Blue Blossom

By Connor Kerns

The novel Blue Blossom embraces the vast sweep of the Second World War across Europe and within one man’s soul. Johann Frühauf grows up in Spain during the 1930s. As a young man, he comes to love literature and intense romantic affairs, but war turns him into a reluctant German army officer, and by the end of the fighting he suffers a breakdown.

After the war, he escapes to the tranquil prosperity of the Western United States. Late in life, he seeks to mend his own spirit by writing a memoir and to give a gift to the woman he loves most: his old friend Frieda, the actress whose dream is to play Hamlet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Connor Kerns
• Release date: Dec 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005013875

Connor Kerns

Connor lives in Portland, Oregon. He started writing poetry at the age of 11, and his first published poetry book was Image Made Word (1990, Roan LTD).He got up the nerve to start e-publishing novels in 2020, and the following titles are available: The Hero of Houston, an eco-thriller; Measure Her, a comedy-romance; Blue Blossom, a historical memoir set in World War II; and a sci-fi/fantasy trilogy, The Three Books of Wisecraft series.Premieres of play adaptations of Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, were produced by Quintessence: Language & Imagination Theatre, where he was Artistic Director. Other productions of his plays include: Pride and Prejudice, The Child is Father of the Man, Face Reader, and Treatment (Quintessence); A Bawdy Tale (Montgomery Street Players); Zaney (Arts Equity); I Go to War and Vaward of Pallas 3 (Epicurean); The Folio (CoHo) and Where No Storms Come (Stark Raving Theatre).He is also a director, having received his MFA in Directing at the University of Portland, and he taught acting for 24 years. His book Imaginative Doing, Collected Essays on Acting was published in 2013.

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Blue Blossom

Connor Kerns

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 Connor Kerns

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Blue Blossom remains the copyrighted property of the author, Connor Kerns, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoy this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy. Thank you for your support.

Chapter 0, Prologue

'Who's there?' (Hamlet, Shakespeare)

My Mother gave me the first name Johann, after John the Baptist. No one has called me Johann since 1939, when I was drafted, except my brother; I go by my surname, Frühauf. I’m not much of a writer, even though I always wanted to be one, but I’m writing down what I remember because it haunts me and maybe, when it’s over, I’ll be able to sleep.

Despite the war, I am trying to remain an optimist and an idealist, a Don Quixote. There has been honor and horror in the story, but I could do without the madness.

In 1936, I fell into fighting in Spain and since then have continued to scatter my wits like machinegun bullets across fields strewn with leaves and rose petals and corpses, muddy and dusty and soggy roads and frozen, tents and bunkers and bedrooms and tanks and hospitals in Poland, Belgium and France, Africa, Italy, Russia, Germany of course, and finally here. I have killed and been wounded, made love and friends, and lost them to exposure, insanity, bullets, treaties, shrapnel, mines, fire orders, bombs and shells, bayonets, heat and cold and disease, stupidity and dishonor.

We are all travelers; we all move years and kilometers; we cannot help it. It’s just that my mind has not been able to keep up with all the stops. Or, what is worse, the doors of my mind can’t keep out all the din--explosions beating languages and beating heart unheard and lovemaking lost--leaving me now alone with the (even louder) concussions of my own voices trapped inside. Can writing down my story give me peace?

Part 1: 1935 - 1945

Chapter 1, Spain

‘Love and war are the same thing….’ (Don Quixote, Cervantes)

My memories before we lived in Spain, when I was quite small, are vague. I remember the echoing sound of English in the prim, wood-floored rooms of our townhouse in London where my father, an ambassador, was posted. Most of the books on our shelves were in English, and I wrote out passages I liked on big pieces of paper. My older brother Josef taped them all over me once and dubbed me an Anglo-Egyptian mummy.

In 1929, my father was posted to Madrid. My parents had friends in Sevilla, where we would visit for the summer. One of my early efforts at writing described it this way: The Andalusian sunshine lies tranquil in the afternoons before the reveling evenings along the Guadalquivir River. Josef and I cooled the hot days swimming with our friend Pablo, disturbing the old fishermen with our flops on the water.

Pablo, like my father, loved languages. We played word games, speaking multiple languages in one sentence and creating our own code. We called our bastardized language Frankeng SprechSpanic Itlick. We were a gang, and Josef dubbed himself ‘Capitán’, and punched our shoulders if we did anything he didn’t like. He also coined our slogan, 'Sicher, la paz é impossible per us.' (Of course, peace is impossible for us.) In retrospect, it was a blatant imitation of fascist propaganda. I preferred, 'Vino und una donna son mejor que Dio e la Madonna.' (Wine and a lady are better than God and the Madonna.) Pablo liked the nonsensical, ‘Es you un prick? Je weiß nicht!’ (Are you a prick? I don’t know!)

