17

The morning after the battleship returned and disembarked at the training center in Kiel, Major Oldif ordered me to report to his office in my full dress uniform. A film of dust coated the lamp on his desk but there was an oyster blue porcelain vase with three red tulips that looked fresh and new. A man with a camera had draped a dark sheet against the major’s office wall.

“Stand here, please, ensign,” Major Oldif said, pointing to the front of the sheet. “Take one of just him first.”

The photographer, who had a thick, scissor-trimmed beard, moved in closer to me and told me to stand straight and look at the camera, then he took a picture. The shutter clicked. Then clicked again. Each time the camera flashed, I hoped it would bleach out my skin, blot out part of me so the images would eventually show some unidentifiable, nondescript figure. “Good, now take one of us.” Major Oldif stepped next to me, and we shook hands for the next picture.

“Son, I’ve arranged for you to receive the Knight’s Cross for your work on our mission. It’s the highest honor you can receive. We’re going to make a great example out of you, ensign. A Dutch boy does good for the German navy. We’ll put it in the papers to sign up more of your countrymen.”

“The papers, sir?”

“You’re a hero. We’re going to treat you like one.” Major Oldif patted me on the back and led me out of his office. “You keep up your good work.”

I had been up all night thinking of the yellow dog in the water. Hearing it barking. Barking. Barking.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

I held back from revealing any of my hesitation. This was something I was becoming an expert at. Still deep down, I doubted everything. And my voice, that voice, my real voice that had not breached the walls of meekness, fear, rancor, and subordination I had boxed myself in with, was still incapable of saying what I really felt then. Weak. Insignificant. It was hard to put into words that smallness, but it made me hate myself.

I had another checkup with the medic that morning and then a mission debriefing after that. At the briefing, Pauwel and I and the other remaining crew members joined in a meeting with a new wave of recruits. Major Oldif stood in front of us and told them all about our previous mission with the Negros. He said it was a great success and what we learned had already begun being implemented by the engineers into upgrades. Then he had me stand, and he told everyone that I was to be awarded the Knight’s Cross. Everyone in the tent clapped for me. Even Pauwel, who still looked pale despite being back on land.

The next day my picture was on the front page of the German newspaper Der Strosstrupp. Major Oldif was quoted praising me, the young Dutchman, as a “credit to his country, whose lead more men should follow and join the German fighting forces.” It talked about the award ceremony to be held for me and mentioned how I couldn’t wait to go back out and fight. It mentioned that from March 16 through the 20th, German naval forces sank twenty-seven Allied ships. “Ensign Koopman was part of our great success,” Major Oldif said at the end of the article.

After we returned, Pauwel moved into my bunkhouse. He hadn’t been able to sleep one night since our mission. I woke in the middle of the night to find him sitting up in his cot, his hands kneading his hair back, tapping some beat on his scalp. Each night Pauwel had been like this, and the deep bags under his eyes were getting darker by the day.

Then, because he was the longest tenured among us, Pauwel got pulled from the midget-sub training group and placed on a U-boat crew that was outbound for a seven-day trip.

“I hope I see you again,” he said before loading onto the U-boat.

The ceremony was set for me to receive my award. Everyone at the base was invited into the tent. There were full steins poured from wood casks of wheat and dunkel beer. Rations of brandy. The cooks made pretzels we dipped in spicy mustard, and we had schnitzel, some of the first meat we’d eaten in a month. I wore my dress blue uniform and was called to the front of the room to stand next to Major Oldif for the ceremony. The major gave a speech about how fine a Dutchman I was and a fine example to other Dutchmen considering joining.

Who would take my lead? If Ludo was alive, as I often imagined him stumbling from the ash of the factory, would he join the Third Reich’s navy because I’d shown him the path? The image of myself being a Dutch hero once the Germans won the war ran through my mind. It wasn’t hard to do with the whole troop of men there to cheer me on. It was the second time in my life I was lauded by a group of Germans. My daydream lifted and dipped on the major’s words. Then I looked out over the crowd of soldiers.

