Somewhere out there, beyond the tempered glass visor of his helmet, a fire bell clanged. This did not concern my grandfather. There was no oxygen here to feed a fire or to carry the vibration from the tongue of a bell. Here the enemies were cold and silence. He was warm in his moon suit, however, and he could hear his own heart beating. Bounding along the lunar surface in long arcs, half a million miles from the earth and its fires and alarms. Let it burn. Let it melt, let its rafters give way, let the whole thing collapse under the weight of its own sad gravity. The only thing spoiling his lunar idyll was the infernal itching at the back of his neck where the helmet attached, impossible to scratch in his suit and gloves of rubberized silk. And that rich smell of compressed air from the tanks on his back, so oddly reminiscent of warm dung. . . .
“Herr Lieutenant.”
My grandfather opened his eyes in the dark. A recent disturbance among the cows below reverberated in the clanging of their bells. A straw from the bale he had been using for a pillow was jabbing him in the neck. He discerned Father Nickel’s head and neck peeping over the edge of the loft, hands gripping the ladder. My grandfather scratched the back of his neck. He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.
“I am sorry to wake you, Lieutenant.”
There was something concealed in a fold of the old priest’s voice. My grandfather sat up, shaking loose the last lunar strands of gossamer. “Diddens?”
“Asleep. Private Gatto, too. They are both well, do not worry.”
My grandfather looked around for the old woman. When he had climbed into the loft a few hours earlier, he had tried without success not to wake her. He had apologized, and with the twang of the local dialect, Fräulein Judit had apologized for her brother’s rudeness. She referred to Father Nickel as “the little pasha.” She said that having been born a baby and finding he enjoyed it, he had never bothered to stop. The light of the Moon filtering in through a chink painted two portraits of itself on the old woman’s eyes. “He will die without ever having spent a night on anything but goose down,” she had said.
My grandfather had assured her that the switch was all his idea. “The bed is much too comfortable,” he had explained. Evidently, there had been truth in this, since after spreading Gatto’s overcoat across his body, he had immediately fallen into sleep with all its treacheries. At some point the old woman had crept out of her blankets and down the ladder without his even noticing.
“She went to draw water,” Father Nickel said. “She will have our breakfast for us when we get back.”
“Oh?” my grandfather said. “Are we going somewhere?”
“That is up to you.”
In the darkness my grandfather could not read the expression on Father Nickel’s face. The tone of the old priest’s voice was hard to interpret. Anticipation might be doubt. Urgency might be mischief. It sounded as if the old priest had made up his mind to do my grandfather a kindness that he feared he would live to regret.
“Come,” he said. “I have a gift for you. Come see.”
He lowered himself back down the ladder. My grandfather reached for his boots and dragged Gatto’s coat to the edge of the loft. He swung his legs over but then sat without moving at the top of the ladder. Reason, common sense, and experience conferred and came to the conclusion, not without regret, that the night was taking a decided turn toward the fucked up. Regardless of how long ago the cognac you had drunk was put into its bottle and how many chickens had died for the sake of your stew, the war was not over. Father Nickel was the enemy.
“I’m sorry, Father. Unless you tell me right now—”
“It’s a rocket, fool!” the old priest said. “A damned rocket!”
My grandfather climbed down from the loft and pulled on Gatto’s coat. The cows made way, pots and pans, a bovine fart. The old priest went out. My grandfather followed, wondering if his ability to smell something off about a situation had deserted him.
The night, an hour before dawn, was very cold. My grandfather buttoned up the coat and jammed his hands into the pockets. Father Nickel appeared to be headed toward an outbuilding at the back of the farm, a garage by the look of it. My grandfather relaxed a little. The rocket that the old priest intended to show him must be a bit of handiwork. Solid fuel, battery ignition, welded from a section of pipe, the kind of thing they printed plans for in Popular Mechanics. The story began to write itself in my grandfather’s imagination. For a year, two years, five years, the old priest had waited for some response to his memorandum from the Curia. And then one day, just as hope began to tip into disappointment, he had run across the article in a magazine or a Sunday newspaper: “The Fascinating New Hobby of Amateur Rocketry.” Detailed instructions, step-by-step photographs, a list of materials. Like a group of exiles re-creating a lost homeland in a few city blocks, the old priest had been able to replicate his lost hope in miniature, to build a scale model of his dream. And now all this nocturnal hugger-mugger because, with the outbreak of war, as was the case in Britain, the Nazis had outlawed amateur rocketry. My grandfather felt a renewed squeeze of affection for this lonely old humanist, holing up night after night in his sister’s garage to engineer—at least in his imagination—the means of transport and escape.
