Olympia Read Online Free Page A

fifteen minutes along the highway. At the edge of the water I overhear a rumour that someone found an old lady last night on the east shore, tangled in the bulrushes. They say her hair was still neatly tied back, her jewellery shiny in the moonlight.

    A weak light from the street lamp opposite the house enters through the big front window. The house is settling into itself for the night. It creaks as the heat of the day drains from its dusty rafters, its secret corners. I’m standing at the fireplace mantel. I remember this photograph from years ago, when I used to play in the attic during the day. It’s faded since then, but my grandmother is wearing the same smile, as if she sees something waiting for her on the horizon, something in the future.

    There are the two sisters, Louise and Greta, just as I remember them, looking into the camera, uncomfortable. Now I know why they’re sneering, half defiant, half terrified. Out of view their hands search for one another, convinced of something terrible to come. And here is Erika, the skinny girl with the pointy nose, efficient and wary. Then Silke, the girl with the heart and arrow drawn beside her name in my grandmother’s youthful flowing hand. She hasn’t changed either, though so many other things have since this photograph was taken, back when the world was new and alive with light, before there was any need to look back and remember.

II

    A man filmed the three boys playing football on Mohrenstraße. Silke sat on a nearby doorstep, knitting. She smiled at the man with the camera. Two Brownshirts came around the corner then. One of the men picked up the ball and kneeled and motioned to one of the boys with a finger. Silke put down her knitting needles and wool and watched her son walk towards the man holding the ball. An old woman sat in the shadows of her living room and looked out a ground-floor window and watched the man with the ball place his right hand on the boy’s shoulder and say something to the boy that she could not hear. The man’s partner laughed when he made a scissors with his fingers and viciously snipped at the air. Both men laughed when the little boy put his hands between his legs and grimaced. Tears welled in the little boy’s eyes. Just then a roar came across the city from the direction of the Maifeld, where the national team had just scored against Czechoslovakia. The photographer propped the camera back up on his shoulder and began to make his way out of the ghetto and back to the stadium.

Olympia

    In August 1972, just before my fourteenth birthday, almost a year to the day after my grandmother drowned, my uncle Günter came to us from Germany and found cracks at the bottom of our swimming pool. Because war stories had always been a part of my family, I thought I knew something of my mother’s brother. All the grown-ups around me then had lived through war, including my father, and everybody had a story they seemed willing to share—friends of my parents, the teller from Frankfurt who worked at the Bank of Montreal at Lakeshore and Charles and spoke to my father in whispers over folded fives and twenties. It seemed that everyone my parents knew back then had escaped to this country from that dark place, as they had, after the war ended. But it took me until that summer to find out that there were things I hadn’t been told, that there were secrets in my house.

    I knew that my mother spent her war years in the north of Germany, trapped there among falling bombs. She told me about brushing her teeth with salt, the constant drought under her tongue, how they ate nothing but salted cabbage. She told me about the dead man who fell from the sky and lay in the front yard of their house through the month of May and into June and how an old woman from the neighbourhood came by with a bucket of salt every week and sprinkled it over the body to keep the fumes down until the town came and took him away.

    She,