Category: Uncategorized

It’s taxing isn’t it, not being in a real room anymore.

It’s like being in a virtual belly of a newly discovered underwater beast, water-handled, and mucked.

It is taxing, feeling so beneath the surface, so damp under the waterline. What is the measure of success now? 

There’s the bravado on the one side, and the blood-soaked climax on the other.

What tries, what edges forward, what renders lyrical, that is the threat of not-being in this Time of __________. 

It is taxing, but it is also overtaxing to feel what shouldn’t be felt: the empty, the quiet, the lag. The lag is always there, crude in what is fresh. What plagues this through, what parallels its cost, is all about our own narrative. 

Always behind us are those who risk and heal and fight and make and set and push and pull and dissect. It is their rendering that is taxing.

But we, too, are equally viced. Our fight or flight is nothing new. It’s the minutes between that sustain: the reactioning.

The instinct should happen in seconds.

Now, it’s just out there – a prolonged tragedy.

MONTH OF SUNDAYS, #31

Thirty women appear in the portrait 
because at the last minute Sunday #31, 
naughty last-born child, 
ducked under their wide skirts, 
hid under cascades of  chintz, satin and chambray, 
worsted, brilliantine, shantung, tricolette, 
every fabric under the sun stitched 
and gusseted as if such cosseting of the one 
who even now advances;  
as if such costumery in its wild dazzle  
would dizzy the one  
who even now comes closer;  
hid under those warm wide skirts  
of velveteen, taffeta, and worsted,  
wrapped himself in mousseline and dotted swiss,  
as if such swaddlings might save him, 
#31, boychild among women  
heating inside their magnificent textiles  
they think might woo the one 
who creeps ever nearer;  
hid among drapes of boucle and matelasse, 
organdie, velour and sateen 
cascading from hourglass waists they pray 
the one will close his hands around, 
his eyes dropped shut, face pressed 
into bodices stitched with hieroglyph 
and eroticisms; hid there, 
among billows of plisse and chiffon, 
between crepes and cottons, the crush of crinoline  
and rough linens they think might give him pause,  
whose breath the child can feel on his bare toes  
peeking beneath a hem 
as the eye of the one who even now has come,  
roves the row of women, and misses him.

 

FINALLY, TO SAY HEART

I dig one chamber, then another nearby. 
I shovel the dirt from the first one into it.  

Then I dig a third, and do the same,  
and a fourth and a fifth and go on like this 
the whole night long.  

With the stars wheeling on broken axles and a gong  
marking the hours.

Swell with pride, broken, faint of, and absence makes  
scribbled in red crayon, are crossed out in black.  

More chambers to dig, each one filled with the dirt of another.

I lay down my spade, my body, my raiment and sleep  
beside the last chamber dug, beside the little pile of dirt ready  
to fill the next.

The shush of backwash through the faulty aortic valve,  
the one-way gate into the left atrium damaged by old wars,  
the hitching gait of the relentless stars.

Blue pushes to red to blue again, from fire to quench to fire.  
Finally, to say heart.

 

PECCADILLO

I will be your little sin— 
a pebble skidded on, a knee skinned, 
a hailstone spat from an errant cloud. 
I’ll be the hint of furrow in your brow, 
an evil wish deep-sixed, 
an endearing gaffe. 
But I won’t be incursion 
without retreat, 
nor the pinprick of mortal illness— 
that gestation; 
nor the long scar of incision 
or the hitch of crippling. 
I will live for the nip 
in our last sweet kiss, the bloom 
of blood on a tender lip.

 

RANDOM ACCESS

To wit!  
A bee’s nest  
in a junked Mercedes Benz.  
How the bees got in –  
one by one  
through the windshield shatter 
where the guy, the drunk,  
the father sick at heart  
plunged through.  
Went off to death 
with just that slap,  
dispatched by the same god  
who let the bees into  
the wrecked Benz.  
Small comfort,  
that stingy buzz, 
the stinging prayers of us, 
our snub-nosed curse.

 

YOUR DISEMBODIED VOICE, LACKING ITS BODY, 
CANNOT LEAD ME TO WHERE YOU ARE.

— for C.D. Wright, 1949-2016

It sailed off lifted on a wind devil whirl that might have been 
spun from a fit of grief furnaced by rage. 
Went away just like that, the voice of your body leaving 
a vacancy that began looking for itself, inside the vacancy 
which is where you plunged, the first available vacancy 
was good enough and you down there you drew the long coils of sentences 
run on into amplitudes cut loose from the throat, bereft, down between 
thumb and forefinger and around your left elbow. 
I could follow you there hurriedly but then you fed the careful knotted skein 
of cadence and pulse to the coals blown to brief flame 
and thus rejoined and raised up you leapt away.

Spoiler Alert! –  This review discusses the ending of the book, albeit obliquely, so you may prefer to avoid reading the review until after reading the book. 

What is it like to be a bear? On Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild:

The romance of the anthropologist has, I suspect, largely fallen out of favor, being as it is a way of telling stories of exotic people in far off places; an account of “discovering” and reveling in “Otherness.” Yet, there is something mesmerizing about the idea of being plunged into a world that is utterly different and slowly figuring out its mores, and a thrill, too, (a dangerous one perhaps?) in observing yourself gradually become changed. If it is no longer acceptable, however, to tell such stories about other cultures (unless in science fiction), it seems that another possibility remains open — to narrate an encounter with an animal. Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis, is a curious hybrid of the two forms, a compromise of sorts. Narrating the story of her rencontre with a bear and its aftermath, Martin, an anthropologist, also describes the nightmare world of hospitals and extensive surgeries, and her experiences among the Evens people in Kamchatka. As she moves through these various spaces and kinds of interaction, she grapples with the question of what is alien and what is familiar, seeking a place where she can belong without remainder.

Animals have long, maybe always, been, in addition to companions or food or tools of labor or food, a source of mystery and fascination. The increasing popularity of vegetarianism and the rise of Animal Studies, the popularity of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, all attest in different ways to a larger cultural meditation on the nature of the human-animal dichotomy. What do we really know about what it is like to be an animal? How do we ethically co-exist with them, what agency do they have, what are our duties towards them?   

As it happened, I read Martin’s book (in one cozy sitting — it is well suited for curling up in front of a fire with) a few days before I was teaching an essay by Val Plumwood entitled “Being Prey,” which describes the experience of a crocodile attack. The pairing was apt: both writers narrate a (harrowing) encounter with a predatory creature, but seek to do so in a different kind of way, to call into question the standard assumptions and beliefs that underpin such tales. Plumwood writes of her struggle to resist the cultural pressure to describe what happened to her through the trope of the mythic struggle, or “masculinist monster myth.” Rather, she seeks to understand herself as prey, as part of the food chain. Her story, she says, “is a humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability.”

Martin, too, gains a new sense of animality from her experiences, but one that is hers alone, rather than a shared property of all humans. She is now medka, an Even word for people who have been marked by the bear, who are half human, half bear. Already before, her Even title, matukha, she-bear, marked an affinity with the creature, but now she is changed. Maybe: she has met what was always awaiting her. Where Plumwood’s essay arrives at a new understanding of her place in a larger cycle of life, a feeling of belonging in the world, Martin’s, instead, is characterized by a profound sense of isolation from other people.

For indeed, the meeting, the animal’s grip on her face, her jaw in the bear’s own, is one of an intense intimacy, whereas her encounters with various medical professionals, first in Russia and then in France, are horrifically alien. She is tormented by doctors and nurses, subjected to various treatments that cause atrocious pain and seem never-ending, as complications arise and she is told that another surgery will be needed. She can trust, it seems, no one, particularly after her return to France, when she is all too aware of how she has become a mere pawn in complex rivalries between France and Russia, or different French hospitals. She is visited by a therapist whose counsel is based in cultural notions of identity that Martin has spent years critiquing, who seeks to help produce a particular kind of story of healing that is utterly unsuited to Martin’s narrative needs. Strangers, and even friends and family, look upon her altered face with pity. She feels, keenly, that she does not belong, and plots her return to Kamchatka.

But there, with the Even people whose understanding of her connection to animality seems so central to her efforts to make sense of events, too, she does not belong. An intriguing feature of both Plumwood’s essay and Martin’s book is that although the encounter with the animal takes center stage, at the margins there is also the insistent presence of another form of difference, another culture with an other concept of human-animal relationships. Plumwood’s awareness of the need for humility in relation to the natural world is partly inspired by Aboriginal thinking, but while the essay thoughtfully explores human-animal power dynamics, it remains relatively reticent on the topic of Indigenous-settler relations. Yet the traces of Indigenous people are all over the text: Plumwood sets out to see Aboriginal rock art; notes that she has not consulted with the Indigenous Gagadu owners of the land about her trip. The understanding she comes to by the end is heavily indebted to Indigenous beliefs, but is presented as her own. Similarly, Martin’s relationship to the Even people is central to her story, and her recounting of her experiences. The question of potential consequences that the publication of this text will have for them is not discussed. Ultimately, Martin’s allegiance is to her writing, to anthropology; this is where she belongs, what she does.

I say this, not to accuse either writer of cultural appropriation or exploitation (though I’m admittedly not not doing that either), but to ponder the question I began with — the romance of the anthropologist, the story of an encounter with otherness, and the residue of other kinds of encounter, other questions of power. “I go close, I am gripped, I move away again or I escape. I come back, I grasp, I translate. What comes from others, goes through my body, and then goes who knows where,” writes Martin. This is the experience of transformation, the work of writing. The endlessly tantalizing possibility of something truly different, truly other, that we could learn to know.

Joy Williams’s collection of flash fiction Ninety-nine Stories of God (Tin House Books, July 2016) begins with what might be called a ghost story.  In the first sentence of “Postcard,” the narrator speaks with Williams’s trademark craftsmanship: “A woman who adored her mother, and had mourned her death for years now, came across some postcards in a store that sold antiques and various other bric-a-brac.” I highlight this sentence because I hope it grips you as it did me when I first encountered it, but also because it nicely represents the concision and density of the rest of the book’s sentences. The story is revealed, the mood shifts, clause by careful clause. Further, these moods are understated. For all its sentence-level simplicity, Ninety-nine Stories is a book filled with subtleties and nuance, layered moods and complex ideas.

Reading Ninety-nine Stories can be a disjointed, disorienting experience. It’s accessible, subdivided into bite-sized, fast stories that serve to chill or humor or unsettle. But these segments, extreme in their brevity and hyper-precise in their language, are often deliberately contradictory, confusing the book’s own ideas and the reader’s understanding. “This Is Not a Maze” reads the title of story 18, below a cross-sectional diagram of a folded tarpaulin that resembles nothing so much as a maze.

And no element of the book is more complexly depicted than the titular God. The reader might find that, having finished the book, she’s left with many of the same questions prompted by the title. Is Ninety-nine Stories, at its heart, sincerely religious? Is it, to the contrary, intended as a criticism of religion? Who or what is the God found in the text? The sporadically appearing God of these stories is prone to the same confusion, limitations of knowledge, vanity, anxiety, and inattention that we all are. One of my favorite moments occurs in the 93rd story, “Father and Sons.” When a group of wolves, with whom God is talking, thank him for inviting them to participate in his plan, God “did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan His sons were referring to exactly?”

Ninety-nine Stories contains a tremendous amount of diversity, in both content and character. We receive stories about Kafka, stories of unsettling relationships between pets and their owners, stories of monks and mystics, photographers, humanists, naturalists. There is a certain associative logic to the organization of the pieces: an idea or link might appear for a few consecutive sections before making way for a new topic. For example, “See That You Remember,” a paragraph-long boast from God about giving Tolstoy a dream he would later write about, is followed by “Not His Best,” in which God denies ownership of Kafka’s more upsetting dreams. The story immediately following these is a kind of joke parable about two monks and a garden. A wealth of themes surface and dissipate this way, many of them dark: cruelty to animals, inexplicable acts of violence, madness, the death of children—often at the hands of their parents. And though they don’t all feature the character of God, they are still ostensibly of God; Williams complicates the intent of the book and the picture of God that she’s presenting.