In the back of the room there was a man much taller than everyone else. I squinted to get a better look. He had a German naval hat with the brim low over his forehead and a German jacket with the collar popped up enough that it would have hidden the fine line of tattoo ink I knew rose over his shoulder and up his neck.

Uncle Martin looked right at me, inside of me, at the blood flowing in my veins. Tears started forming in my eyes.

“And so with no further ado, I present our highest honor and these papers of valor signed by the Führer himself, to one of our own, Ensign Jacob Koopman.” Major Oldif clicked his heels together and saluted me. Then he fastened the Knight’s Cross on my chest. It was a large iron cross-shaped brooch with a tree molded into the middle.

“I know. I know,” Major Oldif said and patted my shoulder when he realized I was crying. Then he stepped back and raised his palm up flat to me again.

I looked down at the broad cross, hanging from a thick black and red cut of ribbon. It had small shards of diamonds studding the outer edge of it, which reflected the tent’s overhead lights.

“Face them now, ensign,” Major Oldif said.

Everyone else in the tent stood with their arms raised straight out and over their heads, except for Uncle Martin, whose finger pointed right at me. More fear shot through my body. What decision had I really made? Had he come to kill me? If I pointed to the back of the room and cried out that there was a traitor in our midst, could I save myself—from getting killed, from looking into my past and seeing what had been taken from me since the war began.

The medal lay flat upon my chest, opposite my heart, and hung there like a cold omen. A photographer snapped another picture. If I could have made my own headline at that moment, I would have changed the names, changed the story, changed everything.

Major Oldif led me to several photographers, who took more photos of us shaking hands. Then the major walked me through the tent, introducing me to other officers and telling them my story of downing the troop ship. All that time my uncle circled the tent, probably dropping explosives under each empty seat. Major Oldif handed me a tin cup of dark roasted coffee with whiskey in it, which warmed me on the way down but burned once it hit my stomach.

When there was a break from shaking people’s hands, Major Oldif leaned into me. “You have earned the right to test our new midget submarine. It is called the ‘Beaver’ and should perform better than the Negro. We’ll start testing in a few days.”

My uncle circled the room with a noticeable limp, shifting from corner to corner opposite me. When the major retired for the night, Uncle Martin walked across the room to me. I was surprised all over again at how much he towered over me.

“I thought you may have been smart and run off to save yourself, or even been killed, but it turns out you’re a German war hero now. You’ve got a medal there to prove it.”

“It’s nothing, Martin,” I said, unsure of what my real identity should be.

“Quite a big hoopla for nothing.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “You little shit, I had no idea where you were until I saw this.” He pulled out the newspaper with the picture of my oval face staring off the page.

“Come with me,” he said and hooked his hand under my elbow and led me toward the door.

In the dark lawn between the tents and barracks, Uncle Martin walked to the back portion of the camp, near a dilapidated utility shed.

When we got to the side of the shed, I stopped not wanting to walk into the shadows after my uncle.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t kill my family,” he said. “Now come here.” In the shadows, Uncle Martin stepped forward and hugged me. “You scared the Christ out of me, slipping off like that.”

My head was in his chest, and I felt his chin lean onto the crown of my head. I hugged him and clutched at his back.

“I couldn’t handle what we did to those men in the Ems.”

“That’s okay. I shouldn’t have forced you like that.”

“I couldn’t keep doing it and I couldn’t stop you. You’ll die killing them like that.”

“You didn’t do any of that, so don’t regret a thing.” The shadow of the forest swayed behind him. When he let me go, I still held onto him until he stepped away from me and bent over into the bushes and pulled out a large backpack. “Here,” he said, laying the large bag at my feet. “You have to get as far away from this as possible.”

“What? Why?”

“I promised your mother I’d save your skinny little ass, and in this bag is how you’re going to do it.”

“Where would I go? Look what I’m doing here. The Germans will win, Martin, and the sooner they do, the sooner all this will end.”

“That’s not going to happen, Jacob. You’ll be killed. I may not be meant to survive this war, and I’m okay with that, but I sure as hell don’t want it destroying you too. I need you safe and alive. This family’s lost enough. And that Major Oldif is using you like a piece of meat to lure other stupid Dutch kids who want to be heroes and have no idea what they’re getting into. Your little fame here, Jacob, is a propaganda ploy and nothing more. You have no idea what these people really want, do you? What their Fatherland would look like?”

