As promised, here is the next installment.  Our rating slides from “G” to the right considerably along the alphabet, but I don’t use the language or the references to sex gratuitously(except in my private life, of course).  For those of you who don’t want to take another 29 weeks to hear the whole story, a limited number of copies signed by the author(that would be me) available for purchase:

www.awordwithyoupress.com/buy/

That would make the boy very happy.

Here we go:

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Chapter Three

In the year that has passed since that April morning on the bridge, the leaves that emerged from those saplings across the river turned the dark green of Renate’s pullover, then the brown of her beret. They struggled with German bravery against stiff autumn breezes, only to wither in place, and then just let it all go in the free-fall of despair. Most of them were dead before they even hit the ground.

But fresh hope is more tenacious than a dying leaf, and there are well received rumors adrift that another spring is working its way up the Rhine-Neckar valley. The rumors must be true, for there is vengeance in the night air, as winter has unleashed a take-no-prisoners wind to slash through the darkness one last time in what was once the old Jewish quarter of Heidelberg.

That wind, conjured up at the banks of the river, had me looking over my shoulder and burying my fingers in my trench coat. I could hear it scratching its dirty nails on well-worn cobblestones, stirring up from the Neckar and loping on all fours through the labyrinth of alleyways and side streets in search of stragglers, such as me, picking up speed whenever something fed its nostrils. I was alone by the time I got to the far end of Unterestrasse, everyone else having wisely barricaded themselves indoors. I quickened my pace, and reached the familiar oak door of the Cafe Hirschorn to join my fellow misfits before it picked up my scent. A few broken leaves and scraps of newspaper fled before it, and I could hear the whistle of momentum just as I stepped inside. I warmed my fingers by the fire and loosened my scarf, and I foolishly thought I was safe when I gave a nod to my friends who were at the table waiting for Godot, or me, or miracles.

But as the wind sliced past The Hirschorn and into the square, over its shoulder it caught sight of me cozied up at our table. It came to an abrupt halt, and bristled. I had just edged into my usual window seat in our booth and saw it face to face when it pressed its snout against the glass. It bared its yellow teeth and snorted, steaming the window. I didn’t make a move. The antique glass is thin and fragile. It reared and tensed on its haunches, preparing to strike, but at the sight of a log being tossed on the fire, it recoiled and hissed “Never mind. I’ll be back next year. You won’t.” With that threat did winter abdicate. I watched it shuffle across the dimly lit square and lift its leg on a fountain before trotting up into the hills, the darkness, and some undisclosed cave.

“Who’s paying?” The barmaid, Sabrina, held a full tray shoulder high, and had no intention of setting it down until she had her answer. She knows us well.

“Arthur is,” said Tobias, with a grin made forever boyish by the gap between his two front teeth that made taking him seriously an acquired talent.

“Bloody Hell!” said Jimmy. “He doesn’t even touch the stuff! Why should he have to pay?”

At that, Lord Adrian pulled a knotted-up bandanna filled with lint and treasure out of the pit-deep pockets of his rumpled Siberian overcoat, and plunked it down on the table. He’s our English diplomat, whose keen sense of fashion he artfully appropriated from Fagin. He picked open the knot, and the afternoon’s take spilled out in all directions. No paper money, just a collapsing pyramid of coins. He quickly set a stack a little taller than it needed to be on the edge of the table to cover the first round. Satisfied, Sabrina set down the beer and swept the stack into the geld pouch slung just below her belt buckle. She reached into the remaining booty and helped herself to another ten marks. “You shorted me the last time,” she said, as she scanned our blank faces to see who among us would dare to protest. We were aghast and agape! Indignant with indignation! We were, after all, almost innocent. And she had the cheek to calculate the interest and punitive damage as well!

Orders were backing up and she never really did appreciate our theatrics. She spun around without another word, back to the bar where her boss, Manny, was working two or three pumps at a time.

Youth and beauty were required credentials for anybody working tables in this university town, and Sabrina with the scandalously long legs was no exception. As she paced back to the bar, working those illegally tight American jeans, somebody said over the clatter and din, as somebody always does, “Did you ever notice that little brown pouch of hers hangs directly over her little brown pouch?” Of course we did, as we always do. Hannah was running late, which gave us time to talk about women in all ways Neanderthal before she arrived, and we got that obligation out of the way. Hannah was Wendy, and we were the Lost Boys. The whole tribe consisted of Arthur McBride and Jimmy Joyce (who were inseparable), Tobias and Lord Adrian, Uli, Deiter, and myself. I’m Morgan, the only Yank, and the only one at the table who can’t strum a guitar well enough to open up his case and his heart on some street corner for passing Deutchmarks. Jimmy keeps threatening to change that. He’s offered lessons on the sly if I’ll make him look handsome when I ever get around to forging his portrait. Might be a stretch, but why not.

