And so in the next unforgettable minutes, there in an American national wonderland, I learned that “French leave” meant desertion, although in this case not from any army but an entire country. Germany, that is, when it was falling to pieces after losing World War One and the Nazis were coming out of the woodwork. As his searching words led me through, my imagination transformed the hunched figure clasping his hands between his legs into a young veteran like my own father coming home from combat. Aunt Kate may have thought Herman had no ambition, but it sounded to me as if he had been smart as an Einstein in his choice of livelihood after his term as a soldier on the losing side: making beer where they drank it like water. “In Munich were beer halls like you would not believe, big as this, almost.” He pointed a thumb to the whopping Inn behind us. “And Oktoberfest there, two-week festival of foods and beers.” He gave that hollow laugh again. “Crow Fair for drunkards. Good place to be a Braumeister.” From what he said, that was a vital task in the brewing of beer, sampling and comparing to the competition, and he had enough knack at it to work up to a job at a famous place, although I had never heard of it until his chilling telling.
“The Buergerbraukeller, biggest in Munich.” He paused, the night just before Armistice Day in 1923 coming back to him as it brought me to the edge of my deck chair. “Not always a good idea to be where history gets made.” He ducked his head as if dodging too late. “Packed hall that night, thousands drinking beer, government people there to say the country is not going to the dogs, if anybody would believe them. I am notcherly curious, so I come out from where brew vats are, to listen. Bring stein of beer for myself, why not, and sit at table near the back, where people have left.” All of a sudden he flung an arm up as if firing a pistol at the sky, making me nearly jump out of my hide. “Right in time for Hitler to come through door and climb on table and shoot in the air, like some cowboy. Close as me to you,” he repeated, shaking his head at how history brushed past him. “But when I try to reach across table to grab him, pull the feet from under this crazy person up there shooting, make him fall on his face like fool he is, Hitler keeps dancing around like cat on a stove, he is so nervous, and I miss him this far.” He held his fingers inches apart. “Before I can try again, whole bunch of brownshirts with guns out jump on me and others around, goverment people and all.” Drawing a breath, he husked out the rest of the recitation. “Hitler takes those to a room, the rest of us is held at point of guns, told shut up and drink beer. When myself and some others say what is happening is not right, we get knocked around and told we are now on list to be shot.” Talk about spellbound; I was as much all ears as when he’d told about being swept up by the Witch of November, only this November rough weather was called Adolf Hitler.
“A putsch, it was,” which he defined as a gamble at taking over everything. “Did not work that time, Nazi march on rest of Munich failed the next day, so putsch collapsed, good thing. But I had two eyes then,” he made a wan face, “and did not like look of things in Germany. Beer hall bullies, Hitler bunch was, but maybe more than that if they ever got hold of government, hah? On list to be shot reminded me too much of H?he Toter Mann”—the specter of Dead Man’s Hill sent a chill up my spine. “Pthht, to that,” he rid himself of his homeland. Leaning toward me as if that would bring me nearer to understanding, he tapped his temple, where little thinks came from. “Listen, Donny, this is the how of it. Find a safe harbor, is good saying. In Germany then, that meant small ports on the Baltic, where Nazis was not thick on the ground yet. Always ships going out the Baltic Sea, to all places of the world.” This I could follow almost as though I were at his side escaping from the Nazis and that sonofabitch of all sonsofbitches, Hitler. “I give the ship engineer a little something,” he went on, rubbing his fingers together in that familiar gesture meaning money. “He lets me hide in tool room, down where boilers are. Nobody topside comes ever, and I make friends with stokers by helping out. Learn to shovel coal. When we dock in America, jumped ship, I did.”
? ? ?
IN THREE PARAGRAPHS, there it was, not so long after all. One for Believe It or Not!—the man who came within the length of his fingers of stopping Hitler. Not only that, the history that had made him an enemy of Germany for real and an enemy of America on paper, both at the same time.
Almost dizzy with the size of the fix he was in—we were in—one more thing I had to check on.
“Jumped ship. Is—is that against the law, too?”
“Could say so,” came the not unexpected reply. “Stowaway, is that word,” he ruefully added it to the growing list of other offenses charged to Herman Brinker.
“Aunt Kate,” I whispered again, for no reason but the weight of the question, “was she in on this? You being an alien and all?”
He nodded slowly. “She knew, all the time. Had to. House in her name, car in her name. She is the one that counted, on paper.” He shrugged, helplessly resigned to the one-sided situation. “No identification papers can I show for anything.”
And she had called me a storier? What about living under false pretenses with a husband who was not anything he appeared to be? Busy piling that up against her, it took a few moments for that last part to fully register on me. I thought we were bad off when we simply didn’t have any money. Now we didn’t even have a real Herman.
He turned to me, his expression the most serious yet. This next, I will never forget.