Christopher's Ghosts (2 page)

Paul said, “Why not?”

“Look at me, then think about it,” she said. “Stay here. Don’t move.”

She leaped to her feet and ran. After a moment she returned with a water-soaked handkerchief and began cleaning his face. Her touch was gentle but efficient. She concentrated deeply on what she was doing. Paul smelled blood, wet linen and the water it contained, the girl. Especially her hair. He put a hand in front of his face to stop her from continuing the first aid and said, “Thank you, but I should go now.”

“Go where? No one will help you. They will take one look at you and know you have been beaten up and think you’re a Jew or a Bolshevik.”

“They can think what they like.”

“My father is a doctor,” she said. “I’ll take you to him.”

Paul got to his feet. Standing up, he was overcome by dizziness and nausea. When he leaned over to vomit, it seemed to him that he was falling into a bottomless abyss. His legs would not obey him. He lost his balance and fell. He tried to get up again but couldn’t. He felt the girl’s hands on his arm, guiding him.

The girl said, “You have a concussion. That’s a serious matter. Let me take you to my father.”

“Does your father speak German?”

“He wouldn’t dream of speaking anything else,” she replied.

 2 

The father who was a doctor determined that none of Paul’s bones had been fractured. However, four lower ribs had been broken. Paul, stoic up to that moment, shrieked when the doctor poked each of them with a stiff forefinger.

Better the lower than the upper ones, the doctor told Paul. The upper ones, when shattered, could pierce the lungs or the liver or the spleen. “The ribs will be painful for a few weeks but there is no treatment, they must heal themselves,” the doctor said. “Try not to make sudden movements. No sports for a month. You must make yourself
cough fifty times every day.” He demonstrated the deep, phlegm-clearing cough that he was prescribing. “Now you,” he said.

Paul coughed. The pain was excruciating. This showed on Paul’s face. He gasped and seized his side. The doctor said, “Yes, it will be painful at first. But it is absolutely essential to clear the lungs. Otherwise they can become congested and that could be fatal. You could drown from the fluid in your own lungs. Drown! So cough! Ten times when you wake up, ten times at mid-morning, ten times at noon, ten times in the afternoon, ten times before you go to bed. Do you ever wake in the night?”

“Sometimes, not often.”

“If you do, put your face in the pillow and cough ten more times before you go back to sleep.”

The doctor found no other sign of internal injury. The ribs had not splintered and punctured the lungs. The spleen seemed to be intact. The liver felt normal.

“Nevertheless you must be watchful,” the doctor said. He spoke very rapidly, as he did everything else. He spoke in a mumble, something rarely heard in the old Germany where everyone was exhorted to speak to strangers at the top of their lungs. “If you notice blood in your urine or stool,” he continued, “or if you cough up blood or bleed from your anus, penis, nose, or ears, you must go to a doctor immediately. At once, without delay. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Herr Doktor.”

“Herr Professor Doktor. Your family has a regular doctor?”

“Yes, Herr Professor Doktor.”

This doctor was a small lean man with a bald crown with two puffs of graying black hair growing on either side of it. He was sure of his skills, unsmiling, abrupt in his speech. It was obvious that he expected meek obedience from his patients. Paul thought that he was angry about something—an injustice, an insult—at the center of his being. Whatever it was, he quivered under the weight of it. Paul had seen this condition in some of his parents’ friends and in certain of the brainier masters at his school.

“Sit up,” the doctor said.

Paul obeyed.

The doctor cut several long strips of adhesive tape, then taped Paul’s ribs, sternum to spine, on each side. He pulled the tape very tight. It was a painful process. Paul did not make a sound or a face.

“It’s all right to gasp,” the doctor said when he had finished one side. “We’re alone here. I know it hurts.”

Paul nodded.

“You’re good at hiding your feelings,” the doctor said, cutting tape for the other side of Paul’s chest. “That’s a useful quality in life, as you will find.”

Paul could think of no answer to this that would not be disrespectful, so he said nothing.

