Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss

by Unknown

  Other nights she stayed awake altogether. We knew well enough where sleep would overtake her. Nestling in the embrace of the woman officer, her gateway to the world. Sometimes, she would be allowed to hear a Chopin polonaise or a Wagner symphony. To rest her back against the crisp sheets. And the Brunhild would offer her soft clothes, wash her body in a tub, shampoo her hair. Clarissa would lie there with her legs curled up and her mind closed within itself. At the morning parade, a telltale nerve would twitch in the officer’s cheek as she passed by Clarissa.

  Clarissa never said much while she worked, but once she started singing in a deep, low voice, like a husky gurgle. She fought back the strange sound but it kept pouring out of her, unchecked, spilling on to our workbenches.

  Unable to continue joining the airplane parts with that terrible sound, we stopped. It was like a mute, straining to use his voice, the tremor of his vocal cords causing his listeners to shudder.

  One night I awoke and found that Clarissa had returned to her cot from the hidden room. But instead of stretching out, she was sitting there like a statue in whom life had frozen, staring out into the darkness.

  I could not stop myself from going over to her.

  “Clarissa.” I spoke softly, “What does she do to you?” Suddenly her face contorted with a pain so intense that I recoiled. She turned her head slowly, as though a key had been inserted in her back, and said dryly: “She doesn’t do me any harm.” Then she touched my head.

  “You’re young,” she said.

  “Why, I almost had a child, and my youth is gone.”

  “You’ll have other children.” She touches my forehead. “I never will.”

  Once a fate is sealed, wherever the body goes, that fate precedes it. People shy away as they would from someone with a dreaded disease, but the body has its own truth to tell. It follows its course, spinning and stumbling, never to be shaken off. She has been branded and the stigma can never be shaken off. She has been branded and the stigma can never be wiped away. Clearly, she will never be free to love again, as we will if ever we get out. The bruises and emaciation, the disease and the wounds have gnawed away at the racked bodies, but though they are torn, they will be given another chance. Like a forest that goes on burning after a fire. The soft murmur of the sea at high tide and the waves of the moon will bring other loves and children into those wombs. Beyond the vastness of this nightmare, we will rediscover love. There will we give birth and raise our children. Not on bread but on water. Not on the body but on the scarred soul. This scarred soul of mine opens up to her, longing for her support. But she has already been branded. For the rest of her life she will wander through the Land of Nod, with no brave hunter to go with her. Nothing but her seared spirit.

  Softly I ask, since she is the one who knows: “Will we ever get out of here?” She says, “They’re getting closer. It won’t be long before the echoes of the explosions reach us.”

  She bends over me and shares her secret. “I’ll be going to Palestine. I have an uncle there, my mother’s brother. We used to make fun of him. We said he was crazy going to such a godforsaken place. But here I am now, without any God. I’ll join him. He’s an important man by now in Palestine.” She utters the word gently, splitting the name of the country, syllable by euphonious syllable, before her voice drops to where it becomes eerie and remote.

  Clarissa rocks herself as though in a lullaby. She’s far away from me by now, and we’re like moles in a tunnel, except that we haven’t had the welcome sleep those wise animals have. All we’ve done is crawl down into the deepest holes where the abomination flows submissively, begging to pour out to sea. But the sea is thousands of miles away over occupied land. The roots of the burning trees tremble and cower under the weight of the abomination, demanding to know where the water will come from. Every last one of the bridges has been bombed this winter, yet the trains have not stopped crossing the rivers. People have become roots and roots, people. The wise animals listen to the sound of the flowing abomination and wonder when it will let up.

  I can’t go any closer to her. I return to my cot, as she goes on rocking herself, consoling her flesh and her spirit, no longer taking any notice of me.

  Winter was digging in around us and we were forgotten. Heavy rains started to fall, and it seemed to me that every drop was also carrying a grain of ashes from those consumed by the smoke. The camp was not bombed, but the approaches were covered in marshy mud, as the trudging of the sticky feet and the sheer fatigue kept beating, like the room of a watchmaker gone berserk. Whenever I caught a glimpse beyond the fences, I would see the treetops swaying in the forest.

