December
Hussein is making the demand that the territories occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War be returned to the Palestinians.
It is so easy now, in the safety of my study, to think about ways she might have escaped. I have a book which tells me in black and white which route of escape was successful. But nothing was so clear at that moment in history. Any decision might be the wrong decision.
December
I have finally found a book of poems by Mahmoud Darweesh, the Palestinian poet Shirley told me about.
Perhaps if she had dropped her brushes a few pages earlier. Perhaps if she had made what now seems so clear was the right decision, and escaped into the mountains. Yet, as I place myself in her shoes, I can feel the passion of her work. It is a work that will not be interrupted.
December
Shirley told me he is very close to Arafat and has written some of the famous statements of the PLO.
I am imagining her state of mind as she worked. The story of her mother’s suicide is still ringing in her ears. It is as if a mirror has shattered. None of the fragments of who she is or who her mother was will come together. And who is her father now, this father who has lied to her? She dips her brush into cerulean blue and strokes a river into place, the river where the first Charlotte drowned.
December
They read their poems together from the same platform at a conference in Rotterdam.
Bit by bit she reconstructs her world. The line of her father’s mouth the day he returned from the concentration camp. Paulinka’s strange smile as she gazed at Wolfsohn. Her own sadness folded into the contours of the house of her childhood. Each image is like a tiny flame and she is drawn into this light which, if once it was like the dying embers at the site of a conflagration, is now the first sign of new life.
December
Before the reading, at their first meeting, Darweesh greeted her in Hebrew.
As slowly the mirror reassembles, the clarity of her vision sharpens. Hasty thoughts thrown to cover the gaping place where something she seems to have always known yet had no words for pulling her down into a spiral, throwing the composition into chaos, disperse now and the pattern of meaning becomes clear. The atmosphere of the room, her paint, the canvas, brush are charged with excitement, and this, despite all that goes on around her, borders on joy.
December
That haunting image from the First World War. German and English soldiers meeting between the trenches to celebrate Christmas.
The colors she used are still vibrant. You can go to see her work today in the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam. The ocean so blue near Nice. The air filled with the most brilliant light. The war raged on, she wrote, and there I sat by the sea and saw deeply into people’s hearts.
December
The sense of absurdity which descended between the wars. One can well understand it. The fashionable debauchery of that time, which Hemingway records in The Sun Also Rises. My mother grew up in this atmosphere. Adulated her parents. Said when they would dress up to go out drinking they looked like movie stars. Her alcoholism part of the history of war.
After she liberated herself from her private history, what would this young, newly delivered life become? There was not enough time to know. Except to say that in the end what one might call a private history is not so private after all. Though I was born in another country, Charlotte’s story reaches as if into the recesses of my own secrets. And I am wondering now, do any of us have enough time?
December
As with any of the stories in the book, I have had to read and write and tell Charlotte’s story many times. Only by doing this does it become mine.
I would like to end the book here but I cannot. It is fitting that I treat Charlotte’s story as a war story. She died in the holocaust. Now, nuclear holocaust makes us all targets of war. But there is also the soldier’s story.
December
It is a delicate balance, telling someone else’s story, entering another life, identifying, feeling as this other might have felt, and yet remaining aware that a boundary exists over which one cannot step.
Soldiers continue to wage war in the old way. Yes, the technologies are increasingly sophisticated. But still there are those who place their bodies in the way of weapons and aim their own weapons at others. And what is even more true is that the idea of the soldier remains as a fixture of all our thought, so that in some way each of us is both civilian and soldier. In the full understanding of ourselves, the story of the soldier is also our own.
December
Writing about one’s own life, it is only when one writes about the most intimate and seemingly idiosyncratic details that one touches others.
What I wanted above all in this last chapter was to render a portrait of the war story, and to do this by portraying the storyteller. And so I thought of Ernest Hemingway.
December
Is this because it is private and hidden feelings one longs to hear expressed?
In the beginning I did not know that Hemingway’s real experience in warfare had been exaggerated as part of his public image. He served in the ambulance corps in Italy near the end of the First World War. He was under fire in that war only once and then just for a few minutes before he was wounded in the leg; he spent the remainder of the war in a hospital.
December
I like the feeling of intimacy in a journal. Pajamas. Unmade bed. Breakfast dishes. Body smells.
Yet, even so, it was not so much the documentation of the experience of the soldier I wanted as the creation of the myth. And for this Hemingway was perfect. He created a legend in which he performed the principal and heroic role.
December
The starched uniform of the soldier a counterbalance to the terrible intimacy of ruptured flesh.
Hemingway’s literary style became the voice for the Lost Generation, a term which described the generation that had come of age during the Great War and been embittered by it. But as I came of age, his voice embodied the masculine ideal. Laconic. Tough. Tight-jawed. Humphrey Bogart was the perfect actor to play one of his heroes in To Have and Have Not.
