Ivanov Reyez
Unease
After a few streets, I understood he was following me. When he started, where he started, I had no idea. When he stopped, it was up to me.
I was not naïve as to what he wanted. I had been followed before, pestered before, as many young men have, but it was disconcerting that my flȃneuring plans this afternoon should be deviated in order to lose him. It was my habit and joy to walk from the Hauptbahnhof to the Amerika Haus on Karolinenplatz. Sometimes, when I was in a particular hurry because of some cultural event, I took the streetcar and got off by the black obelisk in the traffic circle. My plans, however, did not seem completely dashed because I had stopped seeing the man by the time I reached the Amerika Haus. Perhaps I had lost him, though I had been merely walking and not negotiating any clever or panicky strategy to lose him. More likely, he had given up and redirected his steps to a busier area where he could select another young man to follow. Or perhaps from a distance, hiding well, he saw me approach the Amerika Haus, and culture was certainly not what he hungered for.
There was also the danger that I could report him, and he could be arrested, or at least frightened enough to stay away from me. It was unimaginable that I would physically hurt him. Even so, as I crossed the always shiny brick floor of the lobby towards the restroom, I expected that he would suddenly appear. He would enter after I did, and for a moment stand not far behind me, perhaps expecting me to turn around. Then he would fit himself into the urinal next to mine. In the awkward silence, listening to each other’s pissing, he would attempt something: a smile, a look, some words, a hand. But I was not at all excited or even interested—just annoyed.
He did not appear. Good.
I did not stay long in the Amerika Haus. But I still sensed his presence when I walked out, though I did not see him anywhere. For blocks I walked slowly, a little more tired today, and I cut through a park where not too long ago an Army buddy had photographed me. I rested on a bench. Still, the man did not appear. What had attracted him to follow me? A slender young man, pale and dark-haired, in brown corduroy pants and a vanilla poplin shirt and black dress shoes. I was also wearing a wide black belt and a dark blue, lightweight jacket that I had bought in Washington, DC, last April. I headed for the Milano Bar, my favorite place for a beer near the Hauptbahnhof.
I had not been there for very long—long enough to order a beer and have it brought to me, long enough to look around and sink into my own darkness. Suddenly, a man stood at my table. I looked up. He was the same man who had been following me. How had he found me? He wore black slacks, a grey sweater, and a white shirt, like a conservative college student, so unlike the radical students cropping up like mushrooms in American universities. Was he a loner in the habit of stalking loners? Especially, military loners? No doubt he knew I was an American soldier, and not merely because of my shoes. He just knew.
His presence was brazen, more than the little I had experienced in the States, but he politely asked me if I was expecting anyone. If not, could he join me? I hesitated for a few seconds, then said okay, and he hurriedly pulled out a chair. There were other tables, but he would have sat beside me in an empty stadium. His stalking me did not frighten me, nor did it anger me. He had gotten one step closer, but I did not even slightly stir. He ordered a Löwenbräu—what I was drinking—and it was quickly brought.
He appeared handsome, sandy-haired, and perhaps green-eyed, thirty or so. We chatted about the weather, the coolness, and the possibility of rain. He too loved rain. I noticed that his English, though accented, was grammatically correct. He sounded educated and was patient or refined in his movements, so unlike the soldiers in the barracks. His hands were pale, his fingernails clean and manicured, like those of a nun.
“How do you like Germany? You know, so far.”
“I like it very much. When I knew I was coming to Germany, the first thing I wanted to buy was a German briefcase. A beautiful, tough, leather one.”
“That’s very interesting. Why did you want a briefcase, a German one? Other people usually want something—”
“Touristic. As I told my company commander, ‘I’m too young to be a tourist.’”
“You are young. How old?”
“Twenty. But—”
“You look more eighteen.”
“That’s what I was about to say, that people usually think I’m younger.”
“But don’t you want a souvenir or two—at least before you go? Some people take cuckoo clocks, beer steins, others—”
“My briefcase will be my souvenir. I want to use it in college.”
“But why a German briefcase?”
“For the last few years, I’ve been reading more German philosophy and fiction, and I associate the German briefcase with things intellectual.”
“Günter Grass?”
“More like Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.”
“Oh, that one.”
“The experience of Germany will be my souvenir.”
“Yes, yes. An experience is a souvenir.”
“It’s not something you have to take care of outside of yourself,” I said.
He stared at me, his eyes realizing a gambit, and their anxious glint made me uneasy.
