Playing Naomi, page 8
He remembered sitting with him at the kitchen table in the flat in Kozloduy. They were surrounded by packing crates, waiting for the van to take them to the capital. His father had been appointed head of the government laboratory in Sofia. Suddenly everything in Kozloduy was poignant and affecting. An aura of sadness enveloped the town. On the eve of their departure, Miro began to understand the meaning of past tense. The apartment, the market square, the ferry landing, the old hotel on the banks of the Danube would be swept away into yesterday. The people he knew would change in his absence, pass from happy to sad, from innocent to guilty, from alive to dead without him knowing.
“What did my mother die of?” he asked his father. It was time to put away childish things and confront the past. “You never talk about her. You say she died when I was a baby. But what did she die of?”
His father gave him a searching look. “She took her own life,” he said heavily.
Miro felt the breath sticking in his throat. The explanation, so raw, so unexpected, made him choke. “Why?” he asked. Death had never been so tangible before. It had always been a word on a page or an image on the screen, a part of a story in which he had no part. The protagonists died, but not without fighting for survival. No one volunteered to die. Soldiers were shot dead, patients died of cancer, but no one, in all the books he had read and all the movies he had watched, wished for death. “Why did she kill herself?” he asked.
“I can’t talk about it,” Simon Bogdan said. There was ineffable pain in his eyes. It lay on his pupils like a dull film.
“And the woman who visited us a long time ago, the American?” Miro said. “Who was she?” The past suddenly reared up, a vista stretching back over the years, stopping short of the mother who had taken her life. The American was his earliest memory.
“You remember her?” his father said. His eyelids were drooping strangely.
Miro had a vague recollection of a red-haired woman, of dialogue, of incomprehensible phrases, words without meaning, and of the pain in his father’s eyes, the same dull pain he had seen just now. “Who was she?” Miro repeated, more urgently.
“Someone I met at a conference in Los Angeles,” his father said. He compressed his lips to a thin line, making it a final pronouncement. “Those years in America,” he said. “I want to cut them out of my life.”
The forbidding look on his face silenced the boy. He looked down on the table between them, keeping his eyes on the flowery border of the dinner plates, embarrassed by his own curiosity, as if he had asked a prurient question. He felt guilty. Caught in a speechless blush, he did not insist on answers.
Miro no longer felt embarrassment, but it was too late to ask questions. Simon Bogdan was dead. The redhaired American was the only survivor from a distant past. Miro turned over the book he had been reading and looked again at the photo of the author on the dust jacket. She looked back at him with insouciant eyes. He was reduced to searching East West Connection for clues to his past. Did his mother take her life because of his father’s affair with an American writer – the American called Nora in the book? Was Nora a pseudonym for Naomi Baum? She had encrypted the answer in the lines of her novel.
After Miro moved to the capital, Kozloduy receded. The small town flattened out under the weight of new impressions: Sofia and the American School. The row of Stalin era buildings became a cardboard silhouette, peopled with stick figures bearing evanescent names. But East West Connection was like a box of colourful mementos. It brought back the plain façade of the hotel, the raised walkway along the Danube behind it, the young couples out for a stroll on a Sunday morning.
Nora stepped through the revolving doors of the hotel. After the semi-darkness of the lobby the morning light was dazzling. She walked past the blue-smocked women setting out pansies in the concrete planters and crossed the empty square. The fountain in the centre was dry. Weeds were growing in the bottom of the cracked basin.
She turned into the main street and walked on to the farmers’ market. Peasant women set out their wares on planks laid over pickle barrels and were weighing out potatoes and onions and cucumbers. People were queuing for eggs although the cartons were almost empty and it was clear that there would not be enough for everyone in the lineup. It was not yet eleven o’clock, and already the sun beat down on the treeless street. At the end of the stalls a gypsy had taken up his post together with his dancing bear.
Miro remembered the old animal, a heap of bones and matted fur, lying on the ground beside his master, surrounded by a glittering army of flies. If you put a coin into the upturned cap on the sidewalk, the gypsy yanked at the animal’s chain. The bear opened his bleary eyes and rose and took a few shambling steps. He was too feeble to stand up on his hind legs. Miro remembered hunkering down in front of the animal to look into its fleabitten dull eyes. He had nothing to give him, nothing to put into the upturned cap, and the gypsy got angry. “What d’you want, you little bugger? Why are you staring at the bear, like an idiot? Go home.”
Home:
On the fifth floor, where Nicolas lived, the pane in the hall window was broken. Shards of glass glittered on the ledge.
Nora rang the bell.
Nicolas opened the door.
“Come in,” he said and led her into the living room, which was crowded with oversized furniture. A large glass-fronted bookcase in the style of the 1950s extended across the whole length of one wall. A clunky sofa stood against the opposite wall and, kitty corner, a daybed with a red comforter and a roll pillow with silk tassels. The coffee table in front of the sofa took up so much room that Nora had to squeeze past it sideways.
She walked to the window and looked down to the swollen banks of the Danube. An elderly man was walking a dog along the berm that kept the river from inundating the fields. The water was brown and turbulent.
Neither she nor Nicolas had spoken after the initial greeting. They turned to each other. He permitted her to take his hands.
