by Devin Murphy
Günter met us at the finish line and hugged Pauwel and Timothy.
“We did it! We did it!” he yelled. Then, as if remembering himself, he stood back and raised his hand high in front of our team to salute us.
The noise of all the boys who watched was deafening as they cheered and closed in around us in a dizzy whorl of lights and flames. The camp director ordered everyone to the main revelry grounds, where there was a giant pile of wood. All the boys walked forward and touched their torches onto the pile. Once the bonfire was stoked, the camp director ordered the winning chariot team forward.
“You young men have shown great strength and honor today. Your family and country are proud of you,” the officer said.
Then Günter handed each of us a dagger. I unsheathed mine and held it in front of me so the firelight shone off the blade.
“As is our tradition, the winning team gets to do the final march of heroes.”
Günter and another counselor came forward with a giant shield that had a broken thunderbolt on it.
“We get to carry the fallen soldier,” Timothy told Garth.
“It’s an honor for us,” Günter added.
We lined up at the flagpole, where they had me lie down on the shield. Edwin, the other four boys, and Günter lifted the shield over their heads and started marching. The camp director led everyone in the songs we had learned over the course of the last five weeks. With my dagger pinned to my chest, my head rolled from side to side to see the tips of the torches lit around me. The voices of hundreds of boys, singing in unison about the valor of fallen soldiers, lifted into the sky. I lay on the shield as if I were Quex, and let the singing and firelight soak into me, basking in what would be the first but not the last time Hitler’s nationalists would celebrate me.
4
The buses arrived the next morning to take us back to the train station. I had spent all night imagining myself as a war hero, leading my troop from the Hitler Youth camps east through Russia. We marched, now hardened men, until we hit Stalingrad. I army-crawled on the cool forest floor, and the scope of my gun lined up faceless individual soldiers who didn’t see me hidden behind trees, sniping away at them from a distance, chanting, Smelly old pussies, smelly old pussies, as each figure dropped to the ground.
After the long train ride, we found Uncle Martin and our father waiting for us at the station by the loading docks. There was too much to tell them all at once, but all three of us started shouting to them about it anyway.
“We won the camp games!” Ludo announced.
“We learned how to take target practice,” Edwin said.
“Look what I won,” I said to my father and held up my dagger for him to admire. “Look at this.” The blade glinted like a blue fang in the sunlight. The pad of my finger traced the RZM numbers.
“Jesus,” my father said.
“We did orienteering and grenade fights,” Ludo said.
“Jesus, you did that?”
“We loved it,” I said.
Uncle Martin and my father looked at each other, and I could tell a coded family message passed between them.
Next to the harbormaster’s office, the scaffold radio tower we’d seen before had collapsed into a pile of charred lumber and steel.
“Look at that,” Ludo said.
I looked at my uncle, who didn’t turn but walked ahead of us to the boat.
“Wires must have gotten too hot,” my father said.
I was disappointed my father wasn’t more excited for us. The more animated we became, the quieter he and Uncle Martin got. Later that day, when we cruised the Ems on the Lighthouse Lady, I overheard my father and my uncle talking.
“This is more craziness,” Uncle Martin said.
“What would you have me do?” my father asked.
“You can take them somewhere else for a while. You have the money.”
“But then what? I’d have to shut down the factory. I have to stay and keep that up.”
“There’ll be more trouble. More fighting.”
“They can’t fight anymore. They’ve done that already and ten million people died.”
“You’re naïve,” Uncle Martin said.
They stood for a long time in silence. I stopped listening and turned to Ludo and my brother, who basked in the glow of how well camp had ended for us. They carried their daggers on their belts just like me.
Hilda met us at the dock and walked home with us. She’d been riding her horse and was dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and a black, felt-covered helmet.
On our walk, Edwin slapped at his shoulder.
“Got the sucker,” he said, and cupped a fly in his fist. “I can feel the wings banging against my fingers.
“Can I have a strand of your hair, Hilda?” he asked.
“What?”
“A strand of hair. Can I?”
Hilda took off her helmet, let down the little bun she kept her hair folded up in and started to preen through the hair flowing between her shoulder blades. She singled one out, yanked it, and held it out to Edwin.
“Make a sliding knot in that,” Edwin told me.
“It’s too delicate,” I said.
“The way you taught me,” he said. “Loop it and cinch it until the loop is half the size of a guilder.”
I’d never taught my brother anything in my life and when I looked at him he winked at me, a put-on mannerism I now see he took from Uncle Martin. I twisted Hilda’s hair, and imagined my hands running through the rest of it, what the full heft of it would feel like. When the loop was knotted, Edwin took the strand. Still holding the fly, he let his pinky and ring finger pinch the fly to his palm and held one end of her hair strand with his thumb and pointer finger and the other with his other hand. He slid the knot of hair under his pinched fingers to where the fly was, and started wiggling the strand back and forth, working the fine hair and little bug. When he opened his hand the fly jumped out and flew, then stopped in midair, and started moving like an inverse pendulum in perfect circles around the tips of his thumb and pointer finger where he pinched the little hair tether.
“Here you go, Hilda,” Edwin said, “flies make good pets.”
