Authors: Gloria Whelan
After the Train
Gloria Whelan
for Doris Vidaver
E
VERY HUMAN BEING HAS HIS OWN
GATE
. W
E MUST NEVER MAKE THE
MISTAKE OF WANTING TO ENTER THE
ORCHARD BY ANY GATE BUT OUR
OWN. TO DO THIS IS DANGEROUS FOR
THE ONE WHO ENTERS AND ALSO FOR
THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY THERE.
—E
LIE
W
IESEL
,
N
IGHT
THE LAST DAY of school is a hundred thousand hours…
AFTER SCHOOL I’ve taken to stopping at the redbrick church…
AFTER DINNER I get my fishing pole and hurry out…
ALL DAY I WORK hard moving bricks at St. Mary’s,…
THE NEXT DAY I have one of my nightmares. The…
THE NEXT DAY at work my head is still dizzy…
I TOSS AND TURN all night. When morning finally comes,…
IT’S HARD TO KEEP my mind on my work. When…
I WALK INTO OUR HOUSE, but I don’t. The boy…
I THINK ABOUT THE BOY who wrote the letter to…
I CAN’T TAKE IT all in. It’s like being served…
HERR SCHAFER DOESN’T FORGET the invitation. Later that week I…
THE NEXT NIGHT Hans and Kurt are at the door…
I LONG TO TELL Herr Schafer about our adventure, but…
T
HE LAST DAY
of school is a hundred thousand hours long. It’s as long as waiting in the dentist’s office or listening to your parents talk about what it was like when they were kids. The sun leaks through the windows, paints everything gold, and makes me warm and sleepy. Herr Schmidt drones on. I think about a soccer scrimmage after school and how I will be out with my rowing club on Saturday. I watch a fly, come to life with the warm weather, buzz against the window. I’m that trapped fly. I hear a train whistling in the distance and wish I were on it. I study the way Ruth Kassel’s hair falls over her face as she leans down to write and the way she nibbles little slivers from her pencil when she is concentrating. She catches me staring at her and I quickly look away.
Herr Schmidt’s classroom is the one I most dislike. Going to his class is like tearing off a scab. The war has been over for ten years. The Nazis are gone. It’s 1955. Why should we have our noses rubbed in someone else’s dirt just because we happen to be German? Our eighth grade is being scolded for something our parents did. It is something I don’t want to hear or think about.
With his white-blond hair, pale skin, and long thin arms and fingers, Herr Schmidt looks like he lives in a cellar or a cave. He has an irritating way of drawing out his words so you are afraid he will never finish a sentence. “Ri-i-i-ight here in Rolfen,” he said, “I am sor-r-r-ry to say there is the e-e-e-evil of anti-Semitism.”
I’m tired of being told all the bad things about our country. Why can’t he talk about the good things about Germany? I slump down and stare at my desk. It is at least a hundred years old. The carved initials in the desk are like ghosts of the students who have sat there before me. During the war the desk survived the bombs of the Americans and the English. I squirm in the hard wooden seat and catch Hans Adler’s eye. His shrug tells me he is as bored and impatient as I am with the lecture.
As if it were just another lesson in grammar or arithmetic, Herr Schmidt prints on the blackboard the crimes of the German people and we copy them, each one like a scolding.
All over Germany Jewish converts
to Christianity were expelled from the church.
When he speaks of what the church has done, Herr Schmidt looks serious and sad, as if to say,
People may do stupid and even evil things, but the church? How can that be?
But of course the church is not just a brick building that got up off its foundation and shook out the Jews; no, there was the pastor and those who chose him and paid him. When you speak of the church, you are not speaking of a building but of men and women. Even I know that.
We squirm in our seats. Hans speaks for everyone in the class when he wriggles his hand in the air and says, “We were just babies during the war. We didn’t have anything to do with what happened to the Jews.” I silently agree. Most people want to be good and they want people to believe they are good, so it’s hard when you’re made to feel guilty for something you didn’t do.
Herr Schmidt says, “I know I am reviewing what we have talked of before, but I want to be sure you understand. l tell you these things so that your generation will not repeat the mistakes of your parents and their parents.”
