Twelve Dollars

John Briggs, Editor

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Hartford, CT 06105-2337 Hartford, CT

This edition features the works of:

Jim Barnes Rusten Currie Valerie B. McKee

J. Karl Bell Meryl DePasquale Robert Philen
Joe Cantrell Katrina Emery Aimee L. Pozorski
Cathy Caruth Elizabeth England Jessica Roth
Peter J. Caulfield Chris Farrell David Sahner
Grace Cavalieri Natalie J. Friedman Martha Serpas
Stephanie Cherolis David Lee Garrison Irene Sherlock
Robert Collins Rolandas Kiaulevicius Nicole Simek
Nicole Cooley Zoltan Krompecher R. Clifton Spargo
Lorien Crow Pamela Leck Jennifer J. Thompson
Charlotte Crowe David Leeson Katharine Weber

SPECIAL TRAUMA SECTION includes Cathy

Caruth, David Leeson, Grace Cavalieri • CSU and
IMPAC award winners • Andrei Voznesensky •
One-act comedy on marriage

Spring
2006
Spring 2006 • Vol. XXVIII No. 1
Connecticut Review

Connecticut State University System

Spring 2006 • Vol. XXVIII No. 1
 Connecticut State University System
David G. Carter, Chancellor

The Connecticut State University System (CSU), consisting of four universi-

ties and a system office, serves more than 35,000 students. CSU, the largest
public university system in the state, has a distinguished history. Central
Connecticut State University (CCSU) in New Britain, one of the oldest
institutions of higher education in Connecticut, was established in 1849 as a
normal school. Also established as normal schools were Eastern Connecticut
State University (ECSU) in Willimantic in 1889, Southern Connecticut State
University (SCSU) in New Haven in 1893, and Western Connecticut State
University (WCSU) in Danbury in 1903. Today, CSU provides affordable
and high-quality, active-learning opportunities that are geographically and
technologically accessible. More than 160 academic programs are offered
throughout the CSU System, and more than 6,000 degrees are awarded an-
nually. CSU graduates think critically and possess the problem-solving skills
necessary for success in the workplace and in life. CSU alumni number more
than 150,000 and are leaders in business, government, industry, science,
education, and the arts.

Board of Trustees for the Connecticut State University System

Lawrence D. McHugh, Chair Karl J. Krapek, Vice Chair

Cerissa Arpaio L. David Panciera

Richard J. Balducci Ronald J. Pugliese
John A. Doyle Peter M. Rosa
Theresa J. Eberhard-Asch, Secretary Carl Segura
Fernando Franco John R. Sholtis, Jr.
Elizabeth Gagne Rev. John P. Sullivan
Angelo J. Messina Gail H. Williams
John H. Motley

Connecticut State University Consultant

Dean Golembeski

ISSN#00106216
Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees, Connecticut State University System
Connecticut Review is indexed in The American Humanities Index.
 Spring 2006
Board of Editors

JP Briggs, Senior Editor

Western Connecticut State University

Stuart Barnett, Editor

Central Connecticut State University

Meredith Clermont-Ferrand, Editor

Eastern Connecticut State University

Vivian Shipley, Editor

Southern Connecticut State University

Consulting Editor
Andy Thibault

Trauma Section Editors

Stuart Barnett, Aimee L. Pozorski, Stephanie Cherolis

Production Editor
Jane Walsh

Managing Editor
Kathleen Butler

Design Editor
Jason Davis

Interns
Lorien Crow, Eileen Dorcey, Ian Dunbar, Heather Gunnoud, Amy Ingalls,
Aaron Kupec, Val McKee, Lisa Siedlarz, Marilyn Terlaga, Pat Vidal

Colophon
The text of this book is composed in 10 point Garamond BE,
and the display fonts are Helvetica Neue and Trajan.
 Inside This Issue
T — Trauma section

poetry
Robert Collins Origen’s Angels: The Fall..............................14

David Sahner Epicurus Counsels the Moderns...................62

T Grace Cavalieri The Heart For It...........................................102

T Martha Serpas No Name Storm...........................................135
The Boat Shed..............................................136
A Future With Hope....................................137

T Zoltan Krompecher Coming Home: A Soldier Returns

from Iraq (Excerpt)...................................138

T Irene Sherlock The Last Time I Saw My Brother Alive......158

T Jennifer J. Thompson Hunger..........................................................159

T Nicole Cooley The Shangrila Hotel.....................................170
The Princess and the Pea.............................172
To Have and Not to Have...........................175

fiction
Jim Barnes The Sound of a Harmonica.............................7
CONNECTICUT REVIEW

Peter J. Caulfield Dancing into the Bright Moonlight..............53

Katharine Weber Green Thumb.................................................63

T R. Clifton Spargo Second Sorrow...............................................85


T Pamela Leck A Fireman Walks In.....................................131
T Elizabeth England Settling Matters............................................149

interview
T Aimee L. Pozorski An Interview with Trauma
Pioneer Cathy Caruth................................77
essays
Robert Philen The Stories We (Don’t) Tell:
On Ethnographic Storytelling....................15

T Aimee L. Pozorski Trauma’s Time................................................71

T Natalie J. Friedman Inherited Trauma: A Member of the
Third Generation Speaks..........................115

T J. Karl Bell Return of the White Plague.........................163

T Cathy Caruth Confronting Political Trauma......................179

articles
T Stephanie Cherolis When Laguage Fails:
Witnessing Holocaust Testimony...............93

T Nicole Simek Pierre Bourdieu & the Subject of Trauma....139

translations
Katrina Emery Luna de Miel (Honeymoon)...........................25
by Yolanda Pallín

David Lee Garrison The Nose .......................................................60

by Andrei Voznesensky

awards
CSU Art Award
Rolandas Kiaulevicius The Dream...................................................103


CSU Fiction Award

Lorien Crow Cowboys and Indians..................................183

CSU Essay Award

Meryl DePasquale Butt-Antlers & Ignorant Suburban Trash....189

Leo Connellan Prize

Valerie B. McKee Heirloom......................................................196
 Leslie Leeds Prize
Chris Farrell Cuatras Miradas (Four Looks)......................197

IMPAC–CSU Young Writers Awards

Charlotte Crowe Korean Laundry...........................................198
Jessica Roth Growing Citrus.............................................200

artwork
T National Archives A house before & after an atomic bomb......70
Ruins seen from Circular Church, SC..........73
View of a V-1 rocket over London................92
Children waiting outside the wreckage.......121

Rolandas Kiaulevicius The Dream...................................................103

T David Leeson Battle for Al Kifl...........................................104
Barred Owl...................................................105
Sparrows in Snow.........................................106
Storm............................................................107
Shoreline......................................................108
Iraqi Army Dead..........................................109
Dew on Grass...............................................109
Tears for a Comrade.....................................110
T Rusten Currie Through the Looking Glass.........................138
CONNECTICUT REVIEW

T Joe Cantrell Mounting of the Heroes at the

Vietnam Wall............................................178

Artists’ Statements T David Leeson...............................................111

Rolandas Kiaulevicius..................................194


Contributors’ Notes................................................................................202

Cover Photo: David Leeson, Spc. Jesse Blancarte fights back tears at a
memorial service in Baghdad for PV2 Gregory R. Huxley Jr., 19, of Forest Port,
NY, who was killed in action April 6, 2003. Digital original, 2003
 Jim Barnes

