“The word I heard all my childhood. Jew, Jew. The only word that still ties me to my dead brother and my crazy mother. Becky used to say it during meals, breaking into the conversation, and then begin to moan, almost to lose control of herself. She would get up and walk away trembling. Desperate. They … because of the way life has always been for us, Javier, the life of Jews, they taught me that the only way is to demand, to insist, and to doubt. That even when we’re trampled on, locked up in concentration camps, thrown into exile, our salvation is to go on demanding, demanding, refusing to be content, and doubting.”
“Be quiet, Ligeia. You’re babbling.”
“Demand and doubt. That’s the way I am. And that was where I made the mistake with you. I made you fail by asking too much of you, demanding more than…”
“Leave me alone! Shut up!”
“That you should write more and better than you could write. That you should love me more than you could love me.”
“Shut up! And take your hand away!”
“And even if you hadn’t failed, I would have doubted your success and you and myself, everything. I can’t believe blindfolded. I have to do things, to test things and be sure. I have to believe without believing.”
“And I? Belief without doubt for me?”
You moved away from him. “You, Javier? For you, whatever people believe in. It doesn’t matter. You know better than I.”
“No, it doesn’t matter. Faith is nothing. What counts is what you know. That’s much more destructive.”
“I’m tired, Javier.” You stood up. “Don’t go through that again. I’ve heard it over and over.”
He remained on the floor. You picked up the dented tray.
“No, faith doesn’t hurt us. It’s knowledge. Ligeia. Listen to me. Do you remember that novel I started?”
“How could I forget it?” You felt light, free, safe, as you calmly picked up the fragments of the mirror and the bottle. “It came and went and came and went in your black briefcase, always a plan, never an act. Shit. Chapters you were going to make notes for and organize and some day, when you had time, inspiration, the right mood, God knows what…”
“Tell me: tell me what it was about.”
“A man who loved a woman who loved him.”
“Yes, on the surface that was all. But there was more to it than that. Tell me.”
“Love brought them to knowledge they hadn’t had before.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“In the flesh there’s a miracle that must be suppressed. Everyone has felt it. Everyone lets it escape. But not these two. They knew how to preserve the miracle, to hold on to it. Shit, Javier! You dirty bastard!”
“And then?”
“And then they understand that their secret can’t be communicated. But they’re tempted and they try. Temptation comes disguised as an impulse to be generous. They reveal their secret to others and at once the miracle vanishes. It’s misunderstood. They are left naked, saddened. They have opened Pandora’s box.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t remember, Javier. How can I remember everything? The point was that when they opened it their treasure turned to ashes. So you have to be selfish. Some things can’t be shared. Love is between two people and only two people, even if it is poor, pretentious, clumsy, absurd. Love that others can share is not love. Love exists only for the lovers. I think that’s about it.”
“Yes. There was no answer. What the man and the woman had discovered could be known only to themselves.”
You had put the pieces of glass on the tray and now you stood. You were tired, it was hard to move. “Why didn’t you write that book, Javier? You had a beautiful theme.”
He joined his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.
“I don’t really know. Or rather, I do know. I did have the feeling the book needed, an intuition of the beauty that was possible. But I never wrote it because I thought no one would understand me.”
“You can’t mean that. What a child.”
“No, I don’t mean it. It’s just one more excuse. The fact was that the theme itself didn’t allow me to write it. It would have been like revealing a secret that ought not be revealed. It would have violated the very logic of the book.”
“Javier, my love…”
You stood beside him. There was something in the air, a feeling of repose, of a little truth finally attained. “We’ve lived through so much together. Isn’t the past enough to go…”
“No, it isn’t.” He looked at you, his head still resting back on his joined hands. “It isn’t enough because now we know each other. It’s a great lie that the more you know each other, the more you love each other. A proud and foolish lie. What you love is the unknown. What you haven’t possessed yet. And maybe to stop loving when you begin to know the other person is … well, necessary for sanity. Because if we loved and knew each other, yet went on loving, we would all be out of our minds.”
