‘What kind of love is this?’ they demanded, this love that allows terror and torture to innocent men and beasts?’ There had been loving parents in some lucky lives, of course: a few loving friends, a loving teacher or two, loving cats and dogs. A few admitted that, not clearly knowing what love meant, they had recklessly given it to all sorts of undeserving persons, and been let down, dropped, deserted, and swiftly passed over or replaced. So did this God-love have infinite meanings then – all different from anything known on earth? If so, what was the use of talking about it?
‘Time to talk or sing if we ever get to heaven!’ came a shout. ‘Right now, let’s keep our mouths shut!’
There was complete silence, so much so that the old choirmaster came back to see what had happened. ‘Are you working them up about something?’ he asked the new member. ‘If so I’ll have to ask you to leave at once. I’ve put a life’s work into training them, and I can’t afford to hear it all go for nothing. What’s more, I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind about the love-singing and even the love-talk. I’m into Justice now. Justice is the greatest thing on earth!’
‘But will you let me stay and sing with your choir a little longer?’ the young man asked.
‘That’s fair enough, of course. And I will stand and listen as hard as I can,’ said Sam, stepping from the fringe of the forest into the sunlight.
The sound he heard was like light itself – sometimes flashing up through the trees and descending again into blackness through thick leaves, and once more climbing up a scale of brilliance till it reached a sunburst of sound. Bells, flutes and cymbals like those that herald the appearance of a new king were heard, and then a second descent into the dark evening shadow moving swiftly along the ground.
‘Have they fallen on their knees to pray and praise then?’ Sam asked incredulously, peering at the men and women on the ground.
‘Not yet,’ said the new singer. ‘How on earth could they sing with tongues parched dry with thirst, with stomachs blown tight as drums with hunger?’
‘But have they sung up forgiveness to God yet?’ the old man asked.
‘No, no,’ the other answered again. ‘He will not be forgiven for a long, long time. Only when the desert is green as an orchard, when the dying children get their milk and lose the look of wizened age. Only then.’
The old choirmaster stepped forward defiantly. ‘Of course the singing sounded good,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to be different from all other singers?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ the other conceded.
‘Then what exactly are you aiming at?’ the old choirmaster went on. He had known all along that this particular singer was proud, if not actually arrogant. He had met all types in his profession – the cringing and the confident, loud-voiced braggarts and soft-voiced hypocrites, bullying voices and begging ones. Yet it was difficult to know where this particular voice fitted in. All he could vouch for was that it was a totally new and beautiful one. And so powerful it was that the man was automatically taken as leader.
The young man was silent for a while before answering Sam’s question. ‘You ask what I’m aiming at. I am helping people to forgive the Almighty One for all the terrible things He has allowed on earth – the unbelievable wretchedness and frightful pain. He has forgiven them for many things. Now they can forgive Him. He can never be human. They can never be gods, but at least they can show they are human and be proud of it.’
‘Don’t try to change my singers,’ said the old choirmaster. ‘It has taken me long enough to prevent the bending knee and that horrible, begging note.’
‘There’ll be none of that if I have anything to do with it,’ the new member assured him. ‘They must go on shouting and cursing for as long as they wish. First the God must be shown fearlessly all they have endured. Then He might be forgiven. You will let me stay a short time with your singers, then?’
Again the old choirmaster could only agree. He waited, rather jealously, to hear what other sound this newcomer would bring from his choir. The old man believed that he had heard all sounds produced by animal and human throat. But this was something else. Fearful sounds and words evoking frightful images; young men, women and children of every race sliced to the bone by guns, beheaded by bombs; the frightened breath of children waiting for doors to open in the night; the roar of the wounded lion, the scream of the trapped hare, the terrified bellow of beasts with rolling eyes, slung up for slaughter; the rumbling of earthquakes spurting from unknown depths. These were not sounds only from throat or ground. These were the sounds of Hell on earth.