Dieter Kroner has been drawing dirty pictures of Herr Schmidt. Now he leans across the aisle and whispers to me, “That’s all Jewish propaganda.” Even I know better than that. Men have stood up in court
and admitted their parts in what happened. There are government records and terrible pictures of men more dead than alive in prisoners’ striped suits. It is all true, but I don’t want to hear about it.
At last Herr Schmidt gives us our assignment to do over the summer. We groan. When we leave today, we want to close the door on the school and not think about it. Herr Schmidt says, “In spite of the terrible things that happened during the war, there were Germans who risked their lives to oppose Hitler. I want you to find such a person and write that person’s story.”
We push our way out of the classroom and into the hallway, where there’s a sour smell: part sweaty socks, part stale air. Students shove one another in the halls and on the stairs as if they can’t wait to get the day over with and get outside. Even the teachers seem impatient. Our algebra teacher storms up and down the aisles of the schoolroom, crumpling our papers and rapping the boys on the head with his ruler.
At lunchtime we kick around a soccer ball, an old size four with most of the leather worn away. Hans gets into a fight with Kurt Niehl because Kurt won’t own up to a foul, and I have to pull them apart, getting an elbow in my ribs for my trouble. I make a nice shoelace pass, the ball rising into the air in a beautiful arc, lofting right over Hans’s head and falling at Kurt’s feet, but just
at that moment the bell rings and we have to go back inside.
As usual Hans has done no homework and is unprepared for our Latin class with Frau Lerche. No one is more goodhearted or can turn on more charm than Hans, so most of the teachers forgive him his lack of interest in his studies, especially the women teachers; but Frau Lerche is immune to Hans’s charm. Although he bats his long lashes at her and gives her his most radiant smile, she’s not moved. When he translates
fastigium
, “height,” as
fastidium
, “disgust,” he gives Frau Lerche an opportunity for exercising her considerable sarcasm. “I have reached the height of my disgust with your translations, Herr Adler,” she says, which makes Hans turn beet red. While Frau Lerche launches into a discussion of the beauty of the ablative case, I sit and stare out the window as if it were a postcard from someplace I’ll never visit.
Finally the last day of school is over. Kurt and Hans and I run out of school, cheering at the top of our lungs. Hans says, “Herr Schmidt is so depressing. My father didn’t have anything to do with what Herr Schmidt was talking about. He was in charge of supplies for the army.”
Kurt says, “Neither did my father. He worked in a commissary, cutting up meat for the officers.”
I don’t say anything, because I’ve never asked my father what he did in the war and he has never said. I decide to ask when I see him in a little while. I’ve promised to meet him at the church where he works, but before I take off, I make plans for the evening with Hans and Kurt.
Hans says, “Let’s go fishing on the river.” He means the Wakenitz River. There is nothing Hans likes so much as doing something he’s not supposed to.
We have been forbidden to fish there because the river is the border between us and East Germany. After World War II, the Allies split Germany in two. Our half of Germany, the West, is the Federal Republic of Germany. Across the border, East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, is really controlled by the Soviet Union. The joke is that East Germany is neither democratic nor a republic. When Russia took over that part of Germany after the war, millions of Germans fled Communist rule. The refugees came looking for jobs and freedom, and our town of Rolfen took them in like abandoned kittens. Now the East forbids its citizens to leave the country, and those who do risk their lives.
Kurt says, “It’s too dangerous to fish there since they’ve built the guard tower.”
We watched the tower go up and the East German soldiers plow land at the border to make an empty strip
where they can spot anyone trying to escape. Kurt’s right—it’s dangerous. But the big river here in Rolfen is polluted with sewage and with the ballast from the freighters. When we fish the little Wakenitz, we’re careful to stay on our side of the river.
Kurt doesn’t like going near the border. He and his family are refugees who escaped from East Germany and the Communists. He remembers what life was like under the Communists. Years ago you could cross the border; now, if you try to escape, the Communist guards shoot you.
Most of the people in Rolfen welcomed the thousands of refugees from Communist East Germany, but there are some in our town who resent the
Zugereisten
, the new people in town, because they take jobs and living quarters and food, all of which are scarce since the war. Bullies at school call out to refugees, “Get out of here! Go back to the pigsty of a country where you belong!” I have been with Kurt when the taunts are directed at him, and I have seen him grit this teeth and double up his fists, but he keeps his temper. Such taunts come from Gerhart Miller and Dieter Kroner and their fellow hoodlums, who are older and stronger than Kurt and me. People like Gerhart have to have someone to stomp on to make them feel superior. It reminds me of Herr Schmidt’s description of what happened to the Jews.
