Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (16 page)

We moved here
recently, the other woman says, up from the city. My husband thought it would
be better for Little Boris. Better for Big Boris too, I suppose.

Is it better for
you?

The woman shrugged.
I like the water, she said. And there are many trees here. But it’s dull. Don’t
you think it’s dull?

Sometimes.
The city’s not
that far off, but it seems like I never go there. Except sometimes on weekends
the three of us will go downtown or to Lincoln Park. Or when visitors come, we
go to the Art Institute and things like that.

Do you work?
the
woman asked. My husband doesn’t want me to work.

The
matter-of-factness of the statement momentarily displaces Ruth’s anxiety about
the question. How many times has Ruth had that conversation with other women
who themselves had either given up or sidetracked their careers or who still
doggedly and with a distinct air of superiority continued to follow their bliss
as lawyers, Realtors, administrative assistants? But this woman came from
another world, an older world. She took a breath.

I’m an attorney.
But I’m not practicing right now. I mean, I do a little bit on the side, edit
briefs and that sort of thing for my old firm.
A glorified
paralegal, really.

What sort of law
did you practice?
the
woman asks eagerly.

The boring kind.
Corporate
contracts.
I wanted to do criminal, actually.

Criminal?

Yes, I wanted to go
after the bad guys, Ruth says, smiling a little at the absurdity of it.
Actually, I wanted to work for the International Criminal Court, in The Hague.

Interesting, the
woman says, in a tone that makes it impossible to know if she truly finds it
interesting or not. Myself, I have no profession. I am still getting used to
America.

The sun is
shining,
children are shrieking, the wind off the lake stirs
Ruth’s hair and plays with the collar of her blouse. Why, then, does the
strange woman’s presence feel like an intrusion from her old life, when she was
free, like cold water pricking and stippling Ruth’s skin into wakefulness?

Boris has climbed
off the metal horse and has moved a short distance to the slide, impelling his
mother to follow him; Lucy is clamoring for Ruth to pick her up. She follows
the Russian woman to the play structure, where she’s holding her son’s hand as
he goes down the slide.

I’m Ruth.

Nadezhda is my
name. You can call me Nadia. Everyone does. She studies Ruth for a moment. Why
The Hague? You do not have enough American bad guys?

Oh we do, for sure.
It’s just, ah. I’ve always been interested in European history. My mother came
from there.

Conscious of the imminent reveal of her Jewishness.
Ruth rarely thinks of or directly encounters anti-Semitism, but
Nadia’s coolness, her foreignness, has her antennae up.

Her parents were in
Auschwitz. My grandparents I mean.

How terrible, Nadia
says simply.

Yes.

So you would like to
go after the Nazis then. But the Nazis are all dead.

No, Ruth says,
shaking her head. There are always Nazis.

Nadia stares past
Ruth at the waters of the lake for a moment. It is why I agreed to come to
America. Why I am standing here talking to you with my American son. Because of
what my own grandmother told me. She survived the siege of Leningrad. You have
heard of this?

Yes, I have.

And in my own
country there are bad things. I wanted to live somewhere that wars don’t
happen.
Somewhere normal.

I can understand
that.

Bad things happen
here, says Nadia as if to
herself
.
Terrible
things.
But they do not
mean
in the same way. You understand my English?

Nadia’s eyes are a
pale and crystalline shade of blue that makes the pupils startlingly dark. Ruth
smiles, reflexively, and looks away.

Perhaps you can.
Americans are so, so comfortable mostly. I have noticed this.

Ruth smiles with
one corner of her mouth by way of acknowledgment, and Nadia laughs suddenly, a
snapped-off sound.

I like you, Ruth. I
hope I see you again.

Likewise, Ruth
says, astonished at what has been said, at what she feels in the air between
herself and the stranger.
Contact.

It can be tough in
a new place, Ruth hears herself say. She fishes around in her purse; she still
has business cards, sat down one night with a permanent marker and crossed out
the office number on each one, leaving the cell number intact. She extends one
and Nadia takes it between her elegantly manicured fingers.

Nadia murmurs
something into Boris’s ear, and he immediately holds up his arms to be picked
up. She places him in the stroller (an expensive model, Ruth can’t help
noticing, a couple hundred dollars fancier than her own), nods to Ruth, and
rolls away without another word.

