Carry Me Page 24

  The only fellow who took time to show me the ropes was Günter Krebs, my old schoolmate. I hadn’t forgotten his bullying at Grundschule, but he took care to introduce me to everyone in our department, from higher-ups to secretaries. The other fellows could be shockingly rude to the female secretaries, but Günter treated them with respect and was popular with them. His mother had been a secretary, he told me.

  He invited me to sit with him at lunch. When I mentioned that the Paris Trib was my favorite newspaper, he nodded and said it was wise to keep up with English and American newspapers. It was more than acceptable in the Translation Department to be seen reading newspapers at one’s desk, he said, so long as they were the correct newspaper. “Not trash, mind you, not the Daily Mirror, but the Times or your Herald Tribune.”

  Günter warned me that Dr. Ziegler liked to see clean desks at the end of the day. “If you are assigned a project, you’d better complete it before you think of going home. If it means working all night, so be it. We’ve all done our share of those. Ziegler—a smart fellow, to be sure. Doctorate in chemistry from Freiburg. Lots of brains around here. No tolerance for mistakes. That’s fine, pressure is good, keeps us on our toes. Dr. Ziegler can be a bear, but he looks out for his boys. If you can stand the pace of the work, who knows, your next post could be overseas. I went to Warsaw with the boss last month. We had some jolly good dinners, all on the expense account, of course. He likes sidecars—brandy, Cointreau, lemon juice, lots of ice. Not bad.”

  Everyone else in the Translation Department was standoffish on principle, the principle being to dislike new people. Even my old classmate Robert Briesewitz didn’t bother being friendly at first, and he’d been one of my original Apache tribe, in the Walden woods.

  Krebs invited me to see the new Gary Cooper film playing at the Harmonie, in Sachsenhausen, across the river. As we walked to the tram stop he asked if my father had been in the war. His father, a lawyer in civilian life, had spent his military career “pushing a pencil,” drafting contracts between the army and suppliers. “My old fellow was never wounded. Five years in the army and not a scratch.”

  “That was lucky.”

  “You think so? I’m not so sure. An honorable wound, that can set you up for life.”

  Günter’s mother was a Frenchwoman. He admitted that he’d spoken French before he spoke German. He laughed when he mentioned boys on his street calling him a Parlewuh and a Froschschenkelfresser during the war, slang their fathers brought back from the front.

  “I don’t blame them really. Kids can’t abide anything outside their own realm of experience. It’s natural. And those Frenchies marching in here after the armistice, the black fellows? What a disgrace. Peace with honor? What pig shit. They were rubbing our noses in defeat. Listen, old fellow, we ought to plan a hiking weekend. You’ll find a lot of men in the department who are oarsmen, or pretend to be, but there’s not much hiking spirit. But for me, you know, growing up in this god-awful city, going out in the mountains with a knapsack makes me feel really a German.”

  He was tall and slightly pear shaped. Ungainly. Not exactly ugly, but not handsome. His flat hair was yellow-blond. His chin was small. He walked like…a duck. His manner could be haughty and dismissive, but there was also in him a friendliness, an eagerness to connect to people.

  On our way to the cinema we passed the BMW showroom and paused to have a look through the window. I pointed out a couple of machines and mentioned my old ambition of riding a motorcycle across El Llano Estacado.

  “There really is such a place?” He was stunned. “Karl May didn’t make it up?”

  “No, el llano is real. Look it up in a good atlas, you’ll see.”

  “Well, well, my friend Billy.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “I think this is a marvelous plan of yours. I quite approve. You should hold to it. Buy your motorbike and strike off across El Llano Estacado. Wouldn’t Old Shatterhand be pleased!”

  “Unlikely. Don’t see how. I’m not about to give up my job.”

  “When the other kids would call me frogeater, I would go home, tuck myself in, and read Karl May. Used to see myself roaming el llano but I never dreamed there was such a place, so never looked into it. And now you say there is—that’s wonderful. I hope you get out there, old fellow. Remember to send me a postcard, will you?”

  “Certainly.”

