Love Endureth

"Somewhere someone is searching for you in everyone they meet."

That was the whimsical Chinese sagacity of a little strip of paper buried in a fortune cookie. It made me smile when I first read it and I smiled reading it again. It's a fanciful thought, albeit too grandiose to be true. But then I thought of how I was searching that way for you. If ever you read this. Even if you don't, the search is no less. Maybe I will pass away and it will be a story in a book you will accidentally find and read 100 years later. One of those rare paperbacks in a world of eclectic paperback bookstores with carpet and cats and succulents on the countertop. You will know you are you. Just as I would know you if ever we met. 

At 40, I thought I would have found you by now, but for so many years my search was too narrow in focus. Or I was lazy or didn't understand and just waited for you to come as though we would be drawn together by some binding force greater than anything we could imagine, much less comprehend. A human magnetism, of sorts. I had too much faith or laziness. I'm not sure which. It depends on the day you were to ask me. So to remedy both, I joined dating sites in 42 different countries and let it be known, specifically, of the one for whom I searched. You in so many words. Described yet undescribed. To me, you are not just anyone, or a convenient someone, rather, you are the only one. 

I was holding that paper fortune as I had beers with a friend of mine some months later. The night I had Chinese, on a date that wouldn't lead to a second, I put it in the jacket pocket and I was wearing the same jacket that night. I had almost forgot about it, just as I almost forgot about the date. I read it to him when he asked me what it was and he sniggered. "A needle in a haystack, my friend. Women are women just as men are men. Confucius says, Find a socket and plug it."

We were having drinks in McGwire's, a sports bar chain that is more popular than it deserves to be. They subscribe to the tried-and-true formula for restaurant success of cheap food, hiring attractive young women, and by putting a multitude of absurdly large TVs on every wall. People sit in the glow of them in cataleptic trances watching the progress of a ball of some sort. To offset allegations of sexism, they hire one or two older ladies, heavyset but perky moms with semi-pretty faces, and I think about how odd it must be for them and if they know they are that person. Used to negate a lawsuit. I have too much sympathy for people I don't know, a girlfriend once told me. That is my problem, she said. 

McGwire's is more of a place for twenty or thirty somethings desperately trying to reclaim their lost youths, or for family's so dear dad can ogle perky boobs and kids can stare at at the enormous TVs and mom doesn't have to cook, but Joe liked it and so anytime he asked me to meet him to catch up, he always said Mac's, which is what everyone called it for short. 

"Look around, Cab, there are a dozen good looking women in here and probably a large majority of them are single, or will be soon. And there you are posting ads on a dating site in Norway. Your reach is too far. Shop local! Minnesota girls are the prettiest in the world. I don't care what anyone says. Don't be a malcontent. Be a sport, eh?" He only stopped the lecture because he was distracted by a pretty server passing by with a tray of drinks. She wore tight jeans and a flannel. They all wore tight jeans and flannels. 

He was as ordinary as they come. Sterile in matters of abstract thought and devoid of any romantic inclination beyond the standard deviation of occasion-appropriate Hallmark cards and Valentine's Day roses. He didn't read books. He didn't write anything he didn't have to. He watched TV. He drooled over sports and regurgitated all the latest sports drama. He loved commercials.  He was content eating the same tasteless food, drinking the same beer and having the same sex with the same women until he liked one just enough, or they were both in a place and time in life where it was time to settle. When it was no longer sporting and was instead some tedious crusade of youth. A simple page turned. It would last for a while. Long enough to be married and to satisfy that inherent societal obligation to procreate and maybe, for nostalgia's sake, hunt again after an inevitable divorce when the wife was paid off and it was time to upgrade, or to scratch that intrinsic itch. Or maybe, when she felt that way of him. It goes both ways. Trades him in with the cellphone. The car. The re-fi. Bars are filled with such hackneyed people. Of all ages and types. 

It was dreadful to consider. So dreadful to me that the prospect of being alone until my days were finished was far more appealing than life at Mac's, or Applebee's, or Red Robin. Or in front of a TV, slowly degenerating. I suddenly treasured my lonely liberty as it was. And that far-fetched hope that my ad in Romania or New Zealand or Zimbabwe would one day bear fruit in the form of an unexpected email responding very agreeably to my advertisment, was not lost but a little less pivotal to the overall contentment of my existence. And though I knew of coupling in this mad, mad world to be just an innate craving very simply driven by millions of years of evolutionary existence to propagate the species to which I unwillingly belong, there I was at 2 a.m. looking through an Austrian dating site for, if you will, potential life sockets. 