The young leader lifted up his arms, urging the choir to louder and louder shouts of outrage. Then he raised his hand for silence. ‘That was excellent!’ he called. ‘You have shown a magnificent fury for the things allowed by God. Now you can show forgiveness to match!’
Again the air was filled with furious mutterings and cries of complaint.
‘You see, they are not stupid,’ the old choirmaster explained. ‘Most of the things we heard are the fault of Man. They have nothing to do with God. Anyway, He is above thanks or blame. To think anything else would be blasphemy.’
Old Sam had once hoped to be a popular preacher in a large city church with a decent stipend and a gathering of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who would listen to him with unquestioning respect. How he longed, after all these years in the wilderness, to arrive at a cool, Christian building where there was no cursing, no obscenity, no endless questions and no striving on his part to offer quickfire explanations for every single horror that had ever happened upon earth!
He sidetracked a good deal of the argument nowadays. Yet he was still left with the humiliating desire to keep on with his own nagging questions, whether directed to an angel or devil in his own mind or even to some interloper who might happen, in passing, to step out of a dark wood. He turned again to the young singer for reassurance. ‘It is the fault of human beings, isn’t it?’ he asked anxiously. ‘The old barbaric gods would have allowed these horrors, of course, but not the great, good God of Love we have prayed and sung to day after day, year in year out.’
‘I can promise great changes will come one day,’ the younger man replied.
‘One day, one year, one eternity,’ added the old choirmaster, shaking his head dolefully.
The young man smiled. He had always foreseen more doubt than hope. One had to wait aeons and aeons of time for hope. Suddenly he left the path. He entered the forest again. Black darkness hid him.
‘Is that young man gone for good?’ asked one of the singers. ‘I liked him. His standards were far too high, of course. He will never be popular.’
‘He may well come again,’ the choirmaster replied. ‘He was simply here to see the damage and the pain for himself.’
‘But who brought it on us?’ the singer asked again.
‘No doubt we brought it on ourselves,’ said the old man.
‘That is an easy answer,’ said the other.
‘Yes, I believe you’re right,’ the choirmaster agreed. ‘It would take some superhuman power to bring all the catastrophe that has occurred on earth.’
‘So that is the only answer you can find?’
‘Well, I am only human,’ said the old man. ‘And I am tired. What more can I say? For the whole of my life I have been dumbfounded.’
Hearing this, the rest of the choir circled protectively around him. They were no longer angry. Doubt was more lovable than an iron faith, they decided. This looser circle they had formed let in both light and shadow. People felt free to break away from it and to come back again, to stand still, argue or be silent, to sing in tune or discord, to listen or to stop their ears. It was no sacred circle. Those who left were not followed or persuaded by love, the binding ties of friendship or the community spirit – to come back.
Over the centuries came changing groups of singers with their choirmasters. Rules changed. Tunes changed. Hopes rose and fell. Onl
y music itself remained and the great forest of ancient trees. But every choirmaster taught his group not only how to sing, but to listen intently and to count the beat. Sometimes the songs were strident with bitterness, sometimes mellow with hope. Often for endless time there was no singing at all in the forest. But always an ardent listening for the return of a young leader hacking down branches to let in light – and for the terrible and confident crackle of His approaching footsteps over aeon upon aeon of fallen twigs.
Ilse’s House
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her novel Foreign Affairs. She has published ten novels, one collection of short stories, and a non-fiction work entitled The Language of Clothes.
Sure, I’m aware that people still theorise about why I never married Gregor Spiegelman. I can understand that Greg was a madly eligible man: good-looking, successful, charming, sexy. He reminded me of those European film stars of the thirties you see on TV reruns; he had that same suave low-key style. And then not only was he chairman of the department, he was important in his field. Everyone agreed that there were only two people in the world who knew as much as he did about Balkan economic history – some said only one.
