Yann Andrea Steiner (3 page)

All her life she spoke very little, Theodora. Like certain Englishwomen she found speech to be noisy, mendacious, and she had chosen silence and the written word.

You asked what part of Germany the station was in.
She
believed it was south of Krakow, heading south toward the border.
In those cursed lands. She was of British origin, but she had grown up in Belgium. She didn't know European geography very well: like many English, she liked only London-Paris and the Gulf States.

You asked if the man who guarded the station visited her in her sleep. It was what I believed I'd written, yes, when she slept. I wasn't certain that the man was not the master of that station where she lived for two years of war. Why wouldn't he be? Or that they had loved each other – I'd thought of that too, and even that it was from the pain of it that she later died.

I said that I didn't try to find out, that I never asked anything of that nature about Theodora, but I believe it wasn't out of the question that they should become lovers.

You asked me what
I
thought. I told you that I had never asked for names, neither of the man nor of the young woman in white, in the drawings. I said that as soon as I heard that story, I spoke the name I'd surely heard before, of Theodora Kats. Then at the end, after several years, around me, people applied that name to the woman in white lost in a Europe of death.

I remind you that I'm sure I knew Theodora but that my only memories are of Betty Fernandez, whom I knew well and who,
for her part, as I told you, was a friend of the young Theodora Kats. That I knew Betty Fernandez loved and admired her.

I had never forgotten that name, that time, the white of her dresses, that innocent wait for the train of death or of love – they weren't sure which; no one has ever been sure.

You say that even if I didn't know Theodora, even if I never went near her, I must tell you what I think might have become of her.

Personally, I believe she went back to England before the end of the war. First she landed a job with a well-known literary review in London. And then she married the British writer G. O. She wasn't happy. I had mainly known her after her marriage to the British writer G. O., who was famous the world over and whom I admired enormously. She had never liked him very much, neither the writer he was nor the man.

You asked me what Theodora was like in London. I said that she had put on weight. That she no longer made love with her husband, that she didn't want any more of that, ever. She said, I'd rather die.

You said, “Was that woman, in London, the one from the German train station?”

I never tried to find out. It's the most I can say. But if you
ask me, it isn't out of the question. She had made something of herself even so, even dead she would have become something; she would have been claimed by a family in England or somewhere else. But no. No one claimed the body of Theodora Kats.

“Still, at some point she left that station.”

Yes. Unless they found her after the defeat of Nazi Germany and left her there, in that station, just as they had left “political prisoners” in the camps, thousands of them. As for her lover, nothing was ever known. She was there, in that same station. I see her there, still in her white outfit ironed that very morning, and later that day speckled with her blood.

I believe this is why no one has ever forgotten her, or that whiteness. It was the white of her dresses, the excessive, uncommon care she took of them, which made the people who had heard of her never forget her; those canvas hats, also white, her canvas sandals, all those things, her gloves. Her story spread throughout Europe. There was never any certainty. We still don't know who she had been or why she had been there, in that station, for two years running.

Yes, it was the whiteness of the dresses, of the summer suits that made her story spread throughout the world: a very British
lady in an immaculate white outfit, waiting for the train to the cremation ovens.

For the vast majority, the decent image of that white is what remained. And for others, it was her laugh that prevailed.

“Perhaps she has no story at all.”

“Perhaps. Maybe she went mad from a latent, lingering madness that took away her will to live, to know, to understand. A kind of madness of normalcy might have taken hold of her, of her mind and body. As for me, I've done all I could to see that the phenomenon of that station was disseminated. And it was.”

You asked me if she was dead. I said yes. And that the ceremonial of the station had been disseminated. She didn't wish to be seen in an unflattering light, owing to the cancer that had made her lose so much weight, that had triumphed over her pale beauty. So she asked to be brought to a large hotel near the hospital where she had stayed and there she took a room. She asked for her most beautiful dress, and to be made up. It was there that her friends saw her for the last time, in death as in life, in death.

I
T'S raining.

It's raining on the sea.

On the forests, on the empty beach.

It's been raining since nighttime. A fine, light rain.

The summer umbrellas aren't out yet. The only movement on those acres of sand are the holiday campers. This year they are small, it seems to me, very small. Now and then the counselors let them out onto the beach, so as not to be driven crazy.

There they are:

They shout.

They love the rain.

The sea.

They shout louder and louder.

After an hour they are good for nothing. Then they're brought in under the tents. They are changed, their backs rubbed against the cold. They love that, they laugh and shout.

They are made to sing “We'll to the Woods No More.” They sing, but not in unison. It's always the same with them: what they really want is to be told a story. Any story, as long as it's told. Singing they want no part of.

 

Except for one. One who watches.

The child. The one with the gray eyes. He came with the others.

They ask him, Aren't you going running?

He shakes his head no. That child stays silent a lot, for hours he stays silent.

They ask him, Why are you crying? He doesn't answer. He doesn't know.

 

One wishes everything could be graced by that tearful child. It's the grace of the sea when the child looks at it.

 

Is he unhappy here? He doesn't answer. He makes a sign meaning who knows what, like a minor problem he must apologize for, it's not important, you see ... it's nothing.

And suddenly they see.

They see that the splendor of the ocean is there, as well, in the eyes of the child watching it.

 

The child watches. He watches everything: the sea, the beaches, the emptiness. His eyes are gray.
Gray
. Like the storm, the stone, the Northern sky, the sea, the immanent intelligence of matter, of life. Gray like thought. Like time. The past and present centuries blended together.
Gray
.

