Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger

Author:Simon Stranger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

L for the leaden atmosphere, in the cells at Falstad, stale and musty from body odor.

L for the laughter that occasionally broke out among the prisoners when someone told a joke. You were surprised at how often this happened. As though humor wasn’t the first victim of war after all, but among the last, as it helped the prisoners escape the barbed hooks of mistrust, bringing life back to their eyes and a more relaxed look to their faces—for a few seconds at least—in a moment vaguely reminiscent of mercy.

L for Lillemor, or Esther Meyer Komissar, as she was really called. The only one who remained in Sweden after the first time the Komissars fled to Sweden at the outbreak of war in 1940. Lillemor may be the only one of us who’ll survive this, you sometimes think, when your circumstances allow you enough peace and energy to reflect; like while you are working in the quarry and the German guards are chatting among themselves. You never got to see it, but Lillemor outlived the war; she outlived everyone, and was almost ninety-nine years old when Rikke and I visited her in Stockholm in 2016.

It was a Sunday in early September, and we had arranged to meet at her home in a functionalist-style apartment block just outside the city. I had met her a couple of times before, the last time at Gerson’s funeral, and I remembered her as an energetic and colorful lady who wore large sunglasses and red trousers and who had a passion for art, but that was already a few years back, and I had no idea what shape she was in now. Time can quickly slip away with the elderly, as it can with small children, where only a few years can separate a crawling baby and a preschooler with a satchel and ponytail.

With someone older, five to six years can make the difference between someone who’s up and about and someone with dementia, but that was not the case with your daughter. Lillemor received us with a smile and a walker, upon which she balanced a breakfast tray and a cup of coffee. She wore a bright red cardigan and white trousers, matching earrings, and gray hair in a pageboy cut. We took off our shoes, presented her with the bottle of port and basket of strawberries we had brought, and made our way through the first few seconds of social fumbling, helped along by comments about how nice it was to see each other. Immediately afterward, when I stood in her kitchen helping with the food, she tapped her almost-ninety-nine-year-old finger on a mint-green plate I had in my hands and said: “We had that plate when I was a little girl. My mother and father bought it in America.”

For a moment I imagine her five- or six-year-old hand, tiny little fingers and soft skin, merged with the sight of her wrinkled fingers and nearly blue nails. The little plate had once possessed an aura of greatness and wonder.

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