The Sunflower Forest

‘Mama asked me to go,’ I said, ‘but I have this test on Monday to study for.’

‘That’s an awful long way,’ he said.

‘That’s what I told her. I said you’d probably take her out in the car, if she’d only wait till you got back. But you know how Mama is. She wanted it right then.’

He wandered over to the window and pulled back the curtain. ‘It’s been such a long time since she’s been out,’ he said, more to himself than to me. Then he turned in my direction. ‘Did she say where she was going?’

‘No.’

I knew what he was thinking, even though he didn’t say it. He was thinking I should have asked her specifically, that I had been irresponsible to let my mother wander off with Megan without finding out at least which way they planned to go. It had not occurred to me until just that moment that Mama might have had no idea of where she was going. That was the problem with Mama. Like the time she had dismantled the refrigerator because it wasn’t working. Mama would set her mind to do something and she’d do it, not caring whatsoever that she had no clue about how to go about it. The sheer pleasure of action was enough for her, even when her willingness to tackle something far outweighed her actual knowledge of what was involved. Suddenly the simple Saturday afternoon walk seemed fraught with every kind of possible disaster.

‘Maybe I should take the car and go look for them,’ Dad said thoughtfully.

‘I don’t think you need to do that,’ I said. ‘If they get lost, they can call. Megan’d know to do that.’

‘Do they have any money with them?’

Again, I realized I hadn’t checked. ‘Well, they could go to a farmhouse and use the phone there.’

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘Since about one.’

My father sighed. ‘She’s been inside all winter. She should have waited.’ Letting the curtain fall back into place, he went over and picked up the bag of groceries from the bed. ‘Well, I’ll give them until five. If they’re not back by then, I’ll take the car out and look for them.’

There was no need to worry. At 4.30 the storm door slammed, and I heard the sound of Mama’s voice calling for my father. When I came downstairs, I found them embracing, involved in one of those chaste but terribly long, complete-with-droning-bees-sound-effects kisses that they got into. Dad never said anything to her about being gone without telling him. Instead, he told her that Mr Hughson from the garage had paid him double overtime for working Saturday afternoon and that he’d bought us steaks for supper.

When it became obvious that I’d get stuck helping with the meal if I stayed downstairs, I returned to my room to study. Megan had gone thundering up the stairs past me when I’d first come down, so on my way back to my room, I stopped at her door. It was shut.

‘Can I come in, Megs?’ I asked and opened the door without waiting for an answer. ‘How was it? Did you and Mama find any sunflowers being planted?’

Megan was crying. She was sitting on the edge of her bed and had her stuffed tiger cat shoved against her mouth to block the noise.

‘Whatever’s wrong with you?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Nothing,’ she said and furiously mopped her face. I came over and sat down on the bed beside her. That immediately caused her to throw the stuffed animal down and get up. She crossed to the window. Reaching for a rubber band on the window ledge, she lifted her hair up and put the band around it. I remained on the bed.

‘Megs?’

Another prolonged effort to stop the tears. I waited.

‘Lesley, who’s Klaus?’ She turned to look at me.

‘Klaus who?’

Tears flooded her eyes again. ‘That’s what I’m asking you, dummy.’

We stared at one another in silence. She had snot running over her upper lip.

‘What are you talking about, Megan?’

‘Well, you know we went out? We were walking on this road by the creek. By those fields where you and me got the fireflies last summer, remember? Anyway, there was this little boy there. He was playing in the underbrush.’

Megan paused. She came over to the bed and picked up the tiger cat again. Taking its two forelegs, one in each of her hands, she held it out in front of her and gazed at it. ‘All of a sudden,’ she said pensively to the cat, ‘Mama looks at this kid and she says to me in this really excited voice, “There’s Klaus!” You could just tell from the way she said it, she was super excited.’ Megan looked above the stuffed animal’s head to me. ‘I mean, really, really super excited, Les. She shouted, “Klaus, Klaus, come here!” And this little kid looks up and he sees her and of course, ’cause he hears this lady yelling at him, he gets this scared look and he takes off down into the underbrush. And Mama’s hollering “Klaus! Klaus!” after him.’

