The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  Silence.

  It grew.

  Still, she sat, feeling the Formica with her fingertip.

  Motionless, I watched her.

  ‘I could never be what he wanted,’ she said very quietly. ‘He wanted so much. When I was little, he would take me from the nursery and walk with me down to the drawing room and let me sit in the leather chair beside his desk. Then he would take out his pipe and sit down and smoke it. And he would look at me. “Of all of them, you are the best,” he would say. “You are the best. Many people in the village say to me how beautiful my daughter is. Such a little lady. People think, what a fortunate man I am.” He said that to me. I don’t know how many times. And I would sit in the leather chair and my feet didn’t touch the floor.’

  She paused. Tears puddled in the corners of her eyes but she ignored them. She continued gazing at the table top.

  ‘Why me?’ she asked, her voice plaintively questioning. ‘Why was he always so ambitious for me? I was not good. Why did he keep telling me those things? Why not Elek? Or Mihály? They were his sons. I never understood. Why was it me?’

  Again she paused. She did not look up.

  ‘I was so afraid we would find him. He would have known. He would have looked at me and been able to tell what I had done in the war.’

  ‘Mama, let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘Why did I survive? I should have died. It would have been better to die than to have let them do those things to me.’

  ‘Please, Mama …’

  Then silence. She became briefly absorbed in her tea mug, tipping it and staring into it.

  She looked over. ‘Did you understand about József? About what I was saying about decisions?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did, I think.’

  Another pause. The energy seemed suddenly to drain out of her, and she covered her eyes with one hand. ‘But what do I do now? What about Klaus?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  She sighed. ‘O’Malley’s so upset with me. I am beginning to think he will hate me soon. And how could I manage without O’Malley? How could I live without him?’

  ‘You’re never going to have to worry about that, Mama, so don’t start thinking about it.’

  ‘He doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Mama, I think he does. I think he understands a whole lot more than you give him credit for sometimes. I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘I can see you do. But don’t, Mama. Daddy’s not going to give up on you. You know Daddy.’

  Her expression forlorn, she sighed. ‘I worry so much,’ she whispered, and the tears returned to her eyes. ‘How can O’Malley bear me? I am so dirty. I’ve let so many evil men touch me. So many filthy pigs. How can it be that I’m not a filthy pig myself? How can O’Malley bear to lie in the same bed with me? How can he love me?’

  ‘Oh, Mama, don’t talk like this.’ I rose up and leaned across the table to hug her. I clutched her head and kissed her hair. ‘Daddy does love you. You know that. He loves you more than anything else in the world. We all do. What happened before makes absolutely no difference to us. You’ve got to understand that and believe it, because it’s the truth.’

  She sat back. With one finger she dislodged the tears; she snuffled, then she reached out for the teapot. Pouring another cup of tea, she added milk and stirred it. With the cuff of her nightgown she studiously cleaned away a drop of tea that had spilled on the table. She drank from the mug in gulps.

  I glanced at the clock. It was not quite five.

  ‘I always felt so guilty for being Aryan. I was always writing that to Herr Willi. Over and over and over again I had to tell him how guilty it made me feel. So he would forgive me. But it never helped. Now,’ she said, ‘when I think about it, I see it isn’t simply being Aryan. It’s being alive.’

  She inhaled slowly. ‘I told Herr Willi that if I’d had to live through that time, I wish I’d been born a Jew. That’s the truth. I do. It would have been better to go to your death, innocent. It would have been better to suffer the cruellest evil at other people’s hands than to become evil yourself. Then there would have been no shame. Then you would not have to think, The people who love me wish they could stop.’

  ‘Please, Mama, please don’t think about this any more. Please? I understand. I do. About József. About the hostel. About Ravensbrück. I understand the things you did and the decisions you made. They’re understandable, Mama.’

  She looked at me. ‘You can forgive me then? Ja? For what I do, you can forgive me?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mama. I can forgive you.’

  The next morning after breakfast when Megan had gone outside to play, I told my father about Mama’s restless night and the conversation we’d had. He knew about those things. He’d always known, I suppose.

  He told me other aspects of those times, about her long, slow recovery from typhus and the after effects of the two-and-a-half years in Ravensbrück, where she’d spent most of her time with Polish women like Jadwiga, doing heavy farm labour. He described their harrowing journey back to Lébény and their fruitless, decade-long search for Klaus through the ruins of Germany. That was the real reason, he said, that they’d stayed on in Wales, because it was easier to follow up leads on the Continent from there. A fact I’d never known was that my mother and father had come to the States for a short time immediately after the war and lived with Grandma. However, Mama had been so fretful with worry about the possibility of missing a clue to Klaus’s whereabouts that she’d persuaded my father to return to Europe. Yet search as they had, through the orphanages and the Red Cross and all the other agencies set up to reunite families, no substantial evidence about Klaus ever surfaced. All the records from the Lebensborn hostel were destroyed and the hostel itself abandoned when invasion by the Allies had seemed imminent. Whoever had taken Klaus either did not know he had been unwillingly given up or else did not come forward. My mother remained tormented. In every crowd of school children she saw him. Every small boy with blond hair and blue eyes might have been him. She could go nowhere without searching the faces of all the children. Every shop, every street, every home with a child in it caught her eye. In the end, my father insisted they leave Europe and return to the US. It was 1957, he said: time to get on with their own lives before this thing destroyed them both.

