“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start. . .” —Rilke
I never had time to mourn you. Straight to the point: I never knew to mourn you, and if I ever realized the depth of my emotions, I hid them from myself and the world. I was not wise enough to know that I would never have anyone like him again.
I met Jurgen when I was nineteen and he was 25 years older. I was so much older than my years, but I didn’t have emotional maturity. I was older because my brother had been killed in a car accident. I was newly fifteen when that happened, and the only way out of a sorrow beyond words was to read everything. I lost myself in novels, in poetry, and in music. They saved me.
Jurgen also had trauma, more than mine. His brother, a German army officer, was lined up and shot by the Russians when they vanquished Berlin in WWII. Jurgen had been in the army like everyone his age as compulsory conscription was enforced with dire results if one dared to do otherwise: execution. Jurgen was wounded but recovered sufficiently to be sent to the Russian front. There, he carefully washed his linen handkerchief each night and sprinkled Kölnisch Wasser, a cologne, on it, a reminder of home he could breathe in while fitfully sleeping. It was the only shred of peaceful life he had at the front. From that cold place, he was captured and sent to a Russian gulag. The prison camp did not have a fence because there was nowhere to escape to; doing so meant death from cold and/or starvation. Jurgen never detailed his time on the Russian front or in the prison camp; he was too stoic for that, plus he was a German living in the United States. WWII was in the past, but some still remembered. I know that he learned Russian in the prison camp, a skill he later used as a professor of German and Russian. He did have night blindness from starvation in the prison camp. He did seem squeamish once, when he read a poem I had written about five men who drowned in the Baltic, at night after many drinks. He said, in effect, that people should refrain from gratuitous violence and death in their writing.
Many people have had a forbidden love. Mine was forbidden because of the time, the early 1970s. I was still expected to marry, produce a family, and devote myself to anything but myself. The village I lived in reinforced the idea all the time. My heart told me something different. I didn’t want to dissolve into someone else. I also had the heart of a poet, sensitive, too sensitive. I cringed at the thought of a conventional life. Still, I was a child of my time. Once upon a distant time, an unmarried life was not a life. Worse, living with someone was a fiery brand upon the woman and her parents. What would the gossiping villagers say? I have thought that I was a non-conformist all these years, but I did obey, ever so reluctantly, the rules. I never told anyone about Jurgen. Emerson was right about conformity to the norms of a time: “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” Conformity unites a group in behaviors and creates a “reality.” To question can disrupt the edges of that so-called “reality.” What are we then without our “reality”? I didn’t need a course in psychology to understand conformity; it was in my bones.
How many people across time and the globe have given up the person locked in their heart, to live what society expected or dictated? How many people have a remorseful shadow following them? Like a shattered, precious vase, shards of forbidden love can be found throughout history. Abelard and Heloise suffered beyond reason, both cloistered, and Abelard castrated by her uncle’s brutish friends. Goethe’s longtime lover and finally wife, Christiane Vulpius, was rejected by Weimar society, tucked away in the back of Goethe’s house and still looked down upon when they finally married. She was called a whore. Closer, closer in time, is a friend I had. She adored her lover, but the marriage was rejected by her family because he was a shepherd, and his German was coarse and often incorrect. And then there are the shards left when some married people fall out of love.
What was the attraction I had for Jurgen? I studied German literature with him, in German. We went line by line through Faust, and line by line through Rilke, a poet who opened me up like a rose in his poetry. Jurgen was a gentleman and a non-conventional soul. Evenings with him were civilized, full of intelligent talk, a few glasses of wine, and the companionship of a kindred soul. He even played balalaika. I played piano. I had lived in Europe and had visited every museum and cathedral I could find, so we had much to talk about. Still, I don’t know what his attraction was to me. I was tempestuous and passionate, all Storm und Drang, but I was beautiful. I don’t know how it started, but I think it was a mutual seduction. He often wondered out loud about our age difference and about my attraction to him. I had the sensation that what we had was not his usual romantic venue.
What happened? I came back from a summer working in Dahme, Germany. Somehow, I found out that Jurgen had been seen with another woman. I asked him what they had done—namely whether they had sex, and his reply was that what happened between the two of them had nothing to do with us. I assumed the worst, and even though I had meandered one evening from my fidelity to Jurgen while in Germany, I was enraged, and that is when I met my husband, a classmate. I flaunted this new relationship, and one evening, when I played in a piano recital, my to-be-husband came up after the concert and gave me a rose. When I finally came back to my dorm room, it was filled with dozens of roses from Jurgen.
I married my college classmate Brad because our parents, especially his, wanted us married. We had started to live together, bound together by lust. The only thing we had in common were our then good looks. I was an artist, and he was an athlete. It should not be surprising that the marriage fell apart within months. For me, it was hell from day one and lasted until I left. We were equally miserable.
His parents were in favor of the marriage because we had been living together, and it looked like a good match. This is probably what parents thought at that remote time. I knew that my mother was opposed to Jurgen. I was always in rebellion, yet I obeyed her, eventually. She made her case with sounds without words, and through gestures, and facile expressions when I mentioned Jurgen’s name. She was obedient to norms, even if she didn’t like them. Even though I was defiant, I was trapped by the rules of the time and could not see beyond my time to a place where marriage was not necessary at all.
In retrospect, maybe my mother was right about our age difference—25 years. I was wrong, not knowing that I could have spent time with him until it ended, with or without marriage, an institution that was then supposed to last forever. An unmarried life was to be excluded from the tribe, to be talked about in the little village where my mother lived. Maybe I would have been drawn away from Jurgen by the magnetism of my peer group. Possibly, perhaps, maybe.
At this point, the story only darkens, becomes deep night. I was still in Jurgen’s class of five students, a night class. I am trying to remember what he said directly to me, but I do recall, with sorrow, that he broke down in class in front of me, weeping with so many tears tumbling down his face. On another day, he asked me why I was getting married, and I stupidly said it was because it was time to be married. He said he would have done that for me, but my anger had not stilled, and I ignored him. Within a year of my abandoning of him and my disastrous marriage, he left the house that he had just built with his own hands and found a teaching position in Canada. I found one photo of him during that time, and it was disturbing; he was troubled. If I had known, I would have kissed and kissed him until he was in a better place.
Now, in the strange autumn of life, I no longer possess the fire I had when young. I have been through classes like “Balance Therapy,” and I have a dozen support socks for a weak ankle vein. Sadly, my back is bent from correcting too many college composition papers. As the TV cop used to say at the scene of an accident, “Nothing more to see here, folks. Move on.”
Now I realize what I lost. Jurgen was made for me. It didn’t matter how long it lasted. I hid what we had from other people and from myself. In an article I found about him, he ended the interview with a quote from Tennyson, comparing language with love. Tennyson’s poem was about loss, and Jurgen did the interview a few years after I slammed the door on our relationship:
“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
I, too, must turn to Tennyson’s poetry in this requiem, this scene from an emotional crime:
“With weary steps I loiter on, Tho' always under alter'd skies The purple from the distance dies, My prospect and horizon gone.”
Jurgen is now far away from the Russian flame-thrower tanks of WWII. He is away from the Russian tanks on top of bunkers hoping to bury the enemy in a trench. The old gulag barracks have fallen into rotten pieces. His books and house have been sold. He is beyond my reach.
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