Authors: Melanie Rae Thon
How can this be?
She had golden hair, silky hair, human hair curled in ringlets. I would crush her now myself to stop remembering.
My mother’s uncle Tamás died because his neck was thin, his beard long, his only gift teaching Hebrew. Her father lived seven months, longer than most, because he was a carver, a craftsman, because for a time, a short time, Bertók Spier’s clever hands proved useful. Long ago, he’d carved an altar for a synagogue in Vienna. He carved headboards with vines and flowers, cradles that never tipped, caskets without nails. In silence, in delight, he carved nutcrackers and puppets. Bertók Spier carved the delicate legs of chairs and tables. In Sárvár on the Rába River, no one asked, no one cared, if these legs belonged to Jews or Gentiles. For his son and daughters and nieces and nephews, he carved tiny bats with folded wings, slender does, sweet-smiling camels. Once he carved a tiny whale, a fine filigree of myrtle with a little man inside, a man you could see, a man with a dove, a miniature Yonah.
How can this be?
Even Bertók the carver couldn’t explain how he’d done it.
In the camp, he extracted gold from the mouths of the dead, found emeralds stashed in the bowel, sapphires the soul didn’t need, diamonds his neighbors had swallowed.
My mother’s mother, Amiela, died because she carried Tavi, three years old and always hungry.
Efron, Jozsua, Tzili, Judit.
Her cousin Datiel lived because the sun struck his face and he looked stronger than he was: older, taller, almost fair, almost pale, enough like them, almost a soldier. He wheeled carts of the dead and almost dead. He heaved them into ovens.
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled.
Datiel survived the war and hung himself twenty-six years later.
They arrived at night on the train. Work would make them free—if they were quick, if the wolf dogs didn’t kill them. Somewhere in the eerie fog, an orchestra played Hungarian Rhapsodies to soothe them.
Are you mad? Is this possible?
And then they began to see, yes, a piano and a cello, a violin dancing in the air, in the mist, and a woman with a baton, standing very straight, and then forty other women, female shapes shifting behind solid instruments, ghosts gathering themselves from smoke, from soot, from that weird black dust everywhere falling. Music muted the cries of children, and they thought:
If the music doesn’t stop, anything—anything at all—is bearable.
My mother’s grandmothers died because they were old; her grandfather because he hobbled behind them. Aunt Lilike took the hand of a child, a little boy lost, a waif abandoned. Lilike and the son of a stranger died together.
You lived because your shoes almost fit and you found a piece of wire to close them, because you stole a spoon from a dead man, because you tore his shirt to wrap your feet, and your feet didn’t freeze and swell and blister, and the sores didn’t cripple you; because you pulled the straw from the dead one’s pants to stuff your own pants, because you weren’t afraid, because the dead were dead and couldn’t hurt you.
You died because you failed to button your tunic to the top, because you failed to make your bed flat and tuck the corner, because you failed to stand three hours in the freezing rain as the guards called your ridiculous numbers, as their dogs searched for the ones who didn’t answer, the ones who failed to rise, the ones whose hearts and minds had failed them.
One day my mother thought she would run into the buzzing fence and end it. A song, it was, electricity in wire, a sweet, high hum, the
Mephisto Waltz
tenderly tempting. She didn’t care about her own life or the fifty women the guards might shoot in retribution.
I dared God to accuse me of murder.
But she stepped outside the barracks into the light and the sun on her bare arm felt warm, and the sun on her skin saved her. Another day, later, near the end though she didn’t know it, my mother moving rocks in the river thought,
So easy to go down, so cold, so sweet to slip under
, but twilight came and the sky turned pink and lavender beyond the trees, and a prayer began to pass among the women, a whispered song between them, as if in a single breath they’d all remembered the day, the hour,
Shabbat
, the holy night, the queen, the bride already here, radiant among them. They had one choice: to live as long as possible, to let God hold them in the river.
