Chapter Five: Bellicose, Part One

**Yes I realize I have jumped a chapter.  Ch. 4 is a series of unrelated reflections, the "jumble" that my life took between ch. 3 and ch. 5.  Sort of a "journal entry" approach.  But it isnt close to being finished.  Needless to say "substantial" elements of the story arent being missed by its exclusion, it merely adds some color.***

A picture held us captive.  And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations par. 115.

Bellicose, I am.

A quiet war raging; an infinity of little moments.  Driving.  Not there yet.  Not there.  Here the world, like so often, was awaking to the chilled air, stretching its arms open to the approaching light, which was, like so often, beautiful and serene.  If only I had noticed.  Everything unbeautiful feels infinite when you are anxious.  Even the pangs between breath.  The lined streaks of painted pavement rolling by.  I was elsewhere.  Not even the glacial morning through the lowered car windows could catch me.  My breath, a breath of ghosts in the morning cold, burned in my lungs.  I shivered slightly, but made no effort to turn on the heat in the car.  I was driving, only driving.  And I was not there yet.

You were late, I remember.  Late.  Of course you were late.  Our very last day together.  I ended up sitting inside the only shop that was open that early, a little deli market across from the courthouse run by an old Asian couple.  I had skipped breakfast and wasn’t hungry now, but still managed to order a sandwich hoping it might kill some time.  I couldn’t help but be cliché right then and again notice that the whole world was going about the minutia of its daily life while my world was devouring itself.  Love was this beautiful little fragile thing it seemed to me, becoming some private holocaust of mine on this family breaking day, and there these two were making sandwiches and arguing in Chinese over God knows what. Thankfully it was mercifully warm inside the shop, because the sandwich was probably the stalest thing I had ever eaten and did nothing to comfort me.  When the old Asian couple wasn’t looking I threw it away, and just sat there, reading a story about how my potato chips came from some great lineage of potato farmers dedicated to bringing me the best quality potato chips everyday.  I briefly thought about how it was odd that anyone could dedicate themselves to potato chips, but my attention quickly turned to the shop’s radio which was crackling with an upbeat Christian music station, playing a song in the background about how love endures forever.  Great.

I sat and tried to imagine love lasting forever.

But all I could remember was my mother’s face as I told her.  As I broke the news of our failure.  Her son’s agony more her own even than mine.  How she would have burned herself to save me.  And how her heartbreak erupted because she could not. Her fingers in my hair and the smell of her perfume as she wept beside me.  Our tears above the linoleum and aside the counters.  Before the fridge and beside the oven and microwave.  Amid the ordinary.  A gray stillness was in her house, a fitting November day parading its magnitude upon all of us lesser figures below.  The silver lights of winter clouds snuck in through the windows.  Nature crowded around us at the kitchen table, through the window slats, through the rafters and the watchful trees hung with her favorite birdfeeders.  I remember now as we cried in the quiet, the two cats that had survived my youth came to us there, huddled underneath the November sky, pressed in the shape of prayer against the table my mother painted with cherries when I was a child, putting their heads against us.  Did they sense agony?  It is of course always a possible coincidence, of their hunger and want of food, or of some sudden lurch in the need for affection.  Catnip, maybe?

It is fitting though, if in that moment they loved us.  Because so long ago they saw my youth, and now they saw my age, so sudden.

And I remember after that, my father.  Against the mirror in his room as I looked away from his face, suddenly so carved with grief.  I need to talk to you, I said.  He knew, already he knew as he replied even if he did not want to believe.  You have never said something to me in just that way he responded, fearing the worst.  I’m so ashamed I said, and he shook his head and put his hand on my shoulder, saying either I shouldn’t be ashamed, or in refusal to believe the event my shame convulsed from.  How he did not want to believe it to be true.  Oh how he wanted to save his son.  To ensure that I could be happy.  But we were amidst  undeniable ruins, architecture that once had tamed the landscape but spoke now only between the brush and branches of a reclaiming wild.   Only in two instances have I seen my father cry.  I heard it in your tone, your request, he said, I’m so sorry this happened. 

He too would save me if he could.

But he could not.  And so there was a sort of doubled grief.  I could not look him in the eye.  It was like confessing my failure to Christ Himself.

