Mountain Memory

It snowed steadily although lightly for the next two days, accumulating maybe three inches of snow, but promising a blizzard in the not-too-far-distant future. I was under the covers—a pile of covers—reaching "warm" for the first time that day in this indifferently constructed group of temporary camp buildings. I was nearly asleep, when I felt the draft of the covers being raised and a body slipping in under the covers.

Earlier, Corporal Hart—Ted—has been with me in my bed. We had writhed against each other on top of the sheets, as we often did, not being able to be satiated enough with the touch, and smell, and taste of each other. As was also often the case, I had speared him in a side split and moved in and out of him deeply until he was putty in my embrace—relaxed and completely open so that he took me to the root, murmuring his surrender to me. I turned onto my back, pulling him with me so that he was full length on top of me, both of us bending our legs so that we could get leverage off the surface of the bed with the balls or heels of our feet for me to thrust up into him and him to rear back into my pelvis to meet the thrusts.

I embraced his chest with one arm, latched onto the lobe of an ear with my teeth, and fisted and jacked off his cock as I pounded his ass. We came almost simultaneously, Ted first spouting toward the ceiling and splashing on his belly and chest, and me creaming his channel deep.

As we lay there, panting, the cold of the room crept in to push away the heat of our sex, and, reluctantly, he said, he left me.

I hadn't called for Ted to attend me; he had come to me on his own in the night. I had felt so guilty about the possibility that the men I fucked only allowed me to do so because of my rank that I hadn't been with any of them for two days. Concerned when yet another body burrowed under the covers with me several minutes after the corporal had left my bed, I moved my hand toward the nightstand where I had laced my service revolver, but a hand gripped my wrist.

"Please, Captain Carter, you said I'd only be shot for entering the camp again if I was going through the trashcans. I came for you, not the trash. I meant what I said when I said it wouldn't be taking advantage."

"I told you . . . you don't need to—" I didn't finish that sentence as I was overtaken by a moan as the mouth of the young German who had told me to call him Jake found and enveloped my cock.

When he had subdued me into an irrevocable want of him, which didn't take long, he lifted his head and said, "Although I am grateful, I'm not here because of that; I'm here because I want you inside me. I have lusted for you since I watched you fuck that young soldier against the tree—and then again just now, as I watched you two through your window. I want your cock. I want what you gave that young soldier just now." He slid his lips over my cock again and, with a sigh, I gave in to his ministrations.

With me on my back, he rode my cock for what seemed to be hours. We lay and murmured to each other as we rested between fuckings.

"You do this like a pro," I whispered. "I thought you said you had a family here you'd come back for. I had assumed a wife . . . and children."

"One does what one has to to survive in wartime. All I had for the last year that was marketable was what the guards of the führer's winter house craved. I acquired, first an expertise and then a taste, and then a need for it myself. Yes, I had a wife and children," he answered. "I think of you as having a wife and children too back in your country. You do have a family, don't you?"

"Yes," I admitted, "I do."

"It's the war. It's the same for both of us, I think. It's just the war. A man has his needs, no matter the circumstances he finds himself in."

"Yes, it's just the war," I answered, as he brought his face down to mine for a kiss. But it wasn't just the war. Not with this man. It was more than that. I couldn't fool myself about that. "We'll be leaving in four more weeks," I said, not knowing why I'd brought it up. But, in fact, knowing why. And then, many minutes later, when the panting and rhythm of the fuck had abated into a mutual flow and we were lying there, recovering, knowing we weren't done, only taking a rest to recover, I whispered, "I will miss these mountains." I couldn't tell him what I'd now discovered I'd really miss.

"You don't have mountains where you come from?"

"Yes," I answered, with a laugh. "I come from the Rocky Mountains, running down the middle of America."

"I've heard about those. Like our alps, but not as tall."

"Yes. I'll miss the tallness of these mountains."

"And I'll miss the longness and thickness of you—the vigor and musky scent of you," he said, after a hesitating. "But we'll have these four weeks, if you'll let me come again."

"Yes, we'll have these four weeks. But then we'll be gone and it will be the middle of the winter. There'll be no more food to put out for you."

"There wasn't food before you came. Afterward I don't think it will be the food I miss from your going."

We fucked again then, tenderly, me holding him under me on his belly, and languidly mining his ass passage.

