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My expensive Callum,
Seventeen months have passed since we last saw each other; In fact, I hope we’ll see each other at least one more time. I know you’re busy, but come visit us. Whenever you want, check no to let me know a few weeks in advance so you can paint it.
I also hope you don’t get discouraged by the verbal exchange we had when you were here. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I think since you might feel guilty. But anyway, we never call much, so who knows anyway, it doesn’t matter.
I don’t need you to feel any worse, but I understood what you wanted to do: pay attention to my stories about Russia before I was too disappointed to tell them. It’s not a satisfied thing to accomplish, and I admit it. But as I reflect, I can see that their thinking is correct: I am at an age when other people are very temporarily inclined towards simply a position where other people do not tell a story.
[Go back to the “We Germans” complaint. ]
Your questions were ridiculous, clumsy, naive and false. You deserve to have realized yourself to what you were really looking to ask: have you noticed horrible things?Let me answer you now: yes, I did. And: have you done horrible things?It’s hard to say, but not as you think.
Here’s what surprises me: can you believe your mom didn’t ask the same questions at your age?Or that they haven’t resurfaced, like pieces of soup, since I got back?Your mom’s generation was less educated about it. rightly so, I have to point it out. These are not questions of good manners.
But even if I sought to give you a correct and kind answer when you were here, you may not have. You’ll have to realize that even such excessive reports don’t stay alive in your mind.
What you finish doing, what I finished doing, is locating sentences that simplify hectic years into anything that can be said while we have a coffee, and then you don’t forget that word instead of the silent silhouettes it has. which was a merciless time to be alive, but that some people, as we all know, have been through a much worse situation and that we deserve to be grateful that our time is not so violent now.
The explanation of why these topics arise is as weak and worldly as thinking about the 1940s both one and both days. If those of us who have experienced it communicate about it, and we do so more and more now that we are old, we are communicating about Hitler and the history of the global rather than ourselves. I believe that my wine circle resembles an Organization of Petitioners both seeking to introduce a two-line amendment to the verdict of history.
So when you gave me your clumsy interview, none of those years came to me as fast as it deserved to have been. By the time I realized, more than the anger you’d put me in, you were back and you were back in London, living your life and maybe forgetting all this verbal exchange with your grandfather.
I, on the other hand, have more time than I know what to do. In other words, if you measure on days and not years. I recently realized how young youroma was when he died. Seventy-two! I barely know anyone so young, unless it’s my circle of relatives and the other people who paint here. I think we’d spend more time together.
But good: a lot of time, a lot of calm and nothing to do. And my memory, once you introduced it, began, slowly, with wheezing at first, to spin around.
With very old memories, it turns out that the more you roll them up, the more they take. Faces I hadn’t noticed in decades now appear among the other diners of the restaurant, and I hear the murmur of forgotten names in the bakery talk. Of all of them, it’s the other people who come back first. Sometimes it’s reminiscent of a meeting. I’m very pleased to see you again.
Then come the sounds and sensations, increasingly numerous. The motorized growl of the arms tank in which I drove to Russia. Hunger, my God, I don’t forget hunger, when it’s in your arms and legs, as if you can feel muscle cells breaking down. The mere memory was enough to send me to the Greeks for a plate of souvlaki and fries, more than I normally hope to finish. I knew what I was doing, of course, but it was comforting to be able to do it.
This worldlyness is not what you were looking to hear, but that’s what it is. Since our conversation, I have felt again the slight constant sunburn, the tense and painful skin of my forearms and neck, in this first Ukrainian summer. A thick and permanent heat that he enjoyed and that perched on us like sauce: we put poncho-like awnings on the back of the car and numbed in the shade, undressing in our underwear, as we crossed the field. He stuck to us while we were dreaming, and if you couldn’t find a river to jump, you had to scrape it into red pasta at night.
[Go back to the “We Germans” complaint. ]
As these sensory memories returned from the edge of oblivion, they began to spread to each other, joining and speculating on incidents, conversations, things that happened, the more I write, the more there is. An old burn on my espalda. de left hand has started to sting me again. It’s not all sunbathing. I heard projectiles the other day as I walked through the park, the dull noise of my howitzer. And that same morning, in the elevator, I suddenly discovered myself sweaty, my face purple, my center in the clutches of latent fear for a long time.
All this made me think that maybe I can do anything with the time I have left, the plan was for youroma and I to travel and enjoy our retirement, well, life is not fair, we know that, here it is: some other topic. But can you believe what I’d say if I knew I was watching TV in the afternoon?
I know you’d love to think of me using the power and lucidity I have left. Work again, after all those years of painting so I can stop. It feels good. She would be satisfied no matter what she did, but you have been her favorite; She would be pleased if I did anything for you, if only to write you this long letter.
