This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  RHEUMATIC FEVER

  An inflammatory disease. Rheumatic fever may develop after an infection with streptococcus bacteria, such as scarlet fever. It usually affects children between the ages of six and fifteen. Sequelae are limited to the heart.

  DIPTHERIA EXPOSURE

  Do not forget the acute infectious disease caused by the bacteria Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Do not forget the diphtheria outbreak in 1949 at the DP camp in Lahr. You were fourteen. All you had to wear on your feet were those crepe-sole shoes. No defence against bacteria that can spread through your bloodstream to other organs, such as the heart, and cause significant damage. More precisely, with an infection of this sort the fibres of the myocardium—the walls of the heart—are thinned and its cavities dilated.

  Michael, I’m thinking of you in these terms: thin walls of a cavernous heart, a cavernous heart of thin walls.

  MUMPS

  No one remembers what these are. Mumps might come from ‘mumble’ or from ‘lumps’. In any case, the mumps are what you had a severe case of as a child, this according to your pal Ken Taylor. The mumps are characterized by a painful swelling of the salivary glands. Again an inflammation of the heart known as myocarditis is a rare sequelae of the mumps. Other complications include orchitis, which is the painful swelling of the testicles. Likely you experienced this in spades. In teenage males, infertility is common.

  TONSILS

  Yours were taken out. In the opinion of Dr. Franz, a doctor of pathology from Hamburg, the scars to your myocardium could have resulted from an infection following an operation to your tonsils.

  VITAL SIGNS

  Did you cry? The doctor did not remark on it. But then he’d have been busy, occupied with your vital signs—pulse and breathing and lack thereof—to have had the presence of mind to take a picture of your emotional health. For goodness sake, you were cold.

  PHYSICAL FINDINGS AND PATIENT HISTORY: SUMMARY OF THE EVIDENCE

  You had your tonsils taken out, one testicle is smaller than the other, and at time of death there was a rogue gland functioning in your pituary region. To make matters worse you were possibly infertile due to your teenage case of the mumps. Them’s the lumps. Still the origin of those scars to your myocardium are bewitching, the etiology ranges from scarlet fever to diphtheria to an infection to your tonsils. Enter signs and symptoms and cue the storm clouds: episodes of insomnia and anxiety. What caused these? What causes a mature person to lose the ability to sleep? Worry. Adrenaline. Loneliness. Uppers. Did you simply bite off more than you could chew?

  The Upstanding Young Doctor at ASKLEPIOS KLINIK ST GEORG

  Doctor Franz is without doubt an ideal follow-up candidate if it comes to a more in-depth exploration of the rheumatic fever/jaundice hypothesis. But Dr. Wuehler, the attending at St Georg’s, he ultimately might be the one to contact for more facts about the last hour of your great escape. He is our best bet for the whereabouts of you, Michael, for the upstanding fellow from St Georg’s in Hamburg was the last person to have laid hands on you, the last of all to apply pressure to your by now much maligned heart valves (which, it must be said, were not equal to the task).

  NADIR OR ZENITH

  You were not tapped for a leading role as your cousin Sybille once told me, were you? The champagne did not flow after a successful opening night. No, probably not. Sybille’s version of events doesn’t add up. Much of the evidence about you is misleading. The type of life you lived in Hamburg is your business. But again, I don’t suppose you were on the way up, as Karl claims you were. Or were you? I just don’t know. Were you at the nadir or the zenith? Had you finally found the solution to a long-term problem, or had you dug yourself deeper into the hole? The question remains: Michael, were you digging yourself out, or under? Did you feel like a failure at art and at love? I’m beginning to see how nothingness and emptiness and impotence were leitmotifs for you all of your life. You were not German, not really Jewish, not Canadian, and neither on the rise nor in decline, not at your Nadir nor perched at the Zenith. For all that, or because of all that, you had a cavernous heart. For sure you had that, and thin skin. I can hear it, and you beating yourself up, over nothing, underground.

