“Why do you not want Welleren to be your father? Or Veltzen, for that matter? What are you hiding?”
She stopped and whipped around. “Jesus! A shrapnel scar is what I am hiding. On my neck. Can’t help being self-conscious about it. Kids—students—they stare. What did you think it was? I happened to be on a wrong side of a street in 1944, ten days before the liberation, that’s all.”
I caught up with her. “Here!” She was holding the collar down. On one side, the skin of her neck carried a splatter of scars that looked like small belly buttons.
“It’s not bad at all. You are a beautiful woman, you shouldn’t be so worried about it. See? I haven’t got an ear.”
I captured her hand and pressed it to the side of my head. “Did your mother ever tell you Mr. Veltzen missed half an ear?”
Her fingers curled around my stub, then eased away. “Let go.”
I did. “I am so sorry I allowed it all to happen this way. I shouldn’t have let your mother go, no matter what.”
“Enough! This is not funny at all! Drop this role-playing, this psycho-nonsense, this—just drop it, okay! I hate this kind of stuff ! When people—dissect, and deconstruct, and when everyone is a drama queen, and speaks in riddles, and betrays each other and stays miserable just because they are too clever and cute to be faithful and happy and—”
She may have been talking about her mother. It didn’t matter. There was no ice in her. “Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s go back.”
We went, she two steps ahead of me, I following her like a dog. “I’m taking a shortcut,” she said, and dived into the wood that surrounded the open geometry of the lawns; she led me through a chain of narrowly cut, tunneling trails and secluded meadows, sometimes with grottoes or water basins. This is where those chevaliers and maidens, having given up on escaping from the park, would have settled for a lesser reward of sex. There was something touching in the way she marched so sternly through it.
We climbed into the car but she tarried to start the engine. She put her hands on the steering wheel and took a deep breath, then slammed the wheel with the heels of her hands. “Okay. There used to be two of us. Me and my twin sister. I was Anna and she was Marie. When Marie left us, I took her name in. So it won’t be orphaned. Now I am Anna-Marie. Pierre does not know. Nobody aboveground knows. I am living for both of us. And it is killing me—”
With that, she broke down.
• • •
The story never ends. She told me that every tale I had heard yesterday was—a lie?—no, a half-truth, because it had an unmentioned second presence, a twin sister. (Ah, Elizabeth, what cruel brand of poetic justice had been served on you for your transgressions into poetry: two, no, one child to feed and clothe when you have lost everything to wars and revolutions!)
Elizabeth and I had twin girls, Anna and Marie. One a peacemaker, another a rebel. One took her stepfather’s side, another sided with the mother. One stayed put and another left the nest for a man. He was a Jew, a German Jew, a doctor. He was twenty-four, he lived in a refugee settlement in Paris. He’d lived there since 1933, still hoping to get proper papers to be able to practice medicine. How did they meet? Marie was so secretive about him. Just hints and brief remarks. Maybe it was a twin thing—Marie protected her individuality. She was like a tigress, she loved like one. His name was . . . Anna didn’t even know his full name. Marc something. Fromm? Frohman?
They may have had plans. Marriage. Naturalization. Did they legalize refugee Jews who married French citizens? Perhaps he did not want to burden her this way. He wanted to ask her hand as a man in his own right. But by 1935, the National Committee of Relief all but publicly announced that France should free herself of the refugee burden. Some Jews were sent back to Germany. That was after 1933. There was fear. Desperation. And then these people approached Marc—people from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. How would he like to escape to the Soviet Russia? Something called KOMZET—the Committee for the Settlement of Working Jews on the Land—was active there since the twenties, and it had helped so many already! It set up prospering communities in the sunny Crimea, in the Ukraine. No pogroms, no persecution, free and honest labor, and respect instead. And now there was the greatest ever plan in the works, a new Palestine in Russia, in the Far East, on the Amur River—how would he like to be a pioneer in the brand-new world, in the independent Jewish Republic, the Soviet Zion? And to be a doctor there, to help his people bring forth a new beginning!
