The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She wondered what Dmitri Meatte would say to this. She would have liked to spit it into his face: Seigl is not a Jew.

  She was too upset to return upstairs. She thought, A man who plays at being a Jew is worse than any Jew.

  “Because he declares himself a ‘Jew’—and he lies in this.”

  This seemed right to her. She was exhausted. She sank into a deep stuporous sleep from which she wanted never to wake.

  15

  HE WAS AN optimist!

  He didn’t believe in sin. Still less in original sin. He believed in personal failings.

  HE WAS AN optimist.

  “An optimist is one who has no choice.”

  IN EARLY MAY he called his closest friends to tell them he’d decided to undergo a radical chemotherapy treatment his neurologist had suggested to “halt the progress” of his deteriorating condition. It involved a week’s hospitalization, IV fluids would drip continuously into his veins. He was likely to suffer mania, depression. It would be a rough siege. After he was discharged he would have more chemotherapy, probably.

  He heard Sondra Blumenthal draw in her breath.

  “Oh, Joshua. Is this safe?”

  “ ‘Safe’? Is life ‘safe’?”

  “Don’t make jokes, Joshua. Is it safe?”

  Seigl gave an impression of pondering the question.

  “Friedman says yes. To a degree.”

  “What are the possible side effects?”

  Seigl laughed irritably. You had to hand it to the woman: going for the jugular.

  “AN OPTIMIST IS one who lives in the moment, but plans for the future. As if he won’t be there.”

  Seigl made an appointment to see the family lawyer, Crossman.

  This visit he’d been postponing for a decade.

  Time to draw up a will.

  He said, “I want not to be distracted by the ‘future.’ I want to be responsible, as I guess I haven’t always been.”

  Seigl meant, and Crossman knew that he meant, Seigl’s lifelong indifference to finances, family investments, property. The estate his father and his father-in-law had amassed that had been left to a small circle of heirs.

  Seigl saw Crossman’s agile eyes drop toward his, Seigl’s, knees, legs. And lift again to Seigl’s face.

  The lawyer said, carefully, “I’d been wondering when I might hear from you, Joshua.”

  The Karl Seigl Memorial Foundation. Seigl signed documents, and by the time he left Crossman’s office he was poorer by twelve million dollars.

  THERE HAD RETURNED to Seigl’s life, at about the time that Seigl was being made to consider his mortality in more than theoretical/poetic terms, the young scholar whose surname was Essler.

  We might be related. Very distantly. Cousins?

  They met again at a religious studies conference at Columbia University in April. At the conclusion of a panel discussion in which Seigl had been a dominant voice, Essler approached him awkwardly. “You probably don’t remember me, Dr. Seigl, but—” Seigl interrupted, “Certainly I remember you. ‘Jeremy Essler.’ You’re writing a dissertation at the University of Rochester on Holocaust literature. In fact, I’ve been thinking of you.”

  Seigl invited Essler to join him and several others for dinner. Next morning they met for breakfast and talked for hours. By the time they shook hands in parting, Seigl had asked Essler if he might consider, sometime in the future, acting as Seigl’s literary executor.

  Quickly Seigl said, “It wouldn’t be pro bono. You’d be paid a salary out of a foundation I’m establishing.”

  “Dr. Seigl, I’d be deeply honored. Thank you!”

  The young man spoke so eagerly, Seigl felt a pang of dismay.

  “Probably it won’t happen for a long time. Decades.”

  Essler smiled. Since Seigl had seen him the previous fall he’d grown a beard, sand-colored, trimmed short, that made him appear older, and on the third finger of his left hand was a gold wedding band which he was turning compulsively.

  “I’m not impatient, Dr. Seigl. I can wait.”

  INVITATIONS FROM EUROPE: the Swedish Book Fair in September, the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and in November a symposium in Rome on a fashionably esoteric topic, “The (Re)Discovery of the Body: Ancient and Modern Visions.” Seigl had no new book, but there were new translations of older books of his being published abroad. It was as if his posthumous life was well under way, without his knowledge.

