The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  “I see how you always do what your brother tells you. I see that in the way you nod your head when he speaks to you. You follow him around like a puppy.”

  The idea that we were both lonely kids destined to become friends began to feel remote now. Deflated, I wondered if she wasn’t just like any other kid looking for a way to make me feel like an idiot. I wondered if it wasn’t inherent in people, this bullying impulse. It was true what she’d said about me being a follower, but I didn’t need reminding of the fact.

  “It was my idea to come here. He doesn’t know where I am,” I said.

  She seemed to think about that for a moment, and then she said, “Do you know what Braille is? Practically everyone here knows it. We have books in Braille, but mostly we have regular books. A whole library full. They like it when I read to them. I’m probably the best-read kid of all time.”

  Her favourite book, she said—and for reasons that should have become clear to me as she retold the story—was The Count of Monte Cristo.

  We stayed up there talking about the stories we liked. I told her about my comic book collection and the hero named Doctor Atom and his laser-beam eyes. She thought that was great, the way he reduced the German occupiers in London to one smoking heap of ash after another. She’d never seen a comic book before. I told her with no confidence at all that I’d be happy to bring one the next time I visited, and she nodded and said she’d like that.

  My mother had never mentioned anyone having a baby at Mercy House in her day—other than herself, of course, and the other atonement girl who’d told her how to protect her child against radiation sickness—but it was a big house and, according to her stories, she spent almost all of her time there in the basement.

  As Muriel showed me around the house that day, I wanted to ask her about her parents, but I didn’t want to upset her. I imagined they were both in that small graveyard by the chapel that she never took me to. I followed her down the stairs to the main floor and past a door that led, according to Muriel, to the scullery and pantry—where those ladies had worked, she said. No one went down there anymore, not since the last of the atonement girls had left, back when she was still little. I couldn’t help but imagine my mother down there, of course. It was a grim-looking door, if a simple wooden door with a brass knob and hinges can look grim, but it was through that portal my mother had disappeared every day for five years, and to no good end, and I was relieved when Muriel told me to hurry along, there was more to see.

  We walked through a maze of rooms, each sparsely furnished and empty of people but for the second-to-last room, in which four residents sat playing dominoes. None of them seemed to notice when we walked past them. One of them, a man seated in a wheelchair, traced his fingers over the cross that was the patchwork of dominoes set out on the green card table before placing his tile, then raised his hand and said something in a language I’d never heard before. It was just something that Mr. Mulligan did, Muriel said, identifying the man by his name. Before the war he’d taught Latin at Trinity College Dublin, she said.

  We ended up in the library on the far side of the house that day. It was a big, beautiful room with high ceilings and heavy chairs and a thick red rug and green lamps set on the end tables.

  “You’ll like this place if you like books,” she said. “We don’t have any of those comics you’re talking about. These were all here when the sisters came. You can borrow The Count of Monte Cristo if you like.”

  She began scanning the shelves for the title, her eyes travelling along the colourful spines. She moved to the next shelf, then the next, and finally declared that one of the staff must be reading it now.

  “How about this one instead?” she said, turning back to me.

  She handed it over, thumb forward on its cover, fingers obscured underneath. It was a science fiction novel called The Butterfly Cage by someone named Kilgore Trout that told of a future society that recreated its ancestors with a machine of such terrific power that the people in those recreations didn’t know they weren’t real. She loved that part, Muriel said, but the twist was even better. The simulations were turned into penal colonies that held generations of those who were made to pay for the sins of their forefathers.

  “And why would they do that?” I said. It seemed an unlikely scenario to me. What I knew of science fiction was limited to Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone, programs my father and Thomas did their best to watch most Sunday evenings.

  “Because the sins are so terrible that the punishment can never end,” Muriel said. “The girl in the story begins to understand why she’s really there. She’s the only one who knows, you see. She figures it out when she starts noticing things. Weird repetitions, like déjà vu. You know that feeling? And things disappear and reappear again without explanation. One time she sees her own face in a cloud while she’s walking to school.”

  “Does she get out?” I said.

  “I’m not going to ruin it for you—you’ll just have to read it.”

  She turned and scanned the shelves with the air of a connoisseur engaged in the serious business of choosing only the best of what is on offer. It took her a moment, this serious deliberation, then she said, “Presto. How about this one? In this one the good guys win. The Americans get in the war and drop the bomb on the Japanese and the Germans end up with only half a country. Which you’d think is a stretch. But they make it sound real.”

  I didn’t want to read a story about the war, no matter how badly the Germans took it in the teeth. I told her I’d give the first one a try, and when I took The Butterfly Cage from her I saw what she’d been hiding from me this whole time.

  I recoiled, almost dropping the book.

  She brought her hands into her armpits and glowered at me. “You know it’s not polite to stare,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  We stood there in a silence filled with the strange formality that suddenly re-established itself over us, and then she brought her hands up close to my face and said, “So what does that make me—a monster?”

  There were only two fingers and a thumb on each hand, clawed and frightening to look at, like twisted tree roots.

  “That’s why you don’t go to school,” I said.

  “No ghouls at school, right? Isn’t that what everyone would say?”

