I read this sentence in George Steiner’s essay and it stuck with me ever since. He described the magic spell that Hitler cast over his audiences. He wondered how that clownish Austrian with a thick accent mesmerized huge crowds and cowed kings and heads of state. Steiner analyzed his recorded speeches in detail, but could not pinpoint the secret. In desperation, he wrote Hitler spoke “the language of hell”.
He thought it was a clever metaphor.
He was wrong.
Luna wandered into the kitchen, her eyes dreamy and her hair uncombed. I hissed at her that she would be late for the school bus and that I could not take her, not today. I had already been late to departmental meetings more times than I could count, and with my tenure at stake, I could not afford…I shut up. The pearls of EarPods gleamed in my daughter’s black curls, and not a word I said was getting to her. I gave up and drove her to school.
Afterwards, I hurried to my university campus and naturally got stuck in traffic in the wasteland of strip malls. This gave me an unneeded opportunity to mull, once again, over the wrongs done to me, regurgitating the bitter dregs of my impending divorce. Wasn’t it unfair how Max, ensconced in his new home with his newly pregnant girlfriend, always managed to wriggle out of his parental duties? I heard of husbands suing their wives for full custody, and while such battles seldom ended well, I had to admit I was jealous. Max, about to have his own biological baby, was quickly losing interest in the legal substitute. Even though it had been his initial idea to adopt…
I checked myself. What was I thinking? Luna was my daughter. So what if she came into my life as a six-year-old bundle of nightmares and insecurities with her big blue eyes and her mane of black hair? She was my own as much as would any baby cooked up in the magic oven of my womb–the oven that had resolutely refused to produce anything.