A Volume 7, Number f. March 1997 Ithaca, New York FREE

A Missing Star

Paul West

Certain much-heard voices impose themselves on posterity. My old friend, astronomer Carl Sagan, had such a voice: a tutored baritone no doubt practiced in bathroom or laboratory, bouncing about among tile and glass, a calmative among the wets and clinks, the squeaky faucets and the hoarse Bunsen burners. In the old days, when he never wore a suit, the voice wasn’t quite so manicured, so crisply mahogany in hue, when we chatted about salary, Swinburne, and stars, and in a much later year I wondered how that voice had fared when, reduced to heart­ broken banality, he found himself saying to his dying father, “Take care.” I knew his parents quite well, having become a fan of his mother’s potato pancakes, of his father’s burly wit; besides, his mother, Rachel, knew my books and urged them upon her son, who complied, I live in a house only a short downhill walk from where Carl now lies horizontal in a box, still a neighbor I suppose, motionless and dumb. And this new image of him fills me with ontological horror that his cherished cosmos has done this to him at sixty-two, renewing Beck­ ett’s warning that death does not require us to keep a day free in the calendar. We abide its w him and its deadly design with what the Greeks called frike, a hair-rais­ ing shudder, and then hope to think of something else. Surely it is naive of me, child of the Nazi blitz, to feel such shock and outrage at the demolition month by month of a friend. I felt the same way about my mother, who surprised us all by dying at ninety-four, also of pneumonia. We had thought she’d reach a hundred easily, but she was weary of us, of life. Irrationally, for months, I fretted that her corpse would feel the cold. Clearly, I did not believe in death, in its ability to wipe things out, but, in some kind of defiant nostalgia, denied it. I still hear Carl’s ing the dead with us longer, hygiene be selves, shunting it away from us like the usually denied to novelists and poets. In voice, just as I still feel my mother’s damned, so that the state they have entered plague. We suffer from synecdoche, tak­ this love story haunted by astronomy, he warm square hands. Indeed, trapped in becomes a piece of the real, like their ing part for whole, when we need corpore­ lived again before he even died, all the some post-mortem passacaglia, I live on, loquacity, their sarcasm, their charm. al impact —no more memorial services way through what I think of as his golden hearing and sensing the dead more and Death, about which, as distinct from sanitized by the body’s having gone. days, when he excelled at the graces of the more, as if they have at last come into dying, we know too little, deserves to be Maybe death comes first, then the dying amateur, the fervent savant, before the their own, invulnerable and stark, unique­ better known, looked at .with less disgust, begins; or death happens in a sea of dying prospect of nuclear winter filled his mind. ly reliable. almost as if it were what Aristotle, who that both precedes and follows it. The upshot of all this is that, at least There is such haste to get them out of knew everything, called a form of imita­ There is another problem, in this man’s until the novel gets published in 1998, I sight, certainly in Carl’s Jewish religion, tion without a name. They are trying to be case anyway. More seen on TV than in will have his remainder, or rather my pur­ even in temperate climes. Perhaps this is like us, and something holds them back, life, he may have achieved a replica of loined version of his body, on my premis­ a more majestic version of our eagerness but they are wonderful in their hidebound immortality anyway, in which case, es, more or less to myself, which is per­ to warehouse us as soon as we begin to striving. according to what I have just written, we haps better than trying to deal with him as age and no longer fit the eugenic para­ Could we bear it? Could it be worse than need to see his body even more, weekly on a cloud of disembodied memories. Con­ digm of flawless maturity in the best of living among those compound ghosts of the tube, lying in state like the Crab Nebu­ gealed in cold print, not by him but by me, possible worlds. Sometimes, when it’s the departed cobbled together, in Carl’s la. I think I saw him as much in life as ever he will haunt me still because I know now, snowy in the Finger Lakes, bodies await case, from the sailcloth crackle of his on TV, perhaps more, so I have a double as I did not while writing the novel, that burial for months, hoardcd-up until the brand-new yellow swimshorts as he once image of him to cope with, complicated the real person, of whom Raoul Bunsen is ground softens again, and I wonder about plunged into the waves off Cocoa Beach, even further by the fact that, only months an imitation, a translation even, lies a little the housing of the dead in attic, outhouse, the way he held a tape recorder to his chin before he died, I finished an autobiograph­ way downhill from the house, yet oddly or gazebo, erect as in a catacomb or at as if shaving, the empathetic irony in his ical novel in which he, as Raoul Bunsen, dispossessed of himself, a star that winked some wakes, remembering a Hemingway voice when he called me long-distance on figured as the character who talked a pair out, whose image continues to travel story in which the bereaved hang a hurri­ my fiftieth birthday, I in darkest Pitts­ of lovers into astronomy, taking them through space. cane lamp on the deceased’s frozen lower burgh, to reassure and fortify, he four along with him to Cape Canaveral, as it jaw. years younger? Perhaps what horrifies us then was, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Paul West’s most recent novel, his fif­ There is something to be said for keep­ is the smidgen of death we allow our­ Pasadena, and many other holies of holies teenth, is Sporting with Amaryllis. page 2______T he r o o k p r f s s March 1997 Staying on the Line PIANOS • Rebuilt alities emerge despite the naturalist’s intend­ • Reconstructed IS AVAILABLE AT ed objectivity, and we watch one squirrel, • Bought Barbara Adams ABC Cafe Ithaca College nicknamed ‘The Pleader,” pass, over several • Sold Aladdin’s La Forza A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope seasons, from territorial ascendancy to defeat, • M o v e d • Tuned Autumn Leaves Ludgate Farms at the Heart of Crisis. battered in body and spirit. Bookery II Mano’s Diner Diane Ackerman It’s only a quick side-step to the human City Health Club Mayers New York: Random House, 1997 callers on the crisis line, known also at a dis­ Center Ithaca New Alexandrian 305 pp.; $24.00 tance, anonymous except for observed, Cincmapolis Northeast Bagels shared details of their lives, sometimes given A t Collegetown Bagels P&C Last winter, Diane Ackerman’s non-fic­ distinguishing names by the counselors, and Cornell Cinema The Post Office tion work The Rarest o f the Rare celebrated like the squirrels, seeking a way to endure Cornell University The Public Library several species of endangered animals; a year deprivation and somehow continue. Acker­ Courtside Fitness Rebop Records later her most recent work celebrates the man’s parallels of humans with animals are DeWitt Mall Silverbird Espresso endangered human. A Slender Thread: never reductive, but compassionate and Fall Creek Cinema State Street Diner Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis is occasionally ennobling. Ithaca Piano Rebuilders Gino’s Pizza Stella’s Caf6 a meditation on people in extremis, in partic­ The repeated juxtaposition of the two (607an) 272-6547 Greenstar Coop Tops ular those who reach out for the lifeline of a worlds constitutes the basic rhythm of the 310 4th St., Ithaca (O ff H cncock St. 2 blocks from Rt 13) Ithaca Bakery Wegmans crisis center’s telephone counselor. Three book, and we ferry back and forth, at first Complete rebuilding services. years ago Ackerman herself became one of somewhat startled, eventually quite easily. No job too big or too small. Call us. ANI) OTHER LOCATIONS IN I l'HACA the 75 people trained to staff the Suicide Pre­ Anyone familiar with Ackerman’s previous vention and Crisis Service hotline based in works, particularly her “natural histories” of Ithaca, N. Y. (where she now no longer coun­ the senses and of love, will recognize the pat­ What Do You sels but serves on the agency’s board). That tern: a delightful crazy quilt of fascinating Think... experience led to this work, an insightful facts and essential digressions. Here, we learn commentary on the neighboring worlds of that goldfinches prefer thistle seed, that rats humans and other animals. can’t vomit, that squirrels may live 20 years As a writer and naturalist, Ackerman has in captivity but only a year in the wild, and Interes always acknowledged the continuum of life (hat hummingbird hearts, normally beating hearing forms in her work. When I interviewed her 500 times a minute, slow to a dangerously last winter, she said, “Sometimes people torpid 36 beats during sleep. What solutions think that I write different kinds of books— Ackerman brings a special vision to the do you really need? Letters most be signed some books are about animals and some are natural world, the poet’s exquisite attention It’s one thing to be stumped by 17 Down. Scratch your head tor a minute and the answer will come. But life is and a daytime phone about people. But to my mind it’s all part of to “falling berries, scuffling voles, a skink often more challenging than even the Sunday puzzle. number included. the same quest, to understand the human rising from its bog” and to “Canada geese When you need some help finding solutions, consider condition and what life on earth feels like." chicks—all fluff and waddle with bones del­ Brief Therapy, a unique form of counseling designed to At the time she was discussing the risk of icate as twigs.” And the writer in her happily minimize the amount of time you spend in therapy. dominates the scientist in many anthropor- No matter what issues you face — stress, depression, species extinction, but had just completed A relationships, sexuality, self-esteem — Brief Therapy Slender Thread, and the connections were morphic but perfect descriptions— of “small can give you the tools you need to make positive apparent: “If you’re like me, you think that fence lizards doing rapid push-ups as part of changes in your life in the shortest time possible. Send letters to: life is an extraordinary happenstance for mat­ their territorial display,” of mating mallards Call today for a free confidential initial consultation to find out how Brief Therapy can give you lasting results. The Bookpress ter to get itself into, and that it’s wonderful to “taxi dancing” or three standing in a row DeWitt Building, have as many life forms around the planet as “like gents at a urinal,” of “large glossy B r ie f T h e r a p y A s s o c i a t e s 120 East Buffalo Street, Ithaca 215 N. Cayuga St. possible—for novelty, for beauty, out of a crows [who] sound as if they’re gagging on 275-3675 www.brief-therapy.com Ithaca, NY 14850 respect for their dignity and right to exist.” lengths of flannel.” Insurance reimbursable - Sliding scale lee - Major credit cards accepted In A Slender Thread, Ackerman shows us From time to time, a passage describing that while a belief in human dignity and the nature will turn decidedly purple: “the right to exist surely motivates crisis coun­ aubergine drapery of the forest” or “in the D o n ’t F o rg et selors, they also recognize another pull of lavender hours after daybreak, before the sun nature—the inevitability of death, and, for leapt onto the blue stage of the sky to begin humans, the right to autonomy and choice. Not its light opera of soul-searing heat....” But M°00°S°E°W°0°0°D acting as therapists, the counselors are rather the occasional overwriting and a proneness trained listeners: sympathetic and patient ears to prettiness in Ackerman’s style are tolera­ attuned to others’ pain, witnesses to the intrica­ ble^ enthusiasms simply because there is so Open for Lunch cies of human suffering. Witnessing is, in fact, much else here that’s freshly seen and ably what constitutes this book’s complex emotion­ stitched together. and Dinner al tenor: both nature and human nature are Humanity and nature overlap intrinsically (Dinner only Sunday) continually observed, paralleled, respected. and repeatedly in Ackerman’s lushly While writing this work, Ackerman some­ metaphorical prose, from phrases like “a wind­ Enjoy our innovative, international menu, times told people it was “about squirrels and fall of memories,” “a bustier of stars,” or “the the dark night of the soul,” and that delineat­ hard gardening of therapy” to her recollection plus delicious, savory pitas, hearty soups, ing phrase heads the book’s second chapter. that Emile Zola once remarked that “on some fresh breads, tempting desserts, and an array Observing the personable squirrels in her mornings, you first have to swallow your toad two-acre backyard was a National Geograph­ of disgust before you can get on with the day.” of thirst-quenching beverages. ic research project but here becomes a But beyond metaphor, what’s finally most metaphor for nature’s cycle and the struggle important about Ackerman’s vision of nature Monday through Sunday to survive. The writer scatters nuts on the in A Slender Thread is its direct relationship to snow, knowing that feeding the squirrels human life: Animals also get depressed and Dewitt Mall • 273-9610 intervenes with nature yet recognizing inter­ Fine Original Cuisine vention as a natural human impulse. Person- continued on page 3

This publication is Friends of the Bookpress made possible, in M. H. Abrams Kenneth Evett Isaac Kramnick Benjamin Nichols Publisher/Editor: Jack Goldman Diane Ackerman Lydia Fakundiny Martha & Arthur Kuckes Sonya Pancaldo part, with public Managing Editor/Dcsign Editor: Isaac Bowers Helen T. M. Bayer LeMoyne Farrell Eva Kufner-Augsberger Andrew & Nancy Rainage Contributors: Martin & Leslie Bernal Bryna Fireside Sandra Lafeber Mary Ann Rishel funds from the New John Bowers, Steven Chapman, Edward T. Chase, Jonathan Bishop Harvey Fireside Walter Lafeber Carl Sagan Dan Collins, Harvey Fireside, Jon Michaud, Kevin Murphy, Cushing Strout, Paul West Miriam Brody Sheldon Flory R. Carolyn Lange Nick Salvatore York State Council Art: E. Wayles Browne Mrs. William D. Fowler Deborah Lemon Jane Parry Sleeper Jack Sherman, Daphne Sold, Patti & Jules on the Arts. Scott Werder, Don Karr George Gibian Alison Lurie Cushing Strout Edward T. Chase Jody Gladding David Macklin Ann Sullivan Editorial Interns: Cara Ben-Yaacov, Mafalda Moore R. F. Cisne Henry Goode Myra Malkin Deborah Tall State of the Arts Maria & Gerald Coles Jerry Gross Dan McCall Ree Thayer The entire contents of Th i Booeriiss are copyright William Cross Marj Haydon James McConkey Alison Van Dyke 01996 by T h i Boottniss, Inc.. All rights reserved. Th i Boostrtiss will not be liable for typographical error Jonathan Culler Neil & Louise Hertz Maureen McCoy Gail Warhaft or errors in publication. Subscription rate is $ 12 ,!X) per year. Th i Boottrnss is Ruth Darling Eva & Roald Hoffmann Terry McKieman Zell man Warhaft published eight times annually, February through M ay and September through December. Robert J. Doherty Phyllis Janowitz Scott McMiliin Paul West Subm issions of manuscripts, art, and Letters to the NYSCA Editor should be sent, SASE, to: Dora Donovan George & Audrey Kahin Louise Mink Winlhrop Wetherbee T he Bookpress, DeWitt Building Ann Druyan Alfred Kahn Edward Murray Marian White 215 N. Cayuga Street, Ithaca, NY 14850 (607)277-2254; fax (607) 275-9221 Joyce Elbrecht Peter Katzenstein Margaret Nash Carol Ann Wilburn March 1997 T he BOOKPRESS page 3

