Be Inspired ...

"…Unity, justice and freedom for the German fatherland! Fraternally, with heart and hand, let us strive for this! Unity, justice and freedom are the pledges of happiness. In their radiance flourish German fatherland!"
German National Anthem

Our nation makes great promises. Does this include everyone?

* * *

With great fanfare we arrived in Rheinfelden. Our train, powered by a steam locomotive, screeched into the station. Tons of steel shook the earth and sent smoke and thunder into the sky. Clouds of steam hissed through the giant wheels onto the concourse, shrouding the travelers waiting there.

Our ancestors knew that we had returned, Siggi and I.

The twin cities of Rheinfelden, one in Switzerland, one in Germany, were a great contrast to Simonswolde. Whereas the North German countryside was flat, these cities straddled the Rhine River which meandered along the hills at the southern end of the Black Forest. Not far to the west was Germany’s historic enemy, La Grande Nation.

Ma, but not Pa, met us at the station. Her hair was noticeably grayer and her skin was pale yellow. Again she had spent days in bed with jaundice which was caused this time by Pa and his frolicking lawyers. She was high-strung excited, not happy-excited, to see us. Since the station was close to the Swiss border, she led us to the Rhine River to give us a glimpse of the old Rheinfelden. She shrilly asked a customs official if we could walk out onto the bridge for a closer look at Switzerland. The river was deep and swift with silent, deep whirlpools sucking down flotsam. Quaint old rowhouses snuggled each other on the opposite riverbank, and someone was fishing from an open window.

We walked to the middle of the bridge, the boundary between the two countries, where Ma pointed back to the German side:

“See that rock outcropping over there? With the steel beams hanging from it?”

We spotted it: “Ja.”

“That’s where your father’s fishing hut was before the war.”

Siggi and I went ballistic.

“We can go fishing there.”

“And with our father.”

Ma was silent.

After our detour, the three of us walked to our new home. Along the way Ma pointed out the buildings that Pa had designed, as well as the manicured parks and tree-lined streets. Even now Siggi and I did not know that Pa had built a house, our home, and that we would be moving in with him. Family matters must be hidden from children? Could it be detrimental to their psyches?

Siggi and I did not think of Pa as a member of our family. Although he probably had not invited us this time, Ma had moved in with him when she became ill. He had invited us numerous times in the past to join him in the south, even though he had lived in only one room in the hotel Saengerhalle, Hall for Singers, into which he had moved from Bavaria. I did not know why he had moved, if he had built our house there, or if he had sold it. The Saengerhalle was the best accommodation that he had been allowed here because of the great housing shortage. If we had lived with him, he would have been placed on a list to get an apartment, which was probably why he might have asked us to come back to him before.

Now that he had built a house and we were coming, he did not want us, because it would be more difficult to get a divorce. Ma would be close by to raise hell. You just couldn’t throw a mother and her children out onto the street and let them freeze and starve. It would be difficult to evict his burdensome wife and lovable by-products from their new home because Ma stuck to Pa like cockleburs that he continuously attempted to pluck off.

We by-products were still too young to understand that children normally had two parents. The closest contact that we had had with another family was with our cousins, Gerd and Maike, in Simonswolde. They did not have a father either because Ma’s brother had been buried in Russia, after which our mothers fought each other over his inheritance.

Siggi and I did not know of divorce because it was rarely a solution under German laws, but we would soon learn that it carried an intense social stigma. Ma had never told us much about our father, except that he was irresponsible and did not care for us, having abandoned us after his climaxes. She did not tell us about such because she did not want us to know that either.

When we arrived at our new home, Siggi and I were astounded. We went ballistic, again, for the second time in one hour. We could not believe it. This could make us “hyper,” even though “hyper” hadn’t been invented yet and neither had attention deficit disorder. However, if we’d suffer from them, it would be cured with spanking. Now we were overwhelmed to find a new three-story mansion that no one had ever told us about. Three families lived here. A small enameled sign pointed to Pa’s office in the daylight basement: “Herbert Neuman, Freier Architekt und Diplom Ingenieur.” This was status.

And there was not a manure pile in sight.

Our new home was located at the outskirts of the city, two blocks away from a street that had been built by the ancient Romans. It was still used, had far fewer potholes than the streets in my present hometown, and this was the stability and permanence which Siggi and I so craved.

The size and luxury of our new home astounded us. Its design conformed to the regional uniformity of cubic shapes that were reminders of chateaux without turrets. It was built with reinforced blocks of concrete and fired clay that were finished with stucco and plaster. Like most mansions, it was also covered with a steep hip roof of red tiles that endured for two centuries. These roof tiles were not even referred to as “Deluxe” or “Superior.” They were simply thought of as tiles, and there was no lesser quality available. Wrought-iron grilles with diamond patterns adorned the windows on each side of the front door, and most of the other windows were flanked with wooden shutters that could be closed to keep out light and prying eyes.

And raging fathers.

When we opened the oak entrance door to our house and entered the foyer, where an oaken staircase curved upward, I swelled with new emotions of pride, permanence and security. In Simonswolde we had lived in a crowded house where we’d shared one stinky hole with other families, and this one was its antithesis.

I ran up the stairs.

“No, no, come here. We live downstairs. Other people live upstairs,” Ma said emphatically.

I turned around as Pa opened the lead-glass doors to the vestibule of our new home. He was smirking and did not say, “Welcome home.” He did not hug us and we did not hug him. Instead, Siggi and I dashed around him and looked into the first room to the left.

“Ma, look,” I exclaimed, “a bathroom. With water.”

It was the first bathroom with plumbed fixtures that I had ever seen. It was so clean and inviting that Siggi and I could finally toilet train ourselves. I knelt beside the white bathtub to twirl the shiny handles. A dull thud drew my attention to the mysterious glow that came from a snow-white porcelain box on the wall behind me, and through a hole I could see dozens of long, blue flames aligned in precise rows. I rose on my toes, drew a deep breath, and puffed into this fiery regiment. A cleft opened and closed with a thump. While turning faucets on and off, I realized that the fire in the box, an instantaneous gas heater, responded to the flow of water.

Excitedly we rushed from room to room. In the kitchen Siggi turned a knob on the stove and it emitted a hiss, filling the air with a strange odor.

“Turn off the gas,” Pa scolded him.

In the Herrenzimmer, gentlemen’s room, Siggi and I admired the bas-relief curlicues on the plaster ceiling, the recessed lights and chandelier. This room also had iron radiators under the double-paned windows like all the others in this house.

“What are these things for?” we queried our parents.

“They are heaters.”

“How do they work?”

“Hot water circulates through them.”

“But where does it come from?”

“There’s a boiler in the basement that heats the water,” explained Pa.

We raced back through the vestibule and down to the basement where we found the boiler that heated the entire house. Downstairs in Pa’s office, draftsman Sepp showed us the drawings of the buildings they were designing. Pa’s practice had become very successful because he was very talented and the reconstruction of Germany was in high gear. Every building, including all houses, had to be designed and supervised by architects. It was the law.

Pa was also successful because he was gregarious, easygoing, and was always ready to joke. With other people but not with us. He was making up for lost meals by stuffing himself in restaurants and thus had grown plump like many of his countrymen. He was jolly with a balding forehead and drank wine or beer only with his meals and in between also. We discovered that he would never drink anything but alcoholic beverages, yet I never considered him to be an alcoholic.

Now that we were united with our father, who looked rich like a banker, Siggi and I felt that our poverty had ended, and we enjoyed the first few months living in our new home. This was the best time of our lives, and it could not get much better. Or much worse. For the first time in my life I felt a twinge of confidence in myself, secure in having a father, a new home, a real toilet, while Pa owned an automobile at a time when few people could afford one. Even so, Ma, like all housewives, walked to the neighborhood stores for our daily needs, carrying her purchases in her shopping net because she did not drive and most of the stores were within walking distance anyway.

While out shopping, the housewives visited with each other, and this helped build a stable society. Ma gossiped about her irresponsible husband and the mistreatment of women, while others told that they did not have husbands or had only partial ones. Some were dead and gone, others partially gone having lost limbs on battlefields, while still others sat at a Stammtisch in cafés every night. A Stammtisch is a table in a restaurant which is reserved for the same group of men who meet there almost nightly to visit. These were also partial husbands. Here they drank beer and wine and ruminated about the politics of mankind, and it had been one such group that had hatched the Putsch, a secret plot, in Munich that had triggered one of the world’s greatest man-made disasters.

Pa was too embarrassed to be seen with Ma, and they never went anywhere together. Or did they hate each other so much? He also was too embarrassed to be seen with Siggi and me in our tattered clothes from Simonswolde. Children often teased us, especially here in Rheinfelden, where people were not so poor and were always properly dressed. Pa bought Siggi and me each a new suit with Knickerbocker pants, the first new clothes that Siggi and I ever wore, except for the leather pants that he had sent us in Simonswolde. We had worn them daily for seven summers until our pee rotted out the crotches, and we grew too big for them.

* * *

After moving in with Pa, we slowly began to realize that our parents did not get along with each other. Siggi and I barely knew our father and did not expect to have one. In the past we had written him only a few times and had received only impersonal notes in return along with an occasional toy. Now that we were all together in one house, there was still not much contact with him. Our parents argued frequently but mostly in private. Worse yet, Ma, Siggi and I were confined to one bedroom, to sleep together in one double bed, while Pa had a room by himself. Siggi and I did not yet know that this was weird. We had always been weird, but did not know that we were weird. We did not yet realize that mothers and fathers slept together and that growing boys had their own bedrooms.

We never entered Pa’s bedroom. But one day when everyone was gone, and I must have felt unusually courageous, I sneaked in to snoop around and searched his dresser which smelled of sour sweat, exactly like Pa. Much later scientists would discover that this virile scent attracted women, as did money, like flies to honey. I found Pa’s address book and was puzzled by more than seventy names listed therein and realized that they were all women. There was a photograph of an aunt to whom Pa had introduced us, Aunt Faessle. She owned a hat store, was cross-eyed, and we did not like her. Ma told us that she was stealing our father. In this picture our aunt was squatting down and her pale buttocks were beaming in a dark forest, but I couldn’t find New or Improved stamped on them. So far there had been only very few people that I really didn’t like. And I did not yet know that I would someday develop a real soft spot in my heart for lawyers. When will they classify such soft spots as a sue-able disease?

I searched Pa’s toiletry case and found a rolled up balloon. Because there was no sex education in our schools, and our parents didn’t teach us anything useful, I had not yet learned about the birds and the balloons. I could only guess what it was and wondered which aunt would get to ride on it. Pa had a great choice of women with whom he could ride, because they greatly outnumbered men, since so many of them had been killed during the war, while others were still stuck in gulags. Still others were hiding in other countries because they had been Nazis and did not dare to return to their furious Fatherland.

