Weekends in our US suburb, the immigrant who lived next door would hunch on a rigid wooden chair in his garage and absently watch a 13-inch colour television whose thin antennae barely mustered the berserk picture on its screen. He would smoke upwards of a pack of cigarettes a day and down a case of Heineken deliberately, quietly, without apology. Beyond this, his only task those afternoons away from shifts at the ironworks was to mow the lawn, and he happily devoted a clattering hour or two each weekend to manicuring the grass around his wife's flower beds. In spite of what seemed his obvious affection for lawn care, whenever he would see me sent out by my father to mow our own lawn, he would offer a scrunched smile, untangle his Bavarian tongue, and call cheerfully in accented English, "When you finish, Jas, you come over and cut my grass too!" This became his recurring joke, and he had a variation of it no matter what the season. When I trudged out to corral the leaves of autumn, I would be greeted by the immigrant grinning and calling me over to clear his already tidy yard. In winter, when I would be sent to shovel snow from our driveway, he would already have tossed most of it from his own, but through the chiselling wind he would grin and shout, "When you finish, Jas, you come over and clean my driveway too!"
We'd befriended the immigrant and his family only a few months after moving into the house just north of Chicago. My mother would invite them all – the immigrant and his wife, her elderly aunt, and the grown son who lived with them – over for samosas, for stewed lamb, for dahl or aloo gobi. They would invite us over for steak fillets wrapped in bacon, for slaw, mashed potatoes and gravy, for pastries that should have been sold for dollars an ounce in a European bakery. Depending on which household was grilling burgers on a given summer day, meat patties wrapped in aluminium foil would be delivered in one direction or the other over the short chainlink fence between our gardens.
A year or so after we moved in, during one of our dinners together, the immigrant noticed the black-and-white portrait of my father's father on display in our living room. In the photograph, taken sometime between the Great War and its successor, both of which he had served in, my grandfather stands at attention in front of a brick wall, a subedar, dark-bearded and turbaned, in full military regalia. I never knew him. He died in 1957 when my father was only eleven, and this is my only impression of him, the one I think of when I hear the word 'grandfather'.
A few days after that dinner, the immigrant walked out of his garage, crossed the grass to our driveway, called to my father and me in the afternoon light and eagerly thrust a frame toward us. It too contained a photograph of a soldier, of his father, also in military regalia, standing at attention during the Second World War. Now the immigrant presented it to us. "My father! He was soldier too! Like you' father," he exclaimed, leaving off the 'r' in 'your'. "He was in the SS!" The immigrant beamed at this earnest offer of friendship. "Like you' father!" he repeated in strudel-ed English. My father took the photograph in hand, betraying no surprise at the apparition of this soldier, this photograph that could have been pulled from a history book, could have been a portrait of villainy. He held it gingerly. He looked into the other side of the war, paused a moment, then smiled, nodded, and said, "Yes. I see. Thank you," before handing back the frame.