Yann Andrea Steiner (6 page)

Until dawn she danced, said the young counselor, and when daylight came she danced in her sleep. Then the animals of the island very gently brought her back into the dark grotto of the Atlantic Reservoir. They warmed her body of shadows with kisses and those kisses restored her to life by making her forget life.

 

The young counselor falls silent. The child with gray eyes had lain down against her and fallen asleep. He had rested his hands on the girl's young breasts. She hadn't moved; she had let him do as he wished. Beneath her dress, he had found her breasts. His hands were frozen with the sea wind. He was in awe, he squeezed them tight, he hurt, he could not let them go, he couldn't think of anything else, and when she removed his hands from her breasts his eyes welled with tears.

 

We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon's events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.

 

One final time Callas sang her despair and Capri fell upon her to kill. Once Norma had been murdered, the screams of
Capri is over
reigned over the beaches, States, Cities, and Oceans, and the dazzling reality of the world's end was confirmed.

A
UGUST 1980.

Near me is this crowded beach, this solar revolution in the circle of the sky.

August 1980. Gdansk.

The port of Gdansk. For the entire world it became the suffering of a people invaded because they were poor and isolated.

Gdansk, making us tremble like children. Alone like that child. Captive. Strangled by the fascism endemic to Central Germany.

 

The child passed by with the other campers. He looked behind him and then he looked at the sea.

The girl came later; she brought breakfast. She joined the child. She put her hand on the back of his neck. She speaks to him. He walks with his head slightly raised toward her, listening carefully, and sometimes he smiles. Like her, he smiles. It's
as if she's happy because of Gdansk, she says. He knows nothing of Gdansk, but he is happy too.

She tells of the shark's visits to David. That one time he comes by with an American accent, another time with a Spanish accent, another time with an accent from nowhere at all, a sneezing, blowing, bellowing accent, and David just has to deal with it. The child laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs. While he is laughing the girl stops telling her story. Then she resumes. She says that one time he comes with a baseball cap that he found in the sewers of New York on his way to hear a rock concert; he doesn't even know where this concert was or if it was really a concert, that din he heard, but the shark is the way he is, nothing to be done about it. He's stupid, says the counselor. Stupido.

The child asks what the shark was doing in New York.

The young counselor says that the shark works as a cop for shoals of herrings and goes into the ports of New York and Mandalay to spy on fishermen, so that he can then report back to the herrings. It's not very nice, says the girl, but life is like that sometimes. The child doesn't really look like he understands.

Then she says that one day the shark came back to the island and asked David to come, that he wanted to show him the
Sargasso prairie, where there is never any wind or waves, only a long, gentle swell. Never cold. And where sometimes the sea turns milky white from a mother whale whose mammary glands have been injured; where you can bathe in the sea of milk that comes from her mammaries and drink it and roll around in its warmth. That it's an indescribable happiness.

Come, David. Come. David.

And David, finally, comes.

And the shark cries and David can't understand why.

And all the animals of the island encircle David and begin to wash themselves as they do every evening, and also lick David, who is now their child.

But what the shark wants is to go on the sand to steal David. Nothing to be done about that. We're here, don't be afraid, the animals tell David.

 

And David says to the shark, There you go, it's starting all over again, nobody can ever tell what you want.

And the shark weeps and cries out over and over that it's not his fault.

And here is David weeping with the shark over the horribly unjust fate handed to sharks.

And then the light becomes illuminating, the air suddenly
echoes with liquid thunder, and the Great Half-Breed of all the oceans slowly emerges from the Atlantic Reservoir to watch the setting sun.

Still blind and so beautiful, the Source asks who was crying out in pain, that it's indecent, that they can't hear themselves think in the Atlantic Reservoir.

 

And all the animals say in unison, It's the shark who wants to eat David. Then David understands and he feels bad for the shark.

They're all nuts on this island, the Great Half-Breed says in French.

 

The child asks if the Source still dances in the evening. The young counselor says yes, every evening until nightfall, and not always staying in cadence, nor always the Guatemalan polka. Sometimes a tango by Carlos d'Alessio. And sometimes the slow, funereal Passacaglia whose author no one here is sure of, probably an old organist from some Germanic country, according to some.

The child asks how long David has been on the island. The girl says two years, but she isn't sure either.

Then she asks him if he wants to know how the story ends.
He shakes his head no, he doesn't want to. He stops talking. And he cries. He doesn't want the Source to die, or the shark. Or David? asks the counselor. He says, Or David.

And then the girl asks the child one more question. She asks what he would like David to do, kill the Source or keep her alive.

The child stares at the ocean and the sand without seeing them. He pauses, then says, Kill the Source.

And then the child asks, What about you? She says she doesn't know. But maybe she'd kill her, too, like him.

She says they don't know why they want the Source to die.

The child says it's true, they don't know.

Outside the windows, it was suddenly night. It had arrived without anyone noticing it coming, and it was already very dark. And they thought about the wildness of the child and the sea, about all those differences that are so alike.

 

The girl says people always wrote on the end of the world and the death of love. She sees that the child doesn't understand. And both of them laugh about that, very hard, both of them. He says it's not true, people write on paper. They laugh. Then she says that the child understands. They laugh. She also says that if there were no sea and no love, no one would write books.

