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“He’s going to be okay,” the chaplain said. “God
is going to take care of him. You don’t need to
worry about that.”
Like an absolution, the chaplain’s words seemed
to release my father from at least this one fear, and
in letting it go, my father began to cry quietly. I
was crying, too, and pulled tissues out of my bag
for both of us.in the hospital cafeteria, a low-ceilinged
windowless place, the bottom-most stop on the
elevator, my father and I talked over cups of hot
tea, to which, had we been home, he might have
added a shot of rum.
Having grown up in a German-speaking village
in rural Hungary ultimately taken over by Com-
munist Russians, my father spoke three languages
by the time he turned fourteen. After the war,
his family’s farm was confiscated, and, stripped
of nearly all their possessions, they were forcibly
resettled. As a teenager, he’d somehow found the
clarity, the will, and the courage to leave. He fled,
alone, across the closed border, risking arrest or
even death, and after a series of close calls finally
landed in a refugee settlement in Germany.
Now, by turns wistful and animated, my father
began telling stories of his childhood. One that
I had never heard before centered on his favorite
Christmas present, a wooden rocking horse.
Contending with war-time deprivation, his
parents would give him the same rocking horse year
after year. What thrilled him then and still did—his
eyes brightening at the memory—was how every
Christmas the rocking horse reappeared with a
fresh coat of paint and a fresh straw mane that made
it new again.
He loved that horse, and I loved the story, and
the tender uplifted place it opened in my father
when he told it, and in me as I listened.
“When you were little I bought you a rocking
horse for Christmas,” he continued, “but you only
wanted to play with the box!” Laughing hard, we
must have been the loudest people in the cafeteria.
Back in L.A., I told Nurit the story of Dad’s rock-
ing horse, and instead of being moved like I was,
she grew silent. Slowly, I drew out the explanation.
From her perspective, the story was not one of
imaginatively overcome hardship—on the contrary,
there was no grievous hardship, because they lived.When each year’s holiday came around again, the
family was still there, still alive, still together. Her
anger, deep and unyielding, was directed partly at
me for the sympathy I felt for my father.
She was right, of course: By the time my father
was ten years old, Jewish families in Hungary
were vanishing by the day, rounded up, deported,
executed. For Jewish children, holidays and toys
and wonderment did not exist even in tatters.
The given life. The lives most brutally taken.alex went back to the farm, and I joined his
friends and hospice team in a dedicated circle of
care around him. When he could no longer walk,
we carted him out to the fields in a wheelbarrow.
When he could no longer eat, we brought him
fresh snow to melt in his mouth. When he could
no longer speak, we still listened. In just six months
he’d gone from being my baby brother to becoming
my ancestor. His bedroom—lined with his harvest,
jars of fruits and grains, and herbs hung from the
ceiling to dry—had become a tomb packed with
supplies for the journey to come.
On the last night of his life, Alex sat upright at
the edge of the bed, his feet dropped to the wooden
floor, restless and repeatedly trying to stand up
though he didn’t have the strength to. I quit trying
to talk him out of it; I just wanted to be close. I slid
onto the bed behind him, pressing my chest against
his back and wrapping my arms and legs around
his. I whispered in his ear that I knew he wanted to
go and that he could go. And with one last grunt of
an exhalation, his body collapsed into mine.
Nurit had been traveling throughout the fall,
presenting her research at international scientific
conferences. She didn’t come to the farm until
mid-December, two days after my brother died,
and it was an awkward visit. I was physically
and emotionally spent from the final days and
nights with Alex and his closest friends, and the
accommodations, with no plumbing or electricity,
were a bit rustic for Nurit’s taste. But I prepared
the outdoor tub for her, heating the water on
a wood-burning stove. Shedding a large towel,
she sank into the steaming bath. Her skin, whole
and smooth, glistened under the crisp night sky
brimming with stars, even the closest ones trillions
of miles away. I pulled my coat tighter, watching
her watch them.UNDER THE STARS | SYLVIA SUKOP