Through My Eyes. Again
Copyright© 2019 by Iskander
Chapter 11
Late November 1963
Our house was empty when I arrived, so I went to my room, took out my schoolbooks and tried to study, lost in tortuous, writhing thoughts reaching no conclusion. Col had believed my story – but her reaction had twisted into an unexpected, scary direction.
I heard someone moving around and my mother slipped her head around my door. “Will, you’re back early. Is everything all right?”
It definitely wasn’t, but I summoned a calm voice. “Yes – Col and Mutti Frida are doing something this evening, so I came home.”
“Okay. Supper is leftovers tonight. Come on down in about half an hour – or you could come down and talk to me as I get it ready.”
I needed to give my mother time, but not tonight. On my desk, Jean Cocteau’s “Les Enfants Terribles” lay open. It’s brooding darkness and dysfunctional relationships suited my mood when I had picked it up, but I hadn’t been reading it.
“I need to get through this chapter of Les Enfants Terribles. I’ll be down in a bit.”
“Okay.” Disappointment tinged her voice.
I returned to the disturbed world created by Cocteau, but soon put it down. I sensed it would take me to places I didn’t want to visit tonight, so I sat there.
After about ten minutes, the phone rang. My heart leapt.
Could it be Col already?
Then I realised if it was, it might not be what I wanted to hear. I couldn’t make out my mother’s side of the conversation.
After a while, she came upstairs.
“Will, Frau Schmidt rang. Something’s happened and she asked if Col could stay here tonight as she has to go out and could be late – and I said, of course, he could.”
“What’s happened?”
“She wouldn’t say.” My mother paused. “It must be something important, though, for her to have to go out tonight. Anyway, Col is walking here. You might want to go and help him as he will be carrying everything for tonight and school tomorrow.”
I suppressed a shudder.
It’s not something to do with Col’s father, is it?
I grabbed my coat and headed towards Col’s house. After I turned the corner into Sea View Avenue, she emerged from their house carrying her school bag and a bulging duffel bag. I walked towards her. When we met, her face was unreadable in the poor light of the streetlamps, so I was none the wiser about how she felt. I reached out and lifted the duffel bag off her shoulder.
“Willi, I am still thinking, so please don’t push me.” Her shoulders tensed. “I don’t know what’s happening with Mutti, but she’s already gone, walking back into town to meet someone who phoned. I’m worried it’s something to do with my father.”
There were tears hiding behind her voice and I desperately wanted to comfort her, but she might see it as pushing her. She hitched her school bag strap higher on her shoulder, her face closed and set off purposefully towards my house. I scurried to catch up.
We walked in silence. Unexpectedly, my father was sitting at the kitchen table as we came in through the back door, glowering silently as my mother welcomed Col.
“We’ll set up the camp bed in Will’s room after supper, Col,” my mother announced.
I watched Col’s eyes flare for a second before she sent me a frown.
“Take Col upstairs, Will, so he can leave his bags in your room. Come straight back down as supper’s ready.”
When we reached the top of the stairs, Col turned towards me and let fly in German, but keeping her voice low.
“I can’t sleep in here with you,” she spat. “What would Mutti think?”
I knew Mutti Frida wouldn’t like this. “I don’t know what we can do about it – unless you tell everyone you are a girl?”
“Of course not. Be sensible.” The sting went out of her voice and she stared at me with pleading eyes. “What are we going to do?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”
“Why can’t I sleep on the sofa downstairs, like when you stay at my house?”
“My mother will think it’s strange. I expect she thinks I sleep in your room when I’m there.”
Col closed her eyes and sat heavily on my bed. “We’ll have to tell Mutti I slept in your room on a camp bed.”
“What?”
“Willi, think about it. It would be a problem if it came out when our mothers talked. Mutti might be so shocked she’d let the secret out.”
I raised a doubting eyebrow.
Col scowled back, then sighed, resignedly. “Don’t worry. I’ll remind Mutti about our promise and tell her we are keeping it. She will understand, given the circumstances.” She didn’t sound convincing.
Given what lay between us, I was not expecting any sort of physical contact but I didn’t want Mutti Frida thinking we had broken our promise.
Col sighed. “Come on, we’d better get downstairs. We don’t want to annoy your father.” We traipsed back downstairs in silence.
Col eyed her plate with suspicion: bubble and squeak with beef fritters.
“It’s fried mashed potato and vegetables”, I explained – in German.
“Stop.” My father’s voice whipped across the table. “Speak English.”
Col cringed, her face twisted with fear and shock. My mother frowned fiercely at my father. His eyes narrowed, but he remained silent.
I turned to my mother, ignoring my father. “I’m sorry. I was telling Col what we were eating. We don’t stop to think what language we are using. I wasn’t trying to be rude.”
My mother nodded and the incident passed. Col shifted uncomfortably in her seat and I tried to give her an encouraging smile.
The conversation around the supper table was strained and desultory, stretching across long, agonised silences broken by my mother asking about how our days had gone. My father’s baleful eye lay heavy on me throughout the meal. With the question marks hanging over my relationship with Col, I didn’t feel hungry.
Somehow, I managed to eat my plateful, as did Col, and then we helped my sister with the clean-up, to her apparent disgust at having to associate with us boys. I wondered how she’d behave if she knew Col was a girl.
As we finished, my mother came back into the kitchen.
“Will, you and Col can get the camp bed and take it up to your room. Do you remember how to put it together?”
“I think so.”
The camp bed was primitive by the modern standards I was used to – basically, canvas stretched tightly across a wooden frame on a set of six legs. There was no mattress, you put some blankets on top of the canvas to soften it. It took us a while to work out how to put it together, despite my previous experience. As we worked together, I could feel Col’s mood thawing, to the point of giving me a tentative smile at one point as we struggled with the wretched device.
