Vergessenheit

Foreword

                   My war began in fire and ended with ice: that much is true, and I can't help but feel, sometimes, that what I went through between the rise and fall of an empire ought to be buried deep in the battered earth along with everything else that didn't make it through. Though I've spent the better part of half a century trying to escape, I now realize that the ghosts from this small part of my large life deserve closure: I owe them a period, or a question mark at the very least. Ellipses can never encapsulate a story, no matter how short and tragic it may be.

So that is why I'm going home, and why I am bringing you with me. I carry all that is left of the old world on my back, and all those things...they've grown heavy. I am not the same Atlas girl I once was: these shoulders need to be free again before I leave, and I've come to realize that written words and the empathy of some invisible, ineffable audience may be my only source of respite. Whether or not you have any desire to remain in the company of my clumsy words is surely your choice and not mine, though I do hope you decide to keep me company still. Memories can make labyrinths, and I may get lost without a string of yarn to follow. So be patient with me, for I am no longer young and this is not my mother tongue. I hate to confuse, but words are so easy to stumble upon, you know: too big and heavy, too slippery. Perhaps that is why I've chosen paper over speech! I've made enough of those, anyway, and voices rarely linger as long as the printed word.

But whatever format I follow, and whatever format has found its way to you—be it confessional, memoir, Platonic drama, dream diary—just know that it's all true. The unbelievable, fantastical, impossible things...even if they didn't happen...even if they weren't real, they're still true. I have nothing to gain from lying to you, now. This as an autobiography of a ghost—an echo collection. And like an echo, my voice will leave me, and the further it goes, the bigger and grander it becomes...even if nobody but God is around to hear it.

(–Nobody but God and my long-suffering daughter, who is no doubt stuck with these nonsensical musings now that I'm gone! Do try your best to make sense of them, my dear, or else I shall haunt you doggedly!)

So why should any of this matter to anyone else but me? And why am I so blithely exchanging one homeland for another—from Germany to Ireland and Germany once more? Well, perhaps it's my flair for the grandiose, but I can't help but find a certain poignancy in the act of dying in the same land I was born. Bringing the circle to its close, just as the Ouroboros swallows its own tail. Or perhaps I'm just a pretentious fusspot! But what matters is that I am no longer afraid to return to the dust that makes us. Death is an unburdening of life and all its gravity. Thus the air strikes, ice fields, and absences of yesterday will be gone at last, scattered across the ether or trapped in the margins of the story I am leaving behind. The small fragment of lead—all that remains of a bullet meant for another—will remain lodged in my right collarbone still, but soon I won't even know that it's there.

Dying is all well and good—dying is easy. But the trouble with living is that, along the way, people become a part of you. They themselves may fade, but still you retain their fingerprints: the voices and faces and dreams of human beings who are long gone in every way but one. Over the course of my life, I have become a keeper of a great many souls. I have become covered with fingerprints, and now guard the remnants of others because I am the only one left who remembers them as they once were; after all, a picture frame or a piece of film can never do a living thing justice.

The years collect behind us and gather dust, and we spend the rest of our lives looking back. It makes me wonder when the passage of time started counting for some-thing so much more than laugh lines and birthdays. Was everything worth it? Did I make a difference? And, more importantly, will you stay? Will you let this old lady unearth her own little piece of history—her own little parable, fable, wives' tale true? I am no artist, so this is the only way I know how to let them live on outside my own ailing head. As the Bard once said, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Just allow me the chance to compose a symphony of typewriter clicks and clacks like a pair of tap-dancing shoes—just let me play God, if only for a little while. I will tell: all you must do is listen.