It doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes
I hadn’t thought about that day for a while. But I’d never
forgotten it, or what he’d said. I knew so little of him, then in a few
sentences he told me everything – and just for a moment he showed affection,
something he never did.
I told Mom about it and what he’d said, not then but a month
or so later, when he’d left us, as we all knew he would.
“That’s quite something for your father,” she said. She
emptied an ashtray and a little ash landed on her black mourning dress; she
flicked it away. “Put those paper plates in the trash, please, honey. How did
folks make such a mess in here, you’d think they’d be tidy after a funeral.”
She picked up an empty Schlitz can. “Jesus, how many of these did your damn cousins
drink?”
“Mom, we’re German,” I said. “Sausage and beer. It’s how you
get through a Lutheran funeral.”
She chuckled. Then she frowned. “He never showed emotion.”
“Never?”
“Never.” She looked out the window at the tall trees and the
darkening sky. “They had no tears left, you see. They shed them all early.” She
turned towards me. “What did he tell you?”
“About Vinnitsa,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied.
*
It’s 43 years later and I ain’t 17 anymore; I’m 60 with grey
hair, love handles and sagging tits, and I’m sitting in the same spot on the
back deck of our house amid the wreckage of my life.
I’m a medical billing specialist. Well, that’s what I was
this morning, anyway. I drove down to the office at Main and 14th like I always
do – well, did – and parked on the empty lot next door, and went up to my desk
on the third floor. It’s by the window. It’s the envy of the others, who work
in cubicles and get no natural daylight, just the fierce glare of the
striplights. “You got a great view here,” someone said once and I guess I did,
right out over the carwash, Luigi’s Pizza on one side of it and the sleazy
fried chicken joint on the other. Luigi’s is OK. I get takeout from it now and
then. I’ve got to know the guy who owns it. “You Luigi?” I asked him once.
“Nah, the name’s Vladimir,” he said. “Vlad’s Pizza ain’t got the same ring
though.” I’ll give him that. The pizza was good though and they had loads of
guys working in back. The chicken joint was busy too but I never went in there.
“What do you get with your chicken wings in there?” I asked someone.
“Salmonella,” he said. I passed. But now and then I used the carwash. Not the automatic
rollers. I’d leave the car with them and three or four small, nuggety men with
dark skins and high-pressure jets would fall upon it and clean it within an
inch of its life and vacuum the inside and get rid of the dust and candy
wrappers and empty Cheetos packets that I’m too big a slob to remove.
 |
| U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement |
Well, this morning I sat down at my workstation and switched
on my PC and checked my phone and my email for messages. Nothing from my Ashley.
I was hoping she’d come by soon, haven’t seen her for a month or two, but she’s
kind of busy, she’s a single mom like I was and the father’s a useless P.O.S. just
like her own was before him. I texted her. And I texted Maria. She hasn’t shown
up now for two weeks and the house is a mess. I don’t know where she is.
Then I started processing a claim. Appendectomy. We have a list
of cost codes and it’s just been updated. I open up on screen and start adding
everything up. A day and a night in hospital, and it comes to $7,776. I gulp
and go back through the figures and then I pick up the phone to my boss.
“Bob, I got an appendectomy and the wound dressings come to seven
hundred bucks,” I say. “Are we kidding them?”
“Gimme the CPT code.”
I do.
“Nope,” he says. “We’re not kidding. Charge it up.”
“Is that OK? Who’s gonna pay?”
“Relax. His health plan will pay,” he says.
“Someone pays in the end,” I say.
“Yeah, I know that, you know that, all God’s chillun know
that. How long you worked here, Greta?”
Too damn long, I think. I hang up. I look out the window and
the sun is quite high already. I work on through the billings, checking the CPT
codes, changing some here and there to lower the bills a little. Now and then I
check my phone. No Maria. No Ashley. The buildings I can see through the window
are a series of concrete cubes and neon signs, baking under a pale blue sky. I
long for my back deck and my garden and an ice-cold beer.
I’m still looking out the window and daydreaming when a
bunch of black cars pull up. Big ones, Ford F150s and Ford Explorers and a
Suburban, all with tinted windows. They screech to a stop outside the car wash
and Luigi’s Pizza and the Salmonella House and these guys in flak jackets and
combat pants leap out and they’re armed and they’ve all got ski masks covering
their faces. Jeez, they must be hot in this heat is my first thought, and then
I see the letters ICE on their jackets and realise what they’re doing.
“F**k,” I yell out. Everyone looks round. Bob and several
others are standing by my desk looking down at the street. “Go get ‘em, guys!
Go! Go!” Bob yells. “Send ‘em to f**kin’ Salvador.”
