Lukas - 8. Chapter 8

Lukas made sure he was in the hospital when Severin woke up from the surgery and was there every day during his 4 days of hospital recuperation before returning home. Over the next few weeks, he became something of a traffic cop for people from work who wanted to stop in - to both check up on Severin and to get decisions from him on important matters at the firm.
Severin was eager to get company news and Frau Marchuk could only welcome these important visitors from his office. It fell to Lukas to be the ‘bad cop.’
“Lukas, I was expecting the treasurer this afternoon. Did he happen to call or send a message or anything?”
“He did, but I told him that you were sleeping.”
Severin looked at him. “But I wasn’t sleeping,” he responded. It wasn’t a curt response, but he was definitely anxious.
“No, you weren’t sleeping, I knew that, but you should have been. The doctor said that you need to rest, and you aren’t resting enough. You sure aren’t sleeping as much as you need to. So, I got rid of him.” Lukas responded, so voice matter of fact with no urgency.
Having pulled a chair from the hallway, placing it next to Severin’s bed when he first returned from the hospital and making it a permanent fixture, he was looking at the various prescription containers along with a dictionary and writing down details about them on his notepad, learning the German meaning and dosage amounts.
Dropping his head back on the pillow, Severin sighed. It was silent in the room for a few moments until he said, quietly, “I feel sorry for Christoph,” he said, a slight smile on his face.
“Why?” Lukas replied, looking up, alert.
“I think that you sort of terrorize him, don’t you? At my firm, he is a model of strength and leadership. Even people who are senior to him respect him, and even fear him a little bit. Part of what we all like about him is that he takes charge of whatever he is doing and gives confidence to the people around him. He’s a natural leader and a very smart person.”
“But why do you think that I terrorize him?” Lukas asked, perplexed. “I don’t think of myself that way, like I’m being mean to him. Does it look that way?”
Severin tried to push himself up on the bed, gritting his teeth, clearly in pain. Lukas jumped out of the chair and came over to the bed. “Don’t try this yet without me, OK? I need to help you move around while the stitches heal. Got it?” he said while slipping his hands under Severin’s body in the way the visiting nurse had taught him.
“I’ll count to three, ‘auf Deutsch,’ and then you’ll push up. OK?
‘Ja’ he replied.
“Ein, Zwei, DREI!” he called out as they worked together to set him up straighter on the bed.
After pulling out his hands, he asked Severin to sit forward for a moment while he repositioned the pillows.
“Does that feel better?” he finally asked.
Severin nodded his head up and down. “Thank you.”
Lukas didn’t return to the chair but stood next to the bed. “Why do you think that I terrorize him, Uncle Sev?” he asked again, some anxiety now in his voice.
Leaning back fully against the pillows, he responded. “Maybe terrorize isn’t the right word. But when he’s around you, he is totally focused on you and what you say and how he can do right by you. At dinner that one evening, when he still had the cast on, he would even ask you before he did certain things with his hand.”
“I’m just trying to make sure that he’s OK, that’s all. Maybe I’m a bit too much sometimes, but, gosh, I so badly wanted him to heal up and recover and be OK. That’s all I wanted. It was great when he got that cast off,” he said, and added. “He said that it felt like new, he wanted to make me dinner but I didn’t want him pushing that hand too hard quite yet, so we made it together.”
Severin smiled. “You even terrorize me sometimes,” Severin responded.
“You, too?” Oh, man, I didn’t realize that I was coming off like that. I really don’t mean to.”
“Lukas, there is no need to apologize to either of us. I, for one, like that you have taken charge here. You could sit back and just let things happen. But I don’t have anyone who will step up and tell me what I should do for my own good. I’m the boss at my company and none of them would do that, both because of the power relationship, of course, but also because I’m just not personally close to anyone there. And my friends here, they’ve been kind enough to visit, which has been wonderful. But none of them can do what you do for me. And for Christoph.”
“I don’t feel like I do much for him. I mean, he can take care of himself. I just try to, as the expression goes, ‘keep an eye out for him’”.
Severin looked at him. “Christoph is very respectful to me as his boss. But when we all are together, he’s more interested in making you happy than in making me happy. Sometimes it’s not bad to have a, how you say in America, a ‘kiss-ass’ around,” he said, chuckling, then grimacing in pain.
