The House at 758

by Kathryn Berla

  Chapter | 13

  About three years ago, I had a disturbing experience. It bothered me for months and I even had nightmares about it long after that. This was before I knew what a real nightmare was and how quickly and unexpectedly it could take over a person’s life. For a long time, I convinced myself that this incident was a “harbinger”, a word we learned in English class that means something which is a sign for another bigger thing that’s about to happen.

  Does everyone have a place in their house that’s a scary place? I do. My scary place is the garage, and even within the garage, there’s a corner where I still won’t go. But on that day I came into the garage to look for something . . . now I don’t even remember what it was. Back then our garage was a mess. Boxes were scattered around the edges of where the cars pull in. There was no order to anything so if you were looking for something you just had to go poking around until you found it. On that day, it was outrageously hot, but in the garage, it was cool and dry.

  I saw the box I was looking for. It was high up on one of the shelves built into the wall. I looked around for something to stand on and saw an old Lego table that Mom thought we should keep in case any little kids came to visit. I leaned over to move the Lego table and strangely heard the sound of maracas. We had a pair of maracas, along with some other percussion type instruments like miniature conga drums, and an African thumb piano. Any musical instrument we ever showed an interest in, Mom would buy for us. Too bad we had zero talent for music. But at that moment, I just wondered who was shaking the maracas, and for one crazy minute, I thought I was hearing a ghost.

  And then I saw it coiled under the Lego table, maybe six inches from my hand. A huge rattlesnake, fat across its middle, head raised back, body coiled, and the tip of its tail lifted into the air, vibrating just like a pair of maracas.

  This was what I dreamed of for months after . . . its eyes. Its eyes looked like pure evil to me because in them I saw nothing. And I had never seen nothing before that moment. Nothing turned out to be the scariest thing I knew.

  Somehow I got my bearings. I screamed, and the snake retreated, more scared of me (they say) than I was of it. My father rushed in and killed it with a shovel. Its body continued to writhe for minutes after it was dead, and a blood stain was visible for months afterward, despite repeated attempts to bleach it out.

  After that, my father completely organized the garage to eliminate any potential hiding places. He explained to me that the snake had come in to escape the heat of the day, being a cold-blooded creature. He assured me the snake was neither good nor bad. It just was. It was a living thing trying to stay alive and it had the bad fortune of being discovered by me. It wasn’t a harbinger or anything else. It was simply a rattlesnake. But that part of the garage where the stain is no longer visible is a place I’ve avoided until today.

  Now this scary place in the garage frightens me for a different reason. It’s a place where secrets are stored. My family secrets. I’m here to find the journal my mother kept about my grandfather’s childhood. The one with the word HOLOCAUST branded onto its cover with black marker. It seems tragic that the journal of the most innocent time in my grandfather’s life should have such an ominous title.

  There are some old kitchen chairs in the storage area. Mom put them here a week before the accident when we got our new kitchen set. She thought we might need them one day if we had a large party and needed extra seating, but they’ve never been moved from this spot. I brush away a cobweb and pull one of the chairs so it’s centered under the light. With the journal in my lap, I flip open its cover and an impossibly faded photo falls from the pages. It’s creased and so fragile it seems miraculous that it still exists.

  I get up to turn on a second light, and the figures in the images look back at me. It’s a group picture with three rows. The first row consists only of a woman sitting on the ground, holding a baby in her lap. In the second row are four boys, who look like they range from Emma’s age to Chad’s age. The three biggest boys are wearing caps, the kind that came back into fashion a few years ago when movie stars started wearing them—newsboy hats, they’re called. In the last row three older girls are smiling over the shoulders of the younger boys in front of them. The girls could be about my age. Everyone is dressed in cold weather clothes and there’s a small low building behind them.

  I flip the photo over and can barely make out the scrawled old-fashioned cursive. February 1944, it says. Bela (12) Miklos (8) Vili (6) Gyuri (10). The four brothers. My grandfather, I know, is Gyuri which means George in Hungarian. And now that I know which one he is I can see the old man in the face of this little boy. The eyes are shadowed, probably from a bright winter sun directly overhead, and the focus of the picture is slightly blurred. But the way he leans timidly and yet protectively into his little brother Vili, the cocked head, the slightly crooked smile . . . how could I not recognize him? And without anything to back me up but my intuition, I suddenly know that this was the last time these young brothers stood shoulder to shoulder and smiled with all the innocence of their youth.

  I thumb through the pages of the journal and find a Ziploc baggie that contains two yellowed documents. My father used to joke that if Mom came across something weak and defenseless that couldn’t be cured with chicken soup and a hug, she’d put it inside a Ziploc baggie. How did he step away from all those memories to begin something new? Did he try to do it, or did it just happen to him? I never want it to happen to me . . . so do I have to accept sadness as my lifelong companion?

