I took the bus home. I let it lie, I was cowardly and did not tell Simon about it. I was relieved, but perhaps I was also, without quite being able to explain it, disappointed.
They phoned later from an office that had given me assistance, I had asked them to call. The woman I spoke to on the phone asked whether I had found my way, and when I said I was unsure whether I had been given the correct name and address, replied in a subdued voice that it was possible to continue the search, it sometimes took time, families could for example have moved abroad, and as though she guessed something from my response, a doubt, she added that we would certainly be successful if I really wanted to be.
A PHOTOGRAPH WAS taken of us. Me with the child, my son, before I gave him away. He is leaning back slightly, perhaps he was afraid of the flash, I don’t remember who took it. I am sitting ramrod straight with the baby, the infant balanced on my knee as though he can really sit up on his own, but I am supporting him with both hands, otherwise he would obviously fall over, he is unsteady, but I am holding him with the palms of my hands parallel, as though I were holding a parcel, a bag, if you removed the child from the picture, it would just look as though I were measuring something, demonstrating the thickness, the width, there is no pride in my expression, no happiness. I am looking at the back of his head. As he pulls backward. I have no idea where it comes from, whose idea it was to take this despondent photograph. Perhaps it was taken at the adoption office, or earlier that same day. I search my facial expression on that day, and think I discern something, is it guilty conscience, shame?
It is a dream now, remote and hazy. I tend this grave belonging to a stranger. It is always silent in the afternoon, I like to be here, around Christmastime I buy a wreath, there are lanterns placed on some of the graves at that time of year, there are other people going around arranging things. No one asks me who I am here for. Actually I don’t know myself either.
~ ~ ~
It can be called a memory trace in the brain. I read it somewhere. When a memory is first laid down, after enough time has elapsed and it has been recalled enough times, the synaptic alterations can become permanent. And parts of the brain used to retain the memory are not necessary to call it forth, it has become like a trace, a photograph, a picture that is maybe always going to be found there.
Simon was preoccupied by the suitcase. During the years he was searching for his cousin and aunt, trying to find traces of them, he continually returned to the suitcase, his aunt’s suitcase that he remembered from the apartment before they had to leave for the hiding place. He wondered whether others might be able to help, whether it might be possible to track it down. His aunt’s suitcase that she had packed because she was waiting for her husband to fetch her, they would go into hiding together. He had seen it with his own eyes, it was a suitcase of the type that was common at that time, with mountings at the corners, canvas and leather material, straps to stretch over the clothes to keep them in place. He cannot remember his cousin’s face, but he remembers the suitcase clearly. It sat in the hallway, a suitcase like the ones belonging to his parents that later, after the war were always placed in an attic, and never taken out again because they do not travel, the two elderly people have become unschooled in everything to do with transport, they shut themselves increasingly inside the apartment. The suitcases were purchased in the same place, both those of his parents and his aunt’s. He has seen her opening it, taking things out and snapping the locks closed again, he imagines that it contained clothes, towels, toothbrushes and washcloths. His parents were also fed up with his aunt’s suitcase, they thought it was in the way, it was both optimism and obstinacy, they said, that made her refuse to unpack. Nevertheless they accepted it, bore with it, and with her plans. She was sorry she was unable to go into hiding with them, but insisted that her husband would collect her. She was young, they said when they talked about it, young and afraid.
He believes that on the day they were taken away, she had the suitcase with her, although it is not likely, a suitcase is overstating things, it has no place in all this. All the same, he imagines the suitcase. That she somehow or other manages to take it with her, that it accompanies her. She and her son, they sleep beside it, perhaps they even sit on it if there is room to do that. (Actually he knows that there is no room either to sleep or for a suitcase), they stay close beside it all the time, it would be a simple matter for someone to steal it or its contents, they must only hope. She always used to talk about what she had packed, his aunt, because it was important. Something materializes through the suitcase and its contents, a kind of tidiness and security. The suitcase and its contents bear witness to a possible destination for the journey, where things will be unpacked and put in their place. The clothes will be worn, the bedclothes will be slept in. The suitcase is a guarantee that this is actually a journey like other journeys, with the definition of such transportation always incorporating the possibility of traveling back to where you started. But at the terminus, where they are expelled, wrenched from the train together with all the others, it is taken from her. The suitcase is flung onto a pile of other people’s luggage. Then she stands there, Simon says. Without the suitcase. Is her son standing by her side? At that moment it dawns on her that they are not going to travel any farther.
HE HAS RECOUNTED this, and I have visualized it. It is easy to envisage those two. In a crowd of people, I think. In a herd being thrust backward and forward in a confined space, the two of them also jolted to and fro, caught among the others, dragged in one direction and then another, and at one moment during this scene, I imagine that they are separated, mother and son. Lose sight of each other. Those two who have been so close during these months alone in the apartment.
In everything that happens, in this movement of people who are shouting, falling, remnants of luggage, bundles being trampled, coats and winter jackets, infants and old people, his cousin is left standing on his own. He turns around, but sees no faces, only vague impressions, shapes, apparitions, hears complaints, shouts, sobbing from children like himself. Around him grows this mountain of people in motion, like a wall, a terrible, unstable wall from which parts are ripped away while new ones are added. Is he wearing something, something that gives him sufficient weight to remain standing on exactly that spot without being jostled along or knocked over? Perhaps a narrow rucksack or some other possession he is carrying, something he is now probably holding with both hands, clutching it to his chest. As though he is embracing it, keeping it safe and clinging to it at the same time. While the human wall continues to be shoved backward and forward once more, and simultaneously increases, like an organism through mitosis, a cell division before his very eyes. The boy’s mother is still part of this formation, and is carried forward like a light object being propelled onward by the current in a river. But the boy, the cousin, remains standing on the same spot. While he waits, he cannot do anything else of course, for her to be carried back to him.