by Andrew Potok
I lived for more than seventy years relatively numb to the past, but now the past is forcing me to confront it, baiting me with, of all things, real estate.
3.
The Hotel Rubinstein was named for Helena Rubinstein, the twentieth-century cosmetics queen, who grew up in a house in the neighborhood. In post-war Poland, a smart entrepreneur named a hotel after her, understanding that Jewish names and the refurbishing of old synagogues and cemeteries would become rewarding tourist bait. Although all the Jews of Kazimierz were exterminated, Jews remain a valuable financial resource. Remarkably, Helena Rubinstein was the person who, already very rich, bought the first fur coat from my mother’s Maximilian Furs in New York and thus helped her launch a successful business.
I find it strange that my mother and uncle’s business in Warsaw was named Apfelbaum, their name, but when they opened their salon in New York, they renamed it. A Jewish name in pre-war Warsaw was okay. In supposedly tolerant America, Apfelbaum would never have made it to the top. I guess they wanted to begin fresh. Regarding anti-Semitism, they would take no more chances.
Loie turns to one side in bed and begins to purr softly while I listen for sounds of Poland, a man in the courtyard below speaking Polish, the sound of a car navigating the snowy streets as American country music blares on the car radio. I try to distinguish between seeing a little, as I did on my last visit, to seeing nothing now. Last time, I had to move my head left or right or up in order to avoid the large central blind spot that was spreading over my field of vision. Still, though blurrier, the Saski Gardens and Lazienki Park were pretty much the same as they had been when I was a child. The child’s excitement was missing, but a kind of shadowy layout and the architecture of the parks, fleeting and spotty as an after-image, appeared briefly on my retinas. The feeling of no longer belonging has become greater without the momentary distraction of a pretty face or a flower provided by eyesight. Without that, I am left with my frustration, my revenge fantasies, my aversion to those Poles—certainly not all, but many too many—who consider the purity of their Christian nation sullied by the likes of any “other,” which includes me and people like me.
“Blindness is as dead as an end can be,” I grumble to Loie in the morning.
“Wrong again,” she says, just out of the shower. “You’ve been a great model for others, and that’s what keeps it from being a dead end.”
“For you, the glass is always half full,” I say as we stretch our jet-lagged bones. I lie down on the floor, bring my knees up, and rotate them.
“Jesus, Andy, you got a PhD in counseling. People tell me all the time what a great help you are to them.”
“Why they gave me a degree for Ordinary Daylight I don’t know.” This is what I know: nothing I can say helps. We accept what we can when we’re finished with our temper tantrums but we know that blindness stinks, unless we listen to those irritating blindness organizations that keep yammering that being blind is no big deal. What are these idiots thinking? True, if you’re born blind, it’s altogether different. You know that you are complete, no matter what is missing. But I know very well what is missing because it was all there—the colors, the faces, the speed of travel and reading, the give and take. Blindness is devastating, mythic, mammoth, monstrous. Believing in karma, leaving it all up to some fucking higher power, being stalwart and positive and optimistic, finding the good hiding inside the bad, accepting blindness as a lesson, a test to overcome, feeling superior to the unblemished, the untested, seems as silly as optimism itself.
In our hotel room, Loie directs me to knobs and handles, to the bathroom door, the chair, sink, shower, and toilet. I follow her and run my hand along them, install a map of the space in my brain, and try not to be a klutz. “It’s shocking how much you have to do for me wherever we go,” I tell her. “I should be better at this.” She disregards my whining. I say, “Just about everyone I ever met at the Seeing Eye bumps into nothing. They can hear the fucking chairs and sofas.”
“You know that that’s bullshit,” she says, then: “I sometimes watch you and Gabriel making your way through town and realize that you’re the bravest man I know.”
What she may not know is that on my angry days, I want to mow people down. “Take that,” I want to snarl as my dog and I plow through a group of sighted people, unaware that an important blind guy is making his royal way through town. It’s a lot worse when I try it with a cane—tap tap. Tap tap. Here comes that blind guy. Without the dog, I am a traveling land mine. I can destroy furniture, unearth plants, knock pedestrians to the ground, dent my forehead, my shins and knees and shoulders. When I stop paying attention for one moment and no longer know where I am, I’ve learned to ask for help. “Where am I in relation to the pharmacy?” I ask, hoping that someone is nearby and listening.
