“I would have brought you the insulin anyway,” he told Frau Herzog and Martin. “Even if he had told me nothing at all.”
He had just adjusted his chinstrap and was pulling on his right glove when he heard a loping tread in the mud and turned, expecting to see the dog. It was Martin, in his rough woollen trousers and patched jumper. He had a plain face and watery eyes that narrowed to a pair of blue slits.
“He has a buried treasure,” Martin said.
“That sounds exciting.”
My grandfather pulled on the left glove. He grabbed the handlebars, the throttle, kicked the engine to life. If he could get hold of the insulin promptly, he could be in Nuremburg by dark.
The boy was standing there, talking over the motorbike’s rumble. My grandfather cut the engine. “What?”
“. . . because of the tall blond man.”
“A tall blond man.”
“He came with two other men and told them to bury the treasure. And Herr Stolzmann said maybe there was a cave where they could bury it.”
Stolzmann didn’t want to tell my grandfather about the buried treasure in the cave. When my grandfather and Martin went back into the barn, interrupting a quarrel between Stolzmann and Frau Herzog, Stolzmann tried to persuade my grandfather, Frau Herzog, and Martin himself that the boy was prattling and, he suggested, mentally defective.
“But I heard you talking to the tall blond man,” Martin said. “He told you to put it in a cave and bury it.”
“Nonsense.”
Frau Herzog went to a nearby stall, picked up a pitchfork and plunged it into Stolzmann’s thigh. It was done with grace in a single continuous motion. Three of the four tines found meat. She jerked them out, and holes in the fabric of Herzog’s coverall bloomed purple. Herzog grabbed at his leg and fell down.
“You are not mentally defective, Martin,” Frau Herzog said.
“I know,” said Martin.
In the kitchen my grandfather treated Stolzmann’s wounds. He found a bottle of apple brandy and poured a glass for Stolzmann, who drained it in one draft. My grandfather poured him a second one.
“There is no treasure,” Stolzmann said. “Just papers. Miles of them. Thousands of kilos. Enough to fill twenty file cabinets. All the documentation from the V-2 program. Every diagram, every report on research and testing. He asked me and two colleagues to hide it all just before he was evacuated to the south. I helped them load the documents, and then one of my colleagues found an old salt mine and they put them in there. They used some of the miners’ dynamite to seal the opening of the cave.”
“Did the SS know about this?”
“Of course not. Von Braun wanted something to bargain with. I imagine the United States of America would very much like to put their hands on these files.”
“I imagine you’re right,” my grandfather said bitterly.
He got out his map and had Stolzmann show him the location of the salt mine, but Stolzmann had not been there when the documents were buried and could give him only a vague location “around Bleicherode.”
My grandfather went out into the yard and lit a cigarette. He had to make a choice. The intelligence man with the 3rd Armored had told him that after the war, Nordhausen was due to be handed over to the Russians along with this whole chunk of Germany. The Russian Army was already on its way. If he went after von Braun, as his heart and his desire to punish von Braun urged him to do, then the documents—a virtual recipe for building a V-2 rocket—might fall into Russian hands before he could return. If he stayed to pursue the documents, then von Braun might elude capture, fall into Russian hands, or surrender to the Allies, but my grandfather would have had nothing to do with it, and there would be no chance for von Braun to give my grandfather the pretext he was hoping for. If von Braun surrendered to the Allies before my grandfather had managed to locate the documents, then the German would be able to negotiate the terms of his surrender and maybe avoid punishment entirely, and if the Russian Army overtook my grandfather in his efforts to find the salt mine, then there was a strong possibility that all would be lost. He could not report Stolzmann’s information and then take off after von Braun; people would want to know just where he thought he was going. When they heard, he would be ordered to stick around Bleicherode or sent after von Braun as part of a team. He did not want to hunt von Braun with a team.
When he finished his cigarette, he went back inside the farmhouse. Stolzmann had passed out in the bedroom. Martin and the dog were sharing a can of Vienna sausages. Frau Herzog scanned my grandfather’s face and picked up some bit of information that led her to reach for the bottle of applejack. She poured two fingers into the glass and handed it to my grandfather. It burned with a harsh and clarifying fire all the way.
“What will you do?” she asked him.
“My duty,” my grandfather said, and then added in English, “God fucking damn it.”
* * *
On May 2, 1945, high above the Adolf Hitler Pass in the Austrian Tyrol, Wernher von Braun convened his inner circle on a sunny terrace of the Haus Ingeborg hotel. Hitler was dead. The war, as they were all aware, was lost. The fall of Berlin was imminent. Regrettably, then, the time had come to surrender. Forward elements of the U.S. 6th Army were already at the foot of the mountain on the Austrian side. The Russian Army was mere miles to the east and moving fast. If they did not act now, von Braun told his companions—among them his brother Magnus, General Walter Dornberger, the former commandant of the rocket research facility at Peenemünde, and Huzel and Tessman, the two men whom Stolzmann had helped to conceal the Mittelwerk files—they would lose their freedom to decide. It was a strange kind of freedom, to choose one’s captor, but preferable to being the prisoner of chance. Von Braun had long since brought his companions around to the view that America was a fitter repository for his gifts than the Soviet Union. The decision was made. The next morning, equipped with a bicycle and a basic grasp of the English language, Magnus was sent down the mountain to bring the Americans the excellent news.
