A Death on a Bavarian Lake

by Hugo Glinn

“That has to be one of the most beautiful ways to die.” Debbie Whitaker was looking at her glass of white wine while fingering a sleek, silver crucifix that hung from her neck.

Just a few hours before, I had been wondering what her glossed lips would have tasted like, but my thought now was, What the fuck are you talking about?

It was the autumn of 1980, and we were sitting at a long, thick wooden table in the back corner of the Gasthaus am Peterstor in the town of Prien am Chiemsee with the six other members of the Middle State University German Language Program that had just witnessed a death on a Bavarian lake. I was at one end of the table, blankly staring at the blue and white checkered Bavarian banners and the blue and yellow coat of arms of Prien hanging from the high rafters of the tavern when Debbie babbled her tripe. Then I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

She stopped twirling the pendant and narrowed her gaze at me. In her nasally, sing-song, LA accent, she said, “I mean, think about it.” She turned to the others, relaxed her brow, and continued. “A beautiful concert in that lovely mirrored hall. The autumn scenery around the lake with a clear blue sky...”

“Die alte frau was still alive when she was enjoying all of that,” I scoffed. “When the heart attack hit, I’m sure it hurt like a mother humper.” Swirling my drink before taking a swig, I remembered how the East German pensioner, trembling probably due to his age, but also possibly because of the realization of the inevitable, bent over and kissed his dying, maybe already dead wife’s cheek while she was lying on a bench on the top deck of a paddle steamer crossing the Chiemsee only an hour earlier.

“What’s your problem, dude?” Tom Stiles, the dude from San Fran, was sitting just beyond Debbie at the far corner of the table. He shook his shoulder-length brown hair out of his face and said, “We just beheld a really tragic event.”

I smiled and thought, Beheld? Tom had scampered quickly out of his seat when he realized that the old lady next to him on the boat was croaking. His frightened expression had been hilarious. “Tragic? Ha! Sure scared the shit out of you.” Tom narrowed his eyes much like Debbie had, but also pursed his lips, like he wanted to say something. I put my glass down with a thud and leaned forward. “You think any of us next week will even think about what happened while we’re conjugating ‘sterben, starb, gestorben’? I doubt it.” I sat back and continued. “A total stranger died. She was old. She may have been old enough to have survived World War One and Two. She survived East Germany for thirty-five years.” I pointed and nodded at Tom. “And you remember what that place was like,” reminding him of the group’s trip to West and East Berlin. I grabbed my glass and continued more subdued, “And then she died. That’s all there is to it.” What my mother had said the day my own father died came to mind and I repeated it: “Life goes on.”

“Can we stop talking about it?” Chicagoan Michelle Kainz was sitting to my right, and though I had thought that this big-city girl could have gotten through this experience with a certain level of equanimity, she was a wreck. The old woman had been sitting directly across from her, and Michelle had been the first to see her put a handkerchief to her mouth and then slump over onto her husband’s side. She had begun to wildly elbow me in my ribs, and when I turned to her, she seemed to cringe into the bench, fearfully pointing at the elderly couple, and murmuring, “I think she’s dying.” When I looked across, her hand had already fallen limp and her face had gone lax, something that I had seen before. I immediately ran to the boat’s pilot house ten yards behind us at the front of the deck and told the captain to call out for a doctor on board and radio ahead at the pier. Now, at Peterstor, Michelle stared at the dark grain of the table. She still had the same stunned, wide-eyed expression she had had on the ship. She whispered, “I think I’m going to get sick.”

I offered her my drink. “It’s just apple juice and mineral water.”

“You’re not drinking?” Martin Kane, former high school fullback from Denver, almost shouted from the other end of the table.

I looked up and reminded him, “No, I’m not. And I don’t, remember?”

“Oh, yeah! Right, you’re one of those.” Martin drank from his second weizen. “Well, after the way all that shit went down, I need this.” He took two more gulps.

I sat back, and for probably the tenth time that evening, I recalled the day my father died. Two months before his death, I had returned from my first year abroad in Austria as a high school exchange student. I was working at a local department store and looking for a college to get me back to Europe. On that day, I had pulled up in front of the house with a ham and Swiss on rye for my lunch break. Simon, my unemployed brother, was across the street on the neighbor’s porch passing a joint to his friend. For some reason, I always remembered his old, rusty bike lying on the grass in front of them and wondering why he rode it just to cross the street. I had shouted to him, “You check on Dad?”

