remember that a private soldier named Hackermeyer gave me a chocolate bar. I wept.
There was no reason to fight on; the war was over, and really had been since February. I
was interned at Essen and was treated very well. We listened to the Nuremberg trials on
the radio and when Goering committed suicide, I traded fourteen American cigarettes for
half a bottle of schnapps and got drunk. I was released in January of 1946. At the Essen
Motor Works I put wheels on cars until 1963, when I retired and emigrated to the United
States. To come here was a lifelong ambition. In 1967 I became a citizen. I am an
American. I vote. No Buenos Aires. No drug dealing. No Berlin. No Cuba.’ He
pronounced it Koo-ba. ‘And now, unless you leave, I make my telephone call.’
He watched Todd do nothing. Then he went down the hall and picked up the
telephone. Still Todd stood in the living room, beside the table with the small lamp on it.
Dussander began to dial. Todd watched him, his heart speeding up until it was
drumming in his chest. After the fourth number, Dussander turned and looked at him. His
shoulders sagged. He put the phone down.
‘A boy,’ he breathed. ‘A boy:
Todd smiled widely but rather modestly.
‘How did you find out?’
‘One piece of luck and a lot of hard work,’ Todd said There’s this friend of mine,
Harold Pegler his name is, only all the kids call him Foxy. He plays second base for our
team. And his dad’s got all these magazines out in his garage. Great big stacks of them.
War magazines. They’re old. I looked for some new ones, but the guy who runs the
newsstand across from the school says most of them went out of business. In most of
them there’s pictures of Krauts – German soldiers, I mean – and Japs torturing these
women. And articles about the concentration camps. I really groove on all that
concentration camp stuff.’
‘You … groove on it.’ Dussander was staring at him, one hand rubbing up and down on
his cheek, producing a very small sandpapery sound.
‘Groove. You know. I get off on it. I’m interested.’
He remembered that day in Foxy’s garage as clearly as anything in his life – more
clearly, he suspected. He remembered in the fourth grade, before Careers Day, how Mrs
Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of her big front teeth) had talked to them
about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST.
‘It comes all at once,’ Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. ‘You see something for the first
time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It’s like a
key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That’s why Careers Day is so
important, children – it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.’
And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out
not to be teaching the fourth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards.
Todd had thought Mrs Anderson was full of bullspit at the time, but that day in Foxy’s
garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if maybe she hadn’t been right
after all.
The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were brush-fires. He
remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. He remembered Foxy’s crewcut, and
the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the front of it He remembered everything.
‘I know there’s comics here someplace,’ Foxy had said. His mother had a hangover and
had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise. ‘Neat ones. They’re
Westerns, mostly, but there’s some Turok, Son of Stones and_’
‘What are those?’ Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons under the
stairs.
‘Ah, they’re no good,’ Foxy said. ‘True war stories, mostly. Boring.’
‘Can I look at some?’
‘Sure. I’ll find the comics.’
But by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to read comics.
He was lost. Utterly lost.
It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.
It had been like that. He had known about the war, of course – not the stupid one going
on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks
in black pyjamas – but World War II. He knew that the Americans wore round helmets
with net on them and the Krauts wore sort of square ones. He knew that the Americans
won most of the battles and that the Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot
them from Germany onto London. He had even known something about the
concentration camps.
The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines under the stairs
in Foxy’s garage was like the difference between being told about germs and then
actually seeing them in a microscope, squirming around and alive.
Here was Use Koch. Here were crematoriums with their doors standing open on their
soot-clotted hinges. Here were officers in SS uniforms and prisoners in striped uniforms.
The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires burning out of
control on the east of Santo Donate, and he could feel the old paper crumbling against
the pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no longer in Foxy’s garage but caught
somewhere crosswise in time, trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those
things, that somebody had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those things, and his head began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and his eyes were hot and strained, but he read on, and from a column of print beneath a
picture of tangled bodies at a place called Dachau, this figure jumped out at him:
6,000,000
And he thought: Somebody goofed there, somebody added a zero or two, that’s three
times as many people as there are in LA! But then, in another magazine (the cover of this one showed a woman chained to a wall while a guy in a Nazi uniform approached her
with a poker in his hand and a grin on his face), he saw it again:
6,000,000
His headache got worse. His mouth went dry. Dimly, from some distance, he heard
Foxy saying he had to go in for supper. Todd asked Foxy if he could stay out here in the
garage and read while Foxy ate. Foxy gave him a look of mild puzzlement, shrugged, and
said sure. And Todd read, hunched over the boxes of the old true war magazines, until
his mother called and asked if he was ever going to go home.
Like a key turning in a lock.
All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were
continued at the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying
it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and
helmets as well as Magic Trusses and Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German
flags emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as
well as correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes to short
men. They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.
Like falling in love.
Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything about it — a
yellowing pin-up calendar for a defunct year on the back wall, the oil-stain on the cement
floor, the way the magazines had been tied together with orange twine. He remembered
how his headache had gotten a little worse each time he thought of that incredible
number,
6,000,000
He remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in those
places. Everything. And I want to know which is more true – the words, or the ads they
put beside the words.
He remembered Bugs Anderson as he at last pushed the boxes back under the stairs
and thought: She was right. I’ve found my GREA T INTEREST.
Dussander looked at Todd for a long time. Then he crossed the living room and sat
down heavily in a rocking chair. He looked at Todd again, unable to analyze the slightly
dreamy, slightly nostalgic expression on the boy’s face.
‘Yeah. It was the magazines that got me interested, but I figured a lot of what they said
was just, you know, bullspit. So I went to the library and found out a lot more stuff.
Some of it was even neater. At first the crummy librarian didn’t want me to look at any of
it because it was in the adult section of the library, but I told her it was for school. If it’s