Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  Vera and I were introduced around and given kisses and emotional embraces by everyone, though I was uneasy because I could not keep track of their names and most of them began speaking to us in Polish or Lithuanian, not knowing or caring that we couldn’t understand. Sometimes Herkus translated, sometimes he just smiled and nodded, perhaps forgetting that we didn’t know what was being said. The party spilled out of the house and onto the deck and then all over the lawn. Beyond that were pine trees. Pop music was playing out of a gray boom box with hot pink trim that must have been from the ’80s, sitting on the railing of the deck. Justine was there, wearing a denim dress that made her seem like a different person entirely. No longer severe, no longer a scholar, she sat in the grass, legs splayed, and let a little boy sprinkle grass on her head.

  Vera was having an easier time making conversation than I was because of her Russian, and so I found myself drifting toward the picnic table that was laid out with dish after dish of food. There was dark rye bread, little latkes and blini, a dish of orange caviar, a dish of sour cream, cabbage rolls, strawberries and blueberries and some other berry I couldn’t identify. Big platters of sliced tomatoes and onions and some kind of salami. It reminded me of parties I had been to at Katya’s parents’ house. I had been tentatively invited to these after reentering Vera’s life. Vera’s sixteenth birthday had been hosted at Inna and Pavel’s house, a smorgasbord of food and toasts. Russians loved toasts and even the men would go on, openly crying, making long speeches in Russian that I had to sit through comprehending only the simple verbs: “go,” “do,” “make.” That was all that was left of my high-school Russian: a vague sense of motion in a chaos of unknown nouns. The only thing I could still say in Russian was “I love you.” The only thing I knew how to say in Lithuanian was “hello.” And in Polish, I could say absolutely nothing. I loaded a plate and went back to wandering, smiling at whoever smiled at me.

  Who were these people? My family? This was the kind of family and belonging I had always wanted. What my father had been so arch about, so unwilling to give, these people extended in a heartbeat, without thinking, as though it were all for free. “I call you son,” Agata had said. “We are family,” Herkus had said. But I still couldn’t carry on the simplest conversation with any of them. I was an alien, floating alone in my pod through their happiness.

  I had never identified as either Polish or Lithuanian in the same way that Kat had identified as Russian. Even Vera felt herself to be more distinctly un-American than I ever had. If anything, I had felt disappointed at how easy assimilation had turned out to be, how quickly whatever strings of blood or fate connected me and Grandma Sylvia had been cut. Why was I then so bothered by the idea that Herkus might be the grandson of a Nazi, that Agata was staring out at me through loving, murderous eyes? Maybe it didn’t matter who our fathers were.

  I didn’t figure out until it was time for the birthday cake that Vera had gotten it wrong: We weren’t celebrating some cousin’s birthday. It was Agata’s seventieth birthday and everyone had gathered to celebrate her. Suddenly the huge party, the endless children, made sense. This was their matriarch. This was their Grandma Sylvia. Her birthday marked the passage of time in their world.

  I did the math rapidly in my head. Grandma Sylvia’s rape birthday had been January 18, 1943. If she had gotten pregnant on that day, she should have had the baby sometime in October. I did the math several more times to make sure. There was no way that Agata was the daughter of the SS officer, not if we were celebrating her birthday in July 2014, and not if she was turning seventy years old. Herkus’s grandfather had been the forest husband after all.

  It had been a ridiculous thing to focus on, this idea of Herkus being the progeny of a Nazi rapist. And if I had been truly anxious about the possibility that Agata was a Nazi’s daughter, then finding out the truth should have brought me relief. But it didn’t. In fact, I felt more anxious than ever. I stood holding my paper plate in the bright sunshine, smiling vacantly.

