My grandfather juggled hot potatoes.  
As a small child I'd study the blue smudge on his watery skin as his arms interplayed and the potatoes occasionally fell.  
“I asked for a rose,” he told me.  “They screwed up.” 
“Did they call you by that number?” 
“They called you by the toe of their boot!”
”Who was your best friend, back then?” I'd ask.  I was young.  I wanted him to have a friend
“I didn't know him.” 
“How could you not know him?”  
A theatrical insouciance passed like a silent wave across his droopy face.
                                    *
My first girlfriend was a sixteen year old, like myself.  I was outgoing and she was bookish with round glasses and two braids of thickly plaited hair, one of which would lie down her back and the other forward, over her chest.  I remember her bare knees and how they peeked from below the hem of her dress.  
“Wowwww,” I said to her after she'd been in his presence.  “I never knew he could be like that...” 
“Like what?”
“Sort of, looking at you ...”
“What do you mean?”she said again, brown eyes enlarging.  
“He was kinda creepy with you ...” 
“He's simply the sweetest,” she said, and those round, magnificently magnified eyes dared me to say more. 
                                    *
Alas, she showed me the toe of her boot days after that exchange, rejection from nowhere and for no one else.  I stood shamed in the cold at the gate of our house before I went inside.  Grandfather was living with us and I went to his room.  
“Well?” he said.
“Well, that's over!”
He nodded.  
“Guess she had too much to live up to,” he said. 
“Yep.”
                                    * 
“Are you forgiving, about what was done?”  I questioned, a day or two later.
He pulled the skin of his tattoo into a small, window-like shape, but was silent.
“You had a friend,” I said.  “You told me when I was a kid.”
“We all had that friend...,” he said.
“And it was some guy you never knew?”  
“Who says you have to know your friends?” he said. 
“You're not talking sense,” I replied impudently. 
He mutated into a stillness I had not witnessed before. 
“Viktor,” he said.  
“Viktor?”
“A man who stood in a hut in nineteen forty five.  Two and a half thousand Jews froze and starved, and he stood there to protect one of his own.”
“Ok,” I said, chilled by the sepulchral drop in his tone, shutting the conversation down.  I did not want to hear what I had in adolescent petulance cajoled him to speak.
“You jilted little punk,” he said thickly, his pitch rising, his face reddening. “Let me tell you, let me tell you some things about some things...!”