The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  ‘He’s my baby! They took my baby away from me, O’Malley!’

  Then my father’s voice, restrained. ‘Mara, come in here. For God’s sake, don’t stand in the hallway.’

  ‘I want him back! You must help me, O’Malley. You promised you’d help me. You promised me. He belongs with me.’

  ‘Mara, get out of that hall this minute. Get back in here.’

  Muffled sobs, and my mother said something I couldn’t hear.

  ‘Mara, I meant it. Get out of that hallway. The girls are going to hear you.’

  I felt like shouting up at him that the girls had already heard plenty.

  Then he must have come out into the hall to get her because there were several muffled, angry sounds, and Mama muttered something about his leaving her alone, that she needed a glass of water because she couldn’t breathe. More noises. The bathroom door. The study door. The bathroom door again. Then they were fighting in the bathroom right above us.

  Megan was inching her chair around the table. Her head was on her folded arm on the table top, but very slightly, inch by inch, she was moving in my direction. Tears had filled her eyes but they didn’t fall. She said nothing; she did not even look at me. And I was too paralysed to be any comfort.

  Suddenly I could plainly hear what Dad was saying. He was still in the bathroom, and his voice rose in volume. It was about Klaus. About Klaus being dead and gone. About Mama living in a dreamworld and how if she couldn’t help herself, no one else could.

  There was a small, strangled shriek of rage from my mother. Then she roared at him, first in a mixture of English and Hungarian, before sliding into pure German. My mother could give a wrath to the German language as she could to no other. She knew all the most vulgar and hateful phrases in that language. And she was furious with my father. Klaus is not dead! she shouted. He had no reason to say Klaus was. Do you, O’Malley, she screamed. Do you? Look me in the face and say that. Say you know he’s dead. Look me in the face.

  I couldn’t hear my father’s answer.

  Then the subject was Megan and me. I heard my father tell my mother that she didn’t pay enough attention to Megan. Why had they bothered to have another child when she never paid enough attention to her? What did they have Megan for anyway, if all Mama did was dream about Klaus? I glanced over to see if my sister was listening. It was difficult to tell. She remained immobile, her head still resting on her arm. I was embarrassed for her. Although hoping desperately that she hadn’t heard, I realized that if I’d heard, no doubt she had too.

  Then the bathroom door opened and they were back in the study. They argued for what seemed to me a small eternity. It went on and on and on. All the peaceful years vomited up their small bitter moments.

  Finally, the study door opened and shut noisily. Dad’s footsteps were on the stairs. He thundered into the kitchen.

  ‘Lesley, do you know the name of those people whose little boy your mother saw?’

  I shook my head.

  He sighed, cast around the room for a moment, as if lost for what to do next. Then grabbing his jacket, he headed for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Megan cried, leaping up.

  He paused, stock still, like someone caught in a frame of film. Still wearing his work overalls, he hadn’t even gotten around to washing the garage grease from his hands. Then abruptly he came back to life.

  ‘I’m going out to get us something to eat,’ he replied. ‘Fried chicken or something. Look at the time,’ he said and sounded as if it were somehow our fault that it had grown so late. ‘And no one’s had any supper.’

  ‘I’m not really very hungry, Daddy,’ Megan said.

  ‘No, neither am I,’ I said.

  He stared at us, flustered, as if we were speaking foreign tongues. Then he yanked on his jacket. ‘Well, I am. I’m starved. So I’m going to get myself something to eat.’ He looked over Megan’s head to me. ‘And for Christ’s sake, get your sister to bed. It’s way past her bedtime.’ Then he left.

  Megan started to bawl. After the agony of enduring their argument, the sudden silence overwhelmed her and she broke into loud, inelegant sobs. There was no point in trying to talk her out of it. She was beyond caring.

  It took a long time to muster the courage to go upstairs. I put it off as long as possible. I comforted Megan and got her to sit down in front of the TV. I made us both mugs of hot chocolate with more marshmallows than milk. But I realized that before Megan would be willing to go up to bed, I was going to have to go upstairs myself.

