Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (32 page)

4.
Miramare

Noir.
It unfolds, it spreads
, needing no shape to
advance, unforeseeable container of itself, like this prose, like a camera set
up at ankle level under a table, angled upward and left to run, to catch what
catch can. “Whose point of view is that?” “Mine.” They stream by, sinister men
and women, pants and dresses, terrifying nostrils, the emphasis falling on
unregarded surfaces, the backs of hands, heads, buttocks, pointed heels, small
dogs with short legs in rapid clicking motion, the light inescapably itself,
marking an ordinary afternoon in the city, any city of the sun—Rome, Barcelona,
Port-au-Prince, Miami, Lahore, Heraklion, Cairo—city on the Black Sea—capable
of casting long shadows before nightfall, doorways cutting themselves out of
streets, noir, each walker at an angle to herself, a sense of thickness to the
air, slightest slow motion, a few extra frames per second, adding new hours to
the day for a second life of dreams, mosaic of the day rearranged, plotless,
into fragments of color: a hand grips a knife, a father faces his son, a
husband and wife play chess. Every hair on your head is counted. And a man is
speaking, a man’s mouth, lips full like mine, moving pauselessly, tip of his
tongue flashing between white irregular teeth, the volume’s all the way down
but there’s something like room tone, street tone, it’s no void, roaring like
surf (a sun city, city by the sea), tuned into a bass line, a song you danced
to once in a sweating cinderblock club, white shirts gone purple in the black
light on the men, flashing under dark suits, the women like suns grown old in
their tight red dresses (under Ibiza, Jamaica, every deep a lower deep,
clubbed) tripping limbs and heads snapped back, numb to the point of a
wallflower’s nonexistence, watching all this, the music no longer music, just a
grind, thoughtless perceiving point, the father is lecturing, lips and hound
jaws and chin and tongue wagging, the upper mandible immobile as we know, top
of your attention (the frame) cutting off the windows to the soul, just a
mouth’s authority, fathering—but who, who is he—soundtrack blurring out what
you thought you wanted most to know—what is he saying. You do not wake from
this,
a camera dreams its battery life away. You are alone
with the others in the theater looking at a bright white screen, that isn’t
even white, a sort of mesh or grid or desert of such terrible purity it becomes
annihilating substance, if you could feel in two dimensions, that part of
yourself that’s always a little ahead of the rest of you, in the eyes, in front
of them, like the little space for breath between nose and mouth, visible in
winter, the image of the past, its absence, retreating, red shift. It’s a
simple situation moments before you wake: you sit looking forward at nothing,
as at the sea at night, and nothing spreads its wings behind you in
transcendental light, making no shadows on the wall, and you are lying in bed,
and there’s a woman in your arms, and she tells you a story in which you play
no part.

