The Butterfly Plague (9 page)

The Nightmare is Europe. I went there in 1936. I can tell you that all parts and portions of this Nightmare belong, fit or can be wrenched away from the period between 1936 and 1938. That is, between going and coming back; then and now. Today it is sometime in August or September. I honestly don’t remember. August or September 1938. I know that I came home the other day and it was August and a dear old friend of mine whose shoes I remember and whose eyes are close to my heart threw himself down on the cinders under the very train I rode in. I was arriving and he died. It was voluntary, or so I understand. His death is important to everyone. It holds the beginnings of a new Nightmare.

This is how a new Nightmare begins. With an act. Sometimes an act of absolution. Sometimes an act of atonement. The act will inevitably involve your integrity. You will believe in what you are saying and doing and perhaps you will even have bothered to make a chart of consequences, all of them hypothetical by necessity, but all of them bound up in the parings of intellect. Lovely long sweet parings. You throw them away. You are left alone with the washed body, skinned and peeled and pure, and this is the act. Inside the body, however skinned and peeled, however washed, however scoured and pure, there are seeds. These are the seeds of everything and there are worms.

It is the worms I think of.

It is the worms.

He threw himself under the train. His lovely feet were severed and broken. I have arrived on many trains. I have never been aware of these deaths, although now I see them very clearly. Someone throws part of himself under every train, coming or going. I’ve just never been aware of it before.

I am never going to know why Bully killed himself. But I am certain that somewhere in someone he has started a Nightmare and perhaps I will know the consequences of that. Perhaps that Nightmare will touch me. But this is not important. What I am thinking is: just as with Bully, every Nightmare begins with integrity and action. They do not all end in death. Think of Bully’s feet and what he did with them, for himself, for us. Think of Bully’s feet. They led and were led. They were both guides and followers. Dancer and walker. Think of Bully’s feet. In shoes they tell a story. Naked? No one ever saw them naked. They were silent. Think of Bully’s feet.

Think of the dreamers.

Dreaming in long rows.

I saw them first in midsummer 1936.

I was in a taxicab and Bruno was holding my hand and we had got off the boat in Southampton and I wanted him to ask me to marry him. We were going to the hotel. As I was sitting there with my thigh against his thigh and my hand in his hand I looked out the window, waiting, thinking, He will ask me now, we will register at the hotel as man and wife and tomorrow he will marry me. We were still near the sheds. And out of one of these sheds, having come through customs, having got off a boat from France, having traveled on trains from Switzerland and Italy, having left Munich and Hamburg, Bonn and Dresden, Stuttgart and Mannheim, having left Vienna (only the very wise left Vienna in 1936), there they were in England walking in a line, the queue that had become second nature, the row they dreamed in, standing still or moving, there they were in England on their way wherever next they would be told to go and the taxicab stopped for them and they walked across in front of us, me watching, Bruno not watching and there were forty of them. Forty or fifty.

This was the first row I saw and the first time I saw that all the faces were the same so that the next time I saw them in a row I knew already that all the faces would be the same and much later when the rows fell down, disintegrated, and became uneven, and later still when I began to see rows of one, the faces were still the same and the dream had not changed but had intensified, become desperate, was held to with fists, like the fist I had to break open to find its star, and I was seeing, sitting in the taxicab, waiting to be asked “Will you marry me?” when I saw this first row of dreamers and I knew that it was the first of something but not the first of a Nightmare.

I don’t know why but it seems to me a dream may be more dangerous than a Nightmare. In a Nightmare you are pursued upright. In dreams you are helpless and float. However you die only in Nightmares. In dreams you live forever. And that is marvelous and horrible.

Bruno did not ask me to marry him then. We went to the hotel and he still didn’t ask me. We did, however, share a room. I thought about the row of dreamers.

“Who are they?” I asked Bruno.

Bruno had kinder eyes then. You could see all the way into them. They were brown. American brown. He wanted blue-eyed children. He didn’t know that then. He wanted to be German and he didn’t know that either. But he did know that a brown-eyed man isn’t likely to have a blue-eyed child. He knew about genetics.

