Moonglow by Michael Chabon
“You should rest.”
“No doubt.”
My grandfather reached into the left hip pocket of the coat he was wearing and found a ten-pack carton of Luckies. So it was Gatto’s coat. He tore open a pack and offered a Lucky to Father Nickel. Neither of them had a light. My grandfather crept back into the house with a piece of straw and lit it in the embers of the hearth. Once he got his cigarette going, he lit Father Nickel’s and carried it back out to the priest. They looked up at the Moon hung from the sky like a mirror.
“Permit me to show you my little mountain,” Father Nickel said.
My grandfather hunched over the oculus of the telescope. It was an old but excellent telescope, lovingly maintained. Father Nickel had fitted the eyepiece with a lunar filter to reduce the glare of moonlight. The resultant detail came as a shock. The rays of craters were sharp as cracks starring a mirror. The edge of the lunar disc was toothed like the blade of a circular saw. Somewhere in the center of the Montes Apenninus, according to the old priest, rose little Mons Gallienus.
“You see Mons Huygens?” he said. “You know it?”
“I . . . Yes. I see it.”
“Now, look perhaps three degrees of arc to the southeast. You will see a shadow, a patch of gray. To my mind it resembles the print of a deer’s hoof.”
“Right.”
“Now from there look, let us say, two degrees of arc to the northeast.”
“Okay.”
“It is there.”
“Right.”
“It has an almost castellated appearance.”
“Ah.”
“You see it?”
“Yes.”
Father Nickel clucked his tongue. “You don’t see it,” he said, not without a trace of bitterness. In fact, due to the earth’s rotation, the image of the Moon had already drifted out of the eyepiece. The telescope would have to be slewed.
“I’m sure I did,” my grandfather said, standing up. “Castellated is the perfect word.”
Father Nickel grunted. They lit two more cigarettes from the ends of the first and smoked them. They looked at the Moon with their unaided eyes. My grandfather shivered and worked himself more deeply into Gatto’s overcoat. The snoring was faintly audible from the house. In a coop at the far corner of the farmyard, the remaining chicken, a rooster, muttered to itself, their comrade in insomnia. My grandfather heard a sound like a breeze through treetops, but there was no breeze, and after a moment he decided it must be the river he had glimpsed earlier from the back of the car. The war, a thud of gunnery, was something he felt rather than heard, a pulse at the hinges of his jaw. My grandfather, taking Father Nickel’s long silence for hurt feelings, regretted his failure to see Mount Gallienus and was about to apologize, but it turned out that Father Nickel’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“In the twenties there was a kind of rocket mania here,” the old priest said. “In Germany. The newspapers and magazines were filled with rockets. Rockets to deliver mail. Rockets to the Moon. Fritz Opel built a rocket car. Every tinkerer and charlatan was going to the Moon.”
My grandfather mentioned Hermann Oberth, whose Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, published in 1923 and discovered in the OSS library during the months he worked for Lovell, had comforted him when, on the hooks of his restlessness, being safe and comfortable and well out of the fight was the worst fate he could imagine.
“His book was the start of it, I believe,” Father Nickel said. “All the rocket madness. Hermann Oberth, yes, a remarkable man, a very advanced thinker.” And then, as if the next words followed logically: “No doubt he is now dead.”* He tap-tapped his cigarette as he pronounced the words todt ist. Glowing orange threads of tobacco scattered from the end of his cigarette. “Oberth worked with Fritz Lang, yes? To make a film, Frau im Mond. A silly film in many ways but technically impressive. The particulars of a rocket voyage to the Moon were presented in a way that made the business seem credible. Not at all far-fetched. After the film, oh, well.” He shook his head. “For a moment, Germans, to the left, to the right, it didn’t matter. Everyone lifted his gaze, just for a little moment, to the heavens.” The old priest squinted up at the brilliance of the Moon. “There was earnest discussion about the imminence of lunar travel. One felt that it might come very soon, in a matter of a few decades at most. Certainly I felt this way.”
My grandfather had seen the Lang film in the early thirties, under its American title of By Rocket to the Moon, at the Model Theater on South Street. In the film the lunar journey had been effected by the means of a multistage rocket, just as described by Hermann Oberth (with what turned out to be remarkable prescience) in Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen. Problems of payload, the earth’s gravitation, and the weightlessness of space were presented and solved by ingenious and plausible means. If my grandfather had heard someone predict, as he walked out of the theater on that winter afternoon at the bottom of the Great Depression, that it would require as many as “a few decades” to conquer the Moon, it would have struck him, then eighteen or nineteen, as absurdly pessimistic.
“It was very well done,” he agreed.
“At that time, I prepared a memorandum,” the old priest said. “I wrote to the Curia, proposing that the Mother Church ought to prepare itself for the eventuality of a human presence on Luna. I suggested that, at every level from the liturgical to the eschatological, profound questions must arise from mankind’s attainment of that neighboring world. Does the papal doctrine of discovery, for example, apply to the Moon as it did to the Indies in the time of Columbus? What will be the fate of the souls of the first Catholic lunar colonists—almost certainly no more than a handful, to begin with—if the sacraments, Holy Communion, Confession, and so forth are not available? When we speak of Rex mundi or Salvator mundi, is it to be made explicit, or is it already implied, that we intend to say Salvator mundorum? If we should encounter Selenites—though, given the Moon’s apparent barrenness, that seems unlikely, but very well—let us say that having made use of the Moon as a way station, humanity proceeds outward to the planet Mars, where it encounters sentient, civilized creatures. Let us say, furthermore—I am quoting myself, you understand. The words of my memorandum.”
My grandfather said that he has assumed as much.
“Let us say, then, that in outward form, and even in the internal construction of their organs, these Martians are not so very different from us. Indisputably, they are part of God’s creation. Presumably, they are in possession of immortal souls. Can their salvation be assured or even conceived on a world whose feet have never been trod by the feet of Christ? And if it can be conceived, and if we might assure it, then is it not our urgent and solemn duty to carry the word of the Lord across the black gulf of ignorance and damnation as soon as possible? And so on and so forth.”
“Interesting,” my grandfather said.
“Oh? Do you really think so?”
“Well, that sort of speculation, it’s not something I ordinarily go in for, but—”
“It was all rubbish.”
“Ah.”
“Pretext, I should say. Any nonsense I could dream up, any sophistry that might persuade the Curia to put its considerable resources into sending a holy mission to Luna. At that moment, as I said, such a voyage seemed far from impossible or impractical. It seemed to be only a matter of time. Naturally, I proposed myself as the prelate of this mission, despite my age. I was strong and healthy. I still am, considering. And to fly in a rocket through the void of space to the Moon, like a hero out of Verne or Wells? To stand there, gazing up at the fat turquoise globe in the heavens? My calling to the priesthood came only in my twenties. A trip to the Moon is something I have longed for all my life!”
For the first time in what felt like years but could have been no more than five weeks—since two or three minutes before Alvin Aughenbaugh caught the bullet that killed him—my grandfather laughed.
“Please, laugh,” Father Nickel said with a show of generosity. “Laug
My grandfather saw moonlight welling in the old priest’s eyes. He put a hand on Father Nickel’s shoulder. “The only difference between you and me, Father,” my grandfather said, “is that I never wrote it all down.”
15
Somewhere out there, beyond the tempered glass visor of his helmet, a fire bell clanged. This did not concern my grandfather. There was no oxygen here to feed a fire or to carry the vibration from the tongue of a bell. Here the enemies were cold and silence. He was warm in his moon suit, however, and he could hear his own heart beating. Bounding along the lunar surface in long arcs, half a million miles from the earth and its fires and alarms. Let it burn. Let it melt, let its rafters give way, let the whole thing collapse under the weight of its own sad gravity. The only thing spoiling his lunar idyll was the infernal itching at the back of his neck where the helmet attached, impossible to scratch in his suit and gloves of rubberized silk. And that rich smell of compressed air from the tanks on his back, so oddly reminiscent of warm dung. . . .
“Herr Lieutenant.”
My grandfather opened his eyes in the dark. A recent disturbance among the cows below reverberated in the clanging of their bells. A straw from the bale he had been using for a pillow was jabbing him in the neck. He discerned Father Nickel’s head and neck peeping over the edge of the loft, hands gripping the ladder. My grandfather scratched the back of his neck. He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.
“I am sorry to wake you, Lieutenant.”
There was something concealed in a fold of the old priest’s voice. My grandfather sat up, shaking loose the last lunar strands of gossamer. “Diddens?”
“Asleep. Private Gatto, too. They are both well, do not worry.”
My grandfather looked around for the old woman. When he had climbed into the loft a few hours earlier, he had tried without success not to wake her. He had apologized, and with the twang of the local dialect, Fräulein Judit had apologized for her brother’s rudeness. She referred to Father Nickel as “the little pasha.” She said that having been born a baby and finding he enjoyed it, he had never bothered to stop. The light of the Moon filtering in through a chink painted two portraits of itself on the old woman’s eyes. “He will die without ever having spent a night on anything but goose down,” she had said.
My grandfather had assured her that the switch was all his idea. “The bed is much too comfortable,” he had explained. Evidently, there had been truth in this, since after spreading Gatto’s overcoat across his body, he had immediately fallen into sleep with all its treacheries. At some point the old woman had crept out of her blankets and down the ladder without his even noticing.
“She went to draw water,” Father Nickel said. “She will have our breakfast for us when we get back.”
“Oh?” my grandfather said. “Are we going somewhere?”
“That is up to you.”
In the darkness my grandfather could not read the expression on Father Nickel’s face. The tone of the old priest’s voice was hard to interpret. Anticipation might be doubt. Urgency might be mischief. It sounded as if the old priest had made up his mind to do my grandfather a kindness that he feared he would live to regret.
“Come,” he said. “I have a gift for you. Come see.”
He lowered himself back down the ladder. My grandfather reached for his boots and dragged Gatto’s coat to the edge of the loft. He swung his legs over but then sat without moving at the top of the ladder. Reason, common sense, and experience conferred and came to the conclusion, not without regret, that the night was taking a decided turn toward the fucked up. Regardless of how long ago the cognac you had drunk was put into its bottle and how many chickens had died for the sake of your stew, the war was not over. Father Nickel was the enemy.
