by Susan Daitch
Man Ray, Self Portrait, 1963. Courtesy of Jack Kews
The snippet had arrived in the mail along with the usual kinds of advertisements for film equipment and personal inquiries about specific jobs that I occasionally receive at Alphabet. Colonel Henry’s suicide splashes over a skirt. One of Méliès’s heads explodes at an elbow. A rocket lands in someone’s eye. Apart from the Dreyfus film, which is somewhat stark, these films are crowded, packed with images. Méliès nearly always filled black space as if he had a fear of emptiness. No cave, room, door, fireplace remained black for long, sooner or later something would emerge from it. In The Conquest of the Pole, a huge figure eats the explorers, but the barren tundra is soon inhabited when the monster throws them up again. I stood in the dark, relatively empty room. I waited for Jack Kews or anyone to burst in. Nothing happened.
I worked through the night to try to reach the end of the film, but there was too much damage, and it was slow going.
After Henry’s suicide Dreyfus leaves Devil’s Island, returning to France for a second trial at Rennes. Although a great deal of evidence to prove his innocence has been established, he will again be found guilty, but for the moment there’s still hope. He lands at the port of Quiberon in Bretagne. I held the film up to the light. A storm has been brewing. The forks of lightning that were hand drawn on the film have all but disappeared, only traces of them remain. Figures of Dreyfus and his guard ascend steps leading to the quay. Sailors, probably sitting on the floor, sway back and forth as if they’re rocked by actual waves in an actual boat; otherwise the scene is gray and static like a nineteenth-century sculpture garden.
Prints from the 1890s are very dark. I turned out the light and laid the carefully unspooled strips across a light table. I wanted to jump ahead, but the storm needed repair. Too many frames had degenerated to dotty atmosphere, pointillist and vague. As creditors threatened and Alphabet’s accounts had the dry heaves, Julius wanted all these scenes dissolved. Kews, on the other hand, sent notes and left messages: preserve what you can then cut to the epilogue.
Louis Kahn wrote that a boy walks around the city and the city tells him what to do with himself. Architects may not be the only ones who look at the exterior of buildings and the layout of streets, parks, and bridges as a kind of visual or tactile guide indicating appropriate behavior and suggesting what to do next. I think his theory about walking around the city works well for girls, too. During lunch I went to the public library. The main branch was just a few blocks from Alphabet, its steps already littered with fallen leaves, and its hours reduced. Others on their lunch breaks brushed the detritus aside in order to sit on the steps and eat hot dogs, slices of pizza, drink sodas, and stare at the street. As I climbed the steps, I felt I ought to have been watching the street too, balling up paper wrapping and reading headlines over someone’s shoulder, yet I continued up the steps with a sense of purpose, aiming toward computer terminals and the smell of binding glue. The process would take about an hour. I looked up Artificially Arranged Scenes: the Films of Georges Méliès, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, All the President’s Men, the testimony of Oliver North and other transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings published in book form, and a biography of John Lennon. I handed my list to the librarian, but he came back empty handed. None of the books were on the shelves. He checked the computer and told me the same person had taken each out, and all were overdue.
“We’ll send him a postcard to see that they’re returned. Try us again at the end of the week.”
“I think I know the man who took them out.” There were hundreds of thousands of people with library cards who might have taken out these books. “Jack Kews.”
“Look under Zola.” The librarian spoke with a Russian accent. “J’accuse. You want I should look it up for you?”
“No, it’s a man’s name.”
“This I can not tell you.”
Light bounced off the librarian’s glasses so his eyes were difficult to see, and he winked at me. I couldn’t wink in return. Dust motes floated in the air above his black and gray hair.
“Jack Kews.” I repeated his name. No one was watching us. Awkwardly, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and slid it across the worn wooden counter.
“A fine,” he turned to a woman behind the counter who suddenly turned to look at a computer screen. After consulting an index card, the librarian wrote Jack Kews’s address and telephone number on a piece of paper. So I entered a silent deal or bargain with a man who hated his job, who wanted to sabotage the head librarian, who mis-shelved books.
