Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  … the map can point to places

  Which are really evil now—

  Nanking. Dachau.)

  And then nearby was Salzburg, as antidote—Figaro with Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, Seefried, Karl Böhm. Then we could slowly climb the Rhine to Cologne (still without a whole building), the Hague and Vermeer, Amsterdam and Rembrandt; then (healed by now, stronger for the burns), we would ship back to Oxford, take a look at our gains, our chances, maybe marry. You’d pack up your chaste tight paintings in Paris (adjectives yours—triangles, oblate spheroids, cubes, all aching with loneliness in empty space) and join me for a last Oxford year on my thesis; then we’d sail home to all the books I’d write (my dreams of extracting love from my past, the boneyard of my childhood)—having already, well before we were thirty, faced the worst that life had ever offered any human pair, the final solution.

  We made it to Munich precisely on schedule, only slightly in the red and apparently in love after four weeks of cold-water hosteling, cold roadside meals—canned potato salad, canned corned beef; we had bought a case of each and would only need bread every day at noon. I keep a photograph of one of those lunches—even without it, I’d have it in my head. We have stopped for lunch by a lake somewhere between Geilo and Oslo. Clear sky, the light a lemon yellow. You sit on a large stone, ten yards from the water, surrounded by smaller stones round and large as baseballs. The sounds are: our feet in those stones, water stroking, your opening of cans. I squat watching you warmed to fragrance in the light, adding to my luck only one more sound—in my head, the voice of Flagstad. She is still alive, a hundred-odd miles from here in retirement, playing solitaire and knitting—and that voice like a new lion in a zoo, intact! If she’d sing now we’d hear it cross valleys, through pines! (she will of course return to make those last recordings which calmly eliminate all future need for Wagnerian sopranos). You speak—“Sir, your lunch.” You are holding out your hand with a plate of food but you have not risen. I must come to you. Halfway is halfway. I rise and go. The happiest day in all my life—I say that silently, moving toward you. Now, twelve years later, it is still unassailed. There hasn’t been a happier. Yet, how do I have this photograph of it, in which your hand and the plate of food are blurred, moving toward me? Did I force you to offer it again for the camera or had I waited, shutter cocked, for the moment? Why did you let me complicate your simple service—you smile in the picture but you have at least the grace to refuse to meet my eyes. Your refusal has begun; your heels are digging in. I am drowned, though, in what tastes to me like good fortune; so I fail to notice for weeks, days or nights.

  In the days I could see you—walking gravely past acres of Norwegian painting (every painting since the war in shades of pink and yellow) to smile and say at last “A nation of fairies!” Or sitting in a Stockholm park, eavesdropping on a Swedish girl and her compact rapidly heating French boyfriend (the girl so liberated that I all but expected a taut diaphragm to pop out and roll to rest at our feet when she uncrossed her legs), you said, “Knock her up and she’ll wail like Queen Victoria!” Or stopping in the midst of tons of bland Thorwaldsen marbles in Copenhagen (all like variations on the head of Mendelssohn)—“Well, I like the Danes. They’re crooks.” Setting those down makes you sound studied, tough; a big reader of Salinger and Mary McCarthy. But I saw you. You were then, every minute of those long summer days, the perfect customized answer to all my optical needs. You seemed—you threatened!—to lack outer boundaries, integument; to vibrate within only vaguely held limits which, each night, permitted—welcomed!— me in to form a perfect compound.

  Was I wrong, self-deceived, about that as well? I could even see you then—by the Midnight Sun; the birds never slept. Were you merely drumming time through all my happy hours of artful plunging? (the years spent studying van de Velde, Eustace Chesser)? It’s accurate, I know, to say you never turned to me. I was the one to initiate action. But once I had laid a hand on your hip, you would rock over toward me and open like—gates! Very earnest, weighty gates that not every man could move. And you’d smile and thank me! Always at the end— and you almost always made it or threw Oscar-winning acts—you would say (not whisper; have you still never whispered a word in your life?) “Thank you” as though I had zipped the back of your dress or made you a small expensive gift (when there stood my donor capped with high-smelling rubber, Reservoir Tipped to block small expensive gifts). And that in the Fifties before the Revolution, when ninety-eight percent of the girls I’d had still shuddered at the end and asked forgiveness—asked me, Count Vronsky! I would lie some nights for hours, too grateful to sleep. You’d be gone in ten seconds.

