Rudy's Rules for Travel Read online

  “I love being close to fish,” he says.

  That night Alicia tells us our timing is muy bueno. We are here for the first night, the grand opening, of her nephew’s restaurant and bar. There will be mariachis and margaritas and the finest food outside of Restaurant Santa Fe.

  “Don’t leave for there early,” Alicia advises. “Wait for the party to start.”

  It is nine o’clock when we follow the balloon-lined street and the sound of mariachis. Two traditionally costumed children, a boy and girl seven or perhaps eight years old, stand outside the freshly painted white restaurant, handing us flyers announcing the big night. As we enter, the children smile broadly and nod to each other, then take us by the hand and lead us to a large round table dressed in a starched white cloth and bountiful floral bouquet.

  Before the mariachis can begin their next number, three young waiters in tuxedos surround us. One offers us a margaritas menu, another a list of food of the day, and the third watches the first two. We are the only diners in the large decorated room, and for the rest of the night the three men stand behind us, watching with great studiousness as each bite of tamale and enchilada enters our mouths, looking at us quizzically and asking after every taste, “Bueno?” or “Muy bueno?” Periodically, the children and mariachis ring our table, joining the waiters in their study of our digestive processes. At one point I look for a restroom. Two older women in aprons come from the kitchen to escort me, then they wait outside the door for me to emerge. “Bueno?” they ask. I have to assume they are inquiring about the colorful bathroom décor and the new toilet. I say, “Muy bueno.”

  We feel the pain of a limited Spanish vocabulary, for the evening is far beyond bueno or even muy bueno. We have to settle in the end for handshakes and “adios” until tomorrow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WOULD YOU RATHER EAT AT THE COFFEE SHOP DOWN THE street or have croissants at a sidewalk café in Paris?” At home, Rudy will ask the same question for twenty years.

  I will have the same answer for twenty years: “Forced to a choice, it’s croissants.”

  For nine months each year, we save all possible dollars at home so that in June, in some foreign bank, they might transform into confusing coins and colorful bills.

  THIS spring is unusually busy for me at work, and I relinquish summer trip planning to Rudy. I learn never to do this again.

  “But you know how I hate details,” he says.

  “Yes, but this time we’re in your land, your Germany.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “That’s the problem—that you’re in your homeland?” I ask the question before I can stop myself. I know the answer well, and the story behind it.

  “I don’t know if I can call it homeland anymore, honey.”

  In the latter years of World War II, young German-born Rudy gained US citizenship independent of his immigrant parents and volunteered for air duty. His missions as a B-24 gunner helped conquer the land of his birth, the land of his cherished stepmother, Mutti, the land that had captured his papa’s loyalty.

  “So you don’t want to go to Germany?” I ask.

  “You know I have to go there. We’ve talked about it. I promised Mutti I’d visit her family . . . her sisters and my cousins. They’re just about all the family I have left. I promised her I’d visit her grave and bring her white roses. I’ve put it off too long.”

  On her deathbed in America, Mutti had asked to be returned home to be buried in her village in southern Germany, alongside her brother, a German Air Force crewman killed in the First World War.

  Rudy rarely talks about the bombings of World War II, but when he does he bites his lip and brings a hand to his mouth, chewing a single nail. I notice in these months before our trip that in quiet moments he sometimes bites the lip and raises a hand to his mouth. I notice, too, that as our departure gets closer, nightmares come some nights, and his bedding is tangled by morning.

  I feel unsettled too, and my sleep is restless. When I wake in the middle of the night I think about the coming trip. World War II was for me a chapter in my history textbook; for Rudy, it was a chapter in his life. Until now, our vacations together have been frivolous escapes from our jobs and our routines. They have been the trips of optimists. This journey plunges us headfirst into painful history.

  Saving dollars is a pleasant distraction. Rudy chooses a charter flight distinguished by more than its attractive price— the company uses a card table as its airport check-in counter, has a contact phone number missing two digits, and when its plane, nine hours late, taxies for takeoff, the pilot announces a change in seating.

