leather chair facing the desk.
“When you called, you sounded as if you had something you wanted to talk
to me about,” Max said.
He spoke with a refined mid-Atlantic accent, the German long submerged,
barely detectable. As a young man recently arrived in America, Max
Hartman had taken speech training and elocution lessons, as if he’d
wanted to banish all traces of his past.
Ben peered at his father closely, trying to make sense of the man. You
were always an enigma to me. Distant, formidable, unknowable. “I do,”
he said.
A stranger seeing Max Hartman for the first time would notice the large
bald head, speckled with age spots, the prominent fleshy ears. The
eyes, large and rheumy, grotesquely magnified behind the thick lenses of
his horn-rimmed glasses. The jutting jaw, the nostrils permanently
flared as if he were smelling a bad odor. Yet for all that age had
wrought, it was evident that this was a man who’d once been quite
handsome, even striking.
The old man was dressed, as he always was, in one of his bespoke suits,
tailored for him on Savile Row, London. Today’s was a splendid
charcoal, with a crisp white shirt, his initials monogrammed on the
breast pocket; a blue and gold rep tie, heavy gold cufflinks. Ten in
the morning on a Sunday, and Max was dressed for a board meeting.
It was funny how your perceptions were shaped by your history, Ben
reflected. At times he could observe his father as he was now, old and
fragile, yet at other moments he couldn’t help seeing him through the
eyes of an abashed child: powerful, intimidating.
The truth was, Ben and Peter had always been slightly afraid of their
father, a little nervous around him. Max Hartman intimidated most
people; why should his own sons be the exception? It took real effort
to be Max’s son, to love and understand him and feel tenderness toward
him. It was like learning a complex foreign language, one that Peter
couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn.
Ben suddenly flashed on Peter’s terrible, vindictive expression when he
revealed what he’d discovered about Max. And then that image of Peter’s
face gave way to a flood of memories of his adored brother. He felt his
throat constrict, his eyes fill with tears.
Don’t think, he told himself. Don’t think of Peter. Here, in this
house where we played hide-and-seek and pummeled each other, conspired
in whispers in the middle of the night, screamed and laughed and cried.
Peter’s gone, and now you’ve got to hang in there for him too.
Ben had no idea how to begin, how to broach the subject. On the plane
out of Basel he’d rehearsed how he was going to confront his father. Now
he’d forgotten everything he’d planned to say. The one thing he’d
resolved was not to tell him about Peter, about his reappearance, his
murder. For what? Why torture the old man? As far as Max Hartman
knew, Peter had been killed years ago. Why should he be told the truth
now that Peter really was dead?
Anyway, confrontation wasn’t Ben’s style. He let his father talk
business, ask about the accounts Ben was managing. Man, he thought, the
old guy is still sharp. He tried to change the subject, but there
really wasn’t any easy or elegant way to say, By the way, Dad, were you
a Nazi, if you don’t mind my asking?
Finally, Ben took a stab at it: “I guess being in Switzerland made me
realize how little I know about, about when you were in Germany…”
His father’s eyes seemed to grow larger behind the magnifying lenses. He
leaned forward. “Now, what inspires this sudden interest in family
history?”
“Really, I think it was just being in Switzerland. It reminded me of
Peter. This was the first time I’d been back there since his death.”
His father looked down at his hands. “I don’t dwell on the past, you
know that. I never did. I only look ahead, not behind.”
“But your time at Dachau we’ve never talked about that.”
“There’s really nothing to say. I was brought there, I was fortunate
enough to survive, I was liberated on April 29, 1945. I will never
forget the date, but it’s a part of my life I prefer to forget.”
Ben inhaled, then launched in. He was keenly aware that his
relationship with his father was about to be altered forever, the fabric
about to be torn. “Your name isn’t on the list of prisoners liberated
by the Allies.”
It was a bluff. He watched his father’s reaction.
Max stared at Ben for a long moment, and then to Ben’s surprise he
smiled. “You must always be wary of historical documents. Lists thrown
together at a time of enormous chaos. Names spelled wrong, names
omitted. If my name is missing from some list compiled by some U.S.
Army sergeant, so what?”
“But you weren’t at Dachau, were you?” Ben asked quietly.
His father slowly swiveled his chair around, turning his back to Ben.
His voice, when it came, was reedy, somehow distant. “What a strange
thing to say.”
Ben felt his stomach flutter. “But true, right?”
Max swiveled back around. His face was expressionless, blank, but a
blush had appeared on his papery cheeks. “There are people who make a
profession out of denying that the Holocaust ever happened. So called
historians, writers–they publish books and articles saying the whole
thing was a fake, a conspiracy. That millions of Jews weren’t
murdered.”
Ben found his heart thudding, his mouth dry. “You were a lieutenant in
Hitler’s SS. Your name is on a document–a document of incorporation
listing members of a board of directors of a secret company. You were
the treasurer.”
When his father replied, it was in a terrible whisper. “I won’t listen
to this,” he said.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s why you never spoke about Dachau. Because it was all a fiction.
You were never there. You were a Nazi.”
“How can you say such things?” the old man rasped. “How can you
possibly believe this? How dare you insult me this way!”
“That document–it’s in Switzerland. Articles of incorporation. The
whole truth is there.”
Max Hartman’s eyes flashed. “Someone showed you a fraudulent document,
designed to discredit me. And you, Benjamin, chose to believe it. The
real question is why.”
Ben could feel the room revolving around him slowly. “Because Peter
told me himself!” he shouted. “Two days ago in Switzerland. He found
a document! He found out the truth. Peter found out what you had done.
He tried to protect us from it.”
“Peter–?” Max gasped.
The expression of his father’s face was terrible, but Ben forced himself
to keep going.
“He told me about this corporation, who you really were. He was telling
me everything when he was shot dead.”
The blood had drained from Max Hartman’s face, the gnarled hand that
rested on his desk visibly trembling.
“Peter was killed before my eyes.” And now Ben almost spat the words:
“My brother, your son–another one of your victims.”
“Lies!” his father shouted.
“No,” Ben said. “The truth. Something you’ve kept from us all our
lives.”
Abruptly, Max’s voice became hushed and cold, an arctic wind. “You
speak of things you cannot possibly understand.” He paused. “This
conversation is over.”
“I understand who you are,” Ben said. “And it sickens me.”
“Leave,” Max Hartman shouted and he raised a quivering arm toward the
door. Ben could picture that same arm raised in an SS salute, in a past
that was distant but not distant enough. Never distant enough. And he
recalled some writer’s often quoted words: The past isn’t dead. It isn’t
even past.
“Get out!” his father thundered. “Get out of this house!”
Washington, D.C.
The Air Canada flight from Nova Scotia arrived at Reagan National in the
late afternoon. The taxi pulled up to Anna’s Adams-Morgan apartment
building just before six. It was already dark.
She loved coming home to her apartment. Her sanctuary. The only place
where she felt utterly in charge. It was a small one-bedroom in a bad
neighborhood, but it was her own perfectly realized world.
Now, as she got out of the elevator on her floor, she met her neighbor,
Tom Bertorie, who was heading down. Tom and his wife, Danielle, were
both lawyers, both a little effusive, a little too neighborly, but
pleasant enough. “Hey, Anna, I met your kid brother today,” he said. “I
guess he’d just gotten into town. Really nice guy.” And the elevator
doors closed behind him.
Brother?
She had no brother.
At the door to her apartment, she waited a long moment, trying to calm
her racing heart. She fished out her gun, a government-issue 9 mm
Sig-Sauer, holding it in one hand as she turned the key with the other.
Her apartment was dark, and, recalling her early training, she went into