The Wall
Page 2
This, then, is the paradoxical hell that Arthur inhabits: because he did not die, he cannot live, and because he is alive, he cannot properly commemorate the experience of those who died, for he did not share that experience in full. And yet he must go on, for only then can he write the works that will contain some part of the lives that were lost. Add to this classic formulation of survivor’s guilt the fact that Adler also suffers the exile’s plight of living a rootless and discontinuous life, and one sees the extent to which The Wall encompasses two great cataclysms of the twentieth century: forced deportation and permanent exile. “Whoever loses his home against his will, simply because he has been expelled by the powers that want to annihilate him,” Arthur muses, “cannot return alone to the site of expulsion as one who happened to be saved from joining the fellowship of the murdered, no matter the reasons that move him.” Given such duress, Adler’s heroic journey is one that arrives at the barest of reconciliations, one in which he realizes, “I simply have to be, because I am.” Paltry as this may seem, there is a certain victory in it, for though Arthur remains “a survivor, condemned to cling to a signpost in the deadly snowstorm of misery,” he stands at that same post with his wife and two children while wielding the tools of his trade—namely words, which Adler, too, wielded (in novels, stories, poems, essays, and scholarly studies) in an effort to both invoke and stave off the demons that he had involuntarily been assigned by fate.
Czeslaw Milosz, another enduring exile of the twentieth century, ends his “Ars Poetica?” ironically by saying:
What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
It is a sentiment that will also serve well the reader in approaching The Wall, for despite the anxiety and despair that so often suffuse Arthur Landau, threatening to derail his every foray into the unknown, he battles on in “the hope that good spirits, not evil ones,” will choose him for their instrument. Indeed, Arthur may be “broken,” but he knows, too, that “you have to be able to feel broken and yet not damn the world, to not become callous, not hate your neighbor, not the guilty, for they are your neighbors. You can’t separate them from those who are not guilty. Doubt and lack of faith are two very different things. Beware the one who exchanges one for the other, or mixes them up!” In like manner, Adler’s symphonic novel is composed in the faith that light will somehow prevail within such darkness, its source being the consciousness that binds together its major and minor notes, its themes and variations, its Kafkaesque poise amid inscrutable suffering before the wall of time.
PETER FILKINS
April 7, 2013
THE WALL
A BLACK PLUME OF SMOKE FROM THE SQUAT CHIMNEY DRIFTS AT AN ANGLE over the factories, invading the neighborhood near MacKenzie’s, where cars are overhauled and rebuilt, the smoke moving heavy and thick through the streets. Ron, the old ragman, thin with a pinched face, pushes his cart wearily along the sidewalk like a mobile cage and then stands awkwardly before our house as he has done each week for years, ever since Johanna gave him a huge box of old clothes, which delighted him, even though the weight nearly brought him to his knees, while we were happy to be free of that junk, he becoming our benefactor in taking it off our hands, rather than just a ragman. Santi, the aging yellow hound from Simmonds’s vegetable stand, wanders lazily about, barks suddenly for no apparent reason, and then shuffles silently along. With shopping bags swaying, women from the neighborhood gather together, stand for a while and lose themselves in meaningless talk until they suddenly separate, parting with an unexplained sharp laugh that disappears abruptly. In the distance, where the train heads west into the countryside, a whistle blows, as if announcing the joy of any kind of journey away from here.
It all goes as usual and is familiar, for it’s been more than seven years since we first settled here. Not in this city, and certainly not in this country, nor even really in this part of town, but just in the immediate surroundings of this neighborhood, here on West Park Row, where we live in a tiny single-family house, as well as around the corner on Truro Street and among the neighboring streets, corners, and squares with their open greens and playgrounds, all of it within a ten-minute radius. We know the entire area, but that which is closest and the most familiar is no farther away than twice the reach of a good strong voice. Here is where we live, adrift and tolerated, comfortable despite everything, almost well liked as old-timers, as they say, us not even knowing whether we have settled in a major city or a village. If anything, it feels like living in the countryside, for it’s hard to imagine that distant neighborhoods are even attached to this same place.
There are several reasons for this. If you want to visit another part of the city, then you pull yourself together, say goodbye, hop into a car, or onto the bus, or even onto a train, and you are quickly whisked away from familiar surroundings. Because here on West Park Row and for miles around us, we are strangers; the few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away. We rarely see them, some of them never, others hardly more than once a year, and only a few more than once a month.
It’s as if we were foreigners, as if we lived in a foreign country, although with each passing year more people in the neighborhood greet us and even know our names. Michael and Eva also play with children from the neighborhood. One might even think that we were almost on intimate terms with the people to the left and right of us, with the salesclerks where we buy our groceries and little daily items, and with a few others. Yet these relations don’t reach very far and are certainly not that deep. There’s us, then there’s others. Maybe just a passing glance, festoons of particular greetings and intricately woven exchanges, certain rites that amount to simple human interaction, sometimes even full of warmth and fellow feeling, yet passed from mouth to mouth without consequence, one hand reaching out to another. It goes without saying that people in the neighborhood have their own ideas about us, and some of them share them with one another, but we cast a blind eye to it. For we don’t think twice when we also talk about the neighbors and others in our own everyday terms, if only rarely, and in mere fleeting snippets of conversation fed by nasty gossip.
