Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  I rapped a bronze knocker in the shape of a stag’s head with antlers. No response. I rapped again. A servant poked her head out from one of the leaded windows above and said something in German. I repeated Karin’s name a few times. The window shut.

  When Karin opened the door, she had on a velvet dress, midnight blue, with white stockings. I held out the cigarette tin. Without hesitation, she took it.

  “Well done. Now go home before you catch your death.”

  “Auf Wiedersehen.”

  “Auf Wiedersehen.”

  When I got back to Newport my parents were drinking champagne and washing up together. I brought in an armful of firewood, and they didn’t ask where I’d been. They were excited and happy, chattering about plans. The war’s bleakness was over with, and we were a real family living in a real house.

  I was helping my father stoke the upstairs fireplace when we heard distant machine guns and an ominous chunk-chunk-chunk, which I soon learned to recognize as rapid mortar fire. I already knew the sound of machine guns from Köln; mortars were new to me. In English boys’ magazines machine guns were always “chattering” or “barking,” but the gas-driven discharge of a MG08, heard at a distance of a mile or more, sounded closer to a snarl. Any closer and the firing became distinctly staccato, like very rapid hammer blows, especially if the operator was experienced and wasn’t running through his ammunition belts too quickly. An MG08 spewed a sharp, gassy reek, and if the firing was very close, I could smell the discharge.

  Newport cottage would never belong to us, but it was easy enough to pretend it did. Even its American gaucheness, its out-of-placeness, suited us well. Built entirely of wood, it would burn to the ground when a few incendiaries fell into the Walden forest during one of the thousand-bomber raids on Frankfurt in late ’44.

  A girl’s pink cheeks and red boots. The graceful double curve of an Apache bow. A battered Sweet Aftons tin. Distant gunfire, pungence of balsam, winter sunlight filtered through evergreens. That’s what I re-member. Also the black scent of old, dead fires when my father and I knelt, crumpling parched newsprint from a stack of prewar Frankfurter Zeitungen, adding birchbark curlings, sticks, and beech logs, then lighting everything with the crack of a match, so that the scent of the dead fire flew away up the chimney, and in its place were the heat and light of a blaze crackling in the hearth of our own home in the heart of Germany.

  The Fraktur font wasn’t easy to read, but I kept at it. I was determined to get my hands on the German language before starting school. It was a matter of survival. Luckily, and thanks to Karin, I had the Winnetou novels of Karl May.

  Dear reader! Do you know what the word “greenhorn” means?

  I’d spent my first three weeks at Walden in bed with the flu. At last the baron’s physician, Dr. Solomon Lewin, told my mother I was well enough to walk the snowy path through the woods from Newport to the main house. Lady Maire had invited my mother to tea.

  Of course I grew bored and restless while the ladies talked. After eating my fill of buttered toast and cakes, I finally screwed up my courage and asked Lady Maire if I might explore the library.

  Permission granted.

  I found the books on their own shelf, where Karin had said they’d be. The cover of the first Winnetou I pulled out had a Red Indian and a frontiersman sharing a campfire with a pair of fine horses in the background. Both wore buckskins and carried sheathed knives and rifles. Sitting down on the Persian rug, I cracked the book open.

  A. FRÖLISCH

  was inscribed on the flyleaf, in black ink, with a neat schoolboy hand. I’d seen the Oberleutnant’s grave out in the woods.

  FROHLISCH, AUGUST

  Oblt 1.6.99–24.2.18

  Königlich Bayerisches Infanterie

  He was eighteen when he died. Had he known he was going to die? His nose, cheek, and left ear had been smashed by machine-gun bullets. He must have looked a horror, even wearing his metal mask, but for Karin, who came of age surrounded by medieval imagery of tortured saints and stigmata, his appearance wasn’t so frightening.

  “You might imagine the religious art my mother collects is her rebellion against her Protestant upbringing, or my Jewish father,” Karin remarked, years later, on one of our café afternoons in Berlin. “But she is drawn to a work for the same reasons I am. She looks for the accurate and truthful picture of her world. That altarpiece, for example, the weeping women: this is a scene we witnessed at Walden many times during the war.”

