“Because one day you may not have the luxury to do so. It’s far better to choose to give something up, rather than have it taken from you.”
I’m not sure if he’s truly talking about my vices or about something else, something deeper. “Wise words.” I pick up the bottle and walk into my house, hoping he’ll follow. I’m quick in the kitchen, taking the last swig of whiskey and throwing the empty container away.
When I get back to the living room, Kurt stands right inside the door. He’s looking at my army memorabilia. I hope he’s satisfied that I’ve removed the patch he dislikes. “What you got there?”
He looks to me before answering, so I smile. “Recordings.”
We both make for the record player at the same time. I seem more awake when I’m close to him, as if everything I feel is heightened.
Sorting through the records, Kurt keeps his head bowed. I’m impressed when he makes his selection and puts it on. It is such a small action, but he did not ask permission or hesitate, which is his usual manner.
When the music plays, I realize it’s nothing more than an orchestral. I listen for a moment, then ask, “What is this?”
Kurt seems lost in the music and doesn’t respond immediately. Finally during a lull in what I think is a violin solo, he says, “Béla Bartók. This is Peter’s favorite.”
He looks like I’ve hit him. Placing the stack of records down, he then backs away, worrying the flat scar on his left arm. He’s shaking his head. “He is… he is a man… a musician I knew long ago.”
“And he liked this piece?”
Kurt nods.
“It’s… interesting. Pretty?”
Obviously my idiotic words sound ridiculous to him as well because he steps to the player again and removes the record. I want to tell him to stop, but there is no time. He’s already replaced it.
Again, we listen for a moment, but then he looks to me, as if searching for my thoughts. “It’s… it’s nice.”
He furrows his brow, fingers twisting the scar.
“I mean, it’s not really my cup of tea, but—”
Interrupting me by taking the record off the turntable, he looks hurt or bewildered. “Then we shall play music you care for.”
“No,” I say as I reach for his hands.
Kurt’s quick to pull away. The record falls on the arm and clangs against the platter. I tighten my muscles and withdraw from the space surrounding him. He brings his hands to his head and looks at my feet.
“Why do you do that?”
“I forget,” he says, but he’s said it before and it gives me nothing more to go on. He repeats the action in reverse. It’s almost as if he’s placing a cap on his head.
“You do it when you’re nervous,” I say, but then feel odd about it. Picking up the record, I replace it in its sleeve, then flip through the stack he’s brought. “Let’s play music we both enjoy.”
All he’s brought is more of the same, so I look to my collection and select a Benny Goodman record. We sit and listen to the clarinet playing “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
“Can I get you something to drink?”
Kurt shakes his head, and I’m stuck with how awkward this is, but as uncomfortable as it is, he still walked all the way over here to listen to music with me.
“Did you have a nice New Year’s?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Does the professor throw a party?”
A small smile appears. “Only for Adéle. She enjoys dressing up.”
“You love her.”
“Children are kind. She cares for me without question.”
I stand up. The weight of his eyes seems even more intense than what I’ve experienced from others. “Unconditional love is a blessing.”
Silence looms. I run a hand through my hair as I cross in front of him to look out into my porch. I think about moving out there, but my guest seems content in my living room, especially now that the swastika is gone.
A smile finds its way onto my lips as I think of the unconditional love of my mother.
“Do you enjoy time with your family?”
The smile fades, and I don’t turn around. “My mother died while I was away, and my father and I have very little in common.”
“Do you visit him?”
I shake my head in response.
“You don’t miss him?”
“I miss him,” I say, “but when we’re together, we just sit around drinking beer.”
“Does he know you’re—”
“Homosexual? Yes, but we don’t talk about it. I think he thinks one day I’ll meet the right woman and simply change my mind.”
“Do you think that will happen?”
I face him. “Is it something we can change?”
He drops his eyes back to his lap. His voice is soft when he answers. “No.”
I study him, taking in his sharp cheekbones, the way his eyelashes curl, his long fingers with slightly too-large knuckles as they pick at his skin. A thought rises in my mind, and I can no longer deny it. I want to be close to him. It’s more than what it had been. He may be the key to stopping my dreams, but it’s deeper now. When I’m with him, there’s a fluttering sensation within me. I’ve only experienced it one other time; that was with Cal, the first young man I’d ever been with. I felt more for him than just physical attraction.
But things with Kurt are far more complicated. Thinking back on my drunken conversation with Charles, I remember telling him it didn’t have to be like that. Maybe it doesn’t have to be with Kurt either. Maybe I’m making all of this harder than it has to be.
When he glances up, I hope my expression tells him something. I hope he responds. I think I see a slight blush rise up on his cheeks, but I’m not sure. “You’re very attractive.”
He’s just slightly shorter than me. The perfect height. I touch his forearm, running a finger over the reddened scar. He lets out a stunted breath.
“I must go.”
“Please stay.”
He finally looks up at me, but only for a moment. When I see the unshed tears in his eyes, I take a step back, giving him room to move to the door should he choose. “Don’t be scared of me. I can help you.” I want him to look back up, and only continue when he does. “You can help me. Please. I’ve never known anyone who….”
When my words trail off, Kurt sits back down, back straight, hands on his thighs. Joy fills me, and I say, “Thank you.”
I put on Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, and as I sit in silence facing the man who haunts me, there is something soothing in the slow beats and the deep voices. At first, Kurt’s expression does not change with the music. He is simply a blank file. I try to put myself in his shoes, attempting to see myself as a survivor of one of those hellish camps. I suppose I’d be the same way: closed, numb, skittish.
