Mother Night (7 page)

I was sitting for the portrait when Jones came calling. Kraft had spilled a quart of turpentine. I opened the door to get rid of the fumes.

And a very strange chant came floating up the stairwell and through the open door.

I went out onto the landing outside the door, looked down the oak and plaster snail of the stairwell. All I could see was the hands of four persons—hands moving up the bannister.

The group was composed of Jones and three friends.

The curious chant went with the advance of the hands. The hands would move about four feet up the bannister, stop, and then the chant would come.

The chant was a panted count to twenty. Two of Jones’ party, his bodyguard and his male secretary, had very bad hearts. To keep their poor old hearts from bursting, they were pausing every few steps, timing their rests by counting to twenty.

Jones’ bodyguard was August Krapptauer, former
Vice-Bundesfuehrer
of the German-American
Bund
. Krapptauer was sixty-three, had done eleven years in Atlanta, was about to drop dead. But he still looked garishly boyish, as though he went to a mortuary cosmetologist regularly. The greatest achievement of his life was the arrangement of a joint meeting of the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey in 1940. At that meeting, Krapptauer declared that the Pope was a Jew and that the Jews held a fifteen-million-dollar mortgage on the Vatican. A change of Popes and eleven years in a prison laundry had not changed his mind.

Jones’ secretary was an unfrocked Paulist Father named Patrick Keeley. “Father Keeley,” as his employer still called him, was seventy-three. He was a drunk. He had, before the Second World War, been chaplain of a Detroit gun club which, as later came out, had been organized by agents of Nazi Germany. The dream of the club, apparently, was to shoot the Jews. One of Father Keeley’s prayers at a club meeting was taken down by a newspaper reporter, was printed in full the next morning. The prayer appealed to so vicious
and bigoted a God that it attracted the astonished attention of Pope Pius XI.

Keeley was unfrocked, and Pope Pius sent a long letter to the American Hierarchy in which he said, among other things: “No true Catholic will take part in the persecution of his Jewish compatriots. A blow against the Jews is a blow against our common humanity.”

Keeley never went to prison, though many of his close friends did. While his friends enjoyed steam heat, clean beds and regular meals at government expense, Keeley shivered and itched and starved and drank himself blind on skid rows across the land. He would have been on a skid row still, or in a pauper’s grave, if Jones and Krapptauer hadn’t found and rescued him.

Keeley’s famous prayer, incidentally, was a paraphrase of a satiric poem I had composed and delivered on short wave before. And, while I am setting the record straight as to my contributions to literature, may I point out that Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer’s claims about the Pope and the mortgage on the Vatican were my inventions, too.

So up the stairs these people came to see me, chanting, “One, two, three, four. …”

And, slow as their progress was, the fourth member of the party lagged far behind.

The fourth member was a woman. All I could see of her was her pale and ringless hand.

The hand of Jones was in the lead. It glittered with rings like the hand of a Byzantine prince. An inventory of the jewelry on that hand would have revealed two wedding rings, a star-sapphire presented to him by the Mothers’ Auxiliary of the Paul Revere Association of Militant Gentiles in 1940, a diamond swastika on an onyx field presented to him in 1939 by Baron Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, then German Consul General of San Francisco, and an American eagle carved in jade and mounted in silver, a piece of Japanese craftsmanship, a present from Robert Sterling Wilson. Wilson was “The Black Fuehrer of Harlem,” a colored man who went to prison in 1942 as a Japanese spy.

The jewelled hand of Jones left the bannister. Jones cantered back down the stairs to the woman, said things to her I couldn’t understand. And then up he came again, a remarkably sound-winded septuagenarian.

He came face to face with me, and he smiled showing me snow-white teeth set in Gingiva-Tru. “Campbell?” he said, only a little out of breath.

“Yes,” I said.

“My name is Dr. Jones. I have a surprise for you,” he said.

“I’ve already seen your paper,” I said. “No—not the paper,” he said. “A bigger surprise than that.”

Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer
now came into view, wheezing, counting to twenty in shattered whispers.

“An even bigger surprise?” I said, preparing to square him away so savagely that he would never think of me as one of his own kind again.

“The woman I’ve brought with me—” he said.

“What about her?” I said.

“She’s your wife,” he said.

“I got in touch with her—” said Jones, “and she begged me not to tell you about her. She insisted it had to be like this, with her just walking in without any warning.”

“So I could see for myself if there was still room for me in your life,” said Helga. “If there is no room, I will simply say goodbye again, disappear, and never bother you again.”

I
F THE PALE
, ringless hand on the railing below was the hand of my Helga, it was the hand of a woman forty-five years old. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman who had been a prisoner of the Russians for sixteen years, if the hand was Helga’s.

It was inconceivable that my Helga could still be lovely and gay.

If Helga had survived the Russian attack on the Crimea, had eluded all the crawling, booming, whistling, buzzing, creeping, clanking, bounding, chattering toys of war that killed quickly, a slower doom, a doom that killed like leprosy, had surely awaited her. There was no need for me to guess at the doom. It was well-known, uniformly applied to all women prisoners on the Russian front—was part of the ghastly routine of any thoroughly modern, thoroughly scientific, thoroughly asexual nation at thoroughly modern war.

If my Helga had survived the battle, her captors had surely prodded her with gun muzzles into a labor gang. They had surely shepherded her into one of Mother Russia’s countless huddles of squinting, lumpy, hopeless, grubbing ragbags—had surely made of my Helga a digger of root crops in frosty fields, a lead-footed, splay-fingered clearer of rubble, a nameless, sexless dragger of noisy carts.

“My wife?” I said to Jones. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s easy enough to prove I’m a liar, if I am a liar,” he said pleasantly. “Have a look for yourself.”

My pace down the stairs was firm and regular.

Now I saw the woman.

She smiled up at me, raising her chin so as to show her features frankly, clearly.

Her hair was snow-white.

Aside from that, she was my Helga untouched by time.

Aside from that, she was as lithe and blooming as my Helga had been on our wedding night.

W
E CRIED
, like babies, wrestled each other up the stairs to my attic.

As we passed Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, I saw that Keeley was crying. Krapptauer stood at attention, honoring the idea of an Anglo-Saxon family. Jones, further up the stairs, was radiant with pleasure in the miracle he had worked. He rubbed and rubbed his jewelled hands.

“My—my wife,” I said to my old friend Kraft, as Helga and I entered my attic.

And Kraft, trying to keep from crying, chewed the bit of his cold corncob pipe in two. He never did quite cry, but he was close to doing it—genuinely close to doing it, I think.

Jones, Krapptauer and Keeley followed us in. “How is it,” I said to Jones, “that it’s you who gives me back my wife?”

“A fantastic coincidence—” said Jones. “One day I learned that you were still alive. A month later I learned that your wife was still alive. What can I call a coincidence like that but the Hand of God?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My paper has a small circulation in West Germany,” said Jones. “One of my subscribers read about you, and he sent me a cable. He asked me if I knew your wife had just turned up as a refugee in West Berlin.”

“Why didn’t he cable me?” I said. I turned to Helga.

“Sweetheart—” I said in German, “why didn’t
you
cable me?”

“We’d been apart so long—I’d been dead so long,” she said in English. “I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that.”

“My life is nothing but room for you,” I said. “It could never be filled by anyone but you.”

“So much to say, so much to tell—” she said, melting against me. I looked down on her wonderingly. Her skin was soft and clear. She was amazingly well-preserved for a woman of forty-five.

What made her state of preservation even more remarkable was the story she now told of how she had spent the past fifteen years.

She was captured and raped in the Crimea, she
said. She was shipped to the Ukraine by boxcar, was put to work in a labor gang.

