We Do Not Forget
a/n: for jill.
-
Some nights she thinks of him; an event that's become rare, but she's long since given up trying to forget. Some have forgotten all those years, she knows, and tries not to look down on them for this. She has never believed that others needed to retain their ghosts, and often feels selfish for having held on to her own pain. Young love, after all, is something often forgotten the next year, but it has been more than fifty.
And he didn't deserve it. Not in the slightest, and she thinks that perhaps this is what makes it so hard to bear. He had been sweet in the beginning, shy and a little awkward, and she remembers his face in the rain. It is raining tonight, but she can hardly dance anymore.
She stretches out her hand to see the water collect on her palm; it is summer, and the rain is colder than she would have expected.
"Mom?"
Oh, he is thoroughly American, her son. Laughing eyes and dark hair (she always thought her children would be blond, somehow, but these days she sees the color as a mark of evil, though she knows this is unfair). He is married and she does not know quite what to think of his wife, a vibrant woman, but a little too brash. She never would have behaved so, but she can accept that these are different times. Different lives.
"It's raining," she tells him, and hears him sigh behind her.
"I can tell, Mom."
Rain, rain, and a soaking wet dress. Almost see-through; she had been shocked when she'd gotten back inside. Perhaps, she muses, she should not be so hard on her daughter-in-law, as she herself had climbed through a window at the age of sixteen, and her activities beforehand had not been altogether innocent. They are not so different, after all.
"You should come inside," says her son, but she shakes her head. "You'll get wet."
"I'm already wet," she says, showing him her hand but nonetheless moving farther under the porch roof. She cannot see the mountains so clearly from here, and she has always loved the mountains.
"We can make it without help, Father." She smiles to think of it; he was always the impertinent one. But it was true, they did make it over the mountains and through the countries and over the ocean and into the lives they live now. She, more than anyone else yet living, can remember the life they left behind. The boy she loved, the boy with sudden and surprising cruelty behind his eyes. She thinks of it as a kind of personal betrayal; he left her.
And so, even now, she thinks of him. Wonders what ever happened to him – if he was killed in the war, what atrocities committed. If he survived, if he's lying awake on the other side of the world with a family of his own. If he feels any sense of responsibility; if he hears the screams of the murdered whenever he closes his eyes.
He would deserve it.
She wishes she could see the world in black and white; he had been good once. She is sure of this. But he was young, impressionable, easily swayed by promises of power. He had loved her – she chooses to believe this – but he had learned to stop caring, to become something less than human. To become cold.
She wonders when she had as well.
(the end)