by Peter Golden
I put a hand under his left arm. “Let me help you.”
“Genickschuss!” he yelled, pulling away from my grip and glowering up at me, his watery eyes red-rimmed, his face pasty and crinkled, like wet paper dried in the sun.
Not recognizing the word, I asked, “Was ist Genickschuss?”
He answered in English, but I heard Germany in his voice. “You don’t understand Genickschuss? Let me explain to you Genickschuss.”
Forming a pistol with a thumb and forefinger, he pressed it against his neck. “Boom! Right here. I seen it. Mein Sohn. He a goot boy. I’m starving and he steals for me some bread. Then the guards make me stand here and watch. Boom! Now you know Genickschuss.”
A feeling of unreality spread through me. “Please let me help you. Are you here with someone?”
The man gazed into the trench, and I imagined that he was seeing his son sprawled out across other bodies and wishing he were in the trench with them. Dead. Free from pain. “My niece. She waits for me in the museum.”
I got him to his feet and put the fedora on his head, and as we crossed the roll-call square, he mumbled, “Vhy did dey make me vatch? Vasn’t it enough fun for dem to kill my boy?”
Softly I said, “I don’t know,” and held the man’s hand and listened to the gravel crunching under my sneakers.
* * *
“Where did you go?” Dmitry asked.
The dedication was over. Most of the attendees were fanning out across the grounds, though a fair number had remained behind for a press conference. In no mood to give Dmitry a recap, I said, “For a walk,” as an immaculately dressed man, sporting a bowler and a handlebar mustache, stepped up to a podium and introduced himself, in German and English, as Gerhard Drux, the mayor of Dachau.
The first question was in German. While reporters wrote in their pads, photographers snapped pictures, and TV cameramen filmed, I stared at the roof lines of the houses beyond the camp and imagined a married couple inviting their new friends to dinner and the wife on the phone giving directions: Go to the crematorium, bear left at the trench where prisoners were shot in the neck, and you’re here. Oh, and do you prefer red or white wine?
“I am aware that many of you participated in fund-raising to re-create the concentration camp as a memorial,” Mayor Drux said in the flawless English of a British lord. “I do not object to honoring those who died. Nevertheless, I am concerned that by re-creating the camp and attracting tourists to it, in the future whenever people hear Dachau, they will not think of our town—the medieval jewel of Bavaria—but of a Nazi prison.”
Was this guy for real? Didn’t he get how monstrously unique the crimes were? No, he didn’t, I decided, and started snickering, a mistake since I was directly in front of the podium.
“And you are?” Mayor Drux inquired with exaggerated politeness.
Konstantin snapped, “He is Mikhail Dainov. From Four Freedoms Radio.”
The anger was plain in his voice. Konstantin was well off to my left, and the mayor didn’t even bother glancing at him, but stared down at me and said, “Mr. Dainov, I must say I am perplexed. You reacted as though I am telling jokes.”
His civility had fermented into the patronizing chumminess of a typical politician, the type who takes a leak on your shoes and expects your vote for making it rain. And I was angered by it—and the camp and the Nazis and a guard executing a son with his father as a witness.
“It sounded like a joke. Were you saying that if they built a brewery instead of a memorial, everyone would think of Dachau as the name of a beer?”
“I did not say that. Are there any other questions?”
A woman diagonally across from me, standing with a large semicircle of people under pole signs from San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego, piped up: “Herr Mayor Drux, you didn’t fully answer Mr. Dainov.”
The woman, who spoke with a faint European accent I didn’t recognize, could’ve been a French movie actress in radiant middle age. Tall and lean, she wore a royal-blue mohair suit with a shell-pink collar. The arrogant beauty of her face had been softened by time and her short, tousled hair was as lustrous as burnished mahogany.
Mayor Drux glared at her until a beefy blond man to her right returned the mayor’s glare, and then he looked at me. “You, I can hear, are an American, and Americans set our cities on fire. Innocent women and children died. But we Germans understand that it was a war and we are not persecuting you.”