They’re through the doors of all three places now and folks
are streaming out and running, it’s like someone kicked an anthill. I see two
ICE guys jump on a middle-aged woman and bring her down on the road and one’s
got his knee on her back. There’s a short, thickset young man in a T-shirt and
a reversed baseball cap and I see he’s the one who serves me pizza sometimes
and now and then he gives me a wink and sticks on some extra topping. They’ve
got him against the wall of Luigi’s. An older guy is marched to one of the
SUVs, hands pinned behind his back, and kind of thrown in through the rear
doors. Bob’s whooping like a lunatic. His secretary’s got her fists clenched
and is punching the air and yelling Yeah! Yeah! like she was having a f**king
orgasm. “You sick f**ks,” I yell but they don’t hear me. Then one of the guys
from the carwash runs this way and I see him darting through the street door
and the ICE men see him too late but they give chase, and two minutes later the
door of the office bursts open and he’s standing there panting, looking around
with his face set in a sort of rictus of horror and I remember father’s phrase
from long ago, hunted – hunted and haunted, eyes
blind with terror. Bob pushes past him to the door and yells down the
stairwell He’s in here, come’n git him and he’s grinning and two of us
shut the door and turn the catch, but the ICE agents are hammering on the other
side and yelling Open up! United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement!
We are a federal law enforcement agency! and the door bursts open and they
grab him and drag him away. And I sink down into my seat.
“Bob,” I say, “you are a f**king creepazoid.”
*
It wasn’t going to end well, was it.
The HR lady sits me down in her office. “I gotta ask you, Ms
Hauer. You called your supervisor, Mr Burdon, a – “ she mouths the profanity –
“creepazoid?”
“I guess it was a bit mean to creeps, eh?” I say. She
blanches a little. She’s very young, I reckon mid-20s, perfect makeup, a
well-cut suit and just the right amount of jewellery, and I’m 60 with saggy
boobs and sitting there in a tee shirt with my purse on my lap and I’ve just
realised my stash tin’s poking out of it.
“Mr Burdon says there’s been long-standing performance
issues,” she goes on.
“That’s because I won’t cover up for his crappy record
keeping,” I say. “Or the way he tries to touch female staff. He has a thing for
Latina girls, you know that? Trust me, he’s a major-league creep. You should
get a life. How much did you pay for that suit?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I was your age, I’d flunked out of college, got
knocked up at a party and had two DUIs already,” I say.
She frowns. “DUIs. I can’t see any traffic violations those
on your file.”
“Oh God,” I say, and then I lose it. I tell he to go f**k herself, then do it again but sideways, then do it on the kitchen table. She blanches a bit more and tells me my health insurance will end at midnight. She takes my ID and has security see me out the building.
*
So it’s the end of the afternoon. I’m sitting on the back
deck, about where I was that warm afternoon 43 years ago. I’m looking at the
garden, it’s grown over with long grasses, not as he’d have had it – my God,
every flower, every twig knew its place; I swear he made them parade in the
morning. But I like it more like this. I saw a possum last night and there’s a
family of raccoons too, and I hear their skirring in the mornings.
Nothing from Maria. But we can guess why now, can’t we.
Nothing from Ashley.
I roll a joint. It’s a big one. It’s a very big one. I’m
gonna get as baked as a damn brownie.
I’m just about to light it when the deck creaks and I look
around and there she is, in her denim shorts and a bikini top with her tattoos
and her piercings and her bare feet and her dirty-blonde hair tousled like she
just got out of bed and I wouldn’t be surprised if she just was in bed, though
who knows who with. Ashley doesn’t tell me everything.
“Seriously, Mom?”
“What?”
“That’s not a freakin’ spliff, it’s a California redwood.”
“I’m celebrating. I just got terminated.”
“Oh, Mom. What did you do this time?”
“ICE raided the pizza joint and the carwash and Burdon was
dancing around with glee and I called him a f**king creepazoid and he is
because he’s a nasty little MAGA piece of s**t and…” I become aware that I’m
crying, and I take out my handkerchief and wipe my face and blow my nose and
it’s full of tears and snot. “What are you doing here anyway?” I say. “I’ve
been texting you for days. Where’s Carla?”
“Guess I sensed trouble,” she says. “I got this little
switch in my brain that tells me. Momma’s f**ked up again, it says. So I thought
I’d come by. I got Carla a sleepover with her friend Ellie. She’s fine.”
“Well now you’re here, you can go to the fridge and get me a
f**kin’ beer,” I say.
She nods, but hesitates, just for a moment, and looks at me,
and her hand seems to be reaching out towards me. Then she turns and goes into
the kitchen and comes back with two ice-cold bottles of beer and we crack them
open and we sit there and for a few minutes we say nothing, passing the spliff back
and forward.
“I did a great job with you,” I say after a while. “I raised
a slutty stoner, just like myself.”
She grins. “Nah, it’s in the genes.”
“It isn’t. You never met your Prussian grandfather.”
“Grandma said he was kind of cold. Not unkind. But not much
small talk.”
“He never showed much affection,” I say. “Except – there was
this one time. When I was 17. A month before he died.” I get up and walk two
yards or so into the garden and turn back and look at her. “I came in about
this time, six maybe? – before dinner. And he’s sitting in a folding chair,
right about here.”
*
This is what I told Ashley then. About Dad. And what he told me that afternoon,
in the garden, when I was 17 and had acne.
