Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Page 21

  Of course this story doesn’t have a happy ending. It ends stupidly, obviously. One cold autumn evening Vladimir left for work as usual, talking as he always did about the need for us to find a place of our own. He was sick of being crowded and he didn’t much like his cousin anymore, he said, he was a nice guy but a bit simple, he didn’t have ambition like Vladimir did, Vladimir who tried to study economics in between pushing buttons, he still wanted to go to university someday, to make something of himself. We need our own place, something big enough for us and the baby, just us, our little family he said. I nodded, I didn’t listen, I was thinking about Nikolai, he’d be home soon, with his beard and his big handsome hands, he’ll take care of me, all I’d ever wanted was to be cared for the way he cared for me, and I had this now, why couldn’t this go on forever? My belly was very big, it stuck out of my dressing gown, which was all I wore, my old clothes didn’t fit me anymore and Vladimir was too cheap to buy me maternity clothes, he was saving for our apartment he said, and when Nikolai tried to buy me something Vladimir flew into a rage, It’s none of your business, he said to him, out there on the balcony where they were drinking, and I imagined they would fight, absurd as that idea was, little Vladimir against giant Nikolai, Nikolai could squeeze the life out of him with one hand if he wanted, but he would never do that, he was so gentle. Vladimir left and I waited for Nikolai, I cooked him his favorite supper, a ham steak and boiled potatoes. The hour came and went, he didn’t appear, I didn’t worry and then I did, it was late, very late, when I woke up where I was curled on Nikolai’s bed and Vladimir was sitting there beside me with his arm around my shoulder and tears on his face, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, there was an accident today, I’ve come from the hospital, What is it, I screamed, what is it you are telling me, Calm down he said, you’ve got to calm down, you’ll hurt the baby, Where is he, I screamed, where is Niko, where is my Nikolai, He’s dead you stupid lying cunt he’s dead I know you cheated on me with him he lost his balance and he fell twenty meters, he’s dead, I got up screaming No, no, tore myself from Vladimir’s shaking hands and hurried out into the hallway, clutching my belly where the pain had started, one of the doors opened and a pair of malicious black eyes peeped out, Shut the door you bitch, I said, it sounds much worse in Russian, very disrespectful, and then before she could shut it I said Please call the hospital, my baby is coming. He did come, I labored all night in the hospital, Vladimir didn’t come into the room but waited outside wringing his hands, he was filled with remorse he said, he came to me in the morning where I was holding little Josip and said Please don’t be angry with me, I didn’t mean it, our cousin is dead, let bygones be bygones. But I couldn’t manage it somehow, I had to leave him, I went on public assistance and found my own place, and poor little Josip had been born with a heart condition, they tried to fix it, three operations, and the last one he didn’t survive, the last time I saw Vladimir was at the funeral, we buried our little boy, not three months old, and I said to myself There are no more tears. But I didn’t want to die, I wanted to live, and I was still good-looking though at seventeen years of age I felt fifty or sixty, I made myself up and went on the Internet and met Boris, he was already living here, he came to court me for one weekend in Petersburg and showed me life, fancy dinners and dancing and a suite at the Hotel Astoria, he is not a handsome man but he makes me laugh, he tells good jokes, he is a Jew in fact like you, I saw you hesitate before you told me, it’s all right, I am married to a Jewish man, though he’s not the least religious and though my father and grandfather blamed the Jews for every evil in the world, besides he has his own business, he’s ambitious, he works as a computer engineer in Chicago, so when he asked me to marry him at the end of the weekend I said yes, there was no problem with the divorce, Vladimir I think wanted to forget everything and he was happy to sign the papers, last I heard he had moved to Moscow to enroll in university there. So six months after the divorce was final Boris flew me here and a little less than a year after that we had Boris Junior, my American son, and I have nothing left to wish for but for these memories I have just related to you to lose somehow their hold on me, there’s a terrible sort of feeling that comes up when I think about that other life, though not when I tell it to you, Ruth, with your kind eyes. Your eyes tell me I ought to forgive myself, like the woman doctor Boris pays for, she tells me that every week. Yes, I might as well admit there are days I find it difficult to get out of bed. The worst thing I’ve ever done is to lie there while little Boris screams for me, he’s alone in his room and the door is shut and he can’t get out, he screams for what seems like hours, and the worst moment of all comes when he stops screaming, all of a sudden like that, like a light switch, and only then in the silence does the guilt and remorse flood my spirit, giving me the strength finally to rise and go to his room and open the door where he is only asleep on the floor, pink and innocent like I was innocent in my love for Vladimir, my love for Nikolai, my love for Josip, buried now like Nikolai in a faraway country that I can’t forget. You are very lucky to have been born here, Ruth, you are lucky to be a real American. Even tragedies are cleaner here, they aren’t really tragedies: yes, sad things happen, even terrible things, but everyone just forgets as soon as they can and goes on, you are all so optimistic, don’t try to deny it, I see it in your eyes, you believe tomorrow will be better than today, that’s your birthright, and I want it to be little Boris’s birthright, as it can never be mine, because somehow it has the power of coming true. Even big Boris is somehow a believer, I don’t know how he managed it, because he is a Jew perhaps, he is more American now than Russian, though my English is already much better than his, he is on fire for this country, where there are no oligarchs, no one-man rule, no Putin and Medvedev playing ping-pong with the presidency, no gangs except in the bad neighborhoods where nobody goes, and where more than money there is hope, endless hope. I am not yet a citizen, I cannot vote, but I wish that I could vote for this man, this black man who wants to be President, I can tell by looking at him he is a good man, a compassionate man, an educated man who wants the best for his people, even people who don’t look like he does. Boris hates him, he says he is going to kill the American dream, but I do not hate him, when he comes on the television I always watch and listen. I am even thinking of going to door to door for him, canvassing, although I cannot vote. It is my way of feeling a little American and making a better life for my son, who I hope will never know anything about his brother or Vladimir or Nikolai or Russia or the woman I was before he was born.

