“Oh, God!” he muttered, sinking back into the sofa. He put his head in his hands for a moment, trying to sort through his feelings. “How do I know that’s true? It could have been any soldier.”
She didn’t react to the insult. “No,” she said, almost whispering. “It could only have been him. I wasn’t a prostitute. There was no one else. I loved him.”
“Do you have any other good news for me, or is that it?” he growled.
She shook her head. “Are you sure you want to hear it all right now?”
He stared at her with an exasperated expression. “Well, go ahead. What can be worse than that?”
She took her time. Eventually, she said in a very quiet voice, “He didn’t die in 1944. And he wasn’t killed in action.”
“Shit!” He almost yelled it. Everything that he had believed was being yanked out from under him. He felt as though he were floating in space with no place to land. Unable to handle any more, he got up, slammed out the front door and sped home.
That night, after the boys were in bed, Angie and he had a long conversation with a lot of tears. When they were both emotionally exhausted, there were still questions to be answered. Lots of them.
Why had she come here? Did she know who he was before she came? What did she want? What should they tell his mother? What about the half-brother? On and on. The implications were overwhelming. He knew he would have to confront her again, but he kept postponing the call. She solved the problem by calling him.
“Well,” he said on the phone, “I left so fast last time that I forgot to take the lighter with me. I really want to keep it.” They made a date and Angie went with him this time.
With the introductions made and the awkward small talk behind them, Henry said, “You told me that he wasn’t killed in combat. Suppose you tell me what did happen.”
“I hate to tell you this because it causes me pain, too,” she said. “He was killed at Darmstadt after the city was taken in March 1945. But he died in an auto accident.” Pause. “He was driving. And he was drunk.” Another pause. “And there was a German woman in the car who was also killed. I don’t know who she was, but that’s why they covered it up and told you he was killed in combat in 1944. That’s in the official record. But the soldier who delivered his things to me told me the truth.”
Henry just sat there shaking his head as Angie put her arm around his shoulder. “How much worse can it get?” he moaned.
“That’s the whole story,” Gerda hurried to add. “No more surprises. No more sad news.”
They all sat thinking for a while. Then he sat up, squared himself and took a deep breath. “OK, now let’s figure out why you’re here and what you want. I suppose you’re looking for money.”
“No! No money,” she said hurriedly.
“Well, you obviously want something or you wouldn’t be here. Why don’t you just tell us that whole side of the story, too?”
She leaned toward them. “I’m a woman alone,” she began. “I have no family here or in Germany, other than my son. Many of them were killed in the Holocaust. There was no future for me in Germany, but my son refused to leave. I came ahead, partly to get established here in hopes that he would someday choose to join me. Also, I hoped to contact your family. I didn’t know how that would happen, but I thought you might want to meet Kurt. Or at lease know of his existence. And I thought you might be able to help him get his visa. It would be easier if we had someone here who would vouch for him.”
She sat back as if drained from finally having put these thoughts into words. She glanced at them to judge their reaction. It was Angie who spoke next. “Why is he reluctant to come to the U.S.?”
“Because he’s heard too many bad reports from friends who have come here, how they’ve been greeted with hostility for having fought on the other side.”
“But surely he was too young to have fought.”
“People don’t take that into account. He’s a German, and Germans killed their father or their son or someone they knew. Anyone with a German accent is suspect.”
“How sad,” Angie whispered.
Henry felt anger rising in his chest. “So this whole thing was a set-up. You came here so you could just accidentally stumble across us, and then you just accidentally left your lighter in my office.”
“Well,” she said with the hint of a smile, showing off her new bridge, “I didn’t know how easy you were going to make it for us to meet. I didn’t plan that part of it. I mean, I didn’t pull out in front of you knowing that it was you. I think providence planned that part of the story.”
“How did you know where to find me after all these years?”
