SCREEN MEMORY TWO – “FIRST BOMBS”
By Michael Roloff
An unfamiliar roar, like
continuous thunder, is waking me and I rear up in bed as two lightning bolts flash
and strike, near simultaneously, followed near instant by peals of thunder,
window glass shatters – had I been clutching the Steif monkey that I then let
go off? or toss. At any event, I leap out of bed and rush to the window that
looks out on the woods, open its two panels, shards all around, and hear Mara, the
German Shepherd yowling hysterically in her enclosure, a yowling that turns
into a keening, more and more high pitched and then ceases, throttled: the roar
of planes disappearing in a north-westerly direction – Ah that’s what that was.
I had heard talk of bombers.
Der erste Luftangriff auf Bremen erfolgte in der Nacht
vom 18. zum 19. Mai 1940.
It took me a long time to fall back
asleep, hugging my Steif Monkey that my parent had brought
back from one of their travels, I recall hanging on to it until one of its pink
ears became moth-eaten.
When
I awake earlier than usual the following morning, earlier than anyone else, I
sneak down the staircase and walk out onto the veranda and notice that the
glass of all the large windows has shattered, the shards of glass looking like
tear drops in the flower heads in the sun.
Walking down the few steps of the veranda and turning
right, out to Mara’s Zwinger [enforcer] enclosure on a section of
the lawn not visible from the veranda - a square 100 by 100 foot shady area
adjacent to the woods which bore the name “croquet” playing ground - I am
shocked: Mara is hanging by her collar
from the highest part of the fence; she
committed suicide is a remembered thought of that moment.
Klinner, our
foreman, came by about the same time and told me that two bombs had
fallen near the riding rink, about 150 yards off, leaving two craters in the
ground, “like graves” he said, that large and deep, right next to each other.
The story went, so Klinner said, that the British bombers were afraid to
actually penetrate the air-space over Bremen which was defended by dirigibles
with razor wire sharp enough to cut the bomber wings, which is why they dropped
their bombs at the outskirts of town.”
This event is the inception of what I
call my “Expulsion from Paradise,” in Spring 1940. As compared to
the first screen memory, in this instance, of the first bombs, I realize
that memory has edited the events, compounded them and rearranged them. I was
indeed wakened by two bombs that fell simultaneously 100 some yards off in
the Fir Place woods, but lightning strikes and simultaneous thunder derive from
other experience, were projections of that moment to make sense of it, and
signify the shock of the totality of this experience – the shattered windows,
the suicidal dog, the expulsion from Paradise which
the bombs elicited - the next day I and my governess were sent
packing to an allegedly safer venue.
Moreover, the flash of two 500 pound bombs exploding
on the ground, at least one hundred yards away, in the woods, is not visible
through a thick fir forest; no doubt the sound of thunder elicited a
hallucinated lightning flash in my mind ex post facto. Fantasy has added its
components, the most serious being m five-year-Old's assumption that the German
shepherd Mara had committed suicide – leaving Fir Place elicited suicidal
impulses in me, I hated leaving. The next time I recall feeling suicidal was
when my father spanked me for being disobedient and going with Klinner to pick
up coal in the horse and wagon during impending air raids in July 1944. {The 19th
of July Section]
The terrified, hysterical shepherd dog indeed
strangled herself with her collar at an upper part of the fence of her
enclosure [The Zwinger] but “Enforcer” also refers to my governess
whose orders whose numerous “nos” elicited my resistance and fury; say, the
fury of a stubborn Billy-goat; the dog’s fury also signified my near suicidal
fury at having to leave paradise in company of my enforcer, my governess. In
other words, the details have been, in the long meanwhile, over-emphasized,
compacted, over-determined, and that is why these details most likely have been
remembered all these many years, whereas other less emotionally determined
recollections are not, or do not seem as accessible.
The drops of dew in the flowers, not just
the shattered shards of glass, also signify my tears; however, since I can be
said to have been crying inside since I was taken from my mother at age
nine months, those tears too are over-determined. Loss loss loss. There was a
time during the many years that I carried this book with me that I was going to
call the memoir “Irretrievable Losses.” This commentary, in other words,
appears to be necessary in telling this event which elicited hectic activity of
the inhabitants of the villa with the result that within a day my father’s
chauffeur Schmidt and Maybach automobile takes me and my governess to the St.
Magnus suburban station, a five-year-old, sad-looking boy and a dowdy spinster
- image for a film!
However, before
departing from my paradise it appears that I took one more 4 & ½ years old’s
amble through the forest. If the clearing that you could see from my
bedroom window was the first section of Fir Place to become laden
with dream imagery - for the Billy goat chasing me up to the clearing in
my first nightmare - the croquet area where Mara strangled herself in
her terror, then became the second area to acquire an extra charge.
Soon after,
the enclosure was dismantled as were the last remnants of playing croquet – the
mallet, the wire goals, the colored balls – a big chopping block was placed
there, and as “chopping block area” it would serve for a second huge event in
my life a few years hence: the spot whence I witnessed the arrival of
the first wagon load of refugees in Spring 1945 – the inception of a
few idyllic years that ended with the inception of the Cold War in 1947.
Forgetting momentarily about the significance
of the pond and the willow-lined path between the pond and marshy meadow to the
left - the third areas to be specifically laden with memories and fears - were the two bomb craters near the
riding rink, well on the other side of the road that skirted the pond before the
road leads back up the chestnut alley to the house. It appears I made an
expedition to the bomb site and looked at the two
grave-length bomb beds is what they looked like more than funnels or
craters, as though the two-some had landed as a pair, sideways. When I made
my first awkward colored pencil drawings – in another year or so - it
was of the most awkward bombers tossing sausage-like bombs. By then I was
secreted away in the far south-eastern part of the then still expanding Reich
and must have got heard r or even seen in that Bavarian village what village
boys did by throwing shit at each other which is what bombers appeared to do in
my drawing, long sausages filled with brown! at the stage of sadist anality for
sure, or is it monkeydom that village boys reside in at that stage of their
life. So if bombers threw shit, the two bomb craters or graves were
what??? I kept thinking of them, and that they were so near to the fox holes
the side of the riding rink that had been cut out of the slope.
Bombs, bombers, sirens and bombing traumas
of various kinds - bomb and ack ack
shrapnel - marked the remainder of WW II as well as man subsequent experiences.
The
“Otis Media” {Middle Ear Infection-Tonsillitis] section plays in May 1944 while
I am having my tonsils removed in an above-ground bunker hospital in Bremen while
the city is under attack and this beton bunker as well as everything inside is
tremoring. During a visit to my parent’s Budapester Strasse apartment in 1943 I
either fantasize or hear the animals in the near-by zoo screaming during a
night time raid – I tend to think this is a hysteri- induced fantasy, but it pursued
me for years and into a story I wrote in 1955. The final, the Alaska chapter of
Screen Memories, features my
first night forest fire-fighting near the Yukon with P-38s bombing fire retardant
onto the line-fighters! Terror creates the most distinct memories it seems. I hear
sirens from the greatest distances!
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