Whereas I was just a fairly attractive young woman with a good job as a market-research analyst. It seemed kind of a fluke that I should have caught Greg, when so many had tried and failed. Women had been after him for years, ever since his marriage ended and his wife went back to Europe. I was rather pleased myself. Though I didn’t let on to anyone, privately I thought Dinah Kieran was about the luckiest girl in upstate New York.
Of course some of my friends thought Greg was way too old for me. But he didn’t look anywhere near fifty-four. His springy light-brown hair was scarcely grey at all, and he was really fit: he played squash and ran two miles every day. I didn’t see why his chronological age should bother me. Back in the past it used to be regarded as a coup to marry a man who was already established, instead of taking a chance on some untried boy like my poor old Ma did, to her lifelong regret.
A couple of people I knew said Greg was a male chauvinist, but I couldn’t see it. I wasn’t exactly a feminist then anyhow. Sure, I was for equal rights and equal pay; I was making as much as any man in my department, and I’d had to fight for that. But when one of my girlfriends started complaining about how having a chair pulled out for her in a restaurant was insulting, I got really bored. Holy God, why shouldn’t a guy treat a woman with courtesy and consideration if he felt like it?
I rather liked being Greg’s little darling, if you want to know the truth. I liked it when he helped me into my coat and gave me a secret squeeze as he settled it round me. I liked having him bring me old-fashioned presents: expensive perfume and flowers and sexy lingerie in the anemone colours that go best with my black-Irish looks: red and lavender and hot pink. I suppose he spoiled me, really, but after the kind of childhood I had there was a lot to make up for.
When we split some people blamed it on the age difference, and others said I wasn’t intellectual enough for Gregor, or mature enough. Or they said our backgrounds were too different; what that meant was that I grew up in a trailer camp and didn’t attend the right schools. Well, it ended so suddenly, that always makes talk. The date had been announced, the wedding invitations sent out, the caterer hired, the University chapel reserved – and then, two weeks before the ceremony, kaflooey, the whole thing was off.
In fact I was the one who broke it off. Everybody knew that, we didn’t make a secret of it, and the reason we gave was the real one in a way; that I didn’t want to live in Greg’s house. People thought that was completely nuts, since I’d been more or less living there for months.
Greg didn’t usually let on that I claimed his kitchen was haunted, because in his view that was just a crazy excuse. After all, I might not be an academic, as he said once, but I wasn’t an ignorant uneducated person. I had a Master’s in statistics and ought to be more rational than most women, not less. He never believed I’d really seen anything. Nobody else had had any funny experiences there, not even his hippie cleaning-lady, who believed in astrology and past lives.
You’ve got to understand, there was nothing intrinsically spooky about Greg’s house. It was the kind of place you see in ads for paint and lawn care; a big white modern Colonial, on a broad tree-lined street in Corinth Heights. Ma would have died for it. Greg bought it when he got married, and the kitchen had been totally redone before his wife left. It was a big room with lots of cupboards and all the top-of-the-line equipment anyone could want: two ovens, microwave, disposal, dishwasher, you name it. It had avocado-green striped-and-flowered wallpaper, and the stove and fridge and cupboards and counters were that same pale sick green. Not my favourite colour, and it was kind of dark in the daytime, because of the low ceiling and the pine trees growing so close. Still, it was just about the last place you’d expect to meet a ghost.
But I did see something. At least I thought I saw something. What I thought I saw was Ilse Spiegelman, Greg’s ex-wife. Of course that didn’t make any sense, because how could Ilse be a ghost if she wasn’t dead? And as far as I knew she was alive and well back in Czechoslovakia, or as well as you could be under the government they had then, and teaching at the university where Greg had met her.
She was probably better off there, he said. She’d liked his house, but she never cared much for the rest of America. Even after eight years she hadn’t really adjusted.
‘I blame myself,’ he told me once. ‘I didn’t think enough about what I was doing, taking a woman away from her country, her family, her career. I only thought of how narrow and restricted Ilse’s life was. I thought of the cold cramped two-room apartment she had to share with her sister and her parents, and how she couldn’t afford a warm winter coat or the books and journals she needed for her research. I imagined how happy and grateful she would be here, but I was wrong.’
