The Archivist (16 page)

Christ, Carol! (Len’s laugh now, low and gravelly from too much smoking.) You’d last maybe a day there. You know, we live in the absolute best part of the city. Even better than your neighborhood, Judy.

(And he looked at me directly for the first time since he came into the room, and I couldn’t keep focused on his eyes; I ended up looking at the door and wondering when Powell would open it and tell them to leave.)

The West Side is a real nice place, Len said. Matt seems to like it there even after all these years. He says it’s still right for him. For you two (he added? — I couldn’t tell whether he’d really heard the slip and was trying to fix it).

And Matt’s keeping up the place, Judy, you don’t have to worry about anything. I stopped by a few weeks ago. Matt and I had a quick drink and I could see he’s doing fine. Nice new set of oak bookshelves he just bought, he told you about them? — they look swell in that corner by the blue chair. He’s a real neatnik, that guy, he doesn’t let anything get messy in the apartment like we do sometimes.

He paused, lit up, passed me the pack; I lit up too. Carol abstained.

I mean, there are nights when we’re just too tired even to feed ourselves, Len said. And so we order in some food and spin a few tunes and then we forget to go to bed. Wake up in the middle of the night on the fucking sofa, for God’s sake.

And sometimes we don’t even know where we are, said Carol. (Still on her back.) You know that feeling, when you wake up and for a minute everything’s a blank, it’s like you could be
anywhere?

Oh yeah, I said, I know.

And for a few seconds we were all silent, and I had a glimmer of what they’ve been sitting on — the suppressed unease, futility … Then Carol snapped back into place, reached for the pack of cigarettes, lit up, exhaled, picked up the reins again.

So anyway, she said. Some things never change. You know we still have that pair of loony squirrels in the trees out behind the building, remember? — the pair that chase each other and dive from one tree to another like they’re birds. Christ! One of these days, one of those little suckers is going to lose his footing. And I’m going to feel sorrier for the other one, he’s the real loser. I do get a kick out of watching them. A scary kind of play — what’s a good word for it, Lenny? — we’ve been trying to improve our vocabularies lately, Judy, we’re tired of the same old words so we use the thesaurus sometimes.

Len frowned, lit up, jabbed his cigarette in the air.

Cavort, he said. Those squirrels cavort.

No, I said. Not scary enough.

She’s right, said Carol. Something’s missing. The squirrels are testing each other, it’s a kind of pushing to the edge —

— oh I got it now, exactly the right word, said Len. Brinksmanship.

Yes, I said. That’s it.

Yes yes, said Carol, excited because she likes little games like that.

Then they told me about how their jobs were going, and I filled them in on Matt’s work. As if nothing had changed, as if I were still in on the details, and we just happened to be meeting here in the middle of nowhere two hours from Manhattan instead of on Grove Street or at some coffee shop in Sheridan Square.

Len talked a little politics, and I took the opportunity to ask him if he had a newspaper on him. Both he and Carol looked startled and said No, simultaneously, so I know they’re in on it too: my news blackout.

Carol stood up and looked out the south window.

Nice view you’ve got, she said. The grounds are spectacular.

Yes, I said. I walk a lot.

Good for you, said Len (a little too fast). Now you have your LPs so you can stay inside if you want, listen to great music all day long. Never get bored.

That’s not a problem here, I said.

Good, said Carol.

They both looked so relieved then that I nearly started laughing but managed not to: it would’ve been too much trouble to stop.

The door opened, the familiar deep-brown face inserted itself, the usual quiet voice (the only one here that calms me!) spoke: Time to go.

We three parted as Powell stood by.

I was reminded of that scene in “The Waste Land.”
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

A rushed farewell, essentially meaningless.

It was worth it for my record player.

They asked nothing of me.

October 2

My record player is saving me. They try to make me stop listening at night, when I need it most. Clay sends one of the attendants to check on me at eleven. If it’s Powell I’m OK, he just opens the door and puts one finger to his lips and I lower the volume; but the others are stooges.
Lights out, music off.
If I protest, they stand around and cross their arms on their chests to show they aren’t leaving until I turn off the record player. So I do, and when I hear the hall door close, I turn it back on and keep it low.

