Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  The professor started to explain—in Hungarian, alas—but was politely asked to take a step back. A higher-up was summoned. What the bloody hell was this? A pipe with wires coming out of it, its ends crudely blocked to hold them in place? Another official was called.

  Summoning his few words of English, the professor tried again—“Is no problem, yes?”—then switched to flawed but serviceable German: Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte—das ist nur meine. . . . A raised finger from the officials—“Quiet please. Wait!” At this point my mother, who spoke both German and English, stepped forward and offered to interpret. “Madam, you will return to your place in line.” She returned to her place in line.

  This went on for some time. Frustrated, people began to grumble, then call out. An official was prying at one of the stoppers with a pocket knife—his companions had stepped back—gingerly working it from side to side. When it slipped out, he carefully held the pipe up to his eye. Nothing. Again my mother offered to interpret—she had no idea what the thing was, either—and again was asked to kindly not interfere. The most recent wave of DPs (Displaced Persons) had been described that very morning in The Sun as generally “the worst types,” that is, Nazis, Communists, gangsters and prostitutes; they were all the same, and the man hadn’t helped his case by speaking German.

  Perhaps a half-hour in, the professor abruptly bent and took off his shoes. No one noticed. When he took off his pants—apparently having gone quite mad—they noticed. Officials started yelling, waving their arms. Clamping his pants’ legs to his chest with his chin, the professor folded them neatly along the seam, walked over to the dumbstruck officials in his underwear and, grasping the ends of the wires in his hand, draped his pants over his makeshift clothes hanger. He had only the one pair. He needed to take care of them.

  Though hardly a knee-slapper, the scene might be worth a small smile—the bumbling officials, nervous about detonating a clothes hanger, the wacky professor standing in his bloomers, folding his pants—until, that is, you consider that this was a time when men and women were less inclined to make spectacles of themselves in public (or in front of the camera), a time when an accomplished man, respected in his work—who may or may not have lost his family but who’d most certainly lost everything else, and who now found himself starting over in a new country whose language he didn’t speak with nothing more than a pillowcase of possessions to his name—might actually be humiliated by his poverty, his skinny white legs, the depth to which he’d fallen. Factor that in, and the chuckle dies—or should.

  And yet—admit it!—it’s hard to feel—after all, it’s not you. Or me, for that matter.

  The thing is, it wasn’t them, either—until it was. Which is how it always goes. One day you’re coming home from the office, throwing your keys on the table, yelling up the stairs to your kids that dinner’s almost ready. You have a nice house, a decent salary, security, friends, enough contentment to actually realize—in short, unsustainable bursts—exactly how happy you are. Two years later you’re alone, hand-washing your underwear in a sink, then hanging it on the wire you’ve strung between the metal poles of your bunk bed. You’re somewhere else. Everything is gone. When you wake at night, it takes you a while to remember. There are guards, fences. Your credentials mean nothing. You own nothing. You are nothing. Everyone speaks Pashto, and when you don’t understand, they speak louder or gesticulate like you’re a fool. You’re an imposition, a burden, pitied if you’re lucky. You barely recognize yourself. Your country—where only yesterday you were coming home to your family, throwing your keys on the table—doesn’t exist anymore: It’s someone else’s country now. You may be able to go back in your lifetime. You may not.

  Feel it now? Just a little?

  What I’m trying to say is that the late 1940s—like all times marked by massive refugee migrations, like the summer and fall of 2015, for example—were a time of bewilderment and displacement and fear. There were some who had an easier time of it—people with money and connections, or high-ranking Nazis fortunate enough to be spirited to safety by the Catholic Church or an American government eager to recruit former enemies to the Cold War cause—but the vast majority were just faces caught in a riptide of sweating men in hats and women in calf-length skirts filling out displaced-persons forms, peeling potatoes into a pot, hanging sheets over curtainless windows in Toronto and Buenos Aires and Brisbane. Surgeons emptied bedpans; scholars scoured the insides of industrial pipe in the heat. These people weren’t one thing or another, but almost without exception, whatever they’d been before, they weren’t any more. Some fought that truth, others welcomed it. It depended on the ghosts they brought with them. It depended on their nature, their tendency to mourn or move.

