Reinhardt watched Friedrich while the water boiled. His son sat at the table, his hands clasped together, very still, and his eyes downcast. Reinhardt poured the water over two cups of mint and brought them to the table with some of Mrs. Meissner’s honey. Even sitting opposite him, Friedrich seemed unable or unwilling to meet his father’s eyes. His son was gaunt, drawn long and tight against the angles of his bones. His eyes held a shadow that was more than the dim light in the room could cast, and he held himself as if he sullied the air around him, as if he were something dirty, something unclean.
“You know,” said Reinhardt quietly, as he stirred honey into his tea, “the last time I saw you I was having tea.”
Friedrich went even more still, rigid even, until his eyes came slowly into focus and he looked at Reinhardt, for almost the first time. There was a distance in them, as if Friedrich held himself in and away from the world, and something else, although Reinhardt could not see what it was. Friedrich blinked once, twice. “The morning Mother died.” The memory of it was suddenly there, clouding the gray of his eyes like a rumor of sorrow, or regret.
“You were with that friend of yours. What was his name . . . ?”
“Hans Kalter,” Friedrich breathed.
“Kalter,” said Reinhardt. He remembered the name. He wondered only if Friedrich had. “What became of him?”
Friedrich shrugged. “Dead, I think.”
There was silence, only the chime of spoons against china. Reinhardt lifted his teacup in his fingers, letting the steam writhe up over his eyes. “That day . . .” Friedrich began, placing his hands flat on the table on either side of his cup, “that last day we saw each other. You made tea in Mother’s blue pot. Somehow, I can’t forget it. I can’t forget that teapot. I keep going back to where we used to live, thinking I could look for it.”
Reinhardt stared at his son, wondering, Could it have been him he had sensed those times he had felt someone else there? Someone watching him. His instincts, already bruised and ragged from the day, twitched, and he forced down the feeling, the feeling that made him doubt his son. That made him feel he was being played. “What has happened to you, Friedrich? Where have you been?” he asked, his fingers restive on his spoon.
“Where do you think?”
“In a POW camp?” Friedrich nodded. “Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Father,” Friedrich retorted. He turned in and away, just a little, as if he were embarrassed, or unclean. As if measuring out the rhythm of his unease, Friedrich’s fingers began to move on the table, the tips brushing softly, back and forth, over the wood.
“It was difficult?” Friedrich snorted, but there was nothing in it, no vigor to give offense. Just something habitual, a reflex, like the slow movement of his fingers. “Why did they let you out?”
“What do you mean? ‘Why’?”
Reinhardt winced inwardly, cringing away from conflict, from confrontation. It would have been so easy to have fallen back into their old patterns, of cut-and-thrust, of parry-riposte. “Just that, Friedrich. We hear so many rumors of the camps. About what the Soviets are doing to our prisoners.”
“Ah,” Friedrich said, seemingly mollified. He closed his fingers around his cup, sipped from his tea and spooned more honey in. “Rumors. Most of them are true, I suppose. They put us in a transit camp in Gronenfelder, up near Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. That was pretty bad. But the camps in Russia were . . . awful. There were times I didn’t think I’d make it. Many of us . . . most of us they got after Stalingrad . . . didn’t.”
“How did you survive?” Reinhardt asked.
Friedrich shrugged, eyes on the slow pulse of his fingers. “Isn’t it always luck? Toward the end of the battle, I was wounded, couldn’t walk much, so a friend arranged to get me onto the field marshal’s staff. We were down in the basement of this huge department store. It was warmer. Food was a bit better. So when the end came, I was that bit better off. And the Russians weren’t so bad to the field marshal’s staff. The march to the camps was . . .” Friedrich stopped, and Reinhardt shook his head, bemusement and understanding vying for place. His son lifted his eyes, and there was that depth and distance in them, a shadow that would not lift. “Well, it was bad. The months went by. The years . . . You . . . made your accommodations, right? You made your peace with yourself, and with your comrades, because you never thought you’d make it out. And then . . . it ended. The war ended. And I suppose even the Russians can’t keep everyone they’ve got. I suppose I wasn’t much use to them. I don’t know, and they didn’t tell, and you don’t question the orders that put you on a train home.”
