Elizabeth
She knows that her mind has grown sloped, that everything passing into it rolls on a slight downhill, cannot find grip, and is lost.
Und die Angst, daß ich nichts sagen könnte, weil alles unsagbar ist.
the fear of everything unsayable
Her granddaughter brings her the German like food, her pale granddaughter Eve, who has grown brittle. She sits in the untrimmed light across the room from the isinglass stove, the flames stripe her face like blue lace, and she reads aloud to Elizabeth from a book of Rilke’s poetry, she reads the words at first in German, the syllables tumbling from her mouth like small discreet stones she circles back to distill into English. She leaves out sentences, whole paragraphs in translation. She torques the meaning through her.
ich lerne sehen. Ja, ich fange an.
But the woman. The woman had completely fallen into herself. She sat up, erschrak, frightened, pulled out of herself, zu schnell, violently, so that her face was left in her two hands.
On the floor of the isinglass stove, the nut coals cluster in an uneven mass of terrain. Their edges glow orange as they eat themselves away. The deafness has thickened like a wax in Elizabeth’s ears, but here, in this quiet room where there are no other sounds to distract her, she hears enough to sense the widening gap between the solidity of the language and the dissolution of her mind. Her granddaughter, the pale one reading, floats in undigested pieces near her. She reads of Eurydice, a woman who is already root,
Wer?
fern aber, far away, far away,
groping, she is, dark before the shining exit-gates, already walking back, moors, cliffs, the Owenglen at dusk, the castle and the blackthorn trees tumbling, all of it will tumble into yellow water. She will unravel to heather. She will press the ocean through her, its crossing through the eye of a needle, and her body will rise up again, young and unscathed. Innisfree. Elizabeth wonders what it means. Has been asking herself always, What does it all mean? Innisfree.
Sie schlief die Welt. A girl who slept the world. An Irish girl who slept in me. Who ate the cliffs of Moher and the mounds of Donegal. She slept in the blood-stricken light of Galway Bay.
Maggie’s hands will come to her at dawn, wake her from the red chenille that has softened like warm earth around her in her sleep, Maggie will come, will come, arise and you must go, an hour after dawn, Maggie’s hands will come to wash her body with the sponge soaked overnight in chamomile, lavender, the wild blue flax children of the lower fields, their wind-skinned heads,
they will not hush, the leaves a flutter round me, the beech leaves old,
Elizabeth will ask Maggie’s hands if they have touched the burned man in the root cellar, if they have heard the wailing of the osprey mother at the fall of her nestlings into the mouths of herring gulls. She will ask the hands if they have seen the goatsuckers on the roof, if they have heard the rhythm of ghosts in a small chick’s foot stamped in the dirt.
Elizabeth’s skin has turned to parchment. It peels off in gray withered sheets, the stuff of egg skins. She will let only Maggie touch her. Maggie, whose hands are smooth and cool and run like a stream through her flesh,
they will not hush, a voice has told her, or is that her granddaughter reading to her now, aloud, dreams of a Dublin chimney sweep.
Elizabeth’s father told her once when they were still in Ireland that every madman who is free will hide himself in that same valley. Now she is older than he ever was. She has turned like ancient stones lying in the Carrowmore.
Arise and go now, arise and you must go.
Only Maggie, who brings the smell of earth and trees, who comes with the sun to rub pine oil into the ridged plains of Elizabeth’s back that has grown as crooked as an island hatched mad from the sea. Her shoulder blades poke through the skin in small bluffs, her spine has sunk into a glen, and she longs to hide herself in shade, wade with the fog across the midland moors the way she did when she was young. Maggie will come, raise her from the white sheets, counties of water where she has slept, early morning, every morning. A boat, she knows, is barely a scar on the ocean. A man, not even a sound. She has seen their butterfly arms. When Maggie comes, Elizabeth will ask after the scorched body in the root cellar, the tugging of the heart. She will ask while the curtains splash wild, full of sunlight and brine, sparrow wings, the early fragile light she loves. Maggie will lift the great warped orbs of her breasts to sponge the caves underneath. She will lift them gently, over the blue basin, and let the water run over them. She will hold their lobed weight in her hand as if they were the world.
Seltsam, die Wünsche nicht weiterzuwünschen. Seltsam, alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume flattern zu sehen.
Strange, to desire what one no longer desires.
Elizabeth knows that her granddaughter cheats her. That she steals words, whole phrases, in translation. She knows that she is cruel in what she chooses to leave out, what she chooses to speak, lines of chaos, death, a heart stone-ground, one who has never arrived.
Hilf mir.
Help me.
so gently slip into a life we never wanted and find that we are trapped as in a dream
without ever waking up, without ever,
Elizabeth sits in the rocking chair by the isinglass stove and imagines herself in flames. This chair has witnessed her through years. It has held the secrets she has kept, the lies she has told. The chair has seen everything. Its mahogany joints have settled to her weight. They cannot hold anyone else. They are worn, full, satiated with her life. They will die with her,
for there is no place we can remain,
nirgends,
holy londe Irlaunde; daunce wyt me,
Éire,
ar ais go—
She crawls after the Gaelic, her limbs dull, swollen finger joints that cannot hold the lost tongue, the one she knew as a child before she knew what language was. Once they had crossed that ocean, to live in the no-place of inland, grapes, the absence of cliffs and moors and fens, her mother would not speak it. Gealach. Sàile. Elizabeth does not remember what the words mean. Is not sure they ever did mean. And it occurs to her for the first time in her life that the world might be godless. The trees, the river, the striving of hills that she has always assumed hid some spirit, some palpable otherness, it occurs to her now they might hold nothing but themselves. Even the sky, which to her has always seemed to bear the weight of angels, might be brief and irretrievably alone. This strikes her for the first time in the mid-lit room that is suddenly without contour and estranged, and this granddaughter, the cool one with less shape than wind, who is fractured, has always been, faithless, pale, this girl she has never quite learned, perhaps she saw the flatness of the world when she was young and her own mother lay down and let herself go into that simple, endless night. Perhaps the girl died to it then, years ago, and went on walking, her small and wheat-haired self. She left her face in her hands with that knowing and stumbled on, blind through the dark with her arms sheer and her mouth full of grief for the things she could not hold.