Still Here, Still There

by Richard Bausch

  Marson said, “It wasn’t something we accomplished. Was it. It was just chance. Don’t make it more than it is.”

  “I think it’s amazing.”

  “Well, stop touting it like it’s some kind of circus stunt.”

  “I’m not touting it.”

  “All right. But it’s not like we deserve any awards.”

  “But you wouldn’t be here,” Patrick said. He had seen the original clipping, when he was sixteen years old, in 1961, and had forgotten it, really, until Hans Schmidt called. It had been such a wonderful surprise, finding out his father’s rescuer was alive. “Think of it. You’ve both survived this long.”

  “Okay, okay,” Marson said, thinking that it was merely odd, as it was odd to be within months of your hundredth birthday. “Sure. Surviving.”

  But there had already been phone interviews and articles about the concurrent personal histories, and some people even suggesting that Congress and the president might get involved. So, Marson thought, perhaps Patrick was right to be enthusiastic. It was true that the old German’s grandson had created a small media storm.

  They had dinner in the mezzanine restaurant. They each had lobster, and they drank a beer in honor of Marson’s father, who used to brew his own. He had only lived to be seventy-three. Patrick had searched out the article about the rescue, paying an online archive service for the privilege. He read it aloud over coffee, and the old man let him, though he couldn’t listen fully. It seemed like someone else’s story. There was a blemish on his son’s left wrist, some form of nevus or liver spot that he had not noticed before. The boy, his boy, an old man now, was seventy-one years old. How could it be that he could still feel about him that he was the boy he once was? The sight of the little blemish filled him with a sudden, reasonless sense of mournful shame, as if the imperfection were in some way ominous, and also a violation of the other’s privacy. He looked away, and then took the last of the beer. His legs ached. He determined to be less short with him, yet there it was as he announced that he couldn’t stay up all goddamn night talking; he had to get some sleep now.

  IV

  Hans Schmidt told his grandfather about the possibility of some further ceremony coming from the government. “Even the White House,” he said. It was a bright morning, and out the window, past the canopy of the hotel entrance, you could see men in green uniforms unwinding red, white, and blue ribbons along Pennsylvania Avenue to funnel the crowds toward what would be the site of the fireworks on the mall. Sun shone through the diaphanous white curtains framing the window. The weather was cool, and there were breezes, and on the muted television a man in a blue suit was tracing a pattern of airflow from the north. Then there was a screenshot of the five-day forecast: temperature in the seventies today. A beautiful Fourth of July.

  “The fireworks make so much smoke,” Hans said. “You won’t believe it. Or maybe you will. It must be the way things are in real battle.”

  Schmidt gazed out. The grass shimmered with sun. Under the canopy in front of the hotel an SUV had pulled up and two women climbed out. They appeared at first glance to be arguing. But one of them laughed, and he realized they were just animated. It had always seemed to him that people in this country had more quick force, more velocity, just moving through things. The older one was blond and held a cigarette in her hand the way a man would. She said something emphatic and then headed into the hotel.

  “The whole city comes out for it,” Hans said. “I was here last year. Wait till you see.”

  “Such expense,” said Eugene Schmidt.

  “Every year the same.”

  They were sitting side by side on an oversoft divan in their wide, white room on the first floor of the hotel. The divan had polished wooden claw-feet, like an old bathtub. On the walls were spare prints of sticklike figures in attitudes of striving, with faded blue-and-orange backgrounds, like some sort of dream dawn, repeated in two separate rows. It made the old man think of hunger. His wheelchair was parked next to the divan. Before them was a low table with a French press and two cups of coffee on it. They looked at the muted TV, a woman now, talking and smiling. There was a drawing of an exploding firecracker behind her. Such a pretty face, but he could not believe anything substantial might exist behind it. Something blank in the eyes. Well, it was a face on television, and he was wrong to make judgments. He shook his head slightly and turned his attention to his grandson’s open, innocent face. They were both waiting for whatever this would be: Smalley and the NPR people would arrive soon. The reunion would be filmed in a small ceremony at two o’clock in the sunny yard in front of the hotel. Both Hans and his grandfather knew that Robert Marson and his son were four floors up.

