Mother Night Part 6

A WELL-PRESERVED.

WOMAN ...

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

As we pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d?"

"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 you cable me?" 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 s.l.u.ts," she said, "married to mud. When the war was over, n.o.body 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 n.a.z.i, 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 grat.i.tude 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."

17.

AUGUST KRAPPTAUER.

GOES TO VALHALLA ...

VICE-BUNDESFUEHRER K KRAPPTAUER, 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.

n.o.body 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, j.a.panese 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 p.r.o.nounced 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."

"What was it called?" I said.

"The Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Const.i.tution," said Jones. "He had a real talent for welding perfectly ordinary youths into a disciplined, determined force." Jones shook his head sadly. "He was getting such a fine response from the young people."

"He loved young people, and young people loved him," said Father Keeley. He was still weeping.

"That's the epitaph that should be carved on his tombstone," said Jones. "He used to work with youngsters in my cellar. You should see how he fixed it up for them-just ordinary kids from all walks of life."

"Kids who would ordinarily be at loose ends and getting into trouble," said Father Keeley.

"He was one of the greatest admirers you ever had," Jones said to me.

"He was?" I said.

"Back when you were broadcasting, he never missed listening to you. When he went to prison, the first thing he did was build a short-wave receiver, just so he could go on listening to you. Every day he was bubbling over with the things you'd said the night before."

"Um," I said.

"You were a beacon, Mr. Campbell," said Jones pa.s.sionately. "Do you realize what a beacon you were through all those black years?"

"Nope," I said.

"Krapptauer had hoped you'd be the Idealism Officer for the Iron Guard," said Jones.

"I'm the Chaplain," said Keeley.

"Oh, who, who, who will lead the Iron Guard now?" said Jones. "Who will step forward and pick up the fallen torch?"

There was a sharp, strong knock on the door. I opened the door, and outside stood Jones' chauffeur, a wrinkled old colored man with malevolent yellow eyes. He wore a black uniform with white piping, a Sam Browne belt, a nickel-plated whistle, a Luftwaffe Luftwaffe hat without insignia, and black leather puttees. hat without insignia, and black leather puttees.

There was no Uncle Tom in this cotton-haired old colored man. He walked in arthritically, but his thumbs were hooked into his Sam Browne belt, his chin was thrust out at us, and he kept his hat on.

"Everything all right up here?" he said to Jones. "You was up here so long."

"Not quite," said Jones. "August Krapptauer died."

The Black Fuehrer of Harlem took the news in stride. "All dying, all dying," he said. "Who's gonna pick up the torch when everybody's dead?"

"I just asked the same question myself," said Jones. He introduced me to Robert.

Robert didn't shake hands. "I heard about you," he said, "but I ain't never listened to you."

"Well-" I said, "you can't please all the people all of the time."

"We was on opposite sides," said Robert.

"I see," I said. I didn't know anything about him, was agreeable to his belonging to any side that suited him.

"I was on the colored folks' side," he said. "I was with the j.a.panese."

"Uh-huh," I said.

"We needed you, and you needed us-" he said, speaking of the alliance between Germany and j.a.pan in the Second World War. "Only there was a lot of things we couldn't what you'd call agree about."

"I guess that's so," I said.

"I mean I heard you say you don't think the colored people was so good," said Robert.

"Now, now," said Jones soothingly. "What useful purpose does it serve for us to squabble among ourselves? The thing to do is to pull together."

"I just want to tell him what I tell you," said Robert. "I tell this Reverend gentleman here the same thing every morning, the same thing I tell you now. I give him his hot cereal for breakfast, and then I tell him: 'The colored people are gonna rise up in righteous wrath, and they're gonna take over the world. White folks gonna finally lose!'"

"All right, Robert," said Jones patiently.

"The colored people gonna have hydrogen bombs all their own," he said. "They working on it right now. Pretty soon gonna be j.a.pan's turn to drop one. The rest of the colored folks gonna give them the honor of dropping the first one."

"Where they going to drop it?" I said.

"China, most likely," he said.

"On other colored people?" I said.

He looked at me pityingly. "Who ever told you a Chinaman was a colored man?" he said.

18.

WERNER NOTH'S BEAUTIFUL BLUE VASE ...

HELGA AND I were finally left alone. I were finally left alone.

We were shy.

Being a man of fairly advanced years, so many of the years having been spent in celibacy, I was more than shy. I was afraid to test my strength as a lover. And the fear was amplified by the remarkable number of youthful characteristics my Helga had miraculously retained.