Oskar turned to see an odd procession clambering though an open hatch. First came a senior ship’s officer, his blue-black uniform draped with gold braid, followed by half a dozen gentlemen of middle years in gray, well-tailored suits. Behind them lagged a train of hangers-on, assistants with leather briefcases, reporters with notepads, a pair of ship’s stewards in white jackets trailing like footmen. Last to emerge, in notable contrast to the others—indeed, to anyone on board—was a young man, Oskar’s junior by a few years, tall and wispy in an overlarge coat that billowed like a cape, hair unkempt, neck wrapped twice around by a green-and-white scarf. Oskar guessed this boy could only be American, though until a few years ago you might have seen him prowling the streets of Leipzig or Heidelberg, a disconsolate reader of Hesse, blinking in the sunlight. The boy managed to look at once bored, angry, exhausted and aloof—all the familiar symptoms of Weltschmerz, world pain.
No one but Oskar seemed to notice him. All eyes instead were on the large, imposing man at the center of the crowd. He was speaking—orating, rather—with his words whipped off by the wind, leaving only a vague aural trail; he reminded Oskar of one of those blustering characters in a Hollywood western: the wealthy rancher, the powerful oil baron. All around him cameras clicked and reporters jotted, his fellow eminences nodding sagaciously, the ship’s officer standing locked in ceremonial courtesy. Meanwhile, the tall boy looked angrier by the moment. Oskar hazarded a guess that the orator was his father.
On the aft deck, the football match sputtered to a halt. It was like the advent of Gypsies in a quiet town: everyone obeyed the common instinct to stop in their tracks and watch the show. They might not approve of it but were transfixed all the same. The soccer players drifted over, craning to catch the big man’s words. Oskar was about to join them when a hand grabbed his sweater and tugged him back.
He turned to see Lena—and what a sight she was. She stood bundled in the kind of robe you pull on after swimming, tufted blue cotton pulled tight and a hood drawn over her head, with enormous sunglasses that left exposed only her lips, narrow chin and upturned, freckled nose. She must have felt this rendered her invisible.
“Come,” she whispered dramatically, drawing him into the gap between two lifeboats. “Do you know who that is?”
Oskar shook his head. It wasn’t smart, this furtiveness.
“That’s a United States senator,” she said. “I heard people talking at breakfast. He’s making an official visit to Germany, a ‘fact-finding mission.’ I thought I should warn you.”
“Warn me of what?” Oskar felt uncharitably cross.
She frowned. She had no clear notion, evidently—just felt in her bones that a warning was called for. Social Democrats, he’d come to think, were temperamentally unsuited to clandestine affairs. They lacked a talent for duplicity. He took her firmly by the arm and said, “Look, you should go sit on the sundeck for a while. Blend in. Let people see you. If they don’t see you, they start to wonder.”
“But this is…” She tugged herself free. “We need to report on this. We should learn as much as we can.”
Oskar sighed—she was beyond his power of reason. He had a mission and she apparently had her own, a private and nonsensical one. At 1435 hours: Senator So-and-so observed on deck surrounded by admirers. At 1442: Senator So-and-so takes out a cigar; a light is provided by Ensign X.
“You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing,” he told her. “There’s nothing here you need to worry about.”
She tossed her head, defiant. “I’m not worried. And I’m not worked up. And you don’t know it’s nothing. You don’t know what it is.”
He felt sorry then. He wasn’t mad; it was endearing really, this capacity for excitement. But before he could apologize, the tall boy in his billowing coat detached himself from the group and began drifting toward them. He moved disjointedly, a step this way and a step that, like he’d come unfastened and was being pushed along by the wind. Lena tightened her grip on Oskar’s arm. The boy halted a few paces away, his eyes all over them in a frank display of Yankee curiosity.
“Hello!” Lena said, too forcefully.
The boy smiled but didn’t speak.
Lena took a step forward, extending an arm. “I am Lena, here is my husband, Stefan. You are American? This is your first trip to Germany?”
The boy stared blankly for a moment, as if he’d not quite understood. Oskar wondered if there was something not right about him.
