Odessa, Odessa by Barbara Artson

Author:Barbara Artson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Sixty million deaths occur as a result of World War II, including Saul’s favorite brother, Seymour. At thirty-eight, in March of 1945, he is killed off the remote and formerly unheard of island of Okinawa by a Japanese kamikaze attack. Young Japanese soldiers leave their wives and children to obey Emperor Hirohito’s declaration of war to fight their American counterparts in a forced marriage of suicide and death. Younger than Saul by three years, Seymour leaves his wife, Betty, and their six-month-old infant, Susan. He also leaves a hole in Saul’s already aching heart.

The brothers had plans to go into business together after the war. Saul was to quit his job as production manager so they could open a small laundry in the working-class neighborhood of Guttenberg, New Jersey. They were to employ and train the unemployable—mostly colored men returning from the war—and bring economic vitality to the foursquare block community. No one would have to force them to pay a decent wage and bring dignity to the lives of their employees.

For the second time in his life, Saul weeps unabashedly. With his brother’s death, unlike his mother’s, there is no grave site, no black void in which to heave himself. Nor will there be a marker to signify that a brave young man died on this very spot. Only the cold, dark, hostile waters of the Pacific Ocean will receive the severed body parts that fall freely from the conning station lodged above the pilot house of the LST—a Landing Ship Tank—which are known to his navy brethren as “large slow targets.”

Unlike Icarus’s fall into the Icarian Sea after he disregards his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun, there is no Bruegel to memorialize Seymour’s plunge into the watery sepulcher along with his fellow patriots. There are no survivors.

Typically, when Saul returned home every evening punctually at seven sharp, he rushed in to listen to his nightly news program on the radio. Tonight, he turns the car into the driveway at five and sits motionless for well over an hour, seemingly a statue with his arms over his head, resting on the steering wheel of his gray-and-black Buick that he recently purchased secondhand.

Dora views Saul walking trancelike across the green lawn, looking as though he might have been drinking, perhaps to celebrate the war’s end—something he would never do and never allowed the children to do. He thumps on the front door.

Oh, he must have forgotten his keys, she thinks, not grasping that he had to possess them to drive the car. He looks at her, says nothing, and walks into the kitchen and sits at the kitchen table where his daughters are doing their homework. “What is it, Saul?” Dora asks, “What’s the matter? Isn’t it wonderful that the war is over?”

His daughters sit stricken, helplessly watching their daddy—their all-powerful and silent protector—as he sits at the kitchen table with a crumpled Western Union telegram, taken from his pocket, and makes strange noises. They can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying.

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