Pa dated many aunts and brought some of them home, apparently because he wanted us to be a big family. When he took Siggi and me, but never our mother, to restaurants, he always ogled the waitresses, all of whom seemed to know him quite well. He never failed to tip the young ones generously and pinch their buttocks lovingly to check if they were ready. If he were a man, he’d definitely be a buttocks-loving man.

We never did anything together, our big family. Our parents still did not tell their children that they were divorcing, that there would never be a real family, even officially. Siggi and I detected no difference in their relationship with each other. We felt that parents were supposed to fight and nothing changed between them now that we were all together. Opposites were supposed to attract each other; they were opposites but attracted each other only to quickly repel each other in nasty ways.

Ma never went anywhere with us, never learned to drive because Pa would not let her, and she moved about in a very small area, as far as her bike could take her. She either walked or biked to the few places that she visited because she had no money and could not buy much. Pa ate most of his meals in restaurants by himself or with one of our temporary aunts, Siggi’s and mine. We did not eat regular meals because Ma did not prepare regular meals and instead, whenever we became hungry, we simply exclaimed to Ma, Ich Bin Hungrig. I am hungry. For several more years we would say several times a day, Ich Bin Hungrig. When we would say so, Ma retrieved a loaf of bread and cut us some slices, and after she thoughtfully covered them with lard and sugar, or margarine, we devoured them.

Someday my dynasty coat-of-arms will depict a chicken brooding on gilded eggs, nestled on a juicy manure pile, because those had helped to keep us alive. My shield will be adorned with a curly ribbon announcing in curly script, Ich Bin Hungrig, like the shield of the English queen announces Ich dien. I didn’t know whom the queen served, but I knew that we were always hungry.

The only other food that Ma fed us included mostly apples and oranges but never bananas. These were too expensive and rotted too fast before Ma could get them. I drooled whenever I saw them on sidewalk displays, imagining their taste to be from the world of Tarzan. He liked them and I liked him. Occasionally Ma bought lettuce, cucumbers or tomatoes for us from which I prepared salads for myself. Like a rabbit, I devoured bowls full of lettuce that I drenched in milk and sugar that ran down my chin. I would become civilized tomorrow.

* * *

Siggi and I still weren’t really aware that Ma was extremely lazy and so different from other people. She was outgoing and often embarrassed us with her loud pontifications in public. She still whipped us but only infrequently anymore. She liked to impose her philosophies on other people, deaf ears, closed minds, tender butts, or not. She talked almost incessantly, and her words blew people away like the wind blows paper and plastic garbage. Her way was the only way, and strangely, she never seemed to listen to other people’s advice. But if it were in print, it was the gospel. She cut out newspaper and magazine articles by the hundreds and saved them. She was a fountain of knowledge, much in the form of statistics, little of which was of any use to us. The wire cord dangling from her waist was still a handy tool to make sure we did everything her way, and it could still help with her catharsis.

Even now that we had a new kitchen Ma never cooked. It was still too much work and still destroyed vitamins. In Simonswolde, Aunt Adele had prepared most of our food, while Siggi and I usually did the dishes. Much of this food had to be cooked, to kill or to disguise the things in it; so there had been no choice of not cooking, and Ma also never cleaned house because dirt always came back.

Since we had no washing machine, doing the laundry was a backbreaking job. The clothes had to be boiled in a big kettle, then this heavy load had to be stirred, scrubbed on a washboard, rinsed at least twice, wrung out by hand, then hauled outside to be hung on a clothesline. After they dried, they had to be brought back in again to be ironed, folded and stored. Consequently we rarely did the laundry, but in Simonswolde Ma had dyed the light-colored clothes from America with dark colors to disguise dirt. Along with these clothes, our relatives also had sent us the dyes that came in boxes similar to Jell-O. After Ma, Siggi and I moved to Rheinfelden, our relatives quit sending us packages, possibly because they thought that Pa was taking care of us.

Because so much of the work in her youth had been heavy and time consuming, Ma learned to be practical. It became one of her basic principles. She never did any work unless our situation became more unpleasant for her than having to do something to rectify it. “Besides,” she explained, “the more I work, the more I have to eat and we cannot afford to buy anything because your father never gives us any money.”

Pa’s philosophy about work was similar to Ma’s; do as little as possible. I cannot blame them for their laziness, considering they had lived through two world wars and the aftereffects. Pa loved his profession and excelled in it, but he did absolutely no work around the house or on his car. Besides, German homes are not in a constant state of disrepair, and it is even difficult to destroy them intentionally. That’s why there are few home improvement centers.

Ma and Pa shared no common interests and had grown up worlds apart. She saved every piece of paper, every rubber band, while he did not save anything and spent his earnings faster than he received them. He wore only suits; she did not care what she wore as long as she could adorn herself with her whip. He always lived for the moment, for the pleasure. When he attended technical college, our grandfather, who at one time was the richest man in his village, deposited six thousand Reichsmarks at a bank for Pa’s architectural study. A few weeks later, Pa had literally spent it all on wine, women and song, even though this was to pay for much of his education. Did he have a good excuse for doing so, because during the hyperinflation he had learned that people who had spent their money the fastest had received the most in return?

After the German hyperinflation, grandpa had shown his savings booklet to Pa and had said to him:

“We had over 100,000 marks in the bank. We would never have had to work again if it had not been wiped out completely.”

In January of 1921 the wage of a worker was about two and one-half marks per hour. Ten months later this rose to fifty marks. By April 1923 it rose to 1,200 marks. By October of that same year, it exploded to 25,000,000 marks. Twenty-five million marks per hour. Rarely had so many people become multi-millionaires, as well as paupers, and simultaneously, in such a short time. And how did they keep track of the ever faster changing conversion rate? For example, Karl Schmaelzle of Boennigheim had contracted to build a three-story house for a fixed sum. It took, and still does now, about eighteen months to build an average home in Germany. When he finished building it, this sum could then only buy one carpenter’s pencil. A three-story masonry house with a full basement for one pencil. Deals like that could get people excited and make them seek revenge on somebody, and not necessarily on the guilty parties.

The currency value declined rapidly, mainly because of the intolerable war reparations imposed on Germany after World War I. When Ma was fourteen years old, Oma kindly had packed her suitcase, had given her some money, and then had thrown her out of their home. In one of her letters to me, Ma recalled that her mother had told her:

“All of your belongings are in this suitcase. Also 1,000,000 marks. If your suitcase gets too heavy, give the money to someone to carry it for you.”

For ten years thereafter, she worked as a maid in Pomerania and Tyrol for room and board only. She learned to save because she earned nothing to save, while Pa who had his college paid for and earned a lot after the war, learned to save nothing. Nothing at all. Deals like that could make mothers seek revenge on somebody and not necessarily on the guilty parties.

* * *

A few times Pa drove with Siggi and me to Wollbach where he had been born and raised. There we visited his brother, Uncle Fritz, who owned and lived in a grocery store that was bought by our grandfather when he was a young man. The date carved into the lintel over its entrance read 1732. Inside this stone and stucco building we absorbed the history with its ancient smells, dark rooms and low ceilings. Its walls were massive and had small windows that shed little light into the darkness of ages, but I felt comfortable here because of its comforting aura of a long tradition.

Uncle Fritz showed us a book that he had written in order to maintain his sanity while he was a prisoner of war in France. The French had caught him after they had drilled a bullet through his chest, which then stuck in the hand holding the reins of the horse that he was riding. His memoir described the history about our grandfather’s store and Fritz himself. He wrote that as a young man he came home from a party late one night, and before he went to bed he desired yet another glass of wine. Therefore he went down to the huge wine cellar where he pulled the plug out of the bunghole of a large barrel to fill his glass. But the internal pressure blew the plug across the cellar and wine poured forth in a big arc. He did not want to waste his beloved wine, so he quickly stuck his thumb into the bunghole to plug its flow. He kept it there for the rest of the night until he heard someone arrive in the morning, when he called for help to retrieve the bung, so he could be free of the barrel. I believe his story because his book also referred numerous times to how good this or that wine had been. It also mentioned that people who came to grandpa’s house usually stayed to visit over a glass of wine.

Next to Uncle Fritz’s store, which was located near the highest point in the village, was an old stuccoed stone church. Its bell tower housed three bells, the largest of which weighed nearly a ton, and for years our grandfather rang them several times a day. To do this he sat on a board tied to the end of a rope, the other end of which was attached to a mechanism that swung the bells high in the belfry. He built a rhythm while pulling on a second rope that was connected to the opposite side of this mechanism. His body served as a counterweight. He traveled up and down to ring them and continued this for up to fifteen minutes, depending on the hour and the day of the week. He had rung these church bells for many years and ringing them was an old tradition throughout this land.

In spite of this long heritage, the Nazis had removed many of the country’s bells without permission. They melted and forged them into cannons and other tools of destruction. Killing and conquering had been more important than calling God, or His flocks to Him. But after the war, new bells were cast and reinstalled in these churches. Siggi and I watched two of them being hoisted up to the belfry of the Lutheran church in Rheinfelden. Was casting new bells more important than housing for the homeless?

During this post-war period, Western Germany, with a severe housing shortage, built a lot of churches and fortunately it did not crank out mobile huts to accommodate the homeless. Instead of quickly pasting together immobile huts, German families crowded into existing housing. They bunched up, often in compressed boardinghouse style, in the remaining shelters left intact after the bombing raids until quality dwellings could be built. In the meantime, people were forced to get along with each other during their mandatory in-house diversity training.

On the outside of the Wollbach church, near its entrance, were two carved stone plaques built into its wall. Each depicted a coat-of-arms, blackened by time, the same time that could heal wounds. One shield belonged to our family and depicted a spoked wheel with teeth, split in half by a staff held in a fist. The description beneath it referred to one of our ancestors who in 1732 was blessed with eighteen children. Several of these were then blessed when they soon died.

After I read the history of Wollbach, I knew that the dead were more blessed than the living at that time. There were plagues and pestilence, wars and starvation. Catholics killed Protestants and Protestants killed Catholics. No one dared to be an atheist. Vikings, Frenchmen, Austrians and Germans all butchered and burned swaths through the Black Forest and up and down the Rhine River, engaging in wars that lasted for lifetimes. They created witches and burned them on stakes, and there seemed to have been little relief from this sort of entertainment and brotherly love.

* * *

One time we visited Grandpa’s orchards just outside of Wollbach with its assortment of fruit trees.