“No,” Reinhardt agreed. “Of course not. And what are you doing now?”
“Not much, I’m afraid,” Friedrich said, and there was the sudden ghost of a smile on his face, something ironic. “Seems things turned out the way you predicted, Father. You always said I’d come to nothing with that lot, with the Nazis, and you were right. No, it’s fine,” he said, raising his hand, forestalling the protest that had risen to Reinhardt’s lips. “It’s fine. Things just . . . turned out . . . the way they did.”
“I’m very sorry for that, Friedrich. And I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry we weren’t . . . That I wasn’t . . .”
“Father, it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s past.”
“Yes. Yes, but,” and Reinhardt felt the words damn up inside, swelling up into his eyes and he blinked back a hot sting of sudden tears. “But they’re years we’ll never get back.”
The words hung between them, and the mood was uneasy. Tentative. There was too much bad history between them for it to be anything else. Or it could be nothing else so soon.
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in a halfway house run by an old comrades’ association. It’s in Rummelsburg,” he said, naming a part of the city to the southwest in the Soviet sector, “not far from Ostkreuz station.”
“You could move here,” Reinhardt offered.
“This is your colonel’s old house, isn’t it? I don’t think so, Father, but it’s kind. I . . . we need to start again. I need to find my own way, as well. The comrades help, I suppose. Although, sometimes, I can’t bear to look at them. They carry such memories. I carry them, too . . .” His words made sense, but the clench of his posture said something else entirely. Unclean, it said. Outcast, it cried.
Reinhardt nodded, hands twisting his mug. “I remember, after the first war, the same thing. I was in hospital. I could not stand to look at the others. But I don’t know how I would have survived without my friends. Without those who had known what it was all like. How did you find me?”
He would have bitten back the question if he could have. He would have bitten his own tongue to have it back. It slipped out without him realizing, the type of question he would have posed to a suspect in an interrogation but, to his relief, Friedrich seemed not to have noticed, his fingers still measuring out their rhythm and reach across the tabletop.
“I cannot stay away from where we used to live, and I saw you there. I followed you.” Friedrich shrugged, sipped from his tea. “Nothing fancy to it, really,” he finished, a smile pulling down one side of his mouth.
“Why did you come?”
“I don’t have one answer, Father. But I think I was compelled. I was visiting the ruins where we used to live. I went once. I kept going. Then I saw you. And I thought, I wondered, Did you feel the same things as me? Some connection back to that time we were all together. It wasn’t always bad, was it?”
“No,” agreed Reinhardt, but it had been. It had been bad. Friedrich had never been an easy child, and he grew more difficult the older he became and the more the Nazis pulled him into their orbit. Into their vision of how a child should behave, and what duties it owed.
“Look, I have to go,” Friedrich said, suddenly. His eyes had gone murky again, openings into some inner darkness, and he held himself as if he had seen or heard of some risk to him, some rumor of trouble. “I shouldn’t . . . I’m sorry to have done this. Done this like this.”
“It’s fine,” Reinhardt assured him.
Friedrich seemed to clench in on himself, again, bracing his shoulders on the table like a strangler’s on his victim. His face, already gaunt, grew longer.
“No. I should go. But can I come again?”
Reinhardt nodded. “Yes, of course.”
Friedrich’s mouth twitched, some semblance of a smile flitting across his lips. “Until then, then,” he said.
“Until then.”
Reinhardt walked him to the door. They paused on the step, neither sure what to do, until Friedrich seemed to come to some decision, and he darted his head up at Reinhardt. “Did you ever look for me? Did you . . . did you think I was alive?”
