The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  ‘All fresh today!’ she enthused in American English. ‘Flown in direct from the United States. What’ll it be, gentlemen?’

  ‘I’ll have everything!’ exclaimed Hugo in his native tongue.

  ‘Bring them two Milwaukee Specials with coffee and the works, honey.’

  ‘Sure thing, Ted. Same for you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He bid them to sit down on a bench seat similar to those in the Chevy cab and of a kind that Hitler would not have approved of because it was so comfortable you could conceive children on it. Thick foam covered in red plastic, its back reached up to their heads and proved beyond doubt that a new world of luxury had just dawned.

  ‘Nice place!’ exclaimed Karl, mightily relieved to be feeling safe.

  ‘You like it? It’s mine – ours, in fact.’ He pointed across to the now busy blonde preparing their meals. ‘Kathy – she’s my woman. She’s from Albuquerque. Her old man’s a colonel. Rich man, long story. We met in Canada and she came home with me. Wonderful woman – wonderful! We set up here earlier this year – spring; yeah, wonderful woman!’

  ‘You’re from Frankfurt?’

  ‘Was. The old Frankfurt, not this hellhole. We’re going to rebuild this place, Kathy and me. Going to be something to see when it’s finished – Germany’s new capital. Berlin is history, my friends, history.’

  Kathy called out from across the counter: ‘How do you like your steaks, boys?’ Hugo and Karl looked at one another perplexed. Hugo was still struggling with English.

  ‘She means, well cooked and tender, or maybe you prefer tough and chewy with a little blood easing out. Some people like that.’

  ‘Whatever comes, it’s good.’

  ‘Make it tender, babe!’

  ‘Who supplies your food?’ asked Karl.

  ‘United States Army Air Force. They fly it in direct every day. I tell you, this is the place to be if you’re of an entrepreneurial spirit. The Americans have plans for this place. This is the new Germany – right here.’

  ‘What about the people who are hungry? Don’t they come in here?’

  ‘They can’t afford it. Maybe in time when the economy picks up, but that’s a way off yet.’

  ‘Then, who are your customers?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ Ted slipped a cigar out of its tube, put it to his smiling lips and seemed to wink as if giving a signal. Within seconds Kathy was at his side, lighting the cigar with a solid silver lighter that had smoker Karl desiring the object even more than he desired her at that moment.

  ‘You smoke? Here, buddy, have a cigar.’ Taking another tube from his breast pocket, he proffered a cigar to Karl. ‘Kathy, do this boy a favour and light that up, would you, honey?’

  Non-smoker Hugo turned away to stare out of the dripping window at the parked up Chevy, still worrying that the authorities were hot on his heels for murder. Karl would be okay; he’d see to it that he wasn’t incriminated.

  ‘You boys got some accommodation for the night?’ asked Ted.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You took a chance, huh? That’s no problem, we’ve got a room upstairs – cheaper than any hotel still standing – if you don’t mind sharing, that is.’

  ‘We don’t mind.’

  Just as the steaks were being served by an ever-smiling Kathy, a morose figure suddenly appeared at the door slapping the glass with the palm of his only remaining skinny hand. Hugo, who’d been staring fixedly into the darkness, visibly jumped with fright. Ted, furious, leapt to his feet and charged across the room at the would-be intruder, pulled open the door and in English shouted: ‘Get out of here, will yer?!’ before pushing the one-armed man away. ‘You can’t afford this place. I’ve told you before. NOW, SCRAM!’

  Composing himself, he returned to his seat, smiling broadly because he’d repelled the invader.

  ‘Problem?’ asked Karl.

  ‘Nah, every night or so we get some joker trying it on. They think we’re Switzerland. They think we’re some kind of charity. We’re not, we’re a business same as any other. Can’t afford to give stuff away or we’d be bankrupt if we did – yes sir.’

