A Pendant

This object is important because it is the only material memory left of my maternal grandmother. She never wore jewelry, not even a wedding band. Most likely, she didn’t have any jewelry to wear. I remember her in the same housedress for all occasions. My maternal grandparents lived their little lives in constant fear of something, a choked-up life of deprivation, one can say. The only sweet memory, the only luxury they had was Grandma’s piano that she played from time to time (she couldn’t become a professional musician, so she made sure that her children did), and maybe a couple of books that I could read and reread every time I was shipped there (what a punishment, thought I). I resented them, mistaking softness for hypocrisy. Or maybe not mistaking - but whatever it was, they probably loved me, their only grandchild. It’s just that I didn’t know how to love them back.

One day Grandma opened a wobbly-legged trunk that served for years as a stand for her Zinger sewing machine. It revealed surprising array of objects, from a bolt of the slippery beige fabric, identified by my mom as parachute silk, and several teaspoons with Gothic font on the inlay of slender handles, to this pendant.  Actually, it was a locket, but Grandma warned me not to open the cover. I didn’t understand at the time. Now I realize that she must’ve been scared to find somebody’s photo there. Those were German trophies, whatever my grandfather deemed valuable, whatever he could bring home with him. Grandma evidently kept all these treasures for a rainy day and had been selling them over the years to supplement their one-earner income. This tiny object tears me apart. It is, indeed, the only thing that survived. And yet, the only thing that she could give me was something that never belonged to her in the first place.

I finally opened the locket years later. There was no picture, just greenish coppery muck, lumpy dirt…