by James Brydon
Sarah answers the door with a flash of expectation in her eyes. Her throat is tight as she speaks. “I heard about them arresting that Nazi yesterday. Does that mean . . . ? Was it him who . . . ?”
I shake my head gently. “We don’t know yet. The police are looking into it, but there’s no sign that he did.”
Something heaves in Sarah’s throat. “Right,” she says. “Did you . . . then . . . Did you come to look for evidence again?”
There is hope in her eyes. I nod. I can’t say that I came to bring the photograph back. She points me up the stairs. A week ago, this was where I began, in Anne-Lise’s room, weirdly preserved in this one meaningless moment that became frozen forever. I sit down on the bed and feel the springs creak beneath me. Anne-Lise must have heard that same noise each night when she lay down to sleep. I wonder what dreams came to her in the isolation and the silence. I reach over idly to the shelves and flick through some of her books, scanning the words her eyes have scanned, watching the fine, precise lines of her handwriting where a passage captured her attention. She had labored long over the following lines from Rilke:
Sing nicht, sing nicht, du fremder Mann:
Es wird mein Leben sein.
Du singst mein Glück und meine Müh,
mein Lied singst du und dann:
Mein Schicksal singst du viel zu früh,
so daß ich, wie ich blüh und blüh,—
es nie mehr leben kann.
Er sang. Und dann verklang sein Schritt,—
er mußte weiterziehn;
und sang mein Leid, das ich nie litt,
und sang mein Glück, das mir entglitt,
und nahm mich mit und nahm mich mit—
und keiner weiß wohin . . .
What did it mean to her, that strange evocation of the passing singer in the tongue of her absent father? How did she understand his uncanny intimacy with the girl and the enchantment he held for her? And where did she think he carried her away to in the end, never to be found again? I pull out the volume of Baudelaire that Erwann gave her. I wonder what she found in that darkness. The gilded paper glows beneath my fingers. The smell of the leather is fresh and sweet. At the top of one of the pages, a hand other than Anne-Lise’s has written:
But oh, self-traitor, I do bring
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert manna to gall. (Donne)
I read the words without breathing. The spider love. J’ai peur de l’araignée. I read the poem underneath, “A Celle qui est trop gaie,” and when I reach the last three verses it feels like my heart has stopped.
Ainsi je voudrais, une nuit,
Quand l’heure des voluptés sonne,
Vers les trésors de ta personne,
Comme un lâche, ramper sans bruit,
Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse,
Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné,
Et faire à ton flanc étonné
Une blessure large et creuse,
Et, vertigineuse douceur!
À travers ces lèvres nouvelles,
Plus éclatantes et plus belles,
T’infuser mon venin, ma soeur!
It feels like a flood is washing over me. And make in your astonished flank / a wide and hollow wound. I look again at the handwriting at the top of the page. Precise, flowing, elegant.
Erwann.
It must be him. He bought her the book. He quoted poetry about love.
He scared her.
I place the book carefully back on the shelf. My feet cannot get down the stairs quickly enough. I am out of the door before Sarah can say a single word to me.
The car crunches through the snow. The whiteness seems immense. I can barely see the road as everything blurs into one unified and glowing expanse. My breath shines against the distance. The weak daylight falters against the glassy, dark mass of the sea, which stretches like a planetary wasteland toward the horizon. The roads are silent and empty as if everything living is cowering away, hiding from the winter.
By the time I reach Erwann’s house I feel calmer. I try to forget about the Château de la Hallière and the panic that gripped me in the cellar. That madness has left me. I can see the lines of the trees and the snowcapped roofs clearly now. I knock firmly on Erwann’s door. I knock again. The cold has frozen the wood to iron. No one answers. Inside, the house is dark.
I turn the handle and push. It is just frustrated instinct rather than hope, but to my surprise, the door opens. I step inside. The air in the hallway seems thick with dust. I wonder whether this is where Anne-Lise died, choking, with this fusty stench in her throat.
I call out. No answer. There is only a peculiar quiet disturbed by the murmurs in my own mind.
I go through to the lounge and sit down at the desk, opening the drawers one by one to find a sample of Erwann’s handwriting. I pull out a leather-bound journal. Across each page, flowing, precise characters stretch out in immaculate rows. It is the same hand as in Anne-Lise’s book. Each entry here has the date traced perfectly above it. They go back months, to well before Anne-Lise’s death. My hands are shaking as I turn the pages, looking for her name.
10/09/58
A potentially interesting occurrence has punctuated the dreariness of yet another rentrée. For once, something threatens to enliven the impression of repetition which attends the beginning of each new year. This is the time when the revelation of futility is most acute. I contemplate the prospect of the next ten months spent iterating the same ideas that I have uttered so many times before and that each year the pupils are less and less able to comprehend. I read voraciously in the weeks before term begins, trying to find purpose in the rediscovery of Kant and Plato. This year, for the most part, it is the eternal return of the same. Rows of vacant eyes stare at me during lessons. I read essays of almost infantile incoherence with a sense of rage that blends quickly into despair.
