Free Olympia by Dennis Bock

a wall of jam jars to the right of the stairs. I want to find something to take home with me. An old gun from the war, a bayonet or hand grenade. Old soldiers keep things like that. I pick up one of the jars from the shelf and brush off the dust with my sleeve. Windfall. I peer through the warped glass and see two pickled lizards. There are dozens of jars, within each a snake or turtle or a few mice or small birds, at least a pair of unhatched eggs or frozen amber-tinged insects. Every jar has a date marked on a piece of tape stuck to the lid:
24. Juni 1958; 17
.
August 1943; 4
.
Oktober 1969
. The oldest from April of 1931. The animals hang in a clear copper-coloured liquid. Sediment churns around the tail of a salamander, the swirl of an escaping fish. I open it and sniff in the fumes, rich and sweet, like the fumes of an outboard motor.

    On Friday we drive down to Munich to see the Olympic stadium. Willy comes with us. Earlier I heard my parents talking about whether or not he should come. My father said he wanted to make it a family affair. I know he doesn’t want to wait for the old-man steps. My mother reminded him he was family, then walked away briskly, arms crossed over her chest.

    The stadium’s bigger than it looked on TV last year. Ruby says she’ll do her floor routine in a place as grand as this someday. The Montreal Games are only three years away. Enormous concrete ribs arch over our heads and meet at a single point stories above.

    â€œIt’s like walking into a whale,” Ruby says, pointing to the circle of sky above our heads. “That’s the blowhole.” On the track below two black men practise take-off on the starting blocks.
USA
is printed in red, white, and blue on the backs of their tracksuits. An older white man stands on the grass beside the runners and fires a pistol at the blue sky through the blowhole. I don’t recognize the moment’s pause between the shot and the runners’ reactions. But they’re already up and running when Willy finally flinches at the noise of the gun firing.

    After the stadium we walk around the centre of Munich, taking pictures, poking our heads into the silent air of cathedrals. I place my hands on the Madonna’s crying cheeks, cool as a river. In the bright sunlight our mother points to things she hasn’t seen in years, the green tree-filled parks and pathways that have turned into banks and insurance companies since she was a girl. In Marienplatz, the main square, we drink lemonade and buy mustard-covered pretzels as big as my father’s hand. To eat them we sit at the edge of the Fischbrunnen fountain, our five backs to a statue of a spitting carp. According to the lore about this place, a couple of
Pfennig
tossed into the water behind us will make us rich someday. My father digs in, hands me and Ruby one coin each. Ruby throws hers in and bounces up and down, her eyes closed in mighty prayer. I fight the urge to whip mine at the carp and finally launch it off my thumb and watch it hit the water and flutter to the bottom. I sit in the shade my father casts, the fountain’s mist cooling my sunburned neck. Willy sits to my left, silently.

    My father’s already snapped some photos of us standing in front of the fountain. Now he asks an American lady to shoot us and takes a spot beside my mother. The woman holding my father’s Nikon looks like the blonde woman on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Behind the camera she chews a purple hunk of gum, taking her time as she fits the five of us into this single moment in time. “Cheese,” she says finally and in unison we reply. A second later Willy’s voice joins our photograph, weak and in another language.

    â€œYour mother’s part of the country isn’t the only interesting part of Germany,” my father says quietly, his hand on my moist neck. “How about we go somewhere with water? More water than this fountain. Maybe even the