The Good German

by Dennis Bock

  We stayed with them for weeks, on through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, until they were discovered and taken by one of the bands of men who claimed them as bounty. Jews were worth more than we were, five dollars a head. Barely worth their time, we were questioned, race and origin verified, and lectured on the hazards of the Jew. We travelled hundreds of miles by foot and car and rail, skirting towns, avoiding checkpoints and race-hunters. Sometimes Muriel’s father left us in camp for days, one time for so long that we believed he’d abandoned us or died, but on the fifth day he returned with new shoes for the three of us, a newspaper, a compass, food, and chocolate bars. We hid in an abandoned cabin and ate our fill, and slept, woke up, and ate some more, and when we’d eaten enough that we could easily carry what remained we set out again. We stole what we could and met fewer guides as we moved west. Head for Emporia, they’d say, and after a week or more a man in Emporia would bring us blankets and a pot of stew in his barn and tell us to keep on for Wichita, Great Bend, and then Dodge City.

  We rode trains like hoboes in the pictures we’d seen of the Great Depression, but avoided those rail lines that seemed to attract other freight-hoppers. These were the lines that attracted the attention of the deportation agents and race-hunters, who knew to look there for their quarry. We took the secondary feeder lines that often carried us north and south more than west, but west eventually, inching ever closer to the sanctuary state we’d heard spoken of. The search for Jews widened in the compliant states we passed through, as one race law after the next was passed in the American Congress and President Thurmond won his third term. We read this in the newspapers Muriel’s father returned with after his solo trips into Mason City, Sioux Falls, and Faith, where he watched dozens of Cheyenne line up in front of the town hall to register for the fate that awaited them.

  We walked through the month of October, and into the second week of November we arrived at the mountain state where big cats rustled the early-evening brush and bears caught your scent from a mile off. The river at McCredie Springs looked nothing like the river that cut through Port Elizabeth. It was clear and fast and drew us to its banks, the Jews and the others we lived among. We drank from it and took its fish and carried it in jugs to our tents and cabins up the side of the valley. Muriel’s father helped construct the small frame homes that needed to be built for those who continued to arrive there, drawn to the sanctuary state of Oregon by rumour and promise as the turmoil in the eastern states grew. With each new arrival reports came, none of them hopeful. We were a growing community, ours and the hundreds of others scattered over these mountains and all down the watershed to the Pacific Ocean.

  NOW THOMAS AND I take fugitives down the McKenzie River on the last leg of the journey into Eugene, where we stay for a day or two before the long hike back to Clear Lake up here in the Willamette forest. We know the whitewater rapids well, and where the hidden boulders lie, the river’s dangerous chutes and cascades. There have been a number of near-misses. We’ve lost a raft, more than a few backpacks, and any sense that we’re in control when it comes to this beautiful cut of landscape. But we’ve never seen any serious injuries. The eighty-odd miles down will take us two days, three in July and August when the river’s low, and triple that for the hike back up over the trails, each with the fifty pounds of supplies we never return without.

  I cannot provide a fair or sensible assessment of my brother’s character, such as it was back when we were boys. What he saw around us in those days was confinement and abuse, and he believed that those who suffered in the same way he did must be his friends and allies. His anger was his attempt to protect us from those who ruled our lives. When that truckload of German workers rolled past that night, he saluted those who knew our situation as intimately as we ourselves did, nothing more. We’ve never spoken of that night since then, or about the night our father died, but it might be true that brothers who lose their parents too soon will find a way of communicating without really talking, or maybe that’s just the fantasy of young men who still believe that the things we think and feel are of no interest to anyone but ourselves.

  I visit Muriel’s father sometimes at Clear Lake, where he still lives in the cabin the four of us shared until Muriel went down to San Jose at the age of twenty-one, where she works in a residential care home for the blind. I try to bring things from the city for the old man—a can of peaches in syrup will still put a smile on his face—and with me he shares what news he has about his daughter. She enjoys her work with the children she cares for. Only weeks ago she took a group on an excursion to the Sierra Azul, he said, and learned the names of wildflowers she’d never known existed. I know by now he considers her to be the one good thing to have emerged from the tragic history that defines him. I see it in his eyes as he tells me what he knows, the stack of her letters to him bound by loose twine and set on the table by the wood stove.

