Excerpt from Book:

Threads

Our mortality is a wound not yet seen.
—Evelyn Emma

When my mother died, I stared at her library for a long time,
taking out books at random, leaving gaps of slender knowledge, and
refiling them as succinctly as they were first placed. Her bookshelves
at oddly inconsistent heights, positioned as precariously as old trees,
held fortitudes of knowledge: a lifetime read, dog-eared, marginnoted.
Highlighted passages and the passage of her life—perhaps me,
a highlight—all that remained of her. I wondered if she wondered
what would happen to all of her books when she was gone; if someone
would select them, inherit them, cherish them as she had—their
multi-colored goodness evidenced by the care and wear. Probably, I
thought—not cruelly—they would be donated. By me, of course. A
thrift store, for poor browsers to find her words by accident, scrawled
into the off-white margins left for fresh ink to bond.

It saddened me that I wasn’t reader enough to keep them.

But before I could part with them (the only things my leftthinking
mother could hoard like a modern-day materialist) I withdrew
a particular volume in French I did not know. It was titled Aucun de
nous ne reviendra, by a woman of whom I had never heard (pictured,
presumably it was her, on the cover) but here, amongst the other texts
in various languages, she reminded me of my mother. She didn’t look
like her, but the way she hoisted her chin, a pressed cigarette waiting
between two fingers…that was my mother. And in the way that
moments such as those could succeed to all the moments that would
have to be, I realized I would never see her again, and it nearly killed
me.

She would have shaken her head at such melodrama.
Flittering through the pages, as I did just to feel their breeze,
they stopped on their own accord (as books do when they are so
marked) by a small, once-folded piece of paper. It was newsprint, the
typical age-yellow of the paper clinging to the pages of the book that
held it, like a decades-served prisoner so comforted by his cell that

freedom is his only fear. The saved page had two highlighted lines:
Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir. I tried to look for a Frenchto-
English dictionary to see what they meant, but failed, and so pulled
the newsprint from the armpit of the spine and unfolded it. It was from
1944 and it was in German. A German text interloping in French print:
a 1944 pun at which my mother must have smirked when she placed
it. She, of course, being German, could read what was there; I, her
shameful American daughter whose childhood was spent pretending
away my diversity in sacrifice to the gods of assimilation, knew only
a passable bit.

It was a short article, one that didn’t even warrant a picture;
a deeply buried story about a German war plane that had crashed. I
stood there, the book in one hand and the loose sheet of paper in the
other, wondering how much the propaganda machine ate holes in the
story; truthfully, I was shocked it was even printed. It didn’t seem the
Reich-way to publicize any—even if small—military defeat; but there
it was, black on yellow for the world to see. A crashed German plane.
I read crashed, not downed. Apparently, this was a mechanical, rather
than an Allied, tumbling.

So there it was: my mother’s war relic.
At most, it was a cultural artifact from the war. At least, my
mother’s eccentricity. But her only daughter, left as I was with a
bundle of paper, held it between finger pad and opposing thumb with
such force as to pulverize the print into the dust that she was, that we’d
all be, that she almost was: then.

She wasn’t a survivor; that was the name they gave her,
afterwards. She was my mother, that fateful, accidental thing between
us—a shared body, for a time—that kept us, through death, through
abomination, together. But what I was afraid of was that I’d forget
her, her face, the way I have my beloved family dog; who I pined for,
then cried for, and swore I’d never forget; now just a ripple of audible
yawns and the sweet stink of dog breath my fallible memory tried to
reconsider. I was afraid I’d forget my mother the same way, the way
you wrote a name in sand though the spiteful moon sent waves to
melt it away. So I did all I could to collect memories in consideration
of nostalgia, worried about a deathbed with nothing to think back on.
And the books’ pages went whif.

If the walls of the Altenburg factory were invisible, you’d
be able to trace the smokestacks down to cauldrons. The spires of
industry, announcing civilization from the horizon to distant travelers,
led through the roof and down to furnaces that were always angry, and
I was the educated woman who kept them growling. Or perhaps not.
Perhaps any true utility of mine was just a futile rouse, in the existential
sense. Maybe, like everyone, I over-underscored my purpose; maybe
I counted too many paces to a place, and forgot all about the steps
behind. Maybe, I don’t know.

