Why the hell did I do that?
Not as a considered move.
I guess the Boy Scout in me suddenly bubbled up and escaped.
Well, I certainly managed to make things worse than they were.
Helena reappeared several minutes later.
“It’ll be just a few more minutes, Billy,” she said.
Castillo looked at Kocian, who he found was already glaring at him.
Kocian drained his second glass of Slivovitz.
“Helena,” Kocian said, “it has been pointed out to me that my behavior toward you and your family tonight has been shameful.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Billy,” she said.
“Pray let me finish.” He waited until she nodded, then went on: “I can only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive an old drunk wallowing in self-pity over the loss of a man who was like a son to him.”
“Billy, you’ve not said nor done anything to apologize to me for.”
“Otto,” Kocian announced, “your wife is a lousy liar. One with a kind and gracious heart. She’s much too good for you.”
Helena went to Kocian and kissed him.
Kocian looked at Castillo.
“In case you’re curious, Karlchen, that was my heart speaking, not the Slivovitz.”
Castillo felt his throat tighten and his eyes start to water. He quickly got out of his chair.
“Did you drink all the Slivovitz, Onkel Billy? Or can I have one?”
“I think,” Otto Görner said, “that we should get into the arrangements for tomorrow.”
[TWO]
Das Haus im Wald
Near Bad Hersfeld
Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg
Hesse, Germany
0830 27 December 2005
The drapes over the plateglass windows had been opened, and everyone at the breakfast table could see what Castillo was describing in what he called Lesson Seven, Modern European History 202.
“You see that thing that looks sort of like a control tower? In the middle of the field?”
“There was an airstrip, Charley?” Jack Davidson asked.
“No. And don’t interrupt teacher again unless you raise your hand and ask permission first.”
Hermann and Willi, sitting on the floor playing with the puppies, giggled.
Castillo turned to them. “And laughing at your godfather also is verboten!”
They giggled again.
“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” Castillo went on, “was that that thing that looks sort of like a control tower was sort of the command post for half a dozen other, simpler control towers, three on each side. There were telephones in the smaller ones, and the larger one had telephones and radios connected to the next level of command—”
Davidson raised his hand.
“Yes, Jackie, you may go tend to your personal problem,” Castillo said. “But don’t forget—as you usually do—to wash your hands when you’re finished.”
Hermann and Willi giggled again.
“Why is it still there?” Davidson asked. “Too expensive to knock down?”
“Otto and I decided to leave it up, ‘Lest we forget,’ ” Kocian said. “It did cost a small fortune to take down the other towers and, of course, the fence itself.”
“Thank you, Professor Doktor Kocian,” Castillo said. “Turning to the fence. You see, about three hundred meters this side of the tower, a road—or what’s left of one?”
Everybody looked.
“The road is a few meters from what was the actual border. The fence was a hundred meters inside East Germany. They reserved the right—and used it—to shoot onto their land this side of the fence. They also tried to mine it, but were frustrated in that endeavor by good old American ingenuity.”
“You want to—” Captain Sparkman began, then abruptly stopped, raised his hand, and said, “Sorry.”
“You’re going to have to learn like Jackie here to take care of that sort of thing before coming to class, Sparky.”
That got the expected reaction from Hermann and Willi. Even Otto smiled.
“American ingenuity?” Sparkman pursued.
“As my heroes, the stalwart troops of the Fourteenth Armored Cavalry, made their rounds down the road, they could of course see their East German counterparts laying the mines. And they of course could not protest. But once the field was in, and grass sown over the mines so that those terrible West Germans fleeing the horrors of capitalism for the Communist heaven would not see the mines and blow themselves—”
“Onkel Karl is being sarcastic, boys,” Otto said. “The fence was built to keep East Germans from escaping to the West.”
“Onkel Karl, you said, ‘my heroes’?” Willi asked, his right arm raised.
“When I was your age, Willi, what I wanted to be when I grew up was a member of the Black Horse regiment, riding up and down the border in a jeep or an armored car or even better”—he met Otto’s eyes, then Billy Kocian’s—“in a helicopter, protecting the West Germans from their evil cousins on the other side of the fence. I could not tell my grandfather or my mother or anybody this, however, because, for reasons I didn’t understand, they didn’t like Americans very much.”
“Why?” Willi asked.
Otto and Kocian both shook their heads.
“Getting back to the minefields,” Castillo said. “Once the minefields were in—Bouncing Betties; really nasty mines—”
“Bouncing Betties?” Hermann asked.
“You didn’t raise your hand, but I will forgive you this once. When someone steps on a Bouncing Betty, it goes off, then jumps out of the ground about a meter, then explodes again. This sends the shrapnel into people’s bodies from their knees up. Very nasty.”
The boys’ faces showed they understood.
“Trying this one more time,” Castillo went on, “after the minefields were in and the Volkspolizei and the border guards and the Army of the German Democratic Republic were congratulating themselves, a trooper of the Fourteenth reintroduced one of the oldest artillery weapons known, the catapult.”
Willi’s hand shot back up.
“The what?”
“I will demonstrate.” Castillo reached for the sugar bowl, took out an oblong lump of sugar, and put it on the handle of a spoon. “What do you think would happen if I banged my fist against the other end of the spoon?”
“They get the idea, Karl,” Otto said. “You don’t have to—”
BAM!
The lump of sugar flew in a high arc across the table and crashed against the plateglass window.
Hermann’s and Willi’s eyes widened.
“That is a catapult,” Castillo said. “So what the troopers of the Black Horse did was build a great big one, big enough to throw four cobblestones wired together. They mounted it on a jeep and practiced with it until they got pretty good. And then they waited for a really dark night and sneaked the catapult close to the minefield—and started firing cobblestones. Eventually, one landed on a Bouncing Betty. It went off. There is a phenomenon known as sympathetic explosion, which means that one explosion sets off another. Bouncing Betties went off all over the minefield.
“The troopers got back in their jeep and took off. The Communists decided that they’d caught a whole bunch of dirty capitalists trying to sneak into their Communist paradise. Floodlights came on. Sirens screamed. Soldiers rushed to the area. All they found was a bunch of exploded Betties and some cobblestones.”
Hermann and Willi were obviously enthralled with the story.