Fatherland

another, a group photograph of Pili's Pimpf unit—bare knees and solemn faces, photographed against a concrete wall.
    As he drew, Pili kept up a running commentary, with sound effects. "These are our jets— rrroowww! —and these are the Reds' AA guns. Pow! Pow!" Lines of yellow crayon streaked skyward. "Now we let them have it. Fire!" Little black ants' eggs rained down, creating jagged red crowns of fire. "The commies call up their own fighters, but they're no match for ours." It went on for another five minutes, action piled on action.
    Abruptly, bored by his own creation, Pili dropped the crayons and dived under the bed. He pulled out a stack of wartime picture magazines.
    "Where did you get those?"
    "Uncle Erich gave them to me. He collected them."
    Pili flung himself onto the bed and began to turn the pages. "What do the captions say, Papa?" He gave March the magazine and sat close to him, holding on to his arm.
    " 'The sapper has worked his way right up to the wire obstacles protecting the machine gun position,'" read March. " 'A few spurts of flame and the deadly stream of burning oil has put the enemy out of action. The flamethrowers must be fearless men with nerves of steel.' "
    "And that one?"
    This was not the farewell March had envisaged, but if it was what the boy wanted ... He plowed on: "I want to fight for the new Europe: so say three brothers from Copenhagen with their company leader in the SS training camp in Upper Alsace. They have fulfilled all the conditions relating to questions of race and health and are now enjoying the manly open-air life in the camp in the woods.'"
    "What about these?"
    March smiled. "Come on, Pili. You're ten years old. You can read these easily."
    "But I want you to read them. Here's a picture of a U-boat, like yours. What does it say?"
    He stopped smiling and put down the magazine. There was something wrong here. What was it? He realized: the silence. For several minutes now, nothing had happened in the street outside—not a car, not a footstep, not a voice. Even the lawn mower had stopped. He saw Pili's eyes flick to the window, and he understood.
    Somewhere in the house: a tinkle of glass. March scrambled for the door, but the boy was too quick for him—rolling off the bed, grabbing his legs, curling himself around his father's feet in a fetal ball, a parody of childish entreaty. "Please don't go, Papa," he was saying. "Please..." March's fingers grasped the door handle, but he couldn't move. He was anchored, mired. I have dreamed this before, he thought. The window imploded behind them, showering their backs with glass—now real uniforms with real guns were filling the bedroom—and suddenly March was on his back gazing up at the little plastic warplanes bobbing and spinning crazily at the ends of their invisible wires.
    He could hear Pili's voice: "It's going to be all right, Papa. They're going to help you. They'll make you better. Then you can come and live with us. They promised . . ."

3

    His hands were cuffed tight behind his back, wrists outward. Two SS men had propped him against the wall, against the map of the eastern front, and Globus stood before him. Pili had been hustled away, thank God. "I have waited for this moment," said Globus, "as a bridegroom waits for his bride," and he punched March in the stomach, hard. March folded, dropped to his knees, dragging the map and all its little pins down with him, thinking he would never breathe again. Then Globus had him by the hair and was pulling him up, and his body was trying to retch and suck in oxygen at the same time and Globus hit him again and he went down again. This process was repeated several times. Finally, while he was lying on the carpet with his knees drawn up, Globus planted his boot on the side of his head and ground his toe into his ear. "Look," he said, "I've put my foot on shit," and from a long way away, March heard the sound of men laughing.
    "Where's the girl?"
    "What girl?"

    Globus slowly extended his stubby fingers in front of March's face, then brought his hand arching down in a karate blow to the kidneys.
    This was much worse than anything else—a blinding white flash of pain that shot straight through him and put him on the floor again, retching bile. And the worst was to know that he was merely in the foothills of a long climb. The stages of torture stretched before him, ascending as notes on a scale, from the dull bass of a blow in the belly, through the middle register of