....she wasn’t his mother; not that such social conventions—i.e. who belongs to whom—made a whole lot of difference to a two-year-old who had, from the moment he entered the world, felt one warm familiar hand after another vaporize in his grasp. First his older brother, Isaac. He carried Luki everywhere, whispering a constant monologue of un-self-conscious running commentary on life into his tiny brother's ear. Isaac was beaten to death on his way home from school by a mob of thugs in brown shirts and black boots. Then his sisters, all three of them, Sarah, Judith and Lizzy, one by one, disappeared into the night. Luki would never remember it, but each one had quietly breathed in the sweet smell of his baby's breath and left a few salty teardrops on his cheek as he slept soundly in the night, each one promising to come back and play with him soon.
And though the gritty feel of a man’s sandpaperish hands, and even sometimes his own musky boy scent, would in years to come stir their corresponding regions of his gray matter, creating that singular déjà vu, it would be many, many years before he’d ever guess, correctly, that it was indeed his father’s imprinting. Because it was at just that time in Luki’s short life, when the homo sapien brain begins to arrange chronologically this whole space/time thing we call life, that his poppi Josef stopped coming home in the afternoons and picking up little Luki, stoppped riding him around on his shoulders, stopped swinging him around in wild circles, stopped steadying the giggling, wobbly boy as he stumbled around off balance. Stopped reading The Brother's Grimm to Luki. Stopped the wrestling on the lawn. Stopped the long Sunday afternoon naps in the sunshine on the sofa.
Indeed, it seemed like life life itself had somehow stopped. The house became quiet and dark. As did his mother.
Even if Luki had been, at first, an unwelcome accident, Wilma had always been a doting, caring, overbearing, pig-headed, smothering, endlessly loving, endlessly Jewish mother. And, of course, as is the way it goes with all mothers, the happy little accident scooches its little buns into their lives…and that’s that. So it was with Luki.
At least until her son Isaac was murdered. Wilma, never one to lie down and take it, got angry, and rightly so. But the anger at the Brownshirts began turning into anger at herself. And then, of course, anger at the girls, and then Josef. Luki managed to hold out longer than the rest of the family, but it was only a matter of time before the ice began to form in ever-widening gap between him and his mother.
Not that she wasn’t still a good mother. She still fed him, bathed him regularly, still dressed him in clean warm clothes and bundled him up like a snow man before they went to the market. She didn’t beat the boy. She was still his mother. She still loved him, such as it was.
It was her touch that changed. He could feel it, sense it, hear it. The soft cooing, the gentle tickling, the kisses and hugs, they didn’t just stop. But they began to harden, for lack of a better term. He’d stare into her brown eyes as she dressed him, and she’d stare back into his bottomless black eyes, both silent. He understood, such as he could, in a visceral way, that there was only so much inside a person, and that she was still his mother; that she still loved with him with all she had to offer. And somehow she knew that he understood it. Not that he was OK with it, but he did somehow understand. And it was only this understanding, this truce, as it were, that allowed her to put up with the uncomplaining child as her mind and soul began to darken. It wasn’t that the tunnel was too black; the tunnel had simply come to an end. She’d taken a wrong turn somewhere under the growing mountain of grief, and now she stood at the end of a mangled set of tracks, in the pitch black, and banging her head into the solid rock of blind despair.
If at first her love hardened and became mechanical, eventually it crystallized and shattered like the mainspring of a fine watch forced beyond its capacity one too many times. It became simply a going-through-the-motion sort of routine. She just didn’t have the chutzpah left, even for going-through-the-motion type of love. And it was this condition she found herself in one bitterly cold morning in December of 1933. With nothing but scraps in the cupboard, no money left in her hiding place under the floor boards in the closet, and her neighbors silently disappearing one by one, she crawled out from beneath her dirty blankets and rousted the boy (she could no longer remember the boy’s name) from his sleep. Shaking and twitching she watched with a twisted grimace on her face as Luki dressed himself from the pile of stinking, dirty laundry in the corner.
“Schnell,” was all she said through a blank stare.
Luki, excited that they were leaving their frigid prison, fought helplessly with his buttons.
“Schnell!” she said, louder.
Yet, try as he may, grunting with effort, his tiny little two-year-old’s fingers were just not up to the task of forcing the nickel-size buttons through the penny-size holes. He looked up at her, a plea for help in his eyes.
