Lost Time

The late afternoon Maine sun was warm, with a hint of the cool evening air that would soon follow. Returning from my walk along Long Pond, I heard swimmers splashing in the water below, as I kept my eyes peeled on the narrow lakeside path to avoid jutting rocks. When another hiker came toward me, I stepped aside to let him pass and looked up to see a young man carrying what looked like a musical instrument case. I gave him a questioning glance, and he stopped.

“A guitar?” I asked.

“It’s an oud,” he said in a quiet voice that seemed to flow into the breeze. “It’s an ancient instrument.”

I twisted my head to look at the case more clearly, and the young man with a blond ponytail nodded, carefully placing the case on the ground. As gently as he’d pick up a baby, he removed an amber, wooden, pear-shaped instrument and held it like a guitar. Strumming several discordant chords, he then plucked a melody whose magic could have coaxed a genie out of a bottle.

I heard myself sigh at the sounds that began reaching deep inside of me. “Where are you going with your oud?”

With his head, he gestured to the path behind me and lifted his eyes to the rocks above. “Come join me sometime. I’m usually there about now, if it’s not raining.”

I nodded, he packed up his instrument, and we continued walking in opposite directions. As I picked my way across the uneven rocks, his voice and his music echoed in my head, until they were interrupted by the chattering of oncoming hikers carrying bathing suits and towels.

I found my car and drove a short distance to the tiny cottage I’d rented. The scent of pine trees interspersed with sea air met me at the door and drifted with me into a cozy wood-paneled living and dining area, with a fireplace that would soon be useful in the evening as fall approached.

I’d retreated to the cottage on Mount Desert Island to think, to reflect, to get away from the well-meaning condolences that made my mother’s death sound ordinary, like a normal stage in life. But it wasn’t at all normal that she’d lived so long, given everything she’d suffered. And she hadn’t wanted to outlive my father, to be the one left behind.

“I’m so sorry, your mother was very special,” my ex-husband, Joshua, had mumbled to me at the funeral. But he never really understood her, why she secretly slipped sugar packets and bread rolls into her purse at restaurants, why she always eyed strangers suspiciously, even our friends when we brought them to meet her. It was embarrassing to Josh. I was used to it, but he wasn’t.

The fresh Maine air helped clear my head, and so I ventured out on another hike the next day. At sixty-four, I still felt strong, making my way through the woods and up a small mountain to a flat rock. Here, I ate my lunch with my eyes drawn to the ocean glittering with tiny islands, before making my way back down the mountain. At the end of the afternoon, on a whim, I returned to Long Pond. I walked onto the lake’s coastal path, sat on an overlook, and watched the kayakers slip their paddles in and out of the water with a regular rhythm, in and out, in and out, as they silently moved forward. The quiet, steady cadence of the paddlers calmed me and left my mind empty.

“So you’ve come back.”

I turned to see the young man with the oud smiling at me.

“Are you playing today?”

He nodded and put his hand out to help me up.

“My name’s Damian.”

“I’m Sarah,” I found myself returning his smile and following him into the woods as a sleepwalker might.

Damian led the way, sure-footed, across the uneven rocks. He was only about five inches taller than me, maybe 5’9”, with a slight build and the gait of a graceful dancer. It was hard to tell his age, but I guessed in his thirties. After half an hour or so, we left the hikers and swimmers behind, and I wondered if I should keep following him alone, with no one else in sight. I really had no idea who he was. But somehow my body had its own mind and I kept on walking. Damian veered off the path to a small promontory overlooking the lake, where we sat down and absorbed the nascent crispness of a late afternoon.

Without a word, he took out his oud, tuned it, and gently stroked the strings into a haunting melody. Each note and chord lingered like aftersounds meeting in an echo chamber. The tones vibrated in my throat, as I closed my eyes and imagined I was drifting over the lake, untethered, following my own path without a breeze to drive me. Damian’s music hovered around me long after he stopped playing, and when I opened my eyes, waves from the music were rippling through the lake.

“That was beautiful,” I said in a whisper.

Damian nodded.

