by Kluge, P. F.
“So, Hans,” he asked. “Tell me. Did Schmeling really win that boxing match?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
He lit the cigar with a wooden match, holding the end of the cigar half an inch away from the flame, toasting before lighting, then drawing the flame in while turning the cigar. Those old-timers, everything they did, everything that looked like a routine, same old thing, caught in a rut, a predictable race, they did with a kind of ceremony. I liked that about them, the love of work and life. Combined with, I admit, a fear of surprise.
“You are sure?”
“Schmeling won.”
“Schweinerei,” he said. Piggish business. He shook his head. “We wuz robbed,” he said.
V.
“YOUR FATHER’S HERE,” THE DOORMAN SAID, calling me from the lobby.
“No way!”
“You mean he’s dead, sir?”
“No. Put him on.”
“Hello, son,” he said. “Pop … What’s wrong?”
“Can I come up?”
I stood by the front door, watching the lights above the elevator door go from 1 to PH. I’d invited him into the city a dozen times after Mom died, till he made clear that I could come to New Jersey if I wanted to see him. Mom could have gotten him to come. She cared about where I lived. But, by the time I asked her, she was sick. I told her it was a penthouse with a view of the world. I told her about the morning sun, the evening skyline. She asked about the kitchen. Now the door opened and there he was. He nodded, walked past me and stepped inside. I heard him walking from room to room. In a few minutes, he found me in the kitchen.
“So,” I said, when he returned from his tour of inspection. “You were in the neighborhood and you dropped by for a beer …”
“I tried calling,” he said, peeking into the refrigerator, unabashedly nosey about my six pack of Ballantine ales and some Colby cheese and a box of Triscuits. “But I only get your answering machine.”
“So … did you leave a message? That’s what the machine is for.”
“No. That was me hanging up. I guess I was hoping they wouldn’t charge me for the call. They do anyway, don’t they?”
“I’ve had a ton of messages,” I said, handing him a beer can. “Thanks to you. House buyers.”
“In a glass, son,” he reminded me gently. He was fussy about the aroma being part of the pleasure of a brew and after he poured the beer into the glass, slowly, tilting the side, he raised it to his nose and whiffed it. “Not bad,” he said, “not good.”
“Well, anyway,” I said. “Welcome.”
“What a place.”
“People say I need a warehouse,” I allowed.
“You got a warehouse,” he shot back. Then he corrected himself. “Sorry. No arguments tonight. Let’s go out back. I see you have a porch.”
I followed him through the bedroom, out onto the terrace. I stood next to him against the railing. For a minute, we felt like passengers on a ship. And the land below, bridges and airports, avenues and parks, those were places we lived, chunks of time, like ports of call.
“Up north,” he said, pointing towards the dark end of the park, “that was my first home in this country. Your uncle’s place. You heard of him.”
“The one in the army, you mean?”
“No. That was Heinz. My brother. Otto was an older gentleman. A great-uncle to you. My uncle. He was my sponsor, when I came in. He was super in a building up there, right across from Central Park. I went there a few hours ago. Just to see what it looked like today.”
“And?”
“Kaput.” Kenny Hauser’s epitaph for America. The old man repeated it. “I knew Central Park pretty good. I walked all over on Sundays. People do that anymore?”
“You’ve got to be careful. Not at night.”
“Could we sit down, out here?”
“Sure.”
“You could spare your Pop another beer?”
“Coming right up.”
“Some food, maybe. Crackers? Cheese?”
“You want to eat out?” I asked.
“Not if you’ve got crackers and cheese.”
While I spread some Triscuits and cheese on a plate, I wondered what he was up to, talking to me like he’d never done before. No baiting, no joking, none of the tired father-and-son routines. I opened some sardines.
“So,” he said when I came back out. “Germany on one side and Jersey on the other.”
“Right.”
“Turn out the lights, will you son.” I stepped inside and turned out the terrace and bedroom lights. Now I sat beside him in darkness. The lights beyond were lots brighter now.
“Well, there’s something I got to tell you,” he said. He was quiet, almost apologetic and that was awkward for a man who never apologized. “It’s hard to explain. You’ll think it’s something I’m doing to you or because of you and the trouble is you might not even be wrong but I don’t want you to think that, even if it might be true. You shouldn’t blame yourself …”
All I could do was look at him and wonder what was coming after a preface which, for its casual distribution of guilt, was a small mind-game masterpiece.
