by Erica Jong
“Isadora!”
Almost thirty. Strangers sometimes take me for twenty-five, but I can see the relentless beginnings of age, the beginnings of death, the gradual preparation for nonexistence. Already there are light furrows in my forehead. I can spread them with my fingers, but they fall back into creases immediately. Under the eyes, a fine network of lines is beginning: tiny canals, the markings of a miniature moon. In the corners of my eyes are one, two, three fine lines, as if made with a Rapidograph pen using invisible ink. Hardly perceptible-except to the artist herself. And the mouth is more set in its ways than it used to be. The smile takes longer to fade. As if aging were, above all, rigidity. The jetting of the face into prearranged patterns; a faint foreshadowing of the rigidity which comes after death. Oh the chin is still firm enough… but isn’t there a fine, almost invisible chain around the midpoint of the neck? And the breasts are still high, but for how long? And the cunt? That will be the last to go. It will still be going strong when nobody wants the rest of me at all.
It’s funny how in spite of my reluctance to get pregnant, I seem to live inside my own cunt. I seem to be involved with all the changes of my body. They never pass unnoticed. I seem to know exactly when I ovulate. In the second week of the cycle, I feel a tiny ping and then a sort of tingling ache in my lower belly. A few days later I’ll often find a tiny spot of blood in the rubber yarmulke of the diaphragm. A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby. I feel a wave of sadness then which is almost indescribable. Sadness and relief. Is it really better never to be born?
The diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me. A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men. Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all mine. A girl like me, but better. A girl who’ll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get their names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child.
“Isadora!”
But maybe I was already a hostage. The hostage of my fantasies. The hostage of my fears. The hostage of my false definitions. What did it mean to be a woman, anyway? If it meant being what Randy was or what my mother was, then I didn’t want it. If it meant seething resentment and giving lectures on the joys of childbearing, then I didn’t want it. Far better to be an intellectual nun than that.
But the intellectual nun was no fun either. She had no juice. And what were the alternatives? Why didn’t someone show me some alternatives? I looked up and grazed my chin on the hem of my mother’s sable coat.
“Isadora!”
“OK. I’m coming.”
I walked out of the closet and confronted Pierre.
“Apologize to Randy!” he demanded.
“What for?”
“For all the bitchy disgusting things you said about me!” Randy yelled. “Apologize!”
“I only said that you deny who you are and that I don’t want to be like you. Why does that require an apology?”
“Apologize!” she screamed.
“Why?”
“Since when do you care so fucking much about being Jewish? Since when are you so goddamned holy?”
“I’m not so holy,” I said.
“Then why are you making such an issue?” Pierre was now using his sweetest Middle-Eastern French accent.
“I never started this holy crusade to multiply the true believers-you did. I’m not trying to convert you to anything. I’m just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.”
“But Isadora,” Pierre wheedled, “that’s exactly it-we’re trying to help you.”
4 Near the Black Forest
Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work… Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.
– Affidavit of S.S.-Oberstürmführer
Rudolph Hess, April 5, 1946, Nürnberg
The 8:29 to Frankfurt
Europe is dusty plush,
first-class carriages
with first-class dust.
And the conductor
resembles a pink
marzipan pig
and goose steps
down the corridor.
fräulein!
He says it with four umlauts
and his red patent-leather
chest strap zings the air
like a snapped rubber band.
And his cap peaks and peaks,
a papal crown
reaching heavenward to claim
an absolute authority,
the divine right
of Bundesbahn conductors.
fräulein!
E pericoloso sporgersi.
Nicht hinauslehnen.
II est dangereux…
the wheels repeat.
But I am not so dumb.
I know where the tracks end
and the train rolls on
into silence.
I know the station
won’t be marked.
My hair’s as Aryan
as anything.
My name is heather.
My passport, eyes
bluer than Bavarian skies.
But he can see
the Star of David
in my navel.
Bump. Grind.
I wear it for
the last striptease.
fräulein!
Someone nudges me awake.
My coward of a hand
almost salutes
this bristling little
uniform of a man.
Schönes Wetter heute,
he is saying
with a nod
toward the blurry farms
beyond the window.
Crisply he notches
my ticket, then
his dumpling face smiles down
in sunlight which is
suddenly benign
as chicken soup.
