“THE PAST IS SO FAT, no one would ever know if you slipped a lie into its armpit,” said Aunt Gunhild. She actually used a more colorful body part, but then Aunt Gunhild was a jaywalker and a smoker in a family in which women, unless they were dead Nazi great-aunts from Hamburg, didn’t smoke. Not on the outside—they puffed on the inside until their throats burned and tears welled in their eyes. Our women braved north German winters in clumpy shoes that gave them chilblains. They married early and stayed married to reasonable men with ice-blue eyes, men who only traveled in wartime. When the rest of the family had already gone to sleep on starched sheets, they would sit in the halo of their own silence and mend the wear and tear of clothes as wounds on their own skin. By the time their faces were as threadbare as their husbands’ last fine-rib undershirt, their past would be woven into a fixed memory, the first spring after the war or that summer when the goat had clambered up the stairs and nibbled on the sleeping children’s chins.
If the past is another country, then it must be lenient toward trespassers.
“There will never be the likes again!”
My father’s words, his finger in the air whenever Gene Kelly tap-danced across the TV screen, Kelly’s esthetic apple buttocks as sexless as Grandma’s groceries bouncing around in the bag when the streetcar makes a turn.
“Those were the days!”
Every kid takes away one main lesson from home—one dish that is cooked and recooked until you’ve seen it in all shades and textures. Your life’s meat and potatoes.
THOSE were the days. Those WERE the days. Those were the DAYS.
There’s a particular loneliness to sitting down at a table others have already eaten at, flicking at hard crumbs and tracing the rings of cleared glasses with your finger.
But what about the Second World War, huh?
Were those the good old days?
No, but when the past sucks it just becomes a welcome lesson in how not to do things.
Thirteen is a great age for lessons.
It’s an age like a witch trial. You sink or you sink.
Sink, sank, sunk, I recited, learning irregular verbs. These irregularities sounded so final, like a Roman emperor holding his thumb at twelve, nine, then six o’clock.
Stink, stank, stunk.
Some of the kids in my class had started stealing things. Little things like pencils, erasers, candy. It was a daring contest, won by Laura, the girl with the biggest breasts who pinched the other girls’ breasts and shouted, “Honk, honk!”
I too had started stealing stuff here and there, but not the kind that could get you into trouble with the Polizei. No, I would cross the border to another country and like a tourist smuggling home street signs, I would strip down bits and pieces that weren’t meant for taking.
I couldn’t steal from my grandfather, who cut out pictures of airplanes from newspapers and magazines to paste them into neat albums that he locked away in a cabinet with a tiny key. The war had made his mouth very small and flat, and he only opened it to eat and to complain about lottery numbers.
The room to my grandmother’s past wasn’t locked. She told me about swinging milk cans on the way home, ten-pfennig lemonade on Sundays. I looked at her photographs while she rolled up her support stockings. She was part of the purpose generation. She couldn’t sit for more than five minutes without mentally cooking the next meal or weeding flower beds. Every visit at Grandma’s, I stole bits of her past, checking under the pillow of her memory, then working on the seams until I found a little worn tear in the lining and slipped my finger inside the stuffing.
“Before your granddad and I got married, he got leave from the front and that’s when I knew love for the first time.” Grandma’s neck blushed and she searched her pockets in the oblivious way Leonard from next door played pocket pool. I had always thought of her as a sexless flower. She needed no gardener to manure her roots, clip her blooms.
“What do you mean?”
Grandma didn’t reply. She stared into the distance where I assumed she was projecting her past in all its perfection—all sexual organs hidden under the covers.
Ours was still a family of prudes. We went to the beach with our swimsuits already sticking to our skin underneath our clothes.
“You made…love?”
“There was a war on and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again.”
Grandma got to her feet. “And now I have to get dinner ready.”
The way she said it made me think these two facts were linked.
If Granddad hadn’t survived the war, Grandma wouldn’t have been cooking us any dinner because none of us would exist now—except for Grandma.
One by one, the ingredients of the meal wafted into the living room.
