Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  —Why? That’s my question. Why was I unshaken, unmoved? Anger with you? Tourist fatigue? (I who could weep years later in Chillon at the pillar to which Byron’s Prisoner was chained?—and that after ten days hiking in the Alps.) What had I expected?—a Piranesi prison with eighty-foot ceilings, thick brown air, torture wheels staffed by malignant dwarfs? No doubt that would have helped. The physical remains of Dachau are so mindlessly disproportioned to the volume of suffering they were asked to contain, the literal volume of agonized breath expelled in that square mile in those twelve years. The slaves who died building pyramids are at least survived by pyramids, not tar-paper shacks and geraniums.

  But no—don’t you see?—I’d expected home. It’s taken me these twelve years to understand that even—my curious memory (dead-wrong surely) of the town itself as a scene from my childhood (porches, ferns, dust!—eastern North Carolina) and my readiness to dawdle there with you, my near-panic at the camp gates when you refused. I had secretly thought through all those months of planning that this would be our home, that if we could enter Dachau together, face and comprehend its threat and still walk out together, then we’d be confirmed—a love not soluble in time or death. Home in the sense of birthplace; we’d have been born there, our actual marriage, a perfect weld-job in the ultimate crucible.

  Nonsense, you’re thinking. Were you thinking it then? Is it why you refused?—you would not be a party to soft-brained theatrics?

  But surely you’re wrong. Sappy as my whole secret plan may have been—so sappy it was even secret to me; a Fiery Consummation!—it was not a fool’s plan, not built on lover’s lies. I wrote of “comprehending the threat of Dachau”—hadn’t I done that already, in advance, by insisting on this visit? Its final horror—and that of all the camps, class I-III—was not the naked fulfillment by a few thousand gangsters of their fear and hatred on impotent objects (that, after all, is everyone’s dream) but precisely the threat to human attachment, loyalty. The ghastliest experiment of all was not one of Dr. Rascher’s mad-scientist pranks but the high voice that pulsed out its desperate need like a hypertensive vein—and at first uncertain of its power to enforce!—“Let me set you apart. Mothers here, children there. Husbands left, wives right.” And millions obeyed, even the de Wieks—the most successful human experiment in history.

  No, the horror is not that the camps did not revolt, that Treblinka stood alone—the horror was accomplished, ineradicable, the moment any one man entered Dachau—but that no husbands, wives, parents, children stood—by their radios or sofas or milking stools—and said, “No, kill us here in our tracks together.” Oh maybe some did—then why are they unknown? Why aren’t their statues in every city center, our new saints of love?—so far surpassing Tristan or Abelard or Antony as to burn like constellations over fuming brush fires. We are only left with endless processions of pairs who agreed—to abandonment, to separation by other human beings (not death or time). You know that there were mothers who hid from their children on arriving at Auschwitz—buried their own heads in coats or crawled through knees—to escape immediate death? Can they be forgiven that?

  Every American over thirty has his favorite obsessive Holocaust story which he’s read or, rarely, heard and retails ever after as his version of Hell. An entire sub-study might be done of these stories and their relevance to the teller. I heard mine, and after we parted. A colleague of mine—age 38—is a west-Polish Jew. His mother died of TB early in the war. There were no other children and he lived with his father, a practicing dentist. When the roundup came in ‘42, my friend was eleven. In warm July weather he rode with his father in the packed train to Sobibor—two days, I think, stopping and starting—and once they were there and unloaded on the siding and a doctor came round to eliminate the sick, my friend’s father said that his son was consumptive. It was news to my friend; but being a child, he only thought, “Of course he’s right; they kept it from me.” But his father never touched him and my friend was led off, presumably for gassing or a lethal injection. Some balls-up ensued, his death was delayed; he never coughed once, chest sound as a stone. But he never saw his father. He was strong enough to work, my friend—farm the camp potatoes—so he managed to live through two more years and a transfer to Auschwitz. Then one day—age thirteen—he was standing in a compound when a line of new men passed. One man fell out for a moment and came toward him. My friend said, “He thought he was running; he was creeping” (too weak to run). Of course, it was his father. They both knew that. But they didn’t speak and, again, didn’t touch; and a guard beat his father into line—fifteen seconds. Never met again.

