“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
The poem surfaces again and again in Weil’s writing, even to the last months of her life. It was as though (Miriam explained) the poem like Love itself persisted in inviting her, bidding her to take its sustenance, even as Weil’s body hollowed and broke. When Miriam stumbled upon the poem in the course of her studies, knowing what she knew of Weil’s final days, the encounter shook her. An instant, it seemed, had transformed the whole purpose of her studies, or rather, this new sense of purpose revealed itself to have been the motive all along. A text that had seemed at first merely a constituent part, a single step on her professional ascent, was now suddenly a door—a door through which she had already passed, a door already shut and sealed at her back.
But wasn’t it strange (I asked her) that the same poem that struck Simone Weil with such force should overcome her, Miriam, as well? She wasn’t claiming that it harbored magical or mystical virtue, was she? Maybe what she had experienced was merely an intoxication, a bewildering but explicable identification with the object of her study. Perhaps it was an occupational hazard for an academic, the risk of discerning in an object of scrutiny a promise of spiritual transformation, an intimation of transfiguring clarity….
“Clarity?” she said with a sigh halfway between dismay and disgust. There was no clarity. All she knew was that everything she had thought, known, wanted, all of it had been entirely wrong. She had watched her dream of wisdom crumble. The path that remained to her was the path through the rubble field, the path of patience. “But in the end it was not so different a path,” she said, “not so great a change. I went from being a student, a student of Simone Weil’s work, to being—”
“A disciple?” I asked.
“Are you mocking me?”
“Not at all.”
“No, not a disciple. A novice, if you want to know. That is the difference: I realized I was not a student but a novice, not even a novice—a postulant.”
“And now you are about to become a real postulant, a real novice—”
“Nothing will have changed. I will just go to a place where people will call me what I am, a novice if you like, a beginner.”
“If I like.”
But, she chided, I seem to have forgotten that I had a job to do.
A job?
The translations. My job was to help her.
But why choose me? Had she confused me with some sort of authority on Renaissance English poetry? I was a shrink, not a professor. As for modern English, Paris was infested with native speakers.
But I suited her purposes, she said, then added: Most deliciously.
Had she chosen me because I had an expiration date?
“But that is what the poem says, n’est-ce pas? Doesn’t it say there are things you can learn only from someone you love?”
“Is that who I am?” I asked.
“And…,” she said, not answering my question but adjusting the thought, completing it, “and from the one who loves you?”
TWENTY-ONE
The latest photograph arrived three days ago, unaccompanied: no note, no inscription, no sheared-off poem-fragment. The image—if you could call it that—is a patchwork, a botch-up of half-shapes, some pale, some dim, large or small. If you could see it, would you think that shape there, that grayish oblong shape, resembled a sort of dog, a dog lying on its side? Would you feel an inexplicable sadness for it, as I did? That is what I felt, an unexplained sadness, before it came to me, the name, the dog’s name: Obus.
He is almost at the center, a little lower, at the feet of those other shapes. You see how Obus, lying down, is outlined in profile, because the picture is taken from above, just as the picture of the river’s surface had been taken from above. It is as though the earlier picture of the river has evolved into this one, as though the water’s surface has curdled, clumped into masses. But what, or who, are those other shapes, shapes that like the dog appear to be lying on their sides?
I cannot say, yet must.
I think, Father, I can no longer tell what I remember from what I have imagined. A boundary has vanished, the boundary separating my own memories and the memories I devised for Clementine: Your eyes, they are your mother’s exactly. All I remember is how those eyes looked, looked at me or rather through me—her long, level stare, how even when we were lying face-to-face, her gaze would shift from one of my eyes to the other, as if two different things required monitoring at the same time. She had better near-field vision than I and could focus on objects only inches away from her; when we lay together, she could see my face with perfect clarity, while for me her face swam in a blur. When we made love, her eyes were always open. When I spoke French, I would always know when she was having difficulty following what I was saying because she would look directly at my mouth, like a person reading lips. When Miriam slept her eyes would flick beneath her lids, as though scanning an invisible heaven.
What do I remember? Who are those two figures in the photograph, lying on their sides, the dog Obus at their feet? Time is short. I must tell you.
* * *
—
“Do I look exactly like her?” Clementine asked when she was six or seven years old.
“No, darling, not exactly. Like me a little too.”
“Will I be bald like you?”
“Probably not, Clem, but you might be tall, taller than your mother.”
“She was as small as me?”
“She was a grown-up like me, but not very tall. French people are not very tall,” I said, and held my hand flat at the level of my collarbone to show her how tall Miriam had been. I remember how Miriam would tilt her head upward and lift her heels to kiss me, how when I clonked my head against one of the beams in her apartment, she gasped and then pressed her temples in reflexive sympathy. I remember her small hand resting on a page, index finger extended, as she followed a line we were reading together. I remember how, when she switched from French to English, her whole being changed, the suppleness of her mouth stiffened, as though checked with a bit.
