The Color Master: Stories

by Aimee Bender

  And then my overalls are back on and he closes his eyes again, I have relieved some knot in his thinking, and the first one is curled over and he doesn’t know quite what to do but also he has some ideas, and his mouth is earnest and effortful.

  Their hands grip the carpet hairs. Look at the initial swell of a bicep, that bump after the dip of the inner elbow.

  When they switch, they’re laughing. Everyone’s drunk. No one has come yet. They kiss in between switching, and their hands move all over, into inner thigh, rounded curve of the ass, sweaty necks. I feel the tide fading from my feet. They look up—come with us, come join us, they say, but I’m over here, I say, for today—and at once they are disappointed and also we all know the rhythm has been set as is. Tight calves and legs lifting. Brown curls and blond knees. When they’re kissing again, I could stare for hours. Men love to watch two women kiss, but how I love to watch two men. So clear in their focus. The amazing space created for me when there is nothing demanded or seen.

  When they are sleeping, I go into my bedroom. It is darker than the rest of the apartment, and only large enough to fit a bed and a dresser. I don’t sit down, but I stand with the furniture, my whole body triggered. And it is only now that I feel the coldness of watching, the interminable loneliness, how the exit will happen, how they will hug me but something will have shifted, how our meetings will be awkward for a while, and possibly never recover. I slow down my breathing, move away from the clawing inside. After a while, I hear as they get up off the floor and let themselves out. They leave me a nice note, and one washes the cookie dish, and they even put the beer bottles in the recycling bin, but the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and do not want to feel anymore.

  PART TWO

  The Fake Nazi

  1.

  There was an old man in Germany who thought he was a Nazi. He turned himself in to a small court in a town near Nuremberg, and said, “Restart the trials; I should be punished for what I have done.” He seemed to be around the right age, and his name was a fairly common German name—Hoefler—and his first name even more common—Hans—but still, they had records and looked up as many Hans Hoeflers as they could and cross-referenced and found nothing. “Where were you?” they asked him repeatedly. He lowered his eyes. “I was in the room for all of it,” he told them. “What room?” they asked. “The ROOM,” he said. They raised their eyebrows. “Of which room are you speaking?” they said. “There were many.”

  “I heard the planning,” he said. “I popped the Zyklon B. I shot rows and rows of people.”

  The judge coughed into his fist. Hans broke down crying, begging for forgiveness, and the secretary found herself resisting the urge to pat him on the head, which seemed like the wrong idea altogether. They found a photo of him at the time, sitting with small children in the park as a babysitter for the neighbors; turned out he was then only a child himself, and would never have been allowed in any “room” anyway. He was an old man by the time he showed up at the court, and at his insistence, two clerks who had some extra time on their hands visited his apartment, where they found his jacket pockets stuffed with ticket stubs, and videos, all around his television, of every Nazi movie that one could ever rent or see. When they played one titled The Room, one of the actors delivered Hans’s exact same line about the room. His TV didn’t even work except to show these videos. He owned action flicks, the comic-book film versions, Holocaust epics, documentaries, stories of one regular man in times of horror, and stories of one extraordinary man in times of horror. He could’ve opened a specialized movie store.

  They filed their report and sent him home. “You’re just a regular man,” they told him. “Congratulations.”

  2.

  This Hoefler, he stayed away for a month or so, but then he brought himself back to the court again. And again. He became their regular monthly visitor. The judge enjoyed seeing him, but he was unsure what to do with him, so he telephoned his niece, who was studying psychology and had talked about needing someone to test, and she in turn set up a mock Milgram obedience test for Hans, for her Ethics and History class.

  She put Hans in a room in the classic situation, in which he had to shock a victim, played by an actor, with a false electrical current, while a pretend supervisor claimed to assume responsibility for the victim’s screams of pain. She employed various friends from graduate school—the Psychology and Theatre Departments—and in truth, it was one of their most fun collaborations, and led to a very vital discussion the following week about grandparents. The test helped explain why cruelty was so easy to indulge if responsibility was claimed by someone else, but, caught off guard, on a regular workday, as his regular self, Hans Hoefler refused to use the shocking equipment, and he walked out, shaking his head, blinking as if he’d been stunned himself. When he returned to the court, pale as ever, the judge hailed his clerk, who called his niece, who drove over right away and ran in with the video to show Hans the recording of his own decency. Of his own interior strength. It was a slow afternoon, and everyone in the court office stood around the TV, watching him watch, hopeful. “You passed!” crowed the clerk.

  Hans, as if deaf, made no sound.

  “This is good, Hans,” the stout judge said kindly, the judge who, by then, had grown a strong affection for Hans Hoefler; after seeing criminal after criminal denying his crime, screwing up his or her face and saying, It is not me, I would never do such a thing, here was Hans, scooping up what was not his and cradling it like a child. Hans Hoefler, with his heavy sad eyes, who reminded the judge somewhat of his own father, dead the previous year of complications from a liver transplant.

