Projekt 1065: List 2

“Wait. I need you to do one more thing,” he said. “I took a camera with me from the plane. A big camera. I was taking reconnaissance photos. Very important reconnaissance photos. I need you to find the camera. Get the film. It’s vital that the film make it out of Germany, even if I don’t. I hid it in one of the haystacks in the field where I came down.”

Ma shot me a silent question with her eyes: Are you sure this is where you left him? I nodded an emphatic yes.

“I’m the legit side of the business,” he told Simon. “She’s the clandestine part.”

“It will take some time to arrange for the transportation,” Ma told Simon now. “But you’re not going anywhere until this ankle heals anyhow. You’ve lost a lot of blood too. A few days’ rest and recuperation wouldn’t go amiss, I’m thinking.”

“But you’re not going anywhere until this ankle heals anyhow. You’ve lost a lot of blood too. A few days’ rest and recuperation wouldn’t go amiss, I’m thinking.”

“But I can’t do it,” I said meekly.

I quailed. The roof? I couldn’t! “D-during an air raid?” I asked.

The thundering, teeth-clattering explosions of the bombs was accompanied by the staccato poom-poom-poom-poom-poom of the Nazis’ antiaircraft guns.

I knew about the Blitz. Short for Blitzkrieg: “lightning war.”

“A murder of crows kills me. A pandemonium of parrots makes me panic. A bevy of quail makes me quail. Which is ironic, don’t you think? Seeing as how the birds and I both love to fly. I once almost crashed a de Havilland twin-engine Mosquito just trying to get away from a row of geese flying south for the winter.”

“A murder of crows kills me. A pandemonium of parrots makes me panic. A bevy of quail makes me quail. Which is ironic, don’t you think? Seeing as how the birds and I both love to fly. I once almost crashed a de Havilland twin-engine Mosquito just trying to get away from a row of geese flying south for the winter.”

Half the stories we read in our primer were about German boys who fought and died for the Fatherland.

“Like our beloved Führer, yes? The Aryan ideal!” He pointed to the picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall behind him. “Our Führer, who has dark hair and dark eyes. Whose nose is bulbous, who is short and never takes physical exercise. And where is his grandfather from? Czechoslovakia, perhaps? Poland? He has never told us. Hmm. So perhaps not the best example.”

He enjoyed our verbal sparring as much as I did.

Pennants with the words FIGHT!, SACRIFICE!, and TRIUMPH! emblazoned on them fluttered in the cold February breeze.

Maybe in my fear of getting caught, I was imagining things, but my visits to Simon in the interim to talk books had been shorter and more cautious.

Every day at recess I had been dragged behind the gymnasium and thrashed by some hulking lout of an English boy while all the other boys hooted and hollered and laughed at me.

I sat gingerly in a chair in my Da’s study.

Simon smiled at the latest salvo in our long-running insult contest, but his smile disappeared quickly.

"You’re certifiable,” I told him. He didn’t understand my British idiom. “You’re crazy. You don’t have any cups in your cabinet.”

I tried to tell myself I wasn’t on top of a two-story-tall wooden scaffold, but I was losing the fight.

Another was covered with Nazi flags and red, white, and black bunting, over which hung a banner that read WE WERE BORN TO DIE IN GERMANY.

Huge turtlelike generator housings stood in the background like giant sentinels, electrical gods there to watch our induction into the Olympic pantheon.

Huge turtlelike generator housings stood in the background like giant sentinels, electrical gods there to watch our induction into the Olympic pantheon.

Huge turtlelike generator housings stood in the background like giant sentinels, electrical gods there to watch our induction into the Olympic pantheon.

He set the needle on a gramophone recording of a trumpet fanfare, and then we sang a couple of Nazi songs.

At last we were all given the thing we had coveted most: the Hitler Youth dagger.

Others had been assigned the sea corps, or the air corps, or the popular motor corps, where you learned to ride motorcycles.

It was fairly spartan, with a small gray bed, a wooden desk and chair, and an old brown bureau against the wall.

My disappointment at not finding the plans right away was quickly replaced by my amazement at seeing the treasure trove of books.

All over the walls, pinned up around and on top of one another, were a dozen sheets of big blue paper with engineering schematics drawn on them.

“Your mother’s been working on it. Apparently, it involves a number of different modes of transportation and many days of travel under cover of darkness. There may even be trench coats and false mustaches. But at the rate you’re going with these blueprints, we’ll be ready before she is. You’ve a fine memory, Michael. Have you ever tried to hone it? Practiced getting better at remembering things?”

When I returned with my modest loot, Simon took the items from me and arranged a few of them unseen underneath his handkerchief.

But to denounce your own parents? I shuddered at the thought. If you were denounced for a real reason, it was as good as a death sentence.

I thought SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer was going to give us instructions, coordinate things, but Fritz yelled, “This is an SRD raid!” and shot through the front door of the pool hall with all the subtlety of a bazooka.