FOR MY FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY IN MAY the only thing I really wanted was a life that excluded O.F., but Mutti said it couldn't be done. So I gave myself a new name instead. It was Maria. Three vowels, two consonants: a song. But what good was a name if no one would use it? Two months later everyone was still calling me Marianne.
Mutti did grant my other birthday wish. It was a tiny white mouse I named Elvis. Buying him was a considerable sacrifice for her because O.F. disliked pets and often gave Seppi a calculating look when he thought no one was watching. They had a talk about little Elvis behind closed doors. It quickly deteriorated into a shouting match. Mutti emerged from it with her green eyes shooting sparks. O.F. locked the living room door behind her and stayed inside, chain-smoking and furiously pecking on the little black portable typewriter he'd confiscated from Mutti last year, on the same day he had installed a lock on his side of their wardrobe.
In June they mapped out my vacation, also behind closed doors. Mutti informed me I was to be sent to summer camp from the beginning of July through August. She was not interested in my opinion on the subject.
As we drifted toward July I wished the calendar would skip all the weekends, sparing me O.F.'s disapproving presence. Then came that one Saturday when my childhood blinders finally slipped.
It happened while I was sitting by myself in the living room, Seppi stretched at my feet. I was waiting for the TV to warm up. A warm breeze billowed the long gauze curtains at the open balcony door. On the narrow street below, in deepening late-afternoon shade, children were laughing and shouting as they played with Wolfi's new ball. It was made of see-through plastic and gave a musical "ping" each time it bounced.
I held Mutti's old purse-mirror close to my face, staring fixedly into the reflection of my eyes, trying hard not to blink. I'd read a story about that technique in one of Frau Keppler's books of weird tales. It claimed if you stared long enough some invisible beast would rise from within, stare back at you out of your own eyes, and drive you insane.
I wondered what it was like to be possessed by an alien. Sometimes, between involuntary blinks, I sensed a dark thing crouching just out of sight.
An instant later it happened: my pupils grew fixed and expanded, crowding my hazel irises into tight bands at the rims. Through the black holes in the centers something glittered and sucked, trying to steal my place in the world.
With a gasp I flung the mirror onto the rug where it collected the green overhead light and sent a flare into my right eye, triggering an odd, silvery buzz. I pressed a hand over the eye, pulled the doily from under the ashtray with the other, and tossed it onto the glaring rectangle, breaking the evil spell. Then I squeezed my lids shut and massaged my rapidly numbing right temple.
When I opened them again it was as if I were seeing the living room for the first time: the moss-green couch, the matching chair I was sprawling on, the coffee table, the two-sided mahogany wardrobe on the opposite wall, the convertible desk squeezed into one corner; the console crammed into the other.
It occurred to me that nothing in the room was as it seemed to be. The couch hid a bed, the desk a sewing machine, the console the TV, radio, and record player, and O.F.'s locked half of the wardrobe doubled as a safe. It's where he stashed all the stuff he didn't want anyone—not even Mutti—to see.
Then the TV emitted the same kind of silvery buzz I'd felt in my light-stabbed eye and slowly the screen turned dull shades of gray. I gathered the courage to scoop up both doily and mirror, shook the treacherous glass-rectangle into the wastebasket, and replaced the doily on the coffee table, appreciatively sliding my fingers over its smooth surface. It had come with us from the village along with every other piece of furniture in the apartment except for the console.
Mutti had paid for the furniture twice. The first time, at Vati's insistence, she'd bought the pieces for him as part of her dowry before they got married. The second time he made her buy them from him after the wrenching divorce.
O.F. purchased the console with the first paycheck Mutti turned over to him once they were legally wed. When he was in one of his huffs he liked to say that only he could decide who was allowed to touch it and when.
The grays on the screen began to sharpen with contrasts while I sifted through the sounds coming from the kitchen. From the other side of two closed doors I could hear Mutti chop and stir while he most likely was shaving at the sink next to the gas stove. I strained to catch the first shrill syllable, a rising pitch inevitably followed by the harsh scrape of a chair, lids banging—or worse, the living room door flung wide with O.F. in the frame, itching to magnify some miniscule fault of mine.
