David:
Friendships need never be explained. But if I had to do it, if some dragon with claws and a tongue of fire stood over us and our lives depended on it, I would say the friendship of Nils and myself had to do with a shared understanding: that beneath the fine rebuilding of our city there was the whiff of unburied bodies, or improperly buried bodies. But what to do about it, morbidity not being an entirely acceptable option? A friendship arising from a quandary.
OKSANA KOSLOVA
Brushstrokes
(from her notebooks)
Franz Rosen: the coming of evening in dark blue – the name of a rose, Duchesse de Brabant or Souvenir de la Malmaison – a regrettable forgetfulness – a figure in a film, overweight and a little shabby from lack of sleep, lovestruck – fingers on a pocket watch
Nils Schreiber: violence – Christ on the cross – sweet reason – a worn leather jacket
Herbert Kaminski: a peacock that has lost its feathers, wandering around on a vast lawn
Simona Jastrow: a schoolgirl’s plaid skirt and white socks – a shriveled peach on a sill – a notebook – violets
Mischa Lander: beaks, birds of prey, men with hooded falcons, Horus – fluorescent lights, iron rooms – Eros in chains, screaming bloody murder – white sideburns, gaunt cheeks – a boy fallen in a well – rain in the afternoon
Anja Mann: a glass of water – stone steps – sturdy shoes – a cape that covers her mouth like a veil and that causes her, unexpectedly and unseen by others, to smile
Holly Anholt: a flying flag – a small boat, brightly painted – Chagall, the shtetl – the undeniability of luck displayed as allegory – freshly baked sweets – dark curls – forest animals in dreams
Self-portrait: lost causes – little pools of light – skin and bones
HOLLY ANHOLT
Mourning
THE DICTIONARY SAYS THAT MOURNING is the expression of grief, and that grief is deep mental anguish, as for a loss. I know the dictionary definition because I looked it up once. I can’t remember when I did this, but all my life I’ve looked up things in the dictionary that I didn’t understand. My father died and my mother died, but I never really mourned. I remembered them fondly and went on, perhaps the dictionary definition like a placeholder to remind me of what was missing. I said this once to Nils, then added in my embarrassed fashion that I was probably being dramatic. He listened and said I wasn’t. I didn’t believe him then.
What brought me to Velden? A bit of black-and-white film, my mother’s wariness, secrets. No. Something missing in myself, something unaccounted for, something which in the middle of my mostly normal life I couldn’t say. It doesn’t seem so different from the world as a whole, now that I put it in such bare, poor terms. And yet this would have been my wish, if I could have put it into words: to rejoin the human race.
Nor could I have told you if you’d asked me if there were more like me than not; more people in the world who feel they don’t belong, or more who feel they do.
Out of touch, living in a fog, a little bit confused.
Having a boyfriend while in a fog, something that sounds like a misdemeanor, spelled out in a municipal code.
But you can live in a fog and not know it, you can blame it on the world, you can believe the world itself is hard to see, as it was yesterday, as it is today, as it will be the day you die.
I always felt at home in fog. I remember spending two weeks in Mendocino when the fog never went away and I never really wanted it to. I wore a raincoat and pretended I was many things. It was only on the day I was to leave that I woke up wishing for sunlight.
After making my grand gesture, giving the place to Karen, I wanted nothing but to leave Velden, yet I didn’t. I had hoped that gesture would free me from all of it, the place, my mother’s claim, my parents’ silence, my failed affair. But grand gestures, I learned, don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. They can leave you feeling empty and theatrical, as if the very structures of your mind were sets to strike.
And once the sets are struck, what is left?
My bits of film, which I looked at every day. My sister in her baby carriage, the fadedness of the image, the ephemeral atmosphere it created. We leave such little traces of ourselves. A photograph seems to say, our lake, our sunlight, our happiness, as if the possessive pronoun would be there forever. A first, lovely mistake.
