FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #4

           “For a long time they said we didn't need one, but then something changed and they said that we did.”  Her voice was thin and reedy, but there was a strength behind the words which even I could feel holding up the pillars of my world.

            I was young at the time, I don’t remember exactly how old I was.  I know it’s one of my earliest memories.  I remember the smell of lavender blowing in from the fields outside the windows of the little house in Provence.  I’ve always associated the smell of lavender with faded yellow.  It’s the sort of mental association that can only happen in childhood, the sort that no amount of logic can fade.  I know, intellectually, that lavender is a shade of purple.  I grow lavender in my own garden, in memory of my grandmother now that she has passed away.  The scent of lavender always brings me back to that scrap of yellow, bigger than my hands that were holding it, and the first time I learned what it meant to be good in the face of evil.

            My sister Leah and I were visiting our aunt and uncle in Provence.  Our parents had saved money the last few years to go back to the farm where my mother had spent her early years.  My mother wanted us to meet her parents and her brother, and to see the place where she had grown up.  My sister told me there was a lot of fighting about whether we could afford to go, but I don’t remember any of the fights.  I remember blonde curls over a bright smile like my mother’s and a quiet pale face with a halo of dark hair taking us in a fast car.  Then I remember the fields of lavender in bloom, as far as the eye could see.  But what I remember the clearest about my first summer in France is the afternoon Leah and I spent in our grandmother’s room the day my aunt took my parents to a wine-tasting at a nearby vineyard. It was the day I learned that lavender can be the color of chamomile.

            My sister had been the one to find it, the little yellow star.  It was inside a box shaped like a ski chalet that played music when you opened it.  I didn’t know the song at the time, but my mother told me it was a song called “la colline aux oiseaux.” My sister learned to play the English version, “Mockingbird Hill”, on the violin for a concert many years later. 

             When my grandmother heard the song of the music box opening, she called us to her side and told us to bring the box along.  We came and dutifully sat while she stared at the scrap of cloth we had found inside the box.  I remember studying the skin of her arms, like crêpe paper through which I could trace the blue of all the veins that kept her alive.  I remember wondering if I would get those same brown splotches on my skin when I got to be as old as her, and then I wondered if I ever would be as old as her.

              I must have fidgeted, because she suddenly looked at me and said, “When I made this, I had a little brother who was just the age you are now.  I want you to look at this piece of fabric and I want you to remember it.  Because of another one, just like it, I never saw my brother past the age you are now.”

               Breathless with terror, I remember asking, “Did a witch eat him, gramma?”

               My grandmother chuckled despite the sadness in her face and shook her head so the snowy white curls bounced, “Non, ma cherie.  It wasn’t a witch who ate him.  I never saw him again because…because of men who made laws which decided who could live and who had to die.”

                She handed me the scrap of fabric, her hand trembling as she gave it to me.  It was a six-pointed star, faded but still yellow; the color of dried chamomile for tea.  It had multiple holes around the edges of it, as if it had been stitched onto something and then the stitches had been meticulously removed.  It was my sister who noticed the writing on it; I was too young to read.

                “Grandmama, what does ‘Juden’ mean?”

                My grandmother smiled, it was a smile full of ghosts that haunted her memories, “It means Jew in German.  And it’s the reason my brother, and me and all my family had to wear those stars.”

                 Leah had a habit of sucking in her cheek, right by her bottom lip, and chewing on it when she was thinking hard.  She was doing this as she asked our grandmother, “Do me and Naomi—”

            “Naomi and I.”

            Leah nodded impatiently, “Do Naomi and I have to wear one here?”

            My grandmother shook her head, “Oh no sweetness.  It was where I grew up we had to wear them, not here in France.  And even there, nobody has to wear them anymore.  For a long time they said we didn't need one, but then something changed and they said that we did.  There was a time, long ago, when people went mad for a little while and they used these stars to mark those who had to die, to keep them separate from those they let live.  Many, many people died.  Like my brother.  But nobody has to wear them anymore.”

            Leah sat there chewing on her cheek but I was the one who asked, “But why gramma?  Why did they kill him?  Did he do something bad?”

            Her voice shook in anger as she answered, “Nothing worse than you, or any of millions of other little children are capable of doing.  Children don’t know how to do anything bad enough for what was done.  The only reason was because he wore a star and he was helpless.”

            It was Leah who asked the question I was too scared to ask, “If it were still the time when…when people were crazy…would Naomi and I have to wear them too?”

            My grandmother nodded, her eyes filling with tears. 

I’m still not sure why she wanted us to hear the story that day.  I know it’s a story I’ve never forgotten; a story that made my grandmother live on forever in my memory, long after she was buried in the ground an ocean away from us.

            “It didn’t start out that way, the stars came later.  I grew up in Germany, during the time before everyone went crazy.  I was sixteen when it started.  First, they made rules about what sort of work we could do.  Then they moved us to live somewhere besides our own homes, they wanted to be able to tell us apart from everyone else.  Then they made rules we weren’t allowed to break, such as how late we could be out of our houses.  Like parents, only they weren’t our parents and the rules weren’t to keep us safe.  I’d already met your grandfather, Hans, at that point and we were in love.  He was working at a butcher shop when they made me move out of our big house into a tiny crowded apartment in another part of the city with the rest of my family.

            “I remember the first day they made us wear the stars, so they could tell us apart from the other Germans.  We had to wear them up front, where everyone could see them.  I was a pretty girl, and before the stars everyone looked at me in admiration.  They would smile back at me when I would smile at them.  Afterwards…afterwards it was like nobody could see past it to my face.  Nobody smiled at me when I went out wearing it on my coat or dress.

