The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  My father doubled his efforts in the lab after Father Heard disappeared and also spent several hours each night in his library reading Bavarian fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, and the newspapers for story ideas; since he’d become the voice of the parish, his stories to the children had become more complex, more nuanced, and as he spoke, his voice washed over the pews, beneath the rafters, and into the cold, fearful center of the congregation’s heart. The tiny vibrations reminded them they were still living their lives, even if those lives were full of uncertainty.

  That day, my father made Thump-Drag a stand-in for Solomon in the story of the two mothers.

  I’d been feeling numb and wrung out in a way, which was beginning to feel normal, and then this giant wave of hurt would rise out of something as small as a music note. Or the scent of burnt sugar, or the feel of chalk dust on my fingers. And I’d suddenly miss my brother so deeply that I would have done anything in that moment if I could touch the top of his foot, long enough to remember he had been real. I would fold into myself at those times and imagine who I would have been if he had not been lost. If he had been around to sketch our futures. I felt the great weight of responsibility settle over me. To not only make my life worthy, but to do so twofold to make up for the potential life I had taken from my brother.

  By late April, the Germans had forced my father’s factory into making lightbulbs exclusively for their war effort. They’d taken over procurement of materials and shipments of finished products. They kept my father on to help when needed, but no longer let him look at the books or profit margins. He had been told he’d be maintained but received no payment for the use of his factory. No money ever came in for the Volkswagen shipment, though confirmation of delivery was received by the transportation company. The workers he employed were required to continue to work in order to get their food ration cards, and as anyone who could have escaped by then already had, the workers showed up out of habit, need, and fear.

  By May, the Germans had installed covers on every external lightbulb in the factory and surrounding buildings, and had the windows covered with dark, heavy sheets to obscure them during air raid threats. The factory took on the shadow of night all day long. I worked on the assembly lines, feeding the glass bulbs into the machine that screwed them into the finished brass fixtures. The work was intolerably boring, but depending on the schedules, I often got to work alongside or near Hilda, who had been called into mandatory service as well.

  I longed to be out on the water with my uncle, for his boat to take us to all the wild places he’d been and I’d read about. We could fish the world and when we came back, Europe would be unified. My father would have his factory back. The Germans would control Portugal to Siberia. Edwin could find his way home. But instead I was stuck on the assembly line.

  Ludo began working at the factory alongside his mother several months earlier so he could get a ration card. Years before, I had overheard my parents talking about how Ludo’s mother had lost nine babies in the womb before having Ludo, and that was why she coddled him. She poured springs into the hopper so they could be parceled out down the line, and it amazed me how attentive she was in her repetitive motions. The fear of spending the rest of my life at such work flooded me.

  Once a day, a guard of four German soldiers walked through the factory eyeballing the workers.

  “Here come the uptight boys,” Edward Fass said.

  “Be quiet when they’re near,” Silvers, the man next to him, said.

  Their heavy heels click-clopped on the tile floors in a big circle around the building. If it rained outside, they stayed longer, but for the most part, they came in, walked their loop, and continued their lap of the town.

  By June the Germans implemented a new assembly line to produce a different shape of lightbulb for their new line of U-boats. The lights had to account for flux in the steel sides of the boats from the increase of water pressure. Several engineers and German military officers had my father show them the entirety of his factory. Hilda and I were working with glass orbs on the assembly line as the men walked past. My father nodded at me. The Germans were silent on their tour. Several of them wrote notes as they walked. The next week the same men came back with a truck full of equipment and designs for a new assembly line. They had my father and several of his workers build it, exactly where the line my father created for the Volkswagen order had been.

  It was after the first full day the new assembly line was in production that we had three nights of light bombing. Air raid sirens wailed each night as everyone in town sought the shelter of basements or scrambled to get away from the harbor, where the bombs tended to fall. The sirens made all the dogs in town bark, howl, and run circles around their enclosures. Fergus went mad with fear. Then came the high, sharp, whistling followed by the walloping crash of bombs blasting into the ground.

  On the fourth night, the sirens sounded and there was a large rumble of planes high overhead. This time though they didn’t turn over us; they kept going toward Germany. The sprinkling of bombs that randomly fell on Delfzijl that night rocked a tenement building, blew the harbor ramp away, and sunk a few transport boats. Uncle Martin kept his boat docked offshore with his navigation lights off and shielded by black lightbulb covers.

  By early July, my father worked every night when he got home from the factory. He went to his lab to march in small, tight circles around a hanging bulb socket. He skirted the pocket of pale light, and his shadow bent at the corners of the room, draped over his workbenches that were covered in burnt fuses, soldering irons, screw caps, filaments, needle-nose pliers, clamps, coils of thin wire that burned hot orange, and gas containers of argon he had delivered from Hungary. Broken glass piled in the corners. Rectangular and triangular cuts of mirrors sat on workbenches that were all lit, making the work space look like a diamond-studded mine.

  He marked the time when he left the room on a large lined piece of paper he’d nailed to the doorway. How long would the bulb burn for? How long would it hold its brilliance? How could he improve upon such a thing? Often, in the middle of the night, he’d walk through the house to his workroom to pace more circles around the dangling bulbs. Perhaps he walked a million kilometers in his own home in trying to capture the light.

