by Joshua Corey
The posterior in question belonged to a matron with dyed hair, sixty if she was a day, and no doubt amply supported by elastic.
You have no idea how good you’ve got it, Yusuf said sadly. If I was your age, the tail I’d be chasing! And catching, too. And you’re educated, everyone can hear it in your voice. You could be the man of the house, a house just like this one, if you had any sense. What are you doing here, anyway?
Just because I’ve been to school doesn’t make me smart.
He laughed: That is the truth, my friend! You speak truth!
Yusuf, I said later, as we were packing up. What did you do in May?
What do you mean?
I mean during the events.
That was a crap time, Yusuf said emphatically. Business went completely into the shitter. I stayed away from the trouble until it was over.
But how did you feel about it? I mean, what the students and workers were doing?
The workers? Don’t talk to me about the workers. I am a worker. It had nothing to do with me.
Liberation has nothing to do with you?
Liberation to do what? To go where? Listen, I’m the son of a bricklayer who couldn’t support his family. Instead of going out to make money, he went to the mosque, as if every day were Friday. I looked around me at my brothers and my sisters and my uncles and aunts and said, I’m not going to live like this! I came here on my own and made a business and made a life in the richest and most beautiful city in the world. Married a Frenchwoman. My kids will go to university. What more can I ask for?
But what about racism? What about what we did to your people? Doesn’t that make you angry?
“We,” Gustave? What “we” are you talking about?
I don’t know, I said. The French. Europeans. The West.
Yusuf laughed. We had been driving in the little van and were now stopped at the Metro station where he could drop me off before beginning the climb back home to Ménilmontant.
Just names, he said. Listen, it’s the end of the week. He took a zippered envelope out of his pocket and counted out my pay.
Thanks.
This, he said, holding up the barely diminished wad of bills, this is what it’s all about. Money and nothing else. You ought to remember that.
I wish I could.
It’ll come to you, Yusuf said, his wolfish grin restored.
One moment, I said, a thought suddenly occurring to me. A flat off the Boul’ Mich. I gave him the address.
Were you by chance the one to paint it over? It would have been sometime in early July. I used to live there. Did you find anything left behind?
Yusuf shrugged. It doesn’t sound familiar. But yeah, you know yourself we paint over vacated flats all the time, all the time we have to clean out the junk some deadbeat’s left behind. Not always junk. I got a pretty decent hi-fi out of an apartment I was painting once.
It was a painting of a woman. Kind of modern, I suppose. A nude.
Yusuf whistled. Sure I’d remember that. No.
You’re sure?
Why are you asking me? Yusuf asked, annoyed. Was she your girlfriend?
No. Never mind. I’ll see you later.
I watched him drive away. I felt myself settling back into the numbness that had been my lot since even before the policeman’s baton had come down on Charles’s unprotected skull. M’s arm reaching up, I remembered, to ward off the blow. At least, that’s what I told myself I had seen.
I thought and felt nothing through the long ride home. Thought and felt nothing stopping at the boulangerie for a ham-and-butter sandwich. Thought and felt nothing climbing the narrow, flaking stairway up to the room I’d been renting since my friend’s parents had forced him to kick me out—for the fall term had begun, and it was now time, as they said, to put away childish things.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The lights were out, of course, so I turned them on. And there she was, curled up on the ratty little rug that was one of the room’s few creature comforts, knees bent, one arm thrown back behind her head, staring at the ceiling. A plastic shopping bag sat beside her.
I fell into the armchair, a white continent streaked with arabesques of blue and pink paint.
I said her name.
Hi Gus, she said, not moving from her position on the floor. It’s good to see you.Charles has been released from the hospital, she added. He’s gone home to his parents. I’m going home, too. But I wanted to see you first.
She knelt before me. Her eyes, clear of makeup, were brimming with tears.
I’ve been such a fool. And she lay her head in my lap.
Tentatively, my paint-heavy hand touched her hair.
It’s all right, I said.
And it was.
