written By
1.
My mother and I sit at her kitchen table. Our coffee cups glow in late
afternoon light. My father, sweaty from yard work, snores in his living room
chair. Perhaps it is the smell of cut grass filling the house. She tells me how
French Moroccan soldiers marched through her village after Germany
surrendered. They were given one day to do whatever they wished with the
German women and girls. Her father hid her and her sister behind the
dovecote above the attic eaves. As she speaks, straw scrapes my skin, dust of
droppings catch in my throat. I listen for my daughter napping in the next
room.
2.
Memorial Day. Small flags line the walk. Inside, lingering over schnapps and
apfelkuchen, my father and his friend swap war stories. How Hiroshima
saved my father from the march on Tokyo and certain slaughter. The horrors
of the Battle of the Bulge. In the kitchen, my sisters and I scrape plates, load
the dishwasher, gossip. My mother makes another pot of coffee, scoops
whipped cream into a clean dish, begins a story about playing truant in a
neighbor’s field. A soldier found her, pulled her deeper into the grass. My
sisters and I stop laughing. Her hair hung to her hips in straw-colored braids.
She was fourteen, not yet menstruating. An officer suddenly appeared, took
my mother’s hand, brought her home to her father. I look up. My daughter
stands in the doorway. Pony-tailed, narrow-hipped, fourteen.
3.
My father has been dead nearly five years. My mother has grown old. She no
longer drives. She worries someone peers in her windows at night. Her
refrigerator contains only milk, butter, a few eggs, some apples, mustard. The
house, where my parents raised six children, where they baked together for
forty-five years, where they laughed and squabbled over countless meals and
games of Scrabble, is up for sale. She will move to a one-bedroom apartment
that is easier to manage. There is so much to go through. So much to divide
among family, give away, throw out. We take a break to run errands. It is a
beautiful May afternoon. We visit the cemetery, plant snapdragons and
pansies where my father’s family lies. It is something they did together.
Afterwards, we drive to Walmart to buy plastic storage bins. Suddenly, in the
parking lot, she returns to that day in Germany. This time, she says she was
only nine or ten. From the dovecote, she and her sisters watched gaunt
Moroccan soldiers tear her mother’s few remaining chickens apart and eat
the bloody flesh. The Walmart cart my mother pushes toward the entrance
steadies her. Now, in her story, she is older, thirteen or fourteen, cleaning her
aunt’s house. She steps outside to hang wash rags to dry. There is no soldier in
a field—there are many. A ring of them. They take her to the barn. An officer
appears. The officer says he will spare my mother if her older cousin, a girl of
almost twenty, takes her place. The shopping cart bumps across the broken
macadam. The night before, we sat in the kitchen, sorting a shoebox of old
German photos. In the soft gold light, she stared at a black and white picture
of a stout, middle-aged woman with wavy hair. A cousin. She spoke a name
she’d never mentioned before. She sat quietly. Then she picked up another
photo, the blur of a child moving.
