Ordinary Heroes

by Scott Turow

  "Many historians have puzzled about why Stalin was willing to lose the thousands and thousands of troops he did in besieging and conquering Berlin without the assistance of the Allies, especially since he eventually honored his promise to share the city after it fell. Some speculate that the Soviets wanted the unfettered right to wreak vengeance on the Germans, which they surely took. One hundred thousand German women were raped during the Russians' first week in Berlin, Stewart." Bear took a second to wobble his old head over one more of the war's disgraceful facts.

  "But the foremost theory today, bolstered by documents found in KGB archives, is that Stalin wanted to reach Berlin alone because the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute there held the only pieces of the German nuclear program that the Americans had not already laid hands on. Indeed, the Soviets discovered stores of uranium oxide at the Institute with which they ultimately revived their flagging atomic program.

  "Once the SS officers made contact with the Soviets, and revealed the circumstances under which they had captured Martin, they found Soviet Army intelligence quite willing to let the SS men go in exchange for telling all they knew about Hechinger and turning over the American. Upon learning he was being handed off to the Soviets, Martin, who was now very weak, asked the Germans, as gentlemen, to shoot him. When they refused, he attempted to escape, despite his condition. He never got through the door. That was the last the SS officers saw of Martin. In the custody of the Soviets, sixty miles outside Berlin."

  "And why would Martin prefer to die in German rather than Soviet hands?"

  "One can only assume. Given what he'd said to your father, it's clear that Martin realized the Soviets would be desperate to learn whatever they could about American knowledge and suspicions concerning the A-bomb. For Martin, it would not be an appealing prospect to die while having every American secret he knew extracted by torture." Bear and I both were silenced for a second, contemplating that.

  The other thing that puzzled me at that moment was how Bear had learned all this. Some, he answered, had come through Teedle. More of what he knew was the product of his lingering curiosity about my father's case. He had read the histories as they emerged over the years. But he had also stayed in touch with Colonel Winters, Martin's OSS commander, who eventually became a senior intelligence officer at the CIA.

  "After Bryant retired from the Agency in the early 1970s, I saw him for a drink at the Mayflower. Winters told me he'd had an intriguing exchange a few years earlier with a Soviet counterpart who said he'd been involved in Martin's interrogation in Berlin, an event which the Russians officially deny to this day.

  "Martin had refused to talk, of course. This Soviet officer acknowledged that they would have tortured him, but Martin was so weak from his hunger strike that they suspected his heart would stop. The only way they found to pry more than Martin's name, rank, and serial number from him was purely accidental, when they called in a doctor, who proposed putting Martin on intravenous. At that point, the Major agreed to answer questions, if they would allow him to die. They interrogated Martin for an entire afternoon. Two days later he was gone. And, of course, it turned out that every word Martin had spoken, while compelling, proved an absolute lie."

  Bear stopped to wipe his lips. I thought this might have been too much talking for him, but he insisted on continuing. He'd worked too long to learn all of this not to pass it on.

  "Over the years," he said, "I've thought often of Martin at the end. He was disfigured and in great pain from his burns, while the nation in whose service he had suffered these wounds was intent on hanging him. Yet he would not betray us. Instead, he accepted death as his only honorable option. Dying in the hands of the Soviets, ironically, ended up reestablishing his bona fides at OSS, especially once they'd heard from the SS officers. They now saw Martin as lost on a frolic and detour, but not a Soviet spy, one of many men who'd broken under the strain of war rather than a true turncoat determined to aid America's enemies."

  I sat awhile digesting what Bear had told me. It was interesting as far as it went, but I had a hard time connecting any of this to my principal remaining curiosity, namely how my father had escaped his prison sentence. I said as much to Bear, who responded with his abbreviated off-kilter nod.

  "I understand that it's far from obvious, but these events in fact paved the way for your father's release. OSS had learned of all of this--the autopsy and the SS account of Martin being handed over to the Soviets--by July 1945, only a few days before Truman, Stalin, Churchill, and Attlee met to discuss postwar arrangements at Potsdam. Robert Martin ended up figuring in those discussions, because our diplomats had realized they could use his fate to our advantage. It was an incendiary notion that our Soviet allies would hold an American OSS officer and, rather than repatriate him, interrogate him about our secrets and starve him to death. It showed that Stalin was not an ally at all, but was in fact preparing for war with us. The Russians continued to officially deny that Martin had died in their hands, but the medical evidence was clear and the circumstances of the Major's death kept the Soviets on the defensive. Furthermore, the proof of their desire to acquire the A-bomb pointed the way for the ultimate revelation of Potsdam, Truman's announcement to Stalin that America had in fact perfected the weapon. I don't want to exaggerate the importance of Martin's death, but it was a clear note in an Allied chorus aimed at forcing Stalin to observe the agreements of Yalta about national boundaries and troop demarcations--and thus, ironically, in avoiding another war.

  "However, in order to engage in a diplomatic dance in which the tune was our indignation over Martin's fate, it was essential that Robert Martin be portrayed as a great American hero, and certainly not a rogue agent. The inconvenient details about Martin's insubordination, the order for his arrest, and his many escapes from American hands had to be quickly blotted from community memory, which necessarily meant that the court-martial of David Dubin was required to swiftly become a historical nonevent.

