Unravelled

by Anna Scanlon

  She winked at me and opened a manila folder, carefully laying my applications in it. I stood up and slung my satchel over my shoulder, tears stinging in my eyes. My thoughts began to drift to my cousins, the ones I had never known. Lujza, the girl about my age, the one with the fiery red hair. I couldn't remember what was reported that had happened to her, Mother had it written down somewhere. Whatever had happened, everyone seemed pretty confident she was dead. Growing up, I received pictures from her parents and from my mother's sister and her three children. Attila, Ben and Laci, all three tall boys with angular faces. They were all a bit older than I was, my aunt sending me pictures of them with their girlfriends under trees, posing with their schoolbooks on picture day and the last one, a picture of a beaming Attila and the woman he had proposed to. We hadn't heard any news about Attila, Ben or Laci, but because of this, Mother assumed they were dead. These strapping boys should have been able to beat the SS, but they couldn't. And then there was Hajna, little Hajna, who was Aliz's exact double, always with a mischievous look in her eyes as she posed for the camera. She was always captured at a moment when she was thinking about something naughty, I could tell by the sly grin on her face. These five young people were nothing but ashes now, if the SS had even the mercy to turn them into that. Maybe they had simply stacked up their dead bodies, hairless bags of bones, throwing them on one another as carelessly as a bag of potatoes. They had been robbed of a future, a career and children. For the first time my throat closed up and hot tears spilled down my cheeks. I collapsed under the weight of these boneless bodies knowing Aliz was the strongest person I had ever met.

  15 CHAPTER fifteen

  ✪

  Three and a half months went by. Aliz went to school every morning on the bus, something Mother had slowly trusted her to do. She had begun to pick up a few English phrases and would sprinkle them throughout the day, to our astonishment. Mother would jump back and put her hand to her mouth as Aliz said "Please," or "Thank you," or "May I have an apple?" Aliz even began to gain some weight, her face beginning to round out like any other girl her age.

  Father called us, like clockwork, every Thursday evening at seven. Sometimes he would speak to Mother and they would exchange harsh words. But, it seemed like things had turned to some kind of weird version of normal. We ate dinner in the evenings, and Aliz and I retired to our rooms to do our homework while Mother cleaned the dishes. I had a heavy feeling in my stomach, wondering when the charade would stop, when the other shoe would drop. I had a gut feeling it would, that things couldn't remain in this idealistic silence forever. And I was right.

  Two days later, on a Saturday, Aliz and I sat crouched around the coffee table playing a game of checkers as Mother knitted something for a woman in her Hungarian club. She was going to have a new baby, so Mother furiously tried to knit a pair of baby booties. Unfortunately, they were going horribly wrong, with holes here and there. One part of it had a hole big enough that it looked like a baby's entire foot might slide through. Mother kept saying she would fix it, but I had no idea how she would even go about mending these monstrosities.

  Gable cocked his head to the side as the two of us played with the black and red discs wordlessly. With his wet, black nose he began sniffing the carpet. At first, this was nothing of note, Gable sniffed everything all of the time. As Aliz took yet another checker away from me (she was definitely good at this game), Gable began to sniff even harder at the slit between the radio and rug. As though his nose were glued to it, he began making snorting noises and then began pawing at the space.

  "Gable, stop it!" Mother yelled from her perch, barely looking up from the wreckage of booties she was trying to make right. "Stop scratching the radio!"

  But Gable wouldn't let up. He tried to slide his tiny paw between the rug and the radio to no avail and then began to bark and growl. Aliz turned to the dog, her face losing color as she watched him paw.

  "It's okay, Aliz, it's just Gable."

  Evidently it wasn't okay, not in her mind. As my eyes drifted toward the dog, Aliz ran upstairs and shut the door to her room, closing it behind her with a slam.

  "That's weird," I remarked to no one in particular. Was there a rat under there she was afraid of?

  "Move Gable," I ordered the little guy. He didn't move, but stood his ground, growling at me as I approached.

  "Gable!" Mother cried, picking him up in her arms. He instantly dropped his vicious demeanor and became putty in her arms.

