Return to Writings...

The Sentry from Zwickau

07-01-07

The Sentry from Zwickau:
An underground story from a city not somewhere else
[Part of an anthology: “Underground Stories from a City Not Somewhere Else”]

Preface: A city not somewhere else

It may take a decade, a century or even longer for a city to become a persistent entity that defines it, gives it an identity; even if historically and culturally that city is but an amalgam of neighborhoods with worlds apart differences, as it’s the case with Paris or New York. This rule of civic identity applies to great cities, lesser cities, and just run-of-the-mill urban centers that give us an origin, a place to be from.

And then, on occasion, we come across places that we prefer to keep silent about; cities that for some obvious, or perhaps inexplicable, reasons never acquired an identity; or, if they did, it was short-lived. I happen to reside in one of those places.

A few years back a visiting Canadian friend asked me how it felt living in exile without leaving home, offering me with a smile a subtle form of condolences; just a rhetorical question from a man who called Vancouver – the other Vancouver – his home.

Can people lose their communal identity simply by crossing a river… or by driving across a county line? Well, if you hail from this Southwest Washington city, you sure can. To our perturbation, it happens time and again as we try to answer what should never be a dreaded question of “where are you from,” condemned to give an answer that makes people think we are from a city located “somewhere else.”

Now, if you wish to visit our fair city, whatever your reason, and hope to do it in a timely and unembarrassed fashion, you may opt to heed some advice. If “our Vancouver” is your destination, be warned! You just don’t get here by clicking your heels just like Dorothy did exiting Oz; and, at times, not even by relying on a trusted travel agent. Not to this Vancouver, latitude 45.63N and longitude 122.60W, in the US of A. Believe me; you could very easily end up 250 miles out of your way. I’ve been witness to several people who have, and there are countless others who have equally believable claims.

For starters, assuming flying is your choice for travel; your initial destination should be Portland, since our Vancouver lacks a commercial airport. Once again, be careful; for the Portland you are after is in Oregon, not Maine. Your luggage tags should read PDX; the Portland where precipitation barely registers snow, but offers plenty of rain.

When landing at PDX, the Vancouver you’re after is just a stone’s throw away; as it follows the compass’ needle, across a Columbia River flowing east-west, parallel to the landing strip. Just go North across either of two bridges, one to your right, one to your left, and you will be setting foot on this orphaned-city its oft-elected mayor proudly calls, America’s Vancouver. Apparently no one has told this popular official, least convince him of it, that to most people on this planet there is more geography to America than the United States; and that Vancouver, to them, is simply a city somewhere else. Be that as it may, while Vancouverites from Canada display their British Columbia provincial colors well, Vancouverites from Southwest Washington must be content to show their provincial ways in a radius that extends not much beyond the sounds from the glockenspiel tower in Esther Short Park… on a quiet Sunday morn.

Cultural or historical identity do not seem to take center stage in this community, now in excess of 150,000 souls, who for the most part hail from other somewhere else’s. But even three decades ago, prior to annexations and northward bound colonizers, the then city of one-third of today’s population could not collectively agree to return to its roots, the name originally given the first settlement (1825) and headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company for Oregon Country: Fort Vancouver. A then spirited voice to rename the city by identity-hungry folks was unceremoniously silenced by entrenched business powers in the community, resulting in thumbs down vote.

Can anyone think of a more apropos and distinct name for a community that became by far the largest non-native settlement of its time, the ignition for the Europeanization of the Pacific Northwest? What better name to identify a community than by its roots? After Lewis and Clark, and that captain from the English Admiralty who never set foot on these shores… came this outpost of Anglo-American transition, then hub of activity in the Pacific Northwest. An identity so strong, so unique, that no other community would have had reason to adopt it and make it its own!

This not-in-Canada Vancouver will always be Ft. Vancouver to a great many of us, even if we are dabbed as a nostalgic bunch living in the past, constantly trekking through our rich, pioneer history, unwilling to settle down as an unaffiliated minor league team for the city up North. Our community has been at the crossroads of much history to be confused, disregarded and even disdained. A visit to the rebuilt fort; or the barracks of old; or a stroll through officers’ row, which housed not just leaders of men, but beyond; will attest to the pride we have in claiming this northern bank of the Columbia River to be known as Ft. Vancouver, the cradle of the Pacific Northwest.

