Leaving Berlin

by Britt Holmström

Eleanor is on holiday with her parents and two younger brothers. They have rented a cottage from a fisherman in Nova Scotia. The Griffiths are firm believers in annual family holidays, Mr. Griffith being a busy man the rest of the year. Distancing herself from something so deplorably bourgeois, Eleanor’s condescension turns those three words, “annual family holiday,” into something ludicrous, something best not spoken of in circles of bohemian refinement.

  The letter informs me that McPherson, the fisherman, talks funny and scratches his neck when holding forth about meaningful matters like the price of fish. He wears overalls. Eleanor’s description is one of lofty amusement.

  She lets me know that often she stands alone on the eastern rim of “the immense spread that is our country,” her feet immersed in the ocean. In this position, she frees her gaze to travel the great distance to the horizon. “How unattainable it is.” Standing there, she contemplates Life at great length. These solitary moments fill her with a deep and sweet melancholy. Happiness, she is now convinced, is “as impossible to reach as the horizon.”

  I imagine her standing barefoot in that old full length fur coat she claimed was her grandmother’s, though we all knew she got it at that kitsch secondhand store on Saint Laurent near Ontario. We all bought our rags there, how could we not know? It was made of squirrel skins, had a green satin lining and was ripped in four places. She called it her Satin Nutkin.

  The letter continues with two pages of blathering that postures to the point of incomprehension. So typically Eleanor, I think, until I get to page four where she reveals that the previous paragraphs were excerpts from a book she is reading.

  The kind of book she was never seen without. Eleanor loved to read in order to enrich her soul. She tended to her soul as though it were a prodigy for whom she had great hopes.

  I have no idea what the excerpts are about, but at the bottom of the page follows an explanatory note. “And these are only two ways to describe death.”

  She mentions people I do not remember.

  Frederic? Who was . . . ?

  . . . Oh, Frederic!

  That idiot. He was tall as a lamppost and thin as a toothpick. He had no front teeth and the laughter of a hyena. He was married to a long-suffering woman whose name was . . . let’s see . . . Deidre or Desiree? Yes, that was it, I think, Desiree, and she despised him, something he greatly admired her for. “Dessie has spunk,” he would say, howling his gap-toothed howl. Rewarding his insight, Eleanor would buy him another beer. He preferred imported brands.

  Eleanor was convinced for a fleeting moment, the feeling self-inflicted like all her feelings, that she loved this feckless moron with a Love that was Steadfast and Pure. According to her logic, the more unworthy the object of her affection, the more Pure and Noble her Love.

  Well, Pure Love was her prime ambition, wasn’t it? Always in capital letters, make no mistake. This was where she and her friend Strindberg parted ways. “I hate to say it, but Strindberg was wrong,” she would point out. “Love is not a sin. Love is a virtue.” Eleanor was virtue’s bride. It turned into a stormy marriage when it turned out Love had a mind of its own.

  Her letter continues with another cryptic offering: “You sought a woman and found a soul — you are disappointed.” She is quoting this with regards to some man named Jeffrey.

  A vague outline of this person begins to unfurl at the back of my head.

  Jeffrey . . . Was he that stereotypical intellectual? Read Sartre, at least in public places? Smoked a pipe? Leather elbow patches, beard, the whole nine yards, proud of the shallow pond he mistook for his depth?

  Yes, I do believe that might have been him. Jeffreyish enough anyway.

  Eleanor’s mind was always busy searching for Truth, also always with a capital T, while cunningly evading it, lest it find her first.

  I often wondered if Eleanor ever used her considerable intelligence for any practical purpose. Often she treated it as a handicap she was ashamed of, especially around men, pretending to be ignorant of facts and events that she was far better versed in than the pompous twits spouting lengthy opinions on everything. She would claim not to have heard of a writer, all of whose books she had read and whose theories she had analyzed without difficulty. She would mispronounce words — transmongolfry instead of transmogrify — as if to put herself in her place, being humble when there is no reason to.

  Her next letter is dated two weeks later, mailed in a pink envelope with a perfectly symmetrical daisy drawn on the back.

