Timothy Ryan

VOPOS

Sour green apples were the best. They were small enough to fit our grubby fists and light so when you slung them sidearm you never jolted a muscle. You could throw so wild and hard the game would go on and on. They were solid and fast, and when you hit someone hard, they really stung. We called that “ace.” We wanted to see red skin, somebody howling. You wanted to strike them in the legs or the arms or the face, that was better than a body shot. It had to hurt, otherwise it didn’t matter; you know, someone had to yell or really curse when they were hit. That’s how you knew you got somebody and it was time to change places.

Otherwise, the apples were so small that maybe you thought you’d hit someone, but they’d fucking deny it. In any case, unlike the real situation then, we had the luxury of changing places.

Our whole crew went through a phase in 1962 when we discovered and grew really enamored of the word “fuck.” Our whole crew was me, whose father was the Assistant Air Attache, Rick, his father was the Navy Attaché, Robert, whose father worked for the Army also in the Bonn Embassy, and Kenny, whose dad was also in the Army. And then there was Joe, our little red-haired devil, hanging around. We were sure Joe used the “f” word the most and we thought that just saying fuck meant that you could really kick ass.

* * *

The apples really looked like warped and crabbed dwarf green tomatoes. They fell down among the gnarled apple and birch trees scattered about the manicured fields in the diplomatic compound bracketed by dun, pebbled-faced apartments. For some reason they seemed to gather in the gazebos, these conceits to a rapidly-vanishing pre-War rural Europe in the green spaces between the buildings. Among the leaves that swept up in piles in the corners of the gazebos, shadowed by their wooden trellises, we’d find clusters of them. Like someone or some animal or force had stockpiled them.

“HAhahahaha!” Joe’s laugh always came out harsh whenever he hit someone, like the forced staccato of a machine gun. He was the meanest in the game. A smart aleck, but I guess we all liked him well enough, partly because he was that small piece inside us that was always trying to impress the others so he threw to hurt like a wild son-of-a-bitch. We felt Joe always wanted to make you think he was there.

* * *

The key element of the game was having a brick wall to throw against. We couldn’t use the apartment buildings because there were too many windows. It was too easy to break one. You needed a good solid wall as a backdrop, featureless and indestructible. The gazebos were perfect: flagstone floors, built in perfect squares about twelve feet on a side with brick laid up to about our shoulder height. Braces from the four corners atop the wall supported a loose open trellis grid of wooden beams with some sheltering foliage above. There was an opening in the walls on one side, a doorway, and that’s what you had to throw through. Early on we made a rule that you couldn’t get up above and throw down; that didn’t seem fair. It made for a claustrophobic experience and because you only had a few feet to run and dodge, you had to be fucking fast.

But of course what made the point of the game was the fact of the Wall itself. Only a few of us had seen it, yet we knew it was really important but no idea how.

Without the Wall there was no running, no speed, no dodging, no throat-choking excitement of maybe getting hit hard enough to hurt, no reason. We knew that when we ran we were doing the right thing. We knew when we ran and stopped and dodged we were cheating death. We knew we were fleeing to the right side of history.

* * *

In September 1962, my father took mother and I to Berlin. It was my first time in the city but not my last. It was not my father’s first time. He was in and out and in and out, over and over, for months in 1948 and ‘49 flying C-47s ‘round the clock during the Berlin Airlift.

He took us perhaps because he wanted us to see it at this new horrible beginning. I had been looking forward to this trip. Even by then, I had absorbed my father’s and mother’s stories and photos of their lives in World War II. My father, Pat, whose name was John, (he acquired the good-natured Irish slur as a navigator in the B-17 “Fubar Freight”) flew dozens of missions over Germany and Poland and once into Poltava in Ukraine. The Germans bombed the shit out of the planes, so he and the other crews made their way back to England through the Caucuses, Iran, Pakistan, North Africa. My mom was on OSS operations in Casablanca, Morocco and Caserta, Italy. During the Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes trials in 1946 and ‘47, she lived in a bombed-out hotel where she had to walk across planks two stories up with destroyed open faced facades to get to her room.

It was indeed morbidly fascinating to spend hours going over her memorabilia, the pictures, the descriptions, the portraits of the horror of the Holocaust and the Nazis in those books when you are seven, eight years old. There’s Goering. Goebbels. Keitel. Streicher. Ribbentrop. Hess. Frank. Kaltenbrunner. Speer. My mother talked about seeing these same people in the dock, day after day of damning sickening evidence, discussing them with Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.

We pulled up to Checkpoint Charlie on the bus and my father, inhabiting his long grey coat and fedora with an authority and authenticity I felt I could only hope after, got up and stepped out the door onto the pavement. He walked back beside the bus to our open window.

“I can’t go,” he said, “The Embassy won’t let me.” The worry of course was that he would be accused as a spy and wouldn’t get out again. But presumably as tourists, my mother and I could go into the East.

