by Kluge, P. F.
“As long as she lived, she wondered about you,” I say. “She never forgot. That picture was like a shrine. I never could figure it out.”
He nods as if to say, he couldn’t figure it out himself.
“Some ways, she was rough on you, Heinz. That last time, at the Bund picnic, she wanted out of there. If it were up to me, I would have gone back for you. We were scared, though. And I guess you made your peace with her. I mean, you were in that photo, side by side.”
Another nod. He couldn’t be more agreeable.
“After I heard you went back to Germany—Otto Hofer called and told me—I told Mom and she said it was just as well you went. That got me. What if a war came, I asked. At least one brother would be on the winning side, she fired back. That was harsh, I thought. She wasn’t like that, usually. Then she calms down. If you stayed in the U.S., she says you’d be a traitor. A criminal. But there were criminals over there, too, weren’t there? Or so the whole world thinks.”
He nods and just keeps driving. I’m right where I ought to ask: were you one of them? One of the criminals? But I just can’t manage it. And he just keeps driving. That speech loss is a million dollar wound.
“One thing I wonder is … whether she loved you before she married me. Whether I was something she came up with on the bounce. Rebound, I mean.”
No, no, he shakes his head. Maybe he’s saying I’ve got it all wrong. Or I’m dead right and he doesn’t want to talk about it. Or how dare I even ask.
“So,” I say. “Was I kind of … number two? I mean, she left you at that camp. She watched me drive away. But later that year, you see her in Germany. You’re in that picture together. I had to wonder. But I never asked. Never found the right moment.”
He glares at me. He gives me a look I haven’t seen since I was small. But none of it works. I plow ahead. “It doesn’t change anything … but … I’m sorry … I’d like to know. What was going on with you two.“
All of a sudden, he slaps the turn signal and pulls over to the side of the road. He reaches past me, elbowing me a little, and pulls a pencil and another pad of paper out of the glove compartment. He opens the door of the car to catch a breeze, starts to write. Then he sees me, sitting there. Go take a walk, he signals. Go play in traffic.
He’s scribbling as I walk away. I stand under an orange tree, at the edge of the grove, thankful for shade. Heinz looks like a student taking an exam, struggling to beat the clock. I step into the orange grove. There are rows and rows of trees loaded with fruit, so close to the road. And dozens of oranges, dozens under each tree, that no one will ever eat. Windfall oranges. I keep walking. Fruit above, fresh as blossoms, marmalade at my feet. And bees everywhere, fat and sluggish Florida bees, too lazy to sting. The car’s far away now, a glint of metal at the side of the road. The orange trees surround me. The smell of them could make you swoon, alleys of orange trees, you could walk in circles, you could wander for days. Maybe that’s what I deserve. I’m sorry, Mom: I say it aloud and my voice is choking. Bringing you up this way. I’m sorry. I’ve got a good memory for bad things and the good things I take for granted. I’m sorry. I’ve gotten so deep into oranges, I can’t even see that zone of sunlight that would mark the edge of the road. Hey, I’m lost. Do I drop markers on the ground, to make sure I’m walking in a straight line? What do I use, in here, for markers? Oranges? They’re all over the ground, in all directions. I step on them, left and right, the place is rotten with oranges, I hear a truck go booming by and I head towards where the sound came from. When I come out on the road I’m a quarter mile from the car, on a shoulder that’s littered with beer cans and pizza boxes. Heinz is staring anxiously into the orange groves. Then he sees me coming and he waves. As soon as I get back to the car he hands me what he’s written, signals me to sit and read. I try putting it in my pocket. Read it now, he gestures. Right here, right now.
Hans, it begins. I had my eye on Maria from the minute I saw her. I told my friends, she’s young, but when she’s older, she’s mine, you stay away. I was a playboy, in the meantime. She saw that. And then you came in, a complete greenhorn, and she wanted you. So if you think you saw something between us, maybe you did. But it wasn’t what you thought. It wasn’t about what was. It was about what might have been. That’s why she didn’t take the photograph down. She was a good woman. Better than we deserved. Either of us. H.
