A private war

If you believed Margo, only three people died in World War II: the wife and fourteen-year-old daughter of her oldest brother Arthur, and her second odlest brother, Edgar.

She had heard of the Jewish Holocaust. She had even shared once how sorry she'd felt for a woman her age whom she'd seen in the Paris metro. The woman, who had been holding a baby, wore the Jewish star sewn to her coat. Margo hadn't given more details.

She had flown the pocket of Dunkirk on foot with her parents and my three-month-old mother, yet she never talked about the soldiers who had been trapped on the beach. All of her stories were about the family: how they'd slept in a barn and she'd woken up with a mouse nesting in her hair, how worried she'd been about breastfeeding my mother, how she'd looked for my grandfather among the POW's who were being held at the soccer stadium and how a friend of the family with a special pass and a bicycle had traveled to the farm where grandpa had been stationed. The farm had been bombed. My grandfather was the only survivor and had been transferred to a field hospital ten kilometers away, an impossible distance to travel with all the German troops barring the movement of civilians.

She never bothered with history as much as she fussed about food, clean clothes and family gatherings. She mailed maps of Germany hidden in homemade jars and breads to my grandfather. She searched the Parisian grocery stores for rare imported bananas to feed my fragile mother. She wore a coat over her nightgown so the neighbors wouldn't see her ungirdled body during air raids. She kept to her laundry schedule no matter the circumstances. She was bothered that the food would get cold when dinner was interrupted by sirens.

Hers was a war of food rations, sleepness nights, letters from the Red Cross and worries about her husband and brothers. "We were lucky," she used to say. "to have lost only three people." And she would sigh at the memory of her favorite brother, blown to bits in the process of demining the beach. She believed that her sorrow was enough. To each his family, her heart was too tender to reach out to the other five million dead.

Noses and handkerchiefs

I have her nose. Not a cute button nose but a prominent, slightly bulbous, utilitarian nose, designed to detect the ripeness of fresh fruit, the danger of rotten fish and the urgency of soiled diapers. That nose can catch of whiff of baking bread from the factory three miles away. It retains its ability to taste food during the worst colds.

It drips a lot.

Fluids gather from mysterious caves around and above the eyes and, like the shallow rivers of Flanders, make a slow continuous journey toward the outer edge of the nostril where they must be caught before falling onto our food, newspaper or - God forbid - the collection plate during Sunday service.

Margo always carried a large cotton handkerchief.

She kept a big stack of them, ironed and pressed in the small cabinet in a corner of the dining room. Every few years, she'd buy a new dozen from a linen salesman at the market, but I always liked the old handkerchiefs better. Worn to the thickness of tissue paper, they held the permanent scent of the laundry detergent that Margo used and they had become soft from many boilings in the Monday laundry (the day for whites).

For Margo, the handkerchief was an all purpose tool. Not only would it catch drips from her nose or any other family nose (she felt entitled to pinch any kid's nose at any moment and demand a strong blowing action), but it could also be used to spit-clean dirty faces, to bandage scraped knees, to protect from the sun (tied around the neck or worn over the head with a knot at each of the corners), to carry berries, leaves, flowers, rocks and assorted treasures gathered on family trips, to protect lunch from the filth of a public picnic table, to wipe soot, tears, grease, dirt, and anything else she deemed needed to be wiped away from this world.

I haven't used a cloth handkerchief in years. I don't even think I could find any in the US. The other day I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my T-shirt. A terrible thing to do. I could feel Margo frowning from above.

The blue room

She kept a portrait of the pope on the wall in the blue room that had been my mother's bedroom. After my mother had gotten married, my great-grandfather had occupied the bedroom until his death in 1964.

I liked sleeping in the room, with its blue curtains and the cotton bedspread that my grandmother had sewn from two different remnants of flower-printed fabric. The oblong bedspread had only two side skirts: for the length and width of the bed that were not against the wall. Margo didn't like wasting fabric on things that couldn't be seen but the bedspread kept slipping off the bed.

The wool mattress, mixed with horsehair, was as old and thin and curved in the middle. It was like sleeping in a narrow canoe. You had to stay put or risk severe back pain the following day.

It was the most religious of all the rooms too. Apart from the pope's portrait, there was a crucifix above the door and a virgin Mary on the night table. Cast in white plastic, the virgin glowed in the dark at night.