But then the boy shook his head. “I’ve been to Germany before. I’ve been all over the place. It’s important to see the world, to understand how good we have it at home.” He gave them a joyless grin. “You could say this is my first mandatory visit to Germany. And my first on a ship with a portrait of Adolf Hitler in the dining compartment. A very large portrait. Of Adolf Hitler on a horse. Oh, I’m sorry—am I offending you? My name is Clairborne, but people call me Clair.”
He held out a hand to shake theirs, Lena’s first. His grip was firm and his gaze unblinking—a lesson from his father, Oskar supposed. Clairborne dropped the handshake and looked out over the empty ocean, his chest rising in a sigh. Something—perhaps life itself—seemed to disappoint him.
“You’re not with the Arbeitsfront,” Clair informed them. He didn’t look around, having evidently seen all he needed to. “You’re not students. You’re not businesspeople. Civil servants? On your honeymoon?” He gave them a glance and a sly, diffident smile. “I’m sorry if I seem rude—it’s a social disease, endemic to Washington. Of course, there they just come out and ask. Where do you work—you do work, don’t you, Stefan? And where do you live, what church do you go to, where do you stand on the Neutrality Act? It’s horrible, but that’s how they are. Have you been to Washington? Are you”—his voice quickened at this new idea—“diplomats?”
“I am a librarian,” said Lena, making the truth sound like a ridiculous cover story. “My husband also. In Weimar, the Anna Amalia Library—you must see it if you can.”
Worse and worse. Tossing out details like a trail of crumbs.
“Librarians!” said Clair, sounding delighted. He studied them for several moments, back and forth. He seemed to come more fully to life, the world pain momentarily dissipated. His greenish eyes sparkled slyly, and he turned them on Lena. “Now tell me, is there any place on board where I can hide for a while? Stow myself away?” A quick glance in the direction of his father said all that was needed about what he wanted to hide from.
Oskar reacted too slowly. He might have suggested a lower-deck gallery, filled with billiard tables and dartboards and noise.
“Of course,” Lela was already saying, “you can come to our stateroom! Wouldn’t that be nice, Os—” She caught herself, maybe in time, and slid over the consonant into “Stefan?”
Before Oskar could reply, he heard his name—the latest of his names—shouted across the deck. The football game was starting back up. The distinguished passengers, moving on with their tour, were being led to the foredeck. If any noticed that young Clair had gone missing, they raised no alarm.
“Hurry, Stefan! We’ve had our rest, now it’s time for some action.”
Oskar watched helplessly as Lena and Clair, laughing like truant schoolchildren, made for the nearest ladder. What could he do? Quitting the game would require some excuse, and party types didn’t take excuses kindly, particularly on a field of battle. And for such men, all the world is a battlefield, every known human activity a stand-in for the one true and eternal calling of German manhood. The ball came blasting toward him like a cannon shot, a whirl of black and white against the ocean’s Wehrmacht gray.
Oskar’s reaction, immediate and perfect, sent the ball back at redoubled velocity toward the enemy goal. I am, he thought, as deadly a warrior as any of them.
—
How much damage Lena had done—to their safety, their cover, the tenuous fiction of expatriate sheep returning to the fold—Oskar could not begin to gauge until much later. After
his side lost the match, 7–3, he returned breathless to the little cabin three decks down to find it empty. A note on ship’s stationery, laid carefully on the lower bunk, read in English, “We’ve gone out for drinks. See you at dinner!” The hand was Lena’s, but he suspected the words were Clair’s. The tone as well, hinting at blithe and reckless misadventure. Lena had spent two days afraid to leave the room and now she’d run off God knew where, “out for drinks,” with the son of an American senator. On a ship crammed forepeak to fantail with enthusiastic National Socialists, for whom reporting unusual behavior to persons of authority came as naturally as saying hello to an old chum on the sidewalk.
