Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  I know a little of medieval France and England, and have studied ancient Greece and Rome, and the nineteenth century in the United States. But Maya is the only civilization I have yearned to be born into. I would like to have lived in the classic period, the Puuc period, that produced great architecture, astronomy, mythology, mathematics. In those years men and women believed that feeding human blood to the soil would increase its fertility. As a young Mayan, I might have rebelled at this terrible waste of human life, but perhaps not. Since birth I would have been part of a deeply believing community, ignorant of the concept of the sanctity of the individual life, indeed, unconcerned for my own.

  With the great mass of people I would have stood on the great plains around the pyramids of Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Kabáh, Sayil, gazing up reverently at the little party of priests in their robes and feathers, belts, armbands, and masks. I would wish, as all the others around me must have done, to be raised in the eyes of the Chac-mool and Kukulkán, even at the price of what we knew was happening in the warm air hundreds of feet above us. To be raised to that platform meant instant, ceremonial death. I see myself, a young virginal girl, rejoicing that I am chosen, my breast about to be sliced open by a sharp stone knife, my heart lifted out of my chest cavity by holy hands and laid in the little bowl embedded in the lap of the great rain god.

  The Chac-mool’s stone head is turned away from the sight of the bloody muscle, his cold eyes royally aloof. He is scornful of any human price for his favors, expecting it always to be greater as his attention wanders and he looks away. His expression suggests: Blood is cheap, a small price to pay for the gift of water in this arid peninsula. It will take the blood of a whole population to satisfy my immortal thirst. His knees drawn up, his back curved, his feet bracing his recumbent body, the Chac-mool ignores my still throbbing heart. He almost smiles at the insignificance of the offering.

  Now when I visit Maya I neither climb nor stand very long watching others go up. I walk across the great plain at Chichén Itzá to where the flat platform of the Skulls sits, with its row upon row of grisly heads, eye sockets with no eyes, unfleshed jutting jawbones, filed, pointed teeth lining the absent mouths. At that time, in the late winter before my approaching birthday, I thought about the Mayans, building, carving, worshiping, exultant in their sacrificial moments of religious fervor. Still, they must have turned their eyes to this grim platform of human remnants as if to remind themselves that the glory at the top of the hundreds of steps, in the hands of painted holy men heightened by feathered headdresses, ends here among the skeletal heads, one very much like the others.

  And the Chac-mool sits up there, grinning into eternity, suggesting to me that it is not so terrible to die if you die in a sacred place at holy hands in a rite as pure and holy as rain. Like your Christ, he says, my custom is to accept blood and change it to water to serve the soil and bring forth maize and bananas, coconut and papaya. Death is for the living: It is a very good thing.

  Deep in this fantasy, I am still without my heart when Sybil comes back from the bookstore to have lunch on our deck. It turns out to be too hot to eat outdoors, so we retreat to the kitchen and I pull myself away from thoughts of death and bloody sacrifice.

  We decide the cure for Washington’s terrible humidity is to go to the beach. It is so hot here that one can believe in the world’s approaching extinction. Is it possible, I wonder, to live long enough to link my own end with the world’s? The thought of death is always made more terrible because it runs parallel to the even more unbearable idea that the world will go on without me.

  When I was a child everything in the future, like the past, seemed to be permanent, immutable. The years, the centuries to come that I believed I would live, were set, like Mayan cities, in stone. Now, to my shock, it is clear that nothing may remain. Not for long. It is even possible I, or my children, or perhaps my grandson, will be a part of the final earthly solution.

  So we drive two hours to the Delaware shore. At the sight of the ocean, ignoring the bodies on the jammed beach from which the odor is not of salt but of suntan lotion, I feel restored, fresh, and almost young.

  Water to me is a saving grace. As a child I forgot my anger at my parents or camp counselors or teachers if I went to a swimming pool, or to the lake. (At that time I had not learned about the cleansing and restorative power of the sea.) I would pull through the water, feeling the power of my arms as I did the Australian crawl, cupping my fingers to push towards the bottom, beating against the surface with my toes pointed ostentatiously, as though a divine Coach was watching me from above and I was showing off, with every stroke, for the elevated Spectator.

