Who is he?
He is the one who cries Jew and listens for his own reply.
Who is he?
He is the one who realizes too late that elegy means praise.
Who is he?
He is the drawer of maps for places that would prefer not to exist.
Who is he?
He is the one who learns to dance so that she may learn to walk.
Who is he?
He is the one who asks the question: Who is she?
Who is she?
She is the one who sees the world in a strand of yellow hair—her own.
Who is she?
She is the one whose recurrent earaches, backaches and headaches since childhood have fed her self-love.
Who is she?
She is the one who made love with Wolf once very carefully and delicately because she was raddled from head to toe with poison ivy.
Who is she?
She is the one who goes with Wolf in the anarchy of the dying afternoon to his rooms.
Who is she?
She is the one who arranges for it, gently, carefully (as if still poison-ivied), the slipping-in, leg folded over leg, the wetly spreading and contracting, a machine-like flower of flesh in which Wolf hides.
Who is she?
She is the one who, afterward, asks him why, why this place is all-important to him? Then remembers long courtship afternoons between the matinee and the evening performances when he told her of his sheltered youth, a Jewish Buddha in a cellophane world freed of death and pain and sickness and then the flowering of blood on his father’s temple—and she remembers and she is the one who does not understand—but neither does she not not understand.
Who is she?
She is the one who replies to his murmured words, “I can’t marry you, Wolf. I’m married to Max.”
Who is she?
She is the one who admits she lied before—but claims she tells the truth now: that she needs Max’s madness the way Wolf needs the despair of the people he works with every day.
Who is she?
She is the one who leans on an elbow, slightly rising from the bed, and reports that, in the darkening winter twilight, fire is eating away at two of the buildings next door.
Fire at the Suicide Academy. It was unthinkable! There hadn’t been even a little blaze in the four years I’d served as Director. Arson! It was the only answer. But, unlike accidental fire, arson is not an answer but a question.
I dressed hurriedly, crouching into my pants, shamefaced before Jewel. It was as if the fire were punitive, a flaming raid on guilty lovers. Jewel was calm. As she carefully enfolded those whitest of breasts with their pinkest of nipples into a yellow brassiere, gone was the ice-bound visionary baking a new kind of human being in her thirteenth-month womb. She quietly asked, “Is there any danger?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all planned for.”
When we were both fully dressed it was as if we had put on disguises. We faced each other at the door, en masque. She began to say something but I rushed past her and found Max shooting film furiously, ankle-deep in red snow.
The mystery was solved. Barbara! She had promised Max he could film her suicide. Only she’d chosen an epic rather than an intimate form. None of us was the spy. It was grief, simple grief over a dying child, that had been the spy all along.
Part Three
1
THE DIRECTOR OF THE Argentine Academy once told us to be suspicious of what seems to be an organic universe, but to guess at its purposes anyway. I mention this only to prepare you for the strange experience … What happened was that the flaming buildings of the Academy burst into a Babel of words: actual words, in many languages, mostly English, naturally, but we had had a smattering of foreign guests from time to time.
It was the blue moment of twilight. There is one moment in winter afternoons when the white tones of the day have finally been erased from the air and the black tones of the night are not yet completely set into the texture of the sky. That is the blue moment, independent of moon and stars; and that plus the white whirl of falling snow was the background against which the fire spread its red shadows, against which the buildings and the landscape spoke.
I had started out to grab Max, out of some questioning instinct. But he was elusively darting between the buildings, switching angles, reloading his camera. The machinery of rescue was already in operation. There was no plan for fire-fighting: only for life-saving and abandonment. I’d always assumed the reason was the avoidance of any possible large-scale inquiry. Thus there was a siren sounding, but there were no trucks, hoses or ladders. Instead the process of evacuation proceeded according to plan. Loudspeakers called out: Please go to the nearest guide. The nearest guide. Guides will meet at prepared assembly points.
The fire had spread swiftly. The air was filled with crackling, with the sounds of invisible wings (the voices had not yet begun), and there was a drumming on the ground as of fleeing animals. A confusion of smoke filtered through the falling snow—still falling, falling—so much was falling, had fallen, this day.