  She is still on holiday and wants me to know that today Life is indescribably beautiful. Every day she greets dawn by dancing across flowery meadows in graceful, secret ecstasy, fishermen scratching their mundane necks at the sight of Eleanor Griffith, soul in hand, twirling towards the endless ocean. An ocean that imparts its wisdom only to Eleanor, because “only I am willing to listen, Miriam. Only I take the time.” She inhales the wisdom with the salty air and comes to an insight. “I embrace Life! Life embraces me!” She is enfolded in a great Peace.

  “Burn the previous letter, Miriam. Burn it! It was too black. More important, it was more revealing than I would have liked it to be.”

  It revealed nothing. Then again, Eleanor would have found it too revealing to be found to have revealed nothing.

  She will be back in Montreal in a few days, she writes, inviting me to dinner at the usual place, The Place, on de la Roche just off rue Rachel by Parc Lafontaine, the kind of tavern where everybody turns up sooner or later for lack of anything better to do.

  I wonder if it’s still there?

  She is expecting a detailed account of what I have been up to in her absence. “Behind my back” is how she puts it. With a frosty hint she hopes I have not been within sniffing distance of the aforementioned Jeffrey. Here her handwriting becomes uneven as if hit by a violent gust of wind.

  If I had been sniffing around some elbow-patched poseur, I would probably have a clearer recollection of him. My love life, if worthy of that description, suffered a sorry lack of passionate intrigue. That I remember. Despite my “whorish” makeup and short skirts, I was a paragon of virtue. A virtue I seemed unable to shed, mostly for lack of trying.

  Next is a hand-delivered letter dated mid-September. It is tucked in a plain white envelope. A homemade stamp features a rose drawn in purple ink.

  With the same purple pen that drew the rose, she quotes Brecht, Mallarmé and Pushkin in an exuberant jumble.

  But of more immense importance is this: she is longing to see Philip whom she has just recently met. PHILIP! He is the cause of her exuberance. PHILIP! She cannot stop pouring out his name. Philip! Philip! Philip! It gushes from her pen. “He has such lonely eyes. Eyes that see but that cannot accept. Oh, Miriam, how he suffers!”

  Philip never suffered in his life. He was too lazy. “Fucking Philip” was how people started conversations about him. “Fucking Philip has done it again.”

  Done what?

  You name it. Had sex with his best friend’s girlfriend. Shoplifted. Given his wife another black eye. Pissed in a public place (one of his favourite pastimes).

  All of the above.

  Yes, that was when it started, after she met Philip. I always thought her decline was partly my fault, for after all I was the one who introduced her to him. This is how it happened. We were sitting in The Place early one evening, a month or so after she got back from the annual family holiday, a dejected Thursday evening when nothing was happening. It was raining heavily, a regular monsoon, and there was nobody around. I can’t remember why the hell we were even there.

  Then the door opened and out of the downpour emerged a drenched Philip. Being wet made him look vulnerable. His moustache drooped, his hair hung into his eyes, raindrops ran like tears down his emaciated cheeks. He looked around, searching for somebody, saw me and came over. “Hey Miriam, long time no see, how are you? Say, have you seen Ben?” (Or was it Harry?)

  Eleanor’s reaction was insidious and unexpected. She kicked me hard und
er the table, demanding attention, meaning to hurt me if she didn’t get it, while above the table her eyes went eerily blank. Her mouth opened and hung unhinged in a drooling sort of manner. So I introduced her. It was no big deal.

  I had known Eleanor for half a year by then. We had met when we enrolled in the drama club the previous fall. I had known Philip for six years. We had met at The Place through mutual friends, but a while back he had disappeared for several months. One rumour had it he was in a mental institution. Another rumour said his wife had stabbed him to death.

  “Fucking Philip,” people concluded. “With him anything is possible.”

  Before she met me, Eleanor had not known The Place existed. It was not the kind of demimonde hangout she had been brought up to frequent.

  She took to it like a fish to water.

