“What you mean—not there?” This was Baby Ain’t.
“I mean that when I reached for her and grasped her—nothing. She was made of air. I could see her right in front of me, floating, gasping, her mouth wide open, little points of flame inside, her eyes rolled back—but she wasn’t there. Mutter, she kept crying, Mutter! German for ‘mother.’ But see, when I grasped her, she seemed to come apart in my hands—dissolve, like. And all of it: the General Slocum, which had started rolling over on her side, the burned hull and the lit-up bodies in the waves—it was all not there, but there. I know what a dream is, what a Sight-fit is. But I was full awake. I seen clear what had happened right there on North Brother Island, because the island had never stopped seeing it. North Brother don’t know how to make its peace with what happened there right on its shores. I spent that whole night trying to save people in the water—calling for help, trying to drag bodies onto the rocks—but all of it was air. My great-granddaddy the riverboat captain—he told me to keep trying to save them if I could. That it would matter to Time Undone. He said this here was Shattered Time on North Brother.
“He lost his own brother Henry in a steamboat accident. Boiler blew up and Henry was blasted up in the air and inhaled scalding steam that cooked his lungs. All the people steamed alive and the great paddle wheel sunk down, under water, spinning, in flames. My great-granddaddy had just missed being on that boat. He’d started out on it, then transferred to pilot another one ’cause of an argument—but see, Henry stayed on and died. A part of my great-granddaddy died on that boat. He never let it go. And you know, he was a seer too: he told me he’d seen his brother Henry dead, lying in a coffin laid on two chairs, with roses, all white and one red, placed on his chest—just as he found him in the makeshift morgue near the river and the nurses coming by to put those same roses he Seen, over Henry’s heart. He had to make up stories about Henry’s death so that he could go on living with himself. So he made Henry a hero, said he was killed going back to the boat to save lives. So when he spoke he said, Keep swimming, Polly Lyle—your eyes will make sense of it! Finally it was dawn and those drowning souls began to disappear as it got light. I waded back to shore and I crawled up on the rocks. I’d swallowed a whale’s worth of water and I was bloody with cuts and bruises. I crawled back blind to the lighthouse and I tried to warm myself and clean myself. When I passed a little broken piece of mirror still nailed up on the wall, I saw that my hair had turned all white. And I thought this might be what my great-granddaddy meant about it makin’ sense somehow—but it still don’t get all the way up to an explanation for me. I couldn’t find my way to sense. A lot of my brain went white then too—dead white after that night, in the places where the images press on, like fingerprints left on the spaces where you think. If you see what I’m talkin’ about.”
There was quiet so deep I suddenly heard the planes again, then nothing.
Then Akilah reached over and touched Polly’s arm.
“What happened, Polly,” she asked, in a ragged voice unlike her usual voice, a voice shaking with emotion, “to Lewis and Mandy?”
A day or two later, I ran up the Forty-second Street Library steps, past the sphinxlike lions, and found a seat in the great Reference Room, one of my favorite places on earth—and I looked up the General Slocum disaster. The General Slocum was an excursion ferry built in 1891, and it was huge—it could fit in three thousand passengers. On June 15, 1904, the ferry, chartered by Kleindeutschland—Little Germany, the German immigrant community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—sailed off with just over a thousand members of its church group for its yearly picnic. Most of those aboard were women and children. The boat took off from the pier at Third Street and the East River with flags flying and an oompah band playing on the deck. They were headed for Locust Point, on the Sound. The captain was sixty-some years old, with a perfect safety record. As the boat was passing Randalls Island in Hell Gate—just about where the Triborough Bridge spans the river today—there were cries of “Fire!” on deck. A young boy named Freddy saw the flames early (in the straw in the boiler room) and ran shouting to warn the captain, who thought he was joking and threw him out of the pilothouse. Little Freddy had run up and down the decks, warning people who wouldn’t listen to him. What merciful, ignored, heartbroken, god had sent him?
The fire swirled up from below, and in no time at all the entire forward part of the boat was a moving wall of flame. The New York Times reported that the passengers ran throughout the three decks trying to escape the conflagration. The skipper maintained full speed ahead (later ruled to be a mistake of judgment tantamount to a crime, for which he stood trial), trying to find a place to dock that would not result in more damage, and the flames shot up, fanned by the wind, as the women and babies crowded astern. At last he stuck his head out of the pilothouse and said he saw the most powerful blaze he’d ever seen.
I started to head for 134th Street, but was warned off by the captain of a tugboat, who shouted to me that the boat would set fire to the lumberyards and oil tanks there. Besides I knew that the shore was lined with rocks and the boat would founder if I put in there. I then fixed upon North Brother Island.