O ff Campus

At The Bookery continued, from page 3 We Die This presentation is part of our ongoing some even commit suicide (generally an altru­ series of readings and talks upstairs in istic gesture); like us, they compete, quarrel, for Carl Sagan the DeWitt Mall. and nurture; build and depend on community. If we exile ourselves from nature, she fervently believes, we become hollow. Turning to We die despite appointments and feuds, nature, our one prayer should be “Teach us while our toddler Sunday' March 2, 4:00 p.m. about ourselves.” who recently learned to say No When a hawk spectacularly swipes a chip­ opens and shuts drawers munk out of her back yard, Ackerman recog­ a hundred times a day Elizabeth Holmes' nizes the drama as simultaneously cruel and and our teen braces for the rapids of poetry has appeared in Poetry, Gettys­ beautiful. This kind of normal “biomischief’ is romance. burg Review, Prairie Schooner, Michi­ examined thoughtfully in the book, particularly gan Quarterly Review, and many other in relation to the perilous states in which the We die despite the contracts journals. Ms. Holmes came to Ithaca in crisis line callers find themelves. Anxiety, and business trips we planned, 1985 to earn a master's degree in writing panic, anger, violence, helplessness, confusion, when our desk is untidy, from Cornell University and has worked despair—these psychic realities are inevitable despite a long list o/Things To Do here as a writer and editor ever since. and natural, yet, in our most human of respons­ which we keep simmering The Patience of the Cloud Photographer es, evoke empathy and solace. like a pot of rich broth. is her first book of poetry. The teeming fields and woods and lakesides of Ithaca contrast to the barren, unidentified We die despite work we cherish, room where the crisis phones are answered. marrying whom we love, But that room—and Ackerman’s book—is piling up a star-spangled fortune, Saturday, March 8, 8:00 p.m. peopled with a wealth of individual callers’ sto­ basking on the Riviera of fame, ries. At first, the vividness of these narratives and achieving, that human participle makes one feels like an uneasy voyeur, despite with no known object. International Women's Day the clear prefatory acknowledgment that details In celebration of International Women's Day, the Durland Alternatives have been thoroughly altered to ensure confi­ Life is not fair,, the old saw goes. Library and The Bookery are co-sponsoring an event featuring the work of dentiality. (Profiles of crisis line callers from We know, we know, but the saw glides women writers from a variety of countries and backgrounds. Stories and other cities have also been merged here, and slow, poems will be read by an "international cast" of women, including: Helena local counselors helped review the manuscript one faint rasp, and then at length another. Maria Viramontes, Anne Adams, Helga Schmidt, Ofelia Ferran, Jane Mt. for anonymity.) Gradually, though, the reader’s When you died, I felt its jagged teeth rip. Pleasant, Zulma Iguina, Magdalena Janusz, Cheryl Higashida, Maria lanna- feeling of trespassing is replaced by a sense of Small heartwounds opened and bled, come Coles, and others. respectful relationship and shared concern. closing as new ones opened ahead. Ackerman has not only set her presentation Horror welled, not from the how but the of individuals in crisis in the context of a when. Sunday: March 9, 4:00 p.m. redemptive natural world, but has also wisely included herself as a fallible narrator. As a You died at the top of your career, counselor, she may make mistakes, become happy, blessed by love, still young. Elisabeth Sheldon distracted, fear saying the wrong thing. We Playing by evolution's rules, you won: Just in time for Spring planting, Elisabeth glimpse her in other settings as an over-sensi­ prospered, bred, rose in your tribe, Sheldon will offer a discussion and slide tive teenager, an impatient invalid, a home- did what the parent gods and society presentation on the use of hot colors in owner with a leaking roof. In one chapter, she prized. small gardens as outlined in her newest even presents herself breaking the sacred coun- book, The Flamboyant Carden. As an selor/caller boundary by attending an evangeli­ Yet it didn't save you, love or dough. alternative to the rather tyrannical English cal church service where she hopes to see one Even when it happens slow, it happens style, Ms. Sheldon will help you enliven client she’s especially concerned about. The fast, your garden in a distinctly American woman is there, and though Ackerman does and then there's no tomorrow. style. Ms. Sheldon, author of the popular not speak with her, she finds herself—as the Time topples, the castle of cards collapses, A Proper Garden, lives in Lansing, N. Y. minister channels the dead to the living through thoughts melt, the subscription lapses. a bouquet of carnations—curiously both partic­ What a waste o f life we spend in asking, ipant and observer. in wish and worry and want and sorrow. This traversing of boundaries—not primari­ ly as a counselor, but as a naturalist, writer, and A tall man, you lie low, now and forever Sunday: March 16, 4:00 p.m. thinker—is exactly what’s so appealing about complete, your brilliant star eclipsed. Diane Ackerman’s work. She’s messy; she I remember our meeting many gabfests Sheldon Flory mixes it all up, throws it all in the pot. This ago, The Bookery is proud to host a reading and fund-raiser for Hospicare of quality and her commitment to the sensory at a crossroads o f moment and mind. Ithaca. Poet Sheldon Flory will read from his "poems from hospice," a col­ world suggest that she is in her element as an In later years, touched by nostalgia, lection based on his work at the Ontario-Yates Hospice. intuitive, synthetic writer, a poet at heart. For I teased "l knew you when her not only nature, but language itself, pro­ you were just a badly combed scientist." vides the soul asylum. With a grin, you added: "1 knew you A Slender Thread is both easy and difficult to when Sunday, March 23, 4:00 p.m. read—easy because it gives great sensuous you were just a fledgling poet." pleasure, difficult because the human sorrow it Susan R. Suleiman contains constantly ambushes the reader with Lost friend, you tau&, is Ms. Suleiman, Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Har­ painful awareness. The work—callers’ stories, I longed to learn, and thisp

215 North Cayuga St., Ithaca Barbara Adams teaches writing at Ithaca Col­ For more information call (607) 273-5055 lege. Her profile of writer Paul West appeared —Diane Ackerman in last summer's Creative Nonfiction.

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teeth, finally the bones from their emaciated Harvey Fireside bodies to make soap for Hitler’s war effort. It was a grim picture that came into focus In an earlier section, "Kikerizpotschen/ only gradually. At the time, we were unaware Kristallnacht, ” (Bookpress, December 1995), of its final shape, like the ant that laboriously the author recounted his memories o f Vienna carries its tiny grain, not realizing that a pair of before and after the Nazi takeover of March hobnailed boots is headed its way. Yet, as I 1938 know as the Anschluss. The story search my memory, I find an echo less of hor­ resumes here nine months later. Half of the rors than of finding shelter among kind people. city's Jews have fled. Now the remainder are Perhaps my memories of tlie sixteen months being forced into a ghetto by secret order of in the ghetto were softened by the painful expe­ Reichsmarschall Goering. riences of my previous nine years: the suicide • • • of my mother, the rejections of assorted rela­ By the end of 1938, the Nazis who ran Vien­ tives, my stays in the orphanage and in the hos­ na had evolved a policy of what in today’s jar­ pital, the fitful attention that my father paid to gon is called ethnic cleansing. Jews residing in me. Now I was suddenly plunged into the midst twenty of the city’s twenty-three Bezirke (dis­ of nine individuals and a stream of visitors, a tricts) were given short notice to vacate their fascinating parade that welcomed and general­ houses and apartments. Henceforth they would ly embraced me. be allowed to live only in three districts that had When we were evicted from the Josefstadt, been the traditional “lower East side”—mainly where I had lived all my life, we were taken in Leopoldstadt (district 2) plus segments of two by the Sonnenscheins, cousins of my stepmoth­ other neighborhoods (in districts 9 and 10). The er Sidy, on the Franz Hochedlingergasse in Prater, for example, with its broad boulevards Leopoldstadt. There were the elderly parents and amusement park, was in the second district with mournful faces, and two grown sons, Karl but had at once been declared judenrein and Pepperl, who, though in their twenties, (cleansed of Jews). already seemed like fussy old bachelors. Their The original working-class area had housed sister, Dora, had managed to escape to England the Jewish quarter centuries ago when it had before war broke out. become a magnet for refugees from the Austri­ The Sonnenscheins had owned a knitting an Empire’s eastern reaches, especially Poland goods factory and were quite well off. My par­ (with its Galitsianer) and Czechoslovakia ents occupied one of their spare rooms, which (source of Bohemians). The latter brings to had once been reserved for the maid. I shared Most of the grownups had bad cases of nerves, unless it was renewed. It permitted the bearer a mind a children’s jingle: another smallish room with my stepmother so their hands were not very steady. one-way trip to Great Britain, the Netherlands, Jo, Jo, Jo, dei Voter is' a Boehm' Sidy’s mother, whom I called Grandma Rosa. When Grandma was dozing and no one else United States, South America and Australia. A Ich hob ihm bei der Taborlinie She had the bed, while I slept on a cot. Soon we wanted to indulge me, I took refuge in my play­ special exit permit costing 8 Reichsmark then Ziegl schupf n g'sehn. were joined by two more waifs, an entertaining house. It was a cardboard box, which housed allowed the departure of my father and me (Yes, yes, yes, your Daddy is a Bohemian/ young man named Zalmen and a woman sim­ furniture—tables, chairs, beds—cut to scale. from the Nazi empire. The two of us were lim­ I’ve seen him at the Taborstreet[car]- ply called Yente die Roite (something like “the This was my little private world, an escape ited to carrying out a combined fortune of 20 line/pitching bricks.) red busybody”), in honor of her auburn hair and from the crowded quarters I lived in. Reichsmark, equivalent to $7.65. An insert cer­ In sixty-year hindsight, this seems to be a non-stop gossip. I still had my stamp album. Everyone saved tifies that I was reinoculated for smallpox and derogatory rhyme about Bohemian immigrants Zalmen became a ghetto entrepreneur, able colorful stamps for me tom from envelopes displayed the proper reaction on May 18,1939. who worked as bricklayers. At the time, I knew to cull our few remaining trinkets and convert from every part of the world that carried mes­ Each of these documents, certificates and it only as a tongue twister, which was supposed those in demand into pieces of wood or coal sages telling us we were not welcome any­ stamps entailed days of waiting in line, humili­ to be recited at top speed in a fake Czech accent that we could bum in the living room stove or where. Until June 1939, the dictators of a few ation before assorted bureaucrats, and the pay­ and was invariably met by a round of laughter trade for a cut of meat we might add to our mea­ Caribbean and South American countries, like ment of our last few pennies. My father had to from a Viennese audience preening its German ger diet. Yente would disappear for days at a Santo Domingo and Paraguay, accepted screw up his courage for a day or two before culture. time, dressed in a low-cut, flowery Gypsy-style refugees ready to hack their new homesteads setting out on another sally into the bastions of In any case, by the 1930s, the Jewish quarter outfit. When she resurfaced, she was a purvey­ out of the jungle. Then they, too, slammed their Nazi officialdom. Sometimes he took my step­ encompassed a variety of social classes. Some or of the latest news—a precious commodity, doors in our faces. mother or me along to allay his anxiety. of the families stayed on even after they since we had been forced to surrender our My father refused to give up. He enlisted my I recall one gray morning when we walked became commercially successful. They may radios months before and relied strictly on the help in browsing through an atlas looking for up to an imposing building, looking for the have grown accustomed to their native sounds grapevine for bulletins from the outside world. possible escape routes. I think it must have office that had to issue us some precious piece and smells; others may have welcomed the The most central figure in our menage was been as a result of a rumor conveyed by Yente of paper. The front door was flanked by police­ proximity of dozens of synagogues in the area, Grandma. Everybody else was always flitting that we focused on Manchukuo. That was the men who didn’t deign to look at or talk to us only a short walk away on Shabbos. The ones in and out, but her stout form remained name given to Manchuria by its Japanese occu­ when we approached. The directory in the who moved away, including my father and ensconced in an overstuffed chair near the piers. They had actually allowed a few thou­ lobby indicated that we had to trudge up three Uncle Willy, were drawn to distant parts of the stove. She always had time to listen to every­ sand Jews to trek to the far-off capital, Harbin. flights of stairs (elevators not open to Jews). city where they could adopt the protective col­ body’s tales of fear and woe, which she gently I checked it out on the map as a destination After limping up a steep staircase, my father oration they needed to assimilate and prosper in punctuated with clucks of sympathy. Her eyes most likely reached by the Trans-Siberian Rail­ told the secretary in the outside office why we a goyishe world. were set above giant pouches of skin, yet they road. We already visualized a reunion with rel­ had come. By then the hand in which he held How were over one hundred thousand Jews • always maintained a kindly, interested gaze. atives in Shaghai, only a few thousand miles mine had become clammy. The secretary had who suddenly found themselves homeless in I’m afraid I took merciless advantage of her south. But the Japanese must have taken a hint us wait for what seemed like hours. 1939 supposed to find a place to live? “A sim­ patience. She taught me to sew. Out of scraps of from their Axis partners in Berlin and soon Finally, a voice from the inner office barked ple matter,” snapred the Gauleiter. “Jews are cloth I began to make credible versions of withdrew the lifeline they had thrown the Jews. “Rein.r (come in), and we obeyed. Behind the supposed to be as thick as thieves. Well, they heart-shaped pin cushions, which served as pre­ New rumors galvanized Jews to line up at desk was a middle-aged man in a police uni­ can ask friends or relatives in the newly sents to female visitors. Grandma also brought other Asian and African consulates around form, who in an officious voice asked my declared ghetto to move over and let them order into our chaotic household. It was her Vienna. Ever the optimist, my father roused father what his business was. My father opened squeeze in.” The loners were ordered to report calm influence that made me keep a notebook himself to track down these elusive visas. It his briefcase and, bowing to the Herr Direktor, to the rat-infested abandoned barracks in the containing all the birthdays of assorted friends was not a risk-free undertaking. The Nazis held out a file. The official riffled through the Simmering district, from which few ever and relatives. A handmade greeting card invari­ periodically directed their minions to seize papers that proved our identity and the pay­ returned. ably made all these distraught folks smile for a some of the Jewish men shivering in the cold ment of fees to various city agencies. We After New Year’s Day 1939, groups of few minutes. Because our lives had been before the consuls opened their doors. The steeled ourselves for the usual nasty comments hunched-over Jews could be seen leaving their declared officially worthless, we needed a applicants turned up at Dachau instead of directed at Saujuden (dirty Jews). But to our houses in all parts of Vienna carrying boxes reminder that each human being could be cele­ Dahomey. surprise, the official looked down at me and and suitcases. Somehow they lugged all that brated at least once a year. “It is a fact,” Goering had pontificated, “that asked me what grade I attended. I remembered remained portable of their possessions across Grandma also indulged my unquenchable Germans and Jews can’t stand each other. They my good manners when I replied, “The fourth town to the ghetto. Everything they left behind appetite for games to pass the long afternoons. don’t like us, and we want to get rid of them.” grade, gnaediger Herr (dear Sir).” On the cor­ had to be signed over to a “kommissarischer After all, we were in a kind of prison with an At first, the Germans had tried to create an exo­ ner of his massive desk, I spotted a family pho­ VerwalteT' (appointed administrator), who dis­ indeterminate sentence. To while away the dus, then they blocked the way with incredible tograph in a silver frame. The couple was tributed it to worthy Aryan neighbors. Theft hours, we played endless rounds of gin rummy. obstacles. standing next to a boy who must have been was camouflaged as an orderly transaction. When we had extra partners we set up the board It all comes back when I look over my around my age. “Na, mach ’s gut, Junge” (do a Meanwhile, the non-Jewish population of the for “Mensch aergere dich nicht!” (loosely, father’s Austrian passport. “Reisepass No. good job, kid), the official said to me with a city merrily danced its way through the season­ don’t fret yourself), a form of parcheesi. If you 35849,” issued by the German Reich on Octo­ faint smile. He unscrewed a massive fountain al round of holiday balls. rolled double-sixes you got to throw the dice ber 1, 1938, is stamped with a big red J (for pen and scrawled an illegible signature topped It was another of the cycles of legalized rob­ another time. A cry of triumph was obligatory Jude). That stamp was added on November 15 by the requisite stamp on our form. We both beries by which the Jews were picked clean. when you knocked an opponent’s piece off the for an added fee of 3 Reichsmark. Then on Jan­ bowed as we received the papers and backed Any that left the country from now on had to do board. I was the resident champion of Mikado. uary 10, 1940, a notation indicates that my out of the room. For a split second we had seen so literally with the clothes on their back. The In this version of jackstraws, you grasped a father and I have both been given the middle a genuine human being emerge from the uni­ less fortunate ones ended up in concentration bundle of sticks in your fist, then released them name Israel—required of all Jewish males and form. On the way out my father gave me a hug. camps where they were forced to contribute into a tangle. You had to extract the pointed providing an excuse for another fee. My presence seemed to have brought him luck first their labor, then the gold fillings from their sticks one by one without disturbing the others. The passport was valid for only one year on this venture. “Who knows,” he told me on March 1997 T h e RQQKPRESS page 5 p < A F E D e w i t t ■ ■ >lem ■ ■ ■ ■ SUNDAY 10-2

