by Joshua Corey
There’s no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
When she went away
The blues walked in and met me
What did my father remember of her? What memories had he suppressed, in the silence of his breathing when he came wheeling his bicycle in long after curfew, the weight of him sagging the bunk where he lay smoking one last cigarette before dropping off to sleep? What was it that lived in him that lived somehow in me, a crack in the heart like the crack in the cornerstone of a large building that never quite collapses but only settles, day after day, deeper into the earth? My mother was a ghost to us both, a ghost in Budapest, a ghost in the camp, a ghost on the day our papers came through, a ghost on the steamer that carried us in three slow days across the ocean to New York. There I came fully into English at last, American English, the language of optimism and transformation. I spoke only English from the moment I crossed the gangplank, determined to arrive in New York an American, answering my father only in that language to his amusement and frustration. I had, have always had, as even Frau Drechsler admitted, an uncanny ear. I avoided him and the other passengers as much as I could, choosing instead to spend my time with the few American members of the ship’s crew, practicing accents—the Indiana flatlands of the purser, a steward’s Brooklyn twang, the black stoker’s melancholy Alabama drawl. When my feet touched American soil I felt myself becoming a part of it, immediately and all at once, and it shamed me to be dragged away from my glimpse of Manhattan to darkest Queens where I found myself once again in the camp, what seemed like solid blocks of other Hungarian Jews, first in the spare bedroom of my father’s cousin’s two-family house on 32nd Avenue and later across the street in the bungalow of our own that you, Elsa, must remember. I wanted, more fervently it seemed than my father, whose idea it had been, to be an American and only American. I dropped the lieder and sang only American songs, what I heard at the drugstores and ice cream parlors: I wanted to be Rosemary Clooney, I wanted to be Doris Day, blonde and girlish and pure as ice cream, not the dark-haired dark-eyed foreigner I felt myself to be and saw reflected everywhere, the women in the grocery store and the bakery, weary waiting for the bus, jabbering away at each other in what I now thought of not as Hungarian or Yiddish but as foreign, jib-jab, nonsense. Now I no longer answered my father when he spoke in our native tongue: I sat stony faced until he repeated his question in halting, heavily accented English. At school, surrounded by other immigrant children, I gravitated toward the native born; I still remember Marianne, who was Polish but second generation, born in the USA, picking up from her the slightly dated Americanisms that tasted to me like freedom: gee whiz, gee willikers, quit bugging me, I got dibs, guy’s got a DA, don’t be a spaz, got a thin one?, razz my berries, that’s a panic and a half. All this time the ghost of my mother was circling. It was two years almost to the day of our arrival, my second birthday as an American, when I came home on a warm breathless September day to that house, we had only moved in the previous month, into a hush, an unnatural summer silence, to find a strange brand-new looking paisley suitcase blocking the front door the way my father’s bicycle had blocked the room we’d once shared. I had to search the little house, room by room, until I found them sitting there, in my own bedroom at the foot of my narrow bed, my father neatly dressed in the white shirt and natty tie he always wore when working, next to a narrow and strange woman, like an insect that disguises itself as a stick or vice-versa, wearing a gray woolen dress much too heavy for the day and a kerchief over her hair that marked her to my practiced eye as a proper greenhorn, fresh off the boat. Just sitting, the two of them, not saying anything, her eyes fever bright, his hooded, her holding a black-and-white photo of me in her bone-white hands. Untold forever her odyssey from the bright black hole she had vanished into one Budapest morning along with my father, the wormhole she’d traveled down out of sight and memory only to remerge on a hot afternoon in Queens; though I did learn later she’d been in America already for two or three months, staying with a second cousin in Jersey City, watching and waiting for the moment, who knows what would make it right in her eyes, to rejoin our lives. She spoke no English, never tried to learn, she looked at me with enormous hopeless tragic eyes and said my name in a way that made it foreign, that brought me closer to her, it suffocated me. Mama, I said in English, it sounds the same in Hungarian, that was the nearest and only bridge I would cross. Mama, where did you come from? Mama, where did you go? I did not ask that question then, but would in the years to come, she would answer only Az ilyen történetek nem a gyermekek számára, such stories are not for children. But Mama, I’d say, I’m twelve, I’m fifteen, I’m sixteen, I’m a grown woman, I’m not a child any longer. I’m eighteen, Mama. But by then she was dead, no longer a survivor, and my father had a new business partner in the woman who’d become his second wife, that awful bitch, and I was living my own real life at last, an American life. In between were six years of noisy silence, Mama a pair of eyes in the kitchen, my father gone all day and into the night, cutting hair at first, trying and failing at the old schemes, two shops closed down under him until he was reduced to driving a taxi at all hours, the invisible man. Mama did nothing at all as far as I could see, apart from making me inedible lunches to take to school in the morning and preparing hot tea and peanut butter sandwiches for me to eat when I returned—though I was returning later and later, spending as much time as possible in the living rooms of girlfriends and the cars of boyfriends. One evening in particular I remember coming home to find Shabbat dinner all laid out on the little kitchen table, with roast chicken and challah loaf and all the rest. I scarcely knew what it was—Papa had come back from the Lager with all the religion burned out of him—and he never appeared that night. But I remember Mama standing there at the head of the table gesturing for me to imitate her, to cover my eyes and say the prayer as God’s bride, the Sabbath, approached. She said it in Hebrew, I watched her, moving my lips, saying nothing. After that we just sat there, me smoking a cigarette, her with hands on her knees, watching the chicken get cold, waiting for my father. When it was full dark I stood up and told her I had a date, which wasn’t true. She said nothing I could hear, though her lips moved. When I got back late that night the table was still laid with the cold dinner—Papa’s coat was in its usual place and their bedroom door was shut. The next morning it was all cleared away as if it never had been, and my mother never repeated the experiment, at least not while I was in that house. The next year I went away to college. And the year after that she was dead.