Madeleine. Matutinal. Marianne, Maribelle, Maria, Mary. Monday, Monday. Murmur martyr, my mother. Murk, mist, maledictum. Murder. Marizkha, Mikhaela, Maya. Maryam. Misery makes mournful memories, must make memory-minders mad. Moths mire mullioned mouths, meadowing. Milk milks milky maids. March. More, Madame? Magda, Malika, Marcsa, Martuska. Microphone. Meridian. Mulch milching mud. Ma. Mare. My mare, my moon. My Manhattan, my malted, Michelangelo. Mike mechanizes mother’s medicine. Medic! Magnficos macerate macaroons, make madder, my my. Maculate my minister, my messenger’s misfortune. Maintains mum. Morning’s minion. Madgehowlet. Maggot. Miles manufacture, missy might meddle, muffle misogynists. Mixed messages, magnified. Mastered mainsheets make miles more merry. Munificent main, maritime moment. Martha, May, Misty. Moth-eaten mot, makebate. Milady’s malady? Meliceris? My madame’s malapert. Male malpractice, mistaken malignity, maladminstered modes modify my modesty. Mother. Miss me. Musk. Many materteral maids make my mincing misses’ mephitic meconium. Maladjusted missal, marshal more mummers, make mayhem, make measure. Misrule. Monumental man, moon-eyed mogul, march myriad museums Maltaward. Murder. Millennium. Millicent. Mandarins make mandamus misprised mainpernable misdemeanors. Minx. Minor minuets mimic majority matrices, madrasas matriculate minors, merry melodies meander. Madness. Mandate. More: Muriel, Margaret, Mytrle, Miranda. Magdalene. Mingled mayflies mock maypoles. Marry, my mobled mistress mutes moneyed monastics. Misunderstood, much? Master? My moment’s monument. Marble. My mother mortified, moldered, massively, my me. Monitoring my mounted marshal, my maugering meager messiah, makes me mundane mostly, moth-eaten, ‘maciated. Mitigates menace. Molly, molybdenum, Mara, Mavis, Maxine, Monica, Moira, Mimi, Minerva. Murk menacing mosstroopers. Midnight. Moonstruck. Monstrous. Moi, ma mademoiselle. My mine. Misled. Mitred. Motiveless malignity. Mythic murmuring. Molting. Mirage.
4.
Miramare
Noir. It unfolds, it spreads, needing no shape to advance, unforeseeable container of itself, like this prose, like a camera set up at ankle level under a table, angled upward and left to run, to catch what catch can. “Whose point of view is that?” “Mine.” They stream by, sinister men and women, pants and dresses, terrifying nostrils, the emphasis falling on unregarded surfaces, the backs of hands, heads, buttocks, pointed heels, small dogs with short legs in rapid clicking motion, the light inescapably itself, marking an ordinary afternoon in the city, any city of the sun—Rome, Barcelona, Port-au-Prince, Miami, Lahore, Heraklion, Cairo—city on the Black Sea—capable of casting long shadows before nightfall, doorways cutting themselves out of streets, noir, each walker at an angle to herself, a sense of thickness to the air, slightest slow motion, a few extra frames per second, adding new hours to the day for a second life of dreams, mosaic of the day rearranged, plotless, into fragments of color: a hand grips a knife, a father faces his son, a husband and wife play chess. Every hair on your head is counted. And a man is speaking, a man’s mouth, lips full like mine, moving pauselessly, tip of his tongue flashing between white irregular teeth, the volume’s all the way down but there’s something like room tone, street tone, it’s no void, roaring like surf (a sun city, city by the sea), tuned into a bass line, a song you danced to once in a sweating cinderblock club, white shirts gone purple
in the black light on the men, flashing under dark suits, the women like suns grown old in their tight red dresses (under Ibiza, Jamaica, every deep a lower deep, clubbed) tripping limbs and heads snapped back, numb to the point of a wallflower’s nonexistence, watching all this, the music no longer music, just a grind, thoughtless perceiving point, the father is lecturing, lips and hound jaws and chin and tongue wagging, the upper mandible immobile as we know, top of your attention (the frame) cutting off the windows to the soul, just a mouth’s authority, fathering—but who, who is he—soundtrack blurring out what you thought you wanted most to know—what is he saying. You do not wake from this, a camera dreams its battery life away. You are alone with the others in the theater looking at a bright white screen, that isn’t even white, a sort of mesh or grid or desert of such terrible purity it becomes annihilating substance, if you could feel in two dimensions, that part of yourself that’s always a little ahead of the rest of you, in the eyes, in front of them, like the little space for breath between nose and mouth, visible in winter, the image of the past, its absence, retreating, red shift. It’s a simple situation moments before you wake: you sit looking forward at nothing, as at the sea at night, and nothing spreads its wings behind you in transcendental light, making no shadows on the wall, and you are lying in bed, and there’s a woman in your arms, and she tells you a story in which you play no part.
