Translated by Alissa Valles

“Lara Croft” is excerpted from On Mother and the Fatherland by Bożena Keff. It appears in PEN America 11: Make Believe.

She lies half sunken in the swamps of depression, her open jaws
full of complaint. sometimes lava flows. sometimes the cold ash
sifts—of the Jewish Historical Institute archives,
where once, sorting through the shot and the gassed,
she came across something.
—I found—she intones, looking
straight into nothingness (me, in front of her, on a chair)—a document.
My mother was killed in a forest outside Lvov.
She was shot in the forest. Half a century and I didn’t know.

*

She didn’t know for half a century, and now she knows!
And she speaks of it in the presence of a random witness.
It happened to be some brunette with crocodile skin gloves,
an agent from a fictional world, Lara Croft, someone like that.
Who’s just getting into her sports plane in Hawaii when some old maid
dressed in a ragged cloak gets caught in the propeller. Lara gets out
to help the poor woman, who with her eyes cast in a void informs her
that half a century ago her own mother was shot in the forest.

—But how terrible!
Lara cried out, for she is not without a heart.
 

Copyright © 2009 by Bożena Keff. English translation copyright © 2009 by Alissa Valles. All rights reserved.