“If Picked or Uprooted These Beautiful Flowers Will Disappear” begins with two women discussing a child’s drowning and ends with one woman impulsively murdering the other. The last sentence, as though to condemn the fact that no one will be held accountable for the child’s death, reads, “There were two funerals but one trial.” Just as frequent as troubled parent-child relationships (in “Moms,” two women discuss throwing an Anti-Mother’s Day party) is the theme of animal cruelty. Kafka’s vegetarianism is the topic of one story. Children visit a slaughterhouse, but are not permitted inside, in another. A gardener is haunted by his days hunting big game. Animals are often presented as noble, even heroic, or as victims of humans’ needless violence. If Ninety-nine Stories is ambiguous, here’s a thesis with little room for reader interpretation: animals have long suffered brutality at the hands of humans. And all these, too, are stories of God. Arbitrary tragedy permeates the universe and must be accounted for, but usually occurs with seemingly no one (visible) to blame.

The forms, too, that these pieces take are myriad: rumors, news items, biographical factoids, jokes, parables, meditations, tales of the supernatural. So various are their shapes that they become a kind of commentary on fiction and storytelling (and, more broadly, art) itself—its history, its methods. Anecdotes about artists, intellectuals, mystics, criminals, and (most frequently) writers compete with God for space in the book. Usually these anecdotes concern these figures’ relationship with God: the messages they thought they received, the visions they experienced, the madness that others later believed afflicted them. The lines between art, worship, and mental illness are repeatedly blurred. “Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer” begins “Not His Best,” a story that proceeds to relate how Kafka also “frequently fretted that … what he bore on his body was not a human head.” Writers and thinkers are as much tortured by God as they are inspired by Him.

In “) (” we learn of Jakob Böhme, a German mystic who devoted years trying to articulate a divine revelation, in which he believed God revealed Himself in a ray of light reflected off a plate. This comes late in the book, the idea of the inexpressibility of God. In another story, “Essential Enough,” God struggles with phrasing who or what He is. “It sounded ridiculous,” notes the narrator, “He didn’t favor definitions.” In what might be the most earnestly contemplative moment of the book, “Naked Mind,” the narrator notes, “One should not define God in human language,” that we “can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God,” and finally that we must descend “ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.” If there is any way to begin unwinding the tangled knot of these stories, it is here. The confusion, the inconsistencies—these appear to be crucial elements in any attempt to tell a story of God. Lacking a clear vocabulary to speak of the divine or the mystical, the stories themselves become the language needed to understand the non-understandable. In this way, the book as a whole almost functions as a long kōan.

I will grant that not every story is a thrilling read. The book has its flatter moments, but this is probably a matter of taste. If you are inclined to flash fiction in general, you may enjoy the one-sentence-long “Museum” (“We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.”) more than I did. Regardless, the writing throughout the remaining 90% of the book more than makes up for these exceptions. It’s hard to believe Williams when she states her disdain for talking about craft, because one of the first things that flies off the page is the masterful craftsmanship of these painstakingly concise pieces.

Which is not to say that marks of artifice give Ninety-nine Stories of God an inorganic feel. Quite the contrary—there is a deep sense of reality residing in this book, owed in great part to the sheer, fractured breadth of its 99 segments. Whether to interpret that reality as God will be left as an exercise for the reader.

I Hope You’re Wonderful

These days, if I make my bed, I see your heart

untucking itself from my pillow and falling out

onto the defunct horse farm I only pretended to own

 

when you were around. Our respective continents

drift past each other in a planet of blood. You were

too beautiful to wear anything, and so you took off

 

my sunglasses. Now I live in the blinding weather

your eyes were two years ago. Would that they were a cloud.

Would that you were a self-conscious clown,

 

a slumped ambassador from the reticent side of the wall.

I wave at you with an irresponsible grin. Your hologram

waves back at me from a New England cranberry bog,

 

the only place where things made sense to you for a time.

On the world’s worst mountain, they still remember

the quickness of your eyes scanning the graves

 

of the almost-successful climbers. A mere outline of a man

climbed alongside you, lighter than a day off.

Later, when you whispered despair to me in the car,

 

love fell out of my ear into our shared coffee.

You climbed your ladder high enough

to see us both in the coffin.

 

None of this really matters.

Your shadows sprinkle the desert.

I never asked you the questions you were convinced

 

I swatted you with, never fitted my truck with trinkets of you.

Revisiting all the places we had tucked each other in,

I keep my hazard lights on. You wouldn’t want to

 

talk to me, anyway. I don’t care to meet

the horrid bird you plan to become this year.

I never thought of our intertwined fingers

 

as a ladder to anything other than ourselves.

 

He Takes His Coffee With No Half & Half

That shirt she wore the night he saw her with

that other man hangs on their kitchen chair

like mold on an archaic torso’s plinth:

“Until you change your life, I’m always there!”

 

She makes him deviled eggs and bubble tea,

spreads almost-butter on his salty toast.

Even her scowl is lovelier to see

than his own face last year, when he was lost,

 

when he equivocated every word,

smashed china every time she disappeared.

Now he’s still dying, but he isn’t bored.

He takes luxurious time brushing his beard.

 

He goes to work and doesn’t stab himself.

He drives his car not into other cars.

He knows there is no God. Is there a hell?

He leaves that to the Sgt. Pepper hearts.

 

He’s still the man. He’ll prove it to his wife.

Soon she’ll stop not coming home till four.

She’ll sit down next to him, remove his “Life

Is Good” T-shirt, and throw him on the floor.

 

After

We board the ferry with nothing further to hide

 

A passing truck means everything to someone

 

The ferryman of death stands by in his coma

 

Albatrosses hang everywhere

 

We spoke through tremors

 

You ate from the sky’s dead hands

 

Now fortunes hang in lanterns

 

Humans walk around without language

 

I fall asleep on the headstone of your hypocrisy

 

I’ve Sat on This Perch for Decades, and Now It’s Time to Get Up

I told him it wasn’t me bending into the world.

He was too busy rolling his eyes to hear.

He was a demolished movie theater

gone slightly radioactive. All the park benches were empty,

and all the road kill had been cleared away.

 

We ignore the dim bespectacled eyes. One day,

the departed play poker on their own monuments:

A haircut that looked like a pie. A scholar who stood

on his head. The eagle burrows into the center

of the earth and gets stuck there, victim of gravity.

 

But even after the militants destroy the statue

tears of blood appear every morning under

the empty pedestal. The poets with varicose veins

pirouette around the fire. The fall foliage is so seductive

in the glow. Dogs tap dance. Rearview mirrors reflect no past.

 

Lighthouses broadcast koans. More flash photography.

Temporary anathema. Mountains in the shapes

of missed handshakes. All the rotten bodies. Take your

boredom, sculpt a soulmate. You don’t know what’s hiding

beside the theatrical highway you drove all night.

 

To Remain Human

When the song ends and the light hits you, fall on the floor

and recall the way you laughed for hours the first time

I held you. I told the artist about your smile,

and he sketched the shadows under your eyes.

 

The last ice cream I bought you was left behind

on the bench for raccoons that never showed up.

And then the rain went on into the next month,

soaking the abstract paintings on the porch.

 

And all the cushions are covered with pictures of houses.

Humans spill out of their windows, roll down the slopes

and into the sun. An eclipse is coming.

Gestures turn to elegy in the dark.

Contents

• Preface • 4
• Introduction • 6
• “In the Very Air We Breathed” • 13
• Epilogue • 81
• References • 97

Preface

In 2001, at the age of 73, Maritza graduated summa cum laude from New York University with a double major in Art History and the Humanities. Even though her formal schooling had ended at fifteen when Nazi Germany occupied Budapest, she had been admitted to the University on the strength of an entrance essay she had submitted, “partly as a lark,” she has told me, when she chanced to hear on the radio that NYU was accepting “alternate experiences.”

Her thesis, entitled “Art and Artists of the Holocaust: Survival and Resistance,” opens with this description:

It was a cool November morning in 1944; we were a contingent of women of all ages, being marched to a slave labor camp. The early sun penetrated the mist and cast strange shadows, the fields were barren except for an occasional sunflower patch. The petals of the flowers matched the color of my yellow star. I promised myself to come back some day with my camera and catch the magic of this light. I now know that this ability to observe and reach within myself, the insistence of holding on to my identity and autonomy helped me to survive and was essential to my eventual escape.

In this passage we get a glimpse of the woman who was a keen observer, possessing a creative and courageous mind, determined to imagine a life beyond the horrific circumstance she found herself in.

In “Jewish Response to the Holocaust” another paper she wrote as a student, Maritza explores the concept of resistance and documents the multiple forms of resistance that Jews exhibited before and throughout the war. She extends Bauer’s1 definition of Jewish resistance as “any group [italics mine] action taken” (27) to “any act taken by an individual Jew to save his life or thwart a Nazi plan.” Maritza and other family and friends survived because of small and large acts of resistance, including, in her case, escaping from the death march that would have ended her life.

How did I come to know this remarkable woman, whose courage, ingenuity and foresight, as well as her determination to maintain her humanity in the most inhumane conditions continues to be an inspiration? Here is how our friendship began. 5

Bauer, Yehuda. The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ©1979

Introduction

One [wo]man’s experience may serve as a point of entry into one of the most appalling human tragedies of this century.

         — David Cesarani, Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944

 

Life may not be the easiest, but now, as always, I can find pleasure and beauty in it.

                                                                     — Maritza Shelley, email March 25, 2016

As a young woman in her late teens, I would often ride my bike into the small village where I lived on Eastern Long Island, New York, and down the main street toward the ocean. I would sometimes stop at a beautiful stucco Episcopal church that had two tennis courts behind the pastor’s rectory. I would stand outside the fence, watching the same group of people who played for hours every morning. I was an outsider, not only to the game, but to the cultural connections that in many ways bound them together. 

All of the players were owners of second homes, many highly educated, and several had grown up with considerable wealth and privilege. In most ways, their lives in no way mirrored my own. I was growing up one of six siblings, with parents whose formal education had ended when they graduated high school. A grandmother also lived full time with us, my two sisters and I shared one bedroom and my three brothers lived in our basement. In all ways our lives were modest.

These tennis players, however, were a very friendly lot, and would engage me in conversation, and one day, invited me to play with them. Even though I hadn’t played much tennis, they were so encouraging that I accepted their offer and showed up the next day in ragged cut off jean shorts over a yellow leotard with an old wooden racquet I’d found in our basement. I’m certain they were appalled but would never have even subtly suggested that I might don tennis attire. (Eventually, I made myself a white piquet tennis dress—and the fuss made over me the day I showed up in it made me realize how I looked beforehand!)

So began my decades long friendship with a group of people who profoundly affected my values and views of the world, those quite different from my Republican, largely agnostic family and conservative community. They were all liberal, non-religious Jews with leftist leanings, active politically and socially, and they nurtured those instincts in me. All had lived through the Second World War in various capacities and in various countries, including Poland, England, Holland and Hungary. Now they lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens and had summer homes in eastern Long Island.

Among these couples and a few single women, I met Maritza, a beautiful and graceful woman in her 40’s, a Hungarian born Jew, who grew up in Budapest and lived there until just after WWII. For most of the nearly 45 years I have known her, she rarely spoke of her experiences during the War and I came to understand that she, like many others who suffered at the hands of the Nazis and anti-Semitism, preferred not to relive such brutal memories.