“Schnell, junge! Schnell! ” She could see the pools welling up in his eyes and she screamed at him, told him if he didn’t grow up and be a man that she wasn’t his mutter. Small mercy that he couldn’t understand her. Her voice, and her speech pattern, had been changing over the preceding months—stuttering, volume swells, missing words, disconnected thoughts—with a seething anger beneath the normally dull and lifeless drone.
Suddenly she stopped her ranting and jerked her head back, as though she’d just been slapped. “What!?” she said, cocking her head to one side. “What did you say?”
Luki’s fingers ceased their struggling as he looked at his mother, wondering at the sudden change. She was no longer looking at him; she was looking through him now, pleading, crying, “Es tut ich Leid, Es tut ich Leid, Es tut ich Leid, Bitte. Es tut ich Leid .Bitte.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I’m sorry, please.
Luki looked around the dirty room wondering who it was she was talking to. He didn’t understand that he’d been sharing his Mutti with the ghosts of his Poppi and his brother and sisters. The pleading went on and on for minutes as Luki stood there and wept. Then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped and her focus once again rested on Luki’s eyes. But it was on fire now, and before Luki could even flinch he felt the sting of his mother’s palm as he fell backward against the bed frame.
“Schließen Sie auf!” Shut up! she screamed as she bent over her son, the last thread connecting her to reality. Luki, curled up like an armadillo being beaten by a gorilla, was soon unconscious.
“How dare you!” she said, after delivering the final blow. “It’s not my fault.”
Luki awoke a few minutes later groaning and whimpering, until he heard his mother’s voice in the next room. She was with someone, crying, begging. He couldn’t understand the words, and he couldn’t hear the voice of the other person in the room, but from the tone of the conversation it was obvious she was pleading again. His head throbbed and his stomach burned from hunger, but he was too scared to get up and ask for food. He soon fell back into a tortured sleep, but was soon awakened by the sound of his mother screaming and stomping, banging against the wall, glass breaking, chairs and tables upending. Luki burrowed deeper into the pile of dirty clothes and blankets in the corner.
Later, he didn’t know when, nor how long he’d been holed up in the dirty clothes, he awoke at the sound of his bedroom door crashing open. More yelling, gibberish, dresser drawers flung open and slammed shut. He wondered why she hadn’t even called for him, when he heard her mumbling something about going to grandma’s house, his poppi was there, and something about Isaac and his sisters. Then the front door opened and shut, and for the first time since she’d woken him up that awful morning it was quiet. Dead quiet.
Luki crawled out of his mound of clothes and slowly crept out into the hallway. Petrified that she might see him and fly into another rage, he stood there, listening to his own heart beat, too scared to step forward into the living room, where she might see him and resume the insanity of the last few hours.
He was, however, a mere child, and his survival instinct pushed him forward toward his mother, where all children’s survival instincts push them. He inched forward, arching his stubby little neck around the corner, trying to catch a glimpse of her without himself being seen. Further he inched, still not seeing her, further, further. But the room was empty. Fear gripped his throat and he looked toward the kitchen door. It hung halfway open and he could see the sink and stove. And there, hanging from the back of the chair, he could see the blue material from the dress she was wearing.
Relief washed over him, and for the first time since he’d crawled out of the clothes pile he suddenly realized that not only did his head hurt, but that his lip and his cheek were throbbing, too. He winced but stopped himself before he let out a whimper after touching his swollen lip and his half-open eye. As he stepped slowly toward the kitchen door his young mind didn’t fix any blame for these painful bruises and the slight taste of blood in his mouth. His survival instinct, after a period of unreassuring calm and silence, pushed him forward again toward what would surely be the enveloping arms of his Mutti. He gathered up the thimbleful of courage he had left and pushed the kitchen door the rest of way open. But he gasped when he saw that the material he could see was only a piece of material, torn from her dress and hanging over the back of the chair. He ran down the hallway, terror beginning to boil in his chest, but stopped short of bursting through her bedroom door.
It took every last ounce of courage he could muster to call her; he stood there frozen for minutes before he was able to do it.
“Mutti?”
He waited, silent, his heart pounding.
“Mutti?”
He rapped softly with an open palm.
“Mutti?” he cried, the terror now beginning to boil over, banging with both hands now, sobbing. “MUTTI!” he screamed, struggling with the rickety glass door knob that, even when he was calm, always caused him grief.
“MUTTI! MUTTI! MUTTI!” he pleaded, until he suddenly the door handle gave and the door flung open, confirming that most horribly terrifying and crushing of fears—the loss of your mother.
