True genius is perhaps in looking at the same thing again and again and still managing to see something new, or seeing it in a different way. When my mother tells her stories, especially the ones which end, and in that way, they survived, that time I know them as well as I know anything, and now that she loses the thread I can prompt her so that we are telling them together. The sound of it is the sound of the Mass in my childhood, priest calling, congregation responding.

Last night she told me again the story of the death of her father:

There are two ways this story ends.

In one, my grandfather undid the hem of his coat into which my grandmother had sewed gold coins — do you know what people do for gold coins? Anything. He gave the coins to a man who promised to bury my father, and he marked the spot with a rock, no cross, no name, so that later he would be able to find it and show the family, if they came. Well they came, it was close to ten years later, my mother took my brothers. No one asked me to come along, I was a girl and in that time a girl was no one of importance.

In the second ending, he was buried next to the church where he had been the priest. Again the man was paid in gold coins, and he put the earth back so carefully that you could not tell where it had been opened to take his body. There was no marker placed. No one came.

I’ve actually heard both of these versions, I like to think of them being simultaneously true. Unmarked graves are a space of possibility, they can be anywhere, contain anyone, anything. Why not beside a church and in some field, all at once.

The new thing was when she said:

Before he he died they had been staying in the village of G. under some kind of house arrest and every night they could hear gunfire where someone had been taken out and shot. This is what broke his nerves people said; after, he wouldn’t even twitch when the air raid sirens went off. He doesn’t care about his life now, and he is still going to die, anyway, in the back of the wagon on the road to the city of K.

The new thing is how time is folding in on itself. My missing grandfather, her missing father is dead, is dying, is going to die. This is now the most important thing about him.