This is a personal narrative I was assigned to write for my Teaching Writing P-12 class. It's a reprise of a poem I wrote and posted here about a year ago, recalling my most terrible event while living in Austria. This, obviously, details the event a little more closely than does the poem. Whether it's as good, I can't really say.

Tragedy Raised a Hand

 
    All summer long Jana had been promising me we would take a trip to the thermal swimming pools of Baden. While most people would find the idea of plunging into heated water during the swelter of a Viennese August uninviting, nothing invokes such a sense of euphoria in me. Swimming in heated pools is like returning to the womb, letting yourself simply be as the water envelopes and suspends your body, while your mind drifts into limbo, unaffected by anything above the surface. I had first discovered this felicity several years before in Vienna on semester exchange. Some friends and I somehow stumbled via trolley upon the most elaborate swimming facility any of us had ever seen: dual heated pools of varying temperatures, both partially in- and out-of-doors, with ambient music playing from clandestine speakers beneath the water. Floating face-up with ears submerged and quaffing the faint mixture of submarine tunes and the muffled din of humans at play above ground, I knew I was in love.     

It goes without saying, then, that today I was poised and ready to return my body to the incalescent depths. I had the car packed, my recently purchased goggles in hand, and I was already wearing my trunks under my pants. Jana was still bustling about the kitchen, whipping up just one more pie for her arsenal of delicacies (packed as tight as dynamite in our picnic basket), while calling upstairs for her son, Fridolin, to come down and bring her his shoes. Jana never could settle on a single task, and she would flit and fly deftly about any room she found herself, much to the detriment of her French bob, and constantly worrying about when she could work in her vacuuming. She was like a master chess player, always thinking several moves ahead. Were there awards in Austria for the most industrious homemaker, she would have undoubtedly made the short-list.

I knew it was best to stay out of Jana’s path in the last half-hour before any departure, so at this point I was in the basement listening to a few tunes on Chris’s phonograph. Generally Chris worked during the day and I stuck around to help Jana out with household chores, but mainly to entertain Fridolin. Since I had come here a year earlier, he and I had formed an unusually close friendship, in spite of our ample generational gap. By now I had been out of work for a few months, with my visa expired, so I made myself useful to Chris and Jana, my two best adult friends. Since the young Fridolin was only now reaching what Piaget called the preoperational stage, it was safe to say he considered all things culled merely for his own enjoyment, and perhaps in me he had found a toy like none other: interactive, larger-than-life and always (usually) smiling upon him.  

For several months now Fridolin had been testing the limits of his mettle, and with it the limits of our smiling approval. Lately he was most concerned with doing the only the things that amount to defying his parents’ wishes. Eating with a fork? Nein! Wearing a helmet on your bicycle? Nein! Withstanding the urge to throw everything out the tree house window? Nein! He had recently expressed his hope to jump from the upstairs window of the house to the tippy-top of the cherry tree he had seen me climb now and again. By all accounts these positions could have been deemed outright insolence, but as Frodo (as we had nicknamed him) was only two, we took them to be due to the audacity of hope rather than of spite.

But Fridolin’s hopes had slowly been growing larger than the wrought iron fence around his parents’ yard could contain. Not only had he started to toss valuables over the fence into the street – something even his usually sanguine papa couldn’t abide – but he had even tried his hand at opening the gate to take a stroll all on his own. Thankfully up until now he hadn’t succeeded in this latest endeavor, as the gate was generally wedged shut, and little Fridolin hands couldn’t manage to open it.

I was probably listening to my fifth or sixth tune on the phonograph downstairs before I noticed how late it was getting. Was Jana ever going to finish that last pie and call me upstairs? I had woken up that morning practically salivating at the thought of thermal swimming, and here I found myself in a damp basement flipping a record over. The longer we waited on cooking pies, the less time we’d have to blissfully atrophy our bodies in the calm, smooth warmth.

