by Susan Taubes
Or if she did not leap on him, he would wait till the storm exhausted itself, as it was bound to eventually. Wait till the furious lashing rain thinned into a mere dribble, to take upon himself the last soft droplet of Sophie Blind weakly repeating, “...always have to do everything myself...” Then Ezra, wounded to the soul by the mere implication of a reproach, would begin to recount, remind her of the instances where he had helped her, done things for her, lifted burdens from her shoulders, bought her gifts; one after another all his good deeds toward her in general, only a few of the inexhaustible store, as long as she could hold her head up, till she was quite overwhelmed by all his good deeds so lengthily and feelingfully listed. The weight of so much consideration, devotion, service of so many years made Sophie quite faint and numb. She wasn’t sure whether she was standing, sitting, or lying. She was asphyxiating. When she finally felt his body surround her and felt crushed under his weight, it was a relief. And in nine months there was a baby.
When Sophie was growing a baby she was happy; nothing bothered her then. She slept and walked and ate when she pleased. When Ezra asked her to do something, she mostly didn’t hear. She was pregnant. My wife is pregnant, Ezra said significantly, when people noted her absence or commented on her absent air at parties. Sophie couldn’t be bothered with social twaddle when she was growing a baby, and even less so when she was nursing and raising. She couldn’t be bothered with shoes that pinched or arguments for or against. She stayed home and oiled her belly or her baby, or both.
Ezra saw how happy Sophie was when she was pregnant and gave her another baby. She soaked in the bathtub. When there was a baby she took it in the tub with her as many as there were and they played with all the faucets and the shower, or just splashed water at each other. When they were older, she gave them paint and clay and beads and old clothes to play with and make things.
Ezra complained; Ezra was appalled by beads and clay and stuff and rags and paint, especially by children painting on the wall. It washes off, his wife assured him, and proved it with a sponge. But Ezra was appalled by the idea of children painting on the wall. It was the end. It was sinful. Ezra proclaimed he wanted order in the house. Sophie watched his index finger wag menacingly and his mouth tighten into a thin line. For a long time she refused to believe in Ezra’s transformation. Was this Ezra talking through his nose like his father? He grew a belly, developed strange ailments, he screamed at the sight of a crack in the wall, anything spilling, a missing button; it had to be repaired immediately.
Ezra ordered her to have the floors waxed. The children will slip, she protested. They should stay quietly in their rooms and walk carefully on waxed floors, Ezra bellowed. But it was pointless when they were moving in a few months, and besides, it was expensive, she tried to reason with him. We can’t afford it, she pleaded, citing unpaid grocery and doctors’ bills. So the children will have fewer toys, said Ezra, stomping into the bathroom with a stack of foreign journals.
Sophie was happy with the children; they went on making things even if it messed up the house. Ezra was mostly away and when he came, always unexpectedly, there would be a row, and that was part of family life. Only somehow, as the years passed and the children grew, the fighting became worse and Sophie saw herself losing and him winning in a way she could no longer accept because now he was keeping count of all of them, her and the children, keeping score of what each lost and did wrong and, having persistently failed and done badly, would continue doing. He was not only recalling past wrongs, but prophesying all the wrongs they would commit. By the time they became men and women he had them on gallows and in the gutter. Sophie Blind, who had never come around to defend herself, now had to begin to defend two and three and more against words and sometimes blows, the words especially, because they were more lasting. Also, now with more children Ezra had a longer inventory of his own favors and kindnesses and exertions in their behalf from the day they were born, which he recited at unrelenting length, till some turned faint and others screamed and stamped and Sophie didn’t know at all what she was doing, let alone what she should be doing, except that obviously this could not be resolved or survived in the way it had been, and that however great and pressing her inclination, she must neither scream nor faint, but do everything else. So many things had to be done: to shield or argue or sometimes just stand stock still like a statue, or get them out of the room and tell them to do as their father said, or try to get him out and try afterward to comfort and cheer. Years afterward when she tried to remember what she actually had done, or what she could or should have done, it was as muddled as then. She didn’t know what she was or should be doing and yet she went on from day to day. And from one country to another, packing and unpacking and traveling more on her own, till she was tired of living in remote, backward places, islands to which the ferry went once a week, mountains without roads, accessible only by foot or mule. She was tired of traveling or just tired and wanted a bit of city life. Both she and the children began to miss and want their things—books, toys, clothes, all the nice things they had bought and used in different places, and left in boxes and suitcases, stored here and there, lost perhaps (the suitcase sent to Ezra’s sister which had all her notes from Italy, and the fine glasses from Venice). She was tired of being shabby and of other people’s bad taste and wanted a place where she could have all their things together once and for all, and not have to move and pack and worry, but be settled in her own home to raise her children, and have peace and quiet to write one of the books she had always thought of writing someday.
