The Faraway Bird

The Faraway Bird

    Natalie sat in darkness as the plane sped toward Berlin. Flying toward her family’s history. Flying into the past. She didn’t want to be here, on this errand for her mother. Vaguely annoyed at missing out on a beach weekend with her friends and stuck on this unpleasant task of family business, she stared out the window. They were high above the clouds. She marveled at the sight of the stars, so many. Thousands.

  It had started with a phone call. A man with a heavy German accent and a bad connection had startled her one evening, during her nightly solo happy hour.

  “Calling from museum,” he said through crinkly static. She couldn’t understand the name he mentioned. 

   “Repatriation of, um, how do you say, artifacts. Your family…” The static on the line continued. “The Nazis kept records…jewelry belongs…come in person to claim…Alles klar?”

  No, everything was not klar. Very un-klar, in fact.

  The next day, the email arrived. All the details, in English. Fine English. Very correct in grammar and punctuation, sounding overly formal to her American ear. She recalled the argument with her mother that followed.

   “Why do I have to go all the way to Germany to retrieve a brooch? A brooch! No one wears those old things anymore.”

  “It was my grandmother’s, and I want it back in the family,” her mother said. “I can’t travel that far anymore because of my hip. I can’t sit on the plane all those hours. You have to go. We’re lucky to have a chance to retrieve anything at all. Most families haven’t.”

  Natalie was steaming that she had to fly to another continent to pick up this belonging from her great-grandmother, whom she never knew. The man at the museum had a sent a picture. The pin didn’t look like anything special. Gold, in the shape of a bird, with tiny seed pearls, with a tiny sapphire eye. Natalie would never wear it and likely her mother wouldn’t get much use out of it either.

  “Think of it as a big adventure,” her mother said. “A vacation, even.”

  Natalie shook her head. There was no point in trying to debate any of this. She was going to Germany and that was that. 

    Now, on the plane, she pulled her sweater tightly around her body and sighed. Loudly.

   “Is everything ok?” The voice came from a woman sitting next to her, in the dreaded middle seat.

   “Oh, yes, sorry. I was just thinking about a conversation I had with my mom.” Natalie proceeded to explain briefly about her trip.

   The woman listened patiently.

   “When I was a teenager, my house caught fire. Bad wiring, I think it was. We lost everything. At the time, I was focused on the fact that I would be getting all new clothes from the insurance money. But now, I think about it differently. I lost a bit of my past, and so did my parents. We had sentimental things that couldn’t be replaced, like those silly art projects I made in kindergarten, and things from my parents’ past. They met in high school and lost their yearbooks and all the mementos of their history. Just gone. The past is important. It roots us to our present lives and gives us context.” The woman raised her eyebrows slightly and then turned slowly back toward the book sitting on her lap.

   Natalie thought about this. Perhaps she had shortchanged this situation. She hadn’t intended to minimize the importance of her mother’s wishes. She made a mental note to call her mom after landing and turned toward the crush of stars outside the window, closing her eyes.

   She was jarred awake by the flight attendant’s announcement. The plane had arrived in Berlin. After clearing customs and being greeted by a big Wilkommen sign, she proceeded to find a taxi.  Her high school level German failed her after guten tag, and she requested transit to her hotel in English. Solo travel to Europe left her feeling like a fish out of water but she managed to check into her hotel without incident.

   It was midmorning by the time she settled in, and her appointment with the museum guy wasn’t until the next day. Despite a bit of jetlag from not sleeping well on the plane, this was a chance to explore the city.

    She left the hotel and found a nearby park that beckoned. She was walking around when a small, fluffy white dog came running toward her. He wagged his tail and looked up at her expectantly, as if she possessed a ball to throw for him. An older man, perhaps seventy, followed at a slow pace, calling out to the dog. He approached her and put the lead on his runaway dog, saying something to her in German.

   “I’m sorry. I don’t speak German. Ich nicht...”  Her words trailed off, sentence unfinished. 

  “Oh, are you English? On holiday?” He looked at her with genuine interest in his face.

  “American. On family business.” She explained about the brooch.

   “Very good of you to come all this way. Good, how do you say, tochter?”

   “Ahhh, daughter.” She was amazed at her brain’s ability to pull that word from deep in her memory.

   “Yes, good daughter you are. Loss is always difficult, but having something taken away from you by force is particularly hard. Unfair. Possessions were the least of it. The loss of life is a scar on this nation that will never fade. Those were dark times for my country. We have had decades of reckoning with our souls.”

   Natalie hardly knew what to say. She looked down at the dog, for an emotional break. Finally, she felt right for being here. It was the smallest bit of justice for her family, for the ones she knew and the ones she never did.

   The next morning, she arrived at the museum. The entrance was expansive, with light wood paneling the walls and narrow rectangular windows soaring to the ceiling. The natural light was warm and made the space seem more intimate.  She introduced herself at the front desk and indicated her appointment with the manager.

   She was ushered through a doorway and led down a hallway to the office belonging to the man who had originally called her. He stood to greet her.

   “Madame, I am Herr Heller. Please have a seat while I retrieve your item from the safe. May I offer you some water or coffee? Tea, perhaps?”

   Natalie politely shook her head. She was suddenly nervous and was not sure she wanted to prolong this visit. She searched her thoughts for a reason why she was suddenly uneasy. At once, the heaviness of her business here could not be avoided. The reasons why the Nazis took the brooch, why she never met her great-grandmother, and why her mother was so insistent on having something of her family from that time.   She felt a catch in her throat and a sense of shame for ever having questioned the need to be here.

   Herr Heller turned back toward her with a small black velvet tray in his hands. He wore thin white gloves as he extended the tray toward Natalie.

   There it was, set so neatly in the center of the black velvet. A small gold bird, encrusted with seed pearls and a tiny sapphire. She picked it up in her hands and felt the end of a long journey through time, and the relief of arriving home.