Uncle Max arrived just as my mother and I were lighting the candle we lit for him every Christmas. Just prior to his knock on the apartment door, I’d pressed my nose to the windowpane. Snow – a thick flurry – was falling and I could only just make out the contours of the wall: the reason why my mother was muttering under her breath as she lit the match.
My father answered the knock on the door and Uncle Max strolled into our apartment with a woman who we had never lit a candle for. My mother dropped the smouldering match on the parquet and I, old enough to know basic fire safety, stamped my slippered-foot down upon it.
I watched my mother throw her arms around Uncle Max; she said his name over and over again until, it seemed, her voice hoarsened. My father shook the woman’s hand, asked her for her name. Inge. Inge was beautiful in an obscure way – I couldn’t tell you, not even now, what the source of her beauty was. Perhaps I was just fascinated with her because I was a pre-adolescent girl and she was twenty-one with big opinions, which she immediately began to explain to my father as he offered her a glass of wine.
I stood with my back to the window, fingers curled about the edge of window ledge, aware of the exact location of the candle without having to double check – from years of lighting its wick on Christmas Eve – and so kept my spine just straight enough that the flame didn’t meet the fabric of my dressing gown or the end of my braid.
My mother continued to cling onto Uncle Max, smothering herself in his chest. He wore a faded blue jacket that might have been corduroy when first lifted off its hanger. I have the jacket, wrapped in brown paper but probably full of moth holes by now, up in the attic.
I resisted the urge to call her, bit my lip until I winced with pain and Inge asked if I was OK. I nodded, smiled at Inge, before returning my attention to my mother and Uncle Max. My mother was holding him at arm’s length now. I could see her knuckles whitening; it was as if she was afraid he might suddenly decide to go back to East Berlin.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked.
‘That’s a story for another day. It’s Christmas Eve,’ Max said.
‘But you’re here for good?’
Inge laughed. ‘Of course,’ she said, stepping towards the window. The flame of the candle flickered with her movement.
I looked up at her, at the red wine stain on her bottom lip, at the half-empty glass she held, at the chipped nail polish on her fingernails. She smiled at me and for a moment I thought she might reach out, ruffle my hair, or cup my chin, but she didn’t and I felt somewhat relieved.
Truth is, I wanted them both to leave. I wanted our normal Christmas back with its normal traditions. I wanted my father to sit on the sofa with me and read stories while my mother prepared our dinner. I wanted to stand, glasses raised, at the candle while we gazed over at the wall, tried to make out the lives that unfolded beyond it.
Do you think Uncle Max lights a candle for us? I once asked my mother.
We don’t need a candle, she’d replied.
I’d learnt as the years passed, from school friends and even the chatter of my own parents, of entrapment and conformity, of food shortages and old technology, of toeing the Party line to survive. I had felt sorry for Uncle Max, had thinned him out, poked holes in his clothes, stooped his spine, but he didn’t look like at all as I expected, gathered up in my mother’s embrace.
I began to wonder whether he was really Uncle Max at all, whether my mother, in her excitement, had found fragments of her brother in this stranger and composed them into the sibling she had lost all those years ago behind the concrete panels she had managed to escape with my father.
It was that moment that Uncle Max prised himself away from my mother, kissing her forehead in the process, and moved towards me. I felt my cheeks redden. My toes curled in my slippers. He was tall, taller than I’d imagined but the only image I had had of him before this came from a sun-faded photograph of a teenager which stood in a frame on my mother’s bureau.
‘Sabine,’ he said, clasping his hands.
I could feel the skirting board against my heels.
‘You need to watch you don’t set yourself alight.’ He pointed at my braid; I pulled it over my shoulder so I could feel it tickle my neck. ‘Your hair is just like your mother’s was when she was a girl, before she started dying it to hide the greys.’
My mother slapped his arm. I giggled. Uncle Max held his hand out.
‘Sabine, it’s so nice to finally meet you.’
I shook his hand. A tear ran down Uncle Max’s cheek; I was the only one to witness its appearance and swift removal – my mother was hugging Inge at this point and my father was pouring more wine.
‘What’s the candle for?’ he asked.
‘You,’ I replied. ‘We light it every Christmas. I suppose we won’t need to do it next year now you’re here.’
Uncle Max leaned closer to the window, looked at the wall in silence for several seconds.
‘No, keep lighting it. For my friends.’
He put his arm around me then and I rested my head on his chest. His jacket felt rough against my cheek; it smelled like freedom.
Emma Venables‘ short fiction has recently featured in Mslexia, Lunate, Cabinet of Heed and The Sunlight Press. She was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. Find Emma at @EmmaMVenables and www.emmavenables.com.