I’d been hanging out with the gang at the mall and when I
came in, Mom was busy in the kitchen and I asked to help but she said, “It’s
OK, honey. Go sit with your father in the garden. He likes it when you do
that.”
“Does he?”
“Yes,” she said.
It was a warm day but he was wrapped in a blanket; he was
near the end and very thin, and his cheekbones stuck out and his nose was like
a beak and of course he’d lost most of his hair because you do, though there
were a few wisps left below the crown. I sat on the edge of the deck, waving my
legs to and fro.
“Where you been?” he asked. He had this gravelly voice and
his accent was still strong, after 30 years in America.
“At the mall,” I said.
“What do you do at the mall? Never do I understand,” he
said.
“Hang out. With friends.”
He grunted. I figured Dad wasn’t really that interested in
what I did at the mall. Then I coughed, several times, loudly. “Sorry, Dad,” I
said. “It’s one of those summer colds. I guess I mustn’t give it to you.”
He smiled slightly. “I do not think it makes much difference
now.”
I winced. He seemed to see that he had hurt me in some way
and cast around for something to say. “I nearly coughed myself to death once,”
he said. “And my lungs filled up with fluid. I had pneumonia. I survived.”
“When was that?”
He frowned and I thought for a moment that he wouldn’t
answer, then he said:
“The first winter after the war. The English kept us in open-air cages. In Belgium.”
He’d never talked about the past. Somehow I’d known not to
ask.
He didn’t seem like he’d say any more, so I asked him: “Were
you a prisoner of war, Dad? How long did they keep you?”
“They kept me a while,” he said. “They didn’t believe my
story, you see. I was a Gefreiter, a corporal, when they captured me. I
was near Lübeck when the English took it. I got very sick in the cage and they
moved me to a hospital. An English officer saw me there and said, he’s no
corporal. He had recognised me. ‘I saw him in Heidelberg before the war,’ he
said. ‘He was a student there. I am sure he is an officer. He has put on a
corporal’s uniform to disguise what he has done.’ So they classified me as a C,
a Nazi. And put me in a camp in the far north of Scotland. With all the Nazis.”
“Sounds like you had a blast,” I said.
I saw the ghost of a smile again.
“I got them to check my story. They transferred me to a
better camp and I was even allowed out to work. Then they released me in 1947.
I went back to Germany. But our home was in the East. And even in the West there
was only rubble.”
“Why were you a corporal, Dad? Our family was kinda upscale,
wasn’t it?”
“Yes, we had a small estate in Pomerania. Everything was
lost when Germany collapsed.” He looked at me directly then, and I flinched a
little, as I always did when he did that, right to the end. “I was not always a
corporal. I was a lieutenant. An Oberleutnant. But I was – zum
einfachen Soldaten degradiert… How do American soldiers put it?” He
frowned. “Busted. Down to corporal.”
He stopped again, but I knew there was something that I
needed to understand. I looked at him; he was trying to draw the blanket closer
around him but his hand was thin and weak, and I did what I never did and
touched him, pulling the blanket around his shoulders. I sat back on the deck.
“What happened, Dad?”
“I refused an order.” He looked at me again, and there was
that faint smile. “A German does not refuse an order.”
“What was the order?”
“I should tell you, shouldn’t I.” For a moment he seemed
almost to be talking to himself. “I should tell you. You must know of these
things.” He seemed to be fighting for breath, then he said:
“It was near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. We caught a family of
Gypsies in the woods. My comrades decided they would have some sport, and got
some horses from a village they’d burned. Then they released the family in the
woods and told them to run and if they escaped they could go free. And they
hunted them on horseback.”
I must have looked appalled. He looked at my face and
continued.
“They got the children and shot them in the woods. The
mother they captured and made to dance without her clothes, then they killed
her. I wouldn’t join the hunt. So when they caught the father and brought him
back to our quarters, the Major told me to kill him. I refused.”
I guess I was sort of stunned. I said nothing. After a
minute he said:
“I saw his eyes. Hunted – hunted and haunted, eyes blind
with terror.”
We sat in silence for several minutes. The sunlight
retreated behind the tall trees and I could see him shiver slightly. Then I
said:
“And they busted you, Dad?”
“Yes, they busted me. They didn’t say ‘demoted for not
murdering’, of course. It was said I had shown weakness in the face of the
enemy.”
He seemed exhausted and I sensed he didn’t want to say
anything more. Then he said:
“Go and help your mother with the dinner.”
I stood up, and started toward the kitchen, then I heard him
say: “Come here.” I did, and he pulled me gently towards him and he kissed me
on the cheek. He never had before. He never did again. I drew back and saw his
eyes were glistening a little.
“How could they do these things, Dad?” I asked him.
“You can’t understand,” he said. “Not now. It was a time of darkness.”
*
We’re sitting on the deck still. It’s getting dark. We’ve finished the joint and Ashley has her arm around my shoulders.
 |
The Gypsy Girl Mosaic of Zeugma Gazientep Museum of Archaeology |
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