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Prelude

This book was inspired by a gift and a promise. The gift was a book my grandmother gave to me shortly before her death in the eighties some twenty years ago. It was a book of German verse by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke that she had carried with her as a young woman fleeing her native Poland before the German invasion of September 1, 1939. The promise was one I made to her just before she died.

My grandmother was part of an imperiled band of ethnic Germans who inhabited a no-man’s-land, German Pomerania with its cities of Zoppot and Danzig, that had ceded to Poland after World War One. Years later the ethnic German enclaves left there were suspected by the Nazi invaders of being traitors and by their own fellow Poles of being potential spies. With no other option, my grandmother made her escape to the New World, turning her sights to assimilating into a new culture with a new language, and she proceeded to hand down to my mother that same forward-looking view of life, with never the slightest inclination to entertain any nostalgia for the old country.

So it was a surprise indeed when shortly before she died, she entrusted a memento of her long-buried past to me, her granddaughter, partly because, she said, I could afford to look back, had in fact made a profession out of looking back as a scholar; and besides, she conceded, as the “writer in the family,” I was the one most likely to appreciate this book and all it meant.

The book, I knew, was simply priceless, a first edition of Rilke’s poetry collection, The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch, 1903), bearing the author’s intimate inscription:

To Lou—In whose presence these words were formed and in whose hands they now live.—Your old Rainer

As my Oma lay sick, her strength waning in those last weeks, she seemed more willing than ever to speak of her childhood friends and family in Poland, to remember them all. It was almost as if she were taking one last count. So I’ll never forget how, in pressing this little volume into my hands, she mused that, though she and of course the world had come to know the poet’s verse, it had been the woman—this “Lou”—who had somehow eluded her.

“Well, you know, Oma, if this is the same Lou, I think it may be, it was Rilke’s muse, the famous Lou Salomé.” (I’d picked up that much in graduate school.) But how, I asked, had she come upon this small treasure? She smiled and lit up remembering, saying: “My mama, your great grandmother, Johanna Niemann, wanted me to have it, but she died too soon of influenza in 1918, and so it was Katya, my nurse, the face I will never forget from my childhood, who gave it to me just before I fled. Mama’s close friend ‘Lou’ from Berlin had sent it to her with specific instructions that she was to give it to me when she saw fit. My Katya, too old to accompany me, did that for ‘Mütti’ at the last minute, when I was leaving . . .

“There was a note, I seem to remember, from this Lou to Mama with the salutation ‘Dearest Johanna.’ . . . Isn’t it there anymore? Oh, I thought for sure I’d kept it. Perhaps with so much time elapsed and all the travels, it too has been lost, like so much else.” And then, patting the volume in my clasp and gently letting go, she looked up wistfully. “I always thought I should somehow know her (what with Katya pressing this book, Mama’s gift, her gift, into my hand at the very end), that I’d missed her, this Lou, in some way, but I don’t remember ever meeting her. I have no image of her. Not even a voice.

“So now the gift is yours, Julianna”—my name on her lips sounding so strangely old, the one I was born with but could never pronounce as a girl. “Yours, my dear Anja”—she whispered my nickname with a slight German inflection—“yours to make with what you will. Perhaps you can find out more about who she was. You can do that easily nowadays, can’t you? I don’t know why, I guess it may be loose ends, but I just think it would be good to know.”

I didn’t quite follow her or understand her need. And not long after that, death, her death, intervened, and then life, my life, intervened to send me to countless academic outposts in a nomadic search for a tenure-track position in literature and writing—eventually ending up years later at Skidmore College in upstate New York. On this vast, leafy campus at the foot of the Adirondacks, I’d been teaching comparative literature and conducting writing seminars in poetry, and now I faced the reward for all my labors—a sabbatical to finally write what I had always been putting off. For a writer, deciding just which topic will conquer one’s procrastination is a terrifying prospect matched only by the one certain fate of any writer—the blank page.

But I didn’t seem to have to choose; the topic seemed to choose me with the arrival of a package one afternoon in late spring as I was preparing my last classes before my long-awaited break. My mother, who was moving out of the family home into an independent care facility outside of Pittsburgh, had sent me an old hatbox full of Oma’s personal papers. My eyes scanned the contents—a daybook, a dictionary, a postcard, a pearl hat pin, a dried corsage of white roses, the wedding certificate of one Cosima Niemann to Carl Lippe. Nothing before 1938, I thought, just the torn cloth arm of a doll with an exquisite porcelain hand. My fingers traced the perfectly formed old script and my mind worked its way back to that wandering child who in making the crossing had become my grandmother. And I remembered our last talk. Her gift and my promise to find Lou.

It was time, I thought. Over the years I had collected bits and pieces—an obscure monograph here, chapters from multiple biographies of her conquests—Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud—critical psychoanalytic essays and her own highly abstract, elusive, autobiographical prose. But all these were like shards in a mosaic that never fit. Forming no coherent image. No singular voice. Oma was right after all.

I resolved to write her story not as others saw her but in her own voice. To concentrate I decided to rent a remote camp in the North Country from an environmentalist friend, a Scotsman, who was off doing research for the year in the Arctic. He warned me that I’d be “having it lonely up there,” he’d send postcards via carrier pigeon or musher, and that I’d know the winter ended when I heard the bear cubs falling out of the trees. But there was no better solitude, no more open space than that blank page of the Adirondack sky. In short, it was the perfect writer’s retreat.

And so that is how this, Lou’s story, began, with a hatbox of memories, the gift of a book and a deathbed wish to find the sender. As I came to hear her story, I could not predict how all those things would intersect. But she would tell me in time.

And as I came to discover, the genius of Lou was much more than physical. Her genius was her willful hold on the imagination. And indeed when I would stray away to the research and all the other voices, she would call me back with a clear voice to her story. She began her telling in the thirties, about the time when Oma was escaping Poland, and then she sank way, way back into the pillow of memory, to her mother and her Russian childhood. And she took me there and I listened. This muse to so many had now become my own. She spoke and I wrote.

This is her story, the truth about Lou.

—Anna Kane, Blue Ridge Camp, 2006