“What are you saying! You yourself saw how many people came yesterday, and they all came to hear you.”
“The bitterness aired by elderly people used to surprise me but now I understand it. There is a point when you find you’ve stepped through the looking glass and what you’re hearing everywhere is jabberwocky, you can’t grasp the language, you no longer understand others and they don’t understand you. You pick up mimicry, similar to the way older people who are reluctant to admit they’re losing their hearing go on pretending to hear in hopes of holding on to their place a little longer in the world of ‘normal’ people. This is the moment when loneliness begins to settle within us . . . But that is not your story, you aren’t old enough yet, and besides, loneliness has already settled in with you, has it not?”
“Think so?”
“I recognize the scent of loneliness. It has soaked your hair, your pores, your clothing, it trails behind you. Now, don’t you worry, very few people can pick up the scent. I can. I have spent my entire life alone, I know all there is to know about it.”
“I believe you exaggerate . . .” I said calmly, though I didn’t like her shift to such personal territory when I hadn’t allowed it.
“Work a little harder, why don’t you, to avoid set phrases when you talk. You are a writer, after all . . .” said The Widow with an edge of mild irritation in her voice.
“I’ll do my best . . .”
“Women long to converse,” she said. “This is a hunger we’ve felt for centuries. Not so with men. They’re forever in conversation. With other men, of course.”
“What are you trying to say, exactly?” I asked calmly.
“This . . . A man besotted with his own voice is on his way home from fishing, carrying the fish he caught in a bag on his back and singing with gusto. By the road he spots a dead fox, scoops it up, and drops it into the bag. The fox, which was only playing dead, eats the fish along the way, then wriggles free of the bag and goes bounding off. The man, besotted with his voice, continues along his way with no fish and no fox pelt. You’re besotted with your own voice and you neglect to keep an eye on the things around you. You think the beauty of your voice suffices, everybody will hear it, and it’s your job to sing. Yet you, yourself, know things don’t work that way. And meanwhile, you’re no fox, the fox is most definitely not your totem.”
“What does that mean, being a fox?”
“Celebration of betrayal.”
“How can I be something I’m not?”
“You sound as if you’re in a state of constant internal mutiny. On your face I can see you are forever bumping into things; you can’t walk by things without them brushing against you. You’re always in friction with your surroundings. Always championing justice. Yet there is no justice, as, I presume, you’ve realized by now. You feel it was not worth the effort, you sink in quicksand, time has crushed you, you’re on the outside looking in, and everything seems beyond your control. You are obsessed by a sense that no matter what you do, you’re no longer visible, nobody hears you, you don’t exist . . .”
“No, really!”
“Irony is hardly your strong point at this particular moment. I’ve spent my whole life among your kind, I am a diagnostician. I’ve perfected this. Just as a blind person heightens their sense of hearing, I have heightened my sensitivity to your type. You’re not artful, you’re only occasionally cynical. The world doesn’t change, it is constantly crumbling and generally it will tend toward greater stupidity than it should . . . And by the way, at airports you can hear, for free, God’s commandment: ‘Mind Your Step!’”
“Can we talk about something else . . .?”
“Sorry . . . It’s just that I have the feeling nobody has ever spoken to you of such obvious things. Because in principle people do not take care of other people. It is only those who hate us who take care of us. And you’re still in somebody’s sights. You’re visible still, yet you go about with no protection. A perfect target. Never has it occurred to you that there are people poised with erasers to erase you, people prepared to stab your flesh with their knives, people ready to trample you . . . Why? For the simple reason that you are a little more visible than they, taller by a centimeter. Most people cannot bear that. You have no children, you’re not an invalid, you aren’t sufficiently ugly, you aren’t married, you’re a woman, you’ve ventured out into the world, you ‘sing,’ you’re accountable to no one—all this is an excess of freedom, something that is not so easily forgiven. Those you left behind do not forgive you, nor do those whose community you joined. That’s why you have had to adopt little self-defense tricks. The way you bow your head, the way you avert your eyes, the way you hunker down and wait for a threat to pass . . .”
“What are you even talking about?”
“I see by your wince that you’re tired. Your spirit is sluggish and drained. And no longer can you expect the little vials in somebody else’s medicine cabinet to glisten at you with the brilliance of diamonds . . .”
The Widow touched my cheek. She did this with her thumb, describing a line from the corner of my mouth to my chin as if brushing away a trace of spittle, a lipstick smudge, a crumb of food. Hers was the lightest of touches, something almost like a blessing.
“How old you are, yet you haven’t yet come clean with yourself about a few of the basics. Would you, for instance, rather dream about a work of art than create it? Do you imagine yourself taking part in literature as a footnote that can easily be dropped, or as an indispensable work of art?”
“I cannot believe . . .”
“What?”
“That I’m sitting here calmly swallowing all these banalities . . .” I said.
“Sincerity always sounds hackneyed . . .”
“And palm-readers are sincere! And manipulative! Like you!” I said, though I’d meant to say something else. But the words, nevertheless, hit home. The Widow, a master of conversation, knew that the words one says never matter as much as the tone. And with my tone I had brusquely shoved her to the side of the road.
