I’ve written the story of the painted faces twenty times, from every perspective, at every degree of remove from reality, but my descriptions of candles and shadows have never come close to resurrecting the commingled scents of greasepaint and melting wax and fear. Certain images I’ve copied over so many times they’ve come to feel like truth. (My grandmother drawing the bristles of the brush through her lips to flatten them, naming the creases of the face as she etches each girl’s future there—the lines called think-too-much, the lines called worry-too-much, and smoke-too-much, and know-too-much. The way she flips her tarot cards on the small table after the transformations are complete, telling one girl to beware tall men, another she’s surrounded by protectors.)
When I tell it from my father’s point of view, it is always a story of innocence. In the girls’ narration, it becomes gossipy: This writer, this former actress, painting their faces in the closet, was surviving the war by pawning the family silver one spoon at a time. She had enough spoons to last five more years. She was psychic, even beyond her tarot skill. Strangest of all: Despite her liberal views, her Bohemian friends, she’d been married to the member of Parliament who had written the Second Jewish Law in 1939. (The new quotas put tens of thousands out of work, restricted Jews from the press, took their land, defined Jewishness as a race rather than a religion. Even the theater was affected. If no more than 6 percent of any cast could be Jewish, then in a play with fifteen characters, one actor was too many. No Jew could direct a play or own a theater. Of course, the girls don’t really whisper this litany. But I need to. I need to remind myself of these details in draft after draft, as if the writing might wear the words thin, until their meanings won’t stick.) The same year the law passed, Rózsa Ignácz divorced János Makkai. They were first cousins, the women whisper. And this boy with the candle, he is their son. As my grandmother seals their wrinkles with powder, they wonder about cause and effect. Did the political differences destroy the marriage? Or were theaters included in the law as revenge against the woman who was already leaving him? Perhaps she’d had an affair with a Jewish director. Their questions are my own.
One of these times, if I get the words in the correct order, if I retrace more precisely the lines of history, I am convinced I will learn something I need to know. If not about my grandparents’ strange marriage or its dissolution, if not about bloodlines, then at least about courage in its quietest manifestations.
In any event, the faces were finished, the walking sticks distributed. The girls laughed at themselves in the mirror and headed into the night. What acts of sabotage or simple self-preservation they accomplished on the streets are not a matter of record.
EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE BOMBER
The briefcase he used was not the black one shown in phone footage. The black case belonged to Marion Cates, deceased, and contained two egg salad sandwiches. That the black case appeared so persistently on the news and on social media, despite being of no interest to investigators, delayed the apprehension of the bomber by as much as two days.
We’re told that in third grade, his English was lacking. We’re told that he refused to smile for class pictures, but he was a happy child, he was. We are told he loved painting. We’re told that Miss Mullens is too overwhelmed at this time to answer more questions.
He was on the FBI’s radar, and then he was not. He was someone’s son, and then he was not. He had a girlfriend, and then he did not. He had a beard, and then he did not. His sister understood him, and then she did not.
There is no question that he acted alone.
He suffered from plantar fasciitis, cluster headaches, a borderline attention disorder, and repeated sinus infections. His heart was broken five distinct times. This much is clear from the autopsy.
He studied botany, specifically the sticky and miraculous unfurling of single grains of pollen into long strings that drilled down the length of the pistil and into the ovary. His graduate work addressed the lipids involved in this reaction. His research was nearly complete.
His finances were in order. He paid bills the day before the bombing, which leads us to wonder if he thought he’d get away with it, go home and need electricity, water, credit cards; or if some ingrained societal obedience overrode all he knew of the future.
His one indulgence was scarves. He spent more income, proportionally, on scarves than on entertainment. In eleven of the sixteen photographs available to the public, he wears a silk scarf of one pale color or another, tucked expertly into the collar of his leather jacket. Affected, perhaps, but not for a European, which he was, after all, even if he was also American, even if he was also a thousand other things, not the least of which was vain.
We agree, collectively, that the amount of time we have devoted to studying his skull shape, lineage, caffeine intake, and psychiatric history is neither helpful nor tasteful.
On his bookshelf: Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Updike, Conrad, Nabokov, Murakami, Dickens, Proust, Mann. Much is made of the depth and diversity of his reading, but then much is also made of the absence of women from the shelves. The Stanford professor who has arranged access to the bomber’s copious marginal notes plans, separate from his assistance in interpreting these notes for the interested government agencies, to release his own analysis of the man’s literary thinking. How long he will have to wait for clearance is, naturally, the issue.
When the bomber was eleven, he took a Hershey’s bar from the pharmacy shelf and snuck it into the public restroom, where he consumed it in three bites. Terrified of the incriminating wrapper, he folded it in half, fourths, eighths, sixteenths, but decided against the toilet, which might clog. He put the wrapper in his mouth and chewed it like gum, and when it was soft enough, he swallowed. Much is still uncertain, but on this one fact we are clear.
