Solimeos, p.6
Solimeos, page 6
Papa tracked blood on the entry stones, his face itself stone. He thrust his hand under Luba’s blouse, pulled out a balloon of a breast, and from under his own Jewish clothes he retrieved a handful of vizsla puppy, which he shoved onto her brown nipple. “It needs milk.”
Luba stood, circles of red fury painted on her quivering cheeks, weeping as the vizsla suckled viciously. “It has teeth!” she cried out. I didn’t know how to help her. My father was a whirlwind. Everything happened too fast. Everything was an order. And everything was threatening.
Papa and Uncle Wolf knelt and kissed the hearthstone of our great fireplace. In disbelief, the two brothers shook their heads at each other, and then, groaning with the effort and the ache, unhinged the oak doors from their frames and carried them on their shoulders like crosses to the truck. These doors had come from the family castle. They were deeply carved with the Pappendorf coat of arms: pine trees, bears, and swords. My mother took her own ring of house keys and handed them to Cook Shteinberg, who covered her face with her apron. With the soldiers and Uncle Wolf hurrying us, we were bundled into the truck.
Ulla, Shteinberg, Volker the barn man, and his two sons stood on the porch. The house was now theirs. Running, my father led the soldiers to the little church beyond the orchards to pick up the ancient wooden Madonna from whose rear end the shortwave radio had been removed and replaced with diamonds from India.
He had his boxes of books packed next to my mother’s boxes of dishes. He ordered the soldiers to leave my mother’s boxes and take only his.
With fisted hands, my mother beat on the shield of his chest. “My dishes! How dare you?”
“We are not moving, Berthe. We are escaping.”
Mama, porcelain herself, a network of small veins crackling her skin like old china, fought in whispers and hisses with Papa over the boxes while the soldiers turned their faces away and waited. The engine of the truck was running, the driver pacing around us. I considered asking him if I could sit up front. I’d never been in a truck.
When he turned away to study road maps with Uncle Wolf and the driver, Mama tore into his boxes, throwing books into the dirt. “I will not leave until I have my dishes.”
I watched in horror as Mama ripped pages from notebooks, broke the backs of leather-covered dictionaries. Yellowed pages flew. She read a label from a notebook. “The origins of man’s consciousness through phonetic fossils. Wonderful.” She tore out a few pages, crumpled them in her fist and tossed the notebook at Papa’s back.
At last, he realized what she was doing. “Berthe? Are you mad? Those are my notes, my ideas. Berthe, I beg you.”
“You and your ideas. Look where they got us.”
“The war was not my idea, Berthe.”
Luba, somehow holding both Cecilia and the squirming puppy, moved behind the truck. Papa looked to Uncle Wolf for help. Uncle Wolf shrugged. I shoved books back into their boxes. More flew over my head.
“Herr Baron,” the driver called from the truck. “The ship…” He waved his arm to Papa, tapped his watch.
“I want my dishes.”
“My lifetime work, Berthe! My ideas are essential. Your dishes are not.”
“The world can live without your Is and your Og, your words, your old gods. Your…your Platos.” Deftly, she shredded an entire notebook. Uncle Wolf tried to calm his brother, who was simultaneously attempting to attack Berthe and give directions to the driver. Uncle Wolf held my father’s elbow, whispering in his ear.
I didn’t know what an Is or an Og was. I just patted Mama on the back. I loved my mother.
She elbowed me away. “Gods with tails. We give our life for his gods with tails.”
“She’s very upset, Dietrich,” Uncle Wolf spoke softly. “Let her take a few dishes. We must go!”
“It’s not about the dishes,” Papa shouted as we chased papers in the wind. “It’s about the war. She blames me for the war. Stupid woman!”
“Right now, Dietrich, it’s about escaping. Now.”
Hands trembling, my father’s with anger, mine with fear, I helped him repack his books and notebooks. “Listen, Axel,” he told me, “your mother is not herself.” He was wrong. She was absolutely herself: angry, depressed, distant. It was he who was not himself. I sensed weakness and fear. Of course, we were all terrified. Escaping. And boy that I was, I hoped that wherever we were going, I would be able to wear more respectable long pants.