Three years after the Oregon Treaty set the US-Canadian border; Ft. Vancouver began to share its history with the newly established US Army setup: Columbia Barracks, later to become Vancouver Barracks. It was not until eight years later (1857) that Vancouver was incorporated as a city, almost three decades before its northern neighbors decided to name their community Vancouver, just like the island it was across from. The Canadian claim of its rights to the name left the city by the Columbia without identity, without civic soul.

Yet, one needs but to visit Vancouver Barracks Cemetery to become aware that this city is very much here, not somewhere else… with countless stories reenacting underground time and again ready to pop out from the gravestones eroded by the rain. These stories, however, must carry the imprimatur of a sentry that guards the cemetery and all its secrets from his own sentry-stone. A gravestone located at the north-most end, properly numbered 01; a marker belonging to Friedrich Leonhardt (1900-1945), once a prisoner of war… now a prisoner of time, unofficial gatekeeper and raconteur.

Whatever the argument as to the identity of this community by the Columbia River, you may be certain that the underground stories you’ll hear from Herr Leonhardt decidedly took place here, not somewhere else.

Ben Tanosborn


The Sentry from Zwickau

Can time stand still, rebel against its very nature, if just for a fraction of a microsecond? What if, in a defining moment, past, present and future could collide at time’s tri-forked intersection, all arriving simultaneously in a time machine? For Gil it did… on a very special January seventeenth in the Vancouver Barracks Cemetery.

Lisa and Peter had stopped in Portland for two days while on a promotional tour for Peter’s new “how-not-to” book, giving them an opportunity to visit Gil in Vancouver; and make that special, and infrequent, visit to Lisa’s great-grandfather at the Barracks’ cemetery. So here they are in a cold and overcast day, three people walking the skies of a thousand and a half souls, encircled by the tree-muted sound of traffic coming from Fourth Plain and Interstate-5 early that afternoon; a purposeful reminder to the dead, should they care to listen, that life goes on; that it doesn’t stop with anyone’s terminated existence in its human form.

As the trio prepares to leave, a car enters the cemetery and parks behind theirs. A woman carrying a bouquet of nondescript flowers steps out of the car and, after taking a few steps, places the plastic-wrapped arrangement by the simple gravestone located at the farthest point north, as if meant to be both entry and exit to the cemetery.

Gil is standing no more than fifty feet away, looking at a woman he hasn’t seen before, yet one that in some strange way invites him to search his past; a past on display in that gallery of memories that at his age is forbiddingly long. As his half-distracted gaze becomes focused, there emerges a face with glittery emerald eyes amid the spectrum of the many shades of green that cover the cemetery canvas. Gil feels propelled to take some steps forward; five, ten, fifteen… until unwittingly he finds himself within murmur distance from the lady dressed in soft tones of gray.

“Clara…? No, it couldn’t be,” Gil asks, and then responds softly, as if to announce himself, then ask forgiveness for his intrusion.

“Yes, Gil… you are out of uniform, but to Onkel Fred, and to me, you are Airman Gil,” asserts the attractive woman, her face reflecting both beauty and a recondite peace that permits only a hint of emotion. She could be forty, sixty… or whatever age the moment required her to be.

Sound takes cover in a vacuum; conversation is then resumed by the eyes at speed synchronized by their thoughts. Volumes are spoken; all in a language of emotions and feelings they both appear to master; but this exhaustive soul-to-soul communication seems incomplete, unable to bridge a forty-two-year separation.

“Your friends are waiting, calling you from the car,” Clara announces at the end of their emotive download. “I never would have suspected that I’d find you here on Friedrich’s hundredth birthday. You are amazing… always were,” she adds, with brief emotion accompanying every feature in her face.

“Clara… I had no idea you lived in Vancouver, or I would have contacted you,” explains Gil, as if stating a position… or rationalizing an excuse. “I am taking my friends to the airport, but if I can survive this initial shock, and my heart is not catapulted into another quintuple bypass, we must find time to unzip each other’s past,” Gil nervously continues, ending with a request for her phone number.

Gil jots down the number Clara gives him… and with a barely audible farewell leaves a smiling woman behind him; a Clara that gets forever younger as he keeps glancing back in his walk towards the car, knees shaking, as if he had seen a ghost.

Lisa and Peter are waiting for him inside the car, engaged in a lively discussion about the anticipated collapse that should have occurred sixteen days before at the entrance of the millennium.

“Lisa thinks that all the commotion about much of the planet coming to a halt, with millions of computers crashing, was a plot by the international brotherhood of programmers,” Peter extends as a greeting when Gil enters the car. And he continues, “What do you think… is there material here to test my skills as an investigative reporter, and give me a book-exposé on these wizards of the cyber world… or should I stick with the things I know?”

