The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  The potatoes she’d prepared sent clouds of steam rising from the bottom of the sink. The steam fogging up the window revealed the happy face, now revived, though more obliquely, that I’d drawn on the window in better times.

  “Go on, then, tell them,” he said. “Tell them your wonderful plans.”

  Sarcasm was not used in our house. It did not suit him one bit. It wasn’t the father I knew who’d speak like that. But what surprised me more was the fact that this rudeness did not give her pause. She met the taunt with an indifference that shocked and then, in a moment, pleased me, not for its own sake but for the fact that she would bring this odd tension between them to rest by not letting it affect her in the least.

  “Something good’s happened, boys. Come, sit,” she said. “I’m just trying to help your father understand. A blessing’s fallen at our feet.”

  Thomas and I looked at each other, puzzled. Our father remained standing.

  “I’m going home.” She repeated this in German, then smiled and opened her hands, like a magician releasing an invisible dove.

  “Only be for a short visit,” she said, switching back into English. “You won’t even notice I’m gone, you two running around wild all day the way you do.”

  She began to ladle out our supper, first to our father’s plate, then Thomas’s and mine, and lastly to her own.

  “Your father doesn’t think it’s such a good idea,” she said. “You can see that. I think I’ve made a worrywart of him. Is that the word—worrywart?”

  He’d made our kitchen table and chairs two or three years earlier. For a month the garage had smelled of white pine and glue. The chairs were stained a light-gold colour and bore the sort of German motifs that our mother stitched into the clothes she sewed for us. He’d cut the shape of a heart into the backrest of each chair roughly the size of what might have been an actual human heart, and now as he stared at his wife, our plates steaming with potatoes, he gripped the back of his chair through that cut-out heart and said he would not allow it.

  “You can’t trust those people to hold to this—this amnesty,” he said. “It’s propaganda. Just a lie.”

  It was the word Toby Schwabe had used, of course. But now it was much bigger than a schoolyard disagreement. The lie threatened something that still bound my parents together—trust or goodwill or maybe something as simple as common sense.

  They didn’t budge from their positions that evening as we ate our supper. It was a tense, brief meal, and afterwards they sought out opposite sides of the house.

  I sat in the backyard and played chess with my father. He was not so concentrated on our games as usual. I won two out of three, something that had never happened before. He didn’t say much, and after the third game he said he was going to work in the garden for a bit. This was something he did when he wanted to be alone.

  I found my mother sitting on the porch steps around front, an unfinished and as yet undefinable piece of clothing growing inch by inch from the tips of the needles that clacked away between her fingers. It was the soft, repetitive nature of this work that comforted her, as it did me. She seemed peaceful and almost happy now, though I didn’t know how that could be after what she’d proposed only an hour or so earlier.

  She nodded and smiled without speaking when I sat down beside her. The last of the day was fading, leaving behind its dash of orange in the sky. The colours playing on the field across the road deepened from purple and brown to a thick, sombre grey. She told me that all this would make sense one day. It might not now but it would. She said I’d look back and understand everything, maybe once I’d grown up and had a family of my own, and that sometimes people have to leave behind certain ideals they’d thought they would carry with them forever. I didn’t know what she was talking about. She used that word, ideals. It was an unusual word for her to use, in German or in English. I thought she was trying to communicate something to me about what happens when you’re married and about parents having disagreements and fighting sometimes. And then it was dark and we sat there for a while longer, me feeling unsure, but proud that my mother had spoken to me in this way, like I was old enough to understand about mothers and fathers, though I don’t think I was, and then with not enough light left in the sky to knit anymore we got up and went back inside.

  THAT NIGHT OUR FATHER sat at the edge of my bed and tried to convince us that we had nothing to worry about. “Your mother’s not going anywhere,” he said. It was the nostalgia she was prone to, he said. He’d probably be the same too if the shoe were on the other foot. We couldn’t blame her for missing her people back there. Her brother, at least. He paused for a moment. But it was an impossible country to go back to because the place she remembered wasn’t there anymore, he told us. The war had changed everything. There and here, he said. She was just having a hard time believing that.

  I wanted her to appear at the door then and nod silently, or maybe sit with us and say that things were going to get better soon. But she didn’t come and sit with us that night, and our father couldn’t think of anything else to say. He sat with us a little while longer, which was something he used to do when we were younger and there wasn’t the need to explain so much to us. Then he leaned forward and kissed us each on the forehead and left the room.

  MY MOTHER’S PARENTS HAD died since she’d come to Canada, but she had a younger brother back there who’d missed serving in the war by only a few years. He worked at the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation now as a cultural liaison officer between Germany and America. A letter came from him perhaps once a year. It was fascinating to watch my mother read these. Sitting opposite her, I’d see her face through the holes in the airmail paper where a censor had cut away a line here and there. I never asked where the cutting had been done, there or here, or what secrets between a brother and sister the person with the scissors was looking for. She’d sent at least as many to Munich, where he lived, and I imagined those light blue sheets of paper she so painstakingly wrote on snipped to a fragile fish-bone skeleton falling to pieces in her brother’s hand.