During the day I close my eyes when I’m listening. At night I want a cigarette and a little whiskey, but these are not necessities.

It is possible for me to distinguish between what I want and what I need. Clay thinks I can’t, but he is hopelessly pre-disposed in his judgments. He has to fit symptoms with diagnoses, adult effect with childhood cause. He is looking for a way to put the whole picture together. He enjoys making connections.

So do I, I tell him, but only when they’re interesting. Past a certain point it is not interesting to think about childhood as the central drama and adulthood as its reprise.

Sometimes my existence up to 1939 seems like an unconscious waiting, an extended anticipation. Almost as if I sensed something unimaginable was descending, and nothing real could begin until it had ended.

I’ve been reading Rabbi Luria’s myth of creation. It’s one of the best Kabbalistic stories. It has a certain lyric economy. I can’t resist it.

God inhaled and withdrew from the world, contracted Himself to make space for the world: an act of self-purification, to free Himself from evil. But the evil was mixed in with other divine powers, and when it flew outward in Creation it shattered the vessels, the lights of primordial humankind, and everything was dispersed — the original pure lights and all their impure forms too. And so everything Made was mixed, the constructive and the destructive laced together. And as the descendants of Adam Kadmon, the primordial one, we are given breath to gather the shards, the evil as well as the good pieces, and return them to their right places.

This is the Repair: our only meaningful work. Not just His work but ours, too.

I told the story to Matt, not long before I came here. He said he liked its images — God breathing in and withdrawing, the broken vessels — but not the myth itself, because it made no allowances for redemption. And I argued that yes, it does, it’s just that there’s no single Messiah to redeem us. There’s only the messianic aim — the end of exile.

I can’t buy that, said Matt. It’s too vague, it leaves too much room for pseudo-saviors.

Everything gets worked out here, I said. Not on some cross but here. On the ground. Between human beings. In our exile anything can happen.

I remember how his face darkened slightly then.

Why do the Jews focus so much on their exile? he asked. It seems arrogant to me.

Arrogant? Suddenly I opened to anger — such tremendous anger, larger than anything I’d ever felt for this man; larger, more heated, frightening. I felt it as a creeping sensation on my skin, not unlike gooseflesh.

You’re in no position to talk about arrogance, I said. I mean, Christianity’s a religion that claims all nonbelievers are damned forever. A religion that used to kill off the same nonbelievers it had already damned, just to prove the point.

Judith, Matt said (interrupting me, shaking his head, his tone urgent). Why do we get into these things? Don’t throw all of Christianity at me, you know that’s not fair. Don’t oversimplify.

Right, I said. But isn’t that exactly what Christians do?

Some Christians, he said. Not all.

Action, I said, tell me about action. Tell me what you’re supposed to do once you’ve taken the place of Christ’s betrayer — you’re in that man’s seat now, it’s your turn, and it’s not enough to talk about salvation, is it?

Careful, he said.

Don’t back me off, I said. Don’t try to shame me.

I’m not, Judith (his tone so weary now), you know that.

Millions dead, I shrilled at him. A whole culture obliterated in less than five years, and Christians still talk about salvation? Where was everyone in Europe? All those Christians standing around wringing their hands, inwardly sighing with relief, saying to themselves
good riddance
.

He turned away from me. You insult many innocent people, he said. You have no right to do that.

The white heat pulsed at my temples.

You can’t have it both ways, Matthias, I said. Either you’re a Christian who admits that most Christians in Europe looked the other way, or you’re not a Christian at all.

You’re on thin ice, Judith, he said. If you’re going to talk about Christian complicity, you’d better also talk about Jewish collaboration. There was plenty of it. Right inside the camps.

I said nothing. Matt said nothing.

We’d been in such a place before, deadlocked, separated, silenced.

My temples thrummed. I remember picking up a glass.

Forget Christians and Jews, I said. You know what I’m talking about. We both know what
we
didn’t say, how
we
didn’t act. It’s not just the war I’m talking about — what about afterwards, when the refugees started coming in, when we avoided them on the street!

