“Are you GOING home, or LEAVING home?” asks the friendly cabin attendant, as Anna picks a copy of DIE ZEIT, as well as yesterday’s edition of ‘The Globe and Mail.’
“Both,” says Anna, with a shrug. And smiles.
Air Canada has bumped her up to business class, a treat she doesn’t take for granted now that she is retired. Flying mostly Economy is one of those little steps into private life and anonymity that post-employment brings, welcome in a way, but an occasional loss just the same.
Here is the attendant now with a tidy tray of champagne glasses, as well as orange juice. Anna decides against the bubbly. She is so immensely tired, this won’t help. The orange juice is wonderful. As the plane prepares for take-off Anna realizes that the seat next to her will remain empty. She looks out the window, watches the neat, oblong fields in patterns of green, brown and ochre, the rows of white stucco houses, and tidy brick farm buildings, the roads with tiny vehicles, purposefully speeding along, church steeples, and then the horizon dips, disappears altogether as white, tufty clouds swim against the windows.
She closes her eyes to shield them from the bright sun, pulls down the window shade.
“So why ARE you leaving home again?” asks Chris in the next seat.
“Oh, I’ll never resolve that. Just can’t. All my siblings and their families are here, and so many old friends. We are all so close, and I miss them so much. I don’t just want to talk on the phone. I want to SEE them and touch them more often when we speak. Walk in the land I was born in. Do you understand that?”
“Of course, I do.” Chris nods.
“I have very loving friends in Canada also. I used to think the difference had to do with the fact that I speak only English over there, or the fact that I met all of them after the age of twenty-nine. But it isn’t that. It’s a feeling of simply not belonging there. Not the way I belong over here, where I don’t have to explain anything. Occasionally, I feel like an enemy alien, and I’m sure I have plenty of company there, speaking every language under the sun. It sounds awful, I know. Many others thank their stars every day of their Canadian lives that they are no longer at home, having escaped murderous persecution there. And then there are those who barely escaped with their lives, like some Jewish Germans I have met, whose families have thrived in Canada, and yet they too feel an unresolved longing for their hometown, Berlin, as it were, without actually wishing to live there now. It’s that precious suitcase of innocent memories we all left behind. So Canada is home, not ‘zu Hause’, but HOME, because I made it my home. I did that, married a Canadian student in Germany and made Canada my home. That’s where my children are, my grandchild, their lives, the place where we all undertook to make a contribution, and were allowed to make one. We should just be grateful, and I think we are that. We made contributions of our choice. Remember, we used to talk about that all the time?”
“Yup. Karl - remember him? - wondered if his ambition of being a circus acrobat would suffice as a legitimate life, worthwhile contribution. The Serge overheard us talking and came over and told him, ‘one of the most important things we learn in life is to take ourselves seriously, to respect what we want to do, and then do it as well as we can, no matter what anybody else thinks.’”
“Yes, yes, I remember. It started a huge debate.”
“Axel was so surprised. He argued that we had a duty to our society, first and foremost, should serve where we were needed, and Lilly agreed with him, as usual,” Chris smiles.
“They felt, as did our parents’ generation, that ability meant responsibility, as opposed to self-indulgence. I remember being right in the middle, thinking we should always be aware of our community, its needs, and be willing to contribute, but I was hoping, I think, that life would not be a permanent state of the emergency we lived in for so long. It had become almost normal, this adapting to more and more outrage. I was hoping to live with more freedom eventually, if I was going to live, to make choices, whatever they might be. My kids’ generation went a step farther. They used to start a lot of sentences with the words, ‘I owe it to myself—’ but that’s gone now.”
“What were you hoping to do? Do you remember?” says Chris, pulling the red blanket up to his chin.
“Are you cold? Do you want my blanket? I think there were no plans in my head at the time. I didn’t dare make any because I realize today that I was convinced I was going to die, part of me was. So, no — and you? Did you want to do anything with your art? I don’t know if you realize how much we all admired your cartoons. By the way, where’s Tom? Is he -?”
