The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  Now I understood—that’s what she’d been talking about on the front porch that evening weeks earlier. When she’d mentioned the word ideals. She’d been preparing me, leaving quiet hints as she collected her transit visa from whatever office, packing hardly anything. In this last sacrifice she’d suffered alone, determined to bring peace to her family.

  NEXT MORNING I FOUND my father sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea from a clear glass when I came downstairs. He was already dressed in his suit and tie. He looked upset still, tired and drained by worry, but he was doing his best to meet the day. I sat with him. I liked it when he did that with me when I was sick or feeling lonesome. It was the first time in my life I recall understanding on some level that he needed me and my brother as much as we needed him.

  “Don’t ever think in absolutes, okay?” he said. “That’s all I have to say. There’s always something hopeful out there—something to strive for. She’ll come back to us. She’s not gone forever.” And with that he pushed out from the table. “Now go get your suit on. And wake up that brother of yours. It’s going to be a long day.”

  After breakfast, Thomas and I helped each other tie our ties the way we always did on Remembrance Day. We joined our father on the front porch shortly before ten-thirty. He straightened our lapels and said we looked right as rain, everything was going to be okay, we’d get through this one just like we always had. He adjusted his own tie, ran his hand through his hair, and moved his neck in that way he did when he wore the suit my mother had made for him too long ago.

  We didn’t talk at all on our way to Chisolm Square that morning. The day was warm, the sky cloudless. It felt strange that our mother was missing. I imagined her standing on the deck of the liner that would carry her to Europe, sailing through the Miracle Canal my father had helped dig.

  All was familiar to me when we arrived at the park—the crowds gathering, the crackle of the public address system, the red-brick houses that fronted the space.

  We found our customary spot among the small grouping of spruce trees at the north end of the square. At eleven sharp the service began. As usual the Reverend from Knox Presbyterian presided. His old hands shook as they always did; the pauses in his speech were long enough to cause concern. Every time he fell silent it seemed he might not start again, that this last word might have been his final breath as the script he held before him quivered in the light breeze. But he would rally and continue on until time came for the town dignitaries to come forth to place their wreaths at the base of the cenotaph. Some of them were seniors. Others were my father’s age or slightly older, chief among them the veterans, of course—forty-year-olds who walked on one leg, or didn’t walk at all, assisted by another whose wounds were not readily apparent. And then came the reading of the names.

  My mind was still ringing with the fact that our mother was gone, and that, according to Thomas, she was gone forever. I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe some version of the story as told by our father. She’d be back, and soon enough. Maybe she’d help build bridges between us here in this country and people in Germany. Perhaps she’d act as emissary and return with news that they were not so different from us, or that they’d learned remorse and now sought forgiveness. Would there not be a new and wiser generation that had learned from the past? It felt odd to stand here beside my father without her. His arm, always linked with hers during the ceremony, rested solemnly at his side until he folded his hands across his waist.

  Yet apart from these worrying thoughts and our mother’s absence, the morning was as it always was at this point. The squirrel and bird chatter was hushed, as if in deference to the seriousness of the moment. The hard-rock granules and mineral filler in the black-shingled rooftops of the houses that fronted the square sparkled in the mid-morning sun. It might have been another fine summer day if it hadn’t been the sixteenth anniversary of the bomb.

  Now the Reverend rose from his seat beside the growing tribute of wreaths at the foot of the cenotaph to introduce the girls who were to read the names of those who’d died since the last memorial service.

  This was when I saw her, the Jewish girl Muriel had rescued only the day before.

  She stepped to the dais with the two other girls, her hair spilling out from behind her ears and resting on her shoulders in a delicate wave. The three of them wore identical cartwheel hats and long white dresses, white shoes, and a white ribbon tied on the left wrist. In the turmoil of what had greeted me when I got home the day before, I’d thought of nothing but our mother’s leaving. Now, as the girl stood there holding the names of the recent dead she was to read, the Reverend told the crowd her story—that this child had been rescued on our shores and that she was a living embodiment of the injustice we’d all sworn to defeat. Here was a victim of the ignorance and prejudice that ruled so much of the world and that we must continue to resist. A chorus of “Amen” rose up. We stood rooted as the Reverend described the terrors she’d lived through.

