the mercy of the American conquerors.

*   *   *

The soldiers invited them into their cellar for brandy as night fell. First Sam gathered the rifles and relieved the soldiers of sidearms and grenades and secured them in the jeep’s footlocker, removing chocolates, coffee, a string of bologna and a crate of sustaining Bordeaux to make room. Wink handed him an American flag. “Think this will keep us from being shelled tonight?”

Sam went upstairs to hang it from a window. The house was intact and neatly decorated. In the front bedroom, he had finished securing the flag and turned from the window when heard a bloodcurdling scream. He took out his gun and opened the closet door, revealing a little girl who continued to shriek.

Her mother emerged from behind a rack of clothing, thrust the girl behind her, and screamed invective at Sam until the German soldier ran up the stairs and calmed her down. “She thinks you are going to rape her. I told her that you are not Russian, but American.”

“Ask her if she can help us with dinner,” said Sam.

They had plates of fried bologna and potatoes, carried downstairs by the little girl.

The German soldiers had a fire going, and seemed quite comfortable in their outpost. “We are very relieved to see you,” said the commander. “We’ve been waiting for you for several days. We were afraid the Red Army would come first.”

“Yes,” said another. “We hear that the German POWs are well taken care of by the Americans.”

“Better than they take care of American soldiers,” said Wink bitterly, referring to the soldiers fighting in December and January, during the Battle of the Bulge, without proper boots, socks, food, or clothing. Sam silenced him with a sharp elbow.

The following dawn, as they were getting directions on how next to proceed, two American jeeps rolled in.

“They’ve surrendered,” said Sam, when the first jeep stopped next to theirs, but the soldiers rushed past them to “secure the town.” One of them returned with an SS knife, which the others admired profusely. “Yeah, hands off,” said the soldier as he stowed it in his pocket.

And then children emerged from houses bearing flowers. All the civilians came out to stand on their doorsteps, and waved as Sam and Wink brought up the rear of the procession, behind two Shermans.

“It’s so easy. And it was so hard.”

“You would have thought they’d fight to the death.”

“They’re finished and they know it. They’re just trying to get on our good side.”

By noon, they had made good progress, passing through Jülich and heading toward Krauthausen, a tiny town close to the Ruhr River. “Let’s see,” said Sam, who was trying to make sense of their latest intelligence. “I think that there’s a pontoon bridge a little bit east of here where we can cross the Rhur. Try that left fork.”

In late afternoon, they turned onto a twisting lane that clung to the side of a mountain. Trees on one side had been crushed down by tanks to afford a track around bomb craters.

Merkers was a small, ugly town on a plateau. Grim barracks and fences surrounded the entrance to a salt mine. Two cog railroad freight cars lay sideways, blasted off the track.

The guard looked at them suspiciously and left to check on their orders. He returned and waved them through with a bored expression.

Inside the fence, two GIs with machine guns lounged against a gray concrete wall on either side of a metal door. Wind roared in the pine trees above them, and brought the sharp, clean scent of snow.

They stepped into a rusted cage elevator, which moved slowly, with the ominous creak of poorly maintained machinery. “This is fun,” said Wink. “I like small, closed, deep places out of which it is impossible to escape if something goes wrong. Like the generator poops out.”

“It’s not closed,” said Sam.

“Gee, you’re right. We could reach out and scrape our hands against that stone shaft.” He looked up through the cage. “We’ll actually be able to see that rusty cable snap. And here we are! Two thousand feet underground.”

They stepped out into a damp, vast tunnel, where Vs of light from bare bulbs on the walls extended into the distance. Posted on one side was the required
HEIL HITLER
sign, except that someone had painted out
HEIL
and replaced it with
FUCK
. Beneath it, several men worked in a makeshift office, a space sectioned off by wooden crates. After a moment, one of the men looked up and came over.

“I’m Levi. I guess you’re the guys we’ve been waiting for. Dance and—”

“Winklemeyer.”

“Right. We’ve got a big transfer job. Need help on the logistics.”

Sam looked around. “Well, what is it?” He was thinking, the ultimate Wonder-Weapon. The manufacturing process, blueprints, mechanical drawings, impenetrable scientific papers.

“Gold.”

“Nah,” said Wink. “What is it?”

“Gold,” said Levi. “Come this way.”

They followed him to a small side gallery. Two more guards stood next to a dynamited hole. Levi stepped through the hole into a place where the lighting was not very strong. “Here.” He yanked open one of a vast army of canvas bags, so many that they stretched far away out of the range of the lights.

Sam reached in and felt a cool, smooth surface. With both hands, he lifted out a small block of gold. It was heavy. “Must be what? Fifty pounds?”

“Two hundred tons in all.”

Sam and Wink looked at each other. “While Europe starves,” Wink said softly.

“The Third Reich was nothing more than a very well-organized pack of murderous, unscrupulous, bloodthirsty thieves. But there’s more. We have reports that this is not an unusual place. They got loot holed up all over Germany.”