When I finished reading I sat awhile, wondering why Mom took me and not my brother. I got out of the car and came around to where he was, leaning against the car, looking down the road. There were tears in his eyes. And mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say. He nods. “I can eat now,” I say. He nods again. We keep driving through the orange groves, which go on forever.
“Your brother’s out back,” Millie says. It’s next day, the middle of the morning and the heat is something fierce. Tar bubbles and blisters, grass turns into straw and that car lot looks like a barbecue grill loaded with lobsters.
“Swimming?”
“I wish,” Millie answered. “Working in the garden. You know anything about gardens?”
“Yes,” I answer. “A lot.”
“Anything you could do, you’d be doing a favor. There’s a world of pain out back.”
I slip on some shorts and a pair of old shoes and walk around to the back of the building and right away, I see what Millie meant. It’s a comedy, a clown show, and a good thing he’s working in back of the motel, not in front, because people would pull over to watch, the way they slow down passing a car accident. Heinz as a gardener would be an attraction, right up with the Parrot Jungle and the Circus Hall of Fame. He’s sweaty and dirty, sighing and grunting and he’s got no idea what he’s doing. He waters the flagstones, not the plants, with a hose that gets wrapped around the legs of a chair and garrots some snapdragons. Another thing, he’s wearing the same clothes—slacks, shirt and shoes—he wore at lunch, that are covered with dirt and water and green smudges. He’s got no clothes to work in—he never did—and if I guess right, he believes that this is all part of it, if you don’t finish looking awful, you weren’t out there. He can’t tell weeds from plants and when he weeds he grabs the tops and yanks hard, leaving the roots in the ground. He’s bought himself a tree that he’s digging a hole for, huffing and puffing. First time he tries to put in the tree, the hole’s too shallow. The tree looks like a statue, up on a pedestal. Next, he digs deeper, dirt flying in every direction and the tree half disappears, its lower branches touching the edge, like the poor thing is clinging to the side of a deep pit. He fusses some and on the next try the tree is lopsided, like something you’d see growing off the side of a mountain. Then he decides, well, time to rest, and he pulls out the chair, which is tangled in the hose, which knocks over the other chair and it goes into the swimming pool.
“Don’t move,” I shout. I sound like a television cop breaking into a drug deal. But I see a rake right at his side, upside down, ready for him to step on it so he can puncture his foot and— boing!— knock out his teeth. This whole garden is like one of those things they used to run in the Sunday funnies: how many things are wrong with this picture? So he obeys, he stays in his chair, smiling weakly at me.
I motion Heinz to stay: Don’t just do something, sit there. And bit by bit, I set the place in order. The tools that are all over the backyard, dropped or thrown, I put on the table. I follow the hose, which has actual knots in it to where it’s half attached to a faucet at the back of the motel. It’s made a puddle that could fill a bathtub and there’s black mold on the concrete that National Geographic should photograph. I turn off the water, re-connect the hose, tight, and turn on the water, not full-blast like Heinz had it, but less than half and I set the end of it in his vegetable garden, near the fence where some eggplant have been trying hard to jump to freedom.
It’s simple. Heinz loves the idea of having a garden. I love gardening. That’s the difference. I take a spade and square up the hole. When it’s ready, I motion Heinz o
ver. Like a parent lifting a bratty kid by his throat, he hoists the tree—a kumquat tree, the tag says — and holds it over the hole. It’s bombs away, any minute. I stop. I tell him it’s a good idea to take the tree out of the pot it came in before he plants it, and to loosen the roots. The survival rate goes up enormously, if you do that. And we don’t drop the tree in the hole, like a World War II pilot putting a bomb down the smokestack of a Japanese battleship. We take the tree in our hands—like this, see?—and we put it gently in the hole, fitting and turning it, till everything is snug and comfortable. It has to feel right, I say. Then, while we’re kneeling down on the ground, we take soil, a little at a time, and we fill in the space between the earth that the tree came with and the earth around it, we pat things into place, like this, we build a mound around the newcomer, because the soil will settle later. And then—bring that hose over here, brother of mine—we give the lemon tree a drink of water, just a trickle at the roots. Next I lead him over to the so-called vegetable garden, where he’s got an acre’s worth of tomato plants in a ten by ten plot of ground. It’s a jungle out there, survival of the fittest, it’s a scene from Our Crowded Planet. I take half the plants out, so there’s at least eighteen inches between what remains. I spade the soil between the plants, so the roots get air, and I don’t turn over five pounds of soil at a time, this is a garden, not a trench on the Russian front.
