by Dennis Bock
“You’re from there,” Ruby said, grabbing Monika’s hand when she heard the voice-over say Fürstenfeldbruck. The Munich Olympiad had been suspended today at three-forty-five, the announcer said. The Israeli team was withdrawing. Günter leaned forward, the magazine rolled in his hand. There was a shot of flags flying at half mast. His eyes rolled back into his head like they’d done the day he inhaled the dry dusty earth of my mother’s garden. Then the voice-over again. Eleven Israelis had been killed, a Munich sergeant, and five terrorists. My mother’s hands fell open. Pictures of a stockinged face peering around a corner came on. As the scene played out, my mother translated for her brother. Her voice softly floating beneath the glow of the screen. Günter’s face didn’t change. Ruby didn’t understand what the announcer was saying.
“What does hostage mean? What’s hostage!”
“Prisoner,” I said. Then the footage of more men in masks, a man throwing a hand grenade into a helicopter as it sat on the tarmac, its still propellers hanging low to the ground like the branches of the tree I’d stood under while watching Monika. There was a moment’s pause before it exploded, a room-filling yellow the same as the rays of sun I’d seen at the lake before my uncle’s arm pulled me back to the surface.
“Juden!” my uncle said, slapping his thigh. He rolled his fish eyes back around from the inside of his head towards me, as if I was to understand something that no one else could. He laughed something else in German I didn’t get and drummed the rolled-up magazine down against my thigh. My mother shot her head around to him and looked at him icily. Didn’t he own me now? I thought. His hand was warm on my leg.
“Okay, that’s enough,” my mother said angrily and scooped the ball of wool from her lap. She put down her knitting needles, took Ruby by the wrist, and marched her up to her room. “I don’t want to be a Juden, I heard her call as she stomped her feet up the stairs beside my mother. “Don’t you treat me like a Juden!”
My mother came back down a few minutes later. She didn’t say anything. She looked at her brother. I could see she was furious. My father put his hands on his knees, about to step between them, his wife and his brother-in-law. Monika was ready to speak. Then I saw something in her eyes that told me this was between brothers and sisters. Not husbands and wives. Not Israelis and Germans and Palestinians. This was about the salt that had pervaded their lives and drained the life from their father, kept the scent of death from the door that June in 1944. This was about cattle cars and blizzards. This was about the heart of my family. Monika was not blood. She would have her turn at him upstairs, alone. Somewhere else, but not here. I watched my mother. I saw her thinking, her fists clasped. I wondered if she could hit someone. Then I saw tears come up in her eyes and she turned and left the room and went back upstairs. Monika got up and walked out onto the porch. My father turned off the TV and told me to get to bed. I closed my bedroom door behind me and sat on the edge of my bed and imagined Ruby across the hall drawing the word hostage in the air with a finger.
Sometime around midnight I got up to pee. I stood over the sound of spilling water, still half asleep, and thought about what my uncle was leaving behind for us—a full pool, a wound in the earth shining in the moonlight. I knew this is how we’d have to leave things. The vacation was over. They were leaving tomorrow.
I went downstairs, through the kitchen and into the dark sunroom that opened onto the backyard, and found Günter in the pool. From the doorway I watched him swim, his long arms powering him through the water, back and forth like a man pacing the length of a small room. I walked out onto the damp grass and crouched in the shadows by the rock garden. For an hour and more I waited like that, expecting him to go under. I pulled a piece of crabgrass from the lawn and sucked the stalk while I watched his darkened figure move through the water. Then I felt the first drop of rain to fall in eight weeks, a light sprinkle, and then the sky swirled and it began to pour. The pool jumped alive and bubbled. I stabbed my tongue into the warm rain, savouring the end of our drought, and formed a cup with my hands. Günter stopped in the middle of the pool and called something out to me then. But I didn’t answer. What if he’d passed something on to me? I thought. I couldn’t move. What if, at the lake, my life had passed into his hands when he pulled me from the water? I heard him call out my name again in a way I’d never heard my name spoken before, a weak fearing voice that carried the secrets I’d never know. I waited like that and listened, the rain on my skin and face beading as the voice called for me again and again through the dark, and finally I raised my cupped hands to my lips and drank.
III
Willy tapped a cane over the cement floor, his eyes rolling in their sockets like heavy wet stones. A roar of applause groaned down through the walls from the open cup of stadium above his head. The torch was being carried through the main gate, he imagined. Behind his glistening stone eyes he imagined a white cloud of doves rising to the sky. As he considered this, the larger of two boys leaning up against the groaning wall kicked the cane out from under the hobbling man and laughed when he fell. “Jews and cripples not allowed,” the boy yelled. He gently nudged the man with his boot. “Verstehst Du?”
Golem
Next summer as we drive down through the foothills of Bavaria, receding blue mountain to left and right, my mother tells us about the cloud of mustard gas that redesigned Willy’s nervous system way back during the First World War. It’s bad and getting worse, she says. That’s why we’re visiting now, while we still can. Somewhere north of Munich she leans back over her seat, left elbow pointing between Ruby and me as we listen. I hear the hesitation in her voice when the part about the gas comes up. Maybe she’s thinking about her father, something they had between them before he died.
“Uncle Willy was there for the fraternization incident,” she says. “That’s what they called it.” This is the Christmas Eve night in the first year of the war when the British stopped firing on Willy and his friends, and Willy and his friends stopped bombing the British. The Christmas when time stopped. My mother tells us he got two goals and an assist playing soccer the next morning on the field they’d cleared between the two front lines. For a moment she stops talking and looks out the window at the blue of the mountains. She puts on her thinking face. I watch her quarter profile, an eye moving with the contours of the roadside. My father’s flipping through the channels on the radio when we enter the side of a mountain, a long dark hole, and burrow deep into the earth. Car headlights pass us in the opposite lane and I think of my mother’s father dying in a salt mine, the brother of the man we’re on our way to see. Outside in the open again, a bright Sousa march suddenly jumps out from American Forces Radio. My mother leans forward and turns it off.
“Right away, from the moment it touched his skin,” she says, “his body grew a mind of its own. It didn’t do what he wanted it to.” She’s back to talking about the gas. Between thought and action, she says, there was a moment’s pause after the poison touched his skin, a dormancy, like the space between the voice and its echo in a deep canyon. This is how I imagine it as she tells us. He feels the delay, the command cascading along his veins before it enters the world through his fingertips, or is breathed into the world on the lips. The moment when the rest of the world seems to fall still and silent. She says her uncle was returned from the war with nothing at all, not a scratch, no wound but the suggestion of simpleness, the air of a man who struggles with the idea of breath before getting down to the business of breathing.
We’ve been on the road for two weeks now. I’ve seen my mother cry tears of joy while handling the gold-knit tapestry of the handmaids of King Ludwig II at Schloss Herren-Chiemsee, the island castle accessible only by boat where my grandparents got married back in 1936 after they met at the Olympics. We’ve walked through the Black Forest and had our portraits painted in the main square in Cologne. My father has played pick-up accordion with a high school friend in Frankfurt. I’ve placed
my hand against the Berlin Wall and wondered who was telling the truth, us or them. As we drive between cities in the Opel my father bought second-hand at a garage in Amsterdam, Ruby and I keep our eyes peeled for deer grazing along the Autobahn and the skinny men with beards who stand at the on-ramps with their thumbs in the air, pointing upwards, as if that’s where they want to go. In the game we invent to help pass the time, a deer is worth five times that of a man. I keep score because Ruby is too young to understand the rules. She’s eleven. I’ll be going into grade ten in the fall.
“It’s like looking at movie film without the projector,” my mother says, turning back to face the highway again, the clicking of her knitting needles starting up over her lap. She’s working on a fall sweater for me. “That’s how he explained it to me when I was your age. The clunking movements.”
