“You speak German with the accent of Pressburg,” Father Nickel said. “I was born in that city in 1864, under the reign of Emperor Franz Josef I.”
My grandfather explained that his grandfather and father had been born in that city as well, though he was unable to provide dates.
“Did they tell you that a Pressburger is incapable of deceit?”
My grandfather was forced to confess that they had neglected to mention this fact. Nevertheless, he started to dig. The hole he dug was not wide and before long the shovel struck metal, less than two meters down.
“Well?” said the old priest.
“Excellent shovel,” my grandfather said.
The minute Father Nickel heard that Allied soldiers had set foot on German soil, he had sent for his former sexton and gravedigger, Alois. Alois had grown up a ward of the parish. It had been his job as a boy to prepare the church’s most valuable relic, a bone from the body of Saint Dominic, for its yearly presentation. At eighteen Alois had enlisted and been shipped east to Smolensk, where a limonka had taken his left ring finger and pinkie and his left eye. He was returned to Vellinghausen suffering from shell shock that gradually deepened into black depression. He would not return to his former employment at St. Dominikus-Kirche. Every night he drank himself into unconsciousness and slept where he fell. While drunk, he would repeat foul blasphemies he had learned in the army. These did not offend Father Nickel, who had heard everything, but he knew that God was less forgiving, and he worried about the fate of his former protégé’s soul. Hoping to distract the young man as much as to protect the church’s treasures, he had asked Alois to build a strongbox that could be buried in the churchyard, disguised as an actual grave. Alois still had a strong back and clever hands. Despite his injury, he could wield a hammer and shears.
To the old priest’s delight and relief, Alois, guided by lingering reverence for his former charge, the holy relic of Saint Dominic, had accepted the commission. He persuaded the late housekeeper, Maria, to part with an old cedar chest. Then he went to the parish henhouse, which had stood empty for over a year, and pried loose the corrugated sheets of zinc that roofed it. He cut the zinc to measure and nailed the pieces to the outside of the cedar chest. He had carved the jocular headstone to Father Nickel’s specifications, then buried the strongbox, filled with the wealth of St. Dominikus-Kirche, at its foot. Now the chest sat looking impregnable and snug at the bottom of a six-foot shaft dug with machined precision to fit it exactly.
“How heavy is that thing, Father?”
“Seventy-three kilograms.”
My grandfather started to question the precision of Father Nickel’s reply, then realized: “Alois weighed it.”
“He made a complete inventory, which I mailed to the Congregation for Divine Worship at the Curia for safekeeping.”
My grandfather felt that he would have liked to meet this tragic but admirably methodical young man. He hesitated, believing he already knew the answer to the question he was going to ask. “Maybe Alois has some thoughts about digging up the box,” he said. “Where is he?”
“No doubt he would have done,” Father Nickel said. “Unfortunately, the young man you killed today, in the street . . . to whom I gave extreme unction . . .”
“Ah,” said my grandfather. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I was able to comfort him at last,” the priest said. “As you saw.”
My grandfather had seen something he was not prepared to concede or even acknowledge. He managed a nod.
“He had been shooting at you. With the bow.”
“That’s right.” My grandfather nodded back toward the jeep. Diddens appeared to have fallen asleep. “Diddens got an arrow in the foot; I had to remove it.”
“Alois was a fine archer. You’re lucky that the injury to his hand spoiled his aim. You have some Russian trooper to thank for your life.”
My grandfather nodded. Then he and Father Nickel went back to staring down into the hole in the ground. My grandfather made out a groove running down the right side of the shaft. There was a similar faint groove down the left side. “He used a block and tackle. The one he used for the coffins. He passed it around the bottom of the chest, through those grooves.”
Father Nickel nodded. He anticipated my grandfather’s next question. “It was made chiefly of wood,” the old priest said with an air of regret.
“Ah.”
“I’m afraid we also burned the rope.”