As I’m thinking it, I notice Kurt is no longer an empty void. The familiar “shell-shocked” numb I’d witnessed of my brothers-in-arms fades just slightly. He taps his toe against my floor, then slowly, the edges of his lips push up.
“Do you like Ella?”
“Ella?”
I point to the record player. “Fitzgerald.” “Yes. This is the first I’ve heard her.” “Why do you like music so much? Are you
Kurt waits until I return with a small glass of tap water before he answers my previous question. I’m impressed he even replies. “Music has always been the one thing in which I excelled.”
“The only thing?”
“Yes.”
I relax into the chair. “I don’t believe that.
I’m sure you have loads of—”
“No. Music is the only discipline in which I
have some talent, and I enjoy it. Well, I used to.” “When did you start playing?”
“I don’t remember. When I was very young.” He tells me of the piano he had as a child,
how his parents sold it to feed him. He squeezes
his eyes closed when I ask about his parents. When
he speaks again, it’s still about music.
“I liked playing in the Biergarten. Everyone
was very happy even though times were rough.” “It was the booze.”
“What?”
“Everyone’s happy when alcohol’s around. God, during the war, even though we knew we’d have to get shot at the next day, we had some great parties. I remember this one in the south of France, I must have drank two bottles of red wine in a matter of two hours. Even though we’d just landed and knew the shit was thick just to our north, we all jumped into the Mediterranean and—” I’m interrupted by Kurt’s stormy eyes and the way his strong jaw is set to the side. “What?”
“You were in the south of France?”
“Yeah.”
“How…. Was it enjoyable?”
I furrow my brow and rub my goatee. “I lost a
“I’m sorry.” I look up, and he says, “For your friends.”
I close my eyes as my face is splattered with sticky warm liquid. Pinching my lips together can’t block the taste of blood on my tongue. Martin’s dead next to me, but there’s no time to think about him. The bullets whizzing past me are almost a blessing. They keep me from thinking about Martin’s wife, Mary, and the picture she’d just sent of their little son. His name is Nat or Nate or Nathan.
With hate beating in my heart, I run forward, rifle aimed at anything in front of me. I charge, screaming at nothing and everything.
“Anyway,” I say, “everyone had a good time swimming in the Mediterranean. It was good to wash the… carnage of war away for just a moment.”
I go to the kitchen. I’m out of whiskey already, so I pull two beers from my icebox. As I enter the room, I silently offer Kurt one, and shrug when he declines with a shake of his head. The first I drain quickly, the second I take long pulls from. I’ll have to go get more whiskey before the day gets too late.
Pushing my thoughts to a happier place, I think about the French forces that helped us take the beaches. I think about Corin and his long body.
After battle, almost every soldier I knew wanted sex. Corin and I fulfilled that for each other. He’d been living in Algeria when Hitler took France and would tell me about his exploits in northern Africa as we laid together, bodies and mind spent. I’d stroke his dark hair and he’d tickle the trail of hair below my navel.
I wish I knew what happened to him.
“It’s late.”
“But I want—”
Hesitating, he picks at his scar before answering. “In the camps you took your hat off when a superior approached, then you replaced it when he was on to other things. If you failed….”
I’m like the pricks in one of those camps?” “No,” he says, “it’s… it’s habit. I can’t….”
After I call him, I wait for Charles on my porch, assembling and disassembling my weapon until he shows up.
“I hope what’s in this bottle is important because I had a very handsome chemistry major in my—” He stops; the porch door snaps closed behind him. “What’s going on?”
His eyes are fixed on my pistol, which I’m still holding, tapping the barrel methodically against my leg. “Just leave the whiskey and you can get back to your boy.”
“Why do you have a gun?”
“I was cleaning it.”
He looks down at the arm of the chair across from me, and his eyes linger, as if he doesn’t want to bring them back up. When he does, he says, “You look a bit frightful.”
“It’s hard to look my Sunday best when I can’t sleep.” I point to the brown paper bag in his hands with the M1911. “You going to let me have that?”
When he places it on the table, I pour myself a drink and bang the new pack of smokes against the heel of my hand. His eyes are still on the gun resting on my thigh. “Think I’m going to hurt you? Is there something about me that makes people think I’m as bad as a fucking Nazi?”
“You know, before I even got into Germany, I killed so fucking many of them. The first one was… I’ll never forget that look on his face when the bullet—
my
bullet—hit him in the stomach. Took him a second to realize it. Coughed up blood before he fell.”
“I felt jazzed. Every new guy wants his first kill, and when I got mine, I knew I was a part of it. A part of the unit. No one told us these were the guys you killed; we all knew because they were the ones trying to kill us. There’d be days where all we’d do was hike our asses all over the place, so I’d be itching for a firefight, and when it’d come, there was no telling how many of my bullets wound up in some German’s body.”
I place my hand over the weapon on my leg, feeling comfort at how my index finger curls into the trigger. “You know they said they were just following orders? They didn’t
mean
to kill all those people, they just
had
to because they were told to.”
“I killed those Nazi fucks because I wanted to. Because before any of us set foot in one of those camps, we knew they were up to no good. Maybe I only knew that because that’s what my government told me, but when I saw those bodies in the boxcar, I hated the Germans for it. So I killed the next German in uniform I came across. No one told me to; I
wanted
to.”
“What’s to figure out? I killed Nazis for years. They killed everyone else. They killed queers—people like you and me—and he thinks I’m like them. I must be a horrible man if I somehow exude the same evil as the Nazis.”