I rest in the drone of bumble bees among the lavender. As Arctic forests burn it lets me forget. The cool intoxication of lavender runs through me like water over stones in a mountain stream, and forms a mirage as you first bloomed in the plump green of early summer.

Your flowers fell in bright yellow garlands, as at the return of war heroes to Imperial Rome. At first the trumpets sound, but, quickly tiring of their boastfulness, I silence them and return to my childhood bedroom, shared with my little sister, where Father read us bed-time stories of Goldilocks and Rapunzel. I see you in the tumbling blond locks of his stories, portrayed with relish, despite his balding head.

Your scent is pleasant, reserved and clean, like a woman in a tailored dress made irresistible by its restraint. Your flowers say “you can have it all” and your scent says “by being sparing.” The memory of you pours like a waterfall over the dust and whispers that secret to us, as the earth burns with greed.
​
I cut back your dead flowers in hopes that new shoots will come, and they do, but frustrate my hunger for yellow garlands with only greenness and leaves. There will be no more this year, because you want me to know that there is such a thing as enough.

You wait patiently as I struggle to stay with my own breath. Thoughts block awareness and litter my mind, like the tiny wild strawberries suspended like unknown planets at your feet. I run through my body from head to toe to convince myself that I am not my mind, but something in me is still unwilling. You wait at the portal, one of your heads bowing to the heat of the first morning sun. You already are what I seek, yet you know that I must discover it myself.

You are like my regrets: unforgiving as the carpet of thorns that covers your stems, so that there is nowhere I can grip without getting hurt; unravelling as I behold you, your colors dividing into a spectrum—of white, magenta and flamingo pink—like my original premises. You overpower the pain and uncertainty with the aroma of a pasha’s palace that infiltrates the surface of the coffee table before me, where exotic painted flowers take form in the tiles.

Your leaves cup each of my regrets like a raindrop, an offering to our sun god. Maybe they will evaporate, and then all that will be left is you and me in this temple of being.

Outside the temperatures had sunk to -5 C, it was dark and the pavements had turned slippery under the first thin dusting of snow. With each minute that passed, the 7 pm concert across the road in the palace chapel seemed to drift away in the stream of events unattended, on cold winter nights when the couch and a warm blanket beckoned.

The bell to the front door signalled that my husband had come home just in time to stop the slumber of bears. “Shall we go?” he asked rhetorically, infused with the heady energy of a clear winter’s night. The aperture for an evening out that had nearly shut now shot wide open, and within minutes we were making our way past the cressets that lined the path to the royal chapel.

Under the embossed dome with flickering candles inside glass holders, the discomfort of the hard wooden pews seemed the only reminder of earthliness. Thin whispers effervesced in the silence, until a lithe, pale man in a grey suit and sky blue tie broke the quiet with his shoe soles on the stone floor. He bowed to the audience, then turned to the harpsichord and sat down, laying soft eyes on the two rows of keys that had become lovers and old friends, in hours, days and years of practice.

Barely without a pause, he played the thirty variations on the opening aria, composed and published by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1741 as an antidote to insomnia for one of his patrons. By all accounts, at the outset Bach regarded this as a monotonous exercise, something like counting sheep. But maybe even the genius surprised himself.

I struggled to follow the agile fingers as they flew across the keyboards, often moving at a velocity and in contortions that made the performance seem like Olympic gymnastics. There was a call to faith in this music that challenged and sometimes even panicked me with its divergent melodies, but that always came together, acknowledging that the threads had never really been separate at all.
​
In the Variations I caught a glimpse of what polyphony can teach us. There is an aria, a harmonic interdependence, to which we all tend and in which we all move. If we do not recognize it, even fight it, there will be no music, only chaos and collapse. This part of who we are - every being connected, every note connected – must be acknowledged in a score. It is the very frame by which independent rhythms and contours are set free to play.  We can be who we are - the variations - if we can acknowledge that we are humans first.

Like a silk scarf that flutters carelessly in the wind, your petals won’t obey. They swagger in different directions—like wisps of hair left to caress the face—in a designer messiness that eludes over-thinking. At times you are as tan as a leather cowboy hat, and at others you aspire to the yellow robes of Eastern royals. I cannot organize you, characterize you or decide who you are.

Frustrated, I look to your stems to find the answers in your past. There I discover two types of stems: one is thick and yellowish, with large thorns widely spaced so they can easily be avoided; the other is thin and green, with thorns, like the small sharp teeth of a carnivorous fish, that pierce wherever one touches the stem. I discover that you have the flamboyance of a mutt, grown from parents of such differing temperaments that you toss your hands in the air and say “to hell with it—I am me.”