  My parents, who hadn’t really been anywhere before, were part of that tide, swept from place to place, sleeping when and where they could. Two and a half days after leaving Innsbruck (I can see them sitting side by side on the wooden planks, doling out the luxuries from Vikin’s basket), their train arrived in Naples, Vesuvius smoking dramatically in the distance, where cordons of machine-gun–carrying carabinieri funneled them onto open-bed trucks. Escorted by police, the trucks took them—standing up, hanging on to the metal tarp scaffolding—to Camp Bagnoli, a fenced-in holding facility where 8,000 refugees lived for the mornings when the numbers of those scheduled for departure were posted in the administration building. My mother and father, segregated into men’s and women’s buildings (a third set of dormitories was reserved for mothers with children), were displaced persons #758 and #759.

  They scrounged, hustled, made alliances where they could, trying, like all refugees, to keep their footing in a world careening between the farcical and the frightening. When the quarter-rations of food—weak coffee smelling of beets, a dollop of spaghetti for dinner—began to take their toll on my mother’s health, my father managed to talk one of the camp police (a Czech basketball star who’d been given the position in exchange for playing for the Bagnoli team) into looking the other way long enough for him to make it out to the local town after dark where, in forty minutes, without a word of Italian, he managed to sell his watch for a fistful of lire, two salamis and a bag of oranges.

  Bizarrely, my parents would remember the hour my father was gone as worse, in many ways, than the time on the train in Vienna. They couldn’t explain it. If my father had been caught—and the odds were high he would be, given the police presence in the local towns and the fact that he stuck out like a donkey in a kennel—he’d have been arrested, tried, imprisoned. But it wasn’t that, they said. It was because, having made it this far, the thought of being separated was more than they could bear.

  More than forty years have passed since they said those words to me—as if being separated was more than we could bear—and though I know that people come together and go their way, I still don’t understand by what route, what slow accretion of resentment and pain, you get from wanting nothing more than to be allowed to continue on together, to sitting in some lawyer’s office in Christmas City, USA—And one more signature if you don’t mind, here, and here—doing to yourself what you’d once feared would be done unto you by others. Is there nothing that the passage of time can’t dissolve?—though just this instant, writing this, I mistyped “dissolve” as “disslove” and stumbled into what I didn’t know I wanted to say.

  My father made it back with the lire, the salamis, the oranges. The basketball star from Nedvedice closed up the fence. The lawyer’s office would have to wait another forty-two years.

  They went on. They’d be lucky. Less than a month after entering Camp Bagnoli, they’d make the reverse trip—again escorted by armed carabinieri, Vesuvius still smoking—to the Port of Naples where they’d board the USS General Harry Taylor, one of the so-called Liberty ships that the United States had stamped out at the rate of two ships a day for four years, effectively burying the Axis powers.

  The irony of troop ships ferrying refugees from the war they’d helped win wa
s probably lost on no one; still, there were richer ironies to be savored. Of these, one stands out, a freak of history.

  There are times when the truth outruns us all.

  Among the Polish laborers and Romanian musicians and Czech journalists on board the Liberty ships, a certain percentage also happened to be graduates of Treblinka and Majdanek; that is, human beings—some more scarred than others—who’d made it through the fire and begun the lifelong work of regaining their lives, only to be displaced again. People like our friends the Horners, who hadn’t met my parents yet (or even each other, for that matter), but who would find themselves sitting on our porch at Twin Lakes with their two boys in the summer of 1970, having just come in from a swim.

  People who’d survived what should, by rights, be unimaginable.

