All We Are

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tonimehler
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All We Are

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All We Are



Salek tacked burlap on the window frame and I took giddy steps across the three meters we’d been allotted. But halfway through my second pass I stopped.
This was...theirs, I said.
Salek held me in his gaze for a second before he clambered from the table and put unsteady hands on my shoulders. Framed in the window he’d abandoned half uncovered, two American soldiers crossed the street. Broad grins. White teeth gripping filtered cigarettes. Pointing at something in this picturesque holiday resort packed with things to see.
And with other newly married concentration camp survivors.
Like theirs, our marriage had embraced brothers whose smooth faces bent over books on kitchen tables; sisters padding shoeless around sleeping infants; mothers fanning coal stoves and stirring fragrant potato soups; fathers not yet home from smithies and workshops and stores and classrooms; grandmothers and grandfathers; uncles and aunts and cousins. Children.
We’ll give them new lives. In our land, Guta, Salek promised as we stepped from the blue and white wedding canopy an aid society sent to displaced persons camps. But surviving your family drains you of We’ll give them new lives. And fills the hollow with All that’s been mutilated beyond repair. An opaque, barren guilt usurps you. Nightmares become your children. The only ones you deserve.
Or want.
Ever again.
A desolate drum that beat louder at night, as I lay warm under the green army blanket, safe in Salek’s wiry arms.
He stroked my hair. My back. Go to sleep, Guta.
New lives. Our land. New lives. Our land.
Frozen toes swelling like tubers, black against the snow. Gored horses. Angry bulls. Flames. But one night, just before dawn, just before I woke, brown soil that crumbled, moist and warm, between my fingers.
It’s a desert, Salek said, amused, when I told him.
It won’t always be a desert, I said, my cheeks hot with shame for the reprieve the dream had brought. I bent over the unmade bed to hide my reddened face and mumbled,
I have to straighten things out around here.
Not that there was much to do in the gasthaus room that like the rest of this inn and other houses in town, the Americans had turned into displaced persons quarters that offered an almost ordinary life.
Unlike the place we’d been before. A former concentration camp where we slept on the shelves on which our captors had stored us. Where only a favored few had jackets or scarves to hang over striped prison uniforms. Where we weren’t allowed beyond the barbed wire because the soldiers thought us a threat to the people outside.
Where there was little difference between now and before.
Aliyah Bet, Salek had preached.
Aliyah Bet, the secret escape movement that disobeying the British mandate against Jewish immigration to Palestine, rescued Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe during the war. Now it filled its forbidden sailings with survivors.
Aliyah Bet, Salek still urged. Family. Home. Identity. Freedom.
Yeah. No. Thanks. the frayed, gray-haired husband of the couple in the room next to ours said, shaking his head. British patrols capture the ships. And stick the passengers in camps on Cyprus.
Behind barbed wire, muttered his wife, wrapping her U.S. army jacket around her gaunt, tired self, starting to shuffle away, pulling her husband along. There’s no barbed wire here. Enough food. You can go where you want when the sun shines.
Not every ship. Not every one. Salek said through clenched teeth, his head bent so low the sound sank into his chest.
I slipped my hand into his.
You don’t need to convince me, Salek.
The brown soil that in my dream, crumbled moist and warm between my fingers, had done it for him.
*
While we waited for Aliyah Bet to signal it was time to make our way to one of the ports from which the overladen, barely sea-worthy cargo ships sailed, we walked.
Up and down this small hamlet in the rolling, wooded, Baden-Württemberg countryside east of the Rhine, on narrow cobblestone streets that seemed to grow narrower with every step we took, past people spilling onto stoops of overcrowded group houses that had been family homes, in front of artless barracks whose overnight construction stood raw amid the charming half-timbered fachwerkhäuser. And one early morning, three months after we’d arrived, to a long meadow fenced by shattered wood posts. High grass rustled between our legs and curved around a tall, thick ash tree.
Probably a pasture before the war, Salek said.
A green caterpillar emerged from the vines that wound around the broken stakes and I put my finger in front of it. The worm hesitated, standing up and swaying from side to side, then inched itself over and kept on going.
*
When we got back to the village I turned toward the small Quonset hut the Americans used as an office. They posted a new list of survivors every day. Salek looked up at the sun, squinting. It’s almost noon, he said. And then, as if I hadn’t understood, Too much time’s gone by, Guta.
Yet at the bulletin board he searched the typewritten page with a trembling index finger and in a kind of litany, whispered the names.
Abel, Aberlieb, Abranel... Buchwald... Chagall...
Halfway down the list, his neck turned a violent red. This... is my older brother’s name, he said, And the place he was born. And when.