My eyes had teared from the chilly air, or maybe it was Damian’s sorrowful melodies. I said no more, not wanting to break the music’s spell that had suspended me in time and space. What an odd person to meet in the woods. He didn’t talk much. But then neither did I. There was something otherworldly about him, something peculiar, not in a bad way, for as I thought about his music, a comfortable equilibrium settled in my gut. Returning along the shore path, my shoulders lost their tension and my arms swung loosely as I walked, with my eyes focused on the path’s irregular footing. My body naturally rearranged its weight to accommodate the rocks, and I felt almost as if I were walking above them, despite my heavy hiking boots. A red-headed woodpecker accompanied me with his continual taps on a tree.

Later, when I returned to the cottage, I swayed back and forth in a rocking chair on the porch and watched the promise of sunset above the ocean. I conjured up my mother’s image, not her last bedridden figure when she was dying, but much earlier, when I was in school. She was short and wiry and always wore dresses that she fashioned herself. After all, she was a seamstress. But her dresses were nothing special. There was no time or money for that. Her hair was prematurely gray and pulled back tightly into a bun. I loved the early mornings, when her wavy hair still hung loose from the night and softened the deep lines in her face. I can’t remember her face ever not being wrinkled.

My mother was strong, and she managed our family with firm resolve. I loved her vibrant voice, even though her Yiddish accent and my father’s always embarrassed me. None of my friends’ parents had accents. Maybe that’s why I hardly ever brought friends home with me when I was growing up. Or maybe I was just ashamed of our cramped apartment that housed the three of us, plus my mother’s sewing machine – the machine that let her supplement my father’s night watchman wages. And when I was a teenager, it supported us after my father died.

I continued rocking on my Maine porch, inhaling the clean air, as dusk approached and the crashing noise of lobstermen throwing their heavy metal traps on the pier gradually subsided. I’d go on another hike tomorrow, maybe on a more difficult trail. There were groups to hike with, but organized activities had never been part of my life. I really wanted to belong but somehow couldn’t. I always felt different. The clothes I wore to school were whatever my mother had time to sew for me with whatever fabric she had left over from her customers’ orders, even if it was drapery fabric. And my socks were anything that was on sale. One year I only had turquoise blue anklet socks to wear to school, and I tried desperately not to call attention to them by always looking up, never down.

Looking down at my feet at the bottom of the rocking chair, I nodded approval at my Smart Wool socks. My parents would be horrified at how much I’d spent on just that one pair.

Even now in my socially acceptable socks, I felt different. I knew very little about where I came from, about my parents’ past. Sure, they’d told me about growing up in shtetls in Poland, about my grandparents, my aunts, uncles and cousins. At my urging, my parents told me the same family stories over and over again. But the stories were sparse, and they always stopped in 1939.

“What happened when the Germans came?” I’d try to spur them on. I knew my parents had endured concentration camps, and that they were the sole survivors of their families. But I wanted to know more. And were they sure no one else in their families had survived?

They’d just shake their heads. “No one else survived. Better to forget. Be happy you’re here.” Then they’d shut down until the next time I asked, and eventually I stopped asking.

I often found myself playing out their former lives in my mind, my imagination taking hold and painting a past that became more and more elaborate. There were no details or family photos to guide me, so I concocted my own stories, with my parents in a pastoral, small Polish town. It was a shtetl where even the poor milkman sang like in Fiddler on the Roof, but without the pogroms. I imagined my parents fleeing the shtetl just in time to avoid the German occupation. After all, they were smart and resourceful. My made-up stories satisfied my needs. And the more I craved information, the more I dreamt up. This bled into my present, so that my imagination sometimes played havoc with me.

But now, the inescapable reality of my mother’s death confronted me. I was the sole survivor of our family, left behind by a past that eluded me. Or was I avoiding it? I’d taken a month’s leave of absence from my job as a journal editor and found myself missing the work issues that structured my life and took my mind off recreating my parents’ story. Sure, I’d read plenty about the fate of Jews in Nazi Europe. But without actual details of my family’s experiences, I’d go on imagining them, sugar-coating them, evading the reality that my parents had tried to forget.

A few weeks in the crisp Maine air, distant from everything, was doing me good. The sea air, tinged with the scent of pine trees, was healing. In the late afternoon, as my eyes glided over the water, I could see a group of kayakers paddling into shore. They moved in unison, so far away that I heard nothing. They could have been specters.

