Hubie didn't have one like it. Neither did Karl. It could be said, in fact, that no one the whole length and breadth of Eindhoven, such as it was, had one like it. Not then, at least. Not in 1944.

It was surely more beautiful than all things, even things they had before the war and the rationing and the Germans. How they kept it was not so much a secret as a mystery. They knew only that some things must be preserved, just as the seasons must wander through amicably, lest life grow heretical and corrupted in its bright corners. Perhaps that was what his father puzzled over as he sat in the diminutive interior room listening to Radio Orange while his eyes wandered and his thin lips moved in mute remonstrance. And all the while, rubbing, rubbing, the glistening metal beneath his thumb. O, our Father . . .

In the minuscule kitchen his mother whispered violently,

“Americans.

“Americans and Limeys.” Her brow knit itself into the nest of a thousand worries. Jan watched silently, whisking food away into warm storage. The only noise was the tink of cool metal against his teeth in a fastidious rhythm. The sound was obtrusive and overwhelming, and they both wanted it to end, but said nothing, knowing someday it would.

“Here we sit waiting for Americans and Limeys. Georg knew what was right. Mark my words.” Georg had left and one day the Americans would come. Would there be a boy among them enough to make his own mother touch her apron in supplication as she did now? “Georg was right.”

Jan stared at his plate. Georg was gone, dispatched in measures to a rehabilitation camp somewhere south, in a foreign land where dark forests sucked the marrow out of children. Jan wondered what that sounded like. Georg surely knew.

“Are you done?” she asked tritely, as though it was unkind of him to enjoy eating occasionally. ”Go see papa,” she continued, whisking the plate away with washing-hard hands. Jansen flopped casually from the table.

His little boy arms curled around her deep thighs. Deep--like old daguerreotypes one looked into rather than at. “I miss Georg, too.”

“Go see papa,” she repeated thickly. “Tell him that one day the Americans and Limeys will come, and what will he think of himself then?” She was neither cold nor cruel. She was merely alone.

Jansen knocked at the door to his father's sulking room. He could hear muted voices repeating faint hopes and false rumors that bent the world into a paradigm of all things hollow.

“Come,” his father called.

The passage opened compliantly. Shadows and dim light of the fading sun tumbled across thin, windowless walls. His father blinked and then thrashed his eyes close. “Close that door.” It was closed with a soft click, shutting out life except what remained in the sheltered room, filled with voices that belonged neither to him nor to anyone he knew. Jan wished all life could be put away so simply.

“Yes? And have you done your chores?”

“Yes, sir,” Jansen replied, still standing loosely in a far distant place.

“If you came here to tell me what your mother has said, I do not want to know.” He whisked away the mother of his sons with an offhand gesture.

“No, papa.”

Jansen noticed his father, in all the ways it is possible to notice one with whom you live so closely. He had the wan face and red, bulging eyes of one who was either a lost man or a drunkard. His voice was molded carefully into a posture of indifference. Jan saw the way his leg curved, ever so slightly, for it had been broken and left unset. He heard the thud, thud of his father walking down the hall in the middle of the night. He paced because he could not run. Because he could do nothing else. But his jaw was firm, though the rest of his body had gone the way of soft flesh, and continually thrust forward in a backless gesture of defiance. It was only a habit, and one that would be broken by force. He was haunted by thoughts of the breaking.

His son stood silently before him, too tired of being afraid to curve his warm head under his papa's palm. O, my Father . . .

But Jansen was not daunted. He knew that the trade his father practiced was still active in this new world. When the Germans broke their radio equipment and didn’t want to take the time to fix it, his father delicately repaired the wires and replaced the tubes. That was the business, and business of such a sort could be justified by the fact that business would be accomplished and the man who refused would be relinquished to the guard of a crueler master.

No, Jan was not intimidated by his father's acquiescence, though he did not like to look stern, bloodied men in the eyes when they passed coolly on the street, for fear they would know he was the son of a man who could not speak of himself.

Major Strauss ruled his father's nightmares.

“Numan--where is that Numan?--come here.” The little echelon of the major and his Oberleutnanten perused the street every day, and miracle, they seemed always to notice one lonesome man. “Cripple,” the lieutenants muttered under their breath. “Dutch swine,” the major commented, “How is it you are such a traitor that you have ruined your body, which could have been of use to your country, and you help its captors? Filthy bastard . . .” The group laughed. It was then they learned that Dirk spoke German.

“A sharp tongue. This will help it.” And the major took his coiled glass walking stick in Coke-bottle green and knocked the facility out of his knees. “Yes sir, yes sir,” Dirk offered meekly.

“While you're down there, clean my boots.”

“Sir. . .”