  The Gary Cooper film at the Harmonie was City Streets, dubbed in German. Sylvia Sydney was female lead. Afterward Krebs insisted we stop in at a historic old Apfelweinwirtschaft where he said he knew the proprietor. He ordered broiled pork for both of us—it really was pretty good. We were on our second jug of Apfelwein when he pulled out his NSDAP membership card to show me. “Really I ought to wear the lapel pin, only it would count against me at work. It’s really shameful. Dr. Ziegler has been for too long in America. He’s out of touch with the moral crisis of Germany.”

  It surprised me that an IG Farben man, likable and good-natured if a bit odd, was also an NSDAP man. But I didn’t want to get into it with Krebs.

  “What did you think of the film?” I asked.

  “Why, Billy, do you admire Gary Cooper? Because I find this film quite disgusting.”

  “Really?”

  “For certain. A decent young man dragged down by his awful Jew of a girlfriend and her criminal father. Yet the young man is taken to be a hero—because he is loyal to her? In fact he is a degraded criminal of the worst type.”

  “Sylvia Sidney? How do you know she’s Jewish?”

  “Come on. You can smell a Jewess like that certainly.”

  “In the movies?”

  “You merely have to look at her nose.”

  “I thought she was good-looking.”

  “That’s how they work.”

  “Who?”

  “A Jewish-seductress type. Vavavoom. Look. The character your Cooper plays, the Kid; he is perfectly Aryan. The Kid may even have a chance of making a contribution to the general welfare of society; instead he chooses loyalty to his awful Jewess. And the story wants us to believe he is a hero because of this? No. No. Never.

  “The most disgusting thing of Hollywood, all run by Jews, is that Cooper himself, the actual fellow, I would say is the perfect Aryan. He is the ideal of our racial type. And yet in the mongrel society of Hollywood he has to play swine, utter swine. I only wish we had more like the real Gary Cooper at work here in Germany, here at the IG, and fewer rancid little Polish Jewboys. Some mornings I am almost sick to my stomach, the florid stink that Kracauer slime brings to our office. The cologne they wear, it’s disgusting. I can’t see why Ziegler tolerates it. But this is excellent cider, Billy—have some more. The best Apfelwein in the world is here in Frankfurt. No one else makes it so purely as we Hessen do.”

  We were speaking in German. Günter had good French, on account of his French mother, but his English was not strong.

  He reached over to fill my glass from the Bembel, the cider jug. I found his anti-Semitism embarrassing. It was in poor taste, so creaky and old-fashioned, totally out of line with the crisp, modern spirit at our headquarters. I told myself he’d be embarrassed in the morning when he woke up with a headache. His rant was surely a case of the apple cider doing the talking.

  After we said good night, I watched him hurrying to catch his tram. He didn’t run gracefully—more an uncollected gallop than a sprint. His arms and legs weren’t working together, I thought he was going to fall flat on his face. But he made the tram, just, and turned and waved enthusiastically. I think he lived with his mother in a flat way out on the Bockenheimer Landstraße.

  I started off handling files of correspondence from IG Farben subsidiaries in Britain, Canada, Australia, and the States. When it came to dyes, paints, synthetics, pharmaceuticals, fuels, and fertilizers, we owned the patents, we had developed the most-advanced processes, we were the leaders of the world. It was fun to be the English voice of such a power.

  My father still took the F-Zeit and the Vossisch
e, newspapers that paid as little attention as possible to the radical parties, but like everyone else we had a radio, and by now everyone knew who the Nazis were. There were brownshirt parades each week in Frankfurt, but, absorbed in the bright aniline excitement of working at IG Farben, I paid little attention. My Conoco road maps were still pinned up in my bedroom at Newport, but they had become invisible. I could no longer see them.

  My first months at IG vanquished my depression, if that was what it was, but those days of aimlessness had left a scar. I’d suffered a spell of barbed-wire disease, tasted a bit of nothingness. Now, holding on to a job, having a career, meant something it had not before. I suppose you could say I was growing up.

  1938

  As soon as the savages sped off in their stolen beer truck, Karin rang my father at the hotel in Bad Homburg. I had no telephone in my rooms. Buck was on duty at the front desk, where he was reading Kessler’s biography of Walther Rathenau. He summoned a janitor to take over and awakened my mother. On their way out to Walden they stopped at my lodgings. My father rapped on my door, and when I opened it my landlady stood behind him, wringing her hands. Buck wouldn’t say much in front of her, only that “we are wanted across the river.”

