The Sunflower Forest

A novel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

In that year what I wanted most was a boyfriend. I was seventeen and had never had a date. I had the rest: breasts, hair under my arms, my period, the desire. I certainly had the desire.

Once, when I was little and not too informed about the mechanics, my best friend and I had pretended to make love, our legs spread apart scissor-fashion, until we were crotch to crotch, one person’s sneaker under the other person’s nose. My grandmother had caught us at it. She sent Cecily home and spanked me with a wooden mixing spoon and made me sit in the pantry to say Hail Marys. There was no doubt in her mind, she said: I got such interests from my mother. Perhaps I did. However, even at that tender age, I had decided that they weren’t such bad interests to have.

Nonetheless, I had reached seventeen with nothing more than a valentine from Wayne Carmelee and three kisses stolen by a Danish Eagle Scout under the bleachers at the county fair in Sandpoint, Idaho.

This was a source of great personal dismay to me and not helped at all by my sister Megan, who was nine that year and always willing to confirm for me that I was just as ugly as I assumed I must be. She also suggested that I probably smelled bad to boys.

My father told me that all I needed was patience. It was a natural thing, and you couldn’t stop nature from catching up with you. My time would come, he said. I replied that if we hadn’t moved around as much as we had, perhaps nature would have already located me.

So, in the end, it was Mama I went to for comfort. I asked her when she first fell in love.

‘Hans Klaus Fischer,’ she said to me. She was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen when I found her. Down on her hands and knees on the linoleum, her hair tied up in a red bandanna, she paused and considered the question. And grinned. Reaching up on the kitchen counter for her cigarettes, she sat down again on the floor and leaned back against the counter next to the sink. She crossed her legs and balanced the ashtray on one knee. ‘That was when I was living in Dresden with Tante Elfie. You see, I wasn’t supposed to be seeing boys. I was just turned fifteen and Tante said I couldn’t go out yet. They were very strict in those days, you understand.’ She lit the cigarette and over the top of it, her eyes were smiling. We both knew that what Tante Elfie said probably never had much effect on what my mother did.

‘He was the baker’s son. I met him because Tante Elfie made me go after the bread every day. If she’d sent Birgitta, who knows? Perhaps I would never have met him. But Birgitta was the lazy one.

‘Anyhow, he was at the back of the shop each day, taking down the loaves.’ She paused and her eyes were still on me. ‘And do you think he was handsome?’

‘Was he, Mama?’ I asked. You always prompted Mama with her stories. That was half the fun.

‘Was he handsome? Well, I will tell you. His hair was maybe the colour of yours. A little darker, perhaps, and combed down like this. That’s the way the boys wore their hair in those days. His eyes were blue, well, maybe more a blue-green. And light. A light, light blue-green. Like the colour old glass is sometimes. And he had very fine lips. Thin. Normally, I don’t like thin lips on a man, but with Hans Klaus Fischer, they gave him such a very …what can I say? …important expression. Haughty, that’s the word for it. He would stand in the back room and take down the loaves, and I would think, “Mara, you must have that boy for your boyfriend.” You could tell how important he was just by looking at him.’

She grinned at me. ‘I was very much in love with him. I went every day for the bread, and while I waited, all I could think of was kissing those fine, important-looking lips.’

‘And did you?’

‘Well, in the beginning it was very hard to get him to notice me. I was just one girl, and there were many girls in love with Hans Klaus Fischer.’

‘But you did get him to fall in love with you, didn’t you?’ I asked.

She was still grinning. With one hand she stuck long strands of hair back up under her bandanna, and she said nothing. Mama didn’t have to. She just grinned.

‘What did you do? How did you get him to notice you when there were all those other girls?’