We spend hours at a time in the car. The knitting grows louder up front when my mother’s understanding of her uncle’s life draws silence. And when my parents disagree about stopping, which is most of the time. Maybe it’s just being back in the German world that’s affecting my mother this way. The weight of the pavement a few inches beneath our feet fills the car with the illusion of purpose and destination. Sometimes my father drives with the radio on, tuned to a station that plays out the American music we all know, something that binds us, a something we can all sink our teeth into.
My father and I don’t mind the driving. We’re used to it from our storm-hunting when we spend whole days in the car searching out tornadoes. This visit to the Old World will cut into our severe weather season, I think. But for a time the trade-off seems fair. Until my mother’s sick uncle comes into the picture. By mid-morning my mother and Ruby begin pestering my father to pull over. They want to get out and stretch their legs. The few times there hasn’t been anyone to stay with, we’ve slept in bed and breakfasts. When it comes to that my father calls ahead. But usually we stay in the cramped apartments of their old school friends. In the north, a high school chum of my father’s showed us fistfuls of money from the Weimar Republic and told Ruby and me that back in his father’s day a wheelbarrow of the stuff didn’t buy you a loaf of bread.
I don’t question my father’s need to drive. I’d rather be back home scouring the province for tornadoes or stuffing my pockets with chocolate bars at the back of Ramsey’s Drugs or fishing the Joshua for black bass and catfish. But the sheer volume of road seduces me. The world, I’m finding, does not end. I don’t care where we go. Ruby suffers car sickness and takes little white pills to ease her stomach. Sometimes she lays her head on my lap. I wiggle my toes to stop the pins and needles and tap my father on the shoulder. Then I lean forward and whisper in his ear that Ruby needs to stop, maybe it’s a good idea to pull over next chance we get. We’re half an hour from Fürstenfeldbruck. After a pee-break we climb back in. Ruby’s sitting up now, refreshed, less nauseated. My mother starts knitting again. For a time only the clicking of the needles fills the car. Ruby’s looking out her window for deer, eager to catch up. I’m winning, ten to two. Then the needles stop and my mother turns around in her seat.
“I only told you about the gas so you won’t make a big deal about it.” She looks at me, her eyebrows raised. “Got it?”
“Roger dodger,” I say, and it occurs to me that this is the summer I’m going to play tricks on my mother’s sick uncle.
“I’m serious,” she says. Then to Ruby: “Don’t ask Uncle Willy any funny questions, okay, honey?”
“Where do Germans keep their armies?” she sings, rubbing her eyes with the small heels of her palms. She’s heard this one from me. She says it a hundred times a day now. She can’t wait for the answer. “In their sleevies!” she screeches and laughs.
“I mean the other funny, remember? Strange questions about how he moves. Remember it’s not polite to stare.”
“You heard your mother, Junge,” my father says, looking at me in the rear-view mirror. “No wisecracks.” He winks, then starts in on a long bend.
“There’s one! There’s one!” Ruby shouts. “Deers!”
Willy must be in his mid-seventies. A great grinding question mark hooks under the skin of his back. They stand on the sloping grass beside the farmhouse. Willy leans on a mahogany cane. My mother stoops and hugs him. They’re talking quickly in Bayrisch, the Bavarian dialect unknown to my father. He waits respectfully, a little off to the side, until they switch back into German. He’s never met Willy before. None of us has except my mother. He wants to keep driving. But I’m thinking maybe he realizes we’ve been on the road too much lately, that he’s been pushing his luck. When he sees a tear run down my mother’s cheek he knows this rolling vacation’s got to come to a screeching halt. I see him shoring up his resolve. Ruby stands in the open wing of the car door, twirling her hair in her fingers, something she does when she’s sleepy. The country air is heavy with the shade of cattle. I look up the sides of the valley. There’s nothing here but this house, alpine-looking, like a Bavarian postcard. Milking cows pause on the shadowing afternoon hills to gaze at us on the path below.
