by August Arrea
“There was a time I was certain my destiny had revealed itself to me the first time I stepped out on a stage and wrung roaring applause from the audience with the notes I sang,” recalled Ava. “It was only later I came to realize my voice was simply a means to uncover my true fate.”
The idea his grandmother could think, even for a second, her singing was anything less than destiny’s calling was flummoxing to Jacob. He himself had grown up listening to his grandmother’s singing, and while opera wasn’t particularly the kind of music his ears gravitated toward in general, he secretly found it to be a rare treat whenever Ava would decide, for one reason or other, to put a record of one of her performances on her old phonograph in the living room. Soon her magical voice would fill the house and no matter what he might be doing at the time, he found himself stopping and listening.
Just listening.
If angels did indeed exist, Jacob would have been the first to argue it would have only taken his grandmother singing but a few notes to draw one of the otherworldly beings out from whatever invisible ether they might dwell. Of course the key word was “if,” though Jacob couldn’t deny his intense curiosity in what his grandmother had to say to try and prove to himself otherwise.
“I wasn’t any older than you are now, when my family packed up the life they knew here and moved it across the ocean to Germany,” Ava began. “This was during the good times, when the nightmare of what would become World War II was something no one could foresee coming, even in nightmares. My father was a research scientist whose work with a consortium of other scientists around the world promised to open the door behind which resided an important, life-altering discovery that would benefit all mankind. And so it was in hopeful further search for the key to open this elusive door that my father brought his wife and three children across the Atlantic. There we settled in a home in the countryside just outside Berlin. It was a beautiful home, large and stately, yet not obnoxiously so. In fact, more ostentatious than the house were the vast, lush gardens surrounding it. In my eyes, it was as if we had been transported to a magical castle in some make-believe storybook, but even more so I remember how happy and proud I was knowing others in the world had finally recognized, as I had long ago, how very important and special a man my father was.
“Unfortunately, the excitement of being in a foreign country was not all sunshine and roses as it was in the beginning, and I would quickly discover our new home was not as welcoming as it first appeared. Nowhere was that more apparent than at the school I was enrolled in where the other kids I had hoped to forge new friendships with were anything but friendly, especially the girls. I don’t know whether their hostility toward me was because I was American, or simply jealousy of how I looked. Thankfully, my remedial understanding of the German language helped blunt their taunts and snide remarks. Still, hatred is very recognizable no matter the language it takes and I quickly found Germany a lonely place to be. What little joy I managed to find came from singing, which my mother encouraged by hiring a renowned voice coach to provide me lessons every day at home after school. But once the lesson was over the emptiness of the house was swift in its return. My twin brothers were just four at the time—hardly suitable playmates—and they took up most of whatever free time my mother might find to spend with me. And beautiful as the country was where we lived, it had a way of making the aloneness I was experiencing all the more pronounced, and I quickly found myself homesick for the neighborhood we had left behind in the States where the constant drone of children playing in the streets served only as a distant echo against the quiet now surrounding me. So it happened, as I began spending more and more time wandering the gardens like some inmate pacing the yard in what had become a prison of solitude, that I came to meet Gotham.”
Jacob had been listening so intently to his grandmother’s reminiscing about her youth that he almost forgot the point of her telling the story.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess; he was your gardener,” Jacob remarked flippantly.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Ava. “He was one of the caretakers on the property who dealt with the menial maintenance problems that would pop up from time to time. Mostly, his time was spent tending to the gardens on the grounds.”
“Must have been some garden having an angel gardener and all,” Jacob muttered under his breath with a chuckle.
“Naturally, I hadn’t any idea at first he was an angel,” said Ava.
“So, he kept his wings hidden from you as well?”
Ava, who knew the moment she led her grandson up the stairs to her room and revealed what rested at the bottom of her trunk that she was in for a good amount of fleering, simply ignored the boy and continued on with her story.
“As I was saying,” she said, shooting Jacob a look to quiet him, which it did. “I began spending more and more time in the garden shadowing Gotham while he worked. To tell the truth, I’m quite sure my company was more a nuisance to him than anything else. Not that he was short or unkind to my uninvited presence. He was a quiet man who kept very much to himself and seemed to almost try to hide himself away from the world in his work. I suppose it was his quiet nature that intrigued me so and made me want to crack through the hard veneer he had around him, and eventually my persistence wore him down. He slowly began to warm to me. One might even say he began to look forward to my daily visits.”
“And is that when he told you he was an angel?” asked Jacob not attempting to be funny or sarcastic in his question.
“No...that would come later. Much later,” answered Ava. “Even before that I knew there was something strange about Gotham—not strange in a bad way, but rather unusual. I can’t explain it. He had a way about him. One could almost see the flowers break open from their buds and bloom right before your eyes as he tended them. And yet you were never really sure if your eyes were playing tricks on you because you were so entranced listening to the stories he told. He seemed to know so much about the world and the people living in it to be just an ordinary gardener. There was a vastness of knowledge he held about life, and it reflected itself in his eyes in a way from which I never could seem to look away. Like staring into the setting sun without the light hurting your eyes, his eyes were.”
