Understanding

UNDERSTANDING

Polka night was Tuesday at the Blue Gentian.

“You ready?” Gerta asked, adjusting her dark blue dress in front of the full length mirror on the closet door.

“You promised ve could eat dinner dere. I’m hungry as oxen.”

“Ach!” Helmuth mumbled from the bathroom. “Alvays you vait til I am shaving to ask.”

Helmuth wiped off the thin lines of shaving cream, gently touching a crease in his face, “The light,” he thought. He rinsed his shaving brush, and set it at the back of the sink next to his soap mug. Then he rinsed and wiped dry the shiny steel blade. Pulling the strop tight against the hook in the wall, he ran the blade along the smooth brown leather. It swished in an even, metric, pattern, reminding him of his cadet days, of other younger cadets marching in formation at a distance, while he shaved. He carefully folded the blade back into the bone handle, and set it in the medicine cabinet next to his morning razor. He closed the door--flashing his face at him again.
“The light.”

“Papa?”

Helmuth turned off the light. “Ya, I am soon ready.” Last week he had promised they could eat dinner out. It was the anniversary of Manfred’s birthday, he would have been thirty-seven. Helmuth didn’t like to spend the money, but Gerta had been right, sitting at home on that day was wrong.

It was a coincidence that it was polka night.

There was another night at the Blue Gentian. For nine years Helmuth had gone by himself on Thursdays. Without an explanation, Gerta understood, one day a week when old men could share brighter memories. She envied Helmuth his Thursdays. He had invited her a few times, but she knew those memories were for the men, not their wives.

Three years ago Helmuth stopped going. Just like that. He had come home early one Thursday.

“Papa, is dat you?” Gerta yelled from the living room, when she heard the back door open.

“Ya.” He hung his overcoat up on the hook next to the door, and started up the steps.

“Vy you home so early?”

He stopped. “Why? You ask why?” he thought. “Ach, is nothing.”

In the kitchen he opened the white metal cabinet door above the counter and took out the bottle of brandy. He poured some into a cup.

“Have a brandy,” the man had said. “To our friendship.”

Gerta always kept a pot of coffee warming on the stove. Helmuth filled his cup with it, the smell of brandy and coffee mixed in front of him. He walked through it into the living room.

“You all right?” Gerta asked, turning off the TV.

“Is nothing.”

“Papa, you don’t lie so goot.”

* * *

“My name is Fritz,” said the man on the next stool. “Fritz Heydrich.”

Helmuth turned, confused, he had just ordered a beer and was counting out his change.

“Ach, ach . . . I,” he spilled the remaining coins on the counter,
“enough, ya?”

The bartender flicked the coins one by one across the glossy wood into his large hand, “Ya.”

Helmuth turned to Fritz. “Call me Helmuth.”

They shook hands.

“Cigarette?” Fritz asked, extending the open red and white box of Regents,
“These are very good, better than we had in Germany.”

“I quit.”

“So? So did I.”

Helmuth looked at Fritz. He had a thin, red scar that ran down his forehead through his left eyebrow, and down his cheek. It was hard to keep his eyes off it.

Fritz clicked his heels together, in mock salute, “Dueling.” He nodded.
“In youth, things seem so easy, so obvious. Cigarette?”

“I—”

“I heard, you quit. But a smoke is good with beer. No?”

Helmuth pulled the foil flaps away, and took out a cigarette. “A secret. Ya?” He smiled mischievously at Fritz through the yellow blue flame of Fritz’s lighter. It clicked shut.

“Good,” Fritz said, “It’s good to have a secret between friends.”

“You sound, forgif me, almost American,” Helmuth said.

“My father was in the diplomatic corps. We were in England until I was eleven. He retired, and we moved back to Mainz, where my grandfather lived. I learned English at the same time I learned German.”

Helmuth signaled the bartender to give Fritz another beer. “Please,” he smiled,
“ve were neighbors, I vas in Veisbaden growing up.”

Fritz gestured to the crowded room. “This is something.”

“Ya, every Thursday. Is goot people. I never see you before?”

“I just moved here. First time.”

After that, Helmuth met Fritz almost every Thursday night at the Blue Gentian. Helmuth’s friends understood Helmuth’s infatuation with Fritz. Fritz was the stereotypical prewar German aristocrat, proud and attractive, who with a wink of his right eye--holding an invisible monocle in his left--could accept his duty, no matter what it was. They teased Helmuth. But truth was they were jealous.

Over the months Helmuth opened to Fritz, as if they were old friends. He told him, a fellow SS officer, things that not even his wife or children knew. Things about the war, things he knew Fritz understood. Fritz graciously accepted his role as confessor.

