Forever Fleeting

by Bret Kissinger

  “Good evening,” Wilhelm greeted.

  “Beer, please,” the man said.

  He rubbed his mustache and nodded politely at Wilhelm. He smelled of leather and newspaper.

  “American?” Wilhelm asked.

  “Yes. Is my accent that bad?” the man asked.

  “Noticeable. Are you fluent?”

  “I took German in college. My father learned it when he was stationed over here.”

  Wilhelm took silent note that even though the man’s father spoke German, he had learned it at college.

  “That’s nice,” Wilhelm said.

  He had always found strangers to be interesting. Every person had a thousand stories to tell. But over the last twenty years, he had rarely run into any. It had been the same cast of characters everywhere he went and the same dreadful conversations.

  “Not really. He spoke English, German, and some French, but his preferred tongue was silence. And he was fluent,” the man said.

  “What brings you to Germany?” Wilhelm asked.

  “That,” the man said, pointing to the television.

  On it, hundreds of people cheered as sections of the graffiti-covered wall came down.

  “Shouldn’t you be there?” Wilhelm asked.

  “I was. My newspaper failed to get me a room at any hotel in West Berlin.”

  The bartender set down a glass of dark beer, and by the way the man looked at it, it was clear he was not a fan of it.

  “Put it on my tab,” Wilhelm said.

  “Thank you, but that’s not necessary. I get to spend fifty dollars a day on food and beverages, and so far, I’ve only had a sausage with sauerkraut. Let me get these,” the man said.

  He unfolded the paper Deutsche Mark from his pocket and set it on the table.

  “Thank you…” Wilhelm said, holding onto the word, hoping the man would pick up on the blunt hint.

  “Russell. Russell Kelly,” the man said.

  Hint received.

  “Wilhelm Schreiber,” Wilhelm said, offering his hand.

  Russell shook it. “What do we drink to?” he asked, lifting his beer from the bar.

  “To your father,” Wilhelm said.

  “To my father,” Russell repeated.

  Both men took a sip and reacted differently. It was hardly Russell’s first beer, yet American beer was water compared to German. Wilhelm also had been drinking it far longer. The beer had as much effect as milk would have.

  “What about you, Wilhelm? Married? Kids? All that good stuff?” Russell asked.

  He took another sip of his beer and was able to enjoy it much more than the first sip, as he knew what to expect.

  “No. Never happened for me,” Wilhelm said.

  “Can I ask you a question, Wilhelm?” Russell asked.

  Wilhelm nodded between sips of his amber-colored beer.

  “Did you fight in the war?”

  Wilhelm sipped his drink without acknowledging Russell.

  “Forgive me. It’s a personal question. I know your story is much different than my father’s. No parades for you. But the same pain, I’m sure,” Russell said.

  “I can’t speak for your father,” Wilhelm said.

  “Well, I can’t either. Nor can he. He … ugh … put a gun to his forehead a few years back,” Russell said.

  “I’m sorry,” Wilhelm said.

  “We were never close really. I thought by learning German, maybe we could have secret conversations that no one else could understand, but he only ignored me in two languages. I asked him about the war a lot, but he never said a word. After he passed, my wife and I cleaned out his dresser and found his medals and some old photographs and letters.”

  “Medals,” Wilhelm said.

  He shook his head and leaned back in his chair, his fingers rubbing the condensation on his glass.

  “You have to justify the death somehow,” Russell said.

  He could only hope his sarcasm was picked up through his American accent.

  “My father fought in the first war at Verdun. They gave him a medal too,” Wilhelm said.

  “Oh, God,” Russell muttered.

  He knew the battle and how destructive it was.

  “I was never close to my father either. My mother, before she died, always told me to be patient—that I could not understand what he had been through. I wanted to understand,” Wilhelm said.

  “Did you ever?” Russell asked.

  “Yes. To understand hell, you have to enter its gates.”

  “And where was that?” Russell asked, taking another sip that almost qualified as a gulp.

  “At Stalingrad,” Wilhelm said.

