Hidden Away (35 page)

“Yes.” His hands squeeze mine. “Would you care to listen to music?”

 

“I’d like to get you to a piano so I can listen to
you
play.”

 

Kurt pulls away and heads toward the living room. “I don’t play anymore.”

 

“You played that Christmas song,” I remind him as I trail after him.

 

He stops before making it to the record player. “I don’t play anymore, John,” he says.

Impulsively, I take his hand. I think I scare him a bit by doing it, but he can’t keep living like a mouse. I pull him through my home, only stopping when I’ve reached the bedroom. Both windows are covered by heavy fabric. I leave the door open in hopes of making him feel comfort by not closing him in.

Kurt opens his mouth and the beginning of a question comes out. I cut it off by kissing him. I hold him gently, one hand cupping his face, the other curved around his hip. I’m energized when he responds. He kisses me in return, opening his mouth to me, relaxing his body. I want more of him, so I lean in. My weight causes him to step back. I follow, not allowing for any space to come between us.

When his back is against the wall, I move my mouth lower to his neck. I work at the buttons of his shirt with my fingers, never letting my lips leave his skin. I can hear him breathing in my ear, and with it is a soft sound I doubt he’s aware of making. It drives me further, begging me to continue.

With his shirt undone, I run my hands over his abdomen. He’s still covered by his undershirt, but it is so easy to feel the ridges of his hard body. He may be a bit too thin, but Kurt has muscles. The feel of them turns me on. I kiss his mouth again, a hand moving up to hold the back of his head, and I press my groin into his hip. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more in my life than wanting him right now.

He stills, and for a moment I continue. But he never comes back to me and I stop. I can’t catch my breath, but manage to say, “Kurt?”

I pull my upper body back. One look at his expression and I realize this is no longer passionate or sexy. It’s not even
nice
for him.

I’ve scared him back to the concentration camp. God only knows what’s going through his mind. My desire overpowered my caution, and now I’ve driven him to a place I never want him to be. I step away completely.

“I’m sorry,” I say after clearing my throat.

Standing there and staring at him isn’t helping anything, so I leave the room. If I was Kurt, I’d want to be alone, so it feels like the right thing to do. Out on the porch, I smoke and drink two quick glasses of whiskey. My dick is still straining against my pants, so I go to the bathroom and try to pee. I stand there for ten minutes.

It takes forever for the blood trapped in my groin to disperse, but when it finally does, and I can feel the alcohol working, I go back out. I expect to see him in the kitchen or on the porch, but he’s not in either spot. My heart sinks. He’s left.

I make my way back through the house. I want to lie down. Sleep sounds blissful until I remember the dreams that will undoubtedly plague it.

My feet stop short when I see a figure standing in the doorway. His head is hung low, his fingers twisting together. “Kurt?”

It’s awkward, and he’s shy, but he walks to me. He moves into my arms and lets me hold him. His head against my shoulder is better than any sex we could’ve had. This is somehow more intimate than sex. It takes more trust on his part to let me cradle him like this than I suspect it would to let me enter him.

I’m not sure how much time passes before he lets me ease him onto the bed. I take my time. Assure him with my slowness that there is no threat or expectation. I don’t want him to feel obligated in any way, nor do I want to push him into a physical relationship.

We lie together, me on my back, Kurt on his side, curled into me. I wrap my arm around him.

The last thing I’m aware of is the peaceful rhythm of his breathing. After that, I’m pulled into the darkness, and for the first time in so very long, I sleep without visions of Dachau.

Chapter 18

 

Mauthausen, Austria
1943

T
HE
gray smoke rose up to meet the gray sky, where it disappeared into the vast, and I could no longer tell which was which. It seemed to me that the gaseous remains of dead prisoners took longer to rise in the winter than in the summer. I was only vaguely aware that the days were colder now. Numbness was my body’s last ditch survival tactic.

The winds whipped through me as I stood out on the stone portico of the Headquarters building. I could feel the feathery licks against my skin, but the cold that should have seared through the fabric of my uniform failed to touch me.

“It’s time.”

I didn’t turn. The routine was the same. When the commandant was finished with me—either my body for sex or my hands for music—he sent me to wait outside the building. Jules always collected me and walked me to my barrack before heading for his own. I would have roughly five minutes to clean up for roll call, not that I kept track of minutes anymore. Or hours.

Or days.

“Here,” he said as he took my hand and pressed something soft into it. “Eat it. You look like hell.”

At the bottom of the steps, I looked at the bread in my hand. I wasn’t hungry. The commandant also forced me to eat, but his intention was to keep me around a little longer for his personal use whereas Jules was just being kind.

While kindness was a luxury I didn’t want any more, I ate the bread to satisfy the Frenchman. “Big night tonight.”

His reference was to the concert for visiting officials. Instead of the accordion I usually played with the orchestra, it would be a piano.

It would not be Peter on the violin.

A sharp pain in my gut doubled me over. Hands on my shoulders. Shouting from high up and far away.

Jules’s voice in my ear. “We have to keep moving.”

We were at the gate. The shouts came from men with machine guns. If I delayed longer, I would be shot. My feet became roots, and I didn’t budge.

