Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

by Joshua Corey

  Lucy is my daughter. L comes before M. An Elsa? Ruth? Me.

  The new reader hates reading, hates its endlessness, its pointlessness, hates the jabber and the pretentious talk and sentences that are too short or too long or fatuous or have the wrong mouthfeel. To finish reading, not to stop but to finish, that’s what would be truly new. To close the book and look up at the horizon or a stranger or one’s husband or anything at all and to say, I’m finished. I’ve read enough. I’m ready to live. The flesh is happy, for I’ve read all the books.

  M goes missing in me, makes a text, marks her place in every book I read and discard, manufactures a middle way between absolute loss and the terrifying fullness of resurrection. As long as the pages keep turning, the sentences keep coming, she is not gone. She is not here. Hers the body I come from, and will return to. Night flight, nap of the earth. The darkness demands something of me. I answer the call.

  In her own living room, alone with Nadia, Ruth says, It’s my stepfather, he’s dead. Nadia nods sympathetically, doesn’t speak, watches. Ruth covering her face. When she takes her hands away she’s laughing and crying.

  I killed him.

  What do you mean?

  I was angry he didn’t try to stop my mother. From moving to Europe when she was sick. He went with her, and then he didn’t even stay with her. He let her send him away when she needed him most. And he died.

  If she sent him away, Nadia said slowly, how is that his fault?

  He shouldn’t have listened to her. He’s been like that forever. He can’t stand up to her. No one can.

  But what does this mean, that you killed him?

  I don’t know. I got a call from the consul in Budapest. Apparently he was living in a hotel there. They say he had a heart attack.

  I don’t understand.

  He died there. In Berlin.

  Wait a minute. Which is it, Berlin or Budapest?

  There’s a man, Ruth says. His name is Lamb. He works for me. I think Lamb killed him.

  Lamb gave your stepfather a heart attack?

  I know it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy to me. But it’s not crazy. I sent Lamb over there to find him. To find my father.

  Your stepfather?

  Not my stepfather. My real father. And he found him. But he wasn’t what I thought he’d be. He didn’t know what I wanted him to know.

  Which was?

  About my mother, Ruth says. Angrily thinking: Words! About M. So he went on. I told him to go on. I told him not to stop until he found out.

  Found out what?

  Where she was. He went to ask him. And he asked him, he kept asking him. He asked him too hard. And he’s dead.

  But your mother is dead.

  She’s not dead, Ruth says. She’s alive. I can’t explain it but she’s alive. I buried her, but I didn’t do it right.

  Nadia holds Ruth’s hand, her expression serious.

  Thanks for pretending you understand.

  But I do understand. I understand you have suffered a loss. The greatest possible loss.

  No, Ruth says, weeping, that’s not true. What you lost was much worse.

  It is no use to compare losses. You have lost your mother, and not only her life. You have lost her death.

  Now I’m the one who doesn’t understand.

  You do not have her death, Nadia says slowly. You cannot hold it. You do not believe in it. So you do not live. You are aimed like an arrow at another woman’s death.

  If you read about this conversation, would you believe it? Late at night, alone in the dark, just the lamp and the window and the page?

  What should I do?

  This man, Lamb. You must find him. You must see him. You must find out what he knows.

  But he’s told me everything. I have his report. It’s cost me everything, my whole inheritance.

  You must find out what he knows, Nadia repeats. And if necessary, you must stop him.

  Stop him from what?

  From killing her again, Nadia says simply.

  This is a mad conversation, the new reader thinks. It’s not realistic. I don’t buy the psychology behind it. This woman who resembles me, who is caught up in the melodrama of her own grief, who can’t complete the work of mourning, I can recognize a little bit. But this Nadia must be a figment of her imagination, like all the others. How terrible. How terrible to be a character like that, all alone.

  You’re right, Ruth says. You’re right.

  This time Nadia lets Ruth hug her.

  And that evening, cooking dinner at the stove, her eyes are dry and clear when Ben walks in the door and stops, quite abruptly.

  What’s wrong.

  She looks at him, standing there in the doorway with his suit coat off, tie loosened, eyes baggy, attaché dangling from his left index finger. He is middle aged, she realizes. We both are.

  My stepfather is dead. He died of a heart attack in a hotel. In Berlin.

  My God. I’m so sorry.

  Moving to put his arms around her. Lucy watches them both from her usual spot on the floor, a plastic toy in her mouth.

  I have to go there.

  To Germany? Seriously?

  Yes, Ben. I have to settle his affairs.

  Of course. Of course you do.

  They watch the pot bubbling.

  I’ll come with you.

  I don’t want that.

  Stepping back. Now there are two pairs of eyes watching her, fascinated yet detached in their curiosity. Only a tiny wrinkle at the corner of Ben’s mouth to suggest his pain.

