A Feather on the Breath of God Read online

  “I didn’t like the way he looked. He wouldn’t say anything but I knew he was hurting. I said to myself, this isn’t arthritis—no way. I wanted him to see my own doctor but he wouldn’t. I was just about to order him to.” (My father’s boss at the bank.)

  “He hated cats, and the cat knew it and she was always jumping in his lap. Every time he sat down the cat jumped in his lap and we laughed. But you could tell it really bothered him. He said cats were bad luck. When the cat jumped in your lap it was a bad omen.” (My mother’s younger brother Karl.)

  “He couldn’t dance at all—or he wouldn’t—but he clapped and sang along to the records. He liked to drink and he liked gambling. Your mother worried about that.” (Frau Meyer.)

  “Before the occupation no one in this town had ever seen an Oriental or a Negro.” (My grandmother.)

  “He never ate much, he didn’t want you to cook for him, but he liked German beer. He brought cigarettes for everyone. We gave him schnapps. He played us the cowboy songs.” (Frau Schweitzer.)

  “Ain’t you people dying to know what he’s saying?” (The patient in the bed next to my father’s.)

  “When he wasn’t drinking he was very shy. He just sat there next to your mother without speaking. He sat there staring and staring at her.” (Frau Meyer.)

  “He liked blonds. He loved that blond hair.” (Karl.)

  “There was absolutely nothing we could do for him. The amazing thing is that he was working right up till the day he came into the hospital. I don’t know how he did that.” (The doctor.)

  “The singing was a way of talking to us, because he didn’t know German at all.” (My grandmother.)

  “Yes, of course I remember. It was Hank Williams. He played those records over and over. Hillbilly music. I thought I’d go mad.” (My mother.)

  Here are the names of some Hank Williams songs:

  Honky Tonkin’. Ramblin’ Man. Hey, Good Lookin’. Lovesick Blues. Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do. Your Cheatin’ Heart. (I heard that) Lonesome Whistle. Why Don’t You Mind Your Own Business. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. The Blues Come Around. Cold, Cold Heart. I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You.

  PART TWO

  CHRISTA

  I am told that my first word was Coca-Cola, and there exists a snapshot of me at eighteen months, running in a park, hugging a full bottle. It seems I snatched this Coke from some neighboring picnickers. I used to believe that I could remember this moment—the cold bottle against my stomach, my teetering, stomping trot, feelings of slyness and joy and excitement fizzing in me—but now I think I imagined all this at a later age, after having looked long and often at the picture.

  Here is something I do remember. Coming home from grade school for the lunch hour: It may have happened only once or it may have happened every day. Part of the way home took me through empty streets. I was alone and afraid. The noon whistle sounded, and as at a signal I started to run. The drumming of my feet and my own huffing breath became someone or something behind me. And I remember thinking that if I could just get home to my mother and her blue, blue eyes, everything would be all right.

  Here are some lines from Virginia Woolf: “ … there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back: or a cup with a blue ring.”

  Sometimes—now—I might find myself in a strange town. I might be walking down a quiet street at midday. A factory whistle blows, and I feel a current in my blood, as if a damp sponge had been stroked down my back.

  Woolf was thinking of a happy childhood, but does it matter? Another writer, members of whose family were killed in concentration camps, recalls how years later, looking through a book, he was touched by photographs of Hitler, because they reminded him of his childhood.

  My mother’s eyes were enhanced by shapely brows that made me think of angels’ wings. Their arch gave her face an expression of skeptical wonder. When she was displeased her brows went awry; the arch fell; the world came tumbling down on me.

  I remember a pear-shaped bottle of shampoo that sat on the edge of our bathtub. “With lemon juice. For blonds only.” As the years passed and her hair grew darker, she started to use bleach. On the smooth white drawing paper of kindergarten I too made her blonder, choosing the bright yellow crayon, the yellow of spring flowers: daffodils, forsythia.