  The crowd grew agitated as he spoke. With each new detail of the conditions her family had lived under—the roving mobs, the forced evictions—they called out their insults and threats against the irredeemables among us. My father’s hand fell to his side and searched out mine, as if he was preparing to pull me away. To our right, a few trees over, was the Schwabe family, Toby and his mother and father and older sister, each wearing the grim expression that, if Toby was to be believed, masked the doubt they carried in their hearts about the history that drew us here. I wondered what they thought about the girl up there now, if they would find some reason to disbelieve everything the Reverend told us about her.

  The girls read the names when he finished speaking, and this seemed to settle the crowd back into sombre reflection. The Jewish girl’s hands shook with nervousness but she didn’t cry. Thirty-two new names were added to that sad list that year. She read out the last ten, stumbling on the foreign-sounding ones. Perhaps she was too young to understand what was being asked of her.

  The minute of silence arrived at last and the world stopped, as if a hand had stilled the ticking of time. The fear and anxiety became more focused still and grew worse as the minute wore on. That’s when the girl began to cry. Most eyes were cast downward, as mine should have been, but secretly I watched her and knew she was thinking about being alone now in this new world without her people. I wanted the girl to see me through the crowd. I wanted her to know that I’d nothing to do with putting her before this crowd like some sort of circus act. But she didn’t look up. I was not able to ask forgiveness or to tell her that, despite the fact that I was German, I understood what she felt.

  And then the ceremony was over. The sound of the shipyard steam whistle split the air, ending our minute of silence, and we all saluted, a thousand families at once, and the crying girl was swallowed up by the milling crowd.

  WE STARTED PREPARING THE house as soon as we got back, though I wondered if, for the fact that my mother was not here, we’d be granted some sort of grace, which of course had been her thinking all along. The depth of the sacrifice guaranteed it, I thought. They’d have got word of her leaving and they’d leave us alone. We’d sit nervously but unbothered at the kitchen table long into the night. But we prepared nonetheless. We changed into our street clothes and filled pots and pans with tap water and set them just inside the front door while our father soaked the lawn and the tree with the garden hose. Half a dozen curious onlookers were already gathering across the street. They chattered among themselves and nodded and paced back and forth. I watched them from the window the way my mother used to and imagined which one would throw what, and who carried the axe that would end up in our birch tree, and which neighbour would make it partway up our driveway or into our garage before our father scared him off with his baseball bat.

  We waited at our kitchen table the way we always did, listening as the crowd grew. Everything was the same as it was every year, except that our mother wasn’t here now. The single lit candle
cast its glow over our faces. The main breaker in the basement was turned off. We’d set up the chessboard to pass the time. It was ignored in the end that night, as it always was. Also at the ready was the stack of comics Thomas and I might flip through while we waited for the crowd to thin. That’s when I noticed the novel called The Butterfly Cage in the pile. I wondered if this meant Thomas knew of my visits to Mercy House and if he’d read the book about the poor girl trapped in that imaginary penal colony.

  There was still light in the sky when the real crowd began to form. It was bigger and more determined than ever before; the crest of the wave we’d been expecting had arrived that day, and only added to the passions that had been inflamed by the living proof of the orphaned girl who’d spoken the names of the dead at the cenotaph that afternoon. Dozens of rafts had appeared as we’d paid our respects at Chisolm Square. In a matter of hours the harbour had turned into a refugee aid station. Some were sick, most hungry, all of them dehydrated and bearing stories of what it was to live in a place like America where synagogues were torched, foreigners rounded up, and politicians spoke with admiration of the policies that had brought order to Europe.

