A Translator
by Nina Kossman
I don’t usually look at reality as a treasure trove of signs sent personally to me by fate, but some years ago something happened that made me wonder.
Some years ago I began an intense search for my roots, and I’m not talking about koryagi, i.e. tree roots out of which I make my little sculptures—I’m talking about roots as in Alex Hailey’s 1970s novel “Roots”. I looked through old photos, I wrote to archives in Latvia and in Ukraine, and of course, I talked to my parents, but they were already very old and sick by then. That’s why, when, after a long and complicated correspondence, I was sent a manuscript of my great-grandfather’s memoir in German from Latvia, I did not turn to my father for a translation, even though he would have been a natural choice, as German was his native language, he taught it in Moscow’s InYaz for years, wrote German textbooks and articles for German-language newspapers in New York. Instead, I emailed the Goethe House and was recommended a translator, a German woman living in New York. She wanted to meet in some posh restaurant in the Village, so there we were, drinking an overpriced cup of coffee, while she was talking about her dog, how her dog would lick her face in the morning, her dog was so smart and loved her so much… I said a few things about my great-grandfather, whose memoir was the point of our meeting; I don’t remember my exact words, but I think I said something about his children, that all of them were killed by the Nazis, except for the one who wasn’t living in Riga at that time. Probably I bragged a little about my great-grandfather, whose books, published at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, were still in print, and new editions were available on Amazon. Perhaps that’s what started the lady talking about her childhood in Berlin during the war. She was a little girl, she said, during the war, but she remembers her father feigning some kind of stomach condition, she didn’t remember the name of it, but she knew that he had feigned it so as not to fight in the Wehrmacht. At this point, I began to be aware of my headache, but it was still bearable, so I didn’t pay it much attention. The lady was saying how hard it was for her young mother during the war, alone with a little girl, and that’s when I noticed the inconsistency and asked—hadn’t her father feigned an illness and been freed of duty to fight in the Wehrmacht, which meant that her mom had not been so alone and helpless after all? Oh yes, she said, but her father died during the war, she didn’t even know for sure what it was, perhaps a heart attack. So he feigned one illness and died of another? I didn’t ask her that, but something strange was going on with me: my head was throbbing with a kind of pain I had never experienced before, even though I was no stranger to headaches. She went on talking about what it was like when the Russians came, and how her mother was still a young woman, and it was a good thing nothing had happened to her, because you know what Russian soldiers did, you know… At this point my headache became monstrous, I had never experienced anything like it before, I could barely see or talk. Somehow I managed to pay for my coffee and to part from the German lady. We agreed that I’d send her my great-grandfather’s memoir, but I never did, because my headache lasted so long—almost a week—and it was so unbearable, that I began to see it as a kind of sign that maybe the lady had been lying, maybe her father who she said had managed to get out of serving in the Wehrmacht, did serve, and not just as a simple soldier but as part of an Einsatzkommando, a mobile killing squad, deployed to Riga, maybe he was in the Rumbuli forest on November 30th, 1941, when thousands of helpless people were ordered to undress and lie in a ditch on top of those already dead (Friedrich Jeckeln, the Nazi official who claimed to have invented it, called this method “sardine style”), and mothers were told to hold their babies close, so their killers could save on bullets—one bullet for both. What if it was his bullet that killed my grandmother?
I just don’t know. I never had a headache like that before or since.
Cover photo by Julia Dragan