  “. . . Too many people back of plane. Quick, some go front.”

  I stay awake for the entire twelve-hour flight. Someone needs to stay vigilant in these long cross-ocean flights. Pilots get sleepy. In particular, I pray that passengers are well distributed for landing and that my Depression-era mate turns into a bon vivant when he lands in Europe.

  Prayer number one answered; prayer number two not. I wait outside the Frankfurt terminal while Rudy picks up a rental car from a local budget firm. When he finally drives up, our convertible gray Citroen cowers behind sub-compact Fords. When I stand next to it, the well-used vehicle barely rises above my waist. Its backseat doubles as a trunk and its doors seem to be made of plastic. Yet another prayer: may truck drivers on the autobahns be observant.

  We begin this day a ritual that will endure in our annual European travel: Rudy will drive; I will navigate. There are reasons for this. I do not understand stick shift and he does not believe in maps.

  “Maps are good for general concepts,” he says. “Better to rely on intuition, inspiration.” Translated, this means an itinerary from Rome to Florence under Rudy’s navigation someday might include Paris.

  “Where are we staying tonight?” I ask, instantly realizing that is a question better posed a month ago at home. I needn’t worry, though, about autobahns. We turn onto the first country road we see. Farmhouses and cottages, but no hotels in sight.

  “Look for a zimmer frei sign, usually on a mailbox,” Rudy says. “Means free room, not free price, unfortunately. Free as in available.”

  AFTER a night in the extra bedroom of Mathilde, we drive several hours south to visit Mutti’s and Rudy’s families. He has never met these relatives in person and has only a postcard sent last month in response to his letter. It says, Willkommen.

  At home, six thousand miles away from Germany, our reunion did not seem so difficult to me as it does today. At home, I thought the challenge would be Rudy’s, not mine. At home I thought thirty-five years’ distance from the war could be enough for towns to heal. Being here only a day, I know how wrong I was. We are astounded at the amount of reconstruction that has already taken place, but still, rebuilding continues—new housing, roadways, bridges, and homes for disabled veterans. In a few places we see “before” and “after” photos mounted on newly erected churches or town halls: “Before” is the building leveled to the ground; “After” is the restoration. We observe that buildings are more easily restored than people, as we sometimes see men of Rudy’s age sitting on park benches or at bus stops. They have lost arms, or legs, or spirit.

  As the images come one after another, Rudy repeats what he says often at home: “There was no choice, Mare. It was a war that had to be.”

  I have asked this question at home, but now I need to ask it again. “Are you sure these relatives really understand that you were in these bombing raids over their country?”

  “It’s not likely a secret that a family can keep, honey. The older women probably learned eventually.” Then, with a break in his voice, he tries to assure me. “Don’t worry. Mutti was lovable and good. I’ve told you she was perfect . . . and she loved me. That’s what will be important to them. And remember, for almost three years after the war, our every spare dollar went to buy emergency food and supplies to ship to them. I would help Mutti and Papa pack up big cartons every single week and
carry them to the postal service. These people will remember, Mare.”

  This is typical Rudy, confident in his beliefs, expecting that things will work out well. I just hope he is right this time.

  We pull into a parking place directly in front of the address, go to the heavy door, and knock one of those tentative knocks that says, “We hope this is okay.” There is no response. Rudy knocks a bit more assertively, and I ready myself to run if needed. At last an elderly woman answers the door. She looks surprised, alarmed even, and turns to call loudly and harshly to someone behind her, leaving us at the open door.

  “Schnell, das Telefon, telefonieren Angelica. Schnell.”

  I look to Rudy who remembers a few German words, “schnell” among them. “It means quickly, do something very quickly,” he explains.

