alter tells his wife Ingrid that he wants to model nude for art students at the local evening college.

"The human body is a beautiful thing," he says.

She doesn't say anything but keeps spooning chicken soup into her mouth.

"I want to feel free, unencumbered by clothes," he adds. "We are born naked; we should stay that way." He has no idea where these words come from; he has never thought or said them before.

She finishes her soup and takes the bowl to the sink, where she rinses it out, scrubs the spoon and places both bowl and spoon into the dishwasher. "You finished?" She doesn't wait for an answer but pulls his bowl away from him and lets water splash against the porcelain.

"You know," she begins, "I don't care what you do." He knows that she means that. Her dark hair and eyes stand out against the white shiny kitchen cabinets. They have been married forty years this day.

Walter goes to his room and takes a look at their wedding picture. It's black and white and has jagged edges. In the picture, two people stand before the castle in Heidelberg and smile for the camera. She wears a dress, tightly cinched with a wide belt, and he holds a hat in his hand. He remembers when everyone wore hats. He remembers that his doctor told him to wear some kind of head covering, especially in the winter. It had something to do with heat loss through the top of one's head. He wonders if she colors her hair now; there's no gray, unlike his own hair, or what is left of it, which is all gray. He puts the picture back into the drawer and goes into the living room. Ingrid sits in front of the television and watches the seven o'clock news.

"Koepke needs to shave." She points at the announcer who has been reading the news for the Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen for about twenty years now. He's a seven o'clock institution, and Walter remembers a time when people wouldn't dare to call family or friends between seven and seven thirty when Koepke read the news. Or if the phone rang, it meant really bad news. Really bad news, like people dead or dying. Now, people don't think twice about calling in the middle of the news or late at night. Sometimes, it's a wrong number, and the other party won't even apologize. Walter shakes his head.

"He's getting old."

"He wouldn't look that bad if he would shave right. I bet he's using an electric razor. Those are no good."

"What do you know about razors," he asks her. He knows she doesn't shave under her arms or her legs.

"I buy yours, that's what I know. I know what I know." She puts her legs on the coffee table and begins flipping through the program guide.

"Rudi's Urlaubschau on One, and Der Alte on Two, and something about elephants on cable three. What do you want?"

Walter doesn't like Rudi's Urlaubsschau ever since the blonde hostess went on maternity leave.

"What's on Hessen One?"

"Nothing."

He would read the program guide himself but can't really make out the small print anymore. He wonders briefly what wonders and delights escape him on the other channels and then settles for elephants on cable three. Halfway through the program both fall asleep and wake up when a loud Persil commercial announces how to get your laundry Persil white. Ingrid pokes Walter in the side.

"Go to bed."

"I am watching the elephants."

"You were sleeping." They have separate bedrooms, mainly because Walter snores and tosses and turns all night. Even with their bedrooms at opposite ends of their house, Ingrid complains that his snoring keeps her awake at night.

"I sleep at most three hours a night," she tells him.

The next morning, Walter gets up before Ingrid and leaves her a note explaining that he drove to the city. He knows she will be mad since he is not supposed to drive unattended after his last nose bleeding spell. He realizes that that is what love finally boils down to: worry. If they had had children, they would worry about them, worry about how they the ate, why they didn't call, where they lived, if they buckled up, or saved enough money for retirement. He and Ingrid make up children sometimes when they talk to strangers they meet on the trips and cruises they take, now that Walter is retired. They created a son, a medical doctor, on a cruise down the Rhine. "He practices at Johns Hopkins," Ingrid said. "But he calls us once a week." They also have a daughter, who specializes in Internal Medicine and works at the Mayo Clinic in Texas, and who sends handpainted postcards full of dolphins. Once they had a son who died in a boating accident on a Louisiana bayou. Foul play was suspected. And then there was the son who traded securities at the New York Stock Exchange and who was engaged to a florist. They conceived him on their trip to Norway; he is their favorite. Walter remembers the pride and sorrow he felt when he told their dinner partners about Thomas, who had been a sickly child, coughing and spitting up when he was little. Of course, that had been right after the war, and there hadn't been much in the way of baby food, not like today, anyway, and they were barely able to make ends meet, with Walter just finishing his doctoral work and Ingrid staying home with the child, not working. But somehow they managed to scrape enough money together to take Thomas to the coast each summer, where the air was dry and salty, and he could play in the sand and ride his pony and cure his bronchial asthma.

