by Devin Murphy
“Northwest for herring grounds,” Uncle Martin said in Dutch.
“There’s no more going north of here,” the sailor replied in Dutch.
“It’s prime fishing up there,” Uncle Martin yelled.
“No more.”
Several soldiers leaned over the railing and studied our decks.
I think I picked up on Uncle Martin’s wordless anger and was channeling it as I wanted to tell them to piss off, but I kept from making eye contact with any of them. Not making eye contact was something my father had noticed as a timid habit.
“Stand straight. Look straight,” he’d said, and even his having to mention it, a fault I felt, made my eyes snap to the floor and I’d apologize like a meek little I’m-sorry machine. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’d chant to tamp down any sparks I perceived between us. I’d do this to try to keep the peace between everyone, though I hated every time the words crossed my lips.
“Is there some sort of trouble that way?” Uncle Martin asked the sailors.
“Sealed off.”
Uncle Martin smiled. He turned toward me, and I could tell his smile was fake, lubricious, one of the vocabulary words my father had given me. My uncle’s neck flushed crimson like he was choking back anger. He must have been furious at the notion that someone would try to stop him from moving freely.
“Well. Not sure what I’m supposed to do to make a living if I can’t go fishing there.”
“Fish south,” the sailor said.
“You guys can’t let us slip by for half a day? I’m sure no one out here would crawl up your asses about it.”
“I cannot let you go farther.”
“Well then. I’m sure you got your reasons.” Uncle Martin’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the gunwale. “Maybe later in the season?”
“Maybe,” the soldier said. “Maybe you’ll be allowed a permit.”
“Okay then,” Uncle Martin said. “You guys be safe out here.”
“You as well,” the sailor said and tossed the spring line back onto our deck. The line was as thick as my wrist and pieces of barnacle shells ground into the fibers from rubbing against pylons sliced my skin.
Uncle Martin climbed up the back ladder into the wheelhouse and started to turn the Lighthouse Lady around.
“A permit! Who are these bed-pissers? Bunch of bastards with misshapen peckers, probably.”
“Why’d they stop us?” Edwin asked.
“Who knows. That big ship must have radioed to shore about us. Sent those guys out to check on us.” He pushed the throttle forward and muttered to himself. “Permits. You’re kidding me with your permits.”
We turned the Lighthouse Lady back south and fished those waters until it was time to go get my father and Ludo. Once they boarded we headed east to the port town of Leer, where the three of us boys would meet the train.
That night, onboard, we played card games: spades, whist, and gin rummy.
“Hilda will be mad she’s missing out on these games,” I said. We all grew up with Hilda, who I was desperately and secretly in love with.
“But she’d hate cutting up the fish,” Ludo said.
“For sure,” I said, like I knew anything about her.
My first sex dream was of holding Hilda’s ankles in my hands and letting the sole of my foot press and rub between her legs—an area that in my mind was as smooth and featureless as a mannequin. I had not yet seen a naked girl and didn’t know what to do. The confusion only worsened, then shifted to a shame because I woke with painful erections pushing on my shorts, or worse, a gooey mess crusting in my underwear, which I would strip off, ball up, and cram deep in our hamper to hide.
While Ludo and Edwin played, I went out on deck, where sequins of fish scales glinted on the drying nets. I walked into the wheelhouse where my father and uncle were arguing.
“I can’t believe you’d let them do this, Hans.”
“They’ll have fun.”
“But there?”
“Come on, Martin. Don’t you give this to me too. The boys will have a good time.”
“They just stopped my boat. They want to control everything.” Uncle Martin waved his arms in front of him as if shaking off some ugly thought.
I went and stood between them, to be a good son, a peacemaker.
“I can’t believe you’ll let Jacob do this,” Uncle Martin said. My father looked at me standing there, and held back anything else he had to say.
That night I slept on a wheelhouse bench as Uncle Martin steered, studied the charts, and referenced his liquid compass and echo recorder. The sound of the diesel engines pumping the props through the wind and rolling white caps shook the whole ship.