Uncle Wolf put his arm around my mother’s waist, offered her a dessert plate and a demitasse cup, and led her gently into the back of the truck. Luba climbed in beside her. She carried baby Cecilia, the infant puppy, and dutifully, frantically covered them with a featherbed. The soldiers lifted the Madonna, the doors of our house, and Papa’s books into the truck.
“Where are you taking us, Dietrich?” my mother asked.
Uncle Wolf laughed and snapped the camouflage cloth over the rear of the truck. “We’re going to Paradise.” Three soldiers climbed into the truck with us and immediately fell asleep. My father sat with the driver. The back of his neck was red and taut with fury.
“Origins of man’s consciousness, ha!” Mama shouted to Papa in the front of the truck. “I spit on your word fossils. Spit!” But he couldn’t hear her over the engine and the deeply drawn snores of the soldiers.
Uncle Wolf slid over to her and held her in his arms, at which moment she began the frantic unending recital of her china inventory, inherited from her mother, who had inherited it from the Empress of Austria, and she never stopped.
Uncle Wolf interrupted. “His work, Berthe, his Is and his Og, they are saving our lives, so mind your tongue.” And then he kissed her on her forehead.
We passed a burning tank. The earth shook with explosions. Shells burst overhead. The truck jolted, shook, swung wildly around sharp curves and flaming potholes. Luba sniffled. I curled as close to her as I could.
Papa yelled, “Out of the truck. Everybody out.” He dragged me out and pulled me into the woods. A plane buzzed above. I fell on my back. He fell on top of me. His bones were sharp, breath rotten.
“If we are caught, Axel, run, hide. Find a farmhouse. There is food at farmhouses.”
Another bomb exploded. “Wolf, you there?”
“Be quiet, Dietrich,” came his brother’s voice. “There may be some on foot, from the tank.”
“You won’t be hurt, Axel. Don’t worry. I won’t let you die. Axel, listen to me.” His words came from deep within, his mouth close to my ear, his breath hot and acidic, smoky. “I’m not like other men.”
I watched his Adam’s apple bobbing, as if he were gagging on his words, struggling. A tank rumbled past us toward the explosions.
“Russian,” Uncle Wolf whispered from someplace nearby.
“They’re after the tank, not us.” Another bomb exploded. Dirt and stones showered upon us. My father pressed down on me. “Axel, if they find us, they’ll kill me. Are you listening?”
“Sir.” It was all I dared to say. He was squeezing the air out of my chest.
He kneaded my shoulders as if shaping dough. Tears or sweat, I couldn’t tell which, were running down his cheeks into my ear. “If we are caught, remember who you are.”
And who was that? It was an unlikely moment for a revelation of any kind, and this one was devastating. Suddenly I thought my papa was insane. Mama was too, and we were all going to die. I struggled, wanting him off of me. A plane buzzed overhead in circles, dipping and diving. The world was spinning off its axis. Cecilia screamed. Luba gently shook her quiet.
“Find a farmhouse,” said Papa. “If they come, run.”
Uncle Wolf whispered, “The bombs are farther away.”
My father rolled off me. “Back in the truck, everyone. Back. Be quiet.” He sprinted out of the woods, found the driver who lay crushed, dead, raw meat, next to the truck. Papa climbed into the driver’s seat. He let me sit next to him.
“Hold on, Axel. We go over the mountain. A half mile back.” The soldiers had never left the truck. They were still asleep. The gears screamed as he turned, backed up, and roared onto the mountain road. My father was two men—one of whom I wished to be and one who terrified me.
Chapter Six
Leaving the Black Forest, we raced through twilight into a night of fear, then a fog-thick morning on dirt roads, through woods and emptiness, empty towns, empty roads, an empty day, through a ghost city to the sea and to a dark dock. Yellow stars on our arms, the infant puppy hidden in a burlap bag. Luba, carrying three-year-old Cecilia in her arms, Uncle Wolf, Papa and Mama and I, at last, boarded a darkened destroyer. We were led down steps along freezing metal walls until we found our cabins and fell into cots. In one area, my mother and father occupied a cabin, Luba and Cecilia were in another, my uncle Wolf shared one with me.