Hans says, “We’ll fish in that bend with all the alder bushes and willows. They’ll never see us from the guard tower.”
Kurt gives in. Kurt’s always trying to keep Hans out of trouble, which is nearly impossible, and Hans is always trying to persuade Kurt to take a risk, which is also nearly impossible.
We plan to meet right after our supper. Outside school it’s a different world. When June comes to our northern city, with its dark, chilling winters, it’s like waking up to find yourself in a new country you can’t wait to explore. We have the North Sea on one side and the Baltic Sea on the other. All winter long the icy wind grabs Rolfen between its sharp teeth and shakes and gnaws it like a dog with a bone. A chill like an evil spell lingers in the school. Though the war has been over for years, heating fuel is still scarce. All winter we have to keep our jackets on in school. Our handwriting looks like bird scratches because we have to hold our pens with gloved fingers. Now my jacket and gloves are shut up in the closet, and without them I feel so light, I could float right up into the sky. I’m sure that my thirteenth summer is going to be the best summer of my life.
A
FTER SCHOOL
I’ve taken to stopping at the redbrick church of St. Mary’s, where Father is employed as an architect. Before the war he had been known for the churches he designed and built. In 1948, three years after the war’s end, when I was only six, Father was hired by the city of Rolfen to help rebuild St. Mary’s Church. We left our home in Swabia and traveled across Germany to the northern town of Rolfen. As I grew older and thought about the move, it seemed strange to me that Father and Mother traveled so far when there are hundreds of churches to rebuild in southern Germany, where we had lived. Once I pointed that out to Father, but he only said, “St. Mary’s is a very famous church, and it’s a privilege to help in its rebuilding.” Today Father has promised to let me climb to the
top of one of the steeples with him, the one that is nearly finished.
St. Mary’s Evangelical Lutheran Church was built seven hundred years ago. Much of the church was destroyed by the bombing during the war, but when all the rebuilding is finished, the church’s twin steeples will once again reach 125 meters into the sky. People who have lived in the town all their lives have been acting as if the vacant space left by the two tumbled steeples is as real as the steeples themselves were. In their stubbornness, they have been refusing to admit that the steeples were no longer there. When first I learned to find my way around the city, the directions I was given always used St. Mary’s Church as the starting point. “It’s two blocks over from St. Mary’s,” people would say, or “It’s just around the corner from St. Mary’s”—as if the absent steeples were still there to point the way.
In southern Germany, where we had come from, the churches were filled with statues and every kind of religious painting, but here in Rolfen St. Mary’s is nearly bare, leaving you to imagine your own picture of God. When the church is filled with organ music and with the singing of the choir, it’s like a cool drink of water when you’re thirsty. Mother and Father attend services at St. Mary’s every Sunday. Usually I go along with them.
There are Sundays when I want to sleep in, my
feather bed a downy nest of softness and warmth. I have a dream I don’t want to let go of or a thought I want to chase. My bed is a safe boat on a great sea. To climb out of it is a risk I don’t want to take. I want nothing to do with the business of washing and putting on my starched shirt, whose collar bites at my neck. I don’t want to listen to Pastor Heuer warn us against the evils of the world. To him that means dancing and movies.
I make excuses, complaining of a sore throat or a headache. Mother becomes cross and insists I must get ready for church, but Father shakes his head and says, “It won’t hurt him to miss church once in a while.” Mother gets angry and there’s an argument. It’s the only time I see them quarrel with each other. It seems odd to me that in the matter of whether or not I go to church Father lets me do as I wish, when he’s strict about everything else.
When I get to St. Mary’s, I look into the small room where the church’s great bells lie. When the church was bombed by the English and Americans on Palm Sunday, 1942, the bells fell to the ground and have remained there, lying on their sides like wounded soldiers. There was an argument in the town after the war. Some said the new bells should be cast from the old, that the new bells should have some of the old bells in them; but others said the injured bells were a reminder and
must remain. “A reminder of what?” I asked Father, but he only said, “For everyone the memories are different, but for all they are sad. Nearby in Hamburg more than fifty churches were destroyed by bombs, and thousands of people in that city and here in Rolfen were killed. People can’t bring back their loved ones, but they can rebuild their churches.”