  I dressed and hurried out to my parents waiting in a taxi. I recognized their driver, a young fellow called Otto Stahl, formerly an exercise rider at Walden—wry face a bit like a monkey’s, always with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “Saddle up, old pal!” Otto cried. He had a Kölsch accent—streetwise, smart-alecky, and tough. “Apache on the warpath! Everyone called inside the stockade. Saddle up and let’s ride!”

  As we drove quickly through deserted streets my father told me the baron had been assaulted and left for dead. Karin was unharmed physically but probably in shock.

  I absorbed the news and peered out the window. In the gemütlichen glow of Frankfurt’s cozy old-fashioned streetlamps there was nothing much to be seen. The latest pogrom had spent itself, apparently. The fire brigade had soaked out the flames, hooligans were swilling cider in warm taverns or asleep in their beds, a few dozen Jewish men were on their way to Dachau and Sachsenhausen. In another couple of hours municipal workers would be hard at it with brooms and shovels, sweeping up broken glass.

  I’m not saying I had insight into the future. The present was bad enough. Who could imagine extermination camps? Thousand-bomber raids? Not me. Not Buffalo Billy.

  From my road maps I knew that, just south of the Canadian River and a few miles north of Amarillo, a highway climbed steep red bluffs up onto an enormous tabletop mesa that the explorer Coronado had named El Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, or the Palisaded Plain—exactly what he meant is unclear. It’s possible he was referring to the bluffs which, seen from the approaches, resemble a fortress wall, a “palisade.” Or maybe he was referring to the stalky yucca stems that sprout on the plains, or stakes the Comanche used to mark trails across that vast, featureless landscape.

  Shutting my eyes I imagined the pair of us speeding across the horizontal yellow of those plains. More than ever we needed a span of emptiness, sunlight, and caustic highway speed. We would cross el llano to cauterize ourselves. And on the other side (California? Vancouver?), we’d reorganize ourselves, establish new connections to life, become different people. Become Americans or Canadians.

  Escapism? Of course it was. Escapism was for realists in Frankfurt then. Escapists saw things plain.

  The iron gates of Walden with their crests of the shamrock and cornflowers had been broken off their hinges and lay flat on the road. Otto stopped the taxi and I helped him drag the wreckage out of our way.

  When Karin let us into the house her father was still sprawled on the floor in the front hall, not dead but not conscious, either, pulse very weak. She’d covered him with a blanket and cleaned and bandaged the gouges on his scalp. The attackers had broken the hilt off his saber and left the weapon in pieces on the floor. Herta’s wails echoed from the wine cellar.

  “She sounds like a banshee!” my mother said.

  “She won’t come upstairs, she’s too frightened,” Karin admitted.

  “That’s doing no good at all,” Eilín said sharply. “She’ll have to stop that.”

  Karin herself seemed weirdly calm. I don’t know what I expected. Fury? She was cocooned in shock. We needed to get her father up off the floor where he was stuck in the glue of his own blood. Buck had the idea of using a folding metal card table for a stretcher. It took all of us to lift him as gently as possible. With Karin and my mother supporting his legs and feet we just managed to carry him into the library where we laid him on his sofa bed.

  My mother telephoned Dr. Lewin, who lived in an apartment building just off the Boerne-Platz. Lewin said the synagogue on the Boerne-Platz was burning: he could see the flames. She begged him to come out to Walden but he said he was wary of going out whilst packs of hooligans who looked like off-duty policemen were still roaming his part of town.

  Lewin had tickets for himself, his wife, and their two children on a French liner sailing from Le Havre for Havana in two days, but he finally agreed to come out to Walden after my mother promised to send Otto to pick him up.

  Herta’s howls from the cellar were dispiriting, the sound of the fear we all felt. I noticed my father’s hands trembling when he lit his cigarette with the little silver lighter he’d once ransacked our trunk to find.

  Karin went down to the cellar to persuade Herta to come upstairs. Karin seemed more composed than any of us.

