by Anna Journey
At the counter stood a man in his mid-sixties, with fraying white hair and a wide speckled forehead. My father smiled and pointed to the display jacket, asking, in Spanish, if he might try it on. The man said he was welcome to and began to move from behind the cash register. My father, a linguaphile who’d lived in Berlin, Hamburg, Bavaria, and Peine, noticed the man spoke Spanish with a thick German accent. “Das Leben is wie ein Kinderhemd, Kurz und beschissen!” my father joked, recalling a well-known German aphorism. (“Life is like a child’s shirt, short and shitty!”)
As the man recognized his native tongue, his face greyed and he backed away from the counter, disappearing through a door at the far corner of the store. A few moments later, a young Bolivian salesclerk walked up to my father and offered his assistance. After trying on the trench coat, my father left the store with the double-breasted leather flaps unfastened. He heard them slap his chest as he walked toward his gate, dragging his alligator-skin bag.
The leather jacket still hangs in my parents’ coat closet, darkly militaristic among the grey pea coats and bright nylon windbreakers. Because of my father’s diligence in saddle-soaping his leather possessions, the trench coat seems to have broken free from time—it’s as supple and saturated with shades of maroon as it was the day my father flew with it back to Canada. The jacket has hung in the closet since before I was born.
My father has two theories about why his switching from Spanish to German terrified the immigrant salesclerk in El Alto:
A. The man, given his age and location, was a Nazi in hiding.
B. The man, given his horror at the language, was a Holocaust survivor.
In either scenario, language morphs into a force of terror, an aphorism slips into a death threat, and instead of handwritten notes about rural water systems my father’s briefcase totes a MAC-10. In either scenario, a stranger flees in mortal fear through an exit.
In seventh grade, I began a yearlong conversation with a stranger. I never saw him in person or learned his name. Our correspondence took place daily, in pencil, scrawled across the surface of a school desk twice as old as we were: one of those hip-bone–shaped maple projectiles attached to a blue plastic chair, as if the piece were once a sleek Space Age invention—its curves and surfaces grown slowly derelict, now gouged with penknives and ossified in liver-colored gum. I began the correspondence unwittingly one day in health class by writing “I ♥ Matt” in the upper right-hand corner of my desk. The next time I sat down in my assigned seat, I noticed beneath my graffiti the words: “Matt who?”
In the classic anthropological text The Stranger (1908), German sociologist Georg Simmel articulates his concept of a unique sociological form. A “peculiar tension” arises, Simmel suggests, from “the stranger,” who manages to be both close to and remote from us at once. The value of such figures in society, then, stems from the stranger’s “objectivity.” Because they aren’t intimately connected with our lives, we feel freer to confess to them our secrets. In pre-modern societies, Simmel writes, most strangers within a group made their living as traders, those “‘strange’ merchants” who move closely among us in a crowd, performing necessary tasks, even as they remain enigmatic.
Though I have only language as proof, I like to imagine my first ancestor—the first person who claimed my surname—as a strange merchant, a traveling journeyman, dragging his carpenter’s bags from village to village. The surname “Journey” comes from the French journée, which denotes the time span of one day. A journeyman, then, has the right to charge a fee for each day’s work. Because such tradesmen have completed apprenticeships but aren’t yet master craftsmen who own shops, journeymen aren’t fixed to one place. They may uproot and travel to other towns, improving their skills at other workshops. The whereabouts of a journeyman can be a productive flux.
When my father encountered his strange merchant in the leather goods shop, he felt free to forge an inside joke with the man. He felt free to belly laugh and drum his fingertips on the counter at the aphorism’s off-color punch line. After all, they’d both traveled a long way to get to Bolivia. Weren’t they both outsiders, facing one another across a similar distance? And yet didn’t they share a closeness, too, through knowing the German tongue?
