Diamond's Dust

“Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.” John Webster

     “Everything that had to be said about this piece of old history was already said,” her professor’s dry response to her long and detailed proposal did not surprise her.

“From you especially, I expected something more original.” He was wrapping the short meeting quickly, and it was obvious that he was not supportive of her choice yet stuck to his no 1.  Rule; let the students learn from their mistakes.

  What can be learned from a town that was once alive and now the wind flows uninterrupted in and out of broken windows, from a whole town that transformed over the years into a handyman special, a fixer-upper. Clara felt that she did her best to explain that she was not interested in the ruins; the research she planned was about people.

  Ghost towns, abandoned towns, settlements that once were alive and vibrant but no longer, the topic she picked for her final project in her historical fiction college class, seemed like an excellent choice for a research, and an excuse for a long journey. She planned to start in the north west, at the beginning of the spring and work her way south. She hoped that by late fall she will be ready to return with enough material to work on, during the winter, in her small congested apartment in Manhattan. But now, seeing her professor’s unenthusiastic response she realized that she will have to do more to impress him, to prove that she was serious. What was it about the images of abandoned towns that kept tugging and pressuring her to learn more she was not sure, but all set to find out.

 Was the whole idea just one big mistake? Clara was wondering about it while packing for her journey west, and again three days later when after long flights and endless bone-breaking hours on dirt roads she arrived at her first destination. It was the middle of May and the days in Alaska were already getting long; she knew that, yet nothing prepared her when the jeep finally stopped, at ten at night, for the colors. The land of the midnight sun, she repeated the words in her head, over and over, trying to fall asleep.

  The next morning, Clara stepped into the main street of the town. The sun, already up in the cloudless sky, augmented the color of the buildings from dull discolored red to a burning blaze. The main street was nothing but a railroad track and on both sides dirt. The houses were lined, in straight rows along this vein that when it died took away the town’s life.

  She really have to stop using words that resemble a living body, that will tarnish the objectivity of her research and prove that her instructor, his voice she could still hear in her head, was correct when he warned her against picking a topic that was in so many ways a cliché. There must be a way to catch the spirit of a place while still alive and the desperation in the final days when it becomes apparent to everyone that a death sentence was signed and sealed. Her plan was to locate one or two stories of people who lived in the town and through their life illuminate the experience of being uprooted from your life by external forces.

  Clara was not sure why she picked this town to start with, maybe because its existence was so short, only twenty-seven years, or perhaps because the town’s life was revolving around making money quickly and shrewdly. This place was not about heritage and family life and building. It was about exploiting the earth and making tons of money in the process.

Or was that the full picture?

  When she saw the listing in a book about American history, it moved her in a strange way. Coordinates: Latitude 60.75 & Longitude 142.00.Population: Ghost town. Really! She remembered her first reaction, that what the 800 people who lived there at the time amounted to?

Later she found that most of the structures were still there, taken care by the park service.  Forty buildings; including a hospital, with a dental office, an elementary school, recreation hall, a silent movie theater, ballpark, skating rink, tennis court, and even a dairy. In November 1938, when the copper began to play out, the miners were getting restless. The Mining Company told everyone “You have two hours to pack your things and board the last train out.” Everything was abandoned, personal belongings and mining equipment.

    The sun rose over the mammoth ore processing building and Clara stopped and watched as the colors faded slowly. She thought she could still hear the pounding of the mill, smell the ammonia from the leaching plant, and feel the vibration of the shaker tables. And then in the corner of her eye she caught something white and fluttering and ignoring the signs posted by the park service, bent and picked a small piece of white paper.

  It was a drawing by a small child, the classic house, a rectangle covered by a red roof. Two windows with the curtains tied in big knots. The door half open was leading to a semicircular entrance way, ending with a white picket fence and a cat. There was even a stick figure in the far right corner, a man to judge from the hat on his head. Looking at the drawing she felt how a big smile is forming inside her. She did not even had to read the few scribbled words at the bottom; she knew she found her missing person. She was right, no one, no matter how detached and shrewd is completely lost. This one person, whom the drawing was made for, was missed.

