by Lore Segal
Max’s arm sinks, his chin rises. From his exposed throat is torn Don Giovanni’s last, great chromatic howl sliding an octave down from high D. He covers his eyes with his black sleeve, lifts a knee, and, like Rumpelstiltskin hearing himself named, crashes through the floor and is never seen again.
One by one my unfortunate guests find their coats on my couch and leave.
“I’m sorry,” I say to them. I cry a little.
“Don’t,” says Betterwheatling kindly, kissing me goodbye. “We’re pros, Lucinella. We know a survival trick or two.”
“Like what?” I ask him.
“I can always argue that my critic is a knave or a fool, incapable of understanding the nature of my work, or jealous, or angry with me for some real or imagined affront to himself or a friend. Since I frequently agree with Peters’s judgments, I shall take the impregnable position that the world is behind, ahead, or out of the mainstream of my thinking, else how could it continue on its appointed round, at its usual speed, when this is My Publication Day? And now I’m going home to bed, Lucinella, because tomorrow morning I start on my new book, Poetry of the Seventies. It fortunately really is the work that matters. Thank you for a lovely party.”
“Goodbye,” George says.
“Don’t everybody leave me!” I cry, and he and Mary sit down on my couch. We talk. Once in a while George says, “I’ve got to write in the morning.” But still we talk.
George has fallen asleep on my couch. Mary and I talk till the sun comes up. Then they go home.
I’m too tired to sleep. And I’m out of coffee.
A page of The New York Times wheels up to Broadway before me, slowly, with a lovely motion.
The new white light catches a pool of dog piss. The brilliance breaks the heart.
“So what’s to smile about?” asks the grocer.
“Nothing. Some friends were over,” I say, “and we talked.”
The grocer gives me an apple for a present, he says, because I look happy.
Zeus arrives today. It is our anniversary. He asks, “What shall I give you, Lucinella?”
Dumbfounded, I wonder: What does one ask of a retired god?
“Shall I show myself to you,” he offers, “in my glory?”
“Great heavens, no!” I cry, remember what happened to Semele. (Once I peeked, and saw his face in mid-passion hanging above me, and quickly closed my eyes.)
“Would you like me to translate you among the stars?” he asks, and I’m tempted. The constellation of Lucinella the Poet, in the heavens for all eternity. “That’s not what I want!” I say, surprised. I’d rather thought it was.
“Ask me for something,” he says. He rises, comes toward me, embraces me, though it’s already 7:15. Still I hesitate.
“What, what?” he asks. I am afraid. “What, love?” He kisses me.
“Become human for me,” I whisper rapidly, so he won’t hear what I am saying. He throws his head back and laughs and kisses me delightedly as if I’d said something superlatively witty. We’re both laughing. Still he holds me. This is our anniversary.
It is 7:20.
FROM
SHAKESPEARE’S
KITCHEN
THE REVERSE BUG
“Let’s get the announcements out of the way,” said Ilka to her students in Conversational English. “Tomorrow evening the Institute is holding a symposium. Ahmed,” she asked the Turkish student with the magnificently drooping mustache, “where are they holding the symposium?”
“In the New Theater,” said Ahmed.
“The theme,” said the teacher, “is ‘Should there be a statute of limitations on genocide?’ with a wine and cheese reception…”
“…In the lounge…,” said Ahmed.
“…To which you are all invited. Now,” Ilka said in the too bright voice of a hostess trying to make a sluggish dinner party go, “what shall we talk about? Doesn’t do me a bit of good, I know, to ask you all to come forward and sit in a nice cozy clump. “Who would like to start us off? Somebody tell us a story. We like stories. Tell the class how you came to America.”