Although I was always curious to know more about her history, I wanted to respect her privacy, so rarely “pried” into her life under Nazi occupation. When I was in my late 40’s, I realized one of my dreams. I flew to Budapest to meet Maritza while she was there visiting her family. By this time, we had been close friends for over 20 years. From our shared love of tennis, Maritza and our other friends nourished my growth with access to theatre, music, film and art, so central to all of their lives. Maritza seemed so accomplished to me! She was an artist, creating beautiful stained glass and watercolors, (which we have practiced together throughout the years) and worked as an airbrush artist in a studio in New York City. But she also volunteered one day a week at the Legal Aid Society instead of taking long weekends at the beach, gave talks for UNICEF and was always learning, taking classes at the New School on everything from movies to Chinese ink brush to repairing a motorcycle. Naturally, traveling to her childhood home was an honor to me!

At the time of my visit, her 95-year-old mother was still alive, but had just moved into a senior care facility from the tiny apartment she had lived in overlooking the Danube. Maritza’s older sister Dolly still taught ballet to young children, and her husband Pista was a director in the theatre. They had a two-bedroom ­apartment in Budapest, where Maritza preferred to stay. I was generously offered her mom’s vacant apartment, at the Danube near the bridge to Margit Island. Each day I would meet Maritza for part of the day, and she would help me explore Budapest with its famous bridges, and the beautiful countryside sur­rounding the city. We swam in beautiful public “wave pools” that replicated the movement of the ocean. We traveled by train through red fields of poppies to visit the studio of Margit Kovacs, one of Maritza’s favorite sculptors. I had recently read Kati Marton’s book Wallenberg and I was excited to see many of Imre Varga’s sculptures including the statue of Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who established “safe houses” and saved so many lives in Budapest during the Holocaust.

I met some of her childhood friends, and we drove with one named Stephen in an old VW Bus to the hills where their summer villas had stood close to one another. Although we did not glimpse any of their actual homes, I could imagine them as children running playfully around the orchards on long summer evening. Sometimes, walking the city together, she would recount some of the history of the city and her life growing up there. Still, I did not probe too deeply, letting Maritza take the lead on what she wanted to share.

Fast forward nearly twenty years to a late spring evening in 2015 and Maritza and I are having dinner together in an outdoor café in Sag Harbor, where she has a second home. That morning I had heard a piece on NPR about the dwindling generation who are still available to give first-hand accounts of the Holocaust. Although Maritza is healthy with an amazing intact mind and memory, she is now in her late 80’s. I say, “Maritza, I don’t know why it has always been so difficult for me to ask you this, but I’m really interested in hearing your life story.” She merely laughs and the conversation turns elsewhere. But a week later I call her. “I was serious about wanting to hear and write about your life,” I say cautiously. She demurs, saying her life is not all that interesting. I assure her that at least to me, it is. And this time she says,  “OK.”

Thus began a journey for both of us. We met weekly during the summer months, usually sitting under tall oak trees in her quiet backyard, and as summer waned, these interviews stretched into the winter months in various sites in New York City.

Four years have passed, as interviewing turned into re­searching, writing, and mutual reading of drafts. Maritza once asked, “What interests you about my life besides my experiences during the war?” “Everything!” I replied. For this is not just the story of one woman’s experiences during WWII, from when Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, and surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. It is the story of a remarkable life, lived fully whether in times of great luxury or terrible deprivations, of continued accomplishments and tragic happenings. Her story has taken me deep into the history of Hungary, learning about the rich heritage that Hungarian Jews share not only in their own country, but in remarkable accomplishments that have enriched our world. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and greatly humbled to be entrusted with her memories. 

In the Very Air We Breathed

A note about the text: While much of this story draws directly from transcripts of our interviews and conversations following those, I often used research to supply context and fill in historical information that a reader might not have. All the drafts were read by and approved of by Maritza, as agreed upon when we first began this project.

In March of 1938, when I was nine years old, the Anschluss happened=Germany annexed Austria, our closest ­neighbor to the West. Yet we still lived as we’d lived before. Yes, my father had to have some different kind of business—but he still made money. We continued with our schooling. Life remained largely the same for us in Budapest, even as the Germans were rounding up Jews and other “undesirables” across Europe and building their concentration camps, beginning with Dachau in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. 

Chapter One • Life Interrupted 

Although I knew some Bible stories from my mandatory religion classes in school, I never believed in God. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard the word God spoken in my home by any members of my family. However, had I been a believer, I’m sure my faith would have been sorely tested on a tranquil, sunny Sunday, March 19, 1944.

My older sister and myself, both teenagers, were attending a Bach concert at the beautiful Saint Teresa’s Church in Budapest. We emerged from its soaring ceilings and graceful arches, filled with Bach’s stirring melodies, and our world had changed. Massive gray steel tanks, their menacing long snouts leading the way, flooded the avenues along the Danube. Soldiers of the Wehrmacht with Third Reich armbands, boasting the Nazi swastika, strutted two by two in black boots, long belted overcoats and the distinctive German steel helmet, the Stahlhelm. Trucks overflowing with German soldiers rolled beside the tanks as well as smaller open motorcars, carrying two or three German military personnel. The expansive boulevard we so loved had become cramped and tense, filled to the margins with guns and soldiers. Adolf Eichmann and other SS officers were among them, sent by Hitler to accelerate the “final solution” for Hungary’s 750,000 Jews. Nazi Germany had invaded Hungary.

Having heard the news, my parents, who were hiking in the Buda mountains just outside of the city, hurried home, and when my sister Dolly and I arrived back at our apartment, my father was already on the phone working to procure false papers for us. He tried to secure as many lifelines as possible, knowing that might be our only chance of survival. We eventually had papers from the Vatican and Sweden as well, but our first papers changed our identities to Christians. Our false papers mirrored us—father, mother, and two teenage daughters. We lost the telltale “I” for Israelite, or Jew, which appeared on all our documents, and my father’s occupation went from owning and operating a textile factory to physical education teacher, about as far from anything we could imagine for him with his slight limp.

Could we have known that our fellow Hungarians, our neighbors and our countrymen, our police and our government would cooperate with the Nazis and betray us with such enthusiasm? We thought, naively, we might be spared the fate of so many other European Jews. After all, Hungarian Jews had always been proud patriots, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with our fellow Hungarians, and making major contributions to the prosperity of our country. We trusted that Regent Horthy, an aristocrat and not—we thought­—a Nazi, would protect us. There will always be debates about what Jews everywhere could have known or might have done had they known Hitler’s plans. But even as present day Hungarians attempt to whitewash their complicity—erecting in 2014 (under cover of night and with police guards) a controversial monument portraying themselves as “victims” of Nazi Germany, the truth is that most Hungarians turned their backs on us and cooperated fully with the German genocide.

When Dr. Pat Zumhagen returned to the States from six months in Paris studying photography last year, she came back in one of the worst times of the Covid’s devastating effects. She had been hearing stories of how particularly hard-hit small businesses had been and how many were closing never to open again. Pat was especially alarmed that one of her favorite bars and literary institutions, the KGB Bar on the lower east side of Manhattan, might be among the casualties.         

Pat had a long history with the KGB bar, which Denis Woychuk had founded in 1993 in a former Ukrainian Union Headquarters. She first became acquainted with Denis and the Bar when her son, Brian Zumhagen, had a book party there to celebrate one of his recent translations. From that point, Pat became a devotee and enjoyed musical and literary events with Denis, who was to become a close friend.

During these years, Pat taught at Teachers College/Columbia and most springs she taught a course entitled Cultural Perspectives: New York City Literature.   Denis would visit the class, adding his ample knowledge of the literary scene in New York especially lower Manhattan and sharing his own place in promoting some of the best writers of today. They would also use as one of their texts for the class samples from the KGB Reader, five volumes of which had been published of works that had been read at the bar. Pat’s class, following The New Yorker magazine as a model, would write their own “New York” stories and were given a night at the KGB to read from their own literary creations, thus joining the ranks of the literary giants who had read there, often early in their careers.

At the point when Pat returned from Europe, says Lori Schwarz, KGB Program Coordinator, the Bar had gone from being closed completely for seven months to allowing 10 people inside and closing at midnight. By December, the ravages of the post-Thanksgiving surge of Covid had brought new restrictions of closing at 10 pm and they were expected to be closed down completely once again. No outside activities were possible, as the bar is on the second floor. The picture for sustaining the bar was bleak. So Pat was determined to find a way to support and hopefully save a place and people she cared deeply about. She proposed to Denis and Lori the idea of a Literary Homecoming Festival where early readers, many now famous, would return to read via Zoom, and the “audience” or attendees would pay a nominal fee to watch and listen (Adults $18 and children $12.00). Never has there been such a bargain! Pat offered to organize the entire event, reaching out to and procuring the writers, planning the dates, and co-hosting the event by orchestrating the “Q and A” from attendees and managing the conversation among the writers with the backdrop of the KGB Bar shining virtually behind her.

The thing that Pat says surprised and delighted her the most was the enthusiasm and readiness with which writers responded. “Yes, yes, yes! We’d love to return to the KGB Bar and read for this event! We LOVE the KGB Bar and have such fond memories of reading and attending others’ readings there!” Pat shared that Jennifer Egan, determined to help, agreed to fill in on December 2, despite a commitment, as outgoing president of Pen America, to attend the group’s year-end celebration and dinner held earlier that same evening! Egan came and read from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Having attended most of these events in the moment, and now having listened to all of them multiple times, I can only say that it might have been called the KGB Homecoming FEAST, because that is what it is! Food for the soul, the in-person-event deprived, lovers of poetry, short stories, essays, and novels longing to revisit favorites as well as be introduced to new works.

With Lori co-hosting and expertly managing all the technological and marketing aspects, and Denis being on hand to welcome old friends, the Festival took shape and became a reality during the months of November and December, 2020.           

The Homecoming Festival debuted on November 10, 2020, with three amazing writers, all of whom had read in the early days of the KGB bar and all of whom had appeared in the first literary collection edited by Ken Foster called the KGB Bar Reader. Helen Schulman, the kick-off reader of the Homecoming Festival and who had read in 1993, commented, “So thrilled to be part of this series at a great New York City literary institution!” Her sentiments were echoed time and again by all of the participants who remembered so fondly their days at the KGB Bar, which soon began to have readings almost every night highlighting various genres from poetry to short fiction and on weekends providing a venue for MFA Program students to try out their work.

Another reader on the opening night, Colum McCann, began by saying, “I actually feel like I’m in the KGB Bar, the way you enter up the stairs, smoke coming up from outside, a buzz coming from inside, and it’s packed, and there’s an energy in that space that is unrivaled by any other reading space I’ve ever been.” “What you have established is truly extraordinary,” McCann stated and said he was “willing to sign in from any place and time all over the world to keep the KGB going and the literary world it created.”

And so the series began! And I can say they were all truly, as Lori Schwarz once said, “magical.” But having been asked to write of a few highlights, here in no particular order, are some evenings that stood out for me.

Although many of the individual Q and A sessions brought some stimulating questions, one of the most truly captivating aspects of the Homecoming Festival was the conversation that occurred among the writers when the last writer had read. This dialogue among writers often about the how, when, and why of writing and its meaning in the world began on the very first night.

In response to a question about the structure of his most recent novel, Apeirogon, (2020) Colum McCann said, “Novelists are not as intelligent as people want them to be. A lot of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I’m operating on a wing and a prayer. Just hoping that I get the right note, like a musician. Content dictates form and its character and language that are important. You begin to see this container that you have created. and then the container begins to contain 100 stories, then 565 stories. . . and it is a kind of paying homage to 1001 Nights.”

Luc Sante, another reader that first night, quoted Louis Sullivan, the famous architect, that “form follows function.” “I began as poet, but I write in prose… but always potentially everything is flexible, it can go any which way, depending on the subject. Sometimes, it can be fun to plug yourself into a pre-existing form… But left to my own devices, I like to chop things up. I like to make contrasts, because I’m also thinking of film, of cutting away.”

Helen Schulman jumped in with “There’s a lot of math in my writing,” and for me— form girds me—so it helps me figure out how to process my ideas. Form gives me a kind of map. I don’t count pages but I weigh them. Readers often, although they may not know it, need the comfort of some kind of pattern, of repetition—I know it helps me to have some kind of musical pattern, and then I can fit things into form.”

