Private Wars

By J.T. Ruiter

 

I remember seeing my grandfather sitting in his long armchair, the service ribbons behind him, his dead-eyed gaze upon me. His wife—my grandmother—droned alone in the kitchen.

Cleaning, she was incessantly cleaning. And my father, he was out back with the aunts and uncles, pushing my sister and little cousins on the swing set Grandpa had built for us kids. I remember hearing them. They were laughing.

Grandpa stared at me, trembling, then gave a miniscule smile, as if a string tugged at his lip.

“—Grandpa!” I suddenly blurted. “Why are you so different?”

An earnest inquiry is met by an earnest answer.

“Why,” he said after a long pause. “I never thought anyone could tell.”

I was both shocked and relieved. At seven years old, I had no idea what I set in motion, I just knew a bewildering comfort for having finally cleared the air.

“Oh, little boy.” Grandpa leaned back, his eyes on the ragged winter trees outside. “If only you knew, if only you knew.”

Sure, Grandpa looked like anybody else—but under a microscope? He was strange. Alien-like. Somehow as a child, I could see that—and so I asked in the blind candor of a child, too.

“So, tell me, Grandpa,” I said. “Please. Please, tell me. You can trust me.”

He spoke, like a shuttered robot being reawakened, discovering again that it could talk—that it could think.

“I can trust you?” he said.

 

#

 

Media often searched my grandfather out when I was a kid. He was like any other old veteran. Except he was the only one who would ever talk about it. On the D-Day anniversaries, on Veteran’s Day, they’d find him—John P. Schenk—and ask him what he saw and what he went through. Because on that, at least, he was an open book.

“What did you see out there?” a female television reporter had asked, a mic at his mouth, a bright light on his face.

“I remember the soles of my boots falling off. I had to steal new ones off a German—or maybe it was a French citizen. I can’t remember.”
He coughed into his fist. “Either way, the person was dead.”

“And what do you remember about that time?”

“I remember the deep green of France’s hills. I remember sore feet. I remember good men dead. Good men dead everywhere. Honestly speaking.”

Anyone could see he was moved as he spoke, but this was not the grandpa my seven-year-old self-inquired about.

“What were you doing out there?” the reporter continued. “Can you tell us a little bit about what the 8th infantry was trying to accomplish?”

“We were trying to rescue the French, my goodness.”

The reporter said nothing.

“We crossed the Rhine,” he said finally. “Into the Hurtgen. The forest. We went all the way to Nuremburg, and then some more. We had delved deep, deep into Bavaria. As we trudged through it, rifles in hand, everything was upside down. It was like, a fantasy land. A rococo, gothic fantasy land. Yes, there was something in the air there... ”

“—Do you feel that the French today honor the sacrifice that you made? It’s been said they would be speaking German today, if it weren’t for people like you.”

“The French, like everyone, are wonderful people,” he said. But then he sighed, dejected. “To tell you the truth, it wasn’t until much later, after the war—yes, when I realized all the good, good people that were lost. I’ve been kept up at night. It can make everything quite unbearable.”

He gave a short laugh.

“Other war veterans I’ve interviewed spoke of their guilt, too” she said, “and about why wasn’t it them.”

“—No.” he said, suddenly stern. “It wasn’t the guilt. It wasn’t the horror. None of that.”

“What then?”

He shook his head tightly and smiled, apparently at his end.

The reporter nodded, putting the mic back in her lap.

—That’s who he became, yes, and it was only my family that knew the broad outlines of his earlier, much different life.

 

#

 

Before going to the war, it was understood he was going to be a lawyer. His was an East Coast family. They moved to St. Louis, made it out all right during the Great Depression.

Then he was called up.

The war was a non-event, at least for John P. Schenk. As simple as punching in, punching out. “After all,” he had said at the time. “It’s the world’s war, not mine.”
When he came back, he finished college. It’s been known he was actively disliked in the Chess club, on the Golf team—by all his peers, really.

But the St. Louis families had set him up.

He toured Princeton for law and looked at the homes in the area, wearing a sweater vest and a serious expression, hands in his pockets. A woman was beside him. She wore a yellow dress, I imagined, looking at the black-and-white pictures from the day—and he very nearly took the leap with it all.

That’s when he left her. He took the car. He drove west.

He was twenty-seven years old.

No one knows where, or what he did during that time. It didn’t amount to much—that’s the consensus, anyway.

He’s always talked about the war, but it’s this time he doesn’t talk about.

