Publikacija SEP 2011 - Vilenica

so she couldn’t reach out and touch things in front of her; Pauline
walked until she bumped into a tree and collapsed on the ground. I
caught up with her and bent down and wiped her face clean of dirt
and the blood that ran down her forehead. The soldiers laughed with
the sweet sound of carelessness, with the acid sound of enjoying someone
else’s pain. Then they led us to the edge of the park, lined us up,
and aimed their rifles at us.
“Turn around,” they told us.
We turned our backs to the rifles.
“Now run home if you want to save your lives!” one of the soldiers
shouted, and hundreds of old legs set off running; we ran, we fell down,
we stood up, we began running again, while behind us we heard the
laughter of the soldiers, filled with the sweet sound of carelessness, with
the acid sound of enjoying someone else’s pain.
Rosa, Pauline, Marie, and I passed that evening in silence. Pauline
trembled— perhaps not so much out of fear for her own life as at the
thought that never again would she see the human being closest to her,
the one who had come from her womb. Rosa’s and Marie’s children
were dead, and the sole remnant of the family I never created was a
fading bloody trace on the wall by my bed. They say it is more difficult
for those with children to depart from this world: death separates
those who received life from those who gave it. Pauline sat in the corner
of the room and trembled, sensing that separation.
The next day, I went to see Sigmund. It was Friday afternoon, the
time he devoted to the ritual cleaning of the antiques in his study. I
wanted to tell him what had happened to Pauline and me the day before,
but he showed me an excerpt from a newspaper.
“Look what Thomas Mann wrote,” he said.
“Marie and Pauline are afraid nonetheless,” I said.
“They are afraid—of what” he asked setting the news article down
on the table.
“They say that the same thing they saw in Berlin is going to happen
here.”
“What they saw in Berlin…” Then he picked up one of the antique
objects from the table, a stone monkey, and began cleaning the small
figure with a small brush. “None of that is going to happen here.”
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