The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  THE HOUSE WE LIVED in looked like any other house in our neighbourhood. The only difference was the number that identified us as a German family, 169061-4, painted on our front door. It can be said we lived in a decent house, though, there was that at least, and for this we were grateful. Ours was a company house similar in size and construction to all the others on our street—a one-and-a-half-storey, three-bedroom bungalow with a sheet-asphalt driveway that disappeared into the closed confines of a single-bay garage. In our unfinished basement we had a new Saratov oil furnace; in the backyard we maintained the sort of small garden that people had called a victory garden during the war but was now known as a liberty garden. We lived in this house because our father was employed by the shipbuilding concern that owned most everything else in town and whose steam whistle we heard blowing at the end of the day’s shift on the far side of the river that divided the town of Port Elizabeth into east and west.

  As slow and brown as the catfish we caught from its muddy banks, the Burnt River had been crucial in the making of our town. Its only set of riffles was up near Old Mill Road, just ankle-deep at that point, and at its most ambitious it might have spanned fifty feet and run no deeper than ten or twelve. But the Burnt (as it was known) had been used to float logs from the county’s earliest cuttings, soon stripped bare in the building of the British fleet in the 1800s; later its modest powers were harnessed by the mills that rose on its banks. The vast barley fields where the oaks had once stood sent their harvests south to the harbour, from which point the malted grain was poured into the cargo holds of topsail schooners that sailed southwest for the Niagara River or east towards the Saint Lawrence and on to England. The tanneries, too, took a foothold here, on the west side of the harbour, and the pelts taken from the surrounding woodland became purses and shoes and carriage tops. Finally, in 1908, with the launch of Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzie in Detroit, our small town experienced another of its many booms, providing leather for hundreds of car seats and roofs per day. No enterprise here was stronger or more firmly rooted than the Chisolm Shipyards Company. Even through the Great Depression the town managed to keep its young men employed, its families fed and clothed and housed. Once the war started, the antiquated tanneries and mills were knocked down, the shipyard rapidly expanded, and waves of men soon came searching for opportunity as the war quadrupled the size of our population in under a year.

  The Chisolm Company owned our house, as I say, and the lot it was built on, as it did most others in town. We shopped in their stores and played in their parks and attended their schools. We were a company family living in a company town. Everything we did depended on the yard. On average we built two cruisers a year, and once three—in the year of the Suez Crisis—and dry-docked and repaired a dozen more, and we saw ourselves transformed into a town of old men, women, and children when the Royal Navy came to port—the names HMS Montgomery, the Excelsior, the Liverpool rang magically in my ears—for there was not a single working man to be seen in the streets at such times, each and every last one called in to work until the vessel in question was shipshape again.

  The hull steel used by the yard came from the Stelco Company of Hamilton, Ontario, situated at the western end of the lake—thirty or so miles as the crow flies, fifty by road—and on a clear night you could see the glow of the smelters and blast furnaces when you stood at the bottom of our street, just three blocks from home, the sky in that direction lit by fires that appeared to me in my child’s wonder as a constellation of stars. In all seasons we heard the heavy rumble of freight trains as they rolled through town to feed the shipyard and the Hamilton steel mills, and from our vantage on the Bridge of Heroes, a half-mile up from where the Burnt River emptied into Lake Ontario and over which we crossed on the days we met our father at the shipyard gates, we saw the vast expanse of building docks and cranes and rail lines and the dozens of ships stacked like islands to the horizon as they waited to make port. Ten blocks back in the direction of home was the pocket of trees that was our neighbourhood and the enduring misery of Mercy House.

  OUR FATHER’S NAME WAS Howard Teufel. The fact that he’d been kept away from the war when there still was an actual war to fight had caused him many sleepless nights when he was a young man. In 1940 he was twenty years old, healthy and strong but for the diabetes that was his category-one exemption. He visited the recruiting office in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario, half a dozen times to talk the duty officer into turning a blind eye to his damning medical report. On each occasion he was denied the opportunity to prove himself in the way so many other local boys were doing. He hated the Nazis as much as everyone else did, he assured anyone who’d listen. But he was a coward in the eyes of those who saw him striding down a Kingston street at the height of the war, a white-feather case, they called it. And for this he was burdened by shame until the day his fortunes finally turned in June 1943, when he was recruited by the Corps of Engineers out of Petawawa, Ontario, and put to work on the greatest engineering project of the war.

  The expansion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway had begun by then, first at Côte Ste Catherine and later at various other points along the length of that thousand-mile-long waterway. He was trained on a single-bucket grab-dredger, which he soon mastered, and on May 1, 1944, the day he turned twenty-four, the final lock was opened and christened with the passage of the HMS Victorious as she made her way upriver into the heart of North America and the safety of the Great Lakes. After he was processed out of the Corps that summer, he came to Port Elizabeth and found a position as a crane operator at the Chisolm Shipyards, which were then expanding as a result of the Miracle Canal, so dubbed by the national press—this for the fact that the British Navy now had safe harbour in which to shelter from the stinging U-boat wolf-pack attacks that had plagued the North and South Atlantic since the start of the war. He took a room near the docks once he was hired on, and on Sunday afternoons he strolled the quiet green of Gairloch Gardens in the east end of town in hopes of silencing the clamour of industry that continued on in his head long after his workweek was ended.

