Bliss, Remembered (22 page)

The next day was Friday—Friday, the seventh of August, 1936—and Leni had given Horst a job that morning in the stadium. She’d had some railroad-type tracks built down a straightaway just to the inside of the running track, with a camera placed on a little tram on the track. The idea was, a cameraman could keep up with the runners, filming them abreast as they raced. It would be a new angle altogether. She’d chosen the five-thousand meters, since the runners ran slower in a long-distance race, so it’d be easier for the camera to stay up with ’em. Unfortunately, the motor that drove the tram made too much noise, so it’d been disallowed as a nuisance. So, Leni needed someone to push the apparatus, and she asked Horst to take on the task.

I couldn’t see him working, though, because that particular morning Coach Daughters had scheduled a trial race in the backstroke. The swimming competition would officially start Monday, with the first heats in the backstroke the next day, so Coach wanted Alice and Edith to have an intramural race in preparation. Then they’d tail off their workouts and be primed for the real thing. Since I was standing there, Mr. Daughters said, “Well, Sydney, you might as well race, too.” And you know what, Teddy?

I coulda won.

I mean, Teddy, I lost on purpose.

Edith usually started out fast, and I found out early on that I was keeping up with her. I was breezing, Teddy. I’d never swum so easy in my life.

There may be some truth in that, Teddy. But it was also the case that even though I wasn’t gonna swim in the Olympics, Coach Daughters had given me a couple tips—you know, when he happened to see me working out with the other girls. Just little stuff—but it did make a difference. Maybe more than anything, though, I swam so much better because there was no stress, no pressure on me.

I knew then what I could do, Teddy. I realized that now that I knew how easily I could swim—how fast I could swim—that I could win the gold medal in Tokyo. I knew it!

Only suddenly, after I made the turn against Edith and Alice, going into the last fifty meters, it occurred to me what the implications were if I did win. Which I knew I was gonna do. Easy. I wasn’t even in the Olympics, and here I was gonna beat the two American girls who were. Just think what this would do to their confidence, Teddy.

I was even with Edith, but she was starting to fade. And Alice, who tended to finish well, was coming up, but Teddy, I had plenty of gas left in the tank. So I did what I had to do for the old red-white-and-blue. I began to slow up. Imperceptibly, you understand, but just enough.

Exactly. I took a dive. The last thirty or forty meters I put on a pretty good act and let ’em both pass me. And now I knew Eleanor was right. I was absolutely gonna be the next Queen of the Backstroke. I almost ran all the way back to the dorm and stayed in my room, because I really didn’t wanna face the other girls.

After awhile, Elsa, the interpreter, came in and said that Herr Gerhardt had called and would pick me up a little earlier than we’d planned. Of course, by now, I was all the talk—the gossip—of the Friesenhaus. I’d even found out that, behind my back, the other gals called Horst “The Red Baron”—he, of course, being the dashing German pilot who’d shot down several of our planes in The Great War. (I’d kept that little nugget away from Horst.)

Elsa, too, was as curious about Horst as my teammates were, so when I merely said “Danke,” after she delivered the message from Horst, she took that as the little opening she needed to pry. “Ah,” she said, “your young man is teaching you German.”

“Ein bisschen,” I replied. That means “a little,” Teddy. Well, you could see Elsa figured she had carte blanche now, if you will excuse me for also meandering into French.

All right, you wisenheimer, silencio, por favor. So then Elsa said: “Ah, and is Herr Gerhardt from Berlin?”

“Well, he is, but he’s studying architecture at Heidelberg.”

“Ah, isn’t that nice?”

“Yes, Elsa, he’s very nice.”

“He speaks such perfect English.”

So I explained how his father was a diplomat and how Horst had learned English abroad. And we chatted on, but, of course, every innocent little tidbit I told her soon spread throughout the premises. It also, by the by, got on a resume they were keeping of all the girls. Horst and I weren’t just an item, Teddy. We were on file. But, who knew?

In any event, after I finally got nosy Elsa out of the room, I put on my best cocktail dress. Well, it was also my only one—a red and green borderprint number that my mother had bought for me when I went to the Trials. The dresses in the thirties were extremely attractive, Teddy. They pinched in at the waist and had a slim bodyline that showed a girl’s curves to the world. There weren’t as many fat gals, then, either. There were more real curves by the bushel.

You bet, Teddy. And my sand was in all the right places, then.

Now the men dressed elegantly, too. We liked to dress up then, in the Depression. Maybe because we didn’t have much, we wanted to be stylish whenever we had the chance. It seems like the reverse nowadays, that the more people have, the worst they want to appear. Casual. But when did “casual” become a synonym for “sloppy,” Teddy? I might have come from the Eastern Shore, but damnit, I didn’t forfeit grace when I was casual.

Oh my, excuse me, now I sound like an old scold, don’t I?

Why, thank you, Teddy. Now that you’re also getting to be a, excuse me,
senior citizen
. God, isn’t that an awful phrase, senior citizen? The only thing worse is “up in years.” Everytime I hear somebody refer to me as “up in years,” it’s all I can do not to say, “oh, speaking of up—up yours.” But, you’ll be pleased to know that your dear old mother has so far resisted that urge.