If I ever forget their names, if I ever forget my own, I just have to find my way back to the Cafe Hirschorn and sit at that table. All of us but Arthur carved our names so deeply into the varnished oak that even the relentless tide of spilled beer cannot erode our certificate of ownership. It was our table, undisputed.

Tobias, deemed leader of the band because he was the one who had the finesse to work out most of the harmonies and give them a ring, jacked his glasses back up the slope to the bridge of his nose and got right into things. “You should have been at the meeting at the Rathaus this morning, Jimmy. Deiter kept raising all kinds of objections, like it was a criminal trial. Talking about student’s rights and free speech and all that. Finally, the mayor cracks his gavel and says ‘Are you trying to show your contempt for these proceedings?’ and Deiter says right back ‘On the contrary! I’m trying my best to conceal it!’ ”

Jimmy says, “You’re marked.” A dedicated hornithologist, he lays down his field glasses and note book and cuts short his scientific observations of the flock of women preening their feathers at the bar and returns his full attention to the table.

He’s probably right. Deiter may now be under official screwtiny. But we all know he couldn’t help himself. Rehearsing, no doubt. He intends to become a lawyer, just like his father, and, more than likely, just for his father. As for Tobias, far more astute than his Alfred E. Neuman grin portends, he’s plugging away at a university degree that will give him the required credentials to examine all those young ladies perched at the afore-mentioned bar as a medical doctor some day. (The rest of us are already in private mal-practice, unfettered by the lack of a diploma.)

“So in the end,” says Tobias, “the council all went along with what the mayor was saying. If buskers are allowed to perform in the streets unregulated, sooner or later a street car is going to run over somebody and turn them into…what did you call it, Morgan?”

“Street pizza. Strasse strudel. Carnage asada.”

“Yes, one of those, and it will be our fault. That’s the excuse. All of us have to go down and register at city hall. Anybody who plays the streets, whether they live here or are just passing through. Fingerprints, photograph, everything.”

“They don’t call it the Rat-haus for nothing, now do they. Then what?”

“You have to give three day’s notice ahead of time where you want to play, and what time. They give you a permit for two hours.”

“Oh, yes, ‘We all love the wandering minstrels now won’t you kindly wander along and play somewhere else!’ I suppose you have to let ‘em know what octave you intend to play in, as well.” Jimmy honored a previously booked engagement with a hangover that precluded him attending the meeting. “Photos and fingerprints? Are they serious?”

“And you must pay five marks to register, and five marks each time you play.”

“Is that for the whole band?”

“That’s for each of us. We’re dead. That’s twenty marks.”

“Thirty if you and Adrian are with us,” added Uli, his voice quietly drifting through a thin veil of smoke that was in constant hunger for crushed leaves.

“Christ Almighty. How do they expect us to support all these pubs?” Jimmy rolled his eyes.

Uli rolled a cigarette. “This all begins the first of May. That’s not much time.”

“About a month,” somebody says, with a sense of urgency that Uli could never muster. When the house is on fire, Uli will be certain to first take out the trash before sounding the alarm.

“Yes. Get us off the streets before all those Japanese tourists come to snap pictures of themselves in quaint little Heidelberg without the degenerates dealing music and dope on every corner. None of this would ever have happened if we played Wagner!” Jimmy, the most foreign of foreigners at the table, had the most to lose by all of this. The music was all that kept him here.

“There’s one more thing,” said Lord Adrian, without looking up from parceling out the bounty into equal piles for each busker, which was pointless since it was all going to stagger into the black hole of Sabrina’s famous leather pouch before the night was over, anyway. “If they catch us playing unregistered after the first of May, they take the guitars right on the spot.”

Jimmy stiffened and pressed some muscle over Arthur McBride. “Never!” he declares. “Where’s me fuckin’ shillelagh?” With his free hand he tosses a swallow of ale down the hole in his beard.

“You might be careful, Jimmy. You’re spilling some of that in your mouth.” I was sitting with my back to the wall, across the table from him. Jimmy put down his mug. He’s looking my way but what he sees is hanging just over my shoulder above the wainscot on the pale red velvet wall. There is a very old photo, similar among dozens here, of a dashing young German aristocrat from another age, all epaulets and sash, with a sword at his side and patch on his eye.