“Watch it!” Lukas said, getting out of the chair and putting his hand on Severin’s shoulder.
“I’m OK, I’m OK,” he responded, patting Lukas’ hand and gently pushing him away.
He took a deep breath, then continued. “At the office, we are very formal with each other, like a typical working relationship based on our positions. But, like I said, I could tell when he was with you that he was, of course, deferential toward me, he was far more interested in pleasing you.”
“To be honest, it’s refreshing for me. When we talked a bit about the office, he wasn’t at all nervous and was very natural and we had a good conversation. But when he talked to you, he was anxious, wanting to just say the right thing. And it wasn’t just because he was speaking English. It was all about saying what he thought and saying it politely.”
“Really, you think that?”
“Yes, I do.”
Lukas looked down at the ground toward the oriental carpet. “I think that I’m the one who is nervous around him. He’s so smart and accomplished and level-headed, not to mention…um…well…”
“Good looking? Severin replied, a slight smile on his face.
“Well, um yes…that, too,” he replied, blushing. “The one thing I think that I can do for him is take care of him. It makes me feel good. It’s like I can do something – anything - for him.”
“I think that you do a lot more for him than you realize,” Severin replied. “Much more.”
Lukas was silent again.
“Uncle Sev, could I ask you something? I mean, it’s kind of personal and if it’s too much, that’s OK.”
“Of course.” he replied, again carefully adjusting himself on the bed and looking at Lukas.
“Are you sure? I know that you’re not feeling great, and I can wait.”
“No, please go ahead. I’m interested, and it will keep my mind on important things,” he answered, smiling at Lukas.
“I must confess, that I like him. A lot. And a few weeks ago, we…um…well, he told me that he really liked me.”
“That’s great news, Lukas! You’re happy about that, aren’t you”
“Oh yeah, for sure,” he replied. “But, well, I guess that there are a couple things.”
“Like what?”
“I guess, I mean, I’ve liked him a lot for a long time, but I just wasn’t sure that he was interested that much in me. I mean, gosh, he’s like ten years older and so much more experienced and has such a great career and all. I’m not even close to that,” he said. “And to be honest, I’m not even sure that I’ll have any professional career at all. I don’t know if this lawyer thing is right for me. I just don’t know,” he continued. “All I know is that I really like him. And I feel great when I’m around him and whenever I can take care of him, if that makes any sense.”
“But then I think to myself, gosh, he’s so much more mature that me: he’s a grown-up; he’s older; I’m like a kid compared to him. He’s just such a strong person, so solid,” he said. “Look what he did for me on that hike. I’m not a fraction of the person that he is.”
Severin, his hands on his lap, looked at Lukas. “Could I share something with you that might help?”
“Sure,” Lukas replied, “if you thought it would help and you feel up to it. I don’t mean to be so selfish and all.”
Severin chuckled, then caught himself as he grabbed at his stomach. “Oops, no laughing for a few days - doctor’s orders, as I think you say,” he said, smiling at Lukas.
“Are you sure you feel OK?” Lukas asked.
Nodding his head, Severin replied, “Yes, I’ll be fine. But I want to share this with you.”
He folded his hands on his stomach and looked straight ahead before he drew a deep breath and started his story.
“I mentioned to you that I was able to avoid the battlefield during the war by getting a desk job. Eventually, though, as the war effort got more and more desperate, most of my office was drafted into the Wehrmacht, the Army as you would say in English. I was sent again to what I think you call a ‘boot camp’ for training. At this point the need was so dire that the training was only about half or probably less of what it had been at the beginning of the war. They just needed warm bodies to put into uniforms, and even the uniforms were old or ill-fitting with mismatched pieces - and that’s if you were lucky enough to get one at all! Not to mention that there weren’t even enough guns and ammunition for training.”
“Of course, I had no enthusiasm for this, and not a few of the others thought the same. With just a couple exceptions, I think we all were happy in our desk jobs and for sure a lot happier than our peers on the cold battlefields. Most of us got along pretty well, and incidentally, at least amongst the survivors, many of them turned out to have successful post-war careers who it didn’t hurt to know as I was building this business.”
