Limbo

by A. Manette Ansay

  How can it be that, at the age of eleven—a sixth-grade student—I knew so little of history, even less of politics, nothing at all about the Nazis? In our small, predominantly German community, there’d been little discussion of either world war. We studied Alexander the Great. We studied the Ottoman Empire. At one point, I remember memorizing a long poem that began “I hope the old Romans had painful ab-domens; I hope that the Greeks had toothaches for weeks; I hope the Egyptians had chronic conniptions; I hope that the Vandals had thorns in their sandals…” But what I remember best is how we studied the Civil War. We couldn’t get enough of hearing about it. It was better than a bedtime story. We, the virtuous North, had fought the evil South—and won! And we’d done so simply out of the goodness of our hearts, to free the helpless Negroes.

  At one point, a guidance counselor came to our classroom, and we played a special game in which half the class got a blue pin to wear and the other half got a red pin. The people with the red pins had to do whatever the blue pins said. Then the guidance counselor said, “Switch!” and the blue pins got to boss the red pins around. We loved it! We begged to do it again!

  “Now you know what it was like to be a slave,” the guidance counselor said. “It’s hard to understand, in this day and age, how anyone could treat another human being that way.”

  The Chosen stayed with me like a country I had visited, a place I’d stayed just long enough to be disoriented, shocked, by what I saw upon my return home. I thought about Danny and Reuven when my history teacher raised the map at the front of the classroom, and burst into tears at the sight of a grotesque vulva chalked on the blackboard beneath. I thought about it in the art room when Lewis Dolittle sucked a mouthful of water from the spigot, and spat it in the face of a particularly quiet girl for no reason other than meanness. I thought about it in math class, where we were reviewing long division yet again; I thought about it when our principal called me out of class to reprimand me for requesting permission to take a foreign language class with the eight graders. Awfully big for my britches, wasn’t I? Well, he wasn’t about to put up with this nonsense! No ma’am, I could take a foreign language when I got to eighth grade like the rest of my classmates. Who did I think I was, acting as if I were better than everyone else?

  I thought about The Chosen walking home after school, leaving by the side door to avoid the popular kids, cutting through the clouds of cigarette and pot smoke released by the stoners. I even thought about it at the piano where, usually, nothing could distract me. I understood, for the first time, what literature could be: an opportunity to live beyond yourself, to be bigger and brighter than you’d ever hoped to be. To see your face reflected back, framed within a broader context. To stare at that reflection, and begin to dream.

  “Is everything all right at school?” my mother said.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  I decided that I would teach myself to study the way Reuven and Danny studied. I would make study part of my daily life, like prayer, like practicing the piano.

  I had a desk in my bedroom. It was white, with baby blue drawers and gilded drawer pulls. It didn’t seem like the kind of desk Reuven and his father would have used, but I figured it would have to do. First thing Saturday morning, I cleaned out the drawers, wiped the top with Windex. I set out a single, pristine notebook, a couple of freshly sharpened pencils, and my copy of The Chosen. Then I set about hunting down the dictionary. I discovered it with the Scrabble board, in the cupboard underneath the wet bar, where we kept the rest of the household’s intellectual property: the Bible, the World Book Encyclopedia, a guide to seashell identification, and my father’s plastic label-maker. The dictionary’s cover was missing, and the front pages were lined with Scrabble scores, but its insides were intact.

  When I had my desk set up, I paged through The Chosen and made a list of the scholars and philosophers Danny and Reuven had mentioned. Then I stuck the list in my pocket, put on my coat, and headed for the library. I hadn’t bothered writing down the names of any fiction writers; I was done with such frivolous study. I was going to dedicate myself to psychology, religion, and mathematics. But when I opened the card catalogue, I discovered there were no books by Freud in our library. There were no books by Aristotle, or Spinoza, or Kant; there was no copy of Principia Mathematica. Reuven had been reading a book on logic by Susanne Langer: no listing. Danny had been upset by a writer named Graetz: nothing. It crossed my mind that I could simply study the Talmud. But when I asked at the desk, the librarian, without changing expression, said that she’d never heard of such a book. Who’d written it again? she said, and I said I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was like the Bible, that nobody had written it.

  God, the librarian informed me, had written the Bible.

  I wandered back to the card catalogue. Briefly, I considered reading the Bible, but it seemed too ordinary, too familiar; I wanted to start with something that would shake me up, the way Freud had shaken up Danny. It occurred to me that Chaim Potok might have invented the books he’d mentioned in The Chosen, the way he’d invented Danny and Reuven. But no—I knew that Freud, at least, was real. He was the guy who’d figured out that what girls really wanted were penises. Even I knew that. It didn’t seem to me that I’d ever wanted a penis, though I could clearly remember a group of us girls teasing Buddy Burmiester because we could have babies and he couldn’t. This had been in fourth grade. We’d taunted him until he cried. But maybe things had been different in Freud’s day.

  Not that I was going to be able to read him and find out for myself.

