by Joshua Corey
Trembling, I locked the door behind us and watched her at the window, leaning out so very far, letting in a little wind, a little rain. Her wet hair clung to her shoulders and curled at her cheeks. She was very pale.
Close the window, I said.
We undressed quickly, not looking at each other, and slid into the bed, which groaned under my weight. Immediately our cold, clammy skins were touching, and then pressed together, and the cold gave way in me to a rush of heat that spread through my limbs and up into my face, so much so that in a moment I wanted to kick the covers off. Her body was very cold, until it wasn’t.
I painted you, you know, I said to her. That same day Charles was hurt, the day you disappeared.
Where is it?
I don’t know, I admitted. I lost it in the move.
I wish I could see it, she said, eyes tightly shut, her cold skin warming against me. Did you make me ugly? You always made me so ugly.
Holding me.
It is one thing to paint a woman, to imagine her, as an artist must imagine what he sees to make it real. It is another thing to touch her and to be touched. The imagination, which for so long has rushed ahead, is defeated by the actual, the senses. There are no words. When she was warm enough, she opened her eyes and smiled at me. Then I was on my back and she was on top of me, like I had never dared to imagine. My belly, her buoyancy. The shock of dark hair on her head, under her arms, abundant at her crotch, against the whiteness of her skin. A rose was petaling her cheeks, her throat, at her sternum. She was moving more rapidly against me. It’s really happening, I remember thinking. And: I must hold on. On.
The things we remember so well: did we experience them at the time? What I remember is her face, as we ground ourselves together, rooted for the moment in the moment, the distortion of it, the tension around her mouth. Her face in the sea. Did Charles give her this face? Did I? Where did it come from, this feeling that could not last, that convinces—in the moment—that it will never be repeated?
What happened? I said softly into her ear, her head nestled against me, our bodies cooling.
I lay there in the bed, watching the light on the blank white wall turn pink and purple with the sunset, while she whispered the story to my chest. How she fled from history into history. There were no trains, she said, there was no gas for cars, only for doctors and police and the army. I stood up in the hospital room, rebuked by his sleeping face, the blank bloody bandage over his right eye, and walked out into the hallway and down the stairs and out into the street where the manifestation had left its long wake: trash, tree trunks, the smoldering remnants of overturned little cars. Under the paving stones: bare earth, dirt. I walked. It was late, the action was west. I went east. I passed few people as I walked, mostly small groups of twos and threes, not students, who glanced fearfully at me as though I carried a Molotov cocktail in my hands. One middle-aged couple crossed the street when they saw me approach. I kept my head down. There were no trains, but my steps guided me anyway toward the Gare de Lyon. It was closest. It wasn’t even the right station for where I was going. At Ile Saint-Louis the Pont de Sully was closed: big trucks blocked the bridge and I could see some men in black uniforms standing very still, it seemed, while the lights from their cigarettes bobbed and danced like fireflies. Austerlitz then. I followed the Seine, which reflected the city lights like always. You couldn’t tell what had been happening there. I reached the station and it was deserted, of course, a great hulking building. Two men stood by the entrance warming their hands by an ashcan fire. They looked at me and I became afraid. I didn’t know what else to do but keep walking. I was glad for my boots. To my right the station was sliding by, the still tracks that led south and away to Orleans, the warm south, Marseille, Spain, Portugal. It wasn’t the right station. To my left the river, vast and silent between silent walls. Then a miracle that I heard before I saw, down a bend in a side street: an engine. I followed. Outside an Autoprix, a small truck with engine idling. The driver came out and said something to someone inside, then reached up and pulled the metal grating down over the shop’s windows and front door. He locked it and handed the lock back to someone through the grating then turned aside to light his cigarette. He saw me coming. A middle-aged man with a head like a treestump wedged upside-down on his shoulders, a gray cap squashing down the unruly roots. He smoked, watching me approach, neither friendly nor unfriendly.
I need to leave Paris, I said. I’m traveling east.
He shrugged like a Frenchman.
I’m going east, he said. Northeast, but east.
Perfect.
