Leaving Berlin

by Britt Holmström

  THE SOUL OF A POET

  * * *

  “LET’S MOVE,” SAID MY HUSBAND ONE NIGHT at supper, twirling pasta with his fork, slopping sauce on the table cloth.

  “Okay,” I said.

  It was neither a flippant suggestion nor a mindlessly rash answer. Decisions of that magnitude may sound sudden when uttered, but they never are. Thoughts — be they pro or con — percolate cautiously in the subconscious for a long time before your gut instinct takes that final step it was planning all along. That was why his suggestion made perfect sense. Our three grown children had built their own middle class fortresses, producing families and mortgages of their own.

  “I mean, we’ve done our bit,” reflected my husband, as though family life had been a job contract that had run out. “Time to buy a smaller place, don’t you think? We’re shrinking, not taking up as much space as we used to.”

  I twirled some pasta of my own and said, “Let’s do it.”

  Clearing out a place that has been home for thirty-four years is a daunting, frustrating, thankless, near impossible labour. Things accumulate: odds and ends and broken bits, stuff that “might come in handy.” All the stuff that piles up along the road from infancy to the grave. The stuff that tells us who we once were, or thought we were, lest we forget.

  Last week I spent an entire day going through the contents of all the boxes long forgotten down in the cobwebbed crawlspace, boxes that had obviously mated and reproduced in the dark over the years, boxes full of treasures once too important to part with. The first one I tore open contained stacks of outdated sewing patterns — some never used, folders of old bills for the repair of cars sold for scrap decades ago, a bag of old party hats and partially burned birthday cake candles, the kids’ schoolwork, a gallery of bad drawings dating back to Kindergarten.

  Some of those I decided to hang on to.

  Hours later, at the very back of that dank space under the kitchen, that dungeon holding the boxes filled with the most forgotten bits of the past, I came across a damp mess of papers and folders spilling out of a collapsed box that had burst at the seams. Imprisoned in this mildewed neglect under a bunch of essays from my university days — marks ranging from C+ to B+ (and one A) — a small notebook demanded attention, clutching at the uneven hem of my memory. I picked it up, wondering why a four by six inch notebook had been so important that I had felt it imperative to preserve it.

  I never kept a diary. My life was never that interesting.

  Studying it, I recalled that this particular notebook had once had a shiny purple cover, smooth to the touch. I don’t know why I remembered that. I opened it. Loopy scribbles crowded every page from top to bottom. The scribbles were mine, yet I had no recollection of what they were about.

  A quick scan revealed that whatever I had written, it was not about me. The one name that cropped up on almost every line was Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor. Eleanor said this, Eleanor did that, and isn’t that just sooo typically Eleanor? The letters kept changing shape and size and direction as if I had been unsure of my identity or whatever role I was expected to play apart from narrator. Oddly, in my scribbles, Eleanor does not resemble the Eleanor I knew as much as the Eleanor she imagined herself to be, the personification of eccentricity and clever illusion.

  Seeing her name in the faded limelight on every page, I remembered what happened. Eleanor went mad. At some point in time Eleanor made the stubborn decision to go stark raving bonkers. I also remembered that Eleanor was not the kind of person who would go nuts unless she decided to.

  The past was a far distant place. It had been years since I last gave Eleanor Griffith a thought. Now here she was, unsullied by the fingers of time. This notebook was where I had chronicled the details of the persistent dreams I had once been subjected to. In the here and now, when I flipped through those densely filled pages again, the writing so purposeful, so intense and diligent in its energy, each one became as clear as if I had dreamt it last night.

  They had appeared with frequency, those dreams, staged in a specific time and place, following a script as if a director had shouted impatient commands offstage for me to for god’s sake get it right. I had often had the notion that somebody else was conjuring up that parallel world inside my head, a notion so strong that at times I had woken up feeling used.