All she really needed was money and a happy love affair, Sophie was told by a retired Englishman in Ibiza.
Sophie remembered she still had the money her father put in the bank when she got married, “in case—” She never let him finish his sentence; it was the day before her wedding and Sophie was afraid her father would say something that would spoil everything, so she refused to listen. In her life there was not going to be any “in case”; everything was going to be right, and none of his cynicism and doubt the day before her wedding.
Sophie made plans to settle in Paris. Ezra protested, then approved. Ezra’s delight in her choice of Paris and his ironic comments were to be expected. To their friends, Ezra boasted he was granting his wife what every woman dreamed: to live in Paris. To his father-in-law, he wrote reproaching him bitterly for aiding his daughter to run away from her husband with the children. Ezra mocked Sophie, but he was pleased at the prospect of visiting her in Paris and spending some weeks or months of every year in his favorite city. At last she had come to a sensible decision.
Ezra urged that the children stay with his sister Renata in Bern so that Sophie might arrange things in peace.
“But I’m leaving you, Ezra,” Sophie said.
“I only want to make it easier for you,” Ezra protested. “You are still the woman I married and the mother of my children,” he added with emotion. “Facts cannot be changed. The children will have the best care in Bern and your hands will be free. Renata will keep them for as long as you need to get organized.”
In the spring of that year Sophie went to New York to pack and ship things she had left there and to straighten out her finances. Was this the right time to have a happy love affair?
It was done.
Sophie returned to Europe to spend some weeks by the seashore with the children till their apartment in Paris was ready. On the plane flying from New York to join her children, her thoughts circled in sweet confusion. She would have many more happy love affairs. Or maybe just one more for the rest of her life. But perhaps just one was allotted in a lifetime, and that she had had. It didn’t matter if she hadn’t quite finished packing.
THEY ARRIVE at Orly airport in the usual gray drizzle. Sophie Blind in her traveling cape, a child dancing at each side, the oldest forging ahead with one of the huge straw baskets in which they put the heavy things—knives, shells, camping equipment, the
typewriter, the iron wrapped in still-damp beach towels. What plane are we going on next? the children ask. Swissair? Pan Am? Air France? Lufthansa? Why don’t we ever go Air India? We’re not taking any more planes. This is where we’re staying. Settling for good. The mother’s tired and distant voice continues in the taxi racing along the quay, while Paris monuments sprout up around them.
They stand before a building under construction. The last floor, where the windows have been put in, she points. A five-floor walkup. I knew it. I just knew it! Joshua comments, hoisting the straw basket. It’s good for your heart, Toby says. Why do they start at the top? Jonathan asks.
The place is not quite ready; the workers are just putting in the moquette. No, they can’t go in till they’re finished in the evening, but a lot of things have arrived—boxes and suitcases stacked against the wall beside the door, and some letters on top of the trunk. Did Daddy write? Why doesn’t she open it? Not on the stairway.
