SECRET FATHER

by James Carroll








Published by: Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston, New York.

Copyright 2003 by James Carroll
BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

Winner of the
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

From a "novelist-historian of our time,"
[Atlantic Monthly] a tragedy of
momentous conflict--between East and West, man and
woman, parent and child--in a world on the edge of
destruction

It is 1961. Khrushchev is hurling
threats, a U.s. spy plane has been shot
down over the Sovlet Union, tensions are
rising. Berlin has been cut off from the West:
it's only a matter of weeks until the Wall
will be erected. The United States and
Americans abroad face dangers they had never
imagined. Against this backdrop, the best-selling
novelist and historian James Carroll
tells an unforgettable love story that
illuminates a key moment in history with the
passions of those who lived it.
Three teenagers from an American school in
West Germany travel to Berlin to join a May
Day rally on the Communist side of the divided
city. Propelled by na@ive ideals and in
rebellion against preordained futures, they
stumble into the center of an international incident.
Paul, the father of one of the boys, and Charlotte,
the elegant German-born mother of another, set
off to rescue their children from the East German
Stasi, which has detained them. Over the course
of a weekend, Paul and Charlotte struggle with
personal secrets, growing passion, and the weight
of a generation that survived World War II only
to face the loss of its children to the engulfing paranoia
of the Cold War.
Secret Father inexorably pulls the reader
into the heart of flashpoint Berlin. In this powerful
tale, missed signals, cloaked motives,
false postures, and panicked responses echo
tragically across borders and generations.

JAMES CARROLL is the author of the
acclaimed New York Times bestseller
Constantine's Sword. He is also the author
of the National Book Award-winning memoir An
American Requiem as well as nine
novels, including the New York Times
bestsellers Prince of Peace and
Mortal Friends. Carroll writes a
widely discussed weekly op-ed column for the
Boston Globe. He is married to the
novelist Alexandra Marshall and lives in
Boston.

"James Carroll continues his lifelong
meditation on fathers and sons with this powerful
political adventure that is also an indelible
exploration of erotic love."--Frederick
BuschBooks by James Carroll

MADONNA RED
MORTAL FRIENDS
FAULT LINES
FAMILY TRADE
PRINCE OF PEACE
SUPPLY OF HEROES
FIREBIRD
MEMORIAL BRIDGE
THE CITY BELOW
AN AMERICAN REQUIEM
CONSTANTINE'S SWORD
TOWARD A NEW CATHOLIC CHURCH
SECRET FATHER










AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Robert Bly for permission
to reprint lines from Selected Poems of
Rainer Maria Rilke (harper and Row).
Copyright 1981 by Robert Bly.
Among works consulted for historical
background to this novel, particularly useful were
The History of the German Resistance,
1933-1945 by Peter Hoffman (translated
by Richard Barry); Stasi: The Untold
Story of the East German Secret Police
by John O. Koehler; Berliners: Both
Sides of the Wall by Anne Armstrong;
Cold War by Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor
Downing; Wiesbaden by Wolfgang Eckhardt;
The Fourth and Richest Reich by Edwin
Hartrich; and Battle Ground Berlin
by David E. Murphy, Sergei A.
Kondrashev, and George Bailey. In
writing this book, I had invaluable support,
again, from my editors, Wendy Strothman and
Larry Cooper, and from my agent, Donald
Cutler. Thank you all. And I particularly
acknowledge my family--Elizabeth and
Patrick, who inspire me, and
Alexandra Marshall, my wife, who sustains
me. I dedicate this novel to her, in love.


































For Lexa









Real love, compared to fantasy, is a harsh and
dreadful thing.
--FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
SECRET FATHER



For Isaiah Neuhaus

If one day can mark a person forever, what of
two days? Those two days, when I knew your
father, when he was young, have marked me since. I can
tell you what I know of his story only by telling
you the marked part of mine. Your father. His mother. My
son. Each life altered, or ended, by events that
for you can be a source of indelible pride, your
patrimony, a legacy from which to take the measure
of all that honors the memory of your father. But these
are events that had a different meaning for me, the
measure of which, I tell you at the start, is the
sadness you may already sense in the space between these
words. I have never told this story to anyone. Because
your father asked me to, I am telling it to you.
People of my generation, ahead of his, saw so little
as it actually was then, as if the Manichean
division of the world into East and West, bad and good,
gave shape also to our most intimate
relationships. An iron curtain ran not just, as
Churchill put it, from the Balkans to Trieste,
but between those of us who claimed to be grown and in
charge and those, like your father and my son, who seemed
still so unfinished and, as I thought of them, vulnerable.
When Michael was away from me, I often feared that
he would get lost, which was my way of fearing, I
suppose, that I would lose him. It was a fear
I could not acknowledge as being more for myself than for
him, because I had yet to reckon with what I had
already lost.
What characterized our personal East-West
division--broadly dubbed in America a few
years later as the generation gap--was that Michael
was the wounded one. That was presumptively a
function of his longtime status as a handicapped child,
but then it also became a matter of my efficient
pretense that the loss we'd undergone together the year
before was more his than mine, as if what I did was for
him, never for myself. Thus, if the world we'd
inherited was to be a jungle, I would be
Michael's brush cutter, leading the way through
impassable thickets with my machete, hacking out
a path for him, calling over my shoulder, "This
way, son. This way." Not noticing until too
late that he had stopped following. That he had
disappeared.
This story, which I've told myself a thousand
times, always begins with the sixth stroke of the clock,
the grandfather clock with the elaborately carved oaken
case that I hear ticking now, not far from where I
sit writing in my old house in New York
City. In our German days, the clock was in the
sitting room of the big house the bank had leased
--not for me, since five nights out of seven I
was there alone, but for the holders of my position.
I'd found the clock in a warehouse near the
Rhine: all Europe could still seem a flea
market in those years, with the fine things of a lost world
for sale cheap. I bought the clock, I think,
to stake a claim to the timbered mansion assigned
to me, and the sonorous Westminster gong wafted through
those lonely rooms like the regular greeting of a
friendly ghost.
If any house had the right to be haunted, it was
that one. It was built after the First World War in
Dahlberg, a near suburb on the opposite
side of Frankfurt from the factory and rail
yard district, which was why it had not been bombed in
the Second. After those two wars, Germany was a
nation of ghosts, an infelicitous place for a man
and a boy yoked together by blood and affection, of
course, but also by that knot of loss. We never
asked it of each other, but our question was, If she
can vanish from our lives, why then can't you from mine?
Five, beat, six. I remember looking up
from that day's Frankfurter Neue Presse,
a newspaper I felt obliged to look at as a
way of improving my German. "Improving"
overstates it perhaps. In my months in the country,
I had come up against a linguistic mental block,
and German had so far remained impenetrable to me,
a blow more to my pride than my professional
performance, since everyone in banking spoke
English. All that week, however, I had been
especially motivated to decipher the local
news. As I lumpishly tracked through the text
of a particular story, the clock had struck six.
Without being aware of it, I had kept the count, and
it was exactly then that the question first rang in my
head: Where is Michael?
It was late in April 1961, a Friday
evening. I looked up from the paper fully
expecting to see Michael's shyly grinning face
in the archway that marked the entrance foyer off from the
sitting room. I saw the tall green
ceramic-tiled brazier on the near side
of the arch, and through the arch, the mahogany bench onto
which Michael would have dropped his bag and his stick.
In a trick of a mind ready to worry, his absence
supplied a vivid sensation: an image in the
vacant air of his lanky, thin frame at a
slouching angle, the loose posture of a young man
with leg braces.
"Hey, Dad."
Is he grinning? Has he left behind his
anger at me? Our first awful fight.
"Hay is for horses," I would have said, a
daring echo of what had been his mother's good-humored
correction. Humor as a ladder out of the pit of
hurt.

But where is he?
April 1961. The newspapers had been
full of what came to be called the Bay of
Pigs fiasco, the first shocking failure of the young
Kennedy administration. There is no way to convey
now the palpable sense of danger with which we all
lived in those years. Kennedy and Khrushchev were like
the cowboy gunfighters then dominating movies and
television, men forever on the verge of drawing
weapons, but weapons that would kill us all.
Political fear was entirely personal, but
personal fear, for that reason, could seem
nuclear, too. Worry that something had happened
to my son, or, if I was lucky, that he was
only angry at me, was as deeply unsettling
as my fear of what I read in our awful
newspapers.
But the news story I had been trying to follow
that week was about an event that had taken place right
in front of me, as if to warn that even a life like
mine could be dangerous. On the previous
Monday, I had attended a conference of Germany's
major steel producers at Rhine-Main
Hall, a new convention center in the reborn
heart of Frankfurt. The meeting had been
called by the Bonn Ministry for Economic
Cooperation. Gathered in a function room were about
two hundred dark-suited men, mostly German
but also including European Coal and Steel
Community delegates and a smattering of
financiers from various countries, of whom I was
one. At meetings like this, the language spoken was
always English, which was a main reason my German
never improved. The purpose was to lay the
groundwork for the creation of an ECSC
consortium to develop iron imports from
Africa.
The third of a number of speakers in the afternoon
session approached the podium, a
distinguished-looking man who--thin, tall, well
tailored, and bald--reminded me of Britain's
Prince Philip. I had actually been thinking
of slipping out, but the agenda notes identified
him as having lived in Moravia for a decade as
the representative of Rheinstahl, one of the great
German steel companies. He had no doubt
been acquiring options on Liberia's inland
iron mines, and his on-the-ground experience in
Africa set him apart from the other speakers, and
I decided to hear what he had to say. At the
podium, he opened the folder that held his
notes, took a sip of water, and was about to speak
when a man appeared from behind a curtain at the edge
of the stage. He crossed quickly to the speaker,
approaching from the rear, and before the speaker noticed
him, the man extended his arm, seeming to touch the
speaker in the back of the neck. Then the shot, the
first such sound I had heard since the war. It was a
tinny noise I did not recognize, since my
experience of gunfire had always been outdoors.
Then the man fell forward, and an image of the
crimson spray had remained with me all week.
Michael, where are you? I am sure it was
a Friday, and I am sure of the time, because on
Fridays Michael always caught the 4:07 from
Wiesbaden to Frankfurt, then the 5:20 from the
Hauptbahnhof to the Dahlberg station, and then it
was a ten-minute walk to our house, even for
Michael, whose gait was awkward but steady. This
distance he insisted on covering by foot, a point of
valiant stubbornness to which I relented because I
knew how he hated being taken for disabled when, as
he put it once, he was only slow. I knew
also that his doctors in New York had encouraged
him to walk as much as he could. On that one day of the
week, I made it a habit to be home
by 5:30 so that I would be there when he came through the
door with his sack und pack and stick at
5:50.
But quickly I remembered that this Friday was to be
different. Michael was to be home at the usual
hour, but he was coming back to Frankfurt not
by train but by car, my car, which he was driving. That
realization made me sit up, the trite reaction
of every parent who'd ever overcome a qualm
to let a teenager take the car. At the end of the
previous weekend, he had made a rare
request, asking if he could drive back
to school instead of taking the train. He knew I
didn't need the car during the week, since my
job brought with it a car and driver. And he knew,
I think, how pleased I was that he had taken so
naturally to driving, despite his handicap. It was
the beauty of the then new automatic gearshift--
in truth, he'd have had trouble with a clutch--and
I'd bought the snappy Fairlane convertible the
summer before thinking of him as its eventual driver.
The pleasure I'd seen him taking at the wheel
since obtaining his license was my pleasure,
too. All of this went into his clear assumption
that I would say yes.
"But boarders are forbidden to have cars," I said.
"Just to and from Wiesbaden," he offered. "I'll
leave it parked for the week. The dorm director
will never know."
I saw how he had allowed himself to count on it,
which, perversely, may be what prompted my
initial no, as if the boy needed a lesson
against presumption. Michael was seventeen years
old, a senior at the American high school in
the charming spa city near the Rhine, fifty
miles away. Eisenhower had made Wiesbaden
his headquarters after crossing the Rhine, and by our
time it served as headquarters for the U.s. Air
Force in Europe--"U-Safe," in the argot.
The sons and daughters of NCO'S and officers
who lived in Wiesbaden's several American
enclaves attended the school, but not only them.
A three-story dormitory also accommodated the
teenage children of U.s. servicemen stationed across
Europe. And some additional students, like
Michael, were children of American civilians with
Defense Department connections--
NATO'-ATTACHED tech reps for Lockheed or
Martin-Marietta, say, or cigarette
wholesalers charged with supplying the vast PX
system of the occupation army.
My own DoDo connection was thin, and ran through
New York, not Washington. I was chief of the
Frankfurt office of the Chase International
Investment Corporation, a spinoff of Chase
Manhattan Bank, which had begun a decade
before as a main funnel for Marshall Plan
funds when American investment shifted from
governments to businesses. The war had
left the Continent starved for consumer goods, and
German manufacturers, with the advantage of
needing to retool from scratch, had pounced on the
market. Those of us at Chase--investing not in the
state bureaucracies but in individual
entrepreneurs and private companies--embodied
the beau ideal of American democracy, what
would later come to be called free-market
capitalism. So we were frontliners in the
Cold War, too, and it did not hurt that
returns on our investments were running at thirty
or forty percent, which set off a second-stage
boom in finance as the industrial recovery of the
Bundesrepublik began to fuel itself. We
called it the bottom-line blitzkrieg.
People like me, in our recognizably American
Brooks Brothers tailor-mades, prided
ourselves on having nothing to do with the omnipresent but
culturally isolated U.s. military, who, out
of uniform, favored Ban-Lons and
double-knits. We did not shop in their
commissaries, and we did not work out in their gyms.
Our chauffeurs drove us in Taunus sedans
or Mercedeses, decidedly not Oldsmobiles.
And we spoke German--or, as in my case,
felt guilty if we did not.
If we had school-age children, they boarded at
English public schools, Swiss convent
schools, or back home at New England
prep schools. Rarely would the child of someone in my
position have been a candidate for General H.
H. Arnold High School at Wiesbaden
Air Base, a putative reproduction of a
small-town American secondary school. But
it seemed the right place for Michael that year, and
as for me, I wanted him close.

When he was little, Michael was a boy who loved
movement above all--if possible, on wheels, so
his love of driving was no surprise. The first
real change in his life came with his tricycle,
a Christmas present when he was four or five.
It was a machine on which he could demonstrate his
true character--his daring, his restlessness, his bright
assumption that the earth was flat so that he could go
fast. When I would come home in the evening, nothing
would do but that I take him down to the basement of the
apartment building where storage cages lined a
labyrinthine passageway that Michael regarded
as his personal racecourse. I recall
chicken wire stretched onto lumber frames,
naked light bulbs on the ceiling every twenty
feet or so, a succession of right-angle turns.
His circuit was quick and, with all that cushiony
chicken wire, I thought, safe. But near the
doorway to the stairwell, one sharp cinderblock
corner jutted into his path, a hazard I had
never noticed because he always cut by it easily.
Once, however, I made a pretense of giving
chase, which made Michael laugh and pour it on.
As he barreled through the maze now, pulling away,
he tossed triumphant looks back over his
shoulder at me. He disappeared around a last
turn, I heard his crash, and knew at once
he'd hit the cinderblock angle. He took the
sharp edge on his face, breaking his nose and opening
a gash in his forehead from which blood was gushing, as from
a pump, by the time I got to him. The sight of his
wrecked face filled me with panic and guilt,
but he remained calm. Stunned into calm, I
thought, but that wasn't so. Michael was in pain,
awash in blood--crimson spray--but he
wasn't afraid because he was certain that nothing bad
would happen to him if I was there.
But I wasn't there some years later, the day
he came home early from school--he was ten
years old, it was April of 1954. He was a
student at the Cathedral School of St. John
the Divine, in Morningside Heights. Edie was
a volunteer docent--a sort of guide--at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she was there
when the school nurse called to say she was sending
Michael home in a taxi because he had a fever.
I was in Washington, preparing to leave for Paris
as part of a government delegation. Edie called me
that night and described fever, headache, loss of
appetite, vomiting. I would have come home, but
she said the doctor had labeled it flu and was
confident the symptoms would abate in a day or
two, and they did. Soon Michael was back
to normal and returned to school, and I boarded a
plane to Paris. Two days later, Michael's
symptoms came raging back, accompanied by the
general muscular weakness known as paralysis. I
was in a meeting with finance ministers, in a room with
extremely high ceilings and Palladian
windows overlooking the Tuileries, when an
officious clerk interrupted to hand me a
telegram: "Come home now. M. has
poliomyelitis. E."
I remember being struck by the fact that Edie,
not spelling out Michael's name or her own, had
spelled out the full Latin name of the disease,
preferring it no doubt to the blatantly
descriptive "infantile paralysis." I
remember also feeling a blast of anger at the
injustice of it, since that was the spring of Jonas
Salk, and the broad assumption was that the scourge
of polio had been defeated. Indeed, Michael
would be one of the last American children to succumb.
When I saw him next, it was in a large
room at St. Luke's Hospital, also in
Morningside Heights. The room contained about a
dozen iron lungs, the airtight metal
cylinders that encased patients up to their necks,
helping the more severely affected children to breathe. By the
time I walked into that room, I had done my
homework and knew that the virus attacks the
motor nerve cells in the spinal cord, an
interruption of communication from brain to muscles.
Most cases of infection did not rise to the
level of diagnosis even, and the virus was shaken
off without lasting damage, without ever being
identified. Most of those whose symptoms were
recognized did not become paralyzed. Most
suffered muscle impairment from which the body
recovered. Few polio victims were left
crippled, and my desperate hope, as I
followed the nurse to my son sealed in iron, was
that he not be one of those. Let the other children in this
room fill out the odds, I prayed with
exquisite selfishness. I loved my son with a
ferocity that would have exchanged the world for him, to the
point of killing it. My son was all there was.
It was nearly midnight, and the room was dark.
I had just come from the airport. The hum of
mechanized respiration, a dozen unsynchronized
motors, filled the room, but the sound registered
as a kind of quiet. The children lay sleeping in their
cylinders with their heads protruding like knobs, like
magicians' assistants waiting to be sawed in
half. Michael, too, was sleeping when we
came to him, and the sight of his eyes benignly
closed filled me with grief. I only then
realized what I had been most dreading, the
statement in his blank look as it met mine:
"If you had been here, Dad, this would not have
happened."
"I'm here now," I meant my eyes to say,
but Michael, asleep, had no need
to rebuke me. Awake, later, he never did.
I bent to kiss his forehead and saw the salty
residue of a tear track running from his eye down
across his temple to his ear. Dried tracks like that
marked each side of his face. A stoic child who
goes to sleep weeping, unable to wipe the tears from
his eyes. So, naturally, I supplied my own
rebuke, and it would be as permanent as his condition.
Michael would not walk at all for a year. And
without, first, crutches, then leg braces and a
cane, he would never walk again. How could we not
assume that this illness would forever mark the defining
moment of his life, and we did. But only for six
years, when the absolute line dividing before from after
--mine as much as his--was drawn.
As the nurse in the polio ward said I would,
I found Edie that night in the darkened cathedral a
short walk down Amsterdam Avenue from St.
Luke's. The nurse told me that Edie had
been at Michael's side nearly all the time.
Only after he was firmly asleep would she go
over to the hulking church, leaving the nurse with the
impression that she needed to pray. "Your son will
need you, Mr. Montgomery," the nurse
presumed to say to me, "but so will your wife."
Edie was a confirmed Episcopalian, but she
had never been devout, and I could not imagine her
on her knees. She loved the cathedral, but in the
way American patricians love Gothic
spaces. We had been married there, and her father
had been a benefactor and longtime vestryman.
One or two Sundays a month, she had found
her way to St. John the Divine, but for
vespers; she preferred the evening service of
chanted psalms to the more showy morning communion.
We presumed Michael inherited his religious
indifference from me, but what Edie really preferred,
I knew, were the soaring shadows of night--the
feeling of being in Chartres, in the heart of human
genius more than in the presence of some divinity. It
was no surprise to me that she would seek rest and
refuge there.
But prayer? I found her at a side altar,
sitting in front of a shrouded statue of what I
took to be the sorrowful mother of God.
Approaching from behind, not wanting to startle her, I
whispered her name tentatively. In truth, I
half expected a rebuke from Edie, too. She
could be angry and unforgiving, and in our twelve
years of marriage I had had my moments
of both resenting her reactions and fearing them.
Why the hell were you in Paris when our son got
sick?
But when she realized I was there, she stood and
turned to me, her hands clutching at her mouth.
She fell into my arms with a desperation I could not have
imagined. "Oh, Monty!" she said.
"Monty" was her teasing endearment for me--teasing
because she knew that from anyone else I hated it.
We were not nickname people--her name was Edie, not Edith
--which is why we called our son Michael, and
only that. Edie was trying to speak to me, but her
sobbing made it impossible. "Monty," she said
again, and the only other word that made it through her lips
was "Michael." The two names prompted in me the
sweet thought that her love for her son and her love
for her husband had become the same thing, and I had
the further thought, holding her as she shuddered against
me, that that was how I felt. What to her was a
moment only of unspeakable anguish was to me a
revelation of this most basic fact of our condition:
one love bound the three of us.
For me, our son's illness, evoking that love,
would be an axis around which our otherwise separate
lives turned as one life. But for Edie, it would
be something else entirely. She abruptly
pulled back from me, as if offended by my
physical resoluteness. Her eyes were
wrecked, bloodshot, foolishly stained with
mascara, crazy looking.
"I can't," she said.
"Can't what?" I asked.
"Cope," she said. "Cope with this. I can't."
"Yes you can." I pulled her back into my
embrace--not to console her but to avoid having
to look into her terrified eyes.
I was right, of course. Edie coped
magnificently from then on. She was at
Michael's service morning, noon, and night,
as his masseuse, his physical therapist, his
coach, his tutor enabling him to stay at class
level in school. She was his motivation, the soul,
ultimately, of his success. Everyone who knew
us would admire Edie's stalwart love, and
Michael would worship her for it, which he showed
by getting steadily better. All of which was more than
enough for me.
But in the one thing with which heroic Edie needed
help--the thing--that nurse had sensed--I was
useless. In the cathedral that night she had
shown me her terror, and I could not look at it.
I could not stand it. Left alone, she coped with it
by means of a savage act of will, which left her
feeling, I see now, like a woman going through the
motions of love instead of loving. She reproached
herself for dutifulness, for the rigid discipline of her
care, for doing what she could for Michael because she
should. All of which, of course, defines love at
its truest. But for Edie the former ease of spirited
affection and maternal fondness had suffocated in
the fumes of rubbing alcohol and the stink of soiled
bandages and pus-stained plaster casts and the dead
skin of our son's inert legs, as she worked all
the while to bring them back to life.
Something inside Edie, it seemed, had turned
to stone. The one acute feeling she would allow herself
from then on was that of self-loathing, which I beheld
clear as day every time she exploded in anger--never
at Michael or in his presence; always,
apparently, at me, in mine; but, I realized
later, really at herself. Unconsciously, she was
recruiting me to punish her, and I was capable of
exploding back, alas. But even when, as was
mostly true, I maintained a relative
equanimity, she took it as a signal of my
detachment. She angrily charged me with
detachment, not from Michael but from her, which was how little
she had come to know of me. This was the emotional
impasse at which we had found ourselves when the question
arose of my transfer to Germany.

As events unfolded, I started the job in
Frankfurt at the end of the summer without Edie.
The assignment, not a major promotion but the
prerequisite to one, had been in the works for
months. On the surface, Edie, Michael, and
I had all been looking forward to it--the
transatlantic passage on the USS
America, a month's travel across the Continent
before settling into the privileged life of postwar
American supremacy. But below the surface,
our family was in turmoil, stirred by every decision
involving Michael. After six arduous years of
corrective operations and physical therapy,
all organized around his ongoing schoolwork, he was
doing well--far better than we'd dared to hope.
Walking confidently with his leg braces and elbow
cane, working hard to think of himself as other than
crippled, our son was, in effect, recovered
from polio, and had learned to manage what
it had left him with. Edie and I, in our
separate ways, had arranged our lives around
what he needed from us, but what he needed from us had
changed. Edie and I came more slowly to knowing that
than he did.
Taking a large clue from him, we had finally
settled on a plan that called for Michael's
return from Germany to New York in
September, so that he could complete his senior
year at St. Dunstan's, his prep school in
Riverdale, but now as a boarding student.
Polio had tempered Michael's exuberant
personality, but we were able in the end to see that what
others took for shy insecurity was in fact the
quiet resolve that had seen him through. We knew
that he was ready for life apart from us--knowledge that Edie and
I separately resisted.
But now he was a senior at Wiesbaden High
School, an hour away from me. We had
decided together, in the end, that I would take the job
in Germany after all and that he would go too. As it
turned out, the jovial atmosphere of a
self-consciously American high school--
cheerleaders! pep rallies!--was far better for
him than the faux cloister of an all-male
prep school. His boarding five days a week
at Wiesbaden seemed about right, and his coming to be with
me in Frankfurt on most weekends did
move us to a new, if unarticulated,
intimacy. Beginning in the fall, we had formed a
habit of taking long Saturday drives in our
new blue Ford convertible. We explored the
winding roads, hillside vineyards, and hock
towns of the Rhineland wine country. We visited
half-reconstructed river cities from Mainz
to Koblenz to Cologne. We went several times
to the Roman ruins at Trier, a small city that
had been home to the emperor Constantine and, even
more remarkable to us, to Karl Marx.
In November, Michael turned seventeen,
the permit age in Germany, and after that he took the
wheel more often than I did. The pleasure I
took in riding beside him in the passenger seat was,
I see now, an unconscious return to the
games of wheels that had been such a bond years
before. I don't recall ever giving him driving
lessons as such, and in Germany there was no question of
driving school. Even with those leg braces, his
body seemed naturally to know what to do, and his right
leg on the pedals was his better leg.
At the wheel of a car, Michael's physical
grace returned. That Michael was relaxed as a
driver relieved me, and the routine of those jaunts
soothed us. In the car, especially with the top down,
we felt no need to force conversation, and a certain
self-isolating silence came to seem all right.
It was our silence together. By the spring of that year, in
other words, we had each found reasons to regard
our weekends as the matter of a mutual compact,
not something either of us would violate lightly.
Ironically, it was also then that we began, for the
first time, to differ about things, first small things, then
larger ones. I knew enough to anticipate
mundane teenage moodiness, but the weight on
Michael was heavier than that, which I understood. But
there were things I didn't understand. The gulf that
opened between us came as a disheartening surprise.
The silence of our rides, I began to sense,
carried an undertone of my son's resentment, which
mystified me.
Driving through Trier one day, he said offhandedly
that Marx had been misunderstood, and that the only
trouble with his ideas was they hadn't really been
tried. "That's ridiculous," I snapped, and
he shot back, "What would a banker know about the
real meaning of Karl Marx?" His direct
challenge, offered with the pristine self-righteousness
of a committed leftist, so shocked me that at first
I could not reply.
"Deutsche marks," I then deflected, as
Edie would have, "not Karl." But I wondered where the
hell this was coming from. Soon enough I would know.
In fact, at the beginning of that week we'd had
what you'd have to call an outright argument, sparked
by his resentment at my first saying no, he could not
take the car if it violated school rules.
"Don't treat me like a cripple!" he had
blurted, as if my mere enforcement of a rule did
any such thing. But the statement stunned us both, and,
as he hoped, I suppose, his rare open
expression of anger forced me to back off. I
let him take the car despite myself, but he had
still gone off angry, leaving me to fume even more.
I recalled that with horror now, because that was how
Edie had gone off.
Michael, where are you?
Friday afternoons at Wiesbaden were marked, as
I imagined it, by an explosion of pent-up
all-American energy--boys heading out to the ball
field, girls in the gym putting up
crepe-paper streamers for the sock hop, kids in
dungarees and pedal pushers going over to the teen
club to feed the jukebox and the Coke machine. I
pictured it all from my place at the large
bowfront window looking across the garden toward
Mosbacher Strasse, and the happy images of young
people at play undid me. I took in the teeth a
blast of new self-reproach. So Michael
wanted to stay over in Wiesbaden and what, go to the
big game the next day? Or take a date to the
American movie theater at the base exchange?
Or--hell--go to that sock hop, even if he
didn't dance? And why not with a car? Why had I
let that become an issue? And what was it about me
that sparked anger in those I loved? Did his
failure to show up now mean he was still angry? Was
this my punishment for the real offense, which he had dared
to name, that I did treat him like a cripple?
Michael, where are you?

The clock was striking again, and to my surprise, the
half-conscious count I kept brought me to seven.
Seven o'clock. It was nearly dark outside. He
wasn't here, and he hadn't called. If there'd
been a wreck, would the German police have a
way of knowing to call here?
The thought of the German police brought me back
to the scene in Rhine-Main Hall on the
previous Monday, what I had been reading about,
what I had witnessed. I replayed it--the
intruder coming up behind the tall German, seeming
to touch the back of his neck; the hollow crack, the
speaker slumping forward on the podium, that red
spray. The gunman disappeared through the curtain as
quickly as he had come. In short order, the
green-uniformed police arrived, the meeting was
adjourned, and I returned to my office, where,
almost at once, I began to wonder if I had
imagined it all.
The dead man had been identified in the
program as Markus von Siedelheim, a name
that meant nothing to me at the time. The killer had
escaped. I gathered from several days' deciphering
of the Neue Presse and from talk at the office
that the police's assumption was that von
Siedelheim had been murdered by crackpot
revolutionary elements who saw new economic
ties between Germany and Liberia as a renewal of
imperialist adventurism--or perhaps by rightists who
opposed German participation in the
recently chartered Common Market, of which the
ECSC was a forerunner. The theories made no
sense to me at the time, although such acts of
political violence would become common in a few
years, with the arrival of the Red Brigade and the
Bader-Meinhof Gang on the left and various
neoationazi groups on the right. What jolted me
instead was the rank senselessness of the act--it was von
Siedelheim's first return to Germany in seven
years. In an odd way, the murder epitomized
the feeling we all had then of living on the edge of
an abyss. That was literally true in Germany, with
divisions of Soviet tanks poised to strike
at any moment, igniting Armageddon. But the
feared violence of the Cold War could be defined
by nothing so rational as the later political
radicalism, for a kind of moral anarchy had come
to undergird the East-West standoff, even if we could
not openly see it as such.
If there was a car wreck, I realized, the
police would call the school. I went to the
foyer, to the telephone, and checking the list that
Mandy, my secretary, had typed and taped
into cellophane nearly nine months before, I
found the number of the hall phone in Michael's
dormitory. When the operator came on, I
recited it for her in my unornamented German.
Numbers I could handle.
The odd, blasting rings went on and on. Finally
someone answered, a boy whose accent dropped me
back to Mobile, Alabama, where I'd done
Navy boot camp as a twenty-year-old, more
than twenty years before. I asked for Michael
Montgomery. The boy grunted and the phone
clattered down. I could picture the handset
dropping, slapping the wall at the end of its
cord. Bright noises in the echo chamber of the
corridor made me see a rough game of
keepaway. At last yet another boy--New
Jersey?--came on the line to say that
Montgomery was a "fiver," as if that explained
everything. I knew that about half of the dormitory
students--who were themselves a minority in the school--
were five-day boarders, routinely going home on
Fridays to American posts, bases, and stations
within a couple of hours of Wiesbaden. I asked
the boy if he was sure Michael Montgomery
was not there. He said yes, and was about to hang up.
I declared myself a parent, which made him say
"sir." He went to check again, leaving the
phone to bang against the wall. After another few
minutes, he returned to say that Michael was
nowhere around, that if he'd stayed over, they would have
seen him in the caf at dinner, but nobody had.
I asked if there was a dance that night or a big
game the next day, and took what I needed from his
answer that he didn't know. I hung up before he
did. Where are you?

Once, at our place in the Adirondacks,
Michael and I stayed up late into the night,
sitting on the deck of the boathouse with our feet
dangling in the lake. He was around eight years
old, two years or so before his polio. What
kept us up was a sequence of shooting stars. At
irregular intervals they crossed the black sky
beyond the even blacker silhouette of Mount
Marcy. What made the sight doubly thrilling was
the way the night sky was reflected in the cobalt
sheen of the water stretched out before us, so we could see
the stars by looking down as well as up. Every falling
star had its twin--until one or the other of us
raised a foot to break the glass of the lake
surface, an impulse coming, perhaps, from a need
to remember which of the realms before us was real. In the
rippling water, the stars danced. "Will we ever do this
again, Dad?" Michael asked at one point. His
profile emphasized the delicacy of his
features, the sharp nose he had from Edie, the
small knob of his chin that she always swore was
mine. The slight upturn of his upper lip could
make it seem at times ready to tremble, and it
did now.
"Sure," I said. "It's only a matter of
knowing when to look." I joined my gaze to his,
facing up. Just then another bright dot of light
carved its swift arc in the speckled darkness.
Michael jumped. "Eleven!" he announced.
He was gunning for an even dozen. Soon he was
leaning into me, half asleep. "That's not what I
meant. Not about the shooting stars. I meant about
doing this with you."
"Sure," I answered too quickly. "Every
August."
"Will I still love it?"
"Yes." I pulled him closer.
When, later, the twelfth star fell, I thought
of waking him, but then it was too late, and I let
him sleep on against me.

I went to the kitchen for more ice. Nicolaus, my
white-haired, solemn steward, was sitting on his
stool in the corner. He looked up from that
week's Der Stern, which had Fidel Castro
on the cover, with upraised fist.
"I'm sorry, Nicolaus," I said, with a
nod toward the oven, where by now the roast would be
dried out. "Something kept Michael at school.
There's no point in your waiting dinner any
longer."
"And you, sir?"
"Why not just prepare a couple of plates and
keep them covered. I'll wait to eat with the
boy."
"Yes, sir."
"And you can go. No need for you to wait."
"I do not object."
Nicolaus never referred to me by name.
To others, as when he answered the phone, I was
Herr Direktor, and the point had been quickly
made that he and I were strictly ex officio.
He had come with the house. He and Frau Marpingen,
the Putzfrau, and Gerhard, my driver, had
been taking care of Chase executives for a
decade. A thick scar crossed Nicolaus's
right cheek and, rising, disappeared in his hair. He
suffered the wound, he'd told me, on the eastern
front. Once he spoke of Stalingrad, but
vaguely. Every time he turned that side of his
face toward me, I felt him making a claim.
If what Germans told the occupying
Americans--investment bankers included--was
true, then every Wehrmacht soldier who'd fought in
the West was dead, just as no surviving German had
ever really admired Adolf Hitler.
I had no trouble picturing Nicolaus's right
arm upraised at the infamous angle. If he and
his kind hated Hitler now, it was for having lost the
war. But Nicolaus kept his resentment
passive. He was efficient, talented in the
kitchen, and, for my purposes, thoroughly
reliable. His only open show of disapproval
toward me was tied to my pouring my own whiskey, which
I did out of a habit tracing to my father, who used
to say it was a way to remind the servants whose
house it was.
He was watching me at the ice tray. I
realized he was taking the measure of my concern.
"Die Jugend," he said.
My impulse to deceive him surprised
me, as if there were secrets to protect. "Just
something at school," I said, and all at once the
images I was fending off were, first, of a tangled
blue highway wreck, and second, of Michael
in his iron lung. Then I saw him falling
forward, as if he'd been shot from behind.
Nicolaus was staring at me. I turned
to leave the kitchen, aware that as I did so, he
turned to the oven, to do as he was told before going
home.
I went back to my chair in the sitting room,
and in the silence, which was total but for the hum of the
brazier's fire and the tick of the clock, I
sipped my drink. When it was drained, I thought of
going for another. Instead, I began a mindless
set of rounds, going from vacant room to vacant
room, snapping on lights, as if a family
lived there and not a man with--what, a missing son?
Missing son. By now I was alternating between open
worry and anger, and it was anger that I preferred.
Goddammit, where are you?
I could not pass a front-facing window without
stopping to look out, eyeing the moving forms of
Mosbacher Strasse, the flow of cars. I
remember lighting cigarettes at those windows,
watching the flare of the match illuminate my face
in the black glass. That your father was a heavy
smoker came to define him, but in those days we
all were.
I climbed the stairs. Michael and I could
each be in the house without the other knowing, it was so
large. When my predecessor had proudly showed
me around, I demurred at first because of the size, but
then he led me into the walnut-paneled game
room on the third floor. A stout mahogany
pool table was enshrined below a hanging green lamp.
On one wall, the cue rack held a dozen
elaborately carved sticks, ash and ebony.
Along another wall stretched the scoring string, and
in the center of the third was a large fireplace.
The tan felt of the table's playing surface
shimmered under the cone of light. I took the house
to have that pool table, because I knew Michael would
love it--a game to be played without strong
legs. Was that treating him like a cripple?
Now I racked up as if he were here. I
chalked, broke, shot, chalked, shot--running the
table once, then again. The noise of the ceramic
spheres, one against the others, with the faintly erotic
punctuation of the pocket thunks, defied
the stone silence of the empty house. The stick
gliding through my fingers and the kick in my right elbow
at each stroke kept my mind tethered
to physical sensation.
Nicolaus had set the fire roaring in the
ornate hearth before he'd departed for the evening, as
he always did on the Fridays we expected
Michael, but it was down to embers before I
noticed. I remember consciously deciding not
to add a log. Where are you?
But by then the question had moved away from Michael.
The raw particularity of eight-ball solitaire
had failed me. My mind had cut loose from one
snapping sequence of sounds to drift, with no leave
from me, back to that other: the slamming of the screen
door that took her from the summer kitchen out into the
breezeway, then into the garage, and another slam.
My God, she could get angry! And then into the
car--slam!--the rev of which I heard so clearly
because I'd followed her for once, this time
to apologize.
That memory brought me back to the fight that had
taken Michael away on Sunday--"You can't
treat me like this!"--and my knees became weak.
Have I done it again? The very question made me tack.
I saw her across a narrow gap of the churning
water of Long Island Sound. With her hair
hidden by her long-billed cap, she was skipper of
her father's Lightning, bearing down on mine as we
both drove in on the last mark in the last heat
of the Manhasset Memorial Day Regatta,
a class race that drew boats from all over the
Northeast. I took her for a boy as she was
shrilly screaming, "Starboard tack! Right of
way! Right of way! Starboard! Starboard!"
I refused to head up, exactly as she later
charged. At the last second, she fell off, and
I took the mark ahead of her, to come in sixth out
of more than fifty. She came in eighth, and
lodged a protest with the race committee. Her
protest was promptly overruled. Where was the
collision?
Only at the hearing did I discover that my
deadly rival was a girl. I went up to her and
apologized, saying that had I known, I would
certainly have given way--and she nearly spit at
me. Later, at the commodore's ball, I
asked her to dance. After blatantly looking me
over and tossing the raven hair I had not seen
before, she accepted. When she came down
to the beach with me, after the band had packed its
instruments, I teased her that she clearly wanted
to be with a man to whom she could yield, but while
feeling superior. She did not find my remark
funny in the least, because to her, she said, the
inability to rightfully ram another boat
broadside was no virtue. She regretted
falling off. So where was superiority? It was a
point I conceded in all sincerity, realizing that this
girl was something new.
We talked for hours, sitting on the sand, staring
at the stars. When I said good night, we kissed,
and kissed again. Much later, she told me that I
knew nothing of a woman's readiness to yield,
since she had already chosen to be with me for life, and
would have made love right then on the beach had I
only pressed. How she took delight, after that,
in teasing that I was more timid on sand than on
water. All I knew was that with this fierce girl
I felt complete for the first time in my life, and
I was not about to risk losing that.
Although we had made our home together in the
apartment on Central Park West, and though we
continued to spend weekends at her family
compound on the North Shore of Long Island,
most of my memories are of our place at the
lake. Not the lake as it is, a deep blue
finger pointing through the north woods toward
Canada, but the lake in my mind, which broke
free of the good times--Michael and me sitting on
the dock at night; taking the cliffwalk hand in
hand with Edie after the boy was in bed--to become the
hazy emblem of what went wrong.
Even the clacking of billiard balls, evoking
slams, could take me there. Now the date was
May 31, 1960, nearly twenty years after
Edie and I met, and nearly one year before the start
of this story. We had gone up to the lake for the
Memorial Day weekend--me, Edie,
Michael, and one of his chums from St.
Dunstan's. It was Monday, and the boys had gone
out in one of the boats. Michael was a crack
sailor, another sport for which one does not need
legs. Edie had intended to finish laying out her
summer garden, but instead we fell to arguing over
God knows what. And the next thing I knew she was
hurling at me my having admitted the day before that
I dreaded Michael's being an ocean away
once we moved to Germany in the fall.
Edie had had her own trouble in coming
to terms with that, I knew, but now, with perverse
unfairness, she accused me of needing our son
too much; "an unnatural dependency," she
said, speaking of perverse. I fired back that perhaps
now that he was whole, she needed him too little, as
if only his infirmity could interest her. It was an
unforgivable retort, and I regretted it before the
words had cleared my tongue, but it must have plucked
the nerve of her self-loathing because it was then that she
stormed out of the room and beyond, slamming doors
along the way.
Bang! I thought of that sound in Rhine-Main
Hall, then put the thought away.
I usually let Edie go when she flipped out like
that, but recognizing my own cruelty for once,
I went after her--a mistake, because to get away
from me, she left the house in her rage, which she
had never done before.
By the time I reached the threshold of the garage,
Edie had already backed her car out and was swinging it
around, kicking up pebbles and gunning away, leaving
me staring at the road long after she had disappeared.
I stood there until at last I realized she
wasn't coming back. I didn't know yet what
would happen, but I already knew for sure it would be
my fault.
In the Frankfurt version of that awful scene,
Michael did not slam doors at me, but,
while driving off, he refused to look back,
to return my regretful wave.
Where are you?



At eleven o'clock, from my study, I called the
dormitory again, and when a student answered, I
asked for the number of Mr. Jones, the residence
hall director, a man I had never met but
whose name was on the previous fall's welcome letter
that I found in my desk. The student did not know
the private number, nor if there was one. He
said he'd find out, and once again the phone dropped
into the oceanic limbo of sounds--harsh laughter,
throbbing music, a shout. At last a rough
voice grunted its hello, a brusque
impatience that made me realize both that this was
Mr. Jones and that he had just been woken from
sleep.
"I am the father of one of your students, Mr.
Jones, and I am looking for him."
"Who is that?"
"Michael Montgomery."
At once the stark silence of his nonreply
registered in the knob at the base of my spine.
I knew somehow to take his hesitation as the main
revelation.
"Michael Montgomery," I repeated,
only now with the inflection of demand.
"And you are?"
"Paul Montgomery. His father. I am
calling you from Frankfurt."
"Michael is a five-day boarder, Mr.
Montgomery. It is Mister, isn't it?"
Most Wiesbaden fathers would have been addressed
by rank, and I sensed Jones's relief to be up
against another mere civilian.
"I expected my son home tonight, and he did
not come."
"Well, as a five-day boarder, sir
..." Jones hesitated, I realized, to sum-
mon his nerve. "... he wouldn't actually be our
responsibility after 1700 hours of a Friday.
Not actually."
It was easy to picture him as a short,
bespectacled physics teacher, one whose utter
lack of physical assurance would prompt such
curial devotion to the rubrics of the actual.
Rules as a barrier to hide behind.
"I am not concerned with actual
responsibility, Mr. Jones. Not at this
point. I am concerned with the whereabouts of my son."
Again his silence was a declaration, but of what?
"Mr. Jones?"
"Yes?"
"I am asking for your help here. I expected
my son home at six o'clock this evening--1800
hours, if you prefer. He did not come. He
did not call. My son would never not come home
without calling me."
"Your son is a high school senior, Mr.
Montgomery. They do these things."
"What things?"
"Not come. Not call."
"I get the distinct impression you are not
telling me something."
"No, sir. That's not it."
"What is it, then?"
Again his silence.
"Mr. Jones."
"Maybe you'd better talk to someone
else. I'd like to help you, Mr. Montgomery,
but I'm not--"
I forced myself to wait. Now my mind went to the
sound of a bulkhead slamming. I heard it through the
bones of my feet, a sound from well below decks.
A sensation from sixteen years before, just after our
bucket, the Stephen Case, took a hit
well below the waterline. As exec on the
bridge, my job was to keep the glasses at
my face, scanning for the telltale trails of more
torpedoes, but what I was most aware of were the
bulkhead hatches banging shut below against the
inrushing sea, as now I worked to seal off the flood
of feeling this strange bastard had opened in me.
And then bang! A gunshot.
"Not what?" I asked.
"Supposed to."
"You're not supposed to? Let me understand.
You are not supposed to discuss what you know of a
student's whereabouts with the student's father?"
"That is right."
"Look, Jones, I can be over there in an
hour. Do I have to come over there so that you can explain
to me what is going on?"
"You'd better talk to General Healy."
"What?"
"General Healy. That's all I am going
to say. I've said too much already."
"Who is General Healy?"
"National security, Mr. Montgomery.
They said it is a matter of national security."
Jones's inflection as he uttered that phrase was
its exclamation point.
By now, at the dawn of the century's last
decade, as I am writing this, the words "national
security" seem to have been reduced to weightless
souvenirs from another time, like small bits of the
Berlin Wall that hawkers have been selling around the
world. In the era of the amiable and feckless Mikhail
Gorbachev, it is impossible to use the phrase
with anything like the punch it carried when Joseph
Stalin had emerged in the American nightmare as
Adolf Hitler with the bomb, or when Nikita
Khrushchev then arrived as a kind of
Mussolini, only madder. "National security"
had, in fact, been brought into the lexicon by a
man named James Forrestal, whom my father knew
well from their time together at Princeton. Forrestal
was famous as the first American secretary of
defense in the late 1940's, although he
had been secretary of the Navy during the war,
near the top of my own chain of command when I was in
uniform. Before that, he had been head of Dillon,
Read, a Wall Street investment firm. But
Forrestal's own fate--he jumped from a
sixteenth-floor window of the Bethesda Naval
Hospital in 1949--reveals "national
security" as code for a state of mind that is
anything but secure. I believed in it as much as
anyone at the time, but now see how it was always
invoked, whether by the greatest statesmen of the era or
by bureaucratic nobodies like Jones, for the same
ends, which were to silence, to hide, and to intimidate.
Apparently, my silence could intimidate,
too. Jones's voice shook as he added, "They
said it was their responsibility to deal with you and
Sergeant Carson, not mine."
"Who is Sergeant Carson?"
"I've said too much already. Talk to the
general. He's handling the whole thing. He's the
one who told me."
"General Healy?"
"Major General David Healy, here in
Wiesbaden. I don't think you should worry, because
it involves his son, too."

I was unable to get General Healy's home
telephone number, which spiked my irritation but
soon forced me to stop and think. Instead of caroming
like a billiard ball from room to room in the
empty house in Dahlberg, I went downtown
to my office in Frankfurt's Bundesbank
building, a glittering new skyscraper that was a
monument to the German boom. Even at that hour
of the night, it seemed half the offices of the
forty-story tower were lit, with restless German
bankers doing business across time zones to the east.
I was there, thinking west, to place phone calls
to the States. In those pre-touch-tone days, most
transatlantic calls involved two or three
operators, often requiring multiple
prearranged appointments at both ends, a
cumbersome process compared to that made possible by the
direct trunk lines that had been put in place
for the Pentagon, and that companies like Chase were
happy to buy into.
My office was on the twenty-seventh or
twenty-eighth floor, I don't remember which.
It was furnished in Bauhaus chrome and leather,
with the austerely elegant furniture set
off by a vast Bijari carpet. At my desk I
placed a call to Earl Gifford, expecting he
would be just arriving at his Park Avenue apartment,
home from a day's work. Gifford was number two
at Dillon, Read by then. Perhaps that fleeting
thought of Forrestal had put me in mind of him--or
was that fleeting thought from now, not then? Either way, the
old firm was still a player in Washington. C.
Douglas Dillon himself, son of the founder, was
Kennedy's secretary of the treasury in 1961,
and had the kind of first-order clout that Gifford would
not actually have to invoke to wield.
We had served together on the Stephen Case
in the Pacific. It was Gifford who'd brought me
into Chase Manhattan in 1950, before he'd
decamped to the Treasury Department in '52.
Although he'd come back to Wall Street after
Eisenhower's first term--to Dillon, Read, not
Chase, because there were no Rockefellers blocking
the way to the top--Gifford's Midas touch in
New York depended on the gold threads tying
him to the alchemists in the Federal Triangle, the
chiefs of whom would return his calls themselves.
When he answered the phone, all I had to say was
"Earl, it's Paul. I need some information."
For the next couple of hours, I sat in the
corner of the long sofa staring out the
floor-to-ceiling window, the dark sky a screen
onto which were projected unbidden images of what
I'd lost and what I feared to lose yet.
Random scenes of auto accidents and
assassinations punctuated my free association,
but my mind was tied, as always in such brooding
rumination, to the lake; to Michael with his feet
dangling; to Edie in her sheer peignoir, lounging
under that starry sky in a hammock strung between the
pair of giant white pines behind the house. Edie
could make that hammock softly sway without any
perceptible exertion, her right arm drifting in the
air below the perfect curve of her hip. That
hammock holding her would swing even without a
breeze, even when she was asleep, as if just the
earthward pressure of her willowy body were enough
to set things moving, which I knew from my own
experience to be the case.
When Michael was an infant, I would be the one
to go to him when he cried, but only to bring him back
to our bed, to Edie. He was the size of a
meatloaf, but since he fit in the crook of my
arm, I carried him like a football.
Edie was always up against the headboard and ready,
baring her breast as I handed him over. He took
to her hungrily. I would slide back into bed
next to them and dreamily watch. Happiness,
someone said, is the wish to be what you are. I
wished, exactly, to be his father and her husband.
When Michael was sated, his face would fall
away from Edie's breast, and he would already be
asleep. I would take him back to his crib and
then return to bed deeply consoled. Edie would
dreamily receive me back, transported by love,
and we would fall asleep with our heads together. I
would sleep as contentedly as if I were the one who
had drained my sweet wife of her precious
milk.
But more than once, that bliss was changed
instantly into horror, with Edie screeching at the
top of her voice while pounding me awake,
tearing at the blankets. "You're lying on the
baby!" she screamed. "Get up! Get up!
You've suffocated the baby!" This happened six,
maybe ten times in that half year. And every time, I
believed it to be true--I had killed our son
by falling asleep on him. "Goddammit,
Paul, get up!" she would scream, having been
transformed into rage itself. Right of way!
Starboard! It was a rage I'd learned to dread
like nothing I had ever dreaded before. "You've killed
him!"
And I would leap back, tearing at the
blankets and sheets with her, looking for
Michael's body, prepared to hate myself as much
as my son's mother clearly hated me now. More
than once, between us in our frenzy, we stripped the
bed naked of its linen. Another time, I continued
the search on my hands and knees, looking for him
between the headboard and the wall. Always I was first
to realize that it wasn't true, that Edie had
simply conscripted me into the dark center of her
nightmare. I never once fell asleep without
having returned Michael safely to his crib.
I never once fell asleep with his body under
mine. I never once failed my son in that way,
never betrayed that part of my wife's trust. In
order to convince her that that was so, I would lead Edie
into the alcove where the crib stood, so that she could
see for herself, although sometimes our frenzied commotion
awakened him and he howled majestically, as if some
beloved one of his were dead as well; as if he,
too, had been thought capable of some heinous
deed.
Of course, the words I dreaded hearing, once
my relationship with Michael grew tense that year,
were "You killed Mom." He had not quite said it, but
I heard the accusation in the rough edge of his
voice. It was a charge I could not deny, and now
I wondered if, after all, Edie's charge that I
killed Michael had come true as well.

When I heard the teletype machine begin to whir
in my secretary's adjoining office, I turned
away from the window, the jagged nightscape of a
half-recovered city. I watched as the pink
paper rolled out of the machine, and I quickly saw it
as an innocuous military personnel file.
Then Earl called back to help me read, as he
said, what was written between the lines. General
David Healy was "Commander of the Joint
Intelligence Group--Europe," based at
Lindsay Air Station in Wiesbaden, the
headquarters of what was called in the argot
"J-2." Healy's previous assignments would
not seem to have prepared him for such a position. For
more than a decade, he had rotated through a
series of Air Force operations jobs, most
recently as commander of the 3rd Weather
Reconnaissance Wing (provisional) at
Wiesbaden Air Base. Gifford told me that
when Gary Powers's U-2 was shot down over the
Ural Mountains the year before, Healy's phony
NASA weather wing had given the glider-like CIA
spy plane its cover. Once the weather-plane
story collapsed, the NASA wing in Wiesbaden
was quietly disbanded--provisional indeed--and
Healy had come out of the mundane operations rotation
in which he'd buried his intelligence function since
not long after the war. Thus, Healy presided over
all U.s. military espionage in Europe
--everything from photo reconnaissance by air to the
dark brutality of secret agents on both
sides of the Iron Curtain.
I stopped Gifford in his recitation, alarmed that
he was referring to such things over the telephone, but
he laughed. "This is from a staffer on the Armed
Services Committee, Paul. Senator
Javits put in the call for me. If there are
classifieds here, they're already out of the corral.
Healy was a "Man in the News" in the Times
last year, after the U-2 affair." Gifford
read on, a summary of a career.
London for two years right after the war. Then
Berlin for three, Washington for two, Paris for
three, and Wiesbaden for nearly five. As
theater chief now of military intelligence,
reporting to the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon,
he was openly the man in charge of tracking the
Soviet battle order in Eastern Europe,
even if the "wet" side of his job would never be
referred to. At forty-seven years old, he was
five years my senior. He was married, with a
grown daughter stateside and an
eighteen-year-old son, a senior at the
American high school in Wiesbaden.

I was in Wiesbaden the next morning by eight
o'clock, approaching the main gate of Lindsay
Air Station, a satellite military post on
the opposite side of the city from the sprawling
American air base with its twin runways
flanked by dozens of fighter aircraft and
midrange bombers. Lindsay, by contrast, was a
walled compound of office buildings and residences
dating to before the war, when it was a Gestapo
headquarters. My driver slowed, approaching the
gate. Lindsay was identified in Healy's
file as a records processing depot, but
Gifford said its main function as a nerve center
of U.s. military intelligence was no particu-
lar secret. Various buildings housed offices
devoted to signals interception, communications
security, cryptanalysis, and the management of
human intelligence resources--""humint,"
in the jargon," Gifford had said. "What the rest
of us call spooks."
"Jesus Christ, Earl. What could my son
have to do with spooks?"
"The son of a spook, Paul. Not a spook.
It's not the same thing."
I looked over my driver's shoulder to see the
compound's buildings looming in the morning
drizzle, four and five stories high with
steeply pitched roofs and chimneys, all painted
the gray-green color one forever associates with the
Wehrmacht. The road veered, taking us
parallel to a ten-foot wall made of cement
blocks painted the same color. Along its
top ran a gyre of rusted barbed wire--a
wartime vestige, I assumed. The road turned
again, bringing us to the gate with its arched entranceway
on which was spelled out "H. Lindsay
Air Station, the United States Air Force."
A flagpole rose above a small guardhouse,
the Stars and Stripes drooping in the rain. A
figure in an olive poncho stepped out of the
guardhouse to halt us with the thrust of a white-gloved
hand.
Something in the way the stout black Mercedes
slowed to a crawl drew my attention to my
driver. Gerhard was a dour German with a deformed
right hand, its fingers frozen in a kind of claw that
hooked just enough to give him purchase on a steering
wheel. A war injury? I never asked. He'd
told me once that he had worked as a truck
driver for the American military before landing his job
as a chauffeur for Chase executives. Thinking
of that, I had asked him as we left
Frankfurt if he'd ever been to Lindsay.
He had said no, but even in the haze of a wet
morning, it seemed he'd driven here as if he
had, and now he stopped the car on the sentry's
dime.
He stared impassively ahead with his window
up, so that the American would have no choice but
to turn to me in the rear. I was seated on the right
side. Gerhard discreetly lowered the left rear
window, and the air policeman leaned over to peer in
at me. He had an unsmiling black face, but
when I saw how young he was, he looked less
a sentry than a lost tourist. I reached across
to hand him my passport through the window. "I am
here to see General Healy."
From under his poncho he pulled a clipboard and
matched my passport to it, a futile check for
my name. "I am not expected. I assume
you'll let him know I am here." I waited for the
guard to look at me. "Tell him I'm
Michael Montgomery's father."
He turned away, entered his booth, and put a
phone to his face. He soon returned and handed
me the passport. He began to recite
directions to the general's quarters.
"Tell the driver, please," I said.
Only then did Gerhard lower his window.
Moments later, because of the rain, I left the car
at a clip, hunched over as I made my way
up the neatly bordered chipped-stone path toward
Healy's house. As I raised my fist
to knock, the door opened ahead of me. An
Asian steward--Filipino? His white coat was
uniform enough--stood beside the door, ushering
me in. I correct myself--not "steward," a
Navy word, but "orderly." And probably not
Filipino, either. That, too, was Navy.
Without a greeting, he led me across a polished
foyer and into a large dining room. Its most
striking feature was a gleaming ebony banquet
table at which a man in a light blue shirt and
dark blue tie was seated, alone, at one end.
Coffee, triangles of toast, and a plate of
eggs were spread before him, along with a sheaf of loose
pages on which I glimpsed, in addition to text,
columns of numbers and, on one sheet, a map.
Several beats passed between my arrival at the
threshold and the moment he looked up at me.
General Healy was a startlingly handsome man.
Tyrone Power, I thought, but with a mustache. His
dark hair was slickly parted at the crown of his
scalp. The fine line of a jaw culminated in a
strong chin, which he aimed at me now,
quizzically. Instantly, I disliked him.
"Good morning, General. I am Michael
Montgomery's father. I am under the impression you
can tell me where he is."
General Healy touched the corner of a linen
napkin to his mouth with one hand while closing the
cover of the file he had been reading with the other. I
saw that the jacket was marked "Class II."
He rose half out of his chair, indicating a
place at the table. "Please join me, Mr.
Montgomery." His grace was at the service more
of deflection than courtesy. "Will you join me in
some breakfast?"
Until that moment, I had not admitted to myself
how agitated I'd become through the night, but all
at once, faced with his convincing calm, I felt
the tension fully--even to note its partly draining
away. Whatever else was happening, this man's
son was all right. So, therefore, was mine.
I sat in the chair he indicated, recalling
from my own time in the service the grave aura the
brass seemed always to carry. Admirals and
generals say what they want, then wait to get
it. We call it giving orders. I had been one
of that legion whose job was to obey. But what about
when the general is a father confronted by a fellow
father? I disliked him, I realized, only because he
had somehow taken Michael from me.
"Coffee would be welcome, General," I said
coldly, reining in my feelings. "Coffee would be
quite enough. Thank you."
The orderly appeared with a place mat, a
napkin, and silver, all of which he spread before me
with expert flourish. To my right, at the foot of the
table, was an untouched place setting, a glass
of orange juice already poured. Directly across
from me was another setting, a plate with a
half-eaten piece of toast, a cup half
full of milky coffee. In an ashtray there, a
cigarette, half stubbed out, was still emitting its
ribbon of smoke.
The general picked up a pack of Camels,
popped a cigarette out, and offered the pack to me.
We had to reach toward each other for me to take
one. The orderly was there with a flaring wooden match
--first the general, then me. As I took the
light, I saw half-moons in the cuticles
of the man's fingernails. I glanced at his face
to nod my thanks and thought, Not Filipino but
Korean. He left the room.
Smoke billowed in the silence. Finally Healy
said, "The boys sprang this on us yesterday. I
am sorry you weren't informed. I assumed your
son told you. I should have insisted on it."
"Where are they?"
Instead of answering, he put the cigarette
to his mouth and slowly drew on it. He exhaled
with pursed lips, a thin vapor trail. Only
then he answered. "Apparently there's some kind of
club trip. That club they have."
"I'm sorry. Club?"
"The sports car business. The Formula One
circuit. Juan Fangio. Sterling Moss.
Ferraris. Porsche Spyders. They're off on
a lark. They've gone to N@urburgring to watch the
Grand Prix. I gave Rick permission. It
never occurred to me your son hadn't spoken to you
if he was supposed to. He's the one with the car.
You let him take the car." The general paused,
as if underscoring my violation of a rule. But then
he shrugged; no violation to him. "It never
occurred to me there might be some issue with the
dormitory. Chalk it up to mixed signals."
Healy tapped the ashtray with his cigarette.
"Anyway, they'll be home tomorrow. Nothing
to worry about."
My first thought went to the mystery of what defines
a father, how different one man can be from another. A
club. My son in a club, and I don't know
it? Of course, it is the business of
adolescents to have lives apart from their
parents. There was no reason for me to know it.
Mixed signals indeed. My son off on a
perfectly normal youthful adventure. Even
at worst, I had a son who had deceived me about
the car, asking for it with rank premeditation,
planning this escapade. Maybe Michael's
fight with me--"You treat me like a cripple!"--
had also been staged, a ploy to get me to agree.
But if so, so what? It would be a shock to be
deceived like that, but such manipulation, too, fell within
the range of normal when it came to kids. Why
do I react as if something terrible is coming? Why
does the shock of my ignorance open a wound? And
why, when this other boy's father ... And then it hit
me: the general is not ignorant, and he's not
telling the truth.
"Issue with the dormitory, General? What do
you mean?"
"Well, who exactly was giving your son
permission?"
"Permission?" I heard myself pronounce the
word as if there were an insult in it. "Is
permission the issue here?"
"What else would be the issue, Mr.
Montgomery?" The general asked his question with a
steely edge. I heard the dare in it, and I saw
his cold intelligence clear. A formidable man.
"If I may ask," he added. "Father to father."
"Simply that my son does not take off for the
weekend without telling me."
"Well." He paused, but not from uncertainty.
The pause was a display of rhetorical
authority. "He did this time, didn't he?"
At that moment, as if this delay, too, were
controlled by the general, the orderly came through a
swinging door behind me. He slid a cup of
coffee onto my place mat. I waved away
his offer of cream and sugar, yet then I put the
spoon into my cup and stirred the black liquid,
stalling. How had the general and I become
adversaries so soon? Then I realized: he was
writing this scene, but I was off the script.
"And who is Sergeant Carson?" I asked.
He shrugged a bit too quickly. "The father of
another student. I told you. They have a club."
"So this is an organized trip? Chaperones
and so forth? The school involved?"
General Healy pushed back from the table,
turning the folder over as he did so, hiding that
designation, "Class II." He
smiled at me thinly. "I think you know it is not
a school-sponsored trip, Mr.
Montgomery. I gather you have spoken to Mr.
Jones."
"He called you last night, after I called
him."
"As a matter of fact, he did."
"As you had instructed him to do. Is Mr.
Jones one of your agents?"
"My agents?" The scornful incredulity in his
voice--why? The very idea of the physics teacher as
an intelligence officer? Or, more simply, that
I would be so crass as to make such an open
reference?
I pressed him. "A lark, you said. What
makes a high school lark a matter of national
security?"
Instead of answering me, he let his gaze
drift up and to my right. Just as I realized someone
was standing in the doorway beyond my line of sight,
perfume registered in my nostrils, a subtle
but pungent scent.
"Come in, dear," Healy said. "This is Mr.
Montgomery, Rick's friend's father."
I started to get up but Healy raised a hand,
a gesture that said, Not necessary. I turned
nevertheless, half out of my chair. She was tall,
very slim--as slim and tall as Edie, whose image
ambushed me for an instant. Then I realized
why. Mrs. Healy was dressed for riding, in tan
jodhpurs and boots that came to her knees. The
flair of fabric at her hips emphasized a
narrow waist. Her white long-sleeved shirt, like
a man's dress shirt, had a column of
ruffles to hide its buttons, the top two or
three of which were unfastened. Edie, too, had been
the sort of rider not to be deterred by a morning's
rain.
But Mrs. Healy's translucent white
face was very much her own, made all the paler against
a downpour of rich auburn hair that rode
lightly on her shoulders, still damp from the shower.
Was that why she hesitated, a woman unready
to be seen by a man not her husband?
But no. Hesitation had nothing to do with her. She
had made the doorway into a frame merely
by pausing in it. The woman had a lifetime's
habit of knowing how to impress. It was
unconscious, natural. Once my eyes
caught hers for a second, she seemed
released to move, as if my being drawn to her was the
key to her entrance. She crossed to her chair just
ahead of the orderly, who pulled it out for her. They
exchanged the barest of nods, a woman accustomed
to servants.
"Good morning, darling," General Healy said.
The chill in his tone was familiar as one I had
struck myself at another breakfast table. The
intimate aftermath of lovemaking was not so different,
in its complications, from the awkwardness following a
particularly painful argument. In my life with
Edie, I had become a connoisseur of hurt in
the air. Since Edie, I had arranged my
life to avoid it, but now, with Michael, had it
come back?
"This is Mr. Montgomery," he said again.
But she cut him off, addressing me. "I am
very fond of Michael. He is a good boy."
Her simple statement put several things on
display. Her accent, most strikingly, a
telltale slant in the word "good" toward
"goot," the v of "v" alliterating with the f of
"fond." Fewer than a dozen words, yet it was
clear that she was German, which in that setting seemed
an offense against nature. An American
general with a German wife? It seemed
impossible. A grown daughter in the States and a
son of eighteen. Marriage, therefore, early in the
war. Impossible. Also manifest was my
mistake in attributing hurt to her, an
assumption of vulnerability at odds with the quick
authority she had just claimed. Unlike the
general, she knew Michael's name. She had a
relationship with him. She asserted the right to judge
him and find him good. So why would that cut me?
A more mundane revelation: her timbre
carried the gravelly dryness of too many
cigarettes. Indeed, she just then opened a silver
box on the table in front of her and took one out.
The orderly was in the kitchen. Aware of Healy's
impassivity, I nevertheless stood and took the
two steps toward her, flicking my lighter as she
leaned to the flame. Her hair fell onto my
wrist. The shower.
That the woman took my gesture for granted,
as if I, too, were her servant, made me
dislike her as well. How quickly I'd come to be
at odds with these strangers. "How do you know
Michael?" I asked, back at my place.
"He comes here to dinner with Rick. A
special pleasure for us, Mr. Montgomery."
I did not know her son, and it jolted me
to realize that I knew none of Michael's friends.
What kind of parent never wonders at his son's
coming home forever alone? Wonder at it? I
welcomed it. Yet now I saw that these friends
he'd kept away from me were part of what had gone
wrong between us. Karl Marx, misunderstood? What
puerile fool had put such a thought in
Michael's head? Surely not a general's
son.
Mrs. Healy was saying, "Michael seems
quite--what is the word--deep."
"Michael is quiet." I let a beat
fall, then said, more formally, "He didn't come
home last night, Mrs. Healy. He didn't
call. That is entirely unlike him. I
learned from the dormitory director"--here I
shifted to face her husband--"that you know what's
going on, General. Your explanation doesn't
match what I was told last night. You were about
to explain to me what my son could possibly have
to do with national security."
"Did I say that? National security?"
"Yes. To Mr. Jones."
The orderly came in again, now with a single egg
in its cup and a rack of toast. In the silence that
settled over the table, I sensed General
Healy's relief to have yet another interruption.
The orderly placed the food on the mat before the
general's wife, who said, "What will have you, Mr.
Montgomery?"
"Nothing, thank you," I answered, although her
small mistake in word order made me wonder
if these two were putting me on. The orderly
left. As he went through the swinging door, I
sensed that someone else was in the kitchen, listening.
I said, "I simply need to know where Michael
is, and then I will leave."
"I told you," General Healy said. "They
went to the race, the sports car race." As he
said this, he stared at his wife, who had no trouble
meeting and holding his eyes, a fierce field of
energy between them.
"At Nuremberg, you said."
"No, N@urburgring. A different place."
"But a racetrack."
"Yes."
At that, Mrs. Healy looked down. She
picked up a spoon, but only to stare at
it.
"And they will be home tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow night at the latest," he answered
easily. "Our son is fluent in German, an
experienced Jugendherberger."
"What?"
"Youth-hosteler. They're having a blast."
He smashed his cigarette in the ashtray.
I turned to Mrs. Healy. "Is that your
sense of it as well?"
She continued to stare at her spoon, which was as
unmoving as she.
"Of course it is," the general answered."
Isn't it, dear?"
There was command in him now, and she looked up
sharply. "Yes," she said quietly. "I
suppose it is."
With a concluding air, the general said, "These young
people are adults, Mr. Montgomery. I have
airmen under my command who are their age. Airmen with
real responsibility. Your son is fine. I
think you're a little ... overconcerned perhaps?"
Mrs. Healy chose that moment to strike her
spoon against the shell of her egg--a punctuating
click. The general dropped his napkin onto the
table and pushed away. "The kids will be fine," he
told me with dismissive condescension. He stood,
and to his wife said, "Excuse my not waiting,
darling. If I'm going to get on the golf
course this afternoon, I have to get to the office now."
Mrs. Healy nodded. Her one hand was tapping
the shell of her egg, the other still holding a
cigarette. Her hands, I noticed, were chapped,
rough-skinned, her fingers blunted.
The general collected the folder from its place
on the table, then made a show of waiting for me
to stand. "Can I arrange a car for you, Mr.
Montgomery?"
"My driver is outside."
"Then I'll show you to the door."
There was no question of my remaining behind, to be alone
with his wife. I glanced at her as she wearily
put the cigarette to her mouth.
I stood and, following the general's gesture,
led the way out of the dining room without a word to Mrs.
Healy, who was not going to look at me in any
case.
Along the short hallway was a door,
slightly ajar. The room behind the door was
invisible, but a sharp odor came from it, and
I was past before I realized what the odor was--
developing fluid. A darkroom. A
household with an amateur photographer.
In the broad foyer, sunlight angled through the
fanlight above the wide wooden double door,
leaving a wash of illumination on the dark parquet
floor. Where had the thick weather gone? The
buoyant morning light defied the grim weight
of what had brought me here without lifting it.
Beside an oval entranceway table--telephone,
a woman's kid gloves, a small blue
vase with a spray of edelweiss--the orderly was
standing with the general's blue tunic ready, holding
it open as if it were armor.
Healy turned, and as he did I leaned ever so
slightly toward the telephone, the disk with its
set of digits.
When I faced the general again, he was slipping
his arms into the tunic's sleeves, deftly
transferring the file folder from one hand to the other.
As he did this, he was watching me closely,
working to measure my height and bearing.
Physically, we were a match.
A pair of silver stars rode on each of his
shoulders, insignia guaranteed to snag the gaze
of a man of my time. And as any veteran's would
have, my eyes then went to the four rows of banded
ribbons on the general's blouse, automatically
deciphering. Nestled among theater ribbons were
battle honors, including the purple and white
of the Purple Heart and the blue of the Distinguished
Flying Cross. Despite my visceral
dislike, I could not look at General Healy's
decorations without admiring him. Whatever else
accounted for his marriage to a self-possessed
German woman, it was clear, at least, that this
man, surviving the chaos of battle, had known
how to offer survival to others.
Above the ribbons were the silver wings of a command
pilot, featuring a star and a laurel wreath. I
indicated his wings with a nod. "I gather, as
J-2, your flying days are over, General."
He ignored my thrust. "I log my time,
Mr. Montgomery. To keep the rating up, for
old times' sake." And then he parried, "You
served?"
"Yes," I answered, without saying "sir."
"Navy. Destroyers. The Pacific."
"And now?"
"Banking."
"Ah, yes. The new Germany."
"With any luck."
As the general looked me over in my gray
flannel suit, I wonder now, what did he
see? Not, I presume, what Americans think
they see in that emblem of faceless conformity. Aware
of each other as veterans of the war, Healy and I
could assume the same winding of the mind around an
absolute past: him at the stick, say, of a
B-29 homing in on D@usseldorf, his
wingman on fire, his concentration fixed on the cone
of target, outside of which all was chaos; me on
the pilothouse bridge of the Stephen Case,
glasses to my face, desperately searching the
blue surface for the telltale streak of the
second torpedo that had to be coming. We knew it
was coming, the skipper waiting for me to tell him where,
where, before ordering the rudder over, shifting course
to present a shrunken target. I never saw the
bloody thing.
The USS Stephen Case. Her
specifications as permanently imprinted as the
address of the house I grew up in.
Displacement: 2,200 tons. Length: 376
feet, 6 inches. Beam: 40 feet, 10
inches. Draught: 19 feet, somewhere in the midst
of which the unseen second torpedo struck.
Crew: 251 men, 23 officers, of whom 197
men and 12 officers died that day when the Stephen
Case sank in 150 fathoms, 12 miles
south-southwest of Vangunu, one of the smaller of the
Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.
It was February 4, 1943, more than three
months, the naval historians say, after
Admiral Halsey had secured the waters around
Guadalcanal. Most of my shipmates were
dead, but two weeks later I was on leave in
Honolulu, in a hotel room overlooking the
beach at Waikiki, sometimes thinking that I, too,
had drowned, which alone explained how I could be in
bed with Edie, in bed for days. It was the only time
in my life when the main sensation, during sex, was
of watching myself, as if there were mirrors on the
ceiling. I was endlessly fascinated by the sight of
my own writhing, naked body, bubbles streaming from
my nose as I clawed up, up, up toward the
surface of the sea, which, from below, is a mirror.
I could never reach that surface. A drowning man
is his own voyeur.
"What?" Edie had asked, and asked
again. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me." When
I couldn't, she let me see her disappointment.
When we parted at week's end, it seemed we had
accomplished nothing, but that was not so. I was
assigned to another destroyer in the same battle
group, but I never stopped thinking of the Stephen
Case, never stopped feeling that I had lost
her. Edie went back to San Diego, where she
worked in the Blood Donor Service. A month
later, she wrote to say she was pregnant and
heading home to New York, but under Halsey we
had pushed all the way through the Solomons to New
Guinea. I didn't receive her letter until
summer. Michael was born in November.



