This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  *

  After crossing the bridge it is still five kilometres to Pullach through the forest. Links und rechts and around I go for over an hour-and-a-half. The sun is blazing and the ground is afire with red and yellow leaves. Cyclists rush past, and old women chatting and marching briskly overtake me on the path. The forest is well-tended, the earth track swept, and I keep coming upon the same piece of river and railway tracks, as if I might be walking in a big circle, but no, here is the edge of a town, which must be Pullach.

  On a street corner, I hail a man passing on his bicycle. As he comes to a stop, a boy slides off the front handlebars.

  “Can you help me?” I ask in English, skipping the elf routine.

  His son stands aside and the man partially dismounts, holding steady the front and back wheel.

  “Yes, I hope so,” says he. He speaks German, French and English, and everything else besides.

  I explain what I am looking for: I describe Neustadt in the film and ask the way to Pullach Station.

  “Pullach Station is that way,” he points straight down the road. “But you do not want Pullach. Let me see your film.” He gestures to my laptop. “Let me see the station in there.”

  No problem. It takes me several minutes to turn on my computer and cue the movie. Meanwhile, he asks where I am from. Canada. When I answer, the boy studies his father’s face to verify if Canada is a good place. I gather it is, as the boy cracks a smile even as his father is explaining “his situation”. He has six children and no car. He is always on the tram, the man tells me, for transportation, and therefore he is familiar with almost every station south of Munich.

  “Where are you from?” I ask, suspecting he is Roma.

  “Hungary.”

  “I have been to Budapest. I went in—”

  “Yes.” He interrupts. He knows all about my visit to Budapest in 1989. He remembers my important trip to Berlin. It’s boring to have Westerners paint impressions of the Eastern Block. He doesn’t have the slightest interest in the fictions travelers take to heart. I’ve been chastened. “Germany looks like a nice place on the surface,” he offers, “and it looks as if everything works well here, but it’s not the case.” He’s seen most of the country. “Hier ist es Schlecht. You understand? Here it is bad, unpalatable. Especially the schools,” he says. “I must fight the government to put my children in the right schools.”

  “That’s bad,” I mutter to him and his boy. We are getting seated just as naturally and comfortably as you can, on a patch of grass between the paved sidewalk and a residential fence, to view a WWII action film.

  Prim pedestrians move on. Nobody is curious about us. I start the movie and the gypsy and his son watch intently as Michael steps out of the Mercedes at Neustadt Station. Trench coat, fedora. Handsome devil.

  “There.” The father points. “See: two tracks and the station shelter with the tile roof. This is not Pullach. This is not even Munich.”

  He does not remark on Michael. He hasn’t noticed him.

  “You won’t find that station here in the south, even the landscape is wrong.”

  I tell him that I have read many articles about the making of the movie and almost all of them mention nearby Geiselgasteig as the area where the old train station is located.

  “No. It’s not the case.”

  To make certain he is not mistaken, I play the movie segment once more. The boy has taken an interest at least. How many action movies has he watched like this, I wonder? Laptop, sitting in the grass, the bicycle on its side: we might have invented the green drive-in theatre right here. Not many is my guess. Movie stars, potentially, are ordinary people to him. Like Michael is to me. I sense the boy is getting excited, his curiosity physical. I watch him as he watches Michael at Neustadt. I wish I could show him the scene on the train where Michael actually has some lines, but that comes a little later on.

  Instead, I narrate more about my family, how they originally came from Breslau, in Silesia, a strip of land in the north-east, and how in Michael’s case family history and film history shadow each other in a curious way. I don’t actually say aloud ‘in a curious way’, yet as I am addressing them I am simultaneously plugged into an internal monologue and fear, for a moment, that I might finally have grown incontinent ‘in a curious way’. The stark egonomics I have lived under for years have produced a fallacy based on the false pretence that the entire world shares my thoughts and concern and interest in Michael’s story. But that’s enough. I must keep to the facts. And although I get the sense neither are listening carefully—not the boy, certainly not his father—I persist because I feel it’s important where Michael is concerned that they learn a little more than what meets the eye. It’s important to me, anyway. I’m beginning to ease into our family’s exodus story set in 1935, when the boy’s father notices something, a placard on the station house at Neustadt.

