The Tale of Yesterday
and Tomorrow
When the Great Walls were being built, Charade begins, wrapping herself loosely in a sheet and huddling into the armchair in Koenig’s bedroom …
And the walls are everywhere, everywhere, she says. They run down the middle of subway cars, have you noticed? I’ll tell you a tale of this morning’s subway:
“You still can’t step into the same river twice,” says the tow-headed boy. He leans against the wall of the car which branches and flowers with graffiti. He must be all of twelve or thirteen years old, and is wedged beneath Charade’s left armpit. “For day-to-day in Harvard Square,” he says, “Heraclitus is more helpful than Senator Kennedy. Anyway, that’s what I’m going to argue. That you still can’t step into the same river twice.”
“You can’t step into the Charles River once,” his companion answers, “unless you want to pick up an infection. We know where Kennedy stands on Pollution Probe, and that’s what counts.”
Then a station flashes into view, brakes, sucks out a hundred people, crams another hundred in. The boys in their crested school blazers have disappeared, and in their place is a woman with paperclips dangling from her ears. She nudges Charade and whispers fiercely: “Finally finally finally finally.” Charade cannot avoid seeing into the woman’s bag, where two dead birds lie rigid in crumpled newsprint. A ritual? Breakfast? The woman is thin as bird bones under seamed skin. “Finally finally finally,” she whispers, eyes glittering.
Park Street station reaches in and whirls her up its funnel to the spinning streets.
“Yes?” Koenig prompts, when her silent orbit brings her back through his bedroom.
“Yes, what?”
He gestures, mildly agitated, pulling back her words from the air. “Whirls her up its funnel to the spinning streets.”
“End of my subway story. She climbed into someone else’s tale.”
“You sound … different.”
“Different?”
“Yes. Your voice changes.”
“So does yours behind your lectern.”
“Yes, but …”
“I can’t help it, stories have their own voices, they speak me. You want me to leave after all?”
No, no, he shakes his head vehemently. “Keep talking.”
Once upon a time, Charade says, before Copernicus, this city lay still on its pontoons between the Charles River and the Atlantic. Back then, a person could climb out of the subway and step into the same city twice; a person could journey more or less straightforwardly from birth to death, which used to be the last stop on the line; one used to be able to count on that.
Once upon a time, geography was stable. More than that — I am almost certain — there was once a time when days followed one another in orderly fashion like huge beads on a rope. You pulled your way along, hand over hand. You could stop and look behind you and say: There’s the past. You could touch what was beneath your fingers, you could smell it, lick it, taste it. This is today, you could say. And you could reach forward and sense the beads stretching on and on. That is the future, you could say; the things that will arrive tomorrow, that have not yet happened, though they do exist and lie in waiting.
But probably even then — if there was a then — the beads just out of reach curled back to touch the past. Probably time has always been a necklace. Probably it has always been possible to begin the circuit at any point.
And when the Great Walls were being built — in ancient China, in Berlin, in Warsaw and Lodz, in Sydney and Brisbane, in the Punjab, in Fiji, in Toronto and New York and Boston — there were always clusters of law-abiding and curious folk who stood watching the progress of division.
And there was always a lunatic or two to shout: Beware! Beware! to the embarrassment of ordinary folks.
On both sides the watchers could see the indestructible present, sweet and straight as a line. Everyman — a chatty fellow — was forever waving to his neighbour across the workers and the rubble. What is this nonsense? he called, and both of them laughed.
Only yesterday, he said in awe to his little son as the wall grew higher, only yesterday we could see the apple tree in our neighbour’s yard. His tree was heavy with blossoms, he always gave us a bushel of apples. Remember how you played in the rain barrels under the trees?
The little boy thought he could remember. Into his mind fell a white flock of petals, and the taste of crisp inaccessible apples became a craving on his tongue. He saw a girl in a muslin pinafore whom he chased between the rain barrels. The girl smelled of tree-sap and new mown grass and he pined for her in his dreams.
Daddy, he wept, I want to see her again, I miss her, I want the apple blossom girl.
What? his father said. What girl? I can’t remember a girl. Our neighbour never had any children, it was a constant source of grief to him.
But as his son described her — the hair that fell pale and heavy to her shoulders, her little brown hands, her white pinafore — he recalled that he and his neighbour had always intended a match.
I can remember a time, he said to the grandson on his knee, when your father played in the rain barrels underneath our neighbour’s trees on the other side of the wall. I can remember when your father was in love with a beautiful girl who lived on the other side. That was before the wall was built.
I don’t believe you, grandpa, the child said. It’s just another one of your stories. There’s always been a wall.
Grandfather and father stared at each other.
Out of the mouths of babes, the father laughed. Why don’t you admit it, Dad? There’s always been a wall.
But … the grandfather said, bewildered. You yourself remember the girl.
Ah, that’s different, the son said. That was part of my wild and reckless youth when I made dangerous forays beyond the wall. That was how I met the girl. The girl is real.
Of course the girl is real, the grandfather blustered. (He was a stubborn fellow, old and contentious.) Before the wall was built, he said, you used to play with her under the trees. Even God cannot change the past, he stormed.
No one is trying to change the past, his son placated. It’s just that your memory is playing tricks. Don’t you remember that first time I smuggled her across the wall? How you begged me not to get involved because of the danger?
It’s true, the grandfather conceded. There was never a time when the wall was not there. But the girl was real. What became of her?
Who knows? the son sighed. She worried about her own father, she insisted on going back.
I always hoped I’d meet her father, the old man said. I always thought we’d have a lot in common. I used to picture his back yard, I used to imagine how we’d stand and chat if the wall had never been there.
I don’t know, the son said. Sometimes I thought he was just an excuse she used. She must have had a father, of course, but I’m not at all sure he lived beyond the wall.
She had a vivid imagination, the old man recalled. And such an unforgettable face. You used to call her the apple blossom girl.
Yes, the son sighed. I still dream of her.
“Do you see what I mean?” Charade asks.
Of course, for me — she might have said — it’s an intense and personal issue, with my father’s past and present being such elusive constructions.
But many other examples could be adduced.
In Toronto — not a city that rides high in the Book of the World’s Awareness — a certain Zundel snapped his fingers and made the 1940s disappear. He coughed brimstone and a staggering amount of documentation wisped away like smoke from an oven: eyewitness accounts, photographs, videotapes of the bodies going under the bulldozers.
“Of course, you know about this, Koenig,” she sighs. “You know all about the trial in Toronto. And in Europe there are academics who solemnly delineate a mass hallucination. There is proof that the Second World War was a hoax.
“And so Verity Ashkenazy and Nicholas Truman,” she says, “both were and weren’t. That’s my honest opinion.”
“Perhaps,” Koenig says, “if you could start at the beginning.”
But Charade sees the approach of morning and falls silent.