  The piece she referred to was The Lamentation, which our mothers had discovered in a stable loft outside Segovia. It depicted five women with the lifeless body of their Christ just down from the cross. As an adolescent I’d watched a couple of grooms uncrate it at Walden, shocked to learn the baroness had paid two thousand marks for it, more than the price of the BMW R47 motorcycle I yearned for at the time.

  “Oberleutnant Frölisch’s mother and sisters came up from Bavaria in his last days,” Karin said. “They washed his poor body themselves, and I watched them wrapping him in a shroud. This was The Lamentation exactly.”

  Frölisch had instructed his mother to bring his Winnetou books from Bavaria so he could give them to Karin. After he died she had stayed up alone, night after night in her father’s library, in the house full of damaged men, slowly turning pages, absorbing the sunlight, piñon, and black powder smoke of Karl May’s harsh, vivid world, where the Mescalero Apache chief called Winnetou rides a horse called Iltschi, the Wind, and roams el llano, a country May describes with surrealist passion.

  Everything missing from our Germany—open space, unbounded distance, harsh sunlight, nobility of character—primed our longing for that space. The light of the High Plains became our dream light in German darkness. Our elders would take pleasure in reminding us that Karl May—that charlatan!—had never set foot in America when he wrote the Winnetou stories. But what did that matter? The world he offered was whole and round and easier to understand than our own.

  That winter afternoon at Haus-Walden, I brought three Winnetou books back to Lady Maire’s sitting room, and asked if I might borrow them.

  She seemed surprised. “Wild West stories? But aren’t they all in German? Do you read German, Billy?”

  “Not yet, but I shall.”

  I would be starting school soon. I did not intend to be an buachaill coigríche, the foreign boy, all over again. I needed to learn German, and quickly.

  That evening I took down an old Muret-Sanders dictionary, lugged it up to my bedroom, and began working my way through the Fraktur-printed pages of Oberleutnant Frölisch’s Winnetou, vol. 1. It was hard going at first, but Karl May’s Apache chief and his German blood brother, Old Shatterhand, spoke with the pure, clear syntax of heroes, and one of the lessons the book taught was that rites of passage are arduous. And Karin, scribbling in the margins, had translated some phrases into English, so with the help of the Muret-Sanders I started along the trail she’d marked, across El Llano Estacado and into the German language.

  February 1919. My mother and I caught a tram across the river Main one gray, raw afternoon. A soldier beggar wearing dark glasses boarded our tram and rattled his tin cup. The conductor seized him by the collar and was ready to throw him off, but passengers intervened. Others joined in, people were screaming at one another as the tram clanked across the Main bridge, and Eilín and I disembarked at the first stop on the city side. I was wearing an army greatcoat, heavy as lead. It belonged to the baron and had been altered for me.

  The British naval blockade was over, but there was still very little in the shops, and beggars were on nearly every street corner.

  Eilín and I had made a pact to speak German and only German during our excursion. She was eager to reconnect with Frankfurt, which had been her first foreign city. She wanted to show me her old haunts: the opera house, where Lady Maire had often taken her to hear Wagner; the medieval Römerberg; the Städel art museum.

  During the last months of the war British aviators had
dropped, or hurled, a few small bombs on Frankfurt, but the damage was minuscule. Frankfurt was still a medieval town of narrow streets lined with timbered buildings. The German revolution was playing out mostly in Berlin and Munich, but occasionally we saw lorries packed with soldiers careening through the streets. Some troops were loyal to the new German republic, some weren’t. They all wore tattered field gray, and it was hard to tell them apart.

  We visited the opera house and the zoo, explored the Dom, peeked in the tiny windows of Goethe’s house. I flung our last few English pennies into the fountain on the Römerberg. From there we intended to walk back across the bridge, look at pictures in the Städel Museum, and treat ourselves to an enormous tea before catching the tram back to Walden.

  We were close to the bridge when we turned a corner and came upon the bodies. It’s possible they’d been executed right there—although now I think of it, we’d not heard any shooting, so they could have been dumped off the back of a truck.

  Half-a-dozen bodies strewn on the sidewalk. Men and women. Blood pooling on cement, thick, black, glinting.

