Be Inspired ...

"…A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her."
David Brinkley

Did we have enough bricks? How would we use them, Siggi and I?

* * *

After an eternity, a quarter century, my new life was almost normal and ranged from office boredom to marital happiness but was interspersed with an occasional hint of my ghosts. For the most part, at this time I was still not sure what these were, how many were hiding within me, or that they even existed. So far I had suffered the math test ghost, the speaking ghost, and long forgotten shadows of others. But I did not think of them as being uncommon, as my personal ghosts, because I thought that everyone suffered similar anxieties to varying degrees, mainly because I had never enjoyed an easy life.

Siggi and I came into this world in a country at war with itself and with many other countries as well. We had lived in deep poverty while suffering through scores of vicious court processes. Our Progenitors’ War continued well into our college years, when mother still sued father and father still sued mother. And Teufi sued all of us. After eighteen years there was nothing left to loot from us, and true to a parallel timeworn cliché, this war would not end until the fat lawyers sang.

Someday there would be other such bands to enhance the lives of our families, Siggi’s and mine, even though we would still be innocent creatures who continued to live within the law and tried to never harm anyone.

Before the end of the Progenitors’ War, we were uprooted from our homeland and shipped to America where we worked in slavery. Then we struggled through college. In later years, when I would examine our past and would briefly mention something about it to other people, I expected them to query me more about our tribulations because these had been so prolonged, so intense and so out of the ordinary. I was proud that we had survived them, thrived in spite of them, and felt that Siggi and I deserved a little empathy and recognition for this. But people usually would not show much interest and simply reply that our struggles had built character. Therefore we must be robust characters and a part of the backbone of humanity. But we would also learn that such statements were often just lip service, and that there would be less and less demand for such backbone. We would learn that being a vertebra would too often result into what hundreds of web sites claim that, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

* * *

Linda and I moved to Seattle and began our new jobs, she with an engineering firm, I in an architect’s office. She finished four years of studies in three years, even while changing her major three times, and I earned a five-year degree with little financial support from anyone. My curriculum took me six years to complete since I had to skip one semester to catch up on my earnings, had worked during college, and had suffered a few setbacks in the battles with my unascertained ghosts. Early on we decided that we deserved an elevating experience since we both had worked so hard for so long, and it did not take us long to conclude that we wanted to travel.

As we formed our travel plans, we discovered that it would not take all that long to save enough for a trip around the world. And save we did. With this prospect, it was not too difficult to squirrel away all of Linda’s paycheck and some of mine, if we bought only the absolute necessities. I had always survived on next to nothing, and Linda’s ancestor’s had worn skirts and played bagpipes in Scotland.

* * *

After Siggi and I graduated from college we became American citizens. Now we were worthy of it.

* * *

As our lives were changing rapidly in America, those of our parents were improving as well. Siggi was going for his Ph.D., while Pa and Ma, bitter enemies for more than twenty years, had found new friends. Each other. Yes, each other! After all, they were born on the same day and that made them friends, even though at times, one had wanted to kill the other. One year after my graduation Ma wrote me:

“…I have to praise Herbert. He did only what he thought was right, everything else he did not care for.”

“I have to listen every Sunday afternoon to his complaints about the unnecessary things that his Teufi is pursuing. He has only me and Dr. Lupfer, and no other place in this world where he can seek refuge from the horrors he has at home.”

“Now Teufi wants to get rid of him since at the present time there is little construction activity. She has already rented out the architect’s office. He is supposed to leave the house because she wants to rent it out for five hundred marks. She does not buy any more food for him and he says he is very depressed. Since I am dependent on him I am very worried about him.

“He claimed before the court that his office was in her name and he only had an income of two hundred marks a month as her ‘construction supervisor.’ He paid taxes on this income but never received any of these wages. (Think about this!)”

This evokes my ever more favorite expression, Weird, weird, weird!

“According to the advice of an attorney, she is supposed to pay him twenty-one thousand marks immediately. Now it goes with him exactly like the three of us in the past. He is living on the edge of a bed!”

“I have to laugh but this situation cannot continue because it is very serious. And since he could not pay me my one hundred twenty-five marks for the last two months, I was forced to think: ‘We four, you and Siggi, he and I, are sitting in the same boat, I mean according to the law. And I hope that this matter sinks into your consciousness.’

“Even though he was in bondage with Teufi for fourteen years and forgot about us, it serves no purpose to hold this against him. He has to be kept alive because he is a very capable architect, and Ami, you could learn more from him than any other person.

“Therefore I am pleading with you, since he is now having a difficult time, facing divorce and other catastrophes, to write him a nice letter here in Rheinfelden and not to Weil, so that he has some comfort, joy and support in his difficult days. Sometimes he is optimistic and sees golden mountains for the day that he is divorced…”

Ma also sent me the following clipping from a newspaper:

“Successfully Completed In America.

“Weil-on-the-Rhine. Ami Neuman, a son of the Weil architect Herbert Neuman, has completed his examinations as a graduate engineer with great success in the University Pullman, (America). Our best wishes to the young building master.”

In this article, someone had subtly advertised an architect’s business by taking credit for my success, to show the world how capable we are, we Neumans. Bring us your design projects. We are the best; we are international.

Through all the years, our parents had never gloated, “We forged our sons into heroes.” Not once did they praise Siggi and me personally for our great efforts or congratulate us for our accomplishments. They did not ask, did we scorch your souls? Not once did they tell us that they were sorry for giving us such an interesting life. They did not ask, how agonizing was your slavery so far from home? They did not ask, did you learn anything?

As always, I read Ma’s letters and paper clippings quickly and then forgot about them; it was unmanly to wallow in parental love and affection. It was too overpowering; I would get bruised. But there are always the reminders such as: “Johnny’s going fishing with daddy.” There are those yearly shopping frenzies with hints of religious tunes and colorful lights that cast such long shadows.

* * *

After working full-time for one and a half years, Linda and I quit our jobs because we had saved enough to begin our first major trip. We made arrangements to cruise for two months to Europe by way of the Pacific, then travel there for three months before cruising home for another month across the Atlantic and back through the Panama Canal. In retrospect this had been a very wise decision, for nowadays it would be difficult for most people to save enough to be able to do this, partly because of the long-term devaluation of the dollar vis-à-vis many other currencies.

I announced to my office that I was quitting but did not volunteer our plans because I was still modest and did not want to show off. I did not want anyone to think that I was better off than anyone else. I knew how rotten life could be and did not want to gloat about being in any way superior to others. However, upon persistent questioning I revealed more and more of what my wife and I intended to do and was greeted with an odd reaction from a few of my colleagues. I did not realize that the basis of their reactions was emotional, one of envy. I did not understand this until much later, for strangely, I could not remember having experienced such a feeling myself. I only became directly aware of envy when someone felt my sleeve to check if my shirt were wool or flannel and observed that person’s reaction. I was not bothered that Maxo owned the tideland, and I owned nothing in the sense that I felt that it should be mine. Maxo insisted that someone had paid for our trip or that we had borrowed it. Could he have been envious, because he refused to believe that Linda and I had earned it ourselves?

To this day I still don’t know why I am devoid of envy. Maybe it was bombed, beaten and starved out of me and was replaced by different kinds of ghosts. I’ve also never felt really tempted to steal anything, except cow feed from my masters.

* * *

As we were packing to move out of our apartment to begin our voyage around the world, Linda said to me:

“We are out of boxes. Could you please go to the store and get some more?”

“Sure Sweetie Pie, I can handle that,” I told her and went out. I sat down to start our Volkswagen and wondered what I had to do. What am I doing here?

I drove away and somehow arrived at the supermarket. I could not remember where to find it, or how I found it, but somehow returned home with cardboard boxes. After we finished cleaning and packing, we started driving to Linda’s parents in the fun city of Elko, Nevada. Eventually this gold mining and gambling town would be designated “The Best Little City in America,” properly advertised, complete with logo.

I was driving. My mind was empty. We arrived in Salem, Oregon, after dark and pulled up to a fast-food drive-in. Cars were buzzing all around us. I had a brief flash in my mind that these were kids cruising main street since it was Friday night, and that’s what they do on such a night. They were searching for that elusive contact. Cruising was rooted in the ancient mating dance of the species, the American Graffiti. This insight came and left again seconds later.

“What are these people doing? Why are they just driving around?” I asked Linda from out of my fog.

She gave me a worried look, saying: “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I think I answered. I think I lied. I didn’t understand the meaning of her question, or why she had asked it.

