Olympia

by Dennis Bock

  I knew that my mother spent her war years in the north of Germany, trapped there among falling bombs. She told me about brushing her teeth with salt, the constant drought under her tongue, how they ate nothing but salted cabbage. She told me about the dead man who fell from the sky and lay in the front yard of their house through the month of May and into June and how an old woman from the neighbourhood came by with a bucket of salt every week and sprinkled it over the body to keep the fumes down until the town came and took him away.

  She, my uncle, and their mother—the father already halfdead in the salt mines near Odessa, the mineral of dehydration sucking the liquids through his skin, his eyeballs, bringing his lungs, his hunger to the ridge of his teeth. The three of them, six months in a basement. And when the end of the war finally came they were collected onto railcars and rolled over the great smouldering landscape to the shores of the Gulf of Riga where they were released like sickly cattle into a February blizzard. Then hopping trains to get back, holding her little brother’s hand dry with fear as they ran, and she the hand of her mother, the three of them grasping for the invisible hand that reached from the tousled boards of departing freight cars and missing, always missing that train, that hand, walking and waiting and running again. Four months to return home and nothing left but stories of salt and drought, stories that in my boyhood meant as much to me as television, as the map of the un travelled world.

  Before Uncle Günter came that summer, I found purpose in the meaning of those stories. Even then I used them to protect myself. I needed those train stories to protect me from the other meaning of cattle car. But the salt connection didn’t occur to me until I saw Günter down there at the bottom of our bone-dry swimming pool. I didn’t understand the salt then, what the drought behind my mother’s tongue meant, what it was doing behind her brother’s eyes. All I saw was the train they rode up to the hanging lip of Sweden. In school we’d seen films of Jews rolling into the camps on those cattle cars, thousands of them at a time. The image of my mother and her little brother aboard one of those wagons shining in my head as brightly as they shot out from those dark spinning reels at the back of the classroom melded with stories of displacement and organized death. After history class I dreamt my mother came to me with forgiveness, sometimes begging. “Peter,” she said. “Sweetheart, we all suffered. No one person more than the next.” But in my dreams and in my waking life I didn’t believe her. I’d seen those films of men and women and children, ghosts already, waiting to die. I told my mother’s story to my teachers and to anyone who would listen. I used it to show how we had paid. That the war had come to us as well.

  She was losing water. The summer drought had already been declared. It was in early August, when my uncle and Monika came to Oakville to spend those weeks with us, that we realized where the problem lay. Hairline cracks, practically invisible, were spreading like transparent veins along the walls and the bottom.

  Uncle Günter and his wife Monika were from Fürstenfeldbruck, a small town outside of Munich. In the letters we got before they arrived they said they planned to stay with us for six weeks, with a weekend trip here and there around the province and down into New York. They wanted to get away from Munich before the Olympic Games quadrupled the size of their town. But once Uncle Günter saw the condition our pool was in, he wanted to crawl down to the bottom and begin repairing those invisible cracks, a job, he assured my parents, that would take three, maybe four days. That’s how he came to take hold of our summer the way he did, and to prolong our thirst.

  Günter and Monika spoke German with my parents, although when Ruby and I were around—which was most of the time—Monika spoke English to us in a British accent. She sounded like Diana Rigg from “The Avengers.” She had spent the war years in England, she told us. Günter’s English wasn’t as good as my parents’. I’d long since been unable to hear their accent, but during open house at school and around the neighbourhood I knew it revealed them as the immigrants they were, the tellers of war stories.

  Everything I saw in Günter, everything he did that summer, everything I heard him say—in German and in his broken English—I attributed to the war. The war had shaped him like it had not shaped, could never shape, my mother. He was tall, taller than my father, with a sunken chest that looked as though it were pushing the life out of his heart and lungs. At school we called kids like him fish eyes. He didn’t look at you so much as stare, blinking nervously over those protruding, round mirrors. He was a construction worker, his large calloused hands constantly moving at his sides like the sands of a shifting desert floor.

  When we arrived home after picking them up at the airport, we walked them around the house, showed them the guest room with the view to the street and a thin slice of Lake Ontario, her winding shoreline already receding for the dry air that had been haunting our summer. We took them into the backyard where my mother showed them her garden. Ruby and I followed behind at a safe distance, listening to their foreign voices and punching each other in the arm. My mother pulled aside the browning rhubarb leaves she’d been trying to keep alive beside the peach tree and offered up a scent of hard Ontario soil to her brother’s nose. I watched him sniff a stream of dust. His fish eyes rolled back into his head. It looked like he was going to hurt himself. He inhaled a second time, even deeper. This was my mother’s brother? I thought. My uncle? I watched his eyes roll back around to the world, to me, and a smile pull at his mouth and cheeks. The dirt drained off between my mother’s fingers. Ruby gave me a shot in the shoulder and took off around the house.

  The five of us walked across the grass and looked down into the dry pit of our swimming pool. My father was the Mister Fix-It of the family. That spring he’d repaired all the eaves on our house in one day. He considered, his hand on his chin. “Ich habe keine Zeit für solche blöden Sachen,” he said, pointing over the dry hole and looking at his sister. He didn’t have time for such imbecilic things, he said.

