Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 14

July 26

It is no better and no worse without booze. It is also not the same. The swings are mitigated, the time away from pain reduced, the pain, when felt, reduced as well. I spent a second day hugging as close to shore as I dared. I had to row today. No breeze to speak of. And when there was wind, it blew against me. All things seem to blow against me. You sound awfully melodramatic, Sarah. Yes. But, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of bombs. I’m afraid of planes that crash out of the sky. I’m afraid of abstract and, for here, impossible fears. Every time I try to concentrate on why my heartbeat races and the blood drains from my face, every time I try to capture an image of real danger, of cold, of drowning, of bears, of stampeding caribou, I cry for my parents. I sit in my boat and sob and sob and sob.

It is strange that in this journal writing I don’t always disclose everything there is to disclose. I don’t talk about the time on the waves mourning. I don’t speak about the tears. I never discuss scars. But it’s harder to keep those away without the drunkenness, without the booze. With the booze, they came out; but they came out and shortly afterwards I blacked out. And in the morning, it was the sweat of alcohol induced exhaustion that fired my body, that forced what of my brain could focus to focus on the immediate. Now that’s gone. I live with the grief, with the fear, all of the time.

The day I let my mother hang up on me, the day I wrote about before, when she banged the phone against the counter, shouting,—perhaps shouting “motherfucker,” I’m not sure—it’s only been nine days and suddenly I’m comfortable saying motherfucker, fuck—well that day, later on, my father called me. Wait, I want to write about what my father said to me. It’s haunted me all day, tear-strokes between the paddle’s dip, and such. But I don’t want to dismiss my mother, my Eema, so quickly. Who was this woman? That question resonates for me with ever mounting volume.

I have this clear understanding of my father. He was this guy who loved to row, who loved his daughter, who cut deals for the Investment Banking Division at Morgan Stanley. But my mother—often days I scream into the wind, trying to find out who this woman who I interacted with so much during the first twenty-three years of my life really was. And then I fall apart when I realize she can’t tell me. Sometimes I worry that the grief will fade, that I’ll mourn them less. When that happens, I quickly try and evoke the physiology of overwhelming sorrow. It has four symptoms: your eyes sting and well with tears; your chest tingles, contracts and feels like it’s crushing your breath; your stomach knots but feels empty; and some kind of mental chemical release makes you feel awake and as if a gray-orange blanket’s dropping over your mental sight at the same time. For me, nothing accesses that reaction quicker than attempting to assemble the fragmented memories I have of my mother here in this journal: fighting with me, slamming the phone receiver down, crying, teasing my father about his plans. Strangely, the woman who raised me—quite caringly, diligently, lovingly—doesn’t emerge with clear defining attributes. I realize that the daughter of a Shoah orphan must, necessarily, be an extremely complex woman. I imagine the secrets we might have shared at some point. Her telling me just what did drive her; how she made do, housekeeping, as she did, out on the Island. I desperately want to know how she could be content with that. My mother, who, after all, made my father wait to marry her until she’d completed her doctoral dissertation in philosophy—a story I only know because my father brought it up—how was she so easily sated by that materialistic, nay, perfunctory existence? And it breaks my heart, and I wail, and I know that I still grieve them, that they haven’t begun to fade. It comforts me to know that I still hurt readily. But I wish I could know her answer (though I wouldn’t believe it, I wouldn’t leave the path of righteousness); I wish I could discover what let her tick so easily while committed to little more than her family, defining herself in context of my father, an investment banker who liked to kayak, who while imminently lovable, certainly did not infringe upon the divine.

But I began to write that my father called later on the same day that my mother hung up on me. He was exhausted and I could hear the smoke harshness in his voice, the WTC hack. He wasn’t sleeping; he was spending too many days down there by far. “Sara.”

He didn’t mean to call me by my Hebrew name, but exhaustion and fume induced laryngitis did for me what he wouldn’t have thought to do, to flatten the A, roll the R, shift emphasis to the second syllable.

“Sara, I’m haunted by what I’ve asked to see. These are the pillars of smoke Laban’s wife turned into when she looked back at Sodom.” I didn’t correct him. I didn’t tell him that it was Lott not Lavan, and certainly not Laban, and that his wife became a pillar of salt not smoke. “Sara, I should’ve walked and never stopped walking, never gone back there.” I still didn’t say anything. I was exhausted. I’d woken up so early, and then had to go to work. My mind wasn’t easy at all.

“Sara, for the first time in my life I want to believe in God, and more than ever, I cannot. There’s a woman who spends her days sitting outside the fence on Broadway. She brings rotisserie chicken to the national guardsmen and guardswomen who stand sentry at Liberty Street. She sees me walk past each day on my way to the volunteer center and today she grabbed my sleeve. Everyone knows she’s waiting to see if they find her husband. Before, she split her time between the hospitals and the site. At this point, they want body parts, they want corpses, she’s not the only one who stands and waits. She’s not the only one. But she grabbed my sleeve and I saw the picture she held, a blown-up photocopy of a portrait. I’d seen her husband before. He also used to get his shoes shined at the place by the gyro shop.