I rode at his side for what seemed like hours in the truck’s little cab, barely exchanging a word. The radio played no news, only songs whose melodies and lyrics enjoyed ironic relations: «Comme d’habitude», «Le Déserteur», «Cinématographe». Wind blew smoke from his cigarettes out cracks in the windows and the engine snorted and gabbled like some sort of sea creature. He took two cigarettes out of the packet and lit them both and passed one to me: I knew some ritual was being enacted but didn’t understand the rules: I took it and smoked it down to the last scraps, though I never smoked. Once I caught him looking at my legs and instinctively pulled away. Ce n’est pas neccesaire, mademoiselle, he grunted. His gray cheek flushed. After that I tried to move as little as possible. The heart of Paris bumped and stumbled away behind us while the sun began to make itself felt on the horizon of the bleak industrial suburbs we passed through. I saw a sign and said what it said aloud, startling him: Drancy.
Comment? the driver said.
Rien.
There was nothing to distinguish Drancy from the other cités I’d seen, nothing at all. There was nothing to see, much less to remember. But the name sat queasily on my stomach and I thought suddenly of the fat, impish face of Cohn-Bendit and what we’d all screamed at the top of our lungs two weeks ago, an eternity ago.
Nous sommes tous des indésirables, I whispered.
Comment?
Rien.
Just after dawn we crossed the Marne and the truck came to a stop on the single main street of a little town. This is as far east as I go, the driver said. Before I could respond he had opened his door and climbed out. I watched him cross in front of the windshield and around to my side of the cab, where he opened the car door and, with extreme politesse, offered me his hand. When I got down he extended his other hand, in the palm of which was folded a ten-franc note. Now it was my turn to say Ce n’est pas nécessaire, monsieur. Merci. Merci beaucoup.
Vous devriez avoir d’argent liquide, he said. Liquid: the word everyone had been using for cash with the banks and the American Express closed. Take it.
I took it.
Good luck, he said to me in English.
I hitchhiked. East and east. There were few motels and I didn’t have money for inns. I met up with backpackers and slept in their little tents, smelling their sweat. A woman in a village where I found myself totally alone and rideless let me sleep on a pile of blankets on the cold stone floor of her kitchen with a fire grumbling under an iron pot like in the Middle Ages. A man in an Italian suit picked me up and let me sleep in the back seat of his Renault in the garage, not telling his wife. I woke up in the middle of the night and found him there with me, still wearing the suit, with a bottle of cognac. He kept talking about how all of his friends and cronies deplored the events—even out here they called them that—but not him, he thought the students were très sympa. Finally I put my hand into his pocket, before he could ask for more, and masturbated him, and after he slunk back to the house full of promises, I got out of the car and that garage and walked out into the night until I met yet another driver. At the border I got some strange looks from the douanier, who asked me repeatedly what my business was in Germany. He warned me that my student visa might be revoked if I left France now. This was nonsense of course. Already I knew from the papers I’d seen and the conversation of the men I’d met that the Events were subsiding, that the factories were up and running again.
Only the students hadn’t gotten the message. But I was patient and I was pretty, and they let me through. And there I got my ticket for West Berlin. And in Berlin I waited six days for a visa, to cross to the Soviet sector. Men in uniforms looking down at my passport and up at me, down and up, down and up, in a kind of official seesaw rhythm, before handing it back to me, little book of identity, and waving me through. And from the Ostbanhof another train, east, always east, to Poland. Trying to reach the house of death itself or to its threshold. I didn’t look on the house, I didn’t behold the gate, didn’t read the words written there, their mocking embrace taking me in as they had taken my father, my mother, and later, unaccountably, returned them to life. I only saw the little town with its unspellable name, with insensible glum blond people and a hotel with no screens to keep out the blackflies and an official guide, a minder, who called herself Zlota. She had a round face and round legs and a runny nose and wore the same blue windbreaker every day, indoors and out, no matter the weather. Every morning she took me out to see the sights: farms, factories. I’d told them I was a journalist for a student paper in Paris; they wanted to support the revolution there and I didn’t tell them it was already over, already lost. Every morning I told her I wanted to see the camp and she shook her head. It is not possible, she said, and screwed up her face into an apologetic look. I imagine she wrote reports on me every night while I paced the dingy room overlooking a black wall. Imagine, a room just like this one with no view except of a wall, but this wall is white and that wall was black. So black that night was no night, it was just blackness, and that’s as close as I came to seeing what I’d come to see. Standing in that window which wouldn’t open more than a couple of inches, staring at nothing, sometimes craning my neck as though I could see around that wall, around that building, around Zlota, around darkness, and see what my parents had seen. I didn’t make it. The day before my visa was set to expire, I left. Zlota saw me