  Ted drew hard on his cigar before turning his head to blow the smoke away from the food. ‘These people are the last remnants of a city that’s about to change forever. The old city’s dead – gone forever. The new city – of which we are the vanguard – will have no place for people like that – beggars. Yeah, it’s sad. Yeah, I cried tears along with the rest of them, but tears won’t rebuild this place. The Amis know how to do it – no sentiment, work hard, ambition, make something of yourself. That’s how you survive. Yes sir, it’s sad alright, but sadness never got nothing done. Am I right?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Karl, chewing his steak and sensibly taking the path of diplomacy. They were too hungry to argue themselves out of a meal.

  Hugo looked out again, this time to see a Jeep pulling up alongside the Chevy. Hell! Now what to do? Run through a back door and bring the US Army down on them for the second time in five years? This time would be the last time. Alternatively, stand and surrender, or better still sit quiet. Let them make the first move. Then run!

  Hugo watched the men alight, exchanging banter, casually approach the door to the café. Okay, perhaps this wasn’t official. Through the door strode five of the largest GIs that either he or Karl had ever encountered. He was about to choke on the best meal he’d ever tasted. Why now? he thought. Such was the way of things in the past few years. He would stand up and make a clean confession. Karl was in the clear and they’d have to understand that.

  ‘Hey, Ted!’ The largest of the men feigned a limp finger salute in the direction of the owner – the kind of salute learned from the movies, not the parade ground.

  ‘Hey, boys! How yer doin’?’

  ‘Good, good. How you doin’, Kath?’

  ‘Good! You boys want your usual?’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Settling themselves down in an adjacent booth, they flung their olive-green caps on the tabletop, revealing severe crew cuts and – for Hugo and Karl – an air of menace. The newly arrived civilians were strangers in the café that night and they weren’t listed on the menu. The broad-shouldered NCO showed a particular interest in Hugo, who remained staring fixedly out of the window while surreptitiously watching their reflections.

  ‘You like Jeeps, boy?’ But Hugo didn’t respond.

  ‘My friend is not an English speaker, sergeant,’ Ted replied.

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘I speak better English,’ said Karl, speaking out of turn and instantly regretting it.

  ‘I wasn’t about to speak to you, son. It’s your friend I want to speak to.’

  Suddenly, Hugo turned to face his inquisitor. ‘I speak English okay.’

  He was about to get up to surrender to the inevitable, but Ted put his hand out to stop him. ‘What is this, sergeant? The boys are just trying to have a meal. They’re our guests – we’re friends.’

  ‘I don’t mean nothing by it, Ted,’ said the sergeant, raising his hands and grinning a Cheshire cat smile. ‘I simply wanted to show the guy my Jeep if he was interested. That’s the little vehicle that won the war, you know. You Germans could learn something from it.’

  This remark set off a chain reaction of hysterics, the stock comedy of a bully.

  ‘You were in the war?’ asked Karl as soon as the cacophony had died.

  ‘No, but we’re here now, son.’

  ‘We were in the war,’ piped up Karl.

  ‘Karl, please!’ urged Hugo.

  The Cold War was within fierce glances of kicking off that very moment and would have done had it not been for the intervention of Kathy with dextrous hands full of white china cups, saucers and – incredibly – an aluminium coffee pot all finely balanced. ‘Now, boys, let�
�s have no squabbling, if you please. Consider this Canadian territory and I don’t want no diplomatic incident. Besides, if you look out of the window, you’ll see the MPs have pulled up and they’re looking for an easy time of it tonight. Coffee’s on the house.’

  Kathy was never one to exaggerate her abilities or just what she could see with her own two eyes. Three Jeeps loaded with MPs had pulled up, a sight that unnerved Hugo even more, but there was nothing he could do except nudge Karl.

  ‘We’ll settle with you and be on our way.’ Karl fumbled in his wallet, but Ted was having none of it, especially when he saw the colour of money being offered.

  ‘Enjoy your food and coffee. There’s no problem here. The sergeant is always checking strangers out whenever he comes in here. Thinks he’s a big shot who has the ear of the President himself. You’ll stay with us tonight. We’ll talk about the old days and you can tell me how you think you’re going to pay for things with Reichsmarks.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Reichsmarks?’

  ‘Nothing except it’s no longer legal currency. We use Deutschmarks, my friend – Deutschmarks, dollar bills and American cigarettes. This is a different country to the one you and I fought for.’ Ted coughed and blamed it immediately on the poor quality of the cigar. ‘If only I could get decent Cuban… Never mind. Enjoy your meal, boys!’

