Unravelled (10 page)

Part two

isabelle

NOVEMBER 1946

My heart burns in flames of sorrow
Sparks and smoke rise turning to the sky
Within me, the heart has taken fire like a candle
My body, whirling, is a lighthouse illuminated by your image

Mihri Hatun, Female Poet from the Ottoman Empire

10 CHAPTER ten

✪

The day we found out she was still alive, Mother shrieked into the phone. It was so loud that I could hear it from the pavement where I sat with the next-door neighbors' children. I held little James in my arms, the chubby but sullen infant, determined to put all of my loose strands of hair in his mouth. I watched Don, his elder by just a few years, toddle in the yard chasing their brown and white spotted cocker spaniel. He tripped every few steps on the uneven ground, face planting onto the grass. His mother, who was putting her laundry on the line to dry, would look over to him every so often and urge him to be a little bit more careful.

The shriek pierced through the mid-morning Saturday afternoon haze, like a crack of thunder before rain fell. My eyes whipped up to the house as I tightened my coat a little more. It was early winter in San Francisco. The leaves wouldn't change here, but I knew winter was around the corner by the thick chill that hung in the air, each day becoming a little shorter.  Hearing the scream, I turned to James and Don's mother, her long brown hair in a knot above her head as she wrestled with her clothespins. With James on my hip, I ran inside to check on my own mother, making sure everything was all right. And I found her, her hands on her face in pure excitement, jumping up and down in her slippered feet.

"What happened?" I asked, James' baby gurgles ringing in my left ear as he bounced on my hip.

"She's," my mother began, breathing as though she had just run a long marathon and struggling to stand still. "alive!"

I looked down at the dining room table, which had since been covered in papers dotted with chicken scratch handwriting and old, fading pictures of relatives in Hungary. My mother had been born in Budapest and moved with her family to Debrecen at the age of 2. When she was 18, she met my father, an American passing through on his way somewhere else. But he said her eyes, two sparkling brown jewels beset on her face, had captured him and forced him to stay in Hungary just a little while longer. A few months before she turned 19, without knowing any English, she boarded a ship bound for New York and then a train to San Francisco, a world apart from her family and anything she had ever known.

She had always lived halfway between the United States and Hungary. She frequented the few Hungarian bakeries in town and started a Hungarian club for the small group of other ex-patriots. Her shelves were lined with Hungarian books, masterpieces and fanciful tales, each in her native language. She still spoke with the sweet yet brusque Hungarian accent, which prompted everyone to ask where she was from after she uttered two or three words.

World War II passed through Europe, and at the beginning, Mother didn't worry too much. In America, we learned to make cupcakes without sugar or butter, find alternatives to nylon stockings and say goodbye to our friends, fathers, cousins, brothers and neighbors who were swept off to war. We heard vicious rumors in the Temple Father dragged us to every other Friday (in a compromise with my mother, for she was never very religious) that Hitler was hunting down Jews, taking them from their homes into forced labor camps. Many were never seen again.

With all of Mother's relatives back in Hungary, and Jewish to boot, of course she did worry. But they wrote to her, assured her they were fine. Sometimes they even called her and she would spend three minutes or more sitting next to the telephone table as she wound and unwound the cord in her hand, speaking Hungarian in hushed tones, as if someone sinister was listening to her conversation, even though no one on our party line spoke Hungarian. Sometimes she would shout into the phone, unable to hear above the static, panicked.

And then, one day, the letters and phone calls stopped. Mother tried to phone neighbors and friends, but Hungary had been decimated. Old numbers became busy signals, or the operator would come back saying no one was on the line. Relatives no longer wrote back. It was as if they had vanished into thin air, like a Harry Houdini act.

We waited. Since I had never met any of these relatives, my life went on as normal. I continued to go to school. I talked to James and Don's mother about attending Berkeley after high school. I went to movies like
Meet Me in St. Louis
and tried to mimic Katherine Hepburn's attitude in the solace of my room. I did algebra and history homework and leafed through the latest issues of
Look
Magazine. Sometimes, I even read Nancy Drew books, which I hid underneath my desk while my teacher was droning on about grammar. My life moved forward, but my mother's stopped, moved backward even. She seemed shut down, unable to do much except call the Red Cross almost every day, make endless charts of our relatives' whereabouts and glue old pictures together, as if it would somehow bring them back.