Dear Elsa,

I’m going to sing to you now, sing like a canary. Sing
from pain. To truly sing is to open a second mouth deep inside your body; it is
the wound that sings.
Something deeper than memory, than
images, something in the flesh.
You can catch it like a
disease,
you can be afflicted with someone else’s memories.
I sang, I smoked too much, for the same reason, smoke from a bomb crater, smoke
from the crematoria,
smoke
from the secret mouth. And
do you have the same syndrome, do you remember for me who spent her whole life
trying to understand her own mother’s silence? I sang for my father, from a
very young age, and my mother was my teacher though I thought she was dead. I
was six years old and they had all been years of terror and unease, from the
moment they stamped the word
Zsido
on my birth certificate to my girlhood in a dying and
divided city to the chaotic postwar period in which I changed apartments three
times before my father appeared one gray morning, thin as a rake, someone I
only remembered from photographs, to take me away from my mother’s parents, the
only family I’d ever known, with the single magic word
America
, and bring me limp and
stunned on the long journey through the belly of destroyed Germany that ended
in the former SS barracks in the DP camp in Belsen where my father and I would
live for the next three years. I sat next to him on the packed and smoky train
car that first night, trembling, forced close by overcrowding and yet wanting
not to touch him, this stranger with his shapeless cloth cap and death’s-head
cheekbones and nails bitten to the quick. To calm me he told me to sing with
him, it was December so we sang Christmas songs in Hungarian, “Silent Night”
and “O Tannenbaum,” and the other cramped and miserable refugees in the
carriage, every one of them a Jew like us, began to sing along. Then once we
were settled in that bare, bleak, drafty room my lessons began in earnest—my
father found me a teacher, a once-plump woman called Frau Drechsler with thick
gray hair and severe black brows and deep wrinkles on her cheeks, so that her
true age was impossible to fathom, to teach me the canon, in her own language
which she spoke in a harsh croaking raven’s voice that dissolved impossibly at
the drop of a hat into the half-ruined but luminous mezzo-soprano that had made
her her living before the war, she taught me the songs, the lieder and cantatas
reclaimed from the murderers, of Bach, Strauss, Brahms, Schubert. I joined a
children’s chorus that gave concerts every Saturday when the weather was fine,
and we learned English songs to please the homesick British soldiers who
watched over us: “It Might as Well Be Spring,” “I Can’t Begin to Tell You,”
“Accentuate the Positive,” “Teddy-Bears Picnic,” “It Could Happen to You.”
Sometimes I’d give little impromptu concerts for the soldiers hanging around
outside the canteen or at the main gate to try and wheedle a few chocolates
from them, or a cigarette I could trade for the butterscotch candies I loved.
German, English: I sang in these languages, not understanding them, but filled
nonetheless with feeling, a kind of creeping deep inside, the feeling of that
inner mouth coming unglued, unstuck. Even then I knew that the soldiers’
English with its elongated vowels was not the “real thing”; it was the English
on American radio, Hollywood English (American films twice a week in the little
theater where SS officers had once brought their families to relax). I studied
my future at the cinema and my father on the sidelines of soccer games,
practicing his trade, his restless hustle: making bets on the outcomes of
games, smuggling black market luxuries, ubiquitous on the heavy iron-wheeled
bicycle he dragged into our room in the barracks at night and leaned against
the door so no one could steal it or sneak in (we were lucky to have the room,
cold and bleak as it was, to ourselves, entire large families were crammed into
neighboring rooms, it must have been my father’s activities that guaranteed our
relatively sumptuous privacy), so if I had to pee in the night I had to do it
in the cracked metal basin we used as a chamberpot, squatting in the harsh
glare of the camp lights that the scrap of canvas that we used for a
windowshade didn’t do enough to deflect. Women, too, my father had his women,
it’s incredible to think now of desire able to survive what had to be survived,
but it had, it rampaged forth, and as little flower gardens sprang up
everywhere in the camp to accompany the much larger vegetable gardens, as we
sang for the soldiers and sat up at attention in the camp school, so too did
flirtations and affairs take place, women who’d lost children, men who’d lost
wives finding each other furtively in sheds and behind bushes, no one much