We bought something to eat and continued on our way south. I did manage somehow to stick a hamburger into my mouth and swallow it. Outside of town there was little traffic on the dark highway. I didn’t know that I was driving and weaved down the road while crossing the centerline repeatedly. Linda asked me again if I were OK. I was once more in an intelligence vacuum because there was not a thought in my brain; I was barely aware of my own existence. In spite of her continued requests to let her drive, I blithely continued while barely paying attention to what I was doing. I was ignorant of her worries for our safety and told her that I was OK because I didn’t know that I wasn’t. Unbeknownst to me, my brain had shut down again the way it had after I came out of the hospital lacking two inches of finger. Like then, I somehow functioned but again, I did not know how.

Miraculously we arrived in Elko without an accident and stayed a few days with Linda’s parents. I did not talk much and slipped in and out of lalaland during most of our visit. Linda’s mother asked me to mail a package. I didn’t know where to find the post office five blocks away, how I arrived there, or if I mailed it. To this day I still wonder why I did not drive around aimlessly until I ran out of gas or did not crash into cars and buildings. Linda’s father took me to a pasture to look at some Hereford cows. As soon as we climbed the fence, they ran up to greet us. Befuddled, I thought they were going to attack us, so I jumped back over the fence. Later I didn’t think that Charlie was impressed with his son-in-law’s courage. Had I been in a lucid state of mind, I would have known that those cows were normally harmless. Why did this happen again? Could it be a reaction to chemicals? Hope it’s not my ghosts. They are difficult to find and harder to slay.

Both times I had taken in foreign substances. For my gangrene there had been anesthesia, huge amounts of antibiotics and painkillers. This time it could have been the shots for yellow fever, typhoid, typhus, polio, etc. that were required for our voyage. We had to be inoculated numerous times over several weeks to be able to ward off these diseases.

Linda’s parents drove us to San Francisco where we toured around the Bay Area and also visited Seal Rocks. There was a coin-operated scale at the visitor center that foretold the future. I weighed myself and read my fortune: “You are going to travel around the world.” Had this scale been located at the pier, I would not have been surprised by this prediction, but it was miles away from one. Coincidence or divine foresight by a mechanical device?

* * *

We embarked on our ship, the “SS Oronsay.” Our stateroom, a tiny cabin much like a coffin just big enough for sleeping, rocking and barfing, was located below the water line. There was also a driveshaft spinning inside our coffin. This did not matter much because we were headed to many exotic places and planned to stay on the upper decks during most of our waking hours. We were scheduled to cruise to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Then we were to continue to India, the Middle East, through the Mediterranean Sea and on to England. But because of sunken ships from the Arab/Israeli war, the Suez Canal was closed. Therefore our itinerary was changed to bypass India and the Middle East, two places that we really wanted to visit and were rerouted around Africa.

As we approached Japan we sailed roller-coaster-like through the fringes of a typhoon. My necktie on the doorknob was our rock ’n roll indicator; it seemed to swing with a more or less steady rhythm, thirty-some degrees to the left, likewise to the right. This was my second storm at sea, and I wondered how many more we would have to suffer through on this trip. Nightfall arrived. The tossing about of our ship caused me severe fright and such claustrophobia that I was able to stay in our cabin, a tempestuous bunker, for only brief moments. I felt as if our ship had been abandoned since I seemed to be the only passenger staggering around the lounges and hallways, while Linda stayed in her bunk bed below the pounding ocean. The doctor gave her an injection to ameliorate her seasickness. I wanted to comfort her but always had to leave our coffin quickly because of my fright, while she seemed to be too ill or too doped up to care if our ship tipped over.

It did not help my confidence that crewmembers were raising the doorsills to the outside with boards, to keep out the sea that was crashing onto the decks. To allay my fears and get some rest, I tried to analyze the action of the waves and the twisting of the ship to reach an objective conclusion about its seaworthiness. I figured that there was no way that it would not burst its seams because even the floor tiles were popping off the bending steel structure. Our ship creaked, groaned and crackled everywhere I went; there was no escape from it. Intermittently it bounced with an agonizing crunch that felt and sounded as if it had hit a mogul on a downhill ski run. I heard a crash. A piano ripped from its tie-down and smashed into a wall. Someone sailed from his top bunk, mattress and all, and broke his ankle. Breakfast dishes set up in the evening jumped the rails around the tabletops and were sliding back and forth in pieces across the floor. Lone crewmembers scurried about.

I spent most of that night stumbling around our ship feeling like a caged lion. I climbed the ship’s ladders and experienced variable gravity. Climbing, while the ship went downward, I floated upward as the support gave away under me. I felt almost weightless. Conversely, when the ship rose under me my weight seemed to double. I was a tiny bug on a twig bouncing about on a raging river.

Not being able to tolerate my confinement anymore, dwelling in the agony inside our ship, I burst to the outside even though this was strictly forbidden. This little bug could get blown away and drown. When I opened the door to escape from my cage, an invisible force pulled it outward. It drew me out while sucking the air from my lungs as well. Ducking into the storm, while clutching the handrails, I worked my way toward the front of our ship. Screaming and whistling, it plowed through the night. I worried about my hair, was it planted firmly enough or would my scalp be bare?

The bow smashed into a wall of water that rolled toward the stern. Our world tilted upward, then downward, as we descended into the valley to crash into the next mountain. Liquid thunder roared through the night. White water raced past our ship into the blackness behind. Intermittently twinkling stars rolled about in the black sky somewhere above. I tottered upward toward the stern. As I approached it, an invisible mountain rose into the black void beyond. I knew it was there because the gale ripped white water from it that reflected the glow from our lights. While I clung to the rail, I craned my neck to find the peak of this rising mountain. It blocked my view of the stars; it devoured them.

The bow dove down again as we plunged into the next valley, to labor up another mountain. Reversing directions, the stern rounded the top of the wave, and the ship shuddered as its propellers rose out of the sea, revving up speed as they churned the air. Before we schussed down the next slope of water, I stared down into the abyss where moments before a mountain had been, the next one emerging to lift us again toward the sky.

This was a roaring time to pray.

We were tossed through the night on a wild roller coaster ride. It gave me the greatest thrill of my life, while at the same time terrifying me as much as the conflagrations of my infant days.

But I did not barf.

However, I did propose to Linda that we debark in Yokohama, fly to Australia, from winter to summer, and meet the “Oronsay” there. But we quickly abandoned this idea since it was too costly, and we would miss many, many wonderful places along the way.

The next day the raging fury ceased and the sea calmed again. I thanked God that we had survived. A news bulletin reported that a lumber ship had broken apart not far from us. After a good rest the following night, our trepidation became a faded memory as we continued to steam toward a new continent.

In Japan we rode a bullet train, a rocket flying just above ground. We raced in taxis at great speeds and followed other vehicles much too closely as well. We learned why many of the taxi drivers strengthened their necks by lifting car tires with them. Linda left white-knuckle marks in their seats instead. We were overawed by the ornate temples of Kyoto and saw the three monkeys who heard, saw and spoke no evil. We toured the Golden Palace, admired Geisha girls, and savored exotic foods and sake.

We toured Hong Kong, a most vibrant city, in rickshaws pulled by barefoot coolies. We enjoyed a nine-course dinner while delighting in the dancing of glittering girls, fiery dragons and smashing gongs. There could have been some male dancers also, but I don’t remember. We cruised around a floating city where more than 200,000 people lived on wooden junks and sampans. Families shared their boats with pigs and chickens, and there were floating stores and floating schools as well. Boys dove from the high poops of their junks into the harbor poop to retrieve the coins that were tossed to them from our ship high above them. A caring mother in an open sampan, carrying her baby on her back, cooked a meal over an open fire, all the while trying to catch our offerings with a butterfly-catching net which had a very long handle.

Thousands of refugees from Red China also lived on the hillsides in squalor under scraps of tin and cardboard. They enjoyed the same luxury that I had savored only eight years before in my tideland shack. Many had no toilets either. However destitute, these people with little education were striving to improve their lot through hope, vision and hard work. Their poverty gave them incentive; they were not paid to sit and mope and pout. And the fruits of their labors were not stolen through excessive taxation.

Even though Hong Kong has essentially no natural resources, it was a wealth-creation haven for two major reasons: low taxes and “cheap” labor of thousands of immigrants. The highest income tax rate there was only fifteen, now seventeen percent, which was paid by only the wealthiest. Average families paid no income taxes at all. Consequently many Hong Kong middle class families would become multi-millionaires in spite of accommodating tens of thousands of impoverished refugees over a period of many years.

I can hear it again, “Yeah, but they have cheap…. but they shouldn’t… but I had a bad childhood… but…” I’m only the messenger of these facts.

