“Excuse me?” said my grandfather.
She frowned at him for an instant, then consulted the card. “Entschuldigung!” She said finally. “Wrong line.”
“That’s quite all right, miss. If you’d care to switch to English, we might—”
“Erzählen Sie mir nicht die ganze Geschichte; geben Sie mir eine Zusammenfassung.”
“A summary of my life?” Kaspar let out a sigh. “That’s a rather tall order. Perhaps I should leave that to my grandchildren.”
“You have grandchildren?” Ilse asked sharply, in English.
“Not yet, no. But children, I have.”
“I see,” she said, recovering her composure. “Aus wieviel Leuten besteht die Besatzung jenes Bombers?” (“How many people comprise the crew of that bomber?”)
“I have two daughters — Enzian and Gentian. I had a wife, Sonja, who died in the course of our passage from Vienna. Her parents stayed behind, as did my brother.”
“Die Flotte hat schwere Verluste gehabt.” (“The fleet has sustained heavy losses.”)
He nodded. “Yes indeed, fräulein. We have.”
Ilse blushed when he addressed her as “fräulein,” although there was nothing inappropriate about it, and Kaspar began to feel cautiously optimistic.
* * *
She brought him home two nights later — she rented a studio of her own, on the east side of town, another black mark on her record — and the game was taken up where they’d left off. They’d had a perfectly conventional date, slurping linguine con vongole at one of Buffalo’s countless Sicilian pasta parlors and making trite small talk in English; but as soon as the door closed behind them, Ilse gave a dark laugh, a different person entirely, and drew forth the cards with a flourish. From that moment on — until they were laid out, naked and exhausted, across the folding army cot she slept on — their spoken communication, according to my grandfather’s (wonderfully unexpurgated) diary, consisted exclusively of these strategic phrases:
“Still halten!” (“Keep still!”)
“Keinen Laut!” (“Don’t make a sound!”)
“Hinlegen!” (“Lie down!”)
“Schnell, hier herum!” (“Quick, this way!”)
“Hände auf den Rücken!” (“Hands behind your back!”)
Then, some minutes later:
“Verstehen Sie diesen Apparat?” (“Do you understand this apparatus?”)
And finally:
“Die Vorkehrungen, Sie nach hinten zu schicken, sind getroffen.” (“The arrangements have been finalized to send you to the rear.”)
Worldly though he ought to have been by this point in his duration, Kaspar reeled at Ilse’s easy lewdness, which made even Sonja (he would not think of her — not now) seem as genteel as a governess. It’s the middle of the century, grandpa, he told himself when it was over, not without a certain melancholy. Women are wearing men’s work shirts now, and telling us what they want in plain language, at least behind closed doors. They’re even fucking like men. I suppose it’s because of the war.
For the first time in his experience, staring into the Victorian standing mirror at the foot of Ilse’s cot, Kaspar felt the involuntary defensiveness of the old. Meeting her, splendid and implausible though it was, had aged him overnight. But this was a small price to pay for such a stroke of preposterous fortune — he’d been on the cusp of his dotage already, after all — and he paid without the slightest hesitation.
* * *
Within the year, to his enduring amazement, Ilse had taken Kaspar’s name and all the worry that came with it, and on February 2, 1943—the same day, auspiciously enough, as the German surrender at Stalingrad — she bore him a plump-cheeked, walleyed baby boy. But the past wasn’t willing to set Kaspar free yet.
In the late fall of 1942, a few months before his wedding to Ilse, a brown paper parcel arrived in Buffalo Bill’s mailbox, addressed to Konrad B. Toula, Professor of Physics, with a New Mexico return address. My grandfather, who had only the vaguest idea where New Mexico was, opened the parcel with caution — and for once his intuition was correct. The author of the letter was a man named Oppenheimer, who purported to be a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Even more surprisingly, he claimed to have read — in the original German — the only scholarly paper that Kaspar had ever published: a study of radioactive decay.
Professor Oppenheimer had recently been appointed by the United States government to direct a project of considerable import to the national defense — or so he claimed — about which he could say nothing further by mail. Would Professor Toula (the use of his original surname irked my grandfather, for some reason) consider a visit to Los Alamos, where a state-of-the-art facility (the exact nature of which could, regrettably, not be gone into in writing) was in the final stages of completion? All expenses paid by Uncle Sam, of course.
My grandfather was anything but impervious to flattery, especially from a colleague; he hadn’t thought of himself as a physicist since well before the Flight into Egypt, and it felt unexpectedly good. There was his betrothed to consider, of course, and his cousin Wilhelm, and his bosses at Kaiser’s, and the twins, who’d just begun attending a new school; on the other hand, Kaspar thought — admiring the Army Corps of Engineers letterhead and the pistachio-colored card stock it was printed on — it looked as though there might be money in it. Before he sat down to reply to the letter, Kaspar got out his AAA Atlas of America (a present from Ilse, who dreamed of a honeymoon road trip) and opened it to a map of the Southwest.
* * *
Imagining this moment — which has the distinction, unique in this history, of being significant because of what it didn’t lead to — I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if my grandfather had taken Oppenheimer up on his offer. It plays out in my mind in glaring Technicolor, a set of train tracks diverging with all the dizzying smoothness of those What if? stories my father used to churn out for the pulps. Ilse might have gone with him to New Mexico, might have agreed to postpone their wedding and support him in the long incubation of Fat Man and his plucky sidekick, Little Boy — then again, she might have angrily refused. There might have been no sparsely attended Cheektowaga wedding — no Orson, no me. The quest to decipher my great-grandfather’s notes might have ended with Kaspar, subsumed in the even more glorious quest to reduce our planet to a lump of frozen ashes. I’d never have materialized at my cousin’s party, Mrs. Haven, never have met you underneath that kitchen counter.
What if?
I picture my grandfather standing next to the All-Powerful Opp, his fists stuffed into his lab coat’s starched white pockets, observing the first H-bomb test at Trinity. Everyone is wearing cardboard 3-D glasses, for some reason, and nervously checking their Kaiserwerks watches. The priapic observation tower and the tiny men inside it are suddenly flooded by the flat gray light of nightmare, and for a nanosecond the landscape is completely stripped of shadow. In this version, it’s Kaspar, not Oppenheimer, who murmurs the notorious line from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. The symmetry with his brother would then have been perfect: both would have contributed, however modestly, to the signature horrors of mankind’s most apocalyptic age.