  Apparently a woman named Angelica is being summoned by phone and must come quickly. I have the plot worked out in my head: someone inside has had a heart attack, they are expecting Angelica the nurse, and instead here we are on their doorstep, foreign intruders, enemies in war. Bad timing. I move closer to Rudy, glance up and see he has a broad smile. “This older woman must be my aunt.”

  Meanwhile, I am, without thinking, slowly moving back from the door, inching closer to our car, when a young lady dressed in a simple dark suit comes hurrying down the street. The older woman steps outside to wave her in. “Angelica, Angelica.”

  Slowly, we realize we are the emergency and Cousin Angelica the cure. In her arms is a giant book, an inches-thick dictionary titled English to German and German to English. Smiles all around, the welcome begins anew. Inside, Angelica takes off her coat and hat, sits at the head of a large wooden table, and dons thick spectacles. She is ready for words.

  One by one we meet the family, two of Rudy’s aunts and uncles and three of his cousins, each of them greeting us with hugs or handshakes and Angelica translating as needed. I understand willkommen, welcome, and know danke schön means thank you, but beyond that I am isolated by language. Rudy has told me often that his German vocabulary is limited to a four-year-old’s experience; however, that is not what I conclude tonight. In the kitchen of his German family, his words flow. He knows when to laugh at their jokes, when to raise a stein in another toast, when to pat a back. I move to the edges of the group, smiling when anyone glances at me. As kind as they are, I cannot belong here in the same way he does. My relief that he has been so embraced overtakes my envy of the linguists.

  The older woman who had come to the door, one of the aunts, brings in platter after platter of beef stroganoff and spaetzle noodles, vegetables, and sweets. Her son wheels in a cart with beers and wines from the region. They seat me right in the middle of the group—someone must have seen me on the edges. They make sure my wine glass is never empty. With Angelica’s help, the son invites us to the brewery and vineyard tomorrow. “You are willkommen,” he says.

  The next morning, Rudy and I go with the family to visit the graves of his Mutti and her brother lost in combat. We all stand close together for what seems a long time, our heads down. Leaving at last, we place garlands of white roses on the stones.

  Once we have toured the town and it is time for us to leave, Angelica looks directly at me and translates the smiles and pats on the back. “They say you both should come back. They say you belong here. You are willkommen.”

  HEADING north, Hamburg next.

  Maybe it is that Mutti’s family spoiled us with warmth. Maybe it is that the climate in north Germany is colder than the south. Maybe it is that the north is more industrialized, more down-to-business than the slower-moving south. Or maybe it is that Rudy just has too many ghosts in Hamburg. Whatever the source, the air is chilly here.

  At home in California, we laughed about ordering a plaque for Rudy’s birthplace, perhaps one like Mozart’s in Salzburg or Shakespeare’s in Stratford. In the fantasy, Rudy mounts his golden plaque to the door of his papa’s saloon, commemorating the night he was delivered in its upstairs apartment by a doctor, a regular customer at the bar. “Er wurde hier gebornen Rudolf Simon Jensen 17 Mai 1921.”

  Now here in Hamburg, the reality of World War II, Rudy’s war, prevents that historical birth from being immortalized. Our search for the saloon takes us to the edge of the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district. It is dusk and ladies of the night are taking their positions in windows of brothels and bars as customers begin to crowd the street. Two policemen patrolling the pedestrian walkway look at us quizzically, then approach. Rudy’s disguise—an outfit he assembled in a local thrift store—apparently has not fooled them. I thought the weathered blue captain’s cap might mislead them. There is, I suppose, the possibility that, dressed in a California sundress and sandals, I have given us away.

  “Hazard,” they warn. “Danger.” We look around us and have to agree that the area looks threatening. They have another concern: “Americans?” I suspect they are trying to tell us the threat is greater for Americans, that resentments here could run deep.

  “Don’t worry,” Rudy tries to assure me, “they’re talking about pickpockets. Just be careful.”