In my half-sleep I thought I heard one of my father’s stories. He would always tell us stories about a character he invented named Thump-Drag, a clubfooted hunchback. When he swung his dead foot, it clobbered the ground, thump, and then he dragged it behind him as if it were an anvil. We grew up hearing about Thump-Drag’s knotted hump, which was really a giant extra muscle, and about how dragging that foot around made him incredibly strong. The steady rhythm of his walking, thump-drag, thump-drag, was the one constant to all his stories.
Thump-Drag was born a millennium ago as a Celt, my father told us, and the stories of his adventures, strength, and humility grew nightly as our father put us to bed. One night he gave moral lessons akin to Father Heard’s at church. The next, Thump-Drag became an outcast for his deformations. As we grew, Thump-Drag’s travels took him all over the world and through time. One day Thump-Drag was a Stone Age troglodyte and the next he fought in the Great War. In this way, he became the Wandering Jew, a Spartan, different Greek mythological figures, and a Byronic hero.
My father walked into the wheelhouse waking me fully up. “There you are,” he said. “Don’t you want to sleep in your bunk?”
“Can I stay here?”
He sat by my feet and rested a hand over my ankle.
“Can you tell me a story?” I asked.
He looked at Uncle Martin, who nodded.
“A short one,” my father said. He began speaking of Thump-Drag in the sailor Ulysses’ story.
“Thump-Drag was cast from the sea and told by Poseidon to put an oar over his shoulder and walk inland until someone asked what he was holding. Then he was to plant his oar in the ground and build a church to the god of the ocean.”
My father went on, but of all the stories, hearing the start of this one now pained me the most because now I saw no matter where he went or who Thump-Drag came upon, he was perpetually moving away from his home. As my father spoke I understood Thump-Drag would see the whole world, but do so alone. I turned to the hulking shadow of my uncle steering our boat through the night. In the dark, my father’s voice went on and then braided his own truth into this story. I wish my father told a different story altogether, one that would not come to resemble his own.
3
Uncle Martin was still at the wheel our last morning aboard. Out the windows, the sun was like a great rolling cat’s eye. Waves crested and crashed into each other until they reached the thin strip of shoreline. I opened the door and felt the briny air all around the Lighthouse Lady. Ahead of us, channel markers led the river up to the town of Leer. Next to the harbormaster’s house in Leer was a large scaffold pyramid.
“That radio tower is probably where the navy cruiser called our location in. They used the tower to order the PT boat to come turn us back.”
“That really got under your skin, didn’t it?” my father asked.
Uncle Martin nodded and gave my father that put-on smile he had given the German sailors.
Our father and Uncle Martin walked us through town. The three of us boys ran ahead and then doubled back in our excitement. We each had our backpacks stuffed with camp uniforms, a tin of biscuits, and a sleeping bag crammed into a small canvas sack my mother had sewn that we could fill with spare clothes and use as a pillow. We detached our sleeping bag pouches and heaved them up in the
air where they drifted upward before freezing for a moment at their peak and dropping back into our arms. We ran ahead, laughing and tossing our bags up like it was our voices lifting the sleep sacks upward. The drab lemon morning light slid up the brick buildings in town and made the dark, earth-colored walls shine like honey.
At the station Uncle Martin gave us a silly sailor’s salute with a wobbly left hand. “Don’t buy too much into what these people are going to tell you.”
“Stop that, Martin,” my father said.
“All right. All right. Just a little advice.”
The two of them ushered us onto the train steps. “Drop this in the post when you arrive,” our father said and handed Edwin a letter.
“Eisenbahn,” our father said.
“What?” Edwin asked.
“It means happy travels on the iron road,” our father said. “And, please, practice your German.” He cupped the back of our necks one at a time. Ludo’s too. “Do well,” he shouted as we entered the second-class passenger compartments. When I looked back, the two giants of my youth waved good-bye to us.