That night I selfishly prayed to God. I would pay any penance to find you. Any tax or cost. I'd give a kidney, which is greater than a rib, I litigated. I wouldn't sell my soul to the Devil, but I'd give him some plasma. Some sperm. And in the wee hours of the morning as I degenerated to the standard male vernacular, depleted of all which makes me unique, I knew it was time to sleep. I lied there in bed and tried to tune the world out of my mind but my thoughts were often so chaotic that apart from taking pills or having a few drinks, I don't know if I ever could. So I decided to read a book about the holocaust I had bought at the paperback bookstore with the cats and carpet and succulents where in 100 years you might find me. I read of Auschwitz and how so many lives were lost before they ever began. I sleep better depressed, but I feel guilty for using others' pain and death as a vehicle to my repose. It was a most egregious sort of theft to me. 

I slept most of the week away reading that book. I called in sick twice with a flu I didn't have just to sleep more. The book was written in 1984 by a woman who was a child in Auschwitz and who described in grave detail the horror of her existence for two years until the camp was liberated. I immersed myself in it so entirely that I began to dream of it. Snippets at first. Then full-fledged dreams. Initially, I dreamt for only a few moments inside the death camp, looking at the others, starved and feeling as lost as can be felt. Life stripped from them before it even was. Humiliated. Cold. Hopeless. Children and babies being brought in and killed in the gas chambers, their bodies burned in the ovens. I looked up at the building in which they entered and moments later black smoke rose from the chimneys and spiraled in wicked helixes before dissipating in the wind. It was the only way to escape, they said. It was mercy, they said. 

I woke up and put the book down. I had to go to work. I couldn't call off anymore or I'd be fired and as much of a luftmensch as I have always been, it does not pay the bills. A social service worker is about performing social service, not milking all the sick hours from the state's budget, my supervisor said to us all in a meeting not so long before. You're here to make a difference and every day you call off is less a difference that you make. I took that holocaust book with me and read between clients. I read it on my lunch break and while I was in the restroom and while waiting at red lights. I couldn't put it down. I couldn't stop looking at the faces and reading the accounts. It came alive in me. 

My dreams were resoundingly effected and became an oubliette of sorts within me. And as horrible as they were, I longed for them. I wanted to know their nature and I developed an insatiable hunger for the knowledge of what it was like to suffer so abjectly. But I had an immediate difficulty in understanding how those dreams felt so real and how I was simply standing there watching the atrociousness as though I were personally exempt from it.   

Then on the third or fourth occasion of the same dream, I felt in my hands the cold stock of a gun and the same bitter  cold that affected those around me did not touch me for I was wearing a warm wool uniform and leather boots. And direfully, I knew, I was an officer of such death and vexation and these were my observations from that perspective in this Gehenna. I froze there looking about me. Then a little girl approached and looked up and said something in a language I didn't understand, but that I understood all the same. And I reached into my pocket and pulled from it a napkin, and in the napkin I knew there to be bread, cheese and dried fruit. 

She took it and smiled with gratitude then scurried off like a kitten with it concealed beneath her torn shirt. She must have been six or seven. Then more children and babies and old men and women were marched into the showers and I could hear the gas hiss and the screams that inevitably ensued. And I could feel on my face tears that stung and smell the black smoke that became of their anguished lives as they burned in the ovens.

I walked in later and saw the ovens firsthand. I opened the heavy door which creaked as though to caution me of it's secret and the charred skeletal remains and their bones, still smoldering, met my curiosity with animus. Embers of what were people, little children, glowed as though their light refused yet to yield to death. I staggered back and fell, the horrific stench overcame me. A rat raced across the barren floor searching for morsels of people food to consume, indifferent to the horror of his sanctuary.  Or was this his temple and he a harbinger of death? 

I woke up in my bed, gasping for air. My obsession over the book needed to end as I could not endure any longer so immersed in such a grievous and heartrending history. The dreams were so vivid that I would have sworn they were real. I could feel them. I could smell them, even awake they were still in my nose. And I could still taste them in my mouth until I brushed my teeth where they came out in spit that raced in indignant rivulets to the drain. Stale, but lingering still. I didn't want to return to it. I wanted the reprieve of some thoughtless dream, some ridiculous dream of a carnival ride from childhood, or of Sunday school, or of a girl who I lusted over, taking off her bra. Something wistful, scary even. I'd settle for dull, something woefully uneventful. 

But what had begun would not be undone and it refused to pardon or relinquish me from the nightmarish uncertainty of its purpose. And night after ghastly night, I returned to the same hellish place. And there was the very same girl whose doleful dirty face I would recognize anywhere if I was to see her. Her big cheeks and large almond-shaped eyes the color of root-beer candies I favored once. Her curly-brown hair so pitifully matted. Such a desperate look upon her face, but a look of deep gratitude with each napkin I gave her as though inside it was a banquet rather than such a meager snack. Night after night the dream haunted me, and napkin after napkin I gave to her, and despite the terror of the dream, that gave me pleasure and purpose. To see her and to feed her. 