  It is so kind of you to listen to me. But Boris is awake. I must go.

  Ruth, saying nothing, eyes wet, wants to hug Nadia. But even after these revelations she feels something in the younger woman holding her stiff and apart. Only her own brimming gaze affirms the peculiar connection that Ruth herself feels with this strange Russian woman: as though they were mirrors of each other, as though Nadia in all her scarcely imaginable intimate losses represented for Ruth a kind of destiny, though she has never lost and God willing never will lose a child, or a lover, only her mother, she thinks, her mother. Something of mother here, she realizes, watching Nadia go, something reminds me of her. She knows something I don’t know, that’s the feeling I’ve had my whole life. Secrets, my mother’s secrets, and Nadia’s. Somehow the capacity to retain the feeling of a secret, though she has apparently disclosed all.

  Her own phone buzzes. Time to go. The sun is brilliant overhead. There are mothers, mothers everywhere, pushing strollers, holding tiny people by the hand, waiting patiently at crosswalks, wiping stains from little mouths. What did she mean, is it somehow American to have children, crazy thought, but it’s true, there’s a kind of blind optimism or denial or expectation in these parents, some domesticated wild hope for a life lived that’s entirely potential, unrealized, golden glowing and embodied in these little animals that will grow into disappointing humans like the rest of us. I am no different. But there are times, more and more, I look
at Lucy, small as she is, and see the truth. She is already far from me, it’s her job, someday she’ll be gone entirely, even if she calls every week, even if she lives in the house next door, even if she chooses to care for Ben and me in our decrepit old age, spooning soup into my quivering mouth and looking at me with adult pitying eyes. I have lost her. I have lost the dream.

  When she gets home there’s another letter. She takes it upstairs and puts it, unread, with the others. There is still a little time. She opens her laptop and writes.