  Upstairs in the apartment, the schnapps flowed freely even if the card game wasn’t quite up to the standard Ted had hoped for.

  ‘Safer up here, my friends. Never get into a fight with the US Army – you won’t win.’

  ‘I think we might know more about that than you realise,’ said Karl, sucking happily on his third cigar. ‘Where did you learn to play cards?’

  ‘In the Kriegsmarine and then in the camps – bridge, poker, jacks; it filled our time. I dreamt of a place like this back then, and my ambition doesn’t stop here. There are hotels to be built in this city. A man like me could start an empire. It’s a time for new beginnings, and not many generations get that opportunity.’

  Discreetly, Karl looked around him at the mess that was Ted and Kathy’s humble abode. Messy, dirty even: old newspapers covered the floor in place of carpet; smoke-stained paint on the doorframes and ceilings; strategically placed tin buckets ready to catch leaks; a blood-stained mouse trap; a single brass tap that wouldn’t stop dripping into a large white enamel sink full of unwashed pots; frayed lace curtains that hadn’t seen a washtub since before the war. The idea of a hotel empire appeared a long way off.

  The apartment was in complete contrast to the uber-clean establishment downstairs from where the smell of ever more steaks, burgers, frankfurters and coffee wafted up on invisible clouds of temptation.

  ‘If you are still hungry there is more food downstairs that can be brought up. Don’t hold back, my friends. We know what it’s like to be hungry.’

  ‘Hugo is always hungry.’

  ‘That’s why I joined the Kriegsmarine – so that I would never be hungry. Sailors always eat unless they’re on a lifeboat, and I didn’t think that would be my fate, but eventually it was. Shot out of the water by the Royal Navy and dropped off in Canada. How lucky were we?’

  No one answered that. For a while there was a silence between them – an awkward silence: thoughts of those who could have been with them that night enjoying the food, the schnapps, the smoke. The war had been a very personal place and no man wanted to think his story of conflict and survival was worth less, or greater, than that of a comrade-in-arms. Ted would not elaborate for fear that his new friends could trump him easily with tales of hardship and torture; and likewise, Karl and Hugo kept their shared experiences to themselves.

  ‘My brother and my cousin were not so lucky. It was very bad in 1945. They survived the war, but not the peace.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Hugo.

  ‘I’ll answer your question with a question – when were you captured?’

  ‘October 1944.’

  ‘And when did you arrive in England?’

  ‘December ’44. Exactly three years ago this week.’

  Ted exhaled like a man taking his dying breath, and for the second time that evening his cheery demeanour changed. Earlier Karl and Hugo had noticed how quickly he’d flown into a rage when the starving beggar tried to enter the café, and now again his face had taken on a very grim expression.

  ‘How did they treat you as prisoners?’ he asked.

  ‘It was difficult at first, waiting to be shipped to England. We all had dysentery—’

  ‘That was a common ailment. Did you have shelter?’

  ‘Tents.’

  ‘Tents? You were lucky. Albert and Joachim had nothing – no shelter, no food, an enclosure built for hundreds of men that eventually accommodated thousands. They dug holes with their bare hands for what little shelter they could make for themselves. The Americans killed them through neglect.’

  ‘The Americans?’

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong! No, it wasn’t only the Americans – the French, the British, they all wanted to get rid of the Germans. You were prisoners before the death camps were opened – all those Jews, gypsies, Slavs. So they did the same to us, only slower. No one wanted to be held accountable by pulling a trigger or dropping a gas cylinder. So, they kill through neglect. The effect is the same.’

  Ted stood up from the table wiping his eyes, before fumbling in his trouser pockets for cigarillos; fumbling desperately to smile again; fumbling to be the amiable cab driver who now had it all, the entrepreneur in the making. Entrepreneurs don’t break down.

  ‘If you’d been captured in 1945 you wouldn’t be sitting here now with me, sipping schnapps and licking the tomato ketchup off your lips. You think it was just the Russians? The Russians still have our POWs. The Allies killed those captured in the West – no, not with bullets or gas, but with exposure to the elements, disease through lack of sanitary provision, and minimal food.’