the way home, “on another day, he might have living from day to day. order with a ruler applied liberally to the knuck­ Crispy Corn Fritters gotten up from the wrong side of the bed and Still, ghetto life wasn’t all gloom and desper­ les. This teacher did succeed in teaching us a Lemon Souffle Pancakes ripped up our papers.” ation. At least once a week we tried to have a few things that might have been of value. In the Overall, the defeats outweighed the few vic­ festive air permeate our dinner. No matter what space of about one semester, I learned dozens Farmhouse Breakfast tories on the road to our liberation. In August the meager fare around the oaken table in the of useful words in “Ivrit,” colloquial Hebrew, Eggs Benedict 1939, Hitler had sent his foreign minister, dining room, we all sat down with expectant just in case we might somehow wash ashore in Waffles & Compote Joachim von Ribbentrop, to sign a pact with his faces. Palestine. We began our classes by saluting a Omelettes opposite number, Vyacheslav Molotov, repre­ One particular Friday night, I recall the elder homemade blue-and-white flag and singing the with Breadbasket senting the former arch-enemy in Moscow. Sonnenscheins, our hosts, at the head of the “Hatikvah.” The Nazis seemed to tolerate such Roasted Qarlic Potatoes Hitler and Stalin seemed to have arrived at a table. They began the festivities by mumbling a Zionist pretensions as one means forgetting rid modus vivendi, and the immediate losers were Broche (grace) before the meal. Karl and Pep- of their Jews. Chicken-Apple Sausages Jews, who saw their escape routes to the east perl, their two sons flanking them, chorused an During that harsh winter of 1939-40, we Specials Change Daily now blocked off. Amen. Then Sidy and Yente brought out a Jewish boys were sometimes confronted after In September, the German blitzkrieg swept steaming tureen of something we hadn’t school by a gang of Hitler Youth outside. If it through Poland, up to the line of territories that savored in a long time: chicken soup. snowed, we just had to dodge snowballs; at DEWITT MALL,ITHACA had been ceded to the Red Army. The attack on How had this miracle happened? Zalmen other times, it was rocks and other missiles. We Poland triggered off declarations of war against had managed to swap some costume jewelry were under strict instruction from the principal, 273-3473 Germany by France and Britain, Poland’s for a bag full of chicken scraps at the butcher Dr. Steiner, never to fight back. One lucky treaty partners. It was not long before the status shop. There were bits of innards that all the oth­ blow by us might prove disastrous for our par­ of Polish Jews became ever more precarious. ers smacked their lips over. I, still the finicky ents. Jewish families had been shipped to con­ Not coincidentally, the Jewish elders of the eater, slurped the soup but turned up my nose at centration camps for less. I still feel the chagrin Viennese Kultusgemeinde announced that the reptilian-looking chicken feet on my plate. I of my enforced cowardice. The best I could do same month that all men, women and children was chided by my father, “How do you expect with my bottled-up aggressiveness was to yell had to be formally registered. to get any nourishment when you keep picking back “Arschloch” (asshole) at the little Nazis as We obeyed instructions but with a sense of at your food? At least, give it a try.” I raced by them. foreboding. Our vital statistics were checked I chewed at one curled-up chicken claw and There was no point in describing my running and entered into ledgers. It wasn’t long before promptly gagged. Some kind soul—it must of the gauntlet to my parents, since there was the first consequence of our census transpired. have been Grandma—whisked the offending nothing they could do about it. Anyway, they My father was one of some two thousand male morsel from my plate and substituted a serving had weightier problems on their minds. In addi­ Jews who received an invitation from the of hearty kasha. Now that peace was restored, tion to the frustrations of trying to leave the authorities to become “pioneers” in a new zone we began telling jokes. They were all in the cat­ ghetto for good, they had to figure out every set aside a couple of hours north of Cracow. He egory of Galgenhumor (gallows humor). day how to survive in it. was supposed to pack the “tools of his trade” There was one about the SS man who was After war broke out in September 1939, and to show up at the Bahnhof (raUmad station) about to slit the rabbi’s throat, when he had sec­ there were even more severe shortages of all dors* Lula Borges in two weeks with one suitcase and no more ond thoughts. “You Jews are supposed to be so necessities: food, fuel, clothing, etc. Ration SiX POETS than 300 Reichsmark (about a hundred dollars). smart,” he said. ‘Tell me your secret and I’ll cards were issued item by item. Of course, Xlthographi by Corneille Once the men had set up stakes, they would be spare your life.” “That’s simple,” the rabbi Jews, who occupied the subhuman ranks of the Dee. 3-31 able to send for their families. replied. “We eat herring tails. If you give me social scale, were given allotments for less than SOLA ART GALLERY At that low point in his fortunes, my father fifty groschen, I’ll give you one every day and the minimum needed to survive. To make cer­ Dewitt Mall felt he had no other option. Dutifully, he packed make you smart also.” The SS-man agreed to tain that they might not bribe shopkeepers into Ithaca, MY 14850 up the portable studio camera he still owned. the bargain. By the end of the week he burst in giving them a bit extra, Jews were allowed to Tel: 607 272-6552 The small suitcase had room left for only a cou­ on the rabbi screaming, “Now you’ve had it. shop only during the last hour of the day when V _ Mon.-Sat. 10:50-5:50 Sun. 12-5 J ple of changes of clothes. I was terrified I would I’ve been paying you fifty groschen for these the shelves were almost bare. never see my father again as his departure date tails, and I just found out I can buy a whole her­ We had long ago said good-bye to the fabu­ approached. To all my arguments, he replied ring for only ten.” “See,” said the rabbi, lous pastries that we had taken as our birthright. with a shrug, “I’m just sitting around doing “You’ve gotten smarter already!” No more Schaumrollen, Sachertorten or Apfel- NATURAL nothing. How much worse can it be in There were also jokes with double entendres, strudel. Our rebellious stomachs had to accept Poland?” mixing the Prussian pronunciation of the Ger­ bread that tasted as if it were baked with saw­ FOODS The answer to his question was provided mans with the Viennese dialect. In one, a Ger­ dust, washed down with ersatz coffee com­ and a large selection of when Yente stormed in the day before he was man officer marches into a local bar asking, posed of roasted acorns and chicory. My father alternative health books supposed to leave. She pulled out a card she “Kann mann hier ein bischen Rum kriegen?” found it almost impossible to give up his ciga­ had just received from, a cousin, Feivel the tai­ (Prussian for, can you get a tot of rum here?— rettes; I helped him stuff papers with some kind lor, who had shipped out as a pioneer on a train but Viennese for, can one crawl around here a of acrid tobacco substitute. the previous month. “We are all thriving,” little?) The bartender answers, "Wenn's Ihna Had it not been for the soup kitchens of the Feivel had written. “Food is abundant and the Spass machtr (If you get a kick out of it!) Quakers and American Jewish agencies, we living accommodations wonderful. A new life Since our move to the ghetto, I had said could scarcely have survived. No doubt, the awaits us. Wish you were here, Feivel.” Above good-bye to my old school under the steady officials who ladled out their nourishing stews his signature, Feivel had put the Yiddish words, hand of my longtime teacher, Herr Maschek. to the long lines of famished ghetto dwellers "PinkJ verkehrf' (vice versa). By January 1939,1 was enrolled in a new estab­ every noontime were aware of what was going My father blanched when he understood lishment at Kleine Sperlgasse 2a, sponsored by on. They must have passed the word to their Feivel had managed to send his warning under the Jewish Kultusgemeinde. Retired teachers central offices in New York or Toronto or G reenStar the nose of the censor. Read in reverse, he was were recruited to staff the three schools in the Rome of how the noose was closing around the ( cooperative m a r k e t ) telling future “pioneers” to avoid a life of star­ ghetto. My new teacher was Dr. Amalie Loew, 135,000 Jews still stranded in the ghetto by the 701 West Buffalo Street vation and misery at all costs. But for my father a bespectacled white-haired lady, who looked fall of 1939. ’ 607-273-9392 there seemed to be no turning back. If he didn’t over her fourth-grade boys and girls with a We kept waiting for someone to come to our NEW HOURS: M-Sat 9-9, Sun 10-7 report for the next transport, surely an armed quizzical air. Her doctorate indicates that she rescue, but nary a pope, president or prime min­ squad would come to drag him along. probably had been teaching respectful gymna­ ister stirred. Nor did the ghetto grapevine report OPEN TO EVERYONE At that point, my stepmother sprang into sium (high-school) or even college students. any foreign protests about how we were being action. Through her brother she knew a decent Rumor soon had it that Dr. Loew was ground down. The golem lay broken in the Christian doctor who might do her a favor. She descended from the legendary Prague rabbi dust. We kept mumbling our prayers, yet it r Subscribe to: came back in an hour, triumphantly bearing an who had made a golem out of clay. The golem soon became evident that if we were ever to official-looking paper. The physician had certi­ had been brought to life by the miracle-work­ escape this ghetto alive, it would have to be by fied that my father was suffering from a conta­ ing rabbi because the Czech Jews needed our own efforts. gious disease. He was absolutely forbidden to someone to defend them from their enemies. After two years of receiving our pleas, Uncle ifiOOKPRESS leave his bed, let alone undertake any travel. Why couldn't we reawaken this creature as our Mike in Danville, Illinois, finally sent us an I The Bookpress b r i n g s y o u a The next morning, my father remained hud­ champion in Vienna? “affidavit of support,” guaranteeing that we I STIMULATING COLLECTION OF dled under extra blankets in bed, his night table The school offered the regular subjects— wouldn’t become welfare cases if we came to | REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS AND | ESSAYS EIGHT TIMES A YEAR. stacked with old prescription bottles. Sidy left reading, writing, arithmetic, history, religion, the U.S. In April 1940, on the eve of Passover, For only $ 12, the next eight for the Aspang Bahnhof. During the tearful natural science, drawing and music—plus we packed the allotted few pieces of under­ issues will be delivered directly to scenes of leave-taking on the platform, she had “weibliche Handarbeiten" (female handicrafts, wear, shirts, socks and handkerchiefs and set your door. managed to submit my father’s medical certifi­ probably sewing) for girls. My lowest grade out for Trieste. Our first decent meal in over a I Name:______cate without much trouble. In the general con­ appears to have been in deportment. I must year was the seder given us by the local Jewish • Address: ______fusion, who cared about one Jew more or less? have been one of the Lausbuben (rotten boys) community. Then we boarded the “Roma,” an It was a tense day, as we listened for foot­ who were provoked by the unaccustomed pres­ Italian steamer, for a three-week voyage to steps on the stairs. Would the storm troopers ence of female classmates to throw spitballs New York. Virtually all the friends and rela­ • Phone:______come to check up on my father’s condition? By and make rude noises. Perhaps Dr. Loew tives who had bid us a tearful good-bye in the I To SUBSCRIBE, PLEASE SEND IN YOUR PAY- I evening, we could all sigh with relief. I am sure, allowed us to be especially obnoxious because Vienna ghetto were sent to their deaths a year | MENT OF $ 12 TODAY TO: I though unbeliever that I was, I must have said a she knew we were reacting to the frustrations of later. 1 The B o o kp ress, D e W i t t B u i l d i n g , I prayer of thanks for my father’s deliverance. ghetto life. I 2 1 5 N. C a y u g a S t ., It h a c a , NY 14 8 5 0 . I Sidy rose greatly in my esteem. Without her In the autumn of 1939,1 was transferred to a Harvey Fireside, a refugee from Vienna, is a I ( V i s a /MC/D i s c o v e r , c h e c k o r m o n e y I courage and practical sense, my father would new school on Castellezgasse 35, with a no- visiting fellow at Cornell’s Institute for Euro­ I ORDER ACCEPTED. PLEASE MAKE CHECKS I | p a y a b l e t o The B o o kp ress. | have been lost. We went back to our routine of nonsense male teacher, Herr Popik, who kept pean studies. I______I page 6 T h e R OOKPRESS March 1997 Apocalypse Lost

Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, the unknowing heirs of Gnosticism, the Dreams, and Resurrection heretical tradition that the official Church Putnam, 1996 strove to eradicate. Angels, as we shall see, 272 pages; $24.95 paperback play a far more active role in various non­ orthodox strains of thought than they do in institutionalized theology. Indeed, Saint Peter Yoonsuk Paik Paul, worried about the temptation of poly­ theism posed by God’s intermediaries, more In Bruno Schulz’s surrealistic fable of often denounced angels as disguises for 1934, “The Comet,” the narrator’s brother Satan than extolled them as divine messen­ comes home from school bringing news that gers. Bloom suggests that the angels exert a the end of the world is imminent. Far from particularly powerful appeal in the present, throwing the household, as well as the gener­ in spite of their lack of grounding in much al population, into terrified pandemonium, orthodox doctrine, because they are sec­ the impending apocalypse draws eager ondary creations and thus reflect our own crowds outside who gaze with awe at the cos­ feelings of cultural belatedness. Or, perhaps mic spectacle unfolding in the night-sky, angels have become the avatars of a national where new stars begin to teem in the path of sectarianism grown so splintered that, a comet hurtling towards earth. For this ulti­ instead of a single universal Father in heav­ mate cataclysm will take place without the en embracing the great multitude of believ­ tragic pathos of a last judgment nor the sub­ ers, the upper spheres become mobbed with lime grandeur of God’s Wrath, but is the celestial advocates upholding the rights and result of “a mutual agreement” reached in “an interests of the “even the least deserving of atmosphere of friendly understanding.” us.” Yet the joyless spectacle of lawyers Indeed, this universal demise, “splendidly feuding in the skies nonetheless mirrors to hocus pocus” and “bogus-experimental,” an extent the likely inspiration for the com­ would be “the most progressive, freethinking plex hierarchies of angels in Judaism: the end of the world imaginable, in line with the vast, elaborate imperial bureaucracy of spirit of the times, an honorable end, a credit Babylon that awaited the newly exiled Jews. to the Supreme Wisdom.” The angels, as figures of mediation, surely Schulz’s comic sensibility (one of my stu­ trouble any orthodox insistence on clear-cut dents once described him as a “technicolor distinctions between the major faiths and Kafka”) was probably affected by the propa­ their shadowy predecessors as much as they, ganda of the official presses in World War as figures of transcendence, unsettle the One, which at its beginning held great appeal opposition between God and human. Bloom across large segments of a European civi­ points out that angels originated in the lization that had grown queasy over the ancient Persia of Zoroaster, circa 1500 apparent dissipation of the manly virtues. B.C.E. Zoroaster was the prophet who, However, in this story, the very rage for the though his religion now knows few adher­ final destruction succumbs, cannily enough, ents, established many of the ideas that the to fashion. The enthusiasm caused by the major monotheisms later converted into doc­ sheer novelty of this inventively festive William Blake trine. His innovations include the cosmic doom proves no match for the principle of America a Prophecy 1793 struggle between good and evil, the apoca­ novelty itself, as the transience and depth- lypse, the arrival of a messiah, and the resur­ lessness associated with modernity effec­ “Great Disappointment”), and 1948 cannot the affairs of the temporal order, have been rection of the dead. Zoroaster’s relative tively drive the comet off-course into “uni­ quite match. In his latest book, Harold Bloom understood as messengers from God or as obscurity appears completely out of propor­ versal indifference.” This apocalypse turns takes on various contemporary phenomena the personal guardians of mortal men and tion with respect to his enduring influence on out to be just another fad, its timeliness dis­ that register most trenchantly our tum-of-the- women. But what is it about them, apart Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it solved in the narcotic suspicion that the millennium jitters. from the saccharine cuteness of cherubs, comes as small surprise that Herman world itself is eternal. Thus, made “richer by The widespread belief, in this country, in that accounts for their popularity and per- Melville chose to make Captain Ahab a par­ one more disappointment,” life goes on. the existence of angels, near-death experi­ durability in an allegedly secularized era? ticipant in the fire ceremonies of the Zoroas- Apocalypse, it seems, would always remain ences, and prophetic dreams are not to be dis­ Bloom cites statistics which reveal that trian Parsees. The Book of Daniel, written at a perennially fashionable topic. missed tout court as insipid New Age pabu­ sixty-nine percent of Americans believe in the time of the Maccabee uprising against the Schulz, a Polish Jew who was killed in lum or fundamentalist superstition. Rather, as angels, forty-six percent claim to have their Macedonian rulers of Syria, owes much to 1942 by Nazi soldiers in his native town of Bloom demonstrates with his formidable eru­ personal guardian angel, and thirty-two per­ the Zoroastrian imagination in giving names Drogobych, most likely did not foresee what dition, such patterns of imagery stem from cent say that they have actually felt angelic and prophecies to the angels, but this work’s horrors were to come in a century that has not traditions and systems of thought that predate presence. Such figures, Bloom tells us, tes­ angelology is surpassed by that of the non- lacked for apocalyptic terrors. But amid the the normative forms of the three major tify to the millennialist consciousness that canonical books of Enoch, which most specters of death camps, atomic weapons, and monotheisms of the West: Judaism, Chris­ has permeated this nation since the frontier provocatively disclose the relations and environmental catastrophe, it seems to be the tianity, and Islam. revivals of the early 1800s—our sense of affinities between the orthodox monotheisms laws of arithmetic that have most prominently having been chosen deriving less from and the heresies they suppressed. conspired to arrange a day of reckoning for I. The Angels Judeo-Christian sources than from older Enoch, in the Book of Genesis, is the patri­ the present era, to which no concrete upheaval religions centered in Iran. arch who, at the youthful age of 365, was as yet has given a name. Clearly, the end of Angels, of course, are among the most Continuing his thesis from The American taken up into heaven by Yahweh. According the millennium in the year 2000 boasts a kind commonplace of religious images. Given Religion, Bloom contends that our national to the heterodox lore of the Kabbalists, of menacing finality that other years calculat­ reassuringly human-like features by the faiths have little to do with traditional Chris­ Enoch was then transformed by the purifying ed by various sects and institutions for the painters of the Italian Renaissance, these tianity; rather, their sense of “cosmological fire of Zoroaster’s vision into an angel called Apocalypse, such as 1260, 1367, 1420, 1588, beings, who paradoxically partake of the emptiness” and sectarian valorization of Metatron. Metatron is a truly unique angel, 1666, 1843/44 (the years of the so-called substance of eternity while participating in individual experience and vision make them one who transgresses the barriers separating

