The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, page 1
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for Jonathan Aaron
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
I
II
III
IV
V
About the Author
Books by Charles Simic
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
I
Late night on MacDougal Street. An old fellow comes up to me and says: “Sir, I’m writing the book of my life and I need a dime to complete it.” I give him a dollar.
Another night in Washington Square Park, a fat woman with fright wig says to me: “I’m Esther, the goddess of Love. If you don’t give me a dollar, I’ll put a curse on you.” I give her a nickel.
One of those postwar memories: a baby carriage pushed by a humpbacked old woman, her son sitting in it, both legs amputated.
She was haggling with the greengrocer when the carriage got away from her. The street was steep so it rolled downhill with the cripple waving his crutch, his mother screaming for help, and everybody else laughing as if they were in the movies. Buster Keaton or somebody like that about to go over a cliff . . .
One laughed because one knew it would end well. One was surprised when it didn’t.
I didn’t tell you how I got lice wearing a German helmet. This used to be a famous story in our family. I remember those winter evenings just after the war with everybody huddled around the stove, talking and worrying late into the night. Sooner or later, it was inevitable, somebody would bring up my German helmet full of lice. They thought it was the funniest thing they ever heard. Old people had tears of laughter in their eyes. A kid dumb enough to walk around with a German helmet full of lice. They were crawling all over it. Any fool could see them!
I sat there saying nothing, pretending to be equally amused, nodding my head while thinking to myself, what a bunch of idiots! All of them! They had no idea how I got the helmet, and I wasn’t about to tell them.
It was in those first days just after the liberation of Belgrade, I was up in the old cemetery with a few friends, kind of snooping around. Then, all of a sudden, we saw them! A couple of German soldiers, obviously dead, stretched out on the ground. We drew closer to take a better look. They had no weapons. Their boots were gone, but there was a helmet that had fallen to the side of one of them. I don’t remember what the others got, but I went for the helmet. I tiptoed so as not to wake the dead man. I also kept my eyes averted. I never saw his face, even if sometimes I think I did. Everything else about that moment is still intensely clear to me.
That’s the story of the helmet full of lice.
Beneath the swarm of high-flying planes we were eating watermelon. While we ate the bombs fell on Belgrade. We watched the smoke rise in the distance. We were hot in the garden and asked to take our shirts off. The watermelon made a ripe, cracking noise as my mother cut it with a big knife. We also heard what we thought was thunder, but when we looked up, the sky was cloudless and blue.
My mother heard a man plead for his life once. She remembers the stars, the dark shapes of trees along the road on which they were fleeing the Austrian army in a slow-moving ox-cart. “That man sounded terribly frightened out there in the woods,” she says. The cart went on. No one said anything. Soon they could hear the river they were supposed to cross.
In my childhood women mended stockings in the evening. To have a “run” in one’s stocking was catastrophic. Stockings were expensive, and so was electricity.
We would all sit around the table with a single lamp, my grandmother reading the papers, we children pretending to do our homework, while watching my mother spreading her red-painted fingernails inside the transparent stocking.
In the biography of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, I read that her first poetry reading in Paris took place on February 6, 1925, and the newspaper announcement says that there were also three musicians on the program, Madame Cunelli, who sang old Italian songs, Professor Mogilewski, who played violin, and V. E. Byutsov, who was on piano. This was astonishing! Madame Cunelli, whose first name was Nina, was a friend of my mother’s. They both studied with the same voice teacher, Madame Kedrov, in Paris, and then somehow Nina Cunelli ended up in Belgrade during the Second World War where she taught me Russian and French children’s songs, which I still know well. I remember that she was a beautiful woman, a little older than my mother, and that she went abroad after the war ended.
There was a maid in our house who let me put my hand under her skirt. I was five or six years old. I can still remember the dampness of her crotch and my surprise that there was all that hair there. I couldn’t get enough of it. She would crawl under the table where I had my military fort and my toy soldiers. I don’t remember what was said, if anything, just her hand, firmly guiding mine to that spot.
They sit on the table, the tailors do. At least, they used to. A street of dim shops in Belgrade where we went to have my father’s coat narrowed and shortened so it would fit me. The tailor got off the table and stuck pins in my shoulder. “Don’t squirm,” my mother said. Outside it was getting dark. Large snowflakes fell.
Years later in New York, on the same kind of afternoon, a dry-cleaning store window with an ugly, thick-legged woman on the chair in a white dress. She’s having the hem raised by a gray-headed Jewish tailor, who kneels before her as if he is proposing marriage.