Marc talked it over with Marie. Marie agreed. Russia was the country of her birth, after all. Yes, her family had run from Bolsheviks, but that was then, and this was now. So many things had changed. So many people had gone there and come back to tell stories about miracles of communism. Besides, young people in love were supposed to go to the edge of the earth and make something out of nothing for themselves, and the more it infuriated their damaged parents, the more reason there was to go.
So they went. Maybe they got married right before it. Maybe they had a ceremony at the railway station, before embarking on the Trans-Siberian Express; and then there were days and days of rocking in a sleeping car, making love, dreaming about the future. Or maybe they married on the Amur, and it was a snowed-in, Jewish-Siberian ritual in a tiny log cabin, under the mighty cedars of the Palestine of the North. Maybe they’ve known such happiness as mere mortals would never know. For those few moments that they were man and wife.
They were never to be heard from again. They vanished. The details leached out a drop a decade, if at all. Most of the twenty doctors who were selected to go to Birobidzhan in 1935 were arrested by Stalin’s NKVD. Because a word was sent—even as the party was still en route, a word, they say, was sent from Paris straight to the Kremlin through trusted channels—through some Russian-resident-turncoat-communist-international-activist-informer—a word was sent that one of these doctors was a Gestapo spy. That he, that Nazi secret police spy, that Marc Fromm—or Frohman—was heading to Russia to subvert the Soviet cause from the deep Siberian underside of it.
Maybe they were arrested the moment they crossed the border. Maybe they never got to see the Amur River of the Soviet Zion. A firing squad for him, GULAG for her. They were just two out of many souls who were used up to erect the infamous circus of the Moscow trials. Maybe they were tortured. Maybe they signed their names under every lie that was mounted against them and their friends. Maybe not. But they say the “spy’s” own father-in-law had sent the word. The father-in-law who happened himself to be a Nazi operator, which of course makes it even more obvious that the wretched son-in-law was anything but a Gestapo man.
“I am living for both of us,” Anna-Marie said, “and it is killing me, because von Welleren did it. God, he worked for the Germans since before 1935! I’ve always known, even if I thought I didn’t. He destroyed his one daughter and he saved another. Why did he do it, why? This is what haunts me. Am I like him? How could he have done this to Marie and then cared for me, for Mother and me, all through the occupation, and worried, and pulled strings so they took me into a German hospital when I was hit by that shrapnel and had their best surgeon work on me so the pieces wouldn’t move and nick an artery—and that was when de Gaulle’s brigades were days away from Paris! If I wasn’t his daughter, why? Because I was the tame one? Because my only sign of protest was to take Marie’s name so I would be a living reminder? He ignored it. I wanted him to see I was Marie too, but he did not believe me. I am not Marie. Marie would have spat in his face. She would have shot him. And me—I am a silent protester, ha, easily ignored. The fearful one, the peace-loving, considerate one. I never brought it up.
“I hate them both! Why, why did they not divorce?! Why did Mother cling on to him? My famously fierce mother, what did he have on her?
“I don’t want him to be my father—because this will give me an easy way out of guilt, but at the same time it really won’t, it only helps Welleren. Because it would mean that he had sacrificed his one stepdaughter to g
et back at our mother, to avenge all these years of being treated like a pansy—he’s had all these reasons, while I—I just let it happen to my own twin sister and never ever said anything!
“And now you arrive and offer me a brand-new father, a clean one, who’s never even been close to any of it, never had to choose between his dignity and his safety, a rich and likable man who’s been survived by another rich and likable man, and I just can’t—I can’t, it just makes me so sad—”
She wept.
And there I was, a two-hundred-year-old fool . . . Barging in to claim my prêt-à-porter daughter, fantasizing how, with one strike of my magic wand, I would make all her troubles go away! What was my ice compared to her, only human, sorrow? A pseudo-problem, a comic book dilemma, a cartoon character’s quest. What did it matter that I’d lived for two hundred and twenty years—I still could not come up with words that could help her. All I could do was wrap my arm around her shoulders. Fatherhood as culpability with no statute of limitations. As responsibility and helplessness. Nothing more.