  Water was freedom, an element in which I believed I had perfect control. Lake and pool waters were calm enough to provide that illusion. I moved through water in a kind of ecstasy, cut away from the rules of the land, social requirements, limitations, disapproval. Water was action, more effective than prayer. When I swam I believed in God. In later life, the act of prayer brought me closer to believing in Him.

  Water is my best and oldest friend. I trust it. On land, always my adversary, I have little sense that my body is any longer a good servant that will obey my orders. My ankles have weakened; I am always in fear of slipping, stumbling, and being hurt when I fall. This fear is not groundless, to make a poor pun: Twice I have broken ankles, many, many times have I sprained or strained them. My arms will no longer lift my thickened body easily out of chairs, out of the bath. My back hurts under the stress of lifting or bending, or sometimes for no reason at all. I stub my toes, jam fingers, feel the irritations of pollen and dust in my eyes, nose, throat. My teeth are loosely rooted in my gums, which have moved back under them. From the pressures of accumulations of fat, my skin has loosened, leaving my chin and neck, breasts and buttocks, abdomen and thighs unsightly to me. Everywhere my skin is ornamented with wrinkles, brown spots, roughened places. Cups of flesh have appeared beneath my eyes. My once-firm, reliable body, quick to command and as quick to respond, now moves in slow motion, dry to the touch, weary, lax, unresponsive.

  But in the water: I return to the state of my youth. I move without fear. There is nothing to collide with. Miraculously, I am upheld by a force greater than my arms and legs could apply. I turn fast, acquire some speed, advance, retreat, rest, and start again without effort. My old friend, water, my good companion, my beloved mother and father: I am its most natural offspring.

  September

  Somehow I have survived this torrid summer. It is the fifteenth of the month, the birthday of my friend Margaret Schlauch, who died last May before she reached her ninetieth year. For much of our lives we were out of touch. She lived halfway around the world for the last thirty years, but always I felt a strong connection to her. From her publications I knew that she was still intellectually active well into her eighties, writing scholarly papers and books in obscure, disparate, but always valuable fields: Icelandic and Norwegian sagas, Chaucer, Emily Dickinson’s style, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the effects of society on language, other linguistic subjects. I had always assumed, despite the difference in our ages, that she would outlive me, for her life was purer, more peaceful, full of higher aims and purposes, and single, without family or children to distract her.

  Maggie and I met in 1936 when I was a seventeen-year-old college student and she, an awe-inspiring professor of English at New York University, was thirty-seven. In those years the coeducational college at Washington Square in New York was called the downtown campus to distinguish it from the uptown, all-male branch of the university called the Heights. We met downtown in the Village.

  The course I took with her was in medieval literature. To this day I remember how impressed I was by the Nibelungenlied, the Völsung Saga, the gentle lays of Marie de France, the Norse Edda and Icelandic sagas, the sad tales of the Tuatha De Danann, the Romance of the Rose. The beauty of Beowulf and the Pearl Poet persuaded me to study Old English and then Middle English so I could do grad
uate work in Chaucer. Maggie’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages was so great that I began to think of the twentieth century as a degraded, almost retrogressive time, a descent from the glories of 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death.

  Maggie was a superb teacher. Her homely, likable face would light up when she talked about the beauties of a language that, in most cases, I could approach only through translation. After a few months of her instruction I was converted by her scholarship and transferred from the philosophy to the English department.

  At the end of an interminable and boring sophomore year, Professor Schlauch and I were on good terms. Once she invited me to a little ‘evening gathering,’ as she called it, at her apartment on Christopher Street. There I met the poet Eda Lou Walton, her friend Ben Belitt, Edwin Berry Burgum, a member of the English department whose field was the European novel (I remember he talked about a writer named Kafka of whom I had never heard), and other impressive persons. They all appeared to be calm and relaxed in their achievements, far removed from the world I inhabited of avid, ambitious students.