  Agata sat in a special chair garlanded with ribbons and flowers, and a girl, maybe a grandchild or niece, brought her a special pink sash to wear. Everyone sang a song that bore no relationship to “Happy Birthday” but was clearly the same thing, and I was happy to clap. For my mother’s birthdays, I just took her out to brunch. Our family consisted of only us two. Christmases were so lonely, we didn’t even bother anymore. Katya did not like Vera celebrating Christian holidays, so even when I reentered Vera’s life, our gatherings hadn’t really gotten any fuller. I wished my mother could be put on a garlanded chair and sung to by a bunch of happy, drunk people. I wished there were children running around for her to laugh at.

  As the afternoon wore on, there was dancing and a lot of drinking and Vera danced with many boys. They were probably technically her second cousins, but no one seemed concerned about it. All in all, it was a success, and I did not even get drunk. Herkus, on the other hand, was a sloshy mess by the time he was loading Vera and me into our cab.

  “I love you,” he said, and moaned. “Oh, it is terrible that you are leaving so soon. You must come back to Vilnius!” Indeed, the tour was almost over and our flight home was on Monday.

  “I’m sure we will come back,” I said.

  “Are we brothers?” he asked. “You and me are brothers.”

  “Of course,” I said, laughing at his jokey grief.

  “Until we die, you big, fat bastard,” he said, slapping the hood of the taxi, and giving a final wave. Vera and I were silent in the back of the cab for a time, lost in our separate worlds, jouncing along the forest road. It was late afternoon and the sun was streaming through the trees, filtered by the pine needles. The skin on my face was tight and itchy, and I was pretty sure I had a sunburn.

  “Did you have fun?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Vera said. “That Herkus guy is a big jerk though.”

  I looked at her harshly. “Why on earth would you say that?”

  “It’s just shitty to be married for that long and then to cheat on your wife with a girl half your age and then leave her and start all over like you don’t have three kids. I don’t know. I know divorce isn’t a crime or anything, he just seems kind of immature.”

  “He had a wife?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You didn’t see those kids hanging all over him?”

  I had seen Herkus giving piggyback rides and faux-wrestling with some kids, but I hadn’t known that they were his. Vera’s Russian had evidently given her a lot of information and context that I had missed.

  “Was the wife there?” I asked, wondering if I had met her without knowing.

  “No. And everyone was really sad she wasn’t there, but she didn’t feel comfortable.”

  “That is shitty,” I said. The splitting up of families had become normal, the word divorce acceptable and clean, but each time it happened it was like a tiny world exploding. Obviously, I didn’t know the half of it. I didn’t know Herkus’s circumstances, and I had never even been married myself, but three kids seemed like an awful lot to leave. He and I were brothers after all, it seemed. More deeply than I cared for.

  “Agata isn’t the product of the rape, by the way,” I said. “I did the math.”

  “See,” Vera said, smiling. “You don’t have to be the grandson of a Nazi to be a total asshole.”

  —

  When we got home, I didn’t want to go to dinner, I didn’t want to take a nap, I didn’t want to write my mother or Kat or do any of the things I was supposed to do.

  I wanted to go see Susan. She had sent me an e-mail that she would be in her room writing all night if I wanted to stop by.

  “Listen,” I said to Vera, “Susan invited me to go hang out with her.”

  “That’s fine,” Vera said.

  “Are you sure? I’ll give you some money. You can go out to dinner with Judith or something.”

  “Sure,” Vera said. She was writing something on her laptop and she had the book on Tesla that Daniel had given
her out on the table. She had become very studious lately. It made me proud of her. Darius had even loaned her a collection of Miłosz poems.

  I sat down. “Are you positive?” I asked. “Because I really don’t have to go. If you’d rather I stayed.”

  “You don’t have to babysit me, Papa. I’m almost eighteen.”

  “Right,” I said. In my mind I was already out the door.

  —

  When I got to Susan’s, I was disappointed to find that she was sad.

  She didn’t say she was sad. It was just apparent. She sat on her bed in a green silk bathrobe. Her laptop was glowing, open on her desk, the amber necklace lying in a sine curve beside it. There was a half-eaten box of sugar cookies open, and she gestured toward it in case I wanted any.