  “You fought at the Battle of Stalingrad? That was the bloodiest battle of the entire war,” Russell said, his face grim. He could only imagine the horror.

  “I was in the Sixth Army,” Wilhelm said.

  “Wehrmacht, right?” Russell asked.

  Wilhelm could tell Russell had studied the war, most likely in an attempt to understand his father much the same way Wilhelm had desired to know more about the Great War to understand his. It was a motive Wilhelm respected greatly.

  “Yes. I was not a Nazi. But most people don’t separate German from Nazi. One and the same,” Wilhelm said.

  “I lost two uncles. One at D-Day and another at the Battle of the Bulge. You’re right. We don’t differentiate,” Russell said.

  “I did not know about the camps, nor did thousands of other young men.”

  “Have you seen them? What’s left of them that is?”

  He waved the bartender over for another round. Russell had not intended to like the beer as much as he did but when in Rome or, in this case, Germany, one drinks beer. The flavor had come on strong, but with each sip, it settled better on his palate.

  “No. I could never,” Wilhelm said.

  “My mom is Jewish. My grandparents were at Bergen-Belsen. They lived. I went with her about ten years ago,” Russell said.

  “My wife was killed at Auschwitz,” Wilhelm said.

  “Your wife was Jewish?” Russell asked.

  The fact he was surprised spoke volumes about the hurtful stigma the war had on all Germans and the philosophy that they all hated Jews.

  “Hannah Goldschmidt—the love of my life. When I left for war, she was captured—around 1941. I did not get released from Russia until 1955.”

  “1955? The war had been over for ten years,” Russell said, hardly believing what he had just heard.

  He knew Wilhelm was well aware of the amount of time and, once again, Russell understood his limitations as an interviewer. He was much better with a pen and paper in his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Russell said.

  Wilhelm waved it off. He was half-way through the fresh pint of beer that had been set before him. He grabbed a handful of the bar peanuts in the wooden bowl and tossed them into his mouth.

  “Never remarried?” Russell asked.

  “No. There were women, but none compared to my Hannah. When you meet the love of your life, you don’t move on from that,” Wilhelm said.

  It was easy to tell his words were resolute.

  “To the women we love,” Russell said, raising his glass to Wilhelm.

  Wilhelm raised his and took a sip.

  “I don’t want you thinking I’m some blind American who is ignorant to our own awful history. We went to war with ourselves to defend the abdominal practice of slavery. We killed nearly ninety percent of Native Americans when we came over from Europe. For Christ’s sake, the Ku Klux Klan is still active,” Russell said, doing his best to console Wilhelm.

  “Hate is something that is taught. The Nazis taught well,” Wilhelm said.

  “Brainwashed,” Russell corrected.

  They talked longer than either had expected and drank more than Russell had intended to. They each revealed intimate details that could only be revealed so quickly when alcohol was a factor. It lowered their guard and dulled the pain of old memories. It wasn’t until
closing time that Russell and Wilhelm left the “Zerbrochene Flasche.”

  Russell had caught only four hours of sleep that night when his alarm shrieked at him. He wanted to throw it against the wall but knew if he did, he would miss his flight. He sat up, and his head pounded as if hundreds of miniature men were hammering on it with chisels and hammers like some unexplored cave. He caught a Bloody Mary at the airport and left the garnishes on the side. Keeping the tomato juice and vodka down would challenge his stomach enough. As soon as he boarded the plane, he flipped the visor over his window and closed his eyes. Russell returned to Schönfeld on three other occasions, both professional and private, and each time, he was sure to catch half a dozen beers with Wilhelm.

  As his seventies approached, Wilhelm retired from his factory job. He had lost the desire to keep the flower shop open and agreed to sell it. But he did not want to know if the building would be kept as it was, renovated or torn down. He packed everything up and had no idea how much his father had hoarded over the years. The basement was seldom used, and Wilhelm had never considered looking through the dozens of wooden crates and cardboard boxes. He only went down to the basement to go to the electrical panel if a breaker had blown. But what he thought would take twenty minutes turned out to last four hours.

