"You think you know the truth," she said. "But history has lied to you." She spoke toward the cup, as if it were a narrow receiver to funnel the words to Willi's ears. "It is just another cage you don't see. If he'd won, we'd have a different history. And so a different truth. You would not be sitting here with your questions. Or your judgment. Had he won, all his ideas would be justified. Even your father would know. History is no guide to the truth, as he thinks it is. It is merely stubborn. Or stupid."
She looked up from the cup to Willi, alone in the maroon chair, framed by bright brass tacks, then let her eyes skip to the bird. She clicked her tongue. "Fly, little bird," she said. "No?"
"He didn't win," Willi said.
She smiled, imperturbable. He'd hoped to anger her, but she seemed beyond anger or irritation, a heart so ravaged by its dream it was like a leaf dried to vein and stem alone, through which the wind could blow and never move it. "So I've noticed. About that no one disagrees."
"History doesn't prove his ideas rotten. His losing does."
For the first time since he'd entered the house, he surprised himself. And her. In this argument she was having with herself, or with Willi's father, this argument in which Willi was a cipher, she had manipulated every answer and response, but not this one. Willi had said something new. Her eyes moved back and forth for a frantic second, dark spots dancing without rhythm in their hollows, before she adjusted, smiled.
"And how is that?" she asked. Amused. Condescending. A little weary. An adult entertaining the notions of a child. She picked up her tea, sipped, set it down. But the cup rattled against the saucer when she picked it up, a tiny, shrill, fantastic bell.
Willi had blurted out the statement—the sort of thing his father might have said. Now she was asking why. But he'd had history drummed into him in school, had learned history as a warning, had had teachers, ashamed themselves, teach history to make their students ashamed. He'd resented it, grown bored with it, but now that knowledge aided him, gave him a way to think.
"Master races don't lose," he said.
Four fingers lifted from the chair arm in easy dismissal. She'd heard it from herself before, had waited sixteen years to respond aloud: "He was betrayed."
"He was? Who betrayed him?"
She thought he was ignorant. She saw a chance to teach. "His generals did," she said. "In Russia especially. And others, too. Speer. Goering. Many used him for their own gain. Or simply did not follow his orders."
"So he could have destroyed inferior races if his own race had been loyal. And history would now show how right he was."
"Yes," she said. She allowed herself a small triumphant tone: He'd seen the truth, as all along she'd known he would, having for sixteen years won this point with his father. "You see it now. Your blood knows it. You can't deny it."
But she'd fallen into Willi's trap. "So," he said. "Master races betray themselves. Some mastery."
For a moment her face was hung on wire mesh being crushed. It elongated, and her cheeks fell into the spaces between her gums. She swallowed, the movement a wave in the loose skin of her throat. Even the bird seemed to know that something had changed in the house, for it caught itself by beak and claws on the wire and beat the air with feathers. Then Willi's grandmother regained the structure of her face and managed a thin and bitter smile.
"Bird, be still," she said, her eyes on Willi.
Astonishingly, the bird went still. The old woman's mouth twisted. She seemed to be fighting to force her lips to cover it. "They've taught you well," she said. "Built your cage so well you've learned to maintain it yourself."
But she avoided answering the challenge his statement posed. And he thought, in the few moments of clarity her confusion gave him, that perhaps all bad ideas destroy themselves. Bad intentions, no. But maybe bad ideas all rotted from the inside out, swelling and bloating with their own incoherence, and time was a sieve in which they caught and through which they could not flow.
Yet he knew he would not change her. He'd heard there were people like her, though he'd never thought he'd find his grandmother one of them. Her own insight into why he'd come was true: He'd hoped to reunite the family. And not just the family—reunite the past and the present. But within that house, where the present had ceased to exist and the future never emerged, Willi began to understand his own alienation. The metallic, ammonia smell of the caged bird seemed, as he sat there, the underlying taste of his life: a bitterness he lived with, unrecognized till now. He had thought he might find a grandmother once capable of causing her son to leave her—but no longer so. She would instead be lonely, hurt, eager to ask forgiveness, waiting for her son to know her again—as she now was, not as she had been. And such a grandmother would justify Willi's anger at his father for those wasted years of not knowing who he was or whom he came from.