“With your tongue.” Dirk hesitated and the major rapped him again between the shoulder blades as an offering of what might lie ahead. The lieutenants giggled. The major’s cocked head floated mightily on his egg-shaped skull. His face, effeminate, with small red lips that suckled often at Dutch women's teats, followed beady eyes that glared over high cheekbones, watching. He glanced around to see the small crowd that had gathered on the other side of the street, a young boy in its number, wondering what the fallen man had done. The major laughed, loudly, for their benefit, while Dirk’s tongue lapped at the air, testing it for a toxicity that emulsified the goodness out of morning.

He had never felt so clearly the desperate realization that life is not the control, but the experiment. Dirk struggled with notions of self-worth, and balanced them against the promise of the walking stick. He choked back a laugh, a sad laugh that considered the apparent fact that his pride could be traded for the threat of a Coke-bottle green walking stick.

Finally, he sank his mouth onto the boot. In that moment, life became easier. It was easier to lick and lick and lick away the dog shit and sewer sludge and dirt, bright shiny clean--just as an officer’s boots should be. The major twisted his shoe left and right so all quadrants would be reached.

Done.

Dirk looked up expectantly. The major looked as though he were explaining a game to a slow child. He leaned down until his breath eschewed thin strips of brown hair that moldered in the spring humidity. “Both shoes.”

Dirk turned down to the purpose. It echoed though his mind, swirled around a tight grip on his heart--

“Now!”

He descended again to his work, once more finding a fanciful unselfconsciousness in the act. Something that was not quite voluntary was also not quite wrong.

The lieutenants made sucking sounds as he worked, joshing each other in a friendly ways as they might do at a cockfight.

Dirk finished again. He looked up, following the gaze of his enslaver.

There stood his young son with the wares of the market clutched in his hands, too precious to drop even then.

Major Strauss interrupted.

“The bottoms.”

Dirk drug his eyes back to the officer.

“My boy, my boy, my boy will see. . .”

“Then work quickly, unless you want your boy to help you.”

And he did just that, though hot tears came down his face that shamed him into remembering that just short moments before he had considered Major Strauss but one in a long line of daily problems. He felt dirty then, not because of what he was doing, but because he had been caught besmirching his name.

The major left him spitting on the street, with promises to call again soon.

“My papa, my papa,” Jansen, cried, finally dropping the bag of goods at his father’s feet, “Oh, what has he done?” But Dirk neither said nor did anything, instead feeling the pull of broad German shoulders as they swaggered away. They would forever be connected to his own, and would rise and fall in a reciprocal union.

“Oh, my papa,” Jan said again, wiping the smut from his father’s lips with a small handkerchief. Something boiled over within him and bubbled, insatiably, to the surface. “Go home,” he said. It shone in his words. Though he was kneeling on a sidewalk having just spit-polished . . . those things . . . defiance rose and descended again and again. It was very black and vile.

“Go home,” he roared, rising. But the venom was smote from his words by the force of will it took to stand on his crippled leg.

“I want to go with you!” Jan said, helping his father brush off his clothes.

Dirk seized his young son’s hands in his own. He clapped them together. They made a sound such as is heard in the butcher’s shop.

“Go home.”

“I--” Jansen started to protest.

“Fine then,” Dirk said, tossing the boy against a lamp post so hard his shoulders crunched severely and the sound of metal against flesh would forever make him wince in pain. “Don’t,” Dirk said. “Don’t.”

There were many things like that, for Major Strauss found him often in the streets or in the shop or working on the radios. “Here you stupid son of a whore. Clean my case.” And he did. And he cleaned other things at the major’s discretion. Sometimes, even, things in the back of staff cars when there was no moon and the alleys were quiet. “Oh, you filthy swine. . .”

The major’s squeaking voice echoed, always.

So when the father looked at the son and the son looked at the father, they saw not only what the other seemed to be but also what he was becoming. They both turned away.

“Come here, then,” Dirk said. And Jan came, pale and trembling, because he could hear the voice of the light post. The father drew his son’s small face toward him until it was nestled on his chest, just above the small paunch that rose and descended on the tide of life. His breath caught, for here was his boy. He sniffled. O, our Father, help me do right!

Jan made no sound, his muscles quivering because they, too, wished to embrace the shattered man, for their hearts to beat with adult pride and childhood wonder, and for neither to be the lesser for the union. But in his ears rang the bells of that morning, rusted bells of the broad wishless city, and one for every trespass. So his arms hung limply at his sides while his father petted his hair and dripped honey words, rubbing the delicate, beautiful thing with his other hand, as though it had the power to heal all that was decrepit and wrong.

Finally, all honey was spent, or rather, hardened into blankets of crisp stickiness that sucked Jansen into a nautilus of spiraling need. What echoed in those chambers was this:

“You are afraid of me, my little Jan.”

Jansen remained very still and mute until something futile willed him to rise.

“No, papa.”

Dirk’s eyes shone with a light coating of salt and a deeper resonance of that which glazes the mind after death. Around the edges, where character is made, they were tinged with seeds of concern and self-affirmation. He seemed dreary and tired. “Your mother things I am a coward.” He paused, paring his nails with the rough edge of the beautiful thing. A small fleck of something greasy hit Jansen on the cheek. He dare not wipe it away. “And what do you think?”