My anger ratcheted up a notch. “Persecuting? We’re persecuting—”
The mayor, done feigning calm, raised his arms as if spurring on an orchestra toward a crescendo. “All Germans must pay for the crimes of these madmen? Would you have risked your life to save people you didn’t know? Risked your children’s lives? Why do you Americans expect Germans to demonstrate a fortitude that you do not have? Your country could have accepted our Jews. You chose not to and then condemn our treatment of them. Is that fair? I think not. Perhaps the Bundestag will come to its senses regarding the statute of limitations, and we can stop the recriminations and forget about trials and memorials. We can leave the past where it belongs. Then it will be a new day in Germany.”
Panting from his tirade, the mayor departed without even saying Auf Wiedersehen. I looked across at the woman. She shrugged and smiled at me and walked away with the delegation from California following her.
16
“Are you serious?” I asked Dmitry, and set my spoon, entwined with tagliatelle in Bolognese sauce, on my plate.
“Konstantin told me.”
“You believe him? He thinks our Twist routine helped Brezhnev get rid of Khrushchev.”
Dmitry chuckled. “So ask our waiter. He speaks English.”
We were in the side room of Osteria Italiana, where I ate dinner two or three times a week, and had brought Dmitry to repay him for all his help after work with my Russian.
When our waiter, a triple-chinned Italian who had recited the specials with the gusto of an opera singer belting out an aria, stopped by to refill our glasses with Chianti, I said, “My boss says this was Hitler’s favorite restaurant in Munich.”
“Sì, signore. In this room. Over by that window. It was Osteria Bavaria then. My wife, the one that dies. She a waitress for Hitler, Himmler, the gang a them, at the start. She say Hitler order trout in butter sauce and didn’t pay his bill and never leave her nothing for service.”
Mumbling about cheap sumabitches, he disappeared into the main dining area. I translated his answer for Dmitry and looked at a family with three towheaded children at Hitler’s table, all of them dipping bread into plates of olive oil, and in the corner a couple as elegant as Fred and Ginger drinking martinis. At Dachau, I’d felt the horrific weight of its history pressing on me as if the force of gravity had doubled. But here, surrounded by the lively hum of conversation and the soft clink of silverware on china, I might as well have been eating eggplant Parmesan at Victor’s in South Orange Village, and it was hard to conjure up a vision of Adolf Hitler dabbing a greasy flake of fish from his mustache with a napkin and assuring his acolytes that a reborn German Reich would conquer Europe.
Sitting there, I realized that history doesn’t announce its approach with fireworks and marching bands. It lurks behind events as ordinary as dining out with friends in the bohemian Schwabing district of Munich. Then one day while you’re minding your own humdrum business, it lands on your doorstep, an uninvited and unwanted guest, and for years afterward you wonder how it got there.
* * *
Winter was nipping at the heels of autumn, and along Schellingstrasse the cafés and beer halls were full of a delightful Friday-night noise that seeped into the street.
“Spasibo, Misha. I never ate Italian food. It is delicious. Do you want me to teach you some new curses?”
“Between you and Konstantin, I have plenty.”
The Henrik Ibsen was five minutes away, and Dmitry’s boardinghouse was ten minutes farther south. On Türkenstra
sse, the shop windows were dark and lamps shone like pale stars in the windows of the apartment houses. The sidewalk was under repair and blocked by sawhorses, so Dmitry and I walked single file on the curb. Below the sign outside my hotel, the elderly doorman in his top hat was standing in a pool of neon-blue light. When I was a few steps from him, with Dmitry right behind me, he said, “Guten Abend.” Before I could say good evening to him, the high beams of a car parked across the street came on, blinding me. Then there was a drawn-out tinny sound. Like a jackhammer, but not as loud or deep. The doorman’s hat flew off and blood spattered the revolving glass door. By reflex, I dove to the ground and heard metal chipping away at the stucco facade of the hotel, the high-pitched complaint of glass shattering, the revving of an engine, the screech of tires as the car peeled away.
Then . . . silence. I was aware that someone had been firing in my direction yet, even though I was shaking with fear, part of me resisted that information. I glanced back to check on Dmitry, who was sitting cross-legged and unbuttoning his suit jacket. He looked up from the widening blackish-red stain on his shirt. “Mi-Mi-Misha. Am I hurt?”
