In the King's Arms (8 page)

Lily often kissed Julian with a passion he did not yet completely feel, pulling his mouth apart with her jaw, prying his secretive face wide open so it looked wondering, and perhaps he did wonder.
Then, going suddenly soft, she would let him prod her drowsy lips, hanging her head as though drugged.

He felt himself become a man of meaning, a participant in an old rite. Lily made him quite mad. He would show her just how mad; he would cram her full of his madness. And then, the yielding of her cool skin would appease his spirit, domesticate the fierce young Briton. It was on old rite, with keen new communicants, and an unknown outcome.

 

 

 

A
STORY Lily’s mother had told her used to wander in and out of her mind. The story took place in Germany. Lily’s mother had then been a young girl, a teenager of about sixteen. Her family was beginning to disappear because it was Jewish: mischievous Karl, who played in the streets despite every warning of traffic, and lately, of Nazis, and whose supper had remained on the table for days before anyone had had the heart to throw it into the trash; tired, old Papa, who always grumbled about his bad back, suddenly packed off to labor camp, somewhere; Grandmama, whom someone had pushed off the sidewalk, who now remained listless and still in her bed. It was an orchestrated time, as far as the Jews were concerned, although between the cry here, and the rumbling threat there, many hours remained to be spent in a sort of willful deafness.

The only picture which had survived that time and made it to the New World showed an elaborately crinolined infant (Lily’s mother) sitting like a doll, as was then the fashion layer after layer of petticoat, jointless arms and legs flung out by the photographer, who must have said a merry thing as he tucked under his hood, and bald, except for a sepia tuft. So Lily had to imagine for herself the pale, serious gaze of the girl in the story, the glossy coronet of hair, the decent pinafore dress.

Lily’s mother had eventually been transported to a labor camp that contained about a thousand women. Her own mother was taken that same day, and they never saw each other again, alive or dead. The young girl was ordered to go right. She noticed, looking backward, that her mother had been ordered to go left, and was walking toward a group of old women. Old women: it was hard to imagine what sort of work they were intended to do. It could not possibly be outdoor work, for it was winter. Much later, Lily would imagine the death of her grandmother as sanctuary from the bitter cold.

Lily’s mother was one of the youngest in the camp. Children younger than she had been sent off elsewhere. She had cried like a child when all her auburn hair was cut off. She saw it floating down all around her, then briskly swept up and collected. She asked the perfunctory woman official where the enormous bags full of hair were taken. “They fill our mattresses and bedding,” said the woman. “You see how nothing is wasted.” Her voice was raised, declaiming to the antiseptic corners of the room.

The girl toiled outdoors. Like most of the women, she was assigned to dig ditches in the frozen ground. Her naked head felt cold, and her thin shift fluttered carelessly in the wind. Each day, in the snowy dawn, a thousand bald scarecrow shapes emerged. They looked like neither women nor men. With no mirror, it took the girl a long time to understand that she looked just like any one of those scarecrows about her. But some were dying; some withered more quickly in the frost than others. At the harsh morning “Appel:” UUUUPPPPP!!!! Lily’s mother noticed the limp slugabeds that had struggled to their feet only the day before. If they were not yet dead, but only ill, these women were taken out and shot.

Each day, the roll call consumed more and more time, for the
pauses between unclaimed names grew longer, and more names went unclaimed. The S.S. officers, livid, would swivel their eyes left and right as the unclaimed names echoed into silence in the air. Soon, too many names produced this mocking nothingness. A decision was made: the women would be given coats. The coats would be sewn from scraps of confiscated Jewish clothing. Sometimes, the girl imagined, a scrap may have come from a threadbare portion of a Nazi’s uniform.

“You see, Lily? They slept cozy on my hair, but maybe I put their clothes on my back.” Here, Gretta would smile a pearly smile. “We were very near to each other all the time, Lily.”

Lily had often pondered this concept. “Yes,” her mother persisted. “Close. We shared the same crazy world. We were their shadow, and they were ours. When we had winter, they had winter. Near us grew the
Tannenbaums
they chopped down for their Christmas. On the holiest night of their year I was crying: let them learn to be merciful to us, doesn’t their Jesus tell them to be merciful? And even that night, as women were dying, they slept cozy on our hair. They were always so near, Lily. I could feel their warm breath. I could smell their hands on my clothing. Very, very near.”

