The Sunflower Forest (29 page)

I sighed and looked down at my book.

‘She was a very complex woman. I did my best by her. I probably made plenty of mistakes along the way. And no doubt through the years there were a lot of things I could have done better. But, Les, I always did the best I could.’

With one fingernail I riffled along the edges of the pages in the book. Weary depression was superceding the anger in me. I felt tired. Too tired to keep on with the conversation. Too tired to cry. Too tired to even care.

My father remained sitting on the chair next to my bed, his hands in his lap.

‘Why did it happen, Dad?’

He looked over.

‘She
was
a good person. Why did she have to suffer through all those atrocious things? They ruined her life. They’ve nearly ruined ours. Why did this happen to us?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I keep wondering what the point of it is. I keep trying to figure out why we deserved this.’

He shrugged. It was a slight movement, just a twitch of his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it just happened.’

‘There’ve got to be reasons,’ I said.

He didn’t reply.

‘There’ve got to be answers.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure there do. Or at least I’m not sure we ever necessarily know them.’

I lowered my head. ‘I can accept this happening. If I know why, I think I can accept it, but I do need to know the answers.’

And all my father did was sigh.

O
utwardly, a semblance of normalcy returned. On Wednesday of the following week, Auntie Caroline went back to Winnetka, leaving Dad, Megs and me to try life without Mama on our own. On Thursday Dad decided that it was time for Megan and me to go back to school. It had to be faced sooner or later, he said, and the sooner the better, especially in my sister’s case, because her work had suffered disastrously during the weeks leading up to the murders. My father took Megan back the following morning, so that he could have a word with her teacher and the principal. I returned to the high school by myself.

Inwardly, however, for me at least, not even a semblance of normalcy showed itself. The thing I had not counted on was the almost palpable way I missed Mama. It was the sense of absence that destroyed me. I woke with it, a curiously flat emotion, and lay in bed, listening for my father to get up first. I couldn’t bear going by his bedroom, seeing him curled up alone in the big bed, still scrupulously keeping to his side, leaving the other half undisturbed. So I would wait. Even on the weekends when I generally got up first, I would wake and wait. The worst time of day, however, was late afternoon. I would always arrive home from school, expecting Mama to be there. Long after I had consciously given up expecting it, some small part of me would tense with anticipation when I opened the door. Then I would see only Megan, sitting alone at the kitchen table, and the flatness would return. The house was soaked in incompleteness. My days were all stained grey.

I felt weighted down. The weeks were warm and scented with lilac and hawthorn, and each day that passed seemed to add another weight. Day by day, the burden grew heavier, and my shoulders ached with a physical pain and my back hurt so much that standing became an agony. I told Dad about it, and he made me hot compresses and rubbed my shoulders. When that didn’t help, he made an appointment with the doctor for me. But it was the passing days that were so heavy. I said this to the doctor, and he nodded and gave me a prescription for Valium.

The only way to make my back and shoulders stop hurting was to lie flat on my bed. That helped. More and more of my free time was spent in my room on the bed. If I lay perfectly still and did not move, I felt OK. But I had to keep the door shut to prevent Megan from bothering me, because I discovered talking to Megan made me move too much. And after a while I found talking to Paul or Brianna or Dad hurt too much too. So I locked the door.

Most of the time in the bedroom I did nothing. I just lay there, stared at the crack in the ceiling over my bed and didn’t dare to move for the pain. And I thought. At first it was just about Mama. My ability to create images of things in my head had always been good, and I could visualize her with intense clarity: the tilt of her head, the hang of her clothes, the spirited quickness of her movements. I could hear her too. She’d had a very distinctive laugh. When she was really pleased, her laugh would go way up the scale to a high note and burst into cackles. Her heavy accent had always dominated her speaking voice and made it very easy to recollect. Her
r
’s especially had sounded foreign, pronounced in a rolled, throaty way that made them nearly lisped. And she had been capable of absolutely fracturing English on occasion, either by using German sentence structure that kept us all waiting breathlessly for the verb, or by committing hilarious malapropisms, like the time she told Megan’s second-grade teacher that Megs was suffering from conjugal bliss when she meant conjunctivitis. Mama had never been wholly at home in English. It had always been a troublesome language for her that she littered with not-quite words, like ‘quietful’ and ‘longly’, and retreated from whenever it became too inconvenient. As a child I had been annoyed by her accent, her unwillingness to accept English, her persistent foreignness. Now these things drenched my memories with tender affection.

