Rachael nods and clenches the strap of her shoulder bag. She moves past her guide and steps into the salon where I, the decorated Luftwaffe flier, now fill my remaining days with serenades to a world that has passed away.
At the end of the grand piano the two women stand before me as if I’m a display. But I ignore both my daughter and her attractive guest. I’m wholly absorbed in the music.
“Can I get you some tea?” Dora whispers to the fidgety reporter.
“I’m good, thanks.”
My daughter nods. “I’ll leave you two alone then. You have much to talk about I gather, considering the distance you’ve traveled.” She retreats through the double doors and closes them gently behind her.
Now it’s just the two of us. I play on, giving Rachael a chance to study me with a professional acuity, like a grid overlaid. A silver mane caps my pale face, gouged like a dry riverbed. A heavy gray cardigan and white oxford shirt shroud a rapidly withering physique. Hints of a robust youth. Heavy, powerful hands, broad shoulders. A firm chin. My eyebrows are white as flour. But beneath them it’s my eyes that grab Rachael and hold her fast. The green is a shade of serenity. She searches them for the heart. And I in turn decipher her thoughts. Am I the man she seeks?
Rachael retreats to the far wall, splashed with photographs. The pictures are a mixed bag of the old and new, black-and-white and color prints. Various sizes. Some are moments captured from decades ago, others just this past summer.
She focuses her attention on a fresh image of me as an old man cradling a woman, frail and ashen, in my arms. Sporting colorful nautical jackets, we lean against the rail of a boat off the Channel Isles, the slate-gray waters behind us. A cold spray whips through our white hair as we smile spryly for the camera. We are two old salts in the twilight of our lives and still very much in love. Rachael feels a twinge of compassion for me now.
But then her eyes fall upon more sinister images. Their bleak, faded sepia a stark contrast to the sublime color of my later years. A portrait of a young Luftwaffe officer. Supremely confident as I leer back at her from under the brim of my visor cap, tilted at a rakish angle that was the style of the Jagdflieger, a fighter pilot. I wear the old uniform of a Germany that I find hard to imagine ever existed. The dark blue flannel frock lined with brass buttons, the choker collar, the stiff medallion of the black eagle over my heart, its wings spread in flight, clutching the swastika in its talons. Another tattered photo. An action shot of that same young man in a baggy flight suit, hoisting myself out of the cockpit of a fighter plane. Again, the confident, swaggering grin. My leather flying cap has been removed to reveal a tuft of disheveled honey-colored hair.
Another framed portrait, this one of a family, dated August 1940. A freshly commissioned Lieutenant Harmon Becker, in full dress uniform, cap in hand this time, stands next to my teenaged brother. Paul, a darker version of his blond knight sibling, is dressed in his Sunday best—a Nazi emblem pinned to his lapel. The boys’ taciturn father, Karl, sits in a chair sporting the less bellicose attire of a local constable. Our round-faced mother, Greta, sits beside her husband, her hand in his, wearing the traditional frilled blouse, heavy dress, and apron dirndl of the Bavarian country Frau.
Rachael is set to turn back towards the piano when her eyes lock on one last photo from my war years. She stiffens. The shot is of a line of German soldiers in crisp dress uniform standing at attention like statues. I am leaning forward to receive a medal while I shake the presenter’s hand. Rachael, of course, recognizes the master of the cold ceremony in the picture. The very lines of his face, his every nuance and contour, from the dark square mustache to the searing crystalline eyes, have been seared into her consciousness as sure as the numbers burned into the forearms of his countless victims. This young version of me formally shakes hands with Adolf Hitler. My guest boils inside. How could I display such a vile photograph on the same wall as one of my wife? Now she feels deceived by the old man behind her. To her I’m nothing more than a tired, broken-down old Nazi. A war criminal.
Rachael turns away from the wall as she would from a foul odor and comes face-to-face with me as I stand right behind her now. She hasn’t noticed that the song ended minutes earlier and silence but for the comforting tick-tock of a grandfather clock saturates the room.