She got up, swaying slightly as if she might fall. A deep wrinkle slithered downward, lizard-like, from the corner of her mouth. I wondered where my sudden outburst of intolerance had sprung from. Perhaps I couldn’t forgive her the fact that she, and not I, had stolen the show during our panel; that her story, not mine, had piqued their interest. Had I been hurt by what she said, but couldn’t admit it? Because everything she’d said was true but her words would have been just as true if she’d said the opposite. In this type of communication, translation is key. And we steer every reading of palms—whether it be a conversation with a palm-reader or a psychotherapist—to our advantage. I will have a chance to apologize, there’s still time for apologies, I thought, and then sat there as if glued to my seat.
The Widow flashed me a cool look in which there was still a shred of warmth, and then she stood up and slowly made her way off. The rays of sunlight streaked her hair and blazed it orange. Her slow advance under the arcades of the Archeological Museum was splendid and achingly photogenic.
Just then I suddenly remembered another, much younger woman. As if the deep wrinkle on The Widow’s face had served as a magnet and drawn to me the other, who came into sharp focus . . .
10.
Marlene
Marlene was Polish (in age she could have been my daughter) and she occasionally cleaned my apartment for ten euros an hour. Who knows how she’d found her way to Amsterdam and from where, but in the flood of words she showered on me in her poor, strongly Polish-accented English, I remembered mention of a collective somewhere in Belgium with its leader whom she referred to, reverently, as “Baba.” She still went there from time to time to lend a hand in the garden or the kitchen. My guess was that this was some sort of new-age commune for the treatment of drug addiction or something like that, where she met a fellow from Negotin . . .
“. . . where she met a fellow from Negotin. The boy had two brothers who were living in Amster
dam. Hardworking, capable fellows, they got here before the Poles, who are also hardworking, capable fellows. Marlene got to know all three brothers. She also knew their mother, who would visit her sons from time to time and stay for a month. The sons were good boys. Before going to sleep they’d read a page from the Bible, which their mother appreciated. One of the boys from Negotin spent all day painting apartments, and on Saturday and Sunday he’d dance the salsa. He even took a salsa class. He enrolled in a school for shiatsu massage. Marlene’s Negotin boyfriend repaired bicycles. The third brother, who did nothing but smoke hashish all day long, had recently returned to his mother’s in Negotin. So Marlene learned Serbian instead of Dutch. Though I never met the young man, I have to say he couldn’t be worth even as much as her little finger. Because Marlene is tall and slender as a birch tree, with a transparent, milk-white complexion and light blue eyes, a true northern beauty. Only her hands are large, red, and chapped, as if somebody had attached them to Marlene’s fragile arms by some terrible mistake. Marlene works as a maid in a cheap Amsterdam hotel on the sly. Working as a maid in a cheap hotel means spending half the day with your nose buried in people’s shit. And the boss is a nasty woman, to all of them—to Marlene, a Bulgarian woman, a Croatian woman, and a Serbian woman—she treats them all like slaves. Sometimes Marlene cleans houses as well, and in her spare time she makes cute little bags that can be worn around the neck. Marlene looks after her family, her grandfather (she has a special fondness for her grandfather), and for her newfound family. She identifies with the stories about Negotin though she has never been there. When one of the brothers gets sick, she cooks healing chicken soup for them. Marlene also looks after her own little ‘Dutch’ family: a turtle, a rabbit, and a cat who live with her in her miniature Amsterdam apartment. The rabbit and cat can hardly wait for her to come home, and they are happiest when she lets them sleep with her.
“But Marlene is not entirely without dreams of her own. You can see by the gleam in her eyes that she is no ordinary young woman. Something is cooking in Marlene, though for now she has no idea where to take herself, to the left or the right . . .
One day Marlene told me . . . ‘I’ve decided to move up . . .’
‘Up? What do you mean, move up, Marlene?’
“She had met some people by chance who ran a puppet street-theater, and the actors needed somebody to stand on stilts, and Marlene, thinking of her grandfather—who had delighted her by walking around on stilts—said, ‘I will!’ And what do you know, she stood on stilts. At first she wobbled dangerously, of course, but now she struts around with the ease of a fish in water. Marlene wears a giraffe costume. Her head is in the clouds and somewhere way down below are the nasty hotel manager jostling with her friends from Negotin; her rabbit, cat, and turtle; her family in Poland; her mother; her grandfather . . . She uses the money she makes on the stilts to buy everybody a little something: a terrarium for the turtle, a carrot for the rabbit, a ball for the cat, a scarf for her boyfriend from Negotin, a little basket woven of matchsticks for me . . . It isn’t the money that matters, it is how Marlene feels. Up there, her head in the clouds, her eyes two and a half meters or more above ground, Marlene feels like somebody who has finally reached the height she deserves. Some Dutch people feel that Marlene’s integration into Dutch society has been a success. The only thing they hold against her as a giraffe is that she hasn’t yet learned to speak Dutch.”