And yet . . . even as I was holding her while she wept, my horribly resourceful mind was already erecting its Ice Palace elsewhere—with my other daughter. There was nothing for me here, the ice of my mind was whispering, only human damage that I could not fix. But Marie must have been different—my true heiress. It is with Marie that my heart should dwell. Never mind that she’d married, that it meant she had been able to be physically close with a man, never mind that, she had to have ice in her! Therefore she could have survived in Siberia, that would be the best place for her to survive, on Kolyma, yes, my daughter could have turned into a magic ice flower, no matter the GULAG machine, and nobody, not Cossack Feodor, not Joseph Stalin himself could have hurt her; they’re dead, they’re worm food now, while my beautiful daughter just sleeps peacefully in her sparkling cocoon, dreaming ribbon ice and hoarfrost, snowflakes and icicles—
Several snowflakes fell on Anna’s hair. It wasn’t the first time. In closed spaces snowflakes now sometimes materialize over me, when I am really cold. I brushed them off and rolled down the window. “Anna. Annie, Anya, Anichka, Annette, Anoosh. Do you hear me? You have to let go of Marie’s name. You can’t wear it like this. Your sister may not have perished. She is just deep inside Russia, hidden behind the iron curtain. And you have to give her back her name. It is important that you do it. Okay? Will you do it for me? Please?”
She eased from under my arm and wiped her tears off. She stared at the dashboard. “Okay.” She nodded finally. Glanced at me. “Tell me something out of your childhood. Just something small. Unimportant.”
So I did. “When I was five, I thought I was destined to be a circus clown.”
“Is that so?”
“Swear.”
“Why?”
Because my mother was a court jester. And in translation to the twentieth century that would be: “Because my mother used to do burlesque and mime in pier theaters in English coastal resort towns. That, and music halls in winter. Father met her in Scarborough.”
She smoothed her rumpled face, tucked in a strand of hair. “Tell me how our parents met.”
I did.
Pierre, when we finally returned, measured us up and remarked, “What did you two do? You now start to look more alike. A real brother and sister.”
• • •
I opened a small trust fund for Anna. We exchanged letters and calls, and I visited them again on Christmas the following year. We settled into a relationship appropriate for an extended family. At the same time . . . I kept thinking about Marie. The daughter who had to have inherited my ice and who would have accepted me as a father. Marie was everything Anna was not. Marie was perfect, Anna—far from it. But Anna was here, real.
Then Anna wrote her novel. It was published in France in 1971 and translated into English in 1975. It garnered enough notoriety at the time, and remains, I believe, on a feminist reading list to this day. It is titled Ma vie sans une jumelle. My Life Without a Twin.
It is a story of a girl who invents a rebellious twin sister in order to cope with her evil father and troubled mother, and then spends two decades of her adult life unable to dismantle the fantasy and drifting in passivity, while the twin usurps and sucks up all the action in the heroine’s life. The book was lauded as “tantalizingly autobiographic,” teasing readers’ sensibilities with a little preemptive note: the names of characters have been changed. Reading it hurt me.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I called them at Christmastime in 1968, and Pierre told me they were not together anymore. They had separated. How? Since when? Since summer or so, he said, since the student riots. Anna had somehow let herself be drawn into those uprisings. All meetings and proclamations at first, and then it turned out there was a young man involved, a boy half her age. The American, Pierre referred to him fastidiously, some kind of a rebel without a cause. Her last postcard was postmarked in New York. “Alexander,” he said. “Our girl’s fifty-four. I know I should say she can do what she pleases, but all I can think of is how he’s going to hurt her. I’m getting old and sour, no? Or stupid?”
I asked him for the address on the postcard. I did not yet know what I’d do—but Pierre got ahead of me. “Oh, that’s right,” he said somewhat sheepishly. “You’re probably flying all over on business anyway.” Then he checked himself, “Or were you just thinking of writing to her? I’m sorry I’m—”
“I’ll go,” I said. That’s what a father would do.
In Anna’s Ma vie, there is no Pierre. I am present, but as a newly discovered half brother. I had been sired by the heroine’s Nazi father with one of his detainees who later managed to start a new life in America. I make a surprise entry into the heroine’s life as a rich and handsome man, which event empowers her to break free from her fictitious twin.