  Mama was still crying. Huddled in my father’s lounger in the study, knees drawn up, head down, she sobbed wearily. It was a heavy, hopeless sound that carried all the way to me on the staircase.

  ‘Mama?’ I said softly. ‘It’s just me, Mama.’ I walked into the room. She didn’t acknowledge my presence.

  ‘Mama?’ I knelt down beside the chair and touched her shoulder. ‘I’ve made me and Meggie some hot chocolate. Do you want some? Do you want to come down and sit with us?’

  My mother always had about her a truly heartbreaking kind of vulnerability. Even in the good times, even when she was being wickedly funny and full of laughter, there seemed to be some tender part of her exposed. That fragility had always terrified me. From the time I had been very, very young I’d felt it, and it made me reluctant to ever take my eyes off her. You just didn’t, not if you loved her. You had to be there right on top of her to protect her, because it never seemed that she could be fully trusted to protect herself.

  From the bathroom I brought a damp cloth and again knelt down beside the lounger. I pressed the cloth to her face and could feel the heat come through to my fingers. Her cheeks were swollen and red, but in contrast, her eyes were almost an electric blue. While kneeling there, my emotions rocketed through extremes, varying from fury at my father’s willingness to leave her like this to a frenetic desperation about my own ability to cope. I was nearly in tears myself before I was finished.

  When I went back downstairs, Megan was still in the living room watching television. It was after eleven o’clock, and she had switched to a raucous cop show where they were killing everyone in sight.

  ‘Get up those stairs, Megan. Honestly, didn’t you hear Daddy? Do you know what time it is?’

  She ignored me. Still wearing her school clothes, she was draped over the chair, feet up on the arm.

  ‘Does somebody always have to tell you everything? Now I just don’t have patience for this. It’s ten after eleven and you’re supposed to be in bed. You’re going to be like murder in school tomorrow.’

  ‘Get lost, Lesley. I’m watching this.’

  I walked over to the set and turned it off. Megan shot up angrily. ‘Who gave you the right to do that? You’re not the boss in this house. I was watching that show.’

  My back against the television set, I glared at her. ‘I’m the boss now, Megan. You heard Dad. He told me to put you to bed. Ages ago. So get up those stairs or believe me, I’ll damned well make you, the way I’m feeling right now.’

  Tears were in her eyes.

  ‘Look, the last thing I want to do is fight with you.’

  ‘I hate you,’ she muttered, and she stomped out of the room. I reckoned that at that particular moment everyone was hating everyone else just a little.

  Mama had fallen asleep. Still in the lounger, she slept in a tight, cramped position, her head resting heavily against the side of the chair. Her breathing was deep and still faintly congested.

  Wandering idly around upstairs, I picked up my schoolbooks with an intention to study but did not sit down. Instead, I went into my parents’ bedroom and parted the curtains to see out to the front of the house. The car was still in the driveway. My father was still in it. I had never heard it leave.

  Megan had changed her clothes but then gone to sleep before she’d gotten under the blankets. She lay in the midst of the clutter of things on top of her bed, the tiger cat stuffed against her face. The light was still on.r />
  Seeing her, I was unexpectedly awash with regret for having been so snappish with her. The emotion came as sodden remorse, oversized for the crime, and made me want to wake her up to get forgiveness. Going into the room, I tried to move her sufficiently to get her under the blankets, but she was too deeply asleep to cooperate. All I could do was double back the bedspread over her. I gazed at her. On impulse I kissed her before I turned off the bedside lamp and left the room.

  I wanted to wait until my father came in, so I took my school work down to the kitchen table. By midnight Dad was still out there, and I knew I was going to have to go to bed myself. I had gone past the point of being tired and into a sort of taut, desperate exhaustion. I looked out the window and wondered if he was intending to sleep in the car. I wondered if I should take him a blanket. But I decided against disturbing him in case he was still angry. So, leaving the back door unlocked, I turned out the kitchen light and went upstairs. Hesitating in the hallway, I considered whether or not to wake Mama and get her into bed. She wasn’t going to be able to move at all in the morning if she slept in a position like that. But the thought of having to cope with Mama awake at that point seemed unbearable. So I left her alone.