Just yesterday, an hour before he came home, our kitchen had rung with laughter. For a sliver of Emmenthaler little Elvis had stood on my shoulder on his pink hind feet, his fragile toes tickling my skin, dancing while his namesake sang "Jailhouse Rock" on the AFN station. As I waited for the TV picture to grow focused I reached into my bushy hair to make sure he was still in his hideaway nest.
A documentary was in progress. I couldn't understand the narrator, whose voice remained garbled even after I increased the volume. He was speaking a nasal American English too fast for my unpracticed ears to comprehend. The accompanying film zoomed along a dim corridor between wooden bunks. Feeble near-skeletons cowered on the rough beds, their heads no more than hollow-eyed, skin-covered skulls.
The narrator's twang was a far cry from the King's English I was learning in school. My greatest achievement, so far, had been the successful recitation of this odd little poem:
Swan swims over the sea.
Swim, swan, swim.
Swan swam over the sea.
Swam, swan, swam.
It was fun to say the lines at top-speed three times in a row, though not very useful.
Overwhelmed by the narrator's rapid-fire English I leaned toward the set, fishing for one simple word I could understand, such as "it" or "that", but the American phrases stuck together like beads on a long, crowded string. Then a translator's voice overrode the twang to explain:
"This was the sight that greeted the liberating forces: men
and women shorn, in rags, starved and near death, left behind by
the same Nazi jailers who fled with the Jews still able to walk . . ."
The camera panned to a hillock outside the barracks. At first I assumed I was looking at turnips. On closer inspection I noticed odd protrusions—a stick-thin arm poking out here, a bare foot jutting out there. Then it dawned on me that I was seeing a pile of naked dead people, grotesquely entwined. The camera focused on the shaved head of a girl around my age, her eyes fixed in terror, her arms nothing but bones covered by skin.
". . . The story is the same in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau.
The Germans called it 'the final solution.' The rest of the
world calls it the cold-blooded murder of six million men,
women and children, most of them Jews. Many were dragged
from their beds in the middle of the night while their German
neighbors and friends turned away so they wouldn't see.
Hitler issued the orders. The German people obeyed . . ."
The roar of my blood drowned out the rest but one word continued to toll deep inside me: Dachau. As far as I knew it was a boring little town just outside of Munich. I wasn't even sure at which end, although now I was hoping it was nowhere near mine.
Seppi put his muzzle on my knees. I touched my forehead to his, glad for his warm, comforting breath. And then the door really did thud against the wall. O.F. paused dramatically in the frame, his cold eyes raking my body.
"Are you deaf?" he said. "How many times must I tell you to keep the volume low? And why are you wasting precious electricity on the overhead light when it isn't even dark yet?"
I stiffened my spine and Seppi froze, flattening himself across my feet. I froze, too, but on the inside, where it didn't show. O.F. scowled, waiting for me to apologize in my most submissive little-girl-voice. Try as I might I couldn't produce a single syllable. He was sure to hold it against me.
On the TV, the translator was saying,
"These were the camp showers, but they did not hold
water. Through them, gas was piped to where the Jews
stood with raised faces, expecting hot—"
O.F. crossed the room and clicked off the set. The sound stopped at once but the picture shrank to the size of a white little ball and hovered. He glared at Seppi, who was beginning to quiver, and shifted his gaze to my knees and up to my face. His eyes glinted briefly at Elvis who had chosen that ill-advised moment to poke his sensitive pink nose out of my hair. Then he went to turn off the light and closed the door much too softly behind him. For once I was grateful for I felt as if I were made of dust and would disintegrate at the slightest agitation.
A copy of the white dot, now no more than a pin-point on the screen, jumped to O.F.'s side of the polished mahogany wardrobe where it expanded until it covered the whole wardrobe door. On it, nightmarish pictures unfolded. Feeble skeletons trembled on bunks. Ragged men were buried alive in mass graves. Children and women collapsed under lethal showers-heads. The haunting face of the girl with the bald head appeared last, her dead eyes drilling holes through my heart. Seppi's solid weight on my toes was the only thing keeping me anchored in a world that was shifting and spinning like an out-of-control carousel.