Walter drives around the city. It is early and none of the stores are open yet. Trucks have parked in the street and merchandise is being delivered. It strikes him that consumers aren't really supposed to see all this; it's like seeing the inside of a stripclub in bright daylight: it looses a lot of its appeal. He drives to the Technische Universitat where faculty parking places are beginning to fill up. Most of the students won't show up for eight o'clock classes. Walter notices that his old spot is still empty; he pulls in and lets the car idle for a few minutes and thinks about how he used to smoke his first and only cigarette of the day in this spot, every day for almost twenty years. Plus weekends and most holidays. Thousands of cigarettes that Ingrid doesn't know about. She had stuck to their New Year's promise of 1968. He hadn't, couldn't, because the sight and smell of smoke excited him. Still does. Two short honks tell him that his successor wants his spot. Walter backs out and waves at Dr. Marand, the new department head of chemistry. New, of course, is relative. Marand came on board when Walter retired five years ago. Marand honks again to acknowledge the wave. Walter circles the parking lot one more time. He is not sure what or who he is hoping to see. Most of his old students have graduated and are working in industry. Walter tries to keep up with the latest developments, especially in his field of interest, oxidation catalysis. Potentially, that's where the big money lies. If conversion could be made to work.

The objective of oxidation catalysis is for the catalyst (which comprises a metal such as iron or copper or zinc or others) to somehow assist in the introduction of an oxygen atom (derived from oxygen molecules in the air) into a carbon-hydrogen body of an inert molecule, such as methane. The result, ideally, is the production of a very important chemical, methanol, from methane and air. If such a synthesis could be perfected under ambient conditions (ordinary room temperature and pressure) the economic advantages for the global production of methanol would be enormous. The current process is energy intensive and requires high temperatures and pressures and has high yields of side products, which means purification is required, which means even more production costs.

Walter remembers telling all this to his wife when she asked years ago what he was working on. She didn't reply then, and afterwards, once or twice a year would ask how the methanol thing was coming along. And each time he would tell her, very expensive. Don't sell your BP stock yet.

Walter sits in the parking lot of the evening college and wonders how he should approach this matter. Walk into the place and ask if anyone needs a male model? He also wonders where his sudden interest in painting comes from. He doesn't like painting, none of the arts actually. And poetry he always considered a waste of perfectly good words for the purpose of creating excess, sort of like the waste products accompanying the current conversion process. He hasn't seen a poem yet that burned clean to the core and didn't leave a lot of unnecessary garbage. Before he can finish that thought, he notices someone entering the school, a man of similar height and age as his, and suddenly Walter feels as if he is about to be cheated out of the most important event of his life. He rushes after the man.

"Are you here to model? I was here first, you know!" He notices how his words ricochet off the tile walls and floors and how they reverberate long after he finished speaking. The man lets the soundwaves die down before he answers.

"Why don't you come to my office?"

"I am Victor Hesse," the man says to Walter and points to a chair. "I am the director. Have a seat."

Walter paces the office. He can't account for his nervousness. He wonders briefly if he's going insane like an aunt in his family who used to set fire to paper and put the burning paper into drawers and close them and wait for the paper to die from oxygen starvation. Sometimes it didn't and entire rooms were scorched that way. She ended up in an institution, where she never again opened her mouth to speak. Walter remembers her as an incredibly large woman, sitting on a bed, smiling benevolently at anyone entering her room like a mute queen holding court. He notices paintings on the wall, abstract ones, he figures, because they don't remind him of anything he has seen before. One looks like a giant tree root, but when Walter tilts his head a little, he thinks it's more like fingers clawing into earth. He isn't sure if he likes that picture. Real things aren't like that. Real things don't shape shift. Real things stay solid, unless, of course, some sort of conversion happens, a little nagging voice in his head adds. It's the same voice that told him about modeling. Walter sits down in a green vinyl chair. He calculates the chemical properties of vinyl and calms down.