Silence follows what seems as an uncomfortable too-long.

“Worth studying,” Gil finally answers with unmasked inattention, as his thoughts are holding hands playing ring-around-the-roses… with Clara clearly in the middle.

A short trek to Portland’s airport seems longer as chopped attempts to conversation suggest to the departing couple that some invisible floating sponge at the cemetery must have absorbed the juices in Gil’s brain. Then, as they start unloading the luggage from the trunk at the airport, Peter gets his chance as he makes eye contact with Gil.

“That was quite a visit you had with that German soldier at the Barracks’ cemetery… Leonhardt, wasn’t it? I thought that maybe it was one of those long-lost relatives… and my curiosity led me to read the inscription… quite an important fellow, I suppose, when his gravestone is marked 01,” and after his spiel, Peter punctuates his “that’s what’s on my mind” by slamming the trunk shut.

“Not a relative, Peter, just someone I first visited in 1958 – his tombstone, that is – prior to an overseas assignment while in the Air Force; and you are, by the way, a first-rate investigative reporter,” promptly answers Gil with an obliged, almost forced smile… all the while wondering why his friend had not even mentioned Clara. But then, perhaps it would have been an indiscretion for either Peter or Lisa to ask about her. And Gil just as soon prefers that it remains that way.

Effusive good-byes and Gil’s friends of three decades are on their way. A last stop in Seattle will conclude the book tour; then, on home to Boston.

During his drive home from the airport, Gil is picking up his scrambled memory pieces of forty-two years, trying to get them all on the time-surface table which for some reason does not seem to stay level. Clara… Clara Allegra – he doesn’t recall her last name but clearly remembers the lyrical middle name – had surfaced from decades of nonbeing. And she is here, living in Vancouver… at the very receiving end of a telephone call that he could make. That is, if only he can get himself together, and gathers the courage that would be needed to cope with two compressed generations in the life of a person that once meant everything to him.

“Tomorrow,” Gil says out loud to himself, not realizing that memories can, when revived if only slightly, erupt violently, without emotional restraint; particularly when they have been repressed for too long, and forty-two years overflows too long.

§

There had been one other visit by Gil to Vancouver Barracks Cemetery, back in April 1958. He had stopped in Vancouver on his way to California from Geiger Air Force Base in Spokane. A welcomed four-week leave before departing with his squadron of “dog fighters” for an overseas tour of duty. Vancouver was home to Tom, his buddy from training days at Parks, who also had scheduled leave at this time to show him the part of the Pacific Northwest that he so proudly called “God’s Country.”

Everyone in their basic training flight assumed that Tom would end up in crypto school, and intelligence did become his career field in the Air Force. But Tom’s biggest challenge had always been deciphering relationships that might have existed between dwellers of this military cemetery, where he had three relatives interred from that many generations; each, to him, “cryptically” buried equidistant from the other two. And not having a good theory as to why was driving him insane. Randomness had little acceptability for Tom.

So here is Tom escorting Gil on this Thursday, April seventeenth, giving him a guided tour, each gravestone framed with the proper annotation of historical certitude. Tom resorts to the slightest minutia, even if he has to extrapolate data from obscure sources, dating back to that first census taken in 1850, to bring his point across.

The cemetery has been Tom’s lecture hall for almost two hours, and Gil the only attendant to his uninterrupted erudition, except that in the last ten minutes two visitors have appeared at the cemetery’s north end. Tom’s lecture is winding down, as the two airmen approach the starting point where they had left their duffle bags; just the width of a car path from the gravestone being visited… now the only place in the cemetery with flowers. It was to be their last stop.

The two young men in blue were joining by chance, or fate’s design, a beautiful lady, gloved and veiled, bringing a formal touch to an otherwise unassuming military cemetery. And a young replica next to her more casually attired. Both were silent, each carrying separate in mentis conversation with whoever had been buried there thirteen years before.

“Friedrich Leonhardt, a German prisoner of war from Zwickau, now part of East Germany, who died just a few days before the war ended in Europe,” is Tom’s closing to the morning lecture, as he points to a small gravestone at attention over a field of wet grass.

“Yes, that’s my uncle,” says in a soft voice the young woman… as if underlining or giving credence to Tom’s introduction.

Undoubtedly they had to be mother and daughter: same aesthetically perfect everything as if jointly intending to define superlative, including the multi-carat emeralds that adorned both their faces. Gil appears hypnotized without a pendulum taking a swing. He cannot talk, cannot move... waiting to be cast away from the spell.

