Authors: Melanie Rae Thon
Their mother died on the train. Their father died in Dachau.
Soon, after, delay, don’t worry.
You died because you kept your faith. You lived because you lost it. You sang when you heard how your mother died, because even if God was deaf, you wanted your mother to hear you.
My father carried three photographs to America: Greta and Hevel Lok six days after they married, a clear alpine lake and snow-covered mountains in the distance; Hevel as a child in short pants, a boy holding a butterfly on his finger; Greta Erhmann walking through a field of poppies, a hopeful girl, conceiving two children in her mind, dreaming her life to come:
I did; I saw you.
Hand-tinted, singular and precious—this photograph held their whole lives: together, apart, before, after. The artist had flushed the girl’s lips and shoulders, had revealed heat rising beneath the skin of cheeks and fingers. The poppies glowed, lit from inside, translucent yellow.
Vivid as these pictures were, they were not as strong as the visions in his mind, the last days, the last hours, Mother ironing perfect creases in his trousers, Mother holding Antje’s cape, dancing without music, swirling the long gray cape into a person. My father remembered his father on his knees the day the blond boys of Vienna became Nazi accomplices. They wore swastikas on their armbands and flicked their little dog whips. They wanted Hevel Lok to scrub the street, to wash away the Austrian cross some rebel nationals had painted. The doctor had known these three in their mothers’ wombs, had felt Dieter’s appendix before it burst and saved him, set Emil’s fractured legs after he leaped from the tree house, listened to Hendrik’s heart and lungs, laid his naked ear on the little boy’s bare chest when he had whooping cough—because the stethoscope was too cold, because he didn’t want to hurt him.
Dieter, Emil, Hendrik!
Hevel Lok wanted to say their names, to call them out of themselves, to remind them who he was, the one they knew, the man who loved them.
My father’s mother loved her children enough to let them go, to believe, to trust, to lie:
One day soon we will all be together.
My father the Austrian orphan became an American soldier, a liberator of Mauthausen who saw the dead—in pits, in the quarry, ones forced to leap, ones half-burned, ten thousand in one grave, hundreds never buried. He saw how hungry they were, the dead, limbs bent back, impossible angles, humans so thin their spines jabbed up through their bellies. Even now they cried and wasted.
So hungry!
The dead wanted my father to feed them. Each one was his own mother. His broken father lay in the pit, whispering the Kaddish ten thousand times, then starting over. Leonard Lok stared across the open grave and saw his unborn child on the other side, his daughter ready to leap, Margalit silently wailing.
He had never loved like this. He thought love might kill him.
How could he go home, and where was it?
Antje wrote:
121 inches of snow in Buffalo this winter and still snowing.
He wanted to be there, under the snow, with her, with them, to sleep without dreams and not be dead but never wake from it. He stayed behind to work in displaced-persons camps in Austria, then Germany. To his sister Antje he wrote:
I think I can be useful.
He meant nothing else makes sense. Nothing else matters.
Antje wrote:
People go over Niagara Falls in barrels, to say they did, to prove it’s possible.
He hated these foolish men who risked their lives on purpose.
The ones returned from the dead told him stories. They lived by chance, by grace, the sacrifice of another.
Because I lied when they asked if I could play accordion; because the orchestra needed a cellist; because someone else had died in the night; because I spoke German; because I pricked my finger and rubbed blood on my lips and cheeks to look rosy; because I was a chemist; because God filled my lungs and I sang “Un bel di” and this pleased an officer, and he chose me to watch over his children, because his wife was too tired after the baby, and I scrubbed their pots, and I scoured their toilets, and they weren’t unkind in their house, and I couldn’t hate them, and sometimes I stole the baby’s bottle, sometimes I sucked milk pumped from the breast of his mother, and I was always afraid, but she never saw and she never killed me.
They told of the ones set free who died anyway, hundreds a day, thousands in every camp, because the soldiers, the good ones, their liberators, gave them meat and chocolate and wine and cigarettes, and they ate too much, too fast, and their bowels twisted, and the food that promised life became the poison that killed them.
