The Poison Tide

HIS SISTER JOSEPHINE found the house in Chevy Chase. Nothing grand; two-storey brick colonial, a living room, parlour, small backyard — and the basement for a laboratory. An unremarkable house in an ordinary street, in a neighbourhood they were still building, where no one had lived long enough to be nosy. Strangers pretending they were friends, fresh faces, fixed American smiles, shallow backyard conversations: Chevy Chase was perfect. A stone’s throw from downtown Washington, six miles from Mr Wilson in the White House, but he may as well have been on the moon. Affairs of state troubled no one on 33rd Street, where life in August was lived at the plodding pace of the milkman’s horse. Nor did the neighbours care about the war; wasn’t Wilson promising to keep them out of it? Dilger might have hidden from it too — best Berlin suits hanging in the wardrobe — if he hadn’t brought it with him in a hard leather bag.

It troubled him less because America didn’t feel like ‘home’. He had belonged to her aboard the ship, sleeping, waking, worrying if he was doing his duty or committing a crime. Symptoms he diagnosed later as cabin fever. He’d drunk too much, gambled too much because he was a German and he was an American.

‘Welcome home,’ one of the officers said to him as they steamed into New York.

‘Good to be home,’ he replied, although he was simmering quietly with anger.

From the Rotterdam’s rail, he counted a dozen enemy freighters in the bay, a dozen more along the waterfront, and as he drew closer he heard, then saw, the cranes swinging boxes of materiel aboard, and a column of lorries from the ordnance factories upstate, tankers, colliers, a bulker loaded with grain, longshoremen driving cattle from a train into the gaping side of a White Star steamer. The spirit of free enterprise, he told himself, but he resented it nonetheless. It wasn’t just a question of money. The newspapers were still full of the Lusitania, the sympathies of most with the Allies. There was barely a mention of the blockade to starve Germans into submission — women and children too. Dilger felt like an alien, and perhaps he wanted to feel like one, reducing America to childhood memories, the past to a foreign country, everything simple, everything clear, free to execute his mission with purpose. By the time he reached Washington he was cured of his cabin fever and able to ask his sister, with the passion he’d felt in Frau Haber’s drawing room, ‘So what do you think of your German brother?’

‘So proud,’ Josephine whispered as she hugged him, so clever, so handsome, such beautiful old-world manners. She spoke German like an American these days. It was six years since his last visit — the summer he’d spent studying at Johns Hopkins — but she had written to him every few months. ‘I’m here to see you all,’ he told her because the less she knew, the safer she would be. On his second day they visited the cemetery and held hands before their father’s stone. ‘Oh Anton, he would have been so proud,’ she said again, wiping away tears with a tiny lace handkerchief that was not up to the task. ‘Oh, how hateful America is becoming — someone spat at Mrs Konig last week…’ and she told him she was pleased the old Civil War hero hadn’t lived to see the country he served with distinction turn its back on their Fatherland.

Just a few months, he said, when she asked him how long he would stay, and although she was sorry, she understood: of course he must return to his medical duties, those poor wounded men… If only she could leave her Adolf and serve alongside him as a nurse — and, yes, their sister Elizabeth in Berlin needed him too.

On the third day he caught a train into the foothills of the Blue Ridge. His older brother, Butzie, was waiting at the station and drove him in a gig along the twisting dirt highway to the farm, a memory round every corner, at the top of every rise; beautiful still, but sadder, as if his father had taken the spirit of the place with him to the grave. The old house had burned to the ground, family pictures, books, swords, medals, the piano they’d gathered round to sing of home, all lost, and the new place was Southern-style ordinary. The Army had purchased most of their fields for its own horses; what was left lay fallow, rain dribbled through the roof of the great barn, and the stone walls they’d bent aching backs to build were crumbling and choked with weeds. Even Butzie was going to seed, struggling to contain his stomach in his filthy overalls. The old man would never have allowed his son to dress that way.

