All Around Atlantis (23 page)

How many mornings did I stand at the kitchen door when I was little, trailing a blanket, throbbing with nausea and cold, as the silence of my dreams—a silence like a chloroformed rag—thawed slowly, until I could hear the spoon against the table, the juice pouring into the glass…Sándor poured a bright arc of juice from the beaker; Lili's long, restless hands spread the toast with delicious unsalted butter. Was that really Sándor? Was that really Lili?

The night's dense net was lying slack and invisible around us in the sunlight.

Lili could always feel me looking, and she'd turn anxiously.

I approached, hesitated, and leaned myself abjectly against her.
Bad dreams?
she said.

She was made out of glass, my mother, wasn't she? Out of pale silk. I straightened myself up and shook my head: no.

But Lili turned to the window that looked out onto nothing—onto the brick of the airshaft. Her fingers were pressed at the corners of her closed eyes.

 

Yes, I had nightmares—children do. After all, it takes some time to get used to being alive. And how else, except in the clarity of dreams, are you supposed to see the world all around you that's hidden by the light of day?

But I also had dreams that were just like heaven: A little lake with leaf-shaped boats…a tiny theatre with amazing, living puppets—yes, the most marvelous park, elegant in the snow, against the gray sky, like a deserted palace, or twinklingly awake again in spring, the trees all in flower…blossoms scattering on the surface as I broke back up through the reflections.

And there were other dreams, too, those dreams that just
twist
, you know—a sunny meadow, the black shadow…

I sometimes watched you. Did you ever know that? When you began sacking out on our sofa now and then. Tossing about, emitting your little sleep-smothered bleats of terror. I stood watching you, breathing stealthily, afraid to break into those dreams of yours; who knew what would come pouring out?

Sleep was a serious business in that household! You probably heard Lili or Sándor, every once in a while, murmuring breathlessly, pleading…Even Walden Tócska, poor thing—flopping and twitching, whimpering in his little bed and sending up smelly eddies of hair…

Sweet dreams! Get some rest!
Sándor and Lili and I going our separate ways, the dark pools opening, the whisper of the trawling nets. And then mornings, watching, walking forward to join Sándor and Lili behind the thin screen of daylight, sitting all together in the kitchen, buttering the toast
…More juice? Yes, thanks. And the jam, please
.

Those mornings were like a seam, joining two worlds, one invisible by night, one invisible by day.

 

Now, how's this for a thought: Suppose you and I had spoken yesterday, after all. And suppose we'd wandered out together, talking. Suppose we'd strolled over, you and I, to this coffee shop where I've imagined you ducking in out of the rain.

I can see you—some version of you—looking at me with incredulity: But what could have been in my brain at that time, you might have asked me; how did I account for my existence? Did I think I was descended from…pilgrims? From a distinguished line of, what—cowboys?

Well, now, it's true that none of those people who hung around our little apartment talking, talked much about their “past situations,” as Neil put it. That prohibition relaxed, of course, as time went by, but when I was little, no adult I encountered ever spoke in any personal way about the years of the war or the decade or so preceding it. And you can be sure that none of the others inquired!

It seemed perfectly natural to me, when I was a little girl, that English was the language of choice for our visitors—most of whom were not madly comfortable in it, to say the least; of
course
they spoke English—that was what people
spoke
. And perhaps you simply took it for granted in your own way, when you eventually showed up; for you, I suppose, English was just one more language to explore and then inhabit.

But for those others, obviously, it was altogether a different matter, wouldn't you say? A language so new, so clean, so devoid of association and overtone as to be mercifully almost unlike, I'd suppose, human speech.

But new and clean as it was, and new and clean as I was myself, I could detect—trembling there in the depths of those accents—clues and evidence; it was as if iron vaults, sunk to the bottom of the sea, couldn't prevent the radioactive waste buried in them from transmitting its toxic, shining signals.