Hungarian, Greek, Czech, Polish—Lithuanian, French, German, Italian— suddenly we spoke as one; suddenly we knew one language: Shalom aleichem malachei hasharet malachei elyon mi melech malchei hamlachim Hakadosh Baruch Hu. And the angels came and hovered there, close, though we worked, though we couldn’t stop working, and God gave us each an extra soul, a holy spirit for the Sabbath—He gave us five souls; He gave us fifty; He gave us all the dead swirling down this river. Did we sing aloud or only dream this dream together? The guards would have killed us if they’d heard, wounded us one by one, left us facedown in the water, silent women, floating Jews, free at last, saved, delivered, but the wind in the trees and the water over rocks were the prayer and the song, and the river and the night and the wind saved us.
How can this be?
You lived because your bones heard
Aida
in your sleep, and the beat of the drums kept your heart beating.
My father said,
Even Moses didn’t want to die. Old as he was, Moses feared the Angel of Death. When he climbed Mount Nebo at last, Moses asked God to kiss his mouth and eyelids.
Father, did you wait for God? Did He kiss you as you fell? Did you die afraid, or surrender in wonder?
Helen, I confess, I kissed you: as Idris lifted you out of my arms, I pressed my lips to your leg—to taste, to know, to love you.
I do love you.
Two hours gone since we lost her. Is love fiercer than death?
Mother, are you with me?
I thought of Helen’s mother, the words she might hear, her husband the first to know, the one to tell her, the terrible sound she might make as slowly she understood him. Do the dead die when they die, or only when we believe it? My father lay dead nine hours before I knew it, and all that time, if I imagined him at all, I imagined him walking in the water, in the world, beside me.
The police found Helen’s father first, Peter Kinderman, a pharmacist downtown, and when he saw them, he was afraid, but not for Helen—he never thought,
It’s her, she’s gone, my beautiful daughter.
He thought accidental overdose, a mistake in a prescription, a stranger dead somewhere or in a coma, his fault, or the fault of one of his technicians. He made the stuttering policeman say it three times.
Drowned, today, this morning, Helen.
He walked from the drugstore to the library, thirteen blocks in the cold without hat or gloves, and the wind bit and he liked it, the small hurt, the swirling snow, the distraction, the drifting in and out, the seconds when it was still untrue, a terrible mistake, someone else’s drowned child, but not his, not Helen, not possible.
How Helen would suffer when she heard it!
She’d hold him, her distraught father, while he wept in relief and terror, grieving now for another man, feeling him, the one he didn’t know, the father of a child missing.
Oh, Helen!
She was always the most sensitive of his children, the quiet one, Helen who came from the womb with her eyes wide open, just a few minutes old and already watching. She would understand his sorrow, the hours of pain when she didn’t come home, when he began to take it in, when he couldn’t breathe, when he had to invent words to tell his wife and somehow find his other children.
Peter Kinderman climbed the winding stairs to the fourth floor of the library because even the glass elevator looked too small, the air inside too close, too much like water—the fourth floor where you can see paintings by Fra Angelico or read the words of Mahatma Gandhi—where you can visit Saigon, Machu Picchu, Wounded Knee— where you can climb Denali. The copy of John James Audubon’s
Birds of America
lies in a glass case, protected. If you took it out, it would stand three feet high and be too heavy to steal. Sixty pounds!
Oh, how Helen loved it.
Clare Kinderman saw her husband and thought,
What a lovely surprise, not my birthday, not our anniversary, and here he is in the middle of the day, Peter looking handsome and sad, cold and disheveled, but surely he’s not sad because he’s come in time for lunch, like the days when we were first married, before the children, before Vonda Jean and Helen, before Jay and Karin and Juli, when the day was too long to be apart, when he had to come, sometimes three times a day, just to look, just to see that I was still here, still his, still real.
He took her outside to say it, so she could wail into the wind, so she wouldn’t have to hold it in her body as he held it, so the cry wouldn’t splinter her ribs the way his ribs were splintering.
I was not there; I did not hear the sound my mother made when she found my father in the shower, when she understood she’d lost him too, her one, her only one, her love, her Leonard.
A Sunday morning, late summer, and Mother had gone to the hospital to play her violin for the children. Leonard Lok slipped free of his body fast to follow her, to hear her play, to see Éva swaying to the songs inside her—
one more time, my love, my darling
—before his spirit dispersed, before his holy sparks scattered. She stood with her back to the windows, face in shadow, bright glass blazing behind her—Éva Lok playing her violin for the children, giving them her wild joy, the miracle of survival in these strings, an endless hymn of praise, a vision of their own perfection— Éva playing Kodály’s
Dances of Galánta
and
Marosszék
, each one a fusion, a rondo and a rhapsody, playing with her beloved Zoltán, imagining him, the teacher who visited her school, who believed every child could sing, who said every child
must
sing whenever possible.
