HOLLY ANHOLT

Vacation

NILS’S ANCIENT, half-collapsing stone farmhouse sat in a short and narrow valley, little more than a cul de sac, forty minutes from Arezzo. It was a place he’d bought with four other people from his paper fifteen years before and it had no heat but a wood-burning stove. Sheep grazed on the hillsides above the farm. One gravel road led out of the valley and around to the village, but there was also a track over the hills to the village, and it was this we walked each morning, often in the rain, to get our coffee and hang around in the sole, eerily quiet café. The tourists had yet to make their springtime descent. I was happy enough for a few days. So many questions put aside, questions like avenging furies, that could take up your whole life and leave your carcass for mere birds. Look, here was life, too. Life without questions but with a village you could walk to, and a café you could linger in, and sheep and goats on the hill and olive and fig trees, and our neighbor for gossip, and the only shower in the house coming from a black hose that sat out in the yard like a fat cat heating up in the afternoon sun. For four days we walked, read books, spoke quietly about the migrating patterns of the geese, about tomatoes, about the Bay Bridge in San Francisco which Nils with unbelievable stubbornness refused to believe was longer than the Golden Gate Bridge; about anything but the city we’d driven from. Then he asked me to beat him, which I did.

It was at first as if someone had called me by the wrong name. I knew it was me who’d been called but it still seemed like they had the wrong person. Aside from a little tussle with a Polish camp guard, violence was something I knew about only at cinematic distances. And yet Nils kept saying it was my anger he was aiming to draw out. It wasn’t for him, it was for me. I’d told him he’d seemed aloof. And this was his answer. I saw no reason to oppose him in this. I saw no reason to say no. He’d even inverted the terms of the discussion. He told me he didn’t want to instrumentalize me. I imagined that must be a term in German, that he was translating from the German, he whose English was usually as easy and idiomatic as mine. But I understood well enough. He was permitting me to instrumentalize him. That’s what he really meant.

He looked so tortured. If you took a Christ by El Greco and laid him down flat, that’s what he might have looked like. I couldn’t imagine hurting him more than he was already hurt. But I did. But I didn’t. The dialectics of such things, in which you could get so easily lost, and forget the bodies that for a few moments were ours.

I had no idea even what my hands would feel like. It’s how little I knew. And for a little while it felt like nothing at all, nothing more than kneading or slapping dough, except I felt a little sad, and like a child, just the opposite of when I’d make dough with my mother, we’d bake cookies and I’d feel so grown up. He let his flesh go slack. It seemed scarcely alive, until my nails penetrated his skin and I saw his blood. Then he goaded me about my anger, find your anger, Holly, where’s your anger, you must be angry, words like that, I felt he was hitting me harder with his words than I was hitting him with my hands, and when I saw the blood and heard those words, that’s when I hit him harder. I was angry at him for goading me. I was angry with him for having blood. I made fists and my knuckles hurt just like in a cartoon and I had no idea anymore if I was hurting him or not.

Of course it had to do with sex. In the end it had to do with sex. I gave up more of myself that night than I ever had. And I was happy to have it gone. See my new naked self. See my soul burned in anger. It makes this high clear flame, and we throw our aloofness into it and out comes, as if it were alchemy, tenderness. Between two people who are close there is no such thing, I think, as a secret whole and entire, there will always be hints, half-revelations, alternative ways of transmitting the essential thing. One sleeps differently. One exhales, and inhales, the perfume of the secret. And then it’s possible to be overwhelmed by the scent.

If I could name the names of my anger, it would surely be banal. I am embarrassed even now to try and say, I’ll want to insert question marks so you’ll know I don’t quite believe. Hadn’t I always had a blank spot where my sister had been, where my parents had been, where I had never been? And this boyfriend of mine, who was it asked him along, with his opinions, and his know-it-all, and care? We Jews, we don’t need this shit. Just show us the money and leave us alone. You Germans with your stupid camps and your memory, who needed you, too? I could have lived without any of it, yet I couldn’t.

So much flew away for a little while when I bent over Nils and found in him the cause of all my pain. What a joke, what a lie, maybe. But I will tell you one secret thing: Nils was found out too.

The following days were aftermath to our afternoon of violence. We didn’t repeat what happened then; we didn’t even mention it. On the contrary, the next time we made love it was tender and quiet. Yet our little world was changed. Nils seemed more relaxed, more energetic, easier, lazier. I caught him playing with some village kids in front of the café. And I seemed to love him more. His life, my life, even the crazy, proverbial stretch provisionally titled our life, made a little more sense. The gulf between inside and out, that ordinarily seemed so immense that only the occasional lucky stab of imagination or circumstance could bridge it, lost some of its substantiality. If it was a void, if it was a mirage, could I not live more directly? I began to hate the circuitous, underground patterns of my life, the rooting-around in a maze, the guilt-ridden going ten blocks around to get one block from where I started. Anger. Anger was my magic bullet. I sang its praises in my heart. Fire was destructive until it was tamed. I would build a hearth and not let it get away.

