Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  Before, it felt like there was a tsunami ripping across the flood plains of her head. Now, it feels like she’s got nothing to hide.

  In the bed in the home she is a sort of revival of Mother, a stand-in to prove how dead she is. She simply lies there, abstract and uncompelling as concrete.

  And when I am near her, when I am seen by her, I can tell that I’m dead, too. The I who she knew, who she loved and was so hurt by, the I who got away in the night because their Mother locked them up because she was afraid of them leaving her. When I’m with her, the I who digs in the lawn is dead, the I who puts their hand against a winning horse’s thigh is dead, and I’m just a ghost, slipping along the never-gripping, unaddressable present.

  I, as I am—as I have grown to be—am not alive in her at all.

  The only place where Mother is still herself is in her hands. That’s all she is now, the only part of her that’s left. They flex lifelike, like daddy-long-legs limbs removed from the round body by a kid’s fingernail. A kid could slice the legs off the body, hold them in their palm and watch them move, feel them tickle, maybe leave one leg on the body so it can push itself around.

  Mother is her hands now, though they don’t do much of anything but move. They live on for her, the her who is dead. Mother. They’re living there, on the sheets, as her brain gets looser and looser. Her hands, pink-wrinkled with the firescar—perhaps the last significant action she ever took. Her head is free of them.

  It’s as if Mother’s hands don’t know she’s dead. Or they don’t believe it. They’re waiting around, patiently. Her head is a gravestone, merely referring to her, but her hands don’t know that. They’re still there. She’s still in them. Because if the hands knew, they’d stop attempting to grip.

  When I hold them, their little old scarred warmths, I think they know that I’m dead. Sometimes I can feel them squeezing me just a little harder. I take the pulses of the muscles of her hands to be a kind of speech. The last living limbs of the dead speaking to the pure dead: me—her kid who loved her and left her because it was the only way they could survive.

  Her hands comfort me, but not the me who is alive. The one who died with Mother’s head. Those hands hold me, lovingly bury me, and don’t know they’re buried themselves.

  I go to the Neighbourhood Bookstore & Café again, one last time, and the kid is still there, behind the counter. Mother’s camera is still here, around my neck. He smiles at me, recognizing me despite the binder, despite my hair tied tight into a bun. I have the flyer, written out by hand and xeroxed onto blue paper, advertising my yard sale. I’ve plastered copies across the neighbourhood, covering out-of-date, sun-faded posters on lampposts and community corkboards. The sale is the day after tomorrow, a Saturday. Everything Must Go, the flyer says. It felt traditional and honest.

  I hold the flyer up as the kid goes to pour me a coffee. “Can I put this up?”

  “Sure,” he says, putting down the cup and brushing hair from his eyes. “You can put it up on the doors if you want.”

  I thank him, put my coffee on my table, and go to the front door with my tape and one of the flyers. I wonder for a bit whether to put it facing out or in but decide that out would be best.

  When I turn around the boy is out from behind the counter, taping another of the flyers onto the back door for me. I smile, and when he looks at me, I keep smiling.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I can feel a well of sensations bubbling up in me, and I sit down and try to drown them out with coffee. I go to Craigslist and Kijiji and any other sites I can think of and advertise the yard sale. I put my hand on Mother’s camera, and when a few more people come into the café, I wipe my face and go.

  Erwin didn’t talk about the war, or what came before. He didn’t tell the stories that were behind the pictures we were reshooting; he just made the pictures.

  “It’s not about sharing the memories,” he said. “It’s about getting them out of my head.”

  Erwin had taken photographs of the war in Crete, snuck them out past the censor and stowed them away, which incited the Wehrmacht to arrest him and throw him in jail, for treason. As soon as Erwin got out of prison, and gave his testimony at Nuremberg, he started a new life. That was the only life he ever told stories about.

  Though he didn’t tell stories about the war, he told stories where he dealt with the aftermath of it. For instance, years after the war, he went back to a tiny village in Crete. A tiny village that was the site of some thorough atrocities.

  He went to a bar in that village and found the residents hospitable to him. He was honest with them, told them about his being there during the war, told them about that day, told them about the photographs he’d taken, hidden, and used for the testimony he’d hoped would bring justice. The villagers were kind to him, until one man finally stood up, said they’d fulfilled their duty of hospitality, and left. In no time, the rest of the villagers stood and followed, until it was just Erwin and the bartender, who didn’t respond when—after the moment had passed—Erwin asked for his bill. Erwin said the bartender just rubbed at a glass with his back to him. Then, Erwin left.

  Speculation backed by research says that this village was probably one of two in Crete that were hit hard in the war: Kondomari or Kandanos. Kondomari had a huge percentage of its population—mostly able and aging men—gunned down after the village was blamed for the deaths of several German paratroopers. The next day, Kandanos was razed, and most of its inhabitants were killed, for allegedly putting up a resistance to the Germans.

  There’s a photo online of a German soldier looking up at a sign they had placed outside the annihilated village. It reads: Here stood Kandanos, destroyed in retribution for the murder of 25 German soldiers, never to be rebuilt again.

