The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  This suit she’d made was tight now on my father’s shoulders and waist—she’d made it when they were newlyweds—and it was plain to see the fit caused him some discomfort. He turned his whole body instead of just his head when he wanted to talk to you, as if he had a stitch in his neck, and he rolled his shoulders and head often, attempting to find a posture that might relieve the stiffness. And so, dressed in our own suit jackets and ties (also crafted by our mother, loosely tailored so that our young bodies might grow into them), we followed our father outside onto the front porch where we waited for her to join us. She was always the last one ready that morning. Our father would check his watch minute by minute as we stood there, looking left and right up and down our street for any sign of the Greens or the Hatchetts or the Friars, or the Citizen Patrol, who might have something to say about this loitering family of irredeemables. Finally, when our mother appeared, grim-faced and steeled with purpose, we came down the front steps together and at last set out for the memorial service.

  The smile that had drawn my father’s attention on the afternoon our parents met so long ago was no longer there, in general terms, and less so now on this specific morning. She wore her hair in the style of the day—like the movie stars and the grim ladies you saw on the government posters at school—which gave her a vaguely Slavic look, though her people, as far as she knew, had never ventured beyond the narrow confines of what we believed was her northeastern German bloodline.

  It was a short seven blocks to Chisolm Square. On that day it felt like a hundred. We walked in silence most of the way. I did what I could to distract myself. I didn’t want to be a bother to my parents. I counted the houses and cars parked in their driveways and listened to the summer sounds that didn’t sound like much to me on any other day but today felt personal and heavy with foreboding. Lawn mowers and cars sat idle. Tree frogs and crickets and cicadas filled the morning with their strange songs of courtship and dying. If I was lucky I’d get lost in these sounds for a time. But my reveries never lasted long. Out of an abundance of caution our father would remind us what was expected of his two sons—backs straight, boys, and no staring once we’re there—absolutely no staring—and tell us that in attending the service we were letting the whole town know something about who we were. We were on the right side, he’d say, and don’t you dare forget that, both of you.

  The square was three blocks north of Main Street and one east of Burnt River. It was green and pretty in summer and bordered by houses constructed at the end of the previous century using bricks and stone taken from the ruins of the Marlatt and Armstrong Tannery after it was destroyed by fire in 1870. The houses were much larger than the company house we lived in. Here they were red brick with white gabling and trim and wore black-shingled, double-sloped roofs against the weather and the pine cones that fell from the spruce and fir trees that towered over the neighbourhood.

  Many of these houses bore plaques that commemorated their builders or original occupants. They spoke of long-dead carpenters and shipbuilders and merchants, and one, at the southwest corner where we entered the park, told of a Swede named Jacobson who’d run rum from the Port Elizabeth harbour across the lake to Olcott, New York, back in the 1920s. Another memorialized a woman named Gatchel who’d assisted fugitives arrived here from the United States via the Underground Railroad following their escape from slavery in the 1860s. This house, smaller, and predating the tannery fire, was a house of great distinction. One of the tunnels of the Underground Railroad had ended in the basement of this very building, its plaque said, and we were proud to learn that our small town had been one of the many points along the north shore of Lake Ontario where men and women had sought and received refuge in their escape from that great slaving nation to the south.

  In all these houses on Remembrance Day the curtains were drawn and the Royal Union Flag, so ubiquitous in those times, was lowered to half-mast. The nervous hum of the crowd gathering at the foot of the towering cenotaph drowned out the cicadas and the birds that had accompanied us on our walk. The names of the local dead were carved below the dates 1939–1944. Above was the inscription:

  They Gave Their Lives to Break the Power of the Sword.

  Now as we found our place, far back from the cenotaph, where the resin smell of the trees we stood under startled my nose, the general murmur of a thousand voices filled the day. Fallen pine cones and brittle spruce needles crunched beneath our polished shoes. My father folded his hands together at his waist, the right hand gripping his left wrist, and Thomas and I, diligent and observant, did the same—right gripping left.

  Out of the corner of my eye I watched my father, careful not to miss any sign or gesture meant for us, for there were unvoiced protocols and rituals to follow—arms folded just so, head angled like this—and any half-hearted observance would be noticed. We never wavered or slouched. My mother stood next to my father, head down, her arm laced with his. We didn’t speak as we waited. In the tree above, even the squirrels seemed to hold off their morning chatter.

  The Reverend from Knox Presbyterian at the corner of Charles and Main always presided over the service. He took his position at the base of the cenotaph and raised his hands and offered a prayer. His voice was amplified throughout the park by a public announcement system that only a week earlier might have been used at a county fair. From where we stood back in the trees it sounded weak and tinny, like some faint radio broadcast coming from a far-off city. It was good enough to follow along, though.