“And what are you looking at?” Jimmy scowled at the Baron von Leftover and accused him of spying. “That bastard’s always got his eye on us. His good eye, anyway. Did you ever notice that?”

“Maybe he wants to challenge you to a duel.” Deiter had been sipping his beer and decided to weigh in. Deiter is our goatee-ed historian, and I believe the only one among us who admits to carrying a comb. Also the only one whose hair seems too short to be bothered. All that’s missing is a monocle.

“Saber and rapier? I’d take him on, if only to drink me beer in peace!”

“Do you know anything at all about the duel, Jimmy?”

“Only that it’s better to win than to lose.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“For fuck’s sake, what are you talking about?”

“Look around, Jimmy.”

He did. This is the very hall where that princely student, Mario Lanza urged everyone to drink, drink, drink. In two or three hundred years the only thing that’s been changed—and it’ll be changed again sometime after midnight—are the wood shavings scattered in snowdrifts on the old oak floor to soak up spilled beer and soften the blow if you fall on your face. Oh, and the wall sconces no longer smell of lamp oil or require a match. Antlers on the wall—the hirschorn—still offer to hold your coat and scarf when you come in the door, if you care to surrender them, and oak beams still hold up the ceiling, though now they grumble about it. On every wall where Jimmy looked were photographs, even tin-types, that had been hanging in place on the velvet wallpaper so long the watered down zinfandel-of-a-color was bleached ten shades lighter than the deep burgundy behind the frames, but it’s nothing to wine about.

“All these photographs, every one, are the ones who lost the duel.”

“These blokes on the wall, they’re the losers? They lost the fuckin’ duel?”

“Every one of them.”

“But they’re not dead, at least, not when they refused to smile for the camera?”

“If somebody got killed, it was usually an accident. You see, Jimmy, the duel had nothing to do with murdering your rival. It had to do with defending your honor.”

There was a time when honor was an honorable thing.

“First drop of blood, no matter how slight, and the duel is over. Nobody wanted to kill anybody.”

“Fuckin’ pathetic!” said Jimmy, invoking the most pretzel-of-a-word in his lexicon. I sit in awe when I see him bend it into a noun, adverb, adjective, pronoun, improper noun and god knows how many other parts of speech all in the same sentence, especially when he feels obligated to be the drunken, cliche’ Irishman. “In fact, that’s the most fuckin’ pathetic story I’ve ever fuckin’ heard in me whole fuckin’ disgusting life!—fuck all! If you’re going to duel, just run the bugger through and be done with it!” And then, having belched for punctuation, he put his arm over the shoulder of Arthur McBride to show he wasn’t completely outnumbered in his sediment. His Irish accent was stronger than stout. He even burped in Paddy. “What about the winners? What about the ones who actually won the duel?”

“Forgotten.” It was Uli, who drew his elegantly long blond hair behind his head as he spoke. (Everything about Uli was long—his hair, his fingers, the pause between words and even the length of the syllables he spoke, like his voice was walking a footbridge swaying over a ravine, a thousand foot drop to the rapids and boulders below.) “Nobody photographed the winners. No scars. No proof of courage. But lose? You’re famous.”

It’s true. Your picture on the wall with these other immortals. Your opinion sought after, in all matters, political and personal, your integrity beyond reproach, tenured. Steins of brew paid for by somebody else, consumed in your honor.

“You really had a lot to win by losing.” Tobias wanted back in on the conversation.

“He’s right. What you are really hoping for after you’ve drawn swords is that your opponent has the skill to inflict just the right wound, after you put up a good fight, of course. A slice, not a stab, and it certainly had to be visible.” Deiter held his finger as if it were a saber, and demonstrated on himself. “He had to hold the sword just so, almost perpendicular to the ground, so it strikes across the forehead and cheek, but misses your eye.”

“I just can’t see it, for fuck’s sake. Lookin’ at those pictures, seems more often than not that polite little nick across the noggin managed to slice and dice the eyeball, in spite of the rule book. What could possibly be that fuckin’ important to fight over?”

“Women,” said Uli, master of the one word dissertation and all-nighters.

For a brief moment Jimmy pondered conceding the point, but the moment quickly passed, slipping on its arse and then sliding down his throat on a cascade of amber ale.

“Genaou—exactly. The duels were almost always about women,” said Deiter.