  He found an entire box of receipts and order placements, some written by his mother. She had flawless penmanship, almost calligraphic in its design. His own writing, like himself, was a mixture of his mother’s elegant, crisp writing and his father’s chicken scratch. Another crate was filled with thank-you cards and photographs from all the weddings and funerals the “Rote Blumen” had provided flowers for. Another box was filled with more private artifacts—photos of his parents he had never seen before and comic books that had been taken away from him because he had been reading them under the counter and not working. He recognized each of them and paged through them. The red cover of his favorite comic seemed to call out to him, and Wilhelm reached for it. The pages split open and a letter fluttered to the ground. Wilhelm grabbed it and unfolded the tri-folded piece of paper and read it.

  “Oh, God,” Wilhelm muttered, realizing what he had found.

  He thought he had cried too much for there to be anything left in the reservoir. Seeing Hannah’s handwriting renewed every memory and, like a tsunami, they crashed over him. It was proof Hannah Goldschmidt had not been a part of his imagination—something that he had thought up during the darkest days in Russia. Hannah was a woman he had loved, and she had loved him.

  The letter made his body tremble and his stomach plummet. He nearly cried out when he saw the date on the top right-hand corner—21 December 1947, six years after Wilhelm had been told Hannah Goldschmidt had died at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He was in a nightmare. He had to be. How cruel a dream it was.

  He had often found her in his dreams though, over the years, they had become as rare as a lunar eclipse. But never had he been subjected to such a thing. If he was dreaming, it was the most awful realistic one he had ever had. The putrid mildew in the basement had no problem attacking his lungs. The letter in his hands was smooth but still threatened to give his dry fingers a paper cut. Her handwriting was exactly as he remembered it. Even the damn stamp was the same. The seven never stamped cleanly, and it was the reason he had replaced it. But when he unfolded the bottom of the letter, something fell out—a dried blue rose. It was from Hannah. It had to be. No one else could understand what the rose signified. Hannah was alive in 1947. If she was alive then, she could be alive now in 1995.

  Russell Kelly

  The cubicles of the Boston Globe were a steady sound of keyboards being struck, phones ringing, and copy machines printing. Russell Kelly was not a man who worked best with a clean desk. He needed clutter and background noise to work properly. He had a steady flow of late 1960’s rock playing softly from his radio. But there were certain songs that should never be listened to on low volumes, and in those instances, he turned the music up louder until a punch from the other side of his cubicle told him it was too loud.

  He stared at his blank computer screen. The cursor’s flashing tried to draw Russell’s attention back to it. His pointer fingers lightly tapped the “f” and “j” keys like the revving of a sports car at a red light. Finally, his mind flashed green, and his fingers started tapping the keys like a woodpecker. But he got a flat tire in the form of a ringing phone. He tried to ignore it, but a few more rings and he would get a dreaded voicemail. He hated taking calls but deplored listening to voicemails.

  “Shit,” Russell muttered. He pulled his hands off the keyboard and reached for the phone. “Russell Kelly, Boston Globe.”

  “Russell, this is Wilhelm Schreiber calling from Schönfeld, Germany.”

  Phone calls were a necessary evil of his job. But he was genuinely delighted to hear Wilhelm’s voice.

  “Wilhelm, I can honestly say I was not expecting your call. How are you?” Russell asked in German.

  He found talking with Wilhelm to be almost therapeutic like confiding in a priest.

  “She’s alive, Russell,” Wilhelm said.

  “Who’s alive?”

  “Hannah. She’s alive.”

  Russell sat up. He had heard a hundred stories of Hannah and knew her death had been the defining moment in Wilhelm’s life—an event he never truly got over.

  “What are you talking about, Wilhelm?”

  “You have to help me find her,” Wilhelm said, the years of desperate longing hanging on every pleaded word.