“He must be back there somewhere. Likes the 747s because of the extra head space.”
The cabin attendant touches Anna’s shoulder and offers her a steaming towel.
“Thank you” Anna mumbles, “you can leave one for the young man here. He must have just gone to the washroom.” But the attendant forgets. Anna wipes her face and hands with the hot cloth. How quickly the air dries out up here. She takes a sip from the water bottle, and another.
She reads the menu. They arrive with the wine trolley. An aperitif? A cocktail? Burgundy or Zinfandel, or a white for her lunch, or how about some bubbly now? She has donned her flight socks and pads to the washroom. Brushes her hair. Applies some hand lotion.
The sky stands still outside, the plane as though suspended in time. And yet, over here are two passengers intently peering at their laptops, others welded to their ear phones, watching the news, films.
“Enjoy your salmon, Ma’am,” — the cabin attendant just a little more solicitous even than before. They have fewer passengers to look after up here, but are constantly on their feet, pampering, just the same.
After lunch, Anna considers the movies on offer, but has seen two already and is not tempted by the others. Too tired, such intense few days, packed with constant interaction, communication, love. She lowers the back of her seat.
“Chris! You missed lunch, but I couldn’t see you anywhere.”
“I was back there with Tom and Rudi.”
“Rudi? Do I know him ? Was he with us?”
“Of course, you know him. Short guy with white blond hair, big ears? Don’t you remember Rudi? A prankster. Hungry for punishment he was. Don’t you?”
“No, Chris, I’m sorry. Right now, I can’t seem to. What barrack was he in?”
“Three, I think. Not sure. He wasn’t from Berlin. Here, give me that paper under your glass there.”
“The serviette?”
“Got a fountain pen? Or pencil? I’ll draw him for you.”
“Here you are. Take this. I wonder — oh, oh of course! Chris, how could I ever forget that kid. He was one of Karl’s side-kicks. Did you say he’s back there with Tom? Are they going to come up and say hello? I’D LOVE TO SEE THEM.”
“Later. They’ll come over later.”
“You didn’t tell me if you became an artist or what you ended up doing.”
“Well, I didn’t end up doing very much. There wasn’t time, remember?”
“What, Chris?”
“But Karl, he and a couple of the others, they kept their heads down and made it through to Hennigsdorf, ran plumb into the arms of a Wehrmacht unit, headed for the city. Didn’t look good at first, but because they had some minor scratches, and no weapons, some sensible older officer packed them off to Karl’s ‘aunt’. He did make it to Dresden eventually, and so did Hansi, by the way, a week later. We look in on them from time to time. Hansi tells some tall tales about that left hand of his. His grandkids lap it up.”
“Chris, how do you know all this?”
“We get around a lot, you know. Keep going.”
“I see. Of course, I don’t get over there very often, but I’ve just been back in Stolpe again, walked around the fields. I think I have to give up looking for graves. There aren’t any. But I had really hoped to find a complete roster of names, so I could properly remember them, you know? I just can’t, don’t even recall who all the Berlin boys were.”
“Well, Anna, you might start with the three Hans-Joachims, two of them from Berlin. Do you remember them?”
“Nooo. Yes, I do, Jochen! Didn’t we call one Jochen?”
“There you are. Remember what he looked like?”
“No. I just recall the day you guys first arrived together, with Motz and Eddie in charge, joking that you were the ‘nameless others’ — and now it looks like some of you remained just that. Worse, tens of thousands of families, siblings, after all this time, never heard what happened to their kids, their brothers, never found out where they fought and died. “Missing” is a shabby, dismissive term to be left with.”
“Well, a famous philosopher said there would be peace once again, when the earth would no longer be able to sustain human life.”