The first time Lily had heard this, it had given her a strange, almost erotic shock, as though a murderer, asleep at her side, had let a senseless hand drift familiarly to her throat and lie there, weighing softly down.

“We were not told about the coats beforehand. They were in a large shack and we stood outside, scared. No one could imagine that something good was waiting for us inside there. The doors had heavy padlocks that the Nazis freed up with great ceremony. Lily, when we saw what was there!

“Some women, I don’t know how many, became a little crazy.
They began to throw themselves into the warm piles. Rolling in them. Some pulled at the coats, ripping the poorly sewn sleeves off. Buttons rolled on the floor. The fever spread until it seemed as though the women were dancing within a large bonfire: coats swirled like flames around their shoulders. It no longer mattered what a coat was for, what the practical use of such a garment was, that it was supposed to keep women like us alive to work a little longer in the cold. Time meant nothing anymore; it seemed like the last day in earth; nothing had a sensible purpose anymore. It was a crazy freedom.

“If anyone had started screaming, Lily . . . . If anyone had started screaming in such a bonfire, I believe to this day you would still hear that scream. You would not be able to get it out of your ears.

“Somehow, I felt very calm inside. I could see everything very clearly. I even noticed how some women stood apart from the mass, hesitating, wanting a coat, trying every now and then to get to the piles. But they couldn’t. The swarming didn’t stop. I began to faint. You know, you notice things out of all proportion when you lose consciousness. I saw a trail of grey flannel. I took notice and I thought: this coat is the one for me. After all the swirling and the grabbing stops, there will be a grey coat for Gretta.

“All of a sudden, a big hand slapped my face so violently that my nose sprayed with blood. I could not see the face behind the hand; the blood flew into my nose, my eyes, my mouth. I felt a tooth go down my throat and began to choke.

“Then I saw the Nazi’s face. It remained right in front of mine, hovering as I tried to catch my breath. As though . . . unsure of something. He looked like a shy boy who wanted to ask me to dance. He seemed young—not five years older than I was. It was so peculiar, staring into his face as he stared into mine. I remember his
sharp nose, and little dark whiskers. I remember thinking—he has black hair like a Jew.

“I felt him put his hand on my shoulder. The other hand he tightened into a fist, as though he would punch me. But I saw he kept it down, by his side. We were staring into each other’s eyes, and he suddenly spoke:

“’But
why
did you grab?’

“His voice was angry, but confused, too, and his face was lost, uncomfortable. He seemed bewildered. Why did we grab? He didn’t really know this kind of person who would act so passionately. Why didn’t we behave like machines? Why didn’t everything go as planned? Why did so many women die of cold, and now they had to give us coats? I thought of how we seemed to this junior Nazi with his simple orders. We must have been a horrifying surprise. Mere beatings could not fix all this disorder, these surprises, these grabbings.

“I looked at the boy. He was trembling with concentration. He stared at me so hard, as though to fix his lesson in my brain. But I hadn’t grabbed. What should I have said? I was afraid the hand would hit me again if I opened my mouth. But I finally said, ‘Please forgive me.’ He acted as though he could not hear my voice. His stare did not alter. Then I saw him widen his eyes. He was looking at my naked head, staring as though he’d never seen a girl with her hair shaved off before.

“Lily, if you could only see how pretty I was before; well, I was young and vain. I felt as though I had been given the mirror I had been missing. I saw my ugliness in his eyes. It was more humiliating than any slap. Suddenly I raised up my voice. I was also crazy, like the others, I suppose, and said, ‘You don’t even see that I am not the right person. I grabbed nothing! You have bloodied my face for nothing! You have made a cruel mistake!’

“For this kind of outburst a Nazi would kill a Jew as though he were a fly.

“I could tell that he believed me. In relief, I began to sob, covering my face with my hands. But just as I did so, I felt him move one step away from me. I looked up and saw him raise his pistol. He had a terrifying expression on his face.

