Eisenbahnstrasse, and the moment I entered the studio for the first time again after returning from a two-week absence. Absurd that a quantity can exist, be verified, that a time can be measured, two weeks, anything can happen, nothing can happen in two weeks. A bundle of mail wedged under my arm, a travel bag in one hand and a sack of coal in the other. The sudden strangeness of the space, the strangeness of the plasterboard wall, so familiar and yet somehow too long, too high now. And how quickly this vision evaporated, returned to the usual, how quickly the wall became normal again. Cold, it was always so cold, and the little ceramic oven burnt out so quickly, the heat vanished from the room again so abruptly, but I didn’t know that yet, I didn’t know the winters there yet, I had only just finished the renovation when I had to drop everything and rush off to New York, now, now. It was November, the cold was just beginning to seep into the walls, freezing, I was always freezing, always pouring another bucket of coal into the oven, always emptying ashes, removing the tray as gingerly as I could to keep the fine red dust from flying up into my face, but I didn’t know that yet, I had only just moved in when my mother called and told me to come. And that night spent waiting in the dark, waiting for it to be time to leave for the airport, for the alarm clock to drill its incessant beep into the walls of my stomach, my bag packed and waiting, the walls waiting, the blood in my veins waiting. How strange the space looked, strange to think of it being empty these past two weeks, two weeks in which perhaps a little dust settled on the table, on the desk, in which a few calls were recorded on the answering machine, a few hang-ups, two weeks in which nearly nothing happened, in which the lamp remained where it was, the table where it was, the cup where it was, the tea I’d drunk the night before, there, where I left it, inconceivable. Yet now, after two weeks’ absence, I open the door, and it’s not the same, something has changed, something feels evil, I’ve brought a stowaway back with me, a demon that kept itself hidden throughout the journey, which now leapt out invisibly, vanished into the walls noiselessly, infusing the space with a fear that never went away again, a fear of a deeper, blacker dark, and I was allowed to keep the bedroom door ajar, a crack, and I crept out of bed and along the creaking floorboards to peer down the long hallway to the narrow strip of living room visible beyond, listening intently to the muffled sounds of the television, soothing me, the muffled sounds of safety. And you were still alive, your stacks of quarters for the bridge toll carefully lined along the edge of the piano each night, your lunch in a brown paper bag in the refrigerator and always something drawn in ball-point pen on the inside of the napkin, the lunch I made for you each night, each night.
Eisenbahnstrasse, and the window above the desk. I used to unlatch the hook and poke my head out to check up on the cat; I used to call his name, and he’d come running along the top of the brick wall behind the garbage bins, look up and stop, his mouth opening in a little cat cry inaudible at that distance. Sometimes, though, he was sleeping on one of the car seats that filled the crowded shed of the car mechanic, who always kept a little food ready in a dish and who sat outside on a folding chair in the courtyard with his wife and daughter in the evening. And I was always afraid of the landlady’s nine year-old son, afraid he’d do something to the cat, but what, he was only a little boy, yet it was a feeling I had, a feeling that never let go of me, strange. He used to wander around the courtyard, poking at things with a stick, looking up at my window now and again as though he’d guessed my thoughts, as though he were afraid of being caught, but perhaps he was only perceiving my suspicion, made uneasy by it, nothing more. And then the cat got locked in the mechanic’s shed one weekend, and I didn’t know where he lived, or what his telephone number was, Ivo was his name, a Croatian émigré. I called to the cat, and he answered, crying, and I waited for Ivo to come and unlock the shed so I could carry him home. The day passed, the cat crying, scratching at the walls and crying, and then I finally found a spot where one of the wooden slats was rotten, and I knocked it through, thinking the cat could escape, but no, I had only broken into the back of a locked cupboard. How long it took to finally find another weakened spot where I could pry a board back somewhat, just enough to let a cat slip through, and how he rubbed up against me in the end, circling in and out between my legs as we went upstairs, running up a few steps ahead and waiting at the top of each flight for me to stroke his thick black fur, our little ritual, his back arching and his tail shooting up in pleasure. I opened the door to the studio and fed the cat and waited for Ivo to come, and the next day, and the day after that, to apologize for breaking into his shed, to offer to fix it, and then a week went by without Ivo, and then another week, and he never came back, never again, because the war had begun, and it gradually dawned on me that Ivo had gone home to do his patriotic duty, and the car wrecks continued to rust in the courtyard, and the wife, the daughter never returned. I moved out of Eisenbahnstrasse a year and a half later, the war having only just begun, and who knows when the rent stopped coming in, when the landlady became alarmed, when her son began standing on his tip-toes to peer into Ivo’s shed, when he began throwing rocks at the windowpanes.
