Читать книгу The Truth About Lou - Angela Von der Lippe - Страница 9

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First Love

Dear Honorable Pastor Gillot,

This letter to you is a first and last appeal. (For you do not know me.) The person who writes this letter is a sixteen-year-old girl who is in the throes of a crisis of identity, which threatens to sever all ties to family, church and community. I have lost my faith, dear Reverend, and I fear I am losing myself as well, falling into an ever-deepening cavern of isolation and despair.

I am a congregant of the German Evangelical Church here in St. Petersburg and it is there that my questions have been unfairly singled out for their heretical content. This perilous and painful state of affairs will, I fear, result in my failure to be confirmed in my family church. The truth is, Reverend, among my peers I am courteous but not at all sincere and how could I be, without betraying the questioning authentic person I know myself to be. You cannot imagine what it is like for me to be constantly holding back, unable to join in the laughter and social gatherings of the other girls, unable to voice my mind’s spirit for fear it will be broken. Pastor, I hunger for knowledge and learning, for the courage to uncover the God I know to be in my heart. But if my questioning be blasphemy, then I am truly damned forever and you need not read one more word.

I have heard you speak from the pulpit: “True faith renews and makes the whole man alive in Christ.” I wish so much to know more and to be made whole, to be led into the light. And I am willing now to live without answers. But I need someone to take me into his tutelage, so that my heart can be quieted in knowing my questions have at least been heard. So I appeal to you to be that person, and if you will only have me, I promise to respond with a determined mind and every fiber of my being.

Yours sincerely,

Louise Salomé

I know there is love at first sight. But at second sight there is always time to reconsider and love is more of a gamble. As I stood there in the anteroom of the modest gabled house that Pastor Gillot called home, I held in my mind the image of the flaxen-haired pastor in peasant shirt and sash, up there behind the roster, with an inextinguishable almost eerie light emanating from his eyes, speaking words that floated out over the congregation drawing them in with the tidal force of an undertow. As I stoically waited for reality to dash my dreams, the rote words of my letter catapulted me into a panic. I trembled and I bit my lip in anticipation. Crumpled in my gloved hand was the only real evidence of his answer—the slight hope of his intentions penned in a perfunctory reply to my letter: “Miss Salomé, come to my home next Tuesday at four o’clock and we shall discuss your dilemma.”

A maid emerged and with downcast eyes led me up three flights of stairs to Pastor Gillot’s garret study. Opening the door she motioned me in and just as quickly disappeared. I stepped into this small room and the first thing I noticed was my letter with its hastily scrawled signature, scattered amongst a stack of other papers on a small desk, an open inkwell and a breviary. The attic room was itself spartan—desk and chair, a simple cot by the wall to my left, a hearth to the right, a few pen and ink drawings (a couple of Dürers), Lucas Cranach’s Luther above the desk, and a small telescope by the dormer window.

Pastor Gillot was seated on a high stool with his back to me looking out the window as if anticipating some other arrival. He turned, and with a penetrating gaze that looked as if it originated in the most faraway recesses of mind, he gestured to me and said in a soft but matter-of-fact tone: “So Miss Salomé, be seated and tell me your trouble.”

I sat in the desk chair, and without so much as removing my crocheted gloves, I began to rattle off my transgressions as if to a confessor and I added the admission that both my parents but some teachers too were disturbed by my unchecked habit of making up stories from the whole cloth of my imagination and then trying them out as truth on my unsuspecting family and classmates. I questioned my faith in God by invoking the world of lived experience and I questioned reality by conjuring a made-up world. I couldn’t find my peace in either world and that was my problem, I couldn’t win.

Oh yes, that world-weary sixteen-year-old was me all right, always so ahead of myself, thinking I could edit my story, preempt the surprises, write my life, as what I wanted to believe, wanted others to believe too. Running so fast from all I knew, oblivious to the fact that I was moving at all.

