Mediocrity and loserdom in the realm of art dog Parthenope (as they do after every gifted woman who has rebuffed their Christian ritual transformation into “saints”) like an ugly rumor. According to one such rumor, the sirens, and among them Parthenope, challenged the muses to a musical contest and lost. For their punishment the muses plucked their feathers, making it impossible for them to fly. Using the feathers of the poor sirens, the muses wove themselves victory wreaths while the sirens tumbled into the sea. This rumor supports, at least as far as the history of female creativity is concerned, ideas about the eternal female rivalry with, at its root, biological, procreative energy.
All in all, The Widow chose Parthenope as her symbolic double. In her early youth The Widow had committed symbolic suicide, exactly as if she knew that her song would not enchant Levin (he, too, apparently knew the trick with the wax), so she reined in her voice and fell silent. It was at the expense of her rash desire to be a nobody (her self-pruning of self-confidence) that she immortalized Levin’s mortal coil. She raised a monument to him into which she inserted herself, just as famous builders have built their own silent shadow into their buildings.
In my mind’s ear, provoked by nothing at all, words of The Widow’s suddenly chimed like a jangling, nervous bell: From time to time I would find a misplaced poem, story, or a page from his diary . . . He was a master at misplacing his things, have I already told you that, lelkem? . . . Tears trickled down my cheeks. I studied the pictures of her on the computer screen. Her eyes, slightly slanted, the color of honey, watched me with taut attention, precisely as if I were her potential prey. And then, perhaps because of my tears, her eyes seemed to slant even more, as if she were choking back laughter. Or a sob. And I switched off the computer.
PART THREE
The Devil’s Garden
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going home!”
—Joel Schumacher, Falling Down (film)
1.
The muskrat, Ondatra zibethicus is a variety of wetlands rat. Smaller than a beaver yet bigger than the common rat: it may, with its tail, reach to thirty inches in length and weigh as much as five pounds. It is named for the musk it uses to mark its territory. It breeds unusually rapidly; the female bears as many as four litters a year with six to eight young in each. Native Americans revere the muskrat: in their creation myths, the muskrat dredged up the primordial muck from the ocean floor. From this muck came Earth.
The muskrat was introduced in Europe in the early part of the last century when they were first raised on Czech farms. Muskrat-fur coats were all the craze in the 1920s. The rats, however, eluded control and scampered off to freedom, and from there they colonized Europe, particularly wherever there was a lot of water. Because of its lowlands, the Netherlands was their most natural habitat. For the Dutch, the muskusrat is a constant threat; it chose for its habitat the polders and by doing so has compromised the elaborate Dutch system of flood protection. Rat exterminators are prized and richly compensated in Holland. The Belgians have come up with a tasty dish made of muskrat meat served in restaurants (though, true, not many): after a salt-rub and an onion marinade, the muskrat is stewed in beer. In New Zealand, the muskrat has been strictly banned as a species, but, in Canada, hats sewn from its fur grace the winter uniform of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police.
These details about the muskrat are a rambling prelude to a brief incident described to me by a Dutch friend, a writer. While working on her novel she found she needed to know the muskrat inside and out. She acquired a freshly butchered one, skinned it, and, recalling dissection class in high-school biology, she cut it open. Then she pored over its innards, roasted it in the oven, and dined on it. She set aside the muskrat’s larger and smaller bones, laid them out in a tin box, and buried the box in her garden.
My friend is a calm and sober fifty-year-old woman, pleased with her life. Each time we meet for coffee I remember her story and feel a rush of respect for her. Before me sits somebody who has faced her muskrat, dissected her problem, dined on it, digested it, and buried the inedible remains. And each time I ask myself: when will I face mine?
The reason for my reluctance lies not so much in my cowardice as in my sense of futility, and then in the feeling of “illegality” of the literary voice and literary form. A woman’s voice is not, of course, illegal, but women, it seems, have still not embraced or conquered every form of literary expression. The specific “dyslexia” that readers—men and women alike—show when reading literary texts, each for his or her own reasons, has made this conquest impossible. In short, most “girls” still write romance novels, while notes from underground are reserved for “boys”; the rebellious confession is a male literary narrative because the rebel is invariably a man, he is our tragic hero. The story of a tragic heroine is read—with the “dyslexia” I mentioned—as the tale of a “madwoman.” We come across such “madwomen” on the street, women who seem to be muttering with an invisible collocutor. An encounter with them is more likely to arouse disquiet than compassion, and passersby usually move away and avert their eyes though the “madwoman” never looks at anyone. Such women have, apparently, learned they cannot rely on anybody. They wage their battles alone.
2.
Things must have been simmering for a time so I can’t say exactly when a thought first wriggled through my mind, or how much time it took for the impulse, half-hearted at first, to gel into resolve. Perhaps my intently forward-looking focus, wherever my forward might be, had worn me down, and with only lukewarm resistance I was slipping backward, plain and simple, without the stamina to jump to my feet and begin again. Perhaps the cities I’d been traversing for years—instead of jump-starting my progress as they used to—were now slowing me down and stirring a vague anxiety that I could justify with nothing. Perhaps the “reflective” character of city spaces was knocking the wind out of me: I saw myself reflected in cities as in a mirror. Using the cityscape—as if it were a gas meter—I gauged my condition. I held my inner map up to the city map. Taking the city’s pulse I took my own. The maps of the subways and undergrounds I compared to my own circulatory system. Others had psychoanalysts, I had cities.