  He’s in his eighties now. On Remembrance Day, if his legs are strong enough, I’ll take him down to Belknap Springs and stand beside him in the small gathering that collects to commemorate the day. Brief and reverent, it’s nothing like the ceremonies I remember from the days of my youth. Afterwards we shake hands with the men and women I recognize from our early days here, many of whom I’ve known since we arrived twenty-three years ago—the blacks and the Jews and the Tillamook and the race- and gender-defiers. We are, as far as they know, just another broken family of refugees. None of them knows Elser’s story. To them he is the old man who years ago appeared with three children in tow and managed to raise them well enough, despite everything.

  They ask me what it’s like in Eugene these days. They know I am one of the river guides who deliver refugees down to the coast. I tell them what I know, that things are going to get worse before they get better, and then the old man and I take the long hike back along the river to the cabin, where we’ll prepare a modest supper of rice and beans and read by candlelight until it’s time for bed.

  Sometimes the day will have shaken loose a memory—a moment spent with my mother or father all those years ago—that he needs to share. There’s nothing more he needs to tell me about them. I know what I need to know. But I can still enjoy a fresh image of my mother as she might have appeared to him on a certain day. He’s been moved to go deeper into his past on a number of occasions, into his own childhood and memories of his mother and father, and once to talk about watching the clouds roll by as he lay feverish and near-dead on a coal barge on the Rhine River.

  With time our losses fade and heal over, no matter how great they are, or how deeply they altered our lives. This is what I might have thought if I had not known Georg Elser. I might have thought that anguish and grief turn to sorrow and mourning, and that mourning slowly opens the memory to the gradual fading of the thing itself. I can say with some conviction that I am who I need to be, and who I should have been all along, despite the story I’ve lived. Isn’t this the proper way of things?

  But for the old man, I don’t think so. I can’t say what he feels on the matter of love and loss, and on the nature of the life he’s led. What does a man like him feel as he nears the end of his days? I wondered this for years when I finally began to understand that guilt must be borne in solitude. It took me time to see that madness was never far off for him. Often he’d disappear for days at a time in the years following our arrival here, to where we never knew, until once, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I followed him into the forest.

  It was a full-day hike at the end of which I watched him stand for hours at the edge of a cliff until it was too dark for me to see him. What thoughts troubled his mind as he stood there I can’t say. But at any moment he was a man poised to disappear over the edge. What surprises me now was that I did nothing. I watched and waited, far back in the trees, for him to jump or to step back from the edge.

  That’s when I understood that guilt is a form of madness when a good man’s life brings little more than suffering and tragedy. I might tell him that the life
he’s lived was the life that he was born into and was supposed to live, and that he changed nothing that wasn’t meant to be changed. That there is no history other than the one sad history we know. But I spare him the platitudes. He is beyond consolation.

  Occasionally the imagined sound of my mother’s knitting needles clacking away in the pine trees outside the window reaches my ear when I sit up late after he’s fallen into his troubled sleep, and for a moment she’s with me the way she used to be, quiet but there, before her own great sacrifice, fruitless and irreversible, took her away from us.

  The mind reaches helplessly for what once was, after so much has been lost.

  Epilogue

  My mother had mentioned the white birch tree in our front yard more than once to Elser, that there was none other like it on the whole street. I watched the light of the fire playing over his face while he told us this part of his story that last night before we crossed the river to America.

  He’d found the house after he spoke German over his wife’s grave. It was just as my mother had described it to him, the birch tree standing there, glowing in the light of the December moon. He saw it well before our family identification number painted on the door came into view, and then he knew there could be no doubt this was her home.

  He waited on the sidewalk until she came to the window, and a moment later my father stepped out onto the front porch carrying a rucksack. The two men shook hands, still strangers to one another.

  There were provisions in the bag, my father told Elser, not much, but enough for a day or two. And then my father guided him to the shelter recessed into the hill at the foot of the Chisolm Allotment, from which point Muriel’s father would lead us to safety almost fifteen years later.

  This was when my mother understood that my father was involved in helping men like Elser escape to the sanctuary states in America. For months by then he’d been meeting with this group of partisans who assisted fugitives in any way they could. Later, after the first riots swept the town in 1953, following the news of the hydrogen bomb test in Libya, they’d talked about leaving as well. But it was too dangerous then, Muriel’s father told us that night, and Thomas and I were too small to travel, practically babies still.

  That night in the shelter, in December 1946, my father introduced Elser to the group who’d help get him over the border. They were people who’d been able to escape after being found in possession of a map of the province, or a German-language Bible, or having defied in some other way one of the hundreds of statutes that regulated our lives. The sentencing was harsh and swift—property confiscated, families split up and sent off to faraway work camps. Those who could went underground to join the resistance and moved by night beneath the town through the tunnels that fed its hopeless trickle on into distant America.