Dear Elsa,
I’m going to sing to you now, sing like a canary. Sing from pain. To truly sing is to open a second mouth deep inside your body; it is the wound that sings. Something deeper than memory, than images, something in the flesh. You can catch it like a disease, you can be afflicted with someone else’s memories. I sang, I smoked too much, for the same reason, smoke from a bomb crater, smoke from the crematoria, smoke from the secret mouth. And do you have the same syndrome, do you remember for me who spent her whole life trying to understand her own mother’s silence? I sang for my father, from a very young age, and my mother was my teacher though I thought she was dead. I was six years old and they had all been years of terror and unease, from the moment they stamped the word Zsido on my birth certificate to my girlhood in a dying and divided city to the chaotic postwar period in which I changed apartments three times before my father appeared one gray morning, thin as a rake, someone I only remembered from photographs, to take me away from my mother’s parents, the only family I’d ever known, with the single magic word America, and bring me limp and stunned on the long journey through the belly of destroyed Germany that ended in the former SS barracks in the DP camp in Belsen where my father and I would live for the next three years. I sat next to him on the packed and smoky train car that first night, trembling, forced close by overcrowding and yet wanting not to touch him, this stranger with his shapeless cloth cap and death’s-head cheekbones and nails bitten to the quick. To calm me he told me to sing with him, it was December so we sang Christmas songs in Hungarian, “Silent Night” and “O Tannenbaum,” and the other cramped and miserable refugees in the carriage, every one of them a Jew like us, began to sing along. Then once we were settled in that bare, bleak, drafty room my lessons began in earnest—my father found me a teacher, a once-plump woman called Frau Drechsler with thick gray hair and severe black brows and deep wrinkles on her cheeks, so that her true age was impossible to fathom, to teach me the canon, in her own language which she spoke in a harsh croaking raven’s voice that dissolved impossibly at the drop of a hat into the half-ruined but luminous mezzo-soprano that had made her her living before the war, she taught me the songs, the lieder and cantatas reclaimed from the murderers, of Bach, Strauss, Brahms, Schubert. I joined a children’s chorus that gave concerts every Saturday when the weather was fine, and we learned English songs to please the homesick British soldiers who watched over us: “It Might as Well Be Spring,” “I Can’t Begin to Tell You,” “Accentuate the Positive,” “Teddy-Bears Picnic,” “It Could Happen to You.” Sometimes I’d give little impromptu concerts for the soldiers hanging around outside the canteen or at the main gate to try and wheedle a few chocolates from them, or a cigarette I could trade for the butterscotch candies I loved. German, English: I sang in these languages, not understanding them, but filled nonetheless with feeling, a kind of creeping deep inside, the feeling of that inner mouth coming unglued, unstuck. Even then I knew that the soldiers’ English with its elongated vowels was not the “real thing”; it was the English on American radio, Hollywood English (American films twice a week in the little theater where SS officers had once brought their families to relax). I studied my future at the cinema and my father on the sidelines of soccer games, practicing his trade, his restless hustle: making bets on the outcomes of games, smuggling black market luxuries, ubiquitous on the heavy iron-wheeled bicycle he dragged into our room in the barracks at night and leaned against the door so no one could steal it or sneak in (we were lucky to have the room, cold and bleak as it was, to ourselves, entire large families were crammed into neighboring rooms, it must have been my father’s activities that guaranteed our relatively sumptuous privacy), so if I had to pee in the night I had to do it in the cracked metal basin we used as a chamberpot, squatting in the harsh glare of the camp lights that the scrap of canvas that we used for a windowshade didn’t do enough to deflect. Women, too, my father had his women, it’s incredible to think now of desire able to survive what had to be survived, but it had, it rampaged forth, and as little flower gardens sprang up everywhere in the camp to accompany the much larger vegetable gardens, as we sang for the soldiers and sat up at attention in the camp school, so too did flirtations and affairs take place, women who’d lost children, men who’d lost wives finding each other furtively in sheds and behind