  I had recorded my observations about Eleanor, and the never changing details from dream to dream, obviously under the assumption that such singularity had to be of monumental significance. And here they still were, neatly dated for posterity, a stretch of fifteen months between the first and the last entry. I opened the book at a random page and there she was: “Sometimes Eleanor is too preoccupied posturing, too busy speaking in private tongues, to acknowledge my existence. She does this on purpose, banishing me from my own dream while she holds centre stage. And I think, ‘Why, you fucking bitch!’ I never say it out loud, for if I did, she’d be terribly hurt. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ she’d say and look wounded. Eleanor’s wounded look is a work of art. Her eyes are round to begin with, and her glasses are so thick, they magnify her hurt and make an impact. That’s the way she is, her own creation, every detail meticulously seen to.”

  I carried the notebook upstairs. I had no choice; it would not let me put it down now it had been found. It clung to my hands like a needy orphan.

  Well, I would give it attention. I was curious.

  Still, how peculiar. When I think back, the only Eleanor I remember is the one she invented. So why had I succumbed to serial dreams about her? Why had I allowed her such possession over my mind, letting her use it to help fulfil the twisted notions that were — for lack of a better word — her guiding philosophy? Letting her stage her frequent dramas in my brain?

  Ours was a fairly brief, if meteoric, friendship. For less than two years Eleanor and I were one soul in two bodies. That was how Eleanor put it at the time. Then again, she was a master of affected images. “Our souls,” she explained, entwining her manic hands for effect, “are Siamese twins attached at the brain.” It was because of the way she gazed into my eyes when she presented me with such statements, nearsightedly and vague, as if to quell any hurtful opposing opinion, that I never had the guts to dispute her theory, though I had always assumed that twins were alike in some way or other. But what did I know? She was much smarter than me.

  It was a friendship exhaustingly intense despite the fact that we had absolutely nothing in common. I had endured high school and been duly rewarded with grades that helped me scrape into university. Eleanor, the prodigy, had been admitted to university a year early. She could strut her learned stuff at the drop of a hat, quote at length famous philosophers and writers I still have not heard of.

  I was introverted. Eleanor was not.

  I had no sense of self. Eleanor was full of herself.

  I looked so steeped in melancholy — I have that kind of face — that people were convinced my soul was as black as my duffel coat. Manic Eleanor appeared to bring laughter and light to the world. She smiled a lot, was quick to laugh.

  I, the silent type, listened; she never stopped talking.

  Her restless hands were thick and solid, like those of some medieval peasant. My hands, slender and white, were docile, too timid for expressive gestures.

  Eleanor always said she wished she had my hands. Why? I’d ask. They’re so delicately old-fashioned, she’d say. Meant for embroidery in a lady’s chamber. And she’d smile, the way a kindly teacher might smile at a dimwitted student who tries hard.

  Turning the pages in the notebook, I once again became convinced that it was she who had directed what she wanted me to dream on any given night. God knows how, but somehow she was still in control, as she had been back then, for a while at least, when we used to skip through the city in the fading summer light, I, the faithful Miriam, hasting eagerly in Eleanor’s flitting footsteps, hoping to find the secret fountain of such joy and exuberance. Grateful that we had met, convinced that no
w life would bestow greater gifts upon me.

  Here are some of more impressions of the dream-Eleanor that I found essential to preserve:

  — “How Eleanor loves wearing weird clothes! When I ask her about it, she explains that antique garments give her access to the past. It must be true what she says, for the older her borrowed frippery, the more highfalutin her language, the more stilted her behaviour, the more calculatingly distant the look in her eyes as they gaze past me, seeking attention in a more worthwhile dimension. She does not expect a person of lesser intellect to understand such a concept, but benignly takes the time to explain it all the same. When I respond that she looks like a neurotic ghost from the days of yore (borrowing her expression), she’s delighted, for this is the precise absurdity she means to project. It charms her (and surprises her, I can tell by the twitch of her eyebrows), to find me capable of that level of insight.”

