Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (17 page)

It is dark, which is to say light: the lamps have come on and the
square is
more lively
than before, a mostly young
crowd settling in at the surrounding restaurants and bars for an unforced and
lively evening. Lamb is sitting with another man who sits bent over, shoulders
practically between his knees, necktie hanging down, as though trying to catch
his wind after getting kicked in the stomach.
A large man,
swarthy, carefully unshaven, with heavy black brows, in his forties perhaps, in
a polo shirt and black jeans and motorcycle boots.
A manila folder is on
the table by the empty pilsner glass, the tulip resting on top of it. Lamb is
listening. The man is talking, steadily, compulsively, to the ground it seems,
someone getting something off his chest, confessing something of which he is
ashamed, glad to say it once and once only and completely to a single other
soul. Only Lamb’s eyes move. What does the man
say.
I
had forgotten that all this time, all of it, from the first moment of the
train, the first moment we caught sight of him, our man, Lamb, to reorient us
in the plot, in Europe, in Berlin, from the Fernsehturm to now, we have heard
nothing, no street sounds, no dialogue, only music, strings at first, for quite
a long time, and now, as Lamb is listening, as this man, who is somehow his
victim, is speaking, pouring his heart out, we are hearing only the lyrics, the
voice, of a woman, in a language you very likely do not speak:

Meghalt a szeretet!

Meghalt a szeretet!

A pure song, a song
of despair, a song of suicides.
As
Lamb or someone like him would say to you, without irony: I could tell you, but
then I would have to kill you.
But I cannot kill you, you are only a
spectator, here to be pushed or pulled by the spectacle of failure, my failure
to understand, my failure to communicate something ineffable, something that
goes beyond the privacy of grief: though it begins there, and ends there, in
its universality, the inevitability for each of us of real irrevocable personal
excruciating loss. It is Lamb’s song, Ruth gave it to him,
I
found it for her. It is the song of the reader. It is the last song, of M.

A letter never
sent, from herself to herself:

A mother is no saint. A mother is sheerly myth. When she’s there, she’s
not there. When she’s not there she’s everywhere. The moon is new. I don’t need
to read her messages because I read. Dowry of myself to myself, wedded to the
word. I have her in the mirror, when I linger with the newspaper while Lucy
calls my name from another part of the house. When my husband’s eyes slide past
mine to Lucy’s, birth a smile. Once I thought she wanted me to accomplish
something. To finish what she never quite started. But I am the one who’s
unfinished, who lacks the finishing touch of a blessing. So I read the books, I
studied the
testimony,
I stared at incomprehensible
black-and-white photographs of children waiting to be beaten, gassed, starved,
shot.
The heart of her heart of darkness.
Mother’s
unintended.
Granddaughter unknown, extrapolate
what
she knows of my character, Ben’s. No lineage.
Dead-ended in
some shtetl, under somebody’s boot.
Cossacks.
Spectacles on my eyes and autumn in my heart—that’s Babel.
Am I a mother before I’m a woman, a woman before I’m a Jew, a Jew before I’m a
daughter, a daughter before I’m nobody? There’s a pair of us. Meanwhile I’ve
put my own heart under surveillance.
Moving image of a man, a
shamus, sharp shadow in an indistinct world.
Europe of
mistrusts.
Space stands in for time: easting, easting.
Poised between tourism and graverobbery.
Autumn,
mulch, winds, decay.
Whoso has no house now will not build him one.
House built on quicksand. It’s not the photos that are
incomprehensible,
it’s the expressions on their faces.
Blank, quizzical, even
smiling.
Very rarely contorted into a grimace.
Very rarely registering pain.
A father strokes his sobbing
son’s hair. They are naked, waiting their turn to be shot. The father points
upward, he is explaining heaven. That image, not even an image, just three
short sentences, seared into my memory and erasing my own childhood.
A rainy afternoon when I was ten or eleven, under the kitchen table
with my mother’s books.
Rainshadow on the floor, on
the table above my head with its immaculate lacy tablecloth.
Surrounded
by solid blond legs of the furniture I’d known all my life, secure in our
apartment like the astronauts in their space capsules, I felt the gravity of
the world let me go. And I’ve never been fully recaptured.
Her
key in the lock, my throat seized by a scream.
I left them there, the
books,
some with photos spread open, ran to my room and shut
the door. Heard her enter, calling, then silence but for her heels on the
hallway’s parquet. She walked out of hearing for a long time—me face down on
the bed, back arched like a cat’s, pressed against the rapidly warming pillow.
Walked back, past my door, then returned without pausing, passing on the way to
the kitchen. A half hour later I found her there with a glass of wine, chopping
vegetables for ratatouille.
Her beautiful face calm and blank
as the children in the photos.
Through the archway to the dining room I
saw the books were gone. She asked me no questions, I told her no lies. I
picked up a second knife and helped her chop the vegetables. We spoke of
inconsequential things, the radio playing softly from its berth over the
refrigerator, both of us looking at the clock waiting for my father to come
home. And he never did. Because reading that story, seeing that gray sky and
ravaged landscape and wasted fruit of naked human bodies and the coats and hats
of their killers, also human, taught me something I’d always suspected. I do
not know who my father was. And I knew my mother all too well.
But M.
What was
she.