Throughout his only book Letters to a Stranger, Thomas James addresses in his poems a mysterious “you.” The “Thou,” as Lucie Brock-Broido says in the collection’s introduction, “is you; it is I; it is the beloved, the Master; it is God; he is strange, and stranger too.” In the final three stanzas of the poem “Letters to a Mute,” James writes to one who remains forever unable to answer:
If I could stick my pen into your tongue,
Making it run with gold, making
It speak entirely to me, letting the truth
Slide out of it, I could not be alone.
I wouldn’t even touch you, for I know
How you are locked away from me forever.
Tonight I go out looking for you everywhere
As the moon slips out, a slender petal
Offering all its gold to me for nothing.
There’s a carnal charge to James’s conditional sentence that begins, “If I could stick my pen into your tongue / Making it run with gold, making / It speak entirely to me,” as if the act of giving language to the mute “you” is a wordsmith’s alchemy—a Midas touch tinged with eros, rarefied and lingual. The line breaks rupture the syntax, over and over again, as the sentence extends across four lines, spilling into the next stanza before the if-clause ends in longing. If the silent one finally speaks, James suggests: “I could not be alone.” Even though the poem’s speaker knows such a union with the mute isn’t possible, he keeps searching for the lost “you.” He eschews the easy illumination of the indiscriminant moon, who’d offer “all its gold to me for nothing.”
“Matt who?” asked the stranger from another class period on the grainy surface of my seventh-grade desk. “None of your damn business,” I wrote back, provoking a string of retorts: “Matt sucks”; “Matt has seven nipples”; “Matt sticks hamsters up his butt.” The exchange soon lost its ire, however, probably because both graffiti scrawlers got bored staring at diagrams of genital sores or educational videos in which the grown-up actress who played Annie in the late-seventies Broadway musical talked about puberty. We switched to sharing our favorite anti-authority symbols, such as the anarchist’s jagged “A” within a circle, and complaining about the high school’s cold overflow trailers. We wrote “Ha!” in response to each other’s wisecracks and offered advice about the best places to take narc-free smoke breaks. We wrote supportive notes like, “I know what you mean,” and, “Hang in there, dude.” We drew smiley faces and doodles of teachers with farting butts. The stranger and I—we needed each other.
One day, I arrived to my health class’s trailer to find that Mr. Gainer had switched our assigned seats. I now sat several rows away and a couple of places up from my old desk. I gazed through the trailer’s interior, the slim space jigsawed with at least thirty desks, thinking, “How are we ever going to find each other?”
The Israeli spy agency Mossad found one of the most ruthless Nazi architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, hiding out in Argentina, in 1960. He’d fled Germany after World War II, finally winding up in Argentina in the early fifties. Eichmann lived in the Buenos Aires area for ten years, where he assumed a false name, and worked variously as a foreman at a Mercedes-Benz factory, a junior water engineer, and a rabbit farmer. Similarly, the Gestapo captain Klaus Barbie—the “Butcher of Lyon”—fled to Argentina after working briefly for the CIA, eventually settling into a bungalow in Bolivia, which overlooked the Yungas Road. Before Barbie was extradited to France, in 1983, did he stand behind a counter at El Alto selling leather trench coats to travelers? Did he imagine the airport a house of endless escape routes? Was he comforted by the many doors? Was he soothed by the constant roar of departing planes?
In 1975 my mother and father m
oved to Peine, in the German state of Lower Saxony, so my father could begin a research position in a plastic pipe manufacturing plant. For a year they lived just three miles from the memorial grounds of Bergen-Belsen. My mother asked my dad several times to come with her to visit the site of the former concentration camp, but he refused. Although my father remains a formidable history buff who can discuss with encyclopedic precision the finer points of World War II—battles, geographical terrain, political figures—the subject of the death camps stirs in him a crushing, unfathomable horror so extreme he can’t bring himself to discuss it. (He feels a distinctive yet similarly acute sense of dread about the void of deep space.) Occasionally he deflects his horror of the concentration camps through humor, singing, for instance, the British song mocking the Nazi leadership called “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball,” which assumes the campy, jingle-like cadences of the marching tune “Colonel Bogey March.”
