Monday, September 19, 2011

German Trench Coat Lady



In the evening, they gathered in the crater. It must have been one of those craters from the bombs they had just begun to build before the very end when bomb artistry had reached its peak and the bombs they began to drop were less dropped for strategic purposes and more in a celebration of mastery.

It felt like only like yesterday, thought Sgt. Frank Starling, when they leaped out of the hatch into the night and fell into the deep green forest, their speed broken by huge white sheets sewn presumably by all sorts of women. They lost Moreno on the fall, broken on the branches or else evaporated upon the night, snagged and caught upon a flock of northward migrating storks. Because when they hit the earth they had already gone from 20 to 19 American soldiers playing hide and seek with ghosts. Over the course of their guerrilla sabotage campaign, 19 became 10 men navigating a sheer billy goat trail into Bavaria their vision distelled into flashes of water, hands on loose earth, teeth unstopping corks, releasing straps, excess baggage plummeting hundreds of meters.

McCoy lost his leg to the land mine, perhaps the only one planted in that beautiful green field on the edge of the rundown estate at the foot of the mountains. When they heard the blast, the men instinctively dove for cover and watched shifty eyed from behind the huge animal topiary neighboring the field as a man in a white tuxedo decorated with dalmatian spots dashed down a long drive toward the wounded soldier. The eccentric Baron Hansel Wolfgang Hasselhoff raised the alarm, summoning some local nuns who took McCoy away.

It was in Hasselhoff's orchards that Starling's men spent a two week stretch gorging themselves on peaches washed down with cognac. Hasselhoff himself always dressed in that weird dalmatian suit brought out new bottles of wine and brandy every evening as an incentive for the men to listen to him lecture on the science of insects, the art of the cobbler, upholstery and other random things. It was in fact in the middle of an interminable lecture on the tragic demise of Italian astronomer Giovanni Bruno that Stevens decided to walk out of the war, which meant he merely started trudging south west, a bag of peaches and cognac slug over his shoulder.

Revived by two weeks of orchard living, the men fought on, setting fire to a checkpoint house on the outskirts of Munich and removing the rivets from a large segment of railway before joining with the regiment in Dresden.

By that time however, the war was mostly over.

***

Dresden was a desolate recall of rubble and pain. The city taken as a whole reminded Starling of the fine burning cooking coals on which as a boy he cooked the oysters he caught in the cove with the other boys who grew up in the area and ran wild during the summer eating all manner of sea things, muscles, clams, the rock crabs whose shells you sucked for their sweet, salty juices.

Perhaps the true looting began when they strode the ruins of Dresden on the lookout for gleaming things. "Get down from there!" he shouted at Corporal Biggs who, after finding a diamond broach in a rock pile, climbed the bombed out steeple steps to raise his prize to the light. In a fit of ecstasy, he bounded higher and higher until he reached the top, exposed like a stylite, immediately brained by a sniper's bullet. "I can see the Elbe from here!" Biggs shouted holding the jewels aloft, his goofy voice the only sound within miles before the thinly echoing shot. He went down like a defenestrated duke, a splash of blood momentarily adorning the cloud cover.

Leonard succumbed on the road north. He had faked a semblance of arches upon enlistment out of Newark and had suffered ever since, propping his recalcitrant feet with various doomed methods. Now he could go no further and merely sat down on the roadside. He said he would wait for the medical unit to come, but no one knew what really happened to Leonard as later it was discovered that he had not returned home .

***

"Bring it out!" Barked Lt. Gracey. "Bring out your shit!"

And mechanically everyone came forward one by one dumping random items into the center of the crater. Someone shepherded in two beautiful white billy goats like soul cleansing autumnal snow. Someone emptied out a bag of German guns clanking onto the hard yellow ground. Corporal Clemens, known as 'shrimp' emerged from the crowd with a gigantic painting of an aristocratic mounted upon a rearing horse.

"That's gold!" said Corporal Clemens, tapping on the gilt frame with his rifle.

"Bring it out!" barked Gracey. "Withholding is a capital offense! Bring out your shit!"

Someone came forward with a large mounted globe containing disproved geographies from a grandfatherly era; another offered a white stone bust of an old composer or philosopher or somebody.

Then, as the mist rolled in over the crater, Lt. Gracey urinated on the head of the philosopher or the composer or the somebody. The urine's steam rose up into the night like the vapors of some primeval libation from a time when blasphemy and worship were one and the same act. Then after that solemn piss the men lit a bonfire, broke out the casks of wine and whiskey and tilted toward oblivion.

