“I gloated over the white man William Shakespeare and the bitter teasing of his ‘dark lady’ in the sonnets. (London Bridge is falling down, my black lady?) If the word fair was switched with the word black the results would be fascinating. (Listen, you treat me black and I’ll treat you black, right?) I had no interest in sociology, in historicity, in race relations. I was obsessed by the raw metaphysical thing in its natural, primitive thingness. If blackness was the issue then I wanted to understand blackness—not all that peripheral stuff. Liberating black people was one thing. But liberating the idea, the reality, the thing of blackness from its bonds of image, imagination, metaphor and myth—that too would be a great liberation.”
Behind Gilliatt the night sky was beginning to quiver with tiny points of starlight beaming through the haze of snow. On the ground in the interstices of stones and snow small fires glowed, having somehow leaped the distance from the burning houses to the little clumps of grass. We were the survivors of a civilization, loitering in burning ruins, telling each other remembered legends. Gilliatt’s exhaustion was gone. I had never seen him so exhilarated. “No matter what I did,” he continued, “or where I looked, blackness remained the property of death and night. With a sideways nod to evil, fear, mourning, sadness, mystery. In short, blackness was what happened when the eyes were closed. Now that’s a hell of a way to go through the day. (I won’t even mention the horrors that have been done in the gleam of whiteness. That’s where hypocrisy meets paradox.) You can see where this was leading me, Wolf, can’t you? I can tell by the Hebraic glint of intelligence in your brown eyes that you do. It led me to the question of choice. Already we can see the Academy waiting in the distance. Blackness cannot be changed. You cannot choose it, you cannot reject it. Yet I swear I looked in the black mirror and knew my own innocence.
“That was when I began a life-long interest in your people. Choice was your inheritance. Weren’t you chosen, first of all? And then forced to choose over and over again. Chameleon of history, owning no color at all, you could change to protective coloration at the drop of a threat.
“Your existence was an insult to my skin. Blackness is unchangeable. But the Jews have invented a way of changing without ever changing at all. I should have known I would meet you when I got here.” The familiar cool Gilliatt had melted in the fire. He was all heat now.
“And I should have known,” he said, “that you were a spy for Brand.” He paused, a parody of his old arsenal of ironic effects.
“Brand,” he said. “Isn’t that a Jewish name?”
But neither of us smiled. I thought: when did we become so obsessed with spies and spying? When we first realized how complex we ourselves were? Or at that moment when we first realized how little we could know about the intentions of others?
“I watched you seduce Barbara—set the wheels in motion—your plan to destroy the whole system if you couldn’t have your way.” I stood up and brushed the clinging snow from my trousers. I would have liked to have struck back at him, violently. But I was struggling just then with a sense of anger at myself, anger at having succumbed even for a moment to a partisan feeling, as I had earlier when the fire had first broken out. It had been a lie anyway. I was not looking for any easy yes or no. Max was absolutely right. He’d found no yesses or noes in his Lazarus-land. Well, I wanted none either. Except, of course, for Jewel. I’d chosen for her because I loved her. But that exception was my own human weakness. It had nothing to do with the truth. And at least part of the truth was that by saving Jewel, I had neglected to save Barbara—and by that simple omission the Academy had been lost. That was Gilliatt’s truth, anyway. And it would serve until the whole truth came along. God, what a jungle of saving it was once you started. Still, his accusation of intention could not be allowed to stand as reasonable.
“You’re crazy,” I said, hearing the weakness in the epithet as I said it.
“Maybe. But a certain truth is available even to a crazy man. You destroyed this Academy. Have the guts to admit it. Your gigantic Jewish pride let you play God with your blonde piece of a wife and that poor mixed-up mistress. If you’d devoted yourself to the grief-stricken girl you were responsible for instead of screwing and settling the wife you weren’t responsible for you could have saved everything.”
I couldn’t take it any more. I began to walk away from this black tirade. In the corner of my eye I saw his angry arm swing wide in an arc that encompassed all of the burning grounds.
“Everything!” he shouted after me.
I turned, slipping in the soft snow. Stung past normal endurance I turned and shouted, “You’re right. It is pride. Pride at being accused.” The words rang in the frozen air. “How could it not be? That’s the way it’s always been. Who in the hell are we, these Jews of yours? There is nothing, no sort of crime or disaster, natural, man-made or supernatural, for which we have not been held responsible at one time or another. How could this not create a fantastic egotism as well as a supreme shame? Pride? If we had not been a chosen people to start with, Abraham’s descendants would have chosen themselves after a few centuries of such flattering persecution. Think of it,” I said. “To be held—sooner or later—responsible for everything: wars, unexplainable deaths, plagues, depressions, revolutions—the murder of God, Himself. It’s enough to turn anyone’s head! That’s why I have the guts to take on myself the accusations of my enemies. Even this final one. I am used to such sturm und drang. You understand me perfectly, Gilliatt. As a Jew I was born into a drama—if conflict is what makes events dramatic. I am the creature of opposites. History and my next-door neighbors are so eager to define me that I am forced to choose myself over and over again each day. No choice lasts more than a day. And all choices last forever. New pressures arise with every sun. And every choice I make contains its opposite. There is only one absolute. My talent (our talent) for existence. I am the fever and ferment of your cities. Try and imagine them without me! Magnificently successful as an individual I represent failure en masse, failure so extreme that it is raised to a higher power and becomes a kind of success—in time. So I also, apparently, have a talent for death. (There goes my one absolute!) At least your blackness is your absolute. You know in what name you’re being destroyed, even if it’s an insanity. But I—I am the Burning Bush. Even while I’m burned by the fires around me I speak, and I refuse to be destroyed.
