Tightrope Across the Abyss

by Shanti E. Bannwart

Bettina lives on top of the Mesa in a hand-built adobe house with turquoise colored trim and window frames. The High Desert is her backyard. There are wild lupines and sturdy New Mexican sunflowers. Fiery red Indian paintbrush blossoms hide between cacti with thorns that hook fiercely into your flesh. Magpies screech in the scrubby pine trees and deer come close to the house to drink from the water in an old bathtub, left there to catch some of the rare rain showers. When the moon grows close to full, coyotes yipe and laugh into the night, telling each other jokes from hill to hill and across the flat mesa, their eerie laughter galloping down into the canyon were a small brook provides water for bull frogs, lizard and hare. In winter a cedar fire brings the iron stove to glow and the smoke rolls across the roof, spreading sweet and deliriously spicy fragrances. The wind pushes tumbleweeds across brown grass and gathers them in thick clusters along chain link fences. New Mexico is part of the Southwest of the U.S., about at the meridian of Morocco. It is dry and hot in summer, but we are blessed with four seasons, and snow falls in winter, because we live at about 7000 feet elevation.

Bettina is my neighbor, and neighborhood at the outskirts of Santa Fe means distances of several miles between us. Bettina Göring has a slim face, blond hair, lively eyes and a quick smile that lingers, comes and goes like shadows of the fast moving clouds across this serene landscape. Her front teeth are just uneven enough to indicate that she might not have American roots. She has not. Like I, she too, was born in Germany. Her grandfather’s brother was Hermann Göring. In case you are young enough not to recognize this name: Hermann Göring was the perfectly blond and Arian profiled German officer, the right-hand of Adolf Hitler and Marshal of the Empire, the leader of the SS, founder of the feared GESTAPO and commander of theLuftwaffe. Herman Göring concocted and condoned the concept of the concentrations camps, where in perfectly engineered gas-chambers and extermination ovens more than six million, mostly Jewish, human beings were destroyed.

I live at the foot of the Mesa where Bettina has settled. New Mexico is about as far away as one can flee to separate from one’s German roots and culture, but not far enough, I found out, to avoid meeting a compatriot who is the grand-nice of Herman Göring. For years I didn’t know about her ancestral bondage and burden. We rarely met and simply saidHello! when we encountered each other along the dirt road. I didn’t know that she was a Göring, even when her husband Adi functioned as electrician and connected my 380 foot deep wel