She nodded and showed them the note which his father’s captain had sent along with his personal items. It contained James’ last known address as well as the names of his wife and son. Some of his papers also indicated that he lived in the Cleveland area. She concluded by saying, “A little detective work was all that was needed after that.” Then, sensing that they still had unanswered questions, she went on. “I’ve been here since 1966. I didn’t want anything from you, except maybe a little help in getting Kurt over here. So I was going to wait until he was ready and then see about contacting you.”
They struggled through another half hour of details, then got up to leave. “We’re going to have to do a lot of talking with family,” Henry told her.
The next weekend, Henry and his family drove up to Cleveland to visit his mother. While the kids played with neighbor children, he told his mother the whole story. She was, not surprisingly, outraged by the idea and refused to believe any of it. “She’s one of those women who turned to whoring after the war to survive. You can’t trust a thing she says.”
“You don’t want to look into the matter of the son, in case what she says is true, and he is Dad’s…son?”
“Why would I want to do that?” she exploded. “He is not your dad’s son. And even if he were, why would I want to see him. He’s a total stranger, and he’s the bastard child of…” And she stormed out of the room.
Angie and Henry seemed able to talk about the situation calmly and thoughtfully in the following weeks. And as time went on, they came to a place of acceptance about the possibility of Kurt’s coming here and being a small part of their lives. It might be nice for the kids to have an uncle, even half of an uncle, since Angie only had one sister.
“But you know,” Angie reminded him, “if you do anything like this, you’ll probably lose touch with your mother. I hope she’ll relent, but you know how she is.”
So Henry called Gerda and said they were ready to talk. She replied, “Oh, I’m so happy you called. I’ve been praying that you would. Kurt is thinking about coming here to be near me because he just got engaged. He’s talking about bringing his fiancée with him so we can be a family, especially if there are children.”
The next months were spent in research into the steps that had to be taken. But their plans were complicated by a sudden and unexpected decline in Henry’s health. His symptoms seemed to puzzle his doctors – loss of appetite, lethargy, fatigue, increasingly higher blood pressure. Even though they treated the symptoms, he got steadily worse. By the time he had started taking days off from work, his doctor finally suggested a specialist who did a thorough workup. What he discovered was alarming in the extreme – Henry had an advanced case of renal failure. If it was allowed to proceed untreated much longer, he could die.
All this time, Henry had been fulfilling his promises to Gerda, and had made arrangements to have Kurt and his fiancée, Kirsten, come to Ohio. They would stay with Gerda until they had time to find a place of their own, after the wedding. Both of them were very excited. They had been tentatively promised jobs at one of the Columbus hospitals, Kurt as a lab assistant and Kirsten as a nurse’s aide, until she could study for and take her nursing boards. Thus, a year after the accident, Gerda was preparing to reunite her family in her new country.
By then, however, Henry ha
d given up his practice. He was undergoing dialysis three times a week, but was not showing the improvement they had hoped for. Everyone was worried about his prospects, and the best medical opinion was that only a kidney transplant would save his life. Since this procedure was relatively new, there was no comprehensive database for live donors, so finding a kidney was primarily a matter of advertising the need through media and by word of mouth.
Kurt and Kirsten were married in Gahanna, Ohio, Gerda’s home, in June, and began work at Riverside Hospital in Columbus in July. They had become regular visitors to Henry’s home out of gratitude for what he had done to help them emigrate to the U.S. But when they discovered that the doctors had not been able to find a kidney donor for him, Kurt sat down by Henry’s bed one day.
Kurt’s English was excellent, although it still had a slight and attractive German coloring to it. He had never talked seriously with Henry about anything yet, still feeling his way in a new land and a strange relationship. This day, however, he knew that had to change.
“Henry,” he told him, “we need to look at things straight on. We are half brothers and that gives us a unique relationship, even though you are thirteen years older. I never knew my father, and you knew him for only the first ten years of your life. But he created a connection between us that means something. So…I am going to have myself tested to see if I am a match for you.”
As much as Henry had been involved in the search for a kidney, he had never considered Kurt as a potential donor. There had been too much other work to do, and too much confusion even to think about that possibility. Now, even as he started to protest, he realized that their partial blood relationship might very well facilitate a match.