He ran out the back door into an empty backyard. The he raced to the front door and out into the yard, leaving a confused trail of tiny footprints in the crusty blanket of snow that covered the lawn, where he finally stood, sobbing, shivering, calling for his mother. Then he stood there quiet for a few minutes—his mind having, for all practical purposes, shut down—before the freezing breeze forced him to turn and head back to the house. But something caught his eye as he was turning. There on the sidewalk, in front of the neighbor’s house, lay another scrap of his mother’s dress. He went to it and picked it up, barely able to feel the familiar coarse threads between his numb fingers. He looked at it, yet in his mind saw and felt only his Mutti. And then he looked down the street, which, though only three blocks long, nevertheless, through his young eyes appeared endless, disappearing at some hazy vanishing point—some place which may as well have been out beyond the moon.
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Short observation on the human condition:
There comes a moment in everyone’s life when, faced with a dire situation, cornered, threatened, with no place to go, at the end of ones rope, so to speak, some people will decide (or decide not to decide, which is a decision regardless) to give up, to sit down, to throw in the towel, that there is after all no point in going forward, that they are all alone with no one to help them, what can they possibly do? (“I’ve done all I can do!” etc., etc.) This proclivity is, by and large, hard-wired, which means you can blame your parents. Or at least one of your parents—you probably know which one to blame. Of course this unfortunate proclivity, through good example, can be “reprogrammed.” As they say, there’s always a choice. It may not be an easy decision, especially if you’re hard-wired to make the wrong, but there’s always a decision to made—and only you can make it.
What’s really amazing, though, is just how early in life these choices, these forks in the road, so to speak, how early they can begin presenting themselves to us. In Luki's case, right now.
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Luki folds the little blue scrap of dress into his palm and squeezes it shut, turns and runs back into the house…only to appear on the front porch a few minutes later, fully dressed, buried under a giant red wool coat large enough for someone three times his age, a giant fur hat, galoshes—all unlaced and unbuttoned. He closes the door, looks at the scrap of material in his hand before stuffing it deep into a pocket and heading off across the front lawn and down the street.
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Meanwhile, a few blocks away…
Ute Studenberg looks into the mirror, pulls her own fur-lined hat down tight, tucking away a stray lock of goldish brown hair. She wonders if her skin color is too dark to bleach her hair. Goldish brown is better than dark brown, and much better than black, but blond, even if it is fake, is better yet. No point in wondering now—it’s not as if Mutter would let her do it anyway. If only she didn’t have these damn brown eyes. Such a curse. Why did Mutter have to be Romanian, anyway? she thought. She checks her coat pocket for the package; checks the other pocket for stamp money—hoping Herr Gerhardt has one at his little cubby-hole of a market. The letter is to her brother, Franz, who is god-knows-where, hopefully still alive, at some godforsaken airstrip… somewhere—hopefully shooting the hell out of some British pilots, who would undoubtedly attempting the same on her brother.
It’s only a mile to the store, but the sky is looking none too friendly and the wind has a chill that’s feels like it must be blowing straight down from Finland. She jog-walks all the way there. The bell on the door clangs as she pushes the door open and greets Herr Gerhardt. “Guten Tag, Herr Gerhardt!” Her shoulders scrunched together and her knees knocking from the cold, she shivers as she produces the letter and lays it on the counter.
“Liebchen needs a stamp,” he said, picking up the package and sniffing it and sighing, “to send a little piece of home to Franz?”
“How is Franz?” asked herr Gerhardt as he weighed the package. “Have you heard from him?”
“Not since our last package,” she said. “But he told us that he would be going some place where he wouldn’t be able to write.”
The old grocer bobbed his bushy eyebrows, “Franz the hero.”
“Jah,” she giggled, spreading her arms out like wings and then imitating a machine gunner, “ta-ta-ta-ta-boom. Franz-Studenberg-wins-the-war-for-the-fatherland!”
He chuckled and, for a moment, could see in his memory a déjà vu moment in which Ute’s father stood in that exact same place and did the same thing when, like Ute, he was just fifteen. He couldn’t help but smile seeing how much they looked alike, like twins he thought, rather than father and daughter..
“Someday,” he said, “it’ll be Ute Studenberg wins the war for the fatherland! Eh, leibling?”
“Jah, Herr Gerhardt, jah! Auf Wiedersehen.”
“Auf Wiedersehen, Ute.”
