Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  I like you, Ruth. I hope I see you again.

  Likewise, Ruth says, astonished at what has been said, at what she feels in the air between herself and the stranger. Contact.

  It can be tough in a new place, Ruth hears herself say. She fishes around in her purse; she still has business cards, sat down one night with a permanent marker and crossed out the office number on each one, leaving the cell number intact. She extends one and Nadia takes it between her elegantly manicured fingers.

  Nadia murmurs something into Boris’s ear, and he immediately holds up his arms to be picked up. She places him in the stroller (an expensive model, Ruth can’t help noticing, a couple hundred dollars fancier than her own), nods to Ruth, and rolls away without another word.

  Hungry! Lucy says. Snack! Except snack in Lucyspeak sounds just like cock. She shouts it, loudly, so that the other mothers turn around: Cock! Cock! Ruth gives them all her most beatific smile. She lowers Lucy into the stroller, fishes a Graham cracker out of the diaper bag to hand to her, and wheels the stroller around to head home, in the opposite direction Nadia took. It looks like rain, she tells herself. Her skin is flushed. Her ears are burning.

  Certain ideas of Europe closely held by a reader. The American configuration: hostility, curiosity, indifference, contempt, fascination, prurience, a persistent sense of inferiority, lewd speculation, exploitations, saturation, colonization. We are new and they are old. Except for history and the conditions of history’s procreation, America owns the New. She dreams of a new Old World in which her own hidden history lies embedded like prehistoric gases awaiting miners to bring about their detonation and release. A Europe of babies and old men and women and nothing in between. Europe of scholars, bearded men with peyes and spectacles, picking up fallen books from bombed-out shelves and kissing them as one does a dropped infant. Europe the furnace of horrors, untold accumulated sedimentary beauties of history heaped and strewn and doused with coal oil in the ashy fields of Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, the once and future Lithuania, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Hungary. Burned: the Paris of the East and the London of the East and the Venice of the East. Not burned: New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Cleveland, Chicago. As the line between the two Jerusalems smolders, incommensurate fires burning in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, fire of the citizen, fire of the subject. One stands or sits down in these reflections, quite at home. In search of a path of resistance to the downward drift of entropy and forgetfulness: dream, reverie, reflection are her methods. Above all, as though distracted, she decides. She does or does not turn the page, does or does not pick up a ballpoint pen with which to carefully underline words, phrases, clauses, sentences, whole paragraphs; does or does not grip the pen close to the tip so as to create marginalia: five- and six-pointed stars, asterisks, a word or two, or the most eloquent marks of punctuation: question marks, exclamation points, while a simple period marks her nota bene. In so doing she emends the quiet of reading, brings greater proportions of noise to particular rows and blocks of black signals, oblique semaphoric signs. Other paragraphs, pages, and chapters are passed over in silence: the reader leaves no sign of her passage. She looks in from the outside of her own experience as half-understood text written by collectives of anonymous authors: her Jewishness, her whiteness, her femaleness (not to her own satisfaction achieving womanliness), her status as an immigrant’s child, her relative prosperity, her degrees. Tearing off strips of paper in her mind (in reality motionless), she says: It is a fact that more men survived than women. It is a fact that the killings of and by men are better documented than the killings of women. It is a fact that the widespread rape of women, then and now, has been poorly and inefficiently documented. It is a fact that some women collaborate or try to collaborate with their oppressors, even their murderers, in continual attempts at the survival of themselves and their children. It is probable that Sophie never had a choice; it is certain that Sophie was fictional. It is probably that such concepts as “agency,” “personal morality,” “mercy,” “justice,” “mere decency,” “humanity” have been put under such extreme pressure by the events of the past century that they are no longer fit to be used. It is probable that our appetite for news of these events is inversely proportionate to our appetite for what is called “reality.” It is likely that a patina of something we dare not call “nostalgia” clings to our collective memory of these events. It is a fact that old men who have been soldiers in a war speak of wartime as the best, the only real time in their lives. Subtract “best” from “real” if you like, it makes no difference. To describe is to affirm, to tell a story is to say, You should have been there. The wind rose, rain swept in: you should have been there. I miscarried my first child after seven months of pregnancy: you should have been there. I dropped out of the life I knew into someone else’s life, a placeholder life: you should be here. Stuck here in someone else’s idea of Europe, an American woman with an American child, secure and comfortable and never for a moment free from fear of losing all security, all comfort. There are certain activities that occupy the entire foreground of one’s capacities—movies, music, reading, writing—while leaving the dark background to metabolize, metastasize, to grow tentacles, so that when you put down your pen, your book, your instrument, you emerge into the dazzling matinee sunlight and find that the background has seized your life and you will never be quite the same. As when you stand by the graveside of a loved one, your grandfather for example, and think, “The stage is set,” and “The coffin is being closed,” and “Here I am at the graveside of my grandfather,” and “Here I am heaping a shovelful of dirt onto my grandfather’s coffin,” and “Inside that coffin under the earth I put there my grandfather is lying with his eyes closed, wearing a ticking watch, wearing the same suit he married his second wife in thirty years ago,” and none of these thoughts are to the purpose or affect in the slightest the real work going on in the background, the work of being alive inside a wound, pain dimmed by the narcotic haze of self-consciousness. You did not choose this wound, you did not give it a name. It’s only a background from which you emerge, like a paper doll cut from a newspaper. The shape of the doll does not affect the news, the contents (front page, advice column, obituary, editorial, book review, advertisement), and yet it is inseparable from them. That is the essential story: daughter of the daughter of a survivor, herself a kind of survivor, once married to a kind of perpetrator, my father, my fathers. Everything else is symptom. So why pursue it? What could be more absurd or pathetic than a paper doll straining to read herself? Indecipherable text in which I take root. So compelled, I owe a debt unpayable. I go forward, to wring blood from stones.

