In the King's Arms

by Sonia Taitz

  “Have you been wandering, too, Julian? I feel like a wandering Jew . . . .” Her voice was uninflected by worry. She was spilling over, lolling in the soul.

  “I’ll wander with you,” he answered, rocking her. They were adrift together on the rolling seas. He rocked her far more slowly than the quick tick-tock of clocks. Even the big wooden grandfather clock seemed hasty now; Julian’s rhythm made time swell with a vast bounty.

  I have all the time in the world, she thought, languidly. All the time in the whole, whole world. I can strain my gaze forever, until the figures on the pier are not just thumb-sized but invisible, all gone. And there’s time in what’s invisible, too. It rests there.

  And still Julian rocked her, until he himself had disappeared to Lily, and all that remained was the rocking itself, and then sleep. The grandfather clock suddenly thought of something to say; it tolled: Bonnngggg . . . . Bonnngggg . . . . Bonnngggg . . ..

  He scooped up the girl whose consciousness amazed him, and felt the sheer weight of her dead frame. Now she was unassuming. Her head fell back as he hoisted her aloft, fully exposing her white neck. It poured from the yoke of her dress like sand from an hourglass. Her bare feet tipped downward, her fingertips dangled, grazing, at his knees. He stood for a moment, absorbed by the shadow the moonlight cast on the wall.

  The night began to lift. Julian raised Lily’s head and watched her fluttering lids, pink under the rising sun. He sank his mouth upon hers, tasting hot berries. She bit him suddenly, knowingly, a small nip. Her legs kicked in tiny kicks in the air. She was half-heartedly searching for gravity. His arms felt strong.

  He took her to the brightening window; they stared outwards together. The brilliant seal of the horizon stretched across their silent, awed faces.

  13

  A PART FROM LILY, Julian had few loyalties. He did nothing with resistance. He was very fickle, although this trait often came across as adaptability. He took advice from everyone, found something to imitate in everyone. He had all the time in the world to hear the other point of view. The other point of view never annoyed him; he was spongy; he could take it in capaciously. Little phased him. Though a certain passion shone from his eyes, it was not a passion for depth but for breadth. Nor did he tend to look within himself; Julian beamed outward, attracting the excavators all around him.

  He had been very happy to work with severely retarded adolescents. This era had been a peak in his short life. The project had been suggested by one of his public school tutors, who supposed it would teach him moral application. Julian was set to work among teenagers who, like all teenagers, wore T-shirts and sneakers and blue jeans, had young bodies and spotty faces. The girls, like all girls their age, had breasts and long, luxuriant hair. The paradox of nubility and malady might have unsettled some other novice, but not Julian. He had thrived.

  Once, during an outing, Julian had photographed them all, one by one. There was something chilling in the care these photographs betrayed. They reflected a concentration that could never be reciprocated, a “love,” perhaps, that could never be returned in kind, it was so abstract, so combinative a love. Did the girl with the curly red tendrils (her name was Betsy) know that the bluebell Julian had given her to hold had matched her eyes? Julian had caught her as the bluebell grazed her lid; she was smiling as though she sensed the visual pun. But in fact she did not even know the word for eyes.

  There was also a photograph of Graham feeding the birds. A flock had descended, gathering around Graham like autograph seekers. Graham had time for every one of them, and the photograph showed this. It showed him on his hands and knees. There were birds on his head, birds on his ankle, and a huge bird-dropping on his shoulder. A beady-eyed bird on the outskirts who lacked several toes and appeared to have given up in the competition for crumbs. And Julian had caught this. Graham’s face was not too visible in the photograph; Julian, standing, had captured the scene from above. When the film was developed, Graham, completely apathetic to the picture of himself (perhaps because he did not recognize the top-view of his own head) smiled at the one of Anna, and would not let go.

