Dresden Weihnachten (5 page)

I cut a piece of goose and dipped it in the sauce. “
Himmlisch
!” I said after I had eaten it and speared some more. Then I decided it was time for me to get serious too.  “Dieter, I don’t mean to discourage you at all. God knows I’m crazy about you—and in a way I can’t begin to explain. If you were an American, I would chalk up your certainty, at this stage of things, that we were going to stay a couple to being just naïve and the headiness of infatuation. But you are more mature than that. You’re not a teenager. What are you, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six.”

“I just don’t understand your calm certainty about us. Though, I admit, I find it appealing.”

“The only way I can explain is to say I have seen it.” He took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “You might think this is crazy—
really
crazy. But in our family, in each generation, there are one or two who sometimes see things from the future, and sometimes, also, from the past. My mother can do it, but she does not like to. It is something I have always had, this gift. When I was very young, I did not know it was special to see something before it happened. Fortunately my aunt—the baker I spoke of—she has the gift too. And she taught me how to value it.”

“So you’ve seen us together?” He nodded. “When did this happen? After we met?”

“No, many years ago. About the time I realized I was gay.” He ate some of the stuffing and growled with pleasure before he went on. “I saw a room with big windows filled with afternoon sunlight and good things cooking in the next room, and I knew that was the home of the man I would be with. When I went to your home for dinner, I recognized the room.

“And when you told me your name, I understood why, every time I had thought of my mate, lions appeared.” When I looked puzzled he said, “Daniel and the lions’ den.” He shrugged ruefully and added, “Often what appears is not the exact thing, but a symbol. Though, this sexy look,” he reached over and ran a finger through the gray that was spreading rapidly over my temples, “this is exactly what I have seen too. But never your face. And when you offered to cook some extra vegetables for that first meal, this too I had seen, that you could not yet see the value of yourself and so would want to add food to make up for it.”

I pride myself in trying to keep an open mind about most things. I certainly believe there is much more to the world that what we choose to see. But this was more than a bit far-fetched. “What if I hadn’t come to Dresden?”

“But you did. You have never told me how this came to be, but I would guess it was sudden and very unexpected. Something you had not planned on at all. Yes?”

He had me there. “Okay,” I said. “But what was this craziness with people from the past at the concert and even during the day today. What was that all about?”

He hesitated, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said slowly, “My aunt once explained to me that we can ask for knowledge and sometimes a picture appears, and sometimes it does not. Most times, though, as we are going to sleep, or waking up, or in a meditation, a picture appears. For me, many times the picture is from a life I lived in Dresden before, during the end of 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s.

“Since you have been in Dresden, things have often seemed very familiar, yes?” I nodded. “Today at the Striezelmarkt it was as if you had seen before the bakers carry in the big stollen, even though this was supposed to be new for you?” I nodded and he gave me a long, assessing look. “Daniel, I have often seen you in that life with me.”

When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “We were very good friends. I do not know if we were lovers, but we were closer than brothers. When the first World War came I joined the
Kriegsmarine
and served on a U-boat. It sank very soon in the war. I have not seen what happened to you in that life. I have tried, especially since that day at your home. But I never see anything.”

Suddenly I remembered an incident from early in my Dresden days. “That’s interesting. The city museum is very close to the hotel where I lived when I first came to Dresden, and one weekend I went in to explore. When I entered the wing on the twentieth century, I suddenly had an very odd feeling that I couldn’t explain,” I told him. “I just stood there for a while, trying to make sense of it, but all I could come up with was that I almost understood something, but I didn’t know what it was I almost understood. Then I noticed a metal can that was part of a display. It was about the size of a soup can, but a little larger. It had a curved metal handle and a slot cut in the top. The words ‘For the U Boats’ was printed on it, in German.”

When I stopped he asked gently, “And what did you feel?”

“I burst into tears,” I said. “Thank God I was alone in the room at the time. It made no sense to me at all. But I felt such sadness and grief, I just suddenly burst into tears. It scared the hell out of me, actually, if you want to know the truth.”

He caressed the side of my face. “Thank you. I am touched you still mourn, even into this life. But you see, we have another chance. Again we’re in Dresden, again it is Christmas—yes, we ate here before I left for the
Kriegsmarine
, and we had Christmas goose. Only in this life there is no world war to separate us, and we are both older, and we are ready to explore together what life has for us this time.”

It was just too bizarre for words. It went against everything my conservative Southern Baptist upbringing had taught me. But I couldn’t deny that—on some inexplicable level—it seemed to fit emotionally. I wasn’t about to fight it. At least not right then.

“So where does this leave us?” I asked.

Dieter’s grin was inconceivably beguiling. “Ready for a stroll along the terrace and then back across the bridge to a nice place I know on Obergraben for a hot night?”

 “Sounds good to me. And what do you see for tomorrow?”

He laughed and ostentatiously closed his eyes and waved his hands around in a fake magical incantation. “Ah, yes, it is coming clearly now. I see much fantastic sex before we get out of bed, followed by breakfast with Dresden’s best Christmas stollen, and then a stroll to try and find the best Christmas tree in town.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I growled.

*  *  *

I’m not
going to describe what happened in the bedroom about thirty minutes later. Whose what went where when and how often. If we had been having sex, I would give you the details. But we weren’t. We were making love, and that’s quite a different thing.

I had had a lot sex before and in quite a variety of ways and places. But that first time with Dieter, I realized I had never made love before. It really was a melding of two souls, a time somehow out of time where nothing else mattered and where everything that would happen in days to come was changed because of what we were doing.

“Precious” does not begin to describe it. It really was sacred in the deepest and most holy sense of that word. A giving, accepting, and melding of that part of ourselves most of us are so scared of we can hardly even acknowledge its existence. Accepting, cherishing… worshipping, really. According to the stories, the wise men traveled a great distance to worship at that manger in Bethlehem. I had traveled a lot of miles to get to that bedroom in Dresden, but that evening Dieter showed me that love does not know anything about distance, or about time or place. It transcends all that.  It just needs to be given.

Of course we fell asleep in each other’s arms and woke up the same way—as we undoubtedly would for the rest of our lives. And as for his “predictions” for what would happen the next day? Well, I’ll only tell you that the Christstollen he somehow conjured for breakfast was out-of-this-world delicious, and we both agreed the Christmas tree we decorated that evening had to be the best in all of Dresden.

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Mistletoe Madness
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About the Author

Edward von Behrer
’s mother was surprised when he came home from his first day of school in tears. “They didn’t teach us to read today, and you promised they would. That's the only reason I went,” he wailed. His cousins still talk—decades later—about the stories he spun during his summer visits to their home in Chicago a few years later. Obviously he was fated to write. That sort of thing seems to happen to a lot of Southern guys. Even those who fled the South ASAP.

Copyright

Dresden Weihnachten ©Copyright Edward von Behrer, 2009

Published by

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Cover Design by Mara McKennen

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Released in the United States of America

December 2009

eBook Edition

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61581-318-6