by Devin Murphy
Ed-win.
Lu-do.
Tim-o-thy, the rash-necked boy.
Garth, another bunkmate.
Pauw-el.
The names felt endless. Our voices lifted the boy upward. When it was my turn, I flew over the whole troop and saw the quick glow of other fires and other boys being launched around the campground before falling back into the soft, giving tarp, my body sinking into it, and then springing back off of it, back into the air. They pitched me into the summer night to the sound of one deep cadence and the voice of thirty other laughing boys.
“Ja-cob. Ja-cob. Ja-cob,” they shouted.
Before going to our bunkhouses for bed, the older boys told us stories about great German soldiers and fairy tales, which were entertaining, sure, but no match for my father’s. His always made me feel like I moved underwater, like the world my body was in was not the world of sight at all, and that it was the world of his stories that mattered most. His stories were so vivid and real, so dangerous and profound, he could have easily scared the piss out of any of these boys.
My father had a habit of gathering all the kids in our church around him for storytelling after Mass ended. Every kid in the village and Samuel, the air-writer, knew to make a crescent moon around him after our mother finished playing from Dieterich Buxtehude’s Fugues, always the final organ song. At first, the kids kept their distance from him the way their parents did, but his stories lulled them close.
My father would tuck his arms against his ribs and whisper as we leaned toward him, and as he raised his voice and lifted his arms, we’d lurch back as if in concert with him. To me, my father telling these stories in church was its own kind of worship. For a half hour every week, he was the babysitter while the children’s parents would talk among themselves. Samuel’s arm waved over the sitting children’s head like a spastic blessing. Edwin and I hung in limbo, somewhere between the adults and our father, trying our best to grow out of the stories we’d heard our whole lives, one ear cocked to what the adults talked about—recipes, fishing grounds, and something about fascism, which I barely understood—and the other searching out new twists to old stories, or captivated by the occasional new tale he’d offer up, letting the children knead them into their own fantasies. The last church story I heard had Thump-Drag stumbling into a darkened church where the Devil was doing a wild dance, his disguises changing with each twirl. The Devil shape-shifted from a giant shaggy dog to a snake with legs, and finally, to a beautiful woman who reached out and pulled Thump-Drag into her dance.
Storytelling was how my father communicated with us, and I remembered every detail of his tales. I felt them enter my bloodstream and become a part of me. Thinking back, if there was any art that truly became part of my life, my father’s stories were it. Their fictions were the magic of my childhood. When I shut my eyes, I’d pick up their tracks, like the paw prints of a fox out in the early morning snow.
My first night in the cabin I lay awake for hours getting used to the shadows and sounds of other boys breathing. Günter got up from bed and walked outside to relieve himself. His hard-on made a tent of his underwear. I hated seeing that as it made me feel by contrast a puny, hairless boy. The screen slapped shut behind him as he spit a gob of phlegm into the grass.
The morning revelry call woke me up, but Edwin was already drawing in his notepad, sketching the boys running to the fields, the cabins adorned with the sharp red, black, and white flags. He had sketches of Ludo at play, his arm shriveled on the paper too. He drew me as well. I was a close and easy model, so perhaps it was all that repetition, but my brother had me down exactly. I’d look down at a sketch and recognize myself immediately. Page after page. Jacob. Jacob. Jacob. There I was.
We met at the camp’s main flagpole during revelry. Pauwel was part of the drum line, and he marched down among the campers, pounding on his drum as if he were a thunderclap. He was by far the best player, and the rest of the drum line softened their playing until they almost faded entirely while his beat picked up for a solo. He carried four drumsticks, two in reserve tucked into the loop of his snare drum’s carrying strap. The band came back on the same note, and the whole parade ground of several hundred boys practiced their marching.
“Eyes left,” and we snapped our heads to the left, so that we moved together, shoes clopping in time to Pauwel and his drums.