“Who?” he said, unpacking.

“Those people who walked in front of our cab.”

“What people?” Shirts and socks; dirty and clean.

“All those people, Bruno. At the harbor. Coming out of the sheds. They carried bundles of children; they were all very tired and they seemed to be going somewhere together.”

“They were probably people on some sort of excursion, Ruth. Put out that cigarette.”

“Didn’t you see them, Bruno?”

“No. I didn’t see them. Stand with your back to the wall.”

“They were sad.”

“Throw your arms out.”

“And yet they were happy.”

“Swim.”

“One-and-two-and-one-and-two…”

“Make your behind flatter. Keep it against the wall.”

“What sort of excursions?”

“Ruth, I don’t know. Swim.”

“I hate this. It makes me ache in the ankles.”

“Relax them. Keep your ankles loose.”

“Am I going to win, Bruno? Do you really think I’m going to win?”

He hit me. He was my trainer.

That was his answer. He did not speak.

“Bruno.”

“What?”

“They had no leader. There was no one leading them.”

“Then they were lost. That’s all.”

“They knew where they were going.”

“Then you stop worrying about them, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

No. “Swim.

We crossed over into France. We were not with the team. The team would meet us there.

We went to Paris. I was sure that in Paris Bruno would ask me to marry him. We stayed in a hotel. Again we shared a room and Bruno would sit on the bed in his American trainer’s uniform: sweat shirt, sweat socks, and blue jeans, and I’d put my back against the wall and swim.

Sometimes I would lie on the bed or between two chairs and swim and Bruno would stand against the wall. His ankles did not hurt.

In the evenings we would go to the cafés and I was allowed to drink a little wine. Bruno drank beer and he was always going off to the bathroom.

I had a hat I loved that summer, a large hat. The brim turned down over one side of my face and it made my profile show to good advantage. I have large eyes and a long nose and what Bruno used to call a Russian mouth—“strong and wide.” My lower lip has a pleasing shape. I like to touch it with my finger. This hat was also lovely because I wore my hair in the Russian manner with a big braid and when I wore this hat, which was nearly every day, I wound the braid into a flat plait above my ear and a number of people remarked that I surely must be a famous ballerina with my hair like that on one side and the hat pulled down on the other, and because of my long figure and long legs. I remember my dresses all had cowls to show off my shoulders and back. I have those dresses still. I never wear them.

We sat in cafés. We were waiting in Paris for the others to arrive from America. Then we would all go to Germany together, where we would finish our training in the weeks prior to the opening of the Games.

We sat in cafés. I waited for Bruno to propose. He did not propose.

One night it was really late in the evening and there was still a little daylight we were sitting on the sidewalk in what had become our favorite café and Bruno had drunk too much, much too much beer and had to excuse himself endlessly.

I sat alone at the table, waiting. A number of people thought I was a ballerina and said so. Eyes looked at me and people smiled, and I smiled back. I enjoyed it. I knew how to behave inside the fame they gave me because I grew up with famous people and had been stared at all my life as though I was someone. All I really was was Naomi Nola’s daughter. Daughter of George Damarosch. Wally Taylor was my godfather. As a swimmer I was famous, but not in Europe. I didn’t swim the Channel (I swam Catalina instead), so I wasn’t like Alice, who did, or my teammate Katherine, whom everyone adored because she was so much like a movie star. No. I was just me and they thought I was someone else. This had a consequence. I was approached.

It was twilight, an hour of great significance for it is the one hour of the day when the shadows play the most earnest games with your appearance. There is no comparable hour in the morning. It only happens just before the sun sets. It is also the hour when certain people make their first appearance abroad in the streets. People who pretend to be someone else by daylight. I am not speaking here of criminals and prostitutes. But of a class of people who might be called martyrs. The early Christians must have enjoyed this hour of the day. Fugitives unjustly accused come out at this hour. Real fugitives (the justly accused) have no desire to join the human race, and no desire to do ordinary things, so they stay away until it’s dark, lying in rooms reading magazines and listening to radios. But these people I speak of go about in the daylight not speaking and not looking like themselves and when the evening comes they have a moment’s respite and they drop their masks.