‘What did he look like? Did you know him?’

The tears reappeared and Megan paused a moment to quell them. Pressing the tiger cat to her chest, she sat down on the bed beside me. ‘He was just some little kid. I don’t know who. He was just little. Maybe five or something. He was wearing overalls and one of those brown jackets that’s got the flannel lining inside. And he had this really white hair.’

‘What did Mama do then?’ I asked. ‘After he ran away?’

‘We were on the road. So she ran down the road a little way, and I ran after her. Then she turned to me and said, “Maybe he doesn’t understand German.” See, she had shouted at him in German. So then she shouts at this kid in English. Same thing. “Klaus, come back here.” But the little boy was on the other side of the fence by then and he was still running. She stopped when she got to the fence. But she kept yelling for him to come back.’

I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Megs. Really, I wouldn’t. It’s not worth getting so upset about. It’s probably just one of Mama’s funny things.’

‘But she kept saying to me, “He must not speak German. They must have raised him here.”’

‘Look, don’t worry about it. You know how Mama is sometimes.’

‘But who is Klaus?’

‘I don’t know, kiddo.’

‘Where would Mama know him from?’

‘Like I said, it’s probably nothing at all. Just a funny idea of hers. Maybe somebody she remembers from before. You know. From Germany or somewhere. I wouldn’t get all upset about it.’

‘You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like.’

‘Just the same, I wouldn’t worry about it.’

‘But who is he?’

‘Megan, I said I don’t know. I don’t. I’ve never even heard of anyone around here named Klaus. So don’t cry about it anymore, OK? It’s probably nothing.’

‘You know what she said, though? She said to him, “Klaus, come back here. It’s Mama. Come back, it’s me, Mama.”’

Megan remained upset. I was unable to talk her out of it, and she was unable to forget it. She stayed up in her room and told my father that she was sick in her stomach when he came up to see why she hadn’t come to supper. She put on her pyjamas and crawled under the covers and stayed there. I didn’t bother her. Nor did I tell Dad what had happened. If it was one of Mama’s imaginings, there was not much to be done about it, and I saw no point in upsetting him too. And I couldn’t fathom what else it could be.

All through supper and into the evening, I watched Mama closely and wondered. That was a strange thing for her to do. Even by Mama’s standards, it was weird. I wondered what she could have been thinking of.

If anything, my mother was more buoyant that evening than she had been in months. The wind had burned the skin along her cheekbones, giving her a ruddy, healthy look. She had removed the yarn tie, and her hair lay thick and pale over her shoulders, catching the glow of the kitchen light as she moved. She and my father joked around. While he was drying the dishes, he flicked her playfully with the dish towel, and she squealed like a schoolgirl. Later, they went upstairs, hand in hand, and left me to watch television by myself.

Mama was pacing. I woke slowly to the sound, not quite realizing it wasn’t part of my dream until I was fully awake. I turned to look at the alarm clock. Four-fourteen. Putting the pillow over my head, I tried to shut out the sound.

Mama had always had trouble sleeping. Her insomnia was periodic. Sometimes she’d go seven or eight months without difficulties, then she’d start waking up in the night and be unable to go back to sleep. She said it was her back. Her back would ache, and she couldn’t sleep because of the pain. Then she’d go to the doctor for a prescription, sometimes for her back, sometimes for the insomnia. Nothing worked for long. If she was in the midst of one of her wakeful periods, she woke up, pills or no pills.

‘Mama, what’s the matter?’ I stood at the bottom of the stairs. She was by the living-room window. In her long cotton nightgown, she looked like a ghost in the darkness. The only light came from the glowing end of her cigarette.

When I spoke, she started and turned. I came farther into the room and bent down to switch on one of the table lamps. She squinted in the sudden brightness.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘What’s wrong?’

At first she did not respond. Then slowly she dragged a hand up and touched the small of her back. ‘It’s just the old hurt, Liebes. I shouldn’t have walked so far today. I overdid it. That’s all.’