Greg said that naturally he’d expected Ilse would soon learn English. He was born in Europe himself and only came to America when he was ten, though you’d never know it. But Ilse wasn’t good at languages, and she never got to the point where she was really comfortable in English, which made a problem when she started looking for work. Eventually she found a couple of temporary research jobs, and she did some part-time cataloguing for the library; but it wasn’t what she wanted or was used to.
After a while Ilse didn’t even try to find a job, Greg said, and she didn’t make many friends. She wasn’t as adaptable as he’d thought. In fact she turned out to be a very tense, stubborn, high-strung person, and rather selfish. When things didn’t go exactly as she liked she became touchy and withdrawn.
For instance, he said, Ilse got so she didn’t want to go places with him. A concert was possible, or a film, especially if it was in some language she knew. But she didn’t like parties. She claimed that people talked so fast she couldn’t understand them, and that they didn’t want to speak to her anyhow: she was only invited because she was Gregor’s wife. Everyone would be happier if she didn’t go, she insisted.
When Ilse stayed home she wasn’t happy either, because she imagined Greg was flirting with other women at the party. I could sort of understand how she got that idea. Greg liked women and was comfortable with them. He had a way of standing close to someone attractive and lowering his voice and speaking to her with this little quiet smile. Sometimes he would raise just his left eyebrow. It wasn’t deliberate; he couldn’t actually move the right one, because of a bicycle accident he’d had years ago; but it was devastating.
The way he talked to women even bothered me a bit at first, though I told myself it didn’t mean anything. But it made Ilse really tense and touchy. Though she must have known what a gregarious person Greg naturally was, she started trying to get him to decline invitations. And when he did persuade her to go to some party, he told me, she followed him around, holding tight to his arm. And she alwa
ys wanted to leave before he did. Well, of course that wasn’t much fun for either of them, so it’s no wonder that after a while Greg stopped trying to persuade her to come along.
When he went out alone, he said, Ilse would always wait up for him, even though he’d asked her over and over again not to. Then while she was waiting she’d open a bottle of liqueur, Amaretto or crème de menthe or something like that, and start sipping, and by the time he came home she’d be woozy and argumentative. When Greg told her it worried him to think of her drinking alone, Ilse got hysterical. ‘You have drink, at your party, why should I not have drink?’ she shouted. And when Greg pointed out to her that she had finished nearly a whole bottle of Kahlúa that had been his Christmas present from his graduate students, she screamed at him and called him a tightwad, or whatever the Czech word for that is.
Finally one evening Greg came home at about one-thirty a.m. It was completely innocent, he told me: he’d been involved in a discussion about politics and forgotten the time. At first he thought Ilse had gone to sleep, but she wasn’t in the bedroom and didn’t answer when he called. He was worried and went all round the house looking for her. Finally he went into the kitchen and turned on the light and saw her sitting on the floor, wedged into the space between the refrigerator and the wall where the brooms and mops were kept.
Greg said he asked her what she was doing there. I could hear just how his voice would have sounded: part anxious, part irritated, part jokey. But Ilse wouldn’t answer.
‘So what did you do?’ I said.
‘Nothing.’ Greg shrugged.
‘Nothing?’ I repeated. I didn’t think he would have lost his temper, because he never did; only sometimes when he was disappointed in someone or something he’d give them this kind of cold, tight look. I expected he would have looked at Ilse like that, and then hauled her out of there and helped her upstairs.
‘What could I do, darling? I knew she’d been drinking and wanted to make a scene, even though she knew how much I dislike scenes. I went upstairs and got ready for bed, and after I was almost asleep I heard her come in and fall into the other bed. Next morning she didn’t apologise or say anything about what had happened, and I thought it would be kinder not to bring it up. But that was when it became clear to me that it wasn’t going to work out for Ilse here.’
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 21