“Yeah, two hours ago,” wheezed Simon trying to keep the hit. He exhaled and then complained, “He was still in my frickin’ bed.” The evening before, after vomiting his dinner, our father had staggered into Simon’s bedroom, which was across the hallway from the bathroom. Simon had slept on the sofa in the living room downstairs wearing headphones, while from my own bedroom, I heard my father retching into the early morning.

I watched Debbie take a sip of her white wine and admitted to myself that she had been right. It had been an exceptionally beautiful evening. The string quartet concert at the Neo-Baroque Herrenchiemsee Palace consisted of a work from Beethoven, another from Hayden, and most of the other pieces from Czech, Hungarian and Ukrainian composers, according to Kiel Humphrey, the resident classicist of our group. “Their styles are much livelier,” he had gushed as we left the palace grounds.

He was sitting across from Debbie next to Michelle, his hands on his lap, making his slouching shoulders even more non-existent. He said, “The music was lovely.” He had a glass of red, a choice that had surprised me. We had been roommates at Middle State the year before and the only thing we had in common was our aversion to alcohol. I had made a drunken New Year’s resolution to quit drinking at Jean McConnelly’s party seven weeks after my father’s passing and two minutes past midnight when I had found my best friend John Gallagher passed out, hanging over the waist-high chain-link fence going around Jean’s backyard. And, a year and ten months later, sitting in a German pub, I had kept that resolution. Kiel’s reluctance stemmed from a regrettable episode following a party in which he found himself duct-taped to a wall next to the local convenience store in his hometown in Michigan. Genuinely concerned, I asked, “Hey, Kiel. You okay?”

He slowly raised his eyes, blinked hard behind his thick glasses and nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered, turning to me. Then he lowered his eyes again and said, “I was just thinking about Grandma Phyl.”

Having never known my own grandparents, I had found it quaint listening to him go on about Phyl taking him to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for Saturday matinees, instilling in him a passion for classical music. While my LP collection included Grand Funk Railroad, Billy Joel, ELO and the Doobie Brothers, Kiel’s had mostly Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms and other German and Austrian romanticists. Phyl had passed away three weeks before Kiel had entered college last year.

“Listen, from what you’ve told me, Grandma Phyl lived a full, long life. Hell, the woman on the boat may have as well, even in East Germany,” I said.

“It’s not that.” An emotional weight pushed down on him, but then he reached for his wine. “I just haven’t thought about her in such a long time.” He took a sip.

I half-expected him to comment on the wine. Instead, he said, “I know she’s in a better place. Just like the old woman from the boat.” From across the table, Debbie muttered, “Amen.”

‍ ‍How the hell do you know that? I smirked at my old roommate and thought about the Dichter, Musiker and Philosophen in salons in Vienna and other European capitals who had discussed the existence of heaven or God or the meaning of life or whatever topic that was interesting at the time. Instead, I was stuck with this group, a bunch of first-time travelers constantly whining about the food, the coursework, the language or how much they missed home. However, I figured that this had been the closest any of them had been to death and that the shock was too much for any logical debate.

“How the hell do you know that?” Martin had started on his third beer and was glaring at Kiel. “How the hell do you know where Grandma Phyl is? Are you some kind of psychic?” Another gulp left a foamy mustache. “Let’s just go ahead and have ourselves a little séance in Gasthaus am, wherever the hell we are.” Another swig, followed this time with a forearm mouth-swipe. “Look, I know where that old East German is. She’s in the morgue.”

SMACK! Cathy Angler, the first Oklahoman I had ever met, was sitting at the corner next to Martin, and slapped him flush on the left cheek. The crack of it turned the heads of the dozen other customers, all older locals who had put up with foreigners ever since a language school had been established ten years earlier. They quickly went back to their own conversations.

“What the hell did you do that for?” demanded Martin, who held the side of his face and was sober enough to refrain from reacting too harshly.

“You were being a dick.” Cathy finished the dregs of her beer. She had been sitting next to Tom on the boat, but had not run away as he had. In fact, she had grabbed the woman’s feet when they stretched her out on the bench. She had sat quietly at the corner of the table all evening, but, at least to me, did not seem as broken up about it as others at the table.

“What do you mean?” Martin reached for his beer. “You tell me how he knows where the old lady is now.”

“You’re drunk and you’re just being a dick.” Cathy leaned forward, her taut neck rising from her shoulders up to her light brown pixie-cut hair. “It doesn’t matter. He believes she’s somewhere, somewhere better maybe, and that’s all that matters. Now, if you don’t want to listen to him reminiscing about Grandma, what was it, Phil?” She turned to Kiel next to her.

“Yeah, Phyl, with a ‘y.’ Short for Phyllis,” answered Kiel.

Cathy returned to Martin. “If you don’t want to listen to it, then get the hell out of here. Leave him be.”

“You believe in this bullshit?” Martin slowly brought his half empty glass to his lips.

In a calmer voice, Cathy replied, “Look, it doesn’t matter what I believe. If you want to get into a debate about the existence of heaven, life after death, whatever, I suggest you sober up first. Right now, I think we’re all a little freaked out. I don’t know about you, but that was the first time I ever saw someone die.”

“First time for me,” chimed Tom.

“Me, too,” followed Debbie and Michelle.

Martin shook his head and said, “Nope.” He burped and then continued. “Never. All my grandparents are still alive.”

“I was away at camp when Phyl died.” Kiel took another sip.

“I was at my great-grandfather’s deathbed.” Lisa Schneider, blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-faced Iowa farmgirl, had been quietly sitting between Debbie and me. She disdained me because she thought I was an arrogant, sexist asshole. Her words. It might have also been because I moved on when I realized I would not be getting past second base. So, she got to the table last and had to sit next to me opposite Michelle. “I was a freshman in high school. He was a hundred and two.” Lisa looked down the table at Cathy. “He was a farmer. I remember him still doing chores when I was in junior high.” She looked down, rubbing a finger along the grain of the shellacked tabletop. “It was cancer. Liver cancer. And age, in the end.” She turned her gaze towards Debbie. “There were fourteen, fifteen people in the room. It was a big bedroom in the farmhouse. Sunlight was shining in through the windows. It was bright. I remember the light green and white wallpaper with flowers on it.” Her gaze returned to the table. “Opa was lying on the bed, his eyes shut, breathing like he was sleeping, the blanket across his chest, rising and falling. Everyone was whispering to each other real quietly. But never face to face. We were all waiting.” She raised her eyes to Kiel. “And then, he opened his mouth, breathed out and didn’t inhale again. And that was it.” She leaned back in her chair and looked across at Michelle. “The funeral service was on a beautiful, sunny day. There must have been over two hundred and fifty mourners in the church.”

‍ ‍Mourners? I imagined the womenfolk in long black dresses with matching lace bonnets clutching sturdy cotton handkerchiefs as they passed by the casket, while the men in dark, ill-fitting suits bowed and mumbled something about how Opa had been a real Mensch. I looked at Lisa and said, “Wow, thank you for that touching Hallmark moment.”

“You ass,” she spewed.

“Why thank you.” I turned to the rest of the table and continued. “Well, my dad, who was an alcoholic, died alone, probably writhing in pain in my brother’s bedroom because his kidneys were shutting down. At least, that’s what the ambulance driver had surmised. His second guess was that my dad’s liver had cirrhosis and had probably exploded inside of him.”

“Ew!” was Debbie’s reaction and Tom gave a disgusted, “Aw!” Everyone else’s jaw dropped, but their faces expressed a range of emotions, from narrowed-eyebrow disgust to wrinkled forehead astonishment to, as in Martin’s case, wide-eyed wonderment.

I continued. “At one point before he died, I went in to check on him. We all thought that he had food poisoning because he had been puking all night. Anyway, as I walked in the room, he opened his eyes wide and stared right through me. It was like he was looking at something miles away behind me. Now, maybe he saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but personally, I don’t believe in such crap. I think that it was more of a chemical imbalance in his head at a moment of lessened pain in which he realized that he had really screwed up his life.” My expression was not one of anger nor sympathy, but more of a recognition of a truth and an acceptance of it. “Then he snapped out of the trance, recognized me, and said that he was fine when I asked if he needed anything.”

The image of my father, motionless on my brother’s bed, staring at the azure and white striped pattern on the pillowcase an inch away from his nose, still breathing shallowly, but life ebbing away from his face, flashed before me.

“I didn’t see him die…” I turned to Lisa. “…which he did about a half-hour later, all alone on the shag carpeting, where my brother found him.” I returned to the table. “Why he was on the floor, who knows? Maybe he had to puke again and was trying to get to the bathroom. Maybe he was trying to get to that vision he had seen earlier.” I looked down at the table and repeated: “I didn’t see him die…” I turned to Lisa. “… but I was the last one to see him alive, which I guess is close enough to seeing him die.” I leaned back and concluded, “There was no church service. The funeral was on a cold, gray November morning with only three people and the preacher standing next to the hole.”

The table sat silently looking at me. Finally, Martin said, with a huge grin, “Shit, man, you’re seriously fucked up.”

I raised my glass and said, “Thank you.”