Another shake, Benjamin mute. “Physician to the king, and your own kin you cannot cure?”
ON the night the levees gave way, Mother broke too.
The River Elbe rose and flooded the banks of Glückstadt — the streets, the houses; the rain came down in sheets and swept away anything still standing. Including Mother.
Even though she was in her bed, safe in Hamburg miles away, that night Mother drowned.
*
I was too young to know all of this, of course. Glückstadt was barely built in 1620, the Danish king’s prayer of a hope against Hamburg. But I have spent my childhood since sifting through whispers, carelessly uttered phrases, spaces between words, to find the pieces of who I am. Who my parents are. Who they were. I take those pieces and with painstaking care place them one atop the other, in an attempt to build an edifice that will not collapse.
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