Secret Father (22 page)

"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 protégé 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
Ausländers
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
Ausländers
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.