When the testing was done, much to everyone’s enormous relief, Kurt was a perfect match. Their dad had unwittingly created this solution by fathering two boys who both shared his genes, even though they had lived continents apart. The miracle could not have happened, however, without Gerda’s conspiracy and Kurt’s unselfishness, which in turn was the result of Henry’s willingness to overlook his father’s indiscretions and accept his half-brother with open arms.
The operation took place in August, before Henry had gotten too sick for it to do him any good. He recovered more quickly than Kurt did, however, because, while the kidney made a sick man better, the donation of that kidney made a well man quite ill for awhile. Henry showed immediate improvement and within two months they were both back to work. Henry bought back into his old practice and went to work with a new sense of gratitude.
Henry’s mother was never totally convinced that the whole story was true, but in time she came to tolerate Kurt, in spite of the fact that he looked like a young version of her husband. Kurt’s presence was a constant reminder that her husband had been up to no good while he was away at war, and he was certainly no longer anyone’s hero.
Although there was little proof of Gerda’s story, one small detail was accepted by all of them as irrefutable evidence: the tiny “H” scratched into the bottom of a cheap cigarette lighter by a ten-year-old boy with the tip of his pocket knife.
As for Gerda, she maintained to the end of her days that, when you need a handful of miracles, you should go find someone to smash into your car!
Author’s Notes
Spoiler Alert
I would suggest that you wait until you have read the book to look at these notes. You don’t want to spoil the …surprises!
Thank you for taking the time to read my newest book. It has a very special place in my heart, and I hope you had as much pleasure reading it as I did while writing it.
People ask me where I get the ideas for short stories like these. Well, an author begins with what he knows, and then lets his imagination take over. Obviously, these stories are fictional. But all except one are based on brief memories from my past. Let me share with you the moments of inspiration that generated each one, in the order in which they appear in the book.
The Feather: I once walked along the beach, found a pristine white feather, and gave it to a little girl who was digging in the sand with her mother. I let it go and a breeze off the ocean took it to her. I have often wondered where she is and what she is doing now. I love this story and didn’t want it to get lost, so I wrote the book in order to preserve it. And I did say, “Here, you need a feather.”
Memories: I have had my own past death recall, which set me on course for a new career. The details of that recall are recorded in two of my non-fiction books. Studying the influence of our past lives can produce significant insights into our current phobias and abilities.
The Key: I once restored a 1942 Chevy Aerosedan, which necessitated going to a local Vo-Tech school to learn how to do auto body work. That’s a photo of my car, which I bought for $250 and sold for $1,000 in the 1970’s. Ain’t she purty?
Merlen: Pure fantasy. I love stories about real mystical events, like this example of after-death communication, of which there are many on record. They show how closely interrelated are the physical and spiritual worlds.
Charlie: Charlie was a real person who was in my grade at Roosevelt School and who lived across the street from the school building. He was one of only two African-American kids in the entire school, and I wonder now what it must have been like for him to be in that all-white school in the 1930’s and ’40’s.
The Voice: I bought a 1950 Chevy Styleline Two-Door Sedan when I graduated from college in 1954. It was a crappy tan color, but I loved it. You always love your first car. I used it to go to graduate school at Princeton Seminary and to visit my girlfriend, Helen, who was a nursing student in Baltimore. We have been married now for 57 years.
The Lighter: I recently had to drive a long detour every day, because the bridge on the only direct road into town was being replaced. There was a right turn in that detour which everyone took. I often wondered if a wreck like the one I describe in the story might some day happen at that intersection.
The Dedication: You might have noticed that I dedicated the book to my four great-grandchildren. I also snuck their names into two of the short stories. You will forgive me if I make use of an author’s prerogative and call attention to the exceptional short people in my family.
Contacting me: I would be glad to hear from you. Please feel free to email me at:
[email protected]
And please visit our website at:
www.beyondreligion.com
Life Surprises Page 14