The Communist's Daughter (34 page)
Olympia
In August 1972, just
before my fourteenth birthday, almost a year to the day after my grandmother drowned, my uncle Gunter came to us from Germany and found cracks at the bottom of our swimming pool. Because war stories had always been a part of my family, I thought I knew something of my mother's brother. All the grown-ups around me then had lived through war, including my father, and everybody had a story they seemed willing to shareâfriends of my parents, the teller from Frankfurt who worked at the Bank of Montreal at Lakeshore and Charles and spoke to my father in whispers over folded fives and twenties. It seemed that everyone my parents knew back then had escaped to this country from that dark place, as they had, after the war ended. But it took me until that summer to find out that there were things I hadn't been told, that there were secrets in my house.
I knew that my mother spent her war years in the north of Germany, trapped there among falling bombs. She told me about brushing her teeth with salt, the constant drought under her tongue, how they ate nothing but salted cabbage. She told me about the dead man who fell from the sky and lay in the front yard of their house through the month of May and into June and how an old woman from the neighbourhood came by with a bucket of salt every week and sprinkled it over the body to keep the fumes down until the town came and took him away.
She, my uncle, and their motherâthe father already half-dead in the salt mines near Odessa, the mineral of dehydration sucking the liquids through his skin, his eyeballs, bringing his lungs, his hunger to the ridge of his teeth. The three of them, six months in a basement. And when the end of the war finally came they were collected onto railcars and rolled over the great smouldering landscape to the shores of the Gulf of Riga where they were released like sickly cattle into a February blizzard. Then hopping trains to get back, holding her little brother's hand dry with fear as they ran, and she the hand of her mother, the three of them grasping for the invisible hand that reached from the tousled boards of departing freight cars and missing, always missing that train, that hand, walking and waiting and running again. Four months to return home and nothing left but stories of salt and drought, stories that in my boyhood meant as much to me as television, as the map of the untravelled world.
The Ash Garden
The Bantai Bridge
August 6, 1945
One morning toward the end of the summer they burned away my face, my little brother and I were playing on the bank of the river that flowed past the eastern edge of our old neighbourhood, on the grassy floodplain that had been my people's home and misery for centuries. It was there I used to draw mud pictures on Mitsuo's back with a wide-edged cherry switch, which I hid in a nearby hickory bush when it was time to go home. I liked its shape and how it felt in my hand, like a fine pen or paintbrush. I scooped up mud from the bank and shaped it into pictures of all sorts: trees, fishes, animals. The day my parents were killed I'd decided to paint my grandfather's face. I had turned six just a few weeks earlier. Mitsuo, my little brother, was only four years old and three months.
I enjoyed the way the black mud quivered like a fat pudding and glistened in the clear morning sunshine as I held it up to my face. When I fingered the first dab to apply to the cotton of his white shirt, I felt a child's pleasure in making such a mess, which we were always punished for; but I was also excited to be able to create something almost beautiful from this thick smelly puddle. Whenever my brother squirmed I threatened to call off our game and march him home. I knew he liked getting dirty, and enjoyed the tickle of my stick on his back. Sometimes he tried to guess what I was drawing there between his shoulder blades. I knew this because his fidgeting stopped and he was silent, concentrating with all his energy on the image I held in my imagination. It was as if he were looking with my own eyes at the drawing emerging before me. But today he was impatient. At first he was unable to follow in his mind's eye the lines of the cherry switch. Something had made him anxious, I thought. After a few minutes, though, I settled him down and my grandfather's old wrinkled face began to take shape in earnest.
I did not choose to draw my grandfather for any particular reason. Of course I had seen him earlier that morning, as I did every day. His face was fresh in my mind, I suppose. And so, with a dab and a blob here and there and a simple sweeping circle, accurately placed, the old round mouth slowly appeared. Next I added his crooked teeth. I drew the eyes closed and tufts of hair sprouting from the top of his head. At the sides, below the small pits of my brother's underarms, I placed the floppy, exaggerated version of the ears we often teased our grandfather about.
As a whole the portrait bore at best a crude resemblance, perhaps recognizable to those who knew him, perhaps not. But it did look like a face, and that was good enough for me. I continued to bend and scoop mud from the bank and apply it, with increasing delicacy and accuracy, to my brother's back. To capture the shading under the eyes and his light mustache, I employed a thinner paste, which I made by letting less water drain from between my fingers before touching it to the cotton shirt. During this lighter dabbing, Mitsuo began to giggle and shift again. I stopped and told him in a stern voice to hold still. He knew he had to listen, because I was his older sister. When we were away from our parents I made the rules.
That's when we heard the plane.
The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art,
edited and introduced by Larry Hannant
Readers will get a glimpse into the mind of a passionately devoted humanitarian and raving empire-builder.
Norman Bethune,
by Roderick Stewart
I often referred to this nuts-and-bolts biography to help get a sense of Bethune's journeys through Spain and China.
Prologue
to
Norman: The Canadian Bethunes,
by Mary Larratt Smith
Smith provides background on Bethune's ancestry.
“The Second Battle of Ypres, Apr-1915,” by Dave Love
Originally published in
Sabretasche
(May 1996). Reproduced with permission at
www.woridwarI.com/sf2ypres.htm.
This is a highly detailed account of an important First World War battle.
Journey
to
a War,
by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
This compelling book, by a famous coupleâone, a poet; the other, a diaristâwas written as they made their way through China during a time of war.
http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/on/bethune/natcul/natcul1_e.asp
The website for Parks Canada's Bethune Memorial House, a national historic site in Gravenhurst, Ontario, features a biography of Dr. Norman Bethune.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_25.htm
Read Mao Tse-tung's essay on Bethune: “In Memory of Norman Bethune” (December 2I,1939).
http://archives.cbc.ca/300c.asp?id=1â74â1345
Listen to “âComrade' Bethune: A Controversial Hero,” a series of nine radio clips, each running two to nine minutes, presented by CBC Archives.
Search under “Norman Bethune” and you will find an intriguing article, “Sex, spies and Bethune's secret”
(Maclean's,
October 19, 2005), by Michael Petrou.
Check out the author's official site.
The Communist's Daughter
© 2006 by Dennis Bock.
P.S. Section © 2007 by Dennis Bock.
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
First published in hardcover by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2006; First Harper Perennial edition: 2007
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EPub Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 978-1443-41567-5
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “Sunday Morning” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
. Copyright © 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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