“Gross,” she said, but held her hand out to pinch at her own hair.
The fly circled around in front of her as we walked. It lifted and flitted, the constant buzz of it moving with us.
“Jacob, you showed him this?” Hilda asked. Some voltage of light cut loose in her cool green eyes. I was paralyzed by her red mouth, a momentary softening of her features, this glimpse of youthful beauty.
“He sure did,” my brother said, patting me on the back. “This one’s full of great tricks.”
I blushed under her stare, and looked at her and the fly on a string that mystified me as much as Hilda did. Hilda was distracted by the fly in front of her, and I studied the part in her hair, the deep green flecks in her eyes, and wished the road would go on forever.
After camp, half the summer was left, so Edwin and I started working full-time at our father’s factory. Our first day, he gave us a tour of everything we’d seen hundreds of times. His office had a picture-frame window that looked down onto the factory floor. The glass furnace, rollers, and cooling tanks were against the far wall. The ribbon machines and assembly lines stood parallel to each other. Production flowed from end to end, then serpentined back in the other direction on the next line until the finished bulbs were ready to be packaged and stacked by the case for shipments. The window filtered out the noise of wheezing machinery and workers calling loudly to one another over the molding press tamping out copper bases for the lights. Once he formally showed us the entire factory, he started describing how Gerard and Annie Van Den Bosch ran the books, the ledgers; what each person in the office did. Then we moved to the factory with Ludo’s mother, Edward Fass, and dozens of others.
“Boys, if you’re going to understand this business, you’re going to learn it from the bottom up, not the other way around,”
he told us.
I tried to picture myself making this my life, standing behind the glass up in the office and watching the output of our own industry. We started by loading the cases of bulbs onto outgoing trucks. “This is when you protect all of the hard work that went into making them,” he said, showing us how to stack the boxes close and tight and to cover each pallet with padded cargo blankets.
“These are the first for our trial run for Volkswagen,” he pointed to a growing stack of light pallets. “A long way to go, but it’s a start.”
Then Edwin and I unloaded supply trucks, and filled and organized the warehouse supplies. When that was done, he had us follow Samuel around. Samuel stopped every ten paces and let his right arm flail up over his head and scribble some frantic thought in the air. He’d force out some inarticulate grunts that were drowned by the factory noises. On breaks that week, I followed Samuel up the cobblestone road from the harbor to a bench where he sat and fed the birds. Pigeons gathered around his feet, jumped into his lap, and settled on the back part of the bench as he crumbled old crusts in his palms. He looked calmer when he was with the birds. His spastic arm didn’t shoot up as often, but when it did the pigeons leapt away from him, and lingered for a moment in a wild flap of wings before falling back toward him. He had them tamed. Big shorebirds often swooped in and made off with large chunks of bread but he kicked his foot at those, preferring the oil sheen–ringed crowns of the pigeons.
After I followed Samuel around, Edwin and I were put on the assembly line to shadow the workers there. Most of the men on the line had hands too thick to do such delicate work. Edward Fass, who manned the first station, had a deep fishhook-shaped scar on his forearm that formed a meaty ridge. I stared at the scar as we screwed in copper bases.
“You’re going to learn it all,” my father told us, and he meant it. He had us getting more involved at his home laboratory too. He kept trying to create new lightbulbs, new chemicals, and new methods; his ambition seemed boundless.
Taking time away from drawing and painting drove Edwin wild, and he spent all his free time with his artwork. He had a book called Fish of the World, and he would pencil-sketch different fish, detailing each fish down to the scales, copying the models from the pages. Sometimes he’d add an extra fin, a change that was not noticeable, but just as often he’d add a set of arms or legs so the fish could easily crawl off the page and run across our room.
“Did you know fish never shut their eyes?” Edwin said while flipping through his book. “I’d like that. Not missing anything. To always be able to take everything in.”
At night, during a storm, Edwin was on his hands and knees leaning over the paper and drawing a giant picture of a fish swimming in a huge lightbulb. “That could be our family crest,” I said, admiring the details of his drawing as Fergus came in trailing the scent of damp fur, and began running around the room, howling in fear of the thunder.
“Oh god, Fergus. You stink,” Edwin said and pushed our dog away from him.
Fergus treated the woods as his buffet: dead birds, squirrels, and the occasional skunk carcass. Each in turn his body processed late at night, coming out one end or the other. Most of the time his wet heaving woke someone in time to shuffle him out back. If he ever found something too foul to eat, he rolled in it and came back stinking of animal feces, rancid meat, and swamp scum. Edwin and I had to take turns holding him and brushing away the filth and knotted burrs, but neither of us had bathed him in a long time.
Fergus howled again, and ran across the butcher paper, his claws tearing the paper before he retreated to some other corner of the house.
“Oh no,” I said, worried about his creation.
“That’s okay. I’ll make a better one next time,” Edwin said.
Our father constantly read the papers for news about Germany. While we were at camp, Volkswagen had given him a massive order to test his lights and ability to supply them. If everything went well, they would give him the majority of their business. He worried about getting the order ready. His clothes were wrinkled. His hair stood up as if licked against the grain. He looked nervous, though he kept his concerns from us. When Uncle Martin came over to visit or eat dinner, the two of them went into a separate room and whispered about what they should do if “the worst” happened.
