I’m not sharpening my knife, nor am I fluffing welcoming pillows. I should mention that I’m not fluffing pillows to kill her with either. I’m not planning anything. There will be no resolution, no epiphany; and most probably I won’t understand more than I do now. I guess I don’t want her skirl of terror to be my last memory of her. My intention — my goal — is simple.
I feel that I missed an opportunity at our last get-together, that I flubbed a pregnant moment. That was a pregnant moment, wasn’t it? Should I have said something to her?
“It’s me, Mamma, me.”
Should I have quoted Milton, what the daughter, Sin, says to her father, Satan: “Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem / Now in thine eye so foul?”
Should I have slapped her?
Everything seems sharp, slick, and shiny after the rain. Some rust collects on the dead leaves of a tree that I can’t name. If she screams again when she sees me, I’ll kill her.
Instead of seeing her, I should go home and put Sebald away in the maid’s room.
I am proud that I finished the Austerlitz project. I consider it one of the best Holocaust novels. I have to say that much of what is being written about the Holocaust these days seems to be directed at the petite bourgeoisie. I find that when a subject has been heavily tilled, particularly something as horrifying as the Holocaust, anything new should force me to look with fresh eyes, to experience previously unexperienced feelings, to explore the hitherto unexplored. When I first read Primo Levi, my body shivered and spasmed at the oddest of moments for a week. I couldn’t read Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen without clutching the edge of my desk. But then it took years, wading through mostly melodramatic books until I came across Kertész’s Fateless, to feel challenged once more.
Kertész, like Levi and Borowski, escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and he’s the only one of the three who hasn’t killed himself — not yet, at least. In 1951, Tadeusz Borowski, all of twenty-eight years old, opened a gas valve and put his head in the oven. The Gestapo had arrested him, a non-Jew, for surreptitiously printing his poetry.
Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.
Two of my favorite books are The Emigrants and Ota Pavel’s How I Came to Know Fish. What I love about them is that they deal with the Holocaust by looking at it indirectly; I don’t recall the word being mentioned in either. Both refuse to soil grief with sentimentalism, and so they are devastating.
Grief is difficult to approach directly and must be courted obliquely. Very few of us are able to write about a tragedy without getting lost in the refractions of blinding tears. It seems to me that we must heed Bushy’s advice in Richard II, and Slavoj Žižek’s for that matter, and look awry.
Does grief make us lose short wavelength cones as well, make us less able to distinguish the color blue?
I wonder whether Hannah, in her last year, gazed directly at her life and was overwhelmed. Could she have saved herself had she looked awry?
From Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus:
Even the trees you planted as children
Long since grew too heavy, you could not sustain them.
The first time I saw Hannah was in my mother’s apartment. When my ex-husband’s family arrived to ask officially for my hand in marriage, she tagged along. I noticed her that day, though I didn’t notice much; I was two months shy of my sixteenth birthday, too involved in books, schoolwork, and delusions.
I admit here that before that day I hadn’t thought much of its possible consequences. I knew, was told, that this was a marriage proposal and my future husband’s family was visiting to measure me, to judge me, that I must comport myself with some dignity, but I hadn’t thought it through. I had no older sister who had gone through the procedure, no older cousins as models.
For example, I hadn’t realized that marriage meant I’d be taken out of school. If I had, I would have asked quite a few more questions in class. I was a moth forcibly peeled from its chrysalis to face the world’s harsh lights and frightening storms.
I didn’t understand what my options were. If I had, I would have paid more attention, would have asked more questions of the nitwit.
I would have shoved his pretentious pipe down his throat while he puffed it.
My ex-husband had the first virtue of Stendhal’s time, as Count Mosca explains to the delicious Duchess in The Charterhouse of Parma: “The first virtue of a young man today — that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its power — is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.”
That’s the fool I married, bless his rancid soul. In this case, you can also add, to lack implicitly a sense of either humor or honor; oh, and to be unable to earn an income, and to be content with his functional illiteracy, and to be a congenital coward. He was filled with virtues — overfilled, you might say.
When he and I were left alone to have a chat and get to know each other in the tiny living room, it took the impotent insect more than twenty minutes to have the courage to say anything (“You look nice”). Doused in uncomfortable silence, we sat there, our shifting eyes covering much ground but not meeting. I exaggerate little when I say that every conversation we ever had thereafter began with a silence that lasted a good twenty minutes.
Throughout our marriage, we would go for weeks without exchanging more than perfunctory communications, sharing little but the bewildered quiet.
And you think that I am lonely now? Heavens.
I wish I’d listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”
I’m not so self-centered as to believe that my marriage was the most horrific or that my ex-husband was the worst. He never laid a hand on me (he would have had to stand on a stepladder to do so) or caused me physical pain. I have come across worse men. I also know that my marriage was by no means unique, nor uniquely Beiruti. In the concise words of Madame du Deffand, who, like me, was married and almost immediately separated, “Feeling no love at all for one’s husband is a fairly widespread misfortune.”
But enough about him.
I noticed Hannah that day because of two things: she ate and she was happy. She devoured everything she was offered. My mother or I would bring out a tray of homemade sweets, chocolates, or candy-covered almonds, and she didn’t hesitate, blink, or demur. The other guests would pretend to consider whether they should take more, hem and haw before helping themselves, but not Hannah. She thanked us profusely for every offering before gobbling it down. When I said, “Please, take two,” she did.
My dear, dear Hannah.
Yes, and she was happy. She didn’t talk much, but she seemed elated to be included, almost as if she were the groom. If not for conventions, mores, and manners, she would probably have jumped across the room and given me a hug, welcoming the new bride into her world. She lavished my ex-husband’s family and mine with joy.
She was there for both the engagement and the evening that passed for my wedding. What endeared her to me was that two days after I moved into my apartment she was the first to pay me a visit. I say me, and not we, because my ex-husband hated her. She was oblivious to his loathing, and to tell the truth, she was mostly oblivious to him. Until her slip into the chasm at the end of her life, Hannah had an uncanny ability to simply ignore unpleasantness, and my ex-husband was nothing if not simply unpleasant. I don’t know when she concluded that he was irrelevant, but it was early on, long before I did. She mentioned him only twice in her journals: the first time, she likened him to a porter at the airport, which in my opinion was an extraordinarily apt description; the last was when he left me and she called him a dog, a “scruffy, mangy mongrel” to be exact.