I thought of putting the book away. Getting some other book. Perhaps a book on dreams to understand how it was that this reoccurring dream so preoccupied my life that my conscious life became secondary to that of what had been, up to then, the reprieve of sleep and never the painful burden. It felt involuntary to the extreme of a curse, or rather, it was the manifestation of life, the resurfacing of a past life more precisely. Had I been an officer at Auschwitz and consequentially these snippets of life were materializing the way bloodstains do when thought to be adequately concealed? The paint of one or two lives more being too thin to conceal such a stain. Did the book evoke dormant memories that had been transfered from that former life, or was it even greater than that? Was I time traveling in my sleep? Some sort of involuntary astral projection. Something greater than human science or even the most advanced theories could logically elucidate.

I tried to explain it to Joe, but he laughed as could be expected for it was too theoretical and complex for him to digest. And as we sat there in Mac's, watching all the pretty girls serve cheap beer and awful food to hordes of driveling consumers, I cringed. It wasn't life. It was a charade. An imitation of life and I gave serious thought to the prospect that I was on some alien planet and this was a cheap production of humanity. A comedic spoof. Meaningless sports and drama on TV and tasteless beer and hours upon hours of endless mundanity. All the women striving to look the same, to dress the same, to act the same. The men, no different. Same jeans. Same sorts of hats and haircuts. What sort of  hellish nightmare was I torturously lost in?

Maybe I was once an Auschwitz officer and this was karma. My lot in life. Maybe all of us old Nazis are scattered about the world in similar places, witnessing the epitome of American culture rot. But I led a good life in this one, I hadn't cheated, or stolen, or taken the life of any being as an adult after I became a vegetarian, except a mouse or two who tried wintering in my home. And even for their lives I asked for forgiveness from whoever is the ultimate keeper of such things. Whoever or whatever tabulates all the killings and lies and thefts we are responsible for over the course of our lifetime, offset, of course, by any good deed. There must be a Hindu term for it. Maybe I hadn't met you because I wasn't eligible by prior acts. But maybe all it would take was one good deed. It was beer philosophy. Pondering philanthropy. The meaning of existence. Astral projection. The entire perplexing gammut. What I did when everyone else had meaningless conversations with each other, or gaped at all those luminous TVs. 

I began to wish that I could exchange this awake world for the dream, as hellish as the dream was, but wishing doesn't make a spot of difference in this world of ours. There are wells upon wells full of a wealth of wasted pennies and miles and miles of birthday candles that flared futilely extinguished flames. Wasted breaths. How many prayers to God have gone unanswered? And how many Hail Marys Full of Grace preceded infelicitous ends?

I am quite certain those who died in the holocaust petitioned God for their lives and wished mightily for freedom and liberation for their friends and families, but such never came to pass, even though they were His chosen people. And deeper and deeper in the pensive thoughts of a third or fourth beer, which all but washed away any interest I had in remaining awake, I thought of the dream. And inexplicably I knew that rather than it being some former life scenario, in my sleep I was traveling. I was there and the body I left in bed was just an empty capsule that awaited my return. Moreso, I realized that if I could feel that napkin of food in my hand, if I could smell the death, and hear their cries, maybe I could change it. However small a change, would be a change nonetheless and one that would ripple fortuitously over time. Further, if I could change it, if I could do something in the dream, it meant it was not a memory and I was not formerly a monster. 

I stopped at Walgreen's and bought a bottle of extra-strength cold medicine and chugged it down. Tomorrow was Saturday so I could sleep all day. I went to bed with great expectations, but also with a fear that the dream might change for I knew that there was no way for me to control it. I could only hope it would not change and the pattern would continue. I hoped to see that little girl again. To look into her beautiful sorrel eyes and to offer her a little more hope than just a napkin. Something kind. I read the book as I fell asleep and sure enough, I was delivered just as sure as I had opened its door and stepped through.

I watched snowflakes fall slowly in the gray soup of a sky and then I heard the groan of my leather gloves as I made fists in the cold early evening air. My hands were sore. The ground beneath my feet was sodden and my boots stuck in the suction of the mud. In my pocket there was another napkin. I stood there and looked up at the guard tower. A soldier nodded at me. Then someone walked past me and said in German that I should walk around more to keep the cold from biting my testicles. It was another soldier of lesser rank. He was frantically smoking a cigarette like a fiend. His face was scarred and potted. He shook erratically. A nervous condition. A most unkind and miserable fellow to look upon, but such as it was someone loved him anyway. Some mother somewhere, or some wife. Maybe a kid or two. He kindly offered me a piece of chocolate and I took it. But rather than to eat it, I only pretended to and I snuck it into my pocket for mein vogel. Mein vogel, I repeated longingly. That is how I knew her. 