  Uncle Günter jumped down onto the blue cement of the shallow end, sank to his knees, and ran his hands over the walls and floor. He closed his eyes. He looked like a blind man looking for a fallen key. He slid on his haunches down into the deep end and did the same thing. When he finally climbed back up onto the deck and started talking in German, I heard my mother and father begin to say no again and again. Nein, nein, nein. But Günter shook his head and smiled and rubbed his dry hands together. Monika stood beside me, frowning, but why I couldn’t tell.

  Günter was bent on fixing our pool. My parents didn’t like the idea. He’d flown here with his wife to visit his only sister and the brother-in-law he’d never met before, and their two children, and the first thing he wanted to do was to get to work plastering the walls and bottom of a dried-out hole in the ground. That’s not why he’d come, they reminded him. But when they found him down there the next morning slowly sanding the chlorine film and dried algae off the walls, they couldn’t coax him out.

  “Okay,” my mother said in English later that morning on the deck, looking down, a cup of coffee in her hand. “A day or two of this, then the vacation starts.” Günter looked up and smiled and gave her a mock salute.

  “Maybe this is his way of getting over culture shock,” my father said on the front porch the second night after Uncle Günter and Monika had gone to bed. I was upstairs in my mother’s sewing room, my head pushed out into the night. “It’ll pass. He’ll snap out of it soon.”

  The great unknown in Munich was who would take home the most medals. How many consecutive backflips Olga Korbut could manage before she spun off into the clouds. The sound of my uncle working in the backyard drifted through the open living-room window while Ruby and I, dressed in matching tracksuits, watched the Games. We were both going to be Olympic gymnasts. Ruby lay on the floor, her chin cupped in both hands, studying the impossible postures of her heroes. She sat in the splits for hours at a time. I did one hundred push-ups every morning and held ha
ndstands during commercials. The Canadian team was twelfth out of fifteen. I fantasized about how things would be different if I’d been born Romanian or Russian or Japanese. Anything but who I was.

  Around our house that summer the great mystery was how long Günter could sit at the bottom of our pool drinking cups of coffee and saying “Verflixt heiss!” to himself as he dragged his plaster-covered sleeve across his forehead. Every afternoon when my father got home from work he found Günter in the kitchen leaning against the counter drinking coffee, the peach or gooseberry or rhubarb pie my mother had made for that evening’s dessert sitting half-eaten on the table. In the next room Ruby and I dreamed of gold medals and of our first real swim of the summer. Rain threatened but never finally came. It hadn’t rained since early July. It felt like the whole town was burning up. And at five-thirty I watched a frown fall over my father’s face as he walked past us on his way to the bathroom to get cleaned up before supper.

  I felt the tension seep through the wall of that foreign language that first Saturday with my uncle and Monika. It was a hot and sticky evening. We ate at the picnic table under the tall pines in the backyard. I felt something when my mother and Günter spoke to each other as clearly as a hand brushing over my face. But something as subtle and indistinct as water draining from the shell of our pool. I imagined she was upset because her brother was denying something of her hospitality.

  “Beautiful,” my father said, sensing something dangerous.

  I bit into my hamburger. “One of the biggest jobs we’ve ever done.” He began to tell us about the boat he was designing at the shop, a sixty-footer on order from Bermuda. Then, for Günter’s sake, he switched into German. I wondered if the Bermudan team had won any medals so far. Monika was sitting across from me. I put down my burger, reached for the wine bottle beside her plate, and filled her glass. My mother was always reminding us to be polite. Monika pulled her long hair behind her ear, touched my arm to say enough. Her touch ran to the pit of my stomach like a vein of butterflies. My uncle looked at me from the other end of the table. I blushed. My father stopped. Neighbours on the other side of the cedar fence were playing croquet. Someone gave the ball a good whack.

  “We got a bronze in sailing today,” I said, clearing my throat. “Soling class.” Monika looked at me blankly, then shook her head. “That’s a three-man keelboat. You guys got a bronze in the Flying Dutchman class.” I looked at Günter when I said “You guys,” and blushed again. Monika had a beautiful face. There was a silence. She looked at me and pulled her hair back behind her right ear again. Women my mother’s age never wore their hair below the shoulder. My uncle sipped his wine. My mother looked at me and smiled.

  “Looks like we’re neck ’n’ neck,” my father said, coming back out to English. “A bronze each.”

  I think my father was the first one to see how things were going to go between my mother and uncle from that time on. When the silence came the following evening, he quickly asked Ruby and me to put on our own little Olympiad. Right there, in the middle of dinner. “Okay,” Ruby said happily, without any coaxing, and bounced across the parched grass before our mother could protest, cartwheeling and backflipping and spinning through the air. When she came to a stop, panting and smiling, she threw her arms up to the sky and thrust out her small chest. My father stood up in his seat. “The judge in blue awards a perfect ten.” When she came back to the table, I jumped up onto my hands, the world turning upside down, the grass suddenly my sky, and held the earth against my palms and fingers as long as I could. Atlas inverted. From there I saw my uncle staring at me stonefaced.

