Matthew Funk
Being Here
A son at his father’s deathbed finds life’s
tangibles lacking comfort.
Matthew
Funk
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“Where were you?” Hans called down the hospital hall as Kurt entered.
Kurt frowned and forgot about making a show of shaking off the rain on his coat. Instead he found his hands tucking in his shirt. He hurried down the hall, wondering if it was alright to run here. For that matter, was there cause to run at all?
And should he hug his brother, a thing, like running, he was unaccustomed to doing? Hans seemed to be ready to hug anyone besides his younger brother, and this suited Kurt fine. Four years and a foot of height separated the two boys. The difference made him uncomfortable, and right now he felt uncomfortable enough.
“You weren’t at school.” Hans was audible even above the PA system, announcing that a doctor was needed in intensive care at once. Kurt sorted through possible replies that would redeem him.
“I was out buying a newspaper,” he began, “for a project.” Hans was already shaking his head, his face even longer with a frown of dismay.
“You should have been…” Hans shook his head again.
“It’s father?” Kurt already knew, but then he didn’t know, because what he’d heard from the principal when he returned to school after vanishing during fourth period didn’t make any sense. “How is he?”
“Bad.” Hans stared hard at his younger brother, as he often did when trying to teach Kurt something. Something he wanted not just to make an impression, Kurt thought, but to scar. “He was on the crowd control line during a protest. Labor protest. One of the protestors threw a brick.”
Kurt didn’t feel like nodding was appropriate, but he had to do something from keeping his neck from seizing up. All the rest of him seemed knotted, the confusing situation wrapping him up with himself. He knew his father, as a police officer in the worker’s district of Berlin, got involved in such things. Kurt Senior spent a lot of time on duty, but Kurt had never known his father that way. He knew the stocky, smiling man who met him during his free periods to have a gelato down at Muni’s and read movie posters and billboards and laugh at them with him. He knew the man who was his dark, round double in appearance, who liked to entertain his family with sock puppet shows or impromptu Cole Porter songs. And he felt he knew him best when his father, with a hangdog look and a limited edition smile – their smile, theirs – would find him on the streets playing hooky and share his truancy with him at a Café, talking Gaugin, Munch, and the new abstracts, and bemoaning politics. But on the line? Kurt couldn’t imagine himself as another set of shoulders on any line; it made no sense that his namesake would have been hurt standing in one against a roaring trade union.
“
“Mother’s been very brave. Come on.” Hans put a hand on Kurt’s back and hurried him into one of the nearby ICU rooms.
On the ICU bed, there was a policeman with a bandage covering most of his head. Next to the bed, a six-year-old girl was just a bowed head of blonde hair, from which came the sound of sobbing. When Kurt entered the girl, his sister Ulrike, turned and rushed to him. She threw her arms around him and squeezed desperately.
“Kurt, Kurt! It’s not right!” Ulrike cried. “I touched father and I talked to him but he won’t stop playing asleep. He won’t stop and it’s a bad game and it’s not right!”
Kurt realized his mother was there when he heard her choked wail. Hans, with his arm around her, hushed the girl.
“It’s alright, ‘rike.” Kurt said. “It’s alright.” He seethed though; he hated himself for lying like that – lying to her and to himself. If he lied, fate might prove him wrong. From what he saw on the bed, he was almost certain he was lying.
“Where was he?” he heard his mother whisper to Hans.
The man on the bed was not his father. His father was a man who had always, even during the starving times, had looked overstuffed with health. His father left the deepest crease in the Baumann couch, even when he only sat a moment, and he was rarely only sitting. The creases of the man on the bed were all in his shallow face. His father’s face turned a new color for each emotion, and he had hundreds of them, most involving smiling. The man on the bed had a face of dry clay. Kurt’s father always listened, always went in to check in on his children, and was a dependable set of gartered socks and underwear in the coffee-rich mornings in their kitchen.
. Kurt was sure this man on the bed would never move.
“It caved in – it hit his skull,” his mother was saying, “the brick, and it crushed the frontal lobes, and the cerebellum was bruised, and…”
“Mother’s been very brave.” Hans said, stopping her. Ulrike had begun to tremble violently in his arms, and Kurt wanted to stop her, or let her go. He wanted to run, to get to the Cafés and search them for his father. He crushed that desire with a vengeance. He never wanted to run again, not run away, not run when his father had stood.
“Please,” said the doctor as he entered. “There isn’t much…” The doctor pushed Kurt and his mother gently towards the bed. “You should say your final words to him.”
Kurt, pushed to standing over his father, realized where he was. He felt the cold shock sting through him, suddenly warm, and shook along with Ulrike, shook the girl off of him.
“Say that you love him.” Hans said.
“We love you.” Kurt found enough voice to whisper it. He grabbed his father’s hand. He found it warm. Warm and empty.
“I’m here.” He said.
“We’re here.” Hans prompted.
“I’m here, Dad.” Kurt insisted. “I’m here.”
All contents copyright © Matthew Funk 2007, all rights reserved.