  Why? I could help you. I want to help you.

  I need to go, and I need to go alone. You can ask your mother to come help. She’ll be delighted. She doesn’t like me anyway.

  That isn’t true at all.

  It is true. I don’t care, it’s fine for her not to like me. Why should she like me? I took her only son away from her. I lie in bed all day, I’m barely employed, I’m her batshit daughter-in-law. Bring her here for a few days, a week at most. She’ll have the two of you all to herself.

  But is Lucy ready to be on her own?

  She won’t be on her own.

  The scene is a frieze. On the stove, a pot of something bubbles toward conclusion. Lucy has crawled over and has a parental pant leg in each hand, tugging, grinning. Ben, eyes pained, confused, but she can see it, she knows she saw it, that flash of relief in the thought of her going. She feels it too.

  I don’t understand, Ben says. He bends down to pick up Lucy, holds her close, already playing the part of the abandoned father. You haven’t spoken to him since he left. You blame him for your mother…. I mean, I understand he’s your stepfather, he raised you, but. Can’t they just, I don’t know, ship him back? We can bury him here.

  It’s not Papa I need to see, she tells him.

  It’s not?

  I need to see her.

  Ben opens his mouth and closes it. Lucy looks at his face, then Ruth’s. Her expression is quizzical, Ruth recognizes it. Deciding whether or not to cry.

  Can we talk about this later? Ben asks, indicating Lucy with a jab of his head.

  We can talk as much as you need to, she says quietly, turning back to the stove. But it’s settled. I’m going.

  You need to see a body? he says tightly. Is that it? You need to see the fucking body?

  I don’t expect you to understand.

  Ruth. I’m your husband. Standing there.

  You need me to go, she whispers. I know you do.

  It’s expensive to fly last minute, he says desperately.

  It’s already arranged. I got a bereavement fare. Don’t worry about it. I still have some money.

  Her money, you mean.

  Yes. It’s all I have of her.

  Ruth, honey. It’s not true. She loved you. I know she loved you.

  It’s all I have, Ruth repeats. Could you take care of her please? I think her diaper’s full.

  Ben has a face he will never show, and he shows it now. She turns to
the stove.

  Please.

  He leaves with his daughter in his arms. Ruth is alone in the kitchen with the pot boiling over.

  The mind is the only mirror, the mirror is the only me. Alone with herself in the dark, naked or nearly so, looking at the other body. Boobs that never sagged, belly never pooched, raveled with stretch marks. Dark eyes ringed with kohl by the single bulb, in a bathroom between Chicago and their unmutual destiny.

  You should know, she says to her, you hired him.

  The taut sister gives her a contemptuous look. Does she still smoke? She smokes.

  I wanted Papa to be Papa, she says defensively. And you…

  You wanted M not to be M.

  Fingers to the glass push hard against melodrama. A bell somewhere, the air pocketing the two of them. Not undead, unborn. You must birth yourself, unaided, alone with a lethal image.

  Elsa. You told me he wasn’t dead.

  No more are you.

  No more are you. That’s what you said, isn’t it? When we were girls.

  I was never a girl.

  As if the dream took on flesh, married, grew older, tended fretfully its diminishing circumference, the garden, died. Leaving what in its wake. A name? A child?

  Elsa. Is she alive?

  Are we?

  The bell again. Return to your seat. She makes a little tepid water flow over her fingers and applies it to her eyes. Outside it’s night, the north Atlantic. She fastens her seat belt and tries to sleep. But she never leaves that room.

  There is a woman who resembles the sentence.

  My name is Elsa Ruth. I’m coming for you, M. For the name.

  What Ben said to her, should have said, she dreamed that he said it, standing silhouetted in the doorway of their bedroom on the last night. If it’s true, she didn’t deserve you. She abandoned you. She ran into the arms of Europe, the arms of death, away from her history, her legacy, her baby. My poor baby. Cradling her head as she sobbed into the counterpane heaped around her like a sea. And I have recalled her to life with these letters, these facile continuations of her unwritten suicide note. We must have an end to it. To questions.

  For Lamb, licensed to kill. With questions if not with kindness.

  Europe. The dream of M.

  The bloody middle of it.

  In her carry-on is the last envelope she received from him, from Lamb, the man she has to find, has to stop from finding. The man who is murdering her past. The envelope was mailed from that city. She will track him down. He will lead me, she thinks, to M.

  It’s a big city, not quite walkable. She walks. In the Jewish Museum she watches Peter Lorre as M, the murderer, on trial with other criminals, pimps, whores, gangsters, as his jury, on his knees, rolling those eyes, screeching, beating his breast, repeating: I don’t want to—I have to! I don’t want to—I HAVE to! Pursued, the pursuer, murderer of innocence, his own. Lorre was a Jew. The heroic caved-in miner in the film that follows, an allegory of the workers’ solidarity, a Jew. The young woman dying from an illegal abortion in the film that follows that one, a Jew. The 1930s in an endless Ufa loop that stops short of the limitless self-mutilation that is German history. She sits there for a long time, watching.

