Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (34 page)

The things we remember so
well: did we experience them at the time? What I remember is her face, as we
ground ourselves together, rooted for the moment in the moment, the distortion
of it, the tension around her mouth.
Her face in the sea.
Did Charles give her this face? Did I? Where did it come from, this feeling
that could not last, that convinces—in the moment—that it will never be
repeated?

What happened? I said
softly into her ear, her head nestled against me, our bodies cooling.

I lay there in the bed,
watching the light on the blank white wall turn pink and purple with the
sunset, while she whispered the story to my chest. How she fled from history
into history. There were no trains, she said, there was no gas for cars, only
for doctors and police and the army. I stood up in the hospital room, rebuked
by his sleeping face, the blank bloody bandage over his right eye, and walked
out into the hallway and down the stairs and out into the street where the
manifestation
had left its long wake:
trash, tree trunks, the smoldering remnants of overturned little cars. Under
the paving stones: bare earth, dirt. I walked. It was late, the action was
west. I went east. I passed few people as I
walked,
mostly small groups of twos and threes, not students, who glanced fearfully at
me as though I carried a Molotov cocktail in my hands. One middle-aged couple
crossed the street when they saw me approach. I kept my head down. There were
no trains, but my steps guided me anyway toward the Gare de Lyon. It was
closest. It wasn’t even the right station for where I was going. At Ile
Saint-Louis the Pont de Sully was closed: big trucks blocked the bridge and I
could see some men in black uniforms standing very still, it seemed, while the
lights from their cigarettes bobbed and danced like fireflies.
Austerlitz then.
I followed the Seine, which reflected the
city lights like always. You couldn’t tell what had been happening there. I
reached the station and it was deserted, of course, a great hulking building.
Two men stood by the entrance warming their hands by an ashcan fire. They
looked at me and I became afraid. I didn’t know what else to do but keep
walking. I was glad for my boots. To my right the station was sliding by, the
still tracks that led south and away to Orleans, the warm south, Marseille,
Spain, Portugal. It wasn’t the right station.
To my left the
river, vast and silent between silent walls.
Then a miracle that I heard
before I saw, down a bend in a side street: an engine. I followed. Outside an
Autoprix, a small truck with engine idling. The driver came out and said
something to someone inside, then reached up and pulled the metal grating down
over the shop’s windows and front door. He locked it and handed the lock back
to someone through the grating then turned aside to light his cigarette. He saw
me coming. A middle-aged man with a head like a treestump wedged upside-down on
his shoulders, a gray cap squashing down the unruly roots. He smoked, watching
me approach, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

I need to leave Paris, I
said. I’m traveling east.

He shrugged like a
Frenchman.

I’m going east, he said.
Northeast, but east.

Perfect.

I rode at his side for what
seemed like hours in the truck’s little cab, barely exchanging a word. The
radio played no news, only songs whose melodies and lyrics enjoyed ironic
relations: «
Comme d’habitude
»
,
«
Le Déserteur
»
,
«
Cinématographe
». Wind blew smoke from his
cigarettes out cracks in the windows and the engine snorted and gabbled like
some sort of sea creature. He took two cigarettes out of the packet and lit
them both and passed one to me: I knew some ritual was being enacted but didn’t
understand the rules: I took it and smoked it down to the last scraps, though I
never smoked. Once I caught him looking at my legs and instinctively pulled
away.
Ce
n’est pas neccesaire, mademoiselle,
he grunted. His gray cheek flushed. After that I
tried to move as little as possible. The heart of Paris bumped and stumbled away
behind us while the sun began to make itself felt on the horizon of the bleak
industrial suburbs we passed through. I saw a sign and said what it said aloud,
startling him: Drancy.

Comment?
the
driver said.

Rien.

There was nothing to distinguish
Drancy from the other cités I’d seen, nothing at all. There was nothing to see,
much less to remember. But the name sat queasily on my stomach and I thought
suddenly of the fat, impish face of Cohn-Bendit and what we’d all screamed at
the top of our lungs two weeks ago, an eternity ago.

Nous sommes tous des
indésirables,
I whispered.

Comment?

Rien.

Just after dawn we crossed
the Marne and the truck came to a stop on the single main street of a little
town. This is as
far east
as I go, the driver said.
Before I could respond he had opened his door and climbed out. I watched him
cross in front of the windshield and around to my side of the cab, where he
opened the car door and, with extreme politesse, offered me his hand. When I
got down he extended his other hand, in the palm of which was folded a
ten-franc note. Now it was my turn to say
Ce n’est pas nécessaire,
monsieur.
Merci.
Merci beaucoup.

Vous devriez avoir d’argent
liquide,
he said. Liquid: the word everyone had been using for cash with the banks and
the American Express closed. Take it.

I took it.

Good luck, he said to me in
English.