  It was exactly what everyone would say. She’d be teased and taunted in a way that’d make what they did to me feel like a clumsy pat on the head. “They’re all idiots anyway,” I said.

  She put her hands in the pockets of her jumper and rolled her shoulders. “You’d better go.”

  I didn’t know if this was her attempt to release me from the shame and embarrassment that had risen between us or if she’d simply given up on me. I’d been her first test and had crashed out miserably. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry for the reaction I’d shown, but the apology I struggled with as I stood there became blurred with my own discomfort. It was only seconds that passed, I’m sure, and before I knew it she was leading me from the library and down the panelled hallway in the direction we’d come. We were more alike than she could ever know. That’s what I wanted to tell her, but I was not strong enough.

  I was surprised that she walked me all the way to my bike. I held the copy of The Butterfly Cage out to her. I’d almost forgotten it was still in my hand.

  She shook her head. “Fair trade for some of those comic books you were talking about,” she said, and turned and started down the lane.

  AT HOME, I SAT on the front steps until supper that evening after hiding the novel under my pillow and wondered if I shouldn’t tell Thomas what I’d discovered. The shipyard steam whistle sounded from across the river at five, and twenty minutes later my father came cutting across the field opposite the house, his hard hat pushed back on his forehead. He walked with a full, leisurely stride that looked strong and determined and made me proud that he was my father. He waved to me and came over the lawn and up the stairs and sat down besid
e me. He took the hard hat off his head and placed it on mine and tapped it twice, the way he used to when I was younger. The two taps indicated that I was in charge now. I liked it when he did that. It was our little game, one he was willing to play with a kid who wasn’t in charge of anything at all. He asked me what I’d gotten up to today, but I wasn’t able to say anything about Muriel, though I wanted to. Now I wasn’t sure I hadn’t done something terribly wrong in visiting the house. My going there had nothing to do with generosity or sacrifice. I’d only wanted to make myself feel better, and my father would have seen right through me.

  We played chess in the backyard that evening. Here I had another chance to tell him what I’d been up to, but I kept this guilty secret to myself. I usually liked playing chess with my father. I enjoyed the game itself, I suppose. But more than this, I liked having my father all to myself when we played. I liked how sometimes we didn’t talk for what seemed like hours but hovered there in this wordless exchange, both of us focused and eager to see what would happen next. He usually won. I got lucky once in a while. I don’t recall him ever saying that he enjoyed spending time with just me, though—with Thomas off doing whatever he did while we played—but I wanted to believe that it was these quiet moments together as much as the game itself that accounted for this evening ritual of ours.

  Sometimes a bead of resin dripped from one of the big spruce trees that darkened the south side of the house. If it fell on one of his pieces—a rook or a pawn or whatever—he’d wipe it clean and return it to the board but intentionally misplace it on a square that offered a more direct attack on my king. I never noticed this sleight of hand. After I made my next move, he’d put his hand on mine and ask if the board looked right to me. I’d study it with great focus, and then he’d remind me that I had to keep my eyes open, there were always cheats out there looking to take advantage, and he’d return the man to its proper place, which then looked right to me, and we’d continue playing.

  I wasn’t able to concentrate that evening. After he won three quick games we shook hands as we always did and packed up the set.

  I was still trying to make sense of that afternoon and the strange girl I’d met. That book of hers was waiting for me upstairs. I wondered if it had something to tell me about her that she couldn’t tell me herself. I carried the chessboard inside and left it on the coffee table on my way upstairs. The book wasn’t under my pillow where I’d put it when I got home. I wondered if Thomas had found it, but I could think of no reason he’d go snooping around under my pillow. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under both our beds. I checked our closet and desk drawers and the pile of socks and underwear and T-shirts in our dresser. The model airplanes strung from the ceiling flew on, searching for a kill. The book was gone.

  I WENT BACK TO Mercy House the following day, and at no time then or on any of my subsequent visits in the weeks to come did Muriel ask about the book I’d lost or the comics I’d told her about.

  It was mid-July now and the arrival of refugees from across the lake continued in a steady drip, this according to the news reports, but the exodus we’d heard was on its way was too small to help move along the plan my brother and I had dreamed up. The memory of that salute rolled around in my head constantly, but not only for the fact that it could get us thrown out of our own home. The thought that I couldn’t be sure who he was anymore terrified me. Days went by when I hardly saw him at all between breakfast and suppertime. All of a sudden it seemed a line had been drawn between us.

  In the morning I usually rode to the hospice and watched the house until Muriel appeared and waved from the window. She didn’t come down to meet me every time, though. Far from it. And sometimes she didn’t wave at all. I wondered if I’d done something wrong on some previous visit, offended her in some way. By then she’d met me at the gate four or five times, and each time I had done my best not to look at her hands or to say anything about school or being normal or the circumstances that had brought her there in the first place. I worried about my own hands, in fact—outwardly they were healed well enough now, but I still struggled with the idea that my blood had been contaminated. Sometimes I felt a tingling in my fingertips at night as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep. I grew convinced this had something to do with the smoke the Russian inspector had blown over my cuts. During the day it didn’t worry me so much, but at night my mind seemed to travel a million miles an hour, and always in some doomsday direction. And so as often as possible I rode down there come morning and watched for her at the window, eager for the friendship and the distraction that would help get me out of my own head.