I wrote that fragment about Marlene and worked it into an essay about recent European migrations. I’d published the piece some time ago and forgotten about it, and Marlene lost touch with me. I don’t believe she’d ever come across the passage I wrote about her, because I don’t remember her ever expressing an interest in any sort of writing. I ran into her boyfriend from Negotin after Marlene had gone from my life. I happened to wander into a shop with used bicycles: the Negotin fellow had short legs, he slurred his words, and avoided eye contact, a cagey guy, all in all. I was right: he wasn’t worth even Marlene’s little finger.
After an exploratory phone call, Marlene showed up some seven or eight years later at my apartment, pale, her disheveled hair sweetly tamed with children’s barrettes, still slender as a birch, with thin-framed glasses perched on her nose that only served to accentuate her air of fragility. Her English seemed even more speedy and garbled and her Polish accent even stronger. Oh, yes, she’d broken things off with the Negotin fellow ages back, she had a new boyfriend now, a Pole, she was no longer cleaning houses, nor did she work in the horrible hotel, her hands showed it, the red chafing was gone, she was busy with, ha-ha, “creative work.” Ever since she’d left the Negotin fellow she had been sharing an apartment with a friend, her friend had a child, a seven-year-old girl, and a former husband who stopped by now and then, the ex-husband was a shaman, yes, why was I surprised, no, he wasn’t from Negotin but he was from that part of the world, clearly she was destined to be around people from there, whether they were bicycle repairmen, or shamans, or their wives . . . And I could see the picture of her new boyfriend on her smart phone, a nice, sharp picture, and this is her grandfather, over ninety and still sprightly, and these are pictures of the little rice-paper shades she made, and colorful bedspreads . . . No, she hadn’t made the bedspreads herself, they were the work of her new boyfriend’s mother in Poland, maybe her future mother-in-law, a hundred euros a piece, if I liked she could get me one, or two, or how ever many I wanted, and these are pictures of clown shoes, she made a pair, and a little trunk, she made them all for the theater . . . Yes, she was still working with the giraffes, she traveled with them, though she’d been thinking she might split off and form her own street theater, for the moment she was holding workshops, teaching others how to walk on stilts, there were people interested, especially in Poland, because there were no jobs there and young people were casting about for ways to survive . . . True, she’d held only two workshops so far, she told the students it isn’t so much a balancing act as it’s about the movements, you have to have a knack for stilts, people often think it’s enough to take those first steps, but what matters is full-body expression, that’s what she called it, full-body expression, that was the catch, to know how to act with your body, because your face is hidden, after all, by a mask . . . She had, mean-while, made her peace with the idea that she’d remain a giraffe as long as she was working at the theater, because nobody would allow her to be anything else, oh, yes, she could have been a zebra had she wanted to, but what difference would that make, which is why she decided she’d break away as soon as possible and open her own school in Poland, no, she wouldn’t do it here, her boyfriend was giving English lessons, that was how he supported himself, the people who were tutored by him cared nothing about his qualifications, true, they were older people, lonely souls, anxious about signing up for proper language classes, but they were glad to learn a little English . . . the times are new, the internet age is here, an interested party can be found for every service offered, and, by the way, I, too, might give it a try, age plays no role at all . . .
I don’t know why—perhaps because of the smoke screens Marlene needed to obscure her genuine state of affairs—rage, instead of pity, stirred in me. Rage is another form of sympathy. Perhaps it was her school for walking on stilts that sent my blood pressure skyrocketing, maybe it was because of her repeated use of the word “career,” though she had barely completed elementary school, and maybe it was because of her advice that, by the way, I, too, might give it a try (that an interested party can be found for every service offered), age plays no role at all . . . All in all, I said something, lashed out with harsh words at Marlene’s invisible stilts, I don’t even remember what, the tone mattered more than the words, a tone Marlene understood, my tone sent her swaying like a crystal goblet, she looked as if she might shatter, but she didn’t make a sound or cry, instead she spat out something like I do what I know the best I can, and then she got up and left. We promised each other, of course, that we’d be sure to see each othe
r more often now, but I knew she wouldn’t come by any more and she wouldn’t call, she’d never forgive me for lashing, out of the blue, at the image she’d so carefully fashioned for herself.
After Marlene left, I sat down in front of my computer and searched on the internet for her street theater with its permanent address in Amsterdam, and on their site I finally watched a video clip with the giraffes. There were a lot of them, a whole family, big ones, little ones . . . A herd of giraffes ambled through an Amsterdam park, and to them flocked the delighted audience. The people stroked the giraffes on the muzzles as if the puppets were real animals, as if the public didn’t know or successfully pretended not to know, that these were only big puppets being maneuvered by stilt walkers. Here, too, Marlene was right, with her stammering effort to articulate full-body expression, indeed, what mattered was not authenticity, but the art of illusion. The giraffes bent their necks gracefully and, stretching out their sweet muzzles, big eyes, and long lashes, they did some sort of not very nimble dance but the clumsiness was endearing, they rubbed their necks together, the little giraffes nudged their way under the legs of the big ones . . . Among them was Marlene, but I couldn’t tell in which giraffe beat her heart.
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