Girl Unwrapped Read Online Free PDF Page A

she could get him home. Grandma herself had no trouble fasting as her constitution was strong as a goat’s, just as Lisa’s is now. Grandma could add up columns of sums in her head. She helped Grandpa Markus in the store that sold fancy linens, tablecloths, runners, lace doilies, finely finished bed sheets, and embroidered blouses. If a crooked dealer came with shoddy goods, Grandma could tell before he unpacked his wares. She could sniff out a shoplifter too. Grandpa Markus would say, “Never mind. If the poor girl pinches a scrap of cloth it’s because she needs to.”
    “He was so kind, your Grandpa,” Lisa says, as if kindness were not entirely an admirable thing.
    All this—before-the-war—is one story. Then comes how Antonia said, “Go, go, go. They won’t bother with us old folks, but there’s no future here for the young.” So Lisa and her two brothers, Wilhelm and Franz, travelled by train to the coast of Italy, where they boarded a boat for Palestine. But it turned out to be a swindle. The boat chugged out to the open seas, then turned back that very same night so that when they looked out the porthole in the morning they saw, not the wide, blue Mediterranean, but the barnacled hull of the same Russian tanker they’d docked beside the day before. The captain had disappeared. Their money was gone. After that it was out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire. Banishment, arrest, release, internment, escape, hiding, hiding.
    “All in all, the Italians were human. It could have been worse. How? Don’t ask! We found good people to help us. Mutti’s voice told me who to trust. We hid with poor farmers, high in the mountains. I learned to take care of the cows. Can you see your mama pitching hay?”
    Toni can. She imagines her mother brandishing a pitchfork at German soldiers who run down the mountainside, their hands shielding their bums.
    At the end of the war, Lisa and her brothers landed in a DP camp, which was not a prison exactly, just a place to wait, to rot, until some country, somewhere, was willing to take you in. Lisa worked as a nurse’s aid in the clinic where she tended to all kinds of miserable souls.
    “Unbelievable stories. You can’t imagine, and it’s good that you can’t.”
    They were mostly Ostjuden , speaking a babble of tongues, but one was a long-legged fellow from Vienna—practically a countryman! It was Papa. He languished on a cot and he was white and limp as cooked asparagus, his eyes like spent bullet shells. Dysentery. Plus something else that caused the doctor to shake his head. A collapse of the spirit. While others groaned endlessly and clamoured for attention, Julius disappeared into the silence of his bones. Not the most appealing sight, you would think, but he had beautiful hands, and after all that time with sausage-fingered peasants, Lisa was susceptible to a pair of elegant hands. And she liked the length of him. Tall as an American if you could stand him up. While she held a cup of water to his indifferent lips, Antonia whispered that this was the one. So he became Lisa’s project. She had will enough for them both.
    “I cooked a hearty broth and fed him spoon by spoon. I knew if I could get my soup into him, one thing would lead to another, and I was right. After a while—” a sly smile plays around Lisa’s lips—“after a while he became hungry on his own.”
    She stares down at the photo on the table.
    “I knew there was no point in going back to Vienna. I read the cards. I knew all we needed to know, but he wouldn’t listen. He had to go back. To look. We lost our place in line at the embassies.”
    “To look for what, Mama?”
    Her mother starts, as if surprised to hear Toni’s voice. She digs her fingernail into the crevices of the photo frame to remove bits of caked-on polish.
    “Always we were very close, Mutti and me. We were like one mind in two bodies.”
    Toni slips off her chair and stands beside her mother to see what she’s talking about.