  The city is brilliant under layers of sun and cloud. A train arriving in a palace of glass, a level pan across the skyline. Conurbation on a plain, historyless from a height. But there, iconic, once sinister, the eye of the East, now beloved and harmless and as absent in its omnipresence as the city’s other totem, a bear: the tower, at the base of which hunkers a Starbucks where Lamb is using his laptop. Snaps it shut now, passes out among the hipsterati, the punks, the tourists, out onto the blank bare face of Alexanderplatz, rolling his suitcase, to another train station, to ride the S-bahn. Of the Italian portfolio there is no sign: perhaps it has been swallowed entirely by the rolling bag, never so anodyne or sinister as now, lugged heavily up the steps to the train platform where they are massing, the Germans, coming and going, easting and westing, with studied casualness. Now he is walking again in sunlight, coat billowing behind him, into the deepest past the city now has to offer, under and through the Brandenburg Gate, crossing the ex-death strip, passing on doggedly down Ebertstrasse, looking neither to the right (trees in the gentle breeze, green lung, vast acreage edge of the Tiergarten) nor to the left (the field of stelae, the memorial the film we are watching uncharacteristically and melodramatically captions with its full and actual name: MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE). His head is bowed a little, only his feet meeting
his eyes. Further and farther to Potsdamer Platz, impersonal assemblage of skyscrapers proclaiming their shaky fealty to the Euro, which is only the Deutschmark in sheep’s clothing: mute, defiant, they reflect only the sky. Under a dazzled postmodern canopy like the biggest of Big Tops, by a reflecting pool or fountain sandwiched between chain restaurants he squats again with his laptop, again uploading or downloading what’s necessary, the updates, the tweets, data. We have not seen this man with a phone. Onward, exhausted Lamb, who has forgotten that trains exist, crossing the bridge in late light with the etiolated yellow geometry of the Philharmonic Building behind him, over the canal and into the old city, the West Berlin that was: island, white showcase in a sea of red, costly bauble of the postwar economic miracle, ground zero when that phrase had another meaning, when Berlin rehearsed perpetually the end of history, tanks facing each other across land mines and barbed wire, the end of the world as we once knew it, suffused now in kitsch the very phrase that was born here, World War III. He is under leaves and trees now, in a quiet prewar neighborhood, strollers and gay couples, a Swedish furniture store, bakeries, restaurants, cafes. He comes to a flagstone plaza with a brick church at one end of it, an outdoor café at the other end with scattered tables and chairs. He is weary now, rolls up to one of the tables and sits down, a bit slumped, as the evening shadows begin to catch in the buildings and treetops and young boys, not all of them white, kick a soccer ball at the church end of the square. A waiter approaches, listens, withdraws, returns with a pilsner, withdraws. Lamb takes his laptop again from the rolling bag’s outer pocket, opens it, checks for a signal, shuts it again. In his eye the amber evening. He reaches inside his coat and takes out a slightly crumpled white tulip and sets this on the table. Takes a sip of beer. Waits.