“I’m moving,” he said.
“I figured you would,” I said. Take a step at a time, I tell myself, the smallest possible step. “I didn’t suppose you’d hang around New Jersey after you sold the house.”
“To Germany, George,” he said. “I’m going back. I decided.”
“To Germany?”
“Yup.” He nodded his head. Perhaps he was hoping I’d take it nonchalantly. Small world, open borders, oceans easily crossed: like that. Not Florida, not Arizona. Germany. An offbeat option, Pop, a surprise, but now that I think about it, about hospitals and retirement homes and socialized medicine, it all makes sense. Still, I shuddered. He was going back. It was as though he’d decided that the whole adventure of his life—the great experiment—was a failure. America was over.
“Just tell me why.”
“Why?” He shook his head. “You don’t want to hear it, George. We’ll only wind up arguing.”
“No argument.” It was my turn to promise.
“Well … since Mom died, I’ve been out in New Jersey on my own and it’s not such a good place to be when you’re alone. But I figured maybe someday you’d want the place. I’d pass it on to you. It’s silly, when I think about it. It’s kind of an old fashioned way of looking at things. It’s not a castle, not even a farm, it’s just a house on a lot in Jersey … and you’re not coming home. You made that clear enough …” He raised his hands to ward off my protest. “You promised … no arguments.”
“Okay.”
“So it’s going to be sold sooner or later. Why not sell it now … turn it into money … and be a citizen of the world, like yourself?”
“You didn’t say world, Pop. You said Germany.”
“I’ll tell you, George …” He drank his beer and smacked his lips. “There’s a place along the Elbe … Blankenese … and you sit at a table, out of doors in a beer garden, and you watch the ships come down the river, in off of the North Sea. From all around the world, they come … and they play the national anthem of every ship as it passes and … I don’t know how to put it … but that pleases me an awful lot. It makes sense. That’s the same harbor I left from.”
Now he looked at me, to see if I still wanted to protest, but the fight had gone out of me. His comments had been so gentle … though I didn’t doubt he’d rehearsed every word of it … that it felt as though he’d already gone. And that sickened me. It was like the news of death. He wouldn’t be here anymore, he wouldn’t be sitting out in New Jersey, feeding birds and hating Yankees. He’d be in another country. I’d be alone.
“Listen, George,” he said. “I criticize you plenty. Too much. Because your mother loved you too much, if that’s possible, which I think it is.”
“So if Mom loved me less …”
“I’d have loved you more? Well, I think
I loved you. But I’d have showed it more.”
“Mom’s been gone a while, Pop. I haven’t noticed any particular … upswelling … of emotion from you …”
“Maybe not,” he said. That stopped him. Other nights, one of us would have walked out. Now he waited and tried again. “But I saw you drive home the other night. You didn’t come into the house right away. You sat outside on the table. That table from the old days.”
“You were watching me?”
“Yes. And it brought tears to my eyes. Seeing you there.”
“I felt you were watching.”
“Maybe that’s love. Watching you …”
Down on the street, there was a commotion of horn-blowing and shouting. Someone double-parked, blocking traffic. People cursing. Then people in buildings got into the act. Someone whose sleep had been disturbed must have lobbed something on the hood of the complaining car. Now I saw the roof lights of a police car lighting up the scene.
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“No rush,” he said. And I thought I saw a little opening. Maybe he left it there for me to find.
“Good,” I said. “There’s something I want you to do before you go. Remember all those trips we used to take?”
“You bet I do,” he responded. Trips to Florida and up to Maine and at least two cross-country outings. He liked those memories, I knew: trips that begin with the two of us inside the car while Mom walked through the house one more time, making sure that windows were down, doors were locked, the gas was off. She’d already lost an argument about packing a breakfast to eat along the way, all that “perfectly good food” going to waste. Now she walked from room to room until the old man finally agreed to let me pound the horn. That brought her out fast … and ornery. “Who did that?” she’d ask. The old man would point at me and I’d point at him and my mother would get in the car.