Uncle Martin kicked the bag at my feet. “I have papers, maps, a compass, a gun, ammunition, food, and enough money and gold, everything you need to start a new life. Now you have to make it out of Europe. Your German papers will get you far, but once you cross the Rhine, you’ll need to start using all the ones in the bag. The pictures of you are from your parents’ house and were pasted onto these IDs.

“I want you to get to England. I left a note with the names of several ship captains that can help you. If you find one of them, tell them who you are and catch a ship to Ottawa. There are good Dutch people there.”

“You aren’t coming too?”

“Jacob, my whole life has been preparing me for this. Stay and fight is what I’m supposed to do. I know this much if I know anything.”

“But there’s no way out, you said so yourself.”

“There is for you and you have to find it. You can’t see the whole picture here, but what you’re mixed in with is vicious. Take this pack and leave, get out of Europe. Follow the instructions and find the men I listed. Find one of these men. They can help you once you get out of here. Your life is all that matters, not this war, not these countries, just your life. You’re the last of our family, and we’ll be erased if you’re lost.”

Martin looked down on me with his wet eyes. A large vein in his neck slipped under a blade of ink on his skin that rose above his collar.

“Don’t regret what you’ve done. You can’t. I don’t. What else can you do, Jacob? You have to survive.”

“Ensign,” someone called to me. “You’re pissing in the woods and missing your own party.” Uncle Martin stepped back into the shadows and pulled the backpack with him. He propped it up behind a tree and turned back to me. I was looking at a condemned man when Uncle Martin said, “Come back later for the pack. You have to leave, Jacob, please, promise me you’ll get out of here.” I turned back from his shadow to the officer in the field behind me. The man staggered. He cupped a cigarette in his right palm.

“I’ll be back in a second,” I called to the man.

“Hurry, hurry,” the man said. He swayed back and forth in the lawn and waited for me to finish peeing.

Martin stood behind the tree in front of me. I stepped forward and pretended to be finishing up. The man behind me mumbled a song to himself. My uncle nodded to me, kissed the palm of his hand and reached his arm out and cuffed the side of my head. “Get to Ottawa,” he said. “You have to get to Ottawa.”

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

“Meet me at that flagpole at one A.M.” He pointed to the large field at the center of camp. “Be there at one.”

“Ensign,” the officer behind me yelled. “You’re missing your party.”

I turned and left my uncle in the dark woods. The officer, a man I’d never seen before, had an oily face with a scattering of dark, spiky whiskers. He threw an arm around my shoulder and started singing in a raspy falsetto as he led me back to the tent, where a gramophone now played.

Once the tent cleared out and the soldiers and officers who had gotten the most drunk stumbled off to their bunks, I snuck back to the woods and retrieved the bag. It was heavier than it looked, packed so tightly that it felt like a solid bag of bricks. I lugged it to my cot and stowed it in my locker. A couple hours later, when my few bunkmates were snoring, I opened the locker and started looking through what Uncle Martin had left me.

The first thing in the pack was a letter scrawled out in my uncle’s handwriting that said,

You have to be the one to survive. Stay off the main roads as much as possible and use these cards to pass checkpoints if you can’t find a way around. I used to work with some men who can help you once you get to Southampton in Britain, Lisbon in Portugal, or Casablanca in Morocco. In whichever port, ask around for Felix Courtier, Javier Méndez, Petrous Valspar, or Michael McCollum. Try to find these men. Wait in a safe port if you have to. If you find these men, tell them who you are.

Inside the pack was a stack of German ID papers with my picture but different names. The pictures were from a series Martin had me take at a department store in Utrecht the year before. There were orders corresponding to each ID badge that had the person by that name for change of post and transportation. Each soldier listed was in transition from one base to another. There were more transporting papers, and huge stacks of money in different currencies. There were wads of bills: German, Dutch, Belgian, French, English, Canadian, Australian, and American. There were canned meals, matches, a Luger, and a series of maps on which Martin had written in where large German forces were and how to go around them. The suggested route ran along the northern woods of Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France, trekking west to show the nearest Allied shipping lanes, and a passage across the water.