  I don’t think anyone imagined her father would survive. He’d been in a coma for two hours by then, with possibly a fractured skull as well as a concussion, and maybe a broken hip as well. His blood was lacquered over flagstones in the front hall. His pulse barely registered. My mother tried smelling salts but he remained comatose, his breathing shallow and hoarse.

  The house was cold. While we waited for the doctor my father and I brought in armloads of firewood.

  “Do you think they’ll come back, the Sturmtruppen? A return visit?” Buck asked.

  “I don’t know, Dad. Possibly.”

  “Your mother wanted us to go for Australia in 1919,” he said. “But they wouldn’t let me in.”

  He was shaken. He’d never been a person to waste time moaning over what might have been. Anyone who bred thoroughbreds for a living knew that life raced only one way around the oval, and as fast as possible. Buck had understood better than most: the only way to live is at forward speed. A racehorse opens its heart and runs.

  We built up blazes in the library fireplace and the kitchen. I wondered if Dr. Lewin would make it out to Walden. Traveling across the city, even in a taxi, he’d be taking his life in his hands. There might be wolf packs roaming the town, and they might decide to stop a lone taxi, drag out a Jewish passenger, beat him up, pitch him in the river Main.

  However, the taxi arrived with Dr. Lewin safe and sound. After an examination he confirmed the baron had a fractured hip, a fractured skull, and remained in a coma. The hip required immediate surgery, but Lewin reminded us that as a Jew he was no longer permitted to do surgery at any hospital in Frankfurt, and in any case he was leaving for Cuba with his family and couldn’t delay their departure. He promised to make some calls to Aryan colleagues.

  While my parents were out in the kitchen consoling Herta, I overheard Dr. Lewin describe to Karin the correct procedure for injecting morphine.

  “If and when your father wakes up he will no doubt feel excruciating pain. This will be hard for him to bear and worse I would think for you. Hence, opiates.”

  He said he’d be leaving a box containing syringes of various sizes, needles, and four sixty-milliliter bottles of morphia.

  “If the pain becomes too much, my dear, a dose of sixty milliliters, understand? That’s one entire bottle. Fill the large syringe and push it in all at once, quickly. Within a few minutes your father’s respiratory system will no longer be functioning. He’ll be unconscious
, he won’t suffer. Sixty mills. All at once. Understand?”

  She nodded, but she hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and I couldn’t tell if she really grasped what Dr. Lewin was telling her.

  What was in store for her father but more humiliation? If he’d been a racehorse Buck would have led him to the edge of the woods, pressed the pistol barrel to the forehead, aimed the bullet along the spine, and fired.

  That would have been the right thing to do, without question.

  That would have been mercy.

  FRANKIE’S ENGLISH BAR

  Postcard. Unsigned, “Tonkreuz-UFA-Neuebabelsberg” [Soundstage UFA studio, Neuebabelsberg], addressed Herr Billy Lange, Frankfurt A. M., Übersetzung Abteilung IG Farben Hauptsitz, postmarked Berlin 17.7.1931. Holograph inscription quoting Rilke. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  Auch ich stehe still und voll tiefen Vertrauens vor den Toren dieser Einsamkeit, weil ich für die höchste Aufgabe einer Verbindung zweier Menschen diese halte: dass einer dem andern seine Einsamkeit bewache—Rilke

  I tell you this is the highest bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

  my trans.!—BL Sept 3rd 1988

  in Toronto

  The telephone call came through the switchboard. My grandmother Con was on the line.

  “Is something the matter, Granny? Are you all right?”

  I could hear a lot of uproar. I was irritated. We were not supposed to receive personal phone calls at work. But Dr. Ziegler was in Lisbon, the other fellows had gone home, and I was eating an orange and reading the novel going around the office that month, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.

  “Dear Billy, I’m at Frankie’s.”

  To my father’s dismay, my grandmother had become a regular at Frankie’s English Bar, where she gambled on horses and enjoyed champagne cocktails with her horsey friends, most of them elderly. Willie Chopdelau, the bookmaker, had two telephone lines at Frankie’s and took bets on all the Irish and English racing.