Now Ulrike remembers her inability to breathe, like you remember your grandmother’s birthday: you splash some rosewater on a card, put it in an envelope, drop the envelope in the nearest postbox, and there’s your happy birthday liebe Bettina! Something very strange is happening. Rosa, obviously, has bodily reached the heart of the mystery. Like a plaster statue, Rosa the White is still visible against the white background if you look carefully. She seems to stare at them calmly, devoid of any panic. From her eyes they can tell that consciousness remains behind her apparent stasis.
Rosa really is now one with the substance surrounding them!
Ulrike decides to take a risk. What does she have to lose? If she could choose—and why can’t she, since she still has her own free will?—she would much rather be with tranquil Rosa than these other women. So Ulrike opens her mouth. She feels how, by only the force of will, with no air current, sound comes out, her very own voice, now metallic, electrical:
Oooon . . .
And instantly there is a terrible, nearly simultaneous wave of horror around her:
No!
Non!
Non, s’il te plaît, non!
But why not? There is no reason why not! They can each finally move on. Suddenly Ulrike has no fear. It is the courage of Fräulein Kehlsteinhaus, a madcap, hysterical bravado that everyone loved (except for bitter old maids). So why not indeed? Like a dung beetle, her lack of fear rolls a growing, hardening feeling beneath articulated legs, a knowledge that however she has done it, Rosa Imaculada has moved forward. Rosa has reached enlightenment. The calm of her death-mask expression conceals within itself everything that matters. Her waxwork face closes the gate of knowledge before them. Ulrike is sure of that. Ulrike knows that Rosa is traveling somewhere. She can see Rosa grinning at them through her matt membrane: Come with me if you dare! But no. They prefer to stand here, gawping at each other. Soon they will go back to fiddling with the wig, apathetic as wilted rutabagas. God, it is exasperating!
Ulrike opens her mouth again and utters the most obvious fact that separates Rosa Imaculada from the other women: Rosa really showed her feelings! Rosa shouted when she felt like shouting, smiled when she felt like smiling, showed her fears without restraint and her joys without calculation. Rosa had let it rip even though it had often been irritating for the other women to watch. Was this Rosa Imaculada’s secret? Was this why she had been allowed to escape this place?
Or had Rosa’s transition been a prize for the best acting? Her gesticulation must have been at least partially theatrical, because big feelings shrank here. Ulrike had already experienced that personally. Her own horror had shriveled and vanished too quickly. And her lack of fear, her Fräulein Kehlsteinhaus bravado was just a nimble creature with segmented legs. It wasn’t her own, like the horror and inconsolability were. It just appeared from somewhere, from outside, and started rolling things up underneath itself. It was lacking in history. Empty of big emotions. And besides, it only knew command words: Go. Do. Say. Be direct.
A sudden longing for Rosa strikes Ulrike. Rosa had held her in her arms. Rosa had pressed her against herself, very instinctively, just as mothers who love their children do. Some mothers. Not all. Not the ones who are jealous of their daughters instead of loving them. Some mothers are sowers of discord. Some mothers are worn out and cantankerous. Some mothers are simply unable to discuss anything rationally with a toxic wave of envy washing over them. How small they are then! When she mentioned the name Ulrich B. Zinnemann at home, when she told her parents about U.B.Z.’s ambitious, uncompleted film project, when she told them about Scott Walker, who created music by beating his fists against raw meat, her mother, her very own mother, standing at the sink, wrinkled her nose. She slumped as if someone had pressed down on her shoulders. And as if the bitter lemon expression weren’t enough, her mother also had to give a snort and huff: “Oh, so your new coworker at the Eagle’s Nest is an aaaartiste.” And as if the huff weren’t enough, her mother had to go on huffing: “Just be careful, little girl. Aaaartistes, especially failed aaaartistes, can be unpredictable!”
