by Andrew Potok
“Well, no, Mrs. Barnes, not perfectly . . .”
“Wonderful, wonderful. That is good news,” she said. “You see, I will cure the whole bloody lot of you.”
“Yes, I hope so, Mrs. Barnes, because I still can’t . . .”
“And listen to this,” she continued in a comradely, jovial voice. “Old Mrs. What-do-you-call-her . . . you know,” she whispered, “that dumpy blind one . . . what is her filthy name? She is completely blind,” she mumbled. “Well, never mind,” she continued, in good voice again, “she called me this morning to say that she was walking through her garden . . . poking around with her stupid white stick, no doubt, kicking up the flowers . . .” She paused and chuckled. “Suddenly she saw a big red rose. . . .” Another pause while a big red rose appeared in my mind’s eye. “A big red rose, do you hear? She saw it with her bloody blind eyes, where there was nothing but blackness before.”
“That’s wonderful, Mrs. Barnes,” I said. “You must be very pleased today.” I didn’t want to talk about old Mrs. What’s-her-name, I wanted to talk about me.
“Even the chappie from you-know-where, what-you-call-him . . . Lima . . . my Lima chappie . . . he is better. . . .”
People were beginning to collect around Lady Jane’s lone telephone, which sat on a desk with the cash register. To its right I noticed a basket of women’s panties, individually wrapped in cellophane with silhouette illustrations of numbered erotic positions. With one hand I started to leaf through them. I put number 19 aside for Charlotte. It pictured a male form bent in a toe-touch. His head blended pleasantly into the lower parts of a lady doing the Plow. Helga droned on. “Harold Macmillan knew,” she said. “I cured plenty of his friends! He knew!”
“Mrs. Barnes, I am in a little store and they need the phone,” I said, intrigued now by a silhouette of a kind of flying rear entry, straight from the Ice Capades.
“If he had recognized me, everyone would have the cure. But not now,” she said. “It stays with me forever. . . .”
“I’m afraid I must give up the phone. . . .”
“Yes, yes, angel. I understand. Take the day off and call me tomorrow.”
On my way back home, I bought six bunches of flowers, half daffodils, half narcissus, at the Chalk Farm station. Walking on Eton College Road, I wondered how to celebrate events of this magnitude.
Charlotte laughed as she opened the door. “There’s only one vase in the house,” she said. We filled it and stuffed the three glasses from Sta ’s cupboard with most of the rest. The remaining flowers perched, without water, around the rim of the umbrella stand in the hall.
We sat down and smiled. She leaned back on the couch, while I grinned foolishly. Charlotte reached into her woven shoulder bag and pulled out a book of Isaac Babel short stories we had brought. It made for wonderful short spurts of reading aloud. “Here’s a really short one,” she said. “See what you think of it.”
In the story, Babel is walking in the woods with Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky seems to miss all the beauty of the place by refusing to buy a pair of glasses for his shortsightedness.
“ ‘Just think,’ says Babel, ‘you’re not merely blind, you’re practically dead! Line, that divine trait, mistress of the world, eternally escapes you. Here we are, you and I, walking about in this magic garden, this Finnish forest that almost baffles description. All our lives we shall never see anything more beautiful. And you can’t see the pink edge of the frozen waterfall, over there by the stream! You are blind to the Japanese chiselling of the weeping willow leaning over the waterfall. The red trunks of the pines are covered by snow in which a thousand sparks are gleaming. The snow, shapeless when it fell, has draped itself along the branches, lying on their surfaces that undulate like a line drawn by Leonardo. In the snow flaming clouds are reflected. And think what you’d have to say about Froken Kirsti’s silk stockings; about the line of her leg, that lovely line! I beseech you, Alexander Fyodorovich, buy a pair of glasses!’