  In his mix of German and English, Rudy tries to explain to the officers that he was born here in this neighborhood, that he is looking for his papa’s waterfront saloon and its upstairs apartment. He doesn’t tell them, but I know he wants to see the upstairs apartment because his mother died there two years after his birth.

  “Gebornen hier? Gebornen hier? Oh.” The patrolmen shrug their shoulders, gesture widely. Their body language says, “How could you find such an old place here?” They point to a plaque on one disco bar: “Built 1901, Destroyed 1944, Rebuilt 1949.” They point to the sky. The policemen are trying to tell us that the war likely leveled Rudy’s birthplace.

  “I wonder,” Rudy says as the men leave, “do you think those two have any idea that I was in the war, in the war against them?”

  “Well, you’re American and the age of most veterans, so maybe for awhile they imagined that. But when you told them you were born here, I think they couldn’t imagine you had been in the war against them. Their manner changed. They probably saw you as a fellow citizen.”

  We walk slowly. “You know, I was never asked to fly over Hamburg. I always wondered if that was because my commanders knew it was my birthplace . . . God knows I had written “Hamburg, Germany” as place of birth on a hundred forms . . . or if it was that when I entered the war, there was already too little of Hamburg left to bomb.”

  There is too much to absorb. What bombs were unable to destroy here, horrific firestorms that followed them did. The city is a mix of careful reconstruction and stark new buildings. We walk along the waterfront until we find a few older structures that have a slim chance of holding Rudy’s heritage, but we cannot settle definitively on one.

  At the large port we sit on a bench, watching boats dock and unload. Each time a larger ship comes into view, Rudy stands and walks toward it, squinting into the sun and waving. Old habits.

  “I was probably about three when I spent so much time at the dock. My mother had been gone about a year . . . and Papa too. All I can understand now as an adult is that when she died, he must have been very depressed. He must have been heartbroken.”

  I know Rudy’s papa sold the saloon, went back to sea, and left him with a foster mom. I have seen the pictures of Rudy the toddler. Posed in a professional studio, the boy with long locks drapes his arm around a dog, or holds hands with a teddy bear. The photos are of a sad boy, one not comforted by either animal.

  “My foster mother would bring me here to meet Papa’s ship. We’d wait for the longest time to see him come down the gangplank. He was a really big man with heavy whiskers and a canvas bag thrown over one shoulder. He was so big, he scared me every time.”

  “It must have seemed like a long wait in between his visits—time goes so slowly when you’re a kid,” I say. “Maybe he scared you because he seemed like a stranger to you each time.”

  “Could be.
But when he picked me up and hugged me, he felt warm. He would stay with us a day or so, and then we would come back to the port to wave good-bye to him.”

  Rudy turns from me, looks out to sea. “Every time he left, I would cry and he would promise: ‘Someday you and I . . . we both go to America.’ ”

  WE have another place to visit in Hamburg. Rudy wants to see a wooded park in the midst of the city, to make sense of bad dreams he has had about the place all his life, dreams about running and running, looking everywhere for someone.

  HIS foster mother had a teenage girl, Helge, who helped with babysitting and feeding the toddler. “I loved Helge. She was so nice to me. That’s why I think it was all an accident.”

  We climb up the stairs of the church steeple to a small landing from which we can see the new high-rise buildings of the city and a sprawling, densely wooded park below.

  “I think this is the park. We came here nearly every day. I was three or four years old. Helge was teaching me ‘hide and seek.’ One afternoon I ran ahead of her, leaving her behind. It got darker and darker. But then I was in the middle of thick trees. I ran and ran, in circles probably. When I couldn’t find her anywhere, I just lay down and sobbed, calling her name over and over, for so long. It was terrible.”

  I feel myself choking and try to cover it with a cough. I can hear the stories and imagine the feelings, but I know I cannot ever fully understand the life of the lost child and the young airman.

  He pauses then, starts to smile. “But after so much crying and calling her name, I looked up and saw her running right toward me. She put out her arms and caught me in a big hug. That part was wonderful.”