No Light
No Light
Michael Costello
Ireland (2014)
Beautifully written: poetic, melodic, tragic, shocking and sorrowful.
Yet humour, romance and joy have also found a place in this cleverly told, compelling
story of human suffering. The dark themes don't overwhelm, but invite further inquiry. The history
lessons are deftly intertwined with the more lyrical and romantic
themes.
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No Light |
Michael Costello |
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© Michael Costello 2013
All rights reserved
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Before I was born I heard my mother singing. I was not aware she was singing a song and even less aware that it was external. In fact I believed that I was the song.
It was beautiful. So beautiful I can still remember her voice. I didn’t always remember only now when faced with death has the memory returned.
She sang a song of love…
Kol dodi hineh zeh bah
Medaleg al heharim
Mekapeitz al hagevaot
…of hope and strength
...the voice of my beloved is coming,
l
eaping on the mountains, dancing on the hills.
After hearing the song I dreamed in her womb that we were together on a mountain dancing barefoot and singing in the warm sun and fresh air feeling the cool grass on our feet and bathing ourselves in the spicy fragrance of cedar.
She looked at me and smiled, her face illuminated by her love for me. She took my hands and spun me round, her dark hair flowing in a gentle breeze that caressed our souls. She held me gently and sang,
Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.
Her long cool dress soothed my face, the pink and soft green patterns embraced my eyes and her perfume of pomegranates bathed me in sensual delight.
I closed my eyes. Gradually the pain returned. At first a distant ache appearing to exist beyond me slowly returned to my body, intensifying, gnawing at my heart and defiling my soul.
I had to cry, my love.
I had to cry. Hunched by the open window that led to my small garden planted with the most fragrant flowers you chose for me. Remember how we lay after wakening, watching the sunlight play on the ceiling, our bodies embracing the perfume of
calendula and saffron narcissus and lily
. You resting your head on my chest and whispering,
You are my fairest love.
Oh those leaps of heart and faith! I pulled you tighter to me and felt your soft relenting body enveloping my soul.
It was too beautiful. The pain of regret was already forming in my gut before gushing inexorably to fill my eyes with sadness. Sadness because I knew I would soon be gone.
I slouch by the window alone. The smell of spring is melting under the heat of summer and the memory of you is fading in the glare of blinding light. I can still hear my mother’s song, now drifting aimlessly among the withering flowers.
A knock on my door!
It is Isabelle. My heart bends.
“Yes!”
“I am making tea would you like some?”
“Yes of course!”
I hear her shuffling away towards the kitchen and carefully raise my shattered frame from the chair. Pain ravishes my body. My bones crack, my wasted muscles strain to perform the slightest movement. I make my way towards the door each difficult step calculated precisely. I am aware now that my soul is failing.
Isabelle stands by the table bent over as she roughly butters some bread. Her dark hair once free and abandoned is now entrapped by grief, bound within a tightly packed chignon. I stand by the table unsure of what to do. I anticipate the pain as I begin to lower myself into the chair. Isabelle now sits clasping her hands tightly around a white cup filled with the heavy smell of marigold tea. Between us lies a plate of roughly cut bread. She watches me reach towards the handle of my cup and witnesses the sweat breaking on my forehead as I take the handle between my thumb and index finger. My hand shakes. She reaches across and steadies me.
“Is it worse today?”
I barely nod concentrating hard on lifting the cup to my lips.
Paris, 1936
I owned a small art shop in Rue des Rosiers. This was Le Marais, a network of ancient streets that housed the main Jewish community in Paris. The narrow lanes constantly bustled with commerce and trade and every morning the air was thick with the aroma of fresh bread and flowers.
I always stopped for coffee at Café Cremieux on my way to work. One morning as I sat with my espresso reading
Le Journal
the door opened and a young woman entered. She wore an attractive pink dress and carried a white bag. As she passed me on her way to the counter I caught a faint whiff of her perfume. It reminded me of pomegranates. She bought a coffee and sat near the window. After a short while she removed a letter from her bag. She stared at the letter for some time before reading it. I wondered if this was this a lover’s note or a correspondence from her parents or a friend but my daydream was cut short when she suddenly looked at me. I was immediately embarrassed and resumed reading the newspaper. At length, she rose from the table and once again I had the opportunity to feast my eyes upon her body. I even looked at her face directly in the hope that she might throw me a brief glance but she ignored me and left. I never saw her again at the café even though each morning I hoped I would. This expectation eventually faded but her image never left my mind.
