Unravelled (17 page)

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 after 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.

"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,"