* * *

Near the Celebes, we levitated peacefully in a lifeless space through the hot, still air over the glass-smooth Banda Sea. The pale-blue sea merged with the pale-blue hazy sky at an indistinguishable horizon. The empty sea joined the empty sky and became one. In the far distance the vague image of a blue cone of a volcano floated into nothingness.

Our peaceful glide continued uninterrupted for more than two weeks, as the “Oronsay” steamed south along with the east coast of Australia on the starboard side and the Great Barrier Reef portside for one thousand and two hundred miles. Lounging on deck chairs and basking in the sun, Linda and I observed crewmembers dump oblong sailcloth bags overboard and wondered if these contained bodies of erstwhile people. We had heard that the thrill of the typhoon had triggered heart attacks in some passengers. If they had died it was no use to keep them onboard because they had a better place to visit.

In December, summertime in Australia, we visited Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Fremantle. The Sydney Opera House by the harbor was still under construction and would be an inspiring landmark. Its design represented a cluster of billowing sails built of concrete and covered with snow-white tiles. Its final costs would far exceed the initial estimates, but it would be worth it, for it will be enjoyed for generations to come, and few will ask how much it cost but many will appreciate its function and beauty.

The harbor of Melbourne was open and unprotected. As the “Oronsay” approached it, a stiff breeze was blowing from the sea pushing her toward the dock. To prevent a collision, two tugboats guided her there to moor broadside. To resist the force of the wind, they pulled our ship seaward under full power with arm-thick hawsers tied to her bow and stern. When we neared the dock these snapped in quick succession, and the wind and waves pushed our huge ship into it, thus adding additional dents to her sides and to her pride.

* * *

Sailing across another broad expanse of ocean, the Indian Ocean, we visited the ports of Durban and Capetown, South Africa, and later to Dakar, Senegal, on the west coast of the African continent. We anchored outside the Capetown harbor for most of the afternoon before going ashore. While waiting, we lounged on deck watching the bustle in the harbor. Capetown is located at the southern tip of the continent, where its high plateau terminates abruptly at a barren vertical cliff called Table Mountain. The sky was cloudless except for one fascinating cloud. It was the “cloth” on the Table, a flat, white cloud that spread thinly over its flat summit. It formed from the moist, warm air that rose from the sea to condense as fog at the top because it was cooler there. This thin layer of fog then slowly slid back down over the edge of the table, draping itself down the cliff like a cloth, like a dissipating slow-motion waterfall, dissolving again in the warmer air at the lower elevations.

At night we visited the top of Devil’s Peak outside the city. From there we admired the Table Mountain cliff again. Illuminated by floodlights, it hung like a surrealistic luminous curtain from the starlit sky over the sparkling lights of the city.

Apartheid, separation, in this case mostly blacks from whites, was still enforced in South Africa. While traveling there, I made it a point to sit on benches marked for “Non-whites Only” and purchased food at “Non-Europeans Only” counters. I was more brown than white, and I was not European anymore. However, the race police did not seem to pay any attention to me. I could have been mistaken for a colored, or a civilized wild man, because I was tanned by the sun and the sea and sported a mane that was tousled by stiff ocean breezes.

We visited a Zulu village with huts built of whips and reeds. My eyes popped out while seriously studying comparative anatomy of the half-bare women going about their business. Balancing urns and baskets on their heads, they walked as regally as any queen, and when we asked them to dance for us, they did and their children as well.

* * *

After visiting Dakar, and sailing through yet another storm, the “Oronsay” arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, on New Year’s Eve Day. There we boarded a train towards Rheinfelden to visit Ma, whom I still prefer to call Linda’s mother-in-law or Siggi’s mother. We tried to sleep on the train while traveling across Spain but were awakened by Spaniards serenading in the New Year. Even though we were very tired from the stormy night before, we greatly enjoyed their fiery spirit and boisterous singing.

After crossing the Pyrenees we arrived in Périgueux, Southern France. Here we were supposed to change to an express train to continue to Basel, Switzerland, but nobody had told us that, or we had not understood our instructions in a foreign language. Since we were exhausted, we did not pay attention to our itinerary and arrived late at night in Paris instead. Because we had missed our transfer, we ended up in a place hundreds of kilometers from where we wanted to be.

While Linda guarded our many suitcases in a freezing snowstorm, I went to the railroad ticket office and tried to convince the agents there that we should be able to travel to Basel without having to pay for our detour around France. After a lengthy discussion in French, which strained my brain, they agreed that we could do so. We boarded an express and fell asleep but were later awakened by a conductor who insisted that we had no valid tickets. Sacre bleu. I could not stimulate my French brain cells enough to explain to him that we had permission from Paris to travel without fare, and therefore we had to pay him on the spot for our unintended journey.

We arrived in Basel early in the morning and were so tired that we did not want to change to another train for the last sixteen kilometers to Rheinfelden where Ma was still living. Instead, we checked into a hotel for a few hours to rest and bathe before commencing the short final leg of our long migration.

Although Ma had two bedrooms and had insisted that we stay with her, we were unable to do so. Her apartment was brimming with junk which was powdered with ancient dust. Therefore, while in the city of my birth, Linda and I resided at a nearby hotel, Die Saengerhalle, the same hotel where Siggi and I had practiced in the dance hall with the orchestra. This was also the hotel where Pa had resided between WWII and the official start of the Progenitors’ War and had almost succeeded in killing himself during a three-day drunken stupor. Fortunately, or unfortunately, his friend, Dr. Lupfer, had found him stark naked and had revived him. This was now the base to which we returned intermittently during our travels around Europe via Eurailpasses. At those times we would also visit Ma, but only for an hour or two at a time, because that was all the motherly love and heart-warming home décor that I could withstand.

She was still living in the apartment where Siggi and I had lived before our exportation to the States. Her collection filled every room. One day while Linda and I were visiting in her cocoon, we heard a knock at its entrance. Ma clambered through her dark vestibule to answer the door, and I heard her talk to someone in a low voice. She returned without mentioning this visitor, so I inquired as to who had been there. “Oh, nobody,” she replied with downcast eyes.

When we ended our visit sometime later, we bid her farewell on the stair landing outside her apartment. There was a door which closed off the stairs up to the attic. I received Ma’s brain waves and asked her casually if I could open that door.

She squealed: “No, please don’t open that door. Please Ami, don’t!”

Now that I was enlightened, I made it a point to disobey her because I suffered a short bout of delayed and suppressed teenage rebellion. Very slowly, to create and stretch tension, to rattle the skeletons in her attic, I nerve-wrackingly slowly pushed down the door handle and mind-twistingly slowly opened the door. On the bottom steps of the dark stairway stood a gentleman dressed in a black power suit, holding a black briefcase, brazenly tipping his black bowler hat with a smile. It must have been the only such hat in Germany because I had never seen them before in this land. He greeted us with a graceful bow, “Guten Tag,” good day, and exhibited no embarrassment whatsoever. Linda and I said not a word and descended the stairs.

* * *

While Ma continued to live in her own world at Werderstrasse 3, Pa and Teufi had moved to Weil-on-the-Rhine, apparently at a time when they still liked each other. Again, the architect’s office was in the basement of the new multi-family house that they had built with the help of our money, Siggi’s and mine. On impulse Linda and I stopped there to visit. We rang the doorbell and seconds later the electric lock returned a buzz. Upstairs, Teufi greeted us at the lead glass doors to the vestibule of the apartment and seemed embarrassed and somewhat frightened when she recognized me. Would I harm her? Would I stuff my second mother deep into the precious possessions of my first mother where no one would ever find her?

Her chubby cheeks flushed as I remembered them from before, and she graciously announced that Pa did not live there anymore. A new door had been cut into the clay tile sidewall from the staircase, next to the lead glass entrance. The irony of what goes around, comes around, was that Pa resided now in one room by himself because his sweetheart had thrown him out, but only after she had cleaned him out. As Ma had written to me, “he lives on the edge of a bed,” meaning that his bed was now the center of his existence, as it had been for the three of us in the prison in our previous mansion and our subsequent attic.

This mystery may remain forever unsolved: How did our second mother receive everything we owned with one or two court processes, while our first mother had not even been able to extract a meager living for the three of us with twenty such cases? Was it because our first mother wore homespun knit stockings and our second mother wore lipstick and false eyelashes? Was it because Ma had gray hair and massaged everyone with brutal truth, while Teufi oozed a gooey demeanor? Was it because Teufi soothed lawyers standing at stud? Had she promised a judge an orchard or a forest if he would help steal from us? Or was it simply that people who decided the fates of children were ignorant or inhumane?