  I thought as hard as I could, riffling through the flotsam and jetsam of six years of public school education. Somewhere in all that, there had to be another name I might look up, someone whose writings I might study. I looked up Alexander Graham Bell. I looked up George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. There was a book about Benjamin Franklin, but that had been checked out. Think, I told myself sternly. And then I came up with another name, one that had even been mentioned in The Chosen.

  Adolf Hitler.

  Why was that name so familiar? I had a vague grade school memory of a group of boys marching around on the playground, kicking their legs and shouting Heil Hitler! until the teachers made them stop. The name triggered a sense of power and importance. I knew that Hitler was a German, like Freud, like me—my father’s maternal grandparents and my mother’s paternal grandparents had been born in Germany—and like almost everybody in our small community. I knew from reading The Chosen that he’d been on the losing side of World War II, a war that, according to one of my aunts, had been “greatly exaggerated.” She’d said this at my grandmother’s house, in front of a number of my aunts and uncles, and I could tell from the beat of silence that followed that she’d said something inappropriate, something—maybe rude? I couldn’t tell. At any rate, it was clear that nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody smiled until the conversation turned to something else.

  I pulled out the H drawer, flicked through the cards. I was in luck. Adolf Hitler had written one book, Mein Kampf, translated into English as My Struggle. Our library had a copy.

  The expressionless librarian checked me out.

  I began the book as soon as I got home, looking up words I didn’t know and copying definitions into my notebook. It was rather dry going, but I kept at it, and I didn’t let myself skip ahead, for I knew from reading The Chosen that there were times when Reuven, and even brilliant Danny, had spent entire days on one paragraph. I believe there was an introduction of some kind, and in my mind’s eye, there are reproductions of a few of Hitler’s landscape paintings—but I may have superimposed some later memory, something I saw in a college course, over this earlier one. I do believe I learned a few things about art. I learned about the death of Hitler’s mother. I sensed that neither topic was the point of the book, but I couldn’t tell what was coming, where all the rambling observations were leading. It was certainly different from the novels I’d read. At last, I stoppe
d reading and went over my list of vocabulary words: one, I think, was oratory. Then I planned out my assignment for the next day.

  I had studied for one hour—an hour I usually spent at the piano.

  I had hoped that, during the night, things I hadn’t understood about the book would come clear. Instead, I found my second session even more challenging than the first. I began to flip ahead, I couldn’t help myself, and encountered a brief scene in which Hitler is walking down the street and sees a Jewish man walking toward him. Just like that, he knows the man is “vermin.” I looked up “vermin,” copied down its definitions: noxious or objectionable animals or insects, including rats and worms and parasites; objectionable, filthy persons.

  Hmm, I thought. The man must have done something to make Hitler angry. But, studying the little scene again, I found nothing in the text but a description of the man’s face.

  A strange, uneasy feeling swept over me. I pushed it away. Surely, I must have missed something. Surely there must be some rational explanation for what Hitler believed. That was why it was important not to skip ahead. I sighed. There was nothing to do but reread the book from the beginning and catch whatever it was. So I began again. It was a Sunday afternoon; the house was still. My brother was down in his basement room. My father had gone to the office. My mother was taking a nap. Sounds seemed louder than usual: the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the thrum of the heat kicking in, the click in my throat whenever I swallowed.

  What had the Jewish man done? Why couldn’t I see it?

  Again, I began to skip ahead, unable to follow the sentences. Again, I came to the section in which the word “vermin” appeared. Hitler, I thought. Adolf Hitler. I thought about the boys on the playground, the expressions on the teachers’ faces when they’d made them stop chanting and shouting. An expression that was guarded and thin-lipped and close. The expression they got whenever somebody used a bad word, or if somebody asked a question that nobody wanted to answer. The expression I’d seen at my grandmother’s house on the day that my aunt had said World War II was “greatly exaggerated.”

  I reached for my copy of The Chosen and began flipping through it, skimming for the word “Hitler,” searching out the very pages I’d skipped—pages that had to do with the war. Six million Jews slaughtered, I found. Gas chambers. Hitler’s ovens. The words sounded cartoonish, like something Wile E. Coyote might think up. Like something out of a nightmare. Like something a crazy person might do.

  Fear seized the back of my neck as if it were a black-gloved hand. I jumped up and sat down and jumped up again. Then I shoved My Struggle into the bottom of my backpack. I carried it out of my room, down the stairs and through the foyer, where I shoved it to the back of the coat closet with the stack of newspapers for recycling.

  The next day, after school, I took it back to the library. I threw out the notebook with the vocabulary words; I put the dictionary back in the cupboard. That was the year I increased my piano practice from one to two hours each day. That was the year I decided I didn’t want to be a heart surgeon anymore. I certainly didn’t want to be a scholar or philosopher. I stopped going to the library. I didn’t read another book, beyond what a teacher assigned, for the next ten years.

  Vermin: even now, that word holds it power, moves from my mouth like some living, whiskered thing that brushed against me in the dark.