The rest was as Polly had described it. Exactly as she had described it. One thousand twenty-one of the original thirteen hundred people who boarded the ferry that day lost their lives in the flames or in the currents off North Brother Island. The Times reported on the patients of the contagious hospitals pounding on the windows as they witnessed the terrible scene before them. And the hero-prisoners from Rikers Island were mentioned in a brief footnote. I read the accounts again, then I closed the book of clippings. I looked out over the great imposing room of learning, the long tables with the dark green shaded lamps, the readers bent over their stacks of books. Sanctuary, I thought. Then: Hilfe, I repeated to myself. Mutter.
Polly had looked closely at each face in our circle. “I was granted to see a disaster on the river, on that island—and so now I need to see the river bless someone. Bless that island. There’s got to be a blessing. Why else would I see these things?”
That night I called my mother. When she picked up the phone, I began talking quickly before she could launch into the rhythms of her inspiration.
“I’m unsure all the time,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore as a teacher. And, Mom? I’m not even sure about my marriage to K.B.”
“Oh, Holly,” she said. “Marriage is for life. Even if I want to kill your father, do you notice me shooting him in the keester? Every woman eventually wants to push her husband out the window, whether she admits it or not. But we go on. To swear is human, to forgive divine.”
“Err, Mom,” I said. “It’s ‘To err is human.’”
“Swear, err, what’s the difference, Holly? You got my point, didn’t you?”
“Well,” said Sallie. “It look to be hard to top that tale there. Hard to top a boat on fire and see-through bodies in the river. And now we know about that head of white hair. So I ain’t up to talkin’ in a new way about what happened to me, what happened here to my face. Except to say that I don’t feel a tit sorry for anything I done. And I ain’t askin’ anybody to shed tears for me neither, like you some done over the fire on the ferryboat and the drowned ghosts. I just set to read my poem and that’s it. That’s all. Nobody can ever say Sallie Keller don’t go full tilt shove. I said I’d tell my poem like it is, and here it go.”
My Face
You ask how I got this face
and I say I got this face
by having a mind to stand up
to the bloodsucker took my
body—took my arms legs, tits,
ass cunt tongue, my pretty hair.
Sold them all to bad 10 years and cheat
me straight up. And when I took my
own body back from him and all he stole—
He come lookin’ for me and when he show
up find me, he bend a hanger straight,
heat
the wire white. Tie me up in front of
my baby son—so he could get-see how
my face open up by that wire.
He slice all ways. Rip side, rip back,
rip-slash over my nose-bone and up.
So he say: You never look good to no
man again. And so right—I look no good
to him that other day when I shot him once
then got the gun up under his chin.
Slick? I say—Better smile one last for me.
’Cause now you get to have a new Face too.
—SALLIE KELLER, POET
ten
Joseph Kyrilikov nodded at me across the dim sum table in the tiny dark restaurant in Chinatown.
“Eat, please,” he cried, and pushed a steaming dish toward me. I looked, aghast, at a pale puffy clawed foot rising from the partially covered china bowl.
“I will not eat chicken feet,” I said. “I’m sorry, Joseph. Dumplings, yes. Chicken feet—no.”
“You must try. He insists.” He pushed the bowl closer to me. “Is excellent. He knows this food.”
I poked the foot with a chopstick. I found his habit of referring to himself in the third person unnerving. The chicken claw unnerved me even more.
He lifted the claw with chopsticks onto my plate. I brought it to my mouth and bit off just a tiny bit of flesh, then put it back down. Its texture was consistent with the way it looked: rubbery, with wrinkles and ridges. It had no discernible taste. I felt as if I’d just chewed off and swallowed a smidgen of someone’s offered hand.
“There,” I said. “I had some. It’s awful.”
“No,” he said. “This is great delicacy. He knows this food.”
He talked for a while about food. I wondered whether, when he was in prison, he’d had to eat a lot of chicken feet or goat necks, maybe scraps from the slaughterhouse floor. Or maybe he’d had so little food he’d fantasized about eating anything, anything that the earth could provide.
A line by Czeslaw Milosz popped into my head about how there were “nothing but gifts” on the poor Earth.
I was about to ask him about food in the gulag, but thought better of it. He sat before me, eating with gusto from the gleaming bowls—chicken feet, birds’ heads, bird brains, dumplings—and chattering on about Thomas Hardy.
“But wait, wait—he needs to think.”
He put down his chopsticks and stared into the distance. He looked both darkly contemplative and impish to me. He reminded me of Fernando Botero’s painting Mona Lisa, Age Twelve, an adolescent anarchical smile, but transposed onto the face of a thirty-some-year-old Russian intellectual with thinning ginger hair and an imposing brow.
“A word, he is missing a word in English.”
He fixed me with his piercing green gaze.
“Try to describe it, maybe I can help.”
