Читать книгу The Truth About Lou - Angela Von der Lippe - Страница 10

3

An All-Too-Human Savior

I never learned to dance. I could never have mastered the steps. It wasn’t so much the rhythms that were as inscribed in my young mind’s catalogue of quadrilles, mazurkas and waltzes as the exquisite parquet pattern that glistened beneath my slippers. No, the worst was the music itself coursing my body and invading all the senses like a stealth fever that rages til it suddenly crests into a calm cold silence.

Music’s abandon—its commanding hold and release—simply scared me as if I were being thrown off a runaway horse. That harmony of body and soul whirling through the maze of the dance floor never quite whispered the ease of its flight to my feet. I was too grounded. Too confused by the noise. Too cerebrally stuck. I tripped but never the light fantastic. To my father’s dismay who was himself an unstoppable dancer.

I remember as a small child crouching beneath the piano as it hammered the frenzy of Chopin’s “Polonaise Fantasie” with all the guests transported in wonder and then, joined by deeper more soulful strings, the piano would swoon into the cradle of one of Strauss’s worn waltzes that sent them all and my father too, more frequently than not without my mother but with one of the unsuspecting ladies, careening out onto the ballroom floor. On one such evening, I squealed when ash from his cigar left precariously in an ashtray on the piano fell onto my arm. Spying me in my hideout, he pulled me out, covering my arm with kisses, and we floated out to the regal notes of a waltz. Giving in to his body’s rhythm, I could do it. I could do anything in my father’s embrace.

Imagining all the coy expectancy and dutifully joyful steps that had once graced this grand room, I stood there in the stillness, encircled by multiple gilded mirrors reflecting an infinity of absences with no true entrances or exits. I smiled to think of the dancers’ delusions of being everywhere one looked and their horror at never being able to leave. These balls, these dances could get out of hand, could last forever, far worse than my fantasies. But now all the mirth, the rogue life, and my father too had somehow found their way out of this room and moved on.

I was aware of the French silk curtains of old that no longer whispered in the breeze of imminent comings and goings but hung stiffly, drawn against buttoned-down pocket windows between the rose-veined marble columns that outlined the majestic perimeter of the room. The multitiered crystal chandelier, once illuminated like a birthday cake, hung like an exquisite ice sculpture, precariously suspended in the blue darkness of late afternoon.

Every object here stood in regal silent witness to those who had come and gone. Somehow now I was the only one left in the room—there as if awaiting a sentence. Too tall to hide under the concert grand, I moved toward the adjacent parlor door and listened to the furor raging inside, far more cacophonous than anything ever heard before in these rooms.

Gillot had come to present his case. Spying through the keyhole, I saw my mother, more animated and articulate than she ever was with me, accuse him of seeing her daughter in private without her permission. Gillot was seated in formal dress, in waistcoat no less, on a sage-green velvet sofa before the raging hearth, and my mother in a chair opposite him that she ascended from in her apoplexy to declare that all further studies would be purely catechistic. That she could not abide by the lies of her daughter’s fantasies and he was not to encourage them.

“She must be confirmed. If you are the one to accomplish that, then so be it,” she paused. “But I do not trust your intentions, Pastor Gillot. Given this year of clandestine meetings and what I know of my daughter’s wild imagination, I can only question in the name of her dear departed father your proposition.”

Gillot rose from the sofa and holding her in his mesmerizing gaze and extending his hands for hers to fall into (I must say, I was annoyed by this), he said in a gesture of utter peace: “Madame Salomé, Louisa is but a child. I want to have her in my tutelage only through her confirmation. Your child is now mine.” My mother’s hands that had rested in his but for a second now thrust him off and she announced: “Pastor Gillot, hear me out. It is my daughter’s soul you will shepherd and nothing more.” She knew it all. She knew and yet she let go. Again.

Seized by a sense of sad elation, I fell back into the center of the room and found myself looking at a painting. Amongst the iconic faces of archdukes, princesses and imperial guardsmen claiming space on these walls was the one face not immediately known to me, and as fate would have it, the only one to whom I was related. The matronly looking woman in the portrait, braced with an Elizabethan collar and a restrained smile, was my father’s mother—frozen in the eloquent silent stare of the dead, the painted dead who never look at you but only through you.

I wondered what she thought of her son’s choice back then—my mother—and what she would think of that daughter-in-law’s choice now. My mother’s “yes” had been so unlike my father’s. Hers, even when she was giving in, was full of bitter recrimination and I found myself wishing for anything, yes, even for music itself, to drown her out.

There is an old Russian saying that goes: Liubov’ ne kartoshka, ne vykinesh’ za okoshko—“Love isn’t a potato. You can’t throw it out the window.” And I used to delight in imparting this bit of wisdom to friends who viewed it as evidence of the essential peasant core of the Russian soul.