*
By the time we made it to the front of the line and crowded through the narrow door of the corrugated steel shed, the sun had set. Just a minute, the young blond soldier signaled, tugging again and again on the string that worked the lone electric bulb. As soon as the light turned on, Salek spoke up.
Jacob Painsky, he said. Katowice, Poland, December 14, 1913. My older brother... Three years older.
The soldier lifted a worn, caramel colored notebook from a shelf, turned its pages, took a scrap of paper from a stack on the corner of the desk, scribbled on it, and handed it to Salek, saying almost in a whisper, It looks like Jacob Painsky was here today.
Salek shot out of the office, howling.
As he ran, his mournful wails faded into ragged breaths and by the time I reached him (my right foot, its toes lost to frostbite, slowed me down) even my wheezes were louder. He offered me the piece of paper he’d crumpled in his fist.
Oh, Salek, I cried, Salek, Jacob’s address? That’s what the soldier gave you? Jacob’s address? I have to stop. My foot... I lowered myself to the ground. You know we can’t go right now, don’t you, Salek? It’s almost night. Salek?
Behind him, an old farmer, gnarled hands on the ropes that harnessed him to a straw-heaped clattering dray, plodded closer. Salek tore the piece of paper from my grasp and flung himself toward the man shouting, Do you know where this is? The old man glanced at the writing and shook his head. Then he scratched his bent-over back, smiled a sad, mostly toothless smile, and started to move on.
Wait. Wait. Please, I yelled. I ran up to him and told him the address. He pointed straight ahead.
*
The year before, on the morning of March 29, 1945, my twenty-ninth birthday, in the dazzling countryside edged by the waves of beech trees that are the Odenwald, just outside Dossenheim on the Rhine river flood plain, a company of the 144th Infantry, while advancing on Heidelberg, five kilometers south, ran up against three hundred Germans who raked the ground with machine and flak guns. The Americans fired back.
The quaint town was unharmed. But the houses that had, in preparation, been painted in camouflage colors still darkened its otherwise colorful streets.
A curtain fluttered in a first-floor window of one of those masked facades and a placid German face disappeared behind it.
I pointed with my eyes.
Salek, who despite the sleepless night had regained his usual composure, loosened my hand from his and with two fingers, traced an ever-expanding coil on my palm. Let’s walk in circles and make them bigger and bigger as we go, he whispered. We’ll find it.
*
It wasn’t his brother who opened the door.
She was hardly taller than a child. Her unevenly hacked brown hair bristled around the small, perfectly formed ears that were all I could see of the face she buried against Salek’s chest. Tattooed numbers marked the arm she bent, moaning, around his neck. With the other, she held him in a grip so close I couldn’t breathe.
When she finally let go of him she waved me over.
Come. Come...
I’m Maya, she said when I reached her. Salek’s cousin.
Guta... I answered, great mouthfuls of air interrupting my words... His...wife.
Maya closed her eyes. Her jaw fell open. One beat. Two...
She put her arms around me.
And led us into a dim room, acrid with the green laundry soap smell of my childhood. Lit a candle stub and set it on the table. Took a rag from the pocket of her overly large, discolored shift and wiped the chairs even though there was nothing to wipe. Salek caught her frenzied hands midair, between his own, keeping them, it seemed, from flying away.
Jacob? he asked.
She nodded.
Anyone else?
Tova, she said.
Here? Salek asked.
They’ll be back soon.
We lowered ourselves into the damp chairs. Stared, as if holding a séance, at the candle flame. Maybe half an hour, even perhaps a whole hour, passed before the door opened. Tova held a small bunch of celery and Jacob, behind her, a packet wrapped in greasy paper. He dropped it when he saw Salek, and two or three marrowbones rolled to the corners of the room. Jacob reached for the bones with his eyes but didn’t move. Neither did Salek.
Before I knew it, Maya and Tova had slipped their hands in mine. Holding tight to each other, we wrapped ourselves around the brothers and pressed them into each other’s arms.
*
Maya collected the marrowbones, washed them with the green soap I’d smelled, placed them in a dented aluminum pot, and got on her knees to scrub the places where they’d landed. Tova, Maya’s older sister (much taller, as if the five years had served to stretch her out) closed the door, crouched against it, and just loud enough to hear, whispered, Isn’t it wonderful? Then she said it again, a little louder this time, as if whoever she was talking to was just on the other side. Several seconds passed. She unraveled her body one limb at a time. Smiled. Touched my cheek. Tucked wisps of hair behind my ears. I’ll make the soup, she said, dragging herself toward the small stove, murmuring how lucky she’d been to find the celery that thrust its small green leaves from her old string bag.
*
It’s really good, I said, my eyes shifting from my hands to the scratched table top. To my bowl.