Eisenbahnstrasse. The weeks after you died, and then the months that followed, as though measured in some other, more malleable, unit of time. How elastic everything seemed, as though things could slip into another form at any moment, as though the very space surrounding me could loop in on itself, become turned inside out without warning. Sometimes I imagined that I was already an old woman merely dreaming of being young, and sometimes I imagined that I was already dead, or a mother who had just lost a son and not the other way around, as though your death had induced time to tunnel back inside me somehow. How I floated through the days that followed with my eyes wide open and my voice sounding as though it were coming from somewhere outside of my own skull. And the jobs at the theater that winter, stapling the long canvas banners to the floor and rolling the paint over them while the set designers and production assistants came and went around me; how I placed a large fan at one end of the banner and went down to the cafeteria to wait for it to dry, hiding away in a corner with a cup of coffee and a book. And on some nights, in between dress rehearsals, the actors would begin drifting in with their make-up and costumes, thronging around the cash register and the refrigerated glass vitrines. What, one of them cried out—no fruit salad? No more muffins? Exaggerated expressions; boisterous laughter. How I watched them drift in and gradually fill the cafeteria, and then closed the book and laid it on the table before me as a man in a powdered wig and a plumed hat picked up an empty parfait glass from the rack of used trays and called out in a woeful tone, this might have been your fruit salad, my lad. And then a woman with her bosom neatly tucked into the bodice of a dirndl bent over my table with a conspiratorial wink to ask me if the other chairs were free, snatched up my book, and held it out at arm’s length, enunciating the title as though it were a papal edict and gesturing solemnly as I shrank back into my corner with an overwhelming urge to cry. Where are you; where are you. I hurried back upstairs, hung up my gas mask by its rubber strap, fetched my coat from the locker, and made for the door without a word. And then, remembering the impending rent, I thought the better of it and carried my coat back to the locker, washed out the brushes that were already beginning to stiffen, stretched a string for a base line, and began sketching out the letters spelling the title of the next premiere. How I painted them in, kneeling on the hard wooden floor and tracing the curves with a trembling hand, thinking about how much I hated the theater, hated everything about it, hated everything dramatic, everything theatrical. Those were the months I used to write myself little notes: watch out when you’re crossing the street; watch out when you’re handling the drill. An absent-mindedness I was unable to shake, and that feeling of being under water, or under glass. How cold and damp it was, how I froze in my thin jacket as we walked around the botanical garden in Paris that November, and then, suddenly, we found ourselves in the tropical climate section, and then in the desert climate section, and how I wanted to stay in the desert, never leave this desert with its cactus and its rare, lavish flowers, protected and warm forever. You, and you. And what do I have from that week, still: a red plastic folder; a white cotton bedspread stolen from the hotel and later dyed a deep shade of rose, which I hung in front of our bedroom window and which gradually faded to a pale pink over the years; the photos I took of myself in an automatic booth somewhere near the Gare du Nord, killing time until my train left for Berlin, haunted by the nagging sense that I would never be seeing you again—these four photographs with a blue background and that look of being under water, or under glass, two in a drawer somewhere and the other two completely forgotten until I caught a brief glimpse of them years later, when the official at the Ausländerpolizei* opened my file and briskly leafed through the pages as I sat across the desk under the harsh glare of the fluorescent light, filling out an application for a right of permanent residence. And how odd it was to see them unexpectedly among all these formulas I’d filled out and signed over the years, with two neat holes punched into the left margin and filed away in a manila folder; how it felt as though I had stumbled into a trap, confronted with some kind of awful and irrefutable evidence.
*
How many times has my thinking become caught in a loop; how many times has my mind circled around a certain word, an expression that passed over a face and vanished, around and around, trying to get closer, but to what. That feeling of something being there, circling around and around; but what. That uneasy feeling of something about to be revealed, the quiet panic. And then, the moment of realization, its anaesthetizing effect. I see this, understand this, yet I don’t see, I don’t understand. The amnesia that follows, when the mind carefully buries its new discovery, only digging it up some time later when it’s certain of being alone, unobserved, turning it over and over, sniffing at it as though it were a dried-out bone.
*
Eisenbahnstrasse, and the job we never got paid for, painting circus wagons for a Buffalo Bill show pieced together with the straggly remnants of the former East German state circus gone bankrupt. The animals out in Hoppegarten*, waiting in their cages with nothing to do, watching, alert. Baboons throwing nuts and anything else they could grab out of a belligerence I didn’t think existed outside the human species; scrambling up to the bars of the cage and kicking against them in defiance. And the camels; a polar bear; two elephants swinging their trunks in unison; a panther crouched in a dark corner, silent and invisible except for his glowing yellow eyes. And a lion, pacing back and forth with the restlessness of an intelligent animal accustomed to activity. How the lion picked up on my movement and followed me when I walked by the cage, and when I stopped and turned, how he did the same, as supremely alert as a cat following a toy with its gaze. We longed to believe that we could let him out of the cage to play, that we could stroke his beautiful fur and he’d arch his back and groan in pleasure, that he wouldn’t maul us to shreds. The animal attendant and the buckets of raw meat he threw into the animals’ cages; how he peered at us with a taciturn and sour gaze. I went off to watch the elephants swinging their trunks in wide arcs, back and forth, back and forth, standing side by side with their huge bodies touching gently; were they passing the time, or were they trying to dispel their anxiety, I could never tell. We eventually learned that soon there wouldn’t be any money left to feed the animals, that they would have to be sold off individually wherever they could; that it would be nearly impossible to find a buyer for two elephants—and how little their chances of survival would be in the event of separation.