  Other features: A wide mouth. Good, clear skin. A strong nose. Too big, her daughters said. (“What do you mean? A fine nose. Aristocratic. Same nose as Queen Elizabeth. I don’t want a little button on my face.”)

  And her walk, which was graceful and not graceful. A slight hitch in her gait, like a dancer with an injury.

  And her hands: Long-fingered, with soft palms and squarish nails. Deft, competent hands, good at making things.

  This is the way I see her at first, not as a whole but as parts: a pair of hands, a pair of eyes. Two colors: yellow and blue.

  The housing project where we lived. The wooden benches that stood in front of each building, where the women gathered when the weather was fair. The women: mothers all, still in their twenties but already somewhat worn away. The broad spread of their bottoms. The stony hardness of their feet, thrust into flip-flops. (The slatternly sound of those flip-flops as they walked.) The hard lives of housewives without money. Exhaustion pooled under their eyes and in their veiny ankles. One or two appearing regularly in sunglasses to hide a black eye.

  Talking, smoking, filing their nails.

  Time passes. The shadow of the building lengthens. The first stars come out; the mosquitoes. The children edge closer, keeping mum so as not to be chased away, not to miss a riddle. “He married his mother.” “I’m late this month.” “She lost the baby.” “She found a lump.” “She had a boy in the bed with her.”

  Finally a husband throws open a window. “Youse girls gonna yak out there the whole damn night?”

  Part of my way of seeing my mother is in contrast to these women. It was part of the way she saw herself “I’m not like these American women.” Her boast that she spoke a better English than they was true. “Dese and dose, youse, ain’t. How can you treat your own language like that!” Her own grammar was good, her spelling perfect, her handwriting precise, beautiful. But she made mistakes too. She said spedacular and expecially and holier-than-thoo. She spoke of a bone of contentment between two people. Accused someone of being a ne’er-too-well. And: “They stood in a motel for a week.” No matter how many times you corrected her she could not get that verb right. She flapped her hands. “You know what I mean!” And her accent never changed. There were times when she had to repeat herself to a puzzled waitress or salesman.

  But she would never say youse. She would never say ain’t.

  Parent-Teachers’ Day. My mother comes home with a face set in disgust. “Your teacher said, ‘She does good in history.

  My mother liked English. “A good language—same family as German.” She was capable of savoring a fine Anglo-Saxon word: murky, smite. She read Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales. She knew words like thane and rood and sith.

  Southern drawls, heartland twangs, black English, all sounded horrid to her.

  One or two Briticisms had found their way (how?) into her speech. “It was a proper mess, I tell you.” And somewhere she had learned to swear. She had her own rules. Only the lowest sort of person would say fuck. But bastard was permissible. And shit—she said shit a lot. But she always sounded ridiculous, swearing. She called her daughters sons of bitches. I was never so aware that English was not her native tongue as when she was swearing at me.

  She did not have many opportunities to speak German. We had a few relations, in upstate New York and in Pennsylvania, and there was a woman named Aga, from Munich, who had been my mother’s first friend here in the States and who now lived in Yonkers. But visits with these people were rare, and perhaps that is why I first thought of German as a festive language, a language for special occasions. The harshness that
grates on so many non-German ears—I never heard that. When several people were speaking together, it sounded to me like a kind of music—music that was not melodious, but full of jangles and toots and rasps, like a windup toy band.

  From time to time we took the bus across town to a delicatessen owned by a man originally from Bremen. My mother ordered in German, and while the man was weighing and wrapping the Leberkäse and Blutwurst and ham, he and she would talk. But I was usually outside playing with the dachshund.

  Sometimes, reading German poetry, she would start to say the lines under her breath. Then it no longer sounded like music, but like a dream-language: seething, urgent, a little scary.

  She did not want to teach her children German. “It’s not your language, you don’t need it, learn your own language first.”