Not much is known but that on at least one occasion he picked up with some odd company of fellow wanderers out there.

And when he got back years later, he was heedless.

He was indolent, and kind, and aimless. Incapable of putting in eight consecutive hours as a professional, shifting from job to job. Instead, he spent his time loafing around his parents’ house, reading about Oppenheimer, half-heartedly perusing Lucretius' De Rerum Natura.

His mother scorned him. Hated him, even. But his father, who he hardly ever spoke to in the first place, was known to look upon him fondly.

All that changed when, one day, he went to his neighbor’s house. The one he never went to before.

He knocked on the door. He introduced himself.

There was a daughter. He put out his hand.

He was smiling.

“Hello,” he had said…

—And that was all we knew.

 

#

 

“I had been dying, you see,” he said to me back in the living room; me, nodding my head, fighting to understand.

My question was like cupid’s arrow—straight to the heart it went, pricking that organ, and the stream that carried out the heart’s plucked hole was already turning violent, bursting like a long-sealed floodgate.

“Dying?” I said.

“You’re going to have to let me tell it the way I’m going to tell it.”

“Why, Grandpa?”

“Because I’m speaking of the war, here. The real war. And I have no fellow veterans, no comrade in arms.”

He paused. Put a finger to his chin, looked at the ceiling.

“I’m not talking of nation against nation, no—but of how utterly unreal it is to be alive at all.”

His earliest memory, he said, was of him in diapers, bobbing up and down on a baby rocking horse on the front porch. Both his parents were smoking cigarettes.

 

The sun was setting. Then all at once he stopped rocking. He stood and, for the first time ever, he walked. But something was wrong even then, “because there was the sickness,” he said.

“I was born that way,” he went on. “I haven’t any reason, but it was there from the first.”

His lower jaw juts up and down from the tremors common of old age.

He brought a hand to it, held it steady.

Scowling, he locked eyes with me, a hand still on his trembling jaw, and continued his explanation: “The war changed everything by not changing anything. And it was interesting. Once, during a firefight at night in Bavaria, I felt I was close to it—the thing that could reveal why I was the way I was. I could see it that way. It was clearer to me.

“Our bullets shot like light beams over the German hills at night. The fighting and the yelling didn’t come from us, it seemed they came from somewhere else. From nowhere. And when the soldiers shot their guns, their faces went red and white with the light. And it was just the stars above us. Hundreds of them. Watching.”
He paused.

“—Yes, the war brought the world to a close. Like an object you could pick up and see end-to-end… Just like what those stars could see.”

I didn’t know what to say, but he spoke as if he knew what I wanted to ask.

“Everything I say cheapens what I mean. But the war was a stage and humanity the actor. And when the war was over, the play of mankind was over, too. Everything after and everything before was just variations of the one. That’s what I mean,” he said, “when I say I could see it end-to-end.

“But that was exactly the problem,” he went on, “because I felt life was as senseless before the war as it was during it—it was all no different than that moment I first came into being on that rocking horse. It wasn’t until then I realized I’d hoped the war would shock me out of my stupor. But when it was over I felt no change, and I brought that with me when I came home, to university.

“Was it something about who I was?” he said to me. “Was something inside me bent and twisted?”

Grandpa told me he did well, but when he was alone in the evenings his heart beat fast, and he didn’t know why. The golf team left him alone to tee holes without partner. In chess, even, they’d tilt his board, laugh and walk away. An invisible pain hobbled every interaction, so that he limped through his speech, and whenever he ever managed to be articulate it was only to give a black look of hatred—so in the end he played either the part of fool or leper.

“There was still the intense scope of history behind our lives to account for,” he told me, sitting there, “the massive, confusing trajectory of the human race for the last one-hundred and fifty—the last two-thousand—the last three-hundred thousand years. Because we are all on this crazy train, and no can really see who’s driving it!”

—He laughed suddenly. “Ohh, ho, ho.”

He scratched his head and smiled, crow’s feet stretching from his eyes. As he chuckled, his chest thumped up and down: he was injecting himself with a dose of who he later became to ease the intensity of his recollections; the frigidness in him was gone. It was replaced by the same Grandpa who had me on his knee, smoked his pipe, and told stories about my father was a child.

“There was more than one time back then,” he said, “when I saw the good around me and thought, ‘I can just let myself get sucked in.’ But the hoped-for marriage got stuck in my throat. I had to vomit it out to breathe.