You hugged him and said quietly, “You don’t know me, Javier, all you know is how to talk. And I’ve caught your damn wordiness. You’re like every other Mexican. You have to justify yourself with words. Anything can be an excuse. The climate, the cactus, Montezuma, the shit you have to eat. Javier…”
“Yes?”
“We used to dream together. Why did we stop?”
“We stopped one dream when Russia and Germany signed a treaty of friendship. Ribbentrop and Molotov. And what difference did it make? Who were Ribbentrop and Molotov?”
You caressed his neck. “We believed in so much in those days. Maybe that could have saved us, to go on believing in something. It was a kind of faith. You and I together in the LEAR, singing the Internationale. Together reading Dos Passos and Miguel Hernández. Together listening to the Spanish Civil War songs. Raising our clenched fists…”
He moved away from your face and saw your gray eyes filled with tears, Elizabeth, and his lips trembled.
“Who knows? We learned that we’re all guilty. Maybe that was the only lesson of those days.”
You let him hold you and were grateful for the weakness of your body in his arms, for the shadows of the bedroom.
“Yes. And only now, so late, have we come to see that the guiltiest of all are those who know that they aren’t innocent and so stop fighting their guilt. Javier … Javier…”
Your face moved away from his shoulder. Your body moved away. You held him with your hands on his shoulders, knowing something at last, at last finding the words before they were forgotten again and forever.
“I understand, Javier. Let me say it quickly. The struggle is between those who are all guilty and that’s why it is tragic. The just and the unjust are both guilty. Neither is innocent. Justice isn’t innocent, merely just. That’s why it’s so terrible. Do you see what I mean, Javier?”
He did understand, you knew, yet he could answer you laughing. Maybe that was what you found unforgivable.
“Madness may be the mask too much knowledge wears, Ligeia. I’m tired. Go get in the tub and finish what you were doing. Hurry up. I want to take a shower.”
You wiped away your tears.
“Is Isabel waiting for you?”
“Ligeia, please, please…”
“You must feel very satisfied with yourself.”
You went to the bathroom. Javier had left the light on.
“Why?”
“Now you can go to a living woman. With a name. Isabel. Before you were looking for a phantom. And phantoms are more comfortable but less satisfying to your pride.”
You opened his medicine kit again.
“A phantom?”
It was empty. All the bottles were on the shelf.
“Me. Your phantom. Like that night at the party when you pretended I was some other woman, an unknown woman, so that you could live out your fantasy. Phaedra. Medea. I don’t remember now. Do you? We went down into a cave together. Oh, boy. The mariachi musicians. A private voyage to Cathay.”
&n
bsp; “You cooperated willingly enough.”
You began to open the bottles of medicine.
“Because I loved you. But you have never loved me or any woman. You’ve loved Woman. Capital W. Phantom. That was how you could go on feeling free and unchained. A real woman of flesh and blood would have been too much burden for you. Whatever her name, Ligeia or Isabel. Listen to me, Javier.”
Silently, calmly, without fear, almost professionally, you emptied the rest of his medicines into the toilet.
“Isabel is flesh and blood too, you know. Just like me. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“She too will demand your time, your love. And you aren’t the young man you were twenty years ago. Listen, Javier. She’s twenty-three. And you are over forty.”
You pulled the chain of the toilet and watched the whirlpool of pills and water as Javier shouted from the bedroom: “But I don’t have the illusions I had twenty years ago! Can’t you understand that? With her I don’t go out to conquer the golden fleece the way I did with you! The golden fleece!”
He laughed louder than the sucking of the toilet.
“It escaped us, Ligeia. We didn’t find it. We spent our lives looking, but we couldn’t get past the guards at the door, the monsters, the dragons, the bulls, the snakes! There were too many of them. So it wasn’t worth it. Nothing was worth it. Neither your father nor your brother nor your crazy mother. Nothing, nothing.”
You turned off the bathroom light.
