Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (35 page)

We should go south, I said
drowsily.
To Mont St. Michel.
We can hitchhike. I’ve
always wanted to see it.

She didn’t answer.

I wonder if there are still
monks there. My uncle told me about a trip he took there before the war. He
said at low tide you could walk where the water used to be. That it was like
walking on water. That the sand there bends like a trampoline, holding you up.

She was sleeping.

I’ve always wanted to go.
The sun died through my closed eyelids.

The two of us slept.

When the light returned she
was gone.
Money on the bedstand.
So I had been valued
to a point, I had been the one the spy loves. I had a story to tell, though I
have never told it before now. Of course I looked for her, at the train
station, at the beach. The concierge watched me come and go without my wife with
bemusement, until I paid him for the next night, and the next. I spent the rest
of the week there, waiting to see if M would reappear, knowing she would not. I
slept a good deal, ate simple meals, felt not the slightest desire to paint or
draw or sketch. When the money was almost gone I took the train again, east,
not getting out at Paris, east and east toward home, Strasbourg, where I would
eventually apprentice to a printer who specialized in tour guides and
wall-sized maps for classrooms and governments. And he made me a partner, and
then he died, and I married his widow, a short plain woman with a pleasant
smile and nothing wistful about her, and we were in business together for
almost forty years. And I was married and then I wasn’t and then I was again to
a woman I now never
see
. She lives in Venice. And I
never again saw or heard from M, though I have written her letters, not knowing
where to send them, until you came along. That sort of thing becomes a habit, I
believe.

Dawn is making itself felt
through the thin hotel curtain.
The city, never fully asleep,
is now not fully awake: like a big cat it stretches, squeezing its eyes and
extending, tentatively, its claws.
Gustave stands.

I have one last letter for
her here that I should like you to deliver for me.

Give it to me, says Lamb.

You won’t open it, Gustave
says in a low voice.

The American shrugs. Think
of it this way. At least someone will read it.

Gustave pauses,
then
hands it over.
A plain white envelope
with no name and no address.

Will you see her?

I don’t know, Lamb says,
tucking the letter away inside his jacket. I doubt it.

Gustave nods. He is
standing there, bent slightly at the hips, cumbrous, patting his pockets as
though to make sure everything is still there.
Though it
isn’t, of course.

It’s a strange story, Lamb
says.

Do you find it credible?

Why shouldn’t I?

Why shouldn’t you, Gustave
echoes. He turns his back on Lamb to look out the window at the city. What I
have told you is the truth. I am nobody’s father and nobody’s son. There was a
woman who tried to make history real, and for a moment, I bore witness. That is
all.

The bulging eyes of the
angel, looking back.

I have a train to catch,
Lamb says, packing his things away. You won’t see me again, Monsieur Lessy.

It’s not you I want to see,
says Gustave. The sun catches the edge of the Fernsehtum, unlimited eye of the
Stasi, kitsch monument to an eastern past. It glints and blinds. The eye
flares.
In memoriam.
In tears.
Someone moving behind him, slowly, with a final purpose.

Her face.

Gustave is gone. What was
he?

A full stop.
A white
wig.
A point of view.

I didn’t ask you to kill him, the new reader says into
the phone. Or she whispers it, defiantly, desperately: It’s not me. But there’s
no one there so she puts it down.
The threshold.
The
private dick’s history is indistinguishable from death. Every day grisly
packages she expects in the mail. When she opens them, more books spill out,
books she can’t remember ordering, books on parenting, on how to stay married,
books on recovering one’s creativity, writing down the bones, what color is her
parachute, do what you love and the money will follow, write a screenplay in
thirty days. When she’s out with the child and the child is sleeping she finds
herself in bookstores, running her eyes across spines in the self-help section,
afraid to look up and see someone she knows seeing her there. She browses the
European travel books, trying to predict his movements by letter: Barcelona
Berlin Brussels Budapest. What have I unleashed, what have I asked for.
An accounting.
A reckoning.
He is
out there in the home of my mind, the place I belong, that doesn’t exist, the
old world.
Wrecking the joint.
A man
with a gun.
What I want him to kill is in me, this rabbit in my brain,
this hamster wheel that never stops squeaking. Her daughter lies sprawled in
the stroller as though she’d been dropped from a height. How can her neck
stretch that far without waking her, hurting
her.
She
sits at the café table with a bad latte and a stack of magazines, leafing
through rapidly, registering only the poses of women with sleek skin and
provocatively vacuous expressions. They leave a sweet smell on her
hands that nauseates
her. She has a couple of hardbacks,
bestsellers; she flips them open and peels out the little anti-theft magnets,
drops them into the basket under the stroller, stands up, leaves the coffee and
magazines, and rolls on out. There are no alarms, no one stops her. The new
reader is a successful shoplifter who doesn’t care what she steals as long as
it’s printed matter. Most of the books go
unread,
they
line the walls of their bedroom in precarious stacks. He doesn’t say anything
about it. She can hear him thinking: better books than expensive clothes.
Better books than jewelry. Better books than a bitter wife who gives me no
peace at night. It’s unfair to Ben, unfair to
herself
.
She is hiding from something, burrowed as deep as she can go in pages, but that
something has followed her. The words, the sentences, are increasingly
abstract. All she retains of almost anything she reads now is a certain
cadence, a progression. Paragraphs are not emotional but sentences are. She
takes refuge in paragraphs, whole pages repelled at a glance, turning them,
black on white, under the kitchen skylight while dinner’s boiling over or on a
park bench or in a Starbucks or late, late at night while everyone is sleeping.
She looks at the clock and
thinks,
He is just getting
up over there. Or, He did not go to bed, he’s still up, he’s smoking and
looking at the moon. Somewhere under the bed Rimbaud is groaning, legless
spirit pushing stubby fingers through his thatch of hair.
Time
of the
assassins
.
Time
of the fathers marching to their doom.
Time of the vanished M, the
letter unites the lips, nipple or cigarette, something to grasp, fondle, hold.
It all disappears. She moves her lips uncomprehendingly over the pale pages.
There she is, at the end. There he is, waiting for her. A man can be a destiny.
A woman can be on a journey without leaving her comfortable home. M. M is a
murderer. M is a marauder, M is empty,
M
is waiting
for the mail. M is alone with M. M is a queen in a castle surrounded by thorns,
staring into a mirror, waiting for her breath to appear. M I miss you, M I
cannot amputate.
Memory.

