Beginning with 1914

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.