The Knotted Roots of a Marriage

“Having flown over Treblinka and snatched a few grapes from the Warsaw grapevine, he strongly suspected but could not confirm the horror. Occupying his mind were two brothers at two fronts, and a family huddled in a blacked-out basement in Magdeburg, an industrial city poised on the knife edge between Berlin and London. In 1945, the Free French seized him disguised as a farm hand outside the Zeppelin Fabrik near the Bodensee and reduced him to a forest drudge, who dodged stones thrown by French children, whip- stitched his own wounds, and ripped oak planks with a handsaw.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—12/21/2015—

Wedding Portrait

Magdeburg, Germany, October 1938

In a photograph on a wall of our bedroom, Ilse, my wife’s mother, stands in bridal white against the smoke-stained bulwarks of the Magdeburg Cathedral—her lightsome train a blur in the wind that defies her retinue. War lurks in the sinuous currents that round out her train, blowing in from the North Sea across the heather of the moors. A few scattered oaks do their best to comb out the gusting snarls, like Polish lances in the coming Blitzsturm, but to little effect.

Two flower girls, Margit and Christa, scatter rose petals in this prevailing westerly that after a two-day honeymoon will lift Otto, my wife’s father, tail him to Warsaw, and waft his parachute to a spruce bough near Minsk.

Behind the couple are two more cousins clutching at the corners of their diaphanous charge. Helga has her eyes on the coins at her feet tossed by wedding guests beyond the picture’s frame. The oldest at ten, Horst smiles through the unruly charge at his uncle’s Luftwaffe uniform.

The boy will survive the war only to die serving in the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu for a cause no one remembers. Behind his head is a poster in a locked case where, with a hand glass, one word is legible: “Reformation.”

My future mother-in-law smiles past her Ottie, who studies the bride on his arm, both perhaps musing what the wind discloses in pressing her gown against a six-month pregnancy.

Ilse makes no attempt to hide the child within, for the “interim ascendancy” has made her four-generation search for Jewish blood a pinching obligation—five months’ work for a three-day pass.

Looking at this photograph today, my wife, Ingrid, sees herself floating upside down and naked at her parents’ wedding. She regrets her flippant pose and casual dress on such a solemn occasion, but there were forces here beyond anyone’s control, like the wind scudding rose petals across the cathedral steps.

Trying to Understand

Clemson, South Carolina, 1980

In 1935, there wasn’t much need for my eventual father-in-law, a journeyman joiner, whose specialty, the helical staircase, few Lübeck homes could afford. The Luftwaffe, therefore, enlisted Otto to repair its wooden biplanes, and he appreciated the opportunity to work.

When first blood was drawn in Poland, he put scruple and doubt behind (“How bad could it be?” he wondered), and was promoted to on-board mechanic and navigator in record time, winging it once to Paris for cognac, later crashing in a sky full of flak near Minsk, and retreating finally in a Polish hearse some prisoners had dug from the snow.

Having flown over Treblinka and snatched a few grapes from the Warsaw grapevine, he strongly suspected but could not confirm the horror. Occupying his mind were two brothers at two fronts, and a family huddled in a blacked-out basement in Magdeburg, an industrial city poised on the knife edge between Berlin and London.

In 1945, the Free French seized him disguised as a farm hand outside the Zeppelin Fabrik near the Bodensee and reduced him to a forest drudge, who dodged stones thrown by French children, whip- stitched his own wounds, and ripped oak planks with a handsaw.

In three years, he cut a village of lumber and brought in the best Burgundy of the decade before walking away and thumbing rides west. He arrived in wooden shoes at his shrapnel-riddled door with half a jug of French molasses.

We wish that he’d commandeered a plane and flown to London with all he knew or crashed it in the Eagle’s Nest. We wish we could tell such a tale of risks we’d never take, having dared to write but a few sharply worded letters to the editor and pay for parcels wrapped by C.A.R.E.

Harmonica Accord

Clemson, 1985

Wordless, the tune swung between these two allies—Grandfather Otto and his oldest grandson—as I, the common foe, wondered now why I’d fought that instrument so long, for the melody they shared was lovely.

It then occurred to me that some things, like kids on monkey bars, travel better skipping a rung, and leaping a stream is easier than fording it if the load is light.

As a chaperone during the slow dance musing love and curfews, I cracked the blinds to look out on the moon-shadowed porch where the intertwined tongues of the alliance beat together.

Betting on Oneself

Helmstedt, West Germany, 1987

Otto might have been one of those lab rats with all hope squeezed out of him by the war, but the aim of those French kids who’d thrown stones at him was not true. “If God is not with us,” he thought, “perhaps He is with me,” recasting the motto he learned for his confirmation. Though his faith in the Luftwaffe (he’d never had much in Hitler) had been shattered by the Spitfire and Mustang, he came, in time, to believe in himself and belief as well. After all, he’d weathered the war better than most, including a brother who’d left a leg in France.