Mutti did grant my other birthday wish. It was a tiny white mouse I named Elvis. Buying him was a considerable sacrifice for her because O.F. disliked pets and often gave Seppi a calculating look when he thought no one was watching. They had a talk about little Elvis behind closed doors. It quickly deteriorated into a shouting match. Mutti emerged from it with her green eyes shooting sparks. O.F. locked the living room door behind her and stayed inside, chain-smoking and furiously pecking on the little black portable typewriter he'd confiscated from Mutti last year, on the same day he had installed a lock on his side of their wardrobe.
In June they mapped out my vacation, also behind closed doors. Mutti informed me I was to be sent to summer camp from the beginning of July through August. She was not interested in my opinion on the subject.
As we drifted toward July I wished the calendar would skip all the weekends, sparing me O.F.'s disapproving presence. Then came that one Saturday when my childhood blinders finally slipped.
It happened while I was sitting by myself in the living room, Seppi stretched at my feet. I was waiting for the TV to warm up. A warm breeze billowed the long gauze curtains at the open balcony door. On the narrow street below, in deepening late-afternoon shade, children were laughing and shouting as they played with Wolfi's new ball. It was made of see-through plastic and gave a musical "ping" each time it bounced.
I held Mutti's old purse-mirror close to my face, staring fixedly into the reflection of my eyes, trying hard not to blink. I'd read a story about that technique in one of Frau Keppler's books of weird tales. It claimed if you stared long enough some invisible beast would rise from within, stare back at you out of your own eyes, and drive you insane.
I wondered what it was like to be possessed by an alien. Sometimes, between involuntary blinks, I sensed a dark thing crouching just out of sight.
An instant later it happened: my pupils grew fixed and expanded, crowding my hazel irises into tight bands at the rims. Through the black holes in the centers something glittered and sucked, trying to steal my place in the world.
With a gasp I flung the mirror onto the rug where it collected the green overhead light and sent a flare into my right eye, triggering an odd, silvery buzz. I pressed a hand over the eye, pulled the doily from under the ashtray with the other, and tossed it onto the glaring rectangle, breaking the evil spell. Then I squeezed my lids shut and massaged my rapidly numbing right temple.
When I opened them again it was as if I were seeing the living room for the first time: the moss-green couch, the matching chair I was sprawling on, the coffee table, the two-sided mahogany wardrobe on the opposite wall, the convertible desk squeezed into one corner; the console crammed into the other.
It occurred to me that nothing in the room was as it seemed to be. The couch hid a bed, the desk a sewing machine, the console the TV, radio, and record player, and O.F.'s locked half of the wardrobe doubled as a safe. It's where he stashed all the stuff he didn't want anyone—not even Mutti—to see.
Then the TV emitted the same kind of silvery buzz I'd felt in my light-stabbed eye and slowly the screen turned dull shades of gray. I gathered the courage to scoop up both doily and mirror, shook the treacherous glass-rectangle into the wastebasket, and replaced the doily on the coffee table, appreciatively sliding my fingers over its smooth surface. It had come with us from the village along with every other piece of furniture in the apartment except for the console.
Mutti had paid for the furniture twice. The first time, at Vati's insistence, she'd bought the pieces for him as part of her dowry before they got married. The second time he made her buy them from him after the wrenching divorce.
O.F. purchased the console with the first paycheck Mutti turned over to him once they were legally wed. When he was in one of his huffs he liked to say that only he could decide who was allowed to touch it and when.
The grays on the screen began to sharpen with contrasts while I sifted through the sounds coming from the kitchen. From the other side of two closed doors I could hear Mutti chop and stir while he most likely was shaving at the sink next to the gas stove. I strained to catch the first shrill syllable, a rising pitch inevitably followed by the harsh scrape of a chair, lids banging—or worse, the living room door flung wide with O.F. in the frame, itching to magnify some miniscule fault of mine.