  It is dark, which is to say light: the lamps have come on and the square is more lively than before, a mostly young crowd settling in at the surrounding restaurants and bars for an unforced and lively evening. Lamb is sitting with another man who sits bent over, shoulders practically between his knees, necktie hanging down, as though trying to catch his wind after getting kicked in the stomach. A large man, swarthy, carefully unshaven, with heavy black brows, in his forties perhaps, in a polo shirt and black jeans and motorcycle boots. A manila folder is on the table by the empty pilsner glass, the tulip resting on top of it. Lamb is listening. The man is talking, steadily, compulsively, to the ground it seems, someone getting something off his chest, confessing something of which he is ashamed, glad to say it once and once only and completely to a single other soul. Only Lamb’s eyes move. What does the man say. I had forgotten that all this time, all of it, from the first moment of the train, the first moment we caught sight of him, our man, Lamb, to reorient us in the plot, in Europe, in Berlin, from the Fernsehturm to now, we have heard nothing, no street sounds, no dialogue, only music, strings at first, for quite a long time, and now, as Lamb is listening, as this man, who is somehow his victim, is speaking, pouring his heart out, we are hearing only the lyrics, the voice, of a woman, in a language you very likely do not speak:

  Meghalt a szeretet!

  Meghalt a szeretet!

  A pure song, a song of despair, a song of suicides. As Lamb or someone like him would say to you, without irony: I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you. But I cannot kill you, you are only a spectator, here to be pushed or pulled by the spectacle of failure, my failure to understand, my failure to communicate something ineffable, something that goes beyond the privacy of grief: though it begins there, and ends there, in its universality, the inevitability for each of us of real irrevocable personal excruciating loss. It is Lamb’s song, Ruth gave it to him, I found it for her. It is the song of the reader. It is the last song, of M.

  A letter never sent, from herself to herself:

  A mother is no saint. A mother is sheerly myth. When she’s there, she’s not there. When she’s not there she’s everywhere. The moon is new. I don’t need to read her messages because I read. Dowry of myself to myself, wedded to the word. I have her in the mirror, when I linger with the newspaper while Lucy calls my name from another part of the house. When my husband’s eyes slide past mine to Lucy’s, birth a smile. Once I thought she wanted me to accomplish something. To finish what she never quite started. But I am the one who’s unfinished, who lacks the finishing touch of a blessing. So I read the books, I studied the testimony, I stared at incomprehensible black-and-white photographs of children waiting to be beaten, gassed, starved, shot. The heart of her heart of darkness. Mother’s unintended. Granddaughter unknown, extrapolate what she knows of my character, Ben’s. No lineage. Dead-ended in some shtetl, under somebody’s boot. Cossacks. Spectacles on my eyes and autumn in my heart—that’s Babel. Am I a mother before I’m a woman, a woman before I’m a Jew, a Jew before I’m a daughter, a daughter before I’m nobody? There’s a pair of us. Meanwhile I’ve put my own heart under surveillance. Moving image of a man, a shamus, sharp shadow in an indistinct world. Europe of mistrusts. Space stands in for time: easting, easting. Poised between tourism and graverobbery. Autumn, mulch, winds, decay. Whoso has no house now will not build him one. House built on quicksand. It’s not the photos that are incomprehensible, it’s the expressions on their faces. Blank, quizzical, even smiling. Very rarely contorted into a grimace. Very rarely registering pain. A father strokes his sobbing son’s hair. They are naked, waiting their turn to be shot. The father points upward, he is explaining heaven. That image, not even an image, just three short sentences, seared into my memory and erasing my own childhood. A rainy afternoon when I was ten or eleven, under the kitchen table with my mother’s books. Rainshadow on the floor, on the table above my head with its immaculate lacy tablecloth. Surrounded by solid blond legs of the furniture I’d known all my life, secure in our apartment like the astronauts in their space capsules, I felt the gravity of the world let me go. And I’ve never been fully recaptured. Her key in the lock, my throat seized by a scream. I left them there, the books, some with photos spread open, ran to my room and shut the door. Heard her enter, calling, then silence but for her heels on the hallway’s parquet. She walked out of hearing for a long time—me face down on the bed, back arched like a cat’s, pressed against the rapidly warming pillow. Walked back, past my door, then returned without pausing, passing on the way to the kitchen. A half hour later I found her there with a glass of wine, chopping vegetables for ratatouille. Her beautiful face calm and blank as the children in the photos. Through the archway to the dining room I saw the books were gone. She asked me no questions, I told her no lies. I picked up a second knife and helped her chop the vegetables. We spoke of inconsequential things, the radio playing softly from its berth over the refrigerator, both of us looking at the clock waiting for my father to come home. And he never did. Because reading that story, seeing that gray sky and ravaged landscape and wasted fruit of naked human bodies and the coats and hats of their killers, also human, taught me something I’d always suspected. I do not know who my father was. And I knew my mother all too well. But M. What was she.

