After the Train (2 page)

A
FTER DINNER
I get my fishing pole and hurry out of the house before my father can ask where I’m going and warn me against the Wakenitz. Hans and Kurt are waiting for me at the road that leads to the river. We do a lot of looking over our shoulders and sneaking down back roads. Every step toward the East German border is scary.

The last thing I want to talk about is school, but school is never far from Kurt’s mind. He says, “I’m writing the essay for Herr Schmidt about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

I should have known that Kurt would already have started his assignment.

Kurt, always happy to tell you how much he knows,
says, “Pastor Bonhoeffer was the head of a seminary not far from where we lived in East Germany. When a lot of the pastors in the German churches sided with Hitler, Bonhoeffer challenged the pastors to stand with the Jews against him. My father told me that Bonhoeffer said, ‘The church is the church when it exists for everyone.’ Hitler had Bonhoeffer put in jail and he was strangled to death.”

Hans says, “Who wants to read that stuff when you’re on vacation? Anyhow, what’s the hurry? We’ve got the whole summer.” I know Hans will still be working on his assignment the day school starts. I decide to get mine over with so it doesn’t ruin my summer. I remember Father telling me of how in Swabia we lived not far from the home of Claus von Stauffenberg, who gave his life in an attempt to put an end to Hitler. I decide that’s who I’ll write about.

Because it’s early in June and we’re so far north, at seven in the evening it’s as light as day out. We’ve turned off the road and are walking single file along a sandy trail that leads to the river. For a minute we stand solemnly in front of a sign with big red letters:
ACHTUNG
!
BORDER THIRTY METERS
. Kurt looks nervous. I guess he’s thinking of his own family’s crossing. He was little then, but he must still remember it.
Even though crossing over was legal then, they made it as difficult as they could for you.

A high fence topped with rolls of barbed wire stretches all along the border. In the distance the East German guard tower rises high up in the air like a church steeple. It’s too far to make out the guard, but we’re sure he’s there, maybe even watching us through his binoculars.

“Do you think he can see us?” Kurt asks.

“Sure,” Hans says, making a rude gesture in the direction of the tower.

“Stop it, Hans.” I can’t count all the times Hans has gotten us in trouble—not that we didn’t help him out.

Kurt is still worried. “Do you suppose he’s got a gun?”

“Of course,” I say, “but he’s not going to pay any attention to a few kids fishing on our side of the border.”

We take off our shoes and socks and roll up our pant legs. As I ease into the freezing water, still cold from the melting snows of winter, I feel the sand squish up between my toes and the little pebbles dig at the soles of my feet. Even if the water is cold, this is the feel of summer. I tie a rubber worm to my leader and make a cast, careful not to snag my line in the overhanging trees and alder bushes. Hans plods downstream.

“Hey,” Kurt yells at him. “You’re stirring up the sand
and making the river cloudy. The fish won’t bite.” This is an old argument between them, and I pay no attention. I wander upstream from them, happy to be in the river with no classes to worry about for three long months. My job at St. Mary’s doesn’t start until next week.

I feel a tug on my line and pull in my first fish. It’s a nice flounder. Since Kurt and I are forbidden to fish here, we can’t take our catches home; but Hans’s father, who manages the hotel, doesn’t care, so we give the fish to the hotel and he pays us for them. I take a chance that the guard isn’t watching where we cast and I try to whip my line across the wide river to the East German half, hoping to catch some Communist fish. I have to space my legs a little apart to keep from being pulled by the strong current that flows out to the sea.

Suddenly on the other side of the river I see a figure run across the bare strip of land where the guards have cut down the tall grasses so anyone trying to make it across the border will be seen. Amazingly, he is carrying a wooden ladder. I stand there frozen, watching him. He heaves the ladder against the fence, which must be five meters high, and throws his jacket over the barbed wire on the top. Then he hoists himself up, leaps over the fence, and falls to the ground. For a moment he just lies there and I’m sure he’s dead, but no. He gets up and starts to run for the river. He’s going to try to swim over
to our side. I know I should do something, but I don’t know what.

A siren goes off. It’s so loud, it hurts my ears and nearly makes me lose my footing and fall into the water. Hans and Kurt have seen him. Hans yells, “
Schnell!
Quick!” Kurt starts for the safety of the shore but turns around to watch the swimmer.

It’s a young man, and now he’s in the water and fighting the current. The siren is still sounding the alarm. Two soldiers are running in our direction. They stop at the river’s edge and aim their rifles. I want to run away, but I can’t move. He’s halfway across into safe territory. Hans calls out, “Don’t shoot! He’s on our side!” And he is. Hans and I and a reluctant Kurt surround him. They can’t shoot him without shooting us.