I thanked him and walked away. Everything he said he said in German and I understood it and spoke it as well. I took deep breaths and watched the steam of my breath make clouds and much like I was a child, I imagined those plumes to be living things. Like rabbits and dogs and sheep. Then I heard her speaking to me and tugging gently on my uniform coat. Herr Prager, she called me. I smiled turning to look at her. She had the sweetest voice I've ever heard. The voice of a beautiful bird.

"Wie sieht mein Vogel aus?" I asked, smiling at her. She nodded her head and returned a painful smile that was a lie. It was a concerted effort to betray her true spirit for she felt if she implored me as a happy girl, I'd reward her. I looked around and no one appeared to be looking so I took the napkin out of my pocket and I discretely handed it to her. Her mother died of the sickness, she told me as she coughed. She looked ill, as well. Her eyes were watery and her skin was sallowed. The feigned happiness faded fast from her. She no longer had anyone in the world. No enthusiasm to live. No purpose. Her younger siblings were killed upon selection and escaped in that black smoke, and her father was shot for resisting the selection of his three infant children and elderly mother. She had nothing left. 

After she was gone, I reached into my pocket and realized I had forgotten to give her the chocolate, but it was just as well, it likely would have been stolen from her anyway since her mother passed and she had no protector. She scurried away like a mouse with her food and back to the barracks where she was housed. I knew she wouldn't live long. Perhaps she would find someone to care for her in the meantime, but more likely, she would not. Someone might pity her enough to smother or strangle her. Regardless, she wouldn't live long. I had a thought and immediately I went and pilfered a burlap potato sack from the kitchen. I moved without any hesitancy or doubt. I stuffed the sack into my pocket, but then realized the sack was probably too small and I could not excuse leaving the camp with a full potato sack. Not even at my rank. So I thought of another plan. 

I retrieved her from the barracks where I found her curled up in a cold corner, coughing into the empty napkin. I grabbed her by her hand and dragged her forcefully so it would be believed by witnesses that I was on a task to subject her rather than to rescue her. I must have nearly pulled her arm from its socket and halfway there her feet stopped walking and they dragged behind her. She must have been confused, but it was a play I had to stage and a part I had to act out with some measure of reality. 

Experiment, I grunted passing a few other soldiers. One of my routine duties was to supply the doctor with his subjects. To help select the right ones for him. She was not ordered by him, but no one knew that besides the two of us and the doctor who would be none the wiser. When I got to the laboratory, I quickly jerked her behind the building and took out my dagger. Then I forced it into the keyhole of the trunk of the doctor's Mercedes and quickly I picked up the girl and stuffed her in the burlap sack and safely inside the trunk. 

"I am sorry for being rough with you, but you must listen," I implored her in an urgent whisper. "You mustn't move. You mustn't speak or cough. Nothing whatsoever or they will find you and they will know it was me who put you here. This car will leave soon. I will come get you tonight and free you and then we will get you out of here, my bird. Here! Nibble on this piece of chocolate, but please! Please! Not a sound! Verstehst du?"

She nodded with tears welling in her eyes. She took the chocolate and I buried her head in the burlap sack and shut the trunk without being noticed, it appeared. I spoke to the doctor only briefly and let him know that I might be by for a some brandy this evening if he shouldn't mind the company as I had on many such occasions. He said he would be delighted. And in that moment, I was well aware I was in the dream and I knew I must hurry before I woke up because although I had dreamt this dream before, it could not be told if I would return or how it would end without me to see it through. 

The evening came and I arrived at Dr. Blumquist's house. He greeted me cordially on the porch. I must have appeared nervous because he made mention of it and told me that I should relax and that hypertension is not good for one's health. He went on to say that all was not lost and though the Allied army was prepping for an invasion of Europe, there was no reason to panic. Not yet. He was a propaganda machine as great as Goebells himself and someday he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his research that came at the cost of so many women and children he saw as worthless rats. The fruits the science will bear, as he heralded it, will be immeasurable. He was a delusional optimist to a fault. The rest of us seemed to know the inevitable end and for me, it was the sooner the better, despite the reasonable assumption that we would all be tried and hung as war criminals. 

In his parlor he poured me a drink and one for himself as we settled in our usual chairs. He turned on the radio. We both had an ear for opera and the Vienna Opera House lived in the speaker of his radio more often than it did not. It was the tragedy and the emotion of it for me. I thought that maybe the doctor felt it exalted him in some way the way he puffed his chest out as listened and as he smoked and drank. He was undeniably a narcissist. He lit another cigarette and offered me one, but I declined. A strange offering in that he knew I didn't smoke. 