  One night, in an attempt to feel like I did as a kid again, and wanting to feel closer to my father and his obsession, I snuck into his lab. I hit the grimy switch and then fumbled to screw a bulb into the exposed socket. My finger and thumb brushed the metal linkage and I felt coursing volts scream through my hand, rushing up my arm to my shoulder, and spread needles over my scalp. It felt like muscle and tendon were pulling apart. Bolts of energy manically vibrated deeper into my chest like plucked cello strings before I shook myself loose. For a moment my arm hung limp, a feeling of paralysis, and that shocking sensation lingered. Even as I left the lab and snuck back to my bed, it felt like a space in my body had been cleared and laid with new chords of nerve that bristled and sparked.

  I never told anyone about that incident as I felt foolish. Though afterward I had electrocution dreams. A silent gushing of force would fill me up, make my muscles quiver, and the linkage of my bones hum. In sleep I was a container for that light, which lifted me away from my body in white starbursts.

  The morning after, my father called me into his lab. I thought he knew I disturbed his work.

  “Jacob, come in here, please. Put your glasses on, and stand back there against the wall.”

  My safety glasses were on the hook hanging next to Edwin’s pair. My father couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. I saw my brother’s glasses and didn’t care if I was going to get in trouble or not. I felt a compulsion to stomp on Edwin’s glasses so I didn’t have to look at them.

  “I need some help,” my father said.

  No accusations came, so I set the cloth strap against the back of my skull and pulled the glasses down over my eyes. Large shards of glass and metal crunched into the floor. Fergus knew not to come into
the room and I heard him lay down outside the door.

  My father called out times for me to write on the paper. Often I’d watch him walk in those tight circles while talking about how to pressurize inert gases, how to set the stem so the contact wires sit properly, and how to best insulate the cap around the electrical contact points. There was a different language used altogether in that room. We spoke of science, using the language of chemistry and the periodic chart. There was also the language of the countries he ordered supplies from and the strange writing on the crates and gas canisters that arrived at the factory, which were skimmed from and brought home.

  “Mark every minute on your paper there,” he told me.

  “How long are we going to time this one?” I asked.

  “Just mark them.”

  “Nine thirty-seven,” I said.

  “Nine thirty-eight.”

  “Nine thirty-nine.”

  “Nine forty.” My father seemed as multifaceted, unknowable as the hundreds of glass fragments scattered around the room.

  As I was calling out “nine forty-one,” there was a quick pop, and the lightbulb shattered in a small explosion of radiant orange dust. Glass rubble holding the last touches of light rained onto the floor. Little white after-burn spots floated across my eyes. Then the room went dark. The smell of burnt filament with an aftertaste of some chemical I didn’t recognize floated around us as our eyes adjusted to the thick shadow we stood in.

  “Ah-ha!” he yelled out.

  The outline of his posture changed from that of a wounded person to someone who had just been healed and was starting to stand taller.

  “It’s the smallest details that matter most,” he said.

  “Are those smallest details why they keep exploding?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Precisely.”

  The next day, while I was working on the assembly line, my father came down to the floor and started working on the new line the Germans had set up. He often poked around with the lines so no one else paid any mind to what he was doing. The workers instead focused closer to their jobs since the boss was nearby. But I watched him as he installed a small mechanical pump behind the metal side panel of the base assemblage. The tip of the pump looked like a homemade baster, similar to what he’d been experimenting with in his workroom at home. It dropped little dollops of thick, dark liquid onto the coil. He checked a few of the lights that the line put out, put the panel back on the machine, and went back to his office. He looked at me and raised a long finger to his lips. Then the four soldiers on their daily lap of the factory opened the door.

  I didn’t have the inherent interest my father had in the science behind harnessing light. There was a time when my father told Edwin and me that the factory would be our inheritance. Now that Edwin was gone, I didn’t care if the Germans had it. They were moving west. Taking everything. At the time, I thought I understood why. At camp they had pumped us full with their reasons. They told us how the Treaty of Versailles had crippled them after the Great War. Though I didn’t know this was the talk that gave Hitler his foothold. That the plan I happily lapped up of taking over Europe was far more severe than imaginable. At the time, at some misunderstood level, I was also furious at my government for flooding Rotterdam and secretly blamed them for the loss of Edwin. I didn’t care what the Germans did, despite the rumblings of my father and Uncle Martin about them taking everything over. I was locked in grief over the loss of my brother. It no longer froze my days like it did my mother’s, but it froze something inside of me that I didn’t think would ever warm.

  9

  A gristly half kilo of ground pork sausage was the first piece of meat we had in months. My mother inspected it on the counter. She wore her ever present blue bathrobe. Her pant legs and thick wool socks stuck out beneath the hem and glided over the floor. She brought out two yellow globe onions and a dark cast-iron pan from the cupboard, and it clanked against the large pot in which she had boiled the crabs Uncle Martin had brought over. The noise of her cooking lifted me for the moment, as I had become used to her living like a ghost in our house. She took one of the onions in her hand and started rubbing off the skin between her palms, making sure we’d have as much of it as possible. When both onions were bald, she chopped them and put one into the skillet and the other into a pot of water with several carrots and a pinch of salt from the glass spice jar. She turned on the burners and when the coils pulsed orange she put the frying pan with the onion and the full pot on the heat.