  Fresh blood is the reddest of reds, but it can seem black, viewed at a certain angle with a certain refraction of light.

  A blood-soaked fawn overcoat. A homburg hat rolled into the gutter. Yellow soles of upturned shoes.

  One of the reasons her parents were sending Karin to an English boarding school was so she’d be safe if the German revolution turned as bloody as the Russian.

  Eilín grasped my arm and turned us about, and we walked away in a hurry. Even in those winter days of chaos the trams operated on schedule. I don’t have any memory of getting home or describing to Buck what we’d seen. Maybe my mother didn’t tell him, afraid he would retreat again behind his barbed wire.

  I’m sure I spent that evening on El Llano Estacado, tracking the text inch by inch, working my way into Germany.

  You could say that in Frankfurt—probably England and France, too—the dead were in charge. Millions were walking about the cities with memories of dead sons, fathers, husbands operating painfully on their minds.

  One gray, fuming morning on the playground of our Grundschule, a boy named Günter Krebs—slight, fair haired, in short pants—began jeering at me.

  Billy Billy Billy! Billy das verdammte Engländer!

  I had been at the school a couple of weeks. Günter Krebs hadn’t bothered me before, but with the dead in charge one never knew what to expect.

  El Llano Estacado had become my refuge. The High Plains were wide and empty enough to consume all the things I was afraid of during those first weeks in Germany. A sunburned warrior, I walked to school in moccasins, sometimes armed with my Apache bow, sometimes carrying my magic rifle. Practically all my classmates were already under Winnetou’s spell, and I didn’t waste any time before letting them know that my father, Buck, had been born on a ship bound for Texas. That he carried a pair of pistols, Colt six-shooters, one in each pocket of his coat, and taught me to ride on a silver-tooled saddle won from a railroad man in a poker game in Santa Fe.

  Boys respect the fathers of their friends. Not having one is a handicap in the power politics of the school yard. Many boys had lost fathers to the war machine; they’d been machine gunned, gassed, vaporized by artillery barrage. I’d been fatherless at Muswell Hill and Sligo, but now I had him back. Not only that, my father was the boss—Geschäftsführer—of the Walden stud. Enormous prestige.

  Because I had an impressive father, because I could say llano in a Spanish accent that sounded to them “American,” because I was prepared to describe galloping my rugged Indian pony across the plains (no black iron fences on el llano), my Grundschule classmates proved willing, even eager, to accept me.

  Niederrad, the half suburb, half village where I went to school, seemed almost colorless. Everything in Niederrad was gray: streets, air, sky, the tattered feldgrau tunics worn by trench survivors who couldn’t afford new clothes. The only place for village kids to play was in the streets: the iron gates at Walden with their cornflowers-and-shamrock crest had always been shut to neighborhood children. But I had the run of the estate and was allowed to invite friends to play there, so long as we did not bother the horses.

  Over the coming summer, in the Walden woods, we would become Apache, Comanche, Taos comancheros, frontiersmen. We’d blaze trails, track renegades, plan ambushes. Make camp, light fires, send smoke signals. Paint our faces with pigment from sample bottles the baron brought home from the color laboratories at Colora GmbH.

  My classmates, soon to be my comrades—Robert Briesewitz, Hans Fischer, Bernhard Färber, Anselm Schuster, Hermann Fleck, Hermann Metzger, Joseph Baumberg—were passionate for rituals. For codes of honor. We all wanted to carry ourselves as warriors. In the Walden woods we would press bloody thumbs together and swear brotherhood. But even then there were still a few, like Günter Krebs, to whom I would always be der verdammte Engländer.

  A warrior must act boldly and ruthlessly against his enemies, and that wintry morning in the school yard while Günter was singing out his reedy little chant, “Billy Billy Billy! Billy das verdammte Engländer!” I lowered my head and charged him, running as fast as I could, butting him in the chest and knocking him down. And all the others all saw me do it.

  Winded, Krebs sat on his ass and sobbed for breath while my warrior brothers gathered around, taunting him. Taunting him, not me. For once I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was a frontiersman, priest of the right cult, willing to make use of all the spurious associations my classmates wanted to attach to me.