***

In the morning, Starling awoke. The men sleeping around him caked in mud and soot looked dead. There was something about embracing that look in war, about embracing the dead look. It was hard to describe. An act of camouflage. An act. He blindly grasped about his immediate vicinity for drink, and then once fortified he marched to the center of the circle, armed himself with three German lugers -- one in the belt, another in the holster, and one in the inside pocket of his jacket. Starling strode off into the forest bottle in hand.

He walked for a long time, perhaps two hours, building up a sweat, bringing himself back to life with drinking and song by recounting the things he knew.

"Bridegroom was the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1926," Starling said.

The site of the man in the black and white pajamas reminded him of a film he had seen about Alcatraz. The inmates of Alcatraz have hobbies. One makes chess pieces out of soap stone. Another feeds a pet mouse or a sparrow or something. After he saw two or three more of the wandering jailbirds, he began to notice how slender they were. Emaciated was the word. These jailbirds were starving. He approached one. The wandering jailbird stared him in the face. The starvation had made him all eyes, nose and mouth. The cheek skin draped against his jaw like leather tenting. Starling offered him his bottle. The jailbird declined, muttered something incomprehensible and then walked off into the mist.

Jailbird Sing, Jailbird Cry
But we all know that a jailbird can't fly


The lines came to him, something he had read as a child in a baseball dugout.

Jailbirds. Jail. Starling's uncle did a stretch in Sing Sing for armed robbery. He robbed the bathtub factory where he worked.

"Bathtub factory," Starling said.

Luger in hand, he scrambled to the top of the hill at which he came out onto a pine cone littered road.

"Pine cone road," he muttered, surveying the clearing.

Starling peered to the left and then to the right. To the north smoke trailed up from somewhere, a house or an enemy camp. Southwest, a pine branch hung low over the road carrying at its very tip a cone. He leveled the muzzle of his pistol. Heavy, like a real pistol and powerful, he had seen these things penetrate steel, but with that wacko kraut design that made no sense. His shot rang out. He missed. "Shoeless Joe Jackson played center field for the Chicago." said Starling, taking another drink, heading south away from the ominous smoke trail.

***

They had been out on the clam flats all day when Jimmy got his legs stuck. He had been digging too long in one place and had forgot to move. "Go get help!" Jimmy said. By the time help arrived, he was already up to his knees in water.

"We'll get ya out of there," said Fireman Perry himself up to his waste in freezing sea water digging frantically.

Boy Starling watched from the shore as all efforts failed. The mud could not be beat, had an army of mud backing it up ready to fill the fireman's breach. Hank from the auto body came out with a hacksaw and Doctor Bender, the strands of his comb-over flailing like rat tails, sawed Jimmy's legs off right above the knees. When they hauled him to shore, Billy was fighting the pain real well, not even crying even though now he only had two bloody stumps which trailed through the cove's little breakers leaving a scent for the sharks that later that night came thrashing.

"Guess no more clamming," Jimmy said looking up at Frank Starling age 12.

"That clay is like a vice," said Fireman Perry. "If you stay still long enough, it bonds like cement."

"It's the suction," said Doctor Bender, drenched, sitting on a drift wood log trying to get his right hand to stop shaking. "Does that sometimes," he said of his hand. Next to him lay Jimmy's legs in a paper grocery bag.

The moments of his childhood were eternally gray like the gray sky, gray sea, gray mud with splashes of red, the red of Billy's blood on the gray stones which reminded him of the red of Biggs's brain matter momentarily suspended against the Dresden sky. It was as if all that was a preamble to this; like the past was constantly giving birth to the one gray moment interspersed with flashes of memory.

Walking down pine cone road, Starling wondered if he would ever reach the front of it, when gray gave way to gold, when that thing called sex came along and cracked him open on the inside so that the golden blood of love flowed in torrents.

***

"You shall refer to me no longer as Lieutenant., but as King. I'm the King of this place, this mud, this filth. Bring out your shit! Bring it all out!"

The soldiers stood around Lt. Gracey who stood on an old carton in the center of the crater ringed round by fragrant pine. There were mutters of approval. It was as if this was the logical next step to what came before. That evening, Private Polanco brought in a large sow which they cast alive like an Indian widow onto the pyre. Then they plunged their pikes into the boiling flesh solemnly, none speaking out of turn, stubbly mouths swallowing boiling fat, gulping alcohol which had the earthy, water flavor river stones hold.

