“Probably.”
“‘Oh, Wernher, your von is so braun!’”
My grandfather never saw Diddens again. He walked out of the farmyard and down the road as far as the first crossroads. Almost immediately, he heard the rumble of engines and the crunch of a truck transmission being skillfully abused. Two half-tracks, an armored car, and a deuce-and-a-half mess truck belonging to the 869th Field Battalion of the 65th Infantry Division rolled past. They had become separated from the rest of the division in the night and were heading to Paderborn, where the cooks riding in the deuce-and-a-half had orders to provide every GI they could find with a pancake breakfast. Paderborn was more or less on the way to Nordhausen, the last known whereabouts, to my grandfather at least, of von Braun. My grandfather climbed into the back of the deuce-and-a-half with sacks of flour, stacked cartons of powdered eggs, two steel drums of corn syrup. He fell asleep before he could even finish cautioning himself not to fall asleep.
When he woke up, the truck was grinding and bucking and he could hear the driver swearing up in the cab. When he’d flagged down the deuce-and-a-half, my grandfather had noted the insignia painted on its front passenger door, a red spot on a gold shield. Beneath this a legend crudely lettered in white paint informed the curious that this truck, whose name was Big-Leg Woman, had been driven continuously since June 1944, from Omaha Beach to the Ardennes, by Corporal Melvin Fish, of the Red Ball Express. Corporal Fish would be accustomed to driving on fucked-up roads by now, but this one seemed to be giving him trouble.
My grandfather poked his head out of the back of the truck. It appeared that some brave tactician had decided to toss a stray unit of motorcycle infantry over his shoulder to cover the SS retreat from the neighborhood. Two or three dozen bikes with sidecars, a couple of squat Kübelwagens. A unit of 105mm Priests on a hilltop to the west had caught the German cyclists on a stretch of open ground. For a hundred yards the road was a chicane of wrecked machines and dead men sunk in a churn of mud. It had not rained for several days, and this was not natural mud; it had been compounded by truck tires and caterpillar treads from dust and blood and whatever home-brew sauce the Krauts were putting in their engines as it leaked from busted fuel tanks to puddle in the ruts. There was hair in the mud. The soldiers, insofar as my grandfather could distinguish their features in the impasto of their bodies, had been the greenest of boys.
For the moment my grandfather was more interested in the condition of the motorcycles. Even before the artillery got to them, they must have been a sorry sight, fruit of the scrap yard, hybrid freaks. Bicycle parts pressed into ad hoc service, a sidecar that seemed to have been formed from a galvanized steel washtub, tires piebald with patches. Bicycles, arrows. Soon they would be throwing bricks and rocks. They were already throwing the bodies of their children.
A little way up the grassy slope that had served the gunners for a bowling alley, a German officer sat on his bike. As Big-Leg Woman skidded and fishtailed past him, his left eye seemed to fix on my grandfather, hanging out of the back of the truck. The right side of the officer’s skull and most of his face, apart from the staring eye, had been shot away. A spray of fine hair clung like dry grass to the blackened cliff of his parietal bone, fluttering in the breeze. His caked boots were planted solidly on either side of what appeared to be a nicely intact motorcycle, low-slung and painted an incongruous shade of khaki. He had a grown man’s build, broad shoulders drawn back to lend his posture a hint of defiance. His gloved fists were locked around the grips of his motorcycle’s handlebars. Maybe he had peeled away from his unit up the rise, hoping to draw the fire of the guns, or had hoped to rally his teenage fusiliers for a suicidal uphill charge toward them. As the convoy of trucks weaved and ground their way through the wreckage, one of the GIs predictably took offense at or could not resist the remnant of that blond head on those arrogant shoulders. He drew his Colt and took a few halfhearted potshots, to no effect. Then he got serious and the head burst into red mist. The carcass with no head stayed smartly upright, straddling the motorcycle.
My grandfather jumped down from the back of the truck, sinking into the grim slurry to his ankles. Like the mud itself, the stench of the mud was an amalgam only war could concoct, like the smell when MP delousing crews made POWs take off their clothes and boots, and the rancid butter gas of unwashed feet combined with armpit and the naphtha burn of bug spray. My grandfather found Corporal Fish’s puzzled face in the right-hand rearview mirror. He waved his thanks for the lift.
The road sucked at his boots. He reached the shoulder and scrambled up to the headless officer. A dense mesh of flies busied themselves in the air just above the decapitated stump as if attempting to weave themselves into a makeshift head. Apart from the stump, which revealed more than my grandfather cared to learn just then about the structural anatomy of the throat and upper vertebrae and the appetite of flies, there was nothing to suggest that the officer, a lieutenant like my grandfather, was prepared to relinquish the motorcycle. Even without his head, he maintained his rigid posture, his air of having dug his heels in.
“Enough already,” my grandfather said. “We get it.”
He took a breath. He worked his arms around the upper torso from behind, turning his face away from the meat and the frenzy of flies. Powerful impulses of his nervous system urged him just to yank the carcass loose and drop or even hurl it to the ground. He forebore. He worked the hands free of the grips with a few gentle twists. He eased the carcass off the seat, hoisted it up, and swung it until the farther leg came away free. He laid the body supine on the grass like he was helping a drunk to bed.
