Wilhelm, sitting between his parents, was entranced by its beauty and glory: the drum flourishes and horn fanfares, the special Hitler Youth flag, and the perfect, spotless uniforms worn by all the young men.
But far beyond that was the excitement of Hitler actually attending, which was a great honor. Wilhelm had memorized, along with Hans, who was an indulgent big brother, the oath they swore.
Wilhelm read the missive left by Hans on the evening of May 6, as the cannons grew ever louder and the great city began to crumble. Crowds filled the streets in a great westward exodus, for it was rumored that the Allies would treat them better than the Russians, their ancestral enemy. Wilhelm’s mother made no move to leave. “I have lived my entire married life here, and I will not go. If your father lives, and if I live, he will find me here waiting.”
Wilhelm went to the front parlor window, settled himself on the floor, and read:
Never forget this wonderful day, my dear brother. I am only sorry you have not been able to have your own
Lebensfeier.
But perhaps, in the future, no matter how dark it looks now, you or a son of yours might experience the same joy. We must, in these times, hold fast to that thought. The Thousand-Year Reich has just begun. Hitler will never die.
Hitler! Hitler himself came down the row of Hitler Youth and shook all our hands.
He shook my hand
.
As he did so, he placed his own over mine, so that mine was held between his, like a father holding the hand of his child. His kindly eyes smiled into mine, looked deeply into me, and I vowed in my heart to
Lebensfeier
, my life job. My Führer said, in his speech that day, “We want a hard generation that is strong, reliable, loyal, obedient and decent, so that we do not need to be ashamed.” This is what I have striven to be, my dear brother, during the long and hard years since.
The vows I spoke that day, and which I saw you, with pride, in the front row, reciting, were these:
We affirm:
The German people have been created by the will of God.
All those who fight for the life of our people, and those who died,
Carried out the will of God.
Their deeds are to us holy obligation. This we believe.
We affirm that God gave us all our strength,
In order to maintain the life of our people
And defend it. It is therefore our holiest
Duty to fight to our last breath
Anything that threatens or endangers the life
Of our people. God will decide
Whether we live or die. This we pledge.
We want to be free from all selfishness.
We want to be fighters for this Reich
Named Germany, our home.
We will never forget that we are German.
And I have not. Wilhelm, I give you this charge: You must continue to fight for the Fatherland.
Remember the Fatherland as I will, if I live: as free, high mountains, as a Nation, working together, as the Hitler Youth book tells us, to rid the world of poisonous blood unworthy of mingling with our pure German blood, our pure German bodies. We are an old, strong people, and our land was glorious. It will be so again. Read your Hitler Youth book daily. It is filled with wisdom.
Work hard, my dear brother, to further the Work given us by our Führer, to use that which I bequeath to you—an idea, a commitment—to move the entire world forward into the bright, glorious sunshine of the timeless ideals of our beloved Führer.
On his brother’s special day, Wilhelm had recited the affirmation along with the young men on the stage in a loud, clear voice, while on one side of him his father held his shoulder and squeezed it, and, on the other side, his mother looked down at him in grim disapproval, and dashed away tears. On the first day of the Battle of Berlin, those affirmations had propelled him from the cellar, to which his mother and himself had been dragged by neighbors, into battle.
In America, he and his classmates marched down Main Street on Decoration Day, the day in May when the graves of American soldiers who had killed his kin were decorated. He daily pledged allegiance to the American flag, though at first it took a beating on the part of his father to make him do so, to convince him that this was necessary, and that he had to forget his last name had ever been Konrad, or even Wilhelm; it now was William—except, rebelliously, stubbornly, in his own mind. He had studied government, he had read their history of the war thinking
Lies, all lies, propaganda
, and made
A
s on all his tests. There were Jewish children in his school—not many, but they were popular and never shunned; in fact, most classmates looked surprised when he asked them whether they knew their friends were Jews, and some didn’t even know what Jews were. There were no Negro children, and of this he was glad. Sometimes he wondered,
Is it possible that my country might have been wrong, might have done wrong?,
but in the end, that letter, that day in Berlin, the memory of his brother proud in his uniform, were all much stronger than years in an American school, mingled as they were with his brother’s sacrifice.
Wilhelm stood, intending to leave the study and turn off the television chatter in the other room. He should not be sitting here in the past; it only made him sad. He heard, “We interrupt this program to announce that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. He is being rushed…”
In that instant, the odd, burnt artifact on his father’s desk glowed and became briefly clear, emitting powerful rainbowed light. He stared, transfixed.
For a moment, his childhood memories became even stronger, and more brilliant, but were infused with something new and unpleasant—the ideas that his mother had often expressed, that Germany had done horrible things during the war and that they were all guilty, all damned, which his father would counter with a mention of Hiroshima. Despite her isolation, she seemed to like the ideals of America, took pains to go through all the preparation for the citizenship tests at home, although Wilhelm’s father told her to never do anything so foolish as to actually go out and take the test because
Hear! Hear!
(he would point toward his closed office door) were her birth certificate, which had taken place at home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wilhelm’s birth certificate, in Canton, Ohio, and his own, in Pennsylvania as well, and that they were all supposed to forget about Germany entirely, as if their lives before coming here had never happened. Then he would sit stonily quiet in the dark parlor for an hour, drinking schnapps, and finally come out, apologize, hug them both, and tell them he knew it was hard.