Winning a post-war lottery by guessing five numbers out of six had levitated his spirit and allowed him to come down from his in-laws’ attic. A few kilometers away, he’d built a home of his own—a stuccoed stone dwelling with a tile roof and a garden filled with Scandinavian loam pushed down by the last glacier. Now there was something to believe in.

Forty years hence, his campaign for “six right” continued. “Picking your own pocket,” Ilse said. “Helping others to rebuild,” Otto countered. In fact, he finished a winner, 15 marks ahead of the game at his death. Ilse found him slumped over his Lotto form, pen in hand.

Needing Belief

Helmstedt, 1987; Clemson, 1988

For an hour after Otto died, Mutti, our German mom, held him and, for a year, she wept when we phoned.

Finally, she came to live with us in “Ah-merry-ca.” Otto came with her and sat in the dogwood outside the living-room window. He cocked his head in an odd way, perhaps baffled by his resurrection, and tried occasionally to fly through the pane between us.

One day, she told me how he used to slice apples and scatter the pieces beneath the hedge; sit and watch the sparrows fight over the wedges while she turned her love to lunch.

I offered her a Granny Smith, but she said it was too green. Nevertheless, she placed some slices under the azaleas in the backyard where they sat un-pecked for days before I took an icepick to them.

She smiled when she saw them, needing belief.

To No One’s Surprise

Helmstedt, 1990

On a visit to Mutti’s home, where starch had once been made from potato peels but the refrigerator magnets now held nothing in a ring, my brother-in-law and I used a high-pressure water compressor to blast flaking paint off her stuccoed house. Dried caulk and paint chips were scattered widely on the walk, the hedge, and the flower beds, but when the outside work was completed, we cleaned the windows and swept up the larger chips.

Early the next morning, I was awakened by a droning motor outside the bedroom window—Mutti was vacuuming her flower beds, sucking up the chips too small to sweep or rake. Still in pajamas, I found the camera in the bottom of my suitcase, sneaked out the back door, and took her picture, for I was sure no one would believe me but, to my surprise, everyone did.

At a friend’s wake a few days later, I told this tale to some stolid natives who looked like they might rise from their death beds to make the hospital corners right and then demand fitted sheets for their shrouds. When I’d finished, one woman said, “Oh, yes, we make the ‘Vampiredust sucker’ just for outdoor use.”

Where tidiness is a religion, I decided, one should not mock the priestess of order.

Trials of a Lutheran Saint

Helmstedt, 1992

One Sunday, without waking Ingrid, I dug my running shoes from the suitcase to see if they would still carry me around the walled city of my wife’s birth and our courtship 30 years earlier. Mutti, happy when she could catch five or six hours sleep, was in the kitchen brewing an herbal tea.

“Guten Morgen, Skip. May I make you breakfast?”

“Nein, danke, mein Schatz, I’m going for a jog.”

“Well, at least let me warm you up a Brötchen—you can’t run on an empty stomach.”

“OK, but just one.”

Mutti made three, I ate two, and ran for 30 minutes, intent on the hard rolls bouncing in my belly and musing about a martyrdom not my own: the night before at supper, she had offered me the center slices of the last tomato because, “You know how much I love the end pieces.”

When I noticed that the breakfast dishes had been cleared on my return and that Mutti was upstairs airing the featherbeds, I decided to test her fealty.

“Schatz,” I called up Otto’s coiled-oak stairwell, “I’m back—will you make my breakfast now?”

“Naturlich,” she answered.

“Over my dead body,” Ingrid said, leaning over the battlements. When Mutti persisted, Ingrid blocked the stairs, and I tried to explain it was a joke as I poured out a bowl of corn flakes. Before I could open the refrigerator, both women were in the kitchen.

Arms akimbo, Ingrid stood in silent bewilderment as her mother bared her naked throat. Gathering the last Brötchen, the butter, marmalade, milk, and the raspberries that she’d frozen the summer before, Mutti said, “I knew you were joking, but I hoped you weren’t.”

“If Ingrid were still asleep,” I said under my breath, “I’d be monarch of all I survey with an omelet before me and a perky side of raspberries.”

Spade Therapy

Helmstedt, 1995

Spring dawned on a Sunday, time to fold back the spruce boughs that had shielded Otto’s grave all winter, prune the evergreen border, set out a flat of Sweet William, and scrub the rain-spattered mud from his headstone. It was a custom without petrifaction, observed by most Germans who tended these plots that rivaled the Gardens of Versailles, without the state but all the pains. While Ingrid cleaned house, Mutti, Anja, and I drove to the cemetery to pay our respects and listen for the cuckoo.