  Like shattering glass filmed in reverse, the pieces, integrating into a picture. Hotels. Lamb sitting in a chair by a rain-streaked window, back to us, wearing headphones, hunched, listening. Lamb on top of a bedspread, no jacket, shirt untucked, ashtray balanced on his sternum, looking up at the ceiling. Lamb in the shower. Lamb standing at the window—a new window, the same window—looking out at the city, suitcase packed and erect next to him, ready to go. Lamb at the hotel bar looking into his glass of whiskey while a slender woman with ash blonde hair and a green dress stands at his elbow, talking. Legwork. Lamb pulling his bag down a street, landmarks signaling behind him, brute signifiers, like a painted canvas spooling behind him, so that we take it on sufferance, indication: Madrid Paris Rome Budapest Vienna Berlin. Berlin. The generic café, sitting at a table looking out at the passersby while informants come and go: bureaucrats soldiers cops academics prostitutes old men, leaning in to fill Lamb’s
ear. Leads. Fanning the photos under the noses of bartenders, hotel clerks, coroners, pimps, reckless divorcees, librarians, janitors, junkies. Exchanging envelopes, currency, significant looks, shaken heads. Lamb’s notebook, Moleskine of course (“of Chatwin, of Hemingway”), with the elastic to snap it shut creating an aura of decision, finality, a new link in the chain. Berlin, he’s back in Berlin. In the men’s room of the train station two men come up from behind, offer no words, but one hits him in the kidney and grabs his arms and the other shouts questions, pummels him in the stomach, slams his face against the mirror, slams his body into the toilet stall, shoves his head down into the bowl, flushes, shouts abuse, leaves him there: Lamb, survivor, offering no resistance, limp. Bandaged Lamb on top of a bedspread, no jacket, shirt untucked, ashtray balanced on his sternum, looking up at the ceiling. Lamb gingerly in the shower. Lamb standing at the window—a new window, the same window—looking out at the city, suitcase packed and erect next to him, ready to go. The man with the heavy brows looks up shocked as the stockroom door splinters open and Lamb like an avatar comes lunging and coldcocks him, lays him out, administers a technical and righteous beating. Bends down to the broken and bleeding form, shows him again the photos, listens. Lamb stands, brushes his hands against his pants as though to clean them, walks out.

  A new hotel, the same hotel. Are there any messages? Lamb pulling his suitcase behind him, tape over his right eye but no more swelling, turning to face us as elevator doors close. Lamb at the door of his room with key card in hand, hesitating. Silent ambient breathing of an anonymous carpeted corridor lit by florescent sconces, the only window at the hall’s end overexposed: Lamb washed out darkly, kneeling by his bag, glancing at us, taking something out, standing. Lamb with a gun. Lamb opening the door.