1

Sitting here in my plush little chair,

In neatly polished glass, a reflection of my cold blank stare,

Like that leaf I spy falling from the Sycamore tree.

Is that you that I see? It matters not who it may be.

Nothing matters now that you have been taken from me.

So, I may not be Robert Frost, but this little poem means a great deal to me. It is difficult

to put heartbreak into words, like trying to describe the kind of thick darkness of a room that has

no hint of light. We know there is a way to describe such things, but the mind refuses us the kind

of relief that will surely come from such an understanding of the abstract.

No, I guess I am bound to the cold hard facts of my mundane story. Yes, that is right, I call my story mundane,irrelevant, and common because there is one thing we can all be sure of in this life, we all lose the one we love the most.

The only difference is the backdrop of the story, but the result is the

same. We live, we suffer, we love, we lose, and we die. This is the great shared commonality of

us all, and a lesson we rarely see until the very end, when the horrible deeds are done, and there

is nothing left but so many ashes of regret. But I am obviously becoming a bit morbid in my old

age. I mean, it is the year nineteen-eighty-five, and I am sitting in my comfy little room at the

Sunnyvale Pennsylvania Retirement Community. Don't misread me here, I am not being

sarcastic.

This is a very good place. I have my own little brown carpeted room, with a very nice

twin adjustable bed. The staff were nice enough to bring me some very fine bedding and pillows,

since I do not have any relatives to rely upon. Let's just say, that after my arrest in Germany in

1935, the cat was out of the bag. Oh no, did I just use that cliché. Well I guess that overused

saying was no different than the one I am about to use, "out of the closet." Yes, that sounds much

more modern. I love these American phrases, such as, "out of the closet," "gag me with a

spoon," and, "that's so bad," which I discovered means something is good. My point is this, I

was not one of those brave enough to proudly proclaim my sexuality during the heyday of 1920's

Germany. Oh yes, you youngsters of today believe that you are the pioneers of gay and lesbian

Brian Hesse rights, but you are sadly mistaken, but don't worry, I wont talk too loudly over your boasting of originality.

Old renegades like me must fade away to make room for the young and high spirited.

All I ask is that you remember us from the past. That you place us in the small italicized

footnote at the bottom of your righteous page. Recessions, war, poverty, and the incessant

political street fighting violence, has a way of forcing people to prioritize their battles. Gay rights

were not high on the list of people's priorities, and neither was the rights of Jews such a concern.

Trying to remember my early years is like looking through a kaleidoscope with my

greasy thumbprint on the lens. But that is sometimes with history. The imagination distorts

images based on whatever fancy or feeling strikes the observer now. At times, the image is clear,

but the narrative is embellished. Other times, the image and narrative are correct, but the

underlying emotion is wrong. Then again, how can we ever tell which part of the story is real or

imagined. So, I will spare the reader of my simple tale with too many observations of my youth.

I know that I was born on a sunny day filled with marshmallow clouds partly obscuring the

beginning of a gloriously colored rainbow. No, that's not right. It was a cloudy grey kind of day

with torrential downpours so thick, one can not even see a few feet in front of the naked eye.

You see, I have no idea what kind of day it was. I know, according to my birth certificate, that I

was born on June seventh, nineteen-hundred and four in a hospital in Frankfurt, Germany. The

weather of that particularly painful day is unknown because my father and mother, Karl and

Anna Werner respectively, never talked much about the weather. My father, a clerk at Gunther's

Trading Company, talked little of mundane things such as the weather. My mother, Anna

Brian HesseWerner, a very progressive woman of the times, ran her own seamstress business from our modest flat in the Bockenheim district.

I cannot say that my childhood is very remarkable. I was

happy, like most innocent boys and girls of that time. I remember playing tag with my older

brother Hans on hazy afternoons when the tutor failed to show for our daily lessons. In hindsight,

I suspect that mother and father had a hard time paying for science, math, and piano lessons as

the great war came to the forefront of thought. So, the first ten years of life are really a blur of

normal boyhood shenanigans of throwing rocks at old Mrs. Konigs salty old German Shepherd

and seeing who could piss the farthest off our flats front porch overlooking Wilhelm Avenue.

The milkman, Mr. Kline, never failed to look up when passing by our pissing perch.

All playful innocence dissipated like a fog meeting the rising sun, in the year nineteen hundred and fourteen. Since politics, not the favorite subject of conversation, in the Werner

household, I had to learn of the war from our tutor, Mr. Aron Dolmer. I will never forget the

man, always smelling of garlic, with his short hunchbacked stature and horn rimmed spectacles,

that always slid to the tip of his nose. He would nervously catch his glasses just before falling

into his thick salt and pepper bushy mustache. He had a kind face. A fatherly face. The kind of

face that revealed a soul pure, kind, and gentle. Completely different than the hard-lined

unsmiling face of my father. My father's face depicts the granite chiseled form of the strong

Germanic male. But I loved them both, as if each complimented the other, providing me with a

balance I still feel blessed to have had in my early years. My mother, the face of an angel.

Unblemished like the face of a fine porcelain doll.

Brian Hesse

"Little Karl," she would say, with the soft voice of a feather gliding in the soft breeze of our cozy

flat. Oh, that's me by the way. Named after my Father Karl.

"Karl sweetie," help mommy set the table.

"Karl my dear," come see the beautiful flowers I picked in the forest this morning.

As you can tell, I was her favorite. My brother Hans loved her too, but he is certainly

more independent than me. I wanted to be her baby and stay that way if I could. The horrors of

the world can halt at the heavy wooden door of our home, and I can stay in her warm embrace

until the end of time itself. She died of cancer when I was just ten years old, one week before I

learned of the coming storm of World War One and two weeks to the day I watched the German

hero's marching off to the conquest of Belgium and France.

I will jump ahead presently to where this story begins, but I believe in precision, and

story precision involves the dull details of childhood. Very few characteristics of my childhood

stand out. The death of my mother, a pin that still pricks carelessly across the surface of my

heart, and the parade of warriors marching smilingly into the arms of death.

It must have been getting late, because I remember looking toward the great gardens

across the street, mesmerized by the pink tint of the towering pine and oak trees as the sun began

its final dissent. From down Wilhelm Avenue I could hear a freight train roaring down the lane,

kicking dust into the air like a swarm of millions of angry bees. As the sound approached, I could

see the blue, red, and bright green uniforms of the young German soldiers.

I use this term Brian Hesse loosely, "German" soldiers, because Germany was not a Nation in the normal sense of the word.

Since old mustached and bravado, Wilhelm, came to power, he worked furiously to unite the

many independent provinces into one so-called Reich. Not surprisingly, I witnessed the many

different brilliantly colored uniforms of individuals, faces glowed with their romanticized

perception of war. Even my neighbor Mr. Vogel, waved jubilantly at the passing soldiers, horses,

and cannon. Would he be waving if a fortune teller could explain his fate in 1942. You see, he

was a homosexual and would die in Mauthausen concentration camp. I know, because I brought

his body to the crematorium.