Somewhere behind us a screen door slammed.
Someone leaving the house ahead of us?
With a brusque nod, General Healy turned
toward the door, donning his hat. The folder was
under his arm.
He led me out into the newly glistening sunshine.
His sky-blue limousine, a Lincoln, was at the
curb now, nose to tail with my black
Mercedes. My driver was at his passenger
door, waiting. Healy's, a blue-uniformed
airman, was coming around his car, having just closed the
far door for someone else, a passenger already in the
rear seat. As Healy and I approached the
curb, the airman saluted.
I sensed the tension in Gerhard, the positive
energy it took not to raise his arm at the infamous
angle, like the positive energy it had taken me,
moments before, not to say "sir."
Healy called his farewell to me: "The kids
will be fine." Then, with a wave of the folder, he
ducked into his car. He said something to the passenger
who was already there, another man in uniform whose
profile I glimpsed. He was blond.
Stooping to my own car, I knew that the general
was right, provided all that he said was true--knowing
equally that all that he said was not.
A mile or two from Lindsay Air Station was
the center of Wiesbaden, as defined by the
barrel-vaulted Hauptbahnhof. Above the
red-brick railroad station was a sentry-like
clock tower, its spiked dome evoking the
helmet of a kaiser's cavalier. Before the station
stood a three-tiered Roman fountain
around which the light automobile traffic of a
Saturday morning flowed. Opposite the station a
broad park was spread, acres of grass, trim
as a bowling green. Clusters of spring flowers in
every color wore the beads of the recent rain like a
dust of glass.
Wiesbaden, a hospital town in the war, had
not been badly bombed, and so it alone of
Rhineland cities retained its prewar beauty.
Running along one side of the park were the Baroque
nineteenth-century buildings of the municipality,
and along the other, the colonnades of the
Kurhaus, site of the ancient hot-spring
baths. Next to the Kurhaus was the elegant
casino, the Spielbank. One client of mine,
bringing me here in the winter, had joked, at
Chase's expense, that Spielbank means
"play bank;" while another client had let
drop that Dostoyevsky's The Gambler had
been set there.
As my car approached the three-tiered fountain,
sliding into the traffic rotary immediately in front
of the station, I impulsively instructed Gerhard
to pull over. I told him to keep the motor
running, then left the car for the station, thinking of that
gambler. In the ticket hall, I found a pair
of telephone booths, chose one, and put a
tenpfennig piece into its slot, my slot
machine. I dialed the number I had memorized
in the general's foyer.
"General Healy's quarters." I assumed it
was the orderly who answered, although I had not heard
his voice during my visit. He spoke so
flatly it was as if those three were the only words in
his vocabulary.
"I would like to speak with Mrs. Healy, please.
Kindly tell her this is Michael
Montgomery's father."
A long time passed.
Then the one sharply articulated word,
"Hello?"
"Mrs. Healy, forgive this interruption. I
had the feeling that with General Healy having to rush
off, you and I hadn't quite completed our conversation."
Again a long silence.
Then, so quietly I wasn't sure I'd
heard, "Had we begun it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Our conversation. Had we begun it?"
"I am only trying to understand what's
going on with my son."
"I really ... have ... nothing to add to what my
husband told you."
"You said you know Michael. You said you like him."
"I do. Yes."
"Can you imagine how I feel? How unlike
him it is to have done this?"
"Done what?"
"Not come home. Not tell me."
"Oh."
"What do you think he has done?" I waited
a long time for her answer. Finally I said, "I
know you are worried, as I am. Why are you
worried, Mrs. Healy? Your husband says there
is nothing to worry about, but he is worried,
too. I can tell. We're all worried
parents. That's why I called you."
"Not worried about the same things."
"What?"
"I cannot talk to you, Mr. Montgomery."
"Mrs. Healy, Michael is--" I checked
myself--stopped myself from blurting, "Michael is
all I have." That I shamefully depended on my
child for emotional equilibrium had not been true
when Edie had made the charge, but it was true now.
I had almost just said so. Such was the forbidden line I
was already being dragged across, as if I knew what
lay ahead.
I veered, saying, "Michael has had his
problems, Mrs. Healy. And I would just be far more
at ease knowing what is going on."
"I wish to be able to help you. I do not know
myself, as you say, what is going on. I do not know
where Ulrich is--your son, or Katharine."
"Ulrich? Katharine?"
"Rick. He is also called Rick. I
call him Rick. They call Katharine Kit.
With Americans always the Spitzname."
"Not always. My son is--" But I stopped.
If he had a nickname, would I know it? This
woman would.
She finished my sentence. "Your son is
Michael. It is true. A good full name for
him. Michael the archangel."
"You don't know where they are, Mrs. Healy?
I gathered from what your husband said that you did know.
N@urburgring. The Grand Prix race. The
sports car club."
"There is a club," she said. "And the race was
what Rick told his father and me. But it
is not true. Rick lied to us. They are not at
races. They are not at N@urburg. My
husband concluded that yesterday afternoon.
"And so called Mr. Jones at the
dormitory."
"Yes."
"So your son, my son, this girl--they
simply disappeared?"
"For them it is an adventure, the Ler-
che, lark. I am satisfied that my husband is
right about that. The young people have no sense of danger."
"What danger?" I heard the involuntary
escalation in the pitch of my voice. "Your
husband is tracking them now? And he is doing it
surreptitiously?"
There was a loud noise behind her, in the
background, a door banging, a carton falling,
something. The sudden hollowness in my ear told me
that she had cupped the mouthpiece of her phone.
She spoke to someone, a crisp order in German
I could not make out. Then to me, with an edge, she
declared, "I have nothing to say to you more. It is
impossible that you and I should talk together in this
way."
"Not impossible at all, Mrs. Healy,
since we are doing it. We have something important
in common, you and I."
"What is that?"
"I don't know. You tell me."
When she did not answer, I thought, crazily
enough, Spook! The wife of a spook. The
exotic, mysterious German wife of a man whose
wife should have been anything but.
She had just admitted that her son had lied, that
her husband had lied, too. Lied to me. She had
allowed it.
I expected her to hang up, but I waited.
A full minute passed and she still had not
disconnected, and I thought, She is considering the
question--what we have in common. And now I knew.
"You are serious about your son," I said.
"Absolutely."
"So am I about mine."
"Where are you?" she asked abruptly. The
change in her tone, I understood, meant a new
decision.
"The Hauptbahnhof," I answered. "A
pay phone."
"Where is your car?"
"Outside. My driver's waiting."
"Do not return to your car," she said.
Authority came easily to her, and for the first time
since the evening before, I found it possible
to suspend what had made me suspicious. "You
must do exactly as I tell you. Your car is being
followed. Leave the station by a side door.
Take an auto-taxi to Hainerberg. Browse in
the base exchange. Become lost in it. Then
walk up the hill to the clinic, where there will be more
taxis. Be sure you are not followed. Take a
second taxi to the Russian Chapel. The
driver will know. Wait there."
The disconnecting click came so quickly I
knew she did it with her finger.

The Russian Chapel was visible from everywhere in the
Rhine River valley. A sepulchral shrine
with three golden onion domes, it sat on top
of a small mountain on the eastern edge of the city.
A local duke had it built a hundred years
before, in memory of his wife, a niece of the czar,
after she died giving birth to her first child. I had
seen the chapel only from a distance, but I needed
no taxi driver to tell me where it was. I'd
had it pointed out on practically every visit
to Wiesbaden. None of my hosts ever seemed
to know if the child, whether boy or girl, had lived
or died.
The surprise in actually visiting the chapel
was to find that it stood with its back to the view. In
the valley I had been admiring it from behind. A
small Orthodox church, the entrance faced a
gravel circle that was ringed, in turn, by an
oval grove of birch trees, the tops of which
fell short of the troika domes. The
life-size veiled head of a woman, carved in
stone, stared blankly out from the meter-wide
medallion above the portal. More than inert, she
seemed vividly dead.
I pulled the heavy door open and stepped
inside. While my sense of sight failed at
once, my sense of smell came alive. The
pungent odors of stale incense, candle wax,
dust, and perhaps the leavings of small animals all
combined to evoke the airless musk of religion.
What I took to be a sanctuary lamp burned
above me, but then I realized the red glow was from the
glass of a rose window strategically placed
to illuminate the otherwise dark reaches of a very
high ceiling.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw what a
cramped space it was: an altar, a grilled
screen before it, a half-dozen pews, and on the
wall to the right, below the rose window, a
gilt-framed icon whose face I could not make
out.
A rack of squat, mostly burned-out candle
stubs stood before the icon. Altogether, the shrine might
not have been entered in the century since its
princess died, and suddenly it seemed more
mausoleum than church. I backed out, feeling
like a profaning interloper.
Aware of the crunch of my shoes on gravel,
I circled around the building to the small fenced
plaza behind. I took in the vista of the city
spread below, the needle spires of Wiesbaden's
Lutheran churches, the brick tower of the
Rathaus, the town hall. A line of haze
hung over the Rhine, an otherwise invisible
river perhaps five miles distant. From that
direction--ultimately, from the North
Atlantic--storm clouds marched steadily
overhead, having overrun the sun again. I took
the driving wind squarely in my face, the way a
deck officer does.
I studied the view as a way to avoid looking
at my watch. The taxi had dropped me at the
bottom of a curving gravel road that marked the
limit of the secluded site. Odd that the chapel
should be so visible across the province yet so
isolated. A Saturday morning, but there were no
other visitors. Then it hit me that Mrs.
Healy would have known that.
Not for the first time, I wondered what Gerhard would
be making of my having vanished. A decade or
two later, expatriate American
executives holding positions like mine would be at
risk for kidnapping, even in Europe, but not
then, when we Yanks were still unvanquished. I
knew that before calling the police at my
disappearance, Gerhard would call Butterfield,
my assistant, back in Frankfurt. So from
Hainerberg, I had called Butterfield first,
and told him to have Gerhard wait for me at the
station.
And I, precisely what was I making of the
melodrama into which I had been conscripted? I
had never been a man for mystery novels or spy
thrillers, and if you had told me that I would
take seriously a warning of being followed,
whispered by a woman with an accent, I would have
laughed at you. But that was before mystery had come
to define my life, the mystery of what Michael
was becoming, the mystery of what Edie's absence had
done to both of us.
Soon I was no longer seeing Wiesbaden;
my mind's eye drifted back to that other grove
of birch trees, in the far corner of the Holy
Trinity churchyard in Oyster Bay. Those trees
marked the Elgin burial plot, where Edie's
family members had been laid to rest since the
middle of the nineteenth century. We mourners were
not actually to witness the interment, so custom
dictated. But as the others were ushered by undertakers
away from the casket and its mound of flowers, I
stonily refused to move. The minister approached
to touch my elbow. Edie's father looked at me with
disapproval.
I had not seen her die. It had never occurred
to me I would not see her remains entrusted to the
earth. How many times could I be missing from this
woman's side when she needed me? Near the
mahogany box that held her crushed body, I
stood with no comprehension of anything but her absence.
Edie's absence was what required my presence.
Her parents' concentration had already been
transported from the churchyard to the country club,
where the caterers would have spread the collation. When
Edie's mother took my arm, I was aware of it, but
I must have shaken her off, because then she was gone, and
so were the others. For some moments there, because Edie had
ceased to exist, so had everything else--including
Michael, which, when I realized it later, seemed
a betrayal of him. I do not know with whom my
bereft son drifted from the graveside back to the
cars, or if he walked off alone. That my
state was one of pure anguish does not change
what else it was, a feeling in grief, which
later seemed another betrayal, of being more
intensely alive than ever.
"Hello, Mr. Montgomery."
She was standing behind me.
I turned. "Hello," I said awkwardly,
unclear for the instant what I was doing here, or who
she was.
She looked different, for one thing. Her hair
was up from her neck, showing the long line that curved
up from her shoulders to her face. She had changed
from riding clothes and now wore a dress of some
kind beneath a trench coat, with the coat's
belt tightly cinched. She wore tan linen
gloves, an item of style, not warmth, and she
wore heeled sandals, which drew my attention to her
shapely ankles.
The odd thing to strike me was that she shaved her
legs, which of course every American woman did.
I had grown up assuming hair grew no more on
female legs than faces, and though by then I
knew better, nothing had cracked my
self-presumed sophistication like the discovery that
year that most German women did not shave their
legs, not even some of the most fashionably coifed
of those I'd met in Frankfurt. But Mrs.
Healy did. Shaven legs, and the relatively
compulsive hygiene they represented, would have been
just one self-reinvention following her marriage to a
well-placed American. Then the exotic aroma
of her perfume hit me again. I deflected the
sensation. She was the mother of Michael's friend, that's
all.
"I apologize, Mrs. Healy, for putting
you in a difficult position."
"Not difficult. Impossible."
"I understand."
"No, you do not understand, because you could not understand.
When you came to our quarters this morning, you--what
is the word--trespassed on a different realm."
"Trespassed? And so one must be aware of being
followed?"
She shrugged. "If you are seen doing business
with my husband, you become of interest."
"To whom?"
"Shadows who watch from shadows."
"But there are no shadows on an American
air base. Unless American. Who would have seen
me coming and going except people under your husband's
control?"
She glanced at me, a quick dismissal.
Shadows, she had said. Shadows in shadows.
Spooks. "They watch you?" I asked.
She snapped her head to the side, no. "I
am taken for granted. I am the clock, the
chair, the domestic pet, the Frau. Nothing
to notice if I maintain my routine, which
normally I do without thinking. Today I must think about
it. That is why I made you wait. I had
to take my horse out. The day must be like any
other. It is why my husband goes to the office this
morning, the golf course this afternoon. A Saturday
like any other."
"And your visit here?"
She cast her eyes toward the golden domes.
"My kleine Kapelle. An ordinary
visit. I come often here. I say a prayer.
I light a candle. I am alone. The place
has the advantage of being too obvious to be
observed." Without moving from where she stood, she
thrust her gloved hands into the pockets of her
coat, a definitive gesture.
She let her gaze come surely to mine.
Nothing uncertain in her, yet her eyes
skittered away, the domestic pet made
to scat. An ambushing qualm, I felt it,
too. Strangers, yet from the moments in the dining
room of her refusal to second her husband, and of
my instinctive memorizing of a telephone
number, we had taken a plunge into the
surreptitious.
Nothing to do against a climate of deceit but
openly declare whatever comes to mind. "I went into the
chapel, Mrs. Healy. Candles, you said. No
one lights candles in there, not in ages."
With that, she took her hand out of her coat
to display a small white candle about two inches
thick, four inches high. Stubs of such candles were
what I'd glimpsed in the vigil rack before the
icon, wrongly taking them for an ancient
vestige of devotion. Was it also my mistake to have
assumed her readiness, like her husband's, to lie?
As if reading me, she looked away. This
rendezvous, all at once, could seem to be
aiming at anything. I became more conscious still of
her exceptional attractiveness, how life had
ushered her, whether gently or not, out of the round
lightness of youth into the far edgier gravity of a
woman who knows what time it is, knowing what time
is doing. It was a trajectory I had tracked
once before in watching Edie across twenty years.
For a brief while the previous summer every woman
had reminded me of Edie. Then none had.
"My husband is afraid that our son has
stumbled, how to say, into his arena. That is why my
husband is not telling you. He cannot."
"But you can."
"But I know less than he."
"A clock, you said. A chair. Furniture
is witness to everything. Your husband confides in
you."
"Not as you mean it. But in front of me he
takes calls. For meetings in the middle
of the night, people come to our house."
"Last night."
"Yes."
"This morning. Someone was at the table just ahead of
me at breakfast."
"Yes."
"And you listen?"
She did not answer, but I sensed that this was what
she had come to speak of. "You listen," I said
quietly. "Because this time it's not the U-2.
It's your son."
She gave me a look. "How do you know about
my husband and the U-2?"
"General Healy's weather reconnaissance
wing? Is that still secret?"
She laughed. "Not from the Russians."
"How long was it secret from you?"
"You should perhaps understand something, Mr.
Montgomery. My husband tells me nothing.
And I need to know nothing."
"How does that work, if you don't mind my
asking? Your husband suddenly is a weather
forecaster, and you don't wonder?"
"To the U-2 I never gave a thought. But this
is different."
I saw that this was what I'd walked into that
morning, the fierce electric air between them. This
was different, because Rick could not have stumbled into his
father's arena without bringing in his mother. To which the general
had said, practically in front of me, no.
And then I saw something else, a simple
matter of arithmetic that all but an oaf would have
calculated at once. An eighteen-year-old
boy would have been born in 1943, of an
American father or a German mother--not both.
"Rick is your son, and not the general's."
She shook her head, denying not my point but its
unhappy implication. "That has nothing to do with this.
In all ways that matter, my husband is
Rick's father."
The crisp certitude of her statement reminded
me once again of Edie: the antidote to doubt is
assertion. If Edie, in her anger at me,
took a curve on that mountain road at sixty
miles an hour, it was because she knew there would be
nothing coming at her from the other side. Surely not
a ratty pickup truck being driven by a kid
who'd been at his father's moonshine.
"So "Rick" is short for--?"
"Ulrich. I told you that."
"And his biological father--?"
"Killed in the war," she said with exquisite
abstraction.
"And you and General Healy--?"
Now she looked at me sharply, as if my
concern had become interrogation. Nevertheless she said,
"We met in 1947 and married in 1949."
"In Berlin."
"You know that?" Surprise transformed her
face into something youthful, innocent almost.
"I know from having read the general's official
file that he was stationed in Berlin in 1949."
She stared at me for a long moment, and I found
it possible to meet her hard look. Finally she
said, "I did not come here for discussing my husband
or my life."
"I understand that, Mrs. Healy. You told me
to meet you here because you want me to know what you think
is happening to our children."
She nodded.
"So why not tell me?"
She slowly removed her gloves, then stuffed
them in her pocket. When she brought her hand out,
she held a nearly new pack of cigarettes,
blue in color, French--not what she'd smoked
in her dining room. While she readied one, I
went for my lighter, but by then she had hers out. It
was gold, slim, monogrammed. I took it from
her, as men did in those days, and offered its
flame. The cigarette drew my attention to her
fingers and hands, which, I saw now, were more than
chapped. They were vaguely twisted, misshapen.
The nails were manicured, but there was a thickness in
her knuckles, a hide-like quality to the skin that
was completely unlike the rest of her. She had the
hands of an overworked peasant.
When she'd exhaled, she cast her eyes about,
then led me to a bench in the shadowy lee of the
chapel.
We sat side by side, out of the wind. I
became aware of being cold. My raincoat was in
the car with Gerhard, who was--what, resentfully
cooling his heels at the station? With my left hand,
I stroked my right arm to warm myself, waiting for her
to speak.
"Thursday night, Rick and my husband
fought." Her rough voice was eerily devoid of
affect. "The plan had been for Rick and his friends
--although not including Michael, as far as I knew
--to leave for N@urburg at the end of
school on Friday. Rick suddenly wanted
to, you say, skip?"
I nodded.
"Skip his classes, to leave Wiesbaden in
the morning. Friday morning. A day of school.
I had told him no, impossible, which he seemed
to accept. But when my husband came home--the
general was very late that night, having been away--
he said that missing a day of school was forbidden. This
is what I had said, what I had thought Rick
accepted. But now Rick defied my husband.
At times they are very angry with each other, and they
were then. My son is very much needing to be--" She
stopped, more full of feeling than she had, until
then, made evident.
"Himself?" I suggested.
She nodded. "He is a German boy living
as an American. Until this year, he was in
schools in England. And it is very confusing for him.
Ulrich is his name, but everyone calls him
Rick. Even I do. And he says that now
seems wrong."
"Why England?" I asked.
She ignored the question, which I would remember
later.
"On Thursday night he said the name
"Rick" seems wrong to him, but he said it
angrily. My husband hardly heard him, and
answered that such feelings are irrelevant, but I
think not. My husband will not be contradicted in an
argument. Meanwhile, Rick--Ulrich--will no
longer be commanded into obedience. As if a child."
As she spoke, it was Michael's face I was
seeing--his mouth twisted with resentment. So this
kid Ulrich was the source of Michael's new
rebelliousness. I felt the rush of my
resentment again, happy to have this other family
to blame.
"My husband," she was saying, "told Rick
that the N@urburg trip was off, and that instead he was
confined. Confined. As if the boy had been brought
before a military court. Confined for the weekend. As
soon as school was out on Friday, yesterday,
Rick was to be home and in his room.
Ridiculous idea. Do you confine your son?"
I shook my head. I couldn't even say no
to him about the car this week, when I should have.
"Rick banged into his room, the slam of his
door sounded like a gunshot."
"I heard a gunshot recently,"
I said, not knowing why I brought that up.
Deflecting the memory of a slamming door?
She didn't hear me anyway. She went
on, "Then I told my husband I thought they had
both behaved like children. I went to bed, and by the time
David came into our room, I was asleep."
She had finally referred to her husband by name--an
unconscious expression, perhaps, of the moment's
intimacy, a thwarted intimacy, to be sure. But
I knew from life with Edie that the heat of argument
was still heat. Mrs. Healy stared at the red tip of
her cigarette. Aware of myself as an uninvited
witness to this family's complexities, I knew
better than to prompt her, but I also knew that the
story had just begun. Where the hell is
Michael in this?
"The next morning--yesterday--we woke to find
that Rick was gone. He left a note on the
kitchen table, addressed to me, in German, saying
only that he could no longer go on living like a
Heuchler, a hypocrite. The purity of
youth. He signed it formally, "Ulrich.""
"Rejecting his American name," I said.
"Yes. More completely than you think. He
signed it "Ulrich von Neuhaus," as if
he is no longer one of us as Healy. And then he
is leaving the note in the kitchen where my husband,
too, would read it. Von Neuhaus is
Ulrich's name before my husband adopted him as a
boy of six, my husband who loves him as I
do, but who cannot understand his impossible position."
"Von Neuhaus," I said softly, sensing the
blow it would be to Healy. "His biological
father's name."
"No," she said a bit too emphatically.
"My family name."
"But you said--"
"Von Neuhaus was Ulrich's original name
because his father and I never married. His father was in the
war. That is all."
"I see," I said. But of course I saw so
little. The aristocratic "von" would explain her
self-assured bearing, although now she seemed ready
to forfeit that under the weight of sadness. The barest
alteration in color had come over her throat and
neck, a pinkish flush that rose from the chute of
two slender bones just visible inside the collar of
her coat. As she drew on her cigarette, her
cheekbones seemed to press out against her skin.
Impossible position, she had said. The
wave of feeling I saw in her seemed one of
simple regret, as if her choices, long
made, more than her husband's or her son's, were
the ones that had been wrong.
"Rick was gone," she said slowly. "And"--she
paused, flagging what she was about to say--"so was my
husband's flight bag."
"What?"
"His flight bag. An overnight bag. A
government-issue canvas bag with zipper
pockets. It was gone. Apparently Rick
took it. That seems to be the main problem, Mr.
Montgomery. My husband's problem--his
flight bag. He had brought it the night before
home with him, after being away, supposedly in
Brussels, but I do not know. Such things he
does not confide in me, as I said to you--nor should
he. I know what I know only because I saw his
irritation at Rick become a matter of gross
alarm when he realized the bag was gone."
"National security."
"I believe so. Yes."
"Why would Rick take his father's bag?"
"He needs a bag. He sees a bag. He
takes it." She shrugged, shaking her head. "An
expression of anger, perhaps." She smiled
wanly. "But also maybe the Air Force bag had
its own appeal. This could be near to funny. Our
rebellious son who works to be free of his father's
shadow, who wants to reclaim a pure German
spirit--still, he loves to be the American general's
son. In his British school, until last
year, it was the nationality. In the American
school this year, it is the rank. He hates it.
He loves it. If he took my husband's
bag, it is, I think, also because of the letters printed
on the blue canvas: USAF. Because of the silver
stars on the tag, making it a general's bag."
"So what does your husband carry in such a
bag? What would alarm him?"
Mrs. Healy shrugged again, definitively this
time. She dropped her cigarette distractedly,
an indifferent bombardier. Her foot went quickly
to snuff it, a firm movement that took me into a
vivid memory of Edie's shoes, shoes with
heels, straps, buckles, shoes on her feet
or sideways on the floor, kicked off in the
bored aftermath of an evening, or in eagerness,
kicked-off shoes beside satin underwear.
She said, "So both of us went to the
high school. There was no question, since this was
Rick, of my not going. It was not yet nine in the
morning. We learned soon enough, waiting until
the attendance roll was taken, that two other
students were also absent."
"Michael."
"And Kit."
"The girl."
"Katharine. A friend of Rick's, and, I
suppose, of Michael's."
"Rick's girlfriend?"
She rotated her hand in a way that said, On and
off. "She lives in the dormitory. Her
parents are at a base in Turkey. It was her
roommate who said they had gone on ahead of the car
club to the race at N@urburgring, to see the
qualifying heats that began yesterday. Apparently
Michael had a car?"
"Yes. I let him take the car
to Wiesbaden this week."
"They went in Michael's car," she said without
accusation. Still, I heard the implication:
Michael's car was the source of the trouble. My
allowing a violation of a rule.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"My husband had his reasons. As for me, I
honestly thought, as with Kit's parents, that you would not
know, or need to."
"And you heard the general tell Mr. Jones not
to call me. So you didn't."
"My husband is a man of authority."
"Except where your son is concerned."
"Is that what you propose to do? Calculate
a score? One team of parents against the other?"
My silence was not deliberate, yet it served,
apparently, to make her hear again what she had
said.
She corrected herself. "I did not mean
"team.""
And that simply, I knew that she knew that
Edie was dead.
Any response I could have made would have been
insufferably banal--that is how I thought in those
days. So I said nothing.
She felt obliged to explain. "Michael
has spoken to me. That his mother died not a year
ago, I know. That she died in her automobile,
I know that."
"There was a collision on a mountain road,"
I said. And then I surprised myself
by adding, "It was an accident," as if Mrs.
Healy had wondered, as if I had. In fact,
I never had wondered about that. Nothing in Edie
wanted to die.
This first explicit reference to her death in--
what, four or six months? Is that what drew
me into this other woman's aura? I had yet
to begin to grasp what Michael's situation might
be, yet now, on that chill bench, in damp,
blustery air, I found myself examining her face.
Again I saw wreckage in her eyes, which, using
her cigarette as a prop, she then lowered.
Nothing, I sensed, wanting to die in her either.
"I know that Michael's mother was a good woman,"
she said. "He has told me how close they
were, how he misses her. He has told me
how she cared for him when he was ill."
"I'm surprised he told you that," I said.
"My son is reticent."
"It is a good thing, Mr. Montgomery,
to talk about this." She raised her face toward me
again, but now with a certain defiance--as if I, an
American male, believed in reticence. A
certain defiance, but also her face seemed
unprotected, which made unthinkable any
expression of the resentment I felt at her
intimacy with my son. Not resentment--jealousy.
"I am sure you are right, Mrs. Healy,"
I said carefully. "I appreciate your kindness
to my son. But I need to know now where he is.
What is happening?"
"You are afraid for your son," she said, "but not
only because he did not come home this weekend."
"This week was the first time I let him take the
car." Now I recognized something else to be
afraid of--not that he was hit by a reckless
driver, as Edie was, but that he was the reckless
kid on the road, hitting someone else.
She went on, "Fear, Mr. Montgomery,
can be an expression of grief."
I had to look away. Reticent with me, is
what I should have said about Michael. How could he have
discussed such feelings with this stranger and never with
me? Yet look at how I, too, was reacting
to her.
The weather had turned dark again, the wind
gustier. Clusters of wing-shaped seed pods
swirled at our feet. Still looking away, thinking
about the war father of her child, I asked, "How do you
know that about grief?"
"You ask me that?"
Again I assumed she was rebuking me, the
profaning interloper once more. But when I looked
at her, to my surprise a faint smile had
transformed her face, a resigned expression that
asked, below the surface, Where would I start
to answer such a question?
Impossible. To change this impossible
conversation, I stood up. The winged seeds had been
sucked into a whirling funnel between us. "So then,"
I said, "let's discuss the simpler things.
Gross alarm. National security. The danger
of my being followed. By your husband's agents?
Or some enemy's? My son's disappearance. The
breach between you and your husband regarding your son.
What the hell is going on?"
She stood, too. She took something out of her
pocket, an old-fashioned cloche hat. It
had started to rain. She put the hat on without a
thought for arranging her hair, then, ducking, she
moved past me to dash away, as if the water would
hurt her. I went after her, snagging her elbow,
the gentleman showing the way. The ridiculousness of
such pairing was in the quick authority with which she led me
inside the Russian Chapel, pulling the door
open, not tentatively, as I had, but as if she
had done it dozens of times before. Once more, the
relative darkness of the Byzantine interior
blinded me.
A flame flared in her hand--her golden
lighter. She lit the candle she had shown me and
placed it in a cup on the vigil rack in
front of the icon. She lit several of the candle
stubs. Only now I noticed that the icon showed
the face of the sorrowful mother of God--burnished
skin, golden braided hair parted in the center, a
red robe, eyes cast demurely down toward the
lower left corner of the gilded frame. Mrs.
Healy stood before the icon with her back to me for a
long moment--enough to make me wonder if she was
praying.
I thought of Edie. St. John the Divine.
Not prayer, but mere refuge. When Mrs.
Healy turned to me, the wavering light was at
play on her face, and now her skin, too, was
burnished.
The mood cracked as soon as she began
to speak. "They found your son's car last night,"
she said briskly. You want the answer? was
her tone. Here it is.
"Where?" I asked. "Are they all right?"
"They found the car. Only the car."
They. Her use and my use of that one word,
referring both to our kids and to the shadow figures
who pursued them, confused me at first. Then,
once more, the refrain: What could Michael have
to do with any of this?
"In an ordinary car park," she was saying.
"The car was normal, parked and locked. My
husband's flight bag was not there, nor were the young
people."
"You have to slow down. Who found the car?"
"Military police. American military
police. Not German. German police have been
told nothing. My husband's men who came to the
house last night reported on this. I heard
them. Your son's car--a blue convertible. An
American car."
"Yes."
"They were looking for it all through the day yesterday
on the routes west, toward N@urburg. But the
three were not going there at all. The sports car
club, yes. But not them. The MP'S found the car
in a city to the north, which is what ..." Pausing,
she searched for a word. The flickering light, shadows
dancing, underscored the unreality of what was
unfolding, made me think of the other chapel, the
other nightmare from years before, polio. "... what
heightened concern."
"What city?"
"Helmstedt."
I had never heard of it.
"Helmstedt," she explained, "on the border
of East and West, at the Allied access
corridor that runs through Soviet Germany."
Soviet Germany. As I repeat the phrase
she used, I recall that it was a common term for
East Germany--the DDR--IN those days. To us, that
vast continent stretching east beyond the Curtain--
Prussia, Silesia, Lithuania, Poland,
Ukraine, the entire way to Azerbaijan and
Turkmenistan--all of it was "Russia," and
all of it was Red.
"Helmstedt," she was saying, "is the last
place in West Germany where the duty train
stops."
"What the hell is that?"
"The American military train into Berlin.
It is why my husband is telling you nothing.
Telling no one. To avoid alerting
authorities in the East. Apparently Rick,
Michael, and Kit left the car and boarded the
train. Probably in the late afternoon yesterday.
A train passed through Helmstedt at four o'clock.
Three hours later, having crossed through the
DDR"--SHE pronounced the letters the German way
--"they would have arrived in West Berlin."
"West Berlin, Jesus Christ. Three
kids can't go to West Berlin on their own." I
had traveled there myself around four times in the
course of the year, always by airplane, always with a
sense of high frontier. Berlin was the pin of the
grenade that Khrushchev was waving in Kennedy's
face. As if to emphasize that, Communist
border guards only the month before had shot and
killed a pair of hapless drunks who wandered
into a forbidden zone between sectors. There were regular
stories of West Germans disappearing during
visits to the East. Americans were discouraged from
traveling to Berlin without reason, and no Chase
employee could go there without authorization from me.
"Impossible," I said.
Mrs. Healy nodded at my statement, but it was
a contradicting gesture. "If they go by the
American Army train, they can. On the
autobahn, they would have been stopped by U.s.
military police and by Communist
Volkspolizei. But not on the train, a
military train. The United States
government refuses to let the Communists interfere
in any way with its military access to the city.
You may have gathered that." The resolve concerning
Berlin, the grenade in his face, was Kennedy's
way of refusing to blink. "The duty train," she
said, "is the main symbol of American will, and so
Americans ride it freely."
"But these are kids." What didn't I know
about the high noon of geopolitics? What
didn't I know about the hijinks of American
teenagers set loose in Cold War Europe?
What didn't I know about Michael's capacity
for deceit and stupidity?
"Each one has an American passport,"
she was explaining. "And as dependents, each has
American military identification. For
purposes of the duty train, they are military
personnel. Even your son."
Jesus Christ. It was true. I'd had
to obtain the military ID for Michael as part of
getting him into the high school at
Wiesbaden. Officially, he was the son of a
Defense Department contractor with the senior
civilian rank of GS-19, which was, in
fact, not true. If there was deceit and
stupidity here, it had begun with me.
"Such American identification and a ticket,"
she said, "are the total of what is required.
And the ticket, naturally, like admission to the base
theater for the latest films, like bread in the
commissary"--she was speaking now with a bitter edge,
sounding like a German of the occupation--"costs very little.
My husband's colleagues concluded last night
that Rick and Michael and Kit are in Berlin,
where the search for them goes on."
"But why Berlin?"
"A teenage road trip? What is the new
American hero's name? Jack Kerouac. Jack
Kerouac in Europe." She was summarizing her
own speculations. "West Berlin, the utopia of
pure resistance. The city without das
Heuchler. The destination of young freedom
lovers. German youth are draft exempt if
they live in West Berlin. Therefore anarchists,
Socialists, cowards come--not for the cabaret, as
before, but for the coffeehouses and jazz clubs, like
New York. The young have a hundred such reasons
to go to Berlin. But my husband has another
theory."
"That your son," I ventured, "has his own
history there. His own unfinished business involving
a family named von Neuhaus." This
goddamned family had sucked Michael into this
foolishness, their unfinished business. I calmed
myself to ask, "Wasn't it in Berlin that you were
living when you and General Healy met?"
Her looking away from me was an articulate
refusal to discuss that past. "One says only
"Neuhaus" if the family is being referred
to as such," she instructed in monotone. "The
"von" is a connective, used only as a
link with the forename. Americans are always making this
mistake, and now ignorant Germans are making
it also."
Was this true? How many times had I heard the
dead man in Frankfurt referred to as "von
Siedelheim" that week? But that had mostly been
at the bank. I almost asked her, but her
expression stopped me. There was such weariness in
her that all at once she seemed an old-world
matriarch explaining to a mulish new
servant the intricacies of life in the
Schloss. All Germany was her estate. At
that moment, I disliked her intensely.
She said, "My husband's theory concerns the
sort of thing that might draw the interest of any young
person--a spectacle, an occasion of
excitement and adventure."
"What, then?"
"Do you know what day it is?"
"What day?"
"The date today."
I had to stop. The date today? Hell, I
hardly knew the month by then, the year.
"May first," she said, as if that explained
something. "The first of May, Mr. Montgomery.
The great festival day of world communism. This afternoon
is the May Day parade in East Berlin, already
announced to be a mass display of Soviet
power. A display for President Kennedy, the first
time ever on television. The Red Army marching up
Stalinallee to Alexanderplatz, the tanks, the
missiles, the trucks pulling guns, the
banners with portraits of Lenin, and the streets
lined with a million waschecht Berliners.
Waschecht, a word which is meaning "washing
true." You say "colorfast." Red."
"Tanks, missiles, guns," I repeated,
knowing now where the issue lay. Karl Marx,
misunderstood! Michael got that bullshit from this
other kid, and now he was in danger because of it. But
I did not know the half of it.
"Yes," she was saying, "and your son will be there
with the son of the man in command of American military
intelligence, a boy carrying a bag with silver
stars on its tag. My son, a native of
Leipzig, now behind the Iron Curtain, yet
now with an American name. Your son with
identification that is not true. Both of them
dressed--how? Blue jeans and tennis shoes.
Behaving--how? In a manner to draw immediate
attention to themselves, with the Soviets looking for
points of complaint. What do you think now, Mr.
Montgomery?"
This was thirty years ago, yet I am still
capable of reliving the quite physical sensation that
came over me then, the weakness in my legs, a
near loss of consciousness. Michael at the mercy
of the Soviets. I can't cope with this. Who
had said that to me? Edie, of course. At last I
understood what she felt.

Our separate thoughts had become a wall between me
and Mrs. Healy. When I focused on her
face again, it seemed once more the impassive
face of the burnished icon--suspended, aloof.
Surely I was dreaming, as I had so often
dreamt of the Stephen Case, that torpedo
slamming out of nowhere.
But her steady, cold voice said otherwise.
"When my husband's colleagues left our house
last night, assigned the mission of recovering his
bag while rescuing our son, David and I were
made to confront how we are different. Not in our
wishes or fears, but in our situations, and therefore
in our feelings."
"The boy is your son," I said. The eyes
of the icon above us were hidden, while this real
woman's eyes were light brown, flecked with
green. Her eyes were clear, steady. Feelings,
yes. But no question of her not coping. "And your
husband," I said, "is playing golf this afternoon."
"Do not misunderstand that," she said. "David has
no choice. He would go to Berlin himself, would be in
Berlin already, but East German agents track
him everywhere, and he knows it. Clerks at
Lindsay are Stasi or KGB. Drivers.
Gardeners. Cooks. David must do nothing
to draw attention to the fact that his son is missing,
much less that his son is almost certainly in
Berlin, soon to be in East Berlin. David
has no choice but to entrust to those others a task
he would much rather keep for himself. Out of love."
As she spoke, an emotional undercurrent ran
in the opposite direction from what she was saying.
I sensed that I was hearing the reiteration of an
argument, justifying a reasonable course of action
that to her was utterly to be rejected. "If
David were to go to Berlin himself, it would worsen
Rick's situation--and Michael's and Kit's--
making them more likely to be noticed by the Stasi,
making them more vulnerable to accusations if they are
noticed."
"Accusations?"
"Our children, if they are taken, can be taken for
spies."
"Which is preposterous, of course. As we would
quickly establish."
"Perhaps," she said, even more coldly. "Perhaps
not."
She left it to me to see the problem,
the one with which we'd begun. "The bag," I said.
"The bag and whatever is in it."
"Which is my husband's concern. And as he
points out, our children are not children. Still, they, and they
alone, are my concern. My husband has two
concerns. I have only one. And my husband is
condemned to wait by the side, and condemned is his
word. Because he is well known to the Russians,
to the Stasi. I am not."
"Nor am I."
"That, Mr. Montgomery, is what we have in
common. It is why I am here."
My mind went all at once to the
Kurf@urstendamm in West Berlin, the broad
shopping street that showcased capitalism deep
behind the Iron Curtain. Chase, under my
predecessor, had provided financing for the
Lindenhof, the newest building on the avenue, the
tallest in the city, and I had been there for the gala
opening in December. The happy crowd that had
thronged the ceremony had struck me, in its
enthusiasm for the glittering new Berlin, as a
version of the crowds one imagined cheering at the
openings of the ponderous edifices Albert Speer
built for Hitler. The question of their former
enthusiasms was one we never raised with our
German colleagues, but it lodged ominously below
the surface of our collaboration, and it could jump
out at unexpected times.
"I am going to Berlin," I said, adding to myself,
where Michael needs me.
"Once I met you this morning," she replied,
"I saw that if you knew what was happening, you would
go." Nothing demure in this woman. Nothing soft.
No question now of downcast eyes. Her son, too,
in need. That was all. "And I," she said, "am
going with you."
Part Two



What my father saw in me as need was simple
readiness. Yet I am now a little past the age that
he was then. I have my own grown children, and I begin
to see things from his side as well as mine.
Teenagers have a way of making parents both wise
and crazy, and so, naturally, my own teenage
years look different now. In my case, alas,
the crazy reasons to worry were real. If my
youthful naivet`e had been only that, but the
context made my actions thoughtless beyond measure, and
if they had ended tragically, they would have been
unforgivable. For a long time, they did seem so.
It was only your father, before he died, who made a
final forgiveness possible; only he, given what
had happened, who could have offered it--to himself as much as
to me and Kit. Someone had said to the three of us,
"Don't you be the thing that brings a hair-triggered
weapon out of its holster." But we were that thing.
My father and I are alike in understanding history
as the frame within which our quite personal story
unfolds. We are telling it all these decades
later because once again Berlin has been in the
news, beginning with the long-overdue breach of the
Wall that brought us all together again. The Wall
went up, in the first place, not long after the
fateful two days in which everything happened.
Oddly, the literal breakthrough of the Wall on
November 9, 1989, the end of an era if ever
there was one, occurred on the fifty-first
anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi
savaging of Jewish shops and synagogues. I
say oddly because Kristallnacht was of course
the beginning of the era, but also because, speaking personally,
the Shoah and what led up to it has been a focus
of my work. I write for the Atlanta
Constitution, and have published three books on
politics and history, the most recent an account
of artworks stolen from Jews, how the great museums
of the world took full advantage of the genocide.
I am conditioned, perhaps, to see the shadow of that
past everywhere, and so, regarding Berlin, the
coincidence of dates struck me less as odd
than as inevitable. The flukes of history make
us love it, but also fear it. That first diabolical
Novemberfest seemed fittingly reversed when
hundreds of thousands of young Germans, grandchildren of the
perpetrators, took to the streets
to smash not glass but drab concrete. They danced
on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate,
monument to Prussian glory. But Prussian
glory had been swamped by the twentieth century,
which only goosed the frenzied happiness of the young
democrats who scaled the Wall, of the
accidental graffiti artists who splashed the
cement barrier with whatever paint came to hand, an
anarchy of color released upon the gray
monotony of a prison that had passed itself off as
half a city.
The destruction of the Berlin Wall, as it
happened, was also the destruction of a wall in my
memory, the events that divided our lives into the
before and after of who we were and who we became. And because
your father was there with us at the start, helping to create
the people we are, it is crucial that you know of him as
he was, taking this remembrance as a measure of
what he then accomplished with his life. We
misunderstood his reaction all those years ago,
thinking it foolish, when, as history shows, it was
noble.
You were too young last year ever to have your own
memory of the Wall coming down, so let me tell
you. Tens of thousands of men and women rushed through the
hole that opened when the Volkspolizei chose not
to fire at the first doofus to hoist himself up to the
ledge atop the Wall, jitterbugging and calling
back to those who'd egged him on, "Aufkommen!
Aufkommen!" Within days, the once
omnipotent Erich Honecker resigned as East
German party chief, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia declared their borders open, and
Mikhail Gorbachev, watching from Moscow,
shrugged. And once again, after the rude interruption
that lasted three decades, the massive
tectonic shift from East to West resumed, the
largest movement of people ever to occur in Europe.
That movement had begun in 1944, with the mad
flight of panicked Prussians,
Silesians, and Sudeten Germans ahead of the
onrushing Red Army. "Feet," as they say in
Atlanta, "do your thing." At war's end, the
migration quickened as if the central plain of
Europe had been tilted on its side from the
Urals toward the Atlantic, spilling westward
women, children, and what men survived. Between 1945
and one night in August 1961, almost five
million Germans fled from the East through Berlin,
the boldest of them marching under that same
chariot-crowned Brandenburg Gate. The gate was
the emblematic transit point marking the continental
divide, but at the time of our May Day visit
to the city, a few weeks before the Wall went up,
there were something like eighty places where the momentous
border crossing could be made. I read later that
three thousand East Germans, mostly young and
skilled, were then making it every day.
After August 13, there were seven crossing
places in Berlin, and they were ruthlessly controlled
by Vopos whose authority was as absolute as the
armor of Soviet tanks with engines idling not far
away. Republikflucht was defined as a
major crime against the Socialist state, and
guards were authorized to prevent flight by shooting
to kill, which they did more than two hundred times.
The Wall became the defining symbol of the
Cold War, for us in the West as well as for your
people. In the rhetoric of Western leaders from
John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, it was
simply evil. Yet to citizens throughout Berlin,
beginning early on, the hulking concrete and wire
construction, running 103 miles through the city and in
a full circle around its western half, was
informally known as the Peace Wall. Your father told
me that at the time of our reunion. In the West,
there would be a journalistic obsession with the "death
strip" as the very symbol of demonic
totalitarianism, but in fact the barrier
represented a practical solution to a vastly
destabilizing problem. The Wall stopped the
East-West refugee flow in its tracks,
effectively saving the eastern provinces of the
nation for an eventually reunited Germany, while
defusing the terrifying confrontation that had turned
Berlin into the Cold War "flashpoint." In one
day, each side implicitly redefined its
commitment in Berlin, with the Soviets yielding their
claim to the whole city andwiththe Allies equally
abandoning the East. The Wall did this. If the
Soviets had not thrown it up, there were reasons
why the Americans could have. Indeed, despite
all their public protests, Americans not
only valued the Soviet Wall, but had, in
deep secret, encouraged it. What a country.
That surface enemies were subtle partners in
maintaining what was necessary for peace is one of the great
untold stories of the Cold War--and it is the
hidden assumption of the story my father has begun,
and that I pick up. The clandestine
collusion between Washington and Moscow eluded us
at the time, of course, but it was very much to the point of
what happened when I joined Ulrich as a
counter-refugee, bucking the flow to go from West
to East. What know-it-alls we were. We knew
nothing.
Subtle collusion between Washington and Moscow
does not mean that their confrontations were less than
terrifying, and the spring and summer of 1961 were,
until the Cuban missile crisis the following
year, the worst of it. It is hard to remember
now, with Russia in social and economic free
fall, but in those days the Kremlin seemed the
center of a nation of evil geniuses. At the
slightest whim of their madness, so we felt, they
could blow us to smithereens. Only weeks before we
took off for Berlin from Wiesbaden, for
example, the Soviets had demonstrated their
superiority by launching the first man into space. The
name Yuri Gagarin was on everyone's lips that
month. And only weeks later, Nikita
Khrushchev would humiliate John Kennedy at
their summit in Vienna. A shaken Kennedy
came home from that encounter to announce on
television it was time to build bomb shelters--a
month's anticipation of the drab concrete of the
Wall, but this concrete was to be poured in the
cellars of American schools, factories,
places of business, and homes. For the first time, a
U.s. president was openly warning of nuclear
attack, and in response, we the people began
to stock up on canned goods. "Berlin is the
testicles of the West," Khrushchev declared.
"When I want to make the West scream, I
squeeze."

When I was a kid using the guest bathroom at
my mother's parents' house, a mansion on the
North Shore of Long Island, I was always
drawn to the tidy stack of back issues of an
American magazine that sat on the cool
porcelain shelf of the toilet tank. It was
called Reader's Digest, and its pages were
laced with pithy oddities that I loved. One was a
feature called "The Most Unforgettable Character
I've Met." The stories of resolute
amputees, say, or of
prostitutes-turned-nuns made it seem a
particular achievement--not to be unforgettable, but
merely to have encountered someone who was. The
Unforgettables: it became a category against which
I measured teachers, doctors, nurses, and
physical therapists. My mother, once she died,
epitomized unforgettability, but she hadn't
while alive. All too soon, certainly by that
spring of 1961, I found myself unable to recall
with precision what she looked like, which was why I
took to carrying her picture in my wallet, as
if she were my girlfriend.
So unforgettability was my standard of
measurement when I met Rick Healy not long
after starting at Wiesbaden. We became friends when
we did what none of our other classmates
presumed to do, which was to ask each other one awkward
but simple question. What happened to your legs? Why
do you speak with that accent? Beginning then, because he
told me to, I stopped calling him Rick,
although everyone else continued to. Even before the
events of that spring, I'd already begun to understand
Ulrich as Reader's Digest material, and
I actually thought of composing an article about him
--the first of my ambitions as a writer.
On the magazine's scale, Ulrich might have
been unforgettable simply by being a German-born
postwar adopted son of an American Air
Force general, but how much more so by his being the son
of a German baroness. It seemed an impossible
claim, doubly so when he urgently swore me
to secrecy. If his mother was a noblewoman, then
what did that make him? We were sitting alone in
the cafeteria, having lingered through the lunch hour.
Beyond the wall of plate glass windows beside us, a
soft autumnal light washed the air.
Blue-smocked workers were wiping down the tables with
ammonia, but he seemed not to notice them.
Ulrich had lit a cigarette, which was forbidden in
that room, and I could not decide whether his defiance
of such rules made what he'd just told me
less believable or more.
But I accepted his claim totally once I
began visiting his family home in the military
compound across Wiesbaden--once, that is, I
began getting to know his mother. She was "Mrs.
Healy" to me. I could see that she was German, but
that wasn't all. From her worldly bearing and careful
way of speaking English, it was clear that she was no
mere housewife, not even of the hunt club set.
Ulrich's mother never referred to her prewar
social status, but she was as beautiful and kind as
a lonely American boy had to imagine
a banished princess to be. I was ready, in that
year after my mother died, to fall under the spell of
someone else's.
Ulrich was tall and thin, with a striking blond
beard that might have made him seem a sailor
except for his shaggy blond hair, which grew even
longer that year, making him seem a sailor
shipwrecked on an island. Ulrich was the first
boy I knew who had no apparent acquaintance
with a barber. In style and attitude, surrounded as
we were by bobbysoxers and soda jerks, he was
unique. It was unimaginable that within a couple of
years Ulrich's would be the style and attitude
of a generation.
Like me, he was new to the school, and to the smug
culture of American Army brats. He was
there after completing all but his last year in the far more
rigorous course of a boarding school in
Dorset, England. When I told him about St.
Dunstan's in New York, where the teachers
dreamed of waking up as British schoolmasters,
we agreed we had survived the same shipwreck
--although it was obvious that we were both better
educated than the kids around us. Ulrich
explained that he had demanded of his parents the right,
as a German, to attend school at least for one
year in his native country before going off, according
to his parents' plan, to an American
university. His father's idea of saying yes, he
snorted, was a year at H. H. Arnold
High.
Ulrich's accent floated between British and
German. That, his whiskers, and the embarrassment of
his father's rank combined to make him an instant
misfit in the chipper high school. Like me. We
instantly liked each other. I tried hard
to carry myself like a survivor of combat, but most
students kept their distance. That was not generally a
matter of ill will, I knew. Rather, wanting not
to rudely look at my deformed legs, my
callow schoolmates simply avoided me, and
soon enough it was as if I were not there. I suppose
that behind my back the cruel ones called me
gimp, or crip, or some such thing, although if they
did, I never heard it.
I knew from hearing it, though, that behind Ulrich's
back they called him Fritz. And I knew that
when we became friends, they called us Katz and
Jammer. Ulrich might have found himself on the
social margin just because of his readiness
to associate with me, but in fact his
quasi-pariah status was set less by his
accent, appearance, or family status than
by his air of condescension. He held in open
contempt the athletes and cheerleaders who embodied
the character ideal of the school so aptly named for a guy
called "Hap."
"Hip Hip High School," Ulrich dubbed
it. One day early in the year, standing before the
general's oil portrait in the school foyer,
he told me who Arnold was--a leader of the
American bomber command who saw to the obliteration
of the city of Hamburg. In one night's bombing
in July of 1943--1 few days after he was
born, Ulrich said--the Allies killed more
German civilians than English civilians
were killed in all the Luftwaffe air attacks
and blitz raids throughout the war. When I asked
him how he knew this, he stared at me coldly,
and I knew to believe him. Years later, I
would learn that fifty thousand citizens of
Hamburg had died that night, and that he was right.
Ulrich was, to my knowledge, the only other student
in the senior class who read novels not
assigned by Miss Klein, the English teacher.
Once I asked him why he was reading The
Brothers Karamazov, and he replied that
Dostoyevsky was unafraid of things as they are,
which stumped me. My fears had been tied to the
future, not the present. Only then did I
begin to recognize things as they are as the things
to be afraid of.
When, another time, I told Ulrich that my
father and I lived in Frankfurt am Main, he
held up a book and said joyously, "He is from
Frankfurt!" The book was in German, but even
I could take in the title as Eros and
Civilization, the author as Herbert Marcuse,
whom I had never heard of. When Ulrich
realized that, he set to work on me, launching an
open-ended tutorial in the theories and slogans
of what would later be dismissed as the faddish New
Left. To me the ideas seemed elusive, and I
only pretended to grasp their urgency.
Eventually, though, I began, as we said,
to true-believe.
My reading tastes had set me apart from other
kids, too. Rainer Maria Rilke was my
idea of a writer to carry around. I took his
famous letters as addressed to me alone.
You must think that life holds you in its hand, will
not let you fall. I remember how Ulrich
hooted when I recited that line from memory.
"Rubbish! Of course it will let you fall. What
the bloody hell is polio if not life letting
you fall? What is the death of your mother if not that?"
Before long, under Ulrich's influence, I began
to criticize Rilke as apolitical, but that
did not keep me from the consolations of his eloquent
sadness. I continued to read Rilke, but without
quoting the letters or poems to Ulrich.
Soon Marcuse formed the pulse of our
conversation, and I began distinguishing between the
language of dispute and of feeling, the one
public, the other private. It was an inhibiting
dichotomy that took me years to overcome.
"Happiness is freedom," Ulrich quoted the
philosopher as declaring, and I recall nodding at
the grave implications of the statement. We were
sitting now in a corner booth of the Zimmertal,
a becurtained Konditorei down the hill from the
American enclave where the high school was, a
place our classmates spurned in favor of the
snack bar at the base exchange with its molded
plastic chairs, ferociously orange. Ulrich
and I were smoking our French cigarettes and
drinking black coffee, hunched together over the
book, dotted with pastry crumbs. Sexual
freedom, political freedom, personal
freedom, intellectual freedom. There was
nothing in the text about freedom from crutches.
I said yes to all of it, but heard myself asking,
How do we actually live when we are free? I
remember repeating the question, but couldn't make my
meaning clear to Ulrich. It was enough to admit to myself
that his talk was weightless, which didn't matter. I
liked it anyway. The happiness for me wasn't
freedom. It was his company.
Ulrich was the first person from whom I heard the
word "bourgeois" outside a classroom, and
to my horror, that day I realized he could be
talking about me. His denunciation of what he
called the economic hierarchy, the waste and war it
leads to, the slaveries of fascism and
Soviet communism alike, but also the
stupefactions of materialism, what would later be
called consumerism, the hypocrisies of
Victorian repression--all of it to be
overthrown by the coming generation, our generation, the hope
of a utopian future. Youth! Ulrich
introduced me to the solidarity of the young.
I objected that I felt no solidarity with
our ball-tossing classmates up the hill, and
weren't they young? He easily turned my
assertion into evidence of alienation, which was the only
authentic way of being young. That idea seemed
tailor-made for me. I love this guy.
Yes, I said, to all that he was teaching me, while
I dared not reveal that my father worked for the
Rockefeller family bank, the very counting-house
of hierarchy.
Eventually, after he'd begun to confide his
secrets in me, I did tell him what my father
did. Ulrich lived in a general's house. I
lived with a capitalist overlord, and if my mother had
been a European, she'd have been a baroness,
too. We laughed and laughed at the contradictions
we had in common, aware that no one else would have
seen what was funny. It was only then I
realized that in Ulrich, my first real friend, I had
my first real secret from my father. There was no question
of bringing Ulrich home to Frankfurt on
weekend, no question even of discussing him there. That
recognition was my door to freedom, and changed
everything.
Once, the bond I'd felt with my father had
been absolute. During my various
recoveries, he had carried me places until
I became too heavy, and even after that I continued
climbing into his lap, and he let me. All the
more reason for being appalled now at what, in my
rebellion against that intimacy, I did to him.
After my mother's death, he had his sorrow and I
had mine, and by then there was no carrying or being
carried, holding or being held. Yet for a time the
simple fact of my father's presence seemed the
only antidote to the pain in my chest that at
intervals left me choking in the air-lock
vacuum of her absence. Sometimes I would awaken
soaked through with sweat, and like during my time in the
iron lung, I would be terrified of suffocating.
For the lung-clearing vapor of my father's presence,
I had come to Germany with him instead of staying in
New York and boarding at my old school, where
the other boys around me had developed the vague
look of statues.
But our time in Germany also coincided with my
reaching an age when I simply had to have my
distance. He, too, could make me suffocate.
I came to admit, for one thing, how little
my father and I actually had in common--an
experience of which he was ignorant, yet with which I
became obsessed. "There is more to life than
making money," I declared to him one day that spring,
a first expression of disagreement.
"Yes," he shot back. "There is having your
own convertible."
A neat parry, that, since I had only
moments before asked for the car as my own. We were at
a restaurant on the Rhine, one of our Sunday
outings.
"But making money off money, Dad. What
kind of life's work is that?"
I was both satisfied and ashamed to see his
face register my question as a blow. I did not know
it then, of course, but I was desperate to defy
my father because he was making me crazy, using me
to plug the gaping wound caused by my mother's death.
He had not killed her any more than I had, but for
each of us, guilt and grief were bound together. We
were companions in that complexity, but we were rivals
in it, too, until events of that May Day, my
true rebellion, released us from the prison of
one loss into another. As if I saw that coming from the
vantage of the garden restaurant, a foreshadowing,
I stormed away from the table, deflecting my
fresh guilt into silently cursing him as a
goddamn materialist. That was a word I had from
Ulrich. It had begun to matter less whether my
new friend held my father in contempt than that I
did.
But Ulrich gave me a language with which
to define the differences between the world I'd come from and the
outlines of a world I'd begun to see in the haze of
my future. Except in those jolting
exchanges, I could not discuss any of this at the
house on Mosbacher Strasse, and thankfully
my father seemed hardly to recognize those
exchanges as the arguments I knew they were.
What he took for my moody adolescent
silences during our long drives through the
vine-covered hills of the Rhine, I regarded as
a dutiful protection of his illusion that his little
boy still needed to be kept from harm. What a
resentful jerk I was.

Later in the year, again at the Zimmertal,
Ulrich declared himself to be what he called a
neo-Marxist, which was the first time I'd heard that
soon-to-be-ubiquitous prefix. It
removed little of the bite of "Marxist," and we both
knew that his Air Force father would have taken mortal
offense at his defining himself that way. There is no
conveying now the offense implied by such a label in
1961. In the States, the Red Scare was still
on, and Ulrich's declaration meant, in my leaping
imagination, that I could be subpoenaed to testify
against him. Also, there was a thrilling, slightly
salacious naughtiness in the statement. Still, by then
I had learned to argue with Ulrich, had learned it
from him. "A Marxist?" I challenged. "Like
Stalin?"
"No, like Groucho," he cracked. "Groucho,
Chico, Harpo, and Neo." But he was dead
serious, and launched into his case. With
Marcuse, Ulrich measured Soviet Marxism
against what he called classical Marxism, as
if it were music. He measured Lenin and Stalin
against a mythical Trotsky, standing sentinel on
the road not taken. The problem with Marxism was that
it had yet to be tried.
Later in the decade, with the aging Marcuse
seduced into the role of senescent pied piper, a
legion of glib young radicals would reduce such
sentiments to self-serving clich`es, but in 1961
a heartfelt simple call for social justice
could blow the lid off unexamined assumptions of
innocence, both personal and national. I knew enough
to take Ulrich's declaration as one of high
commitment, and it was a milestone for me as much as for
him.
Surely by now the bind is clear. I was a
boy born to be good. Brave diligence--first in
the face of my disease, then of my disability--was
the mode of my triumph, and therefore, eventually,
the measure of my character. I am certain that my mother
would have loved me anyway, but that I coped so
well at her behest, earning an endless litany of
accolades from doctors and therapists and also
teachers--wasn't that what had compounded her love with
pride to make it infinite? I was raised
to believe that if I did everything my mother told
me to do--as she rubbed my legs with aromatic
lotions, manipulating my ankles and knees
to quicken the dead muscles, massaging the flaccid
skin to firm it up--nothing bad would ever happen
to me again. Polio had been my one lightning
strike, and for all there was to hate about it, wasn't
it behind me?
And then she died. What did brave
diligence have to do with that? It took me a long time
to figure out that the truck that slammed her off the
road and down a ravine was driven by a drunken
redneck kid and not by my lost twin, called forth from
some mystery zone of fate. My father wanted very much
to be the one who enabled me to come to that healing
recognition, the knowledge that we are responsible not for the
shape of the universe but only for what we do--but
he wasn't. Ulrich was.
"The power of negative thinking," he declared,
citing Marcuse again, "is a force for human
liberation." Disobedience could be a virtue.
Everyone in Europe seemed to want to move from
East to West, but not Ulrich, and then not me.
Recklessness could be a virtue, too. And what the
hell, having lost my good legs and my mother, what
else was there to lose? I never imagined that there was
Ulrich, who also never imagined what his loss would
be. Why were both of us so blind to what could happen?
It is the advantage of mature adulthood
that we can acknowledge, through memory, the complexity
of what drove us into the dangerous thickets of
youth, which at the time seemed like the wide-open
road. If only we could have done so then, seeing,
for example, the absolute relevance of the fact
that Ulrich, as a small child before memory, had
lost his biological father, lost him to the wrong
side of an evil war. And it was absolutely
relevant, if beyond us at the time, that without his father,
he had had for a crucial period the tenderness and
protection of his mother entirely to himself. Her
attention was the warm bath he never had to leave. From
her, just when he needed it most, he had the
guarantee that reality is benign, that life is
trustworthy, or, as Einstein put it, that the
universe is a friend.
That guarantee was betrayed, as he had to have
experienced it, when she turned her tender affection
toward someone else. Ulrich's mother married
General Healy when Ulrich was six, but his life
would take its shape from once having had her
complete devotion. To subsequently embrace
an ideal of "socialism," as it would be called,
"with a human face" was to affirm the primordial
faith that lovingkindness is at the heart of this
cosmos, as he had so firmly been convinced when
he had his mother to himself. By the time I knew him, his
hedged longing for affection, which on a larger scale
we called justice, made Ulrich like every young
person. But his unquenchable belief in its
possibility made him different. In that, more than
in the length of his blond hair or his infatuation with
Marcuse, he was my first radical. In that, he
was unforgettable.
But Socialist hope goes hand in hand with
rage at the cruelties of the present world: starving
children, moronic mass media, the sewer of
politics, the greed of the elite. Yet what could
have been more enraging than the injustice of Ulrich's
own life? To be the heir of a Nazi nation he
never chose, burdened with its guilt, deprived
of a Volk to love, and then to be adopted out of it
by a tribune, as it had come to seem, of the new
empire? The global domination and rank
materialism of America could seem to be
embodied, to Ulrich were embodied, in his father's
confusing alternations between the demand for obedience and the
bribery of what passed in America for status and
affluence. Ulrich's rage at his father, I see
now, sprang from the double bind of both resenting him
and needing him, of having been rescued by him and
orphaned by him, too. For who was General
Healy, finally, but the one who took Ulrich's
mother away, making Ulrich hate her for what she
then became, an American general's dutiful
wife? And why should such a boy not have been hurt and
angry, with the depth of hurt and anger from which comes every
act of true rebellion?