caring for the old proprieties, the camp’s birthrate was impressive, though he
never brought one back to our room I knew they were out there, my father’s
women, he might have been pimping for all I know, I wouldn’t put it past him
and I wouldn’t blame him, not really, after what he’d been through. Which he
never spoke of, naturally, and naturally I never asked. He was only my father,
a stranger that I lived with and came to know intimately without his ever
shedding that strangeness, that male difference, washing with a rag under his
arms and between his legs in the pale mornings, stretching like a cat, shaking
his hair out like a dog, stepping into a cloud of cologne that stung my
half-closed eyes in the bunk where I pretended to sleep. He would escort me
every day to Frau Drechsler in the music room of what had been the senior
officers’ quarters, where she presided over a battered upright piano, asking
her about my progress, but never staying to hear me sing. Was it the German
that pained him? He certainly spoke the language, his little smuggling business
depended on it, though Bergen-Belsen by then was its own city of Jews, its own
little Jerusalem, Germans still surrounded it and came into the camp, making
deliveries, working construction, unembarrassed, men in stiff gray clothes who
had perhaps performed similar duties before 1945, it was impossible to know for
sure. My father would go up to these men with a friendly smile, neatly dressed,
exchange a few low words and something in his fist, laughter. They called him
the Ambassador for his distinguished air, or to mock him: he carried with him
that indefinable aura of prewar grace, of unwounded Europe. He would return to
our room with a knapsack full of cigarettes or a bottle of cognac or tubes of
lipstick or brilliantine or soap (a prized and extremely rare commodity), even
packages of condoms—I didn’t recognize them of course, spilling from his
knapsack onto the bed, my father said they were balloons and inflated one for
me, but when someone knocked on the door he darted out with his cigarette and
popped it, smiling oddly at my tears. I had no toys, my father could not or would
not devote his energies to acquiring any, I had to make do with an old mop head
he tied with some string and pair of mismatched buttons sewed to make the mad
lopsided eyes of the mouthless dolly I carried with me everywhere and slept
with, burrowed in scratchy but warm woolen blankets. Why did he bring me to the
camp, life was better in Budapest, even then, with my grandparents whose faces
I can no longer recall but whose love and care were like iron, doing everything
they could to guard me from the truth, the tenuousness of our lives in the
apartment where I was born, the ever-foreclosed possibilities of my life and
the foreshortened horizon of their own lives that cracked open again
miraculously in ‘45, the narrow escape they never permitted me to escape,
living indoors almost all the time, only discovering the sun and rubble at the
war’s end, beginning to grow, until he appeared that day with that queer cap of
his turning and turning in his hands, his apologetic but frozen smile, the
words he must have used to make my grandmother relax her grip on my shoulders,
letting go, then touching me again firmly to push me toward this stranger and
his plan for me of a better life in America. It was liberation of a sort,
school only happened for a few hours a day and my father was always elsewhere,
except for Frau Drechsler the camp, strange as it may sound, was a fabulous
playground, a Babel, Jews from all over Europe making themselves understood
with whatever lay to hand, Yiddish or German or French or English or Hebrew or
just gestures, nods, lifted eyebrows. I ran wild with the other children, some
of them much older, some of them survivors (I already understood the secret but
critical distinction between the remnant that had actually survived the
Lager
and those who, like me,
had gone on living comparatively normal lives in hiding in their own cities and
towns), we ran in fierce packs through the muddy alleys and fields of the camp,
fighting other packs, stealing whatever we could, girls as young as eight smoking
cigarette ends they found behind the British barracks, cursing proficiently in
eight languages. All this should have taught me something of the world, but it
did not. I was young and remained young, for a shockingly long time. At night I
dreamed of my mother’s voice—no words, just a rhythm, a tone. Her face was a
benign blur, a little glowing fire in the cracked hall of mirrors of my
childish memory. When I sang, for Frau Dreschler, for the soldiers, in the
children’s chorus, I tried to sing a memory I couldn’t possibly possess.

