As we were talking she placed her large, warm hand on mine, as though we had been the dearest of friends for many years.
‘I want you to help me with my magazine,’ she said. ‘I want you to help me choose the unsolicited pieces we sometimes run. I’ve been looking for someone with a more international perspective than our intern who does it at the moment. You’re just the person I have in mind. Will you do it for me?’
I accepted without hesitation: her belief in me seemed to obliterate my own knowledge of what I was. The job, a virtual sinecure, gave me a pleasant office I could wander into whenever I had nothing better to do, a stipend of a thousand dollars a month, and – more precious to me than anything – the satisfaction of being a cog in the mighty, humming machinery of my new world.
Meanwhile, Inge too seemed to be in the process of establishing a new life for herself. Eric Lowenthal, true to his word, had chosen his new project with her in mind, and he began developing it soon after we arrived. He made a tremendous fuss over both of us, and seemed to want to convey that he considered Inge a great prize, going out of his way to include us in every part of the immense effort involved in getting the project off the ground. Every week there were lunches with producers and investors. There were late-night sessions watching audition tapes at his Tribeca apartment. There were rides out of the city to scout locations; script conferences where Eric would consult us on his latest revisions; meetings with lawyers, agents and distributors…
Again that purposefulness, so utterly novel to me; the sense that one’s inner desires and dreams could actually be transformed into material realities in this miraculous new universe. At first, Inge seemed to thrive in its bracing atmosphere as much as I did. A rehearsal period had been set for the following spring, with shooting to start early that summer. The film – a sort of philosophical parable, I gathered – was about a poor émigré from Poland who cleans houses in New York and finds herself inexplicably beset by wealthy American admirers. ‘You’ve read Being and Time, of course?’ Lowenthal had said to me in an attempt to explain it. I had nodded (though I hadn’t read a word). ‘Well, think of Inge’s role as the “Remembering of Being”, and the men wooing her as supplicants trying to recover that memory.’ Which meant nothing at all to me, though Inge appeared to approve, which was all that mattered. Already by winter she was beginning to submerge herself in her role, and as the rehearsal date approached, she seemed to burn again with the same subdued glow of gathering energies (I think of the flames, barely visible in daylight, on jet-fuel refineries in airports), as she had when I first saw her in that Prenzlauer Berg theatre. For a time I even had the sense that she was shifting, with Eric’s encouragement, into that other self of hers: the actress/beauty who offers up her mysterious vitalities in exchange for the world’s regard.
This was our grace period, in retrospect; our honeymoon. There were tensions, of course; little erratic shock waves from the past; shadows cast backwards from the future. The words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ had begun appearing in newspapers and on people’s lips, and they disturbed me, dimly, like obscure portents in a dream. There were problems, right from the start, in Inge’s adjustment to the American way of life. The jetsam of squalor washed up every morning by the tides of a free, unsanitised press created special difficulties for her peculiar, somewhat morbidly compassionate temperament. With no capacity for detachment, no ability to unsnag her heart from the things that caught hold of it, she could be reduced to despair by the contents of the Metro Section of the New York Times. Every one of those grim stories – old people frozen to death in trash-filled apartments; children starved, beaten, hit by stray bullets – seemed to lodge itself inside her and take root there, requiring her to enter into every corner and cranny of its pain, even as each day brought in new ones just as bad. For a while she got it into her head that nothing short of actual, practical intervention would do, and in her quietly fanatical way she would try to help: writing letters to editors, government departments, welfare agencies; badgering our own Lutheran benefactors to get involved; signing up for volunteer programmes; going off on subway rides to far-flung housing projects – this white-blond and no doubt utterly baffling foreigner, offering her assistance to complete strangers in her imperfect English… Then, as the ineffectuality of her efforts, the massive indifference they met, became impossible to ignore, she shifted her energies towards this more passive act of empathy -snip-snip, snip-snip (I can hear her now) – as though instead of trying to relieve the world’s suffering, she had settled for the role of its recording angel.
But although the forces aligned against us may have already been stirring, our own springtime surge was stronger than they were. I remember looking out through the window of our apartment one January morning and taking stock of our lives – the shelter, my job at Gloria’s magazine, Inge’s budding new career, this uncluttered home of ours, the busy street below with its tumult of cars, trucks, skateboarders, shoppers, idlers, deliverymen; all of these things linked together in my imagination and speeding forward in full sail through the brilliant blue Manhattan air – and feeling in some way I never had before that at whatever cost, and on however dubious a basis, I was alive.
CHAPTER 14
Snip-snip, snip-snip… My anchoress upstairs at her devotions.
Oh, these scrapbooks of hers!
Snip-snip, snip-snip… Some element of survivor’s guilt in her fixation on these dismal stories: punishing herself for getting out…?
Snip-snip, snip-snip…
Not that it isn’t also squarely the act of repudiation it appears to be.
More so than ever, in fact: a distinct sharpening of focus seems to have occurred since the current administration took office. The latest volume was lying open on her desk the other day when I went up to check our insurance policy. The old ‘human interest’ stories had given way to more explicitly political pieces. There was a report on the rolling back of the Clean Water Act; another on the destruction of coral reefs, with a Bloomingdale’s ad for a new line in coral jewellery set pointedly beside it. On the opposite page were articles on the attacks of two years ago: an administration official saying, ‘We should flatten a country or two’; a piece recommending torture be legalised for terrorist interrogations; a professor fired for suggesting America ‘had it coming’; vigilantes in some suburb attacking homeowners who didn’t have flags in their yards…
I leafed back, saw a piece comparing the new powers of surveillance permitted under the Patriot Act with those exercised by the totalitarian regimes of the former Eastern Bloc countries. I flinched at this; balked, found myself unable to read on. Hard for me – impossible, really – with all I have staked on my faith in the greatness of this nation, to swallow such a comparison. I need to believe that what de Tocqueville declared of America remains true in spite of everything: ‘America is great because she is good.’
Snip-snip, snip-snip… As if she were methodically cutting away the very ground under my feet!
Apropos of which, a few years ago we were told our refugee status might be questioned if we ever travelled abroad, and we were advised to apply for citizenship. After several months of filling out forms, being fingerprinted, interviewed, having our English tested, we were given a date to go to the US Southern District Courthouse in Lower Manhattan and be sworn in as American citizens.