“We were stumbling sluts,” she said, “married to mud. When the war was over, nobody bothered to tell us. Our tragedy was permanent. No records were kept of us anywhere. We shuffled through ruined villages aimlessly. Anyone who had a menial, pointless job to do had only to wave us down and we would do it.”

She separated herself from me in order to tell her yarn with larger gestures. I wandered over to my front window to listen—listen while looking through dusty panes into the twigs of a birdless, leafless tree.

Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American.

“Hooray, hooray, hooray,” I’d said.

On and on Helga spun her yarn, weaving a biography on the crazy loom of modern history. She escaped from the labor gang after two years, she said, was caught a day later by Asiatic half-wits with submachine guns and police dogs.

She spent three years in the prison, she said, and
then she was sent to Siberia as an interpreter and file clerk in a huge prisoner-of-war camp. Eight thousand S.S. men were still held captive there, though the war had been over for years.

“I was there for eight years,” she said, “mercifully hypnotized by simple routines. We kept beautiful records of all those prisoners, of all those meaningless lives behind barbed-wire. Those S.S. men, once so young and lean and vicious, were growing gray and soft and self-pitying—” she said, “husbands without wives, fathers without children, shopkeepers without shops, tradesmen without trades.”

Thinking about the subdued S.S. men, Helga asked herself the riddle of the Sphinx. “What creature walks in the morning on four feet, at noon on two, at evening on three?”

“Man,” said Helga, huskily.

She told of being repatriated—repatriated after a fashion. She was returned not to Berlin but to Dresden, in East Germany. She was put to work in a cigarette factory, which she described in oppressive detail.

One day she ran away to East Berlin, then crossed to West Berlin. Days after that she was winging to me.

“Who paid your way?” I said.

“Admirers of yours,” said Jones warmly. “Don’t feel you have to thank them. They feel they owe you a debt of gratitude they’ll never be able to repay.”

“For what?” I said.

“For having the courage to tell the truth during the war,” said Jones, “when everybody else was telling lies.”

V
ICE
-
B
UNDESFUEHRER
K
RAPPTAUER
, on his own initiative, went down all those stairs to get my Helga’s luggage from Jones’ limousine. The reunion of Helga and me had made him feel young and courtly again.

Nobody knew what he was up to until he reappeared in my doorway with a suitcase in either hand. Jones and Keeley were filled with consternation, because of Krapptauer’s syncopated, leaky old heart.

The Vice-Bundesfuehrer was the color of tomato juice.

“You fool,” said Jones.

“No, no—I’m perfectly fine,” said Krapptauer, smiling.

“Why didn’t you let Robert do it?” said Jones. Robert was his chauffeur, sitting in the limousine below. Robert was a colored man, seventy-three years old. Robert was Robert Sterling Wilson, erstwhile
jailbird, Japanese agent, and “Black Fuehrer of Harlem.”

“You should have let Robert bring those things up,” said Jones. “My gosh—you mustn’t risk your life like that.”

“It is an honor to risk my life,” said Krapptauer, “for the wife of a man who served Adolf Hitler as well as Howard Campbell did.”

And he dropped dead.

We tried to revive him, but he was stone dead, slack-mouthed, obscenely gaga.

I ran down to the second floor, where Dr. Abraham Epstein lived with his mother. The doctor was home. Dr. Epstein treated poor old Krapptauer pretty roughly, forced him to demonstrate for us all how really dead he was.

Epstein was Jewish, and I thought Jones or Keeley might say something to him about the way he was punching and poking Krapptauer. But the two antique Fascists were childishly respectful and dependent.

About the only thing Jones said to Epstein, after Epstein had pronounced Krapptauer very dead, was, “I happen to be a dentist, Doctor.”

“That so?” said Epstein. He wasn’t much interested. He went back to his own apartment to call an ambulance.

Jones covered Krapptauer with one of my war-surplus
blankets. “Just when things were finally beginning to look up for him again,” he said of the death.

“In what way?” I said.

“He was beginning to get a little organization going again,” said Jones. “Not a big thing—but loyal, dependable, devoted.”