Homecoming Read online

  6

  COMING BACK ONE summer night from a trip, I found Max standing in front of the house looking lost and forlorn. His shirt was half out of his trousers, his hair unkempt.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I . . . Mom . . .”

  He pointed to a suitcase standing next to the cement alcove where the trash cans were stored. “Mom says I should stay with you for a while.”

  “Has she got a new friend?” I shook my head. “Sorry, Max. No go. Come on, I'll drive you home.”

  He said nothing when I took his hand and picked up the suitcase, walked over to the car, and got in with him. “She's crazy,” I said as we drove off. “I could have been away much longer.”

  “She tried to get you at work, and they told her you'd be back tonight.”

  “They couldn't have told her that. They didn't know when I'd be back. All they knew was that I'd be at work tomorrow morning.”

  We were on the Autobahn. The sun had sunk behind the Rhineland hills, but the sky was still luminescent. I was tired from my trip: I had been looking forward to sitting out on my balcony and going to bed early. I felt sorry for Max, but I felt sorry for myself as well.

  “Mom's gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She went to Florida with her new friend. That's where he's from. She said that if you didn't want me to stay with you, you could take me to Inge's on Sunday. Inge's away till then.”

  It was Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday I had my hands full at work; on Friday I had to be in Munich, and I had planned to take advantage of it by spending the weekend at Lake Chiemsee. “What about school?”

  “What about it?”

  “How will you get there?”

  “Mom didn't say.”

  I took the next exit, turned around, and got on again in the opposite direction. I was going home for the second time that day. Max sat silent next to me. “How long had you been waiting in front of the house?”

  “They dropped me off at two. Their plane was leaving at five. I found some kids, and we played together.”

  “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “No. Mom said—”

  “I don't want to hear what Mom said and didn't say.”

  Max fell silent again. I was used to a Max who fidgeted at the movies and whined until the pizza came. I stopped at McDonald's and bought some hamburgers. We ate them at the kitchen table not knowing what to say to each other.

  “We've got to get up early tomorrow. I need to be at work at eight and take you to school first.”

  He nodded.

  “I'll make up a bed for you. Have you got everything you need? Toothbrush, pajamas, clean underwear, schoolbooks?”

  “Mom said—” But then he remembered I did not want to hear what Veronika had said and failed to say. I opened the suitcase, laid out his pajamas and clothes for the next day, and gave him a toothbrush.

  While he brushed his teeth, I put fresh sheets on my bed for him and pulled the old ones over the couch for myself. He made a fast job of it but was not eager to go to bed, and after he had climbed in he asked, “Will you tell me a story?”

  Can you still tell a ten-year-old fairy tales? I tried the saga of the knight Hildebrandt, who comes home after many, many years and meets the young knight Hadubrandt. Hadubrandt is unaware that he is Hildebrandt's son, Hildebrandt that he is Hadubrandt's father. Hadubrandt, now ruler of the land, is furious that the stranger fails to greet him with the deference that he, as his sovereign, deserves. The two duel until they can duel no more. Then Hildebrandt asks Hadubrandt for his name and lineage and reveals himself as his father. But Hadubrandt does not believe him: he believes his father dead and Hildebrandt an imposter. He resumes the duel.

  “And?”

  Well, well, the old saga had won over the comics- and cartoon-jaded Max: he wanted to know how it all ended.

  “The only way Hildebrandt could ward off a fatal blow was to strike Hadubrandt dead himself.”

  “No!”

  “Well, that's what the singers who handed down the saga to us thought one day too. And from that day on they sang that the two men finally recognized each other, threw down their swords, and embraced.”

  7

  THUS BEGAN MY life with Max. I canceled the trip to Munich. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I drove him to and picked him up from school. Over the weekend we practiced the trip in the half-streetcar, half-train that connected the cities plus the ten-minute walk from the last stop. We also practiced the route to the publishing house, where Max reported after school from Monday on, eating with me in the canteen and doing his homework next to me in the office. On Monday evening I found a letter from Veronika announcing her return in seven weeks. I hoped that Max would not start taking my surrogate parent role for granted and that he would remain on his best behavior.

  No such luck. Day by day he grew more lively, headstrong, demanding. First he found an empty office to do his homework in; then, rather than doing his homework, he wanted to play with the children he had found while waiting for me. When it was time to go home, he wanted me to take him to the swimming pool or the movies or to a hotel: he took an odd pleasure in sitting in hotel lobbies and ordering a Coke.

  But as Max grew more restless, my life settled down. I wanted less, I worked less, yet things seemed to get done. I abandoned Odysseus' women and searched no more: no shades of great ladies, no temptresses unto death, no plaited tresses and fragrant raiments, no chaste daughter and understanding mother. I went out less often and began feeling more at home in my apartment and kitchen. Max was in bed by nine and would fall asleep once I had told him a story. I did not waste my time waiting for food or the bill in a restaurant: I ate and did the dishes and had two or three hours to do whatever I pleased.

