“We can both tell her,” said Amelia, reaching across the table.
I took her hand but dismissed her suggestion. What I needed her to do now was get to the rectory and arrange with Father Anton a very private burial at the cemetery just outside of town in our family plot before daybreak. I couldn’t be seen in the streets, as I was a deserter and faced arrest. Amelia agreed without hesitation.
After putting a distraught and near faint Hanna back to bed and then getting dressed, Amelia followed me to the rear of the house, where a solid wooden door led to a small gravel courtyard and a vegetable patch behind it. I’d parked the Kübelwagen back there to keep it out of sight.
“Where is he?” she asked with a shaky voice as we approached the car. Paul’s body lay crumpled in the back. Amelia peered inside and gave out a tiny shriek before catching herself. “Oh! Just look at him!” she cried. “Oh poor dear Pauli! I’m so very sorry!”
But there was no time. I needed to get to my parents’ house to give them the devastating news. Then I needed to go to the church on the edge of town and wait. Amelia would take the car and my brother to the priest right now. Darkness was our only defense, for it would have been an odd sight to see her driving a vehicle with military markings, even if no one noticed a dead Jagdflieger in the back seat. I remembered her letter. I knew the SS were watching her. I just prayed not all the time. I desperately needed my luck, as it were, to hold.
Amelia, a faithful member of the parish, had worked with the old monsignor, Father Anton, to raise money to re-shingle the rectory. Now she would call in a favor.
We parted ways. Amelia started the engine and pulled the vehicle onto the blacked-out street and drove off. I stood like a specter in the shadows of her vegetable garden and listened. The engine faded, but there was no other sound. No one seemed to be awake at this hour. And if so, it was just an auto making its way through the streets early to avoid pedestrian traffic…and bombs. Satisfied that she was safe, I snaked my silent way down the narrow side streets to my home.
It was my father who opened the door. Gruff, in his trousers and suspenders, his shirt wrinkled and with dark circles under his eyes. A half-finished snifter of schnapps sat on the end table in the parlor by the dormant fireplace where we’d last talked so freely about the war. He’d fallen asleep in his favorite chair while listening to a phonograph of Grieg that spun and hissed on the turntable. Seeing him made me wonder what was worse in a time of war—being in the fighting yourself or having someone you love do it while you sit home, helpless and in the dark as to their fate. Your stomach sinking every time there’s a knock at the door. Afraid to receive any notice from the post, as it could be a black note. But now his days of wondering about his sons were at an end. When he saw me at the threshold in my flight suit, he knew immediately.
“Papa,” I stammered and stepped into the house. He closed the door and followed me inside.
When I turned to face him, he bowed his head and exhaled with a pained expression in his eyes. “When?” he asked me. I was unable to even speak. “When?!” he asked again, more forcefully.
“Yesterday morning,” I said in a voice I did not recognize.
His face fell and his eyes glazed with tears. Reeling into the parlor, he collapsed back in his chair and buried his face in his hands. I saw his body quaking. So many memories must have flashed through him in an instant. Paul’s birth, his first words, his first steps. The first time he kicked a football. The way my father would watch the two of us squeal with delight as we wrestled on the grass during family picnics. Those crisp autumn Sundays when we all strolled as a family to church. Snowmen and sleigh rides. Those wonderful, secure moments when we all sat huddled around the fireplace in the deepest Bavarian winters with the winds whistling through the narrow streets outside our door. We were happy then. And my father had just learned he would never preside over that happy family again. So many memories, yet no more to be made. The book on his second son was abruptly closed, with so many pages that would forever go unwritten.
He was positively weighed down with the intense grief. “How?”
“American fighters,” I said, kneeling down in front of him as if in a pose of contrition. “Oh Papa, I tried! I tried but there was no way. There were just too many. We even got two of them. But there were just so many of them!”
His took me in his arms and gave me a bear hug, patting me on the back as he would when I was a boy. “I know, Son,” he whispered. “I know.”
