Big Wheels

By Mark Connelly

 

After the NATO conference, the German major invited us to have lunch at the Bismarck downtown. All of us had tired of the kasino fare and were open for suggestions.

“Believe me, this place is different,” he told us. “At night,” he cautioned, “it’s a gay nightclub. Transsexuals you wouldn’t believe. But,” he held his hand up like a symphony conductor, “the lunch is fantastic. Largest wine list in the city.”

We climbed into his classic Mercedes, a polished black humpbacked whale of a car right out of old German gangster movies. It was two o’clock, and there was little traffic. It was a brilliant afternoon. Glass towers gleamed with precise newness. Everything in the city was clean, new, and precise – almost to the point of being unreal. The major tapped the wooden steering wheel from time to time, announcing places of special interest as we passed.

The car nosed around a corner and dove down a winding street. The star hood ornament resembled a gun sight, guiding us through the narrow-cobbled alley jammed with battered Fiats and VW’s. The tires thudded on the worn stones. Pre-war Bronx-ugly tenements crowded the narrow streets. Old taverns stood on the corners, dark medieval-looking places with thick mullioned windows and sway-backed slate roofs.

 

We were in the old part of the city, a few acres the Eighth Air Force had missed in 1944. The dark neighborhood housed “guest workers” – sullen Turks and Arabs who had come north to haul Aryan garbage and wash dishes.

We sped past dancing immigrant children and turned into a wide square. The Bismarck was a massive cream monument topping a small knoll. Gleaming in the sun, it resembled a frosted wedding cake decorated with glazed columns and lacy scrollwork.

We parked in front and climbed the smooth marble steps leading to immense chrome and glass doors. The entrance was all mirrors, movie posters, and dried flowers. In the center, a larger-than-life statue of David towered above a fountain, well-muscled and overly endowed.

A white-jacketed host led us to the main dining room beneath a dome supported by gilt columns. Sunbeams blazed through circular windows, filling the hall with light that danced on our silverware.

The major ordered, insisting we try the house special. “It’s fun. A real adventure. Salad to start. Then eight cheeses and eight wines are served with histories printed on little cards. It’s a guessing game!” He patted his flat stomach. “It kills the diet, but it’s worth it. Put in an extra half hour in the gym tomorrow. You have to live, right?”

Our waiter, a sleek Italian youth, darted around us with ballet grace. Waiters of his type cultivate a universal stance, a certain looseness in his joints reminded me of barmen in Madison and Manhattan. The lisp, in any language, is the same.

Salad arrived on chilled plates and was presented with royal flourishes. The waiter carried the large ornate chrome pepper mill like an acolyte bearing a censer, twisting it over our salads with powerful delicacy. Bricks of cheese followed on wooden tablets. Wine came in communion trays. We tasted the first round.

“It’s a Mosel,” Dubinski suggested.

The major flipped the card over. “Correct. And the cheese?”

“It reminds me of mozzarella but firmer, with more flavor. Almost like American.”

My years in Wisconsin have made me something of an expert on cheese.

“Danish Harvarti,” I said.

I got most of the cheeses right. I was dead wrong on all the wines. I can’t tell Chablis from Rhine. But I recognized Blue Nun when I tasted it and ordered a bottle from our waiter.

I got high. I stopped nibbling on cheese because something in the club distracted me. I looked up at the dome over us. No doubt the building had been bombed and shelled during the war. It could have been restored and remodeled three or four times.

Something in the columns intrigued me. The bar was set on a raised platform, a dais in an alcove that might have been an altar at one time. The ceiling bore an unusual fixture as if something had hung there. Boyhood memories were coming back . . . after school lessons with bearded, hatted men, the sing-song incantations, ancient texts. . . . I turned and asked the German officer next to me, a city native.

“Yes. . . .” he answered, hesitating, “. . . . before the war, in the old days, it was a synagogue.”

I nodded and drank Blue Nun. At the bar two blond youths in leather jackets and boots were drinking beer from foaming steins, exchanging sexual glances. Next to them a long-limbed raven-haired transsexual in a leather skirt was sipping her first cocktail of the day. She pursed her lips around the straw and raised an inviting eyebrow.

“Did you see the job that M60 did on that streetcar downtown?” Dubinksi asked, his eyes glowing.

Two months before, an enlisted man, for reasons unknown, stole a tank and lumbered through the city business district, crashing into parked cars and knocking over kiosks. Flattened Audis and BMWs attested to the power of NATO armor. The story is popular and generally leads to drunk driving jokes. Nobody seems to recall that the soldier’s last act was driving off a bridge and drowning in the Rhine.

Everyone laughed.

“It’s still a good tank. Only we need two thousand more at least.”

“What I want to know,” Dubinski asked, “is why Germans put those monstrous wheels on everything that moves. Armored cars, weapons carriers, personnel carriers, scout cars. Their wheels are always as high as a house.”

“It’s simple . . . einfach . . .” the German major smiled. “We learn our lessons. The next time we move east, we won’t get stuck in the mud. Prosit!”

 

Mark Connelly is from US. His fiction has appeared in Bristol Noir, Cerasus Magazine, Indiana Review, Cream City Review, The Ledge, Smoky Blue Arts and Literary Magazine, Change Seven, Light and Dark, 34th Parallel, The Chamber Magazine, Altered Realities, Mobius Blvd., and Digital Papercut. In 2005, Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize..