The Arms Maker of Berlin

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My most beautiful poem?

I didn’t write it.

From the deepest depths it rose.

I kept it silent.

Mein schönstes Gedicht?

Ich schrieb es nicht.

Aus tiefsten Tiefen stieg es.

Ich schwieg es.—from the poem “Schweigen” (“Silence”),

by Mascha Kaléko

ONE

THE BIGGEST HAZARD of studying history,” Nat Turnbull once told his wife, “is that if you spend too much time looking backward, you’ll be facing the wrong way when the forces of the here and now roll forward to crush you.”

As if to prove the point, his wife filed for divorce the following week, catching Nat completely by surprise.

Five years later he was again facing the wrong way, so to speak, when a pair of phone calls summoned him urgently back to the dangers of the present. He was three stories underground at the time, asleep at his desk in the stacks of the university library. An unlikely location, perhaps, for the beginning of an adventure in which lives would be lost, but Nat was trained to appreciate that sort of irony.

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