Author's Note: This is the third in my post-war "Conversations" series, preceded by "Fishing" and "Unspoken." You don't need to have read the others for this to make sense; there's a brief reference to "Fishing" that readers of that story may pick up, but it's pretty self-explanatory if you haven't read it. (On the other hand, you might get a richer sense of the father/son dynamic in this story if you've read the others.) I've included some historical notes at the end of the story.

ooOoo

How much would it cost to install a shower, Rob wondered idly as he toweled himself off, then automatically wrapped the towel around his waist.

Not that he wasn't enjoying the chance to have hot baths after nearly three years of cold showers—although, given the warmth of this July day, a cold shower wouldn't be completely unpleasant. Might even feel good after mowing the lawn on a hot afternoon, as he just had.

But he couldn't help thinking that a shower might be helpful for his parents. While they were both pretty spry for people in their late 60s, getting into and out of that bathtub had to be getting harder for them both and a shower would be a lot easier. He had a quite a bit of back pay in the bank; he wished they'd let him spend some to get one of the new models of tubs, with lower sides, and a shower head built into tile-lined walls. Remodeling the plumbing would be a lot of work, but it would update the house.

Nonetheless, he knew how the conversation would go: his father would object to him spending money on them and say he could afford to put one in if he wanted. And his mother would say she thought a claw-foot bathtub was fancy enough for anyone; her family had certainly not had that kind of luxury when she was a girl! . . . So, he mused as he pulled his shaving gear out, if he already knew what his parents were going to say, was it even worth bringing up?

The bathroom was steamy, even with the window open, so he decided to open the door to the hallway to get a little breeze. His parents had gone out while he'd mowed the lawn: his mother off to a ladies' tea for her church circle, his father down the block to check with their neighbor Jack Cooper about borrowing his electric drill while his own was in the shop. Given Cooper's talkative streak, his dad would likely be there chewing the fat for another hour. So he had the house to himself; no reason to not leave the door open for better air circulation.

The mirror cleared quickly enough with the door open that he was able to start shaving. He'd lathered up and had finished the left side of his face and almost all of the right side too when he paused. Had he heard a noise in his parents' bedroom? Then came his father's voice coming down the hallway, "Rob, when you're done in there, why don't we—"

His father's voice cut off as he reached the door, Rob turning from the mirror hastily and reaching to close it just too late.

For a moment they stood there, his father's face white and shocked, Rob himself wordless, with his hand on the door, cursing himself inwardly for having missed the sounds of his father's return, probably while the bathtub was draining. Then his father turned without a word and headed down the stairs, the sound of his footsteps echoing through the living room till Rob heard the back screen door slam.

Grimly, he shut the door and finished shaving, doing his best to keep his eyes on the razor and the skin on his neck that it was scraping over, so as not to meet his own eyes in the mirror. He splashed water on his face afterwards, again and again, well beyond what he needed to rinse off the remains of the lather, focusing on how the cool water felt against his cheeks, throat, and even his forehead. Mechanically, he wiped his face dry and put on aftershave, then he looked out the bathroom window again. He could see his father standing under the maple tree in the back yard, his body rigid and visibly radiating rage.

Rob sighed. He was going to have to go down there and deal with this, but it was not a conversation he was looking forward to.

ooOoo

A few minutes later, fully dressed, Rob crossed the yard to stand next to his father, who was still staring out at the garden, hands square on his hips, fists clenched. Rob had hoped inspiration on what to say would strike as he walked over, his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets with elaborate casualness, but by the time he came up beside his dad it still hadn't.

His father saved him the trouble of figuring out where to start. "You said that commandant of yours wasn't a monster."

Rob glanced sideways, somewhat surprised. Well, he supposed that was a natural—if mistaken—assumption. "He wasn't. Still isn't, for that matter. Klink had nothing to do with it. In fact, he was as shocked and angry as you are."

"I seriously doubt that's possible," his father grated out bitterly. "You aren't his flesh and blood."

Rob shook his head. "No. But don't sell him short on that count. While personal survival was always most important to him, that nonetheless represented a betrayal of ideals he'd held all his life. That's hard for any man to come to terms with."