“That’s beautiful, Helen, it’s all about that, finding the human music,” responded Colum. “A lot of writers are secret mathematicians or architects and may not know it. Weighing symmetry, emergence. . . It’s all about putting your finger on the music—the way the stuff sounds in the end. And that’s why a verbal reading series, like this one, is so important. It’s terrifying for an author, but also vivifying.”

In response to a question about how “difficulty and confusion” can operate in a work such as his current novel, McCann says, “The most important words we can say right now is ‘I don’t know.’ In this political climate, we are in a disease of certainty. [We need to] Embrace the messiness. This stuff is messy. We can get back to the original idea that we contain multitudes. How can we become so much more than one thing? Kaleidoscopic. I think we can do it through literature. We can scuff these things up. And at the fundamental core of all this, teachers and libraries and institutions like KGB keep this fuckin’ stuff alive.”

Pat closed out this first evening by saying that personally she “enjoyed every single minute,” a sentiment shared by me and everyone, I am sure.

Another night of engaging readings followed by thought provoking conversation occurred with Amity Gaige, Jason Brown, and Jonathan Franzen on November 17th. All three writers had also read at the KGB Bar in the first years of their careers, including Franzen’s reading from The Corrections, which became a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Behind the scenes, Pat confided, Franzen was very helpful in suggesting readers for the Festival and volunteering to come back on the spot to fill in when there was a fear of someone not being able to get there.

One of the definite highlights of the whole series was listening to Amity and Jonathan read together from her script taking on the voices of a husband and wife struggling with their marriage. As Amity had imagined, it worked beautifully to distinguish these characters with a different voice and made the story come even more alive.

One question that all three writers engaged with was the issue of veracity in their work and how important the research—journalistic and electronic searches—was to their writing. Jonathan remarked that “Truth is good. Writers are in the truth business—or should be. You’re really trying not to get things wrong.”

But the larger questions, of writing about experiences you have not had and how authentic one can be in recreating those experiences. For Amity, it means talking to people who have had those experiences and then trying to experience some measure of that reality. So setting a novel on a boat sailing around the world, when you’re not a sailor and never have been, she begins by speaking to those who have ventured on long sailing trips and then fictionalizing their actual experiences. She believes writing about things that are beyond her experience is a way to keep learning, an “excuse to expand my own life.”

Amity spent ten days aboard a boat in the Caribbean in heavy weather—”it was what I needed to write the book,” even if she wasn’t that happy to have that experience. “I’m afraid of sailing!” she confided. In some ways it was “madness” to set a novel on a boat.”

The very next night yielded another combination of writers who seemed to enjoy engaging with one another and gave the audience a lively, often joyful and thought-provoking evening. November 18^th featured Sheila Kohler (first person to say “yes!” to Pat’s invite to participate in the Festival!), A.M. Homes, and Michael Cunningham (and a cameo by Johnny D, longtime legendary bartender at KGB, to introduce A.M. Homes). These readers were all published in the first KGB reader and read as far back as 1994. Interesting note: Cunningham’s initial story in that reader was “Mister Brother,” referenced during this Homecoming reading, by Denis Woychuk, who professed great love for that story. Cunningham responded by attempting locate a copy of the story as an add-on reading that night. Unfortunately, he was unable to locate a copy on the spot. As luck would have it, however, he agreed to allow us to publish it in the issue that you are reading right now! Check the lead fiction story!

After their individual readings, the conversation between Cunningham, Homes and Kohler moved to take up a very current topic of our times, “How do we/can we represent or tell the stories and experiences of “others,” whether that be the voice and thoughts of another gender, race, or generation?”

Sheila, recalling first what fond memories she had of reading at the KGB Bar and how electric the atmosphere was, read first there from her novel Cracks, published in 1999, which was turned into a movie, and was also included in the first volume of the KGB Reader. This night she read from a new novel called Open Secrets, which has a “crime thread” or mystery, as much of her writing does. The section she reads is of the thoughts and feelings of a fourteen-year-old named Pamela and this provokes a return to the conversation from the previous night about how one writes from another perspective—adolescence in this case “seemingly so authentically” as one attendee commented. “Well, I am interested in adolescence. And I remember it, maybe because I never really grew up. And I have adolescents in my life; I have grandchildren.” She also reads to her family to see how they respond to the adolescent voices she creates.

Michael Cunningham also talks about how he approaches writing about young people by thinking in terms of perceptions—how does THIS particular adolescent (for example 9-year-old Bobbi in his short story “White Angel”)—see the world? “I try to imagine the way this 9-year-old would imagine his world. The language comes from that.”

A.M. Holmes, in response to a similar question about imagining other’s experiences, remarks, “I’ve always been interested in shape shifting, the notion of psychologically how we evolve and how we inhabit others.” But, she reflects, “We are in a very particular moment right now where often people think they can only write about their own personal experience. That makes me very anxious.”

“Political correctness right now is to not attempt to inhabit the ‘other,’” she continued. But “trying on that which is unknown” is part of the creative and intellectual risk that she encourages her writing students at Princeton to take on—and more importantly, to risk failure. Homes feels, “If [they’re] not risking failing, then they’re not going to become the people they have the ability to be.” But often, if students have been successful and they’re at a university they worked very hard to get into, they become “risk adverse” and find it difficult to challenge themselves—to take creative and intellectual risks and “walk that tight rope because it can be terrifying.” If we’re only writing what we know, where is the challenge?

“Who has the right to what stories?” surfaces again when one attendee mentions the brouhaha surrounding the book American Dirt, about a Mexican mother trying to escape cartel violence and bring her young son to America. When publicity focused on the author, Jeanine Cummings, as a white woman with no direct connection to the refuge experience, there was criticism as to its authenticity and its use of “stereotypes, one-dimensional characters, and a white, American perspective.” Cunningham commented, “It crossed some lines that made some people uncomfortable. There are some lines—but where do we draw them? The first question I believe [writers should ask themselves is], “Do you feel /or to what degree do you feel you can enter the mind/body/soul/heart –of somebody not you? I feel there are characters very unlike me that I could write and some where I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I do not feel I could do that authentically. I could not put on their clothes—I have to be comfortable writing from that perspective.  [It’s]Very loaded right now.”

A.M. Homes added, “Obviously, the imagination is wildly important, but we also have to make space for people who haven’t had a chance to tell their stories. And that’s a big piece of it. Allowing for those and the world of publishing [making space] for those who haven’t been represented yet.”

This issue was raised again in the memorable conversation thereafter dubbed as “the one that no one wanted to end” on December 3– women’s night– featuring writers Annie Lanzillotto, Ru Freeman, and Bernice McFadden. Issues of justice and literary representation were among the topics.

The last evening of the Festival featured Philip Gourevitch, Finn Yekplé and Joyce Carol Oates. Rebecca Donner, editor of the 2nd KGB Reader, On the Rocks, joined for this evening to introduce Gourevitch and Oates, who had stories published in that reader.

On this last night, Oates read from a piece she had written in April, 2020, during the early days of the pandemic and of quarantining. She describes a feeling of being “unmoored” from her usual procedures and routines and unable to “settle.” It is interesting that while many people felt the freedom from social engagements opened opportunities for perhaps creative and relaxing activities, many writers, used to being stationary and solitary, may have experienced this time differently. In her essay, “My Therapy Animal and Me,” Oates mentions the writings of Thoreau and Pascal and their proclamations about living outside of civilization as perhaps ultimately generative, but Oates feels that these are “fantasies a lot of us might have had, but when we actually have the experiences of driving life into a corner, the reality might be quite different.” She says, “Almost no one I know, no poet or writer, none of us—has felt this has been generating or a fertile experience. If anything, we write less and like what we do write less.”

Sylvia Foley, audience member and a writer who had read with Ken Foster and Colm Toibin on an earlier evening, responded in the Chat space:

Thank you too for speaking to the difficulty of writing/making art during pandemic times, how writing (the very lifeblood) suddenly doesn’t seem to have a place, or maybe it’s that one needs to completely retake its ground . . .

Anyway, thanks for your truth-telling.

What tales and stories and musings might come after this Pandemic subsides we can only at this time imagine. Maybe there are generative thoughts percolating just below the surface that will be nurtured when the anxiety and fear begin to leave us. I think of the cicadas about to emerge after 17 years underground. Who knows how they have been developing? But hopefully we won’t have to wait that long for these wonderful writers to draw from these experiences.

No stranger to writing on adversity, New Yorker Magazine contributor Phillip Gourevitch, known for his prizewinning coverage of the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath, ended this evening and the series with a short story, stimulating yet another memorable post-reading conversation among writers and attendees. This one addressed the interrelationship of fiction and non-fiction and the ways fictionalizing can even be an aid to a reporter by prompting an examination of his own personal responses to an unexperienced situation, and fostering an emotional connection with subjects and their conditions. An amazing end to a rich literary experience at the KGB.

And on a last personal note, it was wonderful to see Finn Yekplé reading on the last evening, the youngest of the Festival readers at 17, but one who too made his debut at KGB Bar many years ago at the tender age of perhaps nine. Finn addressed the question put to him, “When did you decide to become a writer?” with a wry smile and said he didn’t think he’d “decided that” but raised a question many have struggled with. What does it mean to be a writer? If it’s someone who’s shared in any forum their creative thoughts and spirits and contributed to our way of imagining and interrogating the world, then indeed, yes, Finn, you are a writer.

Bread and Salt

People do not welcome the marching ranks

with bread and salt—only a manure pile

sprinkled with white snow recreates the image

of hospitality that has lived for centuries.

 

Birds circle above the border, then

stretch into a line, lifting the frontier

into the winter air, not expecting the shot

that will scatter them to the corners of longing.

 

The fibers of love and despair entwined

into a strong thread that stitched together

a family album that darkens under the falling snow

cooling its charred edges.

 

The only way to go out and meet them with bread

is remembering how the soft inside breaks,

how its pores were gathered together into a single whole

by heat alone, heat not subject to words.

 

The beating comes out of the chest, expanding,

becoming this air that bares itself to their beaks,

breathing with hidden heat

like a fresh loaf served to guests.

 

The birds carry off your heart

in pieces pronounced in different languages,

but it matters how they were once held together,

what threads once sewed them up.

 

The Road

Our victory, in its colorless attire,

without distinguishing features or identifiable language,

is a process of transition from one into another.

It concerns the most important words.

 

But first it touches each heart, to see

how its beat becomes an alternation between flowers

and gunfire–does time move in that rhythm,

washing colors and shades from the landscape?

 

A woman and child among those trudging along—

his cries buttoned up with bruises, but the blue sky

and the white milk of far red villages

are blended with his voice.

 

The word “independence” becomes a thing

people can trip over as they escape the front.

The road wallows in fragments of trees,

tattered paper, shattered glass.

 

All these objects are smeared with soot

from the blast that dressed everyone in night.

Their former clothes are hung on a flagpole to dry in

the combination of colors that once signified a flag.

 

Animals Understand

Many things are easier to acquire in childhood:

a foreign—no, neighboring—language,

impressions of day, thoughts of history

in a country divided in two.

 

There are scratches on the tree trunks

left by bullets: we won’t read these

lines, we won’t put them into letters: on the horizon

allied banners loom mute.

 

Animals understand: gotta keep biting to the end,

not hand over territory, not let your body be torn apart

—that’s why words love them,

why they adopt this method of living.

 

In times gone by, the chronicles

of collective days were kept on birch scrolls.

Yesterday, hungry children passing

through these woods chewed young bark.

 

What will the unrealized birchbark see?

What signs will it accept? The marks of juvenile teeth,

like those left on the hands of the marauders

who went through the woods to the orphanage.

 

What will the might-have-been birchbark see?

The darkness in the stomachs of children

who digested the thunder of guns and the shouts of soldiers.

The silence isn’t hard to explain.

 

 Leaving the Church

 People were waiting for some bread, but the only grain

to grind is news washed with blood.

