I Cannot Come to You, I Am Where I Lost Your Voice — Part 2

Rastinews — With your small finger in your mouth, you had felt a sweet warmth the day you finally saw your mother again after all those years; the place, your room, even the very air you breathed, had changed. You were like the identity card issued in your name and carried on you, the one that stayed with you until death: you belonged nowhere. Had the war really ended?

Your mother is so beautiful, like a delicate butterfly. But also as if she had died and had just been pulled from her grave. And that man, the former SS officer, how vile he is; he always reeks of alcohol. That executioner who kept calling you onto his knees, running his lead-heavy hands over your body… The thin, aching blood seeping between your legs; over time you came to resemble the wound that screamed in Auschwitz. If your mother believed you when you bellowed like an ox in that delicate body of yours, then the war would finally end, and you would come out of hiding. But where? You were in a desert whose god, too, had died.

Kiss me three times, Berta. Exactly three times. In the name of Birth, Life and Death.
How long did this pain last, how long? While you grew like a slender branch, soaked and shivering in the rain; after school you still had to go back to that house, that unfinished battlefield… That blood, that ash, that wall.

One winter day, with fog and mist over everything, your grandmother had come back from England to her homeland, gathering up her griefs. She too was like a wounded lion; something sat lodged in her throat that she couldn't swallow. She too had drunk that black milk, from breasts gone pitch-black. She was forever quarrelling with your mother. Your mother clenched her breasts, like a withered patch of skin grafted onto her body, then her teeth, then her hands. Your mother had been reduced to nothing; she seemed almost not to exist.

In this house, the war went on. Amid the ruins, everyone was wounded. Your grandmother, still, was warm and tender with you. Something in her remained alive; she took you in her arms to sleep, planting you in her heart like the last seed left on this earth. She told you memories from an old dream, but then reality began: a war, dark, endless, undefined.

Berta, kiss me. Kiss me the way Elem Klimov's "Come and See" kisses, please.

I was wiping a pane of clear glass; through it I saw pains greater than pain itself. I plant you, too, deep in my own flesh; it hurts even worse. Berta, kiss me.
Ah, our story hasn't ended yet; it hasn't even been written yet.

Your grandmother kept in touch by letter with those left behind from the genocide of six million. She was resolved: she would go, never to return. And she would take you with her, planted in her heart, back to where she had come from — the south.

The same iron mass of a train that had once carried your father to Auschwitz was now carrying the two of you south. Along every road you passed, there were houses in ruins; not a single living witness had been left. Everything, absolutely everything, was bleeding. You went in the hope that perhaps, there, the war had ended.

And there it was: what more did you need than two tiny rooms? For two people who had lost everything, wasn't holding on to each other worth a lifetime? This city could be deep enough to hide the two of your identities.

A new school, a new setting. But your identity always stayed hidden. Strange, though in truth not strange at all. You resembled the Kizilbash, the Armenians, who conceal themselves to survive elsewhere in the world. This, too, is what fascism does.
Kiss me three times, Berta.

You're like a slender branch; you'd blossomed, you'd grown. Your breasts had budded. You wanted to love and be loved; wasn't that your right too? The war went on, Berta. That fascist hand was between your legs even in your happiest moments. It circled back, always finding you wherever you hid, shouting "sobee." And after that, war again, war again.

You would spend the rest of your life in a single bed, lying curled like a fetus with your knees drawn to your stomach. You never let anyone hold your hand, stroke your hair, or kiss you full on the mouth. For years you stayed with your grandmother, circling endlessly around the edges of every religious tradition and ritual. You dropped out of technical university and went to work for an insurance company. But everything was crushed beneath an unfinished past that had never taken its due. This was war; war.

Your grandmother saw your mother twice, but each time her trip was set to return the same day. Your mother was ill; one of her breasts had been removed. She wanted badly to see you; you didn't go.
"One day, when death drew very near…"

When your eyes finally met your mother's at the threshold of a hospital room, she looked at you as if with the weight of six million eyes and said, "Forgive me." You looked back at her, six million times over, and said nothing. The road was long; the reckoning was just as heavy. As that iron mass of a carriage carried you home, Berta, you cried as you had never cried before.

Auschwitz stood between you and your sister. You didn't want to reach her. Then your mother died. Three months later, the Nazi officer, left alone, put a bullet through his own head. His death changed nothing in you. In your single bed, knees drawn to your stomach, you went on sleeping with your nightmares. Your grandmother outlived everyone; she was waiting for an apology, and she lived exactly as long as that apology took.

Of your shattered family, neither your aunt, nor your uncle, nor your half-sister left a child behind in this world. W A R was far more than a word of three letters.
Kiss me three times, Berta.

I call Heidi, the one friend you had, the one you knew from the insurance company. She too is wounded; her father was shot by the SS on the outskirts of Berlin. She arrives half an hour later.

In your bed, curled in the position of a fetus…
And the war has ended.

It was a hard winter, Berta. But the scent of spring is coming. I can no longer come to you every Sunday, Berta. I am where I lost your voice. The sound of bombs from far away… The world is very old, and nothing has changed.

Kiss me three times, Berta.
In the name of Life, Birth and Death.