They walk out on the boulevard: TABAC, BOULANGERIE, kiosks pasted with last month’s concert announcements, the Credit Lyonnais, the urinals; and single file through narrow side streets: DÉFENSE D’AFFICHER on pocked walls; yes it’s all there, rivulets streaming along the gutter and the little man in the blue tablier guiding the garbage toward the sewer hole with his whisk broom; at the next turn Notre Dame appears. So what are we going to do? At least it stopped raining. Go to a movie?
She writes to her lover while they sit in a corner café waiting for the workers to finish. Rereads his note, tears up her own. Arrived this morning in the usual gray drizzle and found your note...she starts a new sheet. Isn’t it time to go, Mum?...Paris is not the same. She crosses out the line and crumples the page.
Yes, there is a carpet under the brown wrapping paper. What fun for the children to rip it off and roll. Gold, if Jonathan insists. Shade called moutarde, when she chose it last year. No furniture? Who needs furniture. On a gold rug they eat, play and sleep. Good thing they brought their butane gas camping equipment till they finish putting in the pipes and the inspecteur du gaz comes around to...
The children are curious. Who sent her that fat letter from New York she is reading while the spaghetti boils? Who is Ivan? they ask. Is he rich? Is he good-looking? Will you marry him? I want to marry a rich man, Toby says. You’re rich aren’t you? Jonathan says. Joshua is never going to marry. Eating on the floor Japanese-style, who are they, these little people? We’ll need some furniture, Toby insists. For guests. What do you think? We’re going to have parties here. It’s true you can’t invite people properly till you at least have some chairs.
But people come anyway. X who heard she was no longer living with Ezra. Y who heard from Ezra that she is living in Paris now. Z who heard from X. They’ve been waiting all these years. Pointless to apologize, Je ne me suis pas encore installée. The carpet is perfectly suitable. It’s out of the question. She can’t, the children might awake. She can’t, she’s exhausted. She can’t, she must unpack. She can’t, she has fifty letters to write. No, she can’t, she must work on her book; she can’t tell them what it’s about. She must sleep. She must really write those letters. To Ezra. Can’t. Business letters. Can’t. To her lover in New York. Can’t. Finish unpacking. Can’t. Can’t sleep. Can’t work. —What is the proper way to dispose of a wedding gown one can’t give to one’s daughter or daughter-in-law? No proper way.
The plaster still hasn’t dried. Can’t dry in this damp...“Quartier pittoresque et malsain,” as the Guide Bleu said. Long after midnight she paces in her fur coat.
Where are you going, Mum? Joshua stands blinking in the hall on his way from the toilet. To a ball in her nightgown, where else? She waits till he has scurried under the sheet in the next room before she puts out all the lights.
─────
The room is crowded with people in party dress. They pass in and out. Some are out drinking on the terrace. The doors have been thrown open and the sun pours in.
Wake up, it’s Wedding Sunday! shrieks a flushed blond woman. Her nude, prominently veined arm upraised waving a chiffon scarf like a general rallying an army, she sweeps across the room, a maenad, leading a group of seedy European intellectuals in her train. They cast furtive glances at the silver trays of garnished hams being carried out on the terrace while noting the disorder in the room: the unmade bed, old magazines, castoff garments, dirty cups and full ashtrays on the floor and the furniture. It’s an artist’s room, someone explains. Little girls stand around the desk rummaging through the stacks of papers and notebooks. Their cheeks are rouged and their eyes lined with blue eyeshadow. Such little girls wearing makeup! one of the guests laughs disapprovingly. They begin to throw the papers around while from the terrace the opening bars of a piano piece come through faintly.
Just then the Bridegroom enters in black, followed by his clan, a noisy procession of bearded men to the seventh generation. They swagger and lurch about, dragging their boots, flushed and perspiring under their kaftans, they press into the room. The air has become asphyxiating, but the women keep bringing in more crystal vases with huge, waxy, odorous flowers.