This is a humble neighborhood. For the most part, it houses workers and clerks who have no real wealth but are not at all accustomed to misery, people whose aspirations we might guess at but will never fathom, destinies that, for us transplants from afar, melt together indistinguishably among all that is foreign, no matter how unique or special they may actually prove to be inside the circles we are forbidden to enter. Two groups, however, remain clearly separate. There are the families on our side of the street, who, along with the abutters on Truro Street and farther on in that direction, make up a stretch of better appointed houses inhabited by more well-to-do solidly bourgeois citizens. Then there are the people across from us (to the left of MacKenzie’s), who don’t live in badly built and somewhat uncomfortable, yet indeed quite cozy, single-family dwellings like us but instead occupy two sprawling apartment complexes with smooth, spacious courtyards that, at first glance, look almost friendly and inviting but on closer inspection betray a cold, boxed-in, narrow feel. Most of the people over there, which must amount to nearly a thousand, probably don’t make less than the heads of the families on our side, but no one here would consider them to be the same class. One has to admit, though, that the kids over there get up to much worse mischief than do our own. Many of the boys run wild, others hang about or sleep away their time, the children often running about filthy, the sucking of sweets and poisonous ice-cream treats never ending. Also, the language used in unattended courtyards and the noises that one hears there are different. For us, the tolerated, there is no reason to look down on these shiftless and nonetheless well-meaning folk, though we take pride in not wanting anything to do with the neighborhoods opposite us, where t
he sounds of family life and the blare of foul-sounding radios pressing through thin walls and down narrow hallways never allows you to escape your neighbors.
The village in which we live is neither beautiful nor charming, yet for us it’s tolerable, because no one bothers us. Also, there is enough light, the chimney is not too noisy, and the area has open spaces to escape to, the largest being Shepherd’s Field, an open space for romping around that is just a few minutes away from our house. In addition, there is available for both grown-ups and children four parks that offer, before they close at sunset, more freedom than one would expect in a major city. Our neighborhood—surprisingly, given that it’s next to MacKenzie’s—is almost free of traffic. Only through Truro Street, where our only bus runs, do long lines of cars pass, West Park Row being more often abuzz with children’s voices than from any other hustle and bustle.
Nonetheless, it took a while to settle in here. Johanna winced when, after some years in a much more well-heeled part of the city, she found something for us here, it being a place that didn’t bewilder me like everything else in this country and also this city, where everything was new for me. No matter where I went, I was a newcomer who could make out only the basic outline of things, myself familiar with nothing, a stranger, acting whatever way I wanted, wrapped up in myself, though also pressing forth from my inwardness with the manner of a salesman who hawks the gaudy wares of his heart for all the world to see and who forgets that perhaps no one really wants them, though it never bothered me if someone turned up his nose at my treasures, for many others appeared eager to buy them. The world felt as if it stood behind glass, and I myself felt as if I were made of glass, but everything consisted of a delicate glass, alive and sinuous, yet fragile, everything peculiarly at odds with itself, subtly transparent, and yet also impenetrable, more to be looked at than comprehended, and nonetheless alien, alien, an inner trust at last slowly deducible only after dogged, constant efforts to feel it.
I was almost done in; there had to be a way out. Now I wanted to blossom. The mortal wound, from which I had not recovered, I either denied or assumed was healed, powerfully striding forth, though less sensitive men would have been frightened, but somehow I was protected from realizing that back then. Johanna, who was busy setting up the house and was otherwise busy with a number of things, looked at me with concern, but I seemed so carefree and relaxed that she yielded, more indulgent than concerned, to the all-consuming fits I would throw about all the useful and harmful borders set up by society, during which she would shrink from me without my noticing. However, daily items such as food, clothing, and shelter had become so precious and expensive, all I could do was be amazed, though I was never worried. I thought the money to pay for what we needed would somehow appear; even though there was no guarantee, if I just kept at it, then everything would work out. Johanna, meanwhile, offered up whatever she could as alms to purchase what we needed. She saw how happy it made me, and so she found inventive ways to make use of her meager funds and hard-earned savings. Thus my burdens were eased, and I enjoyed the feel of life blossoming again in what Johanna had done for us, and, with full wallets holding out to me ever more profligate promises, I could confidently let go of the idea of regaining a small bit of wealth preserved for me for many years in America.
I was constantly restless. Neither earlier nor later in life was it as easy for me to remain so consistently creative. I loved my work, for it was new and came to me so easily that it never occurred to me that others might not understand it or find it difficult or wouldn’t agree with it. However, that’s not quite what happened, and thus seeds of doubt were planted, for others listened quite attentively—or so at first it seemed to me—to what I had to say about my research and findings, but then I unfortunately did not realize that though they expressed amazement at what I had to say, they were not interested at all in what I had to say. My self-deception only grew as a result of the effect people had on me in the postwar years, as both the educated and the half-educated desired an affront to their own conscience, which is what I offered, whether I wanted to or not, for what I said felt like a shower of repentance flooding down upon them. Thus, people wanted to hear what I had to say and yet none had to take it seriously; they wanted to listen, but didn’t have to think anything more about the content, which then made it easy for them to shower me with approval as long as there was no cost to them. People felt a deep guilt and lusted after the chance to whip their injured senses through a kind of filtered horror, even if, though it was not my intent, they did so in such a merciless, skillful manner through me.