Oh, what the hell, Teddy. What’s the use of being old if you can’t be crotchety? What’s the use of living all these years if you can’t remind the present-day idiots that just because they’re knee-deep in technology, it doesn’t make the here and now any better than the past? The young people today think they’re so smart, but our forefathers were so much smarter than we are.

Of course they were. They understood the world they lived in. We’re really strangers, Teddy—strangers to the everyday. We don’t know how a damn thing works. We just push buttons. That’s an indication of intelligence? Please. In the olden days, people were in control of their lives. They had to know the world to survive in it. They knew how to plant food and harvest it and how to cook it and how, like, if they were going somewhere in a wagon, they knew how the wagon worked. But us—the more things we just turn on, the dumber we get . . . en toto.

Absolutely. Now, go to the automatic ice maker and put some cubes in a plastic glass and pour me a nice tall gin and tonic.

I know what time it is, Teddy. I can read a watch as well as the next dummy who doesn’t know how a watch works. I know I’m jumpin’ the gun, but the next part of the story requires a little lubrication, I think. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna get hammered. We’ll just move the time frame up this evening, then be stupider and have something from the microwave for dinner. It’s the last night for the Olympic swimming, so I’ll try to finish up my bloviating in time for us to watch it. And if you think you can hold your liquor like a gentleman, then please make yourself a drink, too. A woman of a certain age shouldn’t drink alone, Teddy. It casts her in a bad light.

After we’d torn ourselves apart, Horst asked me to close my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw him looking at me with this silly expression on his face. That’s because there, perched on his brow, was a laurel wreath. “Nice,” I said, taking it. “Who’d you steal it from?”

“Leni keeps a few in case she needs one for a close-up or some kind of a retake, and she grandly presented me this one for my efforts today.” As we pulled away, he took his hand off the gearshift and made a muscle. “I worked harder pushing that damn camera on the tracks for the five-thousand than the guys did running in the five-thousand.”

I reached over and pinched his cheek. “Leni’s really got a thing for you, honey . . .” I believe that was the first time I’d ever used a term of endearment like that with Horst. You know, Teddy: honey, baby, darling, that sort of thing. But it just came out, naturally. He looked over at me when I said that with a sweet smile of satisfaction. Little things mean a lot. There was a song by that title, and it’s very true. I said, “I’ll bet she’s jealous of me.”

“If she is,” Horst said, “you better watch yourself. Leni thinks she was an Amazon in a past life.”

“An Amazon?”

“More’n that. A queen. An Amazon queen.”

“So, I’m just hangin’ by a thread, huh, waitin’ for her to strike?”

“’Fraid so, liebchen.”

“What? What’d you say?”

“Liebchen. Like ‘sweetie.’ You call me honey, I call you liebchen.”

I made a muscle, then, just like he had. “Well, mein liebchen, if the Amazon wants to fight me over you, I’m ready for her.”

Horst laughed. He turned the car off the main street, the Kurferstendamm (which I knew by now that if you were in the Berlin in-crowd, you called it the “Ku’damm”). I hadn’t really been paying any attention to where we were, though, until suddenly I realized we’d turned onto that street where only the Olympic flags flew—the one with all the Jewish shops. Horst surprised me—not just that he’d brought me back here, but that now he slowed down, pulled over and parked.

I’d already had a question in my mind, so I went ahead and asked it. “Is she a Nazi, Horst? Leni?”

“Why’d you ask that?”

“Well, you said how much Hitler likes her.”

“Yeah, but Leni—I don’t think Leni cares about politics. She’s her own political party. Reincarnated Amazon queens don’t have to join. Now my father, though—he’s in the party.”

“He is?”

“Dad’s a realist. That’s what diplomats have to be. He couldn’t very well be in the foreign service anymore if he wasn’t.”

“Are you?

Horst laughed. “Please. My father made me join the Hitler Youth when we got back from Portugal, but I couldn’t stand that. It’s all rock climbing and camping out, make-believe soldier stuff. As soon as I went to college, I got the hell outta that. It’s bad enough I’m gonna have to go into the navy for a couple years.” And then he suddenly turned to look directly at me, moving closer, too. I’d never seen Horst so intense. “You were upset when we came down here yesterday.”

“Well, not upset. Mostly surprised, I guess.”

“You think I hate Jews, Sydney?”

“What?”

“Do you?”

“No, Horst. I don’t think you hate anybody.”

“Thank you, liebchen.” Then he held out his hands, palms up, sorta shaking them, trying to put his thoughts together. “Look, let me try to help you understand. You can’t believe how bad it was here. My family was so glad to get to go to Japan—and it wasn’t easy there, either. The Japanese had taken our islands in the Pacific after the war, and so it was pretty sensitive for Dad. For all of us. Hell, nobody liked the Germans then. But just to get out of Germany. I mean, people were starving here. It was awful—chaos. And Hitler brought us back. He did. Not just economically, Sydney. We got our pride back.

“But I guess sometimes you need a villain to bring people together. The Nazis think so, anyway, and they said the Jews were responsible for everything bad. The Jews and the Cosi.”

“The who?”

“Cosi—Communists. But look, they weren’t any prize, either. There were fights, riots. And some of the Nazis were really bad guys—you know, bullies, thugs, riding the wave. And especially after they took care of the Cosi, they could run wild. And so that was the bad that came with the good.” He stopped and thought for a moment before going on. “You know, though, we’re not all that different from other people.”