“This will one day be yours,” Grandpa told Siggi and me.

“This orchard has been in our family for generations. We supplied products to the Count von Roetteln,” he continued.

This count had a castle, now in ruins, a few kilometers away.

Not to be outdone in generosity, Pa told us:

“If you are good boys, you will someday inherit my house.”

We shrugged off his statement and said nothing, but as always, we reported to Ma what he had said and what he had done. She always wanted to know what he was doing, and Siggi and I were her spies. Now we did not believe him because we were taught: “Wer einmal luegt dem glaubt man nicht, wenn er auch die Wahrheit spricht,” he who lies once, cannot be believed again, even though he may speak the truth. So there. So long ago he had destroyed the credibility that he was born with because Ma had always told us that he lied a lot. Therefore we did not dwell on Pa’s wonderful news and did not get excited. Did Pa even believe himself?

When Grandpa died later that year, Pa alone attended his funeral, leaving us behind, and when our relatives asked him why his sons had not come, he replied:

“Their mother would not give them out.”

Ma told us that this was also a lie because he had not asked us if we wanted to go or said when he was going. The few times that I had been with Grandpa, I had been happy in his presence. He radiated an ageless stability and smelled like fresh home-baked bread and hard cider. Now I wanted to jump into his grave, but I could never get what I desired. No one ever asked us what we wanted or needed, and he was one of the few people who seemed to take an interest in us, although he did not help. He did not help us because we were on opposite sides in our war. We were on mother’s side; she had indoctrinated Siggi and me for many years to be on her side, and we knew little about what was happening on the battlefields of our Progenitors’ War.

There was one other relative who seemed to take a little interest in us, Aunt Helene, but she was far away, in America. She had even invited us to move there after the divorce became final, and Siggi and I did not realize that anyone was after the spoils of our war because Ma did not tell us about some of the letters that Helene had written to her. Family activities must be kept from children. Could be detrimental to their psyches.

A few years ago Siggi found one of Helene’s letters that she had written to Ma in the early fifties and sent me a copy. Apparently she had known that we soon would be a divorced family, and the three of us might be on our own:

“Dear Katje and boys,

“We wish you, dear sister, all the best and good health and God be with you. I especially have the wish at heart that you bring up your children as only a mother can do, even though your hands are often tied. So do the best for the children so that they later will not worry that ‘mother did not pray with us…’

“…The German girl, Renate, is also here as a student in the same class as Arlene (our cousin) and gets everything free, including pocket money and much freedom. She comes to us to play piano and goes to church with Arlene.

“We have a house for you to live in at the other end of our farm. You should live there and earn your living by picking berries with the boys, etc. We have many possibilities this summer because our daughters want to continue their studies. The boys can help us make hay. You will say that is a good idea. I think every few days, what will happen with Ami and Siggi…

“…Also young people from Switzerland are here in our neighborhood. They like it better here, even though they have to work, but they are free of many…”

* * *

Pa brought home yet another fornicating aunt or so we were told, named Elfi, who moved in with us. Siggi and I did not know if our parents were now divorced, or would soon be divorced, or if Pa had already married our aunt. Privately we called her “Teufi,” a derivative of Teufel. Little devil. Ma did not have to tell us, “look what the old tomcat dragged in” as we noticed his drag-in immediately and were very uncomfortable with her. She had come from Austria and seemed to desire to destroy us, to exile us from our home. Like Fraeulein Faessle before her, Elfi was also a hatmaker, even though there were not many hatmakers left in this world. Elfi’s eyes were not crossed, but we did not dare to cross her path because her eyes emitted poisonous darts that made me suspicious.

Pa liked to make hatmakers. He went mad for hatters. Elfi pressured him to throw us out of our home, but Ma refused to leave even though she would soon be divorced, or was already divorced. No one told Siggi and me about the status of our beloved family, and we could not leave, would not leave, but as Ma would later write me, the judge had shouted:

“Out, all of you!”

Pa’s frustration grew unbearable at his inability to remove us, to enforce the court’s judgment, and because he was caught between two women. To get out of his bind, to encourage us to leave, Pa pounded Ma with his fists, and when she dropped to the floor he kicked her. That’s how her father had apparently cuddled her when she was a baby, our poor mother. I just had come in with my beebee gun and watched Pa vigorously practicing soccer on Ma. Even though he had a heart condition, he had to enforce the judge’s order. He was breathing hard now, and I was worried about his heart; I was worried about my mother. My papa was oblivious of me, even though I wished that he would enforce the judge’s order on me instead, because I was used to enforcement. Ma had often practiced it on me.

Siggi and I never had any thoughts of aggression even though we had been at the receiving end of immense violence most of our lives. From family and foes alike. We might have benefited from a little tele-violence, reenacting its fantasy, its reality, to send messages to guilty parties, parties who did not peer into our eyes to reach our savaged souls. Now I stood there frozen in tears, withdrawing deeper into my shell. Nobody ever visited my soul in its lonely dungeon.

Ma yelled for the police. I ran out, jumped on my old bike and pedaled to the police station as fast as I could. Pa yelled to come back but I ignored him. I could hear him only on one side. “I did not hear you, Pa,” I could always say.

A pot-bellied, ruddy-faced policeman, a leftover from the superior Aryan armies, followed me back on a taxpayer’s bike to the beating scene. He was important, I was a mass of scrambled goose eggs. He was on his way to rescue a damsel, a white knight in a proper blue uniform, but I had to go slow so he’d be able to keep up. I was young; he was old. I had a wonderful life ahead of me, and I could tell by his rotund physique and pasty, capillary face that his had been less than wonderful. Very-cold-in-the-blizzard-dash-to-privy-like wonderful. I would never allow my life to be thus.

Pa answered our front door and kindly asked the policeman to come in for a beer while ignoring me, because I was only his son and had no fancy uniform. The beating of one’s wife could best be dealt with by drinking dark, delicious Teutonic beer with the law.

* * *

Whenever she met him, Ma complained about our irresponsible father to the very same minister whom she had extorted Siggi and me away from many years before. She explained that he did not provide for us, and that he and his new wife were mistreating us. But as always her complaints fell on deaf ears. Our mother’s pain always fell on deaf ears. Siggi and I rarely talked about our pain because nobody asked us. Nobody heard us. The minister’s wife even admonished Ma that she should find a job. She herself was supported by our father through his church taxes, therefore she was qualified to advise our mother to find employment.

Ma claimed that she only had learned to raise chickens. Whenever she filled out forms for this and that, she listed her profession either as a housewife, or as Huehnerzuechtering, raiser of chickens. Nothing could be done now with fowl. No fowl jobs were to be had in Rheinfelden, and furthermore, Ma thought of herself as an architect’s wife. Housewives did not get paid with money, and chickens were much lower on the pecking order than housewives or architects. But the biggest reason that Ma did not get a job was that she had no hope and therefore no ambition. Her past had had fowl, her future looked foul, and this caused her great pain.

No religious or any other organization offered us any assistance, nor did anyone seem to care about our private disaster. Yet Germans were required to pay church taxes, which could amount to more than seven percent of their regular income tax. I only learned this a few years ago when I visited our cousins in Germany and they said to me: “Let’s visit the tax office.” This confused me until they explained about the church taxes, and that they really wanted to show me the beautiful old church in their village.

* * *

When Pa married Teufi, as had been discovered by others, he obviously didn’t know that it might be better to stay with the devil that he knew, than to run to the devil that he didn’t know. But he’d find out, and soon, and too late. Much too late. Was the minister reluctant to provide us with a second mother because Siggi and I were growing up as heathens? Here was his chance to add two more sheep to his flock because we had never been baptized with water. Pa apparently had made a deal with the minister that if he’d marry him to Teufi, he could baptize Siggi and me. So at the ages of twelve and fourteen, we were besprinkled at the altar of the church that Pa had designed and supervised during its construction. This warm remembrance should have soothed our souls, Siggi’s and mine.

After we received the reverend’s water, we would be required to pay church taxes as soon as we earned enough money. This was not separation of church and state. This church, and this state, helped in the separation of mother from father, and father from children, and children from life. We did not know that we would not be around to pay those taxes because we would be separated from this state. Soon Siggi and I would be tricked into leaving this state.

Pa invited some of our relatives to be our godparents, although Siggi and I did not know some of them, and Ma was not invited to our baptism. Defiantly she and her fat Swiss friend, Mrs. Grob, came to the church anyway and sat in the front pew off to one side, while everyone else kept to the other side, like Brahmins and Untouchables. Like men and their inferior wives.

The Very Right Reverend Mennicke, wearing a black robe, came in to perform his function. He surveyed the assembly and asked Ma to leave his church. There was a pair of snow-white, starched rectangles of cloth under his chin. What for, I did not know, but when he spoke they moved with his lips as if to emphasize his words. A man of the cloth asked the mother to leave the baptism of her own children. If I understood this could I be holy? Was this proof that I was a sinner?

Instead of leaving, Ma and Mrs. Grob climbed up high to the pipe organ loft in the back of the church and, like God, watched our baptism from above. They were far away and kept quiet when they should have made loud heart-rending noises with the powerful organ.

Ours was a poignant scene. Siggi and I giggled as the minister solemnly sprinkled water on our heads. For us his ritual was silly. For us life was serious and we had no traditions. Besides, hadn’t we already been baptized by fire during our first war? Surely the bombardiers had prayed when they released their blessings. Now we were baptized with water. Water is easier but fire is everlasting. Pa buttered up the minister to marry him to a sinner. And a robber. She robbed us of our father; later she’d rob our Grundstueck, Siggi’s and mine.

After our water ceremony we had a celebration. We had never had a ceremony after our baptisms by fire, even though these had been very hot events, where people were scorched, and freed from hell. Or sent to hell. We remained in hell. Now everyone walked to a nearby café where Pa was hosting a dinner. Ma and Mrs. Grob followed us at a distance. Untouchables always remain out of reach. Siggi and I wanted us all to be together, but we were not Brahmins. We were children.

The Brahmins physically barred Ma from coming to our celebration so we would not be touched by the Untouchable. Ours was a magnanimous dinner with mountains of food and gallons of wine. The mountains and the wine were not for us; we longed for our mother. We longed for a father and all the others that make a family. We longed for all that had been denied to us.

* * *

Reverend Mennicke married Pa to our second mother, but Siggi and I did not know when or where. We didn’t know when one of our many aunts became one of our mothers. Ma wrote me many years later that she had walked on a blustery day, blistering her feet, carrying a bouquet of flowers, several kilometers from Rheinfelden to Wollbach for their wedding, and I suspect that she went there to raise a scene.