  For a long time I didn’t register that camp survivors had been among the displaced—though how that’s possible, given the people we knew when I was young, I don’t know. I think on some level I still believed that suffering confers special benefits, immunity from future injustices; that having survived Buchenwald, you were done.

  I was wrong. Mixed in with camp survivors like the Horners were men who, reaching to wash their backs in the communal showers, would inadvertently reveal the small, SS blood group tattoo (on the white skin of the inner arm, just below the armpit) which, as my father put it, explained their eagerness to emigrate and proved, yet again, that past crimes don’t disqualify us from future opportunities.

  I’ve tried to imagine that moment, that moment when each recognized the other’s tattoo, but it’s a black hole to me—a moment so dense with context it seems impossible. There you are, naked, stripped of your prisoners’ garb, your black SS uniform—everything but your history. It’s a continent glimpsed through a keyhole.

  And I keep wondering: At that moment, who feared who more?

  We never asked. Some moments are yours to bury.

  XXXVII

  I DON’T BELIEVE SHE ever stopped thinking about him. Ever. Even now, if anything survives, it’s some vision of him—his face, his voice, his body. I believe that. I’d wish it for her. I never begrudged her that love.

  I don’t think my mother’s memories of F. kept her—particularly in those early years in Innsbruck, in Sydney, later in Munich—from caring for my father. I think she did care for him. I think they cared for each other, in fact, that they “made a pretty good team” (to recall The Graduate), but that from the very beginning they were like magnets robbed of their electric charge; I don’t remember ever coming home—as my friends did—to that inexplicable good mood, to contented smiles and whispers in the kitchen.

  Speculating about our parents’ sex life always feels a bit disingenuous—it seems so, well, unlikely (though here we are to prove it). In my case, two photographs speak the proverbial two thousand words—or a hundred, anyway. In both—the first taken on a dock on the Weltersee in Germany, the second somewhere in Sydney in the early 1950s—my mother and father are with a different friend. Both men were part of the refugee migration to Australia and eventually the New World—men I knew and cared for.

  I love those photographs—the morning stillness of the first, the big-city vibe of the second, the way my father leans forward on that dock in Germany, eager to go, to see—but that’s not what matters most. What matters most, at least to me, is that in both pictures (and a dozen like them) my mother is subtly leaning away from my father and toward the other man exactly as if, to charge my earlier metaphor, she and my father were opposing poles of a magnet. They’re husband and wife, yet there’s no hand on the knee, no arm around the waist, no draw, no pull, no valence. It’s a visual metaphor of their bedroom.

  It’s a miracle I’m here.

  I suppose it’s possible to overstate the role that sex plays in our lives, but it takes effort. How much did sex—or the lack of it—actually matter? I think in my parents’ case it mattered a lot, that the weather in our house always came from the bedroom; that even early on, years before things got really bad, it was an issue between them. Thrown into a marriage mined by abuse, triggered to explode, they were never able to get it right, and whatever affection there may have been between them only made it worse, turning closeness into a taunt.

  The lack of physical attraction between a couple can be a brutal thing, and the road to just-friendship traverses a crevasse.

  That my mother and father never made that crossing suggests (just to flog my exhausted metaphor another mile down the road) that the lack of charge between them may not have been the problem after all; if it had been, the transition to some comfortable coexistence in backless slippers would have been easy. Instead, they tortured each other (and themselves), my mother buying lingerie to inspire a man she didn’t want and regularly ridiculed, my father fighting back by not seeing her, by choking off whatever desire he may have had for her, by rolling over and going to sleep for days, then months, then years.

  On those nights when I was three, or four, when, troubled by nightmares, I’d be allowed to sleep between them (tunneling down into their warmth, the tears wet on my face, endlessly safe), I didn’t know I was doing them a favor.

  I’m tempted to say that the way they were together explained the other man. It would make sense. That a lack—whatever its source—created a need. And I might just go with that if I didn’t know how it was.

