“Mantle” by Andrea Mozarowski
Father 1
I never breathed your
breath of love
I never learned breath
your exhalations stung with
fear, darkness, confined fathers
lost forever within prison walls
your breath hung with spirit
oil paint and gasoline
I never breathed your breath of love
nuzzling me close for creature warmth –
a way to find my way home –
drunk, staggering with your love
for me –
I can only dream
that the darkness wasn’t so dark
that in
this
garden
–spores from soil
you had worked
that I took in upon your breath
–and fragrant jasmine–that breaks my
heart today
— and green things that you turned over
in the earth
-even the compost that you carried to the back
-and breathed
-and exhaled
might breathe in me
and hold a hungry clue
I search the child for life in darkness
and long for home
and all my unbreathed love confines
me in my longing to belong
to breathe your love
for me.
Father 2
The last time a soldier falls on his knees it may not be on the battlefield.
And Septimus is crying,
Can’t cry
“I have I have committed a crime.”*
What if life isn’t what matters most?
Ministry of Defence
APC Disclosures 5 (Polish)
Building 60, RAF Northolt
West End road
Ruislip, Middlesex Ha6 GNG
23 March 2010
Dear Ms Mozarowski
Thank you for your enquiry about the above-named. I confirm we hold your father’s
service record.
I regret, however, that I cannot immediately give you the information, which you seek.
All Ministry of Defence personnel records are held in confidence . . .
First glimpse of the British National Archives at Kew–
Swans float in square dark pools. Unfurling clouds.
I have brought with me, snippets of father’s narrative, solitary inchoate details
studied for years, read forward and backward—and reference numbers for
documents from Churchhill’s War Office
“[T]he archive is a place for reading things that were not written for your eyes,” wrote
Ogburn. “This means that there is never quite enough.”
Archive Record 4th
Polish Infantry Division and general demobilization matters
[F/O (Foreign Office) 1063/42]
Personal and Confidential
10th
May 1946
Dear Ross:
The General does seem to have been getting more depressed lately, and impatient for
some positive development . . . One wonders what blunder the spectre of Russia
backing up the Warsaw Gov’t may not panic us into committing . . .What I fear more
than anything may happen is that the disarming and de-equipping will start too soon .
. .and we shall have thousands of depressed, bewildered and only half disciplined
soldiers making real trouble . . .
Yours,
Humphrey Lipscomb
(Brig Humphrey Theodore de Bohun Lipscomb)
Turning over each record
Gloves, care, fragility
Hands shake
I read words one syllable at a time, dreading
coherence
Father’s name father’s name father’s name
A Soldier’s name
Father’s name father’s name father’s name
I’m falling through the sky
I’m falling
What if life isn’t what matters most?
Peter lies next to me,
But it’s my father’s soldier fear
That moves on electric currents in the night
We weep
Peter has taken down one of the books from the shelf in the room we’ve rented on
King Henry’s
Peter asks, “Do you know what Patton did when he visited his wounded soldiers in
hospital? He came to their bedside. On his knees. No reporters allowed.”
Patton, famous for his brutality—
I dream of a large white goose with a square wound in its breast
And Septimus is crying,
Can’t cry
I have I have committed a crime
Beyond— the winding cobblestone of Primrose Hill
In Regent’s Park
The Frieze Masters Exhibition
Picasso’s “Dreamers”:
limbs tangle
I’m falling.
Father, my father.
Father 3
1997. We’ve gathered in Zhytomyr for a meal with old villagers who once lived in
Mozhari:
“We used to say—partisans made the Polissia their country.”
“Polissia, tse krai partisaniv.”
“Nazi soldiers burned our people alive.”
“They pierced children’s stomachs then set them on fire.”
“They erected barbed wire fences, rounded up people, set fire to everything.”
“It was Nazi occupation that drove people to join partisan groups and escape to the
forest, to Polissia.”
“They dug up our earth, our chernozem, and transported it by rail car to Germany.”
“During the war, we burned anything we harvested so that it wouldn’t feed the Nazi
occupiers.”
Father 4
After breakfast we drive out to another garden on the outskirts of Malin, where
there are plots allotted to each family, just at the edge of a Jewish cemetery which
Oleksander points out to us. The sun is strong but a faint breeze moves the stalks
and stems of the plants. I walk among the potato plants which uncle inspects; the
brothers stand in the furrows, facing one another, and pause to talk. I creep into the
field of rye balancing on my haunches squinting at the purple flowers, voloshky,
which dot the crop. I sit on the warm earth, my head just beneath the florets at the
top of the plant.
The low voices of my father and uncle barely reach me. After some time I turn back
and look over my shoulder. My father is now just behind holding a stem in one hand.
I turn and face him. “This rye from Zhytomyr region is for you,” he says.
Father 5
July 12
Today I’m leaving Ukraine.
It’s been a rough trip that makes me feel that I might have gotten close to something
real.
I don’t know how to name things.
Hard. Indigestible. Complex.
London, July 13, after leaving Ukraine
Today I turned to a pocket in my journal, which held the rye and voloshky that I had
tucked in for safekeeping. The plants are clotted with mold. The moisture of the
kalyna berries has kept them from drying out properly. I had pictured myself
someday saying – look – my father handed me this single stalk, rye, all around us,
scarves billowing in the wind.
A dark, shattered man stands in a field and offers his daughter what she
could have chosen for herself.
Father 6
The mantle was one of few items treated with reverence in my family.
So small. Kept somewhere secret by my father. All I understood was that it made
illumination possible. I remember the way it would catch the light with a hiss and
sudden brightening. I wasn’t permitted to handle it. My father took such care. With a
gentleness I can barely remember that grew rare with each passing year.
It wasn’t often that Dad explained things to me. And I guess he didn’t understand
how I took them in. What I did with the information, once I’d heard it. And maybe
because of that, over time, it seems that he lost interest in sharing his knowledge.
Mostly, he bossed me around.
The mantle was different. The first time he showed me the mantle, he explained it
was very fragile. Just one broken filament and we wouldn’t be able to make light in
the lantern for our nights on the campground. I used my super close-up X-ray vision
and believed I could see the fine threads, separate but also very close, like a cross-
stitch or crosshatch pattern I’d seen in women’s embroidery. Dad explained the
mantle was made of silk. Even the oils on your fingertips could damage the item.
That was the first time I’d heard of there being oils on my finger skin.
We had the material means and sacred knowledge to make light. We carried a glass
lantern with us into the forests and cleared campsites. Dad, or one of the boys, lit it
when night fell, especially if there wasn’t going to be a campfire. And yet, when it
mattered most, there wasn’t enough light. There wasn’t the means to make light.
In time, I would come to understand the wounds my parents carried and
how wide forgiveness had to stretch to be deemed forgiveness.
I sit beside a pile of bones. My ancestors’ bones. I am trying to get close to them for their heat—for life force, for old knowledge, for love. Fire in the bones. In the end or the beginning we cannot undo what has happened. We can only tell it. – Andrea Mozarowski, AROHO Legacy Fellow 2019
Letter Excerpt, Ancestors Master Class with Darlene Chandler Bassett