  “What iss this, a vedding?” Schmidt said. “Vee cannot see each ozer?”

  “They’re probably still sleeping. They got in late.”

  The old man leaned over and with surprising fluidity of motion, even to his grandson, poured more coffee into his cup. He brought the cup to his mouth and drank.

  “Think of it,” said Hans in German. “The president.”

  “Ziss president. A baby. So young. Ein Schwarz. In America.”

  “In my opinion he’s the best in a very long time.”

  “I didn’t sleep,” Eugene said. “Can I have orange juice. I need energy.”

  Hans went to the desk against the wall, where there was a phone, and called room service. When he came back Eugene looked at him with an air of expectation.

  “Es wird in fünf Minuten hier sein, Großvater.”

  He sighed. “Sprich Englisch. Speak. English.”

  “It’s on its way. Five minutes.”

  “I’m tired,” the old man said. Then, in German: “He could die in his sleep. Should we have a translator?”

  “I can do that, Grandfather,” Hans answered, also in German.

  “Ich bin müde. Sorry. Englisch: I’m tired. Let’s please speak Englisch.”

  “Do you want to sleep?”

  “I can’t sleep. Hef you talked to him yet?”

  “Last night after you went to bed. They flew first class. His son. A nice man.”

  “Wie ist sein Name? Agh! Sorry. His name.”

  “Patrick. Very pleasant gentleman. Robert was a little out of breath.”

  “You—already you call him Robert. I never called him zat.”

  “He asked me to.”

  “A healthy man?”

  “He was a little out of breath.”

  “Me too,” Eugene said. “A little out of breath.”

  “We could order breakfast. More than this coffee and orange juice,” said his grandson.

  “No. Ich bin müde. I got very little sleep. My Englisch iss not vut it vas.”

  “It’s very clear and good.”

  “Mein mu—my muzzer.”

  “I know.”

  “Girlhood time in Leeds.”

  “I know that. You’ve said that.”

  “The var ztill frightens. Zo big and terrible. I vas cowardly. I remember it like ziss morning.”

  “You were afraid.”

  “Everybody. I gave up. Others depended on me.”

  “You saved a man’s life and he’s here. You’ll see him again, the man whose life you gave back to him. A beautiful thing.”

  “I vas a soldier. As a soldier it vas ze vrong sing.”

  “You did a good thing. Don’t talk like that.”

  “Vell. Ziss iss how it feels zumtime now.”

  They waited.

  “I vas a fool ven vee met in Naples. A chaser of vimmen. A drunk. Vee did not get along. I offended him and his vife.”

  “Vor fünfzig Jahren.”

  “Englisch. Englisch. Please.”

  “Fifty years ago. And you hadn’t seen each other in more than twenty years.”

  “You sink I don’t kn
ow ziss? And you accuse me auf repeating sings.” The old man smiled dryly at him, this strange boy, his grandson, from the daughter who left his house in Ansbach because she had gotten pregnant by an American navy man, she wouldn’t say who. She never even told this navy man about his child. She went to America and broke her mother’s heart. Her mother, who had been able to see her grandson so seldom, and became so sad. The woman he had left alone so many times, and she had been subjected to the rages that rode with him when he did come home after days of drinking and living in other rooms, paying hollow attention to other women, and one of them—was it really so? could it have been so?—had nearly starved to death on the streets of Berlin, fourteen years old at the beginning of the bombing, and four years later all she wanted to do was ficken. Her name was Elise.

  No, wait. Elise was far ago, 1946. Far past.