“Tonight, I heard the houses, the trees, the rocks. I heard them all speak tonight from the fire. I tell you, Gilliatt, we are not here to pass judgment. Forget Brand! To hell with Rath! I tell you we’re here to remember those who forget—we’re here to let the mystery happen. To let the Bush burn—to let the voice speak. To sanctify the ground in case there is no God, or in case He forgets—to sanctify the ground for each other and ourselves at least once before we disappear underneath it.”
A clangor of bells surprised the air. It must be eight o’clock. There was no one in the bell tower, of course. The bells were automated. They clanged and vibrated in the acrid air. The two of us stood still for the moment, surprised by ourselves and by the bells. We looked across the hardening snow, I in my passionate confusion of concerns, past and present, he in his immutable blackness. I closed my eyes, pressing the fatigue away in a brilliant kaleidoscope with my thumb and third finger. When I opened my eyes the colors faded gradually. Gilliatt was gone. We were, for the moment, finished with each other.
3
IT WAS NEAR THE outer gate at the southern tip of the Academy grounds that I encountered the two stragglers. They were both women; one was Barbara. I’d been through too much to feel relief very deeply. But I could still feel glad to see her alive. Her uniform was filthy and torn; her stockings were shredded and she smelled of kerosene. But she was not dead of smoke poisoning or burns. It had been a unique day. No life had been lost—or taken—at the Suicide Academy on this January second, after all.
“Hello, Barbara,” I said.
“Wolf.” She came and leaned against me.
“Yes …”
“I was wrong.” She stifled a yawn. Whatever she was wrong about seemed to have all the banality of yesterday’s mistakes. “Do you have a handkerchief?” she asked.
“No, I’m sorry. How were you wrong?”
“I mean about that child—the children.”
“Why?”
“I realized it right in the middle. When this strange photographer was pushing me to do it—though it was my own idea. He said fire would make everything equal again, the way it was supposed to be. But anyway I’ve seen enough to know that it’s true.”
“That what’s true?”
“They’re all children. That’s the good and the bad of it, both.” Had she heard the fire-voices, too?
Down past the gate a bus idled its motor. The wind kicked up a screen of snow making it difficult to see; but I thought I saw Jewel’s blonde head in one of the windows.
“I’m not coming back, Wolf,” Barbara said. “Even if they’d have me after this.”
From behind the wind Max materialized. He grabbed Barbara by the arm. She gave me a quick kerosene kiss on the mouth. Then she was gone and Max with her.
By the time I saw the other straggler limping in the snow I heard the bus start up and the tires squeak then hiss in the loose snow as it headed down the hill.
“Lost,” the young woman said. Even the one word was uttered with a strange inflection that told clearly she was not American. It sounded like: loust. It was the first and last word I understood.
“Don’t worry,” I said, taking her arm to help her, “I’ll take you down the hill into town. You can get a bus there.”
She was a dark counterpoint to the white harmony around us. But it was the voice that provided her flavor. It had a low timbre, husky and dry. Even though I understood nothing she said, from her style, her well-fitting blue cloth coat with its bone buttons, the way she carried herself, something in the intonation of her words, I guessed that she came from a big city. Perhaps somewhere in Eastern Europe.
—Molim vas, pomognite mi.
I began to steer her down the hill. The tension in her arm told me a little about what she was saying. I knew there was a plea involved.
—Ko ste vi? Jeste li gost ovdje, ili ste tu zaposleni?
This, I could tell, was a question. The insistence of people’s questions! But I was concerned with my own. It sounded like a question about me. I could damned well answer it if I chose. What are you going to do now? Maybe that was what she’d asked.
For one thing I was going to try and forget what I’d done to poor Barbara. I was the one who’d criticized her lectures on sexuality as being too narrow. I had added the concept of laughter-as-sexuality. Once sexual feeling is more than the tension and release of organs and organisms it can go anywhere. Even to a devastating pity for child-suicides.
—Nemate pojma sta sam sve preterpels.
And I would try to remember that I still didn’t know if Jewel and Max were married or if she’d had an abortion. Because of her allergy to truth and my vulnerability to anything she said, I could never know. For all I knew the only authentic fact was that she had carried a child for thirteen months to try and change the processes of life.
—S vremna miris nekog cveca, narocito jorgovana, moze da me dotera na vrhunac zadovoljstva. Majka mi je imala krasnu bastu. Jorgovana doduse nije bilo. Ali ja nisam stranac sreci. Samo mi se desi da izgubim put.
