Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  And that other mother-to-be gesturing at the ditch.

  Messages difficult to decipher: “The cloven-footed animals are at risk.” They feed from her open hand on this hospital bed.

  Let me know if you are going. The park inside us widening.

  A reverie: fragile and fleeting. Our lives: We used to take the rabbit path. Our lives: what opened to us as children on that bridle path. The Swedish Pavilion nestled in the park. The Marionette Theater. That crystal palace by the sea. Our lives: I too would like to make the walnut wine.

  A Book of Intimations. It shall be our lives.

  Andrei Tarkovsky: “My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give love, and to be aware that beauty is summoning him.”

  And what does it all mean? If you asked we could not tell you. The park in afternoon shadow. That vast expanse of purplish green.

  Our lives: Dearest Carole, You ask how I am now that Zenka is gone. The truth is, dear friend, I am really only half alive without her.

  Our lives: the way the dark waves brightened on that windy day, late afternoon, Brighton. What is retained—why that afternoon out of the thousand afternoons—having driven for hours in the rain.

  Deleuze as I have been reading him for my film class will speak of the “crystal image” as the most fundamental image of time, since the past is constituted not after the present but at the same time, one aspect of the present of which is launched into the future while another falls into the past. We cannot tell them apart, and the crystal where this divided time resides makes these moments one indiscernible from the next. The immediate past that is already no longer and the immediate future that is not yet. A mirror that endlessly reflects.

  That drift, that delirium—that procession of figments—here and not here—right before me and already gone. Life indeed is but a dream as you, Ava Klein, as you wander out of reach now.

  Our lives: Where are the St. Jean’s Fires of my youth?

  Fall—the autumn light—the feeling of a whole way of life waning, the smell of slight decay, we burned enormous bundles of dried grape vines. The fire flared up dramatically and in such essential brightness. I can’t begin to describe that brightness etched in my mind, even now.

  As a child’s delight in front of a birthday cake: one candle, two candles, three, then suddenly there are seventy. The fires went down as fast as they had flared up. They flame then sputter, extinguished by a breath.

  They used to say that the girls who could cross the blaze in one leap without scorching their skirts would find a lover within the year …

  The bombing begins. The children ask, in Arabic, in Farsi, in German, in Hebrew, in Kurdish, in French, Où est la porte?

  Windows on the World:

  See how the Staten Island Ferry looks like a bath toy from this vantage point. The United Nations like an upright deck of cards. How small the door. We press our hands against the glass.

  My father points to the sky: It’s the Hindenburg in flames. It’s New Jersey and it’s 1937 and he’s six years old, and it’s just another one of his hapless collisions with history—my father walking through the exploding world.

  As infants in Paterson, New Jersey, every boy was checked as the search for the kidnapped son of the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh continued. In the evening, a knock on my grandmother’s door.

  Who knocks (spoken in Italian)?

  Is that you, Salvatore?

  Marconi and the first sound over water.

  Where is the door? She opens the children’s encyclopedia. A is for Antarctica, the explorers fumble through white, through ice. Where is the door?

  What color bird will you be today? Rose asks.

  The bombing begins. I will be a bluebird with a rose breast, she says. How are you feeling, Ava Klein?

  Under cover of night, from this dreamy bed, thousands of calls may be heard. Most songbirds travel by night. The air is more still, the temperatures lower. Most night-migrating songbirds fly below two thousand feet. Before migration there’s something like dread in them and nothing can quell it but the flapping of wings.

  Shadows on my studio wall:

  Sisters enveloped in smoke on a pale-green sofa I think circa 1965. I seem to always think of it, floating through smoke—an insinuation, a strangeness—a world unto itself—an island among the mod Swedish blond furniture of that room. They are laughing, and my aunt is blowing smoke up toward the chandelier. The bright bell rings and now another visitor comes to the door. My mother simply by virtue of her charms (a bird’s nest, polka dots) could lure anyone, it seemed (driven by wind, the current of oceans, the stars, the sound of her voice) to that, yes, now definitively green couch. The bell rings and we run to it. It’s the good Dr. Jehl, our great friend, and all the children jump up and down, up and down, and he is in his uniform and he is carrying his black doctor’s bag with compartments (the way it unfolded).