A frieze ran around the hall, a leftover from when the shelves were organized differently and the images on the wall directed the reader to the area he or she searched. Egyptian figures, Greek gods, elm trees, elephants, whales, knights, birds in flight were markers of a now obsolete and long-abandoned visual lexicon. There was no place in the frieze for a symbol for books on microchips or superconductors.
The librarian, used to the complicated tenses and acrobatics of Russian, might find the expansiveness of English — the way it absorbs words and sentence constructions from all over, New York English with all its accents, dialects, and to say nothing of all the pidgins — chaotic, impossible to take seriously beyond what’s required for the job. Why not subvert the hard-to-pin-down order should the opportunity present itself. When asked about the disorder he created he looks at the frieze circling the hall and states the obvious. At night all the illustrated creatures come down from their respective perches and mix things up.
“Whatever you want, babechik. Books disappear every day.”
I tried to fix a noncommittal or businesslike expression on my face while in fact I was nervous, as if I’d been caught defacing a book and stood captive at the librarian’s mercy.
“Remember he can’t just hand them to you. He has to return them to us first.” He looked into the distance at a woman who was putting books in her bag until it was quite weighted down. “Mr. Kews always looked like he was stealing books from the reading room. We noticed he put books in his jacket as if he was thinking about stealing, but he did check them out.”
“Is there any particular day he comes in regularly?”
“No.”
The librarian walked over to a cart, pulled a book out, and handed it to me.
“He returned this one a few days ago. It hasn’t been re-shelved yet. You know, at first I thought Kews was one of these, because others come and ask questions about him, then I don’t see him anymore. Now if you will excuse me.”
Trying to look as if I didn’t understand what he meant I took Captain Dreyfus the Story of a Mass Hysteria from him and found a seat at a table. The room was nearly empty. The stacks and carrels were without any sign of industry; no sounds of writing or pages being turned were audible. A man sitting a few chairs to my left snored over a paper, arm stretched out across the table, glasses abandoned a few inches from his hand. Before beginning the book read so recently by Jack Kews I turned it over and over, finally opening it to the acknowledgments then thumbing through the first fifty pages. About a third through Captain Dreyfus the Story of Mass Hysteria, one line was marked.
While the rigidly restricted investigation by General Pellieux went droning on, the legal blinders making it [the trial] like the study of a book whose pages could not be opened. . . .
There the marking ended, but in the margins someone had written: I would like to open this book.
Méliès was taunting me, saying look at me, choose me, you’ll be seduced, entertained as you never have been before, and you won’t regret it either, not for a minute.
I picked up other cans and read the titles written on their labels, one after another: Pharmaceutical Hallucinations, Dreams of an Opium Fiend, Delirium in a Studio (Julius had said it was based on a Delacroix painting), Scheming Gambler’s Paradise, Melomaniac, Dislocation Extraordinary, A Terrible Night, Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter, Four Troublesome Heads. Not all the hockey pucks wou
ld unspool. You can easily give up or try to soften them, then make copies as quickly as possible. It’s like Russian roulette. Once unsealed they disintegrate rapidly because the base is breaking down. Unrolling film is like following a map that might break diagonally any minute. The strips are so brittle they snap if you so much as look at them. You put the pieces back together again with mylar. Dreyfus, the American invasion of Cuba, and dismembered body parts are all mixed together. Where is the real Méliès? Does Méliès ever turn to the audience or to his workers as they hammer and paint, does he ever turn to them and say, Sorry, I don’t feel like myself. Threatened by bankruptcy and violent family members, I can no longer make sound decisions, but keep the camera rolling anyway. The mixture of despondency with bursts of gallows humor reminded me of the moments when my mother used to quote Max Lieberman’s remark on the subject of the Nazis marching through the Brandenburg gate: “You can’t eat as much as you would like to throw up.”