I waxed German and philosophical as I analyzed Granddad. Potatoes. Granddad was the remainder of a real person. Red cabbage. He’d been sent home from the war like a parcel some stranger had torn open and pilfered before sending it on its way again. Meat. The precious part of Granddad, his heart, had gone forever. It couldn’t be found again—like the silverware Grandmother had buried near a tree when the Russians had marched in and couldn’t find again after the war.
“Dinner is ready!”
The ingredients of a good meal are like members of a biological family—opposites by nature.
Aunt Gunhild appeared in our family like a new, polarizing character spicing up a tired TV series. She was Grandma’s cousin. Their mothers had been sisters and they had both married men called Wilhelm, but these Wilhelms had lived in cities far apart. I thought it would have been much cleverer if they had both stayed in Berlin and married men with different names.
These two Wilhelms were the sum of my knowledge about Aunt Gunhild.
It took a lot of carefully dosed questions to coax answers out of my mother, who, as a child of the purpose generation, liked to create work where there was none by ironing the family’s underpants.
“Why haven’t I heard about her before?”
Mom told me that Aunt Gunhild had moved to the Black Forest years ago. “Out of sight, out of mind.” The iron hissed and my mother wielded it like Thor’s hammer across my father’s fine-rib briefs.
That’s when I knew.
My mother didn’t approve of Aunt Gunhild, a single woman, who cooked only for herself. A woman who didn’t send me a girl’s weaving frame for my birthday but a bill powered by two fat zeros.
My mother protested. “You can’t accept it! It’s too much!”
Every night I took out the bill and felt its power crackling like electricity. Money could turn on a lamp or it could turn into a lamp. Unlike time, with its compartments of tenses, beginnings and ends, go-went-gone, money was truly liquid.
Aunt Gunhild invited my grandparents, my mother, and me to the north coast, where she had rented a holiday house for a week. We played cards in the evening and the rough wind was roaring and rattling louder than Aunt Gunhild’s smoker’s cough. The nights were black squares in our windows.
When we were nestling in our deck chairs on the terrace, Aunt Gunhild gave me I see you smiles. I see you smiles make the eyes of the person who sees you so small that you know they don’t really see you with their eyes but with their heart. That’s cheesy, but true—like that song “Lili Marleen” that was sung by Nazis, Allied troops, and Grandma.
During our stay, Aunt Gunhild made me little presents and stuffed my pockets with money. I wanted to steal from her badly, but my mother was always around. All I learned was what Mom told me while we were out beachcombing. Mom wanted to walk arm in arm like the other mothers and daughters on the beach, but she was carrying her memories like a vendor’s tray around her neck. “You were so much cuter when you had pigtails!”
It’s impossible to bond when a vendor’s tray keeps jabbing into your ribs. Also Mom didn’t want to sell Aunt Gunhild’s past in exchange for a shiny lavender seashell. She only told me that Aunt Gunhild’s husband had not returned from the war. He had given her his last name, put on a uniform, and got himself blown to bits right away.
Blow-blew-blown.
My fingers traced the edges of the seashells, their coats empty and hard like Granddad, who always stayed back at the house because the soft part of him had been stolen in the war.
As Christmas approached, there was talk of Aunt Gunhild coming to stay with us for the holidays. My mother’s mouth smiled, but her eyes were as cold as the hungry north German winters she’d braved as a postwar child. The winters in which your veins showed like cracks on ice and you pushed ice around your mouth, turning it into a Christmas roast, a Bundt cake, or a fruit drop. Ice was the poor man’s liquid then.
Aunt Gunhild usually spent the holidays on duty at the hospital where she was working as a nurse, but this time she wanted to celebrate with her family. I imagined her in the nurses’ break room, sleeping with her eyes open, taking long drags and watching the smoke unravel like her lonely psyche.
Dad and Aunt Gunhild were like chemicals that didn’t mix—no matter how hard you shook the test tube. He avoided her, his eyes searching the TV set for more than it could give him. Aunt Gunhild had strong opinions about many things and sometimes her opinions were so strong that they erupted in a smoker’s cough and loud voices that pulled me from sleep. The night before, Aunt Gunhild had come charging topless into the living room to ask Grandma for her hairspray. Dad had called for Mom, ashen, pieces of salted peanuts clinging to his lower lip, hanging open like the flap of my piggy bank when I was listening to the crackling of the bills.
