Chapter 38: Gertrud

Gertrud had striking features. Big, hypnotically blue eyes and an ovular, doll-like face, with a well-rounded chin. Her long wavy sandy brown hair cascaded over her shoulders, and she possessed a tight yet voluptuous, seductively curvy figure. She’d have been a hit with the boys if it wasn’t for her left leg being an inch longer than her right, giving her a slight though noticeable limp.

Despite her disability, I could see that Gertrud was mostly happy with her life. She had a big, kind and jovial family, who we’d have dinner with sometimes, and they were all wonderful, outgoing and warm people. She also had many friends and would go out drinking a lot, hoisting beer steins and singing in merriment.

However, I could see an emptiness in her, like she was longing for something, or somebody. That perhaps, in terms of romantic love, she was desperately lonely. My wife said that Gertrud had never, in her two plus decades of life, ever had a boyfriend, and probably had never even been kissed.

I found that difficult to believe. But, spotting the glint in her eyes, I could guess it true...

From the first time I saw her, I marveled at her spectacular figure. I love a woman with fleshy features, meat on her bones in the right places. I was enchanted by her doll-like face, too, her high cheekbones. Her long pointy thin nose and overall perfect facial structure.

Okay, yes, I’ll admit that I quickly developed a crush on her.

I know, I know, I was an asshole for becoming smitten with her, since I was married. But I did get smitten. I got a thing for her at first sight. And I just couldn’t get her out of my mind.

(In addition to me being an asshole, this was also due, in part, to how unhappy my marriage had become, which I will expound on later... )

At night, in bed, I began to fantasize of her. When I was with my wife, I’d think of...

Gertrud and I had started to work together in the mornings, as she’d do part-time work at the plant nursery, in addition to working on her father’s farm. We’d usually pot plants together in a greenhouse.

There was an instant chemistry there. There was an electricity in the way she’d look at me when we worked together. I’d wonder if, in bed, she was thinking of me, too.

Like this one character on a trashy German soap opera I watched, who’d lie in bed, fantasize about a coworker she had a crush on. Those scenes, that comely young brunette, who sort of looked like Gertrud, always got my mind racing, and I soon got addicted to that show...

(At first I’d been watching it to learn German, because the show was so simple and easy to follow, but then, I got hooked on the show, due to its entertaining plots, and multiple jaw-dropping German beauties... )

((Living in the south of Austria, hardly any TV was in English, and this helped me to learn German, watching so much TV in the language. Funny though, was that in neighboring Slovenia, a small, war-torn, far poorer country, people, especially children, spoke better English, likely because many of their TV channels broadcast US/UK movies and shows in English, whereas in Austria the shows were dubbed into German. Except for German MTV, which showed a few US reality shows in English. I’d found some of my neighbors’ kids who watched those shows spoke English quite well. A paradox, the mind being both rotted and enhanced. An unlikely testament to the educational possibilities of trash TV!))

The trash German show I liked was about these people working in a Bavarian hotel, and like I said, there was that character, a brunette on the show who sort of looked like Gertrud, and I developed an increasingly dire crush on both the TV Gertrud as well as the real life Gertrud.

On the show there’d be these wild fantasy dream scenes where TV Gertrud would close her eyes and envision that proverbial “knight in shining armor” as her coworker and imagine him emerging from the mountains nearby and riding off with her on a white horse, galloping off into an orange hazy sunset.

I began to think of myself as that night in shining armor, swooping her off her feet, and riding off with her, to another village in the Alps, where we’d live in peace. In her, I saw escape. I saw a girlish fun quality that my wife had been losing, day by day, since we’d arrived in Austria.

Okay, I guess I should expound on it, some, how my wife was this laidback girl who’d laugh and be easygoing, up for anything and carefree, when we were in South Beach, but once she got back to Austria, all these skeletons began to claw from her closet. It seemed like she had a morgue, maybe even a fucking cemetery in there. She’d totally become a different person, was constantly grumpy, arguing with me, bitchy and fighting with her mother as well.

It was like Gertrud was the girl I’d been in love with before. Everything about her reminded me of my wife- before we came to Austria. And that was what I wanted again. That person. That feeling...

But I knew it was complicated, of course, and I didn’t want to cheat on my wife. I began also having my own issues, too, with being in Austria.

