The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Seigl was aroused, excited. He felt in Alma Busch a blind groping implacable will stronger than his own will. Her eyes seemed to him literally blind, the eyes of an undersea creature, nourished by darkness. “Alma. Here are survivors.” He opened one of the larger books of photographs. These had been taken by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White at the time of the Allied liberation of Buchenwald in spring 1945. “Human skeletons. Yet they manage to stand. Their eyes are blank, their brains have been damaged by malnutrition.” Seigl turned the page as Alma stared. “These are the dead, Alma. Stacked like firewood to be burnt. You see those people walking along the road? They lived in the vicinity. There was a town close by. They could smell human beings being burnt, cremated. They seemed scarcely to care. They were ‘Christians.’ ” Alma recoiled, a hand over her eyes.

  She left the room. She would say nothing about what Seigl had shown her, that day. But next morning, bringing Seigl a pot of tea, she said in a reedy, ringing voice, “They could be faked, Mr. S-Seigl! Photographs. Like in movies.”

  Seigl regarded her coldly.

  “All right, Alma. You can leave now.”

  “Well, they could. A movie is faked, it’s pictures.”

  Alma hurried from the room. Seigl felt the floorboards vibrate beneath her clumsy feet. He vowed he would never speak to his assistant again about this subject, it so upset him. And the girl was only just ignorant after all, as Jet had identified her: an Aryan peasant.

  “MR. SEIGL?”

  “Yes, Alma.”

  “I guess . . . You lived this?”

  Seigl glanced up, and was stunned to see Alma holding a copy of The Shadows against her chest. Incredibly, it appeared to be the battered copy that Jet had sent, minus its cover which Alma had removed, perhaps, out of tact.

  “Alma! You’ve read my novel?”

  Alma was blinking rapidly, as if thinking what to say. Seigl supposed she’d read the beginning, at least. Maybe she’d skimmed the rest. Maybe, a slow reader, she was still making her way through the one hundred eighty compactly written pages. The Shadows was a novel in genre only: it contained few dramatic scenes, virtually no dialogue, its lengthy, Proustian paragraphs frequently ran for pages. Seigl had imagined it as the verbal approximation of memory, experienced in an undersea, undulating zone of sublunary consciousness. Alma said, choosing her words with care, “I started it. Last night.”

  Seigl smiled foolishly. His heart kicked! His leaky-valved heart. Never would he have expected Alma Busch of all people to be standing before him, clutching a copy of The Shadows against her young shapely body.

  Alma said awkwardly, “It’s sad. It made me cry. I was thinking . . . how my own family would be. If it was us.”

  Seigl said, “Well.” He too was overcome with awkwardness. For years he hadn’t been able to bear speaking of The Shadows with any reader; he’d come to fear and loathe praise, and questions about the novel’s relationship to his father’s family roused him to anger. He had never been criticized to his face, and wondered if he might prefer that. Even the few qualified reviews the novel had received were respectful, complaining of the young novelist’s expectations that a reader might wish to work quite so hard to read his novel.

  Alma said, shyly, “ ‘Jacob’ is meant to be you, I guess, Mr. Seigl?”

  Jacob Seigl was the novel’s first, eighteen-year-old speaker. He’d been born in 1921 in Munich. Did Alma truly believe that he, Joshua Seigl, was over eighty years old? “No, Alma. Not exactly.”

  Alma protested, “He talks like you. He sounds like you.”

  “No, Alma. Jacob doesn’t sound in the least like me. The novel’s language has been composed to make you think so, as if the speaker were addressing you intimately; as if, almost, the speaker is you, having these experiences long before you were born.”

  Alma smiled, confused. “But Jacob looks like you.”

  Seigl laughed. “Have you ever seen Jacob Seigl, Alma?”

  “But—Aharon and Erika, they were your parents?”

  Alma was looking so anxious, Seigl was reluctant to correct her.

  “Alma, dear, no. Aharon and Erika are wholly fictitious characters. They were based upon my father’s parents, or, rather, my father’s memories of his parents as he described them to me, but I never knew those people: they died a quarter-century before I was born. Everything in The Shadows is invented except the landscape and certain dates in the history of Germany and the War.”

