Encyclopedia Prismatica
From the Journal
Excerpts
From volume 1, Issue 2
Where Are You?
The nurse light is on outside the door. Frau Lach must be having physical therapy. I wonder how her knee is healing. Yesterday I saw her using a walker instead of her usual wheelchair, which I’d interpreted as a sign of progress. A woman down the corridor has been yelling the same question for four hours: “Hallo, wo bist du?!” Hello, where are you?! It’s the same every day, and I hear it the loudest from this hallway where her voice echoes from one end to the other. I’ll come back to Frau Lach’s room later when the light is off. I push my wagon to the next door. “Hallo,” I greet as I enter the room. Herr Meuller is seated predictably in his maroon velvet armchair. His grey mop of hair is tousled in a way that suggests he’s only just gotten out of bed. He takes a breath, preparing what he’s evidently been rehearsing. I know, because this has become our daily routine. “Hello,” he says. “How are you?” He enunciates every syllable with care and precision, putting on his best imitation of a native accent. They are some of the only ones he knows in English. He is brimming with anticipation for my response now, and I can’t help but smile at his persisting enthusiasm. “Wow!” I click my flat mop into place. “Ein Engländer!” An Englishman! I tell him to validate his efforts. His responding grin is one of satisfaction. I pay extra attention as I wipe underneath the table in his room, where I know to always check for his customary piles of soil or chocolate shavings, depending on the day. I am careful to avoid bumping his potted plants. His room was already in its typical clean state when I arrived, so I finish quickly. He perks up again on my way out, as if he’s been waiting for this moment. He is laser focused. “See you later, alligator!” He says. My delight is clear. “Tschussi!” I reply cheerily. I close the door behind me on my way out. “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” The next door is locked. I knock, then use my master key to turn the knob. “Hallo,” I greet, noticing Frau Wagner is in and awake, though the lights are all still off from the night before. “Ich putze.” I say. I clean. I expect her typical confusion at my entrance, so I hold up my rag and toilet cleaner for her to see, but she doesn’t turn toward me at the sound of my entrance. Her back is to me, and she stands mere inches from an old film photo framed on the wall, muttering in a dialect I cannot understand. The photo is of a middle-aged couple, but it’s too dark for me to make out the details. I carry on, leaving the lights off and her to her conversation. There is a small shrine of some sort in the corner, constructed from what appears to be any little oddity she could scrounge from around the room. A trail of brown winds from the bed into the bathroom. I follow the footprints backwards to see that they begin at the toilet, the smudges extending to the toilet paper roll, the light switch, and along the walls. The dirty diaper in the trash bin signifying that a nurse has changed her, but as expected, they left the mess. I wonder how long it has been here and if I should worry about her bedsheets. It’s a Monday, so it might have already been days. The stench filling the small room is stifling but I contain any visible reaction so as to not embarrass Frau Wagner should she become lucid. Discreetly holding my breath, I immediately bring the trash to my wagon and replenish the bin with a fresh bag. I quickly and quietly scrub down the sink, toilet, light switch, and all remaining brown finger swipes and spots I can find. I mop the brown footprints first, replace the mop rag, then clean the rest of the floor of the dead skin and the white hairs and the cake crumbs. I leave the shrine, both curious and charmed. I lock the door behind me, unsure if Frau Wagner noticed my presence. “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” “Hallo,” I say as I open the next door. Herr and Frau Schmidt are seated in opposite armchairs, clad in similar woolen sweaters. There are only two rooms for couples in this facility, and this is one of them. They both greet me with a corresponding hallo. Herr Schmidt stands slowly as I prepare my mop. He grips the chair tightly for support on his way up. He has a gentle demeanor and a kind, shaky voice, which he uses to practice his English whenever I’m around. He inches toward me on unsteady steps under a hunched spine. “How are you?” He asks with a warm smile on his face. “I’m great! How are you?” I ask, more pleasantly than I feel, but even less pleasantly than I want to present. My knees ache and my hands are cramping. My mind drifts for a moment to the unwelcome antibodies