Trust (11 page)

And upon what Holiness cannot build, Worldliness is founded. Now when Holiness essays introspection and ends with self-deception, it gives birth to Worldliness. That moment when Holiness, with whatsoever good will, enters the museum hall—in the guise, oh, of the quaint artifact, grail shown under glass, for instance, or miracle-working saint's toe-bone displayed as remarkable (for new reasons, in a newer sense)—in that moment exactly Holiness dies, and in that moment exactly Worldliness inhales its expirations and lives.

—These aphorisms (for all their windiness I don't hesitate to call them that, for they were less than parables and more than mere turns of phrase) were Enoch's long ago, when my mother attempted to compensate me for the inaccessibility of Puritanism with its opposite, cosmopolitanism, which (I have already mentioned it) she liked to term the recoupment of Europe. And she equated Enoch with Europe, and carried me to France the very year the war ended, together with the refugee from Holland whom she had taken on as my governess, and stood with us at the border of Germany, a place where too many roads met, each infested with a line of abandoned tanks like enormous vermin—and there, while I writhed and vomited close by one of those great dusty tractor-wheels, full in the sight of a handful of unamazed Cockney infantrymen (afterward my mother learned that the country cow whose milk I had been given to drink had a disease), the Dutchwoman said, "I shall not go across there." And my mother complained, "But I'm married to a Jew, and I don't mind going across." We did not go across, but wandered southward instead, pleasure-seekers among the displaced, hence more displaced than anyone—"I feel like a survivor," my mother said now and again, "I don't mean from the war of course," while the Dutchwoman reached out for me with strong freckled arms and, fiercely and privately, trusting I would not betray her, whispered, "a survivor from the age of governesses!"—before Hitler she had been a medical student at the University of Leyden. ("Yet she didn't even ask whether the milk was pasteurized!" my mother fumed. "She could have asked to have them boil it at least! I don't approve of refugees, they have no sense of responsibility.") So I was sick against a tank, and in the pit of that sickness, while the pad of dust on the tank's steel belt swam spasmodically under my rain of filth, I heard my mother rail against the unsanitary survivors of a war not yet three months dissolved into history.

For some reason—perhaps it was the laughter of the soldiers, guiding and advising me: "Puke on, darlin', lots of muck oh the Jerry barstid, 'ere naow 'aven't yuh missed a bit of its bluddy foot?"—my mother felt compelled to explain herself:
she
was a survivor, she made out, not of bomb and blaze—one could always get over a
war,
and if one didn't one was dead anyway and it didn't matter—in short she had survived not mere catastrophe but a whole set of wrong ideas. She had outlasted her moment and outlived her time. All the ideals of her girlhood had betrayed her by unpredictably diminishing; "see," she said, and pointed down one of those many roads at a one-legged giant who had hobbled out of the horizon, "that is what has become of the social consciousness of my generation." The Dutchwoman frowned so horribly at this that I had another fit of retching. "I don't pay you thirty-five dollars a week to poison my child," my mother promptly admonished her, but she did not have her mind on it: the maimed fellow had come into view and all of us—my mother, the Dutch governess, the three Cockney infantrymen, and I—looked on in fearful admiration as he swung himself forward on a staff the thickness of a young tree. He was burly and dark, and, for that place and season, not at all haggard; he thrust a paper at the soldiers and propelled himself over the border. "'E'd got a pass from up back," said one of the Cockneys. "Big for an I-talian," replied the second. "They'd ought to get back where they cyme from, them blowkes," observed the third, and then turned back to me with a whistle: "'Aven't yuh myde a job of't, girlie! It's all the shype of the Mediterr-y-nian Owshin yuh've give up!"

