My daughter and I sat in the living room. It reminded me of my great-aunt’s house. We were surrounded by our family, who asked and answered questions. Arnold remembered my great-aunt Alta playing the organ. His son told me where my great-uncle Wesley was buried, and promised to take me there. My sister still had a seascape he had painted on the island. My father’s brother Roland, they told me, had stayed on the island for a while longer than my father, with another family, until someone was sent to fetch him. He was remembered better than my father. And my grandmother? Her name before she was married to my grandfather, I told them, was Ina Tatum.
Ina Tatum. Arnold’s wife repeated her name, and thought, then, looking at Arnold and nodding, she said to me, Oh, that would be Ina Benson. She had remarried. And she was here. On the island. In a rest home. Just up the hill.
Whatever had held me in disbelief for years in this instant vanished. The air in that house, in the graveyard, in the rooms my daughter and I took by the sea, seemed sharp to breathe. As if by a magnifying glass my life was brought into focus. Yet with this new vision, I felt strangely out of balance.
It was dark now. Waiting for the morning hours when the old-age home where my grandmother was would be open for visitors again, my daughter and I ate our dinner with another cousin. Robbie, Arnold’s second son, was compiling a history of our family. Each of us had different pieces of the puzzle. Searching through his genealogical charts, I found my father’s name penciled in on the back of a page belonging to my grandmother. The writing was not in her hand but in Robbie’s. Thus she had disowned my father. Only one child was listed for her in her own hand, a daughter, born after my grandfather left the island.
Robbie and I guessed at the reasons for the rupture in my grandparents’ marriage, and why my grandmother’s children were taken from her. Was there a secret affair? A child conceived outside the bonds of marriage? For years everyone on the island has speculated. And no one knows.
That night I lay awake, shaken by how intensely now I wished to see my grandmother. I wept with a strange grief whose source eluded me and which, like Ota’s grief, was mixed with joy, an elation which seemed to move beyond what I had thought to be myself. And inside a child began to weep with bitterness that she had been disowned, not written on the page, in any hand.
The pockets between cells take in substance from outside the cells which will become part of the cells.
In the spring after the year the bomb exploded, when Ota was able to walk, he was released into the world alone. For months he wandered Japan. After the war, travel by train was free for children. The trains were warm. The seats were clean. Food could sometimes be had from the plates of other travelers. Ota would board a train with others who were orphaned by the war, and they would stay there as long as they could, before being discovered, or until the end of the line. He went in every direction, east Tokyo and beyond, to the far end of Northern Honshu, Aomori, and south even to the island of Kyushu. He would read a comic book, talk with his friends, look for food, sleep and wake to find himself some place unknown. Often he was without any sense of direction.
In the Second World War many machine guns could be fired from airplanes, or from the ground toward the sky, as well as over land.
How is it that we know where we are? Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes that in the early days of flying the ships were open and in bad weather a pilot would simply thrust his head out around the windshield to take his bearing. Then the wind would whistle in his ears, and this whistling would remain there for a long time.
Certain voices, certain names remain in the ears long after those whom they recall have died. But my grandmother did not remember my father’s name. I sat on the bed and spoke quietly to her. She was cordial to me and, after a while, asked if I worked there. Then I told her who I was.
Her mind had become ancient, part like a child, part wise, and emptied, in a certain way, of her own past. She accepted me as her granddaughter, though she could not trace the lineage. When my daughter walked into the room she looked up to her face with eyes of joy. What she did not know, she knew in another way. The undercurrent of this knowledge held us through this day, as if an old power had risen up finally to claim us.
And what the cells relinquish flows into these pockets to be taken to other places in the body.
We had come to visit her just before lunch. The nurse came to help her into the dining room. She was ninety-six years old and just learning to use a walker. My daughter and I promised to return in the afternoon. I drove about the island. I was looking for paintings by my uncle Wesley. They were supposed to be in the school library. After a time I found them. But my search was frantic, as if I could not yet understand that I had found what I had come for, and frantic searching had become a habit.
When we returned to the rest home we entered a strange circle of quiet that seemed to exist outside time. My grandmother searched my face, her own face filled with longing and confusion. We sat with her friend, who made us laugh about forgetfulness and old age. The sea and much of the island lay in a thick fog, and together we sat, four women, arranged in front of a picture window, staring into the soft, white mist.
Machine guns used against airplanes were often mounted in groups. With hydraulic power they could be set to fire with the guidance of one sight.
I asked her what she remembered. She remembered her mother and father. And Walden, my father? I drew her a chart tracing her marriage to my grandfather, the birth of her two sons, and my birth. I wrote my father’s name in large block letters for her.
I placed the drawing in her hand. She took it gently, stared at it for a while in silence, and then began to praise me for the fine job I had done. I traced the lines I had made with my finger for her, stopping to say each name. Then her eyes rested deeply on the page. For the next few moments she was silent again, and while her friend continued speaking with wry humor, my grandmother looked from me to the page and back, and finally, with tears beginning to show in her eyes, she started speaking, almost singing, again, and then again and again, my father’s name. Walden, Walden, Walden, she said.
