Unravelled

by Anna Scanlon

  "I have a big letter for Miss Isabelle Horowitz, who I believe is you," he winked, handing over a stack of letters, balancing on the brown, thick envelope. His hands shook slightly as he handed them off to me. I scanned the "sender" in the upper left hand corner. University of California at Berkeley.

  "Thank you, Mr. Lynch," I smiled, as though everything was all right, as though I would close the door and life would resume as normal. I leaned against the door for support and put the letters for my mother on the table.

  I ripped open the envelope addressed to me and pulled out its contents.

  Dear Miss Horowitz,

  We are pleased to welcome you to the Class of 1951……

  part three

  aliz

  “Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

  -Jospeh Conrad

  16 CHAPTER sixteen

  

  I had heard the rumble of their car on my tail as I ran, so I cut across through the bushes and lunged over a fence. I had no idea where I was going, I just wanted out, the noise to stop, the faces of the dead to quit hanging over me every night. I wanted to stop falling asleep to the sound of Mengele's needles pushing in my veins, to the smell of my family burning. After they had placed me in a class full of kids five years younger than me, making me look stupid, they were shipping me away. Again, I was going away, not because I wanted to but because someone was telling me to.

  I can't really say why I started burning myself and cutting my number. Things felt too overwhelming in my brain. Sometimes I would hear the whirl of the train tracks, the screams of children being thrown head first into fires, the rumors about children being dissected alive. It would start out slowly, in a way that I could handle it, and then it would creep up until it blocked out everything around me. I wanted to be centered, to feel something to bring me back to now, to remind me that Auschwitz is over. But in that reminder, I had to face the fact that my mother was gone. My father was gone. My twin, my other half was gone. And my sister, the one who teased me, pulled our hair, but loved us deep down, she was gone, too. I was left with a family who I didn't even know, a poor replacement for my mother and sister. A girl who walked around with her head down, who I trusted, but couldn't keep me safe for long. A woman, my new caretaker, who looked so stricken with grief that she could snap in half at any moment. I didn't know if I wanted to go back there or not, but I knew I wanted to be in charge of something, anything. I wanted to be in charge of my memories, of myself of when I moved, of when I cut, when I didn't. I was sick of storing away food under the radio because something inside of me kept telling me I had to be prepared if this was going to happen again. I just wanted to be free, be my own person apart from everything the world had ripped away from me.

  Maybe I would run away and live in the woods. Maybe I would jump in the ocean and end it all. Maybe I could be reunited with my family, but I somehow had the sinking feeling that God wasn't that merciful.

  I stopped running for a few moments, hoping to catch my breath. My chest felt hollow. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't squeeze any tears out of my eyes. In Auschwitz, we had learned to quell our cries. Tears didn't bring my family back. Tears didn’t stop the trains hissing to a stop almost daily, bringing in hoards of fresh meat, ready for the Nazis to devour. They were no use then.

  I trudged ahead through the thick of a neighborhood garden and then somehow made my way to the pavement. The smell of salt tickled my nose and I knew I was close to the ocean. I had never really stood on a real beach before. We drove past it on the school bus going to school, but I had never gotten out and felt the sand between my toes. My father had always promised to take us when the war ended. He especially liked the Adriatic. The way he described it, I had always imagined it as a fairyland with gorgeous pristine beaches and endless blue ocean. I even conjured up mermaids in my childhood fantasies. I was so sure we would see them swimming past us or stopping to wave at me before ducking back into the ocean so no one could see them.

  But Papa was gone. He wouldn't keep his promise. As I moved closer to the smell, I cursed him under my breath for leaving me here, to deal with this without him.

  My legs moved forward, until I felt the chill of a breeze blowing through my thin blue dress. It was almost as if the wind was threatening to take me with it. For a moment, I held my arms out to my sides, daring it to do just that. But it didn't.

