The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  As the Eendracht entered the outer reaches of the Thames estuary he saw the young German woman he’d met in one of the cafeterias only yesterday. Her name was Rosa Bauer. She was travelling with her daughter.

  He’d heard the two talking about the stuffed bear seated in the girl’s lap that first afternoon, an hour out from Rotterdam. The bear was not feeling well, the girl said. It was the rocking of the ship. The mother placed her wrist against the stuffed animal’s forehead and belly and said the bear would get better soon, it was nothing serious. There were dark circles under the woman’s eyes. When she tried to smile for the girl, Elser saw the fear in her face and wondered what she’d been forced to give in order to receive the two entry visas that had got her and her daughter on board.

  He’d taken a seat across from them and introduced himself, then produced an imaginary medicine bottle from his breast pocket. He pinched it between two fingers and shook it with great drama.

  “May I use this?” he asked, indicating the spoon beside the girl’s plate. She nodded without speaking, her eyes wide with interest.

  He twisted open the cap on the bottle and poured the invisible medicine into the spoon, then offered it to the bear. The girl’s eyes lit up. There was no bottle or medicine, she insisted. She’d soon be six and was already clever enough to see that there was no medicine, she said.

  He allowed a look of confusion to fall over his face.

  Here was medicine enough for all four of them, he said, let alone this tiny bear.

  The mother reached across the table and shook his hand and told him her name. Rosa, she said.

  He poured out a spoonful and passed it to her and she took it and slurped it down. “It’s not so bad,” she said.

  He took his own sip after that, and then the girl and the bear took their own imaginary draughts too.

  Out on the deck now, he watched Rosa Bauer and her daughter tossing bread crusts to a trio of gulls following at the stern, the birds trailing the ship like a stringless kite. He watched the girl and her mother and the low-lying beaches and salt marshes to the north. The sea was choppy and silt-coloured, but the sun was up now, and the hundreds of barrage balloons, rooted to the ground by their heavy steel cables, hung over London like a flotilla of stubborn black clouds.

  Weeks earlier he’d found a small dictionary under a café table on Rochussenstraat. He removed it from his jacket and looked up Fliegen. To fly. Füttern. To feed. Ankommen. To arrive. And then the whales made their appearance.

  The girl and her mother joined a dozen or more passengers collecting at the railing to witness this good omen. He’d never seen such a thing before. It was marvellous how they seemed not to care about the ship. There were four or five of them breaching and slipping away again. He watched this for a moment, entranced, and turned the pages of the dictionary and drew his finger down, searching. He doubted it would carry a word as impractical as this. But here it was, whale, and not so different from the word in his own language, and he was pleased not only for the good omen but that the girl was here to see this wondrous spectacle.

  The wind was gathering now, the whales still cutting the surface, when the three planes came out of the east, above the array of balloons.

  What appeared to be a man emerged from the lead plane and wobbled, as if momentarily unnerved by this great altitude, and began to hurtle down at speed until a chute emerged and grabbed the air to slow its descent.

  The backs of the whales slipped under the surface and were gone.

  The three planes continued on above the barrage balloons for a short time before the spectacular burst of light filled the morning with the heat of a desert sun.

  The low rumbling rocked the ship. He felt it in his bones. A billowing cloud pushed against the heavens in ripening layers of green and red and blue and rose higher and turned grey and white as its form boiled, then collapsed into itself in an odd mushroom shape.

  The violent winds raised schools of herring and scad and mackerel from the churning waters, and the deck of the Eendracht shifted, and the air jumped alive with things that had never flown before.

  1960

  I discovered early in my school days that volunteering to wipe down a chalkboard or to restack books in the library did a lot to save me from the humiliations of recess. By eighth grade I’d learned to keep my head down. I hid in coatrooms, shadowed hallways, under the stairs that led to the boiler room. I cowered in the science lab storeroom with the gutted frogs and nervous mice as they awaited our cruel experiments. I hid in all these places and more, but the hall monitors and librarians and janitors were on to me. They saw through my camouflage, strategies, and excuses, and when one of them found me, or if a boy caught me loitering in the washroom, there was nothing left but to take my fate into my own hands and step out into the chaos of the schoolyard. I often gravitated to the south end of the playground where the few other German kids at school, similarly flushed from their hiding places, bided their time in retreat to await the merciful clanging of the bell.

  The day the inspectors came to town that year I’d found a quiet place in the schoolyard to read my newest edition of Revenge of Doctor Atom, a favourite comic book in those days, and fell headlong into the story.

  It told of the adventures of a man who’d been altered by the radiation that had killed so many in London. He’d not only survived the catastrophe, its effects had given him superhuman powers. With nothing more than a focused stare he was able to burn a man into a heap of ash where he stood. He was an avenger in the night, slashing through the London fog like an English Zorro. He brought chaos to the occupiers, killing officers with his laser-eyes, thwarting the Nazi menace at every turn. For me, Doctor Atom was the greatest superhero in the Atlas Comics lineup. There were many others, of course, but none could touch the righteous fury of the hero whose young wife and baby had been vaporized in the blast.

