“Herr First Lieutenant, where are you going?” said Ohler. “I’m winning this hand!” Resigned that the game was over, the mechanic showed his cards to Stahl. “I am, see?”
Stahl just lit up a cigarette and moved himself over to a deck chair. He reclined, covered his eyes with his visor cap, and enjoyed a calm smoke on a summer day.
I stood leaning against the wing of my fighter, my armpit supported by the twenty-millimeter cannon protruding from the leading edge. I was thinking of all the men I’d killed, as I have every day since. I found myself missing the company of such fine men as Borner and Gaetjens. Even those with whom my life had only briefly intersected, boys like Kluge or Edelmann who, but for their photos on the wall, I couldn’t even visualize. I felt tired and stretched inside. I didn’t even care who won the war anymore. It just had to end soon or I would die. Either at the hands of the Allies or, worse, swinging from Keitel’s noose alongside Amelia. What was I to do about Leo? That thought eclipsed all others as I leaned against my aircraft contemplating what value were four lives against millions? Against mine?
“Well, Herr Sourpuss,” Mueller’s chipper voice called to me. “Still feeling sorry for yourself?”
“What now, Josef?” I said deadpan as I stared out to the row of fighters lined up on the airfield at the ready.
He backhanded me on the arm. “Maybe this new addition to the squadron will cheer you up.”
I sighed and turned my head. “Let’s see the new tombstone.” That was all I could say, as I was stunned into silence.
The sergeant stood at attention, beaming at me under his ill-fitting field cap: “Hello, Brother.”
Paul was taller and lankier, but still showed that familiar grin. A frailer, darker version of me. He seemed too much a child to be sporting the uniform of a Luftwaffe sergeant. But here he was in the flesh. And my life had just gotten even more complicated. But I remembered my father’s words. And I would do my best to protect Paul Becker from the Allies. But only he could protect him from himself.
40
My brother and I stood alone in the hangar. A stripped-down FW-190 sat quietly underneath the tin roof. Ohler’s people used it to cannibalize parts. Paul circled the menacing craft, running his hands across the control surfaces. I stood quietly and watched him. My plane sat not more than thirty yards away should the alarm sound. But Paul was curious about the fighter, and so I obliged him. It would give us a moment together.
“So this is the ‘Butcher Bird.’” He whistled with boyish admiration. “Does it fly as good as it looks?”
“Better,” I said. “They send us good planes all the time. What they don’t send us are trained pilots.” I rubbed my eyes wearily. “I’m afraid to ask this, but how many hours do you have?”
“Twenty-five,” he answered while still giving the fighter plane his attention.
My heart sank. “Bastards,” I groaned, more to myself. “Even the greenest Americans have ten times that by the time they send them up.”
Paul stopped and looked over to me as if personally insulted. “The schools were low on petrol from the bombings,” he said. “They did the best they could.”
I grinned sarcastically. “I’m sure the first Ami that gets on your tail will give you a break for that.” There was a wrenching silence. Finally I said: “Dammit, Pauli, why did you sign up to fly of all things? Why now?”
Paul stood up straight and answered: “Because there’s a war on, Harmon. And I intend to do my part for the glory of the Reich.”
I let that seep in for a moment and then couldn’t help but chuckle at his blind, pitiful zeal. “You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into, do you?” He didn’t know how to respond. So he walked up to me, put his hands on my shoulders, and smiled warmly.
“I know that I’m with family, Harmon. Of all the great coincidences.”
“It was no coincidence,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I brought you here,” I confessed. “Well, actually Lieutenant Thomson made sure you were assigned here. I took him up on an offer he made a while back.”
“Why would you do that?”
I looked past him, thinking of the warmth of a winter night’s fire that seemed a lifetime ago. “I told Father I’d look after you as best I could.”
He laughed. “But who’ll look after you?”
“I’m fine on my own,” I said. But of course, I really didn’t know.
“Admit it,” he quipped. “You’re happy to see me.”
“I am.” I ran my fingers over my drawn face. I needed a shave. “So what’s the latest from Stauffenberg?” I asked. “Have the Allies flattened it yet?”
Paul stared at me. “That’s not funny, Harmon.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.” Another pause. “Have you lost weight?” I patted him playfully on his hard stomach.
He smiled. “Flight training will do that, as you know.”
“And how are Mother and Father?”
He shrugged. “As well as can be expected. They worry about you.”
“As they should,” I said.
“But you know Father,” he added. “He’ll never show his true feelings.”
I smiled. “A stubborn old constable, that one. And Mother? Does she still sing?”
Paul shook his head. “Not often.”
I inquired guardedly about Amelia too. He said he rarely saw her. Although admittedly he’d been away at flight training for most of the time.
I grew uneasy as his answer brought back to my mind what she was doing. I had no doubt that Paul would have reported her if he knew she was hiding Jews. In fact, who knows if he’d have forgiven my complicity in her crimes? I honestly couldn’t say.
“Hanna’s very sick,” I said offhandedly.
“I know,” Paul piped up. “The Sturmbahnführer sends his men look in on her, but Amelia shoos them away. You’re in love with a headstrong girl.”