It didn’t help things at all that her father took her side, as fathers often do, because it is the duty of fathers to defend their beautiful daughters when mothers attempt to put them down. That was why Ulrike’s father pulled out of the mothballs of his mind a tidbit of information: Ulrich B. Zinnemann’s fifteen-year-old film War Painting, which received an award at the Chicago International Film Festival. It was a marvelous directorial debut! A strong showing from a first-timer. U.B.Z. had given statements to every German-language paper, and there had even been talk of a collaboration with Werner Herzog. What ever happened to that project? Had Herr Zinnemann told Ulrike anything about it?
Those mothers who don’t want to pull together with their daughters completely lose their minds when they discover their spouse choosing a side that isn’t their side, instead the opposing side, the disobedient daughter’s side. The girl’s enthusiasm needed crushing not fanning! Didn’t he see that? An ugly fact had been shoved under their noses: their daughter was going to end up being used. Why on earth would a man who was nearly thirty years her senior devote so much time to a scatterbrained teenager? What drives failed aaaartistes who press elevator buttons for a living? Tell me that!
The mother, Ulrike’s very own bitter mother, sent a scowl scorched in the flames of rage at her husband as he sat at the kitchen table. He had dodged the situation yet again. His resigned grunt made the mother fling her dishrag into the sink and let out a sound that was either a yowl of pleasure or disgust, the orgiastic cry of someone in the right, or the bellow of a spurned truth-teller. And the thrower of the dishrag likely didn’t know herself, screaming because that was the best she could manage, because out of sheer bovinity she had married a slob who drove his company into the ground, who had hidden his true nature, his spineless tapewormness, quite skillfully for several money-saturated years.
Rosa Imaculada never would have played her hand so miserably. Ulrike is sure of that. If Rosa were concerned about the safety and welfare of her child, she wouldn’t have schemed, and she definitely wouldn’t have plotted. She would have shed a theatrical tear and then, voice cracking, screamed her cares to the world. She would have warned her child of the Big Bad Wolf, she would have given a colorful lecture on the full spectrum of male treachery, and finally she would have slapped a package of condoms in her hand.
Aaaartistes, Ulrike whispers without a sound, her mouth twisting in anger as this memory of her mother pops unexpectedly into her mind. Had that been her last interaction with her mother?
Ulrike slumps, even though her posture doesn’t change. Something inside her snaps, something stops supporting her. She looks at Rosa in the distance, her outlines just barely visible: mouth, a sort of a smile, the bump of her nose, plump breasts. There beyond reach are the arms where Ulrike had just been, the arms that do not exist any more. There is no stopping it. Her mother, her very own mother from years ago, pops back into her mind. The memory rolls over her like the terror before, completely and everywhere, but still different, because her mother from years ago was warm, her mother from years ago was beautiful, her mother from years ago was something completely different than the mooooother it was impossible to live with in the same flat, the same city, the same world. Her mother from years ago had smelled of an expensive nightgown woven by silk worms, soft and sweet. Her mother from years ago wrapped Ulrike under the covers, snuggled up next to her, and, in a voice that smelled of peppermint, hummed “Schlafe, meine prinzessin, schlafe . . .”
Out of old habit, Ulrike begins to sob. No tears come any more, so the weeping resembles vomiting on an empty stomach, without the pain caused by the bile. It is acrobatics for the face. Ugly, or at least far from beautiful. Embarrassing, not at all sympathetic. But what does it matter! Like Rosa, she also knows how to feel. And, like Rosa, she will be gone soon too. These women who dangle the dim lamp of reason in their dead fingers can continue devel
oping their theories until the end of the world for all she cares.
Shlomith, Wlibgis, Nina, Polina, and Maimuna stare in fear as Ulrike’s face contorts. There are differences of degree in their fear. There is a dash of irritation (Polina), a pinch of confusion (Nina), and a smidgen of curiosity (Shlomith). There is perhaps one stare in which no fear can be found: Maimuna’s empty look of Ça va bien, which seems to underline the meaninglessness of it all. There is Wlibgis’s gaze, which contains bucket-loads of suffering, which admittedly could have been caused by her sickness, not the situation currently underway. Wlibgis had learned to be a person in suffering no later than in the hospital bed where she knew she would stay and which she had no chance of leaving healthy. And besides, suffering can become a second skin, a hardened leather, a mask that no longer even requires an illness. All that’s needed is one lifelong disappointment . . . and repeated violence. And you can’t just take off that mask. Not even if everyone around you yells in chorus, “Start LIVING, dear woman!” Suffering is better than emptiness, a pillow with a musty smell you can discern at a distance, and still you bury your face in it to stifle your sobs.