Teufi invited us into her apartment and retrieved Pa from his mattress to join us. With its dark wood paneling, her apartment was even more luxurious than the one in Rheinfelden. Since I felt no animosity towards anyone, not even towards my father or his Teufi, another defect in my personality, the four of us had a congenial visit. Teufi served us liqueur, and I never thought that she might have enhanced my drink until after I downed it. Then I remembered that she and Pa had wanted to render the three of us stiff, had talked about poisoning us, when we were cold, hungry and forgotten in our Hardtstrasse prison.

We had a warm reunion.

Often Linda and I had no plans for our travels and had told them that we had Eurailpasses, and that we would probably travel the next day to Spain. Frequently we boarded the first express to a city or country where we hadn’t been before and found of interest. When we arrived at the station, however, we did not want to wait so long for a train to Spain; instead we boarded one to visit some cousins in nearby Kandern. While there, savoring Rhine wine and homemade plum cake, Pa walked in and was very astonished to see us. I felt that he was not so much surprised that we didn’t travel to Spain, but that we might have complained to our relatives about his treatment of us. If he indeed thought this, he was wrong because I never had, nor very rarely ever would, complain to other people about Teufi, Ma or Pa, except what I have written herein.

“Na, da schauts her, look at that, I thought you went to Spain.”

“We had to wait too long for that train. So we came here instead.”

Linda and I were so independent and without plans that not even we knew what country we would be in on any one day. To us it did not matter where we were headed because all of Europe was a playground, rich in history and overwhelming culture. If the first train departed to Austria where we had not been before, we boarded it. That is how we crisscrossed Europe for three months. To manage to do so, we slept often on the trains and subsisted mostly on cheese, French bread, Cokes, oranges and chocolate bars. Occasionally we ate warm meals and took baths while recuperating in hotels or bed and breakfast establishments.

While my architecture classmates were busily preparing for their state examinations, I was blissfully traveling around Europe with my beautiful bride. Others were crawling around the jungles of Vietnam and for what reasons I did not know.

During our worldwide travels we tasted a broad spectrum of many natural wonders, societies and cultures, and to describe this would fill volumes. We toured up the mountains in Japan and cruised down rivers in Australia. We visited palaces and castles, took in Renaissance paintings and admired Roman sculptures. We felt the spirits of the ancient Druids at Stonehenge and lingered in enormous Gothic cathedrals, such as in Cologne and Paris. We suffered concentration camps and museums filled with medieval torture devices. We dwelled in old villages and vibrant cities; we dined royally in castles and slept occasionally, unwittingly, in houses of prostitution.

Our experiences were as varied as the types of toilet paper that we came in contact with. Because we could not afford any during our early years, I was quite interested in this item while traveling hither and yon, so much so that we collected samples. These ranged from double-ought sandpaper to slick magazine types. This valuable commodity was even rationed in the restrooms of an Italian railroad station. A woman sat at the doorway and dispensed several sheets to each customer on his or her way in, and there was no more to be had later, unless one were skilled enough to negotiate very complicated, multilingual, international transactions with one’s pants down!

* * *

We looked for Nessie in the loch and listened to bagpipes in the land of Linda’s ancestors. We traveled from Sweden to Sicily, from Lisbon to Salzburg. We browsed the Louvre and the buildings designed by Le Corbusier, we wandered in the streets of Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles, as well as many others. We took a photo of the little bronze Mannekinpis going full bore in Brussels. Since we were on a very tight budget, we often slept on trains in first class compartments that were our real mobile homes. We could fall asleep in one country and wake up in another. We were mostly by ourselves and our infrequent companions were other Americans doing the same. We moved around so much that in our travels we met by chance two Canadian girls, three different times, in different countries.

On the rocky island of Capri off the coast of Naples, we climbed down a cliff to the Blue Grotto and passed by a lonely girl sitting on a rock. We said “Hi” because she appeared to be another American, and she returned our greeting. From Naples we traveled to the toe of Italy and wondered why so many people were heading north, while our train was nearly empty. These travelers also carried lots of luggage and resembled the refugees with whom Ma, Siggi and I had traveled after World War II so long ago.

From the toe of Italy we sailed between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea to Sicily. We saw only a few people there, and they advised us to leave again as soon as possible because earthquakes had been devastating this area. These islanders made us nervous because they eyed us suspiciously. They must have been wondering why two obvious Yankees arrived here during the tremors, when most everyone else was fleeing. Although we wanted to wait for a calmer sea, we returned on the next ship, to sail again past the Devil, because we did want to suffer his fury in this land.

Returning northward again, we stopped in Venice and checked into a hotel. We washed our socks in the bidet, even though people normally used it for something else. Then we rested. Later we strolled along the canals, always curious, always camera ready. Headless, naked rabbits and chickens were hanging in a butcher shop window, where the door stood open and a cat had sneaked in. While it was pawing at the choicest rabbit, I recorded this on film. This was the perfect picture of the cat and the rabbit that I wanted to present to Ma as a possible title picture for her new cookbook, should she be inspired by it to write one for people who were homeless.

In Venice we also visited the Doges’ Palace and other sights on Saint Mark's Square. Among the many life-size marble statues was one of great intrigue. One naked wrestler held another one upside down around the waist, who in turn firmly gripped him by his forty-carat jewels. As with poems, there must be a deeper meaning represented in this sculpture.

We traveled high through the Swiss Alps and looked down from heaven at twinkling villages drifting dreamlike far below in the pale blue moonlight on the snow. Linda was frightened that our train might fall off the sheer cliffs, and I wondered about the same but told her that we were in heaven. We traveled overnight from Oslo to Bergen through miles of snow tunnels. High up on the steep sides of deep fjords, our train raced through such heavy snow that, at times, we could see only a white sheet in front of our window.

In Stockholm we visited Skansen Park where it was so cold that squirrels climbed up my pants with needle-sharp claws, begging me to feed them.

Back in Basel, we visited museums to admire everything from solid gold sculptures from Europe to woodcarvings from Africa.

Not finding a trail because of fog and deep snow, we hiked through a forest up a steep mountain to the Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps. After an arduous climb we arrived at the gate on the opposite side and discovered a road leading up to it. We toured this castle and admired the many treasures, one of which was King Ludwig’s bed. Its canopy sprouted dozens of replicas of ornate cathedral spires that were carved from wood by two artisans over a period of two years.

On a subsequent trip to Europe we rode up to this same castle in a horse-drawn carriage. It was obvious that Neuschwanstein had been the inspiration for the Disneyland fantasy castle. We visited two other palaces of King Ludwig as well, Hohenschwangau and Linderhof. Numerous fountains in manicured gardens surrounded this small but very lavishly adorned chateau. Inside were many rooms with carved and gilded walls, mirrors and dozens of treasures. There was a chandelier of intricately carved ivory like no other in the world. In spite of this concentrated wealth, there were no visible guards or obvious signs of security measures other than glass cases and doors with locks.

* * *

In Amsterdam we lugged our suitcases from the train to find a hotel. Buildings in various interesting architectural styles bordered the streets and the canals. Within a short distance from the railroad station a sign advertised Rooms and we checked in. Our matronly hostess led us to a room on the second floor, and I asked her where we could board a boat to tour around the many canals. As she gave me directions, I leaned out of the window to survey the scene below but was distracted by the image of a girl in a mirror next door. Naively I assumed nothing. At nightfall, and after eating our usual rations in our room, we went for a walk. Not far away a girl was sitting in a window, but she was wearing surprisingly little. Linda and I continued our stroll and observed numerous scantily dressed girls tanning in the moonlight. Men were standing in line on the sidewalk outside of these parlors, extremely patiently, waiting their turns to get tanned, tuned, or toned down. Was the bowler-hat man the only one in Ma’s attic?

We witnessed a fascinating scene through one of these moon-tanning windows: a sitting maiden with long, bare legs and big boobs ballooning out of a tiny top. My eyes bugged out and I became confused; Linda pushed them back into their sockets. I felt the closeness of my wife and reached for her hand as we continued our walk through this ancient culture of the second oldest profession.

My eyes popped out again when I saw this woman a second time, smiling mysteriously and wiggling her legs and the contents of her brassiere for me. I wished her bubbles to fall out and was disappointed when they didn’t. On our stroll we spied many more girls in various places, in various poses, in different settings. Some were in dark doorways, some in mirrors and others were lit by candlelight behind sheer drapes that were screening the mysteries of this international city.

After our cultural veneration, Linda and I returned to our room and spent a restful night in what we finally realized was an adult entertainment club. Together.