“Your life in Munich,” he said, thoughtfully, smiling, picking up his beer.
But I did not pick up my beer, not assuming he intended to toast. I already knew that whatever he intended, whatever he lusted for and so elegantly restrained, I would elegantly prevent from materializing. Back in late May or early June, while in Mannheim to retrieve my lost duffel bag, I coincidentally ran into a high-school acquaintance who had been rumored to be a homosexual. Although a fairly good-looking guy, pale and dark-haired and slightly effeminate, I was uncomfortable when, in the orderly room, he instantly recognized me and remembered me well. I did not want to be associated with him. What deeply unsettled me was his friendship with a guy I had twice or thrice gone into a freight car with. My guilt had been enormous, and I had fought seeing him again. Now this high-school acquaintance, all wide smiles and glinting eyes, armed with the stories my friend must have fed him (perhaps while making love), was encouraged to ask me if I was staying overnight or longer, and could we meet. Frightened, even repulsed, I lied that I had some urgent insurance paperwork to fill out for tomorrow. He noticed my discomfort and, disappointed, no longer smiling, he did not question or insist.
As the man and I were talking, with never the need to know each other’s name, I glanced at a woman I had seen on another afternoon not too long ago. She had been at the same center table, but not alone. A dark-haired man in a beige jacket sat tightly beside her, as if afraid to lose her, in the silence after a loud argument. She looked away, smoking; he looked at her. They drank from a bottle of cognac. Every time she finished her glass, he quickly refilled it. This would certainly slow her thinking, her flight into the sunlight. It was darkish in the bar, and every time she raised her glass, it seemed to darken more. And then she was alone as she was now. She probably had no idea when he had vanished, why, or how helpless she was. I had turned or lowered my head, and I too was equally without the same knowledge. One would imagine she had never left the table and still waited for his return.
“So where are you stationed?”
I hesitated answering, looking down at the dark table, then at him raising the beer to his mouth.
“Henry−no, no−Will Kaserne.”
Inadvertently, I had placed myself close to the airfield where I was stationed.
“I think I know where it is.” He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Near Warner Kaserne.”
I shuddered to imagine others knowing about this encounter. He asked me if he was right. I said yes and asked him where he worked. I turned to the center table: the woman had disappeared. I scanned the place discreetly, afraid she would think I was looking for her. Assuming she had left, I returned to the man, who was telling me about his job at the courthouse. I had not caught whether he was a paralegal, an attorney, or even a judge. A few minutes later, I told him I needed to run to the restroom. He said he would wait. I went straight down towards the back, as if going down a train corridor. Before reaching the restroom, I looked to the left and noticed a small corner table, where the woman with the cognac now sat—alone in the greyish dark, a drink before her, a bottle nearby. When I walked out of the restroom, she was obviously drunk, struggling to remain upright, her lips moving to nothing audible. The man saw me approaching. Suddenly, behind me, a splash and vomiting. What seemed to be a bottle exploded on the floor, and a loud bang turned my head. No one rushed to lift her twisted face from the mess on the table. No one rushed to sweep the broken glass.
“They will let her sleep it off,” said the man. “I’ve seen her before.”
“Me too. I think I will write a poem about her and call it ‘Vomit.’”
“That’s what she did the last time I was here. She was crying and trying to sing. Then she threw her bottle hard to the floor.”
“But the poem will deal with a man who has mistreated her, who left her broken.”
“Maybe you can show it to me next time.”
“So do you come often?” I said.
“Not as often as I would like to,” he said, smiling, looking down at his bottle and reaching for its neck.
“Why is that?” I said, unamused.
“No, no, I’m not really a drinker. I—”
“Neither am I. I just like a beer once in a while, especially with food.” I avoided saying “sausage.” “I mostly come here for a beer and to listen to ‘I Got You Babe’ on the jukebox. Funny no one’s playing anything. Last summer, I was coming from Ohio with a girlfriend, German by the way, and all the way to Texas, we were listening to this song and to ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ I had told her I was getting drafted.”
“And now you’re here, at the Milano Bar in Munich, West Germany, where you will write a poem, or many more.”
He waved at the waiter nearby, raised two fingers like a peace sign, and pointed down at the bottles. The waiter nodded. In the back, another waiter was sweeping the shards of glass.
“I hope so,” I said. He was staring at the waiter, a slender young man like me. “Or maybe a story or two.”
