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Chapter 6

Winnipeg, April 1963

A few weeks later, I arrived in Winnipeg and rented a basement apartment in a sprawling Georgian house on the banks of the Red River. The owners, the Krazkovksy family had come from the Ukraine during the early fifties, worked hard and saved even harder. They were caring people. Their oldest child, Alan, was a couple of years younger and we hit it off well.

I rented warehouse space in the old Johnson terminal building near the railway shunt yards. The rental package included a modest office in the same building with ancient heavy furniture, creaky floor boards and perpetually dusty windows. Seventy hour work weeks left little time for anything else. Karl was a tough task master, but there was something else about him, something that began to concern me. It started when the giant MacLeod hardware chain, the first big customer after months of solicitation, complained about the shipment of garden hose they had received from the East. The cardboard label, affixed to the coiled hose with twist ties, clearly stated the length as fifty feet. After getting some consumer complaints, MacLeods had done some random checks and come up with lengths anywhere from forty-seven and a half to forty-nine feet. Then I heard from Marshall’s, MacLeod’s main competitor, about chain link fence that was supposed to have been twelve gauge thick, but was thinner at only thirteen.

I picked Karl up at the airport, who had flown in to face the music. Given the circumstances, it was strange to see him brimming with confidence and not at all concerned with the eventual outcome.

“Leave it to me, boy. Just leave it to me. You will keep your customers.”

He spoke fast with a heavy German accent.

The ‘boy’ and ‘you will’ sounded like bellowed German army commands. Karl had been one of the star ‘Fallschirmjaegers’, an elite troop of parachute specialists. He had led his men in the first airborne infantry assault over Crete.

A couple of hours later, we were facing a stern looking panel of MacLeod managers licking their chops for ‘make-good’ money to compensate for the product deficiencies. To my utter disbelief, Karl proceeded to lecture the group – damned, my best customer – on the vagaries of raw material suppliers and crooked people on the production line. His production manager had been bribed by one of his competitors – Karl wouldn’t say who – to make and ship faulty product so as to ruin him. Him, of all people, the exemplary model of integrity, discipline and bravery as former ‘Fallschirmjaeger’. Before anyone could intervene, and right in front of his bewildered audience, Karl jumped on top of the meeting room table, from where he dropped himself onto the mercifully carpeted floor. Though well into his forties, his agile body executed a flawless parachute roll swinging right back onto his feet. The room was full of half-opened jaws, mine included.

“And, of course, you shall have a full refund for your trouble. And to show my gratitude to you, this line of product shall now be offered exclusively to your company.”

If the MacLeod group had a script they were going to read him, it had long vanished. Less than an hour after our arrival, Karl shook hands with everyone and we were out the door with a replacement order. The drama at Marshall’s office over the thinner fence played out like a well rehearsed theatre play with solid actors, exactly like the day before at MacLeods. Everyone knew their lines. Karl certainly knew his. But unlike theatre, these audiences would never wish to see the play a second time.

I was torn what to do about the situation. I couldn’t control things at the plant back East, only my own life. So I started working a bit less and playing a little more.

And a young German woman named Heike entered my life. I had gone to one of the Saturday night carnival festivities at the German-Canadian Club near the Canadian Pacific railway terminal on the North Side of the city. Not having taken time until then to explore the city’s night life it seemed like the easiest thing to do. Some people were in customes, my imagination had not made it past executive grey flannel. I had asked her to dance repeatedly and she had accepted willingly. At the conclusion of the evening, I dropped her off at her parent’s house on Oak St., in the upscale River Heights area of the city.

Shortly after meeting Heike, I decided it was time for an emotional farewell from my Ukrainian landlord. A friend had vacated a small one-bedroom on the ground floor of an older, but attractive building close to the downtown core. The fact that all of the walls, even the ceiling were painted pitch black added a peculiar attraction to the place.

Our first night together at the place consisted of Vermouth and Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, lots of candles and strange shadows bouncing off the walls. The lovemaking had held emotions in reserve. I surmised that we both probably had wondered what was expected of us given the unusual setting. I told her so the following morning.

Heike laughed and poked gently into my rib cage.

“Serves you right and yes – I was feeling more than just a bit strange here last night.”

“I only have three months left on my friends’ lease. Perhaps this was an experiment. I’m beginning to see why he moved out.”