“I can go with Isabel now if I want to, precisely because my illusions are gone. And because Isabel is young. Do you hear me, Ligeia? She’s young! She doesn’t have lines at the corners of her eyes…”
You turned on the light again and looked for your lipstick, your eyebrow pencil, your eyeshadow. Swiftly you began to put makeup on.
“She doesn’t have a double chin. She doesn’t have a flabby belly…”
You looked for your stockings, your panties, your brassière among the wet towels thrown on the tile floor.
“Do you hear me? She’s young! Isabel is young, she’s twenty-three years old … Ligeia … answer me!”
You did not see yourself in the mirror, so you had no way of knowing how you looked. You came out of the bathroom slipping on your bra, feeling for its hooks, and Javier saw you with your makeup on, your eyebrows black, your lips red. Your voice was calm as you continued, awkwardly, nervously, to put on your clothes.
“Just remember, Javier, that for me there was only one moment. A moment when I woke in New York, I think, or in Falaraki, yes, no, on the coast of Long Island after a night of rain. The first time.”
“She’s young,” Javier hissed.
“Just that moment when I woke and felt you get up and move aside the sheets that covered my feet and look at me tenderly. Tenderly, afraid you might wake me.”
“The sea. You always remember the sea. You’re lying. Women hate the sea.”
“You wanted to touch my lips, but you were afraid you’d wake me. Then finally you couldn’t resist. You took me in your arms and lifted me as I opened my eyes. You closed my eyes with your fingers and I was small and tender in your arms. On that one moment I have lived. Always hoping that some day it might come back. But not any more.”
You put on your blouse and buttoned it.
“I slept with Vasco, Javier.”
You touched your hair, shook it out, short and faded, graying. You did not look at Javier.
“Yes, I slept with him. And it was from him that I got that story, that story of youth returning, that story you wrote. It was really writen by Vasco Montero. He thought of it. I stole it. You put it in words, that was all.”
You looked for your purse in the debris of the room.
“I went that far, yet you failed. I wanted to conquer a whole world for you. But you let that world slip out of your hands. That was just as well. You weren’t worthy of it.”
You waited. Javier didn’t speak. You kept your eyes away from him. “I’m telling you that I went to bed with Vasco to get a story for you.”
“You really did, didn’t you?” Javier said. “And you made me think that we had thought of it together.”
“You’d like to escape.” Finally you faced him. “But you can’t. For you everything is an aphorism. Except this: you couldn’t get anywhere with your own ideas. You had to accept and use Vasco Montero’s alms. Leavings from a rich table, from a true poet who could afford to throw you his scraps and be none the poorer.”
You were going to tell me some day, Dragoness, that after that you and Javier said no more. You, dressed, your face made up, your purse in your hand, sat on the edge of the bed thinking about what you would some day have to tell me. You were thinking that this was the end of the road, of the memories and the lies too, a long long road in search of what you had already possessed. All that you knew, all that you wanted, all that you lost and all that you found, you had known, wanted, lost and found in the very beginning as much as now. But in the beginning a part of you had defeated the rest of you and that made all the difference. It made you helpless to use your wisdom. And tonight another part of you was holding you as helpless to use your wisdom as you had been then. Ah, Dragoness, the difficult answer is that we must be able to bless whatever we love, whatever we dream, touch, even what we scorn or fear and reject.