  So I went back to Karl. I wrote to the register office and learned that in the thirties and forties the ground-floor flat of Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 had been inhabited by a couple named Karl and Gerda Wolf, the flats on the next floor by the Lampe and Bindinger families and the flat on the floor up from that by a Rudolf Hagert. Karl Wolf died in 1945; Gerda Wolf moved to Wiesbaden in 1952. Rudolf Hagert moved into an old people's home in 1955 and died there two years later. I found Gerda Wolf 's name in the Wiesbaden phone book and wrote her a letter explaining my interest in the former inhabitants of Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 and asking whether she would be willing to see me. Three days later I had her response: Yes, do come.

  On Sunday morning Max and I drove to Wiesbaden. We took a ride on the funicular—whose upper car fills its tank with water and uses the weight of the water to descend into the valley and pull the lower car up—and a walk in the vineyards. Shortly before three I sat Max down on a bench with a book and made him promise not to budge from the spot. I was at Gerda Wolf 's at three on the dot. She looked to be in her midseventies. Her place was small and full of books and paintings and of medals that hung in small frames like pictures.

  “The medals are my father's,” she said, pointing to a picture of a man with a chest full of them.

  “Karl Wolf was your father?”

  “Yes. He shot himself when he read the report of the Führer's demise. He was at home because he had lost his leg.”

  We were sitting at the dining table, and she served me tea and homemade marble cake. I told her once more what I had written in the letter: Karl's story, his return to Kleinmeyerstrasse 38, my conjecture that the author had lived in the building before or during the war or had gone in and out.

  “You have no real evidence?”

  I shook my head. “I suspect he had a decent education and had never been to Siberia or even in the war. But I can't be sure.”

  She gave me a questioning look.

  “I think when you've experienced something,” I said, “you want to write what actually happened. You don't make your Siberian rivers run south rather than north; you don't make your soldiers speak a slang no soldier ever spoke except in novels or on the screen. Or do you? May
be the author was trying to humor his audience with clichés.”

  “Rudolf Hagert was a research chemist for BASF. He was also mad about cars. I can't imagine him reading a novel much less writing one. He never took in lodgers, nor did we. Frau Lampe let out rooms to students; she wanted to find a husband for her daughter—and did. Her daughter married a man by the name of Bindinger, one of the students, though”—she wrinkled her nose—“anyone who was a student at the time was either a cripple or a mental case.”

  “Did you meet any of the lodgers?”

  “In all the years I lived there only one had the decency to ring our doorbell and introduce himself. Only one.”

  “A cripple? A mental case?”

  “A nice young man who sorely regretted that his bad heart kept him from being conscripted. He so wanted to be part of the fray that I had a word with Freda and she with Karl, and Karl took him under his wing.”

  “Freda? Karl?”

  “The Baroness von Fircks, my old friend, and her husband, Karl Hanke, the gauleiter of Silesia.”

  “Do you know what became of the young man? Do you know his name? Did he—”

  “—write? I have no idea. He was a student, so he must have done some writing. But so did the other lodgers. I don't remember his name. Frau Bindinger must have known it. They were friends.”

  “She died last year.”

  Frau Wolf nodded, as if her death were painful but only just.

  “Are Freda von Fircks and Karl Hanke still alive?”

  “Freda remarried and lives with her husband, a man named Rössler, in Bielefeld. As for Karl Hanke—can you young people be so ignorant of your own history? There were rumors he fled via Spain to Argentina or ended up in an American POW camp or was hanged by German soldiers or executed or beaten to death by the Czechs. In any case, Freda needed to have him declared dead in 1950, but I believe he is still with us. He was the best of them all.”

  She pulled herself up and beamed at me. “His chivalrous treatment of Magda, his commitment to the panzers—he volunteered, you know—his defense of Breslau: little wonder the Führer loved him so.”

  8

  SHE WAS RIGHT. Hitler did love Hanke, so much so that shortly before his death he appointed him SS Reichsführer to replace Himmler. The people of Breslau have never forgiven him—the man in charge of turning the city into a fortress, of defending it and destroying it, of holding it to the last man—for having taken off on May 2, 1945, from a runway that had cost the Breslauers many lives to construct and on which no plane had ever landed and no plane taken off other than the Fiseler Storch that Hanke had hidden and used for his escape. Though perhaps it was not an act of cowardice; perhaps he had wanted to meet up with Schörner, whom Hitler, also shortly before his death, promoted to commander in chief of the armed forces.

  There was no reason to believe him a coward: he volunteered in 1939, when he could easily have sat out the war in Berlin as Goebbels' undersecretary, but he had had it out with Goebbels over the latter's affair with Lída Baarová and the hard time he was giving his wife, Magda, and before that he had jeopardized his position as teacher and eventually lost it because of his work for the Party. He was a gifted organizer and full of ideas: it was he who came up with the plan of using the Berlin indoor tennis centers as the scenes for Goebbels' extravaganzas, when no one wanted to rent the Party assembly rooms; it was he who organized the press coverage of the war, to which he personally contributed. At the same time he dipped deeply into the Party's coffers and set himself up in luxury in his Breslau fortress; he was hard-nosed, high and mighty, and hotheaded; he would stop at nothing. Yes, Gerda Wolf was right: Karl Hanke was pretty much the best National Socialism had to offer.

