Shakespeare's Kitchen

by Lore Segal

  Ahmed said, “He needed me to unlock the New Theater for him.”

  Leslie said, “Ahmed, sorry to be ordering you around, but will you go and find Matsue and bring him here to my office?”

  “He has gone,” said Ahmed. “I saw him leave by the front door with a suitcase on wheels.”

  “Matsue is going home,” said Ilka. “He has finished his job.”

  Paulino said, “It is my father.”

  “No, it’s not, Paulino,” said Ilka. “Those screams are from Dachau and from Hiroshima.”

  “That is my father,” said Paulino, “and my mother screaming.”

  Leslie asked Ilka to come with him to the airport. They caught up with Matsue queuing, with only five passengers ahead of him, to enter the gangway to the plane.

  Ilka said, “Matsue, you’re not going away without telling us how to shut that thing off.”

  Matsue said, “Itto dozunotto shattoffu.”

  Ilka and Leslie said, “Excuse me?”

  With the hand that was not holding his boarding pass, Matsue performed a charade of turning a faucet and he shook his head. Ilka and Leslie understood him to be saying, “It does not shut off.” Matsue stepped out of the line, kissed Ilka on the cheek, stepped back, and passed through the door.

  When Concordance Institute takes hold of a situation it deals humanely with it. Leslie found funds to pay a private sanitarium to evaluate Paulino. Back at the New Theater, the police, a bomb squad, and a private acoustics company that Leslie hired from Washington set themselves to locate the source of the screaming. Leslie looked haggard. His colleagues worried when their director, a sensible man, continued to blame the microphone after the microphone had been removed and the screaming continued. The sound seemed not to be going to loop back to any familiar beginning so that the hearers might have become familiar—might in a manner of speaking have made friends—with some one particular roar or screech, but to be going on to perpetually new and fresh howls of agony.

  Neither the Japanese embassy in Washington, nor the American embassy in Tokyo got anywhere with the tracers sent out to locate Matsue. Leslie called in the technician. The technician had a go at explaining why the noise could not be stilled. “Look into the wiring,” Leslie said and saw in the man’s eyes the look that experts wear when they have explained something and the layman repeats what he said before the explanation. The expert had another go. He talked to Leslie about the nature of sound; he talked about cross-Atlantic phone calls and about the electric guitar. Leslie said, “Could you check inside the wiring?”

  Leslie fired the first team of acoustical experts, found another company and asked them to check inside the wiring. The new man reported back to Leslie: He thought they might start by taking down the stage portion of the theater. If the sound people worked closely with the demolition people, they might be able to avoid having to mess with the body of the hall.

  The phone call that Maderiaga had made on the night of the symposium had, in the meantime, set in motion a series of official acts that were bringing to America—to Concordance—Paulino Patillo’s father, Klaus Herrmann/Claudio Patillo. The old man was eighty-nine, missing an eye by an act of man and a lung by an act of God. On the plane he suffered a collapse and was rushed from the airport straight to Concordance Medical Center.

  Rabbi Grossman walked into Leslie’s office and said, “What am I hearing! You’ve approved a house, on this campus, for the accomplice of the genocide of Austrian and Hungarian Jewry?”

  “And a private nurse,” said Leslie.

  “Are you out of your mind?” asked Rabbi Grossman.

  “Almost,” Leslie said.

  “You look terrible,” said Shlomo Grossman, and sat down.

  “What,” Leslie said, “am I the hell to do with an old Nazi who is postoperative, whose son is in the sanitarium, who doesn’t know a soul, doesn’t have a dime, doesn’t have a roof over his head?”

  “Send him home to Germany,” shouted Shlomo.

  “I tried. Dobelmann says they won’t recognize Claudio Patillo as one of their nationals.”

  “So send him to his comeuppance in Israel!”

  “Shulamit says they’re no longer interested, Shlomo! They have other things on hand!”

  “Put him back on the plane and turn it around.”

  “For another round of screaming? Shlomo!” cried Leslie, and put up his hands to cover his ears against the noise that, issuing out of the dismembered building materials piled in back of the institute, blanketed the countryside for miles around, made its way down every street of the small university town, into every backyard, and filtered in through Leslie’s closed and shuttered windows. “Shlomo,” Leslie said, “come over tonight. I promise Eliza will cook you something you can eat. I want you and Ilka—and we’ll see who else—to help me think this thing through.”