  I got down on my hands and knees and scanned the space Gable had been pawing at. At first I couldn't see anything. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the light and I saw a candy bar wrapper, half opened, waiting for someone to eat it. Grabbing one of my mother's knitting needles and using it like a fishing hook, I pulled out the plunder from under the flat space. There were half-eaten cookies, candy bars, pieces of bread, molding raisons and stale crackers. Upon seeing the buried treasure, Gable yipped in delight, licking his lips. He tried to lunge at it, but Mother held his lithe little body back.

  "It must've been Aliz," I shrugged, getting to my feet to grab a trash bag. I emptied the contents in it, noticing several ants had made their homes on the chocolate hills of the candy bars.

  Lightly pushing Gable back with her foot, Mother helped me gather the contents of the food into the trash bag. "You take the trash bag out, I'll go talk to Aliz."

  I nodded, tying up the black, plastic bag in my hands, stuffing my feet in my shoes and making my way to the door. As soon as I deposited the contents into the trash bin outside, I heard a blood-curling scream. My head whipped up and I could tell immediately that it had come from Aliz's room. Without thinking, I darted inside and up the stairs, almost tripping on the last two. I pressed the door open, letting it hit the wall on the opposite side.

  "Are you okay?" I called, not sure whom I was addressing. The scene began to come into focus in front of me. Aliz was standing in the middle of the room, holding a lit cigarette she must have stolen from my satchel, the ones I was holding for Eva. Mother had caught her in the middle of making small burn marks on her left arm, three angry little moons. Aliz's face was flush with the horror and shame of being caught and she stood as though she were frozen in the room, the cigarette's flame coming closer and closer to her hand. It began immediately clear that it had been my mother who had screamed upon seeing Aliz, not Aliz at all.

  "Oh my god, Oh my god, Oh my god," Mother repeated over and over, burying her face in her hands. For all they had told us about Aliz, no one had told us how to react to this, what to do for her. Mother rubbed her eyes, smearing the thin coat of mascara she wore, and looked up at Aliz.

  "I'm going to call your Father," she told me. The words were cool and harsh. "Your Father," as if he were a detached entity that had nothing to do with her. "He'll know what to do."

  She turned on her heel and scurried down the stairs, toward the phone. A feeling of regret washed over my body as I snatched the last ember of the cigarette before snuffing it out on Aliz's trashcan. Should I have told Mother before? Would it have saved Aliz the embarrassment? Was not telling actually keeping her safe or making things worse? I didn't have the answers, so I plopped down on Aliz's bed, watching her.

  Instead of any emotions, Aliz simply began to tie and retie a hair ribbon she had pulled from her dresser. Her fingers moved quickly, nimbly, like an expert seamstress moving her thread across a piece of material. I waited with her for almost an hour before she let up, throwing the ribbon to the floor and crumpling up in a ball in the corner. She laid her head on the wall at an unnatural angle and fluttered her eyelids in an effort to fall asleep. I breathed a heavy sigh and fell backward on the bed. Mother hadn't asked me to stay with her, but I knew she would want me to, just to make sure. Some guard I was. I had watched her slice open her skin and try to drown herself and I said nothing. Who was I fooling by thinking Mother needed me?

  Twenty more minutes passed and Mother opened the door slowly. Aliz didn't stir from her strange pos
ition on the wall, merely let out a small sigh and continued breathing heavily. Mother sat next to me, taking my hand.

  "He's on his way.”

  My father had only ever come back from Los Angeles once before at my mother's request. It was a year ago, when I had appendicitis. I had been having a sleepover at Eva's house where we were giggling about a couple of the boys in our class. I had made a bed for myself out of several blankets on her floor, curled up and ready for a full night's sleep. Then, a stabbing, searing pain shot through my side and up to my head. I cried out. Mrs. Stein came upstairs to find me drenched in sweat and hot with fever. Mother came to get me and drove me to the hospital, where she called my father. He came up to keep me company as they alternated visits at the hospital, each time just barely missing each other. But this was different. Appendicitis is pretty cut and dry. You get sick and then you get better. Auschwitz was hardly an ailment that had a prescribed healing time. There was no medicine to take to get it to disappear. It needed a steady team, ready on their toes at a moment's notice.