My grandfather had Gatto back the jeep through the churchyard gate and around the edge of the burial ground. Gatto threaded the gaps among headstones until he was alongside the hole. Outside Bonn, Aughenbaugh and my grandfather had come upon the wingless but otherwise intact fuselage of a small flying bomb—a guided missile, we would call it today—jammed into a frozen pond like a cigar butt into the sand of an ashtray. It was of a design no one had ever seen. It was stuck fast in the ice. So Aughenbaugh and my grandfather had gotten hold of a welding torch and improvised a winch out of salvage, spare parts, and a length of chain. They freed the Enzian—as it later would turn out to have been code-named—packed it up, and shipped it back to Wright Field.
Now my grandfather paid ten feet of chain from the drum mounted to the front of the jeep. He tossed it over the limb of a bare chestnut tree that must shade the church wonderfully in summer, then passed it around Gatto’s waist a few times. He cinched it at the back, leaving about seven feet free at the end. He tied a piece of stiff fence wire to the loose end of the chain and gave it to Gatto. He and Diddens picked up Gatto and turned him upside down so that he dangled headfirst from the branch of the chestnut.
A dagger trimmed in nickel with a black scabbard fell out of Gatto’s pocket and hit the ground with a thump. It was decorated with a silver eagle. Diddens got in the jeep and backed it up a little closer to the tree. Gatto swung over the hole. A silver ring ornamented with a death’s-head fell out of his pocket, and then a wristwatch whose face, when my grandfather retrieved it, had a pair of lightning bolts in the twelve spot.
“I’m sorry,” Gatto said. “Tell him I’m sorry.”
Father Nickel said that it was nothing, but my grandfather thought the old priest looked scandalized. My grandfather wrapped his arms around Gatto’s hips and aimed him. Diddens paid out more chain, and Gatto’s head went into the hole.
“No,” Gatto said. “No, god damn it. I can’t do it. Take me out!”
They winched Gatto back up out of the hole. He was crying. My grandfather took his place. Diddens and Gatto turned him upside down and fed him down into the hole. His shoulders barely cleared the sides and his body blocked most of the light. My grandfather thought he could smell spring stirring in the darkness of the hole. It was a meaty odor, a smell of worms. He dangled from the taut end of the chain. He put out his hands. His fingers touched the cold zinc that clad the chest. He braced himself with his left hand and, with the right hand, fed the wire through the groove in the right wall of the shaft. He poked it through the underside of the chest and then kept pushing until the tip of it emerged through the groove in the left-hand wall. He tied a knot in the chain and called out that he was ready.
Nothing happened. He called out again, louder. He kicked with his heels at the chain that held him suspended. It thrummed meaningfully. Still he dangled, a Jew on a chain sharing a strait grave with the bone of a saint. The smell of worms began to cloy. It had the wet-blanket heaviness of his own exhalations. He was suffocating. The Luftwaffe had been all but knocked out of the fight, but every once in a while a stray Messer would fly overhead with its MG-131s chattering and flashing. Maybe Diddens, Gatto, and Father Nickel had been strafed. Maybe the old priest had decided to punish him for killing Alois, and Gatto for looting the corpses of dead SS men.
But as blood filled his head, it seemed to bring an odd tranquility. Suffocation was reputedly gentle and quick so long as you did not struggle against it. He thought about the sense of profound relief that had spread across Alois?
??s face as he was dying in the street. Then he felt a painful jerk at his waist.
In under a minute he was out and on his feet. The evening was upon them in the west. In the east the sky was going from gray to black.
* * *
The jeep hit a pothole. My grandfather’s head jolted against something metal. In his dream he was a boy knocking a soup can off a fence post with a brickbat. He woke up. The tires were spattering fresh mud onto the old snow along the roadside. The road skirted a broad stream or narrow stretch of river. Call it the Ruhr. On the opposite bank of the stream, my grandfather could make out the remnant of a railway line. The tracks had been raked up badly by ordnance: artillery, bombs, or both. They would need to be repaired. That was something for the engineers to tackle once they had resolved the road-mining conundrum.