Halfway down, the younger von Braun brother was challenged by a sentry, Private Fred Schneikert of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who proved both ignorant of and unimpressed by the exalted nature of the prize he was being offered. There was some comedy of mistranslation and regimental head-scratching, but in time the name of von Braun found its way up the chain to an intelligence unit, where it landed with the proper éclat. A couple of weeks before, there had been a report, received through channels from an operative in Nordhausen, alerting them that von Braun might be hiding in the Bavarian Alps. A few hours later, Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun became a prisoner of the 44th Infantry Division. In less than a quarter century, this uncharacteristic act of submission would lead—as von Braun alone had always known that it must—to the imprinting of a human footprint in the soft dark dust of the Moon.
Von Braun was thirty-three. Tall, fair, gregarious, and good-looking, with his left arm and shoulder bandaged in a cast as the result of a recent automobile accident, von Braun posed with his GI captors for an odd photograph that ran the next day on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. In the photograph von Braun looks startlingly dapper for a prisoner of war, in a double-breasted suit and a long coat, but the first thing you notice is the cast, a monstrosity of plaster that forces von Braun’s arm to jut out at a bizarre angle, buttressed by a metal rod. It looks like a comedy prop, something you would see on Moe Howard when you cut from a scene of him challenging an old lady to an arm-wrestling contest. The second remarkable element of the photograph is von Braun’s expression, a smile variously interpreted over the years as one of relief, high spirits, or a remarkable, even defiant smugness.
It was probably the latter; as far as von Braun knew at the moment of his capture, he was sitting on the secret to the location of twenty-four thousand pounds of documents of incomparable scientific and strategic value. As my grandfather had assumed, von Braun planned to use this secret to negotiate the most f
avorable terms imaginable for his surrender and postwar career. There is no photographic record of the expression on von Braun’s face when he learned subsequently that the documents had been located and successfully disinterred from the salt mine near Bleicherode where Tessman and Huzel had buried them.
As for the U.S. intelligence officer who, just ahead of the Russian takeover of Nordhausen, had located and supervised the excavation of the Mittelwerk files, there is likewise no photographic record of the look on his face when, in the lobby of a Baltimore television station, he learned about the postwar clover in which, even without the cache of documents, Wernher von Braun had landed. But there was a testimony, and my grandfather made it to me.
24
Two days before my grandfather surrendered to the New York State Department of Corrections, he drove my mother from New Jersey to Baltimore to entrust her to his brother’s care. It was by no means the ideal situation, but nothing ever was, and he felt he had no choice. His mother and father had died of cancer within a couple of months of each other in the winter of 1954.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” my grandfather told my mother. “It’s going to be on your side of the street.”
My mother had not seen Baltimore in five years, and it looked strange to her. The row houses had two stories clad in white siding upstairs, redbrick down. They made my mother think of gums crowded with teeth. Most of them had flat roofs, but every so often one had a peaked attic. Those were the eyeteeth. The houses had shallow porches held up by white pillars. They ran on for blocks unvaryingly, like a vista you might drive past in a dream.
“I forgot the number,” my mother said.
My grandfather sighed. He took his right hand off the wheel to fish his wallet from the breast pocket of his jacket. A matchbook from Howard Johnson’s fell out of the wallet into the area by his feet. He swore. He returned the wallet to its pocket. His tone was calm, but that meant nothing. “Find it,” he said.
My mother leaned across the seat and felt around on the floor among the pedals and her father’s black wing tips until her fingers kicked against the match cover. “Found it.”
The comb of matches had been torn away cleanly along with the strip where you struck a light. She turned the match cover over to the side on which my grandfather had jotted down an address. My mother read the numbers aloud, but they failed to register. She was remembering the Howard Johnson’s restaurant where my grandfather had taken her one particularly fine Saturday not long before. Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. Lopes, had unexpectedly dropped by the house that day, bringing along two albums of photos from a recent visit to her sister in Altoona. My grandmother had shown what struck my mother at the time as remarkable if not excessive interest in the Pennsylvanian travels of Mrs. Lopes. My mother was thrilled when my grandfather, who harbored little patience for their neighbor, abruptly proposed a father-daughter outing.
He drove my mother out to visit a petting zoo with goats, sheep, and an irritable alpaca named for Yma Sumac. My mother knew that at fourteen she was too old to enjoy a petting zoo. She had enjoyed it nonetheless. There were no other visitors, and the animals seemed eager for company. They rushed to greet my mother and never let her out of their sight. In the enormous barn there had been a tire swing lashed to the highest rafter, and at the end of the visit the farmer had set up empty soup cans along a fence. My mother, always a bit of a deadeye, had shot all but one of them off with a .22 rifle. On the way back from the petting zoo, they stopped at Howard Johnson’s, where my grandfather had consented to my mother ordering a lunch of french fries with a side of peppermint ice cream.
