Secret Father, page 14
"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 non–German 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 1960s, 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: émigrés 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 ofmodern 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.
7
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 ofmiddle 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 off urniture.
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."
