After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Read Free Book Online

adhered to my sweater, I leaned over a little further.
    How easy it would be to simply tumble. Just by leaning over until your head pulled you down. Ever since I heard aboutthe suicide of my friend Gina’s daughter, I had wondered how she got the courage to jump out of her bedroom window. It was uncanny the way she’d made it a form of theater, dressing herself all in black with high heels, making herself up. I couldn’t believe it at first when her mother, Gina, called us.
    â€œI have some bad news,” Gina said. “Bianca has jumped again. This time she made sure an awning wouldn’t save her. She jumped from her bedroom window.”
    I signaled Hannah to pick up the extension. “The police woke me at five this morning and told me there was a girl down in the piazza. I ran into Bianca’s room and saw at a glance the bed hadn’t been slept in and the window was open, its white curtain billowing like a sail in the breeze … our bird had flown.”
    We had just seen Bianca a week before, taken her out to dinner in fact. Though she was still on crutches and in pain, she seemed so full of life, telling us that after jumping once, being seriously hurt and in a coma for weeks, and seeing all the people in the hospital who had lost limbs or had frightful wounds, she began to feel grateful for another chance at life. She wanted to move out of her mother’s apartment on Campo dei Fiori and get a little place of her own.
    â€œBut don’t you still need help?” I asked. Bianca still had a rigid corset under her clothes that made it almost impossible to reach or bend.
    â€œMy mother doesn’t help me. She wouldn’t even tie my shoes when I asked her the other day. She drinks you know. Seriously. And she resents the burden—told me this wasn’t the way she’d planned her retirement.”
    We’d been friends with Gina for forty years or more, and apparently we didn’t know her. She had always spoken of her daughter Bianca with cloying tenderness, insisting on calling her
micino
—kitten—although she was over thirty. Gina tried by every means to keep Bianca in the apartment. I had alwaysthought it was Gina’s fear of being alone after her pretty-boy husband left her. She still doted on him though he has remarried. Carlo had left her for a scholar of D’Annunzio—our proto-fascist poet—a handsome woman with jet black hair who reminds me of the sultry female in the Charles Addams cartoons. Gina has never been pretty but she has a keen mind laced with wit. Her satiric poems, posted on Pasquino’s statue are legendary.
    Well, here I am talking about Gina in a faintly superior tone of voice, perhaps even blaming her for wanting to keep her daughter near, for not wanting to be alone as she ages, when I myself would be devastated if I were
solo solito.
Isn’t that why I asked Hannah to take me back? I like to think it was because of concern for her, wanting to be near her in case her heart went wild again. Her story of losing consciousness and then of losing the ability to speak scared me terribly. But my heart has its own jumpy rhythms and flutters. The big one could happen to me next time. My heart could clench up like a fist or go soft and floppy like a wilted cabbage. But is that a reason to anticipate by jumping?
    Hannah would say absolutely not—under no conditions. It was a glorious sunny day, one that Tiepolo might have painted, when Primo Levi, a treasured friend of Hannah’s, called her confessing that he felt depressed, and was thinking of suicide. I was surprised at how stern she was with him. Told him he had no right to think of it. Where would that leave her and the other Auschwitz survivors? She beat her head with her hands when she heard of his death.
    I notice that I want to connect everything by ellipses, nothing separate, because it all runs together in my mind now, with things popping up, one leading to