The World in Pieces

by Bart Midwood

  “It means that he is a criminal,” said Frieda.

  “No, he was a good man, our father. With faults, yes, but good.”

  “A good man doesn’t spit on a doorstep because a child is born. Every child is given by God!”

  “What God!” said Anchel, suddenly exploding with a show of pent-up bitterness and rage and such terrible contempt in the voice when he said this word “God,” that it could awaken even in a stone a feeling of compassion for the Deity.

  And then Anchel stood up.

  So now five were standing.

  I alone was still sitting, and I said to myself, Sit, Ila. Be still and calm and sit, for the sake of the child in your belly.

  One thing I want you to notice here, Mister Midwood, is that Anchel and Surah now had given up this pretense of their everyone-is-entitled-to-their-opinion attitude, this whole stupid neurotic relativism of theirs. Now coming from them was a myopic violence, a revulsion and hatred that shook their little bodies with such an exaggerated fury that I could have laughed out loud if I did not feel instinctively anxious for the safety of my child, so close now to such angry people, and so vulnerable.

  Cabbages and Kings

  I will tell you how Frieda dealt with this situation, this terrible anger suddenly unmasked in her living room.

  First she moved closer to the window. “You see this field, Surah?” she said. “Three years ago nothing would grow on this part of the kibbutz. Too dry. But your Lo Yadua he thought of something, a very clever system, with ditches. The others they told him such a system it was ridiculous, quixotic. Only Cesare gave encouragement and help with the digging. Well, and now you see the result. Rows and rows of beautiful cabbages, from which this year the kibbutz will realize, believe me, a good profit. And for this your son he has earned great respect.”

  “For cabbages,” said Surah.

  “Yes. Isn’t that marvelous? So now you go to your Christophers and tell them what your Lo Yadua has accomplished, and you will see how they honor you for bringing such a son into the world.”

  “You’re mocking me.”

  “Why would you think I’m mocking you?”

  “The Christophers are educated people. Do you think they’re going to be impressed by cabbages?”

  “Why do you say this word ‘cabbages’ with such a tone? Cabbages are food, Surah. And food is life!”

  “Please, Frieda, enough. If I had a son like your Orsino, maybe then I would go to the Christophers and say, ‘Look what I made: a clever handsome young man, an executive, who travels all over the world and charms everyone he meets.’ Forgive me, Lo Yadua, I don’t mean any disrespect. You are what you are, and this is no fault of yours. This is how God made you, and you have done your best with what you were given in life. But still, you’re simple. Which doesn’t mean we don’t love you. Your father and I love you just the same, no matter what you are. But people like the Christophers, who are not family, they will judge you in comparison with normal people. Frieda she means well, but she is mistaken when she says that if your father and I go to the Christophers and tell them the truth, that they’ll honor me for my labor. For them what you are is not such a wonderful thing as it is to your Frieda. They will just laugh. Not to our face, of course. To our face they’ll be very polite, believe me. But inside they’ll laugh, and they’ll pity us. And in the end this will bring your father and me even more shame than we already have. You see what I’m saying to you?”

  “I’m not sure if I see or not,” said Lo Yadua in such a flat voice as I never before heard from him.

  “Then listen. Even before you told us we should go and tell the Christophers the truth, your father and I had the same idea.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, but then we decided, ‘First let’s go and find out what sort of a man our Lo Yadua has become. You see?”

  “Yes. I am not the sort of man who can rid you of your shame.”

  “Now you have it! But don’t blame yourself, Lo Yadua. It’s not your fault what you are. All the shame belongs to your father and me.”

  “So then, before you came here, you thought that if I were better, not so simple, then you would go back to America and tell the Christophers the truth.”

  “Exactly. But in our hearts, believe me, we already knew, from the letters, the phone calls. Still, though, we thought we should make sure, person to person.”

  “In other words, I have not surprised you.”

  Hope and Violence

  Even if it were correct, this judgment that my Lo Yadua was a simpleton, it would have been, coming from a mother, an annihilation; but that also it was incorrect, there was in it an injustice so big that if Lo Yadua had taken those powerful hands of his at this moment and put them around the throat of his beautiful mother and strangled her, neither I nor the Levis would have raised a finger to stop him. To make such an act of aggression against her, though, this was not something he could do. The whole potential for aggression here was in him completely entailed, mainly by his desire to win from her some honor for being what he was, what my old teacher Meyer used to call “the ontological affirmation.”

  The terrible sad thing here is that the more the evidence piled up in front of him to show him that Anchel and Surah were the last people from whom he could expect such honor, the more determined he became to get it from them. Well, these were, after all, the parents, and say what you will, even if the whole nation of your fellow citizens together with the president and the cabinet ministers come to honor you, still if you at the same time do not get honor from the parents, always in you something will be missing.

  In any case, Mister Midwood, now you can see what kind of an impenetrable darkness we were dealing with here in this Anchel and Surah. That they were ashamed they broke the incest taboo, this was one thing, a thing you could maybe even talk them out of, but that they were ashamed of Lo Yadua, of his actual person, this was already the limit, and what you can do with such people only God knows.