Uncle Wolf stared at the ceiling and didn’t speak.
The chains dropped, the engines turned, churned. The ship moved forward. As long as I could, I counted the slap of the ship’s bottom on the waves. I thought about the time our hounds ate a dead soldier in the forest while I counted to three thousand, and I was happy to be going to Paradise, wherever it was, whatever it was.
By daylight, still in our factory rags, on the deck, we saw other families. Two men clicked their heels and saluted my father, despite his shoddy clothes. When my father returned their devotion with hot looks, they dropped their raised arms.
“It is over,” he said, steely-eyed. “We are no longer what we were.” They looked away from his madness. To their backs, he whispered, “And now we are criminals, suspended outside history, pariahs, but we will live in Paradise.” My mother walked behind us, leaned over the railing, and stared into the sea.
That night, she summoned me to her cabin. She lay on a cot, wearing the striped shirt and pants with the yellow star we took from the factory, her cheeks sunken, eyes hollow. “Axel, find your father. Tell him we’re not supposed to be on the deck after dark.” Other than the unending frantic recitation of her Meissen collection of china, my mother hadn’t spoken a word since we’d raced from our forest home to the sea, fleeing in a filthy truck from all things familiar to all things unknown. “Hurry,” she urged.
I found my way past icy metal walls, stumbling up to the deck. Everything was dark but for the red eye of my father’s cigarette. He leaned against a railing. Reaching down, he held my hand. “We’re going south, then across the Atlantic Ocean. We escaped and are safe.”
“Mama says we’re not supposed to be up here on the deck at night.”
“That isn’t fair, is it?”
This was the father I loved. He was mimicking me, joking with me, the son who forever claimed things were unfair.
“It isn’t fair that we lost the war, Papa, is it?”
I could feel the warmth of his smile. “We do what we can; we take what we must.” He dropped my hand and flipped his cigarette into the sea. “Go tell Luba I want to see her. Go, run.”
In their cabin, Luba and Cecilia were sleeping. I woke up Luba. “Dietrich wishes to see you,” I said, feeling grown up as I used my father’s first name.
“Goddamn him. Alright, you watch the baby.” Though Cecilia wasn’t exactly a baby anymore, that was how she acted. And how all of us treated her. “Ten minutes,” said Luba.
Cecilia realized Luba had left and boiled into a tantrum that wouldn’t stop, no matter what I did or promised. Finally, I knocked on my mother’s cabin door with my squealing sister. “It isn’t fair. Luba gets to go for a walk with Papa and I have to…”
Mama was instantly out of her bed, tossing a blanket over her shoulders. Uncle Wolf appeared in the hallway, taking Cecilia in his arms, rocking. She quieted. My mother threw her arms around Uncle Wolf and Cecilia, then wept with deep, wet sobs.
The ship’s captain suddenly appeared in the doorway. Captain Friedrich Kroening brought with him a case of pears wrapped in yellow papers. He caught my mother by the arm. “Baroness von Pappendorf, I am proud to welcome you to my ship and pray we can serve your illustrious family well. These pears and cigarettes are from friends and for you, madam. The Baron has also received cigarettes.”
“I have to go on the deck. My husband…”
Captain Kroening was fat, much shorter than everyone but me. He adjusted the blanket over my mother’s shoulders, took her arm and led her away. I ate the miracle of the pear, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, then licked my sleeve, counted to one hundred, and followed.
By the time I was on the deck and found my mother at the far end of the ship, Captain Kroening was gone and the ship lights were off. In the moonlight, I found Mama leaning on a railing. She held the vizsla puppy in her arms and was again reciting her inventory of Meissen dishes.
“…three dozen, gold-rimmed, two slightly chipped. Saucers with gold crowns, fourteen.” She was on dessert plates, slowly smoking a cigarette while staring at something going on between the gun mountings: It was my father atop Luba, amid groaning and labored breathing and the slosh of seawater.
I don’t know how long I stood there. As Luba cried softly, I watched, transfixed. When I turned around, Mama was gone. After hearing a cry and a splash, I swung about. My mother was gone.