There’s no sun up in the
sky

Stormy weather

When she went away

The blues walked in and met me

What did my father remember
of her? What memories had he suppressed, in the silence of his breathing when
he came wheeling his bicycle in long after curfew, the weight of him sagging
the bunk where he lay smoking one last cigarette before dropping off to sleep?
What was it that lived in him that lived somehow in me, a crack in the heart
like the crack in the cornerstone of a large building that never quite
collapses but only settles, day after day, deeper into the earth? My mother was
a ghost to us both, a ghost in Budapest, a ghost in the camp, a ghost on the
day our papers came through, a ghost on the steamer that carried us in three slow
days across the ocean to New York. There I came fully into English at last,
American English, the language of optimism and transformation. I spoke only
English from the moment I crossed the gangplank, determined to arrive in New
York an American, answering my father only in that language to his amusement
and frustration. I had, have always had, as even Frau Drechsler admitted, an
uncanny ear. I avoided him and the other passengers as much as I could,
choosing instead to spend my time with the few American members of the ship’s
crew, practicing accents—the Indiana flatlands of the purser, a steward’s
Brooklyn twang, the black stoker’s melancholy Alabama drawl. When my feet
touched American soil I felt myself becoming a part of it, immediately and all
at once, and it shamed me to be dragged away from my glimpse of Manhattan to
darkest Queens where I found myself once again in the camp, what seemed like
solid blocks of other Hungarian Jews, first in the spare bedroom of my father’s
cousin’s two-family house on 32
nd
Avenue and later across the street in the bungalow of
our own that you, Elsa, must remember. I wanted, more fervently it seemed than
my father, whose idea it had been, to be an American and only American. I
dropped the
lieder
and sang only American songs, what I heard at the drugstores and ice
cream parlors: I wanted to be Rosemary Clooney, I wanted to be Doris Day,
blonde and girlish and pure as ice cream, not the dark-haired dark-eyed
foreigner I felt myself to be and saw reflected everywhere, the women in the
grocery store and the bakery, weary waiting for the bus, jabbering away at each
other in what I now thought of not as Hungarian or Yiddish but as foreign,
jib-jab, nonsense. Now I no longer answered my father when he spoke in our
native tongue: I sat stony faced until he repeated his question in halting,
heavily accented English. At school, surrounded by other immigrant children, I
gravitated toward the native born; I still remember Marianne, who was Polish
but second generation, born in the USA, picking up from her the slightly dated
Americanisms that tasted to me like freedom: gee whiz, gee willikers, quit
bugging me, I got dibs, guy’s got a DA, don’t be a spaz, got a thin one?, razz
my berries, that’s a panic and a half. All this time the ghost of my mother was
circling. It was two years almost to the day of our arrival, my second birthday
as an American, when I came home on a warm breathless September day to that
house, we had only moved in the previous month, into a hush, an unnatural
summer silence, to find a strange brand-new looking paisley suitcase blocking
the front door the way my father’s bicycle had blocked the room we’d once
shared. I had to search the little house, room by room, until I found them
sitting there, in my own bedroom at the foot of my narrow bed, my father neatly
dressed in the white shirt and natty tie he always wore when working, next to a
narrow and strange woman, like an insect that disguises itself as a stick or
vice-versa, wearing a gray woolen dress much too heavy for the day and a
kerchief over her hair that marked her to my practiced eye as a proper
greenhorn, fresh off the boat. Just sitting, the two of them, not saying
anything, her eyes fever bright, his hooded, her holding a black-and-white
photo of me in her bone-white hands. Untold forever her odyssey from the bright
black hole she had vanished into one Budapest morning along with my father, the
wormhole she’d traveled down out of sight and memory only to remerge on a hot
afternoon in Queens; though I did learn later she’d been in America already for
two or three months, staying with a second cousin in Jersey City, watching and
waiting for the moment, who knows what would make it right in her eyes, to
rejoin our lives. She spoke no English, never tried to learn, she looked at me
with enormous hopeless tragic eyes and said my name in a way that made it
foreign, that brought me closer to her,
it
suffocated
me. Mama, I said in English, it sounds the same in
Hungarian,
that
was the nearest and only bridge I would cross. Mama, where did you
come from? Mama, where did you go? I did not ask that question then, but would
in the years to
come,
she would answer only
Az ilyen történetek nem a
gyermekek számára
, such stories are not for children. But Mama, I’d
say, I’m twelve, I’m fifteen, I’m sixteen, I’m a grown woman, I’m not a child
any longer. I’m eighteen, Mama. But by then she was dead, no longer a survivor,
and my father had a new business partner in the woman who’d become his second
wife, that awful bitch, and I was living my own real life at last, an American
life. In between were six years of noisy silence, Mama a pair of eyes in the
kitchen, my father gone all day and into the night, cutting hair at first,
trying and failing at the old schemes, two shops closed down under him until he
was reduced to driving a taxi at all hours, the invisible man. Mama did nothing
at all as far as I could see, apart from making me inedible lunches to take to
school in the morning and preparing hot tea and peanut butter sandwiches for me
to eat when I returned—though I was returning later and later, spending as much
time as possible in the living rooms of girlfriends and the cars of boyfriends.
One evening in particular I remember coming home to find Shabbat dinner all
laid out on the little kitchen table, with roast chicken and challah loaf and
all the rest. I scarcely knew what it was—Papa had come back from the
Lager
with all the religion
burned out of him—and he never appeared that night. But I remember Mama
standing there at the head of the table gesturing for me to imitate her, to
cover my eyes and say the prayer as God’s bride, the Sabbath, approached. She
said it in Hebrew, I watched her, moving my lips, saying nothing. After that we
just sat there, me smoking a cigarette, her with hands on her knees, watching
the chicken get cold, waiting for my father. When it was full dark I stood up
and told her I had a date, which wasn’t true. She said nothing I could hear,
though her lips moved. When I got back late that night the table was still laid
with the cold dinner—Papa’s coat was in its usual place and their bedroom door
was shut. The next morning it was all cleared away as if it never had been, and
my mother never repeated the experiment, at least not while I was in that
house. The next year I went away to college. And the year after that she was
dead.