His father didn't soften a bit, and Rob sighed inwardly. Trying to explain Klink to his father was probably a lost cause, particularly at this moment. For that matter, he wasn't sure he could ever really explain Klink to anyone outside Stalag 13 – he hadn't had much luck with anyone else so far, including the Allied High Command.

His father interrupted his momentary reverie. "What happened to the man who did that to you?"

Rob shrugged uneasily, then wrapped his arms around his torso. "I don't know. He's probably dead." It was likely. So many men were.

"But you don't know for sure."

"No."

They stood for a few moments in silence. John Hogan was the first to break it.

"How did—"

Rob cut him off. "I can't tell you."

His father half turned to face him. "Can't? Or won't?"

"Both." Rob carefully kept his voice firm.

His father opened his mouth, as if to protest, then snapped it shut, turning away again.

Rob stared at the grass at his feet. "Are you going to tell Mom?"

"I'm not in the habit of keeping secrets from my wife. Unlike you, we don't live in a need-to-know relationship."

Rob winced. "I'm sorry, Dad. I just . . . I can't. . . ."

"Stop." His father put up his hands, then chopped them down sharply, took a deep breath, then let it go, clearly trying to calm himself. "No, I'm sorry—you didn't deserve that from me. Especially after I told you just a couple of weeks ago that your mother and I understand when you can't tell us everything. It's just . . . I knew that, however light you keep making of it, you had to have had a hard time over there. As a prisoner for all that time. But it's hard to actually see—" his father choked and closed his eyes, "—well . . . physical evidence of that."

Rob nodded acknowledgement, tightening his arms around his body.

"Knowing that you're leaving again in a few days doesn't help," his father sighed.

"It's just down to Washington. With any luck, I'll be able to get back up here a couple more weekends this summer."

"Unless they send you to the Pacific," his father said heavily.

Rob rubbed his chin. "It's a lot more likely I'll get sent back to Europe," he admitted slowly. "We're going to have troops stationed there for a long, long time to come, and that's the area I where I have experience and contacts. I've never been out in the East."

"But if . . . when . . . we invade Japan? The Pacific campaign's been pretty hard already. Given all our casualties in taking Peleieu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—won't they need all hands on deck?"

"That's the Navy, Dad. I'm in the Army Air Force."

His father didn't even crack a smile. Rob sighed, and ran his right hand through his damp hair.

"I don't know, Dad—honestly, I don't. I'm not in the command loop on what's happening in the Pacific, so I'm just guessing by what I see in the papers and a little unofficial scuttlebutt I've heard . . . but my gut tells me it's going to be really bad. It'll take huge numbers of troops to invade Japan, many of them pulled out of Europe, and a lot of the men will die, because the fighting is bound to be far worse in the Japanese homeland than it's been in the central and south Pacific, bad as that's been. It'll be at least as bad as D-Day, probably a lot worse. And the battles will go on for months." He shook his head thinking of the horrific costs, past and future, military and civilian, Allied and Japanese. "It'll bleed us all dry," he added softly, "though I can't see any way around it right now. But we have to win, so it's going to have to be done."

"And you'll be doing it?" his father queried again, softly.

"If I'm needed," Rob nodded. "But as I said a moment ago, they're a lot more likely to send me back to Europe. As a pilot, well, I'm out of date for some of the planes they're using in the Pacific right now. And," he admitted reluctantly if realistically, "too high in rank. They won't use me to fly, because generals should not be up in the air on the front lines." His father looked rather surprised at his vehemence. Rob ignored that, unable to explain anyway, and plowed on. "But of course I could command an air base somewhere, if they need me to. It'd make more sense to send me to Europe, though. Of course, since we're talking Army brass making the decision, that probably means they won't do the logical thing." He chuckled sardonically.

John Hogan looked slightly amused. "You're Army brass now," he pointed out.

Rob quirked an eyebrow back at him. "That only proves my point. Would you trust anyone who'd make me a general?" he teased, relieved that his father was calming down enough to banter with him. "Sooo, they'll put me on an aircraft carrier somehow after all, and I'll spend the rest of the war seasick."

His father chuckled at the image, but fell silent quickly. After a moment, he spoke again, the words dragging out of him hesitantly. "You really think you'll be going back to Europe, son?"