Even after the soldiers had forced themselves to forget everything associated with that rogue age, a part of each of them always disobediently remembered that meal and found all other meals lacking.

***

In the morning, Starling found his way back to the road. This time, the walk took a lot out of him. He was exhausted by the time he made it, yet he felt driven by something, some mystery unfolding within himself that found its mirror in external things. Before him stood a man on a horse. A Russian. He could tell by the hat. He looked like a Russian from another century.

Amerikanitz, said the Russian.

They walked some ways together down pine cone road passing the bottle.

Amerikanitz. That's all the Russian said.

Instead of winding to the left, they walked down a side trail to the right coming out on the edges of a huge compound. Presumably, from the look of it, a crumbling jail.

"Bathtub Factory," said Starling. "My uncle Dave did a stretch in Sing Sing."

The Russian, bottle in hand, pointed at the emaciated jailbirds milling about the yard, let out a gleeful whoop and then driving his boots into the ribs of the horse, proceeded to charge one of the poor fellows, shouting the incomprehensible words, Bizhi Yivre bizhi! The frail man, young, old, it was impossible to tell, preemptively collapsed before the onslaught of horse and man hurtling through the beleagured atmosphere. When Starling came upon him, he was clutching his stick-like calf. Starling took out his gun, leveled it at the Russian's horse, and fired. The horse collapsed. The Russian stood in the mud, wrangling with his rifle strap, struggling with the mud clogged mechanism. Starling fired again. The Russian collapsed.

Starling rummaged through the dead Russian's pockets. A gold Star of David. Leonard's. No. Someone else's. Who could say whose it was. He dropped the religious artifact on the Russian's chest.

"God save the queen," Starling said.

***

At the top of pine cone road, instead of cutting back into the forest, on a whim he decided to investigate the smoke. The trail dipped down a hill, crossed a shallow creek and then wound up again into the pine woods. He followed it north for a ways, winding up and down, until he arrived at a log cabin with a Mercedes Benz parked out front.

He pounded on the door. The door opened. The first thing he thought was Marlene Dietrich. The blond, middle aged woman was wearing a weird trench coat. The trench coat reminded him of his German pistol, of Baron Hansel Wolfgang Hasselhoff, of Germans in general. There was no use making sense of it.

"Is that your car lady?" he asked.

"Vas?"

"Is that your car!"

"Mercedes," she said.

"Gimme the keys."

"You wait."

Starling watched her walk into the inner recesses of the house. He devoured the woman with his eyes as the darkness took her. He wished he was the darkness.

She returned with a Note.

"I...will return the Mercedes of Fraulein Schmidt undamaged and in tact on the date of..."

"You gotta be kidding."

"Sign please."

"This is wartime, lady."

The lady, Fraulein Schmidt, produced a pen.

"Ok, I'll sign. Gimme the pen. Damned bureaucrats, Germans. Are you a bureaucrat?"

***

The regiment came upon the town of Wik. At least the map referred to it as Wik: a low lying zone of thatchery and pig styes on the German Polish border.

"We aren't leaving this god forsaken place until every last one of you has left his seed behind in a Kraut woman!" shouted Lt. Gracey from atop the tank.

The men standing around Lt. Gracey's jeep muttered their approval.

They had passed the point of no return shortly beyond Dresden. Perhaps Leonard had used his feet as a pretext for escape. Perhaps he had intuited savagery's onset.

The village of Wik was mostly made up of a bunch of huts with those thatched roofs. Starling did his best to save some of the horses as the barns burnt. He let the white horses flee, and the sight of them running reminded him of winter waves breaking on the dunes the day after a hurricane made landfall far to the south. Finally, he found a darkened hut. Someone had put out all the lights. He tried the door. Locked. He put his weight against it ever so slightly. The door opened. Sitting in the corner, a stray moonbeam filtering through the window, a beautiful girl in loose man's clothes huddled. She couldn't have been more than 16. It was if the encounter was scripted. So. This was Starling's time.

Starling approached her. He put his gun on the table. He began unbuttoning his jacket.

The girl cowered. Starling looked at the girl. Starling sat on the table. He lay down on the table. He unfastened his helmet and struggled out of his backpack and lay flat on his back.

