Vergessen

"We're closer than any two people should be Gudrun,” she says as I remove her nightdress.

I have learned the creases of her skin, scalp glinting through her thin hair.  I wash and dress her.  I know every inch of her body but we are not close.  The agency sends me. She is not the only old lady I see.

“Like so many you have touched my vagina. You may be the last.  You never asked who it has loved.”  

“Oh Petra,” I laugh. Sometimes the old people embarrass me.  

She reaches into the bedside drawer. "All of these months you have never asked me who I was when I was younger.  That is why I am showing you this bomb."

I see wires, a clock, her shaking hands.

“In the pig fascist prison the hunger strike showed me my future self. Bones. Weakness.  My hair fell out.  They tried to erase us from the dialectic of history by not recognising us, leaving us to be forgotten.  I am the last.”

I understand now the strange shopping lists.

“We will not be forgotten.” She smiles.

I do not know enough to tell if it is just a box of wires.