Thanks to the Virgin, the Pope, the Crucifix, and the heavy bedspread, the blue room was the safest place on earth where to fall asleep. The great-grandfather must have have died peacefully enough because he never came back to haunt the room. The linoleum flooring didn't creak. Doors stayed shut. In the darkness, the Virgin would see me to sleep. The last thing I would hear would be my grandparents whisper their goodnights next door and then everything would go quiet. I knew I could open my eyes in the middle of the night and the Virgin would be there, keeping watch and that was good enough for me.

The felt slippers

Here are Margo's slippers. I took the picture the last time I was alone in my grandparent's house, shortly after grandpa's funeral. My aunt and uncle were kind enough to give me about a half hour to look through the house. I pulled my camera out of my purse and started taking pictures of every object that I thought might mean something to me.

I spotted the slippers at their usual place near the kitchen door. They had been there since my grandmother had died sixteen months earlier. Her clothes, shoes and most of her possessions had been given away within days of her funeral, but for some reason, the slippers had escaped notice. I wonder whether they might have been a source of comfort to my grandfather. Perhaps he liked to sit in the kitchen and let himself believe that Margo was about to come through the front door, remove her street shoes and put her slippers on, as she always did when she was indoors.

The housekeeper hand't thrown them away.

The slippers were almost new. Margo hadn't had time to flatten the back. Then again, she no longer walked as much as she once had. She used to roam the house, making a distinct "thump-thump" noise with her heel whenever she moved. And she moved a lot, fetching the soup pot from the outdoor pantry, filling her iron with water, opening the windows to air the bedroom, climbing up to the bedrooms, down the basement, and from room to room as she completed her cycle of chores. Back when I was in sixth grade, the noise of her feet annoyed me.

"Why can't you lift your feet off the floor when you walk for God's sake?" I accused her one day.

She had shrugged.

"What are you talking about?" she said. "There's nothing wrong with my feet."

She wasn't about to be budge for a twelve year old.

I wished I had taped the sound of her feet on the tiled floor. Heck, I wished I had taped the sound of her voice. It's been two years. I can remember the "thump-thump" noise but I have trouble bringing back her voice. Where did it go? What part of me holds that memory?

The lost needles

She owned three sets of thin metal knitting needles: one for socks and gloves, one for baby clothes, the third for sweaters. She despised lazy thick yarns, wouldn't have dreamed of wooden needles or fancy wools.

She bought her yarn on sale at a stall in the open market, picked colors that would outlast stains and wear. She stuck to a sturdy stockinet stitch with an occasional cable, and for girly outfits, a row of lace. She knit socks, mittens, hats, underwear, bathing suits, dresses, sweaters, cardigans, scarves and booties. She knit cotton socks for the Dominican sisters' mission in Africa. She knit my brother's school sweaters with reinforced elbow pads. And when she knit me a white poncho with a blue trim and a double pom-pom closure, she also made a small replica of the poncho for my doll Henriette.

She knit in the afternoons during the time alloted for such work but didn't want anyone to think she was having any fun at it. She has clad three generations of children in navy raglan sweaters that could be partially unravelled and lenghtened to accomodate growth spurts. She had saved my grandfather's fingers from frostbite with the mittens she'd mailed to the POW camps in Germany. She had prevented colds and pneumonia with yard-long scarves that wrapped around the head and chest.

Without her steady knitting, we would have been sure to perish to the dampness of the Dunkirk winters. Her needles, bent from years of being tucked under her arms, were her swords of woolly love.

Shortly after she died, I searched through the house in hope of finding the needles but she had already disposed of them. She would have been loathed to throw them away - such fine needles, hardly bent by sixty-years of steady work. I imagined she must have shipped them to the Dominican mission in Africa . Somehwere in the world a woman is using those needles to knit a cotton poncho for a young girl.

Arrival

Margo was 49 years old when I was born, just four years older than what I am today. The official story is that I was born shortly around midnight. By the time my father could go to my grandparents' house to tell them of my arrival, everybody was asleep. They didn't hear the doorbell and didn't know about their second grandchild until the following morning.

But in my heart, I know that Margo had dreamed of me that night.

We became inseparable.

I believe she and I had cycled through many lives before. This spin lasted 43 years: Margo departed on June 10, 2006. I can still feel her presence in my heart. I wear her apron when I cook.

This is our story.