  Theater and Madness

  At this last remark from Lo Yadua, that he had not surprised her, Surah laughed, and so did Anchel. Together they laughed, with a sort of condescension that was completely moronic, insofar as it ignored altogether the intense complex of feeling with which the remark was delivered. A perfectly innocuous laugh, yet I cannot tell you how hideous it seemed to me and how shocked I was by it.

  And Frieda too was shocked. Her face it went white; then suddenly she took one of Lo Yadua’s hands again, but this time drew it to her lips. Many times before had I seen her draw his hand to her lips, but then always in an excited fussy way that could make you laugh. Now however was different. Now she drew the hand to the lips very slowly. Very deliberately. A stylized gesture this was, as from a ballet, and full of a lofty sadness, with three or four large tears, and such a calculated serenity that even the attention of Anchel and Surah was arrested.

  Such a kind of stylized gesture I have often seen in the clinics where you have patients in deep psychosis, and always it arrests the attention, just as in theater. Often it has been said that madness it is theater, and so it is, except that in madness the context always it is elsewhere. If you look at madness in this way for a moment, you will see that a primary task for healers is to derive the context. It is like one night you go to see a play that is unknown to you, say Hamlet, and on this night appears only one actor, Hamlet himself, who goes through the whole drama not only without other actors but even without scenery. Well, if you want to understand him, you have to use reason and imagination and derive who is missing and what is what. You have to derive Claudius and Gertrude and the ghost of Hamlet’s father and Ophelia and Polonius and Laertes and Horatio and so on and so forth, all the characters, and what they are saying and doing; and then, you see, your Hamlet, who is walking this way and that and speaking so passionately to the empty stage, will lose for you the aspect of absurdity, and you can then appreciate maybe a little the meaning of the tragedy.

  I have to mak
e now a subtle but very important distinction, between this kind of abstracted solipsistic state like with the isolated Hamlet, and the state that Frieda was in here. Otherwise I will give a false impression, and this whole dramatic gesture of the hand-kissing and the weeping will seem to be something that it was not.

  Ordinarily where you see such gestures coming from a psychosis, you will feel in yourself a toxic effect on account of that the gesture is coming unmediated directly from the primitive contents and is unrelated to the objective situation. But here in Frieda you did not feel such an effect. You felt instead something good. You felt, “This is correct. This is a right response.”

  Now, so, how can this be?

  This can be because here you had not an empty stage, not a context elsewhere, but a context present. Here you had the biological parents, the actual Anchel and Surah, reenacting the old torture and annihilation of their infant son, and with such a witless enthusiasm, that anyone who had even one milligram of sympathetic capability could sense that the whole infant experience had in Lo Yadua come to life again as a substantial animated thing, kicking him in his throat in a paroxysm of rage and agony. You see what I’m saying, Mister Midwood? It was to this, the subjective existential situation actually present in the room that Frieda was responding here, and so, you see, her stylized gesture did not feel to me crazy, but a comfort. To Anchel and Surah, though, who were cut off from the whole subjective side of life, what Frieda was doing was a mystery. Altogether incapable they were of understanding why she was weeping and kissing the hand; and when she let go finally of Lo Yadua and lifted her head and fixed upon them a pair of eyes burning with ferocity like from a wild carnivore, you could see in these in-laws of mine such a terrified incomprehension that truly you could feel for them a real pity.

  Pictures

  This moment where Frieda held them like in a burning cage with her eyes, it lasted a thousand years. Then she walked across the room to examine one of her paintings, which was three black birds on a tractor, set in a wheat field under a gray sky, and with two triangular hills in the background.

  “You like this painting, Surah?” she said with her back to us.

  “Oh, yes, Frieda, it’s marvelous!” said Surah, with such anxiety, such an appreciative fervor, that you could see she was occupied here not with the painting, but still with the fright she had gotten a moment ago from the painter.

  “Marvelous, marvelous!” she added as an extra measure.

  “Thank you,” said Frieda, still with her back to us. “And now maybe you can tell me what you think of another picture that I have to show you.”

  Then, after one more quick examination of the painting before her, she took hold of it by the frame with both hands.

  “Leave it, Frieda,” said Cesare, tentatively approaching her. “Let’s go and sit and have more tea.”

  “Stand back,” she said, and suddenly she lifted the painting off the hooks, turned it around and stood it upright, the bottom edge on the floor, the top edge propped against the wall, exhibiting the reverse side of the canvass.

  At once Surah put one hand on her chest and made like a tragic sigh, “Oh, my God,” expressing both horror and disapproval, after which Anchel went in one instant to her side; whether to protect her or himself I couldn’t tell you.

  What we were looking at on the back of the canvass was this: It was a picture of Orsino, just the head and the torso, painted in a flat meticulously naturalistic style, the figure placed at a tilted angle, with the head near the upper right corner and the waist near the lower left; behind him was dirt and little stones, the ground. The illusion was that he was lying on his back and staring up at you. And some foreshortening there was, insofar as the head was relatively large, as if the viewer were positioned directly over it.