  The Reverend’s sermons told of our town’s sacrifice and the enduring hardships of the postwar era and the need to find patience in our hearts and strength in our backs. He spoke of forbearance and industry and the spirit of common purpose as we struggled against the evils of this troubled world; and then he invited the town’s dignitaries and veterans to approach. With a soft touch of his wooden cross he blessed them as they bent a knee before him and then laid their wreaths in growing heaps at the base of the cenotaph.

  Every year three children were chosen to read out the names of our recent dead. Nearing the end of the service they approached and sang out the names in a way that sounded choral in its beauty and sadness. I imagined what it would feel like to hear my own name sung in this way, to be so revered that the whole town honoured your memory, and that it would almost be worth dying just to know that feeling. It was the legacy of war that got your name remembered in song, and year upon year the list grew, for the war that had ended years earlier seemed not to have ended at all. I wondered too what it would be like to read out those names, which in the days following the service a team of stonecutters would carve into the ever-growing cenotaph, but neither I nor my brother was ever afforded the honour, of course.

  When the reading of the names was finished, the Reverend presided over a minute of silence, which was then broken by the mournful blast of the shipyard steam whistle. It blew louder and longer on this occasion than it did to release a shift from the yard. My heart trembled as the call pierced the air, and finally the old Reverend, dressed in his red and black robes, led us in a prayer:

  Vengeance is Mine,

  And recompense;

  Their foot shall slip in due time;

  For the day of their calamity is at hand,

  And the things to come

  hasten upon them.

  We called out “Amen” and saluted, as we’d do every morning when school began that fall, just a short month away—right fist to the heart, eyes forward, heels together. It was an impressive sound when the whole town did this as one, a thousand families or more—and I felt in that instant that we were a single voice, and that all families were united in our mourning and our determination, not yet old enough to understand that we as Germans would never belong.

  I was six years old in 1953 when I saw a resident of the hospice at a memorial service for the first time. Every year thereafter I studied the crowd, searching for that distinctive pairing of a nursing sister and her blind charge. The sight sent a
shiver down my spine, yet it was difficult to look away, despite this and our father’s warnings not to stare.

  By then my brother had shared with me the schoolyard lore that spoke of the degenerative blindness that would strike you if your eyes so much as met theirs, let alone lingered there with the sort of curiosity that possessed me as a boy. It was a hopeless struggle to avert my gaze, try as I did. Returning from Chisolm Square that day I saw my first survivor, I rubbed my eyes so hard that my vision began to blur, and I grew terrified that the blinding had already begun. Once home I splashed warm water in my eyes until my father knocked on the bathroom door and told me that we’d better get cracking, time was running out. Unsure that I’d successfully washed away the curse, I dried my face and joined my family in our preparations for the coming night.

  Nearing dusk, after the house was readied, we waited at the kitchen table for it to begin. This was the safest room after the basement, in which our mother was unable to spend more than a few minutes due to the way dark spaces made her feel. The power in the breaker box had been turned off, and we’d filled buckets with water and placed them at the ready by the front door. A single candle flame burned at the centre of the kitchen table, and there we waited for the taverns by the harbour to close for the night.

  Ours was the only house they visited on our street on Remembrance Day, but certainly not the only one in town. There were perhaps two dozen German families who’d earned the privilege, as we had, to live where we did, removed from the camp called Little Berlin that held the vast majority of Germans in our town. It had been constructed for those who’d been spared life in any one of the hundreds of internment camps across the country, and they would suffer more than we did. But we could not imagine a fear greater than what we felt as we sat waiting for the crowd to collect in front of our house.

  They always gathered slowly at first, in twos and threes, until finally a hundred or more stood on the street a stone’s throw from our front door. In the early days, when we were little, our parents tried their best to make us believe this was a harmless ritual, something people did to entertain themselves. But soon enough the look on our father’s face made the make-believe difficult to go along with. Now, there was little pretending. He’d rise from his seat and check the front windows, pulling back a strip of curtain. He always carried a baseball bat with him, and our mother always cautioned him to come back before he was spotted. We’d hear the sound of the bat gently slapping into his open palm or tapping against the hardwood floor as he returned to the kitchen, the sound of the mob growing louder and more threatening as the minutes ticked on.

  “It’s going to be all right, they’ll lose interest soon,” he’d say, leaning the bat against the panelled wall beside his chair. He’d put his hand on my shoulder and tell us it was just something people did once a year, like Hallowe’en, and there was nothing to be frightened of. It was normal too, he’d say, that they were angry about what had happened during the war; many of them had lost loved ones, after all. They weren’t bad people out there, he said, just people stung by loss and hardship and looking for someone to blame.

  It was our mother’s presence that angered them, not ours, I finally understood. He never said that but eventually I figured this out. The fact that she’d married a man born in this country, and German on only one side—our father’s father descending from a long line of Swiss—did not grant her the special status we enjoyed as mixed-race Canadians. It didn’t even help that our father had assisted in digging the Miracle Canal that had saved so many ships and lives, or that he now worked at the shipyard, building the frigates and cruisers that would replace those lost in the war. She was German, and that was the end of it. Nothing else mattered. It was of no consequence that she’d served her full term at Mercy House, even risked her health and the health of her unborn children in doing so. It was because of her the mob came; and it was only the purity of my father’s defiance that thwarted them.