“Here is my favourite son,” my mother says brightly in German, brushing her cheek with a sleeve. Willy’s face is narrow. A thin man, not much of a farmer, I think. I imagine his mind reach out before his arm moves to shake my extended hand. The delay is still there. It’s more than just a shyness. I remember the story we learned in class of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. By all accounts, the unnecessary war. The war Willy fought. I wait. His shoes point outwards, like a clown’s. They’re on the wrong feet. I want to withdraw my hand, to step back from him. I want to get back in the car and keep driving. I want to look for storms. His hand drifts up between us like an afterthought, a smile drifts slowly across his face. I’m shaking hands with a war wound.
His voice has an old man’s timbre. He’s saying something tome.
“Grüss Gott,” I answer.
“He says you look just like me,” my mother says, translating. I release his grip and step aside. Ruby shakes his hand like a young adult, unfazed.
“We saw deer from the road,” she says, grinning. It doesn’t matter that he can’t understand her. Awkwardly he reaches to her small head and tousles her hair.
From a distance I study Willy’s tic while the grown-ups sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating poppy-seed cake. Ulla, his housekeeper, sits with us. The whole conversation’s in German. Ruby and I sit politely. We clean our plates and wait for our mother to pour out more fresh milk into our glasses. With my rough understanding of German I gather Ulla lives on the farm, a live-in nursemaid in this one-man sanatorium. No one says anything about her husband. Or maybe I’ve missed something. I sip at my milk and wonder if Willy has been married, if anybody ever consented to him. Ulla cuts the corner of the cake with her fork, takes a mouthful, and rises from her chair. Still chewing broadly, she returns from the refrigerator with three white containers and counts out a handful of colourful pills. The table falls silent. When she finishes she pushes them over to Willy and he swallows each, one by one, his milky eyes turned to the ceiling. His hands like claws. He rolls each pill into the small scoop of an unclipped fingernail and lifts it to his mouth like a crane, his wrist pointing outwards. Ruby’s feet paddle under the table nervously until our mother releases us from the kitchen.
We run outside, filling our lungs with air. In the barn I climb up into the rafters while Ruby waits down below. Sparrows dart in and out through spaces between the boards. Dust pauses in the shafts of light entering through cracks in the old walls. Harnesses and wooden crates and dusty skis piled on the thick pine beams above our heads.
“Watch this,” I say, affecting a horrible body spasm. “It’s Uncle Spaz.” I leap into the air and fall twisting, my tongue sticking out the side of my mouth. I come up from the haystack, covered in straw and dust. “Uncle Super Spaz is going to get you.” I lurch towards my sister lik
e a hungry Frankenstein, lead-footed. “I’m going to give you the Mustard Brain disease if you don’t run,” and she takes off through the open barn door, screaming with delight. Her footsteps run across the compound towards the house and the kitchen door swings open and slams shut.
That first night, after supper, my mother and Willy sit apart from us. They linger at the kitchen table while the rest of us settle into other parts of the house. There’s no sign of the laughing I’ve come to expect of these summer nights with relatives and friends. Instead, from the kitchen comes the hushed talking, the unintentioned clink of a spoon against china. My father’s accordion remains tucked away in the trunk of the car.
Ulla goes upstairs. In the living room my father and I study maps of Europe. His eye and finger speed along red and black highways to parts of the country we haven’t been yet. I’m kneeling beside him. He traces down into Italy, France, and Spain.
“We’ll see all of these places,” he says. Then, “Look at this.” He pulls the map closer to him over the hardwood floor. “The great seaports and rivers of Europe. See how all the important towns are collected along the rivers and natural harbours. Here and here and here,” he says, pointing to Bremen, then London, then Barcelona. I lean closer. “This is where we were last week,” indicating the small blue dot near Hanover where we rented a sailboat while Ruby and my mother walked in the trees along the shoreline.
