Time Travail (16 page)

Hind-wit spoiled that cruel innocence. I got
rid of Henry Berkowitz. I banished him and all other real persons
from memory and concentrated on the stamps in my album.

My pen could hardly keep up with them. The
pleasure came from the things remembered of course but also from
the exploit of being able to remember them. Had I got rid of
cruelty entirely? It was meant for Harvey’s eyes too, after all.
Wasn’t it something like a boastful display of memory, an Olympic
pole-vaulter exercising before a paraplegic? I went on and on from
Albania to Zanzibar.

Of course the two pages he’d allotted to
Fatty Berkowitz were insufficient for that. I borrowed blank pages
from the other piles, mainly from Rachel Rosen’s. Part of the
pleasure came from the way I was able to get back into my
ten-year-old mind, taking at face value the lightweight
lithographed world, that colorful paper conspiracy of silence
against the real world like the two-rouble Moscow subway in the
place of gulags or ten-penny cuddly kiwis instead of slaughtered
Maoris, etc.

But then I ventured too far out of that
time of innocence. I couldn’t help remembering the day the real
world erupted into my lithographed one and destroyed its fictions.
Coming back from school I found my mother waiting for me in front
of the apartment-house entrance. Because of her face I thought
something had happened to my father. He had a heart condition. She
said I was a practically a man now (a
Mensch
) and could understand. I was twelve. Poppa still hadn’t
found work. We desperately needed money. She’d sold my
stamp-collection. I consoled her.

Poor Momma. How the bastard cheated her.
It was worth three times that sixty-five dollars. When I learned
where my album was I stuck the cigar-box with the gummed hinges,
the tongs and the rectangular magnifying glass on the shelf of a
closet, way back, behind other things. I was a
Mensch
. I stopped thinking about stamps, blanked it all
out. Instinctively, till now, I’d avoided returning to that past
joy because of the association with final disaster. It was a
characteristic mental operation.

Harvey didn’t even bother reading a single
page of the precious things I’d recaptured. He finally came out and
said that what he wanted was Rachel. To make up for all the paper
I’d taken from her to record the stamps, he brought up a whole
ream. Now there were nearly a thousand blank sheets available for
Rachel Rosen.

Alone in the room, I took a sheet and
disposed of his third question on her. I told him that I had no
ideas about the location of her room with regard to the later
Anderson house. I wasn’t a surveyor. He was the one who’d seen the
Anderson house being constructed on that lot. Couldn’t he
remember?

As for the description of her room, I’d been
there, very briefly, twice, once with his mother and the other time
with him. All I remembered was that her desk was always covered
with math books. Also that there were two dolls propped up against
the pillow of her bed. They had black button-eyes. Her unfriendly
cat had been on the bed too. The cat’s name was “Mitzi” or “Mitsi.”
When her tail coiled and she stared at you with those unblinking
yellow eyes it was a dangerous sign. I once got scratched trying to
pet her.

That’s all I remembered about her room. I
said that if more came back I’d give it to him. I reminded him that
she’d lived with his family for two years. Her room had been on the
same floor as his. Why did he need me? He must remember more things
about her room than the dolls and the cat. His memory couldn’t be
that bad.

I got the paper back almost immediately, a
fast correction job. The margins were crowded with comments in red
ink defining our topsy-turvy roles: he the teacher, I the student.
The only thing missing was a mark. It wouldn’t have been a pass.
How come I remembered the dolls’ eyes and the cat’s and not hers?
It couldn’t be true that I’d been in her room just twice. His
memory wasn’t that bad.

He repeated vocally what he’d written, over
and over till his voice went out. I foresaw daily hassles with the
bit-by-bit approach. I told him that criticism disturbed the flow
of memory. He’d have to wait a while till I’d accumulated a hundred
pages or so, then criticize all he liked.

What could he say to that? Because of his
silence I relented a little. I said that from time to time I’d let
him have things. But no more harassing.

I was still working on it, I said as the days
went by. I tried to stay out of the room as long as possible, go
jogging in any weather three times a day, once in a blinding
snowstorm. He didn’t like jogging on company time. It did no good
telling him I was multi-tracked mentally and could remember just as
easily moving on my feet as seated at a desk. I was sentenced to
the room. I listened to music behind the locked door clandestinely
with earphones and tried to go on recalling stamps.

A week went by.

Almost finished? he began asking. I’m a slow
rememberer, I said. I almost added: as slow remembering as picking
up nickels and dimes. He shouldn’t be too impatient, shouldn’t nag
me. Nagging disturbed the delicate balance of memory.

He didn’t dare say anything after that. But
sometimes I caught him staring intensely at my skull as though it
harbored millions of images his machine could never get at. I
remembered I’d promised him things from time to time.

#1

The first time I saw her was on a snapshot.
The organization in charge of the refugees must have sent it while
she was still over there. I saw it by accident. You were taking
something else out of your wallet, money to pay for the books,
probably. (Do you remember the books I procured for you for years
till the day I got caught and then you had to pay for them full
price?) Anyhow the snapshot fell on the floor and I picked it up.
You’ve been holding out on me, I said. You didn’t have girls in
your wallet or on your mind like me. That’s how I learned about
her, that she was coming over to live a while with you. Why did you
make such a secret of it?

She was nothing special. She was there with
her parents standing in snow in front of pine-trees. She must have
been thirteen. The photo was a little blurred but she didn’t look
like a promising beauty. I think I told you so. You like them young
I said. I think I said I preferred the mother. I disclaim all
responsibility for things I said or did then. At that age I was the
crown prince of schmucks. I think it was some time in 1943, ancient
history. I don’t mean the photo, but when I saw the photo. The
photo too, of course, even more ancient history, since they were
all together on it and looked reasonably happy. You have to in
front of a camera. What’s the point of all this?