  “We know that this goes on whether we are hearing it or not.”

  “Maggie asked me what it was,” said Ilka.

  “We—I—” Leslie said, “need to understand how the scream of Dachau is the same, and how it is a different scream from the scream of Hiroshima. And after that I need to learn how to listen to what sounds like the same sound out of the hell in which the torturer is getting what he has coming.”

  Here Eliza called Leslie. “Can you come and talk to Ahmed?”

  Leslie went out and came back carrying his coat. A couple of young punks with an agenda of their own had broken into Herrmann’s new American house. They had gagged the nurse and tied her and Klaus up in the new American bathroom. It was here that Ilka began helplessly to laugh. Leslie buttoned his coat and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to go over there. Ilka, Shlomo, I leave for Washington tomorrow, early, to talk to the Superfund people. While I’m there I want to see if I can get funds for a Scream Project … Ilka? Ilka, what?” But Ilka had got the giggles and could not answer him. Leslie said, “What I need is for the two of you to please sit down, here and now, and come up with a formulation I can take with me to present to Arts and Humanities.”

  The Superfund granted Concordance an allowance for Scream Disposal, and the dismembered stage of the New Theater was loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven west. The population along Route 90 and all the way to Arizona came out into the street, eyes squeezed together, heads pulled back and down into shoulders. They buried the thing fifteen feet under, well away from the highway, and let the desert howl.

  By Joy Surprised

  PICNIC

  It was toward the end of the second week, after the second set of experts had failed to find the source of the human howling that emanated from the stage of Concordance University’s New Theater, that Joe Bernstine remembered this nice place for a picnic: Get away for an afternoon, grab a break from the scream that could be heard—couldn’t not be heard—down every street, alley, yard. Shutting doors, closing windows did not prevent the sound from infiltrating the rooms and offices of the institute, the campus buildings, and every store and house in Concordance. It blanketed the countryside for miles around.

  Joe and Jenny, young Bethy, little Teddy and his dog Cassandra came in the Bernstines’ car; Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare brought Ilka and her child. Joe put down a blanket for her on the grass. He wanted to be congratulated on discovering this green place in the embrace of a lush little wood. A range of hills separated them from the town.

  “From here you can barely hear it,” they said.

  Ilka sat with Maggie between her legs. Leslie unloaded bags, baskets, boxes, a bucket of ice, more blankets. Joe got the hibachi burning, Jenny unwrapped things and Eliza sliced them. “Leslie, the wine. You know the definition of wine cookery? You drink wine while you cook. Bethy and Teddy, juice? Maggie, an apple.”

  Ilka said, “Leslie, watch this.” The little girl was studying the white little bite she had bitten out of the red apple, bit another bite, studied it and nibbled away the skin that separated the two little bites creating one big bite. She bit another little bite and studied
it. “I used to do that!” said Ilka. “The bites are characters in a story.” Ilka and Leslie watched Maggie take another and another: one big and three little bites. Ilka and Leslie watched Maggie bite and nibble a family—a community—of apple bites, little, big, and bigger. Eliza and Jenny cooked. Bethy bossed her little brother Teddy so he ran away and chased Cassandra who was barking at the innocent moths. When Joe took Teddy off to play ball, Cassandra barked at the ball. Bethy came and sat on the blanket and bossed little Maggie, who didn’t mind.

  “Time to eat, everybody.” Bethy carried plates, Teddy brought napkins, and Leslie asked if anybody could think of any characters from the bible through Dickens who went to find themselves or ask who they are. They pounced. Everybody got into the discussion. Maggie’s eyes stopped looking. Ilka watched the lids incrementally descend and close. Maggie slept. The wind must have changed; the howling from the New Theater might be something out of a nightmare.

  Leslie asked Eliza to tell the story about her father and the commencement address.