After that, the large gathering broke into cabin groups. We studied how to plot our positions with maps and compasses, and how to shoot targets attached to fifty-gallon steel drums. Rifle training required us to become accustomed to the weight of weapons. We learned marksmanship with air rifles and trained in bolt-action .22s. Those boys who had been to camp in previous years were excellent marksmen. The boys shot the hell out of the targets too, exploding cans, boxes, and barrels, and each little explosion scattered dirt on the slope of the backdrop. The plink-plink-plink of bullets on targets echoed across the field all day, which carried the scent of spent gunpowder.
The most accomplished marksmen received Dienstdolch, daggers, as rewards, which were the envy of everyone who had yet to earn one. The older boys and camp counselors all had service daggers attached to their belts—a major status symbol. All the boys wanted their own daggers and worked for them every day. The daggers said, Blut und Ehre, Blood and Honor. Each came with a steel scabbard attached to a thin leather strap. The blade was six inches long and one in width. The handles were steel with black grip plates screwed in. At the center of each grip plate was the red-and-white diamond insignia around a swastika. The older boys compared their RZM numbers, which had been put on by the natural-material-control office. “Mine is M7/25/37,” one of the boys said as he read the etchings off the blade.
I leaned in closer, eyeing the numbers. I desperately wanted one for myself. I felt that it would rival my Uncle Martin’s scrimshaw blade and imagined the whir of one in front of me. Keep it moving. Keep the steel moving.
We donned gas masks, cinched them tight, and then played tug-of-war with the masks on. If two people from one side got their masks on and ran to the rope and only one from the other team made it, then that one person had to anchor down and hold the line until the others on his team got there to help. I got to the rope at the same time as Edwin during our first tug-of-war match, but Günter tapped Edwin on the shoulder and pulled him out of the line. He dug a finger into the side of Edwin’s mask where it wasn’t sealed properly.
“You’re out, Koopman. Dead men can’t help their teammates pull.” He looked at me then. “Jacob. Fine work.” I swelled with pride over doing well among so many boys that would play and compete and not start raving if they were kept from their drawing.
We dug parallel trenches out in the field and threw wooden potato-masher grenades at one another. Until they showed me how to let it glide out of my hands, I whipped mine with such forced, jerking motions that my shoulder muscles hurt for days. The last one standing won. That was the goal with most of the games we played—be the last one standing.
At night, we had a large group gathering by the main building and listened to speeches and music from the gramophone. My mother would have loved the music. Every Sunday evening at home she made us dress up. Me, my father, Edwin, and sometimes Ludo and Uncle Martin would clear the center of our living room of furniture and her sewing machine, and all take our seats on the couches as she started her gramophone. The room was modeled after a British Victorian sitting parlor. Built-in bookshelves lined the walls. One by one, we each danced with her. She was thin-boned, loose-jointed, at ease as she glided across the hardwood, leading everyone but Uncle Martin, who was the best dancer among us.
“This makes your mother happy,” my father told us when Edwin protested having to dance. So, we each took our turns. When it was my turn she swept me off the couch, spun me around, twisted me along with her graceful body, and delivered me seamlessly back to my seat.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she would say.
When it was Ludo’s turn, she
shifted her hands so his weak arm could stay relaxed at his side as they slid around the room together, as easily as the rest of us did. Fergus’s uncontrollable excitement led him to swing around the dancing couple, his nails scratching the hardwood floor. At camp, there were enough boys my mother could have danced from one boy to the next, across the field grounds for the rest of her life, her flower dress spinning on and on. This image has stayed with me my whole life—my beautiful mother in perpetual motion.
During the third week of camp, the buses took us to meet up with boys from other camps on the shores of the North Sea. In total there were over two thousand boys, and for an hour we marched on the sands showing our formations and marching skills to one another. Then we had to face up to the dunes where a procession of military officers gathered around General Spitz of the Luftwaffe, who had come to give a speech to all of us. His chest from collarbone to navel was covered in so many medals it looked like a toddler had gone wild decorating him.
