Hiding

Look, my grandfather’s hideaway. He hid with relatives, friends, friends of friends… Five years from safe houses to basements with hidden trapdoors, finally hunkering down in some forest den he’d dug with his own hands, gathering the mushrooms, picking the blueberries, hunting rabbits and squirrels.

It didn’t matter about the war ending. He would always hide, always stay on the run, stopping just long enough to stand in the doorway to say, just stopped by to say hello, I think there’s a surprise for you if you look in my pocket… The pocket of the long, gray coat he always wore, always, always, and always standing, always in the doorway on his way out before he’d ever stepped in. And the pocket always held a chocolate-covered plum which I loved most of all. How many times did I see him in my life, an eternity of shattered lifetimes? Maybe five, including the afternoon I stepped into his apartment for a moment, a tiny den with black drapes hung over every window, the bacon curing above the bathtub for the coming winter, the murdered ghosts, their eyes glazed with terror and longing—how do you get to be alive?

Now his daughter (my aunt with the raven black hair which I loved to plait) will not touch chicken if she’d seen the carcass – goose bump skin slipping over the fat and muscles, neck flaps opening in to a rib cage filled with wrapped organs… She whimpers something about cruelty and takes a double dose of Valium that evening. She’s tried killing herself twice now – how is it that she is still alive, she wonders.