At a turning point in his life , writer Michael Pollen found himself dreaming of a small wood-frame house—a place to work, but also a “shelter for daydreams.” Ordinarily more at home among words than things, the author was seized by the improbable idea of building the Amateur Builder place himself, with his two unhandy hands. Thus began a two-and-a-half-year journey of discovery, recounted in Michael Pollan is the an absorbing and often comic narrative, that deftly intertwines the day- author of the award win­ to-day work of design and building—from siting to blueprint, from pour­ ning Second Nature. He ing the foundation to finish carpentry—with reflections on everything is editor-at-large of from the way we invest a space with meaning to the question of what Harpers Magazine. Pol­ constitutes real work in a technological society. lan also writes a column With one eye on Thoreau and the other on Mr. Blandings, Pollan dra­ on architecture for the matizes the satisfaction of transforming a tree into a house, the power of new House & Garden. place to shape our lives , the warring perspectives of architect and car­ He lives in Cornwall penter (personified by two vividly drawn characters the narrator calls his Bridge, Connecticut, with prickly Virgils), and the philosophical significance of leaky roofs and his wife and son. contemporary architecture. Available in March from Random House f from the New York Times Magazine, photograph by John Peden Hardcover • 320 pages • $32.00 ■ 14 March 1997 T h e ROOKPRFSS page_7

the divine from the human to the point of always bringing the spirit of improvisation to Troublesome as the idea of knowledge might rigor,” which they willingly embraced after causing a veritable riot to break out among bear on their quest for higher wisdom. seem in matters of religion, Gnosis, Bloom casting off pagan norms: “We, who used to the heavenly orders. For the angels become maintains, constitutes a mode of experiencing take pleasure in immorality, now embrace infuriated by the arrival into their ranks of II. Gnosis the divine that is not to be confused with faith chastity alone; we who valued above every­ one who is the product of the “white drop” of or belief, for this “knowing represents itself thing else the acquisition of wealth and pos­ sexual union. Metatron is “scarcely Yah- What unites these varieties of “self-affirm­ as mutual, in which God knows the deep self sessions, now bring what we have into com­ weh’s servant, and not at all Yahweh’s mes­ ing spirituality,” which, unlike the “self- even as it knows God.” mon ownership, and share with those in need; senger,” but rather “the lesser Yahweh.” The abnegating” sort, has always posed a threat to This illuminating oneness, according to we, who hated and destroyed one another, heretical scholar Elisha ben Abuyah had a dogma, is the radical dualism which goes by Bloom, yields the image which the omens of refusing to live with those of a different race, revelation of Metatron seated on a throne, the name of Gnosticism. The central tenet of millennium—angels, near-death experi­ now live intimately with them.” which drove the visionary to cry out, “There Gnosticism equates the Creation of the world ences, prophetic dreams, and apocalypse— The utopian fervor of the early Church, are two Powers in heaven.” with the Fall from a primordial state of unity. only haltingly trace: the androgynous which seems a far cry from present-day Chris­ Metatron’s many roles reflect this radically The material world is the doleful handiwork Anthropos, or Adam Kadmon, the unfallen tianity, arose from the eschatological expecta­ ambiguous status, for as Bloom writes, of an inferior deity, the Demiurge, who is by giant who is “at once man and woman, God tion of Christ’s imminent return. The Gnostics’ “[s]ometimes Metatron is called the heavenly some accounts inept, by others malignant. and human, our forefather and our foremoth­ individualistic cultivation of a visionary cos­ scribe, recording our deeds...He can be our Usurping the place of the true God, this er.” This God-Man is what is restored by the mology, by contrast, seems to have precluded defense attorney in the heavenly court, or a imposter attempts to cover up his error by resurrection of the body. working out a durable communitarian ethic. minister of the throne...later he takes the “obscenely naming the Fall into division” as However, the elitist temperament and enig­ place of Michael the prime archangel.” Other the Creation and by “renaming the original III. The End of Apocalypse matic esotericisms of Gnosticism enabled it to sources identify him in metonymic fashion as Fullness” as “the Abyss, or chaos.” avoid the fate of the Christian ethic, which the rainbow that appeared to Noah after the This double dispossession of the primor­ One of Bloom’s most resonant formula­ progressively lost its mystery as it was institu­ flood, the “back of God” revealed to Moses dial God and the human “throws” us into this tions concerns the chain of totalizing disap­ tionalized and absorbed into secularizing on Mount Sinai, the chariot of Ezekiel, and existence, giving us over to the daily pathos pointments that eventually strains toward an abstractions. Gnosticism’s ideal of imagina­ even “the phallus of God.” Most importantly of “forlomness, dread, homesickness, numb­ apprehension of Gnosis: tive spirituality, its inwardness infused by for Bloom, Metatron becomes the guardian of ness, sleep, [and] intoxication” and placing mysteries, dreams, visions, and secrets, has secret wisdom, “the master of the divine mys­ us under the rule of the Demiurge’s hostile Gnosticism...in my judgment rises as a protest endured in the minds of poets, like Blake and teries of Torah” and “patron of the Zohar, the lieutenants, the Archons, who administer the against apocalyptic faith, even when it rises Rilke, and seers, like the Quaker George Fox, central book of all books of classical Kabbal­ universe like a police state. With this wither­ within such a faith, as it did successively within and Joseph Smith, the founder of Mor- ah.” “All those images of God that normative ing parable Gnosticism settles the problem of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Prophetic reli­ monism. Nevertheless, lest the dichotomy Judaism tended to reject but that nevertheless justifying God’s bewildering ways to man by gion becomes apocalyptic when prophecy fails, between a spiritual discipline that pits itself could not be excluded from Jewish tradi­ positing a “transcendent stranger God or and apocalyptic religion becomes Gnosticism against worldly power and one that over­ tions” come to cluster around this man-angel, alien God,” who, in his exile from the cos­ when apocalypse fails, as fortunately it always comes the power of the world appear insur­ making him into a cipher of the dimly embry­ mos, has become hidden and ineffectual, “a has and, as we must hope, will fail again. Gnos­ mountable, Bloom’s thesis that American mil- onic illuminations that have underlain the nihilistic conception.” This God cannot be ticism does not fail; it cannot fail, because its lennialism is an unknowing, popular form of institutionalized forms of the major held accountable “for our world of death G od is at once deep within the self and also Gnosticism attests not only to the explanatory monotheisms. Restating the intertwined camps and schizophrenia.” estranged, infinitely far off, beyond our cosmos. force of this radical dualism, but also to the nature of these heterodox faiths, Bloom con­ “Bom in throes, ‘tis fit that man should live fact that its assumptions are readily available cludes that “Metatron becomes the esoteric in pains and die in pangs!” One hears the whis­ Gnosticism is thus made invincible by the to serve present-day anxieties. Is it not con­ link in angelology between the divine and the pers of esoteric cosmologies in Captain sum of what it surrenders. Often the victims ceivable that, in a culture that wants for human, fusing these realms in the manner of Ahab’s imperious fury against the order of of persecution, its teachers ridiculed the sim­ encouraging images of fatherhood, many the Iranian ‘Man of Light,’ whether Zoroas- “omniscient gods oblivious of the suffering of ple-mindedness of orthodox believers but might want to project onto the “alien God” of trian or Sufi [Muslim].” man.” Our lives on earth would be nothing less never enjoyed their institutional power to the Gnostics the irresponsible outlines of an It is clear that our “bloody sacraments,” to than an unremitting nightmare, were it not for damn. However, as Elaine Pagels points out absent parent, the God of the Beyond as a kind borrow a phrase from William Gaddis, “have the fact that we possess, most of the time in a recent book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent of ultimate, cosmic deadbeat Father? But it known other voices and other rooms.” For unknowingly, a remnant from that luminous (Random House, 1989), the elitism and indi­ was the freedom of interpretation, particularly what is doctrine other than the negation of his­ primordial oneness, the divine “spark” or vidualism of Gnosticism, which tended to the freedom to read not literally but allegori­ tory—the insistence that a certain set of ideas pneuma. Gnosis refers to the “solitary act of limit its appeal to intellectuals and philoso­ cally, that animated the world-negating enthu­ and practices can be made into the unique and knowledge” whereby this spark “find[s] its phers, brought it into conflict not just with the siasm of the Gnostics; though their specific transcendent expressions of the deity’s pres­ way back to the uncreated, unfallen world.” Church’s desire for monopoly but also with wisdom might be lost, their restless drive to ence on earth? If the institutional forms of The pneuma, which existed before the Fall and the Christian message of freedom. The idea invent and imagine illumines the dim reaches Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have denied is thus not a part of Creation, is our deepest that each person, regardless of sex, nationali­ of the knowledge shared by both makers of or concealed their syncretic histories and syn­ self, to be distinguished from the psyche, or ty, or education, whether barbarian or slave, poetry and founders of religion. thesizing appropriations, they have often done the merely individual identity, which, as the possessed a sacrosanct value by virtue of hav­ What Bloom has given us is a labyrinth of so by attacking as heresy the imaginative work of the Demiurge, is barred from entering ing been created by God had an enormous this interior expanse, where, guided by the attempts to reinvent religion—which in them­ the place of the originary Fullness, or Pleroma. part in attracting converts, especially among thread of the elusive Metatron, we encounter selves, as Bloom shows, comprise a rich For the Christian Gnostic Valentinus, Gno­ the disenfranchised. Freud fretting about telepathy, Spenta Armaita, counter-tradition. sis is what causes the resurrection to take This egalitarianism was bound to upset the the feminine earth angel who stands at the left This counter-tradition would encompass the place while still in this life, as this illumina­ rigidly hierarchical social order of the Roman side of Ormazd, Lord of Light, the Gnostic Jewish Kabbalists, Gnostic Christians, Mus­ tion awakens one out of the material world, empire. Pagels notes that three-quarters of the Christ, who was not incarnated, and the Shi’ite lim Sufis, as well as the now-extinct the realm of illusion and death. The Gnostics’ population of Rome were slaves or descended Sufi Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’i, who discerned an Manicheans—whose founder, Mani, brought aspiration to experience the resurrection from slaves, who were “legally classified as astral as well as angel body in each human together the figures of Zoroaster, Jesus, and while still alive made them interpret the res­ property” and “subjected to their owners’ being. Bloom may take as his starting point Buddha—and the Cathars, who were annihi­ urrection of Christ not as a literal, historical abuses, fits of violence, and sexual desires.” contemporary anxiety about the millennium, lated in the Albigensian Crusade. They thus event but as a kind of living metaphor for The most zealous among the Christians broke but by the end, after a masterful display of form a veritable laboratory for the religious spiritual insight. The agony of the Passion completely with the Roman order, refusing to insight and scholarship, he rewards us with a imagination, making explicit the continuities gives way to the bliss of Illumination. Suffer­ honor pagan ideals of civic obligation to fam­ taste of the fruit of unacknowledged legislation. between rival orthodox traditions, challenging ing is accordingly the result of ignorance, ily, social class, tradition, and state. Writing the accepted and acceptable readings of the which one may therefore overcome through to the emperor, the philosopher Justin defend­ Peter Yoonsuk Paik is completing a PhD in sacred texts with idiosyncratic allegories, and “a renewal of knowing the estranged father.” ed the Christians on the basis of their “moral comparative literature at Cornell University.

\£ y n Happily Ever After, Jack Zipes addresses e award winning Black Wealth/ White his ongoing concern with the socialization of Wealth offers a powerful portrait of racial children, the impact of the fairy tale on chil­ inequality based on an analysis of private dren and adults, and the future development Black wealth. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro of the fairy tale as film. Analyzing the historical analyze wealth—total assets and debts rather trajectory of storytelling and the literary fairy than income alone—to uncoVer deep and tale, he examines how we have come full circle W e a l t h / persistent racial inequality in America, and from the early oral tradition in light of the rise they show how public policies fail to redress rairy 1 of storytelling throughout the world. Under­ W hite the problem. scoring all these essays is the question that all Chi Iclrc fairy tales raise: what does it take to bring about • W inner of the 1995 C. Wright Mills Wealth Award from the Society for the Study and the happiness? Is happiness only to be found in fairy tales? of Social Problems Culture K New Perspective on Jack Zipes is Professor of German at the Uni­ Melvin L. Oliver is Vice-President of the Ford Industry versity of Minnesota. He is the author of Fairy Racial Ineauality Foundation’s Asset Building and Community Tales and the Art of Subversion, Don't Bet on the Development Program. Thomas M. Shapiro Prince and Creative Storytelling, all published by is Professor of Sociology arid Anthropology at Roudedge. Northeastern University.

Available in March from Routledge Available in March from Routledge Paper, 8 illus. *144 pages • $15.95 Melvin L. Oliver & Thom as M. Shapiro Paper, 23 tables • 256 pages • $16.95 8 March 1997 Leaving Home

landishly. Listening to them, Saskia knew that Lois Brown one day she would go up the hill to Huge Red and leam those languages. Then, when she was The Saskiad running her own stall someday, she would greet Brian Hall every wanderer flawlessly in the right language. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1997 Soon they would buy only from her.” 380 pages; $23.95 hardcover Lauren’s capacity to both preserve and rein­ vent tradition—an ability most delightfully The Saskiad, Brian Hall’s latest novel, por­ illustrated in her vegetarian Thanksgiving trays a young girl’s search for her identity as a casserole and tenderly portrayed in her fleeting journey of epic proportions, an odyssey replete mother-daughter chats with Saskia—is the with delicious daydreams, various temptations most important legacy she passes on to her of the flesh, and private ruminations about the daughter. Saskia scrutinizes her mother, intu­ nature of life, love and parents. Hall’s imagina­ itively grasping her character, and thereby tive and fluid narrative chronicles two years in freeing herself from the need for maternal pro­ the life of Saskia White, a young girl whose tection. Later, it is Saskia’s father Thomas exploits include writing her own autobiography, who becomes the chief catalyst for Saskia’s supplementing her meager allowance with mar­ growth, rebellion and sexual distress as the ijuana sales, and unraveling the secrets of her novel focuses on his relationships with Saskia, parents’ life as hippies in Indian ashrams and a her best friend Jane, and Lauren. small upstate New York town somewhere along Thomas is a key transitional figure between Route 96 North. the real and unreal worlds. He appears midway The novel’s primary setting is White-on-the- through the story and sparks a number of crucial Water, a half-abandoned but still operative com­ awakenings. When Saskia and her good friend mune of sorts, whose rituals and rhythms do not Jane meet Thomas in Scandinavia and accom­ always bring out the best in people. The com­ pany him on a mission of ecological interven­ mune is located in the rainy town of Tyler, a tion, Saskia thinks that she will finally get the place that justifies flights of fancy, set as it is like answers to some of her pressing questions: what “a sore thumb” among the towns of Hector and does her name mean, why did her father leave, Ovid and not named after “a Greek or Trojan will he come back, and what is her paternal fam­ warrior, nor a poet, but a president no one ever ily history? Saskia delights in Thomas, a mus­ heard of.. .and not even really named after him, cled man who wears “seven-league boots,” has but after a postmaster who lived at a lonely never been seen asleep, and who, upon greeting crossing next to a cornfield in the nineteenth his daughter for the first time in years, manages century.” Saskia White’s home lies just beyond to “dividfe] the world like the Gordian Knot,” the reaches of a civilized upstate New York inaugurating for Saskia the “Neo-Thomas town named Ithaca that is home to a university Age.” In the Scandinavian wilderness, a place referred to as Huge Red, a Farmer’s Market fre­ that Saskia comes to think of as Paradise, her quented by multi-lingual academic types, and an fall from innocence really begins. Alternative School in which students with For both Saskia and the reader, the relation romantic names like Matteo and Haven actually between memory and fantasy becomes increas­ thrive. In spite of Tyler’s mythic inadequacies, ingly uneasy once Thomas resurfaces and grad­ Saskia’s home is a colorful community unto ually reestablishes patriarchal and domestic itself. In addition to the main house, there are the order at White-on-the-Water. Thomas alternate­ trailers inhabited by Bill, her mother’s current ly occupies both psychical realms as the novel boyfriend, a haiku poet and aspiring novelist, gives way to an extended meditation on him as and Jo, a deserted wife, mother of five and Sask- Father, Lover, and Confirmed Bachelor Hero. ia’s father’s former lover. Later on, Saskia’s Hall’s previous use of the traditional elements worldly friend Jane Singh and long-lost father of the epic form in Saskia's vivid descriptions of Thomas become temporary residents as well. other-worldly battles, mythological intrigue, In this novel Hall makes good use of the skills and references to supernatural elements now he honed in his two previous documentary trav­ gives way to the larger themes of rejected el narratives. Stealing from a Deep Place: Trav­ authority, disobedience, and unapologetic indi­ els in Southeastern Europe and The Impossible viduality. Saskia begins to spiral out of control, Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of alternately dismayed, intrigued, and disgusted Yugoslavia. The Saskiad, too, may be seen as a with the new communal order that Thomas travel narrative, one in which a young girl navi­ installs at White-on-the-Water, destroying its gates turbulent waters and ultimately sets her accustomed rhythms. When Thomas abolishes own course for home. As in his earlier works. Thanksgiving, dismissing the suggestion that Hall is concerned with questions of place and it’s a celebration of the winter solstice, it trig­ belonging, images of home and family, the gers a series of disturbing flashbacks in Saskia. nature of friendship and alienation. She becomes increasingly wary that, despite Hall’s title invokes The Iliad and, over the some of her father’s new rituals, such as telling course of five sections, he stages a series of bat­ stories to the children of the house, whom he tles that are about emotional and psychic territo­ gathers “under his arms like Brussel sprouts on ry. As the plot develops, it becomes increasing­ the stalk”—Thomas will soon be on his way. ly clear to the reader that Saskia, in order to suc­ White-on-the-Water recedes into the back­ ceed, will have to leave the ordered chaos that is ground as the gritty world of junior high school White-on-the-Water. This process of disassoci- and underage drinking and petting parties ation begins privately as she enters into an comes to the fore. extended relationship with imaginary pirates, Nearly one hundred years ago, the New Eng­ ships and secret rooms. In scenes reminiscent of Scott Werder land novelist Sarah Ome Jewett penned a letter C S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Saskia schedule in others: she calls her mother Lauren excursions into worlds that are a cross between to one of her readers in which she considered ascends to the top of her house where she finds by her first name, is the best cook in the house Narnia, Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland, ancient the function of fictional characters. “People in ships and castles, sea-captains presiding over and, for all intents and purposes, serves as a sub­ Arabic kingdoms and mythological realms. books,” she wrote, “are apt to make us under­ nautical intrigue, feasting warriors, and maid­ stitute mother for the four waifs that Lauren is After Saskia, Lauren is one of Hall’s most stand ‘real’ people better, and to know why they servants pouring water from golden pitchers housing. Yet Saskia'a imaginative powers intriguing characters. A disappointment to her do things, and so we leam to have sympathy and into silver basins. In this ethereal realm she is enable her to surpass even her mother in her abil­ rich family, but an heiress nonetheless, her iden­ patience and enthusiasm for those we lie with, “bathed and.. .anointed with olive oil.. .wears a ity to transcend the distractions of daily life, tity as a modem-day Earth Mother is inextrica­ and can try to help them in what they are doing tunic as sheer and soft as the skin of an onion, needy children and bothersome neighbors. bly linked to her ability to disappear—mentally instead of being half suspicious and finding shining as the sun shines” as she attempts to One distracting element in this book is that and emotionally. She communes with the pro­ fault.” The richly drawn characters in The Sask­ reinvent herself and her origins. It is in these Hall’s depictions of Saskia in her imaginary duce she sells at the Farmer’s Market, but refus­ iad invite the empathy of which Jewett speaks. mythical domains that she prepares for junior worlds sometimes becomes a tangled series of es to allow her love interests to spend the night On her journey towards truth, Saskia gradually high school angst, peer pressure, and the some­ code words. Some of this private language is in her bed. Hall' s descriptions of Lauren’s acti v- relinquishes the realms of myth and fantasy as times painful consequences of ambiguous fami­ derived from literary works, mythology or for­ ities often slyly satirize upstate New York she forges her own identity. The Saskiad is a ly relations. Saskia’s creative meditations are eign languages. Other elements of it are simply lifestyles in the shadow of Cornell University. haunting quest built on persistent and universal filled with allusions to Greek myth, Tolkien-like fanciful constructions. Readers will attempt to The Farmer’s Market where Lauren sells her oppositions—fact and fiction, mythology and fantasy stories, and ancient explorers’ tales that decode these wordy phrases or cryptic hip termi­ vegetables is described as an “old jousting field reality, man and woman, parent and child—a redefine the notion of “the real.” As Saskia her­ nology —it is an unavoidable impulse borne of just outside Ithaca...covered with stalls and journey of initiation and coming of age. self declares: “Like all real people, I go under the desire to enter Saskia’s world and psyche. tents.” Buyers come “from all over Vasta- several names.” Hall could have aided his readers a bit here, a mundus, drawn by the far-flung fame of Huge Lois Lamphere Brown, an assistant professor Standing on the threshold between adoles­ glossary of terms would not necessarily have Red. They would descend from the glass and o f English at Cornell University, is writing a cence and adulthood, Saskia, is a child who is undermined his project. Readers may be frustrat­ stone buildings on the hill to wander among the book on the life and works o f playwright, novel­ older than her years in some ways and right on ed or miss the symbolism inherent in Saskia’s stalls, inspecting the wares and murmuring out­ ist, and journalist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The Bookpress