  Once we heard a documentary he’d worked on, broadcast from one of the dozen or so floating pirate radio stations on the fleet of ships dedicated to that purpose sailing the American side of the Great Lakes, aiming their propaganda into the heart of what they liked to call the “crumbling socialist commonwealth.” This was somewhere around 1956 or ’57 when the America First Committee started using radio and television to reach into the homes of millions of Americans and, more and more, into Canadian homes. I remember that evening clearly. I was eight or nine. My father was against it—tuning into that radio station. It was well known that doing so was prohibited and could lead to problems. They might cut your gasoline rations or your family food stamp quotas if they found out. But this was family, after all, my mother argued. We’d listen not for whatever politics it might bring but for a familiar voice, a blood connection. She’d not heard her brother’s voice in fifteen or more years by this point. My father finally relented.

  I felt a thrill of anticipation when we heard the signal come through that evening, faint and crackling from the storm that troubled the airwaves over the lake. Outside, sheets of rain beat against our living room window. My mother adjusted the dial, hoping for better reception. There were evenings when a signal came clear—others not at all. Sometimes it would drift from a regular station and suddenly, without us realizing at first, we’d be listening to the voice of the American poet Ezra Pound, who hosted a program called Nations Arise and spoke of the record of Hebrew barbarism and the lies of the British government-in-exile and the imminent annexation of Canada, Newfoundland, and Jamaica. There were other American stations and programs that weren’t jammed by the authorities. WNEB played Family Theatre, The Adventures of Sam Spade, and The Bing Crosby Show. WYRK had Perry Mason and the Western series called Red Ryder. My favourite was the Suspense Radio Theatre with Vincent Price, whose movies we saw on Main Street, as I said. I liked his voice and the way th
e music and the sound effects rose and fell in the background when he spoke.

  But that evening the signal came clear enough to make out what was being said, crackly and distant but it was there, and my mother’s face lit up when her brother’s voice rose from the speaker. He did not sound like her, of course, but in my child’s mind I almost expected him to. She took hold of my hand and squeezed when he spoke. This program, called The White Honour Hour, told stories in English and German from and about the Fatherland. He spoke in that smooth rich tenor that radio men used in those days and asked the many tens of thousands of German-Canadians repressed under Soviet-British rule if they were now ready to rise in whatever fashion they could. Strikes. Civil unrest. Even sabotage. The German people must free themselves from the socialist tyranny of colonial rule, he said.

  My father leaned forward and switched off the radio. The glow of the set flickered to darkness. It was one of the only times I saw my father visibly angry. He swore under his breath and stared at her, and then barked at us to get to bed. I heard them arguing from where I lay under my covers. It was a terrible thing to hear. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. Later I went to the stairs and saw my mother seated in the chair by the green lamp, her knitting needles in her hands. The storm outside had stopped now. I heard the sound of dripping against a windowsill. She didn’t move a muscle. My father was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was out walking, trying to clear his head. My mother didn’t move as she sat there, her eyes closed, thinking what, I’ll never know.

  WE SAW THE CONVOY of trucks pass through town close to midnight for a second time in three days after our mother announced her intention to go home. We stood behind the same hedge we had that first night and watched them rumble past. But this time Thomas stepped clear of the hedge and into the cone of light that came down from the overhead street lamp just as the last truck went past. He was eager to get to the lake where we might resume our vigil, I thought. But that wasn’t it. That’s not why he stepped out onto the curb. He wanted those men to see him. I had no idea what he was up to until he raised his right hand and gave the same salute the boys in the school hallway had mocked me with. He threw them a Sieg Heil like it was Göring himself in that last truck. He stood in the cone of light that fell from the street lamp, his arm unwavering, the lights of the trucks fading as they continued down Main Street. Our father had always talked about the importance of letting the town know that we were on the right side. That’s why we went as a family to the memorial services at Chisolm Square every August. That’s why he worked at the shipbuilding yard. That’s why we tolerated the fires on our front lawn when Remembrance Day came. It was clear now that my brother had made up his own mind about whose side he was on, and from that night onwards I waited with terror in my heart for men to come to our door with the eviction orders that would send us away.

  I KEPT MY DISTANCE for the next few days while I watched him, hoping for a sign that the salute was no more than a reckless impulse he now felt ashamed of. I listened for the sort of slurs and innuendo Toby had brought to me in the schoolyard a few months earlier but heard none. I’d confronted Thomas the evening of the salute as we stood on the beach, waiting for a sign of the Jewish refugees we thought would be coming ashore any time now. He shrugged at first and said nothing. I asked again what he was up to, why he’d done something like that. We could be forced from our house, I reminded him. We’d be broken up as a family. It was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. The lake was flat and quiet that night and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, afraid the neighbourhood patrol was already on their way down here to pick us up. Maybe the salute had been seen by someone from their bedroom window. It was on Main Street this had happened, after all, and chances were not remote in the least that someone had seen us. I told him he couldn’t do anything like that ever again. He just stared out at the lake while I said my piece, and then he swore and told me he was sick of living like this, always the bad guy. Everyone watching every move. He bent down and picked up a stone and threw it with a great heave as far as he could.