  ‘We have heard nothing of this!’ Karl was particularly concerned as he too had relatives in the wider family unaccounted for, but he also remembered the fears he’d had on that sick-making sea crossing to England, about how this time the English might not be so hospitable.

  Ted rounded on him, stabbing an unlit cigarillo into smoke-filled nothingness in an effort to drive the point home.

  ‘Why would you hear anything? Would the British press come up with stories of Allied atrocities? Of course not! But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen – it did. And it happened to the civilian population, too. Now you see only a few of these wretches haunting the dark places, scratching a living among the dirt and rubble. Most are dead.

  ‘When we came here from Canada just over a year ago, Frankfurt was a very different place. You know, when the Amis dumped their food they put it into trucks for driving to a garbage dump, but women threw themselves onto those trucks to grab whatever they could grasp. And the Amis laughed at them and drove through them! But it’s true – I saw it.

  ‘My woman – Kathy – she saw it. The people I knew, the people that I had known, if they didn’t die in the bombing they died in the starvation that followed, and the Amis stepped over their bodies. Eisenhower hates Germans! De Gaul hates Germans! Roosevelt is gone. Churchill is gone. They want to eradicate Germany forever and that process is still underway. You will see it for yourselves.’

  ‘But how do you know about the POWs?’

  ‘I’m a cab driver. My fares are Amis – Amis of all ranks. They talk freely in my cab about all sorts of subjects you could never dream of, but it was the talk of a Red Cross man that interested me the most. He had just landed in Frankfurt, from exactly where I don’t know. He was Swedish and he was in the company of a high-ranking Amie – a general or somebody really high up, I couldn’t be sure. And he was asking the general about the POW camps in France and in the American sector, talking about how none of the POWs h
ad survived in 1946. They were all dead. And the general was saying that that was no concern of his as he had “other fish to fry” as he put it.’

  ‘Why would they say this in front of you?’

  ‘They were not in front of me! I’m the nut behind the wheel; they only see the back of my head; they don’t know whether I’m German, Canadian, Swiss or Amie. To them, I probably don’t even speak English, so they talk freely.’

  ‘Maybe you misheard?’

  ‘I don’t mishear with my own eyes, my friend. This city is littered with corpses that starved to death – buried under all that rubble out there. And where are the men of my generation that I knew? This was a big city. They didn’t all go to the Russian front. And I saw with my own eyes the women leaping onto those garbage food trucks, pleading for them to stop so that they could have something for their children at least. Don’t you think the Amis could feed all these people? Of course they could. But they didn’t.’

  ‘I can believe it,’ said Karl. ‘I’d expected them to treat us worse this time. Two world wars! But the British have been good to us.’

  ‘The British and Canadians have behaved in a better way. The British, however, do what the Americans tell them now. They’re in debt. That’s why I’m a Canadian. Do you know that the people who survive here are the ones who pretend they aren’t German? Don’t be German whatever you do – they’ll kill you. Even now, look over your shoulders! Be Dutch if they ask, Swiss, Czech, be whatever you like, but don’t admit to being German; and even if you do admit to it, don’t be proud, be humble.’

  ‘I thought the Geneva Convention protected everyone?’

  ‘Eisenhower doesn’t give a fig about the damn Geneva Convention! Germany doesn’t exist anymore – we are a “non-country”. That is why the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply because “we” don’t exist. Here, we are in America. Over there, in the north, you’re in Britain. And over there, in the west, you’re in France; but there is no more Germany. What you see out there is the skeletal remains of Germany.

  ‘Soon, people won’t even speak German. That is how much they fear us. Eisenhower and Truman are the ones writing the history books as we speak. There’ll be no mention of the disease and the starvation. I heard that a million POWs have died in captivity in Allied hands – a million! That includes the boys and old men, but that doesn’t include all the civilians. Perhaps several million if you include the civilians – including those poor wretches lying in the rubble out there! To the Amis, we’re just Nazis, while the real Nazis are taken to America where they work on missiles and atomic bombs ready for the next war.