According to his mother, he was framed. According to his mother, the laws of the universe are incompatible with her son, her son, her son doing this. We wonder, collectively, why it’s so important to us that she understand what we understand—that yes, he did this, that he bought the ticket, that he wrote that letter, that the basement was full of chemicals—despite our wish to spare her. Wouldn’t it be better if she thinks it’s the rest of us who’ve gone mad? We ask if she hasn’t been through enough. But we need her to understand.
The briefcase he used was a gift from his sister. Something to replace the canvas bag he’d carried through his academic life. She was the one who identified a scrap of it, charred leather and a bit of buckle.
There are things we can assume: that he was terrified, that he almost wet his pants, that he rehearsed, that he ordered a good meal that morning but wasn’t able to eat it, that he prayed, that he didn’t look at faces in the crowd. That his own name, when he checked into the hospital, sounded to him like a death sentence. That he’d pictured some glorious future, some altered universe, in which history would be written by the victors, among whom he’d be chief. That he couldn’t sleep the night before. But maybe those are facts about us, about the way we’d be.
The bomber’s ex-girlfriend is not ready to talk, but her roommate has given certain details: the fight about the keys, the time he broke the girlfriend’s wrist, the addiction to Indian food. The roommate starts most sentences with “If I’d known.” We are happy to allow her this.
He liked to solve puzzles. He liked to fix machines. When his third-grade teacher, Miss Mullens, told him there was not enough time to talk about sharks, he slowed the mechanism of the classroom clock. “Look,” he said. “I made the day longer.”
If he hadn’t felt the need to watch the explosion, he’d never have fallen from the roof of the bank, and would not have snapped his leg. Three days later he wouldn’t have stumbled, dazed and infected, to the hospital. He would not, when he saw the nurses’ eyes, when he realized the police were on their way, have barricaded himself, wouldn’t have taken the hostage, wouldn’t have demanded the suicidal drugs, wouldn’t have shot himself when they were denied. Or so
we assume.
The country where he was born is on the map, but only a detailed map. It has a flag, but not a flag we’ve seen. His country is smaller than Luxembourg, larger than Lichtenstein, with a surprising number of sheep. To be honest, we’d forgotten about his country. We aren’t at all sure what he wanted.
The night before his twenty-third birthday, he sat in a mostly empty movie theater and watched Audrey Tautou run through the streets of Paris, suitcase in hand. As a botanist, he hated that the wrong things were blooming on-screen: This was meant to be August, but here were tulips in the park. Each flower, to him, had a taste. He’d rarely tasted nectar, just a few curious times—the viscosity, if not the flavor, reminding him of his girlfriend, of afternoons on her small white bed—but he knew each flower’s smell so intimately, so clinically, that when these tulips appeared he felt it on the back of his tongue. He admired the director’s brazenness (he assumed it wasn’t ignorance) in deciding what flowers bloomed when. He admired men who molded the universe like plastic. After this thought, his popcorn lost its flavor. We’ve gleaned all this from the video surveillance.
His mother stands on the porch and again and again says why, till it doesn’t sound like a word at all. It’s a different why from ours. We are ready to accept this.
He had a tooth pulled in the spring of 2012. He was allergic to strawberries. He excelled at tennis. There was no food in his refrigerator. He was dead before they could interrogate him. His blog has been erased.
We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns. We’ve obtained a new map, with slightly different colors.
We will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound like fate.
PAINTED OCEAN, PAINTED SHIP
To Alex’s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Cyril College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it aloud to Malcolm on the phone:
FOWL PLAY
Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” many times since joining the English Department in 2008, but she developed an unexpected intimacy with the poem when, duck-hunting in South Australia this June, she accidentally shot and killed an actual albatross.
Moore, whose doctoral dissertation at Tufts focused on D. G. Rossetti and his muse Jane Burden Morris, took aim at what she thought was a goose.
“My students are never going to let me hear the end of this,” she says.
Because the birds are protected under Australian and international laws, Moore incurred a hefty fine—hopefully the extent of that legendary bad luck! She has no plans to hang the bird around her neck. “The wingspan was over two yards,” says the 5-foot-2 Moore. “That would be asking for it!”
Those exclamation points killed her, the way they tacked the whole episode down as farce. And the cheery italics. None of Alex’s tired sarcasm had come through. She vowed in the future only to give quotes via e-mail, so she could control the punctuation. (“You’re my favorite control freak,” Malcolm said.) Plus there was that photo to the side, her book-jacket photo with the half smile, perfect for suggesting Pre-Raphaelite intrigue and scandal, but here verging on the smug. A month stuck dealing with the South Australian police and Parks Department; half her grant spent on the fine; her research summer wasted; and all of it snipped down by a freelance writer named Betsy into photo, irony, pretty blue box.
And as for the bad luck, it was just starting, waiting for her back home like her postal bin of unopened mail. Not the “hefty fine” kind of bad luck, but the “Your career is over” kind, the “Why aren’t you wearing your engagement ring?” kind.
“Didn’t take you for a hunter,” she heard about twenty times that first department party back in the States.
“I’m not,” she’d say, or “You don’t know who you’re dealing with here,” or “I’m really more of a gatherer.”