“ ‘My child,’ Kerensky replied, ‘don’t waste your time. Forty copecks for spectacles are the only forty copecks I’ve no wish to squander. I don’t need your line, vulgar as truth is vulgar. You live your life as though you were a teacher of trigonometry, while I for my part live in a world of miracles, even when I’m only at Klyazma. What do I need to see Froken Kirsti’s freckles for, if even when I can scarcely make her out I can see in her all I wish to see? What do I need Finnish clouds for, when above my head I see a moving ocean? . . . To me the whole universe is a gigantic theater, and I am the only member of the audience who hasn’t glued opera glasses to his eyes. . . .’ ”
Babel’s story ends when, six months later, he sees Kerensky again. This time, June 1917, Kerensky is ruler of Russia.
“A rally has been called at the House of the People, and there Alexander Fyodorovich made a speech about Russia —Russia, mystic mother and spouse. The animal passion of the crowd stifled him. Could he, the only member of the audience without opera glasses, see how their hackles were rising? I do not know. But after him Trot-sky climbed to the speaker’s tribune, twisted his mouth, and in an implacable voice began: ‘Comrades!’ ”
Charlotte couldn’t have just stumbled onto this. She must have been planning it as an object lesson of some sort. Obviously, blindness was not a prerequisite for living in Kerensky’s clouds, his world of miracles; yet until Trotsky’s stark entrance, I was seduced, while listening, into wanting to dismiss sight, like truth, as ugly and vulgar. With Trotsky’s instant recognition of reality, I realized that I had to hang on to Helga’s cure, to adhere to its strictest requirements, to submit to its wildest contradictions, so that I, too, could sum up the visible world, to understand it, instead of taking umbrage in the ocean of clouds overhead. If Charlotte intended anything at all by the reading, though, it was probably to link Kerensky’s myopic love of miracles with the tenuous miracles of Helga Barnes.
Charlotte was scheduled to leave in a week, which alternately brought on premonitions of great loneliness and hopes of finally being able to devote myself entirely and without reserve to the cure. As her date of departure neared, I halfheartedly talked about her staying. Charlotte might have been more interested in staying if we were signed up in some research institute where precise measurements could be noted daily of the changes in my early receptor potential or the peaks of my retinal beta waves. To me, the bees were a perfect cure with the possibility of a beehive in every basement and two bees every morning with coffee and orange juice. To Charlotte, bees were strictly from the horror movies and were to be carefully avoided. She wanted her nostrums sterile and packaged, a well-kept secret between her doctor and her druggist. As she presented her case for leaving—work, children, and unattended odds and ends—I began making mental lists of self-imposed health regimens, plans for hiring readers, schemes for exploring London, and fitful fantasies of meeting fascinating women who would rub the wounded back of my neck with Nivea cream (the only balm Helga allowed).
“You’ve got to be careful what you tell people about my improvement,” I said. “After all, we’re not absolutely sure that it will last.”
“Yes,” Charlotte said too quickly. “That’s right.”
“On the other hand, it’s going to be hard not to tell all, not to spill the happy news the moment you get off the plane. Maybe you should just hint at it. . . .”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll hint at it.”
“But you should call Ben at the Foundation. Also Dagmar and Freda. Perhaps even Eliot Berson and Dr. Lubkin. Or you could wait a week. . . .”
“Perhaps so,” she agreed. “I’ll wait awhile. But in the meantime,” she added, “you should give some thought to coming back with me. . . .”
“Going with you?” I sat up. “How can you say that? The bees are getting to me. I’m getting better.” But the improvement felt fragile, and I feared that a good dose of cynicism would make it vanish. I wished I could swear out a testimonial like the Casey woman in the Observer art
icle. I wished I could thread a needle like her or read fine newsprint. So far, none of that. Just a joyful run in the streets.
“Still,” Charlotte said, “try to keep an open mind.”
I had begun to miss home, the kids, the warmth of the familiar. But it was painful to project myself back in all that as an unchanged, unseeing man. I felt that my presence in that idyllic scene was disruptive. It interfered with the normal unfolding of lives; it slowed things up, created blank spaces, disturbances, anomalies.
I could only reenter the Vermont summer changed, seeing again. I could picture myself in the garden with its thick cover of scratchy cucumber leaves, the lush smooth fullness of ripening tomatoes. I thought of the smell in the cedar woods and the huge maples, the path through them, soft and springy, vaulted and dark, the sound of a stream, and the taste of blackberries at the other end. The memories were overly tactile; that, of course, would have to change.