The Sound of a Harmonica

T he boy had never heard it clearly before today. The other times it
had been only a hint of a note or two on the wind. He had never given it
much thought at all. But he had stayed away from the hill because of what
he had been told. A child had fallen in the well in the clearing on the hill
and drowned, and for years afterwards there seemed to have been a presence
about the place that nobody had ever really seen. His father said several
times that he had heard the sound of a harmonica coming from the hilltop
each morning as he led the team of horses to the field beyond the branch to
break ground for last spring’s planting.
This evening the boy was having a hard time getting the milch cow to
head toward home and milking. He should have brought the collie, he told
himself. But his mother had warned him about siccing the collie on the
milch cow. It was hard to control the dog once he got going. Ever since the
boy had been old enough to not get lost, he had had to go get the milch cow
each evening before sundown. She always grazed in the back pasture when
the gate was down, and it had been for several days now, since he and his
father had gathered the small patch of ripe sweet corn between the woods
and the branch. His father had studied the almanac carefully for many a
night and had decided to take a chance and plant in late winter in the full of
the moon so they could have roasting ears before summer if they were lucky.
They had been lucky: there was no frost. The cow was there now for the
green stalks left after they had snapped the ears of corn off, and she seemed
not to want to go to the barn for feed and milking.
This evening he had had to chuck clods of dirt at her to get her to move,
and then when she tried to circle back, he had even thrown rocks to get her
on course for home. When he got her as far as the hill, she bolted straight
up instead of taking the trail around the base. He had little choice but to run 
after her. The sun was sinking low onto the trees, and he would have to hurry
because his mother would be at the barn by sundown ready to milk the cow.
He was out of breath by the time he broke through the trees and came
to the top. Here was the clearing where once a house had stood. The house
had been torn down and the lumber used to build the one he and his parents
now lived in a quarter of mile to the east, by the county road. He knew his
great aunt once lived here on this spot. He could see half a wall of the old
 Jim Barnes

log barn still standing and the corrugated sheets of rusted tin that were once
its roof. The cow was nowhere in sight. He sat down on a rock at the edge of
the clearing to get his breath before trying to find the cow. She had probably
circled back behind him and was by now once again in the back pasture. He
should have brought the dog, he told himself again. There was a low warm
wind from the south blowing across the clearing and on it he detected the
sound of a harmonica. The soft hairs on his arms and neck rose. He listened
carefully and heard the clear notes but could not recognize the tune. It was
slow and full of sorrow. The sadness of it gripped him for a moment. He
thought of his brother, who was in the war over there. The sound fell away
to almost nothing. But it was still there, and he listened calmly, trying to
determine where the sound was coming from. There was nothing on the hill
except the tall grass, the fallen log-barn, and the hand-dug well, which was
covered with two sheets of the rusted tin from the remains of the old barn.
He rose and walked over to the well. The sound of the harmonica
retreated, seemed to circle the clearing. He could barely see the water in
the well when he lifted the tin. The hole was dark and smelled like rotting
wood. The sound continued to ride the wind, like the diminishing drone of
propellers that often cut across the sky. He walked over to the pile of logs.
He could find nothing out of the ordinary. His father had told him that a
child had fallen in the well a long time ago and drowned. He knew his father
had not meant to lie but rather meant to keep him away from the very real
danger of the well. He sat on the logs and listened as the harmonica grew soft
and far away now, then closer, then far away again. Twilight was coming on,
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and although he did not believe in ghosts he had to admit that it was strange
to hear something so real and not find the source. It bothered him that he
could not account for the sound of the harmonica. Still, he was old enough
to know that sounds would carry for miles if the weather conditions were
right, echoing off hill and hollow and flowing across the fields. The trouble
 was that he didn’t know anyone for miles about who played the harmonica
except his brother, and he was a long way away, over there in England in the
Eighth Air Force.
He circled the hill looking for the cow among the bordering trees. Then
on a clear patch of ground that once was the road leading down the hill,
he saw her tracks. They seemed to be heading for the barn. He stopped and
listened over his shoulder. He could hear the faint sound of the harmonica
back up the hill in the clearing. When he was in the clearing, it seemed the
 Jim Barnes

sound was there and all around at the same time. Now as he passed on down
the hill in the ruts of the old road, the sound grew faint, then finally stopped
altogether. He squatted and saw the cow’s tracks again. She was making a
beeline for home now. He listened again for the sound and heard nothing
except the slow beginning of the night.
He climbed over the wire fence of the cowlot. At the barn he could hear
the plink-plink of the first streams of milk hitting the bucket as his mother
began her nightly chore. The cow stood still, quietly eating the shelled corn
in the manger. He ran his hand along her side. She was warm.
—You have to chase her a bit? his mother asked.
—She just didn’t want to come in, he said.
—You don’t want to run her too much. She’s going to calve before long.
We’ll have to stop milking her in a few days.
He nodded, then told his mother about the sound of the harmonica.
She seemed to turn pale in the twilight. She shook her head twice and
crossed herself. Then he told her that he had heard it before, but never so
clearly as today.
—It’s a sign, she said.
The boy had heard her say that before about other things. And his fa-
ther, too, for that matter. There were so many signs of things to come that he
could not remember them all. A sign the war was going to go on. A sign that
Hitler was going to be killed. A sign that somebody else was going to die. A
sign that the crops would fail. There were all kinds of signs for all kinds of
things, usually bad.
—It’s a funeral sign, she said. We need to pray.
He knelt with her in the dried cow dung and listened while she prayed
to Holy Mary, Mother of God. When she finished, they stood together in the
dusk and listened quietly for the sound of the harmonica. There was nothing
riding on the breeze, which itself was slowly dying into the coming night,
except the sound of crickets and tree frogs wishing for rain and the collie 

scratching at ticks.
The boy heard his father open the barnyard gate and bump the bucket
of slop against the hog trough and heard the sound of the fat sow and pigs
sloshing about. The horses were bumping about at the manger on their side
of the barn. All the sounds were familiar. His father and mother talking in
low tones was a sign that the world here was all right just now, no matter
what other signs there were or what might come. Their words seemed to go
 Jim Barnes

floating on and on forever just above the ground out toward some destina-
tion only the words could know.

The calf came a few days later, and the boy’s father turned the cow and
calf out into the back pasture together. For two weeks, the boy heard him say,
so that the calf can have all the birth milk. The boy kept going after the cow
each evening in order to put her and the calf in the barnyard for the night.
While the calf was still small and didn’t have strong legs, the boy knew it was
the thing to do. A coyote could bring down a young calf if he wanted to and
there was no protection but a silly old milch cow. With the calf at her side,
she was easy to drive along the trail around the hill where the old well was.
The boy could tell she had no inclination to bolt away and leave the calf
behind.
Afterward, when the calf was taken from the cow and kept in the barn-
yard and allowed only to nurse mornings and nights for a few minutes before
his mother milked the cow, the boy had to drive the cow to the back pasture
or she would have simply stood at the barnyard fence by the calf all day as
she did all night after the milking. The good thing about it was that in the
evenings, when he went to get the cow, she made a beeline for the barnyard,
beating him home by a good ten minutes.
As the summer wore on and the calf got stronger and the milch cow
more insistent, the barnyard fence began to sag in weaker spots where they
strained to get closer during the night. One night the netwire sagged just
enough for the calf to squeeze through it and the two strands of barbed wire
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above it. When the boy went out with his mother in the morning to let the
milch cow into the lot, they discovered the escape.
—You’ll have to run down the culprits, she told him. We’ll have to skip
the milking this morning because the gentleman has already taken care of
that.
10 The boy would bring the cow and calf to the barnyard and separate
them, then drive the cow back to pasture and close her in for the day. He
figured they had already headed to the back pasture, for the cow preferred to
graze along the side of the meadow by the branch in the shade of the trees
during the heat of the day. The calf had been grazing, too, for several days in
the small pasture next to the barn, slowly forgetting the milk of his mother
and becoming a bit of a nuisance, nudging the boy when he wasn’t looking,
then spooking away before the boy could swat him.
 Jim Barnes

But today they were both escapees that had to be brought back and dealt
with. The boy considered punishment and concluded keeping them separate
most of the time was punishment enough. If he and his parents wanted to
keep the cow for milking, then the separation would have to continue. The
boy’s mother would want the calf to be completely weaned before long.