Maybe I was just like the screws that went by.

The factory was an amazing thing. No matter how many days
went by, no matter the bizarre looks I received from my comrades,
whose eyes were perpetually down, I gazed out. The conveyors that
wound along as if dislodged from a tight-wound ball of string, the
steam stampers (my name for them), the cauldrons. The walls with
no windows. These things, functioning together, taking an inserted
material and producing a valuable component: a thing; something
useful. Of course I dreaded its use, whatever it was that we were
producing at the factory, but I marveled at the ability of construction.
The utility of creation. It made me think of motherhood, though I was
sure I would never bear a child, no matter how sure I was—that deeply
internal holler (like a voice saying, “You will. You will. You will.”)—
when I was a little girl. I was an older girl then, and as proof that my
squandered potential motherhood had suffocated that internal voice, I
was rapt by the gears of the production.

Jesus said, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they
do”; and neither did we. We knew not what we created. Gun muzzles
tempted their vicious innards inches from our backs, and so we fed
the cauldrons, we stamped the steam, we sorted the screws. (This last
thing, my job). And I was ironic enough to quote Jesus.

Every day for months (I didn’t have the advantage of chalk
to hash out, in marks, the days of my imprisonment—how taken for
granted they were by my teachers, as they scrawled the chalk to nubs
with arithmetic and Latin. I loved, oh how I loved, to read), every
day I’d been marched there, the miles to Altenburg, to sort screws
on that conveyor. The muzzles behind, buzzing with the audacity of
trigger fingers. How audacious the very thought of being human is:
such small things with such big designs. And my sorting screws was
no more menial than running a country. An army. Than ignoring what
was happening in Europe. No, my sorting screws was no more tedious
than thinking, even for a second, that being a human is something
special.

Some of the screws were as large as my hand (which, wasn’t
very large) and some were as small as the pads of my fingertips (which,
were quite small) and I had to sort them, as they glided by on treads,
roller controlled underneath, into bins according to their size.
Every once in a while, I slipped one of the largest into my
apron pocket. I believed (I had to believe, with God so elusive, in
something) that the largest were the most important. Because I was an
animal, because of gravity, I had to believe the biggest things were the
most important. Screws. Men.

I never received a tattooed number. That was lore. That
was only in some camps. It meant you were a laborer; so what all
the following generations would scoff at was a sign of survival to
those who bore them. Tattoos meant you were to be counted, and that
counting was a subtle, profane indication of life somehow valuable.
They were not used in my camp. My forearms were clean of ink,
of blood, so I didn’t have the reassurance of survival. People must
start listening to us and not to history. History has never been honest;
it is like blank forearm skin, available for anyone to cut and store
ink, while I was there. So I know. History is worse when it is filtered
through human imagination.

There were too many stereotypes to account for, these so
many years later. It was the negative sublime, the thing you stared at
and could not describe because it was a palette of colors our brains
could not use to paint. It was experiencing the white light of the divine,
and pondering why it so seldom shined. Why miracles only happened
in the Torah.

How does one beautifully describe emptiness? Silence?
These words are near useless.

So many years after the factory, this is what has become of
me. A figment, a guest speaker at the endless elementary schools, the
endless beautiful young children with their hopeful schoolteachers,
asking questions though only half-interested—perked up to not
be rude, and I, expected to warm them with a smile, an anecdote, a
cheerfully foreign accent. Would it pain them to know the traces of
langue étrangère they heard in my voice were German? Sometimes
the schoolteachers baked yellow-star cookies with Jude in black icing
on them, which were eaten ravenously by the children.

According the Nuremburg Laws, I was a “Mischling of
the first degree,” which were, “Persons descendent from two Jewish
grandparents but not belonging to the Jewish religion and not married
to a Jewish person on Sept. 15, 1935.” This bought me time; this and
that I inherited the luckier traits of my two other grandparents, leaving
me all sand-blond hair and sea-blue eyes; that and of course the fact
that I’d never stepped foot in a synagogue. But those things only saved
me for so long.

Once, back in the Altenburg factory, a comrade saw me put
one of the large screws into my apron pocket and exclaimed, “Do not
do that; you will be killed.”