Ulrike has stopped crying.
Her mother from years ago hadn’t existed for ages. So why waste the tears? Ulrike stiffens. The women stare at her like cows at an open pasture. Is it time to leave? Is the way open? And what if the “Oooon . . . ” Ulrike had uttered had been enough, what if the change had already begun in her? What if she was about to begin to rock, to shake, to zigzag, then to sink, to sink and to fade?
Shlomith acts first. She lifts her hand and places it against Ulrike’s, and it looks exactly as it should look, like hand holding, and that is enough. In this situation, that could be enough. Nodding, Shlomith encourages the others to follow after her: Let’s form a circle.
So Maimuna clasps Ulrike’s other, if possible even stiffer hand, Polina slaps her fingers against Maimuna’s digits, Nina snatches Polina’s arm, Wlibgis slides between Nina and Shlomith, and then the circle is closed around Rosa Imaculada’s pale body.
Now each of them is stiff, tense like a bow. Shlomith glances at Ulrike: Yes? The others glance at Ulrike and Shlomith: Well? Ulrike nods and in a low voice begins to murmur Oooo, just as a yoga teacher murmurs “Oooo” as she begins to call the holy Pranava symbol with her larynx, with that Highest Holy Syllable vibrating the entire universe, the world soul, and Truth—in a word, Brahman—as she, with the students sitting before her also murmuring, awakens every slumbering corner of the bodily existence.
Except for Wlibgis, all of the women join in the utterance, one eagerly huffing, another more cautiously, voice cracking. Finally, they are doing something! Something like joy begins to bubble in one and all: perhaps they will soon be on Rosa Imaculada’s heels!
Oooo . . . nnnnn . . .
But then no more: no “EI-ron”. The end of the word simply won’t spurt from them. No yell, no hiccup, no final syllable catching in the throat, no R vibrating softly or harshly. The women’s lips remain rounded, as if someone has just snatched a sucker out of their mouths. Plop.
And as if there wasn’t enough to endure in all of this, a much greater PLOP crashes down, an end-of-the-world sort of PLOP, a PLOP that all women trying to become mothers feel inside if heartbreaking tragedy decides, for one reason or another, to activate its screeching machinery. Suddenly Nina rips her hands free of Polina and Wlibgis, and folds up. Not out of pain but out of knowledge, knowledge like the intuitive flash that pierces all expectant mothers when Things Are Not Right. That information comes straight from where every creature comes into the world and will continue to come. It comes from the incorruptible core of womanhood.
Nina knows, inside and out, through the darkest realms of consciousness: Little Antoine & Little Antoinette are no longer inside her.
TEN REASONS WHY NINA WOULD HAVE BEEN AN EXCELLENT MOTHER
N°1. Pragmatism. Nina was usually a very pragmatic woman. Not at all melodramatic. A melodramatic woman would cut up all her husband’s ties if she suspected him of cheating on her. A melodramatic woman would bake the shreds of tie into a loaf of bread and serve it to her husband. She would write a threatening message in nail polish on the bathroom tiles at precisely the height she anticipated his eyes landing in the morning when he staggered in to piss. She would get on the train and spend the night in an idyllic hotel in a nearby village. She would let her phone ring. She would pretend to be missing, maybe even dead. She would set her phone on silent and watch, nauseated and weeping even as she enjoyed seeing JEAN-PHILIPPE appear with his cheater face over and over on the display, obviously insane with worry. The hotel’s pillow would soak through. The ring would come off her finger and fly in an arc from the balcony over the hotel entrance and into the decorative pond in front of the entrance. With the accuracy of a dart thrower, the ring would land in the middle of the waterlily arrangement, directly on the stone frog’s outstretched waterfall tongue. Touché! But that melodramatic woman is not Nina. That woman is Jean-Philippe’s former fiancé, who never would have become the mother of Jean-Philippe’s children.