Sometimes he sat with the children while they ate, teaching them to take a little at a time, to trust that there was more: chicken soup and bread and oranges, carrots and peas and milk and potatoes. And then one day she was there, Éva Spier, an orphan just like him but not destroyed, Éva, a girl who still loved her life, the thin thread of it, who weighed thirty-four kilos, nine pounds more than the day she was liberated, Éva who gave bread to the birds, who said,
Enough to scatter on the ground, enough to
share, imagine.
The crumbs on the ground and the birds at this girl’s feet were life, all of it, all he needed forever and ever. If she could choose life, who was he to deny it? When the bread was gone, the birds pecked her bare feet, and she laughed, and he laughed with her, these two, these motherless children.
Imagine a love like this, here, after, in this place— imagine a life where laughter is possible.
To Antje he wrote:
I’ll never leave her.
But he did leave one bright Sunday morning while Éva played her violin, while light fell on the stunned faces of fifteen children, ones outside of time, ones caught in the rapture. Light was all the weight they could bear, light the only touch tender enough not to hurt them.
If my father had lived, he might have taught some of these children to float, to swim, to walk in water when their legs were too weak to stand, when their frail bones wouldn’t hold them. Children like these saved him every day, and every day he needed saving.
How the body loves life! How the body wants to heal!
On the last day of my mother’s life, I saw the sores on her feet closing.
How can this be?
I was glad when my mother died. I don’t deny it. I thought now she and I can rest, now we can stop hurting. But it doesn’t stop. You might be ten or sixteen or ninety, you might be a hundred and twenty, old as Moses, and still be afraid to leave this earth, still cling to your precious body. At the top of the mountain, you might insist God kiss your eyelids. You might surrender, yes—you might forgive the one who gave you life to lose—but still weep, still wish to touch the body, the face, the mouth of every one taken before you.
Four hours gone, and even I who held Helen Kinderman in my arms can’t believe it. She was radiant. Last week, I saw her in the shower naked. Today, she floated on the bottom. She distracted me. I started my flip turn too soon, and my feet missed the wall—no push, no glide, no rest for the weary—and I saw her again, the second time, just moments after the first, and I blamed her. I didn’t love her then, not enough to sense despair or know her sudden weakness in that moment. I swam to the shallow end and back, and I was slow, too slow, because I was tired, and I saw her the third time, right where I’d left her, twelve feet down, twelve feet under, and I think I was afraid, but I didn’t want to be afraid, so I was angry instead and I sputtered, and my mother said,
Dive
, and my mother said,
She needs you.
And I did dive; I held her in my arms, and I understood how it was, how it will be, and I kissed her leg as she rose, as Idris lifted her away from me, and I loved her as God loves—in helpless grief, in terrible pity—and then the others came,
so fast:
Louise and violette, the firemen and paramedic, the shaved boy, the swollen woman, the one-legged man, the unborn child—and I loved them too, and I knew that what had happened to Helen had happened to all of us, and forever.
How can this be?
There are a thousand ways to die, any day, any hour—yet one child lives, one little girl devoured by the wolf cuts herself free of his bowel and walks out of the woods into the sunlight. One woman in a pit moves, and another one says,
Can anybody hear me?
A wife pulls her husband from the shower in time, and a doctor makes an incision just big enough to slip his fingers inside, and this man, this doctor, this human being, holds the heart of another man in his hand while he repairs it.
Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, my daughter. You have seen God face-to-face. Now all suffering is over. Now it is time to forgive. Now it is time to surrender. Love is fiercer than death. I set myself as a seal upon your heart. Trust me.
And so I rose. I did as my mother asked. I did everything she’d taught me.
You lived because a woman hungrier than you, one too sick to swallow, gave you her soup and bread, and you saw that she was God, offering herself to you even as she lay dying.
I unrolled the white tablecloth with its white satin stitches, and my mother and father appeared, smelling of rosewater and myrtle, shimmering behind lush white leaves, then hiding themselves again so that I could see dove and goat, lamb and lion, wolf and weasel, snake and tiger— three fish swimming under roots, one tiny bear growling in the distance—owl and elephant, ram and raven: life everywhere, life abundant.