I had purchased the shop three years earlier from a Monsieur Goldberg. His was a pawn shop, a service for some I suppose. However he was not popular among Parisians and often the subject of verbal abuse. He decided to sell up and move to New York after a particularly nasty incident involving his daughter Ruth and two young men from St. Gervais. The details were sketchy but it appeared she was assaulted by the men after her father refused to accept jewellery from them. Goldberg maintained the jewellery was stolen but the court case that followed adversely affected his reputation. He was a close friend of my father and through this relationship I managed to secure a good deal on the purchase of the shop.
The shop offered me an opportunity to pursue an artistic career. I converted a small room at the back into a studio and even put a single bed against one of the walls in the event that I needed to spend time working there. A tiny window overlooked an enclosed yard at the rear of the building and this provided some natural light.
I was not yet confident enough in my abilities as an artist so I decided to sell my work alongside more established painters. I had trained at L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts for three years before dropping out. Had I completed my five year course I would no doubt have been more assured and more adept at selling myself and my work. On advice from my father I closed the shop for almost a year to allow the memory of Monsieur Goldberg to fade from the public mind. During that time I built up my collection acquiring mostly local Parisian art and the occasional Italian piece. I painted very little and when I finally opened, my most valued items were three sketches by Toulouse-Lautrec I had purchased from a dealer in Amsterdam. I proudly displayed them in the centre of my window alongside a portrait of my mother.
Painting was difficult for me. I knew that no-one ever became an artist by just wanting to be one. It required discipline and skill: courage and the capacity to dig deep into the soul and unearth the most secret desires. Many times I promised myself that I would work every day to perfect my art but inevitably I would find this self imposed regime impossible to maintain. Ultimately I would end up sitting in Café Cremieux drinking coffee and wine or staring meaninglessly at a blank canvas imagining ethereal brush strokes magically appear and create exquisite images.
I lived with my father in a small apartment in Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. He was Solomon Politzer a Yore Yore
,
a teacher. Most mornings I accompanied him as he walked the short distance to his beloved synagogue in Rue Pavée. His right knee, shattered by a bullet in the Great War had worsened over time and was now almost unable to take his weight. He used a sturdy stick he called “my old friend” to help him walk.
My father loved the Jewish songs and loved speaking Yiddish. He would often speak it to me in the hope that somehow I would feel the urge to engage with him but I always resisted by replying in French. It was not that I couldn’t understand what he said but I was French and felt no obligation to speak Yiddish. The songs on the other hand did evoke sentiment in me. The inherent sadness, the passion of the voices and the sweeping music all conspired to elevate my spirit.
Dertseyl mir, alter
Dertseyl mir geshvind
vayl ikh vil visn
alts atsind.
Our apartment was adequate. A large living and dining room housed his chair and a settee, a broad sideboard, my mother’s piano, a dining table and chairs and a smaller table for his radio. He loved his radio and would spend hours with his head bent towards the speaker, smiling as he listened to music or complaining and rapping his stick on the floor whenever he disagreed with comments being made on topical news programmes.
Facing the settee was the fireplace with an oak overmantle displaying various china figurines and an Art Deco clock. Off the living room were a kitchen and a study. A hallway led to two bedrooms, a bathroom and the front door.
My mother had died seven years earlier but this was still her house. The walls of the apartment were covered in her paintings. The tablecloth on the dining table was crochet lace given to her as a wedding present and hanging opposite the fireplace above the sideboard was a large embroidered wall covering she made illustrating a quotation from
Song of Songs
,
My Dove in the Crevasses of the Rock.
The image displayed a rock filled with holes and from one of those holes appeared a dove. A venomous snake was curled round the rock and above the dove a hawk hovered, ready to strike. It was a simple image yet the colours were vivid; the white dove, the rock covered with lichen and moss, the snake bright and seductive, flushed with intense shades of reds and blues, each scale glistening with danger and menace and the hawk, its brown and ochre feathers detailed exactly. When I was younger she explained the meaning of it to me,
“The dove represents the people of Israel and the snake and the hawk are those nations who would wish to destroy us.”