The shooting had felt as if it had taken place in a frozen stretch of eternity, but now time leapt forward. With the piercing ooh-aah ooh-ahh of police sirens in the distance, I dashed over to Dmitry, got my hands under his arms, yanked him to his feet, hoisted him over my shoulder and, with a spurt of vomit rising in my throat, bolted past what was left of the doorman and into the lobby, where I put Dmitry on a couch and shouted at the desk clerk to call an ambulance.
“Am I—am I hurt, Misha?”
In the movies, they compressed wounds to stanch the bleeding, so lightly I pressed my palms on his stomach, feeling his blood, warm and slippery, oozing through my fingers.
“You are going to be fine,” I said, another aspect of first aid I’d learned from Hollywood.
Dmitry gasped for air. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
* * *
Without another word, Dmitry had died before the police or the ambulance arrived. On my first day of work, Taft Mifflin had given me an emergency number, and I phoned him and he instructed me to go upstairs, lock the door, pack my stuff, and wait for him.
Now, two hours later, I was sitting next to Taft in the back of a Mercedes with a chauffeur and an armed guard in the passenger seat, and we were going to Taft’s hotel, the Regina Palast.
“Why’d someone shoot at Dmitry and me? Because he defected? Because I made fun of Khrushchev?”
“The KGB’s usually more subtle. Poison. Strangling. All the police told me was they picked up some shell casings from an MP 40, a German submachine gun from World War II.”
“Ex-Nazis? You’re joking, right?”
“The Germans manufactured over a million MP 40s, and the Russians grabbed a lot of them.”
I kept picturing Dmitry on that couch in the lobby, white cloth upholstery with faded violet cornflowers, and if I hadn’t been so furious at Taft and myself, I would’ve started crying or screaming. Dmitry had risked prison for rock ’n’ roll and now he was dead, perhaps because of my stupid Khrushchev routine.
Taft said, “Julian left me a message. Your grandmother was shot with a .25-caliber pistol, and the slugs from the revolvers of that Lone Ranger nut didn’t match.”
“What a shock. That nut was a robber and Sweets didn’t get robbed.”
“Could be the shooting here is connected to the shooting there.”
“This has to do with Emma?”
“I said could be.”
“I’m going home.”
“Bad idea, Michael, until we know what’s going on.”
“You can figure it out while I’m in South Orange.”
“You think you’re bulletproof in New Jersey?”
I’d scrubbed my hands in my room, but they were still sticky with blood.
Taft lit a Lucky. “You’re not. We’ll tell the press you were wounded and are recovering at University Hospital. We’ll work it out with hospital security and the police and station some people there. If anyone shows to finish the job, we’ll find out why.”
“And where am I going to be?”
“At my hotel for a week. With a guard. Then you’ll be with a friend of mine for a while. You’ll be safe with him.”
“Eddie told me I’d be safe with you.”
“Sometimes things don’t work out, do they?”
“There’s an insight. Why’d you bring me to Munich? To star in my own spy movie?”
“Calm down, Michael.”
“Who’s this friend?”
“Der Schmuggler.”
“The Smuggler? Where am I going with a guy named the Smuggler?”
“Russia.”
“Are you kidding?”
Taft lowered his window to let out the smoke. “I never kid about Russia.”
Part V
17
Otvali, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
November 13, 1964
If you could die from paperwork, Yuli thought, eyeing the open ledgers on her U-shaped desk, I would have been dead long ago.
All morning Yuli had been cooped up in the office next to her bedroom, and her temples throbbed from the clickety-click of the adding machine. A truck from the port of Taganrog had been scheduled to be at the compound by 0700. But autumn brought rain, and the rain brought the rasputitsa, a season of mud that made the roads difficult to navigate. Russians old enough to recall the Great Patriotic War regarded the mud with some fondness, for it had impeded the calamitous progress of three million German invaders. Even so, with the truck four hours late, Yuli was thinking that the rasputitsa was a deluxe pain in the ass. Then her phone rang.