“I drove twenty-five hours straight,” he said, “and spent it all coddling my emptiness, hating what I’d done, who I was. But when I got out there… well, it felt wonderfully good to be alone at last, my boy. And it’s my sincerest hope, even for all the incredible dangers it brings, that the whole world knows that alone-ness someday. That they can find it within themself. Because being beside the fire with others is nice and cozy, yes—but what of being more than you are? Only a force that wants your life from you can do that.”

“After the war against Hitler,” he continued, “The states were a great place of growth, but the remote plains of the American west helped slow time down, helping with my unease—my handicap.

He gave a tired sigh.

“Oh, I met all sorts of strange people out there. Tribes of silly, lost children out in the desert—vagabonds, nomads. Honorable people, moonlighting as criminals. They were free. At least they thought they were free, as many do. But they were vicious and spiteful. And ignorant, too.”

He was sleeping under the stars one night when he knew the first, tangible reality in his life. “Home. Home is what’s there after you’ve left all other homes. When all else was gone, I knew it to be there. It’s not a perfect analogue but you know, ‘I think, therefore I am’—it was the one thing I knew to be true.”

I suppose it was all going over my head at the time. Yet, children hear with their body and register with their soul. The words, the way they are spoken, the hands and eyes. They are imbued, processed by something else, going someplace else.

Grandpa said when he got home, he knew the adventure (or nightmare) wasn’t over. He still wasn’t whole. He loafed about, read authors that took the closest perspective on life to his own, “but they were like eating ash. The authors were corrupt the same way adults are corrupt to a young man—to an adolescent.”

He became depressed. But he didn’t care what people thought. He was prepared to live his life this way until it ended.

He blinked like he remembered I was only seven year’s old. But then he stared at me square. He knew, after all, that it was I who asked for the one piece of his life he thought nobody would ask, breaking open the dam.

He stopped a moment, brushed dirt off his knee that wasn’t there. Stared at me again.

A long silence settled between us.

“Why is it,” he said finally, “that everyone else falls into the river of life? It flows past until it pulls on them, and they go with it? The questions they have are not strong; they give into its pull easily—but me? I had legs strong as tree trunks. I could withstand that current. I could pull myself out of that deep-flowing river, and watch it. Just like those stars over Bavaria.

“And I had done this. For a long time, I sat on the brink, watching. This wasn’t a choice, no. This is who I was.”

He was quiet a moment. Outside, the wind blew the branches of the ragged elms.

“I remember, I sat there outside the river of life for a long, long time. I knelt down, and laid my hands on that flowing river, as it were. My barest fingertips traced the silken surface of it, when further I dipped in my hand, my whole arm. My eyes were on the light of the water, the soft ripples scintillating around my arm. And these refractive crystals shining off the surface—alive like embers one moment, then winking out as ashes the next—I realized, they were not just a thing…

“No,” he said, leaning back in his winged back armchair, “they were much, much more.”

The room again was void of sound, and his eyes hooded over. He sounded like that robot being rebooted when he spoke:

“A piece of me was always missing where I was empty. I saw much through that hole—but I have no idea how,” he said, lifting his eyebrows, his pointer finger. “I have no idea why.

“Maybe,” he shrugged, “the universe just needs to carry you on your own way, and then carry you out.

“Because it was like a perfect, inimitable snowflake from above.

“It fell out of the sky, fluttering left, then right, until it wafted and lodged itself perfectly, like a jigsaw puzzle, into the missing piece of who I was, and I didn’t have to be alone any longer.”

 

#

 

Grandma came in.

She had an apron on. Yellow rubber cleaning gloves.

She stood akimbo at the door frame.

I noticed the smell of baking sugar. Cookies, rising in the oven, while she had cleaned. And all my aunts and uncles, my father and sister. They were inside now, too. Peeling off their coats, their faces ruddy, chests fluttering beneath their sweaters.

“—Smells delicious in here!” my father said.

Everyone settled in the living room, taking a fresh cookie from the plate set before them; their loud chattering beginning anew. But I remembered his stark words imprinted on my brain, and I ran to hug my grandfather’s leg.

I crawled into his lap. I laid my head down on his chest, and—as he brought a cookie to his trembling mouth, laughing at the jokes of one of my uncles—I inhaled, smelling the coarse oak moss of his aftershave.

 

J.T. Ruiter from US is a Florida resident and former metropolitan journalist with bylines in the Chicago Tribune and Sun Sentinel. His fiction has appeared in The Metaworker, Dumbo and Idle Ink. He was a member of the marching band in high school and fondly recalls having once played before Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square.