Mother Night Part 2

PURGATORY ...

ABOUT THAT purgatory of mine in New York City: I was in it for fifteen years. purgatory of mine in New York City: I was in it for fifteen years.

I disappeared from Germany at the end of the Second World War. I reappeared, unrecognized, in Greenwich Village. There I rented a depressing attic apartment with rats squeaking and scrabbling in the walls. I continued to inhabit that attic until a month ago, when I was brought to Israel for trial.

There was one pleasant thing about my ratty attic: the back window of it overlooked a little private park, a little Eden formed by joined back yards. That park, that Eden, was walled off from the streets by houses on all sides.

It was big enough for children to play hide-and-seek in.

I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child's cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, that those still hiding were to come out of hiding, that it was time to go home.

The cry was this: "Olly-olly-ox-in-free."

And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful- "Olly-olly-ox-in-free."

7.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY ...

I, H HOWARD W. C W. CAMPBELL, JR., was born in Schenectady, New York, on February 16, 1912. My father, who was raised in Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister, was an engineer in the Service Engineering Department of the General Electric Company.

The mission of the Service Engineering Department was to install, maintain and repair General Electric heavy equipment sold anywhere in the world. My father, whose a.s.signments were at first only in the United States, was rarely home. And his job demanded such varied forms of technical cleverness of him that he had scant time and imagination left over for anything else. The man was the job and the job was the man.

The only nontechnical book I ever saw him look at was a picture history of the First World War. It was a big book, with pictures a foot high and a foot-and-a-half wide. My father never seemed to tire of looking at the book, though he hadn't been in the war.

He never told me what the book meant to him, and I never asked him. All he ever said to me about it was that it wasn't for children, that I wasn't to look at it.

So, of course, I looked at it every time I was left alone. There were pictures of men hung on barbed wire, mutilated women, bodies stacked like cord-wood-all the usual furniture of world wars.

My mother was the former Virginia Crocker, the daughter of a portrait photographer from Indianapolis. She was a housewife and an amateur cellist. She played cello with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra, and she once had dreams of my playing the cello, too.

I failed as a cellist because I, like my father, am tone-deaf.

I had no brothers and sisters, and my father was seldom home. So I was for many years the princ.i.p.al companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was drunk most of the time. I remember a time when she filled a saucer with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and table salt. She put the saucer on the kitchen table, turned out all the lights, and had me sit facing her across the table.

And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her.

"There-" she said, "that's what we'll look like when we're dead."

This queer demonstration not only scared me; it scared her, too. My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. From that moment on she hardly spoke to me-cut me dead, I'm sure, out of fear of doing or saying something even crazier.

All that happened in Schenectady, before I was ten.

In 1923, when I was eleven, my father was a.s.signed to the General Electric Office in Berlin, Germany. From then on, my education, my friends, and my princ.i.p.al language were German.

I eventually became a playwright in the German language, and I took a German wife, the actress Helga Noth. Helga Noth was the elder of the two daughters of Werner Noth, the Chief of Police of Berlin.

My father and mother left Germany in 1939, when war came.

My wife and I stayed on.

I earned my keep until the war ended in 1945 as a writer and broadcaster of n.a.z.i propaganda to the English-speaking world. I was the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

When the war was ending, I was high on the list of war criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public.

I was captured by one Lieutenant Bernard B. O'Hare of the American Third Army near Hersfeld on April 12, 1945. I was on a motorcycle, unarmed. While ent.i.tled to a uniform, a blue and gold one, I was not wearing it. I was in mufti, in a blue serge suit and a moth-eaten coat with a fur collar.

As it happened, the Third Army had overrun Ohrdruf, the first n.a.z.i death camp the Americans were to see, two days before. I was taken there, was forced to look at it all-the lime pits, the gallows, the whipping posts-at the gutted and scabby, bug-eyed, spavined dead in heaps.

The idea was to show me the consequences of what I had done.

The Ohrdruf gallows were capable of hanging six at a time. When I saw them, there was a dead camp guard at the end of each rope.

And it was expected that I would hang soon, too.

I expected it myself, and I took an interest in the peace of the six guards at the ends of their ropes.

They had died fast.

My photograph was taken while I looked up at the gallows. Lieutenant O'Hare was standing behind me, lean as a young wolf, as full of hatred as a rattlesnake.

The picture was on the cover of Life Life, and came close to winning a Pulitzer Prize.

8.

AUF WIEDERSEHEN ...

I DID NOT HANG DID NOT HANG.

I committed high treason, crimes against humanity, and crimes against my own conscience, and I got away with them until now.

I got away with them because I was an American agent all through the war. My broadcasts carried coded information out of Germany.