He hadn't prepared himself to find his father right. To find his grandmother locked within the past and himself substituted for his father, while the clock in the distant room refused to move time forward but thumped again and again the same identical beat.
"Would you like more tea?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"What is your question, then?"
"My question?"
"You came here with a question. Have you forgotten?"
Dread as cold and swift as the Rhine filled him. For he realized this was her final weapon. She'd saved the question he'd come to ask until she needed it. Now, when he'd achieved his little victory, his little play on logic and words, she would demand his question. She knew he would have to ask it. Would have to hand it over to her. Would have to let her fondle it. Stroke it. Examine it, turn it over. And then answer.
He was caught within her grip. It made him a coward. It made his tongue thick. But he asked, as she knew he would. She listened patiently, primly, as he heard his voice say, "When I was a baby, my father tried to kill himself. Why? You know. I know you do."
"I see," she said. She looked at her lap, reached down, finger and thumb like soft, white pincers, and picked a crumb from her thigh, held it over her saucer, rubbed finger and thumb together with precise, papery rustles.
"I did not know he tried to kill himself," she said, looking at her saucer where the crumb had fallen. "Marti never said anything. And your father himself. Well, you know."
Willi stared at her.
"You expect me to be shocked," she said. "Maybe guilty. In sixteen years he hasn't visited me. His choice, not mine. He didn't even come to his father's funeral. He's been dead to me as much as if he had been dead. Why should this news shock me now?"
There was something self-pitying in her tone, though she pretended to be brusque, unmoved. Willi knew she was talking to him now, not his father. And that he was in a battle. He refused to acknowledge her self-pity. "Why did he do it?" he asked.
"Ask him. As I said, I didn't even know he tried."
"But you know why he did it. And I'm asking you."
"Why would I know why he did anything?"
As he'd thought: She was toying with the question, a bauble he'd given her, a charm for her old age, a bright thing to make the time in this house pass even more slowly, to drug and paralyze it. Willi stood. He'd been sitting so long he almost fainted, the room swam, and he put back his hand to steady himself. "All right," he said. "If you don't know, I'll go. I've met you now."
Her eyes glittered with a strange, eerie fear. Willi's hackles rose. A devouring hunger played in her face. His standing and offering to leave was, he saw, a deprivation. She needed him. Was ravenous for him. But why? He shivered, turned away, was halfway to the door, when she said,
"I doubt you want to know."
He stopped, breathed deeply, turned back. Her cunning face. She gestured to the maroon chair again. He returned to it, her prey. But he had to know.
"There," she said when he sat down. "That's better. I find it amusing, I must say, when people claim they want to know things without knowing what they want to know."
She tittered, little-girlish. But Willi was tired of her digressions. He had only emptiness inside him, futility. A kind of awful, numbing calm. He didn't respond.
"You could seek ignorance," she said, her voice light now, cheerful. "Why do people always seek knowledge? You, for instance: Why are you really here? You could spend your life pretending you're someone other than you are. Your father could have, too. He would be happier. He wasn't ready for the truth. Yet he poured his life into finding it. And then tried to kill himself when he did. Wouldn't he have been better off seeking ignorance? Letting other people decide how he should live? Without the strength to sustain knowledge, one is a fool to seek it."
Willi stared at her. With no emotion whatsoever, he imagined shaking her: her raisin eyes falling from their sockets, her teeth loosened in her jaw and scattered on the floor like hard, fossil rain.
She saw something in his gaze. "It would be easy to silence me, wouldn't it?" she said. "And then you would remain in your happy cage. Where you know nothing of your life. Fed and watered."
"Tell me." He just wanted it over.
"It's not me who's against you, Willi," she said, her voice intimate now, conspiratorial. "You're my grandson. I've kept track of you. Marti has informed me. I'd be proud of you if you'd let me be."
