Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (33 page)

Memory, Elsa, is a poor
substitute for justice.

What I’m trying to tell you, my impossible daughter,
is that these memories aren’t even mine, so how could they be yours? Let the dead
bury the dead. Don’t spend your youth as I spent mine, carrying your mother on
my back. Life is short and memory is long, too long—you must kill it when you
can. Hate me if you must,
it’s
better that way, you
must get free of it all somehow, as I’ve tried to do. I don’t know and can
never know about my parents and what they suffered. They were ordinary people
and they stayed ordinary, and I wanted to be something else. This city now,
here, where I live out my last days—I look around and it seems like all the
people are young or old, nothing in between. How many of them are murderers?
How many the children of murderers? And how many—a far smaller number—are the
children of the murdered? There’s no living with these questions, no going on
with them. We are what we are, here and now. You must let go of me, Elsa. Bless
me and let me go.

What is the “I” that intrudes incessantly in this narrative like
punctuation? If chapters were commas then readers would ride. Not Gustave, not
Ruth, not Ruth’s anonymous Papa. No mother writes, only M, her posthumous
correspondence. Least of all poor Lamb, leading the goose chase from city to
city in Europe, stoic ingénue, winding deeper and deeper into the I’s
conspiracy with itself.
That this is my story through a glass
darkly.
That it’s my history like a concealed weapon, maybe it’s there
and maybe it’s not, you can’t relax till the showdown comes.
Pistols,
heartbreak at dawn.
Forget the future, forget the glaciers melting and
the sleepless nights, what about a sustainable past to go foraging in, secure
enough to forget?
If horses could sing Bach.
If I
could sit across from you, close enough so our knees touched, and recite this
to you, story of my own estranged and operatic heart. If people still read
poems there’d be no need for novels. I must unfurl the concealing veils for a
reader to guess at, to pounce. I am sitting at a cafe with all the other I’s,
each telling his or her story to one of the endless series of listening Lambs,
all of them hatted, equipped with tape recorders, silencers, false passports,
money belts.
To get the story to kill the witness and make a
clean getaway.
Like Lamb, I am more than a client and less than human.
You exist nowhere but here in the film of my persuasion. To stay you, on task,
is to be an accomplice to your own vanishing. In the frame, in the Lamb-sized
holes, a past appears. And somewhere Ruth, my Jewish-American Emma Bovary, is
preparing to start out on her own journey, at the close of day like Athena’s
owl. To find a future in the Old World, to build an American hope on a heap of
bones. We are not innocent, but
the I
can’t help it.
To make a self is to self-exculpate, digging deep. I carry this forward, a
woman with no gender, motherless.
In search of the body,
corpse with a beating heart, against which I nestle, for shelter, dreaming past
dawn.

There is a third figure to consider for the man who
takes care of things: the enforcer, the muscle,
le samourai
, the assassin. A gardener
wields his secateurs calmly, with no outward show of passion. He does not make
history,
he makes nothing happen that is not inherent in the
existing situation. He prunes; he intervenes; he cuts short. He cannot make
history disappear but he can disappear it, mark it off cleanly and boldly and
without remorse. He vanishes anonymously into the mob whose face he momentarily
bears or—it is the same thing—is taken up as sacrifice. He does not face,
cannot be mistaken for, any justice. His aesthetic is cold in its perfections,
nearly sterile. The surgeon cuts, and if the vivisected limb goes on aching,
that is not his fault. If brass awakes a trumpet. Silence opens—she can hope,
without admitting—a wounded life.

We took the train from the
Gare du Nord and from the moment we stepped aboard I felt us new with each
other, tender, she was
with
me at last, she was mine.
All night
in the third-class compartment she slept with her head on my chest, on my
belly, while I sat upright trying not to disturb her, to cushion her tangled
cloud of hair from the bumps and shocks of the slow-crawling westward train.
She had spoken vaguely about our going to England, to some friends she knew in
London, where we could begin anew. I would paint; she would study again,
perhaps at the School of Economics. Something practical, she said. I want to
learn about money. Where it comes from, where it goes. What makes it seem so
real.
But when we got to La Havre just before dawn she
blinked against me, yawned, sat up, and said she wasn’t ready to get off the
train.

But this is where we get
the boat to Dover.

Dover isn’t the place.
Let’s keep going.

All right, I said. Let’s
keep going.

We changed trains for
Cherbourg. The new train rocked us gently
together,
as
if she were the bird and I were the nest. When I opened my eyes, it was full
daylight. M was gone. But then I saw her outside on the platform, laughing at
me.

Your face!
she
shouted. Did you think I had vanished? Like Kim Novak?

The town was dismal,
somehow gray even in the summer sunlight that fell in blinding sheets between the
buildings, making me hold my hand before my eyes. M had sunglasses. Let’s go!
she
said. I want to find the beach. Come on! And she ran. I
lumbered after.

It didn’t take us very long
to achieve the port: a few high-masted pleasure boats, a steamer parked
offshore with black smoke funneling up from it like a fresh smear of charcoal.
M ran down to the quay and stared at the water. I heard her ask a bespectacled
pensioner with a fishing rod,
Où
est
la plage?
and
he pointed.
Merci!
she
shouted after him, running again. I saluted him
awkwardly as he watched us go by, pipe in his hand.

