Reclamation

"Apple, apple, fallen in the water,"

begins the song we learn in the

camerata choir. We are all girls,

desperate to distinguish ourselves in notes,

exclusive for our clandestine pleasure in the

friction between voices that all want to be the star.

Give me grace, please God, as I appropriate

his Hungarian folk songs. Forgive me for the lie

I tell: that my grandfather, a refugee of

just another Soviet-occupied country, used to

know these songs and sing them to me.

Let me have this one, since he floated away when I was young;

Make this my apology: a lie about a song that he

never hummed to me, which becomes a segue to his story.

Over dinner, I share the song with my mother, who,

pregnant with her own longing, reminds us of his

question — Why do they take from me? He was at a

riot in the streets, after which a priest in

Szombathely proclaimed, "Our young have left us."

Terror comes here, too: I left him

under the covers of his hospital bed in the den, a

vegetable who knew how to grow cherries on vines,

while I breakfasted on pop tarts filled with

xanthine gum and other things unpronounceable. Like

yarn unravelling, I relegate him to a private

zenith, where my version of him knows the song I claim is ours.