  “My father was the English master at Chapeldown Preparatory School, in Toronto, and his colleagues, the headmaster, and the board were trying to get him to retire. Father failed to understand them by the simple expedient of not hearing what they said. Leslie, you remember that New Yorker cartoon? Frame one: Enter pistol-wielding stickup man. Says, ‘This is a stickup.’ Frame two: People at the bar talking, laughing, drinking. Three: Stickup man shouts, ‘This is a stickup!’ Four: People at the bar continue talking, laughing, drinking. Frame five: Stickup man shrugs his shoulders, pockets his pistol, and goes away. Father continues going from class to class, teaching English poetry. The headmaster has an idea. He’s going to give Dr. Geoffrey—that’s my father—the honor of giving the commencement address! The headmaster, in his academic gown, introduces Dr. Geoffrey—their own Dr. Geoffrey who needs no introduction, whose longevity and devotion to Chapeldown School is beyond praise and who will, so sadly, so regrettably, BE RETIRING AFTER GIVING HIS FINAL ADDRESS at these umpteenth Chapeldown Commencement ceremonies! The headmaster urges the boys to give Dr. Geoffrey a well-deserved hand. Applause. An abortive attempt at a standing ovation, some people standing up, some continuing to sit, some standing up and sitting down again. I’m sitting next to mother with the faculty women. We watch father in his gown shaking hands with the headmaster who is descending the five steps to the pulpit. Father ascends the pulpit, thanks the headmaster for his kind and generous words, encourages the boys to look up the word longevity, reminding them, ha ha ha, of their friend the dictionary, says, ‘My address to you today will be short and sweet …’ Applause in the body of the chapel. Small dogged smile on father’s mouth: he is going to get his quotation quoted, ‘For “Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art of ending.” You can look that up in Bartlett’s Quotations for “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.” Beginnings not endings,’ he says is what he has come today to talk about. ‘Have any of you, my young friends, given yourselves account of the word commencement? Is that not a curious name for a ceremony that concludes the school year for some, for others it is the end of a school career, for yet others the career of a lifetime—of very life! “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows,” says Socrates.’ Joe—is there any of the red wine left in that bottle? Thank you.—‘It is not for you, my young friends, to concern yourselves with valedictions, terminations, extinctions, annihilations, quittances—which you can look up in Webster. Look up curtains, full stops, stubs, nibs, tails, butts, tag or fag ends in Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang. To all of you, on this commencement day I say, Hurry up! Begin your holidays, your careers, your adulthood, the rest of your lives this side of eternity. “O lente, lente, currite noctis equi: The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,” and all too soon you too will stand at “the bourn of that country from which no traveler returns.” “Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die.” “From a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down.” Job says, “There is death in the pot.” “Time to be old, To take in sail.” “O we can wait no longer, We too take ship, O soul, Joyous, We too launch out on trackless seas, Fearless of unknown shores.”’ The littlest boys are in an orgy of the fidgets. I said, ‘Mother, stop him!’ Mother said, ‘Exactly how?’ ‘That’s right!’ Father says, ‘“I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms.”’ The school chaplain—elegant chap, pink cheeks, turned-around collar, beautiful, dove-gray suit, is saying something to the headmaster in the chair next to him and the headmaster gets to his feet. Father is saying, ‘ “I would not live always!” “Soon oh soon shall I sleep in Abraham’s bosom.” “Dead as a doornail,” our ancestors’ simile.’ Mother and I watch the headmaster. He is walking toward the pulpit. Father says, ‘“Sad news, bad news… . Through the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean—he’s dead; … The Ahkoond is dead!” “Life and death are equally jests.” “There will be one vacant chair.” ’ The headmaster has arrived at the base of the pulpit, says, ‘Thank you so very, very much, Dr. Geoffrey, for your erudite and I must say most moving address …’ Father says, ‘ “This dust was once the man.” “Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close.” “What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!”’ I notice that the chaplain is no longer sitting in his chair. Father says, ‘It hath often been said … “Death in itself is nothing; but we fear to be we know not what, we know not where.” And yet “how oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry.”’ There is this hefty fellow in overalls—he’s walking as if on tiptoe—approaching the pulpit, already got his foot on the first step. Father is saying, ‘“What is death after all but sleepe after toile, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.”’ His arms and elbows are warding off the fellow in the overalls pawing at him. The headmaster and the chaplain stand watching from below. The man in overalls pulls, half tumbles Father down the steps. ‘“The voice of nature loudly cries, and many a message from the skies, that something in us never dies!”’ cries Father. ‘“Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so, for those whom thou think’st thou doest overthrow, die not, poor death, nor yet can’st thou kill me!”’ Father shouts. They are hauling him out through the narrow door that I never even noticed to the left of the altar, and the two boys sitting in front of mother get the giggles.”