  One day she ventured out, but she didn’t see me. She walked over the gravel drive and turned right, in the direction of the chapel and the small cemetery, and I wondered if she was going to visit her parents’ graves there. I backed away from the gate, sorry that I’d caught her in this private moment. It was impossible not to feel foolish as I stood there on the mornings she ignored me. There were days I waited for an hour or more before I gave up. I never went right home after that. My mother would have asked what was wrong. Had I met some boys who were bothering me? Was I thinking about next year, school and bullies? She was good at noticing my moods, maybe because she felt things as deeply as I did. She worried about everything. I wanted to spare her that. I’d stay out as long as I could, as if I was happily distracted, just being a kid, but mostly I just rode around the neighbourhood, or ended up standing on the pier looking for my father in the forest of tower cranes that grew on the other side of the river.

  There was a lighthouse at the end of the pier where you’d always see one or two fishermen going for pike and bass on the harbour side, or trying for the big carp that travelled a bit farther out in the lake in schools so numerous and close to the surface that you would could see their wake from a hundred yards off. There were always a dozen or more cargo ships at anchor just off shore. These were impressive enough, each as big as our whole town it seemed from where I stood, but more thrilling than these were the Tiger-class battle cruisers that patrolled our side of the lake. There were six of them out there to match the half dozen American cruisers on the other side, this determined by the treaty that dictated the number and class of naval vessels permitted on the four Great Lakes we shared with the United States. Sometimes one of our cruisers came in close enough to the harbour that you could see its twin gun mounts, and once I saw the turrets begin to turn, as if tracking an invisible target. Fearful that a new war was about to begin, I pressed my hands over my ears. But the big cannons stayed silent that day and I heard only the muted laughter of the fishermen at the end of the pier, which shamed me into knowing I could never be as indifferent or as brave as them.

  ONE MORNING IN EARLY August I waited for Muriel by the stone wall longer than usual. It might have been a whole week of being ignored since she’d last come down to see me, but even a friend as unpredictable as this would be more than I’d ever had before. She came across the lawn from behind the house and opened the gate and told me she had something important to show me. She didn’t say what but I didn’t need much convincing. I ditched my bike and followed her, gravel crunching underfoot, wondering what the big secret was.

  The idea that Mercy House might be a place she’d want to get away from had occurred to me more than once, of course, and I considered that, like the hero of the Monte Cristo story, she might be thinking about getting out of there for good. The thought that she was going to ask me for help made me feel good, though just exactly what I’d be able to do for her was beyond me.

  I noticed that her grey socks were pulled high to the knee, leaving a narrow band of pink skin above, which I watched as I caught up with her. The hem of her jumper was wet—from a garden hose, from the lake, I didn’t know—but it was the secret of her body that took my imagination at that moment, and the feeling hit with a force that surprised me.

  The only thing I knew about girls then was that one might lift or bury my spirits with the t
urn of an eye. I wondered if the secret she’d mentioned had something to do with sex—not actual sex, of course, but something that skirted the subject. I’d heard the word petting before and other sorts of rough talk in the schoolyard, but these things, beyond their general meanings, signified little to me. I imagined I was on the edge of some groundbreaking discovery, and I felt my heart race and my stomach turn in knots.

  “But let’s go to the house first,” she said. “We’ll need to bring something to eat.”

  I felt relieved and let down at the same time, and then a wave of nerves hit me again, and finally I was convinced that I had no idea what she wanted of me.

  Since the day Sister Catherine had introduced me to Dr. Ridley and Muriel, more than four weeks earlier, I’d entered the house only once, and just briefly, to use the washroom.

  The dining hall was in a large room fitted out with cafeteria and buffet tables set with salvers of hot and cold food, coffee and juice dispensers, and plates, teacups, glassware, and cutlery. The sister seated at a table near the door smiled at us and returned to the open Bible in front of her. Muriel led me to the buffet table and stacked her plate with breakfast buns and an apple. We sat and ate our buns as the room slowly filled with the old, blind residents. They tapped and swung their canes before them as they spread throughout the room to the tables and chairs they’d occupied, I imagined, since the day of their arrival years earlier, or moved directly to the buffet tables against the wall opposite where we sat.

  The dining hall was not as loud as the lunchroom I knew at school, of course, but there was about it a hum of voices and a scraping of chairs against hardwood floors. As we ate Muriel spoke in a near-whisper about the people at various tables. She spoke of her housemates as a collector speaks of some rare assortment of hidden treasures, all so very odd and uniquely hers. The fact that she’d grown up here meant she knew everything about it, and I knew nothing at all. She was here to show off her collection of rarities. Each of them had a story which she shared a bit of with me. Miss Hollingshead, over there, had been a math teacher before the war. Mr. McNally, the man holding his fork with his left hand, a cobbler. Mr. Conacher, beside the woman with the witchy nose, had been a mining engineer who’d returned to London from an expedition in Northern Ontario only days before the bomb was dropped.