  His immediate impulse was to decline the invitations. He’d been declining similar invitations for years. Then it occurred to him: if the chemotherapy worked, he might be fully restored to his health. (Not that Seigl could recall what “his” health had ever been. It seemed touchingly distant to him now as his childhood.) If he was fully restored to his health, he must accept! Ever new adventures awaited Joshua Seigl, intellectual, romantic, erotic.

  He would visit Munich, where out of a dread of vertigo, the vertigo of history, he had never gone. And maybe Dachau, too.

  “My origin.”

  It was an obscene riddle. If Karl Seigl hadn’t been sent away by his desperate parents in 1939, to be taken in by relatives in New York City, how could Joshua Seigl have come into existence, twenty-five years later?

  AND ALMA BUSCH was a riddle. Lingering now in the doorway of Seigl’s study after she’d brought him his mail.

  “Alma, yes?”

  Since their last exchange the previous week the mood between them was subdued, muted. How many times Seigl had heard that nasal reedy astounded voice You are Jewish. Alma had a way of seeming to fade out of a room when Seigl glanced up, as if her fleshy body were an apparition. He spoke to her only when required, though always kindly. He’d been furious with her and had disliked her and he was telling himself he felt sorry for her, never would he speak ironically to her again, or with emotion quavering in his voice.

  She said, faltering, “What—is going to happen?”

  “When, Alma? To whom?”

  He supposed she had overheard him speaking on the phone. But he would make her explain.

  “You’re going to the—hospital? For ch-chemotherapy?”

  “Yes. But not for cancer. This is something different.”

  Alma regarded him with such forlorn, frightened eyes, Seigl was touched.

  He told her of his plans. A week in the medical school hospital. A “new, radical” treatment for his condition. When he was discharged, if he needed home care, he would hire a nurse, of course. “I wouldn’t expect you to do that kind of work, Alma. You aren’t trained, and it isn’t the kind of work you’ve agreed to.”

  “But I work for you. I would be here.”

  Alma was holding her arms tight against her torso, flattening her breasts between them in a way that must have been painful. Seigl wanted to seize her wrists and yank her arms apart. Her beautiful body, so deformed! He looked away from her, speaking rapidly, as if impersonally. “In fact, I’ve been thinking you could take some time off, too. You’ve been here in this house, as my assistant, without a break for months. You don’t even take weekends off any longer. I haven’t wanted to ask why.”

  Alma, staring at him intensely, said nothing.

  Seigl was wondering: did he want to send Alma away? Was that the point of this conversation?

  “You could take a vacation. Visit your family . . .”

  Alma protested, “I’m working for you, Mr. Seigl! I should be helping you. When you’re in the hospital . . .”

  “But this is an opportunity for you to take a break. You must miss your family.”

  Alma gave a bitter bemused little cry. As if she knew quite well that her employer was tormenting her.

  “See, Mr. Seigl, I don’t have any ‘family’ anymore. I’m working for you.”

  Seigl thought guiltily, But I’m not your family.

  In the early evening, Seigl entered the kitchen where Alma was preparing his dinner. Rarely did Seigl enter the kitchen when Alma was in it, his presence so distracted her. She
would cease whatever she was doing and stand at attention waiting for him to speak. If he was simply going to the cupboard, or to the refrigerator, she would wait in silence until he turned to leave. Now she nearly dropped a heavy casserole dish she was bringing to place in the oven. He heard her draw in her breath. He said, “Alma, I’ve been thinking: while I’m away, why don’t you start a course of some kind? There’s an excellent night school at Mount Carmel College, for adults. There are other schools in the city. I’ll pay your tuition, of course.” Seigl spoke warmly now, in his rapid, impersonal voice. He might have been speaking to a stranger. “You could learn to type on a computer. You could enroll in a degree program: in a business school. There’s an education school at the University of Rochester. You said you had a high school diploma, why not continue your education?”

  Alma’s eerily colorless silvery eyes were fixed upon Seigl’s chest. Yet she seemed scarcely to be seeing him.

  As if taking a course is the answer to the riddle of Alma Busch’s life. Seigl felt ashamed of himself, without knowing exactly why.

