Climbing a Mountain

Beth Chisenhall

We drove up the mountain to get home.  Our copper colored 1975 Pontiac Phoenix winding its way up to the top where the Army base sat.  Rounding the curves, looking across at the remnant of the stone castle on a neighboring hill, I stared from my window at the mountain and the small, Bavarian town below.  It’s timbered Baltic brick buildings and smoothly worn cobblestone streets, flanked by the two rivers that converge there. This car had no air.  In the summer heat my legs stuck to the leather seat.  The seam of the brown leather seat served as a dividing line and my little brother, Devin had only the small space in the middle. Every few minutes he invaded my space and I shoved him over.  My sister, on the other side, shoved him back.

Past the front gate stretched rows of WWII era apartment buildings. Our quarters sat on the second floor of the long, four-story building full of kids who ran up and down the stairwell.  Nearly identical to every other building on post; white with a stone tile roof.  Utilitarian. Down the concrete steps was the basement running the full length of the building.  The long, dark basement housed a line of caged storage units and a dim room with washers and dryers. Once, in a herd of kids, running down that basement hallway, a mouse ran across my foot.  More than once, a mom was raped while down there doing her laundry.

 At six years old, I had my own room for the first time, but it came with a recurring nightmare of sirens.  My dad had his own nightmares, and woke us all up yelling, but he never said what they were.  We stood in the dark at the edge of his bed, trembling, but he only said, “Go back to bed.”   I had my own set of metal dog tags there, too; with my name and social security number – just in case Russia decided to invade West Germany. Our balcony off the living room overlooked the identical building in front of ours.  Some people decorated the bars on theirs with colored ribbon woven in and out of the bars.  The Korean mom who lived below us sometimes used hers to lay out seaweed to dry.  When she was done, she used the seaweed to make kimchi.  For days, the militant aroma of garlic, fermented vegetables, and seaweed wafted through the air and seeped into every inch of the building.

            With no American TV to watch, we spent our summers outside.  Since dad worked in the motor pool, it was just a short distance from our house.  We walked over and looked through the gaps in the chain-link fence to try and find him among all the Jeeps and Humvees.  Eventually, he would notice us and come over to kiss us through the diamond-shaped open spaces of the fence.  Some days, from there, we kept walking.  If we went all the way across the small base, there was a gate in the back with no guard.  Slipping through a crack at the gate, we stepped out at the edge of a German’s orchard.  As far as I could see, grew row after row of apple and pear trees, seemingly the Garden of Eden.  We stayed until dusk, sitting up in these trees, eating pears until our stomachs ached and singing “Copacabana” at the top of our lungs. 

Beside our apartment building, kids played on a small playground.  High-pitched screams echoed between the two buildings as the neighborhood kids swung on the two swings, held onto the metal merry-go-round while another kid pushed it as fast as they could, or played in the sandbox. Frequently, those happy, laughter-filled screams turned to wailing because of one small kid: David Marigold.  Only 7 or 8 years old, and small for his age, David’s daily ritual included torturing all of the kids on the playground.  Kids in the sandbox went home crying with sand in their eyes and their mouths.  He punched and kicked.  He flung kids off of the merry-go-round and the swings.  Leave your bike or roller-skates outside on the grass while you ran in to eat dinner, and they would be gone when you came out. This small, angry, brown-headed boy had a 16-year-old sister, Karen.  Karen was big.  She was tall with long brown hair and wore bellbottom jeans.  Her dark eyes were cold, and she was just as angry as David.  It didn’t matter if he threw sand in your face, or pushed you off a swing, or hit you with a stick.  Hit him back and he was going to send Karen after you.  Angry moms and dads knocked on their door to complain but nothing changed.

Over the course of the Vietnam war, more than 58,000 servicemembers died.  The ones who came home carried the camouflaged scars of their experience and the burden of having survived.  Our dads waged war for a living.  Mean dads raise mean kids. 

When Devin again came in crying, my dad has had enough.  At dinner, he asked my sister, Lori, “Why haven’t you beat the shit out of this kid?”  Then both crying, she explained what Karen was going to do to her if she touched him.  Lori was only 8 and although a good-sized girl, she lacked the muscle or venom to deal with Karen.  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take care of that.”   Just two days later, dad paid the 16-year-old twin boys who lived across the hall from us, to stand there and protect my sister from Karen, while Lori punched David, repeatedly.  Karen was sufficiently scared after being manhandled by the Sudsberry twins, and David didn’t enjoy getting his ass beat by my sister, because neither of them ever bothered us again.  In truth, nobody bothered us anymore.

            We started going to church; not to the small chapel on post, but to an English-speaking church in a small town forty-five minutes away.  My dad is sober now and trying to find something else to fill his sadness.  Some nights our home was full of laughter and it looked like maybe we filled it.  But when he suddenly buried his face in his hands, sobbing, we knew we didn’t.  So, on Sundays we drove down the autobahn, pinching closed our noses as we passed acres of fields growing crops under layers of manure.  Our enormous, metal Pontiac struggled to keep pace with the BMWs as they raced past.  Each week, I studied the beautiful monastery situated on another hill.   Peacefully etched into the side of the mountain, it spoke to me.  I wanted that.  One trip, I gathered the courage to tell my father, “I want to be a nun.”  His only response was, “You can’t, you’re not Catholic.”  The rest of the drive I focused on pushing my brother.  

The church met in a stone building from the eighth century, built on the edge of the river. We climbed up the narrow, winding steps to our church in the attic of the slightly leaning building. In winter, cold air blew through cracks in the walls.  Many of the buildings in this small town were meticulous recreations after having been bombed to rubble during WWII.  They still housed the glass-blower’s shop, a gasthaus for beer or schnitzel, and the bakery. Touring remnants of buildings was a common pastime for visitors.  And once, while walking up the tower of an ancient stone castle, our gymnastics teacher was struck by lightning and killed.  Each week in church, I said an extra prayer.  The next year, I gave up on being a nun and I was baptized there.  The old passed away, the promise of new life.