by Dennis Bock
When Thomas tried the door it resisted at first, as if something was barring the way on the other side. A second push opened it with a stuttering jump, and it scraped heavily against the door frame. Speaking into the darkness, Thomas asked quietly if anyone was there, and when there was no answer he stepped through and disappeared into the void.
I waited by the open door, listening for what was happening inside, afraid that he, too, would vanish from my life. I hated to be standing there, buckled over in loss. This was nothing that would ever get better. It was now who we were. In an instant we’d become orphans in the world. Our mother could not return from there, not the way things were. It was either Little Berlin for us now or one of the province’s labour camps, a thought too miserable to bear as I waited there in the allotment for my brother. Like never before, as if the words themselves had no meaning until that moment, I knew their terrible weight and felt the permanence of my loss, helpless and alone. I was barely thirteen years old and yet I felt I’d been alive forever, as lonely and forgotten as a dying star in the night. I did what I could to guard my sobs, trying to listen for my brother’s footsteps inside the shelter. I needed him. I needed someone. I cried for my father and for my mother, and for the life that had been ripped away from me, so quickly that it seemed it had never existed at all.
Thomas was gone longer than I could account for, or maybe it had been less than a minute, but now I saw a beam of light flicking deep inside the shelter. It moved towards me in short, jerking steps. I backed away from the entrance, and then his voice came through the darkness and finally he appeared again and told me it was safe, it was empty, and to follow him. He’d found a flashlight on one of the bunk beds that lined the walls. He flicked it on and off and directed the beam forward and side to side as he led me down the length of the shelter.
It was damp and mouldy-smelling, barely the width of a school bus, and reached far back into the hillside. It was more a tunnel than it was a room, all brick and bunk beds, long enough to house dozens of people, maybe even a hundred. A temporary shelter, it was nothing like those you could survive in for months, outfitted with water and basic foodstuffs and first-aid kits. The space was empty but for the wooden bunks; whatever provisions had once been there had been removed—looted, or reclaimed by the municipality, it was impossible to say.
“But the flashlight?” I said.
“It means someone was here. I know.”
We moved deeper into the hillside down the length of the shelter, the light tracing over the brick walls in short, jerky movements, maybe fifty or so feet to the last bunk bed at the far end. This was where we’d be sleeping tonight, he said. Then we’d see. We’d wait and see. For what, he didn’t know. He seemed as ignorant of our father’s plans for us as I was. He’d delivered us to the shelter our father had told him to go to, but nothing more.
There was some clutter there at the back end of the shelter: gardening equipment for the allotment—rakes and shovels, buckets, a pickaxe, and an old wheelbarrow turned up against the wall. I tested the bunk and sat. There was no mattress, just a hard board.
Thomas took up a spade and walked back to the front of the shelter, the way our father did with the baseball bat he carried when he patrolled the house on those nights the crowds came. I wondered if anyone had followed us, and if my brother would be able to wield that spade the way he meant to suggest. He turned off the flashlight and creaked open the door and looked outside. The slightest sliver of light from the night sky drew his silhouette for me. I wanted him to come back into the far recesses of the shelter and to hear him tell me that our mother was going to be okay wherever she was, and that she’d track us down no matter what. I wanted him to snap his fingers to make all this go away. I wanted him to tell me that our father had gotten out of the house in time and that he’d come for us and lead us to safety.
The air in the shelter was cold and damp and the chill moved through me and set me to shivering. It was still warm outside, just on the other side of that door, but it was cold in there, and the wood of the bunk was cold too and smelled of earth and rot. Thomas closed the door again and walked back to where I sat on one of the bunks and said we needed to lie down and sleep now. I was too afraid and thirsty and hungry to sleep, I said. He sat down on the bunk beside me and put his arm around my shoulder and said he was afraid too, and we’d find something to eat and drink in the morning. We’d figure out what to do next. Maybe things would settle down in town and we’d be looked after. Maybe the worst of it was over. I knew he was saying this for himself as much as for me, and that he didn’t really believe it, but it was all he could offer us, and I felt as bad for him as I did for myself. He knew he was supposed to take care of me. It was up to him now that our father was gone. I was his kid brother. He’d always looked after me, tried to take care of me in the schoolyard. Even when he’d thrown that salute to the German work crew, when the hatred in that moment had frightened me more than I’d ever been before, I saw myself in him, the hopelessness that was our life here and the frustration that finally spilled out in that desperate plea.
He got up then and climbed the ladder to the top bunk and settled in. The bedframe creaked. I imagined our father moving through the garden now to find us, arms loaded with supplies, and then the fantasy slipped away just as quickly as it had come. I would not meet my father at the gates of the Chisolm Shipyards again, or hear the sound of my mother’s knitting needles clacking away in the living room while I worried through my homework. I tried to bring back the thought of our father coming to us, but what I heard instead was Thomas beginning to pray in the bunk above me. His words were mumbled and rushed between breaths. It was difficult to make out what he was saying to God but I knew this was a prayer because of the way he was talking to himself. He was quiet again for a time then, and I decided it might be a good idea if I prayed, too. I’d never really prayed before, not with any conviction, but I’d seen my mother do it, and I tried it now. I didn’t raise my hands to my face, as might have been expected, but I prayed silently in my head, thinking anyone who might have the power to do something about what was happening would probably be able to hear without me having to say it out loud.