"It was the strangest thing, Captain Prager. On my way home my car had the most peculiar mechanical defect. A choking sound. Upon further inspection of the engine, the carburetor specifically, I found nothing out of order. And whilst the engine was shut off, the noise persisted. Muffled greatly, but there for certain it was. I then inspected the trunk and, well, what did I find do you suppose? Hmm? A potato sack. But in it, to my displeasure, there were no potatoes. What do you suppose I found in the potato sack, lieber kapitän?"

I stared at the radio in silence, shaking my head and shrugging as to say I did not know. 

"How could I know?" I offered at last. I was a terrible actor. A slight feeling of panic arose in me, but it settled with the realization that such a hiccup had to be expected and was simply an inconsequential detour to an inevitable end. 

"Ein kleines Mädchen! And how do you suppose a little girl found her way into a potato sack and then into my trunk, a little Jew girl, Captain Prager?" he laughed. 

"I do not know - lieber arzt."

He again laughed in jest. "It's alright if you do. I am not a spiller of secrets, Captain Prager. Nor an extorter of dear friends. What brings another man his peculiar pleasures is of no business of mine. I should say though, it was a great risk you placed upon me to smuggle her in my trunk. But please stop the charade. You'll find no SS men behind that curtain," he grinned vilely. He had been responsible for the torture and torment of thousands, but he seemed to revel in the wickedness of words more than that of his scapel. He was a homosexual. That I knew. And that might be the only thing to save the girl for unlike the good doctor, I was willing to be the most opportune spiller of secrets and extorter of friends, if such a situation required it. 

"Where is she?" I asked bluntly. 

"Splish, splash," he chuckled. "Do you not hear the little fish?"

I didn't care if anyone was behind the curtain. I hurried past him to see her. And there she was in a tub of dirty but warm water, lathering herself with a giant red bar of soap, seemingly unharmed. She smiled when she saw me. 

"I treated her for typhus. She will live. Someone will have to pick the lice from her hair. Or shave it. But don't you worry, Captain Prager, I will not tell a - "

I turned and jabbed my dagger into his throat. I couldn't risk it. Even with the dirt I had on him. All it would take was for him to be accused of something, and in an effort to plea bargain with his accusers, to turn on me and the girl was dead. I'd seen it happen. Snitching was a routine vehicle for advancement within the party and so was counting sins. The roots of Nazism was watered by such treachery and betrayal and its existence depended upon it. And besides, how could I trust someone who dissected women and children with such nonchalance to honor a bond of friendship? I could not. 

The blood spurted warm on my hand and cascaded down my wrist and trickled up my sleeved arm. He fell back into the hallway, eyes imploringly wide, looking at me as though in his stare he had some final righteous indignation to cripple my honor with. The girl reacted only by dropping the soap in the tub. She had seen so much death, it must have been hardly anything to her at all. But I covered the murder fairly well, shielding the doctor's body with my own and laying him down gently as though he just collapsed to sleep before dragging him to the cellar.

I washed up and got on my knees to help bathe her. I told her jokes as I washed and picked her hair. Some of the bugs were the size of my pinky nail. I combed and cut her hair shorter to alleviate the matting and picked the rest of the lice out of her hair. It took hours but she was happy all the while. I dressed her with what I could find. I burned her uniform and made us supper, courtesy of the dead doctor's cupboard. A warm potato and onion soup with toast and jam. He was the gay bachelor and he would be expecting no company, I knew well. Then I put the knife in his hand and burned down his house. They would think it was suicide. Or they would blame some Jews they'd yet to find and kill. 

I took the girl home and made a bed for her, well aware that I was unconscious and in the dream. Once I had her home, I knew she was safe. I bought her clothes. Toys. Books. She stayed with me in my house and I unofficially adopted her as my own. Maybe I'd get her a puppy. Or a bird. A bird for mein vogel, I smiled. One that could fly freely about the house without a cage. I had no wife or family to look after her if something were to happen to me, but she was safe here and I taught her what she needed to do if I did not come home. But it was just me and her in the meantime and it was blissful. When I tucked her in bed that first night, she smiled at me and stuck out her little hand and said two words, "Schockolade, bitte?" 

"Morgen," I smiled, reassuringly. "Tomorrow must come and it shall bring chocolate with it to celebrate."

When I woke, I was joyful. But I was sad at the thought that it was all just a dream. It felt so authentic and every time it felt even more so than before. I felt it, not just in all the senses, but in my soul. I felt her in my arms and the tickle of the doctor's blood racing up my sleeve. I remembered the books I read her. I could smell the potato sack and the sick and dying in the camp. I could taste the hot soup and the jam and the butter she lathered generously on our warm rolls. It was all so genuine and inexplicable. 