that appeared in my recent blood test. I smile at them both as widely as I can. Frau Schmidt understands the English but has forgotten how to speak it. She begins to respond in a German that is a bit too old, a bit too quiet, a bit too fast for my foreign ears. I hear something like: “~~~~~~ not so good, today is ~~~~, ~~~~ and ~~ ~ ~~~~, ~~ the Parkinsons. ~~~~ medication, but ~ ~~~ very hard.” I stop cleaning. I hold her gaze and listen as best I can. Herr Schmidt, her husband of over 50 years, picks up in English. “Some days are worse than others,” he says. “It’s hard, you know. Not being able to do what you once could. Not remembering. It’s not easy.” He tells me about their godson in Florida, who is a student. He has apparently been researching for a more effective treatment for Frau Schmidt, but so far has been unsuccessful. Nothing they’ve yet tried has yielded noticeable improvements in her condition. They told me once how they met when they were only teenagers. Photos decorate the room depicting them across the years; They are dancing, holding hands, linking arms with friends and family as their skin grows more creased, their hair more grey, their eyes more clouded, their friends fewer and fewer. I’m unsure what to say as she tells me about her suffering. There’s so little of meaning I can offer, and far less I can communicate in her language. I just want her to know I see her–and not simply as some expiring senior divorced from my own reality, the way so many do. I want her to know the empathy I feel, but that I can’t quite articulate, even in my own language. “I am sorry, Frau Schmidt.” My hand is over my heart. I hope it portrays all the compassion, or at least the sincerity I feel. I look into her weathered face the way I might look at my own mother or a child or a mirror. I speak in slow, clear English, and resist the urge to flex my aching hands. “It comes for us all.” They tell me how much they enjoyed the cookies I baked for them. No nuts, of course. I help Frau Schmidt zip her jacket, and she sticks a piece of dark chocolate in the pocket of my scrubs on my way out. They tell me they’ll leave a slice of pie on the table for me tomorrow, and will write my name on a napkin so no nurses take it by mistake. I keep their recycling separate, per request. “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” Herr Hoffmann is out taking a smoke break on the communal balcony when I enter his room. Someone finally replaced his cracked toilet seat. I notice because every time I used to lift it to clean and then put it back down, the broken stops would make the porcelain CRACK! down against the bowl. My ears would stay ringing for at least the next ten minutes, and I’d remind myself to put it down even more gently next time. It probably hurt his head even more than it hurt mine. I vigorously scrub the usual deep yellow trail running from the toilet and into the drain at the center of the room. I’m almost finished with the main sleeping room by the time a hand drawn piece of art on the wall makes me do a double take. It is no masterpiece. The artist in question can’t have been more than 5 years old. Still, looking at it takes me to a sunlit kitchen somewhere warmer. My tiny body kneels atop a creaking wooden table in a house across the Atlantic. My brother, sister and I are drawing with colorful markers on plastic plates that will age into treasures for us all. My brother's work features portraits of our immediate family members, himself dressed in his Peter Pan Halloween costume, plus a disproportionately large Jack o’Lantern and the family cat. I don’t need photos to remember it. Each character has the same huge head, the same circle hands with 5 stick fingers, and wide silly mouths and eyes. Back in Herr Hoffman’s room I stare at the framed drawing. I could swear the character is identical in style to my brother’s marker-drawn plate art at 5 years old… or were we even younger? Decades and continents separate the artists, but some small child in Herr Hoffmann’s life had drawn the same careful strokes and deliberate shapes as my child brother to recreate the uncannily similar studied images of their loved ones. How critical my brother was of the fruits of his labor, a detail-oriented and ambitious person from the beginning. I wonder if this German child was the same. I wonder if this art on paper is as cherished as that plastic plate that I can recall down to the last, marvelously imperfect detail from a world away, or if it will also require a couple of decades and the clarity of retrospection. My brother likely isn’t awake. I count on my fingers and conclude that it's around midnight where he is. When I’m clocking out, he, now an attorney, will probably be on his way to his office. He’ll probably call our mother on the drive there. She has the plate in her cabinet in another state in a house I’ve never seen, along with mine and my sister’s, both of which I can hardly remember at all for some reason. My sister will be across yet another state line getting ready for work and her daughters ready for school, their own drawings taped across the walls on colorful construction paper. Maybe I can catch them at the right time if I call right when I leave. I put the dirty mop into its bag and move onto the next room.