  The spell of the story I’d fallen into was broken that day when a shadow darkened my open page. I turned and saw the German boy named Toby standing behind me.

  “It’s all just a big fat lie anyway,” he said.

  He had short, pudgy fingers and a crescent-shaped mustard stain on his chin.

  “It’s not supposed to be real. It’s a comic book,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about that. The bomb, I mean. It’s a hoax. Like that place you go to. It’s just full of retarded people.”

  There were many things you might do or say in the schoolyard that could get you in deep trouble. What Toby had just told me was near the top of the list. I told him he’d better shut his mouth. We’d both get a licking if someone heard him talking like that. But he was undeterred. There was no such thing as that sort of bomb, he said. Not ever. He knew this because his father and uncle had told him so. They said it was nothing but a lie that gave people a reason to hate us even more than they already did. I didn’t like it when he said “us.” I didn’t like being grouped in with him and his ilk, but of course as Germans we were all the same. I’d heard this argument before—that the bomb, and the bombing itself, was nothing but anti-German propaganda. We’d been warned against it, cautioned never to repeat the ugly lies that the German apologists attempted to spread among us. I stole a quick look to see who was watching. Boys from our class were throwing a tennis ball against the side of the building and calling out their threats and dares. To the right of this a small clowder of girls, coats off and ponytails bouncing, played Cat and Mouse in a bright blur of swirling pink jump rope.

  We knew not to associate with other German kids at school. It was always best to keep to yourself. By the time I’d reached fifth grade it was more than clear to me that Thomas had been right about us never making any friends at all. I don’t remember feeling especially sorry for myself about this. It was how it had to be back then. To ease our way through those days Thomas and I had our secret communication. We sent each other signals when we could, even if we weren’t able to meet directly. There were notes we dropped for each othe
r, and hand gestures we shared, and sometimes just seeing him there across the schoolyard, handling a boy the way he knew how—he was always good with his fists—shored up my sagging spirits. He’d often come to my rescue in the early days, but by the time I was in seventh grade he was too busy fighting his own battles, and I was not so young that I shouldn’t be able to take care of myself.

  “It’s called propaganda. Official lies. You know. BS!” Toby said.

  The girls were still skipping but the boys with the tennis ball had splintered off into smaller groups. The yard monitor was standing at the centre of a second group of kids, her hair tied in a tight bun, blowing cigarette smoke over their obedient heads. I shrank behind my copy of Doctor Atom.

  “Es ist nur britische Propaganda,” Toby said.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I begged him to be quiet. There were only two things worse than lying about those people under care down on Radiation Row, and speaking German in the schoolyard was one of them. The truth as I knew it was as real as Toby’s pudgy fingers. I knew it for all sorts of reasons. I knew it because I’d seen pictures and films about London and the European Clearances and the sprawling Madagascar ghettos. I knew it because everyone hated the Germans, and the Germans deserved every bit of that hatred. Göring was a blimp of a man by then. Our teacher made much of that. “Here we have an example of the superior German race,” she would say, holding up the latest newspaper cartoon that showed him, in one case, gorging himself at a banquet table cut in the shape of Europe. The classroom erupted in laughter, and the girl seated in the desk next to mine puffed out her cheeks at me.

  I’d heard my mother’s stories about Mercy House and seen those blind souls at Chisolm Square with my own eyes. It was a fact so real and so urgent that my heart threatened to jump out of my chest when he said that lie; worse yet, he’d spoken the lie in German.

  The official ban on the German language had been lifted by then, but the stigma lived on. In the street it earned you a nasty look or a bloody nose, and in the schoolyard there was always a boy eager to take you on if he heard you speak it, which no one had ever been stupid enough to do—until that morning.

  The name of the yard monitor that day was Miss Fields. I found her by the sandpit, next to the three small cedars that looked to me like prehistoric creatures, their roots and limbs twisting and animal-like.

  “And what did he say?” she asked. “What did he say in that filthy tongue of yours?” She grabbed my arm and asked a second time, and the girls who always accompanied her as she patrolled the yard began to chant, “Tell us your mind, or your eyes will turn blind!”

  I was wearing the brown corduroy coat my mother had used half our clothing-ration book to purchase for me only a week earlier. I was very proud of it—it looked almost new. When her fingernails dug through the material into my arm I wasn’t as aware of the flash of pain that raced through me as I was fearful that she might tear my new second-hand coat, and that I’d have to explain this to my mother.

  Miss Fields marched me over to where poor Toby Schwabe waited after I told her what I’d heard. He’d been watching the whole time, of course, his face pale with fear. He stood still as a tree awaiting his fate. There was nowhere to run. A dozen boys in any corner of the schoolyard would have gladly caught him and pushed his face in the mud.

  He began to cry when she told him to repeat what he’d said. More kids were gathering around now, and they began to chant the rhyme they’d called at me—Tell us your mind, or your eyes will turn blind. When he finally did, she pinched and twisted his ear and hauled him off to the principal’s office, his footsteps clipped and infant-like beside her brutal athletic stride.

