Free Her Mother's Daughter by Marilyn French

around us, few houses and no people in sight. We walked along a broad dirt road at an easy pace, conversing in the stilted way people do when one of them has learned a language from textbooks and language classes. Adam spoke English but I was never sure he understood what I said. Still, I jabbered, happy to be able to speak after my long near-silence. We were lovers, at my initiation, and happy.
    Then, from a side road hidden by high wheat fields, a man emerged. I was old enough to realize that he was very young, probably only in his early twenties. But I paused when I saw him, and he stopped dead and his mouth opened as he stared at me. He was very tan and as wrinkled as newly washed linen. He had few teeth. His eyes were pale blue and empty. And he looked at me as if I were of another species, the way we might look at a six-foot-five Sikh in Manhattan, complete with red fitted jacket, white sash, scimitar and turban. I was forty-five, and the best-looking I’d ever been; I was thin, too. I was wearing a pale blue soft safari suit that I often took on hard journeys, a cheap straw hat with a stylish brim, and sunglasses, and I carried my heavy bag of camera equipment over my shoulder. But his expression suggested I was a goddess offering him a visitation.
    And I thought: so that is what a peasant is. Or anyway, what peasant meant to my grandmother. Subhuman. The man may have been intelligent enough—he certainly knew crops and weather, and animal husbandry—things I didn’t know. But intelligence didn’t appear on his gaping face; I could not imagine him speaking. He was a creature immured in blue sky, the wind, wheat fields, shaky wood-fenced yards full of dung. Circumscribed within nature, and benighted, benighted. I was shocked by him. I was shocked that the word subhuman crossed my mind. So this is what they meant, the old ones, when they talked of peasants.
    The moment passed. He crossed the road and we walked on ahead of him. We didn’t look back. We arrived at Zmegrud and wandered its two streets, looked at the few houses, the one closed shop, the church, also locked. But by asking, Adam discovered a man who claimed Dafna Pasek was his mother’s mother’s cousin. He took us home, where his wife and sons welcomed us like visiting royalty. They gave us a meal I could barely eat because the parents stayed in the kitchen, and I knew Adam and I were eating their portion. The sons—four of them—had been educated under the socialist government and were all professional men. Only three were there: the fourth, the pride of his mother, was a papal functionary stationed in Rome. The centerpiece of her room was a gift from him, a small model of the Vatican that could be plugged into a wall socket, and lighted up. They listened to my tale, through Adam.
    They told us we were not really in Zmegrud. The old Zmegrud had been several miles down the road. But we had no way to get there and there was no reason to go there, they said, for there was nothing there. Zmegrud had been a Jewish town. I don’t know if it was a Jewish town when my grandmothers lived there, or if it was mixed then, or if it became a Jewish town in the decades after they left. But it was a Jewish town when the Nazis came. The Nazis collected all the people of Zmegrud from their houses and marched them to a valley deep in the mountains. Standing behind the two hundred or so people—children, women, men—the Nazis forced them to dig a hole. Then they shot them so they fell into the hole. It is said that some were not dead when the low-ranking Nazi soldiers filled up the hole with dirt and poured lime over it—lime speeds decomposition. But no one knows for sure.
    What everyone knows and still remembers is the explosion that occurred a few days later. The lime, they said: there was too much, or it bubbled too much. The explosion blew up the burial pit, sending bits of limbs across the countryside for miles