To which I responded, “I am dead already.”

But the muzzle never nuzzled my nape, or my back, or
my head. Perhaps they never saw. Or perhaps the soldiers were just
as bored as they looked. Most of them were beautiful children with
misguided schoolteachers, too. I was efficient enough to sort with my
non-dominant hand, so no one seemed to pay much attention to the
other hand, buried deep into the pocket, with the screw.
Infrequently but steadily, I snuck my hand into the pocket,
which also contained a nail file, and clumsily brushed the abrasive
grain (my father’s three-hour beard stubble!) against the shaft of the
screw. Over time—this was all we had: a surplus, a deluge—I learned
to file with delicacy, drawing the file back and forth with only the tips
of my fingers (second knuckle and above) so that the sinews of my
forearm didn’t flex or undulate, and give me away. Eventually, I could
wear down the threads of the screw’s shaft to near nothing, smoothing
flat what was designed to grip, before withdrawing the screw, placing
it in its bin, and beginning again with another.

When I arrived at the camp near Altenburg from Dresden,
they found the file in my pocket (this had been a different pocket; I had
been stripped of my previous clothes, made to stand naked long enough
to be humiliated, before being given new rags), as they found all of
the things in the world that had belonged to me. They took everything
but the file. This they let me keep, out of mockery, to laugh at the
absurdity that, despite my haggard condition, I could do something as
superficial as shape my nails. As my teeth rotted, as my hair thinned,
as my muscles betrayed the bone underneath, as my tongue became
sandpapered like the blade of the file itself; they’d frequently ask to see
my nails—the round clean shape of them, the kept cuticle, the finish
of an ocean-loved shell. They’d call to me during marches, “Show us
the nails,” and I would raise my hands—surrender and spectacle—for
them to examine. And their yellowed laughter would seem to catch
the sky, echo as if we were all cloistered somewhere. The sound of
it triumphant as church bells, psychotic as air-raid sirens, alluring as
isle-stayed Sirens, noxious like a snake’s kiss. They never worried
I’d stab someone: them, myself. The joy of the paradox blunted their
boredom and I had fine nails until they began to break. Eventually,
they forgot all about it, and so I had the file, and the screws.

I didn’t know what good filing the screws would do; I just
had to have purpose, some rationality. I had to have something that
was mine, just a little agency I could call upon that was geared toward
the future. Even if it was a carrot on a string, even if it was so close to
nothing that I could laugh at myself for even thinking of it (laughter,
even in self-hatred, was balm). It was breath while I was submerged,
and so I filed clean the threads of a screw or two a day, no more
superficial an action as any other we demand our simple bodies to do.
But, of course, the screws had to go to something. We all knew what
the bellowing factory was a part of, even if we didn’t see the direct
result, and it was a human thing for me to do, to hold out hope that my
extended toe into the aisle might cause one of them to trip.

I wondered, flightily, as girls did, what people would
think and how they would remember all of it. I knew it would end,
eventually. How like everything. But posterity—what would it think
of this final conclusion: the realization that despite our millennia of
egotistical arrogance in thinking we were the champions of the Earth,
that we were truly tiered at some class far below the animals. A
hundred years hence, when the necessary reality ceded to the eventual
mythology, how would the writers appropriate what that was for prose?

They would have to, of course; the sound waves from our mutable
voices would only travel so far; but how would the new voices sound?

How would they carry the legacy of this suffering? Could a poem
ever be properly impregnated with the dissonant fugue of such rancid
melodies? I feared the noblest of future scribes would only be able to
get this as a myth, a Trojan Horse, a golden-threaded labyrinth, the
words of the Torah flying away from the fire of their own burning
pages; but perhaps that is all the past is: a broken circle beyond which
the voices of sufferers tremble out into nothing.

