Paula is going to forget her father and she will forget a lot of me so you must be memorable. I forgive you your silence, and your brevity in the letters you do send for I know you hate writing. But I will not forgive you if you leave her to wonder, as I do, what your life contains.
This room. The white Jasmine around the window that sends sweet perfumed air in with every breath of the wind. You and Paula at my side. I suddenly matter so much. I spoiled you because I was too weak to bring you up. Once, I found you hiding in a closet with a broken arm. And once, I saw you strip down for the bath and your white back was ribboned with whip marks. You were less than eight years old. Once, I hid you both under the bed and told him I had broken his reading glasses. That was the only occasion I tried to be brave like you and take the beating. But I was beyond beating, never going to be any better. And he thought himself a good citizen and so would beat his son, but not his wife.
Adolf, I speak to you now and I ask that you destroy this letter because what I say here will make clear that I know something about you that frightens me, and if you ever get into trouble later I would not have my words fall as evidence. I went for a walk before I got sick, in the summer, and I saw you by the pond. Your back was to me and you were throwing a frog into the water. The little thing swam back and you grabbed it up and threw it again, harder, into the water. It swam back. It was drawn to you. You grabbed it and threw it again and again it swam back and you threw it and it swam back and you threw it until it was exhausted and it drowned. It was like you were entranced, the pair of you, you and the frog. I have seen you in that detached space and I have seen a cousin there as well. That cousin killed a dog and slept with it until his housekeeper found it rotting in his bed and then he killed her too. Another cousin came to dinner at our house and ate and drank and spoke ambitiously of crops he could never afford and then went home and killed himself. Keep away from our family and be kind to animals.
I feel sure that if you follow your art you will be happy. I feel sure that you will hang in the memories of millions. You will make something incomparable. You will be terrifying in your greatness. You must nurture your body and stay healthy so that your thoughts are clear and you can avoid ill thinking. You must not be isolated as an artist. Those artists, I have heard, die young of drink and sadness. Don’t drink if you can help it. My father might have been redeemed if he stayed sober. Go to church. The church is where you will find understanding and compassion. You know I am devout and I do not demand that you be so devout as me, but do not leave God. Do not act against God because you are angry. You are never forsaken. I must see you in heaven. I must not be there without you. It will be better there for us as a family, all the children and me. And I will have learned so much by then. Think how it will be, you and Paula will be the babies doted upon by us all. I will be a stronger person and I will have made a beautiful home for us near the gates so we can watch the happy souls arriving and welcome them. We will have a garden such as you have never seen with every flower in Creation. I will gather paints and canvasses for you so that you can paint through eternity. Money will never again make us cry. I want you to live a long good life and repent everything immediately so that there is no catch at the end. Say your prayers and say thanks at dinner and give alms and see that the priests know you. Keep my grave tidy. But most of all be good, be good, be good, because I love you and I know you are good. I see in you a genius that can be good if only you would be good.
I must pretend to sleep now. I have a strong feeling that tomorrow I will die. It makes me hopeful. I love you and I pray you will forgive me.
Klara
The Traveler Is Lost
MY DEAR JULIE,
THIS MORNING ON MY WALK I watched a house catch fire. I was walking down the empty road, staring at my black shoes turning brown with dust, and something made me turn and stare through the shimmer of heat. I knew that I should be in the Gulf Hotel, working at my desk, constructing a virtual version of this day and of this place to wire around the world. I looked back at a house that I had just passed and I saw nothing, just a flat roof and some broken windows. Then it seemed as if the roof were rising. I thought I saw black birds escaping, but it was smoke and ash, and in the time that it took for the dark transformation of those birds the house suddenly caught — struck like a giant match — and it was blazing in the middle of the morning beside an empty street. Blazing away and all the air above it turned black and I thought of the bedsheets catching fire inside and writhing across the mattress, and the white pillows smoking, and the curtains evaporating. I thought of your necklace with the cherry wood beads. I thought of a song that I memorized in high school. I thought of the little plastic boat that used to float in the tub with you, holding your perfume and your scented oil. I thought of you sitting in the tub with your face flushed and your hair in a ponytail, and you covering your teeth to laugh. I stood and I watched the house fall in upon itself the way that my thoughts were falling in upon themselves. I felt thirsty and my eyes stung.
