The German (15 page)

“Eh?” I call.

“Stormtrooper scum,” the tall man bellows, and he shakes his fist at me, and there is a folding knife in that fist, and Carl and the fat man hold my accuser back. Carl has his shoulders. The fat man his waist. “Thug. Brute. Murderer.”

“Take this shit outside, you crazy Kraut fuck,” Howard calls.

The old man stops playing his guitar. He stands from the wooden stool and backs off of the beer crates.

My accuser tears himself free of Carl, who is too drunk to recapture him. As the tall man moves forward, he drags his obese friend over the floor comically. Obscenities pour from his lips as he struggles to remove the fat anchor from his waist. He screams the name of a dead man – a name profoundly familiar to me – and I am lost.

With a twist of his hips, the corpulent friend is cast aside and the tall man charges forward. The knife comes down to his waist. His grip and the positioning of the weapon tell me he’s been taught to fight – tells me he is willing to kill. The woman at the bar giggles loudly. The men begin shouting approval. Howard and Carl are the only ones to voice opposition to the impending conflict. The others are already drunk on blood. This is their coliseum.

The tall man bears down on me. As I expect, his knife arcs upward before he plants his feet. He is still moving, which makes him vulnerable. Yes, he was taught to fight, but he doesn’t fight well. Stepping out of the blade’s path is easy. I twist my body and let his momentum carry him into my range. A fist to his ear disorients him, sends him teetering to the side, and a second blow to his kidneys drops him to the floor, and he is easy to kill now. Exposed. Weak. I could apply my hands like a vice to either side of his head and snap his neck. I could punch his throat and crush his windpipe. I could break his arm and take his knife and sink the blade deep into his chest.

I realize I am cursing this man. Vulgar expressions rumble from my throat like the growls of a wounded cur. My palm slaps his head and my curling fingers ensnare his white hair. I am behind him now and I pull back so that he can see my face. He swings with the knife. Predictable and foolish. With a simple motion, I could drive it into his eye. But I turn aside as the blade slashes smoke-filled air. I snatch his wrist and turn it until the joint pops and the knife clatters to the floor. I yank the tall man’s hair and feel strands come loose in my palm. He cries out. Again he calls me thug and brute and murderer.

His friends, Carl and the fat man, are near me now. I feel them at my back. Their voices are desperate, but they sound so far away and scratching as if shouting at me through a hailstorm. A hand falls on my shoulder and I coil my body, twisting to see what idiot has touched me. It is Carl, of course. His eyes are pools of worry, overflowing with tears, and he begs me to leave the tall man alone. He calls the man Udo, says they are cousins. The name means nothing to me. Names are for the corpse registry, for the carvers of stones. I am turning away when I notice the fat man’s face. It is a childlike face, the face of a boy who is seeing violence for the first time. It frightens him, and his expression of fear pours through me like cold water.

I release Udo and brush strands of his hair from my palm.

“He thought you were someone else,” Carl said frantically. “I’m sorry, Ernst. We’ve been drinking and it’s muddled his thoughts. I’m so sorry. He thought you were someone else, someone who died many years ago.”

I put up my hands and back toward the door. A smile moves my lips. Carl smiles in return. The fat man similarly grins with relief.

I embrace the residue of violence like a lost friend, holding it tightly to my chest, where its familiarity warms me.

~ ~ ~

Outside, the night air caresses my face. A band of plum lines the horizon to the west. I lean against the side of the building, smoking a cigarette. The violence is still with me, and I am made peaceful by its swaddling. Few would understand my admiration for conflict. I am no sadist, nor a masochist. If anything I am absolutely sensible about it. It is man’s nature. Some, like the Indian Gandhi, will extol the virtues of peace and passivity. Ridiculous. If man were a soft creature, he would still crawl through the mud. No. Without struggle mankind would be no more interesting than the sunflower plant. Only through violence, rebellion, conflict was our history possible. Nietzsche wrote of this. He rightly points out that deviation fuels progress. Happy people, the truly content, have no cause for revolt, no motive for war, so we are created a dissatisfied and greedy species. Naturally we will also be a violent species, taking what we imagine should be ours, killing for gods we imagine will one day bring us peace. These justifications for conflict are lies – they are imaginings like fairies and witches – but the violence they fuel is true and honest. It is man’s way. To refute this truth is to hate the self.

For many years I knew little but conflict, fighting for ideals that lifted the violence to acts of valor. No more a soldier, I now reject battle and will instigate no discord, though I will not deny it, as my actions in the bar clearly show. Conflict is an opiate but one I no longer crave.

I crush the remains of my cigarette under my shoe and work it into the dirt. I am surprised to find I’m not alone at the side of the bar.