  Finally, I felt the crunch of the sand beneath my feet and I could see waves lapping at the shore. It wasn't as beautiful as I had imagined the Adriatic to be, but it was nice enough. Shells dotted the ocean line as the brown-blue waves hugged the coast. I put my hands over my eyes and saw the massive body of water stretching endlessly in the distance. Occasionally, a ship would pop up and then fall out of my sightline.

  I sat down on the warm sand, taking off my shoes and socks, letting the sand squish between my toes. I moved my face toward the sun, letting it kiss my face. I wondered if Hajna had something like this she could go to, a beautiful ocean where she could feel everything good on her face. Where Auschwitz was far, far away.

  I squeezed my eyes shut for only a moment, until I felt a big, wet tongue on my face. Turning to my left, I saw a dog that looked exactly like Kiraly, or how I remembered him to look. For a moment, I thought I had been transported back in time. Or maybe I was just awakening from a terrible nightmare. I would get up, Mother would be waiting by Father under the umbrella. Perhaps we were just at Lake Balaton together and I had imagined something terrible after falling asleep in the sun. Maybe I was just sun sick. My father would pick me up and order me to stay inside for a couple of days while my mother put ice and ointment on my sunburn.

  "Get off of her!" I heard a deep voice grumble in the distance. To my amazement, his words weren't a jumbled mess. I could understand them clearly. I didn't have to strain to make out every other word. He was speaking Hungarian.

  "Papa!" I turned to the voice. My heart leapt into my throat, then sank abruptly when I saw that this man wasn't my father at all. Instead, I saw that the voice belonged to a man much taller than my father, a few years younger, with a pointed nose and thin lips. He wore a pair of jeans and short sleeve button down shirt, sunglasses covering his eyes. His hair was the same color Lujza's was, bright red like a flame.

  When he saw the disappointment in my eyes, he offered me a sad smile, patting the side of his thigh to get the dog to follow him.

  "I'm sorry, I thought you were-" I began and then cut myself off, realizing I must have imagined the Hungarian. I hugged my knees and rested my chin on them, letting my toes dig in the sand. I let my hair fall forward in front of my face, as if it would make me disappear. It was like waking from the dreams I had of sitting with Hajna, only to wake up to discover all over again what had happened to her.

  "You speak Hungarian?" the man asked, a tone of shock in his voice. I whipped my head up to meet his shadowed eyes.

  "Yes!" I answered, almost jumping up. Perhaps this wasn't a dream after all.

  "I'm from Pecs," he smiled, sitting next to me on the sand. I had assumed he was only a few years younger than Papa, but upon closer examination, he appeared to be quite a bit younger than Papa. The lines in his face had become deeply exaggerated, making him look much older than he was.

  "Szeged," I answered, my insides feeling gushy. We were still in San Francisco. I could tell by the distant call of the ships to one another. Nothing that large ever floated in Balaton.

  He reached out his left hand to pet his dog, the lean muscle in his arm flexing as he moved. Plainly, I could see there were numbers on his arm, just like mine. They were bright blue, an angry interference.

  The cut I had made all those months ago was hardly noticeable. I usually asked my aunt or signaled to my cousin to bandage them in the morning so kids wouldn't look at me like I was even stranger than I already was. I couldn
't master their crazy language. And I was already a head taller than most of them. A number on my arm would make it totally unbearable. But this morning, my aunt didn't have time to bandage it before she decided she was sending me away and it flew freely, naked to the world.

  Without saying anything, I stretched my number out in front of him. The angry cut was now reduced to a small scab, but the numbers were still more than readable. Isabelle had made up some story about me being cut on a stray piece of glass at school, or at least that's what Aunt Leah had said Isabelle told her. When she questioned me, I simply shrugged and promised to tell her if I got hurt again. By now, she could probably tell I had done it to myself.

  The man looked down at the numbers, taking a deep breath.

  "Auschwitz," he nodded, pointing to his numbers.

  "Me too," I answered flatly.

