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Hans and The American Father Town
New Fiction, By Jo Neace Krause

PART I

      Frau Engers was looking at the face of her son. He was seated on the expensive white sofa with his father's photographs spread before him on the table. She sat opposite him on a chaise longue , a delicate white-haired woman, half covered in a blue silk eiderdown and holding a cup of tea in her hand. He came often to look at the album like this, and talk about this man, this American father he had never met.

The son was forty-two, unmarried. His mother was his only intimate. Intimate in the sense that they could spend hours together in stillness, a whole afternoon without the slightest fear of finding out some further thing in the other that might cause a quarrel or fight. For everything had already been found out, everything, years ago.

She could say what she wished to Hans, he gave her such freedom, such lovely peace, so that without guilt she repeated again Sunday after Sunday the endless story of her romance with his father, the American soldier stationed near Cologne in l957. In the past, when Hans was a teenager, she was quick to put her hand on his, in a kind of proud surrender, and toss her head as if flinging tears back out of those fine, clear blue eyes, tears for dreams that had never materialized, dreams that can never come true, she would whisper.

She was a good talker, this little lady, her very soul full of that controlled, intense German energy which seemed to run without exertion out of her rather pretty, slight, and careful mouth. She was fascinated by herself, by her own past , her vigorous and burdensome heritage. Her mother had been Cologne, but her father was Dutch and a prominent businessman. "Papa was caught behind the lines in Holland when Hitler's army rolled in and closed the borders . . . No one dared move in those days," she told him. " And we did not know for months if he were dead or alive. Then some boy got through to us. One of those couriers who made money carrying information by word of mouth to loved ones trapped inside the occupied countries. He always got his pay ,you can be sure of that, for each word from him was like gold, we hung on his ever word. It was he who told us how the Germans were treating the Dutch. They had gone from house to house in Amsterdam and ordered all the men to the street. The frail ones were sent in one direction, the more hardy ones were roped together and marched to a train headed for the labor camps . He saw my father, a very fastidious man who loved good clothes, like all his family, tied with a rope, being lead down the street with a lot of other men. All of them looking beaten , their heads hung down. I keep remembering that. My father with his fine head bowed, his hair falling. The Germans made them look to the ground as they walked.

We waited for this courier, very anxious, like very sick people wait for a doctor. He was a good looking boy, like you Hans, and he and my mother were very friendly, you know. Later he helped my father file reparations orders against the German government. And we got a lot of money that way. Some of it went to my mother who then divorced him, of course. For she was in love with the courier, the young handsome boy. Romance has never been far away from this family."

Hans stared at his mother. Now she was changing. Going downhill. Her little feet sticking out under the blue cover were swollen around the ankles. He had believed she would become moribund and embarrassing with age. But something quite different had happened. She simply became puffed out and sleepy looking like a cat after it licks up all the cream from a bowl. And Hans felt she had licked his father all up; his father was disappearing like a bowl of milk . She was giving him up, letting him die, too lazy to keep summoning him back out of the faded looking photographs. These days she finished off each conversation with the same tired irritability. "Why don't you take the dog and go for a walk!"

But now she lifted her head and put down her tea cup.

" Ah, yes , your father was such a very handsome man!" she said again, a little breathless and roused, " All innocence in the American way of innocence. As if what they know they know only from their movies. What the movies teach them. Nothing else can reach them. So tall a man, and so proud of the world he came from...a little crazy dark place no one ever heard about — Shoulderblade, West Virginia. Among the Appalachian mountains where the men carried guns and vent hunting in the voods for rabbits and little strange animals the names of vitch I can't remember. I think they even raced mules in the street. Or some such thing. Mule races! Yes. And there was this horrible old crumbling stone building, an insane asylum right in the middle of town. Fenced off course, because the place had a history, or what they called history. Each stone had been hand cut by slaves in the last century. Vhich to them is very old history. Darkies, I believe they call them. Schwarzneggers. Who ran away when their Civil War happened. And the local people hunted them down in the hills with guns. Oh, they are all very proud of that, and everyone claims to be old slave holders, wouldn't you know?.

'So I learned a lot from their little newspaper. They have a little weekly rag sheet there that from time to time printed, and still prints a picture of a lynching. It is a favorite of theirs. Verner would show me. Here, he would say, this is the way it is in America. Just to tease me, of course. And I would see this picture: A Negro body hanging from a bridge. What's that supposed to mean to me, I would ask, to a German? After all we've gone through, I ask you? I could never live there. It was not for me. So I told him. Go. My darling, Please go and leave me.

"I am not anything like an American. I am a very cultured woman. Educated. A teacher. I have my life here. I like to dress up, you see that, Hans. With nice jewelry around my throat, and good silky dresses, and shoes. I like to go to the opera and stroll around in museums when the weather is damp and no good outside. My loyalty is to Cologne. I could never go waste away in some little coal cinder of a place like he lived in. It would be a death worse than any bridge death I could imagine. I would rather be some schwartznegger hanging by his neck from the bridge, I tell. So what can I say? Here is a picture of the two of us standing beneath the cathedral, the great spiral catching the sun like it is a rocket exploding against the sky.

"Maybe he knew about you, Hans, maybe not. I forget. I'm getting old. I think I told him, but he was a busy man. Vhat does it matter? He vent back home and vent into politics." His mother's accent grew thick at times with tension. He could feel her tension rise and fall. " They elected him something or other in this town. Mayor. Yes, mayor of that little town. and we wrote each other a lot of letters, then we didn't write so often. I don't know. We forgot about each other. Sometimes he would send a local newspaper with his picture in it, him officiating at some function. Moose Clubs and Little League Games. That kind of deadly stuff. I would look at these photographs and think, oh, my god, how, how, how did we ever become connected, a great old city like Cologne, a Roman settlement since 5O A.D. and all those miserable American army people. Flooding Germany. History is too cruel to the heart. I don't want to talk about it anymore, Hans. I'm very weak today. Why don't you take the dog and go for a walk."

So he took the dog and went out, down the boulevard with a wind beginning to blow from the dock side of the river. A type of anguish was beginning in him, a kind of weight creeping up around his heart with such sharpness he almost cried out. He did in fact catch his breath in such a strange way that it made the dog look around at him. The melancholy had not happened all at once, but had been growing all day and had to do with his mother's swollen ankles and the whiteness around her eyes, an ugly slow decay setting in. Always decay. Nothing could stop it. The only way to escape it was to never have existed. So decay was a privilege, he swung his head and turned down his mouth, and noticed an old woman staring at him . The very privileged misery of living and dying. What if he had missed this anguish? What if he had never been born? Never got to see all this?

The old woman sat across from him on a bench. She was bundled up in the wind with dark heavy clothing, stockings and shoes, a small shriveled face like a heap of raked leaves, waiting for him to do something strange. Even she at one time had been someone's baby he thought in the cold gloom with a hint of a smile. A hundred years ago someone had brushed her bald head and stared with love into her face. It was all so monstrous, so monstrous to be thinking this way. He ran his hand over his eyes which he thought were full of tears, but were dry and beginning to ache.

His mind went back to his father, a naive man from a shabby naive background somewhere in a benighted America. Jokes were made about the people where his father came from. It was all prejudice, but prejudice did not live without its long malignant root into truth, sipping and growing. He knew that. Yet there-there in such a town Hans himself existed! The thought suddenly astounded him. That he should exist somewhere in the minds of a town. Hans as a rumor. People imagining him from time to time. He had flowed into their talk and thoughts It was fascinating. His mother's love letters had of course been passed around to certain people there, discussed with roused fascination. And if he called there? Called the local editor of that newspaper ? His very name would cause excitement. It was as if he existed in two places at the same time. Two lives.