  Was I really wrong? Wasn’t the only bad night the one in Munich? Where did we sleep there?—some station hotel or with one of our specialty, war widows with lace-curtained bedrooms to rent and permanent frozen killing smiles propped round government-issue teeth? I can’t see the room but I heard the silence—that I took you, really had you, against your will for the first time ever. You were tireder than I; but even then you laughed when I’d hacked to my reward, all huffs and puffs, and questioned your stillness. You said—said! surely our Witwe heard you—“Riding shotgun in a Volkswagen daily leaves a body badly tuckered.” Well, pardon me, Sara—twelve years too late, if you even remember. Hadn’t all the other sex till then though been mutual? Wasn’t it love? We had known each other for ten years exactly, grown up together. We knew all the ways—more than half of them hidden—to protect each other; and any damage was a slip, inadvertent. We could have lived together as easily as dogs; and I’d thought—till that day at Dachau—we meant to. If we didn’t love each other, who ever has?

  —The de Wieks anyhow, if nobody else. You won’t have heard of them. I hadn’t till two years after we parted—in Ernst Schnabel’s book on Anne Frank. A Dutch Jewish husband and wife flushed from hiding in 1943 and shipped to Auschwitz, where the husband died and the wife survived to remember Anne Frank’s death. But this is the thing I want you to know—Mrs. de Wiek’s memory fifteen years later of a moment on the packed train threading toward Auschwitz:

  I sat beside my husband on a small box. The box swayed every time the wheels jolted against the tracks. When the third day came and we had not arrived, my husband took my hand and suddenly said: “I want to thank you for the wonderful life we have had together. ”

  I snatched my hand away from him, crying: “What are you thinking of? It’s not over!”

  But he calmly reached for my hand again, and took it, and repeated several times: “I thank you. Thank you for the life we have had.”

  Then I left my hand in his and did not try to draw it away …

  There is no photograph in the book of him or her; but they’ve walked, since I read that, as clearly in my head, as in Daniel three just Jews walk safe through the flames of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—and a fourth, their angel. The de Wieks walk alone, two stripped Dutch Jews, dark-eyed, grinning, safe in my head; to Hell with my head, safe through all time should no one know of them, sealed in the only knowledge that turns fire—to have loved one another through to the last available instant, to have known and then had the grace to say thanks.

  Were you just not that good—that strong and pure—or did you choose not to be that good for me?

  I see them in their flames (or you by your lake) much more clearly than I see Dachau. My world-famous total recall deserts me. Or does it? Can it have been the way I remember? (I’ve never gone again.) The latest Britannica gives this much—that Dachau is a town eleven miles northwest of Munich, population (’6I) 29,086, first mentioned as a market village 805 AD and continued as a village till 1917 when an ammunition factory was built there—the site in March 1933 of the first Nazi concentration camp; that the town stands on a hill at the summit of which is the castle of the Wittelsbacher and that the other sight is a parish church (1625).

  What I remember is driving through sunny fields of potatoes and grain, you watching for ro
ad signs and calling the turns (German roads then were still under heavy reconstruction; and one of your frequent bursts of song was “Umleitung—there’s a muddy road ahead!”). Wasn’t my right hand holding your thigh, except when a farmer waved from a yard? Wasn’t the town still a village after all, merely houses (no business street that I remember)?—low white houses with small sandy yards, green gardens in front? Don’t I remember screened porches, green rockers, dusty ferns in cans, geraniums in boxes? A gray frame railway depot and platform? Don’t I ask to stop and walk awhile or to drive slow and aimless (we had hours till the camp closed) through the loose grid of streets that seemed home at last (were they really unpaved, ankle-deep in white dust)? But you led us on—“Turn right; here, here.“ Your unfailing sense of where we were, where we must go. I was ready to wait, stop short of the camp. The village itself, your warm proximity, had eased my urgency for confrontation. What we had—there and then—seemed tested enough by time and chance, to require no further pro forma buffeting. It was you—I’m sure of this—who forced us on. An Ariadne who—calm in her beauty, perfectly aware of the course she’s set—calmly leads dumb Theseus back into the lethal heart of the maze, its small tidy utterly efficient death chamber, the patient minotaur who has only played possum and waits now, famished.