  My mother and I spent the night with Aliz. She was a prisoner under our careful watch, confined to my mother's bed as I guarded them in a fitful sleep on Mother's fainting couch. Now, my feet stretched off the edge and dangled. When I was four or five and coming to my parents' room as a reprieve from nightmares, I curled up on it, able to stretch out my small body and sleep soundly.

  By 6AM, I heard the familiar rumble of my father's Ford pull up into the driveway. My paternal grandmother, who had a comment for everything, said that Jews should never buy Fords since Henry Ford was a noted anti-Semite. My father laughed when he bought the car, thinking of how angry she'd be, waving her cane and narrowing her eyes behind her thick Coke-bottle lenses.

  No matter how much I blamed my father for leaving us behind during Mother's most difficult times, I couldn't help but feel a flutter in my stomach when I saw him. I knew I was on "Mom's side", but I still loved him. Truthfully, I don't know how I would have felt if I had married a fun, vivacious woman, only to have her turn into a sullen shadow of her former self. Would I have run away, too? I shook my head, not wanting to know the answer.

  Mother and Aliz were still sleeping, their breath heavy and faces relaxed as I made my way downstairs to see my Father. I opened the front door before he could knock, a heavy gust of wind chilling my body, which was thinly clothed in a cotton nightgown. Father stood at the doorframe, the way he always did; slightly chubby, clean shaven, wearing a suit and hat and tie that had been loosened a couple of times. His eyes were puffy from the drive. Perhaps he had even driven all night, not making a stop in between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Without hesitation, he gathered me in his arms and spun me around, lifting my feet off the ground as we rotated in a circle.

  "I missed you," he smiled and kissed my ear. "I missed you a lot."

  He set me down on my feet and I kissed his cheek.

  "You must be exhausted," I breathed, pulling him inside toward the couch in the living room. Gable, who usually slept curled up next to the wall, immediately opened his eyes and sprang for my father when he saw him, jumping up and down to get his attention.

  "Of course, I didn't forget you little guy," Father smiled, bending down to pet Gable's wiry coat. Gable seemed to smile in both recognition and appreciation.

  "Well, Aliz has been sleeping in the guest room. So I guess you can take a nap on the couch here," I told my father, running to the cupboard where Mother kept her spare linens and turning the couch into a makeshift bed. "I can get you some coffee or tea if you'd like. Maybe you're hungry?"

  Instead of moving forward, Father placed his suitcase on the floor, kicking off his shoes and smiling to himself.

  "Just like your mother," he murmured, a smile spreading across his lips. Was that a compliment or an insult? I ran my hands through my sleep-styled hair and gave him a weak smile.

  "I'm okay," he waved his hand away. "I'll just get some rest for a couple more hours. Then we'll decide what to do with, well, the girl."

  I didn't like the way Father referred to her as "The Girl", but she wasn't actually related to him. She was part of the band of people who had driven him apart from my mother, albeit unintentionally. I couldn't see what his presence would do, other than possibly upset Mother, but he was the one she always called when she couldn't handle a situation. It was just like when I was little and I did something naughty, but she couldn't think of a punishment. Instead of doling one out, she would tell me to wait until my father got home, which would be enough to send chills down my childish spine, even if his punishments were usually forgiving and much more than fair.

  Father settled down on the couch, covering himself up with the purple wool blanket I had pulled out of the closet for him. Gable jumped up next to him, making himself at home in the crux of my father's arm.

  A few hours later, Aliz and I sat at the breakfast table, consuming our eggs and oatmeal in silence as Mother and Father discussed Aliz's fate in hushed tones. I could hear the ebb and flow of their voices every once in a while, rising over the din of our chewing, only to be squelched by the other's.

  "I'm sorry," I told Aliz, swirling my oatmeal in the bowl in front of me, making a small tornado. I didn't know what I was sorry for, for not telling my mother sooner or for allowing her secrets to be revealed. Aliz simply shrugged, turning away from me and toward the wall as she finished her oatmeal, Gable yapping at her feet, begging for a scrap of food.

  Although it was a Tuesday morning, it was clear by the voices in the other room and my mother failing to flit behind us, asking us to finish our food as quickly as possible that we weren't going to school. Thirty minutes or more passed, the silence hanging over us, before Mother came into the dining room. She was already dressed, save for her slippers that scuffed along the carpet.

