The Second Son bt-3

by Jonathan Rabb

  Goebbels moved up, and Kurtzman moved with him. When Hitler finally took the chancellorship in 1933, Kurtzman celebrated with the rest, watched the Reichstag burn, and accepted his post at the Ministry with a sense of quiet destiny.

  It was all as it was meant to be, until the day he was told that the whole thing had come crashing down. He was no longer a member of the party. He could never be a member of the party. He was filth: a Jew. A dirty Jew. They had discovered his secret. In a matter of hours, the once untouchable Alexander Kurtzman was forced to resume his role as the reviled and pathetic Sascha Hoffner. His life, as he had made it, was no longer his. The humiliation and despair might have killed a weaker man. Not so with Sascha. His own death was only of minor concern.

  An image of that sixteen-year-old boy-before Goebbels, before the Freikorps-sat with Nikolai Hoffner as he cradled an empty glass in his hands.

  Mila was next to him. Wilson leaned against the counter. Vollman stood by the door. They had finished the bottle of whiskey. They had let him drink in silence.

  Hoffner set his glass down. He looked over and saw the canisters of film and the viewing machine in a crate by the door. He couldn’t recall when any of that had happened.

  Mila was drinking water. She pushed her glass toward him, and Hoffner took it. He drank. It tasted of rust and sand, and he saw a few pieces of grit swirling at the bottom. They were the same color as the one he had brushed from Georg’s ear. Why that? he wondered.

  Wilson said, “You saw something?”

  The sound of the voice startled Mila. She looked up, and Hoffner set the glass on the table. He tapped at it, sending it across in little bursts of movement. He might have sent it over the edge had Mila not grabbed it and pulled it back.

  Hoffner’s head remained unnervingly light as he stared at the table. “I saw what you saw,” he said. “Spain, guns-a well.”

  “And that last image?” Wilson missed nothing.

  “It went by quickly.”

  “Not too quickly.”

  “No,” said Hoffner, “not too quickly.” Wilson waited. Finally Hoffner turned to him. “It was my son,” he said. “My older son. Sascha. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.” Hoffner felt Mila’s eyes bore through him.

  Wilson said, “You’re telling me that was Kurtzman?”

  The word jarred. “How do you know his name?”

  “We’re not likely to take a man on and not know everything about his family.” Wilson reached for the jug of water and poured himself a glass. He drank. “Kurtzman is in the Propaganda Ministry. Why would he be in Spain?”

  The numbing at the back of Hoffner’s head returned; he welcomed it. “You saw his face,” he said, “the way he was dressed.” His eyes drifted back to the table. “You think this has anything to do with the Ministry?”

  Wilson needed a moment. “So he’s here for the guns?”

  Hoffner felt the first taste of acid in his throat. He took hold of Mila’s glass and held it. “No,” he said. “He’s not here for the guns.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Hoffner drank. He felt the water course through his chest.

  “He’s no longer in the party,” he said. “He’s no longer a Nazi. They found his Jewish blood-from his grandmother-three weeks ago. And they threw him out.” Hoffner set the glass down but continued to hold it. His mind was emptying. “He’s not here for the guns or the Ministry.”

  Wilson wasn’t convinced. “I thought you hadn’t seen him in quite some time.”

  “I wouldn’t need to see him to know such things.”

  Wilson looked as if he might press it. Instead he said, “Then why is he here?”

  Hoffner heard the voices from Teruel, from Tarancon, from a part of himself he refused to listen to-An unusual German … he had death in the eyes-and said, “You say it’s not the way the SS kills a man.” There was nothing in his voice. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  Wilson’s uncertainty turned to quiet disbelief. “What?”

  Hoffner said nothing, and Wilson continued, “You can’t believe that.” He waited for an answer. When none came, he said, “You understand what you’re saying?”

  Hoffner stared at the glass. He had nothing else. “You’re asking if I understand how my son could have killed his brother. Tell me. How could I possibly understand that?”