• • •
In the purple-gray dusk of January, facades of the Fifth Avenue near Central Park always (this is my third visit in the twentieth century) remind me of St. Petersburg, and the park itself is reminiscent of the Tavrichesky Garden, where Andrei Junior challenged me in a frozen pond. I take and hold a breath. For this brief moment I can pretend that time stands still. I gaze into the glowing sky and obstruct the flow of foot traffic.
Back into time, however. Seeing that the marquee of the once glamorous Tivoli Theater now said it played something titled Gruesome Twosome, made me feel world-weary as I walked down Eighth Avenue. Anna’s address was the Fulton Hotel, right above two more grind houses. Bride of the Beasts, lured one. Stud Farm, promised another.
Ma vie describes the heroine scuttling down the fire escape stairs in silk polka-dot pajamas, diving in, hand in hand with her lover, for a midnight showing, the theater’s tiny lobby like “a plush red mouth.” Cuddling in the back row; her lover’s mouth finding her breasts. In her defense, back in those days that mouth (the theater’s, not the lover’s) was still a novelty, brushed and rinsed regularly.
Because of Ma vie, my recollection is double vision now, but I know what I saw when she opened the door. Day-old eyeliner, a kimono, a headband over a whipped-up bun of hair. Skinnier than I’d ever seen her. She stood ankle deep in scattered clothing, and the room behind her smelled of old carpet and whiskey. She held a tall glass of carbonated liquid, in which, secured between her index and middle fingers, stood a chopstick furry with bubbles. She must have just drunk out of the glass, her lips and cheeks were drawn together, moving. Seeing me, she extruded a drained lime wedge out of her mouth and dropped it back in the glass. “Alexander?” Her voice was husky. “What are you doing here?”
I stepped inside, kicking away a pair of man’s jeans. The only illumination in the room was from a garland of chili pepper‒shaped Christmas lights and a PUB sign across the street. The kid in the bed, the American, drew himself up and yanked at the torchère’s cord. “Who are you?”
He was offensively young and pretty. Bushy-haired; torso of a greyhound. Brash without even
trying. “I’m the proverbial watchdog brother,” I said in English.
He snorted. “The who?” I traced his stare back to Anna. She leaned against the wall, mixing her drink with the chopstick. Her mouth was a line of many nuances, but its corners were sagely pointing down. We traded predictable phrases, in French. So, you came to rescue me? —You tell me. Is it rescue time yet? —I don’t think so, no. —You think this kid is a good idea? —Do you realize how rude you are right now? Not for a father, I wanted to say.
“Hey! English please!” The kid sprang out of bed, snapped the waistband of his boxers adjusting them in place, lit a cigarette. “Ann? Where’re my pants?”
Your Adonis is half your age. Fit to be your son. —But he is not my son, Alexander.
“Excuse me.” The kid edged past me, found his jeans, pulled them on, zipped up, drawling around the cigarette in his mouth, “The brother . . . Man, what’s his problem?” He flipped on a TV set and tossed himself back onto the bed, smoking. “Tell him to go away.”
I would have liked him better if he’d offered to kick me out. But he seemed content to let the “adults” deal with themselves. I said to Anna, He’ll ditch you. She tugged at the kimono’s collar. I know. The TV erupted with sitcom laughter. Who’s paying for this lovely room? —Oh, that’s what it is about! You’re here to protect your trust fund? —Don’t value yourself so low.
The Adonis looked for an ashtray, didn’t find it, and let the ash stack fall on the floor as he drew with the cigarette in the air as if circumscribing a picture. “No, I kind of like listening to the language I cannot understand. The chirp. It’s animalistic.”
Anna, let’s go. I have a hotel suite just a few blocks away. We can talk there.
Anna put her glass on the babbling TV. I think it is better if you leave now, she told me. I said, Because he says so? —No, because I say so.
I’m guilty as charged: deep inside me still lurks a tacky showman. Although: what father wouldn’t grab a chance to be a superhero for his daughter? Instead of leaving, I extended my hand to the Adonis and said in English, “Pleased to meet you. Hope you’ve already guessed my name.”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 47
