I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman by Nutter Jude;

Author:Nutter, Jude;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

GROWING UP IN BERGEN-BELSEN: THE FIRST KISS

We all grow up among the dead.

But for a child, you had so many.

In fifteen minutes—less time than it took

to kill hundreds—you could ride

your white, three-speed bicycle, out

through the front gate, over the cricket pitch,

down past the pig farm and into

Bergen-Belsen. The house you grew up in

appears on a postcard mailed

by soldiers of the Wehrmacht to their families

sometime during their training

in nineteen thirty-nine; contained,

toward the end of the war, 869 Gypsies,

Jews, and others—overflow from the camp

next door as Stalin advanced and Hitler

panicked and prisoners were shuffled west.

It was here you had your first kiss—

in an attic room and under curfew

while the military police and a knot

of squaddies home from manoeuvres

invaded the gardens and neighbourhoods to shoot

rabid dogs and foxes. What did you know

about tenderness: you kissed him so hard,

leaning in, your lips like a railing,

and you refused the wet drawbridge of his tongue;

and there you were, cantilevered

across the abyss two bodies become

when they are touching. And behind your lips,

the fender of your teeth and your tongue

dreaming in its grave. Because you felt no desire

you knew there was nothing

worth closing your eyes for and so you gazed

beyond him, through the window,

at the crushing loneliness of summer, the engine

of each leaf busy with its visions, and the light,

preoccupied, turning its back: bright

acoustics of the world’s indifference.

The shooting party worked without talking,

but you heard them pass—the lave

and the backwash of their footfalls catching

beneath the summer’s wide brim of leaves—

but all you could think of were dogs

and foxes, their mouths full of damage, running,

frenzied, through fields and gardens with a sheath

of madness on every tooth; of the sweet

and clever hearts of men scuttled by killing;

and then everything began to unravel: the boy

you were kissing became dangerous because

he was a boy and might well grow up

to be a man schooled in murder, like those outside;

like the guards and the Kommandants of Bergen-Belsen,

who had once been boys;

who had all been fathers. The belief

in her father’s goodness is a girl’s last bastion

against the world. And with this gone, what hope

was there for you? The bird bones of happiness

went into exile. Your life became so small.

You pulled your hair out strand by strand,

you grew afraid of mirrors. Terrified

to leave your room after dark you pissed

under the carpet. Even your toys became dangerous.

Death, insistent as a jewel, was inside everything.

And, as easily as this, you lost your childhood.

And with that gone, what was left?

Bodies so still they were hurtful to watch.

Mouths useless as money.

Afterburn of panic, and graves in which thousands

traded their bones. Grass, willing and wild,

over such graves. Nostalgia for a child

who once believed in benevolence; whose body

had once lived like an animal, had felt

the world’s terminal clasp and taken it,

happily, everywhere; a child

who would of course grow up and learn to kiss

with such finesse and tenderness that men

would never guess just how far in she was haunted.

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