Essays from the Nick of Time (12 page)

Let me be as clear as possible here; I have no wish to be misunderstood. I believe that in this hyperbole-driven age, when the word
heroism
has been devalued to the point that men are deemed worthy of it simply for not abandoning their families, or for effectively smacking a leather ball with a stick, September 11 showed us not one but multiple examples of the real thing, unadulterated and potent and pure. In the last few moments, as the terrified crowds were streaming down the stairwells of the World Trade Center, men were running up, determined, in their minutes of allotted time, to save as many as possible. Ordinary human beings risked their lives (and, more than this, the unspeakable pain of those who loved them) to help others. This cannot be reduced, or contextualized. It can only be acknowledged, humbly, and perhaps with some bit of pride that this too our species is capable of.

This I believe. I believe as well, however, that a legitimate distinction can be made between those who, in one way or another, were directly touched by the tragedy and those who, like myself, were not. Who were never in any real danger. Who never missed a meal. The former are exempt from criticism. The latter are not. The former deserve either our reverence or our compassion. The rest of us merit neither, automatically. Courage, in general, is directly proportional to actual risk. Those who rushed in just after the buildings folded like great slabs of cake into the Manhattan pavement were the ones we heard from least. Those a hundred blocks north, meanwhile, cushioned even from the smell of the smoke by the grace of prevailing winds, scurried about, eager to bear witness to the suffering.

Their own, mostly. It didn’t take long, alas, to note the disconcerting prevalence of the first person in these litanies: “I’ve been horribly traumatized. I’m terribly upset.” A woman interviewed by the
New York Times
explained how she trembled every time she walked into a tall building, which could make for a lot of trembling in Manhattan. Others seemed to have found themselves, overnight, in a Samuel Beckett play: “A city block. A tree. Nothing to be done.” They were thinking of moving out of the city, or maybe the country. And the three thousand souls still buried in the rubble just five miles south? Or the rescue workers, staggering with fatigue, trying to dig them out? Oh. Right. Them.

The solipsism in all this, the eagerness with which some individuals appropriated the tragedy for themselves, fascinated me. I’d seen its like before, though writ small. Among the pack I’d run with as a boy—a motley mix of runny-nosed urchins from Irish and Italian and Anglo-American families—there had been a big, soft kid I’ll call Tommy Kelly. Outwardly no different from the rest of us, Tommy had a quirk we never tired of exploiting. When the pack turned inward—as it invariably would, less out of malice than sheer boredom—and began to pelt him with snowballs, he would not react as the rest of us did. He would not hunker down behind someone’s mailbox and take his hits, knowing that soon enough it would be someone else’s turn to draw the short straw. No, he would, in his own, entirely predictable way, fall apart. First he would select the smallest, scrawniest tagalong in the group and accuse him of starting it. Working himself into a froth, he would thrash this one unfortunate for a time, hoping thereby to draw the fire away from himself. When this didn’t work (we knew what we were about, after all), he would eventually begin to pummel himself. Eagerly. Outdoing what was required. Picking up blocks of snow and ice, he would gleefully crack them over his own head; scooping handfuls of gritty slush, he would mash them in his own face. Sometimes he even managed to hurt himself, and ran home crying.

It took the Tommy Kellys of September 11 exactly three days to find a scapegoat. A well-educated, appropriately liberal friend called with some “disturbing news.” “They” were leaving, he said, abandoning the country in droves. JFK was packed. But that was not the real news. He had it “on good authority,” from a friend connected to the New Jersey Department of Education, that “they” had kept their children out of school on the morning of September 11. Hard to believe? Sure. But records don’t lie. And a nearly 100 percent absence rate allowed for only one conclusion: They had known. All of them.