As exchanges occur between the cells and the pockets between the cells, there is no tear nor gap in the membrane.
The ferry was soon to leave. I crossed the room. I leaned toward her and then hesitated, but she pulled my face to hers, and when I kissed her, she kissed me back with a passion passed through many years, that now belonged to us both. Then she gestured to my daughter and they kissed goodbye. As the ferry pulled into the bay, I walked over its deck back toward the land, and called out over widening water, silently.
The mechanisms used in machine guns could also be used to create faster firing pistols.
Saint-Exupéry writes of the several generations of craftsmen who have experimented with the curve of the fuselage of an airplane until it has been made to resemble the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder.
All cells are immersed in liquid, either blood, or a fluid originating from blood.
What was told to me in Hiroshima, I heard in a language I do not speak. Because I could not decipher sounds, I looked at gestures and expressions. A face held down, hands held up as if to ward off force. These were the truths that were mimed before my eyes. Now, looking out toward the bay I live above, I accept this silence. Argument and explanation have faded into stillness too. I see a man letting pieces of paper fall to the ground, a flash of light, a boy, blackened and numb, carried up a long hill, a pilot climbing into his airplane, a girl and her father dancing, a flat and ashen landscape stretching for miles in every direction.
From 1898 to 1942 a pistol developed by Georg Lugar is manufactured. A box magazine, loaded before use, fits into the grip of this weapon.
What are the words, the sounds we might whisper to ourselves in this new territory, leaf, river, this place of whistling wind, doorbell, cup, this place of ever widening concentric circles drawn in the air above us, this strange place we have come to, and w
itness?
IV
OUR SECRET
The nucleus of the cell derives its name from the Latin nux, meaning nut. Like the stone in a cherry, it is found in the center of the cell, and like this stone, keeps its precious kernel in a shell.
She is across the room from me. I am in a chair facing her. We sit together in the late darkness of a summer night. As she speaks the space between us grows larger. She has entered her past. She is speaking of her childhood. Her father. The war. Did I know her father fought in the Battle of the Bulge? What was it for him, this great and terrible battle? She cannot say. He never spoke of it at home. They knew so little, her mother, her brothers, herself. Outside, the sea has disappeared. One finds the water now only by the city lights that cease to shine at its edges. California. She moved here with her family when her father became the commander of a military base. There were nuclear missiles standing just blocks from where she lived. But her father never spoke about them. Only after many years away from home did she learn what these weapons were.
The first guided missile is developed in Germany, during World War II. It is known as the Vergeltungswaffe, or the Vengeance weapon. Later, it will be called the V-1 rocket.
She is speaking of another life, another way of living. I give her the name Laura here. She speaks of the time after the war, when the cold war was just beginning. The way we are talking now, Laura tells me, was not possible in her family. I nod in recognition. Certain questions were never answered. She learned what not to ask. She begins to tell me a story. Once when she was six years old she went out with her father on a long trip. It was not even a year since the war ended. They were living in Germany.
They drove for miles and miles. Finally they turned into a small road at the edge of a village and drove through a wide gate in a high wall. The survivors were all gone. But there were other signs of this event beyond and yet still within her comprehension. Shoes in great piles. Bones. Women’s hair, clothes, stains, a terrible odor. She began to cry a child’s frightened tears and then to scream. She had no words for what she saw. Her father admonished her to be still. Only years later, and in a classroom, did she find out the name of this place and what had happened here.
The shell surrounding the nucleus is not hard and rigid; it is a porous membrane. These pores allow only some substances to pass through them, mediating the movement of materials in and out of the nucleus.
Often I have looked back into my past with a new insight only to find that some old, hardly recollected feeling fits into a larger pattern of meaning. Time can be measured in many ways. We see time as moving forward and hope that by our efforts this motion is toward improvement. When the atomic bomb exploded, many who survived the blast say time stopped with the flash of light and was held suspended until the ash began to descend. Now, in my mind, I can feel myself moving backward in time. I am as if on a train. And the train pushes into history. This history seems to exist somewhere, waiting, a foreign country behind a border and, perhaps, also inside me. From the windows of my train, I can see what those outside do not see. They do not see each other, or the whole landscape through which the track is laid. This is a straight track, but still there are bends to fit the shape of the earth. There are even circles. And returns.
The missile is guided by a programmed mechanism. There is no electronic device that can be jammed. Once it is fired it cannot stop.
It is 1945 and a film is released in Germany. This film has been made for other nations to see. On the screen a train pulls into a station. The train is full of children. A man in a uniform greets the children warmly as they step off the train. Then the camera cuts to boys and girls who are swimming. The boys and girls race to see who can reach the other side of the pool first. Then a woman goes to a post office. A man goes to a bank. Men and women sit drinking coffee at a café. The film is called The Führer Presents the Jews with a City. It has been made at Terezin concentration camp.
Through the pores of the nuclear membrane a steady stream of ribonucleic acid, RNA, the basic material from which the cell is made, flows out.