He walked toward me, his eyes on the glass.

Judith, don’t, he said.

How can you tolerate it, I said (only it was not speech, it was a wail bursting from me, a keening as if at a death) — what we’ve done together, this pretending, both of us! Damn it, Matt, why don’t you see?

His hand went out in front of his face as the glass left my fingers. I hadn’t felt the release but the glass was gone. It was directly before his face, deflected by his hand; it glanced off his forehead and then arced up, down.

A shrill sound of breaking. Shards on the floor.

On Matthias’s forehead a small cut, a thin bloody rivulet.

I approached him but he backed away.

No, he said (softly, as if without anger), no. Leave me alone.

Matt, I said, please, let me.

No, he said. Go. Please.

I left him five times altogether; this, Hayden, is the sixth.

The first time I left without warning. I knew I had to. I felt him wanting me to. When I came back from Boston, he said he’d been unprepared, shaken, but I knew he’d wanted me to go. He needed his aloneness. It had restored something in him which I’d eroded.

Each time after that, he asked me to go, and each time there was nothing for me to do but go. We would arrive at some impasse, a wall we could not negotiate. I would come apart; he would ask me to go.

His voice low, quiet, unrefusable.

I threw something each time. Usually a book, once a coffee can.

I didn’t aim, I just threw. The glass was the only time I hit him. I didn’t mean to. I think that time I just needed to hear the sound of our life splintering, and see the real shards: not myth but the actual bits of glass, waiting for me to retrieve them.

November 16

The high holidays came and went. I’ve put nothing on paper since then.

On Rosh Hashanah they gave me and each of the handful of other Jews here a prayer book, but I let the Days of Atonement pass, uneventfully, like any other stretch of time.

Atonement. I don’t think I believe in it. It’s an impossibility, a ruse. Why do we even try it? So we can make the vows each year and then break them?

The thing the Jews have going for them is they don’t start wars to convert people. They don’t kill to spread their faith; they ask to be left alone to practice it. But too often they suppose that their God will protect them. Which thus far He has repeatedly failed to do.

The ones deported — what did they think was happening? How did they explain things to themselves? Was it only terror — was it not also complacency to which they surrendered? As if He were just around the corner, watching?

God set certain things in motion when He inhaled and withdrew from the world, and now we bear the consequences.

I picture Len and Carol in Vienna or Cracow or Munich in the 1930s, selling pianos and sheet music. Two Jews, benign and genial and undistinguished, not much different from their Austrian or German or Polish gentile neighbors.

Len and Carol wouldn’t have left. Any more than they’d leave New York now, if it were happening here. This was their life.
Is
their life.

I can picture him saying to her:
We do not leave such a life
. And she would nod, say to him:
There’s nowhere to go
. And they’d stay, knowing they had no choice.

Lottie and Sam? I might guess now that they would’ve left, but that’s easy to say because they’re gone; no risk in being wrong.

Their dying was an accident of time and place, nothing more. Like being Jewish in Vienna or Cracow or Munich in the 1930s.

Accidents. The car heading down Broadway was part of it, part of
such a life
. I too, I was part of it; but I wasn’t in the car when the truck swerved into it.

A quick careening. An error.

It was just one of those things

Just one of those crazy flings

December 31

An hour before the decade ends.

Tired of fighting with Clay. He refuses to see my side; this is pure pig-headedness on his part, it has nothing to do with his training or skills (which I accept as considerable, I tell him; but he must hear a certain irony in my voice, he looks uncomfortable when I say this).

Why did you do it, he asked yesterday, almost before I’d sat down.

Yesterday: our first session since Christmas Eve. I removed the tree from the lobby on Christmas Day, when most of the staff and patients weren’t around. The gardener found the remains of the fire the next day. I figured they’d tell Clay then, but apparently he didn’t hear until yesterday that the tree had been burned. That it was a sweet-smelling heap of ashes in which (if one looked hard) one could pick out little bits of colored ornaments: a Santa’s hat and arm, part of a reindeer, some tinsel, the horn of an angel.