‘I began to come in wearing my Bund deutscher Mädchen uniform. Every day. Even when there wasn’t a meeting. You see, he was a group leader with the Youth Movement.’ She paused, reflecting, and studied the end of her cigarette. The smile came back to her lips. ‘Sometimes I would see him in the back of the shop, and he would have his uniform on. He was very handsome in that uniform. He had a sort of strut in his walk when he wore his uniform; I could tell he thought it made him somebody. So, I thought to myself, Mara, he’s going to like you if he thinks you’re a good member of the BdM.’

‘And did he?’

She winked at me.

‘What did Tante Elfie say then? Did she mind that you were seeing a boy when you weren’t supposed to?’

‘Well, she did a little. At first she did. But I told her what a fine family Hans Klaus came from. I told her what a good boy he was. He was very clever at his studies, you see, and I heard his father tell Frau Schwartz once in the bakers that Hans Klaus might be chosen for the Adolf Hitler School. It was almost a sure thing, he said. So when Tante knew that, she said I could go dancing with him on Friday nights. If Birgitta went along. You know.’ She laughed. ‘To make sure I never really found out much about kissing those fine lips. They were very strict in those days. Not like now.’

‘But how did you make him love you, that’s what I want to know. How did you get him to ask you out for a date in the first place?’

Holding the cigarette out, Mama gazed at it before finally snuffing it out in the ashtray. The floor all around us was still wet, and we sat together, barricaded behind scrub brushes, the pail and floor rags, our backs against the kitchen cupboard.

‘I did a rather naughty thing,’ Mama said. Her voice was low and conspiratorial.

‘What was that?’

‘Well, when he came to the front of the shop once to talk to me, I told him I was really the granddaughter of the Archduke.’

I laughed. ‘You did?’

‘I told him my grandfather was the Archduke and that I had been sent to Dresden for my safety. To live with Tante Elfie, who wasn’t really my auntie at all but just a nanny my family paid to take care of me.’

That struck me as amusing, just the sort of thing I could picture Mama doing with such melodramatic realism that poor Hans Klaus Fischer no doubt never knew what hit him.

‘Why on earth did you do that?’ I asked.

Giving a shrug, she giggled. ‘I don’t know. It was just something I did. I wanted to make sure he liked me. I was afraid he wouldn’t.’

‘But it was a lie, Mama,’ I said, still tickled with the mental image of it.

Another shrug and she pursed her lips in a pensive expression. ‘No. Not really. Just a story. I didn’t mean it to hurt. There just weren’t enough interesting true things to tell him.’

‘So, you told him the Archduke was your grandfather?’

‘Well, you see, you must understand, I was quite desperate about him. I just wanted things to be nice. I thought if he believed that, then he would certainly want to go dancing with me. And once he knew me, then it wouldn’t matter any more who I was related to.’ She looked over at me, and the joke of it sparkled in her eyes. ‘You must understand, I was only fifteen. Everyone’s a little mad when they’re fifteen, believe me.’

‘Did he ever find out the truth?’

She shrugged and rose up on her knees to finish the rest of the floor. ‘I don’t know. After I went to Jena, I never saw him again.’

I was dreaming. It was about the house on Stuart Avenue where we had lived before Megan was born. I was upstairs in the small attic room that my father had made into a bedroom for me. I was standing in front of the little window, looking down on the street below. But instead of the elms that had lined either side of Stuart Avenue, there were sunflowers. The avenue was empty but the sun was shining and it was very beautiful.

However, even though it seemed like the house on Stuart Avenue, I knew it actually wasn’t. It was the apartment in Detroit where we had lived for a while when I was very young. While the bedroom upstairs belonged to Stuart Avenue, I knew that the stairway would lead down into the apartment in Detroit.

In the dream I could hear Mama crying. She was sitting on a cardboard box in the gloomy little storage area under the stairs. But I was still upstairs in the house on Stuart Avenue.

‘Lesley, are you ever going to get up?’

I jerked awake.