Pastor Gillot moved toward me from his perch at the window and laying a hand on my shoulder said: “My child, you are not alone in your questions. Are you prepared now to learn the story of man’s attempt to fathom the mystery of God’s creation? That is the history of science and philosophy, seeking knowledge, and I can tell you that story. Are you also prepared to learn the history of the world’s great religions? Because that is the story of our quest for spirit. History and story. Story and history. This is all simply the struggle between body and soul, between what we know and what we desire to know. If you, child, are willing to learn, you will become truly wise and ‘educated’ in the original sense of the word. You will be led out of this darkness that surrounds you.”

He fell silent, and then holding my gloved hands in his large grasp, he went on: “But you, young lady, must do your part to make yourself ready. You must promise me that each time we meet, you will let go of all of the foolish fantasies that possess you—and tell me everything that clutters your troubled mind and spirit, sparing nothing. And your mind will soon be cleared to let a tree of knowledge take root ... your heart will be open to receive the wisdom of the spirit that you so desire.” With this, he let go instantly and I felt faint and at sea. It sounded pontifical, more suited to the echo chamber of a chapel than this dank attic room.

Of course, I said yes. What it meant for sure, I could not know. But what I felt at that moment was the hold on my shoulder. A physical trust. And I thought of my father. I didn’t know I would soon lose him. But I believed beyond a doubt I’d met his worthy successor and I was blessed. I was suddenly filled with a blissful expectation mixed with a hint of impending betrayal. A betrayal I had willed, indeed wanted.

At first blush you don’t see first love for what it is, you don’t even question. Because it’s the only love, everything. You’ve lost control. Your whole life depends on it being true, and there it is, your life delivered into someone else’s hands. For me what could be safer, more blessed? That someone was a pastor. To make it all right. And loyal to the last, first love stayed with me, long after it was over, never really letting go, holding me in the unspoken suspicion that regardless of him, I, I had willed it to happen.

We began that spring with two hours a week, usually meeting late in the afternoon, sometimes going beyond the hour which left me racing home defiant in my girlish euphoria, determined to keep my secret, but just as fearful that I would miss the evening meal and be caught out. I remember starting each session, sometimes sitting at the desk with Gillot in the high stool at the window or other times, particularly when I was upset with something gone wrong at home, sitting on the edge of the cot. Occasionally I leaned back onto the pillow while Gillot remained at his desk. I would begin by closing my eyes and relate to him all the stories and fantasies that had intruded on my days since our last meeting.

When I think back on those early days, this truly naïve invention of ours—what Gillot called our “Märchenstunden” was not unlike analytic inquiry today. Our “fantasy hours”—unscientific and spontaneous as they were—were all part of a game within which I could speak my foolish fantasies freely, without fear of reprisals.

The idea for me was to “relieve myself” of my menacing fantasies, to get rid of whatever impelled me to make them up, but what Gillot’s presence actually caused me to do was to embellish them with new twists and turns occurring in the moment. I did this because in dramatic moments I opened my eyes for a second and saw a faint smile on his forgiving face. He was intrigued by my creations. They clearly pleased him, as his full sensuous lips curled and parted as if waiting for the next breath of my story. So I did all I could to prolong the fantasy part of our lessons, if only to delay what followed: our actual studies.

Gillot would embark on longwinded discussions of the history of philosophy—man’s notion of what God might be—the one true god—and the history of religion—which as far as I could see was God’s notion of what men should be—the one true people. But how many gods and how many chosen people? The only common ground of these multiple faiths seemed to be in the claim of being special—one and only.

Gillot was translating a history of religion from his native Dutch into German and I struggled fiercely to teach myself Dutch on off-hours and during the two-month summer recess when my family retired to our summer home in Peterhof. My job during our lessons was to help him find the precise German rendering, as he worked himself through the original Dutch text. A drudgery I couldn’t quite follow, because it seemed so predicated on a literal interpretation of the word.

It seemed to me disingenuous—God’s word having been handed down through countless generations in multiple tongues, no telling how many translators being just like me, each one unable to curb their inclination to add a little here and there, to satisfy their lost spirits. Their lives were dull enough and here was diversion. And if Gillot’s exactitude was typical of a scholar’s formal precision, what then of the Luther-inspired personal God with a written word and scripture, which the faithful seeker not only had complete access to, but could even interpret and make his own, indeed improve upon? What of the words that truly spoke to the soul?