“The pharmacy? It’s way down there.”
“Where?”
“There.”
Cane or dog, I can’t allow myself to be lost in thought. Did Gabriel stop at that damn blended curb? Which curb is coming up? If he ever forgets the three stone steps on my way to town, I will crack my skull. Being blind is exhausting. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like,” Loie says. “If I were blind, I wouldn’t ever leave the house. Or go to Poland.”
4.
Buried deep in the genome of a Potok progenitor are the many genes responsible for a mutation known as retinitis pigmentosa, the prevalent heritable eye disease leading to blindness. In my case, there is no certain genetic antecedent, the one possibility anecdotal. My parents spoke of my grandmother Paulina, née Prokocimer, my father’s mother, having had more lights on in her Bedzin home than any of the neighbors, and they suspected her of night blindness, the earliest troublesome feature of RP. And if so, mine was an inadvertent gift from my father who was asymptomatic, a gift I passed on to one of my two children, my daughter Sarah, and she to her two beautiful daughters, Anna and Rachel. Sharing this unwanted gift with the generations that follow me has produced remorse, guilt, rage, and sadness, all of which stick to me like barnacles, exacerbated now by being in the land where it probably began.
A few short years after our arrival in New York, I sat quietly in Herr Doktor’s office as Herr Doktor Professor, recommended by one of my mother’s new, rich customers, said in German, so quietly that my parents leaned far forward in their chairs, “Ach, this boy, he vill be blind,” a prognosis never shared with me. During high school, I went often to the Hayden Planetarium to see the stars, the only stars I ever saw. Once, at Radio City Music Hall, I left my date to find the bathroom and, feeling my way back by touching each of the counted seatbacks, I never found my girlfriend again. At the beginning of the 1950s, a notice from the draft board demanded my presence at the Whitehall Induction Center in New York. I passed all the physical exams and was classified as 1A, fit for war. It took a couple of weeks for me to visualize myself in some ditch on the Korean peninsula in the middle of the black black night having my throat slit by anyone who could see at night. Embarrassed, I called the recruiters to tell them of my night blindness and trudged back to Whitehall where a doctor shone his ophthalmoscope into my eyes and yelled to his buddy, “Hey, have a look at this guy’s eyes.” A couple of them came over and peered into my face with their ophthalmoscopes. “See all that shit on his retina? It’s retinitis pigmentosa.” Apparently there was black gunk beginning to bury the pink photoreceptor cells. Their medical delight in seeing this on the retina of a live human being scared the shit out of me, but my 1A was changed to a 4F. I walked out into the street, relieved to be freed from an ugly battlefield death but understanding that the alternative destiny was not so hot either. Nevertheless, I chose architecture, then painting, still not suspecting the “inevitable blindness” that accompanied RP’s description in any medical text.
In my late thirties, newly married to my second wife, Charlotte, we were driving back home from a chamber music concert at Dartmouth. As always after dark, Charlotte was at the wheel.
The night was cold and clear, the road home smooth. I was humming a lovely cello phrase from the first movement of the Schubert we had just heard and, staring at one of the bright rear lights of the car ahead of us, I watched it disappear. I shot up in my seat. When my gaze shifted a degree to left or right, the light returned. Terror struck, I managed to say, “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“What?”
I shook my head violently, then hit my forehead with the palm of my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Something terrible is happening to my eyes.”
“What’s happening? Should I pull over?”
Early the next morning, I called my ophthalmologist in New York. “No, Andy,” she said, and took a deep breath. “It’s not the dilation,” she said. A few days earlier, I had spent half the day for my periodic check of the progression of the dread retinitis pigmentosa, which, thus far, had taken little other than night vision. In her office, my fingers played with a black and white Egyptian eye she had brought back from her world travels. She played the cello in a family quartet, the perfect woman, the perfect mother. After the dilation, going out into the sunlight was always painful, the streets blurred but, as usual, it all came to rights by morning. But not this time. Maybe the road back to normal was impeded by—what?—a dust particle, a sleepy neuron. “Andy,” she repeated on the phone, “dear Andy, your eyes are back to normal, but it’s a new normal.”