“You know, Lily, I suddenly stopped caring. I closed my eyes and thought, it’s all the same to me, just as it is to you. I am one of the ones who grabbed. I am one of the others with the naked heads. I had hair and I haven’t. I grabbed and I didn’t. I’m alive and I’m dead. I’m young and I’m old. Yes and no and yes and no and yes and no and yes and no. I felt like laughing at him. Live or die? A silly riddle!

“I opened my eyes to look straight at him. He looked at me. Then he raised the gun to his own head, hesitated. I kept looking. But he didn’t shoot himself. He began to cry, without a noise, like this.”

Gretta opened her mouth wide, as though gasping for air. Her eyes went wild for a moment, trapped with the memory. Lily saw the Nazi in her eyes.

“I thought about grabbing the gun from him and killing him. It was just a thought, of course. He wasn’t such a good murderer, and neither was I.”

“And then?”

“What ‘then’?” said her mother, returning to her awful calmness. “You think he proposed to me then? You think we fell in love and got married like a nice Romeo and Juliet?”

“No, but—”

“Did he raise the dead from the earth? The nightmare went on for many more years,” said her mother. “The nightmare is going on
still, in me. Do you think I don’t feel it now, when I tell you? Only now, over there, a forest grows from the bloody ground, and from there they cut their Christmas trees for their martyred Lord. One more dead Jew, more, less . . . .”

“But don’t you feel better knowing that a German cried over you?”

Gretta cut her: “Only a forest grows from the bloody ground,” she repeated. “And he’s alive to whistle in it. Unless some real Nazi eventually shot my junior soft-heart for his moment of weakness.”

Lily had always hoped the poor man had survived somewhere. In her world, such incongruous people were precious and necessary, lovable and even holy.

 

 

T
HE VOLUPTUOUS SPLENDOR of the holiday season had nearly hypnotized Lily by the time Christmas day arrived. Christmas left her to her own imaginative resources; the family had it all “under their belt,” and did not need to resort to conversation about meanings. Lily’s thoughts bobbed freely, a dinghy on the seas. It was precisely when she tried to see things through their eyes that she went furthest abroad, and away from their actual notions.

For instance, she tried to see Jesus as she thought they must, as the martyred child of God. She tried to grasp the notion that death did not really conquer him (it helped her to think of the Jews; death never really conquered them, either). She thought of Mother Mary. She’d been summoned by God to a strange yet homely service: to augment the universal spirit with the warmth of her female body, to sacrifice her womb to the powers that must be. She had assented. Shy Miriam, Virgin of Israel, eyes bright with pure trust.

If Jesus had sacrificed himself for mankind, why, so had Mary. She had said: if that’s what is needed to help my fellow wanderers on this painful earth, then here I am, Lord, open to your service. Mary, thought Lily, was like Queen Esther, the Jewish Queen of Persia. Esther had begun her life unassumingly, humbly. But then she had been called upon. In order to save the Jewish people from annihilation at the hands of King Ahasuerus (who had been evilly
counseled by Haman), she went before the King himself, parading her loveliness, and found special favor in his eyes. He took her into his arms and married her; he was smitten. (Julian had fallen under the same auspicious spell, thought Lily.)

They took to their Jewesses, as God took to Mary, and a vast forgiveness became possible. After all, love allows the widest, most extravagant mercies. When King Ahasuerus was in Esther’s thrall, and she in his embrace, she told him: the people you are being counseled to destroy are my people, my flesh and my blood.
Kill them and you will kill what you love. Be merciful and love will be infinite
. The King listened and understood. He spared the Jews, and killed his remorseless advisor.

So it was that one fragile Jewess had redeemed her kinsmen. So it had been with Mary-Miriam. Even God conceded that to make his own seductive son he would need a woman’s soft womb. He would not go it alone this time, plucking a rib as an afterthought. No. Now he saw the power of the magic vessel, Woman; in her, he could forge his mortal interpleader. A stern King needs his tender maid. This was not chilly old Adam’s time. Jesus was to begin life as a vibrant quickening egg, warmed to life by his mother’s compassionate flesh.