Standing at the corner is the unremarkable-looking man in the dark suit. He looks at me as if concerned. I say hello to the man, but he doesn’t immediately reply. He appears to be forming words in his mind, but they tangle and knot and he cannot speak.

“Will you try to kill me, too?” I ask. It is a joke, but the man’s face blossoms in surprise. His head shakes quickly. “Good,” I say.

He inhales smoke, again looking at me like I am an injured child. The expression insults me, but I feel I am not interpreting it properly.

“What do men always call each other? He believed I was a thing he hated and he labeled me such. It doesn’t matter if I was this thing or not. He simply wanted an excuse to fight.”

“Did you screw his wife or something?”

“I have no use for women.”

Like many to whom I’ve said these words, his face darkens with confusion. He does not understand my meaning. In the beer halls and brothels and cabarets back home, such an admission surprised no one. It was understood without explanation, but those were places of honesty. Not like this place. These people and their masks, their roles. A man is this. A woman is that. In this place, there is John Wayne and there is Vivien Leigh. They are stories they’ve created for themselves. The truth of them lies buried deep: layered clothing against the cold.

“No use for them?” this man asks.

“Yes. I grew up among men. A soldier.”

This seems to amuse him. He smiles around the cigarette. He pulls it from his mouth and says, “I can think of one use for a woman.”

“What is the difference between a lot of people and a pack of dogs? People are led by ideas, and they believe that if they don’t share the ideas they will be left behind to starve.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve already said my good nights to her. I was hoping I might find a bar in town, someplace that wasn’t quite so depressing.”

The man extends his arm to shake my hand but he does not offer his name. I understand him now. He tries to remain hidden, waiting to be drawn out. It is a tiresome flirtation, but common in this place. If I say nothing, he will go away. His desire means less to him than his role. But he will drive me home if I ask him, and he will come inside and have a beer if I ask him, and he will fuck if I ask him, so when it is finished he can tell himself he is without responsibility for the incident. He is a soldier waiting for orders, though he doesn’t understand the cause for which he fights.

Once, I was a captain. I led men. They followed my orders and fought for my cause.

This man would be no different.

~ ~ ~

He lies on my bed. Naked. Face down. I was in the kitchen putting away the beer bottles when he walked into my room. He undressed and lay on the bed. His head is turned away from me, facing the wall. His arms embrace a pillow. The pose and what it suggests disgusts me. He behaves like an animal in the woods, indifferent to the beast that mounts him.

He hurries from the bed and reaches for his trousers. I circle the bed and stop him. Clasping his unremarkable face in my hands, I hold him tightly and force his face close to mine. The fright in his eyes is saddening. He thinks I mean him harm, and he tries to pull away.

I kiss him then. My lips press against his but he does not reciprocate. He struggles even more as if I have tried to bite him. I pull away and shake his head again.

I kiss him again and this time I don’t pull away. I keep my lips to his until he is certain I am not hurting him, and he responds slowly, but eventually his jaw loosens and his lips soften, and his hands slide over my shoulders and hold me tightly. I release his head and embrace him gently. Skin passes beneath my palms. Muscles not yet relaxed meet my touch. I move my mouth to his neck. His head falls back to allow me access to his throat. My tongue traces down his chest and my hand goes to his cock. This is better. This is good.

~ ~ ~

He wakes me from a dream of bullets and leaves of blood and tells me he must go. I tell him that is good and he says that he will stay in Barnard another night and will be back the next week and then again in a few week’s time, and I am confused by the recitation of his schedule as I feel it has nothing to do with me, but he asks if he might call, perhaps tomorrow or during a future visit, and I tell him yes, he may call. I climb out of bed and walk to the kitchen, feeling his gaze on my skin like whispered breath. In the kitchen I write my phone number on a scrap of paper and hand it to him, feeling I have accomplished nothing but the waste of paper and ink. I escort him to the door and he walks into the darkness.

A boy in Munich once said he loved me, and I laughed, imagining he was playing some bedroom game, pretending we were husband and wife, but he played no game and his admission made me cruel. I wish I had understood what his words had meant. So long ago. His name escapes me now, but I wonder where that boy is. Did he find a companion who was not so ignorant as to misinterpret his declaration?

Is he happy? Is he even alive?

Sunday morning, Tom Rabbit dressed for church in his best cotton suit. Downstairs, Estella prepared his breakfast. He knotted his tie three times before he finally got it right, and then he cinched it to his collar and smoothed it over the lapel of his shirt. Looking at himself in the mirror, he saw the toll the last five weeks had taken on his face. He looked drawn and dog tired, hardly a full night’s sleep since he’d pulled Harold Ashton out of those woods, and his days had become exhausting rituals of listening to complaints about his competency, writing down inane tip-offs, and interrogating the local Germans in the hope that one of them knew something – or someone – that could bring peace back to Barnard.