Still holding his breath, my grandfather stripped the body of rifle, cartridge box, and gloves. Black leather gauntlets, heavy and cuffed, very Nazi. He pulled them on. The black leather was spattered with blood. He wiped his hands on the dead officer’s uniform trousers.
He went back to take a look at the motorcycle, a Zündapp. It was filthy but appeared to have been well maintained. It was an uncomplicated machine, engine and gearbox hung on a skeleton like the spread finger bones of a bat. A shaft drove the rear wheel and, he noted, the sidecar’s wheel. Ignition on the gearshift mount. Four speeds. Canvas cover over the sidecar as if the late operator had been accustomed to solitary rides. Apart from the black rubber grips, the seat and tires, and the steel caps of the jerricans, the whole thing was painted a matte shade of desert tan. Stenciled on the nose of its sidecar, a cute little white palm tree hid modestly behind a white swastika. The Zündapp had an air of misplacement, a Central Park polar bear in August. In 1990 as in 1945, my grandfather was willing to devote a minute to pondering the mysteries of the Zündapp’s journey from the Maghreb to the Westerwald and the long downward journey of the Wehrmacht itself from the days of Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
He climbed on. The driver of a passing Willys tapped his horn and my grandfather lifted a gloved hand. He sat a moment, coming to terms with the bulk of it between his legs. He turned the ignition switch, opened the throttle, stepped on the kickstand. The engine rattled to life.
Within ten miles of setting out, he had fallen in love. He had driven a motorcycle only once, for an hour during which he never got comfortable on the BSA belonging to a pool player from Jersey. He remembered contending with alarming phenomena of pitch and torque. There had been a constant sense of lurching. Vibrations were transmitted directly to his bones and joints.
This bike, poised on and steadied by its third wheel, just went. It flowed through upshifts and hugged the road in tight turns. The engine was loud but did not weary the ear. The ride was bouncy but not jarring. The fuel tank between his thighs was nearly full with potato-peel ethanol or distilled shoe polish or whatever it might be. It was an excellent machine, though it had done nothing to help its previous owner hold on to his head. Later my grandfather would remember thinking, as he headed for Nordhausen, that he could not wait to show it to his new friend Wernher von Braun. They would tool around the autobahns of a postwar G
ermany, von Braun riding in the sidecar like a gentle-natured bear.
* * *
“Was he still there?”
“No.”
“No?”
“He was gone by the time I got there. Long gone.”
“But you found him.”
He didn’t answer. He was sitting up, face angled toward the window. His breathing looked steady, but it was past lunchtime, and he had not eaten anything all morning but a few bites of Jell-O. I figured he was feeling a little weak. “Grandpa? You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Want a little soup? Mom made you some.”
He kept his eyes on the window as if something interesting were happening at the birdfeeder, out of my line of sight, another doomed attack by the momzer. Only he wasn’t smiling.
“I’m talking too much,” he said after a while.
“I’m sorry. We can stop. You should rest. Rest your voice.”
He made a face, dismissing the suggestion. He was not talking more than he had voice or strength to handle. He was talking more than he believed to be wise or suitable. Since, in his view, he reached the limit of conversational daring at the end of a three-minute jeremiad on the world’s failure to recognize the superiority of the Wankel rotary engine, I didn’t take this admonishment, or self-admonishment, too seriously. I felt like it was, if anything, a tad melodramatic.
“I’m glad you’re talking,” I said. Melodrama was all right with me.
“That’s just why I shouldn’t be.”
“What? Why?”
“You’re too glad.”
“I’m too glad?”
“Too interested.”
“Oh no, I’m bored out of my skull,” I said. “Really, I’m just being polite.”
On the street a crew was topping trees to open a view for somebody higher up the hill. All that afternoon a chainsaw started, stopped, started again. Views in the Oakland hills are graded on a scale of visible bridges from one to five: the San Mateo, the Dumbarton, the Bay, the Golden Gate, and the Richmond. My mother’s living room and bedroom scored a respectable two. From my grandfather’s bed, however, the only visible span was the swag of black coaxial cable strung from a corner of the house to a telephone pole up by the street.
“You think this explains everything,” my grandfather said. He freighted the word explains with as much contempt as it would bear before exiling it from his mouth. “Me and your grandmother. Your mother. My time in prison. The war.” He turned from the window. In his eyes, through the haze of hydromorphone, I saw a flash of something I took, based on the historical record, for anger. “You think it explains you.”
“It explains a lot,” I said.
“It explains nothing.”
“It explains a little.”
“It’s just names and dates and places.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t add up to anything, take my word for it. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I get it,” I said.
“Oh, you get it? What do you get?”
“I get that you’re a big ol’ fuckin’ nihilist.”
That raised a smile; or maybe the momzer was back.
“Richard Feynman,” I said. “Doctor Richard Feynman.”
“What about him?”