The boy and the collie had walked the length of the meadow along the
branch and had even at one point crossed the branch and gone in under the
dark trees on the north side, where the dog bolted after a squirrel. The cow
and calf were nowhere to be seen. He now doubled back, whistled the collie
to his heel, crossed the meadow, and was walking the fence line, broken up by
occasional clumps of blackjack oaks and blackberry briars, to make sure they
were not hiding out under the low limbs or obscured by the tangled briars.
He determined that he had walked enough ground and that the cow and calf
must not be in the back pasture. That left the forty-odd acres between there
and the house, which consisted mostly of scattered timber and scrub brush,
except on top of the hill where there still was some pretty good native grass.
The boy dreaded climbing the steep hill with its stunted trees and rocks
that didn’t really seem like they belonged. They had the look of mountains
about them, and the mountains were ten miles away. Half way up, when he
stopped to get his breath, the collie leapt on ahead. When the rattle of dog
paws on the rocky hillside subsided, he heard the sound of the harmonica.
He caught his breath, held it, and listened. The same sound he had heard
before came softly to his ears, the sound of sorrow or of loss. And, like
before, the same sensation flowed through his body. He told himself that it
had to be a trick of the wind in the trees or blowing through some cast away
wire caught in limbs or something that could be explained. He himself could
make a whistle out of a smooth green stick cut off a hickory limb, by slipping
the bark and whittling a notch just right.
He knew his mother would say it was a sign and cross herself. But he 11

didn’t cross himself. He just stood and listened and wondered what in the
world could be making the sound of a harmonica and doing it over and over
again day after day. Old Mister Holland could play a harmonica well, but he
lived clear over in Summerfield, back of the post office, and never did play
when he was still-hunting squirrels. His brother could play, too, but he was
over there, somewhere in England or flying over Germany. He heard the col-
lie bark somewhere on top of the hill. It wasn’t a bay or a trailing bark. It was
 Jim Barnes

different. The boy hurried on up, and when he broke through the blackjacks,
he saw the cow and the collie standing by the well. The cow was butting at
the collie as if he were a threat. Then he heard the calf. The cry was almost
human, full of panic and pain, but low, barely audible, then louder as the
boy ran to the well.
Part of one of the sheets of corrugated tin had slipped into the well,
leaving half the well’s mouth exposed, and the calf had probably stumbled
into the hole while at the cow’s udder. The calf was swimming still, so tired
now that just the nose and eyes were above the water. The boy could barely
reach down to the calf ’s head. He managed to grab the calf ’s nostrils with
his thumb and forefinger and bring the head up enough to then grab an ear,
then the calf ’s neck, and finally the forelegs. Lying spread-eagled he heaved
with all his strength, then rolled onto his back, and the calf came slithering
out of the well and on top of him. There were slime and slobbers all over his
clothes. The calf could barely stand up, and when the cow began to lick it, it
fell down and lay still for several minutes. After the cow had licked it good
all over, it finally stood on wobbly legs and began to nudge the cow’s bulg-
ing udder.
The boy covered the mouth of the well with the rusting tin and took
some of the smaller rotting logs and a large deadfall limb to put on top. He
knew something would have to be done about the well soon. Perhaps he and
his father could fill it in. But it could be too deep to fill. It would be easier to
build a housing for it.
The cow was still trying to butt the collie when he got close to her. The
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boy called the collie back behind the cow, and the two of them drove cow
and calf toward home and barnyard. In the excitement of getting the calf out
of the well, the boy had forgotten the sound of the harmonica. He stopped
to listen and held the collie by the neck. The sound was still there riding on
the slight breeze from the south, perhaps not so sad or sorrowful as he had
12 heard it before, but still sad nonetheless.

Not long afterwards and on a Saturday when the boy was out of school,
he and his father hitched up the team to the wagon and drove down to the
Fourche John bottoms to Self ’s hardwood sawmill and got some green oak
slabs. They built the well housing out of them and rigged a pulley for a rope
and bucket so that water could be drawn. The boy was proud of the job they
had done. His father said that it wasn’t much, but it would do for a spell
 Jim Barnes

anyway. It would keep the stock from falling in and drowning. They sat on
the hill surveying their work and listening to horses’ harness rattle when they
shook their hides. There was no sound of music of any kind except the wind
in the limbs of the trees at the edge of the clearing.
By the end of June, the boy’s school was out and the crops laid by. The
long days of summer had begun. It seemed to the boy that he had too little
to do. But he would squirrel hunt and look for wild bee hives when his
father didn’t need him to help with the work. Or he would sit on the front
porch and wait for the mail carrier to arrive in his old Ford. Sometimes there
would be a Montgomery Ward or Sears Roebuck catalog he could look at.
He was sitting on the porch one morning and saw a brand new Ford
approaching slowly. It wasn’t the mail carrier’s. It was dusty, but the boy
could tell that it was the olive-drab army color. The boy’s mother was on the
porch holding her hands over her mouth. The driver nosed the car up next
to the front gate and asked the boy if he had the right family. He called their
name, but didn’t pronounce it right. The boy said that he guessed so. Then
he saw that driver wore a military uniform and was a sargeant but he didn’t
look old enough to be one. The soldier got out of the car with a yellow sheet
in his hand. The boy’s mother went to the gate. “Missing in action,” the boy
heard his mother read with a strained voice. The soldier stood by the car
looking down at his dress shoes, said something the boy could not hear, then
got back into the car and left. The boy’s mother put a hand over her mouth
again. The boy knew she would not cry for him to see, no matter what the
news was. He knew the news was bad. It had been too long since they had
had any V-mail from his brother.
Every night at milking time, the boy’s mother would listen for the sound
of the harmonica. At times the boy heard it. At other times the mother said
she did. The boy didn’t know what it meant, if anything. He had grown
accustomed to the sounds and the silences in between, and they did not
disturb him. In fact, he told himself that it was a good sign, that his life 13

meant something, even if it wasn’t much except going to school and helping
his mother and father whenever he could. His mother prayed each time she
heard it, and the boy thought she was hearing it at times when it really wasn’t
there. But he felt that there was some comfort in it for her. The chores had
to be done: the cow milked, the hogs slopped. Everything would go on as be-
fore. The boy would hear the harmonica or he would not. They would wait
for word or sign. There was little else that they could do.
 Robert Collins

Origen’s Angels: The Fall

One of the fathers of the early church, Origen believed
that the angels fell because they grew tired of adoring.

How many eons had actually elapsed,

their shining heads bent in ecstasy,
their awful wings gathered around them,
before the mind of one too easily distracted
began to wander when he felt how sorely
his broken back and knees were aching,
beads of sweat trickling under his wings,
about to swoon from basking too long
in the unrefracted radiance of God?