I remember a few others. ‘Ich kann non believe hay merde en your sleeve!’ (I can’t believe there’s shit up your sleeve!) ‘Give me puberty or dáme la muerte por cioccolatto y moscato!’ (Give me puberty or give me death by chocolate and muscat wine!) ‘Viva la King du les enfantes elephant!’ (Long live the king of the elephant children!) This was Pablo’s--he loved the sound of it--but it always drew a shake of the head from Josef, and his usual, ‘No é malo, he’s ein falo.’ (He isn’t bad, he’s just a penis.)

The three of us cursed and played our way through Sevilla each summer—dusty streets, the river, the weedy yard, our parents' vegetable garden. In September, as a final gang flourish before the return to Madrid and school, we would toss the tomatoes rotting in the garden. Josef turned it into a carefully-planned game: choosing the projectiles; the launching point; and, when we got older, the human targets. Each year we carried the rotten tomatoes farther and farther afield in pouches created by holding our shirttails between our teeth.

Josef scouted and then ordered. He stood lookout at some street corner; Pablo and I hid--behind shrubs or a wagon or a wall; when he signaled us, we tossed the rotten tomatoes! I seldom knew what Josef’s target was until the last moment. Per-splat they struck bicyclists, pedestrians, even a rich man’s motor car, and then we’d run! fast! trying to keep up with Josef's long legs and his crazy twisting and turnings, alleys-streets-corners, to the garden to lie laughing in the dusky fall light.

The last time Josef gave the command to toss the rotten tomatoes was memorable. We had learned to comb the withered vines for the best grenades--overripe for maximum splattering but with strong enough skins to hold together. I remember the look of delight on Pablo's face that evening, his not-quite-perfect front teeth exposed when his thin lips drew back, his teeth clenching as he grabbed my shirt and said, "Vamos, vamos, vamos!" as he often did when excited.

As we lay in wait with Josef on watch, we could not relax; we crouched blind, studying his body language while he bobbed up and down judging the targets. He signaled, we threw—a laden cart and several people; we all sensed it at once, even as our first volley splattered a gang of older boys! We dropped the other tomato rounds and ran-ran-ran fast, and down-up wide the hill near our summer house and through alleys narrow, then the sudden wall and too high but somehow all three of us vaulted it as though it were nothing--I don't know how to this day, it must have been two meters and we flew over it--and lay panting beneath a tree, the sounds of the snarling boys prowling the neighborhood. After what seemed hours, as dread and excitement and loud heart-poundings eased, we heard the cart clomp off and smiled stupidly at fortune. Josef went back to Germany before the next September and, without his guidance, the tomatoes rotted where they fell.

Meanwhile, Pablo and I developed literary inclinations. My father preferred English writers, my mother German, and Pablo introduced me to Spanish. He had memorized the windmill chapter of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. We even role-played it: I as the Knight and he as the Squire, or Pancho Sanza as he liked to call him. He loved to play the clown. He stuffed pillows down his father's coat and reeled around as if drunk. We mounted fences or bicycles to simulate horses and found a church wall or the headstones in a graveyard to act as the windmills.

Such a ridiculous exhilaration filled me as we charged madly and then, with our wooden lances (poles scavenged from a junk heap) we'd smash into the wall or the mausoleum and crash off our bicycles, or fall off the fence into some dead grass. I'm surprised we were never injured, even though Pablo insisted we pad ourselves well with sweaters, gloves, crude helmets. Pablo would spout off sections of the dialogue, which action we would fantasize or recreate as best our imaginations and the terrain allowed. Then, we would get to the full-out charge, smash into our windmill and then lie on the ground and talk about losing our 'grinders' and our steeds, and dedicating ourselves to serving our Lady Quienquiera (whatever girl we fancied that particular day).

My mother, a devout Catholic, preferred Spain to the ‘insipid English’ as she always called them. She said the Spanish understood her fiery temper. My father, on the contrary, missed seeing theatre in London. He was mild and gentle and, seemed always to be working. They were opposites in nearly every way and, through nature’s alchemy, content.

My brother returned to Germany and joined the army when he turned 19, but I stayed in Spain, and Pablo and I attended university in Sevilla and studied literature. I loved the swirl of different words and worlds. We used to sneak into Casa de Pilatos, our favorite courtyard, and read dirty stories or great literature, depending on our mood.