She was trying to tell me something important. Not merely in syntax—but by the fact of talking in a foreign language at this moment. The timing of our appearances in each others’ lives is as important as what we say when we get there. A Gilliatt arrives at the Academy; an unidentified foreign lady arrives after its destruction. My Fellowship training led me to treat such things as codes to be deciphered.
—Kroz sve moje detinjstvo otac mi je ulivao osecanje da sam savin izvanredno stvorenje. Iz nekakvog sasavog razloga, posla sam za coveka koji me je samo prezreo.
I loved the sounds she was making. They engaged my mind and my emotions (my ears) at some level untouched for years. The pleasure of listening to abstract sounds with the absolute certainty that they meant something. Her gestures, her expression and the musical rise and fall of her voice told me that. We need foreigners, I thought. They’re living proof that what we don’t understand may have some sense after all.
—U krevetu uvek dobijam najvece uzivanje. Nisam hladna zena.
It was marvelous. I could imagine almost anything into what she was saying. It was a musical tone poem. She frowned once during the last speech—her wide brown eyes narrowed and her voice dropped at the end, suddenly: a kind of reverse question mark. Also, her pace of walking slowed at that point—so the possibilities of meaning were not infinite, merely beyond me.
—Ljudi koji izvrse samoubistvo nisu pristojni ljudi.
As long as I didn’t know what she was saying it could have meaning. As soon as I understood, though, it might have little meaning—or none.
—To je zato sto imam rdjavu kozu. Ljudi s rdjavom kozom nikad ne mogu da se snadju u zivotu.
My hand slipped from her arm. She captured it with her hand and squeezed it intensely. I had been understanding very little. The grasp told me she was in bad trouble.
—Cudna stvar: upravo sam bila odlucila da se i onako vratim kad je izbila vatra.
We were almost at the bottom of the hill. The visibility had increased. The air was like clear ice; our footsteps rang on the freezing snow and our breaths made the only clouds we could see. I was about to tell her that there would be more buses a little way ahead, that she would be taken care of. Surprisingly, she burst into an explosion of tears. As if she were not a guest or a stranger I pulled her to me and put my arms around her until she was still. I should have known all that she was saying as well as leaving unsaid.
—Znate li kakvo je to osecanje kad ste toliko usamljeni da vam je svejedno da li drugi ljudi zive ili umiru?
Again I felt she was asking me a question about myself. There was of course only one such question. I answered it.
I would be, again, a Director, directing a daily play with a changing cast, handling the nuances of character and mood in order to unfold plot in all its richness of possibility, or on occasion, to expose it in all its poverty of imagination. To direct the play with an infinite number of roles and an infinite number of destinies, excluding, always, mine.
I would find an Academy where they would let me put into practice my dream of pure, abstract choice. Somewhere I would find a Chairman of the Board or a President who would go along with me; who would let me found a magnificent cold realm of people naked under their own moons and suns, smiling their ambiguous smiles to the undeciphering sky, going down to their unready deaths or lives because they had somehow managed to squeeze the impossible choice from the unchoosable alternatives they offered themselves, or had been able to wring from the mysterious curriculum I offered them.
Oh, it would be beautiful to be king of my empty country again! Right at this moment hundreds of thousands of possible guests at my new Academy were making the hundreds of small decisions, the thousands of small errors, were talking in the white dawn or walking in Gilliatt’s night and preparing for our encounter. They would come, one by one, asking for someone in authority to bear witness.
With my cool curriculum I could amnesty whole lives. I could carry them in my belly long past normal term—all in one day. Just as I was holding this young woman, and by my fierce touch nullifying whatever terrible story she had just told me.
She was quiet now, as if she had been distracted by my thoughts as well as the enclosure of my arms. I pushed her gently toward the station; we were at the bottom of the hill now, where two guides and a bus waited for the last of the refugees.
—Molim vas, pomignite mi, she said to me. The slender fingers of one hand fluttered before her wide eyes.
There was nothing I could say. The suffering of others is always a foreign language.
&n
bsp; Looking back at the hill I saw a confusion of shapes wreathed in a black haze. The only thing I could make out for certain was the great free-form shape of the Sick Rock, that gigantic, most permanent of guest registers. Somewhere behind it a reddish glow flickered at the edges of the sky like an erratic searchlight. It was night, the judgment of day. Furled black clouds poured into and out of each other: fountains of dark. I was flooded with remembrance. O nights of the Academy! O dazzling mornings in Florida and cities where the sky is only a patch between buildings, a blue rag that signals weather, or stretched wide over summer parks makes youth seem endless or terrifyingly brief. Jewel’s yellow hair mixed with the mysterious word written in blood on my father’s temple.
Before I turned my eyes away, finally, it seemed as if the trees, the scattered stones, the formal gardens all invisible against the snow no longer had to speak. Rather it was as if the dark cold air was filled with presences instead of voices: the guests, the living and the dead, as well as those taken from me by absence or misunderstanding. Balanced in beauty, the moment poised before revelation, they hovered there, hushed and happy, in the chambers of the air.
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