Eisenbahnstrasse; the futon spread out on the floor of the studio, and my brother stretched across it with his long feet hanging over the edge, sleeping off the jet lag. His travel case in the corner near the coal oven, open and sprawling with jeans and shirts and underwear, and beside it a pair of sweaty socks and a plastic bag of duty-free chocolate. I gazed at his sleeping body and thought about how well I knew it, and how I’d known it through every stage of growth, known it when his shoulder blades were tiny and fragile and we used to take baths together in the yellow-tiled tub, staring into the bubbles and imagining ourselves inside them; floating the shampoo bottle, the bar of soap like little boats across a lake. I suddenly had to think of him taking apart the radio when he was still too small to speak, scattering the parts all over the living room rug; how I had to gather them all up again after he was tucked into bed. And my little brother, playing the villain now, towering above me in a threatening pose, casting a long, black, jagged shadow and laughing the sinister laugh we used to imitate from the Saturday morning cartoons. Our private joke; his revenge for all the years I pushed him around, dunked him in the pool. What a terrible sister I was, taking advantage of the difference in age, the difference in size, and all the tall tales I told him: how he believed every word. We spent all our free time together, glued to each other’s side, entire summers under water in the small pool out back, the skin of our feet shriveling, our fingertips shriveling, jumping up and down wildly in the water and making waves, higher and higher, pulling ourselves up onto the edge of the pool and throwing ourselves back in, laughing and shrieking and jumping wildly and pretending we were at high sea, shipwrecked, exhilarated, the water splashing over the edge of the pool and flooding the ground around below. And then, exhausted, we’d cling to the side of the pool, breathing in the smell of the blue plastic lining in the sun and bouncing up and down with the waves until the water grew calm again, and then we’d take turns counting the seconds: who can stay under water longer, who can swim more lengths without coming up for air, trying to break the record each time until our lips turned blue and our eyes were red and bleary from the chlorine. I was always the one who made up the rules, and sometimes, imperiously, I changed them on a sudden whim. And now, my brother lying there on the futon, fast asleep; the first time we saw each other after the funeral, his first time abroad. How he took apart my broken vacuum cleaner and fixed the motor and put it back together again, how he fixed my bicycle, but that came later. How I had to go back and forth to the store several times a day to carry all the groceries; his disappointment that you couldn’t buy exactly the same things as you could in Waldbaum’s, a gallon of Florida orange juice, Thomas’ English Muffins. And I was always pushing him to try something new, Königsberger Klopse for instance; we stood in front of Max and Moritz’ arguing, I explaining that it was similar to a hamburger, only better, and he finally giving in with a dark, silent fury. How he liked it in the end and forgot all about his resistance, his stubborn refusal, but that came later. And now we were like two orphans who’d forgotten to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind, lost in a dark wood and afraid, and I thought: I’ll never leave you, I’ll protect you, but I knew it wasn’t true, I knew that he’d be gone again in a few weeks, and that our magic bond was a thing of long ago, when we used to sit in our towels on the front steps, shivering and comparing our wet footprints on the cement walk, the size of our feet until it grew dark and the fireflies started coming out, and the stars. And then we’d talk about time, time and space and marvel at it all, living on a ball revolving in a vast and empty expanse, and how far away the stars were, and how old the universe, and I’d make up some new scientific fact, I’d tell him I knew how to focus the rays of light coming from other planets and could see the past as though it were on TV, and he’d believe me, he’d believe every word.
Eisenbahnstrasse, and how different everything seemed with Artie suddenly there, occupying space and turning my studio into a displaced chunk of Staten Island that was becoming larger and larger each day. How he wore a pair of jeans once, a shirt once, throwing them onto the floor in the corner and the pile growing higher and higher until there were no more jeans, no more shirts in the suitcase, and my brother, having never been to a Laundromat, having never turned the dial on our mother’s washing machine, having never left home, except once, when he ran away one day without any warning, and having nowhere to go, rode the ferry back and forth for an entire afternoon until a drug dealer in a faded sweatshirt asked him if he needed a place to stay, who knows what he had in mind, but Artie never used to see these things. How, a few days later, I got a call from a friend, my former downstairs neighbor; a person was staying upstairs, he said, a young man with the same eyes as mine. He coaxed him down and put him on the phone, and strangely enough, it actually was my brother, who had just wound up in the same apartment upon leaving home as I had two or three years previously, crazy coincidence. I told him to come stay with us on Ninth Street and called our parents to tell them he was safe, and he eventually went back home, and Mom gave up trying to talk sense into him and finally left him alone. Later, after I moved to Berlin, the snapshots of the family occasions I no longer took part in: christenings, birthday parties, my brother’s graduation from the police academy, in uniform, and next to him his father, my father—was it really the same man?—with his hand around Artie’s shoulder, proud that he had finally amounted to something decent. How I took him around the corner to see the parts of the Wall being dismantled, and how I tried to describe to him what it was like before, when the geography ended there, the map in the mind ended there and the grey zone began. And my brother’s imagination was sparked all of a sudden: the sweep of history, the way the world can suddenly change, and I was wondering if the futon would dry by the end of the day, after having scrubbed it in the middle where the cat had urinated, out of jealousy, presumably, because I hadn’t had an overnight guest for some time.
*
That one moment, that one detail which has remained in my memory, but why, it was nothing of importance, nothing occurred, a shaft of light falling obliquely across a sidewalk, a rustling of leaves. And all of it burned into my mind with a brilliance and a clarity, every detail branded upon my inner eye like the crisp letters of a printed word I do not understand. I say light, leaves, yet none of it can convey the mythical significance it holds for me. And does some larger thing lie concealed within it, and why have I forgotten it—forgotten the sudden realization of self-betrayal for instance, there, then, with this sidewalk, these leaves—or is it a random product, jettison caught up in the craggy recesses of a mind.