  One of the documents is thick and rectangular. It resembles a postcard, although it looks nothing like any postcard I’ve ever seen. There’s no tropical beach lined with coconut palms, no national park backdrop with a bear climbing through the window of a car, no Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial. It’s a strictly-business postcard and every square inch has been filled with writing as though the words were precious gems that needed to be stored somewhere—safely and quickly. The other document is just a scrap of paper, unfolded now but with so many creases it’s obvious that someone sometime was trying to make it as small as possible. The writing is in pencil, large and clumsy. I can’t read it but it must be Hungarian.

  I don’t know how many minutes have passed when I turn the last written page of the journal. After that, there are nothing but blank pages. The blank pages feel like the end of time. But they also feel like promises of more to come. Mom tried her best but she wound up with just a collection of facts. There are no personal stories. There’s no emotional response to the facts. It seems to me that all this information could just as easily have been copied and pasted from an ancestry internet website. Only the clues hint at more . . . the faded picture, the postcard and the folded scrap of paper.

  For as long as I can remember, Mom spoke to us about the Holocaust. She used general words designed to deliver facts without causing childhood nightmares. But Mom knew the truth even though she couldn’t get past her father’s vague answers and her mother’s warning looks. She knew the truth of history but she didn’t know the truth of the stories. And yet I can see from this notebook how hard she was trying. And I can imagine her frustration stemming from fear that time was running out—not her own, she couldn’t know that, but my grandpa’s. She wanted to peel back the layers and reveal those stories before it was too late. For his sake. For her sake. For our sake. Now I think I have a chance to finish what she started. Maybe it’s something I can do for her.

  It doesn’t seem right to leave the journal in the box in this scary part of the garage. I want to read it again, but not in this place. I set the box back on the shelf and take the journal to my tent, stopping off first in the kitchen for another Ziploc baggie to protect the picture.

  Chapter | 14

  When I first learned in school that the sun doesn’t rise and set it took me a while to grasp the concept. I saw the sun doing these very things. And I couldn’t feel the earth’s rot
ation on its axis, so I didn’t believe it. The words that we use to describe the daily events—sunrise and sunset—well they just confirmed my belief.

  There was something more. In my childish brain, I wanted to believe I was the center of the earth and the earth was the center of everything else. To imagine a monstrous and merciless sun commanding the planets from its stationary throne was too frightening a thought. Our earth was just a slave to the sun, and I had no more importance than a speck of dust. Even sunlight was greater than me.

  But now the very thing I found frightening is a comfort. I like feeling like I’m just such a small piece of such a big puzzle. In the scale of things, my hurt is unimportant. And my happiness as well. I sit on my reclining chair and wait for the earth to rotate just a little bit more. In another hour, I’ll see the bright orange ball on the western horizon, red and pink clouds coiling around it. Every leaf of every tree, every blade of grass, every bird, reptile and mammal will turn toward the sun as it disappears behind the earth’s shadow. Some of its warmth will stay behind to remind us of its great power and size. The breeze on my rooftop is as soft as a whisper. How many moments will I have like this in my lifetime? How many different places will I sit to watch the sun set?

  __________

  Today is Sunday and dinner is just a sandwich I take up to my tent. Sunday dinners aren’t the big deal they used to be ever since it’s just been Dad and me. And now with Marie, even she doesn’t mind when we all do our own thing. It’s become the one night of the week when we’re allowed to do that.

  Tonight, I have a mission—to translate the two documents I found in the journal. Surprisingly, I’ve found no translation anywhere in the journal. Probably my mom understood the words and figured she’d write it down one day. She didn’t know she would run out of time.

  With my laptop opened to a translation site, I select Hungarian to English. I type the words into the Hungarian box as best as I can decipher them, not bothering with punctuation or accent marks. Like magic, as though someone was typing simultaneously, the words appear in English in the adjacent box. I have my translation of the postcard—or at least an approximation of what I can piece together that makes sense.

  My dear family . . . I miss you all so much . . . I am here . . . able to work . . . I am fine . . . they will be moving us soon . . . please send me letters to . . . I don’t know when I can . . . please don’t worry about me . . . but help your mother . . . love each other my sons . . . when we are all together again . . . I love you all so much . . . a million kisses and a million more . . . love Father

  The postmark came from someplace in Hungary. My mother’s journal says that my great-grandfather Jeno, was sent first to a forced-labor camp in Hungary before being sent on to Buchenwald in Germany. Technically not a death camp, Jeno nonetheless died in Buchenwald along with 33,000 others.

  My mother’s journal goes on to say that Buchenwald is the German word for “beech forest”. A really pretty name if you think about it . . . especially for a place where the slogan above the entrance said “To Each His Own,” but where it was understood the real meaning was “Everyone Gets What They Deserve”. I wonder if Germans today talk about taking a stroll through the buchenwald—or did they invent another name for a beech forest since then?

  Next I get to work translating the note written on the scrap of paper that had been folded so many times.

  . . . heard you are here . . . I . . . happy to know you are alive and I hope well . . . if you have a shirt or any extra piece of bread . . . have eaten nothing but . . . weeks . . . sick . . . take care . . . vili . . . so young . . . careful . . . love . . . a million kisses . . . Mother

  My mother’s journal documents my great-grandmother’s deportation to Auschwitz, which was a death camp. Three of her young sons were sent there as well. This note was passed from person to person, at great risk, to get from my great-grandmother Helen in one part of the camp to her eldest son Bela, who was already dead by the time it reached his barracks. After the war, it was put into the hands of my grandfather by someone who had been there. Someone from his hometown who kept it safe, knowing that one day words would be the only thing left.