-Eminent Domain -

   “When you are thirteen the whole world seems as one big adventure,” Clara kept hearing the woman's voice in the video she just watched. When you are thirteen the strained worried faces of the adults around you, and their whispering voices at night, going on and on, those are just slight distractions. Leaving your home behind, or taking it with you, or even just burning it down to the ground, who cares, you are bubbling with the excitement of something new happening, heck, anything happening. It reminded Clara of the story her mother told her about the night she, fourteen at the time, had to leave her home, with her parents. It was abrupt, it was not planned, it happened in the dark of night. The train ride, the border crossing, the soldiers that one of them winked at her when no one noticed. It was like watching a movie, only this time she was the star.

  From the never ending summer sunlight of Alaska to the muted palette of Maine’s late fall, Clara was still on the look for abandoned towns and their hidden stories. This time it was the one about three small towns who stood in the way of progress and were submerged under the water of a dam built to create more electricity for Maine.

  At times, she asked herself if this search was her way to make sense of her family story. Reconstructing her history from bits and pieces of other stories? The thought caught her by surprise when she closed her notebook late at night and her mother’s words, words she heard for the first time when they took a trip together to her mother’s childhood town, appeared suddenly in her mind. They had nothing to do with the story she was working on, or where they?

“There is no pride in being unwanted, in being tossed away, locked away from your life, your possessions taken away and even worse, your identity. You look around and other people, your friends, are still carrying their identity, their regular life. They avert their eyes when you look at them, and you realize that you become transparent, you become a threat. “

  Clara read the story several times on the journey back East. It was about three small towns standing in the way of a megalomaniac company, and a promise of economic development.     “Light in every kitchen, power for industry, work, money,” the words rolled over the old streets, and years of traditional life and drowned them even before the water came.

  First the politicians, then the lawyers, words like eminent domain and progress were exchanged over the heads of the residents choking any resistance.  And then, when everything was signed and sealed the physical transformation of the land began, erasing the natural forests and farms, creating a flat, scorched lake like bottom.

  Of all the descriptions, she found this one the most upsetting, not a quick unforeseen disaster flatten the land and the houses, but a long drawn process of burning, uprooting and disjointing.

She tried to imagine the people reminding herself of her task, to tear the two-dimensional script and open a door to the story. Fray the heavy cloth; pull out its threads to find the individual lives.

  On the sparkling blue water of Flagstaff Lake the following morning, the boat rocking slightly and the sun rays penetrating the water all the way to the bottom, the shadows seem all but gone.

Clara leans back and let herself immerse in the soft warmth of the rays and the tranquil views of the water and the surrounding mountains. It seems like it was always there, and only history can verify that it is a man-made lake. A sudden stop jerks her forward and for a minute she gazes at the small sandbar, full of grasses and other plant life not sure why they stopped.  The guide gets out of the boat and kicks away at the sand that raises small clouds of dirt and some frightened frogs. Buried just beneath the surface, is a layer of blacktop – the old Route 16, He explains, still intact after more than 60 years.

  On the way back, her eyes closed and the voice of the guide in the background. For a fleeting moment she thinks she can hear the voices, disharmonious upsurge of sounds enveloping her, carrying her away.

   They say that when the water came, one person; a woman and her dog stayed till the bitter end. Clara let herself float with the words;

  The wall of water rolled in, first just licking the foundations, then creeping up the stairs and finally only the rooftops were seen, and then the quiet landed heavy and dense.

This followed years, then months of endless debates and pleas, and only when the finality of the situation enveloped the small towns the preparations for the nearing end began.

There was something unnatural in the slow process of getting ready for a disaster. The physical dismantling of one’s home felt like tearing the insides piece by piece, the pain of the body pales only in comparison to that of the soul. So she decided to let go.

  She felt old, too set in her ways. She was always sure that this house she took over when her parents passed away will be her final stop on the way to the unknown. It felt right, almost comforting; the presence of the well-known artifacts, the pictures on the walls, her parents and sibling’s presence around her. At times she thought she could hear her dead husband’s voice booming, coming at her from the old wooden beams. If there was ever a good time to die this was it. She turned on all the lights in the house, if they want cheap electricity, they got it. She knew it will not last long, but it felt like a small victory, the only one she had. And then the water covered the house, and rolled over it, soon the whole town was submerged, and only one light was still flickering on the water surface.

-If walls could talk-

   “And I thought it was going to be red,” The minute the words came out Clara realized she said them aloud.

  “Ah, some people said that before, “Rod turned his head to look at her nodding slightly. The remark, grouping her with other tourists left a faint taste of bitterness in her mouth, and she did not speak a word for the rest of the journey, crossing the Muscongus Bay to Louds Island.