It was only much later that I realized that he had hoisted us up like observation dirigibles in Cold War weather to let us see what we could and bring back with us an obscured view of what things looked like to Americans grateful and proud to be allowed a peek over the Wall from the West. And then it was later still that I surmised how my mother was an easy and unsuspicious asset to the Embassy. At that time as both OSS and CIA alumnus in Japan during the Korean War no doubt she was briefed before our trip.

And I wanted to think that maybe in his and my mother’s hearts, this was also a moment of inoculation and admonition – to let me see what things looked like in a totalitarian political system, and what I vividly imagined to be a glimpse into their fearful but determined perspective in the darkness of 1944.

“Look, there’s Hitler’s bunker.” My mom pointed out an undistinguished mound of patchy grass in an otherwise useless field half covered in weathered concrete.

It worked. What I remember most from that first trip to East Berlin was the impression of a city that had barely begun to recover from the war, sixteen years gone by at that point. Compared to the bland modernist but voluminous new buildings in West Berlin and Bonn, the resurrected small-town life of Bad Godesburg where we rode our bikes down to the shops to buy gummi bears and firecrackers, this Berlin looked like someone was preserving a glorious fascist nightmare of defeat for some perverse, didactic reason. My feeling was the same the next time I visited the Wall on a student trip in the ‘70s, reading Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard—then it was “Escaping Past the Watchtowers, Through the Wires, Over the Mines, Bullets Whizzing as You top the Wall considered as a Hundred Meter Dash.” And the Vopo has the starting gun.

* * *

Later, back in West Berlin, we drove down a street of tall apartment buildings, many of them burned out. We stopped. My father took out his Nikon camera that he had bought in Japan where he met my mother during the Korean War and pointed it up at the people perched above. He adjusted F-stop, aperture, and speed. Nothing was automatic then. I later took this same camera back to Berlin in 1973 to shoot pictures in the East, then in Finland, then Brezhnev’s Russia.

Windows were being bricked up by skilled masons who were a few inches from the West, but a West that was also a bullet away or two to three stories down or maybe both. People leaned out of windows high up in adjoining apartment buildings, watching.

It was like sealing off people’s eyes and mouths with bricks and concrete under a heavy, pregnant gray sky. Standing over the masons who wore shabby jackets and old workmen’s hats were young men in sharp grey with guns—the Volks Polizei, the “Peoples’ Police,” the Vopos. To keep the bricklayers from escaping, the Vopos stood right behind them with their rifle muzzles just inches from their heads. The masons moved slowly, deliberately. We could see the eyes of both the workers and the police as they bent to their labors, facing down into the empty street before us. It was a place neither of them could go.

In a truism that escaped me at the time, when you were hit playing Vopos, you had to change places. That was the rule. Once you killed a refugee fleeing the East it was your turn to run. It was only fair.

* * *

We used to pedal our bikes the short distance from our housing area down to the sunny flagstone esplanade overlooking the Rhine. At this spot there were some touristy facilities, open cafes, the ferry docks a few hundred meters away. Looking up at the bluffs across the river, we could see the Drachenfels – a castle reputed to be the site of the Siegfried-and-the-Dragon legend. The first time I heard about Richard Wagner was climbing up to the ruins as my dad told me how the German composer turned the Drachenfels story in his Ring Cycle opera into one of Hitler’s favorite pieces of music.

The esplanade was two-tiered. On the upper level we dropped our bikes on the ground and leaned over the wall, looking down upon the Germans walking and biking by below.

As I watched these people, old and young strolling along on a beautiful early spring Saturday, I felt secure here in West Germany, but even at that young age the obviously confusing paradox surfaced that had been squirming in my mind since we moved here. At war’s end we defeated the Germans—the Nazis—who were all bad. Now there were “good” Germans (like those walking by below us because they were here in West Germany) and “bad” Germans in East Berlin. Somehow those Germans stayed bad. I couldn’t shake the images of the concentration camps and atrocities my mother had shown me. I could see below me adults, older people, who were alive during the war and I couldn’t understand why some people now seemed to be “not guilty” and those in the East were not only guilty, but doubly enemies, because they were now Communists.

We would perch on this wall and in one of us Joe would bend down and pick up a chestnut fallen from a tree overhead and whisper “Watch this—” to the rest of the crew. Then when some German kids came pedaling along on their bikes with their straight-across handlebars, Joe unleashed his best Vopo skills, aimed and threw a direct hit on the back of some kid’s hand who was wearing one of those ugly knit ribbed sweaters. The German kid would howl, immediately look up, swerve, and collide into his friends. They all went down on the stones, sprawling, skinned hands and faces, adults jumping away, dropping things, and they looked up angry over their shoulders but suddenly the air above them was filled with more chestnuts, more pinecones, nothing more lethal. They jumped to their feet and started yelling at us. Joe declared it was “ace!” and we just laughed and hopped on our bikes and rode off heading back to Plittersdorf.

It never occurred to us that we were still playing Vopos.