“I am Clara, and this is my mother… also Clara,” pronounces the young replica to force away an unwanted silence. “The name runs in the family,” she adds as a form of explanation. “Are you passing through… being that you’re in uniform?” Clara asks, as if trying with that observation to open a conversation.

“I’m Tom, and I’ve lived in Vancouver all my life, but am now serving in the Air Force; as is my friend, Gil… but he calls LA home… well some suburban town in Southern California, right Gil?” Tom explains in a louder pitch as if trying to de-hypnotize Gil. “He’ll be spending a few days with me, taking notes about paradise; he’s a promising writer,” he concludes, snapping Gil awake with a dose of embarrassment.

“We just came from the train depot and haven’t had time to change to civvies. Tom was intent on showing me his much talked-about cemetery even with the prospect of a downpour,” Gil feels compelled to add, pushing his eyes away from Clara.

Gil had become hopelessly tongue-tied and young Clara was savoring the moment, not in satisfaction of feminine conquest, but in a special feeling of mutual victory, or perhaps mutual surrender. It was a great feeling for Clara to have found a promising prospect to share her Holy Grail. Her mother also senses the moment, seemingly ready to consent.

“Let me present to you Friedrich Leonhardt, of Saxony, a sometime soldier, sometime prisoner of war, and always my favorite uncle: Onkel Fred,” Clara recites slowly, punctuating with unfettered affection both the private’s name and his region of origin; also underlining with her voice the “sometime prisoner of war.” Then, seemingly evading tears, young Clara turns to Gil and, changing the subject, asks, “What rank do your three stripes indicate?” At unison both men answer, “Airman First Class.” Tom adding, “Corporal or buck sergeant for those in the Army.” A very light drizzle now joins the group as it’s about to break up.

Gil continues transfixed as mother and daughter motion to leave, resigned to preserve that moment as an ephemeral gift from Mother Luck. But as she’s about to leave, Clara casually takes out a business card from her raincoat pocket and, without adding a word, hands it to Gil, intently looking into his eyes, and slowly widening a smile… a smile imperceptible to anyone except the two intended prisoners, one of a war past; one, she hopes, of a heart present.

Then, mother and daughter are gone, leaving two airmen, two duffle bags and one sentry alone in the cemetery. Shortly thereafter, the two airmen would be off with their duffle bags, their departure returning Herr Leonhardt to his sentry post at the Barracks’ cemetery.

§

Why, Gil asks himself as he drives home from the airport… why is such an important event in your life stamped out, totally erased? And why does it reappear a lifetime later without apparent rhyme or reason?

As he has done often in the past on critical or disconcerting situations, Gil lets his concerns take a break for the remainder of the day, waiting for that confessional time to be shared with the pillow. This time he would have to search back forty-one years and nine months to get back to that week apparently disemboweled from his life.

But Gil’s memory isn’t cooperating. Only after falling sleep, do clear pictures begin to appear, as if ejected from a geyser into his dreams. Only then is he permitted entrance to that part of the gallery that displays images from that lost week, starting with his reading of a business card: Clara Allegra… Piano Lessons… an address on Evergreen Highway… and a telephone number. Now he finds himself at Tom’s house, early Friday morning, dialing OX and five numbers.

Clara has been waiting for this call, and asks Gil to meet her at Clark College, entrance to the cafeteria, around noon. Gil hadn’t realized how tall Clara is… or perhaps, how short he is next to her; and now he’s having this incredibly attractive girl take him by the arm and appoint him to save them a table while she makes menu choices for both.

While they eat, Clara does not have any questions for Gil; instead, she proceeds with a personal debriefing, as if a peddler showing her wares. They are from Idaho, but had come to Vancouver so that her mother could do her war effort working at the Kaiser Shipyards while her father served in the Army. He had been killed in action in 1943, in the Pacific. She and her mother were sharing this house by the Columbia River with this extraordinary grandmotherly lady, Ruth.

There was little need to ask Clara anything, her answers preceding any questions Gil, telepathically, might have for her. She was finishing her second year at Clark, hoping to finish her studies at U-Dub, and maybe even do graduate work there. So mother and daughter had been saving money for Clara’s coming days in Seattle. Music… her life was music; as was her mom’s; as it had been in her family for at least six generations of moms… all pianists going back to early Nineteenth Century Saxony, perhaps before. While trying to convince Gil that music is to the soul as air is to the body, Clara takes a long pause, and fixing her green eyes onto his browns, asks: “Are you familiar with Robert Schumann’s music?” This is no casual question that is being asked, and Gil knows it. Yes, he is being tested.

