“What, really?” I reply, I’ve never heard this story before.
“Yes. It was such an unexpected and jarring moment. Your father shied away from confronting the man who abused us, he tried to drag me away and walk off. I responded to the drunkard with choice words of my own. This made your father even more embarrassed. He was more concerned that I was the one standing up for myself,”
“Some people aren’t able to face bad things and bad people,”
“Your father never grasped the reasons behind what you did. He thought it was about not being able to go to university but I knew that it was much deeper than that. Maybe you have only now fully understood what it means to be a Roma woman in this world.”
“Did we do the right thing in letting you leave home?” Mum says, “This was my biggest concern. Every day, I have thought about you and I question whether I let you down,”
“It was probably for the best. I only wish we’d been able to stay in touch, things haven’t been easy since I left,”
“I know,” Mum replies and looks hesitant. She wants to broach a subject but doesn’t know how to. It reminds me of being a kid, I can read her so well after all these years. I smile at her and sit back in my chair putting down the cutlery.
“What happened to Janko?” she says, almost in an embarrassed manner.
“What are you on about?”
“I had a feeling you were going to show up here again Ana. I’ve been waiting for this moment for the last few months,”
“Janko died in January at the cottage, I don’t understand how you knew something had happened to him?”
Mum walks to the living room and returns to the kitchen with what looks like a square wooden jewellery box. She pulls one of the kitchen chairs around to my side of the table so she is seated next to me and opens the box which is full of photos and letters.
“Janko wrote to your father and I every couple of months updating us on your wellbeing,”
“I can’t believe it,” I say as my mother passes me the box. There are a bunch of letters written in German from that silly, sweet old man to my parents detailing my time in Savoy. There are photos too. One of me outside a cinema in Lyon holding an oversized tub of popcorn waiting to go in and watch Rocky IV, another one of me in a tracksuit about to go for a run. There is one that Gunari took of Janko and I by the lake taken before everything with Tremmick. I am beaming wildly with my hair all over the place and Janko is foolishly grinning, I remember that he was telling me a story about how he invented Polaroid cameras.
I always wondered what happened to it as I could never find it. For some reason I assumed Janko threw them away. There are photos that I took of Berlin, Munich, Monaco and all the other places I’ve visited over the years. An archive of my life, the letters also allude to the type of work I did.
I read an snipper of an article from Le Monde describing the bloody death on a train platform on the French Riviera of a man they believe to be Nazi eugenicist Albert Tremmick. In the weeks following the murder Janko had walked to the shop to pick up newspapers and it appears he was removing articles about Tremmick from the paper.
“I can’t believe it,” I say again. My heart is breaking in half thinking that I will never see my Dad again or Janko, who was as close to a father as I could have wished for.
“This was the final correspondence we received Ana. It was a note from Janko stating he wasn’t in great health and asking us to pass this letter to you, in case you came back. I haven’t read it Ana,” My mother passes me the letter, I see my name written in his spidery handwriting and I open the letter:
Dear Ana,
If you are reading this then I am very much likely to be dead. Gunari will say I am in heaven, I will only say I that I am at rest. Where the location will be, I have no clue! Gunari has his beliefs and I have mine. Neither of us can claim the other is wrong. And neither of us would enforce their opinion on the other.
I have found it hard to prepare for the end of my life. I am not fearful of what it means for me. I am more concerned with you, my princess. The struggle to convey what you mean to me has consumed me for weeks. I have failed time after time to speak to you in the manner I wished to. Please do not think less of me for putting these words on to paper, rather than uttering them to your face.
Everything you do is subjective, everyone is a judge. All you can do is live your life true to your beliefs and by the time you come to the end if you believe you have a positive tally, then that is all you can do. I am content that when my time comes I wasn’t a complete write-off as a human being.
Nothing can erase your good deeds in life, not the wind or the rain or burning fire. Your accomplishments will outlive you, our community will speak of your name for decades to come. The tales of your life will be spun into myths where only the underlying truth will remain.
Ana, I want you to know that I have been in the place where you are now. The aftershocks of the war turned me to nihilism. I was forced to sink to the very depths of my soul to confront what kind of man I was.
Ten years after the war ended, things became too much for me. I wrote a note stating my intentions and drove off to the South of France. I arrived in Marseille and headed for the building known as the Madman’s House, a very apt name. I stood atop the massive concrete Unité d'habitation building in Marseille. I could see the whole city unfurled. The suburbs, the factories, the beach, the basilica, the stadium, Parc Borély, the Mediterrenean Sea. It was all spread out before me, overwhelming me, enchanting me to end it all.
I thought about my family, the family I abandoned age twenty-one and never saw again. I never found out if they lived or died during the war. By the mid-fifties I was too much of a coward to find out the truth.
So I travelled to Marseille with the firm intention of killing myself. I don’t know how long I stood on the edge of that tower block. I was on the verge of allowing myself to fall when a thought simply popped into my head. “Your time is not now Janko”. Whether it was the voice of God, or creatures from outer space, or my conscience, I will never know.
However, I knew that it was my choice to step down from that ledge. I accepted that one day I would die, but it would not be that day falling from a concrete behemoth in Marseille.
There is a famous quote that says “Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go”.
You will be ready when your time comes, Schatzi but that time is not quite yet. This is your life, embrace what that means. Savour every morning you wake up at the cottage, as the sun rises above the mountains and reflects upon the lake. Thank the Lord, if that is what you so wish.
All I ask is that you don’t close yourself off from the vibrancy of life. If you lose your ability to empathise, it can tempt you down the darkest path. Take heart from the love of your parents, the love of Gunari and the love I hold for you. You are the closest I will ever have to a daughter and seeing you in pain hurts me to my very core.
Remember what we have achieved together. Remember that your actions were a response to the iniquitous actions of people who voided their humanity. Remember that moment when you burst through the door and saved Gunari and I.
Gunari said it was the most heroic thing he had ever seen. I’m not one to quote the Good Book but at that moment you ran straight into the valley of the shadow of death and you feared no evil. I told you to leave us, to allow fate to decide what happened to Gunari and I. But you chose to save our lives, to sacrifice everything for others. You made that choice. You always have a choice, Ana.
My sleeping beauty, it is time now for me say me to say farewell. I am relieved that I have written this letter. Take care of Gunari, take care of your parents and equally importantly, don’t let Gunari crash my little Fiat in to any postal vans.
Forever, your eternal friend,
Janko
I re-read the letter and I can almost hear Janko’s voice saying it back to me. My mother is stroking my back as the tears fall out of my eyes in l
arge drops. I turn to my mother, smile and ask: “Mum, am I OK to stay here for a few nights?”
THE END
Copyright © 2020
Martin O'Brien
All rights reserved.
The Wind and the Rain Page 32