I point to the picture. “Yes, that’s me,” I admit with a scratchy voice. “I was awarded the Knight’s Cross by the Führer himself.”
My thick German accent visibly repels her.
“It’s nice to see you no longer wear it,” she offers acerbically.
I’m unfazed by her tone. “I no longer have it. I keep that photograph not as a treasure, Miss Azerad, but as a reminder.”
“Of the good old days?” Her sarcasm is a razor.
I shake my head. “Of how foolish I was.” I extend a veiny hand to her. She glances down, her combative nature disarmed by the tone of my contrition. She takes it. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Azerad.” I lead her to the couches and motion to one as I ease into the other with a sigh. “Sit. And then you can tell me.”
“Tell you what?” she asks, lowering herself to the cushions.
“Tell me why you are here.”
4
Sitting across the table from me, she clears her throat. I can tell she’s never met a German veteran of the big war before. I wonder what she’s feeling inside. What images of my youth are parading through her mind? After some hesitation she says: “Well…you’re one of the last of the great World War Two flying aces. Your book’s earned some acclaim.”
I guffaw heartily. Even she smiles at her transparency. “From whom? Aviation Week?” I laugh again, then cough violently, cursing the dampness of the English autumn as I hack a wet marble of phlegm into a handkerchief I whip out from my back pocket.
The book she refers to sits on my coffee table. It’s an insignificant, and rather dry, memoir of just one more soldier’s experience during the war. Very few have read my book, as the publisher reminds me every so often. History, it is said, is written by the victors. I glance down at its jacket. Is that young pilot really me? Bitter Skies! the title shouts. Memoirs of a Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot. I sometimes forget my days in the Wehrmacht. But never completely. That’s my burden, I suppose.
I tap the cover with my finger. “Everything you need to know about my war years is in this book. The interesting part anyway. Tell me, Miss Azerad. Why have you come so far to talk to a retired concert pianist who a lifetime ago flew fighter planes in a lost war?”
She remains silent, so I press the issue. “You’re a foreign correspondent.”
She nods.
I lean into her now: “So why am I not talking to The New York Times literary critic as opposed to one who writes about Fallujah and the Golan Heights? What about me is so important to you?”
She lays her little tape recorder on the table and fishes through her leather bag for a notebook and pen. She presses the record button. “Do you mind?” she asks.
I shrug. “What’s the harm?”
She touches the pen to her lips. This woman is a true beauty. A real spitfire—if a German flier dare use that term! Even in my advancing years I can appreciate the fairer sex. Her sultry features are so much the opposite of my porcelain Amelia’s.
She says nothing more, until the silence makes me uncomfortable. “Well?” I say, growing slightly irritated.
“I’m sorry,” she responds defensively. “I’ve never met a German war veteran before.” As I’d figured. Then she adds: “A Nazi.” And the way she says that makes me suddenly look down and fiddle with the crease of my trousers.
“Is that who you think I am?” I say in a near whisper.
She looks up at me. “You wore the uniform.”
I meet her gaze and rub a contemplative hand through my fine hair. “How can I put this? Good men sometimes fight for bad things, Miss Azerad. The quest
ion is, can they redeem themselves?”
“A good question,” she agrees. “One I intend to answer. We can get to that in time. But first some background. You say in your book you were shot down over the English Channel in June 1944?”
“Ah, so it begins,” I say. “Very well. Yes, that’s correct. I became a prisoner of war after that.”
She stares at her notes as if taking insurance information at the doctor’s office. “It must’ve been frightening.”
I shift in my seat. “I’d been brought down once before.”
She pauses, draws in a breath, and looks up from her pad. “But this time was different. Your book doesn’t tell everything. Does it?”
The grandfather clock chimes. I hear Dora rummaging about in the kitchen. And I sit motionless.
“Please, Mr. Becker, tell me. Tell me the whole story.”