Before I lived in Heidelberg, I was not particularly self-conscious about being Jewish. Oh I have certain memories: my grandmother lathering my hands between hers and saying she was washing away “the Germans” (her punning synonym for germs). My sister Randy initiating a game called “Running Away from the Germans” in which we put on our warmest clothes, bundled our baby sister Chloe in the doll carriage, made applesauce sandwiches, and sat eating them in the fragrant depths of the linen closet, hoping our supplies would last until the war was over and the Allies came. There is also a stray memory of my Episcopalian best friend Gillian Battcock (age five) saying she couldn’t take a bath with me because I was Jewish and Jews “always make wee-wee in the bath water.” But in general, I had a fairly ecumenical childhood. My parents’ friends came in all colors, religions, and races, and so did mine. I must have learned the phrase “Family of Man” before my training pants were dry. Though Yiddish was sometimes spoken at home, it seemed to be used only as a sort of code language to hide things from the maid. Sometimes it was spoken to deceive the children, but we, with our excellent childhood radar, always sensed the content even if we missed the words. The result was that we learned almost no Yiddish. I had to read Goodbye, Columbus to learn the word shtarke and The Magic Barrel to hear of a paper called The Forward. I was fourteen before I attended a bar mitzvah (a first cousin’s in Spring Valley, New York) and my mother stayed home w
ith a headache. My grandfather was a former Marxist who believed religion was the opiate of the masses, forbade my grand-mother any “religious baloney,” and then accused me (in his sentimental Zionist eighties) of being “a goddamned anti-Semite.” Of course I was not an anti-Semite. It was just that I didn’t feel particularly Jewish and couldn’t understand why he, of all people, had suddenly started sounding like Chaim Weizmann. My adolescence (at Break Neck Work Camp, the High School of Music and Art, and as a counselor-in-training at the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund) had been spent in the palmy days when a black was invariably elected president of the senior class, and it was a blazing sign of social status to have interracial friends and dates. Not that I didn’t realize the hypocrisy of this reverse discrimination even then-but still, I had my share of honest integration. I considered myself an internationalist, a Fabian socialist, a friend of all mankind (nobody mentioned womankind in those days), a humanist. I cringed when I heard ignorant Jewish chauvinists talking about how Marx and Freud and Einstein were all Jewish, how Jews had superior genes and brains. It was clear to me that thinking yourself superior was a sure sign of being inferior and that thinking yourself extraordinary was a sure sign of being ordinary.
Every Christmas from the time I was two, we had a Christmas tree. Only we were not celebrating the birth of Christ; we were celebrating (my mother said) “The Winter Solstice.” Gillian, who had a crêche under her Christmas tree and a star of Bethlehem over it, disputed this hotly with me. I resolutely echoed my mother: “The Winter Solstice came before Jesus Christ,” I said. Poor benighted Gillian’s mother had insisted on a baby Jesus and a virgin birth.
At Easter, we hunted for painted eggs, but we were not celebrating the resurrection of Christ; we were celebrating “the Vernal Equinox,” the Rebirth of Life, the Rites of Spring. Listening to my mother, you would have thought we were Druids.
“What happens to people when they die?” I asked her.
“They don’t really die,” she said. “They go back into the earth, and after a while get born again, as grass or maybe even as tomatoes.” This was strangely disquieting. Perhaps it was comforting enough to hear her say, “they don’t really die,” but who wanted to be a tomato? Was that my fate? To become a tomato with all those squishy seeds?
But like it or not, it was the only religion I had. We weren’t really Jewish; we were pagans and pantheists. We believed in reincarnation, the souls of tomatoes, even (way back in the 1940s) in ecology. And yet with all this, I began to feel intensely Jewish and intensely paranoid (are they perhaps the same?) the moment I set foot in Germany.
Suddenly people on buses were going home to houses where they treasured clever little collections of gold teeth and wedding rings… The lampshades in the Hotel Europa were suspiciously finely grained… The soap in the restroom of the Silberner Hirsch smelled funny… The immaculate railroad trains were really claustrophobic and foul-smelling cattle cars… The conductor, with his pink marzipan pig face, was not going to let me off… The station commander, with his high-peaked Nazi hat, was going to inspect my papers on some pretext and hustle me over to one of those green-coated policemen in black leather boots with a matching whip… The customs guard at the border crossing was surely going to stop me, discover my little cache of Lomotil paregoric, sulfur tablets, V-Cillin, and Librium from the army dispensary-usual supply of goodies for going down to Italy-and take me away to a secret cavern under the Alps where I would be tortured in cruelly ingenious ways until I confessed that beneath my paganism, pantheism and pedantic knowledge of English poetry, I was every bit as Jewish as Anne Frank.
Given the perspective of history, it’s clear that Bennett and I owed our being in Heidelberg (and in fact our marriage) to the hoodwinking of the American public by the government which was later revealed in the Pentagon Papers. In other words, we got married as a direct result of Bennett’s being drafted-and he was drafted as a direct result of the Vietnam troop build up of 1965-66, which was a direct result of the hoodwinking of the American public by the government. But who knew that at the time? We suspected it, but we had no proof. We had ironic headlines promising that the buildup was to “end the war and bring a lasting peace.” We had good one-liners like: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it…” We had activists as articulate as any who came along later. But we had no proof in black and white on the front page of The Times.
So Bennett, a child psychiatrist with half his analytic training done, was drafted at the age of thirty-one. We had known each other three months. We had come to each other from other unhappy love affairs-and on my part a disastrous first marriage. We were sick of being single; we were terrified of being alone; we were happy together in bed; we were frightened of the future; we were married one day before Bennett had to leave for Fort Sam Houston.
From the first, the marriage was strange. We’d both expected rescue. And there we were both clawing at each other and drowning together. Things turned hostile in a matter of days. We quickly went from verbal assaults to utter silence, punc-tuated by lovemaking that kept on, amazingly enough, being good. Neither of us quite knew what we had gotten into, or why.
