There are unstated conditions for this conversation. I will evacuate myself of feeling so as not to distract my father. This is an unspoken pact we’ve had ever since I can remember, since my mother died. Usually I can follow the rules.
Four years ago, when I was forty-six years old and my sister forty-five, we finally worked up the courage to ask my father to describe his recollections of our mother—a topic that my sister and I understood, from the time we were children, was off-limits. There had been no photographs of our dead mother anywhere visible in the house. We didn’t know, until the time of this conversation, well over forty years after our mother’s death, that my father possessed a photo album of their wedding, which he had hidden in a bottom drawer. Nearly all of our mother’s possessions—the wedding gifts she received from family members, even her jewelry and silver—had somehow disappeared, given to other family members who apparently did not understand what these things would mean to my sister and me. I do not possess a single object that belonged to my mother. There was so much feeling in the room that day—something we were so unaccustomed to—that my sister requested that we break and continue the following day. But my father warned us, “I will not discuss this topic again.” It was too painful, he told us.
My father continues with his story. “The next fall I started going to school in Marburg. I was afraid we would be a target because now all the Jewish children were congregating, at the railroad station, on the train.
“Then the SS started appearing,” he says, continuing carefully.
“They were considered particularly deadly. I remember walking from the railroad station. Every time I’d see an SS man, I’d try to walk around him. Whenever it was inescapable that I had to pass him, I’d just steel myself for the process, try not to call attention to myself in any way.”
There is a dry hollowness between us now. The absence of feeling leaves me light-headed. I am slightly nauseated, a familiar sensation. It comes to me when there is some strong feeling unfelt.
But with all this discussion of my father’s attempts to avoid drawing attention to himself, feeling periodically leaks into the room.
I’m better at interviewing terrorists than interviewing my father. It’s too close to home.
“Is this the sort of thing you want to know?” he asks. I see that my father is embarrassed by having to go over this distasteful story. He is determined to do his duty, but we are perilously close to an indulgent sort of introspection, which my father deems “examining one’s navel.” He hates to call attention to himself by divulging more than is required.
But there is something more: I sense my father’s unacknowledged shame, and I feel ashamed of myself. Like a naughty child searching through her parents’ drawers, I have now seen something I was not supposed to see—my father’s shame. It’s not only that I have discovered something illicit, but my dangerous, prurient curiosity about my father’s inner life is now on display, exposed to my father’s disapproval. My father does not approve of my “examining my navel,” but I, ever the difficult child, want to examine not only my own, but his, too.
“Tell me more about what it was like to feel afraid,” I request. I need to know. I need to know what it feels like to be afraid.
“I felt afraid,” he concedes, dutifully confessing the truth as he knows it, even when it is embarrassing or painful to himself or others. But he has not yet provided me the details about the sensation of fear that I want so much to hear.
“No,” he says, pausing, and then more firmly, “I felt terror morning, noon, and night. The brownshirts would decide they needed to teach us a lesson. And then they would practice putting out fires by shooting streams of water at our house—their fire hoses shooting right at us. They never did break in and attack us, but that could happen at any time.”
There is a shift in the room now. More feeling, and with more feeling, relief.
“They marched into the house one time with guns drawn,” he adds.
“Who was there?” I ask. My skin feels prickly.
“My mother, Irmgard [my father’s next older sister], and Anna Marie’s mother [a neighbor]. They marched in. Irmgard was fourteen, and I was seven. They took my mother into the front room and shut the door.
“I was looking at Irmgard to try to figure out what I should do. What she did was collapse on the flagstones in the front hall and start screaming and kicking her heels. So I tried for a little while to do that, too, but it didn’t seem sensible. So I stood there, aghast. They were in there about fifteen minutes. My mother told us that what they had demanded was that she sign receipts indicating they had paid her whatever debts were owed to my family.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “So I tried yelling for a while. Not long. And then I just stood there. I thought, Should I go and help my mother? I wasn’t certain I should. I was afraid to go help her. I didn’t hear any screams or anything. The door was closed.”
“How many of them were there?”
“Three or four,” he says.
“Were you afraid they were going to kill her?” I ask.
“I would have heard a gunshot,” my father says, sensibly.
He considers my question a bit further. “I was afraid they would kill us all,” he adds.
“So you just stood in the front hallway, your ear to the door, listening? Hoping not to hear a gunshot?”
“I stood there. When they were done, they opened the door.”
I repeat to myself, “When they were done.”
Done with what?
“The same door, where you were standing?” I ask, trying to tether us both to the physical world with concrete details.
“Yes. I was in the front hallway. They had marched into the sitting room, where my father’s desk was.”
“What were their guns like? I ask.
“I’m not sure I even saw the guns,” he says, as if thinking of this for the first time.
“Then how did you know that they had guns?” I ask.
“I always thought whenever the Nazis showed up, they had guns with them,” he says.