I pulled an envelope out of my jacket pocket and removed a letter that I’d unfolded, read, re-read, and re-folded so many times that it was crumpled and smeared. It was from Uncle Jerry (Itzhak) in Australia and had arrived several weeks before in response to my mother’s death. He wasn’t my real uncle, but a close friend of my parents from Poland who’d left the country just in time. As much as I’d craved information about my parents’ past, when his letter arrived, I put off reading it, afraid of what Uncle Jerry would tell me. And now, even though I’d read the letter many times, it still didn’t feel right. It didn’t jibe with my own stories.

“Your mother did everything she could to hide her parents and younger sister from the Germans who were sweeping the countryside. And with her cousins, she tried to hide her grandparents, aunts and uncles. But it was no use. The whole family was rounded up and loaded into railroad cattle cars, transported to the Warsaw ghetto, and then later to Treblinka. Your mother was strong. She somehow survived this concentration camp and one more, but the rest of the family died in Treblinka.” Uncle Jerry wrote so much that it felt like he was unburdening himself.

“Don’t be angry with your mother for keeping this from you. While you were growing up, she said you were too young to understand, and when you were older, she didn’t want to overwhelm you with the past. But much later, she admitted she simply couldn’t deal with it. She didn’t have the strength to relive everything by talking about it. ‘Better to forget it,’ she said.”

I wasn’t surprised that he defended my mother. She was protecting herself and me. As a child and teenager, whenever I went out, even just around the corner, my parents’ voices trailed behind me: “Be careful!” Their voices never left me. “Be careful,” I’m always telling myself.

But here in Maine, I didn’t follow my own warnings. After all, I’d followed Damian, that peculiar character, into the woods. Well, he’d seemed okay, just otherworldly. What harm could come from such an ethereal figure? I felt comfortable with him and his music, detached from so many worries. Could he be real?

To reassure myself that I wasn’t dreaming, I drove back to Long Pond the next day at the end of the afternoon and followed the path to Damian’s rock. Nodding to me as I sat down, he played a mournful piece, a meditation that pulsated through my body and seemed to move to my heartbeat. When Damian finished, he put his oud down and sat very still, with his hands resting on his knees. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and I noticed a tattoo on his left forearm. It was a series of letters and numbers.

Seeing me stare at his arm, he explained in a gentle voice, “It’s something to remind me of a friend who died. This makes my friend indelible. She’s always with me.”

My mother’s obsession with wearing long sleeves flashed through my mind. “My parents had tattoos on their forearms.”

Damian looked past me and then refocused directly into my eyes. “I’m sorry. That must have made things difficult for you.”

Then he began playing his oud again. His music swirled, as if insulating us, and his longish blond hair released from his ponytail rippled in the breeze. Out on the lake, two paddlers waved to us, but we didn’t respond. We were too immersed in the music, and my mind wandered. Sometimes when the oud sounded playful, and I felt myself falling into it, a sudden phrase of discordant notes caught me off guard. But I laughed aloud, and Damian smiled with me.

“It’s nice to dream, isn’t it?” he offered, as he gently rested his oud on his lap.

“I dream a lot.”

“Well, we all create our own reality, don’t we? We all dream.” Damian’s gentle voice seemed to wrap itself around me like a warm scarf. I felt as if all of my body parts had been balanced. Is this what a piano feels like after it’s been tuned? I imagined myself emitting the sweet, clear notes of a perfectly tuned piano.

Who was this unusual young man? I kept wondering. He sounded so wise, so much beyond his years. Or maybe he’s just saying things he knows I want to hear. My parents would tell me to be careful. And Josh would tell me that Damian was probably some computer game guy making fun of me. I’d see myself as a character in a computer game one day. But I didn’t care.

Damian looked at me as if he were reading my thoughts. “It’s okay to dream.”

“But sometimes I think I’m just avoiding reality.”

Damian shook his head. “I think creating reality makes life more beautiful.”

I wanted to ask him who he was, what planet he was from. But he looked away, picked up his oud, and began playing rippling sounds that swirled around me and seemed to flow into the lake, making waves. I found myself lifted from the rock I was sitting on. Then I took several steps forward and stood right on the edge of the cliff, looking out over the lake. The oud’s undulating tones seemed to raise me up higher, then yet higher, until I was standing on my toes, spreading my arms. I almost felt myself floating, with no fear of slipping off the cliff. Then Damian played a series of soft chords that resolved into a gentle waterfall of notes down a scale, as I lowered myself to sit down on the rock again.

