The Concert of Angels and the lovely face of the Virgin have retreated behind another more ancient altarpiece that I glimpse upon entering the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar: its Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell are just as terrifying. Claudine is walking ahead of us, pointing to the panel of infernal torments to show us the figure of a woman utterly racked with pain. “You’ll soon get a good look at her,” she said. “What do you mean, soon?” “You’ll soon see her, if I manage to find her, and if she agrees.” These unsettling words erase the boundary between this picture of Hell and our present life. I shrug my shoulders, suggesting that Claudine just take in the painting in silence.
Several hours later, after we have all had lunch, we cross a public garden and then wend our way through one narrow street after another. Standing in front of a stoop is a tall woman—very dignified, very erect. Every now and then she raises her hand to greet someone we do not see. Claudine leans into me to say, “Here she is, the woman in the altarpiece.” I recognize the pallor of her face, creased by deep wrinkles. In fact, she is looking at nobody; her eyes are cast toward some unknown place beyond the neighboring houses. She is waiting. Her right hand, slightly outstretched, bears wounds above the palm. Her other hand is clenched against her belly…. We pass by. The woman raises her hand to her mouth and bites at the wound, then extends her hand again without appearing to suffer; then she curls her lips into a grimace, and then brings her hand back to its earlier position.
I turn to look at her and observe the same cruel gesture repeat itself, slowly, obsessively: hand moving to mouth, mouth biting at the wound, grimace, relaxation of hand, hand again outstretched, then reaching toward mouth, mouth biting hand, mouth grimacing, then relaxation of hand.
I observe her wound—violet, swollen—which returns again and again to welcome her bite in a very precise cadence. Not a single complaint on her part, not a single murmur.
Claudine explains in a completely matter-of-fact fashion: the Occupation, her husband tortured to death by the SS under the eyes of his young wife and in this very house, below the front stoop, which she now refuses to leave. She goes to do her shopping; she chats with her neighbors. There are days when they see her prostrate in front of her door. They say of these days: her hand is going nuts.
I no longer hear Claudine’s words. My mind, my body are beyond sick, shot through by commands sharper than arrows: “Auf die Knie! Hände hoch, Jude!” “On your knees! Hands up, Jew!” My stomach is turning; I feel my head emptying out. Little by little, a memory that is not mine erases my own recollection. I no longer have the energy to fight back against this mental intrusion. Why should I be forced to relive something I myself never experienced? Horrible thoughts assail me on all sides. I hear blows addressed to me from the past. I undergo these blows. The SS breaking into the house, then the fake search of the premises carried out by the underling thugs, who toss around the furniture and destroy whatever lies within their reach. I feel the kicks addressed to my belly and to my face. They strap me down on the kitchen table so I might witness him getting his teeth bashed in and his fingernails ripped out. Why? Because he is simply guilty of existing, guilty of having a name. Four men hold him down on the tile floor; a fifth man pummels his face into a bloody mess and pisses on him while barking orders. The man is already dead, but they keep going after him. “Get him to talk!” They keep on beating him; they want to leave him more than dead. Their hatred knows no end.
I have no more I at my command to write to the end of this scene. As I extend it and retract it in order to gnaw at it, can my writing hand attain any sort of definitive solution that might at last release it from these irrevocable deeds? I bear witness—but without having witnessed anything of the above. Time is out of joint, projecting me toward a past that is not mine. The disaster is so intense, it echoes far ahead into the future.
This grisly state of possession gets all mixed up with a memory that is far more mundane: the memory of a documentary that included German newsreels from the year 1939. It’s springtime, and the Mädchen are dancing in the fields. There they are in a circle, cavorting around the Ideal Aryan Girl (the film is in black and white). The Ideal Blonde is clutching a bouquet of daisies, her fair locks are wafting in the wind, and she is puffing light tufts of dandelion into the breeze. I see their seeds disappear into the sky, a lie on the level of SS spittle. I hear the Nazis chanting their anthems. Flags, the whole military-industrial complex, people in uniform, goose steps, Heil Hitler salutes. The images all blur: the young girl’s lovely hand, her fresh breath, the flowers, the shouts suspended in air, the tortured hand of a madwoman who reminds us of everything we forget. The two figures—the picture of youth subjected to propaganda and the picture of youth subjected to torture—are overlaid. I am driven by a dark instinct to disentangle these two scenes in my mind’s eye. I am driven to submit to this command: “Remember that which you have never experienced!” But this hand going nuts is something that cannot be forgotten. The permanence of the wound cannot be stanched. It is the Devil bowing and bussing your hand.
Placed as she is on her stoop, a statue made of flesh, this Altarpiece Woman does not see me. A Cassandra of modernity at its most abject, is she enough to conjure away this massive act of forgetting—of which she knows absolutely nothing? Is she enough to stave off that most sickening expression of such forgetfulness—namely, “communication”?
Mouths functioning without words, and words without mouths, each disarticulated from the other. That lips should move, speaking in order to say nothing, that lips should impose onto other mouths the oblivion of speech, that words in exile should collapse into one another or throw around their weight on various wavelengths, intercut with the hurrahs of sports fans or canned laughter—all this astonishes me, all this fills me with dread.
I would like to reread these pages and substitute the words with others. I do not recognize them; they no longer belong to us. I can hear the command: “On your knees! Hands up, Jew!” But I can also hear the lines of one of my favorite German poems: “Händen des Mädchen von einst und jetzt” (“The hands of this girl of now and yore”). There is no throb of the heart strong enough to cancel—be it by a succinct universal phrase—the infinite distance that separates the person who tries to speak, and then to sing, and the person who pays no attention to his mouth, spitting out crazed discourses of extermination.
The birth of a word, and then of another, invented by woman. The day when the wound will be healed. Which could be a secret, or the avowal of a secret: to stop “communicating,” lest you become monsters—that is, empty “whos” and empty “whats” subject to the empty questions tossed back and forth by the Major Powers of Communication. To learn to speak—simply—as before… With the murmurings of small children in tow. And with the sheer song of vowels or consonants also providing an escape from the embrace of the void.
5
Aseroë
MY FEBRUARY VISIT to the Accademia in Venice, the emotion felt facing Giorgione’s The Tempest—the flash of lightning suddenly seized—and my reading one year later, in a catalog of the Château de Tanlay, of a letter written to Giorgione by his poet friend Antonio Brocardo. I wrote a short story in which I identified myself with the latter, claiming that from 1480 to 1510 I had worked in Giovanni Bellini’s studio as well as in that of Giorgio Barbarelli, who was known as Giorgione. Thus, I would have been a rare witness to this capture of a flash of lightning.