  Dr. Jehl, how happy I am to see you once more! His calmness, his reassurance, his intuition—a healer, one of the gifted, our salvation sitting on our couch. The world is a safe place as long as he is near. That much is abundantly clear. He opens the book he has brought for us, the Peterson Field Guide to Birds. It had a green cover. I held it that day a long time.

  Let me know if you are going. Dr. Jehl walking down the wooded path and pointing to things: a boletus mushroom, a lady slipper, a jack-in-the-pulpit, a tufted titmouse. Dr. Jehl, once an American Army doctor in the Second World War, who came some days in his uniform, donned in medals, I cannot think why. The good German doctor who named the world and all its birds and stars and clouds and trees. Who showed us the places animals made their homes. He was in love with my mother like everyone else, tramping through the woods near our house with the five of us children pointing out the many wonders: edible berries, blue-jay feathers, cocoons, mushrooms, the purple finch, the goldfinch, the bluebird.

  Over the radio in the last two hours I hear the Desecration of the Birds. Their names used for machines of war: the Black Hawk, the Raptor, the Falcon, the Eagle, the Osprey, the Raven, the Shrike.

  He loved dahlias, digging them up every fall they lived in the dark and all was well with the world. Dr. Jehl, tromping through the forest. O Tannenbaum, we five children sing with him, he with his walking stick and knickers, in that dappled, that flickering light of the mind. O Sacred Tree.

  We hear the song of the lark, he points to the sky—coming in and out of range, on Lake Erskine so many years ago—Dr. Jehl, come back! How have I so misplaced this time? Encapsulated; it has broken off and floats, autonomous, serene, without any concern for me. Having detached itself from its dreamer—come back, I whisper and grasp what light it leaves behind. I touch the edges of the glass globe where the German doctor and the little girl in radiance reside.

  After almost everything else has left, there, there I am back with him, age seven again, improbably risen from the Fatherland, the Europe of Sorrows.

  We will fight the Americans, the Iraqis are saying, even with sticks. A country posing no threats.

  Rose loves the goldfinch and the robin and the bluebird with the rose breast. The mourning dove is shy. It is larger than a goldfinch. Its tail is tapered with white tips on the edges of the feathers.

  Rose alights and I wonder whether (this tentative spring) she will need a sweater or a juice box—and I think of this child I have been chosen to be the custodian of and how every nuance of her being and every aspect of her becoming is my concern. She smiles, walking to me through the war. And inside that bird’s nest: eggs. She walked with perfect posture so as to protect them. Five.

  I think of the children of Iraq and realize they too—and it is not a great leap—might, in another life, have been mine—and at this minute shivering in the atrocious heat, hungry, frightened, tired. They too belong to me. Think how frightened the children must be—as all of Bag
hdad is blacked out. We have allowed our most basic human contract to lapse: to see to it that the children are not harmed. They were for us to protect.

  Why had we handed over our obligation so readily? We were obliged to have brought these things close to us—to not keep a distance.

  I think of Michael Lu, a child in Rose’s kindergarten class. Struggling his way with fury toward English. Wrenching himself out of Chinese. Broken is the only word he can say in English. Everything you ask of him—his name, his age, how is he today, where do you live. Broken, he says. Broken, broken. Where is our fury?

  The world is broken. We left it carelessly as if it were a toy. We thought it was something we could casually replace. We lost our way.

  I walk from one room to the next.

  Children of Iraq, how is it you stay alive?

