Love on the Rhine

It was always noisy on the Rhine in the early morning. The freight barges that had spent the night moored along the bank started up all at once with a roar that penetrated the thin walls of the students' rooms, startling light sleepers so that they woke from their dreams without being quite sure what it was all about.

On this morning, the barges woke Jamison Douglass. He groaned, and rolled over to look at the alarm clock - five a.m., early twilight on this late-summer day - and cursed softly. He usually had to get up at this time, but it was annoying to do so on his last day of leave.

Yawning, he looked over at his sleeping partner, amazed at her ability to remain unconscious through all this carry-on. Oh, well, she wasn't used to reveille.

Christa lay, as always, on her stomach, in the dead centre of the bed, her light-brown hair across her face, snoring gently. It was warm enough that she had thrown off the covers, again as always, so that she lay with her arms over her head, naked, in her sleep, as always, completely carefree and uninhibited. Her body language expressed her philosophy of life…

Awake or asleep, her posture told the world what she thought of it.

Jamie sighed to himself and, now wide awake, went into the toilet - there was no bathroom - to dress without running the risk of waking Christa prematurely. She could get grouchy.

In shirt and jeans - uniforms were forbidden off-base - Jamie went down the stairs and left the house, turning right. Instead of walking along the Rhine, he chose as his goal the Schwarzrheindorfkirche, half a kilometer distant.

The morning was still cool, the shadows of the poplars long in the low morning sunlight. As Jamie walked along the tree-lined avenue, he reflected on his relationship with this creature - more a force of nature than a woman - with a renewal of surprise at himself. He was usually such a well-behaved young fellow, did everything by the book. How in the world had he ended up under the influence of such a siren as Christa?

He chuckled to himself and - since nobody was out on the meadow beside the avenue at this hour - gave in to the impulse to sing the appropriate song. After all, he was by the Rhine.

' Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin…' I don't know why I'm so sad...the old Lorelei number.

Jamie stood in the old Romanesque church. The paintings on the walls and ceilings were like an old friend to him, especially since he'd spent his whole life in some castle or another. He stood with his head craned upward and studied the dome, with its scene of the 'Marriage Supper of the Lamb', until the pressure in his neck brought him back to this world, and he went out, down the stone staircase and into the streets of Beuel, taking the long way back to Christa's place.

He decided to pass by his favourite bakery and pick up fresh rolls. That way, Christa wouldn't be cross if she woke up and missed him.

It occurred to him on the way that it had been almost ten months since Christa had scooped him up - on the open-house day at Bad Godesberg. Jamie had been playing tourist, visiting the 'Langer Eugen', Bonn's skyscraper, admiring the Bundestag, collecting tonnes of brochures he couldn't understand - not because he couldn't read them, but because he had exactly enough political savvy to know who the current prime minister was. He'd even stood in a queue for lunch at the Red Cross wagon along with the other well-dressed refugees.

Christa had found him on the Rhine promenade, as Jamie, tired of walking, was just thinking of stopping for coffee. She had collected him - Christa was a collector. She collected people, just as she collected facts, ideas, opinions. Everything she collected was tidily arranged into her world view - or else contemptuously rejected.

Jamie she folded into her life immediately. As a project, it seemed to Jamie. Christa summed him up as 'weak-willed, conformist, bourgeois, member of a gang of military terrorists, besides that too short, I hate freckles, and where did you get that awful red hair?'

Jamie was fascinated by her from the start - he'd known so few women in his life - and found himself dragged along in her wake.

Without knowing quite how it had happened, Jamie had found himself in bed with Christa. He had never so much as touched a woman before, and didn't know if this workmanlike procedure was, well, normal - not a word spoken, no kissing allowed, his tentative caresses brushed aside ('Don't be so wet'...)

In spite of this, Jamie believed himself in love. Wasn't that what normal people did?

Jamie entered the bakery and bought bread, two eggs, and small packets of butter, giving the elderly lady behind the counter his best smile, which caused her, as usual, to look at him closely and with deep mistrust. He'd lived in West Germany almost ten years, and he'd never learned to stop broadcasting his emotions.

He returned to the Rheinuferstrasse with his purchases in a plastic bag he'd pulled out of his jeans pocket - I learn something every once in a while, he thought - and opened the door to Number 6 with Christa's key. As he reached the second floor he heard the neighbour's radio playing a current hit, 'Sommersprossen' - 'Freckles'.

Afterwards, he could never hear that song without the most distressing feelings.

Jamie came into the room and started boiling water for the eggs, cutting bread, making coffee. As the smell of Melitta Gold reached her nostrils, Christa finally woke up.

