That seemed all there was to it, but Martin’s mouth was still open. I tried to remember more. “There was hell because we had left the gun and the other things on the ground. By the time they got out to the field, someone had stolen the parachute — probably for the cloth. We were in trouble over that, and we never got credit for having taken a prisoner. I went back to the field alone later on. I wanted to cry, for some reason — because it was over. He was from an adventure story to me. The whole war was a Karl May adventure, when I was fourteen and running around in school holidays with a gun. I found some small things in the field that had been overlooked — pills for keeping awake, pills in transparent envelopes. I had never seen that before. One envelope was called ‘motion sickness.’ It was a crime to keep anything, but I kept it anyway. I still had it when the Americans captured me, and they took it away. I had kept it because it was from another world. I would look at it and wonder. I kept it because of The Last of the Mohicans, because, because.”
This was the longest story I had ever told in my life. I added, “My grandmother is dead now.” My stepfather had finally shut his mouth. He looked at my mother as if to say that she had brought him a rival in the only domain that mattered — the right to talk everyone’s ear off. My mother edged close to Willy Wehler and urged him to eat bread and cheese. She was still in the habit of wondering what the other person thought and how important he might be and how safe it was to speak. But Willy had not heard more than a sentence or two. That was plain from the way the expression on his face came slowly awake. He opened his eyes wide, as if to get sleep out of them, and — evidently imagining I had been talking about my life in France — said, “What were you paid as a prisoner?”
I had often wondered what the first question would be once I was home. Now I had it.
“Ha!” said my stepfather, giving the impression that he expected me to be caught out in a monstrous lie.
“One franc forty centimes a month for working here and there on a farm,” I said. “But when I became a free worker with a druggist the official pay was three thousand francs a month, and that was what he gave me.” I paused. “And of course I was fed and housed and had no laundry bills.”
“Did you have bedsheets?” said my mother.
“With the druggist’s family, always. I had one sheet folded in half. It was just right for a small cot.”
“Was it the same sheet as the kind the family had?” she said, in the hesitant way that was part of her person now.
“They didn’t buy sheets especially for me,” I said. “I was treated fairly by the druggist, but not by the administration.”
“Aha,” said the two older men, almost together.
“The administration refused to pay my fare home,” I said, looking down into my glass the way I had seen the men in prison camp stare at a fixed point when they were recounting a grievance.
“A prisoner of war has the right to be repatriated at administration expense. The administration would not pay my fare because I had stayed too long in France — but that was their mistake. I bought a ticket as far as Paris on the pay I had saved. The druggist sold me some old shoes and trousers and a jacket of his. My own things were in rags. In Paris I went to the YMCA. The YMCA was supposed to be in charge of prisoners’ rights. The man wouldn’t listen to me. If I had been left behind, then I was not a prisoner, he said; I was a tourist. It was his duty to help me. Instead of that, he informed the police.” For the first time my voice took on the coloration of resentment. I knew that this complaint about a niggling matter of train fare made my whole adventure seem small, but I had become an old soldier. I remembered the police commissioner, with his thin lips and dirty nails, who said, “You should have been repatriated years ago, when you were sixteen.”
“It was a mistake,” I told him.
“Your papers are full of strange mistakes,” he said, bending over them. “There, one capital error. An omission, a grave omission. What is your mother’s maiden name?”
“Wickler,” I said.
I watched him writing “W-i-e-c-k-l-a-i-r,” slowly, with the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote. “You have been here for something like five years with an incomplete dossier. And what about this? Who crossed it out?”
“I did. My father was not a pastry cook.”
“You could be fined or even jailed for this,” he said.
“My father was not a pastry cook,” I said. “He had tuberculosis. He was not allowed to handle food.”
Willy Wehler did not say what he thought of my story. Perhaps not having any opinion about injustice, even the least important, had become a habit of his, like my mother’s of speaking through her fingers. He was on the right step of that staircase I’ve spoken of. Even the name he had given his daughter was a sign of his sensitivity to the times. Nobody wanted to hear the pagan, Old Germanic names anymore — Sigrun and Brunhilde and Sieglinde. Willy had felt the change. He would have called any daughter something neutral and pretty — Gisela, Marianne, Elisabeth — anytime after the battle of Stalingrad. All Willy ever had to do was sniff the air.
He pushed back his chair (in later years he would be able to push a table away with his stomach) and got to his feet. He had to tip his head to look up into my eyes. He said he wanted to give me advice that would be useful to me as a latehomecomer. His advice was to forget. “Forget everything,” he said. “Forget, forget. That was what I said to my good neighbor Herr Silber when I bought his wife’s topaz brooch and earrings before he emigrated to Palestine. I said, ‘Dear Herr Silber, look forward, never back, and forget, forget, forget.’ ”
The child in Willy’s arms was in the deepest of sleeps. Martin Toeppler followed his friend to the door, they whispered together; then the door closed behind both men.
“They have gone to have a glass of something at Herr Wehler’s,” said my mother. I saw now that she was crying quietly. She dried her eyes on her apron and began clearing the table of the homecoming feast. “Willy Wehler has been kind to us,” she said. “Don’t repeat that thing.”
“About forgetting?”
“No, about the topaz brooch. It was a crime to buy anything from Jews.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
She lowered the tray she held and looked pensively out at the wrecked houses across the street. “If only people knew beforehand what was allowed,” she said.
“My father is probably a hero now,” I said.
“Oh, Thomas, don’t travel too fast. We haven’t seen the last of the changes. Yes, a hero. But too late for me. I’ve suffered too much.”
“What does Martin think that he died oft”
“A working accident. He can understand that.”
“You could have said consumption. He did have it.” She shook her head. Probably she had not wanted Martin to imagine he could ever be saddled with two sickly stepsons. “Where do you and Martin sleep?”
“In the room next to the bathroom. Didn’t you see it? You’ll be comfortable here in the parlor. The couch pulls out. You can stay as long as you like. This is your home. A home for you and Chris.” She said this so stubbornly that I knew some argument must have taken place between her and Martin.