by R. M. Ryan
The PX didn’t have any Bob Dylan records, but they did have one from Jimi Hendrix with a Dylan song, “All Along the Watchtower”:
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl
42.
Herr Engeler, Herr Engeler. A slumping bear of a man in a baggy suit. His ties, unlike those of Herr Schefke, always hung loose and askew. He usually arrived late to Room 250 with papers sticking out of his accordion-like briefcase. He sat down with a sigh, as if the world weighed heavily on him, and his briefcase hit the floor a moment later like a punctuation mark.
“Na, ja,” he said most days, his hair falling across his face. Oh dear.
He looked down at the linoleum squares on the floor for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Then he looked up, combing his hair back with his fingers. He looked wistful, with a little smile, as if he shared a secret with us. The other instructors were so brisk, getting our German ready, polishing us for our days in the Vaterland, but Herr Engeler seemed like he was preparing us for something else. He seemed to feel sorry for us.
Again, he ran his fingers through his hair, pulling it back over his head. He pointed at one of us.
“Ach, ja, wir beginnen jetzt mit Ihnen.”
We begin with you.
He pointed at PFC Chuck Quarles, in the back row. Blushing, Chuck said his part.
Wie heißt die Strasse hier?
Herr Engeler pointed at Renner next.
Die Zeil, die Hauptgeschäftsstraße von Frankfurt.
Sentence by sentence, we went through the dialogue in the first hour, each of us taking a turn. While this is the normal routine of our mornings, Herr Engeler seemed to have his mind elsewhere.
It was the end of April, and our course ended in July. We were all beginning to feel jittery. The bargain we’d made with the army was coming to an end. In July the army could do whatever it wanted with us. Vietnam was always a possibility.
Early on, Lee Rasmussen had reminded us of that. He started with us in September, chattering away during the breaks outside of Nisei Hall.
“Gonna get me one of those Porsche automobiles over there in ole Deutschland,” he said. “Gonna drive me up and down those ole autobahns like no one’s ever driven them before.”
He had the thumb and index finger of his right hand on the knot of his black GI necktie and wiggled it back and forth, as if it were too tight or too loose or too something. A nervous tic.
“Gonna have me some of that good life over there in Germany.”
In the mornings, though, when we were supposed to repeat the dialogues, Lee couldn’t talk. All he could do was smile and wiggle that tie knot back and forth. It was quite strange, really. Even the career sergeants, who weren’t very smart, could sputter out a few phrases, but not Lee. Pretty soon he disappeared from our class and was put on permanent KP while he awaited reassignment.
The last time I saw Lee he was wiping off tables in the company mess hall. Then Lee was gone. We heard he’d been sent to combat radioman’s school and, we supposed, to one of the most dangerous jobs of all in the Vietnam War—going through the jungle with fifty pounds of radio on his back. When the radio was set up, it had a giant whip antenna attached that said to the enemy, “Here I am. Come and get me.”
Years later, I looked up his name on a list of those commemorated by the Vietnam war memorial.
God.
There he was. Specialist Four Lee S. Rasmussen.
Casualty was on May 5, 1970
in BINH THUAN, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
MULTIPLE FRAGMENTATION WOUNDS
Or maybe it was another Lee S. Rasmussen. The truth is, I’ll never know the truth.
Perhaps that’s the truth of those terrible times.
We’ll never know the truth.
We moved through our days at the Defense Language Institute like men walking beneath a long row of swords dangling from threads attached to the ceiling. One could fall at any time, though, God knows, I tried to forget about the army. I went for walks along the coast at Big Sur and camped in the hills. I dreamed of Europe. I imagined myself lounging at sidewalk cafés with a glass of beer, or sitting at a table covered by pristine white linens as I speeded by train across the European countryside.
In all of this I hardly ever thought about Jenny, who trudged off every day in one of her white nylon uniforms to her job in the bakery.
Herr Engeler seemed even more distracted than usual that April. He would lose his place in the dialogue, or begin speaking what we students called real German, the German of our teachers’ actual lives. That German, while vaguely familiar, was speeded up and slurred and beyond our powers of recognition.