“Don’t I know that,” I agreed. Then it hit me. “The Sturmbahnführer? SS? Who’s that?”
Paul smiled. “Keitel of course.”
My heart sank. Keitel was now an SS major. His sniffing around Amelia’s house wasn’t an act of neighborly kindness. He was looking for something. Or someone. But why not just storm in? The SS needed no invitation. Strange.
Paul crouched down, inspecting the swivel tailwheel of the machine. “She really is beautiful, Harmon. I can understand why Keitel hates you.”
“To hell with him.” I snorted. “Anyone else visiting her?”
“There’s a boy from Koppel’s who delivers her food. But fear not. He’s too young. She mostly keeps indoors.”
“She has little money. War’s hard on civilians,” I observed.
“We all must make sacrifices to the Fatherland. We are a hail of—”
“Ninety million bullets, I know,” I cut him off with impatience. Then I added: “It’ll be eighty million if this shitshow keeps going.”
Paul glared at me. “Don’t say that. The Führer has it all in hand.”
“So I hear. Anything else about home?”
“Oh!” he said as if I had jarred his memory. “Amelia asked me to give you this.”
He stood and retrieved a crumpled envelope from his breast pocket. I eagerly grabbed it from his hand and inspected it to see that it hadn’t been opened, but my brother read my mind.
“It’s sealed, Harmon.” He laughed. “Do you take me for a voyeur?”
He was telling the truth. Still, if she had written anything about Krup then she was foolhardy to entrust such an incriminating note to this Nazi brat. She must’ve really needed to tell me something to recruit Paul as an unwitting accomplice to avoid the censors.
I slipped the envelope into my pocket. “I’ll have Lieutenant Thomson show you around.”
“You’re welcome,” he said with irritation.
“For what?”
“For bringing you the letter.”
“You should be thanking me for bringing you here,” I said. “The other groups near the coast have been decimated. And we’ve had no picnic.”
“Well, maybe we can win this war together then,” he said, slapping me on the back as we walked out of the hangar.
“Maybe.”
The order to stand down came a half hour after I left my brother with Thomson. If the Allies hadn’t come by now, they wouldn’t. That suited me fine. My urgency to read Amelia’s letter was unbearable.
When I got to my quarters I closed and locked the door behind me. Examining the tattered envelope more forensically in my quarters, I could see that it was indeed the original seal. But Amelia, showing more caution than I gave her credit for, still knew to write cryptically. Good girl, I thought. The meaning behind her words, however, rang clear to me:
June 10, 1944
Dearest Harmon:
I miss you more than words can say. Little has changed since we saw each other last. My life here continues as it has, although I do not know how long I can go on like this. Each day that goes by, with no end of the fighting in sight, I ask myself: Is this the day?
There is more activity in Stauffenberg lately. The SS keep us safe. They watch over us. Checking to see that we are alright, yet respectful of our privacy for we are all in this war as one people. They root out the criminal elements with arrests of Bolsheviks and spies. They watch my house to protect me from enemies of the Reich. Although I feel safe under Herr Keitel’s ever-surveilling eye, I wish you were here to protect me as well. I cannot see myself lasting another summer in this state. Please return home to me safe, won’t you? There is so much you can do here.
The SS watch over your family too, so do not fear. Although they are kind enough not to interfere in their daily affairs, I know that should anything happen to your parents, Keitel’s men will be there. They are all the New Germany has promised. A sight to see.
(I believe she inserted this following paragraph, so I could tell if our correspondence had probing eyes. Censors would have redacted it.)
We hear little of the war, other than what we see on the Wochenschau. But I wonder sometimes. We hear whispers of invasion in France. Heavy losses in the east. Yet I am confused as all of the news we get is of victory, heroism, the glory of the Reich. I see more boys coming home, legless, armless, or whole in body but with a ghostlike quality that makes me fear what they have seen. Do you too possess such darkness? Are you indeed well, my love? I hear nothing from you, yet no black notes come so I comfort myself with the passing of each day that you are still with me.
I wish I could write more, but I have said what I need to say. I know this war will end someday. I only pray that it will end before time runs out for those we care about. In many ways, that is as much in your hands as mine.
Do be careful. I miss you so much that the weight of your absence physically presses down on me. I must go now.
All My Love,
Amelia
I folded the letter and stuffed it in my drawer. A terrible sense of foreboding came over me. She was telling me that Keitel suspected her of something. Time was indeed her enemy—and the Krupinskis’. But for now I had a war to fight, although my heart began to tug me in a different direction.
And all the while I grew more despondent, more reclusive, and angrier at the world and all things that tied me to this life of the walking dead that Amelia so astutely described in her letter. Every day I dodged the scythe. And I was coming to abhor all who made this my reality.
I was angry at the Allies for their invasion, the merciless bombing, and now their hosts of fighter planes and well-trained crews. I resented their alliance with the Bolsheviks to the east against us. I fumed at Hitler for bringing this whole bloody mess crashing down upon Germany when we—when I—had once trusted him without question. “The Führer has it all in hand,” as Paul still recited like some pull-string doll. That seemed an alien notion to me now as I recounted his growing madness before my very eyes. I hated Keitel for who he was, Seebeck for what he represented. I was even annoyed with Krupinski for being a stubborn old man and not getting his family out when he could. I was furious with Amelia for dragging me into her idealistic folly. And most of all, I was livid with myself for caring about Leopold and Constanze, little Elsa, and even the bitter Jakob. I was angry for being in love.