  I heard Professor Schlauch tell the others she was planning to spend a year in Mexico, compiling a dictionary of Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Suddenly I wanted to go to Mexico to study. I was heartily sick of college, except for the courses taught by the brilliant and stimulating Sidney Hook and by Maggie, I was tired of the Village, the arty bohemian bars, the fights in front of the Jumble Shop where we picketed because the restaurant wouldn’t admit ‘Negro’ students, the squalid, long subway ride every morning to Sheridan Square from the Upper West Side and then back again late at night after the Reading Room closed. From the small ‘foreign study’ office I wangled an exchange fellowship to the Universidad de México and persuaded my parents I was old and wise enough to leave home, school, and country for part of a year. I was free. I gloated.

  Early in June, Maggie, her Irish mother, and I sailed to Havana aboard the Morro Castle, a year before it sank. There we stayed a month while Maggie learned Spanish quickly (she already knew and spoke about ten languages), and I struggled to acquire a bit of the language. Her mother, as I recall, found it an ugly and incomprehensible tongue and refused to use it.

  Fulgencio Batista was in dictatorial charge of the country. I remember being frisked when we entered labor meetings in Havana, the kind of gatherings Maggie liked to attend. I had known of her strong labor sympathies at college; she was a founder of the Teachers’ Union and the Marxist publication Science and Society, and a faculty supporter of the American Student Union, of which I was an active member. In Cuba and later, during our time in Mexico, she was drawn to workers’ gatherings and labor meetings; among my old pictures I have one of us seated in a box at a labor hall where Vincente de Toledano was giving an impassioned speech.

  I remember a visit to the seaside village of Batabanó, where the inhabitants fished for sponges. A small, bright-eyed boy offered to show us a wonderful sight, he said. We accompanied him to the Catholic church, the most impressive structure in the village, in a class with the residence of the operator of the United Fruit Company and the priest’s rectory.

  Inside the door of the Spanish-style church, the boy reached above his head and pushed a switch. His eyes shone with wonder at the sight. A statue of the Virgin, close to the door, had lit up. Around her head there was a crown of electric light bulbs. Her eyes were two bare bulbs. At her feet another circle of bulbs illuminated the snake on which she stood. In her mouth, in place of teeth, Mary sported two rows of small, white, glowing bulbs.

  I gasped. The boy stared at the Virgin. ‘Muy buena,’ he said.

  Maggie said nothing. Afterwards she used the visit to the church to illustrate her strong antireligious sentiments. The only electricity in the village was here and in the rectory, she pointed out, so the boy’s idea of beauty had been malformed by this ugly vision. I had seen it differently. I was moved by the look in his eyes, the devotion with which he looked up at the Virgin’s glaring features, the way he genuflected at her feet before he turned off the switch.

  It was a memorable, exciting year in Mexico. We studied (well, perhaps it is more accurate to say that she worked and studied while I played and flirted with handsome Mexican boys) and, on weekends, traveled, to the great Aztec ruins and to the west coast, where we walked about the sleepy town of Acapulco, swimming in the warm, blue water, and finding a native family who put us up for the week. There were few tourist hotels built then. It was a lovely, quiet village.

  Everywhere we traveled I had the sense of discovery. Once we went down the neck of the Yucatán peninsula and up its horn by rickety, life-threatening buses that seemed to hang over the edge of the sheer Sierra Madre cliffs. We stayed in Il Progreso, a seaside town where we hired an ancient taxicab to take us on the six-hour drive to Uxmal.

  The Mayan driver stopped his cab at the edge of what looked to us like aboriginal jungles, thick, tangled low growth extending in every direction. He told us he could go no farther. ‘No road into,’ he said. He would wait right here and pointed into the bushes in the general direction of the ancient city of Uxmal.

  Maggie and I walked two miles on a barely discernible footpath, stepping into tangles of vines and extricating our feet with difficulty. We came upon a great carved stone lying across the path. Was it a representation of an animal skull, a mask? A live, antediluvian-looking iguana, grey-green and wise-looking, sat beside it. We exploded with uncontained excitement at our feelings of awe: We were, we thought, the first creatures to come upon these sights, these wonders.