I’m glad, Maya said.
You like it, Tova said.
I would learn that Tova usually finished the sentences Maya started. Unless she said something sad. Then Tova’s eyebrows shot up, and instead of speaking she pursed her lips into a small round grimace that lingered between her younger sister’s unhappy phrases, until defeated by that thin damp circle, they dissolved into a sheepish smile.
Tova handed me another piece of bread.
Maya poured me a little more soup.
Jacob said, eyes darting about in hasty, oblique glances that made his pale eyebrows dance, You’ll stay here with us.
Salek opened his mouth as if trying to breathe in words.
New lives, Salek. Our land.
But he said nothing. Instead, after yet another huge breath, he started shaking his brother’s hands up and down, more and more enthusiastically each time. It made Jacob laugh. It made us all laugh.
Tova made a pallet for us in the kitchen.
One day led to the next.
Maya cleaned and washed and mended and folded and polished everything, even what wasn’t visible to the rest of us.
Tova hurried about smiling, patting our arms and shoulders and cheeks, soothing scratches and scrapes, comforting us. Mothering us.
I cooked what we found or managed to get with ration cards.
You understand, don’t you, Guta? Salek had said that first night, curling around me on the pallet.
I...
We can’t go now. Tova is too frail. And Jacob... It’s like he’s going to explode. He just drums his fingers, even when he eats.
I...can’t...stay... Here.
I’ll look for a place to grow things. Raise rabbits. I’ve seen them down by the river.
The bleak drum in my head beat out rab-bits, rab-bits.
And then, Salek?
Then it’ll be up to the rabbits, he said, putting his arms around me.
I didn’t tell him that wasn’t what I meant.
*
Sometime during our second week, several tired-looking former partisans came to the door that Maya washed so often its forest green paint had started to blister (she washed everything every day in a cycle that never ended: walls, furniture, windows, food, clothes; nothing ever dried completely).
We’ve come to get you home, the woman in the group said, resting long fingers, nails bitten into nubs, on the doorjamb. To our land.
The day before, Tova and I had gone to forage a wild-grown patch. Pulling at the green shoots as if her life depended on it, exertion forcing the words from her like air from a deflating balloon, she mumbled,
Family is all we have. All we are.
Her words had lifted a jagged, deaf rush from the soil.
*
Now, as the small brigade’s vaguely feral scent seeped into our clean dampness, the subterranean grumbling rose again.
They’re not my family.
Jacob stood behind me, wringing his hands.
Maybe what I told him said after I shut the door was an apology. One Jacob didn’t know I owed him.
He listened without a word. When I was done he asked, looking at the floor, What color was it? The bus that took your boys?
Red.
I was almost taken away in a bus too, he said without lifting his head. A gray bus with the windows painted over. But there was no more room. The doors slammed shut, the soldiers turned their machine guns on us, and an officer, scarred from eyebrow to chin on the left side of his face, came out of nowhere.
We were three across in line. I was in the middle. The guy on my right started to pray.
Officer Scarface leered at him, hands on hips. What are you mumbling, you?
Please forgive me, Sir... I’m giving thanks, Sir.
Ja? And who are you thanking?
Please forgive me, Sir... I’m thanking God, Sir.
I’m the one you should thank, he said. Kiss my boots, he ordered.
The way he spread his legs reminded me of an SS recruitment poster I saw once. Anyway, the prisoners on either side of me fell on their knees.
You too, Office Scarface ordered, taking his pistol out of its holster, pointing it at me.
You’ll kill me whether I kiss your boots or not, I said in German.
The right side of his mouth lifted. His right eyebrow, too. If his eyes hadn’t been so blank, Guta, it might’ve been a smile. He kicked the men huddled at his feet until they lay still. Then he waved his head at the guards and his gun at me. Take him to the guardhouse. And with a brief glance at his feet, Finish them.
At the guardhouse, the Obersturmbannführer behind the desk glanced up from his papers for an instant. You speak German, huh? he said, You’ll translate our commands to the new arrivals.
On my second morning at the camp entrance, an older man wearing brown pants that still held a ghost of a crease limped forward. His heavy coat hung open. The lining was torn and stained but its dark blue fabric was rich and smooth. Silk maybe. He held a dirty-faced twelve or thirteen year-old boy by the hand. I explained what was wanted but a few dead moments went and he gave up nothing, not his watch, not his wedding ring.
The guards behind me cocked their guns.
The man reached in his pocket and brought out a very small purple drawstring bag. He angled his head toward the child and whispered, To buy... To buy... My grandson’s freedom...
I reached across the table for the little felt sack. Held it by a corner and shook it out on the table. Three tiny diamonds skittered out. But there was another one. I felt it between my thumb and forefinger.