  “Why are you sad?” I asked.

  “I’m not sad,” she said. There were little pillows of skin under her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. She hadn’t showered. She wasn’t smiling. All of these were signs that she was sad. She hadn’t hugged me or kissed me when she opened the door.

  “You certainly seem sad,” I said.

  She laughed a little. “I’m just disappointed,” she said. “But no big deal. I don’t know what I expected even.”

  My first thought was that she was disappointed in me.

  “What did I do?” I asked. “Because you have to tell me these things. I don’t always pick up on signals, and I might do something without even knowing.”

  “Oh, God, Lucas, no!” she said. “It’s not you. It’s this trip. The genealogist couldn’t find anything about my father’s brother. That was why I came here. And it just feels—oh, God, so much is lost. It seems impossible, like one of those nightmares where you are searching for something and you don’t know what it is, but you feel like you’ll die if you don’t find it, or the world will end.”

  I had just come from spending the whole day with my family, my new extended family, and Susan had spent the day in this room, having to give up on finding hers. She had not been kissed and had her eyebrows smoothed. She had not stuffed herself with blini and watched her child dance among cousins. She had been alone with the blinking eye of her computer.

  “They couldn’t find anything?” I asked. I don’t know why I said “they” like it was some impersonal board of distinguished men in robes or suits, when we both knew perfectly well it was Justine we were talking about, Justine with whom I had just spent the afternoon, watching a little boy, who may or may not have been one of Herkus’s children, sprinkle grass in her hair.

  “No. There’s record of my grandfather because he was a pharmacist, but there isn’t even any record of my father or his brother. Nothing. The Germans were fairly big into record keeping, but a lot of it was burned or destroyed by the USSR later. I could check the Bad Arolsen archives in Germany, but I’d have to change my flight and spend a few hundred dollars I don’t have, and…” She trailed off. “I mean, what’s the point? We advertised in every city in Europe, we put ads in every major Jewish newspaper and magazine, we’ve even done the online stuff. If he was alive, we would have found him.”

  So many people must have been searching after the war. Trying to find the children they’d sent into hiding. Trying to find brothers, mothers, sisters, lovers. So many worlds torn apart. But not Grandma Sylvia. She had known exactly where her brother was. And she had not wanted to return, had never wanted to even send a letter. For all I knew, Agata had been posting such ads for years, and Grandma Sylvia had been stubbornly not scanning the papers in search of them, refusing to even wonder what had become of her other daughter.

  I asked Susan how her father had escaped, and she told me. It was her own Grandma Sylvia story, I could tell, a story that had shaped her family, become mythology, changing the way they saw the world.

  Her father’s name was Josef, and he had been ten years old when the Germans occupied Lithuania. No one had been expecting how rapidly the USSR would cede, and a struggle everyone expected would take weeks or months was over in a matter of days. For a time the Germans were too occupied with fighting the Russians and setting up bases to bother with the Jews. Josef and his brother, Saul, and his mother and father hid out on a farm owned by their aunt in the country, afraid to return to their apartment in the city. The farm was far from Vilnius, nearer to a town called Kaunas, but the techniques employed there were similar to the ones used at Ponary. There was a call for all Jewish men over age fourteen to assemble in the town square of Kaunas. Saul was fourteen, but their father insisted he stay and made him hide under the bed in case any of the Lithuanian police came to check the house. Their father knew he was going to be slaughtered and he told the children so. He left his wallet and wedding ring and papers at home. They never saw him again.

  The next week, there was a call for all of the women and children to assemble in the square. Both boys went with their mother and aunt, her children, and their grandmother. They didn’t know if they would be killed or imprisoned or just made to register or wear a patch. “My father was still too young to understand how bad it was. Even though their father had told them he was going to die, he didn’t quite believe it. But Saul knew and he kept saying he should have gone with his father that day, so they could have died together,” Susan said. She reached for one of the sugar cookies in the box.