I lifted the needle from the vinyl and set it aside, hit the light and ascended the stairs. When Jana heard me shut the door to the basement, she started and looked toward me as though I were a stranger. She had been so wrapped up in her preparations, I thought, that she almost didn’t recognize me.

“Where’s Frodo?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said. “I sent him outside to find you and play a little while I finished here.”

“Well, I’ve been in the basement waiting on you,” I replied with a grin. “I’ll go out now and keep him occupied.”

I walked out on the veranda and was immediately warmed by the morning sun. It was late in the month, and the mornings had begun to stay cool up until around noon. The air was brisk enough to isolate the sun’s rays when they hit your face and neck, and quicken the hairs on your back beneath your shirt. In fact, it was the perfect weather for thermal swimming.

I glanced about the yard for Fridolin, but found no sign of him. The yard was relatively big as far as Austrian yards go, and there were lots of terrific hiding spots the little Lausbub loved to exploit. I looked behind the mini-skateboard ramp, where Jana grew her roses. We often had to remind Frodo that the roses would give him an “owa” if he got too close. I didn’t find him there, so I walked over and peeked under the pine trees that buffeted the yard with the neighbor’s, where Fridolin had fashioned his “workshop.” There was stacked his usual bunch of leaves and sticks, his “tools,” but there was no Fridolin. I walked to the back around the plum tree and strawberry garden, thinking perhaps he was sneaking a berry or two into his mouth while unmonitored. We had explained to him how the berries weren’t quite ripe yet, but I think the sour taste only whet his palate more. Strangely, all the berries hung silently and undisturbed.

Growing a little concerned, I trotted to the gate, but it was shut as usual. Perhaps he’s still inside, still upstairs without his shoes on, I thought. I hurried back to the veranda and through the door, and without a word to Jana I hustled up the stairs, taking two with each stride. No sign, no sign, I began to recycle in fear. When I came back down, Jana knew something was wrong and had left off her pies.

“Where is he?” she spoke, suddenly gripped as I was.

“No sign, no sign!” I struggled to announce in German.

Next we were out on the street, calling his name, sprinting up one street and down the next. Jana was crazed, had jumped into her car weeping, shredding her larynx on his name. I had absolutely no idea how it had come to this, how we had shifted from the high anticipation of genuine calm to complete hysteria. I was running up and down the streets and alleys, in and out of strangers’ yards, asking anyone I saw where he could be, the mesh of my swim trunks drawing tighter around my thighs.

I ran to Napoleonwald, a thinned-out wood where there was a playground we often took the Lausbub, and just a block from Chris and Jana’s. I remembered there had been some construction workers operating tractors and dump trucks that week – Fridolin’s favorite things to watch after his papa’s skateboard videos. I reached the edge of the wood and stopped. I saw the machines and the men working them, but no sign, no sign, I couldn’t see him. I ran back to the house and began combing the streets again. I ran harder than I had run in years, harder than I had ever run in 18 years of playing soccer. I ran like I had run from Jason Summers, who once chased me down with a tennis racket after two neighborhood kids and I had spent our leisurely afternoon throwing crabapples at him and calling him an albino. I couldn’t breathe and I felt ready to collapse and die, or puke, or all three.

In the distance I could hear Jana still screaming, still revving up the steep streets. I prayed she wasn’t going so fast she couldn’t stop if she saw him, if we were to ever to see him again. I had entered a state of mind tethered neither to hope nor despair. I could not chalk this up to my usual philosophy of how things just work out for the best, because I was beginning to think this time they might not. I began to wonder how I might take it, how I would cope and offer consolation to the mother who thought she had merely sent him out into the yard only to find me, and not to his death. I recognized that tragedy was completely foreign to my psyche, that I hadn’t cried over someone in a decade, and then only for a broken teenage heart.

I still wasn’t crying. I was racing against it, up and down those steep streets, and turned the corner one last time back onto the street where it had all started. The gate was still closed, as it had been after us when we rushed out to begin our search. But Jana was there now, having just pulled up and leapt back out of the car to snatch up her boy, who stood there, now starting to cry, as though he understood only then that he had been alone.