The day was hot, but inside the Howard Johnson’s her bare arms and legs had prickled as her sweat cooled in the air-conditioning. There was frost on the scalloped metal ice cream dish. My grandfather had made a comic show of disgust as he watched my mother languidly dip each fry into the pink mound of ice cream before eating it. But she could see something else moving behind his face, some deeper pain or preoccupation. After a while he got up to go to the men’s room. He came back with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. He was not a habitual smoker, but there were months when he would go through two packs a day.
The lighter engraved with a molecular diagram was out of fuel, an oversight she could not remember ever having seen him commit. Their waitress had brought the book of matches in their aqua, white, and orange cover. My grandfather lit a cigarette and settled back in the booth. The look in his eyes of painful assessment appeared to have departed. He complimented my mother on her marksmanship and then, unusually, told her a story from his boyhood. It was a brief tale but a good one. It concerned a friend of my grandfather’s, a boy called Moish, who had been shot by another boy with a .22 rifle. The tale concluded satisfyingly with a bloody fingertip wrapped in a sheet of newspaper and carried home in the victim’s pocket.*
When they got home that afternoon from their outing, the radio in the living room was playing big-band rhumba music, but the house was empty. There was an envelope on the kitchen table, propped against a candlewick vase that held white peonies cut from the back garden. My grandmother had written my mother’s name on the outside of the envelope. Her penmanship, improved by nuns, made every word look like notes to be played on a celesta. In the envelope my mother found a red feather wrapped inside a letter informing her that her mother had decided, for the good of the family, to return herself for treatment at Greystone. The meaning or origin of the red feather was information my mother never ascertained.
My grandfather swore again and stepped on the brake. “You were supposed to be looking,” he said.
“I was looking.”
When you drove it in reverse, the car made a sound that my mother imagined to be the whirring of her father’s displeasure. My grandfather craned his head around and backed them past three houses with his right arm slung across the top of the seat back. He stopped in front of a house with an attic story. Its porch was hedged with bare azalea bushes. Instead of brick and siding, it appeared to have been clad in a grid made of hundreds of cut stones, brown, purple-brown, and gray. Its porch had lost or been deprived of its pillars. In their place someone had installed trellises of wrought iron, entwined by wrought-iron vines. In one of the two windows that looked onto the porch my mother saw a woman’s wide face before a muslin curtain fell across it.
My grandfather cut the engine. My mother grabbed handfuls of the skirt of her jumper and squeezed. Her eyes burned. Tears dripped from her chin to the Peter Pan collar of her blouse. It was so quiet in the car that she could hear the patter of the tears. My grandfather made a soft click with his tongue, irritation or pity. My mother pinned her scant hopes on pity.
“I have no choice in the matter,” my grandfather said. “Forgive me.”
“No,” said my mother. Her daring surprised her. Her heart was thudding against her breastbone.
My grandfather opened the door on his side and got out of the car. “Fair enough,” he said.
He put on his gray worsted suit jacket and shot his cuffs. He straightened the knot of his gray and black tie. He studied the stone face of the house.* He came around the front of the car and opened my mother’s door on his way back to the trunk. My mother wiped her face on her sleeve and climbed out. She followed him to the trunk of the Crosley, which held two suitcases of clothes, a train case with her toilet articles and her glass animal collection, her portable record player, and a box of 45 rpm records, among them “Wake Up Little Susie,” new that week, and “Dark Moon” by Gale Storm.
“Let me worry about this stuff,” my grandfather said. “You go ring the bell.”
My mother stood on the concrete checkerboard looking at the stone house. It had felt so good to say no. She contemplated saying it again, but Uncle Ray beat her to it.
“No!” He was standing on the topmost porch step. He was wearing a sky-blue suit piped in white, and a green necktie patterned with gold circles over a gold shirt. He was taking her in, making a show of it, his arms folded ac
ross his bony chest, looking her up and down. He shook his head, his mouth turned up at one corner as though ready, in a moment, to smile. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Impossible.”
My mother had not seen very much of Uncle Ray since the move from Baltimore in 1952. Since then he had grown more outrageous, and she loved him for it. The improbability of his cars, his clothes, and of the gifts he brought her—a brown-skinned doll wearing a hat of wooden fruit and a red dress embroidered with the word havana, a canvas sack stamped golden nugget containing a vial filled with gold dust—scandalized my grandfather in a way that paradoxically also seemed to bring him pleasure. When Uncle Ray came around, he and my grandmother would do the talking. My grandfather would just sit listening at the table or, once, on a blanket spread under the hickory tree. Uncle Ray’s stories of his life featured people with suggestive or humorous nicknames and towns or neighborhoods with questionable reputations. To narrate that life’s incidents and activities required an impenetrable jargon. The talk went over my mother’s head so completely that nobody bothered to shoo her away. When Uncle Ray got to the end of a story, my grandfather would sink his chin into his hand and say something like “I don’t believe it” or “That’s appalling” or simply “Oy, Reynard, why?” But sometimes he would be smiling.
“Hi, Uncle Ray,” my mother said.