  That Thursday evening I found myself in the company of a different Eleanor. She grasped Philip’s hand and held onto it, gazing up at him as if he were the Pope come to bless her, and not an alcoholic misfit who at age twenty-eight had drowned his litter of ambitions to avoid the tiresome responsibility of having to look after them. For a moment I was sure she was going to kiss his hand.

  Philip was in a hurry and didn’t really see her, the same way the Pontiff does not notice, indeed cannot be expected to notice, the individual faces in an adoring crowd.

  “Say Miriam, can you spring for a beer?” was all he said. Before I said no, Eleanor offered to buy him one. She ended up buying him seven.

  The letter continues with the announcement that she does not love anybody but Philip, will never love anybody but Philip. Philip. Philip. Then she asks, “Am I honest, Miriam? You see, I don’t think I am.”

  No, Eleanor, you were never honest, though God knows you thought you were. You meant to be. You thought you sincerely meant to be.

  On the next page she becomes sentimental, earnest.

  “Remember last summer, Miriam? Remember our walks in the park, barefoot, carrying our shoes in our hands, rolling in the grass, laughing and singing? Remember that perfect morning when we stayed up all night, sitting up on Mount Royal by Belvédère? Remember how dawn came so very early, sneaking over the rooftops, bringing light, making the river glow? How the birds sang in that gentle light when we were the only ones awake in the entire world? How the new day was ours alone? How the city belonged to only us, the only ones worthy of it? The artlessness of our happiness? It was fleeting, but it was there, wasn’t it Miriam? There was guileless joy at times like that, wasn’t there?”

  That wasn’t a dream?

  Words like falling leaves. “Summer is over, Miriam. My heart aches with the loss. But I will always cherish the memories of it. Remember the time we had been to a party in Griffintown and ended up throwing stones into the Lachine canal in the middle of the night? The quiet plopping sound in the dark water, shattering the reflection of the moon? Standing on that little bridge? Walking fearlessly the dark streets back downtown? We owned this summer, Miriam. Especially the nights we haunted like happy ghosts. And I’m so glad we did. Aren’t you? Now there’s a chill in the air and all the magic is gone.”

  Thinking back, remembering, yes, I am glad, too. Back then the world was so full of possibilities each new day, if only at the very moment when the morning grew bright in the east. Sometimes it was so magical Eleanor forgot to act.

  We looked in the mirror at faces that were so young we were sure we were immortal.

  At the end of the letter, “It’s so difficult to love.”

  I always found it far more difficult to be loved.

  The next letter was hand delivered, tucked in a wrinkled brown envelope on which is drawn a stamp featuring an erect, slightly crooked penis.

  Must be Philip’s, all worn out and bent.

  The letter is two pages long and consists of several poems: fragmented, unfinished thoughts. Eleanor was well aware that I was no fan of the kind of poetry she found deep enough to be meaningful.

  And then: “Miriam, listen, I have found something. What is it, you ask? Only this: an incredible calm. Suddenly everything inside me is a sea of calm. There is a God. Not a separate God, but one that is present in all of mankind. There is no duality. I no longer need anybody to love me. There’s so much infinite Love inside me I do not need it reciprocated.”

  Too much by half, but that’s what she was like. If and when it was convenient, Eleanor found and claimed God for herself, flowing over with His Love, saving her own for later. Other times, if God was unavailable, she flowed over all the same.

  “It’s winter now.” Eleanor is sitting by her window watching snowflakes float by in the haloes of the street lights, aching with the white, cold beauty of their slow descent on Hutchison. She does this while waiting for the figure of Philip to appear in the halo directly below, his long black scarf wound twice around his neck, but as ever without gloves or a warm coat. She is ready to rush down and let him in, to offer him food and wine, a bed and a body for the night.

  The next hand delivered letter is dated April 30. The envelope is green and has a heart drawn in the little square pretending to be a stamp.

  Wasn’t that the day I was standing by the bus stop on Sherbrooke, the one opposite the Music Building, and a bus, the wrong one, stopped and there was Eleanor tossing me a letter out the window as if she had been expecting me to stand there, gormless and patient, my sole purpose in life awaiting the imminent arrival of her latest outpouring?