  I was not proud of myself, of course. But I’d done what I needed to do to spare myself the licking he’d get. I saw him again an hour later seated on the bench outside the office. His ear and the palms of his hands were beet-red. He wore his family’s German serial number on a sign strung around his neck. I kept walking, ashamed of my treachery.

  A group of boys was waiting for me as I rounded a corner. One of them pushed me up against a locker.

  “Kraut bastard,” he said.

  This boy’s name was Larson. He was two grades ahead of me, in Thomas’s year, and a full head taller.

  “Nothing to say for yourself?”

  He gave me another good shove and raised me off my feet and slammed me up higher against the locker door.

  “What’re you going to do, Teufel? Where’s your big brother now?” He dropped me to my feet and stepped back and raised his fists. The other boys pressed in.

  These were the sons of those who roamed the town on Remembrance Day night setting fires and breaking bottles. My father had cautioned against any confrontation with these boys. I was supposed to back away even when they taunted and hazed me and threatened to knock me down.

  Larson leaned into my face and growled. “So say it, say it now. Tell me what your name means.” He cocked his head and held his fist under my chin. “You’ve got three seconds.”

  I told him with a second to spare.

  “That’s right. William Devil. And don’t you forget it,” he said.

  He relaxed his fist and raised his arm to salute me. The other boys followed his example. It seemed like everyone in the hallway then gave me a mocking Sieg Heil salute—the one we’d seen a thousand times in the films we were obliged to watch. I’d only ever felt shame at the sight of people doing this. But I felt something else now. It was anger and frustration and fear. My father’s cautions and any good sense in my head abandoned me. I swung and caught Larson in the eye with a fist—it was a lucky shot, I suppose, eliciting a lovely popping sound—and he dropped to a knee and brought his hands to his face.

  Exhilarated, I waited for him to get up, or for the next boy to come at me. The crowd parted, as if by magic, and Miss Fields grabbed me by that same arm and dug in her nails. I was not wearing my coat this time. The yelp of pain that escaped my throat caused the boys who watched this to laugh.

  “Your efforts today to ignite a third world war have proven successful, Herr Teufel. But your kind will not win this one, you can be sure of it,” she said. She dug her nails even deeper into my flesh and marched me down the hall, past Toby, who was still sitting on the bench nursing his hands and rubbing his ear, and roughly guided me into the principal’s office.

  It was a small, cramped space that barely accommodated his cluttered desk. On the east wall was the window from which the principal liked to watch us kids during recess. Next to the window was a portrait of Tommy Douglas, the prairie boy prime minister, as my father liked to call him, who by now, well into his third term, had welcomed Khrushchev to Ottawa more than half a dozen times. My father liked nothing at all about the Communists, and the buffoonish Khrushchev even less, other than the fact that they seemed to hate the Nazis as much as we did. They were the bulwark against the forces that might eat us alive, and even the incident in our House of Commons that previous summer, when the Soviet First Secretary had removed his shoe and banged it repeatedly on the table, was easily tolerated in exchange for the ongoing aid and assistance that guaranteed our survival.

  I wasn’t thinking about politics as I stood there, though, waiting for the punishment that was coming my way. I feared the principal more than I feared anyone else at school, far more than I feared even the toughest boys in our hallways. Formally of the Highland Light Infantry, he had no sympathy for me and my brother, or for any of the other German kids under his charge, few as we were. He’d lost an eye in the war, and that empty socket, hidden beneath its black oval patch, terrified me almost as much as the eyes of those poor souls we saw in Chisolm Square on Remembrance Day. As I waited I listened to the sound of the janitor sloshing out his squeeze-mop in the hallway. He was cleaning the boy’s blood and snot from the floor, I imagined. I feared I’d be expelled, and this would lead to my father having problems at work. I’d fantasized countless times about not having to go to school. But now the idea of stayi
ng in my room for the rest of my life turned my stomach to knots. I lurched for the bin in the corner and threw up just as Principal Crouse and Miss Fields came through the door, the boy I’d knocked down huddled between them.

  Miss Fields told Larson to take the bin outside to the janitor and come back immediately. When he returned, Crouse made some effort to examine the boy’s face, then stepped behind his desk and produced a cowhide strap from the top drawer. It was half the length of a belt and twice as thick—so thick and tough that it stayed straight when he held it at one end.

  He slapped it gently into his palm as he approached me, and tested it against the surface of his desk with a stinging snap. He offered it to Larson, telling him to give it a go, but Larson just stared down at his feet. The principal waited, shook his head in disgust, and brought the leather strap down against his desk a second time. He told me to present my hands, palms up, and proceeded to administer my punishment.

  He held my wrist with one hand while he struck with the other. When he was through with it, seven lashings per hand, he gave me a paper towel to wipe away the blood and told me to wait on the bench outside the office. I made sure I didn’t cry, though I wanted to more than anything in the world. Toby was still there, condemned for his own trespass, staring at the opposite wall with a scared look on his face. We didn’t look at each other, though I saw him sneaking peeks at my hands as I tried to wrap them with the paper towel I’d been given.