Secret Father, page 25
Here is proof that beauty is a trick of the mind: in the dark, in that terrible moment, Kit seemed beautiful to me, beauty itself. I rejoiced in the sweet sight of her near invisibility.
The van rolled down into what seemed an underground garage. The garage also was dark, so that when they opened the van doors, it felt like night. I had to remind myself it was the middle of the day. I could see Ulrich's face more clearly now, and was relieved that the blood had dried. He seemed to have regained some physical resolve. Indeed, I was the only one to stumble and bump the cinderblock walls as they herded us along. Ulrich tried to help me, but without the use of his arms there was little he could do. The clicking of my leg braces had never seemed so loud. Without my cane I had to lope along with an exaggerated stride. I knew what rhythm to strike, but I knew also that the gait made me look spastic, and I hated to have Kit see me that way.
They pushed us into a dimly lit elevator. Fliers were crudely taped to the walls of the elevator car, showing faces of mean-looking men, head-on and in profile. Mug shots. Wanted posters. There were about ten of them.
I leaned toward Ulrich and whispered, "Police station." One of the Vopos poked me in the ribs. "Sei still!" And I shut up.
On an upper floor of the building, they led us into a kind of hearing room, with a long table at one wall, three vacant chairs behind it. Opposite the table were three or four rows of straight-backed chairs. One of the policemen pulled three of these forward, closer to the table, while two others, from behind us, unlocked the manacles on our arms. Oddly, it was when I brought my arms forward that I felt the sharpest crack of pain in my shoulders, but that quickly gave way to the undiluted physical relief it was to be free. That feeling passed, too. We sat, with Kit between me and Ulrich.
I turned toward him, trying to appear casual. He sat slumped, inert, his eyes on the floor. This deflation, on the heels of his frenzied happiness before our arrest, should have warned me of what was coming, but I knew too little still of the ways we come unglued.
Just then, a mustachioed man in civilian clothes entered. That he had a white handkerchief steepled in his suit pocket reminded me of my father. The man's eyes met mine and he nodded. He walked to the table, taking one of the three chairs behind it. He carried a thick manila envelope, which he placed square on the table in front of him. "Good afternoon," he said, and though he smiled at me there was something sinister in his expression. "You are Herr Montgomery?"
"Yes."
He unclasped the envelope and upended it. Our passports, ID cards, visa forms, and wallets tumbled out. Last came the white business envelope I had seen before, with the money. He lifted it and said, "This envelope is for your club?"
"What?"
"Your school group. What is it called? The Pirates?"
My heart sank. I could not think of what to say.
"The Edelweiss Pirates?"
Kit put her hand on my arm. Ulrich did not react. He was still staring at the floor.
"That isn't our group," I said. "We are the school debating club." How easily the lie came to me, a kind of truth by now. "We came to Berlin to debate the team from the American high school here. In West Berlin."
He smiled and nodded. I felt a wash of cold fear on my neck. I was saying what he expected me to say.
Ulrich raised his head. "The bag is mine," he said. "The money was in my bag. These two have nothing to do with it. You know this. You are interested only in me."
The man's smile thickened as he turned his gaze to Ulrich. He spoke to him in German, something I missed.
Ulrich's reply, also in German, given calmly, was a denial, I knew that much.
The man lifted the white envelope and slapped one end of it on the table. "Two hundred dollars in ten-dollar notes, twenty-dollar notes. Officially, ten DDR marks to the dollar. Unofficially, one hundred marks to the dollar. Your two hundred dollars, with the well-planned rendezvous, would fetch twenty thousand marks, which you then, in the West, trade for two thousand dollars."
"We don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Quiet, Monty," Ulrich said.
"And you, Fräulein? Do you know the penalty for illegal currency activity?"
"Don't answer, Kit," I said. To the man I said as firmly as I could, "Josef Tramm put the money in the bag. And then he made sure it was not noted on our visa forms. He was with us at the border, and you let him go."
"Montgomery!" Ulrich barked. He brought himself up, squaring off before the interrogator. "If I tell you the money was mine, will you let these others go?"
The man smiled benignly. He answered in German.
Ulrich replied in German.
"Speak English, please," I said.
Finally Kit spoke. "We want to see the American ambassador."
The man laughed. "The American ambassador is in Bonn, Fräulein."
"The American consul, then. The military attaché. Somebody."
He said, "The American authorities will be notified. Regarding you"—he rifled through the papers in front of him, picked up one of the passports, opened it, and made a show of matching it with Ulrich's face—"you are German born. East German born."
Ulrich said nothing.
I said, "He's American. An American citizen. Tell him you're American, Rick."
"Monty, he sees my passport. He knows what I am. He knows everything."
"Not everything," the man said, and his eyes went gray, locking on Ulrich. I sensed he wanted something from Ulrich, but he wasn't going to say what. I thought of Tramm the night before, looking for the film. Fucking roll of film. The film was what they wanted. And Ulrich was mute.
Later, after they brought us to the house—again a garage, and we did not see surrounding buildings or streets, but it felt like a house you'd find in a pretty nice neighborhood—they resumed interrogating us. This time they took us one by one into the room in the basement. Without my cane, I had to move from place to place while holding on to the wall. It was all right with me that they never offered to help.
The interrogator was a different man, but again a civilian, a chain smoker. He spoke excellent English, I remember. For part of the time during my session, a woman was also in the room. She would be the one who later brought me and Kit soup, after Ulrich had failed to return.
In this second interview it seemed that the guy was just going through the motions, at least with me. He asked where we stayed in West Berlin, what we did before crossing the sector border, what I thought of Willy Brandt's speech at the Schöneberg rally. I asked him for a cigarette, which he gave me. It was German and tasted rotten, but the hit of nicotine felt great.
He asked me about Ulrich, and when I shrugged and said I didn't know him that well, he did not press me. He seemed not to care about me—and he never mentioned Chase Manhattan Bank. They took Kit after me, and when she came back, she said it was the same with her.
"Except they asked if Ulrich was my boyfriend."
"What did you say?"
"What do you think I said?"
"'Mind your own beeswax,' probably."
"Nope."
"What?"
"I said you are."
"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.