"I would like to model," he says. "Nude." The words sound perfectly right, perfectly necessary now.

"That's not as easy as you might think," Victor says.

"I am not ashamed," Walter says.

"I didn't mean that. It gets cold in the studio, and the hours are long. We don't have money to pay, either."

"I'll do it for free. I don't mind the cold." Victor looks at Walter. A long, open stare. Victor's eyes are brown, a similar shade to Ingrid's, Walter thinks. Maybe I can invite him for dinner later on.

"You're lucky. Bert quit last night. You can start tonight. Bring a robe and slippers." Victor cocks his head to the side a little and considers a few moments. "Haven't I seen you before?"

"Do you watch channel three? I used to do lectures there."

"No, not on television. Somewhere else. I remember faces."

On his drive home, Walter decides to pick up a bottle of wine at the beverage market. He strolls through the neon-lit aisles and holds bottles in his hands, weighs them, holds them against the light. He decides on a Spatburgunder, a heavy wine, something for after dinner, something to go with cheese and crackers perhaps. But then he remembers that he won't be home for dinner and he puts the bottle back on the shelf but with more force than necessary, and it topples the bottle behind it, which in turn, falls against its neighbor, until some chain reaction is set into motion and seven or eight bottles tumble from the shelf and onto the floor. Glass and wine crash and splash around Walter's feet and up his legs; he stands in a minefield of broken glass and doesn't dare to move. A white-frocked saleswoman rescues him with a broom and shovel. She kneels before him and asks him if he is o.k. and pats his legs frantically. His pants are wet up to his knees and the woman keeps screaming you are bleeding, you are bleeding.

"I'm alright," says Walter. "I am sorry about the mess. I feel like a drunk priest with all this wine."

The woman takes an unbroken bottle from the shelf and hands it to him. "Take this, please, and drink it in good heath."

When he walks, the wet fabric clings to his legs and his feet slosh around in his shoes. It reminds him of Thomas and how he would have played on the beach, and how Walter would have to watch him because he was so sickly and run after him if he went too far into the water because he couldn't swim. Walter would get his pants wet. But he wouldn't be wearing shoes, would he? No, not on the beach. And maybe Thomas would have been a good swimmer, and there wouldn't have been a need for worry.

When he gets home, Ingrid sits in the garden, shaded by a large umbrella. She seems to be sleeping or at least ignoring his arrival. He begins massaging her feet, first the right one, then the left one. She always complains of a lack of circulation in her feet and legs, and of late, Walter has noticed an increase in the number of spidery veins and blue splotches on her skin. "You smell of alcohol." "I got some wine for later tonight. There was an accident." "Did you hit someone? Is someone dead?" He can see the worry rise in her eyes; just last week, an acquaintance of theirs had hit a kid who had run out into the street after a ball. "No, no, just some broken glass in the store. The lady was really nice about it, though. I mean, I dropped a bottle in the store, and she gave me a free one." He feels Ingrid untighten. "I wish you wouldn't drive without me." "You don't have a driver's license. What could you do?" "Well, at least I would be there." He glances at the sun which is now directly overhead, and he feels the rays needlesharp on his skin. He crouches closer to Ingrid to share some of her shade. He tells her about meeting Victor and that he offered Walter the modeling job. "Well, not so much a job, as just an invitation to show up, really." "Victor is a beautiful name. We should have a son with that name." "Maybe next year, hm? Next year, when we go to the Black Forest?" "Yes, but I don't want him to leave us. I want him to stay." "He'll be an engineer for BMW, and he'll have a nice house in Bavaria and go skiing." "It's nice to think that."