“Do you think Herr Engeler knows where we’re going?” Art Schmid wondered aloud during the break. “Maybe he’s seen our orders. Maybe he’s afraid to tell us. Maybe we’re not going to Germany.”
“I think I’m getting assigned to The Grateful Dead as their translator,” Neil Renner said and whistled.
“Shhh,” Herr Engeler said the next afternoon when he came in the classroom. He clutched his giant briefcase to his chest, as if protecting it. After looking out the window in the classroom door to make sure no one was watching, he set the briefcase on the table at the front of the room.
“Herr Renner, you will stand watch at the door, bitte schön, and give us one of your whistles if you see Frau Schneider marching down on us, verstehen Sie?”
Renner grinned, probably amused that he would be chosen to guard anything.
Herr Engeler opened the mouth of the briefcase and reached inside, and I shivered. It seemed like he was going to let us in on a secret of some kind.
He set a gray-covered book on the table. Das Dritte Reich was the simple title. The Third Reich. The Hitler era. Beside it he put an old map, some pictures, and an official-looking document in script.
“Ich war auch einmal Soldat,” he said, sitting on the top of the table and brushing the hair out of his face. “Genau wie Sie.”
I was also once a soldier. Just like you.
“Es war einmal ein Krieg . . .” He looked off in the distance. That’s how fairy tales began.
He repeated himself in English: “Once upon a time, ja, there was a war.”
“Hier ist das Haus, wo das Knäbchen Albert Engeler wohnt mit seiner Mutter, seinem Vater, und seiner geliebten Schwester Erika.”
Here is the house where the young boy Albert Engeler lived with his mother, his father, and his beloved sister Erika.
He passed around an old black-and-white photograph of his childhood house. It was faced with stucco and had a series of figures over the door. That family of four stood on the walkway in front of the house, holding on to one another.
“Guck’ mal,” Herr Engeler said. “Oben an der Tür, die Engelsfiguren.” Angel figures above the door. “Wie mein Familienname. Engeler ist er, der Engel macht.” An Engeler is one who makes angels.
“Here, look at this photograph, bitte sehr. I was lawyer. Ich war Jurist.”
Indeed, there was a younger Herr Engeler, mostly just a thinner version of the man sitting in front of us, with his hair falling across his face, in the black gown of someone graduating from law school. He smiled, a face for the good things of the world. The photograph is small and cracked, as if it had been in someone’s wallet.
Herr Engeler then handed around a copy of his diploma with the Gothic lettering. It smelled old, like dead hope.
“But der Herr Hitler was interested in me, also, you see. He called me, about this war they were having. I tried begging off. I told them I was busy, but no, they insisted. They made me an aide to a general. Here.”
In this photograph a dour-looking Albert Engeler stands beside an open-topped Mercedes command car in his oversized army uniform. Its sleeves almost cover his hands.
“Look at that car,” Herr Engeler said. “I was the youngest officer and the chauffer and the car polisher.”
He handed around
more pictures of himself and his army buddies. He got up then, and glanced out the window of the classroom door.
“Ja, daß ist das Märchen,” Herr Engeler said and sighed. “That’s certainly the fairy tale. Es war einmal ein Soldat im Krieg gegen Russland. Once upon a time there was a soldier in the war against Russia. Daß war ich. That was me—headed to the Russian front on the general staff. Here. Sehen Sie.”
He unfolded a yellowed map with blue and red and green routes on top of black details. The way from Germany to Russia. Kriegskarte was the heading. War Map. Funny, though, the army just took the highway to Russia. Their route looked like the outline of a vacation trip.
“We left in the summer. I drove. We had the top down. Glorious. The general was in the backseat. The troops were behind us in trucks. Bands along the way. We sang ‘Lili Marlene,’ and the general saluted those who’d come out to see us off. The onlookers waved flags and shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ We commandeered rooms in the finest hotels along the highway. It was a good life, driving to Russia in our open Mercedes.”
