—My colleagues from the Peace Ship intend to stay in Europe and establish a forum for continuous mediation by neutrals.
Ford read from a prepared speech, obviously written by someone else. The word “mediation” itself tripped him three times. Reading out loud, the schoolboy oral-reporter made a big, public grimace at his inability to get through the Ivy League words, a look that said, “Just between you and me, folks, this can’t go on.” He looked up and proceeded in a more natural, if still nervous, tone of voice.
—Now I myself’ll be heading back home to the States the way I came, because somebody’s got to mind the store. If everybody’d stayed home and minded their own store we wouldn’t of been in this state. But one thing I’d like to tell you fellas before I go, and that’s to spread the word to the powers that be on this side of the Atlantic that they stand to garner a whole lot more profits in manufacturing the weapons of peace than the weapons of war. And just to start the ball rolling, tell them that I’m leaving the design of my tractor unpatented, so that they can make it themselves freely without paying me so much as a penny. Now I’d like to talk over those same plans with you, briefly like.
The reporters could not have been more stunned if the enemy had suddenly come up over the top at them. This disbelief would be repeated continually in press conferences down the century, well past the Great Depression when the same Henry Ford went on record as saying, “These are really good times, only not very many people know it.” The world press would learn, through a series of incredulous sessions with Ford and a whole breed of new luminaries, that public personalities, too, were somewhat changed in the emerging age of the masses.
Whatever Forditis or hopes for a quick peace the international reporters had brought to Oslo Ford now proceeded to quash with talk of pistons, rings, and internal combustion. Increasingly agitated, the reporters began to realize that the prospect of European peace and the cheap, widely available tractor were not distinct in this lunatic American’s mind. One fellow, a polemical, troublesome Frenchman, took the floor and asked:
—Mr. Ford, are you aware that two towns the size of your Dearborn are lost here every day?
—Well, I don’t know as to the exact figures, but if that’s the case, well then, it’s a tragedy pure and simple. And it’s exactly to the point that I’ve been making. If the warmakers would beat their machine guns into tractors, then none of us would be in this damn hole, would we?
The situation deteriorated. The grumbling in tongues increased. Another journalist rose up and in commanding voice addressed Henry:
—Mr. Ford, would you care to draw any parallels between the passengers on board the Lusitania and those good folk traveling on board your own Peace Ship?
—Those people on the Lusitania were fools. They were warned, weren’t they?
This brought the house down, but not in laughter. The conference threatened to lapse into a free-for-all. The journalists split into two opposing camps. The majority malcontents protested vocally, attempting to shock the would-be peacemaker back to reality by citing the most gruesome statistics of the war. On the other side, a lone, crazed Dutchman asked Ford about gear ratios.
Finally a Danish correspondent, legendary among neutral and protagonist presses alike, stood up and announced:
—I have the headline for my next edition’s story: “War Continues Despite Tugboat.”
He saluted Ford, turned on his heel, and left the hall. A general murmur of agreement rippled through the ranks. They paid their respects and departed. Ford was crushed. His staff busied itself with the unprecedented task of putting his ego back together. This was the first serious check to self-esteem the mass-producer had yet encountered. Before this, people would have followed him anywhere, out of gratitude for the new car on their curb.
In a barely audible whisper, Ford asked why the papers always employed so many Jews. At last his eyes focused on the back of the hall, where the Dutchman with the technical questions still sat. The sight of this boy—the existence of at least one other person who loved cars more than war and politics—did more to cheer Ford than his whole legion of paid subordinates and volunteer diplomats.
Against the urgings of staff and physicians, who thought that under the circumstances the best strategy was to beat a hasty retreat to the hotel, Ford decided he had to talk to this fellow, if only for ten minutes, to gain a renewed sense of his mission on this ungrateful earth. He had already scuttled his plans to play world peacemaker. He would leave the continuous mediators in dry dock and go back to America and stay close to the factory. He had made his foray into political history. Now, half a world away from his factory, the mechanic wanted just to spend a couple of minutes talking autos.
Of the actual conversation, there is little to report. The departure of the interpreter with the rest of the press created a language barrier that neither of the unschooled men could hurdle. Only an occasional adverbial phrase, pushed over by hand gestures, made it across no-man’s-land into the other’s understanding. Yet the two communicated quite handsomely, if not facts, then at least a common passion. They recognized in one another the fundamental love of nothing better than things that work right and run fast.
Ford drew some sketches of converters and assembly lines, explaining nonchalantly all the while, convinced the boy could understand him if he spoke loudly and slowly. When at a loss for commentary, Peter simply buzzed his lips, imitating an engine revving. Ford would nod, grin, and copy the sound, the two of them making motor noises and slapping their thighs, while outside of the little rented hall a stunned world underwent a bloody cesarean.
Outside the hall door, a cadre of photographers lay in wait, banned from the conference proper. They hoped to get one picture of the great industrialist, and stood patiently amid tripods and magnesium flashpans. A few put their ears to the door, only to come away puzzled.
—Sounds like they’re running a road race in there.