‘Do you want me to rub it for you? You want to go up to my room and lie down on the bed? I think we’ve got some rubbing alcohol.’

She shook her head.

Shivering in the pre-dawn chill, I watched her. Her hair, mussed from sleep, splayed over her gown. She had broad shoulders, which the gown emphasized. I noticed she was losing weight again. Long-term dysentery during the war had played havoc with her system, and she still suffered frequent, severe bouts of diarrhoea; consequently, she never could keep weight on, even with her prodigious appetite. And when she did gain weight and was well within the norms for someone her height, she still looked underweight. Her skin fitted loosely, making her always appear too thin.

‘Shall I make you a cup of hot milk, Mama?’

No answer.

‘A cup of tea? Would you like a cup of tea? India tea, maybe? I wouldn’t mind a cup myself. How ’bout if I fix you one too?’

‘No thanks,’ she said. She kept her back to me and watched out the window. I doubted that she could see much, because the lamplight obscured any view into the darkness beyond the glass. But she watched anyway, absorbed.

I noticed her feet were bare. ‘Mama, come sit down. It’s too cold for you over there. Cripes, I’m freezing.’

Her eyes remained focused on some point in the darkness.

‘Mama, was ist los?’ I asked. She was always most comfortable in German. Even more so than Hungarian, I believe. German had been her language with Mutti, the one of nursery rhymes and children’s songs and a mother’s secret words for her small daughter. We never could settle on a language in our family. Mama slid back and forth at will between German, Hungarian and English, often in the same conversation. But it was German she took comfort from.

Still she gazed at the glass. Bringing a hand up, she scratched along the side of her face in a slow, pensive motion and then dropped her hand and locked it behind her back. In the reflection of the glass, I saw her eyes narrow, as if she were seeing something out there, and her forehead wrinkled into a frown of concentration.

‘I saw him,’ she said very, very softly.

‘Wer, Mama?’ I asked.

She said nothing.

‘Wer, Mama? Klaus?’

Sharply, she turned and looked at me.

‘I know about him. Megan told me about him this afternoon.’

She sighed and once again turned away from me. I saw she was shivering too.

‘Mama, come away from the window. It’s too cold there for you. Here, take the afghan.’

She didn’t move.

I had the afghan around my shoulders. Bringing it over, I tried to hand it to her but she didn’t take it. So I wrapped it back around myself. My stomach felt sick, and I thought perhaps Megan really did have something and I had caught it. I almost hoped so. Then my mother would have to take care of me.

‘I saw him,’ she whispered, her breath clouding the glass. ‘I’ve found him. The Scheisskerle, they could not keep him hidden from me.’

‘What, Mama?’

‘Him,’ she said, nodding her head slightly at the window. ‘The bastards, they thought I’d never find him. The stupid swine. They thought they’d had the better of me. But they never did. I’ve found him now.’

‘Who, Mama?’

‘Mein Sohn.’

Chapter Nine

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I need to talk to you.’

He had a shovel in one hand and a cardboard box in the other. Sunday, like Saturday, had come up warm and bright and smelling of spring. Mama was still asleep on the couch in the living room when my father had gotten up, so he had made himself breakfast, put on his gardening clothes and gone out into the backyard. Mama was still sleeping when I rose too. I didn’t eat. My stomach felt all right, but I wasn’t hungry. Instead, I pursued my father into the garden.

‘What about?’ he asked and put a shovel into the damp earth. He turned a spadeful over.

‘Well, I got to thinking,’ I said. I watched him. With slow, almost rhythmic movements, he spaded up the length of the flower bed. When he came to the end, he paused and leaned on the shovel handle.

‘About what?’ he asked.

‘Well, you know how back in January Mama was acting like she might like to move?’

‘Yes?’

‘I got to thinking. And I think maybe we should. Maybe right away.’

‘I thought you had your heart so set on graduating with your friends, Lesley.’

‘Well, not really, I guess. I mean, it doesn’t matter that much to me. Graduating’s graduating, isn’t it? It can happen anywhere. There’s nothing so special about it.’

My father rocked thoughtfully forward on the shovel. A worm squirmed in the upturned soil. He reached down and pushed a bit of dirt over it.