Her voice trailed off, as if she had suddenly found herself looking into the twin pools of gold upon which she reflected. Jacob himself knew something of what she meant. It was the one thing that had so vividly stuck with him since meeting the man inside the gym—those piercing eyes that were altogether fierce and kind at the same time, and had an uncomfortable way of burrowing straight through the flesh and bone of the person upon whom they were fixed.
“Then when exactly did you find out?” asked Jacob. “About him being an angel, that is?”
His grandmother sat quiet for a moment or two and a bereaved look, better suited for loved ones gathered around an open casket inside a funeral parlor, slowly crept across her face.
“When the incoming tide of war finally visited itself upon us,” she finally answered.
~~~
Closing the scrapbook and setting it aside, Ava got up and made her way to the window where she stood for some time staring out into the sunlit afternoon. Jacob instinctively knew not to say another word whenever the subject of the war came up, knowing his grandmother would continue with her story when she could muster the words to tell it.
“The first Nazi I ever saw up close was from the stage of a small theater where I began performing,” continued Ava. “He was an SS officer seated in the fifth row right in my sightline. I didn’t need to look any further than the cold lifeless eyes and cruel mouth to know I could never have enough distance from him to feel at ease. After the show, he came back stage to introduce himself and express his enjoyment of my singing. It soon became clear his appreciation for my talents extended far beyond my voice when he returned the next night and then the next, always to the same fifth-row seat where he sat holding me captive in the confines of his most unnerving and
uncomfortable gaze. Each night he came backstage after the show and sang to me praises every girl would love to hear, and so would I have, but not from this…man. Then came the night he made his nightly visit backstage after the performance, only this time he declared his true intentions concerning me in the same way an uncouth man belches after swallowing down a plate of food, and just as crudely. Fortunately for me my father was nearby to observe his advances and made it clear it would be over his dead body that his daughter would ever come to be seen in such cretinous company as a Nazi, and that proved to be very unfortunate.”
“How do you mean?” asked Jacob.
“My father had misgivings even before we moved about the political shift that had taken root in Germany, but he was assured what was happening was a good thing for the country and its people. It was only after we had been living there for a while that my father’s initial gut feelings were realized about the Third Reich, and what had been promised as a good thing eventually showed its true face and began its slow destructive spread like a deadly cancer. But by then it was too late. Two days after the confrontation backstage between my father and the SS officer, the Gestapo made an unannounced visit at our home. Before any of us knew what was happening to us, my brothers and I along with our mother and father were shipped off to Treblinka.”
“What’s Treblinka?” asked Jacob, though he knew by the tone in his grandmother’s voice it was not a good place.
“At the time Treblinka was touted as a labor camp,” said Ava. “We quickly came to know it as it truly was—a death camp.”
Jacob felt a lump rise up in his throat.
“A concentration camp? That doesn’t even make sense. Why would you be sent there? You’re not even Jewish.”
He thought he heard a faint chuckle escape his grandmother.
“One did not need to be Jewish to be sent to such places—only breathing,” said Ava. “Countless men, women...children...shipped off like cattle in endless miles of packed boxcars to these waiting factories whose assembly lines churned out the most unimaginable horrors that turned the blue skies gray with an around-the-clock feeding of billowing ash from smokestacks carrying the stench of burning flesh—and all because some had committed the audacious crime of taking a breath of life.”
Jacob had learned about the dark stain of the Holocaust in his history class. Still, he found it difficult to conceive how anyone could be subjected to such atrocities for simply existing. And yet he could hear in his grandmother’s voice as she spoke the weight of guilt she carried for the fate she and especially her family came to all for the simple sin of refusing the unwanted advances of a Nazi ogler.
“One could not walk through the gates of such places and witness what took place behind the barbed wire perimeter and not be convinced beyond question the existence of Satan. The Nazis, however, gave the devil a run for his money when it came to dispensing their version of Hell on earth.” As he listened, Jacob took notice of his grandmother nervously kneading the inside of her left wrist as she spoke. “They came for my mother first, sending her off with a group of other women all sharing the same terrified look and clutching one another for dear life as they were herded off to the showers that we all knew were not showers at all. They staggered each of our demises, the Nazis did, coming for us when we least expected it, even though every minute of every day was spent waiting in terror for it to arrive. My brothers were next. Such heartless, cold-blooded monsters the Nazis were, they refused even to allow the boys the company of the other as a tiniest strand of comfort as they were marched off to their death. It was far more gratifying to the bastards to induce the greatest amount of terror into each boy, who had no idea what was happening to them as they were pried apart. To this day I cannot rid myself of the sight of each of them kicking and clawing for one another or their terrified screams as they were carried away. How I prayed each would pass from fright before meeting their ultimate end.”
