“Bless the chef!” I countered, immediately regretting the flippancy of my ill-considered response. “Please forgive me, but I’m not a believer.”
She smiled to make clear that she took no offense. “Religion is a personal matter. My faith,” she affirmed, “makes me feel beschützt (protected).”
A striking choice of words, I thought, while savoring the flavor and firmness of the first scallop. “I myself altogether lack the foundation of faith,” I confessed. “Given my family history, feeling protected is simply not in the cards.”
She seemed concerned, sympathetic, as though suddenly fathoming that I was missing a middle finger.
“I’m the child of refugees,” I said to set the record straight.
“Oh?”
I might have changed the subject but I chose not to. With me it’s a compulsion, a need to lay my cards on the table.
“My father’s departure from his native Vienna was…” I searched for the appropriate adjective, “precipitous.”
“Precipitous?”
“Involuntary,” I clarified.
“I see.”
Decorum should have compelled me to change the subject. But impatiently lapping up the second scallop whole, my tongue rattled on.
“Huddled, to hide his prominent nose, in the sidecar of a motorcycle with a swastika flapping in the wind, he was driven by an accommodating member of a motorcycle gang, who agreed, for a fee, to drop him off at sundown at a wooded stretch of the border with Czechoslovakia. And when, at the sound of what he took for a gunshot—but was, in fact, an engine backfire—they suddenly stopped, convinced his time was up, my father held his breath as the motorcyclist dismounted, only to return moments later with a bleeding hare he’d run over, knocked its head against the fender, and asked my father to be so kind as to hold it for him. Fresh meat being scarce, he meant to have it for his dinner.”
The arrival of the entrée, one of the chef’s signature dishes, rack of venison prepared “von Himmel und Erde” (heaven and earth) style, i.e. stuffed with a puree of mashed apples and potatoes, came as a welcome point of punctuation.
She eyed me in between bites with an intense, but not unfriendly, gaze, as if, I thought, considering a rare wild flower, which aggravated my malaise.
To smooth the way for my escape, I let slip that I was leaving early the next morning for a trip to Pozna, Poland, and so, unfortunately, would have to skip dessert and miss the lecture, to pack.
“To Posen?!” she burst out, employing the old German name of the region and city ceded to Prussia following the Congress of Vienna and reclaimed by the Polish in the wake of World War II; promptly correcting herself: “Pozna!” to make clear that she harbored no secret dream of reannexation.
I nodded to indicate that I understood.
“Ich bin auch…I too am”—she hesitated a moment—“das Kind von Flüchtlinge…the child of refugees.”
It was the way she said Kind…child that made the years fall away from her face and gave her voice the candor of innocence.
“I come,” she blinked, embarrassed and proud, “from a long line of Prussian aristocrats, the landed gentry of Pozna, Posen, as it was called back then.
“The War was practically over. The Russians were advancing from the East. It was a winter so bitter and cold the children broke the icicles from the windowsills and sucked them like candy. A decorated tank commander in the Wehrmacht who’d been away a long time, and whom the family thought dead, miraculously broke through enemy lines, and came rolling up in his Panzer in the dark of night to the family estate.”
She described what followed in vivid detail, like an eyewitness, yet with a certain distance in the telling, like she couldn’t decide whether to embrace it or hold it at arm’s length.
“The officer leapt out in his neatly pressed uniform, in which the War hadn’t made a wrinkle, tipped his cap, worn at a jaunty tilt, hugged his two sons and his trembling wife, who took him for a ghost.”
She paused to mimic the hollow look in his eyes.
“That night the officer told his wife he wanted to make a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter.
“‘Are you mad?’ his wife protested in a whisper, not wanting to wake the children. “The War is lost, we already have two sons to raise. Why bring another child into this world?”
“But the officer insisted, and his wife dared not refuse a decorated hero of the Reich.”
Turning away, the theologian’s wife bowed her head to mark a private moment, shut her eyes tight and seemed to be peering inwards, straining, as I suddenly fathomed, to remember the moment of her own conception.