Teufi’s move into our house had been easy. She had little more than the clothes on her back. She had wormed her way into our house, on her back. Now Siggi and I had two mothers. Our new mother wanted to throw us out. Our old mother still used us as objects for catharsis. Neither mother cooked any meals for us or did our laundry. Our old mother spoke long monologues about how men had mistreated her, while Pa did not seem to mistreat our aunt-turned-second-mother. Did she not catch up on the news during intimate moments?

Up to this time, since our mothers did not cook for us, Siggi and I were barely aware that people ate regular hot meals because we rarely did. We were young, dirty, and had little social contact with our peers, especially since there were absolutely no extracurricular activities in our schools. Schools were strictly for learning serious subjects and discipline and nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.

Ma brooded at all hours about the court battles with her ex-husband. We didn’t know what occupied our new mother. We rarely saw her. She played the upper class architect’s wife, with lipstick and haute coiffeur. Our first mother fought for justice and stubbornly continued to fight for child support and alimony in the continuing legalized screw jobs. Our new mother found a pot of gold, and therefore fought against justice in order to steal our child support, alimony and future inheritance during this endless mockery of universal moral standards and laws.

Unbeknownst to Siggi and me, Ma had disobeyed the judge’s order to move out of our own home, and we therefore were in contempt of court. With Pa threatening to beat us, the three of us became prisoners in our bedroom. Our father and our aunt-turned-second-mother became our guards and occupied the rest of our home. The judge did not send us to jail because we were already in prison, and Ma, Siggi and I ventured out into the bath and kitchen only when we were home alone.

Our prison contained one double bed, a wardrobe, a wall-hung sink and our meager belongings that were strewn all about. We had no privacy. We spoke in whispers and referred to Pa as Buskohl, Cabbage, in Low German, a language that he did not understand because he had never lived in the lowlands where it is spoken. We were afraid of our guards and tried to avoid them at all cost. Whenever they were home, the three of us did not dare to leave through doors, so we had to climb through our window like burglars in the night. And after about a year, the white paint on the windowsill became gray and polished, except at the sharp edges where the wood was bared.

The three of us continued to sleep together in one bed whose sheets turned as black as our souls. Ma did not, could not, wash our laundry, and we rarely had the opportunity to bathe or shower. We seldom washed our clothes, except in our sink, there never being enough time, because we were always under siege by our father and our second mother. Only when we were reasonably sure that they would leave the house for a longer period of time did we dare to use the kitchen and bath. But we did not linger, since we never knew when they would return, because unlike in our first war, there were no sirens to warn us of enemy attacks.

Often, whenever Teufi and Pa went somewhere together for more than a few hours, we could not draw hot water, not even from our prison sink, because the instantaneous heater would not ignite. We assumed that Teufi shut off the gas somewhere so that we would freeze if we wanted to bathe. This was easy to figure because that’s what devils do, they tempt you with warm showers, then deny you the same. But I located the main gas valve in the basement and turned it on. After we took quick baths under duress, always being alert for the return of our next of kin, we shut off the gas again so the devil would not know that we had used it.

Since there were no bath facilities in the schools, Siggi and I could not shower there either.

Even though our house was luxurious, it had no refrigerator. At this time there were very few of them in Germany, and most food was stored in ventilated pantries. Teufi never bought any fruit and stocked few groceries, so there was little for us to eat. She kept mostly staples, like noodles that required cooking, probably because she knew that we could not eat them. Siggi and I bypassed her noodles, but sucked out the mayonnaise that came in toothpaste-like tubes and blew them back up, so she would not notice. Even though the thoughtful judge ordered Teufi to cook for Siggi and me, she did not; she was to cook for us even though we were now living in our home illegally. Why did he order our aunt-turned-second-mother to cook for us if we were not supposed to live with her?

The potty-bed combination in our prison was the center of our universe, the basis of our modus operandi. The bed: We slept in it, rubbed dirt in it, dined on it, read on it, wrote on it, were sick in it, cried in it, and kept our potty under it. The potty: Our white enameled chamber pot was antique and these now have great value because I’ve seen them in antique stores. If only it came with a tight cover. We did big business in this potty only when it became urgent, and Teufi and Pa denied us access to our bathroom. Only when the two beautiful people left our house did we dare empty it. After we’d fill it to the brim and our pressure became unbearable, Siggi’s and mine, we let fly into the sink, the same sink where we also washed our hands, faces and apples. In the meantime, our room reeked more impressively than the privies in the Simonswolde cow barns, but over time we barely noticed.

We carried our potty penchant to extremes because it was our only choice. This was so because we could not hide outside from the prying eyes of the high population density around us, and because of the destruction of our reputation through vicious parental truths and gossips. Our shame and social values would not allow us to ask our neighbors to unlock their homes for us whenever we had to answer calls of nature. Nor would they have permitted it.

Had I not been as dumb as Lindeman claimed, or had I not been in a permanent state of intimidation by Ma’s subtle waist décor, I would have known where to put our piss ‘n it. I would have hidden little reminders around the Herrenzimmer and their bedroom so that Pa and Teufi could enjoy them also. Keenly they would have recognized the connection between their extraordinary aroma and our extraordinary pain. They could then have enjoyed the intensity of our pain. Dung beetles don’t know that dung beetles dwell in dung. Did the judge even know that we beetles are imprisoned in a big potty?

* * *

One day when I was home alone, I sneaked into the Herrenzimmer that was outfitted with heavy dark wood furniture. Someday we might inherit this elegant opulence and someday we might have class, Siggi and I. One of the pieces was a tall cabinet that also contained Pa’s important treasures, such as liqueur, cigars, and a set of Das Brockhaus encyclopedia. I opened its glass doors to find a metal box hidden in the back corner and tried to open it, but it was locked. I searched for its key, and when I found none, I tried the key to the cabinet instead.

Surprise! I opened the box and found bundles of Deutsche marks banded together with official bank ribbons. I had never seen so much money before. If I got caught stealing our own money, I would get spanked; therefore I did not even think about stealing it. Quickly I locked this box again, returned the key but did not remove anything because Pa could come in at any moment and I would be punished.

When Ma returned home, I told her about my discovery, more as a confession because I thought that I had misbehaved, than to inform her of the money. She wanted to look at this treasure herself. When it appeared that our guards had left for a longer period of time, she asked Siggi and me to be sentinels to warn of their return. I guarded the front yard, and Siggi stationed himself in the back of our house. It was not long before Pa arrived in his car, alone. I was too frightened to move. If I ran into the house, he might get suspicious and come after me. I froze in place, frightened, while he stopped and glared at me. He restarted his car and squealed away. I will never forget his face, contorted by anger, frustration and shame. Was he mad at me? Or ashamed?

I ran into the house and told Ma that Pa had just been here. Biting her lips, she quickly closed the box and returned it to the cabinet. Then we rushed back to our prison and locked ourselves in, scared, but relieved that Ma had avoided a certain and furious beating.

I never took anything from that box and never opened it again. That’s how weird I am. I didn’t know if Ma ever removed anything from it, but I believe that she at least retrieved information that she used in her court processes.

* * *

Since I always had a difficult time in school, I did not want to attend a Gymnasium. Even its Latin name intimidated me, and I did not even know the definition of this word. After I finished the fourth grade in grade school, however, without discussing it with me, Ma signed me up to take the entrance examination, and I thought it a miracle when I passed it to gain admission into the regional Gymnasium, the academic high school in Loerrach. But my scores were so low that I was immediately placed on probation. Most pupils did not branch off to a Gymnasium but remained in grade school to finish eight grades of primary school and continued in a trade school to become apprentices to learn a vocation. A Gymnasium required nine years of intensive study before one could graduate. If a pupil failed one major course, without earning a very good grade in another one, he was required to repeat all other classes as well, even the ones he had done well in. And if he failed yet another one, he flunked out and had to return to the elementary school or to a vocational school.

During this era, only about five percent of the population graduated from a Gymnasium. Because of its high academic requirements, the majority of pupils did not attend it. They were still too young to decide what they wanted to be, so their parents made the choices for them. Enduring the final examinations for graduation caused some pupils to have nightmares, even decades later. Contrast this with the last senior class in the town near my present domicile which produced sixteen valedictorians out of a total enrollment of three hundred eighty-five students. For their commencement speech they took turns reading a story. Also, one student received A grades in high school courses and flunked later in a community college even though he had studied harder.

There was no Gymnasium, or any other kind of high school, in Rheinfelden, even though it had at least twelve to fifteen thousand people, and the nearest such schools were in Loerrach and Saeckingen. I commuted to Loerrach by train, about forty to fifty minutes away depending on the connections, and I seemed to be the only pupil from Rheinfelden who attended this school; all others went to Saeckingen. There was no one I could visit with during my commuting, and I always kept to myself. I had to change trains in Basel and felt lost among the crowds inside the underground hallways and the huge glass-roofed concourse of this station.

Even though I tried to study diligently, I did not do well because of the physical and psychological convulsions caused by our quiet Progenitors’ War, loaded on top of my torments from the earlier noisy and fiery war. My pig’s gristle retained barely enough knowledge to pass some of my courses because I was always in dream mode to shield my soul. To protect my sanity, I kept my mind closed to everything except the necessities for survival that included not getting assaulted.

After my first semester I flunked out and had to return to grade school, but the following year I enrolled at the Gymnasium in Saeckingen, where I passed the entrance test also. Siggi was now old enough and was also accepted there. We commuted to school together, and during our thirty-some-minute trips we often caught up on our homework or played cards with our classmates. During the first semester in Saeckingen I was essentially repeating the courses I had taken in Loerrach. I was in my fifth year of schooling, the first year in high school, called Sexta in a Gymnasium.

The pupils, called students only after they enrolled at a university, had no choice of courses. All were required to follow the prescribed curriculum that was almost purely academic in nature. Our main subjects were German, French, mathematics and sciences, while English and Latin were added in later years. These main courses were taught several times a week, while other classes such as music, art, history, geography and physical education were offered once or twice a week. Since we could not choose subjects that we might have enjoyed, and there were no extracurricular activities, we found little relief from our problems at home.

There was also little distraction inside the school buildings, and unlike in today’s classrooms, all the walls were white and devoid of posters or displays of any kind. The starkness of the spaces forced the attention of the pupils on the teacher, and the artworks of the pupils were displayed only on the walls of the art room.

Once a week we also studied religion. The pupils were separated into two classes, Catholics and Protestants. I liked these classes, mostly because they provided relief from the intense study, and we did not have to take the tests that I so abhorred.

