Jenean McBrearty

Silent Night, Holy Blight

 

 

Christmas of ’57 was a watershed holiday. It marked the first decade of my ownership of the last Hans Heineman belonging to a private citizen, and my first suicide attempt that was purposely designed to fail. I wanted a VA referral to a psychiatrist. But that episode isn’t where the story begins. It begins in July of ’47, at Berlin’s stone behemoth Spandau prison.

 

*

 

“Don’t look so sad, Lt. Wilcox. It’s only for three months.” Captain Schaffer said. “Then we turn the place over to our enemies to run the place.”

 

“You mean our allies, right?” I was sitting in his office perusing the roster as we waited for delivery of the newly convicted war criminals from Nuremburg: Neurath, Raeder, Donitz, Funk, Speer, Schirach, Hess, and Bierman.

 

“I mean Papa Joe Stalin ain’t gonna stop his war against capitalism.”

 

“Whatever you say, Captain. I thought we were only getting seven prisoners. Who’s the odd man out?”

 

 Schaffer took the clipboard from my hand. “Bierman’s still on the roster? Guess his petition for clemency was denied again.”

 

“Again?”

 

“Bierman is Baron Wilhelm von Bierman. Donner in chief you might say. Sorry bastard. He got caught up in anti-Nazi fever. He’s got cancer and will probably die before the tribunal gets around to deciding what to do with him.” Schaffer sank into his squeaky swivel chair and lit up a Chesterfield.  “Imagine giving your family fortune to clown like Hitler. Takes all kinds, I guess."

 

“I’d just lie to know what clown assigned a journalist like me to baby-sit the circus ⸺unless you give me permission to interview these devils. I’m writing a book.”

 

He raised an eyebrow and handed me five stapled pages of SOPs. “Check page four. No diaries, memoirs, or newspapers. These SOBs aren’t allowed to talk to each other, much less a war correspondent wanting to play Hemingway.”

 

“How about Bierman? Officially, he doesn’t exist. Wasn’t even assigned a number. You can put him in cell 599. I hear there’s 600 in this relic.”

 

Schaffer laughed. “Bin 599, looney. Okay, Willcox, he’s your clown. Interview him all you want for the next three months, if he’ll talk to you.”

 

It was a misplaced misgiving. Bierman was like numbers 1-7. Proud. Defiant. Still bickering over rank and privileges of a dead regime. I often saw them in the garden, growing vegetables and flowers in their private plots of the sol they fought for. Most of all, they wanted assurance they wouldn’t be forgotten, so they all sought ways to communicate their self-importance to an outside world that was moving on without them.   

 

Bill, as I called him, called me Will after the first week. For an erstwhile aristocrat, he was surprisingly amiable. Schaffer insisted it was because he realized I was his last chance for immortality in the face of the approaching Grim Reaper.

 

“Ich schwore…I swear, all I did was fund the Party in its early days. When Hitler became Chancellor, I donated to the veteran’s Business Center. The 1918 Gesellschaft. Am I to be punished for caring about our heroic soldiers?”

 

It was a question I could never answer to my own satisfaction. “But you did attend Party functions and you did have on-going meetings with him and people like Speer and Hess.” I had to remind myself why he was imprisoned by reminding him.

 

By week six, he could no longer work his garden plot, and our conversations transformed into confessions I heard at his dispensary bedside. “I don’t have a lot of time, Will” he said in September.

 

“You should let your wife visit.”

 

“No! She’s seen enough dying bodies.” I never gave another instruction. “I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure out how to make you understand why I was a member of the Party. True I can only speak for myself, but millions of us felt the same way, I know. Hopefully, you’ll make the world understand.  “Maybe it was the morphine that made him sound so far away."

 

“I’ve concluded that only way to reach you, is to give you an early Christmas present.”

 

“Christmas? I thought good Nazis traded Christ in for Odin.” I tried to avoid any reminiscences that might make him cry over happier times. He needed to apologize if he was going to be redeemed in my book. I needed a truthful ending to my story.

 

His tone turned commanding. “Pay attention, Willcox. Before you leave Berlin, go to Frau Bierman and tell her to give you the Hans Heineman. She lives at Number 5, Schillerstrasse. I’ve sent word to her to give it to you. She can’t keep it. The Russian authorities will confiscate it if they find out she has it.”

 

“If it’s stolen Jewish property…” Ours was a faux friendship.

 

“Shut up, you fool. She has the last of her father’s object d’arts. He was Swiss. Studied with Peter Carl Faberge when the Faberge family was expelled from Russia. Herr Heineman made five eggs, one for each of his children. Two were confiscated by the British, and two by the Russians, but the fifth is ours, and now yours.”