And it was a kind of map I had spewed over the hem of the German tank—a map made of vomit, with viscous seas and amorphous continents, a Mediterranean of bad milk in the heart of this known and yellowish world—not simply known but precisely known, exactly and profoundly known (although land and lake were joined and parted indistinguishably by a lava of wakened dust), known, memorized, and understood, unmistakably and perilously known by its terrific stink. My mother covered her face in disgust—"God knows what was wrong with that damned cow," she mumbled, half stifled, into her glove, "it's like her to be sick and make a stench," and pulled me back to the car. Although she was not fond of me, the Dutchwoman, who during the final eruption had been obliged to support my head, took my hand almost kindly. The map had begun to drip off the tread, hung with nuggets of mud. And then Africa succumbed, and then the shadow of Asia, and then the vague Americas, and lastly Europe gave way, split open by sudden rivers; the yellow Mediterranean of milk overran them all, sucking up mass after mass and sending out those reeking fetid familiar airs, so that even the hardy Cockneys swore and moved away. "It is not her fault," my governess quietly snarled; she had her foot on the clutch. "It is the stink of Europe." One of the soldiers pressed his nose in a music-hall gesture: the button on his sleeve caught the sunlight and danced it up and down:—his arm snapped up with a start. The bit of wire that marked the border was all at once murmuring with tremor. "What is it?" my mother cried hoarsely—"Did you hear?" "The bluddy devil!" screeched the soldier, letting go his nose. It came at us again just then—a sting of noise grave and quick. The Dutchwoman had started the motor and was slowly turning us, creeping off the gravel into the edges of a blighted field, silent; our wheels grew muffled in grass. The echo of the discharge lay embedded in the morning light as punctiliously as a surgeon's gash. "Is it backfire?" said my mother. "What
is
it?" She fretted at her fingernail as the car righted itself in the road, and looked out behind her through a small side window: "There it is again!" she exclaimed; the precise little roar stuttered in the sky; the knobs on the dashboard chattered. "Ah, they've gone over," she said, "look." I looked, and in a queer detachment of motion seemed to see the three Cockneys dangling like marionettes or hanged men over Germany; beneath the three arcs of their simultaneous leaps the border-wire dimly strummed. They struck the ground a second afterward like felled game, all in a crouch; we watched them spring erect. "I think," said my mother in surprise, "it was a shot. It must have been a shot," she repeated, craning backward. The Dutchwoman did not stir. My mother swung open the door of the car and jumped decisively out. I followed her—suddenly I felt immensely better, not sick at all. The three infantrymen were running down one of those roads that fingered out like a candelabrum on the other side of the border. "They're chasing someone," my mother shouted excitedly. "Can you see him? It's that man without the leg." "No," said my governess from inside the car—resolutely her eyes shunned Germany; she kept her speckled hands on the wheel and would not move—"they are not chasing him. He has shot himself." But we saw him then, and the soldiers flying toward him, whipping dust but never coming nearer, as in a dream; he had gone far, that giant, farther than it appeared, for it took half a mile to diminish him, and when the soldiers had run themselves into midgets, still racing and yet no nearer, his big shadowy head continued to loom, and his staff seemed no less a leafless tree—it was as though they pursued the irreducible moon, or a god. He was fixed in the middle of the road, and the legless thigh rocked fitfully, kicking. "She's crazy," my mother sneered, "I see him now, I can see his stick in the air"—it swept the sky and seemed to writhe from his grasp and slipped like a straw to the ground, and the giant, with the shudder of cut-down tower or sail of ship, sank after it.

The three soldiers carried him back, each one bearing a single member. From the border-wire where we waited it was a strange triangle—first they took the head and the two arms, then they tried one of the arms, the good leg and the head, and after that the leg, the head, and the stump. But is was no use, the fellow was too heavy and big, they could not divide his weight properly in this fashion; the man who had the head was always at a disadvantage. At last they each took one of the three good limbs, and let the two shorter appendages, the stump and the head, hang down out of the way, with equal freedom and equal unimportance; and in this manner they struggled back to their station at the border.

"Ah," my mother muttered resentfully, "I didn't come to Europe for
this.
" The body lay where the soldiers had heaped it; one was shouting into a walkie-talkie, and the two others stood sweating and sighing, fumbling with their trousers, rubbing their damp palms on their damp shirts. "On the far side of the line," the shouter shouted, "in the groin, the cryzy blowke. In the groin, darlin', I said groin," he went on yelling, "not spine,
groin.
" We got back into the car and the Dutchwoman drove as though whipping a horse; we cantered into the white sun of noon. "You've dirtied your blouse," said my mother, picking at my collar—"that putrid smell." She opened her nostrils over the yellow stain, but her nose in meditation was as alien to me as the look of my own vomit. I did not feel responsible. "Leave her be," said my governess in her brutal accent, "when you are so near Germany there are worse things to smell." My mother frowned warily—"What?" "Corpses," said the Dutchwoman, kicking the flanks of the gas pedal. "Well, well," said my mother, "you people like to turn every stink into a moral issue. Can't you go any faster, Anneke?" she demanded, unlocking her brows, although the landscape flew. "The way you step on that pedal you'd think you were a corpse yourself."