  Wilson refused to hear it. “Even if it’s remotely true, he could have killed him in Berlin. Why follow him here?”

  Hoffner had no answer, nothing but the face of Sascha staring back at him through the lens of a camera. “My son is dead. My other one is here.” He felt his throat constrict, his eyes grow heavy. “If only the world were made of such coincidence…”

  Wilson looked across at Vollman. He saw his own disbelief staring back. He looked again at Hoffner. “You’re talking about your own son.”

  Hoffner felt his own rage and despair like wet rope coiling around his throat. “Yes,” he said quietly, “my own son,” and the glass shattered in his hand.

  It was nearly half a minute before he realized he was bleeding.

  Mila was already pressing down on his wrist, pulling pieces of glass from his skin, as Hoffner stared down at the hand and saw one long cut. A single thick shard rocked easily on the table, while tiny grains of glass shimmered across his palm. Mila picked and brushed, and Hoffner felt nothing. It was a hand, not his own, until she finally took a cloth from Vollman and pressed it into the flesh. Instantly, Hoffner felt the pain shoot up through his arm like the twisting of raw muscle. He heard himself groan, and realized it was the burning of alcohol coursing into his skin. His throat constricted and he coughed.

  “Bring over that bucket,” Mila said, and Hoffner angled his head as she continued to work on him. Only once did he come close to vomiting, but the acid stayed in his throat, and his hand began to throb with its own isolated pain.

  Hoffner’s head cleared. He swallowed and looked over to see his hand encased in thick gauze. Wilson had produced a second bottle. He filled a glass with whiskey and held it out to Hoffner.

  “He’s had enough,” Mila said.

  Hoffner took the glass and drank. Wilson set the bottle on the table and retreated to the counter. Vollman was back by the door as Mila sat silently.

  Finally Wilson said, “You’re saying this has nothing to do with the guns or Franco?”

  Hoffner kept his eyes on the glass. He flexed his fingers. He could still move them. “Not everything shatters the world as a whole, Herr Wilson. This one shatters just mine.”

  Wilson started to answer, and Hoffner said, “He left the film. He wanted it found. He wanted me to know.”

  Wilson was still struggling. “But why?”

  Hoffner heard the question in his own voice. “Because I’m his father.”

  It answered nothing and brought a silence to the room.

  Finally Wilson said, “I could help you.”

  “No,” said Hoffner. “You couldn’t.” He felt the need to stand. He pushed back his chair and steadied himself against the table. “Thank you, Herr Wilson. Thank you for Doval, the doctor”-the word caught in his throat-“Georg. I imagine you’ll be leaving Spain now.”

  Wilson showed a genuine sympathy even if he understood nothing. He nodded slowly.

  Hoffner extended his good hand. Wilson hesitated, then took it. Vollman followed suit. It was a bizarre moment of protocol, until Vollman said, “You’re going to try and find him.”

  Hoffner said nothing.

  Vollman added, “I have a plane-for another two days. It has room for four.”

  Mila stood, and Wilson said, “He’d be heading west. Portugal would be my guess.”

  “He’ll be in Badajoz,” Hoffner said, his voice empty, his eyes distant: it was as if he were speaking to himself. “He found enough about Hisma to track Georg. He’ll know Badajoz is where the last of the guns are going. And he’ll think it’s where he can find his way back.”

  Wilson hesitated. “His way back
?”

  Hoffner looked directly at him. It seemed as if he might answer. Instead, he took Mila’s arm and moved them to the door.

  They buried Georg in the first light, in a field just beyond the last of the houses. Wilson had offered to take the boy to Berlin-he, too, had a plane-but Hoffner said no. He thought of Mendy and Lotte, standing through the taunts-those roving packs of boys who waited outside the cemetery gates, jeering while a Jew was laid in the ground. Why put them through that? It was quiet here, and simple. Whichever way things went in Spain, it would be better than in Germany.

  The priest stood off to the side while Hoffner mouthed ancient words whose meaning he had never learned. He had no idea if this was the place or the time for them, but they were all he knew. His mother had insisted he say them for her. He said them now for his son.