  The boys and their mother and aunt were sent to a work camp in Batakiai where they stayed for two months. There were rumors that the camp would be liquidated, and Josef’s mother and aunt and grandmother sat the boys down and told them that they must escape. They were young and strong and had the best chance of surviving if they were unhampered by women and children. Their aunt had her three-year-old and a six-year-old with her in the camp. “Be like rabbits,” their mother told them. “Hide in the woods. Get word to the rest of our family and they will take care of you.” They had family in Australia, and their mother wrote down the address for them on little pieces of paper that she sewed into their underwear. Josef begged their mother to come with them, but she would not.

  The two boys set off at midnight. They zigzagged through the camp, and managed to climb the fence and get safely into the woods. From there they did not know where to go. They spent a crucial three days undecided, starving in the woods. Luckily it was summer, so they were not cold. Eventually, forced by hunger and thirst to explore deeper into the woods, they found a road. They argued over which direction to go, but finally decided to head south. They were picked up almost immediately by the police. Saul, for reasons unfathomable to Josef, refused to talk. “My brother can’t talk,” Josef told the police officers, the lies simply sprouting from his lips. “He is simpleminded. We were sent out to the market by our father to fetch medicine for my grandmother who is gravely ill.”

  Josef swore up and down that they were Catholic and was smart enough to give them the Lithuanian versions of their names: Salius and Juozas. But the Lithuanian police pulled down their pants and saw at once that they were circumcised. The boys were arrested and placed in holding cells until they could be transported back to the camp. The police station was a commandeered farmhouse and the “cells” they were placed in were closets, a linen closet for Saul and what must have once been a pantry for little Josef.

  That was what it would all hinge on: the lack of windows in a linen closet. In Josef’s pantry there was one tiny window up high. It did not open, but he discovered he could climb up to it by bracing himself against the walls, and the casement, when he knocked on it with his knuckles, was loose. Late at night, he took some dusty old cans of fish and carefully tap-tapped the casement of the window entirely loose. He climbed down with it, but fell the last few feet. He waited, unable to breathe to see if anyone had heard. He had fallen on his ankle in a bad way, but it was only sprained, not broken. “He always said if he had been just one day older, he would not have been able to fit through that window,” Susan said.

  Hungry and scared and crying because he was leaving his brother and he suspected the rest
of his family was already dead, Josef headed into the forest to try to be a rabbit as his mother told him. He almost starved to death there, and he once got very sick from eating the wrong kind of berries. He found a farm and he observed the woman working in her garden every day. He stayed in the woods, afraid, watching the family for more than a week. There was one man and one woman. They were both in their fifties. At night, he would sneak to get water from their well and steal carrots and fruit from their garden. They went to church on Sunday, and over the period of about eight days, he convinced himself they were good people. One morning he approached the woman in her garden. He must have looked like a ghost, appearing among her black currant bushes, half starved and dirty-faced. “Please,” was the first word he said to her. Then, “My family is dead.”

  She took him in. It turned out that her husband was a member of the Lithuanian police force working for the Germans, but he too agreed to hide the boy. They hid him in the attic whenever anyone came over and the woman taught him how to knit. That was how he spent the war, knitting in the attic. He became an excellent knitter and could make even complicated cable-knits and fine sweaters, impossibly tiny socks, anything. “I still have sweaters my father knitted me,” Susan said.

  “So you’ve been looking for Saul,” I said.

  She nodded. She brushed powdered sugar from the cookie off her chin. “My father spent the rest of his life feeling so terrible about not saving Saul. He would tell me how wonderful Saul was. How smart. How brave. I thought if I could find him, or even just find out what happened to him…I don’t know what.”

  “Is your father still alive?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Stroke,” she said. “Last January.” So she had come here to mourn her father as well as to search for Saul. I reached out and grasped her calf. The skin was cool and smooth under my hand. I squeezed the muscle.