Hungry! Lucy says. Snack!
Except
snack
in Lucyspeak sounds just like
cock
.
She shouts it, loudly, so that the other
mothers turn around:
Cock! Cock!
Ruth gives them all her most beatific smile. She lowers Lucy into the
stroller, fishes a Graham cracker out of the diaper bag to hand to her, and
wheels the stroller around to head home, in the opposite direction Nadia took.
It looks like rain, she tells herself. Her skin is flushed. Her ears are
burning.

Certain ideas of
Europe closely held by a reader. The American configuration: hostility, curiosity,
indifference, contempt, fascination, prurience, a persistent sense of
inferiority, lewd speculation, exploitations, saturation, colonization. We are
new and they are old. Except for history and the conditions of history’s
procreation, America owns the New. She dreams of a new Old World in which her
own hidden history lies embedded like prehistoric gases awaiting miners to
bring about their detonation and release.
A Europe of babies
and old men and women and nothing in between.
Europe
of scholars, bearded men with peyes and spectacles, picking up fallen books
from bombed-out shelves and kissing them as one does a dropped infant.
Europe the furnace of horrors, untold accumulated sedimentary beauties of
history heaped and strewn and doused with coal oil in the ashy fields of
Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, the once and future
Lithuania, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Hungary.
Burned: the Paris
of the East and the London of the East and the Venice of the East.
Not
burned: New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Cleveland,
Chicago
. As the line between the two Jerusalems smolders,
incommensurate
fires burning in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, fire
of the citizen, fire of the subject. One stands or sits down in these
reflections, quite at home. In search of a path of resistance to the downward
drift of entropy and forgetfulness: dream, reverie, reflection are her methods.
Above all, as though distracted, she decides. She does or does not turn the
page, does or does not pick up a ballpoint pen with which to carefully
underline words, phrases, clauses, sentences, whole paragraphs; does or does
not grip the pen close to the tip so as to create marginalia: five- and
six-pointed stars, asterisks, a word or two, or the most eloquent marks of
punctuation: question marks, exclamation points, while a simple period marks
her
nota bene
. In so doing she emends the quiet of reading, brings greater
proportions of noise to particular rows and blocks of black signals, oblique
semaphoric signs. Other paragraphs, pages, and chapters are passed over in
silence: the reader leaves no sign of her passage. She looks in from the
outside of her own experience as half-understood text written by collectives of
anonymous authors: her Jewishness, her whiteness, her femaleness (not to her
own satisfaction achieving womanliness), her status as an immigrant’s child,
her relative prosperity,
her
degrees. Tearing off
strips of paper in her mind (in reality motionless), she says: It is a fact
that more men survived than women. It is a fact that the killings of and by men
are better documented than the killings of women. It is a fact that the
widespread rape of women, then and now, has been poorly and inefficiently
documented. It is a fact that some women collaborate or try to collaborate with
their oppressors, even their murderers, in continual attempts at the survival
of themselves and their children. It is probable that Sophie never had a
choice; it is certain that Sophie was fictional. It is probably that such
concepts as “agency,” “personal morality,” “mercy,” “justice,” “mere decency,”
“humanity” have been put under such extreme pressure by the events of the past
century that they are no longer fit to be used. It is probable that our
appetite for news of these events is inversely proportionate to our appetite
for what is called “reality.” It is likely that a patina of something we dare
not call “nostalgia” clings to our collective memory of these events. It is a
fact that old men who have been soldiers in a war speak of wartime as the best,
the only real time in their lives. Subtract “best” from “real” if you like, it
makes no difference. To describe is to affirm, to tell a story is to say,
You
should have been there. The wind rose, rain swept in:
you should have been there. I
miscarried
my first
child after seven months of pregnancy: you should have been there. I dropped
out of the life I knew into someone else’s life, a placeholder life: you should
be here. Stuck here in someone else’s idea of Europe, an American woman with an
American child, secure and comfortable and never for a moment free from fear of
losing all security,
all comfort
. There are certain
activities that occupy the entire foreground of one’s capacities—movies, music,
reading, writing—while leaving the dark background to metabolize, metastasize,
to grow tentacles, so that when you put down your pen, your book, your
instrument, you emerge into the dazzling matinee sunlight and find that the
background has seized your life and you will never be quite the same. As when
you stand by the graveside of a loved one, your grandfather for example, and
think, “The stage is set,” and “The coffin is being closed,” and “Here I am at
the graveside of my grandfather,” and “Here I am heaping a shovelful of dirt
onto my grandfather’s coffin,” and “Inside that coffin under the earth I put
there my grandfather is lying with his eyes closed, wearing a ticking watch,
wearing the same suit he married his second wife in thirty years ago,” and none
of these thoughts are to the purpose or affect in the slightest the real work
going on in the background, the work of being alive inside a wound, pain dimmed
by the narcotic haze of self-consciousness. You did not choose this
wound,
you did not give it a name. It’s only a background
from which you emerge, like a paper doll cut from a newspaper. The shape of the
doll does not affect the news, the contents (front page, advice column,
obituary, editorial, book review, advertisement), and yet it is inseparable
from them. That is the essential story: daughter of the daughter of a survivor,
herself a kind of survivor, once married to a kind of perpetrator, my father,
my
fathers. Everything else is symptom. So why pursue it?
What could be more absurd or pathetic than a paper doll straining to read
herself
?
Indecipherable text in which I
take root.
So compelled, I owe a debt unpayable. I go forward, to wring
blood from stones.