Memory, Elsa, is a poor substitute for justice.
What I’m trying to tell you, my impossible daughter, is that these memories aren’t even mine, so how could they be yours? Let the dead bury the dead. Don’t spend your youth as I spent mine, carrying your mother on my back. Life is short and memory is long, too long—you must kill it when you can. Hate me if you must, it’s better that way, you must get free of it all somehow, as I’ve tried to do. I don’t know and can never know about my parents and what they suffered. They were ordinary people and they stayed ordinary, and I wanted to be something else. This city now, here, where I live out my last days—I look around and it seems like all the people are young or old, nothing in between. How many of them are murderers? How many the children of murderers? And how many—a far smaller number—are the children of the murdered? There’s no living with these questions, no going on with them. We are what we are, here and now. You must let go of me, Elsa. Bless me and let me go.
What is the “I” that intrudes incessantly in this narrative like punctuation? If chapters were commas then readers would ride. Not Gustave, not Ruth, not Ruth’s anonymous Papa. No mother writes, only M, her posthumous correspondence. Least of all poor Lamb, leading the goose chase from city to city in Europe, stoic ingénue, winding deeper and deeper into the I’s conspiracy with itself. That this is my story through a glass darkly. That it’s my history like a concealed weapon, maybe it’s there and maybe i
t’s not, you can’t relax till the showdown comes. Pistols, heartbreak at dawn. Forget the future, forget the glaciers melting and the sleepless nights, what about a sustainable past to go foraging in, secure enough to forget? If horses could sing Bach. If I could sit across from you, close enough so our knees touched, and recite this to you, story of my own estranged and operatic heart. If people still read poems there’d be no need for novels. I must unfurl the concealing veils for a reader to guess at, to pounce. I am sitting at a cafe with all the other I’s, each telling his or her story to one of the endless series of listening Lambs, all of them hatted, equipped with tape recorders, silencers, false passports, money belts. To get the story to kill the witness and make a clean getaway. Like Lamb, I am more than a client and less than human. You exist nowhere but here in the film of my persuasion. To stay you, on task, is to be an accomplice to your own vanishing. In the frame, in the Lamb-sized holes, a past appears. And somewhere Ruth, my Jewish-American Emma Bovary, is preparing to start out on her own journey, at the close of day like Athena’s owl. To find a future in the Old World, to build an American hope on a heap of bones. We are not innocent, but the I can’t help it. To make a self is to self-exculpate, digging deep. I carry this forward, a woman with no gender, motherless. In search of the body, corpse with a beating heart, against which I nestle, for shelter, dreaming past dawn.
There is a third figure to consider for the man who takes care of things: the enforcer, the muscle, le samourai, the assassin. A gardener wields his secateurs calmly, with no outward show of passion. He does not make history, he makes nothing happen that is not inherent in the existing situation. He prunes; he intervenes; he cuts short. He cannot make history disappear but he can disappear it, mark it off cleanly and boldly and without remorse. He vanishes anonymously into the mob whose face he momentarily bears or—it is the same thing—is taken up as sacrifice. He does not face, cannot be mistaken for, any justice. His aesthetic is cold in its perfections, nearly sterile. The surgeon cuts, and if the vivisected limb goes on aching, that is not his fault. If brass awakes a trumpet. Silence opens—she can hope, without admitting—a wounded life.
We took the train from the Gare du Nord and from the moment we stepped aboard I felt us new with each other, tender, she was with me at last, she was mine. All night in the third-class compartment she slept with her head on my chest, on my belly, while I sat upright trying not to disturb her, to cushion her tangled cloud of hair from the bumps and shocks of the slow-crawling westward train. She had spoken vaguely about our going to England, to some friends she knew in London, where we could begin anew. I would paint; she would study again, perhaps at the School of Economics. Something practical, she said. I want to learn about money. Where it comes from, where it goes. What makes it seem so real. But when we got to La Havre just before dawn she blinked against me, yawned, sat up, and said she wasn’t ready to get off the train.
