He was stationed in Ulm, where his official duties-coding messages for transmission-were not onerous. His real job was running a black market operation, moving fuel and food from army stores to the hungry civilian economy. He had no trouble setting up an organization, for Germany at the time was well supplied with underemployed thugs. These fellows had simply shed the handsome Nazi regalia they’d worn for twelve years and were open to opportunities in free-market, rather than state-sponsored, gangsterism. Dad was able to help with de-Nazification certificates, of course, and also used his accountancy genius to cover up the pilferage. He had no compunction about using the former Gestapo in his business. I think it tickled him to see these guys meekly taking orders from a Jew, and from time to time he’d covertly feed one of them to the authorities or, worse, to the Jewish revenge underground that was active at the time. It kept the others in line.
Although officially lodged in the Third Army headquarters-company barracks, Dad spent most of his time in a suite he maintained in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Ulm. Now, it is one of my father’s eccentricities that he never enters a place of public accommodation through the main, or normal, entrance, but only through the service areas. I think he got this tic from the mobsters of the ’40s, whose habit this also was, when visiting, say, the Copa or El Morocco. It may have had something to do with security, or maybe they did it just because they could; who was going to stop them? In any case, one night in the winter of 1946, returning from a nightclub and approaching the Kaiserhof via its kitchen entrance, he found my mother among the urchins and old ladies rooting through the garbage cans set out there. He ignored them, as he usually did, and they ignored him, except for one who, lifting her head from the filth, said, “Give me cigarette, Joe.”
He looked, and there-only partially disguised by dirt and the soiled rag she wore around her head-was that face. I’ve seen photographs taken around then and it’s quite amazing-she looks just like a younger Carole Lombard, blond and ridiculously exquisite. She was just a week past her seventeenth birthday. Of course he gave her cigarettes, of course he invited her up to his suite, for a bath, some nylons, a change of clothes. He was gaping. How had this creature survived unclaimed in 1945 Germany? Somewhat later, when she was clean and shiny, and draped in a pink silk robe, and he attempted the usual quid pro, he found out why. She had a pistol and she pointed it at him in a determined manner, and told him that war or no war, she was a good girl, the daughter of an officer, that she had shot three men before this and would shoot him too if he attempted to force her virtue. Dad was astounded, he was charmed, he was fascinated. This was, after all, an era when you could fuck a countess for a pound of sugar; that she could have successfully defended her body against a mass of wandering DPs and escaped prisoners, plus the dregs of one defeated army, plus the forces of three victorious ones, indicated a more than ordinary supply of moxie. One of Dad’s words, moxie. According to him, my sister has all of it in our generation, me and my brother are moxie-deficient.
So, faced by the pistol, he relaxed, they had a drink and a smoke, and they exchanged life stories like the teenagers they were. Her name was Ermentrude Stieff. Her parents were dead, her father, the officer, had died in the summer of ’44, and her mother had been killed by a stray bomb in the war’s final weeks. This was in Regensburg. After that she’d wandered through the chaos of the Reich’s final days, dragging the little suitcase she had stashed in her locker at the hospital. People did such prudent things in those days, so if what happened to her ever happened one would not be an utterly destitute refugee. Sometimes she traveled with groups of fleeing civilians, and here she had two means of establishing friendly relations, depending on the nature of the group. One of these items was a yellow star of the kind the Nazis made the Jews wear. The other was a narrow strip of black cloth with the words DAS REICH embroidered on it, which was designed to go around the lower left sleeve of the uniform worn by the soldiers of the Second SS-Panzer Division. She never told Dad where she got the yellow star, but she got the SS unit marker from Hauptsturmführer-SS Helmut Stieff, her father, fallen for the Fatherland in Normandy and, as a matter of fact, eventually buried in that Bitburg cemetery that got President Reagan briefly into trouble some years ago.
This tale says something about the deviousness of both my parents, and about my own character as well, I think, in that I chose to, in a manner of speaking, dine out on it to amuse or impress Mickey Haas that afternoon on 113th Street. It’s the sort of thing many people would want to keep quiet about. My mother, by the way, denied the cute meeting entirely. She claimed she met Dad at a dance and thought that he was a gentleman. She never scrabbled through garbage cans, or shot anyone. She acknowledged that her father was indeed an SS officer, but she was careful to point out to us children the difference between the Waffen and the Allgemein, or general, SS, the people responsible for the camps. The Waffen-SS were brave soldiers fighting the horrible commie Russians.
Rambling. Basically who gives a shit at this juncture? I suppose the only lasting point is that truth was ever flexible in the hands of my parents. Not only was the far past in play, but they also often disagreed violently about events of the previous evening. This bred in me an early cynicism about historical fact, which makes my present situation, as a martyr, in a way, to different versions of four-hundred-year-old events, not a little ironic.
In any case, now we have to flash forward twenty or so years. As I’ve said, I became an intellectual prop lawyer, and Mickey has managed to stay within, nearly, a stone’s throw of where we first met, for he is a professor of English literature at Columbia College. Mickey apparently draws a great deal of water in lit-crit circles. He was president of the Modern Language Association a few years back, which I gather is a big deal, and he seems to be respected with varying degrees of grudgingness by most of the interpretive fiefs into which the literary critical world seems nowadays to be divided. His field of study is William Shakespeare’s plays, which is how he came to know Bulstrode. Professor B. was a visiting scholar at Columbia, also a Shakespeare expert, from the University of Oxford. One day, it seems, Bulstrode comes up to Mickey and says, “Say, old bean, you wouldn’t happen to know an intellectual property lawyer, would you?” and Mickey comes back with, “As a matter of fact, I do.” Or something like that.
Let me recall the day. It was October 11, a Wednesday, the weather a little chilly, so that you knew the summer was over for sure, and there was a threat of rain in the air. People were in raincoats, as was I. I can see my raincoat, a tan Aquascutum, hanging on a coat-stand in the corner of my office, which is smallish for a partner’s office, but comfortable enough. Our building is on Madison in the low Fifties, and through my window I can see one of the monitory spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, this view being nearly my sole connection to the religion of my youth. My office is furnished in an unpretentious, vaguely modern manner reminiscent of Jean-Luc Picard’s ready room on the starship Enterprise. I have my diplomas and licenses up on the wall, together with three chrome-framed photographs: one is a professional portrait of my two kids as they looked a few years ago, and another is of me and my son Niko in which I am running alongside him as he learns how to ride a two-wheeler, a quite good shot taken by his mother. The only object in the room that one might consider unusual is the third photograph, which shows a large, crop-haired young man in red-white-and-blue weight-lifting togs holding high a heavy barbell. The barbell is so heavy that it bends slightly at each end, for this athlete is in the 192½ lb+ class, the heaviest, and he is lifting over five hundred pounds. Five hundred thirty-two, to be precise. This person is me, and the photo was shot at the Mexico City games in 1968, where I was part of the U.S. Olympic team. This was more weight than I had ever lifted in the clean-and-jerk and would have got me the bronze medal, but I messed up on the snatch, and Joe Dube took it. I have kept up training since then, at a lower level, of course, but I can still yank somewhat more than a quarter of a ton over my head.