Fugler was still in the glow. Talks were proceeding about how and where to set up the school. “Then,” said Harold, “without making anything much of it, he told me that of course part of the routine was that every man in an executive cultural position had to pass a ‘racial certification program.’” Returning to his ironical grin, Harold said, “I had to get measured for Aryan.” He was to accompany Fugler to a Professor Martin Ziegler’s laboratory for a routine check.
With this news, Harold found himself drifting into an even more uncomfortable position. “It’s hard to explain; I’d ended up in this deal where I knew I’d be having to leave Germany. Exactly when and how I wasn’t sure. But being examined seemed to put me in a different position. Because I’d be deceiving them. I mean, they could cook that into a stew, claiming that I was an enemy and they had to do something about me, passport or no passport. I’d gotten so I could smell violence in the air.”
But he did not flee. “I don’t know,” he replied when I asked him why. “I guess I was just waiting to see what would happen. And, look, I don’t deny it, the money’d dug itself into my head. Although—” Again he broke off, dissatisfied with that explanation.
In any case, as he got into Fugler’s car he began to fear that he might be even more vulnerable because he had come to Hitler’s personal and affectionate notice. “It was almost like . . . I don’t know, like he was watching me. Maybe because we’d met, I’d shaken his actual hand,” he said, suggesting that he also had a vague feeling of obligation to Hitler, who, after all, was his would-be benefactor—whom he had misled.
Watching Harold now, I found things simplified; there was certainly a bewildering mix of feelings in him, but I thought I saw a clear straight line underneath—Hitler had esteemed him so feelingly, in a sense had loved him or at least his talent, and more ardently than anyone anywhere else had ever come close to equalling. I wondered if that performance had been the high point of his art, perhaps of his life, a hook he had swallowed that he could still not cough up. After all, he had never become a star and probably would never again feel the burning heat of that magical light upon his face.
In the car, sitting beside Fugler on the way to his exam, and looking through the window at the great city and the ordinary things people did on the street, Harold felt that everything he saw seemed to signify, was suddenly like a painting, as though it were all supposed to mean something. But what? “You had to wonder,” he said, “did they all feel like this? Like they were in a fishbowl and up above there was somebody looking down who cared?”
I couldn’t believe my ears—Hitler cared?
Harold’s eyes now were filled. He said that when he looked at Fugler sitting comfortably beside him smoking his English cigarette, and then at the people on the streets, “everything was so fucking normal. Maybe that’s what was so frightening about it. Like you’re drowning in a dream and people are playing cards on the beach a few yards away. I mean, here I’m in a car going to have my nose measured or something, or my cock inspected, and this was absolutely normal, too. I mean, these were not some fucking moon people, these people had refrigerators!”
Anger seemed to speak in him for the first time, but not, I thought, at the Germans particularly. It was, rather, at some transcendent situation that was beyond defining. Of course, his nose was small, a pug nose, and circumcision had become common among Germans by that time, so he had little to fear from a physical examination. And, as though reading my thought, he added, “Not that I was afraid of an exam, but . . . I don’t know . . . that I was involved with this kind of shit—” He broke off again, again dissatisfied with his explanation, I thought.
The walls of Eugenics Professor Ziegler’s inner office, in a modern building, were loaded with heavy medical volumes and plaster casts of heads—Chinese, African, European—on shelves behind sliding glass. Glancing around, Harold felt surrounded by an audience that had died. The Professor himself was on the tiny side, a nearsighted, rather obsequious scholar, hardly up to Harold’s armpits, who hurriedly ushered him to a chair while Fugler waited in the outer office. The Professor tick-tacked around on the white linoleum floor gathering notebook, pencils, and fountain pen, while assuring Harold, “Only a few minutes and we can finish. Indeed, this is quite exciting, your school.”
