Devotion

  9

  Stand here, Philadelphia, he said. He removed her scant garments and ran his fingers lightly over her body. His fingers were like feathers. He spoke of the first man, tracing the long Y of the Tigris and Euphrates. He switched languages seamlessly and she listlessly responded in kind. Suddenly he pressed her against the wall and she experienced in horror the potential bliss of unrequited desire.

  In the evening the woman entered the room with bowls of sweet coffee. They sat on the dirt floor. The soiled sheets were a testament to their mutual ecstasy and sorrow. She removed the stained sheet and fitted the mat with a fresh one; the sight of it drew them to violate its brightness with mythic depravity. They were at once dogs and gods.

  —Do you remember the first day you came to me?

  —It was my birthday, she said, automatically clutching the pouch.

  —Give it to me, he said. She sat up and reluctantly slipped it from her neck. It was very small on a leather string. He carefully unstitched the top; inside there were bits of ash and the minute screws and firing pin from the poet’s rifle. He replaced the pin and the screws slowly, deliberately, and inserted a bullet then propped the rifle against the wall.

  —Tomorrow, he said, I will teach you to shoot.

  That night he tied her hands loosely with the laces of her old skates. He was gentle and kissed the lids of her closed eyes, moving down her naked throat. She threw her head to the side, opening her eyes. The laces barely made an impression, yet they dominated her dreaming, extending the length of a field, wriggling obscene things that covered ground, wrapped around the slim trunks of flowering trees, and entwined with the unruly yellow hair of Maria, her coach.

  She awoke with terrifying clarity. The winding laces easily slipped from her wrists and she stealthily crawled away from the mat, reaching out for the rifle. She felt the same strain of nausea when moving through the woods with Frank, shooting her first rabbit, then watching him skin, stretch, and hang its small carcass to dry.

  Eugenia rose. Alexander lay naked on the mat. It occurred to her he did not resemble such a god when he was sleeping. Her mind was spinning, inventorying all that he had given her, all that he had taken away. He opened his eyes and found her standing over him aiming low. He looked up sleepily, more amused than alarmed.

  —Philadelphia, he said.

  Raising the rifle slightly, she adjusted her aim.

  —Philadelphia? He said searchingly, still struggling to wake.

  —Yes, Philadelphia, a hotbed of freedom, she said, pulling the trigger.

  There was a large sum in his valise. She kept her papers and handed half the money to the woman and gave his belongings, including his watch and cigars, to the son. At dawn they dug a hole and placed the body of Alexander Rifa into the earth with the rifle, his passport and the blood-spattered laces. They removed the screws and firing pin before burying him. Eugenia kept the screws and the medal he wore around his neck. It was silver and had a slice down the middle, as if glided over by the blade of a skate.

  Before she departed, the old woman said something to her in Amharic. It was the first time she spoke directly to her, but Eugenia did not understand the dialect. The woman’s son tried to explain what his mother had said. A heart is stunned by another.

  The son helped her on the first difficult leg of her journey home. The travel was complicated and she moved slowly as if in a dream. Still possessing their tickets, she traveled by ship then a series of trains, sometimes just stopping in a city to roam unfamiliar streets. In Vienna she visited a museum and saw the golden cradle of a babe who became king. I have the name of a queen, she remembered saying. How long ago that seemed. It’s a long way. It’s a long way alone. There were bridges and lakes and botanical gardens. In Zurich she searched and found the grave of Martin Burkhart, who had treated her and Irina with such kindness, and laid flowers.

  As she drew closer to home she vowed to never skate again. It was her penance, to deny herself the one thing she could not live without.

  10

  In the pocket of her skirt was the key to his apartment. She approached the heavy door carved with a crest of two lions embracing. She held her breath as she inserted the key, half expecting him to be there, waiting, perhaps with a small gift or a plan in mind for a luxurious punishment. The entrance room was dark, but the room he had given to her was flooded with light. Her little bed was still unmade from their hurried departure. The sight of it sickened her. There were a few dresses in the closet, and the pale rose sweater he had given her, still in its tissue.

  She sat at the desk before a small stack of books he had chosen for her to read, determined to continue the education she had consciously shunned. A book on the Golden Mean, which had inspired a routine, built on an equation. And the large nautilus shell that he had presented her, noting how its exquisite curving spine echoed a spiraling turn on the ice. There was a photograph of a pond flanked by young pines and a cone that had retained the scent of the forest in its sticky resin. A kernel of remorse slowly opened and spread through her system; it was another kind of blood. She reached for the books yet unread, earmarked for studying English. The Scarlet Letter and The Professor, and the book he himself had been reading—the Myth of Sisyphus, with bits of commentary in Russian, in his elegant hand.

  As if gently guided, she opened to the beginning and read, mentally translating his brief notations. The text posed a philosophic examination of the question of suicide—Is life worth living? He had written in the margin that perhaps there existed a deeper question—Am I worthy of living? Five words that shook her entire being. She rose abruptly, removed the photograph from its frame, slipped on the sweater, and left, careful to avoid the things that had been his.