Ulrich told me why he had acceded to his
parents' expectation that he would attend university
in America, and not in Germany as he'd long
hoped. General and Mrs. Healy assumed he
would be attending Georgetown or the University
of Wisconsin, to which they knew he had applied.
But in fact he intended to go to a school in
Boston called Brandeis. I had never heard of
it. Brandeis was where Marcuse was teaching, Ulrich
explained, Marcuse having never returned
to Frankfurt after fleeing the Nazis. Ulrich
had even written to Marcuse, who had yet
to answer. He had applied to Brandeis without
telling his parents, an act that made no sense
to me. I was slated to attend Princeton, where
my father and grandfather had gone, and I took the
legacy for granted. Despite myself, my
frame of reference was still firmly adolescent,
assuming as I did that even our acts of
rebellion would somehow be parent-sponsored.
Near the end of April, Ulrich
received his long-awaited letter from the admissions
office at Brandeis, but it informed him only that his
application was incomplete. The parents' form was not
filled out, nor was the section having to do with
financial aid and method of payment. "Parent
signature required for validation," read the
bold letters that some clerk had underscored.
Parent-financed was the point.
But Ulrich could not admit that as the issue.
He took the letter from Brandeis as a rejection
pure and simple. In effect, it was, since
there had never been a chance that his parents would
approve a plan to go there, and Ulrich was certain
he knew why. "Brandeis is a Jewish
university," he told me. "Marcuse is a
Jew. He teaches there because he had to reject
Germany. Brandeis rejects me now because I am
German."
"That's ridiculous," I said. "How would they
even know you're German? You go to an American
high school." I threw my arm in a
half-circle, gesturing at the school building
behind us. We were standing on the cinder track, alone,
beside the athletic field with its fresh crop of
fragrant green grass. Ulrich had waited for
me outside my last study hall and led me down
here, far from the other kids, to tell me his news.
"The people at Brandeis," I said, "would no more think
you're German than they would me."
Ulrich laughed dismissively. "Date of
birth, 1943. Place of birth, Leipzig."
"But your name is Healy. Rick Healy."
"On this application, my name must be Ulrich
von Neuhaus, my name at birth. To call
myself Healy is false."
"Your mother's name is Healy now. How can that be
false?"
"To call myself Healy is to be a
hypocrite, a German in hiding from what we
did."
"You didn't do it."
He answered only with that cold stare of his,
and for once it chilled me, as if I, too, fell
within the range of his negation. Poof! Cease
to exist!
We were on the cusp of a question, a nest of questions that
were beyond me then. Corporate responsibility,
the moral content of memory, the difference between
regret and repentance, sins of the father, guilt of the
son--all of it. Ulrich was miles beyond
me in knowing how the past, as he put it to me
once, paraphrasing Marx, "weighs like a
nightmare on the minds of the living."
After a long silence, Ulrich restated his
conclusion. "Brandeis is Jewish. I am
German. Of course, with this technicality they
reject me. Of course, Professor
Marcuse refuses to reply to me. And I
blame them for nothing."
With that, Ulrich turned on his heel and walked
rapidly toward the school, his pace making it
impossible for me to follow. As he took the
news from Brandeis as a personal wound, so I
took his striding away--the only time he had ever
used his good legs against me.
It was two days later, the last day of
April, that he showed up at my door in the
dormitory. The time was shortly before reveille,
as the Army brats called the shrill bell that
sounded each morning at half past six. But on
this morning, his low whistle from the threshold of my
room was enough to wake me.
"And you are coming with me," he decreed with a
flamboyant hush, and as if his sentence had had a
beginning. He looked first one way down the
corridor, then the other. Apparently satisfied
that he was unobserved, he leaned against the
doorjamb, grinning. He was wearing a white
shirt, a necktie, and a brown corduroy
sport coat, way overdressed for a normal day
at school, which was my first clue.
He carried a blue canvas bag with a shoulder
strap. I knew it was an Air Force bag, which
was unusual for him. The kids of Hap Arnold
had plenty of government-issue paraphernalia--
bomber jackets, overseas caps, knapsacks
--and they seemed to take special pleasure in
flaunting such symbols of the occupation on German
streets, but I had never known Ulrich to do that.
He always acted in downtown Wiesbaden like the
American half of his identity was the thing to be
ashamed of. Among Americans, he acted like his
father's rank was the embarrassment. That he was wearing
his father's shoulder bag, therefore, I knew to take
as a second clue.
His capricious grin was irresistible. His
hair was so blond that, had he been a girl, it
would have seemed bleached.
"Going with you where?" I asked in a hoarse
whisper. I was sitting on the edge of my
bed, in my underwear, half asleep. In the bunk
above me, my roommate, a clunky boy named
Corky Murtaugh, slept soundly. Murtaugh
was unwakable, and would be until just before breakfast
shut down an hour and a quarter from now.
"Road trip," Ulrich answered.
"Wandervolk. Wanderschaft."
"When?"
"Today. Now."
"We have school. What are you talking about?"
"They let the football team miss school."
When Ulrich said "football," he meant
soccer. "Why not us? I give you my dispensation,
old boy."
I laughed. "And who dispenses you?"
"You do."
"Not a chance, comrade, not a chance. Besides, I
have to get back to Frankfurt today. My father let
me take the car. I have to drive it home after
school. I told you that."
"Indeed, you did." Ulrich's grin
broadened.
"You bastard. The car is why you're here. You
don't want me, you want my damn car.
Wanderschaft, my ass. You want me
to drive you so you don't have to hitch. You bastard.
"Shaft" is right." I flung one of my two
pillows at him.
He caught it and held it back toward me as
if it were a tray holding something precious.
"Monty, Monty, my good man." Ulrich could
mimic his mates from that English boarding school
at will. He always feigned Britishness when he
called me Monty, as if I were the field
marshal. He called me that when he wanted
something, perversely mocking me, since he knew
I hated it. "Monty," he said. "Carpe
diem. This is the day the Romans were talking about
when they said that."
"He's right, Monty," someone said from behind him.
Even before she stuck her head in the doorway, I
knew from her voice it was his girlfriend.
Automatically, I pulled my bed sheet
forward to cover my left leg. Instead of just being
scarred and too thin, like my right, my left leg was
a gnarled stick, lacking even the hint of a calf
muscle. It humiliated me--I felt the heat
come into my face--to think she had seen it. No
girl had ever seen my legs.
She was another senior, famously
named Kit Carson. No one could blame even a
girl for adopting the nickname Kit, with that last
name. Each one of us had a pose, and hers
required dressing in black--not like a cowboy but
a "modern dancer." She wore black tights
under her sweater and skirt, which made her look
even thinner than she was. Kit was a waif with
hollow eyes, evoking Edith Piaf. I had
hardly ever spoken to her, though she was also a
dormitory resident, living upstairs on the
girls' floor. And I understood then that she was
how Ulrich had gained entrance to the building, which was
off limits to nonresidents. But then, the boys'
floor was off limits to girls, and there she was.
"Kit is coming, too," Ulrich said. He
put his arm around her shoulder, and the easy way she
leaned into him made it seem they'd been
intimate, perhaps that very night. Then I recalled
Ulrich telling me they had cooled it with each
other a few weeks before. But what did I know?
The girl thing was not part of what Ulrich and I had
in common. This was before the so-called sexual
revolution, but that high school had sex in the
air, and the openly erotic restlessness between boys and
girls was something else that set me apart. Given
my physical inhibition, I assumed that sex
with a girl was a card I had not been dealt.
Feeling bad about it was no more to the point than
feeling bad about that other missing card, my calf
muscle.
Corky just then rolled over with a grunt, making
the bunk rock. Perhaps he somehow sensed the
presence of a female. Kit disappeared behind
Ulrich, who said, "Meet us at the Zim."
He checked his watch. "It opens at seven.
That's forty minutes. Mach schnell!" And with
that, Ulrich hoisted his bag, pulled the door
closed, and they were gone.
I had never been in the Zimmertal at that
hour, had never seen it crowded with Germans on
their way to work, men and women in their various
uniforms: the ubiquitous blue smocks of
laborers, the black housecoats of
Putzfrauen, the brown-and-green jackets of
municipal employees. They were drinking bowls
of Kaffeeweiss and eating Konditor-
waren. These were people whom we Americans rarely
saw at ease among themselves, and as I entered the
caf`e there was a downshift in their free-spirited
talk, a signal that they registered my
arrival as an intrusion. But when I jerked my
way among the tables to the booth where Ulrich and
Kit were already seated, the room's hum adjusted,
and the workers stopped looking at me.
Ulrich had a German-language newspaper
open on the table in front of him. He was reading
intently, ignoring me, which made it seem
normal for me to slide onto the same bench with
Kit. "Hi, big guy," she said, then raised
her eyebrows to indicate that she, too, thought
Ulrich rude. Already I sensed her brashness,
her readiness to give expression to whatever she
thought.
She had a journal-sized notebook open before
her, a faint blue tint to the ruled pages. She
had been writing in it, and I noticed that her pen
was the stiletto-like instrument that draftsmen use.
With a glance, I saw that she had printed minute
letters, each one inside its square, forming words on
the page, lines of prose. "What's that?" I
asked.
"Keeping my accounts," she answered, closing
the book, letting me see the green cloth cover
with its printed word, "Accounts."
Ulrich read through to the end of whatever article
had snagged his attention, then muttered something to himself
in German as he folded up the newspaper. It
was that day's Frankfurter Neue Presse,
and on the front page was a large photograph
of a man in a glass booth wearing earphones. It
would become a famous image, but I had never
seen it, and assumed the paper was featuring another
story about the quiz show scandals in America--the
isolation booth, the headset. How Europeans
loved those symbols of our decadence.
Ulrich looked up at me. "So you came."
"To breakfast, yes." I grinned. "But I have
algebra at nine." I looked at Kit. "You
too, right?"
Instead of answering me, she ran the tip of her
forefinger along the edge of the powdered sugar on her
plate, rectifying it.
A waiter came, and I asked for coffee with
milk.
When he was gone, Ulrich said, with a gravity that
surprised me, "These days are testing us. Now it
is my duty to put the test to you."
Once more I glanced at the girl, and was taken
aback when she flashed me another quizzical
look, as if Ulrich's cosmic
consciousness had made us allies.
"You must come with me to Berlin," he said.
"Berlin!"
Now when I looked at Kit, she said, "He
just told me."
I said, "Why would I go to Berlin?"
"For the reason," he answered firmly, "you would
have gone to Spain in 1937. Russia in 1917.
Paris in 1789. Lads into the breach, my man.
The bloody breach. Berlin is where we belong.
Berlin is where words mean what they claim to mean.
A blow for true justice, solidarity, the
cause! Willy Brandt, the SPD, the only
city in West Germany where Socialists are in
charge! Going to Berlin is how we declare ourselves."
"Going to Berlin is crazy," I said.
At last Ulrich broke into his familiar
grin. "Which is the other reason we must go there."
Kit shook her head. "I'm not going. Not a
chance. I thought we were fixing to go to a Grand Prix
race somewhere. He didn't tell me it was
Berlin until just before you came in. Specially not
Berlin. Crawdaddy would kill me."
"Who?"
"My old man. Great white father. Sergeant
Buck Carson."
Kit spoke with the accent of the Deep South.
When in English class she had recited verses
from Eliot's "Prufrock," it sounded like the
ruminations of a Confederate widow: "Let us go
then, you and ah ..." The lost world was not of the
Somme, but of Shiloh. That stunning performance,
two or three months before, had created an
impression of fatal worldliness, adding Kit's name
to the list of girls I assumed would never notice
me. But now, suddenly, she seemed as young as I,
and a bit of a hick.
I shook my head, too, but I was determined
not to sound like her. "It isn't that my father would kill
me," I said. "It's simpler than that. I
made a deal with him. He trusted me with the car this
week. I'm not going to let him down."
Ulrich nodded sagely. "So your hesitation
is not about algebra class."
"Not hesitation, comrade. Refusal."
He looked at Kit. "And you,
Fr@aulein?"
"No. I could care less about algebra. I
ain't going to Berlin, that's all. Berlin is way
off-limits." She swung toward me.
"Why are you calling him comrade?"
Her question brought me and Ulrich together in a
laugh. "Just a joke between us," I explained, and,
pathetically enough, I was pleased to see that in this one
sphere I had more going with Ulrich than she did.
"Joke?" she said. "As in, Knock,
knock."
"Who's there?"
"Comrade."
"Comrade who?"
Kit began to sway in her seat, floating her
hands, singing with pizzazz, "Come raht along, come
raht along, to Alexander's Ragtime Band!"
"Alexander-platz," Ulrich corrected, a
reference that escaped me. That he'd cut her off
deflated her. "Berlin is not the forbidden city, you
two," he said. "Haven't you seen the
billboards? "Come to Berlin!" Young people going
there pay lower taxes, and get help to find a
place to live. They want people our age in
Berlin."
"German people," I said.
"And Yanks," he countered. "There is a
high school in Berlin, an American school like
ours, named for General Patton. There are sons
and daughters of American military, same as
here. Thousands of Americans, all under orders
to live as if everything is normal. Us, too.
The Wiesbaden football team goes to Berlin.
The debating team. We could be the debating team.
H. H. Arnold versus George S.
Patton. You could be the team captain, Kit.
Look bloody well on your precollege
curriculum vitae."
She shook her head firmly. The girl had
become increasingly uncomfortable. She had made
a perfect rectangle of her powdered sugar.
"I vote for Kit Carson," Ulrich
announced suddenly. "What about you, Monty?
Kit for team captain!"
"This isn't funny, Ulrich."
"Of course it isn't funny!" He slammed
his hand down on the newspaper that was spread before
him. "Kadavergehorsam!
Kadavergehorsam! That's how Eichmann
justified himself. The obedience of a corpse! That
is what he owed his superiors. "A good
soldier acts with the obedience of a corpse"!"
The others in the caf`e fell silent at this
outburst, but like the timid occupation-era
Germans we Americans knew so well, they
made a point not to look our way. A roomful
of people tidying up their powdered sugar.
"What are you talking about?" I asked in a
voice several notches quieter than the one he
had used.
"Eichmann. The trial." He pushed the
newspaper around so that I could see its photo right
side up. The man in the booth was no quiz show
contestant. He was Adolf Eichmann, whose
trial had begun in Jerusalem earlier that
week. A few weeks before, the actual debating
club, speaking of that, had argued before the whole
school the question of whether Israel had been
justified in kidnapping Eichmann from Argentina.
The contrary had prevailed.
Now, when I recognized Eichmann's
picture, the glass booth made no sense
to me. Only later would I understand it as his
bulletproof cage. Once Ulrich saw that I
had taken the image in, he said, "There is the
meaning of obedience. Good German obedience. The
obedience of corpses."
I shook my head, offended. "This has nothing
to do with what Kit and I are talking about. We're
just not going to Berlin with you, that's all."
"Do you know what day is tomorrow?"
"Saturday."
"It is May Day, Michael. Ersten
Mai. The workers' festival. Workers of the world,
unite! The greatest fest in Europe will be in
Berlin."
"East Berlin," Kit put in urgently, and
to me. "He said East Berlin."
"Not just the East," Ulrich said. "Willy
Brandt is mayor of West Berlin, the
Socialist mayor, the only Socialist
mayor in all of West Germany. The SPD always
celebrates May Day, claiming the holiday for
trade unions, not only Communists."
"He wants to go to the Communist parade,"
Kit insisted. "He told me."
"Of course we will go to the Communist parade--
to protest it! To stand for true socialism.
Workers' Day belongs to workers, not to the state.
SPD, yes. KPD, no. USSR, no."
Ulrich was grinning again. He was pronouncing the
various acronyms in the German way, and I
followed only with difficulty, which he must have
sensed, because he slowed down to explain.
"The SPD is the party that last opposed
Hitler. Then, after the war, they stood up to the
Communists--the KPD. But they did so
precisely for Marxist principles, which the
KPD betrays. May Day is the perfect day
to see the real difference between East and West
Berlin--not the difference as imagined by shallow
Americans who condemn everyone on the left."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," I
said, and I put a hand on Kit's forearm to let
her know I was with her. "How do you go to East
Berlin?"
"By going to West Berlin, how else?"
"Not by driving."
"By driving to the border, Monty. From the
border by taking the train, the American train,
which requires no visa, not of two Yank
princes and a princess. Traveling by this train
allows no interrogation by border guards. Being on
this train is like being at the American embassy,
immune. And I told you. We are the debating
club. We have a debate tournament at
Patton High School. Hip Hip High
versus Blood and Guts."
It had taken until now for me to see that he was
entirely serious, and what made me really
nervous was how possible he made it seem. With his
broad smile and perfectly straight white
teeth, he sat waiting for me to declare myself. I was
to declare myself in the light of his unstoppable manic
air, his display of cleverness, how easily he would
answer the questions of the military police as we
boarded the Army train, GI'S barely older
than we were.
And now I saw the point of that blue shoulder
bag on the bench beside him. I glimpsed its tag,
and sure enough, there were the two silver stars of his
father's bottomless privilege in the world of the
occupation. An Army train, a general's son,
an easy transit. He was right: no sweat. And
I saw, with Kit, what there was to fear--that we could
actually do as he proposed. I said nothing.
The waitress arrived with my coffee. When she
was gone, the mood had changed. "Then drive me
to the train," he said quietly. "Skip your
classes and drive me to the train."
"I don't think you should do this, Ulrich. East
Berlin is not a place for fun and games.
Especially if your father--"
He raised his hand abruptly,
cutting me off. "He is not my father."
I knew what he meant, that the general,
strictly speaking, was his stepfather. Still, the
declaration shocked.
"You are not to refer to him as my father." He
smiled oddly. "Here you see the disobedience of a
living body," he said. Only the thinnest veneer
of levity carried his voice now. I sensed beneath it
desperation and hurt such as he had never shown me.
In his bitter bravado, I heard a
pronouncement that the time had come for him to act on
all that he had been telling me for months. I
heard, that is, the stifled cry of a friend, and I
knew at once, as the friend I wanted more than ever
to be, I was bound to answer.
"Disobedience," he explained, "is how I know
that I am not dead."
I faced Kit. "We can take him to the
border, right? To the train?" When she agreed, I
think that she, too, knew that the train that mattered
was already moving, and we were on it.





Twelve hours later, just coming on dusk, we
three comrades disembarked from the Army train in the
cavernous new Hauptbahnhof in the bustling
heart of West Berlin. Our arms were linked.
Kit was in the middle, I was on the right so that I
could use my stick, but in fact she, too, was
taking my weight, enabling me to match the sprightly
pace as we marched out into, unquestionably, the most
exciting city in the world.
Every way but verbally, Kit and I asked each
other, How could we have hesitated even for a moment?
Both of us were shouldering a small bag, for without
actually declaring a change of heart, she and I had
returned to the dormitory from the Zimmertal for
our passports and a weekend's change of
clothes. "Just to the border," we had both been
saying, and then, hell, we'd each grabbed bags
--"just in case." I put on a necktie and
blazer. Kit came down from her room wearing a
belted khaki tunic, a standard item of an
airman's uniform, the equivalent of a
civilian's safari jacket. It was far too
large for her, but she wore it with panache over her
black skirt and tights. The belt was
knotted at her narrow waist. And she was wearing
gold hoop earrings.
Her stylishness hit me, and I saw then the
trick of her pixie haircut, what was called
an Italian boy--how it displayed her long thin
neck, not a boy's neck at all. The earrings
drew attention to the sensual line of her throat,
which was set off further by the red bandana she wore
loosely around her neck, knotted above her
breasts. Her getup qualified as an outfit,
marked by the way she turned up the collar of her
jacket. On her, the airman's jacket was
sexy. And I noted the ghostly outline on each
sleeve marking the places where a sergeant's
stripes had been removed. So as Ulrich
pointed to his father-stepfather--by carrying his bag,
Kit pointed to her daddy by wearing his uniform
tunic. I pointed to mine, I suppose, with that
blazer, purchased with Dad the summer before at
Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue.
To my surprise, I sensed that the shift in
Kit's willingness to come on this adventure was tied
to the shift in mine, as if my being a companion in
Berlin was what would make it safe. As I had
gunned the blue convertible out of the chapel parking
lot, the top down, I was excruciatingly aware
of the pretty girl pressing close next to me,
an all-time first. Her willowy leg was against
mine, and I felt no impulse to pull back.
I did not kid myself about why she was so close.
All three of us were squeezed into the front seat,
Kit pressed as close to Ulrich on her other
side as she was to me.
It was then I recognized that I had overcome
my qualms as much in relation to her as to Ulrich.
This was a girl I wanted to be with, that was all.
So completely had I become preoccupied with these
two that, hitting the road, I never gave a
further thought to my father, or to my promise.
At Helmstedt, we boarded the Army train in
giddy high spirits, helped by beers we had downed
at lunch in a wasp-ridden garden restaurant.
The MP'S who checked our passports,
dependents' credentials, and tickets were, as
Ulrich predicted, only friendly. But that would
change. A short while after the train began
to move, it approached Magdeburg, the first city
inside East Germany and the effective border
crossing, the place where the Communists usually
halted the train.
The American guards had warned all
passengers to sit quietly in our compartments with the
window shades drawn. Once through the checkpoint
at Magdeburg, we could lift the shades and
look out, they said, but doing so before or at the
border was strictly forbidden.
The train slowed to a stop, the engine shut down,
and an eerie silence settled on the snug,
velvet-upholstered compartment. With the shades
drawn, deep shadow enclosed us. We three had
the space to ourselves, which had seemed a stroke of
luck on boarding, but which now, for me and Kit,
became the opposite of luck, because of the license
Ulrich took from our isolation. Outside, the
East German border guards were presumably
checking the roster of passengers. We didn't know
it, but they routinely demanded to board the train, and
equally routinely, the GI'S refused to allow
them to board--a power they could exercise in the
absence of any irregularity as defined by the
detailed protocols of the Four-Power
Agreements.
All we knew, inside our stuffy, dark
compartment, was that the procedures were taking a long
time. Ulrich became increasingly agitated, and,
finally unable to restrain himself, he lifted the lower
edge of the window shade. He raised it no more than
two or three inches, just enough to bend down and peek
out. A wedge of light sliced down onto the
floor.
"Tanks!" he whispered. "Machine guns!
Red stars! My God, the soldiers are
Russians!"
"Rick!" Kit hissed. "Holy shit,
Rick! Close it!" Kit had made herself even
smaller, scrunching as far into the distant corner
of the cushioned bench as she could. "Please!" Her
insistence was absolute--a girl with a will. Ulrich
honored it, dropping the shade. The light was
gone.
What seemed a bare instant later, the door
to our compartment slid open, banging into its slot.
An extremely large black soldier stormed
in on us. His olive fatigues were crisply
pressed, his boots gleaming, his helmet shimmering
white with the black letters MP in stark relief.
He had his sidearm drawn, and once in with us,
he pointed the gun at Ulrich, who sat alone
by the window on the bench opposite me and Kit.
"What are you trying to do?" the MP
demanded in a shrieking voice close to panic.
"You had the fucking shade up. Didn't you get
the orders?"
I thought he was going to shoot Ulrich.
Ulrich, splayed against the bench, thought so, too.
Before Ulrich could answer, a brown-uniformed
Soviet officer with a gangster-style machine gun
under his arm burst in behind the MP, who swung
around. "I'm handling this! This is mine!" And then
he said something I did not understand, presumably in
Russian.
Behind the Soviet officer, pressing in from the
train corridor to fill the threshold, were a
blue-uniformed Volkspolizei officer, also
with a pistol, and, squeezing in beside him, another
overlarge black MP. Very tall black men,
I would later learn, were regularly assigned
to East-West checkpoints in Europe, as they were
to North-South checkpoints in Korea.
Intimidation was the idea, as I understood full
well. It wasn't only the first MP'S skin
color and size that were frightening. With his gun
leveled at Ulrich, he seemed on the edge of
craziness, as if taking Ulrich's act as a
personal affront. I sensed that the Russian
and the East German were giving the MP his leeway
exactly because he seemed dangerously close
to losing control of himself.
I pushed back into Kit, the two of us huddled
together. The second MP forced his way into the
compartment, gently pulling the Russian aside and
reaching toward his agitated colleague. "Okay,
Sergeant," he said, taking the sleeve of the first
MP, "I got it." This man seemed calmer,
and it was a relief when the first one yielded to him.
The second MP had captain's bars on his
collar. His sidearm was still in its holster.
"Wait in the hallway, Sergeant. Cover us."
The sergeant backed out, taking up a place behind
the Russian, beside the German. He did not put
his gun away, though, which kept everyone nervous.
I clutched my cane, which the captain made a
first point of sizing up, as if deciding whether it
was a weapon. His glance fell to my legs, then
up to my eyes, and I saw an abbreviated
version of the familiar pity I knew so well from
strangers. He turned away from me, to Ulrich.
"Did you take pictures?" he asked. "Do
you have a camera?"
"No, sir," Ulrich answered
quickly. That he was completely intimidated shocked
me, underscored my fear.
The captain unsnapped the cover of his holster,
as if to draw his weapon, but as he did so, he
said, "Well, now we have to let these gentlemen
satisfy themselves that there is no camera. Do you
understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"These are the rules, bud. You do as I say
or they take you off the train, and I let them."
"Yes, sir."
"Stand up. Arms out."
Ulrich did as he was told. In the cramped
space, his outstretched hands brushed each side
of the compartment. He turned this way and that. No
camera hanging from his neck. No camera on the
bench where he'd been sitting. In the adjacent
space was his bag. The captain picked it up,
unzipped the main pocket, and upended it so that
Ulrich's toilet kit, fresh underwear, and
shirt fell out. No camera.
The captain glanced back at the Soviet
officer, who was watching like a supervising
surgeon. He said something in Russian, his
voice a bulldozer. The captain unzipped the
side pocket of the bag and again upended it, shaking.
But now, out fell a small aluminum canister,
larger than a thimble, obviously a film
container.
I shot a look at Ulrich and saw the
surprise in his face--a film canister he had
never seen. I knew to mark the moment. Oh,
Jesus.
"Oh, Christ," the captain muttered as if
reading my mind. He stooped and snagged the
canister before the Russian reacted to it. "The
fuck is this?" he loudly demanded of Ulrich,
holding the bright metal cylinder between thumb and
forefinger right in front of Ulrich's nose. Under
his breath, he added, "Make it good."
To my astonishment, Ulrich did. "That would be
the yearbook pictures," he explained with what
I recognized as a forced calmness. "We
deliver it from our high school in Wiesbaden to the
American high school in West Berlin. All
the Defense Department high schools in Europe
have a combined yearbook."
It was true about the combined yearbook, but
otherwise what he said was utter fabrication.
Yet what really stunned me was that
Ulrich was speaking in a flat, unfamiliar
accent with a firm hint of Dixie, like Kit's.
There was nothing German in his way of speaking, no
guttural curl, no vestige of the Gothic
script I often imagined in balloons above his
head. His British mimicry was familiar--
"Monty, my good man"--but never American.
Like most Americans, my assumption was that, the
Deep South apart, our unaccented speech could not
be mimicked.
"That film," he was saying, "has the
pictures of our debating club. We're the
debating club from H. H. Arnold in
Wiesbaden." He pronounced "Wiesbaden"
with a w sound, not a v, like any old American
ignoramus. He blithely concluded, "They need
our negatives at Patton High for the
yearbook layout." Then he turned his most
shiteating grin to the Russian.
The captain turned to him, too, and spoke
several sharp sentences in Russian. That might have
been the end of it, but just then the Vopo, the East
German in the doorway, put in a question, still in
Russian.
The question made the captain turn back
to Ulrich and ask, "What's the German word for
yearbook?"
Ulrich's eyes widened. He shook his head.
German word? Me?
I did not know why it was important for
Ulrich not to be taken for a German. I did not
know why a roll of film should spark such invention and
deceit. I assumed that if there were problems tied
to Ulrich's father, they involved his rank, which was,
as I would later learn, the least of it.
There was an awkward silence in the crowded
compartment, and it was just beginning to feel dangerous when
Kit, her voice muffled against my shoulder, said,
"Jahrbuch."
We looked at her. In her lap was the pale
green notebook I had noticed at the
Zimmertal. It was open, and something made me
take it in more carefully now. Lined paper.
Neatly printed paragraphs separated by space
breaks. The book seemed more than half full of
writing.
The Vopo spoke again, in what language
I had no idea, but he was still asking. To my
further surprise, Kit replied,
"Bericht, Denkerschrift,
Memoiren."
I thought of her in algebra class, her sharp
answers, her readiness to risk being taken by other
kids as smart. Now I realized she was more than
smart. Advanced German. A rebellious
kid, but brilliant.
The Vopo reached down and snatched the
notebook out of her hand.
"Hey!" she said, but then regretted it and
shrank back. The East German flipped the
pages as if looking for what she'd read.
"Was ist das?" he demanded.
"Mein Tagebuch, mein Seele-
buch," she answered. The story of my soul.
"Like Rilke," I put in, and instantly
felt stupid.
Kit put her hand out for the book. "It's right
private," she said. I sensed her anxiety in
the plaintive tone with which she then said, "Bitte
sch@on."
The Vopo handed the book back, nodding like a
satisfied teacher, which the captain took as an
opening to bend down and gather Ulrich's belongings,
folding them carefully back into his bag, as if
only now aware of the general's stars on the tag.
Drawing no further attention to the film canister,
the captain slipped it back into its side
pocket, which he zipped shut. He turned back
to the Russian and, with a broad sweep of his hand,
gestured him and the others out. With a last, hostile
glance at Kit, of all people, the Vopo departed.
Then, brushing roughly by the other MP, the sergeant
in the threshold, so did the Russian with his
machine gun.
Beads of sweat were streaming down the sergeant's
face, and his gun was still leveled at Ulrich, his
hand unsteady. "Holster that, Sergeant," the
captain ordered. The MP did so, and when he
exhaled, his relief was large. He looked at
his superior gratefully. I realized how young the
sergeant was, and how irrelevant to him was his own
mammoth physique. I identified with his
obvious feeling of being in way over his head. "Go
tell the trainmen to get us moving," the captain
ordered. Without another glance at us, the sergeant
disappeared.
I sensed the release of tension in Kit's
body, the way her hipbone settled into mine, and
only then noticed how I had pressed myself against
her. Or was it she pressing me? Who
is this girl, I wondered. I moved away from
her slightly, back toward the center of the velvet
bench.
Now that the others were gone, the American
captain stepped away from the seat by the window so that
Ulrich could resume it. The MP'S voice was
almost kindly when he asked Ulrich, "Do you think
your old man got where he is by acting like an
asshole?"
"No, sir," Ulrich said.
"If I write up a dependent, the charge
goes to the father's CO, not the father. Did you know
that?"
"No, sir."
"And in your case, that's just a little farther up the
chain of command than I care to go. At that
altitude, my nose bleeds, son. And when my
nose bleeds, I get mean."
"Yes, sir."
"You're not just an Army brat. You're the son
of the brass. You have a reputation to uphold, young
man." The MP said this sternly, but with something like
affection, too. I had seen this deference a few
times before--the U.s. Army as a kind of in
loco parentis for the children of soldiers and
officers alike--but it had never relieved me as
it did then. The MP said, "And speaking of
upholding your old man's reputation, you should get
your hair cut. Shave that beard. You look like a
bum."
"Yes, sir," Ulrich said. The obedience of a
corpse. After a bout of real fear, Ulrich was
chastened.
"Give it ten minutes after the train moves
out," the MP ordered, "before you lift the shades.
Okay?"
Ulrich nodded. The officer said mournfully,
"It's some damn fool thing like this that's going to start
World War Three. You know that, don't you?"
Ulrich straightened his shoulders. "That sergeant
shouldn't have been threatening me with a gun."
"Oh, really? He's what kept the Reds off
of you, son. The hair trigger is what keeps the
Reds in line. Didn't you know that?"
Ulrich couldn't quite bring himself to answer, but I
could see that his anger was trumping his fear. His
face above his whiskers was red. I couldn't
believe he was daring even to begin to challenge this
man. I wanted to yell, Shut up!
The officer seemed unperturbed. He
said, "Don't you be the thing that brings a
hair-triggered weapon out of its holster. Who's
to blame for what happens then? Why don't you
kids debate that."
None of us answered. It was a debate we would
not have, because our being to blame would be so crystal
clear.
He gave us each a last once-over.
Locking eyes with me, he said, "Debating
club, huh?"
"Yes, sir," I said, aware of binding myself
to the lie.
"Good for you."
Only after he'd slid the compartment door shut
behind him did I realize that the MP was thinking of
my legs, the gumption it would take for a crippled
kid to stand on a stage and give a speech from
note cards. In another circumstance I'd have
felt condescended to, but right then I was grateful
to be included in the sweep of his affirmation. I was
sorry he was gone.

There was so much to say once the train had begun
rolling again, but in the weighty aftermath of what
quickly seemed an unreal incident, speech
seemed wrong. Instead, the clack-clack of the
iron wheels hitting the rough joints of the tracks
--rougher than ever, the first sign of inferior East
German maintenance--began to pulse in the air like
an amplified heartbeat.
Kit buried her nose in her accounts book,
her draftsman's pen rising and falling as she
worked to keep her letters smooth despite the jostling
railroad car.
I sensed that we would each settle now into the
solitude of transient contemplation, depriving
me of the chance to ask Kit my questions: What are you
writing there? And hey, how did your German get
so good? Or to ask of Ulrich, conversely, Why
did you pretend not to know German? I wanted
to ask him about the stark fright I had seen in his
face when the film canister fell out of his father's
bag. But that his lies had worked made the lies
seem appropriate, and it felt almost true,
what we had claimed--the debating club, the
yearbook.
Ulrich's lies, for the moment, had made our
trip seem mundane, safe, sponsored. I
briefly found myself looking forward to our arrival
at the high school in West Berlin,
checking in at the principal's office, being shown
to rooms in the American dormitory, doing a
microphone check at the podium in the high
school auditorium, practicing our topic:
Resolved: That World War Three will be started
by some stupid kid lying to his father.
That thought made me shut the lid on the free
association of a traveler's brooding, and also on
the thin consolations of the falsehoods Ulrich had
constructed. Our purpose was not a return to the
protection of the American cocoon, but
adventures in the anti-Wonderland of the
Socialist state, the first of which we'd just had. The
lies, in fact, were part of our rebellion. But
I knew I would be in trouble if I was left
alone to follow such a train of thought in rhythm with a
train crossing forbidden country. So I leaned
toward Ulrich. "How did you learn to speak like
that?"
He ignored me, staring at his wristwatch.
"Hey, Rick," I said, a pointed
refusal to call him by his German name, "how'd
you learn to talk like that? Come on, I want
to know."
He lifted his gaze to meet mine, but very
slowly. "Frankly, my dear," he began, and of
course I knew the inflection. In three words,
he'd nailed Rhett Butler. "I don't
give a damn." And then he let his face fall
into that same shit-eating grin. That's how,
asshole.
I pictured him, a lost boy, hour after hour
in one base theater after another, watching Gone
With the Wind, which was in permanent release at
military movie houses overseas; watching a
dozen other movies like it--Picnic,
Giant, Casablanca, Red River,
Rebel Without a Cause. I saw a boy
in the dark studying and memorizing; proving that he
wasn't British; trying not to be German;
taking the measure of the way Americans walk and
hold their cigarettes and knot their neckties;
listening acutely to the way Americans onscreen
talk to one another, preparing to talk that way himself
when the time came. The surprise, I saw, was that
it had come so soon.
Ulrich resumed studying his watch, leaving me
to wonder which of his accents was real. And that led me
to wonder, in the swaying clack-clack of the
hypnotizing train, how I had come
to think of this stranger as my friend. Ulrich had put
on display the mystery of accent and its relation
to identity, especially for those made
self-conscious by the way they talk. Then I
realized that Kit, with her drawl, would have been
Ulrich's tutor, a thought that made me wonder
about their relationship. They weren't acting like
boyfriend-girlfriend now. Why was Kit sitting next
to me?
I thought of asking Ulrich about that film
canister, then admitted to myself that whatever it was
--whatever had made him afraid--I didn't
want to know. And this was well before mysterious rolls
of film had become clich`es of movie
thrillers.
A few moments later, Ulrich tugged the
window shade down and, with a flourish, let it go.
The shade snapped up to its rod, flapping around
twice, letting harsh sunlight flood the
compartment. The landscape outside flashed by in a
blur.
"Rick!" Kit protested, uncoiling from her
corner like a spring. Her accounts book fell to the
floor.
"Ten minutes, the captain said. Ten minutes
is up."
"You're pushing it, Rick. You shouldn't be
pushing it."
"They're the ones who pushed, Kit. Not me.
You saw that guy with his gun."
"You asked for it. Don't be so damn
irresponsible."
Kit's direct challenge to Ulrich
surprised me. She was pissed, but there was also a
core of self-possession in her, unusual in
one so young; unusual, I would have said then, in a
girl.
"What is irresponsible?" Ulrich asked.
"A hair trigger is irresponsible.
Incompetent Americans playing games at the
border are irresponsible. What would have happened
if the Soviets back there were as wild as the
Schwarz?"
"Schwarz!" Kit said. "What the fuck!
Don't call him Schwarz!"
"Black? He is black."
"You know what I mean, Rick. Schwarz
is Kraut for "nigger". And I won't have
that."
"I won't have "Kraut,"" he
retorted angrily.
"It's "nigger" I can't stand," Kit said.
"I've a mind to get off this damn train right
now."
Ulrich laughed, gestured at the flashing
window. "Be my guest, my dear."
Kit glared at him.
He said, "And stop calling me Rick."
"Whatever you say," she replied with sudden
resignation. She leaned down to get her accounts
book and sat back against her corner, pulling her
shoeless feet under, stretching her black stockings
at the knees so they showed white. She glanced at
me with shy embarrassment and whispered, "I can't
believe this," which I took to mean, I can't
believe I'm in a fight with him. But then she
added, still under her breath, "Can't believe there's
racist bullshit here, too." A white southerner
who hated the word "nigger."
I touched her foot with my left hand.
"Ulrich," I said, "what does that guy's being
Negro have to do with anything?"
"Everything, Monty," he said, but calmly.
"Everything. The only reason those assholes are
on duty at the border is because they're Negro
--especially the NCO. Obviously
underqualified for the motor pool, much less the
checkpoint. Negro giants, that's why they are
there. We are supposed to believe all
Americans are bigger than us, all are frightening
Nubians. How stupid do they think we are?"
"We?"
"We Germans. We Krauts." He
looked at Kit. "The bigotry here is yours,
not mine." Ulrich turned away, as if this
declaration ended the argument. He pressed his
forehead against the glass, inviting a change of
mood, inviting us all to stare out at East
Germany. This was what we'd come to see.
Only then did it hit me that we were now
fully behind the Iron Curtain. The train was
flying, as if to cover the enemy territory as fast
as possible, the right idea. We were passing through a
country town, and I glimpsed a man on a
tractor, then a man in a white apron, a
baker, then a man standing by a sign, which I
missed, but barber popped into my head. Farmers,
bakers, barbers--a town like any other in the world.
A generic town in Soviet Germany, with a generic
population--women and men working, laughing,
loving, dying, caring for their children and their elders,
looking back at us and wondering if we are
different. Such were my first impressions of the enemy.
I moved closer to the window, opposite
Ulrich, intending to focus on particular
objects to undo that sense of the generic. I saw
a rusted corrugated-iron roof, then I saw the
crack splitting a cinderblock wall. I saw
a church steeple that had been shorn off, blunted
like a broken sword, bomb damage from the war.
Then, instead of singly, I began seeing objects
grouped: vacant houses, carts without wheels,
herds of emaciated cows, chicken coops
clustered around weed-ridden ponds.
When our train careened through crossroads
villages, people were gathered behind lowered pikes:
women in babushkas holding the hands of children, the children
with one thumb held firmly in their mouths. They
must have come to the crossings to watch us pass, but no
one waved.
I saw derelict railroad cars at
sidings, rusting in place but not quite abandoned. They
had sackcloth curtains on their windows or, if
they were boxcars, sackcloth curtains in the
doorways, indications that these railroad cars had
been claimed for houses.
Even at high speed, the scenes I glimpsed
were striking for their drabness. The trees had the sharp
green of spring, and the sky was as blue as it ever was
in what we so blithely called the free world, but the
human things seemed devoid of color: the gray
of the buildings, the dried mud of the roads, the
washed-out pallor of housecoats and shawls.
Railroad workers wore black overalls. The
smock coats here, unlike the bright blue of the
West German workers', were the color of
dishwater.
Soon it seemed I could make out the very eyes
of those who watched us pass. No color there,
either. What an exception we must have been in our
flashing, carefully painted cars behind the sleek
locomotive. Now I understood why the Army had
polished its fittings and scrubbed its wheels as
if the train were a ship, so that even in the few
seconds it took to pass through the vision of any
one Communist, the American train would cut the
arc of a figment shooting through a dream.
Shooting stars, I thought, cutting through the night
sky--me, as a boy, sitting beside my father on the
dock at our lake in the north woods,
my father whom I loved. And now it struck me: the
harshness of our last moments together earlier that week,
how I had resented him, how pissed off he
was, even as he had let me take the goddamn
car.
I looked back at Kit, expecting her,
too, to be transfixed by the sight of what we were
passing through. Not so. She had fallen asleep.
Her foot was only inches from my hip--a
perfectly shaped foot, joined to a trim ankle
and leg tucked away inside the flare of her
father's field jacket. I took advantage
of the moment to stare at her. I timed the rising and
falling of her small but alluring breasts,
measuring her breathing in and breathing out against my own.
Her accounts book had fallen to her side,
toward me, and it was open. The letters were tiny but so
carefully made that I had no trouble taking them
in, one clean paragraph:
You made her set with you on the veranda, and you
tole her it was incurable, incurable! And the hot
breeze on her face pushed hair acrost her
eyes, so you could not make out what she reckoned of
what you said.
I could have read more, but I stopped because it seemed
wrong, and I found myself wanting to ask about that word
"set," about "acrost," and about "incurable." Who
was "y"? And who was "her"? But already I knew
what a violation it would be to ask about what I'd just
read, even that.
I looked at her sweet sleeping face.
Where are you from? Georgia? Virginia? Is
that your father's jacket? Whose bandana? And incurable
what? Polio, I wanted to tell her, is
incurable, but it doesn't need to kill you.
To get away from those thoughts, I faced
Ulrich. He was so intent, looking out the window,
that I felt I shouldn't interrupt him. But with
Kit asleep, and my thickening questions about her, I
knew I had to. Her presence next to me on
that velvet bench, her foot only inches from my
leg, the sweet aroma of her body, its sly
movement with each breath--it all combined to spark in
me physical sensations I knew very little about and a
quite unphysical longing that felt intensely
familiar.
"So, Ulrich, wie geht es Ihnen?"
"Sehr gut," he answered quietly, not
turning toward me. Then he added, under his breath,
"Nat@urlich." He was aware of my
watching him, of my waiting. So then he did
look at me. "Und Sie?"
"I'm okay. Although to tell you the truth, I
wasn't so sure back there." I'd calibrated
my voice so as not to wake Kit. I was
desperate not to wake her. "At the border," I
said, to distinguish from the uneasiness I'd felt
during the flare-up over Schwarz.
"Nor was I." Ulrich matched my tone.
"You did well at the border, Michael."
I deflected his compliment with a slight recoil
of my head. "Me? You're the one who pulled it
off. You were great."
"I was a fool. As the MP said, an
asshole." He glanced at sleeping Kit, and
I sensed that he felt like an asshole in relation
to her, too.
"He didn't call you an asshole."
"He said my father wasn't one. My
stepfather."
"That's not--"
"World War Three, he said. It is possible
I was wrong to want to do this."
His voice had fallen back into the edgy rhythm
of a German speaking English, a hint of a v in
"want." A German speaking English well, but
as a guest in the language, not an owner of it.
I had to stare at him hard to be sure there was no
punch line coming. How could Ulrich be having
second thoughts when I myself was--I hadn't the
word for it then, but now I would describe my state
as one of quiet exhilaration. The border crossing
had frightened me, but deliciously so. What fear
I had felt before, in hospitals, had been
smothered by my parents.
"Why didn't you want them to know you are
German?" I asked.
"A normal American kid. I could not have
them looking a second time at me." He saw the
incomprehension in my expression, so he added,
"Because of my stepfather."
I thought of debating the point with him:
Actually, he's your adoptive father, not your
stepfather. Instead, I indicated his bag. "But
he's your ticket. The rank is what makes
them jump."
"But if they knew more than what rank he is
..."
"Like what?"
"Like what he does. What he is in
command of."
"Which is?"
"Intelligence."
Nothing suggests the innocence of those times like my
prior assumption that the word "intelligence" meant
only the ability to think and learn. I could see it
in Ulrich's eyes when he realized that he had
to explain the word to me.
"Military information," he said.
"Auskunft. Secrets. Major General
Healy is in charge of learning about the plans and
activities of the enemy. He is what you call
a spy. He is the chief of spies."
This was a long time ago, remember. Before
spies and rolls of film had become the stuff of
pulp fiction and movies. So I was only
mystified by what he was saying. I let my eyes
go to the window, the vista flashing by, a lake,
trees in the distance, the ordinary world. I held
fast to the sight and said, "If it's secret, how
do you know?"
"You know what your father does, do you not?"
"Yes."
"Because he tells you?"
"Not exactly."
"Because you know, that is all."
"But your father--"
"He is not my father."
I brought my gaze back from the passing scene
to look at him. "Your adoptive father, your
stepfather, whatever he is, the guy who raised you
..." Suddenly it hit me, a whole new
context for understanding what we were doing. "And you're
going to Berlin? You're going to the May Day
parade in East Berlin, and your father is a spy?"
"Not my father," he said patiently. Then he
smiled, a certain satisfaction in his
expression: even I could see the outrage of what
he'd done. And now I understood the meaning of his
second thought.
"You are an asshole, Ulrich." And we
grinned at each other. I thought of that film
canister dropping from the general's bag, but had no
idea what my question about it should be.
After a moment, he shrugged. "But also, for me,"
he said, "this is a kind of going home. I lived
in Berlin as a child. It was where my mother and I came
when we were refugees." He gestured at the
window. "That is my home country. Not Germany.
East Germany. And look, look at
it, Michael." He hunched closer to the window and
pointed. "Have you been seeing this? How there is no
glass in the windows? Look there. The roof with
tiles missing. The edge of the roof with no gutter.
Do you see?"
The buildings were going by too fast. I had
to consciously adjust my eyes to take in first one
building, then another. We were passing a farming
town. A barn. A silo. A building without
gutters.
"There are no gutters in East Germany. The
copper has all been stolen. Pillaged by the
Russians. Since the war, and still. Look, there,
see. Roof tiles again. Missing roof tiles.
Even glass. See the horse carts. Why are
there horse carts? Because the tractors are all
gone. Stolen by the Russians! In Bonn, they
say it is communism that keeps the DDR in
poverty, but it is not communism. It is
Soviet theft. Those gutters and roof tiles are
on the houses of commissars in Minsk and
Leningrad. It is what Marcuse says. There
it is. Communism has not been tried."
Marcuse, Christ. It was the last conversation I
wanted to have. I glanced back at Kit. Her
pen had fallen into her lap, her accounts book
closed beside her. Her face was turned into the
corner. Still asleep.
Instead of launching into one of his political
tutorials, Ulrich fell back against his seat,
abruptly weary and, it seemed to me, sad. No
Marcuse for him, either. "Those people we are seeing
there," he said. People at yet another country
crossroads, people not waving, not even the children waving.
"They are prisoners. As I myself would be were it not
for my mother, who ..." He let his voice trail
off.
"Who what?"
"Carried me out. From Leipzig to Berlin. Do
you have any idea how far a hundred and eighty
kilometers is when you are walking, carrying a child,
carrying a bundle that holds all that remains
to you? All that remains of a once great family of
Saxony? Do you?"
"No," I said, hardly breathing.
"She cleared rubble in Berlin. The
Tr@ummerfrauen. You know that word?"
"No."
"The rubble women. She got us to Berlin, but with
nothing. The two of us alone. She would
sit me in the pram nearby, then work with the other
women, picking up debris, wreckage. My
earliest memory is sitting beside a mountain of
paving stones, hearing the stones click against each
other, the click, click, click of stone striking
stone as the Tr@ummerfrauen added to the pile."
Ulrich fell silent, staring out the window.
I imagined the sound of those clicking stones, could
hear it, and I knew that my own equivalent
memory was far less harsh: the sound of my mother's
humming as she massaged my legs.
He looked over at me. "You know her hands?
You have seen my mother's hands?"
"Yes." An old woman's hands.
"She ruined her hands clearing the rubble of
Berlin for a few pfennigs a day. My memory
of my mother is that she was always hooded, always
cloaked with coarse cloth, as if she was a
Turkish woman. Only later did I understand
that she was too beautiful. Women with her beauty
became prostitutes to survive, but my mother--
no. In every way she could, she made herself like a
hag so that the Russians would not rape her." He
glanced toward Kit, who had not moved, then added
more quietly, "But I think they did."
I could say nothing to this. The click-click of
stones--yes, I could imagine that. But this other--
no. Rape? My mind jumped away from the word.
And how could a baroness have become a rubble woman?
Looking back now, I recognize the infinite
gap that stood between me and Ulrich at that moment as
an instance of the gap separating innocent
Americans from Europeans who had been crushed
and crushed again, and then again. We Americans,
astride the world, knew nothing.
Out of the silence, and looking for a way to help him
past the impossible thought, I asked, "When did
your stepfather--"
He cut me off. "Eventually, she was
employed as a translator for the Americans.
She stopped dressing like a Turk. She began
to wear perfume; I remember that. She let her
hair grow back. She found her American
officer. She thought him kind. Compared to the
Russians, he was. He divorced his wife
for her. A simple letter to the States and that first
marriage ended. He has a child older than me,
and he never sees her. I have never met her, my
Stiefschwester. My mother married such a
man because in Berlin in 1949 there were no
German men. She married him because she thought I
needed a father."
"Maybe you did."
"Yes, a father." There was such depth of feeling
in this dismissal that I could not imagine how
to respond. I thought of shifting, to ask what he
knew about his biological father, but that was an
impossible question, dragging in others--questions about the
war, the fate of a pretty woman in a time of
pillage, shame, the real father never mentioned because
never known? Impossible.
When I said nothing, Ulrich, too, fell
into a weighty silence. We gave ourselves over to the
click-click not of paving stones but of the iron
wheels hitting the joints of the tracks.
After a while I remembered what I'd started
out before to ask, and I asked it now, quietly.
"What about Kit, Ulrich? Was ist
los?"
"Loose?" He grinned. He glanced toward
her.
"What gives?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Between you two?"
He stared at me, then smiled broadly.
"Oh, Monty, Monty."
I hated myself for blushing. I sat there
embarrassed and transparent. Simply to do
something, I lifted my cane, twirled it once,
let it fall back into its corner.
"Oh, Monty, you sweet man," he said,
then glanced at her again. From the bright surprise in
his expression, I knew I had to turn and
look, too.
To my complete horror, Kit's eyes were
open. She was looking at me.
Without moving from her corner, Kit said
coldly, "Why are you asking him?"
"What do you mean?"
"Why do boys think they can bargain with each other
over girls, as if we are cows?"
"That's not what we were doing," I said weakly.
"You were asking him if I was already taken."
I glanced at Ulrich, who was grinning,
enjoying this, the bastard. I was on my own.
I looked back at Kit. "I guess I
was asking that," I admitted.
"Then why not ask me?"
"Well, are you?"
"No," she said with an easy glance at
Ulrich. "I'm not taken, am I,
Rick?"
"She calls me Rick. I spurn her."
He grinned. Whatever it was between them, it was
different now.
"Ulrich, then," she said. "Ulrich von
Neuhaus." She looked at me. "Y'all know
what Neuhaus means, don't you?"
"New house?"
Her face lit up. "Casanova!" Her
drawl thickened when she added, "He's my
bratwurst Casanova." Then she laughed hard.
So did we all. When our fit passed, she
touched my leg. "No, Michael. I am not
taken." Then she added, "Are you?"
I laughed out loud again--and felt myself blushing
once more. "No, Kit," I found it possible
to say. "I am not taken."
"In that case," she said, "I reckon
I'll join you in a smoke, Michael."
"What?"
"A smoke. Or do you dip snuff?
Habst du ein Rauch, big guy?"
She mimicked smoking, pressing two fingers in a
V to her lips, as if we were strangers who just
met. But she had called me du, not Sie.
I retrieved my pack from the inside pocket
of my blazer and offered her a cigarette. I
held my Zippo for her, and she leaned into the
flame. "Light in May," she said, blowing
smoke.
"What?"
She put her accounts book in her bag, took
another book out, and held it up for me to see:
Light in August by William Faulkner.
She opened it and pretended to read aloud, but she was
quoting by heart. "If they are not innocent of sin,
at least they sin in innocence." She gave me a
sweet smile, then curled over the book to read.
About an hour later, just as the light of day was
fading, the train began gearing down. We hadn't
spoken much. Kit's calm self-possession had
centered us. We had passed from isolation back
into the solidarity of companionship, the three of us.
Du und Sie--in point of fact, Kit
used the intimate form with both Ulrich and me.

6

Shacks and tumbledown huts in the shadows of
dusk one moment, a bejeweled early evening
skyline the next: to come out of the postwar wasteland of
Soviet Germany into the frantic brilliance of
West Berlin was to cross a line on the earth.
To see that demarcation of the world-historic argument was
to glimpse the edge of a trench into which each side was
poised to plunge. Of such instants is the
structure of a mind made, and after that I was a
sucker for dualism, if in nothing but politics.
But here is the odd thing: I arrived in West
Berlin, with its propped opulence, prepared to see
it as I'd been told to, as a showcase of
freedom. Berlin was the urban proof-text of
free enterprise. From each according to his
ability, to each according to what he can grab. It is
not as if I did not link arms with Kit and
Ulrich, our triune phalanx advancing on the
train platform in an exuberant spirit of
American arrival, the exhibitionism of the
entitled young. But the human tide against which we
pushed pushed back, forcing us out of our little bubble
to see--really see.
All around us was the bustle of far more complex
comings and goings. This train station was the terminus of
major supply routes for the island city. Raw
materials were offloaded in the yards outside, but
here along each platform, and on the broad
terrace into which each platform ran, were stacked
hundreds of pallets holding cartons,
bundles, and mailbags. Moving among all that
were throngs of travelers, not giddy like us but
grim-faced, eyes fixed, coursing to and from trains
with the air of those for whom transit itself was the thing
to survive. Greeters and senders-off clutched
handkerchiefs, some weeping openly. Vendors
stood at sawhorse benches and pushcarts selling
wurst, newspapers, bottles of milk. Their
customers included roughly dressed women and men
mystified by the currency they held--a crowd that
reeked, as one creature, of body odor.
Later I would understand that many of these people had come down
from the elevated train platform above, the
S-Bahn line that ran from East Berlin to West
Berlin, stopping first here at the
Hauptbahnhof. These were refugees who, as
fugitives, had just dared to step off the city train
in this forbidden sector, part of the tide of thousands that
the Wall would break in August.
The S-Bahn was the easiest way to flee the
East, and if there were grave expressions on the
faces of certain of the men and women around us, it was
not for the danger they were in, but for the sure jeopardy
into which they had just plunged their relatives at
home. For those left behind, there would be loss of
jobs, loss of housing, possible arrest, or
banishment to the distant countryside near Poland.
In that time and place, the supremely selfish
act was defection.
Others of those around us were arrivals from the West,
disembarking trains that had come from Hamburg and
Munich and D@usseldorf. These were the young men
looking for draft exemptions and training slots
at Telefunken and Siemens, industrial
giants that had made West Berlin the
electronics center of Europe. They were
girls coming for the artificially high-salaried jobs
in hotels and offices. They were continental
beatniks coming for the jazz clubs and caf`es. And
that evening, they were young Social Democrats coming
for the May Day celebrations that would take place
the next day on both sides of the city. All had
come, in one way or another and however gravely,
for what in America we thought of as the thrill of the
frontier. Us, too.
To get our bearings, Ulrich, Kit, and I
took up a place near a welcome desk that was
manned by several people in religious garb, the men in
clerical collars, the women in austere black
clothing with crosses hanging from cords around their
necks. Standing there, we watched the bustle before us,
awed by it.
At one point Ulrich elbowed me, then
pointed at the granite blocks of the wall above
us. The stone was pockmarked and chipped, and a
massive wooden beam also had rough marks, like those
from a pole climber's cleats.
"What?" Kit said, instantly attuned.
"Bullet holes," Ulrich answered.
"Jesus H. Christ," she said, and took my
arm.
"I doubt it," I said, but she gave me a
look.
Ulrich repeated himself: "Bullet holes."
I felt the cold blast of a large second
thought, not fear, exactly, and not regret at
having come here, but about the oversimplified
impression with which I had anticipated this
arrival. It wasn't physical dread
holding me back, but an unexpected feeling of
sympathy for the worn-down world of East Germany through
which we had passed. It was a feeling like
nostalgia, perhaps akin to what Ulrich had conveyed
as he'd looked out on alien territory that
nevertheless made a native claim on him.
But what claim could it have made on me? We
stood there long enough in silence for me to know. I had
seen the East as a truncated nation on the losing
side of history. Shot by history--no,
crippled by history. I myself was no gleaming city
alight with beauty, no polished locomotive--
no true rebel, either, on an authentic quest.
What I had seen looking out the train window was a
world improperly aligned with itself, where no tree
stood in right relation to any other, where roads
failed to meet except at jarring angles, where
hills had connections neither to the valleys before them
nor to the hills beyond, as if iron curtains had
fallen everywhere within this realm.
But that wasn't all I had seen. I had
caught glimpses of my own reflection, wild
flashes of disconnection there as well. I saw the
line of my cheek as the defining line of my mother's
face, and then, with a snap change of focus, I
saw her perfect mouth outlined in a wispy
cloud, smiling in the sky even there. But Mom was
dead. Incurably dead.
Confronted now by the wrack line of desperate
characters in front of me, and by evidence of mortal
violence in the stone above, I realized why Kit
had mostly slept in the train. She had put the
harsh truth of this world off until now, and she was
pressing my arm. To calm her, I almost said, Not
incurable, Kit, and no bullets lately. But
I said nothing.
Behind the welcome desk, a dozen yards from where
we stood, was a pair of phone booths, and I
suddenly wanted to call my father. I wanted
to tell him that I had seen Mom's face outlined
in a cloud. I wanted to say I was all right with
this sadness, that he didn't need to worry about me
anymore. But at eight in the evening, it was more
than two hours after he would have expected me
home with the car, and by now he would be nuts with
worry. Worry and anger, the double whammy.
My heart sank. How the burden of his love
bent me. And anyway, I could never tell him
where I was without his thinking that I needed him, which I
surely did not. Or so I told
myself, squelching what little remained of the impulse
to call. Sorry, Dad.

Above the welcome desk a poster read,
"Evangelische Gemeinschaft." Ul-
rich was talking to one of the religious women. Kit
and I drew near behind, and to my surprise I
heard him speaking English, even though the woman
was less than fluent in it. He had dipped his
voice in the syrupy southern accent he had used
in the train compartment with the MP. As I listened,
I realized that below the shift in what we think of as
accent, he had altered the very beat of his sentences,
no longer speaking with a German rhythm that jumps
at open sounds, stops at consonants. Yes,
syrup.
In this conversation, the woman accepted the
kibitzing of the timid male cleric beside her. He
seemed to have a decent English vocabulary but no
knowledge of sentences. The woman handed Ulrich a
number of German-language brochures,
explaining each one as well as she could. Ulrich
was masterful as a mulish but well-meaning
American hayseed, vacantly tugging at his
beard. Ah .be danged. I sensed the fun he
was having with his impersonation. Indeed, the fun was in
the subterfuge, which made me think of something
else. Ulrich von Neuhaus--Herr
Independence--was marking our arrival in the
espionage swamp of Berlin by enacting a drama
that had everything to do with his stepfather's function, in a
phrase of a then current book by J. Edgar
Hoover, as a "master of deceit." What a
thrill to join him in it. Kit, too, with her
talk of dipping snuff.
When the sister spread out a map of the city on the
desk, Ulrich leaned over it. Kit and I
stepped closer, each to one side of our friend. I
could feel myself being drawn into the game, even if
I hadn't a clue yet about its rules or even
how victory and defeat were defined. Enough to observe
the tremor in the woman's finger as she traced
what I took to be the dividing border between the
Allied and Soviet sectors. I saw the
serpentine lines of a river and its offshoot
canals, and I picked up the words "Zoo" and
"Tiergarten" and the fan shape of the railroad
tracks here at the station. Otherwise, the map was
as incomprehensible as the city outside.
"Where?" Ulrich asked, then placed
the tip of his forefinger on the map next to where the
woman was pointing. "Oh, that's great," he said in
teenage American. "Really great!" Then
to Kit and me, feigning less, he said, "The
church runs a youth hostel not far away."
The male cleric, his mouth a slit, muttered
in German, something Kit translated with an
urgency that surprised me. "Male and female
dorms," she said. And she met the clergyman's
cold stare, his stare at her. She lowered her
voice, but all could hear when she declared, "We're not splitting up, guys. I am not
spending the night someplace by myself." Having said
this, she stepped around Ulrich to be between us--or was
it to be next to me? Did she want me to put
my arm around her? I saw tiny beads of sweat
on her upper lip, and nearly did.
Ulrich was still leaning over the map, letting his
finger move across it. "Where are the May Day
celebrations going to be?"
Again the male cleric muttered to the woman, who
said, "What means you?"
"May Day," Ulrich answered. "Tomorrow.
Workers' Day."
The sister shook her head slowly, but with such an
air of disapproval that I just wanted to thank them
and move on. Ulrich, though, raised his bright
face from the map, all innocence. "There's a big
parade," he told her, as if defining the
circus. "And a huge street meeting. The
parade in the East, the meeting in the West. You
know this, right?"
"We do not know," the man said emphatically, his
first full sentence in English.
"That's fine," I put in. I took
Ulrich's elbow, pulling him. "Thanks a
lot," I said. "Let's go, Rick."
He looked at me, then back at the pair of
evangelicals, making a decision. Nodding, he
collected the brochures she had given him. The
woman carefully folded the map, and when Ulrich
said, in a caricature of himself, "Ah surely do
appreciate your many kindnesses," she handed it
to him.
We backed away, each with a shoulder bag,
Ulrich with his fistful of folders. The religious
people watched us, but others were watching us, too, in that
drab sea of immigrants and refugees. I
realized how conspicuous we were in our bright
American clothing, Ulrich bearded and
long-haired, Kit pert and sexy, me with my
gimpy lurch. To the Berliners we must have seemed
like the trio on the road to Oz. Judy Garland was
a star here, wasn't she?
We crossed into a second, equally crowded
hall and found places at a standup
Bierstube. Kit insisted on paying for our
beers. She untied her bandana, into which she had
folded several German bills. Ulrich and I
fought her off for a minute, then we each threw in
some money. Kit had made her point,
however. She was no one's date.
We claimed one of the several raised tables for
ourselves and drank our beer. Kit said, "I mean
it, I'm not sleeping in some room full of
strangers or off by myself."
I said, "What if we just go to the high
school?"
Ulrich looked at me with surprise.
"What?"
"The American high school, General
Patton. They have a dorm. We could find some
kids who'd let us in, let us have a couch or
something."
"The American high school?" Ulrich used
my inflection, mocking me.
"It's what you said before."
"That was the story, Michael."
"But it sounded good. What the hell, we could do
worse than hooking up with kids like us."
"Monty, Monty," Ulrich said, "there are
no kids like us. We are the
Edelweisspiraten."
"The what?"
Kit translated, "Edelweiss pirates."
To Ulrich she said, with an air of cut the
shit, "Which is what?"
"Anti-Soviet youth groups, when I was
living here before. I was a child, but you remember something
called the Edelweisspiraten. Heroes of
resistance after the war." Ulrich grinned, but
oddly, given what he was saying. "All
eliminated by the Stasi and the KGB."
"That's just what I mean," I said, looking at
the bullet-pocked wall. "I vote we go to the
high school."
"What, for the sock hop?" Ulrich looked at
Kit, appealing. "This is goddamn Berlin!"
Kit refused to look at him. She raised
her glass of beer to her mouth and hid behind it. I
sensed how much she wanted not to choose between us, which
made me want to force her to. "What do you
say, Kit?"
"I only said I didn't want to sleep in
some dorm for females, off by myself with a bunch of
strangers. I don't rightly see why we have
to fight about it." The threat of dark weather moving in
on us again upset her.
I felt guilty for pressing the point, so I
playfully punched Ulrich's arm. "And I
didn't say anything about a fucking
sock hop, Ulrich."
"I think you want to be calling me Rick."
"Oh, so now your name is Healy, not
Casanova?" But it was not smart to mock him for his
impulse to pass as pure American. Pure
American would keep us safe. "Look,
guys," I said, "we need a base. A place
to leave our bags before heading out. A place that's
safe."
"Youth hostels are safe," Ulrich said.
"But you heard Kit. That won't work for her."
"Hey, don't make me the issue between you
two."
I glanced at her, ready to say, You are the
issue. But just then my eye went past her to a
man at an adjacent counter. He had his beer,
but what he seemed interested in was us. Meeting my
quizzical stare, he smiled. He raised the
glass, toasting me. He sipped without lowering his
gaze.
"Jesus," I muttered, looking down. "That
guy's watching us."
Kit snapped off a look, but Ulrich
calmly picked up his glass. "No problem,"
he said. "Be cool."
I looked again. The man was still smiling at me,
his teeth bright in the curl of his mouth. He was
short, his dark hair in a crew cut. He
wore a rumpled tan suit, a white shirt
open at the collar, no tie. His nose was red,
his eyes were glassy, he looked drunk. Hence
the smile, which suddenly seemed more goofy than
sinister. He downed the last swallow of beer and
smacked his lips happily, then moved toward us.
"He's coming," I whispered.
Ulrich turned toward the man as he joined us.
He claimed a corner of our standup counter
by putting his empty beer glass down. Kit
shifted toward me.
"Good evening, friends," he said. "Perhaps it is the
case that I can be help to you." His smile now
seemed real, and he appeared to be not much older
than we were. He was feeling no pain, but he
wasn't drunk. "Here in Berlin," he went
on, "we must look to help each other. It is the
only way. Welcome to Berlin." And again he
raised his glass.
So did we, draining them, which prompted the man
to go back to the serving window for more. While he was
gone, Ulrich said again, "Be cool."
We had come for the adventure, right? Here it was.
The man returned with a tray, four beers and
four cardboard coasters. He served them around.
When he raised his glass, we clinked with him.
"To a death in Berlin," he said.
"What?" Kit blurted.
"A traditional toast," the man said,
grinning. "Every Berliner's fondest wish. A death
in Berlin--in the distant future, not tonight."
"A body hopes not," Kit said, and we all
laughed.
"I am Josef Tramm," he said. "I
please to make your meeting."
Something told me, as we introduced ourselves,
each shaking his hand, that his awkward syntax was
deliberate, a bit of the buffoon to put us at
ease. I liked that he was so short; he had
to look up at me.
"American students, I think, yes?"
"That's right," Ulrich said. "From
Wiesbaden." Again that w. "Our fathers are in the
Air Force. The US. Air Force."
Josef raised his glass again. "Ah, the
Air Force. We in Berlin love the American
Air Force. In 1948 the airlift saved us."
Ulrich touched his glass to Tramm's. "To the
airlift," Ulrich said with a cocky grin. "When
the same planes that had destroyed Berlin came
back to save it."
Jesus, I thought, Ulrich and his damn
ironies. I vastly preferred the mode of
innocents abroad. Not innocent of sin, but
sinning in innocence. I watched the German to see
what he would make of Ulrich's curve.
"A point well made," said Tramm. "But
Berlin suffered far more from the Russian shelling
than from American and British bombing. And after
the shelling, the Cossack pillaging, which is not
forgotten, even in the East."
Tramm pulled a half-smoked stub of a
cigarette from somewhere in his clothing. Cupping his
hands around a flame, he bent to light it, then
waved the match out. "To people my age," he continued,
"and I was twelve during the airlift, the
Americans were the "chocolate bombardiers,"
that is all. That is why we greet you warmly."
"What are you, the welcome committee?"
Ulrich seemed as relaxed as Tramm.
Tramm grinned. "In Berlin there are many
welcome committees. You were already greeted by the church people."
That was in the other hall. Had he been watching
us there?
"I greet you on behalf of workers. I am
of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund--the
DGB, the trade union council. My job
is to welcome workers arriving in Berlin, which
naturally is to recruit them--industrial workers,
electricians, carpenters, masons. We are,
you say, desperate for labor here. My job
is to--" He put the butt of his cigarette
between his lips, squinting at the smoke. The stub was
so short it must have been hot to his flesh. He
reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and
pulled out a stack of cards, dealing one to each of
us. "Here is a pass for meals and, you say,
accommodation at the Free Workers' Reception
Hall. Clean beds. Good food. The DGB
offers support in finding jobs and houses, and
protects the worker in all matters having to do with
conditions and wages." A mission statement.
"We're not looking for jobs," Kit said.
"We're just here for the weekend."
"Of course, of course. You are Americans.
There is no question of jobs. But you are welcome.
You are welcome at the Workers' Hall."
"Men and women together?" Kit asked.
"Are you speaking of yourself?"
"Yes."
"To remain with your friends?"
"Yes."
"That can be arranged. We have facilities for
senior workers, what you call, I believe,
VIP. It pleases me to welcome the sons and
daughter of the chocolate bombardiers."
Ulrich, eyeing the card, surprised me
by saying, "I have memories of the airlift."
I watched him carefully. Was he going to tell
the truth? His mother looking up from her pile of
rubble at the gleaming American planes, his own
first taste of chocolate? But by 1948, wasn't
she a translator already, working for us? For
Healy?
"My father," he said simply, "was one of those
Air Force pilots flying into Berlin."
"Voil@a!" Tramm said, clinking glasses
again. "Prost!"
What Ulrich said may have been true, in a
way--of his stepfather, not his father--but still, the effect of
his statement was one of deceit. His
ability to lie amazed me. The complexities
hinted at only moments before, the airlift
reversing the air assault, were gone now, and
Tramm seemed thoroughly convinced. America the
eternal friend of Germany; Germany a nation solely
of virtue--West Germany, of course.
Tramm was about to put his cigarette out in a tin
ashtray when Ulrich offered him his pack of
Luckies. Tramm took one and lit it from the
stub.
For my part, I was stuck on the questions of whether
he'd been watching us in the other hall, of what
he'd heard us say to one another in this one.
"Herr Tramm," I asked casually, "you speak
English very well. How is that?"
He shrugged. "West Berlin, my friend.
English is a second language here. You will
find this. In the East, naturally, it is
Russian."
"You speak Russian?"
"No. I myself only English. Russian in
the East. Not here. And you? Sie sprechen
Deutsch, ja?"
"Hardly any," I said. Kit and Ulrich were
studying their beers.
"But I heard you speak quite well," Tramm
said, "of the Edelweisspiraten."
"That was me," Ulrich said. He met
Tramm's eyes and held them.
After a moment, Tramm asked, "Wie
heissen Sie?"
"Rick Healy," Ulrich answered, and he
offered his hand, which Tramm shook, saying,
"Sehr angenehm."
I introduced myself, then Kit did, calling
herself Katharine. Tramm bowed and gave each of us
a quick handshake, although Kit's hand he held a
moment longer. "There is much to see in Berlin,
Fr@aulein. I would be honored to show--the
Kurf@urstendamm, Charlottenburg, Mcationair
Barracks where the Americans live, the
American high school. You say "high
school," no? You would like to see this?"
I exchanged a worried glance with Ulrich:
Did this guy know we talked about the high school?
But Tramm was smiling easily at Kit, still
holding her hand. "Your bag," he said, indicating
the overnight bag on her shoulder. WHS was
emblazoned above the silhouette of an Indian
and the word "Warriors." "You three are
at an American high school, no?"
I could feel myself blushing. Kit withdrew her
hand from Tramm's, saying, "Yes," then giving
me an impatient look: Relax, bud.
Ulrich said, "We do not need to see the high
school. We have seen a high school." When he
laughed, Tramm and Kit joined him, leaving me
to feel foolish.
"Well, well," Tramm said then, an
undeterred salesman, still pitching to the girl.
"You said weekend, Fr@aulein. A visit
for the weekend. Very good. Very good. This is a
special weekend in Berlin. Do you know this?"
"May Day," she said.
"Jawohl! Have you come for this? Then I am
doubly happy to greet you. The great, how do you
say, mass meeting?"
"Rally," Kit said.
Tramm bowed appreciatively. "The rally
is tomorrow. My trade union council,
naturally, is a main sponsor. I can arrange
for you very special permits for places near the
platform. You can hear Willy Brandt. You can
see him."
"And in East Berlin?" Ulrich asked. "We
were hoping to see the military parade."
"Yes, yes," Tramm said without hesitating.
"It is possible. The rally at Sch`oneberg is
in the late morning, the parade passing through Alex
--Alexanderplatz--will come after noon. It is
possible. All is possible. And crossing the
sector border will be easy tomorrow, because Honecker
wants all Berliners to see the might of the
Soviet forces. I will take you myself."
"That is kind of you," I said uneasily.
"But--"
He cut me off. "It is decided. Tomorrow is
my holiday. It would please me. Very much."
"But--"
"For your father. I do this for what your father did."
"Not my father," I said with a firmness I
regretted at once.
He turned to Ulrich. "Then for yours,
Rick."
Tramm's eyes were moist with feeling--also
beer. He seemed entirely sincere, a man
determined to repay an old debt. "It would
please me very much to do this thing for you. Ich bin
sehr dankbar."
"Nichts zu danken,"
Ulrich replied, making me think, with alarm, that
he had abandoned the strategy of presenting himself as
a nonGerman speaker. But of course
ignorance of the language would make no sense if
his Air Force father had been serving in Germany
since the airlift--which, more or less, General
Healy had.
In fact, Ulrich was almost certainly up
to something else, as Kit explained to me later.
His use of the everyday phrase for "Don't mention
it" was effectively meaningless in the context set
by Tramm, whose gratitude, obviously,
wasn't directed to us but to our parents, our
country. Ulrich's--Rick's--was the kind of
dumb mistake that an entitled American kid
would make, and he had spoken that and every other
phrase, Kit said, with a distinctly American
inflection, not a German one. When she told me
this, I was amazed at her knowing such a thing simply
by listening, but her cleverness only made me
appreciate Ulrich's. I was the dunce of this
trio.
The German snuffed out his cigarette gingerly,
sliding the two-inch butt into the flapped pocket
of his shabby suit coat. Later I would learn that
cigarettes had for years functioned as the only
stable currency in Berlin, which explained why
Berliners, even into the 1960's, still treated them like
coin. Tramm polished off his beer, prompting us
to do likewise, which, in turn, he took as a
signal. He stepped back with a hand sweeping
toward the exit. "Diese Richtung," he
declared. "This way."
He tried to help me with my bag, an offer
I refused by brusquely hoisting it away. When
he then reached for Ulrich's bag, I saw that the tag with two stars, the general's tag, was gone.
I thought I must be mistaken and looked closer.
But no, gone.
A watery sensation settled in my gut.
Achtung! was the feeling, and, however vague, it
came clearly tied to Ulrich's bag. When had
Ulrich removed the tag?
To my relief, Ulrich shook off Tramm's
effort, and by the time the ever helpful German turned
to Kit, she had her strap slung across her chest
like a bandolier, both flattening her breasts, which were
already lost inside her father's field jacket, and
making me imagine them. Achtung! again. From a
certain angle, with her short hair and with
jeans on instead of her black skirt and dancer's
tights, Kit could have passed as a boy. If I
said so, I wondered, would she be insulted? An
Italian boy, I would say, but a boy. Yet
she was pure girl to me.
We filed toward the massive arched doorway
of the train station, ahead of Tramm. Already I
didn't like it that he could see me without my seeing
him. But then I had special cause to be
self-conscious. I sensed the Germanic
precision with which he was no doubt taking the measure
of my limp. Cripples like me had been
gassed.
My goddamn limp. Sometimes when I walked
I tried to regularize my gait by pretending
to be a ship sailing up the Hudson. If there was
a dip-and-toss to my shoulders, couldn't it at
least be rhythmic like a tidal current? But no.
Not then. Not there. Rhythm was impossible. The
click of my leg braces was anarchic. Not for
nothing do they use the word "jerk" for my movements.
I consoled myself that it was only Tramm behind me
watching, not Kit.
It wasn't easy to move out of the station through the
surge of cowed refugees: @emigr`es carrying
roped bundles rather than suitcases;
thick-ankled women in shapeless gray suits and
stout heels; younger women with hair on their legs,
matted in splotches by nylon stockings; men in
caps and threadbare coats, some carrying tin milk
pails, relics of the farms they'd left behind.
They were a throng, literally, of arrivistes,
all looking to change their lives. They smelled
of it, the stink of worry and longing. And who was I
to think, despite my trim blazer and tie, that
I was not one of them?