‘I think I’d like to be in a different place,’ I said. ‘And I think it would be good for Mama too.’

‘Your mother is doing just fine where she is,’ he said, still watching where the worm was buried. He rocked again against the shovel. ‘We don’t need to disrupt things on her account. She’s quite happy here.’

‘Really, I don’t mind going, Dad. Somewhere warm. Mama’s back’s bothering her again. She was up last night with it. And I was thinking that if we were somewhere warmer, maybe she wouldn’t have so many problems with it.’

‘It’s March, Les. It’ll be plenty warm enough for anyone right here in no time at all.’

‘Well, I was just thinking maybe it’d be better.’

‘I thought you liked it here,’ he replied, looking over. He was wearing a red-plaid flannel shirt. I noticed that two buttons were missing, replaced by a safety pin. ‘You’ve got all your friends here. And Paul. I thought you and Paul were …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

‘Yes, well, I just thought I’d tell you that it doesn’t matter at all to me. That you don’t have to stay here for my sake. I’d rather move, I think.’

He was searching my face. ‘Did something happen to cause this sudden change of heart? Did you and Paul have a falling out?’ There was a tenderness in his voice that I hadn’t anticipated.

‘No. No, no, nothing like that. I just thought there was no point hanging around here just because of me.’

‘I don’t think we are. I don’t think I ever heard anyone around here mentioning moving except you. Your mama never has.’

‘Well, I was just thinking it might not be such a bad idea.’

I could tell that Dad thought it was me. He thought I’d had some kind of disagreement with someone and was trying to get away. That hadn’t been what I’d intended but at least he didn’t think it was Mama.

Megan, however, was nobody’s fool. She was sitting out on the front sidewalk with her roller skates when I found her.

‘How’re you this morning?’ I asked.

She shrugged and continued to adjust her skates. They were an ancient pair that had belonged originally to one of Auntie Caroline’s children back in the fifties. Mastering the art of putting them on and making them work should have qualified Megan for an engineering diploma.

‘Do you feel OK? Is your stomach all right?’

She tightened the skates further. They pinched into the sides of her running shoes. ‘Nothing was wrong with my stomach,’ she said acidly. ‘You know that.’

I hitched my thumbs into the waistband of my jeans.

‘We got to ask her, Les.’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘Yes, we do. I heard you two up last night. I know she wasn’t asleep. And I can bet you a million dollars I know why. So don’t bother to lie to me.’ Carefully, she rose and put the skate key into her pocket. Taking a step backwards, she let herself roll down the sidewalk away from me. I followed her.

‘No, we don’t have to ask her, Megan. What Mama is thinking about is her own business.’

‘Lesley, are you deaf or something? Did you hear what I told you last night: Mama thought that little kid was one of us.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘She didn’t. She thought he was her son.’

Megan’s eyes widened. ‘Well, that’s worse. She hasn’t got a son.’

Neither of us spoke after that. Megan was skating along very slowly and with deep absorption. In the same way, I focused all my attention on simply keeping up. To the rhythm of the skates against the cement, I counted out my steps.

We went down around the corner and up Bailey Street and over to Third without saying anything to one another. When we reached the park on Third and Elm, Megan stopped. She ran her skates off into the grass and paused, balancing on the toes. Taking the skate key from her pocket, she sat down on the grass.

‘What exactly happened to Mama?’ Megan asked. Her voice was very calm. She was adjusting the skates again and did not look up. ‘I mean, during the war. Just what really did happen then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you ever asked?’

I shrugged. ‘She’s told us plenty of stuff, Megs.’

Megan rested her cheek against her knees. I sat down on the grass beside her. ‘I want to know what happened,’ she said. ‘Not just the funny stuff. Not just about old Jadwiga. I don’t want Mama to stick out her teeth and do old Jadwiga’s funny voice and make me laugh. I want to know the rest of it. I want to know how come Mama’s got scars on her butt and her legs. I want to know how come she was so sick in the war, how come she got starved. I’m not so stupid as you think, Lesley. I see all that stuff. And I need Mama to tell me what really happened. It matters to me, because I never can really forget about it. And I don’t think she does either. So I need her to tell me. It’s better than guessing all the time.’

