The White Vixen by David Tindell Page A

heritage was primarily German, like many of her countrymen, it was not purely Aryan. She would have been considered below his station, and her Spanish blood might have caused her to be considered little better than a common Gypsy.
    And with a shudder, he remembered what had happened to those people.
    No. While he appreciated the charms of his mother’s heritage, the benefits of living in the country in which he had been born, he had always identified more with his father. Like most of his expatriate countrymen, Dieter had sought a wife with strong German roots, and almost without exception the children, especially the males, were raised in their fathers’ culture. A culture that had produced a warrior class so proud, so mighty, that their nation had come close to capturing the world.
    But they had failed. No, that wasn’t quite true, he thought, remembering his reading, and the stories told by his father and his Kameraden, of heroism on the battlefield undone by political bunglers back home, fools who had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory even as the soldiers could see the onion-shaped domes of the enemy’s capital. Bunglers…idiots…some of the milder words he’d heard from the Kameraden about those dark days. And yet, weren’t some of those same men among the very group who had made those disastrous decisions? Willy knew from his reading that must be so, yet it had never been spoken of. Not for the first time, he wondered about that, about where the truth really lay.
    In any event, he was here, on a warm November day, so many thousands of kilometers from where he sometimes felt should be: in the land of his father’s birth, on the continent that should be his now, his and his generation’s. Instead they had this one. A beautiful and bountiful land, to be sure, but with no history, no tradition. A land where Stone Age savages had built a semblance of civilization, but one so weak it would be swept away by a few hundred Spaniards on horseback. And what kind of legacy had those conquistadores built? Tinpot dictators who plundered the land and then hid from the people behind toy armies that wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the field against the Wehrmacht .
    The glass door creaked open behind him, and he heard the tapping of his father’s cane, the shuffling of the slippered feet upon the wood. He turned to face the old man. “Hello, Father,” he said with genuine respect. Germany’s defeat had not been caused by men like Dieter Baumann, who shed his blood on the steppes of Russia and then came to this foreign land to work tirelessly for the Fatherland.
    “ Ach , but it is a beautiful day,” his father said in his native German. He knew Spanish, of course, even spoke fluently it with a cultivated Buenos Aires accent, but within the family, and the Kameraden, it was always German. How many times during his childhood had Willy been scolded for lapsing into the language of their adopted country? He’d heard “ Sprechen sie Deutsch!” too many times to count. “What are you drinking so early in the day?” the old man said now.
    “Cognac,” Willy answered. “Would you like some?”
    “French goat-piss,” Dieter Baumann spat. “I suppose you left the schnapps inside?”
    In spite of himself, the son grinned. “I’m afraid so,” he said. His hand moved to a nearby button. “I can have Ernesto bring you a glass.”
    The old man waved it off. “Thank you, no.” He adjusted the threadbare smoking jacket around his bony shoulders and shuffled forward to the railing next to his son. “Yes, a beautiful day,” he said again, hooking his cane on the railing and leaning forward, supported by his hands.
    “It will be warm again,” Willy said, looking outward with his father.
    “After all these years, I’m still not used to it,” Dieter gruffed. “Summer in the wintertime. Raising a glass and saying ‘ Fröhliche Weihnachten! ’ during a heat wave.” He shook his head, one lock of gray hair