by Devin Murphy
I kneeled next to my supine mother, lifted the hem of her blue, flower-print dress, pressed the collar to my nose, and smelled it. Breathed it in. Everything in my body pounded like I was touching my own heart. I thought of my father holding the empty burlap sack in the water thinking it was Edwin, and only now felt I could relate to that kind of emptiness. Tears burst out of me. I tried to catch them in my fists but they spurt through my fingers. The thought of my mother lost to the cold water was too much.
“I can’t do this.”
“The ground is too frozen.”
“No. Go out with you, again. I want this all to stop.”
“We’re already on our way.”
I looked over the side of the ship. We were a hundred meters from the shore. “I need you to take me back.”
“No going back now,” he said.
“Uncle Martin. I can’t do this.”
He did not say anything; either he was not listening or he did not care.
“Why do we have to do this?” I said. A burning lump lodged in my throat. “It was the RAF who did this. They destroyed everything.”
Martin looked back at me. So many different expressions crossed his face I thought it would split open. Wet light filled his eyes. He had caused enough trouble in town that the Germans had set up a whole battalion here, and it was probably that massing that caught the RAF’s attention. He must have felt that burning responsibility, only increasing his rage. Some devil sat up inside me and, again, I saw what lay ahead of us. More men gunned down and boats sunk. More atrocities. He would continue to fracture the world into more ruined shards. I was certain then that my uncle was wired to explode, and I wanted no part picking up the leftover pieces.
“I need you to take me back.”
He kept steering the boat. My mother’s body, everything familiar to me, lay between us.
“Martin. I need you to take me back.”
“Sorry, Jacob.”
I didn’t know what to do. I felt that the Lighthouse Lady was pushing toward our deaths.
Make it out of this nightmare is what my mother had told me. Make it out of this nightmare.
I crawled on my hands and knees to my backpack, opened the drawstring on top, and reached inside until I felt the handle of the Luger.
“Uncle Martin,” I said and raised the barrel toward his back. “Uncle Martin.”
When he glanced back he did a double take and his eyes leveled on mine. I held his gaze. Something went out of him then. A ghost. He turned back to the water and his shoulders sank over the wheel.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, Jacob.”
He spun the wheel so that the boat started a slow arc back to the shore. I was crying. Still aiming at his back. If I fired, the bullet would have traveled over the body of my mother to find my last blood relative. I had been trained in many languages but had no word for such a feeling.
When we were close to the dock, I grabbed my backpack and stepped out of the wheelhouse.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed, as much to my mother as my uncle. There was no need to toss a line to the dock. I jumped off and the Lighthouse Lady finished its circle and headed back out to the Ems.
I stumbled through the woods back to my house.
There, Fergus wandered from room to room barking, then sat in front of the bathroom and started whimpering.
“Come on, boy. Come on, Fergus,” I called, but that only raised his volume to a howl. When I pulled him away by the scruff of the neck, he yanked free and started another lap of the house, barking into each room.
“Fergus. Fergus. Please come. Fergus. Come.” I kept calling but the dog did not stop and was half-crazed by fear or sadness and didn’t listen to me.
I was still bawling with big chest-heaving sighs as I emptied the giant bin of dog food on the floor where we had kept Fergus’s bowl. Then I propped the back door open for him.
“Come on, boy. Please.” I tried one last time. “Please,” but he didn’t come.
In the woods, at the fort, I left a note for my father between two slats of moldering planks, then walked to the rock Ludo had carved as a tombstone for Edwin. I heaped snow, leaves, and dirt on top of it until it was covered. Even if Ludo and his family were still alive, I’d never be able to look them in the eye after what I’d done to the pilot, even though the man’s presence could have gotten them killed.
I left the woods and walked past my house. Inside Fergus kept barking. This was my final look at my home. It was a beautiful house—almost opulent. My mother had once draped all the windows in great sheets of cloth that she had cut and sewn, making billowing curtains she could cast open to let in the light. It seemed, now, that there was no more light to let in.
I walked to town, past the spot where Hilda had lain huddled and beaten, past the flattened church where the priest’s, storyteller’s, and now organist’s voices were silent. In the harbormaster’s office the Germans were already setting up a new office. They had boats anchored offshore and were ferrying in men and supplies on motorized skiffs. I walked around the harbor until I found one of the men in charge. Uncle Martin had dealt with the man on almost all of his ferry trips, and the man had seen me with Martin aboard the Lighthouse Lady.
I’m not sure if I was thinking clearly in that moment, but there were certain facts, truths I was holding on to. The Dutch had drowned my brother and the Allies had killed my mother, and on the Allies’ behalf my father had sabotaged his safety and was forced into hiding. Hilda didn’t really care for me and Ludo didn’t trust me. My uncle would not belong to this world much longer with what he was doing. He would probably die soon—or continue—killing, killing some more. It was a conscious choice. So, so naïve, but conscious.
When I was in front of the German officer, the man looked at me. “Are you okay, son?” he asked.
“The Allies just killed my mother,” I said, not having any of the right words for what I felt.
The officer didn’t say anything.