A recent evening, I had a nightmare. I was on an interstate,
heading from somewhere to somewhere, but there wasn’t a single
exit offering reprieve from the infinite stretch. All that existed was
flat road—long grey expanse bisected by yellow paint and flanked
by high concrete dividers. No shoulder, no green signs marking the
impending escape routes. It moved on forever, road to horizon like the
prize-winning photographs of the American desert, but I was horrified.
The interstate in its grandiosity, linking one side of the country to the
other, zagging like a heartbeat blip across the landscape: north/south
plummets and hikes with marginal east/west progress. My rational
mind would know that ocean was inevitable, but my dreaming mind
interpreted the web as suburban murder. It was all going and no
stopping, all destination and no journey. How horrible it was to go on
forever and never get off. How horrible to see all the things one could
experience just beyond the shoulders, but be caught in a racing thing
only interested in forward so that all those roadside attractions became
blurs of the stuff memory lusts for, but like in dreams, were gone the
more one tried to remember them after waking. It was because of
words; it was because we tried to use words to describe dreams, and
they were not the things of words. They were beyond words. Dreams
and nightmares both.

I remember when my mother first told me of the screws.
We were on a trip to Philadelphia, a city she loved; it was the
first place she lived in America and I always thought this brought her
some kind of affection for a place I thought was rather dirty. She wanted
to walk me around her old neighborhood, which she painstakingly
plotted out on maps but had trouble, on the ground, locating. We
wandered, presuming which direction to go (her head shaking negative
at how quickly, how much, things changed) until we eventually just
decided that where we were was in fact the neighborhood in which
she once lived. It was a simple self-deception, the ruse of it just a
platform of nostalgia; but for her, it worked. She gleamed with pride
at the concrete of the sidewalks upon which she may or may not have
ever walked. I was less astonished, the evidence of this in my face or
in the small action of my kicking away a piece of trash rather than
stepping over it. To all of this, she replied, “What is the greater talent,
loving Paris? A place everyone knows to love? Or loving Philly, a
place you have to work to love? Isn’t there a greater talent in loving
something that isn’t so obvious? Expectations are really just a matter
of consensus.”

“Beauty is Truth,” I said, quoting a literature class in which I
was then in the throes. I was a college student then, and pretension was
no less an exercise of common course than waking and breathing.

“Beauty is no such thing,” she said, becoming serious.

“Truth—whose truth? Beauty is most in what is false, what isn’t
obvious.”

She told me about the filing of the screw threads in a café
toward the center of the city, where we sat as two women with
drinks and a shared cheese danish. She explained the nail file, the
clandestine wearing-away of a screw-or-two-a-day in opposition of
some phantasm. She told that story with a sense of pride that I could
not understand; I could not see the heroism, the valiance she purported
to own in this small act of courage. I was, generally—as most people
were and should have been— in awe of my mother and what she had
been through. Embarrassed as a small child—at the attention she
got, at her fame—the feeling ceded to admiration as my high school
then college classes matured me to understand what all of it was and
what it meant for her to have survived. But my precocious-if-arrogant
collegiate mind, there in that café in Philadelphia, for whatever reason,
found the screw filing to be an act of futility so mind-numbing that I
could not help the slight tone of condescension that entered my voice.
“What I really want to know, Mom, is why people didn’t
really resist. You know? I mean, they were outnumbered, right? I
mean, how could you just let that happen to you? Take it like it was
okay?” This was the most defeated she’d ever looked at me. She, so
manhandled by life, could do nothing but muster disappointment in
her only daughter. And so she responded by saying nothing.

It occurred to me, just like in my dream: no words.

Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir.

In front of her bookshelves, the page her newspaper clipping
marked remained open in my hands and I realized I had been standing
there for an unknowable amount of time. I had conjured this memory
of her, in the café, suddenly, without spur. But as I looked back to the
yellowed dryness of the newspaper clipping, it suddenly occurred to
me that the memory was not, in fact, conjured from nothing. It was
there in the article. Perhaps my passing German had neglected it, or
perhaps I wanted to unconsciously fail at realizing it, but there it was,
seemingly the boldest word in the paragraph. The crashed German
war plane. Just after taking off from the Altenburg airstrip. A faulty
schraube.

And Philadelphia was beautiful.

And I looked up at her bookshelves, wondering what other
impossible stories of false beauty—the best kind—lived in the pages
there.

At the shoreline I write my mother’s name in the sand.
The ocean comes, incessant as history, sacred as the whole
world, and tries to erase her. I stand between her name and the water,
guarding it with my feet.

Like the words of the Torah, the letters fly.