  "On July 26, 1945, I was called to Third Army Headquarters by Teedle, who informed me that the case was being dropped. He was forthcoming with the little he knew, but the General himself had been given only spare details. He was, however, all for anything that provided an advantage versus the Soviets. And from his perspective, the case against your father was far less meaningful now that OSS was saying that Martin had not been working for the Russians. Teedle was, frankly, quite chagrined by the about-face, and seemed to feel he'd been seriously misled.

  "In court, I had learned never to question a favorable ruling. I thanked Teedle heartily and prepared to leave with the papers recalling the charges in my hand, but Teedle would not dismiss me. Instead, he came around his desk and bore down on me.

  "Why the hell did he do this, Leach?' he asked, referring to your father. There was a tremendous animal ferocity in Teedle. He was not an enormous man, but when the General became intent, it was frightening because you felt he was on the verge of assault. It made for an uncomfortable moment when I had to outline the bounds of lawyer-client confidentiality. But it turned out the General had a theory.

  "`I think Dubin was convinced Martin was not a Soviet spy, and was afraid that between OSS and me, the man would hang for it anyway. Is that close?'

  "I knew I wasn't leaving without telling the General something, and what he had posited was true, as far as it went. I thought I'd satisfy him by saying his guess was accurate, but instead he grew solemn.

  "I've long suspected this whole damn thing with Dubin was my fault,' he said. He was a very sad. man, Roland Teedle, fierce and thoughtful, but morose at the core and full of a sense of his own shortcomings, which he felt had led him to eagerly accept a false view of Martin. I don't know if you realize this, Stewart, but after the war Teedle went on to get a degree in theology and achieved quite a bit of renown in those circles. He published several books. His main theory, as much as I understand these things, was that faith was the point of existence, even while sin was life's overwhelming reality. Society's goal wa
s to lower the barriers to faith, since faith was all that could redeem us. Very complex. As a warrior theologian, Teedle even attracted two biographers after his death. One book was completely unsparing--alcoholism, wife-beating, bar fights into his seventies, but not a whiff of the kind of scandal your father had heard about from Billy Bonner. I wouldn't be surprised if you checked your father's bookshelves and found one or two of Teedle's works there." In fact, when I looked, every book written by or about Teedle was in Dad's library, each, from the feel of the pages, well-read.

  "There was not much I could say to Teedle," Bear said, "when he claimed the whole episode was his fault. It was consummately Teedle. The willingness to accept responsibility was admirable, while the egotism that made him think he was the motive force for everything that had occurred was ironic, at best. But on the other hand, the fundamental quarrel between your father and Teedle had always been about Martin's core intentions, whether Martin, in a few words, was a good man or a bad one. In the end, the General seemed willing to grant the point to your father, and with that finally let me go to bring this news to my client."

  "Who was delighted, I assume?" I asked.

  "Very much so. There'd been so much intense scurrying about once the autopsy had turned up that we'd known some change was in the wind, but neither your father nor I ever dared to hope the entire case would be revoked. David responded appropriately. He jumped to his feet and pumped my hand, he read the discharge paper for himself several times, and once he realized that his house arrest was over, he insisted on buying me a drink. I expected him to ask about his manuscript, which I had yet to return, but he never did. Perhaps, at some level, he was willing to see me do what I'd urged, namely preserve it for his children. That, at least, is the excuse I have given myself, Stewart, in sharing all of this with you.

  "Your father enjoyed the summer air on the way over to the cafe, but by the time two glasses of champagne were placed before us he had grown quite somber. I was sure it was remorse for the many losses he'd suffered in chasing Martin, but that was not what preoccupied him at the moment.

  "I drink to you, Bear,' he said, 'and you should drink to me. Wish me luck.'

  "Naturally, I did, but he let me know I had missed his point.

  "I must go to Balingen,' he said, 'to see how my wife reacts when I tell her I am free to be her husband."'

  Chapter 33.

  ORDINARY HEROES

  If you asked my mother, as I did now and then during my childhood, she would describe my father as the love of her life, the hero who, like Orpheus, had retrieved her from Hades and whose passion brought her back to the realm of the living. That was her story, as they say, and she was sticking to it. And I think, at heart, it was true. Despite the doubts my father expressed to Leach when he was freed, my mother remained loyal to him always, and he to her. There were the usual daily frictions, but my parents treated each other with appreciation and kindness. Whatever the other improvisations in their histories, the intensity of their bond remains an enduring reality for me. It was like the mystical forces that unite atoms and was the very center of the household in which I was raised. They always had each other.

  My inch-by-inch discovery of the wartime travails of young David Dubin, so resolute, high-minded, and frequently unwise, eventually made some of my father's shortcomings as a parent easier to bear. Tenderness came hard to Dad, like so many other men in his generation, but I understand now that, very simply, he'd exhausted his capacity for daring in Europe. He'd bet everything on my mother and, having won, never put all his chips down anywhere else. The terror of the battlefield, the cruelty he'd witnessed, and the damage to his proudest beliefs were a weight always holding him a step back from life. Yet I grant him the one grace we can ask as humans: he had done his very best.

