A Feather on the Breath of God

by Sigrid Nunez

  When I arrived on the scene, my mother had just said something at which Mr. Blum made a noise like water in a slow drain and waggled a finger at his eye patch. Later it would occur to me that what he said next was probably something like “I saw it with my own eyes.” But at that moment I took him to mean something else.

  As he was gathering up his hat and coat, I slipped out of the house and down the stairs, and that is where he found me moments later, by the mailboxes, where we had first met. I had told myself that if I really was never going to see Mr. Blum again I must say goodbye. But as he stood looking down at me, hands on hips and head cocked expectantly, a more urgent need of mine found voice. “Was it the Nazis who poked out your eye?”

  Mr. Blum made a little popping sound with his breath, followed by a word I didn’t catch and which probably wasn’t in English anyway. By then, however, the horror of what I’d just done had sunk in, and I would have bolted back up the stairs had not Mr. Blum started to speak. “If I remember correctly, when I was your age it seemed to me everything in the world was created to give the maximum confusion to my brain. What can I say? It won’t always be like that. You will grow up and go places, meet people, do a lot of things. Go to college, even. Read books. The Bible and Shakespeare and maybe even a little bit Freud. And the world will look completely different to you from what you know here in the projects. Because here you don’t get a clear picture of life at all, believe me. Anyway, your mother says she doesn’t want to see me again, so—” (Why did everyone always do what she said?) He extended his long pale fingers, and when I touched them I was not surprised to find that they were as smooth as wax. He dug a handkerchief out of his pocket. Earlier, I’d seen him blow his nose heartily into that handkerchief, but I didn’t mind that he now used it to dab my face.

  In fact, that was not the last time I saw him. He and my mother made up. His visits continued, and so did the fights. And then he changed jobs, or he moved, or something, and he stopped coming to the house. I don’t remember any last big fight. I don’t remember anyone missing him. From time to time his name would come up and my mother would shake her head and arch her brows as if to say, What a character! And soon we all forgot him. I grew up. I went to college. Read books. Shakespeare and the Bible and a little Freud. Why did he come? Why did she let him in? What happened to his eye?

  Another memory, from several years later.

  It was the winter of the mohair sweaters. My mother had already knitted quite a few of them for me, in different colors. I wore them to school to the envy of my friends. “Your mother is unreal.” (But one teacher disapproved. “What are you afraid will happen to you if you wear the same outfit twice?”) The sweater my mother was working on now was a tender shade of blue. We were watching a movie on television: A Place in the Sun. My mother told me that the book on which the movie was based was called An American Tragedy.

  This was at a time in my life when I had just begun to worship Elizabeth Taylor. I thought that she and Marilyn Monroe divided the world between them, with no third. I had little sympathy for the weakling played by Montgomery Clift. I did not even find him very handsome. Though he was the one whose life was at stake, it was the Taylor schoolgirl I was concerned about. The story was of the sort calculated to feed certain notions that had recently possessed me. It seemed to me that in most cases (as in A Place in the Sun), a man who suffered a tragic fate had had at least some part in bringing it about; in some cases, had even deliberately gone in search of it. Whereas women—especially beautiful women—could expect to have tragedy thrust upon them. In those days Elizabeth Taylor made the papers at least once a week. Like the typical victim of an infatuation, I imagined that I understood her in some special way. No matter what record-breaking fee she was getting for Cleopatra, I knew that she was not happy. It was common knowledge that she was susceptible to respiratory trouble, that she was not supposed to let herself get run down. Once, she almost died of pneumonia. The divorces, the rumors about drinking and pills. You had to worry. Look what happened to Marilyn Monroe.

  I adored romantic movies, above all for the women, many of whom I placed with my mother under the sign of beauty, suffering, and loss. I wanted my mother to watch these movies because I thought she could learn something from them, as I hoped I was learning, about how a woman ought to be. As I say, I thought her coldness toward men was a mistake. I saw the way men looked at her and it made my heart pound. I’m not talking about the leers, though there were plenty of them. I’m talking about a look that was gentle and melancholy and urgent, and that helped me to understand what he meant when years later I came across Valéry’s words: The ardor aroused in men by the beauty of women can only be satisfied by God. At that time in my life I could not imagine any future happiness that did not depend on a man, and I lived for the moment of that transfiguring embrace at which all fear and uncertainty would fall away from me. Anxiously, I studied the mirror. Although many people said they thought my mother and I looked alike, just as many said they saw almost no resemblance. And hadn’t my mother herself said that men wouldn’t look at her twice if she were a brunette?

  At the end of A Place in the Sun, after a last visit from the priest, Montgomery Clift is led away to be executed. We are shown what is on his mind—the image he will carry out of the world with him fills up the screen: the face of Elizabeth Taylor.

  I sit back in my chair, sated with the sorrow and the beauty of it all. But when I turn to my mother I see that she is buying none of it. She holds the length of blue yarn up to the light and shrugs. “God. What you Americans call a tragedy.”