  The hills had turned black but not as black as the woods at their backs. The hibachi glowed as the earth’s center might glow.

  “Look!” Ilka said. Out of the hills galloped danger or was it romance? The two horsemen increased in size, were suddenly here, reining in the mass of horse flesh that reared and beat the air with hooves. The riders raised wide-brimmed hats to the picnickers on the blankets, turned their steeds and galloped off spurting clumps of grass, decreased in size, were gone, and Ilka said,“It’s when I’m happy that I want to cry for Jimmy. It’s the woods, hills, the horsemen, the food, stories, talk—being with you, here with you all. I’m not really crying.”

  “You are crying.” Leslie passed her his handkerchief.

  “Did Una ever give you back your handkerchief?” Ilka laughed and lay back on the blanket. Leslie lay down beside her. A cotton handkerchief is a poor conductor of heat so that Ilka might mistake the heat where Leslie’s palm met hers, the white heat of their intertwining fingers, for the passage of consolation, but Cassandra barked and barked and barked and barked and barked. Did Ilka think Leslie’s shoulder against her shoulder was the connection of a dear friendship? Ilka was not brave about believing that she could have what she wanted.

  They were sitting up. They were leaving. Must Ilka wake Maggie or carry her sleeping? Weren’t they leaving? Teddy had brought his little scratchy phonograph. Joe danced with Bethy on the grass. Bethy was dancing with Teddy who was cutting up. “Stop it!” she kept telling him, “Stop kid
ding around!”

  “Dance?” Joe Bernstine pulled Ilka to her feet; Ilka felt herself pressed against his chest where she had never been pressed before. “Not so shabby!” he said to her. Joe and Ilka danced and turned on the grass, turned past Eliza sitting between Leslie’s knees where Ilka had never seen her sitting before, past smiling Jenny who held Bethy between her knees, past Maggie asleep on the blanket. Joe turned and turned Ilka.

  Ilka said, “You can, too, hear the sound from Concordance.”

  Joe said, “Look at Leslie and Eliza dancing!” Leslie was dancing a jig on the grass, hopping from one foot to the other to avoid the toes of Eliza’s sneakers aiming at his ankles, his shins.

  Were they leaving? Everybody was standing. Leslie said, “Everybody will come to our place.”

  “No they won’t,” Eliza said, “because I’m going to go to bed.”

  Unheard of! “Eliza,” they teased her, “you never go to bed! Leslie goes to bed. You don’t go to bed till dawn. Since when do you go to bed before Leslie?”

  Joe said, “Leslie, no fair! You get everybody riled about the bible and Dickens and finding who we are. You never said what you think.”

  Leslie said, “I think it’s a silly question. There is no such ‘who.’ ”

  They drove Ilka to her door and Leslie came around to lift sleeping Maggie out of Ilka’s lap and carried her up the steps to the front door.

  “I can take her,” Ilka said,

  Leslie said, “I will come by presently.”

  And now Ilka understood that what she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine and had not, consequently, told herself that she desired, was going to come to pass, come to pass tonight. Maggie woke up and cried and had to be jollied and put to bed. Happiness made Ilka deeply patient with so many steps, motions, and revolutions: the opening of drawers and cupboards looking for she couldn’t remember what; finding, mislaying and again finding the bottle for Maggie’s juice; taking Maggie’s shoes off and the socks, seeing the baby turn to stare in the direction of the window: a turn of the wind aggravated the volume and clarity of the human scream—and the child needed to be hugged and tickled to distract her. Ilka unbuttoned and peeled Maggie out of layers of clothing, filled the bath with water, got the temperature right, soaped and rinsed and cuddled her inside the towel, lay beside her incanting one book, another book, the same book another time, every moment distinct and swollen with anticipation.