EPILOGUE
January 2008
NEW SEMESTER, first day of class. Professor E. Nathaniel Turn bull scanned the creaking rows of the lecture hall for early arrivals.
One eager lass had already snatched a syllabus and taken a seat up front, but the telltale lines of a stowaway iPod betrayed her true intentions. Last-minute texters hovered by the door, bent to the task like scriveners to their ledgers. A cell phone’s forbidden galaxy tune twinkled in a backpack.
It was 7:56 a.m., not the best of time slots for a debut course. Half the arrivals still had damp hair from their morning showers. Some were already stifling yawns.
Nat could hardly blame them. The name of the course certainly wasn’t sexy: History 225: Modern Germany, a Case History. The department had given him only half an hour to come up with a twenty-five-words-or-less description for the spring catalog, and even then it had only slipped in as a typewritten insert: An assessment of the Third Reich’s lingering aftereffects on postwar Germany, told through the life story of resister-turned-collaborator Kurt Bauer, the noted industrialist.
Only twenty-seven takers for fifty slots, but Nat wasn’t worried. Reviews would be glowing. Word would spread. By next fall they would have to move him to a bigger room, especially after the book came out over the summer.
His greater concern this morning was whether any of his invited special guests would show up, including a particular student who was a procrastinator by nature. Ah, there she was now.
Karen flashed him a daughterly smile and settled into a seat toward the back. Finally, he would be teaching in a style that wouldn’t shame her. Not that he expected to win her over completely to his favorite subject. He couldn’t help but notice the dog-eared Complete Poems poking from her backpack.
She had phoned at six thirty that morning with a verse to get him off on the right foot:
Mine enemy is growing old,
I have at last revenge.
The palate of the hate departs;
If any would avenge,
Let him be quick, the viand flits,
It is a faded meat.
Anger as soon as fed is dead;
’Tis starving makes it fat.
Good stuff, he told her. And as he sipped his breakfast coffee afterward he contemplated the import of those words for Gordon and Bauer, for Berta and Liesl, and, well, for every player in this saga that had consumed him for the better part of the previous eight months.
Nat had his own role, of course, although as a professional evaluator of such things he was certain his own would never turn up in any official accounting. Because, for all of the supposedly great material the FBI had gathered from Bauer’s storehouse of nuclear secrets, Holland confessed later that much of it had already exceeded its shelf life. During Bauer’s last few years of laying low, the various shadowy vendors, suppliers, and middlemen of the atomic marketplace had apparently moved on without him, re-forming and re-channeling their networks. Meaning Bauer had been peddling a stale loaf indeed.
That meant, in turn, that Nat hadn’t exactly saved the world for democracy.
But he had triumphed handsomely in his own small theater of operations, the realm of academia where Gordon and he had toiled for so long. A prolific bout of further research and furious scribbling had attracted a decent advance from a publisher, followed by an even more lucrative sale of translation rights to a German publisher. Kurt Bauer’s name was about to be immortalized, although not in the way the old fellow wanted. Once again, it was the broken parts that had proven to be the most interesting.
For a while Nat had worried that the man would seek vengeance. But the scorn of a resurrected Liesl seemed to take all the fight out of him. Bauer didn’t even pursue his court case against Berta, much less any vendetta against Nat. As for the Iranians, if anything they were probably glad to see the old man get his comeuppance, since he had goaded them into a disastrous competition over damaged goods.
That freed Nat to handle and dispense the information as he saw fit. The hardest part was breaking the news to Viv.
He invited her over for dinner the night after his return from Berlin. Karen, who had quickly warmed to Viv after her close encounter with the would-be burglar, was there to cook the meal and soften the blow. After coffee Nat gently sat Viv on the couch and uncorked a bottle of Pierre Ferrand, Gordon’s favorite cognac. He withheld the “Dear Jane” letter from Bern, but told her the rest.
There were tears, of course, but by the time he drove her home she seemed grateful for the knowledge, if only because it meant she hadn’t been the one failing time after time for all those years, whenever Gordon had receded into his drinks or his anger.
“Maybe I should meet her someday,” she said of Sabine.
“Maybe,” Nat answered. “The way Sabine sees it, you won. You ended up with Gordon, changed man or not.”
“But she got a son.”
BERTA AT FIRST RESISTED his offer to collaborate on further research for the book. Even after she accepted, Nat had to move heaven and earth to secure a visa for her, and the National Archives would still have nothing to do with her—not that he blamed them.
She helped tie up loose ends in other areas, and her work was spirited, energetic. She even exhibited a newfound tact in dealing with several of their trickiest sources. All along, she stayed in close touch with Liesl. Nat never asked about the nature of their conversations, and Berta never volunteered any answers.
Nat did virtually all of the writing. He was happy to share his advance, but he debated briefly with his own ego over whether to also share authorship. Berta then surprised him by flatly refusing the offer. The only credit she wanted was for research. The work, she said, was its own reward.
It was clear to him that she hadn’t yet come to terms with everything that had happened. Nor did she seem to have any idea of how she would proceed—either professionally or socially—once the project was done. The problem went beyond restlessness or lingering guilt. It was, Nat believed, something quite German—an unfulfilled need to put everything in its proper place and to talk it out within herself, a dialogue among all her weary demons.
So when she disappeared without warning just after the first galleys arrived from the publisher, he did not try to track her down or pry into her plans. When the check for the balance of their advance then arrived by mail, he forwarded her share in care of Liesl.
The course he was about to teach was a fortunate by-product of their work. Its outline was roughly the same as that of the book. He wrote Liesl to invite her and Berta to attend the opening lecture. Liesl sent her regrets, but also her blessing. Berta didn’t respond.
But Karen was here, and now so was Viv, taking a seat just behind his daughter. It was exactly eight o’clock.
Nat unfolded his notes at the lectern and uttered a few bland words of welcome. No more my-way-or-the-highway shock therapy. If anyone lagged, well, he would just have to try coaxing them along, the way any good teacher would.
Dispensing with the preliminaries, he asked the girl on the front row to please hand out the syllabus to everyone else. As she complied, he noticed movement from the doorway and glanced toward the back just long enough to see Berta taking a seat in a far corner, an island among empty seats.
He nodded. She seemed to offer a flicker of acknowledgment, or maybe he imagined it. There was no way to find out for sure, because now it was time to deliver the heart of his opening remarks, with what he hoped would be a stirring preview of what lay ahead. Students always grumbled if you used the full fifty minutes on the first day, so he wrapped things up at 8:35. He closed with these words:
“By presenting you the life of one rather venal and tormented man, I hope to show you the ways in which history is a living entity. Not just because of its survivors, and the stories they have to tell, but because of its enduring power to hurt and to heal, to create even as it destroys, to transform familiar old heroes and monuments into dust even as it raises fresh new icons from the ashes of the lost and the forgotten.”
Rather pleased with himself, Nat scanned the room as the students began packing to leave. Karen nodded approvingly. Viv wiped something from her eyes.
But Berta was gone.
She must have slipped out during his summation, another disappearance without warning. Still haunted, he supposed. And still very much a German, waltzing with her past even as it enticed her down a dark stairwell.
He wondered if she could use some company.