for one minute I could be half the woman she is…what? I’d get it through my thick head Teddy is dead? My life would be better? I’d find a husband? I’d be happy?
I don’t know.
I pass out sweatshirts and blankets and we all snuggle in for the tale. The night temperature plummets into the forties, nipping at little fingers and causing tennis shoes to slide snugly beneath bottoms.
Mom breathes deeply, her strong posture and stillness demanding silence. The matriarch now, she exudes poise, confidence, and a working, hard-won wisdom. Ten seconds of quiet whisper by.
She begins as though in the middle of the tale, as though she’d already begun in her mind.
“The ÁVH, our secret police, had become extremely powerful. In 1951 things got really bad when they took my father and my brother away. Class Enemies, they were called, because my father was a professor at the forestry university in Sopron. My father died a month into his imprisonment in a work camp south of Budapest. Never a well man, really, the work in the cotton fields did him in. The cold, the rain. It filled up his lungs. It devastated us girls left at home. My mother mourned him until the day she died. She called it homicide.”
Mom begins to speak of her older brother, Istvàn. She remembers the lack of news from him, the way all had been silent after his deportation to a work camp. “When he finally wrote to us, he said, ‘I see the sun rise each day as we set out toward the fields in the east and set each night in the west as we trudge back to the barracks.’
“You cannot understand it, my dear ones,” Mom says from where she stands on my iron back stoop, looking slim and fashionable in gray slacks and a blushing summer twinset only I know she bought at the Goodwill thrift store in Bel Air. “You cannot understand what freedom means until it is gone. Who is an informant? Who is not? Who is friend? Who is foe? It’s a mixed up, frightening world of smoke and mystery, and when the mist clears, those around you may still be wearing masks.”
The flesh on my arms rises like dotted Swiss when she speaks in this manner. We think we can imagine. We think we all are in some form of slavery, some form of bondage. But we don’t know what it’s like to look over our shoulder constantly, to carefully consider everything we do and wonder if it is suspect. I steal a look at my sister. Well, maybe some of us do. Rawlins stands behind her by the chain-link fence, a few paces away from us all, leaning stiffly against the railing, arms crossed over his chest.
“It is no way to live. No way for human beings, made in the image of God, to spend their lives. I remember the nights we’d huddle in our attic room, all Grandma Erzsèbet could afford after our house had been seized. She worked at a winery all through the night, and we lay upstairs on a small mattress on the rough wooden planks of the floor. I held my baby sisters in my arms”—the twins nod—“and in the dark I would remember what the priests had said. I was only eight at the time, but I would whisper the portions of the mass that were ingrained upon my memory: ‘Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world.’ And I would pray, ‘Have mercy on us. Grant us peace. Lord, hear our prayer.’”
Now, prayer is important to me. I’m single. I’m lonely and I’m often floundering in a world of married people, strollers, Koala changing tables, and gum in the shape of tapeworms. But see, God is with me all the time. He walks beside me, talks with me, and He tells me that Lillian Elaine Bauer belongs to Him. No matter what, which is unbelievable, but upon thought, the only way it can be. For who, by their own performance, can begin to please a Holy God? And so I can easily picture my mother and my baby aunts up there beneath the eaves of the red-tiled roofs of Sopron. I can hear her murmured words of pleading and praise behind the whitewashed walls. And I know that I stand in a
I don’t know.
I pass out sweatshirts and blankets and we all snuggle in for the tale. The night temperature plummets into the forties, nipping at little fingers and causing tennis shoes to slide snugly beneath bottoms.
Mom breathes deeply, her strong posture and stillness demanding silence. The matriarch now, she exudes poise, confidence, and a working, hard-won wisdom. Ten seconds of quiet whisper by.
She begins as though in the middle of the tale, as though she’d already begun in her mind.
“The ÁVH, our secret police, had become extremely powerful. In 1951 things got really bad when they took my father and my brother away. Class Enemies, they were called, because my father was a professor at the forestry university in Sopron. My father died a month into his imprisonment in a work camp south of Budapest. Never a well man, really, the work in the cotton fields did him in. The cold, the rain. It filled up his lungs. It devastated us girls left at home. My mother mourned him until the day she died. She called it homicide.”
Mom begins to speak of her older brother, Istvàn. She remembers the lack of news from him, the way all had been silent after his deportation to a work camp. “When he finally wrote to us, he said, ‘I see the sun rise each day as we set out toward the fields in the east and set each night in the west as we trudge back to the barracks.’
“You cannot understand it, my dear ones,” Mom says from where she stands on my iron back stoop, looking slim and fashionable in gray slacks and a blushing summer twinset only I know she bought at the Goodwill thrift store in Bel Air. “You cannot understand what freedom means until it is gone. Who is an informant? Who is not? Who is friend? Who is foe? It’s a mixed up, frightening world of smoke and mystery, and when the mist clears, those around you may still be wearing masks.”
The flesh on my arms rises like dotted Swiss when she speaks in this manner. We think we can imagine. We think we all are in some form of slavery, some form of bondage. But we don’t know what it’s like to look over our shoulder constantly, to carefully consider everything we do and wonder if it is suspect. I steal a look at my sister. Well, maybe some of us do. Rawlins stands behind her by the chain-link fence, a few paces away from us all, leaning stiffly against the railing, arms crossed over his chest.
“It is no way to live. No way for human beings, made in the image of God, to spend their lives. I remember the nights we’d huddle in our attic room, all Grandma Erzsèbet could afford after our house had been seized. She worked at a winery all through the night, and we lay upstairs on a small mattress on the rough wooden planks of the floor. I held my baby sisters in my arms”—the twins nod—“and in the dark I would remember what the priests had said. I was only eight at the time, but I would whisper the portions of the mass that were ingrained upon my memory: ‘Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world.’ And I would pray, ‘Have mercy on us. Grant us peace. Lord, hear our prayer.’”
Now, prayer is important to me. I’m single. I’m lonely and I’m often floundering in a world of married people, strollers, Koala changing tables, and gum in the shape of tapeworms. But see, God is with me all the time. He walks beside me, talks with me, and He tells me that Lillian Elaine Bauer belongs to Him. No matter what, which is unbelievable, but upon thought, the only way it can be. For who, by their own performance, can begin to please a Holy God? And so I can easily picture my mother and my baby aunts up there beneath the eaves of the red-tiled roofs of Sopron. I can hear her murmured words of pleading and praise behind the whitewashed walls. And I know that I stand in a
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