Metamorphosism

War stories

So the cello duet is beginning to sound a bit like music. The prospect of performing at the recital no longer feels 100% like a looming execution. Now it feels like standing on a diving board blindfolded, not knowing if the pool is empty, full of water, or full of water snakes. I'm saying, it could go either way. We rehearsed the piece several times, five or ten times, and it sounded different each time. A couple of times it sounded fine. One nice thing is, when I really crank my cello, it sounds great. It's not a bad instrument I have. My old rental cellos were like asking a girl to dance and she stands up and has a cast on her foot. This one is like being at a party and everyone is funnier and more charming and you're wondering why they invited you, and will you ever be that funny.

I stopped home after work to pick up the cello before heading to the rehearsal, and Gamma and her friend were like two girl-sized spinning tops made of highly-compressed sugar, spice and 99.6% pure evil. I don't know what Opa gave them to eat. They hid his slippers outside and when he went outside to look for them they locked his ass out of the house and hid the key.

Stuff like that. After he had been nice enough to help them invent cherry juice, squeeze cherries thru a sieve, add a little lime juice, mineral water and sugar. He made me taste it. They washed their hands and used clean implements this time, he assured me. It's safe.

I got back late, checked on Gamma in bed, and mixed Opa and myself gin tonics. It would be a shame to let the expensive limes go bad, is my feeling. It turns out he likes gin tonics. Yeah, I'll have one of those, he said, when I offered it to him.

We talked about mushroom hunting in Carinthia where he is from. We both like looking for chantrelles on rainy days. July ought to be mushroom season there, he thought. And thinking about that got him telling stories about his childhood, when he went without shoes until it snowed, so as to make them last longer, and ate polenta three times a day, with milk if they had it, and meat once a month at most.

He talked about an Allied four-engine aircraft tried to crash land in the mountains near where he lived, but just crashed, and exploded, having been unable to drop leftover bombs first, and how the motors continued on up the hillside several hundred meters and body parts hung from trees. They ran up and looked at the crash site, he and his friends, and scavenged anything they thought looked good while ammunition still exploded around them. One boy carried ammunition belts around his neck. My father-in-law grabbed a life vest.

They threw a dye marker in the creek and the water turned red and a few minutes later the police came, looking for survivors and the boys played dumb.

After the war, they were in the British zone. Once a British soldier drove into the village on a big motorcycle looking for something. When he parked it and walked off they pushed it into the creek and watched from the woods when he came back and looked for it and finally found it and tried to retrieve it, a little puny guy they said, he had a tough time with it.

Some Hungarians passed through town once he said. They had fought with the Germans and wanted, after the war, to avoid being taken prisoner by the Soviets. They had everything, he said. Field kitchen, hospital, 50 or so head of longhorn cattle. Many horses. They stayed in the village for maybe six months. Playing cops and robbers in the hills, he showed me the scar on his wrist, he fell down a steep slope and slashed his wrist open on a rock. It squirted, he held it shut and ran to the Hungarians, who sewed it up for him. After the cattle grazed everything to the ground, they began slaughtering them. They couldn't eat all the beef themselves, everyone in the village got some, he said.

They moved on, and eventually surrendered to the British, who told them they were taking them to a camp but instead handed them over to the Soviets. There is a high bridge, he told me. Now it's a freeway, you hardly notice when you drive over, back then it was more impressive to cross. The British drove them across the bridge, the Soviets waiting on the other side. Many of the Hungarians chose to jump off the bridge. Maybe 200 meters down to the water, he said.

I never eat rabbit, he said. He raised rabbits, but never ate any. Other people ate them. He had a hutch outside. They grazed in a field during the day and went into the hutch at night. He kept one in the kitchen. It used to shit under the credenza and his mother would scold it. And she got the maddest when it would piss on the floor.

Once they found dozens of barrels in a tunnel where creek water flowed through the closed-down iron smelting thing by the iron ore mine, water that had been used to cool the ovens. They had no idea what was in the barrels, which had been stashed there by retreating German soldiers. Twenty minutes later the entire village was in the tunnel with buckets, carrying petroleum home, for lamps, and oil, and fuel.

Once he was standing on a bridge over a creek and a kid shot him in the forehead with a slingshot. We used pieces of slag for our slingshots. I fell into the water, he said. They pulled me out. They also hunted trout with slingshots. They dammed up the creek and waited until trout gathered in the pool. Trout move up and down in still water, he said. You just wait until they are close to the surface and shoot them. I got a couple that way. We built campfires and roasted them. Unfortunately we had no salt.

Once a kid shot a rock with a machinegun he found and fragments ricocheted and injured the kid's eyes.

My father-in-law has a shrapnel scar in his leg from hunting fish with grenades they found once, but he didn't get around to telling me that particular story last night.

He talked about all these things, war from a kid's perspective, for maybe an hour. All the ice cubes in our drinks melted. Then we went to bed.