I didn’t have long to gnash my teeth, as I heard a gentle tapping on my door and Paul’s voice calling to me. “Harmon, are you in there? Let’s go for a beer, shall we? I’m parched.”
I exhaled and donned my visor cap. Reality was what it was, and I had a brother with twenty-five hours of flying who had to very quickly be taught the dos and don’ts of his high-performance FW-190 if he was going to survive.
I opened the door and stepped into the sunlit air. One thing did bother me. “While you wear that uniform, you will address me as Captain Becker, is that understood, Sergeant?”
Paul clicked his heels, grinning. “Jawohl!”
“Come,” I said, “let’s go look at your crate first.”
He followed me across the airfield past several pilots taking catnaps on the grass with their caps over their faces. We approached his lone aircraft, which sat in the field next to the dispersal area. It had grayish green mottled camouflage with the blue-and-white-striped spiral pattern painted on the cone-like propeller cowling as our squadron marking. It looked quite ferocious, and the thought of this little boy climbing into that buzz saw of a flying machine gave me pause.
“Are you familiar with the 190A?” I asked, fearing the answer.
He didn’t disappoint me. “I only flew the Messerschmitt. Two hours total. It was a tricky bastard to land.”
I nodded. “This plane’s landing gear is wider and more forgiving.”
Sweat trickled down my back as I took him through a walk-around of the machine. I pointed out many technical aspects of the aircraft that I knew were most relevant to his combat survival. After ten minutes of one instruction after another, I turned to him and asked doubtfully: “You think you can remember all that?”
He nodded without much confidence.
Then I heard a shrill voice. “What’s this? Another Becker in our midst?” bellowed Major Seebeck, hobbling over to take a look at the two of us. Paul’s uniform was much more regulation than my flight suit. “Like Manfred and Lothar of old,” he said, likening us to the “Red Baron” and his brother.
Paul immediately drew himself to attention and threw his palm to the sky. “Heil Hitler!” I saluted lazily. I was too damned tired to care.
“Are you settled in, Sergeant?”
“Yes, Herr Major,” he said beaming.
Seebeck stood with his infernal cane supporting him. “Well, I’ll not disturb you two further. I just found it quite coincidental to have two Beckers on the base. Lieutenant Thomson might shed some light on this. Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Sergeant Becker here seems to be the New Germany incarnate.” He looked at me mockingly. “You could learn from his example, Captain.”
I tried to stay cool. “I think right now I’m the one who has much to teach here in lieu of our training schools, Herr Major.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Then you can both learn from each other.”
“Herr Major,” I pressed. “Sergeant Becker is not ready for combat yet.”
“Hey!” Paul objected, but I ignored him and instead looked at Seebeck.
“His training I’m sure is adequate. Besides, Captain, he’ll have plenty of experience this far from the coast before seeing any serious action.”
“Oh, is that so?” I said sarcastically.
Seebeck cleared his throat and stood straight. “That is so.”
“Please tel
l the Mustangs this.”
Seebeck ignored the jibe. “I expect you to have all of our new pilots combat ready. I have the utmost confidence in Sergeant Becker. Look at him. He is the model German soldier. How can such a superior figure be defeated?”
My brother beamed at that, swallowing it whole. “Thank you, Herr Major.”
“Carry on, Becker.” Then he bowed in a cute gesture. “I mean Beckers.”
“Heil Hitler!” the little runt blurted out again.
Seebeck was clearly impressed with the contrast. “Heil Hitler.” Kindred spirits, I thought.
After Seebeck was out of earshot, I said to him, “You still swallow that snake oil?”
“I’m not going to apologize for being a Nazi,” he said defiantly.
I rolled my eyes dismissively. “If I were you I’d put down Mein Kampf and start learning the turning radius of a Mustang or the blind spots of a Boeing.”
“You don’t object to the Führer’s philosophies, I hope.” This was the Paul I remembered. That little Hitler Youth machine who’d forgotten that being a German patriot didn’t mean surrendering your humanity. Perhaps Karl Becker was right. Maybe he had lost his son to Hitler. Nazi or not, it didn’t stop me from trying to throttle some sense into that brainwashed head of his.
“Listen, boy!” I snapped, grabbing him by his collar. “When you’re up in the air and tracers scream past you and you look back to see three, four, hell ten Indians on your tail, I goddamn guarantee you that the sinister role of the Jewish bankers in the Versailles Treaty had better be the last thing on your mind! You study the politics of this chaos on your own time. But up there you belong to me!”
He shook me off of him, and then stood his ground. “I belong to the Reich! I swore my oath to the Führer, not you.”
But I wouldn’t leave it at that. “No, my little plebe. Your mind is Hitler’s, and your heart is Germany’s. But your ass is mine! Father issued it to me, and I intend to return it to him in one piece. Do you understand, Sergeant Becker?”
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