  “ ‘Invented.’ ” Alma looked as if suddenly there were a bad taste in her mouth.

  Seigl said, “The Shadows is a novel, Alma. I’m sure you’ve read many novels? Even when a novel is ‘real,’ its subject is its own language. Like music.”

  Alma was shaking her head, frowning. Seigl could see that the subject had become disagreeable to her. She feels she has been tricked. Poor Alma! He wanted to apologize to her.

  Alma said, “What happened to somebody else, you have a right to pretend it was you?”

  “Of course I have a ‘right,’ Alma. And so do you.”

  “To lie about who I am? My name? What happened to me?”

  “Not to lie. I meant, to invent: if you were writing fiction.”

  “Why is that different? This isn’t different.” Alma held the battered copy of Seigl’s novel, now rather disdainfully. Its sorry state, waterstained and stabbed-at, seemed a sudden manifestation, as in a fantasy film, of its spiritual worth.

  Seigl felt the absurdity of the situation. He hardly needed to defend the human imagination! And to an uneducated slow-witted girl who could barely place one word in front of another. Yet he heard himself saying, protesting, “Alma, you have the wrong idea. Just because a novel is formally invented hardly means that it isn’t about something very real in the human spirit. You read the Bible, don’t you? Your ministers preach from the Bible, don’t they? The Bible is hardly ‘real.’ ”

  Stony-eyed Alma stood blinking at him. The horror struck Seigl, she believed the Bible was real?

  “Alma, I think of myself as writing stories for others. In place of others who are dead, or mute. Who can’t speak for themselves.”

  “But you don’t know. You write like you know and you don’t know.”

  “I know what I’ve been told, and what I can imagine. I know what I, myself, have felt.”

  Alma said, disgusted, “You’re stealing from them. Some people you didn’t even know. And other prisoners in ‘D-Dash—’ ”

  “ ‘Dachau.’ ”

  “—in that place, you’re pretending you were there with them.”

  Somehow, this seemed to Alma the most repulsive act of all.

  “You made ‘Dash-aw’ up, too, didn’t you! You made it all up! You pretended you were there, and you weren’t. It’s all lies.”

  Alma placed the mutilated book on the edge of a table some feet from Seigl, as if not wanting to come any nearer to him. Her hands with their cobwebbed backs were trembling. Seigl observed in silence. He had not a word more to say on this sorry subject.

  She hates me now. I broke her heart.

  13

  HIM? MEATTE’S GONE.”

  The Tattooed Girl stood transfixed. Gone?

  She had not seen her lover in three weeks. She had waited for him to call, and he had not. Until finally she called the number he’d given her, telling her never to call unless it was an emergency, but this number was disconnected. And calling information she was told There is no listing of that party in this directory.

  In these three weeks it was spring. It had become spring. The sun-warmed air gnawed at her, roused her to a terrible yearning between the legs, she could not bear.

  Sick at heart and hating him. And the last they’d been together, he’d told her he was crazy about her.

  Finally she went to the place he lived, he’d taken her to many times, but he’d forbidden her ever to approach except by his invitation, but there were others living there now, who claimed not to know him. The Tattooed Girl wanted to scream
at them knowing they were lying.

  Now the Tattooed Girl was desperate, she had no choice daring to go to The Café where he had forbidden her ever to enter warning he would strangle her with his bare hands if she did so. If she even showed her face in the front window. She was terrified of entering the restaurant she had not entered since that first night he’d been kind to her so long ago though guessing he would not be there, and he was not. And when she asked for Dmitri Meatte she saw the pity and scorn in the men’s eyes.

  They were laughing at her she could see. The other young waiter, and the other one. The cashier. In the kitchen the cook and the busboys were laughing, laughing. A boy with a rash-reddened wedge face and a slimy lower lip leaned so close to Alma, she could smell his sour breath. Saying, “Want me to take you to Meatte, sweetheart? I can.”

  “Just t-tell me where he is.”

  “See, sweetie, Meatte told me: ‘When my girl comes looking for me bring her to where I am. Don’t tell her ‘cause she’d get lost. She ain’t so bright, she’d get lost.’ That’s exactly what Meatte said, ain’t it, Bo-Bo?”

  Bo-Bo shrugged irritably.

  The rash-reddened boy was laughing like a deranged parrot.

  “Here’s a girl wants her Meatte! Wants her Meatte-Meatte!”

  The kitchen smells assailed her. Hot grease. She couldn’t breathe. One of the busboys nudged at her breast, grinning. The Tattooed Girl was panicked suddenly thinking they would gang up on her. Even the cook her daddy’s age. Blindly she pushed past them, careened against a counter searching for something sharp or something hot. Her fingers snatched at a deep-frier as the cook cursed her seizing her by the back of the neck and walking her swiftly to the rear door, shoved her out into the alley against the trash cans.

  “Keep your fat ass out of here, bitch.”

  Ever afterward, the Tattooed Girl would hear those hyena howls of laughter.

  14

  He has seen into my soul. Now he knows.

  Yet it was strange: he hadn’t asked her to leave. Yet.

  After she’d mouthed off like that, another employer would have fired her at once. Kicked her out. Alma Busch’s fat ass, unwanted. What she deserved.

  But, Seigl! You could not figure a Jew.

  “ALMA.”

  She was standing hesitantly in a doorway. She could not recall why. Where she was going. In her mind she was pushing away the men’s grabbing hands. She was snatching at the deep-frier filled with hot grease and sliced potatoes on top of the stove. She might have overturned this onto those who mocked her, and onto herself. Her disfigured hands, her ruined face. In her memory the man who’d been her lover was with the others laughing at her. Fat ass. Bitch. Out of here. It was a deserved punishment though she could not remember why.

  “Alma, is something wrong?”

  The Tattooed Girl turned a vague blank dead-doll face toward this voice.

  Seigl. Her employer. The Jew, who’d been so kind to her.

  Between them now there was an air of caution, unease. Alma had at once accepted it, that she would be asked to leave, yet two, and now three days had passed, and Seigl had not asked her to leave, though there was a stiffness to him now, a wariness in the man’s eyes. Always, since coming to work for Seigl, in this house, she had believed that no words Alma Busch might utter could have the slightest significance and so it surprised her, that Seigl had spoken to her as he had. She had seen the shock and hurt in his face, was this caused by her?

  Wanting to say, But I’m nobody. I’m nothing.

  Wanting to say, Just kick me out. I deserve it.

  Her employer was so polite! It could not be real, could it? She was hating him less, maybe. He was taking that from her, the thrill of her hatred.

  Though he was still the Jew to her—the rich, smug Jew living in this house. That, she would not forget.

  Now he was asking, was something wrong. Because she had been behaving so strangely these past few days. Staring and seeing nothing, biting at her thumbnail until it bled.

  Mutely Alma shook her head.

  “Since the other day, our discussion . . .” Seigl spoke like one who knows beforehand what he will say. Alma who seemed never to know what she would say was grateful for this. The Jew speaking in his Jew manner, like a professor. He would not be emotional now, and he would not surprise her. Alma recalled how she had taken comfort of a kind in school hearing a teacher’s voice, the words prepared and uttered for years, washing over her, lulling, impersonal. She did not want the personal, she did not want to be Alma, and to be hurt, and to bleed, in this place. “You said you had heard that the Holocaust never ‘happened’? I’ve been wondering who told you that, Alma. Because obviously somebody told you. It can’t have been a supposition you’ve made for yourself.”

  Alma was biting at her thumbnail. Seigl waited patiently for her to speak.

  “Maybe in school . . . ?”

  “In school? One of your teachers? I doubt that.”

  Alma tried to remember: there had been a film, maybe. A film about the Holocaust, and Jews. She hadn’t seen it, hadn’t been in school all that week. Eighth grade, or ninth. Somebody said it was a Jewish holiday, some kind of holiday: Holocaust?

  Alma’s mouth was going sullen. The kind of mouth you got slapped for back home.

  “OK. I don’t know.”

  “Was it someone in your family, Alma?”

  “Someone—what?”

  “Telling you the Holocaust was a fraud.”

  “ ‘Fraud’? I don’t know.”

  “You said, the pictures could be faked. The photographs I showed you. They were originally published in Life magazine. Why would Life magazine have published fraudulent photographs? It was hardly a Jewish publication.”

