by Dennis Bock
I was wearing my own sign now. It was a cardboard placard secured around my neck that read 169061-4, the number painted on the front door of our house. I sat there for an hour or so, afraid to move a muscle. Thomas walked past twice, but always someone was watching, and on the third pass, when the hallway was clear, he was able to hand off the note he’d written for me. Inspection day today. NOW! it said.
Skipping class was one thing; leaving the bench before you were released was another. I felt like I was dying. I dared not imagine the punishment the principal would meet me with the following day if I left the bench before he released me. Added to that, a hallway full of kids had seen me throw that punch, and the boy I’d knocked down wasn’t the toughest at school by any stretch. Others would come for me. And I had defied my father’s injunction to never throw the first punch. In all the Remembrance Days past, he’d never once confronted those men who gathered on our lawn. It would only make things worse, he said. It would prove their point: once a German, always a German. I wouldn’t be able to hide the strap marks on my hands for long, and once he saw what I’d done he’d remind me that this act of defiance would now be on my permanent school record. I would be considered an instigator. More than this, word of my defiance would likely follow him back to the shipyard—where one day, if I was lucky enough, I might be placed in an apprenticeship program.
I watched the clock on the wall opposite the bench. The portrait of the Queen stared back at me. It was as if she knew what I’d do, the mischief in my veins too strong to rein in. I couldn’t help myself. It was inbred, this disagreeable German spirit, integral to who I was. I would cause problems, though I didn’t want to. I looked down the hallway, then up. It was empty but for a girl who appeared at that moment. Her name was Mary-Beth. She was one of those arid, doleful girls who travelled the schoolyard at recess in Miss Fields’s wake, throwing superior glances as they went. She took more pleasure than most in ridiculing me. When she saw me, she stuck out her tongue and spun off around the corner. The decision was made for me, it seemed. I’d never win, no matter what.
I found Thomas waiting at the bike racks five minutes later. He held my hands in his, looked closely, and shook his head.
“Jesus, Dad’s going to kill you,” he said.
There was no need to remind me. I wasn’t looking forward to the end of the day. I’d make my confession, and my father would sit me down for a lecture about the precarious situation we were all in, every day of our lives. It was up to us to show our neighbours that we were not the people they thought we were. You know better, he’d say, and then he’d leave me to think about what I’d done. But all I cared about right now was getting down to Mercy House and seeing what those inspectors had in store for us that afternoon.
There were not as many kids waiting that day as there usually were. Eight or nine boys lingered at the side of the road smoking their stolen cigarettes and horking at the low-hanging branches of a dead cherry tree as they watched the trucks parked on the circular drive and the men who waved their Geiger counters over the property, tracing window frames and downspouts and the front and side entrances. We heard the telltale crackle from the device held by the man who tested the small fountain at the centre of the drive. He removed something from a pocket and dipped it in the water and placed it again in his pocket. As they often did, two sisters and a man in a dark suit stood on the doorstep watching this until the team was ready to enter, and the door closed behind them, and there they stayed unseen by us for longer than usual.
Thomas and I stood off from the other boys, as we always did. They kept to themselves in groups of two or three, spitting and mumbling nervously as they waited for something to happen. My hands were still burning from the strapping. Another cigarette was lit and passed around. The smoke smelled good, and though I hated these boys I admired the imperfect smoke rings they were somehow able to create. I envied them their nonchalance and their cool, uncaring nature and wondered if I’d ever be as lucky as them to live in a place where you knew you belonged. And then something unusual happened as we waited. They seemed to get bored. The one who’d lit the cigarette flicked it in the air and declared the fun was over. He and another two boys left the group and started up the road. Soon the others were gone, too, and Thomas and I were alone.
We were not so easily deterred or bored. For a moment, as the last of them left, I’d felt superior to these boys whose determination had so suddenly and surprisingly failed them. We were the only ones now, the connection we felt to the house still strong. We waited another half hour until the first of the inspectors re-emerged, and then the others appeared. They carried the black bags we always saw them with to the backs of the trucks. The sisters and the man in the suit returned to their positions at the entrance, as if seeing off departing visitors, and after the inspectors had packed away their gear they climbed into the two vehicles and the roar of motors sounded and the trucks began up the lane towards us.
The Russian trucks had a wide, imposing front bumper and grille and tires as thick as tree trunks. This was the same make we’d always see in the short propaganda films in school that trumpeted the evolution of Canadian-Soviet cooperation. Their diesel engines grew louder as they approached. The earth rumbled with their weight and the cool April air vibrated with sound. There were two men up front, driver and passenger, and in the back of each under the tarp there were three or four more.
The man in the passenger seat of the first truck was not smiling. I didn’t recognize him from any of the previous years. Perhaps he was new or usually sat in the back with the samples and equipment they used. He was a young man with sharp features and light blue eyes, with a crewcut and black horn-rimmed glasses. He held a cigarette between his fingers, right arm hanging out the open window. He nodded and slapped his hand twice against the door when he saw me and my brother standing at the side of the road. The truck slowed and stopped, and he threw open his door and climbed down and walked over to us. He looked at me as if I were another sample he might consider for transport back to the laboratory.
