Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (36 page)

You’re right, Ruth says.
You’re right.

This time Nadia lets Ruth
hug her.

And that evening, cooking
dinner at the stove, her eyes are dry and clear when Ben walks in the door and
stops, quite abruptly.

What’s
wrong.

She looks at him, standing
there in the doorway with his suit coat off, tie loosened, eyes baggy,
attaché
dangling from his left index finger. He is middle
aged, she realizes. We both are.

My stepfather is dead. He
died of a heart attack in a hotel.
In Berlin.

My God.
I’m so sorry.

Moving to put his arms
around her.
Lucy watches them both from her usual spot on the
floor, a plastic toy in her mouth.

I have to go there.

To Germany?
Seriously?

Yes, Ben. I have to settle
his affairs.

Of course.
Of course you do.

They watch the pot
bubbling.

I’ll come with you.

I don’t want that.

Stepping back.
Now there are two pairs of
eyes watching her, fascinated yet detached in their curiosity.
Only a tiny wrinkle at the corner of Ben’s mouth to suggest his pain.

Why? I could help you. I
want to help you.

I need to go, and I need to
go alone. You can ask your mother to come help. She’ll be delighted. She
doesn’t like me anyway.

That isn’t true at all.

It is true. I don’t care,
it’s
fine for her not to like me. Why should she like me? I
took her only son away from her. I lie in bed all day, I’m barely employed,
I’m
her batshit daughter-in-law. Bring her here for a few
days, a week at most. She’ll have the two of you all to herself.

But is Lucy ready to be on
her own?

She won’t be on her own.

The scene is a frieze. On
the stove, a pot of something bubbles toward conclusion. Lucy has crawled over
and has a parental pant leg in each hand, tugging, grinning. Ben, eyes pained,
confused, but she can see it, she knows she saw it, that flash of relief in the
thought of her going. She feels it too.

I don’t understand, Ben
says. He bends down to pick up Lucy, holds her close, already playing the part
of the abandoned father. You haven’t spoken to him since he left. You blame him
for your mother…. I mean, I understand he’s your stepfather, he raised you,
but. Can’t they just, I don’t know, ship him back? We can bury him here.

It’s not Papa I need to
see, she tells him.

It’s not?

I need to see her.

Ben opens his mouth and closes
it. Lucy looks at his face, then Ruth’s. Her expression is quizzical, Ruth
recognizes it.
Deciding whether or not to cry.

Can we talk about this
later? Ben asks, indicating Lucy with a jab of his head.

We can talk as much as you
need to, she says quietly, turning back to the stove. But it’s settled. I’m
going.

You need to see a body?
he
says tightly. Is that it? You need to see the fucking
body?

I don’t expect you to
understand.

Ruth. I’m your husband.
Standing there.

You need me to go, she
whispers. I know you do.

It’s expensive to fly last
minute, he says desperately.

It’s already arranged. I
got a bereavement fare. Don’t worry about it. I still have some money.

Her money, you mean.

Yes. It’s all I have of
her.

Ruth, honey.
It’s not true. She loved
you. I know she loved you.

It’s all I have, Ruth
repeats. Could you take care of her please? I think her diaper’s full.

Ben has a face he will
never show, and he shows it now. She turns to the stove.

Please.

He leaves with his daughter in his arms. Ruth is alone
in the kitchen with the pot boiling over.

The mind is the only mirror, the mirror is the only
me.
Alone with herself in the dark, naked or nearly so,
looking at the other body.
Boobs that never sagged, belly never pooched,
raveled with stretch marks. Dark eyes ringed with kohl by the single bulb, in a
bathroom between Chicago and their unmutual destiny.

You should know, she says
to her, you hired him.

The taut sister gives her a
contemptuous look. Does she still smoke? She smokes.

I wanted Papa to be Papa,
she says defensively.
And you…

You wanted M not to be M.

Fingers to the glass push
hard against melodrama.
A bell somewhere, the air pocketing
the two of them.
Not undead, unborn. You must birth yourself, unaided,
alone with a lethal image.

Elsa. You told me he wasn’t
dead.

No more are you.

No more are
you
. That’s what you said,
isn’t it?
When we were girls.

I was never a girl.

As if the dream took on
flesh, married, grew older, tended fretfully its diminishing circumference, the
garden, died.
Leaving what in its wake.
A name?
A child?

Elsa. Is she alive?

Are we?

The bell again.
Return to your seat. She
makes a little tepid water flow over her fingers and applies it to her eyes. Outside
it’s night, the north Atlantic. She fastens her seat belt and tries to sleep.
But she never leaves that room.

There is a woman who
resembles the sentence.

My name is Elsa Ruth. I’m
coming for you, M.
For the name.

What Ben said to her,
should have said, she dreamed that he said it, standing silhouetted in the
doorway of their bedroom on the last night.
If it’s true, she didn’t
deserve you. She abandoned you. She ran into the arms of Europe, the arms of
death, away from her history, her legacy, her baby.
My poor
baby
.
Cradling
her head as she sobbed into the counterpane heaped around her like a sea.
And I have recalled her to life with these letters, these facile continuations
of her unwritten suicide note. We must have an end to it.
To
questions.

