She was singing Schubert when she and her father walked into the cold room. He listened for a moment. He told Assia, diffidently, as though confiding a secret, that they were hearing an example of the absolute purity that the Germans had taken into their heads to kill in order to preserve. And that the Jews might have easily been persuaded to die for willingly.
There was only one body in the cold room. She had never seen one covered in an oil tarp before. Her father deferentially pulled back the covering. She understood then that he had accompanied the body in on his journey. There was a proprietorial sense in the way that he was touching it. If her father was a balmy ally of the sandman, this girl, this little dead girl, was Sleeping Beauty. Those who had prepared her either had shaved her body, or had not needed to at all. They’d shampooed her hair with balsam. She was very pale. Not sallow but almost lambent. She was dead in bloom. Her father had begun placing the cotton. The gurgling, double-stomached gravity tank, which she had never seen before and thought, for a moment, a laundering sink or a special place of ablutions for the yeshivists, accompanied Yashi’s singing, providing an undertow as her voice crested. Alongside the body was a tray of cc syringes with fourteen-gauge needles. She was used to the combined vapor of blood and ammonia now. It no longer made her sick to her stomach. Her father made the incision into the child’s carotid artery. He attached the cannulae to the tubing of the gravity tank.
“Who is this girl, Papa?”
He ignored the question and started making the injections. The propylene, he told her, was to keep the muscles moist. The formalin was a fixative. The isopropyl alcohol was a preservative. The phenol was a mold preventive. He told her that she was standing too close.
“I didn’t know you knew how to do this.”
“I’m no expert. Do you enjoy emergency work?”
“Are you mad?”
“Forgive me,” he said.
“You brought me in here, but you’re not telling me anything.”
“I should think things are self-evident enough.”
“Can we start with why you’re doing this?”
“No.”
Assia thought for a minute. “Then tell me where you learned to do it.”
“Where did you learn nursing?”
“You learned just by . . . ?”
“Under the Reich.”
“Under the German Reich?” she asked.
“In the early days, they didn’t waste resources. We used to say that surgeons, if they were Jewish, went to two places. Can you guess where, Assia?”
“No.”
“To the dogs or to the dead.”
Yashi had finished her song. She began another.
“You embalmed their dead?” she asked.
“It was a living,” he said.
She saw that he kept his head down as he was working because he was trying not to smile, and he didn’t want her to see. But suddenly that wasn’t true at all. He was keeping his head down because he was as ashamed of his past as he was of his present and she, like all daughters in the perspectives of their natural fathers, comprised his future. He wasn’t telling her about this child whom he was preparing for her budding grave by virtue of the fact that the less she knew, the better it would be for him, no matter how badly he wished to intimate, or confess, or warn.
She said, “Papa?”
Yashi was singing in German, and, for the first time since she had commenced, Assia realized that she no longer understood the language. Not rendered in a lullaby, anyway.
Her father said that he did not remember the name of the little girl. He seemed about to say that he had never met her, but he choked trying and started saying that he suspected he might have known her father slightly. He couldn’t be sure since, even in peacetime, those types lived under a nom de guerre. You see, the man was currently on the intelligence staff, but he had been a hero in the Polish resistance. He said that this wasn’t rare in itself, but the fact that a Warsaw hero remained alive was rather bizarre. The girl’s father’s sketchy obituary had once appeared in the American Jewish Daily Forward. Israeli journals, such as they were, had for many years strictly embargoed obituaries. Israel had long been mistaken for a necropolis. During World War Two, the Haganah had designated clandestine missions in the Pole’s memory. He hadn’t gotten an obit in the Promised Land, but he had been accorded the honor of having his name turned into a code word. The Pole had entered the country officially already dead, and, when discovered, it was only the certitude of finger-printing and the meticulous Nazi records that had saved him from being hanged as an impostor in the busy Haganah gallows. When it was corroborated that he actually was the dead hero, and when he was debriefed, and when a legitimate set of identity papers was drawn up, it was suggested that a seat in government might be set aside for him. Free elections would be held following the war. This young girl’s father, a survivor among more than three hundred thousand who died in his home city, said that he wished to wait and see how the war would go.
