by Torey Hayden
‘They’re good enough.’
‘Mama, they’re not. Those jeans are all baggy and out of shape. Besides, you just don’t go wearing jeans to something like this anyway. And you don’t go wearing one of Daddy’s shirts. It looks awful.’
She paid no attention to me.
‘Mama. Please. Please change your clothes. Do it for me, OK? For once I just want you to go out looking like everyone else’s mother does.’
Nose in the book, she ignored me. I snatched the paperback up out of her hands. Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own Life.
‘What are you reading a book like this for?’ I asked.
She shrugged and gave me a good-natured smile. ‘Research?’ she offered and chortled.
I didn’t think she was being particularly funny.
She stalled for so long that finally I had to physically boost her to her feet to get her moving. ‘At least tuck the stupid shirt in,’ I said, grabbing the waistband of the jeans and stuffing the shirt tail into the back. ‘Honest to Pete, you’re worse than Megan sometimes.’
The entire way to Garden City she sat silently, arms folded across her breast in her warrior-goddess pose. I grew increasingly angry, not only about her continued resistance but also at my father for not doing this nasty chore himself. Anger, it seemed, was becoming our household emotion.
The mental health centre was a new building, reaching out in two long arms around a gravelled entrance drive. The reception area inside was brightly painted in primary colours. The woman behind the desk greeted us with more cheer than a Monday morning warranted. How had the journey been? Was the wind bad? Did it look like thunderstorms for the afternoon? Mama, in a sudden burst of friendliness, chatted enthusiastically with the receptionist. It occurred to me then what was happening. She was going to go in there, bright as a penny, and charm the damned socks off everyone. As I sat glumly in one of the waiting-room chairs and watched her operate, what came to my mind was the war. No wonder she had survived. She could roll with the punches. And this was just one punch more.
I sat and read out-of-date magazines while my mother spent an hour with Dr Carrera and another hour with their psychometrist, taking various tests. Then Dr Carrera and my mother came out into the waiting room. The doctor was a very tall man, older than Mama, and built like a football player, with powerful shoulders and a broad chest. He was handsome in a distinguished, Latin way, and dressed nicely in a well-tailored grey suit and crisp-looking white shirt. Only his tie seemed out of place. It was wide and bizarrely coloured, which made me think he must have a good sense of humour or horrible taste in ties, or a kid like Megan at home, to buy him presents.
He shook my hand. ‘Your mother will be coming back to see me next week,’ he said and handed me a folded slip of paper. ‘In the meantime, here’s a prescription for her.’
‘Will she be coming in the morning, like this?’ I asked. ‘Or do you think we could have a different time? See, I’m having to take time off from school to bring her down …’
‘There’s a late clinic on Wednesday nights. Until nine. Would that be better?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said and smiled. Great. Then Dad would get stuck with bringing her.
The doctor walked all the way out to the car with us. For the first time my mood lifted. Perhaps we were finally accomplishing something. Dr Carrera seemed pleasant and competent. Mama appeared to have gotten along well with him. They chatted genially together in the parking lot as I unlocked the car. They were discussing London. Mama was telling him about the roses in Regent’s Park. He was saying his oldest son was living near there and studying drama.
We stopped at a drive-in for lunch. Mama, in exuberant spirits, suggested that we really treat ourselves. So we ordered the biggest hamburgers on the menu, as well as French fries and onion rings and some deep-fried mushrooms, an item I’d never seen offered on a drive-in menu before. They looked dreadful to me and tasted the way Megan’s socks smelled, so Mama ended up eating them all.
We had a riotous time together in the car over lunch. Mama was telling me about the test she had taken at the clinic, and about the psychometrist whose job it was to administer them. I had nearly forgotten what great fun my mother could be when she was in a good mood. That, in turn, made me realize how depressed her behaviour, as well as mine, had been during the events of the last few weeks. But in a torrent of laughter, her stories and jokes came back.
I asked afterward if she wanted to go someplace. The day was gorgeous, and I was sick to death of being cooped up at home. With the car at our disposal, it seemed a pity to waste such a beautiful afternoon. Yes, she agreed, why not have a good time?
‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.
She was pulling up the last of her milkshake through the straw. It made a raucous noise.
‘The museum?’
She shook her head. ‘We can be indoors in our own house.’
‘Where then?’ I asked. ‘You want to go shopping?’
‘No,’ she said, as I had assumed she would. She never had been one to enjoy shopping.
‘We could go to the zoo, I guess.’
Mama laughed. ‘Go see Twinkle the Elephant,’ she said, mimicking an official-sounding voice. There had been numerous billboards on the highway coming into Garden City that commanded ‘Go see Twinkle the Elephant’ at the local zoo. It surprised me that in spite of her aroused state on the trip down, she’d been reading billboards about elephants. I certainly hadn’t.
In the end we decided to go to the reservoir. Neither of us was a devotee of elephants, and we couldn’t think of any other interesting-sounding alternatives. So the reservoir it was.
‘This is a very pretty place,’ Mama said to me. Picking up a stone, she lofted it into the water. The surface, already riffled by the wind, spread out in choppy rings, ‘When Klaus is back with us, we’ll bring him out here. He’ll love to play here.’
‘Mama,’ I said, ‘just for this once, let’s halt the conversations about Klaus. Let’s talk about other things instead.’
She nodded.
The sun was brilliant. It was the type of day to spawn thunderstorms: clear, slightly humid and rather too warm for the end of April. There was just enough wind to keep it from being hot. We sat on a sloping bank above the wide stretch of water.
‘Did you tell Dr Carrera about Klaus?’ I asked.
‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about him.’
‘Well, I was just wondering. Did you?’
‘I told him that they took my baby away from me during the war.’
‘Yes, but did you tell him specifically about Klaus now? About Toby Waterman?’
She picked up another stone. With her fingers she rubbed dirt from it. The stone was round and smooth, grey and ordinary. Carefully, she lifted it up, sighted and threw it out into the water. There was nothing to sight on from what I could see, except small waves. She watched the arc of the rock intently before it splashed into the depths. She didn’t answer my question, and I could tell from her studied inattention that she wasn’t going to. I also reckoned that she hadn’t told the doctor about Toby.
We sat together in untroubled silence. Absorbed in hitting her target in the water, Mama repeatedly picked up stones and lofted them, each time studying the way they fell. I watched off across the reservoir toward the other side. It was early enough in spring for there still to be a slight greenish tinge to the normally yellow prairie grass. Above, the sky stretched endlessly away, endlessly blue.
My mind wandered. I thought about Klaus, the real Klaus, wherever he was. And about the war with its influential, unyielding grasp on my life.
‘Mama?’ I asked, turning my head to see her. She had her chin resting in her folded arms, atop her knees. She too was watching the far horizon. ‘Who was Klaus’s father?’
At first she said nothing, and I became self-conscious. It occurred to me then how private that question was and how perhaps I shouldn’t have asked it.
She sh
ook her head. ‘I don’t know. I never really knew any of them. They just came. I never knew their names.’
‘What about my other brother? What was his name?’
‘József.’
‘Where’s he at now? Do you know? Was it like it was with Klaus?’
She shifted her weight and sighed. Lower lip over upper, she let out a long breath that made the hair around her face flutter.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t ask you stuff like this, should I? I’m sorry. I know it’s really personal. I can understand that you mind telling me.’
‘No, I don’t mind telling you,’ she replied. She smiled, not at me but at the horizon, before looking over. ‘But the question is, do you mind knowing?’
Chastened, I turned away.
There was silence.
‘It was a terrible time,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s hard to tell. Ordinary life just disappeared. Poof, like smoke. And you were left with no rules to go by any more. You had to make up your own. And if you haven’t lived like that, it’s hard to make it sound real.’
She reached out for another rock, dusted it, sighted it against the invisible target and lofted it. Silence followed the splash.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘some of the things you do in times like that, they’re dreadful things. But you do them anyway. You do them because they’re better than the alternatives.’
She ran her fingers through the dirt on the ground beside her, searching for another stone.
