It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.
They were people.
Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.
To be frank ĄX I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well as people, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause.
Too hard.
Amen.
Too hard.
‘Who are you?’ I said to the man in the park.
‘Let me finish my story first,’ he said. ‘So this young man knows there’s a war coming, figures America’s gonna be on one side and Germany’s gonna be on the other. So this American, who hasn’t been anything but polite to the Nazis up to then, decided to pretend he’s a Nazi himself, and he stays on in Germany when war comes along, and gets to be a very useful American spy.’
‘You know who I am?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said. He took out his billfold, showed me a United States War Department identification card that said he was Major Frank Wirtanen, unit unspecified. ‘And that’s who I am. I’m asking you to be an American intelligence agent, Mr. Campbell.’
‘Oh Christ,’ I said. I said it with anger and fatalism. I slumped down. When I straightened up again, I said, ‘Ridiculous. No ĄX hell no.’
‘Well’ he said, ‘I’m not too let-down, actually, because today isn’t when you give me your final answer anyway.’
‘If you imagine that I’m going home to flunk it over,’ I said, ‘you’re mistaken. When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep like a log. I’m not a soldier, not a political man. I’m an artist. If war comes, I won’t do anything to help it along. If war comes, it’ll find me still working at my peaceful trade.’
He shook his head. ‘I wish you all the luck in the world, Mr. Campbell,’ he said, ‘but this war isn’t going to let anybody stay in a peaceful trade. And I’m sorry to say it,’ he said, ‘but the worse this Nazi thing gets, the less you’re gonna sleep like a log at night.’
‘We will see,’ I said tautly.
‘That’s right ĄX we will see,’ he said. ‘That’s why I said you wouldn’t give me your final answer today. You’ll live your final answer. If you decide to go ahead with it, you’ll go ahead with it strictly on your own, working your way up with the Nazis as high as you can go.’
‘Charming,’ I said.
‘Well ĄX it has this much charm to it ĄX ‘ he said, ‘you’d be an authentic hero, about a hundred times braver than any ordinary man.’
A ramrod Wehrmacht general and a fat, briefcase carrying German civilian passed in front of us, talking with suppressed excitement.
‘Howdy do,’ Major Wirtanen said to them amiably.
They snorted in contempt, walked on.
‘You’ll be volunteering right at the start of a war to be a dead man. Even if you live through the war without being caught, you’ll find your reputation gone ĄX and probably very little to live for,’ he said,
‘You make it sound very attractive,’ I said.
‘I think there’s a chance I’ve made it attractive to you,’ he said. ‘I saw the play you’ve got running now, and I’ve read the one you’re going to open.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And what did you learn from those?’
He smiled. ‘That you admire pure hearts and heroes,’ he said. ‘That you love good and hate evil’ he said, ‘and that you believe in romance.’
He didn’t mention the best reason for expecting me to go on and be a spy. The best reason was that I was a ham. As a spy of the sort he described, I would have an opportunity for some pretty grand acting. I would fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out.
And I did fool everybody. I began to strut like Hitler’s right-hand man, and nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside.
Can I prove I was an American spy? My unbroken, lily-white neck is Exhibit A, and it’s the only exhibit I have. Those whose duty it is to find me guilty or innocent of crimes against humanity are welcome to examine it in detail.
The Government of the United States neither confirms nor denies that I was an agent of theirs. That’s a little something, anyway, that they don’t deny the possibility.
They twitch away that tid-bit, however, by denying that a Frank Wirtanen ever served that Government in any branch. Nobody believes in him but me. So I will hereinafter speak of him often as ‘My Blue Fairy Godmother.’
One of the many things my Blue Fairy Godmother told me was the sign and countersign that would identify me to my contact and my contact to me, if war should come.
The sign was: ‘Make new friends.’
The countersign was: ‘But keep the old.’
My lawyer here, the learned counsel for the defense, is a Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz. He grew up in America, something I never did, and Mr. Dobrowitz tells me that the sign and countersign are part of a song often sung by an idealistic American girls’ organization called ‘The Brownies.’ The full lyric, according to Mr. Dobrowitz is:
Make new friends,
But keep the old.
One is silver,
the other’s gold.
10: Romance …
My wife never knew I was a spy.
I would have lost nothing by telling her. My telling her wouldn’t have made her love me less. My telling her wouldn’t have put me in any danger. It would simply have made my heavenly Helga’s world, which was already something to make The Book of Revelation seem pedestrian.
The war was enough without that.
My Helga believed that I meant the nutty things I said on the radio, said at parties. We were always going to parties.
We were a very popular couple, gay and patriotic. People used to tell us that we cheered them up, made them want to go on. And Helga didn’t go through the war simply looking decorative, either. She entertained the troops, often within the sound of enemy guns.
Enemy guns? Somebody’s guns, anyway.
That was how I toast her. She was entertaining troops in the Crimea, and the Russians took the Crimea back. My Helga was presumed dead.
After the war, I paid a good deal of my money to a private detective agency in West Berlin to trace the wispiest word of her. Results: zero. My standing offer to the agency, unclaimed, was a prize of ten thousand dollars for clear proof that my Helga was either alive or dead.
Hi ho.
My Helga believed I meant the things I said about the races of man and the machines of history, and I was grateful No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed ĄX and my Helga was the angel who gave it to me.
Copiously.
No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord ĄX as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.
Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed.
Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains.
And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was What a map I could draw for a tourist a micron high, a sub microscopic Wanderv?gel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga’s belly button. If this image is in bad taste, God help me. Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health. I have simply described the game, an adult interpretation of ‘This-Little-Piggy’ that was ours.
Oh, how we clung, my Helga and I ĄX how mindlessly we clung!
We didn’t listen to each other’s words. We heard only the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats.
If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been, Away from the sovereign territory of our nation of two, we talked like the patriotic lunatics all around us.
But it did not count.
Only one thing counted ĄX
The nation of two.
And when that nation ceased to be, I became what I am today and what I always will be, a stateless person.