“I need you to take me back.”
He kept steering the boat. My mother’s body, everything familiar to me, lay between us.
“Martin. I need you to take me back.”
“Sorry, Jacob.”
I didn’t know what to do. I felt that the Lighthouse Lady was pushing toward our deaths.
Make it out of this nightmare is what my mother had told me. Make it out of this nightmare.
I crawled on my hands and knees to my backpack, opened the drawstring on top, and reached inside until I felt the handle of the Luger.
“Uncle Martin,” I said and raised the barrel toward his back. “Uncle Martin.”
When he glanced back he did a double take and his eyes leveled on mine. I held his gaze. Something went out of him then. A ghost. He turned back to the water and his shoulders sank over the wheel.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, Jacob.”
He spun the wheel so that the boat started a slow arc back to the shore. I was crying. Still aiming at his back. If I fired, the bullet would have traveled over the body of my mother to find my last blood relative. I had been trained in many languages but had no word for such a feeling.
When we were close to the dock, I grabbed my backpack and stepped out of the wheelhouse.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed, as much to my mother as my uncle. There was no need to toss a line to the dock. I jumped off and the Lighthouse Lady finished its circle and headed back out to the Ems.
I stumbled through the woods back to my house.
There, Fergus wandered from room to room barking, then sat in front of the bathroom and started whimpering.
“Come on, boy. Come on, Fergus,” I called, but that only raised his volume to a howl. When I pulled him away by the scruff of the neck, he yanked free and started another lap of the house, barking into each room.
“Fergus. Fergus. Please come. Fergus. Come.” I kept calling but the dog did not stop and was half-crazed by fear or sadness and didn’t listen to me.
I was still bawling with big chest-heaving sighs as I emptied the giant bin of dog food on the floor where we had kept Fergus’s bowl. Then I propped the back door open for him.
“Come on, boy. Please.” I tried one last time. “Please,” but he didn’t come.
In the woods, at the fort, I left a note for my father between two slats of moldering planks, then walked to the rock Ludo had carved as a tombstone for Edwin. I heaped snow, leaves, and dirt on top of it until it was covered. Even if Ludo and his family were still alive, I’d never be able to look them in the eye after what I’d done to the pilot, even though the man’s presence could have gotten them killed.
I left the woods and walked past my house. Inside Fergus kept barking. This was my final look at my home. It was a beautiful house—almost opulent. My mother had once draped all the windows in great sheets of cloth that she had cut and sewn, making billowing curtains she could cast open to let in the light. It seemed, now, that there was no more light to let in.
I walked to town, past the spot where Hilda had lain huddled and beaten, past the flattened church where the priest’s, storyteller’s, and now organist’s voices were silent. In the harbormaster’s office the Germans were already setting up a new office. They had boats anchored offshore and were ferrying in men and supplies on motorized skiffs. I walked around the harbor until I found one of the men in charge. Uncle Martin had dealt with the man on almost all of his ferry trips, and the man had seen me with Martin aboard the Lighthouse Lady.
I’m not sure if I was thinking clearly in that moment, but there were certain facts, truths I was holding on to. The Dutch had drowned my brother and the Allies had killed my mother, and on the Allies’ behalf my father had sabotaged his safety and was forced into hiding. Hilda didn’t really care for me and Ludo didn’t trust me. My uncle would not belong to this world much longer with what he was doing. He would probably die soon—or continue—killing, killing some more. It was a conscious choice. So, so na?ve, but conscious.
When I was in front of the German officer, the man looked at me. “Are you okay, son?” he asked.
“The Allies just killed my mother,” I said, not having any of the right words for what I felt.
The officer didn’t say anything.
It surprised me it was my voice, in my mouth, speaking again. “I’ll be eighteen soon,” I said, “but I’m ready now.”
THROWING AWAY THE OAR
15
I was taken to Kiel by train with written orders from the officer in Delfzijl explaining that I knew boats, was water-smart, and would be valuable to the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. The train heading across Germany stopped every ten or twenty kilometers and had to ease over the repaired sections of railroad that had been bombed, or pass through some check station, where cars were added or taken off. Each station was full of soldiers, thousands of them. The world was flooded with soldiers.
There were several officers on the train who were responsible for me and the other new recruits. The train ride took us through dense forest areas, a defense line with cement pillboxes for machine-gun nests, small towns that bore the scars of bombs cut through their cores, and rows of factories that had been covered by mesh tents and blacked-out windows. The whole country worked toward the war effort and on the train ride, I looked out at the German countryside and wondered why they needed more territory. Wasn’t this sprawling place enough?
In Kiel the officers on the train led me to a set of buses in the parking lot with more young men. It was all eerily similar to the movement of boys at the youth camp.
The buses took us to the naval training base north of the city. The base had a large open field, rows of barracks and office buildings, and a port with ships and several U-boats docked inside the break wall. The U-boats were identical to the one Uncle Martin had sunk. The one I helped sink. When the buses unloaded, all the new recruits lined up on the open field. Soldiers organized us in rows and we dropped our bags at our feet and stood straight with our arms at our sides. Like being at the shore during camp years before, I wondered what brought all these boys here, what faith or failure had delivered them.