I was only vaguely aware of politics, despite my father’s career. My brother was fond of quoting Hegel in debates when he visited--the universal over the individual, or the government over the individual. Our supreme duty is to be a member of the state. Hitler and Franco, fascism instead of democratic republics, were of little interest, and when Josef bullied me about economic improvement, loyalty to the state and, most alarming, ethnic cleanliness, I retaliated by avoiding him or staying silent.

When I wasn’t studying, Pablo and stayed out late in the flamenco halls or the café/bars, tapas and wine and girls, sauntering through the seldom-sleeping streets of Sevilla…the warm evenings…the endless conversations about who had slept with whom, often in the same breath, and sudden singing and spontaneous dancing. I fucked indiscriminately and never took it seriously until I met Micaela. My first surrender to her was in her friend’s bedroom on a scorching afternoon after watching the bullfights. That day, hot and black and red, always makes my mouth tingle when I think of it. As she hovered above me, she lay her hands over my eyes so I couldn’t see, and I no longer felt removed from the act, a spectator watching the bullfighter expertly manipulate the beast. Instead, my body joined her body kiss by kiss, moan by moan, lips grazing and parting, grazing and parting.

She wrote a poem for me which I memorized:

Por la tarde de mi alma,

Por la noche de mi corazón

Empieza la luz del cielo,

Y te veo, te veo,

Mi absolución.

(Through the afternoon of my soul, / Through the night of my heart / Dawns the light of heaven, / And I see you, I see you, / My absolution.)

I learned poetry could be foreplay and that the act could be profound when all the senses were engaged. Even though our affair only lasted half a year, I craved that intimacy ever after. I found it again in Pilar. She had danced as a girl before her constitution gave out; she still moved with a percussive grace and sensual, muscular carriage, which I associate still with southern Spanish women. But I had learned not only to intersperse poetry with kisses but to close my eyes to experience the feeling of oneness.

From the first time in a cellar, making love with Pilar felt like clasping a warm wave in a pleasurable pool of marmalade and sweat. She used to sigh afterwards--I never knew if in sleeping or waking, or somewhere between—and I would sigh in response because I wanted to feel everything she felt.

Pilar appreciated my scraps of romantic poetry but she was studying painting. She was enthusiastic about Vermeer’s realism but also appreciated the stark geometry of Picasso. I persuaded her into coming to Madrid for a weekend visit to my parents’ so we could go to the Prado Museum together. From the moment they met us at the train station that day, to our final parting, my father adored her and my mother ignored her.

Spending time with my father had always been awkward, with long silences unless we were discussing literature. His instant ease with Pilar made me realize he liked girls and my mother liked boys. He drove us to the Prado, and the two of them stuck together, whispering and pointing in the quiet gallery among the timeless the paintings, while colors burst out of the frames. They compared Bellini to Titian, and I felt embarrassed when my sexual excitement flared looking upon Titian’s figure with her head thrown back, her breasts thrust toward the heavens, her arm behind her head. Was everything sex, I wondered?

I soon found out the answer to this boyish question. Pilar went to study in Paris for a few weeks, and Pablo’s sister Teresa and I drank too much sangria at Pablo’s birthday party. By chance we found ourselves kissing furiously on a tiny terrace, leading to furious intercourse. Like moths to flames, Teresa and I would find each other night after night, fucking furtively in parks or alleys or under a bridge. We were rough with each other, but the pain always ended in surprising pleasure, like dying and being resurrected. These adventures, with their chafes and scratches and bruises, we kept secret.

I felt relieved and guilty when Pilar returned. Aglow with inspiration from the Louvre, and the pang of our separation, she immediately took me down to the cellar, our sweet nest of pleasure. But her body detected my disloyalty and she confronted me, extracted a confession, and shouted me passionately up the stairs and out of her life. Word spread and I lost not only Pilar but some of my closest friends. I also lost Teresa when I promised an angry Pablo I would stop seeing her.

One of Pablo’s favorite haunts was the courtyard of Casa de Pilatos. At night, it was serene, empty except for the few servants who kept it up for some dignitary who lived there only in the winter months. If the staff knew we were there, they ignored us. One unforgettable night, drinking wine and joking around, we heard gunshots.

We shouldn’t have been as surprised as we were, but Pablo cared even less for politics than I. The Spanish Civil War had started while we were in our fourth year of college. My mother had complained often to me that the government, new since 1931, was not good to Catholics and had refused money to her parish church. Los Falangistos, some of whom were fascist friends of my brother Josef, were outraged when their party lost the election that year. The coup had failed, but General Franco had troops and people called his actions a civil war.

We knew all this, but gunshots in the center of Sevilla? We sneaked to the top of the wall and looked. We were amazed to recognize two of Josef’s acquaintances shooting at police officers. We lay on our bellies, waiting for it to quiet down, but there seemed to be an uprising. I wondered—how did those boys get guns? I remembered them trying to get up the courage to dance at a club and feeling sorry for them. Yet here they were, trying to kill!