Once we were moving, the train leaned into curves. Groaning metal rose into our cabin as we picked up speed.
Ludo kept saying, “Look at that. Look at that,” as we clattered across bridges, through tunnels, and over several canals that were emerald green with scum. Had we been close enough, we could have reached out and written our names on the surface until the sour algae pulled our letters under like secrets. We ran parallel to the blue outline of a river in the distance that cut through lush, green patchworks of barley, alfalfa, and potatoes. Dim silhouettes of medieval towns flashed by through the clearings of trees.
Edwin drew in a notepad, sketching the tapestried landscape; elm trees, low hills, church steeples, gray-blue wisps of smoke from the Tudor farmhouses with high rectangular windows. I was nervous about what lay ahead, but Edwin’s steadiness and focus on his drawing put me at ease. I peeled back the flap of the letter my father gave to Edwin so as not to tear it and be able to seal it back together. It was nothing interesting. A note to a Mr. Gunnelburg, an executive at Volkswagen: In hopes to continue to grow our business together and to more years of good relations. He thanked the man for telling him about the camp. Said we were very excited about attending. I folded the letter back to look unhampered and watched the countryside roll along.
The train rode through dense forested areas of old-growth elm and pine trees before slowing at the edge of a tan, umber, and rose-colored town. When we got off the train, we entered the train station, a large stone building, its roof black with age. Birds nested high up the wall in veiny cracks through the mortar. Inside we used a rest room next to a bakery. The toilet smelled like urine and dense, black artisan breads. The square in front of the station filled with boys our age. Across the square, bicycles leaned against tenement buildings that were covered in ivy which wrapped around the grillwork of their balconies. The sky was drained and pure and I was so excited to be in this new place that I remember it all very clearly.
“What do we do now?” Ludo asked.
A group of older boys were in front of the station. They wore gray socks up to their knees, gray shorts, and white shirts with brown suspenders and soft brown cloth hats. They were mostly lean and blond with wide, tan faces and glistening mouths. It would be easy to think they came from the same family of two dozen blond brothers. Compared to my own brown eyes and pale form, I couldn’t pass for a distant cousin. One of them yelled out, “Camp boys. Form a line here.”
The three of us merged with the other boys and were led out the front of the station to a row of buses. We were counted off by tens and told to board the third bus, where one of the older boys was to mark us off on a clipboard. A sprig of hair fell down and bent like a stork’s leg over his forehead. His mouth was full of yellowed teeth.
“Edwin Koopman.”
“Koopman, Koopman. Ah, you are Dutch.”
“Yes,” Edwin said.
“Well, good to have you here.”
“Jacob Koopman,” I said, stepping up to the older boy.
“Jacob Koopman,” the older boy said. “A pair of Dutchmen, very good.”
We got on the bus, and I heard Ludo behind us.
“Ludo Shoemackher.”
“Look at this,” the older boy said. “The Dutch are coming to their senses and joining us.” The boy with the clipboard patted Ludo’s weak left arm. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” Ludo said.
“It doesn’t look like nothing.”
Ludo tried to walk onto the bus but the boy extended his clipboard and blocked the stairs.
“What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Nothing.”
“An injury?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s nothing,” I called back from the bus’s steps.
“Tell me,” the boy said.
“Polio. From a long time ago.”
The boy stepped back. “Can that make me sick?”
“It’s no different than an injury,” Ludo said, stepping by the boy and onto the bus.
Over two hundred boys boarded the row of buses. Some of them already wore their camp uniforms, and others looked like they came from a day playing in the woods, sweaty, dusted in dirt with mud tracing the seams of their shoes. When the three of us sat down, a boy in front of Ludo whose neck looked scoured by sandpaper turned toward him. He had the flattened nose and thick neck of a young boxer. His features seemed set with a chisel and hammer. Deep-set black eyes. Long furrows across his forehead. He kept licking his lips like a parched lizard.
“You know, you won’t be able to compete with any of us,” the boy said, eyeing Ludo’s arm.
