“I am sorry to wake you, Lieutenant.”
There was something concealed in a fold of the old priest’s voice. My grandfather sat up, shaking loose the last lunar strands of gossamer. “Diddens?”
“Asleep. Private Gatto, too. They are both well, do not worry.”
My grandfather looked around for the old woman. When he had climbed into the loft a few hours earlier, he had tried without success not to wake her. He had apologized, and with the twang of the local dialect, Fr?ulein Judit had apologized for her brother’s rudeness. She referred to Father Nickel as “the little pasha.” She said that having been born a baby and finding he enjoyed it, he had never bothered to stop. The light of the Moon filtering in through a chink painted two portraits of itself on the old woman’s eyes. “He will die without ever having spent a night on anything but goose down,” she had said.
My grandfather had assured her that the switch was all his idea. “The bed is much too comfortable,” he had explained. Evidently, there had been truth in this, since after spreading Gatto’s overcoat across his body, he had immediately fallen into sleep with all its treacheries. At some point the old woman had crept out of her blankets and down the ladder without his even noticing.
“She went to draw water,” Father Nickel said. “She will have our breakfast for us when we get back.”
“Oh?” my grandfather said. “Are we going somewhere?”
“That is up to you.”
In the darkness my grandfather could not read the expression on Father Nickel’s face. The tone of the old priest’s voice was hard to interpret. Anticipation might be doubt. Urgency might be mischief. It sounded as if the old priest had made up his mind to do my grandfather a kindness that he feared he would live to regret.
“Come,” he said. “I have a gift for you. Come see.”
He lowered himself back down the ladder. My grandfather reached for his boots and dragged Gatto’s coat to the edge of the loft. He swung his legs over but then sat without moving at the top of the ladder. Reason, common sense, and experience conferred and came to the conclusion, not without regret, that the night was taking a decided turn toward the fucked up. Regardless of how long ago the cognac you had drunk was put into its bottle and how many chickens had died for the sake of your stew, the war was not over. Father Nickel was the enemy.
“I’m sorry, Father. Unless you tell me right now—”
“It’s a rocket, fool!” the old priest said. “A damned rocket!”
My grandfather climbed down from the loft and pulled on Gatto’s coat. The cows made way, pots and pans, a bovine fart. The old priest went out. My grandfather followed, wondering if his ability to smell something off about a situation had deserted him.
The night, an hour before dawn, was very cold. My grandfather buttoned up the coat and jammed his hands into the pockets. Father Nickel appeared to be headed toward an outbuilding at the back of the farm, a garage by the look of it. My grandfather relaxed a little. The rocket that the old priest intended to show him must be a bit of handiwork. Solid fuel, battery ignition, welded from a section of pipe, the kind of thing they printed plans for in Popular Mechanics. The story began to write itself in my grandfather’s imagination. For a year, two years, five years, the old priest had waited for some response to his memorandum from the Curia. And then one day, just as hope began to tip into disappointment, he had run across the article in a magazine or a Sunday newspaper: “The Fascinating New Hobby of Amateur Rocketry.” Detailed instructions, step-by-step photographs, a list of materials. Like a group of exiles re-creating a lost homeland in a few city blocks, the old priest had been able to replicate his lost hope in miniature, to build a scale model of his dream. And now all this nocturnal hugger-mugger because, with the outbreak of war, as was the case in Britain, the Nazis had outlawed amateur rocketry. My grandfather felt a renewed squeeze of affection for this lonely old humanist, holing up night after night in his sister’s garage to engineer—at least in his imagination—the means of transport and escape.
Just before they reached the old garage, Father Nickel cut abruptly to the right. He tramped past the ruins of a pig pen, past a squat water tank, past a garden whose beds were still cloaked against the winter in sheets of burlap. At the edge of the farm, what appeared to be a large forest stretched away into the distance of the night. Pine and fir trees stood together as if conspiring to keep out the moonlight, hiding a profound darkness behind their backs. Father Nickel headed directly toward those trees and that darkness. Some trick of the moonlight made it appear to my grandfather’s suddenly spooked imagination as if the trees had all at once, just a moment before, stopped in their tracks. They held an air of restless hesitation. My grandfather came to a halt. Half of the American soldiers killed or wounded since D-day had come to grief in woods like this.
“What rocket?” he said. “Whose rocket?”
“Your rocket, my son,” Father Nickel said. When he saw that my grandfather continued to linger, he said, “Listen. I know you are hunting for rockets.”
Now? said experience, common sense, and reason. Christ, you idiot, what the fuck is it going to take?
Gatto kept a carton of Lucky Strikes in the left hip pocket of his overcoat. In the right hip pocket, apparently, he kept a looted Walther PPK, wearing its sharklike leer. My grandfather had never held one before. You could feel the homicide trapped inside it.
He had told the old priest nothing about his work, the mission, unless he had blabbed about it at some point in his sleep. That was the kind of thing that happened in spy novels and romances—muttered revelations of conspiracy, adultery, crime—but it struck my grandfather as unlikely. A creation of novelists and screenwriters, like total amnesia and hand-to-hand combat between men who were carrying guns. In his experience the things people said while they were asleep were even less intelligible than the things they saw. At any rate, except for the occasional appearance put in by his Yiddish-speaking mother, my grandfather dreamed in English. It was hard to imagine that if he had talked in his sleep, the words would have come out as German.
There was no telling, however, what Diddens or Gatto, drugged on chicken stew and drunk on wine, might have confessed. After a certain number of years, a priest probably came to elicit confessions without even trying.
“Apologies.” Entschuldigung, to my grandfather’s ear always the most beautiful of German words. Away to the north and northeast, the war pulsed at my grandfather’s temples and the hinges of his jaws like a headache coming on. “I must insist, Father, that you tell me where you are taking me. Now.”