De Born is napping on his stomach. He finds this uncomfortable, but Assia insists. She likes to wake him with her fingers in the nape of his neck. There are two empty candle jars of black caviar on the night table. The remnants, smeared along the sides, appear like the stragglers of an ant colony. The bottle of wine is three-quarters of the way empty.
“Can we talk about it?” he now says, stirring, turning over, blinking.
He has three distinct rings of fat around his midriff, and his nursed breasts rest against the first of these when he stands. But his shoulders are decidedly youthful, even girlish. The shoulder blades are pert, tense rudders.
17.
Robert
The candles have come out far in advance of the moon. The kids downtown carry them in processions. Or they sit by themselves in silty doorways with their legs up, their knees fanning, and the tallows burning between their sneakers. There are no trains until the nexus of Forty-second Street. Radio voices promise impending statements from the mayor, the police commissioner, the governor. President Bush remains in the air. In Lower Manhattan, a lot of the eateries are open to rescuers alone. Firemen in full gear sit beneath chalky sidewalk awnings, eating ersatz delicacies, thrown together out of yesterday’s leavings. Some of them are weeping into their to-go tins. The radio voices are now announcing that a number of houses of faith will be holding vigils until dawn.
The pedestrians, out of habit, keep reaching for their inoperative cellular phones. The loss of carefree communication is among the most bitter injuries of the day. Electronics have set us apart from past generations. Everyone knows that recent technological advances have aided us in circumventing wars, or at least in severely shortening them. “Look at this,” one man calls, holding up his dead cell, “they’ve fucked us right in our future.”
Mimeographed handbills are being distributed by blank-faced people who jostle against the grain of the oncoming crowd. They provide the photographs and, in most cases, the glowing résumés of people who are not dead but “missing.” Most of them are pictured on the beach or barbecuing, surrounded by their children. These are clearly not people who deserved to die as they did. The overriding mood is not one of anger or heartache but of disbelief and curiosity.
“Hundred and fourth floor. Did you see her on the stairway?”
“Hundred and seventh floor. Did you see him in the plaza?”
There are blue wooden horses and yellow crime tape at the blockade of Fourteenth Street. You must show ID to a policeman to cross the demarcation line in either direction. Those without identity plead their cases in long lines to the left. Cops stand about fingering their pistol packs. One female officer, told for the thousandth time today that this is a free country, replies, also for the thousandth time, that she never knew how free until this morning. Someone is going to have to do something about that.
Now it is full dark and the bells are ringing on Low Plaza in the heart of the Columbia University campus. Saint Paul’s Chapel, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the Riverside Church, and the Union Theological Seminary are all sounding their brass. Ulysses S. Grant turns in his tomb, ten blocks to the north. It’s a warm night, and the oaks still have their summer coats on. Those incidental blue lights around the campus are like fruit from my youth, lying unplucked still. They sit magisterial at the top of an odd street lantern, or upon the brow of a building, or in the bottom of a fountain. A computer cove keeps the faith through the first-floor window of Furnald Hall. Blue data flashes as I pass by. A cyber mayday. A boom box, far off, plays the Beatles.
This is now the time of the children of the children that I had neither the time nor the opportunity to have. My generation, you’ll remember, disowned the future. Childbirth, in the rhetoric of the age, was the equivalent of premeditated murder. Judging from what happened this morning, it appears that we were not so very naïve after all. But tender youth, despite its apparent preference for 1960s pop, grows ever more tender now, and the generational rift becomes more and more severe. These are the fresh faces that I can recall from the eighth grade or earlier.
Doubtless, war is on their minds, but they consciously lack our generation’s militancy. As near as I can tell, it’s sexual politics as usual out here on the quad this evening. Cliques are group-flirting with other cliques. How astonishing it is to meet one’s proximal grandchildren in a time of dread catastrophe, and how strange to see that they are immune to the whole thing.
The scythe moon is shining down directly upon the black Alma Mater, still seated there on the steps of Low Library with her arms upraised. The library’s doors are wide open.
The Student Services staff has thought to cover every imaginable contingency. For instance, you can get into a queue to speak with a specialist about the possible reaction of the stock market this coming Monday morning. Some of these kids have portions of their trusts tied up, and they are in dire need of weathermen to tell them which way the Dow is going to blow. There’s another line if you would rather confer with an astrologer. Or you can wait in line to speak to Chaplain Wolmer, who just turned eighty-five and stands unbowed, albeit on an iron walker. You can stand in line and have your name stenciled in the Golden Book, the register of honor. In an hour, you will find yourself downtown at the crash site, serving lemonade, coffee, and hot dogs to the salaried rescue workers. You yourself will be paid in balm in Gilead. You can space out across the green and your group captain will run you through some emergency yoga drills, along with deep-breathing exercises. You can listen to a scholar deliver a lecture appertaining to the way in which the crusader mentality has cannibalized the kingdom of Afghanistan since ancient times. The scholar has brought maps, charts, and artifacts, and he lists the names of the invaders; a weird historical coterie, including Alexander, Mahmud of Ghanzi, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, George, First Earl of Auckland Eden, and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. Likely the name of George W. Bush is going to be added, although he’s still in the air at the moment. At the end of his chat, the scholar will urge you to tide over until dawn when an Afghani sheikh is scheduled to visit the Islamic Studies Department to give a special talk on tolerance.
