Unlikely Warrior (34 page)

Even though I had seen next to nothing of the city, I said, “It’s a beautiful city.”

“Was it heavily damaged?”

“Not so badly that it can’t be rebuilt. It will always be beautiful.”

He rubbed his hand over his forehead for a second, as though debating with himself, returned my discharge paper without further words, and jumped down from the car.

Shortly thereafter the train began moving once more, and a few hours later I reached Wels, another hundred kilometers closer to my destination. Wels, a charming little town in Upper Austria, was much cleaner, the people better dressed and fed than any I had seen since my discharge. The train station was intact, the tracks free of burned-out cars, and everywhere people were carrying away the remaining rubble and applying fresh paint.

We had arrived in the American zone now, and there was no mistaking the difference. The platform was cleanly swept, and the official answered me politely that the first train west would not be departing until the following morning. I sat down on a bench, deciding to wait until the next day.

Looking through the window of the station restaurant, I could see people sitting at tables with white tablecloths, dining with forks and knives. After a few minutes, a waitress in a white apron came out and asked whether I was hungry. She led me inside and maneuvered me to a table decorated with a bouquet of purple asters. Then she brought the food for which I obviously wasn’t able to pay.

There must still be good and generous people alive,
I thought,
people who aren’t concerned only with their personal well-being.
It was incredible to think that anyone would politely bid a filthy, lousy, ragged, and obviously ill creature to a decent table and serve him a three-course meal, including a glass of beer, without any hope of payment. And that the waitress, a girl about my age in a typical Austrian dirndl, would even sit down and join me for a few minutes—it was all too much for my tear ducts.

I told her about my trip from Kiev and my fervent hope of finding my parents still alive. I wiped my eyes dry on the edge of the tablecloth and was ashamed of my dirty hands. This was the first time I had eaten a normal Austrian three-course meal since those lovely days in Braila, almost exactly one and a half years ago. Before I had finished eating, the waitress returned and presented me with twenty-five German marks.

“I collected that for you from the other guests. You’ll need it,” she said in a shy, almost guilty voice, as though she wasn’t certain how I would react. I took the money and buried my face in my hands to hide my tears.

What was the matter with me, anyway? I, the hardened warrior, who had been rolled over by tanks, who had killed and stolen, who had survived the worst snowstorms for days without food or a roof over my head, had finally returned to my own country and couldn’t refrain from blubbering at the slightest opportunity. I knew it was partially due to my physical weakness, but I was ashamed nonetheless.

The waitress explained to me that just three hundred meters away was a spot where all the trucks stopped to pick up hitchhikers. Still blushing with embarrassment, I thanked my benefactors, who sat watching sympathetically. Then I stumbled down the steep road to where hopeful hitchhikers were gathering. Trucks stopped every few minutes, and the drivers called out their destinations. Any who wanted to go in that direction paid a small amount and got in. Soon a truck arrived that was heading my way.

When one of the others said, “He’s just returning home from Russia,” the driver wouldn’t take any money, and I was helped up into the cab.

I got out fifty kilometers later in Vöcklabruck. Dusk was gathering as I sat down on the steps of the town fountain in the little medieval city. The farther west I made it, the more drastic became the difference between my clothing and that worn by the rest of the people in the streets. More and more people stopped to stare or quiz me. When I told one of those who sat down next to me that I wanted to get to Mondsee, he jumped up, saying, “That’s Lugerbauer’s truck over there, the mover from Mondsee. He’s just leaving!” He ran across the square, and after speaking a few words with the driver, who was just getting into his vehicle, he waved me over.

For two hours we drove over a narrow, curving road through a night brilliant with stars. I perched in back on top of a mountain of sailcloth tarpaulins and tried to think about what might lie ahead. Would I find my sister in Mondsee? I didn’t know where she lived or even whether she was still in that town. It would be dark. Should I sleep first and wait for morning to begin my search? And what if she weren’t there? If no one knew anything about her? In fact, what would I do now in general? Tomorrow? In a month, a year?

I was twenty-one and a half years old and felt like an ancient and decrepit grandfather. Weak and run-down as I was, it would be some time before I would be able to do even light work in order to earn my living. In case I couldn’t find any of my family, might there be some sort of government organization for men like me, a place where I could be cared for until I had recovered my strength?

And how would I earn my living in the future? As a technical draftsman, the only thing I had any training for? Or as an artist, a painter, doing that which had always given me so much pleasure as a child? An image of the hand-carved spoon that had welcomed me back from the dead came to me. I turned the spoon around in my mind, again examining it from all sides. A pity I had had to leave it behind.

The next thing I knew the driver was tugging at my leg. “We’ve arrived. End of the line, everybody out,” he said jokingly.

The tiny village square was quite dark. A few lights twinkled from the windows of the surrounding houses. “By any chance, do you know the Baroness von Krüdener?” I asked the driver.

“Oh yes, she lives up on the mountain on the Pichlerbauer farm. Take the road toward Zeller See for one and a half kilometers, and then go right on the little path with the apple trees on each side. It’s the big farmhouse. You can’t miss it.”

I thanked him, walked to the edge of town, and sat down on the ground, leaning against the trunk of a tree. The idea of having to climb a mountain seemed overwhelming. I was feeling dizzy more and more often, as though not enough blood was getting to my brain.

