In the moonlight he could not be entirely certain, and no doubt his conscience or forty years of accumulated retrospective tenderness influenced his impression, as reported to me, that when Father Nickel saw the gun in my grandfather’s hand, he looked heartbroken. But he simply nodded, and when he spoke, his tone was patient and forgiving.
“In the winter, you see, in December or January, they started to route the trains this way. From somewhere up in the Harz Mountains, I believe, to the rail yards at Soest and thence west. At some point they were loading them on the beds of special lorries, camouflaged under netting, and driving them within range of Antwerp and, of course, London. For the trains to deviate this far to the south before turning west, well, it’s very much the long way around, isn’t it? I presume the more direct routes were bombed. And then, when the retreat from Belgium began. There was no other way. In time things became chaotic around Soest, which has been bombed very heavily, very heavily. Often the trains passing this way were obliged to stop; there is a siding along the river just down the hill from here. They would sit and wait on this siding for an hour, two hours. And then, you see, one night when the train carried on, one of them had been left behind. Abandoned. I still do not know why. I must assume that it was damaged in transit or found to be somehow defective. No doubt they are fragile. Deadly things often are. Come.”
“You’re saying that, on the other side of these woods, there is a V-2.”
“Yes.”
“An intact V-2 rocket.”
If this turned out to be true, it would be, as far as my grandfather knew, the first such capture by any of the Black List teams. It would be a spectacular prize.
“Yes, yes!”
“Through these woods.”
“And then down the hill. There is a path, with the snow all gone it’s nothing, a walk of twenty minutes, perhaps, for a young man. Twice that, since you shall be in my enfeebled company. Come.”
Just before he followed the priest whose ward and beloved sexton he had murdered only a few hours before, into the darkness at the back of the trees, my grandfather took a look up—a last look up, it might be—at the stars. The Moon was down, and they had reclaimed the whole of the sky.
At that hour all across Europe, if the local skies were clear, people who believed, knew, feared, or hoped they were about to die were looking up at the stars. From Finland to the Balkans, from the Black Sea to the doorstep of Africa, across Poland and Hungary and Romania. Looking up, maybe, through a pane of Perspex, or through lenses that corrected for myopia. Through a tangle of razor wire, a gun slit, a grid of tracer fire, the blown hatch of an M1. Standing, stumbling, kneeling. Dead on their feet or running for their lives. From open fields, street gutters, and foxholes. Atop a pile of rubble, in a fresh-dug ditch, on a Turkish carpet in a house that had no roof, on the deck of a ship on fire.
No doubt some of these people looking up at the stars sought the lineaments of God’s face. Many saw no more than what was to be seen: the usual spatter of lights, cold and faraway. For some the sky might be a diagram captioned in Arabic and Latin, a dark hide tattooed with everyday implements and legendary beasts. At least one man, looking up at the stars that night from the edge of a forest in the Westerwald, saw an archipelago of atomic furnaces in a vacuum sea, omnidirectional vectors of acceleration radiant from a theoretical point of origin that predated humanity by billions of years, as unperturbed by mechanized mass slaughter on a global scale as by the death of one individual.
This was my grandfather’s line of thinking, and he found both comfort and guidance in it. He could trust or mistrust Father Nickel; either way the outcome would mean nothing to the stars. So why not, for one night, lay down the weary burden of mistrust? For an hour, say, and no longer. Just long enough to see the rocket. After that he would shoulder the burden again.
*
“So, what happened?” I said. “What’d he do?”
I had been schooled by now in the ways of South Philadelphia and the world that was, in my grandfather’s view, its macrocosm. I was expecting treachery, mischance, one debt incurred when another was repaid.
“He showed me the rocket,” my grandfather said.
“A V-2. You saw a V-2 rocket.”
“I saw more than one. This was just the first.”
“And?”
“And . . . ?”
“What was it like?”
He pursed his lips and angled his face toward the window. He considered the question for long enough that I began to wonder if he had forgotten it.
“It was tall.”
“Tall?”
“The old man said it was as tall as the steeple of his church.”
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t pictured them as being so tall. “But, I mean . . . how did you feel? What did you think?”
“I don’t know how to put it into words.”
“Were you disappointed?”
“On the contrary.”
“Afraid?”
“Of what? It wasn’t going anywhere.”
It occurred to me that neither disappointment nor fear was an emotion my grandfather ever really struggled to express. Both could be stated plainly and left behind.
“Did it make you happy?” I said.
The word seemed to catch him a little off guard.
“Something like that,” he said.
*
In children’s drawings, all houses have chimneys, all monkeys eat bananas, and every rocket is a V-2. Even after decades of stepped-back multistage behemoths, chunky orbiters, and space planes, the midcentury-modern Enterprise, the polyhedral bulk of Imperial star destroyers and Borg cubes, the Ortho-Cyclen disk of Millennium Falcon—in our deepest imaginations the surest way to the nearest planet remains a trim cigar tapering to a pointed nose cone, poised on the tips of four swept-back axial fins. By the time I became conscious of rockets—and I grew up at the height of the space race, surrounded by the working models and scale models my grandfather’s company manufactured, by photographs and drawings of Saturns and Atlases and Aerobees and Titans—they had progressed well beyond von Braun’s early masterwork, in design as in power, size, and capacity. But it was a V-2 that would carry me into the outer space of a fairground ride, that labeled the spines of the public library’s science fiction collection. A V-2 was the “weenie” or visual anchor of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. In the V-2, form and purpose were united, as with a knife, a hammer, or some other fundamental human tool. As soon as you saw a V-2, you knew what it was for. You understood what it could do. It was a tool for defeating gravity, for escaping the confines of earth.
For my grandfather, I believe, the war was everything that happened to him from the day he enlisted until the moment he walked into a clearing in the woods outside Vellinghausen, Germany, in late March or early April 1945. It was everything that resumed happening, the awful things he saw and the revenge he contemplated, from the moment he walked out of the clearing until the German surrender six weeks later. The thirty minutes or so that he spent with the rocket in the woods, however, was time stolen from the war, time redeemed. He would leave the clearing with that half hour cupped in his memory like an egg kept warm in the palms. Even when the war had crushed it, he remembered the pulse, the quickening of something that might break free and take to the sky.