The Sunflower Forest

My father told me that all I needed was patience. It was a natural thing, and you couldn’t stop nature from catching up with you. My time would come, he said. I replied that if we hadn’t moved around as much as we had, perhaps nature would have already located me.

So, in the end, it was Mama I went to for comfort. I asked her when she first fell in love.

‘Hans Klaus Fischer,’ she said to me. She was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen when I found her. Down on her hands and knees on the linoleum, her hair tied up in a red bandanna, she paused and considered the question. And grinned. Reaching up on the kitchen counter for her cigarettes, she sat down again on the floor and leaned back against the counter next to the sink. She crossed her legs and balanced the ashtray on one knee. ‘That was when I was living in Dresden with Tante Elfie. You see, I wasn’t supposed to be seeing boys. I was just turned fifteen and Tante said I couldn’t go out yet. They were very strict in those days, you understand.’ She lit the cigarette and over the top of it, her eyes were smiling. We both knew that what Tante Elfie said probably never had much effect on what my mother did.

‘He was the baker’s son. I met him because Tante Elfie made me go after the bread every day. If she’d sent Birgitta, who knows? Perhaps I would never have met him. But Birgitta was the lazy one.

‘Anyhow, he was at the back of the shop each day, taking down the loaves.’ She paused and her eyes were still on me. ‘And do you think he was handsome?’

‘Was he, Mama?’ I asked. You always prompted Mama with her stories. That was half the fun.

‘Was he handsome? Well, I will tell you. His hair was maybe the colour of yours. A little darker, perhaps, and combed down like this. That’s the way the boys wore their hair in those days. His eyes were blue, well, maybe more a blue-green. And light. A light, light blue-green. Like the colour old glass is sometimes. And he had very fine lips. Thin. Normally, I don’t like thin lips on a man, but with Hans Klaus Fischer, they gave him such a very …what can I say? …important expression. Haughty, that’s the word for it. He would stand in the back room and take down the loaves, and I would think, “Mara, you must have that boy for your boyfriend.” You could tell how important he was just by looking at him.’

She grinned at me. ‘I was very much in love with him. I went every day for the bread, and while I waited, all I could think of was kissing those fine, important-looking lips.’

‘And did you?’

‘Well, in the beginning it was very hard to get him to notice me. I was just one girl, and there were many girls in love with Hans Klaus Fischer.’

‘But you did get him to fall in love with you, didn’t you?’ I asked.

She was still grinning. With one hand she stuck long strands of hair back up under her bandanna, and she said nothing. Mama didn’t have to. She just grinned.

‘What did you do? How did you get him to notice you when there were all those other girls?’

‘I began to come in wearing my Bund deutscher Mädchen uniform. Every day. Even when there wasn’t a meeting. You see, he was a group leader with the Youth Movement.’ She paused, reflecting, and studied the end of her cigarette. The smile came back to her lips. ‘Sometimes I would see him in the back of the shop, and he would have his uniform on. He was very handsome in that uniform. He had a sort of strut in his walk when he wore his uniform; I could tell he thought it made him somebody. So, I thought to myself, Mara, he’s going to like you if he thinks you’re a good member of the BdM.’

‘And did he?’

She winked at me.

‘What did Tante Elfie say then? Did she mind that you were seeing a boy when you weren’t supposed to?’

‘Well, she did a little. At first she did. But I told her what a fine family Hans Klaus came from. I told her what a good boy he was. He was very clever at his studies, you see, and I heard his father tell Frau Schwartz once in the bakers that Hans Klaus might be chosen for the Adolf Hitler School. It was almost a sure thing, he said. So when Tante knew that, she said I could go dancing with him on Friday nights. If Birgitta went along. You know.’ She laughed. ‘To make sure I never really found out much about kissing those fine lips. They were very strict in those days. Not like now.’

‘But how did you make him love you, that’s what I want to know. How did you get him to ask you out for a date in the first place?’

Holding the cigarette out, Mama gazed at it before finally snuffing it out in the ashtray. The floor all around us was still wet, and we sat together, barricaded behind scrub brushes, the pail and floor rags, our backs against the kitchen cupboard.

‘I did a rather naughty thing,’ Mama said. Her voice was low and conspiratorial.