The Main House was completely ablaze; a long flicker of fire scuttled around the corners of the Guides’ Quarters; the terrace of the Recreation Center crashed in a foam of fiery splinters as my eyes moved across it. Of the five covered ramps that allowed one to walk in shelter from the Main House to the others, two were suffering flames through their ceilings, exposing them to the winds which spread the fire even more quickly.
In the distance I saw a line of guests being led by a guide, past the fountain—still spurting stupidly amidst its nymphs and shepherds—and past the blazing Main House. They did not seem to like our guests, those people whom the great Director of the French Suicide Academy once characterized as without the courage to end or the strength to go on. These people moved swiftly, purposefully, guided by cold fear. Adrenalin is the enemy of despair.
It was then that I heard the voices. I must forget metaphor—I must forget similes. It was not as if the buildings, the Sick Rock or the trees spoke. They spoke. They did not embody the former guests whose voices they used. They were those guests; they were those voices. It was a Babel that included the distant ocean, perhaps the fire itself. (Why else the expression, “tongues of flame”?)
I stood there, Jewel’s passionate sweat drying on my own, and heard a melange of my years and beyond. A tree, a tall cherry birch, spoke with the voice of a Chicago businessman who had arrived during my second year. He had killed his wife, we learned later, and was one of our more complicated cases.
From the Main House came the words of the cancer-riddled farmer who’d arrived this morning. The Sick Rock was, for an instant, a Japanese woman, a teacher, whose husband had tormented her into suicide with incestuous infidelities. The statements were not in the form of neat summations, nor were they the usual whines. They were, somehow, a new form of statement: impending revelation. Taking a small detail of their complaint—a promise reneged, money lost, artistic failure, or even feet that no shoes could ever seem to fit without hurting—they wove a sense of expectation that, after the first few, gave me an odd sense of exhilaration. One of the Fellowship sayings that had always seemed to me both mysterious and logical was: Live so as to compel an answer from the world. Here was the world literally replying to my unspoken questions. Perhaps the fire would end the long monologue of my days and nights, put an end to the endless monologues of suicides in blissful ignorance of their immanent endings. Listening made me drunk all over again even though Max’s flask and my weakness of the afternoon seemed the property of other years, not hours; even though the Academy was burning down around me; even though Barbara might be lying dead, choked with smoke and pity; even though Jewel was a madman’s wife (with an aborted child) and would remain so in spite of twenty-five minutes of exquisite touching in my overheated room, in spite of our icy dance.
From old, old habit I raised my eyes to the sky. The blue moment was over. The black night had dominance, ex
cept that the silvered circle of the moon lighted about half of the landscape, as much as it could considering the clouds that were being blown by the considerable wind across its face from time to time. Dappled, they blew fluffily seaward; or was it away from the sea? My sense of direction was as deranged as my other senses. Those clouds, Cumuli Academi, had blown in from Maine, from Connecticut, from cold Canada itself, perhaps. Confused as I was I saw them as rolling across the America I had escaped, escaping from some vagrant America of their own, as each of my guests had escaped from theirs, arriving over my head to bear witness to the burning of the Academy. Why was I filled at such a moment with a sense of—there is no other word—beauty?
Drenched with snow, my eyes and ears a chaos of dazzlement, momentarily incapable of drastic action and unaware of how long I’d been standing there, I turned and saw Jewel standing in the doorway where I’d left her. In her white boots, white skirt and heavily-stitched white sweater behind the screen of snowflakes she was like some perfectly made, almost invisible snowbird. I saw details now that I’d missed before. The black drooping earrings, the long arching of her neck, the poise with which she balanced herself, pitched slightly forward; not only this center of balance, but all of it, was my handiwork. I could understand, at that moment, the temptations of Brand. To save—who could resist it? It was the same as creating. Or at least it felt the same. It seemed to me that she smiled, then. What an amazing, magical gesture it was. To draw lips back over teeth and compress flesh around cheekbones. The stunning result was disproportionate to the cause.
