The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Oh, fuck it. Laugh.

  Laugh-laugh. You’re the babe for laughing.

  She saw her mittened hands gathering wadded tissues. Left behind in the pew. Thick with mucus they were, disgusting. Teeming with germs. Bacteria? These she brought back to the house and these she would steep with the strong dark tea her employer drank through the day.

  “Just what happens. What God lets happen.”

  The Tattooed Girl smiled thinking of Jehane de Brigue. What God had let happen to His “healer.”

  9

  Maybe someday it will be cheering to remember even these things.

  This line of Virgil he’d long contemplated. For was it an expression of the most profound pessimism, or, perversely, optimism?

  Seigl was an optimist! He’d made that discovery when Friedman told him at last the medical term—the “name”—of his illness. For he’d said to Friedman, with a shaky smile, but definitely a smile, “In all knowledge there is comfort. Thank you, Doctor.”

  IT WAS A coincidence merely. Coincidence without significance.

  The day of the diagnosis, Seigl received a small package in the mail postmarked New York City. His assistant opened it as she opened all his mail and brought it to him, mystified: a first edition copy of The Shadows that had been badly waterstained, torn and gouged-at as if with a knife. The jacket cover, a twilight rural scene two-thirds darkened earth and one-third pale sky, had been scrawled over in red crayon—or was it lipstick?

  JEW HATER JEW

  “Jesus! Who sent this, Alma? Is there a return address?”

  There was none. The book had been sent via media mail, at an ordinary rate.

  Sickened, Seigl placed the book on an edge of his desk atop his dictionary. He couldn’t bring himself to examine the desecrated book further. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to simply discard the book as if it had no meaning. That day Seigl was working in his study and was on the phone intermittently and as he spoke in a seemingly normal voice his gaze drifted onto the angry bloody words

  JEW HATER JEW

  like a shout that kept reverberating in his ear. A Zen koan of a curse he thought it. He had no doubt there were further curses inside but didn’t want to look.

  Later, in another room of the house, Seigl glanced up to see his assistant standing uncertainly in the doorway. “Alma? What is it?” Wordlessly she brought to him, to show him, the mutilated book opened to the title page, where in Seigl’s tight, terse hand he’d inscribed

  to Jet, beloved sister

  with love & much hope

  Josh

  18 June 1990

  10

  OPTIMIST: THIS WAS Seigl’s new sense of himself. Now the long winter was ending. Now he strolled or sat outside, in a heavy sweater, in the sunshine. Sometimes he even worked on his terrace, for brief periods until he became too cold.

  On good days he was damned grateful for his health and on bad days, well—he could always be grateful he wasn’t worse.

  He was beginning a new course of medication. A physical therapist came to the house twice a week leaving his muscles aching but his spirit rejuvenated. He was elated by invitations that, a half-year ago, would have depressed him: he’d accepted an invitation to give a two-part Tanner Lecture at Princeton on “any subject” of his interest. He’d agreed to lecture at Cornell, the New School, and Berkeley. (Berkeley! Thousands of miles away, yet Seigl had no doubt he would do it, wheelchair or not.) Two recent essays of his in the New York Review of Books had been very well received and had brought calls from editors inviting him to write for them. Though his play Why/Warum? was hardly more than a jumble of surreal scenes, he had shown it to a director friend at the Public Theater who was eager to workshop it in the fall. He’d abandoned his novel-fragment Redemption, quite the strangest thing he’d ever attempted, a bizarre future-set parable Seigl scarcely recognized as his own writing, but he had been stimulated by the experience of writing fiction again, working so intensely inside his imagination, and was thinking he might try again, in a more realistic setting.

  And there was his ongoing Virgil translation. Sondra Blumenthal had praised it. Months of deeply engrossing work lay ahead.

  And he was seeing friends more frequently. He was playing chess, and he was having people to dinner at the house at least once a week, as he’d never done before the onset of his illness.

  Optimist!

  He regaled his friends with his newly acquired born-again attitude. “I can’t remember now what the hell I used to be so anxious about. Most of the years of my adult life. Was I crazy?”