At the threshold of the unornamented entrance, just as
the cool air was hitting us, a man in a black
leather jacket jumped from nowhere into Ulrich's
path, stopping Kit and me as well. To the three
of us he said, "Deutsche marks for dollars.
Good rate. No fee. Nothing paid."
Before any of us could respond, Tramm stepped
in--"Nicht, Nicht! Nicht!"--and
pushed the man away with a force surprising in one so
short. The man cursed Tramm, but he backed
off, then scooted into the crowd, disappearing at
once.
"Black market," Tramm
explained. "Beware these people. Nothing on the
street! They are thieves. It is the great
problem of free Berlin. Make no business on
the street."
The encounter had taken place so quickly that I
felt bewildered by it, and the aftermath was no less
intimidating. We were surrounded by a crushing
pedestrian tumult against a backdrop of blaring
horns, the random noise of traffic. The
sidewalk seemed a stream of potential black
marketeers. D-marks for sale! Vodka!
Records by Elvis Presley! I imagined a
slew of pitches and saw in the face of every
passerby a readiness to make them.
Suddenly a pair of exceptionally tall
women, with their arms linked, stopped right in front
of me. They wore slinky elbow-length gloves;
their eyes were outlined in what looked like charcoal.
One was red-headed, one was blond. Their
impossibly long, curvaceous legs stretched
from short skirts to stiletto heels. Tramm
shooed them away. I had seen prostitutes on
street corners at night in Wiesbaden, but
never like this. Involuntarily, I stepped back,
which was hardly cool.
"Hookers," Ulrich said with a knowing glint, but
his worldly air leaked away when Tramm
snickered, "Jawohl! But they are male!
"Surprise whores" is what they are
called. But the bigger surprise is when their
pimps rob you. Make no business on the
streets, my friends!"
Tramm slipped between me and Kit, taking each
of us by an elbow as he ushered us along. I
exchanged a look with Kit, who was as wide-eyed
as I.
"We're not in Kansas anymore,
Michael," Kit said.
"Berlin!" Tramm said. "You are in Berlin,
the greatest city in the world! The most wicked! The
most wunderbar!"
When Tramm then adjusted his gait for me, I
sensed it and felt grateful. I relaxed some, and
admitted to myself that without him, whatever was coming,
we'd be lost already.
Outside, the darkness of night landed hard. Now
we were on a broad, bustling boulevard defined
by glaring lights, a thousand, a million of them.
The avenue was a double river, with headlights rushing
in one direction, white water, and
taillights in the other, a flow of blood. Across
the avenue, up and down its length, were giant
neon signs, a dance of blue, yellow, and red.
Punctuating the near distance were tall
streetlamps wearing halos of gold, and beyond was a
canyon wall of illuminated windows in a rank
of modern buildings. Light had never seemed more
garish, more exotic, yet its effect was to draw the
eyes ever upward, to the contrasting backdrop of the
black vault of sky, against which one thing stood out
above all. A spotlighted tower soared in the far
distance, with a gleaming stainless steel sphere atop
it, like a huge ball bearing pierced through by a
silver needle.
"Whoa!" I said. "What's that?"
"The Fernsehturm," Tramm answered with the
self-satisfaction of a tour guide. "The
television tower. It is taller than the Eiffel
Tower in Paris."
"Just to make people in East Berlin jealous?" I
asked.
Tramm laughed. "The Fernsehturm is
in the East. The Russians built it for
propaganda, just to be seen, just as you have seen it. The
joke is, in East Berlin they have a television
tower but no television."
We three laughed--a forced laugh really, a
release of pent-up tension. But it was also an
expression of relief, no doubt, that we had
actually done what we had so crazily set out
to do. Berlin. We had come to Berlin.
A joke about the material superiority of the
West? We didn't care, or if we did,
Ulrich included, we weren't making an issue
of it. We just laughed, and that was that. How simply
we had handed ourselves over to the care of our new friend.



The free workers' reception hall was a
relatively new building in an otherwise
older, mixed-use section of the city not far from the
train station. Kreuzberg, Tramm said, a
neighborhood that had survived the bombing and
shelling, was now home to diligent Berliners and
guest workers. There were tall prewar apartment
buildings, apparently renovated, modest
restaurants and shops, a nightclub or two,
a church. The hall had been shoehorned into all
of this, not quite fitting in scale or feel.
It was a three-story box of poured concrete and
broad plate glass windows, from perhaps half of
which streamed a cold, flat wash of light from
fluorescent tubes.
We arrived at around nine o'clock by taxi, having
covered a distance short enough to have walked, which made
me think Tramm had decided I was not up to it.
He paid the driver and led us into the building as if
we were dignitaries. In an expansive front
room, a woman sat at a desk while about a
dozen other people sat on vinyl couches and plastic
chairs that ranged across a polished terrazzo
floor. Potted plants stood here and there
to break up the space. At a table, four men in
overalls and workers' smocks were playing cards.
Behind them was a floor-model radio from which came
a plaintive female voice singing something sad.
Except for the desk woman, everyone in the room
was male, and they all seemed to have looked up as
we came in.
Behind the desk hung a large banner featuring
the letters DBG and a slogan that translated, by my guess, as "Building Free Berlin."
Below the banner was a closed door marked
"Herren Direktoren." When we stopped
a few yards from the desk, Kit took my hand.
I looked at her, read her mind: all male.
She held my hand as if she were my girlfriend.
Tramm spoke briefly to the desk woman.
He dealt her three of the cards he'd given us,
then gestured us forward. "You are welcome." He
held up a pen, which we each took in turn
to sign a guest book. I signed last, noting
that Ulrich had written "Rick Healy,
student." Kit had written "Katharine
Carson, student." I wrote "Michael
Elgin Montgomery, student." My mother's
face flashed before me again. If she were alive,
knowing what I was doing, she'd flip out. She'd
blame my father, flipping out at him, which she always
did as a way not to yell at me.
Foolish thought. If my mother were alive, I
would not have dared to come here; she'd never have allowed me
to take the car.
When I resumed my place at Kit's
side, I took her hand again, and she let me.
In the merciless light from flat ceiling
fixtures, the paleness of her face made her
look ill. Yet that vulnerability seemed more
linked than ever to her unbreakable spirit, which
I had learned already to trust. Kit was at the
dependable center of our adventure.
"Frau Hess will show you where to stay," Tramm
said. "I will wait for you here."
"Wait for us?" I asked.
"To show you the canteen." He pointed toward a
door on the far side of the broad room. "The
cooking is finished now, but there is always soup and
bread, good black bread. You like to eat the
German bread, no?"
"Yes," Kit said. "Love it. I'm
starved."
I was too, suddenly. But I said nothing.
"And then perhaps to see Berlin?" Tramm said.
"Berlin at night, yes?"
Kit squeezed my hand to signal no. Before
I could protest, Tramm added, "To go, you say,
on the city."
"On the town," Ulrich corrected, and then,
"Sure. Wunderbar!" The w wrong.
Frau Hess wordlessly led us to a staircase
and up a flight. She was a plump woman on the
wrong side of middle age. I noticed her
hands, one at the railing, the other at her side,
palm facing me. Her hands had rough, reddened
skin, like Mrs. Healy's.
As she took the stairs ahead of me, it was
impossible not to notice the ribs of her girdle
pressing against the stressed material of her brown
dress. The back straps of her brassiere
did, too. I looked away to notice other
things: a grilled light fixture, a black
vinyl-clad banister, a pay phone hanging on
the wall at the landing by the stairwell door. I
looked for bullet holes, but this building was too
new for that.
We followed the woman into a vacant
corridor. It had the feel of a high school
hallway, lined with gray steel lockers. We
passed an open doorway from which piano music was
coming, and I glimpsed a large room that held
numerous bunk beds, some disheveled, at least
one with a man asleep.
At the end of the hallway, Frau Hess
withdrew a key from somewhere in the ample folds of
her shapeless dress, and she opened a last door.
She reached into the room for a wall switch. As
tube lighting flickered on, she stood aside.
We saw a small room with six aligned cots
protruding from one wall, leaving a narrow
aisle between the wall and the ends of the cots. Each
cot held a thin mattress. Each was neatly
covered with a dark brown wool blanket tucked in
crisply at the corners. The room,
apparently, was unoccupied.
I recognized the blankets as the same
Army issue we had at the dorm at
Wiesbaden, war surplus blankets stamped
U.s. It was a good omen, and I led the way
in. A large mahogany wardrobe beside a window
on the far wall was the only other piece of
furniture.
Frau Hess and Kit exchanged a few
sentences in German, and once more I marveled at
Kit's fluency. The older woman pointed
back through the doorway, down the corridor--
instructions, I took it, about the WC and
washroom. Kit thanked her and offered her hand
to shake. Only then did the woman soften. She
took Kit's hand warmly and smiled.
"Machen Sie es sich bequem!"
Make yourself at home. She handed Kit the room
key and left.
Kit closed the door and turned to me and
Ulrich. She said with relief, "It's just us, at
least for tonight."
Ulrich walked the length of the room and flopped
down on the bed nearest the window. "Great!
Great!" He grinned at us triumphantly.
"Is this not great?"
"This is a female workers' bunkroom,"
Kit explained to me, "but they don't get that many
women--"bachelor women," as she said. This could
be just ours for both nights." Kit dropped her
bag on the cot farthest from the window, leaving four
cots between her and Ulrich. She took her
jacket off and dropped it on the bed, too, an
act so natural that it pulled me instantly into the
fantasy of her removing that sweater as well.
I had a mad impulse to take the cot next
to her, but squelched it. I crossed to drop my
bag, my stake, on the one beside Ulrich's,
leaving Kit an end of the room to herself, the closest
thing she would have to a girl's privacy. I was,
of course, thrilled just to be sleeping in the same
room with her--until it hit me that I hadn't
brought a bathrobe or even pajamas. Unless
I slept with my trousers on, she would see my
legs.
"So, did I not tell you?" Ulrich
crowed. But his satisfaction, I saw, was made
up mainly of relief. He had his hands clasped
behind his head, his feet propped on his overnight
bag at the end of his cot. The skin on his
cheeks, just above the edge of his beard, was flushed with
pleasure, his eyes wide with anticipation of my
response. His pleasure would be incomplete if
mine failed to match it. In his longing for my
affirmation, I glimpsed the deeper meaning of our
friendship, and it was in that, more than in our arrival, that
I could join him in feeling relieved. I leaned
over to punch his arm, the friendly blow, then sat on
my cot. Kit took a toothbrush and tube of
toothpaste from her bag and disappeared from the room.
About two feet separated the cots, and my
knobby knees pressed close to Ulrich's
leg. "Only one problem," I said.
He gave me a weird look. "No
pillows. I cannot sleep without a pillow."
"Not the problem I'm thinking of."
"What?"
"Josef."
"What about him?" Exasperation and warning laced
Ulrich's voice: Do not fuck this up with
worry, you asshole.
"He's downstairs," I said as casually as
I could. Was it because I was the only one not fluent
in German that I, alone apparently, sensed
something moving below the surface appearances?
"He's waiting for us."
"And how, old chap, is that a problem?
Josef is our ADC."
"Our what?"
"Aide-de-camp. Every general officer has
one." Ulrich grinned. "Josef will open doors
for us, already has."
"You don't think he's a little ...?"
"What?"
"I don't know."
"Monty." Ulrich threw an arm toward the
ceiling, the room. "Look what he's done for us
already, beginning with that black market character at the
station."
"Maybe he's black market." But I said
it without conviction, lacking language with which
to express my suspicion.
"Selling what? Josef does not want
anything from us. The new socialism, Monty.
The family of man. This is what I have been
telling you. This is what ersten
Mai celebrates, the way Rosenmontag
celebrates the coming of spring."
"Rosenmontag celebrates the coming of
Lent. Big difference."
"And Josef honors the airlift. I was
here, remember? Berliners love Americans.
It is that simple, my friend."
"I just have a funny feeling. You don't?"
"Not on your life."
"Why did you take your father's tag off your
bag, then?" I gestured toward his feet where the
bag was.
Ulrich looked at me sharply, but did not
answer.
I pressed. "Why? Why the phony Dixie
accent? Why aren't you telling Josef the truth?
Telling him who you are--that you are from Berlin? You
signed in at the desk as Rick Healy. What
the hell happened to Ulrich von Neuhaus, if
you think everything is so cool?"
Instead of answering, Ulrich let his eyes
drift toward the ceiling, then across it. Was he
looking for hidden microphones?
When at last he spoke, it was softly,
calmly. "Did it ever come to your mind that a guest
whose name carried that "von" would be less than
welcome at the Free Workers' Hall?"
"So what about your father's tag?"
"My stepfather's."
"So don't give me shit about my having a
funny feeling, okay?"
"Josef is good, Monty. Relax. He will
make everything possible for us tomorrow."
I flopped onto my back, suddenly
exhausted. "I know. I know." Exhausted and
hungry. "I need some soup. I need some
bread."
"Now you are saying something." Ulrich stood up
with an athletic swing of his feet. "Where is the
wonderful Kit?"
"The john, probably. The WC. You go
ahead. I'll wait for her. We'll be down in
a minute."
"Okay." Ulrich hoisted his bag, the strap
on his shoulder, and he turned for the door.
"Why are you taking that?" I asked. I sat
up.
He looked baffled for a moment, then his eyes
looked uneasily from the bag to me and back. "I
would just rather bring it, that is all." He
tugged at his beard, that phony gesture he had
used with Tramm, now using it with me. Jesus.
"The door locks, Ulrich. The lady gave
a key to Kit. We should leave our bags here."
"Not mine."
"Why?"
"Because." A distressed look came into his
eyes. A moment of proletarian insecurity after
all. "Because I should not have brought it." Not
proletarian--adolescent. "My stepfather
would--" And then he just stopped talking, stopped
cold.
"The chocolate bombardier," I said.
"Yes."
"And we are the Edelweisspiraten."
"Yes."
"And you don't have a funny feeling. Not on
my life."
He shook his head. "See you downstairs,
Monty." All we're after, his manner said, is
a weekend's diversion, the adventure story
we'll get out of it. So far so good. "Let's have
some soup."
"And then go "on the city"."
He laughed. "Oh, and Monty, my good man
--you should be calling me Rick."

After soup and bread in a big room furnished in
greasy plastic with a counter holding a large jar of
pickled pigs' feet, which looked like fetuses in
formaldehyde and from which only Josef ate, we
did indeed go out. Not quite on the town but on the
neighborhood--to a small basement jazz club
about two blocks away. The air outside had
turned damp with a threat of rain, and in the crowded
lounge the air was thick with smoke. There were
small round tables, low backless stools for jazz
buffs to sit on with knees hunched, and a bossa
nova trio consisting of guitar, bass, and
drums. Of the forty or fifty people squeezed into the
place, perhaps a dozen were American servicemen,
including several blacks, which made it seem
safe.
German girls wearing garish makeup draped
themselves on the GI'S. Goldliebchen,
Josef called them in whispered good humor, as
if the girls were nothing more than another
manifestation of the gratitude of Berlin.
Tramm, like the other Berliners in the room,
seemed to accept the fact that white
girls clung to the necks of blacks. I
didn't know what to make of it, except as part
of a scene that drew me in at once. I sought out
Kit's eyes, thinking of her rejection of
"nigger," but what would a girl from the Deep South
make of this? She refused to look at me.
In fact, whites-with-blacks added to the
bohemian air, embodied what Europeans
cherished as the pure and primitive energy of the
American jazz scene. In the States, 1961
was the year of Chubby Checker, who, in a famous
remark of Eldridge Cleaver's, taught white
men how to dance. But it was jazz that Berliners would
always prefer to American rock, and so would I.
Music defined my generation, but in that regard,
as in others, I was already on the margin, where I would
remain even when the Beatles made their splash
later that year. My taste in music was rooted in
my permanent problem. Jazz was meant to be
listened to, not danced to. Subtle movements
of the head, a little toe-tapping--no twist and shout
for me. Or anyone else that night, thank
God.
Josef and Ulrich quickly downed several
beers, as if to catch up to the other patrons.
Kit ordered a Coke, then another, while I
nursed a single beer. I found it impossible
to talk over the music, and knew better than to do
so in any case. But the bossa nova could not
keep Tramm from a steady loud patter
addressed, embarrassingly, to the three of us. The
genius of Brazilian and American music, the
technical perfection of Telefunken
amplifiers, the hot-club scene in West
Berlin--on and on Tramm pontificated.
To my surprise, neither the musicians nor our
fellow patrons seemed to care. As usual, the
disturbance was imagined, imagined by me, a
function of my masterly uptightness. Soon
Tramm was expounding on the Marshall Plan,
funding for 180 new bridges within the city
limits of Berlin alone. He had gone from being
our tour guide to our professor. As the evening
wore on, I half listened to him and half let
my mind drift.
Ulrich would not have liked where my mind drifted.
I watched with disguised interest as a leggy
German girl at the next table fondled her
GI. Her amazing legs were shaven, but the hair
in her armpits wasn't, a sight that
made me embarrassed for her. The girl clutched
a shot glass in one hand and let the other rest in
the soldier's lap, occasionally applying gentle
pressure, making him groan. The unsought
image in my mind, meanwhile, was of Ulrich's
mother behaving in such a way, in just such a place, with
her Yank, David Healy. When he groaned,
did he think it was love?
I hated the idea of Ulrich's mother as a
Goldliebchen, ordered it out of my mind, but
no use. Every German girl in the room,
seemingly at foreplay, made me think of her. The association was an offense, but I couldn't
shake it. Finally I decided to go. I raised
an eyebrow at Kit. She nodded.
Ulrich and Josef were speaking loudly to each
other in English. Ulrich--Rick--had succeeded
in seeming only American, although several other
young men in the room were long-haired and bearded, and
they were German. Was it a German style, I
wondered, and not particular to Ulrich? The waiter
brought a fresh pair of ceramic beer steins to the
table just then, and so neither Josef nor Ulrich
hesitated to let me and Kit go. Auf
wiedersehen.
Outside, it had begun to rain, a soft
midnight drizzle, which felt clean. We linked
arms to walk, taking the rain as only the young know
to do. We turned our faces to it, licking the
air, laughing.
"Do you know what a raincoat is?" Kit
asked suddenly.
Because half my mind was still back with the leggy
German girls, I thought at first she meant some
euphemism for condom, but no, not Kit.
"What?" I said.
"It's what your mama makes you wear when
she's afraid she'll get wet."
I laughed with her and said, "Come to think of it,
they never explain what's so great about staying
dry."
Getting wet in the middle of the night seemed just
then to be precisely the point of coming to Berlin,
and the best part was having no need to say so. As we
walked along, I was aware of her hip by mine,
mine bumping at each step. For once I stopped
hearing the click of my braces, almost forgot what
they were for. The feeling was, if I could have, I'd
have skipped, skipped gleefully through the gathering
puddles, Gene Kelly singin' in the
rain.
But who was the dead opposite of Gene Kelly
if not me? In those days, too, the opposite of
Paris was Berlin. Instead of skipping, I
channeled my exuberance into a cocky twirl of
my cane. I wished we could just slow down so that
these moments together would last longer.
We paused under the overhang outside the
Workers' Hall. We were alone. "What did you
make of it back there?"
"Nice guitar," she said.
"I mean the couples."
"The girls with the GI'S? Good thing my pa
wasn't there. Great white father. Emphasis on
white."
"He would have--?"
"My daddy started out as a mill worker in
Montgomery. Best thing the war ever did, it did
for him, even if he's too thick to know. The
Army got him before the Klan could. But some things
he won't abide. He'd kill me if he
knew I was even in there."
"So you're from Alabama?"
"Yep."
Despite our damp clothes, the chill, I
wanted to stay out here with her, pretend this was a
date. But I could not think of the next thing to ask.
Kit said, "What else do you want to know?"
"Your folks are in Turkey?"
"Ankara. Pa's a flight-line mechanic
at the air base. Ma hates it there. Base
housing is Quonset huts."
"You going back there after graduation?"
Kit shook her head. "They think I'm going
home to Montgomery, to live with my granny,
work as a carhop at the AandW."
"But you're not?"
She shook her head again and turned away from
me. She stared out into the rainy dark, leaving it to me
to ask more. "What then?"
"Rick didn't tell you?"
"No."
"It's what we did together. Him at
Brandeis, me at Ole Miss. Rick helped
me work up the nerve."
"To do what?"
"Apply to college without permission. We
both did that, but not starting from the same place.
College is a fur piece for someone like me."
She grinned. ""A fur piece."
Get it?"
I wasn't sure I did, but I nodded.
"Might as well be a fur coat."
"But you got in?"
"Yep. Ole Miss. Oxford,
Mississippi. Full scholarship, work-study,
the whole shebang. Next September, whether the
great white father likes it or not. And it will be
not."
"You haven't told them?"
"I'm working on it."
"But they'll be proud."
Kit snorted. "Ole Miss," she said.
"My pa thinks it's a football team.
Period."
"And you?"
"To me it's Faulkner country, that's all.
Faulkner lives in Oxford. I wrote to him.
Rick made me do it, just like he wrote to that guy
of his."
"Marcuse."
"Right. I wrote Faulkner. I told him
I was coming, get ready."
"Light in August." I was about to lie,
say "I love that novel" like a callow date.
"What?" She looked at me with such interest that
I could not lie to her.
"I know you're reading it," I said.
""My, my. A body does get around.
Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two
months, and now it's already Tennessee.""
"What?"
"The last line of Light."
"Oh. I thought maybe it was yours, what you're
writing."
She gave me another look.
"I saw you. I saw what you're writing, a
glimpse of it."
"A body does git around, big guy."
""The story of your soul.""
"Did I say that?"
"Yes."
"And you said Rilke. Thanks for saying that. It
made the Vopo leave me alone."
"I do read Rilke," I said. "Letters
to a Young Poet. Though I'm no poet."
"Don't be so sure. Who else but a poet
would stand out here like this, freezing his durn butt
off?"
I laughed, aware of how chilled I
felt, but when she turned and opened the door, I
was disappointed.
She gestured at the sign: "Frei
Arbeiterschaft Halle."
"At least it's free," she said.
Once in the room, our ease with each other
evaporated. I went at once to what I thought
of as the boys' end, and misunderstood when, turning
around abruptly, I found that Kit had followed
me there. But she was only going to the wardrobe, which
she opened. Inside, she found a stack of folded
towels. She took two, tossed one to me, and
returned to her end of the room, leaving me to wonder
if she had any idea how uncomfortable I'd
become. As if I had lied to her.
Separately, without comment, we each toweled our
wet hair. Then, while Kit went down the
hall, I opened the wardrobe and found hangers.
I slid one into my damp blazer and hung it
up. I went over to the window and watched the rain
fall through the cone of light cast by a nearby
streetlamp. The window was open a few inches, and
I could smell ash in the air--what Berliners had
smelled for years, I would be told, every time it
rained.
Kit came back, and I took my bag with
me to the WC down the hall.
When I returned to the room, the overhead
light was off. Now the light from the street was the
only illumination, a faint glow. Kit's
corner was entirely dark, and it took me a
moment to realize that she was already under her blanket.
I was crushed that this time alone with her was now going
to end in sleep, but relieved that she would not see
me without my clothes. I went to my cot,
undressed facing away from her, removed my leg
braces, careful to put them down without a sound, and
slid under my blanket. My good GI
blanket. I was equally aware of the scratchy
wool on my legs and of the three vacant cots
between me and the girl.
I was wearing briefs and an undershirt, which made
me wonder what she was wearing. I knew nothing
firsthand of the female body apart from the sweet
implications of clothing; nothing of breasts,
nipples, the curve of the hip. I had pictured
it, of course--the camerabook nudes and
statues, the furtive sessions with girlie
magazines. But what was a vagina to me beyond a
fancied wound between legs? Or the
clitoris, of which I'd never heard. When I
pictured a woman's naked body--as I did
then Kit's--it had no hair anywhere except
for the head.
"A penny for your thoughts," she said, her
disembodied voice floating in the darkness. I
almost choked at what I'd have had to answer if the
truth was even remotely on my list of things
to say.
"Mothers," I said--I don't know why. And at
once I rebuked myself. Playing on her pity
for a boy who'd lost his mother--is that what I was
doing?
"What about her?"
"Not my mother," I said, a lie told
to deflect an emotion I wanted no part of.
"I meant Ulrich's mother."
"Ulrich's mother? What about her?"
"Her being German. I was thinking of her back
there in the club."
"With those German girls?"
"I guess so, yes. I mean--well, not
literally. Those girls were hookers, right?"
"Just desperate kids, Michael. I mean,
what would we be doing if we lived here?
Imagine."
"That's what I was thinking about Ulrich and his mother
when they lived here after the war. What they
survived, what they went through."
"Mrs. Healy is good to me."
"Me, too."
"You've been through a thing or two."
"Not like that, though. You could see it in Ulrich's
eyes today, the way he looked out that train
window."
"And the way he's getting blasted tonight."
"I guess I don't blame him," I said.
But what I felt was gratitude that he was still out
there, gratitude to Tramm for keeping him out.
"I just mean, I can't really picture
Ulrich's mother acting like those girls."
Kit laughed. "But it sounds like you did
picture it, big guy. And what the heck, why
not? Mrs. Healy was a Fr@aulein, and if
you know her now, you know she was a pretty one. And
General Healy, or Major or Captain or
whatever rank he was then, was a handsome Yank
flyboy. And sure they went to clubs. Why the
heck not?"
"Not flyboy, Kit. Spy. Do you
know that? Ulrich told me that today in the train
while you were asleep. Ulrich's stepfather is a
spy in charge of spies."
"I wasn't asleep."
"Jesus, you too?" One unexpected turn
after another--why was I loving it so? "You're a
spy, too?"
"What, because I pretended to sleep? I just needed a little time to myself, was all."
"But Kit, have you noticed something about this trip?
Nothing is what it seems to be."
"Substance versus surface, big guy. Not
"this trip"--life. Nothing's what it seems
to be in life. The hateful duplicity of all
that we experience, which happens to be Faulkner's
subject."
"And yours."
"The moral disease of the human condition." "Incurable."
"What?"
"You said "incurable" in your book."
"What book?"
"The one you're writing."
"Now who's duplicitous!"
"I told you I glimpsed it. Only
glimpsed. You mind?"
"What I write in my accounts is
private, bub."
I did not answer. After a long silence, I
said, "I'm not talking about your book, or
Faulkner. I'm talking about us. Ulrich
pretending to be Rick. You and me--a debating
club, for God's sake. Josef Tramm--a
union rep? Yeah, right."
"Don't get paranoid on me, Michael."
"It's Berlin, Kit. Paranoia everywhere."
"Okay, so maybe we're all spies.
Maybe those girls in the club were spies.
Maybe when she was young, Ulrich's mother was.
Maybe she still is. Let's pretend it's a
movie. Ingrid Bergman."
"Marlene Dietrich."
"Romy Schneider."
"But it's not a movie, Kit. Ulrich's
whole thing in coming here, what we saw in him on the
train--it's more than what you and I are up to."
"Maybe. Maybe not."
"No, for sure it is. I mean, the guy has
all these ghosts in his brain. The Edelweiss
Pirates, what the hell is that?
Adolf Eichmann. Herbert Marcuse. The
chocolate bombardier. Rubble women. Talk
about incurable."
"No one was talking about incurable, Michael."
"You were."
"Because I said "disease"? Is that what you're
asking?"
"You mean like my polio?"
"I didn't mean that."
"It's okay, Kit. I know I had polio.
You don't have to worry if you refer to it. That's
obviously no secret, though everybody treats
it like it is."
She didn't say anything. It seemed like her
turn, and so, for a few moments, neither did I.
I could hear her breathing.
Was it over? The day? The time with her? Had I
blown it by actually saying the goddamn word out
loud? To keep our talk going, I said
quietly, "Earlier today, I thought of The Wizard of Oz, and then you quoted from it. You were
Judy Garland."
"You're Ray Bolger?"
"The scarecrow?"
"We were talking about Rick."
""The power of negative thinking is a force for
human liberation.""
"If you say so."
"That's Ulrich's motto, Kit. Marcuse.
That's what we're doing here. Negative thinking
in relation to the German past. Negative thinking
in relation to American materialism.
Negative thinking in relation to his old man.
All that negative shit--"the disobedience of a
living body." You heard him. It's why you and
I weren't going to come at first, why we started out this
morning by saying no."
"But we do negative thinking of our own, I
guess. Huh?"
"Like about your father?"
She didn't answer. I pressed. "What was
that about the Klan?"
"The Klan is just one tree among many in the
woods I come from."
"But you hate it. So you're here."
"Something like that. I was cussing this whole thing on
the train, but now I'm glad we came."
"Even if you're headed for a Communist
parade?"
"Yes. And you're glad, too,
Michael. I can tell. You can't fool
Dorothy."
"I am glad. I love it, actually, being
here." I paused, admittedly for effect, before
adding, "Especially now."
Those two simple words marked a move away
from the others and toward us--which is why, no doubt,
we each fell silent again, each staring up at the
shadowy ceiling, each breathing so the other could hear.
You, I thought. Not Ulrich. Y. You, Kit.
Not me, either. Tell me about you.
At last I said, "Your mother. What's she
like?"
"Oh, she's real southern, a country gal.
Daisy Mae and all that. Dogpatch. My
folks are what you guys would call
hillbillies."
"No, I wouldn't."
"No shame in being hill people, Michael. It
all depends on where you're starting from. You start in
a place very different from me."
"How do you know that?"
She laughed. "Written all over you, big
guy. There are mill workers and there are owners.
Some differences not even being an Army brat
smoothes out."
"I'm not an Army brat."
"Which makes the point."
"No shame in that either?"
"Right."
"But we were talking about your parents. Your mother."
"Daddy whistles Dixie when he wants
something from her. And she delivers." Kit's laugh
now carried a hint of the lewd, a hint of her
parents' raucous pairing. "Sometimes he calls
her Dixie Cup." But her jovial esprit
had come out of nowhere, and even in the dark it seemed
counterfeit.
"What do you call her?"
"Mama. Most of you guys say "Mom."
But I call mine "Mama." I love that word
"Mama." Mammary. Marvelous.
Magnificent. Amazing."
"What do you mean, "you guys"?"
She laughed again. Kit was enjoying this--what, this
dissection of differences? I had been feeling so like
her, but now she was emphasizing how we were
unalike. A way of pushing me away? "You
Yankees," she said. "You Yankees. You say
"Mom, Momm ... Dad,
Daad." We say Mama. We say
Daddy." I sensed her in the dark, her head
propped on an elbow, facing toward me.
"Knock, knock," she said abruptly.
"Who's there?"
"Marmalade."
"Marmalade who?"
"Marmalade everyone but Daddy."
I got the joke, but I did not laugh.
She snorted and fell back on her cot.
"Although not in my house. A Dixie Cup can't
fight back."
I heard in her inflection an echo of her
father's demand, a hint of her mother's surrender. And
that said what about Kit? Another way we were
alike? The weight a kid feels from the tension
between her parents, or his. A mill hand. A
racist. The great white father. Her disdain for her
father was very clear. And mine?
"I'm surprised at you, Michael," Kit
teased. "Laughing at a joke like that."
"I didn't laugh."
"I noticed. Why, because it's raunchy?"
"Was that raunchy?" I asked, trying for fun
and affection. If I'd had a pillow, I'd have
thrown it across the room at her. "Why does this
feel like a game of keep-away?"
"Because there are certain things we are not talking
about?"
"Exactly."
"That's the Army brat's way, Michael. You
live a lot of different places. You see a
lot of different people. You keep having to fit in
over and over. You're very careful what you show
to folks. Wiesbaden is my tenth school."
"It's my third."
"There you go. An Army brat gets to choose
which of her sides to show. When I'm with Ma and
Pa, I'm Katey-Ann, Miss
Keep-the-peace-at-any-price. With Granny,
I'm Katharine, the girl who fetches. My
folks think I'm going to take care of her in
Montgomery, for my room and board."
"But?"
"I love Granny," Kit said, "but come
September, I'm a freshman at Ole
Miss, and that's that. And the first thing I'm doing is,
Knock, knock--"
"Who's there?"
"--on William Faulkner's
front door in Oxford, so I can ask him if
he needs help with the chores."
"What do you mean?"
"He's an old man. He's going to need
help with his chores, and I'm going to do them for him.
And before I'm through, I'm going to get him to read
my novel."
"That's the thing we aren't talking about, your
novel."
"Which you were reading without permission."
"I didn't know it was a novel."
"Bits and pieces of one. Still private."
"I'm sorry."
She fell silent again. After some moments, I
said, "Knock, knock."
"Who's there?" Not mere pleasure in her
voice now, but true delight.
"The little old lady."
"The little old lady who?"
"You don't know it?"
"The little old lady who, big guy!"
"And when Mr. Faulkner answers the door,
you tell him you are good mountain folk, which is why
you can yodel. Liddle-oldle-ladee-whoo!"
"Jesus, Michael, you are good. I'm
great, but you are good."
"And you can tell Mr. Faulkner that you've
been to damn Berlin!"
"Even East Berlin, if we get away with
it tomorrow. Can you believe we were behind the Iron
Curtain today? The damn Iron Curtain,
Michael!"
"We're still behind it, Kit."
"Could you believe Rick at the border? That
asshole."
"Talk about obedience of a corpse. I'll
tell you something--I was scared there for a minute."
"For a minute? Jeez, big guy, I'm still
scared." And we laughed again, hard. A couple of
kids at camp after lights out, scaring each other,
creating the potent intimacy of night secrets,
our confessions to each other. Two kids admitting
to being scared. And then, in the good silence that follows
laughter, waiting to see what else we would
admit to.
But the silence thickened, and I thought, with sudden
if regretted weariness, that we might be going
to sleep now.
But there came her voice again, floating in the
darkness. "What about your mother?"
"What?"
"You said your mother before, I heard you." She
paused before adding, "I know she's dead,
Michael."
I had to stop. Hadn't she been the one to bring
mothers up? With her crack about raincoats? If
she knew my mother was dead, then was her reference a
deliberate opening, the sly offhand remark, say,
a shrink might make to help? Wizard of Oz,
wizard of pity--was she someone, really, to trust?
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Ulrich told me. He told me not to tell
any of the other kids. He told me you don't like
people to know about it. I haven't told anybody."
"I don't want people feeling sorry for me.
I hate that."
"Nobody does."
"Yes, they do."
"Because of your legs, you mean? Okay, I
take it back. You're right on that one. How can people
not feel sorry for you because of that. Of course we
feel sorry for you, Michael. You're
crippled."
I was hardly breathing as she said this. It was the
first time anyone, even including blunt Ulrich,
had used that awful word with me. Awful word, yet the
truth. The sound of it in that dark room brought an
unbounded feeling of relief. "I do okay," I
said.
"You sure do," she said.
After a long moment, in a different voice, she
said, "Knock, knock."
"Jesus, Kit. What's with you?"
"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Mahatma."
"Mahatma who?"
"Mah hat 'n' mah cane! I'm goin' for a
walk."
I didn't know how to react.
"Get it?"
"Cane."
"I forgot today, Michael. Completely
forgot. That you have it. Your cane. Like it's
disappeared. Because of the way you are. You are
amazing."
"Polio has its advantages, believe it
or not."
"Like what?"
"Like ... like it made me really close to her."
"Your mother?"
"She took care of me. She ... took ...
really ... good care of me."
"You must miss her."
It wasn't at all horrible to me that my
eyes spilled over then. Tears coursed down my
temples into the wells behind my ears. Unbounded
relief, yes--even if made possible by this
girl's not being able to see me. I hadn't cried
in months, and never, since Mom, in another's
presence. Not even my father's.
Now, as I write this, looking back through the
years at the figure of that boy, bereft in a
strange bed, I wish I could do for him, across
time, what the girl across the room had no way of
doing--reach through the dark and only touch him, to let
him know that the pointed chaos of such feelings is
what we were put here not to withstand, but to express.
What I did know was that the shedding of tears in
response to her, even if she did not understand, was
what I had come to Berlin to do.
Lying there completely motionless, my legs as
if paralyzed, my arms at my sides, my head
flat, without a pillow--I flashed back to those
first months in the pulmonary unit of St.
Luke's Hospital; my life in an iron
lung, a time when I was certain I would spend
all of my life in an iron lung. I had
been able to imagine that prospect only by imagining
also that my mother would be always there beside me, to wipe the
streaks from my temples, to smooth back my
damp hair, to sponge my forehead with her hand. The
wetness on my face now brought back the consolation
of her presence, as if she were the one in the room with
me here.
"I miss her a lot," I said, yet felt
consoled for the first time since hearing from my father of my
mother's death, a consolation mediated by the gorgeous
girl across from me. "Why does it help to say
so?"
"I don't know, Michael. I've never lost
anybody. But I know in other things, it helps
to say so. That's why I write my little novel."
"Don't call it little."
"Well, it's not big." She laughed
self-deprecatingly. And then, with her sense of
what was needed to break me from grief, Kit told
me how she had started writing because of Faulkner,
who taught her, she said, that the most interesting people
are the ones who are broken inside. The brave
ones are at war not with the world but with themselves.
She was speaking with a forced literary
self-consciousness, a girl wiser from books than
from life. But I could have listened to her forever.
Finally I said, "Will you tell me?"
"What?"
"About your novel. What's it about?"
"I don't know you well enough."
"Writers read their work to strangers all the
time."
"I know, but you're not a stranger, either. You're
sort of in between. I would need you to like it, but I
don't know if you would."
"I would."
"Don't say that. If you automatically
liked it, what good would that be?"
"So who is incurable? Tell me that, at
least."
"That would be telling you all of it."
"Is it about you?"
"It's about my mother. That's all I'm gonna
tell you. Don't ask me anything else. And
no, you can't read it."
"Okay, okay."
"It's why I felt so ... when you brought up
mothers."
But I had not been the one to do that, I was sure.
"Michael?"
"Yes?"
"This is sort of like what writing does. This
talking. It's new to me, to talk like this."
"Not even with Ulrich?"
"Especially not. I like Rick, but he makes
me nervous when he gets mad."
"I get mad, Kit. At my dad."
"That doesn't count."
We laughed.
Then I said, "Being here in this room in the
middle of the night with you. Talking like this. I've
never done this before either. It feels right, Kit. But
it feels illegal."
After a further silence, she said quietly,
"I know."
It helps to say so--wasn't that what she had
just told me? What I wanted to say then seemed
absolutely and utterly unspeakable, illegal,
verboten. How to say "I like you, Kit"?
Except, of course, by saying it. I said
nothing.
I let my face fall to the right, away from
her. Human culture, Monty,
assumes man's alienation from his sexuality. I
let my eyes drift in the undifferentiated
light outside the window, light defined only by the
floating mist, tiny drops of water carried
by specks of cinder and ash that remained in the air of
Berlin.
Unconsciously, I had lifted my left
hand up and out of the blanket--perhaps a way of not
touching my erection. I became aware of my
forefinger softly rubbing the left side of my face
until it was dry. I imagined my finger as if it
were Kit's, as if she were the one--not an angel,
not my mother--to come to me. And with that, or something soon
after--more fleeting thoughts of Ulrich quoting
Marcuse, of my father, of Tramm, of Kennedy and
Khrushchev, of Elvis, even, singing "GI
Blues"--I went to sleep.
When I woke to a noise and a jolt of my
cot, my first thought was, Kit, you have come to me.
But it was Ulrich. He bumped past me and
fell heavily onto his cot, fully clothed and
still clutching his bag. The stench of vomit poured off
him. Almost immediately he began to snore.
I lay rigidly on my side, my face in
the foul wash of his exhalations. I did not move.
I sensed someone standing motionless at the foot of my
cot--Tramm. I did not turn to look at
him. He made no sound, and I knew somehow that
he was watching me. In the diffused light from the
street, I was as visible to him as Ulrich was
to me. An old hand at paralysis, I knew
I could make him think I was dead asleep.
Tramm then came into my field of vision, a
stone-sober man moving quietly with intent.
Ignoring me, he stopped over Ulrich. He
lifted Ulrich's hand and started, I thought,
to remove his watch. Jesus. A simple
thief.
But that was not it. Tramm was removing the strap
of the bag Ulrich had clutched to himself. The strap
was entwined in Ulrich's arm, like a child's
sleeping-toy. Tramm could move it only so
far, but soon he had it free enough to open the bag's
zippered side pocket.
That was the pocket with the roll of film that the
MP had made such a fuss over in front of the
Russian at Magdeburg. Tramm had to have
been directed to that pocket, as he had to have been
told of our supposed interest in the high school.
There was no way his knowing that was a
coincidence. So Tramm now knew from us tonight that the
melodrama in the train compartment at the border, with
Ulrich announcing us as the debating club, the
roll of film as the yearbook photos--knew that
we had lied. He knew we didn't give a
shit about the high school.
From the way he was now sliding his hand inside the
unzipped pocket, back and forth, back and forth,
I realized that the film canister was not there.
Tramm urgently opened the bag's main
compartment and felt inside it, pushing his blind hand into the
clothing. No roll of film. It was as if I were
watching a movie, the villain outsmarted by the good
guy. Ulrich had been ahead of me all day.
Was he even now only seeming to be conked out?
But no. His breath was so foul, his snoring so
grotesque, way too much, he couldn't be
faking.
Tramm sank to one knee at Ulrich's
cot, remained motionless for a long moment, staring at
Ulrich. What boss would Tramm report this
failure to? He craned his neck forward
slightly, and I sensed that he was about to frisk
Ulrich, his clothing. The prospect alarmed me,
as if I, too, had a part to play in the
hide-and-seek of the film canister, whatever it
was. Instinctively, I groaned and tugged at
my blanket, a warning, as if my waking up would
threaten Tramm--which apparently it would have. He
froze again. He was looking at me.
I smacked my lips, twice, then settled
again. When, seconds later, I peered through the
slits of my eyes, Tramm was closing the
zippers of the bag. He tucked it back
into Ulrich's side. I half expected him
to sleep on one of the vacant cots between me and
Kit, but I heard a click, the door opening,
and click, softly closing. Tramm was gone,
although it took me a full five minutes to dare
to roll over and look. Yes, gone.
I brought my left wrist up to my face,
to see my watch. Fifteen minutes before three.
I made myself wait a full thirty minutes
more. Then I threw my blanket back and found
my trousers at the foot of my cot, folded but
damp from the rain. I clutched the trousers in one
arm. In my bare feet, without my braces or
cane, I moved haltingly to the door. Yet I
made my way soundlessly through it. Along a bright
hallway, I steadied myself on the wall
as I went. In the stairwell, I found the pay
phone. I let my trousers fall out of their
fold, fished in the pockets for the coins I knew
were there, and dropped them into the telephone slot.
I inserted four, a guess at the cost of a
long-distance call. I dialed the number of our
house on Mosbacher Strasse, knowing already, with
no conscious planning, exactly what to say.
I was going to tell him that I was sorry about
calling so late, sorry about our argument, sorry
about the breach of trust with the car. I was going
to explain that I would have called sooner, but I had
not been ready to apologize, had not been strong
enough--and now I was.
I was going to tell him that I was in Berlin,
afraid of what I was doing here, but also that I was
more alive with this adventure than I had ever been
before. I was going to tell him that with Ulrich von
Neuhaus I was safe, that we had a game
going, and that we were winning.
I was going to tell him that, yes, tomorrow I would
cross the forbidden border--and everything from then on,
I was certain, would be different. And above all,
I was going to tell him about Kit Carson, that for the
first time in my life, in wishing for a woman, it was
not Mom.
The phone rang and rang, in that strange
German way, and my father never answered. I did
not imagine what he was doing, already, to come after me.




















Part Three



We were in a refitted DC-3, the
airplane that had become iconic in the haze behind
Bogart and Bergman, how it had seemed to be
nosing upward even while still on the ground.
C-47 was the military designation--C for
cargo--but the plane I had booked through
colleagues in Frankfurt was owned by the Bank
of America, the San Francisco bank whose
European holdings made Chase
Manhattan's seem like chump change. Bank
of America openly controlled several dozen
companies in West Germany, not counting its even more
extensive silent partnerships with German
banks. They had a small fleet of
DC-3'S and combled's based at Rhine-Main,
halfway between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, and it
had been a simple matter to tag one on short
notice that morning.
The plane's appointments were meant
to impress, and normally the plush swivel seats,
arranged in cocktail-lounge style around small
Formica tables, would have held investors, union
officials, or government ministers. Today
General Healy's wife and I were the only
passengers.
The jovial pilot, a retired Army Air
Corps veteran, had told us he averaged four
flights a week to Berlin, but during the airlift
he had flown four roundtrips a day, and could still
hit Tempelhof blind. Mrs. Healy and I
boarded the plane barely more than two hours ago
--less than three hours after we left the
Russian Chapel--and as we did, the pilot
saluted as if we were the commander and his lady.
Bank brass, Army brass--what's the
diff? The youthful copilot had doubled as our
steward, and reappeared in the cabin only moments
ago to lock down our swivel chairs, help us
with the seat belts, and collect our coffee cups.
"I wish you would call me Paul," I said
now.
Mrs. Healy was looking out the window as our
plane banked down over Berlin. I glimpsed
the towering half-arches of the airlift memorial
at Tempelhof, where we would land soon. But
Mrs. Healy was seeing other things, things I
knew better than to try to imagine.
"You should call me Paul," I pressed.
"We will shortly be in company where I won't
want to be using your last name. Am I correct
about that or not?"
She brought her face toward me, but her eyes
still carried the weight of what she'd been seeing.
"Who?" she asked. "What company?"
"A colleague of mine. A Berliner. A
banker. Hans Krone. Very well connected
across the city, famously so."
"How well do you know him?"
"My bank, Chase, owns a controlling
interest in the Commercial Bank of Berlin, of which
he is head. I meet with him several times a
month, always in Frankfurt. In effect, I
am his boss."
"And you trust him?"
I had to laugh. "I trust him totally for what
I need him for. I've never needed him for
espionage."
"Nor will you today."
"Which returns me to my point. We don't
want him or others to even imagine espionage,
right? This is just three kids on a lark and a
couple of pissed-off parents reeling them in.
No question at all of "national security," as
your husband calls it. Right? So we're leaving the
general out. In which case, who are you?"
"Ulrich's mother. Rick's mother. Can it not be
left at that?"
"All right," I said. "We'll see." I
did not keep the skepticism from my voice.
On the other hand, I saw the problem. If she
hoped to fudge things about her husband, perhaps it was
because she was savvy enough to know that in Berlin, it was
better to avoid explicit deception. Enact the
truth, would be the strategy, but limit it.
She said, "I have never beheld Berlin from the
air before." She let her gaze drift back to the
window, the scene below.
"I find that surprising, given your husband's
work."
"We left here shortly after we married. I
never wanted to come back, and have not. As for
David, given his work, as you put it, he could not
return here. He became too senior."
"He knows too much? He can't risk--what,
their truth serum?"
She aimed the razor of her look at me, a
look that said, Don't you dare mock my husband
or his work.
I felt chastened. "I just cannot believe I am
doing this. I'm one of those hapless Americans who
find it impossible to imagine the world of spies as
actual, existing outside of bad fiction."
"It exists in Berlin, Mr. Montgomery."
For a few minutes, we let Berlin be what
there was between us, as the plane banked over the
desolate, compulsively squared-off urban
landscape of the Eastern sector. One broad
boulevard, lined with twin ranks of new,
blockish buildings, stood in contrast to the mostly
barren streets that intersected it, vast acreage
that had been cleared of rubble but never built upon.
Indeed, pyramids of that rubble marked every few
blocks, like the tombs of dead rulers. That one
boulevard in the Communist showplace was
Stalinallee. From the air it resembled the
false-front street of a Hollywood
backlot set.
Mrs. Healy said, "My first arrival here was
on foot."
"Carrying your son?"
"Yes. Slung across my body in a shawl.
Not a proper shawl. The remnant of a
blanket, as if I were a Turk. As if he were
an infant. He was three years old."
"1946."
"Yes."
"Why Berlin? Wasn't Berlin pretty much
leveled at that point?"
"Leipzig," she said wearily, "was
"pretty much leveled.""
In my own life, that year was the joyous
beginning, Edie and I on Saturdays in
Central Park, each with a hand holding
Michael's hand, Michael swinging his feet off the
ground between us, his healthy perfect feet. Through that
year, well into the next and the one after, the word always
in my mind, as in the minds of most of us who'd
returned from the war, was "home."
"But Leipzig was your home."
Without looking my way, she smiled wanly.
I realized that in addition to the squared-off
stretches of wasteland that still defined one half of the
city below, she was seeing a reflection in the window,
the wasteland of memory. I could not know it then, but
she was surely seeing flashes of the particular
horror that had driven her, like a frightened
animal, into the herd of refugees fleeing west.
The leveling of Leipzig, in her
case, in her family's case, had not ended with the
war. It was a nightmare story, a ghost story, a
horror story I would not hear until years
later, although I think she was inclined for her own
reasons to tell it to me then--a stranger sitting
near her in an airplane. If so, it was an
impulse she resisted, except obliquely.
I did not know at the time what to listen for, although
now, in recording what she did tell me, I
see what cast the shadow in her expression, all
of it having been made explicit by someone else.
"The word "home" had no meaning in this country
then. We Germans had forfeited any right to such a
word, any relationship to what the word once
implied."
She turned to me. The distance between us, as between our
two worlds, was enough to hold an ocean. "Berlin
seemed safer. A starving city, a smoldering city
--yet for me, for my child, it was safer. And
Berlin was where I could learn ... what I had to learn."
"Which was?"
"Ulrich's father, his natural father I mean,
had disappeared. Like all of the German men. I had
not seen him since ..." She paused just enough for me
to note the care with which she sorted through the ways
to express--what, the mystery of their bond?
"Since Ulrich was conceived. I had to learn what
had happened to him. I did not know if he was
alive or dead. I did not know ..." Her
voice drifted off.
Again she was referring to the man as Ulrich's
father, his natural father, not as her husband, not as
anything in relation to her. The significance of this
distinction, observed both then and earlier in the day
at the Russian Chapel, was lost on me. But
it was a distinction I noted each time. "And did you
learn?" I asked.
"Yes. Eventually. Not at first. At first I
only survived. We only survived.
Faceless among the mass of Berlin's women and
children. Women and children without men. Women and children without
names. I felt safe among them. But we were not
safe. Not yet. Not until we found a place
among those who could protect us."
"Americans."
"Yes. It was that simple. Americans made
us safe. A common feeling in Berlin."
"You went to work for the Americans."
"I became a translator."
"Because you knew English?"
"I had been at university."
"And you met General Healy."
"Colonel Healy then." She smiled. "I
could not bring myself to call him David.
Colonel Healy. Not David for a long time.
He was extremely kind to us. His kindness
awakened me from what was known in Berlin as the
"sleep of the women," the living death of our
kind. At first it was a simple matter of fresh
milk for my little one. David brought fresh milk
for Ulrich, a miracle. I never knew where he
got it. For me, he brought a feeling of being
protected. And he was able to find out what had
happened to Ulrich's father when the Russians
came. There were Soviet files that--" She
stopped, clearly checking herself.
But now that she was telling me her story,
actually telling me, telling someone, a stranger
on a plane, she wanted to go on. "I was
devastated. I had loved Ulrich's father very much.
A youthful love. All through the war, I had been
terrified for him. Then I learned I was right to be
terrified for him. One spends years fearing the
worst, and then, when the worst reveals itself, it is
far, far worse than one dared imagine. He was
not meant for the army, certainly not meant for the
Nazis."
"What was his name?"
She looked at me, deciding whether to say.
Then she answered. "Wolf. His name was Wolf.
In those years when we were young, it was a name that made
us laugh. So untrue of him, that name. He was the
opposite of wolf. He was, you say, a
thinker. A philosopher. A prot@eg`e of
Edmund Husserl. He was brilliant, the
youngest Herr Doktor Professor at the
University of Leipzig, and I was his promising
student. It would be too much to say I worshiped
him, but not too much to say that I defined myself
by him. I was so young. Like me, he was from a
landholding family, a proud family. But our
families, it would be seen, were not hard enough.
We were not hard enough. Our families had been
made soft by privilege. And also he was a man
of the mind--another kind of softness. He was not
equipped for the realities that unfolded in this nation,
that fell upon this nation. That is what, having come
to Berlin, I would learn. But I am speaking too
much."
"No. You are not." I waited.
Finally she resumed. "He had become like the
nation. He was the nation, the Reich. That is a word
one never hears anymore, have you noticed?
Reich. What was done routinely by Germans for the
Reich in 1945, no German would have done--almost
no German--in 1940. Certainly not Wolf.
When I knew him, unthinkable! The war was a
complete disaster for him, even more than for others. The
war destroyed him--this is what I learned."
"From Soviet files?"
"Destroyed him, my husband, even before it
killed him."
"He was your husband?"
She started when I said that, as if I had
caught her in an indiscretion. A crimson
flood rose in the skin of her throat, overtaking
her face, her face seized for a moment with true
fear. Which she then swallowed, a draft of
poison.
Why? How had wedlock, instead of its shameful
opposite, become a source of mortification?
How had her marriage to this man become a
secret to protect? Why, even now, was she
terrified? Soviet files?
In my experience that year, no German of my
acquaintance lived with any discernible attachment to the
past. As I recall, that very week the trial of
Adolf Eichmann had convened in Jerusalem,
Israel's forcing of a long-deferred moral
reckoning. We did not know it then, but that trial
marked the beginning of Germany's turning back
to face its history. This woman, for reasons I
did not see yet, had never been able to turn
away.
"Your husband died at the end. In Berlin?"
She nodded.
Why, I wondered, had she used that
euphemism with me--he never returned from the
front. The German habit of lying. I knew
not to press that. "Berlin at the end," I said too
easily, "was a nightmare."
She shrugged, conveying the impossibility of
continuing this conversation. "It was all a nightmare,"
she said bitterly. "Berlin is nothing more than where
people like you were finally able to see it as such."
"And being here brings it all back to you?"
"How could it be otherwise?" She was at the end
of her patience with me. The willing stranger in the
airplane, tossed up by fate, was a
dunce. "Ulrich is his father's son. There is the
curse. To have Ulrich at risk in Berlin ..."
She could not finish her sentence, or would not.
The plane dropped suddenly, approaching the
airport. Her hand went to the armrest of her
chair, clutching it. She was finished talking.
What she had told me mainly was that my son was
in even more jeopardy than I had feared, that I
grasped nothing of what it might involve.
On landing, the plane bounced once before
settling into its long rollout, and I noticed
Mrs. Healy's clutching fingers go white for some
seconds. Fear, yes. But also absolute
control. The plane engines reversed loudly,
cutting our momentum, then eased, making it
possible for me to hear her when she shifted toward
me to say, "It is Charlotte, Paul."
Von Neuhaus? I nearly asked. But that
name, taken by her son in rejecting the name Healy,
was her family's name, she had said, not her first
husband's. "Please call me Charlotte," she
said simply.

And that is how I introduced her, as one of the other
parents, to Hans Krone, who stood waiting at
the foot of the flimsy short stairs that had been
rolled up to the plane. The sun was bright, but
Krone was wearing a tan cotton overcoat that
emphasized his bulk. He was a shrewd man,
large enough to be physically intimidating, and he was
known for his readiness to pull the trigger on a deal.
He took his power for granted, and, as a member
of a close-knit West Berlin elite, well
he might. A new oligarchy had established itself in West Germany during the economic boom of the
fifties--the steel barons of the Ruhr, the
sanitized industrialists at Krupp and
Bayer, and the key commercial bankers who,
controlling liquidity, were the true princes of the
new Reich. In ways that we Ausl@anders
were aware of, but for all our stakeholdings never part
of, these Germans worked closely together, even
took care of each other. They shared an
implicit bond defined, exactly, by what
separated them from us. At a certain point, the
clients of the occupation had become its
proprietors, albeit proprietors who as
yet were content to indulge us Ausl@anders in
our illusion of conquest. As long as it helped with
cash flow, they would.
Krone, presiding over the financing of the
construction frenzy in West Berlin, was one of these
princes. He and his kind controlled more of what
made for life in the new Germany than the
government did, not least because, in addition to handling the
throttle of the economic locomotive, they were the
engineers of the economic turbines running
underground, commonly known as the black market.
Involving millions of dollars, the black
market by 1961 flourished especially in the
East, since the official economy there was
moribund. The failure of the Communists
to supply basic needs and wants to their population
made the black market inevitable, which is why
moral scruples about illegality on the part of
outsiders like me were irrelevant.
Surreptitious exploitation, of currency
fluctuations particularly, fueled a discreet
auxiliary engine of the Berlin banking boom, and
I knew that Krone was a prince of that realm,
too. I had nothing to do with his illegal
activities across the sector boundaries of the two
Berlins, accounts that showed up nowhere on his
books, much less on mine, but I assumed his
reach into his peer elites in the Communist world.
Indeed, in asking for his help today, I was counting
on it.
None of this needed to be referred to. With me,
Krone had always been direct. His friendliness had
implied neither deceit nor ingratiation. I
liked him, and in fact it was a relief to feel the
warmth of his uncomplicated, affirming handshake.
When it came to women, German businessmen were
afflicted, in a famous phrase from another
context, with the disease that presumes itself the cure.
Their sly, winking discretion intended to honor the
appearance of a rigid post-Nazi morality, but
like inquisitive confessors they managed to be
both puritanical and lewd at once, if
only by implication. There was no chance that Krone
would bat an eye at my abbreviated
introduction of my companion as the mother of
Michael's chum. I had briefed Krone
by phone, telling him the simple truth that my
seventeen-year-old son had gone to Berlin without
permission, probably for the May Day
celebrations in the Soviet sector, and I
wanted to find him. I'd told him that Michael
was with two other American kids, but apart from
descriptions, I had not identified
them. I could sense in Krone now, even in his
brisk greeting of the woman beside me, the
assumption that there was more to her presence here than that.
And who was I to tell him he was wrong?
A car was waiting for us on the tarmac, a
gleaming black Mercedes. Unlike mine, this one
was a recent model that had at last forsworn the
traditional bulbous hood and fenders for a boxy
sleekness with the barest hint of fins. This style
shift to American aerodynamics, the illusion
of speed even while standing still, could not occur in
Germany without a simultaneous shift away from the
deadweighted past symbolized by the classic
Mercedes design. And we Yank bankers had
conveyed to the denizens of Stuttgart the virtue of
built-in obsolescence, which is the economic
point of style. All of this, to your father, would have
been an instance of capitalist waste, except for
what was being rendered obsolete. Those old
Mercedes fenders, after all, had never seemed more
themselves than when flying flags that bore the
swastika.
The driver, in black suit and cap, stood
by the right rear passenger door, holding it for
Mrs. Healy, while I crossed to the other
side. When I slid in next to her, ahead of
Krone, she was waiting to make eye contact with
me, to flick an eyebrow, alerting me. To what
I hadn't a clue, then realized she wanted no
discussion in front of the driver. To keep up with
her, I was going to have to sharpen the edge of my
paranoia. In General Healy's household,
apparently, the assumption had to be that servants
were enemies.
In response to her muted anxiety, I
covered her hand with mine, a less intimate act
than it might have been because she was wearing her tan
gloves again. It was an automatic gesture,
even with her. Often I had reassured Edie with
such a touch, but in this context I intended it in an
impersonal way, only to convey that we had no
choice but to trust Krone's methods, whatever
they were. But Mrs. Healy lost no time in
withdrawing her hand from under mine. There would be no
calling this woman Charlotte unless we were not
alone.
Krone joined us in the back, settling his
ample frame on a swingdown jumpseat
opposite me. The driver had taken his
topcoat. His suit was a well-cut,
double-breasted navy pinstripe carrying a hint of
Savile Row. The midday heat had not registered
on me until now, when Krone snapped his
handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his
large forehead. In America, but for those
pinstripes, he would have been taken for a football
fan, a man living for the glory days of his own
gridiron career in school. The warm smile with
which he had greeted us at the foot of the rolling
staircase was gone.
"This is a very tense time in Berlin," he said.
After wiping his face, he carefully wiped his
hands. He returned the handkerchief first to its
creases, then to its pocket in three perfect
steeples. His fastidiousness made me think
briefly of Edie.
"First of all," he went on, "you are
correct, absolutely correct, to be concerned
about your children. I have a son and a daughter, and I have
sent them only this week to spend the summer, at
least the summer, with my wife's brother in
Geneva. Things cannot go on as they are."
The driver was at the wheel now. Krone touched
a button in the door panel, and a glass
partition slid soundlessly up from its slot in the
driver's backrest, sealing him off. Mrs.
Healy glanced at me, her point made.
The car began to move, smoothly, fast.
"What do you mean, Hans? The reports I
have from you could not be more upbeat."
Krone now held my eyes with a certain
coldness. He was a man of some Jewishness--not
much, but enough to have prompted his spending the Nazi
years in London. He spoke English with the
same curt formality with which he dressed. "We
live in two realms here, Paul." I could, in
another circumstance, have taken his show of patience
as condescension, but I didn't care about that. "There
is the realm of commerce, and there is the realm of
daily experience. You and I, in our normal
transactions, have reason to be concerned only with the
former. But that is not the case today, from what you have
asked of me. Normally, we at the Commercial
Bank succeed by emphasizing our success. But in
this divided city, success has become our
greatest danger. Commerce in West Berlin is the
miracle that never ends. Of course in our
reports that is all we say, and it is true.
The last thing we want is to undermine confidence in
investment. So yes, by all means,
upbeat. That is what you expect, no? What
New York expects?"
His eyes remained fiercely locked on mine,
to make clear that until now he had given me
exactly what I had wanted from him. If now
I wanted something else, he would not be held
responsible for any contradiction.
"And daily experience?"
"Berlin is the best investment in the world. But we
are talking now about something else." He glanced
at Mrs. Healy, this Charlotte, and turned
back to me. "The unraveling rope."
"What?"
"Berlin hangs over the abyss by a rope. A
rope which unravels. It is a rope no more.
Berlin hangs by a thread. Do you know how many
crossed this week?"
"Crossed?"
"Into our sector, from East to West. More than
five thousand. Last week, almost as many. Since
winter, every week, thousands of the very people Ulbricht
needs most--the young, the skilled, the motivated,
the intelligent, the courageous. They are flocking
west. The DDR cannot allow this to go on. And not
only the DDR. Hungary. Poland.
Czechoslovakia. All losing their best people through
Berlin. It is Moscow that cannot allow this to go
on. The border will be closed. It must be closed.
And then, of course, the devils come loose.
All hell cuts loose."
Krone looked fully now at Mrs.
Healy, a deliberate display of hesitation.
I said, "As I explained to you, Charlotte
is the mother of Michael's companion, one of his
companions. Her concerns and mine are identical.
You can speak freely."
But something was bothering him. What? That I had not
used her last name?
The car had turned onto one of the broad,
well-ordered boulevards of West Berlin. It was
empty of traffic. A Saturday afternoon with no people
out?
"Explain about the crossing to me," I said.
"I know the Communists control their zone. How do
so many get out so easily? I don't get it."
Krone shrugged. "Outside of Berlin, no
one understands this. In Bonn they do not understand. It
is because Berliners, going back to the war, live in
one sector and work in another. Families live
partly in the Soviet zone and partly in the
American, or British, or French. The
subway and elevated trains cross East and
West every minute. At Potsdamer Platz,
workers and students cross from one side to the other every
day. This is the way the city lives. And the
benefit to the Eastern sector is the tax that is
levied, theoretically, on every person crossing in
--the forced currency exchange that amounts to tax.
East German marks are worthless relative
to West German marks. To go into East Berlin,
one must purchase East German marks with all the
Western currency one is carrying, but a minimum
of twenty Western marks. This is the main source
of liquid currency for Honecker and
Ulbricht. Therefore, the Vopos are concentrated
on points crossing into East Berlin, in the city
center--Potsdamer Platz,
Friedrichstrasse. The dozens of points for
crossing out elsewhere in the city, other
S-Bahn and U-Bahn stops, for example,
are relatively unguarded. The law still
requires currency submission, but mostly and
practically that involves entrance, not exit.
East Berliners know how to play this game, and
East Germans coming from outside the city, and
Poles and Czechs, they learn it fast. The
crackdown Honecker must be preparing will involve
only people from the East. The border will be sealed against
them. Not against us, you see? From us he will still need
dollars and marks. And if he allows
Americans and Britishers continued citywide
access, then NATO will have no complaint. Only
Bonn will have the complaint, because the border closing
against the DDR means the end of the dream of Germany
as one nation--Adenauer's dream, but
Khrushchev's nightmare. The only question is
whether Kennedy will listen to der Alte,
to Adenauer, when the time comes. If he does,
then the devils are set loose."
"Kennedy is committed to Berlin, Hans. I
promise you that decision has been made."
"But committed to West Berlin or to all of
Berlin? That is not decided, Paul."
"What are you saying? You want in Berlin what
there is at the Iron Curtain? Klieg
lights? Unmuzzled dogs? Razor wire?
Machine guns? Watchtowers? You want all of
that here?"
"We Berliners, Paul, have simple hopes.
Stability. Predictability. And a
possibility for something better in the future.
If not one Germany now, as der Alte
wants, at least let there be two. We want
East Germany to remain German. If all
Germans who want what we here in West Berlin
want--freedom, democratic structures, the
decent life--if all such people leave the East,
then the Soviets will simply populate it with
Slavs. East Germany will be Slavic Germany,
which is not Germany."
There was a familiar curl in the way Krone
said the word "Slav," inevitably evoking how
once the word "Jew" had been spoken. That
Krone was to a degree Jewish himself only
reinforced the point; the Nazis had murdered six
million Slavs, too. In Krone's mouth,
one heard an implication of what, in the word, had
brought it into English as "slave."
He must have sensed my uneasiness, because he
veered from the thought. "But the main concern that we have in
the Western half of Berlin is simply to live.
The war that Adenauer would welcome will last five
minutes here. The fifteen thousand American
soldiers are in Berlin only to trigger the
American response, which of course, once that
garrison is crushed by Red Army tanks, is a
nuclear attack on Moscow--and all that
follows. Compared to that, what are klieg lights?
What is razor wire? A sealed border without
a war. It is what you should want as well."
"I don't want a sealed border until my
son is home with me in Frankfurt."
"Well, your timing is good. You have arrived just
ahead of the moment of truth. Why do they call it
that?" He grinned. "Odd phrase, but compelling.
Moment of truth. No equivalent in German."
He looked over at Mrs. Healy, as if for
concurrence. She knew better than to blink.
Krone went on, "Everyone knows that Ulbricht
had to allow access back and forth between the sectors
until today, May Day, his big propaganda
fest. All the Stalinist apparatchiks from
Moscow to stand with him on his platform at Alex--
Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Bulganin, their
great parade, Soviet tanks, a flat truck
to carry a large toy Sputnik, big
trailers hauling green missiles. They say
Yuri Gagarin himself is in Berlin today."
Gagarin had become the first man in space
less than a month before.
"A great show of Soviet power for the whole city
to see, the whole world--that is May Day. And of
course to Berliners, ersten Mai also
celebrates the day our city was liberated by the
glorious Soviet heroes in 1945. So today,
yes!" Krone leaned toward me. Beads of
perspiration had once more appeared on his forehead.
"But tonight? Tomorrow? The question about klieg lights and
razor wire is not if, but when. The saying for
weeks has been, "After May Day." That is
why more refugees crossed last week than ever.
Because it will be impossible nach ersten
Mai. Well, ersten Mai is now."
"Great," I said with an exasperation unique
to the parents of ingeniously mischievous teenagers.
"How did they plan this so well?"
I looked at Mrs. Healy, who ignored
me to ask Krone, "Are there signals of this
tension? Anything unusual?"
"Everything unusual. First, if the border is
to be sealed, entities on both sides of it are
working to secure their methods of operation, if you
receive my meaning."
"I don't," I said.
"To secure their, as they say, assets on the
other side. Espionage, Paul. An
industry in Berlin, one of our major
enterprises. And second, each side is working
to learn what it can about the other's
assets-in-place before the curtain falls.
Frenzy. And rumors. Wild rumors."
"Of what, for example?" Mrs. Healy
asked.
Krone studied her for a moment before answering.
"Of, for example, a shocking penetration in East
Berlin of the offices of the Ministry of State
Security."
"Stasi," she said.
"Yes. The rumor is that there was a fire at
the ministry, a death, a death of a senior
official prompting major security
measures."
"When?" Mrs. Healy asked calmly.
"Earlier this week. Monday or Tuesday.
So the rumor has it."
"A fire?" I asked. "An accident?"
Krone laughed with an air of You
Americans! "There are no accidental fires
at ministry offices in Berlin. Not in East
Berlin, not in West Berlin."
"Was this at Karlshorst?" Mrs. Healy
asked, a question that meant nothing to me except that she
knew to ask it.
"I would not think so," Krone answered. "As
I say, we are only talking about rumors, which
lead to guesses. The ministry has offices in a
dozen places in East Berlin." Krone
interrupted the flow of his speculation to face only
me, to explain what he apparently assumed my
companion would know. "The Gestapo had forty thousand
agents to keep under surveillance a population of
eighty million. Stasi has nearly three
times that many agents to watch a mere seventeen
million. Stasi is everywhere in the East. They
make the Gestapo seem amateur.
By comparison, the Gestapo was kind."
He turned back to Mrs. Healy, already
aware of her as versed in this language.
"Karlshorst, in the Soviet compound,
Mielke's offices, yes. But unlikely to be
penetrated. And the rumormongers would surely have
passed along that detail. Therefore, less
notorious offices ... more likely someplace like
..." His hesitation was for effect. I did not know
what game he was playing, but his partner in it was
certainly not me. He and Mrs. Healy were
circling one another. "Like, perhaps, Schloss
Pankow, the former palace, in the heart of a
residential area, where the Arbeitsgruppe
Ausl@ander has its headquarters."
"What is that?" I asked.
"An office in charge of all matters
relating to foreigners inside the DDR, including
East Berlin. Which is why I am, shall we say,
acquainted with it." He bowed. "At times it
falls to me to be one of those foreigners. A man
in my position, we have dealings with the
Arbeitsgruppe Ausl@ander. We have
subtle ventures in East Berlin, Dresden,
Leipzig, four or five other cities in the
DDR. We must travel. We must interact with
certain officials."
"Subtle ventures?"
Krone's gaze became steely.
"Extralegal, Paul. Commerce in the zone between
zones, if you receive my meaning."
Black market. Bribery. Zone between zones.
A classic instance of criminal rationalization.
I said nothing.
"This is work of my own," he said
coldly. "Not related to my work for Chase. Not
related to the Commercial Bank. Not related
to you, Paul. I only refer to it now to indicate
the range of my connections, which is relevant
to my ability to provide you with the help for which you have
turned to me."
"I see that."
"So time is short," Mrs. Healy said.
"Our sons need us. How do we find them?"
Krone responded as if he'd been waiting
for her sharp inquiry. "Sind Sie
deutsch?"
"Born in Germany, yes," she answered. "But
I am an American citizen. I am the mother of
an American citizen, the dependent child of an
American officer, a child at risk in this city.
You have made me understand the risk very well. Now
I want to know how you can help me find my
son."
Krone nodded, apparently reassured by her
crisp authority. "If the youngsters have come for the
May Day fest"--he shot his cuff, revealing a
gold cufflink, a stainless steel Omega watch
--"then we have just time enough to go there, which is how I have
instructed the driver. Chairman Ulbricht and his
Central Committee and august guests from the
Kremlin are just finishing their borscht and goulash
under the chandeliers of the Rathaus. They are moving
outside to the reviewing stand which looks out over the
great market square, which for hours has been
crowded with what they will say was two hundred thousand
people but is closer to fifty thousand, no doubt
including your three children. Are you feeling lucky?"
"Not particularly," I said.
To my surprise, since we were still in
prosperous West Berlin, the car pulled over to the
curb and stopped. The driver jumped out and, as he
moved around to Mrs. Healy's door, Krone
looked out the window, saying, "Ah, we are here."
To one side was a tidy park with pebbled paths,
benches, and flower beds choking with tulips,
daffodils, and lilies. To the other was a broad
set of once elegant but now badly rusting
cast-iron stairs heading up to an overhead
platform. Paint was flaking off a sign that read,
"Tiergarten."
The driver opened Mrs. Healy's door, but
she did not move.
Krone explained, "We cannot drive into East
Berlin without drawing attention to our party.
Am I correct in understanding that as undesirable?"
"Yes, you are," I said.
He indicated the stairs. "We are one stop
away from the Soviet sector. To cross
by S-Bahn, we are like everyone else. It is
how we go if we are merely tourists."
"That's what we are."
Mrs. Healy started to get out, but Krone
said, "One moment."
From the floor beside his foot, he picked up a
small briefcase and opened it. It was empty.
Balancing the case on his knee, he reached
into his suit coat for his billfold. He took
out one note, and then two others like it, and he
held them for us to see. Three bills, each
twenty deutsche marks. "This is the admission.
We must exchange this for East German marks,
twenty D-marks each. Otherwise, we should
leave all money here." Krone took a wad of
bills out of his wallet and dropped them into one
slot of the briefcase. I did the same with my
money, into another slot, and then Mrs. Healy,
removing the cash from her purse, did likewise.
"German money," Krone said, "American
money, everything." Then he handed a twenty-mark
note to each of us. "And you have your passports,
yes?" We both nodded, and then so did he,
snapping the briefcase shut and twirling a
small built-in combination lock. He reached
across to touch my arm. "We are what we are,
Paul. You are my banking colleague, here from
Frankfurt for meetings." Still touching me, he
looked at Mrs. Healy. "You are my
colleague's friend. Let the officials draw their
own conclusions. The less said the better. They are
imbeciles at these crossing desks. They know
nothing. They will ask a question. They always ask a
question. Keep it simple. If possible, keep it
true. But do not mention your children."
"Of course not," Mrs. Healy said, that
authority again.
Krone nodded at her. "Sehr gute.
Jawohl?"
Pointedly, she made no reply, and that
apparently pleased him.
Mrs. Healy got out of the car. Krone
caught my eye to wink, obviously, about her
shapeliness. I turned away from him, quite aware of
it myself.