He began to humor himself more and more ; he pulled on the dog's lease to continue the walk. The street was very noisy. All kinds of traffic, new shiny colorful cars like a jungle of birds stirring . And there was a religious procession underway, so he thought it must be Mardi Gras. Yes, Mardi Gras. But he paid so little attention to what happened on the ground. For he was a pilot and his thoughts, like the birds were always on the world above, in the sky. It was the weather that concerned him. Not the Mardi Gras procession. The weather and the clouds, the rising storm clouds. His ears were to the weather, his very skin listened for rain.

Of course he had been to the United States hundreds of times. For he was an airline pilot. He had even been to Pittsburgh many times which was within driving miles of this father who dominated so much of his thinking, but he had never until this day felt the exertion of his father's blood pull him to the countryside. Only now had the idea of actually seeing his father in the flesh had come to him .

He flew for a well known German airlines, and this made him very proud. And it made him see things in a very special way. His eyes could detect something out of line in a second. A pilot must or you know what would happen. He was always seeing to things, straightening things. A crooked lampshade in a room drove him mad. Shoes must be placed close together, ready to go. So didn't it make a tidy sense to go see his father? Keep his life in line? A pilot kept everything lined up, in order. He was an excellent pilot. Everything had to be straight. One mistake and you knew what would happen to you ,Hans, no matter how beautiful your blond German hair.

And he loved the air. He loved the joking men he flew with. They knew about his birth. Pilot error, they laughed with him, and you're not the only one, Hans! Still they treated him a little differently. He could feel they were protective of him somehow, sensing that underneath he felt an emptiness , and had not married. Had no wife. They would go with him to see his father. They would not let him go alone. He adored his friends Klauss and Oscar and Egon.

When Hans walked the dog back to his mother, he patted her like a tame goose. The excitement of his plan was flapping like mad in his mind . He would not tell her yet. But less than a week later he and his friends went off together to West Virginia. They had flown to Pittsburgh and rented a van, now they were headed down Interstate 79, still laughing from the drunken party of the night before where they had women , and dressed up in silly hillbilly costumes , blacked their teeth. Sang songs. And told jokes about hill people. Ah, who made up such twisted little thoughts, he wondered. Those sudden little hate bombs of delight. This was how the secret malice of the world was passed around, really, with wild intimate laughter, these jokes like rude supports under a kind of squirming hate. Let me tell you this one. Why did the hillbilly take a box of tampons to prison with him for? They were still laughing when they got into the small town.

It was late afternoon, the early part of March. The cold was gone, but warm weather had not arrived. They had been on the interstate two and half hours when they came to their exit.

There followed several introductory miles of the usual fast food places, a shopping mall and some gas stations, then the street narrowed and the town expressed itself. A dim greyish light fell over everything like a depression . Welcome to Shoulderblade, W.Va. Home of Buck Latimore. The Singing Humanitarian.

They drove around looking for a motel, talking with great excitement, wondering how the town would react to the news of a former mayor's indiscretion showing up in the flesh. It would cause a big commotion they were certain. But perhaps Hans should stay out of sight for a few days. Perhaps he should call a press conference, with the town's dignitaries or give a private interview to the local news People had no doubt argued about the affaire for years, until it was a sort of ledgend .

Wilson Goodloe stood in the tall windows of his bank in Shoulderblade, and looked absently down the main street. Out of the glare of the setting sun he watched the bright chromium grill work of a strange car approach up the hill and pass in front of him. It was a large Audi with four men in it, laughing and having a good time. The one in the front passenger seat looked like he had his hair dyed yellow. The car crossed the intersection and drove out of sight around the corner. "That's him," Goodloe said to himself without any excitement of thought or feeling.

That morning he had received a call from the town clerk's office informing him of a call from a Pittsburgh attorney who represented a certain Hans Engers, a young man claiming to be Werner Heffner's son by a German woman from days gone by. Heffner had died ten days ago and was buried without fanfare in the local cemetery. Goodloe's bank was trustee to the estate. If it were money the young man was after, Goodloe could tell him to save his gas and milage. There wasn't any.