Could my backslide be traced, perhaps, to my sojourn in Kolkata a few months before? The sight of miles of concrete pillars with jutting iron rebar—through the sun-drenched early morning mist on the road from the airport to the hotel—gripped me with a sinking sense of apocalyptic angst. It was not clear whether this was a construction job that had been begun and then abandoned, or a project that never would be finished because it wasn’t meant to be, or a modern ruin of a structure that had stood there until only recently; just as I couldn’t tell whether this city was a relic of the past, or of the present, or of the future in store for all of us. Kolkata had the feel of well-lived chaos, though this chaos could have been a synonym for frenetic organization. The inhabitants were slug-like parasites latching onto the city; they were devouring it like ants, trundling it off like an emptied animal hide, filling it with their saliva, feces, sweat, tearing down, drilling and rebuilding, molding it to themselves. The urban homeless behaved like tropical slugs, they conquered the city, took it to pieces but also fortified it; they created dark, smoky corridors along the sidewalks from which steamed the scents of food; their home was assembled and dismantled on the street like a cardboard box; and indeed home was, most often, a cardboard box, a sheet of discarded plastic, an old tarp, the hole in the wall of an abandoned house, a shelter below a bridge, by a railway line or standing façade. Decay as a higher principle was everywhere: in the thick dust that blanketed the city, the trees, the shrubs, the grass, from which the greenery acquired not only a clay-like hue but a clayish texture; in the mildew stains on the freshly painted walls of my hotel bathroom; in the pervasive odor of sulfur. On the street, people rolled out their rags, their sheets, their coverlets and draped them over the fences that ran along the road; the people seemed to do little else than air th
eir mouse holes, wash, trim hair, shave, copulate, give birth, die, pray to their gods, defecate, prepare food, raise children, feed their livestock . . . and all this on the street. In the painfully open process of life there were some places that were under control, “pure places,” like the golf course by my hotel where long since decolonized Indians imitated their former colonizers, strolling about with golf clubs amid the divine serenity of the greens. I experienced the view of the trim lawns and the figures moving around on them as soundless, in slow-motion, probably because only a few steps away, beyond the fence, beyond the uniformed guards and the entrance ramps, began the boundless clamor of human chaos.
Here, in Kolkata, assaulted by the swarming sounds, images, smells, and colors, I burst, with no warning, into tears. These were wrenching sobs that seemed to have been gathering steam inside me for years, and now, having found a fissure, came gushing out. Back I went to the hotel. For the first time in my life I felt a plain hotel room was home. There was also stowed away inside me a vague twinge of defeat.
Was, perhaps, an earlier episode in London a warning signal? I’d come to London for a business meeting, for a lunch during which we’d discuss work, or a work discussion we’d have while lunching; I was there to show the person I was meeting that a trip from Amsterdam to London was a breeze for me. And so it went until the moment when I found myself at the cheap hotel I’d reserved online and of which there are so many around Paddington station. Tourists milled around the reception area, most of them large Italian and Spanish families (do Italians and Spaniards ever travel alone?). My room was the size of a generous coffin, the bathroom miniature, a shower under which one could barely stoop; a child-sized bed and a mirror set so low that the priority guests at this hotel must have been below the age of twelve; around the mirror there was an array of items including a hair dryer, an electric burner, and two or three packets of tea and instant coffee in a small dish. And it was in such a hotel that after the meeting, instead of hurrying off to the museums and galleries or calling my London friends, I holed up until the next morning, riveted by fantasies that room No. 455 no longer existed, that—as soon as I’d walked in and shut the door behind me—the wall had closed off. In the morning I forced myself to get up; the floor covered in wall-to-wall carpeting, on which thousands and thousands of bare feet had trod before mine, creaked so painfully that it sounded about to buckle. Out I ventured, first letting the stampede of Italian and Spanish families rumble through the door, but after only a few steps I took a seat in a café to sip my morning coffee and spent over an hour observing a group of construction workers, Romanian men, who’d stopped in for breakfast; the waitress, a Russian woman who served me my coffee with milk; a young woman with a little girl whose face was slightly disfigured (they, too, were Russian); and two women who walked into the café, their breasts thrust out, marching in parade step. And they, too, were Russian . . . In my thoughts I worked the puzzle, musing whether the waitress was related to the Russian women who ran the café, and what the emigrant bond was among them all. Upon leaving, I turned left toward the underground station and then had a change of heart and went back to the hotel, where I spent the rest of the day and night until it was time to leave for the airport.