How much also I must have forgotten. Would I recognize that world if I were to revisit it, her building, its front door? What was the street number, the street? Surely it has all changed, all except the smells, the linden trees flowering in the park below, the damp rising from the swept streets, combining with the odor of her bedding and the atticky exhalations of the beams, the worn parquet.
Her apartment: a wedge of steep space under the mansard roof. By her bed, Miriam had a compact disc player she used for her alarm clock. She never changed the CD, so that when the alarm went off, the song was always the same, like a Delta blues, but sung by an African voice, Malian, maybe, or Senegalese. Beneath that keening upper voice, someone tapped out an intricate beat, as though with a pencil on a gourd. But it is no use trying to describe it: the music seems now half-submerged in our dreams and like those dreams soluble in daylight, a part of the sweet, momentary confusion of not knowing where we were, or whose body we lay beside, her head hidden under the pillow against that daylight and that recurrent song.
How impossibly remote it all seems, but I think now that that distance is not one of time, though eighteen years have passed, or of the space between Paris and New York. It is instead an inner distance, as though those smells, those sounds, have retreated to the darkest interior of my body, distilled and condensed within a tiny ampoule of toxin. Though the capsule is small and impossible to detect, were it to crack open, releasing that tar-black suspension of memory, mere seconds (I am certain) would bring death.
But why lethal? you will ask, Father. For the love of God, Abend (you will ask), your story may be dark, may be bitter, but how does it
outstrip the common lot of human misfortune? Your unremarkable share of fate was to fall for a girl in Paris, a girl more closely acquainted with despair than you knew. Sad, yes—but lethal? These elements are nothing but ordinary, the familiars of a thousand stories: the pregnancy, the desperation intolerable to her and paralyzing for you, your complicity, unwilled and unwitting, and yet participating in single-minded collusion in her self-annihilation. That she worked it out and accomplished it, drowning herself in the Loire, that she left a child behind, all this is sad, yes, tragic, yes, but surely the Loire (you will say) is used to this sort of thing.
How could I object, Father, were there not more to say?
What the ampoule holds is lethal because it contains a separate, distinct resin, darker and thicker, as pungent as tar. When I look at the most recent photograph, when I consider its overlapping shadows and compacted masses—alleviated only by the pale oblong that is Obus, asleep with his forepaws held straight out, like a superhero in flight—when I stare into that picture, I can taste it, that acridity in the back of my throat. The figures in the picture (you see now there are in fact figures in the picture) lie on a crude pallet on the floor, the recently paved floor of a half-built parking garage, to be exact. The air is heavy with an asphalt odor, and compounded with that odor the vinegarish reek of heroin, heroin cooked in a spoon before injection, or heroin torched from below on a sheet of foil, the smoke inhaled through a glass tube. And there is the odor of stale garments, hair, and bodies, and the inexpungible odor of blood.
This darkest smudge here is the hair of a girl. The paler patch is her face in profile, turned away. She too is lying down, the dog asleep at her feet, her knees pulled up and arms folded around a shadow in the hollow between her knees and chest. Who took this picture, its grain coarse, the camera’s perspective elevated, its shutter staring a long moment to draw in what little light it could? Who is the girl, hugging the shadow? And that other form, curled like a question mark behind her back, who is that whose face, also in profile, faces the same direction? Would you recognize it? In the picture it is so much younger—eighteen years younger—you could not possibly have placed it, even if you could recall now its later, gaunter appearance, the face of a stranger, of a solitary man seated in the back of your church: that face—my face.
Do you see it now, how even then, even all those years ago, the dark, dilated eye of my correspondent’s lens hung open over me, watching me, tracking me, as vigilant and invisible as a new moon?
SPURLOCK
3:41 A.M.
A darkness like tar has filled the church. Someone has even let the eight-day sanctuary candle burn down. In the grip of his dream, Spurlock gropes his way up the aisle, feeling for the edges of the pews with one hand while holding Abend’s testament in the other. He shoves off from the front pew and sweeps the darkness with his free hand until his foot strikes the first step leading up to the choir. Finally he makes it past the choir stalls to the altar rail, where, clutching the document to his chest, he begins the climb up to the altar, the stairs in darkness so much steeper and more numerous than he remembered. How easy it would be to fall, how impossible to arrest that fall. Finally, however, he makes it to the top, where he discovers that the sanctuary candle is in fact still lit, though weak and guttering on the lampstand. In the morning he would have to contact Mrs. Burke, the sacristan, Jessica’s mother, so that she could replace it.
Clinging to the altar edge with his free hand, his heels hanging over the lip of the narrow step that holds him, Spurlock can finally accomplish what he has come to accomplish: placing Daniel Abend’s testament on the altar. When, however, Spurlock attempts to set his burden down on the marble surface, something objects with a desiccated crunch, seems to push back against the weight of the pages. What is this? Has Mrs. Burke left a bundle of straw or branches on the altar, to be included in this Sunday’s flower arrangements? Surely she knows the altar is not a work surface, much less a storage space. He had never known Mrs. Burke to be so careless. But then again, she had reason to be distracted, he thought, probing the bundle to see if he could move it. Her daughter Jessica had been having difficulties again. Suddenly, detecting beneath the coarse fabric of the bundle a knee or elbow, Spurlock recognizes with horror that the bundle is in fact a person, a person hunched or squatting on the altar. This person is no doubt one of the visitors, the homeless, in the crouched posture of one accustomed to sleeping sitting up, on subway cars, or on park benches divided by cast-iron armrests whose express purpose is to prevent vagrants from lying down.