The teacher looked determinedly past the hand, the arm, with which Gerti Gruner stirred the air—death, taxes, and Thursdays Gerti Gruner in the front row center. Ilka’s eye passed mercifully over Paulino, who sat in the last row, with his back to the wall. Matsue Matsue, an older Japanese from the university’s engineering department smiled pleasantly at Ilka and shook his head. He meant “Please, not me!” Ilka looked around for someone too shy to self-start who might enjoy talking if called upon, but Gerti’s hand stabbed the air immediately under the teacher’s chin, so Ilka said, “Gerti wants to start. Go, Gerti. When did you come to the United States?”
“In last June,” said Gerti.
Ilka corrected her and said, “Tell the class where you are from and, everybody please, speak in whole sentences.”
Gerti said, “I have lived twenty years in Uruguay and before in Vienna.”
“We would say, ‘before that I lived’,” said Ilka, and Gerti said,
“And before that in Vienna.”
Ilka corrected her. Gerti’s story bore a family likeness to the teacher’s own superannuated, indigestible history of being sent out of Hitler’s Europe as a child.
Gerti said, “In the Vienna train station has my father told to me…”
“Told me.”
“Told me that so soon as I am coming to Montevideo…”
Ilka said, “As soon as I come, or more colloquially get to Montevideo…”
Gerti said, “Get to Montevideo, I should tell to all the people…”
Ilka corrected her. Gerti said, “…tell all the people to bring my father out from Vienna before come the Nazis and put him in concentration camp.”
Ilka said, “In the or a concentration camp.”
“Also my mother,” said Gerti, “and my Opa, and my Oma, and my Onkel Peter, and the twins Hedi and Albert. My father has told, “‘Tell to the foster mother, “Go, please, with me, to the American Consulate.’”
“My father went to the American Consulate,” said Paulino, and everybody turned and looked at him. Paulino’s voice had not been heard in class since the first Thursday when Ilka had got her students to go around the room and introduce themselves to one another. Paulino had said his name was Paulino Patillo and that he was born in Bolivia. Ilka was charmed to realize it was Danny Kaye of whom Paulino reminded her - fair, curly, middle-aged, smiling. He came punctually every Thursday, a sweet, perhaps a very simple man.
Ilka said, “Paulino will tell us his story after Gerti has finished. How old were you when you left Europe?” Ilka asked to reactivate Gerti who said, “Eight years,” but she and the rest of the class and the teacher herself were watching Paulino put his right hand inside the left breast pocket of his jacket, withdraw a legal size envelope, turn it upside down, and shake out onto the desk before him a pile of news clippings. Some looked new, some frayed and yellow; some seemed to be single paragraphs, others the length of several columns.
“And so you got to Montevideo…” Ilka prompted Gerti.
“And my foster mother has fetched me from the ship. I said, ‘Hello. Will you please bring out from Vienna my father before come the Nazis and put him in—a concentration camp!” Gerti said triumphantly.
Paulino had brought the envelope close to his eye and was looking inside. He inserted a forefinger, loosened something that was stuck and shook out a last clipping. It broke at the fold when Paulino flattened it onto the desk top. Paulino brushed away some paper crumbs before beginning to read: “La Paz, September 19.”
“Paulino,” said Ilka, “you must wait till Gerti has finished.”
But Paulino read, “Señora Pilar Patillo has reported the disappearance of her husband, Claudio Patillo, after a visit to the American Consulate in La Paz on September 19.”
“Go on, Gerti,” said Ilka.
“The foster mother has said, ‘When comes home the Uncle from the office, we w
ill ask him,’ and I said, ‘And bring out, please, also my mother, my Opa, my Oma, my Onkel Peter…’”
Paulino read, “A spokesman for the American Consulate contacted in La Paz states categorically that no record exists of a visit from Señor Patillo within the last two months…”
“Paulino, you really have to wait your turn,” Ilka said.
Gerti said, “Also the twins. The foster mother has made such a desperate face with her lips so.”
Paulino read, “…nor does the consular calendar for September show any appointment made with Señor Patillo. Inquiries are said to be under way with the Consulate at Sucre.” And Paulino folded his column of newsprint and returned it with delicate care into the envelope.