"I don't even know you."
"That isn't my fault."
"It might be."
"You're certainly stubborn."
A small triangle of sunlight leaking through the shades had crept up the wall opposite Willi. In its illumination he could see the tinge of an older layer of paint, a thin discoloration, under the current one. A sickening suspicion struck him, born of things he'd learned in school and perhaps not true at all here—that a Jewish family perhaps once lived in this house, and the Nazis had taken it from them and given it to his grandparents. He didn't know it was true, but the chair he sat in suddenly seemed a vile thing, the possession of someone starved and turned to smoke. He had all he could do to stay seated. This place had infected his imagination. Everything around him seemed unreal, a museum of death, occupied by ghosts, and his grandmother one of them. This house seemed a place where cruelty and stupidity and idealism and rigidity and hypocrisy and self-loathing and accusation and justification had mingled to form a glue that gummed up time. The triangle of light might extinguish itself, and darkness might fill the room, but he and his grandmother would sit here forever facing each other, with real or imagined other families who had lived here, too, and only his grandmother's papery breathing to fix and hold awareness, while the bird slept and the clock clanged on in its timeless night.
"Stubborn as your father," his grandmother said. Willi stared at her, horrified—that she could go on talking. Go on breathing. Go on pretending to live. "Well—I'll tell you what you claim you want to know. Have you ever heard of
Lebensborn?
"
Willi started.
Lebensborn:
Fountain of Life, Source of Life, Well of Life. His father's words to Marti echoed in his ears:
Your mother. My well of life.
His grandmother was watching him. "Ah," she said. "You recognize it. Perhaps you know of the National Socialist Welfare Organization, too. Your grandfather and I met in the cathedral of light. He was already married, but our love was instantaneous. Unstoppable. Unquenchable. In that structure, at that time, we saw the country's future, and we saw our future, and we bound ourselves together to create those futures."
She paused, and her hand went to her hair. She brushed it lightly, caught up in the memory. Then she saw Willi watching her, and her hand dropped back to the arm of the chair.
"It horrifies you, doesn't it," she said, "to discover the passions of the old? As if you grew from seed and invented passion on your own. We asked each other what we could give to the
Führer.
It was, of course, difficult for us to see each other. He had his marriage. And his other responsibilities. We saw each other when we could, and for a long time that was all. A secret thing. But those days were glorious. So much was new. You will never know."
A reverent tone had come into her voice—reminiscent, sad, longing. Willi was listening to the old woman voice the meaning of her life. Her burning bush. He listened, fascinated and horrified, knowing that everything she said was a story of betrayal that she had twisted into a story of faith and loyalty. It was the first time in his life that he'd even vaguely understood that betrayal could look like loyalty, death like life, hatred like love, darkness like light. It all could be turned, and this old woman, fervent and elegiac, was speaking of her holiness.
"Then the Party gave us our answer. They gave us
Lebensborn.
" She pronounced the word as someone else might pronounce the name of God, almost unspeakable. "We loved each other, and we saw a Reich lasting a thousand years. Such a Reich needed children—young men to fight its battles. We could not be married, but we could give the
Führer
and the Reich children. This was
Lebensborn.
And so we did."
She looked at Willi, and on her face, mixed within its confused, sad radiance, glittered that hunger he'd seen earlier, a greedy hope: that he would believe. This was why she needed him. This was why she was speaking, why she'd opened up, made herself so vulnerable—not because she wanted to answer his question for him, but because, after sixteen years of silence and waiting, she was investing her entire life in what she told him, in the hope that he would understand, approve, and validate her. Willi wondered if she had already devoured him. And if she hadn't, had he left a trail by which he could find his way back to wherever he'd come from, to whoever he had been?
"My father," he said.
She nodded. "Yes. It was for the future, don't you see?" She was breaking down, disintegrating. Willi had the sense she could turn to a pile of bones in the chair, quilted in silken skin. She was desperate, pleading with him to understand.