But it was, in a way, corpses which had brought us to that place at that unlikely time, it was on account of corpses that we were there at all: corpses and Enoch, who had been appointed an adviser to corpses, an amicus curiae with respect to corpses, a judge, jury, witness, committeeman, representative, and confidant of corpses. He had no office, but went wandering from boundary to boundary sorting out corpses, collecting new sources of more corpses, overseeing and administering armies of corpses. Some he yielded to their claimants for burial, and some he had dug up and re-buried for no plain reason, and some he let lie where they had been thrown: he was a liaison between the dead and the living, and between the dead and the dead, and between the soon-dead and the too-soon dead. And he was a liaison among the dead of all the nations. "In Europe" (in one hotel-room after another his ironic growl would wake me between nightmares) "there is only one united country, only one with unanimous voters, a single party, an uncontradicted ideology, an egalitarian unhierarchical church, an awesome police-power..." "Go to sleep, Enoch," I would hear my mother's whine, reprimanding out of the dark. "The country of the dead," he gave out at last, and gave in, and fell asleep, and snored, gravely, like a hawk over carrion—until, in the morning (for he hated to get up), "Wake up, Enoch"—this from my mother—and then, "Wormy, wormy, wormy, early in the mourning our curse shall rise to Thee"—this from Enoch, hymn-singing.

For at that time my mother still went everywhere with her husband. Sometimes we would all travel in a body—Enoch, my mother, the Dutchwoman, and I in the lead-car, and two cars full of Enoch's assistants following after—but more often I would be left behind with my governess to play on some littered and sorrowful beach, where I would amuse myself by searching for shells—not seashells: for the Dutchwoman had taught me how to dig after empty cartridges nesting just below the wet sand, like clams, at the margin of the water.

"Can't they explode?" my mother objected, handling my collection of shells at the end of a day's harvest. "If she happened to drop one? She shouldn't be allowed to keep them."

"They are empty and harmless," remarked my governess without interest.

"But there might be a good one mixed in with the others," my mother said, tying a veil over her hat; she was preparing to take a night train with Enoch to a city in the north, where a fresh shipment of corpses waited.

"They are all of them already exploded," repeated the Dutchwoman. "They have been used," she observed almost angrily.

"Oh, but you really can't be sure!" my mother reproved. It seemed she was angry too, and not at the cartridges. She sheathed her forefinger with one of them, tapping it like a thimble. "How can you be sure?"

"Because there has been a war, madam; there has been shooting," said the Dutchwoman.

"As though she owned the war!" my mother announced to the ceiling. "What a nuisance you are, Anneke—you aren't the only one who has had to take hardships, you know."

"Yes," said the Dutchwoman tonelessly, "we were told that in America the sugar was rationed. How bitter your tea must have tasted."

My mother pretended to laugh; her mouth drew wrathfully back. "You don't like Americans, Anneke."

"I don't like
you,
madam."

"I pay you for your duties, not for your approval." But my mother's mirth had turned inexplicably genuine: she was amused, up to a point, by aggressiveness in servants.—"After all," she used to say, "if they go
too
far one can always fire them."

The Dutchwoman was careful not to go too far; she valued her position, since she had so little to do. While I ran about in the foam, she would doze on the mossy rocks, and did not care what I did, or whom I found for a playmate. A little country boy, whose hair had been shaved off altogether and whose red scalp shook out scales, gave me the ringworm; patches round as pennies emerged on my hands and on my chin, and my armpits itched intolerably. But the Dutchwoman declared that I had touched poison-ivy leaves against her warning, and I never contradicted her to my mother. Often she took me to eat in dim restaurants black with flies where there were no tablecloths or menus, and the food was so unfamiliar that I felt ill at the sight of it—brown and green sauces under which chunks of white fat lay folded in a bath of grease. All the while my mother believed that we dined on the boulevard, and made alarmed noises over the restaurant bills my governess used mysteriously to produce. But still the Dutchwoman was careful, very careful. "If you say one word," she would threaten me, "Mrs. Vand will send me away, and you will be left alone. Soon you will lose your way in the roads, and they will mistake you for a refugee child, they will put you in a camp for refugee children. Then you will contract a disease among all the sick little Jewesses. Afterward they will send you far away to Palestine where you will die in the desert of thirst."