'Young Kurt Ehrens — ' she would say, 'only twenty-six, and a full colonel in the S.S.! And his brother Heinrich, he can't be more than thirty-four, but he has eighteen thousand foreign workers under him, all building tank traps. Heinrich knows more about tank traps than any man alive, they say, and I used to dance with him.'
On and on she would talk this way, with poor Heinz in the background, smoking his brains out. And one thing she did to me was make me deaf to all success stories. The people she saw as succeeding in a brave new world were, after all, being rewarded as specialists in slavery, destruction, and death. I don't consider people who work in those fields successful.
As the war drew to a close, Heinz and I couldn't drink in our pillbox any more. An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz's late wife — boys that young, and yet with men's uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.
So Heinz and I did our drinking and talking in our dormitory, a riding hall jammed with bombed-out government workers sleeping on straw mattresses. We kept our bottle hidden, since we did not care to share it.
'Heinz — ' I said to him one night, 'I wonder how good a friend you really are.'
He was stung. 'Why should you ask me that?' he said.
'I want to ask a favor of you — a very big one — and I don't know if I should,' I said.
'I demand that you ask it!' he said.
'Lend me your motorcycle, so I can visit my in-laws tomorrow,' I said.
He did not hesitate, did not quail. 'Take it!' he said.
So the next morning I did.
We started out the next morning side by side, Heinz on my bicycle, me on his motorcycle.
I kicked the starter, put the motorcycle in gear, and off I went, leaving my best friend smiling in a cloud of blue exhaust.
Off I went — vroooom, ka-pow, kapow — vaaaaaaa-roooooom!
And he never saw his motorcycle or his best friend again.
I have asked the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals if they have any news of Heinz, though he wasn't much of a war criminal. The Institute delights me with the news that Heinz is now in Ireland, is chief grounds-keeper for Baron Ulrich Werther von Schwefelbad. Von Schwefelbad bought a big estate in Ireland after the war.
The Institute tells me that Heinz is an expert on the death of Hitler, having stumbled into Hitler's bunker while Hitler's gasoline-soaked body was burning but still recognizable.
Hello, out there, Heinz, in case you read this.
I was really very fond of you, to the extent that I am capable of being fond of anybody.
Give the Blarney Stone a kiss for me.
What were you doing in Hitler's bunker — looking for your motorcycle and your best friend?
22: The Contents of an Old Trunk ...
'Look,' I said to my Helga in Greenwich Village, after I had told her what little I knew about her mother, father, and sister, 'this attic will never do for a love nest, not even for one night We'll get a taxi. Well go to some hotel. And tomorrow we will throw out all this furniture, get everything brand new. And then well look for a really nice place to live.'
'I'm very happy here,' she said.
'Tomorrow,' I said, 'well find a bed like our old bed, two miles long and three miles wide, with a headboard like an Italian sunset Remember — oh Lord, remember?'
'Yes,' she said.
'Tonight in a hotel,' I said. 'Tomorrow night in a bed like that'
'We leave right now?' she said.
'Whatever you say,' I said.
'Can I show you my presents first?' she said.
'Presents?' I said.
'For you,' she said.
'You're my present,' I said. 'What more would I want?'
'You might want these, too,' she said, freeing the catches on a suitcase. 'I hope you do.' She opened the suitcase, showed me that it was full of manuscripts. Her present to me was my collected works, my collected serious works, almost every heartfelt word ever written by me, the late Howard W. Campbell, Jr. There were poems, stories, plays, letters, one unpublished book — the collected works of myself as a buoyant, free, and young, young man.
'How queer this makes me feel,' I said.
'I shouldn't have brought them?' she said.
'I hardly know,' I said. 'These pieces of paper were me at one time.' I picked up the book manuscript, a bizarre experiment called Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. 'This you should have burned,' I said.
'I would just as gladly burn my own right arm,' she said.
I put the book aside, took up a sheaf of poems. 'What does this young stranger have to say about life?' I said, and I read a poem, a poem in German, aloud:
Kuhl und hell der Sonnenaugang,
leis und suss der Glocke Klang.
Ein Magdlein hold, Krug in der Hand,
sitzt an des tiefen Brunnens Rand.
In English? Roughly:
Cool, bright sunrise —
Faint, sweet bell.
Maiden with a pitcher
by a cool, deep well.
I read that poem out loud, and then I read another. I was and am a very bad poet. I do not set down these poems to be admired. The second poem I read was, I think, the next-to-the-last poem I ever wrote. It was dated 1937, and it had this title: 'Gedanken ?ber unseren Abstand vom Zietgeschehen,' or, roughly, 'Reflections on Not Participating in Current Events.'
It went like this:
Eine machtige Dampfwalze naht
und schwartz der Sonne Pfad,
rollt uber geduckte Menschen dahin,
will keiner ihr entfliehn.
Mein Lieb und ich schaun starren Blickes
das Ratsel dieses Blutgeschickes.
'Kommt mit herab,' die Menschheit schreit,
'Die Walze ist die Geschichte der Zeit!'
Mein Lieb und ich gehn auf die Flucht,
wo keine Dampfwalze uns sucht,
und leben auf den Bergeshohen,
getrennt vom schwarzen Zeitgeschehen.
Sollen wir bleiben mit den andern zu sterben?
Doch nein, wir zwei wollen nicht verderben!
Nun ist's vorbeti! — Wir sehn mit Erbleichen
die Opfer der Walze, verfaulte Leichen.
In English?
I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
'Lie down, lie down!' the people cried.
'The great machine is history!'
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so.
'How is it,' I said to Helga, 'that you have all these things?'
'When I went to West Berlin,' she said, 'I went to the theater to see if there was a theater left — if there was anyone I knew left — if anyone had any news of you.' She didn't have to explain which theater she meant. She meant the little theater where my plays had been produced in Berlin, where Helga had been the star so often.
'It got through most of the war, I know,' I said. 'It still exists?'
'Yes,' she said. 'And when I asked about you, they knew nothing. And when I told them what you had once meant to that theater, someone remembered that there was a trunk in the loft with your name on it.'
I passed my hand over the manuscripts. 'And in it were these,' I said. I remembered the trunk now, remembered when I'd closed it up at the start of the war, remembered when I'd thought of the trunk as a coffin for the young man I would never be again.