Rooms for Vanishing

Kindertotenlieder

London, 1979

Sonja

Oh, I had tried to reach her before. That was never the problem. I was always trying to reach her, to talk with her, to be nearer to her, to experience her visitations more completely, but when I grew close, which I often did, she wasn't there. If anyone ever bothered to ask me what happened then in the darkness as I lay waiting for my child to come home, to return to me, to appear to me as she had in life, I would have told that person the truth, which is that she goes away, she goes, she goes.

As she should have. I never expected otherwise. Not really.

The truth was that she had been going from the moment she was first here with me. When she was born, she was calm, like a woman in middle age having already been told the terrible news: this is life, beware, no one gets out unscathed. On the morning of her ninth birthday I found her outside in the sun speaking aloud to someone who wasn't there, and when she came inside finally, after an hour of this, she told me it was my mother she was speaking to, my first mother, shot dead beside a train in a forest nine hundred and ninety miles northwest of my house in London, and that my mother had been asking after my well-being, that she had come to talk after all this time among the dead, and my daughter told my mother that she was looking after me, but not for long, others would have to do it soon because she was going too, she said, just like everyone else had. We have no power to stop this rushing off into other heavens, do we?

Later, I had to ask Anya, did she say anything else, did my mother tell you anything more? This was near Paris, in the small house we went to, a place I could not afford, a place I detested. The old wisdom says that when a child dies, the child dies having known everything, having received all knowledge. During those final months, someone said this to me. It was the case then that people very frequently pulled me aside into strange corners to tell me ghastly things like this. And it was also the case that I found myself asking ghastly things of my child.

For instance, this question, which I asked in the back garden, while bees hovered. They were bees that Anya understood somehow would not sting her but would only sting me. Part of this new wisdom was to understand the amount of suffering a mother had to endure. Did she say anything else, I asked again, and Anya looked to me and said, what was her name, and I said, my mother's name was Fania, and she said, this is a very pretty name Fania, and I said, I remember almost nothing about her but the name, and she said, this is something your mother told me, and I asked her to repeat this, and she said, your mother says you probably remember nothing, that she is a shadow to you.

The opposite of reason is not always the same as a lie: doctors had given Anya medicine, and the medicine was making her hallucinate, and the combination of the medicine and the hallucinations was making her talk about my dead mother. This is what Franz was always reminding me, that the drugs had powerful consequences, but I hated Franz very much then, and I did not care for the truth. Everyone after all was dying everywhere and I was not dying anywhere but there in the garden, in the city's heat. I dressed as if I were mourning months before I needed to, and I never stopped.

There are separate rooms, Anya said, when I pressed her to describe how it was she got to talk to my mother. Separate rooms, like separate trains. I am on one side of the wall, you are on the other side of the wall. I am on one train, you are on the other train. What don't you get, Mama? Separate rooms, separate trains.

The day before, Anya and I had played hide-and-seek, and when she could not find me, when she grew too tired to keep looking, I said, I am on one side of the wall, you are on the other side of the wall.

Move through the wall, Anya had said. Move through the wall, Mama.

And I told her: It doesn't work that way.

Close your eyes, she said, and move through the wall, Mama. Just try. It's not that hard. Fania does it all the time.

She goes, she goes, she goes.

The last trace of living I saw in her, we were holding her, passing her between us as if this was what she needed, what was prescribed to her by doctors, to be moved between her parents, shared in love, offered our silent benedictions, when in fact it was us who needed the holy intercession. A mirror of her birth, all of us in this room holding her. In the moments immediately after, we were visited by a profound quiet, an absence of all sound, and I am sure this was the noise of her passing over.

Are you in there, Franz asked her at some point, or have you gone already? We were young. It was late, and July. She had come as a surprise. We were students. Very much unprepared to become parents. After it was over-really over-he stood over her body. I do not believe it, he said. I refuse to believe any of this is possible.

All of this is embarrassing to admit. All this business of anticipating the dead, putting one's ear against a wall and expecting voices. I was always in the process of embarrassing myself, or revealing to myself some new territory of embarrassment that I had not yet discovered. It was, others had told me, a problem of sensitivity, a problem of the times, a consequence of my personal history. I go back to these moments, if only to remind myself of what happened and what did not.

And what happened was this: my husband had gone missing. It had been days. Two days, three days; I had not slept, and it had become difficult to judge the time. He was a conductor of an orchestra here in London. Not one of the very famous ones, or even one of the very good ones, but one successful enough that he occasionally appeared on television looking appropriately bewildered, or in the pages of the various newspapers whose readers cared about the obsolete arts. He'd been at the concert hall the last I knew. It had been an ordinary evening. He'd left before supper, as always, already in his dress slacks. A car came to retrieve him. Near eight, I listened to him on the radio, which was something I used to like to do.

Our last moments together were rushed. I took him by the shoulders. We'd suffered an unsettling encounter recently and I thought he might want me to come with him, if only to try to forget about it all for a few hours. This encounter was all we'd talked about lately. But I am getting ahead of myself.

He didn't want me to come. You'll hate it, he said, meaning the concert, the music he was conducting, the graveyard air of the concert hall.

That last day, Franz seemed taller, I thought. He was always physically very lovely, even when he was young and stupid. You have been good to me, he said. Well, you are very easy to please, I told him, I can always tell when you are unhappy.

I thought I was telling the truth when I said this. I'd always believed I knew him better than I did.

He put his hands against my cheeks and kissed me and then he was gone.

When he did not return by his normal time that night, I figured it was because there was some official dinner or event I had forgotten about. It was autumn, the beginning of the season, and this was not uncommon. I'd long stopped paying close attention to the endless cycle of benefactors and begging that attended his job. When he was not there in the morning, I thought I must have slept through his arrival and his leaving, his coming and going.