to the train; I believe she’d become fond of me. She stood on the platform in her blue windbreaker, a kerchief tied over her hair to make her look like the peasant farmer’s wife she was born to be. She had made me some fudge if you can imagine that—a heavy brown square of it. I looked her in the eye. I’m a Jew, I said. And then, I don’t know why German would have been clearer, I said it in German: Ich bin eine Jude. And then: Je suis juive. I am a Jew, a Jewess. How do you say it in Polish? Her expression didn’t change. My parents came here, I told her, on a train, with many others. Do you understand? Zlota could have been anywhere from twenty to sixty with that kerchief covering her hair. Do you understand? And they came back, I said helplessly, with the train standing there, spreading my fingers by my sides, they came back and they couldn’t talk about it. No one will talk about it. And you haven’t said a word. Will you speak to me? It is not possible, she said, like she’d been saying all along, like she’d said even silently riding next to me on the little diesel bus to see the sights of the province, like she’d said when she’d watched me try a little of the local brandy without drinking any herself, like she’d been saying when she asked me about the revolution in Paris and about America and Elvis Presley, like she’d been saying from the moment she’d met me on this very platform standing a little apart from a pair of bored soldiers with machine guns who’d been furnished by someone as window dressing, as reminder of what I wouldn’t be permitted to see or to know. It is not possible. And then I was on the train with her chocolate on my lap, leaking through the thin paperboard to stain my only dress, watching that round silent face retreat through the window; I was sitting backwards in the compartment and so the town and the house of death fell away from me like a film running backwards that someday would have to be run forward; it is inevitable, and yet not possible, that’s how I’ve come to feel about it. So rewound backward over miles and governments to Paris, to Charles’s bedside, and further back to the sea, and now to you. And soon I’ll have to get on the plane and fly back to America and pick up my life there. Because that’s the only life, I see that now. I came looking for origins. I came looking for real life. But this Europe, this continent of yours. It’s a graveyard. The headstones are beautiful, and there are beautiful people to tend the graves and walk in the grass. But everything’s dead here, and everyone. Don’t you see that?
Lying next to me, her voice and the spiral of cigarette smoke and the dry heat of her leg pressed against mine the only reality; that and the blazing rectangle of light the single window cast above our bed, showing every crack and ripple in the ugly wallpaper, sparking the dull edge of a brass wall sconce into fire. What did she discover? That she was part of something she didn’t want to be a part of? Or not part of something she wanted to be a part of? I pictured it, I pictured her, east and east, through the verdant fields and charcoal-green forests and industrial parks of Deutschland, from the Rhineland where I was born to the border, FRG to GDR, shiver of the closed train, the closed faces, the arrival finally in Poland, rain and smoke, Zlota the watchful peasant at her side all day and in the night that black wall and some unimaginable past rising up in the night, in her body, in Jewishness itself, as unimaginable to me as to her, to anyone who tried to see it, feel it, standing on the border, face pressed to the icy glass, all possibilities foreclosed. It is human, I said to myself, not knowing why, it is human it is human.
We should go south, I said drowsily. To Mont St. Michel. We can hitchhike. I’ve always wanted to see it.
She didn’t answer.
I wonder if there are still monks there. My uncle told me about a trip he took there before the war. He said at low tide you could walk where the water used to be. That it was like walking on water. That the sand there bends like a trampoline, holding you up.
She was sleeping.
I’ve always wanted to go. The sun died through my closed eyelids.
The two of us slept.
When the light returned she was gone. Money on the bedstand. So I had been valued to a point, I had been the one the spy loves. I had a story to tell, though I have never told it before now. Of course I looked for her, at the train station, at the beach. The concierge watched me come and go without my wife with bemusement, until I paid him for the next night, and the next. I spent the rest of the week there, waiting to see if M would reappear, knowing she would not. I slept a good deal, ate simple meals, felt not the slightest desire to paint or draw or sketch. When the money was almost gone I took the train again, east, not getting out at Paris, east and east toward home, Strasbourg, where I would eventually apprentice to a printer who specialized in tour guides and wall-sized maps for classrooms and governments. And he made me a partner, and then he died, and I married his widow, a short plain woman with a pleasant smile and nothing wistful about her, and we were in business together for almost forty years. And I was married and then I wasn’t and then I was again to a woman I now never see. She lives in Venice. And I never again saw or heard from M, though I have written her letters, not knowing where to send them, until you came along. That sort of thing becomes a habit, I believe.
Dawn is making itself felt through the thin hotel curtain. The city, never fully asleep, is now not fully awake: like a big cat it stretches, squeezing its eyes and extending, tentatively, its claws. Gustave stands.