Here, I should tell you, crows fly into ruined houses and spend the night. My easy rhetoric does not dispel the ashes. In the day there are, of course, loud noises that you would find unbearable and I have become somewhat hopeless at my job. The waves break before the shore and I imagine what it must be like to live here always, drifting through the hot and noisy days and sleeping through the quiet dreadful nights and feeling no ambition, no ambivalence beyond the war. It seems as if people have ceased to be like living things, like animals, and now we only tread through time. We are detached from ourselves. Every action and reaction here has politics. And so you think before you buy three bananas and a loaf of bread whether it is right. Do I need three bananas today or should I buy just one and another tomorrow? Should I buy twenty? What will happen?
I’ve watched my neighbors burying their valuables in the gardens at night, all of them together, digging under the fragile illumination of their flashlights. Hiding necklaces, and wedding rings, dollar bills in paper bags. There is something hopeful in these burials. The families must be thinking that they will return. They must be thinking that the houses will burn, but the gardens will be tilled again, and underneath the scrub and earth and broken stones, precious things will remain precious.
Far away from here you must be treading through your kitchen now, fixing yourself dinner. You must be drawing down the bowls and turning on the stove. You must be singing to yourself. What’s that? A lullaby? You sing every song so slowly I can’t tell. If you only knew how the tiny silent spotlight of my vision brightens around your wrist as you lift the strands of silk from the bared beads of corn. If you only knew how my fingers ache to touch your throat when you are singing. Far away from me you must be licking the salt from your upper lip and the melted butter from your thumb. Are you there? Where are you? When I finally called yesterday there was nothing, no you, with whom to speak. I so long to hear you breathe, to hear you shift and lean against the wall. To know that my voice is in your hair and that your mouth is nearby. I found myself thinking today that I wish you would write and say that you are pregnant. Not that I want a child because I don’t and never will, but because it would give me some reason, some absolute reason, to come home. So write and tell me about this miracle and then meet me at the airport and shake your head and laugh because it is not true. There is only me and there is only you. I can see the look on your face reading what I have just written. You smile and shrug your shoulders and your forehead bunches with sadness. It stings my heart to touch your nerves this way. But it is nice the way that a letter can collapse time and make it seem as if you are in front of me, reacting to my words even as I print them.
There is another journalist in the room connecting mine and twice now we have gotten drunk. He has crimson tasseled curtains and we drink white rum from every teacup that remains unbroken. He pats his big belly after every sip. Julie, how can I write to you about this place when all I can see are the white raf
ters over your head and the maple leaves scraping the windows? Here, the smell of gunpowder reminds me of the smell of pencil shavings. It hangs everywhere and it clings to the bristles in my nose at every breath. I cannot sleep, for every rustle in the street wakes me and my heart batters my ribs like a bird in a box. I find all my bedsheets and my clothes stiff with the last night’s sweat. The other journalist types constantly, a rat-tat-tat of trenchant thoughts tumbling down the hall. I hear him laugh and pull on his shoes to go out walking. I see in his eyes, the way that he captures and deconstructs whatever is before him. What I say is at once what I say, and also some great unfastening of me. His restless fingers flex and tap as he listens. He always hands me something, like rum or bread, when he asks me questions. I speak to him of the great gap that I feel between what people say they believe and what people actually think. I ask him: how can we report the dull horror of these days and the prickling nausea of these nights, as if they were important, when all we must do is report them? I confess my homesickness, and that I can no longer concentrate on the tedious unraveling of every struggle. I believe that human callousness is a crime. But I can think only of you, Julie.
When the tanks roll down the street I turn my head and watch the frames of my glasses shudder on the table by my bed. The universe quivers and all the sleepers wake. I count a thousand seconds of silence. I watch my glasses vibrate until they begin to turn. Last week I was buying fruit and bread at the edge of a road leading into the country. I was standing with a hand in my pocket, touching the leather of my wallet. A boy was looking at me, holding out his hand for me to place some money in it. That brown boy was looking at me. We both felt the ground shiver. We stood still, each one watching the face of the other one shiver. The road trembled hard beneath us, and the moment dragged open. He opened his mouth and shouted and I turned. A crowd of people was moving in tandem down the center of the street, dragging a cloud of dust. Above the cluster of crowns another head rose. I saw a metal face with a dark proboscis, pointing at me. For an instant I could see into the eye. Men began to flood the street, running from their houses. Every voice a separate clap of thunder. One man raised his narrow arm and fired a handgun at the head of the beast. The gun made a pathetic noise, like a cracker, and only then did the grinding oblong wheels gain speed, and the people walking before them disappeared. The remnants of the human shield stood back in confusion, men and women, their eyelids, cheeks, and lips monochromed by dust. And the bodies on the ground, Julie, could not have been bodies at all.
I transcribe for you here the conversation that I had with the other journalist late that night:
“You don’t think that you could have stopped them?”
“I didn’t even think of it. I only thought, how impossible. How impossible.”
“Have another drink, my friend. What will you wire back to your magazine?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re holding your teacup with an old woman’s hands. You were very fortunate to have witnessed it. Your people will want the story. You should have interviewed the other prisoners after they were abandoned. What did you do afterwards?”
“I came back here. I walked home and peeled my fruit and put it in a bowl and washed my hands and ate at my table. I sat by the window until it was dark, thinking of nothing, and then I came to you.”
“It’s a hot night and you’re a young man. You have to turn the muscle of your heart into something as indifferent as the muscle in your arm. We are performing a service by being here. You think that these people hate us, but you’re wrong. They are indifferent to us. Their eyes are so full they’ve gone blind. We have to tell their story.”
“Why do they need us to do that?”
“They don’t. It’s always someone else who gains by knowing tragedy. I can take the story from you. I can tell it for you. You can haul yourself through the streets like one of them. You can let your eyes go dark. Watch the killing, come home, eat and sleep, and then speak to me. And I’ll be you. I’ll be the you who needs to get paid. Drink up and write a letter home. You only look like you come from here. You were always able to leave.”
“Do you think of yourself as a good man?”
“Yes. I think of you that way too. You miss your wife and you’ve forgotten your name. It’s a kind of fever that we all go through, and that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
GOOD NIGHT, JULIE. FAR AWAY from me you must be kneeling down upon your shadow now; and the gleam of your irises is screened from the night by your hair. I can smell your skin in the palms of my hands. Float away, only love, away from the planet’s strange embrace. Tread through the cumulus of dreams. May you wake with a mouth full of violets. May you drink clean water from the tap. I’ll come home to kiss you in the grass again. We will never tremble apart. Julie — fear is waking without you. So turn the bed upside down and we’ll make love in the curtains. I can see your arms and legs. I can see the empty plates and glasses. I can see the gnawed corncob. I can see the patina of rust in the white porcelain sink. I can see your fragile nightgown folded on the floor. I can see your eyelashes flickering.
The Lilac Fields at Sabor
FOOTSTEPS CONCATENATE WITH SHOUTS ALONG the street. Sebastian blinks. He rolls away from the window and crushes the pillow to his cheek. He covers his exposed ear with a damp arm. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, the slumped shoulders of rumpled shirts draped over the iron rails at the end of the bed and over the loosened doorknob materialize as the desolate ghosts of soldiers. He hears glass breaking and then, finally, the night silences itself.
“Four of us were at a table. A good-looking, shorthaired girl served us drinks from two gun holsters strapped by a leather belt to her skinny hips. She clapped a dirty highball on the table and asked me if I wanted whisky or gin. And then she took the bottle from her right hip and uncorked it with her teeth. She poured the liquor from the height of her shoulder and I stared into the brilliant jet, falling past my loathsome face,” Barbus says and laughs.