  Then I stumbled and looked down to see what had tripped me. My pride at the uniqueness of our exploration faded. There at my foot was an empty green Coca-Cola bottle, probably left behind, I was later to learn, by a Carnegie Institution archaeologist who had been working on the site for ten years with a large team, uncovering the temples and the ball court.

  After college, Maggie helped me to obtain a scholarship to Cornell. The long separation of our lives began. Once she visited me in Ithaca, I remember, and I was enormously impressed by my Cornell English professors’ respect for her. Then I married, moved about, and the war came. My husband and I both entered the service. Maggie and I continued to correspond, she sent me offprints of her articles, the war ended, and then there was a long silence during which we were out of touch.

  In April 1952 I came upon an article in the New York Times entitled ‘Journey for Margaret.’ It reported Maggie’s decision to leave the United States for political reasons, and to go to work and live in Poland. Then a letter from her arrived, mailed in Warsaw. She wrote that she had decided she would not take the loyalty oath when, she thought, New York University would demand it of its faculty, because ‘I am a dedicated Marxist, no matter how undogmatic.’

  Her odyssey was extraordinary. She had dismantled her apartment, given away her books, and settled her aged father into a nursing home. She left Montreal without a passport and flew to Copenhagen. The Polish ambassador took her from the plane and put her on one to Warsaw. There she joined her sister, the wife of Polish physicist Leopold Infeld, who had been in exile during the Hitler years and had returned to head the department of physics at the University of Warsaw. He expedited her establishment at the university, where she originated the department of English studies.

  She was to live in Warsaw for the rest of her life. Often she traveled abroad, to Scandinavia, to England, and at least twice to the United States, always using a diplomatic passport. When she was in the United States lecturing, I went to the University of Connecticut at Storrs to see her, and then she gave a class at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, where I taught. Once we met in New York to hear Fidelio, at the ‘new’ Met, a reunion of significance to us because we had heard the opera together thirty years before in the lovely old building on Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway.

  It was fine to see that she was the same likable, sharp, modest, affectionate woman she had always been, intellectually ageless and still enthusiastic abo
ut her writing, teaching, and research. By now her fluency in Polish and Russian equaled her extraordinary command of the Romance languages. We laughed about the disparity in our linguistic skills. I asked her if she was still able to read Nahuatl. She said she hadn’t tried recently. I had to confess I had forgotten most of my Spanish.

  I asked her if iron-curtained Poland had lived up to her hopes for it when she emigrated. She said, ‘Of course, one is always somewhat critical of some things in any country. It is inevitable. But I have never regretted my decision. I am with my family [by now she had a brilliant young niece and nephew, and her widowed sister Helen had become an accomplished translator], friends, and colleagues, and a wonderful succession of students, eager to learn English and grateful for whatever I am able to teach them.’

  I told her I had thought of her and her half-Jewish niece and nephew during the recent anti-Semitic activities in Poland. She was silent for a moment and then she said quietly: ‘I was glad that Leopold was dead.’

  During the last intermission we walked about the beautiful crimson, crystal, and gold opera house. I wanted to know if she liked the building. She said she thought it was very fine. But how much had our seats in the orchestra cost? At the time I think they were almost twenty dollars apiece. We recalled the old days when we had paid fifty-five cents for each seat in the family circle, looking out at the wonderful, exalted ceiling, the red-lined boxes, the gilt decorations, and the brilliant chandeliers. ‘All this beauty,’ she said slowly, with, it seemed to me, some reluctance, ‘for the very few.’

  That was our last meeting. We wrote on occasion. Then her letters stopped. Three of mine went unanswered. My last attempt to contact her was a long letter I wrote from the Villa Serbeloni in Bellagio, Italy. The Polish Minister of Culture visited there for a three-day conference while I was in residence. I asked him if he knew Professor Schlauch. He said of course he knew of her. Was she well? He thought so. Would he deliver a letter to her? He hesitated. I said I would leave it unsealed. He said yes, he would try. He would not promise, of course, that he would be able to locate her.