Until I Find You

The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

“It’s not the tattoos, my dear boy,” Jack’s father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William’s hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren’t an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. “It’s everything I truly heard and felt—it’s everything I ever loved! It’s not the tattoos that marked me.” For a small man, he had overlong arms—like a gibbon.

“Perhaps you should put your clothes on, Pop—so we can go out to dinner.”

Jack saw that messy music, a wrinkled scrap of a page on his dad’s left hip, where Jack’s mom was once convinced that Beachcomber Bill had marked him—the tattoo that had failed in the planning phase, according to Tattoo Ole. Jack got only a glimpse of those notes that curled around the underarm side of his father’s right biceps; most of that tattoo was lost from view, either the Chinaman’s mistake or the Beachcomber’s. And that fragment of a hymn on his left calf—the “Breathe on me, breath of God,” both the words and the music—was every bit as good as Tattoo Ole had said. (It had to be Charlie Snow’s work, or Sailor Jerry’s.)

As for his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” it was upside down to Jack—but when his father sat on the toilet, William could read the music. Since this tattoo was strictly notes, without the words, Jack knew it was “Christ the Lord” only because of where it was, and it was upside down—and of course Jack remembered that Aberdeen Bill had given it to William. As Heather had told Jack, this long-ago tattoo had been overlapped by a newer one, Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord” should have been.

His father was leaping up and down like a monkey on the bed; with a remote, which William held in one hand, he had lowered the hospital bed to a flat position. It was hard to get a definitive look at all his tattoos—for example, to ascertain exactly which lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel was in the area of William’s kidneys. Jack knew only that Tattoo Ole had done that one. (“More Christmas music,” Ole had said dismissively.) But Jack got a good enough look to guess that this was the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s Messiah—and, in that case, Widor’s Toccata was right next to it.

All but lost in an ocean of music, Herbert Hoffmann’s disappearing ship was even more difficult to see because of William’s monkey business on the bed. And there, on his father’s right shoulder, Jack recognized another Tattoo Ole—it lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. It was more Bach, but not the Christmas music Jack’s mother had thought it was—neither Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium nor his Kanonische Veranderungen uber das Weihnachtslied. It was tough to see his dad’s shoulder clearly, with all the bouncing up and down, but Jack’s Exeter German was getting better by the minute —“Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich.”

Jack also caught Pachelbel’s name, if not the particular piece of music, and—in a crescent shape on his father’s coccyx—Theo Rademaker’s cramped fragment, “Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott.” (The composer was Samuel Scheidt.)

Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, My Joy”), which Tattoo Peter had given Jack’s dad in Amsterdam, was indeed missing part of the word Largo—as his sister had said. The Balbastre tattoo (“Joseph est bien marie”), which was newer and only slightly overlapped the Bach, was not by a tattoo artist Jack could identify.

Jack’s French, which was nonexistent, gave him fits with Dupre’s Trois preludes et fugues pour orgue—not to mention Messiaen’s “Dieu parmi nous,” which followed the Roman numeral IX.

Did that mean “God is among us”? Jack was wondering.

“I have a son!” his father was shouting, as he bounced up and down on the bed. “Thank you, God—I have a son!”

“Dad, don’t hurt yourself.”

“ ‘Pop,’ ” his father corrected him.

“Better be careful, Pop.”

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed. Jack was trying to identify the Bach tattoo Sami Salo was alleged to have given William on his backside— and the notes that Trond Halvorsen (the scratcher) gave him in Oslo, where Halvorsen also gave William an infection—but Jack was making himself dizzy with the effort.

“Do you know what toccata means, Jack?”

“No, Pop.”

“It means touch, basically—almost a hammered kind of touch,” his father explained; he wasn’t even out of breath. Jack saw no evidence that Dr. Horvath had been right about the psychological benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s jogging program, but the aerobic benefits were obvious.

Stanley’s Trumpet Tune in D, which marked William’s chest in the area of his right lung, seemed to make a visual proclamation. (Didn’t you need good lungs to play the trumpet?) And there was that fabulous Alain quotation, in French and English, on his dad’s bare ass—not that William was standing still enough for Jack to be able to read it.

“Pop, maybe you should get dressed for dinner.”

“If I stop, I’ll get a chill, dear boy. I don’t want to feel cold!” his father shouted.

For Professor Ritter and the doctors—they were listening outside, in the corridor—this must have been a familiar enough utterance to give them a signal. There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door—Dr. Horvath, probably.

“Perhaps we should come in, William!” Professor Ritter called; it wasn’t really a question.

“Vielleicht!” Jack’s father shouted. (“Perhaps!”)

William bounded off the bed; he put his hands on the rubberized floor and bent over, facing Jack while he lifted his bare bottom to the opening door. When Professor Ritter and the doctors entered, William was mooning them.

Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.

“I must say, William—this is a little disappointing,” Professor Ritter said.

“Only a little?” Jack’s father asked; he’d straightened up and had turned to face them, naked.

“William, this is not what you should wear to the Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath admonished him.

“I won’t have dinner with a naked man—at least not in public,” Dr. von Rohr announced, but Jack could see that she instantly regretted her choice of words. “Es tut mir leid,” she added. (“I’m sorry,” she said to Jack’s father.) The other doctors and Professor Ritter all looked at her with dismay. “I said I was sorry!” she told them in her head-of-department way.

“I think I heard the word naked,” William said to his son, smiling. “Talk about triggers!”

“I said I was sorry, William,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Jack’s father said irritably. But Jack saw the first sign that his dad felt cold again—a single tremor. “It’s just that I’ve told you I’m not naked. You know that’s not how I feel!”

“We know, William,” Dr. Berger said. “You’ve told us.”

“But Jack hasn’t heard this,” Professor Ritter joined in.

Dr. von Rohr sighed; if she’d been holding a pencil in her long fingers, she would have twirled it. “These tattoos are your father’s real clothes, Jack,” Dr. von Rohr said. She put her hands on William’s shoulders—running her hands down the length of his arms, which she then held at the wrists. “He feels cold because so many of his favorite composers have died. Most of them are dead, in fact. Aren’t they, William?”

“Cold as the grave,” Jack’s father said, nodding his head; he was shivering.

“And what is here, and here, and here, and everywhere?” Dr. von Rohr asked, pointing to William’s tattoos repeatedly. “Nothing but praise for the Lord—hymns of praise—and prayers of lamentation. With you, everything is either adulation or mourning. You thank God, William, but you mourn almost everyone or everything else. How am I doing so far?” she asked him. Jack could tell that she had calmed his father