She ended up telling the full story, and as she talked the whole party squeezed around where she sat on the arm of the couch—even Malcolm, her fiancé, who’d seen it happen. He was sweet to listen again, and sweeter still not to chime in with his own version. Her colleagues sat on the coffee table, the bar, the floor, and sipped white wine. She told them how her half brother Piet had invited her and Malcolm to his place outside Tumby Bay for June. “He’s not Australian,” she said. “He just thinks he is.” And then once they got there, Piet, in that way of his—just masculine enough to intimidate Malcolm, just Australian enough that everything sounded like a fine, foolish adventure—convinced them to come shooting at his lake, so he wouldn’t miss the last day of duck hunting season.
“Australia is the new America,” announced Leonard, her department head. Or rather, he slurred it through his beard. The new hire nodded. Everyone else ignored him.
After Piet brought down three ducks and his dog had dragged them in, he wrapped Alex’s hands around the gun and showed her the sight line.
“What kind of gun?” someone asked.
“I don’t know. A rifle. It was wooden.”
She’d seen something barely rise above the stand of trees on the small island in the lake, and shot. If she thought anything, she thought it was a white goose. It crashed down through the trees, and Piet sent Gonzo swimming out to it. Gonzo disappeared on the island, yapping and howling and finally reappearing, sans goose, to whimper at the water’s edge.
“Christ,” Piet said, and took off his clothes—all of them—to swim out. He emerged from the trees after a long minute, full frontal glory shining wet in the sun. Malcolm slapped his entire arm across his eyes. “She’s a monster!” Piet shouted. “You’ve slain a beast!”
Thirty minutes later, Piet, half-drunk, was on the phone to his friend Reynie at the Parks Department, asking him to come out and tell them if that wasn’t the biggest fucking bird he’d ever seen. They took two double kayaks out—Piet and Reynie, then Malcolm and Alex, who still hadn’t seen her victim. It lay there, enormous, wings out, half on a bush, a red spot fading out to pink on the white feathers of the neck. Its whole body glared white, except the wings, tipped in glossy black. “It was beautiful,” she told her colleagues. “I can’t even describe it—it had to do with the light, but it was just beautiful.”
“You shouldn’t have brought me out here, Piet, Christ,” Reynie had said. He put his hand on the bird’s back, and Alex walked around to get a better look at the face, at the rounded, almost cartoonish beak. “I’ll have to write you up, and you’ll lose your license and pay a fortune. It’s a wandering bloody albatross. They’re vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable to what?” Piet was using his phone to shoot photos, moving the bush branches for a better shot.
“Extinction. Jesus Christ. Vulnerable’s a step from endangered. Piet, I don’t want to write you up, but you shouldn’t have called.”
Piet snapped a picture. “Didn’t shoot it,” he said. “She did. Not even from here, never shot a gun. Girl’s excelled at everything she ever tried in her whole damn life.”
“Which is how I spent the next three weeks camped in Adelaide,” she told her colleagues. The ones who were out of wine took this as a cue to stretch and reload at Leonard’s bar.
“Hey, great story!” Bill Tossman clapped her on the shoulder, used that loud, cheesy voice more suited to an executive schmoozing on the squash court than a professor of modern poetry. “Wish I could stay to hear the end, but my two friends and I here are late for a wedding!”
They laughed, then all started in: You must be parched! Can I get you some water? Hey, take a load off!
“You’re going to do that all year,” Alex said. “Aren’t you.”
And yes, they did, until the real bad luck became public in November and they suddenly didn’t know what to say to her at all.
She actually taught the Coleridge that fall, and passe
d around a copy of the photo Piet had e-mailed her. It was an unfortunately dull section of 222, half frat boys who only took classes as a pack (one, confused by her story, later indicated in his paper that the mariner killed the albatross because he thought it was a goose), a bunch of foreign students, mostly Korean, who never spoke, and a freshman English major named Kirstin who made every effort to turn the class into a private tutorial. They passed the photo listlessly, one of the boys raised his hand to ask how much the bird weighed, and Alex made a mighty effort to turn her answer into a discussion of the weight of sin and Coleridge’s ideas of atonement.
Kirstin compared the poem to The Scarlet Letter and one of the boys groaned, apparently traumatized by some high school English teacher. Alex wished someone else would talk. Poor Eden Su, for instance, in the front row, was one of those Korean students. She wrote astounding papers, better by a mile than Kirstin’s, and yet she never spoke in class unless Alex addressed her directly, and even then, she whispered and pulled her hair across her mouth. Alex had asked her to stop by her office later, and now Eden was slowly picking apart a cheap ballpoint pen.
By one o’clock she was in her office on the phone to Malcolm, the red leaves on the maple hitting the bottom of her window again and again. He was in Chicago, meeting with his thesis adviser. He’d be back the next night, and was asking if she wanted to grab dinner.
“I’ll take you someplace nice,” she said. “You’ll need champagne.” These meetings were probably his last before he defended his dissertation, and they were going well.
Music for Wartime Page 11