  Now and then, on television, in a war movie, say, an American actor would deliver some German lines, and my mother would hoot. If subtitles were used, she said they were wrong. When my elder sister took German in high school, my mother skimmed her textbook and threw it down. “Ach, so many things wrong!”

  A very hard thing it seemed, getting German right.

  In one of my own schoolbooks was a discussion of different peoples and the contributions each had made to American society. The Germans, who gave us Wernher von Braun, were described as being, among other things, obedient to authority, with a tendency to follow orders without questioning them. That gave me pause. I could not imagine my mother taking orders from anyone.

  I remember being teased in school for the way I said certain words. Stoomach. And: “I stood outside all day.” (“Musta got awful tired!”) I called the sideways colon the Germans put on top of certain vowels an omelette. Later, after I’d left home, I had only to hear a snatch of German, or to see some Gothic script, to have my childhood come surging back to me.

  My mother said, “English is a fine language, it gets you to most places that you want to go. But German is—deeper, I think. A better language for poetry. A more romantic language, better for describing—yearning.”

  Her favorite poet was Heine.

  She said, “There are a lot of German words for which you have no English. And it’s funny—so often it’s an important word, one that means such a lot. Weltschmerz. How can you translate that? And even if you study German, you can’t ever really learn a word like that, you never grasp what it means.”

  But I did learn it, and I think I know what Weltschmerz means.

  My first book was a translation from the German: fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. My mother read these stories aloud to me, before I had learned to read myself. What appealed to me was not so much the adventures, not the morals, but the details: a golden key, an emerald box, boots of buffalo leather. The strangeness and beauty of names like Gretel and Rapunzel, especially the way my mother said them. The notion of enchantment was a tangled one. You couldn’t always believe what you saw. The twelve pigeons pecking on the lawn might be twelve princes under a spell. Perhaps all that was lacking in one’s own household was the right magic. At the right word, one of those birds might fly to your hand bearing in his beak a golden key, and that key might open a door leading to who knew what treasure. My mother shared this with all her neighbors: the conviction that we did not belong in the housing project. Out on the benches, much of the talk was about getting out. It was all a mistake. We were all under a spell—the spell of poverty. What is a home? We project children drew pictures of houses with peaked roofs and chimneys, and yards with trees. My mother said, “Every decent family is getting out,” as one by one our neighbors moved away. “We’ll never get out, we’ll be the last ones left,” meaning: the last white family.

  Metamorphosis. First the fairy tales, then the Greek myths—for years my imagination fed on that most magical possibility: a person could be changed into a creature, a tree. In time this led to trouble.

  I can still see her, Mrs. Wynn, a twig of a woman with a long chin and hollow eyes: my teacher. The way my mother mimicked her, Mrs. Wynn became a witch from one of the stories. “Your daughter says, In my first life I was a rabbit, in my second life, I was a tree. I think she is too old to be telling stories like that.” And then my mother, mimicking herself, all wide-blue-eyed innocence: “How do you know she wasn’t a rabbit?”

  Oh, how I loved her.

  Because my mother gave it to me I read a book of German sagas, but I didn’t like them. Heroism on the fierce Nordic scale was not for me. To Siegfried I preferred the heroes of the Hausmärchen: simple Hanses, farmers and tailors and their faithful horses and dogs. (In a few more years I’d prefer to read only about horses and dogs.) I did not share her taste for the legends of chivalry or the romances of the Middle Ages. The epic was her form. She liked stories—legendary or historic—about heroic striving, conquest and empire, royal houses and courts. Lives of Alexander and Napoleon were some of her favorite reading. (This was a mother who for Halloween dressed up her youngest not as a gypsy or a drum majorette but as Great Caesar’s Ghost—pillowcase toga, philodendron wreath—stumping all the kids and not a few of the teachers.) She read piles of paperback romances too—what she called her “everyday” reading.

  One day I came home to find her with a copy of Lolita. The woman who lived downstairs had heard it was a good dirty book and had gone out and bought it. Disappointed, she passed it on to my mother. (“So, is it dirty?” “No, just a very silly book by a very clever man.”)