  “Maybe we’re on the wrong side here,” he said. “Maybe we shouldn’t believe everything they tell us.”

  BUT I DID BELIEVE everything, and the fear of our imminent roundup grew the following day. In my mind, it was all but guaranteed. We’d be packed up and shipped off like baggage. I worried through that morning and afternoon as our own personal Doomsday Clock ticked closer to midnight. Was there any difference between my brother and Toby, I wondered, the boy I’d eagerly reported to the yard monitor when he spoke his lies? I knew I should report my brother for the salute, and for what he’d said, and wondered if, by reporting him, I’d be able to save the rest of my family. I knew enough about Little Berlin to understand we’d suffer there like we’d never suffered before. Even worse was the possibility of being sent to one of the internment camps around the province or far out west.

  I didn’t sleep much that week. Every night I stared up at the model planes suspended from our bedroom ceiling and imagined shooting down my brother. I wondered if I’d have the courage to do that if I knew he was going to drop a bomb on a village below. Wasn’t this the same thing? Sacrificing a loved one for what was right. Our troubles were coming fast and thick now. I knew what a licking he’d get from our father if I told him about that salute, impulse or no impulse, and from then on the resulting doubt and disappointment would always hang between my father and brother.

  Added to this, our mother was talking about the amnesty that’d just been announced from Berlin—the real Berlin, Thomas said later with a note of satisfaction—and Ottawa had declared that those with relatives in Germany might apply for the required transit visa. These would be expedited upon request. My father insisted it was a ruse on the part of both governments: Ottawa would seize the opportunity to identify sympathizers; and Berlin, which my father had more than once referred to as “the great Sodom, that lost and wicked capital,” would always know to take advantage where advantage could be gained. It was propaganda, he said, meant to beguile the willing fools among us.

  I didn’t blame her for wanting to go back, but nor was I able to understand or forgive her this pull that drew her away from us. It would be natural to want to see your people after so long, but at the same time my small selfish heart felt the betrayal.

  I was frightened, too, that she’d entrusted me with that secret as we’d sat together on the front steps a week or so earlier, though its full meaning was lost on me. What was it that I’d eventually understand? What knowledge waited for me on the far side of my youth? It’d sounded as though she’d made up her mind to go, and that one day I’d finally see what had made her do what she did, though at the time I did not know the full scope of her plans.

  AFTER THAT WE DIDN’T sleep on the back deck the way we’d been doing up until then. We stopped entirely. Now every night as I lay in bed I pushed away thoughts of life rafts crammed with refugees. Now there was something more urgent and pressing about our home life that pushed those other thoughts away. I tried to ignore the silent tension that was building between our parents, despite the fact that it seemed my father’s arguments had won the day—that my mother would be a willing fool to accept the amnesty offer. It seemed she’d dropped the matter, but an unease hung between them. We ate our suppers in complete silence now. The scraping of knives and forks was the only sound you could hear over the radio. If the evening news brought mention of the amnesty, my father would rise from his heart-back chair and turn it off with a hard snap of the dial.

  It was weeks before the house returned to what seemed like some version of the normal we’d always known. Yet there was a stiffness between my parents that remained. They focused on us and the food on our plates and the chores we were expected to do around the house and yard. We were used to our father telling stories about his day and whatever ships he was unloading at the shipyard. I still played chess with him almost every evening after supper. The fact that he won nine games out of ten I t
ook as a good sign. It meant he was focused and himself again.

  I tried to divide my time fairly between them. Often I sat on the front steps with my mother and listened to her talk about when she was a girl. I liked the memories she shared with me. They were always pleasant, set before or outside the threat of the war that eventually came to push her out of her old life. She’d lived in the countryside where she and her brother took care of their two horses and fed chickens and collected water from the well. They walked to school together, and in summertime they swam in a river that was so cold, even on the hottest July day, that they came out frozen to the bone after only a quick dip. I tried to be the son she wanted me to be. I was still at the age when a boy is ill-defined and protean and eager to take after those he loves. I wanted to know what she was like at my age. I imagined she was just like she was now, fully formed, determined, and independent. I’d seen only one photograph of her from that time. She’d carried it with her when she came here. It showed her with a group of thirty or so girls standing against a stone wall, headmaster to the left, another adult, a teacher, to the right. She stood in the centre beside her best friend, a girl named Silke, whom she hadn’t seen now in almost thirty years. On the back of the photograph there was a pencil drawing of a heart pierced through with an arrow and the date 15 Oktober 1927.