I’d been instantly distinguished in my wife’s village. First of all, by being American in a small Alpine village that had no Americans, but also because I was a Jew, in an area that hadn’t had Jews even in the vicinity for years.

There was once a small population nearby, hundreds of years ago, but they’d been massacred in a pogrom at the onset of the Crusades. A few more trickled in after that but were banished for centuries by the monarchy and then the small number who’d returned around the 19th century were killed or driven out during WWII.

Almost no one in the village had seen a Jew in person. They’d only really heard and read about them in history books, mostly as just dying in the Holocaust.

Of course, I’d known this before arriving, but when I got there, in person, the weight of it hit me. I started to have these intense nightmares, stuff like being trapped in a prison, a burning building, or sitting in a plane about to crash. I’d never had such dreams, rarely ever had nightmares in my life, until I got to Austria. It was like there was a negative presence, an energy there. The ghosts of dead Jews trying to remind me of what happened. Or ghosts of Nazis trying to force me out.

Not that I received any maltreatment, though, aside from the night terrors and the terror that’d become my wife...

When I arrived to the village, most of the townspeople (other than a few elderly Hitler youth, who seemed to eye me with contempt) were both fascinated and mystified by me. The American. The Jew. Though aside from my plant nursery coworkers and in-laws, most of the townsfolk only stared at me curiously, didn’t make much conversation, but were cordial.

The Austrians are generally a reserved people.

Gertrud, though, from the second we laid lovelorn eyes on one another, made no secret of wanting to talk to me. She wasn’t shy at all around me. She wanted to know everything about me. We spoke mostly in German, since her English was minimal, and thanks to my SIL and Slovenian coworkers, my German had improved rapidly, and after only a short time, I was able to have conversations. Albeit at first in very poor, very broken and horrendously grammatically incorrect sentences, though I improved as time went on, and talking with Gertrud helped me greatly.

(My wife, though, had been terrible about helping me with my German. She refused to speak it with me and would get angry at my mistakes, lose patience quickly. But Gertrud didn’t act like that and seemed to find my mistakes and lack of comprehension endearing. Her easygoing nature part of what endeared me to her... )

((My wife, at this time, her behavior was increasingly erratic, and there were instances where she got violent, threw food or punched me, without provocation. One morning she simply erupted and went Mike Tyson on me, punching me, and bit my forearm, drawing blood and leaving a crescent-shaped scar that exists to this day... ))

Gertrud acted nothing like this and was a breath of fresh air, blessed female companionship to have during my tumultuous, frayed relationship with my wife.

Not only was she kind, I found Gertrud to be rather curious about me, too. And she was also highly curious about the Jews. She wanted to know everything about Jews, like they were this mysterious people. She couldn’t understand why everyone had hated them so much, either, and she told me of the burning sense of shame she felt when she learned Hitler was Austrian, that there were concentration camps in Austria, that it was possible something like that could actually happen.

(Which led me to remember when I was a child, asking my parents about the Holocaust, unable to understand not only how it could happen, but why... )

Her father, a farmer, needed help with his pigs, and had asked Gertrud if she’d ask me to help a couple days a week, but Gertrud explained that she’d read online that Jews couldn’t touch or eat pigs, that it was against their religion, and asked if I could do something else on the farm.

However, when she told me of this, I let her know that I wasn’t religious, ate pork, happily, and would be willing to help out her dad.

When I showed up to work with her dad, I was surprised to find her there, alone, waiting for me by the pigpen. We tended to the pigs, fed them, and then sat down for a quick lunch, eating this soup her mother had made for us that reminded me of matzo soup.

In talking with her, I found her to be blunt, very direct, and she asked me straightforwardly, if I had relatives killed in the Holocaust. I did, distant relatives in Russia, I told her.

She asked me if I hated the Germans or Austrians. Many in Austria had blamed the Germans, she said, for what happened, but she’d been reading about it online, and knew most in Austria gladly joined the Reich. Including many in her family, and although they were menial, low-level infantrymen, a few of whom died in combat, she felt such shame in that they’d fought for a scoundrel like Hitler. She almost looked like she was going to cry, telling me this.

I put my hand on her arm to comfort her. When I touched her, I had such a surge of electricity, barbs of energy jolt through me. The hairs on my arm stood up, and I had to take a deep breath ... Collecting myself, I told her that I didn’t hold it against the Germans or Austrians now, because I didn’t think it was fair to blame them for their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ crimes.