But Christ Himself wept for me.  Would die for me.  But even He in that moment knew that, somehow, it did not matter what he did.

And thus I got a hug.  A small thing, maybe.  But one that I cannot forget.  I stained his shoulder as I wept.  His strong hands around me.  Mine around him.  All against the mirror in his room, duplicating, inflecting, flinging off to infinity our fears and failures.

My confession echoed.  But we were silent.

  

My friends and I sat there in the restaurant.  Against the echoes of this horrible day.  The sun was setting as we spoke to each other.  Stunned.  The years between us gripping us together.  But there were jokes.  How we jeered about your infidelity, made light of it, as only we could.  It was all we could do.  God, it was too heavy for us.  We who were lifetime friends.  They could not bear my grief, nor could I.  Humor was our solvent, the universal acid.  Our laughter was our prayers to God for healing.  So we sat for hours, laughing.  So we sat for hours, praying to God. 

As if this were light, some joke, some eloquent mistake that had already passed along far enough in time to now be funny.  But it was only the day after.  And our black morass was broken by Simpson's quotes, Halo, by our favorite sports moments from high school.  God how I love my friends.

All of our movements made one single poem.  Our gestures and roars, laughter.  The vast text amounting to one message.  Again and again.

 Goodbye, my love.

------------------------

I decided finally to leave the sub shop and at least go inside the courthouse, get a feel for what lay ahead.  The shop was only a few blocks from the courthouse, but its odd how anxiety can play with your perception because the walk over was agonizing.  It felt like I was walking to a great mountain looming in the distance, so great and so far that no matter how long I walked it came no closer, impervious to approach.  

Finally, though, I arrived at the old iron-framed doors through a brick pathway.  Marching on either side it was lined by gardens and trees which were beautiful, but so meticulous and ordered I couldn’t help but picture in the distinct lines separating each part of the gardens from each other and the cobblestone pathway and the stores surrounding the block of the courthouse, that the judicial system itself was spilling over into the ground like great roots hewing and funding the earth above, carving even the wilds with its order.

Once I was inside the grandeur of the exterior was soon forgotten amidst dreary halls that flickered with sickly neon lights, made all the worse by the day’s rising brightness from which I had just came.  Even darkness can flare into your eyes.  And here it grabbed you before you would ever be ready.  Causeways stretched before me, labyrinthine like roots beaten into order and ninety-degree angles, lumbering onward sleepy and surreal in the artificial dusk.  Someone had folded infinity upon itself, it seemed, and drew lines to make crisscrossing corridors regress farther and deeper than I imagined anyone would dare to go.  Somewhere beyond the concrescence of hallways, through many doors and secrets, I imagined some great engine like a heart beating, fueling ever new complexity. 

Above all it was remarkable how getting a divorce is a lot like getting your license at the DMV.  Both have long lines, both smell terrible, like smoke and bad coffee, and about the same types of people are there.  And almost everyone, feeling desperate and alone as the great system processes them, will tell you how they are the victim, how if only someone would listen they would see how they are the exception to a principle. In fact if you gave the people here the opportunity they would tell you their life story until their number was called.  Then they will tell their life story to the poor operator behind the desk who called them. About how they have a face and aren’t part of this listless crowd filing through metal detectors and past the Public Defenders and their cheap suites.  Everyone knew deep down they weren’t “they,” but each was “I”.  Unique, special, untrammeled by the defects they saw in the mass of the crowd.  But deep in these gray halls which marched so far and forgot so thoroughly the dewy opalescence of the new day outside, this was hard to tell.

Still, it was as if we all wanted to discover our savior, summon a messiah through the plea of simply explaining ourselves to our fellow man.  Everyone here prayed, atheist or believer, and the person standing in front or behind to them was their god.  Everyone, they think, is a potential Christ.  And surely, they think, they deserved to be saved.  But we aren’t.  They aren’t.  All of us are alone together. The gray light of the lamps fell on all our faces. If only we could save each other, I bet they were thinking. We each were absorbed in ourselves and in the fact that we couldn’t escape what made us tragic.  We were ashamed of our solidarity with one another here and every incoming gaze tasted like judgment.  But they weren’t, they were only another sadness murmuring from the lamps of dim and tremulous eyes.  As I turned around to look at those behind me, I was hurried on by a guard at the metal detector waving next, please.

