GRACE AND GRAVITY

by Lex Shramko

What? Had you known what? I want to ask. 

“But, you know,” she shrugs. “I was just a kid.” Her lips seam together with regret. Then I understand—she means that she looked away. She lost her sister. 

“There was a commotion. Big, important officers with their sleek cars, standing in the road, divvying the spoils. Fat, lit cigars. Self-important bellies. Pointing. Here! There!” Mom points aggressively, her voice low and loud. “I looked around. 

And when I looked back…”

I wait. I half expect a scene of bloodied terror or tangled chaos. “There was nothing. No one. I never saw her again.” 

Curled into herself, rigid, shocked. A German medical corpsman staying with her, holding the car door for balance. Crouching next to her in a tiny ball perched on the backseat. Gently coaxing her. For days. He went away and returned often. Never leaving her alone for long. Her eyes open. Her eyes close again. He beckons with his hands.

Come, you must come. I have made a little private area for you. You must relieve yourself. Come. What is your name? What is your country? What is your language? Come. Kommen. Podoydi. Come.

Tatyana. I am called Tatyana. They call me Taty. She doesn’t think her mouth has moved. Or has it? 

Later, after she has squatted for an eternity behind hanging blankets and released a flood of urine, she stands uncertainly. Hands in the pockets of her thick fabric coat, made from her apartment window curtains, made by her mother. The roughness of the fabric on her skin because the clothes underneath have rotted away. An Allied soldier, this one with a hat, stops near her and kneels. His face kind. His jacket stained and open at the neck. 

What is your name? Are you alone? Where was your home? 

A smatter of broken Russian trickles through her mind. Some words she understands. She cries out, forgetting to say her name, forgetting to say the name of her homeland. 

Where is my sister? I’ve lost her.

Rows and rows of coiled barbed wire. The man with the stained jacket and hat holds her hand, tightly, tightly. Addressing a Russian guardsman across the rolls of concertina. 

Do you know a woman named Galina? I have her sister here. 

Give her to me. Together she and I will look for her sister. Come. Podoydi. 

My sister! She rushes forward, her shoulder jerking when the hand holding hers tightens and pulls back, away from the fence. 

Standing alone in a crowd. On the edge of a village’s dirt road. German army prisoners marching through a crowd of onlookers. A German Oberstleutnant under Allied guard stops in his tracks. Stares at her. He speaks to his captor. His body is still, jackboots properly parallel, his Aryan head angled. His captor nods and they approach. The captor keeps his hands on his gun, watchful. 

Where is Galina? Have you seen Galina? Are you alone? 

A dim glimmer of recognition. Where has she seen him before? How does he know Galina’s name? The captor looks at her and softens, easing from wariness to kindness. 

I’ve lost her. Do you know where she is? 

Nein, nein. But we will look for her. For now, you must wait for me. He empties his pockets and gives his gold watch to a woman bystander. 

You—you there. Yes. You please take this watch and feed this child. I will return. I will not be long. Come. 

The summer in the woods. She is not cold sleeping under the stars. Foraging for berries, mushrooms. Sitting on the woman’s stoop, waiting for the food. 

Sometimes there is a bowl of thin broth. 

You there. Leave the bowl on the step when you are done. 

Stay in the woods, sleep under the night sky, tucked in a thicket of grass, it is better. No one sees her in the bush. Naked under her coat save for a pair of underpants. Watch the stars shift in the sky. There, there is the Pole star. That way is north. 

The Oberstleutnant returns. I will take you home to my wife, we don’t have children. Come. Komm. 

Home is an impossibly magnificent estate in the forest. A week’s sleep, around the clock. In a real bed. Tailored clothes. But the coat is lost, it is burned. Too much dirt and too many lice. Books and education. She is just eleven years old—she can learn fast. Private tutoring in German. A sanctuary of forest trails. A forest trail to the city of Hamelin. Another forest trail to her new friend’s house. A trail to an overgrown cottage, where Old Russian cloyed on the lips of an impossibly ancient Russian movie starlet living alone. The forest is her new language. The forest is all she knows. The forest is all that is reliable. The trees and the sky beckon. It’s okay. You are here now. Come. 

Months later. An exchange of letters among German officers seeking Galina. News that she is in Germany but leaving. An immediate return letter: Where is she now? 

Where is she going? A reply letter, weeks later. It is not known; she didn’t say. 

Come, it is time for your chores. Come. 

Come! Get dressed—we are going to the city now. Come. 

A walk through the streets of Hamelin, hand held tightly by the Oberstleutnant. He trips her with his cane, the one with the hidden rapier. Stumbling but held up by his strong pull on her hand. Falling but not falling. A moment of floating, adrift and trapped. Her free hand reaching for the Oberstleutnant’s arm—

—a flash of sky and the Oberstleutnant’s face tilted towards a secondstory window. His face communicating something to the window, and her own eyes helplessly darting to the same window. A woman’s face dissolving behind a twitch of curtain. 

You must have tripped! But look, I caught you. You’re fine. Come. 

Her heart thudding. A pain in her shin from the cane. Embarrassed to have tripped, maybe even scuffed her good leather shoes, she concentrates on her steps, hurrying to keep up with the Oberstleutnant. 

They return to the estate home by way of the forest path. She thinks about the woman in the window. Was that her sister? But why would the Oberstleutnant keep the sisters apart?

She is good, she is obedient, she is perfect. She goes along. She has no other choice. 

An increasingly absent Oberstleutnant, visiting the city often. The wife’s mounting brittleness and quickness of temper. Lashings with a switch for minor slights. The tightening in the shoulders when she is beckoned. The heavy fear slows her footsteps through the forest when she is late returning home. 

