An Afterlife. Frances Bartkowski

      

      Advance Praise

      “An Afterlife is a totally surprising book, unforgettable in its depiction of the daily lives of holocaust survivors in postwar Germany. Ruby is a seamstress so talented that her sense of color, thread, and fabrics becomes a bridge to friendship with a German shopkeeper who shares her passion and quietly employs her. So many details linger within Bartkowski’s skillful telling: the dark bread, the small celebrations, the amazing images of young refugee mothers walking in town with their baby carriages, lover’s afternoon walks (back before curfew), are miracles upon miracles. The characters agonize between remembering and forgetting, but An Afterlife moves forward, and like all truly visionary books, re-defines its title. We read An Afterlife with an awareness of present streams of refugees, supported, resisted, misunderstood, and the repetition of old cycles adds to the depth of Bartkowski’s novel.”

      — Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Machine Dreams, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell

      “Bartkowski delivers a novel that transcends the fiction genre. This work is as detailed and accurate (with brutal and miraculous turns) as the most searing historical documents, folded in a narrative as immediate and vivid as a poetic memoir. The book is written as it must have been lived, with an ear to the ground and an eye to the future. Its power is a testament to the tether and persistence of inherited trauma and its twin: the redemptive possibilities of telling the stories our forebears could not tell. As the title suggests, these characters live another life after the labor and death camps, after the Displaced Persons camps, after emigrating to the U.S.—this other life springs up on every page of this extraordinary novel, in full color, in season after season, in names and births and deaths and letters and twists and fabrics and factories and an unforgettable hope that trembles throughout this beautiful and necessary book.”

      — Brenda Shaughnessy, author of Our Andromeda

      “How do worlds, lives, and loves get recreated in the aftermath of catastrophe? In a work of enveloping empathy and vividly conjured detail, Frances Bartkowski imagines answers to this impossible question. A poignant and utterly persuasive evocation of death and rebirth, spanning years and continents.”

      — Susan L Carruthers, author of The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace

      “Frances Bartkowski’s An Afterlife gives us the imagined years of characters arriving on the east coast after a shared life in the displaced persons’ camp, opening up questions of surviving, even flourishing in the aftermath of unbearable atrocity and loss. This brilliant story relays the excitement for new life and community even as the ghosts of loss and complicity gather again, threatening to pull these characters back and down into the dark. Each one bears a singular relation to loss and love, and together they struggle to affirm the sound, the smell, the feel of a new world.”

      — Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life

      An Afterlife

      An Afterlife

      a novel

      Frances Bartkowski

      Copyright © 2018 by Frances Bartkowski

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).

      Cover photo: “Mother Tower & Lech, Landsberg, Bavaria, Germany” by Zairon, 19 April 2015, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

      First Edition

      Printed in the United States of America

      Casebound: ISBN: 978-1-62720-166-7

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-167-4

      Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62720-168-1

      Design by Tyler Mummery

      Marketing by Alicia McEnearney

      Author photo: Colleen Gutwein

      Cover photo is of the Mothertower in Landsberg, Germany

      Published by Apprentice House

      Apprentice House

      Loyola University Maryland

      4501 N. Charles Street

      Baltimore, MD 21210

      410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)

      www.apprenticehouse.com [email protected]

      For the unburied who came before, for their kin who live on,

      and for those who come after

      And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

      W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

      Il faut oublier pour rester présent,

      oublier pour ne pas mourir, oublier pour rester fidèle.

      Marc Augé, Les formes de l’oubli

      Contents

       The Mothertower 1

       Harbor Lights 99

       After All 113

       Autumn Morning 177

       Acknowledgments 181

       About the Author 183

      •

      The Mothertower

      Arm in arm, or hand in hand, the two of them always found a way to come closer than before. It was late summer and they whispered to each other in the darkness. Before going home to their separate rooms in the camp and the sounds of neighbors, they took their time. Night and the thick old trees masked their shadows. And there stood the Mothertower. Like a castle missing everything but its turret, it stood tall–large old stones topped by a golden cone. It was dark, and inviting, like something out of a storybook. Whenever they walked here, the two of them felt like children in a fairytale setting off on an adventure, not running away like Hansel and Gretel from the witch and her oven. The night air was thick and soft. They found their bench, one of three in a semi-circle around a fountain. Here the river overflowed into a brook, and another and another. The sound of water was everywhere. And no one but them to hear it. There had been rain, the river was high, loud and close. Their voices were drowned out by the sound of the falls.

      If their embrace was awkward who would mind? He took her onto his lap easily. She floated in his arms. They looked into each other’s eyes in the darkness and met their own wishes mirrored in the other. Kissing him, she went for his neck and collarbone, and he got lost in her hair. They were not children now. The summer night made all things possible and the ghost of the mother in the tower turned away at the sight of these two. The connection was quickly over and even they couldn’t believe what they had done. And no one to punish them. And no one but the two of them to remember this night.

      Ruby stepped back, straightened her skirt, and held out her hand, taking Ilya up. Smiling to themselves, and almost shyly, to each other, they took their time through the quiet narrow streets back up the hill to their rooms in the almost never quiet alleys of the Kaserne, the DP camp. In this Bavarian city barely bigger than a village, where German army officers used to train,