No matter what you do, everything tastes like salt,

even the water finding its way out.

 

Water won’t get lost in the cracks in the world

that we call trenches, won’t get stuck

at the exit from the enumeration of incomprehensible words,

all troops have retreated from… and …estimated casualties.

 

The man stepping out of the church will see

the flags at half-mast—that means the sky

hooked itself on them as it descended, dragged them down,

wishing, perhaps, to press them into the earth.

 

Water follows the sky towards the ground.

After the late light, only the sound

of a request doesn’t follow the general order,

looks down at passports charred in the blast.

 

The man sees how his words of prayer

passed through an abundance of holes in the ceiling

like flour through a sieve so the stones can be shed.

Seeing it turns him to stone.

 

What can he compare his citizenship to?

To this church dome raked with machine-gun fire.

There are so many cracks in it, his gaze gets lost,

wandering them like a labyrinth inside a stone.

 

The Philosophy of Geography

 The place we live will never be an object.

It will be process of cognition—or, as a last resort,

a thinking subject churning the seasons of the year,

digesting words and actions.

 

The flame that has passed through cities and villages choruses;

it’s a whole hooting class, looking at the grownups

as if they’d throw the ashes of every constitution on their faces

just to cover the adult pallor that reminds them of winter.

 

The teacher won’t ask them about their homeland’s borders—

the boy from Bryansk in a shirt striped like a checkpoint’s gate bar,

the girl from Donetsk with braids that hang in dotted lines

like the ones grownups use to mark disputed boundaries.

 

Full-blooded children’s talk, ruddy with feelings,

stepping on the clarity of thought like troops

on enemy territory–those are the marks of the subject

to which every soldier swears his oath.

 

Outside the window is spring, and all the objects on the street

are trying to bring themselves back to life, forgetting

they’ve already poured out all their tenacity for the people—but the teacher

is only wondering what to teach children with a burnt map.

 

Remove the barrier of absence, erase the tank tracks

in other people’s soil with the tension of meaning (the approved meaning

—what else is there?) and you can let love for a country

that was never an object run through the riverbeds within you.

Sam Knowles, political exile adrift in Paris, has bought his plane ticket home. But the day before he leaves, after saying goodbye to a few characters in the building where he lives, he meets with Alexandre Bakelunde, an Australian actor on a weird mission. There seem to be people out to kill the movie star. The two hide out in the hotel room of a fellow Aussie, a writer intent upon inventing a new school of literature.

Chapter 23

Knowles left it to fate. Or what he called fate, a species of chance – anything but destiny. That was too hazy, heavy, too inescapable – too Germanic. They were in France, where the word impossible did not exist. Whatever happened next was dependent on Bakelunde remembering their encounter and making time for Knowles in his busy schedule. Knowles had the plane ticket back to the States on Sunday evening. Did the film star need him? He must have known what his family was up to.

Saturday was slipping away like the last days before long trips always do. He had business to take care of, a close friend or two he wanted to see in the evening. A short visit to Clarisse to pay the rent a few months in advance and, yes, watch mutely, without giving anything away, as the money lay on the table under her gaze. The kitchen table? He’d never been inside her and Henri’s apartment but guessed it was the pick of the lot, with rooms facing courtyard and street. Their bedroom, what was it like? Henri was an old biker and Clarisse something of an artist so he imagined a turbulent mess behind closed shutters, everything in piles, dirty sheets. If Clarisse was still drawing, there would be smudges on the drinking glasses or a pencil half-under the pillow, maybe the bed was strewn with crumbs after they stretched out to watch a film. There were overgrown plants in the rooms facing the courtyard and the entire apartment was lazy with the mismatched bric-a-brac landlords collect from every tenant who strays into their orbit.

He wanted to say goodbye to Hervé if he could find him. Their meetings cheered Knowles. Always fortifies you to know someone else is in the soup, even if it’s a different pot.

Knowles spread the bills, laying them across his working desk out with a croupier’s flourish. He stared at the money. He couldn’t bear to part with any of it even if he knew he had to give Clarisse and Roland well over a grand for three months’ rent: July, late like always and then surprise her with August and September. He wanted to see her face, to see what changes it provoked. That would be some small revenge for perennially teetering on the edge of insolvency. It was a grand gesture, akin to giving his status away. He lectured himself that he shouldn’t indulge in anything like that but knew he wouldn’t be able to resist.

Knowles went down the corridor to see if Hervé was in. He knocked once – no response. He waited and was about to give it a second go, a little louder this time, when he heard a small scratching noise. Knowles leaned closer. At first, he thought it was mice, their tiny claws scraping the floor as they ran a relay back and forth. It kept on, faster than slower. Well, there must be plenty for the little pests to chew on in the room Hervé used to store his things. But there was another sound, barely perceptible, like someone pressing a wheezy old bellows. Hervé had left the windows open, and the blinds were moving back and forth. That was it. Sure. His wife had left him so where else did he have to sleep? Knowles listened, his head leaning against the door, a smile on his lips, waiting for the words, for a groan or a cry. The narrow cot Hervé had in there was tipping back and forth. The springs were sagging, the shoe repairman was with a silent one, a refined lady, a long-time client who needed her old heels patched up quickly. All work done on premises in 20 minutes! No cries, no chants, no slaps – the man was a regular methodical hole puncher – just the aura of sex, waves of glimmering heat off a quick one a few blocks from the cordonnerie. Knowles had arrived after the seduction, in time for the famous old rhythmical mechanical, the wellsprings of life. How often do we get to listen to others having sex ? Knowles let his head lean on the door as July sweat rolled down his forehead and he suppressed the urge to roar with laughter. It was fine, it could go on forever, just like that, an endlessly subtle grating full of variations, pauses, deep breaths, bodies turning wordlessly on the cot. He had to listen closely, the silence was a bit odd given how famously verbal the French are but Knowles could wait for the fireworks. Maybe they were old lovers who’d already said everything there was to say.

He could have left. He stayed there leaning on the door and listening to gentle cries, like a cat when you stroke its ear. The bed made its little rasping noise. Their exclamations barely rose above a whisper.

Someone was on the stairs. Knowles straightened up as they walked by, pulled himself together and headed down to Clarisse’s, his coat full of money and good omens.

 

He counted it again quickly and laid the full sum in the middle of the table. No flourishes, no grand waves of sudden wealth, no braggadocio. With his version of a businessman’s air, Sam explained that he had things to resolve in the States, he’d be there for a while and not knowing precisely when he’d return – he was coming back, bah oui, Paris was home – thought he’d better pay everything in advance, this being one way to repay her kindness. Her kindness in what, Clarisse asked, leaning forward and shuffling the money with quick hands. In renting him the battered old apartment, he said, at decent price, for putting up with his lateness etc., adding whatever civilités came to mind. He’s joking, she decided. Clarisse folded the money and slipped it beneath the table, into her purse. Knowles couldn’t repress a smile. Madame, Knowles bet, was quite fond of her pognons, those discreetly wadded bills that arrived from nowhere, untraceable, and prone to be spent any way she pleased. She must have a few arrangements like that scattered around the building.      

Clarisse believed Knowles had come into an inheritance. She’d long suspected something on this order. Now he could enjoy life without worrying about some rosy future that never came. His legal status was screamingly obvious and functioned as the unspoken premise of their relationship: He wouldn’t have taken the apartment otherwise. Her belief about his new-found wealth rested on little more than the old adage that people with money never talk about it. That, and something in his body language, his cool detachment, the easy way he parted with a considerable sum.

How he and Clarisse ended up in bed, her bed, was a lingering mystery to Knowles, the only thing he was sure of, being that he didn’t initiate it, while Clarisse Roland was certain her attraction to Knowles had nothing to do with his new-found confidence or his better situation. The perfume of body heat, his air of diffidence, as if it didn’t matter to him where they sat as long as they kept talking, as well as her sense that there was another man behind the tightly controlled mannerisms, it all became an irresistible game. She decided to torture Knowles after months of stray, ineffectual glances.

They were in her bedroom, Knowles hovering on the edge of the mattress while she lay curled on the far side, vulnerable yet open, both talking in low voices as if someone were nearby, each one waiting for the other to make the first move. An hour later he was climbing the two flights to his place.

-Out! Get out! My husband will be back at any moment, Clarisse growled in a panic that was maybe real and maybe not and may have been nothing more than her desire to pretend she hadn’t taken the fatal step. She couldn’t bear Knowles just now. Well, so there it was, he thought – mari means they’re married, doesn’t it? They’re traditional enough to get hitched, as if that mattered. Knowles put his clothes on at a leisurely pace and let himself out, taking the stairs to his apartment in a dream, testing each step to make sure it was real. There’s an old Zen story about a neophyte crossing paths with a master, the younger man gamely sauntering up to the elder and asking, what’s happening? To which the master replied, Everything – all the time.

 

                                                                     #

The phone was ringing. Alexander Bakelunde on the line. He was intrigued by Knowles’ idea of a walking interview, no holds barred as he ambled around the unfamiliar town. They could allude to his being an actor but that wasn’t determinate, was it? He’d talk and express his opinions freely. Could Knowles publish it in France ? That would be the best. Where did Knowles live? This was a different Bakelunde from the pushy tyro of the night before. Knowles gave him the address and Bakelunde said he’d be there at three. Knowles stood there listening to Bachelunde, agreeing with everything the actor said without giving it any thought. His body was swimming in all the pleasurable sensations that linger after a rousing fuck. With Clarisse it was all dark clouds and thunder, the strange sense that she was trapped in her apartment and they had to go through with it… The actor wanted publicity, did he? The back page of Libé was always hungry for fresh exotics.  

Alex Bakelunde arrived at Cité Monthiers five minutes early. Giving Knowles the once over, he began walking around the place like he owned it. As far as the interview was concerned, he forgot he ever mentioned it. He stood in the empty room in the middle of the apartment.

-Is that the way you use it? For pacing, thrashing things out? Brilliant. A blank space right in the middle. Every home should have one. Pretty ramshackle, he said, nodding at the high ceilings, the peeling paint and the stains on the plank floor. -A portrait of me in Paris? Sure, why not? Shake the branches and see if anything falls. There’s something else I want to talk to you about, he said, leaning against the wall where the alcove and the empty room met. -I want to introduce you to someone, maybe someone you already know. Is there a phone around here?

-Someone I know? What was Bakelunde up to? Was he one of those tiresome people always angling to turn an acquaintance to their advantage? Knowles’ desk was a mess once again as he unearthed the cumbersome old phone with its second receiver on back. You could see the gears turning with people like that, but Knowles couldn’t see Bakelunde’s. He assumed the actor meant Chalmers Manville in Australia, in which case the jig was up. He set the phone down in the middle of the desk.      

-You have international?

-It’s a fixe. Call anywhere you like.

Bakelunde reached for the phone and stopped, glancing at Knowles.

-One of the old models.

-That’s right, Knowles said. Complete with a second earpiece in back. Property of the State.

-I’ve seen one before. In a museum.

-That’s right. Or in an old film. I’m not sure why it wasn’t chucked but it works. Where to, by the way? 

-Australia.

-Late over there, isn’t it? Knowles could see that life around Bakelunde was always going to be sur le vif – on one’s toes.

-He’ll pick up.

Bachelunde dialed the number from memory and put his hand over the receiver. -His name is Eddie Trafalgar but it might as well be Frankie Fountainebleau. He’s really just Jones, born in Canberra, and I doubt they were Joneses when the family queued up for entry. I sometimes call him that just to annoy. He’s late of Flox & Co. Talent, Sydney, shown the door due to certain financial irregularities, now operating out of a highrise in one of the better districts. Care to guess who made that possible? We’re thick as thieves. I’m here because of him and he’s there because of me. Two oceans seem a safe distance.