By that afternoon, it was obvious something terrible had happened. His assistant, Jonathan, called to ask whether I had seen him. He had not come to work. The players were waiting. We think maybe he's confused his schedule, Jonathan said. Maybe he thinks we are meeting in Fulham, he told me, which was where the orchestra occasionally rehearsed, but we went to Fulham and we couldn't find him. He has not been himself lately, Jonathan admitted, which hurt me to hear. I'd thought Franz would have been able to hide himself from his colleagues.

Do you have any idea of what might have happened, or where he might be? Jonathan asked.

I was in our kitchen. This was Stamford Hill, Dunsmure Road, a Tuesday morning in October. Out the back window children were playing a game in which one of them was a monster and the others were competing to tame the monster. Each of them got to take turns being the tamer and then the untamed. For years, they had played this identical game every morning, even as they aged. It fascinated me how badly each of them wanted to be the wild creature, the one the others had to struggle to contain.

Across the line Jonathan was telling me that they'd sent someone around in a car in Knightsbridge hoping to find him on the street, or maybe in Hyde Park. This same car had already searched Westminster and Chelsea and Kensington. If I heard anything, he said, would I ring them as soon as possible? We're all very worried, he said. For good measure, he repeated himself. Very worried. Many of his belongings are still here, Jonathan wanted me to know. His coat, for example. And his shoes. I'm looking right at them, he said. He left them on his desk. He's even left his wallet behind. It's right here in my hand. It doesn't seem good, he said.

By then, I had stopped listening. On our kitchen table, I'd found what Franz had left me. It was a photograph of a woman standing in the center of a church. She was maybe eighteen years old. There was nothing else. No farewell note. No explanation. This was his farewell: this picture, which would come to mean so much. He was gone. I almost said this to Jonathan, as a way to tell him don't bother looking any further. Or better yet, to say the truth:

I'll have to go. I'll have to go get him myself.

It was Franz's idea to go to Paris at the end, which is another way of saying that it was a terrible idea. Perhaps also: the beginning of my hating him very deeply, and simultaneously needing him as much, the combination of which eventually became ruinous and dejecting. Like all good poisons, one doesn't recognize the poisoning until far too late. A doctor at Gustave Roussy had promised a treatment unavailable to British doctors. I did not want to go. I did not believe in the doctor. I did not believe that the promise was real. I had no interest in traveling to France. We could not afford any of the treatment, nor could we afford the travel, or the house in Neuilly-sur-Seine with the garden where we ended up living. Franz had convinced me we were doing the right thing by trying the doctor there. England had failed us and here is hope, he said. Here is a possibility. Here is a chance at another life, he said. Among the very stupid things he said then, it is perhaps worthwhile to point out that this sentence did not alarm me when I heard it.

Franz did a great deal of convincing then. Or to put it better: I made a long series of mistakes in allowing him to convince me of anything. He convinced me to come with him, to stay there for the weeks it took to exhaust all hope, and after she died there, he convinced me to bury her not far away, in Bagneux, in a perfectly pleasant graveyard in a place an entire life away from my life. Yes, it was a far distance, Franz said, a terribly far distance from the two of us, but it was important I remember that when the Messiah arrived, and the prophet Elijah blew his shofar, all the mountains on earth would split in two and the dead would be returned to earth.

On her deathbed, Anya reached up at one point to be lifted into the air so that she could see the flowers in our garden. She believed in some way she had planted the garden herself, although this was, for countless reasons, impossible, not least among them that we had been there only a month, and that for quite a long time she had not been strong enough to walk. At all hours, birds descended in the yard to roost in the branches of the apple trees. It was Franz who told me once that a common mist crow, such as the kind we used to see in the trees in London, and which, on occasion, descended there in the backyard, with light on the hood of their heads as if they, too, were pilgrims, could not only remember the face of someone who wanted to attack it, but would transmit the memory of this face to their offspring, and that this offspring would do the same, onward into time, forward into history.

If only Jews knew to do this, I remember him saying.

I'd like to believe that this bit about the crows was true, just as I would like to believe everything that Franz ever told me was true, such as the reason for our moving Anya to this place, and the reason we left her there. When he told me about the prophet Elijah, and the imminence of the Messiah, I exploded in rage.

Although the greatest rage I reserved for my own sense of submission. We went. I went. Franz went. Anya went. And only two of us returned.

The day we buried her, I began to hallucinate in the heat, and I became convinced, after weeks of sleeplessness and grief-induced catatonia, that those around me that morning-all of them players in various orchestras Franz had conducted, variously insufferable Englishmen and women, a good deal of them religious afflicted, not one of them a friend of mine-were members of my family, long-dead ancestors, the grandmother of my grandmother, for instance, everyone delivered from wherever it was they had been living all this time, on whatever near-earth, to stand beside me, to offer ancient solidarities I did not understand. This was ten years ago now, and I have retained no real memory of the service, or of the ride back that afternoon to our rented home, nor do I remember anything of the train we took back to England later that week, under passports that still felt to me like a kind of false identity: me in the picture, but a different me, a sister I had never met, a version of my lost mother beaming back at me. What I do remember, and continued to remember long after we returned, was the feeling of everyone around me that day, so many of my mothers, and my grandmothers, the chorus of their crying married to my crying, my baby in the earth just as their baby was in the earth, a part of them in the earth just as a part of me was in the earth. And I remember waking my first morning in London, in the house where Anya had lived all her life, and discovering a letter folded neatly on my nightstand written very obviously by Franz, in which he pretended he was one of these same ancestors, writing to assure me of the comforts of perpetual life or some other rank idiocy. Dear Sonja, his letter began, I write to you from the world to come. He thought somehow that this might make me feel better. He was always confusing the bottomlessness of mourning for something larger and more foolish.