*
Eisenbahnstrasse, and the queues of East Berliners waiting for their “greeting money,” a hundred marks a head, compliments of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany. Lines all the way up Köpenickerstrasse, Muskauerstrasse, snaking out from every bank in the neighborhood and stretching for blocks, wrapping around corners. People standing closely together, waiting in line quietly, impassively, shuffling a few steps forward now and again and nudging their belongings along with the toes of their soft-soled vinyl shoes, identical red and blue plaid tote bags packed full with thermoses and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper: people evidently accustomed to waiting. And now, their minds firmly set upon feeling some hard western cash in their hands, their own currency having grown somehow silly, with its lightweight aluminum coins and dwindling exchange value: how bitter to have worked an entire life for this very money and to witness it becoming suddenly invalid, ludicrous, an entire system, an entire country rendered invalid and ludicrous, practically overnight. I crossed the street, still hearing the sound of my mother’s voice on the telephone, struggling with the medical details of your failing kidneys, these two spent organs steadily leaking toxic juices into your bloodstream. I opened the door to the drugstore and walked down a brightly-lit aisle as an array of deodorants and shower gels streamed past to either side; I tried to remember what it was I’d needed to buy. I found myself slipping a bottle of shampoo into my bag, and I was so surprised that I stopped and looked around to see if anyone was watching, when all at once I felt a flush of anger rush over me; I don’t want to fly to New York now, you can’t die now, my life has been in shambles for so long, and now I’ve finally renovated a loft with the first real grant I’ve ever gotten, and I’m just getting started, and when are you going to get a real job, I hear you saying, because it was nothing more than a handout for you, wasn’t it, money from the legacy of a painter whose works I’d often gone to see at the Museum of Modern Art on the “pay as you wish” days—the crowded days—and to you it was charity. Oh, Daddy. What was this anger, and why did the fear only creep up the next day, on the plane, when I had no way of knowing if you’d still be alive by the time I arrived, but that came later. I walked up to the register to pay for the dishwashing liquid and the kindling wood in my shopping cart; I tucked the change away, zipped my wallet shut, and was heading for the door when a large hand suddenly took firm hold of my arm. Come this way, please. You know, I don’t even know why I did it, I said to the undercover guard, following him to the back of the store as he pointed at the two-way mirrors lining the walls to either side. I waited for the police to arrive and take down my name and address; I was admonished never to enter the store again as I stammered out a confused apology. Later, at the funeral, people would be ogling me as though I were some kind of celebrity; Berlin was the very place the world’s eyes were on, right that very moment, and I had just arrived, still fresh with the aura of history in the making. I felt giddy, as though something incredibly funny had just occurred, and I imagined them all chiseling away at me, breaking off small, authentic chips, but that came later. A few neighbors arrived; one of the men from next door, where two Stanleys and two Wandas and a police officer named Jim lived, who used to reveal the most opulent cache of fireworks we’d ever seen at sundown each Fourth of July, like an overgrown child hoarding a stash of toys and firing them off into the wee hours of the morning. Goddamn corrupt, you used to say. They’re required by law to turn the stuff in, and what does he do? Typical Irish cop—swiped it away from a bunch of kids. One of the Stanleys was approaching to offer condolences, and I felt a wave of dizziness come over me; he held out his hand, and although I felt deeply moved, it occurred to me that he might have been motivated by a sheer sense of morbid curiosity. I reached for his cheek and planted a wet kiss on his neck instead in a spasm of motor control gone momentarily awry; I drew back and gazed at this man with his long stringy hair combed over his scalp to cover his bald spot, who had slept and woke each morning with his unshaven cheek lying on a pillow a mere four yards from my own, who had walked down the same street to the same bus stop as I had, without exchanging a single word, a single glance with any of us, every day for decades. How strange we always found these neighbors, and how quiet they were in comparison to our own sloppy, tumultuous household, their shades drawn and not the slightest sound, the tiniest peep, only once every so often, a sudden cheer, a round of applause from behind a Venetian blind, the two Stanleys apparently sports fans of some kind, but it was hard to imagine of what: it never took place during the football season, the baseball season, didn’t concur with the hockey championship, the World Cup; perhaps it was some alien game they were cheering on, played by extraterrestrials on another planet. The line in the cement separating our driveway from theirs; how it always felt as though I were doing something dangerous when I hurried across it to retrieve a stray ball. Two children grew up in that house and we never got to know them; they were taught to walk looking straight ahead, taught never to say good afternoon or to engage in eye contact with anyone. And later, Mrs. Tobiassen came to pay her respects as well, and reported in a cheerful voice that had resisted the Staten Island twang and had stubbornly clung to its Norwegian color for decades that she and her husband were taking the greatest care of themselves, the greatest care, she stressed, to make sure that this—and she pointed at the casket with an index finger angled coyly, as though to tickle a small furry animal—this wouldn’t ever happen to them.
And the next day, how I met Aunt Emma at the Staten Island Ferry terminal and drove her back to the house, Aunt Emma chain-smoking the whole way and I drinking in the vowels, the faintly nasal pronunciation, this voice that sounded so much like your own, that contained an entire generation, an entire lost world within it. And back at the house, Aunt Emma looking for an ashtray, and I, searching the kitchen drawers and finding a hairbrush filled with a tangled ball of dyed hair and a pair of dentures, but no ashtray, searching the kitchen cabinets crowded with bottles of ground oregano and basil and prescription vials, my mother’s blood pressure medicine, my mother’s pain killers, and everything sticky with greasy fingerprints, but no ashtray, not a single ashtray in the house. And then Aunt Emma wandering into the kitchen with a lit cigarette and a hand cupped underneath to keep the ashes from falling to the floor, and my mother commenting to no one in particular that she didn’t want to have that kind of stink around her house, around the food, and the plates and plates of cold cuts: ham, roast beef, provolone; the smell of coffee dripping through a machine and boxes of store-bought crumb cake and doughnuts stacked up on the kitchen counter. Aunt Emma wasn’t hungry, and so I suggested we go out for some fresh air; she threw her coat over her shoulders and we left the house and walked to the funeral home as she smoked one cigarette after the next in thoughtful silence. We were about to cross the parking lot when I looked up for the first time and discovered a group of hearses lined up on the gravel, shiny black limousines reflecting the branches overhead in their flawless surfaces, and then I saw that the funeral home beyond them had doubled in size, that a second story had been added on top; strange that I hadn’t noticed it the day before. We walked toward the entrance with the small stones crunching under our feet and entered a crowded lobby looking onto four individual parlors with a wake being conducted in each. I peered into one of them and saw an elaborate wooden coffin; the upper part of the lid stood open, exposing the powdered and coiffed corpse of a middle-aged woman lying on white satin, with a string of rosary beads draped around her manicured hands. I quickly looked away. It crossed my mind that I’d read somewhere about a scandal, a corpse that had only been groomed above the waist; someone must have considered it a waste of time to dress the rest of the body, concealed as it was by the lower half of the casket lid. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. We walked on and entered the room where my father had been laid out in a sea of flowers and his best suit and a pair of shoes with the date of purchase written inside in ball-point pen, an idiosyncrasy of his, where the last of his brothers and sisters would soon be walking up to the coffin one by one to pay their respects, where Aunt Lulu, who could hardly walk anymore, would cry out Goodbye Artie! from her chair and everyone in the room would fall silent. Later, I wandered outside and into the lobby, furnished with a number of stiff chairs whose gilt arms and legs curved out from underneath the velvet upholstery and dimmed by heavy brocade curtains gathered to either side in two broad, majestic sweeps and held in place by braided cords with golden tassels, wondering what kind of historical style this was supposed to represent, here in the middle of Staten Island, across the street from a Burger King and a K-Mart. I sat down on one of the chairs next to an ashtray, a slender aluminum cylinder containing a collection of snubbed-out cigarette butts, their heads submerged in sand like a flock of odd birds, I thought, and lit a cigarette. And a moment later, an old man sat down next to me and introduced himself; he used to work with my father, he said. A fine man. I nodded politely and stared at the carpet; my eyes followed the imitation Persian pattern up to the heel of someone’s shoe and stopped. He was a good father, I answered and turned to look at him. He was always talking about you, the man resumed, how his daughter did this, how his daughter did that, you were his pride and joy, did you know that? I studied the lines in his face, this man whom I had never met before, yet who had known some other part of you, the part that left home for work each day, hours before we got up for school, that sat down to lunch each day with a ham sandwich, maybe, or scrambled eggs on a roll, the two of you in your identical grey overalls, your orange hard hats resting on the floor beneath the table, a half an hour for lunch and a newspaper opened to the sports page, the baseball scores. The man stared ahead for a few more moments, his gentle face lost in thought, and then he turned to me and said that he was going to pay his respects one last time before going home. I thanked him and gave him my hand, and then I watched him walk away, struggling to remember his name, realizing I hadn’t heard him properly, hadn’t really understood his name at all, but maybe my mother will know, one of my father’s closest friends from work, surely my mother will know, and then I saw him pass the parlor where my father’s body was lying in state, walk on to another door at the far end of the lobby, and shake the hand of a stranger standing outside, having come to attend somebody else’s funeral, and having unwittingly consoled the daughter of the wrong deceased.
All of a sudden I turned and asked Uncle Louie about Pippi, in a whisper, whether he was still alive, whether I could visit him, and Louie stared ahead at the casket for some time and then he wrote the address of the sanatorium on a slip of paper and pressed it into my hand with a ten-dollar bill. Take him out to lunch at the diner down the block and buy him a few packs of cigarettes with whatever’s left over, he said, and then he stood up and walked away. And when I did make the trip to Far Rockaway a few days later and stepped out into a vigorous ocean wind, I decided to buy the cigarettes first, and then I buried my face in my coat as my scarf whipped about my face, one block, two blocks in the bright, cold sun. I signed in at the front desk; there was a kind of community room to one side with a television installed above the door, where its control knobs were well out of reach, and then a nurse’s aide appeared and led me into a small room with an old man lying in full dress on a narrow bed. There’s someone here to see you, Joseph. The old man on the bed didn’t respond. Wouldn’t you like to get up and say hello to your guest, Joseph? He’s dead, I thought, can’t you see he’s dead? But then the old man obediently rolled over and pushed himself up into a sitting position. The aide smiled at me and left the room, and I stood next to the bed and didn’t know what to say. I’m your niece, I began. The old man looked up at me impassively. Would you like to go for a walk? He stood up slowly and shuffled out of the room with his head bent low. I didn’t know what to do, and so I followed. I just arrived from Berlin, I said as I caught up with him, and he stopped, his eyes growing wide. No kidding, he answered; it seemed he’d been watching the news coverage, hordes of bewildered East Berliners passing checkpoints in tiny cars; hordes of ecstatic West Berliners cheering them on. I’m Artie’s daughter, do you remember your brother, I asked, but I wasn’t sure if he understood. I offered him the pack of cigarettes, and his face lit up; I watched him peel away the cellophane wrapper and light one carefully, sucking the smoke deeply into his lungs. He’s dead; he passed away last week, I said, but Pippi didn’t answer, he merely lit up one cigarette after the next, smoking each one down to the filter and then crushing it under his shoe. Now and again, he got up from his chair and shuffled across the room, and then I followed and took a seat beside him. He seemed to have forgotten all about me as he sat there smoking thoughtfully, and at some point, I stopped following him every time he changed his seat. There was a commercial on television: a happy family in a beautiful home; a trim, manicured mother holding something behind her back and smiling knowingly into the camera. Just pop it in the microwave—and Voilà! They’ll never know the difference, and a short while later, I noticed that Pippi was gone. I glanced around the room in alarm, and a moment later he emerged from the men’s room with a long banner of toilet paper hanging out of the back of his pants and trailing along the floor behind him. I followed him across the room, and then I sat down next to him and told him to go back to the bathroom and clean himself up properly, didn’t he see he was dragging dirty toilet paper around with him, why didn’t he watch what he was doing, and why was he being so impolite, anyway, didn’t he realize that I’d come all the way out here just to see him? He looked at me and seemed to remember me again all of a sudden; Oh, Jeez, I’m sorry, he said, and then he grew silent. I gazed around the room at the other patients sitting on plastic chairs and staring up at the television or blankly into the space before them as the crowds on the screen above danced jubilantly around the checkpoints and a few reckless spirits climbed up onto the Wall, holding their arms high in a sign of victory. Pippi resumed smoking one cigarette after the next as I watched him from the corner of my eye, this uncle I’d never met before, who had lived in a sanatorium for the past forty-five years and whom I’d never been allowed to see, whom I’d never even known about, because you never spoke of him, you never spoke much at all, and I’d dared to visit him for the first time, this man who looked more like you than all your other brothers combined. And all I knew about him was that he’d thrown Grandma’s furniture out of the window one day, and that he used to take off his clothes and wander around the neighborhood until someone found him and led him back home. The afternoon passed, and at some point he asked if it would be alright if he went to lie down; it was time for his nap, he said. And when I returned to Far Rockaway a week later, he didn’t know who I was anymore, and I bundled him up in his overcoat and tried to take him to the diner, but the wind was still too strong and we barely made it there when he wanted to head back, and so we returned and I sat in the lobby and watched him smoke a pack of cigarettes again, one after the next, with your eyes, your eyes fixed on the far end of the room. I finally left the sanatorium and emerged into the blinding afternoon sun, the brilliant blue sky and the wind that took my breath away, Far Rockaway, you came out here with Uncle Eddie every week, and you never said a word about it to anyone.