He’s been watching me, he’s good at that. Now I signal he should get down on his knees, please. I teach him how to weed, how to pull gently from the bottom, so that everything comes out, roots and all and I suggest that, though it’s fun to throw weeds over your shoulder it’s even better if you put them in a pile. That way, we can start a compost pile. I have my doubts about this, that I don’t tell him. In New Jersey we had food scraps, grass cuttings, leaves. In Florida, I don’t know. Maybe he can get doggie bags when he eats out, add French fries and dinner muffins and Jello to the mix. Now I’m done for the day. I sit down next to him. He nods thanks. I guess I got a little out of hand—it’s his garden—and I was bossy.
“I’m sorry if I …” It’s not easy to convey regrets, after I’ve killed myself while he was mostly watching. Someone should tell him that mid-afternoon isn’t green thumb time in Florida. “I know it’s your garden.” And then, when I look at Heinz, I see I’m wrong. It’s all over his face. This garden wasn’t for him. It was for me.
“I’ve been wondering,” I start. It’s my fourth day with Heinz. We’ve both cleaned up and we’re down in front of the Flamingo, headed out for dinner. To be honest, it tires me out, this long-awaited reunion. Heinz organizes his day around errands and meals and it’s always just the two of us, which means that I do all the talking but I can’t talk about what I really want to know. Even now, as soon as it sounds like there might be a question coming, I see him backing off.
“… what you live on,” I say. “The money side of things down here.”
He relaxes, relieved it’s not about the war.
“This motel isn’t exactly a cash cow,” I continue. “You drive a new BMW. We eat where you want and it’s always your treat.”
Wait a minute, he signals, wagging a finger. You’ll see. Off we go, down the coast ten miles and then cut inland. I still can’t get over seeing him here. Who are his friends? Heinz was always the heart of the crowd. And what about women? He loved women and they went for him and he still draws looks, when we’re out together. Tonight, for instance, he’s got polished leather shoes and black slacks, nicely creased, and a light blue shirt that’s long sleeved, with the cuffs nicely folded above his wrists. Me, I’m wearing stuff Mom bought for me years ago, a pink polo shirt with some kind of animal, maybe a crab, crawling around the pocket and khaki slacks and open-toed sandals.
After half an hour, Heinz pulls into a line of cars stopped outside the gatehouse of something called The Greens. The guard waves some people through, saluting briskly. Others they check and double-check, making a phone call to warn insiders that someone’s coming. They recognize Heinz. More than that, they throw him a salute, an arms-out Hitler salute, that’s a running joke, I guess. Heinz waves back—an on-purpose sloppy wave—and gives me a what-can-I-do-about-it look, the same look he gave me at the entrance to Camp Deutschland, years and years ago. It gives me the willies. We head down a curving road that has a landscaped island in the center, with hibiscus and plumeria and grass that looks like an unrolled carpet. Left and right, I see a line of antique lamps and benches. There was a time, I guess, when people grew up—like my son—thinking that, if they made it big, they’d live in Manhattan with a view of Central Park. That was the dream. But dreams go out of style. And America came up with something different to dream about, a place like The Greens, where you live on the edge of a golf course.
At the end of the road there’s a gate. Heinz picks up a plastic gadget, like a remote control for a TV, pushes a button and the gate opens, then closes behind us. We head down a crushed coral driveway, towards a house that has a garage that’s bigger than our whole place in Berkeley Heights. The driveway curls around the front of the house, showing off the property, which includes a lily pond, a row of palms, a hedge of hibiscus, lots of orange trees and flower beds, well-kept. As we get close to the house, a couple of dogs—German shepherds—come running out to us. They recognize the car, they dance around it. He gets out and the dogs are all over him, jumping up, licking his face, rubbing against his legs. Me, they’re not so sure about.
“Ticks and fleas must be something fierce in Florida,” I say. Not much of a contribution. Anyway, Heinz doesn’t hear me: the dogs have priority. The front door opens and a man and woman come walking down the sidewalk.
