by Joseph Kanon
“I’ve come for the files,” he said.
“How did you know?” Professor Brandt said as Jake started to read.
They were sitting at a table with a single lamp, a pool of light just wide enough for the pages but not their faces, so that his voice seemed disembodied.
“He told them at Kransberg you were dead,” Jake said absently, trying to concentrate. “What possible reason could he have, unless he didn’t want them to find you? Didn’t want to take the chance—”
“That I would tell them,” he said. “I see. He thought that.”
“Maybe he thought they’d search.” He turned a page, a report from Mittelwerks in Nordhausen, another piece missing from the Document Center. Not cross-referenced, never handed over-the missing part of the story, like Renate’s child. “Why did he leave them with you?”
“He didn’t know how bad it was in Berlin, how far the Russians had come. Not just the east, almost a circle. Only Spandau was open, but for how long? A rumor, that’s all. Who knew? It was possible he wouldn’t get out-I thought so myself. If they were captured—”
“So he hid them with you. In case. Did you read them?”
“Later, yes. I thought he had died, you see. I wanted to know.”
“But you didn’t destroy them?”
“No. I thought, someday it’s important. They’ll lie, all of them. ‘We had nothing to do with it.’ Even now they- I thought, someone has to answer for this. It’s important to know.”
“But you didn’t turn them over, either.”
“Then you told me he was living. I couldn’t. He’s my son, you understand. Still.”
He paused, causing Jake to look up. In his dressing gown he seemed frail, no longer held together by the formal suit, but the scrawny neck was erect, as if the old high collar were still in place. “Was it wrong? I don’t know, Herr Geismar. Maybe I kept them for you. Maybe they answer to you.” He turned away. “And now it’s done-you have them. So take them, please. I don’t want them in my house anymore. You’ll excuse me, I’m tired.”
“Wait. I need your help. My German isn’t good enough.”
“For that? Your German is adequate. The problem, maybe, is believing what you read. It’s just what it says. Simple German.” He made a small grimace. “The language of Schiller.”
“Not the abbreviations. They’re all technical. Here’s von Braun, requesting special workers. French, is that right?”
“Yes, French prisoners. The SS supplied the list from the campsengineering students, machinists. Von Braun made his selection from that. The construction workers, it didn’t matter, one shovel’s as good as another. But the precision work-“ He looked over to the word Jake was pointing at. ”Die cutter.“
“So he was there.”
“Of course he was there. They all went there, to inspect, to supervise. It was their factory, you understand, the scientists. They saw it, Herr Geismar. Not space, all those dreams. They saw this. You see the other letter, from Lechter, where he says the disciplinary measures are having an unfortunate effect? The workers don’t like to see men hanging-it slows production. Exact words. His solution? Hang them off-site. Yes, and Lechter complains that on the last visit some of his colleagues were taken to an area where cholera had broken out. Couldn’t this be prevented in the future? Visitors should be taken to safe areas only. To risk the health—” He stopped, clearing his throat. “Would you like some water?” he said, getting up, an obvious excuse to leave the table.
Jake turned another page, hearing the water run behind him. A memo requesting a transfer back to Peenemunde for a Dr. Jaeger, proof that he’d been there, a carbon for the files, evidence for Bernie. Just paper. Was anyone not compromised? Drinking brandy at Kransberg, waiting for visas. But how much had Tully known? He realized for the first time, a Gunther point, that no one had actually seen the files but Professor Brandt. Tully must have left the center as frustrated as Jake had been, all the way to Berlin for an incomplete story.
“Here’s Emil,” he said, turning to a page filled with figures.
“Yes,” Professor Brandt said over his shoulder, “the estimates. The estimates.” He shuffled back to his chair.
“But of what? What’s this?” Jake pointed to one of the sets of numbers.
“Calories,” Professor Brandt said quietly, not looking, clearly familiar with the paper.
“Eleven hundred,” Jake said, stuck on the math. “That’s calories?” He looked over at the old man. “Tell me.”
Professor Brandt took a sip of water. “Per day. At eleven hundred calories per day, how long would a man survive? Depending on the original body weight. You see the series on the left. If it fell-to nine hundred, say-the factors average out to sixty. Sixty days-two months. But of course it’s not exact. The variables are not in the numbers. In the
¦ men. Some more, some less. They die at their own speed. But it’s useful, the average. You can calculate how many calories it would take to extend it, say, for another month. But they never extended it. The work in the first month, before they weakened, was actually more productive than any extension. The table near the bottom demonstrates that. There was no point in keeping them alive unless they were specialists. The numbers prove it.“ He looked up. ”He was right. I checked the math. The second page shows how much to increase rations for skilled workers. I think, you know, that he was using this to persuade them to allow more food, but I can’t be sure. The others died to the formula. An average only, but accurate. He based them on actual numbers from the previous month. Not a difficult exercise.“
He interrupted himself for another sip, then continued, a teacher working through a long blackboard proof. “The others also. Simple. Time of assembly, units per twenty-four-hour period. You don’t have to look, I remember them all. Optimum number of workers per line. Sometimes they had too many. The assembly was complicated- better to have one skilled set of hands than three men who didn’t know what they were doing. He proves this somewhere. You would think, common sense, but evidently they liked to see this. In numbers. These were the kinds of problems they had him working on.”
