by Ilan Stavans
She had skillfully pacified life; she had taken so much care to avoid upheavals.
She had cultivated an atmosphere of serene understanding, separating each person from the others. Her clothes were clearly designed to be practical, and she could choose the evening’s film from the newspaper—and everything was done in such a manner that each day should smoothly succeed the previous one. And a blind man chewing gum was destroying all this. Through her compassion, Anna felt that life was filled to the brim with a sickening nausea.
Only then did she realize that she had passed her stop ages ago. In her weak state everything touched her with alarm. She got off the tram, her legs shaking, and looked around her, clutching the string bag stained with egg. For a moment she was unable to get her bearings. She seemed to have plunged into the middle of the night.
It was a long road, with high yellow walls. Her heart beat with fear as she tried in vain to recognize her surroundings; while the life she had discovered continued to pulsate, a gentler, more mysterious wind caressed her face. She stood quietly, observing the wall. At last she recognized it. Advancing a little farther alongside a hedge, she passed through the gates of the botanical garden.
She strolled wearily up the central avenue, between the palm trees. There was no one in the garden. She put her parcels down on the ground and sat down on the bench of a side path, where she remained for some time.
The wilderness seemed to calm her, the silence regulating her breathing and soothing her senses.
From afar she saw the avenue, where the evening was round and clear. But the shadows of the branches covered the side path.
Around her there were tranquil noises, the scent of trees, chance encounters among the creeping plants. The entire garden fragmented by the ever more fleeting moments of the evening. From whence came the drowsiness with which she was surrounded? As if induced by the drone of birds and bees. Everything seemed strange, much too gentle, much too great.
A gentle, familiar movement startled her, and she turned round rapidly. Nothing appeared to have stirred. But in the central lane there stood, immobile, an enormous cat. Its fur was soft. With another silent movement, it disappeared. Agitated, she looked about her. The branches swayed, their shadows wavering on the ground. A sparrow foraged in the soil. And suddenly, in terror, she imagined that she had fallen into an ambush. In the garden there was a secret activity in progress, which she was beginning to penetrate.
On the trees, the fruits were black and sweet as honey. On the ground lay dry fruit stones full of circumvolutions, like small rotted cerebrums. The bench was stained with purple sap. With gentle persistence, the waters murmured. On the tree trunk, the luxurious feelers of parasites fastened themselves. The rawness of the world was peaceful. The murder was deep. And death was not what one had imagined.
As well as being imaginary, this was a world to be devoured with one’s teeth, a world of voluminous dahlias and tulips. The trunks were pervaded by leafy parasites, their embrace soft and clinging. Like the resistance that precedes surrender, it was fascinating; the woman felt disgusted, and it was fascinating.
The trees were laden, and the world was so rich that it was rotting. When Anna reflected that there were children and grown men suffering hunger, the nausea reached her throat as if she were pregnant and abandoned. The moral of the garden was something different. Now that the blind man had guided her to it, she trembled on the threshold of a dark, fascinating world, where monstrous water lilies floated. The small flowers scattered on the grass did not appear to be yellow or pink but the color of inferior gold and scarlet. Their decay was profound, perfumed. But all these oppressive things she watched, her head surrounded by a swarm of insects, sent by some more refined life in the world. The breeze penetrated between the flowers. Anna imagined rather than felt its sweetened scent. The garden was so beautiful that she feared hell.
It was almost night now, and everything seemed replete and heavy; a squirrel leapt in the darkness. Under her feet the earth was soft. Anna inhaled its odor with delight. It was both fascinating and repulsive.
But when she remembered the children, before whom she now felt guilty, she straightened up with a cry of pain. She clutched the package, advanced through the dark side path, and reached the avenue. She was almost running, and she saw the garden all around her, aloof and impersonal. She shook the locked gates and went on shaking them, gripping the rough timber. The watchman appeared, alarmed at not having seen her.
Until she reached the entrance of the building, she seemed to be on the brink of disaster. She ran with the string bag to the elevator, her heart beating in her breast—what was happening? Her compassion for the blind man was as fierce as anguish, but the world seemed hers, dirty, perishable, hers. She opened the door of her flat. The room was large, square. The polished knobs were shining, the windowpanes were shining, the lamp shone brightly—what new land was this? And for a moment that wholesome life she had led until today seemed morally crazy. The little boy who came running up to embrace her was a creature with long legs and a face resembling her own. She pressed him firmly to her in anxiety and fear. Trembling, she protected herself. Life was vulnerable. She loved the world, she loved all things created, she loved with loathing. In the same way she had always been fascinated by oysters, with that vague sentiment of revulsion that the approach of truth provoked, admonishing her. She embraced her son, almost hurting him. Almost as if she knew of some evil—the blind man or the beautiful botanical garden—she was clinging to him, to him whom she loved above all things. She had been touched by the demon of faith.
“Life is horrible,” she said to him in a low voice, as if famished. What would she do if she answered the blind man’s call? She would go alone . . . There were poor and rich places that needed her. She needed them. “I am afraid,” she said. She felt the delicate ribs of the child between her arms. She heard his frightened weeping.
