– Draco scrubs the skin on his arm viciously every time he showers. The skin is always red and marked by scratches. He tries so hard to get the mark off of him. He wants to feel clean again.
– George can’t look in the mirror anymore. Not without remembering Fred. He smashes all mirrors in their home. He cuts his hair, he dyes it.
– Neville sees Nagini in his dreams. But in his dreams it reaches Ron and Hermione before he does.
– Harry has multiple wands all around his house hidden in places that only he knows. Beneath his pillow, beneath his bed, under the couch. Just in case.
– Hermione’s boggart is no longer failure.
– Draco and Blaise are afraid of fire.
– Someone accidentally calls George “Fred” once. No one knows who starts crying first.
– Headmistress Miverna Mcgonagall is fierce, powerful and kind. All first years are intimidated and amazed, she seems untouchable. However some nights she roams the school hallways and remembers every student she lost, every life that got taken away too soon, every soul that left them too early.
– Harry suddenly can’t stay in very small rooms. He feels trapped, his throat starts convulsing and his eyes sting.
– Hagrid still feels the weight of what he thought was Harry’s corpse in his hands. It haunts him.
– Hermione, Ron and Harry had gotten so used to spending months having one small meal per day that sometimes they forget they’re supposed to eat.
– Harry rolls in his sleep once and hits his forehead against the night stand on accident, when he wakes up with pain on his forehead his heart sinks and his whole body freezes. It isn’t until he sees the bruise that he’s able to calm down. Because Voldemort isn’t back.
– Ron dreams that he’s back in their tent, traveling and hiding, he’s changing the radio stations and he hears Ginny’s names as one of the victims.
– Molly always has “where’s Fred?” on the tip of her tongue, at all times.
– Harry spends the year post-war discovering who he is, what he loves, other than the Boy-who-lived and the Savior-of-the-Wizarding-World. Because there are things he never had time to think about, never had time to experiment, never had time to experience. Sometimes he wonders if coming back had been the right choice, because it hurt so bad on some days that he couldn’t take it.
– When Teddy is sad or scared and he’s crying, Harry tells him stories and shows him pictures of his parents, it’s then and only then that he calms down and his hair goes back to normal.
– Harry pulls back to himself when the date of his death nears every year, his friends do everything in their power to bring him out of it.
– Draco and Harry have talks about the war some nights, both saw what Voldemort was capable of, Harry in his dreams, Draco in his home. Both understand.
– Luna is quirkier and weirder than ever before. She always does everything in her power to lighten up the mood in the room when the silence is bitter and mournful. It’s like she can’t stop shifting and smiling and nervously twitching and saying random facts about things no one has heard of before. Everyone knows it’s her way of coping, of staying positive. So no one minds. It’s comforting.
– Harry gets the sudden desire to travel all over the world. Sometimes Ron and Hermione come with him, others he goes alone, once Neville joins him. Draco does too.
– Draco starts writing, he writes thousands of words on some nights and none on others. He’s good at it, too.
– Harry always, without fail, looks for Sirius’ constellation. He visits his grave too, tells him how things are going in his life, how he’s coping, how he isn’t.
– Hermione getting a tattoo of blooming pastel flowers on top of her “mudblood” scar, because she’s alive, many her friends are alive and she wants to remember that.
And maybe not all is well, maybe they have scars time cannot erase, but they’re together, their hearts are still beating, so it’ll be okay. They’re going to be okay.
How about a librarian, with bottle-cap glasses and moth-eaten sweaters? Susan comes by the public library, looking for background context on her latest article–
“I’m looking for a murder, or a scandal,” she told Agnes Jepsen (according to her name plate). “They assigned me this fluff piece, but I’m pretty sure there’s got to be something sordid and interesting in local flower garden history.”
Agnes pushed her round glasses up her nose– the glass was thick, her eyes blurry and distorted behind them. “Come with me,” she said, and dragged Susan back to a dusty old local memoir section. “I think there’s some buried skeletons in these…”
Susan had been trying for years to live here, and she was good at it– here on this ground, this apartment with these squeaky floors, this sandwich scattering crumbs all over her work desk. Eyes open, eyes up– she had been lost in worlds of fantasy before, and they had stolen bits of her when they went away. She had been lost in the plumbed depths of wardrobes, in the shriek of train whistles and the shrill ring of phone calls that asked you to come and identify your little sister’s body.
But she was here, now– she had work to do, friends to gossip with, cheap, smushed sandwiches to buy from the corner cart at lunchtime, and two books on influential journalists that Agnes had pushed on her. Eyes open, eyes up, don’t dream.
It was weeks before Susan realized she had memorized Agnes’s schedule– she was simply the best help, whether you knew precisely what you were looking for or not. And Susan found herself showing up on the library doorstep and saying, “Agnes, I’m looking for train schedules from the 1800s, London,” or “Agnes, you have anything on displaced samurai?” or “Ag, chemical proesses for distilling scotch whiskey?” or “Ag, something? Anything interesting. I’m a blank slate,” or “Ag, want to grab a drink when you get off?”
Susan had fought so hard to live here, but the thing was that Agnes didn’t, half the time. Agnes paid her bills and got her mousy hair cut with a clocklike precision every two months and saw her parents for dinner and tore into Susan’s newspaper assignments with a wide-eyed, present glee– but part of Agnes lived in historical accounts of subsistence farming in Virginia and the physics of seabird flight, or even in the shelves of children’s literature.
“This is one of my favorites,” Agnes told Susan once, cross-legged on a worn rug on Susan’s creaky floor. Tugging a blanket firmer around her shoulders, she turned through illustrated pages. “Other worlds, lost children. As a child, I’d turn over every green stone I found, seeing if it would send me someplace magical, like it did them. Did you ever wish things like that, when you were small?”
“No,” Susan said, tipping her head back to look at the speckled paint on the ceiling. “I read dictionaries.”
“I read dictionaries, too,” said Agnes. There were smudges in the margins of the little book, and notes written in a half dozen different pens, from a blocky child’s lettering to Agnes’s present, spidery script. “Doesn’t mean you can’t dream, too. I think that’s half the problem with schools these days– they teach kids to think, and not to dream.”
“I had an old friend who liked to say stuff like that.”
Agnes pushed her glasses up her nose. “Oh? I’d love to have a fellow grump to complain with. Are they local?”
“He died,” said Susan. She reached for her mug, but it was empty and she put it back down.
Agnes looked at her critically. “That is your answer for a depressingly large number of questions,” Agnes said. “You take this,” she said, handing her the book and wobbling to her feet in one unbalanced motion. “I’m getting you more tea, and maybe some chocolate.”
It was a Sunday, the morning light peering through the windows. Susan sat cross-legged on her worn couch, in nylons and a pale skirt with her dark hair pulled up and away from her face. She listened to Agnes putter and hum out of sight in the kitchen, and then Susan let the book in her lap fall open to the first page.
Sometimes, when you give parts of yourself away, you get something back.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belonging to a man – a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chastity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus – they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chastity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. —Monica Sjoo
Question of Smoke 