Keeper of the Flame

On thanksgiving my father asked me if i wanted to visit the Nazi. That’s what my father—a dentist to whom the Nazi had entrusted the care of his teeth—called him, what he’d always called him: “The Nazi.” As in: “Did I tell you who came into the office this week? The Nazi.” And: “Did I tell you that I talked to the Nazi?” And: “You’ll never guess what the Nazi told me.” And so on.

The Nazi to whom my father referred was not a real Nazi—and, as far as I knew, my father didn’t call him “the Nazi” to his face. Neither had this so-called Nazi served under Hitler in World War II. Back then, the Nazi my father knew had yet to be born. And though my father had a pretty good idea of where this Nazi’s sympathies might lie, all my father said about him was that he had money, that he’d written a book about the Wewelsburg castle in southern Germany (the one that Heinrich Himmler had attempted to restore); that he’d built a castle of his own in a remote location in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina; that he, like my father, had an affinity for snakes, had fed white mice to copperheads he’d kept in terrariums; that he’d taken to leashing one of these serpents and walking it as one would a dog; and, finally, that his curatorial impulses and an affection for artifacts once belonging to members of the Third Reich had led him to build a private underground museum in the belly of the aforementioned fortress—a vault of ominous artifacts that my father convinced me I needed to see.

I’d spent a good part of my childhood visiting my father’s dental patients, many of whom lived deep in the mountains, in houses that might or might not have electricity or phones. During one visit, I’d watched a man yank intestines from a slaughtered hog. I’d been towed, with my sister, down a gravel road on a wooden sled roped to an ox. I’d gathered eggs in shit-strewn barns, run cobs of corn through grinders that worked by cranking a handle and spinning a wheel so that the kernels poured out of one rusted chute and naked cobs out of another. I’d been bucked from the back of a horse; I’d been charged—no kidding—by a yak. I’d sat on a quilted bed in the front room of a house owned by a man who, at sixty-some years of age, had not only installed his first phone but had also been receiving, as a result, vulgar calls from a woman who lived down the road, words so filthy he claimed he wouldn’t repeat them.

But I had never before visited the Nazi. After my father and I had driven out of town, on a narrow two-lane road winding past ramshackle houses and trailers using sheets for window curtains, over narrow bridges spanning rushing streams and onto a gravel road where we passed multiple signs announcing that we were now on private property and that potential trespassers would be shot; after we’d reached the heavy-duty chainlink fence running the length of this property; after my father had dialed the Nazi’s number on his cell phone; and after the front gate glided backwards on lubed wheels—we drove inside and the house came into view. The Nazi’s house did, in fact, resemble a castle. It wasn’t exactly Neuschwanstein but it had rock walls and turrets and wooden doors with wrought iron hinges and arched windows. It had a fountain and an impressive series of stairs leading to the front door. The whole thing looked like something a government—though certainly not our own—had erected centuries before.

We left the truck. I had the feeling we were being watched, that our movements were being recorded—that somewhere inside the castle, a bank of TVs flickered, monitoring different zones of the Nazi...