“I’m sorry, Father. Unless you tell me right now—”
“It’s a rocket, fool!” the old priest said. “A damned rocket!”
My grandfather climbed down from the loft and pulled on Gatto’s coat. The cows made way, pots and pans, a bovine fart. The old priest went out. My grandfather followed, wondering if his ability to smell something off about a situation had deserted him.
The night, an hour before dawn, was very cold. My grandfather buttoned up the coat and jammed his hands into the pockets. Father Nickel appeared to be headed toward an outbuilding at the back of the farm, a garage by the look of it. My grandfather relaxed a little. The rocket that the old priest intended to show him must be a bit of handiwork. Solid fuel, battery ignition, welded from a section of pipe, the kind of thing they printed plans for in Popular Mechanics. The story began to write itself in my grandfather’s imagination. For a year, two years, five years, the old priest had waited for some response to his memorandum from the Curia. And then one day, just as hope began to tip into disappointment, he had run across the article in a magazine or a Sunday newspaper: “The Fascinating New Hobby of Amateur Rocketry.” Detailed instructions, step-by-step photographs, a list of materials. Like a group of exiles re-creating a lost homeland in a few city blocks, the old priest had been able to replicate his lost hope in miniature, to build a scale model of his dream. And now all this nocturnal hugger-mugger because, with the outbreak of war, as was the case in Britain, the Nazis had outlawed amateur rocketry. My grandfather felt a renewed squeeze of affection for this lonely old humanist, holing up night after night in his sister’s garage to engineer—at least in his imagination—the means of transport and escape.
Just before they reached the old garage, Father Nickel cut abruptly to the right. He tramped past the ruins of a pig pen, past a squat water tank, past a garden whose beds were still cloaked against the winter in sheets of burlap. At the edge of the farm, what appeared to be a large forest stretched away into the distance of the night. Pine and fir trees stood together as if conspiring to keep out the moonlight, hiding a profound darkness behind their backs. Father Nickel headed directly toward those trees and that darkness. Some trick of the moonlight made it appear to my grandfather’s suddenly spooked imagination as if the trees had all at once, just a moment before, stopped in their tracks. They held an air of restless hesitation. My grandfather came to a halt. Half of the American soldiers killed or wounded since D-day had come to grief in woods like this.
“What rocket?” he said. “Whose rocket?”
“Your rocket, my son,” Father Nickel said. When he saw that my grandfather continued to linger, he said, “Listen. I know you are hunting for rockets.”
Now? said experience, common sense, and reason. Christ, you idiot, what the fuck is it going to take?
Gatto kept a carton of Lucky Strikes in the left hip pocket of his overcoat. In the right hip pocket, apparently, he kept a looted Walther PPK, wearing its sharklike leer. My grandfather had never held one before. You could feel the homicide trapped inside it.
He had told the old priest nothing about his work, the mission, unless he had blabbed about it at some point in his sleep. That was the kind of thing that happened in spy novels and romances—muttered revelations of conspiracy, adultery, crime—but it struck my grandfather as unlikely. A creation of novelists and screenwriters, like total amnesia and hand-to-hand combat between men who were carrying guns. In his experience the things people said while they were asleep were even less intelligible than the things they saw. At any rate, except for the occasional appearance put in by his Yiddish-speaking mother, my grandfather dreamed in English. It was hard to imagine that if he had talked in his sleep, the words would have come out as German.
There was no telling, however, what Diddens or Gatto, drugged on chicken stew and drunk on wine, might have confessed. After a certain number of years, a priest probably came to elicit confessions without even trying.
“Apologies.” Entschuldigung, to my grandfather’s ear always the most beautiful of German words. Away to the north and northeast, t
In the moonlight he could not be entirely certain, and no doubt his conscience or forty years of accumulated retrospective tenderness influenced his impression, as reported to me, that when Father Nickel saw the gun in my grandfather’s hand, he looked heartbroken. But he simply nodded, and when he spoke, his tone was patient and forgiving.
“In the winter, you see, in December or January, they started to route the trains this way. From somewhere up in the Harz Mountains, I believe, to the rail yards at Soest and thence west. At some point they were loading them on the beds of special lorries, camouflaged under netting, and driving them within range of Antwerp and, of course, London. For the trains to deviate this far to the south before turning west, well, it’s very much the long way around, isn’t it? I presume the more direct routes were bombed. And then, when the retreat from Belgium began. There was no other way. In time things became chaotic around Soest, which has been bombed very heavily, very heavily. Often the trains passing this way were obliged to stop; there is a siding along the river just down the hill from here. They would sit and wait on this siding for an hour, two hours. And then, you see, one night when the train carried on, one of them had been left behind. Abandoned. I still do not know why. I must assume that it was damaged in transit or found to be somehow defective. No doubt they are fragile. Deadly things often are. Come.”
“You’re saying that, on the other side of these woods, there is a V-2.”
“Yes.”
“An intact V-2 rocket.”
If this turned out to be true, it would be, as far as my grandfather knew, the first such capture by any of the Black List teams. It would be a spectacular prize.