Eva Taylor
TRANS. BY Olivia E. Sears
The Day We Fled
JUNE 1961
The day we fled was a very long day. It began in a world of dense night and ended in a world that was utterly different. It was like turning your glove inside out and wearing it that way from then on, with the stitching on the outside. The same, but different.
The glove is made of your skin, that glove is you, a voice says.
It took at least a year to prepare for that day, a year for my father, with his slow, cautious steps, one after the other, to ready himself for the great leap when he would have to carry us all on his shoulders. My father had to become a Baron von Münchhausen and pull not just himself but also his three women out of the gutter.
Apparently, the cat got my mother’s tongue, and my grandma’s too. The thought of that day became like a gag over their mouths, a transparent gag, invisible in fact, but no less potent. Sometimes it still covers their mouths.
The curtain opens.
Part One: In the dark
I hear noises. I’m lying in my little bed, it’s nighttime, a faint light seeps into my room. The figurines hanging on the wall are watching me, the night makes their tiny faces look sad. Sleep has left me suddenly, I wait. Then the door opens wide, it becomes a portal for a new era, my mother enters transformed. She’s not sweet or attentive, she yanks me up (where did those long, cold arms of yours come from, Mutti?), she doesn’t wait for me to wake up and she ignores my complaints. We run down the staircase, the stairs whine and the doors slam. In the kitchen Papa and Grandma are waiting, they’re wearing their coats (why are they wearing their coats inside the house, at night?). My mother sets me down on the kitchen table under the lamp (why has the lamp become a floodlight?). And by the light of the kitchen she dresses me, quickly, in silence, in the middle of the night. And Papa and Grandma stare at the floor.
“We are going to the seashore,” my mother whispers. (But you don’t have a seaside voice, Mutti, that’s not a traveling smile.)
And over everything there stretches a sticky silence, until the light is switched off, the door closes, the house becomes a black box.
Part Two: Dawn in the car
Between night and morning, a car travels toward Berlin. It wanders forward and back, those inside have no compass. Someone needs to reach out and part the river. Someone needs to reach out to help them cross without drowning. But there is no hand reaching out, and there is no river, just a fog that seems reluctant to rise with the dawn.
Part Three: Passage on the S
On the platform of the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz the four of them wait beside soldiers with sub-machine guns. The four try to act like it’s a typical day, assume a mask of self-assurance to get across the border, a wall not yet visible but already present in someone’s mind. In the railcar, the girl clutches a red purse to her side, a little girl’s purse, full of money. Money that at their departure station constituted the family fortune and upon their arrival will be worth little or nothing. Money that may as well remain in the child’s purse, because she’s the only one who’ll use it when they arrive, she’ll play banker.
Part Four: Arrival in white
The British European Airways plane seems like an enormous crane, it lifts the four of them and hurls them to another airport, a cement desert, the clouds form a ladder to the ground and then become a slow snow. Snow of forgetting.
EVERY MORNING
Every day they wake up early, eat breakfast, and everything happens quickly and silently. It’s not just a routine, it’s a way of being. Then there are the days after breakfast when they’ll sit a few minutes longer.
“Do you remember?” she asks.
“I remember every moment,” he says.
Silence.
“Thank goodness it all went well,” he says.
“Thank goodness we did it,” she says.
Sometimes in the exchange the roles are reversed, it doesn’t really matter. Then they get up, and some distant impulse makes them embrace and stay a moment like this, standing in front of the kitchen window.
In the course of the morning she phones her daughter, wherever she may be. “Remember this day. If we hadn’t left, who knows where you’d be now.”
“Yes, Mutti.” She knows it’s a terrible response but she doesn’t have another one prepared.
“Or if something had gone wrong. We could have ended up in jail at Bautzen, or you in an orphanage or given up for adoption to some couple in the Party or sent off to Russia.”
“You really think so?” asks their daughter after a pause.
“You don’t get it, you really don’t understand.”
The daughter knows that the conversation is slowly moving toward its overwhelming climax.
“We did it for you. You know that, right? Remember that, always remember that.”
I know, Mutti. The day we fled was such a long day. And it never ends.
Eva Taylor was born in Germany and lives and teaches in Italy. She has published the prize-winning novel Carta da zucchero (2015) about a family’s escape from East Germany in 1961, as well as poetry collections in Italian and German. The first translations of her poems into English appeared in Words Without Borders (2016).
Olivia E. Sears is a translator and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation and serves on the editorial board of Two Lines Press. Her translation of Ardengo Soffici’s groundbreaking 1919 poetry volume BÏF§ZF+18: Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms is forthcoming from World Poetry Books (Fall 2019).