  In the temples were two bullet holes with trickles of blood, then another bullet hole in the left eye, which was mangled and gory and resembled the entrails of a fish. The other eye, the right, was undamaged and wide open in a blind stare, and it was more from this eye than the other that you could infer the figure was a corpse.

  “This is my Orsino,” said Frieda. “He is behind all my pictures. Wait, I’ll show you.”

  Then she went and removed one by one all the paintings. Each one she turned and placed upright on the floor and propped against the wall, until we were surrounded by twenty dead Orsinos, all identical to the first, except slight variation in the colors.

  It was like a dance that she did here, stylized, as with the hand-kissing, so we looked on in frightful tension, not daring to speak, until she was done.

  “What are you showing us here?” said Surah.

  “The truth,” said Frieda. “At least three hundred more I have like this, some much bigger. If I could, I would show them all, but who can get so many on the walls of such a small room?”

  For a moment Frieda hesitated, as if maybe she were uncertain whether she had meant her question to be rhetorical or real.

  “Well,” she went on, shrugging her shoulders, “it doesn’t matter. In my mind is a room where I have them all. Maybe you would like someday to come into my mind and visit this room with me, Surah.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Surah. “Some day I’ll come and visit.”

  Here Frieda laughed aloud. “So polite you are, Surah! Such a good little girl, you know? But listen to me. Now it is time for you to be a woman. This is why I show you now my Orsino.”

  “But what are you saying with this picture? Are you saying that this is really what happened to Orsino?”

  “Yes, Surah.”

  “Then your whole story, that he’s rich and charming and so on, it’s all a lie? You’re saying you lied to us, Frieda?”

  “To protect you I lied. Only to protect you! So that you wouldn’t worry about your own son.”

  “My God, my God,” said Surah and she shut her eyes for a moment, putting a hand on her chest and breathing heavily and rapidly with little convulsions such as come often at the start of an asthma attack, and you could see it was not here her usual dramatics, but something quite genuine.

  “But you don’t deserve such protection!” snapped Frieda sharply. “That’s what I see now!”

  At this Surah opened her eyes abruptly; and somehow, with a surge of anger she overcame the convulsive breathing, and she turned a spiteful eye on Cesare.

  “So then,” she said in her teeth, “your Mister Rubin was telling the truth.”

  “Why do you look to Cesare?” said Frieda. “It’s not he speaking to you, Surah, but I!”

  “Cesare, do something,” demanded Surah.

  “Stop this!” cried Frieda indignantly. “I’m talking to you, Surah! Look at me! Not at Cesare!”

  “I am looking at you, Frieda, but you must calm yourself.”

  “I will, I will, but first listen to me. What Rubin told you about Lo Yadua, this too is true.”

  “You mean that he killed many people?”

  “Yes, but in war, Surah. In battle. As a soldier. Don’t you see, Surah? Such a son he brings honor to you. Also, Surah, you must know that it was he, your son, who avenged the murder of my Orsino. Yes, Surah, it was he, your son, who killed those animals that took away from me the light of my life. And so, even if he were an imbecile, I would worship him. As it happens, he is not, thank God, an imbecile. He is a highly intelligent human being, also a genius with his hands. Such hands, Surah! Look at them! You call him simple, but this is because you understand nothing about material objects, about what it is to build a house, to dig ditches, to plant seeds, to make, as my Cesare likes to say, ‘beauty and accommodation.’”

  “Enough, Frieda. I understand you. And now you must rest.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Surah, as if I’m an invalid!”

  “But that’s just exactly what you are.”

  “No, you’re the invalid, Surah. And your husband too. Both of you. Invalids!”

  “Is nobody going to stop her?” said Surah looking
sharply about the room; then, seeing that Cesare, Lo Yadua and I just gazed at her impassively, she said: “So then, I see how it is. Just as I said before: All of you, against us!”

  “No!” cried Frieda. “It is you who are against us! To lie and keep your whole life a secret, this is to put yourself against everyone!”

  “That is ridiculous coming from you, Frieda. You too lie about your son! To me and Anchel you lied right here in this room only two minutes ago! And such a lie! That your son is alive! That he’s rich! And charming! My God, Frieda, why do you make such a lie? Because you want us to envy you?”

  “Enough!” cried Cesare, who looked now like he wanted to kill.

  “Stay out of this, Cesare,” said Frieda. “I don’t want you to protect me here.”

  When the Tiger Springs, Time Leaps

  “So this is what people are, even in the Holy Land,” said Surah, turning to Anchel with an air of finality. “You do something good for them, even give them your only child, and this is how they thank you.”

  “What are you talking about, you witch!” said Frieda. “You didn’t give your child from generosity. All you wanted was to be rid of him!”

  “You see? Lo Yadua, look at me! You see how this woman poisons your mind against us?”

  “I don’t see how Frieda poisons anything,” said Lo Yadua. “Never until this moment has she ever said one word against you, Surah.”

  “I don’t believe it! I can see with my own eyes that she poisoned your mind against us long before we got here.”

  “You’re mistaken, Surah.”

  “So you say. But I see what is what here. Also I see that it is she that has turned you into a killer!”