  Dad stayed home that Saturday instead of going down to the garage, as he usually did. I had upset him, telling him about the things Mama had said to me in the night. He paced restlessly around the kitchen, washing up the dishes with rough vigour. When I next saw him, he was sitting on the floor beside the couch in the living room, where Mama was still asleep. Gently, gently, he stroked her hair, his face only inches from hers.

  Paul was coming over for Saturday lunch. He and Aaron had been out rat shooting the previous evening, so he’d promised to make it up to me on Saturday afternoon. We didn’t have much in mind. Just going out to Ladder Creek and being alone.

  He arrived about eleven o’clock in a roaring good mood. He had bet Aaron that he could hit five rats in a row without missing and had won, so Aaron had had to buy him three boxes of .22 shells. Gleefully, Paul brought them in to show me. I told him that his pastime was disgusting, that it was undoubtedly his least likable characteristic and that I refused to listen to him glorify it. But I did volunteer to help him put the guns and the rest of the shells in the house. I was not going to ride around with all that crap in the car, I said; it was dangerous. He agreed wholeheartedly. But I knew all he was worried about was someone stealing the precious things and spoiling his main source of entertainment.

  After all the trauma in the middle of the night, my mother, in a way so characteristic of her, was full of rollicking good humour when she finally got up. She’d surfaced only slightly ahead of Paul’s arrival and was showering when he came. While we were in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for a salad for lunch, she wandered in, her hair still wrapped in a towel.

  �
��Ah, modelling the newest fashions from India,’ Paul said when he saw her.

  ‘Where have you found this lout?’ she asked me. ‘In a dump shooting rats? He has no respect for his elders.’ Pulling the makeshift turban off and letting her damp hair tumble down, Mama flicked the towel at Paul, giving him a sharp snap on the backside. He jumped, grabbing the seat of his pants. Both of them were hooting like chimpanzees.

  Lunch was spirited. Mama, rested and relaxed, bantered with everyone. Dad and Paul fell into a serious discussion about the Chicago Cubs. Megan, desperate for attention, rocked back and forth on the edge of her chair and inserted non sequiturs into our conversations.

  Afterward, Paul and I left. Dad had promised Megs that he would run her downtown. Megan had gone on absolutely relentlessly in the previous few weeks about getting some shoes she wanted. They were a kind of sneaker that all the other schoolchildren were wearing, and Megan seriously believed that her social life would be at an end if she didn’t get some too. At first my father had told her that she was just being silly, that we didn’t have money to spend on things like that, and that her other shoes were perfectly good enough, especially since they still fitted, which was something none of Megan’s shoes seemed to do for long. But then Dad received some overtime from the garage, and I guess Megs must have worn him down on the issue. Anyhow, he had promised to run her down to Penney’s. Consequently, when Paul and I came through, she was standing barefoot in the hallway because my father had told her to check her socks to make certain they weren’t holey or smelly. So there Megan stood, having taken them off completely to have a good look. Dad came blustering in, telling her to hurry up.

  ‘I’ve got to have those running shoes,’ Megs was saying to no one in particular. ‘They cost $10.98 and I got to have them.’

  My father was muttering under his breath about something else she was going to have to have, if she didn’t speed up.

  Paul and I went out along Ladder Creek to our familiar spot. I don’t know how it came to be that we went there and nowhere else along the creek, but by that point, it was our second home.

  We took the blanket from the back seat of the car, took it down to the water and spread it out over the thin grass. Paul took his shirt off, and we lay down together. I could see little heatwaves rising off the plains and looked up to scan the skies. April and May were tornado season and in Kansas, you paid a great deal of attention to what the skies were doing at that time of year. It was clear and cloudless. I wondered how long it would be before the thunderheads formed.

  We talked, but not much. The main topic was Paul’s going away to school and my going away and the fact that we were going to different places. We discussed the survival of our relationship in cool, detached tones, as if it didn’t matter too much to either of us if it faded and died, when I knew for a fact that it mattered much. I told Paul I wasn’t even certain that I would be going to college, given that I had cashed the bond in. He said he wasn’t very sure about Ohio State anymore either. He really did wish he was going to study astronomy, or at least physics. Then he paused. It was easier, he said in a sad tone, when we were kids. Then there never was a worry about things like jobs or money. That comment caused us to digress on to the subject of childhood in general. I said I thought Megan had it a lot easier than I had had, and that I’d always felt a certain amount of responsibility toward the family that I didn’t believe she did. Paul said it was just personalities, in his opinion. That different kids reacted in different ways. He said the same thing was true of him and Aaron. Aaron had no sense of responsibility either. Aaron lived in the here-and-now and had no sense of the future. Basically, he said, Aaron just had no sense, period. The conversation made me think of Megan and her obsession with reading about the war. That had subsided some, but I knew she was still doing it. I couldn’t understand where she got it. I said I knew too much already without reading more. I said I did believe that ignorance was bliss in many respects. Paul replied that he thought they got that expression wrong. Innocence, he said, was bliss. But to his way of thinking, ignorance was like standing in a prison cell with an unlocked door and never opening it.