“Hallo! Wo bist du?!” “Hallo,” I say as I open the door. Frau Burger and Frau Taylor are both in. I look at Frau Taylor and smile as I enter. “Just here to clean!” I say comfortably in my mother tongue, allowing my natural cadence to flow. She’s wearing that cardigan of hers that I love. It’s in both our favorite color, sage green, with small flowers embroidered across the knitting. I compliment it every time she wears it. “Did you hear back about the scholarship?!” Frau Taylor asks in her delicate British accent. Seeing her hopeful expression, I wish that I hadn’t told her about the interview. I’ve been dreading having to let her down. “I didn’t get it this time,” I reply. Her face drops. “But it’s alright! There will be other opportunities.” I’m more disappointed about this than I’m willing to show her, but her company makes it difficult to stay down anyhow. “That’s true, something else will come along!” She agrees sunnily. Frau Burger is facing her corner of the room, reading a book from her wheelchair. I get the subtle feeling she’s growing annoyed with the regular conversations between the maid and her roommate in a tongue she cannot understand, but perhaps it's only my own insecurity as such a weak German speaker. If she’s irritated, she says nothing. I wipe down the sink, scrub the toilet, and refill the paper towels. “How is physical therapy going?” I ask. I start to zigzag across the floor with my mop. “I think all my years in the ballet must help,” she observes, “because they’ve said I’m handling it much better than others.” I love it whenever she talks about her life traveling with the ballet. It was what originally brought her to Germany many years ago, and although it was a short career followed by decades of humbler proletarian labor, the glamor of it still leaves me starstruck. She glances now at her roommate, still facing the other direction, supposedly absorbed in her book. She lowers her tone. “I’m trying to get out of here as soon as possible.” Frau Taylor normally lives alone in a quaint apartment in the prettiest part of town and spends her days reading books or chatting with friends and neighbors over tea. That was until several months ago when she fell. She lay on the floor for two days with a dislocated shoulder, a fractured humerus, several breaks and tears in her knee, and no living family to notice when she didn’t answer the phone or to find her during a lunch visit. It was a neighbor who eventually called the police. She was taken to the emergency room where a handful of surgeries were performed. By the time she was fully awake again, a doctor she’d never met was telling her he’d found a place for her in a “home.” No suggestions were made for where she might receive further treatment, no recommendations for at-home assistance, no options given for various living facilities, not even the choice between a private or shared room was given. Only a declaration that the decision had been made for her. With nobody younger to come and make such calls on her behalf, youth apparently being the variable attribute which would grant or deny ultimate authority over her life, her emergency medical team had taken it upon themselves. They never even considered Frau Taylor herself as a reliable decision-maker for her own care, housing, or late life, despite no evidence suggesting an unsoundness of mind. On her first day at this home, her new doctor said to her, unprompted, “Just so you know, you can leave at any time. You’re not in prison, you know.” “What a peculiar thing to say to me,” she later observed as I scrubbed down her windows. “On my first day!” I couldn’t help but laugh. She did too. According to Frau Taylor, she’s been trying her best to regain her autonomy. However, the best way she describes the staff’s response is as “interference.” “It’s becoming very strange,” she muses to me now. “It’s almost like… as soon as I start making progress, the physical therapists skip my appointments for two weeks. As soon as I say I have found help for my home… I don’t tell them your name, of course… and a physical therapist that will do house visits… I had to call myself, you know, they wouldn’t help me… they