T
HE HOLIDAY campers have reached the other end of summer. The child with gray eyes was there. Next to him, always, was the young girl. Everyone sang except the two of them, the child and she, the employee of the holiday camp, that solitary girl.

 

Then once again they went, as you know, to the other side of the breakwater. Toward the promontories of clay and the black pillars. And there, she sang for the child that by the clearwater fountain she had walked again and again; she sang that. She said that the non-Jewish deportees who passed through Rambouillet had also sung that song. He asked who that was, the deportees.

She said, Frenchmen. And that afterward, the Jewish deportees had sung that song about the clearwater fountain before dying.

Then she said no more for a long while.

And then she said that they were Jews.

 

The tide went out and the girl told the child about a book she had recently read, one that still haunted her and that she couldn't get off her mind. It was about a love that awaited death without provoking it, infinitely more violent than if this love had been made from desire.

The girl told the child that what he didn't understand about what she was saying was just like what she didn't understand in herself when she looked at him. She told him that she loved him. She said, “I love you more than anything.”

The child began to cry.

The girl didn't ask him why he was crying.

 

Then the child asked again about the Jews. The girl didn't know.

As on the first day the sea carries to shore the white froth of its fury; it brings it back as it would bring back an old love. Or the ashes of incinerated Jews from the German crematoriums who shall not be forgotten until the end of the centuries upon centuries that the Earth has to live.

 

The child with gray eyes stood there. And the girl stood there too. Like strangers.

They looked at the sea so as not to look at each other, as if trying never to see each other again. Never to speak.

And while they looked at other things the child wept.

 

And I took them in as I did you, as I did the sea and the wind. I shut them in this dark room that had wandered out above time. The one I call the Room of the Jews. My room. And that of Yann Andréa Steiner.

 

The child wept for a long time. The girl let him cry. He had forgotten the girl.

Then the girl asked, “What do you remember . . .”

The child said, “Nothing.” And then he was silent. And then he said very clearly that his little sister, the German soldier fired into her head and her head exploded. The Child did not cry. He tried to remember and he remembered. He said that there was blood everywhere. That the dog too had been killed by the German soldier because it had jumped at him. The dog howled so much, he said he remembered that too.

Her age, his little sister's age, was two. The child didn't remember anything more.

He falls silent. He looks at her. He has grown pale. He's afraid to say something he's concealing. He says he doesn't remember.

She says nothing. She looks at him again. She says, “It's true. People don't remember anything.”

He says that except for his little sister Judith, it's true, he doesn't remember anything.

He is silent. Then he says, “My mother shouted, she told me to save myself, to run down the road very fast, right now, not to tell anyone about Judith, not ever.”

The child suddenly falls silent. As if he were losing his sanity. As if all at once fear had again become the law, as if suddenly he had become afraid of her, had grown afraid of that girl as well.

She looked at him for a long time and then she said, “You have to talk about this. If you don't, we'll die, you and I.”

The child doesn't understand. She can see it. She says that if he doesn't, it will all happen again.

The child looked at her again and he smiled and said, “You were saying that as a joke ...”

She smiled at the boy. He asked her, “Are you Jewish too?”

She answered that she, too, was Jewish.

 

The child had never seen such a fierce storm and he was surely afraid. Then the girl took him in her arms and together they walked into the foamy surf.

The child was in a state of terror. He had forgotten about the girl.

And it was in that act of forgetting that the girl saw the child's gray eyes in their full light. Afterward she had shut her own eyes and held herself back from walking farther into the deep foam, as she wanted to do to kill them as well, the two Jews that they were.

The child was still looking at the waves, their ebb and flux. The trembling in his body had stopped.

The girl turned her face away from the sea, kissed the child's hair; it smelled like the sea wind, and she cried and tonight the child knew why.

She asked the child if he was cold and he said no. If he was still afraid, and he lied and said no. He corrected himself. He said, “Sometimes, at night.”

The child asked if she could go farther out, to where the waves were crashing, and she told him that if she did the force of the waves would most likely rip them apart from each other and carry him away. The child laughed at this as if it were a joke.

She asked him about his parents. The child didn't know where they were buried. He said they had taken pills, the way his mother had always said they would. She had put him out the door and then they must have been dead right after.

Had he seen them die?

No. Only his little sister and the dog.

And the German soldiers, had he seen them?

No. Later, on the road, after he'd run away, he saw some passing by in a car.

The girl sobs quietly. He looks at her. He is surprised. He says nothing about this.

“And after that, what happened? What do you remember?”

“I went down the road. And in a field there were horses and a woman who had heard rifle shots. She called me over and gave me bread and milk. I stayed with her, but she was afraid of the Germans so she made me hide.

“And then she got afraid again so she put me in the orphanage.”

“Full-time?”

“I think so. On Sundays we went to the forest. I remember that.”

“And never the sea?”

“No. This is the first time.”

She says, “Are you happy at the orphanage?”

He says yes, he's happy. He cries. He says again, this time in a shout: “When the German soldier shot at my little sister, the dog jumped at him and the soldier killed him too.”

They look at each other some more. He says, “I can really remember the dog when he barked.”

 

Then the child doesn't look at anything else. He stares into the void. He says his mother had told him that they were Jews. That the Germans were killing Jews, all the Jews. They, the Germans, didn't want there to be a single one left, a single Jew, ever.