The Sunflower Forest (12 page)

Tired as I was, once in bed, I couldn’t sleep. I heard my father come in eventually. Then the house returned to silence. After another hour or so of trying to sleep, I rose, took a blanket and my pillow and went downstairs. Turning the radio on and tuning it to the all-night station, I curled up under my woolly blanket on the couch.

I fell asleep dreaming that Aaron was actually Klaus and that Paul and I couldn’t see each other any more because that made us brother and sister. The funny thing about the dream was that Mama was not in it. It was Bo. She was my mother.

I
n the morning I woke stiff and sore from sleeping on the couch and uncomfortably tired. Dad came into the kitchen while I was making a pot of tea. Rumpled and weary looking, he rummaged out the instant coffee and a mug, poured hot water from the kettle into it, stirred it with the handle of a fork lying on the counter and walked out of the kitchen with it. He was already in the hallway before he paused, turned around and looked back at me. Then without saying anything, he came back and embraced me. It began as a one-armed hug because he was still holding the coffee. But then he set the mug down on the table and hugged me with both arms. Holding me painfully close for just a moment, he then let go and left with his drink. He said absolutely nothing.

The shower went on upstairs. Within half an hour my father was back, his hair wet and slicked down. He drank a second cup of coffee while standing beside the counter, watching me pack his lunch. He asked if I would mind staying home with Mama. I said, sure, I’d do it, without even stopping to think whether I minded or not. He nodded, smiled and rumpled my hair in an agitated caress.

My sister, who did not have a particularly thick veneer of civility in the best of times, was hopeless that morning. She was too tired to want to get up. The blouse she planned to wear was in the dirty clothes basket. I refused to boil her an egg, and by the time she had finished complaining about it, there wasn’t time for her to do it herself. Then she couldn’t find her gym shoes or her social-studies book. There was no change in the house for lunch money, and I wasn’t about to let her take the five dollars I found where my mother kept the grocery money. In the end, she left for school crying because I made her peanut-butter sandwiches and Mama always made her tuna.

Mama was still asleep. Sometime in the night she apparently had awakened and gone into the bedroom, because when I looked in, she was stretched out on her stomach across their big bed. It must have been very close to morning when she had, because she had not bothered to get under the covers but had Dad’s bathrobe over her instead. The remainder of the bed was in jumbled confusion from my father’s getting up.

She still wore her clothes from the day before. Only her shoes were off, and they lay, one on top of the other, at the foot of the bed. Some of the tension had gone from her face. Her jaw was relaxed. Her forehead was smooth. But even asleep her expression remained troubled.

She slept a long time. On the occasions when she could do so, my mother had a tremendous capacity for sleep. She slept like one dead, and next to nothing woke her. I sat downstairs, bored and unsettled. Clearing away the dishes, I washed them, dried them and put them away. I scrubbed out the sink. I sorted the laundry and started a load. I vacuumed, picked up the debris of newspapers and magazines and other paper that seemed to collect in the living room. Even doing the ironing did not fill up enough time.

At one point I came across Megan’s books about the war. Aimlessly, I paged through them. The worst aspect of the war to me was that it had happened so much before I was born. I hated thinking about it because of that. Where
had
all the good people gone? Why had no one stopped all the atrocities? I would have. If I had been born in time, I would have done something. But I didn’t even stand a chance. It seemed brutally unfair to me that I should have to live with the consequences of something I had never been given the opportunity to prevent.

Shortly after noon, Mama woke up. She came stumbling drunkenly into the kitchen, her hair dishevelled, her face swollen from so much sleep. Dropping into a chair at the table, she struggled with her packet of cigarettes. I made a cup of coffee for her.

‘Oh
Scheisse
,’ she muttered under her breath, and with eyes still half-closed, she braced her head with one hand and smoked the cigarette. She wasn’t beautiful then. My father was forever saying how much he thought Mama looked like Princess Grace. Sort of a Germanic Grace Kelly. From over by the sink I stood watching her. My mama was nobody’s princess.

She looked up. ‘When did O’Malley come back?’

‘He never really left, Mama. He was just sitting out in front in the car.’