Today Father is eager to show me the progress they’re making. “Peter,” he says, “you can’t know what comfort it gives me to see the church being restored. It’s as if our country has been given a second chance. It’s God’s forgiveness.”
From my visits to the church I have become friends with the workmen. “
Guten Abend
, Peter,” they call out when they see me. They know I am the son of
der Meister
, the boss. They like Father, for he is often up on the scaffolding or down on his knees helping the workmen, as if he could not wait a moment longer for a brick to be laid or another stroke of the paintbrush, as if he were suffocating and knew he couldn’t breathe again until the day the church is made whole.
While Father is the architect overseeing the rebuilding, he always says it is the workmen who are the important ones, and the workmen are quick to agree. Each one feels it is his special skill that is making the difference. Herr Brandt is working away at repairing the
organ. “Young man,” he tells me, “the organ is the soul of the church. Just think, when Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, was a young man, it is said he walked a great distance just for the pleasure of playing the organ in St. Mary’s Church.”
Reiner Nordstrom, one of the stone workers, is repairing a stone carving of the Last Supper. “Look closely at the carving, Peter,” he says. “See the little mouse gnawing away at the roots of the oak tree? The oak tree is the ancient symbol of Rolfen.”
On our way up the scaffolding that covers the steeple like a wooden net, we pass David Schafer, who is inspecting some brickwork. Herr Schafer is a large, stocky man with a cap of black curling hair, sad eyes that turn down at the corners, and a watchful look, so that every time he sees you there is a moment before he relaxes into friendship. He is one of a handful of Jewish people who have come to live in Rolfen from East Germany. Today after the usual second of hesitation he greets us warmly. “
Wie geht’s
, Peter? You have a fine day for your climb, but watch your footing.” Then Herr Schafer says, “If you are very quiet, Peter, I’ll show you something special.”
Up, up we go on the scaffolding that hugs the church, Herr Schafer leading the way. I’m not exactly afraid of heights, but there’s something about being high up in
the air that makes you terrified you’re going to fall and at the same time makes you want to take off into the air. As we near the bell tower, he pauses and, putting his finger on his lips for silence, points inside the tower where new bells will soon ring out. He is pointing to a nest and, on the nest, a large bird that stares at us as if daring us to trouble it. “A falcon,” he whispers.
I whisper back, “She isn’t bothered by all the work that’s going on?”
“No, no. She puts up with us. She knows it is her territory and we are only intruders. Now I must get back to work. I’ll leave the sky to the two of you.
Auf Wiedersehen
.”
The scaffolding continues up the part of the steeple already repaired. Each tile covers a section of the neighboring tile, so the steeple roof looks like the scales on a giant reptile’s tail. I don’t dare to look down. Each step feels as if I am putting my foot into air. At last we come to the place where the work has stopped. There the scaffolding has a platform where tile will be stacked, ready for the workmen. Father helps me to find my balance, and I settle down on the platform next to him.
Seeing Herr Schafer makes me think of the lecture we had in class. I ask Father, “Why would Jewish people want to live in Germany after what happened to them here?”
“You know the word
Heimat
,” Papa says, “‘homeland.’ And you know the word
Heimweh
, ‘homesickness.’ You had it when we moved here from Swabia. You were lonesome for what was familiar to you. It is the same for Jews who grew up in Germany. There was a time when the Jewish people were at home and happy in Germany. Many have good memories of their childhood; it is hard to give that up. The language as well, Peter; it’s a comfort when each word is familiar and will do just what you want it to. Jews hope things will be better now in Germany. The sad thing, Peter, is that when I hired Herr Schafer, I saw on his resume he had once taught philosophy at the university in Heidelberg.”
“Why would a professor be laying bricks?” I ask.
Father says, “You know yourself that thousands, like your friend Kurt, have escaped to Rolfen from East Germany looking for a better life away from the Communists. Unfortunately there are no jobs here for professors. Schafer was lucky to get a job at all.”
“But where did he learn to be such an expert bricklayer?”
“He’s a resourceful man,” Father says, in a voice he uses when he doesn’t want to speak of something. He changes the subject. “You said you wanted a job this summer, Peter. Herr Schafer could use a helper. You wouldn’t be laying the bricks—that’s work for an
expert—but you have a strong back and you could help in moving the bricks. What do you say?”