 

“Why give a family heirloom to a stranger from Phoenix?”

 

He answered the question with his dying breath. “Because you can get it out of Germany and by doing so, you’ll understand why I fought.”

 

 I called the doctor, but he’d used what was left of his life to justify the ghastly exercise in futility that was the war. I wanted no part in his remorseless existence, and no present could erase my contempt for his efforts to smuggle contraband. Present, my ass.

 

*

 

By Christmas, I’d been reassigned to writing white papers on denazification policies and was two chapters into my book. Hearing familiar carols sung in churches and beer halls amid the destruction and dislocation that defined post-war Berlin softened my attitude a bit, but it was finally getting demobilized that put me in the holiday spirit. I’ll be home for New Year’s, I sang as I drove down Schillerstrasse, and remembered Frau Bierman. Beer for Army drunks or bread for a poor war widow? Hell, I could afford both. As for the Heineman egg, I didn’t tell Schaffer about Bierman’s deathbed bequest and had no intention of accepting it, so no harm, no foul.

 

Frau Bierman was younger than I expected. Hunger has taken its toll and she was gaunt, but I could see she’d been very pretty, once. “Wilhelm wouldn’t let me visit him, Lieutenant. He said Spandau was too ugly, and he hated ugly places and ugly people.” She ushered me to small table in front of the fire place and wrapped herself in a green woolen blanket. She poured tea with gloved hands.”

 

“I’ll arrange for some heating oil.” I handed her three Hershey chocolate bars and a tin of tea.

 

“I would have refused charity for one without charity for all many years ago.  Now, I thank you for your generosity. Wilhelm said you would come…”

 

“Madame, if it’s true you have the last of Heineman’s eggs, perhaps the American art dealer will pay good money for it. I can help with that, too. You won’t have to suffer like this.”

 

“And then what, Lieutenant? No, my husband wanted you to have it.”

 

She went to a closet and returned with a tin box. Inside, nestled in faded white satin, was a translucent porcelain egg mounted on a base of gold filigree. On top was the gold and blue head of a peacock, the body and tail of which spread down the back of the egg, tiny rubies, emeralds, and sapphires forming the eyes of the feathers.  

 

“I ...I can’t accept this, Madame. It’s too beautiful to entrust it to an American cowboy.”

 

“You must take it. My children are dead, I have no one to pass it to. Who will protect it if not one who will fight for it?”

 

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I fought because I was drafted, and that of all the things I was willing to die for, a pretty egg wasn’t one of them. “It must be worth a fortune for the jewels alone.”

 

She gave me an enigmatic smile. “It is priceless, but only because it is rare. O you know,” she asked as she removed the scarf that covered her head, “that redheads are only 2% of the world’s population?” She unpinned her hair and her copper-colored tresses fell about her shoulders, giving her blue eyes a celestial brightness. As she had hidden the egg in a plain tin, she had hidden her glory from my sight under a piece of cotton chintz. It will be difficult now to preserve the things that are irreplaceable in Germany; the Germans themselves.”

 

*

 

I told myself I broke my engagement to Belinda Torres because I was unfaithful to her with the widow of a Nazi war criminal. Then I changed my story. I just don’t love Belinda, I decided, and congratulated myself for brutal honesty. The war changed everyone who fought it, and everyone who didn’t. We were all courageous cowards, I wrote in a postscript at the end of my book. People like Wilhelm Bierman fought for blood and soil, race and eggs.

 

“But the truth is, I like the last Hans Heineman I keep in a silver-plated box, I cannot love just anyone. I can’t love a woman solely because passion eggs me on. Every Christmas, I am reminded that the woman I marry must understand that I am a protector of a treasure. Why?” I asked Dr. Saperstein.

 

“You’ve become obsessed with that thing. It’s like a curse has been laid on you by this monster Bierman. Don’t worry, many of my patients obsess over their war-time souvenirs. One fella wears the desiccated hand of a Japanese soldier he killed as a medallion. One day, you’ll come to understand the symbolism behind your idee fixe”

 

“The problem is, Doc, I do understand it. All too well. I know why they fought. Bierman didn’t just give me a story, and a Christmas present. He gave me a duty.”

 

 

 

Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, who taught Political Science and Sociology. Her fiction, poetry, and photographs have been published in over two-hundred print and online journals. She won the Eastern Kentucky English Department Award for Graduate Creative Non-fiction in 2011, and a Silver Pen Award in 2015 for her noir short story: Red’s Not Your Color. She lives in Kentucky and writes full time, when she’s not watching classic movies and eating chocolate.