Were these adults mothers? Did their mothers know they bore adults? These Dutch people were not like the ones in Uncle Fullo’s church who didn't drink, dance, play cards, or watch movies.

* * *

Our experience in Amsterdam was so enlightening that fate provided an encore not long thereafter. When we arrived in Frankfurt one evening, we discovered an illuminated display in the railroad station which listed the many hotels in the city. It also informed us that there was not a single room vacancy. Since we could not afford to hire a taxi to cruise around to find accommodations, and since we were limited as to how far we could walk with our heavy luggage, we walked down the most promising-looking street. We entered the first hotel that we came to and the female clerk at the reception desk said:

“Yes, we have rooms and I will take care of him,” while pointing directly at me. I did not know what she meant by this because she never took care of me.

Linda and I lugged our suitcases up the dark stairs, down the dark hall, into a dreary room with a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. We did not like this place but we were tired and relieved to find a room at all. After we deposited our stuff we went back out to find something to eat. Two American girls happened to walk by and appeared to be as lost as we had been a short time before. We informed them about the hotel vacancies and invited them to stay with us. But like us, they felt uncertain and therefore declined our offer.

By the time we finished our dinner, the automobile traffic had not diminished as is normal after working hours in the center of big cities. It was actually increasing. Again we went window-shopping as we had done in Amsterdam. When we looked into what we thought to be a store window, my eyes popped out again, and this was a persistent problem for me on this voyage. Color photos advertised what was being sold here. They showed naked women, with men…

As in Amsterdam, we had unwittingly stayed again in a red light district. A fortyish woman approached men on the sidewalk to drum up some kind of business. When we passed her, she did not try to enlist me, as it was obvious that I was with my wife.

After absorbing this high culture, Linda and I returned to our room. Since I was a hero, I had the courage to go to the bathroom first. I tiptoed down a dank and dark hallway and around a scary corner. Dirt caked to walls, floors and ceilings. I summoned intense willpower to levitate myself into the room because I did not want to get stuck to the grimy floor or to the throne connected to a sewer pipe.

When it was Linda’s turn, I guarded her zealously outside the door. Afterwards we washed in the sink in our room, and when we threw back the covers of our bed, we discovered that it had been slept in the night before. Or a few hours before, a few weeks or many times before. Do the guests here need protection?

To protect ourselves, we slept in our clothes and put clean “cases” on our pillows, two of my tee shirts. We left them there when we split again from this five-star rated establishment because we did not want to get polluted. We spent a fitful night rolling around because the traffic roar did not die down until about four o’clock in the morning. I studied the proletarian wisdom scratched on the wall next to our bed. It was in English and spelled correctly. The mysterious Kilroy who seemed to have preceded us everywhere in the world had left a note that he had been here also.

We rose in mid-morning and I surveyed the street below. There she was again and still drumming up some kind of business. She caught one, a customer, a male in his forties who was unbuttoning his overcoat as he followed a few steps behind her. They entered the building across the street, probably a type of hotel like the one in which we were staying. I looked at my watch and observed the entrance. Ten and one-half minutes later this man came back out by himself, buttoning up his coat, obviously having drummed his business.

* * *

On our cruise back to the United States we steamed through the Panama Canal and returned to San Francisco. Several years later we would cruise partway into this canal again, have a party on Lake Gatun, and return back out to admire the Cuna Indians on the San Blas Islands. When our ship anchored offshore of these small islands, beautifully dressed women met us in their wooden dugout canoes. One caring mother kept her very young, stark naked baby with her in her rocking little boat. She had stained it, the baby, with a black dye-like substance to protect it from the fireball in the sky, and to keep it cool she intermittently splashed it with seawater. Judging by my rooftop tanning experiences, that blackened little baby was tougher than this sun-fried baby had ever been.

The Cuna tribe lived in huts on tiny islands, coral peaks daylighting from reefs below, and in a lifestyle that I had only dreamed about as a youth. These little people were hardy because they had no electricity, except for a few car batteries, and collected the rain that flowed from their huts into their canoes parked beside them. All the females wore brightly colored molas, dresses sewn together in intricate cloth patchworks of unique geometric designs. Supposedly these Indians used to paint these designs on their bodies but were prompted by a missionary to get dressed. Did the Cunas ask the missionary to go naked and paint clothes on his or her body?

We met a little mola-dressed girl who had two of the saddest eyes that I had ever seen. They were so big, and so deep, that I could see the shadows in her soul. Around her delicate bare neck she wore a necklace of unprotected double-sided razor blades.

* * *

After our initial half-year long adventure, Linda and I returned to the Seattle area to find new jobs. For the next few years, I worked with several architectural firms, which included a three-man office, as well as the largest one in Washington. Over the years I realized that architects belonged to an unstable profession. Many lost their jobs frequently, thus forcing them to move from office to office, depending on the booms and busts in the construction industry. An affirmation of this was that only three alumni from my architecture class attended our twenty-year college reunion, and they all worked for state transportation departments.

Not long after we returned from our trip around the world, another ghost began to haunt me, and for the first time. The midnight ghost. It reared its ugly presence probably because I must have suffered from an unrecognized depression, having to return from our careless lifetime adventure back to the workers’ rats’ race paradise. My first visit to the land of my birth must have torn open old wounds in my soul and up to this time, I didn’t know that this ghost existed. It was the meanest one by far, the persistent and punctual midnight ghost. It woke me frequently, and strangely, almost always at the same time, within fifteen minutes of one hour after midnight. What terrors created my midnight ghost so long ago?

Once this ghost woke me, it would ruin my following day, even if I had been awake for only a short time. My head would hurt, and I would be totally exhausted. I always worried that my co-workers would guess that I was a wreck, and that I would perform my job poorly. But I did not complain to anyone because this could be a good reason to be fired. And I often wondered when I would make a big mistake, such as placing a column in a doorway or not allowing enough headroom for some mechanical equipment. Fortunately I never made such mistakes, always received excellent performance reviews and was never fired or laid off from any position that I ever held during my career in architecture.

My midnight ghost was almost always controlled by the alarm clock. It usually zapped me when this inanimate object dictated my schedule. I usually slept soundly Friday and Saturday nights and during vacations. Since I have become self-employed, and I set the alarm clock only when absolutely necessary, my midnight ghost bothers me only occasionally and mostly during the dreary winter months.

* * *

When Linda and I returned another time to Europe, we naturally stopped again in Rheinfelden to visit her mother-in-law who was such an attraction. She claimed that this time she was ready to accommodate her loving children. Previously we had spent a lot of money for a hotel only several blocks from her because her apartment was a garbage dump. With great anticipation, she wrote us that she had asked Siggi what she could do to make us feel at home. He had told her that there were only two conditions, to clean a room for us and not to badger us with advice.

We arrived at her apartment at ten o’clock at night to find that Ma could not break her old tradition.

Nothing had changed. Nothing was ready.

Even though Linda and I were exhausted from jetlag, we had to rearrange junk until midnight to clear a place in her wilderness. Instead of resting, we wrestled with our mattress, which caused our nerves to become wired, while our lungs vacuumed the valuable microscopic and larger particles which covered everything, even though we were careful not to stir them up during our attempt to establish a campsite. But after a few hours of restless bouncing around our bivouac, we were too exhausted to rest, so we rose to play cards until six-thirty in the morning, after which we caught the first train out of town to somewhere. Anywhere.

Ma twittered that her stuff couldn’t possibly hurt us, but if we wanted to avoid her generous hospitality when we returned again to our home base, Pa, like a devoted father, would pay for our stay at a new bed and breakfast that he had designed in Loerrach. When we returned from an excursion, we moved there as she had suggested. Pa confirmed that he would pay, and I can’t remember if I believed him. As we prepared to depart again some days later, and it was time to pay for our stay, Pa conveniently suffered a heart attack and stayed in a hospital. We did not visit him there because spending two or three days every decade with one’s father had already been excessive. Ma gave us almost three hundred marks to pay for what Pa had promised to pay. She retrieved it from a secret place in her nesting material and said that she would recover it from Papa. Ha, ha, ha! Since I had served for years as her object of catharsis, and she had sent me into unexpected slavery, I accepted her offer. Letting her pay for our room was by far my most extreme act of purposeful unkindness toward anybody.

At some point a man must lose his patience.

* * *

Before Linda and I had left on this particular trip to Europe, we had made reservations for our hotel rooms while traveling through the Communist dictatorships of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. We had to pass through these countries to get back and forth to Greece where we had arranged for a Mediterranean cruise. We rented a car in Germany and drove eastward to Czechoslovakia where important men with grim faces, carrying efficient killing devices, guarded its border. To keep people in. One of them opened our luggage and searched only through our travel literature and did not seem to be interested in our camera equipment or anything else.