But this is where we get the boat to Dover.
Dover isn’t the place. Let’s keep going.
All right, I said. Let’s keep going.
We changed trains for Cherbourg. The new train rocked us gently together, as if she were the bird and I were the nest. When I opened my eyes, it was full daylight. M was gone. But then I saw her outside on the platform, laughing at me.
Your face! she shouted. Did you think I had vanished? Like Kim Novak?
The town was dismal, somehow gray even in the summer sunlight that fell in blinding sheets between the buildings, making me hold my hand before my eyes. M had sunglasses. Let’s go! she said. I want to find the beach. Come on! And she ran. I lumbered after.
It didn’t take us very long to achieve the port: a few high-masted pleasure boats, a steamer parked offshore with black smoke funneling up from it like a fresh smear of charcoal. M ran down to the quay and stared at the water. I heard her ask a bespectacled pensioner with a fishing rod, Où est la plage? and he pointed. Merci! she shouted after him, running again. I saluted him awkwardly as he watched us go by, pipe in his hand.
It took the better part of an hour for us to walk there. She put her arm in mine and we walked along the coast road, saying little, watching the sea. It was a turbulent gray day with sudden shafts of light striking out here and there, touching the pewter waves and turning them into fiery medallions that as abruptly faded. The sand I could see, below us, was gray. It was summer, but the wind was cold and I had no jacket. M, in her jaunty blue raincoat, was better equipped. Still, she walked on my left, so I could shield her a little.
La plage. The beach, when it appeared, was broad and bright. We had to descend to it, and as we did the sun broke more fully through the clouds and turned the indifferent gray expanse of sand into a radiance I squinted at. M walked faster and faster, then pulled away from me suddenly and ran. I did not run after her but continued to walk steadily as her body grew smaller and smaller, as she ran down the road and across the brush grass and into the dunes. There were holidaygoers here and there, but not very many—it was not at that time a fashionable area. Its claims to fame were historical: in 1912 the Titanic had stopped over at Cherbourg after leaving Southampton, taking on additional passengers and cargo before steaming into the night, never to be seen again. And in 1944 the D-Day landings took place not far off. Years later, I found myself wondering if this beach, what I came to think of as the beach of M, if it were not the same as Utah Beach, where the Allies had suffered comparatively few casualties in their ultimately successful effort to reclaim France from fascism. It was not and could not be, of course. All my contacts with history were destined to be fleeting if not imaginary. I knew this even at the time, and did not care. For I had M.
I had her, but she was running. And when she reached the edge of the water and did not stop, I again began running too. She ran straight into the waves, arms outstretched, and disappeared for a moment in the surf. I beat down the beach after her, passing a few scattered blankets and umbrellas. Someone was playing the Rolling Stones on a transistor radio: I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead…. I kicked up some sand in that direction and a few voices protested. I was over a dune and down onto where the sand was hard and flat. For a moment I did not see her. I took off my shoes and plunged in.
Gus! she was shouting, crying, laughing in the water. Gus! It was not so deep, after all, where she was standing. Gus! Her face, hair, clothes were wet. She turned from me toward the waves and shouted something at the sea.
I grabbed her by the shoulders, then by the waist, and lifted her out of the water. She kicked viciously at me, still wailing.
Finally we sat down in the sand together. A man in sunglasses and madras shorts had stood up, had begun to approach us to see if everything was all right. He saw her sobbing with head down, caught my glare, hesitated, withdrew.
For a while the sun shone on us and kept us warm, while the dune did something to block the wind. But then the clouds rolled in.
I called her name, over and over, softly. It was getting colder.
She had composed herself by this time and was staring out to sea. When she finally looked at me her smile was like that you’d give a stranger you trust not to harm you. But then she gave me her hand.
Somehow we made it out of there, in the growing chill of the later afternoon, both of us wet, chilled, with sand in our clothes and our hair. We had passed, on our way out of town, a small cluster of buildings, one of which was a hotel. By the time we made it inside the dark miniscule lobby we were both shivering uncontrollably. But M shook out her hair and drew herself up when the concierge greeted us warily. Behind our backs she pressed some bills into my hand.
Monsieur et Madame Niemand, she said to the clerk. De Paris. Nous sommes en voyage de noces.
C’est vrai, I said. We’ve had problems with our luggage, though. The rail company is supposed to send it on to us.
The clerk looked at us: the hulking, heavy-browed Alsatian and the delicate, arched woman with the American accent. He shrugged.
; Sign here, Mr. Niemand. He put the key in my hand.
The room was small, on the fourth floor: a chair, a little table or writing desk, a sink, the bed. The window faced the alley, a blank white wall that reflected perfectly the mood of the sky, turbulent with clouds but very occasionally permitting a shaft of sunlight, long as a finger, to touch the earth here and there. A little rain was wetting the windowpanes. If you opened the window and leaned out, a bit farther than was comfortable or safe, then your gaze might bring you a glimpse of the sea.