“I can think of no better musical illustrator. You can tell that he was at home with prose as he was with music, or he couldn’t have written Papillons. And I am somewhat familiar with Carnaval but not much else,” Gil responds, embarrassed that he was probably sounding pedantic. “Why are you asking me, is he your favorite composer?” follows up Gil, now curious as to why Clara had asked him that out of the blue.

“He is not just a favorite composer, Gil, but infinitely much more,” Clara answers as if giving a first clue to a mystery novel, or perhaps making a crayon sketch of a yet to-be-painted portrait. “Did you know that before Schumann met his wife to be, Clara Wieck, he knew another Clara… one who was a year older than him?” recites Clara, hoping that Gil might catch the meaning. “He could still play the piano, then… his pianoforte days,” she concludes.

Clara is exceedingly pleased with Gil, and it’s showing in the rosy patina lingering on her cheeks. As she goes about unwrapping Gil, he is becoming all she had hoped him to be and more, so much more that her mind, echoing her heart, is already discarding other intimate choices; she is definitely ready to ask him to share her Holy Grail. But for now, she is just inviting him home for dinner; to spend time watching the Portland lights; and maybe listen to mother and daughter play, both piano and their clavichord… which according to Clara was one of the few in existence in the entire West Coast. How could Gil refuse! Never mind the clavichord!

Tom is upset with Gil but soon realizes that he has no choice but to become a minority sharer in a unique, predestined, boy-girl relationship. Perhaps he should ask Clara when, and for how long, Gil can be free to visit some of the places, and do some of the things, that he had so carefully planned. But this Friday evening, Tom would be Gil’s chauffer, leaving him at the entrance of this great big house south of Evergreen Highway and north of the railroad tracks. There, adorning the entrance, under the watchful eye of Mnemosyne, is Clara. This reincarnated Euterpe takes Gil by the hand out of a dark rainy evening into her home… and as far as Tom could tell, into her life as well.

A Friday like no other in his life, that’s what Gil experiences. In some ways, it’s almost as if the entire evening had been framed in another time, mother and daughter catering to him in a way that is almost surreal… the sounds from the clavichord adding to it. By the end of the evening Gil’s schedule for the next five days has been written in Clara’s social calendar in India ink. It’s almost a repeat of that Sadie Hawkin’s Day in High School, when a girl Gil didn’t know, Arlene, had paid top dollar for him at the auction, and had given him a litany of services to perform for her, including being her escort to the dance. Except that instead of one day, it is five; and instead of a girl he had little in common, this time he would become companion to a goddess-muse.

If Friday evening had been an experience like no other for Gil, Saturday would turn out to be equally special, in a different and less surreal way. He joins Clara at the American Music store on Main Street, where she plays the Lowrey Organ every Saturday morning to promote the store’s trial plan. After sharing her bag lunch, Gil accompanies Clara two blocks south, to Spelmans, to purchase a pair of Air Steps. He even convinces her to pick the red calf instead of the black patent; something about that irresistible green-red combination… according to Gil, to the coquettish delight of Clara. She then confesses something to Gil, a term of endearment she hasn’t heard for thirteen years.

“Do you know what Onkel Fred used to call me?” asks Clara, blushing but still looking into Gil’s eyes: “Kleinsmaragde.” Then explains, “Little emeralds, I was five, maybe six then.” Gil doesn’t want to ask Clara whether Friedrich was her real uncle, or how they had come to know him, being a prisoner of war. After all, did it matter?

That Saturday night is one to be remembered, starting with dinner at Seafood House, a 16-ounze T-bone steak for Gil and frog legs for Clara; then dessert over at Waddle’s in Jantzen Beach, with lots of silver invested in the juke-box. Later, a short drive east of town to Fisher’s Grange, and their excuse for dancing to the music of the Tempo Kings. Excuse, that’s what it is, to find themselves body to body, face to face, in a solemn erotic introduction that’s yearning to take place; their silence now playing games with the aroused feelings of two people that dream while awake of holding one another in a timeless first embrace. No cha-chas, or rock-n-roll, just that first slow piece.

An empty Sunday morning awaits Gil, as he and Tom prepare for a planned trip to Multnomah Falls and Hood River. He could not very well tell Tom that he would rather be with Clara and her mother attending mass at Saint Joe’s. How could such thought even cross his mind! A day away from Clara might even help clear his mind.