“Do you think you saw the guns and then forgot them?”
“No, I don’t think so.” My father cannot imagine that he would forget something like this. I know that he could.
“I believe my mother told me afterward. I knew they had drawn guns, but I’m not sure how I knew.”
“So the door opens. What happened after that?”
“I don’t recall,” he says.
“Did she come over and hug you?” I ask.
“I don’t recall. I think she might have come out, and we hugged each other. She would have picked us up.
“I’m surmising,” he explains.
“Where was your father?” I whisper.
“Apparently my father was in the fields at the time of the attack, when the brownshirts marched into our house. My mother was deathly afraid that my father would return with a scythe in his arms,” he says.
Why was my grandmother afraid that her husband would go after the Nazis with a scythe? Could the Nazis have raped my grandmother?
Is my father telling me that he understands what happened to me, that he understands why I knew it was not sensible to be hysterical under the rapist’s gun? Is he warning me that after this brief interlude he will go back behind the wall that shuts out the recognition of terror, the terrors of his past and the terrors of mine?
For now, in this very moment, we are allies, my father and I, in the war against terror and rape. In this very moment, we are together.
Now my father switches to the present.
“Except for the beating of the boys, I never suffered anything comparable to what you went through,” he says, shocking me with a bolt of empathy. He seems to be considering my past experience in a new light. And with this return to the present, I sense new rules—he seems to be giving both of us permission to feel for the other, at least for the moment. We are no longer in an empathy-free zone.
&nb
sp; “The beatings didn’t bother me very much because in my family children were physically punished if they were bad. It wasn’t as bad as it would be for a child today, for Evan, who has never been beaten,” he says, referring to my son.
I am thinking now of when Evan was a toddler. Like many toddlers, when Evan got too excited, he would sometimes try to bite me. My father offered to cure him by biting Evan back.
“I prefer to be spanked than to be yelled at or made to feel guilty. It was less painful. I felt warm in my bottom and that was it,” my father says.
“I was afraid at night, afraid during the day,” he continues, without prompting from me.
There is a noticeable lessening of tension in the room.
“Did you have trouble sleeping?” I ask.
“But I didn’t know I was terrorized,” my father says, as if he hasn’t heard my question. So he didn’t feel his terror in the moment, either.
“When did you realize?” I ask.
“I still remember the feeling,” he says. “As soon as the U.S. ship started pulling away from the dock in Hamburg, I felt a huge upwelling. Then I realized that my fear was leaving me—the ship was American, and American law applied there, although there were some Nazis on the ship. The USS Washington…a passenger liner…March of 1938…so I was almost ten.
“I got very sick. I couldn’t hold anything down. I’m not sure, maybe I got food poisoned. As soon as I recovered, I was voraciously hungry. And everyone else was sick, and I was getting to run around the ship. And getting to eat four or five meals a day. We didn’t have much to eat in Germany—we had fake flour. I got to eat real food. I was small and thin for my age at the time.”
It is hard for me to imagine this muscled man emaciated and starving.
“But I still had German habits,” he says, by which he means, the habits of a German Jew, petrified of the Nazis. “If I saw Boy Scouts, I would go way out of my way to avoid them because they reminded me of Hitlerjugend. I was very passive and did everything I was told in school—I imbued any authorities with German power. I was afraid of them. Of the principal. That was with me until I got to be thirteen or fourteen….. Even then I deferred to authority.”
I hear again my father’s words: “I didn’t know I was terrorized.” I wonder now, was he terrorized by the police in Concord, Massachusetts? So determined to get them off the case that he told them we had forgotten about the crime four months after it occurred?
“So only some of your fear left when you left Germany?”
“My anxiety left. But those other fears were bred into me…. It took a long time to realize they weren’t founded on anything. Another fear is that I didn’t ever want to stand out, so I feared for a long time huge visible success—I didn’t know that I was smart. I didn’t try to get prizes or anything like that because I was afraid I’d be exposed. In college. And even professionally for a while. It did have a lasting effect, living through that terror.”
Is this why my father never praised us when we did well in school? I wonder now.
“This quality that you write about”—he changes the subject—“of not feeling afraid during a crisis. I know exactly what you mean. In a frightening situation I become very clearheaded. I assess the situation and try to maneuver within the constraints of the situation.
“When we had the car accident, I lost control of the car,” he says, referring to a serious accident he and my stepmother suffered in 1994. “The car did not respond to the steering wheel, but I wasn’t frightened. I tried to create a trajectory to cause the least damage. I didn’t just throw my hands up.
“Same thing when I’m mountain climbing. If I get into trouble, I suppress everything that I’m concerned about…. I’m not afraid. It’s gone.”
“How does it feel to go into that state?” I ask.
I’ve only recently realized that there is something unusual about this capacity to slip into an altered state that makes me more efficient, even smarter. I am not sure how to feel about my father’s admission that he can do the same thing.