‘What was that?’

‘Well, when he came to the front of the shop once to talk to me, I told him I was really the granddaughter of the Archduke.’

I laughed. ‘You did?’

‘I told him my grandfather was the Archduke and that I had been sent to Dresden for my safety. To live with Tante Elfie, who wasn’t really my auntie at all but just a nanny my family paid to take care of me.’

That struck me as amusing, just the sort of thing I could picture Mama doing with such melodramatic realism that poor Hans Klaus Fischer no doubt never knew what hit him.

‘Why on earth did you do that?’ I asked.

Giving a shrug, she giggled. ‘I don’t know. It was just something I did. I wanted to make sure he liked me. I was afraid he wouldn’t.’

‘But it was a lie, Mama,’ I said, still tickled with the mental image of it.

Another shrug and she pursed her lips in a pensive expression. ‘No. Not really. Just a story. I didn’t mean it to hurt. There just weren’t enough interesting true things to tell him.’

‘So, you told him the Archduke was your grandfather?’

‘Well, you see, you must understand, I was quite desperate about him. I just wanted things to be nice. I thought if he believed that, then he would certainly want to go dancing with me. And once he knew me, then it wouldn’t matter any more who I was related to.’ She looked over at me, and the joke of it sparkled in her eyes. ‘You must understand, I was only fifteen. Everyone’s a little mad when they’re fifteen, believe me.’

‘Did he ever find out the truth?’

She shrugged and rose up on her knees to finish the rest of the floor. ‘I don’t know. After I went to Jena, I never saw him again.’

I was dreaming. It was about the house on Stuart Avenue where we had lived before Megan was born. I was upstairs in the small attic room that my father had made into a bedroom for me. I was standing in front of the little window, looking down on the street below. But instead of the elms that had lined either side of Stuart Avenue, there were sunflowers. The avenue was empty but the sun was shining and it was very beautiful.

However, even though it seemed like the house on Stuart Avenue, I knew it actually wasn’t. It was the apartment in Detroit where we had lived for a while when I was very young. While the bedroom upstairs belonged to Stuart Avenue, I knew that the stairway would lead down into the apartment in Detroit.

In the dream I could hear Mama crying. She was sitting on a cardboard box in the gloomy little storage area under the stairs. But I was still upstairs in the house on Stuart Avenue.

‘Lesley, are you ever going to get up?’

I jerked awake.

Megan was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. She had nothing on but her underpants and an oversized T-shirt that said ‘NASA Johnson Space Center/Houston’ across the front. Leaning against the door frame, she braced one foot against the shin of her other leg. ‘Daddy says you have to get up right now, Lesley. He has to go to work for a while this morning and he says you got to come down and stay with Mama while he’s gone.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost nine o’clock. Daddy says he’ll be back after lunch.’

She turned and left without shutting the door behind her.

I closed my eyes. I could still remember the dream. I had awakened so abruptly that it clung to me and seemed very real, even as it faded.

By the time I’d dressed and come down to the kitchen, my father had already left. Megan was there, still eating breakfast. She had her chair pushed back from the table, her legs drawn up under the generous folds of the NASA T-shirt. Mama was clearing away the breakfast dishes and putting them into the sink. The radio was playing very loudly. Saturday Morning Swap Shop. My mother was addicted to the show, relishing all the bargains she dreamed of getting.

I reached over and took a slice of bread to put into the toaster. It was a wholemeal type, full of crunchy little wheat berries. Although it made wonderful toast, it was messy to eat because all the wheat berries tumbled everywhere. And Megan, who already had a piece, wasn’t helping things. She was picking wheat berries out and carefully setting them atop her knees, which, pulled up under the T-shirt, formed a knobby platform. Then she licked the wheat berries off with the tip of her tongue. Each one, one by one.

‘Honestly, Megan, you eat like a pig,’ I said.

Megan set another wheat berry out, looked over to make certain I was watching and then languidly pulled it up with the tip of her tongue.

‘Mama, look at her. Look at the disgusting mess Megan is making with her toast.’

My mother turned from the sink. She regarded Megan a moment and shook her head. ‘You’re making crumbs everywhere,’ she said. ‘Sit up and put your feet down where they belong.’