  11

  The letter

  Dear Eugenia,

  So many times you asked me of our family, but I told you nothing. Your father gave me instructions to say nothing. Why should a child suffer the burden of politics, of blood? He truly feared for your safety. He was a professor and could speak several languages, just like you. His mother was Jewish; who died before you were born. Now I understand him. Your father was more political then religious. His outspoken ways caused him to be listed by the Soviets.

  Our family was Catholic and your mother prayed all of the time. She cared mostly about her garden and you were her most precious flower. I feel nothing for my blood. I feel new, and Frank is new and our baby will be new. You are also new. That was the gift your parents gave you by releasing you.

  Martin attempted to find our family. I hoped to return you to my sister and be free. But he found no one, nothing was like it was. I felt as if we were floating in space, and I felt frightened. But now I realize it was also a miracle. Having no past we have only present and future. We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.

  There are no signs that tell us who we are. Not a star, not a cross, not a number on the wrist. We are ourselves. Your gift comes only from you. But Frank told me he once saw you skating on a small pond hidden in the woods. He was hunting a deer. He stopped and watched you but you did not see him. He told me you were a champion. That is exactly what he said.

  Frank found us a nice house near the black forest. Sometimes I dream the wolves are crying. But all of that is over. I only want to be myself. I have a job selling perfume in a nice shop. I have several pretty dresses that I can wear again when the baby comes. We are safe and we are the new age.

  Your Irina

  12

  At long last she returned to the cottage. A window was broken and the entrance was swept with dead leaves. There was a small pile of letters. The Academy, Maria, Irina. What would have happened had she continued her studies, stepped onto the rink of the world, if every move on the chessboard, every equation, even the dark fluidity of love had coalesced?

  Winter struggled t
oward spring. Eugenia seldom left the cottage. She sat at the table before her journal and wrote in the shadows of heartache, slowly tracing the curves of letters as if by the blades of her skates. She added nothing to the brief essay of a life, only variations of the same poem, her Siberian Flowers, in a futile effort to uncover a father’s eyes, a mother’s face.

  In her sleep she could hear the lyrical voice of Alexander. In her sleep she could hear her mother crying. Overflowing with the need to confess, to spill each indiscretion that led to the taking of another life, she boarded the trolley and went into the city, to the chapel attached to her former school.

  —I yearn to pray, Father, but cannot face our Lord. I cannot tell him what I have done.

  —My child, that is the mystery of confession, to unburden and leave it to him to carry the load.

  —The confession booth is not wide enough to hold my sins. It is but a small boat in the center of a terrible sea.

  Eugenia sat on a bench in the park across from the chapel. She bent over and tied her shoe. Earlier she had wrapped the money from the valise of Alexander in heavy brown paper. It was a good sum. She walked to the post office several streets away. At the post office she was given a small sturdy box and she wrote the address from the envelope of Irina’s letter and posted it.

  On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Eugenia took a folded letter from a small wooden box with a dragonfly painted on the lid. It was the letter her father had pinned to her blanket in early winter of 1941. She was barely a year old but he had already detected a brightness in her that shone far beyond the farmhouse, the flowers in the yard, even the beauty of his wife. Eugenia opened her heart to feel what he felt, the great shadow of Stalin’s troops advancing. Even as flowers budded and burst, heralding the coming of an obscene and terrible spring. She did not need to read, as she knew every word by heart. But her eyes fell on his last words. The letter slipped from her hands. She did not reach to pick it up.

  The qualities that will help you get through life you have received from me. The qualities that will make you welcomed in heaven from your mother.

  Eugenia took her skates from the closet and walked to the pond. It was crisp and bright, a day full of promise. She stopped here and there along the way, absentmindedly picking up small stones, filling the deep pockets of her old coat, the one that had struck Him with its inefficiency against the cold weather. She approached the clearing. The same small grove of trees the same pond beneath the same sky.

  The priest had been kind but could not draw her out. Instead she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy then the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows this, and the deer, and the pine.

  I am Eugenia, she said, offering her confession, the voice-over of her young life. She began with her first sense of him, of the pleasure she felt in being observed and how it ignited her performance. She told of her happiness in receiving the coat and the warmth it provided and how she sold herself for a little sack of screws from a poet’s rifle, driven as much by curiosity as desperation. She left nothing out and as she described her consuming desire for him, she sensed with horror that a craving was yet within her. She told of washing his blood from her ankles, burying him without a single tear. As she relived that moment she wept at last, not for the loss of him but of innocence.

  Eugenia carefully tied the laces of her skates. As she touched down upon the ice she felt a wholeness that had been so long absent. Everything came back to her swiftly and she performed with a harmony only silence could match. The animals in the forest gathered. A fox, a deer, a rabbit in the leaves. The birds appeared to be transfixed, perched upon the limbs of bordering trees.