December
Hemingway’s great influence on our generation. The language. That story David Lueck told me (cut from the fifth chapter). How as a boy he hung a map of the battlefields of World War II in his room. (His hero, Douglas MacArthur.) Before he was twenty-one, he was fighting in Korea, and, while he was there, reading—A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway was the paradigmatic American writer, fishing in the waters off Havana, or, his beret pulled slightly lower on one side, cigarette in his mouth, typing his latest account of a bullfight or recreating the landscape of a battlefield from memory.
January 1991
In one way it seems strange to be going on vacation now. In midwinter, mid-crisis, to a warm, lush island in the Pacific Ocean.
There were many coincidental connections between Charlotte’s and Hemingway’s story.
January
Looking at the surface of the sea, one would never guess at all that lies underneath.
January
Continually, a sweet scent in the air. Shedding clothes, tensions, fears. Everything sways here like the ocean. So evident, a maternal feel to the earth. My body bellying out, because of age, health returning. I like the feel of it. Breast heavy.
January
Reading Hemingway in the midst of all this. Detect a sharply divided response to pleasure in him.
January
A beauty that tears one open.
January
We watch the news. Every day brings us closer to the deadline for an invasion.
January
Feeling close to the origin of existence here. Mud on the slope, palm fronds on the path smeared with it, lizards, ancient land animals, creatures in the sea looking like pure protoplasm, earliest ancestors.
January
So much childbirth in Hemingway’s stories. Especially in his wa
r stories.
January
Eating breakfast in our room, we watch the Senate debate on television. Senator from New Jersey offers an eloquent argument for extending the period of economic sanctions. Meeting violence without violence!
January
The vote taken while we slept, we wake to find that Congress has given the President the right to declare war immediately after the fifteenth.
January
A turtle swims to shore just a few yards from us. I’ve never seen one so close. But it moves too slowly. A man on the beach tells us all the turtles on this beach have some kind of tumor.
January
On the news channel they show men training with live ammunition in the desert at night, the landscape lit with greenish floodlights and shell bursts. It looks like the moon.
January
Going home now, I don’t want to lose this feeling of ease in my body, as if the sea and land have come into me.
January
The day of the deadline. Picking us up, my daughter says she wants to leave the airport as soon as possible. Everyone is anxious now about terrorism. Suddenly it occurs to me even she could be a casualty.
January
I can’t believe it. We are at war. The phone rings as I am unpacking. Joanna says fire has been exchanged. I run upstairs to the television. A reporter is describing bombs being dropped in Baghdad. I sit stunned on the edge of the bed. Can this really be happening?
January
A feeling of horror spreads through my body, a cold and shivering sickness. Scud missiles falling on Israel.
January
More Scuds. So far none of them chemical. I think of Shirley. Then I remember what she told me. Her fear Israel would use nuclear weapons, and now I am terrified too. They are wearing gas masks in Israel. And I am holding my breath here.
January
Looking out the window. Sunlight. That warmth in midwinter we often have here. But my eyes will not take in the light because inwardly I am thinking, “This could be the end, the last of it,” and I feel myself turn away.
January
All day on the news they repeat the same stories. What is it they are not telling us? They claim they are only bombing military targets in Iraq. But that is always the claim.
January
A reporter in Iraq hears children screaming from the bomb shelters, the ceaseless noise and terror of it all having shattered them.
January
I wake and just as I have for the last several days turn on the television for news. But there are only game shows and cartoons. What is happening? I feel betrayed. Enraged. Something I need to know is being kept from me.
February
I am thinking of Käthe Kollwitz. Her summer house in the Harz Mountains was so close to Dora where the V-2 rockets were produced, and she knew nothing of that.
January
The lie between two lovers that sours everything. A lie told by a government which must be repeated by so many, some implicated, some naive, knowing but not knowing, denying. So the disintegration of perception itself.
February
Included among “military” targets in Iraq: telephone and communications offices, gas companies, bridges inside cities, factories of all kinds.
January
The degradation of lies. The staleness of it. Fetid. Against this just the sensation of air rushing over skin, into the lungs. A bath.
January
A diagram of a bunker built under Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace. In antiquity a city was defended at its perimeter. Now the defenders go underground or into the air to continue waging war while cities above and beneath them are destroyed.
January
Planes equipped with computer images which flash over the windows directing vector, guns, bombs. The pilot sees colored arrows, coordinates, maps. What is outside the window hardly concerns him any more.
January
A man over the radio suggests that if there were one death for every sortie there could be 44,000. But does every sortie drop bombs on civilians? I try to add up the numbers but these are hopeless calculations.
January
We take a day out from the war. I stay in bed with a sore throat, aching muscles. We make love. Is it still possible to do such a thing? To feel pleasure? Tenderness?
January
Words an extension of the body. Like hands or feet. Used for so many purposes. To escape or come near. As weapons. Celebration. Identification. This is who I am. I am my story.