I read somewhere that in medieval Japan, the old samurai wrote what they had learned about how to live, to help teach their children and grandchildren. Each generation has added its own experiences, so that, as a young man, you can get the recommendation of the centuries I liked the idea. Especially since I wish you and my father had met. He was a reader, the kind of e-book pastor, who decorated his space with shelves. I think you would have enjoyed each other.
And there’s something about my stay in the East that I need for you. I can’t articulate it myself at all. And I don’t need you to jump to the conclusion of the pantomime: not that I have to confess to get rid of my chest before the end. I’m not looking to get rid of my conscience. What’s in it is in it.
I’m not a Nazi. No court would position me to blame me for anything, not even omniscient. What I need to tell you is not about atrocities or genocide. I haven’t noticed the camps and I’m not qualified to say anything about them. I read Primo Levi’s ebook about it, like everyone else except, of course, that when we Germans read it, we have to think: we did.
But that’s not all. What I need to tell you is something different, it’s courage. I don’t think anyone sees true courage, never forgets it, I guess because it doesn’t look like anything else in our characters. It’s as bright in my brain now as if it were a lie in this box of Polish brushstrokes a long time ago a dreadful guy named Lattke mendacity about the sensible thing about me.
I saw him in the war, in captivity and once, years later, in peacetime: after your Uncle Jochen returned from the hospital, his friends, who did not know that his leg had been amputated, knocked on the floor door and asked if he wanted to play football. He was a boy, a child with a terminal illness, and he may have just turned around in bed. I think hisoma looked for him.
But he went out and played football with them on his crutches in the backyard of the house. And I not only played, and I fell, but I laughed and screamed and I was happy. It’s courage. And I haven’t forgotten.
Callum Emslie: I don’t know precisely what kind of disease my Uncle Jochen had, just that it was in the bone marrow in his leg and that he died on his 12th birthday in 1968, he had held on to see his birthday. This story of him playing soccer on his crutches, I heard from at least 4 people: my grandparents, my mom and one of the other children, who has since become a terrifying evangelical Christian, told me at my funeral. opa. about part of a century after the game.
It is true that I asked my opa less than delicate questions on this visit, and as for this guilty vacation to see him come back at least once again, yes, I have noticed several times, I probably would not have been a reference grandson However, I think I did well. It was not as if he lived on the same street: his apartment was on this domesticated wooded hill outside the gates of Heidelberg, in southwestern Germany wine and relaxed. every summer when I was a kid. Even when I was a student and in my twenties I ran out of money, I paid every two years for the flights, which at the time I thought was quite frequent. have been alone.
But I liked passing by. I admired him, essentially for being so unimaginably stoic. A few years before his death, he walked alone through the woods and had a kind of spasm in his legs. He had to faint and couldn’t get up. There was no one around. , so he dragged his arm towards the road to seek help, then tried to pretend it hadn’t been a big deal. That’s how it got fixed and that’s when I was almost 90.
In every time I saw him after that conversation he never spoke of the long letter he was writing, presumably he finished writing it to a time and kept it in a drawer: when he died, my other uncle discovered it among his belongings, which was addressed to me It was only a year or so before my wife and I first met; I think how close they were to overlapping.
My opa had begun to write a memory once before, a time after the death of myoma. This had nothing to say about the war or his tenure in captivity, but it began the day he and myoma met, when he returned to Germany. . It was basically a vacation they had spent, their children’s birthday parties, days of satisfaction. He resigned from it when his pain took a different course. He must have lived a long time without her.
During this visit, when I asked him about Russia, I assumed he would have to talk. From my past adolescence to the mid-twenties, every time I talked to him about reading French and German at school or doing my first paid TV homework afterwards, he said something like, ‘When I was your age I was in a donetsk door trench ‘o’ I was starting my year at the Gulag. The lesson was simple: don’t forget how lucky you were to be born when you were born. I thought if for once I dared ask questions directly about it, with a computer recorder ready, I’d have hours of hard oral history. I figured I could play the recording for generations and say: this is your great-great-grandfather’s voice. Pretty touching stuff, I’m sure I agree. But, as he says, nothing happened. The only thing I don’t forget is that, hoping to provoke a colorful history of difficulties in the Gulag, I asked him what the Russians had fed him. He thought about it for a while and then said, “I think it must have been some kind of soup. “
So even though I put notes to explain anything that would be difficult for non-Germans to understand, the context I can climb is scarce: he enlisted outside the school at the Wehrmacht in 1940, helped invade the Soviet Union in 1941, fought in artillery on the eastern front for 4 years, captured in present-day Austria in 1945 and sent to a Russian criminal camp northeast of the SeaArray , where he remained until 1948. That doesn’t tell you much.
[Go back to the “We Germans” complaint. ]
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