Goodloe was a busy man. As the wealthy owner of the biggest bank in town (an impressive architectural structure built by his family on foreclosed land mortgages after the collapse of l929), he was protected from all surprises and shocks in this world by a tight little network of sharp listeners. He was the same Goodloe who made national news a few years ago when he threw a man out of the bank for carrying mud in on his shoes. Had the client arrested for destruction of bank property and his account closed out. "And don't you never, never come back in here again!" was his last finger pointing address to the man.

Very few outsiders could add anything to Goodloe's life. The place to comment on his bad grammar or his white polished tennis shoes, was the place your luck ran out in that town. He wondered what Heftner's son thought he could tell people around here, that love could buy you money?

The motel our German pilots picked was being used by a swarm of hunters that week end. Rough looking men milling around in paramilitary garb with slain deers strapped to the tops of cars in the parking lots. The animals had a human quality to them somehow, like slender people prepared for autopsies. Or for strange burials where their enthrals were scraped out .

In the noisy lounge Hans and his friends began to drink with them in a formal reserved manner, but once they had a few more drinks a meanness rose between the two groups. It was Oscar who began to slyly make insinuating remarks about the town. "Because he read on the box you can go horseback riding, swimming and play tennis with them. See? And I hear you strung up some swartznegger here at one time," he began. " From the town bridge. There's a picture around. I 've heard about it. Even in Germany we have heard about that photograph. And I would like to have a copy of the original if I might. I would pay big money for it. Nothing would be considered over my head, as long as it was within reason, of course. And I understand you once had a mayor here who was quite a lady's man, right? What was his name, hu? "

No one knew what the visitors were talking about. Or pretended not to know. The hunters claimed they were from out of town, they had never been to this part of the mountains before. But they had been to Germany. Stationed there in the military, they said. Something they would never forget, for the place was crawling with crazy wild women, the kind who really knew how to take care of a man with a dollar bill in his pocket. They would reach you a drink in one hand and a sweat band in the other, then they'd break your back for the next ten hours. God, did the men around here need the military in those days.

The fight began in the bar and worked its way into the hall with loud curses, grunts, and body slams. From there, it pitched and tumbled out into the parking lot. Off in the distance the police sirens began. Hans was knocked to the ground and kicked. Oscar was punched and dragged by the hair. But Klaus managed to get to the car and drive them out of there before the police arrived. They felt lucky to get away, out of the town and back onto the thruway, that great stretch of road like an international reserve where they felt safe . What on earth had they been thinking about? Coming down here among a bunch of ignorant hicks who would just as soon shoot you as say hello? They began to laugh at what had happened. Why were they acting like this, like a bunch of slumming teenagers? Bumming around? Yet it was wonderful somehow as well. " Did you hear what that one son of a bitch said, Cologne? That's where Nietzsche caught syphilis,right? How would he know something like that?" It was amazing. . And very exciting, except Hans now was very silent, his handsome exquisite face showed stress, as if he were in great pain. "It's my leg," he told them. "I can't bear my leg any longer. I need to have you turn the car around . I want to go back to the hospital. Back to the town."

"Back to the town? Tell me you can't be serious, tell me you can't mean it? Back there? Tell me I didn't hear right!"

But Hans began to scream in agony, until frightened, his friend turned off at the next exit that showed among its signs the blue hospital logo of a stick man lying in a bed. " You go on to Pittsburgh," he told them once they reached the emergency room in Shoulderblade. "I'll keep in touch."

There was no talking to Hans now, standing on his good leg , his face distorted into a mass of misery, he waved them on.

"But don't you think we should wait with you? To see if anything is wrong?

"Of course something is wrong. My leg is broken. I can tell that. You go on , get some sleep before your flights takes off."

So they left him, staring after his disappearing shape between the wide spreading doors. An attendant had come sleepily out and put him in a wheel chair, and wheeled him away, his blond head lying back in pain. There was nothing to do but leave him.