It surprised me it was my voice, in my mouth, speaking again. “I’ll be eighteen soon,” I said, “but I’m ready now.”
THROWING AWAY THE OAR
15
I was taken to Kiel by train with written orders from the officer in Delfzijl explaining that I knew boats, was water-smart, and would be valuable to the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. The train heading across Germany stopped every ten or twenty kilometers and had to ease over the repaired sections of railroad that had been bombed, or pass through some check station, where cars were added or taken off. Each station was full of soldiers, thousands of them. The world was flooded with soldiers.
There were several officers on the train who were responsible for me and the other new recruits. The train ride took us through dense forest areas, a defense line with cement pillboxes for machine-gun nests, small towns that bore the scars of bombs cut through their cores, and rows of factories that had been covered by mesh tents and blacked-out windows. The whole country worked toward the war effort and on the train ride, I looked out at the German countryside and wondered why they needed more territory. Wasn’t this sprawling place enough?
In Kiel the officers on the train led me to a set of buses in the parking lot with more young men. It was all eerily similar to the movement of boys at the youth camp.
The buses took us to the naval training base north of the city. The base had a large open field, rows of barracks and office buildings, and a port with ships and several U-boats docked inside the break wall. The U-boats were identical to the one Uncle Martin had sunk. The one I helped sink. When the buses unloaded, all the new recruits lined up on the open field. Soldiers organized us in rows and we dropped our bags at our feet and stood straight with our arms at our sides. Like being at the shore during camp years before, I wondered what brought all these boys here, what faith or failure had delivered them.
An officer wearing a long leather jacket that smelled of pipe tobacco marched up and down the lines inspecting everyone. Though he wa
s well into his sixties, he still had the firm build of a laborer. His thinning silver hair was cut close and combed slick to his head. Tong marks dented his skull, each a shadowed crease above his ears where the forceps yanked him into the world. Medallions hung off his pressed uniform, which looked like it restrained him from swinging an axe, or tossing concrete blocks from pile to pile and other motions befitting his build. In the full daylight, his smoky blue eyes pinched at the corners and sharpened his direct gaze. His presence unnerved me from the start, and perhaps that was how he commanded such attention.
“I am Lieutenant-Major Erich Oldif, commander of Kiel Training Station, and you are Crew X-41B.” His Adam’s apple jumped up and down in his throat as he spoke. “You will be trained in body, mind, and spirit in order to make your proper contributions to your Fatherland. Your time has come, so be proud of who you are and where you’re from.” As he spoke, a soft purple vein wobbled on his forehead and wormed into his right dent.
Major Oldif’s officers called out our names and led us to a supplies building, where we were issued uniforms and identification books, then shown to our bunks. The bunks were long tent houses with wood-burning stoves at each end. The forty bunks each had a wooden chest at the foot of it.
The blue service suit we were given contained a jacket, a pair of trousers, a white and blue shirt, a shirt collar with three stripes, a silk neckerchief, gray gloves, lace-up black boots, and a cap. The men around me put on the neckerchief, as well as golden badges, which signified rank and went on the left shoulder. The uniform was similar to that of the men in the U-boat Uncle Martin and I had destroyed. I could see those men again, their shadow forms waiting in the dark; I knew what they never saw coming.
For our first three weeks in Kiel, we recruits were put through basic military training, calisthenics, small arms and rifle work, first aid, and land strategies. It all seemed so familiar. In that short intense time of training, there was no time to dwell on crushing loss after loss, which is what I needed.
The major showed up throughout the day and shouted at the training officers and my group. The dents in his head flushed with the reddish purple flow of blood. We were awakened at five in the morning, marched and run around all day, and fed twice. My weight whittled until I became a thin rope of muscle, hard hands, and mean, knobby elbows. Despite my outer toughness and the growing inner swamp of anger fueling me, I was terrified of the major. When he decided to ride us harder, or call me specifically a “puny bitch of a man” or “Dutch dog,” I tried to hold his gaze but I always found myself blinking uncontrollably.
“You stank-filled gut snake. Hold your weapon higher. Tuck in your shirt. Kick your heel up higher when you march. Fall in line—move.” The odor of tobacco drifted from his clothes.
“Did you know that the Dutch language is a disease of the throat? All those phlegmy words,” the major said so everyone around could hear.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Major.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes. Major,” I screamed.
His bladed face was as lined as an autumn leaf. Loose skin around his jowls gave him a second chin that hung down like a shriveled turkey neck.
The major smoked long cigarettes and flicked the stumps, which arched like smoking orange bugs, into the snow. Burnt butts littered the training grounds, and there was a special detail to make rounds and clean them up. At the back part of the grounds, there were bullet-riddled barrels used for target practice. The major walked behind us as we fired. If he felt he needed to, he’d bend down next to us and instruct us how to hold the stock of the rifle taut against our shoulders to steady the shot, or how to spray the muzzle of a machine gun back and forth to level a target.