No, Miro thought, he did not. And something else was wrong with Naomi Baum’s scene. The pair wasn’t alone. There was a third person in the room: a boy.
The boy felt shy because he had never met a foreigner before. The woman was as exotic to his child’s eyes as a bird of paradise. He slid off the daybed and extended his hand to her. “Hello,” he said, as he had been taught. The woman kissed him on the cheek. She was crying. The tears wet his cheek.
“Please,” said his father, “don’t upset the child. You promised.”
“I can’t help it,” she said, but she let go and went to the window, looking out to the river.
His father joined her in the alcove.
For a moment they remained in silence. Then the woman reached out to take his hands, but he withdrew them and stepped back. “No,” he said. “Don’t. I can’t go through that again.”
None of that was in Naomi Baum’s book. Miro was missing from the pages of East West Connection, but his childhood memories were hovering in its margins, floating above the lines, a shimmering apparition, a ghostly palimpsest.
Some things in East West Connection were the literal truth, others were a riddling metaphor, a mystery revealing itself only to the chosen ones. Simon Bogdan, whom Naomi Baum called Nicolas, was taken in the night and made a man of sorrow.
Nicolas was lying on the concrete floor, stripped and beaten. The rusty smell of blood seeped into his nostrils. The pain was insufferable. The joints of his fingers were on fire. He did not know how long he had been hung up, suspended by ropes, when they took him down and pushed him into the windowless cell. He did not know what time of the day it was. Burn marks punctuated the skin of his arms, virulent purple eyelets, glistening evil observers of his agony. His groin was a dull mass of pain, electrified by the memory of the cattle prods they had passed over his skin. Nicolas shut his eyes against the white, inexorable light of the bulb above his head, but a veined gleam remained on the inside of his eyelids, dry and rasping. He wanted to sleep. No, he told himself, don’t fall asleep. They will wake you, pour a bucket of ice water over your back.
Miro expounded the allegory. His father never suffered persecution at the hands of the authorities. He breathed their ideology. He was in their camp. Miro’s memories of his father included sadness, but no screaming suffering of the physical kind. The prison scenes in East West Connection were true nevertheless. Miro understood their hidden meaning. He knew how they applied to Simon Bogdan’s life. His father was imprisoned by his sins, tortured by guilt over the death of his wife. The American seductress, his lover, plunged him into the fires of hell, a dungeon from which there was no way out.
But she herself escaped. The guilty one escaped.
The consular car traveled across the tarmac, dark and shiny in the rain. It stopped in front of a yellow turbo prop without markings. A stewardess dressed in a drab blue uniform stood at the open door of the cabin. Nora climbed the metal stairs. The drizzle touched her cheeks like a cold breath and formed dew drops on her sweater. There were a dozen rows of seats. The stewardess led Nora to the front row and stashed her bag in the pilot’s cabin.
The engines shuddered into action and the plane began to taxi down the runway. Nora’s mind was curiously blank. All she could think of was how wide and comfortable the seats were in the old Solyuz. The plane nosed steeply into the air. There was a sharp bang, and the door of the pilot’s cabin burst open. For a second Nora thought it was a pistol shot. Her brain sparked: game over. But it was nothing. The lock on the door had given way. It was swinging against her armrest. Nora’s bag came tumbling out, slid down the aisle, and came to rest against the third row seat. No one moved. The man beside her eyed the piece of luggage with the interest of a customs officer. When the plane steadied, the stewardess came forward, collected the bag and closed the door again. The voice of the captain came over the intercom, announcing that they would land in Athens in an hour and ten minutes. Nora looked out the window at the raindrops streaking across the pane. Then, finally, she thought of Nicolas and wept.
Miro kept his fingers on the lines and allowed the past to enter his body. The woman made her escape, but no one escapes the wrath of God. She, too, was made to suffer: the black plague of depression. She returned to America, pregnant. Her belly was swollen with the fruit of evil. She chose to abandon the child, give him up for adoption. Yes, she was right to rid herself of the incubus. The child was an incubus. For what else could come of such a woman? He knew now without a shadow of doubt: The American temptress had led Simon/Nicolas astray. She was responsible for the death of his mother.
The coded past hidden in the pages of East West Connection possessed Miro. It was in his heart, large, soft, unreachable, but the scent of the truth was in his nostrils, sweet and rotten, like the spoor of a corpse buried in a shallow grave. He must have an answer. He must go to Naomi Baum and ask her to explain the mysteries of East West Connection, to confess her sins. He must coax the answers from her and, if she refused, pry open her mouth until the words spilled out. That is why he agreed to do the installation – pearls before swine, sacred art before Hillman’s profane audience – for a chance to make Naomi confess.