On the way back from our soup break I slipped it through the fence that separated us from the women. For when we find our son, I told my wife. We’d managed to arrange it so we marched past at the same time every day, Guta. People did, you know? One day a month or so later, my wife didn’t come. The woman usually behind her in line made the thumbs down sign when she caught my eye. I never saw any of them again. Not my wife. Not my son. Not the rich man. Not, God forgive me, his grandson.
I held Jacob’s hand for a while. Then I got him a piece of bread and some of the vegetable stew I’d made the night before.
*
That night Salek told us he’d found a small abandoned cottage with a tiny yard covered in rubble. Near the railroad tracks, he said. The next morning while Tova and I cleared “our garden,” and Maya cleaned the cottage, Salek and Jacob brought our pallets and table and chairs and odds and ends.
On one of their trips Salek saw a rabbit and captured it, and on the next trip two more. The first was a female heavy with her litter.
Salek built cages for the pregnant rabbit and for one of the males. Tova butchered the other one. I was sickened by the smell of its blood and though I managed to cook it, I couldn’t eat it. Three days later Salek killed another rabbit and the little body was still warm when I began to skin it. Tova happened in the kitchen for a glass of water, found me gagging, wiped the tears from my eyes and nose, and took over. The next morning, the smell of blood still in my nostrils, I barely made it off my pallet before I threw up. In the days that followed, when I wasn’t throwing up I wanted to.
I’m sorry, I mumbled when Salek found me bent over the toilet.
He didn’t say much. But when someone told him of a farmer with a hen, he put a two week-old rabbit in each of his coat pockets and set out to walk the fifteen kilometers to the place that had been described to him. After having gone some five kilometers he turned back and got a third rabbit. Just in case. He was new at breeding animals and especially with the young ones, wasn’t sure he could tell the difference between the sexes. Their parts seemed so similar to him, so hidden and inconsequential. The farmer might not trade eggs for two small rabbits if he couldn’t breed them, and since farmers usually kept animals, Salek had no doubt the man would know at a glance. The third rabbit was insurance. You could at least make a meal of three small rabbits.
He returned after everyone was asleep, with three eggs, one for each rabbit. He woke me, and unwrapping the cloth in which he’d protected them put them in my lap, one after the other.
He didn’t tell me until years later, but he saved the eggshells and ground them into a fine powder he fed me, a little bit at a time, lost in potato pieces he mashed carefully and sprinkled with salt.
The nausea went away.
My breasts were swollen. Just a little.
Then came the craving for sweet things and sharp things and salty things.
And the familiar small throbbing in my belly.
I’m not replacing you, I whispered to my dead sons.
And foraged and dug in the garden and cooked and put food on the table and grasped for the flashes of hope that like skipping stones, sometimes skimmed my guilt. But the more I strained toward them, the faster they disappeared.
A lonely, exhausting week went by. And another.
Then, one morning as sharp and white and vivid as lightning, Tova handed me a cup of dandelion tea. Drink, she said, as if consecrating me to some holy pact.
She took my hand and laid it on my belly.
Salek is in the backyard, she said, reaching for the cup I’d drained, and pushing me out the door.
*
I found him building rabbit cages.
I’m pregnant, Salek, I said.
He sighed.
My knees gave way.
Salek cried out, reached for me, and begged, his voice cracking,
Please, Guta... Please... Did you think that I... No. No. It was relief... That you’re still... That you didn’t... Are you all right?
You knew I was pregnant?
He nodded, touched his lips to my hair, pushed me away, and looked at me as if to drink me, his eyes brimming with feelings he had never named. Would never name. Then he took me in his arms again and started dancing us to a some inner soundless cadence. One-two three. One-two-three. In circles. Wider and wider with every turn.
When we reached the cottage he called,
Jacob. Maya. Tova.
Jacob stepped from behind the growing stack of rabbit cages. Had he been watching? Listening? I was always taken aback by how tall he was. I thought of him as small and bent over and every time I was confronted with the real Jacob, his long-limbed self surprised me. Was it just me? Did the others also see Jacob as small and bent? Not Maya, I told myself as she ran into the yard from washing something and shook her wet hands at him, laughing. He seized her and tugged at the hair I’d trimmed into lively curls. She laughed again. Behind her, Tova drew herself toward me, her steps uncertain, cautious, encumbered.
With no more prelude than the music in his words, Salek announced,
Guta is carrying my child.
A train whistle sounded. We were very close to the tracks. As the railcars went by we stood in their shadow.
Salek cleared his throat.
And yours Jacob, and yours Tova, and yours Maya, he promised, his voice a living thing as fragile and brilliant as candlelight. Our family is going to have a child.

end
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