  — “I dreamt last night that Eleanor was not so much wearing, as being held up by, a constricting Victorian dress made of stiff satin, its noisy folds a faded purple. I imagined her legs dangling under the skirt, kicking the air, not reaching the floor, but then I noticed a pair of sadistic black boots, newly polished, poking out from under the prudish hem. She had draped a lavender scarf over the dress and had pulled together the look with a black fedora and sunglasses. This is vintage Eleanor. Eleanor is so studiously vintage.”

  — “The apartment where she exists in my head is endless, inexplicable and old, a dimly lit separate universe where time and space have yet to form a continuum, a labyrinth of hallways and rooms. It’s red and dark and empty, except for the cavernous chamber somewhere in the middle where Eleanor lives in attention-seeking solitude. It has a dull echo of voices belonging to people who were only ever present in Eleanor’s baroque delusions. There’s dust everywhere, a thick layer muting the glow from the various lamps tucked in shadowy corners. Strange how one room can have so many corners. It is reminiscent of a stage setting from a Strindberg play full of repression and frustration. A Dream Play would be fitting. We performed it once in the drama club where I first met Eleanor. She, of course, is still performing, she never stopped. She claims to worship Strindberg, mainly because women are not supposed to. She’s perverse that way.

  ‘The sons of dust in dust must wander,’ she quotes when I point out the dust, letting that annoying faraway look steal into her eyes, allowing a hint of superior smile, adding, ‘and the daughters too. Mustn’t forget about the daughters, must we, Miriam? NO! Don’t touch anything or you’ll break the spell. If you do, everything will implode.’

  So I sit very still, minding my own business in my very own head, beholding Eleanor’s choreographed gestures, which is exactly what she wants me to do. I’m obedient, sensing that I must be. If I, too, have a role to play, this is it.”

  — “Eleanor adores throwing lavish parties in my dreams. At last night’s party, people were welcome only if they were dressed in fetching costume and chattered ingratiatingly about Life and Art to emphasize how superficial and phony they are. Eleanor insisted on this, because she secretly hates them. She walked silent in their midst, looking straight at people, staring right through them, finding nothing in them, nothing behind them, saying she was disappointed, but not surprised. She has named such gatherings Epic Theatre. (Must be another reason why she doesn’t invite Strindberg, for how would he cope?)

  Often she’ll begin to sing in the middle of an amusing anecdote some guest is telling, performing the deliberate offense looking so beguilingly innocent that her interruption is never disputed. When the captive audience turns its attention to Eleanor, she stops singing and walks off to refresh drinks and empty ashtrays, her smile that of a perfect hostess, her hands performing their tasks with the resentful movements of an untipped waitress. In my dream last night she had invited the Rolling Stones, but she had locked them in the bathroom to prevent me from meeting them.”

  — “Sometimes Eleanor has small, formal tea parties with people long dead, using only the finest china and silverware. She adores having Strindberg for tea in her dusty chamber, that windowless centre of her universe that is like an internal organ the light cannot reach. Why a long dead Scandinavian misogynist? She claims they suffer from the same hallucinations. They both have a fierce need to be driven mad by ‘the hell that is Love.’ For make no mistake, Eleanor, too, is a misogynist. Eleanor needs to look down on women, especially those less clever than her. And all those prettier than her. That is, most of the women of her acquaintance.”

  — “With me Eleanor talks mostly of Love, of how she worships Love. It is, she indulges, and not for the first time, a state of mind. Only through this State of Mind will she, Eleanor, become Pure. The reason she talks of Love with me is because in her perceptive eyes I am a simple soul who relates, without too much strain, to basic emotions. Which, of course, is ironic, in that this is the very condition Eleanor herself so hopelessly strives for.”

  — “My dreams about Eleanor are growing shorter. It’s as if a battery is running out. She talks less, has less time for me. A bit arrogant on her part, considering she’s acting out her fantasies in my head. That aside, I’m looking forward to not being burdened with her and her predictable antics. I’m tired of her. There: I’ve said it.”