Herr Engeler smiled at us and, with his hand over his heart, began to sing in a baritone voice.
Vor der Kaserne
Vor dem großen Tor
Steht eine Laterne
Steht sie noch davor.
As he finished the opening of the song, his hand went out, and a trembling finger pointed out Lili Marlene, somewhere beyond where we sat in Room 250.
“Not a gun was fired until we got to some town in Russia. I’ve forgotten its name. That’s where we dug in. We somehow got cut off from the rest of the brigade. Cut off for evermore. It was the fall then. Kennen Sie diese Geschichte? Do you know this history?”
Goldberg, our history student, raised his hand to answer “Yes,” but Herr Engeler didn’t see him. He was talking to some ghostly reality at the back of Room 250 on that sunny afternoon in the spring of 1970, in Monterey, California. The six of us in our brown shirts stared at him, at the colored arrows on the Kriegskarte, drawn so boldly across Russia—stared at the smiling young man in his graduation gown—stared at the frowning young man beside the Mercedes-Benz.
“Ach, ja. Schrecklich. It got worse and worse. We were so isolated. Our little group—we had our own little war. The big war was on the radio until our batteries went dead. All day long, on the radio, the generals pleaded for artillery. The trucks with the guns were lost somewhere. So kalt. Cold, cold. Ach, die Toten. So many dead. Alles verloren. It’s all lost. Winter. So cold, cold. The dead stacked all around us. It was too cold to bury them. The ground broke the tips of the axes. We stacked our Kameraden. Made bunkers of them to protect our riflemen. Even in death they could not escape the war.”
Underneath the lantern
by the barrack gate,
Darling I remember
the way you used to wait;
His voice trembled this time. His finger shook as he pointed.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Quarles told someone at the break.
“Shhh,” Renner said, as Frau Schneider went by, bowing her head, trying to hear our gossip, nodding, not missing a beat.
43.
Herr Engeler was pacing back and forth when we came back from the break.
“Ach, ja,” he said and sat back on the table. “Wo sind wir gewesen?” Where were we?
“Im Russland,” Goldberg said.
“Yes, in Russia,” Herr Engeler said, starting up again.
In terrible Mother Russia. It was so cold, but then in spring comes the warm weather and all the artillery shells a general could want. Unfortunately they are coming to us from the other side.
My general was quite depressed. He had this headquarters tent and sat at a little table bundled up with four or five coats on, staring at photographs of his wife and children. With each month of the spring, he removed a coat.
For a while, he drank brandy as he sat there. He had one of those windup Victrolas and would play these thick, shellac records. Of course his favorite song was “Lili Marlene.” He played it over and over. The record became scratchier and scratchier, and the sound of the woman’s voice got farther and farther away from us, as if even she knew that we were losing the war and wanted to get away from our lost little brigade.
In May, he was down to two coats, and he reached into his pants pocket and handed me the keys to the Mercedes and gave me one of these maps you see here.
“Du musst zurück nach Deutchland fahren, Leutnant Engeler,” he told me. Drive back to Germany. He used the familiar form with me, as if he were my father. “Wir sind alle tot hier, versteht’s du,” he said. We’re all dead here. He wanted to save one of us.
So early the next morning, I took one baked potato. It was my allotment. It was the only kind of food we had.
Oh, that car. We’d arrived at the battle in the bright promise of summer with the top down and the wind in our faces. When they started shooting at us, we forgot about the car. When it started snowing, I covered it with a tarp, and there it sat for the winter. Incredibly, the car started on the first try, though I couldn’t get the top up. I didn’t care. I put it in gear and headed on down the road.
The guard looked me over as I left the camp. I told him I was reporting back to headquarters. The general had given me a note, like a permission slip to stay home from school, and I showed the guard that.
“I don’t care what this note says. You are a traitor to leave us here like this. You should die with your regiment,” he said, but he nonetheless waved me on, and I left our doomed camp, the rising sun at my back, driving on this road back to Germany. Even with the sun, I was freezing cold because the top was down. Aside from the chill, the big challenge was avoiding all the holes in the road from artillery shells.
