“The Pictures”
“The Pictures”
by Kelp
She called them “the pictures,”
Old black and white photographs,
Some of them were brown and white,
Mounted on black pages
In an oversized photo album, bruised and beat-up,
That my grandmother would show me
As we sat together on her big green couch.
I might have been five or six years old
The first time she showed me “the pictures”.
They were pictures of her family:
Her parents.
Her siblings,
Four brothers and one sister.
They were all married.
They all had children.
The men wore suits and ties and hats,
Following the style of the day.
The women, too, were stylish, but modest.
The children had round faces and thick cheeks.
My grandmother’s thick fingers
Hovered over the black page,
As if to caress it,
Or to keep it from blowing away.
“They put them into ovens,” she said.
And I thought of Hansel and Gretel.
“They burned them up in big ovens.”
All of them:
Her parents,
Her siblings,
Four brothers and one sister,
Their spouses,
Their children.
She taught me their names, the names of her siblings:
Nuchem
Yankel
Shimon
Boruch
Gittel.
When we were born, my brother and I, our parents gave us Hebrew names.
My brother’s name is Nuchem Shimon.
My name is Yankel.
When my grandmother died, the pictures went to my mother.
When my mother died, the pictures came to me.
I am the only one alive who knows the names.
I neglected to tell you about my grandmother’s face
As she tucked me in for a nap.
I hadn’t known that a person could cry without making a sound.
The tears formed at the outer edges of her eyes
And glided down the sides of her face,
Moistening the wrinkles in her neck.
She placed her fingers gently on my forehead,
My cheek on the rough fabric of the green couch;
I was anesthetized by the earthy smell of the cushion,
And immediately fell asleep.
Later, in my teens, I saw other pictures,
The ones that you have also seen,
The gruesome ones that are difficult to look at,
And that are difficult to get out of your head once you’ve seen them.
Pictures that wrap around your head and your throat like a snake.
I cannot tell you which pictures are more horrific:
The ones I have seen in the books and the films and in the museums,
Or the ones my grandmother showed me of her family, my family.
Images of a family that I would never meet.