HERBERT KAMINSKI

Accident

I’VE LIVED LONG ENOUGH that I try not to impute myth to fact. A car crash is a car crash. Accidents happen. Now I will record the facts as I know them: it happened near Puglia, on a hill road with many bends, a dangerous road, according to the Italian highway police. It was a road that had seen other accidents, other shrines. There was a second automobile involved, driven by a priest. The priest had a clean driving record and was familiar with the road. As he rounded the bend that was the site of the accident, the priest observed her car, with its headlights on, approaching at an uncertain speed while approximately one-half on the wrong side of the road. The priest took evasive actions, braking and swerving. She likewise swerved, but possibly did not brake immediately. She lost control of her car and it tumbled off the road into a ravine, rolling over twice or three times. Her car’s airbag was deployed but was useless in this case. Her chest was impaled and her neck broken. The priest’s car did not leave the road and he was uninjured. Her posthumous body was tested for the presence of alcohol and none was found. The same test was performed on the priest, with the same result. Further, her car was examined to determine if perhaps some mechanical failure, of the steering or braking systems, or a stuck accelerator, might have caused the accident. No such fault was found. When her body was returned to Berlin, I had the chance to observe it. Despite her injuries, her face in particular did not look injured. She looked like a baby bird that had fallen from its nest.

Now there were conditions precedent to this accident, certain situations. Before she left for Italy, we had a terrible quarrel. It was perhaps worse than this. I believed that she had left me for good. I could say that the “ordinary things” were said, the things that are always said in such quarrels, but I would be only saying this from what I’ve read in books. No one had ever said such things to me before. I had not had a wife, nor truly a lover, before. If they were not so hurtful, I would have found certain of the things she said banal. But again, this would have been only from having read them. “I am finished, I am trapped, my life is over,” she said. Like a man fending off blows, putting up his hands, I said, “This is because you have nothing in your life.” I was here referring to the fact that she had stopped painting, but she may not have understood. She often said that she detested shouting, yet she shouted at me, “Yes, yes, where you are, that’s where there is nothing.” Then she added: “If I stay with you, Herbert, everything you hoped from me will be gone. I can only hurt you now.” Then she added to that: “This is the same thing I said to my first husband. I cannot ignore this fact. My life goes around and around.”

The other situation was that she had recently despaired of her painting, which I’ve just mentioned. She had been working on a series inspired by the mosaics of the “brave Soviet airmen” in the Moscow subway, who appeared in her paintings like snowflakes barely crystallized over particles of dust, falling out of a clear sky. I found these, as I found nearly all her work, mystical and beautiful. I am aware that these are categories, particularly the beautiful, that many artists find pejorative and antique, but from my own view she should properly have gloried in them, and defied the right thinkers. I did not often surprise her at her studio, in the interests of not encroaching on her freedom. But on the afternoon before she left, I did, for reasons that seemed little more than chance. The studio had been constructed from a carriage house two kilometers’ distance from our residence on Schwanenwerder Island. The side door was ajar. I knocked, of course, but my nose had caught a draft of sweet-smelling smoke. I walked in to find her stoking an oversized, nearly out-of-control fire in the fireplace with canvasses she had cut out of their frames. “What are you doing?” I cried. She was in one of her enormous white shirts and her face was smudged with the sweet-smelling smoke. What I recall now is her utter calm. “If you never do something like this, you can never start over,” she said, almost as if proud. I moved towards the fire until its heat pressed me back. “They’re beautiful, please don’t, I’ll take them and store them and never show them to you,” I said.

“I’d rather they burn. If they exist, they’re like children, I’ll think about them,” she said.

Then she held both her hands out towards me, and we embraced. We actually hugged each other. I held her fragile, small frame. But her voice remained high, defiant and clear. “There are very specific things in these I detest. Grandiose feelings. Even Franz noticed, he pointed them out to me. And about such things, he’s invariably correct.”

I studied my wife for clues, for signs of relenting, in what I saw clearly as a war she was waging against herself. That is, I saw it clearly until I did not. I began to think, who was I to say that’s what it was? It was not simply that I felt tongue-tied with her. It’s that I believed her intelligence was deeper and clearer than mine, that she saw things which I would be lucky to see later.

She took a few steps away from me, picked another rolled canvas off the floor, and without a further look threw it on the fire. It resisted the flames a few moments, then along its cylindrical length a brown curl formed and spread.

“You’re making me terribly sad,” I said.

“Then leave,” she said, “I don’t want to become sad myself.”

I waited a moment, then backed away. “Don’t be alarmed, Herbert,” she said, and gave a careless wave to her work. “About these, I’m quite desperate. About my life, less so.”

I nodded the sort of tight, aborted nod, little more than a seeming tic, that must inevitably suggest acquiescence more than conviction. Then I left. Outside, my eyes continued to water from the smoke. I sat in my car with tearing eyes and reddened throat telling myself that, after all, my wife might be right, or at least that there was no judging such things.

It might seem, from my arrangement of facts, that I am assembling a brief to propose a suicide, or a perhaps half-intended suicide. But this is not the case. I would only not wish to be accused of avoiding such evidence as exists. She either wished to live or she did not. It must also be said that she was a rather careless, inattentive driver, better than she had been, but still inattentive. And one thing more: when she left for Italy, it was with certain of my firm’s financial records. Some cabinets had been ransacked. Our friend and my first assistant had recently resigned and gone missing, the result of a potential scandal hanging over him. I believe she had taken the files for him and was going to him.

A cremation was conducted in Berlin. There was no one in Moscow who wished to claim her body back, and I would have opposed it in any event. Her mother now lives in Finland. We notified her, but she did not appear at the memorial. Of course there was no way to notify the father, if he is even alive, which no one believes. She died with a few friends, no family. In the pews was her first husband from Moscow. I recognized him from photographs, a slight, dark-eyed, dark-haired man, a poetic type, handsome, still young, altogether different from myself. I noticed him three or four times. He made the certain impression on me that he still loved her. A Russian choir sang at the service.

I consider that she led a lonely life. Like myself, she may have tried to believe that her loneliness was only prologue, that something in her life was supposed to happen next, in which loneliness would be redeemed, the holding out of her soul proving to be nothing more than that, a waiting game, time spent in the heart’s antechamber. But we run out of chances.

Oksana. I write her name with difficulty. Oksana.