All the way back to Amsterdam from London, I was pressing an imaginary remote control, yearning to turn down the volume. Several rows in front of me, young men were laughing, turkey-like, with loud, throaty guffaws. From their laughter sprayed male hormones and, through the haze produced by the sun, shining on the travelers through the little airplane windows, these men resembled a TV ad aimed at beer drinkers. I didn’t know how to help myself, the throaty turkey guffaws jangled my high-strung ears. A woman was sitting next to me in a T-shirt and her bare arm was practically rubbing mine. On her arm she had a tattoo, a caricature, the face of a bald man with a bulging bluish nose and lips that slid glumly downward. The woman’s arm was meaty, larded with fat. The color of her skin hinted that she spent a lot of time in tanning salons. I was awash with panic. I felt I might choke. Droplets of sweat beaded the skin of my face. The man’s face on her arm with his glumly drooping lips fixed its beady gaze on me, two black dots. It is time for me to go home, I whimpered to myself. Where could I go home to?! Where was home? I asked myself. I don’t know, I answered thoughtfully, anywhere, just so it’s home . . . Later, when I’d revived, I remembered an episode about home that happened some twenty years before that, in another city, in New York . . .
3.
I found myself in a situation at one moment when air raid sirens (whose message I did not, at first, comprehend), radio and television broadcasts, and my closest neighbors were all imploring me in a panic to hurry down to the cellar and by all means bring along a bag with the bare essentials. I did not realize that this phrase, part of the vocabulary of war, was signaling a radical watershed in my life. First I dutifully puzzled over what bare essentials ought to go into such a bag, only to catch on quickly to the fact that this raised a real quandary: my Yugoslav passport was no good because the new Croatian government was about to replace it; my money was no good because the banks were on the verge of shutting down and then the currency would be changed; my home was no good because at any minute it could be reduced to rubble, just as I, at any minute, could be obliterated. If I survived, then the first assumption was that I’d spend the rest of my life compensating for these losses. And something else: war is a time when the worst of humankind floats to the surface. Whoever survives must face the consequences. I know that now. Then, when it was happening, I knew nothing about any of this.
Long did that phrase—a bag with the bare essentials—ring in my ears after I first heard it in 1991. I often packed and repacked the imagined contents (yes, this was a form of backsliding), just as in my early childhood I agonized over which one of the three wishes I’d make if I were to stumble upon a good fairy and she’d allow me to choose what I want to be: wealthy, happy, or wise. Who knows where I got the idea that I had to choose only one and that getting one would preclude the others. Because in the world of fairy tales, Ivan the Fool, the stupidest character of all, gets all three of his wishes—wealth, happiness, and wisdom. I remember feeling sheepish about the way I puzzled over this, just as my little niece did—whether out of embarrassment or the belief that wishes don’t come true if other people know of them—when she hid her Christmas wish list under her pillow. I read it while she was out of her room. Her wishes gave me an almost physical pang, maybe because they reminded me of my never-to-be encounter with the good fairy. Although I was younger then than she is now, her wish list seemed even more earnest and heartfelt than mine had been. Wealth was hidden in her first-place wish: I wish for a job for my daddy. The sentence—I wish to be allowed to wear high-heels—meant happiness, I suppose, and I wish for good grades in school could be translated, in the language of fairy tales, as wisdom. The only thing I couldn’t for the life of me explain was why my precious little niece added to her Christmas list I wish for clean teeth. She brushed her teeth regularly, went to the dentist’s for check-ups, and had the sweetest smile in the world. Maybe high-heeled shoes and clean teeth in her world were the only valid ticket to a happy, wealthy, wise life.
Our deepest desires pounce on us from unexpected places, ambush us, snatch us by the throat, and steal our breath. I was in New York one July after spending two semesters in a small American college town, on my way to Europe, but not going home, because I no longer had a home. I was staying at the apartment of New York friends who were out of town. This was their generous gift to me. Savoring long ambles through the scorching-hot city, I stopped to look at a store in Soho and stepped into the chilled, snow-white space: the wooden floorboards had been painted white, the shelves were white, everything was white. The store offered an upscale array of luxury household items: towels, curtains, bedding, tablecloths, napkins . . . Silk, lace, linen. And while still standing there in the doorway, I burst into tears. The salespeople stopped and watched me with interest. I
went back out into the street. The heat beating from the air, the pavement, and the concrete quickly dried my tears. And now I understood that the promise I’d made to myself after the experience with the bag with the bare essentials—to never, never wish for a home—was simply impossible. The urge for home is powerful, it has the force of primal instinct; the mind-set of the short-term—nourished and entrenched over time into a pigheaded moral principle—was more dangerous than I’d thought; it could turn against me if I didn’t toss it a morsel and staunch its hunger, if, in other words, I didn’t make a home from which, one day, if I so desired, I could catapult out again. Everything moves in circles, the greatest feat of every emigrant seems to be making a new home; emigrants, many risking their lives in the process, come pouring out of their countries only because they want, sooner or later, to purchase a home and hang out the flag of the state where they live; moreover many spent their entire lives in two homes, the one in the country they left, the other in the country where they ended up, just in case they’re hit by the traumatic loss of one, or both.
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