He then eased me back with his hands on my shoulders and gave me a forgiving nod. “You didn’t kill him. I think we both know who killed him.”
I nodded, fully understanding his objections to all that was happening for the first time since the Nazis had come to power just ten short years ago. I gave him the details on how I had recovered his son’s body and brought him here so he and Mama could say goodbye. At dawn, I told him, if all went as Amelia thought, Paul should be with Father Anton and Gregor and we’d have his burial.
“Such an early service?” he asked, confused. “Why so hasty? We need time for a proper viewing. People will want to pay their resp—”
“I left my base against orders,” I said, cutting him off. I told him of my confrontation with Major Seebeck. His face showed concern. “I’ll be okay,” I assured him with a lie. He remained unconvinced. “I just need to figure out what to do next. I have friends in the Luftwaffe. My squadron. Major Trautloft. Maybe even Göring himself. My record speaks volumes. Knight’s Cross. Over one hundred victories. And I left because of…Pauli. I’m too valuable to lose with the way the war’s going. But I can’t stay in Stauffenberg. I have to leave right after the service.”
He swallowed hard. “I understand. Thank you for bringing him home, Harmon. That was the right thing to do. Orders be damned at this point. And yet why do I feel like there’s more to this?” he questioned me with a knowing gaze. Karl Becker may have been the smartest man I ever knew.
I debated revealing the truth I knew of Stauffenberg’s last Jews, but I decided there was no reason to put him in danger. He was a good man, but not a crusader. So I told him my tale only.
He seemed okay with that. Then he cast a sad look to the ceiling. There was a shuffling of feet. Soft, feminine. A falsetto voice drifted down the narrow staircase.
“Karl?” I heard a voice. “Who are you talking to?”
How does one tell a mother that her youngest son is dead?
My mother fell to the dusty wood floor when told the news by us both. “No! No! It cannot be true!” she protested, bordering on hysterics. “Please, God no! Oh please…my baby…” Then she curled up in a pathetic fetal position with her face buried in her fists. “Why? Why?” she kept asking no one in particular. My father knelt down and tried to hoist her up, but she shook him off. “Schatz!” he whispered to her, calling her by a pet name I hadn’t heard him say in years. “Get up off that floor! You must be strong.”
She looked up from her fists. “Damn you and your strength! My son is dead! How am I supposed to be strong?” She slammed her forehead with her palms. I stepped forward, fearing that she’d gone temporarily insane with grief.
My father comforted her by sharing her pain. “He was my son too,” he said. With that she regained her self-control. This was not her burden alone. She held out her trembling hand, and he took it in his iron grip. With a tenderness I’d never seen before in a man so stolid, Karl Becker pulled his wife off the floor and smothered her in his arms. They held each other while I lingered like a voyeur. Even in such an agonizing moment as this, I saw the strength in the bond that had sustained their marriage for so many years, from the end of one war, through the turbulent times of a country reinventing itself in a more sinister form, to the horrors of sending their children off to fight the world. If I survived, I vowed to have such a marriage with Amelia. If I even made it out of Stauffenberg, that was. And that thought quickly snappe
d me back to another unpleasant reality.
I gave them a few more minutes to comfort each other. But the purple light creeping through the front window told me we had to move. I could only hope Amelia had made the arrangements.
I heard the Kübelwagen pull up to the curb outside, its brakes making a deafening squeal that I thought for sure would wake up the entire Main valley. But it was fear heightening my senses. Amelia stayed outside in the idling vehicle.
“We must go,” I said.
“To where?” sobbed my mother, confused.
“I’ll explain on the way,” said Papa.
I gave them a moment to get dressed. I felt so cruel doing this to them, but if they wanted their son buried properly before I was arrested, this was the only way. War is cruel. In my insubordinate state, my only hope was to get back to base before Seebeck sent the Luftwaffe authorities to find me here. What I didn’t know was that Seebeck had something much more dangerous in mind for me.