“Did you take her home?” asks the second man.
The second man arrived at the dining hall a few minutes ago, inserting himself easily into the famished gaggle of journalists eating breakfast around the long plywood tables. He smiles at Sebastian and lifts Sebastian’s coffee cup to toast the group. He introduces himself as “Tamai. I am a good driver. You need me,” he says.
“I know where to find a dozen women like that for you,” he adds. “With long hair too. You should have a long-haired woman — to make you strong.” He grins. His front teeth are cracked. “You are writers, are you all? You must see the fields at Sabor for your papers; I’ll take you tomorrow, twenty-five dollars each.” He holds up two fingers and then five fingers and points affably between himself and them.
Strains of American music filter through parted curtains in Barbus’s room. The crimson fabric inflates and deflates with the dusty breath of day. Dust motes glisten in the rose-light. Everywhere, the fermenting odor of alcohol enlaces the verdant scents of sweat and smoke.
“Barbus?” Sebastian calls.
“Sleeping,” comes a familiar growl from the direction of the bath.
Outside the birds cackle up the dawn. The rumble of car motors competes with the snap, snap of toy guns fired at suspicious looking garbage bins.
“The kids are up early,” Sebastian mutters. He plucks at the muscles along his neck and finds them taut as guitar strings. His spine feels crooked from sleeping twisted in the bowed palm of the antique mattress. “How many hours to Sabor?” he shouts looking in the speckled mirror over the bureau.
“Two,” Barbus calls back.
When the sun rolls into the clearest region of the sky, the air ripples with heat. White filaments of cirrus clouds veil the fields in spotty shadow. The light silvers the road. Sebastian leans his forehead on his hand to shield his eyes from dust and turns his head to watch the landscape. Music winds
painfully out from a cassette tape, through the crackling speakers in the front, muffling his companions’ conversation. There are no animals in the leas alongside the road. No chubby sheep or stocky ponies graze the scruffy greenery. Sebastian stares into the citadel of trees set back, meters away from the asphalt divide.
Occasionally he sees a soldier, lounging at the periphery, leaning a narrow body against a birch trunk. Sebastian sits up straighter to get a better look at them. In the city the young soldiers are always alert and on display. They parade their uniforms down the ruined alleyways as if the cobblestones hold pot lights, and all the broken windows hide galleries of breathless girls. Among the trees, from a distance, while they stare into the canopy and draw on cigarettes, the soldiers seem like wardens for the pastoral world. They guard the forest from the city and the ground from the sky. Vanity glimmers behind still irises and sullen jaws are set firmly above supple necks. At times they look hot and bored, like boys in Sunday suits. They long for some infringement, some spark to light their consciences. They would prefer to fight. They ache to move. Their pale cheeks are always flushed, and their eyes are always shining. At thirty years of age Sebastian already feels himself growing old, whenever he sees the white teeth of soldiers.
“She has skin as pale and warm as sand. I told her I would marry her when they rebuilt the church. She said that was a safe offer,” Tamai continues.
Barbus laughs. He tips his head back and slurps coffee from a steel canteen. He glances back at Sebastian. He smiles and his cheeks vibrate as the car hits a hole in the road. “My friend Sebastian here, has a fantastic lover. Tell the good driver about your wife, Sebastian. Go on. Ah, he’s shy.” Barbus turns back.
“Never mind.” Tamai waves a hand, dismissing the silence. He points to rubble beside the road. “My mother was in a movie once, filmed over there, by those stones. You see? That used to be a house where a crazy old man lived. He liked to sit outside his kitchen in a chair and wait for someone to drive by. When he saw a car coming he ran out into the road waving his arms and yelling so that the startled driver would pull over, thinking that there was some trouble. When the car stopped the old man stood, waiting calmly for the window to roll down and then he would invite the motorist for lunch.” Tamai pauses. “It’s so lonely out here. I’m glad that they destroyed that house.”
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 3