  It was written during an exam for a film class. She is feeling stupid, she says, she never had enough time to study, what with tending to Philip’s tortured soul full time. She shares with me “the most postmodern” question from the exam. “Discuss, from a historical and esthetic point of view, film’s relation to drama and the novel.”

  How on earth, she asks, can she be expected to concentrate on such irrelevant trivia? She will be seeing Philip later. They will drink wine and talk about matters of significance. Together they will reach new depths, new heights. Expand the universe.

  Philip! Philip! Philip!

  Did she write the letters of his name slowly, revering her feelings for him? Or fast and hard, following the heralding thumps of her heart?

  “Tonight, Miriam, do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to listen! Yes, I am. I’m going to sit silent and listen and absorb. All night I shall listen to what other people have to say, not just Philip, but everybody. And I shall learn. Oh, I’m so very, very happy!”

  She does not elucidate the reason for her happiness, her unselfish plan to lend an ear to the thoughts of others for a change, but there is no need, is there? The reason is Philip.

  She continues: “Frederic has explained to me why Philip can never be satisfied with only one woman, why he can never be satisfied period. He assured me that Philip does not humiliate me on purpose.

  “Now that I understand, Miriam, I shall be patient.”

  And then: “Something is happening, Miriam, something so momentous I stand humbled before it.” She does not share what it is, but page after page of undisciplined emotions dance and shout, too full of admiration for their own grandiosity to notice the beat they are twirling to. A chorus line of exclamation marks dance in their wake.

  There are no more letters until September that year. By then she is in a terrible state, as fragmented and incomprehensible as the poems she loves to quote. I no longer recall what went on in the interim.

  No, wait . . . That must have been when I started to see less of her, that fall when her deterioration was well under way, her eager plunge into masochistic madness, catalyzed by Philip, who was already beyond redemption. Of course, had he not been beyond redemption she would not have Loved him.

  “Never is Love more Pure than when it has to redeem,” Eleanor assures me, and not for the first time. “Miriam, no doubt you’ll think this letter egocentrical, like all my letters to you, but I have to write this pain, this disease, out of my system. I need to direct it to somebody who will not turn away
from me in disgust and disappointment.”

  Tediously, it is all about Philip — who else? — so full of anger, so weary of the prolonged exercise of survival imposed upon him daily.

  Everybody said he was a poet. It was true that he did write some poems once, published in some long defunct literary journal. Eleanor knew he was a great poet. He had not written anything for years, be it a poem or shopping list, but this was apparently beside the point.

  As Eleanor used to say, he does keep a notebook just in case.

  “He suffers, Miriam, he suffers.” Eleanor is frightened. She has almost run out of tears. “It would be so easy to die tonight. I need to see Philip, to talk to him, to tell him he’s wrong about me. Tell him that I’m not the punishment for his sins. I’m the one who wants to take his pain away. I am the balm on his wounds. He must understand that.

  “The days are growing darker, Miriam. So is my soul.”

  It was around that time I started to grow tired of her self-inflicted pain. I never knew pain could be so narcissistic.

  A hand delivered November communiqué sits in an envelope that is the same dull grey as an early winter sky. This time she has not bothered to draw a stamp.

  She accuses me of lying, though it is not clear about what. Somebody named Tom is upset and it is apparently my fault. There is something I should not have done.

  I have no idea what she is on about. It sounds as though she is superimposing the drama of her own turbulent love life onto mine. I do not recall having an actual love life, only wanting one desperately.

  Was this Eleanor’s generous way of making me think I had one?

  “Notice,” she writes on the second page, returning to a more interesting topic, “that I have not mentioned the name of a certain person.” She ends by saying she hates to see the gloom of December punctured by gaudy Christmas lights. “There is a reason for such gloom. It should not be tampered with.”

  A January letter in a white envelope addressed to “My Friend Miriam” contains several grim statements.

  Philip has left her. He is with Janet now.