An officer wearing a long leather jacket that smelled of pipe tobacco marched up and down the lines inspecting everyone. Though he was well into his sixties, he still had the firm build of a laborer. His thinning silver hair was cut close and combed slick to his head. Tong marks dented his skull, each a shadowed crease above his ears where the forceps yanked him into the world. Medallions hung off his pressed uniform, which looked like it restrained him from swinging an axe, or tossing concrete blocks from pile to pile and other motions befitting his build. In the full daylight, his smoky blue eyes pinched at the corners and sharpened his direct gaze. His presence unnerved me from the start, and perhaps that was how he commanded such attention.
“I am Lieutenant-Major Erich Oldif, commander of Kiel Training Station, and you are Crew X-41B.” His Adam’s apple jumped up and down in his throat as he spoke. “You will be trained in body, mind, and spirit in order to make your proper contributions to your Fatherland. Your time has come, so be proud of who you are and where you’re from.” As he spoke, a soft purple vein wobbled on his forehead and wormed into his right dent.
Major Oldif’s officers called out our names and led us to a supplies building, where we were issued uniforms and identification books, then shown to our bunks. The bunks were long tent houses with wood-burning stoves at each end. The forty bunks each had a wooden chest at the foot of it.
The blue service suit we were given contained a jacket, a pair of trousers, a white and blue shirt, a shirt collar with three stripes, a silk neckerchief, gray gloves, lace-up black boots, and a cap. The men around me put on the neckerchief, as well as golden badges, which signified rank and went on the left shoulder. The uniform was similar to that of the men in the U-boat Uncle Martin and I had destroyed. I could see those men again, their shadow forms waiting in the dark; I knew what they never saw coming.
For our first three weeks in Kiel, we recruits were put through basic military training, calisthenics, small arms and rifle work, first aid, and land strategies. It all seemed so familiar. In that short intense time of training, there was no time to dwell on crushing loss after loss, which is what I needed.
The major showed up throughout the day and shouted at the training officers and my group. The dents in his head flushed with the reddish purple flow of blood. We were awakened at five in the morning, marched and run around all day, and fed twice. My weight whittled until I became a thin rope of muscle, hard hands, and mean, knobby elbows. Despite my outer toughness and the growing inner swamp of anger fueling me, I was terrified of the major. When he decided to ride us harder, or call me specifically a “puny bitch of a man” or “Dutch dog,” I tried to hold his gaze but I always found myself blinking uncontrollably.
“You stank-filled gut snake. Hold your weapon higher. Tuck in your shirt. Kick your heel up higher when you march. Fall in line—move.” The odor of tobacco drifted from his clothes.
“Did you know that the Dutch language is a disease of the throat? All those phlegmy words,” the major said so everyone around could hear.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Major.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes. Major,” I screamed.
His bladed face was as lined as an autumn leaf. Loose skin around his jowls gave him a second chin that hung down like a shriveled turkey neck.
The major smoked long cigarettes and flicked the stumps, which arched like smoking orange bugs, into the snow. Burnt butts littered the training grounds, and there was a special detail to make rounds and clean them up. At the back part of the grounds, there were bullet-riddled barrels used for target practice. The major walked behind us as we fired. If he felt he needed to, he’d bend down next to us and instruct us how to hold the stock of the rifle taut against our shoulders to steady the shot, or how to spray the muzzle of a machine gun back and forth to level a target.
During my fourth week of training, I walked into my barracks at the end of the day and saw a tall soldier sitting on my bunk.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Oh,” the man said. Then he looked at me for a long moment. He had a gap in his wide front teeth, and wore an ensign’s uniform like me but with more stripes on his shoulders. “I heard Major Oldif barking at some ‘Dutch dog’ on the parade grounds today, and I thought you looked familiar. I looked up the names of the recruits and saw my old charioteer’s name there.”
“Pauwel,” I said. His words somehow transformed the unknown features of his face into my old friend with those dark, exotic eyes, and square teeth. He was lean, and had no traces of the baby fat that hung off him several years before. He had grown over a quarter meter and stood with a confidence that seemed like a new coat on him.
“What, you don’t remember standing on my back?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t expect to know anyone here.”
“Well, neither did I, but here we are. Good to see you, Jacob. How’s your brother?”
I sat on the bunk next to Pauwel. I let my arms rest on my knees and my head drop between my legs. Seeing someone I knew before I lost my family and then thinking of Edwin was too much. Winged sorrow sliced through my chest. “He went missing a few years ago.”
“Wait, what?” He went silent for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Ludo?” he asked.
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.
Already, I could tell that my memory would no longer be a solid picture but a mosaic. Edwin biking down Junfanger Street. The sun ablaze in Hilda’s hair as she walked the strand at Einflound Beach. Ludo lobbing a lightbulb through the trees. The long strides of my father across the cobbles of market square. My mother’s soft palms bedding down the pixies in her tulip bed. My uncle pulling up nets from the Mulway shoals. The memories of each of them came easily, but when I let up, each image was an origami bird lifted up to a strong wind.
After that first month, my training shifted from mostly physical to classroom work. Between lectures, Pauwel joined me for meals in the dining hall if he was not out on a training trip or sea trials. The dining hall was a long wooden building covered in the red and black Nazi flags. A mess line separated the kitchen from the rows of tables and folding chairs. It smelled like boiled cabbage and mud dragged in from an army of boots. When the room was full of ensigns, wearing the same clothes and all eating the same food, there was a current of a common goal that moved everyone, our training was brought about with an unquestioned intensity. Several nights during those first few weeks, we assembled in the dining hall for speeches and patriotic singing. Afterward we sang the songs we wanted, and the men started up with their own chorus of the “Lili Marlene” song, which had been playing on the Radio Belgrade station in the bunkhouses. We all sang together:
Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate,
Darling I remember the way you used to wait.
’Twas there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me, you’d always be,