  But it was.

  The more you walk through the memory palace, the more you think you have a handle on things, the more you believe you’re not forgetting anything, even though you know you are. You curated the palace to fit an impression of everything—of you—perhaps because you knew that you didn’t actually want to remember everything. You built it because you wanted a sense of control over these moments that you lacked at the time they occurred.

  But in the end you know that life is nothing like remembering it. In this way, the palace skews things, makes you seem even more to blame for the life that you’ve led. The control you have in simulating pieces of your life, again and again, tricks you into forgetting how little you could do at the time. You look back at running away from Mother, from Genny, and though you know it was a matter of survival, you can see the moments where you could have stopped yourself.

  You take your tour of the palace and resent your old selves for not having more control at the time. You resent them for existing within their own times, while you do your best to obscure your present with your past. So much so that when you get out of the palace, when you open your eyes at the bottom of the rope, you feel sick. Because as soon as your eyes are open, there you are. Here. So blazingly so.

  I call the realtor and she comes over, sees the house, sees how partly fixed it is, sees how much stuff I’m going to take out of the house for the yard sale on Saturday. The armoire is still here, but I tell her it will be gone soon. Tonight. She says it can stay, but I say it can’t, no.

  “It’s a family heirloom,” I say, and she nods. She, too, knows how to weaponize sentimentality.

  She agrees that enough has been done. I hand her a copy of the key, Mother’s copy, because I know that I can’t be here much longer.

  “It’s still a fixer-upper,” she says, as we stand by the staircase, “but it will certainly move.”

  All the guts of the house, anything not nailed down, sit ready in the living room. A mess ready to be spit up. A hairball. The cat, I think, is hiding somewhere inside the jungle of old wood, sofas, and knick-knacks.

  The realtor takes a gander at all the things, then smiles at me as I walk her to the door. “You’ve got a lot of lifting
to do,” she says, as she walks out and waves.

  “Always.”

  When the monument vanishes, what still stands? Is it the things the world has decided should be upheld, should be visible? The high heroes and the villains, the moments of affection and the moments of shameful betrayal—the extremes?

  If the world had its way, that’s all we’d remember—the awful and the brilliant. But if the real world had its way—the world of hearts rather than intellectualized nerve clusters—we would remember what we want. We would carry with us through life only that which we wanted to identify ourselves by, not what we feel is obligatory.

  If we could do that, we could, perhaps, carry with us a bit less fear and shame. We could glide forward on less fragile wings.

  We would not forget all the tragedies, nor would we remember merely all the happy bits. We would cling more to the moments in between, the neutral moments of nearness—Mother sitting at the other end of a table with her camera opened up, cleaning it, while I scrawled an assignment for school on loose-leaf. Dropping Genny off at her office on the way to the university in the morning twice a week.

  When the monument vanishes, we ourselves are tasked with keeping up the struggle. We’re left with the impression of the monument’s absence, with remembering what we want and need to remember. In pulling away from something, in obscuring its easy presence, you get a sense of what the thing really is to you. You get a more full view of it.

  Mother is no longer my mother when I’m near her. It’s only when I look away, when I close my eyes and step into the memory palace, that I really get a sense of her.

  The sinking of a monument is not a surrender, is not a memory giving up, but rather a challenge, a passing of the torch. We must keep the memories we want alive, without relying so much on cold stone, metal, and placards, all of which—good and needed as they may be, at times—transmute the breadth of sensation into the finality of information. Most monuments, eventually, make their memories stuffy. They make you think that there is only one version of something that you should remember. They make you think the past is clean and over.

  To me, Mother stands in for a host of incompatible memories. They don’t add up to anything rational, don’t add up to a finished product. They pile up into a convolution of honest loose ends and contradictions. There are many different versions of her that have lived and died, many different versions of her seen from different versions of me. Remembering her, to me, is watching two armies clashing in fury and love.

  The same goes for Genny. Remembering her, the full spectrum is there: loathing and loving and everything in between—comfort and fear, confusion and conclusion.

  The blankness of a monument hurts. In a monument’s failure to fully portray loss there is a sort of tragedy. It’s hard to feel anything but grief, because grief is the only appropriate reaction to loss. But what about humour, or relief, or anything out of the ordinary? There is a sort of policing, a lack of trust to most monuments. There are decided ways of relating to them.

  You can’t fuck in a graveyard. You can’t smile on a tour through a death camp. You can’t yawn at a confession. But why not? Most monuments don’t let you revitalize a memory into your own code. They are too sacred; there’s no place for your humanity to meet them.

  I wasn’t in Hamburg for the Monument against Fascism’s final lowering. I only saw it in the middle, not at its peak, or its absence. But there were so many things written on its skin that were more than simply names. There was graffiti, incoherence, irreverence. I read in the papers that some officials were disturbed by this, the way people didn’t follow the rules. But the supposed ruination of the monument energized me. I fed off it, how people had chosen to interface with the monument—with the memory, with the ideas—however they pleased. That was the beauty of that monument, how it was different from most other monuments. It stood against fascism, and what stands against fascism better than vandals? Better than not following the script?

