In War Times (22 page)

He did not hand over the new microfilm she’d given him, and denied that he had any such thing.

He did not tell her that Hadntz had exacted from him a promise to dedicate lifelong efforts toward her goal, and that he knew that she had shown him the factory simply to impress upon him the necessity, although Keenan’s death had already provided that. He therefore did not tell Elegante that he had been warned that this would most likely entail uncertainty and sacrifice unforeseeable at this point in time, and that he had still committed himself. He couldn’t tell her that Hadntz’s vision of humanity’s possible future made him ring with real, yet unhearable harmonies, because that seemed terribly fanciful, utterly private, and difficult to articulate.

He did not realize for two decades that Elegante already knew this, possibly more fully than he did, before they ever met. And she did not tell him, either, at this point.

In the end, perhaps, it did not matter about the microfilm. When he and Wink denied knowledge of the device, she went through their duffel bags until she found it, tossed Sam’s underwear back in the bag, and put the device—what Wink had taken to calling “The Cow Pie at the Center of Time”—into her pack.

Sam and Wink looked at each other. There was nothing else they could do.

She found the written plans amid his composition books, and took them as well. There was no company magician here to intervene. She paged through the other composition books for a few moments, reading bits of his narratives, raising her eyebrows from time to time, then returned the books to Sam’s bag.

It was dusk. They were still amid ruined farmland. Bette let them out, took the wheel, and drove away, passing the line of command cars with a spatter of mud.

The soldier behind them relinquished their command car. “What was that all about?” he asked.

“Top-secret,” said Wink.

“Right,” said the soldier over his shoulder, sarcastically, as he walked down the slick road toward his original jeep.

Sam and Wink shoved their duffels into the back. Wink said, “Your turn to drive.”

There was no town or village in sight. They passed through snow-covered fields. Occasionally the legs of dead, bloated cows, or even dead soldiers, were visible by the side of the road. Low ridges became purple in the distance and then it was dark.

“So,” said Wink. “The OSS is involved.”

“I guess. She’s been on to us all along. She was there when the suits asked me about it in D.C.”

“Apparently the British have an interest in it as well. They sent you to Germany, right?”

“Yes. But with the OSS’s cooperation. I think that the Brits were more interested in the V-2 information, and with possible radar disruption. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more. I didn’t even tell Elegante how…terrible it all was. There aren’t any words.”

Wink waved his hand. “That’s all right. But if this is so important, maybe they could supply us with decent materials and a dedicated work space, to begin with.”

“It could be that Elegante is the only one that takes this seriously.”

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe she doesn’t want to call any more attention to it. To us. To it.”

The caravan pulled off the road and halted. They got out and stretched.

Wink stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the freezing landscape. “Looks like another warm, cozy night in the snow.”

Yet, even here there were trees in blossom; a scent of lilac and hawthorn came in waves from the ownerless gardens. After all, it was spring.

—
G
REGOR
D
ALLAS
1945: The War That Never Ended

The deep arbitrariness of life was brought home to Sam as they followed the retreating Germans up the Stuttgart Line, through villages strewn with corpses and rubble, the stench of fire and death, where troops had been fighting only hours earlier, finishing the Battle of the Bulge.

Had Sam been disposed to perfect vision instead of severe myopia, he would probably be one of those perished soldiers, like Keenan. He felt his brother’s loss constantly, like a phantom limb. In his composition books he told Keenan small details which only he would find interesting, things he could not put into reassuring letters home. Keenan alone would understand why certain things were funny, or the profound loneliness of a crystalline winter night spent in a foreign, snowy field. His mother would not appreciate the details of life in the wake of years of war, where the price of a prostitute was a few cigarettes, where advancing American troops left behind glittering caches of empty wine bottles liberated from cellars.

After they crossed the German border, the caravan stopped once more. The men availed themselves of the break by relaxing in one of the hastily evacuated houses on the town’s main street.

His mother might understand the sense of familiarity he felt in the bedroom of a member of the Hitler Youth, with its model airplanes, a poster of the Fuehrer on its wall instead of the one of Count Basie he’d taken from the Count’s 1937 appearance at the Lakefront.

Downstairs, the office of Dr. Klein, the dentist who was the father of this boy, was filled with books in French, German, and English, including a copy of Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
.