“In any case, we were the last available manpower, ‘combed out’ of the population, as I told your dad, from what had formerly been considered strategic white-collar work. No one pretended anymore that our work mattered except for the so-called ‘leaders.’”
“Most of these, the trainers in the camp, were true believers, or at least tried to project that image. If they had really been true believers, of course, they would have volunteered for the Russian front,” he added, smirking. “But it was easier and safer to yell at the guys who they believed to be soft and cowardly shirkers than fight the ‘hoards from the east’ themselves. So, they made our lives hell.”
Except for one guy, ‘Leutnant,’ or in English ‘Lieutenant’ Weber, Gerhardt Weber. He commanded the various ‘Unteroffizier,’ or I think in English, Sergeants, who actually did the day-to-day training. While the Unteroffiziers couldn’t stop talking about duty and the Fuhrer and Fatherland, the Leutnant preserved a distant but still authoritative presence.”
“Leutnant Weber recruited a couple of us more mechanically inclined recruits to figure out ways to build barricades and tank traps that maybe other parts of the Wehrmacht could use. For me, this was a lot more interesting than throwing a grenade or learning how to use a flak gun for shooting at airplanes, and it quickly seemed that I made myself useful to him.”
“This was done largely outside of our general training, and it was considered kind of a privilege to work alongside the Leutnant, who, as I mentioned, was superior to all the typical ‘Unteroffizier’ who trained us.”
“He was older than the rest of them, and around 10 years or so older than me but we got to be friendly. He had joined the army in 1932, before the Nazis took power. The army was, of course, a right-wing organization even back then, but not as nazified as it progressively became during the 1930’s. Most important for him was that it was a way to get a regular paycheck during the depths of the depression when unemployment was over 30 percent. At that time the size of the German army was limited by the Treaty of Versailles, so it was a very coveted position.
“Physically, he was another of the almost classic Aryan type - tall and blond and built like a lean farm workhorse, which certainly didn’t hurt his image amongst dedicated National Socialists, not to mention intimidating some of the more delicately framed Unteroffizier,” he said, another knowing smirk on his face.
“In spite of his position, at a personal level he was modest to a fault. But after he found out that I had the Matura, meaning a college prep degree and was planning on going to further my education, he couldn’t help telling me that he had a library with all the German Classics. This included Goethe, Schiller, etc. - people who you probably never heard of,” he said, looking at Lukas.
“I know who they both are!” Lukas quickly protested.
‘Just testing, but I’ll confirm that with your father,” Severin joked as he smiled back, then continued.
“Coincidently, he was also a Rhinelander, from near Cologne, the region where my family was from, and sometimes we’d banter a bit in the local dialect. But we had to do it privately for him to avoid any fraternizing accusations and for me to avoid any hint of disrespect for an officer, practically a capital offense in the Wehrmacht. But it was fun.”
“Anyway, I was getting to like and respect him at that same time, and I think that he perhaps felt the same about me. He asked me more about my background and career goals, and I did some sketches of my tunnel boring machine ideas and other little contraptions that I had imagined.”
“He wasn’t a trained engineer at all, but he had great questions and seemed to just intuitively understand mechanical concepts. I wasn’t flattered by his questions as much as I was, believe it or not, intimidated by them. Besides my dad, he was the first person to bring up challenging problems that I had to address.”
“He was just a naturally smart guy. And even though I had a fancy education, he was my introduction to very smart people who don’t have academic credentials but have natural good judgement and analytical abilities. He was so damn smart! I think that he would have run even more circles around me if he had the training.”
“As time went on, he often pulled me and a few other guys from mundane training to work with him in refining some of the tank trap ideas that we were working on, his hope being that he might show them to his superiors, or so I thought. But one by one, the other guys were getting called up and assigned to battle units until our engineering group was just him and me. And I had no doubt that I would be gone soon enough myself.”
“I didn’t know how I was avoiding the call-up, but I didn’t want to question it, and I just let things take their course. You don’t ask questions in this kind of situation unless you want the wrong answer. But it scared me that, despite this tank trap project taking more and more of our time, it was obvious that it was never going to be implemented. Who is going to listen to anyone out in some remote irrelevant training camp in the middle of nowhere while huge, unstoppable armies were bearing down from every direction.”