“What say we take another trip before you go?”
“Where …”
“Down to Florida, Pop. Memory Lane.”
“By car?” he asked. I knew what he was thinking. It was one thing to bring up a son, live with him and even—in a German sort of way—love him. But it was something else again, agreeing to spend all those hours and miles sitting next to him.
“Hey, Pop,” I said, enjoying having him cornered. “You’ve never traveled with me since I was grown. It’ll be a treat, watching me work.” Now I went into my column-writing voice. “Ah, in America, there are morning roads and evening roads, straight shots and scenic routes. There are open roads and dead ends, happy roads and heartbreakers, honeymoon roads and killer highways, lovers lanes and miracle miles …”
“Okay, alright already,” he held up his hands in protest. “Stop, please.”
“Well? What do you say?” I filled him in on my leaf-peeping odyssey. He listened, just barely. The magic escaped him. His mind was someplace else.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
VI.
I DRIVE SLOWLY DOWN HILLTOP AVENUE and turn into the driveway of a house that has a for-sale sign in front of it, which reminds me of quarantine signs the Board of Health used to put up when a kid had measles inside. This house is condemned. There’s sickness here. Death. This is what it feels like coming home to a house that’s empty, walking through it room by room, knowing that nothing’s changed and a pile of junk mail is your only welcome back.
The house is quiet. It knows I’m a lame duck. It’s waiting for a changing of the guard. New blood. Kids tracking mud and making noise. Meals being cooked for more than one. What strikes me tonight is the German-ness of the house. Not just the objects, though there are plenty of those. There’s the herring crock, the Hummel figurines, the carved wooden plates on the wall, the collection of beer steins, the pine-scented Badedas bath oil next to the tub. And, of course, there’s those pictures. Old black and white. My parents. Mom’s. Various dogs. And the picture Mom brought back from a trip she took in 1938, she and my brother and some buddies, all in uniform.
But it’s not what we have in this house so much as the way we live, or lived. Never leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight, even if our guests didn’t leave until midnight. The way we saved. The piggy bank, the pinochle kitty, the Christmas club. The way we bought. Cash for refrigerator, cash for a new car. We opened presents on Christmas Eve. Americans waited till morning, eating breakfast among piles of torn up wrapping paper. Dummies. We were Germans. We spent dollars, paid cash, and couldn’t sleep with an unpaid bill in the house. We believed that work was good, the more work the better and it never hurt to do a little extra. Maybe we were the dummies. We got up early, to work during the week, to garden on weekends. Oh how we gardened! Rock gardens and rose gardens outside, African violets and Jerusalem cherries inside, and vegetables you never find in markets: gooseberries, currants, kale, Swiss chard. We believed that weeds—“unkraut”—were morally bad. We found that dirt washed off, we didn’t mind getting dirty. I loved it. And Mom with me. Alright. Okay. I can hear it now. A typical frau, dominated and docile, working like a man. Teutonic stock. What can you do? Watch her now: the husband takes a break and she rushes inside to bring him a beer which he drinks, sitting on the front stoop, bare-chested on a Sunday, and then she checks on the afternoon roast inside, fresh ham with the rind still on it. We were like that, maybe. Germans. She wore ancient house dresses and ankle socks and old shoes and I sat on the stoop in shorts that were never long enough to cover that last inch of boxer underwear, waving cheerfully to neighbors driving home from church. Germans.
Well, it meant being out of fashion. You say “Gallic” and it means something snappy, elegant, maybe a little rude but stylish enough to pull the rudeness off. You say German or—my God, Teutonic—and the roof falls in. I’ve checked the New York yellow pages. Manhattan has more Cambodian restaurants than German. It has French places by the dozen, Mexican, Italian, Japanese. But propose a German place and listen for the groans of pain. It’s that way down the line, books, language, clothing. Everything but weapons and uniforms. Well, we had some good times of our own. A keg of Ballantine Ale out in the garage and a driveway full of cars and someone playing an accordion, and the kids sleeping upstairs. Another kind of good time was coffee, coffee with cake. Stollen would do, and cookies were accepted, but serious baking was from New York konditoreis, providers of sachertorte, schwarzwalders, pistachio, marzipan, brandy, butter-cream. And we were all charter members of the clean-plate club.