With everything he’d given me there was enough paperwork and planning for ten evaders to slip out of the country. Whatever misplaced paperwork he had done, he had done so to procure all this. There were identity papers, passports, exit visas, and entry permits. He even had a French Legionnaire’s papers that said, “Legionnaires, you ask for death and I will give it to you.”

The pack had combs, a toothbrush, soap, wire cutters, and three compasses that were hidden as buttons. There were maritime maps with planned-out escape routes printed on thin silk that could be folded up and stuffed into a pocket without taking up any space. There was even a pair of special shoelaces that could be used as miniature saws to cut wires. The bag had been packed to use every last millimeter of space. There were twenty-four malted milk tablets, boiled sweets, a bar of chocolate, Benzedrine tablets, a ball of darning wool, water-purifying pills, a razor, needle, thread, fishing hook and line, a rubber water container, fifty cigarettes to smoke or barter with, and a brown tarp. The whole pack was an escape plan in jigsaw puzzle form. All I had to do was sneak off and put the pieces to work.

Uncle Martin’s bag had shown what kind of man he was. His plans were so detailed that he must have been funneling supplies to escape lines and Resistance fighters like Ludo had suggested. I could see the hanged man and full mast sailing ship etched onto my uncle’s skin when I shut my eyes, the marking of life and death he wore over his veins.

I lay in bed living a dozen different lives, projecting myself into a vast array of futures and then dropping one life and taking up another, each time jumping further and further from the confusion of the war.

Uncle Martin told me to get to Ottawa, no matter what. The Dutch royal family had gone there, so if Edwin or my father were alive, they would have gone there too. The thought of them waiting out the war in Canada filled my head while I was carefully repacking the bag and putting it back in my bunk locker. But I’d also heard of German deserters who had been shot and left in the street for three days as an example. I didn’t know if I had the courage for something so bold as escape.

At ten to one, I walked outside and headed to the flagpole. I didn’t bring the pack because I didn’t want anyone to see it. I scanned the edges of the field for the figure of my uncle to emerge or call me to him. Call me to get out of this place. The field at night felt as empty and vacuous as floating in the ocean in the Negro, waiting for the cruiser to come find me. When I was by the flagpole I heard a series of gunshots: tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. After each noise, a ship or U-boat in the harbor exploded. I dropped to the ground and looked into the trees for the muzzle flash. The shooter changed aim and fired at the camp buildings, seeking out planted explosives, which began to burst into flame. Soldiers ran into the field near me. They looked up for planes as four more buildings split open with orange flame and noise. I knew it was Uncle Martin in the camp. That was his parting shot.

In the wreckage of the camp, most of the crew and soldiers who were not injured or killed were still drunk as they tried to put out the fires. A captain found me cowering in the field and put me to work cleaning up. Had he not, I would have gotten my bag and run off then. He thought I’d passed out after the party and didn’t question why I was there. I worked through the dark hours. Some soldiers talked about the air raid that had just hit us and thought one of their own had fired the gun into the sky after the planes. At a quarter past four in the morning, too tired to be of any use, I returned to my bunk to sleep.

Just before dawn, a heavy pounding sound came from the revelry field. It was a steady beating of a marching song I’d heard as a boy at camp. Now it sounded much deeper and industrial, like some large machines hammering out the rhythm. Outside the first tendrils of sunlight reached over the treetops. By the flagpole the dark shadow of a man swayed next to four, giant fifty-gallon oil drums that he swung wildly at with two long, metal rods. The rods jumped up off the tops of the oil barrels and he slammed them back down again. There were men running at the mad drummer. I recognized the outline of the bare-chested man, sweating in the cold from his wild swinging.

Two guards ran across the field. Pauwel turned to them while still pounding on the drums he’d set up in a half circle around him. The guards stopped. Pauwel was naked except for a shoulder holster that held a Luger. The guards called for him to stop, but he kept hammering. When one of the guards pulled out his own pistol, I ran over, waving my arms and telling them not to shoot.

“Pauwel.”

