Chapter | 13

About three years ago, I had a disturbing experience. It bothered me for months and I even had nightmares about it long after that. This was before I knew what a real nightmare was and how quickly and unexpectedly it could take over a person’s life. For a long time, I convinced myself that this incident was a “harbinger”, a word we learned in English class that means something which is a sign for another bigger thing that’s about to happen.

Does everyone have a place in their house that’s a scary place? I do. My scary place is the garage, and even within the garage, there’s a corner where I still won’t go. But on that day I came into the garage to look for something . . . now I don’t even remember what it was. Back then our garage was a mess. Boxes were scattered around the edges of where the cars pull in. There was no order to anything so if you were looking for something you just had to go poking around until you found it. On that day, it was outrageously hot, but in the garage, it was cool and dry.

I saw the box I was looking for. It was high up on one of the shelves built into the wall. I looked around for something to stand on and saw an old Lego table that Mom thought we should keep in case any little kids came to visit. I leaned over to move the Lego table and strangely heard the sound of maracas. We had a pair of maracas, along with some other percussion type instruments like miniature conga drums, and an African thumb piano. Any musical instrument we ever showed an interest in, Mom would buy for us. Too bad we had zero talent for music. But at that moment, I just wondered who was shaking the maracas, and for one crazy minute, I thought I was hearing a ghost.

And then I saw it coiled under the Lego table, maybe six inches from my hand. A huge rattlesnake, fat across its middle, head raised back, body coiled, and the tip of its tail lifted into the air, vibrating just like a pair of maracas.

This was what I dreamed of for months after . . . its eyes. Its eyes looked like pure evil to me because in them I saw nothing. And I had never seen nothing before that moment. Nothing turned out to be the scariest thing I knew.

Somehow I got my bearings. I screamed, and the snake retreated, more scared of me (they say) than I was of it. My father rushed in and killed it with a shovel. Its body continued to writhe for minutes after it was dead, and a blood stain was visible for months afterward, despite repeated attempts to bleach it out.

After that, my father completely organized the garage to eliminate any potential hiding places. He explained to me that the snake had come in to escape the heat of the day, being a cold-blooded creature. He assured me the snake was neither good nor bad. It just was. It was a living thing trying to stay alive and it had the bad fortune of being discovered by me. It wasn’t a harbinger or anything else. It was simply a rattlesnake. But that part of the garage where the stain is no longer visible is a place I’ve avoided until today.

Now this scary place in the garage frightens me for a different reason. It’s a place where secrets are stored. My family secrets. I’m here to find the journal my mother kept about my grandfather’s childhood. The one with the word HOLOCAUST branded onto its cover with black marker. It seems tragic that the journal of the most innocent time in my grandfather’s life should have such an ominous title.

There are some old kitchen chairs in the storage area. Mom put them here a week before the accident when we got our new kitchen set. She thought we might need them one day if we had a large party and needed extra seating, but they’ve never been moved from this spot. I brush away a cobweb and pull one of the chairs so it’s centered under the light. With the journal in my lap, I flip open its cover and an impossibly faded photo falls from the pages. It’s creased and so fragile it seems miraculous that it still exists.

I get up to turn on a second light, and the figures in the images look back at me. It’s a group picture with three rows. The first row consists only of a woman sitting on the ground, holding a baby in her lap. In the second row are four boys, who look like they range from Emma’s age to Chad’s age. The three biggest boys are wearing caps, the kind that came back into fashion a few years ago when movie stars started wearing them—newsboy hats, they’re called. In the last row three older girls are smiling over the shoulders of the younger boys in front of them. The girls could be about my age. Everyone is dressed in cold weather clothes and there’s a small low building behind them.

I flip the photo over and can barely make out the scrawled old-fashioned cursive. February 1944, it says. Bela (12) Miklos (8) Vili (6) Gyuri (10). The four brothers. My grandfather, I know, is Gyuri which means George in Hungarian. And now that I know which one he is I can see the old man in the face of this little boy. The eyes are shadowed, probably from a bright winter sun directly overhead, and the focus of the picture is slightly blurred. But the way he leans timidly and yet protectively into his little brother Vili, the cocked head, the slightly crooked smile . . . how could I not recognize him? And without anything to back me up but my intuition, I suddenly know that this was the last time these young brothers stood shoulder to shoulder and smiled with all the innocence of their youth.

I thumb through the pages of the journal and find a Ziploc baggie that contains two yellowed documents. My father used to joke that if Mom came across something weak and defenseless that couldn’t be cured with chicken soup and a hug, she’d put it inside a Ziploc baggie. How did he step away from all those memories to begin something new? Did he try to do it, or did it just happen to him? I never want it to happen to me . . . so do I have to accept sadness as my lifelong companion?

One of the documents is thick and rectangular. It resembles a postcard, although it looks nothing like any postcard I’ve ever seen. There’s no tropical beach lined with coconut palms, no national park backdrop with a bear climbing through the window of a car, no Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial. It’s a strictly-business postcard and every square inch has been filled with writing as though the words were precious gems that needed to be stored somewhere—safely and quickly. The other document is just a scrap of paper, unfolded now but with so many creases it’s obvious that someone sometime was trying to make it as small as possible. The writing is in pencil, large and clumsy. I can’t read it but it must be Hungarian.

I don’t know how many minutes have passed when I turn the last written page of the journal. After that, there are nothing but blank pages. The blank pages feel like the end of time. But they also feel like promises of more to come. Mom tried her best but she wound up with just a collection of facts. There are no personal stories. There’s no emotional response to the facts. It seems to me that all this information could just as easily have been copied and pasted from an ancestry internet website. Only the clues hint at more . . . the faded picture, the postcard and the folded scrap of paper.

For as long as I can remember, Mom spoke to us about the Holocaust. She used general words designed to deliver facts without causing childhood nightmares. But Mom knew the truth even though she couldn’t get past her father’s vague answers and her mother’s warning looks. She knew the truth of history but she didn’t know the truth of the stories. And yet I can see from this notebook how hard she was trying. And I can imagine her frustration stemming from fear that time was running out—not her own, she couldn’t know that, but my grandpa’s. She wanted to peel back the layers and reveal those stories before it was too late. For his sake. For her sake. For our sake. Now I think I have a chance to finish what she started. Maybe it’s something I can do for her.

It doesn’t seem right to leave the journal in the box in this scary part of the garage. I want to read it again, but not in this place. I set the box back on the shelf and take the journal to my tent, stopping off first in the kitchen for another Ziploc baggie to protect the picture.