Reluctantly the guards put down their rifles. They shout curses at us, then walk slowly away, looking back a couple of times, as if the man might jump back into the river and give them another chance.

It’s only now, while the man is shaking the water off him like a dog, that I feel a weakness in my knees and see that my hand holding the fishing pole is trembling. What was Hans thinking, calling out like that, and why didn’t we have the sense to run away? Yet there the man is, although he’s more our age than a grown man. He’s escaped. They’re not supposed to shoot someone
on our side. If we hadn’t been there, who knows what they would have done? I look more closely at the man. He’s shaking with cold and fright. He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen. Kurt takes off his sweater and gives it to him. “Who are you?” Hans asks.

“My name is Gustav, Gustav Uhlich. My father was killed on the Russian front and my mother died when the Russians took over our part of Germany.” His voice cracks and he gets a fierce look on his face. “I’d rather be dead than stay in East Germany under the Communists.”

The three of us gather around Gustav as if he’s a huge fish we have landed and don’t know what to do with. He looks at us and gives us a big grin. “I was lucky,” he says. “I owe my life to the three of you. If it weren’t for you, right now my body would be floating away to the sea.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask. I feel like we have some responsibility for our catch.

“I have to get dry clothes and then find a job. I was a baker’s apprentice and I can bake as well as that baker. He was lazy and half the time he let me do his job. I can make
Spitzbuben
,
Vanillekipferl
,
Krapfen
,
Nussrolle
,
Obstkuchen
,
Apfeltorte mit Meringe.
…”

“Okay, okay, we get the idea,” Hans says. “I’ll talk to my father. Maybe we could use you in the hotel kitchen.”

“That would be great. All I want to do is get my
hands on the proper ingredients. In East Germany there is no good white flour, no marzipan, no coconut, no dark chocolate. And margarine instead of butter. How can you be a baker?”

“Well, you won’t find much of that stuff here, either. But at least you can complain about not having it without being arrested. You can come home with me, Gustav,” Kurt says. “My folks and I came over from East Germany. We’ll get you some clothes.”

Suddenly Gustav sinks down and just sits there. His teeth are chattering. His smile is gone. It is as if he has suddenly realized what he has done.
“Ach!”
he says. “Those guys could have killed me! Did you see their rifles?”

The three of us march Gustav into town. We must look plenty funny, the three kids with our fishing poles and a wet Gustav. The Niehls listen with open mouths to our story and then run around getting Gustav clothes. They are so busy, they don’t even think to scold us. Mr. Niehl is practically jumping for joy. Over and over he cries, “You put one over on them! And I’m going to rub their noses in it!” While Gustav explores the Niehls’ kitchen, opening the icebox and the cupboards, Mr. Niehl is on the telephone to the town newspaper. In no time its editor, Herr Schultz himself, appears with his big black box camera to take pictures of a grinning
Gustav with Hans on one side and me and Kurt on the other.

I know I have to tell Mother and Father what has happened before they learn from the newspaper that I was fishing in the Wakenitz. They listen to my confession. At first they think I am making up the story, but I’ve brought Hans along to back me up. That is a mistake. “They pointed their rifles at us, Frau Liebig! They were going to shoot us!”

Mother sinks down on a chair, and Father goes pale and forgets to close his mouth. “Shut up, Hans,” I say. “They were just after Gustav, honest.”

“But we saved his life,” Hans insists.

After Hans leaves, Mother and Father make me promise with my hand on the Bible that I will absolutely never go back to the river.

“Still,” Father says, “to help save a life is a fine thing. Such a chance is not given to many people.”

The amazing thing is there are tears in his eyes even though he has never set eyes on Gustav Uhlich. What is he thinking about? He reaches out for Mother’s hand. I am sure it has to do with his secret. Mother must know what it is, and I mean to find out too.

A
LL DAY I WORK
hard moving bricks at St. Mary’s, but in the evenings I go out to play soccer or practice with my rowing club. The racing shell is light and slips through the water so easily, I feel as if it might take flight. I try to forget my troubles, thinking only of working the oars, pulling at the water and sending the boat forward, responding to the coxswain’s urgings. Our little boat skims along the big river past freighters and barges that have sailed all over the world. I imagine myself on one of those freighters picking up a cargo of silk in China or stowing away and sneaking off a freighter in America and heading for the West and cowboy country. On Saturdays Hans and Kurt and I hitchhike to Travemünde, a resort on the Baltic Sea that has been there forever. Mammoth hotels rise like castles along
the shore. The beach is dotted with rental chairs shaped like baskets, which we can’t afford. Just off the beach is a park with a bandshell, and on the weekends there are concerts. The bandmaster is a jolly fellow with a fat belly and muttonchop whiskers who leads the band in rousing marches and corny waltzes while the old people keep time, humming along, and the little kids run around like unleashed puppies.