Our schools also instilled us with a great amount of discipline. We had to write everything with pen and ink; we never used pencils or erasers. This forced us to think carefully about what to put down on paper, and when we made an error our only choice was to cross it out. Neatness was also graded. All lining had to be done with a straightedge; freehand ruling was not allowed. If a pupil ignored this rule, the teacher would be likely to embarrass him with an unkind remark:

“Ami, Dummkopf.” Dumbhead.

Sulk.

“Can you not follow rules?”

We never used preprinted forms for homework or tests. Multiple choice, true or false questions and such were completely unknown to us. Most of our examinations were much more challenging. For example, our teacher dictated sentences in German, and we had to write the translations in ink in the foreign language that was being taught. The pressure was enormous because we had to respond to the speed of the dictation, and we could not return to re-read questions or think about our answers later. Ten to twelve spelling or grammatical errors on a language test resulted in failure. For other kinds of tests, the teacher usually wrote the problems or questions on the blackboards and later erased them again.

Even though several hundred pupils attended this school, it had no valedictorians, school board, logo, school colors, mascot, advisors, counselors, nurses, librarians, cafeterias, vending machines, copy machines, newspapers, reader boards, bands, sports teams or coaches and clubs. There was not a single club. Or gang. Resource officers, with or without guns, did not exist because each teacher had the ability to mete out immediate and severe punishment, along with its associated shame, which no student wanted to suffer. There was no scapegoating either. A willow switch, a pull on the ear, more effective than guns?

There was only one non-academic employee in our school, a janitor to keep the building clean. We had no study hall, teacher’s aides or tutors. If we needed assistance with our schoolwork we had to hire our own tutors after school. And if we still could not meet the academic standards, we simply flunked out because there were no alternative schools, or “GED” (General Education Development) programs.

There were no loudspeakers, radios, telephones, movie projectors or sound equipment to distract us. We had no invited speakers or demonstrations, seminars or parent-teacher organizations. There were no courses in self-esteem, sex or social agendas. Instead of learning to mix drinks, we learned French. Instead of bouncing around in tutus, we beat our brains out with algebra. We were not taught how to dress with condoms. We were deprived and unprotected in this cruel world, but we were taught all the basics, including sciences, mathematics and foreign languages. We learned a lot and at a much smaller cost than it does today. Because we had to study so hard some of our textbooks often fell apart and became severely dog-eared and dirty.

There were no school buses even though the pupils came from far and wide. They commuted by trains, buses and bikes, or on foot, and had to pay for their own transportation, textbooks, and all other school supplies.

Our school taught facts, logic and no hocus-pocus of any kind. We had no distracting entertainment such as dances or assemblies in our boot camp. In other words, we were totally deprived but learned absolute discipline and obedience. We actually learned too much of such, Siggi and I. Even before we had entered school, we were the paragons of discipline and urgently needed some hocus-pocus. Unfortunately our school did not provide us with such relief from the torments that were caused exclusively by people. If our parents, lawyers, teachers or other pupils mistreated us, there was no one to help us. We were expected to be silent when we wanted to scream and simply had to frown and bear whatever miseries were heaped on us.

There was little opportunity for socializing in our school. Breaks between classes lasted five minutes, with fifteen minutes for a mid-morning sandwich and some fresh air. School was usually finished by noon after which the pupils returned home, where most of the families ate their meals punctually at the same time every day. This was possible because the wives stayed home and cooked, while the fathers often worked nearby and also came home to eat.

There were no organized or coached contacts between the students after school either. All intercourse between them was between individuals pursuing fun, creative and physical activities. There was no alcohol drinking, no shopping mall loitering or TV, because there were no shopping malls or televisions. Instead the children read, visited, talked, roamed in the forests and pursued individual hobbies. Most of them were close to their parents, especially their mothers who were home most every day, and were allowed to be children; and to be children, girls did not paint their faces to attract boys. They did not even shave their armpits or legs, but I would discover that they still could be enticingly sexy.

There was not only no hocus-pocus in our schools, there were few, if any straight A pupils and no honor societies. We did not get publicly recognized for outstanding performance, and there were no accounts in the news media of achievements by teachers or pupils; nor were there reports of them committing crimes. Our motivation was not the carrot but the stick. We were not bribed to do well; we were instantly punished and embarrassed if we didn’t. Few pupils could achieve perfection in all subjects, and it was an exceptional person who could excel in a wide range of academic courses, especially since we could not choose them.

The pupils of a class remained in the same room for most courses for the entire school year; only the teachers changed rooms from hour to hour. Once we were assigned our seats, that’s where we stayed for the duration. When I was seated toward the back of the room, my daydreaming intensified because I could hear the teachers less clearly. But since I was very shy I liked to sit there, because I was able to hide so as not to be called upon for answers. I was always nervous about having to answer the teachers’ questions and usually tried to hide behind the pupil in front of me.

One day the algebra teacher startled me: “Ami!”

I jumped to attention.

“What did I just ask you?”

I did not know but I mumbled: “Man has to learn to control himself.”

My compassionate classmates snickered. The teacher had made this statement much earlier, even though it was unrelated to the subject. Now he had asked me to answer an algebra question. Surprisingly, this kind teacher ignored the class response, agreed with me, and asked no more of me.

The teachers in our Gymnasium were a motley collection. Some were friendly and helpful, others grouchy and mean. Mister Danner was boorish and frustrated by his lack of vision because he had one glass eye, as well as false teeth. When he talked he spit, showering the pupils as he walked among their rows. We called him Muni, colloquial for “bull,” because of his broad forehead, stout neck and lack of refinement. One day Muni was standing before the pupil at a front desk, lecturing, spitting and intensely boring his eye into selected individuals. The pupil on the side of his glass eye, Siggi, slowly lifted his arm and held up a finger next to it. It was his index finger as the bird had not been imported yet. A titter went through the room and Muni wondered why. Not knowing, he flew into a rage, and with his powerful ham he beat the head of the pupil sitting directly in front of him. This head recoiled from the desktop and this surprised even Muni. He told the pupil who suddenly suffered a headache, “Das war die Muliplikation der Ohrfeige, that was the multiplication of the box on the ear.”

Professor Asal, much more polished and cultured than Professor Muni, did not beat us but left his mark through memorable discourse. Regal, with a mane of white hair, dressed in an almost-white suit, he advised not that I was dumb, but that I would become a Guellefahrer, someone who spreads human effluence over the fields. This prediction would come true in a way because I would someday be in nutrient management spreading similar stuff over the pastures in America.

* * *

Speaking of stuff, at this time my ear became so productive, that when I was in dream mode, green goo coursed down my neck. Since Ma had no money, Papa Buskohl kindly suggested that she take me to his friend, Dr. Lupfer, so it would not cost anything. Since Dr. Lupfer could not help me, Ma took me to Dr. Metzger who also could not stop my infection. Finally she traveled with me to the ear clinic in Freiburg where I was diagnosed as having proud flesh.

Surgeons sliced out my wild meat, not through the big old scar behind my ear, but through my ear canal. But when they removed my bandage sometime later there was rot in it. The doctors did not guarantee their work, so I just kept oozing until such time that Ma could save enough out of our meager subsistence to pay for another surgery, at some future date, in another hospital.

We never had insurance.

* * *

As the months passed our guards increased their harassment to expel us from our castle. Pa became increasingly abusive, and in a rage he bent the door handle to our prison. While he was pounding the door, we moved our bed to block it and secured our window shutters as well.

Suddenly I suffered from powerful peeing pressure.

When Pa could not get in, he went outside to beat and shake our shutters while screaming insensibly. Fortunately we had no tools around the house that he could use to force his entry. I held on to my nozzle and aimed for the sink and just in time. I had to control my aim and flow; it was difficult under pressure, and so I splashed all over the place. What a relief to splash all over the place to release my pressure! I should have aimed through the slats of the shutters, but I didn’t think of it.

Pa must have realized that he could not get into our cell because his shouting faded into the distance. I peeked through the shutters and could see him stomping down the street waving a pistol. I was more relaxed now; he was still uptight.

Some time before I had surprised him when I walked into the Herrenzimmer while he was buying a pistol from a salesman. His face had turned beet-red with embarrassment. He obviously did not want us to know this. Never let your enemy know your strength. Afterwards he took Siggi and me out to a field and festively shot colorful flares into the sky, to show us that his pistol was harmless. He did not tell us that it could also launch teargas. Will he try to flush us out of our potty?

It was illegal to own guns that shot real bullets. I had heard that Hitler had taken them away to protect the people from themselves. The Nazis wanted to protect them instead, and had this not been the case, I might have collected another hole in my head. Our own father persecuted Ma, Siggi and me in our own home. Our own people tyrannized us in our own country; people were always persecuted in wars. We were ever alert and suspicious of our father and Teufi and their whereabouts and stayed away from them but always observed their activities. Siggi and I were spies and developed distrustful personalities. We moved about like guerillas in enemy territory, always out of sight, always gathering information. We kept looking for facts that could help Ma on the judicial battlefields. What projects was he developing? What cafés did he visit and with whom? How many miles did he drive? How many cigars did he smoke?

At this time we did not yet realize that the court was a farce, that the biggest guys with the biggest lies and the most money always seemed to win. Just like today and also in other countries. Ma never told us anything about the court decisions and the activities of the jurists, puppeteers and bombardiers. Siggi and I only knew that we always lost because we never had enough to eat and no proper place to pee. Had we attempted to kill somebody, would the judge have sentenced us to a warm place to pee and three hot meals a day?

Our father knew that we were in a war because I found another piece of equipment in his arsenal. When I sneaked a look into his car, our car, I noticed a black rod sticking out of the door pocket. It was a hard rubber truncheon with a leather wrist loop. He must have bought it recently because it was still shiny and had no hair or blood stuck to it. What ghosts is he afraid of? What other weapons does he hide?

* * *

We lived under siege in our cozy one-room prison for about one year after the judge, the almighty, had commanded our exile. Because we were guilty. He did not tell us what we were guilty of, so we must have been innocent. Our father committed the crime but we were guilty. He was guilty and we were punished. When you starve your children, you are innocent, but was this not a crime? Had I thought about this for very long, I would have been very confused as to what was right and what was wrong. Now I know. Murderers could get five to twenty; Ma, Siggi and I could get life.

It was a rainy day before Christmas when Siggi and I came home from the train. Our enormous pressure to study was off because it was the start of our vacation, a time when people were especially joyous.

“Think we’ll get any presents?” Siggi asked me almost cynically on our way home.

“Don’t know.”

Never said much.

We had always received something for Christmas in the past, even if it were only a few pieces of candy. This was the first year that we did not have a Christmas tree, with tinsel and real wax candles of fire. We even had them in Simonswolde, even though Ma and Aunt Adele were devout atheists and believed in the devil in a human form, although they never swore to call for him.