  The photograph of Anna was an accident, really. Anna was the most “normal” looking of the group. Julian had daydreamed, often, of kissing her, sometimes of exploring her body with the most exquisite care. She would probably not have minded, either: she was sweet, playful and trusting. But on the day of the outing, Anna had been in a bad mood, perhaps because she had dripped chocolate ice cream on her new pink dress. One sign that Anna was more aware than many of the others was her sensitivity to dirt on her person. Her mother had successfully toilet-trained her. Anna could even apply the word “dirty” in a broad, metaphorical sense, as an insult or expletive. Now she was muttering “dirty . . . dirty . . . dirty . . .” sometimes at her dress, and sometimes angrily at Julian, who tried to cheer her up.

  He had propped her against a tree, aimed his camera at her, and made her break into a smile by putting the camera down, running to her, and giving her a quick, tight hug. But when he returned to take the shot, her smile had faded; as he clicked the shutter he knew that it had faded. The photograph came out blurred: Anna was shown with her head moving downward toward her dress, still looking at the stain. Her arms remained outstretched from the hug that had filled them, and with her lowered head she looked a bit Christ-like, fragile, thin and wavering.

  Even with Lily, Julian secretly relished a self-image as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a dream of villainous tyranny, even as he caressed the soft-bodied woman he kept in thrall. She trusts me, he would think, nerves prickling with desire, and I could tear her to pieces. He fed on her atavistic nightmares, her worried mouth, the eyes that would not settle. Julian was no longer the victim of circumstance; no, it would be she.

  He sensed his own wild and delicate containment. Would he feast on her, his prey? In the midst of a deep embrace he would shove Lily’s head back and then, having contemplated her fragile skull at arm’s length, render the woman back, squeezing.

  A King may look at a cat, he thought. And be very much fascinated. Pocket it in his purple robes, make it purr at the pulse-points. My Kingdom for a cat, dear Lily. Would you like to be the cat, hmmmm?

  Lily often kissed Julian with a passion he did not yet completely feel, pulling his mouth apart with her jaw, prying his secretive face wide open so it looked wondering, and perhaps he did wonder. Then, going suddenly soft, she would let him prod her drowsy lips, hanging her head as though drugged.

  He felt himself become a man of meaning, a participant in an old rite. Lily made him quite mad. He would show her just how mad; he would cram her full of his madness. And then, the yielding of her cool skin would appease his spirit, domesticate the fierce young Briton. It was on old rite, with keen new communicants, and an unknown outcome.

  14

  Europe, 1944

  A STORY Lily’s mother had told her used to wander in and out of her mind. The story took place in Germany. Lily’s mother had then been a young girl, a teenager of about sixteen. Her family was beginning to disappear because it was Jewish: mischievous Karl, who played in the streets despite every warning of traffic, and lately, of Nazis, and whose supper had remained on the table for days before anyone had had the heart to throw it into the trash; tired, old Papa, who always grumbled about his bad back, suddenly packed off to labor camp, somewhere; Grandmama, whom someone had pushed off the sidewalk, who now remained listless and still in her bed. It was an orchestrated time, as far as the Jews were concerned, although between the cry here, and the rumbling threat there, many hours remained to be spent in a sort of willful deafness.

  The only picture which had survived that time and made it to the New World showed an elaborately crinolined infant (Lily’s mother) sitting like a doll, as was then the fashion layer after layer of petticoat, jointless arms and legs flung out by the photographer, who must have said a merry thing as he tucked under his hood, and bald, except for a sepia tuft. So Lily had to imagine for herself the
pale, serious gaze of the girl in the story, the glossy coronet of hair, the decent pinafore dress.

  Lily’s mother had eventually been transported to a labor camp that contained about a thousand women. Her own mother was taken that same day, and they never saw each other again, alive or dead. The young girl was ordered to go right. She noticed, looking backward, that her mother had been ordered to go left, and was walking toward a group of old women. Old women: it was hard to imagine what sort of work they were intended to do. It could not possibly be outdoor work, for it was winter. Much later, Lily would imagine the death of her grandmother as sanctuary from the bitter cold.