The little girl had been smuggled out of Poland in her late mother’s womb. She was his only child, although he’d barely known her and had never gotten the opportunity to be a father to her. He had undoubtedly dreamed of her, prayed to her across two continents now, and two separate wars. Her existence might well have been the one thing that kept him alive while so many others were dying.
Assia couldn’t wait any longer. She interrupted, asking him how the little girl had died.
“Influenza,” her father said. There were epidemics to the north.
“Do you mean she died of natural causes?” Assia asked.
“Don’t you dare say that,” her father said.
Dr. Gutmann said that the general staff had been mortally afraid that the Pole would kill himself when he became aware of his daughter’s death. Someone had been foolish enough to try the man-to-man approach, and he had gone mad, and had gone off to the desert to kill Arabs in recompense. Afterward, he planned to take his own life. The search party found him alive but raving. They sedated him and brought in the same debriefers who had originally established, for their benefit and his, that he was still alive. Negotiations stretched across two evenings. It was agreed that the Pole would not kill himself on the condition that he would be allowed to murder an Arab girl. One his own daughter’s age. A patrol went out and found him one.
“He shot the Arab girl?”
“No,” her father said, stroking the negation along the upper strop of his vocal cords. “No, he was afraid that he would be haunted by the sound of the shot.”
“I know the feeling,” Assia said.
He glanced up from his work at her, gauging for himself by the look in her eyes whether her statement was true or not. He said, “He couldn’t bring himself to shoot the Arab girl, so he strangled her instead.”
Then he put down his syringe and stepped back from the table. He lifted his head. She saw the sweat beads on his brow, arrested by the cold air. She took a patch of cloth from the pocket of her smock and mopped at his forehead. The fluids were rinsing around the girl’s body. There was spillage all along the floor.
He said, “They’re planning a hero’s funeral. It isn’t this child . . .” He choked on the words. “It isn’t going to be this child’s funeral.”
“Then whose funeral?”
“It is her funeral,” her father said, “but she won’t be attending. They’ll bury the Arab girl’s body in her place. In a padlocked casket.”
“But what’s going to happen to her?” she said.
He said, “Her father has in mind to die once the war is over. He wants to be buried with her. That’s the deal they made with him.”
She looked at him for a long time. The barium sweat beads ran like tears down his cheeks. He said, “If you know your Pentateuch, you know that there is a God of peace and a separate God of war. I’ve served both.”
“But which do you believe in?”
“That isn’t my choice, Assia.”
“Papa, that’s what the Nazis said.”
Then he turned and quit the room, leaving the girl lying there with her chest cavity open and the tubes attached. “ You finish,” he said. Yashi sang in the cold dark.
Three weeks later, she received the news that he was dead.
19.
Robert
The bay windows, here in 307 Dodge, separate like cerebral compartments, whining on their hinges. The curtains are pulled back, and the windows are wide open tonight. This lounge has always been a cloistered space, but the winds of time and change have never been this room’s enemy. In 1968 the first rule of belletristic discussion was that you should never tell me tomorrow the same thing that you are telling me today. Legitimacy lies in verisimilitude and not factuality. If it was not new, it could not be true, and, to be fruitful, ideas had to multiply. This was our way of preserving our legitimacy. No one warned us that we would grow old, and it never dawned on us that we had come to college in the first place to cover just that exigency.
The lounge was a dayroom then. It is now a night room. It is lit by three rose-shaded batwing burners. The lamps fabricate shadow in even proportion to their light. I look to the ceiling and my suspicions are confirmed. The fluorescent tubings that I remember have been looted. If I looked out onto the plaza, doubtless I would find fraternity boys fencing on the lawn, à la Star Wars. A blackened and paint-stained coffeepot sits upon a hot-plate burner. But for the cord and fang-socketed plug-in, this might constitute the habiliments of the part and parcel range breakfast out on the longhorn drive, hell-bent for Texas.