The next note to come in the mail was a series of cartoons, unfolding like an accordion as I slit the tape that bound them.
They were drawn on the backs of postcards, one attached to the next. The postcards were tourist attractions from Paris: the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Les Deux Magots, the Champs d’Elysees, the Musée d’Orsay, the pyramid in front of the Louvre. The cartoons on the back were drawings of Emile Zola in New York done in ballpoint pen. He went to the top of the Empire State Building, visited the Lower East Side and the Fulton Fish Market. I wouldn’t have recognized the figure and buildings; they were drawn with very simple lines, but each tableau was labeled.
Jack lived in Brooklyn. Not in my neighborhood but in a building much closer to the river. There was a parking garage on one side of it and a laundromat on the other. Above the laundromat were the offices and classrooms of a technical school, and Antonya pointed out Styrofoam heads looking down at us, wigs pinned to their scalps. To the left of the laundromat was a Mail Boxes Etc. A man strolled out of it, walked to the front of Jack Kews’s building and positioned a milkcrate with his foot so he could sit on it as he looked through his mail. I wondered if the man was Kews, but he had white hair, was clean shaven and wore a pork-pie hat. He looked our way but didn’t speak to us as we stepped into the entrance. The hall was painted half-red, half-yellow, and its mailboxes were battered, the little doors swung off their hinges. Tenants probably rented the boxes next door in order to receive mail. We pressed a buzzer labeled Kews. No one answered, but Antonya pushed the front door. It was open. We walked up five flights of stairs and knocked on number 5B.
“There isn’t going to be anyone home if he didn’t answer the front door bell.”
“It might be broken.”
I knocked softly. Antonya knocked loudly. We heard nothing, standing in silence for a few minutes until a voice from behind a door across the hall called out to us.
“Hey girlies, girlies, come over here. You looking for Jack?” Antonya jumped.
From a crack in the door we could see a face pressed against the door chain. He smiled like the Coney Island laughing boy, aggressive and intimidating, an attempt to entice and threaten at the same time.
“Jack’s not in,” he told us.
“We know.”
“Do you know where he is? He owes me money. I lent him fifty dollars. Jack’s here from London illegally, you know,” the nearly disembodied voice croaked.
“Jack went to England years ago to avoid the draft. He had a low number like two or something.” He laughed to himself. “So he left, then he came back, and now he’s here, or he was here. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he owes me money.” The man rested his chin on the chain. “Another woman was looking for him yesterday. I told her the same thing. She could have been a nofky, or a ghost sent from immigration, from the police, or she could have been his girlfriend for all I know. It’s nothing to me what happens to him now that he’s skipped out. She could have been sent by a ghost of the draft board. Hey, be all that you can be in the army.” He snickered and sang off key. He appeared to salivate, white foam collected at the corners of his mouth, and although we only saw a sliver of him, it seemed that he was completely naked.
“What did she look like?”
“Like you, the one with short hair.” Antonya, who had been standing behind me, stepped out of his line of vision, almost slamming her back against the wall beside his door so he couldn’t see her, but I was the one with short hair.
“I can’t go out regularly, see, or I’d try to find him myself. I’m in a wheelchair. Jack used to help me out when the mood suited him.” He must have been supporting himself somehow, braced on shelves or ledges on either side of the inner jambs so he could stand.
Antonya rolled up a five-dollar bill and put it up to the man’s face. He opened his mouth so the could clamp the bill in his teeth, then he turned his head to spit it out somewhere behind him.
“Why won’t you open the door?” I asked out of a perverse streak to see if he could be completely unleashed.
“Nothing doing, girlies,” he said with obvious contempt, then the door slammed in our faces, and that was that. It was getting late, and we had to get back to Alphabet.
Downstairs by the mailboxes we looked at the labels beside the buzzers. The name on 5C was Lewisohn.
“What’s a nofky?”