“Bright and early the next day,” she continued, her voice now taking on a strange solemnity, “Father put on his perfectly pressed uniform, set the cap on his head at just the right angle, pausing briefly in front of Mother’s vanity mirror to approve his appearance, said he’d only be a minute, and as Mother watched from the bedroom window, he smiled, patted the protruding cannon, lifted the hatch, climbed in, set the great metal elephant in motion, and poking his head out, waving to her at the window one last time, leapt out and hurled himself under the rolling tread.”
They cleared the table and brought in the dessert, a wild berry parfait that neither of us touched.
“Did she mourn for him?” I inquired.
“There was no time for mourning,” my tablemate shook her head. “With the Russian artillery thundering ever closer all through the day and into the night, Mother pulled herself together, took a pick axe, buried Father’s remains, and fled with the clothes on her back and a small bundle, with my brothers in toe, and the seed of a child planted in her womb, walking all the way to Berlin.
“Father posthumously had his wish, a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter,” she shrugged, with a look that wavered between disapproval and a proud affirmation of self. “The four of us lived together in a cramped attic room with a ceiling through which it rained and snowed. In that leaky attic I grew up with barely enough space to stretch my arms and legs, but there,” she smiled, “I felt protected.
“When I grew up I met and married my husband”—she nodded at the theologian, who cast increasingly concerned looks to see his wife so stirred up with a stranger, to which she replied with reassuring nods. “I became a kindergarten teacher, had a long career, and just retired last year.”
She was horrified, she said, at the number of broken families her pupils came from, one in three in Germany. She hoped to devote her “golden years”—the hackneyed expression took on a freshness framed by her radiant, tightly braided blond head—volunteering to help children in need.
I had stuck around too long to escape the economist’s lecture, but I was preoccupied and don’t remember a word of what he said about the present crisis or his prognosis for the future.
I kept glancing at the theologian’s wife, now seated beside her husband, her hand in his. Born of conflicting legends, we were bound in braided tragedies. And though I still can’t fathom what it means to feel protected, and doubt I ever will, as disparate as our destinies are, there is an undeniable parallel between the motorcycle that carried my father to one kind of freedom and the tank that took her father to another, on both of which history hitched a ride.
Happiest when peripatetic, Peter Wortsman’s restless musings have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the German newspapers The Atlantic Times, Die Welt, and Die Zeit, and the popular website World Hum, among other print and electronic outlets, and in the last three volumes of Travelers’ Tales The Best Travel Writing. “Protected” first appeared in Habitus, A Diaspora Journal, in an issue devoted to Berlin. The text is excerpted from a work in progress in search of a publisher, working title “Ghost Dance in Berlin,” inspired by the six months Wortsman spent as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. He is also the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die, two plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, and an artists’ book, i
t-t=i, produced in collaboration with his brother, artist Harold Wortsman. His numerous translations from the German (a verbal form of border crossing) include the German travel classic Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine, and most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist. His column “Rx for Travel” runs in P&S, the journal of The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
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1. The author was the Holtzbrinck Fellow in Spring 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin. This account is excerpted from a book-length work-in-progress.
LISA ALPINE
The Chilean Cliff Carver
When the heart calls, do you answer?
WE MET IN A BULLRING UNDER THE VELVET CLOAK OF night. An evening lit by a pale pearl, bruised full moon. This was where I first encountered the pitch-black-haired Chilean who sported a smirk on his perfectly chiseled face. He stared at me while I was lifted to the heavens yet again. Not a human sacrifice but a contact dance performance I was hired to do at a private party on the island of Ibiza in Spain.
The Chilean and I skirted each other on the dance floor. Like matador and bull. I find attractive men dangerous and try to avoid eye contact with them. They terrify me.
Just as I did allow myself to look into his relentlessly piercing eyes, he swiveled and turned his attentions onto another woman. A real beauty. Slowly, they danced close together. Barely perceptible tendrils of steam were rising from their entwined bodies. He then danced with a man. He danced with the woman again. He danced again with the man. Then he danced with both of them at once. They were svelte and sensual, and wielded sly, flirty smiles. In my direction! Provocative. Especially in the flickering torchlight.