Then, on September 1, our father spread a late edition newspaper onto the kitchen table while we ate dinner.
At 4:45 that morning, 1.5 million German troops invaded Poland along its three-thousand-kilometer border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea. The paper had a transcript of Hitler’s address to the Reichstag claiming the massive invasion was a defensive action.
“What does this mean?” Edwin asked.
My father paced the kitchen muttering. “We should have known better. That man was not to be trusted. Of course he wasn’t going to stand by the treaties.”
Edwin and I didn’t know what to make of the news. It would have been boys like Günter who crossed the border into Poland.
Over the next few days the papers said that France and England didn’t believe Hitler’s rationale for the invasion, and on September 3, 1939, they declared war on Germany.
“We are in the middle of this madness now,” my mother said. “We’ll have to leave, there’s no other choice.”
“Drika, I have sixty employees. That’s sixty families to tend to. I have to stay.”
“I don’t care. You have to ask what you care about. What’s important here?”
My father didn’t look at her, but at us.
My mother walked from the room and I followed to comfort her. She sat in the den on a bench next to her candle-making kit and looked out at her flowers. She made candles by dipping wicks into large cans of molten wax and letting them dry after each dip. They came out slender, tapered, and the color of tulip bouquets when she hung them from small nails on the wall.
“Can I do something for you, Mom?”
She looked at me and shook her head no. Her eyes were welling up, and I knew she had an expanding bubble in her chest that kept her from talking. I wanted to swallow her bubble of mute hurt and keep it buried in my gut so she could breathe easy.
She ran her finger under the drying candles, which touched one to the next like a faint wind chime.
“They add atmosphere to a home,” she’d said. Birthday cakes, summer meals, almost every room, and especially her and my father’s bedroom were covered in her candles, like she wanted to always see and be seen in light that swayed.
“Do you remember what you used to tell me about your flowers?” I asked and tapped on the glass to point at her garden.
She snorted and tried to smile.
To make sure Edwin and I wouldn’t pick her flowers she’d told us that forest pixies didn’t have cradles for their infants so at night lay them in the tulips to have the breeze rock them to sleep in the chalice of the bloom.
My father walked into the room. “Maybe I can have Martin take the three of you across the Channel if things get any worse.”
“Of course they’ll get worse. We’re between two countries at war, between all this madness,” my mother said.
My father was silent but held his arms out and she stood, walked to him, and let herself be folded into him.
Ludo, Edwin, Hilda, and I each took a box of extra lightbulb casings from our father’s lab, carried them out back to the fort we’d made from mildewed wooden factory pallets, and used them to play a war game where we treated the small glass casings as grenades. Fergus followed as we chased one another in circles through the forest. We pretended the bulbs held light inside of them as we arced them behind our backs and hurled them. When Edwin hit me square in the spine, the glass exploded, dropping me to my knees. Hilda ran up to me and kneeled by my side. She put her hands on my chest and her hair hung down and grazed my cheeks. Her rich smell—sweet grass, lilac,
sweat—fell over me, pinioned me. Pinioned, another of my father’s assigned vocabulary words. I tried to memorize her in this moment, how the sunshine gleamed along the palms of leaves overhead, down the sharp needles of the pine boughs. The world glowed as the image of her face made room for itself in my memory where it would move like a fish, fluid and glinting, down the river of my life.
Fergus howled and yelped every few feet among the trees. He stopped after a yowl, sat down, twisted behind himself, and jammed his back foot into his mouth as if trying to swallow it whole.
When we ran out of bulbs, we hid the empty boxes in the fort, said good night, and went home for dinner. Our mother was in the kitchen making the homemade noodles she used for casserole. Puffs of flour dusted the counter. She leaned into the wooden roller and flattened out sheets of dough. She cut the sheets lengthwise into small strips that she then draped over all the open cupboard doors. Raw dough noodles hung limp over everything, as if the shelves were bursting with food. The cupboard was stocked with molasses, rye, dry yeast in little tins with sealable glass lids, cloves, vinegar, dried fish, and chocolate bars my brother and I would nip when we thought they’d go unmissed.
“No, no, out, get out, take that stinky dog with you too,” she said, chasing us out with the roller raised over her head for show. When she was in the kitchen’s doorway she stopped and looked at the ground behind us. “What happened?”
Fergus had followed us through the front door, across the main entrance carpet, and into the kitchen where he walked in dainty little circles behind Edwin, who hadn’t noticed the small blotches of blood each paw print left behind.
5
After Germany invaded Poland, my father read the newspapers with greater fervor. He’d drop the tightly coiled paper on the table, and Edwin and I would scoop it up to read what little details there were about Russia and Germany dividing up Poland. We secretly wanted to be part of the army, but were confused why the Germans would do such a thing with the Bolshevik Russians everyone at camp had talked so poorly about. We read about England going to rations and evacuating cities, about Germany bombing Scapa Flow naval base in Scotland, and the British air attacks on the German navy. My father and Uncle Martin had charted and been practicing our escape plan for months.
