Strange Contortions of the Soul

---01.07.2000---

When I left London before New Year, Zoe gave me a book called “In Search of the Unknown Island.” It’s a sweet little book whose author won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. I read it and realized that I am searching for my own little unknown island, not the one that I’m on but the one that I am. Partly lush, partly barren, no map, only clues.

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I’m a little wiped out today. I’ve set to work this week on my first remote design project and it’s a bit rocky. The client is an internet startup that’s chomping at the bit, and pushing, pushing on everything. It feels tiresome. Work has been a long time coming though—I’ve been here about two months now. On my first day this house saw me sitting at its kitchen table, head swimming, hands writing things down. Hmmm, maybe there’s something to that.

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Oliver, Katie, Jon, and I went for a walk the other day on Gugh. We sat on the gentle slopes of an ancient, collapsing burial site, now no more than a stone filled depression, approximately the size of a rowboat, at the island’s highest point. The day was brilliant and we could see St. Agnes from end to end: the quay, the blind lighthouse, the old church, the cricket pitch near the lagoon, flower fields, coves, trees and hedges all surrounded by a shining sea. This little parcel, this little spot, whole lives, whole generations, family trees with twisted and interconnecting branches, work done, lessons learned, loves and deaths and fights, have all held in that little, amorphous cross of land. You can see the centuries overlap, each liquid layer hardening onto the last, forming a lens several millennia thick, a sharp focus, an odd parallax. And more will be poured, more opportunities, trials, pints, and paths to follow, all there, all for us yet to see.

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Since it’s a wind-down kind of a week I thought I’d share a little bit about my family. My parents were both born at the onset of the second world war. Both were evacuated to the country; both came home to find their neighborhoods had been leveled. But my father’s family had been sheared by the war in a way my mother’s hadn’t. It’s the story my aunt began to tell at Christmas as she poured the contents of a blue wooden chest out over the kitchen table, a hundred or more paper windows, each one with a view to the past. It’s the story my grandmother finished while we sat over coffee and cake among the velvet curtains and chandeliers of her small apartment. It’s the story I’ll tell you now.

Many of the story’s significant moments take place along one street in Cologne called Vorgebirgsstrasse. It runs like a datum line through the last few decades of my family’s history. It was on this street in the 1930s, in a small restaurant that a woman caught my grandfather’s fancy. I can’t remember her name now, but she worked there and that’s where they met. He was fond of her and called in often. He would drop by as she was finishing work; they would sit in the back, in the kitchen. She would feed him and he would tell her stories. They’d laugh, he heartily, she smiling with her eyes. Perhaps, after a time, lifelong plans were laid, perhaps they weren’t, but one day in the back of the restaurant a child was conceived.

They married and by the time this child (my father) was born in 1939, a war was on the way. What happens? War becomes a horrible reality, but lives continue and my father gets a sister. At some point, as with all men, the Nazis call my grandfather into service and he doesn’t refuse. Weeks later he is in Russia. His wife gets on crowded trains back at home with the children, periodically taking them to outlying towns to avoid the bombs falling on the city. They make due in a little apartment on Vorgebirgsstrasse. During the winter of 1943 his wife falls ill with TB. Because of the war, medicine is unavailable and there, sadly, her story ends. She never recovers.

The children somehow make it back to their mother’s parent’s house in Dresden. It all goes a bit fuzzy here but at some point my grandfather decides it would be best to remarry and ensure his children have a mother. He makes arrangements to get an announcement into the local newspaper. Days later on the other side of the Rhein, in Deutz, my grandmother reads about a man with two children and sends him a quick letter. By the time his answer arrives she has forgotten about the original ad and it takes her a moment to place it in context. They correspond for many weeks. He sends her a photo inscribed on the back with, “Soon we will meet.” The photo still repeats the promise on the kitchen table now, decades later, as the century closes.

There on the other side was my grandfather, thin, and in uniform. I remember how, when I was about five years old, he would sit down on the couch, in the spot that I was already sitting, squashing me behind him, pretending I wasn’t there, and answering my protests and giggles with a comic vigilance. “What was that? Did someone hear something?” There he was looking serious, each breast pocket bearing the same pin: an eagle, wings spread, holding a swastika in its talons. There in that photo were melded together two of the most diametrically opposed associations: the love and admiration of a grandfather and the mass murder of a people. Seeing them represented neatly together in the same frame produced the strangest contortions of the soul.

Around Easter of 1944 he goes back to Cologne and meets the woman he had written to. Two weeks later they are married in the presence of the priest and two witnesses. Later he brings her the kids, the key to the apartment, and the checkbook. Her parents ask her if she’s crazy. “What if he gets killed in the war? You’ll have no husband and two kids on your hands that aren’t even yours!” His late wife’s parents protest. “How can you take the children away and give them to a woman you hardly know?”

One day, in February of 1945, my grandmother wants to take her adopted children back to visit their maternal grandparents in Dresden, but the trains have been ordered stopped. That night the bombs rained down, finding the older couple in their apartment instead of the bomb shelter. They had gone back upstairs for one reason or another, just before the first hammers whistled out of the sky. By morning the city was gone.

Later that year—I’m not sure when exactly—he was transferred to Italy to serve in the Field Police. While stationed there he grows weary of war and deserts, hiding out with an Italian family. As it turns out though, life on the lam wasn’t all that much easier than life in the army. His movements were more constricted than he thought, if caught the questions would be short and the bullets swift. So he decided to turn himself in at a PoW camp. It was there that he waited out the war in relative safety. For a prison camp, it had some unusual amenities. Once a week, for example, a market was set up and they traded—God knows what?—with the locals. Another day the trash cans went out, some full of garbage, some empty, and then returned, some empty, some full of prostitutes.

It’s so very strange the way war tears and twists life into something so unrecognizable. And stranger still to trace one’s family history through the debris.