Guttural noises of someone clearing their throat and spitting came flying out from the other end of the line. Bakelunde took charge. -Hello, Eddie… Eddie, how are you? Yes, it’s me, Ed. Sorry to disturb at this hour. Yeah, I’m in Paris. Where else would I be? No invites to Monaco yet… Everything’s fine, production just getting under way. I’ve got the day off… Stop being a grandmother, Eddie, we need to talk. I’m here with a man, a friendly fellow. I think you know him. His name is Knowles. Sam Knowles. A very unassuming gent, a quiet one who, once you’ve been introduced, you hardly remember a thing about him. Remarkable quality, wouldn’t you say? Perfect for a spy. I believe he’s in your employ? I believe you’re keeping an eye on me by means of this fellow, yes? … Come on, Eddie, no need to protest like that. Spend your fifteen percent any way you please. It just seems to indicate a certain lack of trust, Ed. I’m not a product, I’m a human being who can very well handle my own business here in Europe. Like to speak to him? He’s here and I’d like both of you to know I know. Talk to him, Eddie… You doth protest too much, old man.

Bakelunde handed the phone to Knowles and reached for the receiver in back.

-Wallo. Who is this, please?

-Sam Knowles. A friend of your client.

-Is that so?  

Knowles listened to Trafalgar and answered his questions. Trafalgar seemed as mystified as Knowles, who’d never heard his voice before.

-Well, he likes to pick up strays, that’s all I can say, Trafalgar rasped. -You know your way around Paris? You live there? That’s probably it. Put Alex back on the line.

This time it was Bakelunde who was quiet, while Trafalgar emitted a long stream of denials, assertions and confidences. Knowles had no idea if Trafalgar was who Bakelunde said he was.

-Eddie, there’s something else on the agenda. About our film here in Paris.

-Yeah? Trafalgar replied with thinly disguised reluctance.

-I think we’re in quicksand. Not sure but I get that feeling. The actors are telling me things. Finances are shaky. A delay right now I can’t account for. Everyone is assembled and we’re suddenly on hiatus. The line-producer announced new funding, but where is it? Meanwhile they are or maybe aren’t paying my hotel bill. So let’s be prepared to open the spigots. I know, I know, it sounded grand but maybe it’s a busted flush, Eddie, one of the great could-have-beens. What? Why? No, Eddie, I’m not coming home, tail between my legs and all that jazz. No chance in hell. Come on, Eddie – would you?

And with that, Bakelunde hung up the phone without so much as a goodbye.    

-Punchy character that fellow. Did you really think I was checking on you? Knowles asked. What exactly does your agent think you’re up to?

-I don’t think Eddie Trafalgar has a fair clue in hell. But he’s an agent with time and money on his hands, so why not? If it’s not you, it’s somebody else. I’m his first client to escape the penal colony and he’s probably gnawing on contracts that I’m going to bolt and he’ll lose me. And you know what? A European agent isn’t a bad idea. When you turned up, I had you pegged for a spy, someone to keep Trafalgar abreast.

Knowles watched over Bachlunde’s shoulder as the actor scanned the papers strewn across the desk and the theatre announcements on the wall.

-Your French is good, Bakelunde said idly, apropos of nothing.

-Passable. Knowles watched Bakelunde’s lips moving as he slowly read a postcard and poster invitations to events, his eyes squinting with painful effort. Dyslexic, Knowles concluded, or borderline. Perfect profession for someone like that but how does he learn his lines? So, what was he going to tell Bakelunde? He wasn’t sure he was going to tell him anything. He was too intrigued. The actor demanded attention – he brought his dramas with him. Knowles didn’t feel like calling it a day.

The two men were only a few feet apart when Bakelunde spun around. -So who do you work for? If not Trafalagar, who?

-Good question. Knowles smoothed the hair on the top of his head, paused for effect and stared directly in Bakelunde’s wide-open, cool green eyes. -Strictly independent. No contracts with anyone, not even a detective really. But interested. That’s the truth. Now it’s my turn. Who would be checking up on you? Second choice says it’s your family. If not your employer then your family or your wife if you have one. Correct? Who are they?  

-No, no, they wouldn’t be interested in my life in Paris. Bakelunde seemed a little uncertain of his own statement. -I’m orphaned you see. Not exactly written out but politely excused. As long as the havoc I cause doesn’t disturb them.

-Go on.

-I can get away with everything short of murder.

-They’re wealthy, are they?

-Enough. You weren’t brought up –

-Rich? No. Strivers, bosom of the middle class. I gather the air is different up there.

-They’re rich, they have everything, and they live in fear. Fear of losing everything overnight, fear it might disappear while they’re asleep. Fear someone will come for it, claim it, saying it was stolen and doesn’t really belong to the secretive Bakelundes. So, therefore, they must accumulate more, to reassure themselves, and they must be eternally on guard. Not the life I wanted to lead. I took their money up to a tender age and walked. So no, I don’t think they’re after me, or even interested.

-Even if they thought any publicity was bad?    

-I’m a long way from Australia. If I have a bit of fun, it’s local news in a lingo Australia can’t fathom.

-What happens if I turn on the ancient model here and type in ‘Bakelunde, Australia’?

-You’d get me with a line at the end saying that I am the son of Rebecca and David of the notoriously reclusive Bakelundes of Upton Hills. They’re very careful about things like that.

Talking about his family put Bakelunde on his back foot. He became reticent, guarded and let Knowles get away with the flimsiest of excuses. The air inside the apartment was stifling.

-You don’t have to believe a word I say. I’m not a detective. Just a writer, a curious type. I don’t completely buy your family story. From what you say, I think they’re interested. Why I don’t know. Where’s the money come from?  

-I couldn’t say. For an instant, Knowles noticed, Bakelunde was fidgeting. -This place of yours is stuffy as hell. What say we get a beer? I’m on a small mission of mercy this afternoon. You can come. Might interest you. Another writer. The guy who wrote the film you saw last night. He’s here in Paris working on the follow-up. Apparently. he’s in bad shape, coked out, refusing to write the sequel. I’m going to see if I can cheer him up. Come with me if you want, Bakelunde added as if he didn’t care either way. -The guy’s probably bent out of shape by now. Knowles watched as Bakelunde transformed before his eyes, once again playing the movie star, the man people deferred to without knowing why – all because he gave good camera, as the saying goes.

The two men charged off, Bakelunde in the lead, enjoying his untrammeled freedom in Paris, Knowles, watching Alexander from behind and marveling at his ease, his belligerent child-like openness, couldn’t help thinking of him as gifted beyond all measure: a talented actor on the rise, from a wealthy, mysterious family, possessor of a brusque glamour women somehow couldn’t resist. He said anything off the top of his head and turned any corner he liked – who was going to stop him? They’d headed downhill, out of the French quartier and into a small district full of bright lobbies in renovated buildings, where the company names were all baby talk in the bright logos of the start-ups. Knowles stopped him. -Any clue where you’re headed? Bakelunde replied, -None. Does it matter? They made their way across the Ninth to Moncey and Chaptal on the bare shoulders of a July afternoon. If this were a film, shot from above, Knowles thought, we’re bounders rambling around an abandoned city. They walked down the middle of the steep, clustered streets where life had closed its shutters and retreated indoors. Near Pigalle they gave up and fell on the bench in a shade facing the merry-go-round at Place Ventura. The decorative gondolas and painted horses were abandoned. Paris was at a standstill. A dark-skinned gypsy stood in front of a crêperie sawing on a violin.

Vintimille wasn’t far away, not even a ten-minute walk, but the heat set them back, the streets were like walking on hot coals. Crawling along Victor Massé in the shadows under the awnings, Bakelunde and Knowles barely noticed the shuttered stores as the actor drawled a picture of the man they were going to visit.

-Greene came out of nowhere with a mean little book Sydney hated so much it became a hit. Published it himself – no one else would. A few actual living people, pillars of society, took offense, they weren’t used to the unflattering depictions. The book sold so Trafalgar took a chance, putting together money from people who don’t precisely get on with the nouveaus. The film took off. It suited the public mood. Doesn’t happen every day.

A driver far away revved a van up rue Pigalle and pulled over, the humming engine turning into a turbine roar as the sound bounced off the walls of the narrow street. The rest of the world had come to a halt. The men searched for a bar. They’d never make it to Vintimille without a little help.

-You saw the film. Know anything about Sydney? No plot, just snapshot x-rays of the city’s characters, the old crowd being pushed aside by new money. Came out a few months ago and took off like a rocket. One of the cable companies offered him a hundred grand for the next big thing and he grabbed it. Now he’s in Paris, tourist visa about to expire. Hasn’t written a line. Has the money and can’t work. Strange bunch, writers. Laughing all the time and telling anyone who’ll listen, ‘The jig is up. No worries.’ No place open around here for a quick one?

The two men dawdled across Pigalle, Knowles listening intently to Bakelunde as he went on about the writer when the small white van suddenly careened out of nowhere. It revved again and bore down on the intersection. Bakelunde jumped but Knowles gestured not to worry, certain the van was going to slow and let them pass. It kept coming and at the last second swerving, aimed directly, sending the two men sprawling onto the curb. A crowd of onlookers gathered while the van disappeared in the roundabout a block away. The two got up slowly. Knowles had had a close shave with a wall of hot air but was otherwise unscathed, Bakelunde’s forearm had a raw tattoo. A second later and they’d be cripples.

-You think he took his hands off the wheel for a second? Bakelunde asked, as if the whole thing were a joke. -It’s been known to happen.

-I don’t think so, Knowles replied, brushing himself off and glancing down the street to see if any more surprises were coming. The inside of his jacket was damp with sweat. -That was a little too perfect. He stared at Bakelunde with all the attention and guile of a dog panting for instructions. -No, Kemosabe. Someone wants you out of the way.

                                                                  #

The man at the front desk of the Vintimille had his head down, fast asleep. Bakelunde shook his shoulder.  

-Hartley Greene? The Australian? He still here?

-The writer. Who shall I say is calling?

-Alex Bakelunde. Don’t call. We want to surprise him. The deskman sat up straight.

-Hotel rules, sir. No worries – he never picks up. You’ll have to climb – the elevator is out.

Out of breath after the second flight, they paused on the landing so Bakelunde could go on with the story.  

-We got in each other’s hair a few times on set, he leapt out of the cheap seats yelping I should play the scene as written and when I told him it wasn’t possible, cinema isn’t made up of words, he should stay at home and count his money if he has any, the penurious scribbler threw a fit that his precious novel was being traduced, calling me Great Lord Ozzie Over The Top in a loud voice until I ran him off the set. Someone filmed that little imbroglio I’m sure. The movie’s made a nice pile of dough so it’s all bygones, hatchets buried. At least I think they were. We’ll see soon enough. Tread softly – he’s a real piece of work.

-You’ve got to clean that arm, Knowles said, either unimpressed by cinema stories or exhausted.

Hartley Greene, frazzled, exhausted from wrestling with his “New Idea,” leaned in the doorway, shaking with something between delight and terror, surprised by the appearance of Alexander Bakelunde, his bête noir, in the hall of the Vintimille. -Well, well, well. Bakelunde looked like providence itself, with a six pack of cold ones under his arm. Greene, not completely sure that Bakelunde wasn’t a figure of his imagination, led the way through his room to the narrow balcony and gave the actor a full-dress inspection. He set two chairs facing the narrow balcony and prepared himself for a barrage of questions.

-I was just having it out with your ghost the other day, right here in this room. I was sure it was you. Uncanny, no? A phantom double. That anything you know about? Greene rolled a cigarette carelessly, letting curly threads spread across his lap.

Bakelunde kicked his moccasins off and wrapped a wet towel around his forearm. He watched Greene, his old antagonist, his slumped shoulders, fidgeting fingers, his tendency to chew his lips when he became agitated, constantly flicking his head to throw his hair back. Unchanged. Bakelunde let the silence linger. Greene was a good sort, ineffectual but decent. He didn’t want to scare the man, and he didn’t want to talk about what had just happened on the street. Greene was in fragile shape. The silence continued while the two men sipped their beer.  