With my mother's obsession with her family, the space between Father and Mother grew more and more apparent. At first, it was a small wedge between them, but as the days turned into weeks and then into months and years, my father's inability to fill the void, he became distant and detached. He began to accept assignments in Los Angeles more and more often, gathering his items in his car and leaving for months at a time. Sometimes, Mother didn't even tell him goodbye, simply sat with her coffee as she spent the day memorizing every detail of the pictures. I had never met any of the people in them, but it was as if they lived here with us, as real as anyone else in my life. Some days, I swore I heard my mother speaking to them.

In 1945, the war ended.
Life Magazine
published stories on Auschwitz along with pictures of living ghosts barely able to hold themselves up for the snap of the camera. The stories of starvation, of no sanitation, of gas chambers and Zyklon B turned my stomach. They turned my mother into a shell of herself, working her into a deep depression.  

She spent months on the phone to every Red Cross in Europe, not caring about what it cost to place a call so far away. They explained to her calmly and quietly that there were too many people scattered too far away to find everyone. But their names were put on lists. She would be called if their names turned up. So Mother waited. She waited by the phone, biting her nails to the quick. Sometimes, she would make an attempt at normal life by cooking pot roast or going to her sewing circle or Jewish women's club, but there was always something missing, a blank stare on her face. Her body was there, her mind was elsewhere, in Auschwitz.

It had been almost two years since the end of the war. At seventeen, almost two years seemed like a lifetime to me. I had kissed two boys since then and had had my heart broken. I was promoted two grades in school. I had grown two bra sizes and changed my hairstyle at least five times. But to Mother, it was like life had stopped as though nothing had ever changed. There were months of no news, punctuated by bad news that would send her into crying fits. Her brother was dead, shot in Auschwitz on an SS officer's whim. Her niece was dead, gassed for a bout of dysentery. Her parents were unaccounted for, but the Red Cross workers told her not to hold onto any hope of their being alive. Old people were typically killed on arrival at Auschwitz. We were even told to expect that most of the children would be dead, as well. Many of their names were brandished on transport lists to Auschwitz, and most were killed on arrival with the old people. When Mother told me this, I remember a metallic taste starting at the center of my tongue and spreading to my entire mouth. We were told, though, that none of this was certain. It was all hearsay, but the death toll was believed to be unbearably large.

"She's alive!" my mother had shouted that winter morning, baby James grabbing the free strands of hair on my head. I was in the process of drying it, so that I could use the new curling iron Father had brought back from Los Angeles for me. He had suggested I move down there with him multiple times, but I couldn't bear the thought of leaving my mother alone with the dead, to become one of them.

"Who?" I asked, my mother practically dancing in a flurry of joy. Her toes barely touched the ground. She reminded me of the girls at school dances who spun and jumped to the music, their arms swinging in the air.

"Aliz!" she screamed. "Aliz is alive!"

James immediately began to cry at my mother's outburst, and I rocked him from side to side in an effort to soothe his hiccups.

I scratched my head and pulled another strand of my drying brown hair from James' grasp. I made my way to the table where all the pictures were laid out, sepia and black and white prints of people from a by-gone era. There were candid shots of children's birthday parties, photos of weddings twenty years ago, even one that my mother had told me had been taken at her grandmother's funeral, all of the subjects standing together sorrowfully in dark garb. Scanning the rows of pictures, all spread out like a haphazard family tree, I found Aliz Stern, or Stern Aliz as she was called in the Hungarian name order. She stood next to her twin, Hajna, their hands to their sides and cheeky grins on their faces. They both brandished small rucksacks on their backs, as if they were ready for school, their hair in long braids that ran almost to their waists and tied off with big bows. Although Aliz was smiling, Hajna's grin seemed a bit more impish, a bit livelier. Both were smiling at a subject in the distance, their eyebrows knitted as if to shield the sun from their eyes.