I wondered about Mama as a little girl. I tried to create a picture of her with pigtails and knock-knees, full of childhood’s eager clumsiness and innocence. The sweeping panoramas of Lébény and of Dresden with Tante Elfie unfolded themselves with willing familiarity, but I realized abruptly that I had never been quite able to formulate an ordinary girl to go with them. All I could ever conjure up was a survivor, someone who lived only in extremes, where everything had always been loyalty or betrayal, trust or treachery, life or death. Childish concerns were impossible to measure on such an heroic scale. What did girlish rivalries with schoolfriends, fights at home for the biggest piece of cake or desperation at being left out of a list of invitations to a party weigh in comparison? Thus the only girl I had ever brought to mind had bold Aryan features and the veiled, uneasy acumen so common to the very bright. But she never had innocence.

I wondered, when I couldn’t re-create the girl from before the war, what she must have been like right afterward. I couldn’t picture Mama then either, with less than a hundred pounds on her tall, rangy frame. I couldn’t imagine her with short hair. Dad, during that era, came to me more clearly. I saw him the way he looked in the photograph we had of Uncle Kip’s wedding. Dad had been best man. Slight and slim in his dress uniform, he’d stood beside Kip on the steps outside the church. His cheeks had been round and red as autumn apples, his eyes completely obscured by the shadow of the visor on his hat. But how had he looked to Mama in that hospital in Germany? She, with her love of classical music and ballet, with her sophisticated knowledge of upper-class European life, with her restless, undisciplined intelligence. How had he beguiled her to want a pimply-faced farm boy from Illinois? What kind of magic did he use to make her choose a life of wearing secondhand denim and scrubbing her own floors and wandering from one backwater community to another with a man whose only accomplishment was loving her? I could create images but I could never give life to the young man and woman they must have been.

On other occasions I contemplated Klaus. Where did he live? What did he look like? Did he resemble Mama? She had a very distinctive mouth, wide and supple, and both Megan and I had inherited it. Had he? And what was he doing that precise moment I was thinking of him? One afternoon I counted out the time zones in the Atlas. Seven hours difference between Kansas and Germany. After that I could never look at the clock without doing quick calculations regarding Klaus. Four-fifteen, I’d think, and it is 11.15 at night there. Is Klaus asleep? Is he taking a bath or finding a book to read or doing any of the other countless little things one does before bed? Does he have children now? Maybe he has a boy or a girl of his own. Is he kissing them goodnight?

Perhaps the most bewitching aspect of reflecting on Klaus and József was the eerie knowledge that Mama had been willing to kill them both. My skin would crawl when I really thought about that. To be the child of a mother capable of murdering her own children was a concept that was almost paralytic when I fully considered it; yet, because I was in no danger, I could regard it with fascinated horror. The odd part was that the woman capable of such an act stayed as distant from my mama, to me, as did Klaus and József.

What eventually grew out of my thoughts was an uncontrollable desire to pursue the past. I was transfixed not only by the power of Mama’s stories and the events that came of them, but also by Mama, herself. The magic of our bond was irrefutable. She
made
me, I’d think, she carried me inside her own body, just as she had Klaus and József. I was part of her before I was myself. I had a right to her world and her dreams and her memories. With incredible clarity, I would think:
they’re mine
. They
are
my memories.

I thought of going to Hungary and visiting Lébény. I thought of tracing Mama and Daddy’s trek from northern Germany, where they had met, down through Austria and Czechoslovakia. I thought of going to see the location of Ravensbrück. I thought of searching for Klaus myself. And perhaps most of all I thought of going to Forest of Flowers, where my mother’s resurrection took place. Wherever, I realized I had to go.

The first few days back at school were a crash course in human behaviour for me. I learned quickly to recognize all the little signs: the looks, the avoidance of looks, the instant exit, the intense discomfort I could provoke simply by being present. I also became acutely aware of the countless, casual phrases regarding murder and insanity that littered everyday speech and that took on a brave new meaning when I was in the room.

