Nina

Issue No. 5: Stressed Out!
Words - Babette Dunkelgrün.

During that year, I’m with Nina every Wednesday morning. 

Within a few weeks I become accustomed to everything from the way she is quick to smile to the scent of her place: health food store meets old carpeting, and two to three sprays of organic air freshener. To my surprise, I even embrace the conversational hiatus.

Surrounded by Nina’s table of innocent bags of herbal tea, the Zen fountain with pink rocks, and her framed replicas of Monet’s lilies, I hear my own voice repeating itself endlessly. 

For some reason, there’s not a moment when I detect a hint of boredom on her face. And when I think there might be, it ends up being a sneeze.

Nina is not the first person I’ve paid to listen. There’s Helen, with a soft voice and therapeutic drawing. When the crayons run low, I find Claire. According to her, there’s not a challenge I can’t overcome… by editing my resume or adding in cardio.

I’d be lying if I said Claire wasn’t a source of hope, but I prefer Nina. She doesn’t mind whether I want to talk about periodical feelings of melancholy or undiagnosed asthma. 

In her company I speak freely. She’d never reduce my life to a phase I need to get through. 

These are our sessions. As a seasoned reporter, I hit the road weekly, searching for my history. Nina is tasked with fact checking, knowing next Wednesday will bring another storyline. Randomness makes way for interpretation.

I used to struggle with these stories. I’d doubt relevance, objectivity, and above all, the value of memory. Nina teaches me that as long as I’m able to derive my own meaning, it’s truth. 

My mother is always in the living room, paint brush in hand. During the day she traverses the country for an organization that helps Dutch Jews, who were in hiding during the war, thank their rescuers.  

There are mayors, violins, medals and coffee at the ceremonies. At the dinner table there’s talk of eating flower bulbs, traitorous neighbors, and 7.50 florins per Jew. Our conversations don’t seem to arrive on any other path, which holds a significance of its own. 

Behind my house there’s a tall forest and behind my mom, I locate shades of green and brown, but her canvases lend a warmer glow to the space inside: purple, burgundy, okra. She paints abstract art, which never stops me from inquiring.   

“What do you think you’re seeing?”

I look at the canvas and remember our summer trips as a family, to that small town outside Florence. The evenings are noiseless. I’m in the garden below the stars and can just about smell the lavender. When I look back at her, she’s giving me a puzzled look. “I was thinking more of Auschwitz.”

I envy my classmates. After school they bike home, where I imagine cups of strawberry tea waiting for them. “Tell me honey,” the mothers of Amsterdam say in unison. “Did you have a good day at school?” The answers will vary, but one thing is certain: in their homes starry skies are never synonymous for mass murder.

My father was born in 1943; his parents had fled from the Netherlands to Switzerland during the pregnancy. He remembers his youth in postwar fragments, the talk of the town surrounding who came back and who didn’t. That was then and this is now.

Me: “It’s simple. Today he has atheism and science, the International Herald on Sunday and seasonal tickets to the orchestra.”  

Nina: “Don’t you want it to be simple?”

My mom isn’t born until after the liberation, seemingly more removed from genocide than my dad.  

At school they understand. To me, there are more important things than the Holocaust. There’s social sciences, sex ed, and who to sit with at lunch. I’d want to tell them about it at home, but nobody asks. My dad does wonder whether math class has included the average and the median yet. And mom would like to know about my friends. Would they keep me in hiding, if it came to that? 

Nina is gentle. “Have you looked at it this way?,” she often asks when the 50 minutes are almost up. And then she looks at me above her glasses, the way she always does when something important is coming. “You don’t have to pay for the six million.”

This phrase becomes a constant in my life, like the verse of a song or the deeper breath that has started finding its way through my lungs.