“Yes. Chris? Isn’t it true that the youngest are so earnestly searching for one, to learn where they belong, and that’s precisely why it’s easiest to fill that void with attractively packaged garbage? Flavour of the month? Hitler didn’t have a philosophy, he had a strategy, had intentions, remember? Fed by monstrous prejudice and hate, and spread an enormous amount of misinformation. There were slogans. ‘One for All and All for One.’ Remember? There wasn’t ever what you would call a mission statement. I would have been hard pressed to explain what we stood for. You?”
“We didn’t talk about that stuff much. Except with Axel maybe. No. We were pretty preoccupied, as I recall.”
“Surprise.”
“Yes.” Chris looks up from under the blanket. “Did they learn anything, Anna? Is the world better for everybody, for kids? Safer, I mean?”
“Um, that’s a very big question, Chris. In one way, there are big improvements. Everywhere in the world people are more aware, have far more access to information, good and bad. That’s the basis for our actions, after all, our reactions, our values, this freedom to access information. But now that we do have more access, it has become a massive problem of the opposite extreme: we take on the responsibility of really using all this free info, as it’s called today, sort the useful from the propaganda, yes, there still is a lot of that, though much of it is commercial now. We are much better off, in that way. At the same time it brings a lot of stress to people’s lives, this daily obligation to keep ‘informed’, much like the child’s task to eat everything on the plate, because there are children starving in Africa.”
“What do you mean, Anna? Why wouldn’t a child eat up? What does it have to do with Africa?”
“Well, grandparents in particular still feel very guilty about throwing out food. The idea of people elsewhere starving, while we are wasting it here—”.
“Oh, I see, yes, I understand, the memory. People are starving in Africa?”
“Yes, they are. They have been for a long time.”
Chris looks at her intently. “I can’t imagine this being a problem, Anna, feeling obliged to stay informed, I mean. It’s a treasure to me, that thought. I guess it follows that you learn a lot of bad stuff, like about starvation in other countries. But then you also hear what’s being done to fix it. No?”
“Yes and no. There are a lot of organizations that help in emergencies, many of them from Germany too, but it never seems enough. Then, science has made enormous progress, for good and bad. There are new ways to solve problems. These days I just keep thinking of the people whose talent, ideas and caring we LOST. Do you know that many millions of people died as a result of the Second World War? In Russia, all over Europe, Asia — think of the potential for advancing humanity, bringing about change. Making the world more fair-minded.
Now school systems in most countries I know of have improved a lot. Teachers on the whole try to get kids to cooperate with each other, get the idea across that society thrives when people work together, but then they come out of school or university and are immediately rewarded for competing, cheating, betraying and exploiting weaker people. This has become a blight on all of humanity. Has set us back to the times of the industrial revolution almost. Extreme selfishness is in vogue, and I really don’t know where it’s going to end. I hate to depress you, but that’s where the world is today. I worry about my little granddaughter, and her entire generation, not to mention the next.”
“Don’t worry. We don’t get depressed. I mean when you’re dead, it’s over, right? Like you’re not scared of dying or anything. But we watch a lot of movies up here. They have changed, haven’t they? There was one with these huge spaceships coming out of the sky, over New York, I think it was, and these immense, mean, ugly creatures sending these awful messages — I mean, what’s going on? What kind of art is that?”
“Not art, Chris, those scary uglies, that’s us. That’s who we have become, sending death and destruction down on those below us. And with an awesome sense of entitlement. We’re Superman, we really believe that. Our way is to be the new order of the world. Violence is very chic, Chris. It’s a form of acceptable pornography, and there’s no end in sight. A constant demonization of ‘those other guys.’”
“You know what? Hitler would have loved it.”
“Of course.”
“Well, yes, but I don’t know that I would have made any difference, changed all that much in the end, Anna. Or Tom, or Eddie. My cartoons, all those pigs with straight tails and those kids walking on their hands, what kind of protest is that? I wasn’t trying to change anything. I was just being silly, share a joke.”