I could feel everything in this moment. The pain in my head and my heart and my body. It came crashing over me, but was taken again when Jules pulled me along.

He said something as he left me in the musicians’ barrack, but the sound of his voice was lost as the rushing of my mind slowed and then silenced again.

The concert took place an hour after roll call. The night was filled with propagandist marches produced to keep the German spirit high. No one shouted at me, so I knew I played the correct songs. I looked up one time. Only once.

In the front row, the commandant sat with his wife. She had long dark hair and brilliant red lips, reminding me of the ladies that lived in Peter’s apartment building. Perhaps they were still there. Lesbians were considered asocial, but they weren’t rounded up by the thousands like us queers, although there were rumors spoken by men who’d been in other camps that there were ladies who wore the black triangle.

I hoped those still lived in that building. I’d never cared enough to get their names. I wished I had.

It was difficult to see the commandant’s gaze, but I could almost feel it. These songs excited him. Eyes hot on me.

I looked to the children who sat next to his wife, in between her and another man in his Nazi uniform. They would grow up to be good Germans and torture the next generation of queers and Jews and men who thought differently.

A flash of the France Peter had described came to mind. I bit my lip to remove it. There was no need for lies. Peter was gone and I was in a prison camp.

I would die here.

The piano was old, but properly tuned. My thin, pale fingers stood out against the black of the wood. I imagined my fingers as bone—an easy task since they weren’t much more than that now.

When the concert was over, I sat in my bunk until lights out. I waited. Men came for me in the night, quietly slipping into the dormitory. No one woke but our elder. He said nothing as the guards took me.

The commandant was in his office, his uniform barely on as he sat at his desk pretending to work.

“Inmate, play,” he said as the guards left the room.

I played a marching song. He was soon behind me, his fingers gracing over my cheeks, up through the stubble of my hair, down over my shoulders, underneath my shirt. He brought his mouth to my ear. Warm wetness stretched and trailed where his fingers were. Ear, cheek, chin, throat, shoulder.

“I wish I knew how you captivate me like this,” he murmured against my flesh. He pulled my shirt off. “Then I could combat it.”

Tonight, he touched me as a lover, forcing me to hold his gaze as I lay back on the bench. After, he kissed the sunken spaces between my hips. “One day,” he said as his body began to settle and his breathing returned to normal. “One day when all of this is finished, and I can be with you as I should like, you’ll say my name, and we’ll—”

I turned my hearing off. They were lies he spoke. He didn’t love me, and I would slit my wrists before voluntarily saying his name or making love with him.

He did this quite often, allowing himself to slip into a fantasy where he wasn’t a Nazi, and I wasn’t a dirty queer. I wanted no part of it, but I had no power beyond not listening.

I knew what the next day would bring before it even came.

It was no surprise when I returned after morning roll call that I was thrown across the room. He had hours to think about what a horrible pillow-biter I was for making him want me. The disgust for himself oozed out, and he expressed it by beating me.

The numb protected me from the pain of his fists and feet, and I could only hope that one day he’d end the temptation, and send me back to Peter.

Chapter 19

 

Berkeley, California
1952
“A
LL
right, so now you swing the bat,” I tell

Adéle, then laugh as she swings it so hard, she spins on one foot. “This is baseball, not the ballet.”

When she’s come to a full stop, she giggles at me. She performs a curtsy, then looks to Kurt. They are both on my team, with Jules and Flori out on the homemade diamond. It took twenty minutes to show him how to throw the ball, and even after a half hour of playing, he still can only get it close enough for me to hit it every fifth time he tries.

I step up behind the little girl, sinking down to her height, and help her hold the bat. She says something to Kurt in French. I don’t know what to make of his expression after she says it, but it looks part disapproving, part indulgent, and part amused. He shakes his head, says something back to her, then nods at Jules.

Jules throws the ball in a strange arch. My hands tighten over Adéle’s and we swing. There is a satisfying crack when the ball hits the wood, and I can’t help but smile. Standing now, I carefully push her to begin her run to first base, then I chuckle when she skips down the imaginary line.

Flori has retrieved the ball. Her throw back to Jules makes me reconsider making him the pitcher. Adéle is leisurely making her way to second base, but her parents make no play to stop her. Instead, they congratulate her for making it to the garden gnome. Perhaps it was because I was a boy, but my father was never that easy with me.

I am startled out of an impromptu recollection of my childhood when Kurt steps close. My heart beats just a bit faster. “You’re up,” I tell him unnecessarily. “Need help?”

The thought of bringing my arms around him, helping him swing the bat, our bodies pressed tightly, causes me to grow a little more excited than is warranted by a game of baseball. I don’t think it’s noticeable, so I hold my ground.

“No. Thank you,” he says, head bowed. He’s very shy today, but the fact that he even agreed to play seems like progress.

After two missed swings, he hits the ball and sends it past the garage. He runs for first and I remind Adéle that it’s time for her to go to third, then home. As I watch Kurt, I notice a little limp in his gait. It’s nothing much, but I can see that he might have some problems with his right hip.

I sweep Adéle up into my arms as she reaches the brick that serves as home plate. She laughs as I swing her around. “That was fantastic! I’ve never seen anything like it!”