“Sara, I was on the twenty-ninth floor of Tower One. I heard an explosion, my chair nearly tipped over, fire flew past my window. But that was all I really saw that day. Everyone yelled to get out of there, so we went into the stairwell, which was clean, which was light, and we walked down, in an orderly fashion. We were in the bottom lobby when Tower Two was hit, and after making us stay where we were to avoid falling objects, to figure out what was going on, they walked us though the mall level and up the E train platform so that we came out a block north of the complex. About all I saw were two beautiful towers surreally streaming smoke. At the time, I wished I’d had my camera, but if I did—I don’t know that I would have made it away before they fell. Only later, first when I saw the makeshift bloodmobile and then when I saw the continuous replay on television, did I begin to link images with what I’d physically felt. Apparently, it wasn’t enough. I needed to know more, I needed to hear, to learn to see what all those other people experienced, the ones who saw bodies falling, people falling and becoming bodies, that crazed metamorphosis of flight, the plummet and crash turning flesh into meat. I needed to hear from the people whose escape was visceral. I needed to feel so that I could understand my own survival. And now I’m not sure I can handle all that I’ve learned. Every once in a while, one of us volunteers at the tent will find a body part, especially us regulars who come in daily and are given tasks that take us closer to the pit. It’s like an amateur scoring a hit in the major leagues, our corpse discoveries. I’ve found the images, the knowledge, the experiences I sought out; I don’t know if I can handle them, Sara.” He broke into a bad coughing bout, followed by the sound of him spitting into something. Then he cleared his throat and continued.

“Sara, the first time I crossed back into Manhattan afterwards was the following Friday. Somehow word had traveled the country that it was official candlelight memorial night, though that wasn’t what I had in mind when I went into the city. I’d found out that we were going to have temporary office space and that I’d be resuming duties the following Monday. That’s why I could go back. I had some idea of what would be. I drove down through town, traveling largely backwards along the path I’d taken walking uptown seeing the city. It was an absolutely stunning evening, weather-wise, but you could smell the smoke, see it. It was also the first day they opened below Fourteenth Street to vehicle traffic. At 7pm, or whatever time it was, dusk, people started coming out of doorways holding candles. Standing alone in doorways in the oddest, emptiest places holding candles, looking sheepish and proud and waiting for dark. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t look at them. I continued on. Finally I had to pull over, it was dark out and I didn’t want to drive any further. I was in the East Village and I walked over to Tompkin’s Square Park. There, too, people had set up candles, on the ground, lots of people held candles, were silent, reverent.

“Sara, I was so angry! Not at the terrorists, at the hijackers, at Osama bin Laden or whomever. I was angry at these people holding candles. What right did they have to mourn? I was a survivor. I was in the tower when it was hit. I was in it when it was hit again. My survival was measured in the tens of minutes with which I escaped before they collapsed forever. A few floors separated me from the several thousand who went to work and never came home. Who were these people to hold candles and mourn, Sara? How dare they? Nonetheless, I walked up to the circle. Nonetheless, it was a very spiritual sort of thing, solemn, obviously genuine. Like I said, one wants to believe in some deity right now. One wants there to be a God making sure everything works out in the wash. Someone handed me a candle and I took it.

“Sara, I felt like finally the right person had a candle, finally the right person was mourning; it was me. You want to somehow look more bereaved. You want everyone to notice you. You want them to actually see your greater sainthood or whatever. But no one came to me in specific and said, Harry, yes, you look like you belong here more. No one was interested in doing that. People came and went. They handed candles off to other people and let them have a turn. There were only so many. Parents brought children. There was no disrespect, this was a universal ascension to solemnity, to reverence. Unparalleled, Sara, not a single dissenter. Not a single wise-ass or protesting voice. I guarded my candle jealously.

“Sara, I wish I could hold you. Wish I could wake up Saturday morning and get you out of bed. We’d layer some fleece, grab the boats and hit the Sound. Roll across the water just as the mist was burning off. Yeah, well, eventually, standing there, I began to realize, though I held my candle no less jealously, that we were all survivors, some of us by more, some of us by less, but all of us survivors, the only ones with different rights than us lay buried under burning concrete. And I felt a little better. But I guess I still had to go out and immerse myself in the world of immediate survivors, the world of rescue that’s now turned into a world of recovery.”

Abba had told me this story before, but I didn’t stop him. I liked hearing about the candles set on the hexagonal bricks of Tomkin’s Square Park’s central walkway, the solemn people lit by candlelight, the Friday night normally devoted to hipster mating rituals subverted and made reverent. It was a religious fable for him, my father. I was too tired to say much anyway. So I stayed on the phone until he was done. And for a second time that day, I lay the receiver back in its cradle after the other end had gone dead.

I really, really, really wish I had something to drink.

Oh shit. I just realized today’s Saturday, Shabbat. I’m all fucked up. I wasn’t supposed to row today. I wasn’t supposed to cook today. And I’m certainly not supposed to be writing this. I can’t believe I’m losing track of days like that. It’s bad. I need to stop writing.