  Russell stared at the unfinished work beside his desk and the flashing cursor. The words he had written were uninspiring to him—words he was forced to write. He knew he should finish it. It was what a sensible, responsible adult would do. But no matter the distance between Boston and Schönfeld, Wilhelm’s pleading was unmistakable.

  “I’m catching the next flight,” Russell said, making sure there was no hesitation in his voice.

  When he had returned home from his first trip to Germany, he had told his wife, Lauren, all about Wilhelm. She understood there were some people you connected to. Though she did not like the last-minute trip, she gave him her blessing. The flight seemed longer than normal, and the jet lag was worse than ever. It was the unique experience of time traveling either into the past or into the future but at the cost of being thrown into a blender. He traveled through Schönfeld and to Wilhelm’s house. The door opened before he could even knock.

  “Thank you for coming,” Wilhelm said.

  “What do you have?” Russell asked, setting his dress coat and briefcase down beside the kitchen table.

  Wilhelm opened a bottle of Weizenbier (wheat beer) for Russell and then laid the evidence on the table. Russell removed a notepad, a blue ink pen, and a tape recorder. He had also brought his laptop but found writing with a good ballpoint pen to be one of the greatest feelings and a better way to retain information.

  The table looked like a murder mystery or a missing person case. But that was exactly what it was—a missing person case that had gone cold fifty-four years earlier. Wilhelm showed Russell the letter and pointed to the date repeatedly as Russell read it.

  “Now, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say maybe the wrong date was stamped,” Russell said.

  “Please look into this,” Wilhelm pleaded.

  “If I was going to turn you down, I would have done it over the phone.”

  Russell listened as Wilhelm went over every detail he knew and took strong guesses at those he did not. Russell had heard much of it before but never took notes nor tape-recorded the conversation. Russell poured over the notes until after midnight, Germany time. He had now officially been up forty of forty-eight hours with only intermittent sleep on the plane ride over. Wilhelm fell asleep in his recliner, and after a heroic effort, Russell fell asleep at the table. He stayed another day and copied the photograph of Hannah Wilhelm had. She was nineteen in it, and Wilhelm had told him it was taken some time in 1938 or 1939. It w
as a torn and faded black and white photograph. Wilhelm had memorized every line and every curve, but it was hard for Russell to distinguish what Hannah had actually looked like.

  “I have made a copy of this, Wilhelm, but the picture itself isn’t ideal, the copy even less. If you’re willing, I can take this photograph back with me. We have people that specialize in photo enhancement,” Russell said.

  Wilhelm was uneasy with the idea. The photograph had been a rosary for him over the past fifty-five years and the only evidence he had of her existence.

  “I understand. What are your thoughts on coming to Boston? You hold onto the photograph,” Russell suggested.

  “I don’t know. How would I be accepted?” Wilhelm asked.

  “Like an elderly man. I wouldn’t lead with the fact that you are a German World War Two vet though,” Russell said with a smile.

  Russell had added perks of seeing New York City and Boston, but Wilhelm only cared about the integrity of the photo. It was the only photo of Hannah he had. He would not risk it. Wilhelm followed Russell, a veteran traveler, through the airport and onto the plane. Wilhelm had never flown on such a large airplane nor had he flown such a distance. It was hard to believe something so large could fly over an ocean so expansive. As he flew over Western Europe, plane rides with Aaron came to his mind but turned into his attempted escape with Höring over Stalingrad.

  When they landed, JFK international airport seemed to have decreased the entire world to less than five thousand acres. Every country seemed to be represented. Russell was at home in the airport. He knew which lines to enter and how to speed past people without being rude. With his guidance, they went from the terminal to outside in less than twenty-five minutes. A long line of taxis dropped people off at the door.

  “What hotel will I be staying at?” Wilhelm asked.

  “Hotel? No. You’re my guest. We’ve got plenty of room. Fair warning, we have two dogs, and both are big time droolers,” Russell said.

  Wilhelm asked if they could take a few short hours to see the city. He was mesmerized by the Statue of Liberty as they flew in and even more so on the ferry ride to it.