“A little,” she said in English.
“D’you know these guys? D’you want ’em here?”
After a hesitation, she shook her head. Whereupon my father, who was in any case physically fearless, and who believed, moreover, that if you treated people in a rational and friendly manner they would treat you the same way, and that the world would be a better place if everyone would do this, went over to the sedan and shook the men’s hands, introduced himself in German as Chuck Aberant of Denver, Colorado, and asked them if they lived in Berlin or were just visiting like he was, listened with genuine interest to their answers, and then told them not to worry about the girl; he would personally vouch for her safety. It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.
My mother, who at twenty had already witnessed the bombing of Jena, the Red Army’s arrival, her mother being doused with the contents of a neighbor’s chamber pot, a dog eating a child’s corpse, pianos hacked apart for firewood, and the rise of the socialist workers’ state, liked to say to me that she had never in her life seen anything more amazing than the American man’s warmth toward the two creeps in their sedan. His kind of trust and openness was, for a Prussian, inconceivable.
“What’s your name?” my father asked her when they had the street to themselves.
“Clelia.”
“Oh my, what a beautiful name,” my father said. “That’s a great name.”
My mother happily smiled and then, certain that she looked like a mouthsome Tyrannosaur, tried to stretch her lips down over her hundred teeth; but concealment was a lost cause. “Do you really think?” she said, smiling all the more widely.
My father hadn’t said two kind words, it was more like ten. It still wasn’t very many. In the back pocket of his khakis was a map of Berlin, the kind with the patented folding system (my father loved innovations, loved to see inventors rewarded for improving the human condition), and he was able to lead my mother to Zoo Station and buy her some wurst at the all-night food kiosk there. In a mix of English and German, followable only spottily by my mother, he explained that this was his first day in Berlin and he was so excited to be here that he could have walked all night. He was a delegate to the Fourth World Congress of the Association for International Understanding (which wouldn’t survive to hold a fifth congress, owing to its exposure, the following autumn, as basically a Communist front). He’d left his two little girls, from his first marriage, in the care of his sister, and had flown to Berlin on his own nickel. He’d had some disappointments in life, he’d hoped to contribute more to the world than teaching high-school biology, but the wonderful thing about teaching was that it gave him whole summers to get out, out into the world, out into nature. He delighted in meeting foreigners and uncovering common ground; at one point, he’d studied Esperanto. His girls, only four and six, were already great little campers, and when they were older he intended to take them to Thailand, to Zambia, to Peru. Life was too short for sleeping. He didn’t want to waste one minute of his week in Berlin.
When my mother told him she’d run away from Jena, my father’s first impulse was to think of his own daughters and insist that she go home again in the morning. But when he learned that her mother had beaten her and that she’d never go to college, he reconsidered. “Golly, that’s rough,” he said. “Something wrong with a system that makes a bright, vital girl like you work behind the counter in a bakery. I’m an old-fashioned camper — a blanket and a piece of level ground’s enough for me. My hotel’s not much, but it does have beds. Why don’t you sleep in mine, and we’ll see how things look to you tomorrow. I can get a little shut-eye on the floor.”
His motives were almost certainly benign. My father was a good man: a tireless teacher and loyal husband, a seeder of independence in my sisters, a sucker for stories of injustice, a reflexive giver of the benefit of the doubt, a vigorous raiser of his hand when there was unpleasant work to be volunteered for. And yet I’m haunted by the fact that, all his life, he did exactly what he pleased. If he wanted to take his students to Honduras to dig sewage lines, or to a Navajo reservation to paint houses and brand cattle, even if it meant leaving my mother alone for weeks with the kids, he did it. If he wanted to stop the family car and chase a butterfly, he did it. And if he felt like marrying a pretty woman young enough to be his daughter, he did it — twice.
He was originally from Indiana. Hoping to make a contribution to agriculture, he’d pursued entomology, but the road to a PhD in entomology is long. Certain stages in the life cycle of the caddis flies he was studying could be collected only for a week or two each year, and to support himself while the years went by he took a job with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. He was living in Denver when he finished his dissertation and sent his collection to his committee in Indiana, which couldn’t grant a degree without seeing specimens. The package, which represented eight years of work, disappeared in the U.S. mail without a trace. His dream had been to teach at a university and do pure research, but instead he ended up as an ABD in the Denver public school district.
Sometime in the late thirties, he took under his protection a bright but vulnerable girl whose stepfather was an alcoholic brute. He had conferences with her mother, he arranged for the girl to live with a different family, and he encouraged her to apply for college. But the girl turned out to be amenable to rescue only temporarily, because her boyfriend was in prison. As soon as he got out, they ran away to California. My father served four years in the Army Signal Corps, the last of them in Bavaria, and when he returned to his job in Denver he learned that the young woman was living at home again; her boyfriend was now in military prison for nearly killing someone in a bar fight. My father, who I suspect had been in love with her from the beginning, invited her on long hikes in the mountains and by and by proposed to her. Trying to turn her life around, and under pressure from her mother, the young woman may have felt that she had no choice but to accept. (She looked like an angel in the one picture I ever saw of her, but there was something empty in her eyes, a deadness, the despair of the disparity between what she looked like and what she felt herself to be.) The daughters she’d had with my father were one and three when her boyfriend finished his sentence and resurfaced in Denver. My father never told even my mother, let alone me, what happened then. All I know is that he ended up with sole custody of my half sisters.
He was more than twice my mother’s age, but she was a couple of inches taller, and maybe this helped equalize and normalize things. In Berlin, he blew off the plenary sessions of the Fourth Congress, which even by the standards of international do-goodery must have set new records for tediousness and pointlessness, and together he and my mother walked the city. They took the boat rides that must be taken in Berlin, they ate at restaurants that seemed first-class to her. On their fifth evening, he sat her down and made a little speech.
“Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “I want to marry you, and, no, don’t worry, I’m not trying to pull anything dishonorable. I just have a feeling that if you stay here you’re going to get in trouble and find yourself back in Jena in no time, and there goes your whole life. So, and then we’ll see about getting you a passport and so forth. I’ll fly back here next week with my little girls, and you can see if you want to come back to the States with me. If you don’t want to, no hard feelings, we’ll annul the marriage. I just think you’re a swell girl, with a good head on your shoulders, and I have a feeling I’d be happy to stay married to you. I think you’re pretty darned wonderful, Clelia.”