With my head in my hands and my eyes closed, I heard sea gulls searching for their dinner. I felt perfectly composed and didn’t move for quite some time. When I opened my eyes and looked around, Damian was gone. I’d wanted to ask him more about himself. Who was he? He gave me a sense of calm I hadn’t felt for a long time, if ever.

The following morning, taking advantage of the good weather, I packed a lunch, filled my water bottles, and drove to the head of a trail I’d hiked years ago with Josh. It would be a hard trek, but I was feeling strong. The trail started as a path in the woods, with the morning sun shimmering through the trees. Every once in a while, a citrusy scent wafted my way when I passed a family of pine trees. The footing was level and clear of large stones, so I was able to stride easily and breathe deeply. I lifted my chest and let my hips sway. My arms and legs propelled me forward to an internal pulse radiating from the center of my body. The sound of my boots hitting the ground reverberated through me. The regularity of my stride balanced my mind. It matched my heartbeat, pushing me onward. And my backpack, with still-full water bottles, lunch, snacks, an extra fleece, rain gear, and miscellaneous stuff helped to balance me.

As I climbed the trail, rocks gradually replaced trees. I made my way around boulders, carefully climbed up metal rungs that park rangers had inserted on an especially steep incline, and then began the trek up the side of an impressive mountain. I remembered this from years before but was still awed by the sight. Soon there were no more wild blueberries to pick, and when the trees disappeared, the last chance to pee went with them. The string of hikers ahead of me dwindled, as more and more exhausted trekkers gave up and turned back. I forged ahead on the ever-steepening trail. As I climbed higher, my pace slowed from fatigue, while the breathtaking seascapes drove me on. Several times, I thought I saw the mountain’s summit ahead and pushed myself into a second wind. But each time, it was only a faux summit, and together with a shrinking string of hikers, I plowed on. Finally, I heard cheers ahead of me and reached deep inside of myself for a last spurt of energy, before finally reaching the top. Holding on to my hat so that the stiff wind wouldn’t steal it, and feeling my shorts and shirt billow in the air, I slowly turned a full circle while looking down at the ocean and across to neighboring mountain tops. I reached my arms up and let the wind blow into me.

After devouring my lunch, I lay down on a rock, with my head resting on my backpack. Seeing only blue sky so far above the ground, I felt as if I were in an airplane. The last time I’d flown anywhere was to a conference in Italy a year ago. When I changed planes in Frankfurt, Germany, the passport control officer examined my passport, and seeing my place of birth, said to me in German, “So you were born in Germany?” I understood and nodded slightly, not inviting conversation. “Heidenheim,“ he said, after looking at my passport again. I nodded. I could have glared at him and snapped, “Yes, I was born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Heidenheim.” But I just looked at him and tried to appear blasé without speaking. For if I’d responded in German, it would have come out sounding like Yiddish. That was the only “German” I knew.

The cheers of hikers reaching the mountain’s summit woke me from my daydreaming, and I readied myself for the descent down the mountain. It wasn’t as interesting as the way up, maybe because I was tired and my legs seemed to move mechanically. Or maybe the trail down below was just too busy to be attractive. So when I reached a plateau, about an hour and a half down from the summit, I veered off onto a less popular path that in a roundabout way would lead me to the trailhead where I’d started that morning. Thankfully, there weren’t many hikers here, and I relished walking alone in the peaceful air, hearing only the crunch of my boots on the trail. My mind wandered as I looked out at the islands in the ocean below.

Then I fell. Or I think I fell, for at some point I opened my eyes and found myself lying on the ground. I sat up slowly and felt my head carefully but didn’t find any bleeding, just pebbles in my hair. My face felt scratched, with what seemed like dried blood on my forehead, nose, and cheeks. My arms and legs were scraped and bruised, with dirt and dried blood streaked up and down them. I could move my arms, though it was painful. Maybe I’d tripped because I was tired and let myself be distracted. Or maybe I’d fainted. I was definitely feeling my age. Clearly, I hadn’t listened to my mother’s voice: “Be careful.”