I’m ashamed to say that, taken by surprise, and momentarily hamstrung by our friendship (this was a decent man I was talking to), I said little at the time beyond a few general expressions of disbelief, and thereby contributed, in some small way, to the proliferation of that idiocy. As is so often the case, I thought of a great many things to say after I’d hung up the phone. How, I might have asked (overlooking the patent absurdity of the entire accusation for a moment), were Muslim children identified on the school rosters in New Jersey? And were the political sympathies of their parents evident from their surnames? And why, if they were all in on the plot, and knew, therefore, that the planes would hit lower Manhattan, did they keep their children out of schools in New Jersey, for God’s sake? And what of the wives and husbands and children of the Muslims who had died in the attack? And wasn’t it a miracle on the order of the loaves and the fishes that this plot, so tightly controlled that it had slipped past the porous but still formidable radar of the information-gathering services of the United States government, had been common knowledge among twenty or thirty or fifty thousand Muslims, none of whom had let slip a word until the deed was done and they were getting into the cab, bound for JFK?

To our considerable credit, this brand of clumsy scapegoating (which might easily have gained in strength and virulence in a less heterogeneous society) quickly died. Which should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. Lacking a convenient coven of witches to burn, disoriented by the fluttering of American flags, we simply jumped two steps up the conjugation and transferred the locus of our suffering from “them” to “us.” We began to pummel ourselves. Life as we had known it was now effectively over, we declared. Nothing would ever be the same again. The ship of state was taking water. Best, therefore, to throw a few civil liberties overboard. Captain Ashcroft said so.

This eagerness to punish ourselves, to drag ourselves about in an ecstasy of suffering, would have been more explicable, more typically American, had it been coupled with some redeeming notion of our own sin. Throughout much of our history, after all, when hard times had hit, we had turned inward, assuming that the fault was ours and that we were being punished. Castigating ourselves for our shortcomings, we would flog ourselves into righteousness, thereby renewing our covenant with God and, by extension, the promise of America.

But this was something different. We felt as pure as the lamb. We had been struck for no reason. How could God do this to us? The result was a cultural mutation—a half jeremiad. Self-flagellation without self-scrutiny. Suffering without the need or capacity for atonement. We still flogged ourselves (we had that part down) but without quite knowing why.
²

Which is not to suggest that the old rituals had lost their power, only their ability to make us uncomfortable by suggesting that we were somehow complicit in our fate. Although shorn of its reflexive element (any mention of our own role in this was, quite simply, verboten), the jeremiad’s power as a form of jingoistic exhortation and national renewal remained undiminished. Just as earlier crises—from colonial famine to the Civil War—had been quickly folded into the rhetoric of America’s mission, so in 2001. The enfolding, of course, was slightly different now. Less than forty-eight hours after the attack, commemorative T-shirts and postcards were already for sale on Spring Street. From WTC chocolate bars to personal alarm systems (“Because, in trying times like these, one can’t be too careful”) to Estée Lauder’s “America the Beautiful” compacts (with Austrian crystals for stars), the marketplace did its work: blurring the edges, dulling the pain, melding everything into the familiar lingo of dollars and cents. We felt better. History was once again back on the reservation. America was open for business. Evil would be punished, as our commander in chief assured us, though we would have to sign a very large check, and do exactly as he said, to make it so. The paradise of shoppers had replaced the other one as the telos of the American experiment, but the ability of the myth to regenerate itself, to seamlessly cover over any event, remained eerily intact.

A slightly narrower aperture. In August of 2001, my family and I, like tens of thousands of fellow Americans, traveled to Europe. The fresh green breast of the New World (a bit of a stretch for Jamaica Bay, but let it go) fell away below us, and eight hours and two movies later the clouds opened out on the half-harrowed fields and slate-roofed villages surrounding Prague. I had spent a good part of the journey staring at the global-positioning screens overhead, watching them calculate and recalculate precisely how far we had traveled and how much farther we still had to go. Would that it were that easy.

