Joyland Trio Deal
Page 22
And then she hears the rumors of his resurrection. She feels sick. I was there, she tells the neighbors. He died. A mother would know, she falters, if he were alive. Stupid Lazarus, she says, that’s who introduced him to those lepers. And now he’s dead too and they will both stay dead together. I knew that boy when he played with my son. They were both dreamers, but Lazarus needed to mess with everything. Feed one beggar and you will spend the rest of your life hungry, I told him. I’m sure I told him that.
She never tells the neighbors that she liked Lazarus when he was young. He was a good friend to her son. She watched them spin tops and chase each other. They were two boys in love because the sky was bright and she felt back then like a very good mother.
The rumors multiply and soon she sees images on the streets of herself cradling her baby and wearing that blue dress she liked so much. Everyone has a favorite outfit when they are pregnant. It hurts to see him in her arms again. But it does remind her of those sweet warm days. And for a while she enjoys feeling that everyone thinks she is perfect. She stares at an etching until she can almost feel him nursing. She closes her eyes and sways because he will never drink another drop.
She bites her lips until they bleed. Her eyes are sore. Her brain is dry. She dreams of him coming home — of life itself being dispelled as the dream. She dreams of watching him become a carpenter and make a chest to hold his children’s toys. She dreams about sharing her parenting secrets with his wife. She dreams about making cakes and dolls and dresses. And holding little hands to help little legs walk. She dreams of how devoted she could be. If only, if only she could be so devoted that time itself could run backwards and they could enjoy each other again like they did when he was still too small to speak.
From Klara
I’LL COME BACK IF YOU need me. I’ll know if you are feeling lost. And now it is night and you have left my bedside for the brief hours you agree to sleep. Dr. Bloch says he has never seen a boy sob so, be so stricken with grief. Today you scrubbed the floors and walls and washed the drapes and my clothes and sheets and then you cried on my stomach because it still stinks of the iodoform. I saw you in the hallway holding Dr. Bloch’s hands and praising him and thanking him for allowing you to press the suppurations on my body with the poison in your own dear hands. He is a good doctor and a good man. He will try everything because you beg it of him. Only your devout eyes on me keep me from screaming like a demon all the hours of the day.
My living son, I hate to leave you when I’ve given you so little, but I long to hold little Gustav, Otto, and Ida. I never saw their faces; I only saw their cheeks and eyes and wondered what kind of children they would make. At five years, Edmund broke me in half, sweating all over my arms and breasts and neck and shaking and covered with spots and then still, so still, so stiff, so silent. I rocked him well into the night after his death. He was so much bigger than the others and still so small against the world and there were too many more faces that he never got to wear, that I never got to witness.
Alois looked at you children as if you were too far away to make out your individual features. He was, as you know, angry about being illegitimate and what family he did have was half-mad and half-simple. He had no way to know what loving families do. They were all wild animals living in the forest. I was in danger of becoming a wild animal too, until you. Often, even after you were walking and running, he called you by the name of one of the dead ones, not out of grief I’m sure, but that he was lucky to remember a name. I looked at you and Paula as if the entire world winnowed down to just two faces, one boy, one girl, all that was left, and all that still mattered. I knew that in you was some of the same material as in them I lost, and I wondered if the way you walked or the sad look, the bitter voice you sometimes had, was familial. I never felt that way. I felt powerless, but I never felt the way I saw you and your father feel. The way you leveled your whole selves against forces that hadn’t attacked you to get even for the injuries you had sustained elsewhere.
Those eyes, which are as light as mine, but different. I missed the dead ones so much I even fantasized about the things that they might hate. I imagined them hating your father as you did. I imagined them brooding and plotting and nursing their tempers until they went flying free and the group of you stood together burning down his bee houses. I wanted you to be free of hate, but I couldn’t get it all out of me and I also wanted to be close to you. Your tenderness and obedience for me was the only respect I felt worthy of. I failed the others; my body failed them; my brain failed them; my heart failed them. I didn’t make them strong enough and then I didn’t protect them. Paula skipping, cooking singing, you doing everything — relentlessly painting, reading, arguing — left in me a thousand half-formed images of what they might have been. And we, the larger family, might have overcome your father and tempered you. Six children: Gustav, Otto, Ida, Edmund, Adolf, Paula, and only two at my bedside now.
You must take care of your little sister. She is feeble, like me and she will not be able to support herself alone. She isn’t ugly, but I feel that seeing how life was in our house that she will not marry. She loves the garden; always let her have a garden. Your half-sister, Angela, will go against you, but you must love her too for she is only capable of soft feelings no matter how strongly she expresses them. I have a premonition you will conquer her somehow and it fills me with confusion.
I know you hate this monster in my cells. Don’t blame the doctor for poisoning me when I am gone. I want to go. The pain will shut down when I die, this pain that is so intolerable. There are dozens dying by me with this same pain and thousands more across the city, across the planet, millions in pain. I think, So this is what it feels like to be dying. Did my children hurt like this? I know that you are angry and more full of anger than I understand. I look at your paintings, my beloved, and the sketched glass windows shimmer with thoughts I can barely decipher. I am so proud of you and you will have everything that you desire. You will be a great artist; isn’t it obvious now that you have been accepted into art school? Isn’t it obvious that your talents will save you from the menial work that is your experience and our legacy? Be proud, Adolf, be ever proud of who you are. I gave you shadows in your father and your grandfather; I know that. I called your father “uncle” too long into our marriage. I let him beat you and I gave you sweets to make it better. I taught you nothing about money or people because I knew nothing. I was poor and because I was poor my life was so narrow and I still felt overwhelmed by it. I combed your hair and I tried to picture what an architect does and I couldn’t. I only knew that it meant you would draw buildings and someone would make them. This seemed to me to be an ideal.
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 rafters 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 q
uivers 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?”