Amid the faltering conclusion of the Meissen dessert plate recital, she had disappeared. She’d ended with the dessert plates. I ran the length of the ship, looking everywhere I could, even reluctantly at the dark waters roiling below. I bolted back to our cabin to find my uncle.
Bootless, barefoot, Uncle Wolf lay on his bunk, Cecilia sleeping at his side. His feet were pale and narrow. I woke him, saying, “I can’t find my mother.”
“And where is your father?”
I shrugged. I remembered the seawater sloshing between the gun mounts. Papa’s breathing, pumping. I thought that he somehow controlled the beat of the ocean itself, the plow of this ship through the sea.
Cecilia started shrieking. Just as Uncle Wolf picked her up, Papa and Luba arrived. Luba rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, her dress dripping wet. Cecilia screamed, and Papa took her from Uncle Wolf’s arms, thrust her at Luba. She dropped her bodice before both men and me, closing her eyes while Cecilia suckled.
“Luba, where is my puppy?” Papa asked.
“How should I know? I keep my eyes closed.”
“Where is your mother?” Sensing something disturbing in my gaze, he shook me by my shoulders. “Tell me, Axel, where is she?”
“I’ve been looking,” I said. “I can’t find her.”
Uncle Wolf slammed his hand against the wall so hard a burning kerosene lamp fell. Papa danced to stomp out its sparks. He stomped long after the flames died.
“If Berthe is hurt, Dietrich, it’s on your head. I shall never forgive you.”
My father made a fist, swung a half arc toward his brother, then stopped himself.
“Papa.” I tugged at his sleeve. “I don’t know where she went. Maybe Mama’s hiding.”
Uncle Wolf rushed to the captain, beseeching him to stop the ship and search the waters, but Kroening refused. The ship continued on its course as Uncle Wolf, numerous crew members, and I searched for Mama in its every corner: the engine room, the kitchen, and so on.
Behind nearly every cabin door, I heard weeping and quarreling. Pain was everywhere, I observed, but was my mother’s so severe she’d leave me behind? Did a cold, watery grave offer her more solace than a loving son?
Uncle Wolf moved from our cabin space to sleep in a hammock with the crew. When we docked in Spain, I watched a small army of men bringing on board meats, vegetables, fruits, bags of flour, sugar, salt, boxes of eggs. We were to eat like kings.
Dietrich, Luba, Cecilia, and I sat at the captain’s table for three meals a day, noble and high-ranking as we were. Captain Kroening did not join us.
Uncle Wolf stopped once at our table and explained to me he’d moved to a bunk in the crew quarters because Cecilia was keeping him awake at night with her tantrums. From the way his eyes slid around, I knew he was lying. He did not sit with us but farther down a long table.
Dietrich’s face had changed overnight. There was a film over it, a scab. I couldn’t look into his eyes; they were so lifeless. It was as if he had gone blind. Now that Uncle Wolf was avoiding us, I had a cabin to myself, which allowed me to continue sneaking out at night, wandering the ship, looking for my mother. I leaned against door after door, listened, listened. It was cold. Two men slept in the hallway outside our rooms.
One night, Dietrich came fumbling and stumbling into my cabin. “Can you write? Do you have paper and pen? Get up. I don’t want to forget this.”
This was the first of my father’s waking lectures. It was the beginning of my endless task of writing them out for him. He began: “Gentlemen of the Royal Astronomical Society, the relationship of blood to language is indivisible. It is the ultimate framework for the origins of consciousness. Words have a peculiar property. It is the same property in our genetics…no doubt you have heard of Friedrich Miescher’s work.” He strode up and down the deck. I ran after, back and forth, trying to write and keep up with him. He bumped into a woman who was watching the sea, a sailor who was watching us.
Another night. The engines were off again. The lights flickered, died. Captain Kroening stood next to Dietrich on the deck, whispering, squinting into the night. “I’m afraid there’s a British ship nearby and at least one submarine. Please put out your cigarette.”
“If there is a nearby submarine, possibly following us, why don’t we race forward and lose them? We can’t continue to delay like this. We’ll run out of rations, water.”
“No, no, let me assure you, Herr Baron, we are moving forward.”
“I order you to turn on the engines and move at full speed away from the danger. Or I shall report you as soon as we land.”