She raised her head and looked at him drowsily.

'You're impossible. Can't you let a body sleep?'

Jamie smiled at her.

'Me? If the Battle of the Rhine out there would let up, I'd be quieter, too.'

Christa groaned, and got up.

'Okay, soldier boy, make breakfast. I'll be right back.'

She rummaged around under the bed and found the old, long t-shirt she wore as a nightshirt, pulled it on, and disappeared into the lavatory.

While Jamie was setting the table, he could hear Christa throwing up in the loo. That bothered him - they hadn't had that much to drink the night before. He heard water running, and when Christa came back, she seemed to be feeling better. She went to the washbasin, where she washed herself, thoroughly and without false modesty, put on jeans and a Pakistani shirt, and sat down to breakfast. Apparently her appetite was not affected by whatever had upset her stomach - she broke the shell on her four-minute egg and began slathering butter and jam on a roll.

Jamie looked at her with concern.

'Aren't you well?'

Christa smirked.

'Oh, I'm fine. Just a little morning sickness.'

She looked at him challengingly, apparently curious as to how he would take the news.

Jamie caught his breath. He set down the coffee cup carefully, as if he might break it. The quiet morning was suddenly a thing of the past. He felt he was being thrust into a crisis, one he'd been prepared for, to a certain extent, but still...

A thousand questions went through his mind - When? How? What now? Oh, lord, the parents. He didn't know Christa's at all, and his - they didn't even know he had a girlfriend, let alone a German one...his father and his war stories...

They'd just have to come to terms with it, and then...

He'd be a father. Him.

Some of what he was thinking must have been written on his face, because Christa suddenly burst into laughter.

'You should see yourself, my little man. What are you thinking? That I'll marry you now? You really believe that, don't you?

She leaned back in the armchair, crossed her arms, and laughed.

'You think I'd follow you meekly back to Scotland, and herd sheep?'

Jamie protested.

'But...we've got to think of the child...and I think...'

Christa laughed derisively.

'You? Think? Don't make me laugh. You never think. You just feel. What do you take me for, anyway? Do you really believe I'd tie myself down for life with a short-tailed, fat-faced Scots boy like you? I'm not that stupid.'

Jamie was speechless. He wanted to answer, but he simply couldn't find the words. Apparently, though, Christa wasn't at a loss for words.

'You dumb git. You don't get it, do you? Do you think a woman can't raise her child by herself? I'm finished with school. In a few weeks I'll be starting a real job. I'll be fine by myself, thank you very much, love.'

Jamie finally found his voice.

'But...why would you have to? Why can't we raise the child together? Okay, I get it, you don't want me. But I can give you money. I could help...'

Christa laughed again, scornfully. 'You, help. I can just see you now. My child is not going to become what you've turned into. Look at yourself, soldier boy - you follow orders. You even follow my orders. You don't know what to do with yourself without an order. I've just pulled the rug out from under you, and there you sit and have no idea how to react. If it's not in the regulations, you don't know what to do with yourself.

'You poor little beggar. You can't even hate me. And you call yourself a soldier. You're pathetic.'

Afterwards Jamie could never quite remember how he got out of there. Somehow he'd got his things together. Somehow he'd got out without falling down the stairs. Somehow he'd got into his car. Somehow he'd driven over the bridge at Bonn.

It wasn't until he was on the Autobahn that he came to himself - at least enough that he didn't drive back to the base, but into Cologne.

There he wandered mindlessly up and down the Hohe Strasse until he stopped in front of a shop selling children's clothing. Jamie's blood ran cold. He turned around so abruptly that he almost ran into a young couple. He excused himself absently, and made his way back down the street to the Cathedral. He sat there for hours, staring dumbly ahead, until the evening mass roused him. He left this comfortless sanctuary, and, retrieving his car from the parking garage, drove back onto the Autobahn, in the direction of the Kottenforst.

In the woods he wandered aimlessly and mindlessly among the huge, old evergreen trees. He didn't trust himself to examine his thoughts. Every time he told himself he must have an idea about what he should think of the events of the day, his subconscious mind shrank away - as if it were necessary to let a door close on all this without looking behind it.

The summer day was long, but finally, even in the Kottenforst, the sun went down. Jamie sat on a tree stump, listening to the birds, and suddenly began to sob bitterly.

This was the state he was in when the police found him. They'd been called by late-evening hikers. At first the police officers mistook him for a drug addict. But since he showed his military ID, and seemed to be sober, they accompanied him to his car.

On the way there, encouraged by their show of interest, Jamie told them what was bothering him. The policemen - bachelors both - were understanding.