I tried to tell Joe, but he laughed and said I'd lost my mind. He told me I needed to get laid while looking around the bar for himself. It was a defining moment and there was no greater contrast between me and everyone else in the world than there was in that very moment of time. So I left and that was all for my social life. Going to Mac's with him was all that I did outside of work. There had been that string of painful dates last summer and fall. But after each of them, I wasn't interested in having another. There was something missing and I knew it in my heart.  

I ignored calls. I neglected family obligations and I stayed home. I tried to sleep as much as possible because everytime I went to sleep I went home to mein vogel. Every time. She waited for me and hugged me as I came through the door. We cooked, we played, we sang and danced. We even celebrated Christmas with tinsel on a tree and small gifts. I taught her how to read and write. And she drew me pictures of things she saw from the window that were often birds. I bought her clothes and dolls and a puppy she named Fritz, after her father. I found a picture of her family and framed it for her. One of those gifts. You should never forget them, I told her. And every night before bed to celebrate another day of life, I gave her one piece of schokolade. I think I did so just to see her smile. 

I can't explain how it was for those weeks that turned to months. It was like dying and going to Heaven for just a little while. I didn't fear getting caught because I was too preoccupied with the exuberance of being truly happy. While I was cautious and never took her out of the house so not to have to explain her to someone who might ask, there was no point to live in fear. I knew that if I expressed fear, she would feel it. That is how parenting works. It is a matter of imprinting. So I didn't show her anything I didn't wish for her to have or to feel. I wished I could have taken her to the Berlin Zoo. Or to the park. Or on a picnic. Just once. There were many things we wished to do. But I made a zoo in our house with pictures we drew and hung on the walls. And we picnicked on the Persian rug in the front room. It was as though I lived in my dreams and slept in consciousness. Wake and sleep had traded places. 

Awake, I drank heavily and depended on cough syrup to get back to her. That was the price or else I wouldn't sleep long enough or deep enough to find her. I became a master of navigating my sleep. When the bombs came it brought with it a strange anamoly. I no longer had to fear detection from the Nazis for when someone is dropping bombs on you it tends to be the predominant thought rather than detecting Jews and those who hide them. The fuhrer's "Final Solution" was mercifully coming to an end and would never be fulfilled. The Allies were close. In Auschwitz they dug mass graves and tried to expedite death and bury the remains. People were being buried alive, run over by trucks and equipment, anything to hurry the process. Plowed as though harvested, or rather, tilled and sown. But with the bombs I suddenly had to consider the punishment we all would receive for obeying our ungodly orders. 

When I dreamt a dream in which I was in the camp, I left it. I went to our home and spent what time I had left with my bird. The bombs made her uneasy, but when I held her, she settled and she was happy. It pleased her to hold Fritz, her puppy. She smiled at me and asked if she could call me daddy since her daddy was gone. I answered yes, but I cried. Not in front of her. But after she slept, I cried. I hoped we could leave together, but fleeing the country would be impossible, so I decided all there was for me to do was to enjoy her in the next little while, an unpredictable allotment of time that whenever ended would be far too soon. I thought to pray, to wish, but my prayers and wishes were no greater than those of six million dead that went unanswered.

I read somewhere that if you die in your dreams, you die in your sleep, but I didn't take heed to that as I was too preoccupied with protecting and loving my bird. Nor did I honestly care as the thought occured to me that my death might usher in another life that would bring me one life closer to you, or to a child of my own I had yet to meet. Our child, perhaps. I would die a hundred deaths, as painful as can be conceived, for but one life with you. One day. One hour. And I knew that I would die an equal number of deaths if I could stay with my bird. 

But soon the war ended. The bombs stopped and then came occupation and liberation for those poor souls in the camps, and with it there had to be accountability. And being that I was an officer at Auschwitz for two years after I had been wounded on the eastern front, a man who escorted countless men, women and children to their premature and agonizing deaths, I could not deny my culpability. There might even be someone to testify against me that I had jerked the girl, my bird, to the experimentation laboratory near the end. And she was never seen again. I could argue and plea and hope and wish, but there was no point in doing so. I was guilty and only the acceptance of my death would ever adequately express an ounce of my remorse. 

I had to say goodbye to her. And no worse dream had I ever had. No worse feeling. I almost wanted to accept my fate without saying goodbye, but I knew it might mean something to her someday if I could at least find some words of meaning to impart, having been with her for more than a year. And I felt it not too much to hope that although she was only seven years-old, she might remember me. I hadn't a picture to give her, but I hoped what I gave was enough.  