  It was there that the leaves would fill up with drops of water and the early winter winds would smooth over the rows of foliage. Some of the leaves reached over the fence and even drifted down into the doorways of the barracks.

  These were left untouched. Except by the wind, which, after all, was good to them.

  New airplane parts were piled high on the workbenches, and we fitted them together helplessly. The door opened and Clarissa entered, wearing a pair of men’s boots. Water dripped off them onto the floor, leaving the tracks of her hurried entrance.

  Out of the coat wrapped around her, she took a kerchief and unfolded it, revealing the shiny redness of forest berries. She opened her mouth and flicked in one berry, then another. The juice oozed down her chin like a festering wound. The meisters, the German mechanics appointed to guard over us during working hours, stopped what they were doing and watched. We all huddled around her as she began stuffing our hands and our mouths with ripe, red berries. My mother’s jars are brimming with red jam, and she lines them up, one by one, on the pantry shelves for all the seasons to come until the following summer.

  “Where did you get them?” one woman asked.

  “It’s a present,” said Clarissa breaking into a raucous laugh and swaying from side to side. “I’m kept as a lover, didn’t you know?”

  Then she pressed her head into the empty kerchief and breathed in the lingering fragrance of the fruit. The kerchief covered her, but we could still see the shivers running down her spine. We left her there in her kerchief. Not a single one of us touched her. We went back to our workbenches and clung to them. Even the meisters left her alone, until the door opened again. In the doorway was the officer, some loose strands of golden hair dangling under her hat and falling damply along her neck. She went over to Clarissa, took her by the shoulders and shook her with one powerful jolt. The kerchief dropped to the ground, the red spots embedded in it. Then she bent over and picked it up. It was the first time I had seen her bend over. Her spine jutted out under the blouse of her uniform and we could follow her breathing. The sight of her stunned me. A tremendous revelation. Even she, proud as she was, knew how to bend. The taut cord that had learned how to stretch, never allowing itself to slacken, had loosened ever so briefly. So she is no different from the rest of us.

  “Das ist meine Clarissa,” she said in a stiff voice. “Sie ist Mein.”

  “Mine, mine.”

  As she straightened up, the kerchief dropped again and she stepped on it. We turned around. Janine was the only one who dared. She took one step forward, shooting out a piercing look, the officer directly across from her.

  For a split second their eyes met, a moment that froze in space. The officer turned, let go of Clarissa, and Clarissa stumbled. Where is Janine? A Catholic who had coupled her fate with a Jew. Following him eastward. That’s how she wound up with us. Where is Janine now? In some vinegrowers’ village near Montpellier, not far from the Spanish border, where the grapes are unusually juicy, where one can get as drunk on a single bunch of them as on a flask of wine.

  I am not yet sixty. I took my granddaughter Hagar to the house from which they removed me.

  I could not tell the ten-year-old that this was where I had loved another man. There had been a fetus inside me who might have become her father. I told her.

  “This is where I once lived. This
is where they banged on my door. This was where they dragged us outside and took us to the town square.”

  Hagar looked wistfully at the house we had not entered and asked: “Why don’t you knock on the door, Grandmother?”

  I said to myself: that door has been slammed shut for good. It can’t be reopened. Deep in the recesses of my memory I buried that man who had slept in my bed and was the first to come to me. I don’t dream about him anymore. When Hagar’s grandfather took me, I cast that chapter of my life aside into a sealed box and threw the key into the depths of the sea. Still, it is beyond me how these things seep through and gather in other parts of me, filtering into my children.

  The dammed-up waters seek new outlets. When I heard them forcing their way, I clasped my head with both hands and ordered: “Stop!” But they disobeyed. Outsmarting me, they worked their way in between the cracks.

  I clasped my granddaughter’s hand and felt its fervor. She was standing next to me, so keen and pure. I said to myself: I’m not trying to get even. I’ll be sixty next year, after all. I’ve brought along my son’s daughter, to show the intruders who broke the door down—those masters of the stripes and the whip—that they haven’t outdone me.