Directly beneath the wall covering was a Hanukkah menorah and either side of that were two silver samovars belonging to my father. My father would take hours polishing them, squinting as he meticulously cleaned along the intricate lines of carvings.
My mother enjoyed painting miniatures. I am convinced that watching her work was what inspired me to paint. I would sit for hours fascinated, watching her peer through a large magnifying glass and delicately use her tiny brushes to create delightful scenes of Paris. When I began painting I once asked her why she painted this way.
“They are so small and fiddly; it would drive me mad to attempt something like that.”
“Oh Paul!” she laughed. “You are so full of youth. You want to make big statements about your heart and impress us all with your bold strokes and gaudy colours. I prefer to create mystery. My paintings appear small and insignificant but as you move closer they begin to reveal a hidden world full promise and delight.”
Her words intrigued me but at the time I had no idea what she was talking about.
One September morning I was routinely walking with my father to the synagogue. The leaves on the beech trees painted the sky with gold and amber and the sun dazzled the buildings with autumn light. As usual my father stopped frequently to speak with neighbours and friends but he always spent a little more time speaking to Madam Guillard who kept the flower shop at the corner of our square and Rue Pavee. I didn’t mind because I loved being among the colours and the smells. As my father and Madam Guillard spoke about the threat to France from an increasingly hostile Germany I walked among bunches of dahlias and marigolds and savoured the scent of pink and white roses.
“Don’t be stealing any of my roses Paul”, Mme Guillard remarked loudly. My father laughed.
“Ah, those roses Esther!”
I smiled and ignored their taunts. I had noticed a poster advertising the new season at L’Opera Comique beginning with
Carmen;
however what really caught my attention was a small photograph of the woman I had seen in the coffee shop five months earlier. Beneath the photograph was her name, Camille Berman
.
The date of the opening performance was 11
th
September. That was in four days. I decided to purchase a ticket without delay. Now I became restless, shuffling among the flowers and staring frequently at my father and Madam Guillard in the hope of transmitting my thoughts to them but they seemed oblivious to my impatient behaviour and continued their conversation that now focused on the activities of young Jewish men in Le Marais.
“They don’t have respect for the traditions anymore.”
“It would seem not Esther.”
“It weakens our community Solomon. We need our young men to be strong and committed especially when we see what is happening in Germany with that man Hitler.
“Don’t worry; we are a strong and resilient people Esther.”
“People like you are, Solomon.”
I tried to imagine Madam Guillard as a young woman. She must have been beautiful once. Since her husband’s death she had managed alone. Her son had left many years earlier and now lived in Rouen with a wife and two children. Whenever he visited she would organise a party and invite everyone in the district. I have to admit I enjoyed it. The good food, the wine, the music and the dancing were an irresistible combination. However, I was still inclined to resent my father’s obvious affection for her.
My mother had died only seven years earlier at 04.37 on the 12
th
December 1929 to be exact. She was forty-two and I was sixteen. Initially she had complained of headaches during the summer of that year and these became increasingly worse during the autumn. The doctor prescribed Laudanum to alleviate the pain telling her it was probably stress or a virus. It was neither. A tumour was festering and growing inside her brain. Her co-ordination became affected. She had trouble holding anything with her right hand and eventually her voice became slurred. I remember lying awake at night listening to her moaning and imploring my father to end her life. It was an impossible request. He continued to cry and pray and sing lullabies to console her agony. Finally she was taken to hospital on the morning of the 4
th
December after collapsing in the bathroom. For eight days until the time of her death she remained in a coma. My father never left her side. He continued with the prayers and occasionally sang but mostly he spoke to her tenderly about their life together, reminding her of their hopes and triumphs and shared sadness. I will never forget her funeral. It was the last time I set foot inside the synagogue. During Jewish funerals a eulogy or Hesped is normally given. In my mother’s case there were several but I will always remember my father struggling to recite a poem by Yisroel Shtern as he paid tribute to her life.
Let my song be concealed; locked away
In a place that is holy and still.
I don’t beckon or call you to me
And if I do let you inside
I still keep a door out of sight
So my song stays concealed, locked away…
