A quick summary of story–1:
German town Weimar witnesses close affinities shared by childhood friends,
Benedikt Schmidt (Ben), Paul Fischer (Polly) and Lydia Weber. The story ends with Polly’s feelings of his love for Lydia being unrequited.
_____________________________
1939
Goslar, Germany
I joined them on the table for breakfast. Dad was stirring his tea without clinking his spoon against the tea cup; unusual for him. Mom sat across, sipping on hers while looking outside the window with pensive gaze.
“They found him hanging from a ceiling fan. Just two days after we left for Goslar. Aunt Frieda from Weimar visited us yesterday while you were out..” a shril whistle blasted inside my ears that spiralled up and benumbed my brain. It silenced the rest of her sentence.
I had dreamt of Lydia just last week; ambling through a valley of edelweisses, the morning sun scattering just the right amount of glow on her soft cheeks. Her fervent smile deserted her as she approached me. Her porcelain jaws stiffened, when I asked her,
“Did you have any kids with him, Lydia?”
She showed her skeletal ring finger to me that didn’t have any ring on it.
______________________
I too, was a God fearing boy.
I had an inexplicable harmony with words. There in the worlds I’d create in my mind, nobody pitied me for being spindly.
“My verses are people, Lydia. Their syntaxes are their skeletons, their metres, their hearts. They are the kindest people, I know,” I could lay bare my heart before her. Only her.
Lydia would give a hearty ear to my musings on days it used to feel heavy because the world outside had been little too unmindful, little too unbearable.
Ben would chuckle, shaking my chin with his index finger and thumb, “Do they also have beards like your silken turf, Paul?”
The exchange of verses had fallen shorter over the time and I could see Lydia drifting towards valorous anecdotes of war heroes shared by Ben. Humming along to the songs from Wunschkonzert with me had started to feel childish to her, as Ben’s rendition of Erika with chest thumps and foot stomps would give her more thrill now.
Everyone seemed to love being heroic, hearing something heroic, loving someone heroic, while I was left to witness the sand slipping through my fingers. Damn these flimsy fingers.
That gaze that lingered or at times became cheeky. That brush of their hands. Her face flushing with hues of morning rose. The brute in him turning into a butterball when with her. The excuses to stay together more than it was required. The indifference to the world as if it barely existed around them.. I’d see it all, with a heart that would almost forget to beat and ache so intensely, I’d leave them be. Every single time.
The clown still held on to some distant hopeless hope there, until that day..
The ruffians from the downtown had ganged up on me. Ben took it all. The first purple patch under his left eye, the first broken bone. Lydia’s crestfallen face made me lose even that crumbling hope that day. The way she caressed those wounds, her eyes just unnecessarily smitten by his act of bravery, I never knew this Lydia before. She had never been this Lydia with me.
I wish they taught in schools how to tame our inner storms.
I had thought it over hard, many times. Erasing our names together that I had scribbled on the backpages of my diary didn’t help. Breaking that wooden carved heart with ‘Lydia’ engraved in it with a hammer brought even greater pain. I couldn’t remove her from those nooks of my home, I had dreamt her with me.
I could not.
“It’s not just Jews they persecute, Paul. I heard they send gay people to the camps too, where they meet the same fate as that man with amputated leg was subjected to,” Ben had shared with a playful smile after the lunch was over one day.
I got my weapon. People knew that I was a scrawny sissy whereas Ben, a sturdy rough orphan.
I stood before the mirror after I came back home. First I tried to resist it. I struggled to shrug it off my mind. It didn’t yield.
Hands that shook vehemently yet they inflicted those bruises.
Conscience that shrieked yet it dwindled.
With a few blood stains on my trousers, a limp in my walk, and a despondent face, I appeared before my parents. “I always knew Ben was nothing but a hoodlum,” my mom had sunken in chair while my dad darted to catch Ben’s neck.
______________________
I somehow managed to catch his glimpse for one last time that evening, just before my parents and I had to catch the train to flee to Goslar that night. Escorted by two soldiers he had been dragged out from the troop transport truck and almost dumped in front of his uncle’s house. With a bare chest, he had his trousers on with their seams sticking out. They had been pulled up forcibly and haphazardly, one could easily tell.
“Sag es niemandem,” they left after barking at the people present at the scene.
His body looked like someone had splattered the deep purple of Torenia flowers all over it. His face, as if life had been squeezed out of it.
I had killed him that day, there and then, before running away to save my grace..
The dry rye bread waited at the table. I stared at it long, stood up and left, as mom kept calling me from behind.
_______________________
Image courtesy: Unsplash
Glossary:
Wunschkonzert: a musical request programme that used to be aired on radio during those times
Erika: famous German marching song written and composed by Herms Niel in 1938
Sag es niemandem: Don’t tell anyone in German language
Nazi Germany systematically persecuted gay men under an expanded interpretation of Paragraph 175, vie
wing homosexuality as a biological threat to the growth of the Aryan population.