  11

  SHE HATES ME. That is her mission now.”

  The savage assault from Jet had shocked Seigl, yet allowed him the luxury of knowing, rare in his life, that someone hated him. No doubt his sister was deranged, yet her hatred must seem to her pure, even righteous.

  JEW HATER JEW. What did it mean?

  From the deranged sister’s perspective it meant that he, Joshua, was a hater of Jews, because, from the deranged sister’s perspective, he had failed to “live up to the promise” of The Shadows. Yet it meant, too, obviously, that Jet was the Jew who “hated” her brother who was insufficiently Jewish, in her eyes.

  Since the farcical scene in Seigl’s study in December, and Jet’s abrupt departure from Carmel Heights, Seigl had considered trying to contact her, but not very seriously. When he thought of her, it was relief he felt, mainly: not shame, not guilt, still less a sense of brotherly responsibility for her. He had no sentimental familial yearnings. She was right to perceive in him a certain icy-heartedness. And she was right to have perceived that, by his stubbornness in keeping his assistant, exactly the assistant he’d wanted, Seigl was choosing Alma Busch over Jet Steadman-Seigl.

  “As if there could be any choice.” Seigl laughed.

  12

  IN THIS NEW SEASON there was Alma Busch more and more on Seigl’s restless mind. This girl-assistant who was becoming by slow degrees Seigl’s girl-attendant.

  No stranger to trouble myself I am learning to care for the unhappy. Like Virgil’s Dido she seemed to him, had seemed to him from the start, not in eloquence for she had none, but in her manner and her physical being.

  Her touch.

  “ALMA? THAT MARK on your cheek . . .”

  At once Alma’s hand flew to hide it. Her moist eyes narrowed in surprise and chagrin.

  Seigl spoke gently, kindly. “I’ve wondered—is it a birthmark? Or . . .” His voice trailed off in embarrassment. And he’d meant only well.

  There was a painful pause. As when a professor asks a difficult question and no one volunteers to speak. Your impulse is to answer the question yourself, or to deflect it with more words. With experience, you learn to wait. You force yourself to be silent to give another time to speak.

  Finally Alma said, almost inaudibly, not meeting Seigl’s eye, “. . . birthmark.”

  So he’d been right. Jet had been wrong, thinking it was a tattoo.

  “It isn’t unattractive, Alma. Not at all.”

  Alma laughed harshly. Her eyes were without mirth, and her face had hardened. From the sullen cast of her mouth Seigl guessed that she didn’t find the birthmark at all attractive. He’d blundered by bringing up the subject, no doubt. But he persisted:

  “Have you ever thought of having it removed?”

  Alma was backing away now, eager to escape. Seigl was sympathetic with her, but disappointed. And annoyed. What prevented them from speaking of the birthmark objectively? It was the first thing you noticed when you saw Alma Busch. It leapt out at you, though it was a faded rosy-brown, as vividly as her unnaturally red lips. Seigl had been seeing it for more than five months. He did find it attractive, as he found Alma attractive. And yet.

  Your beauty, Alma. Shouldn’t be defaced.

  Alma answered Seigl’s impetuous question by shaking her head in a way that might mean yes, or no, as she fled the room.

  Seigl should have called after her, “Alma! I’m sorry,”
but he did not.

  For hours afterward he smarted from the encounter. Alma’s childish behavior. Yet she was a grown woman, probably older than he’d originally thought, hardly a child, and this was a subject they might discuss rationally. Seigl didn’t consider for a moment that the birthmark was none of his business for his assistant had become his business, he felt a moral obligation to help provide for her if something happened to him.

  “ALMA? WHICH CHURCH is yours, which do you go to?”

  Alma frowned. Was this a trick question of Mr. Seigl’s?

  “Different ones. It depends.”

  “Which was your church when you were growing up—in Pennsylvania, was it?”

  “Different ones.”

  “You do believe in God?”

  Not ceasing her work Alma laughed, mildly embarrassed, and said yes she guessed so. “Sure.”