And my parents. How easily now I could see the distance between them which I had never seen before. Sitting within arm’s length of the TV night after night, because the remote for the VCR was lost, running my bit of tape back and forth, stopping always at the moment of the two of them by the lakefront posing for the camera, together but not touching, so that you could see a jagged white slice of the lake between the outlines of their clothes. It seemed the largest thing in the frame now, that white slice of nothing.
This place of my parents’ happiness, this Camelot, this idyll, this whatever it was in space and time, where they thought they were safe and assimilated and a little lazy and together, or I thought they were safe and assimilated and a little lazy and together…like normal people…like happy people…but history is there to be revised.
I decided to return to the bunker. There, I felt, would be something more like fact. How could it have been otherwise, with Ute, Karen’s mother, coming around? The truths of their lives laid bare and then an heroic struggle for survival. Who could deny them that much? I wished only to touch it. I wished only to feel for one moment some true connection to the lives that were theirs before I was born. It had not been in this house in Velden, it had certainly not been in Auschwitz. Or anyway I hadn’t found it. Maybe blame it all on me.
I went alone this time. Two shovels, gloves, water, a hat. A vague idea where I was going. It was a day early in summer, every tree in leaf, the forest floor damp and soft as if newborn, a day you could sweat in the shade just walking around. The key to finding the bunker, I knew, was how unnatural it looked, like a lump, like some big creature that had hunkered down and thrown dirt and leaves and roots on itself for camouflage. I had watched Mrs. Baum’s steps closely enough, at least on our exit. I knew where we came out, at a bend on the Velden-Karlsheim road. So that’s where I went in. I left myself two hours to find it and two hours to find my way out, being afraid of darkness and bears. Bears, very funny. Cartoon wolves, even funnier. A few squirrels were more like it. After an hour and a half of aimlessness, down this path, down that one, crossing back on the same path twice or three times, I stumbled into the clearing of buttercups. And there was my hunkered-down thing.
Whatever digging I’d done before was invisible by now, covered over with late spring profusion. I dug with abandon for awhile, slashing and jabbing with my shovel, pulling away vines with my hands, then I tired. I sat, rested, and resumed more slowly, as if I’d learned a lesson and would now be prudent. In it for the long haul, I would strip this concrete animal bare and dig out its insides until I found what I was looking for.
And what was that? Some scrap, some proof, some remainder of any sort of three people’s lives that were lived here long ago. Something to take home, I suppose, a souvenir, a proof, no, anything at all.
Or it had nothing to do with a thing. I would simply dig myself to exhaustion, I would see, but what would I see, you don’t just see things that aren’t there. My parents’ lives, Martin, Doe, Helena, as if in some bizarre application of thesis-antithesis-synthesis the result would somehow be me fully formed, fully alive.
The heat of the day increased and everything went still more slowly. Criticism more usual to my sleepless hours before dawn crept into my thoughts. Epiphanies were for phonies, archaeology was no substitute for life. Why didn’t I just blow the thing up? Why didn’t I hire someone else to dig? Why did I ever leave Paris? What was wrong with me, anyway? And as a counterpoint to my criticism, I dug.
I hung my jacket on a branch. There was too much over-growth, the shovel couldn’t cut it, I needed shears, which I didn’t
have. I stripped away the easy stuff, made little dents in the earth, grew little piles of dirt on every side of it, but still the bunker sat there like a half-buried sphinx, its true shape obscure.
I dug and thought of Nils, his narrow twinkling eyes, the low ironic rush of his insight, his reticence, that left room for my own.
I dug and thought of my father and all his Oldsmobiles, I tried to remember them each in order, which came after which, which had fins and which were Rocket 88’s with those little rocket emblems, and what colors they were.
Or never mind those, what about this, my father and the Nazi cutting a deal, me and the Nazi cutting a deal.
