09. Blue

I like to imagine her there.

At the Christmas markets where there's mulled wine, fresh cinnamon doughnuts, and glittering trinkets for sale. I know it's not true of her life, that this idyllic image has nothing more than a passing connection to her, but still, I like to imagine that it meant something to her. It makes things easier.
Serge is walking towards me, smiling wide, with a hot toddy in his hand.
"Do you want one too?" he asks. I shake my head and stay rooted in my seat at the charming café I've planted myself in.
"It's a gorgeous market, you must come see," he insists as he sits down. I shake my head once more. We've come all the way from Marseille and we're now closer than ever to her, but this doesn't feel right. These are not the Christmas markets my grandmother grew up attending.
He stares at me from behind his drink, the steam fogs up his glasses.
"What is the matter, my love?" he asks.
"I'm not sure that I'm ready to see it," I say. Serge puts his hand on mine gently.
We're just three hours from our destination and I am beginning to get cold feet. Of course, I had read about it, the small town she had grown up in that now belonged to Poland, ravaged by the Red Army and Germany alike. But suddenly, going to see it, the place that stole my grandmother's innocence, seemed wrong. It was no longer a pilgrimage, it was a journey into a past she had tried to protect us from.
The last time I saw her, she had turned blue. I had so many questions left for her, so much of her life I had been desperate to understand, but I was too young and too afraid to dare disturb the peace with my curiosity. It was my biggest regret. I had tried to piece her life together from fragments of stories passed down, pieces of history that lined up, and the bureaucratic pages that documented her life, but nothing could replace her own words. Nothing could replace hearing her tell me in her soft-spoken, broken English, how she made it to Australia. Now, here I sit on a street in Berlin that she may well have walked down, never knowing what her life truly looked like in this place or any before it.
Was she desperate to leave familiar places that left her stifled, like I was? Or was she given no choice? I suspect her life in Schivelbein had been a hard one. But life in Berlin must have been brighter, even then. Or could she no longer stand the sight of destruction? Like me, was she itching to get out, to not wait for the world around her to be rebuilt but to find a place where she could safely rebuild herself? Did she crave the limitless southern skies I grew under, or were they a simple perk? When she got off that ship, did she ever look back like I have, so many times?
Thick hot tears begin to steam down my face at the thought of her, younger than me, in a place where she could barely speak the language. Then comes the final memory of her, silent, cold, and blue.