Now we had Teufi.

When we arrived at our mansion, we found our biggest Christmas present ever: Mountains of clutter in our front yard, all of our worldly possessions from our prison.

In the rain.

Our present from devils.

They had scattered the sum total of our lives out on the precisely manicured lawn.

Like dog piles.

We walked around to inspect our belongings and went to the window entrance to our cell. It was locked. Siggi and I never had keys, and we tried to open other windows and doors, but they were all locked, and nobody seemed to be home. Always keep your doors locked or your children might find you. Our courageous father had left the scene and could not face us: His sons, his enemies, ten and twelve years old. I stuttered when I told Siggi that our father had thrown us out. Just in case he hadn’t noticed. It was better to bawl now, in the rain, than later when people would notice. They’d think that we were weird. We did not want to be weird; we wanted to be proper.

Ma was nowhere to be found.

We sat down in the shimmering clutter and waited because we didn’t know where else to go. While we were waiting for another miracle, we might as well be actors in this Christmas scene.

My little brother and I.

We did not speak. Nobody ever listened to us. The lawyers and judges were too high; they could not be reached. What will happen to us next? Do miracles happen, especially at Christmas?

While we were getting soaked in the gray evening light, a few people passed by but did not see us. Or pretended not to see us. They knew that we were proper and did not want to embarrass us by stopping to admire our setting. No one offered us help; nor did we expect any. No one had ever done so. No one called the authorities to find missing children. No one yelled for missing parents. It was a holy time to give presents, and we had no beer to offer to a policeman.

Thirty-five years later, I would learn a few details about this episode in a letter from Ma. At the time I received it, years before, I quickly read it and promptly forgot it, as always, and I would never think about it again until now. But I had saved it, as always. Even though the divorce court had ordered our eviction a long time before, Ma had refused to move out. She wrote me that she had yelled at the judge in the courtroom when he had issued our eviction:

“We need a shelter for two abandoned boys. There is central heating in the double garage and a water faucet. Now the products of Ford are stored there.”

This is what she wrote me, that she had said, our poor mother. Now that I am no longer dumb, I would have told the judge something else. I would have shown him something as well; I would have forced him into our hell.

“No, no,” said the Saeckingen judge, “you cannot live in this house.”

Ma wrote me that two bailiffs executed the judge’s order. In less than two hours they had dumped everything from our cell in hell onto the lawn, piss pot and all, and locked us out. The products from Ford remained home, while we did not have one.

While Siggi and I sat basking in faux euphoria on our veranda, Ma arrived with a borrowed quaint little handcart. With a Christmas-spiritless face she confirmed that we had been evicted and told us that she found another place to live. See, miracles do happen; it could only get better. We piled our mattress onto the cart along with a few other things. Ma pulled our load through empty streets, and Siggi and I followed. All was quiet, except for the squeaking and the rumble of the cart’s steel-treaded wheels grinding along the shimmering wet pavement. My feet were cold and I could feel them squish. Will Ma spank me?

“Where are we going?” we asked her.

She did not answer and hid her face from us. This could be a signal of our future. About twenty minutes later she turned into a driveway and stopped at the entrance to an old three-story apartment.

“Here we are,” sniffled Ma.

She wiped the rain from her face. Nobody sniffles on the Eve of Christmas.

“You mean we live here?”

We lugged our wet mattress into the building.

“Which floor?”

“Top,” she said.

We grunted up the stairs, one step at a time. Our world was heavy. On the second floor a tenant peeked through the curtain of his apartment door, and I pretended not to notice. My soul curled up like my Simonswolde friend, the gentle hedgehog, and like his, its bristles pointed outward. See nothing, feel nothing. Soon we’ll eat some garbage in our very own kitchen.

When we arrived at the top floor Ma asked us to rest, but Siggi and I were anxious to see our new home and turned to open the door to that apartment.

“No, no,” Ma said, “this is not it. One more floor, to the penthouse.” As with our last home with Pa at Hardtstrasse 45, we could not find our new home, Siggi and I.

With renewed vigor we heaved our mattress to the top of the stairs where Siggi ceremoniously opened the door to our penthouse.

My digestive system convulsed.

Surely Siggi’s did too.

Penthouse?

Attic.

Bats.

At the far end of this attic Ma opened a door to our aerie high above the city. It had a floor, a ceiling, a dormer and a door. That was it. Fortunately we could stand up in half of it, because the ceiling sloped almost down to the floor. There we dropped all of our furniture, our mattress, and it covered nearly one fourth of our eagle’s nest.

“I have to pee,” I exclaimed and began to dance.

Whenever I was nervous, or frightened, the float valve in my bladder tripped and urination became urgent. There must be a name for this condition, but I had not heard it. Could it be RMBBS, reverse miracle bladder bursting syndrome?

“I will ask the people downstairs if you may use their toilet,” graciously offered Ma.

“Nooooo,” I moaned, while I continued to dance.

“Everybody in the world has a toilet! It’s Christmas Eve and we don’t even have a place to sit,” I continued my discourse, although my thoughts were much fouler.

I would have cussed but might get whipped. Instead I began to bawl.

Siggi thought this to be a good idea and joined me. Ma followed our chorus. Our glee club must have confused the tenants below because now there was agony in the carols of Christmas.

Silent Night, Tearful Night…

Dancing and bawling, I relieved myself in the neighbor’s one-holer on the stair landing two flights below, but I could not wash.

After we brought up the few remaining things from our “moving van,” we holed up in our attic for the night. The owner of the building was out of town, and Ma had not asked for permission to live here. We were squatters now without electricity, water, sewer or heat. And we were without a father and without hope because a judge had decided that we still had no right to live on this earth.

Ma had planned ahead. In the spirit of Christmas she had brought a candle and some matches. She lit it but we could not afford a tree. The three of us curled up on the floor, while our mattress was drying, slowly, forever, in our cold room. While we remained bundled up in our clothes, we tried to ignore our exhilarating imbroglio the only way that we knew how. We searched for some old magazines, stared at the paper, pretended to read and did not talk. We dwelled in separate voids in this holy and silent night. I locked my soul in a deep dungeon but didn’t know where Siggi’s and Ma’s were stored. There was nothing we could do, short of throwing a Molotov cocktail through Pa’s window to help Teufi light his fire. Or we could do this at the judge’s house to get his attention, but no one told us this, and we didn’t think of it.

This evening, amidst millions of real candles of joy burning on Christmas trees throughout the land, our lonely candle cast flickering shadows on the narrow confines of our new prison. Will its dark specter remain with us until we pass out of this existence?

A day or two after our holiday celebration, the bailiffs came back and loaded our remaining possessions into a truck with the order to move us to the city of Schwoerstadt. But Ma refused to leave Rheinfelden because she wanted to stay close to her ex-husband. Why this was so, we didn’t know, Siggi and I. There was still a housing shortage, and only a few of Ma’s precious possessions fit into our new cell. Therefore she directed the executioners of justice to distribute our belongings among about fifteen different acquaintances in the city.

I was certain that the other remnant of our family was faring much better: Pa and Teufi were celebrating their liberation with fine wine under the baroque ceiling of the Herrenzimmer. They crawled under their goose down blanket and fluffed it up and down frequently, until they pumped out the start of a baby who developed into Oliver. It was at least his fourth known product. Ma had miscarried one, with circumstantial evidence of more from other mothers. Oliver was Teufi’s first, she claimed.

During the months following our eviction, Ma ordered Siggi and me to retrieve some of our stuff with the quaint little handcart from the places where she had stored it and haul it up to our attic. Years later, she wrote me that some bedding and a suitcase full of stuff turned up missing, and that she would worry forever as to what might have been in it. We piled most of our belongings outside of our room and did this obediently, always following orders from adults because they intimidated us. Carting this stuff through town was humiliating, but she still had her control device pinned to her skirt, where it was mostly a permanent fixture. It did not have to be used much anymore because it activated us into action by its mere presence. The thought of not obeying or rebelling never occurred to Siggi or me, even yet.

Our minds were primed for slavery.

* * *

Ma was out digging in garbage, or packing people’s ears with garbage. Everyone always thought that what she had to say was garbage. Siggi and I were alone and were lounging on our mattress in our new hell when there was an unexpected knock on our door. We were afraid because we thought that no one knew that we were here. Are we going to be evicted again? Who could have found us already?

I opened the door and a white-haired stranger, dressed in a suit, handed me a cake and wished us Merry Christmas. That’s all he said and we thanked him. He did not live in our building, and we never learned who he was. Ma did not know him either. Siggi and I discussed whether it was safe to eat this cake. We were hungry but couldn’t be sure that the devil had not sent it. Could it be that someone actually felt sympathetic about the Massenschlachtung, wholesale slaughter, of souls?

When the owner of the apartment returned from her vacation, Ma informed her that we had moved into her attic and had had an electric meter and outlet installed. We had improved her dusty attic. Thoughtfully Mrs. Braun had them removed again and demanded that we move out immediately. We could not even be stored in the attic of a stranger. You always want to stay away from riffraff. But Ma refused to leave. It was easier for the three of us to hide in an attic than in the streets. And in the streets people would know that we were riffraff, the dregs of society, the offal of an architect, a professional man.

After we shivered through our heartwarming Christmas vacation, earning our doctorate degrees in heroism, Siggi and I returned to the Gymnasium to pursue more trivial studies that were supposed to be useful for successful living and survival. Since we were modest children, we did not tell anyone about our advanced degrees. We tried to keep our accomplishments to ourselves and became totally withdrawn. Snobbish.

“Now everyone knows about our divorce,” I said to Siggi.

We had heard people talk about “the divorcee,” namely Ma. We sensed the stigma. None of our classmates had divorced parents, or they kept it secret, for in this society everything followed rigidly established mores and divorce was strictly taboo. Siggi and I were ashamed about our dilemma even though we were only innocent victims in idiots’ battles, years before big bucks could be sucked out of victimization games. A book on the teacher’s desk in our classroom listed the names of the students, along with the names and professions of their fathers. Our father was an Architekt. It was important that everyone knew the professions of the fathers. A more appropriate entry for us would have been “Abandoned by Father,” or “Never Had One.”

Germans were so formal that people who had known Pa for decades still addressed him as Herr Architekt. This was to show respect for his person and his position as a highly educated man. There were not many higher up the social ladder than architects because they designed almost our entire environment, including all of our homes. Lawyers, maybe a little higher, created our hell. They were addressed as Esquire and Your Honor. Was it an honor to send people to hell?

* * *

Our predicament became all consuming.