Megan was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. She had nothing on but her underpants and an oversized T-shirt that said ‘NASA Johnson Space Center/Houston’ across the front. Leaning against the door frame, she braced one foot against the shin of her other leg. ‘Daddy says you have to get up right now, Lesley. He has to go to work for a while this morning and he says you got to come down and stay with Mama while he’s gone.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost nine o’clock. Daddy says he’ll be back after lunch.’

She turned and left without shutting the door behind her.

I closed my eyes. I could still remember the dream. I had awakened so abruptly that it clung to me and seemed very real, even as it faded.

By the time I’d dressed and come down to the kitchen, my father had already left. Megan was there, still eating breakfast. She had her chair pushed back from the table, her legs drawn up under the generous folds of the NASA T-shirt. Mama was clearing away the breakfast dishes and putting them into the sink. The radio was playing very loudly. Saturday Morning Swap Shop. My mother was addicted to the show, relishing all the bargains she dreamed of getting.

I reached over and took a slice of bread to put into the toaster. It was a wholemeal type, full of crunchy little wheat berries. Although it made wonderful toast, it was messy to eat because all the wheat berries tumbled everywhere. And Megan, who already had a piece, wasn’t helping things. She was picking wheat berries out and carefully setting them atop her knees, which, pulled up under the T-shirt, formed a knobby platform. Then she licked the wheat berries off with the tip of her tongue. Each one, one by one.

‘Honestly, Megan, you eat like a pig,’ I said.

Megan set another wheat berry out, looked over to make certain I was watching and then languidly pulled it up with the tip of her tongue.

‘Mama, look at her. Look at the disgusting mess Megan is making with her toast.’

My mother turned from the sink. She regarded Megan a moment and shook her head. ‘You’re making crumbs everywhere,’ she said. ‘Sit up and put your feet down where they belong.’

I went to the cupboard for Rice Krispies.

‘Megan, Mama said put your feet down,’ I said when I returned to the table with my bowl of cereal.

‘So? You’re not my mother.’

‘Well, she is. So, do it, Megan. Mama said to.’

‘So, make me.’

Annoyed, I sat down.

When Megan continued to pick at her toast, I reached over and grabbed one of her legs. I yanked it down to the floor.

Mama ignored us. She kept her back to us and continued to do the dishes. She had a Brillo pad in one hand and the old cast-iron skillet in the other and was really giving it hell. Occasionally, she would pause and put to her lips the cigarette that was burning in the ashtray on the windowsill. Once she turned the radio higher. But she never turned around.

When Megan reached for another piece of toast, I clamped my hand over her wrist.

‘Stop it!’ Megan said, rather louder than necessary. ‘Stop bossing me around all the time, Lesley.’

‘The way you’re eating that toast is nauseating and you know it. Now, you can’t have another slice. You’re making a mess on purpose.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Mama? Make Megan stop. She’s still picking at her bread. She didn’t listen to you at all the first time.’

‘Lesley, let go of me. Let go of my arm! I mean it.’ Megan leaped to her feet to yank her arm free. The motion knocked her chair over backwards with a resounding bang.

Mama turned around.

Silence.

We both looked at her. She picked up her cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray with great care. The room went so quiet that I thought I could hear the sound of the cigarette against the glass of the ashtray, in spite of the clamour of Saturday Morning Swap Shop.

Wearily, Mama raised a hand to run through the hair alongside her face. ‘What is the matter with you two? You’re sisters. How can you always argue?’

We didn’t answer. There was no point in answering.

‘I can’t understand you,’ Mama said. ‘Why aren’t you happy? You have such good lives. O’Malley and I, we love you. We give you everything. And still you aren’t happy.’

‘We’re happy,’ Megan said.

‘We were just horsing around, Mama,’ I said. ‘We didn’t mean to sound like we were arguing. Did we, Megs? We were just playing.’

‘I cannot understand you.’

‘We are happy, Mama,’ Megan said again and there was soft desperation in her voice. ‘See? See? I’m smiling. I’m happy. Me and Lesley, we’re real happy. Don’t cry, OK?’