Before we came to Heidelberg, the setting for the first two months of our marriage was as strange as our reason for getting married. There we were, two terrified, transplanted Manhattanites, plunked down in San Antonio, Texas. Bennett was shorn of his hair, stuffed into army greens, forced to sit through hour after hour of army propaganda on how to be an army doctor-something he detested with his whole heart.
I stayed “home” in a sterile motel outside San Antonio, watched television, tinkered with my poems, felt enraged and powerless. Like most native New York girls, I had never learned to drive. I was twenty-four and stranded in a Texas motel facing a sun-parched strip of highway between San Antonio and Austin. I slept until ten-thirty, awoke and watched television while I carefully made up my face (for whom?), went downstairs and gorged myself on a Texas brunch of pancakes, sausages, and grits, put on my bathing suit (which was growing tighter and tighter), and baked in the sun for two hours or so. Then I swam in the pool for five minutes and went back upstairs to confront my “work.” But I found it nearly impossible to work. The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had no sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability to write. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life. I had begun composing and illustrating little stories when I was eight. I had kept a journal from the age of ten. I was an avid and ironic letter-writer from age thirteen, and I consciously aped the letters of Keats and G.B.S. throughout my adolescence. At seventeen, when I went to Japan with my parents and sisters, I dragged along my Olivetti portable and spent every evening recapitulating the day’s observations into a loose-leaf notebook. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines during my senior year in college (where I won most of the poetry prizes and edited the literary magazine). And yet despite the obvious fact that I was obsessed with writing, despite publications and despite letters from literary agents asking whether I was “working on a novel,” I didn’t really believe in the seriousness of my commitment at all.
Instead, I had allowed myself to be shunted into graduate school. Graduate school was supposed to be safe. Graduate school was supposed to be the thing that you got “under your belt” (like a baby?) before you settled down to writing. What an obvious swindle it now seems! But then it seemed prudent, wise, and responsible. I was such a compulsive good girl that my professors were always dangling fellowships before me. I longed to turn them down but hadn’t the guts to-so I wasted two and a half years on an M.A. and part of a Ph.D. before it occurred to me that graduate school was seriously interfering with my education.
Marrying Bennett sprung me from graduate school. I took a leave of absence to follow him into the army. What else could I do? It wasn’t that I wanted to give up my fellowship-it was History giving me a boot in the ass. Marrying Bennett also got me away from New Y
ork and away from my mother and away from the Graduate English Department at Columbia and away from my ex-husband and away from my ex-boyfriends-all of whom had come to seem identical in my mind. I wanted out. I wanted escape. And Bennett was the vehicle for it. Our marriage began under that heavy burden. That it survived at all is rather a miracle.
In Heidelberg, we set up house in a vast American concentration camp in the postwar section of town (a far cry from the beautiful old section near the Schloss, which tourists see). Our neighbors were mostly army captains and their “dependents.” With a few notable exceptions they were the most considerate people I’ve ever lived among. The wives welcomed you with coffee when you moved in. The children were maddeningly friendly and polite. The husbands would spring gallantly to help you dig your car out of a snowbank or carry heavy boxes upstairs. It was all the more astonishing then when they announced to you that life was cheap in Asia, that the U.S. ought to bomb the hell out of the Viet Cong, and finally, that soldiers were only there to do a job but not to have political opinions. They regarded Bennett and me as creatures from outer space, and that was rather how we felt ourselves.
Across the way were our other neighbors, the Germans. In 1945, when they were still militarists, they had hated Americans for winning the war. Now, in 1966, the Germans were pacifists (at least where other nations were concerned) and they hated the Americans for being in Vietnam. The ironies multiplied so fast you could hardly absorb them. If San Antonio had been strange, Heidelberg was a thousand times stranger. We lived between two sets of enemies and we were both so unhappy that we were enemies to each other as well.
I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways. The Armed Forces Radio Network blaring out the football scores and the (inflated) number of Viet Cong killed on the other side of the world. Children screaming. Twenty-five-year-old freckle-faced matrons from Kansas wandering about in housecoats and hair rollers, always awaiting that Cinderella evening for which it will be worthwhile to comb out their curls. It never comes. Instead come the salesmen who stalk the hallways, ringing doorbells, selling everything from mutual funds to picture encyclopedias (in simplified vocabulary) to Oriental rugs. Besides the American strays and British dropouts and Pakistani students selling “on the side,” there is a veritable Bundeswehr of gnomelike Germans, peddling everything from “handpainted” oils of sugared Alps under honeyed sunsets to beer steins which play “God Bless America” to Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks which chime perpetually. And the army people buy and buy and buy. The wives buy to fill up their empty lives, to create an illusion of home in their drab quarters, to spread the grease of American money around. The kids buy helmets and war toys and child-sized fatigues so that they can play their favorite games of VC’s versus Green Berets and prepare for their future. The husbands buy power tools to counteract their own sense of impotence. They all buy clocks as if to symbolize the way the army is ticking away their lives.
