My Cousin Skinny, page 5
‘Is he?’ said Willi.
‘He’s in Belgium too. I think. Somewhere.’
‘I hope he’s all right,’ said Willi.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I hope so.’ She held his hand for a few seconds more, then moved on to the next cot.
After a few days without his eyes bandaged, Willi could make out the nurses and doctors as dark shapes. Every day he was visited by a different doctor. They all smelled like disinfectant and wore protective masks. Today’s doctor leaned over and lifted Willi’s eyelids. He shined a light into first one eye, then the other. He moved the light around and told Willi to follow it with his eyes. He held up four fingers and asked Willi how many he saw.
‘Four,’ said Willi.
‘Excellent,’ said the doctor.
Willi could find his way around the ward now. He could make out the rows of cots and the shapes of men lying on them. The windows still blinded him. He carried the white stick they had given him. He had to put his face very close to the wall to see the children’s drawings.
He wasn’t supposed to go outside, but he did anyway, just to breathe the cold air, to feel it on his face and hands, to be able to stand up without being shot at, to be away from the moaning and snoring and coughing. Still the artillery thumping in the distance reminded him where he was and where he had been. Sometimes he would cover his ears, but it didn’t do any good.
When the doctor held up the eye chart, Willi could make out the largest letters. And his eyes had stopped watering. Still, when he tried to read a sonnet from his Shakespeare, all he saw were fourteen fuzzy gray lines of type across the page. He had trouble seeing anything in bright light. He couldn’t see faces clearly, and colors were dull.
He was fitted with thick glasses. With the glasses he could see better. If he held the book close to his face, he could make out words ‘the darling buds of May,’ but it still wasn’t exactly reading. Most of the time he didn’t need the white cane. Just on uneven ground or at night going through the ward to the latrine.
‘It will continue to improve,’ said a doctor one day. ‘We’re sending you home. Good luck, Sergeant.’ Just like that.
Willi put on his uniform, put his kit together, and reported to the hospital director to be officially discharged.
‘I know you’re disappointed, Sergeant,’ said the colonel as he signed Willi’s papers. Willi stood at attention.
‘I know you’d like to get back to your comrades.’ He paused.
Willi was supposed to say ‘Yes, sir!’ but he didn’t say anything.
‘Germany hasn’t won the war yet, Sergeant. But thanks to you and millions of other brave young men like you, we’re well on the way.’
Willi knew that was a lie. They were sending schoolboys and old men to the front now. And America had just come into the war.
‘You’ve done your part, Sergeant,’ said the colonel. ‘This proves it.’ He pointed to the medals pinned on Willi’s chest and then tapped them, in case Willi couldn’t see him pointing. ‘His Majesty, the Kaiser, thanks you.’
Willi saluted the colonel, did an about-face, and left the war.
MUNICH AGAIN
The train ride home took three days. The train would stop unexpectedly, sometimes to make way for a train taking soldiers to the front, and sometimes for no apparent reason. Sometimes it was the middle of the night, and the passengers, mostly soldiers, including the wounded, would be ordered off the train. They would crowd into the station as best they could. It would be warm, at least, and if you were lucky, there was turnip soup and black bread. But sometimes there was only a platform and they waited outside in the cold. Or they just sat in a car on a siding in the cold and the dark.
The cars were crowded and they stank. There were not enough seats for everyone. Willi had to stand after they left Frankfurt. His white cane didn’t count for anything. Lots of men were worse off than that.
A few men talked or played cards. But mostly you heard coughing or snoring or moaning, pretty much the same as in the hospital. In Stuttgart they took a guy off the train who had died where he sat. Nobody had realized he was dead until they had all stood up to get off. ‘Hey, Kamerad!’ somebody said, and nudged his shoulder. He fell over. The entire back of his shirt was soaked in blood. They all filed past the dead guy to get off the train. To die on your way home …
The last leg of Willi’s trip – the train from Stuttgart to Munich – had more civilians than soldiers on it. Willi sat down facing a middle-aged couple with a young girl. Her grandparents, he thought. ‘Guten Tag,’ he said. ‘Is this seat free?’