The man who approached me wore a hat. Or rather he carried a hat. He also carried a walking stick. His clothes were stylish and well cut, a simple blazer and flannel trousers. He had a clubfoot, and consequently wore laced boots, one of which had an outsize heel. The hat was a snap-brim straw. White. Like one of Dolly’s. In some ways he was rather like Dolly—that height, and the same slimness. But his knees weren’t knocked. Poor Dolly! How I love the way he walks.

This man stood just at the entrance to the café, where the tables separated and the tile proclaimed its inlaid name. He was just beyond the awning so that some of the twilight fell on him and although he was facing me I could not tell exactly what his features were like. Then he half-turned and his profile showed a clear impression of a nose that was positively Arabic, cheekbones very high and sloped. His chin receded at one end of his face and his hair at the other. The effect was Egyptian, like the mummified face of Tut.

He tried to appear to be waiting for an acquaintance. I have often done this myself so I know the feeling. I recognized it. If you are the least unusual to look at (my height, his profile) it is best to look concentrated when alone in public. This diverts people’s attention and when they stare at you their rudeness is not so rigorous. I hid behind my ballerina pose and he behind the absence of his “friend.”

Gradually he insinuated himself beyond the entrance, right in among the tables that sat close to the pedestrians on the sidewalk, but close, too, to the patrons and their conversations. He was listening. In the course of his listening it was apparent that he heard two or three people speaking of me, for his glance advanced in my direction, at first haltingly and then with attack. I noticed that at some of the tables he was recognized and turned away from. This made me feel guarded. I did not like being stared at by someone other people evidently did not wish to associate with.

Slowly he brought his body into action and he followed the line of his gaze to my table. Bruno had left his hat on his chair and I tried to lift it up onto the table to show him that I had an escort, but I dropped it clumsily, and throughout our interview it sat there underneath the chair near my feet.

“Madame,” he said.

I nodded.

“
Permettez-moi de vous présenter
…”

“I’m American,” I said. “I speak English.”

I also speak French, but I could not bear the thought of having a conversation in a foreign language with a man whose motives I already suspected. His manners, however, were impeccable. He had addressed me as “madame.” He had also allowed me the compliment of a small and tasteful bow. No flamboyance. No coyness. He was European to his fingernails.

“Then may I introduce myself? I am Jakob Seuss.”

“How do you do, Mr. Seuss.”

I didn’t know whether to maintain my own pose in the face of his, or to give in and be myself. I wanted Bruno to come back. I was suddenly uncomfortable. Something was going to happen.

“Permit me to sit down,” said Mr. Seuss.

He did so. I could not prevent this.

I waited.

He stared off over the heads of the others as though waiting for me to take him in. I watched him carefully. He was very quiet. His voice, when he spoke, was wet with sibilance. This was because he wore cheap teeth. His hands rested, one on top of the other, on his cane. He seemed tired and sad. He swung his head around and looked at me. I recognized the look at once. He was one of them, out of his row and wandering alone.

I knew then that I should learn something of the mystery of my dreamers and I began to like him. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but from the weariness of his approach, from the expression in his eyes, and from the breath he took before he began, I knew that he had delivered his speech a hundred times before he delivered it to me. I knew that he had spoken it in French, Italian, German, and Dutch. Now he must speak it in English.

“Madame,” he began, “I will not waste your time and interest with preamble.”

He laid his hat at the edge of the table, where Bruno’s should have been. He sighed. I knew that he was translating his message into my language and I waited. I looked at the others. Some of them were looking at me curiously and one or two frowned and a very large woman wearing a toque with a silver tassel shook her head with vehement reproach. She mouthed something in German which I did not understand, but I understood enough of her facial vocabulary to know that she was warning me against him. I turned back to Mr. Seuss, more intrigued than before.