A conversation we had once, in the evening, right out on the street by his apartment, before we left Berlin, on a night when the skinheads had attacked some African asylum-seekers and Nils had been out to cover the story, and he’d come back shaken, and I was shaken too:

“Nils…you know what’s weird about being in Germany?… Or maybe it’s just what I’m doing here, this property…or going out with you…I can never entirely shake this tin can that must be tied to me somewhere, this low level clanking away. ‘Jewish.’ ‘Jew-ess.’”

“Is that so terrible?” he asked with an offhanded laugh.

“I don’t relish the thinking about it all that much, frankly speaking.”

“You’d rather be ‘citizen of the world’.”

“Of course,” I said, and could feel the shape of my smile in my mouth.

Nils stopped on the sidewalk, quite dramatically, which wasn’t his style at all. “You know something? It pisses me off, too! It pisses me off!”

“Hmm?”

His face was taut, his jaw drawn down. “Just like you, having to breathe the same stale shit all the time. Germans, fucking Germans, thinking about Germans, having to ask myself for the thousand and ninety-ninth times, what’s going on with these people this time?”

His tirade was loud enough that I half-waited for windows to open, or buckets of water to be dropped on top of us, for anguished shouts to come tumbling down, like in a cartoon, “We’re trying to get some goddamn sleep around here!” But no windows opened. Grosse Hamburger Strasse was still put to bed. A thought wrestled to escape my throat. It hardly seemed appropriate. “We…you…couldn’t get away for a few days, could you?”

“Why in hell not?”

“I don’t know, I mean, your work…”

“No, no, I’d love to,” he grumbled. “We ought to. Go south.”

And so that’s how it was we came to Italy. Nils said to me once, and I believed him, I thought it was brilliant, that national destinies were way oversubscribed as determinants of personal fate, that they were mechanical and penny-ante, that if you wanted to find out how your life was shaped by larger things, in a way that at least poetry condoned, you ought to look to the stars the way they used to. Astrology trumped nationality any old day.

Of course this was from the same man who brought us the theory that the truest metaphor of love was Cupid’s arrow. Or not even a metaphor, but a reality. Nils, who usually inhabited the sphere between ironic and laconic, could wind on about that one too. “Like the idea of a Muse, it speaks to the unlikelihood and lack of human control over something. People who say it’s kitsch say so out of fear. They wish to make themselves ‘open’, they exaggerate their own will. They will tell you of course that love is a fairy tale, something from an earlier stage of human development, but even if they’re right, they feel it is somehow possible, for them, love is possible, if they somehow make themselves deserving. No. Bullshit. When you keep an eye out for it, that’s when you get in trouble. Better to be clear-eyed, better to go about one’s business; and if Cupid strikes, then everyone will rush to say something about the person’s character who was struck, they’ll find aspects, they’ll build a case, they’ll add more crap to the lore and evidence about love. But they’ll miss the point. Cupid will strike again, in ways unimaginable, and then the paradigm will change again.”

Am I prejudicing the case against my boyfriend? I hope not. He had a wish to fix the world, I think. I recall his smile, his fretful look, his feelings of outrage, as if the world itself were an outrage. He was hard on himself.

Perhaps I was too. When we were in Italy, I received a letter from Oksana, saying she had left Herbert and was coming our way. I told Nils that much. What I didn’t show him, until after her death, was this part of the letter:

“Franz came by,” Oksana wrote. “He’s leaving. Herbert gave him money. I eavesdropped, very blatantly, I’m afraid. Resigning from the Fund, from all of it. Time for a shack by the sea. It’s too comical, Herbert tells him, he says he can’t suffer this many losses in a day (referring also to my leaving).

“Herbert said to Franz,” she continued, “he only wished to know if he, Herbert, would be left holding some bag or other. Franz says his conscience is clear and that Rosen – do you know Franz calls himself sometimes by his last name? – is the bagman. Franz says, isn’t that how it should be? Hasn’t that been Rosen’s job?”

Nor did I tell Nils that Oksana had taken files that might have implicated Franz. I didn’t like it that Nils was going after him. Somehow I took it as a personal affront. Yet it weighed on me to have a secret from him, even when it wasn’t much of a secret, that Franz was headed for a shack by the sea with a few marks from Herbert and a clear conscience. Give the fox a head start. Why not? But the hound was my own.

I know what Nils thinks, or once thought, but our conversation about children had nothing to do with us later breaking apart. It was a childish conversation. I regretted it immediately. Then there was Oksana’s death and we had no more time.