Glancing round at his rapt companions

whose numbers stretched in all directions
ad infinitum away from the beatified throne,
he couldn’t help but wonder if any of his cohorts
felt the same way he did—a little bored, on edge
and uncomfortable, maintaining the pretense
of piety because not enough was transpiring
in heaven to keep the archangels absorbed,
and angels were meant to be messengers
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who deliver the unspoken word of God,

not fawning, undignified sycophants.

How many more ages came and went

before that restlessness inevitably spread
14
and entire phalanxes of angels began to awaken,
wondering what they were doing wasting time
and most of eternity stupefied with awe,
until that first rebel unfolded his wings,
stood up slowly on stiff haunches,
turned away from the startled throne,
and strode without looking back
straight toward the abyss?
 Robert Philen

The Stories We (Don’t) Tell:

On Ethnographic Storytelling

S ome stories have power. They have the capacity to reaffirm or to

change the ways people think, or perhaps simply to make them think, if only
momentarily, about something previously taken for granted. However, the
effects of such powerful stories are not always those intended by the teller.
One such powerful story is the tale of a small incident in the life of
Malito Chávez. Malito was a young boy (he turned three in the two-month
period when I knew him), the son of a middle-class family in the city of
Oaxaca, Mexico, whose income derived from several newsstands around the
city. I lived with this family for one summer while I was studying Spanish at
a local language institute.
One afternoon, I was in the walled courtyard of Tia Chagua’s house
(Tia Chagua was Malito’s great-aunt, and his father Jorge’s aunt) along with
Malito and Jorge. Tia Chagua’s house was just around the corner from the
Chávez house, and during my stay, I was almost as frequently in the one
house as the other. The exterior of Tia Chagua’s house, like many other
middle-class houses in Oaxaca, was not much to look at and, also like many
other middle-class homes, co-existed on the street and in the neighborhood
with the mean hovels of the poor (which in some cases consisted of little
more than plywood and cardboard shacks and in the better cases of small
cinder-block houses). Inside the courtyard, though, was a different world. The
ground was carpeted with thick green grass. A tree shaded one corner of the
yard, including part of the concrete patio, which jutted out from the house
into the courtyard. The inside faces of the courtyard walls were covered with
stucco, in contrast to their unadorned exteriors. The only visible reminders
of the outside world were the shards of jagged glass clearly embedded in the 15
tops of the walls to deter would-be thieves.
On this particular afternoon, I was relaxing in one of the plush chairs
on the patio, sipping naranjada (a sweetened orange juice beverage), snacking
on escabeche, and enjoying the sight of Jorge and Malito engaged in a game.
(As an aside, one oft-remarked feature of Mexican cuisine is the tendency
for food to get hotter the further north in Mexico one is. While the food of
Oaxaca is certainly spicier than that eaten by most North American Anglos,
 Robert Philen

it is nowhere near as fiery as that of northern Mexico or New Mexico. I be-

came the object of amusement in the Chávez household, as the gringo who
eats chiles, my first day there. Not realizing that Oaxaqueños typically do
not eat the chiles in escabeche, which are simply there to make the other pickled
vegetables a bit picante, I scarfed down several chile slices in succession and
was met by the shocked faces of the entire family.)
Their game was quite simple and was clearly the source of the greatest
entertainment for Malito, who had not quite turned three years old at the
time. He would run full tilt at his father and leap into his outstretched arms.
After a quick hug, his father would release him and Malito would tear around
the courtyard in a large circle as fast as his little legs could carry him until he
came full circle to leap once again into his father’s arms, all the while scream-
ing in glee at the top of his lungs.
This was repeated several times until, on one circle of the courtyard, as a
clearly tired Malito was within about fifteen feet of his father, he stumbled.
He didn’t simply fall to his knees, though, or fall backward. He went flying
through the air and landed hard, face first, and skidded several feet across the
ground on his face. As he lifted his face, bits of turf stuck in his hair, he im-
mediately began to cry. His father, now standing over him, shook his finger
at Malito and commanded, “¡Sé hombre!” (“Be a man!”). Just as quickly as he
had started to cry, Malito stopped and rose to his feet to stand tall in front of
his father, lip quivering from the effort of holding back his tears. After several
seconds, his father knelt down and smothered his son in an embrace.
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What is the significance of this story? I certainly have my interpretation.

This is one example of the process of socializing boys to be men in Mexico
and as such is related to that broader shibboleth of “Mexican Machismo.” At
the same time (like so much else about gender constructions in Mexico), it is
not particularly dissimilar from similar examples of the socialization of boys
16 to be men in the US—though I suspect the incident would be less likely to be
capped with a hug, especially from the father. But here, rather than simply
expanding upon what I see as the significance of this particular ethnographic
anecdote, I prefer to discuss the way in which stories like this one are gener-
ally received and interpreted.
A few months after the above-described incident, I was back at my
graduate studies in anthropology at Cornell University in beautiful (in terms
of landscape) and god-forsaken (in terms of its isolation) upstate New York. I
 Robert Philen

was a teaching assistant, along with five other anthropology graduate stu-
dents, for a large section of Introduction to Anthropology. To give us gradu-
ate students some small experience in lecturing to a large crowd, as well as to
give the undergraduate students some broader sense of the range of things
that anthropologists might research, the instructor of the class had each T.A.
give a short presentation related to his or her research interests.
In an attempt to make my presentation interesting, I related the above
story of Malito to them, followed by a short interpretation of what I found
significant about it. I tried to emphasize to the class first, that this was an
example of how masculinity is inculcated, as well as of the reaffirmation of
standards of masculinity already inculcated (with the swiftness of Malito’s
ceasing to cry clearly indicating previous socialization not to cry), and sec-
ond, that though the anecdote illustrated Mexican patterns of socialization,
there was nothing uniquely Mexican about it. Similar patterns of socialization
are present in other places, too, including the US.

In my experience throughout the US, most grocery stores

have very definite class connotations to local people,
even if the realities of who shops at which store don’t always
correlate perfectly with such perceptions.

Despite my best efforts to provide an interpretive frame for the story, the
story was powerful in a direction precisely contrary to what I had wanted to
convey. About a week after my presentation, one of the other T.A.s, a good
friend of mine, approached me and said that though he had thought my pre-
sentation was good and not particularly problematic, he wished that I hadn’t
given it, as his students’ interpretations of it were problematic. He had had to
spend an entire discussion section arguing that my presentation had not been
proof positive of the horrific qualities of Mexican machismo and Mexican
17
men, including trying to convince one Latino student that his own culture
wasn’t wrong-headed.
As a result, I didn’t use this story in teaching for quite some time, pre-
cisely because of its power. Recently, however, I did tell the story to students
in my “Cultures of Mexico” class at the University of West Florida in Pensac-
ola, Florida, fortunately, to different effect (at least so I think and hope). This
time, in addition to my interpretive framing, I added an additional, short
anecdote about an incident I had recently witnessed in a local supermarket
 Robert Philen