For all of your swagger, you haven’t lost your sweetness. In fact, the ants literally love you to death, and devour some of your buds whole before they have the chance to blossom. There is a callousness in the jagged stumps the ants leave behind, like the remnants of a forest fire.
​
But you are a survivor, and I meet you there: In the yellow shadows of the sky after a long, hot day, when the sun has burned through the cool blue, and you are still resilient with color.

In the batting of an eyelid, you populated your patch of the earth quickly and then you were gone. From the countless first buds, like a sea of white lights in the night, you seemed to straddle the long, slow work of evolution and were suddenly there, not in one or two but in plenty. I visited you each morning to watch a gradual opening, but you were in a different rhythm, or keeping ahead of all rhythms, like a face that has undergone age-defying treatment. You played with my ingrained sense of time – past, present and future – and claimed that such conventions were old hat. There was just you and the cascades of giddy pleasure that fell from your branches, forever in this fleeting moment.

The sweetness of your flowers wrapped me in sticky cotton candy - in too much there was never enough. Their opening was like the grand opening of a giant department store, offering early-bird discounts. The pollinators clambered over one another to get the most and the best, fastest. The usual graces – keeping to one’s flower or only climbing into a new one when it became vacant – were a wistful memory. The distance between wanting and getting vanished, meaning we were in danger.

You invaded the neighboring flower beds, offering no other justification than that you needed the space. I cut back your unsightly upshoots, the tiny angry thorns penetrating my thin garden gloves. But it seemed hopeless. You were like a hydra, with tendrils that beckoned to be cut so they could multiply.
​
Just as this wild dance was at its most virulent, your petals began to fall like young men on the battlefield, and within a day all that was left was a colorless bush. You retreated into the shadow of your dark leaves, empty as a widow. All’s quiet on the western front. The genie is back in the bottle. But your short life haunts my thoughts daily, and I meditate to still them.

You float dry in the small sea on my desk. My greed for your scent parches you, no matter how much water you get. Beheaded from that prickly body, your scent retreats into the water. If I drink it, perhaps I will taste you as you once were, but that is impossible, for I have taken you from your magic place, where the most extraordinary things grow knowingly out of a desert mirage.

You came from the Eastern fringes, that corner of my island that faces Mecca. There, your ruffled petals were like many whirling dervishes, dizzying me as I followed their contours in a never-ending flow. Your infinite swirling transfixed me, until I snapped the fingers of my intellect that said this wasn’t allowed. It was my tragedy, not yours. Other petals still swirl atop that bush, until the red fruit bulges out of the flowers like clowns’ noses, and the dervishes retreat into the memory of the roots.

You were unabashed magenta, defying the pastels of dust and stone. This could seem promiscuous, but flowers of the desert must flaunt themselves to survive. Chartreuse leaves covered in a barely-visible fur that kept vital fluids in and preying insects out, served as shade for the thick, grey stalks of a thousand hair-thin thorns. The roots had grown deeper than my spade could ever dig, and so I began to understand that you drank your magic from underground rivers.

The bumble bees lost their minds in your nectar. As they dug themselves into the heart of you, your scent intensified, overwhelming the air like incense. Even if I have the power to pick you, your intensity won’t stay in my hand, because you are like a prayer call that falls from the minaret.

I try to name you, as though this were an easy thing, and quickly run into contortions. Your soft petals are like the skin of a new born that slides across my fingers like silk, and that I dare not try to catch lest I ruin the flow. Like water that cannot be held, they elude naming.

Were you the first to open in my garden this spring that seems like high summer? I’ve been waiting and watching to catch the first opening bud, so that I can call you something, as though pressing a loud button in a game show; waiting since last year when you and the others wilted and your last flowers froze with open mouths in still deaths at the first frost. Instead I slept last night as you pushed back your encasement, even if night in this land retreats to the point of a needle in summer. I soared on the wings of a dream through my imaginings of what you would become, but now that I see you, I know you are more than a dream can manage.

I look around and see your cousins still holding their petals in tight buds, like a woman’s taut up-do waiting to be released from hair spray and pins. Up on top, just under the roof ledge, two of your siblings have opened, and cry to the heavens like amateur opera singers. You are the quiet brave one, opening surely in the shade of leaves, keeping your color, not selling out to the bleach-hot sun.  

The aroma of lilac wafts regal purple through the garden, but inside your buds - those countless change agents - is a new time that will come when it chooses. It will take us by storm and transform everything as we knew it in this garden, a microcosm of the world. You are young and shy, but unmistakably like a smell I don’t know that I’ll try to call peach or something inadequate like classic soap. Eventually, when all of your petals are open and I pass under your archway, it will be as though it is all I have ever known. Your fresh pink face, like grandmother’s begonias, and your lemon curd yellow heart will form me for a time, until that becomes old time.

No past isn’t a part of me, and, just as a reminder, you’ll come again in late summer. You hang on, my marathon rose. In your persistence, my own becomes less irritating. 