Jake looked at the paper, not saying anything, letting Professor Brandt collect himself as he drank the last of the water.
“He must have done other work, not just this.”
“Yes, of course. It’s a great achievement, technically. You can see that. The mathematics involved, the engineering. Every German can be proud.” He shook his head. “Dreams of space. This is what they were worth. Eleven hundred calories a day.”
Jake flicked through the remaining pages, then closed the folder and stared at it. Not just Emil, most of the team.
“You’re surprised?” Professor Brandt said quietly. “Your old friend?”
Jake said nothing. Just numbers on paper. Finally he looked up at Professor Brandt, the simple, inadequate question. “What happened to everybody? ”
“You want to know that?” Professor Brandt said, nodding, then paused. “I don’t know. I asked too. Who were these children? Our children? And what’s my answer? I don’t know.“ He glanced away, toward the stuffed bookshelves. ”My whole life I thought it was something apart, science. Everything else is lies, but not that. So beautiful, numbers. Always true. If you understand them, they explain the world. I thought that.“ He looked back at Jake. ”I don’t know,“ he said, exhaling it, a gasp. ”Even the numbers they ruined. Now they don’t explain anything.“
He reached over and picked up the folder. “You said you were his friend. What will you do with this?”
“You’re his father. What would you do?”
Professor Brandt brought it closer to his chest, so that involuntarily Jake started to reach out his hand. A few pieces of paper, the only proof Bernie would ever have.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Professor Brandt said. “It’s just that-I want you to take it. If I see him again, I don’t want to say I gave it up. You took it.”
Jake gripped the file and pulled
it firmly out of the old man’s hands. “Does it really make any difference?”
“I don’t know. But I can say it, I didn’t give them away, him and his friends. I can say that.”
“All right.” Jake hesitated. “It’s the right thing, you know.”
“Yes, the right thing,” Professor Brandt said faintly.
He drew himself up, erect, then moved away from the light, just a voice again.
“And you’ll tell Lena? That it wasn’t me?” He paused. “If she stops coming, you see, there’s no one.”
He didn’t have to tell her anything. She was asleep on the bed, clothed, the boy next to her. He closed the door and sank down on the lumpy couch to read through the file again, even more dismayed than before, time enough now to see the picture fill up with its grisly details, each one a kind of indictment. Valuable to Bernie, but to who else? Is that what Tully intended to sell? But why would Sikorsky want it? The simple answer was that he didn’t-he wanted the scientists, busily making their deals with Breimer, each page in the file a pointing finger that they thought had gone away. Valuable to them.
He lay back with his arm over his eyes, thinking about Tully, a business in persilscheins before Kransberg, selling releases at Bensheim, sometimes selling them twice. Crooks followed a pattern-what worked once worked again. And these were better than persilscheim, as valuable as a ticket out. Deplorable things might have happened, but there was nothing to involve them but pieces of paper, something worth paying for.
When he awoke, it was light and Lena was at the table, staring straight ahead, the closed file in front of her.
“Did you read it?” he said, sitting up.
“Yes.” She pushed the file aside. “You made notes. Are you going to write about this?”
“They’re points to verify at the Document Center. To prove it all fits.“
“Prove to whom?” she said vacantly, then stood up. “Do you want some coffee?“
He watched her light the gas ring and measure out the coffee, going through the ordinary motions of the morning ritual as if nothing had happened.
“Did you understand them? I can explain.”
“No, don’t explain anything. I don’t want to know.”
“You have to know.”
She turned away to face the stove. “Go wash. The coffee will be ready in a minute.”
He got up and went over to the table, glancing down at the folder, caught off balance by her reaction.
“Lena, we need to talk about this. What’s in here—”
“Yes, I know. Terrible things. You’re just like the Russians. ‘Look at the film. See how terrible you are, all you people. What you did in the war.’ I don’t want to look anymore. The war’s over.”
“This isn’t the war. Read it. They starved people to death, watched them die. That’s not the war, that’s something else.”
“Stop it,” she said, raising her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to hear it. Emil didn’t do those things.”
“Yes, he did, Lena,” he said quietly. “He did.” “How do you know? Because of that paper? How do you know what they ordered him to do? What he had to do? Look at Renate.”
“You think it’s the same? A Jew in hiding? They would’ve murdered—”
“I don’t know. Neither do you. He had to protect his family tooit could be. They took families. Maybe to protect me and Peter—”
“You don’t really believe that, do you? Read it.” He flung open the folder. “Read it. He wasn’t protecting you.”