I saw her then, defined by her smile (which I had been denied for the years of our marriage), the seal of her newfound poise and balance, unafraid of fire or wrinkles that brought age or of the gifts of subtraction that age adds. In the course of this day in which she’d taught me a certain precarious grace—as tricky as the art of dancing on ice—I’d taught her the value of the smile. It was, after all, a trivial physical movement: the slipping back of certain muscles, the contraction of skin, the changing of proportions in relation to the eyes. And vanity that had kept her in fear of the lines of age had kept her from being created. Now she stood, mortal as her smile, in the doorway of a place that had no recollections of our intimacy. I had stolen nothing from Max. I had, in fact, given to him. Perhaps, as a result, I no longer cared whether or not he’d slept with my wife or my ex-wife. Such a narrow view of time was no longer possible. Given the people we were then she had always been my ex-wife, and apparently always would be. Seeing her smile her way into eventual death I could see, clearly, that she was saved. I was guiltily glad. And I was sure I would never see her again. Reviens was only another word for goodbye.
Exultant, I saw that Gilliatt had been right. I was the spy. Everything I was—the eternal Jew he would call it—was against neutrality, indifference, a universe of accident. There was only one choice I really could make. Like Brand I wanted an anti-Suicide Academy. I was against suicide not because it was suicide but because it was murder. If there were no death, if men did not die in the course of what has ludicrously been called a natural process—then I could devote my life to Suicide Academies. What an affirmation it would be! But this walking flesh, soon to be still as stone—how could it choose to stop being? What corruption! Peace, rest. They were illusions. Let peace and rest die forever! Up with conflict, with suffering. Down with that sky that had been my shelter here. If I could have moved I would have helped to spread the fire.
Everyone was scurrying to safety. A squad reached Jewel, and before I could do anything, engulfed her and moved off down the hillside. There would be general relief at surviving the disaster of the fire. Not only among the guests: even Rath and Brand would put aside their differences. There would be no choices made at the Suicide Academy tonight. The Rabbi, the homosexual lieutenant, the old farmer, the young writer, the executive vice-president, the concentration camp survivor: they would never again be so close to reality while they lived.
My feet were blocks of ice and my eyes were tearing from smoke and cold; yet I did not or could not move. Nor did I know what I was waiting for (the moment of beauty, of revelation having passed or having not arrived at all) until Gilliatt appeared, breathless with exhaustion and anger.
2
“WELL, YOU BASTARD,” GILLIATT said, “it’s over.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” I said. As I said it I realized it was the truth.
“Not as long as I’ve been waiting for you.”
“And—”
“You’ve done it.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
He flashed his famous death’s head grin. “Look around,” he said. “That’s your work.”
Automatically I obeyed. The fire had done its worst by then. Most of the buildings were half-ruins, crackling and smoking in fiery repose. Under different circumstances they could be rebuilt in short order. Now, however, they would stay as they were, strange as Stonehenge, until someone bought the land and cleared it of its mysterious debris. The wind was quiet and the smoke hung in the night air as if painted there. The mixed choir of voices to which I’d been listening was now a muted murmur. I could not distinguish any coherent words. I doubted if anyone else could.
But it was the sight of Gilliatt that was the raw shock. It was not just that he was so disheveled, his usually neat suit grimy with fire-soot and his shirt cuffs (French) torn. The striped tie he wore was askew on his throat. He looked like a young Negro executive caught in a race riot. It was, however, the bare black fact of him that brought me to the horror of what was happening and of what I’d done. It was a visceral understanding, automatic, instinctive. I think if he were not so obviously primed to accuse me I would have beaten him to it. But his direct attack paralyzed me for the moment.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s have it out.”
“Where’s Barbara?”
“You knew she’d do something like this!”
“Is she dead?”
