• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 901 0

nose, in the sidecar of a motorcycle with a swastika flapping in the wind, he was driven by an accommodating member of a motorcycle gang, who agreed, for a fee, to drop him off at sundown at a wooded stretch of the border with Czechoslovakia. And when, at the sound of what he took for a gunshot—but was, in fact, an engine backfire—they suddenly stopped, convinced his time was up, my father held his breath as the motorcyclist dismounted, only to return moments later with a bleeding hare he’d run over, knocked its head against the fender, and asked my father to be so kind as to hold it for him. Fresh meat being scarce, he meant to have it for his dinner.”

The arrival of the entrée, one of the chef’s signature dishes, rack of venison prepared “von Himmel und Erde” (heaven and earth) style, i.e. stuffed with a puree of mashed apples and potatoes, came as a welcome point of punctuation.

She eyed me in between bites with an intense, but not unfriendly, gaze, as if, I thought, considering a rare wild flower, which aggravated my malaise.

To smooth the way for my escape, I let slip that I was leaving early the next morning for a trip to Pozna, Poland, and so, unfortunately, would have to skip dessert and miss the lecture, to pack.

“To Posen?!” she burst out, employing the old German name of the region and city ceded to Prussia following the Congress of Vienna and reclaimed by the Polish in the wake of World War II; promptly correcting herself: “Pozna!” to make clear that she harbored no secret dream of reannexation.

I nodded to indicate that I understood.

“Ich bin auch…I too am”—she hesitated a moment—“das Kind von Flüchtlinge…the child of refugees.”

It was the way she said Kind…child that made the years fall away from her face and gave her voice the candor of innocence.

“I come,” she blinked, embarrassed and proud, “from a long line of Prussian aristocrats, the landed gentry of Pozna, Posen, as it was called back then.

“The War was practically over. The Russians were advancing from the East. It was a winter so bitter and cold the children broke the icicles from the windowsills and sucked them like candy. A decorated tank commander in the Wehrmacht who’d been away a long time, and whom the family thought dead, miraculously broke through enemy lines, and came rolling up in his Panzer in the dark of night to the family estate.”

She described what followed in vivid detail, like an eyewitness, yet with a certain distance in the telling, like she couldn’t decide whether to embrace it or hold it at arm’s length.

“The officer leapt out in his neatly pressed uniform, in which the War hadn’t made a wrinkle, tipped his cap, worn at a jaunty tilt, hugged his two sons and his trembling wife, who took him for a ghost.”

She paused to mimic the hollow look in his eyes.

“That night the officer told his wife he wanted to make a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter.

“‘Are you mad?’ his wife protested in a whisper, not wanting to wake the children. “The War is lost, we already have two sons to raise. Why bring another child into this world?”

“But the officer insisted, and his wife dared not refuse a decorated hero of the Reich.”

Turning away, the theologian’s wife bowed her head to mark a private moment, shut her eyes tight and seemed to be peering inwards, straining, as I suddenly fathomed, to remember the moment of her own conception.

“Bright and early the next day,” she continued, her voice now taking on a strange solemnity, “Father put on his perfectly pressed uniform, set the cap on his head at just the right angle, pausing briefly in front of Mother’s vanity mirror to approve his appearance, said he’d only be a minute, and as Mother watched from the bedroom window, he smiled, patted the protruding cannon, lifted the hatch, climbed in, set the great metal elephant in motion, and poking his head out, waving to her at the window one last time, leapt out and hurled himself under the rolling tread.”

They cleared the table and brought in the dessert, a wild berry parfait that neither of us touched.

“Did she mourn for him?” I inquired.