marina

Marina believed in the romanticism of life. It’s one of the qualities I most wish I had. She could take something small and believe instead in its enormity. She took joy in stories such as the man and the starfish along the beach.

Her favorite creature was a caterpillar. Not a butterfly, she believed them to be cliché. But a caterpillar. A slimy little worm with a fat roll for a body and eyes black with longing to develop, to change. She collected them on her finger, picked them right out of the grass and let them crawl to their little hearts’ content. It made her smile, and she would look up with her big blue eyes. “Wanna hold him?” I never did.

            I remember the way Marina used to smile at me. Her gentle lips would curve, and her red nail polish would sparkle as she brought her fingers to cover the cherry abyss of soft words.

Time was kind to Marina, I can attest to that. As she grew into her eyelashes and gained the swirl of her hips that every woman needs to truly conquer sensuality, I remember watching in awe. How life could develop that way amazed me.

I remember the day when Marina’s smile dimmed. We were listening to the radio for the first time in weeks; the war was raging and we didn’t want to get out of touch. War in its infinite ugliness took away the bliss of ignorance.

The words stung like daggers. Well, one word in particular, really: deportation. As if my yellow star wasn’t dangerous enough. You could be beaten to death in the streets simply for looking at someone the wrong way; it didn’t matter because the star was a toxin. It made you hideous to look at, a waste of god’s energy manifested into a spirit of supposed worthlessness. The toxin was so strong that eventually you were forced to believe in it.

Marina looked at me with fearful eyes, but they lingered only for a moment. Something stronger pulled at her; she blinked and turned toward the bedrooms. Her ears cocked, she stood silent as a mouse and still as a cocoon, waiting for a muffled cry to push her fear underneath her instincts.

The ghettos were awful; I remember them as the worst kind of prison. Humiliation was the main focus of all those around us. It was as if we were vermin. Crammed into little spaces meant to quarantine us in our disease spread by the toxin of the yellow star.

Marina would occasionally bring me food, but she never ventured past our secret meeting spot: just outside the ghetto. I spared her the details regarding my living conditions; to this day I will never know whether she actually knew what they were like.

I remember that day my worst nightmare became a reality. Deportation was no longer just a phrase, and the day came for me to take my turn. I spent days on end crushed against the walls of a car meant for cattle. I suppose it was fitting. To be treated as an animal from the very beginning. The fear was the worst. I feared for myself, but mostly I feared for Marina. She couldn’t live without me, without my income, without my reassurance that things would be okay. A beautiful Christian girl, I believed, was next. How naïve. Her beauty was what saved her.

Days in the camp were long, bitter, painful. Mocking signs, dirty faces, and stinging words almost killed me. But nothing could ever compare to the day when I saw Marina again. She was behind bars, but it was I who was on the wrong side. A man held her hand, smacked me across the face for taking too long a glimpse. She was more beautiful than I remembered, but her smile was not the same. Everything about her seemed wrong.

I became numb. To understand was to die, I believed, therefore I refused to comprehend. I moved with the motions of a corpse, and did not wish to see Marina again. Little did I know that Marina was yet another matter with which I had no say.

The next time I saw her was the last. It was the end, the final destination, the time for me to see my god. The god of tolerance, the god of hypocrisy. As I was undressing to take a final shower, I saw her again. Her lipstick cherry red, her eyes a dull gray, her nails gripping a key.

We were separated by a wall of people, and I was forced head-on into a man who moved me into the chamber, the deathly shower. As the door was closed, I remember closing my eyes and taking one last deep breath.

Suddenly the door creaked open again, and a hand grasped me, pulling me out of the chamber and into the “fresh” air again. As I blinked open my eyes, I caught one last glimpse of cherry red lips as Marina swallowed the key and closed herself inside.

The tiny space was not mine to keep; I was forced to trade my death.

I hope she dreamed of caterpillars.