  I found scrawled in white paint on the thin lead skin of the up-shooting pillar the words:

  PUNK’S

  not DEAD

  I stood there, in front of a mortal monument, a monument that would stand for less than a decade, myself living proof of a sort of anarchy of existence, and felt validated. I felt that every single human bit of me was important, and that any remembering I did was a personal responsibility rather than a social one.

  I felt scrawled on, enigmatic and obtuse.

  It’s nearly eleven o’clock the night before the sale and Hudson is coming soon. The house is completely bare besides the armoire and everything in the living room. I’ve put a flat sheet down at the base of the armoire and I’ve been sitting here for a while now, thinking that I should have made coffee. I go down to the living room and find the box with the kettle, but then I remember there’s no coffee in the house.

  This house has never been so undone. There are so many things intrinsic to the house’s soul that have been excised.

  I stand in the living room looking out the curtainless window to the dark, curtainless lawn, freshly clipped. I stare at the back of the realtor’s sign, freshly pushed into that lawn. I remember the photo of me, digging.

  I go to the front door and kneel where the photo is in its frame. Where it is not. I close my eyes and it’s there, in the memory palace, and I pick it up and carry it to the other room. I open one eye in a squint so that I can double expose the palace onto the house. I navigate around the things in the living room to an empty space on the floor and start a pile.

  Hudson knocks when I’m in the middle of pulling Polaroids of me and Erwin and everything from the empty drawers in the kitchen. I yell at him to come in, but he doesn’t, so I go to the door and let him in. He looks tired, unshaven, but gives me a nice, quiet smile. His arms are full of his tools, and I take some and help him upstairs.

  “Coffee?” I say, bending out and into myself.

  “My saviour,” he says, setting his tools down on the sheet and putting a hand on the doorwood.

  When I reach the banister, I close my eyes, and as I go down, everyone waiting around on the stairs comes along after me. I feel like some kind of duchess regally exiting a palace to go to a ball as the enemy knocks on the front gate. They take the photos of younger me and younger each other from the wall as they follow, and I show them where I’m making two piles in the only bare spot on the living room floor: take and leave.

  I hear Hudson’s hacksaw slowly beginning to growl through the hardware of the armoire as I open the back door. I get in my car and drive.

  It’s Friday night, but it’s not busy out. This is Winnipeg, and it’s not late enough. The younger versions of myselves are jammed in the back of the car. There’s someone in my trunk, laughing. I drive through a Tim Hortons and get two extra-large coffees and turn back. None of them want anything.

  I’ve decided that I’m leaving—I keep forgetting that I’m leaving, keep trying to forget it—in just a few days.

  I park out front, behind Hudson, and almost knock before I come in. I open the door, the tray of coffees in one hand, and I can hear Hudson’s saw, I can hear his humming. The coffee is heating my hand. My friends stay out in the yard, so I leave the porch light on and hit the stairs. My eyes are open because what’s the difference now? The house is barren in both places.

  Hudson is standing with the doors of the armoire open. I can only see his legs, and it looks like he’s being eaten by it. He hasn’t gotten far while I was out. I tap his shoulder and hand him a coffee. I am happy to see he is whole, removing the shelves from inside.

  “Are you sure?” he says, looking at the armoire with the doors removed. The wood saw Hudson used to dismantle the loft bed is sitting on the sheet, its teeth so clean.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you sure you want me to do this? Take it apart? It’s beautiful.”

  I look at it. “It’s got to get out of here, and unless you get some more arms, it’s the only way.�
��

  He closes the door and drinks some coffee. He could not look more tired.

  “I could get some more,” he says.

  I do not say anything for a moment. I think about the cat looping through the rooms. “No, I don’t think so. This has to be the way.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze it. I could explain it, I could tell him what is gained, but there are too many words in the world I could use to say it. He drinks some more coffee and adds a very small twist to his head.

  “Thank you,” is all I say before I go downstairs.

  I stand at the pile of things and look out to the yard, where all the rest of me are running around, getting in arguments, laughing at one another. I go to the door and let them in, take them to the living room.

  “We’ve got to figure all of this out,” I say.

  They move like ants through the house, pulling at things remembered, dragging sensations and little favourite glimpses into our lives, putting them in the pile to keep. The rest—jagged, dim, heavy, and unincorporatable things—are torn out and left in the other, larger pile. Everyone has their favourite pieces. They clutch them and we listen as Hudson moves the saw through the wood again.

  It takes him a long time to make it through, and while he does that I clear off the dining room table, clear it of the boxes, the lamps and whatnot, for the sale. Then I lie down on it like it’s an operating table.

  Corpse pose, Alice whispers in my ear, and I let my muscles fall dead.

  My eyes rest, half-closed, half-open, as everyone takes up their favourite bits from the keep pile and places them on my body, massaging them into the gaps in my loosened flesh. I feel so refreshingly burnt down, like I’ve been dropped into a crucible and broiled away. There is a sea of hands on me, pushing, reshaping.