There was an expensive-looking suitcase on the railroad tracks, and they were afraid to come near it. Far from any station, on a stretch of track bordered by orchards where they had been stealing plums that afternoon. The suitcase, she remembers, had colorful labels, of what were probably World-famous hotels and ocean liners. During the war, of course, one heard of bombs, special ones, in the shape of toys, pens, soccer balls, exotic birds—so why not suitcases? For that reason they left it where it was.
“I always wondered what was in it,” my wife says. We were talking about the summer of 1944, of which we both had only a few clear recollections.
The world was going up in flames and I was studying violin. The baby Nero sawing away . . .
My teacher’s apartment was always cold. A large, almost empty room with a high ceiling already in shadow. I remember the first few screechy notes my violin would make and my teacher’s stern words of reprimand. I was terrified of that old woman. I also loved her because after the scolding she would give me something to eat. Something rare and exotic, like chocolate filled with sweet liqueur. We’d sit in that big empty room, almost dark now. I’d be eating and she’d be watching me eat. “Poor child,” she’d say, and I thought it had to do with my not practicing enough, my being dim-witted when she tried to explain something to me, but today I’m not sure that’s what she meant. In fact, I suspect she had something else entirely in mind. That’s why I am writing this, to find out what it was.
When my grandfather was dying from diabetes, when he had already had one leg cut off at the knee and they were threatening to do the same to the other, his old buddy, Savo Lozanic, used to visit him every morning to keep him company. They would reminisce about this and that and even have a few laughs.
One morning my grandmother had to leave him alone in the house, as she had to attend the funeral of a distant relative. That’s what gave him the idea. He hopped out of bed and into the kitchen, where he found candles and matches. He got back into his bed, somehow placed one candle above his head and the other at his feet, and lit them. Finally he pulled the sheet over his face and began to wait.
When his friend knocked, there was no answer. The door being unlocked, he went in, calling from time to time. The kitchen was empty. A fat gray cat slept on the dining room table. When he entered the bedroom and saw the bed with the sheet and lit candles, he let out a wail and then broke into sobs as he groped for a chair to sit down.
“Shut up, Savo,” my grandfather said sternly from under his sheet. “Can’t you see I’m only practicing?”
I leave the dentist’s chair after what seems an eternity. It’s an evening in June. I’m walking the tree-lined streets full of dark, whispering trees in my neighborhood in Belgrade. The streets are poorly lit, but there are people about strolling close to each other as if they were lovers. The thought crosses my mind that this is the happiest moment in my life.
In Chicago,
The woman looked like she must’ve known the cow that started the Great Fire. Later she married an Italian with a street organ. At times he kissed her with the monkey still on his shoulder.
The animal I saw looked young and full of mischief. He wore a tattered coat with brass buttons, which he must have inherited from his father. That day they had for an audience a small boy who wanted one of the monkey’s bells. His beautiful mother kept pulling his arm to go, but he wouldn’t budge. The old woman turning the crank had her eyes raised to heaven in a manner favored by saints who are being tempted by demons.
Another story about time. This one about the time it took them to quit their cells after beginning to suspect that the Germans were gone. In that huge prison in Milan all of a sudden you could hear a pin drop. Eventually they thought it best to remove their shoes before walking out.
My father was still tiptoeing hours later crossing a large empty piazza. There was a full moon above the dark palaces. His heart was in his mouth.
“It was just like an opera stage,” he says. “All lit up, but nobody in the audience, and nobody in the orchestra pit. Nevertheless, I felt like singing. Or perhaps screaming?”
He did neither. The year was 1944.
The streets are empty, it’s raining, and we are sitting in the Hotel Sherman bar listening to the bluesy piano. I’m not yet old enough to order a drink, but my father’s presence is so authoritative and intimidating that when he orders for me the waiters never dare to ask about my age.
We talk. My father remembers a fly that wouldn’t let him sleep one summer afternoon fifty years ago. I tell him about an old gray overcoat twice my size, which my mother made me wear after the war. It was wintertime. People on the street would sometimes stop and watch me. The overcoat trailed the ground and made walking difficult. One day I was standing on the corner waiting to cross when a young woman gave me a small coin and walked away. I was so embarrassed.
“Was she pretty?” my father asks.
“Not at all,” I tell him. “She looked like a hick, maybe a nun.”
“A Serbian Ophelia,” my father thinks.
It’s possible. Anything is possible.