Like shattering glass filmed in reverse, the
pieces, integrating into a picture.
Hotels.
Lamb sitting in a chair by a rain-streaked window, back to us,
wearing headphones, hunched, listening.
Lamb on top of a bedspread, no
jacket, shirt untucked, ashtray balanced on his sternum, looking up at the
ceiling.
Lamb in the shower.
Lamb
standing
at the window—a new window, the same window—looking out at the
city, suitcase packed and erect next to him, ready to go.
Lamb
at the hotel bar looking into his glass of whiskey while a slender woman with
ash blonde hair and a green dress stands at his elbow, talking.
Legwork.
Lamb pulling his bag down a street, landmarks
signaling behind him, brute signifiers, like a painted canvas spooling behind
him, so that we take it on sufferance, indication: Madrid Paris Rome Budapest
Vienna Berlin. Berlin. The generic café, sitting at a table looking out at the
passersby while informants come and go: bureaucrats soldiers cops academics
prostitutes old men, leaning in to fill Lamb’s ear.
Leads.
Fanning the photos under the noses of bartenders, hotel
clerks, coroners, pimps, reckless divorcees, librarians, janitors, junkies.
Exchanging envelopes, currency, significant looks, shaken heads. Lamb’s
notebook, Moleskine of course (“of Chatwin, of Hemingway”), with the elastic to
snap it shut creating an aura of decision, finality, a new link in the chain.
Berlin, he’s back in Berlin. In the men’s room of the train station two men
come up from behind, offer no words, but one hits him in the kidney and grabs
his arms and the other shouts questions, pummels him in the stomach, slams his
face against the mirror, slams his body into the toilet stall, shoves his head
down into the bowl, flushes, shouts abuse, leaves him there: Lamb, survivor,
offering no resistance, limp. Bandaged Lamb on top of a bedspread, no jacket,
shirt untucked, ashtray balanced on his sternum, looking up at the ceiling.
Lamb gingerly in the shower.
Lamb standing
at the window—a new window, the same window—looking out at the city, suitcase
packed and erect next to him, ready to go. The man with the heavy brows looks
up shocked as the stockroom door splinters open and Lamb like an avatar comes
lunging and coldcocks him, lays him out, administers a technical and righteous
beating. Bends down to the broken and bleeding form, shows him again the
photos, listens. Lamb stands, brushes his hands against his pants as though to
clean them, walks out.

