When I first asked Heinrich Knoll who he was and where he came from, he said "I was born in Germany -- during the madness." It was hard for me to believe that this sweet man had sprung from the bloody soil of Hamburg in 1940. But having spent his early years in a war-torn country hellbent on its own destruction did not make him hard or bitter, and we became fast friends.
We saw each other almost every week for years and never groped for subjects of conversation. Even our silences seemed constructive, and he often told me not to apologize for anything. In our relationship there did not seem to be any disappointments, only eagerness to share -- except on the telephone, where he became shy, as if the machine were a third party that would give away secrets.
When we sat in his living room, sipping some new beer he had discovered, the background was often filled with the sounds of Mozart or Haydn, links between him and his university years in Vienna. My own musical tastes are a little less predictable, more modern, more audacious, and we rarely went to concerts together because we could not find anything we would both pay to hear.
He combined science and the arts, and he would show me technical articles in German magazines or newspapers, challenging my pitiful ability to pierce the arcane language of his youth. A scientific editor, he had come into my life when I had hired him to edit a research article on the effects of winter salt on parking structures.
Ten years ago he began mysteriously losing weight and he had shrunk by forty pounds, weight I did not think he could afford to lose, before a thyroid condition was discovered. When he weakened again more recently, doctors tried vainly to discover why. At last, he told me a tumor had been discovered wrapped around the base of his spine.
After scans showed that various outpatient treatments were doing nothing to get rid of it, he was finally hospitalized. During the lengthy run of radiation and chemotherapy, I was glad the hospital was only a ten-minute walk from my home. I went to visit him as often as I could, sometimes just sitting in his room looking at his shriveled body as he slept.
His wife once called during that stay to offer me tickets to a concert they had bought. Mozart and Brahms and John Estacio, a contemporary Canadian composer. How ironic that he would have to miss this musical experience that we could finally have shared.
There's a joke about the woman who wanted to get her elderly husband's attention again, so she told him she had just bought a new dress and could she model it for him. When she returned to the room, nude, he said, "I think your new dress needs ironing."
That came into my mind more than once when I saw Henry's arm, the skin as wrinkled as an old elephant, the muscle gone, looking like nothing else I could recall so much as pictures from his native land when he was a boy, emaciated and shriveled adult bodies in children's striped pajamas.
Henry's voice strengthened after his chemo treatments began and I was encouraged. Monday night he asked me about my recent musical experiences, and he indulgently listened to my account of an opera I saw over the weekend: Satyagraha, by Philip Glass, an impressionistic account showing how the young Gandhi in South Africa came to embrace truth and justice in dispute, rather than victory.
And then Cynthia called yesterday to tell me there was nothing more the doctors could do for Henry. Still alive, but no point in visiting him again, she said. He is sedated to lessen his pain, unconscious, gone. I immediately thought of Annie Dillard's reaction to the loss of a young friend killed in an airplane crash:
The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other . . . is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit here. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother, when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
It is not the right time to write a story, when it is still happening. But I cannot sit silent. This morning I am already reeling out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire.
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