She lit a second cigarette from the end of the first. Thoughtfully, she rubbed along the skin of her left temple and stared into space. I turned and took a can of tomato soup from the cupboard to make lunch for us.

She was still sitting, still staring when I came to the table with crackers and the soup in enamel mugs. With the fingers of one hand, she’d begun working the tangles from her hair, but it was a casual, undeliberated motion.

‘He’s a good man, O’Malley,’ she said, ‘but he has no dreams.’

‘He’s got dreams, Mama,’ I said, wondering how she could say that when my father’s dreams seemed so plaintively obvious to me.

She shook her head. ‘No. He has no dreams. He has fantasies. But no dreams. Nothing to pursue.’ She looked over, focusing her eyes on me for the first time. ‘When you marry, don’t make that mistake. Marry a man with dreams.’

I said nothing.

Silence. She lifted the mug and sipped the soup. She was staring again.

‘I had dreams,’ she said. ‘Once.’ Then she looked at me again. ‘How old are you now?’

‘Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen next month.’

She nodded. Looking into the mug of soup, she nodded a second time. I could hear birds singing somewhere. Not terribly melodically. Sparrows, most likely.

‘I was seventeen,’ she said. ‘Then. When he was born.’

A pause. Elbows on the table, she clasped her hands together and put the tips of her thumbs between her teeth. ‘Did I ever tell you what they were doing there? At that hostel? Where they took me from Jena.’

I shook my head.

‘It was a
Lebensborn
hostel.’ She glanced over at me. ‘Do you know about that?’

Again, I shook my head.

‘Fountain of Life. That’s what it means. They were breeding us. We were selected for our Aryan qualities. We were the source of their fountain.’

There was a slight lisp to her words because she still had the ends of her thumbs against her teeth. She gazed at the tabletop. ‘Some of the girls knew. Some of them volunteered, I think. I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t allowed to talk to them very often.’

She paused for breath and then fell in pensive silence.

‘I was sixteen when I first arrived. Sixteen and four months old. It was November 15th. And there were trees outside my window. Lime trees. And I thought, Mara, you are such a silly goose to be so scared.’ She looked at me and smiled slightly. ‘You see, I
was
scared. I was terrified. I didn’t know what they wanted, why they’d sent me there. All the other students with foreign birth certificates they deported from Jena. But me …’ She looked away again. ‘But when I looked out the window, I thought, this can’t be such a bad place. There are lime trees here, like at home.’

Her voice grew very soft, hardly about a whisper, and I had to lean forward to hear her clearly.

‘I was very innocent then. A child really. I’d only had my periods for two years and I did not think of myself as a woman. I was very much a virgin, even in my mind. I didn’t know things.’ She shook her head. ‘I just did not know.’

She paused, searching the grain in the tabletop for something I could not see. ‘He was born there. On a bed with no sheets. I said to them, “Please give me a sheet.” I was lying on a rubber mat and I was cold. I was freezing. And it hurt so much. I hadn’t thought it would hurt like that. “Please,” I said to them, “let me lie on a sheet.” And when he was born, I wept.’

She unclasped her hands and took up the mug of soup. She stared into it. ‘I was so full of milk for him. It came in fast, and I couldn’t stop it from leaking. They would hold him up in front of me and he would cry and the milk would just run. It ruined all my blouses. My breasts, oh God, my breasts hurt me. And I was so ashamed. I felt like a little child who cannot get to the toilet in time. They’d hold him and watch to see my blouse get wet. But if I cried, they laughed.’ One hand in a gentle, unconscious movement came up to cup a breast.

She glanced briefly in my direction. ‘You see, I was just a child myself. Hardly turned seventeen. And I will tell you, I did not know much. I decided to put toilet paper in my bra. Wads of it. To keep the milk from showing. It seemed so indecent to stain my blouses like that. And I was humiliated when they made me cry. So I put all these wads of toilet paper against my breasts. And put on my blouse. It was the one Mutti gave me, the white one with lace at the collar that Oma had made. It was my only good one. The only one left without stains.’

Her voice grew faint. ‘They came with him. It was just before lunchtime. Eleven-thirty. I think. And he was crying so hard. My breasts were full. They ached, and I felt them leaking. But it didn’t show.’

