Then I heard the bitterness of defeat in my grandfather’s voice when he said that he had gone to Nordhausen.
I thought about how, when I was a kid, as my big-talking, sweet-talking, fast-talking father was in and out of courtrooms, tax dodges, marriages, and my life, the constancy of my grandfather’s silence had been just that: a constant. It was, like him, something I could always rely on. And really, where was the proof that two decades of national yammering, of getting it all out, had brought about an increase in collective national happiness? I had recently read something in Scientific American about the Roman city of Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius, uncovered by archaeologists; how exposure to light and air was destroying what centuries of darkness had preserved. And radiation treatment? A textbook example of a situation where the cure was worse than the disease. On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.
“I think maybe I’ll have a little soup after all,” my grandfather said.
I went into the kitchen and ladled some of my mother’s chicken soup into a bowl from the big Tupperware in the refrigerator. While the soup heated in the microwave, I opened the legs of the breakfast tray and wiped it down with 409. I folded a napkin and set a spoon on the napkin. I found the salt and pepper shakers shaped like terriers, one white, one black. Sometimes my grandfather liked to sprinkle his soup with those little yellow Israeli soup croutons—he called them mandelen—and so, for the extra calories, I poured a handful into a saucer and set that on the tray. When the soup was hot, I eased it from the microwave to the tray and carried the tray to the bedroom. The broth was gold. The carrot and celery and onion were gems. A filigree of golden fat adorned the surface. In the steam coming off the bowl of soup was the hint of lemon, a memory of my grandmother. Really, it smelled very good.
We got him propped up and into position. Then I set the tray across his body and tucked the napkin into the collar of the long T-shirt he wore.
He leaned forward to put his face, his nostrils, in the path of the steam coming off the bowl. He closed his eyes and inhaled. He picked up the spoon, and I watched him put away most of the bowl. The taste of it seemed to come as a kind of relief.
“Okay,” he said. He put down his spoon. “Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun.” After the name, he added something acrid in Yiddish.
“All I got was onion,” I said.
“Something your great-grandmother used to say. A Yiddish curse. ‘He should grow with his head in the dirt, like an onion.’”
“That what’s going on there?” I picked up the copy of Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, purloined thirty-odd years earlier from the library of the Wallkill prison. “In the Willy Ley book, you—well, somebody—like, blotted von Braun’s name out over and over again.”
“Me,” he said, adding dryly, “It didn’t work.”
He sprinkled a few mandelen onto the soup and took another spoonful. I heard the tiny crackers crunch between his teeth.
“And then . . . I remember how you wouldn’t watch the moon landing. How you got up and left the room. Even though that was pretty much something you had been waiting your whole life to see.”
“Yah.”
“Did that have something to do with your feelings about von Braun?”
“Yah.”
“So, obviously? Something must have happened . . . ?”
Another spoonful of soup went into his mouth. He swallowed it. His eyes were fixed on mine, watchful and withholding, challenging me to justify the logic of my inference.
“Because that morning, when you took off on that motorcycle, it sounded like, at that point, you were feeling almost like . . . like you and von Braun were . . .”
“‘Kindred spirits’?”
“Yeah. But then later, at a certain point . . .” He was still watching me, with less apparent tenderness than I could ever remember having seen in his eyes. He had put down his spoon. “It kind of seems like you pretty much decided you hated the guy’s guts.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed.
“Why?”
When I was a boy and fell prey to what he regarded as an inherent weakness for stating the obvious, my grandfather had a certain voice he would use to repeat whatever I had just said. To me it sounded like the voice that Mel Blanc used to do dimwitted bloodhounds, Yetis, and musclebound dumb-asses in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. My grandfather probably thought of it as the voice of Lon Chaney, Jr., playing Lennie in Of Mice and Men. I had not heard it in a very long time, but now it resurfaced: stammering, at once low-pitched and infantile.
“‘Something must have happened,’” he said in his moron voice.
I waited. He picked up the spoon and tilted the bowl toward himself. It looked like he was going to polish off the rest of it. I imagined the account I would make to my mother when she got home from work: He loved the soup. I got him to eat a whole bowl.
There was a clang as he flung down the spoon. In a man so frail and narcotized, the gesture felt inordinately violent. He pushed the bowl away. Later I would find a chip missing from its rim.
“You want to know what happened at Nordhausen?” he said in his regular rasp. “Look it up.”
22
When my mother got home, I went down to the library, a storybook-style cottage on Mountain Boulevard that stayed open late on Thursday nights.