(René Taïcon: 1930 Archives départmentales Pas-de-Calais 4Z482 Sous-prefecture de Saint-Omer, France)
My mother was Fridolin, a boy of fourteen. He pushed me forward in the soup line, and dealt with knotted bootlaces, and kept me from the path of the whistle punk. We were the youngest in camp. The gadje around us were Italians, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe captured in Africa, Jewish refugees, spies, Canadian dissidents. That is to say, they were musicians and intellectuals; thugs and soldiers, fascists and anti-fascists; husbands and fathers. Our guards were paternal, used up in the War, and Fridolin and I passed through the gates at will, beneath the machine-gun towers. He wore the issued prisoner-of-war shirt, with a red disk on the back that I thought was the sun. I was so small that the guards’ wives, working from romantic notions, knitted scarves and mittens, and saw that I had boots.
We spoke only Romani, but a lingua franca quickly brewed in the camp, which served any conjuncture: the heavy magic of sacré dame; the extremely satisfactory scheiße. Clinging to the sides of the crawler tractor, only vaguely grasping the words, we bawled with fraternal roar, ‘Auprès de ma Blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon…’
We went into the snowy woods, our boots wrapped in fur to keep snow from the gromits. Frido carried a shotgun loaned from the guard house, cradling it, as men in those days did. We made the buckshot ourselves, paper cartridges of stone grit. The shotgun, iron and maple, was moody, which did not alter our totemic reverence. We were after ptarmigan and hare. Frido put the gun to his shoulder and fired with the motion of one who has rehearsed an act endlessly in his mind, a proficiency I could only dumbly watch. Knocked backward by the kick, he lay felled in a puff of snow powder and cordite. It was my task, floundering forward, to collect the kill.
The dead hares were floppy and soft; we put them to our icy cheeks.
“Zigeuner mischling,” the cook said affectionately, his hand on my head.
“We are not half-breeds!” Frido whispered to me, as we went out the door.
Newly educated, he saw the world in different terms, compared to the convictions of his vanished parents. He read German, English, and French, and he insisted that I also apply myself. Whether he resented the unlettered tribe from which we derived, I had no idea, but I did not encourage his desire to change.
I opened my mitten and revealed a little two-bladed knife. “Old friend,” said Frido, “we are not dirty thieves. Put it back.”
Summers, we manned a spotting platform in the trees, lying half-asleep on the rafting floor. The trunks of tall trees are always perceptibly in motion. We monitored the skies with a round spinner airplane chart that was like the silhouettes in a bird guide—lateral and inferior views of the Mitsubishi Zero. Fridolin read. I didn’t care about reading, but it ensued naturally enough, and I took it as one of the dormant skills of the body, like swimming or telling lies, or the long soar into the trees before the myoclonic jerk caught me up.
It is so hard to remember. His brain did not bulge as I imagined it might, and I suppose he was slighter than ever, nostrils tensed like a hare’s. Among the men he was elvish, with wrists I could put my finger and thumb around. A captured U‑boat captain, a family man far from home, gave a course in theoretical physics. Fridolin bent his head beneath this surface, and gasping, barely returned. I sat beside him, swinging my boots and drawing airplanes and bombs, or slipping into a lanolin haze sucking gritty snow from a mitten, until someone requested I not.
When Frido began to cough a jolt crossed Herr Kapitän’s face. We all coughed, and I grizzled, and coughed in the night. But Fridolin had a choking cough like the shepherd dog when it lunged in its collar. Everyone coughed and sang hoarsely, wistfully, their voices watered like soup. It was spring. We were ill, and the dormitories were not being swept, and some did not get up for souper, but it was often said that the end was in sight. Fever went through us.
Then the women came. I was startled, having forgotten them, and the larger world. We fell, every one of us, in love. Women were revelatory, and we competed for the vital currency of their attentions, and I watched, with regret, my condition improve.
The war somewhere had ended and the camp broke up and we were carted away in Red Cross vans.
Frido and I were coterminous; there wasn’t one without the other; we weren’t brothers, but looked it. We had no one else. Our lineage was complex and fraught, and we were as fabricated of each other as the litter of puppies the German cook had in his bunk. Still, there was something thick and stubborn about me, utilitarian, like a brick shithouse. Of course I lived. In the sanitarium, they opened his chest, collapsing the lung to rest it. He was thickly bandaged after that, and so distorted that I laughed when they brought me in. He was like our shapeless, fur-wrapped feet, floundering in the snow.
An impatient nurse whispered in French. If there was anything I needed to say to him, it should be said now. Fridolin, drawn from other thoughts, turned languidly. He watched my face as I reported that the Japanese had sent their best Fu-Go bomb to kill me, but had failed.
His eyes were heavy and he examined me for other things. He breathed through his mouth as he looked. In the forest, when the saws stop, a silence takes the sky and then the rent begins; the very sky rips and opens in an unstoppable way and then the air fills with a rain of black lichen so that no longer can you look up. Then—very strongly—the feeling comes over you that you can’t get back far enough—that there is nowhere left that is safe.
“Dis ce que tu as à dire,” said the nurse ominously, pushing my shoulder, but I didn’t have a thing to say, and was pushed forward to touch the tips of his fingers, which, emerging from a mitt of bandage, were swollen and hot.
Through the fall of black lichen I saw his eyes narrow. Instructively, he said: “Old friend.” Then, “Souviens-toi,“he might have added, or “Na bister.” It is so hard to recall; I can hardly bring it back. I don’t remember how he told me to never forget.
~
Jessica Lackaff was born on the Oregon coast, where Sacajawea saw the whale. She is a self-taught writer, a runner, and an ex-book dealer, not that you ever really stop. She has what Chuck Palahniuk calls a “kitchen table MFA”. She has published in Jaded Ibis Press and Eternal Haunted Summer.