  Ruby scored higher than I did, but I knew that was because she was younger and that our mini-Olympics were meant to bring us together. I knew they were meant to head off something coming between my mother and my uncle. And for a while they did. That evening after supper Monika sat in a lawn chair out on the grass with her wineglass hanging low to the ground, whistling out scores along with my parents until the August light began to fold in upon itself and the sounds of croquet balls and the splashing of distant swimming pools grew faint and cool around the neighbourhood. When I let go of the earth for the last time that evening and returned to my feet, blood resuming its equilibrium, my uncle was gone.

  We began clearing away the table, everyone except Uncle Günter taking his or her share back to the kitchen. He was standing out on the front porch, alone, his hands in his pockets. I saw him there when I delivered my first load of dishes. Back out by the picnic table, I saw my father walk across the lawn and pause at the edge of the dry swimming pool and look down at the hard, cracking cement. I watched his face drain of all the joy that had filled him at our performance, all the pleasure that had been his, as if that empty hole in the ground were sucking up his vitality and his pride. No one else seemed to notice his grief the first night he stood at the edge of the pool, shaking his head in disbelief. At the time I didn’t think it had anything to do with Uncle Günter’s slow work, or the tension between my mother and her brother. I thought it was my grandmother. How she’d drowned the year before. I guessed he was looking for her down there in some way. These people had brought from Germany unwanted memories, unwelcome stories, along with their appetite for wine and reparations. I guessed he was thinking about losing his mom.

  By late August, Olga Korbut was wowing the whole world and Uncle Günter was up to eight coffee breaks a day. He wanted to stay down there. Working and standing around. My mother and father wanted him out. Monika had taken to borrowing the Chrysler and disappearing every day. I guessed she’d had enough of waiting for Günter. She drove to the Elora Gorge, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Detroit. She went to Toronto a couple of times a week, to London, to Kingston, and Wolfe Island. When she was gone, when an event Ruby and I didn’t much care for came on TV, we went out to the backyard, hung our feet over the side, and watched our uncle stand around at the bottom of the pool. On the grass we played under the sprinkler to bring home to him our desperation, our need of water. I thought the pool would remain dry forever. I walked around the house all day, drinking water from a glass. Günter had become a fixture down there, his trowel, the cement mixer my father had reluctantly borrowed from a friend from work, the three moon-eyed bubbles of the level watching his slow dance among the forgotten artifacts at the bottom of a dried sea.

  One day, after playing in the sprinkler, we sat on the deck with our glasses of water and listened to Günter speak to us. Neither of us understood a word. For the whole afternoon he told us what sounded like stories. We sat there, embarrassed to stop him, forced to listen to the end of his ramblings, sipping, forever sipping. Sometimes as he spoke he became angry and then immediately fell silent, or laughed and slapped an open palm against his thigh. We sat at the edge of the hole in the ground and watched him move like a lion in a pit among his tools, picking up things and examining them, holding them up to the sun as he spoke. Clouds of dry cement dust rose from below and slowly enveloped us and caked our throats. He covered palm-sized patches of wall as if throwing a white cloth over an old movie set from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.

  On a Saturday after supper, after Günter and Monika had been with us for three weeks, my parents left me in charge of Ruby. They took Günter into the city to go dancing at Club Edelweiss, a German-Canadian restaurant where my father sometimes played accordion with a band, or soloed for small parties. When my uncle reluctantly agreed to go, Monika suddenly developed a headache. She said she was tired from her day of sightseeing. She sat on the front porch with Ruby, a glass of wine in her hand, and waved when the car pulled out of the driveway. I went around the back and climbed into the pool for the first time.

  I crawled around in the shallow end like Günter had that first day, exploring. I kept my eyes open. I didn’t know what to expect. But I wanted to go deep. I wanted to find out something about my mother’s brother. I knew nothing but the war stories, the outstretched hands reaching for fre
ight trains. In Decisive Decades, our school history text, I’d read about the Potsdam Conference, the great shifting of borders after the Control Council agreed to deport more than six million Germans beyond the Oder-Neisse line. I knew this was the uprooting of my mother’s people. But about Günter himself I saw now that I knew very little. On my haunches I slid down the dusty incline to the deep end and felt the sides of the pool squeeze the world into a box of evening sky above my head. At my feet extension cords twisted like snakes, trowels sharp and weapon-like, a sawhorse, the three-foot level, a half-used bag of cement, and an old red toolbox.

  “You don’t want to be anything like him, do you?”

  I looked up. The sun was settling behind the apartments across the street from the house. A last shaft of light spiralled between the buildings and lit up Monika’s face at a ninety degree angle, collecting in the glass in her right hand. “What’s down there for you?” she said.

  “I dropped something.”

  “Well, get it quick and get back up here or he’ll rub off on you,” she said. Then she walked away.

  In the kitchen the next day, while I was getting a handful of cookies for Ruby and myself, Günter came in and said in his broken English, “I need help. Come here.” I didn’t answer him. He poured himself a glass of lemonade, drank it down, and walked out of the kitchen. I followed him into the backyard, jumped down into the shallow end, and felt the cookies in my pocket snap into little bits.