“If you’re a writer, or want to be a writer, you know you must have experiences, all kinds.”
“I know.” I turned around, wondering about the woman still plastered on the table. “I’ve had some.” I felt myself shuddering. “Germany is a new experience. In Germany, it’s a new experience, or an old experience in a new frame.”
“Interesting. Like considering a new case based on old cases.”
The waiter appeared with the beers, setting them on the table. The man handed him a bill and
spoke in German.
“Danke schön!” said the waiter, smiling, then ran off to a fat man waving him over.
“I told him to keep the change.”
“Danke,” I said. “I only know a few words, just in case you’re thinking of trying me.”
“I definitely will try you when your German expands,” he said, smiling wickedly.
We took swigs of the beer. I had started to sense that I was piloting this encounter. But to what end? Had I lightened the initial unease into a game? He glanced at his watch and excused himself to run to the restroom, as if he were on a certain schedule. Did he expect me to run after him, as if this whole scene were prescripted? I sat still.
He did not take long. As if sensing that soon we were going to leave, he seemed agitated and his glances scattered about the bar. One minute, he was checking out the bartender; another, he was focusing on the better-lit men at the center tables, as if trying to capture their rowdy conversation, before diving into the farthest dark corners. He finally alighted on a guy walking in from the dark. It did not bother me. It was not as if I needed his attention. Freely he had come; freely he could leave.
“What is your work?” he said.
“Where?”
“Where you’re stationed.”
“Oh, in the Flugplatz, I—”
I quickly stopped, inadvertently having landed him on the airfield. Will Kaserne, of course, was not an airfield. He had caught it, his eyebrows rising.
“Flugplatz? Where?”
“Oh, one of them.”
I feared that if he pursued this, I would start bumbling.
“Are there many?”
He was grinning, amused by my discomfort.
“I don’t know. I suppose so. You would have a better idea than I, wouldn’t you?”
“We can leave,” he said, jumping up, the chair pressing the back of his knees. He nearly toppled forward onto the table. “Or you can stay if you want to.” He started for the door. Heads were rising and turning.
“Wait.”
When I came out of the restroom, he was gone. I ran outside, the night cool. He was gone. I started heading for the nearest streetcar stop, my head like a sparrow’s on a fence top, hoping he would appear out of the darkness.
“Briefcase!”
I turned around. He was running behind me.
“I was looking for you,” I said.
“I was talking to a waiter. I saw you rushing out.”
As we walked, sometimes we sank into an awkward silence. The noises and voices around us rose like the roar of a dinosaur to distort even the smoothness of our English. It was as though we were trying to adjust to a foreign country, or to unknown streets, where any dark street could define us for each other. I had memories of walking as a boy with another boy on dirt roads, both of us lit like light posts, supposedly to watch TV in my house; again, of walking as a teenager with another teenager to a freight car, our tension lit by the darkness we sought, then afterward strongly fled.
Now this man and I stood waiting for my streetcar, which long in coming gave us a chance to smell the nearby French fries and look at each other squarely, trembly, and ask if tomorrow it would rain.
“You’re a smart young man, and I would like very much to see you again.”
“And if I see you, will that make me smarter?”
“Depends on how you feel,” he said, smiling. “Maybe happier.”
“So you think I’m not happy?”
“I do not think you are happy. I think that, like me, you are missing something.”
“So I would be happier afterward?”
“Afterward? I don’t understand ‘afterward.’”
I looked at my reflection in a shop window: pale and slightly unrecognizable in this skirt of darkness.
He extended his hand. We shook hands, his hand somewhat sticky, like a boy’s.
“Goodbye, brief…case,” he said. “Two words.”
“Tschüss,” I said. “One word.”
“Oh, you’ve been to Berlin?”
I had no idea what he meant.
“Not yet.”
I climbed into the streetcar, both of us smiling, the people around him somber. He did not turn and walk off. He was staring at the tracks up ahead. And I left him with more loneliness than we needed.
Ivanov Reyez is a retired English professor. His fiction has appeared in Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy, El Locofoco, Texas Short Stories, 34th Parallel Magazine, Summer's Love, Winter's Discontent: A Fiction Anthology, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in The Sierra Nevada Review, The Mochila Review, El Portal, Eclipse, Belleville Park Pages, Poetica Magazine: Reflections of Jewish Thought, and other journals. He is the author of "Poems, Not Poetry" (Finishing Line Press, 2013).