  "I lost everyone," he murmured, his voice dull against the crash of the waves.

  "Me too.”

  "My sister lives here in the US. She let me come stay with her for a while. I can't think, I can't sleep, everything is just so different here."

  I nodded my head in agreement. Without thinking, everything came out. I told him my entire story and how I had ended up with this shell of a woman taking care of me while her daughter looked on, confiding my secrets despite our language barrier. The man listened silently, for the first time. He didn't make those funny noises in the back of his throat people did when they were impressed by something. He didn't act like I was some poor charity case. He just listened. To me. To my story. And then I listened to his. His childhood in Pecs. The Ghetto. Auschwitz. The march to Dachau. The Americans coming to find him. Searching desperately to find his fiancée for two years. How he knew she was dead, but his mind couldn't stop from searching for her in his dreams. The unbearable thought of his family turned to ashes. This new American world where everything was colorful, fast, bright and in a language that could not be understood.

  "Where do you live?" he asked.

  My voice caught in my throat. I didn't even know my aunt's address. I was hardly ever let out of her sight, enough for it to matter. I had been told it so many times, I should know it. I couldn't remember the funny numbers, the silly sound of the street. It was all too foreign, not something that could stick in my head.

  "I don't remember," I told him sheepishly, letting my hands wander over his dog. "I used to have a dog like him. Before….his name was Kiraly. We left him with the neighbors. I don't know what happened to him."

  I swallowed hard, letting the saliva drip through my throat.

  "Can I show you something?"

  I nodded. I could hear my mother in my ear telling me never to speak to strangers, much less follow one to his home. But my gut trusted him, and I followed in this unknown man's footsteps.

  We walked up the beach for about ten minutes, my shoes in my left hand, before making our way to stone steps. He led me up them to a small, abandoned shack, which stood masked by a few trees. Vines hung above it and small holes were bored into it, as though no one had cared for it, as though its owner had disappeared.

  "I like it," he smiled. "It's abandoned. Like us."

  He swung the door open and his dog leapt forward, as if he knew the shack by heart. I tentatively put one bare foot in and was instantly greeted by the smell of paint. Canvases lined the walls, some were finished, others were barely started. There were life-like renditions of places I remembered, smiling family members sledding down a hill, their cheeks illuminated by the brisk winter air. And then there were flames, bodies in the flames, skeletons with their hands outstretched, men reduced to animals.

  "My sister, Roza, she doesn't like these, the sad ones. She says they're too hard to look at, to picture our parents dead like that. She likes the happy ones, the ones with our cousins and little sister smiling or singing," he explained. "But sometimes if the images are haunting me, it feels good to paint them, to let go of them. Then I don't have to think about them any more."

  I nodded, stepping into the shadows. I could see he had rigged the shack with electricity and had strategically placed the lights so that he could see what he was painting.

  "Could you paint one of my sister?" I asked quietly. It was a lot to ask of a stranger, but he nodded solemnly.

  "Sure," he licked his lips, rummaging through his blank canvases for the perfect one. "What did she look like?"

  "She is my twin. She looks exactly like me, but a little bit different. Her nose is more upturned, I guess. At least that's what Mama used to say. She also had a little cluster of freckles on her lower back. I didn't notice it, until…"

  My voice trailed off. The man nodded and began to paint. I closed my eyes, letting the sound of the waves lull me to sleep.

  I awoke to voices discussing what should be done with me. Should they call the police? Was my aunt listed in the phonebook? Did she even have a phone?

  My eyes fluttered open, the smell of goulash wafting in the early afternoon air. I could tell I was in an apartment and not a house, as the kitchen was so closely squished with the living room. A row of clothes dangled from one end of the room to the other, perhaps air-drying. I pushed the sleep that threatened to close my eyes again away, stretching out my body and examining the city through the window in the afternoon sun.