Now, sitting down on a high stool facing Harold, notebook on his lap, the Professor noted the satisfactory blue of his eyes and the blond hair, turned his palms up, apparently looking for a telltale sign of something, and finally announced, “We shall take some measurements, please.” Drawing a large pair of brass calipers out of his desk drawer, he held one side under Harold’s chin and the other on the crown of his head, and noted down the distance between them. The same with the width of his cheekbones, the height of his forehead from the bridge of his nose, the width of his mouth and jaws, the length of his nose and ears, and their positions relative to the tip of his nose and crown of his head. Each span was carefully plotted in a leather-bound notebook, as Harold sat trying to think of how to get hold of a railroad timetable without being noticed, and how to create an unobjectionable reason for having to go to Paris that very evening.
The whole session had taken about an hour, including an inspection of his penis, which, though circumcised, was of little interest to the Professor, who, with one eyebrow critically raised, had bent forward to look at the member for a moment, “like a bird with a worm in front of him.” Harold laughed. Finally, looking up from the notes spread out on his desk, the Professor announced with a decided clink of professional self-appreciation in his voice, “I am concluding zat you are a very strong and distinct type of the Aryan race, and I wish to offer you my best wishes for suczess.”
Fugler, of course, had never had any doubts on this score, especially not now, when he was being credited by the regime as the creator of this astonishing program. Imitating Fugler’s smooth accent, Harold told how, on the way back in the car, he had become rhapsodic about tap’s promising to “transform Germany into a community not only of producers and soldiers but artists, the noblest and most eternal spirits of humanity,” and so on. Turning to Harold beside him, he said, “I must tell you—but may I call you Harold now?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“Harold, this adventure—if I may call it so—coming to such a triumphant conclusion, suggests to me what an artist must feel when finishing a composition or painting or any work of art. That he has immortalized himself. I hope I am not embarrassing you.”
“No—no. I see what you mean,” Harold said, his mind distinctly elsewhere.
• • •
Back in the hotel, Harold greeted the members of his troupe who had gathered in his room. He was quite pale and frightened. He sat the three dancers down and said, “We’re getting out.”
Conway said, “Are you all right? You look white.”
“Pack. There’s a train at five tonight. We have an hour and a half. My mother is very ill in Paris.”
Benny Worth’s eyebrows went up. “Your mother’s in Paris?” Then he caught Harold’s look, and the three dancers rose and without a word hurried out to their rooms to pack.
As Harold expected, Fugler was not giving up that easily. “The desk clerk must have called him,” Harold said, “because we had hardly turned in our keys when there he was, looking around at our luggage with disaster in his face.”
“What are you doing? You can’t possibly be leaving,” Fugler said. “What has happened? There is a definite possibility of a dinner with the Führer. This is not to be declined!”
Conway, who happened to be standing nearby, stepped over to Fugler. Fright had raised her voice half an octave. “Can’t you see? He’s terrified of his mother’s passing away. She’s not an old woman, so something terrible must have happened.”
“I can call the Paris embassy. They will send someone. You must stay! This is impossible! What is her address? Please, you must give me her
address, and I will see that doctors attend to her. This cannot happen, Mr. May! Herr Hitler has never before in his life expressed such . . .”
“I’m Jewish,” Harold said.
“What did he say?” I asked, astonished.
Harold looked up, caught up in my excitement. I wondered then if this was the point of the story—to describe his escape not only from Germany but from his relation to Hitler, such was the pleasure spreading over his grinning boy’s face, right up to the part in the middle of his hair.
“Fugler said, ‘How do you do?’”
“How do you do!” I almost yelled, totally flummoxed.
“That’s what he said. ‘How do you do?’ He took half a step back like a shot of compressed air had hit him in the chest, and said, ‘How do you do?’ and stuck out his hand. His mouth fell open. He went white. I thought he was going to faint or shit. I felt a little sorry for him . . . I even shook his hand. And I saw he was scared, like he’d seen a ghost.”
“What did he mean, ‘How do you do’?” I demanded.