But it was too late. Mama lowered her face into her hands. Then she ran from the kitchen. We remained, listening to the shuffling unevenness of her footsteps on the stairs until they were drowned out by the radio.

Megan also began to cry. The tipped-over chair was still on the floor behind her. She stood, watching me, and let the tears run down over her cheeks.

‘Look, Megs, you want some more breakfast? Some toaster waffles maybe? You like them, Meggie. Don’t cry, all right? Shall I fix you some waffles? They’re your favourites.’

Wiping her eyes, she shook her head. Then she righted the chair and left the kitchen too.

My dad called them ‘spells’. Mama’s spells. When they happened, he would lift his shoulders in a bemused, half-shrug and then smile, as if it were just a whimsical little quirk she had, such as the way people might throw salt over their shoulder after spilling it. Although I’d hated the episodes, for most of my childhood I thought they were normal. I thought every child’s mother acted like that. I must have been ten or eleven before I discovered other mothers didn’t.

I stayed in the kitchen alone and finished up the few dishes left in the sink. Clearing off the table, I wiped away the last crumbs of Megan’s toast. I dumped the soggy Rice Krispies.

Sometime later Megan came back into the kitchen. With a widetoothed comb, she was trying to untangle the ends of her hair. ‘Will you help me?’ she asked, holding out the comb. ‘I can’t get all the snarls out.’

My sister had beautiful hair. Like my father’s, it was so dark that it was almost black, but like Mama’s, it was very, very straight. You could run your fingers through it and it would fall away in a soft, undulating manner, like water. The best part about Megan’s hair, however, was the length. It was nearly long enough for her to sit on. There was so much of it and it was so often left loose, since the sheer weight of it prevented her from using little-girls’ hairslides or headbands, that Megan always had a kind of untamed look about her. Even so, people stopped sometimes and turned around to look at her again because she was so striking. I had never been allowed to keep my hair that long when I was Megan’s age, but then I had never had hair like Megan’s.

‘You know, Les, Daddy’s going to kill you for giving Mama a spell,’ Megan said softly as I combed her hair.

‘Me? It was your fault, you little pig. Daddy’s going to kill us both.’

She didn’t answer. Pulling away from me, she took the comb out of my hand and went over to the table. She hoisted herself up on it and then pulled long strands of hair around to comb the tangles from the ends.

‘Megan, don’t do that on the table.’

She didn’t respond.

‘Did you hear me? That’s unsanitary. Go somewhere else.’

Still no response. But she had stopped combing her hair. Instead, she just fingered through it, regarding the strands. ‘Les?’ she asked without looking up. ‘Why do you suppose Mama does that?’

‘Does what?’

‘You know. That. I mean, we were just goofing around, that’s all. How come she can never tell that?’

I shrugged.

‘Why does she keep thinking we’re unhappy? How come it’s so important to her anyway that we be happy a hundred per cent of every second?’

‘It’s just one of those things, Megs.’

‘One of what things?’

I shrugged.

At a quarter to eleven Mama came downstairs again. Megan and I were still sitting in the kitchen. She came to the table and reached for her cigarettes.

‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ I asked. I was already on my feet.

She nodded. Going over to the sink, she leaned forward to look out the window above it. With fingers of one hand resting against her lips, she smoked without ever taking the cigarette from her mouth.

‘There are no flowers,’ she said.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘But there’ll be plenty again when spring comes. Remember all the new ones Daddy planted?’

Megan had wrested the kettle from me so that she could fix Mama’s coffee herself. Carefully, she measured a spoonful of granules from the jar. ‘Here, Mama,’ she said, stirring the boiling water in. ‘Here’s your coffee.’ She squeezed her body between my mother and the sink in an effort to make Mama look down at her. She held up the mug of steaming liquid. ‘Here, Mama. Just the way you like it.’ But my mother stared over her to the window.