(
He dwarfed them. They were on each side of him,
their arms linked in his. He had his hands in his pockets. His wife
was smiling at the camera. So was he, but reserved,
self-sufficient, as a concession to the occasion you felt. He had
horn-rimmed glasses and a moustache like Thomas Mann or Stephan
Zweig. The girl was looking up at her towering father. You could
see the long black shadow of the photographer across the snow like
a giant finger pointing at her. The branches of the pines were
covered with snow. There was a crow on one of the branches. The
amateurish blur of the photo reminded you even then, that first
time, of the photos of obscure families doomed into making the
third page of a tabloid.
)

#2

This is for the first question, a description
or a photo you say. I never had a photo of her. I remember now that
she had brown eyes. Also short dark hair. She was slim with a
quiet, serious face. She was no raving beauty although better than
on that snow photo. Four years older it must have been. How come
you can’t remember yourself? You saw her every day for two years a
thousand times more often than I did. Your memory can’t be that
bad.

(
There’d been a second photo, a reduced studio
portrait. Delivering a book-order to Harvey a couple of weeks after
the first photo I find it on the living room table. Mrs Morgenstern
has gone to get Harvey for me. He’s down in the cellar. Her oval
face emerges out of artistic blur and darkness into the narrow zone
of focus. The lighting of her features is cleverly done. The
illumination seems to come from within. Her sensitive lips are on
the verge of a smile. Her great dark eyes elude mine, barely. I
stand there trying to capture that mysterious gaze. It can’t be
done since she’s looking past the lens. I try anyhow for minutes.
When I hear Harvey coming I slip the photo into my pocket. When I
get home I cut off the margins and place it over Wendy Hiller in
the secret compartment beneath the semi-public girl friends. It’s
funny how you can operate on two levels like that. A little over
two years later it’s necessary to reduce her to shreds and flush
her away. That was the only photo of her I’d ever
possessed.)

One night in January – so another year between
me and all that – I heard the staircase creaking laboriously. There
were shuffling steps up the corridor, then his harsh panting in
front of my door. The alarm-clock dial showed 2:32 am green in the
darkness. Now he was trying the doorknob. The door was locked. He
practically whispered it, either because he couldn’t manage
anything but a whisper or else because he knew I was awake and so a
whisper would do.

“I have her. Down in the cellar. Your
mother.”

***

Nine

A minute went by. The only sound was the
ticking of the alarm clock. Then I heard his footsteps moving away
from the door and then the diminishing creaks of the staircase. The
ticking of the clock finally covered the sound.

After a while I slipped my bathrobe on and
went downstairs. You could hear the sensors working away in the
dark dead room. All I felt was emptiness there. I stood on the
threshold of the cellar for a while. Then went down carefully, step
by step. I kept to the wall side of the stairs as though those
extra inches could make a difference to the rays. The junk-heap
hulked in the red gloom. He was crouched forward in his chair,
hiding the screen. I moved to one side to see it, standing as far
away from the lead-plated door as possible, my back against the
cinder-block wall.

For an hour I saw a succession of flickering
close-ups of drapes, the oval mirror, furniture detail,
windowpanes, the chandelier, the grinning skeleton teeth of the
piano, hundreds of other objects. Once his father scuttled eyeless
across the room.

Of course she was gone. Had vanished even
before he’d undertaken the painful journey up two flights to tell
me about it. Why had he bothered? She’d died in December 1952. That
entitled her to about eight seconds’ electronic existence. What
he’d seen would never come back.

He’d told me about that. In the mode of
random selectivity the probability of an identical return to a
particular spatial-temporal intersection was practically nil. It
was part of the more general problem of temporal navigation. I went
on looking anyhow.

At the end I asked him what she’d been doing,
what she’d looked like. I had to repeat the question twice, louder
each time. Finally, without turning around he said she’d been
seated in the striped armchair chatting with his mother in the
flowered one. He’d been able to read my name on her lips.

After a while I went upstairs. My eyes
started to burn, a symptom. I’d got a good dose of rays. I stopped
in the corridor. It still felt empty, one-dimensional in the lonely
stratum of the present. I felt empty too. It was like a broken
appointment. I tried to imagine her there but couldn’t. I’d never
seen her in that living room. After the move to Brooklyn she’d
visited the Morgensterns twice a month for years but without
me.

What came back was another living room with
my mother and Mrs Morgenstern. I saw (see) Rachel coming down. My
mother says something to her in Yiddish and embraces and kisses
her. Rachel smiles shyly with that slight shrinking of hers when
offering herself for embrace, always a dangerously consoling one
with my mother. I see her staring seriously over my mother’s
shoulder at Harvey as he comes in, abstracted, not noticing any of
us.

But that had been in the old living room, not
this one. I went back to bed.

When I woke up at ten o’clock in the morning
Hanna’s TV wasn’t booming as usual. There were no sounds anywhere
in the house. The only thing I heard was the rain lashing against
the panes. My eyes were still burning. I tried to imagine my mother
seated in a striped armchair I’d never seen. All I could come up
with was the image of her embracing Rachel, the wrong time and the
wrong living room.

I was alone in the house. Hanna must have
muscled Harvey off to the hospital again. Their rays, the
therapeutic ones, would burn away more of his memory-units, placing
that much more burden on me. I didn’t turn the light on in the
corridor. It was like solitary midnight there. I opened the door of
the dead room and stood at the threshold.

In the gray light from the weepy windows I
could see the lenses working away in the four corners. They were
busy with their vision of what I couldn’t see even though I’d been
down in the cellar for a good hour that night. Maybe I’d stood too
far away from the lead-plated wall. I went inside and stood in the
middle of the room for a while. The sofa bore the imprint of
Harvey’s body. I felt tired and stretched out on it.