  We learned of this the following day as we surveyed what was left of our house. But that night we knew only that the crowd was wilder than it had ever been, and as the last light of day left the sky, the field across the road disappeared under a sea of people. The sound of bottles breaking on the driveway punctuated the chanting. Eye for an eye! Eye for an eye! The men out there were drunk—they were every year. It was a tradition now, like Christmas or Thanksgiving, a high mass in the season of mourning.

  Our father watched from the window, slapping the bat gently against his open palm. Men appeared with fuel for the fire they’d build on our lawn. They stacked broken chairs and skids and bundles of newspaper, this time a whole picnic table, tree branches, and bags of garbage. The bonfire was lit as the crowd grew.

  My mother wasn’t here now to pester him back into his seat in the kitchen. Thomas and I joined him by the window. We saw the bonfire flames jumping as high as the lowest branches of the birch tree. It spread upwards and along the branches closer to the trunk. The night was fully dark now beyond the circle of light cast by the fire. The crowd tossed more fuel onto the flames and the fire moved freely, finding its fuel higher and wider throughout the tree until the whole thing was alight and the world seemed to be burning.

  We begged him, as our mother used to, to stay close. The expression on his face showed anger now more than fear. It seemed he’d crossed over to some new understanding of what he was looking at, maybe something she’d always known and told him to recognize but he hadn’t been able to until now. Things would never change here.

  We didn’t know the flames had leapt to the roof of our front porch, carried by sparks and burning branches, until we smelled the smoke coming from upstairs. From the roof the fire had rolled its way up and into the front room on the second floor. The bags of fabrics our mother used for the clothing she made for us were already in flames when we got up there, and the burning-hair smell of the prized angora wool she’d been saving filled the air. Coughing through the smoke, we ran up and down the stairs, buckets splashing and banging against our thighs, but it was clear we’d lost this fight. It was spreading too rapidly. We were panting heavily now. The air was too thick with smoke. Our father yelled to us that there was no saving the place, he just had to get a few things from his bedroom—some precious heirloom or document or money, I didn’t know—but Thomas and I had to get out now. He pulled my brother in close to him and said something into his ear. Thomas nodded and took my hand and pulled me down the stairs and out the front door.

  My eyes and lungs were burning, and outside the chanting of the crowd fell off as we dropped to our hands and knees on the driveway and retched. There were hundreds of people gathered now, so many that they spilled onto the road. Only the hardiest and most ardent of them moved about on the front lawn by the original bonfire.

  We waited for our father to come out, kneeling there on the driveway like boys at prayer, watching the front door, the night lit by the fire. Thomas held my arm when I got up and called out towards the house. I called out again and again and tried to break free from my brother’s grip but he did not let go. Smoke billowed from the windows, heavy and black, and poured up the side of the building. A pumper was there now and men set to work to bring down the flames. They told us to get back, far back, across the street. From there the night still felt hotter than an oven.

  Thomas was still holding me by the arm but I was not struggling anymore. We watched the numbers painted on the front door bubble up and burn, and when the team of firefighters determined that the structure could not be rescued they turned their hoses on the trees and the houses on either side of ours.

  The sound of the inferno roared on and turned the night sky bright as day. Cheers went up every time a part of the building collapsed in on itself.

  The crowd grew larger still. Revellers gathered to watch the German house burn to the ground. Even now, these many years later, I cannot describe the heart of a child as he watches his life disappear before his very eyes.

  IN THE MORNING ONLY the brick chimney remained standing. The crowd had thinned during the night but was collecting again. Men removed long planks from the back of a truck, sprayed them down with water, and laid them out over the foundation. The fire marshal arrived and held a white cloth to his mouth and nose as he walked along the planks inspecting the ruins. He’d stop every few steps and lean down to pick at something with the long pole he carried. Above what had once been our living room he shook his head and crossed himself, and Thomas took my hand and said we had to leave now, there was nothing left for us here.