‘He isn’t going to be able to keep the place up, Anton,’ his sister Emmeline confided after supper. ‘You know Butzie, he isn’t a clever one like you.’

Emmeline was weary of tending the family flame. Years of selfless fetching-and-carrying for her father, then her brother, were beginning to show in the lines of her face, and her crown of thick blonde hair — once so admired by the young men on the neighbouring farms — was streaked with grey. She was still attractive, with their mother’s large sad eyes, a German lady fading like the elegant blue silk fauteuil in the drawing room, a ghost of former times. ‘Come to Washington with me,’ he had said. ‘We’ll make new friends together and you will be close to Josephine and Adolf.’

Early the following morning he rode the bounds of the farm, a warm breeze in his face, swishing through the long grass. He sensed it was the last he would see of the hills that even his sister in Germany still talked of as home. Family should be home, he thought; only the war is requiring us all to choose another. At five, his father had taught him to ride in the paddock by the house, at the age of eight to jump the high stone wall in the valley; and before his son left for school in Germany, he had fought the Civil War for the benefit of Anton in the seven-acre, hard-riding his old mare like a man half his age. Dilger’s chest ached with memories and to outpace them he spurred his horse into a gallop that left them both shaking.

When he left the farm, Emmeline went with him. ‘Just for a few months,’ she promised Butzie, but by the time they reached Washington, she said she felt ten years younger. Josephine met them with the keys for the house in Chevy Chase. Her husband Adolf had clopped about the capital in a cart, collecting the pieces Dilger needed for his work.

‘For your surgery?’ Emmeline asked.

‘For my research,’ he replied.

‘Anton’s working on infections,’ Josephine explained.

‘It’s my hobby.’

‘More than that, Anton,’ Josephine added with the warmth that never left her voice when she spoke of him. ‘Helping the sick is God’s work.’

On their first night in the house they drank beer and laughed and told stories of Father and Mother and how it used to be. They were only sad when Dilger reminded them of the games he’d played on the farm with their nephew Peter.

‘You were like brothers,’ Josephine declared, drying her eyes with her tiny hankie.

‘Elizabeth says so too,’ he said quietly. They toasted Peter, they toasted their sister, they toasted Germany and ‘victory’, then Adolf sang a song of home and they joined him in the chorus.

The following morning Dilger rose early. He dressed in the velvet hunting breeches and jacket he used to wear on the farm, then crept downstairs to the cellar. Twenty-five feet by twenty-five, the size of a comfortable parlour, with a polished oak floor, plain white walls, sink, trelliswork bench, desk, and ever-obliging Adolf had arranged for a carpenter to fit some shelves. There was a door from the kitchen and one into the yard, and two windows high in the wall, a few feet from the ceiling. Adolf had found most of the things on his list: an incubation oven — tick, sterilising machine — tick, phials and Petri dishes, burner and a wire cage — the guinea pigs would be arriving in a couple of days.

‘Come up and have some breakfast, Anton,’ Emmeline shouted from the kitchen at a little before nine.

‘Were you feeling unwell?’ she asked when they were seated at the table. ‘I heard you on the stairs at five o’clock.’

Just an impulse, he assured her, scientists keep their own time. She smiled and patted his hand indulgently, but he wasn’t to forget they were taking tea with the nice couple across the street later. He said he wouldn’t, although he didn’t care much for tea.

‘Well, you’ll have to pretend,’ she laughed, wagging her finger at him. ‘Mustn’t offend our new neighbours.’

In the cellar, sunshine was streaming through the stained windows and shimmering on the floor beneath the workbench like bacteria on a slide. Dilger stood for a time at the foot of the stairs listening to his sister washing the dishes in the kitchen above. She was humming a lively tune, something by Mozart.

‘All right,’ he muttered, and taking a deep breath he reached for the white coat he’d left on the peg by the door.

The leather travelling case he’d nursed from Berlin was on the bench top. Slowly, very slowly, he opened the compartment in its side, took out the velvet padding and placed the phials in a tube rack: two marked B and two marked E. Thank God they had survived the journey.