“Mummy,” the child called. She held him away from her. She studied his face and her heart shrank.
“Don’t let Mummy forget you,” she said. No sooner had the child felt her embrace weaken than he escaped and ran to the door of the room, from where he watched her more safely. It was the worst look that she had ever received. The blood rose hot to her cheeks.
She sank into a chair, with her fingers still clasping the string bag. What was she ashamed of? There was no way of escaping. The very crust of the days she had forged had broken and the water was escaping. She stood before the oysters. And there was no way of averting her gaze. What was she ashamed of? Certainly it was no longer pity; it was more than pity: her heart had filled with the worst will to live.
She no longer knew if she was on the side of the blind man or of the thick plants. The man, little by little, had moved away, and in her torment she appeared to have passed over to the side of those who had injured his eyes. The botanical garden, tranquil and high, had been a revelation. With horror, she discovered that she belonged to the strong part of the world, and what name should she give to her fierce compassion? Would she be obliged to kiss the leper, since she would never be just a sister? “A blind man has drawn me to the worst of myself,” she thought, amazed. She felt banished because no pauper would drink water from her burning hands. Ah! It was easier to be a saint than a person! Good heavens, then was it not real, that pity that had fathomed the deepest waters in her heart? But it was the compassion of a lion.
Humiliated, she knew that the blind man would prefer a poorer love. And, trembling, she also knew why. The life of the botanical garden summoned her as a werewolf is summoned by the moonlight. “Oh! But she loved the blind man,” she thought with tears in her eyes. Meanwhile, it was not with this sentiment that one would go to church. “I am frightened,” she whispered alone in the room. She got up and went to the kitchen to help the maid prepare dinner.
But life made her shiver like the cold of winter. She heard the school bell pealing, distant and constant. The small horror of the dust gathering in threads
around the bottom of the stove, where she had discovered a small spider. Lifting a vase to change the water—there was the horror of the flower submitting itself, languid and loathsome, to her hands. The same secret activity was going on here in the kitchen. Near the waste bin, she crushed an ant with her foot. The small murder of the ant. Its minute body trembled. Drops of water fell on the stagnant water in the pool.
The summer beetles. The horror of those expressionless beetles. All around there was a silent, slow, insistent life. Horror upon horror. She went from one side of the kitchen to the other, cutting the steaks, mixing the cream. Circling around her head, around the light, the flies of a warm summer’s evening. A night in which compassion was as crude as false love. Sweat trickled between her breasts. Faith broke her; the heat of the oven burned in her eyes. Then her husband arrived, followed by her brothers and their wives, and her brothers’ children.
They dined with all the windows open, on the ninth floor. An airplane shuddered menacingly in the heat of the sky. Although she had used few eggs, the dinner was good. The children stayed up, playing on the carpet with their cousins. It was summer and it would be useless to force them to go to sleep. Anna was a little pale and laughed gently with the others.
After dinner, the first cool breeze finally entered the room. The family was seated around the table, tired after their day, happy in the absence of any discord, eager not to find fault. They laughed at everything, with warmth and humanity. The children grew up admirably around them. Anna took the moment like a butterfly between her fingers, before it might escape forever.
Later, when they had all left and the children were in bed, she was just a woman looking out of the window. The city was asleep and warm. Would the experience unleashed by the blind man fill her days? How many years would it take before she once more grew old? The slightest movement on her part and she would trample one of her children. But with the ill will of a lover, she seemed to accept that the fly would emerge from the flower, and the giant water lilies would float in the darkness of the lake. The blind man was hanging among the fruits of the botanical garden.
What if that were the stove exploding, with the fire spreading through the house, she thought to herself as she ran to the kitchen, where she found her husband in front of the spilled coffee.
“What happened?” she cried, shaking from head to foot. He was taken aback by his wife’s alarm. And suddenly understanding, he laughed.
“It was nothing,” he said. “I am just a clumsy fellow.” He looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes.
But, confronted by the strange expression on Anna’s face, he studied her more closely. Then he drew her to him in a sudden caress.
“I don’t want anything ever to happen to you!” she said.
“You can’t prevent the stove from having its little explosions,” he replied, smiling. She remained limp in his arms. This afternoon, something tranquil had exploded, and in the house everything struck a tragicomedic note.
“It’s time to go to bed,” he said. “It’s late.” In a gesture that was not his but that seemed natural, he held his wife’s hand, taking her with him, without looking back, removing her from the danger of living.
The giddiness of compassion had spent itself. And if she had crossed love and its hell, she was now combing her hair before the mirror, without any world for the moment in her heart. Before getting into bed, as if she were snuffing a candle, she blew out that day’s tiny flame.
Inside My Dirty Head—The Holocaust
MOACYR SCLIAR (1937–2011)
Translated from the Portuguese by Eloah F. Giacomelli
Prolific and prodigious, Scliar had a lighthearted style and an enchanting voice that recalls the art of Sholem Aleichem. But the tone in this extraordinary tale from the collection The Enigmatic Eye (1989) is dark, ironic. As in Victor Perera’s “Kindergarten,” events are told from a child’s point of view. At its center is an obsession with tattooed concentration camp numbers as a sign of personal identity and also a sense that, after the Holocaust, the world has been invaded by impostors. Compared with Szichman’s “Remembrances of Things Future,” the focus here is, in Joseph Brodsky’s words, “the dance of the ghosts of memory.” Scliar is also the author of Max and the Cats (1989) and Kafka’s Leopards (2011). His Collected Stories appeared in 1999.