  He introduced himself to my mother after he saw her feeding a family of mallards one fall afternoon in his first year here. She had a shy, pretty smile that immediately drew him to her, he said, but she was cautious and halting as she struggled to understand his intentions. English was still a struggle for her, and when he offered to speak German, and then did so, he informed her that, yes, he was Canadian through and through, but that his mother had come over from Hamburg in 1919, and that German was the language she’d used at home when he was growing up. He learned that day that my mother’s aunt had put her on board a ship called the St. Louis bound for Cuba in 1938. After the port authority in Havana turned them away for no reason she knew, the ship sailed northeast for the Canaries, and finally, after sitting off Tenerife for three months, the Portuguese government granted them permission to call in at Ponta Delgada, in the Azores. There, at the age of fourteen, my mother was deloused, interrogated, and placed in the internment camp that became her home for two years, until Canada, on humanitarian grounds—most of the passengers on the St. Louis were juveniles—opened its doors in 1943, only a few months before our parents met that afternoon at Gairloch Gardens. She and my father spent the rest of that day walking the grounds, avoiding talk of the dangerous heritage they shared, which he’d done his best to hide since the start of the war.

  MY PARENTS PULLED MY brother from school for a full week in October 1953, the year he began first grade, when news broke that Germany had decided to up the ante by testing their first hydrogen bomb in the Libyan desert. In an instant the Doomsday Clock was moved to one minute before midnight, and violent anti-German protests swept the nation. My mother watched the street from the living room window in the days that followed that test, always fearful that the roving mobs would turn their attention to our house. The few remaining German-owned businesses that had survived the attempt to remove the German population from the economy were torched—the
Commonwealth First Decree having been modelled after what had been done to the Jews in Europe a decade earlier—and my mother and father, ever fearful, locked our doors and waited for the War Measures Act to return order to the streets. Even my father stayed away from work that week as our town buckled under the protests after Libya. Thomas was old enough to remember the crowds and the chanting and the smoke rising from the Vogel & Sons hardware store on Main Street. But I can’t claim to have an accurate recollection of those times, still cocooned as I was in the pleasant ignorance of childhood. Nor do I remember the day shortly after when news came that a Soviet hydrogen bomb had been successfully tested in Kazakhstan, as Sakharov’s atomic bomb had been nine years earlier, just three weeks after Germany had deployed the only bomb it had over London. With that new Soviet hydrogen bomb, the brief advantage held by Berlin in 1953 evaporated in an instant, as it had in 1944, and the balance of power once again guaranteed that neither Germany nor the Soviets were willing to violate the truce that prevailed. And so, for now, here in this socialist northern enclave, we were safe.

  THROUGH ALL THIS I saw no reason to believe that we weren’t like any other family. Normal is what you know and see every day when you’re a child, and to my mind we were ordinary and undeserving of notice or special treatment, one way or the other. Our routines and rituals seemed to fall in line with the typical Canadian family’s. As I imagined everyone else in town did, we gathered in front of our new Soviet-made Izumrud 201/203 television to watch the hockey game beamed in from Maple Leaf Gardens or the Montreal Forum on Saturday nights. Often the picture was fuzzy, and always blue on top, reddish in the middle, and green at the bottom, this a result of the special plastic laminate our father had purchased and adhered to the television screen to bring some colour to our viewing experience. The miracle of television was still something to behold, its imperfections as magical as the thing itself. We loved the Leafs and disliked the Canadiens and watched in awe when the Soviet national team swept the 1958 exhibition series that riveted the whole country. The picture didn’t matter as long as the broadcast didn’t cut out suddenly, as it often did in those days. But this too helped me believe we were participants in what could be called normal life. The same interruptions, shortages, and power outages burdened us as they did everyone else in town. We built snow forts and rode our toboggan down Jackson’s Hill in winter and pedalled our bikes in summer and lived in a neighbourhood whose houses looked warm and comfortable and safe. In the fall we harvested vegetables from our liberty garden and, like so many families did back then, we went on country drives, in the ’38 Chevy Deluxe Coupe my father was so proud of.

  Sometimes we drove as far north as Simcoe County, where our parents talked about renting a cabin one day. I liked to watch the way my mother might straighten my father’s collar as he drove, or touch his hair when he spoke with measured optimism about the shape of our future, or praise the car he’d finally managed to save enough to purchase second-hand from a man at the shipyard. Ours was one of the few American automobiles you still saw on the road. If you had a car it was usually a Lada or a Moskvitch, both sturdy enough, manufactured as they were with the Russian winter in mind. Our old Chevy was beyond exotic compared to those Everyman cars. You just didn’t see them anymore. I don’t think my father cared much about being seen in an unusual car, though.