On the shelf above the hot plate are some soiled dishes and three filthy ashtrays. A doodled and sagging pouch of Bustelo slants halfway over the edge.
He sits in the corner, pretending to read the newspaper, but the motion of his eyes is not linear at all. They bounce like the eyes of Harpo Marx, contemplating a Holy Terror. He is not the man that I’ve seen in photos wedged between Sylvia’s largely conjectured childhood and adolescence and her equally conjectured decline and demise, with Ted Hughes quoted always unapologetically, and always out of context— Ted simply did not live in the same world that his wife had expired in. The professor’s face is a book that he himself has had occasion to rewrite. The plumes of his eyebrows are bushy, overturned clef notes. His wrinkles are all downstrokes, as though he has spent the last forty years pulling long faces. I move closer, and the corners of the newspaper, a late edition, rife with full-color details, start to tremble.
“You might have worn a disguise,” he says, looking up. “You may have had the good sense and good grace to come up behind my back, or come upon me in my sleep. But you are not unexpected, as I have read the account of the young woman on the airplane, and, as much as I’d like to, I can’t tell you that you are unwelcome. What are your terms?”
That lift that is in his merry eyes is absent from his speech. There’s no Cambridge antecedent and no New Delhi past in his accent. He’s flattened his parlance.
“My terms?”
He laughs a belabored and consumptive Peter Lorre brand of laughter. “Trickery,” he says. “At last, you’ll stoop to trickery, will you? Now we’ll make a ceremony out of it, won’t we? You’ve come incognito, my dear friend. Where’s your cape? Where’s your baying wolves outside my window? Have you taken so many today that you’ve had to cut back on your pomp? Could it be that you have finally grown sick of yourself?”
I understand now. The latest casualty is Professor Abdiel’s noble mind and invaluable memory. Obviously both are now beneath the towers’ rubble with the rest of the worthy departed. It’s a terrible pity. This is the man whom I have waited all these years to speak to and never once thought of contacting. His presence in the books that I have read served to render him incorporeal. Chiefly, his own book, his own Freudian study of Sylvia, published in ’75 and still in print, or so I would imagine. It was the most influential book of its kind, and Sylvia’s supporters bought it in order to discard it a quarter of the way through the read. At base Abdiel said that mausoleum poetry, as exemplified by Ariel and by the maggoty clones that were then clustering about the corpus of Ariel, the first notable book of his lifetime that came in cold and dead upon arrival, was wholly parasitical, appealing greatly to the death instinct and to the narcissistic side of the collective personality. Sylvia was celebrated for looking intently into the mirror at the same time as she was engaged in breaking it.
And Ted Hughes didn’t fare so well, either, in Abdiel’s book, although they had been intimate friends for many years prior to its publishing. Ted, said Abdiel, although professing to be the prime victim of both Sylvia and her cult, never psychologically strayed from the shelter of her resting place. In his later collections, he built a wild game preserve, a boar menagerie around Sylvia’s tomb, and shut himself in for the same reason that medieval warlords lived and died in towers protected by crocodile moats. He tossed meat from his tower windows at ever-distant intervals.
Abdiel grips my hand in his. The blood that is lost in my fingers goes to my head. I feel the weary day come upon me like the collapse of the sky.
“Haven’t you come to teach me of finality?”
“I read your book on Sylvia.”
He says, “That was only the beginning of the tale that I have to tell. You wouldn’t entertain granting me a reprieve, would you? I might be able to learn what you want to teach me on my own.”
“You are mistaking me.”
“Are you being coy?”
“No.”
“Then who or what are you?”
“That’s what I came in here to find out, Professor.”
He lets go of my hand. “We both mistook each other for something else,” he says.
“You don’t sound relieved.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Considering all that has happened today, we should both be thankful to be alive.”
“I have information that I don’t wish to take to my grave.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“We’re fellow travelers,” I tell him.
“Are you saying that death itself dies?”
“For the last time, I’m not death.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
“What do you have to tell me?”