The city is brilliant under layers of sun and
cloud.
A train arriving in a palace of glass, a level pan
across the skyline.
Conurbation on a plain,
historyless from a height.
But there, iconic, once sinister, the eye of
the East, now beloved and harmless and as absent in its omnipresence as the
city’s other totem, a bear: the tower, at the base of which hunkers a Starbucks
where Lamb is using his laptop. Snaps it shut now, passes out among the
hipsterati, the punks, the tourists, out onto the blank bare face of
Alexanderplatz, rolling his suitcase, to another train station, to ride the
S-bahn. Of the Italian portfolio there is no sign: perhaps it has been
swallowed entirely by the rolling bag, never so anodyne or sinister as now,
lugged heavily up the steps to the train platform where they are massing, the
Germans, coming and going, easting and westing, with studied casualness. Now he
is walking again in sunlight, coat billowing behind him, into the deepest past
the city now has to offer, under and through the Brandenburg Gate, crossing the
ex-death strip, passing on doggedly down Ebertstrasse, looking neither to the
right (trees in the gentle breeze, green lung, vast acreage edge of the
Tiergarten) nor to the left (the field of stelae, the memorial the film we are
watching uncharacteristically and melodramatically captions with its full and
actual name: MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE). His head is bowed a
little, only his feet meeting his eyes. Further and farther to Potsdamer Platz,
impersonal assemblage of skyscrapers proclaiming their shaky fealty to the
Euro, which is only the Deutschmark in sheep’s clothing: mute, defiant, they
reflect only the sky. Under a dazzled postmodern canopy like the biggest of Big
Tops, by a reflecting pool or fountain sandwiched between chain restaurants he
squats again with his laptop, again uploading or downloading what’s necessary,
the updates, the tweets,
data
. We have not seen this
man with a phone. Onward, exhausted Lamb, who has forgotten that trains exist,
crossing the bridge in late light with the etiolated yellow geometry of the
Philharmonic Building behind him, over the canal and into the old city, the
West Berlin that was: island, white showcase in a sea of red, costly bauble of
the postwar economic miracle, ground zero when that phrase had another meaning,
when Berlin rehearsed perpetually the end of history, tanks facing each other
across land mines and barbed wire, the end of the world as we once knew it,
suffused now in kitsch the very phrase that was born here, World War III. He is
under leaves and trees now, in a quiet prewar neighborhood, strollers and gay
couples, a Swedish furniture store, bakeries, restaurants, cafes. He comes to a
flagstone plaza with a brick church at one end of it, an outdoor café at the
other end with scattered tables and chairs. He is weary now, rolls up to one of
the tables and sits down, a bit slumped, as the evening shadows begin to catch
in the buildings and treetops and young boys, not all of them white, kick a
soccer ball at the church end of the square. A waiter approaches, listens,
withdraws, returns with a pilsner, withdraws. Lamb takes his laptop again from
the rolling bag’s outer pocket, opens it, checks for a signal,
shuts
it again.
In his eye the amber
evening.
He reaches inside his coat and takes out a slightly crumpled
white tulip and sets this on the table.
Takes a sip of beer.
Waits.