The huge crowd cheering the dictator; the smiling faces of children offering flowers in welcome. How many times have I seen that? And always the same blonde little girl curtsying! Here she is surrounded by the high boots of the dignitaries and a couple of tightly leashed police dogs. The monster himself is patting her on the head and whispering in her ear.
I look in vain for someone with a troubled face. The exiled general’s grandson was playing war with his cheeks puffed to imitate bombs exploding. The grim daughter wrote down the old man’s reminiscences. The whole apartment smelled of bad cooking.
The general was in a wheelchair. He wore a bib and smoked a cigar. The daughter smiled for me and my mother in a way that made her sharp little teeth show.
I liked the general better. He remembered some prime minister pretending to wipe his ass with a treaty he had just signed, the captured enemy officers drinking heavily and toasting some cabaret singer from their youth.
It’s your birthday. The child you were appears on the street wearing a stupid grin. He wants to take you by the hand, but you won’t let him.
“You’ve forgotten something,” he whispers. And you, quiet as a mutt around an undertaker, since, of course, he (the child) doesn’t exist.
There was an old fellow at the Sun Times, who was boss when I first came and worked as a mail clerk, who claimed to have read everything. His father was a janitor at the university library in Urbana, and Stanley, for that was his name, started as a kid. At first 1 didn’t believe any of it; then I asked him about Gide, whom I was then reading. He recited for me the names of the major novels and their plots. What about Isaac Babel, Alain Fournier, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford? The same thing. It was amazing! Everything I had read or heard of he had already read. “You should be on a quiz show, Stanley,” people who overheard us said. Stanley had never been to college and had worked for the papers most of his life. He had a stutter, so I guess that explains why he never married or got ahead. So, all he did was read books. I had the impression that he loved every book he read. Only superlatives for Stanley, one book better than the other. If I started to criticize, he’d get pissed off. Who do I think I am? Smartass, he called me, and wouldn’t talk to me about books for a few days. Stanley was pure enthusiasm. I was giddy myself at the thought of another book waiting for me to read at home.
In Chicago there was a tremendous suspicion of the Eastern literary establishment. The working people never get portrayed in their books, I heard people say all the time. Most of the people I met were leftist intellectuals from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. These were Jews, Poles, Germans, Irish. They had relatives who worked in factories. They knew America could be a cruel place, an unjust country. After I saw South Chicago and Gary, Indiana, I had to admit they had a point. Both places, with their steel mills in smoke and fire, were like hell out of Hieronymus Bosch. The ugliness and poverty of industrial Chicago was an enormous influence on me. It prevented me from forgetting where I came from. A big temptation for all immigrants with intellectual pretensions is to outdo the natives in their love of Henry James and whatever he represents. You want to blend in, so you’re always looking for the role models. It’s very understandable. Who wants to look and talk like a foreigner forever!
The night of my farewell dinner in Chicago, I got very drunk. At some point, I went to the bathroom and could not find my way back. The restaurant was large and full of mirrors. I would see my friends seated in the distance, but when I hurried toward them, I would come face to face with myself in a mirror. With my new beard I did not recognize myself immediately and almost apologized. In the end, I gave up and sat at an old man’s table. He ate in silence and I lit a cigarette. Time passed. The place was emptying. The old man finally wiped his mouth and pushed his full, untouched wine glass toward me. I would have stayed with him indefinitely if one of the women from our party hadn’t found me and led me outside.
Did I lie a little? Of course. I gave the impression that I had lived for years on the Left Bank and often sat at the tables of the famous cafés watching the existentialists in their passionate arguments. What justified these exaggerations in my eyes was the real possibility that I could have done something like that. Everything about my life already seemed a fluke, a series of improbable turns of events, so in my case fiction was no stranger than truth. Like when I told the woman on the train from Chicago that I was a Russian. I described our apartment in Leningrad, the terrors of the long siege during the War, the deaths of my parents before a German firing squad which we children had to witness, the DP camps in Europe. At some point during the long night I had to go to the bathroom and simply laugh.
How much of it did she believe? Who knows? In the morning she gave me a long kiss in parting, which could have meant anything.
My father and his best friend talking about how some people resemble animals. The birdlike wife of so and so, for example. The many breeds of dogs and their human look-alikes. The lady who is a cow. The widow next door who is a tigress, etc.
“And what about me?” says my father’s friend.
“You look like a rat, Tony,” he replies without a moment’s hesitation, after which they just sit drinking without saying another word.
“You look like a young Franz Schubert,” the intense-looking woman told me as we were introduced.