As the paperweight surged with light, Wilhelm saw the world as his brother had described it in that sacred letter, but instead of its populace being of pure German blood and genes, the colors of their faces ranged from pale to dark. Many voices poured from them, a Babel of languages that refuted everything his brother had stood for. All were equal in rights and in education. The human brain grew and changed, shed its ancestral darkness, became a species not of male brother-warriors and aggressors, but a species of women and men who instead used other means to solve conflicts. Ideas flowed through him in waves, as if to wash from him the blood-memories, the ancient feuds, the ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, even the wars fought in the name of his mother’s religion, the religion of others …
The light dimmed. Shaken, Wilhelm continued to watch it, breathing hard, clenching his hands in tight fists.
Nothing more happened. Finally, he ventured to touch the thing. Its coolness surprised him.
He had taken chemistry courses in high school and since then had wondered how it had been formed, what it was made of. Perhaps it was a meteor? He thought several times about breaking off a piece and trying to melt it in a crucible and see if it gave off an identifying gas, or color, but he did not even dare think about tampering with anything belonging to his father.
Now, he wondered whether or not there might be other reasons not to play with it.
Wilhelm left the office. He closed the door behind him and went into the living room, with its drawn drapes, the ironing board set up in front of the television set, and the heavy dark furniture. It was lit by a single lamp, the base of which was a lovely young blond woman in a meadow of porcelain flowers, sitting beneath crystals that dangled from the silk shade, spangling her face with light.
He turned up the television set. What had he heard? The President had been shot?
But no. The usual soap opera was playing. He watched a commercial for Ipana toothpaste. He turned to the other two channels, adjusted the rabbit ears. Nothing, nothing, about an assassination attempt. Had he been dreaming? Had the glow in the artifact anything to do with what he had heard?
Two days later, he returned from school to find his mother in her immaculate kitchen, leaning on both arms against the table, her head bowed. When she raised it, her face was streaked with tears. “Your father is dead,” she said.
He was stunned. “Why? What happened?”
“Two men came today, from his company. He—caught pneumonia and died of it.” She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, folding her hands on the table.
He put his hand on her back. He was the man now. He had to be strong. He shouldn’t cry. “Where did this happen? Why didn’t he call and tell us he was sick?”
“He probably—he didn’t think he was so sick. He just collapsed at a meeting.”
His father’s funeral was held in the little German farming town they had gone to so often when Wilhelm was a child. His father’s casket was closed. Wilhelm beat against it with his fists. “I want to see him!” Two strong men, friends of his family, took him from the church. A few other men came out with him, tried to comfort him. One offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. He was dull and dazed at the funeral, with its incense and Latin, and watched the casket lowered into the ground with a sense of unreality. Something was not right.
A few weeks later, there occurred an afternoon when he felt as though his mother was going to tell him important things. He had felt some tension for several days after the man in a black suit came and talked to her behind the closed, curtained French doors to the living room. When she invited him into the little-used parlor, always darkened, the furniture always covered with sheets, and they both sat in the dim light on facing chairs, he had hoped. Her lips had been tight when she had begun talking, on that long-ago afternoon, as the other neighborhood children played outside. “Wilhelm, I feel as if I must tell you…” But then, suddenly, she stopped talking, got up, and left the room.
Their years in the American town were probably more lonely than they ought to have been, and as he was going away to Ohio State—the United States government paid for his college, which he took for granted then but soon realized was unusual—and his mother lay in the hospital dying of cancer, in what he later realized was a rare private room, also paid for by the U.S. government, she finally talked.
His father, she said (“And I know I can trust you to tell no one, ever, but you deserve to know; I am so very tired of lying”) was a spy during the war. He worked for Germany, but also for the Americans. He had been a brave man to do so. She, herself, had not known this until she questioned him severely about why they were able to move to America when everyone else in Germany—her mother, her sisters, her one surviving brother, and his old father—had to stay behind and starve. He said that in exchange for scientific secrets from Germany as well as from Russia, he had bought them all a better life—college for Wilhelm, a lifetime pension for her should he die. He had warned her his being killed was not unlikely, because of his past. Many people were after him—in particular, former Nazis who were angered at his defection. The United States government could only protect him so much. He had things to do, dangerous missions to carry out.
Furthermore, Wilhelm’s mother said, his father had told her that he realized American ideals were much better than those of the Nazis. Wilhelm’s mother fixed him with a strong, steady gaze. “Remember that that is what your father thought. I am sorry he never told you, because you probably will never believe me. He was never a Nazi himself, not in his heart or mind. It made him sick to pretend, sick to seem to support his oldest son in joining the Nazi Youth. You cannot imagine those times, Wilhelm, how hard and dangerous they were. Your brother’s death broke him. I see how you worship the past, how you hoard those swastika magazines under your bed, when you should instead, if anything, God forbid, be hiding pictures of women! It is our fault, your father’s and mine, for not talking frankly to you, but you were so young. We hoped you would forget, and we didn’t want to burden you with more than you could understand, with more responsibility than you could handle. And we were afraid … you might let something slip.”
She fixed her eyes on him, still the young blue of cornflowers, still the eyes that could see right into him, see what he was thinking. “Your brother died for the wrong reasons. It is a tragedy. But we were all caught up in … all kinds of wrong ideas, wrong actions, and by the time some of us wanted to stop, there was too much momentum. Hitler made it all sound so glorious, and once he had power, he murdered all who opposed him.”