  Hans’s mother had come from Em. Emma, the love of his life—young, thick-bodied, worried Emma, whose sister Brigitte used to hate him for his drinking and his infidelity. And Brigitte lived in America and took the pregnant girl into her house. Emma was never the same. None of the women in his life were ever really the same after they lived with him. He did nothing for them but take what they were willing to give. It seemed to him now that there were many. Elise had been the first adultery, and he went to the priest to confess it. Vergib mir Vater, denn ich habe gesündigt. I have sinned. But he went back to her and back to her. No one more wildly carnal. There were times, holding her after the erotic fits were expended, when she would talk about wanting to see through death into the future, that she could almost believe she would never die while it was all going on. But she did die, half starved and full of black-market heroin she had acquired with her body and its uses. And she had given him TB.

  Nineteen forty-six. The whole world exacting reparations, as if the ordinary citizen were also a criminal. He was not a criminal, and like many other former soldiers he was working slave labor, as those people had in the camps. And he had been with Elise and caught the TB from her, and, oh yes, Elise was 1946, not this boy’s grandmother, not that late wife, not Emma.

  Poor Elise, from his twenties. And this journey to see the American was bringing everything back, a lot that he had forgotten and did not want to look upon anymore. Elise a little girl in a war who came of age while the bombs were falling and the streets were burning, and he had used her, as everyone used her. That first year of peace, he had gone through days asking for food, wandering hungry and wine-sick, a man who had wanted a family. And finally he was ill with the TB that Elise had picked up in some little corner of the wrecked city. He, Eugene Schmidt—who today would be honored for quitting, and for using the American to keep himself safe, and for getting too old to keep his own memory straight—he had spent days stealing and cheating and wanting to die or kill someone. And then the feverish days in a United States hospital near the Russian zone, and the other wife, the first, Melicent, yes, Melicent, whom he hardly knew, and who left him for some English soldier. Melicent, a girl, too, from a family with money, and her father became a Gauleiter, who died in a bomb raid on Essen in 1944. That was right. He had it now. The hero of her grown life, Melicent’s father, and Eugene never understood her devotion to him, a stern, looming, dyspeptic official with a thin unsmiling mouth and a perpetual air of having just received news of some approaching catastrophe. Well, the catastrophe had indeed swept over everyone. But he would not have to talk about all this today. Would it be necessary to explain?

  The second wife, mother of the boy’s mother, Emma, yes, she was the one who gave him back to himself for a time.

  Em had made him, for that small while, feel like the idealistic Catholic boy he had once been, who went to confession every week. He became the version of himself that he had been at twenty, for a few spare and beautiful months. No drinking. Going to church. Confession and communion. The boy he was before the war. He remembered now, though there were muddles. He called Emma “Elise” sometimes in those last years, especially when drunk. After he had started up again with it. He could be drunk and no one would see it. He knew how to carry it, like a kind of vivid energy, a good mood. He could still discern when to say or do certain things, could still walk straight. It was not an illusion. Emma would only know if she smelled it on him, and there was something about the way he slept, something in the breathing. She tried to understand; she was not a bad person. She went to Mass and communion every day of her life and she forgave and forgave and forgave. And her daughter Agnes going away was the end of her, really. He told her, “That was not me. Agnes can say it was me, but I was willing to go on and forgive and let her have it and accept the illegitimate child. She wanted to leave. She wanted out of my house.” Emma sat looking out on the street from the second-floor window, her bedroom, where she slept apart, and her face was lined, looking older than it was. But suffering seemed natural to her. Ich bin nicht dein christliches Jungen. Not your Christian boy, he would say. I’m not your creation.

  Or was that Melicent? He had said it outside a church, in sunlight, a Sunday morning, after a bottle of kirsch. No, that was another occasion. A baptism. What year?

  Everything ran together. And sometimes it all seemed to rush at him when he was on the edge of sleep, all of life, a speeding blur, a hurrying.

  He was in no hurry now, but Hans was anxious to keep him moving.

  “I don’t repeat zings so much,” he told the boy. “I confuse zem. A little.”