(again, stories can have power in ways that “interpretive framing” usually
does not) to reaffirm that there is at least commonality in the socialization
into manhood in Mexico and the US While shopping I had encountered
a woman and her young son (probably between one and two years old).
The young boy had begun crying at the top of his lungs while sitting in the
shopping cart. The woman snapped at her son, “Shut up boy! You ain’t got
nothing to cry about. Shut up.” Though the boy’s crying did not stop quite
so quickly at Malito’s had, he piped down relatively quickly as well.
This anecdote, though, was not an unfiltered presentation of an incident
at a local grocery store, of course. Like all narratives, its details were pre-
sented in a particular way, with some of the possible range of details included
and others left out. I didn’t bother to tell my students, for example, that the
incident took place on the canned vegetable aisle and that I was looking for
canned tomatoes at the time, just as I did not tell them about eating chiles en
escabeche when relating the anecdote about Malito. There were other, more
socially significant details, which I also intentionally omitted.
This incident had nothing to do with race. I’ve seen so many similar
incidents over the years, involving white and black participants, that it’s
difficult to recall any particular one (and the main reason I could recall
this specific incident is that I had just seen it a day or two before). In this
particular case, the woman and her son happened to be black, but that was
something I didn’t dare tell my students, because I knew how some, at least,
would interpret it: it’s not just Mexicans, but blacks, who raise their sons to
be macho misogynists. Of course, race is still involved in the telling of the
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story, because I was well aware that if I didn’t actually say “black,” most stu-
dents (and most people in the US) would assume the participants were white.
In contrast to many other parts of the US, though, the verbatim quote, “Shut
up boy! You ain’t got nothing to cry about. Shut up,” is not racially marked
in this part of the Southeast as it might be elsewhere, but is instead typical of
18 the speech of many working class individuals, both white and black.
I also attempted to omit the most obvious markers of socioeconomic
class from my narrative to my students. For example, I didn’t mention that
the woman wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt, which were tattered and a bit
dirty. This isn’t to suggest that only poor people ever appear in public in
tattered, dirty sweats, but the woman’s apparel certainly marked her as poor.
Here, things are more complex. When discussing socialization of gender
construction, and especially of masculine behavior like not crying, I don’t
 Robert Philen

think race per se has that much to do with it, but socioeconomic class does
have some bearing. But I did want to avoid having my students think, “It’s
not just Mexicans, but poor people, who raise their sons to be machos who
can never cry.” The reality is more complex than that, and since I was trying
to convey the simple point that while machismo is part of Mexican culture,
machismo isn’t uniquely Mexican, and that we shouldn’t essentialize Mexico
as the land of macho fools as opposed to the enlightened USA, then it didn’t
make sense to even bring up socioeconomic class.
I feel that I probably failed in this, though, for I realize that I did include
a piece of information, in addition to my verbatim quotation, which tipped
my hand on the woman’s class background. I mentioned that the incident
had taken place at the local Winn Dixie. In my experience, throughout the
US, most grocery stores have very definite class connotations to local people,
even if the realities of who shops at which store don’t always correlate per-
fectly with such perceptions. In both Pensacola and Athens, Georgia, where I
lived for two years, Winn Dixie is a grocery store chain local perceptions as-
sociate with poor people, and, in fact, the particular store where the incident
occurred sits nearby a low-income neighborhood, and most of its customers
do appear to be poor. I was shopping there because it also happens to be the
closest grocery store to my house, though I do not happen to live in the low-
income neighborhood.
Reasons for class associations with particular stores are not always so
clear as the fact that this Winn Dixie is located close to the residences of
many poor people. In Athens, the Winn Dixie was located right across the
street from the Harris Teeter–a very definitely middle-class store–and nei-
ther was located in a residential neighborhood at all. I was always struck by
the fact that prices were higher at the Winn Dixie, but most poor people
shopped there because they seemed to think the Harris Teeter would be too
expensive for them. In fact, supermarkets in poor areas (or more often the
convenience or corner stores that don’t really take the place of non-existent 19

supermarkets in poor areas) or supermarkets catering to working class and/or

poor people are frequently more expensive–the poor pay more for food. But
what was especially striking in this case was that the two were directly across
the street from one another. In any case, I fear that by siting my anecdote at
Winn Dixie, and not simply omitting the location or lying, I may have once
again undermined the very intent of my storytelling. But then, I suppose,
such is the way with stories.
 Robert Philen

If some stories have power, others lack power. It’s not that they aren’t
interesting or amusing, necessarily. They may even be memorable or be
frequently told, but they don’t affect people in ways that have an impact on
how they look at and interact with the world.
Having read many, many ethnographies, I know that the story of Malito
could easily be the centerpiece of an ethnography, as a story which illumi-
nates something fundamental about a particular culture. There are other sorts
of stories that anthropologists (and others) frequently tell, but that are never
regarded as particularly important—certainly not important enough to be
part of ethnography (which is to say they are not deemed to be particularly
illuminating), except perhaps as an introductory anecdote to self-reflexively
mock the naiveté and inexperience of the ethnographer during early stages
of field work. One such story took place in the very same courtyard at Tia
Chagua’s house.

In my enthusiasm and lack of language skill, I apparently

missed a subtle cue that a little more than small talk was going
on. In quick succession, I agreed that I liked tamales, both sweet
and savory; I liked mole; I liked tacos; I liked chile rellenos; I liked
carne asada; I liked refried beans; I liked huevos rancheros.

It was the day Malito turned three, and Malito’s parents were holding a
large birthday celebration for him. Since Tia Chagua’s courtyard was larger
than the Chávez’s, the fiesta was held there. The extra room was important,
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for all the close relatives and their children, as well as many friends of the
family and their children, were in attendance. Around fifty people were
crowded into the courtyard, with children running all about. Fireworks were
set off intermittently, and a clown was in attendance to provide entertain-
ment, but the greatest excitement (for the children and the adult spectators)
20
was the three piñatas, which were broken in turn by the blindfolded children,
spilling their contents of candy and small toys on the ground to be snatched
up by the youngsters.
There were bountiful refreshments for the guests on a table laden with
various sweets: red-dyed tamales dulces, and a plethora of cookies, candies,
and cakes. I had already sampled several of the sweet tamales and cookies,
when I picked up a small cake wedge to try. It was a triangle of white sponge
cake with chocolate frosting, topped with a white, sugary glaze. Or rather,
 Robert Philen

that was what I saw and therefore expected. Once I recovered from my
momentary revulsion over the taste that was now in my mouth, I gradually
began to realize what it actually was: a triangle of white bread, topped with
refried black beans and slightly melted queso fresco, which was quite tasty
once I got used to the fact that I wasn’t eating white cake with chocolate
frosting.
This wasn’t the only time with the Chávez family and food that what
I perceived and what was were fundamentally at odds. As I said above, I
was in Oaxaca for Spanish language study. Part of my fee to the language
institute went to the family for my room and partial board, which is to say
breakfast. One morning, what I saw served for me on the plate was wide
pasta noodles in a tomato-based sauce topped with melted cheese. Once
again, my perceptions were fundamentally at odds with what was there. The
wide pasta noodles were strips of corn tortilla simmered in the sauce. The
tomato-based sauce was in fact a tomato-based sauce, but in the manner of a
typical Mexican salsa rather than the Italian-esque sauce (such a sauce is not
as uncommon as one might think in Mexico) I was expecting with the pasta
noodles—actually quite good once I knew what to expect. The melted cheese
turned out to be mayonnaise, which was unfortunate from my perspective
as a lifelong mayo loather. (I never did get used to the Oaxacan penchant for
slathering mayonnaise atop any number of dishes—though I did develop a
habit of ordering all food sin mayonesa, just in case.)
Not all my experiences at the Chávez table were so trivial. Others, I
felt, were illustrative of important aspects of local culture, in particular of
local standards of hospitality and economy. On the day of my arrival at the
Chávez household (keeping in mind that I was there to learn Spanish), there
was very little we could talk about, not because we had nothing to say to one
another, but because we lacked the means to communicate, I not speaking
Spanish and they not speaking English. We made small talk, very slowly, by
passing a Spanish/English dictionary back and forth. After I picked up on 21

