Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“I’m sure we will come back,” I said.

“Are we brothers?” he asked. “You and me are brothers.”

“Of course,” I said, laughing at his jokey grief.

“Until we die, you big, fat bastard,” he said, slapping the hood of the taxi, and giving a final wave. Vera and I were silent in the back of the cab for a time, lost in our separate worlds, jouncing along the forest road. It was late afternoon and the sun was streaming through the trees, filtered by the pine needles. The skin on my face was tight and itchy, and I was pretty sure I had a sunburn.

“Did you have fun?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Vera said. “That Herkus guy is a big jerk though.”

I looked at her harshly. “Why on earth would you say that?”

“It’s just shitty to be married for that long and then to cheat on your wife with a girl half your age and then leave her and start all over like you don’t have three kids. I don’t know. I know divorce isn’t a crime or anything, he just seems kind of immature.”

“He had a wife?” I asked.

“Yeah. You didn’t see those kids hanging all over him?”

I had seen Herkus giving piggyback rides and faux-wrestling with some kids, but I hadn’t known that they were his. Vera’s Russian had evidently given her a lot of information and context that I had missed.

“Was the wife there?” I asked, wondering if I had met her without knowing.

“No. And everyone was really sad she wasn’t there, but she didn’t feel comfortable.”

“That is shitty,” I said. The splitting up of families had become normal, the word divorce acceptable and clean, but each time it happened it was like a tiny world exploding. Obviously, I didn’t know the half of it. I didn’t know Herkus’s circumstances, and I had never even been married myself, but three kids seemed like an awful lot to leave. He and I were brothers after all, it seemed. More deeply than I cared for.

“Agata isn’t the product of the rape, by the way,” I said. “I did the math.”

“See,” Vera said, smiling. “You don’t have to be the grandson of a Nazi to be a total asshole.”

—

When we got home, I didn’t want to go to dinner, I didn’t want to take a nap, I didn’t want to write my mother or Kat or do any of the things I was supposed to do.

I wanted to go see Susan. She had sent me an e-mail that she would be in her room writing all night if I wanted to stop by.

“Listen,” I said to Vera, “Susan invited me to go hang out with her.”

“That’s fine,” Vera said.

“Are you sure? I’ll give you some money. You can go out to dinner with Judith or something.”

“Sure,” Vera said. She was writing something on her laptop and she had the book on Tesla that Daniel had given her out on the table. She had become very studious lately. It made me proud of her. Darius had even loaned her a collection of Miłosz poems.

I sat down. “Are you positive?” I asked. “Because I really don’t have to go. If you’d rather I stayed.”

“You don’t have to babysit me, Papa. I’m almost eighteen.”

“Right,” I said. In my mind I was already out the door.

—

When I got to Susan’s, I was disappointed to find that she was sad.

She didn’t say she was sad. It was just apparent. She sat on her bed in a green silk bathrobe. Her laptop was glowing, open on her desk, the amber necklace lying in a sine curve beside it. There was a half-eaten box of sugar cookies open, and she gestured toward it in case I wanted any.

“Why are you sad?” I asked.

“I’m not sad,” she said. There were little pillows of skin under her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. She hadn’t showered. She wasn’t smiling. All of these were signs that she was sad. She hadn’t hugged me or kissed me when she opened the door.

“You certainly seem sad,” I said.

She laughed a little. “I’m just disappointed,” she said. “But no big deal. I don’t know what I expected even.”

My first thought was that she was disappointed in me.

“What did I do?” I asked. “Because you have to tell me these things. I don’t always pick up on signals, and I might do something without even knowing.”

“Oh, God, Lucas, no!” she said. “It’s not you. It’s this trip. The genealogist couldn’t find anything about my father’s brother. That was why I came here. And it just feels — oh, God, so much is lost. It seems impossible, like one of those nightmares where you are searching for something and you don’t know what it is, but you feel like you’ll die if you don’t find it, or the world will end.”

I had just come from spending the whole day with my family, my new extended family, and Susan had spent the day in this room, having to give up on finding hers. She had not been kissed and had her eyebrows smoothed. She had not stuffed herself with blini and watched her child dance among cousins. She had been alone with the blinking eye of her computer.

“They couldn’t find anything?” I asked. I don’t know why I said “they” like it was some impersonal board of distinguished men in robes or suits, when we both knew perfectly well it was Justine we were talking about, Justine with whom I had just spent the afternoon, watching a little boy, who may or may not have been one of Herkus’s children, sprinkle grass in her hair.

“No. There’s record of my grandfather because he was a pharmacist, but there isn’t even any record of my father or his brother. Nothing. The Germans were fairly big into record keeping, but a lot of it was burned or destroyed by the USSR later. I could check the Bad Arolsen archives in Germany, but I’d have to change my flight and spend a few hundred dollars I don’t have, and…” She trailed off. “I mean, what’s the point? We advertised in every city in Europe, we put ads in every major Jewish newspaper and magazine, we’ve even done the online stuff. If he was alive, we would have found him.”

So many people must have been searching after the war. Trying to find the children they’d sent into hiding. Trying to find brothers, mothers, sisters, lovers. So many worlds torn apart. But not Grandma Sylvia. She had known exactly where her brother was. And she had not wanted to return, had never wanted to even send a letter. For all I knew, Agata had been posting such ads for years, and Grandma Sylvia had been stubbornly not scanning the papers in search of them, refusing to even wonder what had become of her other daughter.

I asked Susan how her father had escaped, and she told me. It was her own Grandma Sylvia story, I could tell, a story that had shaped her family, become mythology, changing the way they saw the world.

Her father’s name was Josef, and he had been ten years old when the Germans occupied Lithuania. No one had been expecting how rapidly the USSR would cede, and a struggle everyone expected would take weeks or months was over in a matter of days. For a time the Germans were too occupied with fighting the Russians and setting up bases to bother with the Jews. Josef and his brother, Saul, and his mother and father hid out on a farm owned by their aunt in the country, afraid to return to their apartment in the city. The farm was far from Vilnius, nearer to a town called Kaunas, but the techniques employed there were similar to the ones used at Ponary. There was a call for all Jewish men over age fourteen to assemble in the town square of Kaunas. Saul was fourteen, but their father insisted he stay and made him hide under the bed in case any of the Lithuanian police came to check the house. Their father knew he was going to be slaughtered and he told the children so. He left his wallet and wedding ring and papers at home. They never saw him again.

The next week, there was a call for all of the women and children to assemble in the square. Both boys went with their mother and aunt, her children, and their grandmother. They didn’t know if they would be killed or imprisoned or just made to register or wear a patch. “My father was still too young to understand how bad it was. Even though their father had told them he was going to die, he didn’t quite believe it. But Saul knew and he kept saying he should have gone with his father that day, so they could have died together,” Susan said. She reached for one of the sugar cookies in the box.