The doctor said, “Did you cry when you were a baby?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your parents didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“Then you must have cried. Or maybe you didn’t but they thought it would be bad for your character for you to know that. Do you think the Leader cried when he was a baby?”

“I never imagined that he ever was a baby, Herr Professor Doktor.”

“Ah, a wit! Do you think it wise to make such jokes, young man?”

“There’s nothing funny about the Leader, Herr Professor Doktor.”

The doctor looked up. He was enjoying this conversation. “Then you are a loyal German even if you are a wit?”

“I’m not a German, sir.”

“You’re not? You certainly sound like one. And look like one. They could paint you in the uniform of a hussar and hang you in a museum. If you’re not German, what are you?”

The pain of having his ribs strapped made it difficult for Paul to hear what the doctor was saying, much less answer.

“American,” Paul said.

“What luck. How did that happen?”

“My father is an American, my mother German.”

“Your mother doesn’t mind your being an American instead of a German?”

“She and my father decided before I was born that I would be an American.” Paul did not know why he was telling this strange little man about whom he knew nothing things that no one outside the family had a right to know.

“Why did they make such a decision?” the doctor asked.

“I wasn’t there.”

“But maybe a fortune teller was and she saw the future.”

Paul said nothing. In fact there was a fortune teller in his family’s life, a friend of his mother’s. She lived with the Christophers when she was in Berlin. Perhaps the doctor was collecting tidbits for the secret police. Living in the Reich made you think such thoughts even when you hadn’t been beaten within an inch of your life in the last half-hour.

The doctor finished taping. He had already put iodine on Paul’s skin where it had been broken. “There,” he said. “Done. Your parents will be surprised when they see you. You live nearby?”

“Not far,” said Paul, cautiously.

The doctor sat down at a desk, unscrewed the cap of a thick black fountain pen, and wrote for a minute or two with great speed. When he finished, he blotted the paper, folded it, and handed it to Paul.

“This is for your parents,” he said. “It describes your injuries and the treatment. If you have severe pain, not twinges but pain, take one aspirin dissolved in water every four hours.”

“And your fee?”

The doctor waved away the clumsy words. “No need.”

“Thank you, Herr Professor Doctor.”

“Since you’re an American you can dispense with the honorifics. In your country, I understand, you call doctors ‘doc.’”

“That’s true, doctor. I will say goodbye now.”

“Let me ask you a question before you go,” the doctor said. “Why did they do it?”

“Who? Do what?”

“Have you forgotten? The Youth. Why did they beat you up?”

“They didn’t explain.”

The doctor bit his lower lip, nodded his head. “Then all is in order,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”

 
 
3

After Paul told them the story of the beating and his medical treatment, his parents read the doctor’s letter, written on plain stationery. It was unsigned.

Lori said, “What is this doctor’s name?”

“It was never mentioned.”

“No diplomas on the wall, no name on the door?”

“His office was small, too small for the furnishings.”

“What did his daughter look like?”

“Dark hair, pale skin, pretty. My age, I think. She was alone.”

“Anything else?”

Lori knew that there must be something else. And there was—or was there? He had seen the girl at a distance. He saw no need to mention these sightings, or to list the small details of her appearance that he had memorized so that he could reassemble her in his imagination when she was not present.

He said, “She spoke English to me.”

“Why?”

“It’s against her principles to speak German, she said.”

“Her father must be a Jew, hiding his professional life,” Lori said. “We have put the poor man in danger.”

Under the Nuremberg Laws dealing with the legal status of Jews in the Reich, Jewish doctors were permitted to treat Jewish patients only. Treating an Aryan patient, even in an emergency, was a serious offense.

“The girl should not have taken you to her father,” Lori said.

Hubbard said, “Let’s not assume too much. They may not be Jewish at all.”

“She had a reason,” Paul said. “She told me that no one would help me if they saw me beaten up, because they would think I was a Jew. Or a Communist.”

Lori looked steadily at her son for a long moment. “Sensible girl,” she said. “I’d like to meet her.”