I passed soldiers once in a while.
“Hey, da,” they yelled.
“Hey, da,” I yelled back. Sometimes I gave them rides; sometimes they just looked at me with these gray, starved faces. They were all eyes, shuffling along.
I had extra gas in tanks strapped to the running boards, but I ran out of gasoline somewhere in Poland. I started walking. At first, most of the others on the road were soldiers like me fleeing back to Germany, but then people started walking toward us, Poles fleeing the armies coming east from Germany. I knew some Polish and asked a man what the territory was like ahead, in the west toward Germany. It’s all crazy they told me—soldiers everywhere—Americans, Russians, everyone shooting at everyone else.
I had some money, German marks—probably worthless by then—but I gave all of it to the man for his clothes, and he took mine. So now he was a German soldier headed back to the front, and I was a Polish peasant headed to Germany. It all made perfect sense then. Funny, those clothes of his smelled like rotten strawberries. I’ve never forgotten the scent.
I walked and walked. I slept in ditches and drank water from feeding troughs in farm fields. It was still cold there in the east. I have arthritis in my elbow now for all the times I broke the ice on top to get to the water below. When I talk about it, the pain shoots through here.
I was lucky. I could speak some English, some Russian, and some Polish. I’d been an actor at the university. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to have my moment. Funny, isn’t it, how your moment just slips up on you.
I walked and walked. I’d lost my map, so I never knew exactly where I was. Some nights I could hear the Russians singing around their campfires. Some nights it was the Poles. Less and less often it was the Germans.
After days and days of walking, I was stopped by American soldiers in a Jeep. They had that same haunted look that our soldiers had. All eyes. I spoke to them in Russian. I made quite a show, and they drove me to this German village they’d captured and made the Bürgermeister feed me.
I spoke Polish to him. That Bürgermeister just fell all over himself bowing and bringing me dishes himself—you know, taking them from the waiters and giving them to me and muttering “Bitte schön, der Herr.” Thank you sir
. Lebersuppe, sauerbraten, kohl—liver soup, marinated roast beef, cabbage—a real German meal. I hadn’t eaten food like that in months, but I made the mistake of using the German word Salz—salt—and the Bürgermeister heard my accent from just that one word and knew I was German.
Before I knew it, he threw my coat at me.
“Verräter!” he screamed. Traitor.
I was back on the road. Weeks went by. They seemed like hours. An American truck stopped. A soldier with a gun sat at the back and lifted up a tarp and motioned me up there. All Polish civilians looking at the floor. I thought the game was up, but I didn’t say a word. After an hour of driving, the truck stopped.
“Here you are,” the soldier at the back says and points to the ground with his gun. When I just sit there, afraid to get out, he says, “Stoppen you-a here-a.” I always loved the way the Americans made up words, as if they thought their inventions were a foreign language.
I got down from the back of the truck and walked with the Poles into the American compound. I worked there for several days, digging a trench around the perimeter, cleaning the latrines—peasant work. They fed us hamburgers. Every night hamburgers and ice cream for dessert. Never in my life before had I eaten butter pecan ice cream.
I was homesick for Berlin, so one night I just left. I’d picked up a compass somewhere and started walking through the woods. I had to backtrack. I had come too far west. I had a little knapsack with food and a jar of water in it. I got to this river that was a border somewhere. There was a bridge, but the Russians guarding it wouldn’t let me cross, so I went a mile downstream, took off my clothes, and, holding them over-head, swam across. It was so cold my teeth began to chatter halfway across. Then I was shaking all over, and my legs were knocking, one against the other, and all my swimming did was spin me around, naked, in the middle of the river, but the gods were kind, the current, oh sweet God the current lifted me right up to the shore like a sinner God wanted to save. Before I knew it, I was sitting on rocks at the far side of the river, and the morning sun came over the pine trees and warmed me. It took an hour or two, but finally the shivers went out of me.