  “Look there.”

  I pause the film.

  “Unnötiges Reisen verlängert den Krieg.” He shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

  At Pullach station, I wait with a handful of commuters for the train to Munich.

  It’s propaganda. Unnecessary travel lengthens the war.

  1 In England alone around 75 feature films were released between 1950 and 1959 about the Second World War, among which the prisoner of war genre figured prominently. Some of the best known prisoner of war films of that era include: The Wooden Horse (1950); Three Came Home (1950); The Password is Courage (1952); Stalag 17 (1953); The Colditz Story (1955); A Man Escaped (1956); The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957); Danger Within (1959).

  The Seagull

  When I see the curtain rise on a room with three walls, when I watch these great and talented people, these high priests of the sacred art depicting the way people eat, drink, make love, walk about and wear their clothes, in the artificial light of the stage … when I’m presented with a thousand variations of the same old thing, the same thing again and again—well, I just have to escape, I run away.

  The Seagull Act i

  THERE ARE PARTS OF MICHAEL’S STORY I could never find in Europe. Even so, the seven years he spent in Canada, from 1949-1956, seem very remote. I knew nothing of the family’s first temporary address in Canada, in Ottawa, until I discovered his diary, and then, the other day, drove from my residence down to 262 York Street only to find it no longer exists. Where once there stood a row house, there is now a four-way stop. A bland intersection, one block down from busy Rideau Street.

  Within a year of arriving in Canada, Michael’s family settled in Sault Ste. Marie, on the shores of Lake Superior. His stepfather Antoine Stehr, a biologist, found a position at the Forest Insect Laboratory to study Spruce budworms. His mother Eva, no longer involved in the theatre, entered the ring of dog breeding, kennel clubs, and conformation shows. Meanwhile, Michael attended Sault Ste. Marie Collegiate Institute from 1949 to 1955, and later McGill University, where he studied chemistry but failed miserably.

  His first dramatic role came in the fall of 1955, at the age of twenty. Michael played Konstantin Trepliov in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, in the McGill University English Department’s December production at Moyse Hall. It was an occasion, the first ever production of the play in English in Montréal. Archival material indicates that Soviet officials were in attendance:

  The embassy of the Soviet Union is interested in securing nine tickets for the Saturday evening performance of “The Seagull” by Chekov, Dec 3, 1955 and I am sending herewith the cheque for paying to the tickets. The Soviet Embassy would appreciate any information you could send answering “The Seagull” performance, producing by the McGill University. Thank you very much for your kind consideration. Yours very truly, E Novikov. First Secretary.

  Not long ago, I began to compile an oral history of Michael’s adolescent years, based on conversations with former classmates, using as
a reference point his arrival in Canada in 1949. I supplemented the memories of friendships formed in high-school with the remembrances of family friends and acquaintances. I interviewed two of Michael’s cousins; my father, Nicolas, and my aunt, Sybille. My father Nicolas had stayed with Michael et famille in Sault Ste. Marie from 1954-55, when he was fifteen and a new immigrant to Canada from South America. My conversations with Michael’s mother were had in the summer of 1994, the year Eva was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

  *

  EVA (Mother)

  It’s too late. It’s too late to talk about him.

  MCGILL DAILY

  The tremendous current popularity of Chekov, and in particular of his once ridiculed drama The Seagull, seems to prove that audiences have caught up with this influential writer. This will be the first dramatic offering this year by McGill students, who have become well known in this city for good productions of classic drama. The Seagull will be followed next term by a revival of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing which is scheduled for the first week of March.

  Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, December 1, 2, 3 at Moyse Hall, Arts Building. Set design and direction by Stephan Porter. All parts played by students and members of the faculty of English. Curtain time 8.30.