  Seigl waited for her to say more. But what was there for his literal-minded assistant from somewhere in western Pennsylvania to say?

  He could hear himself sounding pedantic, dogged. But he didn’t want to alter his tone. His question was serious: he’d been wanting badly for months to ask his assistant these questions. “Is your God a ‘person,’ Alma, with characteristics like a human being?—for instance, an elderly man? A patriarch?”

  Alma frowned, narrowing her eyes as if to envision God. Her expression was respectfully blank.

  “Or is your God more of a principle, Alma? An ideal?”

  Alma mumbled she guessed so. “Yes.”

  “Do you pray often to this God?”

  Alma shrugged. How often was “often”? She shook her head ambiguously.

  “When you pray, does God ever answer you? I mean—does God ever seem to speak to you?”

  At this, Alma laughed. A snorting derisive laugh. But immediately her expression went grave again, respectful. She murmured she guessed not. “Not too often.”

  The exchange would have ended here, except: there was a new edge to Alma Busch, since Seigl’s query about the mark on her cheek. He had been thinking afterward that the backs of Alma’s hands and other parts of her body were similarly blemished, and it might have been tactless of him to speak of having just the mark on her cheek removed. Was Alma angry at him? It was difficult to imagine Alma angry at anyone; she’d hardly defended herself against Jet, and had never uttered a word of complaint about Seigl’s sister afterward. But the other day he’d overheard her clearing her throat before she answered the phone to say with unexpected precision and dignity, “Hello. Mr. Seigl’s residence.” That morning he’d overheard her speaking with Andre, the young Jamaican physical therapist who came to the house twice a week, the two of them talking together for some time, even laughing together, and this seemed new to Seigl, too, and startling. He supposed that Alma might be interested in physical therapy as a career and had questions to ask about training. With a pang of loss he thought, she won’t be my assistant forever.

  Now Alma said suddenly, “Why are you asking me these things, Mr. Seigl?”

  “Why? Because I’m curious.”

  “But why?”

  There was a startling opposition here. Though Alma’s voice was low, scratchy, not aggressive. It was the first time she’d directly questioned him in their months of daily contact. Seigl said, smiling, “Why? Because your answer is of interest to me, Alma. Your thoughts on the subject of God.”

  Alma frowned and drew her elbows close against her rib cage in that odd, awkward nervous mannerism, as if she were holding herself tight, to the point of pain. She said, “But why does it matter what I think? Somebody like me.”

  “Your ideas are perfectly valid. Your thoughts on the subject of—”

  “All the books in the house here, people’s thoughts, what’s the point of more?”

  “But you are you, Alma. You are unique. That’s why I’m interested in your thoughts.”

  Under Seigl’s scrutiny, Alma began to mumble and lose her way. She said, vaguely, “If smart people know, and say what they know, why are there . . . I mean, there wouldn’t be so many books, would there?”

  Seigl laughed heartily. He liked this insight, though he had no idea how to respond to it. Like a shy backward student Alma Busch had suddenly surprised her teacher. And like a practiced teacher, Seigl deftly shifted the subject.

  “ ‘Of the making of books there is no end.’ The human mind is forever questing, Alma!”

  It was one of Seigl’s cardiology examination days. While panting on the diabolical treadmill, he’d given evidence, finely recorded, of having what the cardiologist called, and what no other examining doctor had ever discerned, a “leaky” heart valve. Now, he was on a powerful beta-blocker medication, and had to be periodically re-examined. And in the cardiologist’s office he found himself replaying the exchange between him and Alma, wondering if he’d said the right thing. As an intellectual, as one who has frequently taught, he could not bear to be in the wrong, and to be perceived by another as in the wrong; yet he couldn’t see how he might have spoken more eloquently or more convincingly, under the circumstances. He was left intrigued, yet disturbed. For it seemed to him now that Alma Busch had become silent not because she had nothing further to say on the subject but because she had considerably more.

  Why does it matter what I think? What you think? About God, or anything? It’s all just words.

  “SOME PEOPLE SAY this never happened.”

