The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 3

It’s still hard to believe and barely remembered or understood, but the rats fleeing the Reich ended up in South America, which included Ostwald, and of course I followed.

For a time, I lost track of him. I settled down in Chile, where I was convinced he had gone, but could find no trace of him, and so I attempted to find a new life, perhaps my own, for the first time in years. What I found there was a surprisingly thriving poetry scene. There were workshops everywhere, visible, not the frivolous nature of the medium that exists today, and I suppose if there was Neruda to celebrate, there was reason enough to keep the flame alive.

I had never written a word of verse before, had never even considered it, and so in the early days I sat listening and scribbling, every now and then, when I heard something I particularly enjoyed, or that inspired me. There was a lot of chatter, in these workshops, that had nothing at all to do with poetry, gossip of the kind that made the country come alive for me, epics woven around legendary rogue figures of transitory nature, local fodder, most likely to be churned up carelessly by the vagaries of history. My kind of place, at the time, when I could use the distraction.

Eventually it occurred to me that one of the figures endlessly discussed in the workshops was in fact Ostwald, who attended rival workshops and had even been known, in the past, to have visited mine, or what I hoped I could claim for my own, if I could just manage to write something, anything. I told them, You know he was a Nazi, right? And they said, Sure, but everyone here is these days, or hadn’t you noticed?

I felt foolish, but the embarrassment was enough to spur me on, and that night I wrote my first tentative piece. I called it “Nazi Crimes,” and it is not worth sharing now, but it was enough to convince me it wasn’t a waste of my time, and hopefully no one who heard it the next week.

Somehow Ostwald, who was using an assumed name, an outrageously preposterous one, Renato Guerrero, seems to have heard my poem, or have heard of it. He was training, perhaps for the first time in his life, for military service as a pilot, but found the time to attend one of our workshops. He told me he liked the poem, but I remained unconvinced he’d ever heard it.

It was not until the workshop ended, late in the evening, that he betrayed ever having seen me before, but all he did was give me a rueful smile, and that was that.

Later, after his plane had crashed during a foolhardy attempt at sky-writing, having failed to spell a single distinguishable word and yet still managing to get his message across, I visited Ostwald in the hospital. I asked him if he remembered me, so we could all be clear about it, and all he said was he would be leaving the country soon, and hoped our paths would cross again. The way he said it, though, sent chills down my spine. It was only then that Ostwald began to seem unnatural to me, but looking back, I wonder how that was possible.