One of them shook his head.

'You shouldn't take women like that seriously, buddy.'

The other policeman agreed.

'You'll be more careful next time. Think about it - you could have had to marry that harpy.'

Jamie thanked them for the good advice, and drove home to the base. After all, he was on duty in the morning.

In his room, alone, in the dark, it finally occurred to him what he'd been thinking all day.

'She's right. I can't even hate her.

'But I have one deep, heartfelt wish...

'I wish I had never laid eyes on Christa Biermann.'

AUTHOR'S NOTE: If a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client, what can you say about one who is his own translator? This story was originally written, with excellent editing advice by a friend, in German. My friend, like me a professional translator, quite intelligently refused to tackle this drivel on the grounds that anyone who would perpetrate the phrase ' ein schlafendes Götzzitat' in a short story deserved to have to figure out how to say it in English on their own.

I hope the result amuses, if only for the odd alienation effect of a story that's been back and forth between continents in more ways than one. -DG.

Afterthought

Roger slipped out of the warm pub, buttoning his pea coat against the cold night. There was no snow, and the air was still, but the chill seeped past the artificial heat the beer had given him, heading straight for the bone.

In the lamplight he could see his breath, so he knew he was still alive. This thought did not comfort him.

He walked quickly down the alley to the main street, crossing to the pavement that ran along the river, keeping his head down, as if against an imperceptible wind. He was trying not to think, and finding it difficult.

He stopped in the darkest space between two streetlamps, and stood staring down into the black, turgidly flowing water, looking for a still place inside. It had been a hard day, the hardest he could remember.

Oddly, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The same people had said the same predictably thoughtless things. The same amount of work had accumulated at his office job. The same customers had written in to complain about the usual things: all of them, obviously, his fault, and all of them his personal responsibility. His coworkers had ignored him - without knowing they were doing it, after all, they said hello - just as they always had.

Perhaps it was the cold and the early dark, Roger didn't know. But as the day had worn on, he had felt increasingly tired, as if holding up the weight of his existence had become unbearably difficult. Even a drink and a warm supper had done nothing to dispel the sense of sinking under a load that could no longer be supported.

Roger was not angry. He was lonely, and he recognised this with a mental shrug. He was often lonely, even in a pleasant crowd. Not because people visibly shut him out - he was a pleasant person to be around, a good listener, ready with the encouraging nod, the pertinent question, perhaps even an anecdote of his own - but because he felt estranged from them all, as if keeping them company were something he did to help them, not himself.

Sometimes Roger wondered idly if it were possible for someone to be there, just for him.

Somehow he doubted it.

Roger had always been like this, a little aloof, perhaps, a little to one side of the flow. He had tried not to make himself noticed while making himself useful...but everything hurt, and fighting the pain took a lot out of him.

Roger would have thought a person who judged others by his own standards a solipsist. He did not expect his neighbour to think like him, or feel like him. He didn't know how to set up his own measuring rod and call another man short.

He tried to understand. But other people hurt. Like a blow to a raw nerve, the casual cruelty of everyday human converse caused pain to him. He reckoned this was his own problem, and did his best to cope without blaming anyone else for his own perceptions.

But tonight, he was tired.

He looked down at his own hands: sturdy, perhaps too large, used to work at any number of jobs (he always had at least one), now surprisingly agile on a keyboard. He looked across the water at the lights on the other bank. And he began to cry, silently, in the cold and the darkness.

Roger began to cry because he suddenly remembered another night, impossibly long ago, when he had stood in almost this same place, looking across the river at the same lights. It had been summer, then, and he had been alone, then as now...

But he had been happy.

He couldn't remember what he had been happy about. That was why he cried.

Roger leaned on the railing and stared down into the water, his mind calm but his mood somber. He wondered...were they right when they said this was all the world there was?

If so, he had nothing to lose.

Were they right when they said there was another world, just like this one, where the same standards applied?

If so, what would be the difference? He might get a good night's sleep out of it.

Were they right when they said there might be another world, one in which ordinary kindness was returned, and someone might love you, just for yourself, and not for what they hoped to get from you?

In that case, lead him to it.

He felt the last piece of the puzzle snap into place, with an almost audible click in his head. He was ready.

He was already poised with one foot on the railing - the other already off the ground - when another thought struck him. He was surprised at himself for forgetting something so obvious, so much so that he almost stumbled as he climbed back off the railing.

Roger pulled his coat collar tighter and hurried home, his boot heels sounding a tattoo on the deserted street in front of his apartment house.