I wanted to take a photo of a flying squirrel gliding from tree to tree near the customs house, but an official “No Picture Taking” sign forbade anyone to do so. Reluctantly I complied because I did not want to tempt the sub-machine guns. In this country we found many such signs forbidding people to photograph important installations such as railroad stations, power substations and bridges.

We arrived at the Karlstein castle, parked our car and hiked up a narrow road to the top of the hill while the faint fanfare of trumpets grew ever louder. After a final turn, we squarely faced the entrance to this imposing castle. Its drawbridge was down and four men wearing colorful medieval costumes stood in the openings of the battlements above. We imagined that they were blowing their long bugles that were festooned with medieval banners just for us, because we were the only visitors here, and therefore they gave us a hero’s welcome.

We strolled around Prague, the city of spires, to its numerous steeples, carvings and sculptures. These adorned everything: bridges, sidewalks, buildings and parks. But strangely, much of this beauty was coated with black soot. The socialistic dogma inspired no one to maintain the treasures of their foremothers and forefathers, and sadly, since we in America can’t wait for the soot of ages to accumulate on our heritage, we decorate much of our landscape with garbage.

In Bratislava we were lost. Using gestures, we tried to ask two peasant women for directions while pointing to our map. When they seemed to indicate that they were also heading our way, we invited them to ride with us and after many miles they asked us to stop to let them out. It took us a while to realize that we were far from where we wanted to be, and that they were probably at their destination.

On our way to Pezinok we thumped along a single lane road that was built with pre-cast concrete planks, laid side by side. Therefore we could not drive very fast, and while traveling through a dark forest, we met a black car full of cigar-smoking macho men. They stopped us and asked us, “Wohin? Where to?”

“Pezinok.”

We had a definite feeling that they were monitoring our progress through their country. It took us most of one day to travel only a short distance through Czechoslovakia, mainly because we were often stuck in an unending line of slow-moving diesel trucks, puffing huge clouds of black exhaust. This made it difficult for us to see ahead to pass them. We rolled our windows up and down at intervals, up to keep out the fumes, down to catch a breeze to cool off. Our routine was determined by the intensity of the fumes and heat that we could suffer inside our small car. Our endless processions passed through many villages, which were spaced a few kilometers apart, generously blessing their populace with noise, soot and carbon monoxide.

In Pezinok we drove to the hotel where we had made reservations through the Czechoslovakian state travel office. No one spoke English, French, High or Low German, or so it seemed. Even though we presented our official reservation papers for this hotel, the clerk indicated that he had no room for us. Later that day we realized that he probably wanted a bribe from us, especially since we saw no other guests there. Since we offered him nothing and kept saying something like Cedok, the name of the state travel office, he finally assigned us a room.

After checking in, we ordered dinner in the empty hotel restaurant. I drooled over the menu and ordered Steak Tartar, since I always go for the wildest, the mostest, the fastest, and the weirdest. When my steak arrived I was truly grateful because it looked like it had been tenderized in the old tradition, under a bareback pony rider while galloping across the steppes of Asia. Although this raw meat was pale, tender and very delicious, I worried about the seat. But my concern was unfounded because I had the stamina of a great Tartar and suffered no uncomfortable aftereffects.

While crossing the Czech-Hungarian border, we had to drive through a depression filled with some kind of fluid. I asked the hitchhiker who traveled with us about the purpose of this wheel wash. He explained that it was to disinfect the vehicles coming from the neighboring country; that was the official explanation, he said, but the real reason was to insult the neighboring country. He also told us that he had waited all night at this border crossing to get permission to leave, and that only “trusted” people were allowed to do so.

After sightseeing in Budapest, we had dinner with wine by a window open to the still, warm summer night, while our souls were soothed with melodies from live Hungarian violins.

This was life. This was heaven.

At the border crossing into Yugoslavia, a customs official came down our line of waiting cars and asked us if we were Americans. Of course we were, therefore he barely looked at our passports and waved us ahead, so we could continue our journey without delay. As Americans it was easy to get into Marshal Tito’s country, some of which is now called Bosnia. To his countrymen we looked so much like Yankees that when I bought some postcards, without saying a word, the clerk told me in English how much they would cost. This also happened in Germany when I addressed strangers in German, and they would answer me in English.

While driving to Belgrade, we stopped in the town of Niš and found a historical monument, a tower of bleached human skulls. These human skulls were all cemented together, their dark eye sockets silently gazing eerily through the glass coffin that mirrored the stained glass windows of the sheltering outer tower. During the fourteenth century, armies had come from the east, killing millions of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. The killers then erected towers of the skulls of these brothers and sisters as reminders as to whose god was in control. We learned on our travels that the people who created the most cadavers were too often in control.

* * *

We drove into Greece to Thessaloniki and continued through the Larisa Plain, to the Valley of the Meteora. These meteora were huge individual precipitous rocks that rose from the broad valley floor. During the time when invaders from the East had built skull towers such as the one in Niš, Greek monks had built monasteries on top of some two dozen of these stone pinnacles to isolate themselves. At one time they were only accessible by means of a rope and basket or a series of retractable ladders. Now only six of these cloisters remain. They are quite well preserved, and one of them covers the entire peak of a monolith like a crown.

Not far away from this area, one of these giant rocks had a cavity halfway up its smooth side that was big enough for a house. A house stuck in the belly button of a mountain that even now could only be accessed with a rope ladder. There was also a clothesline but no fence to keep people from falling from this lofty perch so high up above.

In Athens Linda and I visited the Acropolis to meet Zeus, chief god of the ancient Greeks, but he was not home. In the young night we sat in his temple ruins under a half moon to sense its history, to admire its culture, to visit its people. We walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down into an ancient amphitheater that had been built into the side of the rock. It was brightly lit and a cast of characters, wearing long white robes, practiced a play about the people from so long ago.

The next morning we waited for the right light to photograph the Acropolis from a distance, and what a spectacular picture we caught.

The Greeks were very friendly to us. When we could not decipher the restaurant menus, they sometimes invited us into their kitchens to let us taste the different foods simmering there. Once a cook came out and retrieved a bare leg of lamb from under a café chair where it had been stored. We also saw such a naked leg, strapped crossways, catching a ride, on the back of a motorbike traveling through the city.

From Athens we cruised to the islands of Rhodes, Crete, Santorini, Mykonos and Delos. We anchored beneath the barren cliffs of Santorini, one of the places where Atlantis might have disappeared into the sea. We rode donkeys up a steep narrow path to the top of the black rock cliff where snow-white cubes of houses huddled together. They all seemed to have been freshly whitewashed, many of the narrow paths between them as well, and at the end of the day the setting sun changed them to orange and pink.

We sailed through the Sea of Marmara to Istanbul, whose skyline sprouted hundreds of domes and minarets. We visited a mosque where men washed their feet at the spigots on an outside wall before entering to worship. In this bustling city many big, old American cars mingled with men and beasts that were loaded with burden, while numerous merchants were hawking their wares. We strolled through the Grand Bazaar with hundreds of shops that offered everything from goatskins to brass housewares. At the Topkapi Palace we admired the collection of royal treasures which ranged from an ornate gold cradle to a fist-sized diamond.

* * *

After we returned from our cruise, we retrieved our rental car and drove from the Greek mainland to the peninsula over a high bridge. Had we not looked aside, we would have missed it because we did not know that it existed. It was the Corinth Canal, a deep vertical cut into the sandstone up to two hundred-sixty feet deep and almost four miles long.

We visited the Oracle of Delphi, where a stout woman in a peasant dress was leaning into a rope and pulling a carved stone on rollers, to help rebuild a column of an ancient ruin. Here our spirits soared with the eagles that circled above. We learned that life is a journey into the unknown, and there is much to be discovered. Set free your imagination and unyieldingly follow your goals because even a slave can eventually soar with eagles.

We traveled back to Yugoslavia through Kotor and northward up the Dalmatian coast to the ancient city of Dubrovnik on the Adriatic Sea. Twice we walked around this old city along the top of its meters-thick solid rock wall. It was so high that we could overlook the red tile roofs of the multistory dwellings that bordered the narrow alleys below. Its main plaza was paved with light-colored cobblestones that were shimmering as if they just had been polished.

From Dubrovnik we hiked out into the country. When we returned in the evening, we were puzzled about an ever-louder murmur that eventually became discernable as voices as we re-entered this city. Multitudes of people were crowding sidewalks, leaning from windows, standing in doorways, and were all engrossed in conversations. Even though we could not understand a word, we greatly enjoyed their visitation frenzy. Later we learned that their nightly tradition is called korzo. So what were they talking about day after day? I’ve attended annual company picnics where most everyone quietly stared at each other, and into space, as if to search for the magnificent insignificance of being there.