‘Do you understand what I mean?’ she asked and looked over.
‘I think I do,’ I said.
‘Here, in this country,’ she said, ‘things are easy. No one is forced into evil decisions. Here, choices are just choices. Good is good. Bad is bad. There are no grey shadows around everything you do.’ Lifting up a hand, she regarded the nail of her little finger. ‘That is the hard part to tell. Because I can’t explain it well enough.’
‘You’re doing OK, Mama,’ I said. ‘I think I know what you mean.’
Silence. Only the sound of the crows in the pine trees behind us. Mama turned her head to look at them. Then she leaned over to locate another stone. Picking it up, she rubbed it against her shirt, examined it, rejected it, letting it fall back to earth. She searched the surroundings for a second stone.
‘I was very young,’ she said. ‘I was only seventeen when Klaus was born. Seventeen and two months old. And I was a very stupid girl for seventeen. You’re smarter than I was. Much. I was too protected. It was all pretty clothes and dancing and good marks at school for me. Popi wanted a lady of the manor. He should have been raising a soldier.’
She paused.
‘I went with no knowledge, no understanding,’ she said softly. ‘I’d been at university studying, but I knew nothing about the world. Nothing at all. I still thought you got babies from kissing with your tongue.
‘When I first arrived at the hostel, they put me in a room and made me undress. I was ashamed, so ashamed to have to do that. Popi was very harsh about that at home, about showing our bodies. He was so strict with me when I wasn’t modest. And here I was, naked, in front of strange men. Even I didn’t really believe they were all doctors. Some of them had uniforms of the SS.
‘This one, he measured me. Everywhere. He put these things, what do you call them? – Greifzirkel – around my head to see how much room there was for my brains.’
She leaned over and ran her fingers through the grass. Finding a pill bug, she tapped its shell with her fingernail.
‘Then afterward they put me in a little room with a wardrobe and a bed and that was all. No chair. No table. If I put my arms out, I could touch opposite walls. Most of the girls were in pairs at the hostel. They shared their rooms. Some of them had curtains and coloured bedspreads. You see, I think some of them were volunteers. They knew why they were there. And they got the nice rooms. And the pretty things. But I didn’t, and because I was a foreigner, they kept me separate.’
She stopped. The pill bug was still trapped beneath her fingers, and she sat, her gaze fixed on it.
‘When he came to my room that first night, I didn’t know what he wanted. I didn’t even know who he was. I’d never seen him before. He was older, perhaps twenty-five or so, and he told me to lie down on the bed. I did. I don’t remember now why I did it so willingly. I suppose I just didn’t really have any idea of what he was going to do. But he said, “Lie down.” And so I did. But I wouldn’t take my nightdress off. He said, “What is the matter with you?” He thought I was teasing him, that I was pretending to be shy. “Warum tust du so spröde?” That is exactly what he said to me. So spröde. What is the word for that? Coy? He thought I was teasing. “But I’m not,” I said. “Then take off your gown,” he replied. But I wasn’t going to. What would Popi think of me then, if I went around taking my clothes off every time a strange man told me to? I wouldn’t do it. I told him so. So he grabbed my nightdress at the shoulder and pulled at it. I was angry with him then because he pulled so hard it ripped. Right at the top of the sleeve. I remember shouting at him. It was the only nightdress I had, and I remember saying, “You think these grow on trees, these gowns?” But he grabbed hold of me and pushed me back on to the bed and got on top of me. And then I was too scared to think of the nightdress any more. He still had his uniform on. He just lay on top of me and he was very heavy.’
She lifted her head and looked out over the reservoir. ‘He said, “What’s your name?” And I said, “Mara.” And he said, “You’re the Slav, aren’t you?” And I said I was a Volksdeutscherin from Hungary. I could feel his breath on my face. He had been drinking schnapps, and I could smell it. And he was so heavy I could barely breathe out. Then he kissed me on the lips. Like no one had ever kissed me before. When he tried to do it again, I bit him. “No one does that to me,” I said to him. And he laughed. “You’re full of fire, my little Hungarian whore.” I told him I was no whore. He said, “You’re a whore, Mara, or you wouldn’t be here. You’re nothing more than a little Hungarian cocksucker.” Well, I tell you, I started to cry then. I was so full of shame and humiliation. And fear. I just broke into tears.