  "Get dressed, please," she told me with a curt nod. My father followed her, flopping down on the couch and opening up the newspaper he had brought with him. He balanced the headlines over his small paunch of a belly, reading them with an occasional nod or grunt.

  "Am I going to school?" I asked, moving the last bit of oatmeal through my teeth. My mother shook her head in a movement so slight, I wondered if she had even moved it at all.

  I moved upstairs, wondering what it was my parents had planned for Aliz. When I was little, my parents worked together, a seamless matched pair. They were the couple you talked about in one breath, LeahandGeorge, GeorgeandLeah. Before falling asleep at night, I could hear peels of laughter drifting into my room. Gradually, it faded, until it was gone completely. There was no more laughter, nothing was funny anymore.

  Shaking the thought out of my head, I made my way downstairs where I heard voracious shouting in Hungarian. It was small at first, like the purr of a lion, and then grew and grew until it was almost deafening. I had never heard such a roar from this sullen, marred little girl. Her eyes were bigger than normal; her rage seemed to make her grow several feet. It was as if she were possessed by something unearthly, her eyes with a fire behind them, her hands breaking everything in their path. She screamed as loudly as possible, until her voice went hoarse, my Mother struggling to match hers. Instinctively, I covered my ears, the high-pitched Hungarian squeals pinching my eardrums. Father put his arms around me protectively, the way he did when I was little, shielding me from a bad dream.

  In Aliz's rage, she began knocking the silverware off of the table, the congealed oatmeal falling to the floor as its container shattered onto the carpet. Just as Aliz's destructive path reached the china doll my grandmother had given my mom, the one that stood in traditional Hungarian garb, proudly watching over the living room, Father caught her wrists in his. My mother's face was awash with a mix of relief and surprise that Father even remembered how much that doll meant to her. But it wasn't over. Aliz wriggled in his arms, screaming what must have been obscenities. Like a fish on a hook, her small lithe body wriggled until she was free of him.

  "Aliz!" he called, running afte
r her. But it was too late. She had already made a head start to the door, flinging it open. By the time Father made it outside, she had already disappeared around the corner or passed the neighbors' houses or was maybe hiding in the bushes.

  My head was reeling, spinning in a million different directions. My mother wasted no time in grabbing her sunglasses and stuffing her feet in her shoes, tossing the keys to my father. Without a word to me or to one another, they hopped in his Ford, the car growling to life as they made their way searching for Aliz. All of those months they had spent apart couldn't curtail the fact that they had once been and thought as one. Maybe they still did.

  I spun on my heel, closing the front door to survey the damage caused by this tiny hurricane. Candy dishes, oatmeal, and shards of glass lined the floor. Gable had burrowed under the couch, whimpering in the wake.

  "Come on, little guy," I told him holding out my hands. He whimpered and turned away, feeling safer under the couch. I can't say I blamed him.

  Taking a deep breath, I spotted the source of the hurricane. Aliz's suitcase sat neatly on the steps, ready to go. Tip-toeing over to it, making my way over the wreckage, I opened the suitcase delicately. Mother must have been ready to send her to an institution, thinking it would have done her good for a couple of weeks. With all of the upheavals and changes in Aliz's life, it was no wonder she didn't want to go. Questions swirled in my mind, like should I have told Mother sooner about Aliz’s behavior? Should I have kept quiet?

  I tried to shake the thoughts out of my head as I began to clean up the spilled oatmeal and broken pottery and candy dishes. Halfway through, Gable began to peek his head out from underneath couch and made his way to me, licking up every last remnant of the oatmeal.

  As I gathered the pieces of yet another broken candy dish, the doorbell rang. My heart skipped a beat, hoping it would be Aliz, her hair stringy from running, her face sullen and wind-kissed. I hopped up and unlocked the door, opening it just slightly. It was the mailman, Mr. Lynch delivering the morning mail. He stood, balancing himself on the doorframe, his hat askew, out of breath. Now almost 70, he had been delivering our mail for as long as I could remember, bringing us news from overseas, bills and balances and invitations. He had been the person we couldn't wait to appear and the person we loathed to see.