Lisel Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly. This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep. But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room. You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.

This is not fantasy, this is our life. We are the characters who have invaded the moon, who cannot stop their computers. We are the gods who can unmake the world in seven days. Both hands are stopped at noon. We are beginning to live forever, in lightweight, aluminum bodies with numbers stamped on our backs. We dial our words like Muzak. We hear each other through water. The genre is dead. Invent something new. Invent a man and a woman naked in a garden, invent a child that will save the world, a man who carries his father out of a burning city. Invent a spool of thread that leads a hero to safety, invent an island on which he abandons the woman who saved his life with no loss of sleep over his betrayal. Invent us as we were before our bodies glittered and we stopped bleeding: invent a shepherd who kills a giant, a girl who grows into a tree, a woman who refuses to turn her back on the past and is changed to salt, a boy who steals his brother’s birthright and becomes the head of a nation. Invent real tears, hard love, slow-spoken, ancient words, difficult as a child’s first steps across a room.

Since it always begins in the unlikeliest place we start in an obsolete country on no current map. The camera glides over flower beds, for this is a southern climate. We focus on medals, a horse, on a white uniform, for this is June. The young man waves to the people lining the road, he lifts a child, he catches a rose from a wrinkled woman in a blue kerchief. Then we hear shots and close in on a casket draped in the Austrian flag. Thirty-one days torn off a calendar. Bombs on Belgrade; then Europe explodes. We watch the trenches fill with men, the air with live ammunition. A close-up of a five-year-old living on turnips. Her older sister, my not-yet-mother, already wearing my daughter’s eyes, is reading a letter as we cut to a young man with thick glasses who lies in a trench and writes a study of Ibsen. I recognize him, he is going to be my father, and this is his way of keeping alive. Snow. Blood. Lice. Frostbite. Grenades. Stretchers. Coffins. Snow. Telegrams with black borders. On the wide screen my father returns bringing his brother’s body; my mother’s father brings back his son’s from the opposite edge. They come together under the oaks of the cemetery. All who will be my family are here, except my sister, who is not yet imagined. Neither am I, who imagine this picture, who now jump to my snowy birthday in the year of the million-mark loaf of bread. My early years are played by a blue-eyed child who grows up quickly, for this is a film of highlights, like all documentaries false to the life—the work of selective memory, all I can bear of a painful childhood. The swastika appears and remains as the huge backdrop against which we’re seen. The sound track of a hysterical voice is threatening us. We’re heard as whispers. Shortly before my city bursts into flames, my stand-in disappears from the film, which continues with scenes of terror and death I can’t bear to watch. I pick up a new reel, a strange sequel set in a different location and made in another language, in which I am back. The colors are bright, the sound track is filled with music, the focus gentle. A man is beside me. Time-lapse photography picks up the inchmeal growth of daughters toward the sky, the slow subversion of dark by gray hair. Little happens. The camera sums up the even flow of many years in a shot of a river. The principals from part one are missing, except for me who am the connection. The time is now, and I am playing myself.