  The “good” books, the ones to be kept, were placed in no particular order in a small pine bookcase whose top shelf was reserved for plants. To get at certain ones you had to part vines. Dear to my mother’s heart was the legend of Faust. Goethe’s version was years beyond me, but what I gathered of the story was not promising. I liked stories about the Devil all right, but Faust’s ambition struck no chord in me. I was a child of limited curiosity. I wanted to hear the cat speak but I didn’t care how it was done. Knowledge equals power was an empty formula to me. I was never good at science.

  Shakespeare in one volume. Plutarch’s Lives, abridged. In the introduction to the plays, I read that Shakespeare had used Plutarch as a source. At first I thought I had misunderstood. Then I felt a pang: The world was smaller than I had thought it was. For some reason, this gave me pain.

  I remember a book given to me by my fourth-grade teacher. A thick, dark green, grainy cover, pleasant to touch. A story about immigrants. One man speaking to another of a young woman just arrived from the Old Country. The phrase stayed with me, along with the memory of the feelings it inspired. I was both moved and repelled. “She has still her mother’s milk upon her lips.”

  My mother never called it the Old Country. She said my country, or Germany, or home. Usually home. When she spoke of home, I gave her my full attention. I could hear over and over (I did hear over and over) stories about her life before—before she was a wife, before she was Mother, when she was just Christa.

  She was a good storyteller. To begin with, she spoke English with the same vigor and precision with which German is spoken. And she used everything—eyes, hands, all the muscles of her face. She was a good mimic, it was spooky how she became the person mimicked, and if that person was you, you got a taste of hell.

  She was the opposite of my father. She talked all the time. She was always ready to reminisce—though that is a mild word for the purposive thing she did. The evocation of the past seemed more like a calling with her. The present was the projects, illiterate neighbors, a family more incurred than chosen, for there had been no choice. The past was where she lived and had her being. It was youth, and home. It was also full of horror. I cannot remember a time when she thought I was too young to hear those stories of war and death. But we both had been brought up on fairy tales—and what were her stories but more of the same, full of beauty and horror.

  She had been a girl, like me—but how different her girlhood from mine. And I never doubted that what she was, what she had been and where she came from, were superior to
me and my world. (“What you Americans call an education!” “What you Americans call an ice coffee!”)

  In memory I see myself always trying to get her to talk. Silence was a bad sign with her. When she was really angry she would not speak to you, not even to answer if you spoke to her. Once, she did not speak to my eldest sister for weeks.

  Toward the close of a long dull day. I have lost the thread of the book I am reading. As so often on a Saturday at this hour, I don’t know what to do with myself Outside, it is getting dark. Nothing but sports on TV My mother sits across the room, knitting. She sits on the sofa with one foot tucked under her. She is wearing her navy-blue sweater with the silver buttons, which she made herself, and which I will one day take with me, to have something of hers when I go away. (I have it still.) The soft, rhythmic click of the needles. At her feet the ball of yarn dances, wanders this way and that, looking for a kitten to play with. On her brow and upper lip, the pleats of concentration. Will it annoy her if I interrupt? (She is so easily annoyed!) I let the book close in my lap and say, “Tell me again about the time they came to take Grandpa to Dachau.”

  Motorheads is a word you would use today for the men of my mother’s family. In half the photographs I have seen of them there is some sort of motor vehicle. My grandfather and my uncles and many of their friends were racers. In the photos they are wearing black leather jackets and helmets. Sometimes someone is holding a trophy. In one astounding photo my grandfather and five other men round a curve, a tilting pyramid, all on one motorcycle. The stories took my breath away. Motorcycle races across frozen lakes. Spectacular, multivictim accidents. Spines snapped in two, teeth knocked out to the last one, instant death. What sort of men were these? Speed-loving. Death-defying. Germans. They slalomed too.