Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Christopher Kloeble

Anni and Mina

Anni didn’t realize she’d set our house on fire. Her eight- year-old’s mind screened her from the knowledge. It rejected the truth for her own protection, as Anni herself rejected so many things. As the months went by, she practiced shaking her head, training herself, whenever other children called on her to play with them, or at lunch, when somebody suggested eating a littlemore. Or after her First Communion, when Farmer Egler asked her in a whisper whether she was interested in the closely guarded secret he kept inside his pants. And oneday,when shediscovered my I love you carved into the winding root onWolf Hill and asked herself who’d written it and when, she shook it as if she never wanted to stop

again, left and right and left, with raised chin, staring eyes, and white lips pressed firmly together, locks of hair whipping against her cheeks, wiping the world away. When winter came, our burned-out house, surrounded by snow, looked like a black-and-white photograph. She went there looking for something, without knowing what. Something pretty, small, familiar, something to press against her breast and cherish. She poked a stick through the mound of ashes, whipped it at rats, wrote Mama and Papa and Julius with it in the soot. On each of these forays she pocketed something. A collection of Most Beloved Possessions accumulated in a basket under her bed, which she

206