We followed Krone up the ratty iron
staircase. It shook frighteningly on its bolts,
but at that moment the danger from an ill-maintained
item of public accommodation seemed the least of
our problems. Indeed, the wobbly stairs seemed
to amuse Krone, and with his large frame he shook
them deliberately as he ascended, pounding his
feet like a kid. "Become accustomed to such
wreckage," he said over his shoulder. "The
S-Bahn is administered by authorities in the
East, according to the terms of the 1948 treaty. East
Berlin municipality--corrupt, inefficient,
bankrupt--maintains stations and tracks even in
West Berlin, which is to say does not maintain
them. That is why these stairs shake, why the train
rattles, why the tracks do not meet each other
smoothly. You will see." He laughed. At the
top of the stairs, before a rusted turnstile, he
waited.
A dozen yards away was a small booth with a
uniformed figure behind a grille--a woman in a
tattered blue hat. She was staring in our
direction, but was so impassive it seemed
possible she did not see us. Krone laughed
again, clapping my shoulder. "The S-Bahn is
already East Berlin, you see, even here above our
beloved Tiergarten, the most exquisite city
garden in Europe." He handed us each a token
and led us through the creaking turnstile. All the
while, he kept speaking loudly, as if he were a
tour guide. And then I realized that that was the
effect he was going for. Apart from the dull woman
in the booth, however, there was no one on the
platform. So if he was acting a part, it was for my
sake and Mrs. Healy's. He was preparing us.
"With the S-Bahn administered and manned from
East Berlin, you see why conditions are so poor.
Very dramatic, really, the S-Bahn all the
way past Wannsee and out into the DDR, yet also
bumbling along above the caf`es and boutiques of the
Kurf@urstendamm. People from the East coming this way in
the morning for work, returning at night. At this
time of day, even not a holiday ..." He
gestured broadly at the empty platform, moving
lightly on his feet, a kind of dance step.
Krone was good.
His routine was cut short by the sound and vibrations
of a train crashing into the station. The lead
car had the word "Friedrichstrasse" crudely
printed on a board affixed above a single
headlamp, the glass of which was broken. The entire
platform structure had begun to move, and the
sensation of steel plate trembling under my feet
brought the Stephen Case to mind, the train
platform having taken a torpedo.
"Shake, rattle, and roll," Krone
called over the noise, and, as if he'd read my
mind, he made a show of taking a legs-akimbo
stance appropriate to the swaying deck of a ship.
The train slowed to a stop with an ungodly
screech. There was not a lubricated gear, a
balanced wheel, or an unworn brake pad
anywhere aboard. The cars were brown, round-topped
relics of the Weimar era, made of slatted
wood, not steel, wood that had not seen a
paintbrush since Hindenburg.
The doors opened unevenly, some only
halfway, all with the groan of swollen wood
against warped iron grooves. We stepped through the
door nearest us, to be greeted by a lone
figure, an East German policeman in
knee boots and peaked hat. He held a
machine gun in the crook of his arm. A fat
cigarette clung to his lower lip, with a thin
stream of smoke causing him to squint, yet his
eyes were steadily upon us, as if he had been lying
in wait.
Despite the James Dean pose of that
cigarette, I sensed the policeman's
nervousness, and recalled what Krone had said about
the general tension here, the universal expectation of
something deadly. Torpedo indeed.
Squelching my fear, I took Mrs.
Healy's elbow for the moment required to move into the
car. We imitated Krone in turning our
backs to the policeman, each reaching to grasp a
cracked leather strap and taking up a position
to look out the window. Not out. In the station, the window
was a slate mirror in which to see the Vopo
eyeing us. The door closed, the train jerked
into motion, and very quickly we were out in the brightness of the
midday sun, a relief.
The windows had become windows again, not
mirrors. They were cloudy with dirt, but the sight
that opened before us was breathtaking nonetheless. We had
a clear view down the length of the opulent shopping
street, the Kurf@urstendamm. In the distance, I
glimpsed the looming Lindenhof, a
skyscraper of olive glass, the building
Chase had underwritten and that I had helped
dedicate in December.
The Ku'damm was marked by four lanes of
gleaming automobiles divided by a center rank
of youthful linden trees, which were showing off a fresh
crop of pale green leaves. The sidewalks
below were a riot of colorful caf`e umbrellas
and awnings. At eye level, I saw the bright
signs and flags attached to the multistory
buildings. The neon displays, illuminated even
at midday, were not nearly the kaleidoscope they
would be at night, but for that they were a more outrageous
assertion of Western extravagance.
This glimpse of color gave way in a blink
to the gray open stretch of a weed-ridden field beyond
which sat the hulking ruin of the Reichstag, a sight
that no one of my generation could fail to recognize.
Hitler had set it afire in 1933, blaming
its destruction on the Communists, successfully
sparking an electoral victory from which the rest
of the awful century had unscrolled. And forever
after, the Communists, thus branded the mortal enemy
of the monster himself, would claim the loftiest perch of the
moral high ground--not just as victims of
Hitler, like Jews, but as active, deadly
opponents. The Reichstag had become, in
effect, a permanent memorial to the heroic
Communist resisters.
Just as quickly as it had come into view, the building
was gone. Now the train careened onto a
timber-and-rod trestle bridge, crossing the
muddy Spree, which marked the border there between East
and West Berlin. It seemed less a
geographic boundary than a temporal one, for
all of a sudden the view was of the yawning jaggedness of
bombed-out buildings, ruins, and rubble of the sort
cleared in the West fully a decade before. I
saw an entire city block of roofless
buildings, of walls stripped away to show the
interior spaces, once vivid wallpaper
made gray by weather. A second similar city
block quickly followed, and then a warehouse
district, the drabness of which was relieved only by a
huge bright poster showing the unsmiling face of
Walter Ulbricht above a red star and a red
hammer and sickle.
I looked at Mrs. Healy. She, too, was
staring out at the passing scene. "Colorfast?" I
said. Really, the only color out there was
the red on Ulbricht's poster. She looked at
me vaguely, missing my reference to her phrase
that morning.
And then snap! The scene outside went
completely black, the window once more a
reflecting glass. The policeman behind us was
exactly as he had been, with his fat cigarette,
his machine gun, his cold eyes on our backs.
The rattling noise of the train had doubled, which was
how I knew we had entered a terminal.
Friedrichstrasse station, I guessed.
As the train abruptly slowed, the single weak
light bulb behind us flickered, then went out,
plunging our car into total darkness. My free
hand went automatically to my breast pocket,
to cover my billfold. The jolt of darkness
disoriented me. How would I ever find Michael
here?
The car stopped. My eyes adjusted. Not
darkness now, but the shadows, as it were, of night.
Krone led us out onto a narrow platform that
reeked of ash. Cinders in the air made me
squint, and when I looked back, to my
surprise, our squinting policeman had never
moved.
With a few other people who had been on the train,
we walked to a set of stairs that took us down
to a starkly lit chamber that seemed a basement
room but could not have been, since we'd started well
above street level. We lined up at a set of
grilled turnstiles, patiently passing through
into another, far larger, brighter chamber, also
windowless. This room was encircled by an
iron-grid catwalk near the ceiling. A pair
of blue-uniformed policemen stood opposite
each other, looking down at us. They, too,
cradled machine guns, but unlike the guard on
the car, these two were openly nervous, their eyes
darting down to us, then to each other. They were young and
scared and therefore truly intimidating.
Krone nudged us away from the passengers
toward a doorway to the right, leaving the others in a
line before a doorway on the left.
"West Germans and foreigners this way,"
Krone explained. He tossed his head toward the
others. "They are East Germans, poor
devils." A dozen or so men and women,
drably clothed, preoccupied at that moment with
retrieving passbooks and identification from
purses and pockets; they were decidedly
uninterested in us.
The doorway led to an iron staircase that
took us down into yet another large room, about
street level. In its center was a towering desk
behind which a female guard sat--another threadbare
blue uniform, not cut for any woman. She was
sour looking, of indeterminate age. Beside her,
standing on the raised platform, was a
green-uniformed, helmeted soldier. He held
the end of a chain that was attached at its other end to the
throat of a Doberman pinscher. The soldier and his
dog watched us approach as the woman studied
papers on her desk.
Krone reached back to me and Mrs. Healy.
"Passports, please," he said loudly, an
obvious display of English. We handed them over,
and Krone in turn passed them up, with his own,
to the woman at the desk. They exchanged a few
words in German, then Krone motioned us along
without waiting for the woman to return our
passports. In such a sea of hostility, a
passport can seem like the log that keeps one
afloat--and I almost protested. Instead, I
followed Krone's lead through yet another door.
As we went, he said, "This would be far more complex
on a normal day. Today they want us in the East
to see their great parade."
In the next room was a bank of cashiers'
windows along the far wall, like at a
racetrack. Several dozen people stood in four
lines, and we joined one. Within minutes, we had
each filled out a form declaring what currency we
carried, and we had each purchased the minimum
quota of East German marks.
In a way, it was the defining ritual of our
passage, since the Cold War itself had begun as
a currency dispute at the outset of the occupation of
Germany in 1945. The Allies had agreed
to institute a new reichsmark for all
transactions, including the pay of their
respective armies. American soldiers could
redeem these marks for dollars, although Soviet
soldiers could not redeem them for rubles. This led
to a brisk black market between Ivans and
GI'S, with the American treasury providing
Soviet soldiers with dollars, which meant that the
United States was indirectly paying the costs
of the Soviet occupation. To avoid that, Washington
simply announced, one day in the late summer of
1945, that it would no longer redeem
Soviet-issued reichsmarks, a move that
instantly impoverished several million
Russians--and started the currency dispute that had
continued up to the moment of our arrival at the
cashiers' windows in East Berlin.
From that room, we moved to a dark, narrow
corridor that reeked of disinfectant. Male and
female Vopos, their attack dogs standing by,
cursorily searched us. I was behind Krone, and was
startled to see him throw up his hands, allowing one
policeman to pat him down while another eyed the
form he had filled out. They took Krone's
wallet. The interest was not in weapons but in
currency. Anything they found in excess of what
his form declared they would confiscate, adding to the
admission charge. But it was also clear that undcld
currency would put you at their mercy--the main
reason, I saw, for the whole cumbersome
procedure. As the policeman took my
billfold, I felt a twinge of worry that
somehow the bills I had left behind in Krone's
car had suddenly materialized again. When the
Vopo returned the billfold to me and I
slipped it back inside my jacket, I
noticed that perspiration had soaked my shirt.
At the far end of that corridor was a final
desk, where our passports, having been
mysteriously brought forward, were returned to us without
comment by another dour, age-uncertain woman. With the
passports, we were each given a receipt
stamped with the sum of money we had exchanged and a
notation marking the amount of foreign currency we were
legally carrying--zero. These receipts we would be
required to show upon exiting East Berlin, when,
equally clear, we would be subject to search again.
Moving through a last set of creaking
turnstiles, we found ourselves out in the cavernous
main hall of the train station, a warehouse-like area,
depressingly drab but for a cone of mote-filled
sunshine slicing down from a central skylight.
Altogether, the open space was an antidote to the
choking claustrophobia I had felt in the
transit areas. Dust, ash, and an even sharper
blast of disinfectant soured the air
--disinfectant already my association with the public
interiors of East Berlin. Yet breathing had
never seemed so sweet.
I looked around at the people. No one seemed
to be watching us. The hall was a massive postwar
construction of concrete and girders,
undistinguished in every way, as if thrown up by the
engineer corps without an architect. There were wurst
wagons, a standup coffee bar, and several beer
windows. Ticket windows blanketed one wall.
There were soldiers, some in the green of East
Germany, some in the brown of the Soviet Union,
red stars on their hats. There were Vopos. The
few civilians in evidence were crossing toward the
large doorway through which drifted the strains of band
music from outside.
Krone was anxious to get out there, but halfway
across the hall, I stopped him. I pointed back
to the transit area through which we'd come. "The kids
had to go through that?"
The image of Michael limping from the towering
desk to the cash windows, past the guard dogs, under
the hateful eyes of machine gun-toting Vopos
--all waiting for what mistake? The image of
my son, my boy, my child, here without me.
"To get into East Berlin they had to run that
gauntlet?"
The normally ingratiating Krone met my
eyes coldly, as if impatient that I should have
been surprised to be intimidated, even
afraid. What the hell did I think the
world-historic conflict was about if not something
frightening?
Krone said calmly, "The young people went through that
or its equivalent at half a dozen other
transit points, although I suggest the
likelihood of their having done so here"--he
gestured toward the square where the music was coming
from--"if their object is the parade, which one
assumes it is, since they are boys drawn,
no doubt, to marching bands and tanks. So yes, just
like that, presuming they did cross into East Berlin
this morning, or at least"--he grinned, daring
to tease me--"presuming they crossed legally."
This entire account has as its implicit
subject my unreadiness to be the parent of a
mature person capable of coping with the
vicissitudes of life, even as tied to the
uneven contest of world politics. But, as Edie
might have said: Politics, shmolitics.
Michael's distance from me had nothing to do with
Stalinist police, and his jeopardy, as I felt
it, was that of an unstable walker taking his uneven
steps too close to an edge. Never mind that the
edge was the armed border between two Germanys, and the
danger the machine guns cocked to enforce
it. Oh Michael, I might have cried in a
dozen other circumstances, all relatively
mundane, yet crying still, where in God's name
are you?
In other circumstances I would have been angry.
Here I was only afraid.
Krone led the way out into the dazzling light of the
early afternoon. I followed Mrs. Healy, whose
stride was so purposeful that it was impossible
to imagine that she harbored anything like the fleet of
fears that had rafted themselves to me--which is how little
I knew at that point. Her dread had the
advantage of being tied to what was real. And
truly lethal.
Outside, the sight of a throng of people--a sea of
color--transformed my perception. I listened
for a buzz of anticipation, but did not hear it.
Instead of the communal lightheartedness of a typical
crowd, this one gave off an air of anxious
gravity, which I registered like weather. We had come
upon them from the rear, thousands and thousands, and could see
how they were pressing forward, away from us, as one
creature. The crowd stretched across a vast open
square--Alexanderplatz, what Krone had
referred to as Alex. On the far side, like a
matching bracket to the Hauptbahnhof, stood
a large, red-brick building, the traditional
Rathaus of Berlin. Its pair of towers
reached into the blue sky. It appeared that the
building had been reconstructed since the war, a
centerpiece of this Socialist showplace that was
marked on another side by a soaring television
tower, the Fernsehturm, a needle spire
topped with a great steel globe. I had seen the
tower before, but only at a distance. From immediately below
it seemed unreal, and the clouds moving behind made the
thing seem ready to fall on us.
But the focal point of the square was the
Rathaus fa@cade, which was draped half by a
huge flag--the black, red, and gold of the
DDR, its hammer-and-sickle seal encircled
by golden sheaves of wheat--and half by a fluttering
banner showing the iconic face of Walter
Ulbricht, East Germany's own Lenin. His
eyes stared blankly out over the crowd and seemed,
like the eyes of some Byzantine Christ, to have been
waiting to lock upon us. You! those eyes seemed
to say, and I looked away.
In front of the Rathaus, facing us and
visible above the hats, scarves, and bare
heads, was the elevated reviewing stand, draped in
red bunting. A line of--to us--small old men in
gray topcoats and uniforms, homburgs and
peaked hats, stood looking out in our direction.
Across the distance, they resembled a row of
stern-faced stacking dolls. In fact, they were
looking at the parade going by just below them, the parade
that was as yet nearly invisible to us. All we could
see were flags and streamers carried by invisible
marchers. We watched the colors dip as they
passed the center of the reviewing stand.
To the right, just coming into view, was the pointed tip
of a massive green missile, angled upward,
a giant's cartridge aimed at heaven. This was
the first of a succession of such weapons in the parade,
and soon we could see them coming in a rolling line,
a full battery of missiles. Their profile
was easily recognized by a newspaper reader of the
time, for these were Soviet surface-to-air
missiles, proud cousins to the high flier that had
brought Gary Powers down the year before. I nearly
nudged Mrs. Healy to tell her this, but I
recalled that the U-2 incident had brought her
husband out of cover as an intelligence officer.
I realized again how much more heavily all of this
fell on her than me. Everywhere she looked was
an implication of threat, whether past or to come.
Krone took us each by an elbow and proceeded
to push through the crowd. "The point is to search for
them, no? They are the self-centered young, so it is
unlikely that they would remain back here, unable
to see. Wouldn't your sons and their friend push forward
to draw close to things?"
"My son is lame," I said. "He walks
with difficulty, carries a cane."
"All the more reason to look for them closer on.
A boy with a stick--Germans would be kind to him.
Even East Germans."
They were not kind to us, but Krone's display of
authority was like a wedge as we moved through the
crowd. Strangers deferred to him simply because he
let them see he expected them to do so. Moving
constantly, we were able to efficiently pass through.
At one point a universal gasp of amazement,
followed by robust applause, drew our attention
back to the parade. We saw a line of four
huge, trailer-borne intermediate-range
ballistic missiles. We did not know it then,
but these weapons were of the type that were soon to salt the
cane fields of Cuba. After the
initial applause, the crowd fell ominously
silent for the moments it took the missiles to pass
by.
Then there were formations of dark green Soviet
tanks, their steel treads clanking, turrets
emblazoned with gleaming red stars, phallic
muzzles proudly angled up. Next came
phalanxes of soldiers of the National People's
Army. Their goose-stepping sent a surprised
chill through me, which Krone registered. He
explained that in Berlin the goose step evoked not
Nazis but Prussians, with whom East
Germans were still allowed to identify.
For most of an hour we elbowed our way through the
crowd, Mrs. Healy looking for her Ulrich,
her Rick; me looking for my Michael. After
scanning the front edge of the crowd, where the kids
would most likely have been, I began to feel
discouraged. Exhausted, too--I hadn't slept
the night before. Michael, where are you?
Drawing close to the reviewing stand at one
point, we could see the facial features of the
Central Committee and Politburo members.
If Yuri Gagarin was there, I did not see
him. I wondered about the senior Stasi official
Krone had referred to, dead in a fire. Was
he supposed to be up there? And then I thought of
Krone's saying there were no coincidences in
Berlin, no accidents in Stasi offices. What
about Frankfurt, I wondered. Mrs. Healy
had asked what day that fire happened. What about
the shooting in Rhine-Main Hall? What day was
that?
We could see that the civilian apparatchiks
on the reviewing stand wore beribboned medals on
the breasts of their topcoats, just like in Herblock
cartoons. We also saw that some of the dignitaries
were Chinese, perhaps North Korean, and I
wondered if the Asian Reds planned, as soon
as the festivities were concluded, to get the hell out
of flashpoint Berlin?
Judging from their impassive but alert
expressions, the ruling elite of the Communist world
seemed no more authentically enthused on their great
day than the twenty-five or thirty thousand
subdued people below. The leaders gazed out like spooked
sentries. The throng wore the taut face of an
entire society, dead afraid.

Many of the young people we saw wore the blue
shirts and red neckerchiefs of the so-called Free
German Youth, but they lacked the crazed
enthusiasm of the Hitler Youth they had succeeded.
It was impossible to imagine the timid kids who
gave way at Krone's gesture barreling down
the street smashing the glass of Jewish-owned
storefronts. The point was that none of the German
young wore penny loafers or blue jeans, chino
trousers with little belts in back, crewneck
sweaters, or button-down shirts. None of
them, I was at pains to notice, wore leg
braces or stout brown orthopedic shoes. None
of them carried canes.
"Hello, Charlotte," a bearded,
bespectacled man said, stepping out of the crowd
to block Mrs. Healy's way. His blond
hair struck me, and I had the feeling I knew
him, but I did not recognize him. With the collar
of his worn tweed jacket turned up around a
black turtleneck sweater, he looked like a
professor--a German professor. But his
accent and his ease in approaching Mrs. Healy were
pure American. Sunlight glinted off the
lenses of his glasses, making it hard to focus
on his face.
Mrs. Healy seemed unsurprised.
"Hello, Hal," she said.
"We'd better talk," he said, "but we
shouldn't do it here."
An encircling wall of Germans pressed us,
their blocky unfashionable clothes, their stink of
sausage and beer, their blank eyes. East
Germans clearly aware of us as Westerners.
Hal made a show of studying me, then
Krone. I sensed it when he decided to ignore
us for the moment.
He pointed to a small grove of birch
trees on the edge of the plaza, toward the base
of the television tower, away from the parade. "Perhaps
there." He turned and led the way. Mrs. Healy
followed, then I did, and behind me, Krone. I
realized that two other men, at least two, were
moving in sync with us toward the trees, at a
remove. One of them wore a tan windbreaker that
looked American, the other wore aviator
sunglasses.
The grove of trees had been planted around a
granite tablet mounted on a rough concrete
base, a memorial of some sort. The trees were
young, the branches low. Because the foliage
blocked the view of the parade, people had avoided the
compact space, which lent a kind of privacy to it.
Hal faced Mrs. Healy, me, and Krone.
His two companions took up positions on the
edge of the grove, and then I saw a third.
"You can't be doing this," Hal said abruptly.
"The general--"
Mrs. Healy cut him off. "The general is
my concern, not yours."
"I beg your pardon, but he told me this
morning that you understood the importance of maintaining
the routine." All at once I recognized him
as the officer I had glimpsed in General
Healy's car, leaving the house at Lindsay. The
beard was false, but convincing. "The general has
no idea you're in Berlin. He'd be furious.
The risk--"
"The risk, Hal, is our son's." Mrs.
Healy's calm only made the man's agitation
more pronounced. She touched his sleeve. "This is
the father of Rick's friend," she said, indicating me.
"I know who he is."
"This is Colonel Cummings," she said to me.
"My husband's executive officer."
Evidently their relationship had more texture
than the usual one between a general's factotum
and a general's wife. Cummings, I guessed,
had been with Healy for a long time.
She went on, "You are here looking for Rick,
Hal. So am I. What do you know? What have you
learned?"
Cummings glanced at me, then at Krone.
As if Hans were not able to hear, Cummings asked,
"Who is this German?"
I answered, "An associate of mine, our
escort."
Without hesitating, Cummings addressed
Krone. "Would you excuse us, sir?" Cummings
lifted a finger toward the man in sunglasses,
who stepped toward Krone with an extended arm,
indicating over here. Krone looked at me,
and I nodded. He allowed himself to be shown to the
edge of the grove, apparently out of earshot. I
would be aware of him throughout the conversation that followed,
watching us.
"First of all," Cummings said to me and Mrs.
Healy both, "you should assume that every German you
meet here is Stasi. Trust no one."
"Mrs. Healy is German," I said with an
edge that surprised me.
Cummings did not miss a beat. "Look,
Mr. Montgomery, you are in way over your
head. I don't know what you think is going on,
but I promise you, you haven't got a clue.
This is dangerous, and not only for the youngsters."
Mrs. Healy stood with her hands in the
pockets of her trench coat. She was as
immobile as stone, staring down. Of course it was
true that I knew nothing. But what did she know?
The piece of the story that would explain everything
to me?
When I spoke then, it was to Cummings, but she
was the one I meant to address. "Why don't you
tell me what's going on, then? We have
crossed a border here, and my ignorance at this
point serves no purpose."
"Impossible," Cummings said.
Mrs. Healy stepped closer to him, closer
to me. She put her hand on Cummings's arm again.
"It is all right, Hal. I am sure of it."
Then she looked at me. Now when she spoke, it
was with the air of a briefing officer, a hint of
another life she had led. "Ulrich
inadvertently took a bag that contains a roll of
undeveloped film, tourist pictures. But
along the edge of the film is a reduction of
microfilm that contains sensitive material, which
is all you need to know. It is all that I know about
it."
Microfilm, I thought. Cary Grant. Am
I at the movies?
Cummings picked up the explanation, which made
me realize none of this was true, or, if true,
it was so incomplete as to be false. Not at the
movies. In one. "If Stasi or the KGB
were to find that film on Rick, the intelligence
loss would be extreme, to say the least. But of more
pressing concern"--Cummings shifted to meet
Mrs. Healy's gaze--"of far more pressing
concern to General Healy is Rick's welfare.
You know that, Charlotte."
Mrs. Healy, instead of replying, looked
down.
Cummings turned to me again. "The certain fact
is that Rick would be taken by the Communists to be a
professional. They would, I promise you, not
assume his presence here was some high school
joyride. They could only assume that he was in
Berlin either to pick up that film or pass it on
to someone. He would certainly be arrested,
charged with "illegal relaying of information." He
would be brought to trial for "illegal agent
activity." Given who his father is, and given the
present state of East-West tensions, such a
proceeding would be conducted as a show trial, a
shameless propaganda exercise. The only hope
would be that they might not want to draw attention
to what is on the film."
"Which is?"
Cummings laughed.
I said, "And General Healy kept this roll
of film at home?" That seemed an obvious
lapse, but then I thought of that darkroom. He had
it at home to develop it himself? But I left the
sarcasm in my voice as I pushed further.
"He left such a sensitive roll of film where
his son could, as you put it, inadvertently take
it? How is that, Colonel? Maybe the general
has something of his own to protect here. "National
security" was his mantra with me. Has the
general himself breached it?"
Mrs. Healy touched my arm, not in a
particularly friendly way. "My son is what is
important," she said. "As is your son. As
is Katharine." To Cummings, then, she issued
an order. "Tell us what you have learned."
Cummings recited his brief. "They arrived
on the duty train at 1915 hours last night.
They were picked up in the station by a labor council
functionary, an SPD recruiter named
Tramm. We know he is a Berliner with his whole
family living in the West, but we still have to assume
he's Stasi. He took them to the labor
council hostel last night, where they stayed. They
left the hostel in Tramm's company this morning
at about 0900, aiming to go first to the SPD rally
at Sch`oneberg, then over here for the parade. We
learned all this only about noon. Since then, we
haven't had any more luck in finding them than you
have. Odds are they're in this crowd. Or were.
Or were stopped trying to get here. The Vopos have
arrested a couple of hundred people in the last three
hours, drunken pugs from the FRG, black
market buckos, assorted goofballs. Our
kids could be in the net, hardly noticed."
"Americans? Hardly noticed?" I said, but
both Cummings and Mrs. Healy ignored me.
"If Tramm is Stasi," she said coolly,
"would it not be certain that they are being held by now?"
"The question is the film. Does
Tramm know of it? For that matter, does Rick
know of it? Again, assuming they make the connection
to the general, they wouldn't dare hold Rick without
a violation--a carton of Marlboros, a copy
of Playboy ..." Cummings indicated the
potential length of the list with a shrug.
"Especially considering," I said slowly,
playing the only card I held, "the state of
Stasi paranoia since the fatal fire.
Isn't that the background noise against which this concert
is being played?"
Cummings did not flinch. "What fire?"
I refused to look away from him, and I did
not answer. Finally--what I was waiting for--he
shot an accusing look at the woman beside me. The
charge was clear enough: Why are you telling this dumb
bastard?
Before Mrs. Healy could react, giving me the
next clue of what in hell was going on, a
screeching noise broke over the square, an
ungodly roaring from above. Like all the thousands around
us, we looked up, but in order to see we had
to shift quickly to the edge of the memorial grove,
to be clear of the foliage canopy. In the blue
sky, swarming from the east beyond the Fernsehturm,
was a cloud of war planes, dozens of
olive-green aircraft flying in close formation.
All at once, half a dozen of the planes
peeled off and down, swooping toward
Alexanderplatz as if to strafe us. I
recognized these planes as MiGo 2Is.
They descended like kamikazes, which I had seen
once from the bridge of the Stephen Case as they
dived into a sister ship. The MiGo's came down
so ferociously that I took Mrs. Healy's
hand, and instinctively she pulled close to me.
Like the throng around us, we had begun to duck, but just
then the planes pulled up. For the barest moment they
were close enough for us to see the fire of their engines,
feel the heat of their afterburn on our faces, and
smell the sweet odor of their fuel. Then the
jets curled back up to the sky where they belonged.
They rolled together, swooping up, up, up. In
perfect synchrony, they slipped back into the
last rank of the mass formation as it made its way
across West Berlin. As the engines' roar faded,
the crowd saluted back by breaking into its first
authentic cheer, a throaty roar of its own that
said, Thank the gods of revolution, for you have
spared us!
In the aftermath of the roars, I became aware of
Mrs. Healy again, how I was holding her, my
arm around her shoulder. Cummings was watching us with
cold disapproval. Mrs. Healy stepped away
from me.
"Where are you staying?" Cummings asked.
Staying? We hadn't yet considered it, and when
neither of us answered, Cummings misunderstood, and
felt obliged to explain, "So I'll know where
to contact you when we find them."
Hans Krone had watched all of this from the
edge of the grove, between Cummings's men. We had
moved closer to him to see the flyby, but he was still
apparently out of earshot. Yet now he piped in
with the answer: "The Kempinski."
Cummings looked at him with a questioning expression:
How had the German heard?
But Krone was smiling broadly, an
ingratiating assistant waiting to be thanked.
He walked toward us. "The Kempinski, on the
Ku'damm. Our best hotel."
"And if we need you?" Mrs. Healy said
to Cummings.
"Call your husband," he answered.
He turned his back on her and strode out
once more into the thick bustle of Alexanderplatz.
His men dallied a bit, one feigning interest in
the grove's memorial plaque, the other
shielding his eyes from the glare outside the shade
of the trees. In this way, the agents allowed
Cummings to go ahead a few paces, and when they
followed, each headed into the crowd at a different
angle. Soon they were swallowed up by the milling
throng, which was dispersing.
I faced Krone. "He thinks you are Stasis."
Krone snorted dismissively, snapping his
handkerchief out of his breast pocket and applying it
to his perspiring brow. When he met my eyes,
I said, "And I am prepared for the possibility
that he's right. But I'll tell you something,
Hans. I am depending on you. I have no
choice. If you let me down, I will destroy
you."
The sunlight glinted down through the trees. In
another place, the play of light and shadow might
have seemed lovely, but the air between me and this
German banker, whom I hardly knew at
all, seemed threatening. I had spoken without an
instant's forethought, yet I knew that
what I'd said was true, and so, I sensed, did
Krone.
"My dear friend," he said, "it is a grief
what these times require of us. St." He smiled
at me, but not without a twitching at the side of his
mouth. "I understand."
The last of the airplanes was gone, and a band
struck up its march not far away. I turned
to Mrs. Healy. "Cummings obviously has a
squad of men here, to have learned what he knows. In
Sch`oneberg. At the SPD hostel. You and I
are superfluous on the street, hoping to bump
into the kids."
"But what else?"
Instead of answering, I faced Krone again.
"I have the impression, Hans, that you know what
Cummings was just telling us. You shouldn't have been able
to hear from where they had you standing, but--"
"Have you worked in the bourse, Paul? The stock
exchange? I was a young man, a caller, on the
floor of the exchange on Threadneedle Street
during the Nazi years. Have you ever tried to hear
anything on the trading floor?"
"You read lips."
"Traders bought and sold on the nod, but chits
required numbers to the fraction, and it was my job
to get them. In that noise, of course one read
lips--but without even knowing one was doing so." He
had folded his handkerchief again, and now put it
back into his pocket.
I said, "It would confirm Cummings in his
assumption about you. You gave it away when you
answered his question about the hotel."
"But he missed it, did he not?" Krone
glanced at Mrs. Healy. "American agents
are not infallible. I spoke up then because I
wanted you to know that I--how shall I put it?--
anticipate."
"So you took it in--Tramm and so on."
"More or less. Tramm, yes." He faced
Mrs. Healy. "And your husband, of course. The
well-known Colonel Healy. Or, as I
gather, General Healy now. You should have told
me. It makes the thing clearer. The problem, I
mean."
"Let's assume Tramm is Stasi.
Assume the kids have been detained. Marlboros
or something."
"Or the film," Mrs. Healy put in.
"Do you know what's on it?" I
asked.
She looked away.
Krone said, "It is obvious--not the
particular, but the universal, for sure. Given
who General Healy is. I told you, both
sides are scrambling. You say
"scrambling"? Ahead of the border closing that
any moment comes. Prized information about
assets-in-place. Informers. Each side
taking one last survey of the other before it is too
late. One last penetration. I promise you this,
Mrs. Healy. Your husband is remembered
here."
She refused to look at him.
"If your sons are carrying film, be certain
the film will be found. If the film is, as we
say, K@ase, then"--he stopped, made a
point of waiting until Mrs. Healy looked
at him--"you have more to worry about than embarrassment
to your husband."
It was a nasty moment, and Krone's readiness
to skewer her made me angry. But it mystified
me, too, that even my bank colleague was
privy to things that were kept secret from me. Mrs.
Healy, in not replying, made her disdain plain.
I had to remind myself that she was German and
Krone was a Jew. Did that account for the
hostility heating the air between them?
"If the kids have been detained," I said
to Krone, "do you have a way of finding out? A way
that wouldn't tip off the East Germans if they
haven't noticed them?"
Now it was Krone who glanced quickly about to be
sure no one was listening, no one reading his lips.
Although the crowd in Alexanderplatz was breaking up,
even as a band played on, we were still relatively
isolated in the grove.
"From Sch`oneberg, the colonel said. If they
were coming here from Sch`oneberg, they would have come, not as
we did by S-Bahn, but by U-Bahn,
crossing at Hackescher Markt. The
procedures would have been the same--currency
tables, passports, Volkspolizei, et
cetera. If Stasi wanted to hold them with
flexibility, the possibility of a minor
detention, but perhaps leading to something more, Hackescher
Markt is where it would have happened. A routine
interrogation, a routine detention--those
Marlboros. A middle initial missing from a
signature. A penknife construed as a
concealed weapon. Of course, if they were not
Americans, they would simply disappear."
"And as Americans?"
Krone looked at his watch. "Eventually, the
U.s. consulate in Dahlem would be notified,
but if that had happened, one presumes Cummings
would know it."
"And if a roll of film is an issue?"
I asked. Mrs. Healy and I exchanged a
look. Her expression was keenly reined. Still,
I sensed her anguish, as if we were friends with
access to each other's secrets.
"Hackescher Markt," Krone repeated.
"Perhaps an inquiry is in order into transactions
occurring there this morning."
"Of whom?"
"Why do you dear people not have a coffee while I
make a telephone call, or perhaps two
telephone calls. I shan't be long."
He looked through the filigree of leaves to the
top of the television tower. "There is a tourist
caf`e up on the Fernsehturm. It goes
around like a carousel. It is where you are expected
to go now if you are what you pretend to be, a
place to spend your East marks."
We began walking toward the tower, leaving the
trees behind. Krone had fallen easily into his
tour-guide mode. "East Berliners do not go up
there. The view of two cities, for them, is too
depressing. You from the West are expected
to marvel that the elevator works. So be off. A
cup of rotten Russian coffee, half
Turkish. A bowl of watery borscht. A
piece of strudel, cooked yesterday. A
cigarette or two. Before you have finished, I will have
joined you."



"So Herr Krone is our Virgil?" She
said this with her lips above the rim of a cup of tea,
a good china cup that she held at her chin, as if
for its moist warmth.
We were seated at a table by the
floor-to-ceiling window of the rotating tower
restaurant. The waiters wore tuxedos, and
mostly stood idling in corners or at the
service counter. It was late afternoon, too early for
diners. What crowds had been drawn by the May
Day celebration had dispersed from here,
too.
The restaurant was a carpeted ring around the
tower's core, from which came the soft purring of the
engine that powered the movement of the room. We
turned so slowly it was as though the flat world
outside were doing the revolving. The tables,
including ours, were covered with white linen,
slightly threadbare, a bit gray from rough
laundering. Most were empty, although a trio of
burly, prosperous-looking men sat drinking
schnapps at a table across from us, the end of a
leisurely meal. Visiting West Germans,
probably, versions of the men I rode an
elevator with every day in Frankfurt. At
another table, a pair of matronly women sat
with their tea and tortes. They were easy to take as
wives of Politburo members, in from one of the
upperechelon suburbs, extending their outing.
I had been in restaurants at the tops of
buildings in New York, and they, too, made
me dizzy. This one seemed less a skyscraper
restaurant than the luxury dining room of one of
those monstrous dirigibles that the Germans had so
loved before the war. Outside our window,
Stalinallee ran east to the far edge of the city.
I recalled reading that it was wider than the
Champs-@elys`ees, but its housing blocks and
government buildings lacked not only the mansard
splendor of the Champs but also its cushioning twin
hedge of trees. On both sides of
Stalinallee were the stretches of ruins and vacant
lots and pyramids of rubble I had seen from the
plane. There were warehouse clusters and a pair of
massive cemeteries--grim enough to make one
wonder why the authorities would allow tourists
up to this perch to view them.
"I'm sorry, what? Virgil?"
Her eyes remained on the city below. She'd
made her remark, clearly expecting no
response. Just as well, since once more I was
struck by the thing that was not to be discussed, her rare
beauty. Was it possible that I had first set eyes
on this woman only this morning?
The silence between us built until it, too,
became an expression, as I felt it, of the
inadvertent intimacy that now defined our
partnership. "Tell me what you see when you look
down there," I said, picking up where we'd left
off in the plane. I touched the ash of my
cigarette to hers where it sat streaming
smoke in the faux-crystal ashtray.
"The Soviet sector," she said, "was the
most heavily bombed because the old Reich
chancellery, the new Reich chancellery, the
F@uhrer's bunker, the Rathaus, Albert
Speer's constructions at Wilhelmsplatz--it
was all concentrated in the eastern half of the city.
Stossers--you say "boosters"--of the West
Berlin miracle tell you this not at all. The
Soviets were designated custodians of the
abyss. When I first came here, the rubble was
obscene. What you see there now is cosmic
order by comparison." She sounded like an
objective reporter, an academic
historian, that evenly paced, that unemotional.
"The city was full of ghouls," she added. "One of
them was me."
She sipped her tea. She had, of course,
taken off her gloves, and again I noticed her
hands, fingers splotchy and thick, nails
blunted, knuckles too knobby for rings. Now
I noticed that she wore no wedding ring.
"Why did you come here?"
She looked away from me. Why did everything
I asked fall on her like interrogation? Was I
really that oafish? Or were the boundaries of what she
had to protect really that expansive? I had
begun my probing hours before by asking her that very question.
This time she said, "To swim in the Spree."
She put her cup on its saucer and sat back
against the chair. "That is what we called
it--arriving in Berlin from the East, crossing to the
American sector. Radio Free Europe
called it the "dash for freedom." The Voice
of America called it "voting with our feet.""
She took up her cigarette, inhaled, then, with the
acrid French smoke a veil, she repeated,
"We called it "swimming in the Spree." The
river was the dividing line."
"It still is."
"Yes, but now there are bridges."
"Krone makes it sound like the bridges will
close. Do you buy that?"
She shrugged.
"You and your husband haven't discussed what may
happen here? Or, now that the May fest is past,
could already be happening?"
"I told you. My husband and I do not discuss
these things."
"I don't believe that. You know about
the film."
"Only because it involves my son. That is the
only reason." She was angry. The way she
put her cigarette in her mouth made it clear:
No more of this.
We watched as the river came fully
into view, our perch rotating to the west. In the far
sky, the red disk of the sun had begun the slide
toward its slot on the amazingly flat
horizon. The sun's glare obscured the distant
landscape, but nearby, below, the beautifully
laid-out Tiergarten was turning toward us, just beyond the
Spree. West Berlin.
"There was not one tree standing in 1946," she
said, referring to the park. The past, apparently,
she would speak of. "The trees in the Tiergarten were
a gift from the queen of England in 1948. We
gathered in groups to watch the British soldiers,
gardeners in helmets and combat boots."
"We?"
"We women of the work crew. All work crews
in Berlin were women then. The British soldiers
loved us for their audience." She laughed, a
surprising sound. "The soldiers were kind. They
allowed Rick to help them. He took great
pleasure in planting these small shoots,
smoothing the dirt around each one. He formed the
mistaken impression that rifles were garden
tools, that soldiers planted things. I did not
find it necessary to correct him. But he did not
believe me when I told him the shoots would grow
to be trees. That is because he had yet to see a
tree."
"I remember when Michael was that age. I
didn't believe he would ever grow to be a man."
"Because of the polio?"
"No, before that. He just seemed complete to me
already as a little boy."
"But he was not complete, was he? Michael is
complete now." She said this with an assurance I can
only describe as motherly, hinting at the bond of
intimacy this stranger had established with my son.
And how, then, could she be a stranger? Was her
clear feeling for Michael the current on which my
feeling was being drawn to her?
"It is a problem for you, I think. Your son
is a man now. A young man, but a man. But you
do not know this."
Her speaking to me so matter-of-factly seemed
somehow normal, and suddenly I saw
why. "That is exactly the kind of thing that Edie,
my wife, would have said to me. She was always
explaining me to myself."
"Which I think you did not like."
"At the time, true. I used to tell her that
I thought she was hypercritical. To which she would
say it wasn't criticism, just the truth."
Unexpectedly, I laughed. "And the funny thing
is, that's what I miss most about her. The way
she spoke directly to me, uncensored. If
I showed up at the breakfast table with the handkerchief
misfolded in my pocket, she would reach over,
take the thing, and make it neat, which irritated me
no end. Now I am surrounded by people who, if they
see the flaw in how my handkerchief is folded,
are paid handsomely not to mention it."
Mrs. Healy leaned toward me. "You have
folded your handkerchief well this morning."
I found myself smiling. "When Edie told me
that, it made me very happy."
"You were the one with whom she felt free to be
herself. From what Michael has told me, she
never made him feel he had any flaws
whatever. In his mother's mind, he told me once,
he was perfect. Which was a very large gift to him, as
he knew very well how far from perfection he was.
His mother's love was what was perfect, as he felt
it. That is why he is so mature. Accepting of
himself. Of others."
"Michael misses his mother, that's for sure."
"Michael became a man when she died. Her
death made him a man. Perhaps that is why you have not
seen him that way as yet. While he is a child,
she is still somehow with you. When he is no longer a
child, she becomes a mere memory. A beloved
memory, but only a memory."
"Strange, Edie feels present with me--with
you. I mean, talking about her with you makes her
seem ..." I had to stop, to allow the rush of my
emotion to flow on ahead without me.
After a moment, more calmly, I said, "I
haven't talked about Edie like this. I haven't
spoken of our arguments, of how difficult--"
To my horror, I felt a burning behind my
eyes, and pinched it off. I looked away, out the
window. The view was of the Kurf@urstendamm, and
I saw my own building, the Chase building, the
Lindenhof.
""Real love, compared to fantasy,""
Mrs. Healy said, ""is a harsh and
dreadful thing." It is normal to feel her
presence when you speak of her truthfully. The
difficulties were no denial of love, were they?"
I shook my head.
"They are the condition of love. You and your wife
--the difficulties, the flaw, it was Michael's
polio, I think. No?"
"That is true. We dealt with it very
differently. No matter what she made
Michael feel, it was a massive imperfection
in her mind. Edie felt terribly guilty, as
if the disease were her fault."
"When you knew the fault was yours."
"Yes."
"So, since you were both at fault, you punished
each other."
I brought my eyes back to hers, amazed.
No one had ever said such a thing to me, nor had such
a thought ever crossed my mind. Yet I saw her
simple statement as the exact truth--truth of
our marriage, truth of what we were doing to each
other, up to our last moment together. The slamming of
those doors.
But Mrs. Healy wasn't finished. "Do you not
see?" She leaned toward me again, as if examining
my face. "You were hard on each other to avoid
being hard on Michael. You worked very well together--
to protect him. It was how you had to do it. Your
love for each other would have meant nothing if it was
at his expense. So I repeat, "Real love,
compared to fantasy, is a harsh and dreadful thing."
Dostoyevsky."
I sat back, still with that feeling of amazement.
But I also felt embarrassed, caught again.
Caught at being human. I forced a laugh.
"What are you, a shrink?"
"Shrink?"
"Psychiatrist."
"How American of you, Paul. To think that
grief is a medical condition, a mental
illness. To discuss these things--you do this only with a
doctor?"
How was it that now she had called me Paul?
"And you?" I said. "With whom did you discuss the
things you had no words for? In my experience,
grief, since you bring it up, has been a long
silence. I do not believe you are so different from
me in that."
"I know that silence."
"And then, here in Berlin, you found a
man who lives by silence. Who is professionally
bound to speak to you of nothing."
"That is not so. Of the things that matter to both of
us, we speak freely. Because of David, I have
not depended on my son for the things a person must
have--feelings of dependency, mutuality,
partnership."
"And you think I have?" I felt a rush of the
old resentment, imperfection being flagged. "You
think I depend on Michael?"
"It would be natural in this period. And, as I
say, Michael is not a child. His strength would be a
comfort. His simple presence, I imagine, a
consolation. I am not judging you, Paul."
"I do enjoy his presence. I've been living
for the weekends this year. I need his presence,
Charlotte. Why does it feel like a confession
when I tell you that?"
"The grief you feel for the loss of your wife
is also grief that Michael is trying to get
free of you."
What a fool I was. Overly aware of
having just used her first name, as if now we were friends,
I took her statement as a grave accusation.
"Does Michael tell you that? That he's trying
to get free of me?"
"He does not have to tell me. The thing is
clear. It is normal. The same is true of
my Rick."
"But your husband is not Rick's father."
"Rick is getting free of me. It is what
they do. It is what we did."
"By getting ourselves in serious trouble? I don't
think so. I am not in Berlin enacting an
Oedipal drama. I am in Berlin because my
son needs, at the very least, my support, and
perhaps rescue. Michael is in a danger zone,
whether he put himself there or was sucked into it."
"Sucked into it?"
"By your son, the gravitational pull of a boy
Michael emulates, a boy whose world--well,
look." I gestured at the window, at the scene
outside, the abyss of the Eastern sector coming
once more into view. "I am thinking of what you said
before: "Ulrich is his father's son. There is the
curse." I don't like thinking of my son in the
pull of someone else's curse."
"Nor do I. I am sorry Michael is
involved with this."
"Which father?" I asked then, sharply.
"What?"
"The curse of being the son of an American
spymaster, or were you thinking of Wolf?"
Her silence was her answer.
"Why is it a curse to be the son of a
philosophy professor who died for his
country?"
"I did not mean "curse" literally."
"But something is going on here that involves your
first husband, your time here after the war. The
gravitational pull of a celestial body that
ceased to exist?"
"You are American. Things are simpler for you.
Feelings of grief? Get a shrink. Feelings
of anguish, guilt, dread--don't think about it.
America is all future, no past. Is that not
the point of your country? It is difficult for you
to understand that here in Germany, certainly here in
Berlin, everything involves the war. The war is the
past that will never go away."
"But which past? First you told me that your husband
died at the front. Then you told me he died
here in Berlin."
She lit a fresh cigarette, shrugging with an
exquisite indifference. "At the end, this was the
front."
"That's not what you meant. You intended to deceive
me. At first, in Wiesbaden, you recited from a
script of your late husband's life, what you
tell everyone. "He died at the front." It
was the accident of your being ambushed by the sight of
Berlin from the airplane that prompted you to say the
other thing."
"I trusted you with "the other thing.""
"And I am worthy of your trust, Charlotte.
Tell me why it is a secret that Wolf died
here."
She shook her head once, decisively.
"You said Wolf had become like the nation. What
he would not do in 1940, he did in 1945.
What did he do?"
"Where were you in the war?"
Hadn't she asked me that before? No. Healy,
in the vestibule of their home. She had not heard.
She was not testing me.
"The Pacific," I answered. "The
Navy."
"And you, Paul? Would you have approved the
attack on Hiroshima in 1940, as surely
you approved it when it occurred in
1945? That is all I meant. The war had its
diabolical momentum. Even with the Jews. In
1938, at Kristallnacht, all Hitler
wanted was to expel them. Eichmann, what they are
saying now in Jerusalem--elimination, that
grotesque word "extermination,"
Ausrottung--all of that came later. All
of that came after the war had already destroyed us,
destroyed us as human beings, destroyed our
morality."
"So it was the war's fault?"
"How dare you say that to me!" The flash of her
anger purified the air between us. She smashed out
her cigarette. "I am not deflecting the
fault! I am telling you how it was."
"So is that what Wolf did? The Jews?"
To my complete surprise, she laughed. Her
anger dissipated. She said with strange mirth,
"No, Paul. Not the Jews. Nothing to do with the
Jews."
"Krone is Jewish."
She shrugged. Who cares?
"He spent the Nazi years in England."
"He knows the new Berlin, I can see that."
"Why have you not been back here?"
Again a shrug. Exquisite indifference.
"Your husband?"
"I suppose so, yes."
"Which one?"
"Are you trying to trap me?"
"I'm trying to measure the hole my son
fell into, that's all. You know the measurements,
but you won't tell me."
"It is a rule of life, Paul. You get
not what you look for. You get what you find."
"Dostoyevsky?"
"Healy." She smiled. "And do not ask which
one." She reached past the ashtray to touch my hand,
a gesture that reminded me of Edie. She, too,
after the rough weather of our effort to talk to each
other, could come out like sunshine. I kept my hand
where it was, palm down on the cloth beside a water
glass. She let her hand remain blanketed
over mine.
"Hello."
It was Krostne, who was standing several paces
away, like an anticipating waiter. How long
had he been watching us, reading our lips?
Mrs. Healy pulled her hand back, although
only I seemed to feel we had been
caught at something.
Krone joined us, pulling a chair from an
adjacent table. He snapped a finger, and a
waiter came over at once. "Scotch
whiskey," Krone said.
The waiter shook his head. "Vodka."
"Bourbon," Krone countered, and I realized
he was playing a Berliner's game, the
cross-border one-upmanship, the parrying for
control.
"Vodka," the waiter repeated.
"Wacholderbranntwein." Krone winked
at me, and mouthed, "Gin." The waiter shook his
head impassively. "Vodka."
"Ach so. Ich m`ochte ein Bier,
bitte." He winked again, and for my benefit said,
"In that case, a beer."
The waiter went off. Krone bowed toward
Mrs. Healy, then turned to me, speaking fast and
low. "They were detained at the Eintritt
desk. At least one of the three is at risk for
being charged with failure to declare currency, which can
easily be compounded with smuggling charges and black
marketeering."
"How do you know it was them?" I asked.
"A boy with a beard? A girl? A boy with a
cane? Leg braces?"
"Goddammit," I said. The explosive word
seemed to split me in two, as if half my
body now floated out the window, a mystical soul
above Berlin, looking down not on a city but on a
large steel hulk slicing into the sea, a smoking
ship sinking while its klaxons screeched and
flaming bodies leapt over the rail into an ocean
of burning fuel oil.
That was what had terrified me when the Stephen
Case went down--the sight, from my place on
the upended bridge, of the sea afire, the
impossibility of water in flames, an
absurdity I would comprehend only later. "The
Pacific," I had told her of my war only
moments before. "The Navy." Answers that said
nothing.
The other half of me, which had stayed in the
restaurant with Krone and Charlotte, said,
"They are being held?" An idea as impossible
as water on fire.
Krone had raised his hands toward me, palms
outward. Now he slowly lowered them, shushing me.
"That is what I am telling you," he
said softly. "I spoke to a friend who witnessed it
in the station. My friend saw the three young
Americans being challenged, then taken away
by Vopos. A German man in a worker's cap
was with them, not detained. That would be Tramm. His
being able to walk away means Stasi for sure."
"Wo sind sie?" Charlotte demanded, and
then another imperative question, also in German.
"Can we do this in English, please?" I
asked.
Krone, again with the quieting hand gesture, said,
"Extreme alarm would be premature. This may
be minor harassment, designed to embarrass the
Building."
"The Building?"
"American headquarters at Dahlem.
GI'S are often held for a few hours if they
are flip, if they do not declare their unopened pack
of cigarettes."
"You're the one who spoke of tensions
approaching a climax. After May Day, you said,
the border will close. Both sides maneuvering for
position."
"It is still May Day," Krone said. "There
are thousands of Westerners in East Berlin right
now, like us. Tourists. Nothing will happen at the
border today, not tomorrow morning. But tomorrow night,
Sunday night, when all good Socialist workers
are at home ..."
Charlotte seemed indifferent to the question of border
tensions, as if her worry transcended the armed
push-pull of East-West politics.
Eventually I would learn in what way that was so.
But just then, watching her hand go to her cigarette,
her fingers shaking as they had not before, I understood that
it was up to me to respond to what Krone said.
"When was this?" I asked. Do this calmly, I
told myself. Show nothing. Be a banker closing a
deal. A Spartan with a wolf in his shirt.
Ah, wolf! There was an association to note,
but not to express.
"They were detained after noon," Krone
answered. "Before the festival began at
Alexanderplatz, well before we arrived."
"That was hours ago."
"What witness?" Charlotte asked.
Krone's stern expression said he did not like
being probed, but after a second look at her, he
answered, "A cleaner in the station. A
Putzfrau who sees everything."
"East Berliner?"
"Naturally. Although her son has crossed
to West Berlin. He works in a factory I
control. So his mother is grateful to me. She
kisses my hand."
"A peasant woman."
"If you like."
"So she comes from the country, with other family
members still in Soviet Germany." Charlotte's
expression was one of dull simplicity, worn
down by having to pluck out threads of the obvious.
Krone returned her look with one of irritation.
"We must assume," Charlotte continued, "that
Stasi knows of your inquiry. If the
Putzfrau kisses your hand, she kisses theirs
as well."
Charlotte said all this with willed detachment, but
I could sense her anxiety. All aristocratic
hauteur was gone. Hers were the eyes of a woman
ready to recognize a peasant as a sister--the
eyes, say, of a starving child's mother scouring the ground
beside a shuttered market stall for an overlooked
potato.
What was the equivalent of water aflame for
her? The discovery in the rubble of a shoe that still had a
maggot-ridden foot inside? A decision
calmly made to toss the shoe on the pile of
harvested stones?
Looking at Charlotte, seeing her as I had
seen her in the Russian Chapel, a haloed
face at home with suffering, I felt ashamed
to realize that, had she ever found such a shoe, she
would have gathered the other rubble women to bury it with a
prayer.
I touched her sleeve. "If the Stasi knows
we are here poking around, that's good. We want them
to know. We want them to know right now that these kids
have parents who are here, parents the Stasi has
to deal with." I leaned toward her, sensing weakness
for the first time, weakness I could only misunderstand.
"We are here to bring our kids out, Charlotte, and
we will."
"I don't--"
She was about to disagree with me, so I cut her
off. "It's too late to think they don't know who
General Healy is. They've seen your son's
ID. We have to land on them with who your husband
is. We have to land on them with Chase Manhattan
Bank. This is no trio of drunken GI'S
looking to score on the black market."
I turned to Krone. "They don't do this with my
son. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Paul. So do the waiters."
"Good. Not with my son they don't." Feeling,
yes. Expression, yes. Feeling and
expression, however, for the sake of power, a
dazzling rush of power. I gripped Krone's
forearm and saw him wince. "You have to make them deal
with me. Get me to them."
"To whom?"
"That is what I am paying you to tell me,
Hans. They have our kids. They know we're
looking for them. They are waiting for us."
"I doubt the latter point, Paul.
Despite Mrs. Healy's intuition, the people on
whom I depend are not Stasi."
"Not intuition," Charlotte said.
"Assumption."
She raised her eyes to Krone's, allowing us
to see what was written in them--the stories of children
dying by the roadside, of pits full of unclothed
bodies, of young men shot dead at border
crossings. Her assumption, clearly, was that
Krone was Stasi, which would account for her sudden
deflation. She had entrusted herself to me, and I had
delivered her over to the enemy. And why should she not
have been drained of fierce authority? Her
nightmare was coming to pass.
But not mine, not yet. Why the kids' detention
seemed the end of the story to her I could not know, but
to me it was the beginning. "It doesn't matter,"
I said. "We want them to know. Even if there are
"illegal agent" charges because of something
Ulrich was carrying, we have to react like what we
are--parents concerned about our children."
I had said this too loudly, and she whispered,
"Sie sind keine Kinder." She had
picked up a toothpick from a cup in the center
of the table and was staring at it. Her face was
crimson. I was the father of a bystander. Compared
to Rick's mother, I had nothing to worry about.
The waiter arrived with Krone's beer, a
foaming clay stein the color of pewter. Krone
took a long swallow that signaled a need beyond
thirst. When he lowered the stein, a line of foam
marked his upper lip. He took his handkerchief and
dabbed at it. All the while his eyes were on me.
I said, "You were telling us before about--what did
you call it, Arbeit something?"
"Arbeitsgruppe
Ausl@ander."
"The office for foreigners, you said."
"Yes."
"So, for example, three Americans
detained for currency irregularities."
"Not necessarily that. No, no, not that at
all. That would be border police."
"But the Arbeitsgruppe Ausl@ander
would have preempting authority, surely."
"Yes, but--"
"And your contact there was--?"
"Colonel Erhardt. Colonel Rainer
Erhardt, the deputy chief. But Paul, our
relationship is of necessity entirely
discreet."
"Then you shouldn't have boasted of it to impress
me. I am impressed. I want you to take me
to him. Where is his office?"
"Schloss Pankow," he answered quietly.
He glanced out the window as if to point the place
out, but we were facing west again.
"That is where the fire was," Charlotte
whispered. "You said before, the fire was there."
"Indeed so. And Erhardt's chief, Colonel
General Sohlmann, is the officer who was
killed."
Charlotte snapped the toothpick in two, an
involuntary reaction.
I checked my watch. It was not yet five.
"Take us there, Hans."
Krone shook his head. "No. I have never
met Erhardt there. He would be under immediate
suspicion."
"Not if I'm with you. The office in charge of
everything concerned with foreigners--where else should an
American father go if his son has disappeared in
East Berlin?"
"But if I--"
"You are my local factotum, Hans. Is
that not so?"
It was a humiliating designation, but just then it
was accurate. Hans, nodding, even welcomed it.
He raised his beer to his mouth and chugged. How
far he'd come from the cozy urbanity with which he'd
greeted us at Tempelhof.
"Let's go," I said when Krone's stein
hit the table. This time he wiped his upper lip with
his sleeve.
He and I started to get up, but Charlotte
stopped us. "I can't," she said.
She held the two halves of the toothpick,
each one between a forefinger and thumb, pressing against the
splinters.
"I cannot go with you there. It is impossible."
I settled back into my chair. "You are
Rick's mother. They know who he is. It tells
them nothing new if you come." If you don't come,
I added to myself, that tells them something, too. But
what?
She shook her head. That was it.
"Then go to the hotel," I said.
"Yes." She was no more surprised by my
authority than I was.
I asked Krone, "What hotel did you
say?"
"The Kempinski. On the Ku'damm. The car
will be waiting at Friedrichstrasse. The driver
will take you."
She nodded, put the toothpick halves
neatly in the ashtray, then picked up her gold
cigarette lighter and dropped it in her purse.
I said, "Why don't you wait here for a few
minutes after we leave. If only one person
is following, he will have come after us."
"It does not matter," she said, slipping a
tan glove onto her left hand. "I am accustomed to the shadows of watchers." She tugged
on the second glove, then glanced at Krone.
"Perhaps they will take me for a mozhnos."
If this was a test, Krone no longer cared.
He looked at me. "A swallow," he said.
"A Soviet term for what your CIA calls a
"sister." A female who lures an agent."
Krone turned back to Charlotte. "Unless, of
course, the agent being lured is female."
"A "crow," in that case," she said with a
bitterness I had not seen. "I will go and sit in the
Tiergarten. I will look at the trees that were
gifts from the queen of England, and that my little boy
helped to plant. Then ..." She looked
directly at me, her expression transformed
by dependency. She brushed a strand of hair away
from her face, an elegantly unselfconscious
move with which she brushed away her need, becoming
once more a self-possessed patrician lady.
"... I will wait for you at the hotel."
"And Cummings?" I asked.
"The initiative is his. Presumably he
will have learned what we have learned. Meanwhile, he
assumes I am being followed." She
said this with a hard glance at Krone. "I will
protect the truth of what I am--not an agent,
a mother."
"Consistent with that," I said, "you could come with
me."
"To Schloss Pankow? Impossible."
Why? But I knew not to ask in front of
Krone. Whatever he was to me--and I wasn't
sure--he was something else entirely to her.
Krone started, a sudden recognition. "Ah.
I booked only one room. Under the name
Montgomery."
She looked quickly at me. Was she thinking of the
scene later when her husband would call and find her
in another man's hotel room?
It was just that prospect that had prompted
Krone's abrupt disclosure. Even now,
to him, anything was possible between me and this world-weary,
mysterious woman. Was that a measure of a
Berliner's implicit moral anarchy, which came
with life lived on the edge of an abyss? Or was
it tied to a Berliner's knack for reading what was
written on the air? A hotel room, a
rendezvous between two anguished people, the movement of
fear into the realm of desire. Whatever such things were
to Krone, what were they to me?
Charlotte nodded, snapping shut her purse and
saying under her breath, "Sehr gute." Then
she turned to me and said, "It is better if I
do not use the name Healy. Better if I leave
all my names behind."
"Right. You can take the room. I will call you
later. If your husband calls--"
She stopped me. "I will be calling him."
"Of course," I said, sounding like a perfect
fool. But it was not my puerile imagination when her
suddenly wet eyes stayed with mine for an instant
longer than necessary.