Just before they reached the old garage, Father Nickel cut abruptly to the right. He tramped past the ruins of a pig pen, past a squat water tank, past a garden whose beds were still cloaked against the winter in sheets of burlap. At the edge of the farm, what appeared to be a large forest stretched away into the distance of the night. Pine and fir trees stood together as if conspiring to keep out the moonlight, hiding a profound darkness behind their backs. Father Nickel headed directly toward those trees and that darkness. Some trick of the moonlight made it appear to my grandfather’s suddenly spooked imagination as if the trees had all at once, just a moment before, stopped in their tracks. They held an air of restless hesitation. My grandfather came to a halt. Half of the American soldiers killed or wounded since D-day had come to grief in woods like this.
“What rocket?” he said. “Whose rocket?”
“Your rocket, my son,” Father Nickel said. When he saw that my grandfather continued to linger, he said, “Listen. I know you are hunting for rockets.”
Now? said experience, common sense, and reason. Christ, you idiot, what the fuck is it going to take?
Gatto kept a carton of Lucky Strikes in the left hip pocket of his overcoat. In the right hip pocket, apparently, he kept a looted Walther PPK, wearing its sharklike leer. My grandfather had never held one before. You could feel the homicide trapped inside it.
He had told the old priest nothing about his work, the mission, unless he had blabbed about it at some point in his sleep. That was the kind of thing that happened in spy novels and romances—muttered revelations of conspiracy, adultery, crime—but it struck my grandfather as unlikely. A creation of novelists and screenwriters, like total amnesia and hand-to-hand combat between men who were carrying guns. In his experience the things people said while they were asleep were even less intelligible than the things they saw. At any rate, except for the occasional appearance put in by his Yiddish-speaking mother, my grandfather dreamed in English. It was hard to imagine that if he had talked in his sleep, the words would have come out as German.
There was no telling, however, what Diddens or Gatto, drugged on chicken stew and drunk on wine, might have confessed. After a certain number of years, a priest probably came to elicit confessions without even trying.
“Apologies.” Entschuldigung, to my grandfather’s ear always the most beautiful of German words. Away to the north and northeast, the war pulsed at my grandfather’s temples and the hinges of his jaws like a headache coming on. “I must insist, Father, that you tell me where you are taking me. Now.”
In the moonlight he could not be entirely certain, and no doubt his conscience or forty years of accumulated retrospective tenderness influenced his impression, as reported to me, that when Father Nickel saw the gun in my grandfather’s hand, he looked heartbroken. But he simply nodded, and when he spoke, his tone was patient and forgiving.
“In the winter, you see, in December or January, they started to route the trains this way. From somewhere up in the Harz Mountains, I believe, to the rail yards at Soest and thence west. At some point they were loading them on the beds of special lorries, camouflaged under netting, and driving them within range of Antwerp and, of course, London. For the trains to deviate this far to the south before turning west, well, it’s very much the long way around, isn’t it? I presume the more direct routes were bombed. And then, when the retreat from Belgium began. There was no other way. In time things became chaotic around Soest, which has been bombed very heavily, very heavily. Often the trains passing this way were obliged to stop; there is a siding along the river just down the hill from here. They would sit and wait on this siding for an hour, two hours. And then, you see, one night when the train carried on, one of them had been left behind. Abandoned. I still do not know why. I must assume that it was damaged in transit or found to be somehow defective. No doubt they are fragile. Deadly things often are. Come.”
“You’re saying that, on the other side of these woods, there is a V-2.”
“Yes.”
“An intact V-2 rocket.”
If this turned out to be true, it would be, as far as my grandfather knew, the first such capture by any of the Black List teams. It would be a spectacular prize.