In front of me, on both sides of the street, I could see the silhouettes of large pear trees. I knew the kind of pears they produced—hard and sour—and the wonderful cider the farmers pressed from them. I sat and speculated for a while longer, wondering whether the wisest thing wouldn’t be to wait until dawn and then go up when I was fresher. I counted the shadows of five pear trees. Maybe I could make it after all by going past five trees and then resting, five more, and so on. After almost three years, I was so close.

Deciding to make the effort, I pulled myself up, leaning more heavily than ever on my cane. Five trees up the hill. Then five more. A long rest, and another five. Slowly I came up to where the road disappeared in front of me into the pale sky, evidently because it led down into a depression. It was as though the closeness of my destination gave me strength.

I don’t know when I reached the place where the path branched off to the right, only that my heart was thumping as though it would explode, and I could see zigzagging lines in front of my eyes. The narrow, stony path between the apple trees was too steep for me to walk. I ended by crawling up most of it on all fours.

It must have been about ten o’clock when I arrived in front of a fine, imposing farmhouse. For a few moments I sat down on the edge of the wooden well trough. Clear, cold well water was running continuously through a wooden pipe, and I scooped some of it up in my hand. Lights were glowing behind the little windows on the ground floor of the house as well as upstairs. I could hear the snuffling and murmuring of the cows in the stable nearby.

I walked to the heavy, hand-carved door of the farmhouse and knocked. A light went on inside. The door opened just a crack and I caught a brief glimpse of a young girl, who slammed the door again immediately, a frightened expression on her face.

I knocked a second time, and after a couple of minutes the farmer’s wife asked through the closed door, “Who are you? What do you want, in the middle of the night?”

“Is this the house of the Pichlerbauer?”

“Yes, it is,” she answered.

“I’m Baroness von Krüdener’s brother. Is she here? I’ve just come back from Russia.”

The door slowly opened, and the farmer’s wife, with the girl peeping from behind her shoulder, said only, “Oh dear, oh my goodness.”

She gestured at me to come in. Wordlessly we climbed the wooden stairs to the second floor. She knocked on a door and said, “Frau Baronin, there’s someone here who wants to see you.”

“Yes,” I heard my sister’s voice answer.

The door opened upon a large but cozy room. At the sight of me, my sister’s eyes widened, and she backed up a few steps involuntarily. Somewhat behind her, near the blue-tiled stove, stood my mother. For a few seconds no one moved or said a word, then both of them started rushing toward me to embrace me. I held up my hands to ward them off, pointing to my clothing. None of us could speak. They must have understood, because, still silently, they lifted off the heavy Russian coat and spread it on the floor. Then they threw one piece of clothing after the other on top of it, until I was standing naked in front of them.

Still without saying a word, my mother dragged over a large wooden tub full of water and began to wash my bony body from top to bottom with soap and warm water. As overcome as I was by emotion and exhaustion, I was still shocked to see how old my mother had become in just three years. My sister meanwhile took the bundle of my clothing back down the stairs and burned it outside.

Then they pulled a long white linen nightshirt over my head, laid me on a large, soft bed, and covered me with an eiderdown comforter. Everything was white and soft and clean, and I was shaking uncontrollably. My mother fed me warm farina pudding with a spoon while the tears rolled down my cheeks. I pulled the quilt over my head and sobbed like a little child.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
GLOSSARY
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Man with bird, 1989

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My mother carefully saved and numbered each letter and note I sent from the trenches of the Eastern Front. Many of these were scribbled in pencil on tiny salvaged scraps of paper. In the chaos of the war, when often all that remained was our rifles and the clothes on our backs, it was impossible to preserve her letters to me.

After returning home, and following a two-year stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium, I began to paint, and eventually became a professional artist. I left Europe in 1966, moving to New York and California before settling for the past thirty years in Mexico. The letters from Russia always accompanied me. Though I sometimes shared humorous or exciting events from the war years, the letters themselves were never reopened or read. I was certain I would only be embarrassed by the ramblings and complaints of a frightened nineteen-year-old.

One afternoon in February 1984, my wife, Phyllis, and I were discussing that evening’s activity. Each month a group got together and read from their latest literary efforts. Phyllis said she had nothing prepared, but that it didn’t really matter. I suddenly realized that the date was almost exactly forty years after those terrible frozen days of my first Russian winter.

I looked up and read what I had written on three days in February 1944. Phyllis quickly translated the letters, and we took the versions in both languages to the party. When it was our turn, I began to read a letter in the original German and then faded into the background while Phyllis took over, reading the English translation. We felt the strong impact our presentation had made on those present, mostly artists and retirees living in beautiful, balmy Mexico, people who were free to follow their passions and whims every day of the year. The contrast was powerful.

Next, I reread all of my letters for the first time and found they were quite different from what I had imagined. Surprised at the humor and the honesty, I began to imagine a book about my war experiences that could set the record straight. Mine would be a very different story from those in the movies. I had always complained about war films, with their phony uniforms and backward swastikas. Worst of all, they told a tale that was very different from anything I had experienced. An antiwar book featuring a nonhero might even be helpful for upcoming generations of young men faced with other wars.

When I began writing, long-forgotten events, including the minutest details, poured out from a deeply buried source. I stopped painting and did nothing but write until the book was completed. In the process I recognized that my true reason for writing had been to heal myself. Even after ten years of painting sad-faced men and harlequins, I still hadn’t completely dealt with the guilt and shame of the war years. Writing this book gave me much-needed clarity and helped me to deal with emotions I had never permitted myself to feel.