Tante Eva

poverty and starvation of so many. America! And Liezel used to invite Eva to visit! Never would she set foot in that country, never. Where Blacks had been slaves, traded like cattle. Where education and health care were only for the rich. Where so few lived like kings and the majority lived in squalor. They had seen movies, Hugo and Eva and all of their acquaintances, of the slums of Chicago. These were movies played often in East Germany, at the state-owned cinemas. Of the hungry and malformed living in West Virginia, dying in coal mines. Liezel was different from Hugo, despite their atheism. Liezel had let go of so much that she’d become almost cynical, definitely selfish, concerned only with herself like a good capitalist, whereas Hugo, more than anyone Eva knew, believed in the possibility of a better, safer world, where justice and integrity could be had by all.
When Liezel was a little girl, Eva was her whole world. Eva was a decade older, and Liezel worshipped her. She wanted to have blonde hair like Eva’s and blue eyes like Eva’s. She’d pull at her dark hair and look so sad. “Ich möchte aussehen wie du,” she’d say, in her sweet little girl voice and her large dark eyes were sad like a calf’s.
Liezel was Eva’s “first daughter.” When her own daughter arrived, years later, it didn’t affect her as it did some new mothers. She felt she’d done it all before. She worried that this had caused her problems with Elena, that Elena knew she wasn’t really her first child, her first maternal love.
She remembered very well when her mother brought Liezel home from the hospital. The war hadn’t really affected their part of Austria yet, at least not in any way that Eva was aware of. Their mother and father, though not without problems, she guessed, seemed very much in love. He was a tailor, and she worked hard to take care of their home and the children. When Liezel was born, Eva began helping more than ever around the house. She learned how to change diapers and gave baby Liezel baths. She fed her food that she ground herself in a baby-food grinder, taking the scraps she kept after preparing the meals for her brother and father, and putting them all together in the hand grinder, swinging the arm of the grinder around and around in circles, until the food was mush. And she’d hold her baby sister’s sweet, milky-sour flesh against her own and sing to her, rocking her gently, until she’d fall asleep. She often watched her mother breastfeed with envy. How she loved her little baby sister. How she’d wished she were her baby.
Her mother was thirty then, still young and still healthy, before the lupus attacked her. It was before the war affected them. It was a time of innocence, in Eva’s mind. A time of hope.
That time disappeared rapidly.
Sometimes she wondered if her mother got sick because of the war. And her father, Franz Stiller, stupidly volunteering near the end of it. On a drunken bet, he volunteered. Eva remembered the argument. Her mother crying, yelling. Her father rough and domineering, as he often was. He was too old—much older than their mother—and too nearsighted to be drafted. And he hated the Nazis. He hated them for killing his sister, who’d suffered from epilepsy. Eva hadn’t known her aunt very well. But her father knew when they took her to the hospital, before the war even started, that she wasn’t coming back. The idiots, the mongoloids, the homosexuals, all the many varieties of the handicapped. They all went first. But her father was the sort of man who became stupid when he was drunk—and the sort of man who never backed out of any bet he made. Pride, the sin of Lucifer himself.
Just like that—and he was gone. Willi missed him the most. He became unmanageable. And so, they made him stay out until supper, and then again, until bedtime. “Raus! Raus mit dir!” she remembered her mother yelling. And Eva, too, would yell that at him, if he came home to sit around, sullen and angry and throwing things. Raus!
In her own marriage, she didn’t know who was the crueler. It always appeared that way from the outside, that one is crueler than the other, but often it’s the opposite in private. Behind closed doors, the one who seems kinder, the one who appears to be the victim, may be the most insidious, the most vicious.
A week after she received the letter, the phone rang in the hall. Most everyone had their own phone, but not Eva nor Krista and her mother. Eva was home and heard it. The walls in the building were made from cheap particle board—everyone could hear everything. Eva walked down the hall and answered it. It was her daughter, Elena.
“Hallo, Mutti,” she said.
“Hallo, Elena, Liebchen, was ist los?”
Her daughter did not call often. She often thought, despite their distance, that they were close enough. They were in each other’s lives, weren’t they? Elena had moved to the West in her late teens and resented her mother for bringing her up in the GDR. To leave, she had to defect, to abandon the country and all she knew. Afterward, she had been forbidden to return. This was only because Elena had been foolish enough to join the Party. If she hadn’t been such an enthusiastic Communist in her teens, they would have been much more lenient on her, but when a Party member left, it was a betrayal that caused a casting out. It had been a harsh time. In some ways, it was after Hugo died that the resentment began. Elena’s resentment of her changed shapes and forms—for not providing her a father, as if it were Eva’s fault he died. Perhaps, for not giving them a life in the West—but it was all the same to Eva. Blaming. Self-pitying. Eva had loved her.