Free After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Page A

anthology?”
    â€œNo,” I say, feeling suddenly tired, flaccid. “That’s great.” Hannah writes poetry herself. She has even been translated. She is probably better known than I am. I have a flicker of envy. But it only lasts a minute or two. I envy her much more for her intact brain.
    â€œI’ve noticed that images—a white gull with pink feet, a red lily—stick better in my mind than facts or names even of people I know quite well.”
    â€œWhy don’t you read me something?” she says with sudden generosity. I flip through the pages of the slim volume I brought with me. “Here,” I say “just a taste:”
    Her body is not so white as
    anemone petals nor so smooth—nor
    so remote a thing. It is a field
    of the wild carrot taking
    the field by force.
    She cocks her head and looks at me. “Anemone?”
    â€œFive petals, red or purple or white. I love the way he makes it about degrees of whiteness and the personalities of the flowers. You’re my wild carrot.”
    â€œNot sure if I should be flattered,” she says.
    â€œYou should. You’re no hothouse flower. You are stronger than you think.”
    She wraps her arms around herself and shivers as if to contradict me. I wonder what Hannah’s sexual fantasies are like. I’ve never been rough with her, always treated her gently, trying to erase her memories of the camps, but what if she imagines pain: being tied and tormented, spanked, pinched in sensitive places? I look at her, trying to imagine myself into her head.
    Later, back on our terrace, I sit in one of the intact chairs, the one with the embroidered cushion and look over my notebook. Already I am forgetting what I wrote earlier. Some of it sounds quite good. I’d be interested in it if another old man had written it.
    But suddenly I see I’ve made a terrible error. Here I say—quite clearly in blue ink—that Hannah heard my mother playing Chopin, but Hannah didn’t hear her, didn’t even know her. I was confused. It’s true my mother was elegant and regal. I can still remember her dressed to go out to the symphony in a blue velvet gown, her chestnut hair swept up and tamed, but Hannah didn’t know her.
    If Hannah had known her, would she have liked her? I think so. Funny how their meeting seems so true. Did I say that Hannah saw her dead body and kissed her face? I can’t remember if I said that, but that isn’t true either. I would have liked it certainly, the two women I care most about, together.
    Hannah had insisted on a visit to a neurologist “just to have a baseline.” I hated the idea. It suggested a progressive worsening. Before my follow-up visit I was so afraid of whatthe doctor would find that I threw up. My vomit was thin and green with yellow specks. An abstract painting that mesmerized me for some minutes before I got off my knees and washed my face.
    It’s not that my doctor is unfriendly or incompetent, but still she makes me feel as if I’ve dropped into a parallel universe, changing from subject to object. She scans my face, looks me over, and asks me how I’m doing. I try to be upbeat. Then she asks Hannah if she has noticed anything new since last time. Hannah tells her about my mistakes with money, my difficulty with simple arithmetic, my confusion about what things cost. My buying the seventeenth century book. I am embarrassed, like a small boy at school trying to sound out words that he doesn’t know.
    â€œI’ve been tired lately,” I say. “I haven’t been well.”
    The doctor exchanges a look with Hannah. I suddenly can’t remember what kind of a doctor she is. Pediatrician? Geriatrician? Oncologist? I feel more and more anxious and cover it with a smile. She is talking to Hannah about some new medicines that are being tested. I protest that I don’t want any medicine.
    â€œIt might help with