He thought I was asleep when he slipped out of the bed, dressed, and left. But I wasn't. I still needed to learn how he was getting into the camp past the fences and guards. I quickly pulled on my fatigues and followed him at a distance, aided by watching for his tracks in the recently fallen snow. I followed his footsteps up to the base of the Kehlstein Mountain towering over the camp to the south, but then lost the track where the rock started. Still, it all looked like a sheer rock wall to me. That's why we hadn't bothered to fence it in.

Three weeks and five visits from him later, I discovered where he went and how he got there. I managed that by staking out the shrine where the food was left for him and following him from there. His trek took him up a rocky incline at the base of the Kehlstein and then descending by a circuitous channel with rock walls on each side into the back of the camp. Another, nearly invisible, crevice in the rock was accessible by moving sideways. This passage opened up and ascended the mountainside to a glade of trees. A shack close to collapse was hidden in the trees.

I stood at the door as he mussed with the food over a small table, turned away from me so that he didn't see me for the longest time. The room contained the table, a rickety straight chair, and a cot. The rest of the room was taken up with painting supplies. An unfinished oil painting sat on an easel.

The painting was of the nearby Zugspitz, the tallest mountain in the German Alps. The mountain commanded the distance. Nearly centered in the foreground was a ravine leading down toward the base of the mountain and rising on either side of the canvas. Mist enveloped the floor of the ravine. On the left, rising out of a rock outcropping on the side of the ravine, roots clinging to hard-won crevices in the rock, was a lone pine tree. The branches of the tree were nearly barren, although there was a hint that it was still fighting for life even though its only grounding was solid rock.

Although the painting obviously was of the Zugspitz, upon closer inspection, I knew the painting really was about that lone pine, clinging to the last vestiges of life by tenacious and hopeful roots buried in the crevices of hard, unforgiving rock. The mountain of the painting reminded me so much of the mountain rising above my family ranch in Colorado that it choked me up and I briefly entertained the thought that he'd been to the Rockies. That must have made an audible sound, as Jake turned in surprise.

I expected him to be angry. I had ferreted out his lair, which he obviously had wanted to keep as a secret.

He merely smiled a sad smile though, and started to undress and move to the cot, where I fucked him like the end of the world was at hand.

And for us, it was. I had to inform him that it would be too dangerous for him to visit the camp again, and that I'd now be too busy to break away to visit him here. The orders to pack out had arrived and the last week in the camp would be chaos.

He let me go with a tender kiss at the door of his shack. He said nothing about what this departure meant for him—either in the lost sex or the end to his food supply. And I said nothing either. I didn't want to think about it, and there didn't seem to be anything to say about it. But in subsequent years I was haunted by not having found some way to protect him.

The night before the transport convoy arrived to take us away for the flight home, one of my men came to my office.

"This parcel was left for you at the gate, Captain," he said.

"Who—?"

"It was a German guy, but he didn't give a name. But he's the guy who has been coming into camp at your order." The soldier knew what Jake and I had been doing, of course. All of the men probably knew.

When I unfolded the yellowed, German-language newspaper print away from the parcel, it was revealed to be the painting of the Zugspitz I'd seen on the easel in Jake's shack. It had been finished. In my melancholy at parting from Jake, the lone pine stood out of the painting even more now than it ever had done.

Regardless of what else had to be done, I left my office immediately and, after some fruitless searching, finally found the entrance of the ravine at the back of the camp that led me to the doorstep of Jake's shack. The shack was deserted. I decided that he probably was right—that good-bye was inevitable and prolonging it would only add to the grief.

Since he wasn't there, I told myself that he had gone into the town and would find shelter and sustenance there. I kept telling myself that for some time. I don't think I ever convinced myself that he'd done so, though.

* * * *

Like many a soldier before me, I returned to the States, to my lucrative cattle ranch, and to my wife and two children. I fell immediately into a normal, straight life. Like so many others—the lucky ones—I was able to compartment off my war years from the home life I had gone to war to preserve. And like so many others, I wasn't quick to respond to my children's innocent questions of "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" because I had gone to war to save them from knowing what one has to do in war and the totally different person it demands you be.

It was only when I was feeling vulnerable or nostalgic that I thought back on what I had done with men during the war—and inevitably my thoughts at these times went to Jake.

