Amina and Ott thus became best friends, and she shielded him from his mother’s excesses. Consumed by the past and what might have been, Barratte insisted that Rabun men should make their living excavating dirt and pouring concrete, and have their fun hitting each other on fields and killing animals in the woods. Ott’s inability to live up to that standard was a constant source of disappointment, and, in this way, Barratte assumed the role of perpetrator that Ott’s father had abandoned.

The details of the civil litigation with Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson were easily concealed from Ott, but the criminal indictment exploded inside his life like a bomb, detonating upon the arrest of his beloved Nonna Amina. In an instant, he lost his dearest companion and was forced to endure his family’s humiliation alone in a school, like all schools, where mercy is in short supply. What little compassion that remained at home in Barratte was depleted quickly by the ordeal of defending her cousin and operating the newspaper in her stead. Ott’s only other potential source of support, his father, had remarried and was expecting another child with his new wife, leaving little room for his oldest son, who had become one of those mistakes of passion best forgotten. The time between visits to New Jersey grew longer until there was nothing left but time.

Ott turned in on himself then, to a mostly silent world narrowed to manageable proportions and insulated from causes, effects, and accusations. From this place he would emerge only as necessary, to respond to his mother when her threats became real, to scribble answers to exam questions that demonstrated a grasp of numbers well beyond his classmates, to correspond weekly with Nonna Amina and visit her once each month at the prison for women near Rochester. But Nonna Amina had become a different woman. Devastated by the betrayals of Katerine Schrieberg and nearly everybody else in her life, disgraced by her father’s Nazi past, despised by the public, imprisoned, scorned, and nearly bankrupted, she became embittered, morose, and began displaying the symptoms of clinical depression. Moreover, although a plea bargain would set her free in three years instead of thirty-on the weekend of her sixty-seventh birthday, to be exact-handing over Hanz Stossel to the Nazi hunters in exchange had nearly killed her. It was not that she believed Nazis were guiltless or deserving of special protection; Amina held the more radical belief that all people deserved compassion and somebody must start somewhere. For the sake of that naïve idea, she had risked her life to help a Jewish family when they were being persecuted, and, later, a Nazi family when their turn had come. What harm was there in that? Had she shown favoritism? The prosecutors forced her to reveal confidences to gain her own freedom, and that act of treachery cut as deeply as it would had the Gestapo forced her to turn over the Schriebergs. She owed everything to Hanz Stossel; he had helped her escape East Germany and given her the opportunity to lead a new life in a new country. But on the basis of her own grand jury testimony, he was captured while on vacation in London and extradited to Israel. He lost his home, his family, his law practice, and his fortune. He died of pneumonia in an Israeli jail cell several years later.

Otto Rabun Bowles, now at the age of fifteen, had become a thoughtful, perceptive boy. He understood the significance of much of what had happened; but to make sense of it, he used the same strategy he had been taught in mathematics of simplifying equations and reducing fractions to their lowest common denominator. In his new, simplified, equation of life, Nonna Amina suffered because she had tried to help two families, one Jewish and one German. Because, in the final analysis, she was German.

32

It was the injustice of Nonna Amina’s imprisonment that caused Otto Rabun Bowles to embrace his German heritage, raise it up from the filth in which he believed it had been trampled, and carry it forth for all Rabuns. Like his father before him, who in the name of honor entered the darkness of his own father’s sins, young Ott, in the name of honor, entered the darkness of the Rabun past. Also like his father, however, he never quite returned from the journey.

Ott’s letters to Nonna Amina in the penitentiary soon became interviews for the story of redemption he was writing in his mind. He asked her to recount in the smallest detail the lives of their fallen family, beginning with Joseph Rabun, the patriarch and founder of the company that bore his name and that had been a source of such pride and, now, shame. Amina resisted Ott’s inquiries at first, finding the memories too painful to explore; but Ott was persistent and, gradually, Amina opened up, discovering that writing about her past was an effective therapy for the deep depression into which she had fallen.

Barratte, by contrast, was overjoyed by her son’s sudden insatiable curiosity about his heritage and ancestors, deeming it the first step in fulfilling his destiny to become the savior of the Rabuns. So enthusiastic was she, in fact, and so determined to encourage and assist him in any way, that for Ott’s sixteenth birthday she arranged a three week trip to Germany, coinciding with the reunification of the country following the collapse of communist rule and thus allowing them the luxury of freely visiting Dresden and Kamenz.

They began their tour by paying their respects at the poorly maintained gravesites of the Rabuns in a churchyard outside Kamenz, including Ott’s grandmother, great-grandfather, aunt, and uncles murdered by the Russian soldiers, and also the monument to little Helmut Rabun, made from the mangled girders of his school destroyed by an Allied bomb. As heartrending as this visit was-and it was exceptionally difficult for both mother and son-the emotions released there paled in comparison to the sheer agony, and terror, that overwhelmed Barratte when they reached the ruins of the once grand estate where the Rabuns had lived and where Barratte’s mother and siblings had been murdered in cold blood before her eyes, and where she, Bette, and Amina had been raped. Witnessing the indescribable wailing and anguish of his beloved mother, Ott was instantly transformed, vowing at that moment to right the wrongs of the past and restore the dignity and glory of the Rabuns, accepting his mother’s mission for him as his own.

After taking two days to recover from the trauma of seeing the estate, Ott and Barratte undertook a more methodical tour of Kamenz and Dresden, searching for remnants of their family’s past in recorders’ offices, archives, and, often without knowing it, standing, walking, riding upon, and drinking from the sturdy concrete infrastructure constructed by Jos. A. Rabun & Sons, which had survived not only the horrific Allied bombing that leveled much of Dresden and killed thirty thousand of its inhabitants but also the dreary period of communist rule and reconstruction afterward. The only sour moments during these days came when Ott and Barratte proudly revealed their identities and heritage to aging pensioners who might have known the Rabun family, only to be greeted with silent glares or malicious comments about how the Rabuns had lived all too well while others suffered during the war, and how Friedrich and Otto had despoiled the good name of Kamenz with their involvement in the death camps. But for each one of these bitter people, Ott and Barratte also located more friendly contemporaries who were delighted to see living Rabuns and share with them sweet stories and photographs of the happy days before all came to ruin. During these conversations, Ott marveled at his mother’s fluency in speaking German and eagerly demonstrated his own growing proficiency, greatly pleasing her.