I get in the suicide prevention line. It stretches the length of the campus. It’s not that I have the least desire to kill myself; it’s that I no longer have any idea how to continue to respond to the deaths that I have already suffered, the deaths that, more than any living experience, have shaped the course of my life. I have come to a catacomb in the road, and, for me, this terra incognita actually is nothing less than a Ground Zero. I am a misfit and Columbia University bears prime responsibility for making me so. I have lived more than twice Sabbath’s life span and am coming up on twice Sylvia’s. If Sabbath should happen to be alive, as Oma seemed to think, then she is nonetheless irrefutably dead to me. The only way that she might have survived would be to trade in her identity and not only eat her words, but eat her own self-chosen epitaph. As I understand it, this Atman that she spoke of, and ostensibly gave her life away to, is the enlightenment that comes when all passions and desires have been subdued. By all indications, it was what Sylvia Plath located in the end matter of Ariel. But I have been trained in poetry here at Columbia. My allegiance to poetry has survived my death from drug addiction and my death earlier this morning, owing to circumstances still impending. I know for certain that there can be no poetry without the battle royal of conflicting passions and desires.
The sky’s growing gray, and the clerical lady at the front of the suicide line stares into the anodyne light of her laptop computer. When she finally looks up, she does a double take. I haven’t changed my dusty clothes, and I am obviously no student. I am an old man who fell from the moon.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
I lay my student ID card from thirty years past on her card table. My younger self looks up at her.
“Would you like to speak to a counselor?” This is the line that she has been rattling off all night.
“I was hoping to talk to a
poetry professor.”
Her fingers move along the keypad. Her eyes shift from side to side. The balance gear in an old clock. “Very . . . slow . . . computer,” she says, refusing me further eye contact.
“I’m in no hurry,” I tell her, underscoring my vagrant status and thus receiving another leery upward glance.
“We have a Professor Abdiel,” she says.
“Abdiel?”
“Dr. Abu-Asan ibn-Abdiel, professor of English and acting associate dean. Says here that he came to us from King’s College, Cambridge.”
“May I see him?”
“He’s in the lounge of 307 Dodge Hall. Need directions?”
“No.”
18.
Assia
Waking, he asked her again to tell him—he’d had the same request all week. He allowed her to finger-feed him the allegretti cake. She washed it down with the bed table wine. She was unsure of whether or not she wanted the truth about her final meeting with her father to appear in her memoir. She and Etienne had been generous in their portrayal of Sylvia, and she thought it only fair that she extend herself the same courtesy. Etienne’s eyes, now that she had turned him over, were once again red-rimmed, milky, and flagging. The moments coming before and directly after sleep never seemed to stick in his memory, although she did not believe that time was something that could truly be lost. She assumed that nature was feathering the bed of his waiting grave with all of the amorphous moments that his mind had demurred. De Born would hear out what Assia had to say from the inviolability of slumber. He would be the first and only one to ever hear the truth of it, and then he would fall once again into the rinse cycle of sleep. He would wake up asking anew. There would be no reason for her to tell him her truth twice.
Recounting what had happened so many unresolved years ago would not be easy, but the act of remembering would be indispensable when it came time for her to formulate the lie that she would eventually have to insert into her memoir. She needed to measure the corpus head to foot before she buried it once and for all.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.
“No, but I can conduct one.”
She thought that she knew what he meant. He was saying that he could not keep a relevant secret to save his soul, but he could send it forth like an electrical surge, sweeping all else into darkness. He could destroy a secret.
He arrived, exhausted, newly tanned, and many years older, several hours after they had told her that he was expected momentarily. He had on the traveling hat of braided straw. He had worn it when he boarded their steerage from Germany when she was a little girl. He had a new rank upon his shoulders. It was the middle of the night, but most of the camp had risen up out of their profitless beds. They all asked what he had seen on the road. He didn’t look as if he had taken much notice of what was happening on the road, or, if he had, he did not look like he cared to remember what he had seen. He told them that he’d been asleep the whole trip.
He asked how her mother was. Assia said that she had planned on asking him the same question. He told her not to worry. In this war, the only mail that ever got delivered were the latest ultimatums. He ate in the dark, and then pushed his chair back from the table, and he sat there with a stiff plank nailed to his back. He looked to her like a firing-squad victim condemned to the indignity of dying upon his ass. He was defying his executioners by commanding his spinal column to stand at attention. He was no longer the tall man he had been when Assia was a child. If she hadn’t already decided that he was a man dying a hero’s death, he might have been a schoolboy resigning himself to a delayed beating for the relief of it finally being over.