  The sun spread its warmth, signaling an early spring. The friction of her skates accelerated an already premature weakening of the pond’s surface, precariously veined beneath a dangerously transparent layer. She did not slow down but whirled as if in the center of an infinity of infinities. That infamous space conjured and inhabited by mystics who no longer seek the nourishment of this earth. Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold. She bowed her head and lifted one arm toward the sky, surrendering, drawn by the gloved hand of her own conscience.

  THE WHITENESS OF WINTER

  Siberian Flowers

  Siberian flowers are pink

  as a daughter’s circlet

  a pale dressing gown

  dragged across a window

  not seen through again

  There is blood everywhere

  drained of its blood color

  And the face of love is nothing

  but the whiteness of winter

  blanketing the hill

  the fir and the pine

  the fawn and the horn

  Everything is blown

  And yet we long

  Two dark eyes

  One head bowed

  One fallen crown

  A Dream Is Not a Dream

  A FATHER’S DOOR

  Light spreads across a desk fitted with an ashtray, pen, and a stack of foolscap. The writer hunches over and picks up the pen, thus leaving the world that flows beyond the heavy wooden door, carved with twin griffins, balancing a levitating crown. The room is still, yet the atmosphere is charged, a sense of horns locking.

  Outside a young girl crouches beneath the foreboding herald, which seems to emit a soft reddish glow. She imagines she can hear the scratching of her father’s pen. She waits furtively until it ceases to scratch, for then he will open the door, take her hand, descend the stairs and make her chocolate.

  Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.

  There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

  When I was yet in Paris I received an invitation from Albert Camus’s daughter Catherine, to visit the Camus family home in Lourmarin. I seldom visit people’s homes, for despite the hospitality offered I often suffer a feeling of confinement or imagined pressure. Almost always I prefer the comfortable anonymity of a hotel. But in this case I accepted; the honor was mine. After taking leave of Simone I circled back to Paris, boarded a train to Aix-en-Provence, and was met by Catherine’s assistant for the hour’s drive to Lourmarin. Any trepidation I may have felt dissipated with his kindness and the warmth of their reception.

  The ancient villa, where silkworms were once bred, had been acquired with Camus’s Nobel Prize money, to be their home away from Paris. My small suitcase was brought to the room which had once been his. Gazing from the window it was easy to see what drew him here. The naked sun, olive groves, dry patches of land dotted with tangles of yellow wild flowers all seemed akin to the natural setting of his native Algeria.

  His room was his sanctuary. It was here that he labored over his unfinished masterwork The First Man, unearthing his ancestors, reclaiming his personal genesis. He wrote undisturbed, behind the heavy wooden door, carved with twin griffins supporting a crown. I could well imagine young Catherine tracing their wings with her finger, desiring nothing more than for her papa to open it.

  I was fourteen when Camus lost his life in a fatal car crash. In the news that followed were pictures of his children, and a des
cription of his valise, found in a field in the rain at the scene, containing his last manuscript. It was a humbling experience to occupy, even briefly, the room where he had written it.

  VIEW OF LOURMARIN

  Modestly furnished, there were shelves lined with a range of his books. The three-volume set of Journals de Eugène Delacroix. Lettres de Gauguin. La Vie de Mahomet. Le Viol des foules, Serge Tchakhotine’s chillingly relevant appraisal of the abuse of the masses through political propaganda. Before heading downstairs I returned to the window. Somewhere across the field, beyond the cypress trees, one may enter the cemetery where he rests aside his wife, his name somewhat eroded, as if nature had written a story of her own.

  Catherine made lunch for us and prepared a violet- colored tea, a medicinal for my chronic cough. The conversation was warm and natural without a moment’s awkwardness. Afterward I joined Catherine’s daughter for a long walk with the dogs through the adjoining fields. We spoke of the trees, identifying them—cypress, fir, pine, young olive trees, fig, cherry trees heavy with fruit, and a commanding Cedar of Lebanon. She plucked some cherries for us as the dogs romped happily ahead. Toward the end of our walk she handed me a slender stem capped with tiny yellow flowers, a wild thing with a wisp of a fragrance. It’s called immortelle, she said.

  When we returned, Catherine’s assistant beckoned me to the downstairs office, where they work and perform official duties. It was modest and contained an air of tranquil productivity. He asked if I would like to see the manuscript; I was so astonished that I could hardly manage an answer.

  I was asked to wash my hands, which I did with some solemnity.

  Camus’s daughter entered, placing the manuscript of Le Premier Homme, The First Man, on the desk before me and went and sat in a chair giving us distance enough so that I could feel alone with it. For the next hour I was privileged to examine the entire manuscript page by page. It was in his hand, each page suggesting a sense of unflinching unity with his subject. One could not help but thank the gods for apportioning Camus with a righteous and judicious pen.