They did not smile or say anything, so he leaned the white cane against the seat and took off his rucksack and his coat. The woman pulled the girl to her and whispered something in her ear. The girl was called Lieschen. They watched as Willi lifted his rucksack on to the luggage rack. When they spoke to one another, which was seldom, it was in anxious whispers, and they didn’t speak to Willi at all.
It was as though his blindness were contagious or dangerous. They looked elsewhere or at their hands in their laps. Only Lieschen looked at Willi. The white stick made her think he couldn’t see her, so when he smiled at her, her eyes got wide and she looked away. But after a while she dared to look back and he smiled at her again. ‘Lieschen,’ said the woman, and pulled her closer still.
After a while Willi fell asleep, and when he woke up a different couple was sitting opposite him, a balding man with a flashy suit and a small mustache. He had his arm around a blonde woman in a fur coat and a dirndl. She had bright red lips. They both were studying him.
‘At the front?’ said the man, cocking his head and smiling.
Willi smiled back at him but didn’t say anything.
‘Going to Munich?’ said the man.
Again Willi didn’t speak.
‘Shell-shocked, I guess,’ said the man to the woman.
‘I guess,’ said the woman, and gave Willi what was supposed to be a sympathetic look. She adjusted her skirt to show a little more of her shapely legs, a little gift for one of Germany’s sad, brave heroes.
The man saw her do it and laughed. ‘You’re shameless,’ he said.
She laughed and kissed him, all the while with her eyes on Willi.
It was snowing a little as the train pulled into the Munich central station. The station was full of people, most of whom were not going anywhere. It was quiet except for the occasional loudspeaker announcement or the squeal of steel wheels against steel rails, and the hiss of escaping steam, as a train came to a stop. People dozed on benches or in corners away from the wind. Some stood by makeshift stoves – steel drums with fire inside – with their hands out, reaching for heat.
Willi climbed into the streetcar and took a seat reserved for invalids. He watched as large snowflakes fell on the dreary landscape. More than three years of war had drained all color from the city, or was it just his eyes? People looked lost, bewildered, half dead. And why wouldn’t they, having been ground down by hunger and fear, by the death and maiming of their sons and brothers and fathers?
The war wasn’t lost, according to the official line. General Ludendorff, the great German hero, was supposedly planning a massive offensive that would push the Allies into the sea. But who believed that? The streetcar rumbled from street to street, and Munich revealed itself again and again: ashen, immobile, all but unrecognizable. Everything was still here, but now it was dead, ossified, crumbling, and at an end.
There was an encampment of men in the small park behind the brick station building at the end of the line. Willi had played in that park as a boy. But now the station building was boarded up to keep the homeless out, and a cluster of tarpaper and wooden shacks had been thrown up around it. A dozen men stood by a steel drum stove.
‘Hey, Kamerad!’ one man shouted, holding up a bottle as Willi walked by. ‘Come join us! Hey, Kamerad! I’m talking to you.’
Willi kept walking and the man lunged and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Kamerad, I’m talking to you.’ Then he noticed the white stick. ‘Sorry, man. C’mon, have a drink, Kamerad.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Willi. The man smelled of sweat and alcohol.
‘Seriously. C’mon, Kamerad, have a drink,’ he pushed the bottle against Willi’s chest. Willi pushed it away.
‘Hey, c’mon man, that’s no way to treat a Kamerad.’ He took a drink from the bottle, held it out toward Willi and gave Willi a hard look. ‘Hey, I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re Willi Geismeier, aren’t you? Hey look, everybody, it’s Geismeier, back from the war.’ Now four of the other men came over. ‘You don’t remember me, Geismeier?’ He leaned toward Willi again. ‘Here, take a good look.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Karlo. He’s blind.’ A couple of the men laughed at that and turned back to the barrel where it was warm.
‘The son of a bitch doesn’t remember me,’ said Karlo.