  Well, in the immortal words of King Lear—“Howl.” My friend thinks the question in his story is why?—why his father did that. I’d never tell him but the question is how? There are degrees of offense at which motive is irrelevant. Can he ever be forgiven?—that father (out of Dante) stumbling on his appallingly vital son whom he’d lied to kill? Can any of the millions ever be forgiven?

  Can you, Sara, ever? And not just by me. It was you who refused. Only you were not killed. You could have walked into that tamed camp with me; you could have had the guts to settle it inside—to have seen it all with me, to have armed it with the threat which without you it lacked and then (if you needed so desperately) have said to me, “No, I will not live for you.” Instead, for your own no doubt clear reasons, you lurked outside on the shady rim, half-sadist, half-coward—unwilling to choose, thinking you could wait and that I, having waited for half an hour beyond a wire fence among debris as meaningless as M.G.M. sets, would presently return.

  I did and didn’t. When I came back through the gates, I didn’t look for you but went to the car and sat in its oven-heat. I already knew that I was not waiting and had not returned, not to you at least; but—stopped short of panic or the courage to act my feeling—I was not prepared to abandon you physically, to leave your bags on the empty parking space and drive off for Salzburg with your twenty-dollar Figaro ticket in my wallet. So I thought in the heat, “I may go-under but I won’t go looking.”

  In three or four minutes you walked up slowly, got in and sat, facing forward. How did I feel to you? What vibrations, what aura? Or were you receiving? Had you ever been?

  What I felt was hatred. What’s hatred, you ask?—the wish that you were absent from my sight, my life, absent from my memory. I had put my hands on the wheel for steadiness, and I thought my hatred was shaking the car. Then I saw, in my head, a Volkswagen jittering-away in the sunkist parking lot at Dachau; so I cranked up and moved.

  You said “Where are you going?”

  I did not want to stop now and look at you’I must keep my hands busy. I said “I? To Salzburg.”

  “Am I coming?” you said.

  “Unless you jump,” I said.

  I think you took that to mean you were forgiven. You behaved as though you were. Slowly through our drive to Salzburg you loosened, slowly became the girl I’d thought I needed—smiles at my profile and, then when we’d got in sight of hills, you sang the whole final scene of Figaro (from “Gente, gente, all’ armi, all’armi”), taking all the parts, chorus included. Your text was letter-perfect, your Italian B + only your baritone plunges failed. Yet I knew your motive far better than you. It had nothing to do with the coming evening. It all bloomed out of your need and wish to sing five lines—

  THE COUNT:

  Contessa, perdono. [Countess, your pardon.

  THE COUNTESS:

  Più docile io sono e dico di sì. —I’m gentler now and I’ll say yes.

  ALL:

  Ah! Tutti contenti saremo così. —Ah! Everybody’s happy with that.]

  That, I think, was the climax though the day (and this piece) had a good while to run. I took that to mean you were pardoning me—for not having cheerfully granted your independence back at Dachau, for not having bought the metaphor your refusal offered (we’d be hitched to one load but in separate yokes). So I thought I would launch a spot of unforgivability.
When you’d sung through the orchestral tutti to the curtain, you faced forward resolutely—no bow in my direction. That meant I should applaud—right? Well, I drove a good mile before making a sound; and then I said “One question.”

  “What?”

  “Why in all your extensive reconciliation repertoire”—can you still do Cordelia, Marina, Fidelio?—“is it always the lady dispensing largess?”

  You’d have bit off your tongue before admitting you hadn’t noticed. You said, in an instant, “It’s the way the world’s built.”

  “Many thanks,” I said and by then we were threading the fringes of Salzburg, its castle as stunned by the day as I.