I hitchhiked.
East and east.
There were few motels and I didn’t have money
for inns. I met up with backpackers and slept in their little tents, smelling their
sweat. A woman in a village where I found myself totally alone and rideless let
me sleep on a pile of blankets on the cold stone floor of her kitchen with a
fire grumbling under an iron pot like in the Middle Ages. A man in an Italian
suit picked me up and let me sleep in the back seat of his Renault in the
garage, not telling his wife. I woke up in the middle of the night and found
him there with me, still wearing the suit, with a bottle of cognac. He kept
talking about how all of his friends and cronies deplored the events—even out
here they called them that—but not him, he thought the students were
très sympa.
Finally I put my hand into
his pocket, before he could ask for more, and masturbated him, and after he
slunk back to the house full of promises, I got out of the car and that garage
and walked out into the night until I met yet another driver. At the border I
got some strange looks from the
douanier,
who asked me repeatedly what my business was in
Germany. He warned me that my student visa might be revoked if I left France
now. This was nonsense of course. Already I knew from the papers I’d seen and
the conversation of the men I’d met that the Events were subsiding, that the
factories were up and running again. Only the students hadn’t gotten the
message. But I was patient and I was pretty, and they let me through. And there
I got my ticket for West Berlin. And in Berlin I waited six days for a visa, to
cross to the Soviet sector. Men in uniforms looking down at my passport and up
at me, down and up, down and up, in a kind of official seesaw rhythm, before
handing it back to me, little book of identity, and waving me through.
And from the Ostbanhof another train, east, always east, to Poland.
Trying to reach the house of death itself or to its threshold.
I didn’t look on the house, I didn’t behold the gate, didn’t read the words
written there, their mocking embrace taking me in as they had taken my father,
my mother, and later, unaccountably, returned them to life. I only saw the
little town with its unspellable name, with insensible glum blond people and a
hotel with no screens to keep out the blackflies and an official guide, a
minder, who called herself Zlota. She had a round face and round legs and a
runny nose and wore the same blue windbreaker every day, indoors and out, no
matter the weather. Every morning she took me out to see the sights: farms,
factories. I’d told them I was a journalist for a student paper in Paris; they
wanted to support the revolution there and I didn’t tell them it was already
over, already lost. Every morning I told her I wanted to see the camp and she
shook her head. It is not possible, she said, and screwed up her face into an
apologetic look. I imagine she wrote reports on me every night while I paced
the dingy room overlooking a black wall. Imagine, a room just like this one
with no view except of a wall, but this wall is white and that wall was black.
So black that night was no night, it was just blackness, and that’s as close as
I came to seeing what I’d come to see. Standing in that window which wouldn’t
open more than a couple of inches, staring at nothing, sometimes craning my
neck as though I could see around that wall, around that building, around
Zlota, around darkness, and see what my parents had seen. I didn’t make it. The
day before my visa was set to expire, I left. Zlota saw me to the train; I
believe she’d become fond of me. She stood on the platform in her blue
windbreaker, a kerchief tied over her hair to make her look like the peasant
farmer’s wife she was born to be. She had made me some fudge if you can imagine
that—a heavy brown square of it. I looked her in the eye. I’m a Jew, I said.
And then, I don’t know why German would have been clearer, I said it in German:
Ich bin
eine Jude
.
And then:
Je
suis
juive
. I am a Jew, a Jewess. How do you say it in Polish?
Her expression didn’t change. My parents came here, I told her, on a train,
with many others. Do you understand? Zlota could have been anywhere from twenty
to sixty with that kerchief covering her hair. Do you understand? And they came
back, I said helplessly, with the train standing there, spreading my fingers by
my sides, they came back and they couldn’t talk about it. No one will talk
about it. And you haven’t said a word. Will you speak to me? It is not
possible, she said, like she’d been saying all along, like she’d said even
silently riding next to me on the little diesel bus to see the sights of the
province, like she’d said when she’d watched me try a little of the local
brandy without drinking any herself, like she’d been saying when she asked me
about the revolution in Paris and about America and Elvis Presley, like she’d
been saying from the moment she’d met me on this very platform standing a
little apart from a pair of bored soldiers with machine guns who’d been
furnished by someone as window dressing, as reminder of what I wouldn’t be
permitted to see or to know. It is not possible. And then I was on the train
with her chocolate on my lap, leaking through the thin paperboard to stain my only
dress, watching that round silent face retreat through the window; I was
sitting backwards in the compartment and so the town and the house of death
fell away from me like a film running backwards that someday would have to be
run forward; it is inevitable, and yet not possible, that’s how I’ve come to
feel about it.
So rewound backward over miles and governments
to Paris, to Charles’s bedside, and further back to the sea, and now to you.
And soon I’ll have to get on the plane and fly back to America and pick up my
life there. Because that’s the only life, I see that now. I came looking for
origins. I came looking for real life.
But this Europe, this
continent of yours.
It’s a graveyard. The headstones are beautiful, and
there are beautiful people to tend the graves and walk in the grass. But
everything’s dead here, and everyone. Don’t you see that?

Lying next to me, her voice
and the spiral of cigarette smoke and the dry heat of her leg pressed against
mine the only reality; that and the blazing rectangle of light the single
window cast above our bed, showing every crack and ripple in the ugly
wallpaper, sparking the dull edge of a brass wall sconce into fire. What did
she discover? That she was part of something she didn’t want to be a part of?
Or not part of something she wanted to be a part of? I pictured it, I pictured
her, east and east, through the verdant fields and charcoal-green forests and
industrial parks of Deutschland, from the Rhineland where I was born to the
border, FRG to GDR, shiver of the closed train, the closed faces, the arrival
finally in Poland, rain and smoke, Zlota the watchful peasant at her side all
day and in the night that black wall and some unimaginable past rising up in
the night, in her body, in Jewishness itself, as unimaginable to me as to her,
to anyone who tried to see it, feel it, standing on the border, face pressed to
the icy glass, all possibilities foreclosed. It is human, I said to myself, not
knowing why, it is human it is human.