She reached for another cigarette. ‘When it didn’t come through on to my blouse, the woman holding him said, “She has no more milk.” So, you see, they took him away. I was of no more use to them then.’ Her voice went flat. ‘And I never saw him again.’

Mama went upstairs and took a long shower. She must have been in the bathroom the better part of an hour and a half. I washed the dishes and put them away. When my mother returned to the kichen, she had changed into clean clothes. Her hair was wet, the comb marks still showing. The earlier mood had dispelled. She was brisk and full of purpose again.

‘Will you come with me?’ she asked. I didn’t need to ask where.

‘Mama, Daddy’s not going to like this. He doesn’t want you to go out there, I think.’

She shrugged. ‘He doesn’t understand.’

‘Mama …’ It was a plea.

She glanced over at Megan’s books, now sitting on the counter. Going over to them, she picked up one and opened it. ‘Whose are these?’ she asked. ‘Yours?’

I shook my head. ‘Megan’s. She got them at the library.’ I watched fearfully as she paged through it.

‘Megan’s, hmm?’ she said.

‘I told her not to. She didn’t have anyone’s permission. She just did it. You know Megan.’

Mama stopped to study one of the photographs. ‘Is Ravensbrück in here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

She lifted her head and regarded me across the book. ‘You know what Ravensbrück was, don’t you?’

Slowly, I nodded.

Her expression grew into a taut, sardonic sort of smile, and she flipped through the rest of the pages. ‘Some day, Les, I’ll tell you about that. When you want to know, you don’t have to get books. I’ll tell you.’

‘They aren’t my books, Mama.’

She nodded. ‘I didn’t think they were.’

I went with her. There was no point in not going. She would have gone without me if I hadn’t.

Mama knew where she was heading. We walked silently through town and then out along the most southerly country road. She never talked to me. She never said a word. Hands in the pockets of her jacket, she just walked.

We came to the spot Megan had shown me the day before. Mama squeezed between the strands of barbed wire and went down a gully toward the creek. We walked there for a few hundred yards until we came to a decaying cottonwood trunk, fallen across the creek bed. Mama sat down on the lee side, her back against the brown, rotting trunk.

The day was cold. It remained overcast, and although it did not rain, you could feel the damp chill. The gully afforded very little protection from the wind. Mama took out her cigarettes and matches. Cupping her hand, she lit one, then leaned back and waited.

About half past three we saw him. He was a small boy. I doubt that he could have been six. He wore patched overalls over a T-shirt and an old denim jacket a size or two too large.

‘Hello,’ Mama said to him.

He whooped with delight. Hopping down over the rocks deftly, he settled into the lee of the fallen cottonwood beside Mama. He cast a brief, wary glance in my direction but that was all.

He was an odd-looking boy. His hair was lank and fair, that ashen tone of blond that is more grey than yellow, and it was cut in a curiously old-fashioned style, as if someone had put a mixing bowl upside down on his head and trimmed around it with dull scissors. But what was more striking were his eyes. They were very, very pale, like the eyes of a blind dog. Whether they were blue or green I never did decide because there was literally almost no colour in the irises at all, just the black of the pupils and a faint rim separating the irises from the white.

‘Here,’ Mama said, ‘I’ve brought you something.’ She took a Hershey bar from the pocket of her jacket.

‘For me?’ the boy asked and bounced up on to his knees with excitement. He grinned. I noticed he still had all his baby teeth. In one of the top front ones there was a conspicuous silver filling. It gave him an unexpectedly run-down appearance, the kind of sullied imperfectness you don’t associate with young children.

‘I’m going to call you Mrs Nice,’ he said to Mama and patted her cheek. ‘You know what? That’s what I told Teddy. He’s my brother. He’s eight. I said, I met Mrs Nice down at the creek. He don’t believe me. He thinks I made you up.’ He unwrapped the Hershey bar and shoved a full half of it into his mouth at once. ‘I don’t care. You’re
my
Mrs Nice, ain’t you? Don’t got to share nothing with Teddy!’

Mama smiled.