Schloss Pankow, Krone explained as we
approached it, was the former palace of Prince
Elector Joachim II. He pronounced the
name as if I would know it. The building, he said,
was an exceptional example of
early-nineteenth-century architecture. Krone
had sublimated his anxiety again in the pose of a
tour guide. Or was it his anxiety that was itself the
pose?
The palace, he said, was built to resemble a
stone castle of a much earlier time, with towers,
turrets, and crenelated roof lines. One wing was
deliberately left unfinished, to evoke the
ruins of the Middle Ages--a hallmark of the
Romantic period. "The odd thing," he said,
"is that when the Soviets reconstructed the
Schloss, they restored the ruins, too, which is
quite a joke in West Berlin. Stasi and its
brand-new ruins."
It had taken us perhaps ten minutes to go
by S-Bahn east from Friedrichstrasse to a stop
marked Heinerdorf, in the heart of the Soviet
zone. From there it was another ten by foot to Schloss
Pankow. En route we passed a new
cemetery on one side of the rough avenue, and on
the other the stucco buildings of a hospital
complex. Both the cemetery and the hospital had
been built on the formerly sprawling parkland of the
palace estate.
A spiked iron fence set off what remained
of the palace grounds from the avenue. A guard
booth marked the entrance, and as we approached, a
soldier stepped out. He wore a crisply
pressed gray uniform, a steel helmet, and the
golden epaulettes of some elite unit. He
held a machine gun in his left arm.
Krone, with the panache of one empowered
by another's authority, went right up to the guard,
handing over his own visa and my passport. I missed most of what Krone said, but I heard his
reference to Colonel Erhardt, which was enough to prompt
the guard to hand back our documents and wave us
through. I glanced back to see him return to his
booth and pick up his phone.
We crossed into what would once have been an
elaborate terraced garden but now was a large,
crudely paved parking lot running up to the huge
building. The lot was full. Some cars were the
olive green of state officialdom, some had
police lights on their roofs, all were
unimpressive minis. Yet these cars were the
height of luxury in East Berlin.
The building was four stories high and,
despite its provenance, was far more hulking than
palatial. The monotony of its dark granite
fa@cade was broken by large windows. Archers'
slits between each pair of windows had been filled
in with daubed cement. From a central tower flew the
red flag of the DDR, and from several
smaller towers other flags fluttered in the early
evening breeze. As we drew into the building's
shadow, I felt the temperature drop, the
chill onset of night. Out of the fading sunlight,
the Schloss seemed especially sinister. I
thought of Kafka, and the weak grasp I had on the
false confidence of my stride.
Far to the right, jutting out from the main part of the
building, were the "ruins," a faux-Gothic
remnant of wall with an archway that led, from what
I could see, nowhere. The wall was anchored by a
half-built Norman keep, a folly whose
whimsy seemed out of place in East Berlin. From
the tower a huge banner hung, showing the goateed,
unsmiling face of Walter Ulbricht.
Soon we were at a second guard station, where
two more members of the military elite stood with
their machine guns. Before Krone spoke, one of
them waved us through.
We crossed a planked drawbridge
traversing the vestige of a moat. Like the
paved-over garden behind us, the ditch had been
flattened and shoddily lined with asphalt. On
second glance, I saw that the drawbridge was
no Romantic relic. Its hinges were wet with
oil, so the bridge could be pulled up to seal the
entrance against the onrush not of an invading army but of
an unleashed mob. The thing to fear most was a
population deprived of automobiles, even
small ones.
We went through the open archway into a tunnel that
led into a spacious inner courtyard the size,
say, of a country club's set of tennis
courts. The image was prompted, no doubt, by the
startling sight of close-cropped grass carpeting
the area. The grass was split by the neat, pebbled
driveway on which we entered. The surrounding
walls seemed made of windows. A border of
flowering shrubs lined the courtyard. Benches sat
every few dozen yards all around, but they were
unoccupied. Indeed, not a soul was anywhere to be
seen. Kafka indeed. All the drivers of the cars
outside, all the bureaucrats at desks and
file cabinets behind the windows, all the
apparatchiks and commissars, where were they?
In the far right corner of the rectangular
courtyard were gently flapping tarps attached
to lumber scaffolding; apparently the restoration was
still under way in that section of the building. The
canvas tarps covered the fa@cade there,
its four full stories. The horizontal
roofline at that point was interrupted by the lone
upright figure of a sentry standing with his weapon,
looking toward us. Even across the distance, his cool
observing eye intimidated, and I focused on
what was before us.
The driveway led to a surprisingly modest
doorway in the center of the Schloss. As we
approached, our feet crunched the gravel, an
overly loud sound to my ear. Sure enough, there was
movement behind a row of ground-level windows to the
right. When Krone saw me turn toward the
windows, he said quietly, "The barracks of the
Dzerzhinski Guard, the Stasi SS. They are
not here to guard against you Americans or us West
Germans, but against citizens of the glorious
Socialist republic. They want you to see them
watching you."
"And you, Hans," I muttered.
"It is the feeling of being watched that keeps the
East the East. A feeling that belongs to dreams,
but not here."
"You know about the barracks because you've been here
before? Or was that a dream?"
He did not answer.
"Hans, you said you never meet Erhardt here."
"Erhardt is not my only client, Paul.
Now, do you actually desire to discuss this right into the
building? Or can you trust me?"
"I don't have a choice, do I?"
He stopped. "Look. Chase Manhattan
engaged my services. You depend on me for
ties to Berlin finance. Berlin is not Vatican
City. Berlin finance is not the Holy Office,
and I am not the Virgin Mary. Which is
precisely why Chase Manhattan depends
on me. You either cease pretending otherwise, or
we halt this enterprise right here."
"I take your point. But I am depending on
you to level with me."
"Nothing I have told you is false."
"But you don't tell me everything."
He laughed. "Until now, that is why you paid
me so well."
"Right. Until now. And one other thing,
Hans. The Holy Office--isn't that the
Inquisition? Where they burned heretics?"
"Yes. And Jews." He stared at me hard,
almost scornfully, as if I were Roman
Catholic. Then he grinned, slapped
my arm, and set us walking again.
We were soon in a spacious entrance hall,
at a desk, with Krone once more presenting our
documents to a guard, who pointedly compared the
photographs with our faces.
There was razor wire in the way the man looked
at us. He never uttered a word. Then he stood
and disappeared with our papers through an adjacent
door. Some moments passed. I became aware
of a faint, acrid aroma in the air. I worked
to identify it--the smell of stale ash, the
blowback of an aged coal burner, cinders
falling from the sky, the aftermath of some inflamed
astonishment--or not. Something mundane, more
likely.
Out of restlessness, I surveyed the once grand
foyer. Plaster moldings on the walls and
ceiling, reliefs, and fluted faux columns
topped by Corinthian capitals--all the
elaborate work had been lost in a careless
overcoat of dull beige paint. I noticed a
large bronze plaque on the wall opposite
the doorway. It had clearly been mounted after the
walls had been painted over. With a small stand
holding a vase of fresh flowers before it, the
ornamented metal plate--about four feet wide,
six feet high--seemed like a shrine or the back
of an altar. Names in two columns were engraved
below the familiar seal of the DDR. "Moabiter
M`artyrer," read the heading above the columns
of names. Below were a few lines of text,
impossible for me to decipher, but presumably
an epigraph extolling heroism. At the very
bottom of the plaque, in letters to match the heading,
was the date: "1 Mai, 1945."
Krone was beside me. "What's this?" I asked.
"Moabit was a notorious Nazi prison in
Lehrter Strasse, long gone, never replaced.
It was where they kept the so-called political
criminals--KPD, Communists. That is whom this
commemorates. The DDR glorifies the
Communist anti-Nazis as the founders of the
Socialist state. The only Germans who fought
Hitler." There was sarcasm in his voice.
"And why not glorify them?"
Krone shrugged. "Moabit was a spa compared
to Buchenwald." He tossed his head toward the
columns of names and at the same time touched the
back of my neck with his forefinger. "Who would not
prefer a bullet in the back of the neck
to choking asphyxiation, naked, befouled, in the crush
of a gas chamber?"
At that, he turned and strode back to the
desk. Such an emotional expression was rare for
him, I sensed, but I found it perplexing. To me,
Nazi victims were alike in being Nazi
victims. But was it so simple for Jews? For
Communists? Could the victims be in competition?
Degrees of victimhood? Certainly no
American had the right to ask such questions.
But what about that date, May Day 1945?
Wasn't May 1 the date of Hitler's
suicide? The day before the Soviets overran
Berlin? A riddle in time: What happened on that
single day of Berlin's interregnum? I glanced
toward Krone, wanting to ask what was being
commemorated here, but his back was to me, and I
hesitated. I looked again at the plaque, the
text, but my mulish mind could not translate
most of the German. Several words registered--no
more.
A noise told me the guard had reappeared.
I turned. Instead of the soldier, I saw a
gaunt young man in a dark suit, white shirt,
and tie. Horn-rimmed glasses gave him the
look of a graduate student, his gray pallor
that of a patient in a sanatorium. On second
look, he was not so young, and there was nothing weak about
him. He was interrogating Krone. My
passport and Krone's visa were in his hand. As
I stepped toward them, I realized the man was
speaking Russian.
A surprise. Moscow overlords usually
stayed behind the scenes in East Berlin, their armored
divisions in the suburbs, their troops in the
Soviet compound in Karlshorst. Was Stasi
different? A KGB subsidiary for sure, but was
Stasi under overt Soviet supervision? Or was
it surveillance? Was the Russian's presence
related only to the pressures of May Day,
or was this a hint of the coming border crisis?
And what was I to make of it that Krone was
answering fluently? He pointed toward me, and it
was clear that I was the subject of the exchange.
Krone had given himself over to the role of an
American VIP'S toady, and I sensed it as
he exaggerated my importance. The complete
sycophant, he had drawn his hands together, even
bobbing forward as he spoke. The only words I
recognized in what he said were "Chase
Manhattan," "Rockefeller," and, after a quick
insistent exchange, the German phrase
"Arbeitsgruppe Ausl@ander."
After the Russian looked me over--his
eyes were frog-like behind his lenses--he led us through a
doorway and up a broad, brightly lit
stairwell. The soldier followed behind. Our
steps echoed up the shaft.
At the third landing, the top floor save one,
we went through a door into a wide corridor
filled with bustling men and women. The Stasi
bureaucracy was one of the largest in Soviet
Germany, and at last was showing itself. Dozens of
people--some in uniform, some not; some carrying accordion
files, some wire baskets; some pushing wheeled
trays laden with boxes--were toing-and-froing from
room to room, up and down the length of an
apparently endless hallway. The civilian men
wore baggy serge suits and scuffed shoes. The
women wore heavy pleated skirts, sweaters
over blouses, hair on the upper lip. I
heard snatches of German, yet intuitively
I knew, here again, that some of these functionaries were
Russian. Although if Russian, they would not be
mere functionaries.
Once I adjusted to the sight of the Stasi
workers, such a contrast to our isolated approach
till then, I relaxed some. This must be like a
corridor in the Pentagon, or in Whitehall
in London. It was what I expected. Never
mind what nightmare each brown case file
represented, each folder in its tray, each
dossier. Abstracting from its actual outcome,
what was more mundane than a bureaucracy at
work? Now, to find Michael in its maze.
Michael, whom I pictured grinning at the
wheel of the car. Where are you?
Our Russian escort led us down the center
of the corridor, his authority implicit both in
the way the sea of workers parted for us and in the way
they avoided looking at him. He acknowledged no
one.
Every door we passed was closed except for the
occasional one that happened to open as someone went in
or out. Even then, we could glimpse only
interior vestibules off which, presumably, other
doors opened into the offices proper. All the
doors were marked just with numbers. There was nothing
to be learned from looking.
What they weren't able to keep from us,
however, were the motes of dust in the air. As we
made our way along, I noticed--overriding the
general aromas of mildew, body odor, cheap
cologne, and rose water--an intensifying
smell of ash.
Finally the Russian stopped, opened a door,
and held it for us. We went through and found ourselves in
a narrow inner hallway, perhaps thirty yards
long. At its far end, toward what I realized
would be the corner of the building, was an ancient
tapestry that had been hung to serve as a blocking
wall. We approached it. The tapestry was
threadbare in places, and if the colors were ever
bright, they had long since bled together into a faded
gray-green. It showed a hunting scene, a
cornered stag, hounds, horses, a man with a
horn. The tapestry was hung to come within three or
four feet of the floor, and in that space I saw
a stretch of the same canvas tarp I had seen
outside. The stench of ash was coming from here, from whatever
rooms the tapestry sealed off. Now I
recognized it: the smell of a doused fire.
The Russian stopped again, knocked once on
a door, and, without waiting for acknowledgment, opened
it. He stepped aside for us. We entered a
cluttered work area with half a dozen men at
desks and typing tables. They ignored us.
The room seemed to press in from the sides: the
walls were lined with metal file cabinets, which were
themselves stacked with cardboard file boxes. In
front of the window, facing away from it, was a
tattered leather couch. The man gestured toward it.
We went there and sat. The armed guard remained
by the door through which we had come, and the man disappeared
through another door.
Krone, beside me, adjusted himself restlessly on
the couch, a large man at the mercy, as it were,
of pinched underwear. Then I realized he was
maneuvering to come closer to me. He coughed and
kept his hand at his mouth, and I leaned toward him.
"With the Russian here, Erhardt and I can never
have met. It is up to you." He coughed again and edged
away from me, but I snagged his arm.
"That fire," I said, nodding in the direction
of the sealed-off corridor.
"Yes. The fire is why the Russian is
here. The KGB is watching Erhardt." He
coughed again and moved away.
Two feet separated us on the couch, and we
did not speak again. The light washing in
through the high window behind us faded quickly. Soon
twilight gave way to evening, and evening to night.
One by one, the typists and clerks in front of us
yawned, closed their drawers, covered their
typewriters with towels, and pulled the strings on
their little lamps. They retrieved their thermoses and
lunch cans and snapped shut their satchels.
Without a glance at us or our guard, they left the
room, having bid no one good night. Heading
home to their dismal flats after another day of serving
the cause of world revolution.
Without the desk lamps, a dusty low-wattage
bulb in a ceiling fixture did little to fend off
the gathering darkness. I wouldn't have been able to read
by this light.
An hour passed. When I thought another had,
I checked my watch, but could not see it. By then,
Krone and I and the soldier, still at the door, were
the only ones there, each in his silence, each in his
personal shadow.
When Erhardt's office door finally opened, the
man who showed himself was in uniform, the uniform of a
senior officer--braid at his shoulder, beribboned
medals at his breast, gleaming brass buttons.
The officer was short and bald. His face was thin,
cut at an angle set by an ax-like nose. He
actually clicked his heels and bowed slightly in
our direction, a movement that drew attention to the
right sleeve of his tunic by setting it swinging. The
sleeve was folded in half and pinned up. He'd
lost an arm.
Krone and I stood. When the officer looked
at Krone and said "Herr Montgomery," I
saw at once that he was Colonel Erhardt,
pretending not to know who Krone was--a message
for Krone. It was all I needed to know that what
Krone had claimed about their surreptitious
relationship was true.
I said, "I am Montgomery." I stepped
forward, indicating Krone. "This is Herr
Krone, my associate."
Erhardt remained at his door but stepped
aside for us. As we crossed the threshold, he
offered his left hand, like a bishop offering a ring
to kiss. However much business he and Krone had
done together, it was as if they had never laid eyes
on each other. Yet we were here, weren't we?
Erhardt had found a way, even with a Kremlin
falcon on his shoulder, to meet Krone's
demand. Krone was good. As I went
past Erhardt, I realized that he was good, too.
The dark-paneled office was large and better
lit. A conference table with eight chairs dominated
one end of the room, and in one of those chairs sat the
Russian. He was holding a pencil poised
above a notepad on the table in front of him.
How it must infuriate these Stasi big shots,
I thought, when Moscow swoops in to jerk the leash.
The Russian's relative youth, and even his
gauntness, I saw, were to the point of the insult being
delivered, and the function of that insult was control.
It wasn't only that the Russian was here
to watch. He was here to make a show of watching. In
how many ways, and how mortally, I wondered, was
Erhardt being squeezed? And what a nightmare for
him now to have Krone show up out of nowhere.
At the other end of the room, by the window, was
Erhardt's desk, one end of which was taken up with
half a dozen telephones. How could these people
threaten us, I thought, when they haven't figured out
the multiline phone?
Erhardt went behind his desk and sat.
There were no chairs for me and Krone. As we
stood before his desk, I realized how this
arrangement would make a petitioner of everyone who
came before Erhardt in such a way. He had been
a man with real power, but now? The deputy
director of the office in charge of all matters
concerning foreigners: What would a sealed border
mean to him? What did the fire in the adjoining
office mean? What did it destroy? And if that
fire killed Erhardt's chief, Sohlmann
... My mind leapt sideways and back. Why
had Charlotte flinched at Sohlmann's name?
Why had she refused to come here? My questions tumbled
over one another.
Erhardt glanced at a one-page brief that was
centered on the desk before him. Then he looked at
me.
"Your son, he is absent?" he said.
"My son, Michael Montgomery," I
replied with what calm I could muster. For some
seconds it was as if the interview were occurring
underwater. Words bubbled out of me, and I could
barely breathe. "Age seventeen, a student in the
American school in Wiesbaden. He came
to Berlin for the weekend, a school excursion. I
am told he was detained with two other American
students at the station."
Erhardt eyed me with studied
indifference. "That is under the authority of the
Volkspolizei, the East German People's
Police--the Hauptverwaltung
Aufkl@arung, the main administration for border
security. If your son violated border
procedures, it has nothing to do with this office."
To my surprise, Krone spoke up. "That is my mistake, then, Colonel. I was under the
impression that the Arbeitsgruppe
Ausl@ander is concerned with all matters
involving noncitizens of the DDR."
Erhardt shook his head. "Not border
violations. Certainly not. NVA also has
authority. Nationale Volksarmee.
Stasi is not concerned with borders."
"But what possible violations are we talking
about?" I asked. "Three American teenagers
are here for a parade. And now they are arrested. In
custody. Where? Charged with what? I demand to know
what's going on."
"Herr Montgomery--"
"No, wait a minute, Colonel. I have
come to you to keep this thing simple. I have not as yet
contacted the American authorities. I have not
involved the consulate, nor have I been in contact
with my associates in Washington. That is because
I assume there is a mistake here, the bad
decision of a minor functionary at a crossing
point under high pressure because of May Day.
Vopos, NVA, Stasi--I don't care
who. A small mistake that can be quickly
corrected by you. Corrected without becoming an
incident. It serves my purposes no more than
yours for this to become an incident."
"I have told you my situation, Herr
Montgomery. My office has nothing to do with your
son's circumstance, whatever it is."
"It does now, Colonel. My next stop
from here is the American headquarters in
Dahlem, and you are the person I will name as
responsible for the kidnapping of three American
children."
"Children?" Erhardt's one hand went to the empty
sleeve, where he hooked his forefinger into the fold.
"Yes, children. Minors. Ineligible to vote.
Unable to buy a drink."
"Old enough to serve in the Army, I believe."
His glance went to the corner of the room where the
Russian was sitting, then back to me. "Although
I understand your son would not be a
conscript, for other reasons."
"That's right, Colonel. My son's being a
cripple will be a big part of the story when this
becomes public." Cripple. A word I never
used about Michael. Why had I used it now?
Because of the German's missing arm? I veered from the
thought. "Now perhaps you can explain to me how you know that
about my son, if this matter is of no concern
to you."
Erhardt smiled and looked at Krone. "Your
associate, Herr--?" He was making a point
not to know the name.
Krone touched my arm. "I told them that,
Paul. Downstairs."
"And you, Herr Montgomery," Erhardt said.
"You departed for Berlin when?"
"Today. This morning."
"But before your son had been, as you say,
kidnapped. No? Why is that, sir?"
He had me, and I knew it. I found a way
to say, with dead calm, "I have business with Herr
Krone. You can understand that."
I let my eyes shift to the right, toward the
Russian. Would the KGB distinguish between
run-of-the-mill black marketeering and treason?
Not after a fire in the Stasi inner sanctum, which
had the Russian sitting on Erhardt's one good
shoulder. You, too, Colonel, have business with
Krone, I said in every way but words.
Erhardt said, "I am a father myself. I know
what it is, the worry you have." He leaned forward,
openly consulting the page on his desk. "That is
why I troubled to learn what the situation is. As
a father." He reached his one hand to the corner of his
desk, to punch the button on the base of a
gooseneck lamp. It threw a wedge of golden
light onto the paper, and he began to read aloud
the German text while Krone leaned toward my
ear, translating. Two Americans,
Hackescher Markt, currency violation,
detention pending appearance before the people's
magistrate, which will not take place until
Monday.
When he looked up at me, he smiled again,
but still without warmth. He resumed his English. "It
is inconvenient, Herr Montgomery. But also
insignificant. Dozens of these each month.
There will be a--what do you say?--financial
penalty."
"Fine," Krone said.
"Yes, fine. A small amount. Your son will
be released on Monday."
"Three Americans," I said.
Erhardt looked again at the page. "No,
two. A man and a woman."
"There are two boys and a girl."
"No. My information is otherwise. Perhaps it
is that the second boy was not arrested."
Krone touched me. "If they counted the one as
a native of Leipzig,, he would not be in an
Ausl@ander report."
I looked sharply at Krone. Why was he
bringing up Leipzig? "He's an American
citizen."
"I am only speaking to the possibility--"
I turned back to Erhardt. "Three
American children."
Erhardt shrugged. "I have no record of
three. You will have to take it up with the
Hauptverwaltung Aufkl@arung. I have
done what I can do. I have done too much."
"I am not waiting until Monday."
"Herr Montgomery, your son stands accused of
violating the laws of the Deutsche
Demokratische Republik. I said a
moment ago that this is a minor violation. But perhaps
I spoke inaccurately. It is better to say
that there are no minor violations of the law in this
nation. We take the law as serious--"
I slammed my fist on his desk. "Don't
give me this garbage, Colonel! You have
kidnapped these Americans. I want them
released."
"Nothing occurs until Monday."
"I want to see them. I demand to see them.
I demand that you arrange for me to see them."
"You perhaps must then take this up with the American
consulate, as you said." Erhardt's finger went
back into the fold of his empty sleeve.
It was as if Krone took that slight gesture
as a signal. He touched my arm, then leaned
over the edge of Erhardt's desk. "As one
Berliner to another, Colonel; as a man
appealing to your sympathetic heart--let me ask
you to use your influence on behalf of these young people,
on behalf of this father. I know you can help. I am
asking you to help as a fellow Berliner."
Erhardt said nothing for a long time. I could hear
the Russian breathing from his place across the room,
and I was sure Erhardt could hear it,
too. Finally, he stood. His desk chair
clattered back. He looked at me and said,
"We do not want an "incident," as you term
it. I will learn more. I will inquire about a visit
to your son--"
"All three," I said. "I want to see
all three."
"Out of respect for your position, Herr
Montgomery, I will do this."
Krone handed Erhardt a business card. "I
will await your call."
Without looking at it, Erhardt put the card on
the sheet of paper on his desk.
That was it.
I wasn't sure it was enough, but it was all we
were going to get. Krone and I turned and crossed
toward the door. By the time we reached it, the
Russian was there ahead of us, pulling it open.
We walked through without breaking stride. The
Russian slipped ahead of us and led us back the
way we'd come, with the soldier following.
Downstairs in the foyer, I stopped Krone.

The Russian, having held a door, was several
paces behind. "Hans, before we leave, I want
you to ask this man where Michael is."
"He will not tell us."
"Ask him."
Krone, dutiful assistant, did as he was
told. That gave me the moment I wanted to step
across to the bronze plaque I had noticed before.
I focused on the explanatory paragraph,
looking for the words that had faintly registered in my
brain. I saw them now.
Von Siedelheim.
The name was buried in the account of the Moabiter
M`artyrer, in the next-to-last sentence of the
paragraph, near the bottom of the plaque.
Von Siedelheim--a martyour in 1945, in
Berlin.
Von Siedelheim--the name of the man I had
seen murdered only last Monday in that
Frankfurt lecture hall. I had replayed
the instant of savage violence again and again, the
torpedo striking below the waterline of my already
listing mind. But now, what had reasonably been
taken to be a neo-Nazi assassination in
Frankfurt was stripped of political meaning,
coming into view as telltale white bubbles
streaking toward my son.
Krone joined me. "He has nothing to say."
But he did. The Russian snapped a word in
our direction. "Bitte!" A command. He was
pointing at the door.
Krone pulled me.
We went out into the night. Light from windows on
all four sides of us--the Stasi graveyard
shift--established the margins of our passage,
made it possible to see.
The soldier behind us remained at the doorway as
we moved into the unlit courtyard across which, in a
rectangle of light by his sentry box, another
soldier waited, watching.
With the slow, steady gaze of an officer scanning
the ocean's horizon from the bridge, I took the
measure of the eerie world of Schloss Pankow at
night. But inside I was trying to grasp the
implications of what I had just seen.
Von Siedelheim. My mind flashed again with the
image of that tall, handsomely balding aristocrat
taking a bullet in the back of the neck, the
crack of the single pistol shot, the shocked intake
of breath of a thousand witnesses, the spurt of
blood from the man's exploded face as he fell
forward on the lectern.
I stopped walking.
We were in the center of the courtyard. Krone
continued on for a couple of paces, his shoes
crunching the gravel. Then he stopped and came
back to me. The pair of sentries watched from
opposite ends of the driveway. The dark
silhouette of the crenelated building, with flags
still flying from its towers, loomed over us. But we were
alone.
"Paul," he said urgently, "we must get out
of here."
"What was it you said about a bullet in the back
of the neck?"
Krone looked impatient, resentful. My
question made no sense to him, but he stifled his
reaction.
"At Moabit. Bullet to the back of the
neck, you said."
"Yes. The favored way Nazis executed
political criminals. Traitors were hanged.
Jews were gassed. A method for every category of
enemy of the Reich. The KPD took it as a
point of pride to be shot in the neck."
"Shot from behind?"
"Yes."
"And what day was the fire?"
"What?"
"The fire here, when Sohlmann died. When was
it?"
"Tuesday night, Wednesday morning."
A day after the shooting of von Siedelheim,
events connected by a name on the wall, a name on
a bankers' program in Frankfurt. Markus
von Siedelheim--a developer of trade with
impoverished Africa--martyred, it was coming
clear, by racist neo-Nazis.
And this other von Siedelheim, this earlier one,
martyred, too. A Communist murdered by the
racist Nazis who started it all.
To leave all my names behind--Charlotte
Healy's words came back to me. I felt a
surge of hatred for General Healy for leaving her
unprotected, but his reaction--"national
security"--at last made a kind of sense. The
murder in Frankfurt had set an emergency in
motion, I saw that much now.
And whatever Healy was protecting--a roll of
film?--it was not his wife and not her son.
Overhead, the dark sky was full of stars, a
measure of how little light the city of Berlin threw
even now. I was suddenly aware of the vast infinite
wonder of the night canopy. I could have been on the
bridge of my ship on that blowing ocean. On the
dock by the lake. I was in the presence of some
unseen reality, conscious as I was both of the
negative strike of my anger at Healy andofa
fresh desire to consecrate my life, as if for the
first time. To what? The rescue of Michael, that was
all.
"All right," I said to Krone, "let's go."
But he had just put his hand firmly against my
chest. "Whatever you are thinking, Paul, be
careful. If Erhardt is helping us, it is not
because of me or what I can bring against him. It is
because he needs something, needs it desperately, with the
KGB pressing him--and he thinks you can bring it
to him."
"What?"
"You tell me."
And there was the reason for my anger at General
Healy. Erhardt wanted what Healy had, and
Healy's wife, her son, a girl named Kit,
and my son were caught in its snare, whatever it
was. National security? A roll of
film? The coming crisis of border closure? A
May 1 anniversary of 1945? The cause of a
mortal fire in the devil's own sanctum
sanctorum? Charlotte's fear of the name
Sohlmann? What?
Each question was its separate prick of light in
the radical dark, like the stars above. Yet I could
not imagine the design, the architecture, what
gave those lights the order of constellation. In my
ignorance, would I lead Colonel Erhardt to the
cosmic secret, with Hans Krone as the
guide? Was he my Virgil or theirs?
All I knew for sure was that in America's
valiant war against brutal, godless communism,
Charlotte and Rick were on their own, and with them so was
Michael. The snare was tied to some long-dead
martyour, a man still bound to America's enemy, and
therefore mine. He was a man whose family was somehow
still at risk.
Markus von Siedelheim, murdered on
Monday, assassinated, executed.
Von Siedelheim. Completing the name I had
just read on the bronze plaque, not Markus, was
Wolf.
Part Four



That first night they kept us in a small room
in a big house someplace near a railroad
crossing, which we knew because there were regular blasts
of a locomotive whistle right through until
midnight, plaintive wailing sounds that could have
been coming from our own throats, we were so afraid.
Kit and I were together, but not with Ulrich. We
had been interrogated again, one at a time, in the
early evening, in a musty basement room of the
same house, and Ulrich, after they took him
away for his turn, had never come back. The
woman who brought us a tray of food--again soup
and bread--told us he was being held in another part
of the house, but that was all she would say. We
worried that Ulrich was the one in real trouble because,
as Kit put it at one point, the trigger was his
bag and the gun was his father. Stepfather, I corrected
her.
Being with Kit kept me from going insane, although
before the night was over, I was sure I had
slipped into a dream state in which everything that
happened, bad and the unexpected good, was
imagined. Even now, in relating the events of that
frightful yet exotic night from the vantage of a
mundane middle age, I find it hard
to believe I am referring to what happened to me.
They arrested us at the transit point in a
subway station. Before crossing from West to East
Berlin, Josef Tramm had instructed us in how
to fill out the temporary visa applications. He
was standing beside us when the East German policemen
began their search, and at first he acted like our
protector, with a few gruff exchanges in
German, as if announcing us as VIP'S. The
police ignored him. They made Kit take
off her father's khaki field jacket, which
Tramm protested, but when they then searched its
flap pockets and handed it back to her, I
realized that they had not wanted to risk touching her
breasts. The Vopos were not much older than we
were.
They searched Ulrich's bag with no special
show of interest. I watched as they turned to the
zippered side pocket, which I had seen Tramm
search the night before. Even in my paranoia, I
had not imagined that they would find a white envelope
that held a wad of dollars--twenties and tens.
The shocked look on Ulrich's face, his immediate
denying exclamation in German, told me what I
already knew. When I turned to look at
Tramm, he was gone.
Of course, it was cash Ulrich had not declared on his visa application. He continued his
protesting denials as Kit and I exchanged a
stupefied look. Stupefied and stupid. Her
dark, wide eyes were always ready to be
surprised, yet this time they showed her absolute
bafflement. This was so, as she told me later, because
in her anxiety she had pictured just such a thing.
And now it had actually happened! She stepped
toward me, took my arm in her firm grip, and
whispered, "Damn, Monty, damn!"
One of the Vopos took Ulrich's arm, but
Ulrich shook him off, looking wildly around--
looking for Tramm, I knew. A second
policeman moved in on him. Kit and I
backed away. The Vopos took Ulrich's
arms again, and now when he struggled one produced a
nightstick out of nowhere and brought it down on
Ulrich's head.
Ulrich staggered but didn't go down. Both
policemen began to beat him, a
succession of quick blows to his face and head, one
using the stick, the other his fist. I had never seen
such mayhem, and my reaction was only visceral.
"Hey," I said, and unconsciously raised my
cane, pointing at the nearer policeman as if it
were a weapon. He slammed the nightstick against
my cane, knocking it out of my hand. It
clattered loudly on the floor, bouncing away.
He turned back to Ulrich and clubbed him
once more. Ulrich slumped, out cold, as the other
Vopo held him. Blood streamed down his
face. My arms were jerked together behind my back
by someone I did not see. I saw an expression
of pure terror on Kit's face. I wanted
her to look at me, but the blood on Ulrich had
seized her, and I knew that, as horrible as this was
for me, it was even worse for her. Why did I
sense that? She had seen blood like this before.
Suddenly Kit was pulled away, out of my
field of vision, all of this accompanied
by German imperatives--the language, to my
ear, never more itself. My arms were yoked behind me by a
set of manacles closed around the bones above my
elbows, causing an excruciating pain in the
nerves and muscles there. As I was being hauled
away, my eyes went to the crowd of people who had
witnessed our arrest, Germans from West Berlin as
well as from East Berlin, faces that would come
to mind years later when I read of that famous
bystander detachment.
Behind the people was the tunnel entrance through which, only
moments before, we had come from the subway into the
cavernous transit hall. Now I saw a man
making his way against the flow of May Day traffic
pouring out of that tunnel, and I knew that it was
Tramm, heading back to West Berlin, his job
done. We never saw him again.
In short order, Kit, Ulrich, and I were
thrown into the back of a windowless van, all three
manacled in the same way, but with Ulrich still
unconscious, bleeding.
When the Vopos slammed the doors shut on
us, we were plunged into darkness. The stench of fresh
vomit filled my nostrils, and for a moment I
feared that I, like some recent occupant of the van,
was about to puke. When I successfully stifled the
nausea, I felt the power of my own will, what
we called in those days mind over matter. To my
surprise I thought, I can do this.
"Kit, where are you?"
"Behind you. Over here."
"Are you all right?"
"Rick is hurt, Monty. Rick!
Rick!"
I shifted in place, finding them. As my
eyes adjusted, I made out Kit. She was
leaning over the slumped form of Ulrich. A loud
rumble shook the steel plating under us, the engine
starting. When the van lurched into motion, Kit
fell back, audibly banging her head against the
metal wall.
"Are you all right?"
"Shit, Monty," she said. "What the
hell."
On my knees, I was able to get over
to Ulrich. With my hands useless behind me, I
nudged him with the knob of my left knee.
"Ulrich! Ulrich! Can you hear us?"
He groaned.
"Good man, Ulrich! Way to go, comrade! Do
you hear me? It's Michael. Monty."
"Oh, God," he said.
I put my face down to his, unsteadily and
off balance with the bumping of the van as it careened
along over rough and broken pavement. "You're
okay," I said. I placed my cheek against his
head, my nose into his hair, which was wet with
blood. "The bleeding stopped, comrade," I said,
only hoping it was so. "You're going to be okay."
But I was panicked, thinking, Shit, what if
he's really hurt?
"Quit calling him comrade, Monty," Kit
said.
"Let me wipe your face, Rick," I
said. I put my shoulder against his head, pressing.
He groaned and pulled away.
"I'm sorry," I said.
Ulrich pulled himself up. "No, I am
sorry. Oh, God." He rolled onto his
side and came to his knees. "I am so
sorry."
"Don't be crazy," Kit said from her place
by the wall.
"Are you still bleeding?" I asked.
"I don't think so. I am just sorry.
Sorry."
"Why should you be sorry?" I asked.
"It is because of my stepfather," Ulrich said.
"The bastard. The bastard!"
"It was Tramm," I said, "not your
stepfather." Ulrich's anger at his stepfather made
no sense to me. On the contrary, didn't we
need the general more than ever? As an American
big shot, wasn't he our best chance of getting
out of this? "You've got to tell them who your stepfather
is. They won't mess with an American
general."
"Oh, Monty, you really amaze me."
The old snap in his voice relieved me. I
was glad to have something to disagree about. He was okay.
"Tramm is the one who screwed us," I said.
"He's the one who planted that money." If you
made a mistake, it was with fucking Tramm, not
your stepfather.
"Yes, Tramm put the money in there. But this
is all a work of theater. Tramm played his
role. Now they play theirs, and we ours. But for
what audience? For General David X.
Healy. This is why I do not need to tell them who
my stepfather is. They already know. And not just because of
my ID, either."
"What do they want?" I asked.
"I do not know," Ulrich said, but with a new
note of defeat.
"That film?" Kit said.
"Shh!" Ulrich said. Until then, it hadn't
occurred to me that we could be overheard. All at
once the question hit me, the one that should have the night
before: Where was the film? Why had Tramm not found
it in Ulrich's bag?
Ulrich had slumped back against the wall of the
van. Unlike me, he was able to steady himself against
the jostling, bumpy ride. My left thigh was
pressing painfully down onto the metal of my
right leg brace, and when I tried to adjust, I
fell over, knocking against Kit. "I'm
sorry," I said. I looked for her face. Her
eyes were closed. Back into that nightmare of hers,
whatever it was. Incurable.
When I regained my balance, I turned
back to Ulrich. Something in his slumped posture
made me ask, "What's wrong?"
His voice, when he answered, was strangely
disembodied. "I came here to get away from him,
from what he does, from what he represents, from
what he made my mother become."
"You shouldn't have come to Berlin."
"Berlin is the one city where he cannot follow.
And Berlin is my city."
"Well, you can have it," I said, trying
to lighten the mood.
Some moments passed. To my surprise,
Ulrich had begun quietly sobbing.
"Rick," I said. What pain he must have been
in.
But it was not the beating that made him cry. "I
cannot get away," he said. "I cannot get away from
him. Not even here. I cannot. I cannot."
The van swerved, taking a turn fast. Kit
fell against me this time, and as she did, a
strange, guttural groan escaped her lips.
"Kit, are you all right?"
When she didn't answer right away, the question
resonated in the close air. Are you all
right? I remembered the words, a woman's
voice coming to me from a threshold, a light behind her
figure, a kind of halo around her head, making
individual strands of hair stand out like silver
threads. Those words had always soothed me, no
matter what. Are you all right? They soothed
me now, just to have spoken them.
"No," she said finally. "My arms. My arms
have gone numb. My hands. I can't move my
damn fingers. Something's wrong."
"It's the clamps. They've cut your
circulation. You have clamps on your arms. You know
that, right?"
"Monty, my arms are paralyzed."
I heard the panic in her voice. Oddly,
her agitation had a calming effect on me. "The
manacles on your arms, Kit. Here, turn
toward me." I swung around so that my back was
to hers, to take her arms in my hands, one at a
time. "Can you feel that?" I massaged her upper
arms, first one, then the other, my hands moving up and
down over her elbows, kneading the flesh around the
metal cuffs. How thin she was, how easily
I could make out the contours of her bones. "Is that
better? Your arms are just asleep, that's all."
"Why does it smell like vomit in here?"
"Somebody before us. Drunk. May Day. The
parade. Do you feel that? Can you feel me touching
your arms?"
"Yes."
"Then you're okay. You'll be okay." My
fingers found hers, intertwined with them, kneading and
pressing. "You're okay, Kit."
All this while Ulrich, apart from us, was softly
crying against the wall.
"How come my arms are tied,
Monty, and yours aren't?"
"Mine are, Kit. Same as you. That's why
I have my back to you."
"You do?" She looked around at me. "Holy
shit." Then she laughed, and I realized with a rush
of absurd self-satisfaction that she was grinning
at me with some kind of admiration. That I was
coping. At that moment, I believed in myself because
she did.
It had yet to occur to me that if I uncovered
unexpected resources of strength or resolve
in myself, they had not been put there by someone else.
Yes, I was afraid. Yes, I was sure that,
not for the first time, my body was about to fail me. But
Kit seemed more real to me than my
premonitions. Her simple presence was the
vertical axis by which I measured balance, her
presence and the stunning fact that she had turned to me
in need. And I was meeting it.
Here is proof that beauty is a trick of the
mind: in the dark, in that terrible moment, Kit
seemed beautiful to me, beauty itself. I rejoiced in
the sweet sight of her near invisibility.

The van rolled down into what seemed an underground
garage. The garage also was dark, so that when they
opened the van doors, it felt like night. I had
to remind myself it was the middle of the day. I could
see Ulrich's face more clearly now, and was
relieved that the blood had dried. He seemed
to have regained some physical resolve. Indeed,
I was the only one to stumble and bump the
cinderblock walls as they herded us along.
Ulrich tried to help me, but without the use of his
arms there was little he could do. The clicking of my
leg braces had never seemed so loud. Without my
cane I had to lope along with an exaggerated
stride. I knew what rhythm to strike, but I
knew also that the gait made me look spastic,
and I hated to have Kit see me that way.
They pushed us into a dimly lit elevator.
Fliers were crudely taped to the walls of the
elevator car, showing faces of mean-looking men,
head-on and in profile. Mug shots. Wanted
posters. There were about ten of them.
I leaned toward Ulrich and whispered,
"Police station." One of the Vopos poked me
in the ribs. "Sei still!" And I shut
up.
On an upper floor of the building,
they led us into a kind of hearing room, with a long
table at one wall, three vacant chairs behind
it. Opposite the table were three or four rows of
straight-backed chairs. One of the policemen
pulled three of these forward, closer to the table,
while two others, from behind us, unlocked the
manacles on our arms. Oddly, it was when I
brought my arms forward that I felt the sharpest
crack of pain in my shoulders, but that quickly gave
way to the undiluted physical relief it was
to be free. That feeling passed, too. We
sat, with Kit between me and Ulrich.
I turned toward him, trying to appear
casual. He sat slumped, inert, his eyes on
the floor. This deflation, on the heels of his
frenzied happiness before our arrest, should have warned
me of what was coming, but I knew too little still of the
ways we come unglued.
Just then, a mustachioed man in civilian
clothes entered. That he had a white handkerchief
steepled in his suit pocket reminded me of my
father. The man's eyes met mine and he nodded.
He walked to the table, taking one of the three
chairs behind it. He carried a thick manila
envelope, which he placed square on the table in
front of him. "Good afternoon," he said, and though he
smiled at me there was something sinister in his
expression. "You are Herr Montgomery?"
"Yes."
He unclasped the envelope and upended it.
Our passports, ID cards, visa forms, and
wallets tumbled out. Last came the white
business envelope I had seen before, with the money.
He lifted it and said, "This envelope is for your
club?"
"What?"
"Your school group. What is it called? The
Pirates?"
My heart sank. I could not think of what
to say.
"The Edelweiss Pirates?"
Kit put her hand on my arm. Ulrich did
not react. He was still staring at the floor.
"That isn't our group," I said. "We are the
school debating club." How easily the lie
came to me, a kind of truth by now. "We came
to Berlin to debate the team from the American high
school here. In West Berlin."
He smiled and nodded. I felt a wash of
cold fear on my neck. I was saying
what he expected me to say.
Ulrich raised his head. "The bag is mine,"
he said. "The money was in my bag. These two have
nothing to do with it. You know this. You are interested
only in me."
The man's smile thickened as he turned his
gaze to Ulrich. He spoke to him in German,
something I missed.
Ulrich's reply, also in German, given
calmly, was a denial, I knew that much.
The man lifted the white envelope and slapped
one end of it on the table. "Two hundred
dollars in ten-dollar notes, twenty-dollar
notes. Officially, ten DDR marks to the
dollar. Unofficially, one hundred marks to the
dollar. Your two hundred dollars, with the
well-planned rendezvous, would fetch twenty
thousand marks, which you then, in the West, trade for
two thousand dollars."
"We don't know what you're talking about," I
said.
"Quiet, Monty," Ulrich said.
"And you, Fr@aulein? Do you know the penalty
for illegal currency activity?"
"Don't answer, Kit," I said. To the man
I said as firmly as I could, "Josef Tramm
put the money in the bag. And then he made sure
it was not noted on our visa forms. He was with us
at the border, and you let him go."
"Montgomery!" Ulrich barked. He brought
himself up, squaring off before the interrogator. "If I tell you the money was mine, will you let these
others go?"
The man smiled benignly. He answered in
German.
Ulrich replied in German.
"Speak English, please," I said.
Finally Kit spoke. "We want to see the
American ambassador." The man laughed.
"The American ambassador is in Bonn,
Fr@aulein."
"The American consul, then. The military
attach`e. Somebody."
He said, "The American authorities will be
notified. Regarding you"--he rifled through the
papers in front of him, picked up one of the
passports, opened it, and made a show of matching
it with Ulrich's face--"you are German born.
East German born." Ulrich said nothing.
I said, "He's American. An
American citizen. Tell him you're
American, Rick."
"Monty, he sees my passport. He
knows what I am. He knows everything."
"Not everything," the man said, and his eyes went
gray, locking on Ulrich. I sensed he
wanted something from Ulrich, but he wasn't going
to say what. I thought of Tramm the night before,
looking for the film. Fucking roll of film. The
film was what they wanted. And Ulrich was mute.
Later, after they brought us to the house--again a
garage, and we did not see surrounding buildings
or streets, but it felt like a house you'd find in
a pretty nice neighborhood--they resumed
interrogating us. This time they took us one by one
into the room in the basement. Without my cane, I
had to move from place to place while holding on
to the wall. It was all right with me that they never
offered to help.
The interrogator was a different man, but again a
civilian, a chain smoker. He spoke
excellent English, I remember. For part of the
time during my session, a woman was also in the
room. She would be the one who later brought me and
Kit soup, after Ulrich had failed to return.
In this second interview it seemed that the guy
was just going through the motions, at least with me. He
asked where we stayed in West Berlin, what we
did before crossing the sector border, what I
thought of Willy Brandt's speech at the
Sch`oneberg rally. I asked him for a
cigarette, which he gave me. It was German and
tasted rotten, but the hit of nicotine felt
great.
He asked me about Ulrich, and when I shrugged
and said I didn't know him that well, he did not
press me. He seemed not to care about me--and he
never mentioned Chase Manhattan Bank. They
took Kit after me, and when she came back, she
said it was the same with her.
"Except they asked if Ulrich was my
boyfriend."
"What did you say?"
"What do you think I said?"
""Mind your own beeswax," probably."
"Nope."
"What?"
"I said you are."
"Boy, you sure know how to throw the enemy off.
Talk about a "fur piece."" She didn't
laugh. Had she just made some kind of declaration?
Then I had a new thought, and I announced
firmly, "Everything I told them was true." As
I said this, I cast my eyes first to one
corner of the ceiling, then another. I mimed the
act of holding a microphone. Kit nodded. With
her, this could be a game.
She said, "Ich auch. True, all
true. I don't think it's smart to lie to them.
I really don't." She made a stretching motion
with her hands, the fish that got away. Now, in
telling this, I wonder why it did not occur to us--
if they could be listening, couldn't they be watching?
She drew close to me, to cup my ear with her
hands. I felt the warmth of her breath on the
side of my face. What I thought of already as her
particular aroma--part soap, part tobacco, a
hint of musky perfume--floated by my
nostrils. When she whispered, the words went into my
ear in a succession of puffs. "I didn't want
them putting me in a room by myself. I wanted them
to know it was okay with me to be in the same room with
you. They think I'm a beatnik anyway."
She pulled back. We turned away from each
other to look the room over. It was sparsely
furnished, with a deal table, four straightbacked
chairs, a narrow day bed against a wall. The bed
was covered with a gray blanket. A tattered
brown bolster made it seem a couch. This was more a
servant's quarters than a prisoner's cell.
Kit put her mouth back to my ear. "That
woman seemed nice. I told her I can't be
alone. She said it didn't matter. She said they
might leave us together."
"Good," I whispered. I still assumed Ulrich
would show up, after they were finished interrogating him.
It would be the three of us. Kit could have the couch,
no problem.
She moved to the table and pulled out a chair.
She unbelted her khaki tunic and shrugged it
off. Her black turtleneck sweater displayed
her small breasts. In a normal voice, she
said, "The lady told me we'll be here until
Monday, when they take us to a judge. The
judge is in charge of informing the U.s.
government. She said it's our own fault for
screwing up on a holiday."
"She said that?" I took a chair, the table between
us.
"Not "screwing up," but that's the gist. Did
they ask you about the yearbook?"
"No. They asked you about that?"
"The club. The yearbook. The whole
shebang."
The roll of film? The story Ulrich had
made up about club pictures? These were questions I
wanted to ask, but knew not to. And then it hit
me, the role to play. "God, that's right.
What's going to happen when we don't show up at
the high school in West Berlin?"
Kit winked. "Nobody actually expects us
in Dahlem until tomorrow. And the debate isn't
until Monday. Maybe we'll still make it."
"Oh, sure. Just like that. They let us out."
"Resolved: Walter Ulbricht is not such a
bad apple after all."
"Jesus, Kit. Why aren't you scared or
something?"
"Monty."
"Okay, okay. Resolved: Why do people
write novels about incurable diseases?"
She stared at me hard, then, with a shrug, put
her reaction aside, whatever it was.
"That's no debating proposition," she said with
fake nonchalance. "Not in the form of a question,
Dummkopf."
"Why do they?" I pressed. What disease?
Who has it? Will he need an iron lung? I
wanted to know everything. Her "little novel," my
glimpse of it, seemed the key to the mystery of
what was pulling us together. Not disease, I hoped.
"I want to know."
She rolled her eyes: With an audience?
"Really," I said.
She shrugged. Okay, big guy. "Because
writing is the opposite of banking. That's why you
love Rilke, because his letters weren't to a young
banker."
"Writing is the opposite of war," I said,
warming to it. "Which makes you the rebel, since
you're the Army brat."
"Air Force brat. Big difference."
"You are a beatnik."
"Thank God my daddy doesn't know where I
am. What's your daddy doing about now?"
"My daddy?" I laughed.
"Really. I mean, he knows, right? What's
he doing about this mess you're in?"
"No idea. Out of his mind, probably."
"Pissed?"
"Trying not to be. He feels guilty when he
gets pissed."
"Why the hell would that be? Jesus, Monty,
God put daddies on the earth to be
pissed off. Being horny and rip-roaring mad--that
about covers it with those guys. And beer."
Was she doing this on purpose again, emphasizing
what made us different? "My father feels sorry
for me. He doesn't think I can handle it when
he gets pissed. He doesn't think I can
handle a lot of things."
"You do all right."
I grinned at her. A grin entirely forced.
"You think so?"
Blood rushed to her face and she looked away
from me. She reached for her jacket, fumbled in the
pocket for cigarettes, pulled out two, and handed
me mine.
"What?" I asked.
She shook her head.
I leaned across the table, close to her, a cloud
of smoke between us. I whispered now, but with
insistence, "What?"
She looked right at me. "I told the lady
you needed me," she said very quietly. "I said
you'd lost your cane. I said you needed help.
It's not that I meant it. I just didn't want
to be alone. That's what popped into my numb
skull."
"Needed you? Because I can't handle things?"
"That isn't what I meant. You're handling this
shit better than I am. That's why I had
to lie."
I made an urgent gesture at the ceiling:
Don't say you lied! And then, whispering, I
said to her, "But what a funny lie. I'm not
sure what my legs have to do with the mess we're
in. Is it that you think at some point we'll have
to run?"
"Monty."
I had to look away from her. It was the burning
behind my eyes that had me scared.
We sat there smoking, not talking for what
seemed a long time. The truth is, I went under,
sinking into my impassive shell, into a quite
familiar feeling. Often that year, when driving with
my father through the tailored, vine-covered hill
country of the Rhine, he would say something that would have
that effect on me, something completely lacking in
malice, like, "You should consider fine arts in
college. You have the sensitivity for it."
And I would choke on words I was unable
to utter: Sensitivity? Since when is that
something to put on your resume? Since
when is that a virtue? Virtue, I would think
then, from the Latin, meaning manly.
Art begins in a wound, the novelist John
Gardner would tell us years later. And wound was
what I would hear in my father's use of the word
"art," which would sink me every bit as much as the damn
torpedo had sunk him. Not business. Not
science. Not premed. Nothing requiring toughness.
Fine arts--what, like watercolors? Me in a
smock and beret. All I wanted, when my father
looked at me, was that he not see woundedness.
And now, Kit too?
Out of the silence, she said, "He's probably
like that because of your mama."
Mama. How my mother would have laughed to have that word
applied to her. But what Kit said wasn't true. My father had been like that with me ever since
I could remember. Kit was just trying to change the
subject. So I let her. "I have a picture
of my mom;" I said, reaching for my wallet. But
the police had my wallet. Police,
Vopos, whatever they were.
In addition to everything else--my passport,
my military ID, my fifty bucks, my
driver's license--the police had my mother's
picture. It showed her at the helm of our
Lightning, the Desperate Lark, the wind
feathering her dark hair. I'd taken the photo
myself one summer day just as we were approaching the starting line of a race at the lake. I was her
crew, and I'd been counting down the seconds to the
gun even as I clicked the camera. I caught
in her face that determination to prevail at all
costs. Only now do I realize why that
expression should have been so precious to me: it was
to her determination to prevail on my behalf that I
owed everything.
"Well, I used to have a picture of my
mom. Speaking of pictures." But of course we
had just been careful not to speak of pictures.
Jesus.
"Where's Rick?" Kit asked suddenly.
"He should be here by now. They didn't take this
long with you or me."
I did not know what to say. My intuition
told me Ulrich was in real trouble. Between his
stepfather and his being German born and his
unpredictable attitude, anything could have
happened. Especially since I wasn't with him.
I sensed even then how Ulrich had come
to depend on my inbuilt prudence as a check on
his craziest impulses. It was, from his side,
why we were friends. I was drawn to him because he had
everything I lacked, those crazy impulses
certainly, but also his exotic masculinity and
overt rebelliousness. Not to mention a beautiful
mother who was alive.
My worry matched Kit's. Without me, would
Ulrich be at the mercy of the thing that made him
strange? But what good had I been to him the night
before, when he had so stupidly let his guard down
with Tramm?
The night before I had not worried about Ulrich
because, let's face it, I had been preoccupied
with Kit. I was alone with her again, but it was
different now because the dangerous game was under way,
and Ulrich, far more than the two of us, seemed
ready to get hurt. The point being--this was no
game.

The room's one window--it showed nothing but a cement
wall, and sky above--had gone completely black
in the time we had been together there. We were sitting in
shadows.
I stood and crossed to the door for the wall
switch, snapped it. Harsh light from a cheap
plastic ceiling fixture washed the room,
turning the windowpanes into a set of ebony
mirrors. I glanced at Kit, who grimaced.
It was far too stark, like both the interrogation
rooms we had seen that day, and so I flicked the
switch off and returned to the table.
In the darkness we sat in silence, watching the
glowing tips of our successive cigarettes.
Now and then we heard a mournful train whistle.
I had forgotten that the hands of my wristwatch
glowed in the dark. We had been in custody for
nearly eight hours, in that house near the
railroad tracks for three. Ulrich had been
gone for almost two.
It was more than an hour later when we heard a
key turn in the door lock. The Hausfrau
turned on the light and entered with a tray of bread
and soup. It was then, in response to Kit's question
in German, that the woman said that Ulrich would be
spending the night in another room of the house, that
he was fine, that we should not worry.
Though I could not quite follow what she was saying,
I sensed that it mattered to her that we not be upset,
and when Kit had translated the
woman's words, I really wanted to believe her.
She was heavyset and not that old, and her most
prominent feature was a dark mustache, which made
me feel sorry for her. Which made us even, I
guess.
An hour after that, a key turned in the lock
again. Kit and I were still seated opposite each
other at the table, a saucer full of cigarette
butts between us. When the woman opened the door,
I stood, bracing myself on the chair. This time she
did not turn on the light. She was dragging something
into the room. By its shape I recognized a
rolled-up mattress with a bundled blanket and
pillow.
I drew myself up and said, just as I had
rehearsed it in my mind for an hour, "We demand
to have our friend with us."
The woman looked at me uncomprehendingly.
Despite myself, I softened at once.
"Bitte sch@on," I said. "Freund,
bitte."
Sadness suddenly came into her expression.
She let the bedding fall like a corpse at my
feet. "F@ur Sie," she said to me, and then
she nodded at Kit. There.
Kit said, "Dankesch@on."
The woman returned to the threshold. Light
poured in from the hallway. She turned to look at
us with what I took to be a grandmotherly concern.
Years later, I would recall the potent, needy
connection I felt with her at that moment--my version
of Stockholm syndrome.
She seemed about to say something personal.
Instead, she nodded brusquely and, with curt
gestures, indicated the WC down the hall. It
was her job now to supervise our last trip to the
bathroom before locking the door again.
Kit got up and left the room. The woman,
following her, disappeared.
All at once, it felt like a replay of the
night before, as if Kit and I were an old married
couple with our routine. I spread the mattress
on the floor against the wall across the room from the
day bed. The table would be between us. With more
difficulty than I would have wanted witnessed, I
arranged the blanket and pillow on the
mattress. Then I straightened myself again and
took hold of the back of my chair. Now what?
The room seemed desolate without Kit, and for a
moment I feared that she, too, would
simply not return. Betrayed first by Tramm,
then by the Hausfrau.
I tried to squelch that worry with an assertion
of calm, like stifling nausea, mind over matter
again. And perhaps I had some perverse need
to establish, if only for myself, that despite
Kit's claim to the Hausfrau, I did not
need her. But I did--and knew it. She
wasn't coming back. She wasn't.
I channeled my growing panic into agitated
busyness. I squared up my mattress and
arranged the blanket again. I hung my blazer
on the back of a chair. I unbuttoned my
sleeves and rolled them up. As I went through these
motions of delay, I was acutely aware of the
difference between this night and the night before. There was no
question now, for example, of undressing. No lowering
of my trousers, unstrapping my leg braces--
none of that, thank God. When Kit and I had
taken our swim in the unearned intimacy of the
"female bachelors" room of the union hostel,
we had done so in a spirit of adventure. Now there
was no pretending, after boozy jazz and a soft rain
in moonlight, that we were a young couple embarked
on the old journey. No softness here, no
jazz. We were in goddamn awful trouble.
Kit returned.
She went directly to the day bed and sat down,
looking at me. I stared at her stupidly before
I realized she was waiting for me to leave. I
went out, andwiththe Hausfrau behind me, found the
WC down the hall. By the time I returned,
Kit was under the blanket on the bed.
I looked back at the German matron, but,
as if she had spent her day's quotient of
empathy, she refused to meet my eyes.
Slowly she closed the door, restoring the
room's darkness and sealing it with the click of the
lock. I made my way to my end of the room,
found a chair, and sat.
From the day bed, Kit said, "Jesus H.
Christ, Monty." Her voice was thick with
anxiety.
"I know," I said. "Me too. And the H
means hell. Where the hell is Rick?" I
called him Rick, thinking of the snoops who would be
listening in on us. We had to emphasize his being
American.
"I'm scared," she said. "I'm really
scared."
"They wouldn't hurt him, Kit. They wouldn't
dare. An American? A general's son?" I
could say that, couldn't I?
"People just disappear, Monty. This is the Iron
Curtain we're across."
My thought was, Maybe we've disappeared.
But saying that would have made it seem true. I
said, "I feel like we've let him down."
"What can we do? We're just hanging on ourselves
here."
"They want us to feel like he's on his own, you
know? As if we're not in this with him."
"But we are."
"Right. Rick's being okay is why I came
to Berlin."
"Me too."
"That and the debating club." I laughed
quietly, and was relieved to hear her laughing,
too. But then I thought, Fuck it, they never
believed that debating shit.
And speaking of lies, she had told them I was
her boyfriend, which brought me back to my very first question.
"About Rick," I said.
"What?"
"You didn't tell me what happened between you
two."
A long silence. Then she said, "How can we
talk about stuff with Big Brother listening?"
"Just talk, Kit. They only care about things
we have nothing to do with. Talking about our stuff
makes the point."
"So what about him?"
"You tell me."
"Have you seen that hole in his wall?" Kit
asked.
"What, in his bedroom at Lindsay?" So
she'd been in his bedroom. "Yes, I've seen
it."
"I was in there when he did it, Monty. He
punched that hole in the wall with his fist. It scared
me."
"He has a temper. So do I."
She laughed. "Not like Rick you don't.
You're a gentle guy, Monty. You give off
gentle vibrations, it's the thing about you. Don't you
know that?"
I sensed her flowing my way, but could not
imagine how to meet her. "Rick," I said.
"Rick is dealing with a lot of shit, Kit. You
know that. His stepfather--" I stopped myself,
another deflection. Not his stepfather. Do not
talk about his stepfather.
"And his real father," Kit said.
"What do you know about that?"
"Nothing. But he had a German father first, right?
And when you think about what sets Rick off--the
Eichmann trial, a Jewish university, that
Jewish radical ..."
"Marcuse."
"He's a Jew, right? So maybe, who the
hell knows, Rick's real father, you know ..."
"Killed Jews?"
"Have you ever noticed that about the Germans we
meet? How none of them ever knew about the
concentration camps. Do you believe that?"
"So you think Rick's problem ...?"
"Is with his real father. Why the big secret about
the guy? Rick's mother won't even talk about
him. It makes Rick crazy.
Vergangenheitsbew@altigung--have you heard
that word?"
"That's not a word. It's a paragraph."
""Coming to grips with the past." It's what they
say about the Eichmann trial. Rick said it about
himself that day when he hit the wall with his fist."
"And it scared you."
She did not answer me.
"The sins of the father," I said.
"And the stepfather," Kit said, her voice barely
above a whisper. "Rick feels guilty because of
both of them. Death camps and Dresden."
"But that's crazy. Am I guilty if my
father forecloses on widows?"
"Yeah, right. In Frankfurt, capital of the
Wirtschaftswunder, mortgages for
widows, sure."
"And you're guilty if your daddy ... Kit,
what wicked things does Sergeant Carson do in
a Mohammedan country? Make moonshine?"
Even in the dark, I sensed how my question opened
into a room she didn't want to enter. Again she
said nothing. Her great white father. I veered. This
was like sailing. "It's the point of being young, isn't
it? That we get to start over?"
"The past is never dead, big guy," she said,
recovering. "It isn't even past."
"Who says?"
"Billy Bob Faulkner. William to you.
My daddy would kill me if he knew what
Faulkner's books say."
"About colored people?"
"For one. And about how Eupheus Hines beats
his old lady purple. "Universal bones,"
Monty. "Universal bones." That's what
Faulkner calls it. The cruelty in folks.
Incurable cruelty. Specially men."
The word hung in the shadowy space between us:
incurable.
"I thought it was your mother who was incurable," I
said. "I thought it was her disease you were writing about."
"You did read my damn book, didn't
you?"
"One paragraph."
"Some paragraph. I'll tell you what my
mother's disease is--it's my father, .his incurable
cruelty."
"That's why the blood in the van got to you.
You've seen blood like that before."
"In the kitchen. In the bathroom. On the
porch. Always on my mama."
"I thought you said she was his Dixie Cup."
"And what do you do with a Dixie Cup when the
ice cream is gone? You crush it with one hand.
Haven't you seen that?"
"Yes."
"Haven't you done it?"
I had. The sweet sensation of the wax container
crumpled around its wooden spoon. I could not
say so, gentle me.
"Andwiththe other hand," she went on, "you punch a
hole in the wall. We've had fist holes in the
wall in every house I've ever lived in."
"Did you explain that to Rick?"
"No."
"But it's why?" Why she wasn't his girlfriend
anymore.
"Yes."
"Because of your old man."
"I get scared. I can't help it. Not of
Rick. Just of, like, what I'm feeling, which
isn't Rick's fault. He would never take his
problem out on me, I know that. I love the guy.
But he's too intense."
"Like at the border, when he tried to fight them.
Jesus. When he trusted Tramm."
"You blame Rick for that?"
"Not blame. How could I blame him?
Whatever happens next, Kit, and however much the
past--I don't know--all of that is off the table
as far as I'm concerned, because this is already
the best damn thing I've ever done."
She took that in. Then she said, quietly
again, "I could never talk to him like this."
"About your secrets?"
"Which ones?"
"That your father hits you?"
Silence.
"Right?" I pressed.
She said, "I've never told that to anyone.
How did you know?"
"It's what your book is about. The feeling
you're scared of."
"Whoa, what is this, ESP?"
"Writing about it as a way of saying it will never
happen again."
Kit laughed. "If my daddy was here tonight,
he'd have his strap out."
"Because you're behind the Iron Curtain?"
"Because it's like midnight or two A.m. or
something and I'm in bed in a room with a boy."
I laughed. "A boy across the room, a boy
in a chair. And anyway, your daddy wouldn't mind
it being me." Not intense enough. Intense emotion--
what was that line?
Kit said, "I don't know about that, him being able
to read my mind and all."
"Meaning?"
"He'd know I'd be wanting y'all to come on
over here."
"Us all?"
"Or do I have to come on over there?"
"No," I said. "No, you don't." But I
did not move. She remained where she was,
waiting. And I--I waited, too.
We remained there in the silent dark, apart from
each other for a long time. At last, I knew I
had to move or speak. Still, I could do neither.
What was given me then were a few lines I had
sometimes recited to myself while drifting into sleep
but had never said aloud. I said them now.

"I am not yet wise in grief--
so this great darkness makes me small.
But if it's you ..."

I stopped. Always before, "y" had been my mother.
But no more.

"... make yourself fierce, break in."

"Like this?" she said, startling me with a touch on my
shoulder. She had crossed to me without a sound. I
could hardly make out her form. She took my hand
and gestured me to my feet. Not speaking, she
began to unbutton my shirt.
When I was bare-chested, I opened my arms.
Like that, she was inside my embrace. To my
amazement, her own skin was naked against mine, the
pressure of her breasts against my chest, the
fleshy firmness of her nipples.
"Jesus, Kit," I said. I started to pull
away, but she held me.
"Make yourself fierce, you said."
"That was Rilke."
"It was nice."
When I lowered my face to hers, her mouth was
ready. She wasn't the first girl I had
kissed, or the second, but she might have been the
third. I knew nothing.
We kissed again, then simply held each
other. The skin on my chest had never seemed more
sensitive.
I whispered, "I've never been naked with
anyone."
"We aren't actually naked yet."
She was wearing underpants. When she pulled
back now, it was to get at my belt buckle.
My belt, in her father's hands, would be a strap.
I let her unfasten my trousers, aware of it
as she brushed against my erection. She pushed my
trousers down, and I sat in the chair as she
began to pull them off. I stopped her. "My
shoes," I said. "My braces."
She knelt and began to untie my ugly
orthopedic shoes. I let her do this because I
knew that when my legs were exposed, she would not be
able to see them in the dark. I leaned forward
to release the leather fasteners of my braces. Very
quickly then, my shoes, braces, and trousers were
off, and Kit once more drew me up to stand with her,
both of us naked except for underpants.
Taking my weight, she led me to her bed. We
lay together on top of the blanket, on our
sides, facing each other. I kept my legs
back, away from her. We mirrored each other,
her face an inch or two from mine. I could not
read what was in her eyes. We kissed. I
touched one breast, brushing it lightly with the back of
my hand, so tentatively.
"Bee stings," she said.
"What?"
"They're so small."
"They're beautiful."
"Compared to what?"
I laughed. "To what I've only imagined."
"And this isn't even daylight."
"Which is just as well," I said.
She moved closer to me, pressing the length of
her body against mine, taking my erection against
herself. I moved back against the wall.
"What?" she asked.
"This is good, Kit. Just being with you like this."
"Is enough?"
"Yes."
She pushed close to me again. She put her
mouth on mine, her tongue alive in a new
way. I found her breast with my hand. My other
hand went around her, to her ass, pulling her to me.
But matching my arousal was a mounting inhibition, which
came to me as a question: Why is she doing this?
I pulled back. "Why?" I asked. "Why
are you?"
"Because I just love contact sports. And this is
one you can play."
"Oh," I said with a bitterness that surprised
even me.
"Legs are not what counts in bed, big guy."
"Who's talking about legs?"
"All right. Let's talk about something else.
What about grief? "Wise in grief," you
said."
"Rilke said. And what he said was "not
yet.""
"But it's true. It's true of you. You are
wise in grief already. It makes you kind and
caring, and you know things nobody ever told you because
it's true, you are wise, that's exactly what
you are. I've never met a boy like you."
"You feel sorry for me."
She went rigid. "Oh, Christ."
"I mean you--"
She pulled away. "Jesus H. Christ,
Monty. I'm not the visiting nurse, you know."
"Nurse? Why do you say nurse?"
"Oh, come off it, big guy. You told me
to get fierce. It so happens that turns out to be
easy for me--with you. I like you!"
"I forgot. I'm your boyfriend."
She sat up. "What is your problem?"
"I just don't want you--" I was
flat against the wall, pressing into it.
"I don't, Monty. Okay? Feel
sorry. That's what you're worried about, right?
If I feel sorry for anybody, it's myself.
Stuck in Berlin with a pair of sawdust
Casanovas."
"Casanova. New house. Ulrich."
"Rick isn't here, though. Not now. Can't we
leave him out of this--you and me?"
"You brought him up."
"You, Monty. It's you I'm with. It's you
I want to be with."
"Because of my grief."
"Which you brought up." I sensed her deciding
to say what she was thinking. Then she did. "You
know, Michael, you really ought to get over it."
"What do you mean?"
"About your legs."
"Get over it?"
"Your legs are only a problem if you let
them be. We all have things we would change,
Monty. About where we come from. About who we are.
About our bodies. Look at me and my small
boobs."
"Your breasts are great. I love your
breasts."
"You can call them boobs, Monty, now that
you've met."
"They rise up out of your ribs like mounds of
life itself."
"Tits, Monty. And too small. Cut the
crap."
"They're perfect."
"Unlike your legs, you mean?"
"I never discussed my legs. Not with anyone."
"That's not true. You discussed them with your
mama."
"Not discussed, exactly."
"But she knew. You let her see what you
felt. It wasn't that she was magic, Monty.
No miracle worker. If she knew about your
legs, it was because you let her know. What you had
going with your mama was something you did for yourself, as much
as her doing it."
"Why are you saying this?"
"Because you can do it again. You can do it with me."
"I'm working on it," I said.
"Me too, Monty. I wasn't kidding about
my boobs. It ain't polio, but it still bugs
me. If your mama was here, wouldn't she
tell us both to get over it?"
"Yes."
"Well, then." Kit leaned forward and pulled
the blanket away from my legs. Her nakedness
hit me again, and I had an erection again.
"Let me look," she said. Then added,
"Mother, may I?"
"It's dark."
With that she got up and went over to my pants.
She came back with my Zippo and flicked it.
She sat next to me and held the flame before our
faces, so that I would look at her. She was
entirely in earnest, knowing this could not be a game with
me. In the light, I saw how small her
breasts really were, but I was right. They were
beautiful.
"So, may I?" she asked.
"Yes."
I watched her, a silhouette moving down the
length of my body, the lighter flame making a
halo at her burnished face. She ignored the
bulge in my underpants and moved the flame to my
legs--my real private parts. First she
examined the smooth skin of my left thigh, the
bony protrusion of my knee, and then, moving
slowly, the gnarled flesh below my knee, the web
of purple veins, white scars, red welts, the
uneven ridge of my shin bone--the most familiar
terrain I knew. It silenced me to watch someone
else explore it.
Unfamiliar, impossible to keep on the margin
of my concentration, were her breasts, each flowing
forward around its nipple as she bent over me.
Each was shaped to fill a champagne glass.
Breasts, I thought. I could never call them
boobs, tits, knockers--crudities that had
never seemed, despite Kit's ease with them, more
profane to me.
I reached to touch her, setting my fingers at
play, lightly, in her hair. I studied the
shape of her long, thin neck--Nefertiti,
Audrey Hepburn, a swan. I watched the
flickering glow of the Zippo flame as it washed
back onto her face. A diamond of light
danced in the green cone of the one eye I could see.
Her expression, a tender curiosity, reminded
me of a certain nurse who had, one summer,
regularly changed the dressings on that leg, but
she had always exclaimed, as the pasty skin
appeared from under the peeled-back bandage,
"Oh, good! It looks good!" She had said that
even when I knew that that part of me looked dead,
ready to be burned. Oh, dead! It looks
dead!
Would Kit say "good" when it wasn't good?
No. Kit was looking at my leg not with medical
detachment but with the interest of a patient examining her
own leg, trying to find the spot that had been
hurting her.
But then, for an instant, I was afraid she would
do something equally sentimental as saying "good,"
something condescending--like kiss me there on my
bitter flesh, touch me on the sharp edge of my
bone.
She did no such thing. Yet in examining me,
her face was close enough to my leg that I could sense
her warm breath on my ever sensitive scars.
Looking back, I know what I could not have known
then, that it was indeed the moment, as she'd said, of my
getting over it. My legs would still be ugly, a
permanent curse, a disability. But never again, not
for one second, would I ever wonder if they
defined me.
She closed the cover of the Zippo with that hollow
snap, and for an instant, without the light, she
disappeared. But she came back, bringing her face
to mine, drawing the blanket forward as she did,
covering us, clothing our nakedness. She put her
mouth by my ear and whispered, "Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"I love you, Michael."
The surprise was that I was not surprised.
I touched her cheekbone without seeing it because her
face remained close to my ear. "I love you,
Katharine."
And then silence for a long time, a deep, consoling
silence in which I listened to her breathing.
After a while, I freed my right arm from the
blanket and reached to her. My hand found her
cheek, andwiththe back of my fingers, I rubbed it
softly. To my amazement, her cheek was wet.
"You're crying?"
"Not with sadness. With feelings. Lots of
feelings."
"Intense emotion."
"You betcha. All of them."
"You're okay now, Kit. We're taking
care of each other."
"You sure are taking care of me, Monty.
I'd be cooked by now without you."
""Then your great transforming will happen
to me,"" I recited, completing Rilke's
stanza, ""and my great grief cry will happen
to you.""
"It just did," she said softly.
I let my hand caress the back of her neck,
and without consciously deciding to, I gently
drew her head to mine. We lay together like that in
silence, her face nestled between my cheek and
shoulder. Later, I would wonder what this
embrace, this whole encounter, had to do with sex, but
not then. Knowledge, carnal knowledge--not the same thing. The
naked intimacy was all we wanted, all we
needed. And it turned out to be as true of her,
despite her sexy moves, as of me.
I felt the moisture of Kit's tears
puddling at my clavicle. Despite her "big
guy" breeziness, she was weeping again.
Incurable. She continued to do so, almost soundlessly,
until she drifted into sleep.