Who knows, maybe there was some truth to that. But if so, this particular measure for calibrating the affairs of the heart, with its raw, common taste, had also found its way into the ranks of the imperial aristocracy, for whom a potato was slang for a sexual adventure with no consequences. It was known even to those of us who lived in the outermost circumference of the crown’s inner circle that “potatoes” had become a staple not only of the archdukes’ but indeed the emperor’s diet. Fresh from “potato parties” in the country they would return to their palaces along the Nevsky Prospekt, to the royal ties that truly bound, and they approached their prescribed mates with the same knowledgeable palate they brought to a good vintage wine. There was bouquet, age, nose, and certainly aftertaste to that consecrated union but never the mundane pleasurable moment of the potato.

Our emperor Alexander II, known within the family as Sasha, was a chief offender in this regard but I liked him nonetheless. As a child, I used to think that his silver mustached tusks actually meant that he had been sired by a white elephant. Supreme animal. Supreme man. Our emperor would oddly sacrifice his life trying to reconcile these polar sides of his character, his peasant desires with his imperial duty.

This man who in his public life had freed the serfs and then flirted with the anarchy of a constitution had in his private life installed his mistress (Ekaterina, the nameless one) and three illegitimate children in a palace apartment just above that of his wife, the empress Maria Alexandrovna. He wanted to bring the outside inside, to bring the hidden out into the open. He was famous for having said: “We must liberate from above before they liberate themselves from below.” And he tried to do this in his own household; he tried to contain two rivaling forces—mind and heart, duty and passion, wife and mistress—and though these women could not abide one another, he forced them to live under each other’s noses, thereby neutralizing any threat to life and limb that might be hatched from their private plots of revenge.

In the end, though, it was the bigger contradiction that proved his downfall. He could not reconcile the folk with the crown. Sasha the indomitable, Sasha the fallible, would fall victim of his own magnanimous heart. And as fate would have it, it ended up exploding on him literally, when one day in an excursion outside the palace grounds he was attacked with a grenade thrown by one of the very subjects he had tried to free.

VIOLATING moral standards, in the Orthodox or Lutheran traditions, was a nasty business but not hard to do in my native Russia. After all, what was it to be Russian, if not to rise above or fall below? And just who the ultimate arbiter was, was a moving target: the god of the land or the god of the imperial altar.

There was some pull fomenting in those years to declare one’s allegiance to Mother Russia, to embrace the distant expanse of the tundra as well as the crown. And that requirement sent my mother into fits of anxiety. As a widow now she was feeling the social pressure to withdraw from the cosmopolitan circles of St. Petersburg and retire to the countryside surrounded by the mystical alchemy of the masses—a prospect that was clearly out of the question and far too Russian for her.

She had already seen my cousin Emma fall prey to just such fateful choices. Emma, who was my age and my father’s sister’s daughter, had as a young girl fallen under the treacherous spell of religious orthodoxy, the mighty Russian church. As she relinquished her doubting Lutheran pietist faith, she gave herself over completely to the mystical séances and visionary practices of that special brand of orthodoxy festering in the countryside. Coincident with her spiritual conversion, my cousin fell in love with a young Russian cadet in the corps whom she would later marry and thereby surrender both body and soul to Mother Russia.

Poor Emma—she was the only girlfriend I had in those days—she was robust in every way, full bodied, and I envied her for that. In fact her physical maturity made me painfully aware of my lanky lateblooming boyish build that I compensated for by stuffing handkerchiefs under my modest breasts to give them the lift and curvature that were the style of the day.

Emma knew of my private lessons with Gillot (she had covered for me with my family more than a few times) and I knew of her flirtation with mysticism from her frequent excursions to the countryside. I also knew enough not to inquire and kept mum. But I didn’t understand the full extent of her conversion until one day in a history of religion class in the English Private School that we both attended, Emma rose from her desk to have her say in the middle of a lesson on the cleric Martin Luther and his many reforms, not the least of which was the insistence on the right of each and every one of us to interpret scripture.

And Emma, my sweet ordinary cousin, stood there with eyes unblinking and a look of terror contorting her face, one fist tightly grabbing the side of her skirt, as if trying to hold down whatever was agitating her, and the other hand, outstretched, pointing to the park outside our classroom window. Bells began tolling from the onion dome of the nearby cathedral as if enunciating this moment and Emma declared she saw him burning out there by the linden tree.

While the girls hovered around her and a teacher ran to calm her, I peered out the window and saw not so much as a brush fire. But Emma screamed that he, that he was burning—he was burning—that his body slathered with animal fat was propped up on a pike and suspended over hot coals that toasted him slowly to a crisp black—that a lion lay inert in death’s sleep beside him with a crown of fire raging around him, fueled by ancient scrolls, books and his beloved scripture. It was all going up in smoke.