I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when Thomas shook me awake and told me to listen, be quiet and listen. He was sitting on the bed beside me now, one hand on my shoulder, the other holding the flashlight, turned on and directed to the back wall of the shelter. He’d heard something, he said. He swung the flashlight beam over the wheelbarrow and the other gardening tools. It was just a lot of junk back there. My heart was beating like a fist. And then I heard it too.
He got to his feet, holding the light steady on the upturned wheelbarrow, and raised a finger to his lips. I was too frightened to speak as it was, though. Wide-eyed, I watched the wheelbarrow as the sound behind it grew louder. Thomas took the spade in hand and stepped closer to the back wall.
The wheelbarrow shifted, and then it slid sideways and fell to the ground. Where the barrow had stood was a small wooden door—a half-door, it seemed, with an old rusted knob. He held the light steady as the knob turned.
The door pushed open and a man’s head appeared. He emerged and stood, nodded to us, and raised his hands as if in surrender. Thomas held the shovel against him, poised and at the ready. With his other hand he directed the flashlight beam from the stranger to the small door and back again, lingering on his face.
The man moved a hand to cover his eyes. “Yes, I’ll tell you everything,” he said in German. His clothes were covered in dirt, his hair thick and greying. “But we have to move fast.”
1945
After Rosa died, Elser told Dr. Ridley that God had blinded him for a reason, and that he did not deserve the surgical procedure the doctor was offering. Use your talents on a worthier man, he said.
The opportunity was presented to him again three months later. He wanted nothing more now than to look into his daughter’s eyes, he told the doctor, and forty-eight hours af
ter the operation, the bandages were removed and there in a patch of October sunlight stood Ridley and two nursing sisters.
Elser rose from his bed and crossed the small room and looked at the Great Lake and wondered if he still wasn’t half-blind, the far shore so distant as to be unseen. He wondered at the clarity of the sky and the gulls that hung in it, such elegant, simple things. He embraced the doctor and the two sisters, who blushed at his exuberance. In his broken English he complimented the doctor on this miracle. And then he crossed the lawn to the great house in his hospital gown to look at his daughter for the first time in his life.
LINA TEUFEL WAS IRONING bedsheets in the laundry room when he appeared. The bassinet was placed on a worktable across from her. She watched him pick up his daughter and stare at her. For a moment she failed to understand that he was looking at his child, actually seeing her for the first time. He seemed different, but the understanding came as an echo returned to her with some slight pause. She knew the surgery had happened, yet for a moment she was puzzled at the sight of what she believed was a blind man staring at a thing with such intensity that he seemed overwhelmed to the point of tears. And then she understood. She put her hand over her mouth and shook her head in wonder, and she too cried for the miracle that this was.
IT DID NOT TAKE long after that for the secrets to begin to fall away. First, the shared language. Lina and Elser walked the grounds and spoke in hushed tones, careful that the late-autumn breezes did not betray their confidence. They fell silent again when a sister or Dr. Ridley appeared. At first their walks were not commented on. But then Sister Evelyn hinted at suspicions that had taken root among the staff and residents. Fraternization was not the word she used, but it was implied well enough. Such a thing was not tolerated here. Elser understood this, yet every morning he looked forward to her arrival and the walk they took together in the garden once the baby was fed. He often met her at the gate, his daughter cradled in his arms, and when the child saw the wet nurse she reached for her, drawn by the smell of milk. Lina Teufel took her now without fear or reluctance.
Sometimes she sang to the child in German when the three were alone. She told him of her life outside the gates and about the town that hated people like them, and about her son, Thomas, not much older than this one here, she said, condemned to suffer for the sins of others. She spoke of her husband, too—his steady employment at the shipyard and his good nature and how, without him, half-German and Canadian-born, she would have been sent to the camp that blighted the north end of Port Elizabeth. She told him about her old life in Germany and the crossing on board the St. Louis and the camp in the Azores. The retelling of her ordeal moved him, not for the hardship she described but for the crimes against her that she didn’t talk about. The sorrow he felt in hearing her story and knowing the terrors she’d lived through opened his heart to her. It was pity at first, and compassion, and, foolish man that he was, he slowly began to feel something more.