By the time the Hausfrau's key turned in the
lock the next morning, Kit and I were dressed
and sitting on our separate sides of the room.
Kit wore her black turtleneck under her
father's jacket. I was safely buttoned into my
blazer and tie. The Hausfrau wore the same
brown sweater over a shapeless dress and the same
sturdy shoes. Now she smelled of cooked
cabbage, which seemed odd so early in the morning.
But what time was it? Daylight was filtering in through
the cloudy high window, and my watch said eight
o'clock, but the dependable flow of minutes and hours
had been interrupted. I could not trust the clear
signs that it was morning. If the woman had said
"Guten Abend," I would not have been
surprised. In fact, she said nothing.
And if she had conveyed a hint of sympathy the
day before, today she seemed only irritated. She
stood in the threshold staring at us, a thick
pillar of disapproval. Did she assume we
had betrayed her laxity by huddling together under the one
blanket? Would she believe that our intimacy had
been, if not chaste, not sexual? But why would she
care? The woman was no nun. And what
were Communist morals in any case? Had she
been privy to our time together, she would have laughed at
us pregenital puppies, wildly short of
understanding who, overnight, we had become.
Without having planned to, I blurted, "Where
is our friend? Wo ist--?"
Kit finished my question, "Unser
Freund?"
The woman looked blankly at me, then at
Kit, who spoke several sentences in German.
Except for the word "American," I missed it.
When the woman still did not reply, Kit said
to me, "I told her we demand to see the
American ambassador."
"Consul general," I said. "In Berlin,
it's the consul general."
Kit mouthed the word "asshole" at me, and I
felt stupid and crushed. She grabbed her bag and
went to the door, having understood ahead of me that
our mute matron was waiting for us to go down the
hall to the WC.
While Kit was gone, I made one more stab
at learning something. "Unser Freund, sie
gem@utlich, ja?"
Her dismissive look made it clear that I
had used a word wrong, but she knew what I was
asking, and she still did not answer. I tacked,
spoke in English, unable to believe that she really
could not speak it. "Ulrich's father is an
important American. You should tell your
bosses that. You shouldn't be messing around with that
kid. You'll be sorry." Even I nearly
laughed at my thin threat, a boy reduced to the
intimidation of the playground.
By the time, after Kit, I returned from the
bathroom, she was wearing her bandana neckerchief,
a small stylish touch. I wanted to wink at
her, a bit of style myself, but she would not look
at me.
A simple breakfast of warm milk and toast
had been set on the table, and we ate it
greedily. Then the woman took the dishes
away, and once more locked the door behind her when
she left.
The absence of visible guards made me wonder
if we had made a mistake in not trying
to escape. Then the image of a broad, roughly
plowed field crossed my mind, as if the house
beyond the cement wall were surrounded by farmland--the
picture of a hobbling boy in a blazer,
the girl having to wait for him, dogs giving
chase, gunfire, helicopters, tanks. Then
what? Kit finds a branch for me to use as a
cane? Kit risks her own survival to hang
back, lending me her shoulder? I looked at
her. Though we were alone now, she still refused
to meet my eyes. No one had ever warned me about
the morning-after tristesse of lovers, even
lovers who stopped short. But here it was. She
sat facing away from me, immobile, as if there
were something in the wallpaper to decipher.
Knock, knock--no one home.
All at once I began to feel afraid
again, really afraid. Afraid of what had
happened to Ulrich; of what would happen to us; of
my father, how pissed off he'd be; of Kit's
father, how he would hit her. Then I realized that
her version of fear like this was what had taken Kit
away from me. There was no speaking of it. There was
only sitting there, an ocean of anxiety in us and
between us.
An hour, perhaps two, elapsed after the key had
turned in the lock, but when the lock clicked again
and the door opened, it was not the Hausfrau but two
green-uniformed Vopos. At their brusque
order, we gathered up our things. They ushered us out
of the room and down the dim corridor. As I
steadied myself against the wall, one of the Vopos
poked me to hurry me along, prompting Kit
to snap at him in German. "It's okay," I
said, loping. I smiled at her, hoping for a
smile in return, but not getting it.
With one Vopo leading and one trailing, we
went through a door and down the creaking wooden
stairs we had ascended the day before. We found
ourselves in the same basement garage, the chilly
stench of it. A windowless van like the one that had
brought us there sat waiting.
When I followed Kit into the van, I heard
her yelp of pleasure before seeing what prompted
it. Ulrich was there, huddling in the far corner, his
knees drawn up into his arms. Kit went right
to him, stooping to put her arms around him. I
wasn't jealous at all--I loved Ulrich,
too.
He sat with what for him was an extraordinary
impassivity, accepting Kit's embrace but not
returning it. Otherwise, he seemed all right,
no signs that he had been beaten again. When the
guards slammed the van door shut behind
us, we were plunged into darkness. Like before.
I pulled my lighter out, made its flame
our center.
"Where the hell have you been?" Ulrich said, and
I was relieved to see him grinning.
"Were you in this house here?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Someplace else, I
think. I've been in here for an hour at least, and
they've been driving. But they could be fooling us."
"Are you okay?"
He nodded.
The van lurched as the engine started, and we
bounced against one another when it began to move.
Kit was still holding on to Ulrich. The noise of the
motor vibrating through the sheet metal made it
seem safe to talk. I snapped my lighter
shut, as if darkness would guarantee our
privacy. I leaned closer to Ulrich. "Did
they interrogate you?" I whispered.
"For a long time. Through most of the night."
"About what? We've got to get our stories
straight. They didn't ask us about hardly
anything."
"The yearbook. Did they ask you about the
yearbook?"
"Yes," Kit said. "But we stayed with the
story."
"The film, Ulrich," I whispered. "What
the hell happened to the film? That's what they
want."
"And what is it, anyway?" Kit asked.
"Do not do this to me," Ulrich pleaded. The
anguish in his voice was more pointed for coming in the
darkness. "You are asking me like they asked me."
"But we only have a few minutes here," I
pressed. The fear was swooping in again. "You
fucking have to tell us what is going on."
"I do not know!"
"Monty," Kit said, and I felt her hand
on my shoulder. I sensed that she had a hand on
each of us.
I said, "In a few minutes we're going
to be separated again, probably in front of that magistrate, and each of us won't know what the
others are saying. Come on, guys."
"Not the magistrate," Ulrich said. "It is
Sunday."
"Jesus Christ, Ulrich," I said,
"they're Communists. They don't care about the
Lord's day."
Ulrich pushed back against my agitation
by replying with dead calm, "The magistrate is
tomorrow. They are taking us somewhere else today. They have
until tomorrow to do what they want with us."
"Do they know who your father is?"
"My stepfather, Monty. My fucking
stepfather."
"Oh, fuck you, Ulrich, with that crap. Father,
stepfather, you know what I mean."
"Nevertheless, the distinction is not
unimportant."
And then, like that, a new question came to me: What
about his actual father--was he in this too, somehow?
But I didn't know how to ask.
Kit squeezed my arm, which I took as a
signal that she and I were together. Yes, in a way
we were interrogating him.
"Well, either way," I said, "do they know?
That's what I'm asking you. Do they know?"
"Of course! Nat@urlich!"
"Then that's why the yearbook doesn't fool
them. I saw Tramm going through your bag for the
roll of film. The film is why Tramm set
this whole thing up."
"Did you give it to them?" Kit asked.
"I do not have it," Ulrich answered. "I do not
know what you are talking about."
"Hey, Rick," I said. "It's us. Kit
and Monty. Jesus, man."
"I have no film. I do not know about film."
Despite its dullness, there was a desperate
edge in Ulrich's voice that doubled my alarm, a
hint of how little I knew of what he'd gone through
--not just last night, but over the years.
Kit was still pressing my arm. She said
quietly, soothingly, "Okay, Rick. Good
enough. But we have to keep our story straight. If
there's no film, why is there a yearbook? Why
are we the debating club? Maybe we should just go
back to the truth. May Day. The Red Army
parade. Marcuse."
"It is making me crazy not to be able to see
you. Who else is in here?"
"No one. Just us," I said. I lit my
lighter again.
Now, when the golden circle of light brought us
alive to one another again, I was shocked to see
Ulrich's face wet with tears. There had been
no such emotion in his voice--which seemed
impossible. I clasped him by the back
of the neck. "Hey, comrade, you're okay. In
fact, you're better than okay. You are great.
You are doing great!"
"This is all my foolishness. This is
completely my unforgivable foolishness. And I do
not know what they are doing"--Ulrich looked up and
locked his eyes on mine--"with you. I told them
to let you go. This has nothing to do with you." He
faced Kit. "Or you."
"Or you, either," Kit said. "You haven't done
anything, Rick. Don't let them make you think
you've done something."
As if that was what had happened to him, Ulrich
lowered his face into his hands, muffling words that I
heard as "I am afraid." His head and shoulders
began to shake with sobbing. How far he was from my
cocky tutor, berating me, his mulish pupil,
with the slogans of a pop radical. Where was the power
of negative thinking now?
As I watched him, I felt a deep pity,
and also an embarrassment that was new to me. The word
that sprang to mind--a word very much of the era--was
"brainwashed." They had done something awful to our
friend.
As if to protect Ulrich's dignity, Kit
touched my arm, indicating I should put out the
Zippo, which I did. Whatever else, immediate and
remote, prompted Ulrich's distress, the
truth is that he was giving vent to what all three
of us were feeling. But Ulrich had not been consoled
as I had been last night by Kit. I'm not
sure where I stood with her just now, but I had
experienced the consummation that matters most. I could
not remember what Marcuse had said about sex and
revolution, but I knew he was right, whatever it
was.
In the unsteady darkness, Kit and I balanced
against the jolting of the van by leaning together, but our
leaning was over Ulrich, to hold him. I was aware
of the physical feel of each of them, but
differently. My left hand reached around Kit's
ribs, the tips of my fingers extending just to the
wire of her bra at the rise of her left
breast. Her right hand was on my left thigh, above
the wasteland of my lower leg, no secret from her.
"It's okay, comrade," I said again.
"Don't call me comrade," he hissed.
"All I mean is, we're with you all the
way. Honest to God."
This was as solemn a promise as I
had ever made. Indeed, that I pronounced it as
"we," certain that I was speaking also for Kit,
moved the statement, more than its rote evoking of the
deity, from mere promise to vow. We three
slumped together then in silence, a desperate trio
in the corner of the lurching vehicle.

Minutes later--or was it an hour?--the van
seemed to jump a curb. Then it went steeply
downhill, tossing us, brakes pumping, snapping
us alert. We must have been going down a ramp.
The van halted abruptly. Seconds later
the door was pulled open. The dim light of a
large garage filled the metal cubicle. I
glanced at my comrades. Ulrich was wiping his
nose with his sleeve, stifling his emotion. Kit was
rubbing her eyes against the light.
Guards in uniforms unlike any we had seen
before stood at the ready by the open door. They
carried machine guns, and one of them, as he
ordered us out, used his as a pointer. Kit was the
first to climb down. I was amazed by her apparent
self-possession, as if she knew what was coming and
knew we were up to it. The girl who was afraid
to be alone was, in her chosen company,
indomitable.
With a dancer's grace, she reached back to me--
less an offer of help than an act of
choreography. It was the most natural thing in the
world to take her hand, then to lean on her. As I
clumsily hoisted myself out of the van, of course,
the illusion of fluid movement broke. Then we
both turned to watch Ulrich climb down behind
us--he sullenly refused help--and Kit held
my hand until one of the guards struck my arm with the
stock of his gun.
Instead of the baggy green serge of the Vopos,
whose uniforms came from the quartermaster's pile,
these guards wore tailored and crisply pressed
gray tunics and fitted trousers falling neatly
over polished black boots. Their black
helmets shone. On their shoulders rode golden
epaulettes. At their belts were chromed
bayonet sheaths. They ordered us to move. We
followed one into an ill-lit corridor while the
other came behind.
The soldiers wore steel taps on the heels
of their boots, causing the click of each
footfall to echo with a sinister lack of
synchrony. At a succession of heavy
doors, we banged through. At each threshold, the
decor of the linked hallways improved, from
unpainted cement block to block painted gray;
from painted block to walls surfaced with a mustardy
stucco; from naked bulbs hanging by cords to ceiling
fixtures fashioned, saucer-like, of pressed
tin. Finally we halted in an almost handsome,
wood-paneled vestibule before an elevator
cage featuring cast-iron florets and brass
fittings. The gate slid open, and we went in.
The elevator operator wore a dark blue
smock and a felt cap with a bill--decidedly
civilian, proudly proletarian. He closed
the gate, leaving the two guards outside. He
tended to his throttle with his back to us. As the
elevator ascended through the grilled shaft in the
gyre of a winding staircase that showed vestiges of
opulence--a brass banister, crystal wall
sconces, however dull--I caught Kit's
eye and whispered, "Not a jail. Not a police
station. Too fancy."
"Sei still!" the elevator operator
said, half delighting in his interlude of
authority, although not daring to look back at us.
He reminded me of Charlie Chaplin or Stan
Laurel.
I nudged Ulrich. He would be the one savvy
enough to guess where they had brought us. When he looked
at me, I mouthed, "On Sunday? Court?
Questioning? What?"
He let his eyes drift to the slowly moving
needle indicator above the gate, a gauge showing
that the building had five floors including the
basement, where we started. When the needle
approached 2, the operator dropped his
throttle and the car slowed with a hiss, softly
bounced a couple of times, then stopped. The
machinery sighed. With a pronounced dip of his right
shoulder, the operator pulled the gate open. A
man in a black suit, white shirt, and black
tie stood there waiting for us. He looked like a
mortician.
He wore heavy black-framed glasses that
drew attention to the unhealthy pallor of his bony
face. Not only the frames were thick; so were the
lenses, which magnified his eyes out of proportion
with the rest of his face--a man of several
disjunctions. He said nothing, just gestured with one
hand, a simple movement that revealed him as someone
accustomed to being obeyed.
We went across a small lobby, through a door,
and out into a broad, vacant corridor. It was
illuminated by one dim ceiling fixture, but the
hallway proper was a shadowy tunnel that went
on and on into darkness. To the left, only a few
dozen feet away, the corridor ended not in a
wall but in a hung tapestry toward which our escort directed us.
The tapestry showed a medieval hunting scene
--a wounded deer, a huntsman in breeches,
dogs with blood dripping from their muzzles. As
we approached, I smelled something acrid, as
if the tapestry had recently been rescued from a
burning building. Before we drew nearer to it, the
man in black led us through a door into a narrower
hallway.
As in the basement corridor, I moved with one
hand skimming along the wall, my leg braces
clicking, and the other hand gripping Ulrich's arm.
Despite the clamp he'd fixed on his
emotions, he still seemed disoriented. He was
nevertheless all the support I needed just then--
Ulrich and Kit, all the support I would ever
need.
Ironically, it was because he had proved to be
less than stalwart, once we were arrested, that I
began thinking of him as a true friend, a guy like
me. His presence at my side, his firm arm under
my grip, was helping me--and I knew I was
helping him. His need was calling from me a strength
I did not know I had.
When the next door opened ahead of us, showing a
small room crowded with furniture, Ulrich
brought his free hand to my forearm and pressed it.
Friends, friends forever!
When I looked at him, he nodded. I mouthed
"comrade" at him, the word he'd swatted away,
but now he grinned.
A conference room. Its wood-paneled
walls, long table, and leather-backed chairs
gave it the air of a place where important
meetings were held--unlike the crude interrogation
cells we'd seen earlier. The room had a
large Palladian window looking out onto a
grassy courtyard awash in the light of midday.
Across the grass was another wing of the same
building, huge. We were in some kind of old
palace.
The man in the black suit had said nothing up
to this point, and now he only gestured
toward the table, indicating chairs for us on the near
side. Four other chairs stood opposite.
Once we were seated, the man exited the way we
had entered, closing the door behind him. A second
closed door broke the wall on the other side
of the table.
I leaned toward Ulrich, but his hand shot up,
stopping me from speaking. He cast his eyes to the
ceiling: How can you keep forgetting? They were
always listening. I looked at Kit, thinking that they
had even listened to us the night before. She had her
left fist inside the cup of her right hand on the
table in front of her. She was staring at her hands,
a way of not looking at me.
I turned back to Ulrich.
"Edelweiss," I said, touching him. Who cared
if they heard us?
"Piraten," he answered. We were like chums
in a clubhouse, checking the secret password--
an association all three of us must have had, because
we burst into laughter.
I took out my cigarettes and offered them
around. My friends each took one, then I did.
We smoked in silence, letting the nicotine work
its magic on us, the potent rush followed by the
chemical ebbing, which we mistook for calm. When
Kit blew a smoke ring, it hung in the air
before us. I tried to match it, imagining that my ring
could go through hers. But I choked on the smoke, which
made us laugh again. Some pirate.
Then we were quiet, still, each of us holed up
inside. Okay, I thought, imagine something good.
The U.s. consul general. Ulrich's
stepfather. The Marines. An intervention, after all.
The cavalry. Rescue. Free.
What else would explain their bringing us here on
Sunday? I warmed to the argument, a debate-team
captain after all: What else would explain the
disappearance of our guards? The reunion with
Ulrich? The posh surroundings? The resentful
withdrawal of the mean-spirited man in black? The
only answer to every question: the Americans have come for
us.



When the door opposite, across the table, opened
at last, it never occurred to me that the first person
to enter, after the now familiar bespectacled man in
black, would be not some Eisenhower or
Wild Bill Donovan or Hap Arnold or
either Dulles brother, but my own father.
And, goddammit, what did I see as the table
between us stopped cold his rush toward me but the old
anguish in his eyes, the most familiar sight of
all--the worry, the expectation of disaster, the
sure conviction that, in my case, all was lost,
lost forever. And how could my heart not have sunk at
the sight of him?
"Michael!" He moved a chair aside
to lean closer. If he could have moved the table, he
would have. I recognized the coiled energy, the power
that would collect in his fist, say, as he
squeezed the tiller of the Lightning to make it go
faster in a light wind. Some races we won
simply because he willed us to, which was why,
approaching the finish line, in addition to being
thrilled, I could be intimidated.
My father was dressed in a gray suit, and his
rep tie was like mine, but as always he exuded that
peculiar American masculinity, embodied in
the understatement of style, while I still only
aspired to it. The foundation of a man's style lies
in his shoes, and I yearned for penny loafers.
My blazer and tie made the blocky orthopedic
shoes protruding from my chinos that much more
ridiculous. My father's shoes, as I knew
without looking, would be English cordovans,
slim, perfect.
Is it necessary for me to state here that I dearly
loved my father? That I lived for his approval?
That I understood myself in terms that I had from him?
But in these hours, all thoughts of my father had
dropped away, and now, instead of feeling
rescued, I felt ambushed. His goddamn
worry, what a burden it was. He
worries, therefore I am. His worry--therefore his
presence--was the last thing I needed.
"Hi, Dad," I said. But I did not
move.
Right behind him was Mrs. Healy, who brushed
past my father as she entered the room. She wore a
fitted tweed jacket over a long brown
skirt, and with her tan kid gloves she seemed
ready for the paddock. She had often struck me as
really good looking, especially for somebody's mother,
but there was an unworldly implication of anguish in
her face--an emotion transcending my father's
mere worry--and it made her all the more
beautiful. She said nothing as she moved
quickly to the end of the table and around it. Ulrich was on
his feet and moving, too. They met at the table's
head, opposite where the man in black stood
watching. The desperation with which Ulrich and his mother
embraced set them apart from the rest of us, as if
Kit and I were mere teenagers charged with curfew
violations, while Ulrich was a man charged with
murder.
"Please to separate," the dark-suited man
said, his gruff accent, even in three clipped
words, sounding not at all German.
Mrs. Healy and her son ignored him. A
helmeted soldier in the crisp gray uniform
appeared in the doorway. He entered
efficiently, but before he could move to Mrs.
Healy, my father stepped ahead of him. It was my
father who took Ulrich's mother by the shoulders and
pulled her back. "Charlotte," he said. "Not
now."
I had experienced my father's tenderness many
times, and I had also witnessed it occasionally in his
responses to my mother, even when she came at him
in anger. But the intimate way he approached
Ulrich's mother seemed entirely new to me.
"Let your mom go, son."
What? My father's authority with them
surprised me.
The soldier behind my father had frozen in place,
deferring to him.
Ulrich was crying again. As his mother released him, my father said, "We're going to get you out, Rick.
You're going to be okay."
"Please," the dark-suited man said, but with
sharp impatience, a clear imperative.
Ulrich came back to his chair between me and
Kit, wiping his face with his sleeve, ashamed.
Mrs. Healy and my father went to the chairs
opposite us. My father pulled one out for her, an
unconscious gallantry that seemed out of
place. I had to stifle a visceral resentment,
my father with his banker's manners, everyone a
potential client. What a phony he was.
"Okay," he said, leaning my way. "Here's
the situation. You guys are all three going to be
all right."
Again his authority surprised me. "Dad, how
did you get here? Where's Ulrich's dad?"
Because of the tense reaction in my father, and in
Mrs. Healy, too, I realized at once how
stupid it was to mention Ulrich's father.
Ulrich's father the master spy. Obviously, my
father was here because Ulrich's could not be. I sat
back holding the red flower of my face--fucking
asshole--and resolved to just shut up. Just
shut the fuck up.
"There's been a mixup," my father said.
"We've spoken to the authorities, and it will be
rectified quickly."
Rectified, I thought. What a pompous word.
My father's gaze was on Ulrich. "Rick, you
are being charged with failure to declare currency at the
border--not border, but sector demarcation. Because
it's a question of sector, border regulations do not
apply. The lines between Berlin sectors are not
international borders, or at least the U.s.
refuses to recognize them as such. That's the
heart of the mixup. You guys have stepped into a
political minefield."
"Minefield?" Ulrich asked with alarm.
"Metaphorically," my father answered. He was
the soul of calm. "And the trick is to go out the way
you came in, a step at a time, by the book. The
book, in this case, is the Four-Power
Agreements, which say the Allied Control
Council must be represented at your hearing, but
they also say internal sector regulations
apply, so your hearing cannot be held until the
standard magistrate session. It's a formality.
As an American citizen, you are not subject
to DDR authority, exercised solely."
"But if the sector line is an international
border?" It took me a moment to catch the
drift of Ulrich's question, of why it was frightening.
My father answered, "That is the point of
dispute. But it's a larger issue than you, and
it's something the Allies aren't prepared to yield
on. The point is, Rick, we'll have you out of
here by this time tomorrow."
"What do you mean Rick?" I asked. There
went my resolution to keep quiet. And then, with the
mystified expression they all turned on me,
I realized they thought I was raising the banality
of Ulrich's name. I added quickly, "What do you
mean Rick is charged with the violation?"
The distinction had been clear in my father's words
and in his addressing them to Ulrich alone, speaking of
"exercised solely."
"Yeah," Kit joined in on my side.
"All three of us are charged."
Mrs. Healy was sitting stock still beside
my father, staring at her hands clasped on the table in
front of her. She had not removed her gloves,
and for the first time I sensed that she was ashamed of the rough
ugliness of her hands. We all have things, Kit
had said, that we hate about ourselves.
Then I looked at my father's hands. I thought
of his fierce grip on the tiller--Hard
alee! His voice had that kind of determination in
it when he finally answered Kit. "No," he
said, "only Rick is charged. That's also part of the
mixup. You and Michael have been held
by mistake. They claim they didn't know whom
to release you to, but now they know."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
My father did not look at me at first, a
hesitation that told me he had heard quite well
what was in my voice. I thought of the moment he had
come into my room at the house on the lake, to ask
me to come downstairs where he told me about the
phone call from the state police; told me that it
had come nearly two hours before; told me that he
had already been to the scene of the accident without me.
"Why didn't you take me with you?" I had
demanded. He was unable to put his answer into words,
which I knew anyway: Because you are not strong enough
to withstand the blow of your mother's death. You are my weak
and wounded son, and now you will be weaker and more wounded
than ever.
"What does that mean?" I repeated when he
did not answer.
"It means you are coming with me. Now." He
faced Kit. "And so are you, Katharine. Only
Rick is being charged. The currency at issue
was in his bag. Only Rick remains in
custody."
Mrs. Healy brought her face up. She found
her son's eyes. "Tomorrow for sure," she said.
"You will be out."
"But that's crazy," I said.
"No, it's not, Michael. It is the way it
is." My father said this with his simple authority, as
if he were telling me all over again that Mom is
dead.
Okay. Right. Mom's death--a fact of
life. Get over it. Something to accept. No
choice. But not this. I do not accept this. "But the
currency violation," I said calmly. "That was
my money, not Ulrich's." The lie came as
easily as the feeling. What was Berlin but one
lie after another, harmless lies adding up
to their fucking opposite. Berlin, for all these
lies, felt like my first real experience of the
truth. My truth.
"Mine, too," Kit said. "The money is
mine, too."
"We put it in Ulrich's bag," I said,
"without his knowing about it. His was the only bag we
had."
Ulrich put his hand on my arm, the bone of it.
Then he pulled back, a clear signal of
indecision.
But on his other side, Kit, who had the nerve
to light one cigarette from another as she spoke,
picked up the beat as surely as I had laid it
down. She said, "We heard you could make a
killing on the black market."
I looked across at her, loving the way her
father's jacket decked her thin shoulders, the
overlong sleeve cuffed back like an artist's
smock, the sexy bandana. The girl's
self-possession was a marvel to me.
Not to my father. "Don't be ridiculous," he
snapped. He may have seen right through us, but his
irritation showed that we had him.
He glanced at the man in the dark suit, who
was still standing at the foot of the table, listening to every word
--but doing so, it seemed, through the slit of his mouth.
Pathetic Dad, I thought. Didn't he
realize they would be listening to us even if the
zombie apparatchik wasn't hanging over the
table like a Commie gargoyle?
"So Kit and I have to be at the hearing, too,"
I said. "We remain in custody."
"Michael--" Mrs. Healy began.
But I interrupted her. "Even if we are
guilty, Allied Control takes over our
case, right?" Looking at Ulrich's mother, my
eye went to a line of perspiration that had formed on
her upper lip. I had to look away, even if
it meant looking at my father. "Because we are
U.s. citizens, all three of us. Right?"
As I said this, I may well have grinned--the
point I'd scored. In recalling this scene now,
I wonder if my extraordinary sense of
invulnerability was a matter of entitled
American exceptionalism or the mark of a
virgin boy still flush with the exuberance of having been
naked with a girl and survived.
My father's hand was suspended, palm outward, a
foot or so above the table, and as he
spoke it remained poised like that, as if he were
swearing an oath. He and I occupied different
realms altogether. He spoke slowly and calmly, the
way he always did when he was pissed, really
pissed.
"The undcld currency was not yours, Michael.
Nor yours, Katharine. Nor was it Rick's.
We know that it was planted in that bag by the
unidentified man known as Tramm, who brought you
to the sector boundary. We know this. And so do the
East German authorities."
He glanced again at the man, which is when I
understood that he was not of "the East German
authorities." He was Russian. At the time,
I could not fully grasp the significance of such
a distinction within what to us was the monolithic
Communist enemy. Later I would get it--that to the
East Germans, Communist or not, the so-called
Soviet Military Mission remained in 1961
an unwelcome occupation force. I would get it
also that by then we Americans amounted to something
similar, if subliminally, to West Germans--
although West Germans who defied Americans were
not kidnapped, made to disappear, written out of
history. The night before, that had been my terror
--that we had "disappeared," and here I was daring them
to make it happen.
My father, afraid at that moment of what I was
doing, not Russia, was speaking with measured
gravity. "That the dollars were planted has been
acknowledged in discussions we have had. The
authorities are prepared to stipulate the
likelihood that the man known as Tramm was a
West German provocateur, an agent of the
intelligence service of the Federal Republic.
But that assumes your continuing to deny any knowledge of the
dollar currency in excess of what you declared, as
you have done until now--all three of you." My
father lowered his voice and stared at us. "Changing your
story at this point, out of loyalty to Rick, is
a mistake for him as well as for you."
Somehow I found it possible to keep looking him
full in the face, his smooth-shaven, handsome
face. He was self-assured but also guarded, as
if an inch below his composure was an expression of
rank mystification. Was that hint of bewilderment a
sign of what had gone wrong between us?
At the lake. That night he had asked me
to join him downstairs on the porch, where we could
talk, as if we could not talk in the
knotty-pine box of my room. Each of us
sitting in a rattan chair, the sky black through
the screen, no star cutting an arc, no star
falling. When he told me that Mom was dead, I
found it impossible to look him in the eye,
impossible even to find his eye. I realize now
that the porch's many other places for our eyes
to settle was why he'd brought me down there. In
my room, we would have had to look at each other.
Blind. Mute. I had been equally unable
to give voice to what flooded into me, a
terrifying feeling of rage, rage at him.
Mom is dead! Here was what I could not say.
Because of you! You made her mad again! And this is
what happened!
My father was staring back at me across the table.
Familiar as that face would become years later,
when it was mine, it seemed then like the face of someone
I hardly knew. It was, of course, how I
must have seemed to him. Absolute and mutual
incomprehension. I said, "I'm not leaving
Ulrich, Dad. That's all."
"Me neither," Kit said, God bless her.
"You do Rick no good by staying here."
"His name is Ulrich," I said, stupidly,
passionately.
My father ignored this. "We are getting him out
tomorrow. I promise you."
"Do you keep your promises, Dad?"
"You know I do, Michael."
"So do I, Dad." I put my hand on
Ulrich's arm and kept it there. Ulrich brought his
face up, and the three of us sat there looking at
my father and Ulrich's mother as if we were immovable.
I guess we were.
Mrs. Healy said very quietly, "Thank you,
Michael. Thank you, Kit."
After a long silence, my father said, "All right.
But it is important not to change your stories.
About the money. Forget this crap that it was yours.
Tramm put it there. Tell them the truth,
Michael."
I nodded, but I knew that he was still in charge,
or thought he was. Still fucking in charge. What
I said then surprised me, a pristine
expression of my anger after all. "The truth?
Tramm? The BND? That the money was planted
by a provocateur of the West? That's the
truth?"
From the way he flinched, I could see
that my father was afraid of what I was doing.
Tramm was a Stasi plant and everybody knew
it. Would I use that to upend the deal they had
made? My father was afraid of me.
A first-time feeling for both of us. A shattering
of some pact of falsehood that we had made.
What an odd satisfaction it was to finally be coming
back at him. Especially odd then, since I
knew very well that all he wanted was to take care
of me. But that was exactly what had made me
angry. I wasn't stuck in an iron lung
anymore, waiting for Daddy to come and unlock it.
At the time, I had no clue about any of this.
At the time, all I had were wave-like feelings
breaking over me, a torrent of emotions that
closed off from my conscious mind the countercurrents
swirling just below the surface--but below.
So, yes, my father was afraid that I was going
to bollix the tidy deal he'd struck at his own
private Potsdam Conference, but he was afraid
beyond that, I sensed even then, of something else I
could do--do to him. What?
Force out the truth, I might have guessed at the
time, of what he had done to Mom? You made
her mad and she died! I was too young to imagine
for a moment that his fear was tied, not to her, but only
to me. I am a father now myself, and understand what it
is: the mortal dread that a once needy child can
live without you. Not only can, but must.
My father was nothing if not self-disciplined, and
he found it possible to bracket the chaos of his
emotion, stilling it with a patently false calm.
"Just tell them the money was not yours. That it was
none of yours. That truth, Michael. Don't
play games with these people. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Dad. I hear you."
"Good. You will have no lawyer. The hearing is not
public. Allied Control will have a
representative standing by, an American
officer from the Army provost marshal's office, but you will have to handle the back-and-forth of the hearing yourselves.
Rick declares his innocence. You two back him
up. Tell them about the guy who brought you to the
checkpoint, Josef Tramm. It's not for you
to know or say who he was. That will confirm what
they already have. Then they will release you." The three
of us sat quietly, taking this in. My father
glanced again at the apparatchik. That he was privy
to this briefing did not matter, since tomorrow's hearing
would be Berlinsky charades in any
case.
Kit broke the silence. "Why isn't the
American embassy handling this? No offense,
Mr. Montgomery. No offense to you, Mrs.
Healy. But at the dorm they tell us if we
get in trouble, we should always call the embassy."
I was grateful for the kindly air with which my father
nodded at her. "We've talked to some people,
Katharine."
"Her name is Kit, Dad."
"Kit. What they tell us is that for now this is
better handled according to the set procedures. Mrs.
Healy and I are here as a matter of parental
concern. If your father and mother were in Germany, they could
be here, too. We're just parents, Kit--which is
best at this point. The U.s. government is
aware of what's happening, but if this became a
formal matter outside procedures already set by the
Four-Power Agreements, it would become
political. We want to keep it in the confines
of Berlin, Kit. Not Washington. Not Moscow.
Berlin. East Berlin, West Berlin, a mother, a
father, some kids in a jam. That's all."
"Not innocent of sin, but sinning in innocence,"
Kit said. She said it with a totally straight
face.
"Whatever you say, Kit," my father answered,
but warily. And then he added, "So far it's a
small matter. We have to keep it that way. Do you
understand?"
"Small potatoes," Kit said.
"Don't misunderstand. I mean, just for--"
"No, I get it. Small matter. Mox
nix."
"For the sake of the dismissal we expect tomorrow."
"She understands, Dad."
"And if you have a phone number for him, I'll
call your father. I'll call him right away, this
afternoon."
"No," she said emphatically.
"No need for that, Dad," I put in.
But he was studying Kit.
I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of
her. She was staring back at my father with clear,
firm eyes. Her courage was what I saw, and
her resolve. I imagined her facing down her
own father like that. Great white father. Fathers were put here
to be pissed, she had said. She was put here to stand
up to them.
Looking at my father then, I saw that
bewilderment. Her old man whips her, Dad,
I thought of saying, let's leave him the hell out
of this. But what did my worried father know? I was
sure he had never hit anyone. Suddenly I
felt sorry for him. A dead wife. A kid
who tells him nothing. Worse--a kid who
lies.
To get him off Kit's case, but also in a
rush of my own guilt, I said, "I'm
sorry." He looked at me with surprise, and
I went on quickly so he would not think I was
sorry for staying with Ulrich. "About the car, I
mean. Sorry for taking off in it."
And then, seeing the rank irrelevance of my
confession, I laughed. To my relief, so did
he. "Not to worry, Michael. You'll be happy
to know the car is safe where you left it in
Helmstedt. Although you left the rear window down."
He grinned the old shit-eating grin, the parent
who knows everything.
"All is finished here," the man in the dark
suit said, and he clapped his hands once. My
father jumped, a reflex that shocked me and made
me admit the awful knowledge that my father was afraid of that
man. Really afraid.
Ulrich leaned forward, not reaching to his mother but
to my father. "Please," Ulrich said, "make them
put me back with Monty and Kit. They are
keeping me alone. I cannot be alone again.
Please."
Kit and I found each other's eyes behind
Ulrich. I saw a shining depth of feeling in
her, the same gratitude I felt for what had
passed between us. The simple intimacy of the night
before was not to be repeated, and that was all right.
Smoke rings. Perfect for a moment. Gone.
My father said, "I will make a point of it,
Ulrich."
And apparently he did, because when they returned
us to the same house that afternoon, the house within earshot
of a railroad crossing, Ulrich would be in the
room with me and Kit.
Late at night, with Kit asleep on the day
bed by the wall, Ulrich would begin by thanking me for
what my father had done, but he would also express
resentment toward his stepfather, who had done nothing for
us, and toward his real father for being absent forever. In
my whispered response, I would ask him to tell
me both their stories, and he would answer it was
impossible, impossible. "Later," he
would say. "Later. I will tell you everything."
Given what happened the next day, it was a
promise he would not keep.

We stood up, the three of us, on our side of the
table, and Mrs. Healy and my father on theirs.
Only then, as I gripped the back of one of the
chairs for balance, did he notice that my cane
was nowhere in sight. "Where's your stick?" he
asked.
I looked at him helplessly. Please,
Dad, I wanted to say, but did not. My father
turned to the Russian. "My son carries a
cane. Where is his cane?"
While the man looked from me to my father
uncomprehendingly, the door behind my father opened.
Someone listening from another room knew that we were
finished. The door swung wide and I saw
another man in uniform, this one with ribbons and
braid and red boards on his shoulders, some
officer. He was a short, thin man whose bald
head and sharp nose made him look like Adolf
Eichmann.
Then I noticed his empty sleeve, an
amputated arm. An arm ripped from its socket
by Nazis? Or by Stalin? An arm lost, in any
case, to evil, to war, to the violence of men. Not
to a virus just ahead of the vaccine, the lucky
bastard.
My father had turned back to me, seriously
agitated now. "What happened to your stick,
Michael? What are they doing--"
"It's all right, Dad. Never mind.
Jesus."
During this brief commotion, with the room's
attention on the officer's arrival and on my
goddamn missing cane, Ulrich and his mother had
circled to the foot of the table and were embracing.
Suddenly all eyes went to them. The one-armed
officer and the Russian exchanged sharp words I
did not understand. Ulrich had his mouth to his mother's
ear and was whispering. It was so obvious that I
expected the apparatchik to bark an order at
them, or the officer to step between them, but each one
remained where he was, watching, as the mother listened
to her son.
Kit banged her chair against the table, and I
knew she was trying to draw attention to herself.
"Mr. Montgomery," she said loudly. "Something
else. Would you help me with something
else?"
We all looked at her, all but Ulrich and
his mother.
"They have my accounts book. Would you make them
give me my accounts book back? I need it."
"Your accounts book?"
"I really need it." Kit had her left
thumb inside her right fist and was gesturing like an
agitated child. I thought she was going to say it had
her novel, the story of her soul, an incurable
woman whose disease is a man. But she surprised
me. "It has my letter to Faulkner in it," she
said. "I'm writing to William Faulkner because
I am going to be his page next year." Kit
turned toward the man in the dark suit and spoke
to him in German, a sentence constructed around the
words "William Faulkner." The man only
stared at her, but the point was, he was no longer
staring at Ulrich and Mrs. Healy, to whom, in
fact, he had never barked "No whispering!"
My father said, "I'll ask about it, Kit.
I'm sure you'll get it back."
"I need it now. I have to set down some things."
"Kit's a novelist, Dad," I said, as
if that explained her urgency. To my knowledge, my father
had never met a novelist. My father hadn't a
clue, even, that I myself had begun to imagine a
life as a writer. Kit would get her accounts
book back, but not until the next day. Still, it
would be time enough for her to do something precious with it.
Ulrich pulled away from his mother's embrace.
She took him back for the instant required
to kiss him firmly on the cheek, a cheek that had
the moisture of his tears.
I looked out the window at the afternoon light. I
wanted to memorize the light, not imagining that it
would fade, but understanding that the sky would never look this
clear again. Even then I knew it was right here that
I had learned who I was, had become who I
am, and that whatever happened now, I would never be the
same again.
"What about your stick?" my father asked. They
had him halfway out the door.
I felt pity for him then. What a burden it
was to be such a worried father. "It's not
important, Dad." Not my stick, of course.
I was speaking of my very legs.
Part Five



"This way, Charlotte." I took her elbow.
We had just crossed from the stairwell to the round
entrance foyer, its walls--now I saw it--the
color of smoke. Hans Krone and our
escort, the gaunt, bespectacled Russian,
were close behind.
Krone, seeing my detour, stopped the
Russian with an innocuous question, giving us a
moment's opening. Charlotte had no idea where I
was leading her until we stopped in front of the
bronze tablet, "Moabiter M`artyrer"
"I wanted you to see this," I said. "I saw
it yesterday."
She looked at the lines of text, afloat like
tea stains on a plaque the color of a caramel
apple. Out of the margins and the spaces between the letters,
as out of silence, rose the list of names, the
explanatory paragraph, the date--May 1,
1945.
She slowly backed away, gloved hand to her
mouth, forefinger knuckle between her clamping teeth.
This, or something like it, was what had kept her from
Schloss Pankow yesterday. She would not be here
today except to see Ulrich.
She turned from that one particular name to cast an
accusing look at me, a look full of hate and
defiance. Then she moved rapidly across the
foyer, through the door, and out into the bright afternoon. Her
skirt flared at her calves with every clipped step
she took.
I caught up with her in the broad, grassy
courtyard. A squad of gray-uniformed
soldiers was moving through its drill a few dozen
yards away. Aware of the difficulty in closing
those last few inches between my grasping hand and her
sleeve, like that old Greek paradox of the arrow
never reaching its target, I lunged, took her
arm, and forced her to slow down. "Show nothing," I
said. "You are showing too much."
She fell into step with me, but only because I was
right.
Leaving the squad to its maneuvers, we
crossed the courtyard, ahead of Krone and the
Russian. We passed the sentry and entered the
shadow of the archway that led through the front wing of the
palace. In that disappointed tunnel, the air
became wind, a last pressure against
us, and together we bowed slightly into it--to get out, out
into the crescent-shaped parking lot with its thin herd
of dwarf autos.
Krone's Mercedes was there waiting for us, an
incarnation of escape. The uniformed driver, in the
universal chauffeur's cap, was at the wheel.
When he saw us approach, he hopped out and
came around, but Charlotte was at our door ahead
of him. She opened the door, flung it wide,
got in. I followed.
Even as she made room for me on the seat,
sliding away, her right hand shot back toward me,
poking the air near my face. "Silence!" she
commanded. "Do not speak!"
Krone, following behind, was stooping to join us,
aiming for the jump seat on which he had ridden before, but
I stopped him. "Hans, ride in front, will
you?"
He stared at me. "There are things to discuss."
He then let his eyes flit briefly toward the
Russian, who was watching us from a dozen yards
away. Krone said, "That one is KGB, from the
Kommandatura. Erhardt is terrified."
"Later."
"But I--"
"And turn on the radio, Hans. Turn it
on loud."
He looked at me with the disappointment of an
unneeded hunting dog, then nodded brusquely.
He closed our door, then hoisted himself into the
front seat with an awkwardness that made it clear
he had never ridden there before. The driver got behind
the wheel and, without so much as a glance at Krone,
started the engine. As we began to move, I leaned
forward. "The radio, Hans."
He pressed the dashboard button and an
operatic chorus poured into the air, something of
Bach's. I pressed the button on my armrest
that raised the partition between front and back seats.
When we were sealed off, I turned
to Charlotte, but her shoulder was angled away from
me. She was staring out the window, as if the landscape
of the wrong side of Berlin might hold some
interest. Rubble nostalgia? I could see the
whorl of her ear, its pearly shimmer. I could
see the line of her cheekbone, the luster of skin
without makeup. But I could not see even one eye.
"Charlotte."
She ignored me. What had Krone said?
Kommandatura?
The car had come quickly to speed, and the stucco wall
of the nearby hospital flashed by like unspooling
ribbon. I glanced out the rear window. No one.
From what I saw, ours was the only moving car in
East Berlin.
Turning back to Charlotte, I asked, "Who
is von Siedelheim?"
She whipped around toward me. "Silence!" The
order came in a hiss now, and her eyes darted
forward to Krone, to the driver.
All that had gone before, every revelation--her life
as a rubble woman, Healy's rescue, even
Healy's film in the bag that Ulrich took
--was nothing compared to this. Von Siedelheim.
Moabiter M`artyrer Wolf. Bullets
to the back of the neck. Tied in this knot were threads
of the secret of secrets, twisted into the rope of the
noose around the neck of her only son, and therefore
around the neck of mine.
"No," I said quietly but firmly. "The
time for silence is past. No more silence between us."
She stared at me helplessly, then once again
her eyes went to Krone.
"He can't hear us," I said. The choral
passage on the radio filled both cavities
of the limousine. "Listen," I said. "It's
Latin. Deposuit potentes. "He hath
put down the mighty." It's the
Magnificat, your Virgin icon. We are as
safe here as we were in her presence in the
Russian Chapel." Only the day before, yet the
chapel now seemed to give us a shared history, that
first instinctive coming together that drew its energy from
what we could not put into words. When language
fails, longing takes over, a thing I knew from
Edie. Indeed, it was Edie who had made me
listen to this exuberant canticle until it was
mine, too. Not religion, but music. ""He
hath exalted the humble and the meek,"" I
translated.
Charlotte nodded. "Bach wrote this for
Leipzig. I heard it sung in Leipzig every
Christmas."
"You hear it now." Flutes, drums, strings.
Voices. "So do they." I indicated Krone
and the driver. "Which means we can talk."
For the first time, she brought her eyes directly
to mine. Her eyes were fluid, enormous, searching
mine.
"You can trust me, Charlotte. I
promise."
She smiled. "And you keep your promises.
So does your son. Your son is
magnificent."
I didn't think so at the time. It wasn't that
simple to me, not yet. But I left my
complications with Michael aside. "And yours," I
said, "yours is in trouble. What trouble,
Charlotte?"
I think she was going to tell me, but just then the
pavement turned rough, and with wheels rumbling, the
driver slowed. I saw that we had come
into Potsdamer Platz with its cobblestones. That
quickly, having crossed through the trafficless streets
of a Sunday afternoon in what the Soviets called
democratic Berlin, we were approaching the
checkpoint of the American sector.
Automatically, we turned from each other,
reaching for our passports, the entry receipts.
I pushed the button to lower the partition and handed the
documents to Krone, who took them without comment.
I raised the partition, waiting for the kiss of its
seal.
Charlotte had moved away, and again sat facing
the window. She watched as our car pulled into the
slotted line. The border police wore long
green trench coats and peaked hats. Rifles were
slung at their shoulders. The cars ahead moved
forward slowly but steadily, a candy-striped gate
rising and falling at each one. When our car
pulled to the barrier, the soldier bent to the
driver's window, glanced at the proffered set of
documents, at the pair of us in back. He then
straightened to wave us through.
As if it were the soundtrack only of time in the
East, Bach's canticle was just then winding through
its ... in saecula saeculorum. Before we
had pulled fully away from the checkpoint, the
chorus finished its Amen with a decisive snap,
and all at once the air was blank. Behind the
Iron Curtain, silence on the radio could
seem not a void, as in the West, but a
positive statement, a broadcast version of a
soundless scream. The silence went on and on.
Charlotte looked at me with an expression that
said, There, now we will be overheard. But what the
silence sparked in me was a fresh urgency, the
warning I had yet to give her.
I slid next to her and put my arm around her
shoulders, like a boorish date. I
brought my mouth to her ear. She seemed to understand
what I was doing and did not resist. "Whatever
Rick told you back there as we were leaving," I
whispered, "they let him tell you. They wanted
him to tell you whatever he told you."
She started to pull away from me, but I held
her. I was aware of Krone turning to look
back at us, and perhaps so was she, because suddenly she
relaxed against me. She put her hand on my
leg. I continued to whisper, "What they wanted
Rick to tell you is probably why they let us
in to see the kids in the first place. So now you know
the secret, whatever he told you. And they will
expect you to act on it now. And they will be
watching, following."
Her finger shot toward Krone: Him.
"It's the film, isn't it? Rick told you
where the film is."
She made no reply, but I was aware of her
body stiffening against me. The honeyed perfume of
her hair filled my nostrils.
She brought her hand up to my face, her fingers
at my cheek, what could have been a tender caress.
But I knew the gesture for what it was, an
obscuring of Krone's view of my lips.
"So you must not do it, Charlotte," I said.
"Let the film go until tomorrow, until after the
kids are out."
"What film, darling?" she whispered.
Darling? "What?"
She adjusted her face so that now it was her mouth
at my ear. "Tell them," she whispered,
"to take us to the hotel."
I began to pull away from her.
But with both her hands at my neck, she held
me. And then a sudden change of mind. "No,
wait! Don't tell them yet."
And to my amazement, she brought her mouth around
to mine. With her lips parted, she kissed me, and
I tasted the sweetness of her saliva.
Her leg pressed against my leg, from ankle
to thigh, a first promise of her long, muscled
body. As she adjusted, forward and over on the
seat, to more fully embrace me, her mouth all the
while on mine, I felt the fullness of her
breasts on my chest. My hands closed, one on
her back, one on the curve of her hip.
I responded with lavish willingness, pulling
her to me, so that she would know, despite my
surprise, how I had wanted this. This
obliteration of the confusion I had felt, or rather, the
suspension of it. Confusion would return in short
order--it always does. For the moment, no one was
asking how this carefully unacknowledged hunger had
come here, like an animal, to be fed. Her hunger,
apparently, as much as mine.
My one hand went under her tweed jacket, into the
silk, I thought, of her blouse. But it was not
silk, not her shirt, but her satin camisole, which
rode up from her waist. Then that hand was on her
flesh, incandescent to the touch of my fingers, which then
measured the hollow perfection of the small of her
back.
Krone was watching us, I knew it.
And then I realized that Charlotte knew it,
too, because she pulled her face back. Sowing
mine with kisses, her mouth moved across my cheek
to my ear--the ear away from Krone. Instead of
devouring it, as I wished, expected, she
whispered with cold urgency, "Now! Now tell
them to take us to the hotel!"
To fool Krone about the hours ahead of us, the
woman had--was this possible?--just fooled me.

At the Kempinski, I followed her across the
lobby, her heels clicking on the bright marble, that
brown skirt swirling at her legs, her leather
shoulder bag swinging with each step like a slanted
pendulum. She walked with the assurance of a
well-to-do shopper returning from a spree. At
the desk, she asked for her key and, right beside her,
I asked for mine, as if we were not shoppers now but
fellow conventioneers returning from sales conference.
By the time I had arrived at the hotel the evening
before, she had the privacy sign on her door.
At the desk, she had left a note for me,
together with a bag containing a new shirt, underwear, and
socks, as well as a razor and toothbrush--
purchases she had made for me at a department
store. Her note had proposed breakfast in the
hotel dining room the next morning. I had been
afraid that I would be unable to book another
room, but people who came to Berlin for May Day were
not the type to stay at the Kempinski.
Charlotte's room was on the seventh floor,
facing the Kurf@urstendamm. Mine was down the
hall, a room with a window on an air shaft.
I had slipped a note under her door, thanking
her for the clothes and saying "Yes. See you at
breakfast."
Now, when the tuxedoed clerk handed her the stout
brass room key, he also gave her a folded
piece of pale blue paper, which she took without
any show of interest. She put the note in her
bag without reading it.
As the clerk passed me my room key,
Charlotte covered my hand with hers. "My room,
darling," she said, then laughed brightly, a woman
without a care in the world. "It's in your name
anyway."
"Whatever you say, Liebchen." I winked
at the clerk, which was surely overdoing it, but what
the hell. Charlotte and I linked arms.
In the elevator going up, in addition to the
operator, were a pair of dour old ladies, one
of whom reeked of talcum powder. The other leaned
on a thick rubber-footed cane, which made me
think of Michael.
The ladies got off at five, making it
seem we were alone. The elevator operator, a
short man in the round, stiff-sided cap of his
kind, looked like an organ grinder's monkey and
appeared to be just as oblivious. When the doors
closed after the ladies, I said, "I don't like
it that they took his cane away."
"I think he is coping well with that," she said,
"as with everything." Her confidence in Michael
seemed total, and that alone was enough to set her apart
from Edie, not to mention from me.
I was more than irritated at my son for his spirit
of cavalier recklessness. I knew that my
irritation was beside the point, but still, my simple
view was that he should have been out of East Berlin
by now, with me. I had taken a room with twin
beds, expecting him to sleep here tonight. Charlotte
had her reasons for feeling differently--Rick not
alone--and I understood that. But there was also something
spacious in her response to my son, whom I
suddenly envied for that.
At the seventh floor, the operator pulled the
doors open for us. Charlotte said,
"Dankesch@on," and led the way out. When the
elevator doors had closed again, she dropped
my arm.
She went immediately to her room, content to show me
her back. She unlocked the door, and then left
it open for me to follow her in. The room was
large, far more elegant than mine, decorated in
a sort of muted art deco style, with sleek
surfaces, mirrors, variations of
black and beige. A canopied double bed
anchored one end of the room, a settee
arrangement the other. A highly enameled
black-and-white chandelier marked the room's
center. On the far side of the entrance was a set of
French doors, slightly ajar, open to a
balcony. A filmy curtain billowed in the
soft afternoon breeze.
Charlotte walked to the French doors, opened
one side, and turned, waiting for me. "Step out
here, darling," she said. "I want that you should see
this, eine sch@one Aussicht." A
beautiful what? Her demeanor, blowing hot and
cold, for show and not for show, had me off balance
by now. I went past her, out onto the balcony,
as she wanted. We went to the stone balustrade and
looked out over the tidy rooftops of Berlin's
most prosperous district.
Across the avenue was a new tall building
made of glass the color of the Caribbean, and a
block to the west was an even taller one, newer,
also glass, the color of olives, like the new
skyscrapers nestled behind Rockefeller Center.
I realized it was the Lindenhof, my building, the
one I had helped dedicate in December. I
had never seen it from an angle like this.
From directly below, the bustle of the Ku'damm
carried up to us, a glad cacophony of horns,
streetcar bells, the general buzz of traffic,
and the voices of strollers and caf`e patrons up
and down the boulevard.
Side by side, leaning on elbows, facing the
view, we were also fully in view ourselves. That,
too, I realized, was her point. She put her
hand on my arm, an easy, familiar gesture that
had nothing to do with what either of us was feeling then. But
whether we were being observed or not, she felt free
to talk here, and said so. "Here we are alone," she
said.
"Charlotte, they are not omnipresent."
"You are the one who warned me," she said
brusquely. "But foolishly, you warned me in
front of Krone."
Krone. I leaned to look down at the
curbside where I had said goodbye to him only
moments before. He had not bothered to conceal his
resentment, convinced as he was that I still needed him,
the insult he took from my instructing him not
to return for me until morning. His quick glance
at Charlotte had conveyed his
disapproval, but despite his peevishness, I was
sure he'd bought it--the blood urgency of our
afternoon rendezvous.
"Let go of it, Charlotte. Krone is
trustworthy. I am certain of it."
As she replied, her face remained in
profile to me. "Krone is Stasi. That was the
point."
The point, of course, of her kissing me, the
point of "darling."
I watched her as she calmly took in the
stunning vista. My every intuition told me that
Krone was what he claimed to be. If I was
wrong about Krone--
"Ridiculous," I said, not bothering to keep the
anger from my voice. Ridiculous was, in
fact, how I was feeling. First my son toying with
me, now her.
Instead of answering, Charlotte pushed away from
the balustrade, turned, and walked back into the
room. Once more she waited at the door for me.
I followed. She closed the doors, then pulled
the curtains closed, first the sheer layer and then the
heavy brocade drapes, which plunged the room
into shadow. She went to the wall switch, snapped
on the black-and-white art deco chandelier, then
pulled an ottoman over from one of the chairs,
positioning it just below the hanging light fixture.
She gestured at the ottoman with a swirl of her
wrist.
I stepped onto it, a surprisingly firm
pedestal that brought me up so that my head was level
with the chandelier. In its workings, I saw at once
what she wanted me to see--a small black
knob attached to a thin cord winding into the hole from
which the electrical wire ran. A microphone,
of course. I stared at the thing as if it were aware
of me doing so.
I was back for a second on the Stephen
Case, on the bridge, stretching like this to see.
To see. Where was the telltale white streamer in the
blue water? Futility itself--because by the time you do
see, it is too late.
I looked down at Charlotte, dumbly. She put her finger to her lips and made a
pointing gesture at the microphone. Leave it
in place. A contradiction of my impulse, which
was to rip the thing out. She shook her head. If
you rip it out, they know.
I nodded. She took several steps
back and turned. She walked past the bed and through
a door into what had to be the bathroom.
I did not move. Ridiculous, I thought.
Standing on my cushioned stool, wishing it were the
bridge of a ship, a rampart, but seeing it,
seeing it for the ridiculous thing it was: an
ottoman from India, land of elephants. And just
like that, I realized what I was, and what she
was. I was a circus animal doing tricks,
waiting now for the sound of my trainer's whip.
The sound coming from the bathroom was that of a sudden gush of water slapping a plastic shower curtain.
I hopped down and went to her. If she did not
want me to join her, would she have left the door
ajar?
The bathroom was the size of an office, a
display of ostentation that at a later time would seem
thoroughly American, but which then smacked of the
decadence of old Berlin. At one wall a
pair of gleaming alabaster sinks were set into a
sheen of black countertop. Opposite were a
toilet and a bidet of Carrara pink, and the third
wall was taken up with the tiled counter of a dressing
table. Its cushioned wire chair stood before a
large gilt-framed mirror. Attached to the
wall beside the mirror was a slung telephone,
pink in color--in those days, any color but
black was unusual. A second large mirror
dominated the wall above the sinks, so that when I
focused at last on Charlotte, languid against
the dressing table, I also saw reflections of her
to my right and left. Beside her was the bathtub and its
drawn shower curtain on which water was beating, a
sound that filled the space.
She had removed one glove, presumably
to turn the shower knob, and was now removing the other,
a deliberation that seemed to have overtaken her
concentration. The effect of seeing her head-on and in
both profiles simultaneously was dazzling.
The mirrors were an absolute showcase of her
beauty.
But against the gravity of her fierce expression,
the very idea of beauty, hers or anyone's,
seemed banal. As if to underscore the frivolity
of mere appearance, the fresh sight of her blunted
but heroic fingers drew my gaze away from her
face.
I pushed the door closed behind me.
"There are no wires in here," she said. "I have
examined closely." She dropped her
gloves on the table beside her.
"But you run the noisy shower anyway. You can't
be too careful, is that it? What makes you think
it is Krone?"
"You saw him with Erhardt."
"Yes, and I saw Erhardt sweating blood in
front of the Russian. What Krone said is
true. He owns Erhardt. He can destroy
Erhardt. It's why they dealt with us."
"No. You were right before. They dealt with us because they
expect me to lead them to what they want. I know
that. Of course I know that. But neither Erhardt nor
the commissar booked this room. Krone booked this
room, Paul. Krone. I found the
microphone five minutes after checking in. There
was no time for anyone else to put the microphone
there. Krone is Stasi."
I stared at her. She had to be wrong, but I
could think of no way to rebut her. And I am
ashamed to admit that my thought went at once to:
If Krone is Stasi, what does that mean for
Chase?
To hell with Chase, I told myself. "That
makes no sense, Charlotte. Krone booked
this room for me. He did that before knowing anything,
before knowing who you are."
"But he knew by the time he left us at the
Fernsehturm. He was away from us for most of
an hour. He came back agitated. Do you
remember that beer, how desperately he lifted
that stein?"
"Exactly. If Krone were Stasi, would his
hands shake?"
"My hands do not shake. That does not mean I
am Stasi."
"Your hands shook at Schloss Pankow,
Charlotte--although not in front of the Russian.
Your hands shook in front of the tablet at the
entrance. The Moabit martyrs. Why is that?"
She reached into her bag, which stood open on the
vanity behind her. She took out her cigarettes
and, with an easy flick of the wheel of her gold
lighter, lit one, a show of transcendent calm.
I sensed it as a ritual act, designed
to cover up--no, to manage--a deep
insecurity. When she exhaled, the smoke rose
to the ceiling, where it was lost in the cloud of steam that
had begun to pour out of the shower.
"That has no relevance to what you and I are
doing."
"Oh? Isn't that what kept you from Schloss
Pankow yesterday? You were afraid of what the
tablet reveals."
"Which is what?" she asked with slit eyes. "This parody of lovers that you had us enacting
began when I asked you in the car about von
Siedelheim. You kissed me to shut me up about
von Siedelheim. Why?" I stopped, but only
for a breath. "At a convention hall in
Frankfurt a week ago, I saw a man
named von Siedelheim take a bullet in the
neck. And then I learn that a man named von
Siedelheim was one of a group taking a bullet
in the neck in Moabit prison just before you came
here in search of your son's father. And this von
Siedelheim was named Wolf."
Her expression could not have been colder. "What
makes you think this Wolf, as you say, took a
bullet in the neck?"
"That's how the Nazis executed Communists.
That's what Moabit was, a prison for
Communists. Every prisoner was executed just as the
city fell to the Soviets, which the bronze tablet
commemorates."
A startled buoyancy came into her eyes for a
moment--a woman of feeling after all. But before I
understood it properly, that clue to her swirling
inner state was covered up again.
I thought I was on a starboard tack, so I
pressed on. "Does General Healy know your
first husband was a Communist?"
I waited, but she said nothing, which seemed
answer enough to me. The expression on her face,
all three of her faces, had gone to stone,
simply stone. I thought of the carved face of that
czarina, looking out from the lintel of the Russian
Chapel above Wiesbaden, where I had asked how
she knew of grief and she slapped my question
away. As I recalled that moment now, I would
recall this one in the future--no slapping
away, just her immutable inscrutability.
All right. If she was not going to start answering,
I was not going to stop asking. "Does General Healy know that Wolf's ... brother? cousin? was
just executed in the same way? By whom,
Charlotte? Secret Nazis? The cabal that
protected Eichmann? And why doesn't Rick
know that his father's name was von Siedelheim?"
This question landed a blow. "How do you know what
Rick knows?"
"You told me as much when you said Rick signed
his runaway letter "von Neuhaus," your name.
Why haven't you told your son who his father was?
What is the shame in Wolf's having been a
Communist against Hitler? And wouldn't it be
to Rick's advantage now if Erhardt knew?
Jesus Christ, Charlotte, Rick's father is
on the Stasi honor roll."
She shook her head firmly. "No. It would
not be to his advantage."
"Because whoever his father was, his stepfather trumps
it. But they know who his stepfather is. They know about his
stepfather's flight bag, the thing that started this. They
know about the stepfather's roll of film. What? The
list of agents-in-place in anticipation of the
sealing of the border? Whose agents, Charlotte?
Ours or theirs? Or does it matter? Is that the
secret you are protecting? Or are you
protecting the secret of your husband's
incompetence for having lost it?"
"I am protecting no one. But I am
trying to protect my son. Trying to."
"I was right about Rick, wasn't I? He just
told you where the film is."
She did not answer--which, again, was the answer.
"And I was right that Erhardt and the KGB watcher
let him tell you, because now they expect you to lead
them to it."
"You were right to warn me." She turned and mashed
her cigarette in a porcelain ashtray on the
dressing table, then turned back to me. "But I
have no need of you telling me to be careful."
"I can see that. I admit, you've taken me
by surprise. Clearly, you've learned a thing or
two from your husband over the years." When she said
nothing, I added, "Or is it he who has
learned from you?"
"Do you dare ask me such a question?"
"You said that to me before, Charlotte. When I
asked you about grief."
"I am asking you to leave me alone."
"What do you expect of me? That I should walk
out of here and hope for the best? That I should slink
down to my room and hide so that your subterfuge will
work? I disappear and then you go into the other room and
make noises for the microphone so that whoever is
listening will believe what Krone told them--that the
two boys' parents are celebrating the
prospects of their release with an afternoon tryst?"
"No, Paul." She looked away,
but an ardent roseate tide flooded her neck,
rising into her jaw and cheeks. In the mirror to my
left, her eyes came right to mine, the
liquefaction of her former cold resolve. "How
could I do that?" she asked, stunned, I knew,
by my blunt crassness.
But her retreat now to girlish innocence angered
me more. "How could you fake the love fest alone,
you mean? Easy, Charlotte. The agents in their
earphones are men, no doubt. And men only
want to hear the sounds of the woman in throes."
"Please."
"You're offended? So am I. You set us up
here this afternoon so that you could slip away a little later,
to get the film for your husband, or perhaps for the free
world. What did you imagine I would be doing? Am
I supposed to stay here and, at the proper
physiological intervals, resurrect the
sounds of eros? Tell me what you expect of
me, Charlotte."
"Let go, Paul."
"But I am not holding you."
"Of your son. Let go of your son."
"What has that to do--"
"Everything! You hold on to your son to hold on
to your wife. But she is dead. You should let her
go, too."
"Charlotte, I can't--"
"Michael has moved on from you, Paul. And
he has moved on from his mother. He wants only
to let go of his grief and to live. But you will not
allow it."
"He needs me."
"Your son has made his own choices. And he
is more than capable of living with them. And you cannot stand
the feeling. It is what makes you ferocious with
me."
In recalling this, I see now how I proved
her point then by slapping my hand against the cold
stone surface of the sink counter, jarring the bones in
my wrist and forearm. "My son is in jeopardy!
He put himself there because of your son. What is the
jeopardy? You have to tell me!"
"I cannot."
"Why?"
Our eyes were still locked together, but through the
mirror, which now wore the haze of steam from the
shower.
She did not answer. I held my stinging wrist
in my other hand, and I told myself--an
old trick I had often used with Edie--Down,
boy, down. "We are speaking different
languages," I said. "What translation do we
need here? German-English? Woman-man?
Mother-father? Or is it spy and ordinary Joe?"
She laughed. "Ordinary Joe."
"I'm out of my element here. You see that. And
if it makes me "ferocious," I
apologize. But I'm lost. I don't know where
I am."
"You are in Berlin, Paul. This is what it
means--to be in Berlin."
"Which is why you left."
To my surprise, she took my simple
statement as a blow, registering it physically. That
slouched, elegantly world-weary woman was
transformed in an instant. She had the bereft
expression of a rubble woman, hankering for nothing
more than not to be hit again.
Her voice had become almost inaudible when she
said, "I never left. You see, I tell you
to let go, recognizing how we are alike, because
I myself never let go."
"Of Berlin?"
"Of all that Berlin did to me. I tried
to leave, but I could not. David knows this. All
these years with him I have been pretending. I never
let go of Berlin. This is what I must confess
now. I confess this to you."
I could not know then what she had just told me, and
so I only looked at her.
Our silence became a kind of impasse, more
painful in its way than the harsh exchange--
to recall the cruelty of my words to her shames
me--that preceded it. Moments passed. And more
moments.
Finally, she drew herself up from the edge of the
dressing table, coming to her full, impressive
height. She folded her arms primly in front
of herself. "You are right about the microphone. I must
give them something to record. Otherwise they will
know. They will--"
She brushed past me to pull the door open and
go into the bedroom. She left the door open behind
her, and a current of cool air rushed into the steamy
bathroom, dispelling the shower cloud of which I had
been barely aware.
16

From where I stood in the bathroom, I watched
as she crossed to the bedside table and turned on the
light. She picked up the phone and dialed zero,
waited, then spoke several sentences in German,
the last of which she punctuated with the word
Dankesch@on. She hung up.
As she walked out of my line of view, she
shrugged off her tweed jacket.
"I made a booking for dinner, Paul," she
called. Her voice was loud, appropriately
so, entirely offhand. "Half seven," she
continued. "Is dinner in the hotel all right? They
say the dining room is superb."
"All right," I said, marveling at her
transformation, but failing utterly to match it. I
said the curt words loudly enough to be heard above the
shower, in the other room, but I knew that my
voice, compared to hers, was false, stilted.
The shower, as far as the microphone was concerned,
was now for me. Realizing that made me feel,
once again, ridiculous. Ridiculous! I
might as well have been poised on that circus
stool, standing as I was in a steaming bathroom with my
suit coat still on, my tie, my perfect
creases gradually losing their edge.
I closed the bathroom door, as if for
privacy. But from whom? Her? The listening
strangers, whoever they were? The ghosts of her
Berlin?
Only then did I notice her satin
nightgown hanging by a pair of shoulder straps from
the door's back hook. A forbidden garment, the
sight stopped me. She had bought it for herself the day
before, when she bought my shirt. The gown was the full
length of her body, the color of burnished
gold, a lace filigree at the neckline, a
fold of material for her breasts to fill.
Involuntarily, I touched the garment, touched it
where her hip would take its warmth, pinched it between
my forefinger and thumb. The smooth fabric brought
rushing back the sensation of balm on my fingers,
what I had experienced in finding my hand at
play upon her camisole in the car.
The last of whatever resentment I had felt at
being made to seem her trick pony drained
away, because the simple intimacy of this woman's
need was real, even if her desire was not. It
mattered not at all that the mystery of her need did
not include me. I was here to help her--
that was all--help her not to be dragged under by the
ghosts of this city. Whatever the shadows of the local
past, she and I did have a bond that protected us
from them--the absolute future that was our children.
But her satin nightgown. I leaned toward it and
brought the fabric to my nostrils. I
recognized the perfume of her skin. Desire of
this kind, I thought, like the gloss of silk to lovers
who have left their clothes behind, is beside the point.
I did not know it yet, but I was wrong.
Desire is what separates human beings from the
ghosts they fear. I let her satin gown fall from
my fingers, and it twirled slightly, the hint of a
dance.
When I turned, the varied images of myself in
the mirrors were a puzzle. I would remember the
odd sensation later in that decade when the maze of
mirrors emerged as a clich`e of the literature
of espionage. I saw myself, in one surface
reflecting off another, as a man seen from behind, his
dark, close-cropped hair well up from his
collar, the silver at his temples, the square
shoulders of his sorrowful gray coat--none of it
familiar. To this stranger, I would gladly have
put my question, which at that moment would have run something
like, If she is right about Krone, is she right about
you?
Let go? Let go of Michael? At the fresh
thought of my newly unyielding son, I had
to sit. I lowered my haunches onto the cool
marble ledge of the counter. Michael, where are you?
I addressed this second question to the man with his back
to me, aware of it as my first question. Two nights
ago, at the beginning of this story, it was a question of
physical whereabouts, but it had become a question of the
interior geography across which we are chased
by ghosts. Michael, where are you?
Here in this city, came the answer, this city
of ghosts.
And are you here in flight from me?
That was a question--how you flee from me!--that I
never knew to put to his mother, but I should have.
Edie, what about me made you run?
And there it was, a connection too blatant
even for me to miss: Edie's flight from me had
literally killed her, and wasn't a replay of
that, with you, Michael, what terrified me now?
Michael running from my anger, like Edie. You
killed her, Dad. That was what he had been
saying to me in every way but words.
This stranger just sat on the edge of his counter,
looking away from me.
And how, I wondered, had the unknown woman in
the other room come so surely to the knowledge of what I was
doing, of who I was, of the fear that made me
dangerous, but only to those I loved?

