My father had a habit of gathering all the kids in our church around him for storytelling after Mass ended. Every kid in the village and Samuel, the air-writer, knew to make a crescent moon around him after our mother finished playing from Dieterich Buxtehude’s Fugues, always the final organ song. At first, the kids kept their distance from him the way their parents did, but his stories lulled them close.
My father would tuck his arms against his ribs and whisper as we leaned toward him, and as he raised his voice and lifted his arms, we’d lurch back as if in concert with him. To me, my father telling these stories in church was its own kind of worship. For a half hour every week, he was the babysitter while the children’s parents would talk among themselves. Samuel’s arm waved over the sitting children’s head like a spastic blessing. Edwin and I hung in limbo, somewhere between the adults and our father, trying our best to grow out of the stories we’d heard our whole lives, one ear cocked to what the adults talked about—recipes, fishing grounds, and something about fascism, which I barely understood—and the other searching out new twists to old stories, or captivated by the occasional new tale he’d offer up, letting the children knead them into their own fantasies. The last church story I heard had Thump-Drag stumbling into a darkened church where the Devil was doing a wild dance, his disguises changing with each twirl. The Devil shape-shifted from a giant shaggy dog to a snake with legs, and finally, to a beautiful woman who reached out and pulled Thump-Drag into her dance.
Storytelling was how my father communicated with us, and I remembered every detail of his tales. I felt them enter my bloodstream and become a part of me. Thinking back, if there was any art that truly became part of my life, my father’s stories were it. Their fictions were the magic of my childhood. When I shut my eyes, I’d pick up their tracks, like the paw prints of a fox out in the early morning snow.
My first night in the cabin I lay awake for hours getting used to the shadows and sounds of other boys breathing. Günter got up from bed and walked outside to relieve himself. His hard-on made a tent of his underwear. I hated seeing that as it made me feel by contrast a puny, hairless boy. The screen slapped shut behind him as he spit a gob of phlegm into the grass.
The morning revelry call woke me up, but Edwin was already drawing in his notepad, sketching the boys running to the fields, the cabins adorned with the sharp red, black, and white flags. He had sketches of Ludo at play, his arm shriveled on the paper too. He drew me as well. I was a close and easy model, so perhaps it was all that repetition, but my brother had me down exactly. I’d look down at a sketch and recognize myself immediately. Page after page. Jacob. Jacob. Jacob. There I was.
We met at the camp’s main flagpole during revelry. Pauwel was part of the drum line, and he marched down among the campers, pounding on his drum as if he were a thunderclap. He was by far the best player, and the rest of the drum line softened their playing until they almost faded entirely while his beat picked up for a solo. He carried four drumsticks, two in reserve tucked into the loop of his snare drum’s carrying strap. The band came back on the same note, and the whole parade ground of several hundred boys practiced their marching.
“Eyes left,” and we snapped our heads to the left, so that we moved together, shoes clopping in time to Pauwel and his drums.
After that, the large gathering broke into cabin groups. We studied how to plot our positions with maps and compasses, and how to shoot targets attached to fifty-gallon steel drums. Rifle training required us to become accustomed to the weight of weapons. We learned marksmanship with air rifles and trained in bolt-action .22s. Those boys who had been to camp in previous years were excellent marksmen. The boys shot the hell out of the targets too, exploding cans, boxes, and barrels, and each little explosion scattered dirt on the slope of the backdrop. The plink-plink-plink of bullets on targets echoed across the field all day, which carried the scent of spent gunpowder.
The most accomplished marksmen received Dienstdolch, daggers, as rewards, which were the envy of everyone who had yet to earn one. The older boys and camp counselors all had service daggers attached to their belts—a major status symbol. All the boys wanted their own daggers and worked for them every day. The daggers said, Blut und Ehre, Blood and Honor. Each came with a steel scabbard attached to a thin leather strap. The blade was six inches long and one in width. The handles were steel with black grip plates screwed in. At the center of each grip plate was the red-and-white diamond insignia around a swastika. The older boys compared their RZM numbers, which had been put on by the natural-material-control office. “Mine is M7/25/37,” one of the boys said as he read the etchings off the blade.
I leaned in closer, eyeing the numbers. I desperately wanted one for myself. I felt that it would rival my Uncle Martin’s scrimshaw blade and imagined the whir of one in front of me. Keep it moving. Keep the steel moving.
We donned gas masks, cinched them tight, and then played tug-of-war with the masks on. If two people from one side got their masks on and ran to the rope and only one from the other team made it, then that one person had to anchor down and hold the line until the others on his team got there to help. I got to the rope at the same time as Edwin during our first tug-of-war match, but Günter tapped Edwin on the shoulder and pulled him out of the line. He dug a finger into the side of Edwin’s mask where it wasn’t sealed properly.
“You’re out, Koopman. Dead men can’t help their teammates pull.” He looked at me then. “Jacob. Fine work.” I swelled with pride over doing well among so many boys that would play and compete and not start raving if they were kept from their drawing.
We dug parallel trenches out in the field and threw wooden potato-masher grenades at one another. Until they showed me how to let it glide out of my hands, I whipped mine with such forced, jerking motions that my shoulder muscles hurt for days. The last one standing won. That was the goal with most of the games we played—be the last one standing.
At night, we had a large group gathering by the main building and listened to speeches and music from the gramophone. My mother would have loved the music. Every Sunday evening at home she made us dress up. Me, my father, Edwin, and sometimes Ludo and Uncle Martin would clear the center of our living room of furniture and her sewing machine, and all take our seats on the couches as she started her gramophone. The room was modeled after a British Victorian sitting parlor. Built-in bookshelves lined the walls. One by one, we each danced with her. She was thin-boned, loose-jointed, at ease as she glided across the hardwood, leading everyone but Uncle Martin, who was the best dancer among us.
“This makes your mother happy,” my father told us when Edwin protested having to dance. So, we each took our turns. When it was my turn she swept me off the couch, spun me around, twisted me along with her graceful body, and delivered me seamlessly back to my seat.