Elegy for Rocktown Stephen Marion someone said the wheel at the top of loway told us. No matter what. Crack She’s not a girl, said Ruth. She’s a the headrig was not moving, and a window. My legs are sticking woman. Brenda is my age. several agreed, but the men said, Yes together. She flapped at the hem of Oh Ruth, you all are girls to me. We had bread and fruitsalad that it was, that it always was, because her skirt. You all are too young to remember could not wait. It had been three elsewise where did all that lime­ We sank at the fullness of their doing this same thing thirty years days, and Sunday before church the stone come from? The gray bare bags, the gnatted teats jutting out at ago. She sighed again, the high- dishes multiplied on folding tables in lake of sand, so familiar the eye no funny angles like stretched places in pitched singsong her students in Ten­ the fellowship room. Houses sad­ longer registered it, reappeared to us a balloon. nessee history had imitated for nearly dened by the smell of beans cooking then, whiter and glassier at the end Well I feel bad, said Ruth, and we forty years, until it was part of our in the early morning, we dressed the of a dry month such as August. turned to her, the strange blackred vocabulary, indelible as the fact that children for Sunday school, and Crossing the river bridge five miles hair she always complained was too the Volunteer State bordered more dressed ourselves for the service, and from town we all looked for the res­ thick to brush. Here we come with states than any other. Women did it in entered the damp church basement cue squad boats, but only some food and they haven’t even found the the kitchen when they broke a plate. single file, worrying over the state of cranes stood on the bank, waiting. man. Nobody even knows for sure if The horsefly circled above the food on the table as we do with the Then we turned back along the he’s drowned. ribbed flesh of the last cow. It had

f t p

L. Glenn coming of any death. How many water, patches of empty green Amid the lowing of cows, her face brought blood, we saw, a perfect red mornings had these same dishes gone behind the trees. A white boat read slowly from one of us to the other. bead that faded into the pitch dark of out, a name taped beneath each, and passed going downriver and our It’s not for us to know, said Mrs the barn and the smell of green then come back washed clean as husbands laughed, saying if they Calloway. It’s a sin to cook when manure and silage. Itches glowing on shells from the water? could not find Moody Myers in three there is a death in the family. us in spots we could not reach, we In the back seats we leaned into days they might as well give up. Ruth leaned her head to the win­ drove on. curves toward the Carter place, They ought not to be out there on a dow. It would all spoil, wouldn’t it, Nobody can know what that family church bulletins shielding our skirts Sunday anyhow, said Ruth Puckett. she said, answering our stares. has gone through, Mrs Calloway pro­ from the clumsy warm bowls we Some work cannot be avoided, The final cow across slung back her nounced. held on our laps. We left town. It said Mrs Calloway, who, because head at a horsefly on the ridge of her The voices rose in agreement. Yes, disappeared quickly into the pale she had taught us all in school, had spine. The heavy skull popped, blue we said. Her real daddy was taken in August leaves, until only the water- no first name we could say aloud. eyeball unleveling in its socket, but a wreck on the highway. Now this. tower and the churches and the zinc She sighed. the horsefly was too far back to reach. There was no wreck on the high- mine headrigs remained. Because It’s the girl I feel sorry for, Mrs Cal­ we didn’t have anything to say, Milk seven days a week, Mrs Cal- loway was saying. continued on page 2 Inside: "Message from the Deep," by Linda Healey "The Floating Woman/' by Emoretta Yang "Were the Wild Things Were," by Micah Perks Poems by Paul Hamill, Ko Un, David McCann, & Margaret Nichols page 2 T he Bookpress Quarterly March 1997

way, said Ruth. He died in his sleep. we all knew, was dead and she had of the needle sliding through? Bren­ appeared only in the backgrounds of It was, said Mrs Calloway. It was a become ours, our sister. We swore the da leaned over her desk with her ears old Easter photographs, old snow wreck. white sweater was never washed, plain, arms folded tight as if she pictures. These were fine little hous­ Ruth shook her head. never even taken off. were cold. es, we thought, looking up at the roof, We’ll just remember it however we On the shrunken January afternoons And just how in creation does all but cold. Still, even the coldness of want to, said Mrs Calloway. It’s past our school buses shot past the road that blood gush out? said Rockie Lut- those winters is warmer now. And history. where the church had put up a little white trell in the back of the room on the most of the little houses were sold How can that happen to somebody? cross on a wire post. Then a feeling set­ very next day. With that cherry in and busted up for firewood. We had He was a good looking man. tled on us, as if we were trying to remem­ there to stop it up. Moody Myers to thank for hauling Bowen Carter, her daddy. He drank ber something, and we were scared Each afternoon his three licks this house down here. Only he could some but I believe he was a good inside the way we were when we did not echoed down the long hall. Smack. think that up. man. He was still good looking when expect to find Brenda in her desk the Smack. Smack. The boys made low Bowen Carter would not have he died. very next morning, waiting, a look of hurting sounds after each, and he allowed arrowheads scattered on the He flew that airplane, we said. It great impatience on her face. Sometimes always came back smiling, wet a fin­ table or weeds in the lane the way landed in the flat place beside the it was noon before the fog from the river ger to his lips, lowered it to his back­ Moody Myers did. Bo&en Carter river. He never wanted to farm. You dissolved and the world outside Rock- side, and said sssss to us. He was the operated the ferry until they built the could hear him coming and run out town Primary School appeared again. It preacher’s boy, and we loved the way bridge. Our fathers let us ring the bell on the porch and he would tip his is hard to remember it, hard to know for he walked and stood, each part of him that brought him across for us. Who wing. He took them two children up certain if those mornings were real, in some kind of wonderful accord. He can say what makes us remember the with him. That boy is just like him because inside we prayed again and told us Rocktown had been named clap of that iron bell over the river, but he don’t have the looks. again for our flat building to disappear in after him. and stretching our necks to see who He flew under the river bridge that that fog. Still the spirit smell of purple That, we said, must be why they was already on quilts in the grass time. He turned a car ditto sheets woke us, changed the name. around Indian Cave, instead of the over in the middle of and the bams and We told fortunes. Pick a color. Pick frozen slopjar under the bed and our town and climbed out fencerows and a leaning a number. What do you think will feet numb on the floors of these hard the side door and merrygoround warmed happen? little houses? walked off. I was com­ up like figures on an old You will marry Brenda. We don’t know any better, that’s ing out of the movie television, and we took Hell fire, said Rockie Luttrell. I why. And still searching for a place with my mama and out books and lead pen­ can’t marry her. She’s our sister. to lay down our burdens, and glanc­ daddy. cils in homeroom. We ing out the window toward a pool of He shot a man. He listened at the call of the men gesturing under the catalpa tree, got mad and walked roll for Brenda’s voice. Nobody could love Brenda. we wondered, Is it us or them? Who home and come back After Christmas that What was that husband’s name? makes it so crazy? And we smoothed with a pistol. It didn’t year Mrs Hodge wrote asked Mrs Calloway, and we all pro­ our clothes down, down over us as kill him. I believe it the numbers 1950 on fessed not to know, even though the cleansing from church began to was a Gann. His daddy the chalkboard and some of us did. wear off and the broadness of the was still alive then and he paid off the told us a new decade had begun. Then She drove him crazy, Mrs Calloway afternoon, so much like our lives, sheriff, wrote a check. she wrote, Alexander City, up there said. Now you tell me. They has not became apparent. From here it That Moody Myers married her for and told us the town had a new name ever been a man mixed up with her looked like this tragedy, and all the that place. He was always around that too, and if we said Rocktown or who didn’t do odd things. Now you tragedies, little and great, were con­ cave. He was always going back in wrote it on our papers it was wrong. tell me if it’s the truth. nected, just as everything was con­ yonder. Now look at him. Dead. They People had gotten tired of the old I think, said Ruth, that it is just a nected in the air above our heads in didn’t find nothing but his boat and name because it wasn’t progressive, matter of what is already there com­ the church. But time, we knew, scat­ three fishes. she said, and what was the town any­ ing out. tered them all out. It scattered them With Mrs Calloway in the center way, made out of rock? So the time It comes out all right, said Mrs Cal­ all out until the next one brought picking at the thick hose on her ankles, was new and the place where we all loway. It comes out all the way. You them together again. and saying, History repeats itself, his­ lived was new, and we looked out our seen what her husband done. He It is worse, whispered Ruth, when tory repeats itself, we came to the gate window onto the fields with their couldn’t take it no more. What was it everybody knows. at the Carter place. The cardoor cedars, and it was still empty as the he was? I think it’s better, said Mrs Cal­ squeaked and we heard field crickets ping and click of the metal radiator. A psychologist, said Ruth. And loway, loud enough for anyone to singing this late in the day, so fall was In the cold afternoon recesses we they were divorced. They had been hear. I think it’s better. coming early. Under the white sky walked around buried in coats, laying divorced for a while, a year maybe, dusty weeds hung over the lane. Chil­ our numb ears to the big iron grate at when he did what he did. dren in a strange bright place, we the edge of our boundary, hearing the Killed himself, said Mrs Calloway. She steals, we told one another in clutched our little dishes. The gate work of zinc miners down deep We were quiet. the bus line. You better watch out. swung open and we rolled in. underground. We called to them And that builder she used to date, She had the student teacher’s dia­ through the air vent, which smelled she continued, he started back to mond ring in her shoe. of oil and rock. Someone always said drinking. And they was another one I saw her in town, and she was talk­ Brenda Carter was to be our sister. she heard them answer back. following her around all over the ing up a storm and didn’t have no We watched over her after Mrs It was the winter of seventh grade place and writing her name on stuff white sweater on. Hodge told us this in the winter of that we became young women. The with spraypaint. Good lord. If I had a Boy, said a girl named Lagloria seventh grade, but she would barely boys were ordered outside to play child, and of course you know me Major to all the boys, who called her look at us. Mrs Hodge never called football. They cast unknowing and Jimmy couldn’t have no children, stuff because it was said she stuffed on her anymore, and at lunch our sis­ glances back at us, and the door I’d be afraid to put her in that dance her bra with toilet paper. ter followed us in the back of the line, slammed, its sound carrying down school. I’d be afraid that Brenda Boy. You ought to see Brenda in her face ruddy and swollen like a the hall past the rows of lockers, and would teach her some of that stuff. yonder. She pointed to the brick room drunk’s, always wearing the same suddenly we were part of a solemn When a woman starts to moving this where we changed for gym class. dirty white sweater. Everyone talking congregation. Our minds skipped way and that men start feeling things. She’s afraid of us and us all just girls. in the halls back then, the clatter of from Mrs Hodge to every woman we They can’t help it. She waits until we’re gone. plates and trays and the mossy smell knew in town, all bound together as It could happen to any of us, said You’re too busy stuffing. Stuff. of milk in cardboard cartons, and it if by the newly twisting muscles in Ruth as we walked toward the porch I swear. It’s true. looked to us wrong and embarrassing our lower backs. We watched on with our dishes and our bowls. It Stuff. that Brenda Carter still accepted her Monday mornings to see who would could happen to any of us. Sally Ann I am not. And I’ll prove it to any brown paper towel for handwashing, arrive with little loops of thread for Myers’ face appeared behind the one of you that’s man enough. still could bring the spoon of earrings. Who can forget holding the screen. It had a look of anguished I have seen the light, called Rockie whipped potatoes to her mouth, even chunk of ice to the earlobe until it surprise, the way they all do. Luttrell from atop the bleachers as we though her daddy, her crazy daddy was red and numb, the dull scratch Oh mercy, said Sally Ann Myers, squaredanced. Go ye to it. Swing reaching open the screen door for us. your partner. Get ye all ye can. Mercy. I wish you’d never done this. Brothers! he screamed. And sister, The Bookpress Quarterly We filed past, scratching our feet he whispered. I tell you they won’t let Statement of Purpose on the rug carefully even though we the girls wear pants to school. No sir! didn’t need to, and gathered round a And by god, if Mr Sweeten ever table so piled up with Moody Myers’ caught one in pants he’d rip them The Bookpress Quarterly is a journal of fiction, poetry, essays, books and papers and maps that we things off right there and lay the rod and artwork, published as a supplement to The Bookpress. It couldn’t set down the first dish. We to her. shares with The Bookpress the goals of encouraging literary shuffled around together, wondering By god, chanted the boys. Lay the community and conversation in upstate New York and show­ what to do, but still we caught our­ rod to her. selves smiling. That house! Rock­ This is what we come from, all one casing that region’s best writers and artists. town used to have a whole hillside body this way, coiling out and around • • • covered with them in the forties and like the amoeba we studied in books. Illustrations by: J.M. Barringer, Laura Glenn, fifties, portable plain white squares We took our places in the rows of Marianne Loveland, Catharine O’Neill, split into two big rooms for the fami­ desks, lattitude and longitude for the o" and Victoria Romanoff lies who came to work at the New Jersey Zinc Company, but now they continued on page 3 March 1997 T he Bookpress Quarterly page 3