“Hi, Pop,” the woman says to Heinz. “I wish they gave me that kind of hello.” Heinz is sitting down, getting dog-loved. He better wash up before he eats. Hitler loved dogs too, I recall. While he takes care of this important business, he signals for everybody to introduce themselves.
“Hi,” the woman says. “I’m Debbie Greifinger Barnes.”
“I’m Buddy Greifinger,” says the guy.
“I’m Hans,” I say. No need to add Greifinger. “Who are you folks, anyway?”
“We’re his kids,” Buddy says.
“I guess we should call you uncle,” Debbie adds.
“Nice to meet you,” I say. Once they tell me he’s my brother’s son, I can see some resemblance around Buddy’s mouth —the look of a charmer—and in the way he carries himself. Debbie has more of Heinz, a female Heinz, looking like one of the cable television women who sell exercise equipment, stomach firmers you can put in a suitcase, rowing machines where you can work out and watch television at the same time.
“Were you born here?” I ask. “Or on the other side?”
“Over there,” Buddy says. “Right before they came over. Hey Pop, what was the name of the place l was born at?”
“Buddy!” his sister protests. “You know he can’t …” Heinz glances up, gives Buddy a what-a-cluck-you-are look. He points to his tongue, the same as he’d done for me, only then he was smiling.
“Oh yeah,” Buddy says. “I keep forgetting. A man talks to you all your life, you forget to adjust. I don’t think he had a stroke, actually. I think he just ran out of words. My theory is, you have only so many in you. You run out, that’s all.”
“Was it Hamburg?” I ask.
“That’s right,” Buddy says. “I guess I’ll go over, check it out sometime. I don’t remember a thing.”
“About your mother,” I say. Heinz is still fussing with the dogs, checking for ticks and fleas, running his fingers through their fur, lifting their ears, taking his time. “When did she pass on?”
“Beg pardon?” Debbie says. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“She’s in Germany,” Buddy says. “She goes back every year, spends a couple of months. Far as I know, she’s fine. Anyway, we keep getting credit card statements.”
“Could we go in, now?” Debbie asks.
“Pop?” Heinz lifts himself off the ground. He and his son head in towards the house. Debbie takes me by the elbow to follow but, when I start walking, she holds me back.
“This all must be a lot for you to take in, Uncle Hans,” she says.
“We were out of touch for a long time. We were close once and then we headed in different directions. Then came the war.”
“That was … World War II?”
“Yes,” I answer. Dumbfounded. It’s amazing what you can’t count on people to know.
“It’s been over a while, hasn’t it,” she says. And, I guess, maybe she’s not so dumb after all. “You stayed out of touch a long time.”
“It’s hard to explain. I thought he was dead. And maybe he thought it was just as well. Does he … I mean did he … ever talk about it?”
“Never,” she says. “It’s off-limits. He was in it, over there. Someplace. That’s all I know. I’m sure of one thing, though. He’s excited about you. I’ve never seen him that way about anyone. He told us …” She stops to correct herself. “I mean, he wrote it down, that he tried to reach you.”
“By postcard!”
“Well he can’t call, can he now?” she says.
“No, but not a regular letter? Or registered mail?”
“He’s a funny man,” Debbie says. “Sometimes, he’s funny hah-hah. Sometimes another kind of funny. But, he let us know. Any day now. The long lost brother …”
“No,” I interrupt. “He was the long-lost brother.”
Heinz and Buddy stand waiting at the front door. When I get there, Heinz takes me by the arm and leads the tour, with his son trailing along behind, like a realtor commenting on points of quality that might not meet the eye: central air conditioning, controlled in every room, central heating, even central vacuuming, a hose in every room, and the dust shoots right down into the cellar, so you don’t have to drag that doodlebug behind you. The house is huge and modern: it has high ceilings and tall windows, a covered porch, an open patio and a restaurant-size kitchen with Mediterranean-looking tiles, six-burner stove, a counter the size of an autopsy table, strings of garlic and tomatoes everywhere, bowls of fruit that looks just like the soap that looks like fruit in bathrooms. There’s even an “entertainment center” with a television screen the size of a bed sheet and three little kids camped in front, watching something with rocket ships.