She first heard about this tiny island, only three miles in length and one mile wide, while searching for another abandoned town to become part of her project, and a random sentence jumped out.

  “1912 Schoolhouse on Malaga Island (which had been recently “depopulated” by the State of Maine) is disassembled and moved to Muscongus Island, where a church is built of the Malaga lumber and hardware under the direct supervision of Alexander P. MacDonald

  ‘Depopulated’ the word had such an innocent ring to it. Once it was populated now it is not, no big deal, just on and off, one moment here the next moment gone. People can be depopulated, buildings need to be disassembled, but the result is quite the same, what was, is now gone. In the case of the school house, rather small and painted red as Clara could recall from her readings about it, the lumber and hardware were put to good use and created the brotherhood church on Muscongus Island, or Louds as it was often called.

  The thriving community of the island, now all but gone, accepted this unexpected, generous donation ($600 worth) by the Seacoast Mission, and a Gothic Revival church was built and dedicated. The red was thoroughly covered, by dull gray Clara noticed, as Rod maneuvered the small power boat and tied it to the dock.

  “It is always open,” Rod said as if reading her thoughts. “Just open the doors and walk-in, I will wait for you here next to the boat,” and with that he stretched full length on the grass and pulled his hat over his face.

  Clara walked slowly towards the building, then up the three front stairs and through the glass doors that led into a cool, dark room filled with rows of chairs. As if pushed by a force bigger than herself she walked around the room moving her hand along the roughly hand honed wood planks.

  There was nothing there, what did she expect to find, did she expect the walls to talk to her?

Frustrated she sat on one of the stools, leaned back and closed her eyes. At first the quiet was uninterrupted, and then she thought she heard a burst of laughter, then another. Kids she thought, running around playing. She opened her eyes and looked around, but there was no one. She raised her eyes and gazed at the massive beams. Right above her head she thought she could detect a faint glow of red. She closed her eyes, waited few seconds and reopened them, the red was still there.

  When she asked Rod earlier that day if he knew anything about the history of the church he crossed his arms over his chest and mumbled something about bad karma. He refused to enter the church but agreed after her long persuasive speech, and a promise of a sizable pay, to take her to the island. Now she had the task of convincing him to take her to another island where it all began, Malaga Island. She only saw a few photographs of the island’s black granite rocks rising from the choppy blue ocean.  It looked like any other island along the Maine coast, but looks can be deceiving when it came to Karma and past stories.

  The pictures, documenting the life of the small community of Malaga Island were piled on her desk in the motel room the same way she left them in the morning. Clara arranged and rearranged them while her mind was drifting away. Black and white, clusters of people, posing in front of their homes, children in the school room, folks performing some daily activities. In times when pictures were taken only on special occasions, this excess of photographic evidence of life that was gone made her shiver as if unknowingly she looked into the face of evil.

  She read for the second time the short letter she received that same day from her professor. He commented on the last paper she sent him. “Not bad,” he wrote, which in his minimalist way meant that he was quite impressed. “You got something there,” it continued. “Maybe I was wrong to object to this project, and you were right.” He finished by saying “take the stories inward, look at yourself as if you were there, then draw on that.”

  But Rod, when she approached him the next day said “no,” and then again “no way,” as if to stress that under no circumstances, or persuasions, he will be willing to take her on his boat to that cursed island. “M a l a g a,” he spat out the sounds one by one as if they tasted too bad to hold in his mouth. Without him, she needed to come up with a different plan.

  She heard about the cemetery where many of the residents of the island found their final rest. The Pineland Cemetery, next to what used to be the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded that later became Pownal State School, then Pineland Hospital and Training Center and, finally, Pineland Center. Its campus in New Gloucester grew and changed over the years as did its population.

The cemetery hosted a special section; she read, with graves moved from the island when its inhabitants evicted, and where those who were institutionalized in the nearby school, joined after they passed away. Getting there after driving through the narrow twisting roads, Clara was amazed to see the bright new renovated campus of Pineland Farms. Green sprawling lawns meticulously manicured, beautiful brick buildings and even a fish pond. She located the cemetery with ease. It was beyond the main campus; a small sign declared ‘Pineland Cemetery’ and she parked her car close to the entrance.

