That Day We Rode the Bus

What’s on my mind? 

I knew something was wrong with Mutti, my Austrian grandmother, when my mother took six-year-old me on the bus to Mutti’s apartment. My mother did that so she could evaluate how Mutti was doing, all things considered. Mutti had always been there when we came to visit, but not that day, which felt strange.

Nor was Papa there, but I already knew I would never see him again. I was too young to understand the depths of grief, and how swiftly grief can turn to anger and self-destruction.

Before that day we rode the bus, I remember how my mother answered the phone, listening for a few seconds before falling to her knees screaming “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!” 

This I observed almost clinically, having never seen such a thing before. 

My mother later told me my grandfather was dead. His heart, she said. To me, he’d simply vanished - Papa, who each time I saw him wore a pale silk tie with a pearl stick pin. Papa, who each time also wore a finely tailored suit the milky color of moths. Papa, who played the violin with such exquisite, sweet sadness that Massenet’s Meditation would forever be stamped on my soul. Papa, in the lakes of whose eyes memories swam and overflowed. 

I will never forget Papa, or how, that day we rode the bus, my mother raged as she tore through Mutti’s kitchen of rusted spice tins and moldy bread. 

Mutti moved - more precisely, was moved - to a small apartment near the ocean, where she could walk in the sun and calm herself. My uncles hired a woman named Mrs. Balzar to live with her. How long this arrangement lasted, I’m not sure, but Mrs. Balzar departed in a storm of shouting after Mutti’s mood did not lift, to put it mildly. 

From there, Mutti took her place in a retirement home, the days of sequinned dresses long forgotten.

  

That day we rode the bus, the day six-year-old me visited Mutti’s apartment when Mutti wasn’t there, I remember opening forbidden closets as my mother’s fury grew in the kitchen. It must have been hard for her - remembering what was then, seeing what was now.

Mutti had been an opera singer in Vienna; Papa was a classical violinist. But Papa had also built a thriving import business in Eastern Europe, under his surname. The family moved from Vienna to Budapest to Prague. I knew only that; nothing more. 

After the family escaped Hitler’s Europe, Papa built another successful import business, but under an anglicized version of his name. I didn’t know anything about the War in those days; no one in my family ever mentioned it.

Mutti and Papa’s apartment was a place of wonderment. Mutti’s closet was the perfumed repository of many fine furs and many fine clothes I had never seen before. A blue-sequinned evening dress hung in that closet - perhaps a reminder of her former life in Europe. The blue-sequinned dress winked at me. I winked back.

I wanted that dress for my very own - at least, a piece of it. From Mutti’s sewing basket, I took the large, sharp shears with which she cut fabric pinned to paper patterns. I sliced a wide swath of fabric from the bottom of that dress.  

I remember my moment of terror as rows of electric blue sequins spilled from the dress like rivers of tears. And then I quietly closed the closet door and returned the shears to the basket. Understanding plausible deniability from an early age, I planned to blame my mother for cutting the dress, if anyone asked.  

I’ve never forgotten the over-brimming lakes of Papa’s watery eyes, or the day my mother fell to her knees, or that day we rode the bus to Mutti’s apartment, or the rusted tins of spices, or the trickle of sequins to the floor.

Some 20 years ago, I was deeply moved to visit the former Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, which is now a museum. In recent years, I’ve visited Prague, where I was somehow compelled to find the old Jewish cemetery. As I read the long list of Prague citizens who died in the Holocaust, I came across Papa’s surname - a name not uncommon, but also not widely known. 

Working backward to that time, I realized with sudden shock the man with Papa’s name may well have been a nephew or another close family member. I remember crying and crying for a man I didn’t know and had never heard of. 

And that is why, whenever I hear Meditation, my tears trickle down like the sequins of an evening dress, that day we rode the bus.

© Nicole Parton 2019