“There’s this guy,” he finally told them. “I ran across him and we were having a smoke because he’s from the Midwest anyway, Illinois, right, and he’s been transferred. Anyway, we swap our names and when he hears mine, my last name, he makes me repeat it twice and he gets this look on his face, like he’s remembering something. All of a sudden he snaps his fingers and he says, ‘I know why you look familiar… and that name. There is this guy looks kinda like you and he’s got the same name Waldsomething in the camp where I was a guard way up north.’ His first name? He didn’t know. He’s a POW.”
Fidelis put his beer down with slow precision. He adjusted the glass on the table, then raised his head. He stared quizzically at Markus, and when his son looked back at him, biting his lip, nodding slightly, Fidelis hid his face in his hands. For a long time no one said a thing. There was a fuzzy quiet in the kitchen, and the cranking whine and then roar of the cooler generators across the yard underneath the wild grape vines. Schatzie appeared at the door and Delphine rose and let her in. Everyone watched the dog walk calmly through the room, straight to her post in the hall. Markus took a sip of his beer again, and then he spoke. “The guy said one other thing… I should tell you. He said this prisoner… he never talks, but sings. The guy can sing, this Waldvogel.”
Fidelis gripped his fingers together now, and his head began to nod up and down as he glared before him.
“I got us a clearance. It took some doing, but I’ve got the papers right here.” Markus patted his breast pocket. “So I’m heading up there tomorrow,” he said, very softly.
“I am going with you,” said Fidelis. “Can we get him released from this place? Er ist ein Junge.”
“I know,” said Markus, “but I doubt they’ll let him go. To tell the truth, I know they won’t, Dad, but we can visit him. That’s something. It’s a big thing, Dad — you don’t know how hard I worked, how many strings I pulled.”
Together, unspeaking, the two went out front to close the shop. They worked side by side, washing down equipment, checking the coolers, counting and securing the cash from the drawer.
Delphine let them go and stayed in the kitchen, began to clatter dishes, wash pots. As she always did when things were troubled, she started to bake. Cookies, she thought distractedly, pouring out ingredients, sifting flour. Gingersnaps. Measuring and stirring helped her make sense of things. Going up there — she didn’t want to do it, just an instinct. She didn’t want to see the men shattered if the boy wasn’t Erich or Emil and also she didn’t even want to see if the boy was one of them. There was too much that would be answered, in too short a time. How he’d changed and how he had survived. How he got into the war in the first place, so young. And would he have news about his twin? Perhaps she was just protecting herself, she thought, putting the cookies in the oven. And she thought that again, the next morning, as she watched Markus and Fidelis drive out of the yard and down the road. Protecting herself. Perhaps her place was really to be sitting next to her husband, to hold his hand in the car as they drove along. But she couldn’t. For all those reasons. And then, too, there was a voice in her that asked a small and terrible question, a quiet question, one she would not ever speak aloud. For the news was all over the place, rumors and horrors coming out, and she had to wonder knowing what she read in magazines and papers if they had killed any… in her mind she said innocent people, or civilians, but in her heart she thought Jews.
AS THEY CLEARED the flat North Dakota prairie and entered sandy pinelands and rolling prairie of central Minnesota, which they would drive all day, Markus had the childish urge to ask his father to sing to him in the car. His father had the side vent open and was smoking but letting the smoke out into the rush of air. Markus would have begun to sing himself, as a way of starting without directly asking his father, but he was embarrassed about the quality of his voice, the scratchy thin tunelessness of it, no melody, a talent he wished he’d inherited. Instead, he got his mother’s curious mind, he guessed, her drive to learn things and her oversensitive nature. He would have had a hard time of it in training if he hadn’t also learned from Delphine to talk back smart and keep his eye out for bullshit. If he hadn’t learned from his father’s friends how to play a good game of poker. Thank God he played cards, kept himself in a man’s game, otherwise they would have stepped all over him.
The roadway was narrow, with potholes and near washouts, and the two traveled slowly north and then due east into the deepening forest. The former prison guard had drawn a map of the location, which he maybe thought he shouldn’t have done. Markus knew just about what he was looking for anyway. It wouldn’t be some big secret. The camp was set on the edge of state forest lands, which were marked. And there was just one fairly obvious train track that the highway followed for a long time.