‘I remember you,’ said Willi.
‘Yeah? So, what’s my name?’
Willi turned to go.
‘What’s my name, Geismeier?’ he said, and grabbed Willi’s arm again.
‘Let go of my arm,’ said Willi.
‘Or what?’ said Karlo.
‘Just let go of my arm,’ said Willi.
‘The son of a bitch was always too good for the likes of us, Karlo,’ said the other man. Now he remembered Willi too. The rich kid. ‘Just let him go. He isn’t worth it.’ The man steered Karlo back to the fire. ‘So long … Kamerad Geismeier,’ said the other man.
‘So long, Kamerad,’ Karlo shouted. ‘See you at the barricades.’
HOME
Willi rang the bell and waited. Klaus Zeff, the family’s caretaker for as long as Willi could remember, came out of the house. When he recognized Willi, he let out a cry and broke into a run as best he could. He unlocked and opened the gate and threw his arms around Willi.
‘I wrote that I was coming,’ said Willi.
‘We didn’t get your letter,’ said Klaus. ‘You’re here, though. That’s what matters.’
Klaus kissed Willi on both cheeks.
‘Mama and Papa?’ said Willi.
Having heard Klaus cry out, Willi’s mother and father were waiting just inside. Klara Zeff too. And they gathered Willi into one gigantic embrace, with their sobs turning into laughter and then back again. Willi felt loved and smothered at the same time. He closed his eyes and wished they would stop.
They continued to fuss over Willi, helped him off with the rucksack, then his overcoat. Someone asked him how the trip home had been. Someone else wondered was the train crowded? How long had he been underway? Would his eyesight come back? Willi said he didn’t know. Was he home for good or would he have to go back? Willi said he didn’t know.
Willi asked about the men camped at the station.
‘They’re from the neighborhood,’ said his father.
‘I know,’ said Willi. ‘Karlo Levinski. I know.’
His father named those he knew. ‘Out of work. Down on their luck,’ he said. ‘They’re mostly harmless. They’re rude. That’s about it.’
Willi wanted nothing more than to be alone. ‘I’d like to lie down,’ he said. Their love and attention was too much to bear.
Willi’s room had been closed off, so it was cold inside. Willi opened the radiator and it rattled and hissed. He stepped to the high window and looked out over the garden. Snow drifted down and settled on the iron furniture, the bare trees, the wall, the steep tile roof of the carriage house. Beside the carriage house, there was a chicken coop, built after he had left for the war and food had become scarce. Willi couldn’t make out the vegetable garden but he knew there was one down there somewhere. His breath fogged up the window. He made lines in the fog with his finger. Then he wiped them away.
The familiar pictures were still on the walls – watercolors his mother had made in her youth. His diplomas from his year in England and from the Munich police academy hung side by side. His mother had put them up while he was away. His books were there – Shakespeare, his German and English dictionaries, Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon – an encyclopedia, and all his police manuals, and the notebooks full of his notes and speculations. It all seemed to be the remains of another life, familiar but having nothing to do with him now.
He picked up a Shakespeare volume and flipped through the pages. An old ticket from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon fell out and fluttered to the floor. He stared at it then left it where it lay.
Willi lay down on the bed, his hands folded behind his head. He woke up from a deep sleep three hours later to what he dreamed was gunfire but was actually the sound of his father knocking on the bedroom door.
‘Sorry, son,’ said his father, seeing the startled look on Willi’s face. ‘Come to supper. Mulli’s anxious to see you.’
Mulli was Willi’s grandmother. The baby Willi had heard her name Elly Mueller as Mulli, and everyone had called her Mulli ever since. Her husband, Leonhard Mueller, had died when Willi was four. Mulli had moved into the Geismeier house for a while, but then moved back to her old apartment near the university. As a boy, Willi had loved to go there and spend the night. She kept a bed made up for him with plenty of pillows and a big down quilt. At first she would come on the streetcar to fetch him and his little suitcase, but eventually he could get there on his own. Years later, when the war started and times got hard, Mulli moved back in with his parents.