The child should be out in the fresh air
, Mrs. Spiegel would lament from time to time.
It's not healthy to be all the time indoors!
But Lili would only smile, as if she hadn't quite heard, and put an arm around me. And I curled up closer, to listen.

But, you know, Peter, despite what people say about children (their unerring ear for truth, their piercing vision—all those platitudes), children can't pluck actual specifics out of thin air.

Where did I come from?
Frankly, children are philosophers and theoreticians and seers only by default; they're so ignorant they
have
to be philosophers and theoreticians and seers. It's not that children disdain hard data, it's not that they're too lofty for it—on the contrary, they're dealing with as much hard data as they can! Think how much hard data is entailed in just getting the applesauce to stay on the spoon!

Where did I come from?
“Europe,” all right? That's what I was told, and that was plenty. Mrs. Spiegel might have been happy to share with me her exhaustive knowledge about who in the neighborhood purported to be from Vienna or Budapest or Berlin though they were actually from some miserable shtetl near Lwow, but frankly, Peter, when I was four or five or six, I had other things to worry about! “Europe.” That was plenty. “Hungary.”
Plenty
.

My first words were Hungarian. Naturally; I was almost one and a half when we left. By the time I was seven, I didn't speak
any
Hungarian. By the time I was twelve, I couldn't—as you may or may not have noticed—understand it!

Isn't it strange? If we can remember, why can't we remember everything? Why can't we remember where we once were? The words we once understood? Little snippets of conversation we heard? If I, for example, can remember back forty-seven or so long years, why can't I remember back forty-nine? Just a few little years more? Why can I not remember my father? I spent almost a year of my life in his presence “over there” until he “developed problems” and evidently blasted himself into literal fragments of despair. So why is it that what I have with me now, instead of a memory, is a solid space that nothing—no memory—can occupy?

I'll tell you what I think. I think we can't remember all the way back because God (to speak metaphorically) arranged it that way. And God arranged it that way, in my opinion, so we can be deceived.

 

These highly compressed, enigmatic, and largely private lyrics, anticipatory, even premonitory, in their elegiac tone and obsessive cataloguing of a world which was not yet lost, reflect, inevitably, their broad cultural contexts. Certain theoretical orientations, therefore, may be comfortably invoked with a view to illuminate…(etc., etc.).

—From
Atlantis: The Poetry of Sándor Szabados
, by Péter (orthographical-marks-fetched-up-from-the-murk-and-pasted-back-on-for-credibility) Kövi

 

The cover's faded now, you know; the paper has discolored. No matter—I'm sure the book stays modestly in print.

And how did I feel about it, how did it seem, your little book, when I took a look at it again last night after all these years? That is, aside from the embarrassingness of the prose? Well, you can count on me, Peter, of course, not to be able to identify a lot of the distortions and inaccuracies a book like that is sure to be rotten with. And it's hardly original, I know, to observe that biography is bound to be at least as much about the author as it is about the subject. Yes, that's
not
an original observation, I know. And, all right, your book isn't biography, anyway—it's a translation, plus a “critical appreciation” (or some such slithery disclaimer), which “inevitably” entails “illumination” of the subject himself. Well, I know, Peter.

Oh! But how did I
feel
about it! Hm. All right, yes—how did I feel…

Well, I'd have to say…I felt
…ambivalent
.

 

Were you aware, Peter, how Sándor responded to Mrs. Spiegel's admiration? Were you aware how completely insane it drove him? “The genius,” as she sometimes referred to him. He could detect her footfall with absolute accuracy, as if the two of them were in the forest, and he'd fade instantly into his room for hours, to write, or to read his Thoreau or Dickens or Auden or Stevens, while Mrs. Spiegel chattered on emptily with Lili in the kitchen, stalling. “Did I hear something?” she'd say, glancing over her shoulder. “No.”

