*
One day the GI and his friends come to tell us we’ll be leaving Wels,
that the Russians are helping transport the survivors home. ey come
to say goodbye. ey bring the radio. Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”
comes on, and we let loose. With my broken back, I can barely
manage the steps, but in my mind, in my spirit, we are spinning tops.
Slow, slow, fast-fast, slow. Slow, slow, fast-fast, slow. I can do it too—
keep my arms and legs loose but not limp. Glenn Miller. Duke
Ellington. I repeat the big names in big band over and over. e GI
leads me in a careful turn, a tiny dip, a breakaway. I am still so weak,
but I can feel the potential in my body, all the things it will be possible
to say with it when I have healed. Many years later I’ll work with an
amputee, and he’ll explain the disorientation of feeling his phantom
limb. When I dance to Glenn Miller six weeks aer liberation, with my
sister who is alive and the GI who almost raped me but didn’t, I have
reverse phantom limbs. It’s sensation not in something that is lost but
in a part of me that is returning, that is coming into its own. I can feel
all the potential of the limbs and the life I can grow into again.
* * *During the several hours’ train ride from Wels to Vienna, through
Russian-occupied Austria, I scratch at the rash, from lice or rubella,
that still covers my body. Home. We are going home. In two more
days we will be home! And yet it is impossible to feel the joy of our
homecoming uncoupled from the devastation of loss. I know my
mother and grandparents are dead, and surely my father too. ey
have been dead for more than a year. To go home without them is to
lose them again. Maybe Klara, I allow myself to hope. Maybe Eric.
In the seat next to ours, two brothers sit. ey are survivors too.
Orphans. From Kassa, like us! Lester and Imre, they are called. Later