start doubting my progress. They tell me it isn’t true, that there’s no one to do house visits. But I know there are because I spoke to the doctors myself,” I stop cleaning and regard her more intently. She’s remarkably calm, considering the number of psychological thrillers or horror stories that have been inspired by similar predicaments. Still, I think, how difficult it must be to make your own case for your mental fitness. How hard it must be to get out of a “home” without trusted outside (younger) family members to make that case for you and commit to your welfare. How challenging recovery must feel when the care facility profiting from your helplessness might not actually be designed to get you back on your feet as urgently as advertised. Whether paranoid or cautious, imagining myself in the same circumstances makes the room start to feel very, very small. I don’t let on, though, and hope she can’t read the anxiety on my face. I won’t be the one to offer her nightmares creative material if she hasn’t heard the horror stories herself. “I think,” I begin hesitantly, glancing around to ensure no other English speakers are within earshot, “that people who work in these fields can sometimes have a tendency to stop seeing their patients as people,” “Yes!” She interjects. I've barely begun my thought, but her eyes are alight at the reassurance of my allyship. It dawned on me only recently that I may be one of the only people she can speak freely about all this with, and I think of this again now. “I think,” I carry on, “that it is easy to begin seeing people like they’re just objects that you work with–same as the computer, or the desk chair. And, I think it’s worse once you’re old–” “Yes!” She interjects again, her eyes wide, brows flying high on her forehead. “People don’t really identify with being old.” I remember my earlier conversation with Herr and Frau Schmidt. I think of my antibodies. “I read a study once about why people so often prepare inadequately for retirement. They don’t even see their older selves as themselves. It’s someone to have sympathy with, but not to see yourself in…” Relief floods Frau Taylor’s face. “Exactly. It’s really just… so strange…” I let out a sigh. “I’m sorry,” I say after a few moments, “it must be so difficult.” “It is,” she says, but seems more consoled by my acknowledgement of her plight than downtrodden by the struggle itself. “Hopefully we will both be out of here soon. You know,” she looks at me more closely, more fondly, “we’re the same, in a way. Both sort of… floating.” Frau Taylor and me: two working class women, alone in a foreign country, passing the years switching from one blue collar job to the next just to get the bills paid and pantry stocked, slowly wearing down the cartilage between our bones and, with any luck, the barriers that might have been imposed by more sedentary lives. And, despite the generations that separate our kindred stories, the stars had aligned so that we would both wind up here, in the same place, at the same time. “I think so.” I agree, smiling, honored by her comparison. We do have the same favorite color after all. “Danke,” Frau Burger suddenly chimes in from the corner, not looking up from her book. Thank you. “Guten tag.” Frau Taylor and I exchange a funny face, and then both hold back a surprised laugh. Clearly dismissed, I smile and say goodbye to them both, moving onto the next room. “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” My mind is drifting to a book I read recently about the importance of sleep as I quietly unlock the door to a dark, quiet room. At 8am, Frau Schulz is still sleeping. I’ve grown accustomed to doing the work in near silence and without light. Most residents can sleep right through my work if I’m careful enough, so I’m sure to be. The others don’t take such precautions. On my first day, I’d asked the head maid in broken German something that would’ve sounded like, “when she sleeps?” “~~~~~ ~~~.” I didn’t know the words. Based on the inflection and her physical cues, I think she said something along the lines of, “it doesn’t matter.” I don’t say anything, and wait for her to clarify. She confirms my assumption when she adds, “Sie putzen.” You clean. Stealthily slipping my master key from the lock, I head into the bathroom with my supplies. The book had told me that it’s quite difficult for the elderly to get proper sleep; Some scientists even attribute many of the health concerns associated with aging to a decline in sleep quality. I start to imagine myself in Frau Schulz situation: struggling to get a good night’s sleep after tossing and turning to find a position that won’t hurt my joints too badly, only to be woken up at 8am by someone entering my