Riders on the Back of Silence

Brooklyn, the present day I. The Spirit Box Son: A son is a steadfast keeper of secrets, a cupped palm, a calyx, a son is a spirit box, listen— I was born after armistice, the fissured cities, but slept nights with a human smoke. And though I never shuddered from a black rouge of rationed coffee to keep clean, the frost and sullen mud of a forced march, the unspoken, the unspeakable, became my life: I was a boy bathed in dreams by a menorah fashioned against the penalty of death, a mysterious klezmer. A son is a spirit box, imagine. II. Riders on the Back of Silence Son: As a boy, my old-world aunts and uncles would weep when I entered the room: What did I have to do with sadness? Their cryptic tears and purse-tucked Kleenex were my own tantalizing Hardy Boys case to crack. Gradually, as a junior detective, I grasped how much I resembled an uncle lost in the war, and like the savvy, querying boy at the Passover Seder become a scrupulous man, an inquisitive reporter, I set out to track my look-alike’s, my family’s wartime destiny— What my father marshaled against, what my mother endured, the unspoken, the unspeakable, became my mission: though I was born in a venomless time and suburb, phantoms, chimeras breathed in our never-quite-here-and-now house, secret calendars of fire: Mother, I dreamed we were riders on the back of silence, the wild unsaid beneath us: horse, whale, behemoth. We never spoke of the war. So with stark reading, a well-thumbed Diary of Anne Frank, I resolved to imagine pitiless showers, whips and watchtowers of brute commanders, their Gypsy-less, Jew-less, jerry-rigged heaven. III. The Photojournalist Son: In my search for your cloud-wrapped past, Mother, the wounded earth became mine, and each time I aligned myself with the exiled, the dispossessed, I aligned myself with you. Apprenticed to, obsessed with, light and justice, always I’ve tried to bring into focus a girl, with war as her spur, with hunger as her horse and shadow— Mother, in El Salvador I couldn’t lift my camera to capture the unearthed bodies of silenced nuns: I’m almost, but never quite, inured to death: a child in a jacket of flies; the last typed lines of a friend, a dissident poet whose body was opened beyond belief— In the Secret Annex, in the countless precincts of strife, I’ve learned an Esperanto of blood and hope and forbearance, as if someday I might receive my wish: to read, on a night as serene as truce, your long-awaited story: the capo’s unrelenting curses, a castaway’s pain: I should know it by heart, Mother. IV. The Antimiracle Mother: At the spring’s start, there were fists rather than fragrance, April-upon-April hope braided with arrests and betrayals, as dark as the derided spaces in our censored mail. Garrisons, watchtowers, checkpoints as daunting as Gorgons, proliferated. The borders became too-tight belts— Long after the white of truce, in restless sleep I struggled to awaken the family dead, to confess, unabashed: Lampshades of sullied flesh, linens fashioned of human hair— I was not prepared to stand outside humanity— V. The Pet Name Son: Soft as a fontanel, Dove was the pet name you gave me as a boy, and on the world’s battlefields, like a drop of holy water, its bolstering sweetness became my talisman. It was with me, mitigating, winged, shielding me somehow, as my lover Jaeger’s lens shattered and his lifeblood soaked into my shirt. It was with me, a thousand leagues from God, when I photographed a gassed village— whole families and their livestock hushed as if by an invisible hand, as if some heedless, insane baker had dusted the afternoon with flour. VI. Trains Mother: Today, amid the earliest birdcalls, the first neighborhood sounds, I swept the stoop, leaned on the trusty broom, and wondered: If I could write, son, about those years, where would I begin?— Your grandfather was a stationmaster, tall as a flagpole and as taciturn. And though his owl-gray eyes have gone to earth, I keep thinking he’ll round the corner in his fastidious clothes, carrying a sprig of asphodel or fragrant honeysuckle— so dignified with his gold spectacles and timetables. God took him the Sabbath before the shouts and stones, the smashed storefronts of Kristallnacht. How it would’ve angered him to see that his beloved trains were used to betray us. VII. Dove’s Arc Mother: For years I dreamed maternal dreams of your cozy security— spacious freedom from pogroms, all the misery the wide, unmerciful world doles out to Jews and scapegoats, and always you seemed determined to court danger— So you want to know about a prisoner’s, a Häftling’s dignity? This is what it meant: at the roll call, some anchoring wish— or a shared shoe, a black rouge of rationed coffee in the camp, to dodge selection for the flames ... Truth to tell: there’s barely been a day when the filth of the barracks, the fury of the camps didn’t obsess my heart; But I will go with you to Birkenau, near the slain beasts of the old crematoriums, where everywhere you walk, you are walking on human ash. I want to leave something sturdy in this world, maybe a book of live-to-tell truth, grace and vitamins, for those to come. More than anything, son, what I’ve wanted to tell you: there was a woman of courage in the camp, and she shepherded me, kindled me to keep me alive. A clear light seemed to shore her (as if we were seeing a one-woman sunrise, an unstoppable human dawn), so that she garnered strength to share her meager scraps, strength to carry the ones still minus an alphabet, making up soothing rhymes, little puddles of sound... Like so many, she died of typhus. And after liberation, in the DP camp, amid the chaos, I prayed my children would inherit a portion of her spirit. And it’s true, you have some of her fearlessness, her passion, you do. Son, why didn’t I see it before? How my hardscrabble prayer, in it’s dove’s arc, was answered.