Something about the moment brought a smile to his face—I didn’t know what yet—and I decided that he was a nice man. He was probably still in his twenties, younger than my father, certainly, and had straight white teeth and a dimple in his chin, like my grandfather, whose picture sat in the glass cabinet in the living room. He smelled of cigarette smoke and strong soap and rubber—I imagined from the gloves he’d been wearing until a few minutes ago.
“Doctor Atom,” he said in heavily accented English. Then he turned to the man in the truck and said something in rapid-fire Russian. The man behind the wheel nodded.
“You like Doctor Atom?” he said, turning back to me and pointing with his cigarette to the comic book in my hand. I’d been flipping through it as we waited for the men to emerge from the house; it was rolled in a tube in my hand but loose enough to show the flash of Doctor Atom’s eyes in the cover illustration.
The Russian inspector noticed my palms now, still torn and bloody from my strapping, and said something I did not understand. His language was coarse and hard in my ear. He waited a moment, then took hold of my left wrist and examined the cuts there. I tried to show that I wasn’t afraid, of him or the pain, but he must have seen it there in my face. He shook his head, with pity or confusion or concern, I have no idea, then took a pull on his cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there long enough that I began to wonder if time had stood still. But now he did something surprising. He breathed his cigarette smoke over the cut on my palm in a long grey breath. He squeezed my wrist while the smoke poured over my cuts, and when there was no smoke left he let go and smiled at me, as if I were in on the joke. His colleague in the idling truck honked the horn and called out to him and he released me, his lungs emptied, and tousled my hair like a coach congratulating a kid who’d hit a decent drive out into midfield.
“Doctor Atom—it’s you now,” he said.
My hand didn’t look or feel different, of c
ourse, but everything was different now. It was still red and hurt like hell but he’d blown his radiation breath into my wounds, and now the worst was to come. Now it’s you. My superstitious heart slammed against my chest. I couldn’t help myself. I’d spent a lifetime in the shadow of that house on Radiation Row, heard the hundreds of tales, seen the newsreels, and watched those blind-staring eyes as its helpless occupants caned their way through Chisolm Square on Remembrance Day. I made a fist, then shook out my hand, trying to undo what he’d just done to me.
He walked back to the truck, climbed in, and slammed the door shut. The engine roared and the truck started to move. He flicked his cigarette out the cab window. It landed in the grass beside the road. I waited till they were up the road a stretch, then dropped my comic book and ran down to the lake and washed my hand as best I could. It helped the stinging but it wasn’t enough, the radiation was already inside me.
I walked back up the steep short incline to the road where I found Thomas waiting for me. I don’t recall what he was doing when all this happened. He would have been right there, as he always was, but my attention had been fixed on the Russian’s face. I didn’t tell my brother what I was thinking. I was too frightened. I got on my bike and said I was going home, I needed to get home right away, and that’s when I looked up and saw someone watching us from a second-floor window of the old house.
It was far off, as I say, but even at that distance I could see that the figure wasn’t wearing the habit—the white bib and coif and black veil and dress—always worn by the nursing sisters, in spring, summer, fall, and winter, as though the suffering they were exposed to rendered their own discomfort trivial by comparison, which without doubt it surely was. I could make out no details beyond that, not even enough to know if this was a man or a woman. The figure held still after I got Thomas’s attention. He turned and we both stared, and then the person waved to us.
Cowards both, we dropped our bikes and crouched behind the fieldstone wall. It was an impulse, foolish of course, yet I was overcome with a strange feeling that I later understood was humiliation. The shock of our discovery—that we’d been found out—and the impossible realization that we’d been spotted by a blind person began to take root. In a moment all we knew about the house made no sense at all. We held still, our backs hugging the stone, not daring to lift our heads up to peek again. Thomas stared at me with drowning eyes. He arched his shoulders in a questioning gesture, as if to say he had no idea at all what we’d just seen. We’d been caught at our own game, it seemed, no longer the observers but the observed, and by whom and for what reason we had no clue.
I SCRUBBED MY HAND in blistering hot water when I got home. The superstitions that ruled us, ridiculous to think of now, were as real to me as the smells of our mother’s cooking that filled the house that late afternoon. The wounds were opened again with the scrubbing, the washbasin pink with blood. It was an irrefutable fact. I might even have felt some dizziness come over me, so convinced was I that the radiation that had felled half the city of London was now churning the blood in my veins.
My mother was standing at the kitchen sink. “What’s that face?” she said in German, and she asked if something was wrong. She couldn’t see my hands, stuffed painfully as they were in my pockets. I slouched, shaking my head. She asked if I wanted to take over pressing the potatoes. She was making dumplings, a dish that my father and I loved more than any other. I’d be back in a minute, I told her. There was a light switch at the top of the stairs, but I didn’t turn it on when I went down to the basement; I waited in the dark and stared at my hand, thinking that the radiation I’d absorbed might make it glow.
