Mother Night (4 page)

“Sprechen-Sie Deutsch?”
his mother called after me as I was leaving.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“I asked if you spoke German,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “No—I’m afraid not,” I said. I experimented shyly with the language.
“Nein?”
I said. “That’s no, isn’t it?”

“Very good,” she said.

“Auf wiedersehen,”
I said. “That’s goodbye, isn’t it?”

“Until we meet again,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well—
auf wiedersehen.”

“Auf wiedersehen,”
she said.

I
WAS RECRUITED
as an American agent in 1938, three years before America got into the war. I was recruited one spring day in the Tiergarten in Berlin.

I had been married to Helga Noth a month.

I was twenty-six.

I was a fairly successful playwright, writing in the language in which I write best, German. I had one play, “The Goblet,” running in both Dresden and Berlin. Another play of mine, “The Snow Rose.” was then in production in Berlin. I had just finished a third one, “Seventy Times Seven.” All three plays were medieval romances, about as political as chocolate é
clairs
.

I was sitting alone on a park bench in the sunshine that day, thinking of a fourth play that was beginning to write itself in my mind. It gave itself a title, which was
“Das Reich der Zwei”
—“Nation of Two.”

It was going to be about the love my wife and I
had for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two.

On a bench across the path from me a middle-aged American now sat down. He looked like a fool and a gasbag. He untied his shoelaces to relieve his feet, and he began to read a month-old copy of the Chicago
Sunday Tribune
.

Three handsome officers of the S.S. stalked down the walk between us.

When they were gone, the man put his paper down and spoke to me in twanging Chicago English. “Nice-looking men,” he said.

“I suppose,” I said.

“You understand English?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank God for somebody who can understand English,” he said. “I’ve been going crazy trying to find somebody to talk to.”

“That so?” I said.

“What do you think of all this—” he said, “or aren’t people supposed to go around asking questions like that?”

“All what?” I said.

“The things going on in Germany,” he said. “Hitler and the Jews and all that.”

“It isn’t anything I can control,” I said, “so I don’t think about it.”

He nodded. “None of your beeswax, eh?” he said.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“None of your business,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“You didn’t understand that—when I said ‘beeswax’ instead of ‘business’?” he said.

“It’s a common expression, is it?” I said.

“In America it is,” he said. “You mind if I come over there, so we don’t have to holler?”

“As you please,” I said.

“As you please,” he echoed, coming over to my bench. “That sounds like something an Englishman would say.”

“American,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Is that a fact? I was trying to guess what maybe you were, but I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You figure that’s a compliment?” he said. “That’s why you said, ‘Thank you’?”

“Not a compliment—or an insult, either,” I said. “Nationalities just don’t interest me as much as they probably should.”

This seemed to puzzle him. “Any of my beeswax what you do for a living?” he said.

“Writer,” I said.

“Is that a fact?” he said. “That’s a great coincidence. I was sitting over there wishing I could write, on account of I’ve thought up what I think’s a pretty good spy story.”

“That so?” I said.

“I might as well give it to you,” he said. “I’ll never write it.”

“I’ve got all the projects I can handle now,” I said.

“Well—some time you may run dry,” he said, “and then you can use this thing of mine. There’s this young American, see, who’s been in Germany so long he’s practically a German himself. He writes plays in German, and he’s married to a beautiful German actress, and he knows a lot of big-shot Nazis who like to hang around theater people.” He rattled off the names of Nazis, great and small—all of whom Helga and I knew pretty well.

It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.

They were people.

Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.

To be frank—I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well as people, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause.

Too hard.

Amen.

Too hard.

“Who are you?” I said to the man in the park.

“Let me finish my story first,” he said. “So this young man knows there’s a war coming, figures America’s gonna be on one side and Germany’s gonna be on the other. So this American, who hasn’t been anything but polite to the Nazis up to then, decided to pretend he’s a Nazi himself, and he stays on in Germany when war comes along, and gets to be a very useful American spy.”

“You know who I am?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. He took out his billfold, showed me a United States War Department identification card that said he was Major Frank Wirtanen, unit unspecified. “And that’s who I am. I’m asking you to be an American intelligence agent, Mr. Campbell.”

“Oh Christ,” I said. I said it with anger and fatalism. I slumped down. When I straightened up again, I said, “Ridiculous. No—hell, no.”

“Well—” he said, “I’m not too let-down, actually, because today isn’t when you give me your final answer anyway.”

“If you imagine that I’m going home to think it over,” I said, “you’re mistaken. When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep
like a log. I’m not a soldier, not a political man. I’m an artist. If war comes, I won’t do anything to help it along. If war comes, it’ll find me still working at my peaceful trade.”

He shook his head. “I wish you all the luck in the world, Mr. Campbell,” he said, “but this war isn’t going to let anybody stay in a peaceful trade. And I’m sorry to say it,” he said, “but the worse this Nazi thing gets, the less you’re gonna sleep like a log at night.”

“We’ll see,” I said tautly.

“That’s right—we’ll see,” he said. “That’s why I said you wouldn’t give me your final answer today. You’ll live your final answer. If you decide to go ahead with it, you’ll go ahead with it strictly on your own, working your way up with the Nazis as high as you can go.”