  At the edge of that green couch, my parents stare blankly ahead at the television set that in my memory sits on a low platform and down a long tunnel at the opposite end of the room. The president is talking and he sounds something like a billy goat, bathed in that blue cathode ray, trying to act as if everything were perfectly ordinary, but we children know better. A bay filled with pigs. How horrible. I walk to my mother’s side—though I am big, I sit on her lap.

  It is not then—though they meld in my mind somewhat—but the next year, the same couch, the television emitting its darkness, when I recall my first sense of terror. I am less numb this time and more panicked, in fact. I gauge the world this day by my parents’ responses—I have never seen them look quite this way, and we wait together, for what I do not know. In my father’s face: World’s End. My parents are unreachable, inaccessible—and we children are left completely alone—I am the oldest and must take care of the rest of the little ones now, as we roam the extraordinarily dangerous terrain of our suburban living room. A week in October. A poisoned rocket is pointed at us, my brother says. Really? Wow. Duck your heads! The world is nothing like you had supposed. Hauling your children’s encyclopedia (Antarctica, Africa, aster, air).

  At the edge of that couch, in my father’s face, an unreadable emotion. Seeing the president’s head (from which emanated the voice of a billy goat) as if from a far distance in the blue light of the television set. Rockets are pointed at our house. Quarantine. Just the word haunts. This was the same fall that the World Book arrived. I had only opened the first book: A.

  Apple. Abacus. Albatross.

  Red floods the desert, in shock and in awe you stand.

  And where children once swam in the Euphrates—

  The theory is, as its title suggests, to shock and to awe Iraq by dropping as many as eight hundred “smart” cruise missiles on the country in two days—

  The earth is a rocky planet in the habitable zone. This zone is an area where liquid water, which is essential for life, can exist. Unlike gas planets, rocky planets like earth have surfaces where water can gather in pools and seas.

  The world ocean covers seven-tenths of the earth. No one standing on shore or sailing on water can help wondering how large the ocean is. Even on a large steamer one may cross the ocean day after day and see no other ship. Men in lifeboats have floated for months without being found. The ocean is not only large, it is also a very lonely place. I think about the melancholy encyclopedia writer who wrote this introductory paragraph to the ocean for children in 1963.

  The great continuous world ocean is commonly thought of as five separate oceans.

  A woman says plage just above the line of her breath.

  In shock now, and in awe.

  The children’s encyclopedia reads: The Middle East, located at the juncture of three continents, makes it a region second to none in the world of tracking, research, and study of the phenomenon of bird migration. More than five hundred million birds pass over the Middle East twice a year in the autumn and the spring.

  In Baghdad the children say, I’m thirsty. And make the universal sign for water, their hands cupped in the air—and thousands of birds cover the sky.

  My sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Spreen, stands now before the darkening blackboard where he has written “The Cradle of Civilization.” He pulls down the map. Everything begins here, he says. With his pointer he reaches and his black jacket lifts up slightly from his hip. This is the Mesopotamian Circle. The word “Mesopotamian” comes from the Greek for “between the rivers,” and he points to the Tigris and the Euphrates. Now mostly present-day Iraq. Everything starts here, he says, pulling down the map: the first cities, the centralized state, mathematics, astronomy, the wheel, the sail, the measurements of time: the sixty-second minute, the sixty-minute hour, the 360-degree circle. The written word. Our first stories. The way we think of who we are.

  Fancifully, we girls called him Sea Bream …

  Pillaged, the cuneiform tablets that tell us of the invention of writing, the creation of the first cities, legal codes. The Cradle of Civilization—our deepest memories engraved there.

  Destroyed a clay tablet. It bore a few simple marks. At the top was what seemed to me to be a fingerprint, and below it a stick-drawn animal, perhaps a goat, or a sheep. For the first time ever, a transaction of animals conveyed, by drawing signs on earth. Recently discovered in Syria. Sheltered in the museum in Iraq. The tablets survived until today.

  Witness to the moment of our beginning.

  Missing: a vase, a book, a bird, the counting of sheep, so begins our sleep and our forgetfulness.