  She searched for the Malaga section but at first could not see any special signs, any dissimilarity in the straight rows of graves. She was about to give up. Standing alone between the straight rows of graves the quiet was eerie. The slight wind moved the leaves and for a moment she was convinced she saw a movement behind the dense green wall.  And then it caught her eyes, two short rows of plain looking graves of gray sandstone, tucked away in the back.

The names were familiar; she looked at them awestruck realizing that those who moved the remains of the dead from the island did not bother to grant each person its own grave, and Headstone. This was a simple act of dignity that was robbed from the dead, and perhaps from the living too.

   “Take the stories inward, “were her instructor’s words of advice, what did he mean? What was she suppose to be doing? What should be her next step? Walking back to her car she almost tripped on the commemorative stone at the end of the row, when she raised her head, she saw the sign. It contained a summary of Malaga Island’s history, and the final words were; this plaque is dedicated to their memory, Green House Bath Middle school 2008.Someone did care; she should find the people who could talk to her about what happened, that is where the key is to her story lies.

  With time, Clara learned to sort through the many different versions that accompanied the abandoned towns she set out to research. There was always the ‘official front runner’, the one told over and over till it attained the innate sing-song music of a folk tale and the two-dimensional appearance of a well-polished canvas. It was only when she tugged at the worn edges that the cracks appeared and through them the layers upon layers of hurried brush strokes. This one was not different.

  Sitting on the second floor of the white renovated library building in Ellsworth, she looked at the river flowing slowly below, and back to the table piled high with books and articles. This was starting to resemble a modern-day Rashomon, she sighed frustrated tired from her attempts to understand what happened. She just returned from meeting a very a well spoken, young and energetic representative of the Malaga scholarship foundation, in their office on Main Street. Peering at the lists of names from where the foundation drew the eligible candidates, she felt as if hundred years rolled back in front of her eyes. Not a legend (perhaps nightmare), a folk tale whispered at the dead of night, this was ‘real’ as the names listed, with dates of birth and death.

“This is our attempt to make things right,” the young women said without hiding her pride.” It is time that someone will pay for the wrongs.”Clara wanted to match her enthusiasm, to listen to her stories of the three public apologies made by Maine governors over the past years, about the families rediscovering the story hidden for so long and coming to terms with the pain. This was the ‘happy ending’ every story should have, the good that overcomes the evil, and justice that triumphs over ill- doings, the world becoming a safe place again. For some reason Clara felt that she could not participate in the sense of satisfaction radiating towards her, and Instead nodded while collecting the many copied documents she got, and not trusting her voice walked out while the words of the young women trailing behind her “don’t hesitate to come back if you want more information.”With a much-needed coffee, she stumbled into the library and only there in the cool quiet found her breath again.

  In her house in Brunswick, they sit in the dining- room with its windows overlooking the marsh that forms the beginning of the New Meadow River. At this spot, narrow and shallow,  the river does not look anything like the wide river it is going to become, further on when it reaches the town of Phippsburg on its east shore some 12 miles away, passing between Bear Island, Harbor Island and Malaga.

  Etta Mae, the owner of the house is a direct descendant of one of the families from Malaga Island; Clara was excited when she agreed to meet with her. “There not a day passed since I came to live in this house, almost eighty years ago, that I do not look through the windows at the marsh and think about them.” Etta shrugs her shoulders and pulls out a small almost completely torn picture album.

  Clara has so many questions she wants to ask. Etta is the only person still alive, who witnessed that night, almost hundred years ago when the inhabitants of Malaga Island were forced to leave. Etta and her immediate family; mother, father, and sisters, were taken to that dreaded place, its name only whispered, under one’s breath, Pineland.

   “It was supposed to be for our own protection; we were told,” Etta says as if reading her thoughts.  “A safe place, a roof over our heads,” she keeps on saying as if reciting something she repeated to herself many times over the years. “But any place that you cannot leave when you want to is nothing less than a prison. Isn’t it?”

  Etta looks straight at Clara as if waiting for an answer, and for the first time since she stepped into the small house Clara feels that no words can express the shame and frustration that were cemented over the years until they set up to form a solid ball of anger. She lowers her eyes and looks at the picture album. As if grateful for the destruction, Etta opens the small book and leafs through in a way that divulges the endless times she did that same movement over the years.

  “The only thing I never let go off, “she declares as if to herself, “Look, this is me at eighteen before everything happened.” It is clear that to Etta, life is divided into two sections; before it all happened, and after, later on, when everything known and trusted transformed within days into isolated fragments.

