The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [22]
I return to the ad to understand you, the black and white photo of the girl who should have died in a paragraph’s time. The words told the truth. Others have died around you, or lived lives bound by suffering. The words lied; you are here today. Behind her hungry, little smile lies something else: a pure, grinding determination for a life like the reader’s, sitting in her armchair thousands of miles away. Not just her food, or her pity, or her coffee money, but her chance to live as she wanted, love as she wanted.
As a child, you studied death also. After school, you went alone to the funeral parlor near your school and stood with the mourners around the open casket. You liked to be there when it was time for the viewing, to see what death looked like. You approached death methodically, unafraid; death was your rival. Poverty, abuse, disease, none of these had gotten you so far, but you knew that death was a worthy opponent. In those days, you watched it and you mastered it, you looked back at me from the page, smiling with a different kind of hunger altogether.
Katherine Jamieson is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Programs, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Writer’s Chronicle, Meridian, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011. Read more of her essays, articles, and stories at katherinejamieson.com.
CAROLYN KRAUS
The Memory Bird
Bearing witness never ends.
ON A WARM AND WINDY JULY MORNING, WE WERE headed south on the Partisan Highway out of Minsk, Belarus. Marina, the friend of a Jewish Belarusian expatriate I knew back home in Detroit, was nervous at the wheel of the little twenty-year-old Soviet-built Moskveech she’d just learned to drive, its doors wired shut and a red fire extinguisher skittering around on the dashboard. The car was coughing out smoke as we passed a six-foot-high wooden obelisk topped with a red star that marked the Minsk city limit. Farther on, the road bisected a factory district, then passed blocks of gray apartment complexes that had sprung up after the war on the outskirts of every Soviet city. Up ahead, a goatherd urged his flock along the highway beneath a sign proclaiming: “Pay your taxes. You’ll feel great!” Atop many of the telephone poles lining the road, storks’ nests were perched like giant straw hats.
Packed into the narrow back seat of the Moskveech were Lev, a sixty-year-old self-taught Belarusian filmmaker with intense black eyes and tufts of white hair ringing his otherwise shiny bald head, and Ina, a Belarus State University history teacher who was also curator of the one-room museum of Jewish History that occupied the corner of a basement near the center of Minsk. Jews now made up only three percent of the city’s population, but given that Minsk had been nearly half Jewish before the war, the collection Ina had shown me the day before was alarmingly skimpy: a few dozen artifacts of Jewish life in Minsk that had survived—a treadle sewing machine, a matzo press resembling the wringer on an old washing machine, a lone prayer book rescued in 1944 from the smoldering ruins of the Minsk Ghetto, and a scattering of photographs including one of skulls spilling out from an upended gunny sack discovered at the site of a Holocaust slaughter.
Lev and Ina made an odd pair: the professor in her prim black skirt and bobbed gray hair; the filmmaker with his rumpled slacks and t-shirt, his solid row of gold-capped bottom teeth, and those two clownish puffs of white