Gerta noticed the difference. She prayed that Beth and Peter would see their father like this. But Peter hadn’t been home or even called for ten years, and Beth was away at college.

“Maybe this summer,” Gerta wished, “Beth will see her papa like I know him.”

It was hot and muggy, and the air conditioning at the Blue Gentian was broken. The front door was held open with the chrome cylindrical ashtray from next to the stage where the polka band’s equipment was. In spite of the open door, no air moved through the room.

There were two shot glasses in front of Fritz when Helmuth arrived. Fritz slid one towards Helmuth’s place. “Have a brandy.” He raised his glass. “To our friendship.”

“Ya, to friendship.” Helmuth drank it down before sitting.

“Ach, it is too hot.”
As if granted permission by Helmuth’s observation, Fritz removed his sport coat.
“Please, take off your coat too,” he pulled at the front of his shirt like a bellows, pumping air in, “it helps.”

Helmuth removed his coat.

“Here, I’ll hang them up,” Fritz said, reaching out to take Helmuth’s coat. Fritz’s bare arm hung timelessly before Helmuth, the edge of a line of blue numbers peeking up at him.

“I don’t understand,” Helmuth whispered. He reached out to touch the tattoo, but stopped. “Vat are you?”

Fritz sat back down, his coat in his lap. “I am a German, like you.”

“No.”

“Yes, like you. We were neighbors.”

“Not like me.” Helmuth’s eyes stared at the Fritz’s arm. “No.”

Fritz smiled, “Well, you are right in a way, my family was much better connected. But I would never let something like that come between friends.”

Helmuth grabbed Fritz’s arm and turned it over on the counter. “Dese are identification numbers.” He pushed the arm away. “You haf betrayed me.”

Fritz lit a cigarette, leaving the pack out. He stared into the rising cloud of smoke in front of him. “Like you, I was an officer in the Schutzstaffel.”

“No.”

“Yes, in youth things are so easy, so obvious. But I grew up. In 1943 I was transferred into the Verf gungstruppe. The killing had to stop, I thought. So I refused. . . . They made an example of me, and sent me to the camps.”

“But--“

“They showed me my case file. There were orders, special orders . . . to make sure that no matter what, I was not to be allowed to die. And believe me, many times I wanted to.”

“How could you turn your back on your duty?”

“I had to. I thought others would join me. They didn’t.”

Helmuth lit a cigarette. He looked into Fritz’s eyes, expecting to see what he had seen a million times in every camp. But they were welcoming, gray, and watery. Fritz smiled.

Helmuth sat back away.

“No. My friend, no,” Fritz said. “We are friends.”

“I don’t vant your forgifeness.”

Fritz laughed, “I didn’t offer it. Why should I? To a friend. You did nothing to me back then.”

Helmuth jumped off the stool. It rocked back and forth, fighting against gravity. “I don’t vant it. Nefer.” He reached into his pants pocket, pulling out a single, neatly folded, dollar bill and two quarters. “I pay,” he said, slapping the money onto the counter.

* * *

Helmuth never went back on Thursday nights, and for several months he refused to go on Tuesdays. He asked his friends if they saw Fritz, but they said he had stopped coming the same time Helmuth had. He never explained what had happened, he couldn’t. That would have meant acknowledging the past.

“Papa,” Gerta yelled from the landing, “I haf your suit on da bedt.”

Helmuth was standing next to the bed, staring down at his suit. Gerta had put his white shirt and his tie next to it. For a second he saw it as his uniform, pressed, and brushed waiting to work its magic, button by button, making him--

“Papa?” Gerta yelled to him.

His fingers tips traced circles in the plain, blue wool, searching for vanished dreams. He was scared to go to the Blue Gentian, although he knew he would never see Fritz again.

“Papa?”

“Ya, I hurry.”

Helmuth dressed. He stood in front of the mirror above Gerta’s dresser to adjust his tie. His eye glanced down at the rows of pictures, the family. Gerta had moved the picture of Manfred to the front. He picked it up to see his son better. It had been taken--by a neighbor--on Manfred’s thirteenth birthday. Peter was four, and Beth was two. They were sitting in their backyard. He remembered thinking at the time how odd it was to have summer in December. They were smiling, all of them.

“I miss you Manfred,” Helmuth whispered as he kissed the photograph.
“I . . . I love you.”

The restaurant was crowded by the time they got there.

“Good evening Herr Reuling, Frau Reuling,” the maître d’ said. “We’re running behind, would you mind waiting at the bar?”

“Tanks,” Gerta said, pulling at Helmuth’s arm.

Helmuth looked at the bar, each stool, and not until he was sure that Fritz was not there, did he start towards it.

Gerta didn’t see him nod to himself as they sat down. But he had been right about one thing, he and Fritz were not alike.