  I said that this would be my version, what I remember and understand. The rest of the day—what I thought was the day—is necessary; then tell me yours; I genuinely need it. Yet, again, my memory of places is vague, my grip on surfaces. You’ve greased my hands, greased every wall; or is it only some new lubricant from myself, manufactured now in me—suddenly—in response to your refusal, to ease me away? Anyhow, it’s still produced. Some days it pours.

  Mozart’s Geburtshaus—we saw that together but what do I recall? Two or three pokey rooms, white walls, dark brown woodwork, an early piano on which (the guide told us) Harry Truman had just played. Was there even a birth-room? Were they sure of which room? I couldn’t say. It seemed more like the birthplace of some dry chip—say, Metternich—than the Sublime Foul Mouth. And didn’t you recognize that? When we’d made our separate rounds and I passed the guest-book on my way downstairs, I saw you’d signed with your comic alter-ego—Veronica F. Pertle and traveling companion. We were already lethal, in under three hours—we’d agreed to be a team of cut-rate Midases, transmuting all we touched to chalk.

  I slept through a good deal of Figaro—all that endless nocturnal business at the start of Act III, the confused identities. I’ve slept through greater performances than that—Melchior’s Lohengrin, Welitsch’s Salome—though always before from travel fatigue, biting off more grandeur than I could chew, but here I wasn’t tired. I’d slept eight hours the night before, driven ten miles to walk maybe five hundred paces round a concentration camp, then eighty miles farther on a good wide road. No, I was retreating. The great death wish, Sleep Mother of Peace—if I couldn’t lose you, I could lose myself. You woke me toward the end with a firm elbow—“Don’t miss the forgiveness.” So I can still hear that (Schwarzkopf’s perfect frailty, a bulldozer disguised as a powderpuff); thanks for the elbow—the trip was not in vain.

  What I think I remember—as clear as the Norwegian day, your offered food-—s the rest of the night. Correct me on this—

  We had late coffee in some hotel lobby which seems, in memory, entirely upholstered in 1938 Pontiac fabric, and were spared conversation by a pair of purple-haired American ladies drinking Liebfraumilch six feet away. They had also heard the opera and debated the performance. One defended it stoutly but the doubter trumped her in the end—remember?——Lena, all I know is, when I hear great singing something in me swells up. Tonight it didn’t swell.”

  —“Mine neither,” you said and stood and we left, heading toward Munich still hungry (no supper). Yet you didn’t mention food, barely spoke at all; and what did I feel?—that really I was racing, to end this night, the trip, what we’d had and you’d failed, that I could go without food and sleep for days, an emergency encystment for however long it took to deliver you to whatever door you chose.

  Then on the edge of Munich you said, “I’ll never sleep without some food.”

  It was pushing two a.m. So I had to hunt awhile; but we found a place open somewhere in Schwabing, down a flight of stairs thickly cushioned with dirt.

  “More dikes than Holland,” you said going in; but in what light there was, they seem more like gypsies to me on hindsight.

  You wanted fondue but we settled for something merciful and a good deal of wine; and with all the eating, surely we hadn’t said fifty words when the two men entered with the lion before them. If they weren’t gypsies I’ll surrender my license—they laid down about them that heavy metal air of offense and threat I’ve known all my life (they still roamed the South when I was a boy, telling fortunes and offering odd skilled services no one would accept, though by then in trailers not painted wagons; and their squat swart women with the Carmen earrings and their men whose hard faces all wore livid scars are high in my childhood pantheon of menace).

  They picked you at once. Do you still think I signaled them? I saw them see you the moment they entered, even the lion.

  He was straining toward you on his red dog-leash—maybe six months old?—and no one held him back though I swear the rear man—the one with hands free—passed the huge lady-owner a small piece of money in their rush to you. Were they illegal, bribing their way? The lion was smelling your foot before you saw; and of course you didn’t flinch—a male lion cub in a Bavarian dive at the end of a day comprising Dachau and Mozart: oh.