*
This disturbance in the fabric of things; how can I describe it?—A difficulty with the present tense. I feel this moment, taste it, yet it eludes me; it’s as though I were merely remembering it, dreaming it. Now, I think, now—yet nothing I tell myself can break the spell.
*
Bedford Avenue; standing in front of the subway map, pronouncing the names and tasting the residue they left behind on my tongue. How far removed they seemed, as though from another world, another time; how unlikely it seemed that I could go outside with this map in my pocket and actually board a train. And then I finally overcame my lethargy and walked down Bedford Avenue and descended the steps to the subway as the sweat trickled down between my breasts; how I got on an air-conditioned train with no clear plan in mind, reached up for the overhead bar, and watched the goose-bumps appear on my bare arm as the sweat on my skin grew cold. I changed trains several times, first at Union Square, then at Grand Central, combing the crowd as the subway pulled into each station, my eyes darting from one face to another, searching for someone I might know, anyone at all, inconceivable to have grown up in a city and recognize no one, absolutely no one. My eyes shifted from the subway window and the river of people rushing past outside up to the row of advertisements above them, hotlines for wife abuse, child abuse, centers for cosmetic surgery, dental surgery, with a picture of Doctor So and So and his signature underneath, topped off with a medical sort of flourish. And then, suddenly, I found myself on the way up to the Bronx and decided to get off at 149th Street to see if the old building was still there, when was the last time I went, I must have been a child. I walked down Brook Avenue without recognizing a single building, a single tree, turned the corner at 148th Street, and walked towards St. Ann’s, counting out the even numbers on the south side of the street as they approached 516, the building my great grandparents purchased after they arrived in the country, the building my mother grew up in, my grandmother grew up in, two long rows of five-story buildings on either side of the street with railroad flats two to a floor and women in long skirts and aprons sweeping the sidewalk every evening. Here was 514, a two-story building set back somewhat from the others; there was a child’s tricycle lying on its side on a small concrete patio out front with weeds sprouting up between the cracks. I walked on to the next building and saw the numerals 518 nailed into the wood above the door, and then I stopped and retraced my steps; I must have passed by it, I thought, but there was no 516, only a building with the number 514, and another with the number 518, both of comparatively recent construction, but no 516, and I stood there, gazing at number 514, then at number 518, and realized that the building must have been torn down long ago, after the neighborhood had turned into a slum. And later, after the lots were redrawn and new buildings erected during a phase of urban renewal, 516 simply vanished from the row of addresses on East 148th Street altogether, and I stood here, where the front door to the building must have been, picturing my mother sitting on the front steps as a child, my grandmother, a child, here, on this very spot where the building once stood, manifested now in nothing more than a gap in a numerical sequence. I stood there for some time studying the buildings and the sizes of the lots, unable to explain how an address could have vanished, the newer buildings being no larger, no wider than the older ones had been, they wouldn’t have taken up the extra space to make an entire lot vanish like that, I thought, and I walked down the street and turned the corner my mother had turned every day throughout her childhood on her way to the grammar school, across the street from the park, where the tough boys used to slide down the big granite rocks on cardboard boxes and tall trees grew out of the crevices in between, littered now with old newspapers and crushed beer cans and small piles of used syringes scattered among the underbrush.