* * *

There happened to be an actual “Haunted Mansion” in Bad Godesburg which was off-limits to us, but of course that’s why we would go there. A small, overgrown estate closed off to everyone, a derelict wreck, but we thought we learned a secret. It totally fulfilled the image of what we thought a haunted mansion should be, and became. We didn’t think about the result.

With the spiked overwrought front gate rusted and locked, our crew would clamber over the pitted stone walls slippery with moss and slime, irregular and gouged with unrepaired shell and bullet holes, giving enough roughness for us to scramble over in our PF Flyers. Once inside the walls, we moved cautiously through fecund, threatening overgrowth toward the tumbled-down house as if we were on point patrol. Everything was open to the elements through battered and broken window frames and holes in the roof. One of the two front doors was missing, with the last hanging precariously to its hinges. The place was a delightfully dangerous two-story maze of shattered floorboards, smashed furniture, creepy all over with a satisfyingly moldy smell.

We absolutely stuck together because we had learned that even though the mansion was “abandoned,” we were convinced some crazy old guy was holed up in there. We reasoned that this was enough of a secret to keep that he might want to kill us. He was maybe, presumably, probably, an unrepentant Nazi hiding out in this shell of his old world. One of the “bad” Germans still here in the West.

* * *

Joe made this all worse by filling us with vividly imagined atrocities by this German ex-concentration camp guard easily willing to slit the throats of young American kids who discover his secret. The last time we went in we were creeping into the second floor bedrooms. Then we heard footsteps on the attic stairs coming down, sounding forceful but also random and thus scary. When someone hissed “there’s more than one!” that freaked us out so we tumbled down the stairs to the ground floor, peeling pell-mell out the front like a crazy band of panicky bats and didn’t stop running until we had breached the wall and were back on the narrow street that led down to the Rhine.

“God that was close!” heaved Rick bent over, hands on his knees and almost hyperventilating. I realize now he had asthma.

“Shut up!” yelled Robert, looking over his shoulder at the blank wall behind us. “They might hear you!” 

“They would have known we were there anyway,” said Kenny, “It wasn’t like we didn’t make a lot of noise, you know, everything in there made noise when you stepped on it.” 

“Let’s go down to the River,” I said, also out of breath inwardly shuddering over the close call and then I was thinking— I looked around, something was different. I could tell that we all were thinking the same thing: Did we leave Joe in the house? We were not going back, it was too fucking scary.

We all thought Joe would be okay, later he would regale us with some snarky Tom Sawyer story so like everyone else I was waiting for someone to say something before I would say anything but no one did. And so I was silent too.

The adults never noticed Joe when he was around and no one asked us about him. A few days later we huddled together in a gazebo. “I don’t think there were any crazy Nazi war criminals at the mansion,” said Robert solidly. 

I said, “If there’s no crazy guys there, we should go back.” 

“Fuck no,” said Rick, sounding like Joe, “We shouldn’t go back. One, there still could be crazy guys there, two, if we go back they could get us and three, maybe it was just time for Joe to leave.”

So Joe simply faded from the picture but whose inimical outline remained in us like those Communist bureaucrats’ ghosts from old official photos.

* * *

That summer, a few months after the haunted mansion episode, a new guy named Mark came into Plittersdorf. He was my age, and his dad was named to replace my dad as the Air Force attaché. It was now 1966, and his family had been stationed somewhere around LA. He had a real cute sister, Wendy, who seemed like a tomboy, but I didn’t get to know her much because we were leaving soon, scheduled to rotate back to the U.S.

Rick had already left. Robert and Kenny were still around. When we met Mark, we told him about how we liked to play British Bulldog, where you have one guy in the middle, and everyone else lined up in two opposite lines and they run across the field, and the first guy has to tackle people, and once they’re tackled, then they’re in the middle, too. And eventually you get to the point where you got a whole field of people trying to tackle one or two guys. And we also got him into Vopos.

* * *

Two years after we moved to McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington, where my father flew C-141 troop transports to Vietnam, my parents took me to Anaheim and we went to Disneyland. They had stayed in touch with Rick’s parents, and we dropped in to their place nearby in Santa Ana. This being 1968 I had bought a bunch of peace and psychedelic band posters (Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane) that discomfited my parents. Rick showed me his room which was filled with tons of Nazi paraphernalia – posters, books, insignias, uniforms, SS shit. It was scary because he seemed really into it.  Like he was stuck in the past. I decided not to mention Joe.

We went outside after dinner into the cooling evening.

“You guys must play some games around here for kicks,” I said to Rick.

“Yeah, well, you guys in Tacoma ever play Watts Riots?”

“No,” I asked. “How does that go?” and I wondered who Rick thought the good Americans were and who were the bad ones.

* * *

In those decades before the internet and Facebook, it was easy to lose touch with people. I haven’t seen any of those guys from Germany since the late Sixties. Strangely enough, though, I’ve been seeing Joe everywhere in the past few years. Countless images of his rage on television. On the streets of Charlottesville. Yelling me down at a recent protest. A red cap replacing his tousled thresh of red hair.