The Bride is led in, heavily veiled. Jangling silver bracelets weight down her wrists and arms. She enters barefoot like a slave, reeking of ether. The Bridegroom’s clan has formed a group, the youngest squatting in the first row, the little patriarchs in the back standing on stools, they pose for a classroom picture. The Bride kneels down, her hands crossed behind her back, waiting to be beheaded while the Groom chants in a high falsetto: “You are my pride and glory! Without you I’m a beggar...” The kinsmen file past, grunting approval. Each places an iron collar around her neck till her head buckles. The Bridegroom joins kinsmen as they chant.
The Bride is placed in a coffin lined with pink satin. The Groom invites the menfolk to enjoy her in turn. All the children press around the coffin to watch. The men clamber in with their boots, the patriarch first, down to the youngest nephew, a boy with a girl’s face and the smile of a gentle clown, while the Bridegroom blows smoke rings up to the ceiling. Soft as silk, the little nephew says, and they have to drag him away. Indignant women replace the coffin lid. The wedding has been consummated. The guests adjourn to the terrace where there is a reception for a famous actress.
The children have propped up the lid of the coffin with the handle of a rake. Now the little girls climb in and out. A head suddenly emerges from the coffin to deliver a speech: “Woman is part less than human, part more than human and part human.”
The Bride and the Groom are playing “It” in the garden. She staggers around uncertainly, blindfolded, her arms stretched before her, and embraces a tree trunk passionately.
• • •
In a wall panel quite high and to the left practically behind her, a scribe or an angel is writing; perhaps a reproduction from a book, her eye caught only the gesture of the moving hand overlarge, violent...one of the Evangelists? An angel with a message for her, she persists in believing, because of his troubling presence, not bookish at all, grimacing and gesticulating to catch her attention. It’s a bearded angel with a comic Jew-face, bible in hand, that changes into a cherub on a Renaissance fountain, then a faun...
How did Ezra get in?
•
How did Ezra do it? She wonders dimly, as she walks toward the kitchen still half asleep. It’s past four. She will have a cup of tea.
How did Ezra get in, by what fraud, cunning or magic, when her door was locked? She always said no; to all men; to Ezra. Her look, her walk, the way she dressed, spoke, or kept silence, stated it clearly. She was waiting for someone else. Or perhaps for no man. She meant it when she told Ezra that she could not marry him because she was about to resolve something; she was not yet resolved. Ezra understood; it was his right to try to persuade her otherwise, to dissuade her from walking this path alone, wherever it led—she said she did not know in her confessed state of ignorance where her paths would lead. But Ez
ra was sure. She remembers only that he kept translating both her words and silences into another language, dazzling, polyglot; the foreign phrases from Greek, German, Latin, Hebrew, French; verses from the Old Testament. She was trying to make out his features in the dark: the face changing like reflections in water; the hands now in her hair, now fingers groping between blouse and skirt, skirt and slip, then lightly up her thigh; the voice, breath weaving, brushing over cheek, ears, throat; the fingers, cat-like, padding through her bush and before she knew it her palm came down over his hand and she had said, I want the real thing.
And lay smiling, pleased as if it had been done already while he asked anxiously, Are you sure you really want to, and What if I give you a baby, It hurts the first time; already driving in, having propped her up, mounted, and whispering in her ear while she clutched his head. It is not easy work deflowering a woman, he said. Then she let go, her hands falling away, her head rolling to the side, eyes open, saw the room in the sweep of a full circle: his shoe with his wallet in it on the floor to the left where her head was turned; the patch of dawning light in the window to the furthest right, and in the center Ezra straddled upright his knees hugging her ribs, tall and erect, looking out, out far, riding over miles of steppes, and still driving, she thought he would break straight through her skull, then breathing once more, breathing comfortably now, full of pleasure, the warm liquid trickling down her thigh his member slipping out, resting on her thigh, after rider and mount tumbled and fell together, and they both went to sleep.