“I have knowledge of an unsolved murder.”
“Whose murder?”
“Sylvia Plath’s,” he says.
“You are saying that Sylvia Plath was murdered?”
He nods sagely, the top half of his black-beaded irises disappearing under the awning of his heavy lids. “She died at the hands of someone she had never met and knew intimately. You could say that she died at the hands of someone whose birth she has midwived posthumously.”
I plant both my palms against the table. I lean in close. “Who?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Then you don’t know,” I tell him.
He nods as sagely and as self-satisfied as before. “That’s right. I do not know. I do not know because the person who killed Sylvia might not even have been born yet.”
“What are you saying?”
“Sylvia Plath killed herself only by proxy. She left it up to time and circumstance to choose her true killer. But she died, knowing that the poet who supplants her in impact will be her murderer. The next poet celebrated on a mass scale will not only be a suicide, but he or she must and will be a mass murderer.”
“A terrorist?”
“From your perspective, perhaps. A hero to others. But a rough beast. Its hour come at last. Slouching towards Bethlehem. To be born in death.”
“I don’t think so.”
“One of the first criticisms of her poetry was that it taught sensitive, despairing readers to kill themselves. That’s absolute nonsense. What the poems do is to invite us to take part in Sylvia’s ongoing death. It follows then that that Second Coming must be her annihilation.”
“Why are
you saying this?” I ask him. “That goes against everything that you wrote in your book.”
“I had an epiphany when I read about the brave girl on the airplane.”
“I didn’t read anything about any girl on a plane.”
He slides the newspaper across the table. “See for yourself, then. Her name is Leela. Leela Aimee Silvert.”
20.
Assia
De Born asked to hear her story through once again, but went back to sleep near the midway mark. She had fed him most of the cake, and he had sucked the wine bottle dry. Assia kept talking anyway, altering many of the minor details for effect. She discarded her father’s straw hat and dressed him in those jungle fatigues that the commanders wore while safely monitoring tank battles, often from miles away, totally out of so much as binocular contact, listening impassively over the transmitter as voices described the details from their sand craters. She sutured the little girl’s flesh up by herself after her father had left the room. When he returned, the task was completed, and she and her father sat beneath the chiming stars through the night, and spoke of what they would do if one or the other of them were to die. She left it like that and moved the bedroom’s oscillating fan with the ribboned streamers so that it would soothe Etienne in his sleep. Directing it at his body, she stood in its breeze and smelled an awakening memory of something pungent and vaguely ammoniac, an alternate musk to that of human sweat. Him, too, she thought, and she wondered if she had ever been present at an opportune, well-timed passing. Sylvia’s had seemed so. She closed her eyes and walked out of the room.
Shura was still watching television. Assia wrote a note. She took Shura to the window and pointed to the driveway. Shura took the note to the Pakistani driver, holding his post in the Bentley outside. He drove away. She took her daughter by the hand. They went upstairs together. Assia had in mind that she should say something. When they entered, she picked her daughter up in her arms and they both looked down upon the memorial of the old man’s body, lying peaceful and astray in the lathered folds of the bedsheet.
She couldn’t believe in a next world, but the concept of forward momentum was something else. Her father had died saving lives, regretting the lives lost on both sides, and he had passed his regret and his resignation on to her. This is what she had left her former husbands and lovers with when she had parted from them. They were one and all innocent as old men, shaking their heads, shedding their tears, and sifting through their misfortunes for the fragments of a silver lining. Sylvia’s parting was a break in Assia’s chain. It was an outrage to Assia’s own bloodline. What was it that Sylvia had said in her suicide brief that was so profound? Assia knows the answer, although no one has ever petitioned for her opinion. It’s very simple: Sylvia had said red. Only that. She said red alone. She said red in the sense of renouncement. She said red in the sense of rage. She said red to summon the muse who would never ever speak to her, as such, again, but neither would she ever abandon her. The muse who would hereafter accompany the sonata of Sylvia’s poetry with the resounding absence of any semblance of a heartbeat.
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