“The new normal?” What was she talking about?
“It’s the cones, the receptors in the center,” she said.
“But I thought it was supposed to go from the outside in.”
“Usually it does,” she said, “but retinitis pigmentosa is unpredictable,” then in a coarse whisper, “fucking unpredictable.”
“I’m going to lose my central vision?” I heard her breathing but she said nothing. “The end of painting?”
“Andy,” she said, “I’ve known you for a few years. You’re strong. You have to stay strong. Promise me you’ll paint as long as you can.”
5.
I am the furthest from feeling like my father when making love or making art. The act of painting with oil on canvas began with the erotic, turned into playfulness, and only then got serious and dealt with the technical problems of balance, surface versus depth, interactions and interconnections of color, symmetries and asymmetries, and the demands imposed by the moment, with its immediate dictates on experience, history and culture, philosophy and rhetoric.
My affair with art began in this Poland, once my home, my safety, my childhood innocence, my first language, my earliest sense of landscapes that gave birth to my moods and passions. “You have always been a moody boy,” I hear my mother’s voice from way back. When I was cheerful, my nanny and I took a trolley to the spacious, airy park with a beautiful white castle on a lake, as well as Chopin’s weeping willow tree. In my darker moods, we walked to the Saski Gardens, the somber, mysterious park where I first touched a horse chestnut. Elderly ladies sat on the benches along the path and, sliding their cold hands from the fur muffs on their laps, pointed out the fallen chestnuts. From the moment I touched the moist, shiny brown nut inside the shell, my heart raced and a new world stared at me. The green burrs were sometimes split by their long drop to the ground. More exciting still, I forced them open with my fingers, which slid inside to touch the smoothest, most delicious tissue, a bared cornucopia of unimagined delights. The radiance, sheen, and luster of the burnt umber nuts begged to be recreated, worshipped. Decades later, the oily pigments squeezed into shiny blobs on the palette gave me similar heart palpitations and my passion for art and sensuality was reborn.
In architecture school we labored at drafting tables, wielding T squares and slide rules; we wore khakis and proper shirts with rolled-up sleeves, a far cry from the life of alienation and despair, the one I, a hopeless romantic, wanted to inhabit. I still sometimes wonder if my pursuit of the latter required a compromise between fashion and art. Nevertheless, my idiotic need for agony and ecstasy was satisfied by the great Louis Kahn, the architect of the building where we worked, a great poet-artist, one side of his face seared by fire. Louis Kahn prowled the building under his magnificent tetrahedrons while Eugene Nalle, a shadowy poetic figure, a steel plate in his head from, I hoped, some daring event, lurked quietly about the drafting room, offering allusions and metaphors, and at times arcane symbols from unknown cultures for us poor slobs to interpret.
In color class, Josef Albers, the master of color and the square, spoke not only of art, but of his sensuous experiences as he roamed the streets of New Haven. “Ach, I am valking down—vot is de name of dat street?—und open de overcoat.” We eagerly await the revelation. “Vot do I see? Inside de blue lining, I see a picture of—vot is de name of dat schrecklich building?—dere vere is de dinosaurs . . .” And we all wished we had an overcoat with a blue silk lining, at least, and also the sensitivity, the awareness of the extraordinary ordinary. Another day, Albers would report, “I cannot valk on de floor of dat building. De design—vot dey tink?—Islam arabesque? Up and down it goes. It is not for walking. It is to trip and fall like drunk.” More than the theory behind his many homages to the square, he taught a careful mindfulness to the endlessly interesting configurations of the world through which we wandered.
I never thought of my origins then, not the horse chestnuts or the war’s terrible effects on my family, dead or alive, or on me. The aim was to steer clear of it, to immerse myself in the non-material, imagined, created by me alone. When I quit architecture school to devote myself entirely to painting, I studied in Paris with the neo-cubist Andre Lhote, together with a bunch of Americans on the GI bill. After a day of painting, some of us spent long nights drinking Pernod or absinthe, trashing or defending our developing styles of angst-ridden expressionism or abstractions softened by Matisse-like sensibility or a neo-neo-cubism. Only a few denied that painting was the expression of intangible ideas and experiences, that the subject of art emerged from the sheer act of making a painting. Some were searching for the sublime; some said that our canvases did not simply hold an image but an event, that the studio was a bullring, the act of painting a bullfight, a drama, a matter of life and death.