“They’re still looking for her. It was a thorough job. Soaked everything in kerosene first. It’s finished, anyway. So let’s finish with you and me.” His mouth opened into a broad smite—not his face, just his mouth. “It doesn’t matter how things begin. Only how they end, right? Isn’t that what that camera-lunatic said to you this morning? Well, let’s end it right. Let’s give the Jew and the Negro the right send-off.” As he spoke he backed off toward the Residence Quarters behind me, from which Jewel had vanished only a few moments before. I followed him. I saw no reason not to, so it is hard to say whose will was in control. Allowing myself to feel the weariness in my muscles and bones I sat down on the steps and leaned my back against the wet and charred beams that supported the terrace.
“What do we know about each other, anyway? Nothing!
“I have been eloquent on the subject of the Jew before—and I will be again, you can rely on that. I’ll get to the Jewness of the Jew later. But first: The Blackness of the Negro. From the start I was a fundamentalist. I knew I’d been born dead. I was black, wasn’t I? All of us paralyzed together in black streets. But I didn’t stay paralyzed long. I was in search of the myth almost as soon as I could talk and walk. And by the time I could think—Wow! I would stare at the jeweled blackness, my own or anyone else’s, in amazement. Think of it! To be black. To be all colors at once. And to be the unwitting and unwilling heir to an instinctive mythology as old as that of the Jews and maybe more profound.
“It was the secret life I led. Publicly I was black. But secretly I was a philosopher of blackness, I was a metaphysical investigator of the reverberations of blackness in the human—and inhuman—soul. All those years I led different lives—but the real life was the exploration of blackness. Did you know I once went to sea? That’s right! The Merchant Marine. I was the only black man on the ship. I wanted to see how that would be. Now, of course, everyone knows there are no such things as white men. How could there be an absence of color? A human negative? A world of minus-one? Ridiculous!
At the same time not everyone is black. It’s a paradox I tried to figure out then, but I still haven’t. Oh, God, the hunger I had to know all there was to know of the past of blackness. Of what it meant in common language. Even though it was all so awful.(Awful: capable of inspiring awe.)
“Example: If spotless refers to white, does black mean spotful? (And how far is that from spiteful?) In what society, old or new, is the word black associated with purity, my friend Wolf, tell me that? These were the questions to which I addressed myself in my secret life. Have you ever heard the expression—in any language—the blackness of innocence? As black as the driven snow? When has a ‘coal-black heart’ meant goodness?
“In how many hundreds of years will ‘blackest of intentions’ be taken to mean good will? I had made a great discovery. The black man was a victim of slavers, and landlords, rednecks and merchants. But he was also a victim of language and imagery.
“When I got back from the sea voyage of two years among the non-existent white men I contrived a sexual relationship with a lovely young white girl chosen because she was an anthropologist and a linguist. We moved into her little apartment and I began a two-year program of tormenting her with my findings regarding the mythology and language of blackness. (She was Jewish, of course.) I would come home one evening and after an excellent dinner prepared by her tired but willing hands would casually drop the remark, ‘Do you think it would have been possible for the fellow in Treasure Island to hand the death warrant to his mate in the form of a white spot?’
“Or if she brought a friend of hers over for the evening, a nurse with the unlikely name of Bland, I would ask, ‘Miss Bland, do you think there will ever be a time when the coming of the white dawn will bring terror and despair to your invalid patients and the fall of black night will be welcomed as desperate relief after the long day of pain?’
“But all this joking was to cover my own black pain. I searched furiously—while my young anthropological beauty was out earning our daily bread—for some sign of benevolent, or at least indifferent, blackness in nature. There were no black trees. Some butterflies had black segments on their wings but none were all black. Things turned black in nature when corruption touched them, that was true—but not much consolation. There were animals and fish that were all black: cats (bad luck) and sharks. Many insects, of course. Bulls and stallions. These last gave some hope—except for the fact that the white stallion is the breeder’s delight, as well as the pleasure of small children rooting for the good. No, all in all, nature failed me in my search almost as badly as language and myth did. Only in the recurring images of night and death did I find my blackness totally accepted.
Suicide Academy Page 14