January
They are calling the bombings “surgical strikes.” Image of a doctor wearing a white mask leaning with his scalpel drawn over Baghdad. Or they talk about “collateral damage,” meaning marginal. I think of the margins of the Bayeux tapestry into which women embroidered broken bits of bodies injured in the Norman conquest.
January
I can feel myself holding back, falling into silence. As if trying to mute my own intelligence. Words become obscene. I want to retrieve that small animal inside, the howling, the whimpering.
February
Fresh-faced young men. Malleable. Not knowing yet who they are. But still caught in the old story which just now begins to define them.
February
Code name “Desert Storm.” As if it were all a secret. How would you translate “Desert Storm”? A storm in the deserted place at the core of the self?
February
That story I read in the Bay Guardian about an attempted murder. One man meets another man on the weekend, sleeps with him, then suddenly finds himself being stabbed. Says he will not forget the look in his assailant’s face at that moment. As if he weren’t there. Vacant. Empty.
February
Struggling against despair.
February
For just a moment as the Cold War began to break apart it seemed to me that a door opened. But now the door seems to close again. And I want to stand up and shout, “Look, look. There it is. Something unexpected. Take the first step.”
February
Can the words here reflect the mood? Even more unfinished. Ragged. In a certain way, torn.
February
In the afternoon, resting, we read to each other from a novel I read as a child; it gave me comfort then, to know I was not alone in the turbulence of my life. What are they reading now in Iraq? Mesopotamia. Cradle of civilization. Sumer. Birthplace of writing.
February
If I tell myself this is the way it has always been and always will be, I escape the pain of it.
February
Everything terrible in my childhood repeated itself at least once until it created a pattern that was seared into memory, and response.
February
How to tell a story without fashioning it along the prefabricated lines? As a nation, we are immersed in an old story and cannot see what is happening. Once again we picture ourselves as the liberating army. And this layered over a still older story. Man as warrior. The archetypal glory of the hero.
January
Today is the first day since the war began that I read the book review page in the Times. In this memoir Charles Scribner, Jr., refers to Hemingway’s great insecurity about his masculinity. Gender enmeshed in the predictable narration of our destruction. Bush worrying about the “wimp factor.” Trying to show his strength.
February
Suddenly I understand the news clipping Nan gave me several days ago. Pilots preparing to drop bombs in the gulf war were actually watching pornographic films just before they left in sorties. It has existed for a long time, an objectified relationship with women, as part of the training by which young men offer themselves to kill or be killed. It is in the Iliad. Achilles’s anger. The reason he absented himself from the first days of battle. Because Agamemnon stole his possession, a woman he had captured in an earlier battle and kept as his prize.
February
What David Lueck told me happened in Korea. About how he and the am
bulance driver picked up two young Korean women, prostitutes, and brought them to the front. They were hungry. The men lined up to go into the back of the ambulance with them. Years later, he was sickened by his participation. Even that night, he crept back to give them winter jackets. “Softheartedness,” he said, “not a trait men in combat wish to admit having.”
February
Today in the papers they talk about an arsenal of weapons possessed by both the U. S. and Iraq which will create the effect of nuclear weapons without radiation. A burned-out crater in place of a small village.
February
Smart bombs are aimed at Baghdad, but Basra, which is a military headquarters and closer to the sea, gets ordinary bombs. Meaning they cannot be aimed, meaning there can be no attempt to avoid dropping them on civilians.
Basra, fabled site of the Garden of Eden.
February
Dream. I am a refugee during the Second World War, a Jew, trying to escape the holocaust. I have a little dog called Bifra. I leave it behind and it falls into the hands of a Polish man who is a Nazi collaborator. He names the dog Bisra. Then I awake with the word BASRA on my lips.
February
Massive bombing of the trenches where Iraqi soldiers are holed up in bunkers. Now the soldiers have become like civilians, huddled in the ground, frightened, with utterly no way to defend themselves.
February
Faced with the hopelessness of these circumstances, I can feel within me the temptation to insulate myself as my father did. To pretend nothing touches me and fabricate an expression of cheerfulness. Or to become cynical, like my mother when she drank.
February
Despite the war, I feel I must get back to work. I’m glad to have this daily task now. To struggle with the shapes of sentences. Perhaps from a web of language, language is the only way out.
February
I am trying to continue where I left off in the text. But perhaps this will never be possible. In a book review today I read that any sight, any sentence, any event to which one is exposed leaves a permanent impression. The brain is changed forever. Of course Whitman knew this when he wrote, “A boy went out one day and all he beheld he became.”
It fascinates me that the lives of Charlotte and Hemingway touch in so many ways. Like Hemingway, Charlotte’s teacher and lover had been in the ambulance corps in the First World War, where both men were wounded. Both men used their experiences in the war in their work. Did Hemingway, like Wolfsohn, suffer from a kind of shell shock? The question is controversial. If Hemingway was traumatized, it was a subtle trauma, one inflicted not by war alone, I suspect, and at the same time one he shared with many other men.
A Chorus of Stones Page 31