We were Germans. We walked a lot, especially after meals. Me and any number of neighborhood onkels would step out into the best and worst of weather, congratulating ourselves on how good or bad it was. We walked miles on Sundays, passed by convoys of Sunday drivers. The simple pleasures were ours. George, do you remember our Florida room? In mid-winter, snow on the ground, icicles hanging off the rafters, we’d wheel chaise lounges out of the garage, onto the concrete slab in front, and lie down under a blanket, basking in the sun, one-up on Miami.
We were Germans. I plead guilty. The language was everywhere. No Katzenjammer stuff. We never said “dummkopf” or “schweinhund.” But Yale was Jail. We sat on the table. And we ate our plates. We were Germans, hooked on schedule, detail, routine. It was annoying, I grant, always arriving on time. I figured that if a grown-up human being said seven o’clock, seven o’clock was what the person meant. Any sane person who wanted guests to arrive later was free to say 7:15 or 7:20 and, hell, I’d’ve been there just when they said. I never budged on that one, because you start caving into that stuff, the world goes to hell in no time. I never budged, no matter how many people came stumbling to the door in bathrobes, with soap in their ears. Maybe all this going-by-the-book shows a lack of imagination. Maybe so. But we believed in rules, for ourselves and for others. Promises kept, work delivered, bills paid. We knew there were plenty who made out fine breaking promises, dogging work, shirking bills. But we couldn’t live that way. We played by the rules, lived within our means, showed up on time, worked hard and
wondered—this was the price you paid—if the world wasn’t laughing at us.
I’m almost through. We were Germans. That means you can put aside all the old world work habits, the immigrant customs, the home country recipes, and you still have something else. We lived through the first world war on one side and the second on the other. We changed sides. But some things never change. And the tie remained. Christmas we sang “Stille Nacht” and the first presents we opened were the ones from Germany. You could spot them by the crinkly wrapping paper, the sprig of Black Forest pine that left needles all over the carpet. Pathetic presents, right after the war. Neckties. Chess pieces. The only gift we really wanted were schnappsbohnen, whiskey-filled pralines, which usually melted, drained and dried en route. Those were the Deutschland pakete and they were nothing to what we sent in the other direction, right after the war. George, do you remember when you were little, those long rolls of brown butcher paper, those neighborhood tantes cramming boxes full of coffee, chocolate, Crisco, socks, sewing needles, razor blades, toothpaste? Package weight was restricted. Five pounds. We contacted everyone who was Germany-bound, we cut deals with freight companies in Yorkville, sent parcels care of a New Jersey soldier who was stationed near Stuttgart with the Occupation. Once we drove to Philadelphia, a trunk full of packages, because a German crew had delivered the cruiser Prinz Eugen to the Americans and were willing to carry packages back home. Mom added it up, figured we spent two thousand bucks on Germany packages. I wondered then, still do, whether those people—our people—would have done the same for us, if Adolph had won. The way this country’s headed, I might yet wait for packages. Maybe we’ll all find out what the world thinks of America.
And now: the last of it. Being a German in America gave you a tie between then and now, between here and there, between winner and loser, good and evil. It was like watching western movies and knowing you had some Indian blood. It gave you a complicated view of things. And I confess that, like my son, and for better reasons, sometimes I rooted for the Germans. Alright? For their dedication, their cleverness. Like the Indians. And because, like the Indians and the Brooklyn Dodgers, they always lost. The bad Germans and the once-in-a-while good ones. Whether it was Maximilian Schell in “The Young Lions” or James Mason in “The Desert Fox,” the Germans had to lose. I may be way off base here, but I think the experience of defeat gave us an edge on what was happening and what was going to happen in America. We were ahead of our times. We knew. That good men do bad. That lives are lost for nothing. We knew. The taste of defeat. We knew. George, I watched you go to school and they taught you America had never started a war. That was number one. And never lost a war. That was number two. What a cocky, happy nation back then, might and right together, an unbeatable combo! But we knew. We came from a place that started wars and lost them. Every one of us had traveled to a place no American had ever been, way out on that last frontier: defeat. Absolute defeat. Unconditional surrender. We knew. We know.