“Allo,” Der Schmuggler said. “We are in Moscow and will be home tomorrow at three. Send Pavel to pick us up at the station.”
The “we” included Mikhail Dainov. That American radio man, Mr. Taft Mifflin, had requested that Der Schmuggler bring Mikhail to Otvali because Munich was no longer safe for him. His cover story was that he was a distant American cousin of Der Schmuggler who planned to study Russian at Rostov State University. He would use his real name, Michael Daniels, and Der Schmuggler told Yuli that Michael was fluent in Russian, but he had warned her to speak only English to him in public. On Monday, Yuli had gone to the university and, after eating lunch with Sofia and Viktoriya, her best girlfriends from school who were currently finishing their medical training, she submitted the forms for registering a foreign student. Der Schmuggler had taken care of getting Michael a visa, then had met him in Munich, and they had traveled by train through Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, crossing into the Soviet Union at Brest and riding on to Moscow, where they would board another train for Rostov-on-Don.
“Pavel will be there,” Yuli said.
As a rule, their phone conversations were brief. Der Schmuggler’s influence extended from the small-time regional Communist Party officials to the almighty puppeteers behind the Kremlin walls in Moscow, an influence maintained by a system of payoffs in American dollars and kontrabanda designed to prevent the KGB from raiding the warehouses in the compound or monitoring their telephone lines. The KGB did tap pay phones in train stations and airports, and because you never knew when your allies in the party would become enemies, whenever Yuli or Der Schmuggler called home from inside the Soviet Union, they refrained from discussing any compromising information.
“You are taking your insulin?” Yuli asked.
She heard a drawn-out sigh, as if he were both puzzled and annoyed. “No less than two injections every day for the last ten years. You know that. Why do you ask?”
Yuli was stalling until she could gin up the courage to ask him about Michael, this boy who soothed her loneliness by dancing with her in the softly lit corners of her imagination. She assumed that his face radiated strength and kindness, but she couldn’t draw a detailed portrait of him in her mind.
“Papka, I always check on you.” To disguise her eagerness to hear a de
scription of Michael, Yuli added as if it were an afterthought, “What does your cousin look like? I mean, I want to be able to recognize him.”
“He will be with me. Do you remember what I look like?”
“You are very handsome, Papka. What about your cousin?”
Der Schmuggler chuckled. “Ah, I understand. What can I say, dear girl? He is tall and resembles the boys on your bedroom wall—the boys from the beach.”
“The Beach Boys.”
“Yes, the long, light hair, the nice smile. Green eyes, a poet’s eyes. But also rugged-looking. A Marlboro Man, maybe a little, but no mustache or cowboy hat.”
Yuli liked what she was hearing until Der Schmuggler asked her to wait a moment, and then he must have turned away from the mouthpiece because his voice was harder for her to hear when he said in English, “In a minute, Michael, I am speaking to Yuli. She wants to know if you are handsome.”
“Papka!” she shouted, feeling herself blush.
Der Schmuggler spoke into the mouthpiece. “I am here.”
Irritated at him for embarrassing her, Yuli replied, “Please ask Michael why your brains are in your socks,” and hung up. Yuli was replacing the tape on the adding machine when the phone rang again. She considered ignoring the call, but decided that it would be more satisfying to have another chance to chastise Papka for his idiocy.
“Allo,” she said, and the curtness of her tone unsettled her. Der Schmuggler had a habit of teasing Yuli about boys, and it didn’t really bother her, because he loved her, and she understood that it was difficult for a man who had lost his parents, seven brothers and sisters, and his fiancée during the war to watch all those boys chasing her and to speculate on when she might marry and leave Otvali. Nor was Yuli embarrassed that she was curious about Michael the deejay. She was enchanted by rock ’n’ roll and the shinier aspects of American culture scorned and outlawed by the Kremlin. But her curiosity about Michael accentuated her loneliness, and the depth of it terrified Yuli. As a young girl hiding from the Nazi soldiers, Yuli was forced to accept that her parents couldn’t rescue her and to renounce her feelings of desolation. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have survived. And yet here she was, lonely beyond words, perplexed and vulnerable, as if she were a tortoise who had misplaced her shell.