He had no other word for it. He said it aloud for the first time into his daughter’s ear. Is this old fool father of yours in love? he asked. Has the gift of sight blinded me so? The wet nurse’s smile cheered him from his routine in a way that amazed him; he fell off to sleep recalling their conversations, and how she gazed over the lake when they walked behind the house, the look on her face at once so familiar and profound that he thought he’d known her his whole life. The ease with which they spoke as they strolled the grounds that season came not only due to the language they shared. It was much more than that by now, he knew; but he knew too that this was a foolish game he permitted himself. It would go no further than to ease the mourning he still endured. He was, in the end, nothing if not a realist, a practical man. Yet he allowed this to feed him the measure of hope that would carry him forward, and this in and of itself might also have been the result of some practical concern for survival—this need to look forward with something more than despair in one’s heart.
He would involve himself in the care of those around him now that his sight had been restored. He could be useful to the sisters as they tended to their daily chores. Whatever they needed from him he would provide. It was a gesture towards penance, of course, and an added layer to his camouflage as a Dutchman among these survivors. But this was also the sort of self-preservation that a man like him required. Without work or purpose he was nothing, and so he applied himself. While the wet nurse cared for his daughter, he assisted with the various patients who’d become bedridden since their arrival, lifting and bathing, and he helped unload the delivery trucks that rolled in. With a population nearing one hundred, there was no lack of things to be tended to.
It did not occur to him that he’d be asked to leave soon, now that he was sighted again and, unlike so many others there, had not been taken by one of the cancers they saw so much of. As Julius DeGroote, he would be free to go. More than this, he was expected to go. Where to he had no idea. Into town, he supposed, to work with men at the shipyard perhaps, or to Hamilton where the Stelco Company stoked the fires whose distant glow lit those cool autumn nights.
He was resolved. In early December he prepared to be turned out. He’d been given tours of the town and introduced to potential employers in need of a labourer or assistant, a plumber’s helper or carpenter’s apprentice. There would be opportunity, they assured him, and through their wide network of charities the sisters helped him find a place to stay and a woman, herself widowed, to look after the child while he gained employment and worked to better his situation. He made his rounds and said his farewells, and on his last evening at Mercy House, before the wet nurse was to leave, her long day finally ended, she found him in the makeshift nursery putting his daughter down for the night.
He was gentle and loving with the child now. Perhaps he’d learned from her example, she thought. She was pleased to see that a man so scarred by the war might still find love in his wounded heart for that poor child. He laid his daughter in her crib and sang to her quietly.
Lina took his hand and held it as a wife might do, or so it seemed to him, without shame or hesitation but simply with the easy trust of those bound by the shared love of a child. He felt the warmth of her face near his as she leaned in to watch the baby drift off, eyes closed now. It was a small moment, this one added to the many they’d shared these last months. His admiration for her had grown as they continued on in the project of caring for the child. And now came the quickening in the heart that was the illusion of youth, and then just as suddenly it was gone, and he forced himself back towards the proper demeanour that was expected of the circumstances that bound them.
HE STOOD OVER HIS wife’s modest grave the following afternoon to say goodbye. The falling snow softened the trees and the hard earth in the woods far behind the consecrated grounds of the chapel cemetery, where those who’d sinned against God were not welcome. Here she would remain, in this small clearing, with a view to the lake she’d never seen. He wondered if she could see it now, somehow, in the mystery of death, and the flat, carved stone that marked this place as hers. Behind him stood the wet nurse and Dr. Ridley and Sister Evelyn, come to pay their last respects as this couple was finally parted, Rosa DeGroote to remain there forever, and the widower who’d carry their child out into the world.
He felt chastened and ashamed and thrilled by the power of the emotions that had taken him as he’d held Lina’s hand. An old fool, after all was said and done, he thought.
It was a poem that came to him unbidden as he stood there, and at once Sister Evelyn and Dr. Ridley turned their heads to him, as if he’d just then performed some marvellous bit of magic. At first they thought they’d heard wrong. But they’d heard perfectly well. They didn’t know what poem it was, but its meaning was of no importance. It was the language he spoke it in, the words to the piece of music his mother had often sung to him when he was a child, and that he’d heard the night he was detained at the Swiss border all those years ago. It came to him freely, like a man speaking in tongues, an
d at once they understood that a German had been living in their midst this whole time.
1960–1983
I thought I saw something in the man’s eyes that told me he was sorry for what had happened to our father, though of course I couldn’t know this as we stood there in the fallout shelter that night. He’d lowered his hands slowly and called us by our names and told us in German that he’d take care of us now, we were safe with him. He waited a moment for us to say something. But we just stood there, both of us too frightened and shocked to say anything at all. He was a complete stranger to us and to our family’s history, as far as we knew, crawled up from a hole in the middle of the night—until he told us that he’d known our father for years, since we were small, and that it was our father who’d arranged for this meeting.
He was to be our guide tonight and for the weeks to come, he said, and right now we were to climb into the tunnel and follow his every instruction, no questions asked. Thomas was to go first, he said, then me. He’d follow behind so he could seal the door properly.
The doubt and shock I’d seen in Thomas’s face began to fade as he pieced this together in his mind. What our father had said to him as we’d prepared to leave our burning house the night before was coming clear. This was what our father had arranged. To meet this man. This was the help he’d promised we’d find at Shelter 49.