The little house on West Park Row was like a little volcano that held me inside and felt good to me. There I could work and gather my powers until they overflowed. But should I erupt and through my actions cast raging fire and glowing ash upon people, then terror was let loose and others had to defend themselves. For who indeed dared to consciously provoke me? It was a vain, indeed sick new beginning! Yet I couldn’t help myself, and, unfortunately, there was no one who could intercede between me and others. There was no such balance, and in the following years this sealed my fate. When today I look back at my life in this country, I have to admit that I am burned out, and the comparison to a volcano is somewhat close to the truth. But in the end one should never think in terms of metaphors, for they can drive you crazy. Much has changed over the years, and I’ve carried myself differently for some time now. By now, most of them have forgotten about me, those for whom back then my existence was a sensation that caused a real stir. Now I’m only dormant. However, a monument to my past actions I am not.
Rather, everything around me, whether human or concrete, has become perfidious, everything and everyone—except Johanna, the blesséd and ever-devoted companion, the woman, the incomparable essence at the heart of it all. How can one such creature alone encompass, and I really mean encompass, so much inside herself? There is a bounteousness in her that hardly any one person could contain, something so multifaceted and rich, yet hardly comprehensible. What can I say? It’s simply incomprehensible! When I really think about it, Johanna is everything I am, for I do not exist, only she does. She props me up and stands by me, she brings together many different sides of me, something that allowed me to exist again, that put me back together and taught me and gave me a name and made me whole.
It’s unimaginable to me what would remain of Arthur Landau without Johanna, because I have ceased to exist, called it quits, am completely spent, the vestige of a memory of who I no longer am, maybe even a message from nowhere, someone who can never find his footing, never land in one place. Other people are just as dubious, I am at least aware of that, but I never even rise to the level of a dubious existence, the fragile bearing of a single nature, because I am homeless in every sense, belonging nowhere and therefore expendable, never missed, because no one knows anything about me. But, because of Johanna, how I think of myself is not entirely true. She moves about the house, works in the kitchen, places food on the table, suddenly says something that is wonderfully clear, and always then follows up the consequences of any particular incident with something that makes sense of it all, everything placed in meaningful order, and—what is really amazing—most of it somehow relating to me, affirming me and affecting me. Johanna speaks, the two syllables of my name rolling out from her lips, such that I hear it, look up, understand, and already, amid the emptiness of my potential existence, something is planted which I must acknowledge—namely, that I exist. This is what Johanna wants. She married someone and bore him two children who belong not only to her but also to someone else, whom she softly and innocently calls Father. Father, Father! Then I have to wake up and look around, as if I were coming out of a dream, in order to realize that I’m there. The harder it is to do this, the more I feel it is true, because in realizing that I am simply here at all I could even agree with the philosopher who boldly wished to conclude from nothing more than his own thinking that he existed. Nonetheless, it is not thought that retur
ns me to this sense of wonder; indeed, it’s not my own thinking at all, but rather a condition amid which one is conceived, and that one is me.
Johanna brought about this miracle. She took me in when I no longer even existed and before I reappeared. She took in something that lay among the fields of possibility, nothing that was certain and nothing that was real, but something she thought was there, which she had a feel for, and which to her was perceivable. She had an unshakable trust in the unreal she chose out of blind, hopeful courage, because she believed in the possible, in the promise of the future. That’s how she was able to wrest her very being free from the times that hardly offered any hope, much less a future to believe in, tomorrow an improbability in itself in which everything begins anew and is again created anew, whereby one greets it with a powerful cry of an inner birth: You’re alive! You’re alive! She must have sensed the kind of exultant inner strength that within the shadow of a ghostly entity still feels itself to be real, such that it also feels incarnate through a palpable presence and is freed from all other apparitions with its limbs intact, a single being in an equally apparent space. That remains an incomprehensible feat, and even if I am nothing else, I am this feat or, better yet, I am the culmination of this feat, he who sits amid the security of what he’s been given by this woman, who day after day does everything she can to assure my existence, so that I don’t sink into the ever-present danger of the delusional and disappear into things and dreams that surround me with a steady, mildly disorienting, and abrasive whir, reminding me that I am among them, a subject among objects, a separate other amid the endless flood of so much existence, relaxed and singularly composed amid an unfathomable network. Touched by such earnest effort, I cannot betray myself, or, at least, what I am. Thus my demise is avoided, such that I can feel alive. I hear laughter, and so I laugh along as well. Doubts creep up, but they cannot last for long on West Park Row, for I do not succumb to them. To the neighbors, my background seems nothing special; I’m just someone from elsewhere. But no one asks where, no one asks at all.