“All he wanted was to find the answer to the question ‘Why did Challenger explode?’ Right? And that answer was never going to be ‘Because it was all part of God’s plan’ or, I don’t know, ‘Challenger exploded so that some little kid somewhere would get inspired to grow up and become an engineer and invent a safer, more durable propulsion system for spacecraft.’ Or even, like, ‘Because humans and the things they make are prone to failure’ or ‘Shit happens.’ The explanation was always going to be something like ‘Because the weather was too cold, so the O-rings became brittle and failed, and fuel leaked from the fuel tank and ignited, which caused the shuttle to accelerate beyond its intended structural tolerance so that it broke apart.’ The answer was always going to be dates, and names, and numbers. And that was good enough for Feynman, because the point was to find out. The meaning was in the inquiry.”
“It was the solid rocket booster,” my grandfather said. “Not the fuel tank.”
“Right.”
He kept on looking at me without speaking, but whatever had blazed out through the cloud cover was gone. A tear rolled down his cheek, and he turned his face to the window again. I got up and pulled a Kleenex from the box. I started to try to wipe away the tear, but he pushed my hand aside. He took the Kleenex.
“I’m ashamed,” he said.
“Grandpa . . .”
“I’m disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn’t last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they’re all still around. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“I’m not ashamed of you,” I said. “I’m proud.”
He made another face. This one said that what I knew about shame—what my entire generation, with its deployment of confession as a tool for self-aggrandizement, knew about shame—would fit into half a pistachio shell.
“Anyway, it’s a pretty good story,” I said. “You have to admit.”
“Yeah?” He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. “You can have it. I’m giving it to you. After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?”
“When the earth’s shadow falls across the Moon.”
“Very significant. I’m sure it’s a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.”
“Kind of trite,” I said.
He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life—his, everyone’s—I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.
“So,” I said. “You went to Nordhausen.”
He shook his head, but he was going to give way. We both knew it.
“Yes, God damn it, I went to Nordhausen,” he said in a tone that sounded more defeated than angry. At that moment I knew—knowing nothing—that it had been the worst place on earth. And a part of my nature that had lain dormant for a long time snapped open like an eye.
I had been raised among quiet people who repressed their emotions. I knew my father to have been “a big talker,” “a bullshit artist,” and (an epithet I remembered hearing my grandfather throw in his face) “a loverboy,” but that was hearsay and, given his record, distinctly an argument in favor of repression. I was aware that in some remote age, my grandmother had been a source of fire, madness, and poetry, but those days were misty legend; one could only infer them from traces in the geological record. In my family, in my lifetime, we preferred to leave the business of feeling, and talking about feeling, to people with nothing better to do.
Youthful rebellion, therefore, had required my wholehearted embrace of poetry, fire, and madness, and of all those—Rimbaud, Patti Smith, Syd Barrett, the girls I went after—who trafficked in them. Long after rebellion cooled, I flew the flag of self-expression. I had emerged into adolescence toward the end of the seventies, that great unbuttoning. As I came into young manhood, the ascendant Recovery Movement was at work normalizing the idea that redemption lay in the sharing of experience and feeling, and that in denial there was something like damnation. Right up to that afternoon at my grandfather’s bedside, prodding
him to tell me about Nordhausen and the beefy young blond man, I believed (and for the most part believe still) that silence was darkness, and that naming shone a light. I believed that a secret was like a malignancy and confession a knife, a bright hot beam of radiation that healed as it burned. I believed it was good—this being among the few things that truly did go without saying—to “get it all out.”
Then I heard the bitterness of defeat in my grandfather’s voice when he said that he had gone to Nordhausen.
I thought about how, when I was a kid, as my big-talking, sweet-talking, fast-talking father was in and out of courtrooms, tax dodges, marriages, and my life, the constancy of my grandfather’s silence had been just that: a constant. It was, like him, something I could always rely on. And really, where was the proof that two decades of national yammering, of getting it all out, had brought about an increase in collective national happiness? I had recently read something in Scientific American about the Roman city of Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius, uncovered by archaeologists; how exposure to light and air was destroying what centuries of darkness had preserved. And radiation treatment? A textbook example of a situation where the cure was worse than the disease. On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.
“I think maybe I’ll have a little soup after all,” my grandfather said.
I went into the kitchen and ladled some of my mother’s chicken soup into a bowl from the big Tupperware in the refrigerator. While the soup heated in the microwave, I opened the legs of the breakfast tray and wiped it down with 409. I folded a napkin and set a spoon on the napkin. I found the salt and pepper shakers shaped like terriers, one white, one black. Sometimes my grandfather liked to sprinkle his soup with those little yellow Israeli soup croutons—he called them mandelen—and so, for the extra calories, I poured a handful into a saucer and set that on the tray. When the soup was hot, I eased it from the microwave to the tray and carried the tray to the bedroom. The broth was gold. The carrot and celery and onion were gems. A filigree of golden fat adorned the surface. In the steam coming off the bowl of soup was the hint of lemon, a memory of my grandmother. Really, it smelled very good.