They didn’t look much alike, my sister and my mother. Megan was thin and lithe and dark, like some half-imagined thing escaped from the pages of a fairy tale. Mama was tall and pale, with broad, prominent features. Her hair was still light as sea sand. The only thing she had given Megan was her blue eyes, and they were very blue, like chambray cloth.

Mama turned entirely away from the window, and Megan had to run around to be in front of her again.

‘I’m sick of this place,’ Mama said. ‘It’s too cold. I hate the cold.’

Mama went over to the table and sat down. With both hands she finally accepted Megan’s mug of coffee.

‘Does that mean we’re going to move again?’ Megan asked very quietly.

‘I don’t like it here,’ Mama replied.

‘I do,’ Megan said, her voice still soft and tentative. Mama was looking at her over the top of her mug as she drank the coffee. ‘I think it’s nice here, Mama. I got friends here. Like Katie and Tracey Pickett.’

My mother lowered the cup. ‘There are no flowers.’

‘But Mama, it’s January.’

With a sigh my mother set the coffee mug on the table. She gazed at it. ‘But there are no flowers here.’

‘There aren’t any flowers anywhere in January, Mama,’ Megan said.

My mother was silent for a moment. ‘There were in Lébény. In Popi’s conservatory,’ she said. ‘There were always flowers there.’

Megan’s face brightened abruptly. Coming closer to Mama, she knelt down and put her arms around Mama’s neck. With one hand she moved Mama’s face away from the direction of the coffee mug so that she would have to look at her. ‘Tell me and Lessie about Lébény, OK, Mama? About Popi’s flowers, OK? Tell us about that time you and Elek sneaked in and took Popi’s camellias for your hair and then you two went to that dance. You know. That time you weren’t supposed to be up late because it was a big-people’s party. The time they played “The Blue Danube” and you and Elek danced in the upstairs hallway and you could smell all the beautiful ladies’ perfume. Tell us that story, OK?’

My mother’s face softened. The tired, bloodless look left her and she smiled down at Megan, who was on her knees beside the chair. ‘You know that story, Liebes. I have told you that story a hundred times already.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Megan said, her expression beguiling. ‘But it’s really my super favourite. Tell me again, OK? Please? Me and Lessie want to hear it.’

Mama was still smiling when she touched Megan’s face. The smile made my mother very beautiful.

Chapter Two

My mother was born into a family of the Hungarian gentry, genteelly declining in the ruins of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, who had fought alongside von Hindenburg in the Great War, had retired from the military a short time afterwards and returned to manage his family estate in northwestern Hungary. His child bride, whom he’d met and married in 1914, was the youngest daughter of one of the old, established families in Meissen, in Saxonia.

Besides my mother, there had been three other children in her family. Her older brother, Mihály, she remembered only dimly because he had gone far away for schooling in Germany before she was two. Her beloved younger brother, Elek, however, was only thirteen months her junior, and they had been constant childhood companions. Mama’s stories about Elek were so vivid he almost seemed to be my brother. Her younger sister, Johanna, had died of scarlet fever the year Mama was eight.

Although my mother never said as much, I suspect she had been her father’s favourite among the four children. She had been a strikingly beautiful child, with that blonde, clear-eyed pureness that was so prized in those days in that part of Europe. In all the photographs, she was dressed up like a little princess, in velvets and silks and lace. Her flaxen hair was very long and carefully curled. And even with the solemn mood of those old pictures, she’d managed just the slightest hint of a smile on her lips. We had only one photograph of her entire family together, and in it, my mother stood apart from the other children and leaned against Popi’s arm. If you looked carefully, you could see his hand on her shoulder, his fingers twisted lovingly through her hair.

Popi had seen to it that she was well turned out. She had been bilingual all her life because Mutti spoke to her only in German, while Popi spoke Hungarian. But he had also brought a special tutor from Milan for her when she was six so that she could learn Italian. She had had dancing lessons and voice lessons and had learned to play the piano and the organ. When she’d wanted a pony, Popi had hired a riding instructor from Vienna and bought her a white horse.