  Ten thousand years of human history.

  Missing: tablets from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first literary work, from the culture that invented writing.

  The child draws the letter C.

  I go to the children’s encyclopedia, that record of the great wide world and all its wonders and all its charms.

  When I was a child I liked to go to the children’s encyclopedia and millennia would pass in an instant.

  A bird is an animal. It has a backbone, it is warm-blooded and walks on two legs, the same as a human being. It flies, as do insects and bats. And it lays eggs like salamanders, some snakes and turtles. But a bird is special. Birds are different from all other creatures, for they alone have feathers—and a wishbone.

  At night I dream a goldfinch alights on the head of a child.

  The Armenians say that this means there will be one thousand years of peace in the kingdom.

  Missing: a small carving of a bird, one of the earliest stone sculptures in existence. The archaeologists had found it literally in the hand of its ancient owner, who had been crushed to death when the roof of his burning house fell on him, evidently as he tried to save this piece.

  The priceless library now ash.

  Unlearn the world with me, I say to that dreaming, studious child who is bent over the children’s encyclopedia at night with a flashlight reading about—what—I cannot see anymore. Unlove the world, I say to that child. But she does not hear me.

  The child draws the letter C.

  Destroyed, disseminated, or left to be sold on eBay.

  At her small table, the child writes. On her three-lined paper. Her first marks and words—her private cuneiform.

  A bird is warm-blooded and has wings.

  Unlove the world with me.

  I close the children’s encyclopedia on bird.

  That night when my dream resumes, the air is already in flames.

  Dear relinquished future, dear sadness, dear regret.

  A bird is an animal. It has a backbone, it is warm-blooded and walks on two legs, the same as does a human being. It flies, as do insects and bats. And it lays eggs, like salamanders, some snakes and turtles.

  Unlove the world with me, Rose.

  Unlove the world, but she is blue now with a red breast. Rose and I walk through snow, looking for the Lenten rose. It’s still too early, I say to her, and my voice echoes strangely against the gray mounta
ins. Inside we open the Book of Roses. Two-to-three-inch cup-shaped flowers in deep maroon, green, cream, hues of white and pink. Deeply lobed evergreen leaves, they are valued for their late-winter or early-spring flowers that appear when little else is in bloom.

  The Lenten rose floats resplendently by with its melancholy message: Take refuge.

  I was happy to be on this earth with you and the flowers.

  I ask her to unlove the world with me. Even the flowers. Even the snow. She made a snow cat, a snow girl, a snow rabbit, that interminable winter. She was learning to write. Her name in snow. Even the birds.

  She reaches in her toddler body from a place passing, then passed, already passed with her palms up: Great news: It’s snowing! And snowflakes collect in her open hand and on her tongue: cherry blossom, ash. Preserved in this crystal of time, eternally five, there in my mind’s eye.

  Unlove the world.

  She leafs through the children’s encyclopedia.

  My parents seated on the edge of that green couch in front of the flickering box.

  Dr. Jehl holding a fallen baby bird. My mother walking with a nest on her head. My father blowing a moody bugle. Unlove the world.

  But she is just learning to count. Mr. Spreen holding my model of the solar system. Wire and clay. A clod of earth. The fluorescent head of the president. We look out the window and see a loping deer, a hedgehog, a red fox, horses in fog, Saturn, Mars, the wobbling of stars.

  But she says no. If she understood what I was asking she would certainly say, as it is one of her new favorite phrases, I refuse.

  She loves me tonight as far as Pluto and back, times infinity.

  At what point do we accept the reality of loss, that brevity is part of the butterfly’s beauty?

  Our lives passing before the darkness and eclipsing it for a minute … All human longing, all human ingenuity. Dear relinquished future, dear regret. Dear smoking ruin. Shall summer come this year and go as always?

  I recall last August. Rose in blue light: “This won’t be the last hot day of summer?” she begs. She makes me promise as I try to coax her out of her princess pool.