  But the revelation of my mother's identity shook me to the core. How could she have done this? How could she have deceived my sister and me about our heritage? How could she have denied her own past? I barely slept for weeks. The world, as I knew it, seemed as dramatically changed as if I'd found out I was the offspring of an amphibian.

  I had always accepted that there was an element of mild deceit in my mother's character. She was essentially a straightforward person, but she could lie like a champ when required. I was quite a bit older when I realized my parakeet, whose cage I had constantly failed to clean, did not simply fly away when I was seven. And she was very good at sticking up for utter implausibilities that she thought were good for us--like the alleged bout of childhood pneumonia she'd contracted because she had gone outside without a jacket.

  But the autobiography she'd passed off was no little white lie, especially laying claim to the hallowed status of a survivor. How could she have done this? The words were buzzing through my mind at unexpected moments for months.

  But time slowly began to leach away my anger. All parents keep secrets from their children. I eventually realized that neither she nor my father could have anticipated the abiding reverence the Jewish community ended up paying to those who had suffered in their names. True, that purported legacy allowed my mother at times to exert considerable emotional leverage over my sister and me, as well as my father's family, but she explicitly rejected any effort to celebrate her for what she had supposedly endured, always insisting without elaboration that she had been far, far luckier than most.

  More important, I accept now that my parents really had no choice. They had started down this road before the revelations of Martin's death in Soviet hands and were stuck with it when Dad was released. Admitting they'd falsified Gita's identity would have been foolhardy; he'd risk renewed prosecution, and she, in all likelihood, would never have been admitted to the U. S. Once here, the legal perils remained real, both for him, as a licensed attorney, and for her. Ironically, every time our government pounced on a former Nazi and tossed him out of the country for lying his way in, I'm sure their fears were reinforced. Certainly no one would choose to reveal a secret so dangerous to loose-tongued creatures like small children. The years passed. And their joint refusal to speak about the war stiffened their resolve not to tell Sarah or me. The anguish and disorientation I felt when I discovered the truth was, oddly, testimony to the fact that they had been sparing us pain.

  Nor do I think they made anything easier for themselves. Everyone who has so much as nodded toward therapy knows that the turmoil of the past is never wholly forgotten. Unresolved, it seeps through even the strongest foundation. My mother was warm, strong, and courageous. She was a venerated champion of the needy, who could count hundreds of persons rescued through the Haven, the relief agency she ran. But I never had the illusion she was happy. As the past receded, she grew more brittle and dwelled closer to her anger. Some of that fury, I think now, might have been easier to set aside if she'd been free to acknowledge the shame of being the town bastard, instead of pretending to come from a tragic but loving Jewish family. Yet my parents had taken to heart the lesson of Orpheus and could return to the world of light only by never looking back.

  I do not judge. I still cannot fathom enduring or witnessing what they and millions of others had. My mother referred so frequently to the "darkest time humanity has ever known" that the phrase lost any power for me--she might as well have been saying, "Things go better with Coke." But my excavations finally brought me nose to nose with the staggering truth she had been trying to impart. More human beings were killed in Europe from 1937 to 1945 than in any epoch before or since. Yes, six million Jews. And also twenty million Russians. Another three million Poles. A million and a quarter in Yugoslavia. Three hundred and fifty thousand Brits. Two hundred thousand Americans. And, may a merciful God remember them, too, more than six million Germans. Forty million people in all. Mom had called it right. Not merely dark. Black.

  In June 2004, my sister made her intended trip home to look in on Mom, who was declining. Caged by my own lies, I had debated for months what I would tell Sarah. By rights, our parents' story was as much hers as mine
. I just didn't think I'd get much credit for sharing it. Still, the day she was leaving, I buttoned up my courage and gave her a copy of Dad's typescript, and a handwritten summary of what Leach had added. She read that letter in my presence and, despite the labored apology it contained, responded in the spirit of our era.

  "I'm going to sue you," my sister said.

  "And what good will that do?"

  "Hire a lawyer, Stewart."

  I did, my high-school pal Hobie Tuttle, but no papers were served. Sarah called two weeks later. She was still boiling--I could literally hear her panting in the phone--yet she admitted that she'd been moved reading Dad's account.

  "But the rest of it, Stewart? About Mom being this other woman? You're making it up. The way you've always made things up. Reality has never been good enough for you. Dad didn't write one word saying that.

  I reasoned with her for just a moment. Leave Leach aside, whom she dismissed as an addlepated ninety-six-year-old. Why else would Dad have let Martin go? What other woman could Dad have married, given the fact that Teedle had him in custody a day or two after freeing Robert Martin? By then, I'd sorted through dozens of Gideon Bidwell's two-by-twos, copies of photos which Dad had kept after sending everything else to Biddy's family. I found one showing my father in uniform, conversing with a woman who is indubitably my mother. They stand in a courtyard in front of a small chateau constructed around a medieval turret, a "little castle"

  if ever there was one. Sarah had a duplicate of the picture, but she claimed it might have been taken at another time and place.

  "Believe what you want," I said.