A sly smile was curling her lips.

“Thank God, there is hope.”

“I’ll even promise to wear a costume next time we go to a masquerade ball.”

“Things are looking up – what are you going to be?”

“A herring.”

“A herring – how…, what do you mean?”

“That’s easy, all wrapped in newspaper, just with the tail hanging out.”

Tears of laughter were still rolling down her cheek, as we both stumbled into the kitchen to examine the meagre contents of the small fridge.

Those had been the good days, the easy days, the days full of promise. Heike, her older sister Elke and their mother Lisa had left Bremen for Winnipeg a few years after the war. Lisa’s husband had fallen at Stalingrad and she had married Frank upon arrival, a man with a secure pension at Canada Packers. She had deemed me a good addition to the family.

“My daughter may be pregnant”, she announced one day, a few months after we first dated.

This turned out to be a false alarm after a hastily arranged marriage some weeks later. It was then Heike announced that children were not part of her forward vision anyway because maybe she could not and therefore would not – or was it the other way around? I had trouble remembering, had been too self-absorbed to even ask.

We had moved into a bright, but plainly decorated flat near a busy intersection, not far from the dark cave I had left when the lease expired. The rental agent had neglected to mention that frequently passing freight cargo, being shunted between yards, would make the cutlery jingle on the dining room table. We toughed it out for a year with strains of everyday life beginning to show between us. I had finally mustered the courage to leave Karl to his acrobatics and wanted to move on. The fact I hadn’t told Heike right off the bat that I had applied for a job with a big corporation on the West Coast didn’t help matters.

“If you think I am going to pack up everything I am doing here and follow you obediently, you better think again.”

“But it’s Vancouver. It’s a major company, who normally only hire off campus. And Elke and her family is there.”

“Just what I thought. You show virtually no respect for what I am doing. It’s only been two months since I signed up for my master’s in library science here. Do you think I can just walk away from that mid-term?”

Fact was, I really hadn’t thought at all. At least not about that. I had been focused on making the big time professionally. At least in terms of what it meant to me. And that was landing a marketing job with a large international corporation.

Vancouver, August 1966

The call I never expected had come a week later. And I had gone to Vancouver, on my own.

Heike would follow in the New Year, she said, perhaps after the second semester in the spring. I could still remember the panic attack, barely twenty-seven, a few days after my arrival at the downtown motel on Richmond Street, not the best part of town. It was a feeling of total loss of control over life, something I had never felt before and since. I didn’t know a soul in the city – well, that wasn’t true, there was Elke, of course; but I couldn’t get myself to reach out for help to Heike’s family. Instead, I called the company’s regional manager and my boss, Arthur Clark, a polite and gentle giant of a man, white mustache penetrating from a reddish face. He had come and picked me up.

“Stay with the family here. At least a few days, until you sort yourself out,” Arthur had said.

And not asked, what, why or anything else about what might be wrong. Work and more work, absorbed to the point of nothing else, was my self-prescribed medication. And that had seemed o.k., at least for myself and my superiors. Especially for them – they decided that bigger things in Edmonton would follow six months later, just after Heike had arrived and settled into our place in Vancouver. She willingly moved to Edmonton, although we both hated the place with a vengeance. So we were both ready for another move six months later back to Toronto. The lighthearted moments of herrings going to masquerade balls had all but evaporated by then.

Another move back to Winnipeg followed only a year and a half later and another move a year after that – back to Toronto again.. We had still been together during most of those convulsing upheavals, but more on automatic pilot than anything else. It was then that news came of my mother’s heart attack. Only sixty-seven, the physical and emotional toll of war, years of struggle and my father’s horrific death had taken their toll.

I opened my toiletry bag the morning after arriving in Germany to find Heike’s note:

“I know this is a bad way to tell you at a time like this. But I simply didn’t have the heart to face you before you were leaving. I won’t be in the house after you return from Germany. You are not a bad person, far from it. But we have grown too far apart to come back together again. I only wish you well for the future.”

Sincerely,

Heike

“P.S. Don’t worry about the stuff in the house. I will only want what is rightfully mine.”

My mother had been moved out of the ICU into a semi-private ward by then. It took all the emotional strength I could muster to greet her with a smiling face, as I entered her room that morning.