“You are a fine group of young men,” he said into a microphone. “You are making your families proud. Keep having fun. Learn as much as you can, and you will make this nation a phoenix, rising with the scalding light of redemption to bring prosperity back to our people. When you are called, your hearts will know to rise.”
The boys around me shot their arms up so their palms faced the top of the dunes so I did the same.
“Sieg Heil,” the thousands of boys said in unison, and their chorus could have beat back the surf with its force.
When the general finished his speech, the camp counselors said we could strip down to our shorts and leave the rest of our clothes folded at our feet.
As we stood there I looked to see which boys had the first trails of hair plunging from their belly buttons to their pant lines. Who had ribs and veins protruding or developed muscles or was flabby and pale. I was comparing everyone with my own body and the general’s words were already far from my mind.
“Now, raise your hand if you cannot swim or if you are a poor swimmer,” Günter said.
The few boys who raised their hands were asked to come stand behind him. “Now, when the general’s whistle blows, you boys who are good swimmers can go swimming. Those behind me, we will go down to the beach and you will learn how to swim.”
When the whistle sounded, I hardly heard it, but waves of boys peeled out of their ranks and ran across the sand toward the surf. Bodies crashed into the water by the dozens when Edwin, Ludo, and I at last realized we were free to run; the others had expected the whistle from years before.
The three of us turned and ran across the flat sand to the water in a wild stampede of yipping and yelling to one another. The hard crash of my body into the ice cold water knocked the wind out of me, but I dove farther in, closer to the crowd of hundreds of milky-pale boys playing in the North Sea. We began to wrestle one another.
One boy dunked himself under, and came up with globs of wet sand that he threw up into the air, yelling “Incoming!” as the boys around him dove under the surface to avoid the gritty spray that fell in after them.
Other boys yelled “Incoming!” and “Fire!” and “Save yourself!” Their voices carried down the strand. Einfall! Angriff! Alle mann van bard!
Then, Timothy, our bunkmate with the rashed neck, jumped on my back and pushed me under.
“Take that,” he said.
His meaty hands pinched at the muscles of my neck and I thought, You fucker, and tried to swim free and kick up, but he kept me pinned down until I swallowed mouthfuls of water. Then he placed his foot on my back and kicked me into the sandy bottom where I felt his other foot press between my shoulder blades. Then I thought, Jesus, I’m going to drown.
But Edwin came to my rescue. He pushed Timothy away. When I jumped out of the water and gasped for air, I heard the last of my brother yelling at Timothy.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I worked my way to shore and for a moment wished the sand under my feet were the soil of Delfzijl—of home.
Later in the day, after I recovered on the beach, Pauwel, Ludo, Edwin, and I wrestled in the water. We teamed up to get on each other’s shoulders and tried to push one another off. I grappled with Ludo, who kept pushing me into the cold water despite his dead arm, which was thinner at the bicep than the knot of bone at his elbow. We did this until our bodies were blue from the cold and red from the sun. I imagined pictures rising from our bones to our skin. Then we were instructed to come out of the water, dry off, dress on the sand, and board the buses, which we rode home with our skin tight from the salt and sunburn.
Timothy turned toward the three of us on the bus. “I’m surprised the Dutch boys didn’t drown.”
At night we watched a movie that had been set up in a giant tent. The film was about a teenaged Nazi martyr named Hitlerjunge Quex, who grew up in poverty in Berlin. It showed him in 1932, during the pit of the German Depression, when his out-of-work father, a supporter of the Communist party, sent him on a weekend camping trip with a Communist youth group. While there, Quex found the Communists were undisciplined and rowdy. They smoked and drank, danced late into the night, and served their meals by tossing hunks of bread at a hungry crowd that fought for what they could catch. One of the games the Communist camp counselors set up quickly turned into a game of holding each other down and slapping the other’s private parts.
When this scene appeared, the boys who had been to camp before yelled, “Filthy animals,” in unison and then they leaned into each other and laughed.