Finally the door worked loose, and an ambush of flares and shutters went off all at once. But the plates were ruined. Ford had not come out of the room alone, as everyone had hoped, but with his arm around a boy of completely uncelebrated face. They asked him to stand for his portrait again, this time alone, but Ford, stunned from the first round of flashpans, ruined these plates, too, by appearing almost epileptic. He recaptured Peter/Theo and bade him good-bye, with one of the photographers doing the interpreting.
—You’ve given me something more than the rest of Europe put together seems likely to. I hold that a gentleman always returns a favor. Now what is it that I could give to you?
When the translated, edited version reached Peter, he answered without hesitation.
—A Model T.
—Write down where I can reach you. I’ll do better than that.
Peter could not write the address of the Schreck farm or the widow’s shop, two worlds now closed to him. He gave, instead, the journalists’ bureau in Paris. Ford waved the scrap and announced with backwoods bravura:
—Gentlemen, a beneficiary.
And so their first plates were redeemed, at least for a Names and Faces column inch or two. Peter himself never read the papers, and he did not discover his fame until he received the letter from Detroit. He took the letter to a polyglot friend in the Paris newspaper ghetto, who rendered a liberal, stylized translation in hybrid Dutch-German. Peter got the point, or thought he got the point: if he could survive the universal destruction that the new century still faced, he would be a rich man.
Although Peter had always cultivated a careful indolence, living for speed, consumption, and those rare luxuries that sometimes fall to the lower classes, the prospect of gentility derived from compound interest did not much move him. For one, he could multiply only approximately, using schoolboy tricks. The exact size of his fortune lay a few digits to the left of his comprehension.
Additionally, the Ford legacy failed to excite him because he knew he would never grow into his inheritance. Ford had failed to sto
p the war; it would go on forever. Both sides, pressed for manpower, would dispense with the luxuries of reporters and photographers and swallow their observers into service. Naturally, he would be killed in action; there could be no other ending.
If the war ended that afternoon, however, it would be just as disastrous. He could not maintain the identity of Theo Langerson in peacetime. There was little future for an illiterate reporter. He could not stay in France without the excuse of a career, and he could not, as an evader, return to his adopted Germany without prosecution. And his place in the Netherlands had, by all appearances, been more than adequately filled.
So the prospect of the Ford bequest seemed altogether dim. But Peter knew of a better use for the letter. He folded the crisp American document carefully and inserted it in his next mailer to Maastricht, to be forwarded to the policeman’s daughter, Wies. He enclosed the self-portrait that he had made by holding his new box camera at arm’s length in front of his face. She could identify him by that, if she remembered his face from the day in the widow’s shop. If Wies ever received this letter, it might go a long way toward expiating the one guilt he carried around inside him, if the love not extinguished by a single act of desire could best be called guilt.
Wies found in the terrifyingly legal document an expiation of her own. She had had a son; whose was no matter. She had failed to secure him a father. She had borne him into relative poverty. She had passed on to the child an undiagnosed neurological disorder that left him subject to fainting spells and loss of balance. And worst of all, she had conceived him in the world’s final days, in 1914. Before the arrival of the Ford letter, she had no compensation to offer the infant for these multiple sins except, when the time came, stories of a heroic father who, on principle alone, went to fight and be killed in a war that had not summoned him.
But this legacy would be better than stories of heroism. Wies went to the back of her press and extracted a folder secreted there. She withdrew a folded photograph, prematurely aged. She compared the new portrait of this fellow Theo to the middle figure in the larger print, although she needed no such comparison. She gazed at the triple portrait a little longer, trying to place it in time. Then she broke off the exercise as meaningless. She folded the American letter and replaced it and the photo in the folder. On the front of the folder, she meticulously crossed out the name “Schreck” and wrote the name “Langerson.”
The child, who had been duly christened Hubertus Johannes in full, watery ceremony, went from that moment on by the name Peter Hubertus. He was none the wiser. And his mother, Wies, never tired of remarking how the child seemed destined to become a reporter like his father. His first full-time job was writing the obituaries for a small-circulation Maastricht daily. For extra income, he faked letters for help that his colleague the advice columnist printed and answered.
In 1934, at the age of nineteen, the boy repeated the sin that ran in the family line, but rectified it without drawing notice by making a clean and expedient marriage. The union produced a healthy, plump baby girl. Each day brought new responsibilities to Peter Hubertus until by the age of twenty-five, he was, aside from ever-increasing neurological problems and fainting spells, a model citizen.
As his father, the older Peter, had feared, the war was still raging when the boy reached his majority. It had started up again after a brief armistice. And a hitherto friendly neighbor, in the horror of the 1940 occupation, exposed to the authorities—whether out of greed or fear is irrelevant—Peter Hubertus’s German ancestry.
Thus revealed as German by descent, Peter Hubertus was conscripted into the service and deported to the Westerwald. There he was put in charge of a work farm for young men of many nationalities, primarily Dutch. The camp aimed to engage the young men—too unreliable for active service—in demanding but generally useless work. They built roads that inched outward from nowhere to nowhere. They leveled hills and filled in gullies, then dug the holes out somewhere else.