* * *

With uncontrollable joy and overwhelming anticipation, back in the city where I was born, we dropped in again at Linda’s mother-in-law’s. She had a visitor sitting in her nest. Pa! That’s right, our father sat in the nest of our mother. Ma and Pa were happily nestled together in eclectic garbage. And they were not even beating each other with two-by-fours or lawyers; they had no black eyes, cuts or bruises. Only empty pockets. This was the first time in my life that I ever saw my parents congenially together and having a light-hearted conversation. It seemed that under our circumstances I had had an extremely long life, having survived half of the thousand-year Reich, and then some. What is going on here? Did a black hole pass through our solar system and warp everything? Do empty pocket books foster congeniality in parents?

Pa was jovial and as rotund as ever. He wore a snow-white shirt with very long sleeves, as well as fine suit pants that were also far too long. He still looked like a banker, albeit, a shrunken one. Maybe he planned to grow some more so that he could be as tall as Siggi and I. Now Pa was the centerpiece in our asylum and was totally out of place, like all the other objects that surrounded him.

When Ma is gone, I will sculpt an interpretive center from the contents of our sanctuary. It will be two stories high and two blocks long. It will be named: “The Summation of the Tortures and Pleasures of Ami and Siggi.”

Pa nursed a bottle of wine that he had brought with him. The wine was for him, not for us, so he could drink to our well-being. He wanted us to be well in spite of his being. Ma was still pure and did not drink; she will always be pure regarding alcohol, or so I think. After fighting each other all of our lives, Siggi’s and mine, our parents were now the best of friends. They were each other’s only friends, companions in suffering. He had a minor problem in that he could not decide whether to love us or to kill us. Teufi had treated him as he had treated us, when she took his fortune and discarded him as he had discarded us. This led to the expression: “What is good enough for the goose, and her little goslings, is good enough for the gander.” Is there still room for him in the attic?

They told us that Ma had found a girlfriend for Pa from a lonely-hearts column in a national magazine. Ma found boyfriends in attics. Pa was now living with the lady of Ma’s choice, and her name was Hella. They lived together in her home near Munich and were enjoying a luxurious life, even though he owned nothing. Even the suit he was currently wearing had belonged to Hella’s husband who had long since died. Graciously, Pa invited Linda and me to visit them at Lake Starnberg, and we set a date to stay with him for a few days.

When we arrived there, there was a surprise visitor, half-brother Oliver, son of Linda’s father-in-law and Teufi. He was tall, had long hair and was a rock musician with a see-through electric guitar. Oliver was much younger than I, and we did not have much to say to each other.

That evening I drove him home to Munich and went with him up to his apartment. Sadly, Teufi, my other mama, was not there or was hiding in a closet. Her apartment oozed wealth with its glass and chrome furniture, and a real tiger skin with a head, tail and paws clawed the wall. After Teufi had sold our house and architect’s office, after she had legally gotten rid of Pa, she invested a lot of her loot with two American shysters, Bobby and Bernie, who then robbed her of part of our inheritance. What went around, came around; the irony for our Teufi. Should we be sad about this or should we be glad, Siggi and I?

After dark I said good-bye to Oliver and returned to Hella’s house. It occurred to me that I could have robbed Teufi of my tiger, but I did not think of it at the time. While I was thinking of this, and was about to curse myself, something appeared in my headlights. A lonely, long-legged tigress was leaning against her car, and I would have stopped to help, had she not wanted to help me. To help me she waved the most beautiful leg that I had ever seen in my lights on a dark highway. In good conscience I ignored her call but was sure that my chivalrous father would have helped her. I was confused, still, or again. Did she need help? Or did I?

* * *

Hella served us a delicious dinner and afterwards we nursed from a big bottle of wine. She asked Linda and me to drink to our friendship, and we did so with interlocking arms. She was a lady. Linda and Hella were ladies. Now we could address Hella with the informal German Du, instead of the formal Sie.

Later that evening, Pa cried a few tears about his mother, who had died of cancer, but Siggi and I never knew this because she had departed long before we were born. No one had ever talked about her, nor about any of our relatives who had died before we were old enough to know that children had relatives. German and family history must be kept secret; it could be detrimental to our psyches. Even old family photos that we would find over the years had family members cut or torn away. Now I stroked Pa’s shoulders to dry his tears. I knew how tough it could be for a man to lose his mother. These were my thoughts and these were my actions toward my father, my Buskohl, during this joyful night, and, as Dave Barry is wont to say…

Linda and I stayed in the guesthouse that Hella had built to accommodate refugees after World War II. It was a requirement of the Lastenausgleich, equalization of burden, law. This law required people who had not lost their dwellings during the war to shelter the homeless, either in one’s home if one was lucky enough to still have one, or to build a new one to help accommodate them. Hella could afford to do so because she owned a factory, as well as a villa by Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

On an early Monday afternoon Pa and I drove with Hella’s new BMW to the Munich Oktoberfest which seemed to be the oldest, biggest, loudest and longest recurring party in the history of mankind. Linda stayed behind to read a book; she could not visit much with Hella, because they did not speak a common language. When we arrived there, this Fest was already revving up for another week with rivers of beer and mountains of food disappearing into thousands of bellies. We sat in the tent erected by Lowenbrau, one of the more than three hundred breweries in the state of Bavaria. Steer number fifty-six was skewering, to be devoured by the barbarians sitting at long, heavy, wooden tables. Father and I emptied giant glass steins and also helped make the steer disappear. He showed off his son to the revelers around us and lied to them with a smirking face:

“This is my son from America. He is a reporter for Time magazine.”

“Oooh, ahhh,” they smiled their replies.

In all the tents oompah bands played oompah, and before long all the bodies bobbed and howled with the oompah. The pressure of downed beer sent us weaving out of the oompah and towards the pissoir. In the men’s department, Pa parted his coat, humbly bowed his head, opened his fly and splashed into the trough. I took his picture, because one always takes pictures at family reunions, especially during moments to be remembered. At this moment my father was getting a hold of himself, with hands that painted beautiful pictures and played melodious music, with hands that also beat wives and fondled stray buttocks.

Afterwards we strolled among the tents, the crowds and the food booths. We took in the smells of hundreds of barbecued chickens, trout and the sounds of dozens of bands, and when Pa was all partied out we returned home again. During this visit with my father, one of the longest ever, we never talked about our good old days, about what he had done for us all of our lives to help mold strong characters, Siggi’s and mine. We had never talked about it before and would never do so in the future.

* * *

Linda and I returned to Rheinfelden for a reunion with another shred of our runted and stunted family. We took Ma for a drive around the Black Forest. Little white-haired Ma, who had shrunk a few centimeters since the peak of her career because she had sent too much of her calcium down the drain, sat by herself in the backseat. Advising as always.

At the monastery in St. Blasien she insisted that I take a picture of the domed church. I had hundreds of slides of magnificent structures, great and small, from around the world and did not want this one. Or I succumbed again to a long-suppressed teenage rebellion and therefore did not record this church on film. Once I gave my socks an additional twist to defy Ma, when she had told me that people would think that I had crooked legs if the knitted grooves did not align properly. Her fashion requirements had to be resisted from the start, otherwise before I knew it, she’d require me to dangle a stylish whip from my belt to defend myself against lawyers.

After admiring the monastery, we continued our tour until I screeched to a stop. There was a commotion at a Black Forest house-barn, somewhat like the one Siggi and I had witnessed in Simonswolde so many years before. On top of the obligatory manure pile beside the street, and in front of a farmhouse, were two people wrestling, this time not a pig, but valuable memories. I was squealing with delight, the man and wife were grunting. I clambered for my camera to record an important event. Here was a paramount activity of liberation, or hopefully not of enslavement, or of the family togetherness that I always so craved.

A husband and wife together on top of a pile. A picture poster of the exploited masses of the world, heaving kakadoodoopoopoo with pitchforks onto a wagon. The idyllic picture of how a family should always work closely together through thick and thin. She was wearing a plaid dress that fell to below her knees. He was wearing a pair of pants. And both wore rubber boots like Aunt Houwke and I used to wear in cowboy country. From a safe distance I snapped a picture as they flung wads onto the wagon, and I noticed that German nutrient hung together much better than its American counterpart, probably because it was precisely engineered and reinforced with a lot of straw which was used for bedding in the nutrient production barns.