  The inevitability of our grief and hopelessness was close on us now, and soon it would leave us gutted and overcome with despair as the reality of our situation pushed itself into our hearts. But as my brother pulled me away I almost believed I heard our father’s voice calling out to us—that he’d tricked fate somehow and found a way back out into the night as the house burned to the ground. It was a boy’s desperate fantasy, a last attempt to hold on to the life that was gone now. I didn’t hear that voice, of course. There would be no sudden reversal from the turn our lives had taken. I think Thomas knew this before I did. I’m sure of it. As he pulled me away from there, I heard him say again and again, “Don’t look back, don’t look back, there’s somewhere to go now,” though in the state I was in—I was crying helplessly—I didn’t think to ask where that somewhere was.

  The streets were filled with people flowing in the direction of our house, small groups, families, gangs of boys excited to see what it was that had kept their fathers busy in the night. Smoke was heavy in the air. It hung over the street like scented curtains, blue and billowing in the early-morning light.

  Just south of Chisolm Square we saw a crowd pelting a burned-out house with rocks and bottles. We couldn’t read the number painted on the door—it had been melted by the heat—but it was clear that another German family lived there.

  The riots weren’t isolated to our town. We learned later that this night came to be known as Devil’s Night for the spirit that had been unleashed across the country that evening. But it was not the Jewish girl’s story told by the old Reverend that had inspired the mob. It was the photograph published in papers around the world that showed the American president shaking hands with Chancellor Göring after issuing the executive order that brought the Rademacher Act into full force. Trains and buses would soon begin delivering settlers (this, the official name) to ports of departure at New York, Savannah, Baltimore, Charleston, and Philadelphia.

  By the fall of 1961 the deportations would be fully underway. According to the act, the seizure of Jewish property would finance the clearances. The American taxpayer could rest assured, President Thurmond said, that the burden would be borne by the avaricious Jew. Within days of the executive order, shipping lines began the biddin
g for contracts to deliver their cargo to the Indian Ocean. It was to be a booming industry, as rich as oil, and might last a decade when all was said and done—such was the infestation to be dealt with.

  We saw a body hanging by the neck from a tree beside the post office that morning. Thomas covered my eyes and told me to keep walking. But I’d seen the man’s face, purple and bloated. It was Dieter Schwabe, Toby’s father. We kept moving, to where I didn’t know, and finally, just east of the harbour, we found a place down by the lake in among rocks the size of a man, placed there as a breakwater. No one would see us from the path above, my brother said. We were safe there. We’d rest until night fell. And then we’d do what our father had explained when he’d leaned into Thomas’s ear last night before we left our burning house.

  AFTER DARK WE WALKED to the fallout shelter hidden at the back of the Chisolm Allotments, just a few blocks from where we’d been hiding. This was where we needed to go, our father had told Thomas. He’d said it would be safe for us, and that we’d find there what we’d need. We heard gunshots and sirens going off but it was not possible to know what direction these sounds came from. In the glow of street lamps the smoky haze of our burning town swirled in the humid summer night. The allotment was wild with growth at this point in the summer. The swing-gate creaked as we entered and Thomas set it on its latch again once we were through. We walked along the narrow path that ran down the middle of the grounds between rows of plants. It was as quiet as a cemetery but for the gentle waves troubling the stones on the beach just down the hill. A half-moon sat low over Lake Ontario, and as I followed Thomas the plants brushed their dew-damp leaves against my legs and arms.

  The entrance of the fallout shelter, set into the side of the hill that marked the eastern edge of the allotment, was an old wooden door encased in a cinder-block frame overgrown with climbing ivy. If you didn’t know what it was you might have thought it was a place to store gardening tools, for the sign that read SHELTER 49, painted over the cinder block, was nearly invisible under the densely matted vegetation that hung there. This was one of the many shelters we knew about in town, though we’d never investigated this one in particular. The allotment was active three seasons out of four and people from this neighbourhood were always coming and going here, tending their plots; in wintertime the gate was kept locked.