Despite its motto—“The Laborer Governs the Earth”—the camp was little more than an armed prison, Germany’s peculiar solution to the age of masses. Conditions were relatively soft by 1940 standards: campers were fed regularly, and although they received no medical treatment, they were not excessively tortured.
Most of the young men held up well, goaded on by group morale games, as when they all grew parodies of Hitler moustaches. Peter, invariably the one who had to make the men shave off the parodies, fared the worst of all. His fainting spells grew more frequent and serious, and while ostensibly a camp administrator, he merited no more medical attention than his men. He took to wearing dog tags with the familiar medical insignia of those with chronic problems, only his read: “Do not trouble about me. I will be better shortly.”
What traumatized him even more than his collaboration, which he could get around fairly well, given the circumstances, was his knowledge that the world was facing its critical cusp in history, and that he could observe or alter no more of it than these few acres in the Rhineland where he and his men tore down hills and built their ambling roads to nowhere.
One day a man about his age appeared at the camp office in a spanking lieutenant’s uniform. Peter Hubertus felt relieved that the cursory execution he had always expected had come at last. But the young man identified himself as Peter’s cousin Adolphe, the son of Adolphe and the widow Alicia Schreck of a nearby farm. Wies had traced the surname that Hubert had scribbled on the ancient scrap of paper, informing the boy’s only relations of his internment. Peter Hubertus Langerson knew nothing of any such relation and denied it vehemently.
A heated and confused debate followed, with neither young man willing to give in to the other’s objections. Adolphe, the more completely informed of the two, could not make his explanations stick until he produced a photo of his father, whom he himself had never seen. Peter, seeing in it the perfect double of the right-most figure in his mother’s old trio print, finally gave in and embraced his cousin.
Under the strain of new relations, Peter Hubertus suffered a violent blacking out while the young Adolphe stood by, helpless. On recovering, he recounted to his alarmed cousin a full medical history. He explained that employees and even employers at the work camp merited no treatment by physicians.
The young lieutenant, who had commanded troops in the Blitzkrieg on France, had long before, while living on his grandparents’ farm to which Alicia had returned following her husband’s death, completed two years of veterinary school. He hoped to employ the new veterinary technology to improve husbandry on the farm. He gave up the course to defend the fatherland. But he retained enough medical knowledge to convince his newfound cousin that his suffering might be relieved by a rudimentary mastoidectomy. He volunteered to do the operation, and Peter, desperate for aid, agreed.
For the next three hours in a locked room, the vet removed a chunk of the Dutchman’s skull behind his ear without benefit of anaesthetic. He operated with penknives run under hot water nowhere near sterilizing temperatures. He closed the wound with handiwork closer to latch hooking than sutures, and dressed the wound as ably as possible.
A ranking camp officer, alerted by the long closed-door session, broke in on the proceeding’s close. Not believing Lieutenant Schreck’s claim that the dressing covered a minor infection, the agent lifted the bandages, revealing the incision beneath. The vet and his unconscious patient were sent to their separate punishments.
The military tribunal presiding over Adolphe’s case felt grounds for particular harshness. If a lieutenant took it on himself to defy so small and easy a rule as that prohibiting medical attention for laborers, would he not soon be tempted to acts of open insubordination of greater consequence?
The young Adolphe was assigned to a disciplinary officer notoriously without those means—such as wit and marriage—that most people use to channel their sadism. The officer told Adolphe that he had been condemned to death by live burial. He brought Adolphe to an open field not far from where his
cousin’s work force built their monumental and worthless earthworks. Three enlisted men dug a trench and made Adolphe lie in it. They buried him in loosely packed dirt. When the dirt had not been on him more than a minute, the disciplinary officer instructed the men to dig him out and revive him.
The officer told Adolphe his sentence had been rescinded in favor of the more humane execution by pistol. Adolphe was made to kneel in the dirt, forehead to ground. The officer put an unloaded pistol to his nape, and fired another into the air. At the explosion, Adolphe crumpled to the ground under the impression that he was dead.
When the disciplinary officer began to prod him with a boot toe, Adolphe came to the ambivalent conclusion that he could still feel. He was told to wait in this field without moving; if he so much as altered his posture, his punishment would far exceed what he had suffered so far. The other men piled into a waiting staff car and departed.
Outside time except for the gradually fading daylight, Adolphe could not tell how long he had waited or how much waiting lay ahead of him. His mind could not be bothered with such complex concerns. For without the normal distraction of activity, all he could do was reproduce, again and again, the details of his mock executions. On his knees, face down in an empty field, he could not remember if the executions had occurred that morning or deep in history. He was totally alone; the other fellows would not come back. Gradually, the atmosphere of the planet he alone inhabited filled with the terror of memory.
This son of two semiliterate, earthbound peasants would never have survived the ordeal without a remarkable intervention. At that moment—which was not for the lieutenant a real moment, since he lay outside time—when his brain threatened to collapse into aloneness, a shape emerged from a nearby copse of trees. He focused on the form, his link to the material world. A thin woman in white pinafore, sporting a parasol and the most glorious strawberry-red mop of hair Adolphe had ever seen walked slowly to within a few yards of where he knelt. Adolphe at once returned to his senses, though alarmed that the woman should be dressed in clothes a half century old.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 35