Now, this is the hour.
I imagined Davia walking from Rowland Hall to the McGillis School, five steep blocks, to wait for Seth and then walk two miles home, together. Every day she goes. They could take a bus, but never do.
Time to think
, she says,
and besides, I miss him.
She will not say she’s afraid. I know she can’t explain it. A child doesn’t need to hear a story to feel it. The story is there, trembling in the body and the blood, in the wind through the pines, over rocks in the river. The violin lies in its case, but the zither plays itself, and the song swells unspoken.
Let me speak now, my children. Let me tell you.
I saw Karin and Juli Kinderman coming home too, on the same bus, but not together, a kind of agreement they have, to pretend to be strangers, Juli a freshman at West High, Karin a senior. They’ll find their parents in the living room, and they’ll know their loss before they hear it. All their lives, Helen’s sisters will wonder why their father let them stay in school today, why he let Juli dress in drag to play Hamlet, why he let Karin learn to pose questions in italian.
Are you afraid? Are you hungry? Who is your favorite saint? Shall we go to the opera?
They’ll rage. How could their mother allow Karin to eat her lunch in peace while little Juli, Prince of Denmark, sneaked outside to lie in the bed of a truck, to get buzzed on cigarettes and blow smoke into the mouths of her two boyfriends? Forever and a day, Karin and Juli will blame their parents for these terrible hours, macaroni and cheese, hot ash, complete ignorance.
Peter Kinderman has found vonda Jean, has called her home from her honeymoon in Hawaii. When she heard her father’s voice, she thought:
He knows about the black-footed albatross and the black sand beaches, the orange amaryllis growing so fast I heard it, the pink hibiscus. He knows about
the first day, a waterfall with three rainbows, scarlet ‘apapane birds blazing through a forest so green it scared me. He knows the sea is bluer than the sky, the world upside down, heaven underwater. My father who loves me too much knows about the tequila and ginger I used to ease the sting of sunburn, the mango daiquiris last night, the flaming sambuccas after dinner.
And perhaps she is right—perhaps he imagines the tiny red bathing suit she wore, the strapless dress, her near nakedness at this moment, but the words he speaks are soft, and in the breath before the cry, all transgressions past and still to come are by a sister’s death forgiven.
Helen, I don’t know why it was our time. I don’t know why I didn’t save you.
Eight hours gone and Jay Kinderman, serving his mission in Hermosillo, walks a dusty road at the edge of the city, hoping to save one soul today, hoping to win one convert. He does not know. He cannot imagine a world, a life, a day without his four sisters. He hears Helen’s mocking voice above the others, Helen, three years older, calling him
Elder Kinderman
, and he laughs at himself, at his white shirt, stained with sweat, filthy from dust blowing. He laughs and she’s there, watching, his Helen. He loosens his tie at last, as if she has whispered:
It’s okay. Do it.
His companion is sick today—heaving, dehydrated, afraid to leave his bed, afraid to drink the water. If Jay liked Elder Mattea better, would they be more successful? Something to overcome—in time, if possible—part of the test, part of the challenge: surrendering to love long before you feel it.
He is forbidden to work alone. All day, he has been disobedient. Not one crime, but a crime committed moment by moment, street to street, hour by hour. It would have been right to stay with Jared, good to care for him today, to watch over him as he slept, change the sheets a third time, fetch the bedpan or a doctor—it would have been generous and just to boil water clean and sit with Elder Mattea as he sipped it. But there will be other days to learn this kindness. Today has been a gift, time apart, his opportunity. All day, he has failed, but now, as twilight comes, he feels calm again and strengthened—and he is not alone: Helen has come to walk this scrap of earth beside him.
He sees a small Indian woman moving toward him, slowly gathering herself out of the dust until she becomes a shape he recognizes. He counts, he tries to count, all her skinny dogs, all her skinny-legged children, all the mottled chickens that lead this strange procession.
And he thinks,
Now, today, this is the hour
, and for once he won’t preach, won’t try so hard, won’t provoke himself with language. Helen is here. Helen has revealed his mistakes to him, the failure of practiced words, the hopelessness of his precise Spanish.