Forced to move.

Left to feud with our hope.

------------------------

Hope is a bizarre thing.  It can be both the fuel of inspiration, or, as my Opa told me of his time as a prisoner of the Nazis, “endless hope is madness,” a constant openness before something that never appears, a phantom, a projection, that awful chimera of liberation that lingers like a stain upon the air but has no substance.  This was a saying in the war, anyway. 

I would as a child ask him for his stories from the war.  Fascinated, as if they were some great fairytale told for me.  If I had only known they were real, I'm not sure I would have ever asked him to relive them.  As it was I thought, as a child only can, that he was reciting fictions.  Incredible stories that breached the skins of truth.

Like the time he was in the movie theater when the Germans came.  May 10th, 1940. In the Blitzkrieg upon Holland.  And the SS told everyone to come out and report.  The tanks quaking the earth so the moveable letters of the theater sign came crashing down.  And their storm ruined a perfect date.  And my grandfather like some god came out, all guts and combustion and iron, and said in perfect German as he marched up without hesitation to the head SS officer there, between the machine guns and the screams, "How dare you detain German citizens!"  And he looked at his girlfriend.  And then back at the SS, the bleary daylight between the extended darkness of the theater and the open air hardly giving him a moment to think.  And he moved with a courage I could barely fathom.  "We are German citizens, her and I!  Wait until your Commander hears of this!" He gestured with a feigned German fury and aristocracy toward the chest of the SS officer.  Do you know who I am? the motion said without speaking.

And  the SS officer looked unsure.  He had just, the moment before, beat a citizen to death with the butt of his rifle my Opa recalled, smashing in a belligerent Dutchman's nose until the fragments met his brain and they all squelched and broke from existence.  And taken aback at his own monstrosity, the officer was on his heels.  And my Opa took the advantage.

"Your papers?"  Said the SS.

"Papers?!"  My Opa roared.  "How many disgraces must I report of this operation?  We are citizens!  Can you hear an accent??"

My Opa was arrogant at his linguistic talents.  But rightfully so.  He spoke Dutch (of course), but perfect German, French, English, Spanish, Russian.  I envied him.

"The whole city needs to be taken and here you stand trying to deal with two Germans!" my Opa roared.  "Will the history books then recall the Third Reich's hesitation to take Holland because of its own failure to recognize itself?"

He was Shakespeare in the face of bullets.

Without another word the officer waved them on, with his grandest apologies to him and his lady.

And my Opa said: he kissed his girlfriend and said it wouldn't work out.  He had to go now.  And he told her to flee to Britain.  Like he was John Wayne about to ride into the sunset.  And he went immediately to Afsluitdijk; then Grebbeberg; Rotterdam, and Dordrecht, to fight in the resistance.  He said the Germans tried an airborne landing at the Hague but it was a disaster for them.  I could only imagine he had something to do with it.  

I remember he described different weapons, how they sounded, felt.  How God would have to forgive him differently for every one, because they all shattered souls differently.

He became a leader in the Dutch resistance immediately.  He had a special gift.  His sense of smell was so acute he could smell Mustard gas before it became effective.  He told me his nickname given to him by the men he was assigned to was Filter.  And there was an enormous Jewish man in the squad they called Atlas.  He told me of a story once, where a Jeep was stuck in the mud, that Atlas pulled it out by himself.  And another time he was stabbed by a bayonet by a charging German, but instead of pulling it out, he pulled it deeper, and thrust the assaulting German toward himself, through himself.  And as they met face to face as the steel plunged into his belly, he looked into the German and said, with no feign of humor, no joke or jest, "you cannot kill death."

Atlas then tore the jaw of the German, off.  Pulled his face rightward, northward, south.  Into a circle of snapping bones and a grotesque many-angled struggle.  And he then pulled the Bayonet from himself as if he had merely tickled him.  I didn't know if my Opa was exaggerating.  But his eyes were filled with reverence as he spoke.  And if my Opa, with all his bravado and courage could speak reverently of another's deeds, I could do nothing but believe.

