Well, this is news, he says. This is wonderful news. When can I read it? Do I get to see it before you’re done?
You’ll see it soon, I say.
I hope so. What an undertaking. Correcting the sins of the father and all that?
A corrective, yes. I never did understand why you thought fiction was the way to tell the truth about what happened. Maybe I understand a little better now.
Are you sticking to the facts? he says.
I’ve tried to.
You’ve taken no liberties?
Maybe one or two.
And have you found that they grow? They’re like seeds, aren’t they? Before you know it, you’ve got a forest.
That might be true, I say.
We like to believe we can control the story, he says, or for that matter how we live, not that there’s really any difference. But we don’t. The truth comes when it’s ready. It hides when it’s not. Don’t confuse fact with truth. That book—it’s always needed you to make it right. You’ve always been the thing that’s missing.
The raven pumps into the spitting sky when I start my car. There’s a little choo-choo-train puff of smoke from my father’s chimney, the forest behind the house a gingerbread fantasyland of evergreens dripping with icing.
Back to the city, praising Audi all-wheel drive the whole way, the silver four-ring logo staring at me from the steering wheel, cousin to Krupp’s triclopean hoops, brother to the Olympic loops, chains all, methods of restraint—but these are only idle observations, distractions to occupy my mind as I slice southward toward the city, as I slide into the tollbooth lane, greened for EZ passage, as I barrel down the West Side Highway, hugging the river, past my favorite sloop, Ishtar, my signal to exit, weirdly having reappeared at its mooring in the dead of winter, and east to the Apelles. The city is producing some slushy precipitate mess, nothing worthy of being called snow, but portentous.
28.
Albert Caldwell was thirty-nine when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, too long in the tooth, and too well connected, anyway, for the infantry, thus inducted as an officer in 1942 and assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Discharged 1945, he was called back in 1947 to work on the “subsequent proceedings” against Alfried Krupp at Nuremberg. The primary proceedings had failed to win a conviction against Gustav, the family patriarch and head of the firm, whom the court had deemed mentally unfit, and the U.S. was bringing a new case, one in which his son, Alfried, was charged with four counts: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, use of slave labor, and conspiracy. Albert worked on the team prosecuting Krupp for using slave labor in its factories both within and outside Germany.
Albert’s discovery notes for Cecelia Goetz, the counsel in charge, were accurate, carefully executed, and surprisingly absent the condescending tone that crept into the notes of many of Goetz’s subordinates (men, all). Albert respected Goetz deeply, though his motivations were hardly noble. He’d never worked for a woman before, and never again would. He knew as well as anyone that back home no private firm would hire a woman, thus he wasn’t competing with her for an office in New York. This knowledge afforded him the ability to work calmly, with no concern for his own future. It was the only time in his life he felt comfortable conversing with another lawyer about questions to which he had no answers. He and Goetz endlessly discussed the intractable problem before the prosecution: What punishment could possibly equal the crimes Krupp had committed? Albert was adamant that a death sentence was far from adequate. What was a hanging? A quick jolt and then darkness. A firing squad? A painless moment of shock. A quick death was no punishment at all. Death should be a reward dangled at the end of a stick until the convicted begged night and day for it. But how to push a convicted Nazi to that point? Flaying? Boiling? Catherine wheel? They were hardly even beginnings.
That each of the perpetrators could die only once was, for Albert, a powerful argument against a natural state of justice. How many times would each member of the executive board of the corporation need to die to make up for the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands of people? How weak the mechanism for exacting revenge we have been granted, and how unimaginative our solutions, he’d said to Cecelia, who took a more measured approach: Punishment was imperfect because it required concessions to the humanity of the punishers. Of course there was no natural state of justice—justice was a human creation, and relied entirely on human behavior to define its parameters and enforce its boundaries. To think otherwise was naïve. Were it in her power to dole out torture, to do so would erase her own humanity, turn her into a monstrosity, and pervert the very rights she’d sworn to protect.
Albert interviewed a number of witnesses, including Jewish survivors of camps at Fünfteichen and Markstädt, which had supplied the bulk of the labor to the armament factories in Poland. Among the stories he recorded: a Polish Jew, Janusz Stern, assigned to work at a Krupp factory and beaten to death on the factory floor for laughing at a joke. Albert crisscrossed southeastern Poland searching for an electrician’s apprentice, the lone surviving non-German eyewitness, but in the end could only determine that he’d disappeared near the Russian front.
Albert worked two years on the case. Krupp’s sentence: twelve years and forfeiture of property. Not even three years later, General John McCloy ordered that Krupp was to be freed from Landsberg, his property restored. The only thing worse than a Nazi was a communist, and Stalin’s shadow was creeping across the continent. The U.S. needed a strong, industrialized Germany between the Reds and the free people of Western Europe. Cecelia Goetz was right. Justice is a concession to the humanity of the punishers. If we were made to atone for the sins of our fathers, there’d be no one left.
I understand now that my father was trying to atone. He might not have burned and broken his body, but his illogical fears, the terrors that controlled his movements through the world, were punishments, daily reminders of his sin. His books were shrines to the death of Janusz Stern. Every crooked word he wrote was an act of remembrance. Every malformed character, every faulty structure, every looping metafictional roller coaster. For decades he failed to write a single word of truth, and that was his lasting memorial to what he’d witnessed in that Krupp factory. The book he hated most, the one he always said was the biggest lie of all, the one that made him famous, made him wealthy, and forced him to create yet another version of himself in order to deal with the praise, Slingshot, was the story of a Jewish teacher who escaped the Nazis, set in Poland in 1944. All those years he was writing negatives, reverse images. The more he lied, the more books he sold. A person could be forgiven for thinking that the whole world is inside out.
29.
The air had frozen and cracked open so that it could spontaneously generate snow without need of the clunky cloud-based apparatus, a spectacular advance in meteorological destruction, a full-bore whitewash, wall-to-wall cotton sludge, a ubiquitous visual plane that induced in my father an acute claustrophobia because he couldn’t—yes, it was true—see his hand in front of his face. Whiteout conditions! he thought (he couldn’t help himself from naming everything, however banal; he was sure that even as he drew his final breath he would be cataloguing the room, Table, Chair, Wife, Window, and his dying words would be something profound like Ceiling Fan) and went on to consider that on the ice caps this was how explorers died, lashed together by a length of rope, sausage links snaking blindly around in wobbly parabolas, spirograph patterns, tangled knots that enfolded the fools in their open-air tomb, though it was easier to recover the corpses when the thaw arrived several months later…