"Aliz is at an orphanage in Katowice, Poland. They said I'm her only living relative, well that they know of, so she'll be coming here. We can fix up the guest room and she can live with us!"

Mother was in a state of euphoria, sitting down on one of the dining room chairs with a thud, her slippered feet making a small scratching sound on the wooden floor. Even though she had been in America for more than half of her life, Mother still clung to the Hungarian thought that slippers must be worn inside at all times, lest you catch a cold. No one I knew subscribed to such a thought. Mrs. Taylor, who lived three doors down, dismissed it as a Hungarian wives tale, waving her hand while pronouncing it so, making her seem so much more learned and knowledgeable than the poor, provincial Hungarians.

"She's coming here?" I choked out, barely comprehending what was happening. I licked my lips and shook my head, completely taken aback.

"Well, yes." Mother nodded. "She's getting an expedited visa."

I sat down on one of the off-white dining room chairs that had belonged to my father's mother. He was always so particular with them, so upset when we sat down on them without having washed up beforehand. I sunk down into it, my body feeling a bit like it was glued there. James' mother was waiting for him, I was sure of it, but I couldn't bring myself to stand up just yet.

"Are her parents gone?" I asked, swallowing hard. I didn't want to say "dead" because whenever the word was uttered, my mother would close up, shutting her mouth so tightly that her lips would almost disappear. Her eyes would look down at the floor, her entire posture changing.

"We don't know what happened to her mother," she informed me, showing me a photograph of a beautiful, well-endowed woman with a polka-dot parasol over her head. She was lying underneath a tree in the grass, a small dog curled up beside her. "Her father is gone. And so are her sisters. Or so they've said."

I swallowed for a moment, letting the cuckoo clock's bird come out three times to mark the time before continuing.

"If she is a child and they killed the children in Auschwitz," I began. "How did she live?"

Mother shook her head and pulled her shoulders to her ears.

"I don't know. But she's alive. We're going to call your father, and we'll work out her visa. If they find her mother, then she'll go back to Hungary, but until then, she's coming here to live with us. We're her only relatives that they know of. She's been living in an orphanage for almost two years, Izzy. She needs her family."

Before I could answer, there was a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole to find Mrs. Jean Reilly, James' mother standing in front of it. A strand of brown hair had escaped from her bun and she held her laundry basket delicately on her hip. Next to her stood Don, his hand clasped in hers, his other hand stuck in his mouth. Last year, Don had lost his index finger on his right hand during an accident with the washer. As a curious three-year-old, he had stuck his hand in the wringer and turned the handle on the side to see what would happen. Since then, when he wanted to be naughty, he would sometimes put it under his nose to make it look like he had shoved his entire finger up there, something which would prompt Mrs. Reilly to give him a swat on the arm and tell him to go inside.

"Is everything all right?" Mrs. Reilly asked as I opened the door. She stood on her toes to try and see my mother, but mother had already made her way upstairs, probably sorting out the sheets and towels before we even knew how long it would be until Aliz arrived.

"Fine," I nodded, handing James over to his mother. He gurgled and grabbed her neck, immediately recognizing her. "We just heard one of our relatives is alive."

Mrs. Reilly nodded and smiled slowly. My mother wasn't particularly close to the Reillys. She had seen them sometimes for afternoon cupcakes or coffee to discuss neighborhood business. But they weren't close. Still, she and every other housewife in the neighborhood seemingly knew about my mother's search, each shaking her head as they heard about it, and some greeting her with stunned silence when they saw her, unsure how to react to my mother's sullen demeanor.

"They're Irish-Catholic," Father would say about the Reillys under his breath as he watched them gather into their family car for mass each Sunday. I had grown up thinking that was an insult. It wasn't until I reached junior high school that I learned he was talking about their religion and heritage, and not delivering a swift, rude word. I had grown a little closer to them as I began babysitting in high school, earning a little extra money by watching their young boys while she did chores or when Mr. and Mrs. Reilly went to confession or mass on Wednesday nights.