At my age I’m always cold. Yet now a heat wave ripples through me. “You’re a good reporter. But why should I confide in you?”
She answers sternly: “Because then, and only then, will I tell you why I care.”
5
I slide open the coffee table drawer and produce a tattered envelope with a yellowing piece of paper folded and stuffed inside. I carefully slide out the paper. The note is creased and has grown soft as tissue over the years. I discovered this letter when, at Dora’s gentle prodding, I finally forced myself to start clearing out Amelia’s personal effects from our house. Her death, though not entirely unexpected—a cancer had been robbing her of her life for over a year—came far earlier than the doctors predicted. I’ve just begun the unbearable task of packing away her life. This fragile epistle, which I’ve read every day since I found it, is one last link to the beginning of our long life together.
Rachael observes me as if I’m about to perform a card trick. “My wife, Amelia. She died recently.”
She nods. “I’m sorry.”
“Of course the reporter knows,” I say. “I wrote this letter to her during the war. When she and I were sweethearts. Naturally it’s in German. But I’ll translate it for you.”
Rachael begins to scribble something but then catches herself and pauses. She glances at me with sympathy. “I don’t want to pry. That’s a personal cor—”
“No,” I cut her off. “If you wish to understand what happened, then I should start here.”
“Alright, Mr. Becker,” she says. “I’m listening.”
I unfold the delicate letter and smile up at my guest, whose professional curiosity is piqued. She looks at it as if trying to discern the lettering through the light.
“You see? No need for glasses,” I say with mock pride. “My eyes are still sharp after so many years.” I reflect on that a moment. “I can see it all so clearly now.” Then I begin to read.
6
December 14, 1943
My Dearest Amelia,
The war goes on. The killing. Still the Americans come. Things seemed so simple not so long ago. I miss the old life. My home, my music. Most of all you, my love. But I suppose it is unhealthy to dwell on such memories here. I must stay focused on the ugly business at hand. We fly every day now. And, in a sense, it suits me. I know that sounds odd but it is an odd life we live. We bear the mark of death, yet because we fly we are more alive than most. I cannot adequately express how it feels to be so high. The sky a deep blue…the color of your eyes. Silence but for the hum of the engine and the occasional voice on the radio. The earth below seems so peaceful. Yet I do not have long to contemplate my false reality, as the skies will soon be filled with death that I have come to know like an old friend.
I pray the winter finds you well. When this trouble subsides, we will be together again. But for now my duty pulls me aloft and into harm’s way, for this is a different war. It is not like the heady days in the beginning. We are on the defensive now. And as I curve into formations of Boeings so thick they block out the sun, my past sins flash before me.
But do not worry, my love. I believe I will survive this test. And then, my dearest Amelia, a clear horizon beckons us to a better day.
With all my love,
Harmon
Bundled up in my flight suit, I penned those words sitting at my desk in my cozy hut on base while a gentle snowfall added a thin layer of fresh powder to the Belgian countryside. No sooner had I finished the last sentence and sealed the envelope than the alarm sounded. I jumped up and scrambled out into the cold, racing to my fueled and armed fighter, which sat at the ready on the tarmac just outside the snow-covered hangar.
As I hurried across the wet ground to my waiting aircraft, I handed the letter to my ground-crew chief, Sergeant Ohler, with orders to mail it whether or not I returned.
Before climbing into the cockpit of my Focke-Wulf fighter plane, one of many lined up along the field with propellers whirring, I paused and gazed up into the steely overcast of clouds frowning down upon us. After so many years of going to war in the sky, I came to dread the ferocity of air combat and to embrace the words of Shakespeare: “…this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” This could have been the soliloquy of every German flier in Western Europe by this time.
Then it was off to the war once again. My moment of quiet reflection obliterated by the roar of engines and their promise of battle…up there somewhere, beyond the blanket of gray, waiting for me.