Oh we displaced all that passion percolating just below the surface into exacting God’s word. Silly as it sounds, we did. Only much later would we have words for it—“repress,” “sublimate.” I couldn’t begin to question what happened in that space. He, my confessor and I, I, his ... ? And another word, “dissociate,” for what would later happen. “First love” masking feelings, untranslatable.

So in returning from two months of pent-up fantasies under the accusatory gaze of my mother, I yearned to resume our “studies” and I burst into Gillot’s study with an urgency to tell the truth, my truth, to the one person in the world who would understand and believe me. With that unmentionable incident by the lake last summer and my wish for my mother to drown, for my father and me to escape with the circus, and hoping beyond hope for my dear brother, please God, not to die, I had more than enough stories to fill the fantasy part of our lessons. And enough vivacity to improve on reality for Gillot’s meticulous scholarly translation.

I had begun to feel feverishly desperate in the weeks of our separation. I needed more than his counsel or his spiritual care. I needed his physical presence, that protective warmth of being seen for the first time, for who I was. I was determined to preserve our conversations and never to lose this kinship that I had never before experienced, so I would go to any lengths to confess to Gillot the sins of my fantasies, those black stones weighing down on my “lost soul,” and to pretend a devotion to his religious instruction that I did in fact not have. If only to perpetuate the intoxicating hold of disclosure, this feeling of desire I had for him, I gave myself over freely to my stories, sifting through the embellishments, searching for the one lie that would speak the truth of me to him. That he would believe. That would move him to respond....

MEMORY, what is it? I dreamt of my mother emerging from a flooding of water naked and her body, surrounded by the black snake-like curls I knew so well, was barely pubescent with young buoyant breasts and nipples that looked like sand dollars—she was smiling not shamed at all by her nakedness or struck by my alarm . . . she did not seem to recognize me but lifted both arms and then with aplomb reached with her left hand to deliver into mine her right hand severed from an arm that fell limp at her side like a complacent tired doll. The water around her was a ruby red but no blood drained from her body. And the hand I held in my hand was that of an old woman, with blue veins mapping traces of deep riverbeds. But to which there was no delta. And I stood there, with her detached hand held in mine, and reached for a water lily to wrap the hand in, and pulling it from its root I looked into the heart of the flower to see a face with eyes so like Evgeny but somehow not his at all, how could it be, and I let it go to float away in the pink river ... away from me, from my grasp.... And I felt the full surge of a scream that was inaudible. Though I tried, I could not be heard. And then I awoke, holding nothing but the memory of a dream.

What is dream but a distorted creation? What is memory—but a created distortion? Then if memory is at once remembering and inventing at the same time, what can reality be? An invention?

And why does it frighten me so? . . . I asked Gillot when I returned to him that fall and our “fairy tale hours” became more fraught with emotion, sometimes to the point of precipitating a fainting spell. Far more than missing Gillot, I found that the tension around those secret meetings (a tension that seemed to escalate with each questioning look of my mother, trustful pat from my father and stoic accepting smile of my brother, as I made my exit) began to overtake me. I no longer spun my tales to exert control but my tales began to spin me.

Gillot seemed to soften with each telling of my emotional distress and I interpreted that to mean he had also cared and had missed me. He was no longer the stern patronizing analyst of my foolish stories. Seeing that they terrified me to the point of tears, he took me on his lap, caressed my hair and face, and whispered tenderly, “Girl, you must let it all out. I am here. No one can hurt you.”

Could I have really been so blind, so breathlessly naïve? Was he simply obtuse to what we were doing or mercurial, calculating? I question now what I couldn’t then, no not for a moment.

I tried to reason out the torture of my dream—my childlike mother, the Neva floods of family lore, my brother—no, her brother—swirling down a river of generations of blood in the innocent hold of a water lily and the culprit who was responsible for this family misfortune that spilled into my sleep, where was he? The sly one was nowhere in my night’s creation. He stood somewhere beyond the grasp of sleep.