Oskar pondered his next move. The governing principle, as always, was to live your cover. So: we have a young husband crossing the ocean with his bride. He returns from a football match to find his wife having left, her destination unrevealed, to have drinks with another man. Well, no—a boy. But a tall and confident boy, an American, the son of a powerful political figure. Is the husband jealous? A little, probably. But there might be a reasonable explanation. Yes, he would think that’s the case. After all, my wife, my new wife, loves me. And I love her. I’m somewhat blinded by this love. And so I feel agitated yet also hopeful. Worried, yes, and puzzled, but also trusting. And so I, the husband, will just go out and find her and learn what this is about, what a fool I was to worry, and we’ll all have a good laugh.
It took Oskar a few minutes to think this through, longer to make himself feel it. Longer still to open the cabin door.
The afternoon had taken on a vivid and surreal quality, a hint of Kafka, a few strokes of Max Ernst. Oskar walked down the expansive, hotel-like corridor, swaying lightly with the roll of the ship and self-conscious about his movements, which felt awkward and forced, as if he were concealing an injury. He reached a bank of elevators and stepped into one, joining two women in pastel dresses of a style no longer worn in Germany (or in Washington either, from what he’d seen), beneath sun hats tied under the chin with ribbons. One of them smiled, not warmly but inquiringly, as he imagined her greeting half strangers on the steps outside her church.
He wondered about these women, their lives, what they were doing here. Had they attended bund rallies with their husbands at the county fairground? He’d seen these rallies in the newsreels: American men in homemade uniforms listening to speeches, waving placards, exchanging the Hitler salute. They looked just as foolish and just as harmless as the SA bullies in Saxony had seemed a few years ago, before they took over the streets, then the cities, finally the nation. Offscreen, the announcer had shouted frantically, in imitation of Goebbels: Our racial comrades overseas stand united in support of the Führer! Then shots of a bonfire, women in dirndls folk-dancing, little girls weaving garlands of flowers. You had to imagine spring colors; in the movies, the flowers were gray.
The promenade deck, forward of the ship’s superstructure, had grown busy. At this hour, with the last of the pallid daylight, the wind had slackened and a festive atmosphere prevailed. Oskar peered through the crowd, looking for Lena in her Mata Hari costume, Clair in his scarf and billowing jacket. The idea seized him that everyone on deck was moving too slowly, making a subtle but concerted effort to block his view. Knowing it was irrational didn’t dispel it. He shoved off from the rail and edged around a kiosk dispensing glasses of warm, honeyed Glühwein. Nearby, a small audience had gathered to watch a DAF man juggling what appeared to be tennis balls wrapped in yellow handkerchiefs. The tied-off corners of silk flapped like tiny pennants as the juggler threw the balls higher, snatched them overhand, changed his pattern and spun in place, drawing applause and laughter from the onlookers.
Through all that clapping, among all those voices, Oskar heard a voice he knew—its distinct flavor of giddiness with a soupçon of panic. Lena, wherever she was, sounded happy but also anxious. That reassured him. He looked around for her, turning in every direction; it was impossible to tell where the sound had come from, and he saw only unfamiliar faces, stupid American grins, a hundred middle-aged children playing Follow the Leader. Lena’s laughter came again.
Oskar turned. Far up in the bow, where the deck narrowed into a blunt spearhead, a temporary platform had been erected: metal scaffolding with a floor of wooden planks surmounted by a wide canvas awning like a party tent, made festive by scarlet banners bearing the swastika, black on a white background. There was a bandstand and bistro tables and a team of stewards in white jackets—an entire ad hoc café for very important passengers only, and there among them sat Lena at a table with two male companions now. Poor Stefan Sinclair must have been hot under the collar; Oskar felt only a deepening chill. Lena waved at him, affecting gaiety. Clairborne smiled wanly. The somewhat older man stared without expression. Leading up to the platform was a little stair of five risers with no handrail, and Oskar ascended them like a prisoner mounting the gallows.
The band—four instrumentalists and a singer of uncertain age, lashed into a gown of decent length but a size too small in the upper body—struck up a medley of cabaret tunes, leading off with “If Only Elisabeth Didn’t Have Such Pretty Legs.” They played like they meant business. The platform was cramped, nearly every seat taken; Oskar was obliged to squeeze between people as he made his way over to Lena’s table, where a single chair sat empty between her and the boy. The other man gestured politely for him to take it. As he did so, Oskar realized that this fellow wasn’t as old as he’d looked from a distance—barely older than himself, twenty-five or so, with prematurely thinning hair so blond it was almost white.