locked room, turning on the lights, and cleaning noisily. Worse, that person sometimes can’t even understand her language. It’d be too late in the morning for me to fall back asleep and my whole day would be worse for it. Lights still off, I silently wipe down all surfaces. I’ve successfully almost finished cleaning completely unnoticed when– “It’s easier if you turn on the lights!” Shouts a voice from the doorway in German. Frau Shulz startles awake. A nurse saw the door cracked from the hall, my maid cart parked outside, and apparently needed to inform me of the function of light switches. She turns on the horrid fluorescent monstrosity on the ceiling, swings the door fully open letting in all the noise of the busy corridor, then strides across the room and opens every window. It’s below-freezing outside and an icy wind immediately rushes in. I shudder. I scramble across the room to turn off the light again and frantically whisper in German something that translates to: “She sleeps.” I struggle to mask my irritation. “I can clean in the dark.” Despite my whispering, she is still practically shouting. My brain does quick translations of her words, and I register: “It’s fine! ~~~~ ~~ ~~~morning! She ~~~~~.” I attempt again in my German babel, and repeat: “It’s okay. I clean in the dark. She sleeps.” I’m still whispering, amazed that this alone hasn’t made my point clear. Am I using the wrong vocabulary? What I want to say is that Frau Schulz is not a piece of office furniture. But for better or worse, my lack of language skill forces me to stick to the basics. I walk toward the nurse, gently obliging her to back through the doorway. I smile awkwardly before shutting it in her face. I scurry to the window in a huff and shut it as Frau Shulz gapes at me wide-eyed. Her dazed, unblinking expression reminds me of an infant. Hadn’t my baby niece made the same expression when awoken from her nap? Hadn’t her diaper also needed to be changed? Dust to dust, I think. She struggles to pull her blanket over her, which had come loose in the night and was now badly needed. I shivered, approached the bed, and lifted the blanket to cover her properly. “Es tut mir leid, Frau Schulz,” I whisper. I’m sorry, Ms. Schulz. I add what I hope is the correct translation of: “You can sleep. Almost finished here.” I lock the door behind me when I leave, regarding my own master key with scorn and hoping that Frau Schulz will remain without further disturbance until she’s well rested. I know it won’t be the case, though, because I spot the laundry cart making its way down the hall. “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” I beam when I notice the artwork and elaborate collection of pencils and paints on Herr Basnet’s table, my cleaning supplies momentarily forgotten. “Wow!” I say, stepping closer to better see his work. There is a sketch of a goat, another of a rabbit, one of a pair of clasped hands, and one of a bouquet of flowers, all skillfully drawn and shaded. “These are great!” “Thank you!” He says, face brightening. “Which brand of pencils do you usually use?” Herr Basnet is from Nepal originally, and seems even more relieved to be speaking English than I am. I’ve overheard him speaking English with any of the nurses who will entertain it, as well. This isn’t our first conversation bonding over our art. “I think they’re the same as yours,” I say, observing his pencil box and the brand name across the top. “I can show you a few things I’ve done recently, if you’d like?” “Please!” He is bubbling with excitement now. I take out my phone and scroll through the photos until I land upon the recent captures of my own artwork depicting various animals among flowers, not dissimilar from the sketches on the table before me. I hand the phone down to him, seated in his wheelchair. “They’re not all colored yet so some are a bit flat, but I did these last week,” “Oh my,” he says with a short gasp. “May I?” He asks, already scrolling through the pictures. I nod and smile, already reveling in his approval. It seems too generous, especially from an artist as plainly gifted as himself. But he is wide eyed, reverently swiping between photos and zooming in and out to note the details. “I have to look at photos and copy them,” I confess. “I can’t really draw like this just from imagination,” “It doesn’t matter!” he exclaims. “Wow… beautiful choice of colors here!” He admires my shading of an underripe blackberry. “You’ve got to keep at it. This is really something special!” I feel like a little girl as I stand there, mop in hand, glowing under his praise. The scholarship rejection suddenly feels insignificant, and I feel the fragile blossoms of long-smothered fantasies begin to sprout in my stomach. Hadn’t