Ludo turned to the window. His right hand cupped his left like the lid of a sugar cup.
The buses took us to the camp offices, about fifty kilometers away from the train station, where we had to be checked in.
We were each given a clipboard and told to sign the loyalty oaths. To the camp. To the National Socialist Party. Without reading it, we did.
In the main congregating ground around the flagpoles, we split into groups. Each group was assigned an older boy as a group leader. Edwin, Ludo, and I were, thankfully, placed together. We were led to a cabin that slept ten boys. Our cabin had a row of five cots with chests at their base on either side and a large window at each end.
Our group leader for the next five weeks was Günter Zimmer, a seventeen-year-old boy with blue eyes, nubby ears, and black hair, oiled and parted down the middle. His breath smelled like smoke and mint. His uniform of gouged wood.
“Unpack, change into uniforms, and meet outside in ten minutes,” Günter said.
When Günter went outside, the rash-necked boy from the bus assessed his bunkmates. “Great, our group has been invaded by defective Dutchmen.” The few boys next to him leered at us as we continued to unpack.
“Don’t worry about him,” a boy in the cot next to Ludo said. The boy looked at Ludo and put down a colorful three-tone quilt he unfolded from his bag. “I’m Pauwel,” he said. He had glossy, volcanic pimples around his nose and chewed at the peels of raw skin around his thumbnail.
“Ludo Shoemackher, and these are Edwin and Jacob Koopman.”
“Nice to meet you,” Pauwel said. He had a pear-shaped face with doughy cheeks that made him look like a chubby little Viking. “You’ll settle in fine.”
Outside, we were lined up for uniform inspections by Günter, who had us stand straight, tuck our shirts beneath our belt lines, and fold back the tops of our wool socks. He stood in front of me and ran his hands over my shoulders to smooth the creases.
“Look up and ahead. Not down.”
I looked up and let my eyes lose focus and cursed myself for being scared of people talking directly to me, like anyone, at any moment, might spark into a rage if I said a word.
After inspection we were ready for our first tour of the grounds and marched single file by the rows
of bunkhouses, and a giant building that was the camp officers’ housing and offices.
“This is the parade ground with the flagpoles,” Günter said. A red flag with a black, hooked swastika flapped in the breeze, snapping as it fully extended before folding back on itself.
Beyond the main grounds were sports fields that pushed all the way back to a dense stand of woods. In the woods were obstacle courses, firing ranges, and an area where previous campers had built bunker forts and concrete pillboxes to border the camp’s property.
We marched around the campgrounds, then we teamed up for a football match where I ran myself ragged from the pure joy of having so many other kids to play with. After the game, we ate as a giant group at long wooden tables set end to end in rows outside so all five hundred camp boys could eat together at once. I had never seen so many boys, and wondered what had brought them here. For the most part it was the sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who were in charge of the camp, although there were several camp officers. Alten Händen, they called them, Old Hands, who we were told had survived hard times on the front lines. They marched through the grounds, scanning, supervising, instructing on Kampfgeist, fighting spirit, or Labenscraum, living space, and then disappeared into cabins near the main office.
Most of the German words were thick and heavy in my mouth. Ludo and Edwin took to nuances of the language we hadn’t learned in lessons, but I was quite clunky at it.
That first night we had campfires and played games. Tests of courage, really. Boys jumped over bonfires. Older counselors carried out giant circular canvases with handles woven along the edge. When rolled out, the canvas was large enough for two grown men to lie end to end in any direction. Thirty campers from my troop gathered around the tarp as one boy crawled into the center. Then everyone lifted his edge of the canvas so the boy in the middle launched off the ground. Günter counted so we knew when to dip and lift the canvas. To his cadence, we launched the boy in the middle up into the air, a free-float ascension until he peaked and sailed back into the taut and ready trampoline. This was how we learned one another’s names. The flying boy shouted his name, and the rest of us repeated it as we heaved.