  From the parking lot (!) on—in my memory—it does seem a room, not ample but sufficient and sturdily enclosed. The new small gates (where are the old ones?—Arbeit Macht Frei), the cyclone fence thickly threaded with vines, the no-nonsense sign (Maintained by the Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army), the clear sky, the light—seemed interior, roofed, sheltered, shrunk or a model scaled precisely to a larger form. Is that why I didn’t lock the car?—after weeks of paranoia, left our luggage available to any passer? Or had I started guessing you would stay behind?—guessing and hoping?

  You had got yourself out (“Chivalry ends here,” you had told me in Stockholm) and stood in sun that suddenly had the weight of sun at home, that seemed each second to be loading you with burdens. Also the color—you were bleaching as I watched. Yet you took off your sunglasses and stood by your shut door, hands at your sides, squinting straight at me.

  I came round to you and extended my hand. You accepted. I took a step onward and engaged your weight, gently.

  You said “No.” You were planted. Your hand stayed in mine but your face refused.

  I said “No, what?” and laughed.

  “Not going,” you said.

  I didn’t ask why but said what my father always said when I balked— “Are you sick?”

  “No,” you said.

  “Then you promised,” I said.

  You had not; you should have laughed. But you shook your head.

  “If I ordered you?” I said.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “If I did?”

  “I wouldn’t go.”

  I said “Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”

  “Wouldn’t,” you said.

  We had not smiled once!

  You took back your hand.

  I said “Will you wait?”

  You nodded yes.

  “Where?”

  “I’ll wait,” you said. You half-waved behind you, a cluster of trees, shady grass beneath.

  So I moved again to go—to leave in fact—not looking back, and entered the camp. Dachau. Left you waiting, as you chose. Are you waiting still?

  You have never seen it and, as I’ve said, my otherwise sharp pictorial memory is dim on Dachau; so to write this, I’ve spent three days trailing information through volumes of war-crimes trials, memoirs, histories of the S.S., photographs (forty Jewish women—nude, mostly potbellied, three of them holding children—queue up for a massacre in some Polish ditch: two of them are smiling toward the camera). Guess what a good three days I’ve had—to learn very little more than this (the memoirs on Dachau specifically are in Polish and German, shut to me): Dachau was opened in March 1933, a pet project of Goering and Himmler. The site, a mile square, was equipped for 8,000 inmates. At its liberation in April ‘45, it contained 33,000—90% civilians, 10% war prisoners. The civilians, from the first, fell into four groups— political opponents, “inferior races” (Jews and Gypsies), criminals, “asocial elements” (vagrants, pimps, alcoholics etc). Further divisions were recognized by the colored patches on prison clothing (selected with a grinning irony)—black for “shiftless elements,” yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Though the oldest camp and the popular symbol for all, it was classified in the S.S. scale as a class-I camp—the mildest rating (Auschwitz was III). Only 70,000-odd inmates are estimated to have died there (4,000,000 at Auschwitz). The existing gas chamber was used only experimentally. Indeed, experiment was among the camp’s functions—the famous experiments of Dr. Sigmund Rascher in chilling prisoners to 19°C, then attempting to thaw them with live whores stretched on their bodies (Himmler regretted that the chosen whores were Aryan). Or locking prisoners in mock altitude chambers to observe when they’d die of oxygen starvation. Or the study of asepsis by inducing infections which were left to gangrene.

  —You know most of that. Everybody over thirty does (though to anyone not there, as prisoner or liberator, it has never seemed credible). What I’d like to tell you is what I saw, twelve years after its liberation. I have the four photographs I took that day. I can build it round them.

  The gates were unguarded. I walked through them onto a central road wide enough for trucks but closed now to all but lookers like me— there were maybe a dozen in the hour I was there. To my left, one compound (the only one or the only one saved?)—a four-acre piece of flat tan dirt enclosed by stretches of concrete wall (seven-feet high, electrified on top), relays of barbed wire and, in each corner, an all-weather guardhouse (twenty feet high, all empty now). No trace of barracks, no sign of shelter. Where were the famous “dog cells” in which prisoners could only lie on their sides and were forced to bark to earn their food? Razed apparently (on a partial diagram I count thirty barracks). A few weeds grow and, in my picture of a stretch of wall and guardhouse, a leafy branch decks the upper right sky. (Good composition. But how old is the tree?) No entrance there, no gate in the wire. To the right, though, free access—trees, grass, flowers, buildings.