A year after Lhote, I signed up to work in the Beaux arts atelier of the neo-impressionist Maurice Brianchon, all of whose students painted Dufy-like boat scenes with colorful flags blowing in the breeze and neo-impressionist dejeuners sur l’herbe or sur bateau as well as tasty nudes. The students’ wrists and elbows danced stylishly; their fanciful brushwork was charming and seductive, as they laid on delicacies, mille feuilles, and eclairs.
The Beaux arts experience did not feed me the meal I was searching for. The deeper understanding—that longed-for, authentic, profound communion with art and artists—arrived slowly, with the help of the Goya Black Paintings at the Prado and Giotto’s frescoes in Assisi and Padua, with the still lives of Georges Braque and Hans Hoffman’s color and structure, the depth and meaning of black in the work of Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, who enabled me to disgorge what boiled inside, to eradicate the world of power and propaganda, the diurnal miasma of taste and fashion. Then, with the domestication that accompanied my move to a home in Vermont, my work settled into a gentler lyrical abstraction, as did the work of two of my admired painters of the time, Nicolas de Stael and the California painter Richard Diebenkorn.
But as color perception and detail slowly faded, I built very large sculptures that I painted in vivid colors. The blacks, the whites, the screaming hot colors in huge circles and tall columns looked magnificent when they were first exhibited in a wide open green landscape. I finished up my sighted art work with a series of assemblages: ten large boxes with epoxied, welded, or screwed-on gauges and pipes, electrical circuits, pumps and solenoids, atomic rejects, all painted with bright and sparkling marine paints, now rotting in the cellar of the Richardson Street house.
And then, in my early forties
, as the center of my retina, the macula, was being cloaked by the black gunk of unabsorbed pigment, as I felt more and more raw and vulnerable, a non-entity, unmoored, empty, stateless, when straight lines had blown apart and colors had turned to mud, the good doctor of my mind gave me permission to stop.
Sitting on a rock at the highest point of my land, where a neighbor’s cows sometimes grazed, a place where I had sat many times in the past to shake off a rage, some slight, some trivial infatuation, I now contemplated suicide. Could I? If so, how? Seated in this most silent, isolated place, I also imagined a ritual, a wake, a Kaddish, my work laid to rest in well-crafted hardwood crates, with dozens of good friends chanting and dancing in a circle, the bonfire burning higher than the treetops.
6.
I began training at St. Paul’s Rehabilitation Center for Newly Blinded Adults, which became my residence for the next few months. There, I joined fifteen people who were also facing the end of their world as they knew it. Except for watching a blind person tapping his way along Fifty-Ninth Street, I’d had no contact with blind people, and was not eager to confront our mutual freakiness.
A guy calling himself a mobility instructor led me up the stairs to the men’s sleeping quarters, a shabby conglomeration of bunks, the space as tight as that aboard some slovenly eighteenth-century sailing clipper. “Now,” he said, “three steps forward, a right angle left, and the bathroom is straight ahead.” He took my hand and led it to sink, toilet, and shower. I could have figured it out with my remaining eyesight but now I was in Atlantis, the mythic world of the blind.
The trainers taught us the proper use of a white cane, Braille, and something they called “techniques of daily living.” Seeing too much, I spent most of every day blindfolded, preparing for what I knew was coming. For the first couple of days, the whole group sat together in a semicircle, no one daring to break the silence but, once we did, everyone was dying to tell his or her story. Within moments of a breakout story, everyone spoke at once. Having feared this nightmare, I was instead struck by a lightning bolt. I understood that I was with people who were in the same lifeboat as me, though we had little in common except for the blindness that now defined us. But that was more than enough. Like grunts in a platoon of draftees, we developed strong kinships—as befuddled cane travelers, numb-fingered scratchers of Braille, careful eaters of peas from forks, a band of children fighting the institutional hierarchical system of social workers and administrators. They became my community, so much so that in spite of being encouraged to go home for weekends, I chose to stay in our primitive accommodations, preferring them to the comfort of my bed, family, and friends.