Hidden Away (30 page)

But I could hear him singing and had to shush him all day.

That evening I wasn’t sure what to do with myself without Konrad, so I sat watching Peter’s hunched body as he coughed up blood. Despite the pain he had to be in, he smiled at me.

For the first time in a long time, his eyes twinkled, reminding me of him on stage in Vienna. I went to sleep with a vision of him holding his violin and being a passionate conduit for the music within him.

Chapter 15

 

Berkeley, California
1952
“S
O YOU
’
RE
drinking more, sleeping less, and
having hallucinations?”

I pause midsip and glare at Matheson. “Hell, no. That makes me sound crazy. No hallucinations. Just dreams.”

“I can tell it’s screwed up by your bunk eyes.

Looks like you’ve been fighting a never-ending battle.” He brings his bottle of beer down to the bar.

Uncomfortable, I shift on the stool. This isn’t my type of bar anymore. While no one could simply tell I was homosexual, I knew I just didn’t belong here. In the years after the war, I’d stopped coming to places like this. In fact, I’d isolated myself until Charles managed to drag me out, and then I only went to the bar to pick up a man for the night.

“So what am I supposed to do about it?” I ask.

 

“Hell if I know.”

My mouth drops open, and I turn my full attention to the man next to me. “What? You’re supposed to be the go-to guy for advice and pep talks. What do you mean, ‘Hell if I know’?”

He takes a pull from the bottle, then licks his lips. “It means I have no idea how to make all this shit stop, John. I’ve seen men come home and kill themselves because they can’t quite fit back into the life they used to have before the war. I’ve seen ’em drive themselves crazy trying. I’ve seen guys turn their backs on everything they knew before the war—wives, children, parents. Some GIs wither away into nothing while others come back and flourish, and I have no idea what makes the difference.”

My already fragile mood plummets. “I came to you for help.”

 

“I appreciate that you think so highly of me, but—”

“Why is it on campus you act like you have all the answers, but now that I actually need some advice, you—”

“Because advising students on campus about academics is easy compared to giving them guidance about life.”

“But you’re always so full of—”

“Listen,” he says, scratching at the finish of the wooden bar. “Despite what you think, I’m not a shrink. I go to one myself.”
I widen my eyes. “What?”

“Every week. We talk about the kids with boated bellies and French women the Germans raped and the German women the Soviets raped and the women all over Europe we….” Matheson doesn’t finish that thought; instead he leaves it hanging. “All us grunts have something that eats at us. We’ve got a whole God damned generation of men who’ve seen too much and done too much.”

“What about you? What’s your—”

He continues as if he didn’t hear. “No one else can help you work it all out so you can sleep, but talking to—”

“Not going to a shrink, especially a VA shrink.”

Matheson pulls his wallet from his pants pocket and flips a few dollars onto the bar. “I didn’t want to either, but when my wife left me and took the kids, I put both fists through the bay window she loved so much. And when she told me I wasn’t fit enough to see my kids anymore, I took a bat to the whole house. Nothing was saved. I mean, nothing.” He finishes his beer. “And when I was in a jumbled heap in the middle of shattered glass and broken memories, I realized she was right. I wasn’t fit for anything.”

“Then what?”

“I drank for six months until the divorce was final. Then one night I went out to the bar to pick up some booze and there was a woman dancing, looking like she didn’t have a care in the world. Being shitfaced and wanting tail, I stumbled over to her and bought her a drink. She was funny and beautiful and looked at me like I wasn’t a piece of slime that couldn’t hack domestic life.”

I grip my bottle of beer tighter and let out a disappointed breath. “So some dancing woman made you normal again?”

“I’m not finished, John. Some dancing woman turned out to be a nurse. An army nurse and was attached to an evac hospital over there. She’d tell me these stories of messed up men with no arms or burnt faces, and it was hard to hear, but she spoke about it like it was nothing. She saw shit like that every day and had to keep dealing with it after the war at the VA hospitals.”