They came for me about a month later. July of 1945. We celebrated her seventh birthday two days before. Ms. Martha Vogel, her official name. I surrendered myself with no complaint, and asked only that they find someone to take the girl who would let her keep the dog. When I explained who she was, they looked at me suspiciously at first, but seeing no harm had been done to the child, they understood the story to be even more bizarre. I suppose, they didn't suspect a Nazi to be capable of any sort of compassion, and maybe that was deservedly so. 

They assured me they would see that she was placed in a fine home and they would try to place her with relatives once those things could be sorted out. Martha cried as they took me away, but I leaned down to her and gave her a kiss on her plump rosy cheek and told her to reach into my shirt pocket one last time. When she did she found a piece of schokolade, what she would have gotten that night at bedtime. She smiled. "Always celebrate each day," I said to her as she nibbled it. 

I woke up in a fog of melancholy. I knew I'd never see her again and in the next dream I would be tried and hung, or perhaps, I may have to endure a length of time in a cold jail cell awaiting such an unnerving fate. And then, I guess I would see if it is true what they say about dying in your dreams. 

But I never dreamt of that time or place again. At least, up to now. Better than a year later, it has yet to return. My sleep is filled with either emptiness or those flippant absurd things that people normally dream of like cotton candy. Of the innermost dilemmas of the sexually repressed subconscious, or anxiety-laden adventures with the most desirable of trollops. Of desperate attempts to escape this mundane world we inhabit. I could have sworn those dreams were real and as opposed to what so blandly ensued, the sentiment was only further augmented. 

When I finally accepted the fact that the door had closed, I decided to go to a nice bar in an attempt to have the semblance of a social life. But instantly, I felt not to be among my own species. What migratory instinct I had of revealing myself to find and subsequently mate with a potential love interest was non-existent and absurd considering the way we humans do it. To situate ourselves in a bar and scan the room for ring-less fingers or wandering eyes like unsavory grifters of these spawn shops. Waiting for an opportunity to say something complimentary or of interest enough to beckon further flattery. To barter, bargain, and to inspire curiosity of the fairer sex. Halves looking to be whole. 

I was the out of place uncomfortable stranger who appeared more like someone looking for potential assasins than mates and the thought arose that maybe I will always be a stranger. A stranger to this world that although born to, I do not belong. The best days of my life were lived in a few months of dreams. Maybe if I drank enough cough syrup and read more books I could go back and save someone else, as I had saved my bird. If God would let me live my life in that way, I would be content. I was going to finish the beer in front of me and leave. I found myself staring up at a TV I had no interest in just to look at something.  

I didn't notice her sit by me. But I noticed her Boston accent when she ordered a beer. It sort of sounded like she ordered "a bear." She was beautiful and thin. She was neither short nor tall and she dressed nicely. It had been a while since I had seen a woman in a dress, even a casual one, I realized glancing over at her. Trespassing with my eyes. She took off her black jacket and there were tattoos on her arms and I found myself intrigued, glancing over, risking detection in my flagrant inspection. The bar was an upscale local place and though they were busy, there were many seats to be had still, other places than the one she chose directly beside me. 

"Hello," she said. 

I nodded and smiled, awkward. She was having fun with me, it appeared. This was some sort of social experiment. A joke. She was a reporter and this was one of those lifestyle pieces I detested where some pretty reporter asks people their views about something in the community. Some issue I cared nothing about. 

"I've been searching for you for a very long time. I owe you a debt," she casually related. 

I turned and looked behind me, then back at her. Then around for cameras for I was sure it was a gag. Maybe Joe was behind it. Having his fun. Maybe it was one of those internet things or she was going to tell me she worked for Publishers Clearing House. 

"You've been searching for me?" I asked in flat disbelief.

"Yes, practically all my life, in everyone I've ever met."

I huffed. As she spoke, I noticed that on her right arm there was a bird tattoo and in German it said "Mein Vogel" above, and "Liebe Ertragen" below it. Then there were numbers that I knew well. They were Martha's numbers. 

"My bird. Love endureth." I translated softly, practically in a trance.

"Very good, sir. May I buy you a drink as a down payment on that debt?"

"I wouldn't say no."

She grinned and asked the bartender to get me another, which he did promptly. 

"Danke," she said. 

"Are you German?" I asked, a little more at ease. Still, I was faking casualness. I was about to burst with interest and nerves. My insides were a wildfire.  

She laughed. "No. Well, sort of. My grandmother, she was Dutch-German."

I thought that I must be dreaming. But then I realized I wasn't. I was wide awake and this was the bar up the street from my house. I even told myself the date and time and what I had for breakfast this morning. 

"Are you German?" she countered. 

"No," I laughed. 

"Only in dreams?" 

I smiled, raptured in astonishment. It appeared that I had been captured in this life just as I had in the dream. Only my inquisitor in this world was much prettier than in the other. 