I’ve asked my father why he bought a coat from a shop he believed may have employed a Nazi in hiding. At the time, he assumed the German salesclerk had disappeared into the back room to locate a coat in the storage area, that because the man was older and slow the younger employee simply took over when he saw my father waiting. As my father walked to his gate, however, he began to think about the initial clerk’s reaction to the German language spoken among the dark Bolivian coats. He began to wonder what associations lay beneath the language.
“Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth,” says Paul Celan.
A Holocaust survivor and French citizen of Jewish-Bukovinan descent, Celan continued to write poems in German all his life, because the language of the Gestapo who murdered his parents in the death camps was also his own native tongue. German poetry, though, as Celan understood it, needed to break free from the euphonic language of the lyre. The diction of the German lyric poem needed to become flatter, greyer, more factual, in order to contain the “sinister events in its memory.” “It does not transfigure or render ‘poetical,’” Celan suggests in his Collected Prose (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop); “it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.” In his poem “Alchemical,” Celan writes (in Pierre Joris’s translation from Paul Celan: Selections):
Silence, cooked like gold, in
carbonized
hands.
Great, gray,
close, like all that’s lost,
sister figure:
All the Names, all the al-
names.
Similarly to Thomas James’s “Letter to a Mute,” Celan’s voiceless “al- / names” remain unreachable in their silence, although the “alchemy” evoked here is utterly sinister—people are “cooked like gold” and left “carbonized.” Paradoxically, what’s lost remains “close”—a phantom kinship—through a dark memory, through the poem’s stark echo of “All the Names.”
Celan’s relationship with his mother tongue remained an uneasy one. As he moved away from the lush music and surrealistic imagery of his poem “Death Fugue” and into the sparer diction and clipped syntax of “Stretto,” his use of neologisms (“venomstilled,” “wordblood,” “heavencrazed”) also increased. And although neologisms abound in German, Celan’s linguistic combinations are subversively mispaired—a paradoxical uniting and sundering of sense. His strange coinages assault the German language even as they forge an unexpected intimacy—two words colliding to make an unstable, charged new sign.
From what truth did the coat salesman hide in his refusal to reply? Which sinister events—and how many names—might his speaking in German have mapped and measured?
The speaker in Thomas James’s poem “Letters to a Stranger,” seated inside a church, confides:
…the wine rides through my breast
Like a dark hearse.
All the while I am thinking of you.
An avalanche of white carnations
Is drifting across your voice
As it drifts across the voices of confession.
But the snow keeps whispering of you over and over.
James’s speaker takes Holy Communion as if to make his absent stranger transubstantiate, but only a snow of funerary white flowers moves to reply.
I decided to continue my “letters to a stranger” by finding my seventh-grade graffiti pen pal somewhere in the slew of reassigned seats. I returned to the former desk we shared and wrote the coordinates of my new seat. I drew a little map with a treasure chest’s “X.” A few days passed, and I suspected the stranger hadn’t thought to check the site of our old correspondence. Then, after a week, that familiar writing drifted, once again, across the maple’s waiting grain.
I once had to write my own last name a hundred times in a row after misspelling the noun “journey” on a third-grade spelling test. I’d spelled my name correctly in the upper right-hand corner of the test, in the blank space after “Name,” but I grew so anxious about screwing up on the test that, in my nervous energy, I inverted the “e” and the “n.”
I like to think that my ancestor William Journey changed the spelling of his last name by deleting “man” from “Journeyman,” in the late 1600s, as he departed England on a ship bound for the New World. I like to imagine he reinvented himself in the middle of the Atlantic, as he leaned against a salt-worn railing on the top deck, dreaming of tobacco fields, an unnamed creek, watching the open water foam.
My father, William (“Tim”) Journey, once hopped into the Volks-wagen of a stranger in Berlin, throwing his rucksack in the backseat. It was 1964 and he was headed toward Split, Croatia, a beach town on the Dalmatian Coast, to meet two of his friends from the Free University of Berlin. On the side of the street, he’d held up a sign on which he’d scrawled “Nuremberg,” since he needed a ride that would carry him from Berlin straight through Eastern Germany, an area where hitchhiking was illegal. A young woman pulled over and offered him a lift.