We had not had a shower since long before Christmas and did not even have water to wash our hands after calls of nature. The three of us slept in our clothes, which we did not change during our vacation, because the temperature in our cell barely rose above freezing. We had been taught that it was fiery hot in hell, but we also learned it could be very dark and very cold as well. One could shake there and shiver.

On the morning we returned to school it was particularly cold. Around seven o’clock Ma lit a candle and shook us awake, so we grumpily crawled out from under our blanket. I sat up, thump, whacking my head against the sloping ceiling. With cold noses puffing mist, we did not take long to get ready as we tied our shoes with freezing fingers and combed our greasy hair. Ma went through her usual feeding routine by cutting a few slices from a loaf with her gloved hands to serve our standard meal, bread with lard and sugar, and pieces of rescued apples.

“I need a drink,” I said coldly. “This bread is dry.”

Ma reached for the bottle of water that had begun to freeze and handed it to me. I drew a few sips and gave it to my little brother. After we quietly finished our continental breakfast, Siggi and I brushed our teeth because Ma always insisted on this. We gripped our brushes and sawed without toothpaste. Since she always bought the hardest brushes, I eventually would saw grooves at my gum line. I did this even though my teeth are very hard. This is probably so because I absorbed a lot of fluoride that some factories spewed into the air and into the ground, along with other chemicals. They provided this community service free of charge, except maybe for occasional cancers far in the future.

Thirty minutes after waking, Siggi and I descended the waxed and polished wood stairs. Two flights down we stopped at the neighbor’s toilet hole that did not have a cover. A hint of dawn barely lit the unheated three-story high privy, and I wished that it had at least a light bulb. I struggled to unbutton my fly. My thingy shrank into my newly growing manhood hair, as I probed and tugged it with icy fingers, to get it out from my wooly underwear, to get the proper aim on the hole. I thought I had it and let go. Pee splattered off the bench, temporarily warmed my fingers and soaked my pants. The paint on the bench was worn off in front just like that of the windowsill of our former prison.

When I finished soaking, I struggled to button up my fly. I dried my hands and the bench as best as I could with newspaper and went back out to let Siggi take his turn to get pissed off for the day, in case he wasn’t already. After he enhanced his attitude, we continued down the stairs, ready to face the challenges of a new semester.

Outside it was barely getting light.

“Are my ears clean?” I asked the usual question whenever we went out in the mornings, knowing well that they were dirty because I could feel my dirt. I could feel it in my ears, I could feel it in my eyes and I could feel it in my soul.

“No,” he said.

I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket. Stretched it over my little finger, wetted it with spit and stuck it into my left ear. Reamed out the wax and dead skin. Moved my finger to a cleaner spot and repeated this procedure several times until no more came out. Then I scooped out the usual cheese dip from my right ear with a bare finger to get out most of its crud. Wiped it off somewhere and finished the cleaning with my handkerchief. I always worried how far away people could smell my ear and therefore tried to keep some distance.

Whoosh, whoosh,… Why is my ear whooshing? Can my goo be seen? Can I feel the waves of distant shores? My heartbeat?

“Come here. Do you smell anything?” I asked Siggi, as I had many times before.

“No, I can never smell anything. Why do you keep asking me?”

I never believed him.

“But smell this.”

Siggi repulsed.

He also spit-cleaned his ears with a handkerchief decorated with crusty stuff. Everything in our lives was always gusty, crusty, dusty, fusty, musty, or rusty, and rarely lusty or trusty. And worst of all, Siggi and I could not get close to someone busty. Ma didn’t count. We inspected each other to make certain that we looked clean. It was important to look clean since we were upper crusty, our father was an architect, and we went to school with the elite.

“You have crud in your eyes,” Siggi told me. How uncouth he was, to tell me that I had crud in my eyes. He had crud in his eyes too, in both eyes. After we wiped them with our crud cloths, life didn’t look so cruddy anymore. I enjoyed my refreshing spit shower; it woke me up in the mornings. But I resented the smell of spit. I resented it when Ma’s nesting instinct got out of control, and she cleaned her brood with her spittle. She spit on the seam of her skirt and wiped us clean. We were growing tall now and did not want her to do it, especially in public. But she always insisted on cleaning her brood; she never listened to us; she insisted on smearing our dirt around, on making it transparent. How does she know which way the dirt travels? From skirt to face, or face to skirt?

When Siggi and I arrived at the train station, spittle clean, people were already crowding through the gate. No one ever stood in line and there was a mad push to get a seat. As I sat down, I noticed that my fly was open. I had had a frustrating time trying to button it up with wet and icy fingers, but these pants were worn out before I received them, probably because of this very defect. Ma did not sew; sewing was work and interfered with her brooding. Cleverly I kept my satchel over my lap until I could find a safety pin in school to secure my gateway.

* * *

Winter continued to be bitterly cold, and our attic was not insulated. When the streets became icy, Siggi and I strapped on the medieval skates that we had brought from North Germany and skated around the city; this exercise warmed us until we ran out of steam. Then we returned to our attic to shiver on our communal mattress, our entertainment center, where we spent much of that winter.

To counterbalance our freezing in the winter, this attic boiled us during the summer because it also had a Mansard roof just like Doebele’s tuberculosis ward. Therefore we spent little time there during the hot afternoons but roamed outdoors as much as possible. I always expected to be shrouded in a cloud of flies, buzzing to get into my head. But even with my luscious bait, these would not help me, to lay eggs there, to hatch maggots, and maggots again into flies. Strangely, few showed much interest in me.

Nowadays we have antibiotics, nuclear bombs and spaceships, electron microscopes and cloned sheep. We have machines that transform virtual reality into reality and reality into virtual life. An elderly man I know recently had an ear infection and to cure it, his doctor placed a maggot in his ear. While it grew roly-poly it healed his infection. Had I known this, I could have raised organic maggots, to cure myself, as well as sell them to doctors to cure all the infections in this world.

Even though the flies did not show much interest in me, people sometimes did. I sat in class, in extreme dream mode, and forgot to empty my ear. Goo ran down my neck. I was startled by the snickers and whispers from the admiring pupils behind me. I could not understand them and did not have to. I always tried to ream out my ear unobtrusively with my little finger and wipe it off on my clothes since a handkerchief drew attention. I never gave up hope that the goo would not stink and instinctively sniffed it, but the diagnosis was always the same: Still stinks, still rotten. When will I get empty and die?

My home class teacher must have detected that something was rotten about me, and that I was very shy. His name was Mr. Haecker. He was always jovial, never punished anyone, and I really liked him. He asked me to be the class speaker. Every grade had one pupil who held this position. It only required collecting money for excursions or donations for the cemeteries of the war dead. It involved no paperwork and all payments were made in cash. I was happy to do this because this teacher had shown faith in my ability and my honesty even though I was rather dumb and somewhat dirty.

* * *

We were squatters in the attic for one year and continued to survive at a subsistence level. We commuted to the Gymnasium to get educated for what reason I did not know. Since there was no study hall, the pupils were assigned enough homework to keep them busy for several hours after school. After Ma made sure that we had finished it satisfactorily, we could go out and escape. But our main diversion was reading and more reading, especially when it was raining. The only other hobbies that we could pursue and would not cost us anything were to vandalize, burn, steal, rape and murder. But these activities were not in vogue, were not advertised anywhere, and we did not think of it.

We borrowed books from the libraries, a dozen at a time for each of us. An American bookmobile passed through Rheinfelden every two weeks, and we read most of the books in its youth section and many of the adult books as well. Many were about America, such as Gone With The Wind, The Egg And I, My Friend Flicka and The Naked And The Dead. We also read Cheaper by the Dozen and about Manitou and Tecumseh, and traded comic books, such as Hopalong Cassidy and Donald Duck with other pupils. Almost every day we lounged on our comfy mattress to develop our minds as Americans.

During winter evenings we lit a candle, and the three of us huddled around it. Our severe eyestrain was the cost of relieving our severe soul strain, to let our minds wander to faraway places. We swung from vines in the jungles of Africa, fought gangsters in America, and sailed around the world with Magellan. We learned a lot, except how to improve our own plight.

We found no self-help books in the libraries. Few had been written, mainly because up to this time in Germany the masses did not pursue higher education, thereby not producing scores of social scientists who must research, publish or perish. We would have greatly benefited from publications such as: Waterless Personal Hygiene, How To Duck Lawyer Attacks, Shelters For Soul Bombing and Surviving Parental and Judicial Terrorism.

Besides a lot of reading, Siggi and I spent much of the earnings from our magazine routes on movies to relieve our ever-present gloom. Over the years we saw dozens of them, most of them American, many of them about cowboys and Indians, which for us helped create an American Dream.

* * *

As time went by, we grew extremely apathetic from lack of incentive or hope, and there were no prospects of finding jobs. We knew of no other children who worked for money, and no one ever suggested to Siggi and me that we should do so, because we were pursuing an academic course in the Gymnasium and not a vocational one. We were not qualified for German vocations because they did then, and still do now, require several years of apprenticeship. Part-time menial jobs, other than paper and magazine routes, were non-existent. There were no gas jockeys or hamburger slingers because there were very few gas pumps and no fast food joints. Ma was an architect’s ex-wife, and at this time it was generally unacceptable for women to work outside the home. Even so, she did some work away from home when she gathered special treats for us: grapefruit, oranges and other fruit that she retrieved after dark from the garbage pile of the nearby wholesaler named Buehrer.

Aunt Adele’s intense etiquette training was of no use. We still had no table to sit at, no plates or silverware to hold properly. Fork in left hand, knife in right hand, sit straight and raise your spoon to your mouth. Don’t play with your food. Aunt Adele had trained us over the years in Simonswolde in these refinements as it gave her a purpose in life; a bona fide screaming relief to rid herself of the demon when the premenstrual syndrome attacked her. Her training sessions had also helped distract us from the delicacies that she had served us.

Siggi and I remained social klutzes until our girlfriends would fine-tune us in later years. Or we would fine-tune ourselves for them after we could afford a toilet and girlfriends. In the meantime we continued using the toilet of Mrs. Lenz downstairs, instead of standing on the edge of our roof and peeing down on the city. We were modest children and did not want somebody to build bronze statues of us, nude, in the middle of Rheinfelden, like the one of Manneken Pis in the middle of Brussels.

* * *

We could not afford to move into any kind of low rent housing, and I didn’t even know if such was available yet. Pa provided a few marks now and then but always much less than the court had ordered. Ma and Pa continued sparring professionally, which officially started in 1949, but I suspect, unofficially many years earlier. Pa would waste more money on lawyers, in attempts to evade his obligations under the law, than he would ever pay for the support of his sons, Siggi and me.