 

Is the child aware that someone on the beach is looking after him? A dark young girl with eyes at once sad and gay. No one knows. Johanna is her name.

Once he almost seemed to be turning back toward her. But no, he was looking behind him, back to where the wind came from; because that wind was so strong, a solid block, so strong that it was as if it had changed direction, come from the forests, from a place unknown; as if it had left this ocean sky for the unknown shores of another time.

Yes, that is what he was looking at: the wind. The wind that had escaped to the sea, an entire shore of wind that flew above the sea.

T
HE ONE looking after him is she, that Jeanne, a summer camp counselor, very young and gay. She asks him, What are you thinking about all the time? He says he doesn't know. She says it's the same thing for her, she never knows either. Then he looks at her.

Today beneath the barren sky there is a kite like they make in China, I'm not really sure, but I seem to recognize Chinese lacquer red, a color from North China.

 

The child stands there. He too looks at the kite, the red design in the sky. He is a bit apart from the others, but probably not on purpose; he must be that way all the time. Like a slight delay behind the other children, without meaning to.

When the kite fell down dead the child watched it. Then he sat down on the sand to watch it some more, a kite that was dead.

 

The seagulls are there too, turned toward the distance, feathers smoothed down by the wind. They remain that way, posed on the sand, watching for the disorientation of the rain. And suddenly they let out a deafening cry; they are frightening. Then for no reason they fly into the distance, only to return just as suddenly. Those seagulls are crazy, say the children.

T
HE CHILDREN have climbed back up the hill to go to the dining hall. The beach emptied, slowly, as every summer day at that hour, lunchtime for the “camp kids.” The counselors called them in. The child got up, waited for his Jeanne. He put his hand in hers and followed.

 

One day summer will be over. The memory of it sometimes comes to you in the bright light of the beach, through the transparency of the rolling waves. When summer stretches as far as the eye can see, so strong, so hurtful or dark, or sometimes illuminating; when you're not there, for instance, and I am all alone in the world.

 

I will never know if the child realized one day that on this beach, there was often someone watching him. Several times he turned toward me but it was to stare at nothing, just a whole
troupe of kites. Or the wind. Or the seagulls. It's the young counselor he's looking at, whom he knows was assigned to him by the administrators of the holiday camp.

 

It's the first time I see the body of the child so close to me. He's a skinny child, tall, maybe too tall for his age. Six years old, he said.

 

A second kite took off like a crazy person toward the sea and then it was snatched up by the wind. The child ran as if to catch it but the kite fell down dead. The child stopped, looked at the dead kite. And he passed it by.

 

Then the aria from
Norma
floated out again from the residential hotel. Far in the distance, Callas again cried with the child over the dead kite.

 

In the midst of the bad weather there was an hour of sunshine, and warmth suddenly enveloped the beach. The wind fell and they told the children they could go out and swim, that the ocean was warm after the rain.

 

The counselor didn't follow him, wasn't watching him anymore. She saw him without looking. The child removed his wool vest, as if he were all alone in the world; he went to drop it near her and then headed off toward the sea with the other children. He didn't mention the death of the new kite.

And very soon he came back up the beach, toward the young counselor.

 

The child is in a white bathing suit. Thin. You can see his body clearly. He is too tall, as if made of glass, a windowpane. You can already tell what he's going to become.

The perfect proportions, his joints, the length of his muscles – you can see them. The miraculous frailty of his relays, his bones, the folds of his neck, his legs, his hands. You can see.

And his head, carried like a mathematical emergence, a lighthouse, the tip of a flower.

A
ND IT came. Suddenly the nights were hot. And then the days.

And then the small children from the camps took naps under blue and white tents.

And the child who remained silent lay there with eyes closed, and nothing set him apart from the other children.

And the young counselor came up near him. And he opened his eyes. Were you sleeping? He doesn't answer, just gives that same apologetic smile. Don't you know when you're sleeping? He smiles again, says he doesn't really know.

How old are you? Six and a half, he says. The counselor's lips tremble. Can I give you a kiss? He smiles, yes. She takes him in her arms and kisses his hair, his eyes. She has removed her arms and lips from the child's body. There are tears in her eyes; the child sees them too. He is used to it, this child, he knows that sometimes he makes people cry when they look at
him. This child is used to it. Then he talks about the last few days. He says he was sad when there was the storm, the rough waves, the rain.

“Will it come back?” he asked.

“It always comes back,” said the counselor.

“Every day?” asks the child.

“Hard to say,” the counselor replies.

S
OMETIMES I see you without knowing who you are, at all, without knowing you at all. I see you far from this beach, elsewhere, distant, sometimes abroad. The memory of you is already there, in your presence, but already I can't recognize your hands, I've never seen them. Your eyes remain, perhaps. And your laugh. And that latent smile, always on the point of welling up from your fantastically innocent face.

T
HE WEATHER was beautiful and I went out to see. That's when it might have happened. I might have written you only to say that it could have been that morning when I would have told you that without realizing it, perhaps, I loved you. You might have been in front of me, listening. I might also have told you that once this morning had passed, it would have been too late for me to tell you this: that I loved you, and forever. Too late. That never again would there have been so violent a need to say this to you in this palace of a northern beach, beneath this noonday sky, this rain and wind.

And then the sun came out again, green and raw. And it turned cold.