  When I told Max about Hanke's career, he clicked his tongue. The long phone conversations about Hanke I had had with a historian friend had piqued his curiosity.

  “But I thought brave was good.”

  We were sitting on the balcony having dinner. I had always thought it must be nice for a father to lay out the world before a child. Perhaps I had dreamed of learning about the world from my father. I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers. I looked up at the sky and took a sip of wine while arming myself against Max's disappointment.

  “Bravery is good when the cause is good. When the cause is bad, bravery is . . .” I paused. “Not good” was too pale, “bad” too strong.

  “Bad?”

  “It's like hard work. When you put a lot of work into something good, then the work is good; when you put a lot of work into digging a hole for your neighbor to fall into and get hurt, the work is bad. Because digging the hole is bad, the work you put into it is bad.”

  Max was concentrating so hard that a crease had formed between his brows. “Would Hanke have been better if he'd been a coward?”

  “Brave or cowardly, zealous or lazy—if the cause is bad, it doesn't matter.” Was that true? Couldn't cowardice and sloth be virtues if they sabotaged an evil goal?

  Max had the same idea. “If I'm lazy about digging the hole, it won't be that deep and I won't hurt my neighbor that much.” Then he went off on a tangent. “Isn't there an expression about falling into a pit you dig for somebody else?”

  “That's something different,” I said, and instead of being pleased at the turn in the conversation I tried to wind things up. “The value of being brave, working hard, saving money, keeping order depends on what it's for.”

  “But I don't know yet what I'm saving my money for.”

  For a moment I thought Max was making a joke, but then that frown came back, and he looked up at me with concern.

  “Well, when the time comes, spend it on something good.”

  “But what if I spend it on something bad?”

  I may have said what I thought I should say, but I didn't believe it. Bravery was a lesser virtue than fairness, the love of truth, or compassion, but it was a virtue all the same, and even a man like Hanke was, in my eyes, better brave than cowardly. I did not like lazy people, and I did not like it when people made a mess of their financial affairs or their lives. I was my mother's son. I did not want to argue with Max over whether the diligence I expected him to show at school or the order I expected him to maintain at home served good ends. My answer to his first question should have been: Yes, bravery is good, but bravery is not enough. It was too late for that now. All I could say was, “Spend it on something bad? Just don't, that's all.”

  9

  I GOT THE PHONE NUMBER of Barbara's sister Margarete from information. When I phoned, she interrupted me the moment I gave her my name. “I thought you'd forgotten about me.”

  “You . . .”

  “You were going to call ages ago. When was it you were in touch with my sister?”

  “As you say, ages ago.”

  “Barbara told me then you wanted to know who might have written about us and whether there were any clues in Mother's papers. Is that what you're calling about?”

  “It is.”

  “You can come on Saturday at eleven. If you want copies, though, you'll have to bring your own photocopier.” She hung up.

  I got hold of a photocopier and arrived at the designated hour. Just to be sure, I was early and waited around the corner in the car. Margarete Bindinger lived in a fifties housing development of semidetached houses with gardens. I would have been glad to grow up in a place like that. Mother and I would take an occasional Sunday walk through one, and everything looked so nice and friendly: each house with a basement and attic, a balcony, and a bathroom with its own little window right next to the entrance; a garden with a terrace and swings and a stand for beating carpets, with fruit trees and ornamental trees and a vegetable patch; places for children to roller-skate and play hopscotch and dodgeball and soccer. Now the trees were tall; the gardens were all grass, bushes, and flowers; and the streets were lined with cars.r />
  The garden door had a knob that did not turn, but there was a bolt on the inside. Since I felt squeamish about reaching over to push it open, I rang the bell. The house door opened, and Margarete Bindinger said, “You don't need me to come out, do you?” and waited for me to make my way to her. There she stood, short and gaunt, with a gray face and a look that made me feel less than welcome. Instead of responding to my greeting, she pointed to the photocopier and asked, “Does it take a lot of electricity?”

  “I don't know. I just want—”

  She put up her hand. “I don't want to charge you for the electricity you use. It looks like a handy machine, and I was wondering whether I should get one.” She let me in and closed the door. It was only then that I noticed that her right leg was shorter than her left and that she walked with a cane. She led me into the room facing the street and sat me at a table with six chairs. There was a folder on the table. She sat down opposite me.

  “I—”

  But she put up her hand again. Instead of letting me speak, she posed a series of brief questions to which she expected brief answers, and grew impatient when they went on too long. Once I had finished telling her about Karl and my search for his creator, she asked, “Why are you interested in him?”

  “He knew my grandparents and knows the place where I grew up, and I would like to find out how the novel he wrote ends. I'm just curious, that's all.”

  She looked me straight in the eye. “No, you're not just curious. But that's none of my business. Barbara told me to help you, and I have no reason not to. There's not much to show you in any case.” She put her hand on the folder. “Mother didn't keep a diary, but she did keep letters—letters from her parents, her best friend, my father, and us. There are also a few letters from a man who is a stranger to me. I don't know anything about their relationship.” She stood up. “I'll leave you alone now. Let me know when you've finished.”