As Anja trimmed the evergreens, and I gathered up the spruce boughs, Mutti reminded her granddaughter that elephants tend the remains of their loved ones long after the bones turn to chalk. “Only humans mummify their dead and then ignore them,” she said.

“Nature rolls the bones over,” I said, “and goes to copulate.”

“Dad,” said Anja, “you might want to rethink your phrasing.”

As Mutti paused to wipe her perspiring face in the silence broken by a distant train, she said to Anja, “Do you want to give it a try?” Anja nodded, seized the spade, and sprang upon its shoulders with both feet. When she’d turned over the rest of the brown-black soil, she took my rake and sent me to the well. When I returned, the two women were setting out the last of the Sweet William and tucking pine straw snugly beneath his chin. Subdued by their work, they stood to survey it while the cuckoo pronounced it good.

On our way home, we stopped at a rail crossing. I cut the ignition and lowered the windows for the full effect of the train’s purgative thunder.

“Death’s a rocket we take back to the stars,” I said, quoting someone I’d long forgotten. “And grief,” I added, “is a train we ride to the horizon.”

After checking to see if there was anyone behind us, Mutti asked me to wait until the train was out of sight. “Watch,” she said, “as the red light on the caboose winks out where the rails merge.”

Die Heilige Mutti’s Exquisite Austerities

Helmstedt, 1996

Our holy mum was a loaf of lamb.

She mixed the ripest tomatoes, the sweetest onions, cheddar, thyme, and black pepper with her ground tenderloin. She then yielded herself to the pan, baked at 175° C basting every 30 minutes, and presented herself prone to her sons.

She handed us our cutlery, offered up a blessing, begged us to eat, proffered us seconds, lay thirds at our feet, thanked us for coming, gave us a mint, washed our dishes while we watched the game, and asked if anyone wanted to take the leftovers home one more time.

We, wealthy butchers all, had grown fat in the shadow of her cleaver.

Cut from the Moorings of Memory

Helmstedt, 2000

All morning, Ingrid prepared soup while her mother held a vigil. Standing at her daughter’s shoulder, Mutti was intent and mystified by the language she’d been fluent in for half a century in this very kitchen, on this counter, with these same utensils, and in this selfsame pot. Now she could not remember the pot’s place and, when through clamorous trials she found it, she could not recall why an extraterrestrial pot should occupy it.

As Ingrid solemnly sliced vegetables and diced a cold breast of chicken, Mutti hovered near the kitchen’s threshold, observing like a mute but attentive child, eager to learn the alchemy of her mother’s soup—how a sweep of the produce bin, base water, and a dash of arcane seasonings were transmuted to culinary gold.

But Mutti’s sponge was dry—it lifted no drop from the counter and left a long greasy smear.

As the soup simmered on the stove, Mutti set the table with my barking guidance, “‘Fork left’ like ‘fork lift.’”

Sitting at the table Otto had built, and as we spooned the last few drops from our tipped bowls, I said, “Great soup!”

Thinking I was speaking to her, Mutti replied, “It’s alright but nothing special.”

Ingrid, knowing this was once her mother’s standard reply to any compliment at her table, swallowed the snub like an over-salted bisque. She knew Mutti had already forgotten who made the soup and that tomorrow its flavor would be better but her mum wouldn’t.

Visiting the Alzheimer’s Ward

Grasleben, Germany, 2002

Mute with tears and jetlag, Ingrid sat stroking Mutti’s age-dappled hands, the thin-blue skin worn smooth as a convent’s lone Bible.

One expects the dry, darker layer of an onion to crumble, but pneumonia and dementia had bitten through multiple strata of her mother’s tight, concentric spheres where, “What color is this leaf?” was brightly answered “six!” and “What day is this?” bled into “Orange?” Hiking the Brocken, winning the house in the lottery, the air raids of the Greater War, Ottie’s escape from the POW camp, the grandbabies and, on some days, her sons—these were the shards of her bowl, rocking in a breeze blowing through the ward window. Indeed, only the onion’s core was left, that translucent sanctum, the crypt beneath the altar, where the fox forever steals the goose, one taler buys a milk cow, and Little Hans leaves home again. Only those childhood songs, her daughter’s name, a few animal sounds, her left hand’s renewed dominance, and the shame of soiling herself remained.

With one hand on the wheelchair, Ingrid positioned herself and, while singing “Dark-red roses are tendered to beautiful women,” she pressed the balky bladder through her mother’s diaper until she felt the warmth.

Softly, Ingrid kissed Mutti’s cheek and chanted the old nocturnal refrain, “Sweet dreams of sour pickles,” to which her mother responded, “But don’t eat them up.”

Leaving, Ingrid drew her tears along the back of a finger without marring her make-up and wiped her hands along the stainless-steel railing. They were tricks Mutti had taught her ages ago.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522.