  When he finished, Hoffner took a clump of earth and tossed it onto the sheeted body. Mila did the same, then Wilson and Vollman. She held his arm.

  The sun had climbed to the horizon as they stood and waited for Wilson in the square. He had gone to see Doval. Mila hadn’t let go of his arm. Vollman smoked through the silence.

  Wilson appeared from the prison gate, and Hoffner said to Mila, “He’ll fly you to Barcelona. It’s the least he can do.”

  Mila said nothing, and Wilson drew up.

  “I told him it’s a direct request from the Admiralty,” Wilson said. His shirt was damp through at the back. “He’s promised no interference. You have two days. After that-”

  “After that,” said Hoffner, “Doval gets to finish what he started.”

  Wilson said nothing, and Vollman tossed his cigarette to the ground. “I can wait. I can fly on the fifteenth. That gives you enough time.”

  There was no reason to answer.

  Wilson said, “We’ll go get the car, then. Vollman and I.” It was a moment of unexpected chivalry: he was giving Hoffner a last few moments with Mila. It took Vollman another few seconds to catch on.

  “Right. Yes.” Vollman gave an awkward nod, and followed Wilson off. Mila and Hoffner watched them go.

  “They hid you in the church?” Hoffner said. It was first time he could ask.

  “I’m not going to Barcelona.”

  “There are good priests everywhere. All this must make them shudder. It’ll be the same in Germany one day-”

  “I’m not going.” She waited until he was looking directly at her. “You don’t have to do this, Nikolai. If he was capable of killing Georg, what is there possibly to gain?”

  Hoffner saw the vulnerability in her eyes. “And what if he wasn’t capable?”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  Hoffner waited. “No. I don’t.”

  “So you go for-what? To let him finish this, to let him free you from whatever you think you deserve?”

  “He killed his brother.”

  “It makes you a coward.”

  He hadn’t thought her capable of causing this kind of pain. Or maybe it was only now that he let himself feel it.

  His voice remained low and calm. “He doesn’t get to walk away. If that makes me a coward, so be it.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re a coward because you go alone.” It was an anger he had never imagined, raw and bitter, and doing nothing to hide its fear. “You’re going to stop thinking there’s something noble to be done, or that you could possibly know what it would look like. You don’t. All you do is hurt me with this and show how weak you are. I know how weak you are, and I know what terrifies you. Your boy is dead, but not because of you. And your Sascha-” She stopped. The words were tight in her throat. “You don’t get to throw yourself away because you want to believe that. There’s more to it now. You don’t get to do this alone.”

  “I do it to protect you.”

  “You do it to protect yourself.”

  She stared across at him, her strength like shattered glass. It hung from them both and fell aimlessly to the ground. Hoffner’s hands ached, and still he gathered up the shards. He knew what it was he deserved, knew with every breath he took. It was the weight of this love-brutal and free and untethered from a lifetime of self-damning-and yet meaningless if he chose to run from his past now.

  “Then you come,” he said.

  The little Ford from Toledo appeared from a side street. Hoffner and Mila waited while Wilson and Vollman drove up.

  The two men got out. There were a few awkward exchanges, a moment of surprise. Someone might have mentioned luck.

  The car had been stripped down and searched, the rear cushioning all knife tears and disgorged stuffing. The front bench was much the same. Mila laid a blanket across it so they could sit. Even so, they felt the springs in every jolt and bump. Hoffner let Mila drive. He slept. And he dreamed.

  He was sitting in a cool meadow, with the sound of flapping wings overhead. He saw a baby lying in the grass, its tiny feet kicking at the sky. Hoffner tried to stand but his legs were too heavy. He pulled at his thighs, and his hands were filled with a thick, wet tar, the smell of it like camphor oil, and he was suddenly holding flames in his hands. Mila pulled him back from the fire, and Hoffner saw her against the night sky. She was older and her body had been burned, her arms peeling in thin flakes of flesh. He reached for her, but she stepped back. He reached for her again and his eyes opened.

