Jaeger had memorized the names and features of dozens of towns on his line of march — Roqueblanc, Lepont, Spa and Werbomont — and was familiar with their roads, bridges, rivers, as well as their distances from Allied supplies and gasoline depots.
He had been working on these maps and notes yesterday when Rosa and Hannah ran in from school. They were shy with him at first but broke into giggles and laughter when he sang their favorite song to them, “Der Jaeger aus Kurpfalz,” which they had always thought had been written especially for them:
“A hunter of Kurpfalz is riding through the green woods—
He shoots the wild game, just the way he likes best.
Trara, trara
Gar lustig ist die Jaegerei
Allhier auf gruener Heid.”
He had bounced them lightly on his knees as if they were on horseback, and the motion made their blond hair swing and catch sparks of sun coming over the church steeples and through the tall windows. Yet the silly, jolly old song had sadly caused the only time of friction between Jaeger and his wife.
“It’s a waste of time to give them memories from the past,” Hedy had said. “It’s not what other people will remember about us.”
Jaeger felt an anger impossible to control. “So they won’t let us forget our past? And just whom do you mean by they? The rootless Americans with their idiot culture of chewing gum and cowboys? Or the English whose passion for freedom never extended to the continents they enslaved? Or are you perhaps speaking of the French, Hedy, who collaborated with us in their own disgrace? Is that the they you mean? Or the Poles whose brains would shame oxen, or those blockheaded Dutchmen?...”
Their enemies knew nothing of Germany’s struggle against intellectual decadence, Jaeger thought as he now buckled his field case, perversions flourishing in the name of freedom, standards proclaiming that right and wrong existed only as concepts to frighten children. Who were they in their insolence to damn Germany? His country had been gutted and its ashes ground into mud and slime. But the world knew only enemy propaganda, the beer hall rowdies, the smashed windows, the yellow stars...
He paced in front of the dead winter garden, hands clenching and unclenching as he attempted to control his erratic thoughts... The so-called avant-garde artists and architects weren’t welcome in Germany because they represented a sickness and distortion that drained the strength of a healthy people. Hitler himself had been shocked by the spectacle of Expressionist paintings in this very city of Dresden and had ordered the gallery closed. Nudity was banned and the American Negress, Josephine Baker, expelled from Berlin, not for her songs or because she was black but because she had had the audacity to perform naked... And with her had gone the gypsies and homosexuals and beggars. And the so-called artists and whores. But what of the Jews? Hadn’t they flourished here? Only an imbecile would deny it. Who had destroyed this? The Germans, or the intellectuals, or the Jews? Kurt Tucholsky with his taunts at humiliated veterans, attacking whatever shreds of patriotism the German people had been left with. And George Grosz’ cartoons as savage as a knife thrust, caricaturing his German hosts as thick-necked brutes with bulging eyes and nostrils like snouts fit only to be lowered into gutters or foaming steins of beer. What in God’s name had they expected? Tucholsky had proudly proclaimed, “There is no secret of the German Army I would not readily hand over to a foreign power.” Was that sentiment to be taken lightly by a nation on its knees from a brutal war and an even more brutal peace? No, he thought — he turned back and forth in front of the frosted windows, his boots matching the furious rhythm of his heart — after Versailles the pacifism of the intellectuals was the highest treason. Yet it was these same aesthetes, tireless and clever with their talk, Germans as well as Jews, a cutting edge of self-styled advanced thought that proposed a mingling of German and Jewish bloods, arguing that the Hebraic strain would provide a healthy correction to the dullness and heaviness of the German character. An infusion of agile Jewish genetic stimuli to turn Germany into a more lively place, a nation of sly humors, and shrewder heads and hands.
He tried to calm himself, standing quite still and breathing slowly and deeply. Why should it concern him? They were all gone now, the artists, the intellectuals, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the whores. But again he thought of the Jews. Was anti-Semitism some peculiar miasma rising only from Germany? He had read in a newspaper... What is the fastest thing in the world? A kike on a bike in the Reich. But not in a German newspaper, no, an American newspaper.
His thoughts swung with pendulum force in an opposite direction, and his heart began to pound so hard that the sound frightened him. He tried to dam up a flood of agonizing memories, to obliterate the shadows forming in his mind. Taking the briar pipe from his pocket, he drove the stem with all his strength into the back of his hand, but the pain didn’t distract him and the inside of his head felt hot, his thoughts revealed to him in pitiless clarity... Armies were marching against him, he could hear them clearly, and the effect was so vivid, dismaying that he put a hand against his desk for support. But it wasn’t boots sounding with the crash of war or trumpets leading a charge, it was a dance of sound and music and in the ranks of that army there were the accusing eyes of those whose homes and shops stood empty now in cities and hamlets across the German fatherland. They looked at him as Rudi Geldman once had, and Jaeger knew where they had gone, even though a part of his mind still shouted that he did not.
They all knew those names, the names of Dachau and Belsen and Buchenwald at Weimar, where Goethe wrote Faust, and Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka, Belsec and Auschwitz... His strange faintness left him when he heard a voice from his father’s room, the old man coughing or calling out weakly for him, but Jaeger resisted the plea and continued to stare through the windows at the thin sunlight on the spires of the city.
Albrecht Jaeger sat alone in the small bedroom off the kitchen. In the daytime his view was of church steeples and a shining curve of the Elbe, but Hedy had drawn the blackout curtains earlier and now the only light in the room came from a gooseneck lamp on his night table. A breakfront, its glass doors removed, bulged with books and correspondence.
He had suffered a stroke three years ago, almost a month to the day after his fifty-sixth birthday. He knew he looked much older than his age; without exercise, his once powerful body had collapsed in on itself, leaving him frail and weary in the grip of his wheelchair. His left eye was covered with a black patch, a vivid contrast to his thin white hair. Since his stroke, that eye had become painfully sensitive to the light but his good eye glowed brightly, almost fiercely, in his ravaged face and he was grateful that he had no difficulty in reading with it. He wore the same dark and simple suit that he had worn in his classrooms for many years. Across his knees was a gray woolen shawl that Hedy had knitted for him, and on top of it his pale and heavily veined hands were locked together to prevent them from trembling.
He called out again, a contorted sound, but his son didn’t answer him; the silence in the small flat remained heavy and oppressive.
The worst effect of his stroke was that it had deprived him of coherent speech. He could recall words and form them into linked sentences in his mind, but the massive temblor in his brain had destroyed his mnemonic sensors so that it was literally one chance in millions that the words he uttered would have any connection with what he was trying to say.