Cousin Michael by Michael Rosen

There was a wedding, and we were invited and, when we got there, there was a man who they said was my father's cousin. This is Michael, they said – same name as you, hah! And at one point in the wedding, my aunt took me to one side and said that there was a time during the war when Michael was a boy, six,teen or seventeen no older than you are now, she said, and his parents said to him that it wasn’t going to be safe where they were in Poland. And so, my aunt said, his parents put him on a train and he never saw them again. Like it always was, at that time, when people told me things like this, my aunt just shrugged, looked sad and said, I suppose they died in the camps, and I never knew what that meant – what were these camps? Why were people taken there? At the wedding, I watched him. He must have been about forty years old then. In my mind, I thought of him being the same age as me, and I imagined my parents saying to me one day: Michael, go, don’t stay, there are soldiers and police and they are kicking us out of our houses and flats – go, don’t stay. So they come with me to a station and we wait for a train and all the time we are looking out for soldiers and police, but it’s OK, so they hug me and kiss me and I get on the train, and stand in the corridor and wave to them through the window, and I can see them close together, waving, and then there’s a shout and a whistle and the train starts to pull off and they wave and they wave and I wave and I wave till they’re gone. And that’s the last I ever see of them. I never see them again, but wherever I go, and whoever I’m with, I remember that picture of them standing together, waving me off, and for the rest of my life I can’t make any of it make sense, that they did that thing of making me safe and there was nothing they could do for themselves. And I think again and again of what they might have been thinking at that moment, as they waved and stood close to each other. What did they think as they lost everything? And later they were herded together and taken to a camp, never knowing what had happened, never knowing why this was happening, never knowing what happened to me, even at the very end as they were closing their eyes. And though I smile and walk about in the world, I carry this with me wherever I am, whoever I’m with, and no matter how many times I try to change it, no matter how many times I try to get them to come with me on the train, or how many times I get them to escape and find me in those freezing places where I ended up, or how many times I imagine that I meet them after the War is over, and we hug and kiss and cry, it never happens. It never happens. There is always nothing. Nothing but nothing. But I walk about in the world smiling and nodding. I even go to weddings, and people smile at me, even this young man with the same name as me, no older than I was then when my parents put me on the train. And he’s looking at me like he’s trying to read me like a book.