Denial by Jessica Stern

distasteful story. He is determined to do his duty, but we are perilously close to an indulgent sort of introspection, which my father deems “examining one’s navel.” He hates to call attention to himself by divulging more than is required.
    But there is something more: I sense my father’s unacknowledged shame, and I feel ashamed of myself. Like a naughty child searching through her parents’ drawers, I have now seen something I was not supposed to see—my father’s shame. It’s not only that I have discovered something illicit, but my dangerous, prurient curiosity about my father’s inner life is now on display, exposed to my father’s disapproval. My father does not approve of my “examining my navel,” but I, ever the difficult child, want to examine not only my own, but his, too.
    â€œTell me more about what it was like to feel afraid,” I request. I need to know. I need to know what it feels like to be afraid.
    â€œI felt afraid,” he concedes, dutifully confessing the truth as he knows it, even when it is embarrassing or painful to himselfor others. But he has not yet provided me the details about the sensation of fear that I want so much to hear.
    â€œNo,” he says, pausing, and then more firmly, “I felt terror morning, noon, and night. The brownshirts would decide they needed to teach us a lesson. And then they would practice putting out fires by shooting streams of water at our house—their fire hoses shooting right at us. They never did break in and attack us, but that could happen at any time.”
    There is a shift in the room now. More feeling, and with more feeling, relief.
    â€œThey marched into the house one time with guns drawn,” he adds.
    â€œWho was there?” I ask. My skin feels prickly.
    â€œMy mother, Irmgard [my father’s next older sister], and Anna Marie’s mother [a neighbor]. They marched in. Irmgard was fourteen, and I was seven. They took my mother into the front room and shut the door.
    â€œI was looking at Irmgard to try to figure out what I should do. What she did was collapse on the flagstones in the front hall and start screaming and kicking her heels. So I tried for a little while to do that, too, but it didn’t seem sensible. So I stood there, aghast. They were in there about fifteen minutes. My mother told us that what they had demanded was that she sign receipts indicating they had paid her whatever debts were owed to my family.
    â€œI didn’t know what to do,” he says. “So I tried yelling for a while. Not long. And then I just stood there. I thought, Should I go and help my mother? I wasn’t certain I should. I was afraid to go help her. I didn’t hear any screams or anything. The door was closed.”
    â€œHow many of them were there?”
    â€œThree or four,” he says.
    â€œWere you afraid they were going to kill her?” I ask.
    â€œI would have heard a gunshot,” my father says, sensibly.
    He considers my question a bit further. “I was afraid they would kill us all,” he adds.
    â€œSo you just stood in the front hallway, your ear to the door, listening? Hoping not to hear a gunshot?”
    â€œI stood there. When they were done, they opened the door.”
    I repeat to myself, “When they were done.”
    Done with what?
    â€œThe same door, where you were standing?” I ask, trying to tether us both to the physical world with concrete details.
    â€œYes. I was in the front hallway. They had marched into the sitting room, where my father’s desk was.”
    â€œWhat were their guns like? I ask.
    â€œI’m not sure I even saw the guns,” he says, as if thinking of this for the first time.
    â€œThen how did you know that they had guns?” I ask.
    â€œI always thought whenever the Nazis showed up, they had guns with them,” he says.
    â€œDo you think you saw the guns and then forgot