When he’s made a deep line in the wood, Matheson stops scratching and draws his hand down to his lap. “We started dating and one day I asked her how she could be so… adjusted to it all and she told me she had to forgive herself for all the men she lost by remembering all the men she saved.”

A bottle slams down onto the bar. It takes me a moment to realize I’d caused the sound. Matheson’s staring at me. I run my hands through my hair and try to get my head on straight. “It doesn’t balance out. No matter how I look at it, I’m always in the red.”

He doesn’t react to my loud voice. Instead he quietly says, “Yeah, I thought she was full of shit too until she convinced me to see the shrink.”

My fists curl into balls. I wish I hadn’t come here to this bar with these people. I wish I hadn’t taken Charles’s advice and talked to Matheson. He holds no truth for me. No woman is going to make it okay for me. There is no shrink in the world who has the secret to making those dead Germans disappear from my dreams.

“You have to make your own way through the shit, but I swear, one day you’ll be so tired of the fighting, you’ll be able to see the answer right in front of you.”

The dreams don’t stop that night. In fact they are worse because I’m not drunk. I wake, fall back asleep, then wake again, wishing I knew how to avoid sleep altogether.

Sober, but tired, I arrive at Kurt’s. Jules is in his apartment, and it seems I’ve interrupted something. Neither indicates that they mind my presence, and Professor Fournier leaves after a bit of small talk.

“Jules doesn’t leave me alone for long. He and Flori are concerned that… that I might become too lonely.”

 

“Should they be concerned?” I ask as I drag a chair into the living area.

He pours tea and then hands me a cup before sitting down in his chair. “I thought of suicide many times in the camp. There were many ways to do it.”

“What about now?”

Kurt blows on his tea and looks up at me. “I am lonely, but I have learned how to manage. In the camp I was surrounded by people. Thousands of them. Five or six men in a bunk near the end. But I was alone.”

“Being alone in a crowd is harder than isolation,” I say.

 

He nods and gives me a little grin. “Yes. Exactly.”

 

“So tell me how you met Jules.”

Kurt sips his tea and I do the same. “He was the Funktionshäftling for my barrack after….” He pauses to finger the scar on his arm. “After the other one died.”

“What exactly is a Funktionshäftling?”

“Prisoner guard. They were prisoners who were given authority over the rest. Jules was the only one who was fair. Most were criminals, but some of the politicals gained power as well.”

“And the other one died?”

He picks at the scar again. “He was killed. I was….” Kurt’s eyes close and he presses his lips together. When he looks at me again, there is a kind of vulnerability in his expression that makes me shift in my seat. “In the camps, you’re forced to do things you wouldn’t normally do. The kapo took me as a lover,” he says, looking at his lap again, “and when he found out that Peter was my real lover, he would beat me and serve up cruel punishments for Peter.”

“God,” I whispered.

“Peter’s mind was even more breakable than his frail body. Those prison camps were designed for the effect. One day, he just had enough and killed Konrad. But it was too late because the damage to his body was too great and his fragile mind was too far gone to ever come back.”

Kurt takes a slow, deep breath, then runs a gentle finger over the aggravated scar. He speaks no more, and I know I should say something, but the air is as heavy as my heart, and I just don’t know if I can break the silence.

But I have to try.

“I killed Germans in Dachau as they surrendered.” There it is, out in the open. I hadn’t known I would say it, but now that I had, it seems as though it was always meant to come out like this.

He is quiet for a moment before he stops worrying his scar. “They were animals.”

My blood runs cold. “No. They were humans. And I
killed
them.”
“They were evil,” he says.
“They were just soldiers.”
“And I was just a boy before they took me. They stole my humanity and you feel guilty for giving it back to people like me.”
I dig my short nails into my scalp. “They weren’t the ones who—”
“They fought to uphold the Nazi ideals! You ended the oppression.”
The room is too small. It’s smothering me. I stand and place the tea cup on the kitchen table. “You can’t justify my evil actions by telling me the men I killed were evil. Evil plus evil still equals evil.”