  I awoke in hospital. Not myself wounded, but tucked uncomfortably into a green plush chair at the bedside of a figure in white. For a moment I remembered nothing, saw nothing, felt myself only to be alone with death or something like death, something still and watchful, commanding if not reverence than at least the silencing of irrelevant thoughts. Be present with your breath, it said. Then I saw the body was a man’s and not a woman’s and I remembered, in a single unfurling flash, hours or days before, out in the street, pushing through the trailing crowd, searching, where they might be, thinking about police brutality, some of it confirmed and witnessed—the wounded beaten in their stretchers or while handcuffed to hospital beds—and wilder rumors, of students disappeared to secret detention centers, bodies tossed in the Seine, the persistent story of a young man, a boy, run over deliberately by a CRS van, and then backed over to silence the screams, only the crush of bones on pavement audible. Practically hearing it, on a side street now back from the surge, all the shops and houses shut up tight and dark save for one, the little used bookshop on the Rue des Anglais with its metal shutters down but one door open, spilling light onto the street, still open as it had been throughout the month the rest of Paris had taken as a forced holiday, stores opening and closing seemingly at random, sugar shortages, no gas, metro stoppages, no trains running out of town, going everywhere on foot or on a bicycle, for weeks now we’d sustained ourselves selling books we no longer read, no longer needed to read, for school like normal life in the city was indubitably out, the trash uncollected, sidewalks impassable, everyone student and bourgeois alike used the center of the street to get around. All the poetry we need, Charles said, is in the streets and in our blood, the language of youth. Charles with his usual quick thoughtless charm had befriended the owner, a heavy-jowled widow whose feeling for print was entirely mercenary, and yet not untouched by a certain piety, for it had been her husband’s shop, her husband who had gotten his fool self killed in the Resistance, or so she’d tell anyone who asked—guillotined by the Gestapo she said, not without a certain relish, drawing two fingers across her throat, cigarette trailing smoke like the ghost of his martyr’s blood. She was a pensioner with modest needs, she insisted, she kept the store in her husband’s honor, he had loved the students, had been one himself, would surely have become a professor at the university after the war, except—snick. And as she said this she would be assessing your stack of books with her deceptively slack yellow eye, and then quote you a price at least fifty francs less than the books were really worth, and yet the shop was convenient to our flat and she always paid cash on the spot. I never saw anyone buy anything there, only sell; she must have had a mail-order business or perhaps she was truly the martyr to her husband’s memory she claimed. At any rate, Charles won her over, did her little favors, never complained about her sharp dealings, and now in the street I saw them through the metal shutters in the window looking out, and when I rapped on the grating I saw Mme. Rossignol hand her key to Charles, who opened the door and unlocked the gate and let me in. A dozen meters off the endless crowd surged by, the new old crowd, our parents’ crowd, supplemented by thick-necked brush-cut youths of another order than the slim-hipped revolutionaries who had seemingly driven all other species out of the ecosystem of the Rive Gauche. They weren’t even from Paris, Charles muttered, full of conspiracies; the Gaullists had bussed them in from the most benighted corners of the Republic for the express purpose of cracking heads, and the government would get no blood on its hands. Your sort of people, he said to me suddenly. No offense. I mean, the sort you grew up with. The sort you ought to be. Peasants. Creatures of false consciousness.

  You know, M said, smiling slightly. Americans.

  She had gotten somewhere a cut on her forehead, a superficial abrasion really, and it made her seem less rather than more vulnerable. The blood had fled her cheeks and her face was hard and angular. She wore black from neck to toe, except for a striped scarf—it belonged to Charles—that she’d knotted Windsor-style, so that she looked androgynous and natty. Charles’s blood was up. We must act, he said. We have to find our brothers. Counterattack.

  Mes pauvres enfants, Mme. Rossignol said, looking at Charles, his fine blond glow. She was standing as always at the high counter—there was a low stool behind her that she rarely sat upon, for when she did she and her authority vanished, inviting shoplifters. The store itself was narrow and claustrophobic with its high shelves crammed with a cacophony of medical textbooks and artists’ anatomies and a complete set of Balzac and a reprint of the first French edition of Darwin’s L’origine des espèces and a dozen copies of the first volume of Capital (no sign of the second or third) and the poetry of Baudelaire and Germinal and near the top shelf, in the back, all in a row, the most recent acquisitions, shelved three deep, books from the denuded flats of ourselves and the revolution. When it’s all over we’ll have to buy them back, I thought, and then Mme. Rossignol will turn the profit she’s been dreaming of. But it was blasphemous to think so, and I glanced quickly at Charles and M as though they had heard my thoughts. The bell over the door rang. M had run out into the street and Charles, after a moment’s gape, had run after her. Mme. Rossignol and I stared at each other, stupefied, like sailors in a ship abandoned by its captain.

  They’ll be killed! she said at last, as though reporting the verdict of the highest authorities.

  I ran after them, pelting down the alley piled high with trash, empty boxes, bits of rubble, past the naked stumps of trees that had gone for barricades, past boarded and blacked-out windows like so many mouths of broken teeth, toward the end where light and darkness mingled and the bodies were surging past. The chant Vive De Gaulle! Vive la France! thumping and thundering, felt more than heard, shaking me out of the private dream that had grown to include the world and my friends. At the end of the alley was a black knight, a man on a great dark horse, his uniform absorbing all the light, a glint where eyes should be, a rock to break the human wave. M had seized the reins and was shouting up at him, her face white, tendons on her throat standing up, Charles also shouting, reaching his arm across her, to grab the reins himself or to protect her or simply in reflex. He had never looked more beautiful, his light overshone M’s completely. I wanted to hear what they were saying, screaming at each other, Charles and M and the horseman, but only heard the chant. Vive la France. And as Charles pushed M back, snapping her grip, the horseman raised his baton and brought it down with astonishing speed, hard and forceful, onto the top of Charles’s head. I heard the crack. And his face twisted upward toward the sky, uncomprehending, the blood starting to flow. And M on the ground, and his body covering her. The horse reared up against the crowd, the bridges, the sky, a figure of ancient power, something atavistic coming to claim the City of Lights for its own. I felt his silhouette over me, like I felt the crowd chanting. And then the clap of iron hooves, and the crowd surged, and he was gone. We were in the mouth of the alley, M and I, alone with Charles and the blood matting his hair and trickling through our fingers and onto the street.