  “I’m sorry,” said his grandson. The boy had his mother’s eyes, that strange shade of light brown. Agnes had always been a stranger to him.

  “Ich bin müde,” he muttered. “Tired. I’m tired.” The phone rang. Hans went and answered it.

  “Hello, are you up?” It was Smalley. Schmidt could hear it all the way across the room. He had a moment of absurd pride in his good hearing. At ninety-five.

  “Yes,” Hans said.

  “Look, we’ve decided you should spend a little time before we film. The reunion doesn’t have to be blind, does it? It’s better if it’s not.”

  “It’s going to be, no matter what. Right?”

  There was a pause.

  “I’m going to film the first moments.”

  “I guess we can reenact the whole thing,” Smalley said. “Like the raising of the flag on Iwo.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind. We should’ve planned this better, I think. We’re only ten minutes away. We’ll come and film the first minutes, and then the ceremony at two. The ceremony’ll be the official version probably.”

  “Ceremony.”

  “People’re coming from Congress, kid. Remember? You got the memo, right? Tennessee and Massachusetts. You know? Congressmen.”

  “Of course, of course. I know.”

  “Do you have a script or something?”

  “I was going to write something after I film it.”

  There was another pause. “We’ll be there in a little while. Call Marson and his son. I know he’s got some other family coming.”

  “All right,” Hans said.

  The other was already gone. He touched the button and then asked the front desk to ring Robert Marson’s room.

  Patrick Marson said, “Shall we come to you?”

  “That would be good, yes,” said Hans.

  He hung up and came back to the divan. “They’re on their way.”

  His grandfather took a breath. “I heard.” He coughed, remembering his bad lungs.

  “You all right?”

  “I hev nut seen him fifty years. Ich kenne ihn nicht. I don’t know him. Vut vill vee zay? Does he even remember?”

  “We’ve been through this,” Hans said. “We’ve had this conversation.”

  “I tell him vee didn’t die. But now vee vill die. And zoon, ja?”

  Eugene Schmidt saw again the ruin of the cities, going home, the rubble-strewn roads and th
e broken sides of buildings in the sun of spring, the tumbledown farms, and he was not even wounded, had healed from the frostbite and the starvation. He went along a winding country road with birds singing in the blasted trees. The whole world shattered, with rows of graves and the soldiers of other countries everywhere. They were going to further reduce the country. Everywhere you looked there was destruction and murder, and the factories were coming down. It seemed that nobody had anyone to go home to. No one he knew.

  Hans said, “Where is your orange juice?”

  “What iss the use?”

  “Not that again,” Hans said. “Please leave that alone. That won’t do anyone any good.”

  Eugene Schmidt grinned at him. “Zat vay madness lies. Ja?”

  The young man did not respond.

  “I am much older zan zee old Englisch king. Lear.”

  He nodded, without quite attending. He was looking at the door.

  “My English. Thank Got für Mrs. Schmidt, who lived in Leeds.”

  V

  Smalley and the NPR people arrived first. His friend Kaye and the two-man crew looked like they could not be long out of college. She had a sharp-featured, intelligent face, leanly muscular arms, and an athletic body. In her white blouse, black slacks, and wide red belt, she looked pleasantly suave and as if she were arriving at a party or soirée. Her cameraman had blond dreads tied in back, and the gray T-shirt he wore was already sweat stained. He was very tall and very round, with some kind of tattoo climbing his neck. For all his girth, his jeans looked two sizes too big and hung on him. He had the video camera in a canvas bag over his shoulder, and he set it on the chair just inside the door. His partner, who murmured, “I’m sound,” toward Eugene Schmidt, was a pale, doughy little puffy-faced man with thick black down on the backs of his hands and fingers. His hair was cut close, so that you could see his scalp. Kaye ordered them around as if they were her children. She introduced herself to Hans and his grandfather, then turned back to the others: “Say your names, boys.”