Four by Ko Un From The Honored Guest a dozen rifles. Those people, the ones Cheju Island Poet we finally chased back into the hills 15 April, 1992 and cut down and stacked like firewood Stayed home all day. From mountain temple to seaside village while their villages burned and the Friends came, he wandered, “twenty li after break- ' streams friends went. fast," ran red to the sea all around. After they were gone, as the saying goes; ten, perhaps, as the Not allowed! Nothing is perfect, there was a rainstorm. crow flies. and even less when your type starts In Lhasa Tibet, the head lama died. Hills, valleys, forests, shoreline rocks. nosing around. ” A hungrily acquisitive soul, he took short winter days, and we had to 16 April, 1992 to asking those he met on his wanderings So he wrote another type of book, then name the seven continents out loud. Stayed home all day. to tell about their homes, the stories another, until by now it takes Antarctica, we said under our Nobody came. and songs a mobilized army of admirers to keep breaths. Europe. Asia. The oceans. The lama’s body was moved to a hill­ that ran from place to place like trails. up with his stubbornly prolonged reply. Once the moon could be seen in the top. He started a notebook. One morning afternoon, the color of spiderweb, Among all the starving vultures after a late-night chat with a lonely He savors the infrequent luxury and Mrs Hodge said it was pulling on the Indian continent, farmer of unnoted travel, avoiding the tides. a few dozen gathered and began to who must have walked all night to the passionate inquisitions of friends, Tides, we said. tear at the sacred corpse. report him, the banquets with certain notables. She gave us all a number so we the police tracked him down and could be kept up with. All the num­ 17 April, 1992 hauled him away. Awesome hunger inhabits the guest, bers are forgotten now except Bren­ Another day at home. They whacked him on the ear, and he pays, mornings after, by incessant da’s. It was the number twentythree. Read an encyclopedia the deaf one, now, and shouted he was writing, reading, and writing again. We could not ready our papers for the and straightway forgot what 1 had a spy. spelling test without crossing her. read. When he denied it, they whacked him He tells the young writer who drove us She existed in math problems and the The lama's bones, what remains. again, about names of highways. 0 truest Nirvana! shouting “Listen up! Listen to us! the island, Keep at it. Never quit. Be Brenda is really a very pretty little We will tell you what to talk about, serious always. girl, said Mrs Hodge once when she 18 April 1992 what not. Talk about fish, plant names, It is as hard as approaching the demon was not around, and something hurt Another day at home. the sizes of rocks, but not king, inside us. 1 realized about these people. Not allowed!" but do it. Then send me something She returned unaware, but we there were sons the dead lama didn V good. looked at her and felt the size of the know about. They tore up his notes, I will find a place to publish your statement. It had not been said of At night, one made off with the lama s shoved him out into the street and work. Dawn, who was the prettiest girl in remains; screamed But choose only your very best for me; the room, nor of any of us. after the sun rose, made a pair of neck­ “Not allowed! Not allowed! No asking anything less, 1 will blow my nose on it. It was cold as a brass monkey, we laces. these islanders about their uncles and said. And she didn’t wear nothing but One to wear, aunts, —David R. McCann that old white sweater. one to sell to the American poet, fathers, daughters, sons and wives, She’s got her crabs to keep her Allen Ginsberg. the ones who caused all the disorder, warm. O Nirvana o f New York and Lhasa who marched around the government David R.McCann is a Cornell Univer­ We had a day in which we all from now on, already! office, sity Professor o f Korean Literature. His brought an object to school for sci­ harassed the local police, and when that most recent publication is Korea Brief­ ence, and we were surprised that she —Ko Un wasn’t enough, ransacked the station ings: Journal Reunification (M.E. brought a contribution. It was a jar (translated by David R. McCann) and stole Sharpe, 1997). filled with rubbing alcohol and seven baby mice, curled up like little pink thumbs. Them mice come out of her hair, we said. Mrs Hodge set the jar in the window, and it made us think of those glass bubbles filled with water and glitter. The tiny embryos settled, and cold sunlight came in, exposing the shadows of their bones like an x-ray, and bars of dust angled to the floor, little vapor worlds we passed our hands through. Outside, rags of snow and the winter pine thickets and the one steel mine tower. In the gradebook Mrs Hodge recorded each item we carried in. to imagine that winter. It is hard to iff did this. He came and cleaned Luttrell zagging in and out with the There was a hornets’ nest of spun conceive of ice. three fish in my yard. From Moody’s leather ball, his shoes tearing the sod brown paper, a hand of tobacco, a Sally Ann Myers, her gray hair boat. like shovels digging in. piece of transparent rock from deep down over the back of her housecoat, But we are called in by Mrs in the mines, the skull of a horse, the steps barefoot around the dishes we Hodge’s raised hand, her old thin wing feather of a turkey buzzard, a have placed on her floor. We want her Let us. Let us outside. Let us, we body far off giving the signal we all pine gall, the bones of a housecat in a to eat, and we tell her so. We want to pleaded, but we could not stand the know, pouring us from all directions paper bag, a cannonball of packed see her eat right there in front of us, cold when we went. toward her. Children that we were hair from the stomach of a cow, a ter­ but she refuses, the way they always At the end of January there was a converging in one small perfect rapin shell bleached with age, and a do. She wants us to eat. They always warm winter day. One of those days place, and the sight of Brenda’s arms radio someone’s father made that do this too. Eat, she says, waving at - you can’t trust, and some of the bare in the weak sun, like something would bring in the local station. We the dishes. You all eat. No, no, we teachers opened windows and the not formed yet, her sweater on the huddled around the window listening say, reveling in our hunger. We can’t false breeze entered like spring, ground beside her. We hated her and to it, wondering what could be made eat. We can’t eat. No. Where is Bren­ rustling our papers. Once we heard loved her and we did not want to look of all these objects, and someone da? Where is her brother Tony? They the radio of a passing car, and thought at her as if she were too bright, so knocked over a vial of mercury that will eat. of riding with the windows down. Rockie Luttrell grabbed the sweater had been contributed. The silver Tony is out at the river, Sally Ann The grass thawed, yellow, splattering and it passed in keepaway, flying one beads flew, skating on the tiles, and tells us. Brenda is with her son. They under our feet. to the other, suspended in the air they had to be swept up. can’t eat. They are not here. She is Watch out, said Mrs Hodge as we between us. Don’t they look like the stars? said alone. Don’t be alone, we tell her. fled from her. Watch out! It will snow Bowen Carter is dead. Moody Mrs Hodge, sweeping them. She is standing outside in the yard as next week. Myers is dead. We have all given our­ we leave her alone. Down in the But we had running fits across the selves away. Leaving the Carter place field is where Bowen Carter used to playground, into the stubbly fields, we are strangely winter hot, sweat­ The weather that year stayed cold take off in his little airplane. Look, blurring in and out of the cold shad­ ing, hearts beating, believing only in on our faces and the winter continued Sally Ann says, and the heads of ows. Someone spotted a workman Rockie Luttrell’s hands on the little as winters continue in childhood. three catfish appear on the burnt who had taken off his shirt on top the jar of mice, and the pink whirl of Rockie Luttrell took the jar of mice in grass at her feet. Then their tails big flat building. We paced our limits, flesh in the cold, alcohol wind. his hands, shook it up, and laughed. appear, hardened and opaque in the slapping back strings of hair, skirts Looking into the pink cloud of flesh, sun. But there is nothing between, blown up against our legs. The boys Stephen Marion has an M.F.A. from settling like glitter, Brenda still didn’t only the heads and tails. The eyes played football as if their lives Cornell University, and lives in East cry. Now, sweating in Moody Myers’ are fogged over. depended on it. We heard their Tenneesee. This is an excerpt from his house with only a tiny fan, it is hard You see, she says to us. The sher- breaths shoot up in moans. Rockie novel Elegy for Rocktown. gagcj T he Bookpress Quarterly March 1997 The Floating Woman Emoretta Yang Connecticut apartment in a state of shock and reproach. “What’s gotten into you. Mom?” He At night Mrs. Pololu kept two blankets sounded hurt and angry. Mrs. Pololu and a quilt over herself, even in mid-July. kept quiet. In the first years of her marriage, her hus­ From the second phone in the bed­ band would end up kicking the blankets room, Mr. Pololu said, “Now every­ away where they sprawled over his per­ thing’s going to be all right, Mines. Your spiring feet. She didn’t want to risk his mother is in fine health.” finding out in those days how light she “What’s she trying to prove? How became in sleep, that she barely hovered long’s this been going on?” there over the bed, her night dress falling “I’m not trying to prove anything. in a cascade onto the lower sheet, dis­ Minor.” guising the thin pallet of air that lay “Do you know what people are say­ between her body and the bed. ing? They know it’s my hometown. As she fell asleep her body would They’re all asking me if you’re any rela­ become lighter and lighter, and when tion. Can’t you do anything about it? sleep overtook her, suddenly she would Jesus, I don’t dare admit I know you!” pop up gently in the air, like a rubber ball “There’s no need for you to admit released at the bottom of a pool. With anything, Minor.”

two blankets and a stem-stitched quilt J. M. Barringer “Look, I have to catch a plane for Col­ weighing her down, it was really very orado; I’ll call you tomorrow night. difficult to divine that she wasn’t actual­ at her, silently. The skin around his blank look that the daughter had never Maybe I’ll think of something.” ly on the bed, that really she floated cheeks stretched and shone with his noticed before. She thought her mother “That’s fine, Minor. You don’t have to above it. And if, in fact, in the split-sec­ smiling, just like the skin around Mrs. was still admonishing her about the skirt, think of anything.” ond before falling asleep, she had not Pololu’s stomach where he ran his hand so grabbing her backpack and sleeping always had the sensation of a quiet and in slow circles. bag, she clattered downstairs to the car. And while Mr. Pololu went downstairs abrupt suction of wind raising her body First it was little Minor who kept her After Amor Annaliese and her friends to talk to the medical specialists, the par­ upward before she lost consciousness of full on the ground; and three years later, had driven off, Mrs. Pololu released her ticle physicists, the paraphenomenolo- it altogether, Mrs. Pololu herself would little Miss Amor Annaliese. And for all hold on the bedframe and felt herself go gists, and the autograph seekers, Mrs. not have been aware of this floating, the time that her children were at home, up, slow and calm. Pololu bobbed around in the bedroom, since it appeared to be a condition only from their infancy to their first days at thinking of Minor’s voice, all pinched of real and unfeigned sleep. The only fur­ school, from Minor’s first Little League Of course, Mr. Pololu was surprised. and tinny on the phone. So now there ther evidence she had that some such game through Amor‘s senior graduation But a lifetime of making rug deals, nego­ they were, her two children, off running thing was happening to her was that piano recital, they served as the two tiating with shippers and capricious gov­ around in the world, really managing when she awoke, she fell back onto the counterweights of Mrs. Pololu’s anchor; ernment officials had taught him the quite well, thank you Mother, by them­ mattress with a plop and a light bounce, never would the ground feel as solid to value of keeping his flabbergasted reac­ selves: Minor, of course, just out of law so light and simultaneous that she was her as when she could straighten her tions to himself. Because he saw his school, with his first job, clerking for a never quite sure if it was the fall which son’s lapel, or comb her daughter’s long, wife’s floating as a kind of indisposition, judge, it sounded so crisp and efficient, had awakened her, or if her awakening brown gold hair. he gave himself over to caring for her. earning money, meeting other young had occasioned the fall. men and women. And Amor Annaliese, Perhaps some other man would soon On the day after Amor Annaliese grad­ Mr. Pololu tried out a number of ways too, in her own way, setting out like this, enough have discovered the weightless­ uated from college, Mrs. Pololu popped to help his wife carry on the semblance all by herself. Because this younger gen­ ness of his wife’s sleeping, but Mr. up completely into space and had to of a normal life; he found a way of eration of women Amor’s age, well, like Pololu was a deep and dedicated sleep­ relinquish all pretense of trying to adding false bottoms to the soles of her them, Amor didn’t want to get married er. He was in the carpet trade and often maneuver on earth. shoes (boots worked best) and into these too early, was waiting for “the right he sank into dreams from which he he poured cement and pebbles. It was all moment”, when she knew what she could recall no events, they were Amor, who had all her life suspected right if all Mrs. Pololu had to do was just wanted to do with herself, get really start­ dreams of pure texture: bristlenappe, that something wasn’t quite right with stand somewhere. But the minute she ed on a career, then she would think sounding plush, lapidary weave. her otherwise placid mother; had been at tried to walk about, everything was lost. about starting a family. How different it Soumak weft-wrap, cloud-band Kazak, home the day after graduation getting No lace, no strap, no button was sturdy was forme! thought Mrs. Pololu. What a Kula yellow and blue. Sometimes after ready to leave for Europe that afternoon. enough to bear that weight. She would combination of relief and regret she felt, making love, he would lift his head to Her traveling companions were to pick move across the cocktail floor in a stride when she pictured to herself her children: look at his wife; she would return his her up for the drive to the airport, and as that embraced lumber and shuffle. No the way they had been, so small and gaze with an expression he took for they drove into the driveway, Mrs. use. It was not a rhythm anyone could stumbling on their feet. The world could contented, and in fact, at those moments Pololu was still hurriedly pressing a skirt, maintain for social gatherings, and soon be so full of danger, and they were so she often was contented. This wordless advising her daughter what to pack. Mrs. Pololu’s secret was out. helpless. Back then, she used to find her­ exchange suited them. He would turn “Mother, I’ve got to travel light. I’m The news passed quickly through the self wishing If only I could just tell them over, she would one by one neatly pull only taking what I can fit into my pack neighborhood. Calls came in from what / know, give them my eyes, my the blankets and the quilt over her, and and my sleeping bag. That skirt’s too around the world. Most of them were hands, my feet! as the sound of his breathing became bulky. And anyway I probably won’t be skeptical, and Mr. and Mrs. Pololu did regular and resonant, she would hear wearing any skirts. They tie you down.” nothing to dissuade those callers from The excitement of Mrs. Pololu’s float­ her own in the interstices, her eyes Traveling to Europe and not taking any their skepticism. One national news ing passed; the phone calls dwindled in would blink shut, and the sheet on her skirts! Just a pair of blue jeans, sweat­ agency sent a writer and a photograph­ number. Minor got a new job with a law side of the bed would tug upward shirts and some jogging shorts! Going to er especially, and then after that, a call firm in southern California. Amor was toward the ceiling. see cathedrals in your pajamas and came from a television station, who staying on a bit longer in Europe; she underwear! Mrs. Pololu did not want to sent a three-man camera crew and a wrote a postcard once a week, then once In those early years, she took care to imagine it. Still, she said nothing; after famous reporter. a month, then every other month. Minor regulate her daytime activities. She all, here was her baby going off, who The TV crew set up their shot in front called on Thanksgiving, on Christmas. shopped, cooked, decorated, cleaned, did knew what would happen to her, would of the Pololus’ house. Mr. Pololu had In early spring someone from NASA the laundry, drove her husband to work she be safe, could she really take care of tied a string around his wife’s ankle, and called to invite Mrs. Pololu to speak to and picked him up at the end of the after­ herself, what kinds of people could spirit the reporter asked a few questions, main­ some of their people in training; all she noon. On Tuesdays they went to dinner her away? A mirror hung over the dress­ ly of Mr. Pololu. There was a shot that had to do was describe how it felt, up in at her sister-in-law’s. On Wednesday er in Amor Annaliese’s room, and next to lasted two seconds of Mrs. Pololu float­ the air like that, and maybe answer ques­ nights after dinner, he played cards with it was a photograph of Mrs. Pololu at the ing on her back about twelve feet off the tions. The honorarium and the idea of the men, and she played the piano for age of nineteen or twenty. Why did ground, as filmed from below, at an being in Florida was tempting, but Mrs. church choir practice. At all costs she Amor keep that? Mrs. Pololu looked angle. Most of the time, the camera was Pololu declined, saying she had just been avoided taking naps if people were going from the photograph to the mirror just in focused on a middle-range shot of the a housewife all her life, she was too old to be around, because when her eyes time to see her daughter’s profile as she reporter, who was speaking earnestly, now to be doing new things, and what, closed and her head nodded, a disturbing paused in her last-minute packing, and at looking directly into the camera’s eye. she could never talk to all those scien­ feeling of buoyancy ran through her that moment, she felt a rush of air, both On the monitor, Mr. Pololu could be seen tists, astrologers and podiatrists. And body, and she would have to shake her­ humid and burned, flowing up out of her in back, standing a little self-consciously, anyway, she thought to herself, how self like a sparrow in a dustbath. collar. Her shoulders lifted, her hips rocking on his heels, with a little undi­ could she describe what it felt like, float­ skewed, a slipper fell off her foot. She rected grin on his face, the string attached ing around? What was there to say? It It was when Mrs. Pololu became 'reg­ managed to hook a comer of the dresser to his wife stretched diagonally across was, well it was just like floating around. nant that the sleepfloating ceased, at least with her heel, caught the bed frame with his raincoat. As the reporter spoke, Mr. Pololu supported her decision. for a while. Mrs. Pololu was sure of that; her hand and settled herself down, as if clutching his microphone in front of his That was the last call that Mr. and Mrs. for Mr. Pololu was so delighted with the seated, on the bed. chest, Mrs. Pololu hovered just off-cam- Pololu ever received from anyone from prospect of becoming a father that as Amor Annaliese looked up from her era, slightly above the two men, the hem out-of-town. At home, things stayed Mrs. Pololu’s abdomen grew visibly packing. She was used to these unex­ of her raincoat bobbing up and down in unsettled for a while. She had to quit larger, increasing with the weeks, he, pected commotions of her mother’s, but the background, now and then the heel of playing piano for the choir, since the unlike before, would stay awake to had never stopped to think about them. her shoe just visible in the upper right preacher felt a little uneasy about her watch her as she fell asleep. In bed he There was something peculiar, though, comer of the screen. lifted himself on one elbow and beamed this time, in her mother’s eyes, a funny Minor called that night from his continued on page 5 March 1997 T he Bookpress Quarterly