I was sitting on the plywood shipping crate my father had built years ago for the things we’d take with us if Germany ever became a normal country again and my mother was allowed to go home. It was a symbol of hope that he offered her, that he was with her in this dream of hers, though I’m sure both of them understood plainly enough that this could never happen. Now that shipping crate held the winter coats and skates and scarves and mittens that smelled of mothballs when we retrieved them in November.
The crate was set against the west wall, in a corner of the basement yellowed by the ribbon of light coming down from the top of the stairs. The horsehair plaster wall behind it was crumbling, and overhead the exposed timbers in the low ceiling ran crossways, strung with ancient black wires that fed electricity to the floors above. There was nothing down there for me but solitude and the dark I’d trusted would reveal the radiation poisoning that now coursed through my veins. I stayed put for as long as possible, holding one split hand in the other, until my mother’s shadow appeared at the top of the stairs and I heard her calling down to me.
She found out about the hands, of course. You can hide that sort of thing from your mother for only so long. She saw me favouring one and took my wrist and pried open my fingers and asked who’d done this to me. Eventually, when I told her, she said this was a country run by animals and she would be marching me up to the school—she said all this in a rush of German. I begged her not to go to the school, it would only make things worse for me.
She took me to the kitchen sink, where she cleaned me up as best she could, and then she turned away and began to cry softly.
I knew she was crying for herself as much as she was for me. I told her it wasn’t as bad as it looked and took the cloth from her and finished cleaning my hands, and she sat down at the kitchen table and stared out the window.
My father’s good mood when he got home turned in an instant when he saw the state I was in and heard the story about the fight and the strapping, but he didn’t say anything about taking me up to the school to demand an explanation or apology. Instead he said we were going to the clinic to get my hands looked after. All that other business we’d talk about later. I told him the cuts weren’t so deep but he knew enough not to believe me.
I wasn’t used to getting the sort of attention I got that evening from my father. The way he draped his arm over my shoulder as he led me to the car made me feel loved and cared for, and despite the fact that my hands were still burning I almost believed a strapping like that had been worth it. He was not a man given to doting or obvious displays of emotion—I imagine few fathers were in those days—but here, as he turned over the engine of the old Chevy, it seemed like this mission to get me looked after was the purest expression of love and caring I’d ever known. The feeling didn’t last long.
The camp we called Little Berlin came into view ten minutes later. It was a short drive but long enough for the burning in my hands to come back after my mother had run cold water over them. I’d seen the camp up close like this only a few times, and each time it had been enough to know I didn’t want to see it again. Through the barbed-wire fencing I saw the long rows of clapboard shacks, and men and women marking time. Each house was the size of a big garage and held up to three families. There were no roads or schools or shops where you could buy things, no libraries, no nothing. There were thousands of people rounded up in there waiting for who knew what. If you were lucky—this according to my father—a truck rolled in and you’d be one of a dozen or so men hired for a day job. But in no time you were back there again, staring out from behind that barbed wire, as they were doing now on that evening we drove past.
When I turned away my father slowed the car. “Take a good long look,” he said. “They’re just like us, no better, no worse,” and when he said I should remember what it felt like to see the look of suffering on an innocent person’s face, I wondered how he could be sure they were innocent. Every schoolboy in the country had been obliged to memorize the speech King George had delivered from the steps of Province House in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in September 1944, on the day the British government-in-exile declared itself alive and well, just a month after the bomb. The following day the speech was published in every newspaper across the country and throughout the Commonwealth. Since then, its most famous line had been reprinted and illus
trated and hung in public halls and factories in every city and town across the land. A viper is nonetheless a viper no matter where the egg is hatched. The posters that hung in our school cafeteria bearing this line in red lettering showed a bloody hand strangling a serpent. Decades of immigration to the Commonwealth had failed to loosen the bond that the Germans here felt for their country of origin, the King had said that day in Halifax. A German was a German, no matter how long they lived among us, no matter how many generations removed from the Fatherland they were. There would be no such thing as a free German in all of the Commonwealth, he’d said, not while the people of the British Isles suffered under the boot of fascism.
We didn’t speak of these things in our home or dwell on the idea of German treachery as the King would have us do. I did my best to ignore the poster that hung in the school cafeteria and the many others we saw around town, as I’d tried to turn my eyes away from those Germans who watched us from inside the camp that evening.
The clinic was a sorry-looking building of weather-stained stucco we’d had occasion to visit two or three times, once when Thomas broke an arm falling off his bike. It was the last place I wanted to go now—a black hole that served only to remind me of the hard conditions we lived under. It served the population of Little Berlin, which at the time numbered in the thousands, but it was not inside the gates of the camp itself. I stood silently while my father argued for the attention of a physician. Finally we were led to an examination room where a Russian doctor looked at my hands, covered them with a cream of some sort, and wrapped them in an iodoform gauze. He didn’t care to ask what had happened. He was not there because he wanted to be, tending to sick and dying Germans. The contempt the Russians held us in was as deep as anyone’s here. I wanted to tell him that one of his countrymen had breathed smoke into the wound after emerging from Mercy House so he could tell me that there was no need to worry, that this was just a lot of superstition running around in my head. But I wasn’t able to say a thing. I slipped down off the examination table, and my father led me back out to the parking lot.