“A prostitute.” It was a word I hadn’t ever heard during my childhood, not that I could remember. As an adult I was driving somewhere downtown with my mother when we saw a woman in a red dress with Christmas gnomes and reindeer printed along the bottom. It might have been made from an old tablecloth.
“There’s Dell, the alte nofky. Do you remember her?”
“No.”
“She was the school secretary, but she had another life.”
“How did you know?”
“I heard.”
Then I guessed what the word meant. She said it with some sadness as if beyond meaning prostitute the word implied that anyone could end up wearing dresses made from tablecloths and think no one noticed.
The way my mother said the words alte nofky meant, as I remembered, that we all conceal something — a past, pretensions, something, and we deceive ourselves into believing that we do so with success. An alte nofky lurked inside Lewisohn, Antonya, Julius, me, the librarian in impenetrable reflective glasses. Jack Kews was a stew of hidden identities. Maybe it was time to give up on him.
When I got back to the office I checked the postmark on the last letter he’d sent me. The print was barely legible, but the zip code looked like the same code as Alphabet’s. It must have been mailed within a few blocks of the Mayflower Building. If he had gone to Spartacus, a few hours’ drive north, I couldn’t imagine when he would have mailed the last letter, but there were enough gaps in the correspondence so that I wouldn’t have been able to account for his weekly movements even if I’d saved all the envelopes. He might have had someone else do the mailing for him. He led me to believe he had been following me around for a long time whether we came from the same city or not. I shook the stack and a small postcard I hadn’t seen before fluttered to the floor.
A twelve-year-old girl goes missing in Paris after this riot. Méliès is suspected. Star Films is searched by the police who overturn volcanoes, the North Pole, and the moon looking for her.
This was written on the back of a postcard from the 1939 World’s Fair. The date was circled, and he didn’t have to tell me of its significance. Never entirely dormant, the furies stirred up by the trial were in 1939 given an opportunity to boil over again. I propped it up in front of the can containing the newly preserved A Terrible Night, in which a man was attacked by giant bedbugs. There is no peace in his bed, no possibility of sleep, only aggravation. He hits them with a broom. Tough luck. When is a bug not really a bug? My bed was haunted by an insect who sent notes, who held up a corrupting mirror, who wouldn’t let me treat the Dreyfus film as a job like any other, who wouldn’t let meaning be. To everything I did he seemed to s
ay, you think this is precious stuff? It’s all been recycled. These shadowy, grainy figures left the refuge of the literal and abandoned the realm of the simple pictorial situation; he nudged them out. You think it’s just a strip of plastic, he seemed to be saying in his notes, think again. He loomed over the sheets, laughing and pinching. I would like to have blown up a frame of the traveler haunted by bugs and tacked it to my office door, but Alphabet wasn’t going to have a door much longer.
Dial 1-800-HISTORY.
On the television screen children in shorts and T-shirts stuck their heads into pillories while a voice overdescribed colonial forms of criminal punishment. Men wearing wigs pounded anvils, and women, also in wigs, smiled back at them. A family in tennis whites was transformed: mother and daughter swished from stable to parlor in long dresses, father and son suddenly carrying lanterns instead of camcorders, braids grown down their backs. My eye ached. I had nothing to do, so I reached for the telephone.
Thank you for calling Colonial Williamsburg. All our reservation agents are busy at the moment. We take your call very seriously. Please stay on the line. This message will not repeat.
The man next door hammered into our adjoining wall while singing along with the radio. Telephone wedged between ear and shoulder I reached for a pencil, but as I listened to him sing and as I considered the deadlines I faced at work, the idea of a colonial village where tobacco was harvested but no one smoked, a place where slaves smiled, baked bread, and walked unhindered by chains made me anxious. I’ve got you under my skin, my neighbor sang. Pocahattans played by students on summer vacation handed the villagers what looked like pemmican and peace pipes, then held out their hands and were given, in turn, strands of glass beads. The colonial family was buying the Chesapeake Bay. Terrified, I hung up the phone, then fell asleep.