I thought of the meadow behind the house, through a break in the stone fence, near the butternut trees. I would sometimes sneak out to a hidden spot in that field where, buried in the tall grass, alone and unseen, I would indulge in fantasies of sight. It was like masturbating, obliterating reality, entering the magic of the sighted world. I would fall into a delicious place, as if gently rocked and lapped by waves. My eyelids, as I remembered from childhood, would become domes of soothing orange sunlight. Images of my former life would race across that sunbaked screen. I would feel giddy and light as I ran surefooted down carpeted stairs, over bumpy fields, as I drove my blue motorcycle along the Mediterranean in and out of the shadows of the eucalyptus trees, as I skied the lovely Vermont slopes, spraying a shower of snow as I turned and twisted. . . .
A small center of joy would gather momentum inside me. It accelerated to such speeds that the iron shades over my eyes would burst, and I would be witness to my own rebirth. Just then, my eyes would always begin to hurt. Under my lids, the light would brighten to lemon yellow, then become splotched with white-hot phosphenes. Sharp lances of hay would begin to hurt my neck and elbows, bugs would crawl inside my socks. I would open my eyes slowly and see the blazing, painful bombardment of white unfiltered light, alive with pulsating fragments of the gray hills, the tops of trees, the stalks of weeds towering over me. I would lie there and weep.
In that landscape, the day I stopped painting I cut the lines connecting me to the outside world. The year’s work, a series of eight large assemblages, was hanging in a gallery. I built racks to store my remaining canvases. I packed some of my materials into cardboard boxes in case any of my children felt the desire to paint. The rest of the tubes of color, the gessos, oils, resins, and varnishes, the boxes of junk I had accumulated from Canal Street and Los Alamos, the plastics, glues, and chalks, the gouaches, paper, board, the jars of acrylic, I gave to painters and would-be painters. I had lent my bench saw to a friend who was building his house, while the jointer, drills, and hand tools went to my eldest, Mark. And then I felt the grief of irreplaceable loss. I had stripped my physical space of the tools of my trade, to keep pace with my eyes. I could no longer even attempt to do the one thing I knew how to do.
In a strange sense, I had also felt relief. I was no longer responsible. I didn’t have to struggle. I didn’t have to be excellent or successful. Even the grimmest Soviet doctor supervising production workers in a tractor factory would have excused me from labor. I had a note from home, valid for life, permitting me to do nothing.
The next day, I got ten stings at Helga’s.
“I will have to start introducing you to some of my other patients,” she said, “now that you are feeling better.” She put the horrible little insects on my neck rather abruptly. All ten were placed and relieved of their stingers within a few seconds.
“I must leave for the hotels right after my next patients, the pair from Manchester,” she said. She was wearing a feathered hat, a city dress, and lipstick. “Well, off you go now!”
“But, Mrs. Barnes,” I begged, “tell me something about my improvement. Can I expect it to get better still?”
“What you think?” she snapped, stuffing things into her handbag. “Once it starts like this, it can only keep going. It is the miracle of my bees.”
Walking down Altyre Close to the bus, feeling frustrated, unfulfilled, I passed two women—one old, one young— heading toward Helga’s. They looked dejected and I supposed they were her Manchester pair. I worried about Helga’s indifference to my improvement. She should have reinforced my good feelings. I felt betrayed.
I met Charlotte at the entrance to the Heath, and we walked through the lower part along Parliament Hill, to make a pilgrimage to Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. The day was clear and balmy. For the first time since our arrival in London, the Heath was alive with screeching little soccer players in short pants, babies sunning in open prams. The great space amplified the distant sounds of cars jammed up on West Heath Road, a wailing ambulance, the whistle of a train near Hampstead station. The other side of the Heath seemed suddenly Mediterranean, the flavor of an English settlement on Mallorca. Near the cemetery, we heard the prim, elegant sound of a tennis game. It went on without exuberance: no one shouted, no one grunted. The ball just bounded in a polite volley.
