A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  I still get requests to go out on assignment. Now, when I politely decline, I no longer feel frantic with grief. It is true, I suppose, that a piece of me has—I was going to say died, but I think been put to rest is a better choice of words. I find I am surprisingly content in my role as mentor to my students. I value the privilege of helping them uncover the shape that their own struggle will take, and then nudging them into the work of it.

  It was in Oscar’s study, I think, that Barnaby had said, of my work as a photographer: “Isn’t that the business you’re in? Teasing the truth out of things?” My camera, my eye, to his way of thinking, was trained on the world with the purpose of showing up Truth.

  Thinking about Oscar sitting there in his study, remembering the look of intolerable pain on his face, which he seemed unable to mask, I take consolation in a new thought. That sometimes the closest one can get to the truth is to look away.

  Barnaby and I stepped onto the wide front steps and looked out over the circular driveway to the brown, wintry lawn. I turned, force of habit, to catch sight of the sea, from here no more than a dull metal band joined to a heavy expanse of white-blue sky. A faint echo sounded from the woods: a few birds deep in the trees, taking shelter from the cold.

  “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” Barnaby asked. There was that dip in the eyes: both of us aware of other questions, other offerings, and everything else besides. The cold air smacked up against me.

  “Barnaby, obviously I haven’t discussed this with Simon, but on matters like these, I know how he’d think. I’m sure he’d agree to us signing our share over to you.”

  “I was going to say the same thing,” Barnaby responded in a husky-soft voice. He reached for my hand, then, lifted it to his lips, his eyes holding steadily on mine, head lowered in that way he had so that in looking at you, he was looking up and over, as though peering out from some enclosure—not confined, but pleasantly ensconced and inviting you in. And me, my resolve dissolving, wanting to go wherever it was he intended to take me. But knowing that I wouldn’t, that I’d found my place, at last, with Simon; that the two of us had, in our odd and unencumbered way, divested of claims to ownership, made for ourselves a home.

  I nodded to my car, parked at the other end of the driveway, where the loose gravel met the first tufts of lawn.

  “I brought my own car,” I said. Barnaby’s lips lingered on my hand. I could feel the smile on them as I looked deep into the lithe gleaming smile in his eyes.

  We must have stood that way for some time, as I became aware that through the leather of my boots my toes were feeling quite frozen. I was thinking how strange it was, and yet how right—and, of course, this had been true all along—that at this moment, I felt Simon’s presence so strongly. A peculiar triumvirate, to be sure.

  Barnaby leaned toward me, I leaned toward him, we leaned toward each other.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Oscar

  London. November, 1956.

  I was surprised to learn that Christine had returned to England; it appears she has been back for some years. How could one not have been struck by the intense loathing she’d felt for this place when I knew her, so many years back? That great ache to be elsewhere; it followed her around like a fog.

  There’s symmetry here, as there has been so often in my life (in everybody’s life?)—the postcard I sent Christine years back, when she was still in China, giving a clue to my whereabouts in the United States, and the postcard Christine recently sent to the address I’d given her then—my lawyer in Long Island, forwarded now by him (bless his loyalty, and the inviolability of his discretion)—imparting the same kind of clue.

  I do not know the circumstances of her return, but something in the tone of her quick note—five sentences, that’s all it was—informed me that her sojourn in the East had not proved to be the escape for which she’d hoped. I suspect Christine’s mission was doomed from the start: that what she was fleeing is not something one can, in fact, leave behind.

  There was hostility in that note—lightly disguised, but clearly there. She blames me for what happened between us; I feel this, though I could not identify what she sees as my crime. Needless to say, I have spent a good deal of time mulling the matter over. After considering and reconsidering a number of the most likely permutations, I remain loyal to this view: that, upon intuiting the imminent confession of my crimes, Christine fled. Which is to say, she was not up to the truth: Christine chose to stake her claim to life in artifice and illusion.

  I say this with compassion; I am in no position to judge. In any case, I do not believe Christine’s choice had anything to do with being shallow. I am certain it was simply a question of survival.

  Perhaps it would surprise her to hear me talking this way. The fact is, I knew Christine better than she thought I did.

  I have set up a home—nothing with the grandness and sociability of Ellis Park; it’s just the two of us now, Wallace and me, in a handful of pleasant, furnished rooms overlooking the heath. I rigorously avoid all districts to which I formerly had ties. I have, through this necessity, found that London is indeed the sprawling metropolis it is famed to be: a haven of anonymity for whoever chooses it to be so.

  I do my utmost not to think of the past and often enough I succeed. I can go from day to day in a kind of self-imposed temporal confinement, willing my mind to occupy itself only with the next twenty-four hours. It is a strange limbo, this living without a past; when I see amputees—and they abound, of course, because of the war—they feel to me like landsmen: others, like me, who go on with a damaged part of themselves cut away.

  It didn’t take me long to track Christine down. It was a further surprise to find she is trying to establish a girl’s school: in a sense, right back where she started. I understand that she has a partner in the endeavor—a young Chinese woman she brought back with her from Shanghai.

  But how was it for her? Did she feel, in coming back to England, that she was coming home?

