An Afternoon in August, 1926

         I never understood my father. That is to say, there was never an understanding between us. Though I was too young to have had any direct experience of this, my mother explained to me during my childhood that my father had not wanted to leave Germany. He was a veteran of the Great War, though he rarely spoke of his experiences or memories from his years in the military.
         He was always a quiet man, though not in the unassuming way that a mouse is quiet, but rather his silent presence was like that of a great and unyielding mountain. He was a very tall man, with broad shoulders and brawny forearms. He had a pale, almost grey complexion and broad, flat, angular features that looked as if they might have been carved from stone.
         One of the few memories I retain of our village was a great and solemn statue which stood in the center of the market square, and I can recall being oddly fixated upon it every time I went to market with my mother. It was the likeness of some minor dignitary, a man standing with one hand clasped in a fist over his breast, and a grimly proud and determined expression eternally on his stone face. As a small child I had always associated this statue with my father, for such was his countenance and poise. There may have even been a time when I believed that the statue was indeed a likeness of my father.
         But I can recall on so many occasions perceiving that same grim, stony determination upon the face of my father as I saw on that of the statue. He wore a sort of sad haughtiness about him, as though he were constantly immersed in the memory of something both very grand and yet which brought him great melancholy. When he did speak, it was in a low, coarse voice, the sort of voice I had imagined a statue might have, one produced by a throat and tongue of stone. He never beat my brother Phillip and I, and indeed hardly reprimanded us, even after great mischief, though to be fair, we were fairly well-behaved. But there was something very terrible, worse than beating or shouting, about the disappointed silence, somehow deeper and more infinite than his usual silence, which followed the exasperated report of some misdeed of Phillip or I by my mother.
         There is one memory that I retain of my father, which in my mind is much clearer and more resistant to the wear of old age upon one’s mind than others. It was summertime, I recall the particular heat of July that year, and I was eight years old. It had been a quiet and non-descript day in our house, and in the afternoon my mother went to the market while my father napped on the battered sofa in our living room. It was in my nature on such days to become restless and bored, so I would roam the house aimlessly, perhaps hoping to happen upon an undiscovered room or passageway.
         At one point, I found myself in the hallway on the second story, which adjoined the two bedrooms of our house; the one which Phillip and I shared, and that of my parents. It was at their door that I found myself staring. When I thought of it, I could not remember ever having been beyond it for any length of time, and my curiosity suddenly peaked. There was some kind of foreboding about my parents’ bedroom which had always prevented me from entering on previous occasions, though on this day I was feeling especially inquisitive. I proceeded slowly down the hallway and, raising my arm cautiously, grasped the cold metal of the tarnished doorknob. My heart raced suddenly, with such fervor that I felt the pounding in my eardrums. Slowly, apprehensively, I turned the knob and began to push the door inwards, as if I feared that too rapid a movement would betray me to some unseen sentinel. The door creaked slightly on its hinges, and then I was inside. The room seemed enormous to me, though it was in fact rather small and cramped. The bed seemed a titanic monolith, the floor, a vast sea of worn, bare floorboards. There was a towering chest of drawers in the corner of the room to my right, which seemed hundreds of miles away. On the wall opposite the bed was a closet, and it was this that caught my eye as a gazed in fearful wonder at this in which I was a trespasser.
         Again with tremendous caution, I made my way around the corner of the bed and approached the closet door, whose dark wooden surface seemed to stretch endlessly upward toward the distant ceiling. I remember with such clarity the sounds which the floorboards made beneath my feet, the creaking and shifting and cracking of the wood, like a chorus of warning voices, baying me turn back. At last, I reached the door, and stretching my arm upward, a grasped the handle and turned it. I had to exert all of the strength in my small body to move the door, which seemed to be of infinite weight. It seemed to resist my intrusion, a gate set to guard some horrible secret. Once it was open, I peered into the dark space beyond, which yawned before me like the black and gaping maw of some monster.
         Above my head I saw a row of shirts hung from a wooden bar which spanned the distance between the walls. Below these, shoved to the remote back of the closed, was a small wooden box, by which I was immediately intrigued. Moving forward and bending low, I drew it toward me, for it was not heavy. With trembling hands, I pried the lid back to find a small pile of photographs. I lifted these from the box and began to shuffle through them. They seemed very old, yellowed with tattered edges, some bearing dark stains and tears. Most of them featured rows of men in military uniforms, with rifles shouldered or carried. On their heads they wore strange helmets with cruel-looking spikes affixed to their domes. One of the photographs, near to the bottom of the pile, was of a single man in similar garb, standing beneath an archway in a cobblestone street. As I found the eyes of this man, I realized that it was my father. Written on his face was the some stony, determined expression that he wore in the present day, but there was more youth and vigor, recognizable even through the dark, fuzzy quality of the picture, and less melancholy in it. Something about seeing my father this way, a soldier, with a rifle and spiked helmet, frightened me. To me, military men had always seemed inhuman, as if they had been only formed to the likeness of men from clay, and were commanded by unseen powers to harm one another. I could remember having seen soldiers in our village at home, but I could not recall ever having seen my father in his uniform. To be suddenly forced to associate my own father with such creatures of destruction and violence was terrifying.