  From his viewing seat in the jury box, Hans gripped the wooden pew and said nothing as he watched himself with no expression on his face. They found him a week later, hanging from a rope in his dingy Munich apartment, with a short note propped on the dresser saying he had to die for what he had done to the Jews, to the Gypsies, to the Poles. He had piles of writing on his desk, next to the note, titled, in careful calligraphy: One Nazi’s Confessions. In cramped handwriting, rigid black ink, Hans had written pages upon pages; he had invented instances, written of places and times that did not exist and heinous acts that had never happened. He was a revisionist but backwards, adding horrors instead of denying them, inserting himself wrongly into true events. He used familiar names and terms—Kristallnacht, Dachau, the “sweet smell”—but the details he used otherwise were often shockingly wrong. He wrote of a hurricane at Dachau. He said in Auschwitz the guards were all named Hans, which seemed like a joke, except that all who knew Hans knew his sense of humor was limited. Was he making fun of us? asked the judge, scratching his head. Of history? It’s not funny, he said, and his secretary said no, she didn’t think so, though she could not explain it either. Hans said that he had rounded up Jews and Gypsies in a church and burned them inside and he could not forgive himself for shooting the ones that flew out the window in an attempt to escape. But someone noted that this was awfully close to the plot of the Wiesenthal classic on forgiveness, The Sunflower, and that that Nazi in question was already named. It took ten minutes to find The Sunflower on Hans’s bookshelf, dog-eared to a beige softness.

  Hans’s notes were bound and filed in the judge’s paperwork, the finishing chapter of the Hoefler saga, which had been ongoing for more than four years by that point. “Case closed,” said the judge, with no small pang of regret for having asked his niece to do the Milgram study. He had known that Hans would walk out of the test. He’d been sure of it. But if he’d known that, he should have also known that that kind of empirical evidence on videotape might clash too intensely with Hans’s own image of himself as a murderer, which then might unsettle him enough to lead to something worse, but the judge was never a very good chess player and could not think nine steps ahead. It was tiring and difficult, this judge business.

  Since Hans had no friends at that stage of his life, his funeral
was attended only by the staff of the court. “If only the rest could be so responsible,” said the auburn-haired secretary to the judge’s clerk as they drank cups of stiff coffee afterward, standing in the coatroom, still in their coats. The world, they agreed, needed more Hans Hoeflers. “Better to commit suicide than kill someone else,” they suggested, but the words sat flat in their mouths as they worked that day. Like soda, unfizzed.

  Even if it was true, there was something despicable about valuing Hans’s concave heart, and by the end of the day, the judge’s clerk found herself spurning Hans, and flicking him from her mind like a bug.

  3.

  That auburn-haired secretary did not flick him from her mind; instead, she drew him closer inside it. She became obsessed with what had been wrong with Hans. Why hang himself? Why all the guards named his name? What would cause a person to distort so profoundly? She was about thirty years old, and her life had fallen into predictability, and so these thoughts of Hans would not leave her mind, which was as open as a bowl, ready to receive them.

  She dreamed of him all the time, walking through the streets with a cane like her father’s, trailed by a tangle of scruffy dogs. Her father, a man so quiet and unobtrusive he often had been handed people’s plates and trash—even in public, even out dining. There was a generation of German men who, in response to what history had revealed, refused to tolerate any sign of internal aggression. Her father had never raised his voice. He would not even laugh loudly. He said, “I’m sorry,” when people bumped into him on the street, as if his presence on the sidewalk deserved apology, for had he not been there in the first place, he reasoned, the person would have had no one to bump into. “I am a mouse, a mouse,” he had whispered to her as he was dying. The problem was that being a mouse sometimes made people irritable, and many raised their voices in her father’s presence because he spoke so softly it was aggravating. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” her mother said, often. “SPEAK LOUDER, MAN!” While he was dying, which took a few days, the nurse kept leaving her mystery novel on his stomach, along with her purse, and sometimes her snack, so when the secretary visited he was covered with objects, breathing thinly and carefully so as not to shake anything off.

  Hans joined her father’s ghost-space easily. The two men walked through her dreams together, unable to speak, shoulders folding in, followed by dogs. She couldn’t stop thinking about them. Once, she had yelled at her mother about something small, like clothes, or the telephone, and her father had stumbled in, weeping and whispering, “Stop it!” His exclamation point came in the form of a loud hush, like a radiator expelling heat. She and her mother had looked over, startled. They both liked fighting. It felt like a good workout, somewhat aerobic. German women had a different legacy to manage.

  Through leads on her computer and in the phone book, the secretary tried to find living Hoefler relatives, but no one returned her phone calls. Finally, through an advertisement she placed on the Internet, she was able to track down a former girlfriend of Hans’s, from their courtship in the 1950s, when Germany was split in half like a bread roll; when the Ottoman Empire could still occasionally be found on globes in thirdhand trinket shops.

  The secretary walked up a dark stairway, curling around to the back of the stone building. The walls smelled of wine, and mold.