During the two-hour drive, my father noticed the woman kept peering sideways at him, grinning slyly. “You recognize me, don’t you?” she finally asked. My father doesn’t recall his answer, though he remembers not wanting to offend the woman. He scrutinized her Bardot-like blond bouffant and black cat-eye liner. He probably nodded. She leaned over, reached into the glove box, and popped open the compartment to reveal a stack of autographed studio portraits, handing one of them to my father.
“So who was she?” I asked. He couldn’t remember. “Some obscure German movie star.” “What did you do with the photo?” He’d tossed it into the first trashcan he passed in Nuremberg, then thumbed for another ride. “I can’t believe you threw it away!” I cried. “Weren’t you curious?” My father shrugged, saying he found the movie star boring and self-absorbed. She didn’t tell a single good story. “Unlike your mother,” he said.
The trench coat still hangs in my parents’ downstairs closet, brought out each crisp Virginia winter by my father as he slants the tweed brim of his Greek fisherman’s cap into the wind. And since before I was born, the supple sleeves of the trench must’ve been touched by thousands of people. By now, its dark leather’s been brushed by all of us: by the countless elbows of travelers swirling through the airport store, by the palms of the Bolivian clerk who rang up my father, and by the stranger from Germany who, far from home, once crouched in the display window, lifting the heavy leather flaps over the sloped and armless torso of a plaster mannequin. As he returned to the cash register, he leaned back. He watched a man pause in front of the jacket and absently rub his shoulders as if to keep off a chill, although it was warm in Bolivia. He watched the man approach him, pointing, just beginning to open his mouth.
LITTLE FACE
“You’re going to smell something,” Robin said. She raised the dermatological zapper, shaped like an electric toothbrush, above the cluster of chicken pox scars pebbling my chin. “I like to call it Korean barbecue.” The head of the fractional resurfacing device had a flat, rectangular grid at its tip that re
sembled a small socket—a geometric hive of evenly spaced dots. I exhaled and shut my eyes. The scent of my frying skin—so close to my own nostrils—hovered somewhere between pork meatball and snuffed match. I’d coveted other people’s smooth, scar-free faces since I was thirteen. No chin-pits the width of pencil erasers. No bumpy, honeycombed cheeks. No nicknames hissed in gym class: Hey, Swiss Cheese! My younger sister and I spent most of our early childhoods overseas in the 1980s—five years in Bangladesh and two in India—where we faced an array of exotic calamities: my idiopathic weeklong fever that befuddled our Belgian doctor and caused me to hallucinate a flock of yawping red crows; Rebecca’s encounter with a rabid dog; my vomit-inducing head injury after I raced down the concrete steps of the American Club’s restaurant, stumbled backward, and smacked my skull, concussing myself. But my sister and I never managed to catch the chicken pox as little kids. We came down with the virus a few years after moving to the United States—both of us at the same time. I was thirteen. She was ten. Soon afterward, I babysat a neighbor’s three children, and one of them asked: “Why do you have holes in your skin?”
At Oak Creek Elementary—the school where my mother works as a teacher’s aide—the first-grade students annually celebrate the one hundredth day of the school year. In the past, they’ve honored the occasion by responding to prompts such as, “If I had one hundred dollars I would buy . . .” or, “If I could have one hundred of anything, it would be . . .” For the most recent “100th Day” celebration, however, Mrs. Hill, a first-grade teacher my mother assists, wanted to do something unusual. She gathered her students on the blue rug at one side of the classroom and wrote the following prompt on the board: “When I’m one hundred years old, I will . . .” The students raised their hands to offer suggestions: “walk with a cane,” “play checkers with my grandchildren,” “need a wheelchair,” “have white hair,” “wear a hearing aid,” “be bald,” “play video games all day.” The six-year-olds then went back to their seats to divine a paragraph of their future biographies, beginning with the topic sentence: “When I’m one hundred years old, I will be very different.”