Rob bit his lower lip at the sound of his father's concern. "Yes, probably. England, maybe, or more likely Germany. We have an enormous amount of work to do in Germany right now—not to mention the rest of Europe. And we have to get the peace right this time. Because we can't let it get screwed up like we did after World War I. We can't keep having so many world wars that we have to number them to keep track. All this madness has to stop. We can't afford to have a still worse World War III in Europe in another twenty years, maybe with the Soviets as our enemy instead of our ally next time. And I intend to do all I can to see that we don't." His voice had gotten vehement, and he checked himself.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the two coins that always resided there these days. He shifted them dexterously between his fingers, handing the slightly smaller one to his father, who took it and looked at it curiously, puzzled at the unexpected shift in conversation.

"That one, that's a 50 pfennig coin from the Weimar Republic, in 1920," Rob said.

"Aluminum," John Hogan noted, flipping it and feeling its odd lack of weight.

Rob nodded. "Germany couldn't afford to use silver any more, as they had before the war. Three years after it was minted, when the hyperinflation started, that coin wouldn't buy anything. The money was devaluing so fast that even the big paper notes weren't worth anything. Schultz, the Sergeant of the Guard at Stalag 13, told me once that he remembered how in late 1923 a pound of bread cost 3 billion marks, a pound of meat cost 36 billion, a glass of beer 4 billion, but a couple weeks later the bread cost 80 billion, the meat 900 billion, and the beer 52 billion marks."

John Hogan shook his head; the numbers were astronomical.

"He knew one friend who had used his paper money as wallpaper," Rob continued, "because it was worth more that way than spending it. Another friend lit fires in his stove with his money because it was cheaper to use it than to use newspaper as kindling. It was rumored some people actually burned money rather than try to buy firewood. Schultz himself took a suitcase to work to get his wages. His wife had to come get the wages and run to the shops to buy whatever was available with them immediately, then she'd barter what she'd bought for what she really wanted. One day he left the suitcase unattended for a few minutes; he came back and found someone had stolen the suitcase, but left the money. That seems almost comical, but the loss of the suitcase was a real hardship for him because he couldn't afford to buy a new one with the billions of marks he was getting paid. He couldn't afford to buy toys for his children, so he made them a kite with his paper money.

"Anyone with savings lost everything. His saddest story was about a neighbor of his, a war widow, who sold her house intending to live on the proceeds, but a few weeks later the money wasn't enough to buy a loaf of bread." Rob sighed. "A lot of people went hungry, for months. So ordinary Germans suffered far worse in 1922 and '23 than they had during the war a few years earlier. And the financial mess was largely due to the war reparations the Allies insisted on. But the Great War wasn't all Germany's fault. France and England should've listened to President Wilson back in 1917, and Wilson should've stuck to his principles, instead of insisting on the War Guilt clause and the harsh peace."

His father nodded, remembering when all those events in Germany had been in the news, and how far away and not particularly important it had seemed at the time. He hadn't paid that much attention. But in the long run, they had come close to costing him his son—not to mention the uncountable other people who did lose their lives in the next war.

Rob handed him the second coin, another aluminum one, and John examined it.

"And this one, it's a two franc coin made in Vichy France two years ago," Rob explained. "The problems symbolized by that 1920s German coin helped lead to Hitler's ability to take power, and the war he started produced this coin from defeated and occupied France. There were lots of other factors, sure. But there's a real connection between those two coins, all the same. And I'm keeping them together so I can put my hand in my pocket, feel these two coins, and remind myself why it's important to get the peace right this time. I don't ever want to add a third coin to this collection."

John Hogan gently put his hand on Rob's shoulder. "I see that, son. And I'm proud that you want to be part of it, to keep doing work that needs doing. I guess it'd be easy for you to say you've done your turn and resign once the war with Japan is settled, but it sounds like you're not intending to do that."

Rob shook his head. "Europe has to rebuild. There's still too much work to do, too much damage to heal there, for me to just let go." He hesitated, then added slowly, searching for the right words, "Wounds leave scars. But eventually, given time, and if they heal right, scars can fade. I have to believe in that, Dad – not in forgetting the past, never that, but in mending and restoring. It's my only way forward, into the future."