He came close again and grazed my bare arm. Red alerts were going off in my left brain. He looked like a heart landmine. Step toward him and my heart would surely be torn to bits.
This inner torment spiced up my dance routine with Oscar, my California dance partner, who seemed to be getting a little jealous that the Chilean was moving into his territory. Party guests were now standing in a circle around him and me, hemming us in as we increased the acrobatic lifts and spins. This hyper performance, fueled by alpha male competition and magnetic physical attraction, went on until the moon, exhausted, fell into the sea that caressed this limestone island in the Mediterranean. Wiping away the fine grit from the bullring that powdered my arms and face, I did not see the Chilean depart. He had vanished on the arm of another woman. Perhaps another man, too. For the best—I was not there to have a fling. I was there to perform.
My dance troupe did do more than dance on Ibiza. Several days after my encounter with the Chilean, in glaring sunlight, we went in search of the sunken civilization of Atlantis. Local lore had it located off the tip of Es Vedra, an island floating offshore Cala d’Hort’s bay.
The scorching heat of the sun beating on the steep trail that led down to the bay released intoxicating herbaceous oils of wild rosemary, lavender and thyme that clung to the cliff side. When we reached the sea’s edge, salt bream filled our nostrils. It was enlivening to be awake and outside during the daylight after so many all-night dance extravaganzas in Ibiza’s uber-clubs and mega mansions.
As we leaned against the smooth, sun-bleached limestone boulders in this quarry on the sea’s lapping edge, Sana handed each of us a ritualistic tab of ecstasy. Sana was our group leader and instigator of all things outrageous. As the zing zip of the drug effervesced in my bloodstream and my defenses dissolved, stifled emotions welled up. The secret burden of my life surfaced.
I had so wanted a little girl child. My son was adorable, but I wanted more kids. The abortion I’d had several years before due to my ex-husband’s wishes was a sore, a gash still bleeding into my veins daily. As the heat emanating from the rocks penetrated my tense body, the iceberg-shard tips of that anguish melted and rivulets of sorrow slid down my cheeks pooling, in the hollow of my collarbone.
My maudlin grieving was interrupted by a shuffling sound. My teary eyes snapped open and there stood a young girl with long dark hair. Not a hallucination. Her jade green eyes stared directly into my sea blue eyes. By God, my wish was being granted. Who had waved the wand? Drugs are amazing. I’d always wanted another child, a girl to take to Paris. And here she was!
This little girl even spoke French. Her name was Marie-Claire. We bonded immediately. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up. She wasn’t put off at all by the tears streaming down my face or my herky-jerky French. She wanted to play and to show me the crab.
Still holding hands, we walked past my bemused friends who could not figure out how I had suddenly conjured up a child, and waded into a tepid tide pool. She dove down, pale shiny child butt sticking up in the air. She popped up breathlessly and said I must do the same thing to see “him.” Sure enough, once I did as she commanded, the crab was waggling his antennae eyes at me from under the rock through the murky water. Our upside down antics had stirred up the sand.
She then took me up a trail and around a ledge and we both peed on the dirt. Both of us were fascinated by the yellow streams gushing out from between our legs. Suddenly, hearty laughter startled us. On the boulders above us stood a man who was pointing and laughing. “Papa,” she yelled, wagging her finger at him.
The Chilean! The dark handsome dancer from the bullring full-moon party.
For some reason, I wasn’t self-conscious about having him see me peeing with his daughter, both of us totally naked. She explained to me that they had a camp beyond the rocks where he was standing.
Marie-Claire grabbed my hand again and ran down to the sea where the gurgling ocean waves sucked in and out over rocks covered in yellow-green algae. She beckoned me to sit on the green seaweed carpet and slide down into the water. A wave caught us and pushed us upward. We slid back and forth with the tide, laughing until tears ran down our sun burnt cheeks.