  She got old, she became a grandmother, but she didn’t look like a grandmother, and she wasn’t grandmotherly. Her moods continued to be better than they had been when I was growing up. She was not so often depressed; even the migraines ebbed. But she began to have other troubles. Dizzy spells, shortness of breath. Once, in line at the supermarket, and a second time, at home, she fainted. But she would not see a doctor. She got in the habit of saying, “You’ll never get me to a hospital,” and “I want to die at home.”

  She did go to the hospital once, long ago, to have a cyst removed from her neck. It was a hard time for us children, who weren’t sure what was happening, and who, being under twelve, were not allowed to visit on the wards. She came home with a thick white bandage taped across her throat. It bothered me a lot, that bandage. It bothered me even more when it came off a week or so later, revealing that sinister scarlet smile. The idea of the vulnerability of the throat—the image of a throat laid bare to a knife—became fixed in my mind. (Elizabeth Taylor’s famous tracheotomy most likely played some part in this.) I would never be able to wear chokers or turtlenecks or anything that fit snugly around the neck.

  I never saw her at a loss for words. She was always able to say what she wanted to say. She always knew how to say what she was feeling. Her memory was excellent, as were her powers of observation. Nothing escaped her, you could not put anything over on her. I think she had a good mind.

  But as a mother her instincts were often wrong. My first day of kindergarten she knew I was afraid and might give her trouble. She led me into the school building and showed me the door I was supposed to go through. I looked where she pointed, and when I turned around again, she was gone.

  She so believed in the efficacy of corporal punishment that she was baffled when it failed. “Poor Mrs. Reece. No matter how much she beats that son of hers he still steals.”

  Although she insisted that you obey all the rules without question, she was disdainful when you asked to do something because everyone else was doing it. “What are you, a sheep?”

  She had no best friend, no one—besides her daughters, as we grew older—to whom she could really talk, no confidant. She didn’t trust people. If anyone tried to get close to her, she backed away. “People are too much trouble.”

  And yet, people trusted her. People poured out their hearts to her, even some that she hardly knew. People told her things t
hat they said they had never told anyone else. She was a good listener. While the other person recited the story of his or her life, she would not interrupt or allow her attention to wander. Her head wagged from side to side or up and down understandingly. As a child, I would listen in on these talks, no less attentive. But with the years I lost my tolerance. I discovered that, with people who insist on telling you the story of their life, usually it’s a sad story. I hadn’t my mother’s infinite capacity to hear such stories. Nor did my mother forget what she’d heard once the person was out of her sight. The stories took hold of her, and she in turn insisted on repeating them. In later years, when I’d come to visit her and she’d start in—about the mailman, say, whose son had stolen from his own mother’s purse even as she lay dying of cancer—I would cut her off.

  It was the same with the animals. Young, I was delighted to come home from school and find that we were once again giving shelter to some helpless dog or cat. But in time I grew to dread the unmistakable smell that would hit you as soon as you opened the front door. Many of these animals were in bad shape. Many had been abused, in some cases by people we knew. My mother didn’t believe in doctors for animals either. She doctored them herself, using a book she’d found in a secondhand shop. Not all of those animals survived.

  When she finally moved from the projects into her own house, she fed packs of strays from her back porch. In bitter weather she built shelters of plastic and cardboard in the yard: an animal shantytown. She fed the birds and the squirrels too.

  Twenty years passed between her first and her second trip back to Germany. After that second trip she returned a number of times. But she never moved back. After all those years of pining for home—why not? “Because it isn’t home anymore. Remember: The Germany I knew is gone. The Allies bombed it away. There is hardly anything of the Old World anymore, everything is new. And it’s just like everywhere else now, Germany. Changing all the time, getting more like America every day. There are tourists and foreigners everywhere you go. The cities are crowded and noisy and polluted. The Rhine is dying. The Black Forest is dying. And most of the people I knew there have either left or are dead. Why would I go back now?”

  I want to ask her whether she still wants us to bury her in Germany, but I refrain.

  Back in Germany that first time, she realized that she was forgetting her German. “I go into a store, I want to ask for something, and for a second I have to struggle for the German word.” With the years she lost more and more of her German, and at some point—she doesn’t remember when—she began thinking in English. After living in America twice as long as she lived in Germany, she finds that German has become her second tongue. She stops reading in German. Dining in a German restaurant, she orders in English. But her accent remains as thick as it ever was, and she still makes the same mistakes. “They stood in a motel for a week.”

  (She was not the only one in her family to become an American. Soon after she arrived in Brooklyn, her youngest brother, Karl, not yet out of his teens, came to stay. Drafted into the army, he did part of his training in North Carolina, and lost every trace of his German accent; an impeccable Southern drawl replaced it. Under that hot sun he grew in quite another direction from his sister. He saw himself as an American through and through. He never left the army. On his second tour of duty in Vietnam he married an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese girl who was already expecting their second son. My uncle brought her and their first son to the States. One night he suggested that he and she and my mother and father go out together. It was the year of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. My mother said, “You know what people are going to think, don’t you?”)