“Sure.” I am excited at the idea of working on the church. I see myself getting up each morning and walking to work with my father. When the church is finished, I can say I had a part in it.
“I’ll talk with Herr Schafer,” Father said. “Now, what do you think of the view?”
Seen from atop the scaffolding, the town of Rolfen is like a picture in a book. There is the river and the canal that circles the town, turning the whole city into a moated castle. There is the gate, with its two round five-hundred-year-old towers. There is the main street, with its elegant merchant homes and the Shippers Society building topped by the golden sailboat, for Rolfen has been a trading port for a thousand years. There is the
Rathaus
, the town hall, which, like St. Mary’s, was built seven hundred years ago and is as fine as any town hall in the world. And there is the school where Mother teaches kindergarten. This is Mother’s fourth year of teaching, and when I walk down a street with her, it is never long before some little kid runs up to her and pulls at her sleeve and says, “Mrs. Liebig, Mrs. Liebig, remember me?” and she gives him a hug and he gives her a blissful look.
There are also the ruins where bombs fell and where
repairs have yet to be made; but today, as I look from up so high, they are hidden away.
Sitting in the clouds next to Father, just the two of us, I feel I have his whole attention. Away from everything, I have to ask the question that has been troubling me. I can’t put Herr Schmidt’s lecture out of my head. I know Father was in the German army. I wonder if he was part of the SA, the brownshirted shock troops, the men who sent millions of Jews to their death in brutal and cruel ways. I’m afraid to ask, afraid to learn the truth. He looks like the same father I have always known, neither short nor tall, with thinning blond hair streaked with gray. As usual the wire frames of his glasses have bits of tape where the frames bite into his ears. Under his suit he is wearing the tan wool cardigan that Mother knitted for him from wool she unraveled from an old sweater she found in a used clothing shop. I can’t picture Father in a uniform. But I have to ask.
Right away I’m sorry. Father looks like I have struck him. “No, Peter. Never. I was a soldier in the German army like millions of other German men. As an architect I was ordered to construct barracks. I had nothing to do with what happened to the Jews. Did I guess what was going on? Yes. Did I try to stop it? No. It might have meant death for me, and I was a coward. Others took that chance, but I didn’t. In that I am guilty.” He is silent
for a moment. I can see he longs to tell me something that will make me feel better about him, and at last he says, “There was one time when I had to make a hard choice and I made it. It’s a thing that gives me great comfort.”
I have to say, “Herr Schmidt told us we are all guilty because of what Germany did to the Jews. But I was only a little child. How can I be guilty?”
“Herr Schmidt should confine himself to scolding those who had a hand in the evil. He would find more than enough people to blame. There is no need for him to accuse children.” He gave me a long look. “Most of all you, Peter.”
“But Father, why did no one try to stop Hitler?”
“When a man is as powerful as Hitler was, it takes great courage to oppose him, but there were such men. In Swabia we lived not far from the home of Claus von Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg and some of his friends risked their lives to try to put an end to Hitler. But Peter, this is no place or time to think of such things. Let us keep silent on the subject.”
So there was a time when Father had to make a choice, perhaps a choice of life or death for someone. He made the right choice, but a choice he doesn’t want to talk about. Parents are mysteries you keep unraveling like the old sweater Mother took apart. Bit by bit, day
by day, you discover more and more about them. I have taken my parents for granted, but Herr Schmidt’s class is making me look at them in a new way, and now Father’s insistence on silence makes me more curious than ever. I wonder what his secret is.
“Peter, only look around you,” Father is saying. “We are on top of the world. How do you like it up here? It is easy to play God,
nicht
?”
It’s true. Thinking of how little everything below us looks, I ask, “Father, do you think perhaps God so high up doesn’t know about all of our small problems?”
“He is like the falcon with its sharp eye that misses nothing. Have you a problem for God, Peter?”
I shake my head no.
Father looks relieved. We sit there together, kings of all we see. “Father, if you were ruling the world, what would you change?”
“I’d make everyone’s heart a little bigger, with a little more room for all. And you, Peter, what would you change?”
“I’d do away with all algebra tests.”
Father laughs, and with one last look at the toy city beneath us, we climb down the scaffolding under the sharp eye of the falcon.