Just yesterday, an hour before he came home, our kitchen had rung with laughter. For a sliver of Emmenthaler little Elvis had stood on my shoulder on his pink hind feet, his fragile toes tickling my skin, dancing while his namesake sang "Jailhouse Rock" on the AFN station. As I waited for the TV picture to grow focused I reached into my bushy hair to make sure he was still in his hideaway nest.
A documentary was in progress. I couldn't understand the narrator, whose voice remained garbled even after I increased the volume. He was speaking a nasal American English too fast for my unpracticed ears to comprehend. The accompanying film zoomed along a dim corridor between wooden bunks. Feeble near-skeletons cowered on the rough beds, their heads no more than hollow-eyed, skin-covered skulls.
The narrator's twang was a far cry from the King's English I was learning in school. My greatest achievement, so far, had been the successful recitation of this odd little poem:
Swan swims over the sea.
Swim, swan, swim.
Swan swam over the sea.
Swam, swan, swam.
It was fun to say the lines at top-speed three times in a row, though not very useful.
Overwhelmed by the narrator's rapid-fire English I leaned toward the set, fishing for one simple word I could understand, such as "it" or "that", but the American phrases stuck together like beads on a long, crowded string. Then a translator's voice overrode the twang to explain:
"This was the sight that greeted the liberating forces: men
and women shorn, in rags, starved and near death, left behind by
the same Nazi jailers who fled with the Jews still able to walk . . ."
The camera panned to a hillock outside the barracks. At first I assumed I was looking at turnips. On closer inspection I noticed odd protrusions—a stick-thin arm poking out here, a bare foot jutting out there. Then it dawned on me that I was seeing a pile of naked dead people, grotesquely entwined. The camera focused on the shaved head of a girl around my age, her eyes fixed in terror, her arms nothing but bones covered by skin.
". . . The story is the same in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau.
The Germans called it 'the final solution.' The rest of the
world calls it the cold-blooded murder of six million men,
women and children, most of them Jews. Many were dragged
from their beds in the middle of the night while their German
neighbors and friends turned away so they wouldn't see.
Hitler issued the orders. The German people obeyed . . ."
The roar of my blood drowned out the rest but one word continued to toll deep inside me: Dachau. As far as I knew it was a boring little town just outside of Munich. I wasn't even sure at which end, although now I was hoping it was nowhere near mine.
Seppi put his muzzle on my knees. I touched my forehead to his, glad for his warm, comforting breath. And then the door really did thud against the wall. O.F. paused dramatically in the frame, his cold eyes raking my body.
"Are you deaf?" he said. "How many times must I tell you to keep the volume low? And why are you wasting precious electricity on the overhead light when it isn't even dark yet?"
I stiffened my spine and Seppi froze, flattening himself across my feet. I froze, too, but on the inside, where it didn't show. O.F. scowled, waiting for me to apologize in my most submissive little-girl-voice. Try as I might I couldn't produce a single syllable. He was sure to hold it against me.
On the TV, the translator was saying,
"These were the camp showers, but they did not hold
water. Through them, gas was piped to where the Jews
stood with raised faces, expecting hot—"
O.F. crossed the room and clicked off the set. The sound stopped at once but the picture shrank to the size of a white little ball and hovered. He glared at Seppi, who was beginning to quiver, and shifted his gaze to my knees and up to my face. His eyes glinted briefly at Elvis who had chosen that ill-advised moment to poke his sensitive pink nose out of my hair. Then he went to turn off the light and closed the door much too softly behind him. For once I was grateful for I felt as if I were made of dust and would disintegrate at the slightest agitation.
A copy of the white dot, now no more than a pin-point on the screen, jumped to O.F.'s side of the polished mahogany wardrobe where it expanded until it covered the whole wardrobe door. On it, nightmarish pictures unfolded. Feeble skeletons trembled on bunks. Ragged men were buried alive in mass graves. Children and women collapsed under lethal showers-heads. The haunting face of the girl with the bald head appeared last, her dead eyes drilling holes through my heart. Seppi's solid weight on my toes was the only thing keeping me anchored in a world that was shifting and spinning like an out-of-control carousel.