  KEN (High-school friend)

  I am going to use the name Mike because that is how we all knew him and it may say something about him that he used this North American contraction. It is likely that he was Michael, or whatever the German version is, at home, and that he used that when he went back to Europe. Relationships between teens were much different in the fifties than they are now, and maybe we did not communicate nearly as much to each other as young people do in these Facebook times, but Mike was definitely the friend with whom I had most contact and he and Eva had a very great influence on my life.

  He was fourteen when he arrived in 1949. He lived two doors down from us on Wellington Street. The railway was literally in his backyard. The CPR Station and the Express Office was out his back door. There were two tracks and steam engines were used. It was noisy. At night the boxcars shunting back and forth kept the neighbourhood awake. During the summer, Mike and I and your father worked together unloading Canada Post boxcars crammed with parcels.

  We walked to and from school each day and home for lunch. Mike never talked about the past. He showed up in the Soo, and socially he fit right in. He was self-confident, extremely good-looking, a handsome teenage boy, not at all introverted. He didn’t study very hard, but he did well at school. He got high marks without much effort. And he learned clarinet; I remember music was important in his family. He was athletic and good at sports but never joined one of the school teams. I don’t know why. Instead he preferred to play basketball with some older kids at the YMCA. He picked up basketball quickly. Basketball was ‘American’. He wanted to master that aspect, I think, being an ordinary kid.

  Eva coached him not to talk about the war. His mother was worried he might get picked on, because he was German. The family didn’t want to attract attention, or cause trouble. They didn’t want to awaken any kind of racism. I’ve got to think they lived in fear of that eventuality. So Eva had coached him to never enter a dispute of any kind. Michael would never debate an issue at school. He wasn’t shy, but you couldn’t get him into an argument. He avoided confrontation.

  My parents were very much into the activities of the United Church that was just a block down Wellington Street from our houses. Mike and his family were not religious. My uncle was in a church-sponsored minstrel show, and I asked Mike if he would come. Mike handled that by saying that he would not be going; nothing more. There was a bit of culture conflict there. There was a large and active Young Peoples group, to which Mike did not become included even though the rest of us did. He was genuinely curious about why my family would go to church at all. He listened carefully when my father would explain the roots of our faith. When Mike was satisfied he understood, he would say something like, “Okay, I get it,” and leave it at that. He would move on to something else, leaving no doubt what his opinion was. It was a very effective way to influence others and he had mastered that skill at a very young age.

  On the other hand, I would not describe Mike as a leader. I doubt if he was ever chosen as a team captain or class president. He was a year or two older than most of us, but he preferred to stay under the radar. In the summer, Mike and I did some camping and fishing. We’d borrow a boat or canoe. In the good old days there were thousands of places to just put up a tent. Lois’ parents had a cottage and we could go there. One time we brought home smelt and Eva cooked them in a sort of stew with the heads still on. Saturday football games were a big deal. We might decorate my parent’s car and get into the parade and there was always a big bunch of us, including Mike.

  NICOLAS (Cousin)

  I’d been sent at the age of fifteen from Colombia to live with my aunt Eva and Antoine and Michael in Ontario. Everything was new—so many first impressions—and Michael and I were very different. I: compulsive, over-serious, probably humourless, on my guard, in Canada to study and do well, confident that I could do well—better than he. Awkward. He: making a point of being relaxed, trying to look in no doubt, to be hip, sloppy, not a good student—but mostly, I think, because he was utterly undisciplined and uninterested. Because I think he was smart.

  Michael was tall, slim, very loose like a noodle. He smiled and laughed a great deal. Happy-go-lucky.

  LOIS (High-school friend)

  We were teenagers then, and not too bright ones either. But I remember he was good-looking, well built, just a good guy. He was a friend, and I liked him. Jane, who was my real best friend, had a crush him. So did Jenny Folds, the girl across the street. She really had a crush on Mike. It was always Mike. I knew him as Mike. We never talked about Germany. I don’t know why we didn’t, but we didn’t. To me he was Canadian. We knew Eva and Antoine had come from Germany, we knew that, but it didn’t figure.

