Read Online After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster - Free Book Online Page A

recognizable. A few blocks further on is Piazza Navona, one of Rome’s most famous piazzas. How is it possible to get lost there? But she does. Time after time she confuses the path there with the streets on the other side of Corso Emanuele.
    There the landmark is a newspaper kiosk that you can see as soon as you open our front door. From the kiosk, if you take Banchi Vecchi to Via di Pellegrino you will end up at Campo dei Fiori and the market. She loves our Roman vegetables and fruits, especially in the summer, and must have gone to the market hundreds of times, but if she wakes up tired or is distractedby thinking of her writing, for a moment she will confuse Banchi Nuovi and Governo Vecchio with Banchi Vecchi on the other side. I have given her maps with everything marked in red and the different routes: the one to her favorite shop, the one to our friend Arianna’s house, the
Campo,
and for that day or week she’ll be all right but then she misplaces my map and forgets again which route is which. After years of her doing this, it began to annoy me.
    â€œIsn’t it time to let this go? To recognize how strong you are now? You’re not the little girl in the camps anymore.”
    â€œStop stop,” she said putting her hands over her ears. Later she tried to explain. “Please believe me. I don’t like being lost. It’s just that the streets become unrecognizable. I try and remember but I can’t. Oh, it’s hopeless, you can’t understand.”
    The irony, my love, is that now I do understand. I went out the other day to pick up some
cornetti
at the café on Via Giulia where we have always gone for our espressos, sitting side by side reading the
Corriere della Sera.
I took a little walk, enjoying the smell of fresh baked bread and the sight of vans unloading produce: red and green tomatoes, eggplants in their glistening purple skins, and slender green zucchini with the blossoms still intact. Then I got the idea of shopping for a birthday present for Hannah.
    I crossed back over the Corso and started looking in the windows of the antique shops lining the street for a pretty pillbox to give her. I thought I would write
“ti amo sempre”
on a slip of paper and put it inside. A tower clock chimed ten. Startled, I checked my watch and, seeing that it was really getting late, turned to go home. But suddenly I’d forgotten the way. I had a memory of crossing the Corso when I left our front door but somehow that wasn’t right anymore. Nothing was familiar. All the small streets seemed possible. After a few minutes of standing in one place, wondering if I should beg someone to help me, I suddenly remembered the magazinekiosk on the corner where I always crossed over the Corso in the mornings to pick up my paper before going on to the café for my cappuccino.
    I didn’t tell Hannah because I knew her fear for me would make her scold me. She would have made me take a map, and sketched out important landmarks. I went from near tears to laughter thinking about it—a case of the blind leading the blind. But I am touched, too, at the thought that she would try and do something so difficult for her—out of love. I determined to mark the maps myself while I still could.
    When we’re young we tend to think of memory as something belonging to us. There are good memories and bad ones, but aside from forgetting names occasionally, it is hard to imagine what ceasing to rely on your memory means. My mind still functions enough for me to be frightened and feel diminished. Someday, I hope not too soon, I’ll cease to be alarmed; I’ll slide out from under the wearisome tasks of everyday life and my poor Hannah will have to take them up.
    But I’m still worrying about my failure to organize my memories into some form. At least I should put my early years with Hannah first, then Claudia, finally me, old and aging.
    But that doesn’t interest me now.