“OKAY, thank you, Paulino,” Ilka said.
Gerti said, “When the foster father has come home, he said, ‘We will see, tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘And will you go, please, with me, to the American Consulate’?” and the foster father has made a face.”
Paulino was flattening a second column of newsprint on the desk before him. He read, “New York, December 12…”
“Paulino,” said Ilka, and caught Matsue’s eye. He was looking expressly at her. He shook his head ever so slightly and with his right hand, palm down, he patted the air three times. In the intelligible language of charade with which humankind frustrated god at Babel, Matsue was saying, “Let him finish. Nothing you can do is going to stop him.” Ilka was grateful to Matsue.
“A spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations,” read Paulino, “denies a report that Claudio Patillo, missing after a visit to the American Consulate in La Paz since September 19, is en route to Israel.” Paulino finished reading this column also, folded it into the envelope, unfolded the next column and read, “U.P.I., January 30. The car of Pilar Patillo, wife of Claudio Patillo, who was reported missing from La Paz last September, has been found at the bottom of a ravine in the eastern Andes. It is not known whether there were any bodies inside the wreck.” Paulino read with the blind forward motion of a tank that receives no message from the sound or movement in the world outside itself. The students had stopped looking at Paulino; they were not looking at the teacher. They looked into their laps. Paulino read one column after the other, returning each to the envelope before he took the next and when he had read and returned the last, and returned the envelope to his breast pocket, he leaned his back against the wall and turned to the teacher his sweet, habitual smile of expectant participation.
Gerti said, “In that same night have I woken up…”
“Woke up,” the teacher helplessly said.
“Woke up,” Gerti Gruner said, “and I have thought, ‘What if even in this exact minute one Nazi is knocking at the door of my mother and my father, and I am here lying and not telling to anybody anything,’ and I have got out of the bed and gone into the bedroom and woke up the foster mother and father, and next morning has the foster mother taken me to the refugee committee, and they have found for me a different foster family.”
“Your turn, Matsue,” Ilka said. “How, when, and why did you come to the States? We’re going to help you!” Matsue’s written English was flawless, but he spoke with an accent that was well nigh impenetrable. His contribution to class conversation always involved a communal interpretative act.
“Aisutudieddu attoza unibashite innu munhen,” Matsue said.
A couple of stabs and Eduardo, the Madrileño, got it: “You studied at the university in Munich.” “You studied acoustics?” ventured Izmira, the Cypriot doctor. “The war trapped you in Germany?” proposed Ahmed, the Turk. “You have been working in the ovens?” suggested Gerti, the Viennese.
“Acoustic ovens!” marveled Ilka. “Do you mean stoves? Ranges?”
No, what Matsue meant was that he got his first job with a Munich firm employed in sound-proofing the Dachau ovens so that what went on inside could not be heard on the outside. “I made the tapes,” said Matsue. “Tapes?” they asked him. They got the story figured out: Matsue had returned to Japan in 1946 and collected his “Hiroshima tapes”. He had been brought to Washington as an acoustical consultant to the Kennedy Center and been hired to come to Concordance to design the sound system of the New Theater, subsequently accepting a research appointment in the department of engineering. He was going to return home, having finished his work—Ilka thought he said—on the reverse bug.
Ilka said, “I thought, ha ha, you said ‘the reverse bug!’”
“The reverse bug” was what everybody understood Matsue to say that he had said. With his right hand he performed a row of air loops and, pointing at the wall behind the teacher’s desk, asked for and received, her okay to explain himself in writing on the blackboard.
Chalk in hand, he was eloquent on the subject of the regular bug which can be introduced into a room to relay to those outside what those inside would prefer them not to hear. A sophisticated modern bug, explained Matsue, was impossible to locate and deactivate. Buildings had had to be taken apart in order to rid them of alien listening devices. The reverse bug, equally impossible to locate and deactivate, was a device whereby those outside were able to relay into a room what those inside would prefer not to have to hear.