It took the better part of
an hour for us to walk there. She put her arm in mine and we walked along the
coast road, saying little, watching the sea. It was a turbulent gray day with
sudden shafts of light striking out here and there, touching the pewter waves
and turning them into fiery medallions that as abruptly faded. The sand I could
see, below us, was gray. It was summer, but the wind was cold and I had no
jacket. M, in her jaunty blue raincoat, was better equipped. Still, she walked
on my left, so I could shield her a little.

La plage.
The beach, when it
appeared, was broad and bright. We had to descend to it, and as we did the sun
broke more fully through the clouds and turned the indifferent gray expanse of
sand into a radiance I squinted at. M walked faster and faster, then pulled
away from me suddenly and ran. I did not run after her but continued to walk
steadily as her body grew smaller and smaller, as she ran down the road and
across the brush grass and into the dunes. There were holidaygoers here and
there, but not very many—it was not at that time a fashionable area. Its claims
to fame were historical: in 1912 the Titanic had stopped over at Cherbourg
after leaving Southampton, taking on additional passengers and cargo before
steaming into the night, never to be seen again. And in 1944 the D-Day landings
took place not far off. Years later, I found myself wondering if this beach,
what I came to think of as the beach of M, if it were not the same as Utah
Beach, where the Allies had suffered comparatively few casualties in their
ultimately successful effort to reclaim France from fascism. It was not and
could not be, of course. All my contacts with history were destined to be
fleeting if not imaginary. I knew this even at the time, and did not care.
For I had M.

I had her, but she was
running. And when she reached the edge of the water and did not stop, I again
began running too. She ran straight into the waves, arms outstretched, and
disappeared for a moment in the surf. I beat down the beach after her, passing
a few scattered blankets and umbrellas. Someone was playing the Rolling Stones
on a transistor radio:
I was
drowned,
I was washed
up and left for dead….
I kicked up some sand in that direction and a few
voices protested. I was over a dune and down onto where the sand was hard and
flat. For a moment I did not see her. I took off my shoes and plunged in.

Gus!
she
was shouting, crying, laughing in the water. Gus! It was not so deep, after
all, where she was standing. Gus! Her face, hair, clothes were wet. She turned
from me toward the waves and shouted something at the sea.

I grabbed her by the
shoulders, then by the waist, and lifted her out of the water. She kicked viciously
at me, still wailing.

Finally we sat down in the
sand together. A man in sunglasses and madras shorts had stood
up,
had begun to approach us to see if everything was all
right. He saw her sobbing with head down, caught my glare, hesitated,
withdrew
.

For a while the sun shone
on us and kept us warm, while the dune did something to block the wind. But
then the clouds rolled in.

I called her name, over and
over, softly. It was getting colder.

She had composed herself by
this time and was staring out to sea. When she finally looked at me her smile
was like that you’d give a stranger you trust not to harm you. But then she
gave me her hand.

Somehow we made it out of
there, in the growing chill of the later afternoon, both of us wet, chilled,
with sand in our clothes and our hair. We had passed, on our way out of town, a
small cluster of buildings, one of which was a hotel. By the time we made it
inside the dark miniscule lobby we were both shivering uncontrollably. But M
shook out her hair and drew herself up when the concierge greeted us warily.
Behind our backs she pressed some bills into my hand.

Monsieur
et
Madame Niemand,
she said to the clerk.
De Paris.
Nous sommes en voyage de
noces.

C’est vrai,
I said. We’ve had problems
with our luggage, though. The rail company is supposed to send it on to us.

The clerk looked at us: the
hulking, heavy-browed Alsatian and the delicate, arched woman with the American
accent. He shrugged.

Sign here, Mr. Niemand. He
put the key in my hand.

The room was small, on the fourth
floor: a chair, a little table or writing desk, a sink, the bed. The window
faced the alley, a blank white wall that reflected perfectly the mood of the
sky, turbulent with clouds but very occasionally permitting a shaft of
sunlight, long as a finger, to touch the earth here and there. A little rain
was wetting the windowpanes. If you opened the window and leaned out, a bit
farther than was comfortable or safe, then your gaze might bring you a glimpse
of the sea.

Trembling, I locked the
door behind us and watched her at the window, leaning out so very far, letting
in a little wind, a little rain. Her wet hair clung to her shoulders and curled
at her cheeks. She was very pale.

Close the window, I said.

We undressed quickly, not
looking at each other, and slid into the bed, which groaned under my weight.
Immediately our cold, clammy skins were touching, and then pressed together,
and the cold gave way in me to a rush of heat that spread through my limbs and
up into my face, so much so that in a moment I wanted to kick the covers off.
Her body was very cold, until it wasn’t.

I painted you, you know, I
said to her. That same day Charles was hurt, the day you disappeared.

Where is it?

I don’t know, I admitted. I
lost it in the move.

I wish I could see it, she
said, eyes tightly shut, her cold skin warming against me. Did you make me
ugly? You always made me so ugly.

Holding me.

It is one thing to paint a
woman, to imagine her, as an artist must imagine what he sees to make it real.
It is another thing to touch her and to be touched. The imagination, which for
so long has rushed ahead, is defeated by the actual, the senses. There are no
words. When she was warm enough, she opened her eyes and smiled at me. Then I
was on my back and she was on top of me, like I had never dared to imagine.
My belly, her buoyancy.
The shock of dark
hair on her head, under her arms, abundant at her crotch, against the whiteness
of her skin.
A rose was petaling her cheeks, her throat, at her sternum.
She was moving more rapidly against me. It’s really happening, I remember
thinking. And: I must hold on.
On.