Secret Father (48 page)

"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 ofmoral 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
Verhältnis 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 doorjamb.

"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 clothbound 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.