  Paul reached over and unbuttoned my blouse. When he lay back down again, I could feel his warm, bare skin. We made love in the hot afternoon stillness. It was much better, easier. I could relax. The heat helped; heavy and soporific, it dulled my thinking, and my body responded effortlessly.

  We grew drowsy afterward. Little bugs floated by in clouds, and you could hear their high-pitched, distant buzz, sawing against the silence. We lay, eyes closed, arms around one another, our bodies slippery with sweat. Having been awake in the night, I was tired. I grew sleepy in the warmth and dozed with the steady thumping of Paul’s heart against my ear.

  A car came along. We heard it on the road. I roused when Paul rose up on one elbow to listen to it. We were down out of sight of the road because of the slope the creek bank created. The car slowed but went on. I fell back on to the blanket. I’d been fully asleep and dreaming. It had been a confused dream, an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole sort of dream where I had not realized I was actually asleep until I woke. But now, awakened, I was heavy with the desire to return to it. I closed my eyes.

  Paul remained poised, up on his elbow, as alert as a jackrabbit. Probably some kid casing out parked cars, he said as the sound diminished. I asked if he had locked the car. Yes, he said. But good thing he’d taken the guns out.

  We talked then, lazily, about kids and cars and things like drugs, which were rampant at school if you knew where to look. I asked him if he knew Jennifer Olsen, because I knew for a fact that she was stoned half the time. You could tell too. Paul told me that his mom had caught Aaron with part of a lid not long before, and she’d said that he could just go live with his dad if he felt like doing stuff like that. I asked Paul if he’d ever tried pot. Yeah, he said, once with some of Aaron’s friends. He hadn’t thought much of it. He hadn’t gotten much of a high. What about me? he asked. I said I’d never been anywhere it was offered.

  Then we heard the car come back. Paul was sure it was the same car because of the way the engine sounded. He said he was going to check who it was. I wasn’t wearing anything. I rolled over and reached for my jeans, just in case we had to make our presence known.

  As I was buttoning my blouse, a policeman came over the crest of the embankment. I had a moment’s panic, thinking perhaps what Paul and I had obviously been doing was illegal, but it passed. I kept forgetting I was an adult.

  ‘Are you Lesley Elena O’Malley?’ the policeman asked.

  The panic returned. I was still struggling with the buttons on my blouse. Paul stood halfway between the policeman and me.

  ‘Are you the daughter of Cowan Christopher and Mara Elena O’Malley?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Would you come with me, please?’

  Numbly, I rose to my feet. The panic had risen to something akin to terror. I had no idea why he wanted me, which made it all the more frightening. I’m listening to Mama’s stories too much, I thought. I also thought of running.

  ‘What did I do?’ I asked when I found my voice. We were up on the edge of the embankment, nearing the road.

  The officer opened the police car door for me. He motioned me in. But when Paul leaned forward to get in with me, the policeman put his arm out. ‘No, son,’ he said gently. ‘Just the young lady.’

  The officer went around and climbed in the other side. Paul had jumped back down the embankment to get our things. The last I saw of him was when he came struggling back up, the red wool blanket a jumble in his arms. The police car started and we drove off.

  Numbness suffused my body. I was shaking, but the panic had subsided as abruptly as it had come. What replaced it was a disquietingly complete calmness. I felt absurdly clearheaded. ‘What do you want me for?’ I asked.

  His eyes were fixed on the rearview mirror, and he did not look at me. ‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s just kille
d three people.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  My mama had waited until Paul and I had left and Dad had gone in the car to make the few minutes’ run downtown to let Megan off. Then, armed with one of Paul’s rat-shooting rifles, she went to the Watermans.

  Apparently, she killed Toby Waterman first, there in the frontyard with his mother, who’d tried to push him inside. Just one shot. Then Mrs Waterman. Finally, my mother shot Mr Waterman, reloaded and shot him twice more.

  By the time the police arrived, my father was there, trying to get her to give him the gun. But she panicked, seeing the officers with their handguns, and she fired at them. The policeman said he’d had no choice but to shoot back. He fired three times and hit her twice. When she fell, she was still holding the rifle.

  During the trip back from Ladder Creek, time took on a bizarre quality, running simultaneously too fast and too slowly. Like film in an unreliable movie projector, the scenery flew by the car in jerky, Keystone-Kops fashion. But inside the car, things wound down to slow motion. I saw each movement of the police officer beside me in frame-by-frame detail. He glanced in the rearview mirror, over to the side mirror, looked ahead, rubbed his cheek, signalled and turned the car on to the main highway. He looked over at me. He smiled politely. His skin was very dark, as if he were of Middle Eastern extraction. His uniform appeared uncomfortable, because he kept scratching at his shirt and pulling the collar out from his neck. Beside him I sat, frozen, all my attention focused acutely outward, every external stimulus from the stubble of his beard to the smell of the police car being registered with permanent, graphic clarity. But inside myself I felt nothing whatsoever. I was empty.