Germany in August smelled like wet stone and cigarettes,
the kind of damp that slips down your collar
and stays.
The houses seemed old enough
to have learned when not to speak.
I’d finished chow and wandered across Bleidorn.
By the gate, the payphones waited -
a row of pale mouths,
quiet until you asked them something.
The war hadn’t started yet.
But we’d been briefed.
We knew enough
not to be surprised.
I lifted the receiver.
Static filled my ear.
Then my mother.
She said Georgie
too carefully,
as if the word might break.
Asked if I was eating,
if my room was all right,
if I was scared.
I said no.
We both knew better.
My father took the line -
a man who spent words
only when they mattered.
“We’re proud of you,” he said.
“Keep your head down.
Pay attention.
Don’t trust what looks quiet.”
Then the click -
not loud,
not cruel,
just finished.
I stayed there longer than I should have,
hand on the receiver,
waiting for something else
to come through.
I walked off post,
through Ansbach’s emptied streets.
A bell struck once.
A cat watched me from a window
without interest.
I didn’t know where I was going.
Only that something in me
had shifted its weight.
Back at Bleidorn that night,
I lay on the bunk staring up,
not thinking about maps or drills
or the new words they’d been using -
but about how my mother’s voice
thinned on come home safe,
and how my father held his silence
like it might spill.
That was when I learned
what the uniform costs.
Not the danger -
that was always obvious -
but the distance that settles in,
quiet as smoke,
between what you feel
and what you can say.
Sometimes, even now,
I’m back in that booth -
rain tapping the glass,
the line open,
listening to two people
do their best
to reach me.
GBS jr
Plattsburgh, NY
2012
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