I stared, transfixed at my father’s picture for what seemed to be an eternity, before finally placing the photographs back inside of the box. Next to them sat a small framed portrait, though it was a painting rather than a photograph. It depicted a man, with short grey hair, and a neat grey mustache, turned up like the tusks of a boar at its ends. He wore a military uniform, though his was adorned with many medals and trinkets, and he bore an elegant sword. On his face was a look of such terrible ferocity and haughty wrath that I once again felt fear surface in my heart. His eyes had a look of cold steel about them and seemed to pierce into my very soul. I had not the faintest clue as to the identity of this man, but it did not matter. His likeness frightened me to the depths of my being, and sent terrible chills up and down my spine. The man in the portrait seemed a grotesquely exaggerated version of my father and the other soldiers in the photographs, perhaps the leader of all of the other soulless clay men. The more I stared into his fierce, iron eyes, the more frightened and yet transfixed I became, until I could bear it no longer. I cast the picture aside and stumbled backward through the entrance to the closet. I glanced toward the door to the bedroom, and my heart nearly stopped. There, in a rigid, straight backed pose reminiscent of the photo I had just seen, stood my father. As was inevitable, I, the intruder into this secret sanctum, was caught. There was a silence in the room, as thick and heavy as the August air, as my father stared at me, his eyes boring holes into me. Without a word, he moved forward towards me. I cowered before the closet entrance, bracing myself for reprimanding blows. But they never came. I looked up to discover that he had passed me by, and was now stooping where I had sat moments ago. In his powerful hands he picked up the photographs and portrait which now lay strewn about the closet floor.
For what seemed an eternity, he stared at them, apparently transfixed, as I had been. Then I suddenly realized that he was crying. Though his stony expression remained intact, and his eyes remained fixed, unblinkingly, upon the photographs, there were large, fat tears running down his cheeks. I sat perfectly still, unsure of what to do. I was still afraid of my father, perhaps now more than ever, but now another emotion arose in my mind: pity. Perhaps in that moment I knew that my father was not, could not be one of those soulless clay men, despite the manner in which that photograph of him in military dress had affected me. Such a monster could not shed tears, nor feel sadness or remorse. Just as I began to ponder this new feeling, my father turned toward me. Again, I feared his anger, but the look in his eyes was not one of rage. His tear-streaked face came to bear upon me, and his eyes, red and moist, seemed to beg me. It was an expression I had never seen on his face before, nor on the face of the statue in our village in Germany, nor could I imagine it on the cold, steel face of the man in the painting. It was a pleading look, one which feared above all abandonment and loneliness. It was the face of a man who had known, at some time in his life, a tremendous and irrevocable loss, of a man who had been bereft of something so fundamentally a part of him, that its removal left only a gaping hole in its place.
My father leaned forward, and for the first time in my memory, embraced me. I realized that I too was crying, though I was not why. Such a whirlwind of emotion engulfed me at that point, that I was scarcely aware of time that passed during our embrace, the time which slipped by while I was enclosed in those strong arms. It could have been a minute, an hour, a day; I would not have known the difference.
That is the one memory of my father which remains with absolute clarity in my mind. I have long pondered why this is so, and I realized, much later, that on that day, I saw into the depths of my father’s soul. I saw beneath his stone mask, into the mind and heart of a vulnerable human being, though of course my childish mind could not have even begun to comprehend this. For weeks following the occurrence, I wondered what had made him cry so, and slowly the pity I had felt for him was replaced by guilt. I blamed myself, without making any conscious decision to do so, for upsetting him by trespassing into his hidden, secret box. If my mother had been upset such as he was, she hid it. She tried to explain to me why my father had reacted as he did, saying that the contents of the box reminded him of the Great War, and that it had made him unhappy to be reminded in that way. I did not understand this, and so I blamed myself.
I was plagued by terrific nightmares, most of which featured faceless men in spiked helmets, pounding on the door to my room. They would enter, and I would cower in terror beneath my blanket, desperate to run away but finding myself bound to the spot by a fearful paralysis. They would part ranks, to reveal a lone figure in the middle. Sometimes it was my father, dressed in his military uniform, and others, it was the man from the painting, the man with the look of cold steel in his eyes which terrified me so. He would approach me, and raise an accusing finger, staring right down it at me as if it were a loaded rifle. I would awaken, drenched in sweat and shaking.
I never told Jurgen or my brother Phillip what I saw in my father’s closet, nor of what had passed between us. My father never acknowledged what had happened again, and generally maintained his rigidity and resolute silence ever since.