Nina was different. Of course she noticed all the same things women tend to notice. She was five months pregnant when she happened to catch a glimpse of an email whose content could be ambiguous, or maybe not. She packed a bag and traveled to her parent’s house one hundred kilometers away, leaving a note on the table: Deal with this and then tell me when the situation is under control again. Nina knew how to keep a cool head at the right times. She focused on solutions.
N°2. Facing facts. Dear Jean-Philippe Pignard, the ball is entirely in your court. If you want a divorce, say so. Just one word and I’ll start looking for a new flat. Jean-Philippe didn’t want a divorce, though. Yet again. This was one of Nina’s bravuras: through imperceptible moves, without making any noise, she got everything she wanted. Her tactics were not based on manipulation, psychological games, or blackmail. On the contrary, she only dealt in facts. Nina was a strong-willed woman from a family of strong-willed women. Facing facts took women in her family only milliseconds. If an ugly word was the most appropriate, they said it (e.g. her grandmother when Grandfather’s love child turned up), calmly and without raising their voices (e.g. her aunt when the repulsive reason for her divorce had to be stated out loud in court); they listened to what others had to say and tried to summarize (e.g. the cousin when cases of chlamydia revealed utterly inappropriate cross-shagging in her group of friends); they didn’t provoke or become provoked (e.g. her mother when her old, demented father began berating his daughter as a skinflint and a closet drunk—the latter accusation was also baseless). That was what the women in her family were like, and that was how she was too.
Which was why Nina boldly opened her mouth and let her mother, her grandmother, her aunt and her cousin do the talking: “Dear Jean-Philippe Pignard, the ball is entirely in your court,” they all said in unison.
Jean-Philippe obediently cleaned up the mess he had caused. He picked up the phone and invited his wife, who was carrying Little Antoine & Little Antoinette, back home. Nina came, because these children were supposed to have a father, and their father was supposed to have a wife, and their mother was supposed to have a husband, and they were all supposed to have one flat bought with the husband’s family money on a linden-lined street five minutes walk from a market square, where one could buy the world’s best organic marmalade made from White Transparent apples.
N°3. Apt situational assessments. When Nina appeared in fourth position in the place which did not at that time have a name but which everyone later, due to Polina’s harangues, began to call, more or less seriously, with joyful resignation or crushing gloom, “the hereafter”, she recognized quite quickly, after recovering from her initial shock, that now, if ever, her organizational skills were needed. In all her (dyed, but that isn’t relevant now) platinum blond glory she had popped up right in front of Shlomith and Polina, in the middle of a heated argument, which was interrupted moment
arily due to her appearance. The women burst into spontaneous hurrahs as if the Mother of God herself had descended into their midst, but their enthusiasm quickly ebbed because Nina was as bemused as they were. The arrival clearly had her own problems: she held her belly with both hands while muttering something, Il faut aller à l’hôpital, vite, vite, but this didn’t interest the women in the slightest. There were no hospitals or nurses here. Whatever the arrival had needed a moment ago was irrelevant. It no longer had any significance.
So the interrupted argument began to perturb Shlomith again. They hadn’t belabored it completely, and unbelabored arguments tended to return to the scene of the crime even more charged than before, practically snapping their suspenders; you couldn’t simply spit them away along the road. Especially not here.
Nina didn’t understand the slightest bit of the content of the argument. The women’s expressions were terrible. Shlomith and Polina were entirely focused on each other. They would have made low growls at one another if they hadn’t had words to use. They would have rushed at each other’s throats like mongrel dogs if their words had failed. But they didn’t fail. English blasted from both of their mouths, with a Slavic accent and without. Nina quickly understood that she was not the subject, had not been and would not be, that her situation did not interest anyone, that no one would ever help her again.
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