  The light of the bonfire they set on the front lawn was reflected in the glass window of the kitchen stove door. My father was unaware that I could see what was happening out there from this angle. He would have made me sit elsewhere, I’m sure of it. The reflection whirled in the corner of my eye like a firefly. Once more he’d get up, bat in hand, and walk to the living room to check the front window, and my mother, speechless with fear, would grab and hold me to my seat, the haunted expression I can still see these many years later closing over her face like a mask.

  Outside, they fed the fire with scraps of lumber and skids and bundles of newspaper and smashed chairs, whatever they could find that would burn. Sometimes the fire leaped to the height of the first branches of the birch tree that grew in our yard. One year there were footsteps on the front porch; another year we heard voices at the side of the house, near the garage, and even once in the backyard. In each case our father gripped the bat in both hands and left the kitchen to investigate, and one night he opened the side door when sounds came from the garage. We heard footsteps rushing back along the driveway in retreat. I remember the terror I felt in my heart, believing my father would go after the man, lured out into the night where he’d fall under the mob’s anger. He re-entered the kitchen and stood silently, listening, his pallor turned ghost-white.

  Most years the crowd began to thin after midnight. When he was sure the worst of it was over, he stood watch on the front porch for a time, then carried the first bucket down the steps to empty it over the flames.

  We brought him refills to soak the coals. It didn’t take long before the kitchen and living room floors were wet and slippery and the smell of the smouldering fire filled the house. Our mother watched from the doorway, arms crossed over her chest. Sometimes a few stragglers stayed behind to observe our quiet industry, too drunk or dispirited to continue with the crowd they’d arrived with. They stood at the edge of the darkness, muttering their slurs. My father would yell at them to move along, sometimes calling out to them by their first name—“The show’s over, Mack, on your way,” he’d say—and then he’d remove the hatchet that had been driven into the birch tree, as it was every year on Remembrance Day. He’d untie the black ribbon fastened around its handle, drop the ribbon into the dying fire, and throw the hatchet into the open field over the heads of those who lingered there, and then finish up with the bonfire while we went back inside with our mother.

  1938–1944

  In his own mind and heart Georg Elser was still an ordinary man on the day he entered the shipping department of the Waldenmaier armaments factory, eight years before Mercy House became his home. He was unremarkable to look at and to talk to, indistinguishable from the next man. Everything about his place of employment, too—the small office smelling of mouldy paper and routine—said as much. Stacks of files were pushed up against a grey wall, organized and ready for reference and review. The vague ring of an absent teacup marked a loose leaf of unsigned paper placed squarely in the centre of his desk, and beside it the ledger detailing last night’s scheduled deliveries and outgoing shipments awaited his attention.

  More than ever he felt the repression and dread that presided over the small town he lived in in the foothills of the Swabian Alps. He found it waiting for him in the morning when he woke; he carried it with him during the day; and at night it circled him in the dark when sleep would not come. It might have been the pity he felt for the men and women he saw every day on his way to the factory in Heidenheim, or in the rheumy eyes of the grandmothers he knelt beside in the church he visited in the evenings where he asked forgiveness for the direction his life was about to take him in. Prayer in his youth had been frequent, but it had been left off for decades, found again only recently. He was a man who spoke into the silence of his heart with the hope that something divine, some moral courage might reside there and guide him. He waited for signs of comradeship or rebellion, some hint of a resistance he could join, but saw none. He pored over broadsheet news bulletins, read the handbills that checkered the stone walls
of the old town. And late into the night he listened to dizzying speeches on the wireless while he troubled through the intricacy of the plot that began to weave through his mind.

  At thirty-eight he was already too old for soldiering, which he considered no small grace in the accident of his birth. But he did his bit for the coming war. He could not do otherwise. The road he travelled every morning ended at the iron gates of the factory, where he worked with men whose grievances had been mobilized in the service of a new, greater Germany. He wondered who among them felt as he did, enslaved by this false brotherhood as they shaped the shoulder stocks and trigger mechanisms of the next war. But what was needed was a first real act of defiance—not the simple imaginings that came to him more and more in those days. He needed something concrete, as real as the hum of machinery rising and falling and the stutter of rivets that followed him as he passed through this maze: drill presses, metal lathes, everywhere the oiled staccato of industry.

  Now he surveyed the ledger, running a finger down the various columns—as he would do six years later in consulting the pocket dictionary on the deck of the Eendracht as he sailed for London—and carried the document pressed to his chest to the warehouse in the adjacent building, where he walked between rolls of copper wire and vats of wool and barrels of granular powder and shell casings and crates filled with boxes of detonators and fuses, each item and every last ounce catalogued, accounted for, and marked for its specific time and place.