How long had I been lying there? It felt like a good hour because the air was cooler, or did it just feel that way because I wasn’t moving? I got up slowly, knocking pebbles over a cliff, and shuddered to see how close I’d come to the cliff’s edge. There was none of Damian’s music to steady me here. I really needed to get ahold of myself.

Shivering, I pulled a fleece out of my backpack, then drank some water. I saved the rest of the water to drink later, so I didn’t use it to wipe the blood off my face, arms and legs. Josh would have packed a first aid kit if we’d been hiking together. I shook my head. Maybe I’d been fooling myself about how strong I was. Or maybe I’d just been lost in my thoughts, not paying attention. Josh always called me a “space cadet.”

My cell phone didn’t have a signal here, and this wasn’t a heavily used trail. Afraid no one would find me if I stayed longer, I pushed myself to get up.

Trying not to move my sore shoulders too much, and bracing myself for pain, I cautiously pulled my backpack on. Then, feeling only half there, I continued walking on the trail, my legs wobbling at first, but gradually gaining some strength. As I reentered the main trail, hikers who passed me stared and asked if I was okay. Could they help? Embarrassed, I waved them on. No, no thank you, I am fine, just a little scratched. Much later, when I arrived at my cottage, my image in the mirror frightened me and my jaws ached from gritting my teeth. My gray hair was swollen with dirty dust, and I looked even older than I was. I shook my head to rid my hair of the few remaining pebbles. Maybe this was a wake-up call to stop dreaming, to pay attention to reality. I shouldn’t be hiking these trails alone. And maybe I shouldn’t be hanging out in the woods with a weird stranger who encouraged my dreaming.

My parents would have bandaged me from head to toe, and then yelled at me for being so careless. How could I do this to them? What was I thinking? Did I want to make them sick from worry? They’d had enough trouble in their lives. I shouldn’t make it worse. And I’d cry, apologize, promise never to worry them again. For they were fragile. They’d been through so much – so much that I didn’t understand.

Why couldn’t they help me understand? Once when I was ten, I asked my mother, “What does ‘displaced’ mean? Does it mean dislocated, like a dislocated shoulder?” I knew about that because my friend Anna had dislocated her shoulder when she fell on the playground. “Was it like that?”

I’d looked up “displaced” in the dictionary and found synonyms like “dislodge,” as in “to dislodge a rock with a shovel.” “Was it like that?” I asked her.

My mother stared out the window and then back at me. “It means something isn’t where it should be.”

“So when I was born, we weren’t where we should have been? Where should we have been?” I held my breath and hoped to finally lure more information from her.

My mother sighed. “You know, we should have been at home in Poland.” Her tone told me that our conversation was over. And my father was just as silent. A big chunk of our family’s past was locked in an imaginary box that I could never seem to find, much less open. So I created my own picture of their past. I imagined my parents as superheroes, slipping away from the Nazis by night, making their way through forests, sleeping under trees, foraging for food in the woods. My parents were resourceful and would certainly find food. I pictured them meeting up with resistance fighters, all heroes outsmarting the Nazis, who chased them but never caught them.

Gently rocking back and forth on my Maine porch, I smiled at my superhero parents, until my bruised face ached and I had to put an ice pack on it. The rocking chair’s motion comforted me as the day progressed to a chilly dusk. I rubbed the goosebumps on my arms and pulled out Uncle Jerry’s letter to reread. It still didn’t seem right. I felt like I was reading someone else’s story. Or maybe I just wanted it to be someone else’s. I put the letter back in its envelope and into my pocket.

Things must have been difficult for me, Damian had said. I thought about that as I prepared the fish I’d picked up at the shop down the road the day before. I’d grown up feeling that life was tenuous and not secure. And I’d get angry at my parents for that. But then I’d feel guilty for being angry at them.

Yes, things were difficult for me. But I reminded myself of what my parents must have gone through and shook my head. Josh had always complained that I was with my mother more than with him. There was always this doctor’s appointment or that tax issue she needed help with. He claimed I spent so much of my time and affection on her, that little was left for him. But he didn’t understand.