Paul told himself that he would never let that happen. His parents would be a danger to her. The authorities knew too much about them
and wanted to know more. The thought of the girl being questioned in No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse by Stutzer, just the two of them alone in that airless cubicle, was already unbearable, though he did not even know her name.

Hubbard called the novel he was writing
The Experiment
. No matter what happened on any particular day, he sat down at his writing desk and recorded the whole experience as fiction. The result was a new kind of novel in which nothing was made up—a truth novel. Its action consisted of the minutiae of his daily life, the characters were his family and friends. It was a lampoon of the National Socialists and the world they were creating. It was a supremely dangerous document to have lying about the house but it was his work. It was art.

Hubbard did not write about Paul’s beating in that day’s chapter of his novel-in-progress. It was too dangerous. Even Hubbard in his zeal to sacrifice everything for art understood this. Stutzer had made it plain that he intended to frighten them, to break them, to ruin them by threatening Paul. Hubbard said, Secret police work is not complicated: find the weakness, get your finger in it, make notes.

Hubbard and Lori and everyone else they encountered appeared in Hubbard’s manuscript under their own names, including even certain National Socialists they ran into while out on the town or at dinner parties given by conservative friends. Lori was distantly related to some of them and she might as well have been related to them all. They had grown up together, they did not judge each other, at least not yet. To them, Lori’s political passions were an eccentricity, like her marriage to an orphaned American who wrote novels because he had no property and no prospect of ever having any. Lori was a romantic. It was in her blood. She was forgiven almost everything by those who knew her family because she was beautiful and intelligent and her heroic father had been killed by political fools. Her weakness for the dregs of society notwithstanding, she was a member of an ancient family, descended from ancestors who had fought and dined with Charlemagne during the First Reich. Her friends thought that she was immune from the dictatorship no matter how foolishly she behaved. They believed that they were all immune. People like
themselves always had been. But both Hubbard and Lori knew by now that nobody except the Leader himself was immune from the new justice.

Hubbard had friends of his own in Berlin, American friends. His connections to them were pretty much the same as Lori’s to her own cohort. That evening Hubbard and Lori were dining at the house of a friend, O. G. Sackett, who was the first secretary of the American embassy. With his dark suits and white shirts he always wore a pink necktie. He and Hubbard were connected by the long-ago marriage of great-aunts and -uncles. They had been roommates and teammates in boarding school, they belonged to the same secret society at Yale. They were as much bound together by a web of blood and oaths as any two Germans ever had been. Hubbard’s friend was called O. G. because these were the first two initials of his given names, Osborn George, and because his strongest cussword was “Oh, golly!” Later in life, when he commanded thousands of Americans and others during the Cold War, the initials would come to mean “Old Gentleman.” He was an honorary godfather to Paul Christopher, a duty he took seriously.

“O. G. is our best hope,” Hubbard said.

“A very faint hope,” Lori said. “They’ll never let Paul out of the country now. He has assaulted the Hitler Youth.”

“They assaulted him first.”

“True but meaningless.”

“There are ways to deal with these matters, Lori.”

“You think they don’t know all about us? All about Paul? Their noses are everywhere.”

This was also true. Hubbard did not understand why they had not yet been arrested. Lori understood only too well, but the secret was not one she could share with her husband.

O. G.’s house was not far away, so they walked from their apartment in Charlottenburg. They did not trust taxi drivers or people who rode on streetcars, or even their own car in which they were alone, because it might be wired by the resourceful technicians of the secret police. Only in the open air, speaking in whispers, could they talk freely. Lori
was convinced, in fact she
knew
, that microphones had been hidden in the walls of their flat. She had heard the sounds of them being installed in the walls they shared with the loyal Germans who lived in adjoining apartments. Germans who always before had been delighted to know and say hello to the charming Frau Christopher now passed her on the stairs in silence, with eyes averted. She had not confided this information to Hubbard, either. It could only lead to questions that would be overheard by the listeners. Hubbard was irrational about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He thought that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to him no matter where he found himself in the world. He had a right to say, to write, to publish anything that came into his head. No one had a right to eavesdrop on him, especially no foreign government. Damn their microphones.