I always dreamed of making a living creatively? Hadn’t I put just as much, if not more energy into my art than I had into all of those perfect grades and university degrees? And what had all those degrees had gotten me in the end, anyway? Certainly not the reprieve from manual labor I’d thought I could earn. Wouldn’t the joint pain persist anyway, whether from gripping a pencil or a mop? “Yours is fantastic, too!” I acclaim. He scoffs. “It’s nothing, really. I’m a poet at heart. You can look me up on your lunch break, you’ll find some of my published works there.” He tells me his pen name as he hands my phone back to me, and I swiftly jot it down in my notes app. “Amazing! I will!” I slip my phone back into my pocket. “This is so refreshing, really. You know, I was just thinking recently that maybe it’s time I cut my losses and try again to do creative work,” He gives me a warm, genuine smile with full teeth that I feel in my chest. “You must!” He encourages. “You’ve got real talent, and you’re still so young!” I grip my mop again and finish cleaning, newly invigorated. My hands still ache, but I notice it less through my cloud of inspiration. As I put the mop in my wagon and go to close the door, he says goodbye. “I’m so glad I met you!” He tells me. “What a wonderful and interesting person you are.” “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” Frau Abel is seated at her table and battling with a neck scarf when I enter her room. I wipe fallen petals from the floor beneath a wilting flower arrangement and hear her regular involuntary hums that slip from every exhale. She lifts her feet as I get closer so I can mop under her chair. I notice her breathing and humming getting faster and more distressed as she tries to fold the scarf on the back of her neck in just the right way. Eventually I come to her aid, trying my best to fold it properly or at least convince her that it looks proper from my angle. She seems to finally be calming down and accepting the fate of her scarf when a nurse walks in with a tray of food. The moment the food is on the table, Frau Abel is once again overwhelmed with distress. Hands are shaking, breathing rapid, humming growing louder, the sounds she’s vocalizing aren’t quite words, but I wait beside her wheelchair until she says something that I can offer an ear to. Finally, an outcry, clear enough for me to translate: “I have to eat, but I have no hunger!” I pause first, observing the predicament and shuffling through vocabulary in my head. I attempt, and come up with what I hope is the correct equivalent of, “All is okay, you can wait, the food stays. When you have hunger, you can eat.” “Es gibt keinen Kaffee!” She laments. There is no coffee! I touch my rubber-gloved hand to the handle of her coffee mug, sitting directly in front of her on the table. “Dein Kaffee ist hier,” I say softly. Your coffee is here. She breathes deeply, and the humming returns to a quiet murmur and a regular pace. “Okay,” she says hesitantly, squeezing the hem of her sweater in crooked hands and staring apprehensively at her breakfast. She repeats the word a few more times to herself as I am leaving, as if in mantra, “Okay.” “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” I clean the next room hastily as a woman I haven’t yet met sits at the window with a faculty member. It doesn’t take me long, but before I am finished, the faculty member has patiently explained to the woman which city she is in at least four times. The TV is on. A news channel blares information about the South African billionaire who used his influence to determine the United States presidential election, and then, in a gesture unmistakable to the German eye, performed the Nazi salute at the presidential inauguration. It’s the same billionaire who called-in to speak at a rally of the German far-right party recently. The faculty member catches me hesitating by the screen as I’m finishing up. What she says next is a word I haven’t heard in German before. A cognate. “Katastrophe.” “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” “I still remember it,” Herr Koch tells me as I am replacing his trash bag. Although not an Englishman, Herr Koch speaks in a quaint British English accent with me. He told me once that the English were his favorite people, but that he appreciates us “Yankees” for our “uncomplicated” nature relative to the Germans. He is sitting at his small wooden table, the TV on in front of him, where a journalist is talking about executive orders in the United States. He continues, “I was 3 years old, holding my mother’s hand as we fled Czechia with nothing but our clothes. It must have been so difficult for her. My father was fighting in the war… it wasn’t