  I learned in school that reading between the lines is just as important as reading the lines themselves. In the postcard and the scrap of paper there is more to read between the lines than there are actual translatable words. But with just these few words, and only the context provided by Mom’s journal, I feel like I’ve had a glimpse into a microcosm that was once a family. I feel the love and the bond and the million kisses of a mother, father, and four young sons. I learned more about Grandpa George in fifteen minutes than I learned in fifteen years. Maybe Mom wanted to share the secrets of these clues with me. But she might have thought I wasn’t ready to hear them.

  __________

  Grandpa arrives tomorrow so today is my last free day with no obligations. My summer job will begin when I pick him up at the airport. This morning begins with two incoming texts. The first is from Lyla and she seems bored. I guess too much of a good thing can really be too much of a good thing. The second is from Chad who has achieved twenty consecutive juggles with the soccer ball.

  I don’t want to go back to sleep but I’m not fully awake. I’m still in that in-between state where either side could win. I visualize Chad standing on a driveway that looks exactly like Jake’s driveway, except without the three cars. He has a serious, purposeful look in his eyes, and maybe the tip of his tongue is peeking out the way it does when he concentrates on something. He’s counting out loud each time the top of his shoe makes contact with the ball . . . eighteen, nineteen, twenty. He stops to text me before starting over again.

  And then the image of the boy at 758 seizes control of the movie that’s playing inside my head. He’s juggling the purple sparkly ball with his bare foot. He barely taps it in order to keep it from flying out into the street. He counts in a language I don’t understand.

  I sit upright and banish sleep from the tent. This is my last free day. Nobody is here to tell me what to do. I don’t have any responsibilities, and I have a clear head. I know what I want to do and, no matter what Dad thinks, I know it’s not wrong. I want to go back to 758. I still haven’t seen him and I want to. I need to.

  __________

  I don’t need anyone’s permission but I still feel like I should tell someone. There has to be a way for me to communicate how important this is to me. Someone should be encouraging me about this . . . obsession? But there isn’t anyone, so I go to the study where Charlie squawks a greeting. I’ve brought a carrot tip and a slice of apple which I place on his fresh produce dish. He clambers down from his perch to the floor of the cage, using his beak the way an old man would use a cane. He begins to munch, at the same time keeping an eye on me.

  “Charlie, just so you know, I’m going back there.”

  I must be crazy talking to a bird.

  “Everyone wants me to move on, but you understand, don’t you, guy? You can’t move on either.”

  And then, as if to illustrate the point, I stick my finger in the cage and Charlie scurries away to the farthest corner.

  __________

  I drive down the street prepared to make my usual U-turn to park in my usual place on the opposite side of the street facing the wrong way. The faded brown Toyota is in the driveway again. I’m sure that means he’s home, so I’ve gotten lucky today. If he leaves, I’ll see him. When it happens, I’ll know what to do. In the meantime, I just have to stay calm.

  But before I engage the parking brake, I hear a whoop and a red light flashes behind me. When the door of the police car opens, I can see it’s the same cop who spoke to me last week. In my side mirror, I watch him as he approaches. He motions for me to roll down the window.

  “Are we going to go through this again?” he asks. He looks tired.

  “You said I wasn’t breaking the law. And
this is a public street.” I refuse to be forced away this time. I’m also wondering if the commotion I’m causing will bring him out of his house.

  “You know they could get a restraining order against you.” He pushes his sunglasses on top of his head and I can see his eyes—vivid blue and kind. “You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  “They can get a restraining order against me. That’s funny.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.” The sun causes him to squint so he pulls his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Do you want these people to get a restraining order against you, because that’s what I’m going to advise them to do.”

  “No.” I look straight ahead.

  “No what?”

  “No, sir.”

  He laughs quietly. “I didn’t mean that. I meant: no, you don’t want them to get a restraining order against you: or no, you’re not going to leave?”

  I think about it for a few seconds with my eyes on 758. I have to stay strong.

  “Both,” I say finally.

  “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He walks over to his car and gets inside.

  I can see in my rearview mirror that he’s talking to someone on his radio. After a few minutes he comes back. There’s been no sign of activity at 758. No shadows behind the window or children playing in the yard.

  He leans over to talk through my window. “Lock up your car and come with me.”

  “Am I under arrest?” The injustice is hard to believe.

  “No, you’re not under arrest. This is your lucky day ‘cause you get to come on a ride-along with me. I just had to clear it with my platoon commander.”

  I make no move to get out of my car. This isn’t exactly what I would consider my lucky day and a ride-along is the last thing I want to do right now.

  “I’m a little nervous about leaving my car here.” Still nothing happening across the street.

  His mouth pulls to one side into a who-are-you-kidding expression.