My grandfather had not eaten in nearly three days. He had not slept more than four hours at a stretch since leaving London. He was dehydrated. Likely he was in a kind of delayed or ever compounding shock. The idea that the 53rd Engineers would soon be called upon to repair that stretch of track on the opposite bank of the Ruhr became confused in my grandfather’s mind with memories of the Corps of Engineers training camp in Illinois long ago. The thought that he was going to be handed a maul or a mattock and put to work was more than he could face just then. There was so much torn-up track, and Berlin was still so far away.
He went back to sleep. When he woke up the second time, he was sitting propped in the softest bed in Germany, on the cleanest sheets. Father Nickel was at his bedside, smoking a GI cigarette. The heavenly bed was built in to an alcove of a candlelit room that turned out to be the only room in the house. The bed alcove took up a quarter of the premises. The kitchen and hearth, with a wooden table and dining chairs, took up another quarter. The rest was books in crates and piles. A refugee kingdom of books hastily evacuated after the collapse of St. Dominic’s, a library in exile.
“Ah,” Father Nickel said when he saw that my grandfather was awake again. “Here he is.”
“Hey!” A chair leg scraped. Diddens loomed out of the flickering shadows. His face was veiled in steam from a bowl of chicken stew that he held in his palm. In his other hand he gripped a steel spoon. The stew smelled leafy, a meadow smell, almost like mint. When my grandfather encountered it again in my grandmother’s cooking, it turned out to be an herb called summer savory.
“You okay, Rico?” Diddens said.
“Fine,” my grandfather said. “How’s the foot?”
“The old lady patched me up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, her name’s Fräulein Judit.”
My grandfather nodded at the stew. “Pretty good?”
“Oh, yes,” Diddens said. He went a bit teary-eyed.
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant, we left you plenty,” Gatto said. He was hunched over his own bowl at the table. “Have some.”
A smaller, stouter, older version of Father Nickel rose up from the darkness beyond Gatto, her head wrapped in a dark kerchief. She was reaching toward my grandfather, holding out a bowl and a spoon.
“Perhaps in a minute, ma’am,” my grandfather said, nodding to the old woman. Her nose and ears were pinches of bread dough, her dark eyes two currants in poked holes. “Thank you.”
“Yes, in a minute,” Father Nickel snapped. His tone softened as he turned back to my grandfather. “First a little of something very nice.”
The old priest had been sitting on the chest from the churchyard. Now he crouched beside it the way he had crouched beside Alois dying in the street. With an air of tenderness, he lifted the lid on the crate. He took stock of the situation within. When he emerged from behind the lid, he was holding a big green bottle with a long neck and a squat bottom.
“It is cognac,” Father Nickel said. He pronounced the word with reverence and a French accent. “Very wonderful cognac.”
He handed the bottle to my grandfather. The label was all heraldry and the kind of clerical script you saw lettering diplomas and pound notes, a bunch of French verbiage. Lean and raffish lions flanked a quartered escutcheon. The vintage was 1870. “Before the phylloxera,” my grandfather said.
Father Nickel sat back down on the crate. The muddy skirt of his cassock rode up. The soles of his high black boots were holed and patched with tarpaper. His high socks were hand-knit and curiously festive, socks that might have been worn by the grandfather in Heidi.
“That’s right,” he said. “Just before. So, you take an interest?”
“Purely scientific,” my grandfather said. He shook his head and handed the bottle back to Father Nickel. “But you go right ahead, please, Father.”
Father Nickel seemed to consider taking offense. “You think I put poison in it.”
“I want to see it properly enjoyed,” said my grandfather.
Father Nickel took a small oblong glass with a wide foot from a hutch by the table. He filled it halfway with cognac. He took a long swallow. He gasped pleasurably. When he lowered his head to my grandfather again, the offense seemed to have been forgiven. “Your friends are too trusting. They ate the soup. They took some wine.”