There was a commotion inside the cemetery though. A group of demonstrators, dressed in black, tried to dramatize the plight of Soviet Jews by heckling Marx’s admirers. We took our place around the grave, laying our bunch of flowers with all the rest. I walked close to the monument with a huge disproportionate head of Marx on top. I asked Charlotte to read me the inscription. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways,” she read. “The point however is to change it.”
I felt particularly foolish and self-indulgent standing in front of a monument to this paradigm of rationality, this warrior against privilege, his opera glasses glued right on. My lips started to move, shaping silent words, and I made Marx a promise. “Listen, Marx,” I said, “if she fixes me up, I won’t rest until everyone has the cure.” I closed my eyes and pictured the Cure-Tour, a package including round-trip air fare, a rooming house in Beckenham, and sightseeing after the restoration of dormant photoreceptor cells. I would arrange it all.
“Once I can really see,” I continued, “I will be a truly responsible person again.” I had always envied people being able to leave their guilts at some altar. It felt good, and I walked down Highgate High Road refreshed.
When we got home, I wanted to call my few remaining relatives. Having planned for Charlotte’s departure, for the propagation of the cure, and for my exemplary behavior afterward, I felt ready to meet the handful of survivors from my previously large family who had settled in London. I wanted to tell them that I’d paint again. I wanted to celebrate this improvement about which I was feeling less and less certain. By sharing it I would substantiate its existence. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, they knew about my blindness. If it had been up to Sta to tell them about it, then I suspected that they knew nothing. He left the room every time Charlotte or I mentioned blindness, to pace in the hall or out in the street. He liked hearing about Helga and the bees, but he had no heart or vocabulary to deal with this kind of loss, to him a horror worse than death.
The image of me that remained with the survivors of my family—after all these years, after invasions, occupations, slaughters, and migrations—was of a charmed, blue-eyed miracle firstborn of aging parents.
“Och, Andrzej,” an old cousin passing through New York said to me recently, “what a beautiful child you were. Like a little prince,” he announced.
“A god,” corrected his arthritic wife. They said I was sent by heaven.
“Where else would you have come from?” asked a Warsaw neighbor, now living in Australia, “with those eyes, that Polish nose.”
My blindness was too incongruous for them to understand. Had I faced them as a blind man, I would have expected them to turn away with repugnance. I wanted to face them when I was in
disputably sighted.
“Why don’t we wait awhile,” Charlotte suggested, “before calling them all. Let’s wait until we’re absolutely sure.” The last time I had seen a large part of my family together was in the fall of 1939, when I was eight years old.
In the early September morning, I heard the drone of airplanes and ran out of our house to see them. The sky was gray, and the ground was wet from the night-long rain. I heard the sound of distant thunder. Hanging from a branch of a pine tree near the house, my caged owl screeched. The owl and an English bicycle, leaning against the still unfinished summer house, were my birthday presents from earlier in the year. I saw planes with the red-and-white checkerboard of the Polish insignia approaching over the treetops. There were three, five, six of them, flying low, so low that I could see the pilots’ faces, and I waved joyfully, not knowing they were German faces. I saw things fall from the planes and all around me bombs exploded. Behind me, the owl’s cage crashed to the ground and parts of the woods caught on fire. I screamed and ran into them, away from the open fields. When my mother caught up with me, she carried me back to the house. Still hysterical, I had to be calmed with drugs.
Later in the morning, my parents paid off the cook and the gardener and drove back to Warsaw.
Much of my family gathered in our apartment that night to make desperate decisions about getting out. They had come from Krakow, from Lodz, and from Bȩdzin, a town full of Potoks, large parts of it owned by them. They stood in groups or paced. There were many people. I held my governess’s hand tightly, and from time to time, my teeth chattered.
The men raised their voices, yelled at one another, until someone shushed them. Then everyone whispered in the dark, by candlelight. My uncle Max shouted about the business while my father paced and picked at his fingers nervously. “Don’t pick, Leon,” my mother kept saying. The skin around his fingernails hung loose and bloody. He was ashen white.