‘Megan, don’t you dare ask her stuff like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just don’t. I mean it.’

Megan eyed me with annoyance. ‘I will, if I want to.’

‘You do and I’ll make you sorry.’

Silence between us. From her expression, I could see she wasn’t backing down.

‘You’re not old enough,’ I said. ‘That’s what they’ll say to you. I asked Dad once and that’s what he said to me. That I was too young to understand.’

‘When was that?’ Megan asked.

‘When I was about your age.’

‘So what about now? Are you old enough to find out now?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure I want to know now. I can see what it does to Mama. Besides, it’s old stuff, Megan. It’s over and done with. The war finished in 1945 and that’s years and years and years ago. There’s no point in knowing, really.’

Megan sighed and reached down to pull tight her shoelaces. Then wearily she rose and skated off.

Chapter Ten

Megan was sitting in the kitchen when I arrived home from school on Monday afternoon. She had her schoolbooks stacked on the corner of the table and her stockinged feet up on the chair across from her. One apple core lay beside her already. She was crunching her way noisily through a second apple while deeply absorbed in a book that lay open in her lap.

‘Hey Lessie, come here and look at this,’ she said when I appeared. I crossed over to the table.

It was a book on the Third Reich, an adult book, something for readers far older than Megan.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘The library. I went in after school and asked the lady there where they had books about the Second World War. She gave me these. See?’ She indicated a couple of other books on the table too. ‘I’m going to read about it. I’m going to learn all there is to know.’

‘Those books are too old for you. You won’t even understand them.’

‘No, they’re not. I can read them. The lady at the library gave them to me.’

‘What did you do? Tell her you were a kid genius? Megan, those books are for adults.’

‘Not necessarily. Lookie. This one’s about kids. See?’ She pulled a thin paperback from the stack. ‘There are poems and stuff that these kids wrote while they were in a concentration camp for children. See what it says here in the back? The library lady showed it to me. Fifteen thousand children went into this camp. And only a hundred ever came back.’

There was a sudden, potent silence. Megan remained intent a moment longer over the book. ‘This could have been us,’ she said quietly without raising her eyes.

‘Megan, you shouldn’t be reading stuff like that. It’s macabre.’

‘It’s the truth though,’ she said. She looked up. ‘It happened, for real. And it could have happened to us. This here, in this book. If we’d been born, they could have taken us away just like these kids and put us in a camp.’

‘They couldn’t either. Those were Jewish children. They took them away because they were Jews.’

‘But we still could have been one of these children. If we’d been born then. They were kids just like us. See, look at the way this one kid writes. He makes his G’s just like I do.’

‘Megan, listen to me. It wouldn’t have ever happened to us. Those were Jewish children. We aren’t Jews. We never were and we never will be. So it could never have happened to us.’

‘It could have.’

‘Megan, it could not have. Wash your dirty ears out. I said, we’re not Jews. It could not have happened to us. So don’t be stupid and keep insisting. You’re as bad as Mama with your ridiculous opinions.’

A frown formed across her features. ‘How come you keep on saying that? “It couldn’t happen to us; we’re not Jews?” Why do you say that all the time? It happened to people, Lesley. Real people. And because we’re people too, it could have happened to us. You’re the one who’s stupid.’

‘You shouldn’t be looking at stuff like that. It makes you crabby,’ I replied. ‘Besides, what do you know about anything? You’re too little to understand what’s really behind it anyhow. You don’t know anything; you’re just a baby.’

Megan’s scowl deepened.

I set my books down and went to the cupboard to get down the peanut butter and honey for my sandwich. ‘All I’m saying, Megs, is that we’re in no position to be even discussing it. We don’t know what happened. That’s my point. We just don’t know. So it’s stupid to go reading about what happened to the Jews and generalizing it to everyone else who was in the war.’ I turned around and looked at her. ‘And if you ask me, you just shouldn’t be reading that kind of junk.’

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