Lucy is my daughter. L
comes before M.
An Elsa?
Ruth? Me.

The new reader hates reading, hates its endlessness,
its pointlessness,
hates
the jabber and the
pretentious talk and sentences that are too short or too long or fatuous or
have the wrong mouthfeel. To finish reading, not to stop but to finish, that’s
what would be truly new. To close the book and look up at the horizon or a
stranger or one’s husband or anything at all and to say, I’m finished. I’ve
read enough. I’m ready to live. The flesh is happy, for I’ve read all the
books.

M goes missing in me, makes a text,
marks
her place in every book I read and discard, manufactures a middle way between
absolute loss and the terrifying fullness of resurrection. As long as the pages
keep turning, the sentences keep coming, she is not gone. She is not here. Hers
the body I come from, and will return to.
Night flight, nap
of the earth.
The darkness demands something of me. I answer the call.

In her own living room,
alone with Nadia, Ruth says,
It’s
my stepfather, he’s
dead. Nadia nods sympathetically, doesn’t speak, watches.
Ruth
covering her face.
When she takes her hands away she’s laughing and
crying.

I killed him.

What do you mean?

I was angry he didn’t try
to stop my mother. From moving to Europe when she was sick. He went with her,
and then he didn’t even stay with her. He let her send him away when she needed
him most. And he died.

If she sent him away, Nadia
said slowly, how is that his fault?

He shouldn’t have listened
to her. He’s been like that forever. He can’t stand up to her. No one can.

But what does this
mean,
that you killed him?

I don’t know. I got a call
from the consul in Budapest. Apparently he was living in a hotel there. They
say he had a heart attack.

I don’t understand.

He died there.
In Berlin.

Wait a minute. Which is it,
Berlin or Budapest?

There’s a man, Ruth says.
His name is Lamb. He works for me. I think Lamb killed him.

Lamb gave your stepfather a
heart attack?

I know it sounds crazy. It
sounds crazy to me. But it’s not crazy. I sent Lamb over there to find him.
To find my father.

Your stepfather?

Not my stepfather.
My real father.
And he found him. But he wasn’t what I
thought he’d be. He didn’t know what I wanted him to know.

Which was?

About my mother, Ruth says.
Angrily thinking:
Words!
About M.
So he went on. I
told him to go on. I told him not to stop until he found out.

Found out what?

Where she was.
He went to ask him. And he
asked him, he kept asking him. He asked him too hard. And he’s dead.

But your mother is dead.

She’s not dead, Ruth says.
She’s alive. I can’t explain it but she’s alive. I buried her, but I didn’t do
it right.

Nadia holds Ruth’s hand,
her expression serious.

Thanks for pretending you
understand.

But I do understand. I understand
you have suffered a loss.
The greatest possible loss.

No, Ruth says, weeping,
that’s not true. What you lost was much worse.

It is no use to compare
losses. You have lost your mother, and not only her life. You have lost her
death.

Now I’m the one who doesn’t
understand.

You do not have her death,
Nadia says slowly. You cannot hold it. You do not believe in it. So you do not
live. You are aimed like an arrow at another woman’s death.

If you read about this
conversation, would you believe it?
Late at night, alone in
the dark, just the lamp and the window and the page?

What should I do?

This man, Lamb.
You must find him. You
must see him. You must find out what he knows.

But he’s told me
everything. I have his report. It’s cost me everything, my whole inheritance.

You must find out what he
knows, Nadia repeats. And if necessary, you must stop him.

Stop him from what?

From killing her again,
Nadia says simply.

This is a mad conversation,
the new reader thinks. It’s not realistic. I don’t buy the psychology behind
it. This woman who resembles me, who is caught up in the melodrama of her own
grief, who can’t complete the work of mourning, I can recognize a little bit.
But this Nadia must be a figment of her imagination, like all the others. How
terrible. How terrible to be a character like that, all alone.