Making Soup

My mother nursed me and carried me to the road. She walked in one direction, then the other, taking in the damage from the previous night.

A woman on a bicycle stopped to tickle my stomach. It was bad enough she did that without my leave, but then she turned to my mother and said, “Thank God she is too young to understand.” Perhaps I was too young to play the piano or read Proust, but I was not too young to understand what went on around me. I understood before I came into the world, when my mother carried me inside of her. She gasped, and I had no air to breathe.

We were camped out at the summer home of one of my father’s friends. He had promised us passage out of Latvia if we could get from Valmiera to his place north of Liepāja, but when we arrived he was nowhere in sight. The doors were wide open, the radio still on, transmitting static. The Soviet Army was moving east to west, and we were about as far west as you could get, so we stayed.

Soft rain fell the following morning as my father drove his cherry-red sports car to the harbor to see about tickets. Storm clouds shadowed the parlor where we parked ourselves to await his return. “Might as well get comfortable,” he said when he eventually entered the room, drenched from the downpour that had begun on his way back. “We will not be going anywhere for another week.”

I liked the way his black hair gleamed in the lamplight. At first everyone had exclaimed I looked exactly like him, but when the dusky down on my head disappeared those same people insisted with comparable conviction I looked like my blonde mother. Only my mother’s mother—Oma—had anything sensible to say on the subject. “Babies often resemble their fathers at birth,” she told me. “To establish lineage and keep the brutes from snuffing out their own offspring, you see. How you look later is immaterial.” I tested her hypothesis by offering up cautious smiles, and my father responded by scrunching up his face in a way that made me laugh. Apparently I was past the point where he could take exception to my pale locks, and we would remain on good terms forever.

It was not so easy to tell with my mother. She seemed to like me well enough but took every opportunity to vanish from my view. Oma had suggested that after being crammed into the back of the car with me and my belongings for days on end she stretch out on her bed here and catch up on sleep, but she did not wish to do that. She spent two dreary days pacing, roaming from room to room. When the sun came out the afternoon of the third, she nursed me, turned me over to Oma, and took off toward the harbor by herself. Oma and I were none too happy about that. “Not much more than a month since she gave birth,” Oma said, as if I did not know that.

I consoled myself with the fact that it was simply not in my mother’s nature to stay put for long. When she was a little girl, she had fled from Oma’s flat in Rīga every chance she got. Ran down the five flights of stairs, into the pharmacy to the right, into the stationer’s to the left, into the Jewish bakery the next building over. Then back upstairs with a bit of matzo the proprietor gave her, leaving a trail of crumbs on Oma’s shining parquet floors. Oma would scold her and curse the Jew, for all the good that did.

“My daughter has restless feet,” Oma said, as if it were a disease.

“She will be back,” my father said, as he always did.