Hum if you don’t have breath; let your body feel it.
And so in his spirit, in his name, Éva taught a simple song to these children in wheelchairs, the ones without hair, the ones without fingers, the ones with fluttery hearts and failing kidneys, the burned boy with a patchwork face, skin sewn from the skin of others. He’d made a collage of himself, a picture pasted together: right ear of a pig and tail of a peacock, open eyes of an owl, closed mouth of a seal. He offered it to my mother when she came, a gift, and she saw who it was before he said it, and she touched his left ear, the ear that was really his, the soft ear, the ear that could still hear and flush and feel, and she said,
It’s beautiful, you’re beautiful, thank you.
How can this be?
Because the boy’s mother fell asleep, and the boy and his sister torched the drapes, because they wanted to see a wall of fire, because the sister furled herself inside, and the brother tried to save her.
My father blazed in the window behind Éva. As light, he fell on bare heads and throats; as light, he warmed naked legs and shoulders; as light, he transfigured all these shattered faces. My mother saw, and almost understood, but couldn’t believe it.
And then a cloud passed, and as light leaves, he left them.
How can a man die so swiftly, without resistance, without a witness? How can anyone die in her own bed, or his own shower? How can a twenty-two-year-old girl who learned to swim before she walked drown in a pool? How can you survive the worst and not live forever?
Helen, I can’t make sense of it.
Last week, three deer stood still on our back porch, transfixed by their own reflections. The next day, I saw one struck by a van, and I knew her, I remembered her, lighter and smaller than the other two, hungry like them because of the snow, desperate, and so they’d come down from the hills into the city. She leaped away, a miracle, unharmed by the van, alive in the moment. But later, I was sure I felt her in the snow, hidden in the park by the river. I looked for her; I don’t know what I meant to do—lie down with her, as I lay with my mother, float away at last, give myself to water? I was certain she would die that night, that inside her starved body ruptured organs bled, weak muscles quivered.
How can this be?
Even now, I hear Helen’s mother softly say it.
My mother who lost everyone she loved rocked me in her thin arms one day and said,
I have you and Liam and Seth and Davia.
My mother whispered,
My life for this, God has mercy.
My father and his sister Antje lived because their mother had a cousin of a cousin in America, a man with a farm and a wife but no children. Miklós Zedek agreed to take these two if they could learn to milk cows and pluck chickens, if they weren’t afraid to twist a neck and break it, if they promised to love mucking stalls, shoveling snow, heaving thirty-pound pumpkins.
His mother said,
We’ll come soon; we’ll come after.
She meant when they’d saved enough to travel, enough to bribe, enough to secure visas. She packed their finest clothes: Antje’s lace blouse with feather stitching, her velvet skirt, Leonard’s black wool jacket with sapphire silk lining. Worthless, she knew: they weren’t going to wear silk and lace on a farm outside Buffalo.
Buffalo: what did it mean, and where was it?
She ironed Leonard’s trousers and handkerchiefs though Antje begged her to stop, though Antje said:
On the boat, everything you’ve packed will crumple.
She darned their socks, toes and heels, saving her children’s lives with tiny knots and stitches. Their mother sang as she worked, peculiar melodies known only to her, giddy and bright, then suddenly mournful. Ironing was perfect bliss, folding her children’s clothes the piercing joy she’d keep forever.
Their father wrote:
There’s been an unexpected delay.
Their mother added:
Just a few more months. Be good, my darlings.
And they were good, very good, and they slept in one room, in one bed, at the back of the house where the rain came through the roof, and the heat never reached them. Their father wrote:
The American Consulate has not approved our applications to immigrate. We’ll try again in four months. Keep your faith in us. We’ll be there.
His scrawled note at the bottom of the page sounded like a whisper, a secret sputtered at the last moment before he could scratch it out or regret it:
Better we have to wait. Your mother’s been sick, nothing serious, just some fluid in her lungs—she’ll be well again when she sees blue sky and the weather’s warmer. She sends her love. She says don’t worry.