Dear Fang, with Love by Rufi Thorpe

Author:Rufi Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

“THANK GOD YOU SAID SOMETHING,” Susan said, “because I was going to make myself take my medicine and go, but I really think I would have had a mental breakdown.” We were in a tiny Moroccan restaurant where we sat on pillows and where the service was very slow and the food entirely mediocre, bowls of lukewarm lentils, stacks of dried-out pita bread. Even though it was early afternoon, we ordered wine, a red that was inexplicably sweet and metallic-tasting.

Susan told me she stayed up all night the previous night reading the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, which described in precise detail the murders at the pits in Ponary. His farm was right there on the road, and he began to keep a record of what he was seeing from his house, and then he buried the pages in a lemonade can in his yard where they were later recovered. It was always a detail like that which defeated my attempt to not imagine these horrible things actually happening: a lemonade can. I pictured a Minute Maid can, though of course it couldn’t have been.

“No emotional content at all,” Susan went on. “It’s addictive to read, you kind of can’t stop, but at the same time by two in the morning I was so sick I thought I would throw up and then I just couldn’t sleep. The Jews in Vilna finally figured out what was going on because some of the children survived in the pit and then climbed out again at night and walked all the way home. Can you imagine?”

Susan’s voice had caught in her throat and she fanned herself with a stiff piece of pita bread. “So then, in the middle of that state of mind, and keep in mind I’m in a hotel, not an apartment like you, so I don’t even have a kitchen to make tea in! So then, my ex-husband calls me, drunk, he’s obviously relapsed, wanting to talk to me about his business, which he is absolutely running into the ground, and he keeps saying the same things over and over again, how he’s so stupid and he’s a failure and he should just kill himself. And I’m thinking, ‘Why do I participate in this? Why is my life such that this man can call me and make me deal with this in the middle of the night?’ I’m sorry—this is too much information, I know, but I haven’t slept and, you know—don’t think I’m some melodramatic person. I could paint this all in a different light and talk about how I have to have Rick in my life because of my son, and how I try to see the best in people, and blah blah blah. I could make it look good. Or if not good, at least presentable.”

“No,” I said, “I get it. I don’t think you’re—”

“A crazy codependent who lets her alcoholic ex-husband ruin her life even when she is taking a vacation by herself focusing on the genocide of her own people?”

I laughed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.