“Still, he kept our little group going, however pointless it seemed. But it gradually dawned on me why I was there. And do you know what that was?” he asked, turning to Lukas.
“No?” he answered, a confused look on his face.
“Because he wanted me there, to spend time with him. Period. That was all. Me! Who was I to this guy? Why would he want me? What could I ever do for him?”
“During this time, I must admit that I was in fact getting some feelings for him, fantasies that I tried to tamp down and couldn’t possibly take seriously. It was ridiculous that he would ever be interested in someone like me for anything but the work we were doing. He was older, infinitely wiser and just an all-around star and, of course, couldn’t possibly be gay. But I noticed how handsome he was, and how his hands looked, with no wedding ring, by the way. And I could hardly help myself when he rolled up his sleeves and I could see his very strong … arms.” Severin said, seeming to catch himself from being too prurient.
“It got to a point where I could hardly wait to see him and then I dreaded seeing him for the same reason,” he continued. “I had to be careful. I could get shot for something like that,” Severin said, his face serious.
“There were lots of drunken parties back then, many of them kind of ghoulish, macabre affairs as the catastrophic defeat was rapidly approaching. Soldiers, and not a few secretaries, literally drinking themselves to oblivion. The entire camp was clearly starting to dissolve as more and more guys were called up, mostly to the brutal eastern front which was now in Germany itself. During what turned out to be the last party, I think that just about everyone except Gerhardt and I were totally drunk and either passed out on the parade grounds or vomiting in the latrine.”
“He asked me if I’d come back to his private quarters to help clean up the sketches and little wood models that we had built of our inventions. I would have loved to have kept some of them, but that was, of course, impossible at the time.”
“In any case, I was nervous and exhausted, both from thinking about him and confronting this awful prospect of being sent to the front. I was kind of a wreck.”
“He closed the door behind us, and I quickly moved over to the table with our drawings and models scattered around and beneath it. There was just one weak light bulb that flickered as the unreliable power vacillated, barely lighting the way to the wooden box on the floor that was our sole storage bin.”
“As I reached for the first model, I suddenly felt his hand on mine. He was standing to the side of me, and I could feel his breath and I could also feel his hand shaking just the slightest bit. At that moment, the only thing that seemed worse than my nervousness was the fact that I was making him nervous. So, I quickly upturned my hand and returned the squeeze.
“I could feel and hear his tension release and there was silence until he spoke, his voice now still a bit shaky.”
“Can I?” he asked, his mouth close to mine.
“I didn’t answer. I just moved my mouth closer and kissed him,” Severin said softly, then paused. “And then we just held each other,” he said.
“Herr Weber…” I started to say before he interrupted.
“Call me Kai,” he whispered. “My mother was Dutch and that’s what she called me.”
“I just nodded back. Kai,” I said. “And kissed him again.”
There was a long pause as Severing sighed. But now Lukas remembered from one of his tours the name written on front of the huge boring machine – ‘Kai IV.’
“It was hours later - I didn’t know what time it was - that we both decided that I should get back to my barracks. But before I left, he gave me a slip of paper with several addresses on it.’’
‘“Can I write to you?” he asked.”
‘“Of course, and I’ll write back. I promise.” I responded as we held hands, standing in front of each other.
“He seemed relieved and smiled. ‘That’s good. I want you to have these addresses in case we lose touch. One is my mother’s house in Cologne, the other is my uncle’s house in Dusseldorf.’
“I hardly knew what to say. There was no intention of having a one-night stand with him, which was a momentary fear of mine. So, I gave him my parents’ address in Vienna and told him about my dad’s job so that he would be able to contact me. Or find out whatever fate would befall me.”
‘Then we had one last kiss.’
“He wouldn’t let me leave at first. He stepped outside, nonchalantly stretching his hands in the air, like he had just woken up. He looked to all sides, and even stepped around the corner to verify a clear path to my barracks before he motioned me to come out.”
“Later that very day, after I had returned to my barracks, there was a lot of commotion and running around. The political officers, the Nazi implants within the Wehrmacht, came into the barracks, demanding that everyone go outside and line up. They said that everyone is shipping out that afternoon for the east, except for me. I was directed to stand down and wait for orders.”
