He had seen and was to see things more frightening than the yeti. Weaver had called it the yeti, though many years later, lingering at the door to David’s bedroom, where inside his wife was reading aloud to their son from a book of world folklore, he would learn that yeti were creatures out of the mythology of the Himalayas, and so what he had seen on the Rapid City air force base one December night in 1943 was something else.
Long before the yeti, Joe had seen the university students at the bonfire swearing their fire oaths. He was still Joachim then, still a German, and too young to understand the meaning of many of the words the students disavowed as they hurled books into the flames: Impudence? Decadence? There was something, too, about sexual activity, and that he did grasp, but he kept his face arranged in the same expression of incomprehension. His mother was right beside him, and he didn’t want to alert her to what he had learned in after-hours conversations with his older brother.
He grasped, too, that the entire display, the conflagration, the brass band blasting noise into the air, the students’ ecstatic pronunciations of the oaths, was actually pitiful, so much smaller and sorrier than the spectacles in Frankfurt and Köln he had overheard his parents speaking about, their voices floating from up from the kitchen to the room he had once shared with his brother Walter. This was very much a village affair, Joe thought, nearly...
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