  Only once—it was last week, as it happens—did I risk venturing into dangerous territory in passing by the library. I stopped, for a time, and looked up at its imposing façade. The home of my long-ago researches—where I sat researching the paintings that would pass through my hands.

  I knew, incidentally, that Christine had followed me on several occasions, including one time when I came here. What I still do not know is what she was seeking in tracking my movements.

  I do not believe, though, that Christine ever trailed me on an appointment with a customer (I speak of the paintings); I was especially careful about this.

  Standing outside the library, a fragment of the past erupted, as if coughed up by the great building itself: that strange night I spent here, locked within the institution’s daunting emptiness.

  I’d been sitting in the stacks, examining the large volumes with their beautiful reproductions. When I heard the tap-phh, tap-pph of the guard’s step, I found myself scooping up my belongings and ducking behind a wall of books. I don’t know what made me do it—the odd whim simply reached out and grabbed me.

  I hid in a cleaning supply closet that appeared just when I needed it, managing to tolerate the burning admixture of ammonium and lye for as long as I could. When I pushed open the door and, faint from the chemical fumes, almost fell from the closet, I could feel from the heavy emptiness that the guard had gone and that I was alone.

  The library lights flashed off. The blackout cloth on the windows had been scrupulously fitted, and in that corner of the massive room all signs of the waning day were banished. I stood alone in the blackness. The air was heavy with dust.

  I’d been careful about my study sessions here: kept them to a minimum to avoid drawing attention to myself or to the subject of my researches. The few hours I spent here, though, I’d enjoyed a sense of calm and peace long denied me. Blocking all else from my mind, I’d given myself over to the blinding majesty of the Art.

  Alone, free to wander unnoticed, the place des
erted and locked for the night, I found it was not the paintings I wanted, but something else. I walked behind the librarian’s desk and struck a match. The matchstick-length life of the flame was just enough for me to identify the whereabouts, from the map pinned to a notice board, of the modern German literature collection. Two flights up, three rooms across: sufficiently simple for me to negotiate in the near darkness.

  As I was taking the stairs, I heard the distant cat wail—the familiar beginning of the air-raid siren’s arc—muffled by the wall of books between where I was standing and the windows. I walked the length of the stack, feeling along with my hands, winding my way in solid darkness around rows of books, the siren outside rising to a screech.

  I reached the window, peeled back a corner of the tarpaper just as the first missile found its target. But I saw nothing; only heard a padded thud, like a rock falling into snow. Then, the tremor rippling through air and steel and brick.

  I crouched at the window, lifted the paper several inches, and beheld the spectacle—shooting stars in graceful arc, giant thrumming projectiles coursing blackly across the skies.

  It didn’t last long. The horizon was bright with flames. Medical workers, salvage teams—I pictured everybody preparing to emerge from cellars like so many ground-dwelling night creatures. But for now, only the eerie fire-scape, elongated buds of oranges and yellows leaping and cowering, and everywhere wavering columns of grayish-blue smoke.

  It was a strange and beautiful nexus—past, present, future, folding and unfolding into one another: history in the throes of being destroyed, the sudden appearance of empty space which would one day hold new constructions, all of it a smoldering of the present.

  I let the tar cloth fall, stretched up from crouching position, my knees creaking painfully. There was no obvious source of light now, only slivers, here and there, filtering in through a glass door panel, a vent in the floor, a hidden skylight up near the rafters. But I had no trouble finding my way; I was suddenly once again a night creature myself. Not from the ground but of the air—an owl, perhaps, or a bat.

  I passed by row upon row of books: the delicious proximity of abundance. Not for the taking, but for the destroying. Here I am, I remember thinking, among the flawless works of genius that had haunted my youth and haunted me still: leather-bound volumes of Novalis and Goethe, Schiller and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. An intense longing: to do damage, real damage, to the weight of work around me, to the productions of a culture that had made me who I am and then turned murderous. A terrible image filled my senses: blood, everywhere blood, the blood of my family—her blood too, the woman, rocking by the stone-cold hearth—there, in the library, dripping down the dusty pages, dripping down, onto the great slabs of stone at my feet. An urge to set fire to it all—to cleanse it all away in a roaring blaze. The power of ritual destruction, the desire to enter the darkening calm, the holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

  Around me, the smell of vaulted stone, the infusion, in air, of millions of pages in thousands of spines.

  I plucked down a volume, gingerly at first, and then more clumsily, loading my arms. Carrying a small tower of books, I walked to the nearest study table and set them down.

  I could not burn them but I determined that I might in some way perform an exorcism. Staring at the stack of books I felt, wildly, as if something ceremonial should be said. The only Jewish prayer I knew, taught to me by my friend Oskar (I say this again because I must: the real Oscar) when we were together at the Internment Center. Shema Yisroel Adonoi Elehaynu Adonoi Echod. Baruch Shem K’vod Malchuso L’Olam Va’ed. Ve-Ahafta es Adonoi Elohecha—

  I stopped. What business had I with prayers? I remember thinking. And what business had they with me?

  I looked at the books: dumb objects, already the life of them—once so aflame within me—extinguished, reduced to ash. I swept the books from the table; they crashed to the floor, filling the space with a single bright echo, godly and inanimate as a thunderclap.