  “The curious thing about Hans,” said the woman, after introductions had been made and she was now curled on her sofa with bubbly water in a green glass on a coaster of cork, “is that he would not let me perform what many men enjoyed. That is,” she said, petting the long-haired white cat who’d hopped onto her lap, “what men often request. I assume you know what I mean?”

  The secretary thought of several things. Which was it? The older woman leaned in. “With the mouth,” she whispered, tapping her chin with a long red fingernail. “Just that.

  “He never allowed it. He did let me once, and then he insisted on serving me repeatedly for days. It was very pleasant for me,” she said. “Were you similarly treated? You’re awfully young.”

  The secretary frowned. “No,” she said. “He was only an acquaintance.”

  “Is he dead?”

  The secretary picked at the old chocolates in a silver dish between them, their corners whitened and chalky with time. She removed one and took a cautious bite. Crystallized maple sugar inside.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve said so earlier.”

  The cat closed its eyes, and no one took a sip of anything, and the sugar was sticky and too sweet in the secretary’s mouth.

  The older woman reached out a hand and put it on the secretary’s elbow. It was a light touch, but there was something else in it. “Let me show you something,” she said. She lifted the cat onto her shoulder and led the younger woman into her bedroom, which smelled musty, windows shut forever, and even with the lamp lit, had an undefeatable dimness. No direct sunlight, only the reflection of it off the building’s bricks next door. It made the secretary instantly weary.

  The older woman knelt, and from a drawer next to her bed removed a small gold locket. Inside was a lock of hair.

  “It’s my hair,” she said. “Not Hans’s. I soaked it in a deadly poison. Hair is porous. Had I needed to, I would’ve eaten it and died. We all had to have a plan.”

  “How old were you? Can a person eat hair?” asked the secretary, who stood awkwardly by the bed, and felt that she was being lied to.

  “Of course,” said the woman, dangling the hair over her mouth. “You young people don’t understand. You think all poison is in a bottle. I was a very bright child.”

  “I am trying,” said the secretary, “it’s just—”

  “Look,” said the woman, waving the hair. “Look, yes?”

  And because she knew she was supposed to, the secretary stepped up and pushed down the older woman’s hand, though she was tempted to let the woman eat the hair, to call the bluff, to shut down the opera. By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children.

  The older woman began laughing; her shirt had lost its top button, purposefully or not, and you could see her skin under the luminous blouse, the settled wrinkles, the breasts, which struck the secretary as almost intolerably lonely.

  “Hans was lousy,” said the woman, slipping the hair back into the locket. “He was lousy and he was wonderful. He was lousy, he was wonderful, and he was a self-centered bastard.”

  She clipped the locket shut and announced that the secretary was no fun. “You should be wearing more textures,” she suggested. “Your face is too plain for standard cotton.” She stood and rummaged in her closet and returned with a brightly colored silk-and-sheep’s-wool scarf, tasseled at the ends. “Wear it,” she said. The secretary waved her hand. “Wear it,” said the woman. The secretary opened her mouth to protest, and the woman said: “Put it on, or I will call the police and tell them that you broke into my apartment.”

  So it was that the secretary left the building, her coppery hair wrapped in the burgundy, ochre, and forest-green scarf, which did become her small precise features, and which did protect against the cold creeping in from the north in a streamy wind. She knew nothing new about Hans except that he did not invite fellatio when he was a young man and he had loved a woman as flamboyant in her inventions as he. They both had been so young. It said very little to her. Now she had a new scarf and a strange feeling in her hands and thoughts, as if the poison had somehow crept from the woman’s lock of hair into her, and so, when she was suitably far away, she found the first person who looked cold, handed her the scarf, and said take it, and that person, whoever it was, took it, because it was gorgeous, and because it was warm.

  The secretary’s own family had survived the war, but barely. All her men had slotted into different ages than were required. They did not have to fight; they were either too old or too young. Her grandfather, her father, he
r brother, her first love. This generational split freed them all from making any of the torturous decisions that Hans Hoefler had made for himself regardless. They formed their identities in the negative space instead.

  4.

  The judge’s secretary was typing one day, details about a couple out walking who had been robbed at gunpoint, a fairly unusual crime for these quiet streets, when she received a call. “I hear you want information on Hoefler,” a man’s voice said.

  She held her fingers above the keyboard, as if typing would scare off the voice. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

  “Meet me at the cemetery,” he told her. “Twenty minutes.”

  “Which cemetery?” she asked, but she knew as soon as she said it, and the man had hung up. It was only a five-minute walk, and Hans was buried there.

  She finished up the tail end of the report, swallowed herself inside her coat, and walked the ten blocks east, past the pawn shop and the bakery that specialized in crusty rolls soaked in chicken fat and sesame seeds. When she arrived at Hans’s grave, apprehensive, holding out her sharpest key just in case, she saw from a distance a man in a wheelchair with no hair on his head, wheeling past the headstones over the small green hills. She lowered the key. The air was chilly but clear, a good day to be outside. As the man drew closer, she saw he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, and that he looked over seventy. She watched him navigate the bumps of grass. He did not look like the kind of man who would appreciate an offer of help.