  Alma shrugged. Why? She had no idea.

  “Was it someone at your church? In Pennsylvania?”

  Alma gave an impression of thinking. She shook her head slowly.

  “It would not have been someone more recently, in Carmel Heights?”

  Again, Alma shook her head. No?

  Seigl sighed. He was close to being pissed with her, she knew.

  The Tattooed Girl, her blind implacable will. You made it all up. It’s all lies.

  “Alma, I don’t mean to interrogate you. But it’s disturbing to me that you, of all people, so good-hearted a person, so naturally generous, should have stereotyped ideas about Jews. Because obviously these ideas are not your own, they’ve been imposed upon you by your elders.”

  Alma smiled guardedly. Yes?

  Seigl stroked at his chin. He’d begun to let his beard grow back but it was a shorter, trimmer beard now. His clothes were less disheveled though they fit him loosely, he’d been losing weight for months. Some days, you could see that this was a sick man: that haunted look in his eyes. Other days, you could not. When Seigl was looking ill Alma felt a pang of concern, that he really was sick, something would really happen to him . . .

  “Do you personally believe, Alma, that Jews are somehow different from you and your family? Jews are—what? Exotic? Treacherous? Dangerous? Not to be trusted? Likely to swindle you? A separate and distinct race of human being?” Seigl smiled. He might have been speaking to a small recalcitrant child. “Surely you aren’t one of those who think that Jews have horns, are you?”

  Alma frowned. What kind of horns?

  “Horns like this.” Seigl made horns with his fingers, protruding from his forehead. The gesture was meant to make Alma smile, and so Alma did.

  With a clumsy sort of levity Alma said, hugging her rib cage, “Well. Not you.” She laughed, more shrilly than she wished. “I guess.”

  “Maybe I’ve had my horns removed, eh? They do that with goats. Saw ‘em off.”

  Alma said carefully, “A Jewish person is no different from—any other person. Except in history, I mean.” Alma frowned, not sure what the hell she meant. She resented it, Seigl watching her so closely all the time. “In a way of thinking.”

  “Whic
h way of thinking, Alma?”

  “A Jewish way . . . I guess.”

  “Which is?”

  Alma’s eyes evaded his. Those Jew-eyes! This was why she hated him.

  “ ‘The Chosen People.’ That’s what you—that’s what they call themselves. Jewish persons.”

  Seigl laughed. “They do? Have you heard this, personally?”

  Alma smiled. No.

  “Do you think I’m Jewish, Alma?”

  Alma frowned. What was the answer to this?

  “But I’m not, Alma. I’m not Jewish.”

  Alma’s eyes lifted to his, shocked.

  “You seem surprised. In fact, I’m not Jewish: my mother was a Gentile. That Presbyterian church I’ve let you out at, it’s the very church I was baptized in. A long time ago.”

  Alma stared at him. “You’re kidding, I guess . . . ?”

  “Kidding? Why?”

  “You are Jewish. ‘Seigl.’ ”

  “My father was Jewish. Not my mother. I can’t be Jewish then by birth. And I’m not Jewish by conversion. I have no religion, Alma. Not the kind you check on forms.”

  Alma continued to stare at him. The Jew: what was he saying?

  “Of course, the Nazis would have classified me as Jewish. I’d have had to wear a yellow star. Maybe that’s the kind of ‘Jewish’ you’re thinking of? A Nazi-Jew?” Seigl was trying to speak as if bemused, but Alma knew better.

  There was a roaring in her ears like distant waves. Alma stood as if dazed. Not a Jew! Not a Jew!

  “Are you disappointed, Alma? Why?”

  She went away from him. She would have a vague memory of him calling after her. The mark on her cheek pulsed like an infection.

  Not a Jew! And she had hated him so long.

  IN HER ROOM the Tattooed Girl shut her hands into fists and beat beat against her thighs. She saw her pale glaring face in the mirror brainless as a moon.

  What had Seigl said: his mother was a Gentile? Not a Jew? He was not a Jew? To be Jewish, you had to have a Jewish mother? Was this so? Then why didn’t such a person as Joshua Seigl change his name? Why would he wish to be mistaken for a Jew, except to deceive?