   “Do you have a family?” Etta’s question startles her. She did not realize how deeply engrossed she was in the black and white photograph of a young girl with a huge smile leaning against a rock with the chopped waves in the background.

  “No, I am still a student,” she has a vague feeling of shame; she sounds as if she is apologizing, but for what?

  “Here,” Etta stretches her hand and land the small album in her lap.

  “I want you to have it, in the place where I am going to it will be nicer without the memories.”

“I have no need for it anymore,” She repeats seeing Clara’s unease.

  “They are all dead, and you seem to care, you will keep the photographs, you will remember them for me.”

  When she steps out of the house, the small book feels warm and heavy in her hands, and she knows she has much work waiting for her.

    Back in her apartment, winter descending around her, white flakes turn into sludge as they touch the streets surface, they match her mood. Clara moves between her desk and the kitchen and back to the desk, then the window overlooking the small park, with few bare trees, enclosed between the brick buildings hardly ever seeing the sun. Tomorrow she will meet with her professor to present the results of her five-month research, and suddenly she is unsure about the whole idea. Over the summer, she managed to put aside her hesitations and forget his dry, unemotional attitude. These stories she brought back, these towns their secrets she tried to unveil, became a part of her, important in a way she was not sure she can explain even to herself.

  In the morning jumping over puddles and trying to duck the rain, cold needles on her face, she walks breathless into the room on the second floor. The professor is already there, sitting behind his desk he waves for her to sit.

  “So, was it worth your time?” he shoots before she even settles in the chair.

  “Ok, ok, let see what you got,” restless as always he leafs through her neatly organized papers, read random sections, gaze at the pictures. When he sees the torn picture album, given to Clara by Etta May he looks at it puzzled, and then look at the photographs for five straight minutes while the quiet in the room becomes almost unbearable. Clara shifts in the chair once, and then again.

  “This is very impressive, “he breaks the quiet suddenly and for the first time since she entered the room looks straight at her.

  “This is really good work,” he repeats as if talking to himself. “But you are not even close to the real purpose, to your true mission.” He gathers all the papers to a neat pile, leans back in his chair and watches her confused face with slight amusement.

  “My real purpose?” Clara finally manages to mutter a clear sentence.

  “You were going to search for ‘real’ stories about people in abandoned towns, weren’t you?”

Clara nods her head waiting for the punch.

  “You found people alright, “he continues to prolong her torture.

  “But you missed the most important person, you missed yourself.”

  With that, as if closing a final argument in a courtroom, he switches the light on his desk, it is obvious that the conversation is over. He seems satisfied, a small, almost invisible grin on his face. Clara looks through the window behind him and is surprised to see that while they were talking it became dark outside.  It feels like only a few minutes had passed since she entered the room,

  “I will give you an extension,” he is still talking to her.

  “Go and complete what you need to do.”

  Clara collects her papers, and before she leaves the room she looks back, he is engrossed in his work, not looking at her.

    That night Clara dreams that she is climbing the Roman ramp, on the steep, narrow trail leading to the top of Massada. It is early in the morning, in the spring, and even though the sun is already climbing over the Dead Sea, it is not high enough to reach this side of the mountain. Here on the western slope, where she is, the shadows are so deep that only a faint contour of the top of the mountain can be seen, lit up by the rising sun as it is wearing a halo. Every small stone her legs disturb create a sound that in the utter quiet can be heard without end until the stone is swallowed by the open chops of the water cisterns, dug into the side of the mountain. It is not the first time she climbs to the ruins of the ancient, almost two thousand years old fortress, but this time she is alone. She stops for a minute to take a deep breath when she hears the hurried footsteps and a man appears from the trail behind her and stops next to her.

  “In the three years I sat at the bottom of this cursed hill I never once climbed it, and now I know why,” he says.

  Clara looks at him, gasping for air and straightening the big turban almost covering his face. There is something odd about his appearance, the clothes, the hair, and yet vaguely familiar.

  “Have we met before?” she starts to say when it hits her. Of course, they did.

  “Josephus?” she starts slightly hesitant, this is weird.

  “The one and only, “he extends his hand and adds a slight bow.

  “Titus Flavius Josephus, also known as Joseph ben Matityahu, a Romano-Jewish scholar, historian, and hagiographer.” He ends the long introduction.

  “Also an army commander, defector, advisor to Titus, a translator…” Clara adds from her memory.