  He never mentioned his biological father. I never knew about the family being actors. I never knew about that stuff. He was in something at high-school and it was Ken who told me it was The Mikado. He wouldn’t have been on stage even, because it was puppets, but he did the voice. Ken apparently saw Eva, Mrs. Stehr, later, but after high-school I didn’t see Mike at all. And after they moved from Wellington Street, I never spoke to Eva, or Mrs. Stehr, again.

  But anyway, we were friends, the whole gang of us in that neighbourhood did things together. We danced, all of us, but he was a great dancer. I loved to dance with him when we went to the dances after ball games. I had my own girlfriends and we would probably meet up at football games and

  basketball games.

  KEN

  The thing I remember most about them is their family dog, named Romeo, and how traumatized the family was when they had to put him down. It had hip dysplasia, and it was obvious to everybody who knew the family that that dog was suffering. He should have been put down earlier than he was. But the family just couldn’t cope with destroying it. There was some story about how it had saved them once. Mike said that the dog had been involved in his escape from Germany. It must have been during or just after the war. In Berlin, the dog had come to their rescue and helped them. They loved that dog. It was so hard for them to see it go, to betray it, in a sense. They suffered to an unusual degree over that, the whole family did. Eva, Antoine, and Mike.

  After Romeo, Eva took up the breeding of Siamese cats and she had the poodles, one of which won top bitch (of all breed) at the CNE in Toronto. Eva knew what she was doing. The kittens were selling for $50 dollars at a time when no one paid anything for a cat. One day, Mike and I were trying to calm Eva while working to save a kitten who’d got caught in the heating ducts. There was so much time and effort involved in both the physical grooming and the training. The rest of us could play with cats and dogs, but there were limits. Mike enjoyed animals but that
side of him was eclipsed by Eva’s enthusiasm.

  You couldn’t call Romeo an ordinary animal. He was a big German shepherd, and he was maybe the only piece of their past which they didn’t hide. Romeo was their signature. Losing him was like losing part of their identity, an identity which both shamed them, and made them proud. You could understand that dog in a lot of different ways.

  Trepliov (Konstantin Gavrilovich Trepliov, the Russian Hamlet at the heart of Chekhov’s play.)

  A psychological oddity—that’s my mother. Oh, there is no doubt about her being very gifted and intelligent: she’s capable of weeping bitterly over a book. You mustn’t praise anybody but her, you mustn’t write about anybody but her, you must acclaim her and go into raptures over her wonderful acting.

  BUDDY (Family friend)

  He died when Woodstock was on—Woodstock, the rock n’ roll concert. He died in New York. Correct? Well you see that was years ago. The best person to talk to about Michael would be Janine Blum. She was good friends with Michael in the Soo. They were in the same class at high-school, a few years ahead of me. I was pretty close to his parents, Eva and Antoine, later, in the early sixties, and I remember when he died; Eva was pretty traumatized by that. It was an accidental death, correct? He had been taking sleeping pills and had started drinking and the combination was one of those accidental deaths. I don’t recall Eva talking much about Michael. They might have been estranged or something. I’d been aware of him in high-school, but it was years later that I got to be friends with Eva. As I said, the best information you can get is probably from Janine.

  KEN

  Janine Blum was his girlfriend. Her father didn’t approve of Michael, who came from a lower social standing. So that was a bit of a problem. Anyway, he soon left to Montréal. At McGill, I heard he studied chemistry. I don’t know. I wasn’t at McGill, Michael and me had gone different ways by then. But I remember hearing that the wife of one his professors at McGill had a thing for him. She was a much older woman, and apparently this professor found out and Mike got worried and then rejected her—Michael rejected this woman—and she then retaliated somehow and made trouble for him. I don’t know where I heard that.