Free This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud

longer. My mother slept in the seat in front of us. Her head was on the window. It bounced sometimes but she did not wake up until it got light. How can she sleep, I asked Emira. Hush , Emira said. My brother, too, drifted off to sleep. His hand covered the bun in his lap and the cheese with its beads of sweat that had turned cold on top. I could not steal it. My father did not sleep. He walked up and down the car. Then, in the exact middle of the night, when everyone except us two, in the whole world, was sleeping, he turned in his seat and looked into my eyes. I did not intend this, he said. I nodded. But maybe it’s better this way.
    When my mother woke she gave us each another bun and another stick of cheese. Now my brother had twomeals in his lap. Eat your food, said my mother, crossly. Don’t act like a poor person. My brother said to me: You can have that bun now, and he stretched out his hand, with the stale bun in it, to me. I laughed in his face. I would not touch it.
    ONE DAY, ON OUR WAY into town, we smelled a barbecue in someone’s yard. I looked out the window and saw a low house, with the smoke of the grill rising up, over the top of the fence. The bent head of a man could be seen. He was wearing a hat.
    â€œDo you ever wish,” I asked my mother, “that we were a regular family, who did regular things?”
    â€œOh yes,” my mother said, “all the time.”
    THE MORNING WE LEFT my father, he said he’d drive us in to school. He was like an animal, and sensed something in the air. We didn’t tell him. “Let’s go up to the lot after school,” he said. “Let’s clear a few trees, then go out for a meal.” He talked the whole way to town, though in those days we almost always drove in silence.
    â€œWe’ll cut hay this year,” he said. “You kids will help. We’ll get a horse. Be cowboys.”
    My mother picked us up after school with the boxes in the back of the station wagon, and then we unpacked them at an apartment in town. We didn’t go back to my father’s house for some weeks and when we did there was a note on the table that said, I’m just out at the lot, I’ll be back before long.
    â€œHow did he know we were coming today?” my brother said. I said: “How do you know that he wrote that this morning?”
    AFTER THE WAR, my father’s father came home, and for seven months he stayed. The neighbours wrote things on his wall, and on the stone outside his step. Worse than that. They did not like a German.
    I’m not a German, my father’s father said, but he took his children to Bavaria, and raised them near the border. His gentle wife he treated like a rag, but other than that he was a kind, and homesick, man.
    NOW MY AUNT Emira says: “Ha! ‘There wasn’t a stick in the house,’ the man says. It goes to show you the holes in his story.”
    Then my father starts to sing and Emira goes for the spoon. “I’m not saying Uncle Alen wasn’t shot,” he relents before she can hit him, “I’m just saying Nino was too. I saw him. Out on the lawn. Stretched, as though resting. We didn’t have shoes.”
    â€œYou fool,” my aunt says. “You think they took the bed from under you? You think they took it while you slept?”
    â€œI didn’t sleep,” my father says. “I haven’t slept my whole long life.” He starts to sing. Aunt Emira brings the spoon down—hard—on the table.
    â€œStop singing those songs,” she tells him. “People willhate you. Your children will hate you. Do you want that? Do you want that, you dummy?”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with singing?” my father asks. Then looks up, and wags his head in a loop, as if searching for the cynic who might be hidden somewhere. “What’s wrong with singing a song sometimes?”
    â€œNo one sings like that anymore,” Emira