Day 187 - Paul's Story

Sandra and Paul at the Marine Ball, 1986

The local employees at the consulate in Stuttgart were nothing like I had been led to believe. In ConGen Rosslyn, the several-week-long consular training program the preceded my departure for Germany, the instructor kept telling me that I wouldn't have to remember everything covered in the couse because the local employees in Germany had all been working there since right after the end of World War II, so they knew everything. I would only have to make decisions and then sit back and let them do the work.

If I had been heading off to Germany five years earlier, he probably would have been right. But sll those local employees who started working right after World War II ended were my parents' age and that meant they had nearly all retired. Instead of a well experienced local staff of elderly Germans, the local employees when I arrived were much younger than I had expected and much more diverse.

In addition to Germans, there were British citizens working at the consulate. One of them was Paul.

It was difficult to know whether or not to believe Paul. He had been in Germany for many years. He claimed he landed in Germany just after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia where he had been part of the film crew for the movie "Bridge at Remagen." The location selected for that World War II film was in Czechoslovakia in part because the West Germans wouldn't permit the filming on the Rhein because of the disruption it would cause to river traffic. The cost of filming in eastern Europe was much lower than in western Europe while the geography and climate were similar. When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, the film crew had to leave the country hastily in taxis. That much is true. But whether Paul was one of those in the taxi was difficult for Paul to prove or anyone else to refute. Paul told that story to explain why he was no longer in the movie biz.

Once in Germany, he stayed, although he made frequent trips back to his home in Devon where he picked up antiques to bring to Germany to sell. I think his explanation alao had to do with World War II. Many Germans lost so many of their possessions during the war that there were few antiques in Germany. What Paul could pick up in England included many French and German items, so it was profitable for him to bring things across the channel.

By the time I met Paul, the number of sources for antiques in Devon of the value and size he could easily import had dwindled, but he was still involved in the antique business as much as he could be, although his antiques were more often recently manufactured in his own apartment.

Paul found that printers' blocks, especially the very large capital letters that often begin the first word of a chapter in old books, were popular in Germany. They weren't very large or very costly, so when Paul was able to bring in a new supply from England, he did very well at the weekend antique fairs. In order to keep himself supplied, he made molds of the original printers' blocks and then created new ones with plastic that he then glued to wood blocks and painted the plastic a metalic color and the blocks black. A black coat over the metalic color, wiped off before they dried gave the blocks the impression of having been used in a printing press.

I don't think Paul ever claimed that his blocks were antiques. The cost wasn't high so everyone involved in the transactions walked away satisfied. Whether or not Paul accounted for his weekend income with the tax authorities of either country is something I chose not to explore.

Paul was a story teller. One story, in addition to the tale of the filming of the Bridge at Remagen, was one I heard him tell many times.

Because German stores were only open weekends and Saturday mornings, except for langer Samstag or long Saturday when they stayed open until late afternoon, the shops in the train station were about the only place for someone who didn't have access to the American PX or Commissary on a Sunday. One Sunday afternoon, Paul went to the train station to pick up some food items from the coffee shop. He decided he would also like a cup of coffee and a pastry. When he picked up his coffee and pastry and all the packages he had purchased, he saw that there were no available tables, but there was a table with two chairs and just one person seated at it, reading a newspaper. Paul asked the man there if he could join him and the man nodded his agreement.

It was one of those round cocktail-height tables with very little room for more than two coffee cuos in saucers with tall stools. The other man's hat was on the table, making it challenging for Paul to put his coffee and other things in his hand on the table. Once he had done that, Paul bent over to get his packages situated on the floor next the stool. Once he stood up and sat down, he took his first sip of coffee when the man across from him picked up Paul's pastry and took a bite. Paul was stunned. The man hadn't even put down his newspaper.

After a moment, Paul moved the napkin with the pastry right next to his coffee cup. Paul waited until the other man turned the page of the paper so the he could see Paul as he picked up his pastry and took a bite. The other man caught Paul's eye and held it for a moment, his face stone-rigid. The then reached across the table and picked up the pastry and took another bite. Paul could hardly believe his eyes. He waited again until the man was about to turn the page of his newspaper when Pauk again picked up the pastry and took a bite.

At that point, the other man folded his paper up, put his hat on, all the while looking Paul straight in the eyes, and stormed away from the table, without saying a word. Paul picked up the remaining bite of his pastry, put his hand into his pocket to pull out change in order to leave a tip on the table. In addition to change, he pulled out his pastry, wrapped in the napkin, just as it had been handed to him at the counter.

At that point, everyone in the audience would laugh along with Paul. It was his story.

After I had heard the story a few times, I was listening to a cassette version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to thr Galaxy when I heard Paul's story, nearly word for word the same, told by Arthur Dent or Ford Prefect, I can't remember which. I had finally caught Paul telling tales. But I couldn't get him to budge. I told him I knew where he had heard or read his story of the pastry, and he looked at me like I was from the moon. He insisted it was his story. So I played the cassette for him - just the part with the story in it. He insisted that Douglas Adams had stolen his story. Nothing would make him admit that he had appropriated the story as his own,

Do I believe Paul's story was real? No. Do I believe Paul was part of the film crew for Bridge at Remagen? No. Does it really matter? No. Now Paul's story is one of my stories.