I spent the month that followed tripping over history, dogged by death. A personal thing, I suppose. My mother and, later, my father had chosen to return home after their forty-year sojourn in the New World. Czech had been my first language, Queens a suburb of Brno. In my head, I carried a wonderfully muddled version of Plutarch’s
Parallel Live
s
—Czech rather than Greek, American rather than Roman, but parallel all the same: on the one hand, Tomáš Masaryk, fleeing into exile; on the other, George Washington, already somehow triumphant, crossing the Delaware. On this side, Edvard Beneš, betrayed at Munich; on the other, Franklin, reeling in the thunderbolt on a key. All seemed to reinforce a series of binary oppositions, neat as the base pairs on a double helix: tradition versus self-determination; the humility born of experience versus the flushed triumphalism of power; the profound, almost filial attachment to place (the
x
coordinate to history’s
y
) versus the freedom of the open road. Tragedy versus optimism. Death versus life.

I spent a good part of our vacation fighting against that inevitable sense of constriction, that horrible thickening of the atmosphere, that is the Old World’s answer to the thin, boundless air of the West. Here they were again: the ubiquitous monuments, the unnumbered dead. Here were the generations from Adam down, staggering under the piled weight of the centuries. As I was—bearing history like an anvil. It hardly helped that my struggle itself was absurd, based on a cliché of continental identity more appropriate to Henry James’s world than my own. I was indulging in a kind of double generalization, I told myself, ignoring not only the determined vapidity, the at times unbearable lightness of the new Europe, but also the historical shadows we Americans had grown since Nathaniel Hawthorne had argued we had none. Still, for all that, a generalization to be reckoned with, difficult to deny.

What was I supposed to do with this knowledge, these layers of grief, like strata in stone, this constant folding-in of death? In every village a graveyard, dense with color; in every graveyard, tending their dead as if they were kohlrabi or turnips, the generations of the living: snipping, pruning, tossing the dead blooms into the tilting wooden wagon by the gate. It was to escape this infernal fussing, this easy familiarity with death—the three-year-old running down the path to bring her mother a trowel—that I’d gone west, to California, where no one seemed to die at all. Where once, while hunting bugs with my daughter in an overgrown field just outside the high desert town of Lone Pine, I had stumbled over a fallen gravestone and realized I was standing in the middle of a vast cemetery that no one, but no one, knew was there. That had been erased from the memory of men as surely as the wind had erased the lettering on its tablets. “You must understand,” my mother had told me throughout my childhood, praising the communal business of caring for the dead (hoping, I suppose, to inoculate me against my culture’s lack of respect for doneness, for gravity, or rather its inevitable issue, the grave), “the less you know of death, the more it frightens you.”

But I had been born in America. We made history here; we didn’t need to know it. To get away from all that depressing tonnage (which even then threatened to become my legacy), I did what Americans have always done: I ran. I moved as far west as I could without coming around again, stopping, finally, so close to the edge of the continent—the very lip edge of the millennium—that, from my door, a well-kicked soccer ball would have landed in the Pacific.

And yet here I was, a mere decade later, strangely famished yet not quite sure what it was, precisely, that I craved, what nourishment I hoped to derive from the experience. After all, what did all this have to do with me?

On a ramble through the forests of Moravia, three days before we left, we found ourselves eating our
rohlíky
and cheese in a walled country churchyard next to a nondescript white-plastered building topped by a wrought-iron skull. “That? That’s the
kostnice,
” said the pimpled young man in soccer shorts, desultorily scratching at the grass with a rake. The charnel house. He agreed, grudgingly, to let us in. We stepped inside. Our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Behind a small, gaudy altar to the Virgin were two columns so massive that for a moment I didn’t understand what I was seeing: not stone, or mortar, but thousands of human shin bones, stacked lovingly each to each, forming ledges, pediments, smooth and cool as marble. Perhaps ten feet in diameter, topped by a delicate frieze of crania, the columns towered over us. For decoration, at regular intervals in the curving wall of bone, a skull had been lovingly set inside a human pelvis. Someone’s mother. Someone’s son. Like a bud at the center of a wide, white rose.

“V Jičíně jsou lepší”—there are better ones in Jičín—said the youth, impatiently shuffling his feet. I had no doubt it was true.

We returned home on September 4, walked out into the humid air and familiar lingo of New York. A week later, the Old World, so to speak, came to us. The
kostnice
was here now.