Venus in the Afternoon

Waltz on East 6th Street

88 WaltzonEast6thStreet I Years ago, Aunt Renata squeezed a picture into my hand when my mother wasn’t looking. Aunt Renata wasn’t really my aunt, but rather someone to whom my mother had clung like a sister, like blood. In the picture, my mother is thin but she is w earing a pale belted dress with a flar ed skirt and she is smiling . That is, her mouth is smiling . Her ey es are unreadable, her cheeks taut. There is a tree just behind her and the smallest hint of a fence . I have studied the picture a thousand times trying to figure out whether this was in one of the camps.The dress belies that possibility but still the f ence looks menacing , cage-like and my mother’s expression is strained and odd.On the back of the picture , in German, and in a masculine script, it says only “Spring.” Aunt Renata said she had found the pictur e when they were liberated from the camp. She won’t tell me anything else. e e e My mother was a beautiful woman.Even now it’s obvious—her bearing still regal, her cheekbones high and pr oud. She never talks about her experiences and her silence walks the house like the ghosts that accompany her. She was 17 and had snuc k out Waltz on East 6th Street 89 in search of food when the Gestapo c ame to collect her family . She was caught a few days later and shipped f rom Prague to the first of several camps. That’s all I know, and I don’t even think she was the one to tell me. There is so much I have wanted to ask her but she ’s never offered up anything but silence. The next part of her story is a void, a portal between dimensions that I dar e not enter. Her words, when she speaks, are carefully chosen. I watch her move around the house like a sp y in her own life , surprised to have found herself capable of holding a bab y, of pulling weeds, her skin glowing, alive. e e e Throughout my childhood I waited for death to c laim her. As if I didn’t dare believe her stay of execution,surprised again and again to f ind her moving about the kitchen in the morning , preparing her strong coffee then settling into her favorite chair by the window, not a figment of my imagination, not a dream I had dreamt. In school,when I would perform in the annual play,I would peer out from between the curtains to make sure she was really there. But there she would be, sitting quietly in one of the front rows amid the chatty American-born mothers with whom she had nothing in common, the long sleeves of her simple but elegant dress hiding the number on her arm. I would see her looking around, as if she w ere once again w ondering whether she had done the r ight thing by putting me in this Je wish school with its fortress-like walls, its windowless brick. Alongside her would be a spr inkling of fathers who had rushed home early from work or rearranged their schedules to join their wives at the plays. I knew little about my own father except that my mother had met him in one of the DP c amps, 9 0 V E N U S I N T H E A F T E R N O O N then lost trac k of him. A dec ade later they r emet and w ere briefly married but he’d died when I was just a baby, ultimately succumbing to the ravage that had been done to his organs in Birkenau. Growing up, I couldn’t imagine what it might be like to have a father. My mother and I were plant and soil. We were a greenhouse, hermetically sealed. But lately, she seems to me paler, thinner. As if the reserve she had all those y ears, the strength with which she raised me and urged me far f rom the dark banks of her memories—as if that were finally dwindling. Last week, when I enter ed her apar tment unannounced, I caught her star ing, unblinking, out the f ront window as if it held...