  "Oh good, you're awake!" a woman with blonde waist length hair exclaimed. I had to fight not to go back to sleep. It was the first time I hadn't dreamt of Auschwitz. "Zoltan said you don't know where you live and we need to find your family,"

  I nodded lazily, moving strands of hair out of my eyes.

  "Why did you run away?" the man, who must be Zoltan asked. He sat down on the couch next to me, the Kiraly look-a-like at his feet. "They didn't treat you badly, did they?"

  I shook my head.

  "They wanted to send me away. I don't know where to, but the nuns thought I should be put in an institution for troubled kids a long time ago. I used to scratch myself to feel something. Or bang my head against the wall to try and get Auschwitz out of it. Sometimes I'd wash my hands over and over again, convinced that if I did it enough times, I would never have to see Mengele again. And in San Francisco, I've been doing the same things, putting cigarettes out on my arms to try and feel something,"

  I gulped. Did they think I was crazy too? Would they call the police and simply have me carted away to the nearest mental institution? Instead of a look of panic, their faces seemed calm, reassuring.

  "I used to have hallucinations," Zoltan said nodding his head. "I'd get up and scream in the middle of the night and Roza would find me in the middle of the street with a butcher knife in my hands. I almost slashed her a couple of times, thinking she was the Arrow Cross or the SS."

  "So you don't think I'm crazy?" I asked, my eyes wide.

  "You were in Auschwitz," Zoltan said shaking his head. "No matter what anyone says, no one understands unless they were there. Sometimes I feel like having Roza check me into one of those places, but I just try to focus on something else instead."

  "Does it work?"

  He shrugged.

  "I don't know."

  I swallowed hard, looking to my right where the picture of Hajna was sitting on the mantle. Somehow, he had managed to capture her impish grin, her slightly more upturned nose, how she was always on the edge of bursting out into uncontrollable giggles. She was alive, just how I wanted to remember her.

  "Why don't we call your aunt," Roza suggested. "She must be worried sick about you."

  "Will you let her take me away?"

  Roza exchanged glances with Zoltan, their matching green eyes lingering on one another for a moment.

  "Can't you just let me live with you? Please?! I don't want someone else to send me away. I'm through with being sent away."

  I could feel myself getting desperate, my cheeks flushing. Sweat dripped down the back of my dress, even though it wasn't particularly hot.

  "We can't do that," Roza shook her head. "But we can maybe tell your
aunt you'd like to see Zoltan. You could see him for a little bit before they send you away. Maybe like a compromise?"

  I nodded, contemplating the idea.

  "But I broke all of my aunt's candy dishes. I was so….so mad. I was so scared."

  Zoltan nodded his head. He understood, I could see it in his deep-set emerald eyes.

  "I've broken things, too, when I've been upset. It's okay. You're a smart girl."

  I could feel a blush forming on my cheeks.

  "Thank you."

  It was the first time since Hungary anyone had called me smart. The nuns had written in my file that I was uncooperative and slow. The teachers at school used words like "a little retarded" thinking I couldn't understand them. But I knew, I knew what they meant. Because I couldn't speak English, because I was so wounded, they had lumped me in with the kids who had been born unable to communicate.

  "What's your name?" Roza asked, bending down next to me. She stroked my hair down to my back, the way my mother used to when I was worried about something.

  "Stern Aliz," I nodded. "At least that's my name in Hungary. Here it's turned around or something."

  Zoltan let out a little laugh, shuffling his feet.

  "They do tend to do that here, don't they?"

  I smiled. My heart began to settle. Maybe I could go on, knowing there were people like me trying to run from their memories. Maybe I would live my whole life running from them. I had only known Zoltan for a little while, but I knew if he was by my side, I could at least give it a try.

  Days crept by and years flew. The world's mouth was tightly sealed, their ears sewn shut. No one wanted to hear about Auschwitz. The world wasn't ready to face their guilt. But I had Zoltan. With him I could just sit and he knew.