"Oh, I'm being rude in prolonging the suspense. Sorry. My name is Sophie Alamore. I'm from Nantucket, Massachusetts." She took a deep breath and grinned. "This is going to sound rather strange, I'm afraid. But you are Cab Prager. And I've never met you, but someone I love dearly has. I was married for a time. Divorced at 32, and well, ever since then I've thought of the story my grandmother used to tell me when I was a little girl. It was too unbelievable to be true everyone said. How she survived the holocaust. A man saved her. An officer. Captain Prager. He stole her and hid her in a potato sack. Put her in the trunk of a car. Raised her for a year or so until the Allies won the war and liberated Germany. But the most unusual part of all was that he did so all in a dream. No one believed her. No one but me. And maybe, you?

"Some thought that grandma suffered so tremendously that it was just some fantastic story she concocted, or herself dreamed up. A bit of a delirious interpretation of a cruel reality, perhaps to better deal with it. She did have typhus, she said, and had lost her mother just shortly before. This man, she said, this beautiful man snuck her napkins full of food day every day and then he snatched her up and she was free. Raised her as his own until they took him away to be tried as a war criminal. She said this man came to her in dreams, and naturally we thought she meant in her dreams. But no, she insisted. He came in his own dreams. Sound familiar?"

"Yes! It is true. My God, it is true!"

"I talked to her more than anyone else and she clarified it all. She said when you left her, when they came to take you away, you told her. You told her not to worry because you were only dreaming and they couldn't hurt you. That - you would wake up. And you said the year from which you were dreaming was 2021 and you were in Mankato, Minnesota and that if ever she makes it to then to come and say hello to you. And you also told her, love endureth, which was practically our family motto," thus the tattoo. 

"She didn't forget a word," I replied faintly. 

Sophie grinned. "No. She didn't. She never did. She lived a very good life. She was an artist and a ballet dancer. She married a pianist. A very kind and loving man. But she passed away a few years ago. Peacefully. In her sleep. She spoke of you, often. She spoke so beautifully of you that I must admit I am very prejudiced in your favor. I'm not sure if you remember, but she once came to Mankato, she told me. You were about her age when you first met at the time. Six or seven years-old. She said she saw you play little league baseball or something and afterwards she spoke to you and your parents, never revealing herself, of course. But she gave you a bar of schokolade, she said, for all the pieces you gave her."

"I remember. I do. I remember that lady. Her. She wore a red dress. I'm sure of it."

"Yes. She always wore red. Something about - celebrating life." 

I had another drink. It felt that I might die at any moment by spontaneous combustion of the brain because it was everything all at once and it was beyond fantastic and unbelievable. But it was very real. I needn't any further elucidation to believe, but was happy Sophie was eager to explain further and to tell me all about her grandmother's fantastic life, including her lifelong love of chocolate. 

"Like I said. I divorced and it changed me. Most people are fickle and insincere. They plod along and enjoy themselves and their creature comforts and don't care to understand or know anything greater than they do. They don't care to know the person they say they love, really. They trample and gorge on culture rot and material things. The unimportant things. They really don't love at all. They imitate only what they're supposed to do. It's foreign to them. A reflex measured in what someone does for them, not what they do for others. They don't dream, much less live a life in dreams. So I got curious one night and I found you on Facebook. I thought of contacting you through there, but, well, I don't know. I didn't think you would remember the dream. Or I figured you'd be married.

"Anyway, I decided to hell with it, I would just come. I found your address in the phone directory and when I went to your house, well, I saw you leaving, so like Magnum P.I. or something, I followed you here. I swatted a few flies, so to speak, and had a drink or two from the other side of the bar before I worked up the courage to talk to you. I guess since I came all this way, I felt I may as well. This is my adventure. So you see, I do owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. I owe you my entire existence. My family's existence. The way she spoke of you made me dream that people are still some kind of way. They can be that way. There is nothing more wonderful in this world than an act of selflessness and kindness and it is always heartening to me when I meet doers of good deeds."

I could hardly move much less speak. Everything else in my life suddenly seemed so insignificant. I thought drinks would help me understand and appreciate the moment and they proved to do just that. This was a sudden celebration of life like those nightly pieces of schokolade, and generations of life to come. We drank and spoke and occasionally I could see mein vogel there in Sophie's big beautiful eyes, which were of the same amber color. 

She had it wrong, though. It was I who owed the enormous debt of gratitude. I was the fortunate one. I fell in love there in that bar with the one who was promised to me in a fortune cookie, and henceforward, I'd never take the eruditeness of Chinese fortunes for granted. We had drinks until the bar closed and walked to my house. It was a dream from which I thankfully would never wake, and as true love goes, it would never relent. Love does truly endureth.