Bedford Avenue. Sitting at the desk, gazing at the old photographs I’d brought back with me to Brooklyn: Grossmutter on the roof of the building in the Bronx, leaning against a low brick wall and resting her large hands on her lap; you and I in a coin-operated picture booth in Asbury Park, the date written on the back in ball-point pen: May 20th, 1962. You were wearing a plaid cotton jacket and a cap and holding me up to face the lens, and I was clinging to your neck, turned half way around towards the camera, but I didn’t know that, all I saw was a pane of glass and perhaps our own murky reflection, and I was gazing at it with a mixture of curiosity and mistrust, unwilling to let go of your collar to take a closer look. I studied your face, beaming broadly in your perfect new dentures, and then I went and fetched the ladder and pulled the box of photographs down from the top shelf of the bookcase to look for one of the house when it was new, but that came later. The cement sidewalks had just been poured and the grass seed sown, and someone had strung cord around the perimeter for protection, tying it to little sticks wedged into the dirt. There was nothing else around, not a single tree, a single bush; the houses across the street hadn’t yet been built, the houses in the back hadn’t yet been built, only ours and the house next door, a kind of odd twin with two front doors and a wider front porch, and this quality of being similar but not quite identical made it look particularly suspicious, particularly alien. And there you were in your plaid jacket with the Brownie camera hanging around your neck, and there I was, an infant in Grandma’s arms. The baby carriage was parked to the side, on the fresh cement, and a leg of a pair of trousers hanging from the clothesline was visible above it; I was about to turn the photograph around to look at the date on the back when I suddenly noticed your strange smile. So that was when you lost your teeth, I thought, toothless before the age of forty; they were extracted while we were moving into the new house, weren’t they, but why did they have to pull them all, surely they weren’t all bad. But perhaps it would have been too expensive to have a root canal done, a gold crown, and perhaps the dentist had simply recommended a more economical solution, because all the money had gone into the down payment on the house, the mortgage. October 1961; my child is the same age now as I was then; you were the same age then as I am now, and it took years for the sewers to be dug, and the basements on the block kept flooding every summer, because they were built on what had once been marshland, and I suddenly had to think of how an entire row of poplar trees fell one year in a heavy rain, and of the frog I tried to keep in the backyard and the little pond I dug for him, and the fireflies we caught on summer nights to collect their eerie light in pickle jars with holes punched in the caps to let in the air and tufts of plucked grass arranged at the bottom.
Bedford Avenue; the long dark hallway packed high along one side with lumber dragged in from the street. How the walls were open from behind, revealing a haphazard collection of screws that caught on to the plastic bag each time I dragged the garbage to the back stairway, ripping it open and causing the cat litter to spill out all over the floor; how I had to stuff everything into another bag and sweep up the mess before carrying it down to the dumpster on Metropolitan Avenue. And then someone new moved into the loft behind and began pushing the litter box in front of our door, to let us know how disgusting they found it, no doubt, but what could I do if Bruce kept an extra litter box in the hallway? Now and again, a call came in for Bruce, a bit of work here or there, light construction, substitute teaching, that was what the neighbor in the adjacent loft did for money. I told them Bruce was traveling, took down the telephone numbers, and promised to pass the messages on, but Bruce never called, and his neighbor didn’t have a number for him, either, and I wondered what it must have been like between them, back when they were still friends and not just co-signers on a lease, when they took on the space and drew up their plans and set to work at building their artists’ community. Bruce’s neighbor used to come home from work in a foul mood and his dogs would begin barking in excited commotion; he was always yelling at them to shut up, stomping through the hallway and rattling the keys as the dogs worked themselves up to a deafening pitch, and he’d shout at them to shut up, will you just shut up?, I always heard him yelling from the other side of the trembling wall. And how the dogs kept barking anyway, out of sheer joy, from the sound of things, locked up in a dark space all day in the unbearable heat and aware that their chance for escape was at hand, finally a bit of fresh air, finally a bit of movement, barking and barking, even after he began whipping them with a leather leash, joyful, even if it meant no more than a short walk down the block and back, with the chain pulling at their necks nearly the whole way, panting from the heat and the excitement. I used to be able to tell the sound of his walk from the moment he entered the floor, and I would tense up, anticipating the plodding step, the desperate joy of these trapped creatures, the shouting and cursing, the sound of the metal chain hitting against the aluminum studs on the other side of the wall as I sat at the table under the skylight, cutting a picture out of the newspaper. I put down the scissors and studied the page spread out before me. Lots of Arafats, smiling Arafats printed on posters held aloft by a small crowd of Palestinian youths. Two, three boys no older than ten, eagerly holding their Arafat posters out in front of them, one of them biting his lip in an effort to hold it high and steady, and another holding two Arafats at once, his slender chest thrust out in a boastful pose. And a smaller boy, his eyebrows drawn and serious, the poster in his hands hanging somewhat slack, an Arafat to his left, to his right, two Arafats behind him, and all of these Arafat heads markedly larger in size than the boys’ heads or the heads of the young men behind them. And then, to imagine the scene with only the boys and the men, but no Arafats, this scene of a crowd of smiling Arafats without Arafat, without any Arafats at all, only the three boys and the man to the right, the two behind, a small crowd, animated expressions frozen by a camera, but no Arafat, take away the Arafats or substitute them with balloons, for instance, everybody could be holding a balloon, the boastful boy could be holding two. First a crowd of Arafats, a hyper-Arafat, whereas in reality there was no Arafat, but only printed paper. How photographs of human heads look just as flat in print as the printed images of human heads beside them. One afternoon I came back along Bedford Avenue and stopped at the corner in front of the building, where Bruce’s neighbor was standing on the sidewalk embracing a young woman, both of them tearfully embracing one another, and I heard them as they promised to write, cupping each other’s faces tenderly in their hands while a car with a Minnesota license plate was idling at the curb, and I could hardly connect this tearful, tender farewell with the scuffle and the foul language and the unloved dogs, and I stood, stunned and staring at this intimate scene that had nothing to do with me, that it was an indiscretion to be staring at in this way at all, repressing a violent urge to hurl myself onto these two figures and embrace them both.
*
A sudden recollection the following day, and I am acutely aware of having neglected to express what I’d set out to. I hear myself begin, hear my words carry me off on a tangent; and, as though my mind had reset the warning signal for the next morning, all at once I recall the precise moment when I embarked on a final detour, failing to pronounce the most important thing of all, registering a look of momentary confusion on your face, and losing the thread of my story.