“Chris. Cartoonists can play a huge part in the way people perceive and react to developments in society and their world. You were just a kid. The best are masters at clarification, really interpret what’s going on. At least they make people think and that’s all you can ask for. Take them to the trough, to SEE the water. Whether or not they’re going to drink and how much to drink, is up to them, isn’t it?”
“Not me. I hate the stuff. Always have.” Chris grins.
“I just realized a while ago that I always had this urge to rush through my life. Felt a huge anxiety about never being able, taking the time, to do anything well enough. Can you relate to that?”
“Oh yes, but only at the end, those weeks in Stolpe, when, you know—.”
The flight attendant has placed the ‘duty free’ catalogue in Anna’s lap. She sips from the water bottle and looks through the pages. There is nothing here that she uses or wants to give away to a friend, and the trolley moves on.
The young man in front of her watches a movie featuring mega-crisis: death and destruction raining down on a room full of civilized men and women, looking alarmed, and a weirdly costumed hero, guns blazing from both hips, rushing to the rescue. Tried and true formula. Only the good guys are getting stranger and stranger. Are looking so scary, so inhuman.
“Chris? Chris, what are you doing sitting with that guy? Looking at that awful movie?”
“Hey, don’t knock it! Did you see that scene just now, that enormous POWWWW, behind him there? What they can do with computers is really and truly awesome.”
“Yes, it is. What do you know about computers, Chris?”
“Listen, every other guy who comes in here carries one of those flat things and opens it right up.”
“Laptops, yes. You—”
“The technology is one thing that has gone absolutely nuts. These planes. We’ve gone on the Concorde to Paris, but Tom likes the 747 the best. I guess I told you already. More room.”
“Yes. Chris, this is so nice, so totally wonderful to run into you here. Such a treat. I fly back to Germany at least once a year, and now, after all this time, what a treat!”
“Anna? The stuff you talked with Fritze about? All that? When you went to the old field with your friend and her dogs? Don’t go looking any more, okay, Anna? That’s not where we are. We dug our own graves, only we didn’t know it at the time. Rainer made a joke once about digging a grave for a very long dragon. He wasn’t so far off. But it doesn’t matter. WE don’t go there any more. We just go where we want to be, when you talk about us, think about us. We are alright, Anna. We really are alright. Do you know what I mean?”
“Well, I’m listening. It sounds so—”
“So good. It sounds good. And it is.” He pauses for a moment. “Will they ever get it right, Anna? Real peace? What do they say in your Canada?”
“In my Canada they spend time and money keeping bullies apart. It helps, but we are still working on the project of ‘Real Peace’ that we endlessly talked about in Stolpe. We'll get there because we have to. And we can.”
“Hey, I'll tell the guys! Remember, we're watching. I have to go now, but I'll see you again soon.”
“Chris? Tell Tom that — that we still believe there’s hope. The Scots people have an ancient motto that says: there are no strangers, just friends you have yet to meet.”
“Please fasten your seat belt now. There’s some turbulence ahead. The Captain has switched on the seat belt sign,” and the cabin attendant points. “Sorry to waken you.”
“Oh, I wasn’t asleep,” says Anna. “I was talking to an old friend here.” There is only the crumpled blanket in the next seat. She smiles.
“We’ll be landing in about fifty-five minutes, would you like some coffee now?” Would she.
Anna has left the plane, carrying her attaché case and purse through the gangway, when she remembers Chris’s drawing. She turns and runs back in. Finds her seat.
“Did you leave anything behind?” says the cabin attendant. “Can I help?”
“Just a little doodle on a paper napkin, a funny face my friend drew for me,” Anna says. “I thought it might be on the floor, but I think it has been cleared away already. It’s gone.” And she slowly returns to the exit.
The kids are at the airport, Emily holding flowers!
“Welcome home, Ami,” says the colourful sign in her granddaughter’s hands, she on Anthony’s shoulders in her World Wildlife t-shirt.
Welcome Home!