Keeping my mind in order, keeping the world in order, continuing to dig. I hit layers of composted leaves and removed them, then began discovering bits of tar paper from what might have been a roof. Then there were chunks of concrete, and from the inside out I began to find the outlines of the walls. I excavated, hauling concrete away with the dirt. And I thought of Franz Rosen in his haberdasher’s coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg. But did I find my mother’s wedding band? No, of course not. My father’s pipe? Hardly. An old button that could have been from his jacket? No. An arm off my sister’s doll? No. A battery from their flashlight? No. Nothing like any of that.
Again I stepped back to see what I had accomplished, but because I’d removed so much debris to the outside, the shape of the bunker appeared scarcely clearer than before. It seemed confused, as though it had been disturbed but to no particular purpose, as though by some ignorant creature simply bent on a bit of destruction.
I drank more water. I resolved to turn the bowl that I had dug in the middle of the bunker into something cleaner, closer to the walls, more thorough, more like a cube.
Again I picked up my shovel. I suddenly felt as though I were leaping into a grave.
Who was to judge what any of this was about?
I struggled to remember why I had begun. And where I had begun.
What a terrible waste was my life, I thought. What a terrible waste was this hole.
I found the digging more difficult, the forest floor hotter, my muscles more fatigued.
It was as though I were digging towards an impossibility. My mind turned hazy and dim.
Something tinkled in my ears.
The end of the line, came a dizzy voice.
In my mother’s arms, warm milk before sleep.
Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, don’t you be going insane before your hole is dug. Not until you find your mommy and daddy.
I dug my way to a corner of the bunker and scraped the slab walls until the corner was clear and defined. Job well done, came a dizzy voice, there’s no reason in the world why this corner should be so clean and defined but you wanted it that way. You wanted something your way. This was your house, after all. This was where your parents lived. And Helena. Was she just like you?
Later I knew that I’d begun to float away even before I found it. My heart was a hot air balloon. My muscles were ground to bone. Arbeit macht frei. Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, give a nice hand, ladies and gentlemen, for the bitter old joke that won’t quit.
No one would ever find me here. No one could ever find me here.
Unless I was given away by a little piece of paper, a sliver of paper, pushing out of the dirt in the corner of the bunker. Announce yourself, intruder! Are you some kind of spy? There’s spies around here, don’t you know.
I put my shovel aside and knelt by my discovery. I had a penknife. I dug gingerly around the sliver. It was something. There was more of it. There was thickness. There were pages of it.
I revived and dug with my fingers. Half of a page emerged, and then another half-page, old and soggy and fragile. I pulled half a magazine out of the dirt, then quickly the other half. Thinking immediately of Nils, of how I would show it to him, this thing that I had found, Nils, look, this something from my parents’ lives.
Then I saw the cover. It was a GDR magazine on cheap newsprint that looked ancient enough but was dated April 11, 1973, with a faded sepia photo of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra on the front.
I sank down and stared at the magazine. For a moment I wondered how it got there. Someone on a tryst, or someone catching a snooze, or someone on the lam? And why did I think of a shepherd? Shepherds didn’t live in forests. Shepherds lived in fairy tales. I dropped the pages from my hands. They had nothing to do with my father or my mother or my sister. They had nothing to do with me at all. There was nothing here. Nothing. All for naught, all craziness, all emptiness. I was in a grave, I felt, and I began to cry.
I tore the magazine up, threw my hands together as though in prayer, grabbed at my head and tore at my hair.
I shook convulsively. This, and my sobbing, didn’t stop.
Not until it was dark anyway. It seems you can’t mourn unless you know what you’ve lost, and that day, somehow, from finding nothing at all, I learned. I made my way back to Velden by flashlight.
FRANZ ROSEN
City
(from his diaries)
What a city we were. What an agglomeration. We were like a hothouse, that had grown under the Cold War’s searchlights exotic flowers of every inappropriate variety. We were like a party that never stopped because when the dancing ended we knew we would die. We dined on wreckage. We were not afraid to beg. We continued our long tradition of believing either in nothing or too much.