INSIDE MY DIRTY head, the Holocaust is like this:
I’m an eleven-year-old boy. Small, skinny. And dirty. Oh boy, am I ever dirty! A stained T-shirt, filthy pants, grimy feet, hands, and face: dirty, dirty. But this external dirt is nothing compared to the filth I have inside my head. I harbor nothing but evil thoughts. I’m mischievous. I use foul language. A dirty tongue, a dirty head. A filthy mind. A sewer inhabited by toads and poisonous scorpions.
My father is appalled. A good man, my father is. He harbors nothing but pure thoughts. He speaks nothing but kind words. Deeply religious; the most religious man in our neighborhood. The neighbors wonder how such a kind, pious man could have such a wicked son with such a bad character. I’m a disgrace to the family, a disgrace to the neighborhood, a disgrace to the world. Me and my dirty head.
My father lost some of his brothers and sisters in the Holocaust. When he talks about this, his eyes well up with tears. It’s now 1949; the memories of World War II are still much too fresh. Refugees from Europe arrive in the city; they come in search of relatives and friends that might help them. My father does what he can to help these unfortunate people. He exhorts me to follow his example, although he knows that little can be expected from someone with such a dirty head. He doesn’t know yet what is in store for him. Mischa hasn’t materialized yet.
One day Mischa materializes. A diminutive, slightly built man with a stoop; on his arm, quite visible, a tattooed number—the number assigned to him in a concentration camp. He arouses pity, poor fellow. His clothes are in tatters. He sleeps in doorways.
Learning about this distressing situation, my father is filled with indignation: Something must be done about it. One can’t leave a Jew in this situation, especially when he is a survivor of the Nazi massacre. He calls the neighbors to a meeting. I want you to attend it, he says to me (undoubtedly hoping that I’ll be imbued with the spirit of compassion. I? The kid with the dirty head? Poor Dad).
The neighbors offer to help. Each one will contribute a monthly sum; with this money Mischa will be able to get accommodation in a rooming house, buy clothes, and even go to a movie once in a while.
They announce their decision to the diminutive man, who, with tears in his eyes, gushes his thanks. Months go by. Mischa is now one of us. People take turns inviting him to their homes. And they invite him because of the stories he tells them in his broken Portuguese. Nobody can tell stories like Mischa. Nobody can describe like him the horrors of the concentration camp, the filth, the promiscuity, the diseases, the agony of the dying, the brutality of the guards. Listening to him brings tears to everybody’s eyes . . .
Well, not to everybody’s. Not to mine. I don’t cry. Because of my dirty head, of course. Instead of crying, instead of flinging myself upon the floor, instead of clamoring to heaven as I listen to the horrors he narrates, I keep asking myself questions. Questions like: Why doesn’t Mischa speak Yiddish like my parents and everybody else? Why does he stand motionless and silent in the synagogue while everybody else is praying?
Such questions, however, I keep to myself. I wouldn’t dare ask anybody such questions; neither do I voice any of the things that my dirty head keeps imagining. My dirty head never rests; day and night, always buzzing, always scheming . . .
I start imagining this: One day another refugee, Avigdor, materializes in the neighborhood. He too comes from a concentration camp; unlike Mischa, however, he doesn’t tell stories. And I keep imagining that this Avigdor is introduced to Mischa; and I keep imagining that they detest each other at first sight, even though at one time they were fellow sufferers. I imagine them one night seated at the table in our house. We’re ha
ving a party; there are lots of people. Then suddenly—a scene that my dirty head has no difficulty devising—someone suggests that the two men have an arm-wrestling match.
(Why arm wrestling? Why should two puny little men, who in the past almost starved to death, put their strength against each other? Why? Why, indeed? Ask my dirty head why.)
So, there they are, the two, arm against arm; tattooed arm against tattooed arm; nobody has noticed anything. But I have—thanks, of course, to my dirty head.
The numbers are the same.
“Look,” I shout, “the numbers are the same!”
At first, everybody stares at me, bewildered; then they realize what I’m talking about and see for themselves: Both men have the same number. Mischa has turned livid. Avigdor rises to his feet. He too is pale, but his rage soon makes his face and neck break out in red blotches. With unsuspected strength, he grabs Mischa by the arm; he drags him to a bedroom, forces him to go in, then closes the door behind them. Only my dirty head knows what is going on there, for it is my head that has created Avigdor, it is my head that has given Avigdor this extraordinary strength, it is my head that has caused him to open and shut the door, and it is in my head that this door exists. Avigdor is interrogating Mischa and finding out that Mischa has never been a prisoner anywhere, that he is not even a Jew; he is merely a crafty Ukrainian who had himself tattooed and who made up the whole story in order to exploit Jews.