“Yes, yes!”
“Through these woods.”
“And then down the hill. There is a path, with the snow all gone it’s nothing, a walk of twenty minutes, perhaps, for a young man. Twice that, since you shall be in my enfeebled company. Come.”
Just before he followed the priest whose ward and beloved sexton he had murdered only a few hours before, into the darkness at the back of the trees, my grandfather took a look up—a last look up, it might be—at the stars. The Moon was down, and they had reclaimed the whole of the sky.
At that hour all across Europe, if the local skies were clear, people who believed, knew, feared, or hoped they were about to die were looking up at the stars. From Finland to the Balkans, from the Black Sea to the doorstep of Africa, across Poland and Hungary and Romania. Looking up, maybe, through a pane of Perspex, or through lenses that corrected for myopia. Through a tangle of razor wire, a gun slit, a grid of tracer fire, the blown hatch of an M1. Standing, stumbling, kneeling. Dead on their feet or running for their lives. From open fields, street gutters, and foxholes. Atop a pile of rubble, in a fresh-dug ditch, on a Turkish carpet in a house that had no roof, on the deck of a ship on fire.
No doubt some of these people looking up at the stars sought the lineaments of God’s face. Many saw no more than what was to be seen: the usual spatter of lights, cold and faraway. For some the sky might be a diagram captioned in Arabic and Latin, a dark hide tattooed with everyday implements and legendary beasts. At least one man, looking up at the stars that night from the edge of a forest in the Westerwald, saw an archipelago of atomic furnaces in a vacuum sea, omnidirectional vectors of acceleration radiant from a theoretical point of origin that predated humanity by billions of years, as unperturbed by mechanized mass slaughter on a global scale as by the death of one individual.
This was my grandfather’s line of thinking, and he found both comfort and guidance in it. He could trust or mistrust Father Nickel; either way the outcome would mean nothing to the stars. So why not, for one night, lay down the weary burden of mistrust? For an hour, say, and no longer. Just long enough to see the rocket. After that he would shoulder the burden again.
* * *
“So, what happened?” I said. “What’d he do?”
I had been schooled by now in the ways of South Philadelphia and the world that was, in my grandfather’s view, its macrocosm. I was expecting treachery, mischance, one debt incurred when another was repaid.
“He showed me the rocket,” my grandfather said.
“A V-2. You saw a V-2 rocket.”
“I saw more than one. This was just the first.”
“And?”
“And . . . ?”
“What was it like?”
He pursed his lips and angled his face toward the window. He considered the question for long enough that I began to wonder if he had forgotten it.
“It was tall.”
“Tall?”
“The old man said it was as tall as the steeple of his church.”
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t pictured them as being so tall. “But, I mean . . . how did you feel? What did you think?”
“I don’t know how to put it into words.”
“Were you disappointed?”
“On the contrary.”
“Afraid?”
“Of what? It wasn’t going anywhere.”
It occurred to me that neither disappointment nor fear was an emotion my grandfather ever really struggled to express. Both could be stated plainly and left behind.
“Did it make you happy?” I said.
The word seemed to catch him a little off guard.
“Something like that,” he said.
* * *
In children’s drawings, all houses have chimneys, all monkeys eat bananas, and every rocket is a V-2. Even after decades of stepped-back multistage behemoths, chunky orbiters, and space planes, the midcentury-modern Enterprise, the polyhedral bulk of Imperial star destroyers and Borg cubes, the Ortho-Cyclen disk of Millennium Falcon—in our deepest imaginations the surest way to the nearest planet remains a trim cigar tapering to a pointed nose cone, poised on the tips of four swept-back axial fins. By the time I became conscious of rockets—and I grew up at the height of the space race, surrounded by the working models and scale models my grandfather’s company manufactured, by photographs and drawings of Saturns and Atlases and Aerobees and Titans—they had progressed well beyond von Braun’s early masterwork, in design as in power, size, and capacity. But it was a V-2 that would carry me into the outer space of a fairground ride, that labeled the spines of the public library’s science fiction collection. A V-2 was the “weenie” or visual anchor of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. In the V-2, form and purpose were united, as with a knife, a hammer, or some other fundamental human tool. As soon as you saw a V-2, you knew what it was for. You understood what it could do. It was a tool for defeating gravity, for escaping the confines of earth.