  Lily’s mother was one of the youngest in the camp. Children younger than she had been sent off elsewhere. She had cried like a child when all her auburn hair was cut off. She saw it floating down all around her, then briskly swept up and collected. She asked the perfunctory woman official where the enormous bags full of hair were taken. “They fill our mattresses and bedding,” said the woman. “You see how nothing is wasted.” Her voice was raised, declaiming to the antiseptic corners of the room.

  The girl toiled outdoors. Like most of the women, she was assigned to dig ditches in the frozen ground. Her naked head felt cold, and her thin shift fluttered carelessly in the wind. Each day, in the snowy dawn, a thousand bald scarecrow shapes emerged. They looked like neither women nor men. With no mirror, it took the girl a long time to understand that she looked just like any one of those scarecrows about her. But some were dying; some withered more quickly in the frost than others. At the harsh morning “Appel:” UUUUPPPPP!!!! Lily’s mother noticed the limp slugabeds that had struggled to their feet only the day before. If they were not yet dead, but only ill, these women were taken out and shot.

  Each day, the roll call consumed more and more time, for the pauses between unclaimed names grew longer, and more names went unclaimed. The S.S. officers, livid, would swivel their eyes left and right as the unclaimed names echoed into silence in the air. Soon, too many names produced this mocking nothingness. A decision was made: the women would be given coats. The coats would be sewn from scraps of confiscated Jewish clothing. Sometimes, the girl imagined, a scrap may have come from a threadbare portion of a Nazi’s uniform.

  “You see, Lily? They slept cozy on my hair, but maybe I put their clothes on my back.” Here, Gretta would smile a pearly smile. “We were very near to each other all the time, Lily.”

  Lily had often pondered this concept. “Yes,” her mother persisted. “Close. We shared the same crazy world. We were their shadow, and they were ours. When we had winter, they had winter. Near us grew the Tannenbaums they chopped down for their Christmas. On the holiest night of their year I was crying: let them learn to be merciful to us, doesn’t their Jesus tell them to be merciful? And even that night, as women were dying, they slept cozy on our hair. They were always so near, Lily. I could feel their warm breath. I could smell their hands on my clothing. Very, very near.”

  The first time Lily had heard this, it had given her a strange, almost erotic shock, as though a murderer, asleep at her side, had let a senseless hand drift familiarly to her throat and lie there, weighing softly down.

  “We were not told about the coats beforehand. They were in a large shack and we stood outside, scared. No one could imagine that something good was waiting for us inside there. The doors had heavy padlocks that the Nazis freed up with great ceremony. Lily, when we saw what was there!

  “Some women, I don’t know how many, became a little crazy. They began to throw themselves into the warm piles. Rolling in them. Some pulled at the coats, ripping the poorly sewn sleeves off. Buttons rolled on the floor. The fever spread until it seemed as though the women were dancing within a large bonfire: coats swirled like flames around their shoulders. It no longer mattered what a coat was for, what the practical use of such a garment was, that it was supposed to keep women like us alive to work a little longer in the cold. Time meant nothing anymore; it seemed like the last day in earth; nothing had a sensible purpose anymore. It was a crazy freedom.

  “If anyone had started screaming, Lily . . . . If anyone had started screaming in such a bonfire, I believe to this day you would still hear that scream. You would not be able to get it out of your ears.

  “Somehow, I felt very calm inside. I could see everything very clearly. I even noticed how some women stood apart from the mass, hesitating, wanting a coat, trying every now and then to get to the piles. But they couldn’t. The swarming didn’t stop. I began to faint. You know, you notice things out of all proportion when you lose consciousness. I saw a trail of grey flannel. I took notice and I thought: this coat is the one for me. After all the swirling and the grabbing stops, there will be a grey coat for Gretta.

  “All of a sudden, a big hand slapped my face so violently that my nose sprayed with blood. I could not see the face behind the hand; the blood flew into my nose, my eyes, my mouth. I felt a tooth go down my throat and began to choke.

  “Then I saw the Nazi’s face. It remained right in front of mine, hovering as I tried to catch my breath. As though . . . unsure of something. He looked like a shy boy who wanted to ask me to dance. He seemed young—not five years older than I was. It was so peculiar, staring into his face as he stared into mine. I remember his sharp nose, and little dark whiskers. I remember thinking—he has black hair like a Jew.