Yet something is different. I have inherited the Aurigny girl and her eyes are alert and they seem to bore into me as I speak. Already I can sense burning within her some great longing for knowledge, a genuine and almost literal thirst to read, to understand, and thus to better grasp existence.
She has a reputation for being clever, but despite the fact that she commented lucidly on Hegel today, I have seen no evidence yet of any special ability. She also has a reputation for loose morals. Although this seems to rest upon hearsay and jealousy, when I observed her today in her tiny tartan skirt and with her bare legs pressed on the school bench, she looked very much the part. And yet it is certainly not this which made me pay attention to her, while her classmates are still to emerge from faceless anonymity. Of them I saw nothing but fragments of petulant or eager expressions. As they spoke, I heard nothing other than the predictable croak of their voices. They wield no power at all over my memory, whereas the Aurigny girl, I cannot deny it, exerts a sort of traction over my recollection and draws my mind ever back to her.
What is it about her that makes it appear as if, in the dullness of the classroom and the numbing abjection of the adolescent mind, Anne-Lise Aurigny somehow shines? For nearly two decades, all there has been is the trivial, half-understood philosophizing and the self-discovery of teenagers filling the air around me. The Aurigny girl is different. She seems to disregard her audience, not to feign indifference or superiority, but because she sounds as if she is genuinely thinking when she speaks. She carefully works out the permutations of an argument or a theory rather than trying to display herself to others. Never mind that her grasp of Hegel is subtle and that she has mastered the terminology in German! (Although it did afford me a certain pleasure, watching her cradle in her marbled lips such words as “Weltgeist” and “Erhebungseffekt”!) This, though, is little more than a titillation, a trivial enlivenment of the taedium vitae. It does not explain the constant return of my thoughts to this one girl.
No, what arrests my attention, what drags my eyes back to her time and time again, wrenching my mind from philosophica
l abstraction, is the naked yearning that is almost palpable within her. It seems as if an abateless desire for knowledge flames inside her. This drive, this longing to apprehend the arcana of existence, this Wissensdurst . . . this is what separates her from the dismal multitude and drags my attention toward her with the gravitational pull of a collapsing star.
The light outside is watery and thin. An eerie sheen reflects off the snow.
I flick through the pages of the journal looking for Anne-Lise’s name. I can hear the breath wheezing in my lungs and my fingers skitter and tremble as they turn the pages.
25/09/58
Already it has become clear that the intellectual capacities of the Aurigny creature far outstrip those of her classmates (although such an achievement in itself would not merit any special attentiveness on my part). Today I questioned her on Nietzsche and I made her stand up, since the experience of intellectual interrogation is doubtless best accompanied by physical discomfort. I want my pupils to be aware of the uselessness of the body as the mind gropes ever upward. They can thereby not only understand but actually incarnate the age-old dichotomy between spirit and flesh!
Nothing could shatter her calm. She rose languidly. Her skin was soft jasmine and her hair was a torrent. As she raised herself, I saw the little wriggle of her hips and the rise and fall of her breasts beneath some clingy item that is no doubt popular in women’s magazines dealing with matters of fashion. She stood before me. Her eyes were soft and bright and her body was held hard and still. The contrast, the chiaroscuro, was quite exquisite! That indomitable posture she struck was so gloriously offset by the softness and the yielding contours of her body! I drank in the joys of her proximity to me. I felt like Donatello staring at a naked shepherd boy before him and preparing to transform that vision into art.
For a while I asked her nothing. I just let her stand like that, majestic and unfazed. Waiting did not perturb her, but not because she exuded the cheap defiance of other teenagers. She disdains the leering mask behind which their ignorance seeks refuge. With Anne-Lise there is a control, a mastery of thought which leads to a concomitant mastery of action. She stood perfectly still, waiting for me to speak. I simply let the silence flow on, savoring the way this moment had been framed: the statuesque girl who had to stand at my bidding and await my pleasure.
Finally, I asked her about On the Genealogy of Morals. How does Nietzsche define interpretation in the work?
“As domination,” she said, “overpowering, reinscribing. The meaning of anything is what is forced upon it by power. What we see and understand are the effects of power and domination.”
What, then, of the search for truth?
“It is the ultimate expression of slave morality. All forms of seeing and knowing are perspectival and not absolute. Objectivity is a myth. The search for truth is a lie; worse, it is a cocoon. We shelter our weakness in it. Knowledge is interpretation and all interpretation is an act of violence.”
So how can we escape from the myth of truth?
“Art. The knowing lies of art free us from the false belief in truth. Art wears its falseness openly. Here we find awareness of untruth and pleasure in it.”
14/10/58
Today Anne-Lise came to speak to me at the end of school. I had not expected it. The final lesson of the day had been an ordeal of drudgery as the winter night set in and lulled everyone to sleep. I looked out upon a sea of drooping eyelids. When the bell rang it was a deliverance, especially for me. Anne-Lise lingered after the others had filed out, fingering her books slowly, pretending to organize her papers. I watched her and I too pretended to gather up my papers and books long after the stupefied horde had disappeared. They straggled out, desperate to return to their identical lives with their transient fashions and friendships and gossip forgotten as soon as it is uttered.