“I’ve never been sure,” Harold said, seriously now. “I’ve thought about it a lot. He had an expression like I’d dropped down from the ceiling in front of him. And definitely scared. Definitely. I mean badly scared. Which I could understand, because he’d brought a Jew in front of Hitler. Jews to them were like a disease, which is something I didn’t really understand till later. But I think it could have been something else that had him frightened, too.”
He paused for a moment, staring at his empty soda glass. Through the window I saw office workers starting to crowd the sidewalk; the day was ending. “Thinking back to when we met in Budapest and all, I wonder if maybe he’d gotten to, you know, feel pretty close to me. I don’t mean sex, I mean like I’d been his ticket to that face-to-face with Hitler, which only important people ever got to have, and on top of that I know he had a top spot in the new school marked out for himself. I mean, I’d gotten hold of the power in a certain way, which I’d begun to notice when I was taken to the Professor to be certified and in the car Fugler began treating me as though I were higher up than him. And when the Professor came out and told him I was kosher, he was already turning into a different man, like he was under me. It was sort of pathetic.
“Mind you,” Harold went on, “this was before we knew much about the camps and all,” and then he stopped.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just that I . . .” He broke off. After a moment, he looked at me and said, “To tell the truth, he wasn’t really such a bad guy, Fugler. Just crazy. Badly crazy. They all were. The whole country. Maybe all countries, frankly. In a way. When I look at Berlin bombed to shit now, everything on the ground, and I remember it when there wasn’t a candy wrapper on the sidewalks, and you ask yourself, How is this possible? What did it to them? Something did it. What was it?”
He paused again. “I’m not excusing them in any way, but when he said, ‘How do you do?’ as though he’d never seen me before, I thought, These people are absolutely in a dream. And suddenly here’s this Jew who he’d thought was a person. I guess you could say it was a dream that killed forty million people, but it was still a dream. To tell the truth, I think we all are—in a dream, I mean. I’ve kept thinking that ever since I left Germany. It’s over ten years since I got home, and I’m still wondering about it. I mean, no people love nuts and bolts like Germans. Practical people down to their shoelaces. But they still dreamed themselves into this rubble.”
He glanced out at the street. “You can’t help wondering, when you walk around in the city. Are we any different? Maybe we’re also caught in some dream.” And, gesturing toward the crowd moving along the street, he said, “The things in their heads, the things they believe. Who knows how real it is? To me now we’re like walking songs, walking novels, and the only time it gets to seem real is when somebody kills somebody.” No one spoke for a moment; then I asked, “So you got out all right?”
“Oh, no problem. They were probably glad to see us go without bad publicity. We went back to Budapest and then we worked the wheel till the Germans marched into Prague, and after that we came home.” He sat back in his chair, preparing to stand. It struck me how deceptively young and unmarked he had seemed a half hour earlier, when we first met, like a guy fresh out of the Corn Belt, while in fact failure had wrinkled the flesh around his eyes. He stuck out his hand, and I shook it. “Use it if you like,” he said. “I want people to know. Maybe you’ll figure it out—be my guest.” Then he got up and went out into the street.
I never saw him again, but the story has visited me a hundred times over the past fifty years, and for some reason I keep pushing it under again. Maybe I would much rather think of positive, hopeful things. Which could also be a way of dreaming, of course. Still, I like to think that a lot of good things have come out of dreaming.
Beavers
The pond, normally as silent as a glass of water, now gave up a sound, a splash at the man’s approach. A heavy splash far weightier than a frog or leaping fish could make. And then spread itself flat as the mirror it usually was. The man waited but there was only silence. He walked the shoreline watching for signs, stood still listening. His eye caught the tree stump at the far end of the pond. Coming upon it, he saw the fallen poplar and its gnawed tip and the gnawed stump as well. He had beavers. Strangers thieving his privacy. Now, scanning the shore, he counted six trees felled during the single night. In another twenty-four hours the slope above the pond would begin to look like wasteland. Another couple of days and a bulldozer would seem to have gone through it, knocking over what was a lovely wood that had nestled the pond through the years. Long ago he had marveled at the wreckage of a wood on Whittlesy’s place, at least ten acres looking like the Argonne Forest after a World War I shelling. The green woods at his back were his to defend.