  Twenty years passed between my own first and second visits to Germany. The second trip took place soon after I graduated from college. By that time already it had become a fad: digging up one’s roots, traveling to the land of one’s parents, describing how it felt to set foot for the first time on the soil trod by generations of forebears. That tingling of the blood, sense of homecoming, and always, and perhaps most important, pride. Imagine feeling that way about Germany.

  I met Germans, young Germans, who had been born in or after Year Zero. On being German, every one of them agreed: It’s a drag. On the New Germany: It is boring. Jokes about impenitent old Nazis gathered in the day rooms of nursing homes, watching Triumph of the Will over and over again. The young people were all saving their money to go somewhere else. Paris, Rome, San Francisco, New York. I would see some of them again when they came to live in New York.

  In the tourist publicity, the words used most often to lure visitors to Germany are romantic and fairy tale.

  I was in the Old Pinakothek in Munich when it occurred to me: Germany was like an Old Master that had been given too many cleanings.

  But what had any of this to do with my childhood?

  People who remembered said, “When your mother brought you here that time, the children called to one another up and down the street, ‘Come and see the children from China!’ We got a kick out of that.”

  But we didn’t look that Chinese.

  “Well—compared to them.”

  Taunted in the schoolyard once when I was a child, I went to the teacher who was on recess duty. “Those boys are calling me a half-breed.” The teacher said, “Well, you aren’t one, are you?” I paused, uncertain. Uncertainly, I shook my head. “Well, then, it shouldn’t bother you.”

  The last thing I would have believed back then was that one day it would be fashionable to be Chinese; or that I had only to wait a few years, till I reached adolescence, to hear people say that they envied me my exotic background.

  Myths.

  Being of mixed race makes you immune to many diseases.

  Women of mixed race are uncommonly lustful.

  A famous conductor, introducing a half-black, half-Jewish pianist to a concert audience, suggests that the pianist’s talent is a result of his being mixed.

  In college, at the beginning of every semester I received an invitation to join the Asian-American Student Society. A Chinese-American man I met much later said, “I got those in school too. That’s what I hate about the Chinese: so damn clannish. You can’t be yourself, you have to be one of them.” He admonishes his brother, who arrives to lunch wearing a short-sleeved white polyester shirt and dark polyester slacks: “Do you have to dress so damn chinky?”

  Another time, at a party, a different Chinese-American friend asks me to play Ping-Pong. I have never played before and I tell him I don’t know how. He says, “Don’t be silly, of course you do: It’s in the genes.”

  Genes. Blood. Soil. Why should I feel a deeper pain on hearing that the Black Forest is dying than on hearing about the dying forests of the Adirondacks? And what is this surge of feeling inspired by a photograph in a magazine: a group of smiling Asian-American children: Those Asian Whiz Kids! Pride?

  Memory of another teacher, on her knees, hugging me and pleading, “Promise me you’ll never forget that you’re just as good as any other little American.”

  When I talked about my mother and father people often said things like, “Only in America.” People called their story “a real American story.”

  The apartment in the projects had a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and three bedrooms. The linoleum on the kitchen floor buckled here, curled up there. The windows were the kind you have to crank open, and they had mustard-colored shades that were replaced by the housing authority every three years, though long before that they would have torn or lost their spring. Winter. My mother lays a hand against the radiator. “Freezing!” She pulls her navy-blue sweater tighter around her. “If I don’t get out of here soon, I lose my mind!”

  For a time when I was very young I used to wind my hair around the fingers of my right hand and tug. I did this mostly in my sleep. When a small bald patch showed on the back of my head, my mother made me wear one of her nylon stockings as a nightcap to bed.

  At that early age I often dreamed that I was being crushed
by some—Thing. A living, heavy-breathing Thing, covering my entire body, bearing down, crushing, smothering. Murdering.

  Older, I had many dreams about trying—and invariably failing—to rescue someone. It might be a child in a burning house, or someone about to fall off a roof or get hit by a car. These dreams persisted into adulthood. In a foreign, war-stricken land—jungle or bush country—I come upon a group of starving natives. I sign to them that I am going to get food, and that they should wait for me. I go and come back, lugging a big steaming pot. But in my absence the enemy would have come and slaughtered them all.

  One morning an old woman who lived alone on the top floor of the building across from ours was found lying dead on the ground. Because she was clutching a rag in one hand, some people thought she must have fallen while trying to wash her windows. Later, one of the maintenance men reported that they had found nothing in that woman’s apartment when they went to clean it out except a mattress on the floor and a single spoon.

  What is a home? In the ten years after I left my parents’ house I lived at fourteen different addresses. This constant moving taught me not to accumulate or to set too much store by possessions. (Yet I am someone who is incapable of traveling light; I want to take everything with me. Traveling in general causes extreme anxiety in me.) I have never had much success at establishing a proper domestic life. (Home economics: the only high-school course I truly hated.) For years I ate off paper plates. I don’t cook. I can’t sew. If there is a leak I stick a pan under it and leave it there. (“I don’t know how I could have raised a daughter like that.”)