The room is bright and square; a dozen chairs are arranged in a semi-circle around an elevated platform, which is empty except for a fold-down chair and a small round table.

"Walter!" Victor booms. "You have your robe?" Walter points to a plastic bag and nods.

"Why don't you undress so that you'll be ready when the students get here. You can do that back there." He points to a door at the far end of the room. "And I'll introduce you to the instructor too."

When Walter walks back into the room, he tightens the belt on his robe. He wasn't sure if he should take off his socks as well, but since the room is cold, he decided to leave them on. He would always be able to slip them off later.

"Walter," says Victor, and grabs him by the shoulder, "this is Oke Siereen, our instructor. I'll leave you in his hands." Walter thinks that Oke looks exactly like he imagined an art instructor to look. Long hair and paint-splattered t-shirt. A few students gather around Oke. "What are we going to do now that we lost Bert?" "

We'll ditch the cartoons and begin again, hm?"

Walter begins to feel slightly warm, tingly actually, as if a low current electricity were running through his body.

"O.k. places everyone." Oke claps his hands like a dance instructor calling his ensemble together and points to the chair on the platform."Walter. Sit down."

Walter looks around the room. Seven people. Three men, four women. Two of them young. One middle aged. One very old, older than Walter. She hasn't yet set up her tripod and canvas and arranged her palettes as have the others.

Oke circles the room.

"Everyone. This is Walter. Let's do a freehand of him. Walter, the robe."

Walter follows the command unthinkingly, as if someone else had taken control of his motions. The robe ends up on the floor, and Walter sits naked, with arms dangling at his sides before the small group. Sixteen eyes are watching him, looking at his lines, evaluating and creating color limitations.

"Look carefully at the subject matter that you are using as source material. Line is created where two planes of color come together." Oke pushes his hands together. It seems he is praying.

"How should I sit?"

"Find a spot that is comfortable over the next couple of hours," Oke says. "It really doesn't matter to them."

Walter crosses one leg over the other, but soon the blood flow in both legs is interrupted, and he has to uncross them. He notices that the old woman has not yet begun to draw his outline. Some of the other students have moved closer, squint and look at him. One even touches his face, tilting it a bit into the light.

"Look at me," the old woman says. "I know you."

Walter shrugs and tells her that he used to lecture on channel three and at the university.

"No, before then. Look at me."

Walter looks but can't remember her face. He has forgotten many faces over the years.

She gets up from her chair with the aid of a cane and pushes toward Walter.

"I remember your face," she says.

She holds her arm before his eyes and folds back her sleeve. Walter thinks she wears some sort of tattoo. He can't make it out though, not without his reading glasses.

"Look at this. Do you see this?" She points a finger to her skin and pulls the skin tight. Walter squints a little and leans back. A stone sinks in his stomach.

"You remember?"

"Yes," he says. Yes, he remembers the numbers now, the numbers he helped brand on people in the camps. He hears how Oke tells a student that paint has physical characteristics which can be exploited for the creation of interesting surfaces.

The old woman leans forward.

"I want you to look at me. I want you to paint me." Oke talks about titanium white, and how you can do a painting in nothing but titanium white and manipulate the surface and have an image created by the shadows. "I want you to paint this number."

Oke lectures on the use of heavy opaque paint that can rise to meet the viewer. Walter hears him say that one can create physical depth to the paint that is useful in conducting light and giving a painting the glow that many early Dutch paintings have.

Walter touches the woman's skin and traces the outline of the number, like a blind man reading braille, all the way back to her wrist. He keeps going until he holds her hand in his. His entire body registers this touch. He is aware of his breath, how it flows out of his nostrils and how it makes the hair on their hands flutter. Goosebumps rise up on his flesh. It is cold in this room. He can't remember the war, except as a large bloody canvas, a painting done by a hemophiliac, an abstract twist of color. Oke claps his hands together and exhorts his students to clean their brushes and put away their canvases. Two hours have passed.

"Same time, next week," says Oke. "Same time, next week."  

© Claudia Grinnell