  The fetus died, but here is the child.

  Winter was coming and the sun had almost vanished. The rumble of distant explosions blended with the sound of thunder. Nothing but the lightning, slashing the clouds, could keep them apart.

  A few weeks before liberation, the meisters began shooting indiscriminately. People disappeared from the factories and the owners vanished. A day before the liberation, we remained all alone in the camp.

  We woke up in the chilly dawn and stood in formation waiting, but there were no footsteps to be heard. We ventured out into the gateways of the barracks. Everything was in place. The fences were bolted. In the distance, the treetops were swaying as though nothing in the forest had changed. Utterly indifferent to us, it had never turned a receptive ear. By noon, the gate had been uprooted. Two dogs still posted to watch over it were shot on the spot, and their carcasses left to rot.

  A Russian division arrived in the camp and our fears gave way to new ones. Fresh from the battles of Stalingrad, they would be overcome by cold and lust. But as soon as they saw us, they turned away. Our emaciated bodies were powerless to stir any passion.

  We lined up for the last time, facing the row of Russian officers who wished to provide us with the first piece of paper we would need to begin life anew. They gave us back our names. I saw mine, but we were strangers to one another.

  Janine said it amounted to a baptism and kept crossing herself. Three Russian officers sat at a desk taken from the camp headquarters. I remembered the second chapter. God takes the finest rib, the one that has suffered nightmares, and releases it in the Garden.

  Clarissa’s icy hand was tugging at mine, the way it did that time when she handed me the medicine.

  I turned toward her and she pointed wordlessly at a woman who was working her way into the waiting row. She had taken on our appearance, turned into one of us. Got hold of a striped shirt, hoping to find refuge in our fold. Gone was Brunhild’s golden hair. She had shaven it all off and her skull bones were showing. All that time, they had been covered by the flowing Brunhildian mane. The color was gone from her cheeks, and her anxiety was seeping out, as if through a faulty stopper. I looked and saw her. She had pushed her way into the hush of the women and, even from as far away as I was standing, I could see the roundness of her breasts between the stripes. She’d been cut off like us. Now she was hoping for the final Judgment Day. The trumpets of angels.

  “Oh, merciful Christ,” said Janine, stretching out an arm in her direction. Then she spit on the ground and made the sign of the cross.

  Thus in the haze of my illness she reemerges out of the ground in her striped uniform. Her hair falls on her shoulders and the SS insignia is etched in blood on her forehead. Even in my nightmares she bears that same deathly pallor. She leans over me, opens her fist, and shows me some yellow tablets.

  I yell: “I’m not to blame!” She grabs me and forces them into my mouth. I purse my lips, seal them tight, and cry:

  “Clarissa, help me!”

  But it’s my husband who shakes me by the shoulder and asks: “What’s wrong? You’ve been having a nightmare.”

  One morning he asked me: “Who is the Clarissa you keep dreaming about?”

  She keeps surfacing. Weaving in and out of the corridors of my memory. Pulling behind the dignity of man and his degradation, his anguish, and his powers of resistance. The eyes of Janine of Gaul harden as she struggles to record what she sees, indelibly, to make sure that she never forgets. Clarissa had said: “I can’t be the one to turn her in.” “You go,” she told me. “Go tell the Russians that she’s hiding among us.” I froze. My legs wouldn’t move. I was unable to shout. I remembered the outstretched palm and the tablets. But Janine had already stepped out of the line and her legs were carrying her unhaltingly, overcome by some secret power. She approached the Russian officers and told them something. Two of them followed her back. Ever so slowly, they approached us.

  Janine stood opposite the Nazi and pointed her out with an arched hand. “That’s the one!” The officers dragged her away and the Brunhild started screaming and jerking convulsively. But the Russian had a firm grip on her. He made her stand up as he struck her on her bald pate. That was how I was later able to picture her skull lying there on the ground after the worms had had their fill. He wasted no time, pulling at her shirt, ripping it right off. She began screaming again and covered her nakedness with her hands. But those breasts were not like ours. Full and fleshy they cut through the torn material.

