Oh—the synagogue, I hasten to add, was Lionel’s doing, not mine, obviously. It was all arranged by the time Lionel got ahold of me. It was what your mother wanted, he said, preemptively. I’d absolutely sworn myself to niceness, Peter, but I’m afraid I let a long silence speak for me.
She’d have been appalled, yes? Or—what do you think?—maybe she’d just have gotten a big laugh out of the whole thing. Or is it possible that was what Lili wanted? Vaguely, I suppose. Who knows what sort of thing people simply suppress for decades. Or maybe she was hedging her bets there at the end. But, still—a synagogue? I doubt she’d set foot in one more than half a dozen times in her life—and as a tourist, at that. Certainly we were no more religious—she and Sándor and I—than potatoes! Not to doubt Lionel’s word, of course. He’s as honest as someone can be who can’t distinguish what he’d like to be true from the evidence in front of his face.
It’s pretty startling to see Lionel (of all people!) coming out of Lili’s old room in his bathrobe, that’s for sure. But I have to say he was good to her, after his fashion. He outwaited all the others, and eventually she was ready to be taken a little care of. She was pretty tired by then. You would have been surprised. Really, Peter—surprised.
A saint, is what Lionel says, missing the point, as usual. And what I say is, all right, make people into saints if that’s what you want; there are worse things to do, I suppose. But I can’t help thinking that what Lili really died of was boredom.
Actually…I wonder now; I’ll bet you don’t even remember Lionel. That is, I think there wasn’t ever a time in my conscious life before Lionel was around, but he wasn’t around all that much till fairly recently. (Well, “recently.” You know what I mean—the last couple of decades.) But even when Lionel was around, I doubt you noticed.
Sorry. I exaggerate. I do you an injustice—you and Lionel both. I’m sure you noticed. I’m sure you noticed something taking up the best chair. Let me remind you—Lionel: Lionel drank his tea; he praised the pastry (even when he brought it himself); he’d suddenly speak up and drop onto the conversation some weighty, worthy, immovable subject that left everyone speechless; he actually seemed delighted when Mrs. Spiegel dropped in from across the hall (“for just a little moment,” as she always put it)…
But the fact is, Lionel sort of actually came into his own on those occasions when Lili disappeared into her room; at some point during those episodes, Lionel used, without fail, to show up, hesitating in the hallway, whispering, clearing his throat, clutching a basically useless offering of soup or coffee cake to be left at the door of Lili’s room.
During the period you were around, I know it didn’t happen so often—that Lili would just vanish, into the darkness behind her door. Oh, there were a couple of episodes, yes—and you, like everyone else, faded away, to leave us in “peace”—but when I was little, before you sat yourself down in our life, it was a pretty frequent occurrence.
Could you have known what that was like for me? I always, I think, simply assumed you did. But, really—how would you have?
That silence! I could cry, of course, but Lili was falling through darkness, down to a world where I couldn’t be heard or seen.
The whole apartment was silent when Lili was in her room. No visitors, obviously. There would only be Sándor, working in his room, or taking me back and forth to kindergarten or grade school, trying to entertain me with cards or alphabet games, and to make our small meals cheerful. Did I want to go out and play? No.
Go out? Go out and play, when Lili might just dematerialize forever in my absence? So you can imagine the state I’d be in, back in the days I was small, when Lili would reemerge from her room, as affectionate as ever, utterly tranquil, as though there’d been no break in continuity whatsoever.
I was in sole possession of that terrible silence then, and our apartment was full of conversation again, and laughter.
Constant visitors! All those men! Where could Lili have found them? There sure aren’t any around these days. Not that I much mind, Peter. But every country in Europe must have been represented, serially, on our sofa, wouldn’t you say? And then there were those big, rectangular Americans, too! But maybe you never noticed any of Lili’s admirers, come to think of it—even the handsome, boastful ones. To you, I’m sure, all of them would have been…just…old. And really, it was Sándor you were there for, wasn’t it.
Actually, of all those far-ranging types of men, there was only one that Lili had no use for: Lionel’s—that worried, deliberate, “cultured” type. She liked men who were fun—who drank whiskey, who would take her out dancing or to hear jazz, out into the world.
It never occurred to me until much, much later, of course, to marvel at the way she kept moving. She worked so hard, too. I think she’d cut back a lot by the time you showed up, but when I was very small she put in outrageous days at Dr. Weissbard’s office. Doing, I believe, the most tedious possible chores—the files, the phones, the bills, the checks, the appointments…Sándor would take me to school and pick me up, and sometimes one of Lili’s admirers would be drafted to take me to the park or the skating rink, but Lili managed to make me breakfast and dinner, she read to me before bed…It wasn’t until I had Eric and was working myself that I had any idea how much energy it all must have taken.
I never heard her complain. And I’d be very surprised if you did, Peter. I remember once trotting along behind her when she went into the kitchen for something to put a bunch of flowers in. She looked at the flowers as if to solicit their views on the matter, shrugged, and dropped them into a vase; I think no matter where she’d found herself, she would have experienced her life as a faintly comic, wholly inexplicable spectacle that was being rolled out in front of her.
Did it charm you? Did it irritate you? Did you find it childish? You, of course, were an adult. Oh, and here’s something else I remember, as if it were holy—Lili stretched out, frowning studiously at her fashion magazine, absently reaching out an arm for me to tuck myself under while I waited for the verdict: No, this is not elegant…
Well, she was so young; she was scarcely nineteen, I think, when I was born. But one could hardly consider that frivolity of hers an adjunct of youth, could one? I, personally, at least, consider it to have been an act of courage and gallantry—a radical choice.
Fairly early on in my marriage (when it seemed worth it to me, I suppose, to bid for Neil’s sympathy regardless of the cost) I confided in him what I’d never tried to confide in anyone else: the sheer terror of those days when Lili would retreat into her room. The moment the door closed, I told Neil, I knew perfectly well Lili was somewhere I simply did not yet exist; anything might happen to her, and there I was, on the other side of the wall, being absorbed into that obliterating silence.
So, what was Neil’s response? Naturally enough, he seized the opportunity to point out that I had “personal problems.” “And no wonder,” he said. Yes, yes, any question would kill her, she was going to disappear into her bedroom one day and just die there, of suffering. No wonder I had nightmares! No wonder I had migraines! “Because she never once just sat you down,” he said, “to have a normal conversation about her past situation. She just simply allowed that whole thing to develop instead—that atmosphere of violence and danger.”
Oh, Neil had a point or two, I suppose; I’ve had my share of “personal problems.” But what other kind of problem can a person have? And a lot of those problems simply faded away, along with the vestigial nightmares and migraines, after he and I got ourselves together to file for divorce.
It’s strange to think my dreams wouldn’t have been visible to you at a glance. I was still having them at the time you showed up, after all—almost every night. As soon as I closed my eyes, the dark pools behind them deepened; I floated, was caught, and down I went—toward the scream of the train. The bolt rang shut across the door like the report of a pistol; my shattered vision recomposed into silence and the small white disk of the sun. Through the
slats, the silent figures in the fields; the small white disk of the moon, light beating down like nails on the silent insects that scurried, slowed, stopped…
How many mornings did I stand at the kitchen door when I was little, trailing a blanket, throbbing with nausea and cold, as the silence of my dreams—a silence like a chloroformed rag—thawed slowly, until I could hear the spoon against the table, the juice pouring into the glass…Sándor poured a bright arc of juice from the beaker; Lili’s long, restless hands spread the toast with delicious unsalted butter. Was that really Sándor? Was that really Lili?
The night’s dense net was lying slack and invisible around us in the sunlight.
Lili could always feel me looking, and she’d turn anxiously.
I approached, hesitated, and leaned myself abjectly against her. Bad dreams? she said.
She was made out of glass, my mother, wasn’t she? Out of pale silk. I straightened myself up and shook my head: no.
But Lili turned to the window that looked out onto nothing—onto the brick of the airshaft. Her fingers were pressed at the corners of her closed eyes.
Yes, I had nightmares—children do. After all, it takes some time to get used to being alive. And how else, except in the clarity of dreams, are you supposed to see the world all around you that’s hidden by the light of day?
But I also had dreams that were just like heaven: A little lake with leaf-shaped boats…a tiny theatre with amazing, living puppets—yes, the most marvelous park, elegant in the snow, against the gray sky, like a deserted palace, or twinklingly awake again in spring, the trees all in flower…blossoms scattering on the surface as I broke back up through the reflections.
And there were other dreams, too, those dreams that just twist, you know—a sunny meadow, the black shadow…
I sometimes watched you. Did you ever know that? When you began sacking out on our sofa now and then. Tossing about, emitting your little sleep-smothered bleats of terror. I stood watching you, breathing stealthily, afraid to break into those dreams of yours; who knew what would come pouring out?
Sleep was a serious business in that household! You probably heard Lili or Sándor, every once in a while, murmuring breathlessly, pleading…Even Walden Tócska, poor thing—flopping and twitching, whimpering in his little bed and sending up smelly eddies of hair…
Sweet dreams! Get some rest! Sándor and Lili and I going our separate ways, the dark pools opening, the whisper of the trawling nets. And then mornings, watching, walking forward to join Sándor and Lili behind the thin screen of daylight, sitting all together in the kitchen, buttering the toast…More juice? Yes, thanks. And the jam, please.
Those mornings were like a seam, joining two worlds, one invisible by night, one invisible by day.
Now, how’s this for a thought: Suppose you and I had spoken yesterday, after all. And suppose we’d wandered out together, talking. Suppose we’d strolled over, you and I, to this coffee shop where I’ve imagined you ducking in out of the rain.
I can see you—some version of you—looking at me with incredulity: But what could have been in my brain at that time, you might have asked me; how did I account for my existence? Did I think I was descended from…pilgrims? From a distinguished line of, what—cowboys?
Well, now, it’s true that none of those people who hung around our little apartment talking, talked much about their “past situations,” as Neil put it. That prohibition relaxed, of course, as time went by, but when I was little, no adult I encountered ever spoke in any personal way about the years of the war or the decade or so preceding it. And you can be sure that none of the others inquired!
It seemed perfectly natural to me, when I was a little girl, that English was the language of choice for our visitors—most of whom were not madly comfortable in it, to say the least; of course they spoke English—that was what people spoke. And perhaps you simply took it for granted in your own way, when you eventually showed up; for you, I suppose, English was just one more language to explore and then inhabit.
But for those others, obviously, it was altogether a different matter, wouldn’t you say? A language so new, so clean, so devoid of association and overtone as to be mercifully almost unlike, I’d suppose, human speech.
But new and clean as it was, and new and clean as I was myself, I could detect—trembling there in the depths of those accents—clues and evidence; it was as if iron vaults, sunk to the bottom of the sea, couldn’t prevent the radioactive waste buried in them from transmitting its toxic, shining signals.
The child should be out in the fresh air, Mrs. Spiegel would lament from time to time. It’s not healthy to be all the time indoors! But Lili would only smile, as if she hadn’t quite heard, and put an arm around me. And I curled up closer, to listen.
But, you know, Peter, despite what people say about children (their unerring ear for truth, their piercing vision—all those platitudes), children can’t pluck actual specifics out of thin air.
Where did I come from? Frankly, children are philosophers and theoreticians and seers only by default; they’re so ignorant they have to be philosophers and theoreticians and seers. It’s not that children disdain hard data, it’s not that they’re too lofty for it—on the contrary, they’re dealing with as much hard data as they can! Think how much hard data is entailed in just getting the applesauce to stay on the spoon!
Where did I come from? “Europe,” all right? That’s what I was told, and that was plenty. Mrs. Spiegel might have been happy to share with me her exhaustive knowledge about who in the neighborhood purported to be from Vienna or Budapest or Berlin though they were actually from some miserable shtetl near Lwow, but frankly, Peter, when I was four or five or six, I had other things to worry about! “Europe.” That was plenty. “Hungary.” Plenty.
My first words were Hungarian. Naturally; I was almost one and a half when we left. By the time I was seven, I didn’t speak any Hungarian. By the time I was twelve, I couldn’t—as you may or may not have noticed—understand it!
Isn’t it strange? If we can remember, why can’t we remember everything? Why can’t we remember where we once were? The words we once understood? Little snippets of conversation we heard? If I, for example, can remember back forty-seven or so long years, why can’t I remember back forty-nine? Just a few little years more? Why can I not remember my father? I spent almost a year of my life in his presence “over there” until he “developed problems” and evidently blasted himself into literal fragments of despair. So why is it that what I have with me now, instead of a memory, is a solid space that nothing—no memory—can occupy?
I’ll tell you what I think. I think we can’t remember all the way back because God (to speak metaphorically) arranged it that way. And God arranged it that way, in my opinion, so we can be deceived.
These highly compressed, enigmatic, and largely private lyrics, anticipatory, even premonitory, in their elegiac tone and obsessive cataloguing of a world which was not yet lost, reflect, inevitably, their broad cultural contexts. Certain theoretical orientations, therefore, may be comfortably invoked with a view to illuminate…(etc., etc.).
—From Atlantis: The Poetry of Sándor Szabados, by Péter (orthographical-marks-fetched-up-from-the-murk-and-pasted-back-on-for-credibility) Kövi
The cover’s faded now, you know; the paper has discolored. No matter—I’m sure the book stays modestly in print.
And how did I feel about it, how did it seem, your little book, when I took a look at it again last night after all these years? That is, aside from the embarrassingness of the prose? Well, you can count on me, Peter, of course, not to be able to identify a lot of the distortions and inaccuracies a book like that is sure to be rotten with. And it’s hardly original, I know, to observe that biography is bound to be at least as much about the author as it is about the subject. Yes, that’s not an original observation, I know. And, all right, your book isn’t biography, anyway—it’s a translation, plus a “critical appreciation” (or some such slit
hery disclaimer), which “inevitably” entails “illumination” of the subject himself. Well, I know, Peter.
Oh! But how did I feel about it! Hm. All right, yes—how did I feel…
Well, I’d have to say…I felt…ambivalent.
Were you aware, Peter, how Sándor responded to Mrs. Spiegel’s admiration? Were you aware how completely insane it drove him? “The genius,” as she sometimes referred to him. He could detect her footfall with absolute accuracy, as if the two of them were in the forest, and he’d fade instantly into his room for hours, to write, or to read his Thoreau or Dickens or Auden or Stevens, while Mrs. Spiegel chattered on emptily with Lili in the kitchen, stalling. “Did I hear something?” she’d say, glancing over her shoulder. “No.”
Oh, Peter. How he hated to hear her go on about his “brilliance,” his “originality,” his “place in European letters”! Even when his work was available in German, I once heard him say to Lili, could Mrs. Spiegel have—in any meaningful sense of the word—“read” any? The woman’s brain, unfortunately, was a Möbius strip of clichés; things went in, he assumed, in working order, but emulsified there, through a continuous, twisting process of Mrs. Spiegelization. Besides, what place in European letters? No Europe, no letters, no place. He had no place anywhere but in our apartment, thank you, he added to me. And that was the only place he wanted.
I remember the way Lili patted his arm, and smiled the lazy, inscrutable smile that kept all those men prisoner on our sofa or tamed them to the yoke of irksome tasks and errands, like picking up groceries or fixing the lamp or taking me to the playground.
When you first met us, were you flabbergasted that Lili never became irritable with Mrs. Spiegel? That Lili always had time for Mrs. Spiegel? Did you realize that Lili actually chided me for mimicking the irresistibly mimicable Mrs. Spiegel? Did you marvel how the two of them used to sit at the kitchen table over interminable tea and cookies?
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 66