The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter by Susan Hahn Page A

kept looking for her
    until he told me she was
    sent elsewhere and
    not to worry.
    He touched my bow, again.
    Called me his
    â€œpretty little maiden.” Then
    he asked, “How old?” I remember
    saying, “I’m twelve.
    I’m Lettie. I’m twelve.”
    Feb. 2
    A woman shaved all the hair off
    my body. Her hands were quick
    and rough. She said
    it was to prevent lice. I looked almost
    brand new. Then I saw
    the others
    who also had been shaved—older people
    now looking like withered children.
    They told us how the shavings were “good for us.”
    That everything they were doing to us
    was “good for us.”
    Soon the older people disappeared.
    Feb. 3
    Karl came back. He touched my scalp
    and smiled.
    My baldness didn’t seem to bother him.
    Then, he took my hand
    and led me to another room.
    Feb. 20
    Because I had no choice—this was the life
    that was given me—and Karl
    kept telling me I was
    safe,
    I had to believe him—
    too fear-frozen
    not to.
    And I was twelve.
    And the red brick building with the small windows
    brightened by white frilled curtains
    and the picket fence around it “looked safe.”
    That’s what I told my small, bald, broken self.
    Mar. 14
    Everything became so familiar, the uniforms,
    all of them, the bodies that inhabited them—
    the strong, healthy ones, the bird-thin sick ones—
    all the smells that were created when they commingled.
    This place where life and death
    collided and the earth opened herself up like the whore
    that she was and swallowed
    us into her putrid womb, this womb
    became my home.
    And because it was my home
    and I was twelve and had no choice,
    I tried to make my mind think everything would be alright,
    but I never truly believed it.
    Inside
    I was violently heartsick.
    June 4
    After mama and papa and Leah disappeared,
    for the longest time I thought they would come back
    and right before the last time the cancer returned,
    I had this dream—that they did. They
    all came through the door of that red brick building
    with the sweet ruffled curtains on the small
    windows and found me standing there.
    Mama took my right hand, papa took my left—
    and we all walked away
    together into the clean
    warm summer air.
    It was only as she got deeper into the diary that Cecilia began to fully understand why her mother kept asking not just for the books about Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Stravinsky, but also for the history books with those awful pictures inside—the books that she dutifully brought her from the library and had to be hidden from her father, buried under an extra blanket in the hospital closet. Her mother was still looking for them—looking for her mother and father and Leah.
    She never found anything in the diary that spoke explicitly of what Karl had done to her mother. The closest she came to writing anything sexual or sensual about him was a mention of
his bare, long, perfect legs, his sculpted calves—like a dancer might have.
After reading this, Cecilia thought she might faint—she felt herself grow dizzy, her face becoming too hot, as she remembered Herr M standing above her, naked, with his godlike legs.

    Cecilia read the diary many times, each time becoming more and more sensitive to the details—and to the things left out. She had no idea when her mother had written any of this. Clearly, parts of it were quite recent. And since no years were recorded, she knew some of it came from her mother’s still quick memory. And with this she remembered how, in all her notes and letters, her mother never put a year on anything, as if she were trying to protect herself from an exact record of
all
things and when they had happened.
    After each reading Cecilia threw up and in the last couple of days of her mother’s life the guilt of having read the diary—the secrets her mother kept, the secrets of her mother’s frightening, small girl life—grew larger and