I knew that Anne-Lise wanted to talk to me; however, as she pawed awkwardly at her bag and shuffled her feet, I began to realize that she did not simply want to talk. She wanted to tell me something that made her nervous. She chewed her lip and it was almost painful. I could feel my skin tingle as I saw her teeth sinking into the flesh around her mouth, and in spite of the numbing wave of heat flooding from the radiator, I shivered.
She finally moved toward me. She started to say something about wanting to study philosophy but doubting her capacity to succeed. She looked down at the floor while she spoke and knotted her fingers together. She looked as if she were confessing a crime to me and I said something noncommittal about how she seemed troubled and waited for her to speak again.
There was trust in the way she regarded me. Her eyes were soft and they washed over me. It felt like radiation. It contaminated me. I could feel the cells, the molecules, the minuscule fragments of my being mutating and metastasizing. I looked for one more second into the vacuum of Anne-Lise’s brown eyes and then I had to turn away.
She moved to speak and I saw only her hair. I felt its scent collect around my face, clog my nose, slip at first gently into my throat, and invade my lungs. When she spoke her voice was naked, stripped of all defiance and indifference.
She told me that she felt like she was abandoning her mother. The guilt of it kept her awake at night, but no amount of guilt would stop her leaving Sainte-Élisabeth. She asked me, “How can you stand living here? Knowing this is all you do.” She kept on speaking, saying that guilt made her afraid but that it was easier to live with guilt than with regret. Her mother had lived with both her whole life, but it was regret that had twisted and shriveled her. She would accept any guilt rather than live like that.
She asked me to give her extra work to help her pass the entrance exams. I don’t remember what words crossed my lips. I only know from her bright, open stare and the tiny flicker of joy that ran across her mouth that I must have agreed. She made some rapturous sound, not even a word, and she turned back. I looked up and saw her float back over to her books. This time she picked them up quickly. She glanced back at me as she walked out. There was trust in her eyes and I shuddered when I saw it. After she left I sat down slowly and tried to collect my own papers but I found I could no longer move.
I waited there, in the classroom. Outside it was night. I should have left long ago but I could still smell her in the air. Her sweetness lingered in the dusk. It felt like a hand pressed over my nose and mouth that was slowly, gently choking me.
15/12/58
There is something in the mythical darkness of Germany that draws Anne-Lise. It magnetizes her and holds her enraptured. Perhaps it is a corresponding darkness in herself, although there is no trace of it in the elegance of her everyday movements. Perhaps it is the darkness of her own past—her father, the Nazi, his origins shrouded in uncertainty—that draws her into the glorified violence of Nietzsche and the desolate woodlands where Goethe’s Erlkönig tempts and touches and murders children. As she quotes the lines, her body shudders and her voice lingers, half in love, half in horror, over the words:
“Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.”
Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan.
The term is ending and I shall not see Anne-Lise again until I have passed through what seems like an unending corridor of days. I want to look forward to the peace of the holidays; the long hours in pleasant isolation; the chance to work and read. Yet when I think of Anne-Lise I see my house not as quiet, but as empty. The minutes stretch in front of me in a monotonous parade. What felt like peace feels like isolation. The world is elsewhere, in homes where people huddle together, wrapped in the glow of firelight and their own warmth.
I wonder how I will get through not the days, but the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the infinite, fragmenting moments that separate me from January and from her. Loneliness preys upon me and plays tricks on my mind. I feel as if I am aging, inexorably graying, withering, imprisoned in the decay of my bod
y. My life is a failure and a waste, a succession of squandered, lonely moments. No one will grieve when I die.
Without her, I lie awake in the darkness and think about the void of my past. It has brought me to this moment unmarried and unpublished, an unnecessary and soon-to-be-extinguished pulse of cells, blood, yearning, hatred, and words. A human life like any other. A trivial thing imbued with the notion of greatness. An ant that learned to read and write.
Anne-Lise, I count the hours and seconds until I shall see you again. I shall unwither and grow in the glow of your light.
Shafts of weak sunlight fall through the window and illuminate the desk in front of me. As we move into the final weeks of Anne-Lise’s life, I read faster and more breathlessly.
16/01/59
Gloomy shadows were lengthening and gathering outside. Inside, I sat with Anne-Lise in the glare of the strip lights. Her face was pale and bloodless. Her skin was almost translucent. Beneath her eyes were two blue semicircles. Her hands twisted together. Reaching out compulsively, she pulled and knotted her hair. I sat across from her behind my desk, my eyes fixed on her. She looked downward, staring at her books, shaking her head.
She had not done the reading I had given her: Plato’s Symposium, parts of Sartre’s L’Être et le néant and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. I wanted her to research the representation of love. She looked downcast and distracted. I hardly recognized her.
I could hear my own voice talking, trying patiently to explain to her what each work was about. Although she nodded from time to time I could see that she was deaf to my words. Occasionally she looked up, as if trying to engage with the subject. Yet as I attempted to meet her eyes, I realized that she was staring past my shoulder. Again and again, whatever was behind me drew her gaze and held it rapt. My words fell on her deafness. Slowly, I turned and peered into the dim square of the window. Was it merely the outside that attracted her? Escape? Freedom?