Far To Go by Alison Pick Read Free Book Online Page B

tension, the relentless, insidious day-to-day: encroaching hunger, restricted living quarters, the edicts marching forward, a row of shiny boots and polished guns. They took in their parents’ fear like black milk—that’s Celan, of course—from the breast. They were raised on it, fed on fear, until fear itself was in their bones, in their visible skeletons, where baby fat should have been. When the children at Auschwitz were sent towards the gas chambers, on the most basic level they knew what was coming.
    Tell me, how should I have faith in the world when I know the things that I know?
    The children I’ve dedicated my life’s work to—they got out. But it wasn’t easy for them either. They were sent away from their families, from houses full of fighting they could not understand, and they blamed themselves. They were given away as Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland. They thought they had done something terrible to merit this. Even when they were reassured otherwise.
    Sometimes, walking in the evening, a toque pulled low over my thin white hair, I try to summon up the child I myself must have been. All I get are flashes: shoes with brass buckles, a curl against my forehead, a sliver of female laughter and a back that turns and disappears.
    There is a feeling that I could have done something. Shame that I couldn’t save her.
    Beneath the shame: fear. Beneath the fear: grief. Alone in my small rooms, so late in life, the knocking from the centre of my ribs. Someone is locked inside there. Has been for years. I roll onto my side, pull the pillow over my ears. And still the little voice, the pleading.
Mama.
    I’ve lived almost my whole life without her. There is no reason I should expect to be walking late in November, my hands in my pockets, and turn a corner and see her, her thin coat, no scarf. Her cheeks hollow, the way I last remember her, in the winter of 1945. There is no reason I should still hope to find her, to take her home to my apartment and heap blankets over her, to spoon hot soup into her mouth and whisper her to sleep.
    I will never sing to her—some old Yiddish folk song—while the snow sifts silently down.
    It’s shameful really, the weakness of my longing. And yet the heart continues. There’s the fluttering in the ribs. The hope that all the loss might somehow be redeemed.
    Ach—that’s the phone. Probably the new department secretary. Mara? Marsha? Excuse me for a minute. No, don’t. I’ll just let it ring.
    What was I saying? Yes, the children. There were, of course, among the children whom I study, situations that worked out well. There were the people we now call “righteous Gentiles,” Christians who risked their lives. There were families in England who gave up everything they had, and often what they did not have, to offer a tiny traveller some kind of home. There are stories of love and heartbreaking humanity—but these are not the bulk of the stories.
    What I have found far more frequently are cases of trauma and upset. The Kindertransport children who were sent out of Czechoslovakia often spoke no English. They arrived in a country with no desire for war, battling tensions about its own role in the conflict brewing across the Channel. The children arrived in homes where money was scarce, to foster parents who had been shamed into taking them. At what we would now call a “critical developmental stage,” everything solid was pulled out from under them. Children do not forget that. It stays with them, a wall that goes up at the first hint of intimacy.
    We academics are told to frame the world in objective terms, but I am speaking now, as you’ve guessed, from my particular experience.
    There are things I remember about my mother.
    The growling of her stomach late at night.
    Her fingers combing gently through my hair.
    The first notes of—what?—a lullaby? No. Something less certain, less solid.
    I remember a dim street, late fall, and my mother at the end of it, a kerchief