47
Father Anton Hackl was a lanky, leathery man, nearing his eightieth year. He stood atop a lone hill with a crisp mountain breeze blowing his priest’s robe like a luffing mainsail, scattering his few strands of white hair. From his perch he could trace a small path winding its way through the cemetery headstones and out a stone archway. The road disappeared over the crest of the hill and then re-appeared a half mile farther down as a gravel lane tracing the curves of the Main until it entered Stauffenberg. From up here the village appeared in the orange light of dawn as a collection of terra cotta and white rectangles, dominated on the far end by the towering Rathaus. As the sleepy village began to stir, little figures, early risers, moved in the stony square of the Himmelplatz, which from this distance looked small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. To our backs opposite the town, the hills undulated in waves of blue until they disappeared in the mist, only to pop up again far to the south and west as jagged, snow-capped peaks. It promised to be a beautiful summer day like those I had known so many times as a child of these hills.
Gathered around Father Anton stood an allegory of despair. Four weathered sheep come to mourn the youngest member of their flock. Dressed in black and standing over the fresh grave of their son, Karl and Greta Becker had aged ten years in one morning. Still in my grimy flight suit and boots, I stood next to them, not even registering the words of the priest as he rambled on about God and country and the better place in which my brother now resided. Amelia stood at my side, her hand cupped in my forearm, and openly wept. Gregor, the priest’s giant, neckless mountain of a nephew, too mentally feeble to serve in the Wehrmacht, had dug the grave in an incredibly short time. He stood with his hat reverently over his sweaty and dirt-stained shirt, his head bowed deep in prayer.
“Harmon?” I heard in the fog far away. “Harmon, my son, you’re next.” What? I’m next for what? I snapped my head up and bore my eyes straight into the soft brown of Father Anton’s, hidden behind folds of crinkled skin. He offered me a flower to lay on Paul’s coffin. I came to my wits and took it from him robotically. Stepping up to the casket, which lay next to Gregor’s freshly dug ditch, I tossed it unceremoniously on the pine box, which the priest had the foresight to order in bulk. Only a carved swastika disturbed its smooth, unvarnished sides.
My mother approached from the other side with her husband just behind her. She gazed in bewildered anguish at the plain coffin. She knelt down, her rosary cupped in her trembling hand, and laid her smooth cheek against the wood as if trying to hear a faint heartbeat. She rubbed the surface in small circles in one final maternal gesture of comfort, like she would often rub his back when he crawled into their bed during a particularly violent thunderstorm. Her motion probably brought one such memory reeling back to her, because she grimaced as if in physical pain and then wailed anew. In a now familiar pattern, my father took her by the shoulders and led her away from her son’s grave to a little copse of trees on the crest of the hill.
Father Anton approached me. “We must leave now,” he cautioned. “There may be Allied aircraft who would love nothing more than to strafe even this solemn gathering. God have mercy on them.”
That’s not all who may be coming, I thought, but kept that to myself. Instead I thanked the priest for his help, and gave both him and his nephew a five-Reichsmark note. Gregor would wait for the rest of the gravediggers to arrive before lowering the coffin into the ground.
Father Anton bowed. “I’m sorry for your loss, my son. Truly I am.” He adjusted his frock, called for Gregor, and walked up to Amelia.
“I can’t thank you enough, Father” she said through her sobs. He took her hand.
“I try to do God’s work. Even in times like these when I wonder if He has abandoned this world.”
That was that. In a moment of anti-climax, my grim quest had been fulfilled. If only my mission to protect him in the air had been so successful, I thought.
I watched the priest and his simple ward slowly make their way east into the rising sun towards the cemetery gatehouse, which sat just below the crest of the hill. Only the roof and chimney were visible over the edge. As they sunk behind the ridgeline, I saw to their right another figure rising up. I couldn’t make out exactly who it was in the morning glare, but the uniform was unmistakable. My stomach buckled. The Luftwaffe was coming to arrest me.
I looked around and spied my parents sitting under the shade of the trees. I hoped whoever this was would give me a chance to say goodbye to them before taking me away.