"Oh, I don't know what to do! What am I supposed to do God damn it!" he said to the darkness. "I'm not good at with sort of thing, raping. God damn it!" he shouted to the rafters beyond which lay endless thatching. It was the kind of roofing Europeans burnt with torches in mad political fits.

The girl eventually rose and brought him a half empty bottle of liquor and a plate of cold stew. Starling at the stew, rapidly drank the liquor after which he started to sing Danny Boy. He was not Irish, but Jimmy had been Irish and sang it all the time out on the clam flats.

Suddenly Lt. Gracey burst into the room.

"What's going on in here, Sergeant!"

'I've raped this girl here!' slurred Starling. "And now I'm drinken up all her liquor."

"Good job soldier!"

Starling stood up and shut the door in the lieutenant's face. Then he returned to the table where he fell asleep. In the morning, the girl was gone.

Starling would think about the girl everyday for the rest of his life.

***

Sergeant Frank Starling revved the motor. Soon, he was careening joyously down pin cone road, across the creek, up to the smoky summit. He had an idea. At the bottom he turned southwest, arriving at the gates of the prison, bursting into the courtyard, slicing through the gravely mud. He stopped.

"Get in!" he said to the jailbird with the hurt leg who lay on his back in the mud half frozen staring at the sky. Starling motioned. The man slowly rose and got in.

"Where you from?" he asked the man. "Watcha do? Petty theft? Robbery? These krauts are merciless. I bet they didn't even feed you in there. Here, take a drink. I haven't done no time myself, but my uncle did a stretch in Sing Sing for robbing a bathtub factory, same factory he worked at. Smar, right? Kind of like biting the hand that feeds you, wouldn't you say? Well, whatever you did, whatever they think you did, it's over now. Now, you're going to be OK. Everything's going to be OK. You're busted out and free. The both of us. Everything is jim dandy."

They drove east past an encampment of Russians sitting by a fire. The Russians were dressed in some motley: a combination of medieval and mongol fashions. They watched the car as it passed, watched it all the way over the hump in the road.

"These people remind me of vikings. You know the vikings? They used to rape and pillage the coasts of Europe. Had these ships carved like dragons. Horned helmets. The Vikings. I liked history. History was always my favorite subject. Mr. Winkelblech's history class. Do you know Shoeless Joe Jackson batted 408 in 1911?"

The jailbird looked terrified, braced his hands on the door his feet in front of him. When Starling slowed down, the jailbird opened the door and leaped out. Starling saw him in the rear view mirror limping back down the road. "Crazy fucker," he said. "Suit yourself."

He drove down into a misty valley in the center of which was the ruin of a barn and a house both burnt to a skeletal char. His wheels got stuck in the mud and he spent some time getting loose by putting hay underneath the tires. Sometimes, pausing in his labor, he looked around. Total, utter silence. The snowy mountains in the distance sang of silence and the silence was terror, and so he sang Mac the Knife at the top of his lungs although he had an imperfect recall of the song's lyrics and so ended up repeating "It's Mac the Knife!" again and again.

"It's Mac the Knife!" sang Starling.

When he return along the road, the Russians left their campfire to throw rocks. They cracked one of the side windows. "Freulein Schmidt ain't gonna like this," said Starling as he motored along the prison's barbed wire.

***

Still, the jailbirds milled around in the courtyard. They had built a bonfire in the center. Starling stopped the car, opened the door, shouted. "Get on outta here! What are you all waiting for!?"

Suddenly, he felt full of anger. What were they waiting for? He got out of the car, trudged across the mud, seized a jailbird by the shoulders. "Don't you get it? You're free! The war is over. They can't touch you now, don't you see? All the records have been destroyed! You've got a clean slate!"

Looking around himself, he noticed that someone had removed the dead Russian. Then he noticed the smell. Flesh. They were eating the Russian's old nag, roasting it in a pit and feeding off it in increments as the outer flesh cooked. An inmate offered him some boiled red muscle which Starling took gratefully (he had missed lunch) and hunkered down. He sat by the burning horse for a long time until the stars came out. He was exhausted all of a sudden, sick of the sound of his own voice shouting "It's Mac the Knife!

"Where are you from?" after an eternity, the jailbird next to him spoke. He was a husk of a man, as if he had been inflated to bursting point and then gradually deflated so that his structure still held the suggestion of a former size. His big featured face was gray. His hands were gray. The grayness gave him an ageless feel so that Starling couldn't be sure if he was 40 or 70.

"Cape Cod."

"Ah, Cape Cod! I know it well. My brother lives in Albany."