Again, this is what our dear father did: He gave more money to lawyers than could be squeezed out of him for his family to live on. Was there anybody in this world so intelligent and yet so stupid? Was he firing on only one piston? Or was it because of his one firing piston?

After the judge’s army exiled us from our prison in our own home, I saw our father but once, when he stopped his shiny car, while I was strolling down the sidewalk. He rolled down his window, spent ninety-two seconds of quality time with me and gave me one Deutsche mark to get a haircut. He thereby absolved his fatherly duties for the year. He drove away, undoubtedly swelling with pride because his son would now get a haircut. He would look proper for two weeks, as if he had a father who always helped him and took good care of him. Did Pa even know that we were stored in a very cold, and a very hot, stranger’s attic?

Father looked into my eyes. He had intense will power; he could look into my eyes. Ma had told us that he wore glasses not to see better but to hide behind them. I always looked into the eyes of the strangers that I met on the street. Many did not like this and looked away as if I were not there. Now my father looked into my eyes. Was he in denial about what he was doing to us?

During the year that we had been under siege in one bedroom in the Hardtstrasse and the subsequent year in the cozy attic, not a single relative contacted us, helped us, or consoled us. We did not contact them, rarely thought of them and barely knew them, Siggi and I. None of them lived in Rheinfelden, except our father and our second mother. How well did they know our parents? Had there been discord between them before we were born?

“Who can reach the dead,

Who can speak for the dumb?”

* * *

In February the Catholic holidays of Mardi Gras offered a break in our dreary existence. It was Fasnacht and school and work stopped for a few days. It started one morning, even though there was barely a sign of it the day before because it was not commercialized. There were no decorations in the stores or in the schools, and there were no annoying, aggravating, mind-numbing, insulting noises to suck bucks out of these affairs.

Adults did not make fools of themselves. They became fools, kings, queens, wild men and shysters. There were groups dressed as barbarians and court jesters, wise men and idiots. But no one knew who they were because they hid behind masks that were carved out of wood or molded from papier-mâché, all painted in bright colors.

There were parades, music, drinking and dancing.

Siggi and I dressed up in makeshift costumes and joined the crowds in the city. Since Ma did not sew, and we could not afford to buy anything, Siggi and I improvised and fashioned our own. We made cowboy hats out of cardboard and hid in crud-crusted scarves like in the movies, to roam the city as gangsters and cowboys. We scared the crowds with our cap guns while we were rambling around robbing, raping, burning and pillaging. An official, religious time for mayhem. We robbed little old ladies and threw them through store windows. Women became pregnant, whether they chose to or not. We spat into the faces of teachers and lawyers and followed Jonathan’s Modest Proposal to cut up babies to eat them.

But we didn’t think of it.

It was all make-believe. There was little crime even though robbers could move about unrecognized during the time of Fasnacht. We never heard sirens or screams for help and rarely saw a policeman. And when it was all over everything went back to normal, and there was never even any litter in the streets.

* * *

We sat in the shade of a tree on our beloved mattress, alone, far out on the prairie. The air was still and the sun had come out of the clouds. It lightened my mood and I became a cowboy. Our screenless window was open, and a swarm of vultures was buzzing around the epicenter of our quiet savanna. Ma was having a conversation with an invisible judge about a court document that she had received earlier. Deep in thought, she whispered something about the “heartless children’s judge Blaersch” and was unaware that I was observing her. Cowboys and Indians always keep still to watch and listen.

I fell off the cliff of sarcasm into the chasm of her brooding. My discourse went something like this and was a spontaneous outpouring akin to gallows humor, the kind that comes when one’s situation is completely hopeless. It comes when it was easier to die than to live. I mimicked the judge I’d never seen before, visualizing His Honor, Judge Blaersch, in his black robe addressing Mrs. Neuman in the serene courtroom with its fine furniture:

“You are looking very chic today, Mrs. Neuman,” I said in a judge-like voice.

Proudly Mrs. Neuman rose, “Thank you, your Honor.”

“But what is that thing hanging from your waistband.”

“Ach Du Lieber, oh my dear, I forgot to take it off,” I screeched with embarrassment, imitating Ma’s voice. “I’m sorry Your Honor. I’ll take it off.”

By now Ma’s face lightened to a smile, surprised that there was still one gram of humor left in me. Humor powered by desperation.

“Don’t take it off here. Take it off at my house tonight. But please remove that silly strap,” I continued as His Honor. “What is it for anyway?” I added, imitating the dignified judge.

“To protect my boys, Your Honor. Don’t you protect your children?”

“How do you protect them with that? Do you wire them? And please be civil. The court always treats you with respect,” I continued, encouraged by Ma, who was now laughing hysterically, tearfully.

“It protects them from themselves. Prevents them from getting silly ideas. Like seeking revenge on fathers and judges. And then they’d go to jail,” I continued as Ma.

“Thank you, Mrs. Neuman, for your great idea. I will ask the plaintiff to wear a whip also; about where you have yours. Like a tie over his fly to wave at the ladies.”

I continued my imitations until Ma was gasping with belly-shaking laughter. When she regained her composure, she looked at me in wonderment as if thinking there’s an imagination in Ami that he’s been hiding. I always thought he was dumb; perhaps there’s hope for him.

Clouds hid the sun again darkening my mood. Reality shut off my discourse. Once again we squatters were still squatting on our beloved mattress in our forgotten prison.

* * *

One hot day, after living in the attic for more than a year, Ma announced that she had found a real apartment two buildings down the street. It also had a Mansard roof of black slate, or dark tile, to boil the people within. Anxious to move, Siggi and I carried our stuff to our new home and discovered that it really was an apartment. We moved down four stories and back up three stories, below its attic. Around noon, we slouched down to rest on our mattress back in our old home that we had grown to love. Siggi and I announced in unison, “Ich Bin Hungrig,” our usual battle cry. Ma sat down with some bread, cut off a few slices and smeared on some spread.

While I wolfed down some cottage cheese, I dropped my spoon and reached for my trembling jaw. My entire body began to shake. I fell back. Ma screamed. She grabbed me under my arms, dragged me out of the attic and down the stair because my limbs were paralyzed, but my body was trembling. I could hear and see Ma screaming, but I could not spit-clean her face or otherwise move or talk. I wanted to assure her that I was all right and felt no pain, as she continued to struggle with me, while screaming hysterically:

“Mrs. Lenz. Mrs. Lenz. Ami is dying!!!”

No such luck.

By now I must have weighed more than she, and I’ll never know how she was able to drag me down the stairs.

Someday someone else would drag me down some other stairs in some other country.

Mrs. Lenz came rushing out of her apartment, helped Ma carry my body into a bedroom and onto a bed, whereupon my tremor ceased. Later a doctor came to examine me and gave me some pills but did not tell me his diagnosis. I remained there alone until evening, nestled in heavenly fresh goose down and brilliant white sheets while I studied this tidy room. The afternoon sun streamed through the white, delicately embroidered curtains, and I soaked in this quiet luxury. Had I not been as dumb as Lindeman said I was, I would have faked a more intense illness even after I recovered, liberally drooling slobber, or mimicking some other impressive symptoms, in order to remain in heaven a little longer. But I did not think of it.

That evening I returned home. I curled up on our bedding with Siggi and Ma, whom I questioned about my paroxysm, and she told me that I had suffered heat exhaustion, and I believed her. Only many years later did I realize that this could not have been true, but that it must have been a seizure caused by too much parental affection, combined with heat, exertion, dehydration and malnutrition. I felt no chills, fever, perspiration and the shaking attack passed within minutes. It would never recur, even though I would pursue my post-doctorate studies of heroism for many more years.

* * *

Slowly the three of us settled into our new apartment at Werderstrasse 3, Rheinfelden, West Germany. This meant that pre-owned treasures, great and small, kept mysteriously accumulating in our sanitary landfill, increasingly crowding us. This apartment was like most others in our neighborhood in that it had a dark central vestibule with curtained, glazed double entrance doors, from which other doors led to a kitchen and three identical rooms. Practical Ma would use all of them as multi-purpose rooms, with sleeping and living as the secondary purpose in the tiny spaces left over. The architect thoughtfully had provided each door with a lock which had keyholes for peeping Toms to see what Ma was doing in her clutter.

Our kitchen had a sink, a cold water faucet and an electric stove but had no built-in cabinets. This was no drawback because it was becoming an ever more complex multi-purpose cube, with important treasures carefully entangled from floor to ceiling, and from ceiling to floor, just like our other rooms.

So far Siggi and I had slept mostly in hallways, railroad stations, boxcars, beer halls, and bomb shelters, or had shared rooms and a mattress with Ma. At first we were excited that we at last would be able to bounce around in our own rooms. But as we gathered the rest of our belongings from where they had been stored throughout Rheinfelden, it became evident that this could never be. We discovered many things that we had not seen before because Ma had busily acquired a lot of stuff and added it to that which was stored at various places. In retrospect I realize that Ma must have asked these families to add their throwaways to her reserves that Siggi and I had to retrieve to outfit our quarters.

Ma’s packrat syndrome continued to intensify. She had to do something to fill her desperate time while amassing irreplaceable heirlooms for Siggi and me. She acquired clothes, furniture, bags, broken or unidentifiable items, or whatever she thought would be useful, once, one hundred twenty years from now, and hoarded them in our small apartment. Maybe she thought that she could barter such items as she had done during the wars, hyperinflation and depressions. Time had bypassed her. People bought new things now and rarely acquired used clothes in increasingly wealthy West Germany. Even so, could Ma have divine foresight?

Our agony, Siggi’s and mine, slowly crawled up the walls. Dust accumulated and it became more and more difficult to find anything. Ma’s packrat syndrome tangled with her laziness syndrome. Lugging stuff up three stories took some doing because she did it mostly herself while we were in school. Siggi and I noticed only that our world slowly densified, and our space kept shrinking to the point that we could barely move or open doors.

Mother’s entangled heirlooms were her heaven.

They were our hell, Siggi’s and mine.

Now, though, we had our own toilet, and it was located off the stair landing, half a flight down from our apartment door. Fortunately it was open to the public because it could only be locked from the inside. If this had been possible from the outside, Ma would have entangled it, and we would not have been able to roost in comfort. It had a small window and was an exact replica of Mrs. Lenz’s toilet that we used so lovingly before. After two years without a toilet, or one that we had to sneak to under duress, a toilet was a welcome addition to our family. We had become acutely aware that a toilet was a basic implement for man’s survival.

When I dropped bombs down the tube, they resonated back up the three-story-high stool pipe. During cold and windy days, a frosty breeze caressed my bott