Confessions

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MY FATHER used to kidnap people and kill them. My brother says he saw my father transform, during the war, from someone he knew into someone he didn’t know. That’s my big brother — I never knew my little brother. I know his picture, I know his face, he looks more like me than my big brother — that is, in photos he used to look more like me — and I call him my little brother, as all of us used to call him — in our heads, even if we didn’t actually mention him in our conversations, his pictures still filled the house — what was I saying? I call him my little brother even though he isn’t my little brother, and I call him “little” because he stayed that way, because he never grew up, because they killed him when he was a boy.

How many times did I see my sisters sitting silently in the living room (the safe room, our refuge in times of shelling) as if they were at a funeral, side-by-side on the long sofa with the green velvet cover, gazing at the enlarged picture of him on the wall, a black ribbon hanging over the corner of it. How many times did I see my big sister turn, in tears, and watch me enter carrying a sandwich — I ate sandwiches all the time: the shelling died down at sunset and my mother would rush into the kitchen, warning me not to follow her, but I always did. I ate those mortadella and pickle sandwiches as fast as she could make them. I can recall my sister now as if all these years had not passed — they passed and they didn’t — I remember her turning to look at me from beneath her long lashes, her black hair framing her white face, and I remember how she’d raise her eyes and look at the picture…. I can recall the moisture on her lashes, I haven’t forgotten that.

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