"What You Read" is a short story that has been released in ten parts in this blog. This is the final instalment. Please see the postings for 1 and 8 April; 4, 11, 18 and 25 March 2018; and 4, 11, 18 and 26 February 2018 for the previously released parts. It is inspired by the work I did for my upcoming book, the expanded version of "The Pendulum. 

Like a woman possessed, I ordered a short biographical account of Klepper’s life, his collection of church hymns and poems, and most importantly his diary. The latter had been written in blood between 1932-42, as life closed in on his family, and he grappled with his faith in the German Evangelical Church, which had capitulated to the Party. Der Vater had been the most important literary achievement of his life, he thought, having no idea that his diary would far overtake it in importance later on. Senior Nazis, even the Führer himself, it was said, had read it, because they saw it as an endorsement of rearmament and the militarization of German society. Klepper mused at their rabid hunger for self-reinforcement. Blinded by their own hubris, they could not see that it was a work of resistance, a tale of just rule that could not be a greater contrast to the violent, disorderly, power-gluttenous National Socialism.

Did you read it because your dead leaders had read it? Or did you read it because you knew of Klepper’s fate, and that there must be more to this novel than the story of a soldier king? Perhaps the contradiction of Klepper intrigued you. One who wrote about Prussian kings, whose life was broken by those who revered their mythology the most: the Nazis, your Party, your people.

Once when I sat with you over coffee in your apartment, decades after your return from Brazil, you lowered your voice to a whisper when you mentioned your neighbour down the hallway. 

“I’ve had tea with her many times. She is very orderly and has the finest things, but she’s Jewish, you know.” 

​It was a jumble of ill emotions, including jealousy and disdain. But, soaring like a dark genie above it all, was the suggestion in your whispering that you had done something illegal. I didn’t know how to respond to this, and took another sip of tea to wash down the queasiness. Maybe that was the way you had read Klepper, as though it was something daring because his marriage to a Jew was against nature in your perspective.

Yet when first you read him in exile, you were not the same person as the one who sat before me now. Then you had left your home suddenly for an unknown and dangerous frontier, with a volatile husband who had hurt you, only because you were more afraid of what could happen if you stayed. I was certain that on that terrace you read Klepper out of fear and confusion, making a book choice that your fanatic husband would find acceptable, but that also offered refuge in what you saw as a dignified history far away from madmen and disgrace. In choosing Klepper, perhaps you also privately acknowledged your feelings of guilt and shame. And maybe this was so terrible that it led into the unfathomable darkness of depression that you spent so many subsequent years in.

You knew everything about your authors, and so you knew that Klepper coped with his family’s dwindling circumstances and the hubris of the times through his unflinching faith. In it he found the strength to resist spiritual crimping and retained his creative integrity, at least for a sufficient time to produce what would become his life’s work.  Suicide or giving up went against his beliefs, until there were no other options. He stayed with God to the end, but you didn't, and now you regretted it.

“Of course God will take you,” I said unconvincingly, as you cleaned your teeth fretfully with a toothpick, after telling me that you didn’t think St. Peter would open those gates for you.

The truth was that I had no idea, as I didn’t presume that there was a God. I had come to the daunting conclusion that you had chosen the path of no remorse, and I grieved your tragedy as though it were mine. I tried to reassure you, because, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, if there was a God, he could do what I was incapable of, which was to know your many faces and to see them as one. Reassuring you was my reminder that what you read that I read wasn’t only about you. It was about both of us.

"What You Read" is a short story I am releasing in ten parts in this blog. Please see the postings for 1 April, 4, 11, 18 and 25 March 2018 and 4, 11, 18 and 26 February 2018 for the previously released parts. Once a week a new part is released. It is inspired by the work I did for my upcoming book, the expanded version of "The Pendulum. 

The Bertelsmann order arrived once a month at the tiny border outpost between Brazil and Paraguay, where you had gone into self-imposed exile with your husband in 1960. At home in the Federal Republic, prosecutors wrenched open a past that previously you thought had been entombed by the need to look ahead. Your husband, my grandfather, ordered books from this German publisher about Adenauer, the post-war Chancellor of the Federal Republic, who spoke in favor of drawing a line under history, and Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s assault on Russia that turned the fate of the war. Grandfather, who remained afraid of the noose of justice until his natural death, wanted everyone else to forget, while he reserved the right to look back at where the military strategy, and the chance to grab more land in the Ukraine, had failed. The Holocaust was a parenthesis to him, which was quite alright in your new surroundings. In the nearby town where ranchers occasionally gathered to determine how they were going to protect the area from drug traders, strong men were admired.