going on. Well, it was all right with him, white tunic and long white gloves, Mrs. stops and chats—the rope has been get­ ing all around the world. But you felt he said, but some there was felt it was dif­ Pololu let herself glide slowly upward, ting longer and longer (I think she’s queasy on it, always up and down, like ficult, and though he considered their guiding her ascent with her right hand on asked for this), and she’s usually too far waves, and you were never sure about feelings misguided, as spiritual guide, he the flagpole, the unfurled flag nestled in up to have a regular conversation; she the edges. I was always saying, “Stay felt he ought to undertake their re- the crook of her left arm. Just as planned, looks down, smiles and waves. He’s away from the edge!” instruction gently and above all, slowly, she reached the top at the words and the always neighborly, and sometimes it Now your garden’s doing nicely, the with an absence of provocation and so rockets' red glare, fastened the flag and seems he needs to talk. The weather has rain last week was a godsend. Well, it’s on. That was all right. Mrs. Pololu under­ unrolled it, just as the volunteers chief set been nice. Yes, we’ve been moving a lot funny you should mention it; the missus stood just what he meant. Anyway, play­ off Roman candles. From where she was, of mgs right along; in fact, there’s a ship­ has been having a little trouble sleeping, ing the piano had become more and more she could look down and between the ment of new kilims coming in next week. but we think we’ve got that problem difficult for her, since, as Mr. Pololu undulating waves of the flag she could see The kids? Ah, the boy’s off on an assign­ licked. At night, Mr. Pololu tells me, he explained, any expenditure of energy in a all her neighbors and their children, point­ ment negotiating trade contracts in Aus­ ties his wife to the bedpost, with enough downward motion results in an equal and ing, laughing and applauding, the flapping tralia; the girl, well, the girl has been length of rope to keep her from bumping opposite motion: striking the keys only of the fabric sharp in her ears. married for three months to a young Ital­ into the ceiling. It’s warm, you know, he made the condition more pronounced. ian fellow, well, an aerialist, that’s right, says, with all the heat up there. Because There were plenty of other ways to Now this is how I see them: with a rope it had been a bit of a surprise. No, we’re don’t matter how many quilts, they keep occupied. She played magician’s tied around her ankle, my neighbor Mrs. not exactly sure where, it’s a kind of won’t keep her down now. assistant for a PTA fundraising night. It Pololu, and her husband out for their daily extended working honeymoon, you went over big. And for the Independence walk. The fresh air seems to do them both know, his work takes them around. The Emoretta Yang worked as a graphics Day Parade and Picnic, the volunteer fire­ good, and she seems to love being pulled last postcard had come from Laodicea. editor for diacritics: a review of literary men asked Mr. Pololu if his wife could do along on her back, watching the clouds in We didn’t know where that is either, we and philosophical criticism and as a something, so she helped the mayor inau­ a blue sky. This summer, with school out, had to look it up. curator in the Asian department o f the gurate the festivities by raising the flag at the children on my block follow them and Oh, those days. We’re glad they’re Johnson Art Museum at Cornell Univer­ the fire station, where the parade started. shout up twenty questions to Mrs. Pololu, over. That was something, every day, all sity. She collaborated with Kumi Korf on Mr. Pololu held her at the bottom of the until the ice-cream truck jangles along, those people, all the time, what a the artist’s book Silk and Secrecy and flagpole, with a rope around her ankle, and they scoot off. headache! One night I dreamed: my currently lives in Salmon Creek, New and as Oh say can you see came over the If they go by my house and I’m in the wife, my kids and me, all sitting on a York with a mixed terrier named Mac- loudspeaker, he let her go. In her trailing garden, sometimes we chat. Or at least, he rag, it was like a beautiful Kabistan, fly­ Duff Lewis. in the year of the blue snow In the year that had two winters committed suicide where everyone was talking, unchristian; whereas Paul back-to-back, when even by leaving a door open: singing, or shouting at once, seemed wondrous but quite natural, the snow turned blue with cold found at table, shirtsleeved ignoring all the others. the pure result of a land —the year when Paul found Babe and aproned, he looked aside It made a person think where everything—the moose, and thawed her but she stayed blue—•, while she looked straight at him, the world is a kind o f asylum the endless passing flocks, words spoken out-of-doors rigid before the cold hit. but with the roles played out fresh-water seas, above all froze in the air, sifting Friends recalled the stillness a few at a time, or in secret. the inexhaustible onto the ground with a noise that ruled between them, though both The dank ground snapped out vowels, tall timber—grew past measure. like sleet. The intended hearer, were sharp-tongued and quick to resent. the town street cried and rumbled Still, that year was so cold, spotting the flutter of lips, Whether a wordless pact like a storm on election day. and the rambunctiousness might cup both ears or lean or a stubborn refusal to rise A woman who’d lost a child of nature and of men as into a gale, but all to warm the other brought on heard its voice at play that came with Paul was such he'd hear was that soft spilling their end was debated, and and was broken again for months. that it was some relief and his own snort o f frustration. the coroner was urged Lovers were sometimes touched to hear of Paul’s move westward to thaw them in their house, by how much of what erupted to find new forests worthy It was a long hard pull: to see what warmed-up words around their house was theirs; of his ax and Babe's shoulders. scrawny turnips to live on, might tell: but he adjudged it or they felt cold at hearing onions black with mold “indecent curiousness" to make them how far apart they sounded: Everyone agreed from far back in the cellar. talk in death they’d shield their eyes from each that no one was the same Paul and the hunters found meat who never would in life. other, who lived through the two winters. to give around: often, fleeing the revelation A few years afterwards, a herd of deer or cows Famously taciturn like Jonah taking ship. a man from Michigan found frozen by surprise, as some of the races were At first the din was fearsome went slightly mad when caught like statues on a lawn. who spread where Paul was logging but soon the hearers turned giddy in the deep woods one night Hauled on log-sleds to dooryards —Downeasters, Swedes, and Scots from silly coincidences: by a far-spreading snowstorm. offarms, or placed as if staked from Canada—, their few warm words oxcarts voiced opinions, He was well nestled in furs to graze on village greens in isolated cabins a dog dug up a growl. and under leaves and snow, and frugally shared around, were like the penny sweets Now and then a sentence unable to see a thing, they let the north survive. the traders brought from town, grave but unconnected when suddenly he divined wonderful in the mouth would rise like a phrase remembered the flakes he felt were words, Paul’s unquenched robustness and savored in memory. from a nightmare about lawsuits. a myriad of soft words was light and warmth to the people. and words of delicate crystal, His words didn’t freeze, Outdoors, a wave of greeting It took a matter of weeks flowing from Canada or if they did they struck could touch the heart: men working for the last straggling voices across the long ice shelves the ground like cannonballs, on either side of a log to break from shaded crannies; of the still-open lakes, cracked open and roared: the echoes would hold each other’s eyes but the accidental aptness across canals and orchards showered the distance like gravel. feeling a strange discomfort. o f the air’s unbidden asides and brown and grey-stoned mountains, People longed for a glimpse The movement of hands and bodies might ring in the mind for years. and on to the Atlantic of him striding by and perked up at work together in silence One man heard the word “And!" to join the weary swells. at the sound of a crash outside, grew eloquent, a union Just “And!" It brought to mind Under one tent of storm, which might be a bough or the cap across space like a dance, additions and replacements, under one blanket of white, of ice on the waterfall if they had thought that way: seasons following seasons, the towns and fields and woods collapsing, but likelier a few recalled, uncertain crop upon crop and ache were unified, a story was Paul and Babe out tramping. why at that moment, how leaves upon ache of stiffening joints no ear, not even Paul's swayed in many directions as the years mounted and passed. was grand enough to hear! When words began to freeze in breezes on sunlit trees. Bonds of love and need Although he could not see them, many felt weak and ashamed, came to his mind, and how that man from Michigan recalling the girl not asked After fourteen months a person lives through losses could feel the small, sharp words to dance or marry, the child o f permanent February, to the next day, and next. melt down his face like tears. not praised, the banker ’s terms dab flat at the mercury’s bottom, The single word was a treasury accepted dumbly, panic the thaw unfroze the words filled with collection and surplus, —Paul Hamill at schoolhouse questions—all in a spring flood of noise: which he would hear again the futile wordlessness a torrent of mutters, cries, in each day’s common speech. o f chances missed, locked hard greetings, complaints of cold, Its gift o f connecting and adding in the glacier of failure. laughter and objurgations would warm his heart against Paul Hamill is Director of Academic Longstanding silences, leaped into the air the sterile accumulations Funding at Ithaca College, where he so grievously sustained abrupt as cracking ice that drift on human years. also teaches. His poems have appeared in many lives, began in a deafening brouhaha, in many journals including The Geor­ to ache in the fallen cold a backwoods pentecost! Speech out of trees and boulders gia Review and the New England like terrible rheumatism. upset some folks: it seemed Quarterly. He is seeking a publisher for The Pettigrees of Bath The misty air held a madhouse what indians might hear, his first collection. T h e Bookpress Quarterly March 1997 Where the Wild Things Were

Micah Perks back. My father was British, a color­ the teepee door. Brandy had peed all had been severed from its body. He blind artist. He was bucktoothed, skin­ over my father’s buffalo robe. Every­ cleaned out the enormous shell and ny, electric. He smelled of gunpowder one was famished and whining. We gave it to me for show and tell. But I Leave the cities, the towns, drive for and rum. My mother thought he gathered up our blankets and marched was too shy. The teacher showed it half a day, the trees pressing tighter looked like Honest Abe Lincoln, her down the hill for breakfast. Living off for me. The outside of the shell was and tighter against the narrow roads, to idol. My father was painting a the land had come to an end. covered in faint grey and green pat­ the very eastern edge of the Adiron­ teepee—he had decided to form an terns. The inside was ridged, like dack mountains. Onto the county road, Indian warrior society. He let every­ A Brief Trip Into The World mountains. I held onto the turtle shell one side a ridge of spruce and rock, the one join. for the rest of the day. other a precipice down to a blue lake. When it was time to begin our Then I was almost five. My mother Once, coming home on the bus the Watch for logging trucks, they hog lives as warriors, the whole school said I was going to school. My father Sage girl was not there to wall me in. more than their share of road, shed gathered in front of the barn carrying said I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. Two boys from Kindergarten class sat bark, branches, whole trees as they blankets, except my father, who had My mother said, Try it. She waited beside me. Talk, they said. I careen through the turns. a buffalo robe slung over his shoul­ with me in the grey morning by the wouldn’t. They hit me. Talk, talk they Take a right onto what the locals der. There were eight teachers, twen­ barn. The chickens clucked and chanted, getting a rhythm going, have begun to call Funny Farm road. ty disturbed adolescents and thirteen squawked. A huge bus trundled drumming on my shoulders and chest Drive over dirt for miles, water on of us—the children and babies of through the early morning fog. It and back. If you just talk, we’ll stop both sides. Say it’s the late sixties, teachers. stopped and the door opened. I climbed hitting you, they pleaded. I cried, but and late June. Blue flag and daisies We straggled up the dirt road edged on. There was no one else on the bus just tears, no sound. line the ditches. The car plows in chicory, milkweed and goldenrod, but the driver. I chose one of the hard, A few days later, I started to cry through white butterflies that cluster through a hay field, then climbed a hill slick, green seats. The bus turned soundlessly again, in the middle of cut­ on the road, wings pumping like at the edge of the valley. Most of us around in our driveway and started ting and pasting. I held my middle so breath. Dragonflies glitter. Turtles loitered around while dad and some back down the dirt road. We picked up Mrs. Winifred thought I had a stomach doze on the logs in the creek. Red fox big guys chopped down trees and Mrs. Sage’s teen-age daughter next. ache. She asked one of the other girls whisks across the road. Great blue stripped them to make teepee poles. Mom had asked her to sit with me. She to walk me to the nurse. The nurse lay heron swims through air. The three painted white triangles did, and we were alone on the bus for a me on a cot behind a curtain and left Over a fragile iron bridge beside looked pretty, up against the high, thin long time. But then there were more the office. Suddenly my voice erupted roaring twin water falls. Pass an aban­ blue sky and the hills just beginning to houses, and her friend got on and in a wail. The nurse’s heels clicked doned brown house, windows shat­ bum red and gold. squished into the seat. They both had down the hall towards me. She yanked tered. They say they found the old My father lined up the children. He woman starved dead in there, had been told us we would be living off the land eating cat food near the end. Wearing from now on. No store bought food layers of clothes against the cold, no allowed. He handed out a knife in a running water so she stank bad. They leather fringed sheath to each child. say the house is haunted. “Hunt for your supper,” he said. Another collapsing, one lane iron We spread out through the woods, bridge over a shallow creek. On the searching for small animals to kill. other side, a saw blade nailed to a wide Soon, we gave up hunting and turned pine is painted with an ancient Mexi­ to berry picking. We took shards of can hieroglyph of a water lily. It looks grey slate, leftover from building the like a red heart pulled in opposite roof of our log cabin, and heaved directions surrounded by a black pick­ them into the brambles. They settled, et fence. The name of the commune making tunnels into the prickers. We school is written underneath. crawled in, but the blackberries were Up a small hill, and down into our all gone. Still, we sat in our thorny valley. The valley is a long spread of caves telling secrets until the after­ green, surrounded by dark woods on noon. When we grew hungry, we every side, cut in half by the road. On sucked on white clover. Then we one side is the stream, widened in late chased each other in and out of the June into a marshy pond. The skinny teepees in the last of the cool Septem­ highland cattle graze in the field, toss­ ber light. ing their yellowed curving horns. Meanwhile, the disturbed boys were Their shaggy, matted coats are orange being initiated. Dad and the other male to rust to white. A mess of red bams on teachers lined the teenagers up by the that side, too. stream in their underwear. They stood On the other side, first the bunker, a in a ragged line—drug addicts, run­ long cement one story building painted aways, truants, and thieves. Skinny with brown dancing figures. Then the boys with shaggy hair, goose pimpled three red and yellow domes set up arms crossed over ribs, smirking ner­ V. Romanoff against the ridge. Turn right at the vously. My father poured cow manure bams, past the flag poles, a British flag, over their heads. They had to jump in big girl butts that pressed me against back the curtain, “I could hear you a flag with a green serpent that reads the cold stream to wash off. Then, they the wall. They talked and talked and from all the way at the principal’s Don’t Tread on Me, some strange yel­ were warriors. the bus filled up with kids, screaming office. Be quiet,” she hissed. But the low flag from a country you never For dinner there were blue jays and and calling to each other. I looked out noise kept coming. heard of, all three smacking in the squirrels, skewered on sticks and the window. Then my father was there. On the wind. The farm house is a riot of yel­ grilled over an open fire. Dad had My teacher’s name was Mrs. way out he lifted me up to drink from a low and red. There is a long chicken cooked this dish for my sister and me Winifred. The boys had crew cuts and water fountain. I never went back. yard pressed against the house. Past at home, and we hated it. Anyway, striped shirts. The girls had dresses and A few weeks later my mother the chickens, the valley stretches up a there wasn’t enough meat to go round. straight hair to their shoulders. Every­ received my report card. We were hill to three teepees. We were really hungry now. My moth­ one seemed blond, and it was hard to graded with either a smile face or a Long haired hippies and their half- er had learned how to make bannok tell them apart. The desks were all the frown face. In the box for Social naked, dirty children are playing some when we lived with the Eskimos. We same, too. I felt strange in my new Skills, there were no faces. Mrs. kind of game in the field. Bell bottom all gathered round, watching her fry dress and tight braids. At nap time I Winifred wrote that I had not spoken jeans, afros and fly away hair, hoop the soft, oily bread in a cast iron skillet put my mat by the teacher’s desk and once in six weeks. earrings that brush past shoulders, bare over the fire. She began to lift it off. lay there in the dim room, not sleeping. chests, laughter and cursing. Open the The heavy pan tipped. The bread At show and tell a girl brought in a Povungatuk door of the car, step onto the cool wet slipped into the ashes. There was a round toy that made animal sounds. ground of Spring. Smell sun warmed wild scramble as teenagers and chil­ Two kids tried to hold hands, but the My parents told us we were going mud and manure, balsam and mildew dren grabbed for the bannok, tearing it teacher said, Hands to yourself. We cut sailing in the Virgin Islands for our and sweat. The black flies whine. The out of each other’s hands. I held my and glued and pasted and colored. summer vacation. We would spend a chickens fuss. One of the hippies yells piece of blackened bread close to my The next morning there was school month on a yacht with a captain and his something but there is wind and you chest. I remember the satisfying taste again. My father said, You don’t have first mate. This vacation idea scared can’t make it out. It probably isn’t of soot and grease. to go. My mother said, Try it, and me—Dad had read me Treasure Island, polite. They wash towards you, grin­ The night grew cold. Inside the walked me down to the bus. This went and I was afraid of a mutiny. Then my ning. You’re here. teepees, we rolled ourselves in blan­ on and on. father said maybe instead we could go kets on the hard ground. My sister and My father ran a snapping turtle live with the Eskimos. He asked for my The Life of a Warrior I snuggled up against my mother. In over in the car, brought it home and opinion. Definitely the Eskimos, I said, another teepee, we heard Brandy, a made turtle soup. He showed me how voting against the pirates. One sunny, September day I came toddler, crying from cold. My father the turtle heart kept beating, just sit­ All right then. My father said he’d upon my father in a field. He was took him into his buffalo robe. ting there like a grey tear drop all by arrange it with a French Canadian crouched on a giant circle of canvas, In early morning, we threw off our itself on the butcher block, faithfully painting the figure of a man on horse­ frost covered blankets and ducked out working for hours, not realizing it continued on page 7 March 1997 T he Bookpress Quarterly page 7