I’d completely forgotten my sorrows and desires. This happy child had invited me into her world, an enchanted playground of quirky sea creatures and hidden caves.
Then she slipped into the malachite green waters and disappeared. Her silhouette moved below the water’s surface. She looked like a mermaid. Then, there was another larger shadow with her. I worried that it was a predator and dove in swimming to her depth. The shadow was her father. They didn’t seem to need to come up for air. They showed me how to swim deep with the colder currents. These people were fantastical and mythical, dancing through their watery world like manatees or dolphins or selkies.
Marie-Claire was hungry after all her romping in the water and on land. We followed a narrow path that wound between the skyscraper-size Mesozoic boulders to where they were camping. He had created an other-worldly living space veiled in cream-colored canvas roofs, with thin slabs of pink slate as tabletops, white smoothed boulders for chairs, and Persian carpets that lay over the taupe sand.
The only way to get to their Bedouin-style encampment was by foot down the steep trail, or by Zodiac. As he prepared lunch, he told me he came here from Belgium every year and brought his boat and his daughter. They held court in this old-world quarry for the entire summer.
We grazed on large green olives, Manchego cheese, tomatoes, and fresh sardines. He had a soft yet radiant smile and told me his name was Patrice. He was from Dalcahue in Chiloé.
My mouth dropped open like an attic trapdoor. I was sitting in a dream setting of opaque rock and turquoise sea, without clothes, completely at home with a man who had terrified me several nights before. He was also blessed with a fairy princess daughter who was affectionate, intelligent and gifted.
Yet, this wasn’t the reason my mouth was gaping open. It was because Patrice was from my favorite place in all of South America—perhaps the entire world. An island floating off the southern toe of Chile, only accessible by boat or seaplane, and only for six months a year when the savage winter storms subside. A place where the fishermen’s wives knit bulky wool sweaters dyed in natural hues from the blood of walnut husks, moss, b
erries, seaweed, and mushrooms.
I knew Dalcahue well, as I went there many times in the 1970s to import those handspun sweaters. It took several days on planes, trains, ferries and small fishing boats to get there from Santiago, the capital of Chile. Nobody outside of Chiloé is from Chiloé.
His voice pulled me back to this island in the warmer climes of the Mediterranean. As he sliced ripe tomatoes on a stone slab, he shared that he was a ballet dancer and lived in a church in Brussels that he’d converted into an art and dance studio.
Damn!
Why couldn’t he be pompous or stupid? Or from Milwaukee? This was all too delicious and tempting (and I’m not talking about the sardines!).
He flipped through a photo album and showed me pictures of his sculptural work. Full-size men and women engraved in the sand on the beaches of Normandy. Tides in the area shift, as described by Victor Hugo, “à la vitesse d’un cheval au gallop”—as swiftly as a galloping horse. The tide comes in at one meter per second. When the long tides were pulled in, Patrice filmed the encroaching foamy salt water eroding the Rodin-quality sculptures he had carved over many days. He chronicled the licking away at their curves, the dissolving of their shapes.
As he ran his fingers over the seashell-gray-toned photographs, describing the feel of the sand as he shaped these voluptuous bodies, his voice soft and faraway, I found him, his lifestyle, his family, all excruciatingly captivating.
A spell had been cast and I completely forgot about my friends back on the rocks.
In the late afternoon sun, after more explorations and a nap in their kasbah, Marie-Claire and I wound around the stones littering the hollow quarry pit they called home. There in the amber afternoon light, Patrice was squatting in front of a carving on the limestone face. It was a man and a woman embracing under water as they swam together. Botticelli delightful, da Vinci beautiful. Classic perfection.
As his golden arms and long-fingered hands chiseled these people into the rock, Patrice told me he was involved with the couple I saw him dancing with at the bullring. The sculpture depicted them. “It is complicated,” he said. I don’t know why he shared this with me but it made me feel very two-dimensional, simple, and boring. And American.
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