But the Hague was not just a place of victory.  Despite everything he did, there was a moment of chance that sprang like a dragon.  The British Royal Air Force, his friends!  They had targeted a nearby park in the Bezuidenhout quarter, a major producer of V-2 rockets.  But like all tragedies of chance, a small error struck, and became a holocaust.  A navigational errata in the pilots instruments, infinitesimal at first, more enormous as they drove through the air and the error compounded, caused their bombs to hate a historic, populated part of the city.  And there was a church there, with a beautiful stain-glass of the crucifixion and ascension of Christ, which my Opa's mother and sisters hid within as the air-raid sirens gave of their moan and wailing.  I heard him hesitate again and again as he told this.  But he never cried.  It was more like he reset each time and simply pushed further in the tale.  And the latches released, without any knowledge of a mistake.  And in the night, as many crowded with only slight fear, because they were within safe zones, the bombs painted with shark faces and white teeth and red smiles fell.  Like dark angels in the air drinking in the drop and the flooding rush of night.

And Christ erupted, melted, fell into phosphorescent molten globs thrown about like falling stars.  The stain glass fused.  Flouresced.

And he lost a mother.  Two sisters.  An uncle.  To friends.

And there was the time a little while after the bombing, he told me he tried to save his friends from a cold train, taking them to a fake new home.  And him and seven others sidelined the train like bank-robbers in a Western film.  He even rode a horse he said.  But this didn't have a happy ending, he warned.  He was caught as he rode gallant, with Holland's flag blazing, and was himself now put on the train.  And he beheld the horror within.  

And when the train met its station, his friend's new home, he told me in hushed tones how he helped them out.  But they had become so cold they couldn't move.  They were families of stones in their seats.  Ashes of lives preserved in the limen between life and death, like the figures of charcoal in the ruins of Pompeii, frozen, held in the moment of passing.  He paused.  A tear almost passed between him and I.  But he never cried.  But he also never withheld the truth from me.  No, he was such an honest man.  He couldn't even lie to a child.  It wasn't right, I knew he thought.

"Do you know what death is?" he asked gently.

"Its when Jesus takes you home."  I said when I was so young, exactly as I was taught in the first steps of my youth.

He waited for a moment, not sure I had answered correctly.  But even he knew this was the only truth I could know then.

"Yes."  He said, as he gathered himself.

"Jesus took them all."  He said.  "But not because he wanted to.  It was just too cold.  The Germans had been---too---mean."

His voiced wavered, infinitely small.

"They gave me a pickaxe."  He said.  "It had been three, maybe four days with literally no heat.  They were all taken by Christ.  They were all glaciers refusing to move from their seats.  I had to..."  A choke.

A whisper.

"I had to hack them out.  They made me.  There were so many guns, rising to kill me."

But then he said the worst thing.

"I saw Atlas."  He said.  "In the train. His broad frame was unmoving in the corner.  Holding two girls as if trying to protect them from winter."

"He was my friend."
And he told me that the most amazing thing was Atlas' face looked serene, even happy.  As if he was content when he knew his last act was trying to help those two girls.

He told me he didn't use the pickaxe to remove him.  He wrapped his arms around him.  Said he was sorry a thousand times.  Used his own heat to thaw him from the seat.  Both he and the girls.

He said, distantly, in the strangest way it gave him hope, that he could hold his friend and comfort him.  Even in death.  That in a small way it was a foretaste of resurrection, to pull and hold his friend in the vestiges of death and say, "I'll see you again soon."

I remember asking my Opa how, after they caught him, he managed to get through the endless days of waiting in the camps for salvation.  He looked up at me underneath his white hair and thin glasses and leaned in, clasping his hand on my shoulder as some Dutch radio program chattered in the background.  He quickly glanced behind him and whispered, as if what he was about to tell me would be met with disapproval by my Oma and my mother who were tending to pots in the kitchen sputtering and steaming with our dinner. 

 “Son, I never made it out of there.”

This was, of course, unsettling, as he was currently holding me.  Was he a ghost?

His voice was heavy and tender as it breathed through a small knowing smile. “But one day me and God will have a long talk about it, and He will give me back to myself.”

I had just wanted some platitude about how hope endures even in hopelessness.  That help was coming.  That it was here in the world.  Somehow this was both better and worse at the same time.

  I was quiet all through dinner that day.