A new hotel, the same hotel.
Are there any messages?
Lamb pulling his suitcase
behind him, tape over his right eye but no more swelling, turning to face us as
elevator doors close.
Lamb at the door of his room with key card in
hand, hesitating. Silent ambient breathing of an anonymous carpeted corridor
lit by florescent sconces, the only window at the hall’s end overexposed: Lamb
washed out darkly, kneeling by his bag, glancing at us, taking something out,
standing.
Lamb with a gun.
Lamb
opening the door.

Bland, a room, bed
bureau TV desk and chair, floor to ceiling window with the smoky gray day
outside, quasi-industrial the view, the long asphalt ribbon of Karl-Marx Allee
stretching into the dark of the oncoming evening, East, perdition.
The man in the chair, a big man, an older man, back to us, in a
good suit, looking out the window.
Swiveling to face us, Lamb, the man,
ballooning at the belly, the waist, eyes smiling, sinister, benevolent,
completely bald,
slightly
ashamed. Looking up under
lidded eyes, standing now,
smile
widening. Lamb shuts
the door. With his left hand reaching into his jacket pocket and thumbing them
out, the photographs. Fanning them on the bed where the man can step forward to
see. Looking down, takes them in. The smile fades, changes, comes back. Look at
him. Look at his human face. He is a big man in his seventies, imposing, huge
even, and well bruised.
Spreading his hands.

You’ve found her.

Dear Elsa,

What I never told you, what I kept from you. What if it doesn’t exist?
Because you hate me, perhaps with cause, but will always be my daughter, and
always be my Elsa, no matter what you choose to call yourself. And so it’s
almost time for me to tell you about your father, and my father, and this awful
world that fathers have made.
But not yet.
Before I do
that I want you to picture me as I was this morning, before the letter arrived.
I was at peace then. Or if not at peace, at quiet, settled, at rest in the way
an object is at rest, like a stone at the bottom of a puddle that does not know
that puddles evaporate, that things can change again after so much change has
already gone by. Husband gone, the old life gone, America most of all gone into
memory. And me in this strange old city, here on the edge of Italy where I
thought I could be reasonably confident of never or at least rarely seeing
another American. A city more German than Italian, more Slavic than German,
written into and out again of the margins of history, a city that crossed
national borders almost routinely, as eastern as it is western, an excellent
place to disappear because it was always itself in the act of disappearing like
a magician’s mute and beautiful assistant. Alone but for a few distant friends,
I had found a pattern for my days. I walked the streets, I worked in the shop,
I read again the same poems I’d loved when I was young, Rilke most of all,
taking strength if not comfort from those lines I’m sure you’ve also never
forgotten, lines whose advice I follow now:

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.

Wer jetzt allein
ist
, wird Es lang bleiben,

wird
wachen, lesen,
lange Briefe schreiben

und
wird in den Alleen
hin und her

unruhig
wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Such beautiful
words make loneliness bearable. And this is becoming a very long letter indeed,
and isn’t it strange that the German for “long letter” sounds like “long
brief”? But it was not a long letter that came to break my peace this morning,
that I could hear even from upstairs by the creak of the mail slot, a slip of
paper that slid between the brass lips of my locked door and came crashing down
on this life, my afterlife. I went down the creaking stairs which have always
served to warn me in the past of my neighbors’ comings and goings, and now
they—
the old Signora on the second floor, the young Signora
on the third—might have heard me go down and then come back up again, as if I
were indecisive about leaving. I went inside, I closed the door, I picked up
the old ivory letter opener your Papa had brought back from a long-ago trip to
South Africa, I opened the envelope. And what did I find?
A
blank page.
A blank page confirming what I knew already in my heart:
that he who now has no house will not build him one. That he who is alone now
will continue to be alone, will write and read long letters,
will
wander the streets and alleys as the leaves fall, remembering.
Remembering in this case my own death, that is to say, my life.
Who sent it to me, this page,
the
page on which I
write this, that you may or may not read? Was it your father? Was it you?