“It doesn’t feel good or bad. I feel competent. I feel I’m in control,” he says.
“Afterward, do you feel burned out?” I ask.
“Physically exhausted,” he says. “I feel tired and emotionally low.”
“Did you ever ask yourself why you could do that?” I ask.
“No,” he answers, simply, honestly.
We will return to this subject later.
chapter three
The Investigation
Once I read the complete file, I had to learn about the man who raped me. I needed to do this to tame him—but also to tame a wild, nameless feeling inside myself.
I have always been a spy. Whenever I sense pain that I don’t understand, my own or others’, I feel compelled to research the source. I become a detective.
This is embarrassing to admit, but I am insatiably curious about the half-known truths that motivate people’s lives, often in ways they do not realize. If I met you today and sensed you have a secret—especially a secret you keep from yourself, especially a secret that might hurt someone—I would start trying to find the key from the moment I laid eyes on you. I might not even know that I was doing this. I might not want to do it, but I can’t stop myself.
I have been spying on violent men for much of my life. Not just men who have hurt me, but also men who have hurt others. I have traveled all over the world to talk to terrorists. I am compelled to understand men who hurt people, as if by understanding what motivates them, I can tame them; as if by taming them, I can make my world safe. But, perhaps for the first time, I am aware that my curiosity could make me sick. Sara tells me that she assumed, after the rape, that the next crime against us would be murder. She wasn’t sure whether the rapist would come back to kill us, or a new perpetrator. But it seemed logical, she felt, that we would be killed. Is murder what I fear?
This time, however, I have help. I am spying together with the police. They want to find the rapist, too, for their own reasons. They want to get him off the street. Today we understand that violent pedophiles cannot be cured. They can be treated with medication, but even then, they must be kept away from children.
Paul Macone, my partner in espionage, wants to talk to me. He wants to give me some redacted files. There is more than one case that he thinks is similar to mine. Remarkably similar-sounding perp, he says. Very similar MO. Same grayish black gun with white grips. He asks me to come out to the station. He would like my help, he says.
Although Lt. Macone and I overlapped in school, I cannot connect with him in a personal way. He is good, in a way that I fear that I am not. Unspoiled. He knows things about me that I normally don’t reveal. He knows about how the shadow of a long-ago terror debilitates me. I worry that he can sense an unhealthy obsession in me, and I feel shy in his presence.
I go to Concord regularly. It’s not just that I grew up there. My father and his wife still live there, and my son visits them every week. I have driven past the police station hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I have a vague recollection that I’ve even been inside the building, but I don’t remember anything. Was I ever arrested? I’m certain I was not. But shame shimmers at the edge of my consciousness, like a mirage I can’t quite see. I discover that I cannot remember precisely where the station is.
I drive past the Louisa May Alcott house, which I visited several times as a child. I know the station is near here, but I seem to have gone too far. I drive back toward the center of town. I am terribly sleepy. There is the Scout House, a large eighteenth-century barn where I attended Girl Scout meetings, where I had to take dancing lessons. An image of white gloves floats into my mind. Did we really wear white gloves? I cannot recall; my brain is turned to mush.
After this bewildering incident, I don’t even try to drive back there. Lt. Macone keeps me apprised of his progress by e-mail.
In October 2006 I open this e-mail.
Hi Jessica,
I had an interesting conversation with a detective in Weston, who has been around for years (and still working). What Weston does have is much, or all of the statewide intelligence on many suspects in assaults from the same time period. In a stroke of luck, they saved all of the paper intelligence so I will go retrieve it from them in the next couple of days.
Once I sift through what they have I will let you know if anything seems related.
I do not respond. Several days later he writes again. I open his message immediately, anxious to hear what he has to say.
Hi Jessica,
I have almost finished reading the intelligence we picked up at Weston PD. Nothing glaring is jumping out, however Lexington had two other assaults in the same general time period that I want to explore with them. In doing some process of elimination, I have a couple of questions. If you are not comfortable with any of the questions, please just let me know.
One report says there were obscene phone calls made to the house after the assault. Do you remember anything about this?
Let me know if I am being a pain….
Paul
It takes me weeks to respond. I’m busy, I guess. And I also get sleepy. I want Lt. Macone to find my rapist because I want to interview him myself, but I am not able to provide much help. I am not aware of feeling afraid. But I don’t feel like dwelling on the topic. I put the thought of my rapist and of Paul’s continuing investigation aside. I will wait until the rapist is found, I tell myself, and think about it then.
It’s not that I’m afraid of my rapist. It happened long ago, I tell myself. I’m grown up now. But I am afraid of the police station, which, for me, is a repository of shame. I prefer to stay away.
Once we find the rapist, I plan to talk to him. I plan to look him straight in the eye. That is as far as my planning goes.
Denial Page 5