“No, papa,” the good son replied somberly. “Never.”

The father smiled sadly. “But you do not know what it is to be a coward, do you? You live in a house of heroes, in a land of soldiers. How could you know?” He leaned closer until the chair creaked deep inside its coils. “A coward is a person who sends his sons to die because he is too weak to go himself.”

Jansen struggled with equity.

“It is true. That Georg--he is not coward. But me? I don’t know. Would you like to see a dead coward, Jansen?”

“Papa!”

“Yes? Me too. But I have never seen one. I hear they reside in basements. Perhaps in closets . . . ” His mind drifted away, sonorous and sleeping. A few moments of chill quiet passed between the unlikely pair and were forgotten.

Beneath Dirk’s laced fingers the gold watch glistened.

“I have something to tell you. But you alone must know it.” His head shrugged itself into a sweater of brighter consciousness, flopping as fish often do upon finding they have been rung unceremoniously from the sea. “Your mother says I am a coward--eh?” He pounded his hands on the arm of the chair. “We will see.”

Jansen shifted on his feet. “Papa?”

“I am going to join the resistance. To help them when they come.”

Americans and Limeys.

“They won’t let you!”

Dirk’s head snapped around so his eyes were two small pools fixed on an unfaithful disciple.

“I am going to join the resistance,” he said again, slowly, to work his mind fully around the words. “To help.” The shriveled and flabby frame shook, and the watch found itself tapping out a tune for fingernails. “I am going.” He convinced himself well.

“Yes, papa.” Jansen lowered his eyes, blinking through a confused haze.

“Oh, my son,” Dirk said, drawing the boy to him with one hand. “Look here.”

When Jan looked, there was father, but not in the new way of fear and petulance and loathing. He was the old man who sang songs and rocked his boys to sleep on dreams of decadence.

“It will not be so long.” And his voice was long, deep. Jansen wanted to fall into the pleasant lilt and lay there, thinking only of soft fields and pretty toys.

“No,” Jan whispered.

“Yes. You will not even notice. You must not worry. I--I--cannot stay like this.” He cast his head toward the heavy core of earth and for a moment the fight was the one Jan had seen on the street; the fight of a dispirited man looking for angels. “I will tell your mother soon, but first I wanted to tell you.” He fingered the watch, thinking.

“I wanted to tell you, my son, not to fear. Fear makes mockery of men,” he said bitterly.

Dirk pulled the timepiece from its resting-place tight in his fist. The gold, worn through in places until the nickel glared out at them, shone with beads of sweat. He wiped them away, laughing nervously. “And there is one more thing.”

The father gently opened his son’s palm. “This is not the life I wanted for you, not for anyone, not the worst man I know.” He clenched his fist, but did not flinch.

“You have no reason to trust me when I say one day it will end. One day all bad things will end. Life will be . . . different. I promise you that.” The radio droned behind them eagerly.

Dirk looked away from his son’s shadowed face. He carefully opened the crisp latch and smoothed the crystal with his shirt cuff. The hours reflected on the case’s inscription.

Zu Helmut für die 13the Geburtstag
Von seiner Vater
3 Januar 1876

“This came from my father’s land, and his father’s land.” After a pause, “Their land. Do not think less of it for that.” He ran a finger once more over the face and then placed it in his son’s quivering palm. It was a moment of reverence. A token of the ages hung in the balance, and it seemed too easy to pass between generations. Dirk felt a tinge of regret that his faithful companion did not show its grief by ceasing to beat off the seconds.

Jan had never held it before. He thought it would fall sweetly to the floor, but it rather complacently stared at him, berating his eager mind with the sins of all it had seen. He spelled out the words painted mournfully and in black on the dial and wondered at their importance: “A. LANGE & SOHNE.”

“Look here,” Dirk said, as they both leaned closer. “One day like any other, these hands will tell the hour when Georg will return, then the hour when this will cease. The hour when things will be different. And after that, the hour when you start your first job, when you meet your pretty wife, when you have your own son . . . Hours like any other, except they are the hours when everything will change. Hold this close to you, for it will be your history when all else is lost. Of that you can be proud--

“If nothing else, never be ashamed.”

Perhaps Jan was too young, but there could not be another chance. He was sure of that. The watch still resting easily in Jan’s hand, Dirk closed the hunter case and set the stem just so. He wrapped his son’s fingers around it, one knuckle at a time. Dirk would never hold it again. He would have to find another way to pass life’s impassable times.

Spitting all the things fathers wish to tell their young children into the yearning receptacles of Jan’s eyes, Dirk knew truth could not be easily served, and he was not the man to do it. So he said all he knew to say, and it was enough.

“Never.”

O! Our Father, forgive us, for we so crudely forget . . .