Maria wanted to be forgotten, left behind in the room while the family moved away. She was ruined for life, and no one in the family could even see that. All they saw was the hollow shell of a little girl, a “good” little girl. But that “good” little girl was a mockery, a farce. A pretend person, not real. A bad girl, in fact, a shell of a person, someone who would never grow up, never love or be loved.
Her mother and grandmother could not imagine her feelings. Somehow, Maria knew, Uncle Felix had taken the soul out of her, removed the essence of Maria, and substituted a fake puppet, a sawdust doll who went through the motions of being good. “I’m dead,” she told herself.
The curtains rustled, waving their thin fingers across the sunlit sky outside. “Listen.”
As Maria crouched alone in the corner of the room, the whispering grew louder.
A thin ghostly hand brushed her hair back from her forehead, smoothing as it went.
Maria did not dare remove her fists from her eyes. She sat, still hunched over, but now she was listening, her whole body, ears and every cell, straining to hear what was being said to her. “You are not dead. You are alive.”
The ghost of Michael regarded her with compassion. Or so she imagined. “Michael?” Maria could not breathe. She had only heard of him, always in the family.
Michael curled his ghost presence around her, stroking her with softness, the softness of a cat’s tail, softer than Mitzie, who had a rough Germanic coat. “My child,” he said, stroking her.
Maria did not move.
“Listen carefully to what I am saying to you,” he said. “You are alive. It is I who am dead. Do you understand?”
Maria’s breathing stilled to comprehend what was being said to her. Was it the curtains whispering? Was it the breeze? The sunlight? The dust, easing against itself across the pitted floor? Far away, the toilet gurgled, and cold water still dripped from the single faucet of the sink, etching its rusty snail-like train on the horrid white porcelain. All blurred to distant sound. What mattered was that tender voice, that soft caress, brushing the hair from her face and stroking her.
“Yes,” the voice continued. “Take my strength, my life. It is for you.” The ghost of Michael wrapped itself around Maria protectively. “Think of me always, if you like. You are the child of us all. Our hope. You must live for all of us.
“You are not dead.” He rocked Maria as she crouched, trying to listen and not listen at the same time.
How long he held her, Maria did not know. The shadows of late afternoon darkened the corners of the room, and still she sat, unmoving. Something was loosening itself. She felt her chest open, swell with sadness for Michael, and then for herself. A warm melting began.
The warmth rose through her body into the center of her abdomen, into all the hurt places, and then, finally, into her chest. There was a sharp, tight pain, so piercing that she became it for a moment.
“Yes, cry. It is better.” The skinny hands of Michael held her forehead. “If you can cry like this, then you are not dead.”
Maria sobbed for her ruined childhood, her hollow body. She cried for all the times she had contained herself — been quiet when she wanted to scream — for all the times she had been a “good” girl. She cried for the lack of love and understanding she felt. For her parents, who were so caught up in their own problems of survival that they had no time for her, no time even to see what was happening to her.
She cried because she had no right to cry in a family with a history such as hers. She cried for her loneliness, for her inability to deal with the husk she had become. She cried for the love she so desperately craved. She cried for what she perhaps would never find.
And most of all, she cried for her own selfishness, her clandestine longings. “I have no right to live.” Her despicable selfishness in the face of everything else. Even now.
“And then he did to me — unspeakable things.” Maria could hear the Rat’s voice, incantatory, as she recounted her tale. Over and over, stopping always at those words: “unspeakable things.”
“It does not matter,” said the voice of Michael. “Forget it. You must go on, my girl, for all of us.”
“And you, Michael?” Maria’s asked sadly. “Do you suffer a lot?”
“No.” His eyes looked deeply into hers and now he smiled. “I do not suffer. I am happy to be around the family. I’m always here, you know.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Maria told him firmly.
“No one does. Call me a memory, then,” he said. “A memory you can hold on to.”
He smiled. Her crying had subsided now. “One day,” he promised, “you will be a woman, as beautiful as your mother and grandmother. And you will love and be loved. Really.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Do not let anyone break your spirit. I don’t want to hear any more of this dead business. Survive, my girl, survive. It is the only way.”
“Will anyone ever love me?” Her pleading entreaty.
“Of course.” The voice of absolute conviction.
Michael, entering the boxcar once more, the boxcar that was to take him toward extinction again, turned and looked back at Maria. The conductor blew his whistle; the train pulled out of the station, gathering speed. But this time, Michael did not fling himself against the closing doors, pressing his desperate face to the outside for the last time. He stood at the opening, a casual, smiling, jaunty figure, a lithe young man, smiling and waving at Maria as he left. “Don’t forget,” he called. He blew her a kiss. “Happiness will come.”
The tightness unlocked in Maria’s body. Her stomach, with its terrible cramping, relaxed. Her chest and throat were open. She breathed. Molecules of sunlight entered her heart.
“Not dead,” she told herself. And now the warm slow tears of release and relief. She felt her body, stroked it. “I am not dead.”
What did the move out of New York accomplish? Everything and nothing. Madness to go on doing what one has always done while history manages without us. Some people, betrayed, are taken and lost. A few people evolve; some merely survive. Perhaps these are synonymous. There are no solutions, “final” or temporary. History is merely hindsight, the impotent illusion of control. Why some people were killed. Why others were crowned. Stupidity rewritten. More unnecessary suffering will come. More history to write.
Winds blew about Europe, and the human race, scurrying and dislocated, mammalian creatures, shuffled to find food and shelter, to bury themselves in dark earth far from conflict. What was survival now? Some luck, some treachery, some confidence in self and long-acquired values. Whatever it took to manage. Selling out. Endurance. A willingness to learn new languages. Luck. Flexibility. A little courage. Some help. A lot of luck.
Like a rock laced by water, Herbert stood in the midst of his historical moment. Each wave overtaking him made a slightly different pattern on his surface, then fell back into the general oceanic pool. Each person, each life bore with it a slightly different need and despair, yet they were of one body, one saline gathering, the surface shimmering and shivering.
Rounded, granite, Herbert endured the water pouring over him and then rejoining its source. The wave broke from its smooth surface to trace its longing upon his veined perception. Then, soothed and dispersed, it fell back again. Herbert was, for a moment, visible. But then the next life came, claimed him for a moment, wrote its history upon his body, and left.
His daughter-in-law was much more practical than that. His son David was already growing older, weakened by the past. Adeline screamed her wants, growing less powerful each day, baffled by loss. Ilse, like a small flower growing between stones, pushed new life forward.