“Still are!” said Tobias, on top of a burp, pleased, as ever, to inject his nervous wit, and thinking it’s well received. Tobias, or not Tobias—that is the question. He can be annoying, but he’s one of us, and we all recognize the signs. That boy needs an oil change. Everybody sees the smoke coming out of his tailpipe but him.

“Yes, yes. Now let me finish if you expect a little pro bono some day. I swear you’re going to need it!” Deiter doesn’t like being interrupted when he has the floor. “A lot of the squabbles started right here, in this hall. Somebody would flaunt his less-than-honorable intentions about some woman. Some jealous fool would protest. An insult would follow. An insult returned. Back and forth until a duel was arranged to settle the matter.”

I’ve heard all this before, right here in this booth. So has Mr. Joyce, though he was asleep with his head on the table in a puddle of drool and Irish whiskers at the time. After the two rivals settled up their account at the bar, it was up the cobblestones, entourage in tow, to the broad and grassy lawn in the shadow of Heidelberg Castle, where capes were removed and handed to the trusted second, swords were drawn, angers flared. Parry and thrust, parry and thrust, slash, advance, parry and thrust.

“Now, for the precision. The perfect cut, the signature of honor upon your face. Remember—a slice, not a stab. You hope it’s swift and he doesn’t blind you.”

“Are you daft? By this time the woman you’re fighting over has already named the seein’ eye dog ‘Scruffy’, had him to the groomers and fitted you for a red-tipped cane. You’re blind already to get sucked into all this,” mutters the Irishman.

“Deiter, tell him about the tree sap,” mutters the Englishman. Lord Adrian moves his lips no more than is absolutely necessary. He considers mumbling an art form, and he’s at the top of his game.

“The resin? Oh, yes, I forgot to finish about the resin.” I think Deiter had been waiting for somebody to ask. Lord Adrian was no more interested now than he was the first time he heard all this, but he had a sense of what people wanted, and intuitively, he obliged. The future barrister went on, “They used to take the pitch from a pine tree, and fold it into the wound. It was supposed to clot the blood, but really they did it so when it healed, it made the scar ruby-red.”

“Like I said, fuckin’ disgusting!” Jimmy feels vindicated.

“Maybe so, Jimmy, but here we are, a hundred, a hundred fifty years later, and we’re still talking about them. Who’s ever going to remember us?” As the words come out of my mouth, I realize immortality might still be an option for them, even without the validation of a duel or a photo on the wall in this shrine of the chivalrous. I can strum a few chords, but I don’t pretend to be a musician. I pretend to be an artist, but my friends? They are musicians. Buskers! Not rock stars playing for twelve-year-olds. Real musicians. Fifty or a hundred people so thick in the street listening to them play that streetcars couldn’t pass. These friends of mine. They have the music. Delirious with music. Music so contagious and intoxicating and liberating that the mayor of Heidelberg himself boasted that he even forbade his own daughter to drop coins in their coffers and made it his personal mission to tone them down, rein them in, before their hedonistic ways spread uber alles, and youth (that would be us) takes over the world!

“I don’t bloody well care who remembers me. I’m not ruining this perfect face me ma gave me for a woman.”

“Jimmy, I don’t think anybody has seen that face of yours in about five years. It’s asking a lot for us to take it on faith that it’s perfect.”

“Well said, Lord Adrian,” nods Tobias, lifting his glass. Jimmy has been hiding behind a beard ever since he could grow one. I don’t know that it’s been trimmed since he left the family farm in that cow-infested County Wicklow and ‘the little woman’ he swears is nursing a pint until he returns, sheep-shears in hand, no doubt.

In this fashion the hours piss their way along at Cafe Hirschorn. Hannah still hasn’t shown up and probably won’t, and Sabrina comes over with what must be round…four? (or is it fourteen? Our higher math skills often struggle when converting pints to liters). Adrian tries to chat her up, as he often does, embarrassing everyone but himself. “Tell me,” he says to her, “Is it true you’re the queen of the land?”

It must be getting late—she takes the bait.

“What?”

“I said, are you queen of the land?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s that ribbon holding your hair together. May I have a closer look?” He sits up straight and fondles the black hair tie when she bends over the table to pull together the empties, and before she knows what he’s up to, he’s made his move, lightly grazing the nape of her neck. “Yes, definitely velvet. And, of course, the diamonds. That’s the give away.”

The baffled Sabrina looks to us for rescue. She’s on her own.