That’s when I knew.
The emperor’s thumb was at six o’clock.
Aunt Gunhild wouldn’t be invited again.
Fall-fell-fallen.
No more I see you smiles and caramels.
Then, one night, I stepped out on the balcony, and she joined me.
The air smelled like soggy leather shoes. The temperature was too mild for snow.
“Winters aren’t what they used to be!” Mom had said, her ice-blue eyes melting a little with regret.
Aunt Gunhild lit a cigarette and flipped the HB packet on the ledge. It was a brand that nobody else I knew smoked.
“HB—Hanging Breasts,” she said with a hoarse snicker.
“Thanks again for the ski suit,” I said. Not that I had ever been skiing, but the suit had the right sort of flashy pink Mom would never have bought me. At thirteen I felt unprepared for most things. Breasts, bras, boys. The ski suit’s soft shell had the silky sound of Allied parachutists landing behind enemy lines in war movies.
I loved it.
We looked at the stars.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Aunt Gunhild asked, her lips twitching a little as if she were counting the stars under her breath.
I thought about the boy I’d stopped being friends with this summer. We’d grappled with each other like we had since kindergarten. Suddenly he’d been on top of me as if I were a raft on a river he’d wanted to explore.
“Uh, no.”
“What do you want to do with your life?” she asked, still counting the stars, her voice sounding like gravel crunching under the feet of dinner guests as they walk out into the night.
I shrugged. Life scared me. Part of me wished for a past without the need to fill in the present, but I was too ashamed to tell her that.
“Did you always want to be a nurse?” I asked, thinking that a house has more than one way in and that a thief needs to be flexible.
“Not at all. You’re so very lucky to be growing up in this day and age.”
Her raspy voice and the shadow of her rotund, blow-dried hair shut me up. Something had happened to Aunt Gunhild.
Her past—it had been stolen a long time ago.
It was like flicking through the newspaper only to find that someone has cut out the article you were looking for. Who had done this to her?
A true thief, not some thirteen-year-old collector of pressed flowers, but someone who knew what they were taking, ripping out the plants roots, juice, and all.
Aunt Gunhild nodded at the stars, scattering ash while her cigarette glowed like an afterthought.
“Stars are the perfect landmarks,” she said. “They never change, but every time we look at them, we see them with different eyes. We can measure the distances we’ve traveled inside ourselves. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I gave Aunt Gunhild an I see you smile, and then I looked through the glass door, seeing the solemn constellation of my grandmother, mother, and father on the living room sofa.
Aunt Gunhild left with Grandma a few days later and we all went back to our normal routine like a string quartet sitting down after an interlude. School was due to start again, and I looked through my things, trying to prepare myself for Laura, the boob pincher, and the hollow-eyed World War II soldiers lying on the side of the road on page 135. Question: Why is it important that stories are recorded for the future?
It was then that I started missing things. Little things like pencils, erasers, a rubber ball.
I asked my mother if she’d seen them, expecting icy-blue eyes for not taking care of my stuff. Instead she steered us toward the two uncomfortable rattan seats no one ever sat in—it was here we’d had our birds-and-bees talk a few months back.
Mom: What do you know about sex?
Me (blushing): Err, everything one needs to know.
Mom: Good, then tell me.
Did she think that unpleasant topics might be absorbed by uncomfortable furniture?
“We didn’t want to tell you, but Aunt Gunhild took some things,” she said. “Cheap little things like tea candles and so on.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“She took some stuff when she was visiting Grandma in the spring. It’s all very childish. We think she might be a kleptomaniac.”
Aunt Gunhild never visited again, but every time I opened my closet, I caught a flash of pink in the corner of my eye, like fluorescent roadkill. The ski suit hung limply in its corner, a deflating memory, soon too small for me. I was liquid too, adjusting to my different bodies, new gravities.
The following year, the Berlin Wall came down in a fall so mild that January brought hazelnuts and primroses.
The present was another country.
Strangers were hugging strangers in the streets. There was dancing. Every person was a crowd, and the crowd was one country.
My parents cried about their past.
It was history.
Everything was liquid.