  They were photographers—take your picture with a lion; best American Polaroid, instant result. I told them No—didn’t I? I’m almost sure I did—but the contact man (the one with the leash) held the lion up and said “See, he begs.” With his free hand he clasped the cub’s front paws together in a mockery of prayer (its high tight testicles were pink as salmon, utterly vulnerable). The man’s English seemed more Italian than German but maybe just basic PX English—“He begs you to warm him; four dollars for picture, give to your husband. He lose his mother, he lonely here.” The cub’s eyes were shut, so lonely he was dozing.

  You continued eating but you asked him “Did you kill her?”

  That seemed the terror-button. Surely these two oily small-time spivs had not been poaching in Kenya; yet at your question, they both threw grimaces at once another, and the talker said, “Look. No charge for you.” He extended the lion, eyes still shut-“He need your help.”

  “He’s asleep,” you said.

  The man jogged him hard; he looked out, groggily.

  “No,” you said.

  But I said “Do it” and produced my wallet. I wanted you to do it and I wanted to pay.

  Looking at the lion not me, you said “Why?”

  “I want the picture.”

  I extended twenty marks to the man and you stood.

  “You sit,” the man said, “then we take you both.”

  “I’ll stand,” you said. “It’s me he wants.” You stood and reached out. You were in the black dress with narrow shoulder straps—much white skin showed.

  He moved close against you and hung the lion on your shoulder like a child. The photographer—the silent man—backed off and raised his camera; the talker said “Big smile.”

  You smiled sideways, no teeth. The other diners paused, awaiting the flash. It came. In its light, blood streamed down your arm.

  The lady-owner bellowed, came waddling forward. The two men leapt toward you. The lion was clamped into the meat of your shoulder.

  I was still in my chair.

  “Stay back,” you said.

  They understood and stopped a foot from the table.

  “What’s his name?” you said.

  The talker said “Bob.”

  The lady-owner babbled coldly in German. They must get him out, get out themselves, die Polizei!

  You were stroking the back of Bob’s locked-on neck, simply saying his name again and again—the two of us the only calm people in the room, only still ones at least. Us and the lion—he was motionless, teeth deep in you. What nourishment was he taking?—what pleasure, fulfillment? What did he think you were?

  —A lion-tamer, anyhow. You stroked him free; he looked round at his owners. You had never smiled, talked baby-talk to him, given the odor of fear or asked for help; you had saved your day. You handed Bob over to the trembling talker.

  He slapped him once across the nose, laid my money by my plate; and they left at a trot—the owner behind them, maledicting.

  (I don’t have the picture
. Have you thought of that? Did we ever mention that? Of course, I didn’t pay but a picture was taken, at the instant of the bite. Does it still exist in some gypsy’s pocket?—an image of a bad night, another close call, image of his life, assault and impotence, the helpless witness of another’s competence to solve hurtful puzzles? I would give a lot for it. What is on your face?—still, after twelve years? What did I miss in the moment of flash, your moment of sudden unexpected pain? Whom were you blaming? I need that picture badly.)

  Before I could stand up to check the damage, you had asked a bystander, “Wo ist die Damen?” and loped off to that.

  So I sat again and was wondering what next when the owner pounded back with a rusty first-aid kit and stopped at me, aghast.

  “Wo ist ihre Gattin?”

  I said that the Fraulein was in the cabinet, washing.

  She considered attempting to wither me for negligence but no doubt remembered that in her situation die Polizei was a two-edged blade; so she said, “Nicht toll, nicht toll. Er ist nicht tollwütig” (not rabid) and headed for the Damen to disinfect you.

  I ate on and in five minutes she returned to say you were all right, would be back soon and would we, in recompense, have a free dessert? I thought that seemed uniquely German—for a lion-bite, dessert—but I accepted and she quickly produced two enormous wedges of obscenely moist chocolate whipped-cream cake. I thanked her, she assured me again “Nicht toll” and that you were fine. Then she left.