  Libeskind’s tower like a vertical pit, cold even in summer, not quite pitch black. Traffic sounds. Her own footsteps, soles scraping concrete. Shush of her fingertips on the metal. Straining to remember what she never knew.

  Outside it’s Berlin, city that was divided and stitched back together again, Western capital suturing the scar on capital’s face, leaving a blank furious space in the center called Alexanderplatz. She wanders north to the hotel on Friedrichstrasse but does not go inside, turns west Unter den Linden to the Gate, joins the flood of tourists, sometimes hurrying, slipping between oblivious bodies, muttering inaudibly Entshuldigung, Entshuldigung. She looks at them, the Germans, their faces, trying to feel something. Was your father a…? Was your grandfather….? There are no old people in this city, she thinks, no old people at all. They were all born when the Wall came down, der Mauer. She has seen it in its relict state, framing the “Topography of Terror” that she knows so well from her childhood, her mother’s books. The photos. She has passed through the Gate and allows herself to be pulled and pushed southward. Another memorial: innumerable stelae, a city block’s worth, an abstraction in stone. People pose for photos, a dog runs to catch a ball, schoolgirls flirt. Here and there bent shoulders—there’s a man in his seventies or eighties standing with his back to a pillar, with a younger man holding up his phone, shooting a video, an interview. Grandpa, what did you…? How do you…? She flashes past, her feet are burning but she can’t stop walking, can’t rest before Potsdamer Platz—the sun’s going down—she’s taken in by the crowd of new buildings, electric glitz of them, finds her way into the Sony Center where a fountain rises and people throng senselessly, under an open rooftop like fan blades coming apart. She can check her email here and does: Ben has sent her a video of him and Lucy, looking soulfully into the camera’s eye. Come home Mommy. We miss you. She is tired. What am I doing here? I am looking for something and not finding it. What was that saying? Find before seeking, yes. Turn things around.

  Are there any messages for me? she asks the hotel clerk. He knows I’m here, she can feel it. There are no messages.

  The room is small and secret, with an interrupted view of the Spree and the turning halo of the Berliner Ensemble. I must go to Brecht’s house, she reminds herself. She takes out the envelope again, again slides the disk into her laptop.

  A man in a hotel room—it could be this one. His face is drawn with fatigue. What could be gray morning light has turned his skin the color of parchment. He could be anyone’s grandfather.

  He has nothing to tell me that I don’t already know.

  Lamb, she says out loud, in frustration. But Lamb does not appear, of course.

  Gustave, on the screen, pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs his eyes. He looks up, off screen, into someone else’s eyes. Lamb’s eyes. You have heard my confession, he says. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Then he says the name.

  That’s enough, Lamb says, unseen.

  In my beginning is my end.

  And the final convergence: to Miramare, castle by the sea, where restless spirits fly. As voices and bodies bearing our look. Ruth in white, the castle is gray, Lamb in dire cinematic black. The castle’s a thrust stage that plays for the sea.

  The flight from Berlin to Trieste is no longer than the flight from Chicago to Newark, as in the old days when she still had a mother to visit. She has the letters in her hand. Still jet lagged, in the bus she presses her temple against the cool glass and watches the Mediterranean flash by. The bus follows the road above the coast, high through deciduous trees, the sea is refracted below like a million dimes on an infinite skillet. Her eyes are closing when she is startled by the glimpse of an ordinary road sign reading Duino-Aurisina. Why did she not purchase a guidebook? But she knows, she remembers, she has a letter in hand, she finds the relevant paragraph:

  Duino is disappointing and at the same time not. The ancient castle hulks high above the water on white cliffs, but you’re not allowed to walk there; tourists are confined to the newer castle (newer! it dates to the 14th century) which has a big enclosed courtyard, as if the inhabitants wished to hide from the sea, or from Rilke’s terrible angels. They’re not so terrible to me, an old woman trying to keep the wind from blowing her sunhat off. He must have listened to the wind, walking back and forth there, until he heard… what he was prepared to hear. Life is wasted on young men, angels too. I’ve stood for a long time in that castle, listening. And when I get tired there’s a café, of course, and an espresso sets me up for the bus ride back to town. Bernardo came with me the last time, he’d never been. Imagine living in this place all your life and never once going to see the castle where Rilke once lived. Of course that sort of thing happens all the time. But he’s not an imbecile, I gave the poems to him and he’s r
eading them. He likes the end of the First Elegy best: