That’s what it feels like to be someone: a temporary opening, a drooling coat. It’s nothing but slipping along a slow restless cycle, where we must always be moving through the labyrinths of our minds, vigilant, to be sure that no identity gets a chance to escape without us killing and wearing it. Because what would happen if we took a rest, a short nap, and they—all of those they who we want to be—all crowded out into the light at the centre?
What would we do then? Who would we be?
In the photographs Erwin was reinventing, he had his son Georg play the young version of himself, and Georg’s best friend play Erwin’s former best friend. Georg’s friend was lanky and reminded me of Tom, of myself. Erwin had me—Sofia—play the younger girl they had both once loved, despite my being a few years older than them both.
Erna, Erwin’s wife, always prepared some small meal, a collection of some sort of wurst, bread, and cheese, for us when we went out on a shoot. She’d bring it in a small picnic basket, usually with a canteen of coffee. Erna was a small woman, a good deal younger than Erwin, who had once been a stage actress in West Berlin before moving to Hamburg to marry him. Erwin had met her when he was in West Berlin to show a selection of self-portraits he’d taken thirty years after he’d been released from prison, thirty years after he’d given his testimony at Nuremberg concerning his commanding officers and atrocities he’d witnessed in Crete. The portraits didn’t show anything but Erwin—then in his fifties—sitting on a lit chair in the middle of a dark room, cropped to around the elbow.
If you followed the trail of his eyes in those portraits, you could tell that he was looking just about a foot away from the lens, which was where prints of the photos he had taken in the war, mostly in Crete, were being held up for him for the first time since. Erwin’s expressions in the photos are mostly the same: a blank, tired, aged face, with hints of shame and guilt and anger. Some affect him more than others, but it’s not possible to know which photographs he is responding to because they aren’t contained within the frame; only his reactions are. The show was called Negativ (nach 30 Jahren)—Negative (after 30 years). Erwin showed me a small hand-bound book of the show, and in it was an essay, which he roughly translated for me, talking about how the negative is itself art’s reaction to the world, despite it being seen as an objective representation. For Erwin, art was the point where a moment in the world met an artist’s decision to save it. To clip its light into a box.
Erwin’s son, Georg, was quiet, just like him, and he seemed so young. It was shocking to think that Erwin was that young, seventeen or eighteen, when he went to fight in the war. I was maybe five years older than Georg and knew quite well that even at that age I was completely unprepared for anything as serious as that. Georg joked with his friend on the shoots in a German tongue I was beginning to understand, though I could still hardly speak it. They joked about innocent, silly things: girls, the toils of school, their shared joyous moments while drinking alongside the canals of Hamburg.
Once, all five of us took a car down to the town of Ansbach, west of Nuremberg. Erna sat in the back between the boys, jabbering along with them. There was a bench that Erwin wanted to find and re-create a photo at. A friend of his who lived near the town and had told him that the bench was still there. We drove nearly a full day to get there, as the light of the day was perfection.
“It was reaching twilight that time,” Erwin said to me in the passenger seat. He was so excited he was shaking a little.
When we got there, the bench, of course, was gone. His friend had misinterpreted his directions. We all stood next to the car while Erwin walked circles, head down, around the street lamp that had replaced it, pulling at the remains of his hair. There was a bench a block away that we suggested we use, but Erwin did not want that. He wanted as few simulations as possible, as few built-in doubts.
Instead, he had us sit on the ground where the bench had once been. He arranged the composition as the sun shot its last hour of beautiful shadows. I sat with the pole blocking me from the camera. Erwin directed the boys to look at me, with affection, which they did, after laughing about it. When the photo was ready to be taken, Erwin stood in the background, beyond the focus field, and stared straight into the camera. Erna hit the shutter.
It’s a night.
I’m at the bottom of the stairs, looking straight into the dark, my eyes wide so as to brighten the darkness with attention. I am opening myself up to its small collection of light. The darkness of the darkroom stares back into me. There is the wind, cascading across my throat, cradling it like a voice, like a noose.
The cat comes out of the living room and into the hallway, stands between the darkness and me. Looks through the open darkroom door and then at me. I break the room’s gaze to look at them. Grey.
“I wish I had your eyes,” I say, and sit down on the floor, my back against the front door. The cat doesn’t run, but they turn their head and take a step back.
“No, don’t go, no,” I say, pushing my back against the door hard as the cat disappears from view.
There is nothing between the dark and me but the light fixture on the wall. I want to have the power to run upstairs, turn my phone back on, and call Genny and tell her I’m trapped. But I can’t. Because it’s too late. Because at the end of the hall, the dark has set its hands on the darkroom’s jamb, the dark is pulling itself out of the room and dragging itself here. The light on the wall is gobbled up by its fist. The knob of the front door is a distance too far. The wind is pushing hard against me, so hard, and my body starts to shake as the dark comes to me, puts its huge lips around my face. It is an incubus of light. It is a gorgon. It is a great and mortal distance, falling back into yourself like this.
But like nothing, the cat mews at the other end of the hall, and the dark yanks its teeth out of me and recedes. As it snakes back into the darkroom, the cat swipes at it. The light takes back the space; the cat stares into the darkroom with those eyes. It’s so hard to live a life with such darkness. To be diurnal while living through the absolute night.
The cat turns back to me, starts to boil away some of the dark that leaked inside.
Sometimes you are walking through the memory palace and you remember the sinking Monument against Fascism in Hamburg, and it rises up from the floorboards in front of you, rises up in that moment when you held the stylus at the end of its tether, tip nearly touching the monument’s skin. Standing there, not knowing who you were, thinking everything made so very little sense to you. You went to the monument that day because you thought you could find yourself there. With the stylus in your hand and the demand of your participation, you could filter yourself through the conviction of that act. But you just stood there, not moving, seeing bare lead ready and hungry to hold your name: nameless. A woman scratched at another flat side of the near-obelisk. A kid stood behind you, chomping gum, muttering to his dad. You thought of a bunch of names that passed over you. Your hand shivered and the tip of the stylus dug into the monument, deeper in slow scratches. You let the hand shake out an impression of you onto the monument. With your free hand, you grabbed at the flesh of your cheek, and eventually, you stopped. You breathed. You looked at the little figment scratched into the monument. The father standing behind you takes a step beside you, from the past into the palace, walled in. There is nothing but the two of you, his hand on your shoulder. “It’s okay. We all lose people.”
It is morning: Friday.
I’m sitting by the landline, listening to the house transcribe the cat, listening to the cat come down the stairs, down the stairs until they stand in the doorway and look over at me, greyly. My hand is wrapped in the phone’s cord, but I can’t get to the phone to pick it up. It is ivy, holding me down.
There are so many numbers on this little sheet of paper I want to call.
Life on a quiet, sunny morning in Winnipeg in May is an emergency situation.
So I just sit here and watch the cat recede into the house’s noise. I watch a slo
w, dark fog skirt across the hardwood, seeking.
When I told Mother I was going to leave with Genny, to follow her as she went off to school, she lost her mind. She started to shake. She told me no, I wasn’t allowed to go. I told her because I wanted her to know that I wasn’t leaving because I didn’t love her, because I didn’t love her less. But what I couldn’t say was that living with her was killing me. Genny had proven that, given me a dependable outlet, a two-way mirror, a kind of relief I hadn’t known I’d ever wanted or needed. I could trust her, then. With Genny it was a ground I could stumble over, and with Mother it was all crags and clouds I couldn’t stop falling through, breaking myself on.
So she stuck a chair under the doorknob to lock me in my bedroom. I’d gone in to escape her and she snagged me with a bang. As soon as I pulled on the door and failed to get out, I started yelling at her through the wall. She yelled at me, too, and the closed door translated. I wanted out, but I had nowhere to go. I loved her so much then that I could have easily killed her if that door hadn’t been locked. I could have pulled every blink from her eyes, put her heart in my chest and carried her to the edge and leapt. But the door wouldn’t open. I imagined Genny waiting for me to tell her how it went. I heard the phone ring in the evening, a sure sign. Mother picked it up. In a minute, I heard her put it back down.
I looked out the window to the backyard. I packed and unpacked, dressed and undressed, revised and reviewed my way of moving forward as I paced circles in that room. Al would break down the door. Annie would start a fire on her bed and sit through it to death in protest. Allie’s hair would be cut off. Someone would break the window and jump feet first to tumble. Another would jump out neck first to snap. Alice would defy herself and rob Mother, or I would hug her, or gut her. I was an unbreakable force. An unbridgeable chasm. I was going to be left behind. As I looked out the window to the back lane, to the trees in the neighbours’ yards, I imagined Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe nearly making it to one another alive but arriving instead to die of misinformation.
Mother quietly pushed a few slices of cheese under the door on a sheet of blank paper. I didn’t move to devour them until I was certain she’d left, until I heard the house creak away under her retreating steps.
Eventually, I was a version of ready. Mother had removed the chair, but it was too late. I had locked the door from inside and tied the rope of blankets and clothes. I don’t know whose idea that was; just all of a sudden, it was there. I had the little pry bar Tom gave me and, slowly, with great ceremony, removed the windowpane from its socket. It was August, but a cool fresh wind came in through the window, through which I lowered the knotted rope. That rope took me a whole day to make, to decide on, to start then quit, then start up again, to finish. Someone knew that they had to keep knotting it up, that it was either that or I was going to be stuck in this house, this world, forever. And at the end of all that buildup and second-guessing, climbing down that rope, forgetting my pry bar propped in the corner of the room, took all of nine seconds.
Once I’d made it around to the front lawn, the house leered at me. Its blank, dark eyes followed me as I went to the front door with my key. I went to Mother’s darkroom, turned on the red safety light, and found the old empty film canisters where I knew she hid money. I took everything, including all the film.
I also took her earliest archive of negatives, three-ring binders filled with sheets of them, the ones most likely to include the most of me.
I hadn’t planned to steal her Leica, but it stared at me through the red. I hadn’t planned to loop the strap around my neck and leave the darkroom for the front door, heading down the real hallway that felt infinite then, and then turn back to stare through the dark, creaky house. But I did all of that. It must have been around five a.m., only a few minutes since I’d gone down the rope. I stood there long enough to hear every closed door in the house: mine, the bathroom, the studio, Mother’s. The removal of the window caused a pressure shift that made the doors slam in their frames. The house was ticking, like a sequence of horizons stacking, about to be shuffled up. Readying to explode.
I had to burn all the love I was feeling for Mother in that moment for fuel. I had to fill myself full of hate for her, just to be able to turn the knob and take another step into the night and not run up the stairs, open her bedroom door, and apologize with every word I knew, tell her that I would never leave her, and then go into my bedroom, pull up the rope, and hang myself.
Steam billowed through my limbs; the front door opened and then closed behind me. On the other side, I locked the door and kept the key. I shouldered my bags and wandered down the street toward Genny’s, moving like a janky automaton, hoping she hadn’t left without me.
But before I left I opened the mailbox, and there was the paycheque I didn’t know was actually a letter. I looked through the living room window where Mother had always sat and waited up for me. The house was glowing red from the safety light I’d left on in the darkroom. Mother’s favourite camera was heavy on my neck.
When I got to Genny’s place her car was still there, so I left my bags in the dark, climbed up to her window, and knocked.
It’s still Friday morning and I have made some coffee and am sitting by the landline again. The house has gone quiet. The cat is not moving. It feels much less strange, being here, now that I’ve gotten it to look more like the memory palace.
My phone is open to my contacts. I dial the number on the landline, the number I’d saved.
I let the phone ring once.
It is ringing again.
I let it ring a third time, and finally it connects. The voice says hello.
I take a breath. The sun pops in through the window and comes over to lean into my chest. I don’t look down at it, because I know exactly what the sun will look like.
“Hi,” I say. “My name is Hedwig Baum and I’d like to sell my house.”
8
THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
You get to the top of the stairs. Blank walls and doors—four of them. It is almost serene, a breath of fresh air. Nothing but closed doors and the armoire.
You are always worried by this part of the memory palace, because it belies what is to come. It is the essence of the calm feeling before being pushed from a tall place, thrust into exile—the tranquility before the peace of terminal velocity is interrupted by solid ground. The top of the stairs is the precursor to a new level of memories, the memories you’ve kept up here because you don’t really want to remember them, not often, but you know you must keep them.
What is in these rooms are not so much memories, exactly, but a preservation of sensations that have wrapped themselves deeply and darkly in the bundling of your nerves. Sensations that if excised from your memory, might dismantle the whole shaky logic of your life.
When I get off the phone with the realtor, I take an inventory of the house. I go upstairs and grab a pile of blank paper from my luggage and start to walk through the whole house, deciding what is still here. I keep my eyes open as much as possible, so as to not let slip in the furnishings of the memory palace.
I mark everything. I go through every cupboard in the kitchen, account for every item in the living room, the dark of the darkroom, the closet under the stairs. Everything on the walls. I go up the stairs, to the bathroom, account for the towels and an old owl carving sitting on the windowsill. In my bedroom is the bed, the loft bed, and the pry bar. I scratch at the sheet of paper, doing my best to account for it all. The unlined paper is unruly, and my lists waver and wave across the pages.
On a fresh sheet, I note every piece of furniture in Mother’s room. The mirror, the empty hangers in her tiny closet. On the floor in the closet is an enlarger, one that is newer than the one she used to have, safely stored from the accumulation of dust under a sheet, sitting next to a little bag filled with accessories. I rifle through the bag and write everything down, including one red bulb (safety light), then go back out into the hall and stare at the armoire
.
I flip onto a new page and write across the whole of it: armoire (old, maple wood, handmade in Manitoba, decent condition, just too huge). I do a new page for the armoire, for the leftover clothes in it, so that it feels like the contents of the house take up more space than they do. Despite the house’s emptiness, I want to feel like there’s more that could be carried away from it. I want to fill up this pile of too many pages.
Every door is wide open but the studio. I go to the door, the door in the expiring house, and I open it in the palace, then slam it shut before the memory can begin to play. Mother’s body coils around in my head. I don’t open the door in the house because I can’t. The studio feels like a Pandora too far.
Instead, I go back into Mother’s room, into her closet, grab the safety bulb, and go downstairs. I stretch my body long as I screw it into the darkroom’s sky. The light comes on—deep red—and my fingers slowly warm. I keep them there until it’s too hot. I leave the door of the darkroom open when I go.
I go to the page that accounts for the darkroom’s darkness and cross the darkness out. In the red light, I look through the rest of the things I’ve written down. Shocked by how much you can find if you make a point to notice absolutely everything, and at the same time sad about how little that still is. How much paper is left over.
Yet even though I surveyed the whole house so closely, every room besides Mother’s studio, I didn’t see the cat. I don’t write them down.
Maybe two months after I came to Hamburg, after I’d started working with Erwin, Darius ran away. When I went out I’d left the door of the little room ajar, hoping to let out some of the boiling late-summer air. I’d looped a piece of string between a light fixture just inside the door and the doorknob outside, to keep it from opening wide enough for Darius to get out. I wasn’t worried about anything or anyone getting in.
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