  All the people were there. I remember them as old and all of them women; but my photographs show one man (late forties, his suit and tie American—was he a prisoner here?) and two children under ten (a boy in lederhosen, a girl hid behind him)—otherwise, old women in long cheap summer dresses, stout shoes. All in clusters of two or three, simply standing akimbo or reading, their lips moving drily at the effort. There are no talking guides, no sign of a staff to question, only scattered plaques and inscriptions in German—the single attempt at a monument, modest, dignified, undistinguished, a ¾ths-lifesize gaunt bronze prisoner gazing across the road to the compound, head shaved, hands in his scarecrow overcoat, feet in wooden shoes, on his marble base DEN TOTEN ZUR EHR, DEN LEBENDEN ZUR MAHNUNG (“To Honor the Dead, To Warn the Living”) and an urn of red geraniums. Granite markers maybe twelve inches square set in beds of geraniums—GRAB HUNDERTEN NAMENLOSEN (that’s from memory—“Grave of Hundreds, Nameless”; was it hundreds or thousands?). Then twenty feet onwards— it is all so small—six or eight women wait beside a building. It is one-story, cheap brick, green tile roof, straight as a box car and only twice as long. At the pitch of the roof there are turret windows; in the end near me, one large brick chimney eighteen feet tall. Along the side, frequent windows and doors. The only sign was a single black arrow aimed toward the far end (the end farthest from the compound and hidden). I followed, past a post-war willow tree, and found at the end a door—normal size, no wider than the door to my own bedroom.

  From here I am on my own—no pictures. I think I remember the logic of progression, each small room labeled in German and English, giving into the next like a railroad apartment—Disrobing Room, Disinfecting Room (roughly ten feet by twelve, nine foot cei
lings, unpainted plaster walls scratched now with the names and hometowns of GI’s). Then another normal-sized wooden door opening into a larger room—maybe fifteen by twenty, shower spigots, soap dishes, floor drains, a ceiling window.

  —I’ve built that effect outrageously—I’m sorry—to the oldest surprise of the twentieth century. The shower was gas, Zyklon B; the window was a deathwatch; the drains were for hosing down the products of surprise and suffocation. The next room was small again—Storage Room. The walls were printed from floor to ceiling with dirty bare feet, all turned neatly up. Corpses stacked like cord wood for the ovens. Next room, the ovens. The largest room and last, Crematorium. Four or five brick ovens spaced six feet apart, their iron doors open on seven-foot grill racks. The walls bore sets of black iron tools—tongs, prods, pokers, shovels. Behind the ovens, in the wall, were little doors—ash chutes to outside, for the Namenlosen.

  End of tour. No more sights—oh an old woman kneeling by the farthest oven, clicking off her rosary. Otherwise nothing else to linger for but sunlight, geraniums. Or to make you wait awhile. I thought you were still waiting; and I thought, retracing my way toward you, that I was returning.

  You could easily have stood it—have I made you see that? It lacked—now I understand the vagueness of my memories—the mystery of place. There are places, objects, quite literally impasted with the force of past event; places in which one is pulled up short by the pressure of actual atoms of the past. Almost never in America—our shrines being ruthlessly scalded and scoured if not bulldozed—and almost always in sites of suffering or wickedness. The Borgia apartments in the Vatican still are oiled with the presence of Rodrigo Borgia’s rotting body; electrons that witnessed, sustained, his life still spin in the plaster, the stones underfoot, can be gouged (brown and rank) with a quick fingernail; unaltered atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that occupied his holy dissolving lungs in 1495 rush over one’s lips and teeth with each breath. Or the Domus Aurea of Nero, subterranean now and leaking, where I rounded a dark corner on an elderly English gentleman masturbating (English by his clothes). Or the dungeon beneath the Capitol in which Caesar strangled Vercingetorix— BC. Or—another thing entirely—the crystal reliquary in Santa Maria Maggiore which one Christmas Eve mass was borne toward me, immobile in the crowd, its scraps of wormy wood, whether hoax or not (the remains of the Manger), as immanent with promise and threat to my life as a gram of radium bombarding my eyes. Dachau is one month younger than I. It saw—caused—the agonizing unwilling death of tens of thousands while I was still paying half-fare at the movies; yet its huddled remains bore me less of a threat, less pressure of the past than Williamsburg, than any plastic Hilton lobby.