  “And let’s not forget a pretty famous writer.” He signs with a wink.

  “The Jewish War, I know, quite a bestseller, “Clara pulls on her sparse knowledge earned in history classes about the big revolt against the Romans in 66 AD.

  “A true masterpiece, even if I have to compliment myself,” Josephus adds.

  “Based on the blood and tears of your people,” Clara cannot resist the temptation to deliver the last punch.

 “Ok, Ok, but I am here to help you, not argue about my personal qualities,” he waves her words away.

  “There is something I want you to see, come,” and with that he rushes her up the ramp to the top of the mountain, now all lit with the morning sun.

  Massada, the view from the top is as breathtaking as she remembers it. The isolated rock cliff, at the western end of the Judean Desert, is overlooking the Dead Sea. With its ancient palaces and fortifications, it is a place of majestic beauty and practical thought all in one, palaces and storage facilities, elaborate water system and delicate columns and porches. It was designed to hold against any force of men and nature.

  “Except for the Roman Empire,” Josephus finishes the sentence as if he can read her mind.

  “Look,” he pulls her to the edge of the stone fence, “look, look at the bottom, what you see?”

  Clara looks at the remnants of one of the camps, one of several camps just outside the circumvallation wall around Masada, left by the Roman tenth legion at the bottom of the hill, low piles of pale sandstones spread all around the hill and mark the huge compound that hosted 15, 000 soldiers and assorted help forces, all part of the siege that lasted close to three years.

  “They had no chance of coming out alive,” that is Josephus by her side. She knows he is talking about the small group of people who dared to defy the Roman Empire; a thousand men women and children who snuck out of the siege of Jerusalem in 70AD and found refuge in the old fortress.

  “So instead they decided to fight till the bitter end and take their own life when all hope was lost,” Clara interrupts, “I know the story, everyone knows the story, thanks to you.”

  “A story-teller job is never done,” Josephus continues as if he did not hear her, “Someone had to make sure these people will be remembered, and I happened to be there, a firsthand witness.”

  Clara stifles the many remarks she has about the questionable role Josephus played in that ancient drama. Ultimately he is right, if not for him, witnessing the events and documenting them, there would have been no story at all. She looks at the structures around her, reconstructed with great care and love, a whole town being a living memory of the people who decided to abandon not only their homes but their lives as well. She grew up to honor their message, “live free or die,” transformed into the new motto of the young state of Israel, “Masada shall not fall again,” a clear broadcast against giving up, going quietly into your fate.

  “So why did you bring me here? “She turns around, but he is gone, and she is in her bed, back in her cold apartment.

  “Without the storyteller there is no story,” when Clara wakes up to a gray, dreary morning, she can still hear the words Josephus said to her in her dream. A story can only live if someone takes the time to tell it, so it will not cease to exist.

  Whether left voluntarily, sunk under water, picked up and taken away, abandoned towns, she knew now, are more than their physical presence, their innate spirit survives in the hearts of the people who are no longer there, and if they are fortunate they become a story. Clara is so engrossed in her thoughts she does not realize her coffee became cold.

  “A shadowy semblance of a former self,” the words of Lambert Florin seem to encompass her feelings so well. Her unshakable belief that the people who inhabited a town leave something of themselves behind when they leave, and at the same time, they carry with them the essence of that town, left behind, wherever they go.

  But what about those who perish, and like Masada the physical structures outlive time but the people are no longer there to carry the story?

  This is when it finally hit her, and she almost drops her cup to the floor and while stretching her arm to pick it spills the remnants of it all over the folders on her desk. How could she be so blind? Her professor saw it; she was driven to research towns that no longer lived so she could run away from the one story she was destined to tell, her family story. In each town that she visited she found something she could take with her. But in the end there is no one who can tell her story but her. She looks at the coffee stain that slowly expands; it dyes her papers murky brown, she tries to read it, find hidden meanings inside its random shapes.   

  Then she lights up her computer and starts to type;

  This is what I know to be true. In June of 1938 when my mother turned fourteen she had to leave her home. It was abrupt, it was not planned, it happened in the dark of night. The train ride, the border crossing, the soldiers that one of them winked at her when no one noticed. It was like watching a movie, only this time she was the star. In March of that year the Germans took over her home-town Vienna, life from that moment on changed for her and her family and everyone she knew, after that nothing was ever going to be the same.

-End-