Old friends came to greet her father, and to apologize for the lack of amenities on hand. There were several among them whom he had himself welcomed upon arrival at the port of this New World years beforehand, having corresponded with the officials of relief agencies and having guaranteed employment to aid them in their coming over. Her father reminded them of the warm and empty hands with which he had originally received them. He could actually guarantee themselves and their families nothing, not comfort, not safety, and maybe not even subsistence. He now asked them to remember how ardently they had taken up his desolate offer. He said they would have all been fools to anticipate living as long as they had in this place. Then someone reminded her father that the Lord God had promised them the land alone and not comfort, safety, or subsistence upon it.
One of the other doctors shone a penlight in his face. The doctor said that the skin around his eyes was the color of chicken broth. Her father suggested that he might have contracted jungle fever in the desert. Some of them laughed then. He remained impassive, letting them straighten his arm in the air. The doctor who applied the injection toasted “I’chaim” as he bore down with the needle.
She didn’t know what he was doing there, although everyone else seemed to be in on the secret. An angry shot had not been fired in days. New dirt had not been turned in over a week as both sides were said to be shadowing each other, deciding where and when the depleted enemy would marshal its last resources for the doomed and token offensive that would fool no one and that would injure very few among them. Both sides had irrefutable evidence that they were the ones winning the war. They pointed to the friendly graves when pressed. The slain comprised the sign from God that they had all been waiting for. Their dead wouldn’t let them lose.
The shaky hospital generator was being spared for the hour when the wounded would begin to arrive again. They had been living without lights, and she marked how her father did not react when told that he would have to do whatever it was that he had come to do by the light of menorahs. The fan pattern of the candelabra radiated the light in a more effective manner than any other system that they could come up with. They kept apologizing.
“All right,” her father said. “All right.”
“Dr. Leschetizky told me that it wouldn’t matter one bit,” one of the younger doctors told him. “All day he told me that Dr. Gutmann could do it with his eyes closed.”
Dr. Gutmann said that that was the way that he intended to do it, whatever it was.
They kept talking to him to keep him from his errand. She heard her father say this was the first time in two thousand years that the Jewish people were fighting over something that hadn’t anything much to do with a certain crucifixion approved by a Pharisaic tribunal and then denied a secular hearing because the magistrate found the would-be defendant surly and uncommunicative. And also because the magistrate had abruptly noticed that his hands needed an immediate scouring. But although this war had nothing to do with that particular execution, the irony was that the goyim they had counted on for help were now holding their tongues and refusing to dirty their own hands. He hadn’t talked like this before. Certainly not in mixed company. She knew, she thought, what had happened, and she knew, she thought, as well the impossibility of confirming it by asking him outright. She could never speak of it, and he would never answer to it. Her father had killed. There were no non-combatants out in the field now. Everyone was expected to take up the fallen weapons. When it had begun, the rationales for the killing—the indiscriminate killing—had been the fulfillment of the Holy Scripture and the self-defense of an entire people. They had gone beyond that now. They were now saying that the war had not so much to do with this earthly paradise, but with the infinite one. Her father had killed in violation of his oath, his temperament, and his principles, but not, according to the rabbinate and popular opinion, in violation of his faith. Not here, not now. Assia found herself wanting to tell him about the guilt that she had felt when the pregnant bomber’s newborn died virtually in her arms before it had even drawn breath in this world. “But I did everything that I could have done,” she could hear herself saying to him. They would comfort each other. They would meet on a level that neither had sunk to before.
He told her to come with him, and they went into the scrub room. He stripped off his shirt by the light of the
menorah, and the first thing that he put on was a rubber scapular. She knew then that they were going to perform an autopsy, which was something rare now in these parts. He told her to scrub and then strictly forbade her to touch anything once they were inside the cold room. She asked if it would be all right if she watched, or should she blindfold herself ? He was giving her no credit for the long months that she had spent nursing soldiers temperately to death, and she was, very consciously, daring his authority. He soothed her pride by telling her that he wasn’t afraid that she would catch her death, but that she just might carelessly transmit someone else’s. There were epidemics to the north, and this was just what they needed right now, a biblical plague on top of a biblical war.
Someone had scrubbed Yashi up and sent her into the cold room before them. She was blind, and old, and known by no other or further names, although it was under this single name that she had been famous, briefly, for singing in the concert halls of Berlin after the First World War. She had turned up on a refugee ship. She was sightless to all but a match held perilously close to her right eyebrow, she was unmarried and childless, and she possessed no wit except that which she put toward the singing of lieder. She could still sing impeccably, never misplacing a phrase or emphasizing a false syllable. She did not, however, know what had happened to her family, if indeed she ever had any, she hadn’t ever heard of any place called Auschwitz or Treblinka, and she couldn’t recall ever being in any camp other than the one she now lived in. She did not understand that there had been a war and that there was one ongoing. Several thinkers and theologians, artists and writers had been housed with the medical corps for safekeeping, although the enemy hadn’t quite seen the logic behind allowing the wounded to recuperate and in letting death take its course within the compound unaided. That just wasn’t the kind of war that they were fighting.
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