He heard the scratching at the door before he opened it. The little brown dog never barked, but transferred his pawing from door to trouser leg in one smooth motion. The furious wagging of the tail made a statement more eloquent than a sonnet.

Roger peeled off his coat, turned up the electric fire, and went looking for food for Rusty. As he ate, Roger sat watching him in wonder.

Roger knew himself as well as any man could. Once the recognition of a truth had come to him, he would never go back. He knew he would never be easy with other people. Life would always be a struggle to have enough energy left at the end of the day to find one's way home.

He stroked Rusty's sleek head in affection.

A dog does not live as long as a man. There would be plenty of time to take the plunge, after.

In the meantime, there was a reason to make it home at night.

The Shell of the World Is Cracked

Jim Hardin woke abruptly and blinked in nervous reflex, his breath condensing in the faint light from the shattered window in the abandoned bedroom. The luminous dial on his wristwatch showed that he had been asleep for two hours.

Jim had been dreaming of home: not much plot to it, just a vivid image, early morning, damp grass, dusty red-clay road. He was a child, watching as his mother stood by the side of the road in her cracked shoes and worn housedress, haggling with the peddler. The stranger looked scornful as he attached the hand-scale to the chicken she had tied by its feet, and shook it to see if she'd been forcing gravel down its throat to add to the weight. The peddler knew all the tricks with which desperate people tried to eke a few more pennies out of their farm produce. In his dream memory, Jim saw his mother's face, wary, determined, as the peddler held an egg up to the light to check for addling. The last thing he remembered before waking was that egg: a bright oval in the morning sunlight.

Now, in the faint German moonlight, he held his breath, listening for the sound that had woken him. There it was, breaking the sullen silence of the beleaguered city...stamp, stamp, stamp...the regular tread of hobnailed boots on the cobblestones outside. He reached for his rifle, and was at the stairs when the first shot came, like the explosion of a cannon in the stairwell of the pinched rowhouse. On his way down he met the others, who had also been catching some sleep while Johnson stood guard. Another roaring shot from below, followed by soft California cursing and the sound of running German boots.

Simpson, the machine gunner, was first on the spot, and started laughing even as Jim glimpsed, through the broken storefront window, the long greatcoat flapping behind the enemy soldier as he disappeared unscathed around the street corner.

'What in blue murder were you trying to do with that pistol? You can't hit the side of a barn with that, stoopid. Why didn't you use your rifle?'

Johnson looked at the Army-issue .45 in his hand, a bit bemused. 'I dunno. Wasn't thinking, I guess.'

'Wasn't...thinking...' Simpson shook his head in mock exasperation. The good-natured ragging continued until the squad's sergeant stuck his head in and stopped the banter with orders.

'We're jumping off. Train station.' They groaned. The previous division had suffered heavy losses trying to occupy the railway station in Hamm. Now they were going to try and infiltrate it, under a quarter moon.

Approaching the ragged ruin of the station, its platforms laid bare under the well-bombed roof, Jim pressed a dirty handkerchief to his face to block out the putrid smell of decaying and burnt bodies. The acrid stench clung to his nostrils, settling in the roof of his mouth, a smell like no other on earth.

The remaining hours of winter darkness were spent in a tunnel leading up to the rails. No one spoke or lit a cigarette, not sure how the enemy was getting his information. Jim whiled away the time thinking about home - but never too hard, lest his attention falter and he miss a clue that led to survival.

Toward dawn the shelling began, German artillery lobbed into the station from half a mile away. Jim and his companions cautiously made their way up the staircase leading to the platform. As Jim poked his head out of the tunnel, he saw a bright ball of flame a few yards to his left, but heard nothing as he was flung back to the foot of the stairs. He stood up, checked himself for injuries. He was bleeding from his left ear, and could hear nothing on that side.

In his confusion, he tripped over a comrade in the still-dark tunnel. 'Excuse me, ' he muttered. His boot struck another as he moved toward the light.

It was only after the third man failed to respond that he realised he had been apologising to dead men.

Emerging into the street he learned from the sergeant that orders were to abandon the station. The station was not occupied, it was not worth it.

Glancing up, Jim spotted an elderly civilian on a bicycle. Realising now the source of the intelligence, he raised his rifle and fired. The man dropped where he was struck, the bicycle collapsing on the cobbles in a vicarious death rattle.

As the remnants of Jim's squad gathered, he looked further up the street. About 75 yards ahead, two German soldiers were assembling a machine gun with matter-of-fact efficiency. Jim raised the alarm and his rifle.