  PART TWO

  Five

  People looked at me strangely when I said loved to practice the piano. Were my parents pushing me to do it? Wasn’t it hard to rush home from school, day after day, instead of spending time with friends? Two hours a day, three hours a day. I’d sit down at the keyboard, and blink, and somehow the time had passed. I loved to practice in the same way that someday, as an adult, I would love to write. Only then it would be publication that left me uneasy. As a child, it was performing I disliked.

  I’d stand there, in the wings, in the deep black box of all that might happen, all that could go wrong. The curtains swayed slightly, humming with the sound of the audience, a sound that is strangely like a rookery, a flock of birds arranging themselves for the night. Sometimes, though I wasn’t supposed to, I’d peer out from the edge of the stage and there they’d be: strangers stepping over each other’s knees, unbuttoning coats, opening programs. When I stepped back into the darkness, I’d see purple and yellow rings. And then, gradually, the piano, lit like an altar at the center of the stage.

  If there was time, I’d duck out to the rest room and soak my hands in hot water. Bending over the basin, I stared at myself in the mirror: beetle-browed, long-jawed, absolutely serious. Cropped fingernails. Gold cross at my throat. I was twelve, I was fourteen, I was sixteen. Dear God, I’d pray, help me to stay focused, help me to concentrate, help me—yes, I prayed this as well—to be a better person. It all seemed connected somehow. If I was good, if I was worthy, I’d perform well—how could I not? I prayed until the water in the basin cooled and I felt the familiar lightness enter my bones, illuminating me with such weight, such absolute purpose and calm, that I could see the notes spread out before me as clearly as I saw the wrinkles in my fingertips. I believed that this feeling was Grace. I believed that it came from God, the way I believed that all good things came from God, the way I believed that all bad things came from within myself, my flawed human frailty. If anyone had suggested to me, then, that I was summoning my own strength, my own capabilities, I would have been horrified.

  Somewhere between sixth and eighth grade, I had fundamentally changed. At school, I’d stopped arguing with my teachers; I no longer bothered to raise my hand. At home, I shrugged, said little, kept my opinions to myself. I was weak, I was nothing—or at least, that’s what I was trying to be. And whenever I failed, asserted myself, began a sentence with the words I want, a voice in my head was certain to chide me: Watch out what you want, or you’ll get it. It was arrogant to want, to expect, to choose. Only God, all-knowing and omnipotent, could know what was best for anybody. I put myself in His hands. I turned myself over to God.

  The moment any child, male or female, first learns to envision God as male, some crucial part of his or her imagination is forever damaged, limited, changed. The moment a female child credits a male god for all that is beautiful and good while simultaneously accepting responsibility for all that is sinful—literally, all that “misses the mark”—she has internalized a particularly dangerous self-loathing. As a little girl, I’d wanted to be the fastest, the smartest, the strongest; now, instead of leaping forward, I held back, prayed for guidance, and whenever I listened for an answer, it was a masculine voice I longed to hear. As my body matured, and I began to think of myself less as a “kid” and more as a “girl,” I felt myself to be growing apart from God, more differentiated from His image. If God was perfection, then my adolescent female body was an exaggeration of imperfection. The only course of action was to abandon myself whenever possible, to become by choice an empty vessel, like the Virgin Mary, for whom I was named, and upon whom I—like so many Catholic girls—was encouraged to model myself.

  A virgin and a mother as a teenage role model?

  For those who do believe, no explanation is necessary, I was told. For those who don’t believe, no explanation is possible.

  Throughout my adolescence, I lived in two worlds that could not be reconciled: the world as it was presented to me, a world I was told to accept on faith, and a second world, the world of my reasoning, the world of empirical experience. I did the best I could to shut out the second world, to be a good daughter, a good Catholic, to become that empty vessel for Our Lord. Yet what to do with everything I felt: passion and violence, wonder and despair? Music was a means of being simultaneously empty and full-to-bursting. Music gave voice to everything I wasn’t permitted to feel and think and say. When I finished playing, I’d simply close the lid and walk away. I considered myself His instrument. I claimed none of that joyful noise as my own.

  I dried my hands, stretched my fingers, rubbed m
y tender forearms. Warm-ups, my teachers said, prevented tendinitis, but it didn’t seem to matter if I warmed up or not. If I spent the weekend at my grandmother’s farm, where there was no piano, the tenderness went away. But it always came right back as soon as I started to practice again. I was proud of my pain, my ability to take it. I thought it was romantic. It was only natural that God would ask you to suffer for something you loved. Jesus, after all, had loved Mary above all other women, and Jesus had allowed Mary to suffer more than anyone—as a sign of His favor, Father Stone explained. It was Saturday catechism. It was nothing we hadn’t heard before in that overheated basement room. We stared dully at Father, lined up in our rows, puddles shining around our boots. He smiled at us encouragingly, as if there were no contradiction in what he’d just said, as if it made perfect sense. “Does anyone have any questions?” he’d always ask at the end of each session, but none of us ever did.

  Love was pain. Suffering without resistance was proof of devotion to God. You did not think about the way such beliefs would undercut your ability to protect yourself, assert yourself, excel. The meek, after all, would inherit the earth. The saints wore their mortifications like jewels about their murdered necks.