During my fourth week of training, I walked into my barracks at the end of the day and saw a tall soldier sitting on my bunk.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Oh,” the man said. Then he looked at me for a long moment. He had a gap in his wide front teeth, and wore an ensign’s uniform like me but with more stripes on his shoulders. “I heard Major Oldif barking at some ‘Dutch dog’ on the parade grounds today, and I thought you looked familiar. I looked up the names of the recruits and saw my old charioteer’s name there.”
“Pauwel,” I said. His words somehow transformed the unknown features of his face into my old friend with those dark, exotic eyes, and square teeth. He was lean, and had no traces of the baby fat that hung off him several years before. He had grown over a quarter meter and stood with a confidence that seemed like a new coat on him.
“What, you don’t remember standing on my back?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t expect to know anyone here.”
“Well, neither did I, but here we are. Good to see you, Jacob. How’s your brother?”
I sat on the bunk next to Pauwel. I let my arms rest on my knees and my head drop between my legs. Seeing someone I knew before I lost my family and then thinking of Edwin was too much. Winged sorrow sliced through my chest. “He went missing a few years ago.”
“Wait, what?” He went silent for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Ludo?” he asked.
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.
Already, I could tell that my memory would no longer be a solid picture but a mosaic. Edwin biking down Junfanger Street. The sun ablaze in Hilda’s hair as she walked the strand at Einflound Beach. Ludo lobbing a lightbulb through the trees. The long strides of my father across the cobbles of market square. My mother’s soft palms bedding down the pixies in her tulip bed. My uncle pulling up nets from the Mulway shoals. The memories of each of them came easily, but when I let up, each image was an origami bird lifted up to a strong wind.
After that first month, my training shifted from mostly physical to classroom work. Between lectures, Pauwel joined me for meals in the dining hall if he was not out on a training trip or sea trials. The dining hall was a long wooden building covered in the red and black Nazi flags. A mess line separated the kitchen from the rows of tables and folding chairs. It smelled like boiled cabbage and mud dragged in from an army of boots. When the room was full of ensigns, wearing the same clothes and all eating the same food, there was a current of a common goal that moved everyone, our training was brought about with an unquestioned intensity. Several nights during those first few weeks, we assembled in the dining hall for speeches and patriotic singing. Afterward we sang the songs we wanted, and the men started up with their own chorus of the “Lili Marlene” song, which had been playing on the Radio Belgrade station in the bunkhouses. We all sang together:
Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate,
Darling I remember the way you used to wait.
’Twas there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me, you’d always be,
My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene.
There was a three-day artillery school, and a twenty-hour course in submarine subjects covering the fundamentals of positive and negative floatation, how to blow and fill the ballast tanks, use of the horizontal rudder, bow fins, diesel engines, and storage batteries. We followed this with training patrols on small minesweepers and U-boats. Tactical instruction on torpedo firing was followed by antisubmarine-warfare lectures and a day spent in a deep-sided, aboveground pool training in the use of escape apparatus to get out of sinking submarines. This expertise explained why Uncle Martin circled the sunken U-boat with a spotlight and a gun in his hands. In the pool we practiced with valves and equalizing pressures, and then moved on to sea survival: how to keep afloat if adrift, and then deal with hypothermia.
I was good at remembering everything and thought, This could be what I become, what I am meant to be—a soldier, a sailor.
After the basics of seafaring, Major Oldif picked me along with several other ensigns to do another round of training. “Our success depends on stealth,” he kept saying. And, “The U-boat is the most successful conveyor of torpedoes.�
� The main point of the second round was to learn underwater maneuvering. First, we learned the principles on a submerged steering trainer, which led us to go out in real boats. For a while it felt like days swirled into each other, and I’d been smothered by a giant bomb of information. I liked how busy they kept me, as whenever there was downtime, my mind would get caught on the same loop of broken memories. There were days I wouldn’t think of anyone by sheer act of will, but then I’d touch the loose cloth of a curtain or smell the hint of crushed garlic in the air, and it was as if I was standing in the living room of my childhood home, and then I’d have to experience everyone I loved disappearing once more.
The few hours at night I did sleep were spent dodging those images or crawling from my bunk and walking around the base. There were mandatory blackouts at night. Everything was dark. I wished the war would be over and there could be lights burning again, as many as could be made. Lights meant for reading and prayers and families, and the last moments of night before sleep. My father, a good man, could come back to his factory and continue to light Europe and spin thousands of stories under that light.
One night, on a walk with Pauwel, we moved among the shadowy figures of guards on their rounds, the menacing fingers of searchlights snapped on and sliced up the great inky blackness of the sky. We watched as a bomber was caught in a cone of light and flack fire opened up all around it. The tail burst apart and the nose of the plane dipped, and its fiery, orange descent streaked across the air. I thought of Herbert Yarborough, screaming through a spinning terror of a free fall. Three parachutes blossomed white beneath the flame, but they disappeared in the darkness soon after deploying.
“What unlucky bastards,” Pauwel said.
We kept walking around the compound and a feral little dog came running up to us. When I bent down to pet it, Pauwel stepped back and said, “Don’t touch that. It’s filthy.”
“You don’t like dogs?” I asked, petting the little brindle mutt on its matted fur. I missed Fergus very much.