The question froze Reinhardt where he stood, cored him right to where a priest might have said a man’s soul would be. He could not move or offer any answer, only look at his son, his tongue probing the gap in his teeth. Friedrich’s eyes changed, darkened, as if some memory, some thought rode his gaze like a plague ship. He gave a tight nod, as if Reinhardt’s reaction were normal, as Friedrich himself were something to be shunned. He drew himself in around the arc of his shoulders and backed away down the path that led to the street, and then he was gone. Reinhardt watched him away, watching until he lost him in the night, until, almost involuntarily, he lifted his eyes to the sky, at the bright shoals of stars that hung overhead, and let the gulf above him draw his feelings up and out.
He was stunned. That was the least of it. He would be stunned in any case, but after the day, after the length and stress of it, he felt himself wavering. As much as he was relieved to see his son—the son he had almost given up hope of ever seeing, the son he had consigned to the dead—he was honest enough to know he was not happy to see him. Not happy in the way books and films showed you could be happy. How you were supposed to be happy. The father he was—had suddenly become again—feared for his son. The policeman he was feared there was far more to Friedrich’s story. Although many had returned home, Reinhardt knew the Soviets were suspected of holding many more. Those who had returned had brought with them tales, of pain and suffering and neglect. Many had been invalids, of no use to the Soviets as labor, and many—too many—were suspected of having turned, become collaborators. Like Margraff, the chief of police.
Also captured at Stalingrad.
Reinhardt looked at the stars, and feared the worst about and for his son.
—
The Tiergarten was quiet, the daytime crowds gone. The Sunday fathers, the ice-cream salesmen, the bands, the people strewn across the grass and benches. The uniforms, the flags, the marching and parades, the new swastikas everywhere, leering and lurking crookedly from every arm and banner.
“See, Friedrich, see how bright they are.”
Reinhardt had one arm on Friedrich’s shoulder, spread the other at the sky. The lights of the city were muted, distant behind the park’s trees, and stars studded the night in abyssal profusions, in glittering spreads and swirls. Friedrich gazed up solemnly. Dutifully, Reinhardt thought a moment, crushing out the spite in his mind as soon as the idea sprouted. His son. His boy. A teenager, now, with an adolescent’s growing gawkiness to his movements and thoughts.
“Remember when we used to try to count them?” Friedrich nodded. “Remember what you said when I asked you how long it would take you?”
“Pappaaa,” Friedrich protested.
“Come on! You remember. It wasn’t so long ago.”
Friedrich sighed. “‘A long, longer time,’ I said.”
“‘How long a long, longer time?’” Reinhardt replied, goading Friedrich to recall those memories.
Friedrich considered, his eyes roaming and flickering up at the stars as much as around his memories. “As long as it took us to see the statue of Roland.”
Reinhardt smiled. The huge walrus had been a popular attraction. After his death, the zoo had sculpted a life-size likeness of Roland, and half of Berlin had turned out to see the statue when it was finished.
“You remember that, do you?”
Friedrich smiled, and they walked on in silence.
“Orion’s bright tonight. And the Bear.”
“The big bear,” growled Friedrich in a baby voice, fingers hooked at the sky.
Reinhardt smiled again, ruffling Friedrich’s hair.
“Remember that time we came when you were little, and we picked a star for you? Can you find it again? Remember how?”
Friedrich’s eyes narrowed as he began to hunt. Reinhardt turned slowly with him. Reinhardt loved the night sky over the city, loved watching it, loving the way more and more of it would emerge the longer he looked. Sometimes, he felt if he watched long enough, a pattern would make itself known, just for him, one only he would understand.
“There it is,” Friedrich said, firmly, pointing to a bright star that hung above the steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church.
“That’s it, well done. What about the one you chose for me? And for Mummy?”
“Who is there?”
The voice came out of the darkness, a pair of patrolmen with a lantern, their eyes lost beneath the peaks of their shakos. Reinhardt stood in front of Friedrich, made to fish out his warrant disc, but his son stepped straight out from behind. He stood straight and as tall as he could, facing the policemen, drawing himself up as his right arm licked out ramrod straight.
“Heil Hitler,” he piped.