Not until you live on the other side of those eyes do you know how she feels when she looks at him, catch her or not, until the naïve innocent deception, like vise-grips of the trade, do you realize. How soft her focus is on the outline of his cheeks, the room so dark that the eyes hidden by silhouette, more so. Flush of skin when she sees you looking. Celebration.
* * *
Talking about 1940
Alex and her sister argue over details.
No, she was the only one marched through the streets.
Not her husband?
No, just her, completely naked.
She wasn’t naked!
Yes, she was! Grandmother told me!
Oh, my god, no wonder she was so scary!
* * *
On the beach we find the near skeletal remains of a shrub, though a few green leaves hold on, and a tuft of white flowers that make me think it might be Oceanspray, but the flowers turn out to be sea foam, and he tells me it’s Kinnikinnick.
Some of the leaves, still vibrant. Wonder if it had survived the wind and waves, the uprooting. Wonder if it might make a home here along the beach, learn to drink salt; feed like crabs off the waste that settles to the sand.
* * *
Her great-grandmother found herself in a wealthy life between the wars.
She had time to learn the art of folding envelopes.
One of those envelopes remained in a box of photos she left behind. At first, it seemed old, like perhaps how envelopes were made 80 years ago, the adhesive deteriorating, the corners folded from the contractions of humidity and pressure. Not a gift. One corner breaks off, brittle. The envelope no longer works.
I remove the photo inside and throw the envelope in the trash. A few pieces of it may still lie encrusted in dried strawberry preserves mixed among a landfill up the road, 4,000 miles from where it was delicately folded and sent to the man in the photo, before he died on the frontlines days before his country switched sides and marched with the enemy against the former allies.
But by this time, she had been marched naked through the streets, and was now rooted in a village a hundred miles away.
* * *
1940, Cont.
Where was her husband?
In jail…he was turned in for making jokes against the Nazis.
Is that where he died?
She sold everything to get a lawyer, and freed him. But they conscripted him to fight the Russians. That’s where he died. Right before we changed sides.
I interrupt with a story about finding a WWII-era bullet casing in Rasinari, hiking with Dorin.
Probably. There are bullets all over that land.
Odd. The use of 1st person plural to assume ownership of a decision made long before we were born, even while many stood in protest. History lumps us all together. We'll take responsibility in the eyes of our descendants for the decisions of others.
* * *
You invest your hope into this castaway, and smile, because, after all, its leaves still green; the way creatures cross the ocean. Why not survive along the beach. Why not make a home here a hundred miles away. But there are fewer leaves today than yesterday. And not a single thing lives this close to the shore.
Instead, I walk along a bone-field of weathered driftwood.
* * *
It frightens me to catch her watching him. Like switching sides amidst the conflict. Like punishment for a poorly timed joke. Like inadequacy, and driftwood. I imagine myself as all of these, a loose shrub along the beach; a displaced refugee, marched naked for the indiscretion of others; a sheet of paper, carefully folded and pressed, but discarded nonetheless. A footnote, to be mentioned 80 years from now among friends along a beach, regardless of the accuracy of detail.