Dobryd by Ann Charney Read Free Book Online Page B

Possibly it had once been a part of someone’s white tulle curtains. It became to us our magic mantle. When any one of us carried it we felt ourselves invested with the presence of the people and the events we re-enacted through our games.
    One of our favourite games originated in an event portrayed in the photographs. It was a wedding party on the point of leaving church after the ceremony. We knew little of what this meant but we understood that it was a celebration of some kind. Lacking precise details we recreated our own version of this event with immense pleasure. Our bit of tulle became a bridal veil. Around it we created a sequence of events which became increasingly elaborate and complex. After a time we began to have difficulty in remembering all the steps required in the rites we ourselves had invented.
    Unlike ordinary children we did not parody reality. Somehow we had an enormous need to forget it. Instead of recreating the roles of adults as we saw them, we preferred fantasy and invention. Yet there was little to encourage us in that direction. We had to rely totally on our own resources, and these seemed to bloom in response to our needs. Our times together were filled with rich and inventive games that I recall, even now, with pleasure.
    From that time on, fantasy-playing became an essential daily routine of my life. When my friends were not around I carried on by myself. I never thought of it as an escape or a substitute for the sad drabness of our life. For me it was part of the reality of our life, just as much as my visits to the marketplace or the stories my aunt told me about the past.
    I grew up thinking that all children spent their free time in this way, participating vigorously in an imaginary world that was as vivid as anything that they actually experienced. It came as a great surprise to me in later years to discover how different other people’s childhoods had been.

PART THREE

I
    Life inside our flat was beginning to change. Inevitably, like everyone around us, my family was making its adjustments to the world in which we lived. Their behaviour acquired a semblance of conformity, and I was relieved that we were no longer avoided as we had been in the army camp. For the time being, the past which separated my mother and aunt from other survivors had been successfully camouflaged.
    I began to notice a change in them. While I had been totally occupied with exploring the world of children, games, the streets, the marketplace, they had returned to life. I suddenly realized that not only could I become like other children but they too were beginning to resemble, more and more each day, other “normal” adults.
    Now when we walked together through the streets of Dobryd, they were indistinguishable from other passers-by. Like everyone else they wore drab army-surplus clothes. Their hair was long, braided and twisted around their heads in thick coronets. Their bodies were no longer skeletal, but filled out and rounded like my own. Their anonymity was further enhanced by the fact that the post-war population of Dobryd was almost entirely new. People did not talk easily about their former lives. Old social and class distinctions had no meaning in this setting. My mother and my aunt were treated by their neighbours with the familiarity of equals, and they in turn were content not to evoke the past in the presence of strangers.
    When the three of us were alone, however, it was another matter. Then the present receded like a clever but flimsy backdrop. My mother and my aunt abandoned their ordinary, everyday masks worn for outsiders, and became different people. With my aunt as guide, I was led away from the familiar, in another direction: towards the past. Not the immediate past which I remembered vaguely, but to a time further back whose distance from the present seemed to me inconceivable.
    Slowly, over a period of months, through different, often unrelated stories, I became aware of a