I shouldn't have rewrapped the painting in the yellowed German-language newspaper print. In shipping it had clotted with what must have been still-damp paint on a hip of stone on the side of the Zugspitz and took the top layer of paint away, leaving an impression of the printing on the newspaper. For a year or more I searched for an artist who would touch the painting up for me. All of them in the Denver and even the Los Angeles area said that the work was too fine for them to touch.

They all asked me where I'd gotten it. I, of course, was vague with my answer. After a while, considering the interest the painting evoked from other artists, I began to fear that someone would think that I had raided the art stash in Bavaria that my unit had been assigned to protect and I hid the painting away. I could not forget it, though, and each time I took it out to look at and my eyes went to the lone pine, I remembered—and I felt myself go hard. The painting kept pulling me back to it and, nearly a year later, when I had occasion to go to New York City on business, I decided to make another effort to have the damage to the painting repaired.

A prestigious gallery in New York said they had an artist who could attempt a touchup. "But I doubt that anyone can match the delicacy and tone of the original artist. You'll be able to tell the difference."

"Do the best you can," I said. "It pains me to see it like it is now. It looks wounded, and I don't want to think of it that way."

"By the way, do you have any idea what you have here?" the gallery official asked.

"Yes, it's of the Zugspitz in the German Alps. I served near there at the end of the war. It looks just like the real thing. It was given to me by a refugee, in exchange for food."

"Yes, it would look like the real thing," she said. "You have here a Jacob Gelmen painting. There's his mark down in the corner. This painting is worth a big fortune, even with the flaw. Very few Gelmens survived the war, although he was the toast of London galleries when the war started. It was ironic, but the London studio where he worked and where most of his paintings were stored was bombed out by a German rocket during the London blitz."

"A famous artist?"

"Absolutely," she said. "A real tragedy. He was Jewish, you know. He was safely away in London—well, as safe as London was under rocketing conditions. But his family was in Germany. He left London to go find them long after everyone knew that would be suicide—he was Jewish, you know. Yes, I already told you that. Sometime in 1943, I think. Yes, indeed. Should you ever want to sell this, Sothbys would be delighted to handle an auction for you."

"Thank you, but I don't think I could ever bear to part with it," had been my answer. I was so choked up that I barely could get the words out. Besides the fact that if I did try to sell it, the question of how I got it when I was in charge of protecting an art stash would crop up again, there's no way I would ever give it up.

I almost didn't ask, but I couldn't bear not to. "The artist, Gelmen. Did he stop painting?"

"He must have been killed in the war when he returned to Germany," she answered. "Nothing has been reported of him since the war. This looks like the paintings of his later work. It may have been one of the last pieces he painted."

The gallery's artist did a decent job of touching the painting up—at least it was better than the mar of the paint removed by the newsprint—but the real benefit of having it retouched was that the touchup only highlighted how much finer the original artwork was.

And, even more than before, it no longer offered a "marred" focal point to take away from the centrality of that lone pine, clinging to life on its rock.

Before the end of the decade, I found an excuse to fly back to Germany—and to Bavaria—on my own. On the ruse of wanting to hike in the German Alps, I went back to Obersalzberg, being able to stay in the U.S. Army's General Walker Hotel thanks to having maintained reserve status and risen to the rank of major. I found where our camp had been, now, I was happy to see, returned to productive farmland. And I found the opening in the rock wall at the base of the Kehlstein.

I found the shack, but the roof had caved in and there was no sign that anyone had been there for years. The winter of 1945-46 had been a rough one in Germany. It was hard to conceive that Jacob Gelmen could have survived if he had remained here. I almost poked around in the ruins of the shack but decided not to, being very afraid of what I might find.

But if he had survived, there would have been no reason for him not to have resurfaced in the art world and taken his rightful place and enjoyed his international reputation.

I both didn't want to think about it and wanted to cherish the memory of the short time we'd had together—in what now was a world that was closed to me and taboo to mention to anyone.

The painting, though—and the art gallery official had shown me on the back where it had been titled as "Mountain Memory"—was mounted over the fireplace in the living room of the ranch house.

There was a fire in that section of the rambling, log-sided ranch house in 1952. The only object I was able to save in addition to getting the family out before the roof collapsed was "Mountain Memory."

I had saved from that fire all that was precious to me, though.