HOLLY ANHOLT
Nils
ONCE I BEGAN TO MOURN, I mourned a lot. In my case anyway, mourning meant unlocking the loss from my mind, where it had sat like an urn on a mantel, always in plain view but never mentioned, almost from the time I was born. To me, mourning came to mean being here but also being there. It meant being without the Other, but also with the Other. Love was the engine of grief.
Unlocking love, unlocking grief. Unlocking grief, unlocking love.
I spent days in my room. I read various poets who’ll go nameless. I packed. I watched TV. I spoke little to anyone. I forgot caring about who it was who betrayed my parents, or even if whoever it was was dead or alive. I caught a summer cold, and finally I rested.
And before I left, I called Nils. Funny the rules you make up for yourself when an affair is over, like I couldn’t see Nils again but I could call him. I could always call him.
Or could I? I was so tongue-tied on the phone. I barely got my story out. He was a good sport about it all. This and that. He proposed some herbal thing for my cold that David swore by. And then: “I think it’s a good thing…what happened to you.”
“In the bunker.”
“If it had happened before…I don’t know…I guess it couldn’t have happened before.”
It was only then I remembered what I’d called him to say. I began to tremble again, the way I’d trembled in recent days, the way you might if you were carrying something you imagined of unusual value and became afraid, just for that reason, that you would drop it. I wished I could find, for just a moment, the unblinking grayness of his eyes, the color of the sea. “You know, if you don’t mourn, if you can’t mourn…I don’t think you can know what it is that needs to be forgiven. Not fully, anyway. Not with a full heart… You may know who to forgive, or who not to, but you don’t know the full loss…”
“Forgiven?” he said in the phone, and it sounded a little echo-y and hollowed out.
“It was what you needed from me, wasn’t it?”
I felt I heard his shrug in the phone, I felt I saw the denial in his eyes.
“Then…then…Nils, I forgive you. For everything, for whatever…But mostly for everything you never did but think you’re responsible for anyway… Your life is so hard. You’re so hard on yourself.”
Now he laughed. “Of course I’m not,” he continued to laugh.
Then I kissed the receiver, and I believe I heard the sound, though I cannot tell you what such a sound would be, of his lips touching the plastic receiver at the other end of our connection.
Good-bye, Nils.
&nb
sp; ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Lewis’s four novels that make up the Meritocracy Quartet chart the progress of a generation from the ’60s through the ’90s. The first book of the quartet, Meritocracy: A Love Story, won both the Independent Publishers Book Award for General Fiction and the ForeWord Book of the Year Silver Award for Fiction. Meritocracy (1960s) is followed by The Conference of The Birds (1970s), Theme Song for an Old Show (1980s), and Adam the King (1990s). He won two Emmys and many other honours as a writer and producer of the television series Hill Street Blues. Jeffrey Lewis lives in Los Angeles and Castine, Maine.
Also by Jeffrey Lewis
Meritocracy: A Love Story
Summer 1966: a small group of recent Yale graduates gather in a Maine summer cottage. Harry Nolan, the son of a United States senator about to enter the US Army and Sascha, his beautiful young bride, represent the apex of their generation. Sascha has men falling for her ‘up and down the eastern seaboard’, and Harry’s friends are convinced that he will one day be President. The narrator is Louie, whose unspoken love for Sascha is like a worm, cracking apart every innocent assumption. An aura of power, earned and unearned, assumed and desired, hangs over this Ivy League world and the events that ensue are fateful for the characters as they are emblematic of the era they grew up in.
The Conference of the Birds
In the late 1970s Manhattan, God is dead. A group of New Yorkers, as brash and defiant as their chaotic, bankrupt city, come together to explore the void left behind. Among them are the shy and sweet-natured Bobby, a gifted cartoonist and the group’s mascot; Maisie, the acid-tongued rich girl who is fighting a two-front war against mental instability and Hodgkin’s disease; the narrator Louie, a very nearly accidental pilgrim torn between his friends and the purpose that has engulfed him; and their austere leader Joe, a saint to some, a pervert to others. Is it self-discovery they seek, or oblivion?
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