NO FOOD

     To me, war has always meant NO FOOD.

     I have vivid images about this subject from my aunt and mother who lived through a World War in Europe, whose parents lived through two World Wars--stories in which NO FOOD is a character almost tangible like Famine of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Durer's engraving. 

     There were lots of other stories--of fleeing, desertion, betrayal, rotting in jail, scram sacks, the Resistance, incredible journeys on foot, and the lousy social life of teenaged daughters whose country doctor father wouldn't let them dance while people were getting killed on the front. 

     Those other stories, like the anecdote of how my grandfather saved his arm by pulling a board out of his back after the field hospital barracks exploded while he was operating in World War I, those other stories made war sound brave.  Or romantic, like when my mother walked two hundred miles to get back home AFTER THE WAR (with her rucksack containing among other things, a ladies’ biography of a free-living woman artist, and a large flat clothes iron, as she would say, “An iron can be a very good thing to hold onto.”)  She walked and rode on soldiers’ trucks across meager farms, through rubbled cities, with the bridges exploding behind her.  Or horrifying, with the implications of rape and pillage and betrayal as in the CROSSING THE BORDER STORY where she was crossing illegally—one of her twenty-seven crossings--dressed as a boy, and soldiers stopped the small envoy of people she was traveling with and somebody yelled, "Get her, she's a woman, get her too!" and she'd run like hell. 

     But the stories of NO FOOD made the strongest impression on me.  The HONEY IN THE HAYSTACK STORY.  In this story, one jar of honey was all my mother had to eat for three days because when she awoke in the morning on one of her numerous border crossings for contraband food, she found she had made her bed the night before in a haystack right under a guard tower with Russian soldiers.  The OX SERUM STORY.  AFTER THE WAR, when pregnant with me, she had to drink beef plasma or lymph or some awful liquid as it was the only source of protein.  The FOR THE BIRDS STORY.  “Never throw away a piece of bread but always place it carefully on a fence for the birds because if you are ever hungry you will remember all those pieces of bread.”

     There were stories about worthless currency and how her father kept them all alive by trading his services for beets or a sack of potatoes.  And how, AFTER THE WAR, a laundry basket full of thousand dollar bills is what it cost to buy me a baby blanket.

     There were stories about how the people--his patients--would go into the meadows and gather edible greens like dandelions and milk weed and how they often did not know what they were doing and sickened themselves on belladonna and henbane, the more poisonous members of the nightshade family. 

     There were all kinds of charming diseases associated with bad water and NO FOOD--dysentery from parasites too numerous to even begin mentioning, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, skin infections, mouth sores, lice. 

     But nothing stuck in my mind like the story my aunt told about the tomatoes.  My aunt stands four feet ten inches tall and likely her small stature is related to the deprivation she experienced during the war. 

     I call her up long-distance in New Mexico to get her own words, but my directness makes her wary.  I kick myself for not remembering to be oblique.

     "Well, it's hard for me to say," she says.  "I mean I really don't remember any stories.  I mean, now that you ask me."

     "Oh you know, the story you used to tell about how you had nothing to eat but tomatoes."

     "Food was always locked up," she gets the wonderment in her voice of a child.  "Our housekeeper, Hannah, had the keys."  My aunt muses over the phone.  "You know how mother always kept the refrigerator overflowing."  She means much later, AFTER THE WAR, when my grandmother had immigrated to the United States and had a neurotic obsession with a full fridge.  "Yes, food is very important to me."

     But the story about the tomatoes? 

     "Well.  I know we never had it as bad as the Kurds.”  We were speaking after the Gulf War.  “I mean, no water!  We always had water.  My God!  Babies dying!"  We both fetch a deep breath.  "Mother was once caught in the Black Market," she suddenly says.

     "What happened?" I say.

     "They made her give the stuff back."

     "What was it?"

     "Milk, sugar, flour," she trails off absently.  "Listen, the rabbits are so bad this year.  I put up some chicken wire and they got underneath."  She will not tell me anything more about the tomatoes. 

     It will be another time when she knows that I'm not using it in a story.  Maybe it's when I'm back for a visit and we're having dinner on her patio overlooking the Chihuahuan Desert, and after dinner she will excuse herself while my uncle and I are still sitting around sipping Kahlua, to take her dogs for an evening walk.  And when she returns, just as my uncle and I are about to start clearing the dishes, she'll return with a young man she found in a Mesquite copse out there.  He is walking the desert north from Mexico, in a banlon shirt and city shoes, with a water bottle, a map, and no hat, and he doesn't speak a word of English.  And she'll sit him down to a plate of food, after which he’ll be shown the highway and be gone. 

     “It was during the war.  I was thirteen years old.  There was NO FOOD.  All we had was tomatoes.  Nothing to eat but tomatoes.  The people next door had a garden with apples and I remember climbing the fence to steal some.”

     “What happened?”

     “Oh, mother punished me,” she says again vague, and I can only imagine what this meant for her.  She will not say any more. 

     The saddest thing during the Gulf War was that it was impossible to speak freely unless you knew who you were with.  You couldn't say you were against the war if you were at work or in a store or in a school.  You risked getting beaten up like the man in the Baghdad Carpet Sales Truck.  You came home to your neighborhood and all the yards sprouted flags and yellow plastic in the trees.  You seemed to be surrounded by symbols and strange truths.

      In the winter of 1944, my mother was part of a group of women who had been drafted into the "Arbeitsdienst," which all teenagers were forced into before they were forced into the armed services.  World War II in Germany.  There was NO FOOD.  All the workers ever got was some kind of horrible stale bread.  There was no butter or jam.  Nothing.  Just bread.  To make this fare more tolerable, the girls stuck their bread onto a pot-bellied stove which sat in the middle of the barracks.  There was a girl, "a pretty, stupid girl--from the country," is how my mother tells this, and one evening a bunch of them were toasting their bread in a group and this girl pulled her two slices off the hot iron stove and with one in each hand, she had looked at each in turn and said, "Well, here's nothing, and here's nothing...Heil Hitler!"  And she slapped the slices together.  And somebody reported her and she was put in jail. 

     In times of war, free speech goes underground.  At first, beliefs are the issue.  And then, it's a mad scramble for food.    

Originally for THE WAR SHOW at Fountainhead Gallery, Houston, Texas, May 1, 1991

Sabine Hilding