In the town of Nordhausen, an intelligence officer attached to the 3rd Armored Division told my grandfather of being approached by one of the locals, who had hinted that he might be persuaded to betray certain of his neighbors. This fellow did not know exactly what behaviors the Americans might be looking to punish or secrets they hoped to extract, but he was certain they would find something in his inventory to suit their needs. He kept a shop in town that, appropriately enough, sold hunting and fishing gear.
In the early morning of his second day in Nordhausen, my grandfather went to the shop with cigarettes, SPAM, chocolate, and, he recalled, a miraculous bunch of bananas, the hand of a golden Buddha ablaze against the gray morning. He found the shop on a street that bore signs of damage from the RAF raid the previous week, the one that had killed fifteen hundred inmates of the Boelcke-Kaserne. The shop had two display windows. One was covered over with a stained oilcloth tarpaulin. The other was intact, but its shade had been lowered to hide, or spare the passerby from having to see, that there was nothing to display. If you turned around, you could see a corner of the walls of the Boelcke-Kaserne rising down at the end of the street. No doubt it had carried sounds and odors to the doorstep when the wind was right.
My grandfather went around to the back door. He did not care if his visit endangered the shopkeeper’s life, but he wanted it to seem as though he did. He rang the bell and showed his Eisenhower pass. They spoke in riddles and allusions, and then the shopkeeper let him in.
The shopkeeper explained to my grandfather that he belonged to some minor Christian sect that had been first frowned on and then harassed by the Reich. Recently, his stock of excellent Mannlicher rifles had been requisitioned by the local Volkssturm during a short-lived moment of planned resistance, in exchange for worthless promissory notes. He was garrulous and priggish, and it was a wonder his neighbors had not done away with him years ago.
He turned down the cigarettes and chocolate as immoral indulgences. The bananas and SPAM were welcome enough but struck the shopkeeper as perhaps, on their own, inadequate payment. My grandfather said that if his question got a useful answer, he would try to come up with a few more cans of SPAM and maybe a tub or two of corn syrup. If that would not do, my grandfather proposed hanging the shopkeeper by the ears on a couple of fishhooks from his heaviest-gauge fishing line, giving him a push to get him swinging, and inviting those neighbors whom the shopkeeper was so eager to betray to come and test their marksmanship using whatever blunderbusses the Volkssturm had left on the shelves.
A breeze blew in through the smashed window. The tarpaulin rustled and snapped like a sail.
The shopkeeper suggested that my grandfather try the Herzog farm, on the road to Sondershausen. Herzog was an infantryman killed during the course of the long retreat from Italy. His widow had taken up with one Stolzmann, an engineer from the Mittelwerk who was now living at the farm and posing as Herzog.
My grandfather rode the Zündapp out to the Herzog farm. The sidecar rode empty beside him. He crossed a stream and, just before the road made a bend to the south, entered a birchwood. The birches congregated in the fog, wrapped in their bark with its cryptic inscriptions. They reminded my grandfather of monuments in a graveyard. He felt a premonitory shiver and, a second later, a sharp tug at the left elbow of his army coat. He heard a crack of rifle fire. Small-caliber, by the sound. Someone was shooting at him from the cover of the trees north of the road. My grandfather glanced back and to his left but saw only trees and a bright dot of daylight in the wool at the elbow of his coat.
My grandfather felt foolish, which bothered him, since he would prefer to die in the grip of any emotion, no matter how abject, than in the knowledge of his own stupidity. If the dealer in sporting goods would betray his own neighbors for some canned ham and bananas, then it was likely he would not hesitate to betray an American soldier for less. The bastard probably had arranged for an ad hoc ambush as soon as my grandfather left the shop. My grandfather opened the throttle and let the beautiful engine do what its designers had engineered it to do. There was another rifle crack, but this time the shot went wide. The road left the birchwood and made its bend to the south. There was no more shooting after that.
When he saw the promised farmhouse and its stand of poplars about a quarter mile ahead on the left, he slowed the motorcycle and killed its engine. The farm had the appearance of prosperity neither untouched nor entirely diminished by war. The stucco farmhouse was large and new, with a second story and signs of modern plumbing. The large ground-floor windows had leaded lozenges in their upper panes. There was half-timbering, a red tiled roof, and an overall air of ersatz medievalism that my grandfather supposed to be good Nazi style. The barn was capacious, with a metal roof in fine repair. The Alsatian bitch who came bounding and chesty across the meadow to give my grandfather a piece of her mind had a lustrous coat. It had been a long time since my grandfather had seen a civilian dog who did not slink around corners with the ribcage visible and the head lowered in shame or calculation. This bold specimen was frankly asking to be shot, but in addition to the headless officer’s rifle and Walther, my grandfather had come armed with a small can of Vienna sausages. After a moment’s quick work with the can opener of his folding knife, a truce was agreed to. My grandfather fed the sausages to the dog at one-minute intervals until he gained some measure of adoration. She followed him to the house but gave no warning of his approach until he was almost to the kitchen door.
In the spotless kitchen he found Frau Herzog trying to help a boy of nine or ten to adjust his artificial leg. She was a good-looking woman with a remarkable bosom who displayed mild anxiety at an American officer’s sudden appearance in her dooryard but nothing that was not called for. She explained that the boy, her son, suffered from diabetes and regrettably would have to decline the proffered Hershey bars. The boy, fair and slender, stared at my grandfather, fear showing unbribed and plain on his face. The bulb of his stump reminded my grandfather of the nosecone of a V-2. The skin over it looked chafed and sore. The prosthesis was too big, too long. At one time it might have been the property of another, larger amputee child. My grandfather had planned on confronting the widow Herzog to cut the bullshit and just ask for Stolzmann, but he was derailed by something in the face or the gestalt of the wide-eyed silent boy with his legs dying out from under him.
“Herr Herzog?” my grandfather inquired.
Alarm deepened the groove between Frau Herzog’s eyebrows. She apologized. She said that she hoped there was nothing amiss. She said that her husband was an infantryman and that he had stepped on a mine—a German mine—in a place called San Gimignano. Now he was out of combat and of no danger to anyone. In the midst of making this statement, she glanced at the boy. My grandfather did not hear a lie in her voice but noted the ambiguous phrasing. If her husband was dead and she was covering up for this Stolzmann, my grandfather could not help but admire her apparent reluctance to tell an out-and-out lie in front of her child.
“My business is not with your husband,” he said, answering her ambiguity with his own. “I’m in a hurry and would like nothing better than to leave all of you in peace as soon as I have the answer I need.”
The bitch came in through the open door and, with a loving tongue, addressed herself to the fingers my grandfather had used to serve the Vienna sausages. She sat down at my grandfather’s side and yawned. Frau Herzog stood with her arms folded under her bosom, which my grandfather could not help but admire, too. He could see that although it was likely she had never wanted anything more than she wanted him to leave them in peace, that would still be insufficient payment, in her view, for what he was asking in return. Then he thought of something she might want even more.
“I can get you insulin,” he said. “Say three months’ supply. If the man of the house answers my question.”