We had not had a Mass service since Father Heard disappeared in February, but we still met at the same time each week. My mother played the organ and the sounds rose out of the gaps in the plywood where the windows had been. People traded warnings, ration cards, and finally, the children would gather around my father so he could tell them a story. Except now they gathered around the front of the altar where Father Heard would have stood, and the adults listened too.
My father doubled his efforts in the lab after Father Heard disappeared and also spent several hours each night in his library reading Bavarian fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, and the newspapers for story ideas; since he’d become the voice of the parish, his stories to the children had become more complex, more nuanced, and as he spoke, his voice washed over the pews, beneath the rafters, and into the cold, fearful center of the congregation’s heart. The tiny vibrations reminded them they were still living their lives, even if those lives were full of uncertainty.
That day, my father made Thump-Drag a stand-in for Solomon in the story of the two mothers.
I’d been feeling numb and wrung out in a way, which was beginning to feel normal, and then this giant wave of hurt would rise out of something as small as a music note. Or the scent of burnt sugar, or the feel of chalk dust on my fingers. And I’d suddenly miss my brother so deeply that I would have done anything in that moment if I could touch the top of his foot, long enough to remember he had been real. I would fold into myself at those times and imagine who I would have been if he had not been lost. If he had been around to sketch our futures. I felt the great weight of responsibility settle over me. To not only make my life worthy, but to do so twofold to make up for the potential life I had taken from my brother.
By late April, the Germans had forced my father’s factory into making lightbulbs exclusively for their war effort. They’d taken over procurement of materials and shipments of finished products. They kept my father on to help when needed, but no longer let him look at the books or profit margins. He had been told he’d be maintained but received no payment for the use of his factory. No money ever came in for the Volkswagen shipment, though confirmation of delivery was received by the transportation company. The workers he employed were required to continue to work in order to get their food ration cards, and as anyone who could have escaped by then already had, the workers showed up out of habit, need, and fear.
By May, the Germans had installed covers on every external lightbulb in the factory and surrounding buildings, and had the windows covered with dark, heavy sheets to obscure them during air raid threats. The factory took on the shadow of night all day long. I worked on the assembly lines, feeding the glass bulbs into the machine that screwed them into the finished brass fixtures. The work was intolerably boring, but depending on the schedules, I often got to work alongside or near Hilda, who had been called into mandatory service as well.
I longed to be out on the water with my uncle, for his boat to take us to all the wild places he’d been and I’d read about. We could fish the world and when we came back, Europe would be unified. My father would have his factory back. The Germans would control Portugal to Siberia. Edwin could find his way home. But instead I was stuck on the assembly line.
Ludo began working at the factory alongside his mother several months earlier so he could get a ration card. Years before, I had overheard my parents talking about how Ludo’s mother had lost nine babies in the womb before having Ludo, and that was why she coddled him. She poured springs into the hopper so they could be parceled out down the line, and it amazed me how attentive she was in her repetitive motions. The fear of spending the rest of my life at such work flooded me.
Once a day, a guard of four German soldiers walked through the factory eyeballing the workers.
“Here come the uptight boys,” Edward Fass said.
“Be quiet when they’re near,” Silvers, the man next to him, said.
Their heavy heels click-clopped on the tile floors in a big circle around the building. If it rained outside, they stayed longer, but for the most part, they came in, walked their loop, and continued their lap of the town.
By June the Germans implemented a new assembly line to produce a different shape of lightbulb for their new line of U-boats. The lights had to account for flux in the steel sides of the boats from the increase of water pressure. Several engineers and German military officers had my father show them the entirety of his factory. Hilda and I were working with glass orbs on the assembly line as the men walked past. My father nodded at me. The Germans were silent on their tour. Several of them wrote notes as they walked. The next week the same men came back with a truck full of equipment and designs for a new assembly line. They had my father and several of his workers build it, exactly where the line my father created for the Volkswagen order had been.
It was after the first full day the new assembly line was in production that we had three nights of light bombing. Air raid sirens wailed each night as everyone in town sought the shelter of basements or scrambled to get away from the harbor, where the bombs tended to fall. The sirens made all the dogs in town bark, howl, and run circles around their enclosures. Fergus went mad with fear. Then came the high, sharp, whistling followed by the walloping crash of bombs blasting into the ground.
On the fourth night, the sirens sounded and there was a large rumble of planes high overhead. This time though they didn’t turn over us; they kept going toward Germany. The sprinkling of bombs that randomly fell on Delfzijl that night rocked a tenement building, blew the harbor ramp away, and sunk a few transport boats. Uncle Martin kept his boat docked offshore with his navigation lights off and shielded by black lightbulb covers.
By early July, my father worked every night when he got home from the factory. He went to his lab to march in small, tight circles around a hanging bulb socket. He skirted the pocket of pale light, and his shadow bent at the corners of the room, draped over his workbenches that were covered in burnt fuses, soldering irons, screw caps, filaments, needle-nose pliers, clamps, coils of thin wire that burned hot orange, and gas containers of argon he had delivered from Hungary. Broken glass piled in the corners. Rectangular and triangular cuts of mirrors sat on workbenches that were all lit, making the work space look like a diamond-studded mine.