  During those first weeks at school in grim Niederrad I was the Wild West, and that was all the breathing room I needed. When the bell rang we trooped inside, boys patting me on the back, patting my shoulders, smiling at me.

  My tribe.

  The Winnetou cult faded as we grew older but it never died out. I’m certain some of my classmates, Indian braves and plainsmen to the last, were carrying copies of Winnetou in their haversacks on the frozen steppe twenty years later when they attacked and were attacked, when they killed and when they perished.

  My father selected the animals—Hesperide, Festino, Henry of Navarre—that became the foundation of the famous Walden stud. Banned from England and Ireland himself, he pored over the registry books and bloodlines and chose the mares and stallions Weinbrenner would buy at Doncaster, Newmarket, and Kildare. By the end of our first year in Germany Buck was managing a staff of twenty trainers, grooms, and exercise riders. There was a veterinarian, a farrier, a saddler, each with his pack of journeymen and apprentices. In late summer, crews of peasants came from the hills to mow the meadows and make tons of Walden hay.

  In March 1920, the ridiculous Kapp Putsch played out mostly in Berlin. For us Grundschule boys it meant no class for two or three days. I remember lying in bed at night and hearing occasional rifle shots from across the river, and longing for a rifle like Old Shatterhand’s Henrystutzen, which could fire twenty-five rounds without reloading.

  The German government refused to pay war reparations, and French troops briefly occupied Frankfurt in April. Our schoolmaster insisted we ignore them. We were to act as though they were invisible. But they existed, whether we acknowledged them or not; a squad of képis besieged on the Schillerplatz opened fire one day, killing five civilians, and my classmates wept from sheer hatred of the French. Ten-year-olds sobbed bitterly, while friends gathered round to console them. Boys hated so powerfully they couldn’t speak, only howl.

  I’ll give you one day. Twenty-one months after the armistice. Summer of our first Walden-bred colts and fillies.

  Walden. August 11, 1920. Early morning.

  Everything quiet, peaceful. Slanted light. Dew steaming from grass.

  A pair of grooms saddle a pair of young horses for the first time.

  With only a snaffle bit, saddles are put on, and the two lightest riders on the place—myself and Karin Weinbrenner—are each given a leg up.

  Ka
rin was home from England on summer vacation. For the first two days she’d spoken only English to me. Since then, only German.

  “Deutsch ist die richtige Sprache des Waldes,” she insisted. German is the language of the forest.

  She’d wanted to know if I’d been hunting with the Apache bow. She’d quizzed me on Winnetou lore.

  “Was ist der Name von Winnetous Pferd?” Name of Winnetou’s horse?

  “Iltschi.”

  “Old Shatterhand’s?”

  “Hatatitla.”

  “Und was bedeutet das?” Meaning?

  “Es bedeutet Blitz.” It means “Lightning.”

  August 11, 1920. Early morning, high summer. Insects chirping in the woods. I’m eleven years old and a horseman.

  The day will be fiercely hot, but isn’t yet. Karin and I wear matching fawn breeches, pale-blue cotton shirts, and mahogany-top boots made by the Belgian boot maker in Frankfurt. My father and mother, and the baron and Lady Maire, are watching.

  My father’s method of breaking young horses is not breaking them. Once we’re aboard, the horses are merely led about under our weight, a groom with a leading rein on each side. Our job is to stay calm and steady, to communicate poise and confidence to the young animals. We mustn’t do anything to spook them, or my father’s curriculum of training will be upset, and the young racehorses might never reach their potential, might never be as good as they could be.

  I don’t intend to disappoint my father, and I don’t. The exercise goes admirably. After fifteen minutes, we both slip down, and the grooms take over. Our horses are led back to the stable, where they’ll be rubbed down and fed. Since they have been handled and taught obedience from the time they were foaled, this is all the breaking they will need. After two or three more walkabouts, always in the cool of early morning, professional riders will start taking them out alone, and after a month they’ll be ridden in company, like other horses. Before they go off to be raced they’ll gallop the Walden track, twenty-five-hundred meters straightway, with a regulation starting gate, so when they go to real racetracks for the first time they’ll see nothing unusual to spook them.