Could I find him if I was vigilant enough and pieced together the story I remembered of the Neva flood with the details of my dream? What had happened to my mother that day so long ago? And why did she forever fear me, her girl-child? And who in God’s name was the culprit—my grandfather?—or was it perhaps me for imagining these torturous things—for suspecting something I could not see ...

I was dreaming the unspeakable—sexual betrayal, my mother’s, of course, never mine.... No, push it away. And he, well, uncertain now but still so comforting, deliberate in wanting to continue.

Intuiting that this relentless questing for meaning left me sleepless, losing weight and filled with more questions than useful answers, Gillot began to focus our studies on a neutral subject—a space neither too real nor too divine. He set about teaching me about the heavens and its stars.

He arranged for us to meet that winter for one hour a week coinciding with the evening vespers service followed by a social gathering at our church, so that the evening hour would not be questioned by my family. During these sessions I would stand at the garret window and he was seated just behind me on the stool with his hand around my waist. In this way he would guide my line of vision and instruct me to look through the telescope and observe some of the most distant mysteries of the night sky.

I remember feeling a warm sensation at his touch of my waist and a tingling sense of playful apprehension as he held both my temples from behind and tried to position my gaze through the instrument. Pointing at some object in the heavens, his hand would open as if to release some energy of his own to the night sky. “Look at the world beyond us, Lou,” he would say, “the universe beyond you and your family, beyond you and me. The universe we’re just beginning to know—we’re all a part of. See those stars, Lou. They float way out there in the chill of the heavens just like us. But we feel them. They are burning.”

I remember feeling a perplexed thrill at Gillot’s words, as I was pulled out of my troubled self, the world I knew, and delivered in the simplest way to the distant orbit of the stars. I looked forward to this one evening per week when he would hold me in his arms and I would be transported for once to a world I had not created. He gave me a running commentary of celestial objects infinite distances away from us and yet we could know them intimately by observing the course of their travels, the intensity of their light. Venus, the brightest star in the sky, commanding the stage of day’s beginning and end as the morning star and the evening star. And he marveled at the distant planets and their discoverers—that poor heretical creature (who had his own run-in with the church hierarchy) Galileo Galilei who beyond challenging the conventional wisdom of our place in the universe had also discovered Jupiter. Jupiter with its swirling red spot and its many moons, invisible to the human eye and barely visible to our telescope, seemed to live in a huge world of its own, a Goliath rivaling solar system to our very own David earth and its one lone moon.

What fascinated me about Gillot’s excursions into the stars was that the inhabitants of these heavens bore no Christian names at all but something more original and primitive. These heavenly objects were the namesakes of mythical gods who carried the legends of some enduring “all-too-human” behavior.

I remember Gillot telling me about Io (one of Jupiter’s moons), the “other woman” in ancient myth who for loving Jupiter (sometimes known as Jove), a married man, was turned by his vengeful wife, Juno, into a cow. And while Jupiter could assume at will all forms, in this case, that of a bull to be with his bovine paramour, Juno would not be made a fool. Though Io might be saved by a peacock named Argus, Juno the wife managed still to lure her husband back. Not only that, but she commended Io forever to a pasture where unbeknownst to Jupiter a gadfly would forever sting Io in the hide. “Hell hath indeed no fury like a woman scorned, or a goddess no less.”

Stories of such ancient and familiar vengeance sent us both reeling in giddy laughter, for though I was young, the age of Gillot’s daughters, and he himself was settling into the dawn of middle age, I could feel the undeniable visceral attraction directing my every word toward him and his approval—as natural a part of me as the gravitational pull of the earth around the sun.

Imagining another world drawing us together, keeping us in balance, denying all the while the real gravity of the world we lived in.

Yet too, I knew from our forays into myth that there were harsh consequences for even the most natural behavior. This was made clear to me when one evening as Gillot hovered over me at the telescope, his daughter Katarina burst in, and blurting an apology, “Papa, forgive me—I didn’t know,” she frowned, hesitating, her hand to her mouth, checking her words. And as Gillot, letting his hand drop instantly from my side, cried “Dear,” his daughter quickly disappeared.