Greene finally gave in. -So, what are you doing in Paris?

-I’m with the sisters of Charity now, Bakelunde said languidly. -International division. Saving the world, one writer at a time. Hartley Greene leered back, and Alex softened a little.

-Decent part in a small film. Trafalgar got me out of Australia for which I should be eternally grateful. And you?

Greene gestured toward the desk behind them.

-Working. How’d you know I was here?

-People talk, Hartley. Paddy Ashland told me you been on the horn with him about the film. He mentioned the hotel in passing.

The two men stretched across the balcony of Hartley Greene’s fourth floor room with a view of the Paris rooftops, shooting the breeze and rehashing old quarrels, while Sam pushed a chair into the corner a short distance away. Greene pestered him for details on the film, by which he meant whether people were still buying tickets. To Bakelunde it seemed a pleasant way of passing the afternoon after what had just happened. Greene didn’t comment on his rumpled suit or the bruise on his forearm. Bakelunde was adept at directing attention elsewhere. Greene was oblivious.

-I don’t know how he got my number! Greene threw his head back, guffawing and showing off his decaying teeth. -I slipped out of Sydney without a soul knowing. You can see how that turned out.  

-Not so bad, mate. You’re set up in Paris, writing the sequel to Canoe.  

The writer snorted. The match was on.          

-Why would I do that? You think I came to Paris to repeat myself? Harbour Canoe2, the sequel in which the writer excoriates a new town with a wry grin? Will that be my grand tour of Australasia? Alterno-boy vs. the Hypocrites? All because gullible Americans from cable have touched down on Planet Oz to throw dollars at anything with a pen in its hand? Greene stretched out in the chair, his feet pressing through the wrought iron balustrade. He was on a roll. -I’d better take advantage while I can, is that it? I’m out, I’m free. Lived on nothing for years before I got lucky. I took what they offered but I never agreed to become a product booster. Nothing personal but it would be better if we drowned our little mutual creation. Maybe we begin the next film with the guy’s last bubbles rising to the surface. Who killed Philip Sanders in The Harbour Canoe? I’m working on other things. I’ll figure out something for Sydney later. His words sounded conciliatory, but his body language and delivery said he couldn’t care less.

-A damned irresponsible position to take, Bakelunde drawled while staring at the skyline. -Have it your way.

-You think so? I made it to France with bread in pocket while the world burns at an ever-accelerating pace. Seems pretty well thought out and responsible to me. You come from money; you’ve never had a worry in the world. Everyone knows the Bakelundes. You’re an actor because it’s an almighty lark. He stood up, heading to the dark recesses of the room.

–Moi? I was penniless for years, he called over his shoulder for the whole world to hear.

He came back clutching a half-gone bottle of vodka.    

The two men’s voices rose as they got into it, having it out without worrying whether anyone behind shutters was listening in.

-You can’t do that. A lot of people are depending on you, the film crew, the actors, the public you never knew you had. You’re Australia’s success du scandale. And what are you doing precisely now? Leaning back, Bachelunde’s fingers slipped between the covers of a small pile of books stacked precariously close to the corner of the desk, ruffling the pages. -Do you have any idea what will happen if you abscond? They’ll never forgive you. You won’t work in films for years. Well?

-Oh la di dah. Do you think I set out to work in film? Is it my sworn duty to write Canoe 2 and 3 and insult a whole new set of dignitaries? That’s what got their attention. Not the style, literary despite my best efforts, but the fact that my little vignettes named names, ever so slightly camouflaged. They’re coming after me with lawsuits, did you know that? Will the Bakelundes give me refuge on one of their private islands if I go back? I’m happy where I am, I’m on the way to a new kind of writing, whereupon Greene, dropping avant-garde French writers’ names left and right, launched into an impenetrable discussion of his new book. Bakelunde seemed unfazed and impervious to every insult Greene lobbed at his family. Their discussion went on until Greene folded, saying he’d consider it, but only because he was tired of being browbeaten.    

-You write it and I’ll make it a hit, Bakelunde said without a trace of bluster. Greene faced Bakelunde while he rolled a new cigarette. His eyes were like pinpricks, and he was growing more furious by the instant. He’d opened his door to a real demon, exactly what he’d come to Paris to escape. -We can all use a hit from time to time, the actor went on, low key. -You’re enjoying this, being in Europe, aren’t you? Doing wonders for you, right? Well then. The actor had sussed out just how hungry his opponent was for success, but Greene wasn’t ready to give in. He shot up from his chair and searched for something on his desk. It was his turn to attack.

-How’s the family doing? Still moldering away with their millions?

-I don’t know. None of my business, mate.

-Oh come on. They’re only among the wealthiest in Australia. Where does the money come from?

-Wise investments. So I’ve been led to believe. I don’t see any of it, or very much of them.

-You’re not curious? About the money? About who they were before they landed in Australia?

Bakelunde deflected the questions, unsure of what possible use a loose nut like Greene could be to him. -Tabula rasa. Wash up in Oz and all sins are forgiven. Forgotten. White skin? You’re in.

Greene didn’t believe Bakelunde, but he had no way of knowing. His conception of the rich was confined to things he read, happenstance and chance encounters, like the politico, not precisely rich but on his way, that he’d written about in Canoe. He had no first-hand acquaintance with the system, unlike Alex who, growing up, was used to Prime Ministers and titans of industry stopping by for dinner and staying late. Greene wanted to pry Bakelunde open on the subject but didn’t have a clue how.

-I won’t bring up your family again if you’ll stop resurrecting that loon from Canoe. Or any of them, he added grandly. We’re free men, in Europe. Paris. A beautiful surprise that six months ago I could never have imagined. A toast, Greene burbled as he poured out the last of a pricey vodka with a snowy scene engraved on the label.

-Sure, Bakelunde said, raising his glass. -But let me get this off my chest. Do anything you like. You should do anything you like, the actor said, buoyant and generous. -Give them the script or story you want but give them something. Bakelunde felt a bit like a mogul at that moment, and he sensed how corrupt it was to give advice. He was about to go on when Greene cut him off.  

-Cheers and fuck every single one of ’em, he said, raising his glass.

-Precisely but give them something. They paid you? He joined Greene at the desk, looking over his shoulder.

-A hefty portion up front, Greene drawled absentmindedly.

-Well done. If you need more –

Greene jumped, gesturing at the surroundings and cackling. -Look around. Anything in this room that leads you to believe I’m burning through a hundred grand?

-How about a party tonight? You could use a little fresh air, Greene, Bakelunde said, teetering comically over the bed and falling, his face drooping with boredom. He had no interest in Greene’s room, preferring to stare through the curtains to a scene far away, where afternoon breezes rode to town on the back of the swells. One hand rested on the hotel phone on the night table.

Later, when he was planning his next move, Bakelunde took advantage of Greene’s distraction to slip a piece of paper under the book at the bottom of the pile on the writer’s desk. Written when he was in the water closet washing his arm and folded in half, the shaky handwritten note said, ‘If anything happens to me, Greene, my family is responsible. Even better material for your next book. Alex’ 

-Boys I’m off, he said. Shaking hands with a non-plussed Greene he said, -Great to see you again. Glad we cleared the air a bit and turning to Knowles, -Talk before eight? He was halfway out the door when he paused before either man could react. -You’ll let me know if you need anything, Bakelunde said, flicking his fingers and disappearing down the hall. He was gone before the writer could tell him again that he didn’t need anything except a breakthrough. Knowles hadn’t reacted quickly enough. Standing up, he straightened his clothes and headed for the door.

-Hold on, Hartley Greene said. -I didn’t even catch your name, did I? Who and what are you and what are you about? How do you know Alex? he said as he folded himself onto his chair with his legs crossed and one elbow on his knee like an ornamental sea creature who stirs the sand every time it crawls across the ocean floor. -I thought you were part of his entourage. Do you want to smoke? We can. And humming to himself he pulled a thumb-size wad of green hash out of his pocket.

-How do you like that? Wants to throw money at me. Knows I don’t need it. Want to hear the funny thing? I had more or less the exact conversation which just transpired with Bakelunde’s ghost a day ago, right here in this room. I thought he was here and I defended myself from the assault. Uncanny, no? He finished rolling and licked the papers. He had no idea he was repeating himself. -Care to join? Who are you, anyway?

Knowles sketched his biography in approximate strokes, more left out than in. He spoke of the journalism with Dufrêne as if it were still on-going.

-So, you’re a writer, really, a real writer? The full-time variety?

-No.

-And you live here in Paris? Greene was being polite. He was still recovering from Bakelunde’s surprise appearance in the flesh. -Decent fellow all in all. Canoe has done extraordinarily well, a complete surprise to everybody in Oz. Made on the cheap, quick turnaround, unlikely hit from the first weekend. Bakelunde’s over the top. And here he is in Paris.

Greene stood up and ferreting around behind the overturned sofa, returned to his chair with a second bottle of vodka.

-I hide it there – from myself. He tipped the sheeny liquid from the bottle into two dirty glasses sitting on the desk. -These film people, you have to lie to them all the time. Such perfect lives, everything to order – their favorite bottled water is written into the contract, a pleasure, I think it’s fair to say, most of the world has never known nor ever will. You couldn’t ask for more. Always jetting here and there. A bunch of absolute and complete dickheads. They want Harbor Canoe II, and they want it straightaway and I’m not going to give it to them. Let them think I’m fucked up beyond belief. Good. Then they’ll apply their tender mercies. He took a healthy slug from his glass. -The machine was ready to pounce. I slipped away in time. Better they think I’ve gone off the rails over here in France. Everybody else does, don’t they? France is a crack-up machine for wayward westerners. It’ll buy me some time. Greene warmed to his subject. -Ever written any fiction?

-Nothing I’d haul out in public, Knowles demurred. Greene was obviously loaded on something that came before his current apero. It remained to be seen if he could learn anything of use about Bakelunde.

-Well but you write.

-I destroy what I’ve written. I’ve got a pile I’m going through. I hunt for ideas and toss the pages over my shoulder. How long have you known Alex?

Greene wanted to talk, and Knowles, quiet, observant Knowles was the perfect foil. A writer too, after a fashion. Greene had kicked around the Australian scene, published a few novels that went nowhere and then somehow struck gold with a book he wrote after he’d given up. A heave, he called it. He was in bad shape, he said. He’d been out late at a party the night before. Seeing Knowles all ears, Greene resumed striding between the desk and the window, coughing in between phrases and occasionally losing his balance.

-Not so long. A marriage of convenience. We have nothing in common and if the script for Harbor Canoe hadn’t fallen in his lap, we’d have passed our two lives amicably on parallel tracks headed to entirely different destinations. He’s OK – Greene broke stride to cup his fist and take in a long hit – a pleasure to watch on screen, a decent guy considering how stinking rich his family is – I can’t let him know any of that.

-Tell me about the family. I’m interested.

Greene waved him off. -What is there to tell? Fabulously wealthy and no one, I certainly don’t, knows from where. They seemed to have washed up on Australia’s shores après guerre with gold lining their coats. Greene strode off to the corner of the room, where he kicked the curtains open and leaned against the wall. -Their existence is a highly guarded secret, they are not written about or discussed, they maintain, one may imagine, direct access to the men who run the continent behind the scenes, and they’ve never once done a single thing to make humanity happy, or if they have, they paid their lawyer to squelch that, too, because their greatest fear is that someone may somehow get past security to knock on their door and ask for something, if only a cup of sugar which means they’d have to rouse the servants. A tawdry affair, having servants but what can you do? Alex Bakelunde is, so far as anyone knows, the kink in the genes and the first one to find his way out of the family labyrinth. He enjoys himself and pulls a long face when the family comes up in interviews. I can’t tell you any more than that, I’m just mongering what everyone else claims is true.

Greene fell silent as the air began to fill with clouds of burnt resin. He threw the last window open and resumed pacing the narrow space.      