“Sir,” Spurlock hisses, startled by his own vehemence. “This is the altar of God! You cannot sleep here.” There was no response. “Sir!” Spurlock hisses again, this time lifting the eight-day candle from the lampstand toward where he thought the face would be.
The man’s hair hangs down in front of his face. With a crackle and a frizzing of acrid smoke, the candle singes a few strands.
“Oh, I am sorry!” Spurlock says, all his anger turning at once to consternation. He sees in the candlelight that the lock is perfectly black, not gray or matted, and has been braided with meticulous labor into fine plaits, sleek and lustrous. Smoke billows around the man’s head. Is the hair still burning? Is the man not aware of this? Spurlock realizes that what he’d thought was smoke is in fact the cloud of his frozen breath. How terribly cold it is all of a sudden: he sees how the knuckles of the man’s small hands had gone pale as marble from the exertion of clutching his knees to his chest.
“You must come with me,” Spurlock says. “We must get you a blanket. We must get you a proper bed. Luis will be here, and he will bring hot coffee…” But Spurlock knows as he says these things that the person cannot understand him. “¿Café? ¿Café caliente?” he says, venturing one of the few words he knows in Spanish. Or is Spanish the wrong language? Spurlock knows no words in Quechua, which is unfortunate, because Spurlock understands now that the person on the altar is not a man but an Incan child, a girl, barely in her teens, a virgin surely, else she would not have been brought here to die. Bearing her on its shoulders, a winding procession has delivered her to the lip of this stony precipice and abandoned her, here, where the cold obliged her to clutch her knees to her chest, to breathe down under her cloak to conserve what little heat remained in her body. Such a cold place to die in, Spurlock thinks, and she had died such a long time ago, so many hundreds of years. So very cold, he thinks, and yet had not the cold itself kept her body intact, protecting her in its steadfast embrace? Spurlock pushes aside the curtain of her hair, careful this time not to singe another of the braids when he brings the candle closer to her face, that face, he sees now, still full with childhood, heavy with slumber. He sees how deep, how serious, it is, this slumber: the furrow on her brow, the girl’s lips pushed forward in a swollen pout, her head tilted a little to one side.
* * *
—
With a gasp, Spurlock jerked upright in his cot, heart hammering his rib cage. A sweat chilled his skin even while a rage surged inside him: “Jesus motherfucking God, Abend!” he said out loud. “Are you satisfied?” One of the sleepers grunted as though in reply. Spurlock swung his feet onto the floor from his cot and tried to breathe as his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the church, the low light cast by the exit signs over the doors, and, yes, from the steady flame of the eight-day candle burning in the sanctuary. He was awake, but his heart still hammered, and the stench of scorched hair lingered in his nostrils. He could still feel the weight of that heavy hair, minutely braided, falling over the back of his hand as he pushed it to the side.
“Well, Abend, are you?” he asked again, more gently this time.
* * *
—
It had been Spurlock’s idea to see the exhibit together, Mummies of the Andes, at the Museum of Natural History, maybe two years ago now. “You mean the hair-clump museum?” Bethany had said when Spurlock informed her of his plan.
“Hair-clump. Everything in that museum is either a gigantic beetle or a clump of hair.”
But when he saw Bethany’s reflection in the glass of the display case, her hand pressed to her mouth, he regretted his insistence. The case was a refrigerated vitrine housing the huddled body of a girl. Her hair, a sleek black, plaited in a thousand fine braids, obscured most of her face, but if you stood to the side, you could see the curve of her full cheek, the pout of the lips, her brow creased by a little furrow.
“They just left her there?” said Bethany.
“She was drugged,” said Spurlock, summarizing the explanatory plaque he’d just read. “She was a sacrifice. They let her freeze to death on the mountainside.”
But Bethany had turned away and was heading toward the exit. By the time he caught up with her, she was already on Central Park West.
“Jesus, Nelson, are you satisfied?”
“What’s going on?”
“Why do you make me look at those things?”
“What do you mean, ‘make you’?”
“It’s a beautiful Saturday, and you have to fill it with freeze-dried corpses.”
“Beth, it’s an exhibit—”
“And you’re a ghoul. You say you’re a minister but you are a ghoul,” she said, but smiled and took his arm as she said it, and Spurlock was filled with relief that she had not embarked on one of her litanies of discontent. “Am I taking you to brunch or not, Mr. Ghoul?”
* * *
—
That had been at least two years ago, possibly three, and yet the Incan child had chosen this night to appear in his dream. Knowing he would not sleep again, Spurlock had mounted the stairs to his office. The light from the avenue was sufficient to reassure him that the stack of sheets, Abend’s testament, was in fact still there on his desk, undisturbed, just where he had left it.
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