Klara Zeff had made a liver dumpling soup, an omelet with eggs from the chickens, and an assortment of roasted vegetables – leeks, cabbage, carrots, from the garden. There were great slabs of black bread. Given that people were hungry all over Munich, it was a plenteous, even luxurious meal.
‘You’re home,’ said Mulli, not quite believing it. She touched Willi’s cheek. Her fingers felt icy; Willi wanted to pull away, but he didn’t. Her hair had turned white since he had last seen her. She was thinner, her skin looked like parchment now, her pale blue eyes were rimmed in red.
After dinner, Willi and his father went and sat in front of the fire. His father took a cigar from his vest pocket. It had been half smoked earlier in the day. He stuck a match and drew on the cigar until it glowed. He held it up in front of him. ‘That’s how it is, Willi. These days you smoke a cigar until it’s done.’
Geismeier Ceramics had done a good bit of belt-tightening during the war, he said, like a lot of businesses. The Munich municipal government, their principal customer, stopped expanding the sewer system when war broke out. For a while they tried to maintain and repair the existing system, which meant they still needed the Geismeier seamless ceramic pipe, still the best and most cost-effective solution available. But soon the war was sucking up all the money that had been for roads, buildings, sewers.
The army became a customer early in the war. They were building and modernizing military bases. But that too stopped as the war had dragged on. So he had cut his own salary by half and then by half again. All the workers had agreed to pay cuts as well, as long as he kept them on the payroll, which he managed to do. On the plus side, there had been a few manufacturing innovations that would cut costs, thanks to the work of a bright young engineer he had recently hired.
‘How is the business doing?’ said Willi. He hadn’t heard anything his father had said.
‘Things are tight now,’ said his father after a long pause. ‘Willi, I’d like you to come work with me, to take over some of the administration. It would be good for you, get you out into the world again. I know …’ He let his voice trail off.
‘I need time, Papa. I can’t see well enough to do anything right now.’
‘I understand, Willi.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said Willi. How could anyone understand?
‘I know you’ve been through terrible things for the fatherland.’
Willi stared into the fire.
‘I spoke to Benno. He thinks he could find some administrative work at police headquarters …’
‘Not now, Papa. With my eyes.’
‘Is it getting better?’
‘I don’t know, Papa. I can’t even read right now.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Willi. Come to the office with me once you’ve rested up a bit, whenever you feel up to it – take your time, and I’ll find something useful for you to do. Just to keep you active, you know. Just take your time.’
My time? Take my time? It doesn’t work like that, thought Willi.
THE ENGINEER
Willi felt broken. He was not in the war, but the war was in him. His sleep, when it came, was filled with dreams that brought it all back. He sat alone in an empty train that never arrived anywhere. It sped through one station after another, the car rocking from side to side, the wheels clacking on the tracks. Or he was being chased through an endless trench in mud up to his knees. He was surrounded by dead and mutilated bodies and someone was crying out for help, but he couldn’t find them. Or a clownish man was stuffing body parts into his mouth until Willi woke up with a start, unable to breathe.
During the day he was more or less free of the horrors, although there was an emptiness where he had once imagined his soul resided. He tried to read his beloved Shakespeare – he had the complete works in English and in the August Wilhelm Schlegel translation. But the war had changed Shakespeare’s dramas too, whether tragedy or comedy, into a catalogue of horrors – cruelty, malevolence, greed, insane ambition.
Some men appeared somehow to be able to remove themselves from what they had lived through, what had been done to them, and what they had done to others. They pulled themselves together, got back to the lives they had left behind, took up old occupations and habits, found something that at least resembled happiness.
But then there were the others, like Karlo Levinski, who had accosted Willi at the station, whose ruination was thorough and complete. Karlo had been in the trenches for two months, almost all of it under nearly constant attack from French mortars. Only two months. Except, as most men who had been there would tell you, time does not exist in hell. Two months or two years: it is all eternity.