-I’m almost there with a new book. Almost there… Everything seems different from here – from Paris. Can’t write the way I did before. Bear with me. Want more? He held the smoking stick out to Knowles, who waved him off. His whole arm was shaking. -The psychology of the individual is exhausted. No one is interested or thinks it will change a thing. Only 19th century readers cling to it, in books they can’t remember they read a month later. No more character, no more alienation, no easy resolutions. Greene came to an abrupt halt, saying he had to go to the toilet in the hall. He reappeared a minute later.

-Bit of old French there. Small tub in the bathroom proper but the toilet’s in the hall. We share our shit. He paused. -I’m not in the best shape, I woke up late and was just getting on track when you arrived. A Kurdish ritual of some kind, the whole community present. They discuss politics, chew the fat and then some guys in the corner are blowing weird sounding horns, playing a melody only goats can hear and the crowd is swaying in the middle of a conversation. Like instantly. Next thing you know the men are barechested, dancing around the women, serenading one after the other in a circle. Everything in a group, completely tribal. The man dances a controlled frenzy. He moves towards the woman, arms and knees thrust out. With each movement he makes towards her she withdraws in the same measure. Then she, forward, towards him – he moves away. Their hips are moving in concert. They submerge their identities in abandon. The men are like Assyrian reliefs, their hair piled in knots on their heads. I couldn’t tell one from another. The whole thing is traditional, nothing improvised.

Knowles prodded him. Didn’t Greene know more about the Bakelundes? It was the first time in months Knowles had been around another writer. He wondered what Greene’s idea was, what this new fiction he was talking about was. It didn’t take much to get the Australian going. Success had crept up on him when he least expected it and now innumerable suppressed plots and plans rose to the surface.

-What I think is that Connected Men, the men of our time, have killed the Man of Character and thrown his body out to sea, where he will be nibbled on by urchins and anemones until he washes up a thousand years hence, to be exhibited in the Museum of Once Was. Everything is too fast for him now. He’s easy prey. Man is a thicket of possibilities. Only his character, his reticent, tradition-bound, inherited character holds him back. The world is information now. Does that work? It’s all around us. How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking? You see it, don’t you? No one wants to be an individual anymore, they want to download the same programs everyone else has so they can interface and say the same thing the guy sitting next to them on the train is saying.  

Greene doubled over, coughing until his lungs were almost up his throat.

-So we can be done with character once and for all especially since there is less and less of it to go around. All those books, all the films: endless depictions of nearly identical characters. Messmen. Mundane Joe and his complexes – his brood. The novel is done with character. Now it can move between people, in and out of bodies, listening to the voices of a wandering flower seller, barmen, concierges if there are any left, the diplomat gliding by in his limo. The ones who escaped. I’ve even got a name for this school of writing: psychosynthesis. The body consciousness of everybody. No one cares about psychology anymore and only sick people want to know why anyone does things. Sensitive bourgeois girls with mental hang-ups (who get jiggy at parties and regret it for days after), doctors, detective types, professors, handsome fellows who inherit the estate: out with all of them. Greene began pacing the length of his long desk, dragging his fingers along the tabletop and knocking books to the floor.

Best not to tell him about Simon, Knowles reflected. Claude Simon was a good one to read for modern French lit but it would only spoil things for Greene if he thought another writer had got there fifty years ago. He wants to strip away absolutely everything that makes fiction interesting, doesn’t he? Knowles mulled as he watched the man barging back and forth across the room, waving his arms, and thinking out loud. -So that’s how I look, Knowles mused, when I’m pacing the floor. Nobody sees me then. He was fascinated by Greene’s back. Fifty percent of the time that’s what we see – someone’s back as they walk away.

-I’ve got to go further… I’ve got to get past the frigging Canoe, the character sketch. I’ve a horror of becoming a comedy writer. Greene stared at the floor.

He’s interested in the wandering souls, isn’t he? Knowles thought. The incomplete ones, the ones without strong definition. That’s the fault with Greene’s argument – he’s plunged into the weeds, the netherworld. Anything goes down there.

Greene must have been reading Knowles’ mind. He stared at the street through parted curtains.

-Have you heard that strolling violin player? From Rajasthan I think. Passes under my window at all hours. At least I think he does. I may be hallucinating. He turned around to face Knowles, who was standing now and about to clear out.  

-So, what about tragedy? Hartley Greene said out of nowhere. -What’s that? What does that mean now? How does it work? Can we reimagine tragedy in a world full of massmen? That’s what I want to figure out. The shape of it? I don’t really know what tragedy is. It’s inexorable, implacable, relentless – that’s the way they describe it on the back of old paperbacks. It isn’t a spy story, I know that much, it isn’t another little horror show of suffering and degradation either. I need something grander than how this one decides to kill his wife or how she decides to betray her husband while he’s out making business deals… I’m in way over my head. He stopped pacing and stood there with his hands on his hips, laughing out loud. -And I’m expecting you to rescue me. Greene stared at Knowles, who’d sat down again and ended up sprawling across the bed, just like Bakelunde an hour before. It was a good show but the Australian’s phrases had pricked Knowles, as if someone were pushing sharp needles into his face. The intense heat and the fumes from Greene’s joint had dulled Knowles’ ability to concentrate, and yet there she was, Clarisse, gesturing to him. He sat up and concentrated on the writer’s question.

-I could write a book set in Paris –

-Why on earth would you do that? You’ve just barely landed.

-Even better. It’s fresh – to me anyway, Greene said, propping himself on the writing table. -Imagine that – fresh Paris. Novels are just angles and optics anyway. Take my word for it, I’ve written ten of them. Where were we?    

-Tragedy, Knowles muttered as he rubbed his eyes and peered through his hands, wondering how it was that a few phrases had so powerfully evoked Madame Roland and a story he had no idea existed but which seemed to him now quite real, -As essentially defined for our age of, as you say, mass mutations, as either when bad things happen to good people unexpectedly, such as our old pals the Nazis appearing in your living room in jackboots or when a man, a woman, cannot restrain themselves from their bad habits, when they put so much toot up their nose they combust and thus, a tragedy, a tragedy of possibility we could say, of how much better they could have been if they could only have resisted beating their wife, living a life of crime or simply squandering their talents, none of which measures up to the Greeks, whose sense was that tragedy is character in collision with fate, a mystery that plays havoc with our good intentions and insists we are not who we say we are. Knowles droned on, unable to shake the sensation that unknown to himself he was thinking something completely different from what he imagined he was thinking at any instant, and that this lambent plane of thought responded to whatever passed within hearing range, in this case the obvious fact that something was happening close to him he had been entirely ignorant of and that Monsieur Roland’s appearance on the roof proved it : who was watching whom ? Were they both busy playing around? Knowles was their plaything, eager to be sacrificed in their tragicomedy. Wasn’t that it? Knowles cast it aside for an instant. -So, yes, agree with you there, we don’t produce tragedies. We prefer hard-luck stories with happy endings, live and learn. Is that what you meant?

The writer, standing, stared down at Knowles. -Ha! That’s interesting. A little discombobulated but interesting. This is what I think. Tragedy is passion, that forbidden word. We have plans – not passions. Catastrophes and concerns – not defiance. Either we’re afraid of character or it’s useless in present circumstances. Tragedy is the inevitable. I’m just working my way into it.  

Knowles closed his eyes and plunged into images of Clarisse, as if the entire nexus had been laying in wait for him, ready to spring once the trap door opened. He was now convinced that every one of Clarisse Roland’s visits had been an attempt to ensnare him in her plans. He’d been set up, he was being set up and it would likely continue into the foreseeable future: he was the fall guy for the death of Monsieur Roland. That was the motivation behind their many meetings, that explained her coquetry. He had to move before the old man was dead and he was implicated. Something was happening around him he could not explain. Did Clarisse intend to have old man Roland kill him in a fit of jealousy, and then seize the property after he tottered off to jail? She’d be a free woman then.

-I lost you somewhere after the Kurdish dancers, Knowles said.

– I need a murder here in Paris.

-You do? A murder in Paris?

-Is it so hard to understand? I’ve had a success, a surprise success for a writer no one took seriously. And then I escaped. Escaped to a place where no one knows me. But my success is back there, in a place where they are preparing to welcome me with open arms into the great and grand money machine, where I will become a Writer capital W on a weekly salary. I’ve got to strike before the offer does. Once I’ve got the idea I write quickly, I can bash it out in ten days. Did for Canoe. And why shouldn’t it take place in Paris? That tells them I’ve got bigger things in the hopper and Paris, that puts me on the map internationally. You know the city. Tell me something, anything, give me a line.

And so Knowles described what he now perceived to be a slow moving conspiracy, a collision of people ignorant of exactly what they were doing while being pulled in to a vortex. It was based on real estate and hence not personal in the sense of annoying Greene’s dreaded character phobia. The young art student who married an older man for security and relinquished her dreams, who finds a younger man, whom she does not love but who is easy to manipulate. She will, in the trial of regaining her freedom, play the two men off each other, making one jealous and leading the other into a compromising situation he will never be able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction. So much the better if he is without papers and falls behind on rent. Either he will be killed by the jealous husband, or it will appear that the husband dies at his hand. Isn’t that the way it worked? And she would walk away from the crime because she had been the object of desire and therefore innocent. The immigrant walked freely into the trap. There she was, a woman about to regain her lost freedom before it was too late, trapped between two men. It rang all the zeitgeist bells. Knowles outlined the basic plot to the astonished Greene, who listened to him with a defiant pose, as if he were daring the writer who crumpled paper to come up with something and ended by listening to Knowles’ last lines slumped in the chair with fingers tapping his mouth.

Clarisse could arrange a separation from Mr. Roland, couldn’t she? Knowles asked himself while he droned on to Hartley Greene. She most certainly could arrange one and, in all likelihood, she would walk away with absolutely nothing but her memories. But with husband out of the way, she inherited the apartments in the building and lived as she pleased.    

-Where the hell are you getting this from? Greene broke in.

-Just making it up as I go, Knowles deadpanned. But I’m a sitting duck if any of it turns out to be true. I’ll have to move and quickly. He decided to turn the conversation around to Bakelunde. Greene surely knew more than he was letting on. There must be rumors, hints, legends. Was Manville Eddie Trafalgar? No similarity in their voices. Two controls operating out of Australia made matters more puzzling. There was something lurking there, too, but Knowles was too preoccupied to see it.  

 

Sam Knowles gave in to pacing reluctantly. It was his only way to understand where things stood. At that moment his apartment, denuded of doors, seemed to be full of them and he was trapped inside. But if he moved, maybe he could find a way out. What was behind that one? (Bakelunde’s family.) He couldn’t say, he hadn’t done any real research on it. That one (the mysterious writer)? Another: why had Bakelunde fled like that? Or that one (the murderous van)? The driver had yelled something as he flew past, hadn’t he? What was it? He could see the man’s mouth moving but had no success in putting the words together. But that wasn’t the question. It was the violent tenor of the man’s words. Was he talking to him, Sam Knowles, or Bakelunde or just shouting something like, Get the fuck out of my way? Murderous heat bends people in strange ways. And: Did Knowles believe what he’d said to Bakelunde, that someone wanted him out of the picture? He continued pacing, which he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, didn’t really help anything. He should practice standing still.

The phone rang and Knowles leapt. Bakelunde was on the other end. He skipped the preliminaries. -Want to join us for that party tonight? were the first words out of his mouth.

-Should be an adventure. I’ll bring Hartley.

Bakelunde gave him a rough idea where the party was, somewhere on the other side of the river, close to the Orsay. -All right, let’s meet at the foot of the column in Vendôme in a few hours. What time is it now? Knowles pushed their meeting back, he disliked getting to parties where everyone was sober and making the usual polite introductions, with all the pointed questions he’d have to answer evasively. -You can’t miss it. Straight downhill from where you are, turn left at Opera. Ragged old barrel cannon jabbing the sky, he told the actor. -Napoleon’s in a toga marooned on top.