* * *
Δ With the plans spread on his knees, Franz looked up and saw the staked hops, beyond them a row of bushy trees, an apple orchard to the right, and to the left, beet fields stretching all the way to the forest on the distant slope. A few farm workers were busy among the hops, sitting or squatting, harvesting the vines that wound up the black stakes. He looked back at the site that had been chosen. A brick kiln had stood here once and he was able to use its old foundations as footing. Later in the day, trucks with bricks from the Lovosice yard would arrive and work could begin immediately. The construction crew was already there, standing in files of five, their clothing gray and their heads shaved. The timbers were already stacked, the clay and lime had been heaped in piles, the kegs of nails had been opened. Slowly he rolled up the blueprints and then he went to talk to the foremen and he did not return to Terezin until after dark, in the old convertible Mercedes, and as they passed the train station in Theresienstadt he asked the driver to stop. He stood up and tried to understand what was going on on the platform. Someone was playing chords on a double bass and to its accompaniment dark figures were moving, unintelligible voices rose singing. Smoke from the locomotives wreathed low, now concealing, now revealing the dancing figures. Franz got out of the convertible and walked toward them. They were wearing top hats and their gray clothes and their faces were smeared with coal dust and they were unloading coal and singing as they worked. One of them had the double bass. Franz could understand nothing of their song except the words, Now Marion is leaving. Some of the guards were urging the singers on and others were kicking the round cardboard boxes in which the top hats had arrived, playing imaginary soccer. It was a grotesque scene: the dim lights, the clouds of smoke and steam, the dancing figures, the music. His driver picked up three more double basses at the station, to be deposited in the storerooms where all the equally useless confiscated things were kept. The old derbies and the dusty dress forms, the ragged prayer books, the horse-drawn hearses, the postcards, the family daguerreotypes, the mustache cups, the straw- and saw-dust-stuffed horses, the glass paperweights containing a landscape upon which snow fell when they were shaken. And what were the gold-framed portraits of the old emperors, Wilhelm and Franz Josef, doing here among all this junk? He shook the paperweight and watched the false snow drift down and in the distance heard the Merry Widow Waltz. Then he walked out and saw the top-hatted workers from the station marching in. Later it transpired that beneath their hats they were smuggling in stolen coal and stolen sausages.
“I will have the building ready within the month.”
“It has to be ready. That’s an order.”
/>
Franz lay in your arms in the hotel room in Cholula, Isabel, and you listened and said nothing because you knew that that was why he had come to you. And he was laughing softly, hidden in your arms, remembering that it had been a cold night and the river had been frozen. He walked into the fortress and one of the guards said that it would be fun to skate as they had as boys. The earth crunched beneath their boots. There was no snow, but the earth was stiff with frost. It was hard to see clearly. The floodlights were on but the evening mist hung low and diffused the light and made it almost as opaque as the mist itself. And for once there was utter silence. What made him aware of it was the absence of the barking of the dogs. At Terezin the dogs could always be heard, at all hours, but tonight they were silent. Maybe it was also the absence of human voices. When the voices of men are still, much becomes audible that usually is not. The scrape of boots over concrete. The pad of bare feet on bare dirt. The creak of unoiled hinges. The distant tap of a typewriter. The click of rifle locks being cocked. The sounds of the snouts of dogs and the lips of children as they eat.
The building rose steadily, quickly. He attended its construction closely, for although the foremen knew their business, he wanted to keep an eye on things, and for the time being he had nothing more important to do. Often he knew that his presence was not needed and perhaps even not welcomed. But he went every day, returning to the fortress at night, sometimes in the truck, sometimes in the Mercedes with the Commandant, sometimes alone, walking, thinking. Thinking that it was his first job. Repeating it: my first job, Isabel, my first job. Yes, Franz, they sent me there because I was efficient, it was their decision, not mine. Yes, Franz, I want to understand you.
In the beginning the bodies of those who died in the Terezin fortress were taken to the incinerator in Theresienstadt, the town that had been transformed into a ghetto by Himmler’s orders. Later that was not enough and he, as architect attached to the camp, was ordered to build a crematorium on the site of the old kiln neat Litomerice. He finished it on schedule and the two ovens were installed with their iron tracks and the lever that moved the cadavers into the ovens mechanically. The ashes were returned to the fortress in urns marked F or M, Frau or Mann. Later the ashes were simply thrown into the river, and still later, when it became impossible to control the epidemics in the fortress, a common burial pit was opened near the north wall. Nevertheless, the commerce continued: in return for a sum of money, the relatives and friends of a deceased prisoner received an urn filled with earth from Terezin. Not Ulrich. Ulrich refused.