For Lamb, licensed to kill.
With
questions if not with kindness.

Europe.
The
dream of M.

The bloody middle of it.

In her carry-on is the last envelope she received from
him, from Lamb, the man she has to find, has to stop from finding.
The man who is murdering her past.
The envelope was mailed
from that city. She will track him down. He will lead me, she thinks, to M.

It’s a big city, not quite
walkable. She walks. In the Jewish Museum she watches Peter Lorre as M, the
murderer, on trial with other criminals, pimps, whores, gangsters, as his jury,
on his knees, rolling those eyes, screeching, beating his breast,
repeating
:
I don’t want to—I
have
to! I don’t
want
to—I HAVE to!
Pursued, the pursuer,
murderer of innocence,
his own
. Lorre was a Jew. The
heroic caved-in miner in the film that
follows,
an
allegory of the workers’ solidarity, a Jew.
The young woman
dying from an illegal abortion in the film that follows that one, a Jew.
The 1930s in an endless Ufa loop that stops short of the limitless
self-mutilation that is German history.
She sits there for a long time,
watching.

Libeskind’s tower like a
vertical pit, cold even in summer, not quite pitch black.
Traffic sounds. Her own
footsteps, soles scraping concrete. Shush of her fingertips on the metal.
Straining to remember what she never knew.

Outside
it’s
Berlin, city that was divided and stitched back together again, Western capital
suturing the scar on capital’s face, leaving a blank furious space in the
center called Alexanderplatz. She wanders north to the hotel on
Friedrichstrasse but does not go inside, turns west Unter den Linden to the
Gate, joins the flood of tourists, sometimes hurrying, slipping between
oblivious bodies, muttering inaudibly
Entshuldigung, Entshuldigung
. She looks at them, the
Germans, their faces, trying to feel something. Was your father a…? Was your
grandfather….? There are no old people in this city, she thinks, no old people
at all. They were all born when the Wall came down,
der Mauer
. She has seen it in its
relict state, framing the “Topography of Terror” that she knows so well from
her childhood, her mother’s books.
The photos.
She has
passed through the Gate and allows herself to be pulled and pushed southward.
Another memorial: innumerable stelae, a city block’s worth, an abstraction in
stone. People pose for photos, a dog runs to catch a ball,
schoolgirls
flirt. Here and there bent shoulders—there’s a man in his seventies or eighties
standing with his back to a pillar, with a younger man holding up his phone,
shooting a video, an interview. Grandpa, what did you…? How do you…? She
flashes past, her feet are burning but she can’t stop walking, can’t rest
before Potsdamer Platz—the sun’s going down—she’s taken in by the crowd of new
buildings, electric glitz of them, finds her way into the Sony Center where a
fountain rises and people throng senselessly, under an open rooftop like fan
blades coming apart. She can check her email here and does: Ben has sent her a
video of him and Lucy, looking soulfully into the camera’s eye. Come home
Mommy. We miss you. She is tired. What am I doing here? I am looking for
something and not finding it. What was that saying? Find before seeking, yes.
Turn things around.

Are there any messages for
me?
she
asks the hotel clerk. He knows I’m here, she
can feel it. There are no messages.

The room is small and
secret, with an interrupted view of the Spree and the turning halo of the
Berliner Ensemble. I must go to Brecht’s house, she reminds herself. She takes
out the envelope again, again slides the disk into her laptop.

A man in a hotel room—it
could be this one. His face is drawn with fatigue. What could be gray morning
light has turned his skin the color of parchment. He could be anyone’s
grandfather.

He has nothing to tell me
that I don’t already know.

Lamb
, she says out loud, in
frustration. But Lamb does not appear, of course.

Gustave, on the screen,
pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs his eyes. He looks up, off screen, into
someone else’s eyes.
Lamb’s eyes.
You have heard my
confession, he says. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Then he says the name.

That’s enough, Lamb says,
unseen.

In my beginning is my end.

And the final convergence: to Miramare, castle by the
sea, where restless spirits fly.
As voices and bodies bearing
our look.
Ruth in white, the castle is gray, Lamb in dire cinematic
black. The castle’s a thrust stage that plays for the sea.

The flight from Berlin to
Trieste is no longer than the flight from Chicago to Newark, as in the old days
when she still had a mother to visit. She has the letters in her hand. Still
jet lagged, in the bus she presses her temple against the cool glass and
watches the Mediterranean flash by. The bus follows the road above the coast,
high through deciduous
trees,
the sea is refracted
below like a million dimes on an infinite skillet. Her eyes are closing when
she is startled by the glimpse of an ordinary road sign reading
Duino-Aurisina
. Why did she not purchase
a guidebook? But she knows, she remembers, she has a letter in hand, she finds
the relevant paragraph: