Secret Father (33 page)

"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 résumé? 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 schön
" I said. "
Freund, bitte.
"

Sadness suddenly came into her expression. She let the bedding fall like a corpse at my feet. "
Für Sie,
"she said to me, and then she nodded at Kit. There.

Kit said, "
Dankeschön.
"

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, and with the
Hausfrau
behind me, found the WC down the hall. By the time I returned, Kit was under the blanket on the bed.