The Bench
“Eleven?” Jonas was surprised, and that came out loud, while scratching behind the dog’s ear. The dog leaned into his hand with the slow, full-body trust of an animal that had stopped keeping track of strangers a long time ago. A big dog, tan and black, with ears that still stood upright even though the rest of him had given in to gravity and age.
“Yes, he will be eleven in March,” Günther said. “The problem with dogs is they teach us about grief over and over again. Every ten to twelve years, if you’re lucky, the same lesson. And we keep signing up for it. I don’t understand it.”
“Because the alternative is no dog.”
“Exactly. The alternative is no dog. Unacceptable.”
“Watch out, this one might outlive you,” Jonas said, and they both chuckled, each in their own way. “I read somewhere that cats eat their dead owners’ bodies. I mean, what is that? Is that a thing? Do dogs do that, too?”
Günther made a face of theatrical horror. “Max would never. Max has standards.”
“Max has standards,” Jonas repeated, looking down at the dog. Max had shifted deeper under the bench where the shade was thicker, his chin flat on his crossed paws. “You hear that, Max? You have standards.”
Max’s eyes moved between them. Then closed.
They watched the sea for a while. The afternoon had turned the water into a mix of blue and copper colors, and the promenade was emptying in the slow way that southern Spanish towns empty — not all at once but in stages, as if the heat were gently pushing people indoors. A man across the road was closing the bakery’s shutters, which lowered to cover the prices still listed in pesetas, although the money had changed a few years ago. Two teenagers sat on the seawall, their feet dangling, looking out at the boats on the horizon.
“My wife used to say we had an arrangement,” Jonas said. “She would say, ‘Jonas, we have an arrangement. You pretend to listen, and I pretend to believe you.’”
Günther laughed. “She sounds wonderful.”
“She was.”
The response settled between them the way it does between old men. No follow-up required, no clarification needed. At a certain age, the past tense speaks for itself.
“A long time?” Günther asked.
“A long time. Over sixty years.”
Günther nodded.
“My daughter, too,” Jonas said.
Günther turned to look at him. Jonas was watching the sea with the particular concentration of a man who has chosen where to fix his eyes so that the rest of his face can do what it needs to do without being observed.
“She was young. Five years old. And my wife was twenty-six. They went together, which — I have spent sixty years trying to decide if that is better or worse. Together means neither of them was alone. Together also means I lost everything in the same moment, and there was no first grief and second grief, no time between them. Just the one.”
He stopped. Günther did not fill the space.
“I watched them go,” Jonas said. “One after another. And I have lived with this for over sixty years, you know? For sixty years, I replay every possible scenario and ask myself every single time — could I have done something differently to make sure they were saved? And the answer, every time, is the same. I couldn’t. There was nothing to be done. And then, at some point, I decided to make sure their passing was not in vain, that I would live in a way that honored them. Even if I had to be the one to give it meaning.”
The sea did what the sea does when men say terrible things near it. It continued.
A woman approached from the direction of the bakery, middle-aged, local, carrying a paper bag. She asked Jonas something in Spanish, gesturing toward the street behind them.
Jonas raised his hands with a small smile. “Sorry, sorry. English only.”
Günther answered her. His Spanish was quick, comfortable, and lived-in. She listened, nodded, then tilted her head. “Argentina?” she asked, with a half-smile.
Günther gave a short answer. The woman thanked him and walked on.
“Your Spanish is very good,” Jonas said.
“My late wife was from Argentina,” Günther said. “Beautiful country. She taught me, or I should say she refused to speak to me in anything else until I learned.” He looked at the place where the sea met the sky, and for a moment, he was somewhere else entirely. “She had this idea, even before we married. She told me, ‘I want to live in Spain. I want to sit on a bench by the sea and hold your hand and watch the sun go down.’ She said it like she was ordering at a restaurant. Like Spain was simply something on the menu.”
“And you came.”
“I came. But not with her.”
He was quiet for a long time. Jonas let him be.
“We were going to have a family. We were going to do everything. She was pregnant with twins.” His voice didn’t break, but it changed. “She died giving birth. Both babies were born alive. Two girls. And I was — I was standing outside, and a nurse came out, and I could see on her face that something had happened, but I still didn’t understand, because both babies were crying, you could hear them through the door, and I thought, if they’re crying, then everything is all right, because that’s what babies are supposed to do.”
He stopped. Started again.
“Three days later, the hospital gave one of the twins the wrong medication. A dosage error. She was three days old. Three days, and the only thing she ever knew of this world was a hospital room and a mistake.”
Jonas said nothing.
“I lost my wife and daughter in the same week,” Günther continued. “I was devastated… My other daughter, Elisa, survived, but I couldn’t hold her or look at her without seeing Marta, her sister, and everything we had lost. I was broken, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.” he paused for a moment. Jonas kept his silence. “I spent six months in a facility, most of which I don’t remember well. I only recall the walls, the aching desire to die, and eventually, that desire fading because I ran out of energy to want anything anymore.”