  In the weeks to come Muriel’s father stayed underground. He learned the tunnels and met with men and women as they waited their turn to be taken over the border, where they could begin the journey that awaited them.

  My father visited him with updates on the search for the German who’d been processed into Mercy House under an alias. They had no idea who he really was, as far as my father could tell, he said. My parents were questioned over a period of weeks after he left, but they had nothing more to offer. The sisters isolated my mother from the other atonement girls at the hospice. There was discussion regarding the placement of the child. Some of the sisters wanted it gone, but most of the residents had charity in their hearts. The child would stay on, Sister Evelyn declared, and the nursing would continue.

  Elser set out for the border the day after my father told him that his daughter would stay in my mother’s care at Mercy House. Now at least she’d be well looked after. It took six days to reach the border, and when he stood on the bank of the Niagara River and watched the opposite side, wondering if he was capable of leaving his infant daughter forever, he knew his fight was there, back in the direction from which he’d just come.

  He looked up from the campfire we were gathered around as he told us this. That was when he understood, he said, standing at the river’s edge those many years ago. And in four nights he walked the hundred-odd miles back to Port Elizabeth, where, over the seasons that followed, he waited and watched Muriel from the rocky beach below the house and from the road outside the gates where Thomas and I had stood on so many occasions.

  We never saw him, not once. I look back through my memory but I don’t see him. He was there, he assured us, and with my mother’s help he held his daughter in his arms once or twice a month through the ironwork of the gates, while my mother looked over her shoulder to make sure none of the sisters were watching. After her service of atonement was complete, she submitted a formal request to make the child her own. The sisters rejected the idea as perverse, but allowed her to visit on occasion. He’d been watching on that July morning—from where he didn’t say—when I walked through the front gates of the Mercy House estate and met Muriel for the first time. With my mother’s help he’d kept her in his life, and so when he came for Muriel on the night my father died, she knew to follow him.

  He told us this last detail as we stood on the American side of the Niagara River the morning we crossed over. It was one of the few happy days in his life, he said, when he saw me pass through the gate and walk up the lane, knowing that I’d finally meet Muriel.

  Standing on the muddy bank, I felt the weight of my circumstances for the first time. I wasn’t ready until that moment, I suppose, to accept the reality of what awaited two teenaged brothers tossed up in the sort of storm that had turned our lives upside down. I was too young to understand the full breadth of the changes that were upon us—that would come later, as the months and years piled on—but on that morning I felt that the world was founded on a lie, and that the small part of it that our parents had occupied was a sort of grace afforded to us that we, in our ignorance and in the rush of youth, had been unable to recognize and to appreciate. I assign no blame here. We were children in difficult times. We loved them in the only way we knew how, in our own small selfish ways.

  An opening in the fog drifted by as I listened to the oars somewhere out on the river. And then I saw the man again—the bandaged hand, the rough beard, the oars rising and falling like a heron’s wings—and for an instant before the fog swallowed us up for the last time the face I saw looking back at me was my own. I felt a strange shudder pass through me, like an echo in the mind and in the body, as if I’d seen and felt this before. After the man disappeared I turned and ran up the bank and caught up with my brother and Muriel and her father. He asked what had put such a strange look on my face when he saw me. I told him the truth. I didn’t know, I said. He helped me up the slope that rose to a field of black earth that stretched as far as the eye could see, deep into the heart of America. The soil was newly turned, judging by the smell of it, rich and manure-scented and still moist and cool from the night.

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful for the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

  About the Author

  DENNIS BOCK’s book of stories, Olympia, won the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the Betty Trask Prize, His novels include The Communist’s Daughter and The Ash Garden, a #1 bestseller, the winner of the Canada-Japan Literary Award, and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Kiriyama Prize, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. His most recent novel, Going Home Again, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Dennis Bock lives in Toronto.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at harpercollins.ca.

  Also by Dennis Bock

  Going Home Again

  The Communist’s Daughter

  The Ash Garden

  Olympia

  Copyright

  The Good German

  Copyright © 2020 by Dennis Bock


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  Published by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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  EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2020 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-6098-9

  Version 08252020

  Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-6097-2

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The good German : a novel / Dennis Bock.

  Names: Bock, Dennis, 1964- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200237349 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200237411 | ISBN 9781443460972 (softcover) | ISBN 9781443460989 (ebook)

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