“Charming,” I said.

“Well—it has this much charm to it—” he said, “you’d be an authentic hero, about a hundred times braver than any ordinary man.”

A ramrod Wehrmacht general and a fat, briefcase-carrying German civilian passed in front of us, talking with suppressed excitement.

“Howdy do,” Major Wirtanen said to them amiably.

They snorted in contempt, walked on.

“You’ll be volunteering right at the start of a war
to be a dead man. Even if you live through the war without being caught, you’ll find your reputation gone—and probably very little to live for,” he said.

“You make it sound very attractive,” I said.

“I think there’s a chance I’ve made it attractive to
you,”
he said. “I saw the play you’ve got running now, and I’ve read the one you’re going to open.”

“Oh?” I said. “And what did you learn from those?”

He smiled. “That you admire pure hearts and heroes,” he said. “That you love good and hate evil,” he said, “and that you believe in romance.”

He didn’t mention the best reason for expecting me to go on and be a spy. The best reason was that I was a ham. As a spy of the sort he described, I would have an opportunity for some pretty grand acting. I would fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out.

And I
did
fool everybody. I began to strut like Hitler’s right-hand man, and nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside.

Can I prove I was an American spy? My unbroken, lily-white neck is Exhibit A, and it’s the only exhibit I have. Those whose duty it is to find me guilty or innocent of crimes against humanity are welcome to examine it in detail.

The Government of the United States neither
confirms nor denies that I was an agent of theirs. That’s a little something, anyway, that they don’t deny the possibility.

They twitch away that tid-bit, however, by denying that a Frank Wirtanen ever served that Government in any branch. Nobody believes in him but me. So I will hereinafter speak of him often as “My Blue Fairy Godmother.”

One of the many things my Blue Fairy Godmother told me was the sign and countersign that would identify me to my contact and my contact to me, if war should come.

The sign was: “Make new friends.”

The countersign was: “But keep the old.”

My lawyer here, the learned counsel for the defense, is a Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz. He grew up in America, something I never did, and Mr. Dobrowitz tells me that the sign and countersign are part of a song often sung by an idealistic American girls’ organization called “The Brownies.”

The full lyric, according to Mr. Dobrowitz is:

M
Y WIFE
never knew I was a spy.

I would have lost nothing by telling her. My telling her wouldn’t have made her love me less. My telling her wouldn’t have put me in any danger. It would simply have made my heavenly Helga’s world, which was already something to make The Book of Revelation, seem pedestrian.

The war was enough without that.

My Helga believed that I meant the nutty things I said on the radio, said at parties. We were always going to parties.

We were a very popular couple, gay and patriotic, People used to tell us that we cheered them up, made them want to go on. And Helga didn’t go through the war simply looking decorative, either. She entertained the troops, often within the sound of enemy guns.

Enemy guns? Somebody’s guns, anyway.

That was how I lost her. She was entertaining troops in the Crimea, and the Russians took the Crimea back. My Helga was presumed dead.

After the war, I paid a good deal of my money to a private detective agency in West Berlin to trace the wispiest word of her. Results: zero. My standing offer to the agency, unclaimed, was a prize of ten thousand dollars for clear proof that my Helga was either alive or dead.

Hi ho.

My Helga believed I meant the things I said about the races of man and the machines of history—and I was grateful. No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed—and my Helga was the angel who gave it to me.

Copiously.

No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord—as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.

Das Reich der Zwei
, the nation of two my Helga and I had—its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed.

Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains.

And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was! What a map I could draw for a tourist a micron high, a submicroscopic
Wandervögel
bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga’s belly button. If this image is in bad taste, God help me. Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health. I have simply described the game, an adult interpretation of “This-Little-Piggy,” that was ours.

Oh, how we clung, my Helga and I—how
mindlessly
we clung!

We didn’t listen to each other’s words. We heard only the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats.

If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been! Away from the sovereign territory of our nation of two, we talked like the patriotic lunatics all around us.

But it did not count.

Only one thing counted—

The nation of two.

And when that nation ceased to be, I became what I am today and what I always will be, a stateless person.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. The man who recruited me that spring day in the Tiergarten so long ago now—that man told my fortune pretty well.

“To do your job right,” my Blue Fairy Godmother told me, “you’ll have to commit high treason, have to serve the enemy well. You won’t ever be forgiven for that, because there isn’t any legal device by which you can be forgiven.

“The most that will be done for you,” he said, “is that your neck will be saved. But there will be no magic time when you will be cleared, when America will call you out of hiding with a cheerful: Olly-olly-ox-in-free.”

M
Y MOTHER
and father died. Some say they died of broken hearts. They died in their middle sixties, at any rate, when hearts break easily.

They did not live to see the end of the war, nor did they ever see their beamish boy again. They did not disinherit me, though they must have been bitterly tempted to do so. They bequeathed to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the notorious anti-Semite, turncoat and radio star, stocks, real estate, cash and personal property which were, in 1945, at the time of probate, worth forty-eight thousand dollars.

That boodle, through growth and inflation, has come to be worth four times that much now, giving me an unearned income of seven thousand dollars a year.