“Jacob. I came back for this shit? Look at this place. This is shit.” He pointed to the still smoldering areas of camp, then pounded on the drums again.

“Pauwel, what are you doing?” I yelled.

Pauwel looked at me with his deep black bags under his bloodshot eyes. His shoulders still worked the metal rods up and down but now more steadily, like he was echoing the ground’s heartbeat.

“I’m playing in the sun,” Pauwel yelled and opened his eyes crazy-wide toward the first sun rays topping the trees. “I’m going to be cleansed by the natural light.”

“Easy now,” one of the guards said as he walked up behind Pauwel.

Pauwel spun around. “Stay back,” he yelled, and he helicoptered the rods over his head.

“Pauwel. Pauwel. Look at me,” I yelled.

“Drop your weapon,” the guard yelled from behind Pauwel. Something changed in Pauwel’s face. He shut his eyes when the first of the sunlight cleared the trees. The warm light touched the back of my neck. The light caught the moving edges of Pauwel’s metal drum rods, and then the beads of wet rust on the upturned oil drum lids. Everything for a moment was touched by light.

“Are you sleepwalking again?” I yelled to Pauwel.

Then the guard moved up closer behind him. Everyone was jittery from the explosions. Saboteurs were feared. They trained their guns on Pauwel, likely wondering if it could have been him who blew up the buildings. Pauwel must have sensed the man closing in on him, as he swung around with a rod high in the air and brought it down on the guard’s head. The guard crumpled to his knees in front of Pauwel, who was about to bring his second drumstick down onto the man when the other guard fired his gun. The shot hit Pauwel’s abdomen below the left side of his rib cage, ripped out his back, and popped through one of the oil cans. The raised metal drumstick fell from his hand and clanked off a drum before hitting the ground. A melted rose opened on Pauwel’s back and seeped down over his buttocks as he crumbled to his side, next to the man he’d struck down.

“Stop. Don’t shoot him. He’s one of us.” I ran to his side with my arms up and shielded him. “He’s one of us.”

Both men were put on stretchers and carried away. They were taken to the compound’s medic, who had a long line of wounded to deal with from the explosions before he could stitch up the guard’s head and spend the rest of the morning suturing Pauwel’s wounds. The bullet missed all his vital organs but tore through his upper intestine.

While waiting for him to get out of surgery, I found out that his U-boat returned early because it had technical difficulties. It had submerged several hours outside of Kiel and gone west for two days when all the lights on board started to explode and pop out. “I mean all the fucking lights,” a sailor told me. “It was the craziest thing. We were in the dark damn near the whole time. We had to turn back, but that took twice as long because we had to be extra-careful going about the smallest things. It was spooky. I felt a little crazy too. And the other U-boat that set out with us, we haven’t heard word from them yet. There’s no telling what happened to them.”

Old visions of lights exploding all over Europe and shards of glass raining down on Nazi soldiers’ heads flashed into my mind, and then there was my father, tall and kind and patient, opening his giant mouth to let out some new story, some soul-enriching story that would tell me who I really was and was supposed to be. But I couldn’t hear the words. I tried to listen to that specter of my father floating through my head, but nothing came.

I was starting to grasp that I didn’t understand this war or where I should be within it all. All the clear lines had blurred.

After Pauwel’s surgery was over, they gave him a large dose of morphine. He was limp in the infirmary bed but his head kept thrashing back and forth.

“Pauwel, what happened?”

“The bubbles are in my blood. I have dark bubbles seeped into my blood,” he said. His head was tilted back and rocking, smoothing out the pillow. Beads of sweat rolled off his brow and his eyes were open too wide. All pupil. It made me nervous. Later that night I held his dirt-smudged hand as he struggled to breathe. His rib cage sank when he exhaled, then he gasped, and a sucking noise rose from inside his chest. When the medic wasn’t watching, I lifted his eyelid back with my thumb. The white of his eye was threaded with bloodshot veins that looked like raw red worms.

I stared at the spackled walls of the infirmary room by Pauwel’s side that night, trying to understand what happened to him all those hours in the dark, and how a human being could capture the mechanical heartbeat of war with only a set of drums.