bushes, no one much caring for the old proprieties, the camp’s birthrate was impressive, though he never brought one back to our room I knew they were out there, my father’s women, he might have been pimping for all I know, I wouldn’t put it past him and I wouldn’t blame him, not really, after what he’d been through. Which he never spoke of, naturally, and naturally I never asked. He was only my father, a stranger that I lived with and came to know intimately without his ever shedding that strangeness, that male difference, washing with a rag under his arms and between his legs in the pale mornings, stretching like a cat, shaking his hair out like a dog, stepping into a cloud of cologne that stung my half-closed eyes in the bunk where I pretended to sleep. He would escort me every day to Frau Drechsler in the music room of what had been the senior officers’ quarters, where she presided over a battered upright piano, asking her about my progress, but never staying to hear me sing. Was it the German that pained him? He certainly spoke the language, his little smuggling business depended on it, though Bergen-Belsen by then was its own city of Jews, its own little Jerusalem, Germans still surrounded it and came into the camp, making deliveries, working construction, unembarrassed, men in stiff gray clothes who had perhaps performed similar duties before 1945, it was impossible to know for sure. My father would go up to these men with a friendly smile, neatly dressed, exchange a few low words and something in his fist, laughter. They called him the Ambassador for his distinguished air, or to mock him: he carried with him that indefinable aura of prewar grace, of unwounded Europe. He would return to our room with a knapsack full of cigarettes or a bottle of cognac or tubes of lipstick or brilliantine or soap (a prized and extremely rare commodity), even packages of condoms—I didn’t recognize them of course, spilling from his knapsack onto the bed, my father said they were balloons and inflated one for me, but when someone knocked on the door he darted out with his cigarette and popped it, smiling oddly at my tears. I had no toys, my father could not or would not devote his energies to acquiring any, I had to make do with an old mop head he tied with some string and pair of mismatched buttons sewed to make the mad lopsided eyes of the mouthless dolly I carried with me everywhere and slept with, burrowed in scratchy but warm woolen blankets. Why did he bring me to the camp, life was better in Budapest, even then, with my
grandparents whose faces I can no longer recall but whose love and care were like iron, doing everything they could to guard me from the truth, the tenuousness of our lives in the apartment where I was born, the ever-foreclosed possibilities of my life and the foreshortened horizon of their own lives that cracked open again miraculously in ‘45, the narrow escape they never permitted me to escape, living indoors almost all the time, only discovering the sun and rubble at the war’s end, beginning to grow, until he appeared that day with that queer cap of his turning and turning in his hands, his apologetic but frozen smile, the words he must have used to make my grandmother relax her grip on my shoulders, letting go, then touching me again firmly to push me toward this stranger and his plan for me of a better life in America. It was liberation of a sort, school only happened for a few hours a day and my father was always elsewhere, except for Frau Drechsler the camp, strange as it may sound, was a fabulous playground, a Babel, Jews from all over Europe making themselves understood with whatever lay to hand, Yiddish or German or French or English or Hebrew or just gestures, nods, lifted eyebrows. I ran wild with the other children, some of them much older, some of them survivors (I already understood the secret but critical distinction between the remnant that had actually survived the Lager and those who, like me, had gone on living comparatively normal lives in hiding in their own cities and towns), we ran in fierce packs through the muddy alleys and fields of the camp, fighting other packs, stealing whatever we could, girls as young as eight smoking cigarette ends they found behind the British barracks, cursing proficiently in eight languages. All this should have taught me something of the world, but it did not. I was young and remained young, for a shockingly long time. At night I dreamed of my mother’s voice—no words, just a rhythm, a tone. Her face was a benign blur, a little glowing fire in the cracked hall of mirrors of my childish memory. When I sang, for Frau Dreschler, for the soldiers, in the children’s chorus, I tried to sing a memory I couldn’t possibly possess.