He turned back to the water in time to see the flattened rodent head moving across the water. Watched motionless as the beast arrived at the narrow end of the pond and sounded, its flat leathery tail, with a parting slap on the water, flashing toward the sky as it slipped down and disappeared. Stepping closer to the shoreline, the man now made out, just below the surface of the clear, sky-reflecting water, the outline of the lodge. Incredible. They must have built it overnight, since he had been swimming right there the day before and there had been nothing. Amazement chilled his spine, the sheer appropriation. He recalled reading, long ago, that beaver shit was toxic. He and Louisa could no longer swim here as they had for thirty years, exulting in the water’s purity, which had once tested potable, cleansed by its passage upward through sand and clay.
He hurried up to the house and found his shotgun and a box of shells and hurried back down the hill to the pond and circled around it to the lodge. With the sun lower he could make out its structure, a wall woven of thin branches the beaver had cut from the trees it had felled and then plastered with mud from the pond’s bottom. Most likely the animal was resting on the shelf it had built inside the structure. The man aimed, careful to miss the lodge, and fired into the water’s surface, which answered with a resonating boom and a peppering of light. The man waited. In a few minutes the head appeared. Expecting a confrontation, he reloaded and waited, hoping not to kill the beast but to introduce it to enough uncertainty to make it go away. He fired again. The flat tail arched up and sounded. The man waited. In a few minutes the head reappeared. The beaver swam, possibly worried but showing full confidence as it headed in a straight line across the pond to the fourteen-inch steel overflow pipe that stood five or six feet in from the opposite shore. There, defiantly—or was it some other emotion?—the beast pulled down a hazel bush growing at the shoreline and swam with it in its jaws and, raising up, pushed the whole plant into the pipe. Then it dived and emerged again with a tangle of grass and mud in its grasp and shoved that load into the pipe on top of the hazel bush. He was intending to stop the overflow. He wan
ted to raise the water level of the pond.
Perplexed, the man, standing across the pond from this intense work, sat on his heels to think about the enigma before him. The conventional analysis was that beaver dam building had as its purpose the blocking of a small stream with a dam in order to create a pond in which the beaver could build its lodge and raise its family, safe from predators. The project would deforest large areas that provided thin branches for lodge building, and cellulose from the felled tree stems on which the animal lived. But this fellow already had a deep pond in which to build its lodge. Indeed, it had already built one. Why did it need to stuff the pipe, stop the overflow, and raise the pond level? The whole effort was somehow admirable for its engineering skill and, in this case, thoroughly pointless. Watching the beast working, the man recognized his feeling of unhappiness with what he was witnessing and wondered, after a few minutes, whether he had somehow come to rely on nature as an ultimate source of steady logic and order, which only senseless humans betrayed with their greed and frivolous stupidity. This beaver was behaving like an idiot, imagining he was creating a pond where a perfect one already existed. The man aimed close enough to the beast to remind him once again of his unwelcome, fired, saw the tail rise and slap the water, and the idiot was gone. In a few minutes he had surfaced and returned to stuffing the pipe. The man felt himself weakening before this persistence, this absolute dedication that was so unlike his own endlessly doubting nature, his fractured convictions. He would need some expert advice; one way or another the beast had to go.
• • •
Carl Mellencamp, the druggist’s son, was the man he needed. He had known Carl since his infancy, watched him grow enormous until now, in his late twenties, when he stood over six feet tall, weighing probably well over two hundred, with a rocking gait, thick archer’s fists, a steady mason’s gaze, and a certain straw hat with curled-up brim that he had worn cocked to the left side in heat and snow for at least the last ten years or maybe more. Carl lived to lay up stone walls, install verandas and garden paths, and hunt with gun or bow. When he arrived in his white Dodge truck late in the afternoon, the man felt the heavy cloak of responsibility passing off his shoulders and onto Carl’s.