  “What never happened?”

  “This.”

  Gravely Alma pointed to the word Holocaust.

  Seigl was shocked. “Alma, what do you mean? The Holocaust ‘never happened’?”

  Alma laughed uncertainly. “Some people—I heard—they don’t think—whatever it was—happened.”

  Seigl was preparing the keynote address for a symposium titled “Revisionist and Postmodernist ‘Histories’ of the Late Twentieth Century” at Cornell the following week, in mid-April. He would be speaking primarily on the phenomenon of Holocaust “denial” as it first emerged immediately following the end of World War II, in Europe, and as it developed through subsequent decades in Europe and the United States. Seigl had numerous, perhaps too many books on the subject in his library and had purchased more via the Internet; his desk and an adjacent table in his study were piled with them. It was a subject he’d written about before, and had a particular interest in since his father had many times told him that his grandfather had predicted there would come a day when “no one living” would believe what had been done to the Jews of Europe, in a calculated genocidal political action. Because “no one living” would wish to believe such evil had ever been perpetrated.

  Seigl had not doubted that his father spoke sincerely. Yet, he’d had to wonder how his grandfather Moses Seigl had been able to predict the future to a young child, in 1939; for the last Karl Seigl had seen of his father was at that time. Seigl had come to suppose that it was another person, probably an older man who’d survived one of the camps whom Karl Seigl had encountered in New York City. He had never questioned his father, of course.

  This was not one of Seigl’s bad days by any stretch of the imagination. Yet his eyesight was annoyingly blurred even with his glasses and so he was block-printing his lecture on long sheets of paper which Alma diligently photocopied on the machine in his study, and would take to the village to have a professional typist transcribe it onto a hard disk. Seigl would not have thought that his assistant had any interest in what he was writing, but her manner seemed earnest.

  “Of course the Holocaust ‘happened,’ Alma. Not in one place but in numerous places in Europe. ‘Holocaust’ is a term to indicate the systematic genocide of more than six million Jews and the deaths of more than five million Gentiles in Europe by the Nazis. Treblinka, Ponar, Belzec, Chelmo, Birkenau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Dachau: these were death camps, labor camps. These were places, Alma. As real as these walls that enclose us here.” Seigl tried to speak evenly, not wanting to become emotion
al. He had had practice in public forums with Holocaust deniers and had learned to steel himself against their hostile, jeering, yet formulaic questions; but he would not have expected his assistant Alma Busch to be one of these. It shook him to think her skepticism might be somehow natural, instinctive. No one wishes to believe such evil has ever been perpetrated.

  Of course, the Holocaust deniers knew perfectly well that the Holocaust had occurred. And they wished to revivify it, through their attacks against Jews.

  Alma was hugging herself nervously. She looked like a schoolgirl who has dared to contradict her teacher. Stubbornly she repeated, “Well. Some people say . . .”

  “Who, Alma? Who are these authorities?”

  Alma stood wordless.

  “The Holocaust is as documented as the Civil War, Alma. Do you doubt that the Civil War occurred?”

  Alma shrugged. She shook her head, no.

  “But how do you know? You didn’t observe it, did you?”

  Again, though rather sullenly, Alma shook her head.

  “In fact there is more evidence for the Holocaust than for the American Civil War, since there are eyewitness survivors still living.”

  “They could be lying. People say.”

  “Why?”

  Alma squeezed her torso tightly, shaking her head. Her ordinarily childlike docile face had taken on a hard, blank-doll glaze.

  “Why, Alma? Why would anyone ‘lie’ about such atrocities? Why would thousands of men and women tattoo numbers on their wrists, in exactly the same way, and with their numbers, in the hundreds of thousands, precisely chronologically calibrated?”

  Alma cried, “I don’t know. How would I know!”

  It was the first time she had ever spoken so, to Seigl. He stared at her in amazement. She said, as if relenting, “I mean, I don’t know, Mr. Seigl. That’s why I was asking.” She’d gripped her left wrist with the fingers of her right hand and was agitatedly rubbing it.