Furtive glances from the refugee Polish housekeeper. Pressed lips. On her last day with her suitcase. I have a job now in the city. My son and I are moving to the city. Listen carefully: If you ever feel something is not right. You will know. It will be—not right. If that, you must leave. Leave! 

By day, an unpredictably broken-hearted wife. By night, an unsafe bed. If you think that lashing was bad, just you wait until Papi comes home. This time I will not protect you. Come!

Sent to her chores. Today it is to beat rugs clean. Shoulders hunched, feet moving obediently, perfectly. The Polish housekeeper’s voice in her head. 

It is time to leave. Beating a rug slung over a line. Thumping the beater carefully over every inch. Duck around with a quick, casual glance at the windows and disappear behind the rug. Beat, and beat again. Thoroughly. Beat, step. Beat, step. Drop the beater and turn for the forest, sprinting. Run like the wind. 

Run without stopping to the city. The woods flying past, the trees leaning away and closing behind her. The forest her friend. 

Wait for hours at the schoolyard for lessons to finish. The housekeeper’s son at the schoolyard fence touching the chain-link. I will take you home to my mother. Come.

The IRO officer, sitting primly behind a desk. What? Why? She has food, shelter, clothing. She is in a good place. Leave. 

The housekeeper turns her around, hands gentle on her shoulder. Her back to the officer. Her shirt is lifted. Exposed. Bruised. Silence. The layers of bruises, each a different shade. Ancient green edges under ripe purple and red. Dull gray over that. No scabs no bleeding because the switch was expertly laid. Blood risen to just under the surface of the skin. Just so and no more than that. 

I see. We will place her in the system. Come.

A children’s home. A friendly knot of war orphans under the kind loving eyes of a professorial husband and wife team. All refugees together laughing, crying, living. Departing for the lands of distant relatives. 

“It was arranged by the children’s home in Germany. Originally, I was going by boat, to Canada. I was on the same boat as my sister.” 

“Wait, Mom, I don’t understand—was she trying to find you? Why didn’t you go on that boat?” 

She stops scrubbing the dishes in the sink, and shuts the tap off. She stands a little taller as she turns her head to me so I can see her face clearly. “I flew.” Mirth—and pride—crinkle at the corners of her eyes. 

“What? How?” 

“It was my friend Elvira in the children’s home who said, ‘Canada’—she says— ‘eh, you can do better than that! Why don’t you go to the United States?’ As a matter of fact, a bunch of us from the home flew together to New York. There was a wine steward on the flight.” 

I blink, as much at the idea of a wine steward thirty thousand feet up in the air as I do at the realization that I don’t actually know when—or how—my mother immigrated.

“It was a total and complete fluke. I don’t know if there was some grand plan. Maybe she did know I was going to be on that ship—somehow, I don’t think so. I can only think it was a fluke. Any other possibility—I can’t—” she waves her hand in the air, as if erasing a chalkboard. She continues, “It was the SS Samaria. 

It sailed from Bremerhaven to Canada—” 

“Wait—what? You had passage booked on the same boat as Galina?” 

“Yes.” 

“But—how do you know? That’s impossible to know.” 

“The Red Cross.” 

“But—how? I mean, they just do blood donations…” 

“Oh no. No. They are much more than that—they are international. Disasters the world over. They have a fantastic network—anyway. They sent me a letter with the information. I still have the letter. I have all the letters. This was before you were born. Remember how I told you that I looked in Canada for her? I knew to try there, in Toronto—” 

This story—the completely thwarted chance of reunification—is one I haven’t heard before. 

“Toronto was just a terminus for her immigration. They would have landed somewhere at a port and then taken a train or a bus to Toronto for processing. She may have stayed there. Or she could have gone on to Australia, South America—” “South America?”

“I have no idea where she is,” my mom continues, snapping my interruptions away with her hand. “I must go back to the last known place. What I need to do is go to Toronto and check out every single church.” 

I look silently at my mother. I know she’s seeing herself, moving from church to church, inking names and clues on scrap paper. I know this because I, too, see her climbing wide stone steps and pulling open heavy wooden double doors. This feels like an impossible task—how many churches must there be in Toronto? 

Reading my face, she continues, “I would start with the Russian Orthodox churches.”

“Yeah, but how do you know she would have belonged to a church—” 

“Doesn’t matter. I should have done that. And I didn’t.” 

“Mom—.” I exhale sharply. I am suddenly exhausted by her regrets. And the stubborn way she clings to them. Or perhaps it is the regrets that won’t let my mother go. This time, it is me who waves my hand in the air to try to bring her back to the subject of the SS Samaria. I don’t want to believe that Galina and my mother were so close to finding each other and failed.

“How do you know that you had passage on that same boat? I mean, how can you be sure of the day and time—”

“Because it sailed only once a month and not even every month!” Mom’s tone is impetuous, impatient. But there is a small wedge of warmth in her eyes. 

“Even if you had been on the same boat, it’s not guaranteed you would have run into each other. Weren’t these big ships, with thousands of people?”

“These sailings took weeks.” A pause; a gentle smile of certitude. “We would have found each other.” Said softly and surely. And she is silent again, adrift and alone.

---

Lex Shramko is a nom de plume that seeks to give credit to her mother’s story, which she captures in her debut memoir. When she is not writing, she teaches feminist philosophy and fencing. Otherwise, she is always on an adventure of traveling, biking, or scuba diving, or checking out the latest coffee shop. Preferably one with a resident cat or dog. She has published academically in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Subjectivity. A newly emergent creative writer, she has published recently in Moonpark Review,Gargoyle, Broadkill Review, and the Washington Post. She was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and France. She lives in Virginia.