It was done. We were as exposed as those stars in the heavens, suddenly spied by other eyes. We never spoke of that moment openly but the hand that let go that day was an admission of intentions Gillot could not reconcile within himself. The neutral territory of our celestial studies had suddenly turned perilous and Gillot wished to return to the safe terrain of our confessional pietist studies. Yet I in my naïve girlish and inexperienced way would not be cast out of his orbit. I tried to make light of our attraction, thinking that we could forever hold desire in the balance in the same way that heavenly bodies might never touch though were forever joined by huge distances of intimacy.

My dear Pastor Gillot, QUOD LICET JOVI NON LICET BOVI

Don’t talk to me of civilization and its decline. The gods still reign.

Day follows loyally on the heels of night and Argus pierces through the blue black gloom of solitude and guides a lover to a mate.

Somewhere in a wooded glade a nymph succumbs to a god, is discovered by a wife, and all hell breaks loose,

when out of the dark struts a peacock, splaying the eyes of a giant, fanning his prey before the kill, dancing a tune no longer melodious—he will, he will.

Her beauty regained, but never the same, She is pure and proven form. Io is strong and she knows, Io knows, so much the wiser now, what Jove is allowed is never permitted the cow.

—Yours ever, Lou

I wanted him to laugh. I wanted to be taken absolutely seriously. I tried my hand at poems I sent to him and began to write down my stories. What I discovered to my surprise was that my lying that was censored everywhere else found its appropriate true form in writing. The written story could be untrue, a lie; it could be fanciful, as long as it had its effect. And it did.

A smile from ear to ear when that afternoon Gillot opened his study door. He loved the strutting peacock and in a moment of levity he said he wished that we had such a dutiful protector for our trysts. But in our case, he told me, “God would have to do.” I found myself ever so slightly taken aback by this hint of sacrilege and by some vestige of faith deep within myself—a faith I would never have admitted to. I tucked the hurt away, didn’t want to know.

Many years later, when the great philosopher Nietzsche was discussing the nature of laughter (its tendency to implode on itself) for a book of aphorisms he was working on, I was reminded of this particular period with Gillot, when he would almost hold his joy in check at our tender meetings. Fritz had said that “Laughter” was the full release of hope into the joy of the moment, that being only momentary, must dissipate into nothingness. And I guess that was true. But I was annoyed at the philosopher’s presumption, that he could arrogantly declare someone’s happiness, our happiness, people he had never known, fatally doomed and yet he, sage messenger that he was, escaped unscathed. What really bothered me though was being reminded of this shaky, all too brief time with Gillot when all our intense joy would take its natural course and evaporate. (The philosopher was right after all.) First love in hindsight had become a cruel joke.

That autumn Gillot’s demeanor toward me, his young tutorial charge, seemed to soften and become tinged with a distanced acquiescence. He surrendered to the reality of our affection within that garret study, as he accepted too its absolute censure outside those walls. A kind of quiet reserve overtook him. He seemed less an authority, and was disturbingly weaker to me. Though I know he delighted in my stories and my bold attempts to unmask the prophet Isaiah and Paul for the mere mortals they were, and to be au courant with the philosopher-saints of the day—Spinoza and Kierkegaard—I would catch him looking at me from time to time with a sad smile. Like one who knows an end for which there are no words....

Abandoning celestial science and our evening hour, we returned to meeting each Tuesday and Thursday at four o’clock and took up once again our religious studies, moving to the Passions of Christ. It was a lugubrious time in our lessons. I felt precipitously thrown from heaven to earth. But I did not question Gillot’s decision, for he seemed to be questing for some answers of his own. I sat and listened, transfixed by the painful endurance of this man Jesus whom so many would come to call savior—who in his final hour called out to his heavenly father “Father, why have you forsaken me?” and then simply died. Without an answer. He was the first great questioner of his faith and of his family and given my doubts about my own mother, I felt a kinship with this man Christ. Gillot was right. I wasn’t alone in my disbelief after all.

Gillot explained how the disciples bereft of their leader were driven in their grief to create a community of their own that would wait for their brother to be reborn and to return. That this hereafter—the belief in the resurrection—was the linchpin of faith. A wish born of our own mortality. A wish to know the future that we could not know. A wish to know that we would live in that future unfettered by pain and sickness and the losses of love. All very human, I thought.