            “It was getting worse and worse in the space where we lived.  It was crowded and the food wasn’t good. But my family was lucky.  Hans always brought us food, anything that could be snuck in.  They were making the rules stricter and stricter every day.  They could have killed me for bringing in a sausage so my family wouldn’t starve.  It was getting harder and harder for Hans to see me.  One day, we came home from work and my brother and a sister who was only eight couldn’t be found.  We searched and searched.  Finally a neighbor told us that the people in charge had taken all the children away.

            “That night there was no laughter, and a bit of light went out forever from all the stars stolen from our lives.  I told Hans about it the next time I saw him.  He was scared by it, more scared than I was – I had learned to accept such things.  Hans told me to escape.  He told me the next time I left, I was to take off my coat and walk like I used to walk, before I learned to hide my face.  I told him I couldn’t leave my family, it couldn’t get as bad as he thought.  He told me if I loved him, I would do what he asked.”

            Leah and I sat, waiting for her to find the words.  I was holding the star, forgotten in my hand. We were watching my grandmother’s face as she relived what it was like to be young and foolish in love with a saint in a world that had gone crazy.  Leah was holding my grandmother’s hand and petting it, she understood more about the story than I could.  All I knew about love was that love was what happened when a prince saved you from a very bad witch or cruel stepmother before she could kill you – and I knew that my grandmother had been in the hands of some very evil stepmothers.

            Leah finally broke the silence and asked, “And did you love him?”

            My grandmother smiled, a different sort of smile, the sort of smile that lights up a room, “Before every meal, ever since I was sixteen, I have thanked God for three things.  I thank him for giving me life and sustaining it.  I thank him for the food gracing our table.  And I thank him for allowing angels to walk this earth in the shapes of men, most especially my husband. Oh I loved your grandfather very much.  I still do.  And, I loved him enough to listen to him.  I was lucky. I had blonde hair and light eyes.  Without the star they asked us to wear, they couldn’t tell me from any other girl in Germany.  After I took off the coat, I met your grandfather.  We took a train to his cousin’s farm near the mountains.  We got married in a church and he told everyone that I was from France and didn’t speak a word of German.  Luckily, near Strasbourg, it was common for people to know enough French to make the lie believable.  Later on, Hans and I bought this farm, so we could grow lavender.  During the time people were crazy, he once told me it was his dream to live somewhere where everything he did would only bring beauty into the world because he had seen too many ways men make it ugly.  It was his idea to grow flowers for perfume.”

            I asked her the only question a small child would think to ask in the story she had told us, “But gramma.  What about your mommy?  Didn’t you miss her?  Didn’t she worry?”

            Grandma’s hands shook and she cried at my question.  There’s something terrible about seeing someone so old cry.  It’s not like when a child cries and you know you have all the years forward to make it right.  When the elderly cry, they cry about things that have been lost and can’t be fixed or replaced.  I didn’t understand that then; all I knew was it was terrible to see her so sad.  I climbed up in her lap, still holding the scrap of cloth, and gave her a hug, kissing her wrinkled cheek where the tears had been.

            “It’s alright Naomi.  I’ll be alright.  It’s just, I never did see her again.  And I’ve always wished I could have said good-bye at least.  One of my cousins, she made it through the crazy times.  She told me that my parents and my sisters thought…never mind what they thought.  There were many pretty girls who never came home, who disappeared the same way my little brother and sister had.  My family didn’t talk about me, didn’t worry about me.”

            Leah looked like she wanted to cry but instead she had chewed on her cheek until it bled to stop her tears, because she was old enough to know it would hurt grandma further.  She looked up with her overly bright eyes and asked, “But gramma, why would you still have kept it?  With how much hurt it made, why would you keep that piece of cloth?”

            Grandma hugged me closer, where I sat on her lap and smoothed out the cloth I had wrinkled in my chubby fist, “Because it also brought me happiness, and life.  And it’s the truth they wanted me to wear: I am a Jew after all.  There’s nothing wrong with calling a Jew a Jew, for labeling things as what they are.  It’s just the conclusions they drew from the truth that were bad.  We can never forget the truth, no matter how bad it seems or how badly it is misused. And you see, the other reason I keep it is as a reminder.”

             I looked up at her in awe, wondering if I would ever live as thoroughly as she had.  Would I ever love so deeply?  Would I ever hurt so much?  I still ask myself those questions and I don’t know if I ever want to feel as keenly as she felt her life. I do know if I could, I would ask her the same question I did that day, “Reminder of what? Grandpa?”

            She didn’t answer for a long time and her eyes grew so distant I didn’t think she could see us anymore.  I wanted to tug on her hand to remind her of my question, but my sister shook her head and told me with a look to wait. I sat and waited, breathing in the scent of chamomile colored lavender.  Eventually my grandma smiled and said, “Don’t believe every promise a politician makes.  There were many good people who did many terrible things.  There are many things even the best of men will do at the point of a gun or when it’s pointed at those they love.  I don’t blame them.  When you have to choose who lives and who dies, you save those you love and let them kill the people they’ve already marked.  But the evil times also made many men and women into saints, and not just your grandfather.  I keep the star they made us wear as a reminder that there is beauty even in a world men make ugly and that the laws of man are only as good as the men who write the laws.”

             I burned those words into my memory, breathing in the scent of the lavender as I stared at a scrap of fabric the color of chamomile.  When I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of lavender, the color floats before my eyes as my own reminder of stories never to be forgotten.

back to Contest #4