Oh, Peter. How he hated to hear her go on about his “brilliance,” his “originality,” his “place in European letters”! Even when his work was available in German, I once heard him say to Lili, could Mrs. Spiegel have—in any meaningful sense of the word—“read” any? The woman's brain, unfortunately, was a Möbius strip of clichés; things went in, he assumed, in working order, but emulsified there, through a continuous, twisting process of Mrs. Spiegelization. Besides,
what
place in European letters? No Europe, no letters, no place. He had no place anywhere but in our apartment, thank you, he added to me. And that was the only place he wanted.

I remember the way Lili patted his arm, and smiled the lazy, inscrutable smile that kept all those men prisoner on our sofa or tamed them to the yoke of irksome tasks and errands, like picking up groceries or fixing the lamp or taking me to the playground.

When you first met us, were you flabbergasted that Lili never became irritable with Mrs. Spiegel? That Lili always had time for Mrs. Spiegel? Did you realize that Lili actually chided me for mimicking the irresistibly mimicable Mrs. Spiegel? Did you marvel how the two of them used to sit at the kitchen table over interminable tea and cookies?

When I was little I used to sit there at Lili's side, supplied with cookies, myself, and a teacup filled with milk. It made me truly sick, Peter, it made me furious, to look at Mrs. Spiegel's arm, just lying there casually on the table—her sleeve riding up over the blue brand that looked so similar to the numbers stamped on the meat at the grocery store: Did Mrs. Spiegel want to be a human being, or did she prefer to be a slab of meat? The truth is, it was as though that dark number of hers could activate Lili's, even under the “decent” (as I felt) cover of her clothing or bracelets.

They never spoke about the past, really, either, those two. At least when I was around, they never, to use Neil's formula, had “a normal conversation” about their “past situation.”

And what do you suppose he
meant
by that, Peter?
A normal conversation about her past situation—
It seems to be one of those things words can construct independently of meaning, doesn't it? Because how could there have been such a thing?

In fact, I don't remember anything that sounded particularly like “a normal conversation” about
anything
! Mr. Korda's arthritis, what the hairdresser said about her son's girlfriend—no subject was sufficiently mundane as to resist a septic influence.

I submit to you, Peter, this example: The day Lili found Walden Tócska in the street and brought him home. Well, as you would imagine, Mrs. Spiegel was simply horrified. “But, darling!” she said. “The beast is filthy!”

Not so, Lili said. That very morning, we'd gone to the vet, where Tócska had received numerous shots and his leg was bound up; we'd bathed and deflead him all afternoon.

But there was no telling where an animal like that had been! What habits it had acquired, or what secret diseases, clever enough to evade the vet's medications, it might be harboring, to spread among us at any instant!

Absurd, Lili said; not scientific. Besides, every child should have a pet, and clearly—she shot a guilty look at me—Anna already adored this dog.

Adored
, Mrs. Spiegel protested—though I'd steeled myself to pat, illustratively, the great, snoring, quivering heap of hair—it was completely obvious that, on the contrary, the child was terrified!

Lili inhaled deeply, and put her palms down on the table in front of her. “Lise, are you saying that poor dog should be…”

No, but of course not! Mein Gott! (And both women, Peter, had gone absolutely white.) Mrs. Spiegel hadn't
meant…
She had only meant…She had meant only…

And then, Peter, there was just a long, long silence, which Lili brought to a close with a sigh, and that was that.

I mean,
Lili
allowed something terrible to develop? It was
Lili
who created an atmosphere of violence and danger?
Lili
was responsible for an atmosphere of violence and danger?

 

If the silences around our household were vivid and eloquent, was that Lili's fault? Look, I said to Neil, we were all careful back then. And wouldn't you have been, in my place? It was as if Lili were sleepwalking over the abyss of her own life. What if she were to wake? What if I were to wake her?

What about us, I asked him—Did he think he and I were starting Eric out on some perfect, pure, unpopulated, white-sand beach? Did he actually believe Eric was not going to bear some indelible, if illegible inscription?

Neil looked at me steadily, wagged a finger, and lowered one eyelid. I'll get back to you on that, he said.