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146
A D
isarray
of loose-leaf notes is splayed across my lap, promising
half written sentences dissolving into ramblings of nothingness. For
inspiration I read long-winded Russian romantic novels and sit
brooding in coffee shops. Yet still, my pages are left blank, college-
ruled lines void of anything worthwhile I might have to share.
Writer’s block. How can I have writer’s block? I’m not even a writer,
just an amateur attempting to play in the big league.
T
he
week
prior
to visiting my father in defeat, a friend,
attempting to compliment me, commented: ‘You could
totally
exploit
that Jewish Holocaust thing.’
Does that count as exploitation? Am I not able to write that authentically?
I thought.
I went home and stared at my blank pages. Tepidly, I picked up a
pen and wrote
A
uschwitz
S
tory
at the top.
I
sharply
look up to the sound of a faint wheezing, my father’s
frail hands attempting to manoeuvre his hard metal wheelchair,
until he clumsily clasps them together across his woollen blanket.
His hands shake. Almost as if the simple act of being is too much for
his aching bones.
‘Pa.’
‘Hello, daughter,’ he says in Yiddish.
‘Did Nurse Al explain to you why I’m here?’ I clearly enunciate
every word to accommodate for his age.
‘I’m old, not deaf.’
‘So, will you tell me your Auschwitz story?’
Anything you write will be a meager shadow. I do not believe it is
possible to convey the horrors of what we have suffered.’
‘Tatenui, my voice has hollowed, let me borrow yours so they will
all remember.’
A tense pause followed, the static in the air rippling around us as
we sat awkwardly.
‘I visited Mamah’s grave yesterday. I left some flowers from you.’
My father hasn’t visited her grave in years – in fact he hasn’t left
the confines of the nursing home for that long either. As I approached
her tiny plot of land, the old flowers I had left on my last visit were
deteriorating, the sharp pink and yellow hues slowly disintegrating
into muddy browns that lay wasting on her grave. The rain carved
pathways down the white tombstone and my knees sank into the
soft spongy grass as I knelt before it. Leaves littered the ground, the
My Story,
His Story
Annabel Loane
12