Alas it wasn’t Luther, thank God for that, and it certainly was not a Grigory or a Basil too close to the Russian heart. No, it was poor Jerome, that saint of old in ragtag frock and bald pate. The one who cooked himself, flagellated his flesh and beat out his lustful thoughts in the desert, the one whose learning Augustine revered and said was not to be surpassed. “What Jerome is ignorant of, no man has ever known.” Actually he was neither prophet nor seer. He was simply a scholar who was as much at a loss as any of us to predict our Emma’s wild imaginings.

As patron saint of translators, Jerome was the one who got it all started, translating the stories, collecting the tales from all and sundry tongues into one coherent story, into the one true Vulgate Bible, written in the one dead tongue that no one questioned, not to mention, even spoke. Til centuries later, a monk equally penitent from a colder, more punishing climate would challenge it all again in theses nailed to a cathedral door, declaring the people’s need to know their God, to speak to him in their own tongue, to determine for themselves what they meant when they spoke about God.

And so in our unending quest to get to the bottom of the one who truly knew the answer, who after all declared himself our “alpha and omega, the beginning and end,” a grand unraveling proceeded through the centuries from the wizened old Jerome to the defiant young man Luther and now to poor hysterical Emma and the mystical incantations spreading like plague itself throughout Russia. And it didn’t end there, no, no. It would flare up throughout my lifetime in the pronouncements of the great philosopher, the aching predictions of my dear Professor and the ranting of the monster himself. Because the truth, unspeakable as it was, was that there was no ending, no beginning, and no one true truth that we could all know. (And what comfort could there possibly be in that?)

And what I remember about that afternoon was that everyone in that classroom, whether Orthodox, Lutheran or Roman, seemed to accept some part of Emma’s vision as true, that she saw what they could not—without so much as a grain of proof, simply because they needed to. They needed to believe in what we could not know. In sharp contrast to my stories, I might add, whose characters and plotlines always had more than a smidgen of truth, and whose ties to the world we know were as obvious as the light of day. Yet my tales, my “visions” of reality were subjected to the scrutiny and summary censorship accorded nothing less than a latter-day heretic.

And so Emma and her delusions were allowed to recede quite unnoticed into life in the countryside where she would bear several children, within the blinding isolation and rampant superstition of Russia’s white nights—open, empty. She did not find the eternity she had sought. But she did find drink, like others, to still her fears of that endless unknown.

“Russia is awash with holy men, surpassed only by its numbers of wanton women,” my mother used to say. “Our tsarina and her royal entourage lend their ears to the former, while our tsar and his archdukes lend their swords to the latter.”

My mother was no poet. Subtlety was never her forte. Mother never plumbed a deep inner meaning when she could pluck from within reach a sterling matter of fact. She was a willful practitioner who compromised means to a desired end. And she viewed her pact with Gillot as just that. Three more months—four at most—of private preparation for my confirmation was merely the means, the compromise, to the larger end of my de-Russification (my papers and release to study abroad) and, not coincidentally, as chaperone my mother would then be spared the dismal fate of inner exile to the Russian countryside.

Volga

Even from afar, it’s you I see. Even from afar, you who remain with me. Like a present that cannot dissipate, Like a landscape holding me in its embrace.

And had my feet never on your shores rested, I still think I would know your distances. As if each wave of all my dreams had crested on those unfathomable and lonely vistas.

Poetry is a wonderful thing. It says one, two and sometimes three things at the same time and still manages to pierce through the ambiguity to the heart of the matter. I wrote this poem, ostensibly to the Volga, the lifeblood of the Russian countryside. I barely traveled her expanses as a child but now on the cusp of leaving that childhood and my homeland behind, I wanted to claim that Russian soulfulness as my own.

The poem was for him, of course. The one who would immediately feel its dimensions. And that late afternoon just a week after his meeting with my mother, he closed the door of his garret study and clasped both my hands in his, saying, “Lou, dear Lou, you’re back, you’re back. We’re together.”

Gillot was looking a bit disheveled—hair askew, a tattered sweater—as if he had been sleeping in his clothes. He seemed slightly undone to me. Gone was the command of his pulpit and the tutorial magic I’d come to know. He paced distractedly, caged like one who would be here and there at the same time and did not know his own mind. His eyes finally met mine and rested with the look of a wincing pain.

Removing my cape, I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my pocket and said: “Pastor Gillot, Hendrik (the first time I had spoken his Christian name), I have written something here.” As he reached for his glasses I motioned to him: “No, you needn’t. Please let me speak it to you.”