  It was more a question of what that automobile represented about the way America used to be before everything got turned upside down. He usually looked pleased when he drove it, and often my mother’s fingers settled on his shoulder for a mile or two, the old Chevy chugging along, and for me this display of affection between my parents was as good as or better than renting a cabin up north or meeting him at the shipyard after the steam whistle sounded, for it told of a confidence between them that made it easier to disregard the troubling signs that had finally begun to make themselves known to me.

  Perhaps the one sign that puzzled me most in those early days was not the number painted on our front door—mistaken at that early age for our home address, added to the more recognizable street number 115 tacked onto a front porch post—but the nervousness that plagued our father when he was in public. At home he was calm and happy, or at least he seemed that way to me—the sort of father who pulled a coin from your ear on your birthday or played Herb Alpert songs on his old dented trumpet. But in the street he was always on guard. “Come on now, William, get a move on,” he’d say, throwing a glance over his shoulder. He didn’t associate with men from the shipyard as far as I can remember, and I have no recollection of visitors calling at our house when I was a boy. At the annual company picnic he never played pickup baseball or talked with the men in the beer tent where so many other fathers seemed to collect. He sat with us instead; and once, after I made the mistake of speaking the wrong language, he raised a finger to his lips and reminded me that outside the home we were to speak only English.

  At the end of the day, as we settled into our beds after one such picnic, Thomas told me it was the war that dictated the use of the languages we spoke and where we were allowed to speak them. Everything was about the war, he said, even the number painted on our front door. Everyone hated us the same way you hated the monster in a monster movie. I’d see for myself soon enough, once school started that fall. I remembered no war, only stories that told of our father’s regret at not having served. It seemed far-fetched that something that had happened outside the span of my own life could hold such harsh sway over our town and family. Thomas reached for the flashlight at his bedside and pressed it to the underside of his chin.

  “It’s a cold war now, stupid, that’s what they call it,” he said. The term cold war was new to me. Icebergs and snow-swept plains and howling winds came to mind. “So you’d better get used to not having any friends at all. We watch films at school. You’ll see them, too. They blame us for everything.”

  “Us?” I said.

  “The Germans.”

  “What happens in the films?”

  He scanned the ceiling with the flashlight beam. We’d strung half a dozen model airplanes up there, on fishing line, in a perpetual dogfight that moved only slightly when a breeze came through the window.

  “Nothing goes right, anyway,” he said.

  The beam traced across the ceiling in a cool, steady arc. He knew all there was to know. There could be no reason to doubt what he told me, though no sense could be made of it in my trusting heart. I looked up to him in every way a little brother could. He was taller and stronger and smarter than I could ever hope to be, and when he told me I’d never have friends in my life I believed him as you believe the crystal ball that speaks the truth to you about your deepest and most shameful secret. He’d already learned something at school called duck-and-cover and knew the location of all the fallout shelters in town, and that in the early days following the war they’d been known as sanctuaries and not shelters. The name made people feel better, he said. It made them feel safer. He even claimed to know by the light in the sky over Hamilton what grade of steel they were baking in the Stelco firepits.

  “Maybe you don’t want to know what our last name means in German,” he said.

  “Maybe I do,” I said.

  Silence fell between us, and he shone the flashlight under his chin again and snapped the setting from white to red.

  “Teufel means devil,” he said.

  Such pronouncements did not frighten me so terribly in the morning as they did at night, and though I learned that our family name did in fact mean in German what he said it did, I chose to believe for as long as I could that we were no different from anyone else. No one had any reason to hate us. I couldn’t bear to think of the lonely future that Thomas had predicted for me. I decided that our name was just a sound that came out of your mouth. The childless couple on our street five doors up whom I waved to on occasion, and who always pretended not to see me, were not green, though we knew them as Mr. and Mrs. Green, and so by that same logic I assured myself th
at there was nothing of the devil in us at all.

  THE NOTION THAT WE were an ordinary family was tested on most days once the truth began to come clear to me, but never more than when our town paused on the sixth day of August to recall the war that had taken so much from so many. For us there was no date on the calendar as frightening as Remembrance Day. What gathered over our house as the anniversary approached was a gloomy mood that caused our parents to snap at me and my brother for the smallest infraction. On the day itself we were not permitted to play outside, not even in our backyard, much less in the street, where the sight and sound of a couple of German boys would have been reported to the neighbourhood Citizen Patrol by one or more of our busybody neighbours. Even if the weather was fine, which often it was in early August, we didn’t so much as step out onto the front porch until we were ready to walk up to Chisolm Square, where we took part in the memorial service.

  My mother, a seamstress by training, had made the black suit my father wore on this solemn occasion. She sewed clothes for us kids, too, which Thomas never failed to complain about. He referred to her creations as immigrant clothing, for her sweaters and winter toques and mittens featured more than a hint of the place where she’d learned her craft, and this openly Germanic patterning was seized upon by most everyone in the schoolyard, including those teachers who did little to conceal their prejudice against us. School was bad enough as it was without our mother painting yet another bull’s eye on his back, Thomas said. One year he refused to wear any of it, until our father put a stop to his nonsense, settling the matter once and for all when he told him it was that or go to school wearing no clothes at all.