  How it was suggested something more than a physical need, which I suppose any number of men could have satisfied in a pinch. How it was suggested something much bigger: an absence generating a dream—a dream of salvation, of deliverance—which then came to be embodied in a single human being. It was as if all the problems in my mother’s life, all the pain—psychological, physical, spiritual—had one solution. A ridiculous idea. Except that it happened to be true.

  For weeks and months at a time after they arrived in Australia, my parents lived separately—not because they wanted to, but because they had to go wherever they were assigned work. While my mother lived in a dormitory room in a Surry Hills hospital, for example, my father slept in a tent city outside the ironworks in Chullora, shoveling coal with a concert oboist from Prague. While my mother mopped floors and cleaned toilets ten hours a day in Sydney, my father cut sugarcane in Queensland where, by ten in the morning, the workers would be encased in a dripping glaze of sugar and sweat like strips of human fly paper. Wasps drowned on their skin.

  For much of that first year in Australia, my mother received letters from F. and wrote to him in turn. How instantly her week must have been tranformed on seeing the thin, blue luftpost envelope on her bunk. What extrordinarily blissful games she must have played with herself before she opened it, saving it, suffering, ecstatic, till after she’d washed up, till after supper, till after everyone was asleep. . . .

  I don’t know how it happened. I’ll never know how he found her—Czechoslovakia was a rapidly closing door, and there were no directories of “political subversives tried in absentia and found guilty of crimes against the state.” What address could she have given him, considering how much she moved? How could her letters have made it back to him without putting him in danger with the secret police?

  All I know is that they managed it, somehow. That they wrote to each other for months. That his letters were indescribably precious to her—something she secreted away in books and under the lining of hat boxes for forty years. I know this because she showed them to me, a tight, blue packet taped to the back of one of her dresser drawers, one rainy morning in Bethlehem when I was sixteen.

  I never read them. She never offered and I never asked. I knew they existed—that was enough. That she’d trusted me with her secret.

  I also know that at some point in 1949 or 1950 the letters had stopped coming.

  It must have been excruciating, that waiting, the dialogue in your head so incessant at first that you barely notice mopping another hallway, scrubbing another toilet, one voice whispering “Something’s wrong, something’s happened,” the oth
er rationalizing, excusing, calculating dates, saying, “It’s only been three weeks,” “maybe he had the flu,” “maybe it was lost in the mail,” and then the weeks become months and four of your letters have gone unanswered and the hallways are endless and quiet, the toilets innumerable, your arms, your legs—but why not say it?—your heart so heavy you can barely move.

  And there comes that point when, having written everything that can be written—keeping it light at first, eventually pleading for an answer, for clarity, for anything at all—you stop. Because there’s nothing more to do. Because he’s obviously faced reality, moved on. Because you’re married and 10,000 miles away. Because you never gave him hope, not really. Because you couldn’t see any hope to give—and he’d understood what you weren’t saying.

  And life resumes, because it has to. Because it has its own plans. My father’s there now—he has a job stringing Wilson tennis rackets. You work decent hours in the Sydney Library. The two of you have a small apartment that you’ve painted white, even something of a community. You’ll remember this. You’ll have stories to tell: of your friend, Vera, who opened a phone booth in Surry Hills to ask a man if he’d be much longer only to have him crash to the sidewalk with a knife in his ribs; of the shark sirens going off on Bondi Beach, the young lifeguards charging into the surf on their boards, deliberately putting themselves in harm’s way; of the cockaburras that would alight on perambulators and peck out the eyes of infants left unattended, of inch-long soldier ants that would rear up on their hind legs in the dirt and challenge your passing. Life would move on, your heart would sleep. And it wouldn’t all be one thing—there’d be good times, too, nights of laughter and singing with friends, and that overcast New Year’s Day when this man that you’d married, who you’d rather come to like—maybe even love?—said something to you on the beach, teasing you, and you scooped water into your bathing cap and ran after him down the sand past the Aussies with their heads propped on the bottoms of beer bottles like so many golf balls on cues.