Monday and Tuesday afternoons, after Clara’s classes at Clark, she picks Gil up at Tom’s house and then drives, and parks, at a point near her house with a great view of the Columbia and the light barge traffic. They stay in the car, protected by a rain that fogs them from view by curious eyes. And they let their feelings have some freedom… but are often forced to restrain them, their passion time and again needing to be discharged in the lighting rod of the interlocking fingers uniting their hands.

Tuesday, before leaving their river-view perch for dinner at Clara’s house, she looks at Gil, half teary-eyed and half smiles, and begins to shake her head. “This morning I was writing a letter to Dorothy Dix. Something like this: ‘Dear Dorothy Dix, My airman doesn’t want to share a bed with me; he says that he wants to marry a virgin; what should I make of that? Desperate in Vancouver’… but I didn’t send it since you’ll be gone in two days,” Clara confesses in tears, amidst saddened laughter to a somber Gil. Then, wiping her tears and changing course, she adds, “Have you forgotten that tomorrow we’ll see our first movie together, Bridge on the River Kwai? It could also be our last date together.” Gil kisses her hand… then, after desalting her tears, makes a request.

“Tomorrow is my last day here; you could skip classes and spend the day and… night with me at the Gorge. It’s going to be sunny, and… well, I thought that the Columbia Gorge Hotel can share this moment of our lives, although I don’t know how your mother…” Gil starts to improvise, his hands both supplicant and shaking while holding hers.

Clara slowly places her forefinger over his lips. “Mother will get to see Bridge on the River Kwai with me Thursday evening, after you leave,” she decides in a casual tone. “Ours is the Bridge of the Gods,” she sentences.

Now there are four hands nervously caressing over the warmth of Clara’s lap. Wednesday is to be their day, their demons and angels once and for all to be set free.

And Wednesday is their day; not a chapter in their lives, but the book of their lives, written with their vows of eternal love expressed midpoint over the Columbia on the Bridge of the Gods, before the night’s seal… as if celebrating the gift of fire from Lewit.

As Gil’s train crosses the Willamette Valley headed to an unpredictable south Thursday afternoon, there is a pensive airman aboard unaware he has spent a week crossing a twilight area, the matriarchal domain of the Clara lineage. An hour yet from Eugene, Gil begins writing his first letter to Clara. He doesn’t know that there will be only seven more… and that none of the eight will be answered.

§

As in the past, the pillow has done its job for Gil. In fact, it has performed miraculous cataract surgery clearing the view to a week that had been totally fogged for forty years. And now he is getting up with a sense of urgency, ready to call Clara at that number which seems identical to the one in her business card of long ago; only, the numbers 6 and 9 are replacing the OX prefix.

But Clara is not at the other end, nor does the other party know of any Clara, and they have had that number for over thirty years. Gil prefers not to think of the possibilities, opting instead to drive immediately to the Barracks’ cemetery.

Alone, with a light mist accompanying him to Friedrich’s tombstone, Gil realizes that there are no flowers next to Onkel Fred’s marker, the only flowers in evidence at the cemetery are those by the gravestone of Lisa’s great-grandfather… the ones Lisa and Peter had brought the day before. Gil begins to understand the power of a vision over Leonhardt’s tomb. He pauses forcing a soliloquy… of interest to his soul; and Clara’s; and perhaps the soul of that German prisoner of war, who meant so much to Kleinsmaragde.

That night, Friedrich will pay Gil a mental visit from Hades. Gil will be told about the communicational limits between the living and the dead. How ideas, and messages, can be transmitted from one to the other, yet no questions are permitted in this common domain.

It is Friedrich’s first mind-gram to Gil that will bring to light some things about Clara. The last time she and her mother visited the cemetery had been in June 1959, Clara Allegra holding a five-month old baby girl named Clara Lewit. They were leaving for Idaho, Friedrich was told, to attend Grandmother’s funeral, the last Clara to be born in Zwickau; and after that they would be moving to the East Coast where Clara would be attending a prestigious conservatory thanks to a small inheritance from Ruth, the grandmotherly housemate who had recently passed away.

Unknowingly, Gil had fulfilled a mission, the realization of Clara’s matrilineal Holy Grail. As for Herr Leonhardt, he would reveal nothing about himself. And Gil can ask no questions.

Summer 2006

This copyrighted story/material may not be printed, or otherwise used, without the author's consent.