“Do you think you’ll be comfortable on this?” I asked, eyeing off the camp bed suspiciously when we had it assembled.
“I expect so.” She gave me a full smile. “Even if I’m not, I won’t be getting in with you,” she laughed and then reached across to take my hands. “I’m sorry about earlier – I can see you are not a pervert. But I do want to try to understand what has happened to you. It must be weird inside your head.”
I gusted out a relieved breath. “Thank you for believing me – inside my head is strange when my young brain’s emotions war with my old brain. But most of the time – what you see is what you get.” I didn’t understand what had happened to me, so I didn’t know what else I could tell her. “Ask whatever you want, and I’ll try to give you an answer if I have one.”
I squeezed her hand – and my mother appeared with blankets, sheets, and a pillow.
For a fraction of a second, she froze, viewing the tableau before her. “Here you go, Col. Spread these blankets on the camp bed and then make up a normal bed on top. There’s plenty of blankets.” She dropped the bedding on the camp bed.
We started making up the bed under her watchful eye as she tried to fathom our relationship. I could almost hear the unasked questions bouncing around in her head.
“Do you want a bath before bed, Col?” she asked.
Col tensed for a moment. “No thank you, Frau Doktor Johnstone. Mutti made me have one before I left so I would not be a problem for you.”
My mother smiled at Col. “It’s a pleasure to have you here.” Again, there was a gazing assessment. I had no idea how to deal with this scrutiny of our relationship.
“Tomorrow is a school day for both of you, so I want you to get ready for bed in half an hour – and when the lights go out, I want you to sleep. No chatting to all hours of the night. Understood?”
“Okay”
Col watched my mother leave and then asked, in German, “If we talk in German, will your mother understand?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve spoken to her about her German and she told me she only had a smattering from when she was at school before the war.”
Col gave me a wry smile and then sat on the camp bed, bouncing to test it. Then she settled, slipped her shoes off, perched her feet on the edge of the camp bed and wrapped her arms around her shins, chin on her knees.
“Willi, I think your mother is worried about how close we are.”
I nodded in agreement. “Though I don’t know what to do about it.”
Col paused. “Does she think we are homosexuals?”
I cast her a wry smile. “Possibly. But I don’t think she will say anything. The subject is so taboo, I think we are safe unless she catches us in bed together.”
Col chuckled. “If she did, she would know we weren’t homosexual.” A faint blush crept into her cheeks at what she had suggested.
I smiled, raising an eyebrow.
Col shook her head and changed the subject. “Willi, you know the future?”
“Perhaps.”
“What do you mean, perhaps? You lived through it.”
I sighed. “Col, I lived through a future. This world is similar to the one I know ... knew...?” I shook my head in frustration at a language incapable of expressing my situation without confusion. “ ... in my previous life ... but there are differences.” I smiled at Col. “You and Mutti Frida are here, not my Col and his mother; a small difference, I suppose, but not the only one.”
I took a calming breath. “The failed assassination of Kennedy is a huge difference. I can see you being here might be irrelevant to the future, but I can’t see how Kennedy living won’t change things.”
“Does it matter, Willi, if the future is not the one you know?”
“Yes, it does.” I suppressed a shudder. “You see, in my world, in spite of continuous confrontation and sabre-rattling between east and west, the cold war never exploded into a real, all-out nuclear war.” I was silent for a moment, recalling there had been occasions when it had been perilously close, even after the Cuban missile crisis.
Col frowned, wondering where I had gone to this time.
I smiled an apology. “Then in twenty-five years, the Eastern Bloc collapses, Germany is reunified, and all the Warsaw pact countries gain their independence. Then the Soviet Union collapses, and many of the republics declare their independence from Russia.”
Col’s eyes flared. “Oh, Willi.”
“It was a magical time. Kennedy’s assassination must have had a huge impact on what went on behind the scenes with the KGB and CIA – and everything is going to be changed now.” I squeezed my eyes shut, holding things together. “And I’m back living through an uncertain, dark future.”
Col leaned across and took my hands. “Oh, Willi. But you managed before, and you can do it again.” She stopped and took a sharp breath in realisation. “You said before there were ... other times. Was this darkness involved?”
I tasted my memories. The constant threat of nuclear annihilation was part of the rotten, acrid flavour of my teens – but as a grimy primer for the canvas on which the rest of my life was chaotically splashed. “It didn’t help, but it was so omnipresent it became part of the background.” My voice lost its gloom. “And then I moved to Australia, where the threat was distant.”
“Can you tell me why you ... tried again?” Her voice soft, enfolding me in care.
My breathing sped up as I trawled through my past which was again my future. My eyes hooked onto Col’s and I grimaced. “I never fitted in. I knew I couldn’t be a pilot, but I tried and, of course, I failed.” I took a breath, suppressing the pain caused by picking at that scab. “My doubts about my worth in every job I did would be reinforced by something going wrong and it would push me...”
Col glanced at the closed bedroom door and then leaned forward, taking my hands back in hers. “Willi, you do fit in – with me and Mutti and now Lili. You must learn to trust yourself – if you don’t fit in somewhere, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”
I sighed. “Col, I’m worried this time my difference is even greater.”
“But you have seventy years of experience to help. Seventy years where you ... you didn’t do it, however close you came.”
I had my head down, so Col leaned forward and peered up at me. “Already your experience has helped you change things with your father and the bullies at school. You even helped me understand what was happening at school, turning Lili into our friend.” Her face was lit with encouragement. “And you are so talented at everything at school.” Her eyes gifted me her support and ... love?
“Yes – but remember, I’ve done it all before.” I could hear the self-deprecation in my voice.
“Don’t put yourself down.” Her words were fierce. “Did you excel at French and German before?”
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