Nothing more is said as I leave, taking the stairs down fast.

 

“Yohnny!”

My feet come to a stop. Turning, I see Adéle as she hops off the swing. She skips toward me. The magnitude of her voice and what she has said hits me. She’s taken Kurt’s pronunciation of my name, which means Kurt has spoken of me in front of her.

Her hand slips inside of mine, and I am frozen. She squints up at me. “Oncle Kurtsy told me you’re a sad man like him, and that’s why he likes you.”

I squat down to look at her better. “What? When did he say that?”

 

She shrugs. “When I asked him why he visits you.”

 

“What else did he say?”

“Nothing. Kurtsy’s quiet like a little mouse. Ma mére says sometimes we must be still like statues and wait for the little mouse to come out. She says too much is too much, but I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you can’t push people into anything. Comfort comes in their own time.”

The little girl looks at me, and it’s clear that I’ve not helped her understand. But she’s helped me.

I take the stairs two at a time, and when I enter Kurt’s apartment again, he’s staring at the violin on the shelf. His body twists as he hears the door.

“Would you like to have dinner with me? I’m not much of a cook, but my mother showed me how to make a mean meatloaf.”

He stares at me, and I swear he’s going to decline, but then he says, “Can we have kind meatloaf instead?”

Nothing on his face gives anything away, but I catch the slight difference in his voice. It’s just a bit lighter than usual.

“Dear Lord. Did you just make a joke?” A blush colors his face, and he takes a step toward me. “It might have been my first one ever.”

The way he says it turns me on, so I shift the way I’m standing in hopes of disguising it. “Does that mean you’ll have dinner with me?”

“I should be pleased to.”

 

“Would you like to come to the store with me? Picking up groceries is awfully boring and—”

“No. I will meet you at your house.” He twitches when he says it, but I don’t draw attention to it.

The thought of him at my house for dinner tickles me. Perhaps this is the beginning of something more than tentative friendship. The idea of someone to go around with is incredibly exciting and gets me through the tedious task of shopping.

The idea of a date with Kurt helps me ignore the women who look at me in the shop. I smile at them out of politeness, but I don’t allow their hungry eyes to put me off this time. These women, even so long after the war, are so eager to find a veteran. It was worse in ’45 and ’46, when khaki fever was a way of life. Young women everywhere seemed to have a sixth sense about a military man. It became awkward to keep declining their obvious invitations for sex or more.

But today, I breeze past the same women who usually devour me with their eyes.

At home, I feel like a maniac. The meal should be perfect because it is my chance with him. He’d joked with me earlier, which means he’s getting comfortable around me.

I don’t want to make too much out of this meal, so I resist setting the table with candles, but I do put a bottle of wine in the center of it. Kurt doesn’t drink, but the wine will let him know I think of this as more than just a meal with a casual friend. I want him to understand how alight my body is with anticipation.

The telephone’s ring startles me. I open the oven to check on the meat and potatoes, then answer in the living room. “Hello?”

It’s Charles. “How are you, John?”
“Fantastic.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. It’s been a very good day, and I

—”

 

His deep sigh cuts me off. “Are you aware how much you’re worrying me?”

“I’m fine. I’m just cooking dinner.”
“You’re cooking dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Since when do you cook dinner?”
“Since I have a date.”
“A date?”

“Yes, a date. Are you going to repeat everything I say in the form of a question?” Charles pauses. “You’ve never dated anyone.”

“That’s not true.” I glance at the clock. “So are you and the German a pair now?”

“I haven’t pinned him if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t see you ever giving up one of your medals, and since you’ve steadfastly refused to be in a fraternity, you don’t have a pin to give him. But are you steady with him? When did this happen?”
“It hasn’t happened, Charles. It’s just dinner.”