For my grandfather, I believe, the war was everything that happened to him from the day he enlisted until the moment he walked into a clearing in the woods outside Vellinghausen, Germany, in late March or early April 1945. It was everything that resumed happening, the awful things he saw and the revenge he contemplated, from the moment he walked out of the clearing until the German surrender six weeks later. The thirty minutes or so that he spent with the rocket in the woods, however, was time stolen from the war, time redeemed. He would leave the clearing with that half hour cupped in his memory like an egg kept warm in the palms. Even when the war had crushed it, he remembered the pulse, the quickening of something that might break free and take to the sky.
When they walked into the clearing, the old priest sat down on an upended packing crate, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. The far-off pounding of artillery came to a momentary halt, and in the interval before the first birds, as the darkness deepened, some power seemed to enter and flow across the clearing. After a moment my grandfather identified that tide as silence. Then a bird sang, and the sky lightened, and you could begin to see the rocket aspiring to heaven on its mobile launch table. My grandfather divined its purpose with an upward leap of the heart.
Of course my grandfather knew that, from the point of view of German command, of Allied command, of Hermann Goering and General Eisenhower and the people at whom it was to have been launched, the rocket was still—was only—the war. The clearing had been cut by soldiers, the rocket had been transported here by soldiers. Soldiers would have armed, primed, aimed, and fired it. Like its fellows—around three thousand between September 1944 and March 1945—it had been fitted with a warhead that contained two thousand pounds of a highly explosive form of TNT that would detonate on impact. Its manufacture had been ordained and carried out not to bear humankind to the doorstep of the stars but to atomize and terrorize civilians, destroy their homes, shatter their morale. If some unknown mischance had not intervened, this rocket would have joined its fellows in racing the sound of its own arrival toward the city of Antwerp, where, on December 16, to take the worst example, a V-2 had fallen on the Rex Theater in the middle of a showing of The Plainsman, killing or injuring nearly a thousand people.
None of that, however, could be blamed on the rocket, my grandfather thought, or on the man, von Braun, who had designed it. The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure, and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. To pack the thing with a ton of amatol, to hobble it so that instead of tearing loose once and for all from the mundane pull, it only arced back to earth and killed the people among whom it fell, was to abuse it. It was like using a rake to whip egg whites, a dagger to pick your teeth. It could be done, but to do so was a perversion. Furthermore, ineffective. As a weapon, a tool of strategy, it was clear to everyone by now that the V-2 had failed. Yes, four or five thousand hapless Frenchmen, Belgians, and Englishmen had been killed by the rocket bombs. Tens of thousands more had been left wounded, homeless, or afraid. But in the end, bombs of the ordinary variety had killed, maimed, and frightened people in far more terrible numbers. And now here were the Allies, deep into Germany, and the rockets were impotent and no longer fell.
My grandfather felt sorry for Wernher von Braun, whom he could not help envisioning as shy, professorial, wearing a cardigan. His pity for and anger on behalf of the imaginary von Braun tapped the reservoir of his sorrow over the loss of Aughenbaugh. Alvin Aughenbaugh, with a hint of Paul Henreid. The poor bastard! He had built a ship to loft us to the very edge of heaven, and they had used it as a messenger of hell.
“Lieutenant?” Father Nickel said. He put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder.
My grandfather averted his face. Automatically, he moved to shrug off the old priest’s hand, but in the end he left it where it was. Between him and Father Johannes Nickel, as between two stars, lay unbridgeable gulfs of space-time. And yet across the sweep of that desolation each had swum, for a moment, into the other’s lens. Poor von Braun! He needed to know—my grandfather felt that he must find him and tell him—that such a thing was possible. Scattered in the void were minds capable of understanding, of reaching one another. He would put his hand on von Braun’s shoulder the way the old priest’s gnarled paw now lay benedictive on his own. He would transmit to von Braun the only message lonely slaves of gravity might send: We see you—we are here.