I heard Ma mumble in the backseat, in deep thought, trying to solve the mystery of her nutrient-obsessed son:

“My son won’t take pictures of beautiful churches. He takes photos of manure piles.”

I thought that this picture could document a family building together, or slaves building a nation, or how women’s lib was progressing in Germany.

* * *

After Linda and I returned to our home in the United States, I forgot my parents. It was easy because I had had a lot of practice. Siggi seemed to have a more difficult time with this, probably because he was still struggling financially to finish his Ph.D. In a letter to Ma that he wrote in the beginning of the seventies and without the usual greeting he said:

“I have to say that the resentment is now really cooking in me. I have spent nearly 100,000 Deutsche marks for my education and it will surely cost another 20-30,000 marks until I am finished. And for that one receives silly letters, which entices one to send silly letters in return. Always to be a tool of your power-political battles.

“Now B (Buskohl) has developed the first diplomatic chess move. Teufi doesn’t fight for her child support anymore because he has hung a lure under hers and Oliver’s noses. Yesterday I received a letter from B. It was without any content. Only that he is so terribly poor that we should come to visit. Nothing about marrying or the like. He does not dare to make us false promises. That would be too much. Vis-a-vis you, he still plays the old harp aggressively, and as expected we hear this song ever more beautifully.

“If something concrete does not happen very soon, I am liable to take the matter into my own hands, to make contact with Hella, naturally in private, to explore the matter and to confirm the things that I hear from you. If I have been lied to, then I will tell her how her fiancée plays power politics with her property. So he himself will suffer the consequences of any allusions and temptations. I am angry that I have written him for his birthday, a forced letter without any content but which he can again use to secure his existence.

“Damn it, now again I am expected to waste my hard-earned money to serve as ornamentation for my ‘parents’ (pardon, the biological parents), and hopefully also take a position over there to serve as a productive family member for parents of whom one can only be a party boy. And the other one is not able to straighten up a twenty-year old junk apartment.”

“Go to Tirana, Albania. You will be rather well received, surely handed a shovel and ordered to work the land. On top of this you will learn to keep your stall clean and in order. And now you are astonished at what I have to say. Maybe you can also learn there to work on a production line or to do dishes.

“…The dam in the form of your mania for dictatorship and justification has been torn away and … He had the piggish inclination to tell me that in the summer of sixty-eight Ami and I have abandoned our father. This is a terrible statement.(?)”

Siggi and I abandoned our father?

“You seem to handle money matters very miserably. First of all you seem to have nothing left from the December payments and besides you have an enormous, fantastic urge to waste money on a lot of useless things until I could just barf. Can you not fathom the effects and anticipate when we in the last twenty years always tried to criticize your junky apartment, even though this would not be allowed and was always prevented through your dictator-like inclination and other talk? Such stuff accumulates and comes to light as soon as enough power is behind it. How often have you said that we could say anything, only not to criticize the junky apartment?”

Ma had forwarded this letter to me, probably because she had wanted sympathy and had written the following note on it:

“Here starts the letter. (He has studied psychology.)”

Siggi included me in his apparent threats and demands. Could a son who so suffered from his parents threaten or blackmail them? He tried to force them to live up to their promises that we’d be blessed with a third mother who was wealthy, and that her wealth would rub off on us. I tried to remain detached from this warm familial interaction and was ignorant about his correspondence with our parents.

* * *

Over the years Ma had often tried to entice us to return to Germany. Her bribes were usually brilliant proposals, such as that we could live with her; or that she knew an old lady who had to go into a nursing home, and we might inherit her house. Now it was the wealth of Hella, and Pa also joined her efforts, even before his Teufi had evicted him from his room in her house. During this time period Pa wrote me a few short letters, and as far as I can remember, his first letters ever to me after we had moved away from Simonswolde. He said that he could find work for me in Switzerland that would pay about fifteen hundred Swiss francs a month. I desired to work there because I yearned to return to my roots and gain outstanding experience in my profession. But after paying for our living expenses there’d not be much left, especially since Pa was probably puffing up my potential salary. He had proved to be a simple, but expert, puffer.

Ma wrote me that Hella was quite wealthy, was in her mid-seventies, and had only one relative, a brother in New York. In other words, she could check out of this lonely world any day now. She implied that Pa and Hella were engaged to marry, and that we could inherit great wealth, Siggi and I. She wrote me that Siggi would receive the mansion on Lake Geneva but did not specify as to how I would be blessed. But as always I ignored her bait. To catch fish, the fish have to be hungry and you need the right bait. This fish was hungry but as always before, she used the wrong bait.

* * *

Linda and I traveled extensively. During the later years I always wrestled with a strong approach-avoidance conflict about visiting Germany again, because my homeland was filled with too much beauty and too much pain. Even so, Linda and I would visit there again long after Pa’s ashes were buried in the cemetery in Wollbach.

After he died of a heart attack caused by self-inflicted hedonism, which might someday be classified as a sue-able disease, he was cremated and must have burned vigorously. But he was not immediately interred, and no memorial services were held for many months. Could it have been that our relatives were waiting for us to come from the States to attend to these things? They had notified us that he had died, and Uncle Fritz also had sent us an official form to fill out so we could apply to get our potential inheritance. I did not do this and will never learn what I may have thrown out with it.

Like all German cemeteries, this Wollbach graveyard was more like a park. It had many polished, black headstones that were all inscribed with shiny gold letters, as if everyone had died only yesterday. There were many Neumans under these stones, because this clan had originated here in Wollbach. Its history book mentioned that at the time of our father’s birth, almost half the families in this area had our surname. The families of the deceased maintained these gravesites which were flaming with flowers, just like many of their homes, where window boxes blossomed throughout much of the year.

We were as overwhelmed by these flowers as we are with the litter along our highways in America. I have walked many miles of them, doing surveys and picking up trash. This garbage is a mother lode of material to study for dissertations for Ph.D. degrees. I have found pre-owned diapers, plastic bottles with yellow liquids, gun clips and holsters, money and mirrors, as well as poisons for minds and for bodies. But I never found a Wall Street Journal or Scientific American, and I am certain that the garbage along our highways screams bloody murder. There was no garbage along the highways that we traveled in Europe. But there had to be garbage. Everyone produces garbage. Was it all in Ma’s apartment? Or was it hidden in thousands of court files across the land?

We walked around the Wollbach cemetery to search out Linda’s underground father-in-law. Aunt Mathilde had told us that he had no headstone and for strange reasons, Siggi and I had not erected one for him. She told us that we would find him under a patch of quackgrass, and therefore we found his plot quickly because his was the only gravesite so decorated.

I had to pee. For old times sake.

“Where shall I pee?” I asked my wife. We’ve always made major decisions together.

“Go wherever you want,” she said to me.

I knew that she was a little disgusted with my incivility, because she had said, “wherever you want.” She always let me make my own decisions whenever I annoyed her. I just wanted to relieve my frustrations, and the devil tempted me to pee on the quackgrass, but I was stronger than he.

We visited a lot of our relatives and people who had been friends of our parents during or before WW II, in and around the Black Forest, and greatly enjoyed them. I had never really known them before, and they were all exceedingly friendly and hospitable. All of them fed us big dinners and home-baked desserts, even though they didn’t even know that I was fixated in the oral stage, that I liked to wolf down food like my father. Only now did I really learn how kind they were. Linda and I stayed with our Aunt Mathilde and Uncle Hermann several times, some of which we spent in bed with severe flu because we were exhausted from our prolonged travels.

A cousin in Switzerland took us up to the Schilthorn peak, and we rode four different cable gondolas to get there. After silently drifting high over idyllic farms with steep, green meadows and fields of snow, we arrived at Piz Gloria, a rotating restaurant offering a breathtaking view of the Alps. Part of the James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, had been filmed here. While we stood in the sky to admire the mountains across the deep valley before us, we heard a sudden thunder. Agent 007 zipped by in a military jet, following the course of the valley and coming so close that we could see the Swiss white cross in its red field on the side of his plane. I reacted quickly and caught this on film.

* * *

Siggi has spent many a summer in Germany, to visit and to do research, sometimes taking his family with him. For him the rich culture and beauty of his homeland overcame his pain from our past. Maybe if I went more often and stayed there longer, the pleasing culture and friendly relatives would crowd out the sad portion of my memories. Siggi always stayed in hotels and never with his mother; she had no room and being with mother brings together the critical mass that can lead to explosions. The only way to prevent this, and still enjoy motherhood, was to tape mother’s mouth shut. Or plug up our ears. I could not think of any other solution. Can heroes deal with mothers? Can mothers deal with heroes? Is Mother not our heroine?

* * *

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