His father nodded in silent understanding, slinging his arm round Rob's neck and pulling him closer to his side; Rob responded in kind, reaching under his father's arm and around his back to grip his dad's far shoulder firmly. The two men stood side by side, arm in arm, as they gazed out over the quiet green of the back yard and garden, under the shade of the maple tree.

fin

Author's notes:

1) Nope, I didn't define what kind of mark or scar John Hogan saw that upset him so much, nor even when it happened to Rob. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to pin that down explicitly and write the backstory for it, and I thought (at least I hope) the story worked without it. I'll leave it to you to define as you want—or not define, if you'd rather not think about such things.

On historical backgrounds:

2) 1940s bathrooms proved harder to research than I expected. I live in a house built in 1947 with one bathtub and shower head that we think may be original, but we aren't sure. I finally found ads for bathrooms from both 1945 and the 1930s that had the kind of tub/shower combination Hogan is thinking of, that become fairly standard in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s building booms. So though they weren't common before the 1950s, they were available, and Hogan would surely have seen ads for them. (Given that nearly half of American households lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, and over a third lacked even a flush toilet in 1940, the Hogans were already in the more fortunate half of the population.)

3) The two coins Hogan keeps in his pocket are real ones, from the coin collection my father-in-law put together as a kid during and after the World War II. I find holding them a very moving experience, for exactly the reasons I have Hogan explain, and this seemed an appropriate place to fit them into a story. The cover image for this story is a photograph of a German coin just like the one I have.

4) The economic and political history behind the coins that Hogan outlines is both real and important. If you're interested, you can find a lot through Google on President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" speech in January 1918: it laid out a way towards armistice that Germany accepted as possible. Unfortunately, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles ignored a lot of his suggestions, particularly in Article 231, the "War Guilt Clause," that blamed Germany exclusively for the war and the attendant loss and damage it caused. That clause created much anger and bitterness in Germany.

War reparations owed by Germany were set at 269 billion gold marks (almost 100,000 tons of gold, worth around $63 billion then, $768 billion today); this was eventually reduced to 132 billion marks ($33 billion then, $402 billion today). The amount of money demanded was controversial; John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, argued it would be disastrous for Germany in his best-selling 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of Peace.

These war reparations, intended to pay for the damage the war caused in Belgium and France, to help pay for what the Allies spent to wage the war, and to punish Germany as the supposed aggressor in the war, were a major factor in the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation in the early 1920s; all of the stories I have Rob attribute to Schultz are drawn from historical accounts of what ordinary people went through at the time. The rough economic times of the 1920s, followed by the world-wide Depression in the early 1930s, helped create the political and cultural climate in Germany that enabled Hitler and the Nazi party to take power. (There were other factors, of course, but the economic woes were a big one.)

Germany defaulted on the reparations several times during the 1920s and '30s, and Hitler flat out refused to pay them when he came to power—one reason why he was popular. But Germany chose to pay them after the end of World War II, in part to help restore its financial reputation. This was part of a complicated series of post-war monetary negotiations; the U.S. loaned Germany money for rebuilding, some of those loans were forgiven to lower the total amount owed, other debts were deferred until West and East Germany reunited (an outcome that seemed for a long time unlikely). The Allied intention was to rebuild Germany (at least West Germany) without causing the kind of fallout that occurred after WWI. Germany made the final payment of $94 million on its World War I reparations on October 3, 2010, the twentieth anniversary of the reunification of Germany in 1990, and nearly 92 years after its defeat in 1918.

5) By the way, I freely admit that Hogan vastly oversimplifies the historical world situation in his comments blaming Europe for the problems following the Treaty of Versailles, and his belief that the U.S. can solve European problems after World War II. (And plenty of later problems were created from the way the Allies redrew the European map after WWII, and from the various compromises with the Soviet Union that were expedient at the time, not to mention the hard times that ordinary Germans experienced in the mid and late 1940s as an occupied country.) On the other hand, from what I can tell from the history that I know, Hogan's views are reasonably realistic for a man of his situation and time, likely to be expressed in informal conversation. And of course, this story is set before the end of the war in the Pacific Theater, so both the Hogan men would be expecting the invasion of Japan as likely within the next few months.