  16

  SEIGL WOULD HAVE no visitors at the hospital, except his assistant, who was to bring him mail, newspapers, books and things he needed from home. But Alma arrived early and remained through the day.

  “Alma, you don’t have to stay here. You can leave.”

  He’d told himself on the eve of checking into the hospital that he wasn’t frightened. He was an optimist now, and an optimist is never frightened. “I’ve been feeling very American lately,” he told his friends. “My old, European soul is being sloughed off.” He was being fanciful, yet perhaps there was truth in what he said. He’d told himself too that he was looking forward to this week of privacy. Rather like being imprisoned, in a cell the size of a bed. Hooked up to a magical potion dripping into his veins. This would be an intellectual and spiritual retreat. He was sure it would be “good for him” in ways other than merely physical.

  At first, Seigl was able to work. To a degree. He wanted to concentrate on the Aeneid. He was fierce and stubborn in his dedication to the massive poem even as, he was beginning to sense, his motive for having begun translating it was waning. Virgilian melancholy and subordination to destiny had less appeal to him now, he didn’t know why. His soul had been altered by the alterations in his body. His soul was a shadow, a reflection of his body. Was that it?

  He vowed he wouldn’t give up. Always, he loved the poetry.

  Except: the precision required in translating Virgil wore him out far more rapidly than it usually did. Especially, reworking the numerous passages he’d lost exhausted him, for he was trying to remember what he’d originally written. It sickened him anew, having lost so many hours of work. “What I deserve, I suppose. For being so careless.”

  Alma, seated at his bedside, glanced over at him. Had Seigl spoken aloud?

  It was beginning to be difficult to tell. What were his thoughts merely, and what were his spoken words. He was certain he’d told the young blond woman who was his assistant to go home, she needn’t remain with him, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain if he’d spoken these words aloud. He wasn’t certain of her name: “ ‘Alma’?” Suddenly the drug dripping like acid into the bruised vein at the crook of Seigl’s left arm was having a bizarre effect upon his mind. Like a funhouse mirror. Like a flight of crooked zigzagging steps. You start confidently to climb, and find yourself . . . Where?

  Seigl was writing by hand, block-printing laboriously. He asked Alma to bring him his laptop, he’d never much used at home disliking its small screen, but now the screen was impossible, the tiny letters swimming like ants in his vision. He saw that the absurdly lightweight mechanism contained an X ray of his brain: that was what the screen showed! He shoved it from him, frightened. “Mr. Seigl? Is something wrong?” The corrosive liquid dripping into his vein was circulating to his heart. He moaned in fear.

  Alma hurried to get a nurse.

  Later, he heard women’s voices from somewhere close by. One of them repeated his name Mr. Seigl—Mr. Seigl—Mr. Seigl—in a way fascinating and mysterious.

  She loves me he thought. She will protect me.

  Another day? He was ravenously hungry. His hand shook lifting a spoon. Flowers were delivered: a half-dozen long-stemmed waxy-white roses. Seigl squinted at the card, couldn’t make out the name. There was some joke (his?) that the President of the United States had sent these flowers. Squinting at Virgil’s Latin lines now made the translator sick.

  Alma read off names. Names on cards? These were friends Seigl could dimly recall. Out of pride he’d forbidden any of them to come to the hospital to see him. Wouldn’t advise it, the neurologist had warned.

  Liquid meals. Bouillon, skim milk. Jell-O. How delicious Jell-O was! Seigl had devalued this astonishing invention. He wondered if strawberry Jell-O was an American invention.

  “This. We’ll have this. All the time when I get out.”

  Alma, quietly opening mail, glanced over at him. Possibly he’d spoken aloud, but what had he said?

  Now he was fully awake. Tottering into the bathroom with the IV gurney attached to his arm was an excellent way of being wakened fully. Returning, and climbing onto the bed. These hospital beds were marvels of machinery. Cranking up, cranking down. Seigl was all-business now going through a copyedited manuscript. When he was finished with each page, Alma took it from him. She would fax these pages to the editor in London. His assistant was learning to decipher editors’ scrawls, and would read queries to Seigl. This way, he could work with his eyes shut.