  — “I haven’t dreamt of Eleanor for more than a month now. I wonder if she’s left the dusty chamber in my head at long last, perhaps to go and hunker down in somebody else’s head. (Who’d have her?)”

  — “I think she’s gone for good. These days I wake up feeling relieved of a burden.”

  Vignettes of Eleanor, as invented by Eleanor. Was that the person she saw when — if ever — she scrutinized her face in the mirror? Did she hurry her eyes past her immediate reflection, so wholesome and plain, to some deeper place, extracting a more alluring essence than the mirror’s meager offering?

  Outside my — her — dreams, she lived in a minuscule student apartment on Hutchison. Textbooks stood in a precise row on the single shelf above her desk. Her bed was always made: matching pillows arranged atop a bedspread where every wrinkle had been erased like a dirty secret. There were never any unwashed dishes in her sink, never a speck of dust anywhere. The place was so spotless and so austere she could not abide spending time there. Nor could she stand not keeping it pristine.

  Also, outside of my dreams, she dressed dowdily: white cotton underwear under sensible skirts — she never wore pants — and sturdy walking shoes. She never wore miniskirts or make-up like the rest of us as she considered both vulgar. “Whorish” was the term she used. Her attitude did not make sense. Makeup, part of an actor’s mask, ought to have been her preferred tool. And considering that she fucked both friend and foe with undiscriminating zest, sometimes having to persuade a potential lover — ply him with booze — to come home with her, she was in no position to talk about whorish.

  At the time I blamed it on Eleanor’s upbringing. It had been strict in tradition and heavy on etiquette. She knew how to dress right for every occasion, the correct way of setting a table and holding a cup, which knife and fork to use first at that correctly set table. She knew which books one ought to have read, pretend to have read if one had not, knew how to conduct a debate about their meaning. (She never read books that were within the intellectual grasp of the general public.) She was fluent in both English and French and well versed in Latin. She could listen to a piece of classical music and name not only the composer, but opus and movement and major and minor and what have you, in order to critique the quality of the particular recording, to then compare it unfavorably to the famous recording of so and so.

  I blamed her in-your-face plainness on her upbringing, but it was no doubt an expression of her general perversity.

  Yet it was the other Eleanor who was real to me now (possibly back then too), the frenzied dream version Eleanor who wore clothes from a different century and took tea with dead lunatics. I rifled through my memories for the real Eleanor, but kept drawing
a blank. She was not there.

  I put the notebook aside and returned to the stolid present. But Eleanor, having escaped the notebook, had no intention of going away. A few days later she was back. I was tackling the closet in the guest bedroom at the time. On the floor, under a carton of out-of-date computer programs hid a shoebox. In it was a pile of envelopes held together with a rubber band that disintegrated as soon as I pulled at it.

  The name of the sender on each envelope was Eleanor Griffith. No address. I no longer recognized the handwriting, but seeing the name gave me a thrill, as if here was confirmation that she had indeed existed. The letters were dated from July 1966 to January 1968.

  Surely it was more than a fluke that I should run across her letters so soon after the notebook? Who orchestrates such coincidences?

  Is there a dream version of me preserved in Eleanor’s head, wherever she is? And if so, what do I look like? How do I act? Does she have folded into old envelopes the person I once was? A stack of envelopes stating “Sender: Miriam Duval” tied with a piece of sturdy twine. (The real Eleanor would never use a pretty velvet ribbon.) If she ever reads them, she will know more about what I was like then than I ever will.

  Some letters we stamped and put in a mailbox proper, others we delivered in person, too impatient to wait. Sitting with friends in one of the usual hangouts, we would slide promising envelopes into each other’s waiting hands under the table. Above the table we would exchange private smiles, twins with rich secrets.

  Having secrets elevates you above the masses, Eleanor used to say.

  I had a sudden flashback: one letter she threw at me from the open window of a bus. I was forced to chase it as it sailed westward along the south sidewalk on Sherbrooke.

  I release the first letter from its pale yellow envelope. The envelope has a proper stamp and is dated July 5, 1966.