Amelia took my hand and squeezed it hard. “Harmon?” she said. “Are you in so much trouble that they would come for you at your own brother’s funeral?”
I looked at her anxiously. “I guess I am.” Should I run? I did indeed entertain the thought as the Luftwaffe officer approached me. But if he’d come to arrest me, why was he alone? I shielded my eyes trying to get a better look at him. There was something familiar in his cocky gait. This was no adjutant pencil-pusher but a combat flier. A notion flashed through my mind, but I dismissed it as silly. Yet as he got closer to me I recognized his face, surrounded by a halo of emerging sunlight.
“Josef,” I said with audible relief. Amelia looked on with curiosity that for a moment shut out her sorrow. I, too, felt a weight lifting. “I’m so glad you’re in one piece.”
With a deep look of concern, my wingman stopped a mere five paces from me. He slapped his heels and threw his arm up in a salute. “Heil Hitler,” he said robotically.
His formality took me aback. I struggled to even reply and flipped up my wrist in a minimalist gesture. “Okay. Heil Hitler. Why so formal, Josef? And more to the point, what are you doing here?”
He stood at ease. “I’ve been trying to find you, Herr Captain.”
“You flew down?”
“Yes. I was told this is the only cemetery.”
We looked at each other for a painful moment of silence. Something had changed in him. Or so I thought. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was I who had changed. First Lieutenant Josef Mueller was still fighting the war. I wasn’t.
“I’m so sorry, Harmon,” he then said with compassion. “I lost your brother.”
I emphatically shook my head. “No, Josef. You know that’s not true. I was the one who failed him. You almost lost your own life trying to save him. What more could be asked of you?” I took him by the shoulders. “Thank you for coming.”
Amelia stepped forward. “You must be Josef Mueller,” she said, trying to ease the tension. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
He bowed formally and took her hand. He kissed it and cracked the faintest smile. “Ah, the fabled Amelia. I feel like I know you already. The captain failed to tell me just how lovely you truly are.” She blushed slightly, and for a spell we could forget that we were at my brother’s burial or that we were at war with the world and I was running from that war. “I’m sorry this is how we finally meet,” he said,
bringing us back to reality.
There was nothing else to say. I nodded to her. “I’ll leave you two alone,” she said, and retreated to the Kübelwagen parked on the lane.
“How’d you get away from Seebeck?” I asked.
He avoided my glance and took in the whole scene. Then he swallowed hard and stiffened. “I didn’t get away from him. I was ordered here.” He could tell I was confused. “By Seebeck.”
“Ordered by Seebeck? Why?”
He was having a hard time struggling through this. Which he promptly admitted to me. “Herr Captain…Harmon. I have orders to report you to the SS here. A man named Keitel.”
My mouth went dry. “Keitel? Not the Luftwaffe?”
Mueller breathed deep. “That’s right.”
“But why did he send you personally?” I asked.
“The lines are down, and the only way to get through was for someone to come here. He picked me. I think to torment me. Or you. Probably both. His orders are to report your desertion to the SS and let them deal with you. He washes his hands of you.”
I couldn’t believe it. There was no way I was ever going to let Keitel get a hold of me, or my family. And I told Mueller so.
“Look,” he said, trying desperately to steer me back to what he considered to be the right path. “Maybe the bombings gave you a break. They meant I had to find you. And now that I have, I want you to know that I intend to carry out the major’s order only if you won’t come to your senses.”
I looked at him. “My senses?”
“Good God, man,” he said with a voice showing the strain of frustration in choosing duty over friendship. “You did what you had to do. Paul’s where he should be. Which is more than others lying in ditches in Russia or at the bottom of the Atlantic can say.” He calmed some and put a soothing hand on my shoulder. “You did an admirable thing here, Harmon. No one can fault you for that. If he were my brother, I might have done the same. But now it’s time to come back to Andeville.” He lowered his voice. “Seebeck’s scared. Those Mustangs really spooked him. He knows he needs every good pilot. He’d be a fool to let you go.”
Of Another Time and Place Page 26