I have one last letter for her here that I should like you to deliver for me.
Give it to me, says Lamb.
You won’t open it, Gustave says in a low voice.
The American shrugs. Think of it this way. At least someone will read it.
Gustave pauses, then hands it over. A plain white envelope with no name and no address.
Will you see her?
I don’t know, Lamb says, tucking the letter away inside his jacket. I doubt it.
Gustave nods. He is standing there, bent slightly at the hips, cumbrous, patting his pockets as though to make sure everything is still there. Though it isn’t, of course.
It’s a strange story, Lamb says.
Do you find it credible?
> Why shouldn’t I?
Why shouldn’t you, Gustave echoes. He turns his back on Lamb to look out the window at the city. What I have told you is the truth. I am nobody’s father and nobody’s son. There was a woman who tried to make history real, and for a moment, I bore witness. That is all.
The bulging eyes of the angel, looking back.
I have a train to catch, Lamb says, packing his things away. You won’t see me again, Monsieur Lessy.
It’s not you I want to see, says Gustave. The sun catches the edge of the Fernsehtum, unlimited eye of the Stasi, kitsch monument to an eastern past. It glints and blinds. The eye flares. In memoriam. In tears. Someone moving behind him, slowly, with a final purpose.
Her face.
Gustave is gone. What was he?
A full stop. A white wig. A point of view.
I didn’t ask you to kill him, the new reader says into the phone. Or she whispers it, defiantly, desperately: It’s not me. But there’s no one there so she puts it down. The threshold. The private dick’s history is indistinguishable from death. Every day grisly packages she expects in the mail. When she opens them, more books spill out, books she can’t remember ordering, books on parenting, on how to stay married, books on recovering one’s creativity, writing down the bones, what color is her parachute, do what you love and the money will follow, write a screenplay in thirty days. When she’s out with the child and the child is sleeping she finds herself in bookstores, running her eyes across spines in the self-help section, afraid to look up and see someone she knows seeing her there. She browses the European travel books, trying to predict his movements by letter: Barcelona Berlin Brussels Budapest. What have I unleashed, what have I asked for. An accounting. A reckoning. He is out there in the home of my mind, the place I belong, that doesn’t exist, the old world. Wrecking the joint. A man with a gun. What I want him to kill is in me, this rabbit in my brain, this hamster wheel that never stops squeaking. Her daughter lies sprawled in the stroller as though she’d been dropped from a height. How can her neck stretch that far without waking her, hurting her. She sits at the café table with a bad latte and a stack of magazines, leafing through rapidly, registering only the poses of women with sleek skin and provocatively vacuous expressions. They leave a sweet smell on her hands that nauseates her. She has a couple of hardbacks, bestsellers; she flips them open and peels out the little anti-theft magnets, drops them into the basket under the stroller, stands up, leaves the coffee and magazines, and rolls on out. There are no alarms, no one stops her. The new reader is a successful shoplifter who doesn’t care what she steals as long as it’s printed matter. Most of the books go unread, they line the walls of their bedroom in precarious stacks. He doesn’t say anything about it. She can hear him thinking: better books than expensive clothes. Better books than jewelry. Better books than a bitter wife who gives me no peace at night. It’s unfair to Ben, unfair to herself. She is hiding from something, burrowed as deep as she can go in pages, but that something has followed her. The words, the sentences, are increasingly abstract. All she retains of almost anything she reads now is a certain cadence, a progression. Paragraphs are not emotional but sentences are. She takes refuge in paragraphs, whole pages repelled at a glance, turning them, black on white, under the kitchen skylight while dinner’s boiling over or on a park bench or in a Starbucks or late, late at night while everyone is sleeping. She looks at the clock and thinks, He is just getting up over there. Or, He did not go to bed, he’s still up, he’s smoking and looking at the moon. Somewhere under the bed Rimbaud is groaning, legless spirit pushing stubby fingers through his thatch of hair. Time of the assassins. Time of the fathers marching to their doom. Time of the vanished M, the letter unites the lips, nipple or cigarette, something to grasp, fondle, hold. It all disappears. She moves her lips uncomprehendingly over the pale pages. There she is, at the end. There he is, waiting for her. A man can be a destiny. A woman can be on a journey without leaving her comfortable home. M. M is a murderer. M is a marauder, M is empty, M is waiting for the mail. M is alone with M. M is a queen in a castle surrounded by thorns, staring into a mirror, waiting for her breath to appear. M I miss you, M I cannot amputate. Memory.