He felt the skin around his mouth growing tight. The barometer of his mind was plunging, announcing a tropical storm of hurricane proportions. He was desperate. He looked at his flinching, trembling hands, but the time was not ripe. He had not received the sign. Not yet. He could do nothing now except lie back on the bed and muster an army of cooling thoughts, think of the Nevada desert swept clean by the night winds, envision the outline of the prospector’s house, the clean contours of the roof against the soothing dark sky. It was a house of right angles with nothing to blur the line of vision, no billowing curtains on the windows, no soft upholstered seats, just straight lines and plain surfaces the colour of death. Blackened floor tiles, door panels of weathered grey, walls as pale as winding sheets. Every piece of furniture in the room was a concession to the practical, a necessary evil: a table, a chair, a bed, no more. On the verandah Miro had placed twelve stones. He recalled them now, one by one, their smoothness, their immobility, the pattern in which he had laid them out. He thought of the cacti he had planted around the house, the spines penetrating his finger and the trickle of blood running down, painting his wrist with a beautiful, ornamental line. He remembered the pain and began to relax. There was something calming about pain. It relieved the soul of guilt, restored the equilibrium between crime and punishment. Miro thought of all the sins that had been committed and the atonement they called for.
He took up Naomi’s book again. It fell open at the forbidden page, the well fingered page, print smeared from being touched often. Miro passed his fingers over the lines, tracing them as if they were Braille. He should have asked his father: “When did you meet the American?” Now he was reduced to guesses. Was it at the conference described in East West Connection?
He looked straight into her eyes with what he hoped would pass for flirtation. But he wasn’t sure he got it right. North American women were enigma to him.
She playfully reached across, and for a moment he thought she was going to take his hand. But she tapped his glasses, which lay on the counter next to his hand. He noticed he had been fiddling with them and stopped abruptly. Bad habit. Made him look nervous.
“What’s with the glasses?” she said.
“What about them?”
“You keep putting them on and taking them off again. How much do you actually see without them?”
“Not much,” he said sheepishly.
“Can you see my face?”
“You look nice in a blurry way,” he said. “I’d have to come closer to make sure.” There, that was a passable joke, he hoped. He checked an impulse to lean into her. Take it easy, he told himself. Relax.
“We’ll leave it on the blurry side for now,” she said. This time she actually touched his hand.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” he said quickly, now that she had made the first move. “This place is awful.” Perhaps he shouldn’t have said that. Perhaps to Americans the bar was beautiful.
Miro flicked past the forbidden scene, which made him think forbidden thoughts, but he could not help seeing some of the words: writhing, immoderately in need of love, entering, entering, entering. He got stuck in the groove of the line describing their lovemaking. He could pull away only by transforming the image, thinking of a knife entering a crimson slit. He allowed his mind to rest on that image before reading on.
Nicolas woke up to the sound of running water. Someone was taking a shower: Nora. He lay back and let the happiness wash over him. I finally got it, he thought triumphantly. The sweetness of it all swamped his mind. Proof. Proof that he could navigate American waters. What more could he possibly want? Love, for example? He felt a twinge in his heart, for Paulina.
For his mother who committed suicide. Did she kill herself because her husband had an affair? An affair with Naomi Baum, called Nora? That “twinge in his heart” was a twinge of guilt. Miro wondered how much of the hotel scene was invented by Naomi Baum to gratify her diseased imagination. He shuddered at her lewdness, her debauchery, her willingness to exhibit her sinfulness to the world.
Miro could not be sure of the truth, and there was no one to ask. They were all dead now. The mouths that could answer his questions were frozen. Large patches of his past were erased. The stage was empty, but the sets were still up. Nelson Street, Pasadena, was there. Only one neighbor was left, Mrs. Collins, and she was off stage, in a nursing home.
“She’s got her good days and her bad days,” the nurse said when she took him upstairs to Mrs. Collins’ room. The nurse was a corpulent woman. Miro could hear her pantyhose swishing with every step she took, rubbing against the inside of her thighs as she was walking ahead of him. She had the kind of smell soap and water could not dispel, the smell of skin in digestive heat, the smell of a woman whose life consisted of eating, drinking, and copulating.
“She is in pretty good shape for a woman of ninety-two,” she said, turning to him. Miro flinched. The emanations of her body upset him. She was too close for comfort. He wished he could do away with the third dimension and turn himself into a foil. He pulled in his elbows and moved away from her.
“How is she today?” he said.
“Lucid, I’d say.”
He kept his distance from the bulging flesh and concentrated on the floor in the hall. The tiles were gleaming. The walls were spotlessly white. Cleanliness was a good omen.
The nurse knocked on Mrs. Collins’ door. The room was in a hush, suspended in the twilight of blinds drawn against the afternoon sun. An old woman was lying on the bed, propped up by pillows, a skeleton with leathery skin. She picked at her blanket with a trembling hand. Her eyes were dull, veiled with glaucoma.
“Visitor for you, Mrs. Collins,” the nurse said, bending over her and enunciating carefully. “An old neighbour of yours.”
She left them alone. Miro stepped up to the bed. There was so much to explain, and Mrs. Collins’ eyes remained dull.
“Do you remember the Bogdans?” he asked her.
There was a pause. He thought he would have to begin over again, say his name, ask his question, but a glimmer of understanding began to appear in Mrs. Collins’ eyes. She cleared her throat and cranked up her voice to speaking level.
“The Bogdans?” she said. She focused her faded eyes on his mouth and mulled over the question. “A young couple with a baby?” she asked. She didn’t seem to understand that Miro was that baby.