His leg was indeed broken. The bone shattered. A specialist had to be called in to do surgery. Hans was very much taken by this little hospital, The General .So clean and tidy with bright banks of forsythia budding outside the window on the hillside. There was almost no noise, the place was so small. Now and then he could hear a lot of female voices. Nurses breaking out laughing. Everyone seemed to laugh too much, to make up for the lack of words. Out of all these voices and footsteps someone was bound to open his door. A huge laughing face screaming his name. No. A small tiny face, whispering. "So, it is you, Hans Heffner? You have come to us at last. We knew you would come one day."

Now he could think with a clearer mind . His friends had put him off to such a bad start. They were a mistake and a disaster. They could not possibly understand the significance of this event. This event he had been approaching all his life. How could anyone understand it? He lay with his leg elevated, waiting. Ah, what is going to happen to you, Hans, in this little soulless town?

At last the door swung open and the doctor came to see him. Dr. Whitehurst.

Whitehurst was a grey haired man with a tanned , blade like face, a dignified authority figure worthy perhaps even of Hans' secrets and confidences. Hans shook hands with him and asked if he were from this town.

'Why , yes. I know it's hard to believe. A home town doctor that's not Arab or Philippine-o . I tell you we're used to foreigners here." They talked for a few minutes. "You don't know who I am ?" Hans said cautiously.

The doctor was taken up short. He looked quickly at the patient. Of course the accent was strange . "Verner Heffner? Do you know Mayor Verner Heffner?" Hans almost whispered.

"I did know him." the doctor said frankly, but rather off handed." He's dead now. Died just a couple of weeks ago. In fact he died right here in this very room. In the same bed you're lying on."

Hans stared at him, fear rose in his face at the doctor's sudden and unexpected words, at the bizarre thought of lying in his father's death bed. Was it really here, where his own body pressed against the mattress, that his father had met the sting of death? "Are your sure? Are you sure? In this bed? That's remarkable."

'What's so remarkable about it? Many people have died in that bed .Most of them my patients , too, ha ha, but we always remove the mattresses. Give them to the state prison. What might be your interest in Werner?"

"Verner was my father."

"Father? ' The doctor pulled the sheet back from Han's leg and stared at his bruised flesh. He listened to Hans without taking his eyes off the leg as if echoes of Werner were flying out of the depths of the raw, bluish and water logged scar. Hans was saying, "No ,not married. They never married. And it was a terror of mine as a child that I might meet him one day. When I vas a boy, I vas afraid of meeting him. Then I grew up and the terror disappeared. My vision straightened out. I became a man. I flew an airplane. Suddenly I vas no longer afraid and I vanted to see him. Just once. I vanted to meet him and tell him how I knew all about him. I wanted to tell him how I had come to love him. I vanted —" he reached for a glass of water and the doctor lifted his eyes. The manner of the man was very theatrical and childish. But offensive in some way too, like a haughty child who wants to give orders.

And again the doctor was not accustomed to hearing people talk intimately about themselves, and he felt uneasy in the young man's presence. He wondered what this bird would want once the soft hissing language dried away from his lips.

"I'll need someone to show me his grave site. That's about all," he explained. His eyes were steady and coldly scrupulous. The doctor thought it very strange the son did not inquire as the cause of his father's death. It was alcoholism.

"Well, that will take some time. For now, you must stay off this leg, god-dam it. Unless you don't want to lose it. It was a long surgery you know. Sixteen hours in all. You didn't take it as well as I thought you would. You drink a little? Liquor's not good for you. But if you just turn your head and look out the window, you can see the little cemetery where your daddy is sleeping. Up there on the hill among those pines and blooms. I understand how you are longing to go and see his grave. 'Cause we only get one daddy , don't we?"

Hans turned his head and looked away, as if to hide a smirk of a smile on his lips for the doctor's simple-minded manner as he tried to console him. It was all so quaint, so sweet. This must be what his mother had meant by their innocence. He must call her and tell her he had made contact with the town at last.

Go on to Part II

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