Or maybe I simply couldn’t get close to any partner. Maybe I was too “displaced” to last with anyone. Josh claimed I didn’t really want to know what my extended family had gone through, that I didn’t want to admit they’d all been murdered. Just thinking the word murdered now, I raised my shoulders to protect myself. Maybe Josh was right that I never wanted to face up to my family’s story, that I wanted to make up my own version. I looked at Uncle Jerry’s letter. He gave me the details I’d always craved. But I didn’t want to hear them.

At that moment, the diesel engines of lobster boats grew louder as they moved toward the pier. Vibrations from the boats pulsed through my body and replaced the thoughts of murder. It was good to be here.

Hiking was out of the question the next day. My body needed a rest, and I was a little shy about going out on my own again so soon. But the following day, I felt ready for a short walk on Long Pond at the end of a restful afternoon. Carefully watching where I placed my feet on the path, I made my way slowly along the lake until I heard the magical tones of Damian’s music.

He greeted me with raised eyebrows when I wandered out onto his usual rock, but he kept playing his oud. When he stopped, he quietly asked how I was.

“All right,” I mumbled, looking down so he wouldn’t focus on my bruised face.

“Is it painful?” he asked.

I lifted my shoulders and dropped them, like a teenager who’d done something wrong.

“I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the trail.”

But he reassured me, “Don’t worry. We all fall on these rocks at one time or another. Just be careful.”

I winced at hearing the familiar warning, though his voice didn’t have the anxiety I was used to. Why wasn’t he more concerned? But wait, I hardly knew him. Why should he be worried about me?

“You’re upset that I’m not more concerned about your fall, aren’t you?”

Could he read my mind? I swallowed hard.

“That’s all right. I’m not worried about you. I trust you’ll find your way all right.”

“Even if I’m a space cadet?” I blurted, as I felt creases forming on my forehead.

Damian smiled. “Oh, maybe you just live a few inches above the ground. That’s not all bad. It might lift you a little above the nastiness down below. I often find myself floating above it all, as well.”

I started to ask him who he was, where he was from. But I bit my lower lip to keep myself from speaking, from dissolving what felt like a dream. Damian picked up his oud and played a slow, mournful melody. My body sank into itself as the music reached my core, and I put a hand on my belly to feel the vibrations there. When he stopped, I had tears in my eyes. And maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw his eyes water, too. I stood and reached out to shake hands, but he took my hand in his and gently raised it to his lips, as an old-fashioned European gentleman might.

“Be well. And don’t worry if you sometimes float above everything. Not many can do that, you know.”

I left, feeling as if I were gliding above the ground, ignoring the rocks below me. A light breeze seemed to propel me past families of hikers who didn’t notice me. I found my car and drove to the cottage, but when I arrived, it didn’t feel real. Damian felt real.

The next day, I tried to let the fresh air clear my mind. But Damian’s image, his music, wouldn’t leave me. So at the usual time in the late afternoon, I returned to Long Pond and made my way along the coastal path, accompanied by the red-headed woodpecker tapping on a tree, urging me on. When I reached Damian’s rock, it was empty. I walked to the end of the cliff and stood looking out over the water. What had Damian said? It was okay to stand above the nastiness below. I thought I heard his oud and turned to look, but it was the haunting sound of loons calling to each other. Waves grew in the lake, not from Damian’s music, but from seagulls swooping down to capture their dinner.

I returned to my cottage and sat on the porch. Wrapped in a jacket and a blanket, I sipped a cup of hot tea and felt the first whiff of what would soon become fall.

After rocking in the quiet evening, I felt more tranquil. Slowly I reached under my blanket and inside my jacket, took out Uncle Jerry’s letter and read it again. I closed my eyes and tried to link the past in the letter to the past in my mind, then put the letter back in my pocket. The porch floor creaked to the steady rhythm of my rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Time seemed to float, as late afternoon turned to twilight, and then to a chilly darkness that sent me inside. I rubbed my hands for warmth, knelt down, and added kindling to the logs in the fireplace. I lit a fire, poked it to keep it going, then pulled out Uncle Jerry’s letter and looked at it again. His details weren’t really a surprise to me. I’d suspected them for a long time. “Better to forget it,” my mother had said. I held the letter over the fire and closed my eyes as I wavered. For a moment, I felt suspended in time, as the past and the present merged. I inhaled and exhaled, then placed the letter back in my pocket.