Earl T. found and displayed to all of them, with evident relish, a stash of letters from the Nazi Party congratulating Klein on his good standing, and photos of Klein and his family at swastika-bedecked rallies. “This could never happen in the U. S. of A.,” said Earl T., sitting in Klein’s office chair with the photos spread out on the floor around him. He sipped Klein’s brandy thoughtfully, beneath Klein’s undergraduate diploma from Oxford, where he had studied literature.

“Hmmm,” said Sam.

Sam was about to try and needle Earl T. about the fact that the pilots in an all-black battalion had won some battles, to see what his reaction would be, but a soldier poked his head in the front door.

“Let’s go!”

The long snake was on the move again. They were heading to the German town of München-Gladback. The British and American spelling of the name was Muchengladbach.

The ground shook with the nearby impact of heavy shells; tanks roared past their windows; machine guns chattered occasionally; and all was woven into Sam’s dreams, which were of destruction, and fires, and seeing Berlin from the air, knowing that people below were being burned to death.

He woke in a sweat, and found that the other cots were empty.

Downstairs, Wink was amassing a collection of culinary riches—bread, tinned meat, various liquors, and a few potatoes. He and the others then combined them with their too-well-known rations to make a rather fine meal.

Filing into the kitchen for dinner, they saw one of the tenants of the building, who retained one small room on the third floor for herself and her two boys. She pushed past them but did not look at them.

Grease, the Perham Down’s esteemed bass player said, “She doesn’t seem very happy to be liberated.”

“Terrible story,” said Wink. “Her husband was stationed here. She convinced him to surrender to the Americans. He was standing on the front porch, in full uniform, waving a white flag, when the tanks came through. Machine gun fire cut him in half.”

“Imagine someone stupid enough to surrender to a tank,” The Mess commented as they ate.

Those were the only words spoken at dinner, and the only sounds were those of forks hitting metal mess kits, and a constant undertone of explosions from, perhaps, nearby Düsseldorf.

The 610th settled in quickly, an isolated island of American technicians amid British forces fighting their way east. Stationed in the swirling cauldron of advancing and retreating forces as the Third Reich finally and slowly collapsed, Sam, Wink, and the other ordnance technicians were pressed into KP duty in support of the troops passing through town. But Elegante’s interrogation—the mere fact of it, and her confiscation of the device—strengthened Sam’s resolve to begin building another as soon as possible.

The Allies presumed that Hitler was in Bavaria, commanding from a hidden mountain redoubt, and that new and fierce resistance was in the offing.

West of the Rhine, though, “liberation” commenced, in grand style. Liberating was not confined to the prisoners in the local slave labor camp. It also applied to the property of the Germans, who had melted away as the Allies approached. Using handcarts, baby carriages, and toy wagons they took all they could carry, abandoned their houses—many of them destroyed—and fled east. Most remaining Germans hid in basements and bomb shelters, uncertain of the disposition of the Amis, the Americans. Most of their factories, which they had kept running up to the very last minute, were also deserted, save for a few in which Germans remained, surrendered, and stayed on as operators in return for food.

Though Muchengladbach had been deserted by the German Army, the thunder of big guns and frequent overflights by British, German, and American planes kept the war very much present. The Germans fought with all they had left—by many accounts not much, but they still made a fearsome display of force, and killed thousands of men—to keep the eastern bank of the Rhine. Germans surrendered en masse, and were marched to a nearby slave labor camp and guarded indifferently. Any who wanted to head for home could easily do so. Most stayed, for food and the chance to stop fighting what was clearly a losing war.

Muchengladbach, as well as Düsseldorf and Dortmund, which all lay directly on the invasion path, had been targeted for greater than fifty percent destruction. The Allies had done a fair job of accomplishing this degree of damage. Muchengladbach was left without telephones and gas. Most streets were impassable, piled with bricks and rubble. Getting the power plant up and running was the first order of business. Sam and Wink were put on that detail.

American soldiers augmented their billets with carpets, kitchenware, furniture, and candles from the ruins of the apartment buildings around them, and the technicians on Neusser Strasse were no different. But when a new guy, Zieberhost, was added to their unit, they found that he didn’t understand protocol when he acquired a clock by poking a gun in the stomach of an old German man and demanding the finely carved clock on his mantel. Grease had been with him, but had been too afraid of what Zieberhost might do to try and stop him.