Among the books you ordered was "Der Vater" (The Father), a novel about Frederick I, Frederick the Great’s father and the founder of the Kingdom of Prussia, that became a bestseller in 1935, but that had largely been forgotten or rejected because of its association with the time period in which it was published.

It was one of the last books to remain in the shelf above your bed, where you lay with intensifying nightmares under the camel-fur cover. I tried not to look around the apartment at your things, as you came ever closer to death. Other members of the family had already decided what they wanted to have once you had died, and sometimes you assigned things to them. I couldn’t bear it, and attempted not to look at anything in your apartment for too long. You had always been generous with me, passing on things that had been most precious to you over the years: your grandmother’s swirling garnet brooch, your best winter hat and coat, and your heavy silver serving spoons. You offered all of your photo albums that included war-time images of the occupation, adding that your children intended to burn them once you had died. I accepted your offer, since the things around you were world heritage to me and should never be destroyed.

Once, when I thought you weren’t looking, I removed this last thick novel of yours from the shelf. It was no longer sufficiently well known to have been recorded as an audio book. No one in the family cared much about it, because no one else read like we did.

“It’s a book about the suffering of kings, who must endure more than ordinary people,” you said, as you caught me flipping through the pages.

I quickly slammed the book shut, embarassed that you had caught me looking through your things.
“Do you want it?” you asked, holding your ailing body up against the doorway.

Into your eighties you had led walking groups through the Black Forest, but now you didn’t walk much anymore, and barely ever changed out of your blue satin bathrobe and night shirt. Your offer unleashed an awful struggle inside of me. I hated the idea of taking more of your things, but the prospect that this book might help me to solve the riddle of you was irresistible.

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” I said sheepishly, looking at the sober grey book that had suddenly become mine.

On the journey home, I began reading eagerly, but encountered a dense, nearly indigestible historical account of the nascent Prussian kingdom. Impatient that the book might not deliver the answers I sought, I turned to the author description on the last page. After reading the short text, it struck me that while remorse had never crossed your lips, you may in fact have felt it inside. How I hoped for it.

Jochen Klepper, the author, was the son of a pastor who had interrupted his studies in theology to become a writer in Berlin in 1932, shortly after he had married a Jewish widow with two daughters. A decade later, after all efforts to spare his wife and one of her daughters from deportation had failed, he switched on the gas in their Berlin apartment, so that they could die together. I pictured you on the terrace of your Brazilian ranch, out of the glare of the sun that your skin could not tolerate, reading the work of this energetic novelist, whose life and career your movement had cut short. What thoughts went through your head, what feelings through your heart?

"What You Read" is a short story I am releasing in ten parts in this blog. Please see the postings for 4, 11, 18 and 25 March 2018 and 4, 11, 18 and 26 February 2018 for the previously released parts. Once a week a new part is released. It is inspired by the work I did for my upcoming book, the expanded version of "The Pendulum. 

Tolstoy’s deeply Russian sense of fatalism, expressed most clearly by the enigmatic character of the Russian General Kutuzov, dulled the sharpness of this new question and must have come as a relief to you. According to him, in the eye of battle no one was responsible and no strategy possible. According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov and Napoleon resigned themselves to fate and superstition, and history simply unfolded. You found a certain comfort in this portrayal, which I had difficulty understanding until I learned that you had volunteered for an organization responsible for redistributing clothing that had once belonged to those sent to be exterminated ‘for the war effort.' Was this too part of the momentum and the haze of war that no one had any control over?

In later years, the nervous condition that forced your eyes to shut each time that you looked at the printed page seemed the harshest of punishments for one so in love with books. Instead, you listened to “War and Peace” performed by some of Germany’s best acting voices on a tape recorder.

“What we did was nothing compared to the slaughter of the Napoleonic Wars. Terrible! TER-RIB-LE!” you exclaimed, with an indignation I recognized from growing up at home. You patted the thick book, which you kept before you on the dining table when you were listening to it, even as you no longer opened the cover. It was like your best defence in a never-ending trial.

When you were over one hundred years old, I confronted you with the truth you could never share with me: the fanatic Party and SS engagement throughout the duration of the Third Reich. I tried not to cast blame, having learned from Tolstoy that the forces of history were too complex to lay the responsibility for their unfolding at the feet of any one person.

“This history doesn’t belong to you and you will never understand it,” you snapped, warning me to leave the past alone. It was a clever, temporarily destabilizing retort until I reflected upon your apparent mastery of the Napoleonic Wars, which had ended nearly a century before you were born. If none of us had the right to history, how could you have the right to the early 19th century?
​
I have sometimes wondered whether it is the duty of family members to the leave the past of loved ones alone. It might have been an act of tolerance and mercy to behold and accept, rather than to demand clarity about every one of your many faces. But I chose another path, which was to read “War and Peace” now and again to discover the questions that may have lurked in your heart, because someday they could be mine.