“And how would such a device be used?” Ilka asked him.
Matsue was understood to say that it could be useful in certain situations and to certain consulates, and Paulino said, “My father went to the American Consulate,” and put his hand into his breast pocket. Here Ilka stood up and, though there were still a good fifteen minutes of class time, said, “So! I will see you all next Thursday. Everybody, be thinking of subjects you would like to talk about. Don’t forget the symposium tomorrow evening!” and she walked quickly out the door.
* * *
—
Ilka entered the New Theater late and was glad to see Matsue sitting on the aisle in the second row from the back with an empty seat beside him. The platform people were settling into their places. On the right an exquisitely golden skinned Latin man was talking in the way people talk to people they have known a long time with a heavy, rumpled man, whom Ilka pegged as Israeli. “Look at the thin man on the left,” Ilka said to Matsue. “He has to be from Washington. Only a Washingtonian’s hair gets to be that particular white color.” Matsue laughed. Ilka asked him if he knew who the woman with the oversized glasses and the white hair straight to the shoulders might be, and Matsue answered something that Ilka did not understand. The rest of the panelists were institute people, Ilka’s colleagues—little Joe Bernstine, Yvette Gordot, and Director Leslie Shakespere in the moderator’s chair.
Leslie had the soft weight of man who likes eating and the fine head of a man who thinks. Ilka watched him fussing with the microphone. “Why do we need this?” she could read his lips saying. “I thought we didn’t need microphones in the New Theater?” Now he quieted the hall with a grateful welcome for this fine attendance at a discussion of one of our generation’s unmanageable questions, the application of justice in an era of genocides.
Here Rabbi Shlomo Grossman rose from the floor and wished to take exception to the plural formulation: “All killings are not murders; all murders are not ‘genocides.’”
Leslie said, “Shlomo, could you hold your remarks until question time?”
Rabbi Grossman said, “Remarks? Is that what I’m making? Remarks! The death of six million—is it in the realm of a question?”
Leslie said, “I give you my word that there will be room for the full expression of what you want to say when we open the discussion to the floor.” Rabbi Grossman acceded to the evident desire of the friends sitting near him that he should sit down.
Director Leslie Shakespere gave a brief account of the combined federal and private funding that had enabled the Concordance Institute to invite these very distinguished panelists to participate in the Institute’s Genocide Project. “This evening’s panel has agreed, by way of an experiment, to talk in an informal way of our notions, of the history of t
he interest each of us brings to the question—problem. I imagine that this inquiry will range somewhere between the legal concept of a statute of limitations that specifies the time within which human law must respond to a specific crime, and the biblical concept of the visitation of punishment of the sins of the fathers upon the children. One famous version plays itself out in the ‘Oresteia,’ where a crime is punished by an act that is itself a crime and punishable, and so on, down the generations. Enough. Let me introduce our panel, whom it will be our very great pleasure to have among us in the coming month.”
The white-haired man turned out to be the West German ex-mayor of Obernpest, Dieter Dobelmann. Ilka felt the prompt conviction that she had known all along—that one could tell at a mile—that that mouth, that jaw, had to be German. The woman with the glasses was Jerusalem born Shulamit Gershon, professor of international law, and advisor to Israel’s ongoing project to identify Nazi war criminals, presently teaching at Georgetown University (“There! She’s acquired that white hair!” Ilka whispered to Matsue, who laughed.) The rumpled man was the English theologian Paul Thayer. The Latin really was a Latin—Sebastian Maderiaga, who was taking time off from his consulate in New York. Leslie squeezed up his eyes to see past the stage lights into the well of the New Theater. There was a rustle of people turning to locate the voice that had said, “My father went to the American Consulate,” but it said nothing further and the audience settled back. Leslie introduced Yvette and Joe, the Institute’s own fellows assigned to Genocide.