  BUBBLES

  I have taken a couple of lessons, and have made progress. My teacher told me about ‘the bubbles’, i.e. on stage the actor fully exists inside three spheres; the bubble of ‘I’: internal monologues and soliloquy; the bubble of ‘You and I’ : dialogue; and the bubble that contains ‘You and I and the world’: no question this last bubble is a big ugly bubble, and a messy place. I have learned also about timing and beats.

  GUARDS

  They—the guards and gardeners, the critics and ferrets, the sentries, the goons en masse—have every advantage but the urge to escape.

  YOU PUT A SPELL ON ME

  Yes you did. My paranormal twin. All along there has been identity repression and assimilation, acting and becoming, diaspora, exile and escape, stateless persons of undetermined nationality, immigration and assimilation anew, sublimation and trials of self-actualization, and the hopeful hard suffering of the birth of the true.

  ESCAPE COMMITTEE

  It’s basically you and me, Michael. We make a plan and flip for who goes first.

  ESSENTIALS OF PLAN

  Do some reconnaissance and find the blind spots in the fence; forge a new identity; pick the location and conceal the trap; sign up a good selection of stooges and diversionists; wear long woollen underpants; use a spirit level; paste a fat lamp to your forehead; tunnel like hell.

  SECURITY PRECAUTION # 1

  Keep your plan a secret. At Stalag Luft III only twelve men out of the hundreds involved making the tunnels had actually known the entire escape plan. Roger Bushell and the escape committee held the cards close to their chests. Similarly, Michael, you kept your Hamburg plan secret; secret from your wife, from your peers and from your parents. I expect you were not yourself aware of the ending. You never let on, anyway. If you’d let the cat out of the bag, you might have tried to stop yourself. You might have modified your diet of barbiturates and milk and whiskey. But Michael, you didn’t let it out. You kept it from yourself until that faint crack that seemed to have come from above, but was issued from deep within, signalled the end.

  RECAPTURE

  Für dich ist der Krieg nicht vorbei. Michael, for you the war is not over. Trust me, and try to show the same resourcefulness the prisoners did. You’re not the only one in history to have been put in an escape-proof situation. Think of Goering’s luxury camp with its machine-gun nests and soil impregnated with microphones and seismographs. By comparison Waldfriedhof is a state-run spa.

  DUTY

  For the Allied airmen escape was no game. They were duty-bound to create havoc and disruption behind enemy lines. It was part of their code of ethics. Same thing here and now, Michael. It is the duty of every prisoner never to give up free will. It is our duty, at least to attempt escape. Even unsuccessful breakouts upset the familiar and disturb the marketplace.

  AUTOPSY REPORT, REVISITED

  Before ending (with a little drama), I would like to return once more to my understanding of the pathology report and the elegant phrase Neubens im Herzmuskel. Michael—you know what this means? YOU WERE NOT WELL. It means you were hurting. Karl raises the worry of childhood exposure to yellow fever. He means scarlet fever. This fits with your case history. But I’m unimpressed by the science.

  Neubens im Herzmuskel, scars to your myocardium, these are technical terms.

  Your heart was broken.

  It was cavernous. It had thin walls. It was easily breached.

  UNFORTUNATE PASSING

  Karl’s letter of 21 April, 1967 stresses you were unwell for quite a while, and that your poor health, i.e. your broken heart, ‘decisively contributed’ to your ‘unfortunate passing’.

  Your scars were t
he result of an original insult, but which?

  Scarlet fever, your doting mother, your absent father—how can we be precise about the natural history of the broken heart?

  IN MY OPINION

  I have taken the best of eight years to reflect, and in my opinion the kicker was not sleeping pills and alcohol. I would trace your killer to the half-glass of milk—the child’s drink, the infant’s soda—which you imbibed for your worrying stomach. In my opinion, you died from exhaustion from a child’s heart broken in 1938. A broken heart launched by the separation of your parents, the little red wheelbarrow of heaviness which you locked from the inside.

  PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

  All that talk earlier about the danger of mixing pills and alcohol when dealing with a narrow therapeutic index suggests you could have deliberately killed yourself in such manner to rescue for your parents some plausible deniability.

  THE FIRE

  When did the fire go out? At the threshold of consciousness you passed into essence.

  CURIO-HAUS

  In the movie, Michael, you kindly assist the Nazi assassins who were tried at the Curio-Haus in 1948, and hung at Hamelin Gaol.

  And in 1967, twenty years enigmatically später, Hamburg is where your life ends. Coincidence? The jury is out.

  STURM UND DRANG

  The alarm sounded. No one came running to find you. There was no manhunt. No grand Grossfahndung. No teamwork, no networking Nazis grinning cheek to cheek. The clock stopped at 6:00 pm—the alarm sounded and then: the connected springs, levers, and cogs wore themselves out, singing and ringing, sturming and dranging.

  Then it was hours before the firemen broke down the door to your apartment. What they found is the territory of medical science. You were in a state, semi or unconscious, in and out of it. Sullied. More than halfway down the rabbit hole. Still: emergency workers with the best intentions rushed you to St Georg’s, where the attending physician, a fine young man, plunged his weight into your ribs, fracturing, splintering, flushing blood, and chasing you, through four chambers of your heart.

  Doing all work possible until all the good went out of that.

  CUT

  Now backtrack. Fast-rewind. To the film—THE MOVIE—release in ’63. Shhh, Michi. It is Germany, March 1944, the 11th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship, etc. Ja, Ja. Das ist Deutschland and Michael you are the blond bimbo on the train. See how you ambulate, no fuss, single-mindedly, with the casual swagger of your superior face. Swaying not much, not much at all because at this point, after a day of shooting, running up and down the Munich-Hamburg line, you’ve got your sea legs beneath you, and your future well ahead and your past bloodless on the tracks.

  FREEDOM

  It must taste great.

  It’s the real thing, no?

  MUNICH

  You’re not at peace. This is the accepted wisdom. Munich is your resting place, but how do you sleep? Not well, if I know a thing or two about you. You were never at ease in your goonskin. Gather yourself together then.

  TRAPFUEHRER

  I’ll push over your stone. And call down the shaft, All Clear! 2

  UNDERGROUND

  It must be exciting. You’re part of the underground. Not the French underground, but anyway. You’re part of a big secret. It’s hard work, the unravelling and disentangling. Use the fat lamp and a prismatic compass. And a spirit level. Now suppose I avert my eyes as you come up for air. Suppose I look the other way at self-slaughter and dismiss what your mother Eva suspected, and what your father Karl would not authorize himself to believe. Suppose I give the all clear, then will you come out, wherever you are?

  You must spit black all day.

  I warn you, I’ll pull you out by the ankles!

  IMPROVISATION

  Follow this rope into the forest. Improvisation is our strength. Gather your things, therefore. We meet at the Sagan station. That’s Neustadt to you. Arrive by dawn.

  OPENING NIGHT

  It’s no use. You live in the past. What time is it? It is past eight. And where are you? Michael, you’re late. Typisch. This evening’s performance will go ahead without you. Neither the flow nor the understanding of the play … This is sad. But show business is show business.

  ALARM

  Have you overslept? Dream of me as I dream of myself, liberated, in Hamburg, pacing the sidewalk of Mühlendamm street below your window, measuring the length between lamp posts, just occasionally pausing like POW David McCallum on the station platform to read from Die Völkischer Beobachter. Another Day of Bloody Losses. Every day is a loss, Michael. Every dawn and dusk, behold some bloody man at loss. You. Me. Me. You. You. Me. Behold. Behold we are lost and never found. Behold bloody lost souls. Understand? Then, if you please, stroll past the front window. That’s all I ask. Proof I have not imagined everything. Proof I’m no crazypants. Ten more minutes. That’s all I can give you. What are you playing at tonight?