"What's he do there?"

"He owns a paint store."

"Like house paint?"

"Sure! House paint, acrylic paint, oil paint. Any paint you want. You like paint?"

"Sure, so how long you've been here?"

"Since 2 years."

"What did you do?"

"What did I do?"

"Yeah, what did you do?"

"That's a good question."

Starling smiled. Jailbirds. Innocent to the last man, like his uncle. Uncle Dave. What a piece of work. "Well, I guess it doesn't matter much anymore," he said.

"I guess not," said the man with a brother in Albany.

"The thing I don't get is, why are you all hanging around here?"

"What are we supposed to do?"

"Go home?"

"Home?"

"Yeah, home, you know, with the wife and kids and the little doggy..."

"Why don't you go home?"

It was a question Starling didn't care to consider. "Listen," he said. "Let's get out of here."

"Where will we go?"

"I know of a place. German lady. German trench coat lady."

Starling felt full of this lonely childhood feeling like love's unmet invitation.

***

They drove through the night up the pine cone road. For some reason, Starling wanted to talk. He was a man of few words, but in the presence of the jailbird, he felt like overflowing. It was like a secret mechanism had been released. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the prelude to the symphony.

"When I was a kid, we used to go clamming on the mud flats..." Starling began to tell the story of Jimmy who got stuck in the mud and had his legs sawed off.

***

"Who are those people?" asked Starling.

"Just animals," said the jailbird.

The powerful Mercedes headlights picked up everything along Old Pine Cone Road, including the a pack of Russians crouched like wolves around some kind of carcass.

"What are they doing here? What are you doing here?"

"Riding in this car with you."

***

Fraulein Schmidt, dressed in her trench coat opened the door and ushered them into a dimly lit parlor. The parlor was lit by two gas lamps, one by the window and the other by the entryway to the neighboring room. Framed photographs covered the walls. A clock somewhere chimed seven. A grandfather clock, somewhere in the recesses. Why did they call them grandfather clocks?

"Please sit. Schnapps?" asked Frau Schmidt, retreating to the kitchen.

The men watched her go, her golden calves.

"Some broad," said Starling.

"You think so?"

"What's the matter? Don't like dames?"

The man didn't respond, just smiled faintly and hunkered down into the arm chair.

Fraulein Schmidt brought out a bottle of schnapps and poured three large glasses full to the brim. She sat in the chair next to the fireplace and took several long swallows. Starling noticed that the prisoner couldn't take his eyes off her.

"What?" asked Fraulein Schmidt in her strong German accent. "Is something so interesting?"

The prisoner laughed. "Nothing. It's just that I never thought I would find myself in this situation. In fact I have dreamed of being in this situation, but now I do not know how to behave."

"What? You two know each other?"

"You could say that," said Fraulein Schmidt.

"You the warden's wife or something?

"Hah. That is well put," said the prisoner. "You could say she is the warden's wife. Yes."

Fraulein Schmidt choked on her schnapps, coughed, stooped over in her chair, breathing heavily.

"Why do you always wear that trench coat? Are you naked underneath or something?" asked Starling.

Then, the jailbird spoke, his voice level and commanding: "So let us drink a toast to the dead. All the dead, right Frau Schmidt? Let us toast the dead this evening."

Now Fraulein Schmidt's boggly eyes were overflowing with tears. Fraulein, Starling thought. She's a little old to be a Fraulein, but still I'd like to see what's going on underneath that trench coat.

"Schnapps and wurst," said the jailbird. "This reminds me of Saturday afternoons, just an ordinary Saturday afternoon."

By the lamplight, Starling noticed the jailbird was also crying silently.

"You got a radio or something?" asked Starling.

"Yes, I do," said Fraulein Schmidt who stood up, retreated to the other room and returned with an old timey phonograph like thing. She put on a record. The record started to play. Some kind of symphony music. German music, echoing and brassy.

Starling removed his jacket and rose to meet Fraulein Schmidt in the middle of the room. When they began to dance, softness pressing on softness, the drawstrings of her trench coat came undone. Slowly the garment relaxed its grip before pooling around her elegant red slippers creating the halo in which they moved. Starling found himself sheltering her nakedness from the hard pressing night, the ex con's gaze. He wondered if this was the beginning of the future proper, the past having run its course, the gray half-birth present worn through like old wall paper. He held her, caressed her, kissed the tears from the eyes of the naked, dancing kraut.