safe for us anymore, and that’s when we came to Germany.” I swipe my mop underneath his adjustable bed, then stand to look at him while he speaks. “It’s been so long,” he says. “I’m just German, now.” I think I sense resignation in his tone, but don’t want to project. I peer out his window at the reconstructed buildings across the street. They’re modeled after the 17th century originals, but I know that they were rebuilt in the 20th century after much of the city had been flattened by bombs. Given his last name, I wonder if I would have been able to tell that he wasn’t German if he hadn’t told me. But then, my own ancestors had changed their last names upon immigrating to the United States, hadn’t they? Would they recognize their roots in me? Would I ever feel just German like he does, if I lived here long enough, the way he has? The idea of it makes me unexpectedly wrinkle my nose. “You spoke French with your sons, no?” I ask, recalling their recent visitation and overhearing them waiting by the elevator. “Their mother is French. One lives there now, the other in Denmark with his own family… they just came to help me move in.” I nod, gripping my mop handle with both gloved hands and resting my chin on its plastic top. I wonder how he feels about his new residence, but don’t want to pry. The conversation at the elevator was my first time seeing Herr Koch have visitors. Then again, I rarely see visitors here at all. Only three of the 125-or-so residents have families or friends who come regularly per my observations. The overwhelming majority spend their days mostly alone, or sometimes in the rare company of staff or other residents. One of the social workers once told me each person gets designated a total of 30 minutes for one-on-one social time each week. “Things are changing again,” he says, the concern clear in his voice. He glances toward the TV, then back to me. Dozens of stories from friends flash through my mind, exchanged between the 20-something languages spoken between the lot of us. “Have you heard the song they’ve been singing?” I ask. “Deutschland den Deutschen, Auslaender raus,” Germany for Germans, foreigners out. The same sentiment is growing in my country of origin, too, and I think again of my sister. She’ll start preparations this week with her fellow elementary school teachers to establish protocol should their school be subject to ICE raids, their students kidnapped by the masked men without badges. “I’ve heard it. It’s disgusting.” He asserts. His typically frail voice does not waver on this subject. “These people are disgusting everywhere. You know… I see the footage of all those people in the Middle East, too, running from bombs and guns only trying to get flour, searching through rubble of their own homes to find their family members,” “So much death,” I respond, recalling the ample footage I’ve seen myself and shutting my eyes. “Tens of thousands dead now.” “More than that. Hundreds of thousands. They’re undercounting.” I’ve read these calculations as well. I nod. He glances around his room and I follow his gaze. It’s a typical room equipped with the same standard furnishings they all come with, plus just a few of his own unique items placed here and there. A lovely oak dresser leans against the wall, but the overall lack of personal belongings makes it evident that he is still in the early process of moving in. He carries on. “They carry the little ones when they flee because they’re too little to run, the same way my mother did. But many of them leave the elderly behind because they’re just too slow and, well, they want to live.” I consider this for a few moments. Something like shame pricks at me for not having yet reflected on this specific experience among all the violence–the experience of the elderly who are not strong enough for displacement, too slow to keep up in crowds trying to outrun bullets, and simply too high-need to prioritize when buildings are collapsing and the children are in danger. Would his sons be back soon to help him with the rest of his belongings? Did he have enough of his clothes here with him for now? Had they already left the city, and would carry out the move incrementally between future visits? Where were they now? “Imagine,” he presses on, pale blue eyes widening on his spotted face, “caring for people your whole life, taking care of them and their children too, only to have them leave you behind in the end.” We remain there, silent. Until, familiar words float from the hallway, through the open door and into his new room. “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” “Hallo! Wo bist du?!” Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
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