7
At fifteen thousand feet the sky was a rich blue, like a Caribbean lagoon. Outside my canopy, the thin air was minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit and so clear it seemed like I was flying through a vacuum. As we cruised along, heading for the intercept waypoint, for a brief period between takeoff and combat I could forget the war. A plush carpet of thick gray clouds beneath me made the ground and its troubles seem to be part of a separate universe.
There were sixteen aircraft in my squadron. I was flying the lead fighter in the lead arrow, each consisting of a four-plane “swarm” element in “finger-four” formation. Each swarm consisted of a loose two-plane “pack” with leader and trailing wingman. I’d logged five hundred-plus combat sorties by now and so wasn’t preoccupied with the minutia of keeping formation or maintaining altitude and airspeed. Instead, lulled to passivity by the humming of the bulky radial engine in front of me, my eyes drifted to the tattered, wallet-sized photograph taped up against the console. Amelia’s smiling face gazed longingly up at me. Although the image was black and white, the color of her eyes was a match. An image so feminine and fair and enchanting, it seemed obscenely misplaced among the coldly sinister dials of this war machine. My thoughts traveled to the letter I’d just penned. I yearned for several winters ago. The looming war had been still a thing of abstractness then and I just a happy boy, so very satisfied that the girl of so many dreams had taken me as her own. All had been right with the world then. I longed to see her in—
“Attention, Nebel-One.”
The crackling of the intercom in my ears abruptly snapped me out of my daydreaming. Ground-control wanted a fix on my position. As acting group commander of the entire Three Group made up of aircraft from several bases as well as my own sixteen-man squadron, I was in charge. Suddenly I was Captain Harmon Becker, the warrior again.
“Nebel-One calling Bodo,” I replied, speaking into the radio molded into the oxygen mask that covered my face and prevented me from passing out at this altitude. “Three Group on course two-zero to waypoint Berta.”
“Victor, Victor Nebel-One.”
I then spoke to my squadron. “Can anyone see them?” I was referring to a convoy of American bombers over the North Sea and headed this way.
“Nothing yet, Herr Captain,” responded Lieutenant Josef Mueller, my jovial wingman. “And our petrol’s running low,” he added.
“JG 32 Three Group,” the ground controll
er chimed in again. “Heavy babies now in sector Gustav-Paula. Go to Hanni eight zero. Vectoring Two Group to support you.”
“Victor, Victor,” I replied. “ Message understood.”
My gloved hand brought the control stick of my aircraft closer in to my groin. The other members of the squadron followed suit as we executed a gentle climb to twenty-five thousand feet and turned towards the new heading to intercept the targets. After five minutes we leveled off in position to meet the caravan of American B-17 Fortress bombers chugging towards us and Germany beyond.
I admit I disdained the bomber crews for wreaking destruction upon our cities. But unlike many of my comrades whose hatred bordered on bloodlust, my animosity was tempered with a desire to understand why they were here. I would in time question the war in my own way. But not today.
For now my duty pulled me north by northwest to stop the Americans. I honestly thought they were mad to even try to break through us. We had known well in advance they were coming, the thick clouds would make accurate bombing impossible, and the Luftwaffe had every available fighter in the air, just waiting to meet them. I scanned left then right to see my pilots’ aircraft buffeting up and down on gentle cushions of frigid air, so close to each other that you could have jumped from wingtip to wingtip. A formidable flock of determined young men in their fighter planes.
My FW-190A fighter was a fearsome aircraft. Its sobriquet, “Butcher Bird,” was well-deserved. Its sleek cylindrical lines came to an abrupt nose at a flat cowling that housed a robust fourteen-cylinder BMW radial engine. With seventeen hundred horsepower at my fingertips I could throttle the little plane to over three hundred seventy miles per hour and still turn inside any fighter the Allies had at the time except the British Spitfire. Although its performance fell off at these high altitudes, its deadly array of four twenty-millimeter wing cannons and two synchronized 7.62-millimeter machine guns made it the ideal weapons platform for taking on the four-engine “heavy babies,” as we called the American bombers.
Of Another Time and Place Page 2