Lena smiled at him but seemed too nervous to speak. She’d traded the blue robe for a white cotton sweater and pulled her hair back with Yankee nonchalance, allowing several strands to come loose in the shipboard breeze. Oskar found it becoming. He leaned forward, took her hands and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
“Darling,” she said, clutching a bit too hard, pulling him closer, “I’m so happy you found us!” She didn’t sound happy so much as rather like the bundist wives, determined to enjoy herself. Perfect, really.
“We’re having champagne,” Clair said. “You’ll join us, won’t you?”
The second man tightened his lips at this breach of decorum. In Germany, introductions would have been made before the talk turned to drink. Oskar understood then—why should it come as a surprise?—that he was German.
“Stefan,” said Lena, “may I introduce Hagen…Hagen von—”
“—von Ewigholz,” the man said, making a slight bow from his seat.
Lena rattled on, still in English, fixing Oskar with a meaningful stare: “Hagen is in the SS. The cavalry! Isn’t that interesting?”
As usual, overdoing it. But it was interesting. An Aryan superman in a Bond Street suit.
Von Ewigholz shook his head, smiling as though in regret. He spoke in the careful manner of someone using a language he hadn’t yet mastered. “I am not here in…any official situation.”
“Hagen is my minder,” said Clair. “That’s something, isn’t it—my own personal minder. I suppose I’ve always needed one.”
Oskar disregarded him. “Are you an officer, then?”
Hagen shrugged. “My grade is Obersturmführer.”
“That means senior storm leader,” said Clair, sardonic.
What it really meant was first lieutenant—only one rank higher than Oskar’s own. He couldn’t help staring at the man with professional interest, an officer sizing up a peer from a rival service. He quickly wiped the look off Sinclair’s courteous face—but in just that instant, he got the feeling that the SS man had also experienced a flash of recognition. If so, he covered it quickly as well.
A fresh bottle of champagne arrived, then another. The band struck up “If You’re Ever in Hawaii,” followed by “Dreams of the South Seas,” wistful, vaguely exotic tunes that expressed that strange Teutonic longing for tropical climes, warm breezes, waving palms. A race of sun worshippers, confined to a gray and chilly corner of northern
Europe. Though not, historically speaking, always content to remain there.
Lena now seemed to feel it her duty, as the woman at the table, to play hostess. “Well, Clair, it appears that you’ve got a fascinating summer ahead.”
“No doubt,” he said, sounding doleful and at least partly drunk. “Yes, I imagine it’ll be great fun. Lots of marching, I’m told. Long guided hikes through the countryside. Und ziss flower vee call ze three-pronged zombie tongue. Athletic competition to foster a healthful taste for physical combat. A chance to form lasting bonds with young men just like myself from all over Europe, apparently by sharing the same toilet. And I’ll finally learn how to give a proper Hitlergruss—you know, whenever I try it, my whole hand seems to droop, like this.”
He thrust out his arm in a parody of the Nazi salute, allowing the wrist to go limp and the long, tapered fingers to dangle, his lips curled in a smirk.
It was, in such a context, the most shocking thing Oskar could imagine. Mocking the Nazis in front of an SS officer, aboard a vessel that was in essence a tiny floating province of the Reich? But maybe that was what Clair intended; maybe he was angling to get sent back home in disgrace.
For a couple of seconds, no one said anything. Then Lena, succumbing to the accumulated tension, gave a short, anxious laugh that was sharp as a bark. Too late, she lifted a hand to her mouth. Clair raised his eyebrows and smiled, accepting this as due recognition.
Von Ewigholz reached over calmly and laid a hand on Clair’s forearm. He didn’t grab it, simply allowed the hand to rest there, like a man comforting his wife. “You are nervous,” he said. “You are frightened to be going there alone, to the Ordensburg—frightened of what will happen, how you will feel, what people will think of you. After everything you’ve heard. But it will be all right. I don’t say you’ll have fun, like a vacation. I just suggest it won’t be so terrible. And you won’t be alone.”
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