  Tired as I was, once in bed, I couldn’t sleep. I heard my father come in eventually. Then the house returned to silence. After another hour or so of trying to sleep, I rose, took a blanket and my pillow and went downstairs. Turning the radio on and tuning it to the all-night station, I curled up under my woolly blanket on the couch.

  I fell asleep dreaming that Aaron was actually Klaus and that Paul and I couldn’t see each other any more because that made us brother and sister. The funny thing about the dream was that Mama was not in it. It was Bo. She was my mother.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the morning I woke stiff and sore from sleeping on the couch and uncomfortably tired. Dad came into the kitchen while I was making a pot of tea. Rumpled and weary looking, he rummaged out the instant coffee and a mug, poured hot water from the kettle into it, stirred it with the handle of a fork lying on the counter and walked out of the kitchen with it. He was already in the hallway before he paused, turned around and looked back at me. Then without saying anything, he came back and embraced me. It began as a one-armed hug because he was still holding the coffee. But then he set the mug down on the table and hugged me with both arms. Holding me painfully close for just a moment, he then let go and left with his drink. He said absolutely nothing.

  The shower went on upstairs. Within half an hour my father was back, his hair wet and slicked down. He drank a second cup of coffee while standing beside the counter, watching me pack his lunch. He asked if I would mind staying home with Mama. I said, sure, I’d do it, without even stopping to think whether I minded or not. He nodded, smiled and rumpled my hair in an agitated caress.

  My sister, who did not have a particularly thick veneer of civility in the best of times, was hopeless that morning. She was too tired to want to get up. The blouse she planned to wear was in the dirty clothes basket. I refused to boil her an egg, and by the time she had finished complaining about it, there wasn’t time for her to do it herself. Then she couldn’t find her gym shoes or her social-studies book. There was no change in the house for lunch money, and I wasn’t about to let her take the five dollars I found where my mother kept the grocery money. In the end, she left for school crying because I made her peanut-butter sandwiches and Mama always made her tuna.

  Mama was still asleep. Sometime in the night she apparently had awakened and gone into the bedroom, because when I looked in, she was stretched out on her stomach across their big bed. It must have been very close to morning when she had, because she had not bothered to get under the covers but had Dad’s bathrobe over her instead. The remainder of the bed was in jumbled confusion from my father’s getting up.

  She still wore her clothes from the day before. Only her shoes were off, and they lay, one on top of the other, at the foot of the bed. Some of the tension had gone from her face. Her jaw was relaxed. Her forehead was smooth. But even asleep her expression remained troubled.

  She slept a long time. On the occasions when she could do so, my mother had a tremendous capacity for sleep. She slept like one dead, and next to nothing woke her. I sat downstairs, bored and unsettled. Clearing away the dishes, I washed them, dried them and put them away. I scrubbed out the sink. I sorted the laundry and started a load. I vacuumed, picked up the debris of newspapers and magazines and other paper that seemed to collect in the living room. Even doing the ironing did not fill up enough time.

  At one point I came across Megan’s books about the war. Aimlessly, I paged through them. The worst aspect of the war to me was that it had happened so much before I was born. I hated thinking about it because of that. Where had all the good people gone? Why had no one stopped all the atrocities? I would have. If I had been born in time, I would have done something. But I didn’t even stand a chance. It seemed brutally unfair to me that I should have to live with the consequences of something I had never been given the opportunity to prevent.

  Shortly after noon, Mama woke up. She came stumbling drunkenly into the kitchen, her hair dishevelled, her face swollen from so much sleep. Dropping into a chair at the table, she struggled with her packet of cigarettes. I made a cup of coffee for her.

  ‘Oh Scheisse,’ she muttered under her breath, and with eyes still half-closed, she braced her head with one hand and smoked the cigarette. She wasn’t beautiful then. My father was forever saying how much he thought Mama looked like Princess Grace. Sort of a Germanic Grace Kelly. From over by the sink I stood watching her. My mama was nobody’s princess.

  She looked up. ‘When did O’Malley come back?’