During the week following my return, I stopped by the French language lab after school to ask Miss Conway if I could get back to working on the French tapes in my free time. Desperate for something to take my mind off things, I thought maybe this would help. I was also nursing the secret hope that she might still invite me over to her apartment to see her slides of Paris as she had promised. In fact, I dreamed about that shamelessly, thinking perhaps we could be friends. She was only twenty-three. I knew that because Brianna, who worked in the front office at school, had looked it up for me, and I thought now that I was an adult and nearly graduated, if she saw me out of school and we talked French together, maybe she would forget I was just a student.

It was after four in the afternoon when I went in to see her, and the school was dead silent. Miss Conway was methodically putting assignments into folders, one after another, and the room was so quiet I could hear her fingernails against the folders.

‘You do well enough in French,’ she said to me when I asked about the tapes. ‘Why don’t you go see Mr Tennant, Lesley? I think you’d be better off exploring advanced German. With your background …’

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to because I knew what came next. It was no secret to anyone now where my expertise in German came from. If you read the newspapers, you knew.

‘I’m really a lot more interested in French,’ I replied. ‘And I need more practice.’

For several moments she did not say anything but continued putting the assignments away. I watched her. She was a tiny person, maybe four feet ten or eleven, and I towered over her. I felt clumsy beside her.

She looked up. ‘I really am sorry, Lesley. But I just don’t have the time any more to do those tapes with you. You understand. With the end of school and everything …’ She smiled. It was a polite smile, impeccably so. You almost couldn’t tell it wasn’t friendliness.

I fiddled with a button on my blouse. ‘I could do them on my own. If you don’t mind. You know, like I did in March. I could just do them in here on my own.’ There was suddenly an intense urge to cry. I wanted her to know how much I was suffering, how much I needed something to divert my attention, how important French was to me, just because it
wasn’t
connected to my mother. Perhaps even more, I wanted her to feel sorry for me, to put her arms around me and tell me she understood. The tears rose in my eyes but didn’t fall. However, I did not try to hide them from her.

If she saw my tears, she gave no indication of it. Instead, she turned and went over to the file cabinet. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the lab has to be locked when I’m not in it. There has to be a teacher supervising. You understand. Those are the school rules.’

I studied her face. I had thought she was beautiful. Indeed, I still did. She had very dark hair and large eyes that intimated a Latin American heritage. Her features had the delicate sharpness of a bisque doll’s.

‘You do understand, don’t you?’ she asked again when I hadn’t responded. ‘Why don’t you go and see Mr Tennant? I think he usually stays late on Wednesdays and Fridays. You could do German tapes then.’

‘I’ve been alone in the lab before, Miss Conway. All those other times I worked on my own and you weren’t there.’

‘No,’ she said and it was final.

At home that evening Dad and I sat together in the kitchen. Dad had made a pot of Mama’s strong European coffee after supper, and he even allowed Megan to drink some. Then she wandered off to some other part of the house, leaving us alone with the rest of the pot.

It was a very hot night. All the windows and the back door were open, and Dad had the fan on the kitchen counter. It whirred back and forth, blowing my hair across my face as it passed. The two of us sat, sweat beaded on our foreheads, and drank cup after cup of steaming coffee.

‘You know, I’m thinking,’ I said, ‘that maybe when school’s out, I’ll go away for a while.’

He looked up abruptly. He had been carefully measuring sugar into his mug, stirring it, staring into it, measuring a wee bit more. Mama never took sugar, just cream, but my father had never adjusted to the thick, powerful taste. But now he stopped, holding the spoon, sugar and all, poised over the mug.

‘You mean college?’ he asked with suspicion in his voice. I knew he knew I didn’t mean college.

I shook my head. ‘No. Just away.’

‘Where?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just need to get away.’

Brow puckered, he lowered the spoon into the coffee and stirred it. ‘I don’t want to hear this kind of talk right now, Les. There’s been too much happening over the past few weeks. We all need to settle down again. Let’s not think of doing wild things.’

‘It’s not wild. I just want to go away for a while. I need to get out. I need to think. I feel like a boulder is sitting on me.’

He said nothing.

‘I can’t stand it here any more.’

He looked up. ‘What can’t you stand?’

I gazed off across the kitchen. The counter was littered with the aftermath of supper preparation: dirty utensils, half an onion, potato peelings on the drainboard. I wondered what, in ten or twenty years’ time, I would remember of this kitchen. I wondered which of the million moments I had spent here would stay with me.