Before anyone else could fire, three shots rang out. The two machine gunners fell backwards. Jim looked to where Simpson stood, legs spread, in the centre of the street, lowering his Browning Automatic Rifle with a nod of satisfaction.

The men ran to where the enemy soldiers lay: each corpse bore a small, round hole in the middle of its forehead. Each was wearing an undamaged pair of military-issue spectacles.

Jim stared at the dead as the rising dawn glinted on their eyeglasses, making bright ovals in the morning sunlight.

Reply to the Lady Who Mourned for Grasshopper

The year they came, I forgot how to stand upright.

At first I was perplexed: Why was I terrified? The insects, though ugly, neither bite nor devour. They do not spread disease. They merely swarm and make noise. At night, they whirred in their tens of thousands, making the tin roof of the cabin hum. My mind, unable to cope, went blank, refusing even to acknowledge the truth - that the winged things from hell were flying grasshoppers, and for no sane reason, I cannot abide a grasshopper. A katydid in the breezeway will cause catatonia. I spent the days of the religious retreat in a state of hypervigilance, unwilling to think about one of red-eyed monsters landing on me. I refused to attempt to play baseball under these conditions. I retreated from the retreat, heading into the woods until I found sanctuary, a locust-free zone in the forest with a log-benched amphitheatre.

There I meditated on an inchworm, sang to myself, talked to angels, decided that even Elijah wouldn't eat one of those things. I went back to the inferno, since I suspected they'd be looking for me to play the piano.

Dinner-time. The kitchen ladies were not happy with the accommodations. Squirrels in the oven pipes were not what they'd signed on for. I liked the squirrels, and loved the bat that had got into the girls' cabin the first night, providing them with the excuse to stay up and scream ('They get in your HAIR!') until grumpy Mrs Waggoner yelled at them all to cover their heads with blankets and sleep, darn it, they were supposed to be awake enough to be spiritual tomorrow...

As I headed across the clearing toward the mess hall (no bugs, they were settling down on the roofs in the twilight), I heard another kind of buzzing in my head. I wasn't fast enough to recognise the symptoms before my vision solarised, and the next thing I knew, I was being jolted back from a faint with smelling salts and fussy ladies. Humiliation, nursing, and the discovery that a certain brand of fizzy stomach powder could actually make you feel more nauseous than before. I turned down the offer of an early ride home. This looked like bravery, and it was. I would very much rather have spent the night away from the leathery horde of cicadas, but I knew that taking me back would mean a pointless two-hour drive for someone, so I stuck it out. I expect my reward in heaven.

Sunday afternoon and home. Never have I left the woodland so willingly. Back to the suburbs, back to boredom, back to a nap on the sofa. Waking for dinner, two hours later. Standing.

No, not standing. Falling down.

For three days, my head spun whenever I lifted it. A point on the wall, focussed upon, moved to the left until, like a ball on a rubber band,; it snapped back into place, only to begin moving again. Sitting up meant nausea. Standing up meant falling down. Locomotion - from bed to sofa to bathroom and back again - was on hands and knees. At fifteen, I was devolving, back to infancy. Thowing a tantrum was not an option, although I was developing a yen for warm tinned milk.

My mother, too frugal for physicians, was finally faced with a medical dilemma: Either I became ambulatory again, or the houseguests who were coming next Monday would be severely inconvenienced (she needed my room). So I was bundled into the back of the car, where I lay during the two-mile drive to the doctor's. Dr Bruce was a fine son of Scotland, not easily perturbed. He shook his head, shrugged, said he had no idea what this was (I was betting on either extraterrestrial intervention or vampires in Pittsburgh's South Park, but knew better than to say so). He offered pills for vertigo, gratis from the pharmaceutical rep. The office visit cost, as usual, two dollars. (A housecall would have been an astonishing five.) We went away, I took pills, stood up and took nourishment the next day, and was able to move to the cot in the den in time for company. Problem solved.

Vertigo. Vertiginous...what? I am not afraid of heights. In fact, I am annoying about them. I enjoy them. I don't mind nature. I feel at home there. What was it about those flying grasshoppers - or any grasshoppers, for that matter - that froze me in my tracks? That caused my brain to forget how to see the world, my ears how to balance, my body how to walk? Where do those things come from, anyway, Alpha Centauri or the cave of Ali Baba?

If they were to become extinct, would the planet stop spinning? Would the inchworms stop inching and the roses smell less sweet? Why are there seventeen-year locusts? Do they fulfill an ancient curse by a forgotten deity, or signify a blessing to someone other than me?

If I never see them again, it will be too soon. If they were not to be, I would not mourn them.

Let the lady mourn for Grasshopper. Not me.