But the reality of faith, Gillot went on, was something much more personal. Faith was now as it was back then, as our pietist faith instructed. Faith was not souls floating in a netherworld or a church, with the insurance of tithes and indulgences. “Faith is, my dear Lou, no more or no less than a hereafter of the heart.” A kind of memory, I thought, of what has passed, what happened, what died.... He said this looking distractedly out the window and his eyes seemed to well with water.

I didn’t quite connect with Gillot’s sadness at that moment. I didn’t want to. I was relieved just to know that my belief was not so far from the truth. But I found myself disturbed for reasons I couldn’t fathom to learn that there was no certain resurrection of the flesh.

The afterworld in which all wrongs were righted, all suffering redeemed ... no, that was a creation. Fiction. And like all good fictions it found acceptance in its written form—and became the lie that told a truth to so many people, including myself. A fiction we needed.

But in the end, in the end, all we had in Gillot’s gentle tentative words, as if spooning out a bitter medicine to me, was “the hereafter of the heart.” I thought of my long-dead crazy grandfather, of Evgeny who was ill, and of all the questions I could never answer. And I wondered how a father could not help a son crucified for unjust reasons and how another father generations later could take a knife to his son’s throat in the name of that original negligent father. All the suffering, all the human pain. Small wonder then that that first idea of a resurrection caught on so long ago. But no, “God is in us,” Gillot said almost inaudibly, “each and every one of us, and all we have for sure, all we were left with is the ‘hereafter of the heart.’” Even then I thought Gillot was telling me something else, something much more personal, not about God, but about us.

I was to understand those words with a loss, an eclipse of my heart, the first. That winter my father suffered a heart attack while taking the cadets through their early morning exercises in the large courtyard beside the Winter Palace. I imagined him in the full splendor of his uniform, performing his duties to the moment of death and then falling in a heap from his horse, his loyal Lipizzaner “Mir,” suddenly disoriented and loosed of the ballast of his secure weight. And then others whose names I would never know realizing what had happened rushing to hold the hand of this fine magisterial general in his final moment. “The hereafter of the heart ... ” I would whisper again and again, ever perplexed by its meaning.

With the funeral and its aftermath of family visits, I did not return to Gillot’s garret study for over a month. When I did that February afternoon, I was disconsolate. Gillot rocked me in his arms and I wailed like a keening peasant my loss that could no sooner be erased than the silence, the absence, my cries sought to fill.

As he placed another log on the hearth and stoked the fire, I watched as the birch bark peeled like the ancient scroll of an unread letter into the faint glow of the embers and finally dissolved in white ash. All the answers I would never have. I began to sob and confessed to him what I felt to be a betrayal. I had wished to tell my father of our “lessons”—but it was a wish that I could not fulfill without breaking my promise to him never again to upset my mother. It was a necessary betrayal in life, but in death, one I couldn’t bear.

Gillot cupped my hands in his, and then moving to his desk he dipped his pen in the inkwell and began to pen a note of introduction to my mother. I protested. He kissed my hand and said, “No, my dearest Lou. This is the only way. Now more than ever you must proceed with your initiation into Christ and go on with your studies. Your mother must know now that I am here to help you through your confirmation. We mustn’t forsake your father any longer. We’ll both feel redeemed in knowing that we have not betrayed your father’s trust—that he lives in the ‘hereafter of our hearts.’”

That phrase again. That damnable phrase I never understood. I couldn’t follow the direction of his words. I wanted everything to stop. I wanted to be held in his affection.

But Gillot sealed the note in wax and said with uncharacteristic assurance, as someone committed to a course: “Now, Lou, the father of your flesh is departed and it’s time for me to take up his mantle and become the father of your soul. Out there in the open.”

I could only imagine how my mother would greet Gillot’s proposition. Though as always I welcomed him as sire of my spirit, I wondered what was to become of the tender touch I’d come to depend on? And if my innocent flesh was not willing to give him up, what about him, this wiser more experienced believer? In silencing the torment in his heart, what was he doing, if not sacrificing our happiness and me?