  “I felt him put his hand on my shoulder. The other hand he tightened into a fist, as though he would punch me. But I saw he kept it down, by his side. We were staring into each other’s eyes, and he suddenly spoke:

  “’But why did you grab?’

  “His voice was angry, but confused, too, and his face was lost, uncomfortable. He seemed bewildered. Why did we grab? He didn’t really know this kind of person who would act so passionately. Why didn’t we behave like machines? Why didn’t everything go as planned? Why did so many women die of cold, and now they had to give us coats? I thought of how we seemed to this junior Nazi with his simple orders. We must have been a horrifying surprise. Mere beatings could not fix all this disorder, these surprises, these grabbings.

  “I looked at the boy. He was trembling with concentration. He stared at me so hard, as though to fix his lesson in my brain. But I hadn’t grabbed. What should I have said? I was afraid the hand would hit me again if I opened my mouth. But I finally said, ‘Please forgive me.’ He acted as though he could not hear my voice. His stare did not alter. Then I saw him widen his eyes. He was looking at my naked head, staring as though he’d never seen a girl with her hair shaved off before.

  “Lily, if you could only see how pretty I was before; well, I was young and vain. I felt as though I had been given the mirror I had been missing. I saw my ugliness in his eyes. It was more humiliating than any slap. Suddenly I raised up my voice. I was also crazy, like the others, I suppose, and said, ‘You don’t even see that I am not the right person. I grabbed nothing! You have bloodied my face for nothing! You have made a cruel mistake!’

  “For this kind of outburst a Nazi would kill a Jew as though he were a fly.

  “I could tell that he believed me. In relief, I began to sob, covering my face with my hands. But just as I did so, I felt him move one step away from me. I looked up and saw him raise his pistol. He had a terrifying expression on his face.

  “You know, Lily, I suddenly stopped caring. I closed my eyes and thought, it’s all the same to me, just as it is to you. I am one of the ones who grabbed. I am one of the others with the naked heads. I had hair and I haven’t. I grabbed and I didn’t. I’m alive and I’m dead. I’m young and I’m old. Yes and no and yes and no and yes and no and yes and no. I felt like laughing at him. Live or die? A silly riddle!

  “I opened my eyes to look straight at him. He looked at me. Then he raised the gun to his own head, hesitated. I kept looking. But he didn’t shoot himself. He began to cry, without a noise, like this.”

  Gretta opened her mouth wide, as though gasping for air. Her eyes went wild
for a moment, trapped with the memory. Lily saw the Nazi in her eyes.

  “I thought about grabbing the gun from him and killing him. It was just a thought, of course. He wasn’t such a good murderer, and neither was I.”

  “And then?”

  “What ‘then’?” said her mother, returning to her awful calmness. “You think he proposed to me then? You think we fell in love and got married like a nice Romeo and Juliet?”

  “No, but—”

  “Did he raise the dead from the earth? The nightmare went on for many more years,” said her mother. “The nightmare is going on still, in me. Do you think I don’t feel it now, when I tell you? Only now, over there, a forest grows from the bloody ground, and from there they cut their Christmas trees for their martyred Lord. One more dead Jew, more, less . . . .”

  “But don’t you feel better knowing that a German cried over you?”

  Gretta cut her: “Only a forest grows from the bloody ground,” she repeated. “And he’s alive to whistle in it. Unless some real Nazi eventually shot my junior soft-heart for his moment of weakness.”

  Lily had always hoped the poor man had survived somewhere. In her world, such incongruous people were precious and necessary, lovable and even holy.

  15

  Europe, 1976

  THE VOLUPTUOUS SPLENDOR of the holiday season had nearly hypnotized Lily by the time Christmas day arrived. Christmas left her to her own imaginative resources; the family had it all “under their belt,” and did not need to resort to conversation about meanings. Lily’s thoughts bobbed freely, a dinghy on the seas. It was precisely when she tried to see things through their eyes that she went furthest abroad, and away from their actual notions.