Everywhere we heard chaotic sounds--windows breaking, gunshots, voices yelling, "Franco viene!" I lay frozen with panic as the guns blasted at each other, as the police officers shot wounds in my brother’s boyhood friends. Pablo pulled me off the wall. I lay trembling before I realized that I couldn't do anything but survive. Survive. Like a bell. My mind cleared. Now it was my turn to pull Pablo, and I got him to his feet. I grabbed his arm and I led him to the back gate and through. We sulked from shadow to shadow, quietly and carefully, until the noise was far behind us.

Early morning, Pablo, Teresa and I were on a train to Madrid to wait for the skirmish to be over so we could go back to school. Pablo and I moved in with my parents. Teresa stayed with some cousins. We were safe.

Josef’s patriotic letters were kept in my father’s desk drawer, but I found them. They were ridiculous homages to the ‘beloved Führer, our new Siegfried’, and economic resurgence in Germany. There were also threats to my father to support Franco and not the Spanish government. I knew when a new letter had come because my father would cry. Mother said very little. To get back at him, I wrote him in nonsensical Frankeng SprechSpanic Itlick. I recall them going something like this:

‘Hermano mio, tous est una fromage con bravura e verdura; amas il Vaterland demasiado, como un amante ama sperm--drink some asti spumante, est gut for le guts. Fuck tu, shitkopf. Love, Il Caballero.’ (Brother mine, you are a cheese with bravura and vegetables; you love the Fatherland too much, like a lovelorn fool loves sperm--drink some Asti Spumante, it’s good for the guts. Fuck you, shithead. Love, the Knight.)

As the civil war got worse, I remember hearing voices one night while I tried to sleep. I crept out until I could see my parents through the bedroom door, which wasn’t quite closed. They were in bed; she was sitting up against the headboard, while he lay with his forehead dug into her thighs, his arms spread lifelessly over the coverlet. My mother fanned with one hand and stroked his head with the other. It was the image that returned most often when I thought of my parents after they were shot.

Didn’t Siegfried get stabbed in the back? my mother asked softly.

That year I happened to meet the painter Picasso. I was working at the museum as a laborer, hoping the civil war would end soon so I could return to Sevilla and finish school. We were packing artwork to ship to Paris. It was the first time I saw Guernica’s distorted figures. Another laborer and I stopped and looked at it.

I don’t ever want to see that, I said.

A supervisor had come in and heard us and told us to hold it steady while he covered it up. I realized two things while he wrapped the monstrous image in paper: He was Picasso; and he had painted it!

The war dragged on. Pablo convinced me to join the government forces; we hated fascism and they promised a stipend. The Republicans didn’t even care that I was German—we were a mixed crew of Americans, a Canadian, British officers and an Irishman, whose lilting English charmed us all. There now, he’d say, It’s the dearest ’a things to be fightin with youse.

We were given a hurried, disorganized, sweaty basic training. I learned to fire a bolt-action rifle, reload, and keep my head down. I suspected Franco’s troops were better-trained, otherwise the radio would not have reported his consecutive victories with unvarying regularity, as his armies drove northward.

I had never gone far without Pablo, and we joined together on the condition we could fight in the same unit. In camp, he and I determined our best service would come as reconnaissance men. We switched orders with a sleeping patrol soldier to get our first mission, a probe of the enemy north of Madrid. Franco's forces nearly surrounded the city. Pablo was team leader over me, the Irishman and a lone Spaniard. We were to make contact with the enemy at night and scout his forward positions. Eagerly, we clanked off with bota bags full of sangria, our rifles, a compass, and some bread and cheese.

There wasn’t a moon, so by midnight none of us could see a thing. The Spaniard, whose name I don’t recall, tripped, refused to get up and started drinking wine under a tree. The Irishman joined him.

There now, the Irishman said, It’s the dearest ’a things to be drinkin with youse.

"Le duele la cabeza," the Spaniard explained to Pablo, pointing at his head.

I’ll knock your heads together! Pablo yelled but the two men wouldn’t budge.

"Forget these putas, Pablo, we work mejor alone."

Pablo looked at them in disgust and then turned to me. His authority seemed to evaporate into the invocation of childhood.

"Ja, gut."

We left them drinking in the starlight.

Later, crawling on our bellies across a field, I asked, Pablo, why did we think we could fight?

Machinegun fire sprayed over our heads. My first battle. We had blundered into a night assault. A grenade exploded to our left and we both instinctively got up and ran right. I slid unhurt