The code was a matter of mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences. Persons I never saw gave me my instructions, told me in which sentences of a broadcast the mannerisms were to appear. I do not know to this day what information went out through me. From the simplicity of most of my instructions, I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus. Occasionally, as during the buildup for the Normandy invasion, my instructions were more complicated, and my phrasing and diction sounded like the last stages of double pneumonia.

That was the extent of my usefulness to the Allied cause.

And that usefulness was what saved my neck.

I was provided with cover. I was never acknowledged as an American agent, but the treason case against me was sabotaged. I was freed on nonexistent technicalities about my citizenship, and I was helped to disappear.

I came to New York under an a.s.sumed name. I started a new life, in a manner of speaking, in my ratty attic overlooking the secret park.

I was left alone-so much alone that I was able to take back my own name, and almost n.o.body wondered if I was the the Howard W. Campbell, Jr. Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

I would occasionally find my name in a newspaper or magazine-never as an important person, but as one name in a long list of names of war criminals who had disappeared. There were rumors of me in Iran, Argentina, Ireland. ... Israeli agents were said to be looking high and low for me.

Be that as it may, no agent ever knocked on my door. n.o.body knocked on my door, even though the name on my mailbox was plain for anybody to see: Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

Until the very end of my purgatory in Greenwich Village, the closest I came to being detected in my infamy was when I went to a Jewish doctor in the same building as my attic. I had an infected thumb.

The doctor's name was Abraham Epstein. He lived with his mother on the second floor. They had just moved in.

When I gave him my name, it meant nothing to him, but it did mean something to his mother. Epstein was young, fresh out of medical school. His mother was old-heavy, slow, deeply lined, sadly, bitterly watchful.

"That is a very famous name," she said. "You must know that."

"Pardon me?" I said.

"You do not know about anybody else named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.?" she said.

"I suppose there are some others," I said. "How old are you?" she said. I told her.

"Then you are old enough to remember the war," she said.

"Forget the war," her son said to her, affectionately but sharply. He was bandaging my thumb.

"And you never heard Howard W. Campbell, Jr., broadcasting from Berlin?" she said to me.

"I do remember now-yes," I said. "I'd forgotten. That was a long time ago. I never listened to him, but I remember he was in the news. Those things fade."

"They should fade," said young Dr. Epstein. "They belong to a period of insanity that should be forgotten as quickly as possible."

"Auschwitz," said his mother.

"Forget Auschwitz," said Dr. Epstein.

"Do you know what Auschwitz was?" his mother asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"That was where I spent my young womanhood," she said. "And that was where my son the doctor here spent his childhood."

"I never think about it," said Dr. Epstein abruptly. "There-that thumb should be all right in a couple of days. Keep it warm, keep it dry." And he hustled me toward the door.

"Sprechen-Sie Deutsch?" his mother called after me as I was leaving. his mother called after me as I was leaving.

"Pardon me?" I said.

"I asked if you spoke German," she said.

"Oh," I said. "No-I'm afraid not," I said. I experimented shyly with the language. "Nein?" "Nein?" I said. "That's no, isn't it?" I said. "That's no, isn't it?"

"Very good," she said.

"Auf wiedersehen," I said. "That's goodbye, isn't it?" I said. "That's goodbye, isn't it?"

"Until we meet again," she said.

"Oh," I said. "Well-auf wiedersehen."

"Auf wiedersehen," she said. she said.

9.

ENTER MY BLUE.

FAIRY G.o.dMOTHER ...

I WAS RECRUITED WAS RECRUITED as an American agent in 1938, three years before America got into the war. I was recruited one spring day in the Tiergarten in Berlin. as an American agent in 1938, three years before America got into the war. I was recruited one spring day in the Tiergarten in Berlin.

I had been married to Helga Noth a month.

I was twenty-six.

I was a fairly successful playwright, writing in the language in which I write best, German. I had one play, "The Goblet," running in both Dresden and Berlin. Another play of mine, "The Snow Rose." was then in production in Berlin. I had just finished a third one, "Seventy Times Seven." All three plays were medieval romances, about as political as chocolate eclairs.

I was sitting alone on a park bench in the sunshine that day, thinking of a fourth play that was beginning to write itself in my mind. It gave itself a t.i.tle, which was "Das Reich der Zwei" "Das Reich der Zwei"-"Nation of Two."

It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves-a nation of two.

On a bench across the path from me a middle-aged American now sat down. He looked like a fool and a gasbag. He untied his shoelaces to relieve his feet, and he began to read a month-old copy of the Chicago Sunday Tribune Sunday Tribune.

Three handsome officers of the S.S. stalked down the walk between us.

When they were gone, the man put his paper down and spoke to me in tw.a.n.ging Chicago English. "Nice-looking men," he said.

"I suppose," I said.

"You understand English?" he said.