Victory (from the Munich Tales)

VICTORY
By Michael Kroetch

He was an old man. His arms were long and thin and trembled a lot—especially if he didn't get his morning tea, which seemed to those who knew him to be the main reason he went on living, just so he could have another morning's tea. He loved tea the way some men loved hunting or beautiful women. He'd had enough of both and would tell anybody so. “Forget your dead carcass or that beautiful girl spread across a bed, give me a cup of tea instead any day of the week. Or EVERY day. Yes, yes, much rather have it every day, if you don't mind.” That was what he would say to people and laugh and laugh at how shocked they looked. He liked making his tea drinking seem a bit risqué. Or naughty. Himself, he preferred that word risqué, but a lot of the other old people who lived in his building didn't know what the word meant. They seemed to think he was asking them if they wanted to play the game “risk,” which he most certainly did not! For some reason the game was hugely popular and always there were all these old people, many of them much older than he was, playing it and trying to take over the world. He didn't want to take over the world, thank you very much. All he wanted was his tea. He had been in a real war a long ago against someone who wanted to take over the world. That had been no game for him. All his friends getting blown up here and blown up there. Many coming home without some part of them. An arm or a leg. Or maybe some part of their brain. He had been lucky and he knew it. Every time he drank his tea, he would not forget his friends who hadn't been as lucky. He would hoist a freshly steeped cup toward the heavens and say, “Here's to you, boys!” Recently when was doing so, his long thin arm had trembled more than it should have and sent the tea cup loose from his grip, launched it skyward just enough to land on the gassy lady who lived next door to him and who it seemed was always trying to get close enough to him at breakfast time on the deck to sit in his lap. He got into a bit of trouble for the incident. The nurse who tended after his neighbor threatened to revoke his tea privileges. As if it were possible to do such a thing! Here he was a decorated soldier, a hero if it needed to be known with a medal of honor and they were going to take away his God given right to his morning tea? Well, not if he had any say in the matter. You could take away the dead carcass from him and the girl on the bed, but you better watch yourself if you come anywhere the least little bit near his tea cup. And that's exactly what he told the nurse. She had just sighed, rolled her eyes, and returned to cleaning up the mess on her patient from the spilled tea. He had laughed quietly to himself, proud of his little victory. He didn't get many anymore, but they were sure fun when they happened.