going to germany, part one

art didnt go for specific answers, but because he didnt know the questions yet. and because it was the last summer he would ever let himself do something like that- take a motor bike trip across germany, alone. he was 24, it was time to decide. he was 24, and there was absolutely nothing keeping him in georgia, nothing but a girlfriend he barely knew and a job delivering carpets to big design firms in atlanta. he was old enough to need to know, he was old enough, now, to figure it out.

there was a picture of his grandmother and her husband, the man who she married just a few years after art's father had been born, after she had gotten a divorce from art's grandfather and sealed away his letters in a box that wouldnt be opened for decades. in the picture she looked beautiful because she always did, and because art had a tendency to romantcize the past, and its characters who he now knew as wrinkled, three dimensional. then, when that picture and so many of the others that he studied his whole life were taken, family members were strangers, they werent family members yet just creatures like him, organisims that had no idea what was coming, or who they were really posing for. in the picture his grandmother, who he grew up calling oma, is smoking a slim cigarette and smiling through it while her husband, karl, is looking at something off to the side, the side opposite from her. he has one hand on her waist, not in an affectionate way but because, it looks like, he is trying to tell her something. that someone is there, to look where he is looking, to see what he has just seen the instant the camera clicked.

art grew up being told that karl was a good man, though the k in karl's name and the way his thin mustache looked like a fold of skin in photographs made him think otherwise. there was really no explaining it- he had only been told good things about the love of his grandmothers life. karl died the year art was born when he stepped off a plane, the first time his feet had met german soil in over 20 years, had a heart attack and died face down on the tarmac. art imagined him clutching his heart, and gasping for air, but according to oma, he just collapsed.

though art never trusted karl, and never knew where to place him in his understanding of his own past, his own history, there was one moment that solidified art's uneasiness. art's parents were divorced and his father had remarried a woman who art had grown up considering the only solace in a family full of stingy, cold people. art was at their house for christmas one year. he remembered being barely tall enough to see over the counter, in the kitchen watching as lynn, his father's wife, cooked. she was stirring something in a big white bowl, and art wondered what it would be like if the bowl was her heart, like the only way to keep your heart beating was to keep ferociously stirring this substance that always stayed the same consistency. his father walked in the kitchen and said

tomorrow lets go to the storage unit with oma to sort through karls things.

lynn looked up and nodded slightly, smiling, and his father walked back out of the kitchen. lynn said, in a fiery voice that she kept in the net of a whisper,

nazi.