Quex sneaks off to another part of the park and finds a group of Hitler Youth camping by the lake and he spies on them. When the German boys appeared onscreen, the boys around us started cheering.
“Watch and learn, Quex. Watch and learn,” the boys yelled at the screen.
Quex saw the Hitler Youth working together to make a fire and cook a hot dinner. They listened to speeches, sang patriotic songs, and shouted in unison their support for an “awakened Germany.”
On cue, the boys in the movie tent yelled, “Awakened Germany!”
When Quex returns home, singing one of the Hitler Youth songs, his father comes on the screen, and at this point all the boys in the tent began to hiss.
Hissssss.
Quex’s father beats him and signs him up to become a member of the Communist party. However, Quex informs the Hitler Youth that the Young Communists are planning to ambush them during a march using guns and dynamite. Quex’s warning is found out, and he becomes a pariah to the Communists and a hero to the Hitler Youth. His distraught mother tries to kill her son and herself by extinguishing the pilot light and leaving the gas on in their one-room apartment at night. She is killed. Quex survives. His father, crushed by what happens, begins to wonder aloud whether his son isn’t right—maybe National Socialism is better for Germany than communism.
The boys in the movie tent all yell, “Of course it is! Of course!”
Edwin, Ludo, and I had seen plenty of movies together. We all nearly pissed our pants when we saw Nosferatu. During The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I yelped when Quasimodo abducted Esmeralda, and Edwin and Ludo giggled out loud when he was crowned as the king of the fools. Still, neither of those was interactive like this.
By the end of the movie, Edwin, Ludo, and I were all trying to anticipate what the group would yell at the screen next, hoping we would guess right, and could join in.
“You’re a hero, Quex,” the boys yelled when the film ended.
After watching that movie, something shifted in me. That night, in my cot, I imagined I was Quex saving the Hitler Youth boys. Brave despite knowing I was on a Himmelfahrts Kommando, a trip-to-heaven mission. I wanted to be a hero too.
“I loved that movie,” I whispered over to Edwin who propped his flashlight on his pillow so he could see his notepad as he sketched.
“Well. Remember what Uncle Martin said. Don’t buy too much into what these people are telling you.”
“Why not? We don’t have this many
friends at home.”
“Which are our friends here?”
I pointed around the room and my finger fell on Pauwel’s bunk.
“Who else? Who else, Mr. Soldier Boy?”
“You’re just mad I’m doing so well and can figure out how to put on a gas mask.”
Edwin swung his legs out of bed, reached a hand to my shoulder, and dug his fingers into the flesh above my collarbone until it felt like he held me by a handle.
“Am not,” he said.
“Okay. Okay,” I murmured, squirming to get away from him.
“To sleep!” Günter yelled from the far end of the cabin.
Asleep, my dream self cared only for the heroic. I had been called to perform. Before camp, I went to sleep most nights dreaming of my mother’s organ music, the spark and glow of fresh new lights my father had brought into the world, Thump-Drag, or Hilda, my grip on her ankles. Now, I’d been called.
The next morning at breakfast, where we were fed scoops from a vat of brown goulash and boiled and pressed sugar beets, Timothy and three of his friends sat across the table from Edwin, Ludo, Pauwel, and me. The boy straight across from me, Garth, was pudgy with pinched, close-set eyes. His hands dimpled at the knuckles. There were different-colored stains down the front of his shirt.
“You strike me as someone who would slap another boy’s privates if you got the chance,” Timothy said. “And you,” he pointed at Ludo’s bad arm, “you weaken the race.”
Edwin sat perfectly still. Then he spit his juice out of his mouth in a whalelike blow across the table. Spray settled and rivulets of juice converged and dripped from Timothy’s chin.
“I thought I tasted a spider,” Edwin said, and turned back to his juice, washing down his breakfast as if nothing had happened.
I was shocked at my brother’s nerve. He sat there calm and easy. Though for the first time I noticed the gray skin under his eyes from staying up every night drawing.