They reached the place in the late afternoon, drove down the simple rut of a logging road, and parked at the barbed-wire-and-log entrance. There was just one man on duty, too casual in a rumpled uniform. He stopped them, took the papers from Markus, and shot a few questions at them. Nodded in surprised intrigue when he found out one of the prisoners might actually be American born.
“You gotta wait, they’re out burning slash,” he told them.
So Markus and Fidelis sat in the car, the doors open, breathing the green air of pines and eating some chocolate bars Markus had bought back at his PX. They weren’t the kind that could be bought almost anywhere else. They saved one. Then they tried not to smoke too many cigarettes or to say too many times, “I wonder if it’s one of them,” or “it’s probably not.” They tried to keep a lucid conversation going, but without Delphine their meanings tangled and finally it was best to simply sit there, silently, letting their thoughts drift, lighting and stubbing out cigarettes.
They tried not to jump up when the men came back, but couldn’t help it, and stood on one side of the car scanning the men intently as the work crew neared from down the road. At once, they recognized Erich. He was still strong, bull-chested, ruddy, and had the same gold lights in brown hair. He was wearing an old rumpled uniform jacket, the blue POW clothing, and a pair of washed-out dungarees. He saw them too, right away, startled by their shouts. They could tell he knew them from the involuntary wildness in his eyes, a shock he covered as he looked away from them both. Erich gazed straight ahead at the entrance, kept a rigid profile as they rushed toward him, didn’t turn when they were held away from the men by the American guards. As Erich passed, they talked to him, called out to him, names and anxious questions. But he locked his features, narrowed his stony eyes, jammed his hands in his pockets when they started to shake.
Something in Erich’s boy stubbornness, so like his own, sent Fidelis over the slippery edge of worry and relief into a blood bent rage. So immediate was his anger that he opened his mouth and roared, at the back of his retreating son, an old threat he’d used when Erich was a child. Then he swore his full swear, which always stopped everyone around him and made the boys shrink away and go still. HeilundKreuzmillionenDonnerwetternocheinmal!
Some of the other prisoners did stop, and one or two of them smiled in startled recognition, as though at their own fathers’ oath, but Erich did not turn to look. He kept on walking. His hands hardened and his mouth twitched slightly with derision. He gathered himself, his thoughts. He wasn’t about to put himself in danger for reasons of mere sentiment. Besides, he was not who they thought he was, not at all. His father was an old man now and ruined, lost, foolish to have come here looking for someone whom he thought was Erich. This man who had sold his sausage all the way to North Dakota — now he looked bony and defeated. Not heroic or even strong. What he’d come to here was nothing, and the man was nothing, thought Erich. What absurd threats, too, as though he could hurt a trained soldier far more powerful in body and cunning in mind than Erich believed Fidelis Waldvogel ever had been in his life. As though anything that Fidelis roared could possibly affect Erich. He almost laughed, thinking of the bull’s pizzle hung on a nail behind the door — that used to frighten him. Now it seemed stupid, almost benign. His father’s arm had once been hot iron. His father’s blue glare had ruled him. And the gentleness, occasionally, that his father showed had made his sons slaves to its possibility. No more. Erich strode on, did not even turn when they cried out Emil’s name again. So they didn’t know yet! Ist gestorben, he thought angrily. Killed by one of your land mines. Leck’ mich am Arsch, he wanted to scream. They’d killed his brother, the other half of him. What did they want now? But after all he had been trained not to show his reaction and reminded himself that this was still war. Unlike most of the other men around him, Erich hadn’t swallowed Germany’s defeat with either the abundance of food or the friendliness of the people in the nearby town or even the American guards, with whom they spoke German. Erich’s fanaticism was that of the culturally insecure. He’d struggled to be a German, and not even captivity was going to destroy what he’d gone through when shipped off to Ludwigsruhe. Erich’s new father was a boundary on a map, a feeling for a certain song, a scrap of forest, a street. It was a romance as enduring as the spilled blood of his brother or the longing of Fidelis or the pains of this war. It was an idea that kept him walking through the prison gates.