  Charles. You thought you understood love. But to love is to look, and you never once opened your eyes. No need to look when everyone looks at you. And you look out at everyone and see only masses and theories and most of all yourself. Your women, Charles, your women showed you everything, there was nothing left to the imagination, because it was your imagination they wanted to test, and you failed. Remember the poster, Charles, the one I helped to print and you hel
ped to write? I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires. A lover’s creed. But what is it you desire, dear Charles? Can you give it a name? Revolution? Power? Or simply not to go on with things as they have been, not to go on with yourself? Yours is the heroism of the suicide, whose only faith is in the blankness that will come after blowing yours and everybody’s brains out, certain that nothing will remain: après moi, le neant. You love nothing but the new. And that’s why in spite of yourself, in spite of your broken skull, you’ll live on to pass your exams, choose a career, marry. It takes the love of others to keep your powder dry. But we are drifting away.

  Where was she? I remembered her leading the way after I hoisted Charles on my back, darting in fits and starts through the streets, trying to avoid further contact with cops and crowds, running for the hospital. His dead weight on my back. M looking back at me, her mouth set in a line, her eyes alive with fear, two little flames in a field of ashes. Body of Charles, the burnt blunt blur of a second head on my shoulders. Limp, leaden. His blood soaked through my nylon windbreaker, through my shirt. I don’t remember anyone else in the streets, just a few parked cars and the weird gray light of the sky reflecting back at us the lights of the city we dimly remembered from the days before the riots, the lights of shops and billboards, the city as it had given itself to me in the first days: lights running up and down, peering out from the exposed skeleton of the Eiffel Tower, the spotlights throwing the facade of Notre-Dame into shadow like an African mask, or the spooky reactionary light that bathed the smooth dome of Sacré-Coeur, day and night. It was an endless stagger, not quite a run, M leading the way, reaching a white hand back toward me and me reaching out toward it with my free hand, never quite touching, silent running, blankness, sound returning only when she ran up the stone steps of the ancient building, l’hopital, and pulled open the outer door and held it for me, us, sweat burning my eyes, I registered with a glance once more her face, cast down and away, as I passed through the doors into the light-filled hum of the gray-green corridor, calling for a doctor, blundering through chairs, up to a hole in the wall behind which a middle-aged woman in white sat writing, looking up appalled at the bloated gasping giant filling her window, and the ruined face of Charles slack and expressionless. I held him in my arms now, like a child, an offering. And it wasn’t until a noise came to answer the roaring in my ears, two identical orderlies with black grease-streaked hair easing my burden from me, directing me to a chair, Charles flying away on a gurney to triage and surgery, other patients and attendants now manifesting around me, holding magazines and books, looking at me curiously. I heard the ringing of phones and the names of doctors being paged and the resumption of small talk (a elderly woman in the chair directly behind me talking slowly and patiently and loudly, as though to a deaf person, to the much younger man next to her about the holiday she’d taken last winter in Martinique—her son, grandson, a stranger, who knew?)—as I say, it was only then that I registered M wasn’t there. Perhaps she was smoking a cigarette on the steps to calm her nerves? But when I stepped back out through the doors there was no sign of her. Two men in white stood next to an ambulance sipping Styrofoam cups of coffee and I came down to them gesticulating. No. A girl? No. They’d just arrived. They were between calls. A quiet night, they said. Quieter than they’d had in a long time. They were exhausted, really. Yes, they had sympathized with the students at first, especially when the cops started cracking heads. But enough was enough. De Gaulle had called elections, what more did they want? He was the man for a crisis, even now. He stood head and shoulders above the opposition. That little Jew, what was his name, one said to the other. Cohn-something, his companion replied. The chubby little redhead. Give it a rest, why doesn’t he. Give us all a rest.