Olympia by Dennis Bock Page A

cloud of mustard gas that redesigned Willy’s nervous system way back during the First World War. It’s bad and getting worse, she says. That’s why we’re visiting now, while we still can. Somewhere north of Munich she leans back over her seat, left elbow pointing between Ruby and me as we listen. I hear the hesitation in her voice when the part about the gas comes up. Maybe she’s thinking about her father, something they had between them before he died.

    â€œUncle Willy was there for the fraternization incident,” she says. “That’s what they called it.” This is the Christmas Eve night in the first year of the war when the British stopped firing on Willy and his friends, and Willy and his friends stopped bombing the British. The Christmas when time stopped. My mother tells us he got two goals and an assist playing soccer the next morning on the field they’d cleared between the two front lines. For a moment she stops talking and looks out the window at the blue of the mountains. She puts on her thinking face. I watch her quarter profile, an eye moving with the contours of the roadside. My father’s flipping through the channels on the radio when we enter the side of a mountain, a long dark hole, and burrow deep into the earth. Car headlights pass us in the opposite lane and I think of my mother’s father dying in a salt mine, the brother of the man we’re on our way to see. Outside in the open again, a bright Sousa march suddenly jumps out from American Forces Radio. My mother leans forward and turns it off.

    â€œRight away, from the moment it touched his skin,” she says, “his body grew a mind of its own. It didn’t do what he wanted it to.” She’s back to talking about the gas. Between thought and action, she says, there was a moment’s pause after the poison touched his skin, a dormancy, like the space between the voice and its echo in a deep canyon. This is how I imagine it as she tells us. He feels the delay, the command cascading along his veins before it enters the world through his fingertips, or is breathed into the world on the lips. The moment when the rest of the world seems to fall still and silent. She says her uncle was returned from the war with nothing at all, not a scratch, no wound but the suggestion of simpleness, the air of a man who struggles with the idea of breath before getting down to the business of breathing.

    We’ve been on the road for two weeks now. I’ve seen my mother cry tears of joy while handling the gold-knit tapestry of the handmaids of King Ludwig II at Schloss Herren-Chiemsee, the island castle accessible only by boat where my grandparents got married back in 1936 after they met at the Olympics. We’ve walked through the Black Forest and had our portraits painted in the main square in Cologne. My father has played pick-up accordion with a high school friend in Frankfurt. I’ve placed my hand against the Berlin Wall and wondered who was telling the truth, us or them. As we drive between cities in the Opel my father bought second-hand at a garage in Amsterdam, Ruby and I keep our eyes peeled for deer grazing along the Autobahn and the skinny men with beards who stand at the on-ramps with their thumbs in the air, pointing upwards, as if that’s where they want to go. In the game we invent to help pass the time, a deer is worth five times that of a man. I keep score because Ruby is too young to understand the rules. She’s eleven. I’ll be going into grade ten in the fall.

    â€œIt’s like looking at movie film without the projector,” my mother says, turning back to face the highway again, the clicking of her knitting needles starting up over her lap. She’s working on a fall sweater for me. “That’s how he explained it to me when I was your age. The clunking movements.”

    We spend hours at a time in the car. The knitting grows louder up front