The old priest filled a second glass with cognac and handed it to my grandfather. Diddens and Gatto raised their glasses. There was a dark green wine bottle on the table between them. If it had come out of the ground with the cognac, it must be something special. Diddens and Gatto appeared to find it palatable.
My grandfather took a sip of the cognac. It came on crackling and hot, like the first hard pulls on a cigar as you were getting it lit. After the blaze of a flavor like tobacco, he tasted something between butter and walnuts, and finally, a bittersweet sparkle on his tongue, like a squirt of oil from a crushed grapefruit peel.
“Well?”
“Wonderful,” my grandfather said.
“The real treasure, eh?” The old priest tapped the crate between his legs. “The rest of it isn’t much. Some old silver plate. A telescope. A gold monstrance. An old Bible bound in wisent leather. Beautiful but so fragile it can’t even be opened, let alone read. All of it the work of men. But cognac . . .” He took another long swallow. He did not need to finish the sentence. His expression made clear his belief in the divine provenance of champagne brandy.
“What about the relic? Saint Dominic’s bone?”
“Ah, yes,” the old priest said. “The left stapes of Saint Dominic. No doubt, no doubt. A very precious treasure indeed.” It sounded halfhearted. His hand caressed the cognac bottle.
“A telescope,” my grandfather said. “Is that what you said?”
“Yes, my son.”
“Is that a relic, too? Is it some kind of holy telescope?”
“No. It is a Zeiss telescope. It is my personal property.” He smiled. “I did not wish it to fall into enemy hands.” The old priest poured another glass of brandy that had been put into a cask seventy-five years ago.
“Are you an astronomer?”
“An amateur,” Father Nickel said. “I have contributed a few insignificant observations. Chiefly lunar.”
“I also take an interest in astronomy.”
“In addition to vine blights.”
“That’s right.”
“Then you come under the protection of Dominic, my son.”
“How is that?”
“Saint Dominic de Guzman is the patron saint of astronomers.” The old priest looked a little melancholy. “As to the value of that protection at this juncture, I would not care to hazard a guess.”
14
The soldiers slept in the bed, each in his one-third share of heaven; it was the barn for the old woman and the priest. Diddens had taken pains to calibrate the amount of wine he consumed so that it counterbalanced the pain in his foot. Courageously, Private Gatto had volunteered to scout ahead, as it were, and locate the point where analgesia gave way to excess. Now my grandfather lay staring at the darkness as Gatto and Diddens took shifts working the stops and pedals of the pipe organ they appeared to h
ave smuggled into the bed. Whenever they fell silent for a few minutes, there would be no sound but his own tinnitus and the intermittent booming of the war at night. It sounded very far away. My grandfather could take no comfort in that distance. He was accustomed by now to feeling grateful that when death settled like a flock of birds around him, it was other men and not him on whom it perched. This gratitude never had anything to do with happiness.
After what felt like two or three hours, he gave up. He extricated himself from the dogpile of Gatto and Diddens and climbed down from the bed in its niche. In the profundity of the rural dark, he groped for his trousers, his boots, somebody’s overcoat. At sunset the weather had shown promise of clearing, and my grandfather thought about opening the crate to look for the telescope the old priest had mentioned. He found the top-front edge of the crate with his shin. He knelt beside it and felt for the hasp. In the end he could not bring himself to lift the lid, discouraged in a way that he found mystifying by the presence of St. Dominic de Guzman’s stirrup bone. He went out into the yard between the barn and the farmhouse. Father Nickel sat hunched on a tall stool, his telescope pointed at the sky.
For a city boy like my grandfather, the number of visible stars had always been only a dim fraction of the five thousand or so he knew were visible to the naked human eye. Even in Rapides Parish there was ambient light enough to conceal the true madness of the heavens. On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.
Tonight, however, as my grandfather joined Father Nickel at the telescope, the stars were lost in the dazzle of a full moon. Also, of course, a large swath of Westphalia was on fire. Smoke cobwebbed the vault of night.