  They were at an outpost. Twenty Republican soldiers stood off in the distance, each with a rifle and a cap. Mila was talking with a man who was holding their papers. Hoffner heard the sound of mortar fire somewhere in the distance, and he watched as each of the men ducked his head. The sound was too far off to pose any danger, but these were men not yet tested by battle. They flinched and gripped their rifles.

  Hoffner pushed himself up and opened the door. His hand had stiffened, and his eye felt as if it had been squeezed shut. He could barely swallow. He forced his legs out, and he stood.

  Mila and the soldier looked over while a second barrage erupted. Hoffner made his way to them, his stride unsteady, with the booze in his stomach and a scorching sun to contend with.

  He drew up and thought to say something, but his mouth was too dry. He spat, and the man offered him his canteen. Hoffner drank.

  “The prison in Coria,” the man said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  Hoffner nodded and finished the canteen.

  “You don’t want to go south,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to explain it to the senora.”

  “The doctor,” Hoffner corrected, and spat again. “The senora is a doctor.”

  “Yes. The doctor. Yague has half of Africa marching up from Seville. They’re already pressing in from Merida. It’s not going to be good in Badajoz. It won’t be good here in a day or so, but we’re not going to think about that.”

  If Hoffner had any inkling who Yague was or where Merida might be, he might have known enough to show some concern. Instead, he told himself not to vomit in front of the soldiers.

  Another explosion rattled behind them, and Hoffner nodded his thanks.

  “We’ll take our chances.”

  He took Mila by the arm and walked with her back to the car.

  Father And Son

  An untamed terror now lived in the towns and hillsides surrounding Badajoz. Hoffner had felt tremors of it in Teruel, isolated echoes in the screams behind Coria’s prison gates, but it was only here that it penetrated the smallest of gestures: a backward glance from a woman on a cart, the sudden silence from a flock of birds perched penitently in the trees, the grinding of tires on a ground too slick and too beaten down by hooves and trucks and rain to be passable. The men who walked along the roads strode with more purpose than was warranted. It was the surest sign that they meant to meet death on their own terms. Fear makes a man cower. Terror gives him strength.

  Like a pouch bag, everything was getting pulled in, barricades and guns and horses to ring the approach from the south and the east. Yague was well beyond Merida. It would come tomorrow or the next day. That was what
they were saying. No one was permitted to pass after sunset.

  “I have to get through.”

  Hoffner tried to show his papers again, but the man with the thick beard and the rifle shook his head. It was a gentle shake, one reserved for overeager children.

  “If there’s still a road to be taken,” the man said, “you can take it in the morning. No one moves after dark.”

  They were in a village called Villar del Rey, thirty kilometers from Badajoz. The man motioned to one of the houses along the square. It was two or three rooms, one bare bulb, the rest lit by candles, with a whitewashed courtyard in front. The sky had streaked into strips of pink and deep blue, and there was a boy of thirteen or fourteen leaning against its front wall. He was long and pale, and he held his rifle in arms taut with new muscle.

  The thick beard shouted over. “Julio. Your mother needs to make a bed for these two tonight. The woman is a doctor.”

  The boy pushed himself up and nodded, and Hoffner followed Mila across the mud.

  Inside, the house was old stone, the ceilings too low for a tall man to stand upright. Pots and pans hung from hooks and shelves, and a drinking trough of wood stretched along the back wall. Two young girls sat at a round table, with a few photographs in frames hanging behind them. One showed a man with a mule and a rifle.

  The man was seated across the room on a low stool. He was rubbing a cloth along the rifle’s barrel. He looked up when the son called for his mother.

  There was silence, and then the sound of an aeroplane from somewhere above. The man set his rifle against the wall and crossed to the doorway. He stepped outside, stared up for several seconds, and then looked out across the fields to the men in their caps and their uniforms-each of them staring up-before he returned. He took the rifle, sat on the stool, and began to rub it again with the cloth.