‘I began to tell him everything. I told him about my home in Lébény and how I hadn’t seen my mama and papa for so long and I was worried about them with the war beginning. I told him how I’d been sent away to school in Dresden. And about Tante Elfie and having to sleep in the hallway because I bothered Birgitta with my homesickness. I said I’d just started university in October and I was only sixteen. I said I hadn’t had any choice about coming, that they had made me come and all I wanted to do was go home to Mutti. But he laughed at me. He said I was no more than a filthy little cunt.’
She licked her lips and wiped them against her left wrist. The crows rose up and went wheeling over the water to the far side.
‘One time I ran away from there. It wasn’t very long after I’d arrived. I managed to make it to the train station, but of course, I had no money to buy a ticket. So I was going to try to get on the train to Vienna unnoticed. But there wasn’t one going south. So I thought, I’ll get on any train. But they found me before I could. And they took me back. The man with the big boots, the one who had been in the room when I’d had to undress in front of all of them, he told me there were camps. Did I know about the camps? he asked. If I didn’t like life here, I could choose to be in a camp.
‘After that they locked my door. During the day I didn’t mind much. They brought me newspapers and books and I had my meals in there, in my little room. But at night …’
She shook her head. ‘I could hear them coming. I would lie in bed and listen to the sounds of them walking in the halls. And I could tell. Always I could tell if they were just walking or if they were coming to my room. I grew to know them by the sounds of their boots. I never knew their real names, but I gave them names. Big Boots. Sure Step. Clodhopper. But that was in the daytime. At night, I’d just lie in bed and hear their boots on the wooden floor and always I�
�d know when they were coming for me.’
She paused.
I wanted to tell her to stop altogether. I did not want to hear more of this. Unlike her usual stories, there was an aching simplicity to this account. No dramatics, no pregnant pauses for me to guess what happened next. She just talked, quietly, without embellishment. The contrast to her normal style made it even more difficult to listen to because suddenly it all seemed terribly private to me, as if I were eavesdropping or reading a personal diary.
The wind ceased, and the afternoon grew very warm around us. In the heat the prairie went absolutely soundless. You could have touched the silence.
‘I became pregnant,’ she said when she finally spoke again. ‘It was much better then. Big Boots still came sometimes. He was the one who stopped the other men from coming because I was already pregnant. But he still came.
‘Just the same, it was better. There weren’t all of them. It was easier. And I thought I would be going home. Some of the girls, you see, were allowed home as soon as they were pregnant; they just came back for the delivery. Some of them, I think, might even have been married to SS officers. But I’m not sure. No one talked there. Anyway, I asked Big Boots and he said, ja, ja, I could go home when the baby had come.’
She looked over at me, and there was a small smile on her lips. ‘I could feel the baby,’ she said, bringing a hand gently up to her stomach. ‘It was a wonderful feeling, him in there moving. I would lie on the bed and dream of him. I’d think, Mara, you’ll be free. This time next year, you’ll be home and helping Popi plant the flowers. This baby, he’s going to be your saviour.’ Then unexpectedly, Mama laughed. She looked at me and giggled again. ‘I must admit, I was a little afraid of going home. Can you imagine me explaining to Mutti and Popi how I got a baby? I thought about that the whole time. I invented such fantastic stories to explain. For nine whole months I was thinking, Mara, how will you tell Popi this?
‘Then he was born. I told you about that. I told you already how he was born. In the delivery room at the hostel. On the rubber mat.’ One corner of her mouth pulled back. ‘Anyway, I named him Klaus. For Hans Klaus Fischer, the baker’s son. Because I’d loved him. When I was fifteen, I’d thought I would marry him. I was so certain of that. I had my whole life mapped out, when I was fifteen.’ Then she shook her head. ‘But no. No, I didn’t, did I? But I named the baby after him anyhow. Because I wished so much the baby was his.’