It is the sea that brings us here. The sea is always an escape, an escape from boring work and strict parents. I tell Hans and Kurt about the books I’ve read, Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast
and Joshua Slocum’s
Sailing Alone Around the World
. We daydream about where we want to go. Kurt says he’d get a job on a freighter and sail to America, where he’d make a million dollars. Hans wants to go no farther than Sweden. “The most beautiful girls”—he sighs—“in the tiniest bathing suits.” I dream about being a spy. I’d get into a small boat at midnight and secretly land somewhere in Russia to join a group of rebels plotting to fight the Communists. Then someone would make a movie about our secret adventure and I would star in it. The three of us sit on the beach daydreaming and letting the sun warm us until we have enough courage to run into the cold sea and splash about.

We don’t go to Travemünde just for fun. There is
money to be made. The people who stay in the hotels are well-to-do; even those from Rolfen who come by train for the day are in a spending mood. If you keep your eyes open, there are little services you can do for the vacationers. Once settled in their basket chairs, they don’t want to run across the sand to get a soda or some tanning lotion. The sand is hot and gets between their toes. Hans concentrates on the women, charming them with his big smile, while Kurt goes for the fat men who loosen their belts for comfort and don’t want to tighten them again to get a coffee or sausage and roll. I look for mothers of little kids who are begging for ice cream. I get the ice creams and the mothers give me a tip. On good days we earn enough for third-class train fare back to Rolfen instead of having to hitchhike.

It is a Saturday in July when I notice a couple with two children, a boy of eight or nine and a girl a few years younger. The parents settle into their basket chairs and give pails and shovels to the children for castle building. The children run to the wet part of the beach, where the sand is good for packing. The girl starts her castle at once, but the boy heads for the sea, making dashes into the water, catching the waves as they roll in.

The basket chairs wrap around you on three sides. Seated in one, you can’t see behind you or to your side.
Hans, Kurt, and I have funny stories to tell of things we overhear while standing unseen beside someone. While I wait with an eye on the boy and girl, who will surely soon be thinking of ice cream, I listen to an older man and woman who have no idea I am only inches away. The man has been swimming laps as if he were in a race, his arms mechanically rising from the water and cutting back into it so that he looks like a giant windup toy. As he hurries out of the water, he gives the boy and girl a long look. After rubbing himself briskly with a towel, the swimmer throws himself into his basket chair. I hear him say to the woman in the chair next to him, “Well, Gerda, so it starts all over again. I thought we were rid of them.”

Gerda says, “You’d think, Konrad, they would know by now they weren’t wanted here. First the East Germans come and take our jobs and make the town a slum with their sloppy ways, and now
they
are back.”

I don’t know who they are talking about; then it occurs to me that the couple with the two small children look Jewish. After all that has happened in Germany, how could the stupid Konrad and Gerda say such things? For the first time, I see why we need Herr Schmidt’s class. I think of Herr Schafer and want to tell them to shut up.

Instead, just to show I’m not at all like Konrad and Gerda, I go over to the children of the Jewish couple and ask them if they’d like an ice-cream sandwich. They say an eager yes, and I buy each of them an ice cream with my own money. When they run to show their parents, the parents protest, calling me over and insisting on repaying me. When I refuse, they became suspicious of my motives. Why would a young boy who doesn’t even know them bestow ice cream on their children? I can see they think I am in league with the ice-cream man and it’s all some sort of scheme. I meant to be kind, and instead I merely look foolish. Reluctantly I take their money. I meant to do a good deed and this is what I get for it. I’m angry with them and with myself, for I understand that what I have done has smacked of condescension. As I look for someone to blame about the misunderstanding and not wanting it to be me, the thought goes through my head,
Jews are funny about money
. Disgusted, I see I am no better than Konrad and Gerda with their anti-Semitic talk.

Unhappy with myself, I turn away, thinking to plunge into the water and let the sea wash me clean, when I hear Hans calling to Kurt and me. I hurry across the beach, eager to get as far away as I can from the scene of my embarrassment.

Hans is hopping up and down with excitement. “I talked the man who rents the basket chairs and the boats into letting us have a sailboat for an hour,” he says.