It is wartime and a woman is writing a letter. Everyone is on the brink of starvation, she says. In the right-hand corner of the page she has written Nordhausen, Germany 1944. She is writing to Hans. Do you remember, she asks, the day this war was declared? The beauty of the place. The beauty of the sea. And I bathed in it that day, for the last time.
In the same year, someone else is also writing a letter. In the right-hand corner he has put his name followed by a title. Heinrich Himmler. Reichsführer, SS. Make no mention of the special treatment of the Jews, he says, use only the words Transportation of the Jews Toward the Russian East.
A few months later this man will deliver a speech to a secret meeting of leaders in the district of Posen. Now you know all about it, and you will keep quiet, he will tell them. Now we share a secret and we should take our secret to our graves.
The missile flies from three to four thousand feet above the earth and this makes it difficult to attack from the ground.
The woman who writes of starvation is a painter in her seventy-seventh year. She has lost one grandchild to this war. And a son to the war before. Both boys were named Peter. Among the drawings she makes which have already become famous: a terrified mother grasps a child, Death Seizes Children; an old man curls over the bent body of an old woman, Parents; a thin face emerges white from charcoal, Beggars.
A small but critical part of the RNA flowing out of the pores holds most of the knowledge issued by the nucleus. These threads of RNA act as messengers.
Encountering such images, one is grateful to be spared. But is one ever really free of the fate of others? I was born in 1943, in the midst of this war. And I sense now that my life is still bound up with the lives of those who lived and died in this time. Even with Heinrich Himmler. All the details of his existence, his birth, childhood, adult years, death, still resonate here on earth.
The V-1 rocket is a winged plane powered by a duct motor with a pulsating flow of fuel.
It is April 1943. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, has gained control of the production of rockets for the Third Reich. The SS Totenkampf stand guard with machine guns trained at the entrance to a long tunnel, two miles deep, fourteen yards wide and ten yards high, sequestered in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen. Once an old mining shaft, this tunnel serves now as a secret factory for the manufacture of V-1 and V-2 missiles. The guards aim their machine guns at the factory workers who are inmates of concentration camp Dora.
Most of the RNA flowing out of the cell is destined for the construction of a substance needed to compensate for the continual wearing away of the cell.
It is 1925. Heinrich Himmler, who is now twenty-five years old, has been hired as a secretary by the chief of the Nazi Party in Landshut. He sits behind a small desk in a room overcrowded with party records, correspondence and newspaper files. On the wall facing him he can see a portrait of Adolf Hitler. He hopes one day to meet the Führer. In anticipation of that day, while he believes no one watches, he practices speaking to this portrait.
It is 1922. Heinrich visits friends who have a three-year-old child. Before going to bed this child is allowed to run about naked. And this disturbs Heinrich. He writes in his diary, One should teach a child a sense of shame.
It is the summer of 1910. Heinrich begins his first diary. He is ten years old. He has just completed elementary school. His father tells him his childhood is over now. In the fall he will enter Wilhelms Gymnasium. There the grades he earns will determine his prospects for the future. From now on he must learn to take himself seriously.
Eight out of ten of the guided missiles will land within eight miles of their targets.
His father Gebhard is a schoolmaster. He knows the requirements. He provides the boy with pen and ink. Gebhard was once a tutor for Prince Heinrich of Wittelsbach. He has named his son Heinrich after this prince. He is grateful that the prince consented to be Heinrich’s godpar
ent. Heinrich is to write in his diary every day. Gebhard writes the first entry in his son’s diary, to show the boy how it is to be done.
July 13 Departed at 11:50 and arrive safely on the bus in L. We have a very pretty house. In the afternoon we drink coffee at the coffee house.
I open the cover of the journal I began to keep just as I started my work on this book. I want to see what is on the first page. It is here I begin a new life, I wrote. Suffering many losses at once, I was alone and lonely. Yet suddenly I felt a new responsibility for myself. The very act of keeping a journal, I sensed, would help me into this life that would now be my own.
Inside the nucleus is the nucleolus where the synthesis of RNA takes place. Each nucleolus is filled with a small jungle of fern-like structures all of whose fronds and stalks move and rotate in perfect synchrony.
It is 1910. The twenty-second of July. Gebhard adds the words first swim to his son’s brief entry, thirteenth wedding anniversary of my dear parents. 1911. Over several entries Heinrich lists each of thirty-seven times he takes a swim, in chronological order. 11:37 A.M. Departed for Lindau. He does not write of his feelings. August 8, Walk in the park. Or dreams. August 10, Bad weather.
In the last few years I have been searching, though for what precisely I cannot say. Something still hidden which lies in the direction of Heinrich Himmler’s life. I have been to Berlin and Munich on this search, and I have walked over the gravel at Dachau. Now as I sit here I read once again the fragments from Heinrich’s boyhood diary that exist in English. I have begun to think of these words as ciphers. Repeat them to myself, hoping to find a door into the mind of this man, even as his character first forms so that I might learn how it is he becomes himself.
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