Ava took a steadying breath, as did Jacob. He had learned growing up from his mother about the hard times his grandmother had faced during the war, but only in the vaguest of mentions. It was, as his mother said, something better left unspoken and forgotten. And now Jacob understood why.
“By the time my father was finally led away, a sort of numbness had set in. The tears had long gone dry and I eagerly awaited the moment the Nazi guards would finally come and end my suffering. That day, much to my dismay, would never come,” said Ava. “Whatever the reason, my sentence was to be not death, but life, if you would call such an existence that. I was left to languish amongst the other rotting souls for God knows how long with only the cursed sounds of our own breathing to mark the passing of time, like the slow ticking of a clock. Not one of us held faith our bodies would hold out to see the day the reign of this Hell on earth would finally come to an end, but the day eventually arrived.
“Even then, with the encroaching Allied forces closing in, we were certain the coming of freedom was sure to be denied us as a chorus of gunfire rang out through the camp. We didn’t have to see to know it was the sound of our Nazi keepers going from barracks to barracks to wring out the last vestiges of their cruelty. Many of the prisoners ran in desperate search for a place to hide, but there was no such place at Treblinka. Myself…I just remember sitting on the ground in the sun continuing to sing in what ravaged voice I had—‘Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix.’ It was a hauntingly beautiful song my mother used to play around the house that had a way of feeding the delirium of a happy moment as well as lend comfort in the doldrums of unhappiness, and it was while I sung and hummed in an attempt to soothe a young girl that the commotion began. I hugged the poor frightened child close to me even as the gunshots grew louder and closer and waited for the moment that had long been denied me, and just as I heard lives being lost around me and could feel death make its way closer I saw it. Cast upon the ground by the sun above came a shadow from behind me. It was in the shape of a man—my executioner, I had no doubt. But it was instantly clear it was no Nazi, nor an Allied soldier. No, this shadow had wings—great, huge wings outstretched like that of an eagle soaring across the sky, and for a moment I began to wonder if death had already managed to snatch me without my knowing and taken me up to Heaven’s edge. I was almost too terrified to turn around, and when I managed to I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Gotham.”
Jacob remained quiet for some time, even though there was so much he wanted to ask his grandmother about the story she had just shared. Like whether or not she ever considered the fact she might have been imagining what she believed she saw. After all, she was in a state. And if in indeed Gotham was an angel, why did it take so long for him to come to her rescue?
“Even if what you are saying is true—” Jacob began instead.
“If?” Ava shot her grandson a look while sounding a touch offended.
“You were in a concentration camp,” said Jacob, as if his grandmother needed reminding. “What you must have went through, at that age, I doubt few people could have survived—starvation, disease, the unimaginable loss of your entire family and living every day thinking your end was coming. Don’t you think it’s the tiniest bit probable when the American soldiers finally arrived to free you from the camp your mind, in your frail state, made you see one of the soldiers as an angel? They were, after all, at that moment your saviors.”
“Thank you very much doctor for your insightful analysis,” Ava remarked with a raising of an eyebrow. “But I assure you, whatever doubts I may have had were put to rest long after Treblinka and I parted ways, and in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”
Fair enough, thought Jacob to himself knowing it was a losing battle to engage in arguing the point any further with his grandmother, who was obviously unbudging on the point.
“I’m just trying to make sense out of what any of this has to with me,” he said with growing impatience. “I mean, if you want to believe in angels and all that, great, have at it. But what in the world could possibly make
you think even for a second that I’m one of these...”
“Nephilim?”
“Yes, that,” said Jacob, touching the end of his nose as though the two were having a spirited game of charades.
“It’s not that difficult a notion to wrap one’s head around,” said Ava. “Especially considering the fact you’re not the first Nephilim to be born into this family.”
~~~
She could almost hear Jacob’s jaw come unhinged.
“What do you mean not the first?” he asked in a most cautious manner.
Ava turned to face her grandson and took in a breath. Now came the difficult part.
“The boy in the photo I showed you earlier, his name is David. He was my first child,” she said, before quickly noting, “He was my and Gotham’s child.”
Her and Gotham’s? Nothing coming from her mouth could have shocked Jacob more, even the horrific details he had moments earlier endured about Ava’s experience at Treblinka. He quickly grabbed up the old photo again and went in for a closer look. Sure enough, he couldn’t deny the fact there was a noticeable enough resemblance shared between the young boy in the photo and the more youthful Ava seated beside him that couldn’t be ignored, and an even more striking resemblance between child and supposed angel.
“He was a beautiful and very special child,” said Ava. “The apple of my eye, and the sun that rose and set in his father’s. In many ways, you remind me quite a bit of him. Headstrong and—”
“This is ridiculous,” Jacob interrupted. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“What’s so ridiculous about it?” inquired Ava. “A woman bears a child fathered by an angel, naturally the child is going to inherit traits from his father as all children do.”