I recited the lines by heart from my heart, and as he listened, the notes of my poem dropped like my own tears into his eyes. He pressed his lips to my cold hands and then let go in defeat. Composing himself he said in a steady tone: “Let’s sit down now, dear Lou, we must, and continue our lessons.”

Poetry does that. It promises life as it delivers endings. It can do no less. And so it was for us. I had arrived the year before with his summons crumpled in my hand, “We will discuss your dilemma,” and I returned that day with my own penned rendering of a much larger dilemma: the “unfathomable vistas” of our impending separation.

Acknowledging imminent endings has a way of putting all other things, all people, and all events into curious relief. Gillot’s imminent absence loomed large. I obsessed about it. It was almost palpable. Compared with this enormous reality before us, everything became very small and inert, like the dolls of my playhouse. And I felt small too, as if I had been reduced to a grain of sand in a huge hourglass whose sole function was to mark the moments toward a passage through which I would slip and beyond which time would literally stop.

There was something so stifling and joyless about those months I thought I must squeeze the heartbeat out of every moment. But where was that heartbeat? As we abandoned our tutorial pretense of my fantasy or his philosophy, the play of our relationship, which had made him at once the most divine and the most sensual of men, both teacher and lover, all but vanished. It was buried in what could now no longer be spoken.

The secret of us, if never spoken, might over time be forgotten, might become the lingering ache of some irretrievable yet undeniable loss. I worried the feeling had stopped. I worried because love, after all, like story and so much else, needs to be created, to play with what it is not, if it is to survive. Without love’s lie, its ruse, its cover, we were lost.

As everything around us became focused on the endpoint of my confirmation, I felt more vulnerable and oddly exposed as never before. Our lessons that had once been ignored were now subject to countless intrusions.

I’d hear a female voice in distressed heightened pitch from the parlor just off Gillot’s entryway as I was led up to his study. His daughters would arrive unannounced to fetch a book from their father’s study or to deliver an unexpected pot of tea. I was suffocating under the burden of palpable suspicion. My reaction was physical. I held things in, as if literally holding my breath; I began losing weight again and sank into lethargy. Mother viewed my sullen demeanor as proof of my chronic obstinate ingratitude.

Gillot responded by immersing himself more and more in detail. My part of the work completed, he would continue to refine his translation alone. We had covered the history of religion and the provocative flights of contemporary philosophers. Now we focused on the commandments, Psalms, Revelation and fashioning a program for my confirmation—no room for dream, and much worse no room for the fanciful embellishments of our unfolding story.

We sat together through those first sessions not questioning our conspicuous silence, not questioning the supplicant voice of Psalms or the mad paranoia of John that rose from the page, as if waiting for a revelation of our own. He was steeped in his translation and I left to the drudgery of my catechistic study.

Heaven came crashing to earth. Io was no longer a moon or mythical creation. Io was me and I felt the sting of my mother’s instructions, his daughters’ intrusion and his wife’s complaints that seemed to trumpet my every arrival to their household. All of a sudden I was that cow now aimlessly grazing in his pasture.

I plucked up my courage. Complaining to Gillot, I protested the choice of texts. I could not connect the Psalms’ plaintive plea for surrender to the damning threat of Revelation to triumph over all the unworthy infidels—of which I thought myself possibly one. There was violence in salvation. There were no stories to these books. Where on earth were the people?

There were only symbols and ominous numbers—seven seals, twelve candlesticks, five stars, dragons, lambs, harlots and brides—and all of these things stood for something whose meaning was known only to the prophet. And a plague on him or her, who added to this prophecy, embellished that text. She would be visited by pestilence for the rest of time right here, the prophet said, writhing in an everlasting world of death, mourning, weeping and pain (fair warning). I knew better than to tempt fate (heresy, defying the known, was bad enough, but defying prophecy, the unquestionable unknown, now that was pushing God’s limit). I knew which lot I would end up with.

Gillot didn’t know what to make of my distress. But he urged me to return to the safe territory of the older stories. “These last books are part of received wisdom, Lou, a prophecy yet to be revealed. They seek the beyond, a resurrection and reunion with a lost brother. They were grieving. Go back to the older stories and write what they tell you. There you can express your fantasies through the hurt of earthly people battling to know an earthly savior. You see, my child, they were seeking a man. Theirs was a clearly human story.”

I took his advice. I discovered that through writing I could begin to create my own prophecies and in no small measure save myself, create my own word, in short, chart my own way. Little did I know the gift Gillot had given me that day by directing me to seek solace in the old stories and counsel from a savior within. So I set about looking for something remotely familiar, for a sign in the scripture of old that would beckon, would guide me, and not surprisingly perhaps, I found my way to my namesake.