  BLOND IS PASSÉ

  Now Michael, only the unsteady percussion of the train’s wheels and the tracks and the carriages, shush and shunted, the buffeting panes and the tripped slosh of metal to remind me that I am rolling through memory as well as time.

  1989

  int-train. The Author is Dead—First episode. Aboard the overnight train to Berlin. Berlin not Hamburg. Not yet Hamburg. All of twenty-four, I sit by the train window, chin in hand like some wise critic of ghostly reflections. Pupils agape, my eyes drink and pull, darkness within wishing for a match without. Over the hours, I slip down the seat and my organism shudders before gliding deeper. Before reaching Berlin, I open my eyes and immediately in the darkness I am conscious of a field of energy neither created nor destroyed: I have company, this is unambiguous. The borderguard—border police, who?—parts the sliding steel door and emerges from my sleep, a totalnightmarian. Wearing leather boots cap belt holster. Short black hair. Blond is passé. I come to consciousness with him speaking the iron-curtain dream language. Passkontrolle. Ihre Pässe bitte. The same old song. A Golden Oldie. The same Anti-Fast-Entry/Exit Wall of Shit. Why have I come? What is my purpose? Passport, visa, ticket. He hums and thumbs my spine: he compares portrait to face, face to portrait, human to race. What if I’m not him? But it cannot be otherwise. I am the one on this train tonight, I begin in a whisper, gaining in confidence, I am the one sitting by the window. Here is my head. This is my head leaning like a book on the glass. And by my nose is my reflection. Trite as I shall ever become, stark as a death mask.

  Now, go away Passkontroller. Go away Nightmarian. Now that same old tripped slosh of metal, to remind me.

  Then to Berlin itself. I buy myself army boots near the Brandenburg Gate. Black leather lace-ups. American or British or French. Russian or German. Old masters or new masters. Punk rock! I slip them on and sit by the wall and wait for an opening. Everything lines up from here. I watch the skies. I compose in my famous blue notebook: The self reports to no one in particular. And date it. Berlin. November 1989.

  Citizens go at the wall with picks and hammers and screwdrivers. Gouging out chunks. Breaking off pieces. The wall spits back stones and cement. I stand aside for the grand wrecking ball to swing (from where it is hung, high, out of sight, aloft) to swing low, through the present, toward the future and back through memory along the return arc.

  Graffiti-crabbed ingots: in purple, in green, in white and black. Fragments from slogans profane and political. Promises private and public. I examine a few pieces and stuff them away in my shoulder bag and start walking. I walk away from that once impenetrable partition, casually, nonchalant as that charlatan POW James Coburn, the manufacturer and bike thief, who slips away in Füssen. In Berlin and without the benefit of Elmer Bernstein’s soundtrack, I walk for hours and hours in a daze of unknowing and already gone: not underground, but like a mole burrowing blind in search of sight before I knew the first thing abo
ut you. Gone and forgotten and no one is qualified to come after me, to round me up, and bring me back, except someone like you.

  But you never came, Michael. Therefore.

  PLAY

  Let me bring you up to date. October 2012 from Ottawa. A typed note. Ordinary paper, no black border, standard postage. Forget Express. Forget I have been on the Autobahn driving eight hours a day. Forget I need a vacation. Forget I have terrible news. Forget ‘our Michi died last night in Hamburg’. Forget I made a death mask of you. Forget if there is something stuck in your ear. Forget you don’t like worms. Forget grubs. Forget ants. Forget Piglet Lamond. Forget Roger Bushell. Forget Wally Floody. Forget the Mirisch brothers of The Mirisch Brothers Inc. Forget Steve McQueen.

  How shall I put it? Forget the odds. Forget the sad and insane. Escape.

  CUT

  To be a witness, true, detached and devout, of free will, predestination, faith and doubt.

  TICK-TOCK

  We do our bit, we tick and tock, until (you’ll never guess the ending, I dreamt this up):

  Michael: The Last Escape

  A New Production

  Hamburg-Ottawa