  That night, I slept where I sat, head on my arm, at the study table. Instinct woke me, snapping open my eyes. Not two minutes later, I heard the distant tapping of the morning guard’s shoes on the stone stairs. I cut across to the other side of the vast room and made my way down the back staircase.

  Mercifully, the back exit could be opened from the inside and was unmanned. I pushed open the door and stepped quickly out into the gray London morning.

  What stopped me, that evening, from confessing everything to Christine? Surely, I might have removed her silencing finger and spoken the truth? Why did I choose, in the end, to keep it all in the dark? Was this my undoing?

  I remember the line from Nietzsche that was popular among my classmates: that without illusions, man would die. But this is too generous; I am aware that it is a mere halftruth, and self-serving, as half-truths tend to be.

  Though perhaps I am romanticizing matters. Perhaps we are all just—well—what we are.

  Foolish theorizing, this. The simple fact is I want to see her. I want to see Christine.

  Rather than unnerve her by simply appearing on her doorstep, now that I have tracked her down, I am planning first to send her a letter.

  I’ve had a devil of a time drafting the thing; my wastebasket is heaped with failed attempts. I will turn to it again this evening. It seems silly, after all this time, to invest the wording of the letter with such importance.

  Five years into it, and the idea of my new alias still jars. This time, however, I was faced with no choice: circumstance forced my hand. Though I took on Alfred’s name to honor him, I cringe at the thought that it is, in the end, a taint, for his memory to be linked in any way with my existence. It is too late, though; as much as any name can be for me, his name now is mine. I hope Christine will not think it forced.

  I hope Christine will want to see me.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. I can say that I was not expecting what I found.

  The building in which Christine is hoping to establish her school is a simple affair. Having secured government funding for the project, she has rented a structure that more than a century ago lodged a poorhouse, long since stripped down inside to the bare walls. Small clean rooms have replaced the cavernous pit it once was; there is no embellishment, just plaster walls and low ceilings, the plainness broken by cheerful green gingham curtains that adorn the windows throughout.

  When, after standing before the building some ten minutes, I finally mustered the courage to ring the bell, I was surprised by the serious face of the young Chinese woman who opened the door. She looked no more than seventeen or eighteen (later, Christine told me she is well into her twenties), and had about her an air of such clarity—a sense of being wide open to the forces of the world while also knowing deeply who she is and what she wants. Unusual, in a person of her youth.

  I suppose I should not be surprised that this young woman—she introduced herself as Ma Ling—reminds me of Christine. Not the Christine I saw yesterday, but the Christine I knew some twelve years ago here, in London, before either of us set out on our respective escapes.

  Ma Ling led me to the rear of the building to where I would find Christine—Christine, whom I’d not seen in so many years, whose beauty and troubled largesse and unwavering focus on the search were inscribed into my being; Christine, for whom I’d never stopped longing. Before opening the door, Ma Ling looked at me so openly that I was taken aback. It was a look that both took my measure and assuaged the deep anxiety I was feeling, a look that was at once deeply attentive and a clear-eyed challenge. Peerless Christine, I thought—elegant, alluring, anguished Christine, steeped in the pleasures of masquerade and at the same time defiantly authentic; perhaps in Ma Ling she had met her match.

  Ma Ling opened the door, and there she was, Christine, seated in a wooden chair in the cold glare of a fluorescent light. Anger, grief, resignation: I saw them all in her face.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” she whispered.

  I enter
ed, closed the door, leaving Ma Ling in the hallway outside. I heard the sound of her footsteps heading away.

  Christine was aged—I’d somehow not expected this—and seemed smaller, giving the impression that she’d lost several inches in height. In place of the brilliant smile was a muted warmth that gave a soft glow to her now more angular features. Her hair, having lost its strawberry sheen, was a common shade of blond, cut stylishly short. It suited her, as did the simple tailoring of her beige wool suit, which showed her narrower though still lovely figure. She was altered, yes, there was no denying it, though her beauty, for me, was in no way diminished. I was aware of something I’d not experienced in a very long time: a flutter, within, of joy.

  “Christine.” It cost me some effort to utter her name aloud; I’d not done so in many years. She did not rise; I sat opposite her on a compact divan.

  “I surprised myself,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I felt so very happy when I received your letter.”

  “Should you not have been?” Christine looked at me squarely. “You must know why I left. After all these years, surely you worked it out.”

  I shrugged. It was a gesture entirely inappropriate to the situation, but I found it was the only one I had.

  Christine leaned forward. Suffering and hatred—I saw them, visible forcefields in the back of her eyes.

  But then, a growing look of astonishment in her face.

  “You don’t know, do you,” she uttered, her voice an echo of disbelief. A long pause. Too long, uncomfortable. When finally she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “I discovered the truth. About your past.” She breathed this last word with discernible distaste.

  “My past,” I repeated idiotically.

  The fact is, I was confused. I didn’t know which past Christine meant.

  “I’m sorry, Christine. I don’t understand.”

  She strode to the window, the old agitation evident in her taut movements. She stood there for a moment, her back toward me, peering out.