  The front door swung open and smashed against the wall before being slammed shut. Fergus jumped up from the corner of the kitchen and started barking.

  “Drika,” my father yelled from the doorway. “Drika.”

  He ran into the kitchen, frantic, beads of sweat on his hairline. “They found out,” he said.

  “What happened?” my mother asked.

  “They found out,” he said again. He leaned on the kitchen countertop to steady himself and knocked the empty milk pot over. His face was flushed red from running, something I’d only seen him do once before, under the bridge in Rotterdam. “The engineers came back to the factory and found out what I’d done.”

  “What’d you do?” I asked.

  “What have you done?” my mother mouthed. She walked up to him and hit him on the chest and yelled this time, “What have you done?”

  “I sabotaged the assembly lines to make all the lights we’ve been sending blow out or explode.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.

  “After they took Father Heard, I had to do something.”

  “Not this. No, let others fight this war, but not this. Now what will you do?” she asked.

  “Let them build this nightmare of theirs in the dark.”

  The heat of his words silenced us. We all stood there for a moment. He was still panting, his chest swelling and sinking. The water on the stove rose to a boil. The image of the lightbulbs shipped from Koopman Light exploding all over Germany came into my mind—a hundred thousand lightbulbs, all over the continent popping and raining little shards of glass onto German soldiers.

  “What happened?” my mother asked.

  “They figured it out. I went to the factory and the engineers were back and working on the assembly line they had me install. When they pulled out my addition, I ran off. They’ll know to find me here. They’ll be here soon.”

  The smell of wet, boiling onions hit me. “Our food cards,” I said, immediately ashamed that this was my first reaction, fear of where my next meal would come from. “They’ll take away our food cards.”

  “They’ll take away your father first.”

  He ran from the room and up the stairs to his bedroom. Fergus followed. A moment later he came down with a satchel and was stuffing a shirt and a pair of pants into it. In the corner of his library he fished through a file cabinet for papers that he started shoving in his bag. He held up his passport and then he shoved it into the satchel.

  “Where are you going?” my mother asked.

  “You can’t go,” I said.

  “Jacob. Come here.” He put his hands on my shoulders and bent down and kissed me on the forehead. “Meet me later tonight by the tree fort you boys built in the woods.” He pulled his pocket watch loose, flipped the worn lid open and checked the time. “Ten tonight, okay? If I’m not there by twelve, don’t wait any longer. Okay. Okay?”

  “Aren’t we coming with you?”

  He squeezed my shoulders and looked me square in the eye. Then there was a loud pounding on the door. Behind it words, stern and brutal. Hearing the voices without having heard a car pull up arrested us all for a moment.

  “Open up, now,” a voice said. The pounding on the door started again, with greater force. We looked at each other without moving. My parents’ whispered conversations late at night over the past several years—their hushed words and careful planning—had all been to avoid this moment.

  Fergus barked at the door. The d
oorknob turned and pushed open. My father sidestepped out of the hallway into the shadowy interior of his workroom. I had heard the same things everyone else had. That there were places the Germans sent Jews, nonconformists, and people like Samuel the air-writer—camps.

  Camp. The word whistled through my mind as our front door swung open. My mother put her hands up to her pale face and stood frozen. Two men in knee-length, shiny, black leather jackets and padded field-gray hats with the red and black Nazi crosses above the eyes walked into the foyer. Each had a Luger pistol in his hand, leveled at his hip. From the corner of my eye, I could see into my father’s workroom, where he knelt, lay down on the floor, and began crawling across all that glass on his belly toward the outside door. His pocket watch dragged beside him by its thin, gold chain. He pulled himself by his bare forearms.

  “Where is Hans Koopman?” one of the officers asked.

  Fergus jumped up on the man who spoke and rested his paws on his jacket and barked. The man jerked his knee up into the center of the dog’s chest. Fergus collapsed. With a gasping exhale he kicked on the ground as his stomach shuddered. He dug into the carpet and writhed for air, making a dry swallowing sound, then stood up and limped out of the room.

  “Where is Hans Koopman?” the man asked again and stepped forward.

  “He’s at work,” my mother said and stepped closer to him to block his view of the workroom. Her fingers trembled.

  The shadow of my father slithered over the floor.

  One twitch of my eye, one tremble of the wood boards beneath him, and he’d be given away. His knees parted the layers of glass beneath him and his long body looked unnatural sprawled out on the ground. He swung open the door of his workroom to the snow-dusted yard and snaked out. Natural light flooded into his dark work space before he pushed the door shut with his foot. Part of me wanted to grab him and stand him up, make him face these men. I wanted him to be brave enough for all of us, for him to show me that there was no real threat to be scared of. To look these men in the eye the way I wanted to but still could not.