He took a breath. Max shifted under the bench, pressing his spine against Günther’s ankle.
“When I came out, Elisa was with a family. The state had placed her. She was seven months old, and she didn’t know who I was. I had to go through the courts to get her back, and the courts looked at me and saw a man who had been in a psychiatric facility, a foreigner, no wife, no family, and they made me prove that I deserved to keep my own child. It took almost four years. Four years of visits where I would sit in a room with a woman watching me hold my daughter and writing things on a clipboard. And Elisa would cry, because I was a stranger to her, and the woman would write that down too.”
“How did you get her back?”
“I don’t know. I think they ran out of reasons to say no. Or maybe the family that had her didn’t want to keep going. I never found out. One day, they called me and said I could take her home. I picked her up, and she cried the entire way, and I sat in my apartment in Buenos Aires with a screaming baby and no furniture, because I had sold everything to pay the lawyers, and I thought: I have to leave this country. I have to go somewhere where nobody knows what happened to me, and I have to start again, and I have to be a father, and I have no idea how to do any of these things.”
“Spain.”
“Spain. Marta’s bench by the sea.” He almost smiled. “She got what she wanted, in the end. The bench. The sunset. She just never got to sit in it.”
“That is devastating,” Jonas said, and his voice was very low. “I feel like I have nothing to complain about after hearing this. Parents should never experience the passing of their children. Never.”
“No,” Günther said. “Never.”
“It causes so many emotions, you know?” Jonas said. “Loss. Grief. Pain. Madness, even. Rage. I was lucky to pull myself together. That I found something to live for, otherwise, the rage would have eaten me whole.”
“I understand rage,” Günther said. “I mean, if someone, God forbid, were to kill my daughter, even by accident — I would find that person and—” His eyes altered, went somewhere younger and harder for a moment. He didn’t finish.
“Kill that person?” Jonas looked at Günther. “But would that make things better? It wouldn’t bring them back, that’s a fact. But would it make things better? For you.”
“Of course!” Günther’s face flushed. “My blood, my beloved, would be in the ground while the killer walks above it, even if in prison? I couldn’t live with that, no. I couldn’t. There are some great movies and books on that premise. A small escape from thinking about it happening to me, you know?”
“Ah, yes, the movies,” Jonas let out a laugh that sounded more like a cough. “If we believed movies, Max here might be an alien.”
Both men laughed now. For a moment, they were just two old men laughing on a bench in the late afternoon sun, which is what the seagulls saw, and the man closing the bakery if he looked over, and the teenagers on the seawall who could not imagine being eighty and still finding anything funny.
They looked at Max. Max’s eyes met Günther’s, then Jonas’s, and he moved deeper under the bench.
The conversation drifted, the way conversations between old men on benches do, without direction or obligation, following whatever the last sentence shook loose. Günther talked about the bread from the bakery across the road, how it used to be better, how everything used to be better, according to him, and how he was aware this made him a cliché and didn’t care. Jonas talked about a hotel he’d stayed at in Málaga once, where the shower had two settings: scalding and off. They talked about the specific indignity of needing reading glasses to find your reading glasses. They talked about the conspiracy between doctors and pharmacists to keep old men alive longer than they wanted to be.
Günther’s phone buzzed. He looked at it, holding it at arm’s length with one hand, squinting.
“My granddaughter. She’s on her way.” A warm smile appeared on his face. “She comes on Wednesdays. She says it’s to visit me, but I think it’s because most good restaurants are closed on a Wednesday and it’s not a weekend, so she has nothing better to do. But she comes every Wednesday. Every single one.” He put the phone on the bench beside him. “She is thirty-one, and she is the reason I am still alive. I don’t mean that in the poetic sense. I mean, she is the reason I didn’t stop living after everything. Hanna is her name. She walks Max with me in the mornings. She calls me if I haven’t called her by four in the afternoon. She brings me food I don’t ask for. She is the best thing I have ever been part of making. The only good thing, maybe.”
“The only good thing,” Jonas repeated. He was looking at the sea.
“She’ll be here in twenty minutes or so. Stay, you should meet her. She likes anyone who listens to me talk about Max. It’s a low bar, but you’ve cleared it.”
Jonas smiled, but then his expression changed, becoming calm and composed.
“I am glad that we have talked,” Jonas said. He stood up slowly, the way very old men stand, negotiating with gravity and stiff joints and the particular reluctance of a body that has been sitting too long. He rolled the right sleeve of his shirt to the elbow.
“It took me a long time to find you, Günther.”
Extended his right arm for a handshake. On the inside of his forearm, a row of faded numbers in blue-gray ink.
“But that was never your name, was it, Blockführer Dietrich Oberhausen?”
The bench. The dog beneath it. The sea remained unchanged.
Günther’s mobile phone was ringing on the slats beside him, the screen lighting up with a name, dimming, lighting up again. Ringing and ringing in the golden light while the sun lowered itself into the water, the way Marta always said it would, and the seagulls circled, and Max lay very still in the shade, waiting for a hand that was not going to come.
Nicely done. That ending.
Amazing.