  ‘He never really left, Mama. He was just sitting out in front in the car.’

  She lit a second cigarette from the end of the first. Thoughtfully, she rubbed along the skin of her left temple and stared into space. I turned and took a can of tomato soup from the cupboard to make lunch for us.

  She was still sitting, still staring when I came to the table with crackers and the soup in enamel mugs. With the fingers of one hand, she’d begun working the tangles from her hair, but it was a casual, undeliberated motion.

  ‘He’s a good man, O’Malley,’ she said, ‘but he has no dreams.’

  ‘He’s got dreams, Mama,’ I said, wondering how she could say that when my father’s dreams seemed so plaintively obvious to me.

  She shook her head. ‘No. He has no dreams. He has fantasies. But no dreams. Nothing to pursue.’ She looked over, focusing her eyes on me for the first time. ‘When you marry, don’t make that mistake. Marry a man with dreams.’

  I said nothing.

  Silence. She lifted the mug and sipped the soup. She was staring again.

  ‘I had dreams,’ she said. ‘Once.’ Then she looked at me again. ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen next month.’

  She nodded. Looking into the mug of soup, she nodded a second time. I could hear birds singing somewhere. Not terribly melodically. Sparrows, most likely.

  ‘I was seventeen,’ she said. ‘Then. When he was born.’

  A pause. Elbows on the table, she clasped her hands together and put the tips of her thumbs between her teeth. ‘Did I ever tell you what they were doing there? At that hostel? Where they took me from Jena.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It was a Lebensborn hostel.’ She glanced over at me. ‘Do you know about that?’

  Again, I shook my head.

  ‘Fountain of Life. That’s what it means. They were breeding us. We were selected for our Aryan qualities. We were the source of their fountain.’

  There was a slight lisp to her words because she still had the ends of her thumbs against her teeth. She gazed at the tabletop. ‘Some of the girls knew. Some of them volunteered, I think. I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t allowed to talk to them very often.’

  She paused for breath
and then fell in pensive silence.

  ‘I was sixteen when I first arrived. Sixteen and four months old. It was November 15th. And there were trees outside my window. Lime trees. And I thought, Mara, you are such a silly goose to be so scared.’ She looked at me and smiled slightly. ‘You see, I was scared. I was terrified. I didn’t know what they wanted, why they’d sent me there. All the other students with foreign birth certificates they deported from Jena. But me …’ She looked away again. ‘But when I looked out the window, I thought, this can’t be such a bad place. There are lime trees here, like at home.’

  Her voice grew very soft, hardly about a whisper, and I had to lean forward to hear her clearly.

  ‘I was very innocent then. A child really. I’d only had my periods for two years and I did not think of myself as a woman. I was very much a virgin, even in my mind. I didn’t know things.’ She shook her head. ‘I just did not know.’

  She paused, searching the grain in the tabletop for something I could not see. ‘He was born there. On a bed with no sheets. I said to them, “Please give me a sheet.” I was lying on a rubber mat and I was cold. I was freezing. And it hurt so much. I hadn’t thought it would hurt like that. “Please,” I said to them, “let me lie on a sheet.” And when he was born, I wept.’

  She unclasped her hands and took up the mug of soup. She stared into it. ‘I was so full of milk for him. It came in fast, and I couldn’t stop it from leaking. They would hold him up in front of me and he would cry and the milk would just run. It ruined all my blouses. My breasts, oh God, my breasts hurt me. And I was so ashamed. I felt like a little child who cannot get to the toilet in time. They’d hold him and watch to see my blouse get wet. But if I cried, they laughed.’ One hand in a gentle, unconscious movement came up to cup a breast.

  She glanced briefly in my direction. ‘You see, I was just a child myself. Hardly turned seventeen. And I will tell you, I did not know much. I decided to put toilet paper in my bra. Wads of it. To keep the milk from showing. It seemed so indecent to stain my blouses like that. And I was humiliated when they made me cry. So I put all these wads of toilet paper against my breasts. And put on my blouse. It was the one Mutti gave me, the white one with lace at the collar that Oma had made. It was my only good one. The only one left without stains.’