An impossible train of thought. To stop it, I
stood and took my suit coat off, rolled my
left shirtsleeve, reached inside the shower
curtain, and shut the water off.
I found a towel, and as I dried my forearm and
hand, I was determined to keep my gaze away from
the man in the mirrors. Instead it fell, quite
by accident, on Charlotte's leather bag, which still
sat beside the ashtray on the dressing table. On the
lurch of a wrong impulse, I dropped the towel
and went for the bag. I opened its mouth fully, and
there, atop a billfold, compact case, change
purse, and a welter of other womanly things, was the
slip of paper she had been handed at the desk, still
folded, still unread.
Her request of me, that I "let go"--what
is the opposite of my letting go?
This is. I reached into the bag and took the paper
and unfolded it and read what was written there. The
block letters with a slight backward slant read,
"Do not forget that I am your V and V now."
And it was signed D. At the top of the paper was
an abbreviated version of the hotel letterhead. At
the bottom, near the right-hand corner, was the notation
"1145" and a pair of initials, an operator.
A phone message, therefore.
I folded the note and started to put it back
into her bag, but that would seal this as a despicable
act of snooping, and then I would find it
impossible to remain in her presence, having done
such a thing. Unless, of course, I could blame it
on the stranger in the mirror.
And so, as though I were her page--odd word, that
girl Kit had used it; "Faulkner's page"
--I carried the folded slip of paper into the
bedroom.
At first I was startled because the room seemed
vacant to me, Charlotte gone, not on the bed, not
on the settee, not in either of its companion
chairs. Startled, on the way to panicked, that she
had gone out into the wilds of the city without me.
Then I saw her, a dark form sitting upright
on the floor in the far corner, a dozen
paces beyond the furniture, beyond the French
doors, which were still closed over with the drapery. She
was as far from the unilluminated but in all ways
electric chandelier as it was possible to get in that
room. The light from the small bedside lamp, with
its cloaking amber hat, did nothing to dispel the
shadows across the room, and I could not see, until
moving closer, that she had her long legs drawn
up under her skirt, her elbows on her knees,
her fingers spread to form a cradle for her forehead.
She had unfastened her hair, and its free
downpour screened the sides of her face. As I
approached, she unfolded herself to lean back into the
angle where the walls met. Her auburn hair now brushed her shoulders, and I remembered that this
was how I had first seen her yesterday morning, her
hair still damp from the shower.
Despite her air of gravity, or because of it,
there was something regal about her; the corner into which she
leaned could have been a throne. With her gaze on the
middle distance and whatever figments floated in it,
she wore her patrician hauteur like purple.
I walked to the French doors and stood over
her in silence. When my eyes had adjusted to the
shadows, I could see how her cream-colored
blouse subtly outlined the contours of her breasts,
and my mind went to the burnished folds of her
nightgown, the aroma of the fabric, which was her
aroma.
She looked up at me, her face
expressionless.
I held the paper down to her without comment--I,
the page, the squire.
And she took it. In that corner there was not enough
light to read, and so, crooking a finger in the
drapery, I pulled it back slightly to allow
a wedge of sunlight to slice down upon her, a
stage effect. She brought her hand to her brow. A
million motes of dust floated in the
sail-shaped brightness, like the figments she had been
staring at before, her vision missing nothing.
As she unfolded the note, I felt
appalled that I had read it first, even though its
message meant nothing to me. I had to look
away now, as if belatedly, to honor her
privacy. If she noticed, she'd have seen it as
a hollow gesture, shamelessly after the fact.
Reading her mail. Sniffing her garments. What was
I becoming here?
I looked through the drapery opening to the
view outside, restricted as it was. As it
happened, the small segment of cityscape that
presented itself was centered on the Lindenhof, across and
up the Ku'damm. The impression the Lindenhof and
other buildings had made before, when we stood on
the balcony, was of offices closed for Sunday.
But now my eyes, as if newly trained, went
right to a window where, behind the olive sheen, there were
lights. I saw a flash of movement, and then I
saw what might have been a man standing and looking
out, a pair of men, one of them stocky, looking this
way. And was that flash a reflection from
binoculars?
Hans Krone.
The Commercial Bank had taken four floors
of the Lindenhof, well up in the building, perhaps
there. Krone's office--there! Krone's office
overlooking the hotel room he had arranged for
me.
Krone, my Virgil. What a fool I
was, a self-important ass to have thought myself
Dante. Did Dante condemn his Beatrice
by asking her to trust his vain foolishness? Krone,
no Virgil, was Judas! Binoculars! A
bolt of self-loathing rose in my throat like
bile. If Krone is Judas, I asked
myself, then who are you? Jesus Christ, indeed.
Having registered all of this without moving, I
let the drapery fall. I welcomed the return
of shadows.
Looking down at Charlotte, I almost said,
You are right, right about everything.
But she had lowered her face onto her knees.
The slip of paper was on the floor beside her,
open.
Her shoulders were moving in the gentle tide of
her inaudible sobbing. I went down on one knee
and put my hand on the back of her neck, on the
angle of skin that lay uncovered where her hair
had fallen away to either side. Through that pink
membrane, I felt the current of her blood
flowing, warm. And I felt the slow ebbing of her
grief, whatever it was.
After some moments, I swung around to sit beside
her on the floor, easing my weight against the
wall, inviting hers to shift against me, which, with a
movement as natural as gravity, it did. With
one arm, I held her in silence for a long time.
Her head at rest on my shoulder, her
tears dry on my shirt.
It was a simple matter to bring my face
down, sheltering her face from the room, my mouth
beside her ear, her mouth beside mine.
"V and V?" I asked, a whisper. There
seemed to be no question of our being overheard; no
question, either, of her not answering.
"Verh@altnis und Verwandten,"
she whispered in reply.
I had no idea how the words were spelled--for this
writing, I look it up--yet they struck a
familiar chord, as if I'd studied them in my
Berlitz. "What is that?" I asked.
"An expression. In English you say "kith
and kin.""
"David is telling you that--"
"He is my family now."
"Emphasis on he."
"Yes."
"That doesn't go without saying?"
"I told you. I never left Berlin, never
really left. I thought I did. David thought
I did. But I never left Berlin. That is the
revelation of ersten Mai, 1961."
"And 1945? The curse of Rick's father--
Ulrich's father. You said that before, "curse."
What curse? That he was a Communist? And then the
Communists became the enemy? What?"
"Paul--"
"Were you a Communist, Charlotte?"
She laughed nearly out loud, a burst of air
in my ear. "Of course not."
""Soviet files," you said. You came here
to learn what had happened to Wolf, and your
American found Soviet files for you, which
answered your questions. And Sohlmann, the Stasi
official killed at Schloss Pankow this
week, how does he--?"
"Paul!"
"You've shown me the pieces, Charlotte.
Now show me how they fit."
"Let go, Paul. Let go of everything. If
you let go, we can just be here together. Be here together.
Can that not be enough?"
"No past? No future?"
"Not until ..." She hesitated, then said,
"Tomorrow."
"And David?"
"David is my rescuer. He gave me
milk for my child, and I will always owe him
that. He finished my story for me, too. But there
is the problem. I never finished the story myself.
He took me from Berlin, but that was not enough.
David and I are like you and Michael, which is why
I know what Michael feels. What David
wants is impossible, and that truth comes clear
only here. If there is a curse, that is what it
is."
"Berlin."
"I am in Berlin and David is not. It was
always thus. I confessed this to you. I wanted
to love him, my rescuer. I tried to love him
all these years, but ..."
She fell silent. I supplied the line she
had offered me: ""Real love, compared
to fantasy, is a harsh and dreadful thing.""
"And now David is hurt, very hurt."
"You "confessed" to him?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"Last night. By telephone. That is why he
sent the message. Why I did not read it."
"A worried father, like me. A worried
husband."
"But with nothing he can do. Everything is out of
David's hands. And like you, David finds this very
difficult."
"And all of this, between you, is because of Wolf?
Wolf is what keeps you "in Berlin"?" I
felt her stiffen next to me. "Because you still love
him, your Leipzig professor, your honored
war hero, your son's father, even if he is dead.
Or perhaps because he is dead."
Abruptly, Charlotte pulled back. I
felt a rebuke coming, for pressing her again.
But I was wrong. She brought her face to mine,
our noses nearly touching. She put her hands on
each of my cheeks, clutching my bones. She
looked into me, a gaze, not a stare. "Paul,"
she said in the whisper that had become our
vernacular. "Wolf died a terrible death in a
terrible time. He was at Moabit prison,
yes. That is his name on the bronze tablet at
Schloss Pankow, yes. But Wolf has nothing
to do with love--mine or anyone's. I will say
nothing more about Wolf except this. He is not what
makes me like Michael or like you--I am like you
both; I see how both of you feel--because your
wife was very different. Your Edie. I know that."
"What do you know?"
"That you and she punished each other as a way
to avoid punishing your crippled son. What you
did, you did for love."
"And you and Wolf?"
"Leave it at this: my dead husband was nothing like
your dead wife."
"But you and I ...?"
She shrugged against me. "Similar, perhaps."
"You are like me because the past has its grip on
you."
"We do the gripping, Paul."
"I see that, because of you. And believe it or not,
I am letting go because of you."
"As am I. Because of you. When I turned to you
in the car, it was not only for Krone. Here is my
real confession. It was for you."
Our kiss then belonged to both of us.
As did the quick passion with which we tried
to swallow each other. Soon we were pulling at
clothes, tumbling across the stretch of bare
hardwood that was the margin between the wall and the thick,
soft carpet against which we brushed. I was a man out
of practice, and I recall that it came as a
surprise to me that Charlotte's bra fastened at
the front. We both laughed when we had to stop so
that she could unclasp it.
The sight of her free white breasts brought a
gasp from the well of my throat. I lost that
sight as she pressed against me, pulling off the
last of my shirt--the shirt that she had bought for
me. Then she was unhooking my belt. Then we were
naked, and I was between her legs, over her, in her,
aware of every bodily sensation, including the
breath-stopping pressure of her thighs at my
waist as her long, smooth legs locked around
me, her legs which so kept the pace of our rocking
that it was impossible to say who set it.
I forgot that there were reasons to stifle our
noises, and reasons not to. The sounds
Charlotte made as she approached her succession
of hills--not only the guttural rapidity of
breathing, but the timed slaps of her open hand onto
the floor beside us, a rider's whip hand--were a
next level of pleasure to me. That pleasure was
like a beloved summer house I was returning to after
winter, and in one of its rooms I met an old
envy, familiar from a thousand times with Edie, how a
man can only marvel at the supreme
self-possession of a woman's ecstasy, her
lover a partner, yes, but an awed
bystander, too.
To Charlotte and me, if I may presume
to report for both of us, our raucous coming together
provided the perfect release; was an
exquisite expression of need and longing; a
transitory but consoling fulfillment of both; an
act of love, even, though the word was nowhere in the
air between us. An act, while it lasted, of
simple purity, pure simplicity. But oh, the
sounds! The sounds surely suggested something else.
Not once did I wonder, as she grew louder and
louder, if, after all, she was thinking of Krone and
his knot of Stasi listeners, to whom our sweet,
redemptive passion could have been only fucking.

"I used to think that hair didn't grow on
women's legs," I said, "like their faces." I
was rubbing my foot along the smooth skin of her
calf, the bent knuckle of my forefinger along the
high ridge of her cheekbone. This was later. We
had moved to the bed, had drawn back its
blankets, and the cool, crisp sheets had received
us as if we alone were meant for them.
I had suggested with a whisper killing the
microphone in the chandelier, but she said no--what
is left to hide? And besides, it is better for the
children if the Stasi think us na@ive.
I could tell from the way she answered that she had
already thought about it, and I might have wondered why, but
didn't. Anyway, she said, who cares what the
Stasi hear, what they think?
We made love again then, with more deliberation, more
delight, more tenderness, and more attention. Aware of the
microphone above us, I made my moves this time
in near silence, and was struck that, despite her
disclaimer, so did she.
Now, enacting the clich`e of our kind, we were
smoking, our bodies half up, leaning against the
cushioned headboard. "Really," I said, "I
used to think that."
She laughed. "And then you came
to Deutschland and met the Fr@aulein."
"My secretary has more hair on her legs
than I do."
She brought her foot to my leg while drawing
on her cigarette, then let her foot fall
away, the utter complacency of sexual satiation.
As she exhaled, I watched the smoke stream out
of her elegant lips.
Beside her, away from me, was the bedside
table and the glowing small lamp, which alone kept the
room from darkness. With the drapes still drawn, it could
have been the middle of the night. In silence I
watched her smoking, aware of the way the table lamp
backlit her profile, from her face down to the quite
pointed form of her uncovered breasts.
"You know why that is," Charlotte said, and it
took me a moment to realize she was still thinking of
my offhand remark about unshaven legs.
"Why?"
"Razors have been rationed in this country during
forty of the last fifty years, because German steel
went to guns. When razors are rationed, how
readily do women procure them, do you think?"
She paused, and I was unsure if she
expected me actually to answer what was, after
all, no question. But before I did, in any case,
she added, "There was hair on my legs and under my
arms until I met my American."
Her simple statement threw me. I looked
away and stared at the glowing tip of my own
cigarette. She spoke so matter-of-factly that
I could not discern what, if any, feeling she was
expressing. To my regret, her words sparked
feeling enough in me, a feeling I did not want.
Her American. Healy. Her rescuer. Her
"V and V," kith and kin. Ulrich's
well-meaning stepfather. Her husband.
A good guy, obviously. And here I was in bed
with his wife. But what kind of man lets his wife
take on the Stasi by herself? Healy, I had
concluded, was a military man of supreme
duty. I knew the type. However unwillingly,
hadn't he put "national security" ahead of his
family? And hadn't he pressed Charlotte to do
his Berlin dirty work for him, reversing some breach
that he had caused? And anyway, hadn't he
abandoned a first wife and child of his own? So who was
innocent? What had that girl said? They sin in
innocence.
And now wasn't Charlotte indicating that if
there was infidelity here for her, it was in relation
to unfinished passions tied to her dead husband, not
Healy?
Such was the cluster of rationalizations with which I could
have brushed my qualms away. But in fact I
needed no such rationalizations. My qualms did
not survive a next glance at her naked form.
The unabashed ease with which she lay next to me,
uncovered if not precisely exposed,
was enough to obliterate forever any idea that
language, accent, nationality, even history are
the particularities that matter. Instead, the slight
mound of her abdomen, the crater at her navel,
the twin ledges of her rib cage, her languid
breasts, and the erect buds of their nipples--all
of this defined her. At that moment my capacity
to take it in defined me.
The unselfconscious show of her repose
seemed as erotic, in its way, as had her earlier
frenzy. I found myself becoming hard again, as if
my foot gently running up the hill of her lower
leg was the very height of foreplay.
I reached across her to put my cigarette in the
ashtray between the lamp and the telephone, a movement
that made her adjust, but that also brought a smile
to her face. She handed me her cigarette to do
likewise. With me leaning across her, it was a
simple matter for her hidden hand to steal down my
body to my stiffened penis.
"What?" she teased. "My grim talk of
fifty years of German steel, is that what
brings you up again? The grimness, darling, or the
steel?"
"Neither. It's the thought of you--needing an
American." I kissed her. "I wish I could
have been your American."
"But you are, Liebchen," she said, laughing
and pulling me onto her again.
Andwitha laugh of my own, I sang, "To look
sharp every time you shave, to feel sharp and be on the
ball ...," the Gillette jingle that would have
meant nothing to the uncomplicated German girl
she seemed to be just then. I began by kissing each
of her shaven armpits, which tickled her and made
her even wilder. The laughter this time, even more
than the sex, was what made us friends.

Later still, forgetting to whisper, she said, "If I
call the front desk and tell them to ring us in an
hour, we can sleep now and still keep our dinner
reservation."
It seemed a thought out of the blue, but in fact
I had begun to doze. I didn't care about
dinner, but I said, "Sure. Good idea." I
found my wristwatch on the floor on my side
of the bed. The time was a quarter past six. She
made the call, then snapped the light out.
She kissed my forehead. "Sleep well,"
she said, then turned away from me,
bunching her pillow under her head, a woman who,
in sleeping, needs a little space.
I was not sure how much time passed--not much--before
I vaguely registered that she had slipped out of
bed and crossed to the bathroom. The hazy thought
pleased me because I assumed somehow that she would
return wearing the burnished satin nightgown, a
sexy domesticity as a complement to her nudity.
Through the closed door I heard the faint sound of the
toilet flushing and the whine of a faucet that I
took at first to be the sink. But, coming more fully
awake, I realized it was the bidet.
When the bathroom door opened again, she had
turned out the light, and so her form was a shadow as
she walked purposefully to the far side of the
room where our clothing lay folded on the chairs.
What is this?
I sat up, threw the blanket back, and would
have spoken, but she came right to the foot of the bed,
to stand close enough for me to see her forefinger pressed
against her mouth. She was already wearing her bra and
underpants.
I got out of bed and went past her to the
bathroom, turning on the light, closing the door
against her. I was not prepared to see myself in
triple images again. I went to the toilet,
urinated, went to one of the sinks and splashed my
face with water. As I was toweling myself dry, still
trying to stretch my brain to the new thing, the door
opened and she came in, almost fully dressed.
Only the last buttons of her blouse needed
fastening. She closed the door behind her, careful not
to let it click.
"What?" I asked.
"I have to leave."
"You deceived me."
"No." She closed her blouse as we
spoke.
"You wanted me asleep so that you could go. Go
where?"
"I wanted you asleep so that you would not ask
me."
I wrapped the towel around my waist.
"Well, I am asking."
"And I am not answering. You must not think there
is anything you can do to stop me."
"What changed you?"
"Nothing changed me."
"This was your plan all afternoon?"
"Yes."
"So it was a lie, all of it."
"No, Paul. Almost none of it. Dinner was a
lie. And sleeping. Nothing else."
"And you wanted them to hear so they would believe,
as I did, that you weren't going for your husband's
film, that you are capable of putting your son first."
"My son is first."
"What is on the film, Charlotte?"
"Do not ask me!" she hissed.
"Agents. The battle order of spies.
Soviet plans. KGB, Stasi--who cares?
Why does this matter so much to you? Let them play
their game. "Let go," you said. Why can't you
let this go, at least until tomorrow afternoon?"
"You fool!" she whispered bitterly.
The word seared me. Yet it also cauterized the
wound of my ignorance, my pathetic readiness to be
hurt by what I did not know.
"They will not release Rick tomorrow or ever," she
said, "until the film is dealt with one way or
another. I must deal with it." She turned to go,
but I stopped her.
"Charlotte."
"No. And do not ask. Ask nothing."
"Let me come with you."
"This is for me to do."
"I respect that. Just let me be with you."
"I will explain nothing."
"I won't ask. I promise."
"And you keep your promises."
"As you know, because you have seen that in my son. He
learned it from me." I found it possible to smile
at her. Each of us was aware of the new place to which
she had brought me--she and also Michael. The
change in me had come from both of them.
She studied me with her careful eyes, no stare
but a long, unmoving examination. Then, quite
simply, she nodded. She turned, opened the
door, and let me go through. She moved back to the
dressing table and its mirror while I found my
clothes and put them on in silence.

When we left the room, Charlotte wore her
tweed jacket and brown skirt, the leather bag
on her shoulder. Her hair was up from her neck,
as before, but she had covered it with her cloche hat.
I was in my suit and tie, as before. We might have
been the demure couple in the hotel brochure
except for the hint of stealth with which we moved into the
hallway, closing our door without a
sound.
Assuming that we would do better slipping down the
stairs, I was surprised when Charlotte punched
the elevator button. While we waited, I
said quietly, "You left a wake-up call.
The phone will ring."
"Does not matter. By then"--by 7:15--"all
will be complete."
I looked at my watch. It was ten before
seven. What could we do so quickly?
Suddenly she stopped. "Wait!"
She returned to the room. Her gloves, I
thought. She never goes out without her gloves. But
I was wrong. When she reappeared, after closing the
door with an audible click, it was her gold
lighter she was carrying, not gloves. Joining me as
the elevator arrived, she dropped it into her
bag.
The elevator operator tended his machine as
if we weren't there. The doors then opened onto
the main lobby, the bustle of arriving guests, of
porters handling luggage, of waiters sailing
among the tables and chairs of the open lounge to one
side, all spread against the yellow glow of
twilight just showing itself through the far wall of
floor-to-ceiling windows. I followed her into this
complicated scene, aware that she was coolly
striding toward the entryway with nary a glance to one
side or the other. It fell to me to eye the
strangers around us, especially the lone men--three
of them, no, four--sitting at separate tables and
on sofas in the lounge area.
And sure enough, as I followed Charlotte through
the revolving door into the full soft light of
evening, I looked back and one of those men was up
and walking after us, fast.
I fell into step with Charlotte as she cut
into the pedestrian flow, and like strollers around us,
I linked arms with her. With a quick glance back I
said, "Don't look, but we have company."
"Does not matter," she said.
"We should--"
"Paul!"
Whatever she proposed to do now, it would be known,
if not prevented. Her behavior contradicted
any plan I could imagine. In her carelessness,
she had let the hotel room door close with a
noise and waltzed through the lobby and out the front
door.

She carried us along, offering no comment, no
explanation, no acknowledgment that I was even with
her, except for the crook of her left arm.
Holding on to her had become my purpose.
Up the Kurf@urstendamm, one block,
another, and another, past the crush of sidewalk
caf`es that were nervously alive with high-toned
theatergoers and club haunters; past the brass
piping and awnings of deluxe hotels; past the
light show of galleries and shops, now closed, but
with their plate glass windows glittering. All
around us were self-styled boulevardiers in pegged
trousers and cravats, women in stiletto heels
and seamed nylons, lace veils, and fur
stoles. There were dandies carrying walking sticks.
The ghost of Isherwood was out, one Sally
Bowles after another, on the hunt for parfait and
cr@eme de menthe. They were a legion, one could
say, of impressionists, half taking in the
scene, wanting only to be impressed, the other
half defining it, happy to oblige. Yet to me
and Charlotte, the twilight revelers were mere
obstacles, even if, to the enemy across the city--
or behind us--they were a decadent throng,
cosmopolitanism itself, proof of the virtues of
Socialist struggle.
We passed the bombed-out Kaiser Wilhelm
Church, left standing as a memorial now, an
accidentally ironic one, since the horrors it
kept in mind had been inflicted by the heroes this
half of the city wanted only to emulate. The
wreckage rose from the bustling avenue like the
charred, half-broken tooth of a monster giant.
It might have warned against the surrounding sparkle, but
the church was itself newly decked with Chartres-made
glass, as if to proclaim that in the West even the
ruins are beautiful. Sparkle is all.
At the street beyond the church, Charlotte led us
left onto a narrower sidewalk where, because of the
press of people, we had to slow down, then separate.
Here, instead of boulevardiers, the crowd was made
up of the vacant-eyed and lost, refugees from the
East, and opportunists looking to exploit them,
sharpies and hawkers. When I glanced back, I
glimpsed the same man cutting across the street.
I knew better by now than to warn Charlotte.
I walked one step behind her. We went along the
block and across the next street, approaching the
mammoth central train station.
As we neared the entrance, beggars,
including the aging war-wounded and one or two gypsy
women holding infants, reached out, and, unseeing,
Charlotte brushed by them as if their proffered hands
were turnstiles. At the last moment, before entering the
station proper, she stopped. She turned and looked
back the way we'd come, and I sensed it as she
spotted the man from the hotel. For a long moment
she simply watched him, as if rules required
that we not get too far ahead. Then, without a
glance at me, she turned and walked into the train
station.
Compared to what it must have been on weekday
evenings, the cavernous waiting area was no doubt
uncrowded now. The restrictions on travel between
Berlin and its environs meant that this station was a
terminal mainly for trains from distant West
Germany. Most of the trains would normally have carried
businessmen, few of whom were in evidence.
Charlotte strode through the vast hall, heading for the
overhead arrival board.
With its clacking letters and numbers, the display was
designed around a large clock. It was 7:18.
Charlotte barely slowed down as she took in
whatever information she needed. She angled toward the
wall of doorways and the train platforms beyond.
Beside track 11 was posted a permanent
block-lettered sign reading "U.s. Army Duty
Train," with times for two daily departures and
two daily arrivals, one of which, I saw as we
whipped past, was 1915 hours. Now.
This train had set the day's schedule, I
realized. The afternoon had in effect been
Charlotte's killing time. To my surprise,
recognizing this changed nothing.
Track 11, alone of the track platforms, was
bustling with people, a stream coming toward us in the dull
smoky cavern. Evening light filtered gray through
the massive glass roof above us, the light fading
but bright enough to dominate the electric lights on
columns along the platform. It was instantly
apparent that the arrivals were Americans, mostly
young soldiers in khaki, with duffels hoisted, but
also dressed-up women holding the hands of toddlers
and porters pushing luggage carts. There were
middle-aged men in suits and ties--American
suits with cuffed trousers and three-button
jackets, not German ones with narrow legs and
boxy coats. The men's ties, like my own, were
narrow and clipped.
We breasted through the arriving
travelers, walking beside the long line of train
cars. Passengers were still disembarking, stepping
gingerly down. This was an American train with
English-language signs and the Stars and
Stripes painted on the doors, but the cars had the
characteristic rounded rooflines of the German
railroad, windows that displayed not rows of seats
but individual compartments, the small plush
parlors that made European rail travel
exotic.
As I followed Charlotte along the train,
I noticed that every car--those upholstered sofa-like
benches, brocade curtains framing shades,
gleaming railings--was first class. No
second-class travel for the occupying Army, or
its women and children.
I assumed that Charlotte was there to meet
someone, one of these arriving travelers. Then it
hit me: Healy? She was clearly on the
lookout. As she slowed at each new car, I
realized she was eyeing its number. So she was
searching for a particular car.
Two thirds of the way down the train, she found
it. By then, the stream of passengers had thinned, and
now only the odd straggler passed us. Charlotte
swung up and onto the car. As I followed, I
paused from the high step to glance back again. In the
distance, yes, I saw the man from the hotel, just
coming onto the platform, and then, closer, I saw
another man, tall and bearded, heading for us. As
he pushed past a laden luggage cart, he
rudely bumped the porter. Behind him, obscured
but evident from passengers making way, someone
else was violating the traffic flow.
In the car, Charlotte moved quickly along the
aisle, checking number plates at each
compartment.
No one else seemed to be in the car. Near the
far end, she read a compartment number, slid the
door open, and went in. By the time I reached the
door, she was bent over the seat in the corner by the
window, like a woman looking for a dropped earring.
Both her hands were plunged into the crevice of the
upholstery where the seat joined the backrest.
My visceral alarm, I think, was that she had
lost her mind.
"Charlotte!" I said, but she ignored me.
What she was doing made no sense until, just
then, she straightened and faced me, holding the thing
she had found. She held it between her
fingers, a 35-millimeter film canister.
"Now, Paul, I need you." She brushed
by me, out into the aisle, down the short distance to the
near exit. She leapt off the train. Quite
deliberately, she peered down the length of the
platform toward the terminal.
When I joined her, I saw two men running
toward us, closing from perhaps thirty yards away.
Behind them was another running man, and behind him,
another.
I glanced the other way. A pair of
exceptionally tall, white-helmeted black
MP'S were sauntering our way, as yet unaware
of us. "Here," Charlotte said. She had
unscrewed the canister lid and was now calmly
unfurling the roll it held. She pulled the
gray film out into the light as if it were a streamer
to throw at a departing ship.
I noticed how thin the film was--
8-millimeter at most, not 35-millimeter
at all.
The day before, Healy's man in Alexanderplatz
had said the missing film was tourist pictures with
an edge of microfilm, but this, I guessed, was
the microfilm itself.
Charlotte had the film unspooled. It was
perhaps six feet long, draping her arm and shoulder.
With a quick glance at the men rushing us, she said,
"Here, hold it. Hold it high."
I did, unsure exactly what I was doing
or what she wanted. I gripped the film at
its midpoint, letting it dangle over my hand in
two roughly equal ribbons. I held it up like
a starter raising his gun, and then I realized that
what she wanted was for the thing to be seen.
"Hey!" A gruff voice from behind. I
turned. One of the MP'S, approaching fast, was
pointing. "Hey!"
The MP was not calling to us, as I saw when I
turned. The nearest man approaching from the other
direction had a pistol in his outstretched hand. Not
the man from the hotel, yet he was someone I had
seen before. The MP was pointing at him.
Charlotte had bent to her bag, and as she came
up from it, I saw the gold lighter in her hand.
She made it flame and brought it to the bottom of the
film strip I was holding, igniting first one end,
then the other. The celluloid flared and the fire
shot quickly up. I had to extend my arm away from
my body. "They will not release
Ulrich," she had said, "tomorrow or ever until the
film is dealt with one way or another."
One way, exposing it to light, and another,
burning it. The film with its state secrets--
names of agents, plans for war, whatever the hell
it was--gone.
The pair of flames met in the air to become
one licking tongue of fire. It scaled the
film, rising toward my hand. I held on to the
thing as long as I could, displaying it for all.
Once again I was her trained circus performer,
happily so. Every ounce of my former unwillingness
had drained from me as I joined in her defining
choice. No to national security and state
secrets. No to General Healy. Yes
to Ulrich, pure and simple--to see the film
removed as a factor from her son's future.
I was a mere instrument of her choice, not an
object of it, which was all right with me.
Amid the swirling commotion of which I was the
momentary still point, my mind settled on the
flame. Oddly, instead of turning to ash and blowing
away, the film, as it burned, was melting, an
ignited liquid. I think now of the sea afire
around the still point of the sinking Stephen Case.
"Stop right there!"
To one side, the MP had gone into a
marksman's crouch, his sidearm aimed at someone
coming fast toward us. The prescribed posture,
yet the MP was far from cool. His hand shook.
"Drop that, goddammit!" His voice,
high-pitched, cracking, carried an overpowering
note of terror.
The man rushing at us, his gun just as ready, I
recognized as the Russian, the black-clad
KGB apparatchik. It was at him the MP was
aiming. "Drop!" the MP cried again, and there were
a pair of gunshots in succession, whose echoes
bounced off the glass roof above.
It happened too quickly for me to take in
intelligibly until later. The onrushing man
whose drawn gun sparked the MP'S panic was
familiar to me because he had silently watched over
our meeting with the kids the day before, clearly
intimidating Colonel Erhardt. As I
eventually understood, this Russian was the KGB
imposing itself on the Stasi after the Schloss
Pankow fire that had killed Erhardt's chief,
Sohlmann. As Moscow had moved in on East
Berlin, the KGB officer moved in on
us--at just the wrong moment.
He was the one, obviously, who set it up for
Ulrich to confide his secret in his mother's ear, and he was the one who then followed her. But the KGB
strategy was one with which Charlotte had her own
reasons to cooperate, and of which she needed no warning
from the likes of me.
So this was the figure rushing toward us with his
weapon drawn, hoping to prevent the destruction
of the film, his only object. Beside him had been
his comrade--the man I saw following from the
hotel. And behind them had come Hal Cummings, in
his false beard and dark turtleneck. His
firearm, too, was drawn.
And with Cummings, finally, had come the hard-breathing
Hans Krone, clutching not a weapon but
binoculars--the binoculars I had glimpsed in the
Lindenhof, across from the Kempinski. So Krone
was not Stasi after all. He had been recruited
through Cummings by General Healy, either yesterday or
a long time before. Cummings's presence with Krone
meant it had been Healy's men watching us at the
hotel, Healy's men listening in on us.
As quickly as this knot of people had converged, at the
sound of gunshots it dispersed. The KGB man and
his partner, seeing the film destroyed--its agents'
names? its war plans?--had simply turned and
run back the way they'd come, disappearing. At
first I assumed that they were the ones who had discharged
their weapons.
One of the MP'S ran after them, but he was
crying, "Medic! Medic!"
The other MP had fallen to his knees beside
me and Charlotte. He was crying over and over,
"That bastard was going to shoot!" His explanation.
His excuse. "That bastard was going to shoot."
This MP was the one who had fired, the only
one. Whether because of his ineptness or because Charlotte
had put herself between me and the KGB agent, one of the
two shots had struck her in the head.
I think she was already dead by the time I lifted
her from the cold cement into my lap, where I sat
beside the last mercury-like beads of the burned
celluloid. The film was destroyed, but so was
Charlotte.
I remember trying to pull strands of her
auburn hair free of the blood. I remember
wiping her face with my sleeve, trying to dam the
red flow away from her neck, as if she would have
wanted me to protect the collar of her
blouse.
What I do not remember is leaning down to her
face and kissing her. But I must have, because the
metallic taste of blood was on my lips for a
long time. I can taste it now.



The next morning, Hans Krone rang my
room at nine sharp, as he'd said he would. I was
ready. I never slept that night. Instead, I
had relived everything--pushing up through the blue
water, lungs bursting, body stretching toward the
light, coming at last to the surface. And breaking
through the surface with a gasp, what had I found but
more water. After rising from the bottom of one ocean,
I found myself at the bottom of another.
First Edie, then Charlotte. One of my
permanent regrets had been that I was not with Edie
when she died. I always thought it would have mattered--
to me if not to her. But being with Charlotte taught
me that at such a moment, nothing matters.
Edie's death: Charlotte had wanted me
to put aside the self-damning burden of it, with the
obvious benefit that would be for Michael. In our
two brief days together, she never said what the benefit might have been for her.
Edie's death: Charlotte had wanted me
to accept the independence of Edie's own destiny
by acknowledging at last that the accident on the road
was no more my fault than hers.
Edie's death: I had stolen her wind in the
Lightning race on that first day; years later,
by making her death something of mine, I had stolen her
wind at the last. Through that endless night in the
hotel, I saw all of this, and the proof of my
overdue honoring of Edie's quite separate
integrity was that I honored Charlotte's--her
freedom, the mystery of her choices, her life
--by not taking the accident of her death as something I
had caused.
Yet one day can mark a person forever. That day
marked me. I knew that night that its shock
entailed a loss I would not recover from--not the
loss of Charlotte, since she was never mine
to lose. What I lost was the hope she gave me
that the harsh and dreadful ache of loneliness was something
of which I could, as she kept putting it to me, let
go. She would not approve of this, I know, but as the
weight of this story shows, it never
happened.
After such a night, I was relieved to get
Krone's call.
I walked out of the hotel into a bright, crisp
morning. A breeze was blowing into the city from the
unobstructed flatland stretching to the Urals, a
great plain that had put Eastern Europe at the
mercy of the Red Army and its tanks. Killer
tanks. We were at war.
Krone's car was at the curb. A first clue
of what was coming was that I saw Krone sitting in the
passenger seat in front, as he so unwillingly
had--was it only the day before? The rear windows
had curtains drawn across the glass. A
second clue was that the driver did not get out
to open the rear door for me.
When I opened it myself, I saw General
Healy sitting in the far corner, looking not quite the
same as I remembered him. He was wrapped in
a cloud of cigarette smoke. As he turned
to look at me, the smoke and some undefined
quality of his presence made it seem a movement
in slow motion. He was in civvies, wearing
aviator sunglasses. He had shaven his
RAF mustache. But it was him.
I returned his stare for the stretch of time it
took him to remove the sunglasses, so that his
unfiltered, steely eyes could settle on me.
"Get in," he said.
I did, closing the door behind.
At the wheel, now without the false beard, was
Hal Cummings. He wore the black suit and
cap of Krone's chauffeur. He put the car in
gear and slowly pulled into the brisk traffic of a
Monday morning.
Healy, now facing away from me, was looking out
the window through a crack in the curtain. He wore
a tan windbreaker with the collar up and a golfer's
cap. When he put his cigarette to his mouth,
I sensed a faint tremble in his fingers.
My impulse was to say I was sorry.
But I checked it because I did not want him
to misunderstand. I was sorry beyond words that Charlotte
was dead. And I was sorry for his suffering and his
loss--which I could imagine. But I was in no way
sorry that Charlotte's last hours were with me, were
what they were, were what Healy knew they were.
"What's the drill?" I asked, as if this were
merely a pre-op briefing.
Healy firmly snuffed his cigarette
in the armrest ashtray, a simple gesture with which
he claimed his authority. "Pro forma. They know
what's happened." Now he turned to me with a
fierce, cold gaze. "They want nothing further
to do with it. They are terrified it will become an
incident, one they don't control. So they want
the kids out, now."
"Because the film is destroyed," I said. "And
they know it."
"Film, Mr. Montgomery? What film?"
His eyes were ball bearings.
I saw the pointlessness of getting into it with him.
He resumed the briefing. "Therefore, at the
hearing the case will be dismissed. There is no way
to screw it up. You will be permitted to see the
kids just before the hearing, so you can reassure them and
emphasize that they should say nothing, nothing. Then
you wait. Only the lawyer from JAG will actually
be allowed in the courtroom. He will be the only
one from our side, but he'll have been briefed.
It's all worked out. As I said, pro forma."
"And I am there--"
"Because I can't be. If it were possible for me
to handle this, believe me, Mr. Montgomery, you
would be back at your hotel."
"And you can't "handle it" because--?"
"You know damn well why."
"Not even now, General?"
"Especially not now. I don't suppose you
can understand this, but the one thing that keeps this procedure
pro forma is my distance from it."
"And my presence works because that is what they
expect."
"Precisely. As was the case yesterday, you
are there as your son's worried father. All three
kids will be released into your custody. And
facilitating your safe return to West Berlin
will be Herr Krone, who is well known as your
assistant and personal interpreter."
"As he was yesterday," I said. I faced
forward. "Good morning, Hans."
Krone looked back at me, but he had the
grace to say nothing.
"If it's pro forma," I asked, "why has
Colonel Cummings drawn motor pool
duty?"
"In case, Mr. Montgomery. In
case."
"In case what?"
"In case of surprises. There have
been surprises, wouldn't you say?"
"No one has been more surprised this weekend,
General, than I have."
Again his stare. A restrained but efficient way
of singeing me with the blast furnace of his rage.
The button controlling the glass partition was on
my armrest, and I pushed it. Slowly the barrier
rose from its slot. When Healy and I were sealed
off, I faced him. "What does this have to do with
Charlotte's dead husband?"
"My wife's history is none of your
business, Montgomery."
"But if it's her late husband, General, that
would be Ulrich's father, and for a time this morning
Ulrich's history is my business,
especially if it involves the possibility of
surprise. What surprise do you have in mind?"
"If I had it in mind, it wouldn't be a
surprise, now, would it?"
"I know that Wolf von Siedelheim was a
Communist, and that he is honored as a martyour by the
Stasi. And I know that someone killed his brother
or cousin in Frankfurt last week." Healy
registered my statement with an abrupt turn of his
head, speaking of surprises. I pressed him.
"Do they know that Ulrich is von Siedelheim's
son?"
"No." Healy dropped his voice to a
whisper. "And they must not know. Whatever you do,
don't refer to it."
"Ulrich doesn't know?"
Healy shook his head.
"And how did this boy's family history
become a matter of "national security"? The
spy caper, the microfilm, the border crisis,
the fire at Schloss Pankow, the KGB--ALL
this crap. How is it tied to Ulrich?"
Healy shook his head, suddenly at the mercy of
what I recognized as grief. "A terrible
coincidence," he said slowly. "Two worlds that should
have had nothing to do with each other, and wouldn't have,
except"--his hesitation was before a bitter
self-reproach--"except for my fucking bag,
left where Rick could take it. Rick's
goddamn rebelliousness, all leading to
"flashpoint Berlin." All a terrible
accident."
A terrible accident. The exact phrase a
New York state trooper had uttered to me on
the phone that night at the lake. A
terrible accident. A woman's fate. A
man's epitaph. Mine.
Without my being aware of it, the car had stopped.
Cummings rapped on the glass partition.
Healy peered through the curtain, then raised a
hand to Cummings. Right.
Through the curtain on my side, I saw that the
car was in a narrow cobblestoned side street. I
took in a row of warehouses. The street was
deserted.
Healy grasped the handle of his door. "This is
where I get out," he said, then added with his former
chill, "This is not the Navy, Montgomery. But
there are torpedoes."
Did he know? I found it possible to say,
"Damn the torpedoes, General."
"Full ahead then."
"Right."
"One other thing," he said.
"What?"
"Don't tell Rick."
"About his father?"
Healy had the skill of showing only what he
wanted seen. That he closed his eyes for a moment
told me of his utter indifference to any impression
I might take. He let his head fall
slightly back, then inhaled sharply. "No.
About his mother," he said, and then opened his eyes
to look at me. "I want to tell the boy that
Charlotte is dead. It is important that he
hear it from me." And in that unadorned statement,
I glimpsed the depth of Healy's love for
Ulrich. He brought the baby milk! It was
a completion of his love for Ulrich's mother, an
extension of it. General Healy loved the boy, that
was all.
"I understand, General," I said. "Of
course."
Healy nodded. To my complete surprise, his
eyes had filled. He put his sunglasses on
again.
I said, after all, the words "I am sorry,"
but he had already opened the door and leapt out of the
car. I had no reason to think he heard me, or
if he had, that he cared.

Less than five minutes later, we were at the
sector checkpoint. Cummings exchanged a few
words in German with the Vopo, who handed back our
documents and waved us through.
I had assumed that we would be returning
to Schloss Pankow, but the hearing was a matter of a
petty currency violation, not state security,
and Cummings brought the car to a stop in front of
an innocuous two-story building a few doors
from the corner of a street that opened into the vast,
nearly deserted Alexanderplatz, the site of
Saturday's festivities. We were across from the
Rathaus, in front of which the rough lumber
reviewing stand was being dismantled. Litter blew in
small, circular bursts here and there in the
plaza, and men in blue smocks pushed brooms
beside wheelbarrows.
The vista evoked nothing of the May Day
spectacle, and as I got out of the car, nothing
anchored my eye to keep it from floating to the top
of the Fernsehturm. From that perch, Charlotte and
I had taken in the grim panorama of the past.
Cummings stayed with the car. Krone took my
elbow. "This way, sir," he said, and I let
him usher me into the building, past a sign with the
Gothic lettering of German officialdom: "Die
Hauptverwaltung Aufkl@arung."
"What is this?" I asked Krone.
"Office of Border Security."
"I thought Berlin sector boundaries weren't
borders. Isn't that the point?"
"They are prepared to yield the point, Paul.
But first they want to make the point."
We passed an indifferent guard slouching in the
vestibule and walked down a broad corridor
with undulating uneven floorboards. At the
corridor's end, through heavy double doors, we
entered a bustling office. Behind a counter, perhaps a
dozen people were at typewriters and adding machines.
A frumpish clerk approached from her side
of the counter. Krone told her what we wanted.
She nodded. She went through a side door and
soon returned with a man in a shoddy blue
uniform I did not recognize--People's Border
Police or something. He looked like a
passed-over train conductor. The Germans and
their uniforms.
He led us back out through the doors, down the
corridor once more, past the entrance we had come
in by, to the opposite end of the building. The double
doors there, apparently, opened into the hearing room
to which, if Healy was right, we would not be admitted.
Indeed, the man stopped short of those doors
to take us through another, smaller one. It
led into a kind of waiting room lined with ten or
twelve thick-legged wooden chairs. Where a
window might have been was a stylized portrait of
Walter Ulbricht--the spectacles, the chin
beard, a double-breasted tan suit with a row of
medals at the lapel. He wore the stern
expression of a man wanting to be taken for Lenin.
Half a dozen people were seated in the room,
separately. Our escort, at the door,
spoke loudly--two sentences, three, and then the
room's occupants sheepishly stood and filed
past us, out into the hallway. At that point, the
man gestured at the now vacated room--it was
ours.
Departing, he closed the door behind himself, leaving
me and Krone alone.
Several standup ashtrays were posted around the
room. I took a chair near one, took out a
cigarette, and lit up. Krone sat next
to me. I offered the pack, but he shook his head.
"Paul, I--"
I raised my hand. "Don't say it,
Hans. I have one question, only one question. I want
the truth."
He nodded glumly.
"Was it Saturday or was it before? If you were
working with them before, you're finished with Chase, and
I'll finish you with every American bank."
"You threaten that and still expect the truth?"
"Yes."
"They gave me no choice. And we were still to be
on the same side, you and I."
"Really?"
"It was Saturday. Colonel Cummings
approached me after I left you."
"While Charlotte and I were in the restaurant
in the tower?"
"He gave me no choice. He made it
seem possible that Mrs. Healy had tricked you.
It was you I was--"
"Never mind."
"But I never--"
"Enough, Hans. You've answered me."
"That is all?"
"Yes. Forget it."
"Paul, I am regretful--"
"Let's just do what we're doing, Hans.
Let's get these kids home."
"In that case, I will have one of those
cigarettes, if I may.
Dankesch@on."

I was on my third cigarette when the door
opened, the same German holding it.
An American Army major, the JAG
attorney, walked in. His crisp tan uniform
impressed, adorned as it was with a pale blue
braid of rope at the shoulder, a ladder of
ribbons on his chest, and unit patches on each
sleeve. His shoes gleamed, but the overall
effect of martial splendor was undercut somewhat
by his crew-cut red hair, stiffened in front with
goop, which made him seem far too young to trust.
His bright, eager expression as he approached
us with hand extended reminded me of the
uncomplicated, chipper boy I had always hoped
to find in Michael. No more.
"Mr. Montgomery? Major Stahl.
Glad to meet you, sir."
"Major, thanks for your help."
Krone and the major then shook hands, but the
officer declined to sit, saying he had arranged
for a prehearing session with the magistrate--"just
to make sure we're all singing the same
music." He winked and left the room, taking
much of my confidence with him.
A few moments later, the door opened again and the
young girl appeared, Katharine Carson, looking
waif-like in her boyish black hair. The
oversized field jacket made her seem even
smaller than she was. She entered the room
tentatively, her eyes darting, as if not convinced
that Krone and I were the only ones there. She
walked right over to me. "Mr. Montgomery,
thank you for getting them to give me back my
book." She held it up for me to see, a
small accountant's ledger, the familiar green
cloth cover.
"I'm glad they returned it to you, Kit,"
I said. "I hope you wrote some fabulous
stuff."
"I did."
"I don't doubt it. How are you?"
"I'm okay."
"And the fellows?"
"Having a right good time." Her sarcasm was
only friendly, and I laughed. I was relieved to have
the signal that nothing terrible had happened here, at
least.
Before I saw my son, I heard the
faint click of his leg braces as he
approached the door from its other side. My
brain was keyed to that sound. When he appeared at the
threshold, steadying himself in the doorframe, he
grinned. "Hi, Dad."
I went to him with my arms open. He stepped
free of the door into my embrace, which I made
firm and lasting.
When I released him, he looked me in the
eye with a clear, strong expression, which elicited
from me an unplanned declaration. "I'm proud of
you, Michael."
"You're not pissed? I thought yesterday you were
pissed."
"I'm proud of you," I repeated.
Before he could respond, Rick came into the
room, wide-eyed with expectation and, I saw,
relief.
He glanced at me, but turned his gaze
loose on the room itself. His eyes went from chair
to chair, snagged briefly on the portrait of
Walter Ulbricht, then came back to me.
"Where is my mother?"
Michael stepped away from me as if he knew
the secret I carried in my breast. He eased
himself into a nearby chair.
"Your mother is not here, Rick," I said.
"I see that. Why not?"
It seemed that Rick had succeeded in stifling his
nighttime agitation, but perhaps he had done so only
by imagining the arrival of this moment, living for it.
And it was wrong, essentially wrong, without her. Not
waiting for me to answer, he glanced with hot
suspicion at Krone.
"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 m`ochte 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 GOODR."
"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 ourselves 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?
Part Six



Nearly 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 Mcationamara
called it. MAD.
And how did the madness end?
Unexpectedly, by the act of a Polish
peasant nobody, an uneducated farmboy who'd
made his way to the city--Gdansk--and become a
shipyard electrician. When ordered back to work
by an armed Communist apparatchik, he'd said
simply, "No." His name was Lech Walesa, and
when others quickly joined in that "no," Solidarity
was born, and the stunningly nonviolent end of the most
brutal regime in history was begun. The
"no" ultimately of entire peoples was
addressed to puppet regimes, the
nomenklatura, the Politburo, the Comintern
itself. Within a few years, on December 7,
1988, Mikhail Gorbachev stood before the
United Nations and pledged a full withdrawal of
Soviet troops from Europe, swearing
to uphold "freedom of choice," as he put it,
for the nations formerly known as satellites. What
began on December 7 at Pearl Harbor
ended on December 7 in New York.
And at last the truth of the old domino theory
proved itself--but in reverse. Communism fell in
Poland: in June 1989, its first free
election gave every Polish senate seat save one
to Solidarity. Then Hungary dismantled its
barbed-wire border with Austria, a first literal
breach in Churchill's Balkans-to-Trieste
barrier, and then a river of East Germans,
voting with their feet again, began flowing by the thousands
through Hungary to the West. In October,
Gorbachev came to East Berlin, and when
hundreds of thousands called out to him, "Gorby,
save us!" he ordered Soviet troops off the
streets and out of sight. The minute the Soviet
leader departed, a frenzied Erich Honecker
ordered his army to shoot the demonstrators, and his
army refused.
The rallies grew larger throughout East
Germany, until November 9. On that night in
1989, as if to redeem the crimes of the same
night in 1938, huge crowds gathered on the
east side of the Wall in Berlin. East
German soldiers and Volkspolizei,
following orders, pushed the people back. But then one
man scrambled up onto the narrow ledge of the
Wall. The crowds fell silent as the man
stood with his arms upraised, presenting himself to be
shot by the hundreds of fully armed soldiers and
Vopos. Despite orders, not one of them
fired.
The man leapt safely down into West Berlin,
and the throng roared its approval. A rush of people
followed him up and over, as hundreds, then
thousands, then--with the Vopos opening gates--tens
of thousands poured into West Berlin.
We Americans began at once to speak of
having "won the Cold War," as President
George H. W. Bush would put it in a
State of the Union speech, showing how little we
knew. In fact, for the first time in history an
empire had dismantled itself before the watching eyes
of the world, not in response to violent revolution but
in response to moral vision--a vision vaguely
glimpsed and then fiercely clung to not first by the
various nomenklatura or politburos but by what
had long been denounced as "antisocial
elements." They were the empire's "unofficial"
people, like the scientist Andrei Sakharov in
Russia, the electrician Walesa in
Poland, the playwright V@aclav Havel in
Czechoslovakia, the musicologist
Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania, the
conductor Kurt Masur in Leipzig, a
nameless legion of border soldiers who held their
fire, and finally a throng in East Berlin, one of
whose leaders, we soon discovered, was Ulrich von
Neuhaus.

Ulrich, like Kit and me, was in his mid-forties
now, in his prime as a professor of
philosophy at Humboldt University. He
had earned his doctorate at Leipzig, where his
mother had studied. Beginning there, he would tell us,
made him feel close to her.
At Humboldt, on Berlin's Unter den
Linden, Ulrich had distinguished himself as an early
theorist of what came to be called the New
Marxism, an intellectual complement to the slow
evolving of what Alexander Dub@cek had called
"socialism with a human face." In the
mid-eighties, Ulrich was a founder of the
Citizens' Committee, an East
German equivalent of the Civic Forum in
Czechoslovakia, an analogue of
Solidarity in Poland. This democratic
resistance movement implicitly, and then openly,
challenged the ideological assumptions of
DDR state socialism. I was not surprised
when I learned of Ulrich's role:
"Disobedience," I remembered him declaring, "is
how I know I am not dead."
Overt challenges to the political structure
were not possible until Gorbachev's influence
began to be felt across the plains. Emulating
Herbert Marcuse, perhaps, Ulrich emerged as a
mentor of the student movement centered in Leipzig
and Berlin, a movement that by 1989 had become the
engine for nonviolent democratic change throughout
East Germany.
From my perch as a political columnist at
the Atlanta Constitution, I had observed
most of this long before November 9. Nothing was
going to keep me and Kit away from Berlin once
the world knew that the Wall was breached. One
advantage of marrying young was that our kids were both
in their early twenties, and we could leave on a
moment's notice. Kit got a colleague
to cover her classes at Emory, and the
Constitution dispatched me to join our man on the
scene.
My father, flying from Manhattan, rendezvoused
with us at the airport in Frankfurt, and for the
obvious reason we took the train from there
to Berlin. Now it was a German train, of
course, with crews changing at the border--very
different from the duty train Kit and I
remembered. As they had once before, the sights of
East Germany--rusted factories, chimneys
rising from ruins, forlorn-looking livestock,
dull-eyed farmers--imposed a somber air on
the journey. But now the landscape evoked an
interior wasteland, the place where Kit and I
stopped being young. I could not begin to imagine what
associations that train trip stimulated in my
father. Suffice to say the three of us found ourselves
sitting silently in a compartment beside two other
mute passengers, staring out the window as if we were
all five strangers.
It was the afternoon of November 11 when we
arrived, and that date, too, underscores the
difficulty throughout this story of getting out from under the
weight of the past--the nightmares of the
dead, as Marx put it;
Vergangenheitsbew@altigung, as
Germans put it. And I had thought the phrase
applied only to children of the Third Reich.
Kit and I surely arrived at the Berlin
Hauptbahnhof in a mood far different from my
father's. For us the thrill of that first disembarking there,
even the memory of the duplicitous Tramm, could
still strike the spark of adventure that had brought us
together. For Dad there could be only the image of
Ulrich's mother dying on the platform, perhaps the very
platform onto which we had just stepped.
We joined the exuberant crowd, aiming for the
great city outside, which was still in the early throes of
celebration. From all across Germany, and from elsewhere in Europe, pilgrims of the Velvet
Revolution were coming to dance on the Wall--as, in a
way, were we.
Our progress out onto the broad avenue was
made simpler by the automatic courtesy of the
crowd in making way for my wheelchair. I should
explain that six years ago my left leg was
amputated above the knee, because accumulated scar
tissue caused clotting in its veins. My right
leg is intact, but it has atrophied from the
calf muscle down and probably won't be with
me when I die.
The Constitution's European bureau chief,
Pete Raymond, was waiting for us with a van
outside the station, as promised. Pete was based
in Bonn, but he'd been in Berlin nonstop for
weeks, and he welcomed us with the hearty ease of a
man at home. Kit knew Pete from
Atlanta, and liked him. When I introduced
him to my father, Dad seemed distracted, too
antsy to pay much attention to my friend. I began
to feel a bit jittery myself--being driven in a
van in Berlin again--which prompted me to ask,
"Whatever happened to Herr Krone, Dad?"
"Hans died about seven years ago. Here, in
a hospital. He had served with Willy
Brandt, both here and in Bonn. He was much
admired."
"I remember now. You went to the funeral."
We were headed for the hotel, but Pete
abruptly asked, "Do you want to see the
Wall?"
"Sure," I said.
Pete spoke to the driver in German. He
then explained to us that Potsdamer
Platz was as close as we would get to the Wall
in a car at that point, such was the size of the
crowds. At Potsdamer Platz, he
explained, the Wall consisted of two barriers
separated by a barren stretch of landscape several
hundred feet wide--the death strip. As we
drew within a block of it, we could see that the open
space was jammed with people, milling around as if they'd
just been released from prison but were unable actually
to leave. Lost among them, Pete said, were the
small pillboxes from which Vopos had, until
only two days before, manned machine guns.
To the south, beyond the death strip, rose the
majestic form of the Brandenburg Gate, on the
top of which, in the fading light of that November
afternoon, figures could be seen waving flags,
generally cavorting, leaning down to haul other
celebrants up to join the fun. We watched from
the van for some moments, then Kit said,
"Novemberfest." And she took my hand.
As we pulled away, Pete turned to face
us. "Oh, by the way, I found your guy."
Kit jumped. "Ulrich?"
"Ulrich von Neuhaus?" I said.
"Never heard of the "von" except from you,"
Pete said. "But there's an Ulrich Neuhaus,
a professor named Ulrich Neuhaus."
Kit said, "Of course. "Von" and
socialism, Michael? Rick would have dropped
the "von."" She said this with an old edge, a
sudden reminder of the structure of our past.
Reminders like this I had spent years deflecting.
"If it's the same guy," Pete was saying,
"he spoke at the rally last night. He's a
kind of Havel here. So far, anyway. His
speech was a litany of tributes to other people.
"The secret heroes," he called them--no
longer secret. It was very moving. The "Wall
dancers" love Neuhaus."
"How did he look?" Kit asked.
"What's he like?"
"You talked to him?" I asked.
"Yes. After the rally, for a couple of minutes.
He didn't want to be interviewed. Not by me,
anyway. If you can get an interview with him,
you'll scoop the Times. I told him you were coming.
He said to tell you he wants to see you."
"How do we arrange it?"
"I know one of his associates on the
Citizens' Committee, and Neuhaus
told me to call him. You tell me."
"Right away," Kit said. "We want to see
him right away."
"Well, propose something," Pete said.
Before I could answer, my father said, "Tonight.
Tell him tonight."
"There's another rally," Pete said.
"Speeches, fireworks, rock music, vodka,
dope. That gets cooking at nine or ten. He
may have--"
"Tell him eight, then," my father said. His
urgency surprised me. "We'll stand by at the
hotel at eight. Will he have a problem crossing
over?"
Pete laughed. "No, Mr. Montgomery.
That's the point."
Kit had wrapped my hand with hers, squeezing
my fingers together. Now she let out a long, slow
breath, as if she had postponed exhalation for
nearly thirty years. Ulrich was good. That was the
relief. Ulrich was good.

Soon we were at the Kempinski, on the
Ku'damm, still the city's best hotel. When I
had first proposed staying there, on the phone to my
father, his silence was so long and so complete that I
thought the line had gone dead. Finally he'd said,
"Yes. Good idea."
At the desk, as we checked in, Pete went
off to find his contact and pass along our
message. I had no idea if it would get
to Ulrich, or when, or what would happen then. As
I tried to imagine what was coming, a vast weariness
overtook me. The sudden crushing fatigue was the
one thing about my condition that I still hated.
Kit and I had a room on the fourth floor.
For my father, I had booked a suite on the top
floor, a standard of luxury he'd not have insisted
upon but would take for granted.
As the elevator door opened, Kit rolled
me over the bump of the threshold and, with a
practiced swivel, turned my chair back
toward my father. Standing in the elevator car alone,
he seemed framed by the box of it. Seventy
years old, but he'd retained his fine posture and
trim figure. Though careful as ever of his
appearance--well-cut blue suit, handkerchief
folded just so, silk tie knotted to ride
precisely in the notch of his Oxford
button-down--the impression he created
seemed as unselfconscious as ever. So
entirely American. So fully in possession
of himself.
But it was not true. He should have had less at
stake in the possible reunion with Ulrich than
either Kit or me, yet in the hours of our
journey from Frankfurt, he had conveyed in
subtle ways the depth of his anticipation and
anxiety, and in the van he had all but declared it,
as if what had happened on that May Day nearly
three decades ago had been as much an
interruption in the flow of his life as ours. Over
the years, we had hardly spoken of it, and in
truth he and I had grown apart. By now I had
no idea what the events of that weekend meant
to him. Ever the successful banker, yet he had
lived a lonely, disappointed life, and being in his
presence always made me sad.
"Will you be able to sleep, Dad?"
"A quick snooze," he said, winking. "What
your generation calls transcendental meditation."
Our generation. Have two generations ever been more
aware of each other as generations? Differences,
disappointments, defeats. These years had sealed the
distance between us. Social history and personal
history--it amounted to the same thing. The sight of
my father framed in the elevator made me
wonder, not for the first time, what had happened to him.
"So we'll see you at quarter to eight," I
said.

At ten past eight there was a knock on the
door, andwitha push of one wheel I swung my
chair around. My father left his couch and started for the
door, but Kit fairly ran there. She wore a
flowing navy skirt and a white blouse that set off
her long neck and head of gray-flecked short
hair. She was one of those rare women who,
pretty in youth, age into beauty, yet I knew
she worried that Ulrich would think her old. Still,
whatever of worry was in her had been overtaken
by joy. She hopped slightly, an unconscious
dance step, as she turned the doorknob. Her
free hand went to her mouth as the door opened.
All these years, we had pictured Ulrich with
that beard and long hair, our first hippie, and she
no more than I could have anticipated the
clean-shaven, lean-jawed, balding middle-aged
man standing in the threshold. "The Most
Unforgettable Character I've Met": the
old Reader's Digest phrase popped into my
mind, and I thought, Yes, still.
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 wire-rim
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
sch@on, 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,
andwitha 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, andwiththe 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
and V tradition. Do you know that?"
"No."
"Forgive my German--something like
"Verh@altnis 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. Very 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 Sohhnann'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
Ausl@ander. 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.
"When this von Siedelheim was murdered in that
particular way in Frankfurt, General Healy
realized that he himself had grown careless,
especially in allowing you to come back from England.
You were in the gravest danger because you were the son of
Sohlmann's nemesis--the heart of "kith and
kin" revenge. And yours was the one set of
records Healy had never succeeded in destroying.
By killing Markus von Siedelheim, even in
1961, Sohlmann was saying he still wanted you
dead."
As I listened to this narrative,
watching a stunned Ulrich take it in, I had
to fend off a disorienting sense of unreality. My
investment banker father, always the most fastidious of
men, now elderly, rheumy-eyed with age--how could
he be recounting such a melodrama of moral
anarchy? And how could I myself, and Kit, have once
stumbled onto the stage where it played out?
Don't be the thing that brings a hair-triggered
weapon out of its holster. The MP'S words had
come back to me again and again, in guilt. But how little
I knew, thinking the hair trigger had only been
that soldier's. Now I was learning that the trigger was
Ulrich's own life.
"And so the day after the murder in Frankfurt,"
my father was saying, "General Healy sent his
agents into East Berlin--one of them was Colonel
Cummings. The run-up to the border crisis of that
summer became, in effect, Healy's cover.
Only Cummings knew what the real mission
was, a mission for you. Cummings and his
accomplices, including one Stasi double agent,
entered Schloss Pankow at night. They broke
into Sohlmann's office and, as expected, found
him sleeping there, as he often did. The agents
did three things, acting on Healy's orders.
They killed Sohlmann, suffocating him. They
rifled a particular Stasi file, the Bonn
spy network. And, acting apart, Cummings found
Sohlmann's personal file, the von
Siedelheim file, which amounted to an elaborate
family tree, with careful notations indicating
almost all the members were dead. The file included
prewar pictures of your mother, and your missing
birth documents. While Healy's other agents
photographed the Bonn spy file, Cummings
took film of the von Siedelheim material
expressly to bring to Healy, so that he would see that
Sohlmann's "kith and kin" records had
been destroyed. After photographing it,
Cummings used that file to start a fire--the fire
that gutted Sohlmann's office, which we could still
taste in the air the day you were brought there.
"Sohlmann was made to appear to have been
drunk, but no one was going to take the fire as an
accident. Healy wanted Stasi and the KGB
to see the burglary and murder as a mere
espionage operation ahead of the border sealing, and
it worked. Sohlmann was dead, but it wasn't
certain that his "kith and kin" vendetta would die
with him, which was why destroying the last link
between you and von Siedelheim was still important.
That was the film, which your stepfather had not had a chance
to develop, view, and burn before you took it.
"Stasi and the KGB thought the film was something
else--the usual espionage--but your mother knew
it concerned only you, the last link. Destroying it
was all she cared about at the end, and your stepfather was
her partner in that. Neither of them gave a damn about
national security, which was one of many things I
misunderstood. I saw all of this in pieces at
the time, but I never put it together. Because my
German is nil, I misread the tablet at
Schloss Pankow that identified von
Siedelheim as the Nazi murderer. I thought he
was listed as one of the martyrs. After General
Healy told me all of this, I had Hans
Krone check that tablet, and it even included the
phrase Verh@altnis und
Verwandten, but I had missed that, too."
Ulrich's lips were pressed into a tight line.
His hands were clasped, a shelf below his chin, his
knuckles white. His eyes were sunk even
further into the dark caves of their sockets. He
looked very tired, and his formerly sure voice, but
for that cough, was weak now as he asked, "This was my
father?"
"Your father, as Charlotte told me once, was
destroyed by the war--morally, then physically. He
began as a brilliant philosophy
professor at Leipzig, where she knew him.
They married as he was shipping out. They conceived you
when he was home on leave, which I believe was in
1942. She never saw him again. A lot of things
changed for the worse after 1942, Rick."
"Everything."
My father fell silent, eased back into his
chair. He reached for his scotch, swirled the
ice, took a hefty swallow.
"When General Healy told you all of this--"
My father interrupted. "General Healy told
me one last thing. He wanted me to say to you that you
were his only son. And he loved you. "Always
loved Rick. Always" were his words."
Ulrich said, "I misjudged him."
"So did I," my father said.
"And my mother?"
"She knew his goodness. She--" My father brought
the fingers of his left hand to his brow, where they
trembled slightly. He closed his eyes. A
man of my generation would, I know, have
wept. Indeed, instead of tears overflowing my
father's eyes, they overflowed mine. Now I
understood what had happened to him. Recovering from the
death of my mother with Ulrich's, he had never
recovered, then, from the death of Charlotte Healy.
I had never seen this in him, which made me realize
I had never seen anything that mattered.

The day after our meeting at the Kempinski,
Kit, my father, and I went to Ulrich's flat in
a sprawling university housing complex on the far
edge of East Berlin. Humboldt had been a
center of Weimar intellectual ferment, and for all
I knew, it had recovered that status under
communism. But all of the university buildings there
had the lumpish impersonality of postwar
Socialist style. That section of the city had been
leveled by the war, and not much thought or money had
gone into the reconstruction. So Humboldt housing
hardly impressed the eye. Or was the gray
monotony the point? Was the shoddiness an assertion
of Socialist principle?
Ulrich's apartment was in a barracks-like
building three stories high, but luckily for me
it was on the first level--an easy lift of me and
my wheelchair. We met Ulrich's wife,
Naomi, a plain woman who he said was ten
years younger than we were. But if anything, she
looked older. She, too, was on the faculty
at Humboldt, a professor of mathematics.
She served us tea and cake that she had baked
herself, but she was otherwise at a loss. She
spoke English, but had little to say. She seemed
afraid.
Ulrich opened a bottle of vodka, and there was
something greedy in the way he threw down his first
glass. He lit one cigarette after another,
between coughs. He and his wife looked like
casualties of a long and terrible war. Fighting
its battles had clearly wounded him, and not even
the thrill of victory was going to reverse that.
But then we met Isaiah, a bright
three-year-old who woke up from a nap with a
raucous, happy cry. As Naomi brought him in
from the bedroom and handed him over to a delighted
Ulrich, Isaiah seemed the one source of
uncomplicated joy in their lives. When
Ulrich called him one of his
Edelweisspiraten, Kit and I laughed out
loud.
We were leaving the flat when, apparently as an
afterthought, standing by the door, Ulrich addressed my
father. "My mother," he said.
"Yes."
"Where is she buried?"
"Wiesbaden. The Russian Chapel."
Ulrich took this in with an almost imperceptible
nod. A moment passed, and then another. He
did not move. He was still holding his son in his
arms, as if drawing strength from the child.
Charlotte's absence appeared to overcome
Ulrich all at once, and he seemed paralyzed
by grief. My father must have read this in him, too,
because he said, "What happened to your mother, Ulrich
--it was not your fault."
Ulrich turned away to stare at the flaking
doorjatnb.
"If I had not--"
He stopped, but in my mind I finished the
thought: If we had not caused that weapon to come out of
its holster.
My father touched his arm. "You did what you did,
Ulrich. So did I. But Charlotte showed me
how to honor what she did."
"Then why have you not recovered from it?" Ulrich
asked.
"From the grief, the guilt--long recovered.
My love for her is what remains with me. And
I know it always will."
"Did you speak of that to General Healy?"
"Yes. It was what we had in common, as he
already knew."
"And his burial place?"
"Arlington."
And then, adjusting his son in his arms and bringing
himself to his full height, like a man about to scale
a wall, Ulrich said, "I will bring my boy
to Wiesbaden, but someday you could perhaps bring him
to Arlington? To explain about David Healy?
To explain about all these things?"
"I will take you all to Arlington," my father
said.
Ulrich shook his head. "I will not be going
to America."
We heard the finality of that simple statement.
There was too little time.
"I am thinking of my son," Ulrich said,
addressing us all. "How the past we give our
children can be such a burden, but perhaps should not be. I
wish that my son could know more of me. What
I come from, who I come from--the things I myself can
make known to him only indirectly." Ulrich
looked at me. "Such knowledge is what we sons all
want, no?"
And I realized that, knowing too little of what my
father had been through here, I also had a stake in
learning of this past. Kit took my hand and said,
"And daughters also."
And then, perhaps showing the effect of the vodka, Ulrich made a spontaneous, outlandish
request of us. "Would you put our story down on
paper? Our May Day story. So that Isaiah
will have it." His eyes were wet. There was no question of his
referring to his illness, but we knew that was what
he was speaking of. Yet another son growing up
without a father. Here was the grief in Ulrich's
life. "My son must have the story of his father from
you." Now Ulrich turned directly to my father.
"All of it," he said. "Including my mother's
story, Mr. Montgomery, as you came to know
it."
"Her story became my story, Rick." When
Ulrich said nothing in reply, my father nodded.
"I would be honored to do that, to try."
I, too, agreed to try to write something,
realizing already how my need was as tied to this as
Ulrich's.
Kit said, "I'm a professor of English,
Rick. Other people's writing, not mine." She
smiled. ""To have great poets, there must be great
audiences, too." That's me. I'll be
Michael's first reader."
"You once wrote a story."
"Everyone writes stories before the age of
twenty."
Ulrich held his hand up. "Wait a moment."
He gave Naomi the child, then went quickly back
into the apartment. He returned carrying a small
green cloth-bound book. He held it before
Kit. Accounts. "Did Faulkner take you
on?" he asked. "What did you call it, what
you were going to be?"
"His page." She laughed that small,
self-deprecating laugh of hers, even as her
eyes filled at the sight of the old book.
"Yes, he did."
"A man of genius, how could he not?" Now,
formally, Ulrich held Kit's book out to her.
"Actually, you have already written the account I
needed. This work of yours sustained me. It
made me know that our friendship was not a dream, that where
there is such a past, there is a future."
Rick handed Kit's book to her, and all at
once she gasped aloud and fell against him,
racked with sobbing. Rick's arms went around her
easily. His face went down to hers. Their
intimacy was total, and private.
As I had seen the evening before, my father's
deepest love, his deepest wound, was unknown
to me, and now I saw that my wife's heart had
belonged all these years to this other man. She had
married me to keep this feeling--her one love--
alive. That I loved Rick too did nothing
to soften the blow of recognition. I had to look
away.