  And there were phone messages, numerous messages Seigl was determined to answer.

  Dialing numbers from his hospital bed. Except Alma was better able to dial these numbers for him. When Seigl spoke, he made an effort to speak clearly, forcibly. He wanted no pity from anyone. He wanted no tales told of him. A degenerative disease. Wasting disease. Poor Joshua must be desperate. In mid-sentence he began to forget to whom he was speaking. Fascinated, he could see himself forgetting: it was like watching a short thread being drawn through a needle’s eye.

  The receiver began to slip from his drowsy fingers. The young blond woman with the birthmark on her face took it from him. “Mr. Seigl has to hang up now. He will call you back another time.”

  Seigl began to weep. For he knew it would never be another time.

  THEY WERE WAKING him. More blood to be drawn? His parched mouth gasped like the mouth of a giant pike caught by a hook through its upper lip. Friedman had come to examine him, and went away again before Seigl could joke with him. Seigl sulked, misunderstood. He was ravenously hungry but a few swallows, and he began to gag. Still, sunshine flooded through the window like a shower of gold. He stared, deeply moved. This has been arranged for me. I am a privileged patient.

  Somehow, without his knowing it, the lye solution was dripping now into Seigl’s right elbow, into another bruised but durable vein. Seigl was eager to believe this meant he had passed the midway point.

  Seigl no longer tried to work. No longer the pretense of work.

  It was laughable: the absurdity of “work.”

  Squinting his eyes to read even the newspaper made him nauseated. The most he could manage were the comic strips. (But Alma had to read the dialogue in the little balloons for him.) If he picked up a pen, and tried to write, his fingers balked. Swollen from cortisone they were, unmanageable.

  He wanted only to be touched. Sponge-bathed very gently.

  Alma took over this task. Alma was awkward but determined.

  He winced, his skin hurt! As if the outermost layer had been peeled away.

  Alma said she was sorry.

  Seigl hadn’t strength to ask for what. Why?

  Alma said she was sorry, the things she’d said.

  The room was darkened, it might have been night. Seigl slept. There was some controversy, his friends were heatedly discussing it, whether in fact Seigl had died. Yet at the floor of the sea he was drifting with the current, and was
fully conscious of being alive. It was silent, so far beneath the surface of the water. Shadowy shapes glided near, soundless. Their blade faces and open, staring, lidless eyes.

  In this place he was creating a magic code. Words and numerals. The laptop he’d detested was restored to him, now its screen was luminous and magnified and he commanded it. Here, at the bottom of the sea, Seigl was granted the power to deflect the course of Time. He could control Time before his birth by a special key on the laptop. You depressed “code” and then this key, at the upper-right of the keyboard. In this way Seigl was empowered to repeal the Nuremberg Laws of 1935! This was the secret. To deflect the course of the War, and of the Holocaust, it was necessary only to repeal the Nuremberg Laws. Seigl understood, he hadn’t the power single-handedly to deflect the course of Time altogether. But the Nuremberg Laws, yes!

  That was why he was so happy, waking. Alma stared at him in surprise.

  She’d brought his CD player. Since he hated TV. During his waking hours they would listen to music. This too was something he could do with his eyes shut. He’d requested Mozart, piano sonatas. Bach, cello sonatas. Chopin’s Preludes. Piano pieces by Ravel, Debussy, Bartók. Cello, not piano, sonatas of Beethoven. The great piano sonatas of Beethoven were too exhausting for Seigl to listen to, in his weakened state.

  Alma was sitting with her head back against the wall, arms folded beneath her breasts. Like the nurses she was wearing white. Like the nurses she was wearing her hair close to her head, brushed back from her forehead. Seigl could see: her forehead was creased with near-invisible lines. Seigl wanted to take hold of her hands and comfort her. Of course, I love you. I will never send you away.

  He was so happy! Such visions were granted him.

  Yet: the siege continued. He tried to explain to the doctor that he was cured now, he could go home now, but the siege continued. The terrible dripping into his veins continued.