Kurt says, “We don’t have any money to rent a sailboat.”

Hans said, “We don’t have to pay anything. We get the sailboat in exchange for the three of us staying late and cleaning up the beach and stacking the basket chairs.”

“We’ll be here until dark,” Kurt says. “And it’s hard getting a ride back home at night. Besides, none of us knows how to sail.”

Hans says, “Peter reads all those books about sailing around the world.”

“Those are books,” I say, “and reading isn’t sailing.”

Hans brushes away my doubts. “You’re always telling us that books are real to you.”

I’m skeptical, but for weeks we have talked about what it would be like to be in a boat on the sea, and here is our chance. We drag the sailboat into the water. Hans holds it steady while Kurt and I climb in. Hans grins. “There’s nothing to it. You just put up the sail and turn that lever at the back of the boat in the direction you want to go.”

“What a fool you are, Hans,” Kurt says. “That’s a
rudder, and anyone can tell you that you have to turn the rudder in the opposite direction from the way you want to go.” Kurt begins to describe some rule of physics, but I’m not listening. I’m trying to keep the boat from tipping as Hans climbs in.

Hans orders, “Peter, help me put up the long pole with the sail on it.”

“That pole is the mast—and you don’t put it up, you step it,” I tell him. As soon as we have it in place, the wind seizes hold of the canvas and the sail begins whipping back and forth like it’s a wild animal trying to escape. The boat tips one way and then another.

I shout, “Kurt, grab hold of the boom.” Too late, the boom swings around and hits him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. Hans pays no attention. He’s busy letting out the sail, which immediately catches the wind. The sailboat is flying over the water. I hardly feel the boat beneath me, only the excitement of being carried across the waves toward the horizon by some strong force. The people on the beach grow smaller. The owner of the boat, looking like a cartoon character, is jumping up and down and waving his arms.

“What’s he yelling?” Hans asks.

“He’s signaling to take down the sail,” I shout. “We’re headed out to sea.”

I can tell from the expression on Hans’s face that the idea of heading out to sea is exactly what he wants. If there’s a danger of drowning, all the more exciting. Desperately I grab at the sail and, fighting off Hans, begin to take it in. We rock wildly back and forth until at last the sail is down and the boat steadies. “How will we get back?” I ask, but the answer is there on the bottom of the boat. A pair of oars. Kurt is still groaning from the blow he received and refuses to have anything more to do with our adventure; and Hans is mad because I lowered the sail. He grumbles, “We could have made it all the way to Sweden.”

“You belong to a rowing club,” Kurt says to me. “Let’s see how good you are.” I row us back through the waves. By the time we reach the shore, my shoulders are aching. Rowing at sea is hard work. Kurt and I are so happy to be on dry land, we forget our anger with Hans until the owner of the boat and basket chair concession calls us
Dummköpfe
and a lot of other things, reminding us that we have to stay until dark to rake the sand and put the chairs away. “That means even if we’re lucky and someone gives us a ride,” I say, “it’ll be midnight before we’re home. My parents are going to be wild with worry.”

Kurt says, “It was your idea, Hans. Peter and I should
go home and just let you clean up.” But a minute later he is saying, “While we’re raking the sand, we’ll look for money. I’ll bet people drop lots of coins during the day. Maybe we’ll get enough to take the train back.”

Hans is trying to talk us into using any money we find to rent the sailboat again, when we notice people leaving their basket chairs and hurrying toward the shore. They’re looking out to the sea, where a small white figure is struggling in the water. The Jewish mother and father have waded out a way and are floundering in the waves, unable to swim and shouting for someone to rescue their son. The man I overheard talking about being “rid of them” plunges into the sea. His arms thrash in and out of the water, his head hardly coming up for a breath. The boy disappears beneath a wave. The next second we see him again. Another wave is coming, but the man reaches out, scooping up the boy. Tucking him under his arm, the man heads back to shore. The couple are crying with relief, thanking the man for saving their son. Even though the boy is now safe, the man who has rescued him keeps one arm around the boy as if, having saved his life, he had a stake in him.

All we rake up is a few pfennig, so just as I feared, it’s midnight when I get home. To put off my scolding from Mother and Father, I tell them about the boy. “The
man who rescued him looked like he didn’t want to let go of the boy,” I said. “Yet only a short time before, he was saying awful things about that family because they were Jews.”

Mother says, “
Ach
, Peter, nothing is more precious to you than a life you have saved.” Though she has never seen the boy, there are tears running down her cheeks.