priest he knew. This priest had been a Bank of Canada shaped like a huge scrape. Then, two girls in red plaid white, you went crazy. You felt hotter missionary in a village in the Canadi­ white igloo. A packed taxi with no shawls sidled towards us. They put and hotter. You ripped off all your an Arctic. But that night I overheard doors passed us. People ran beside it their hands over their mouths and clothes, burrowed into a snow bank my mother worrying. The Eskimos and swung themselves on; others giggled at the gauges my sister had and fell asleep. kept sled dogs, and in the summer they leapt off. The taxi had no breaks, so it made on her stone. Girls don’t carve, Finally, the ship arrived. Everyone ran wild, sometimes attacking chil­ didn’t stop until it ran out of gas. they told us. went down to the shore to help unload, dren. Now, I was not looking forward Jimmy’s house had a kitchen-dining Minnie had a narrow face with high passing wooden crates up the beach. It to this vacation either. My father room, and two bedrooms. There was a cheekbones and carried her niece on was like the fourth of July, like wrote a letter to the priest, and couch, a table and not much else. It her back. Mina wore bangs, was round Thanksgiving. The whole village received a letter back, saying that we was clear that Jimmy’s wife and and sweet faced. They both had num­ turned giddy, crazy for sweets. Jimmy could live with the town garbage man. daughter did not want us there—the bers instead of middle names, given to went to the store and came home with The letter also reported that the dogs little girl hid from us, covering her face them by the Canadian government. four huge bottles of Pepsi. His wife were now kept on an island in the with her hands to make herself invisi­ They both wore black rubber boots poured pink candied popcorn into the summer, no need to fear. ble. The woman kept her mouth in a over embroidered mukluks. Neither of baby’s crib. The children walked We drove to Montreal in our Lan- grim line, but Jimmy stayed up every them could stop laughing. My sister around eating licorice and pretzel drover. Then we took a plane to Tim­ night, drinking tea, talking and laugh­ dropped her stone on the doorstep, and sticks. Jimmy drank the Pepsi quickly mins. From Timmins, we boarded a ing with my parents at the small we ran off with Minnie and Mina. and sent my sister and me to the store world war two sea plane and trundled Formica table. Now, Povungatuk seemed like the to buy more. We felt very important. off for Povungatuk on the Hudson Besides the priest, Jimmy was the best place on earth. We got to eat fried On our way back with the bottles, a Bay. There was a huge roaring in the most important man in Povungatuk. He white bread and drink sweet tea all day boy yelled, Ugly white girls! He threw cabin, so that we had to yell to hear was one of the only people in the vil­ long. The sun never set, and we played a stone at us. each other. The pilot left his door lage not on the Canadian dole. He outside past midnight, under the north­ I felt stripped, bleached. We hugged open so we could watch him fly the delivered everyone’s water and took ern lights. Mom bought us rubber boots the Pepsi and ran, the bottles slapping plane. It began to rain and water away their garbage, driving the only and embroidered mukluks. When our against our stomachs. Later, I told Min­ leaked onto our seats. We were given motor vehicle with breaks. But Mom group of girls charged nie and Mina towels to hold against the roof. From said he was frustrated. This pond is too through the village, I what the boy the little window I saw that the world small for Jimmy, she said. Later, when loved to look down at had said, wait­ had become half grey water and half liquor reached Povungatuk, he would all the identical black ing for their dark green tundra, forever. become an alcoholic, then kill himself. boots scaring up dirt. laughter to Finally, the plane began to turn and But back then, the Canadian govern­ There was a movie wipe the words descend. I saw a straggle of pastel col­ ment still kept alcohol out. Jimmy told every evening shown away. But they ored shacks. Then we landed in the us a man had broken into the Hudson in the community center. The movies just shook their heads. They said that ocean. The plane rocked. The pilot cut Bay store, stolen a bottle of perfume only cost a dime, and if the children Jimmy’s little girl told everyone we the engine, and heaved open the door. and slugged it down, hoping to try out didn’t have the change, they just were ugly white devils. I hid my pale Waves splashed his feet. We were drunkenness. strolled in anyway, because a blind hands in my pockets. about a hundred yards from shore. There was not much food. A big sup­ man collected the money at the door. Then Mom asked if we would like to Four canoes were making their way ply ship made its way down the bay Mostly, we played in a big group of take an Eskimo girl home with us. towards us. They were paddled by twice a year, but it had been stuck in girls led by Minnie and Mina, but there How about Minnie and Mina both? I dark haired men in parkas. A canoe ice and the ship was months late. The was a half-white girl our mother took asked. Mom said it had to be Lizzie, pulled up alongside the door to the shelves of the Hudson Bay Store were us to visit sometimes. Lizzie’s father because she was half white and plane. The pilot lifted my sister and me nearly empty. There was a roast left in had worked at the Hudson bay store, shunned by the others. Lizzie’s mother onto the floor of the boat and the men the freezer, because nobody knew but he was long gone. The other girls wanted us to take her away for a while. paddled away. I gripped the sides as what to do with it, so my mother did not seem to like Lizzie much. She I was disappointed because Lizzie was we splashed through the waves. The cooked it for Jimmy’s family. Other­ looked a little like me—we were the not much fun. men were talking and laughing in a wise, we mainly ate bannok, a soft same height and had the same dark The night before we left, I went to language I couldn’t understand. white bread fried in the shape of a huge blond waist length braids. Lizzie and I Lizzie’s to help her pack. There was Mutiny, I thought. My sister was silent, donut. We drank tea with sweetened, sat quietly drinking tea in her grand­ nothing in her room but a couch cush­ so the whimpering must have been condensed milk. The toilet paper had mother’s kitchen. She seemed mourn­ ion on the floor where she slept. She coming from me. When we neared the run out too, so we wiped ourselves ful and pale and I preferred Minnie and gathered up a small bag of clothes. On shore, the man in the bow jumped into with catalogues. Mina, who always laughed. the plane, Lizzie’s face greyed and her the frigid, knee deep water and drove The sea washed on and on, the wind Jimmy took us to meet a woman mouth puckered. She wouldn’t talk to the canoe onto the.pebble beach. A blew off the water and rustled the tun­ who had been in the first documentary me. I thought she was sick, but Mom crowd of people circled us, all of them dra that swept on and on. The tiny vil­ ever made, Nanook of the North. whispered that she was scared. When with dark, straight hair. They watched lage huddled in-between, and I was a Later, in college, I watched the film. we reached Montreal, Lizzie saw her my sister and me as we were heaved stranger to all of it. The color of the Nanook paddles a kyak to shore. One first tree. She kissed it. out of the boat by our armpits. My world had narrowed. Dull green scrub, by one, his entire family pops out of In Montreal, Dad bought Lizzie, mother and father and our luggage flat grey ocean, dust and pebbles and the recesses of the boat, all huge Becky and me winter dress coats. Even arrived. We all stood there. brown birds. We picked bitter white smiles. Watching the movie, I remem­ though it was the end of summer, we Then the crowd parted for a big, berries on the tundra, and the taste ber feeling suffocated, imagining the all wore our white fake fur coats yellow dump truck. A small, smiling made me lonely. The constant wind whole family curled against each other around the underground mall. Some­ man with a dark brush cut leapt out of made my eyes and nose run, as if I were inside the kyak, pressed against fur and one asked Dad if Lizzie and I were the cab and introduced himself— always weeping. Jimmy explained that skin. This woman had been a little girl twins. Dad said, Yes, we were. Lizzie Jimmy Sivouak. He laughed and we were the first white children in the in the movie, but now she was an old smiled and took my hand. Then we all pumped my father’s hand. He threw village. The other children ran away woman with no teeth. She told winter drove home. our luggage into the back. We from us, shrieking laughter. stories of people losing their way in climbed in after. The dump truck We visited the carver’s coop. My snowstorms, just trying to walk to their Micah Perks lives in Ithaca. She ground its gears, surging up the beach sister was given a small piece of soap neighbor’s house for a little company. teaches at Hobart, and is the author of and onto the one dirt road, past the stone. We sat out in front of Jimmy’s She said they would be found a few We Are Gathered Here. Were the Wild two churches, the pink and blue hous­ house. She carved and I watched. feet from the house, and always naked. Things Were is from her memoir-in- es that all looked the same, past the Time moved knife scrape by knife All alone, unable to see anything but progress. Writers & Artists!

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M. Loveland pageS T he Bookpress Quarterly March 1997 Message from the Deep ““What is this?” you said, your voice Linda Healey heavy with displeasure. I didn’t January answer, and after a minute we lay back on the bed. It was strange; when I had to see you, In the beginning you’d sometimes What feels like the season of endings when my hunger got the better of reason frightened me. You did odd things. On and resistance, you were inevitably on a nail on the wall, next to the bed, hung Sometimes marks a beginning: the street. One rainy Saturday afternoon a strange object made out of metal and I’d gotten up and walked out of “Les wound wire that suggested some In the white, snow-reflected light Enfants du Paradis” with half an hour familiar, everyday item I was always left to go because I’d known without a L. Glenn just on the verge of identifying: a Things are real and plain, illusions doubt I’d find you at the taxi stand; I did. cheese sheer or a cocktail strainer or a And yet there was always that element slightly under our feet. As we went in geometry compass. One night you fall away. of surprise, the duck-duck-goose sus­ you gave me a look that meant took it off the wall and held it up in pense of walking along the line of cabs, “Quiet!” and we made our way silent­ front of you, like a hypnotist. “Watch,” looking for your dark green sedan. ly upstairs to your door. you said, turning it this way and that. I I sit at the kitchen table, finger On nights like this one, forces were at Inside, I had the feeling of having watched, thinking how ridiculous it work. It was certain I could step out onto escaped to another country. The heroine was and trying not to show how ner­ hooked to the morning coffee, the avenue from the side entrance to the in a fairy tale enters the robbers’ cave vous you were making me. Another Yard and find you—bam!—first in line. and sits down by the fire, removing her time you asked me if I could hear the Black in a white cup. Seeing you was like coming into a warm shawl; I took off my coat and laid it bedsprings vibrating. “They are vibrat­ house from a blizzard, like a baby recog­ over the armchair, then chose a cassette ing with the stars,” you said. In dreams / was held at gunpoint, nizing its mother’s face. The cab itself and snapped it into the tape player. You took off my clothes, carefully seemed hyper-real; it was more angular, You’d gone into the kitchen. pulling my sweater over my head, My father kidnapped by people in ski more deeply colored, more brightly lit “You want to eat?” you called. unzipping my skirt, tugging my slip than all the rest. When I saw it, my heart “I’m not hungry.” down over my hips. You turned me, and masks; sat up and beat Yes, a clac of delight and “I can make soup.” as you unfastened the tiny unfamiliar apprehension. Because seeing you was a “I really don’t want anything, really.” hooks I felt your Opinion taking form But this morning is too bright for dare, seeing you was going AWOL. I I sat on the bed and smoked. My over us like a cloud, although how punctured my universe and floated free, shoes were on the floor, my feet tucked much was disapproval and how much crime, relaying my flight plan to nobody. up under me. The long black skirt I was desire was hard to say. I opened the door and slid into the wearing spread around me in a circle. Then we were both naked, we were the kitchen table stays where it is told, front seat. I’d put my scarf around my shoulders; under the covers, we’d passed over the “Hi.” the room was chill. wall. I shut my eyes and saw you, your The coffee steams discreetly. “So, you came.” Your astonishing After a while you brought in the tea father, your grandfather, your great­ smile laid open your face for a single and set it on the table by the bed. “I am grandfather—all your forebears beat before the mask came over it again making soup,” you said, giving me a stretching back in an unbroken line. I I must be beginning to understand and you reached for my hand. I felt the pained look I couldn’t quite identify. “I saw bright sunshine, latticework, warmth of your fingers and it was all haven’t had anything.” whitewashed walls, a blue door; a car­ this world, right: I was here, I was here. “Go ahead—please. I just want some pet, a tower, the sea. You slid the gearshift into Drive and tea, that’s all.” We moved. We moved in a pattern as Because it scares and confuses me. we moved up Mass. Ave. You could make soup out of any­ time-honored as a woman drawing “You are going home?” you asked. thing, out of water and ketchup: deli­ water from a well, as a man picking up I cling tightly to the clean white coffee “I was going home.” cious hot soup, thick and spicy. Your his son in his arms, as two hands break­ “And now you want to go with me?” kitchen always looked bare to me—a ing open a loaf of bread. Nothing could cup, You threw me an arch glance. “But I am bottle of oil, a bag of dried mint, a head have been more prosaic—the moment working.” of garlic—but you were constantly when you groaned and came to rest The kitchen where everything is in I pushed the cigarette lighter in and making pots of rice or potatoes, omelets upon me, the way I twisted your hair in looked out the window. We were head­ and soups. Black olives, peanuts, my fingers, your brief kiss on my col­ place. ing in the direction of where I lived, but honey—those were the tastes of being larbone—but we gave no thought to the I waited. with you. power of prosaic acts. It’s a beginning. “I started only at ten, and there has You sat with me and ate, breaking off We slept. been nothing,” you said. “One dollar, pieces of round bread. The heater two dollars—that’s it.” The lighter flamed up, warming the room, while I woke up in your arms, my cheek on —Margaret Nichols popped out and I lit a cigarette. There the voice of a thousand-year-old man your chest. The lights were on and the was a short silence as you appeared to wailed at us out of the tiny speaker. He room had the dark-side-of-the-moon concentrate on the road. “You were sounded ancient and sad, as if he knew feeling of 3:00 a.m. You were asleep, In my mind’s eye, the unmapped ter­ out?” you added finally. about every sorrow I would ever have the light rimming your profile, follow­ ritory of our deeper selves is shut off “I went to the ballet. Then I went and and was telling me about them. A deep ing the ever-so-slightly aquiline curve from the daylight world of everyday had a drink with these obnoxious Har­ feeling of contentment settled over me. of your nose. In sleep your features life by a huge paneled door. Poetry is vard people.” I glanced at you. “Don’t “You want a date?” you said, offering took on the nuzzled look of the drugged what happens when that door unac­ look that way.” me the package. lion cub I’d once seen paraded on the countably swings open and we get a “What way?” You shrugged. “You I took one. The date was papery on beach at Alicante: blunted rather than glimpse into the other, truer world. I are free.” the surface, dense and jammy within. I vulnerable. You looked both older and see poetry as a gift from the “That’s right,” I said. “And here I am.” felt its sweetness dissolve on my younger than you were. The line of unknown part of oneself—the speak­ “I have to work a lot,” you went on. “I tongue. your chin softened, but your forehead ing of a voice you didn’t know you have to make many payments.” The cab “These dates are terrible,” you said. smoothed out and, for the moment, sus­ had, saying things you didn’t realize made a smooth right turn off the avenue, “If you knew the dates of my home like pended judgment on the world. Your you knew. back toward Lechmere. “We need to buy honey. They are big, on the stem, gold- black lashes, your eyebrows, your milk. I don’t have anything,” you contin­ colored. They are fantastic. This is not a black beard and black, black Margaret Nichols is a rare book ued in the same aggrieved tone. date.” You put one in your mouth. hair...your skin was chalky from the librarian who lives in Ithaca and I relaxed, exhaling smoke. And now “They taste all right to me.” long winter, lighter than mine and more works at Cornell University. She has the night shook itself and uncurled. You gave me your look. This look velvety. I watched you breathe. recently returned to writing poetry was difficult to classify, but part of it I was sober now, and my mouth felt after a 15-year silence. The night itself is marginal: secret and said: American. Part of it said: child. It gummy. The room was stuffy and I insomniac. Driving through the streets, was an expression of disdain not with­ knew I should turn the heater off. I got we passed dark houses and cruising out fondness, a look of irony. You out of bed and put on your striped police cars, the faintly glowing windows reached for a paper towel, but I grabbed bathrobe, stepping carefully over the of jazz clubs and white-lit 24-hour con­ your hand and put one of your fingers in black garter belt. venience stores, their interiors as starkly my mouth. In the bathroom I washed my face exposed as X-rays. We stopped at one in “What are you doing?” you said, and brushed my teeth with your tooth­ Inman Square and I waited in the car startled. brush, and drank a glass of water. My while you went inside. The evening I’d “It tastes good,” I insisted. eyes in the mirror looked back at me spent—the theater, the conversation, the Your face changed again, became steadily; they seemed for once devoid illness-at-ease—shrank up into a tiny intent. You took your finger back and of any editorial comment that I could dot, like the fading image on a worn-out made as if to draw me to you, but I sat trace. TV tube, and disappeared . up and said “Wait.” Then I went into Back in the big room, I turned off the You drove slowly, deliberately, and the bathroom. heat and the lights and crept into bed held my hand. We didn’t talk. Your hand When I came out you were standing. beside you. felt like a balm. I went over to you and we put our We parked on your street. Your arms around each other. With one Linda Healey is a former resident of building, faced in tarpaper shingles, quick gesture you flipped up the back Ithaca who is currently living in Paris. had an almost frontier-town look; the of my skirt, and your hands found the Message from the Deep is an excerpt wooden steps were weathered and gave garters, my skin. from her novel-in-progress.