44. Another Season

Perhaps that winter wasn’t any longer or colder than any of the others. Or it could be that people here needed to remember it that way. It’s amazing, the things people try to explain with it.

And it seems everyone has such a season. For my grandmother, it began the day her son—the brother (at least, I assume he was) mother never talked about, the uncle I never met—was born. I heard about him from my grandmother, and from other people. He died too young and far away, they said. He and a bunch of young men who died with him were memorialized, which is not to say remembered, with stones far away from this block.

What little that’s been recorded about his life didn’t include that winter, which had already begun by the time he was born and didn’t end—if it ever did—until some time long after the telegram, and what remained of him, came from Korea.

It didn’t end, either, when Adam bolted from that camp he would never name. (As best as I’ve been able to tell, it was Bergen-Belsen. What value does a name have, anyway, except that you can attach it to another name?) If there was a respite, it may’ve been been during the months he spent in a half-timber house far from any town the Allies or Nazis thought to be worth taking. Wind and snow swirled outside. It didn’t end when he got to this block.

In the logic of the TV programs I used to see and most movies and the novels they made us read in school, it somehow made perfect sense that Adam killed himself on the night before Christmas Eve. All the plot ingredients were there for preparation and consumption: impending holidays, a man alone who no longer believes (if he ever did) in God, or the gods—in other words, the hope for an end to suffering and defeat, and the promise that nothing would ever prolong his or any man or woman’s wait for it.

Of course, the logic of entertainment (however exalted its medium may be) has as much to do with life on this block as rises or falls in the exchange rate between the dollar and currencies or bars of gold no one on this block has ever seen. That logic has influenced life, or the liberty of anyone to pursue any pleasure to be derived from it, about as much as the life and death of an uncle I never met on some nameless hill in a country nobody on this block would’ve ever heard of otherwise. Why, his death couldn’t even end the winter my grandmother always talked about! It was hard; it was cold; it was coming and there was nothing anybody could do about it, she said.

In stories—like the ones I had to read for school—mourning ends when spring begins. If that were so, it’d make perfect sense that I was at mother’s funeral as winter draws near. So it’s also make sense Adam died on the night before Christmas Eve.

Somehow, though, it always seemed that whatever, whoever was lost with the early morning light was trapped, frozen in nebulous glaciers that didn’t retreat with the first rays of the equinox. Those skies, it seemed, simply moved further along like the rivers into which buds fell from trees.