It’s minus one on the Fahrenheit scale, and suddenly I’m thinking of Germany. No, not some beauty queen whose hippy parents named her after the country they conceived her in while trekking along in their journey of sexual discovery, no I’m thinking of the country itself.
I was there once, well after the wall that divided the east from the west fell. When I turned to look one last time before boarding a plane back to Chicago I thought, I won’t do this again. Perhaps I never saw it at all. How could any old world country slough away the dregs of the 21st century and rediscover the beauty and might of their own brilliant culture?
I’ve never gone back and since it’s minus one on the Fahrenheit scale and my chances of even waking up and seeing Chicago again in broad daylight are slim to none, I guess I was right. That’s how curses work, I suppose.
My Dad spent some time in West Germany after the war. He met my mother there and married her; she was from Iowa. They settled in the burbs of Chicago and all I can remember about my Dad was the sighing he did over West Germany; the sounds of their language, the churches that survived the bombs and the awful night he spent on a dare with some buddies in a burned-out village that no one rebuilt.
“Too many memories, too many sad moments.” He spoke as if he’d had been raised there. Then one day, several years after I buried him, I thought–how the hell did he have enough knowledge of the place to even make the statement he did; “Too many memories, too many sad moments.” I fell asleep right after that question, but the question was sitting on my bed the next morning waiting on me.
That question waited for several years and cropped up here and there, especially when I thought of my Dad. So I went to Germany. I don’t really know why, other than idle curiosity. It was winter and their Christmas markets were in full swing and the women were all beautiful and the wine and beer tasted good. I wandered here and there and wondered no longer why Dad thought only good of that country.
The rubble of the village he spent the night in on a dare wasn’t hard to find. I never got the impression that Germany was vast by any means. Actually, sometimes I felt pretty hemmed in by mountains and people. I stood amongst the ruins while my guide stood some distance off. I felt I could stay among the ruins and rest for some time since I had just gotten off the Autobahn with the same guide who didn’t have the courage to follow me into the ruins. I scoffed; here was a fellow who went at a speed I wouldn’t attempt on the Midwestern prairies, turning around and looking at me while cars zoomed by asking if “American worry?”
I felt the tension of that trip ease out of my shoulders and my feet sort of sink into the earth and I wondered why I had come all this way just to say I stood in the very German ghost town my Dad spent the night in, so long ago.
“Too many memories, too many sad moments.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When I opened them again, she was standing there with a look of hatred that made me shiver with cold. Dressed in rags, her hair wet and ragged, clinging to her face and neck, she was a few paces away from me. I swear I could hear the drip of water drop from her blue finger tips. My German wasn’t all that good and her voice rasped like rusty hinges, but my demise was on her lips and I felt the ice of her curse sting into my skin.
I think the only reason I didn’t die on the spot was because I heard my guide calling me.
“Come away, come away from there.”
“Did you see her?”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“You had to have seen her. She was standing right there.”
“No. I don’t know why you wanted to come here. Years ago, soldiers, they stay there on a dare. They never come out again. One left a wife and a baby on the way. No one comes here.”
“What?”
“Yes. I know you won’t believe, but it’s true. They never find them again. Their bodies, nothing. The place is cursed. No one staying there is the same again. It changes people, it’s like they become ghosts.”
I wonder as it becomes colder and colder in Chicago if I’ve existed at all.