*
Kent Avenue. The naked space, the dazzling view. Plumbing running along the ceiling, windows across the entire front wall; the cement factory and the Brooklyn Navy Yard outside, and in the distance, the steady procession of lights moving over the Manhattan Bridge and up the FDR Drive. How I turned off all the lamps in the studio and sat in the dark, gazing out onto the city of my birth, of my mother’s birth, my father’s birth—and a grandmother’s, a grandfather’s, but that’s where it ends, the trail becoming lost the moment it touches the shores of the old continent again. How I carried Grandma’s armchair out of the basement where it had been sitting in the dark for twenty years, twenty-five years, and tied it to the trunk of my mother’s car and drove it to Brooklyn; but that came later. I shook the cushion covering out the window, shook out the crumbs of foam, hardened after so many years and disintegrating; the beautifully inlaid zipper, that funny fabric with the stagecoaches on it, why is it that none of us ever learned to sew, there was once an entire slipcover for this chair that fit perfectly, with a stiff little ruffle at the bottom and piping around all the seams. I shook the cushion covering out the window and watched the orange-colored crumbs of aged foam become caught in a current of air blowing up from the river, hover, and drift to the ground far below, and then the cover itself slipped out of my hands and fell the eight stories to the street. And there it was, this slipcover with the stagecoach fabric in the middle of Kent Avenue, and then a truck ran over it, and then another; but that came later. And to think of this: Grandma sitting in her armchair crocheting all those years, upstairs, in the house on the other side of the harbor, before the fabric wore through, before her furniture was carried down to the basement and the first tenants moved in upstairs, in the middle of what used to be marshland, drained by the settling Dutch centuries ago. And to think of this: this building existing, this window existing all the while, waiting, the metal handle on the cast-iron window frame, here, now, before me, opened and closed by so many hands, for so many years, waiting for me, waiting for this moment, waiting for Grandma’s chair and the orange crumbs of old foam, visible from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway near the Flushing Avenue exit amidst a landscape of warehouses and water towers and scaffolding bearing huge neon signs. And now, sitting at this window with an undefined span of time ahead of me, six months, a year, and then I saw it for the first time, the power plant you worked in when we were little, before you were transferred to Kips Bay. How is it that I didn’t see it before, how is it that the name of the street didn’t ring in my ears, Kent Avenue: the faraway place you went to every day, came home from every day, the mythical sound it once possessed, and only a word, the way you pronounced it; former times.
Kent Avenue, and the evening Artie came by after target practice, carrying a large duffel bag; how he kept casting careful looks over his shoulder, how he wouldn’t let the bag out of his sight until I stowed it under the bed and locked the door to the loft and we climbed the stairs to the roof. The lights were just beginning to go on all over the city; we watched a tugboat push a barge under the bridge as a faint breeze blew off the river and the evening sky darkened. Risk your life, and what do you get for it? One unlucky thing happens, and they stab you in the back, and then they don’t know you anymore, fifteen years down the drain just like that, three kids and a mortgage. And I had to think of the weapons downstairs, and the party going on next door, and I had to think of how many violent deaths were lying dormant in these things, in a round of bullets, like so many unlived lives within embryos, and how easy it would be to pull a trigger, and how they were itching to be used, to be aimed arbitrarily into a crowd, or turned around, bang, without even thinking.
Kent Avenue, and the dense fog that settled over the city, muffling the millennium celebrations in a thick blanket of chilly mist. The party on North Tenth Street: holding my drink in my hand like the reins of an animal struggling to break away as I stood in the corner watching people dance. They don’t know what they’re revealing about themselves, I thought; they dance and imitate movements they’ve seen on TV, and they don’t know what they’re revealing about themselves. The Polish man who had been filling my glass with vodka an hour or two before, dancing now, as well; how he kept thrusting both arms high into the air as though he’d just won some kind of championship, turning around in half circles and addressing an invisible stadium of cheering fans, facing first one hemisphere, and then another. And I, standing there watching him, thinking about a movie I’d seen on a plane recently about two criminals who’d discovered a bug in the system and broke into the national security or some big financial base and punched something into a computer the moment the hour turned zero. Images of computer systems crashing, airplanes crashing, stock markets crashing, the total apocalyptic scenario drummed into the collective mind for weeks already. And then, the uneasy walk back along the waterfront, my hand clutching the keys in my pocket and my teeth chattering from the damp and the cold. And when I reached the building, all the people coming and going, laughing, reeling, all the taxis pulling up outside, all the bottles scattered around in the elevator, the hallway, the bathrooms, pools of spilled beer everywhere speckled with soggy confetti. How I visited a party first on the eleventh floor, and then on the ninth floor, and how I stood in a corner each time watching people dance. And how I eventually returned to my loft a flight below and opened a bottle of whiskey as the party raged on next door. A string of Christmas lights hanging from the windows and a fog so thick that it swallowed the skyline and bridges whole. I emptied the bottle and wandered next door, where the evening’s amorous adventures were already in full swing, the flirts of a few hours before having tipped somewhat askew, with speech slurred and lipstick smudged and a drink spilling down a dress here and there. And my neighbor, the daughter of an American soldier and a Swabian Fräulein, dancing around in dizzy circles and throwing her arms around anyone she happened to bump into; how withdrawn she always was when I met her in the elevator with her bicycle helmet strapped under her chin, and how affectionate she became when she was drunk, trying out the few German words she knew and beaming at me for approval. I eventually wandered back home, pulled out the Christmas lights, and crawled into bed as the party dragged on next door, lying in the dark with the prospect of sleep seeming hopeless and gazing out onto the impenetrable fog, in which luminous orbs gathered around the streetlights like rumors around the unsuspecting. And how I fell asleep nonetheless, and then woke up a few hours later with my head pounding and a bitter taste on my tongue to discover that the sun had come up and the fog had lifted and everything was still there where it should be: the bridges, the towers, invincible and inevitable as morning.
* Notes:
Ausländerpolizei: immigration authorities
Hoppegarten: racing track in East Berlin