‘I didn’t see Kai all morning, which was not unusual. But when I did see him, my heart dropped.
‘Most everyone in the camp was now at the assembly area, climbing into trucks. And there I saw Gerhard, along with other officers, helping other soldiers into the high truck bed.’
‘Is he going, too?’ I asked myself. I couldn’t run up to say goodbye as there was a cordon of political guys and Gestapo between me and them. But I stared at him, hoping that he’d see me.
“It seemed like forever, but we finally locked eyes. He gave me a smile and raised his hand as if to say goodbye, but then reached down to help the last soldier get into the truck.’
“I tried to not cry and succeeded, at least temporarily. As each truck filled, it drove off and when it was his turn, and we waved to each other before the dust finally obscured him fading in the distance.”
“Only a few hours later, I was called to the mess hall to get my orders. At this point there was only a handful of people left in the camp. The Gestapo had left and only a couple of political officers remained.”
“There was one lonely table at the end of the large room where we had our meals when I approached the woman there, an administrative secretary, who would give me my orders. She had been there since my arrival and seemed like one of the few real human beings around, besides Kai.”
“She gave me a slip of paper with my transfer to France and asked me to sign the register that I had received the papers.”
“’By the way,’ she said, looking around before she spoke to me. ‘You’re a lucky guy.’”
“Lucky? I asked.”
“Yes. You know Leutnant Weber?” she asked, and added, ‘You know that he’s on his way to the Russian front, yes?”
“Yes, I saw that this morning,” I answered, my heart sinking, confirming my worst fears.
“She looked around again. ‘Well, early yesterday he traded places with you. You were supposed to go east, and he was supposed to go to France. At first, the Commandant resisted, but the Leutnant raised such a fuss, said he’d be so much more useful on the eastern front, that they finally let him go.’”
Severin’s eyes were blinking rapidly.
“Are you ok, Uncle Sev?” Lukas asked, pulling his chair closer.
Severin didn’t answer but kept on talking.
“I was stunned, I could hardly believe the words. I was so angry. I marched to the Commandant’s office and made a scene. ‘How could you allow him to exchange places with me? I should be the one going there, not him!’ On and on I ranted.”
“Me! a lowly private! Yelling at the camp Commandant like I’d never yelled at anyone before in my life! It was too late to send me east, of course, but he did the next best thing to crush my insolence, besides executing me, by assigning me to a punishment unit, a forced suicide squad composed of perceived malcontents, shirkers and other undesirables, which is what you saw when you found my record.’
There was silence again.
“I won’t go into my war stories right now, they aren’t important. I was determined to get through that shit, and with a lot of effort and not a little luck I was able to survive. And I always tried to keep track of events in the east. He wrote to me about every day that he could, and I did the same. And I think I’ve read each of his letters a hundred times,” he added.
“Suddenly, there was nothing. No letters, no news. Then the war was over.”
“But I had that piece of paper with the addresses,” he continued. “After I got out of that French camp and found out that my parents had passed, I was of course upset and distraught enough about what those nazi pigs had done. But I wouldn’t give up on everyone who was important to me, and I went looking for him. The place in Cologne was just an empty, burned-out shell. However, I did find his uncle in Dusseldorf. And we stayed in touch for years, both of us hoping that Gerhard would come home. After all, the Russians kept POWs for years after the war.”
“But he never returned.”
Severin sighed again.
“You know, one of the reasons that I’ve worked so hard to build my company is to try to live up to the sacrifice that Kai made for me. In his first letter, he said that my life was ‘too valuable’ to waste and that he wanted to do everything he could to ensure that I made it through.”
Severin paused and swallowed deeply.
“My accomplishments will never be anything compared to what he did. But I needed to make my life consequential in some way to remember him and the faith that he had in me, and the faith that my parent’s had in me, too.”
“There have been some tough times along the way. When the firm first started, we were on the edge of insolvency more than once. But my burdens or problems quickly pale when I think of what Kai, my parents and others have done for me,” he added, a lump in his throat.
Lukas reached out and held his hand. “Thank you for telling me this, Uncle Sev.”
“Only thank me if it helps you to make the right choice, OK?”
“Ok,” Lukas replied as he bent over and gently hugged his uncle who weakly returned the gesture.