She looked down. “You want me to hate him. It’s not enough for you that I’m with you? You want me to hate him too? I won’t. He’s my family, what’s left of it. He’s all that’s left.”
“Read it,” Jake said evenly. “This isn’t about us.”
“No?”
“No. It’s about some guy in Burgstrasse with blood all over his hands. I don’t even know who he is anymore. Not anyone I know.”
“Then let him tell you. Let him explain. You owe him that.”
“Owe him? As far as I’m concerned, he can rot in Burgstrasse. They’re welcome to him.”
He looked at her stricken expression and then, angry at himself for being angry, left the room, closing the bathroom door with a thud. He splashed water on his face and rinsed his mouth, as sour as his mood. Not about them, except for her unexpected defense, guilty with an explanation, what everyone in Berlin said, now even her. Two lines in the cards. Still here, even after the file.
He came back to find her standing where he had left her, staring at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded, not saying anything, then turned, poured out the coffee, and brought it to the table. “Sit,” she said, “it’ll get cold.” A haus-frau gesture, to signal it was over.
But when he sat down, she stood next to the table, her face still troubled. “We can’t leave him there,” she said softly.
“You think he’ll be better off in an Allied prison? That’s what this means, you know. They try people for this.” He put his hand on the folder.
“I won’t leave him there. You don’t have to do it. I will. Tell your friend Shaeffer,” she said, her voice flat.
He looked up at her. “I just want to know one thing.”
She met his gaze. “I chose you,” she said.
“Not that. Not us. Just so I know. Do you believe what’s in here? What he did?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, barely audible.
He flipped open the cover and turned the pages, then pointed to one of the tables.
“This is how long it takes—”
“Don’t.”
“Sixty days, more or less,” he said, unable to stop. “These are the death rates. Still want to get him out?”
He looked up to find that her eyes had filled, turning to him with a kind of mute pleading.
“We can’t leave him there. With them,” she said.
He went back to the page with its spiky typed numbers and pushed it away. Two lines.
They avoided each other most of the morning, afraid to start in again, while she tended to Erich and he worked up the rest of his notes about Renate for Ron. The story they all had to have, but at least his would be first, ready to send. At noon Rosen turned up and examined the boy. “It’s a question of food only,” he said. “Otherwise he’s healthy.” Jake, relieved at the interruption, gathered up his papers, eager to get away, but to his surprise Lena insisted on coming along, leaving Erich with one of Danny’s girls.
“I have to go to the press camp first,” he said. “Then we can see Fleischman.”
“No, not Fleischman,” she said, “something else,” and then didn’t say anything more, so they drove without talking, drained of speech.
The press camp, depleted after Potsdam, was quiet except for the poker game. Jake took only a minute to drop off the notes, grabbing two beers from the bar on his way out.
“Here,” he said at the jeep, handing her one.
“No, I don’t want it,” she said, not sullen but melancholy, like the overcast skies. She directed him toward Tempelhof, and as they got nearer, her mood grew even darker, nothing in her face but a grim determination.
“What’s at the airport?”
“No, beyond. The kirchhof. Keep going.”
They entered one of the cemeteries that sprawled north of Tempelhof.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to visit. Stop over there. No flowers, do you notice? No one has flowers now.”
What he saw instead were two GIs with a POW work party, digging a long row of graves.
“What gives?” he said to one of the GIs. “Expecting an epidemic?”
“Winter. Major says they’re going to drop like flies once the cold sets in. Get it done before the ground freezes.”
Jake looked beyond a cluster of tombstones to another set of fresh graves, then another, the whole cemetery pockmarked with waiting holes.
Peter’s
was a small marker, no bigger than a piece of rubble, set in a scraggly patch of ground.
“They don’t keep it up,” Lena said. “I used to take care of it. And then I stopped coming.”
“But you wanted to come today,” Jake said, uneasy. “This is about Emil, isn’t it?”
“You think you know everything he did,” she said, looking at the marker. “Before you judge him, maybe you should know this too.”
“Lena, why are we doing this?” he said gently. “It doesn’t change anything. I know he had a child.”
She kept looking at the marker, quiet, then turned to him. “Yours. He had yours. It was your child.”
“Mine?” he said, an involuntary word to fill the space, taken up now by a kind of dizziness, an absurd rush of elated surprise, almost goofy, caught off guard in some cartoon of waiting rooms and cigars. In a graveyard. He looked away. “Mine,” he said, guarded again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? To make you sad? If he had lived-I don’t know. But he didn’t.”
“But how-you’re sure?”
A disappointed half-smile. “Yes. I can count. You don’t have to be a mathematician for that.”
“Emil didn’t know?”
“No. How could I tell him that? It never occurred to him.” She turned back to the marker. “To count.”
Jake ran his hand through his hair, at a loss, not sure what to say next. Their child. He thought of her face in the church basement while he read. The way it would have been.