  He slapped her once across the face and she stopped. Her arms fell to her sides. He raised her arm for all to see. Under it was the mark, carefully etched, as though on a sheet of paper. Furiously he struck her again. She lifted her head and searched over the entire row of women until her eyes rested on Clarissa.

  Clarissa turned away, no longer seeing her. Like a madwoman she screeched, her cries rising and falling over our frozen silence. “Clarissa, help me!” The Russian waited another minute, then dragged her away. She stopped screaming and he pulled her behind him like a tattered sack, behind the first barracks.

  A single gunshot and he was back. As he stuck his pistol back in its holster as if nothing had happened, he returned to his seat by the desk. I turned to look into the row of women, but Clarissa wasn’t there. She had vanished. I shut my eyes. The entire row turned into one long strip, and at the tip of the worm, one after the other, we undressed and put on the clothes provided by the Russians.

  Ever since those sinister days, the light for me will forever be flawed.

  When I returned home, I found my parents alive. For three days, my again father sat with me. Then he packed a small bag. I asked him: “Why are you leaving now that I’ve been saved?”

  For two months he traveled all over Europe to collect the proof we would need for me to be able to remarry. “The only way to find the necessary two witnesses,” he explained, “is to start searching right away. If we wait, they’ll scatter all over the world, and we will never be able to prove you’re a widow.” My children are grown, and the dead one who dropped out of my womb is over and done with. The ones who followed covered over it with their beauty and brightness.

  I once took out a picture of my dead husband to show my oldest son, but he didn’t believe me. The truth, after all, is a great mosaic, with new pieces forever falling into place. When one piece is missing, sometimes I look for it and sometimes I stop.

  Whenever I pass by the road signs of our country, I think about her. Maybe she is here, maybe there. Maybe her face is sealed, revealing nothing, except for the wet and oozing sap of berries.

  Whenever I dare to lift the stone, I turn it over and over, and things are not the way they were before, but rather the way one sees them in a crooked mirror or through a window on a foggy day
. I’m not about to breathe warm mist onto the pane, because I don’t really want to see Clarissa in a golden embrace, and Janine with the vinegrowers of Gaul, and myself in Tel Aviv. Only rarely does my soul wander and turn over, but it no longer reaches back to the way things had been at the beginning.

  The way that time adds layers of its own and that you cannot reach back to the day of Creation without climbing down a great canyon. After passing all seven layers of the earth, one moves back a million years, to the Day of Chaos when Creation and Disintegration were one, nesting in a single womb, like Rebecca’s irreconcilable twins.

  There, a great darkness emerged. They say time heals. They say I will be healed. I am grateful for the sun and for the new light, but on the heads of my children, my anguish and torment sit like a hat of glass.

  NAVA SEMEL, born in Tel Aviv, is the author of five books and two plays. Her work highlights the second generation of Holocaust survivors in Israel. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1991 National Jewish Book Award for Becoming Gershona.

  Chapter 11: Fragments and Whispers by Miriam Mörsel Nathan

  Zdenka and Marek Mörsel, Czechoslovakia, 1938

  For my parents

  Miriam Mörsel Nathan’s poetry is deeply visual. Miriam captures the flavors, colors, textures, sounds, and fragrances of Europe before and during the war. I am always amazed how one word of her poetry can contain a volume of life. My dear Miriam, the poet. –MW

  I am a poet, and my work reflects a history I inherited, but did not live; a memory of experiences and loss I absorbed but did not have. My work is infused with European sensibility, images, culture, and iconography of a particular time in an endless search for the past and a constant sense of the contrasting present.

  My mother, Zdenka Schwarz Mörsel, was born in a small town outside of Prague called Pribram. My father, Marek Mörsel, came from Orlova, also a small town, in Silesia, which was Czech, Austro-Hungarian, or Polish, depending on the borders at any particular time. After my parents married in 1937, they lived in Prague.