And then Lord Adrian comes in with an ancient Saxon song Hannah and Tobias caught him singing when he first tested the acoustics on some street corner here one mid-summer night and decided he was home:

“Her eyes, they shi-ine like di-iamonds,

I thought she was queen of the land.

Her hair, it hung on her sho-oulders,

tied up with a black velvet band.”

She loads up her tray, casually wrings out a beer-soaked rag over Adrian’s head, and saunters back to the bar. Hard for the table to hold in a giggle. Only the truly warranted fear of adding strains to the over-stretched bladder keeps us from bursting open into fully fledged laughter.

“She loved it, actually.” Adrian feels obliged to interpret her true feelings hidden just beneath the surface of her disgust.

“You might try brushin’ your teeth, every now and again,” says Jimmy. “Women love it. A shower might also work to your advantage.” The bell tower in the church steeple brings the lesson in hygiene to an end. I lose count, but it must be a quarter ’til footless from what I can make out. We’re running out of insults to hurl at each other and we’re all congratulating ourselves for completing our civic duty to keep all this beer out of the throats of drunks and derelicts. In fact, deserves another round. Sabrina floats back from the bar with the final finale. “Pay up,” she says. “I’ve got to get home.” The fire’s dying down, but there’s not too much in-and-out at the door at this hour, so it stays warm enough. A few loners slumped over their mugs, molting, but most everyone else is gone. Manny himself, who leases the place, trudges out from behind the bar with a big street broom and starts flipping chairs over on the tables and sweeping beer-soaked wood shavings into a pile, but returns to his pulpit and all those levers when the oak door swings in for what has to be the last customer for the evening—and the last man I would ever want to share a pint with.

“Steady, Morgan,” says Jimmy. But I’m already gagging on the smell of sulfur when I see the devil enter our house of worship, and I’m dead sober.

It’s possible, tucked in our little corner booth as we are, that he doesn’t even see us. He doesn’t even look in our direction when he stands by the fire and dusts a few flakes of the road off his cape as if it’s snow. The fingers on his right hand are bandaged. He drags a back-pack and bedroll along with his weapon to the distant end of the now empty bar, where he claims a stool with his back to us. I think he saw us. I think he circled the place twice just to see what he was getting into before he even opened the door.

“You know,” says Jimmy, in a whisper, “someone saw Renate, maybe this side of Christmas, selling her stuff again, in Paris. I was meaning to tell you.” It was not her fuckin’ stuff, and it was not fuckin’ Paris. Even Jimmy knelt to pray whenever Renate offered communion.

“I heard the same,” confesses Uli. I suppose they all had. “Did you ever find out what happened to her, after she left here last summer?” He’s not offering to enlighten me, he really doesn’t know. Nobody at this table but me knows anything other than that she went down in flames, disappeared, and was rumored to have re-surfaced on a Paris street corner. And they know, they have learned, I don’t mind if they gamble for my clothes but do not puncture my rib-cage with the spear tip of her name. All the time Deiter was talking about honor and duels that took place a century ago, I was holding my breath in a rabbit hole, hoping nobody saw me. I just can’t seem to evict this shame that’s taken up residence my heart, that still festers even with the passage of time, which is vastly over-rated as a cure-all.

Of course I know what happened to Renate, or at least, half the story. I’ll wager that boney-cheeked son-of-a-bitch at the dark end of the bar knows the other half.

My friends at the table here are all discovering their multiple virtues. Isn’t that what our twenties is supposed to be about? They’re finding loyalty, discipline, love, talent, even the capacity to hold several gallons of beer at a single sitting. The very first discovery I made about myself since I crossed the pond blind-sided me. Until I was tested I always assumed I was brave. That mother-busker squatting on a bar stool sucking on a pretzel and chewing a beer taught me otherwise. I never drew a sword in Renate’s defense, when I could have made a difference. I froze up. All last summer. I let him ruin her one day at a time.

“She’s got a great cunt. Personally, I prefer her ass-hole.” A year ago, before we knew who he was, before we knew what he was, we had asked him to join us at our booth, extending a little hospitality to a fellow street player, new to the place. “Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to try it on for size yourself, Morgan.” Renate, who was there with him, had just gotten up and gone to the loo. “Go ahead. Hit her up for it. I’ll give you each a one night pass.” She returned and he was all sweetness and smiles…

Maybe he didn’t see us, but even with his back to us that flickering reptilian tongue of his is picking up information if it’s warm enough at the bar for his blood to circulate. He knows we’re here.

He knows I’m here.