Olympia Read Online Free Page B

my uncle, and their mother—the father already halfdead in the salt mines near Odessa, the mineral of dehydration sucking the liquids through his skin, his eyeballs, bringing his lungs, his hunger to the ridge of his teeth. The three of them, six months in a basement. And when the end of the war finally came they were collected onto railcars and rolled over the great smouldering landscape to the shores of the Gulf of Riga where they were released like sickly cattle into a February blizzard. Then hopping trains to get back, holding her little brother’s hand dry with fear as they ran, and she the hand of her mother, the three of them grasping for the invisible hand that reached from the tousled boards of departing freight cars and missing, always missing that train, that hand, walking and waiting and running again. Four months to return home and nothing left but stories of salt and drought, stories that in my boyhood meant as much to me as television, as the map of the un travelled world.

    Before Uncle Günter came that summer, I found purpose in the meaning of those stories. Even then I used them to protect myself. I needed those train stories to protect me from the other meaning of
cattle car.
But the salt connection didn’t occur to me until I saw Günter down there at the bottom of our bone-dry swimming pool. I didn’t understand the salt then, what the drought behind my mother’s tongue meant, what it was doing behind her brother’s eyes. All I saw was the train they rode up to the hanging lip of Sweden. In school we’d seen films of Jews rolling into the camps on those cattle cars, thousands of them at a time. The image of my mother and her little brother aboard one of those wagons shining in my head as brightly as they shot out from those dark spinning reels at the back of the classroom melded with stories of displacement and organized death. After history class I dreamt my mother came to me with forgiveness, sometimes begging. “Peter,” she said. “Sweetheart, we all suffered. No one person more than the next.” But in my dreams and in my waking life I didn’t believe her. I’d seen those films of men and women and children, ghosts already, waiting to die. I told my mother’s story to my teachers and to anyone who would listen. I used it to show how we had paid. That the war had come to us as well.

    She was losing water. The summer drought had already been declared. It was in early August, when my uncle and Monika came to Oakville to spend those weeks with us, that we realized where the problem lay. Hairline cracks, practically invisible, were spreading like transparent veins along the walls and the bottom.

    Uncle Günter and his wife Monika were from Fürstenfeldbruck, a small town outside of Munich. In the letters we got before they arrived they said they planned to stay with us for six weeks, with a weekend trip here and there around the province and down into New York. They wanted to get away from Munich before the Olympic Games quadrupled the size of their town. But once Uncle Günter saw the condition our pool was in, he wanted to crawl down to the bottom and begin repairing those invisible cracks, a job, he assured my parents, that would take three, maybe four days. That’s how he came to take hold of our summer the way he did, and to prolong our thirst.

    Günter and Monika spoke German with my parents, although when Ruby and I were around—which was most of the time—Monika spoke English to us in a British accent. She sounded like Diana Rigg from “The Avengers.” She had spent the war years in England, she told us. Günter’s English wasn’t as good as my parents’. I’d long since been unable to hear their accent, but during open house at school and around the neighbourhood I knew it revealed them as the immigrants they were, the tellers of war stories.

    Everything I saw in Günter, everything he