“No,” he said. “He will think of it himself. He will think of it.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes while he thought. I ate some rice and vegetables. I thought about the first poetry reading he’d given in the United States, just after he arrived in New York. It was an amazing literary event, 1972—I’d gone with Sam Glass. The reading was at the New School—Kyrilikov was introduced by some dignitary, then appeared onstage to wild applause, striking an elocutionary pose. Like my mother, standing up to recite her poems in the North Dakota schoolhouse or holding forth at the kitchen stove, he appeared in the grip of a divine enthusiasm. Resounding Russian syllables rolled from his lips as he stood straight, down front at the footlights, one foot forward like a colt—his right hand proffered, palm extended, declaiming, bardic. The audience rose to its feet. Most of us understood nothing of the Russian, but we recognized the sound of linguistic passion, of syntactical power. Then the distinguished academic, the professor who had been appointed Kyrilikov’s official translator, stepped up to the podium. He read careful parsed phrases, with careful pauses in between—diffident, utterly removed from the cataract of musical thundering Russian we’d just heard. I watched Kyrilikov listening to the sounds of the restrained discrete phrases in English. He looked surprised. His eyes shot back and forth between the audience and the figure at the podium. What had happened to his poems?
Nobody loves poetry like a Russian, Sam Glass had remarked in the cab on the way to the reading. In Russia, he said, poetry fills football stadiums—thousands come to readings and memorize what they hear. In the prisons and underground, through samizdat, they copy the poems and pass them hand to hand. Poetry is at the center of the Russian soul. The night of Kyrilikov’s first reading, I saw that he was going to have to acquire excellent English, and very soon, in order to translate his own work. I saw that he could not bear it otherwise.
He stood up suddenly.
“He will call his friend to retrieve this word!”
“Just give me a hint. Maybe I can help you.”
“This friend, a Russian, he is ready, at the phone, any time of night or day, to certainly assist Joseph.”
He bowed to me, then headed toward the restroom/pay phone area, nearly knocking over the tiny waitress who came bustling around a corner bearing more bowls of food.
He reappeared a few minutes later, a beatific expression of relief on his face. He sat down, replaced his napkin on his lap, and grinned at me.
“It is ‘reed’,” he said. “You know, water reed? This is precise word he wishes to say.”
Joseph Kyrilikov, much to my own relief, then switched to the first person.
“I am nervous man,” he said, “but I am also observant man.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but he was contentedly sipping a glass of heavily sugared tea and puffing on unfiltered cigarettes, so it seemed enough that it made sense to him. It occurred to me, belatedly, that he habitually presented himself in the third person because he felt, as an exile, like a separate being in the West, cut off from his past, from Mother Russia—a completely invented identity. He’d become, I’d heard, somewhat resignedly debauched—devout drinking and smoking, a famous bachelor-about-town. I thought of his great mentor, Anna Akhmatova. My favorite poem title of hers: “Poem Without a Hero.”
He spoke at length about the genius modernist poet Marina Tsvetayeva, how she could never be translated into English—she was too complicated, he said, her rhymes were too complex and there were the triple-layer plays on words that could never come across. As he spoke, I considered the boldness of meter in Russian, and the great tradition of writerly suffering out of which he came. Nikolai Gumilev, shot to death by a firing squad while holding a copy of Homer over his heart (maybe he thought it would stop a bullet?); Osip Mandelstam, taken away for penning a satiric poem about Stalin, starved in the camps; Marina Tsvetayeva, whose praises Kyrilikov had just been singing, who hanged herself after returning from exile, a tiny notebook of her own poems in her apron pocket. And Pasternak and Akhmatova, who wrote unforgettably of the Terror, whose poems were stained with blood. Anna Akhmatova stood outside the gates of Leningrad Prison in the searing cold, in the endless line of petitioners waiting for word of their incarcerated loved ones. When a woman in the line cried out, doubting that even a poet could find a way to articulate the horror and despair before them—“Poet, can you find words to describe this?”—Akhmatova answered the woman, “I can.”
Kyrilikov had spent eight years in Russian prison camps—and in an asylum for the insane, where he was tortured. He had inherited a heroic literary tradition—but in the wrong country. In this new country, he improved his English, he continued to write, powerfully, eccentrically—he learned to translate his own work. But he also found himself teaching hypercritical middle-class American kids how to memorize great poems. These were the children of a superpower republic, brought up on television and committed to antiwar antibourgeois rebellion. He did not identify with their rebellion. Or their poems. He identified still with Russia, with the great literary ghosts who had led him to greatness—though he never went back. Though he ref
used to go back even years later, when the walls fell. He drank his vodka and smoked, touching the shirt over his bad heart every so often like a terrible charm.
He mentioned that there was a party later—a glitzy benefit for an arts advocacy society. I was surprised.
“You want to go to that?” I asked.
He smiled at me, a complex expression on his face.
“He is whore,” he noted cheerfully, and touched his heart, smiling.
I found some time to write. K.B. was working late at the hospital and I sat down at my desk with my notebook. I wrote again about the river being dammed,
Channeling Mark Twain Page 17
