Czechmate. Michael Condé-Jahnel

as we both stumbled into the kitchen to examine the meagre contents of the small fridge.

      Those had been the good days, the easy days, the days full of promise. Heike, her older sister Elke and their mother Lisa had left Bremen for Winnipeg a few years after the war. Lisa’s husband had fallen at Stalingrad and she had married Frank upon arrival, a man with a secure pension at Canada Packers. She had deemed me a good addition to the family.

      “My daughter may be pregnant”, she announced one day, a few months after we first dated.

      This turned out to be a false alarm after a hastily arranged marriage some weeks later. It was then Heike announced that children were not part of her forward vision anyway because maybe she could not and therefore would not – or was it the other way around? I had trouble remembering, had been too self-absorbed to even ask.

      We had moved into a bright, but plainly decorated flat near a busy intersection, not far from the dark cave I had left when the lease expired. The rental agent had neglected to mention that frequently passing freight cargo, being shunted between yards, would make the cutlery jingle on the dining room table. We toughed it out for a year with strains of everyday life beginning to show between us. I had finally mustered the courage to leave Karl to his acrobatics and wanted to move on. The fact I hadn’t told Heike right off the bat that I had applied for a job with a big corporation on the West Coast didn’t help matters.

      “If you think I am going to pack up everything I am doing here and follow you obediently, you better think again.”

      “But it’s Vancouver. It’s a major company, who normally only hire off campus. And Elke and her family is there.”

      “Just what I thought. You show virtually no respect for what I am doing. It’s only been two months since I signed up for my master’s in library science here. Do you think I can just walk away from that mid-term?”

      Fact was, I really hadn’t thought at all. At least not about that. I had been focused on making the big time professionally. At least in terms of what it meant to me. And that was landing a marketing job with a large international corporation.

       Vancouver, August 1966

      The call I never expected had come a week later. And I had gone to Vancouver, on my own.

      Heike would follow in the New Year, she said, perhaps after the second semester in the spring. I could still remember the panic attack, barely twenty-seven, a few days after my arrival at the downtown motel on Richmond Street, not the best part of town. It was a feeling of total loss of control over life, something I had never felt before and since. I didn’t know a soul in the city – well, that wasn’t true, there was Elke, of course; but I couldn’t get myself to reach out for help to Heike’s family. Instead, I called the company’s regional manager and my boss, Arthur Clark, a polite and gentle giant of a man, white mustache penetrating from a reddish face. He had come and picked me up.

      “Stay with the family here. At least a few days, until you sort yourself out,” Arthur had said.

      And not asked, what, why or anything else about what might be wrong. Work and more work, absorbed to the point of nothing else, was my self-prescribed medication. And that had seemed o.k., at least for myself and my superiors. Especially for them – they decided that bigger things in Edmonton would follow six months later, just after Heike had arrived and settled into our place in Vancouver. She willingly moved to Edmonton, although we both hated the place with a vengeance. So we were both ready for another move six months later back to Toronto. The lighthearted moments of herrings going to masquerade balls had all but evaporated by then.

      Another move back to Winnipeg followed only a year and a half later and another move a year after that – back to Toronto again.. We had still been together during most of those convulsing upheavals, but more on automatic pilot than anything else. It was then that news came of my mother’s heart attack. Only sixty-seven, the physical and emotional toll of war, years of struggle and my father’s horrific death had taken their toll.

      I opened my toiletry bag the morning after arriving in Germany to find Heike’s note:

      “I know this is a bad way to tell you at a time like this. But I simply didn’t have the heart to face you before you were leaving. I won’t be in the house after you return from Germany. You are not a bad person, far from it. But we have grown too far apart to come back together again. I only wish you well for the future.”

      Sincerely,

      Heike

      “P.S. Don’t worry about the stuff in the house. I will only want what is rightfully mine.”

      My mother had been moved out of the ICU into a semi-private ward by then. It took all the emotional strength I could muster to greet her with a smiling face, as I entered her room that morning.