Keller’s Liquor

Surrounded by green hills and undulating fields, halfway between life and oblivion, there was a small cemetery forgotten by time – the wind blew softly among the weeds carrying with it the pungent smell of manure and damp earth. Down there stood a modest little hill, above it there were five silent gravestones.

Two for Turkish soldiers, one for a Frenchman, one for an Englishman, one for a German and another for Keller – my companion, my brother in arms. His appeared different from all the others. It was broken in two, a tree had grown right in the middle of it. As if life had mocked death, transforming that cold marble into something wonderfully alive.

Every time I returned to the cemetery I spoke with Keller – not with the stone, but through the tree. I told him the stories of yesterday, the ones he already knew, as we used to do next to the fire in the days of the war.

I always carried with me a bottle of licorice liquor, his favorite, I placed it carefully at the base of the tree. Perhaps the farmer who took care of those scattered graves drank it, perhaps not. But I liked to think that it was Keller who drank it – this too gave me the illusion that he was still there, sitting with his legs crossed under the tree, listening to me in silence.

I always remained a little among the gravestones, with my hand resting on the rough bark. The wind barely moved the branches, and for a moment it seemed possible to hear the crackling of a distant fire. It was always like that – it was enough to stop long enough, and the past returned, not like a memory, but like a season that takes possession of the body again.

“I remember a cannon shell fired by an armored vehicle at 1.5 kilometers from us, which we could almost not see. Like a buffalo of metal it moved agilely in the mud and in the soft earth – its hydraulic arms and all those mechanisms of cold death frightened us, the noises that shattered in the air with incredible violence were then caught again by the hydraulic shock absorbers of the Leopard 1A5.

Behind me there was the mountain, beyond it the dozen men that remained to me. In front, the Leopard.

Sergeant major Hugo Schmeisser reached me with a tense face, the skin gray under the beard of days.

“Captain,” he said, “this is the final inventory: seven Sturmgewehr 44, twenty-five magazines of thirty rounds, twenty-seven grenades. And we all still have our Luger.”

We were hungry. An animal hunger, that dug inside and made every thought slower. Days before I had sent two men to look for wild rabbits, but there were no more animals, nor traces of life – only frozen earth.

That night, under the mountain bitten by the Leopard, I understood that we could not stay longer. I gave the order without raising my voice:

“Gather everything. Burn the camp.”

The flames rose high, devouring the tents, the crates, the traces of our presence. We fled like nocturnal animals: barefoot, silent, invisible. The frozen air cut the lungs. We reached a higher altitude and from there I saw the fire swallow the encampment, an orange glow in the white night.

Then the Leopard returned. A shot devastated one side of the mountain. The snow struck us full in the face, the blood froze on the lips before it could even be wiped away. We spent hours with the Leopard that bit the sides of the mountain, until, thanks to the secret code emitted by the allied radio communications, we managed to communicate our position and we were covered by the fire of a Messerschmitt. It passed above us like an omen, a metallic shadow screaming in the sky — in that moment it truly seemed the beak of a black angel.

Yet, among all those memories, there was one that always returned stronger than the others. More ancient. Warmer.

The night in which Keller saved my life.

We were in the African desert, a few kilometers from the coast, near Tobruk. I had left the encampment to smoke a cigarette, as I used to do in the streets of Hamburg before the war. All those dead men, all that blood clotted in the sand, the war that by now we had in our eyes and in the brain — I needed to walk, to breathe, to move, perhaps also to drink.

I was walking among mines without knowing it. I had pushed myself too close to the enemy lines.

Keller followed me, he said nothing, made no noise – he arrived behind me, grabbed me with a desperate strength and dragged me back into the darkness, centimeter after centimeter, until the shadows returned to be ours.

We returned alive into the trench.

And I understood, that night, that I owed him my life.

But the war, the real one, began afterward. The armistices signed, the clashes ended, Keller already dead for some time.

I never returned to Hamburg, I got lost, I changed identity – long beard, black hair. I moved to Brazil, to Novo Hamburgo, in Rio Grande do Sul. I became Brazilian. My name, a mockery.

I was dead and I still walked – no one knew who I was and I had left behind everything.

One morning of August, around six local time, a black van parked in my driveway in the Vila Rosa district. Three men got out. No words, they took me and carried me away, to a prison without name in the United States but under jurisdiction of a state that does not forgive. And it was there that I truly died.

Yet today I still walk through the streets of Istanbul. Or perhaps I dream it. I see the sun-struck sidewalks, the people who speak strange languages. Richter and Tonon, two former bastards like me, never returned to their homeland.

They had invited me to dine with them at Café Richard, that very evening. A place, that one, of which they were the owners. After dining with them I met a French woman, who belonged to the Parisian high bourgeoisie – she told me she was afraid, but she sat anyway, she ordered a whiskey soda without even asking.

She spoke to me of her husband, an officer of the army, but I listened only to the tone of her voice. I felt something that brought me back home: not to Hamburg, not to Novo Hamburgo, but to the trench, to Hugo, to Keller, to my comrades.

That evening we spoke for a long time, but I did not tell her anything – I did not tell her who I was, nor what I had done, I did not tell her about the war, nor about the cold, nor that I had taken part in the campaign of France and that I was decorated with an Iron Cross.

I only told her that under a tree, on a hidden little hill, there was a man who still lived, and that every year he received a bottle of liquor. Perhaps this is what memory is called, perhaps, in the end, this is how one survives.

And if a tree grows on your grave it is only nature that forgives you.

Keller’s Liquor