the word for “to like,” “gustar” (with no pretense of conjugation), most of the
conversation consisted of questions about whether I liked this or that.
Eventually the conversation moved to the topic of what foods I liked. I
quickly warmed to the topic, as there are virtually no Mexican dishes that I
don’t like (I may not like them with mayo, but I do like them), and this was
the one topic where I already knew much of the vocabulary. In my enthusi-
asm and lack of language skill, I apparently missed a subtle cue that a little
 Robert Philen

more than small talk was going on. In quick succession, I agreed that I liked
tamales, both sweet and savory; I liked mole; I liked tacos; I liked chile rel-
lenos; I liked carne asada; I liked refried beans; I liked huevos rancheros. The
next morning when I came down to the first breakfast served to me by the
Chávez family, I realized to my embarrassment what the food conversation
had been all about. Every single item of food that they had asked me about,
and which I had agreed that I liked, was laid out on the dining table waiting
for me. Needless to say, I couldn’t even eat a significant fraction of the food
laid before me.
The next morning, the breakfast prepared for me was also far too large
for me to possibly finish, though it didn’t literally cover the table as the first
morning, and at least I did not feel guilty or at fault this time. The following
morning, breakfast was still monstrously large, though it was, I noted, slightly
smaller than the day before. This continued, with each day breakfast get-
ting a little smaller, until after about a week, the breakfast served to me was
equal to what I could actually eat, and I finished all of it. This was another
mistake, though one which pinned down for me what was going on. The
next morning, there was once again a huge breakfast banquet arranged for
me. I realized that it was important for them as hosts to give more than I
could consume (I was, of course, paying for breakfast, but indirectly through
the language institute, such that our direct personal relations still followed a
host-guest relation), but given also the gradually shrinking buffet, as well as
the evident fact that though not poor, the Chávezes were also not wealthy,
that it was also important to not waste more money than necessary. Over the
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next several days, I let the breakfast gradually dwindle back to reasonable por-
tions, then established an equilibrium whereby I ate nearly all the food, but
always left a small portion on the plate.
What makes some stories powerful and others not? What makes some
worthy of inclusion in ethnographic writing or classroom teaching, which is
22 to say, what makes some stories representative of a particular cultural milieu
and others not, and so only worthy of retelling (if at all) as minor anecdotes
at a bar or in the halls of an academic meeting—but never at the podium?
One possible answer is that those stories that are powerful and illustra-
tive are those that make some difference. In my relations with the Chávezes,
it made some difference, a great deal actually, how much breakfast I ate,
whereas my reaction to the tortilla, salsa, and mayonnaise dish made no
difference. I do think this is part of the answer to the questions at hand,
 Robert Philen

but only part, because what does or does not make a difference is relative,
of course, to the question at hand. Stories about how much breakfast I
consumed only make a difference if it’s agreed that hospitality is a crucial
concern, and whether a dish is topped with mayonnaise or not makes a great
deal of difference if you loathe the stuff. Further, literal misperceptions of
food could tell us something significant about subtle distinctions in food-
ways. The presence of white bread topped with refried black beans amidst a
spread of “sweets” or tortilla strips topped with mayonnaise at the breakfast
table tripped me up. Such narratives could easily be an entrée to an examina-
tion of subtly distinct cultural constructions of food and meal types, e.g.,
what counts as a breakfast food, a snack, a sweet, and so forth, but somehow
such narratives or discussions never make it into the ethnography of Latin
America.
Another aspect of this is the nature of such storytelling, whether in the
ethnographic enterprise or otherwise. Here I take insights from both Lévi-
Strauss and Foucault. As Lévi-Strauss put it, myths and mythic thinking are
powerful and compelling because they are “good to think” (a formulation
which is, of course, circular if we do not push it further to ask why some
stories are good to think). As Clifford Geertz pointed out well before James
Clifford, George Marcus, and the rest of the Writing Culture crowd, ethno-
graphic writing is fiction, not in the sense of being untrue, but in the original
sense of the word fictio, to craft or to make—that is, ethnographic writing is
constructed narrative and not simple reflection or presentation of what is. I
would argue further that most good ethnographic writing is not just any sort
of fiction, but mythic thought, or at least something structurally analogous
to it. In many of his writings, Lévi-Strauss illustrates the qualities of mythic
thinking through analogy with music. In both myth and music, the produc-
tion of meaning consists in novel and particular manifestations of recurrent
themes. In music, without the particular, and hopefully novel, manifestations
of the theme, no music exists to be enjoyed. Without the theme to orient 23

our interpretations, we have simply noise and chaos.

In the ethnographic literature, there are particular broad discursive con-
structions of specific world areas, which provide an emphasis on particular
themes for ethnographic narratives. For example, there is broad consensus
that hospitality is a major area of concern for studies of Mexico, alongside
other important themes like machismo, religious syncretism, mestizaje, and
progress. Such constructions are, like all linguistic and cultural constructs,
 Robert Philen

arbitrary. This does not mean that they are random. On the contrary, though
Mexican cultural constructions and both Mexican and North American dis-
cursive constructions about them could have been different in form, they are
highly patterned in their occurrence. Nor does it imply that such recurring
themes in the ethnographic literature do not reflect something really there
in Mexican culture, though there is also some projection of North American
imaginary Mexicos, and these two things are hard to disentangle. In any
case, though the recurring themes of discursive construction of Mexico or
any other world area are in some sense arbitrary, seen in terms of Foucault’s
work, it is apparent that they become fixed through the concrete exercise of
power. In the context of ethnographic writing, this takes the forms of litera-
ture reviews, peer review of journals, prestigious conference panels, research
funding, comprehensive exams, and dissertation defenses, all of which force
budding scholars to occupy themselves with dominant preoccupations. The
end result is that there are certain themes one has to address in dealing with
any particular culture area. One does not necessarily have to agree with any
particular perspective, but to be taken seriously, one must address certain
themes, resulting in a plethora of perspectives on a limited number of things.
Compelling ethnographic narrative, then, does not generally address
something utterly new and unknown but works and is powerful, as with
mythic thinking, which seems good to think, by putting a novel spin on the
familiar theme. To return to Lévi-Strauss’ analogy between mythic thinking
and music, when the main theme is missing, one has simply sound (which
may be momentarily interesting, even beautiful, but which is not structured
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music). Those stories which fail to address important themes (that is, those
themes which have been constructed as important), while perhaps funny
or amusing, lack power and end up as the ethnographic equivalent of mere
sound.

24
 Yolanda Pallín

Luna de miel (Honeymoon)

Characters:

He, recently married to she

She, recently married to he

They enter. Both dressed for a wedding: she, in a wedding dress with a tulle veil,
white of course; he, in a tux. He carries her in his arms. Music, for example, “Endless
Love.” They laugh, flirt, play. They kiss. He exits, but not from the scene. Here, when
one exits, one never actually exits the scene. She sits and waits. A tense wait. A long
wait. The music plays on. He enters with a plastic bag full of food. They look at each
other anxiously. The music stops. The words, the imaginary situations, and the spoken
thoughts all begin at the same time.

The First Storm Clouds

He: I’m back already.

She: Already?

He: There was a long line.

She: Oh, a line.

He: At this hour, it’s packed.

She: What?
25

He: What what?

She: What do you mean what?

He: Are you kidding me?

She: Oh geez. . . .
 Yolanda Pallín

He: Well, then?

She: What?

He: So you’re saying yes? . . .

She: Yes.

He: You should have said so before.

She: And?

He: Here you go.

She: No.

He: What do you mean no? Come on. Give me a hand.

She: Sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m confused. I am truly confused.
Understand me. You understand me. I had a terrible day today. Do you
understand?

He: You don’t love me.

She: Of course I do, sweetie.

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He: No. You don’t love me. If you loved me, you would accept me as I am.
You would accept our life for what it is. You insist on getting on my case ev-
ery time I go to the supermarket. To go grocery shopping at the supermarket
is a very normal thing. I won’t do it everyday. But there are people that do
26 do it everyday. They write what they need on a little piece of paper, and this
is called a grocery list. They go down the stairs, cross the street, enter the su-
permarket, look on the shelves for what they wrote down on the little paper,
which we already know is called a grocery list, when they find it they put it in
the cart, they go to the cash register and pay for it all. They pay with cash or
with a credit card. Get it? It’s a boring thing. It’s a real pain. There is nothing
exciting about going grocery shopping. Not one bit. Seriously.

She: Did you get it?

 Yolanda Pallín

He: All of it. I got everything that you wrote on the list.

She: Are you sure?

He: You see how you don’t love me?

She: Maybe not.

He: See?

She: I didn’t say no. I said maybe not; it’s not the same thing.

He: It’s all the same to me.

She: Well, it shouldn’t be the same.

He: Let’s just drop it.

She: I’m going to drop it.

He: It’s dropped.

She: Did you see anyone in the supermarket?

He: In the supermarket? What supermarket?

She: You didn’t go to the supermarket.

He: Of course I went to the supermarket.

She: I said, you must have seen someone. 27

He: Who?

She: I don’t know. What do I know? That’s why I’m asking you.

He: Ah, that’s why.

She: Yes. That’s why.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: And?

She: What do you mean and?

He: I don’t understand you.

She: Finally.

He: Finally?

She: You’re acting crazy.

He: Do you wanna know what I bought? OK. I bought eggs, lunch meat,
milk, three cans, two of tuna and one of sweet red peppers, strawberry mar-
malade, and a loaf of bread. OK?

She: And the mayonnaise?

He: Damn. I forgot the mayonnaise.

She: That’s why you took the list.

He: I thought I would remember it.

She: That’s why you left it on the table in the kitchen.

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He: Really?

She: Yeah, really, mister. Really.

28 He: Don’t worry. I’ll go right now for the mayonnaise.

She: No you won’t.

He: But, didn’t you want me to buy mayonnaise?

She: Before. Before I wanted you to buy mayonnaise. And frankly, if you
want me to tell you the truth, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if you bought
a red dressing or yogurt for the salad. It was for the salad, you know? But
 Yolanda Pallín

now it doesn’t matter to me. It’s not that.

He: Where’s the list?

She: I threw it in the garbage.

He: Great.

She: Yeah, whatever. You forgot the window cleaner too.

He: No, that’s not true. You see, I don’t buy that. You didn’t write down the
window cleaner. I’m sure of it.

She: If you had a good memory, you would have gotten the mayo.

He: What’s wrong with my memory?

She: I don’t know. You tell me.

He: Nothing’s wrong with my memory. That’s the point of a grocery list. So
you don’t waste brain cells on nonsense.

She: Then you did it on purpose.

He: Forgetting the window cleaner?

She: No. Forgetting the mayo.

He: Unless . . .

She: What? 29

He: That you also forgot to write down the mayo.

She: We should’ve called in the order.

He: Did you write down the mayonnaise?

She: You know perfectly well that I did.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: It’s expensive.

She: The window cleaner?

He: For them to bring the groceries up to the house. When you get just a
few things, it’s not worth it.

She: But when you get a lot, yeah, then it’s worth it.

He: Of course.

She: Of course. We should save. For the future. You never know. Things
change. Definitely. That’s that.

He: I really love you.

She: Of course.

He: I still love you.

She: That’s why you go grocery shopping and, yeah, you chat with the ca-
shier. That’s why you pay a visit to the neighbor’s house and you return with
a dirty neck covered with fuchsia colored lipstick. That’s why your condoms
magically disappear from your nightstand. That’s why the telephone rings
and they hang up when I answer it. Yeah, that’s why, because you love me so
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much; that’s why and because you’re a man and everyone knows how men
are, right? They know. Of course they do. That’s why and because you are
scared of me. Deep down, from now on, everyone is going to be scared of
me. Including myself.

30 Declaration of Principles

He: I knew the first time I saw you that I was being cornered by a wild
beast. Wild beasts have long hair, long nails, sharp as their tongue; they are
cold and hot and sweet, or so it appears in the beginning. They are so sweet.
If you’re not careful, the wild beasts will eat your guts out. She was my wild
beast, and I dealt with it with my head held high. I always knew. The first
time I saw her.
 Yolanda Pallín

She: Do you have a girlfriend? Do you come here a lot? Do you like the
movies? Have you been to New York recently? Will you buy me a drink?

He: I was crazy about her.

She: Like all the others.

He: I liked her. I liked her. I liked her a lot.

She: A lot. You liked me a lot.

He: I’ve never been to New York.

She: Neither have I.

He: I didn’t have a girlfriend.

She: You’ve always had a girlfriend.

He: No. Then I didn’t have a girlfriend.

She: Have you ever been to New York?

He: I didn’t want to have a girlfriend. Who wants to have a girlfriend?

She: I had many.

He: You?

She: I haven’t told you about them? Yes. My neighbor from the third floor.
The cashier from the supermarket. My secretary. 31

He: You don’t have a secretary.

She: No?

He: I have a secretary.

She: Maybe that’s it.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: And I’ve never been to New York. Well, at that point, I had never gone
to New York. Later, yes.

She: How can you live without a girlfriend?

He: Very well. I manage just fine. You don’t have to give any explanations.
Nobody smells your clothes. You can put all the names you want in your ad-
dress book with corresponding numbers too.

She: Are you married?

He: I told myself, she’s a wild beast, I’m going to marry her; I’m going to
control her; this one won’t get away; this one is all mine.

She: You’re married.

He: Now I am.

She: What a shame. I did like you. But sure, married men are very intimidat-
ing. I wouldn’t want to destroy a stable and happy home for anything in the
world. Because you are so happy. Yes, you can see it on your face. You are
well fed. Only marriage can give that kind of attractive glow. Right?

He: Are you married?

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She: Me? Never.

He: You’re a wild beast.

She: I am a wild beast.

32
He: You eat children raw.

She: Yes.

He: Then eat me.

She: If you take me to New York.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: I’ll take you if you unleash me.

She: I’ll unleash you if you love me.

He: I do love you.

She: Do you want to marry me?

He: For what?

She: So you go to the supermarket when I tell you to. No. No. Better that
you don’t go to the supermarket. Better that you stay put here, nice and
warm. Watching television. You don’t know how attractive you are. There.
Good. There.

The Wild Beast

She: Once upon a time, there was a very smart girl, very smart, and everyone
used to say, what a smart girl, when this kid grows up, everyone knows, the
poor guy who falls for her. And she said, yes. Poor guy.
Listen, honey, it’s ringing. It’s for you. Yes. I’m sure it’s for you. Aren’t
you gonna get it? Hello. Hello. You see. It was for you. No. Forget it. It’s
fine. I’m getting used to it. That’s all.
Oh, yes. So when the girl went to grade school she received many A’s
and then more in high school and even more in college. But the girl knew
that she was something hidden there, and she read all she could to be well
informed and searching, searching, she found it.
My love. Again. Of course they’re calling for you. I would take a mes-
sage, but they won’t leave one with me. Yes? Hello? Nothing. What an idiot.
Whoever she was.
And what did she find? Literature. Lies. Stories. She liked stories. All us 33

girls love stories, you see. Even though she was smart. How ironic. Boys with
girls. Love and sex. Mostly sex, over and over. Sex, sex, sex. Sex. She studied
the most complicated positions and the techniques most guaranteed for suc-
cess. She tried them out. She made the Dean’s list several times. Her resume
stood out with glory and splendor. Gold and sex. And marriage. Imbecile.
OK. I’m coming. Yes? Yes? Hello? Hey, please don’t hang up. Hey. Hey.
Don’t hang up, girl. Wait, I’m telling a really good story. Of course, I’m sure
you’ll like it, and besides, it will do you good. The most important thing is
 Yolanda Pallín

that we stick together.

You’ll see. The girl grew and grew and learned the important things in
life, and someone told her that the most important thing was to make her
man happy. And she made him happy. And he slept with the neighbor.
Yes, sweetheart, before you, it was the woman next door. And before
her . . . oh, you are the woman next door. I’m sorry, sweetie, it’s just that I
thought you were the one from the supermarket. Yes. The bleached blond.
You don’t say. Really? Well, honey, I hate to give you the bad news. If I find
out . . . well, I’m already in a big mess. You take care of it. No. I won’t tell
him that you know. OK. But don’t be too tough on him. He’s had a terrible
day. Good. Talk to you later. Yeah, girl, whenever you’d like. On your behalf.
It’ll be no big deal. I know how it works. Well, you’ll learn, just like all the
others. That’s that.
All right. One less woman. Yeah. If it were only that easy.

Initial Declarations

She: I love it.

He: I like it too. That’s why I brought you.

She: Do you like me too?

He: More or less.

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She: You do like me.

He: Yes, silly.

She: You’re silly.

34

He: You’re sillier.

She: Yeahhhhhh.

He: What do you want to drink?

She: I don’t know. Whatever you’d like.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: I recommend a “queen’s love.”

She: Yummmm.

He: One-third Advockaat, one-third cherry brandy and one-third grapefruit

juice, topped off with a delicious maraschino cherry. Exquisite.

She: Advockaat?

He: Smooth and creamy.

She: Does Advockaat have egg in it?

He: Pure yolk.

She: Like the ones at Santa Teresa?

He: You don’t like them?

She: I feel like throwing up just thinking about it.

He: No, honey. Forget the Advockaat. Goodbye to the egg.

She: Please don’t say it again.

He: How about a “kiss me quick”?

She: Whenever you’d like.

He: Now.
35
She: And what’s in that one?

He: Not egg.

She: Please.

He: One cup of Pernod, five shots of red curaçao, and five shots of
Angostina. They make it right in a tall glass with crushed ice. With a splash
 Yolanda Pallín

of club soda?

She: And a straw?

He: If you’d like.

She: OK. Sounds great.

He: What’s wrong with the Pernod?

She: With the Pernod?

He: Is it the curaçao?

She: No. It’s the Pernod.

He: Really.

She: It’s that . . . I’m embarrassed to tell you . . . well, it’s that a few years
ago I got so drunk off Pernod you can’t even imagine. . . .

He: Off Pernod?

She: Yeah. In Paris.

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He: In Paris.

She: Yes, when I was studying French. I spent nine months in Paris. I like to
travel. Traveling stimulates the imagination. I know my way around.

36 He: And you took up Pernod.

She: Just once.

He: But who would even think of getting drunk off Pernod? Sorry, it’s just
that Pernod is expensive.

She: Yeah, I know. And thanks for the drink, I appreciate it.
 Yolanda Pallín

He: Well, I don’t know. . . .

She: Go ahead. Try it and see. I don’t bite.

He: A “relax”?

She: Yeah, that sounds good to me.

He: Are you gonna want? . . .

She: Sure.

He: Me too. A “relax” is a simple but sophisticated cocktail. They don’t

make it just anywhere, you know. Actually, it’s pretty hard to find a place
that serves a good “relax”. . . .

She: And here they make them super incredible.

He: Well, yes.

She: And?

He: An herbal tea of lime blossom, one-third gin, sugar, and fresh mint.

She: Lime blossom tea makes me sleepy, I’m allergic to gin, and sugar makes
you fat. But I’m crazy about mint. Oh, I know. Order me a malt whisky
straight up, no water and no ice.

He: No ice?

She: Better yet, a bourbon. 37

He: Sir, can we get a double bourbon and a Coke. No, the Coke’s for me.
Caffeine-free, please.

She: I love this place.

He: Do you want to marry me?

 Yolanda Pallín

She: Sure. Yeah. Why not?

He: I love you.

She: Me too, honey. Me too.

Doubts?

He: I’m not faithful. I don’t know a single guy who is faithful. Faithfulness
only exists in the crazy minds of women. Women’s minds seem to go crazy
during the same time that they are married. So? I love fruit. And I eat fruit
whenever I can. And nothing happens. Nobody comes and crushes your
skull for eating one and a half pounds of kiwi.

She: Gastrointestinal problems from a number of possibilities. Vomiting.

Diarrhea. Anxiety. Upchucking of the intestinal flora. Acidity. Poor thing. My
love.

He: No. I’m not faithful. It’s the voice of my ancestors. The call of the
jungle. The greatest instinct. One of the fine arts. The best one of all.

She: Do you use condoms?

He: Yes. I mean, what?

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She: Did you grab the umbrella? It’s raining.

He: It’s only drizzling.

She: But you never know.

38

He: Instinctual perpetuation of the species?

She: That’s nonsense.

He: No. That doesn’t work either. With her, no. Not now.

She: I think I’ll go.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: No. I’ll go.

She: Sweetie. It’s my turn.

He: Yours? Well, if you’re innocent.

She: Yeah. That’s why I’m fed up.

He: Already?

She: Already. I’m going to the supermarket. Do you want me to get apples?

He: Why?

She: I don’t know. Are there some left?

He: Maybe there are, maybe there aren’t.

Doubts? I know. You know. Doubts are a waste of time. Doubts don’t let
us function. Doubts depress us. Don’t doubt, my love, don’t let yourself do
it. Life is beautiful, we’re young, we’re healthy. . . .
Are you sure that you want to go shopping? Did you make a list? Do
you have cash? Did you grab the umbrella?

She: I don’t rely on lists.

He: It’s not like I’m trying to make you. . . .

She: Because I’m your lawfully wedded wife?

He: Plums. I’d rather you buy plums. If it’s not too much trouble.
39
She: I’ll put it on the credit card.

He: No, not the credit card, it always leaves a paper trail.

She: Yeah, you’re right, sweetie.

He: Then comes the bill, and you know the rest.
 Yolanda Pallín

She: Experience is a degree in itself.

He: Be careful.

She: Do you think it’s gonna rain?

He: Yes. I’m unfaithful. If I’m not unfaithful, I’ll die. If I don’t discover,
aim, uncover, and arouse, then I don’t sleep well at night. And if I don’t
sleep, I’ll age prematurely. And if I turn myself into a wrinkled raisin, then
you won’t love me anymore. And if you don’t love me anymore, my love,
then why would I want to live. Tell me. Why in the hell would anyone want
to live?

She: I’ll be back soon.

He: Yeah?

She: In a hop and a skip. Easy as pie. One minute here and gone the next. I
do it for you. For us. For all this.

More Doubts?

He: Me and my wife, I didn’t just meet her on the street like the famous
saying goes. Me and my wife, I don’t remember how I met her, because I’m
sure that she is the one who met me.
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You know how things work.

But, it didn’t happen on the street because she hardly ever goes out.
For the time being. In my opinion, it’s better that she stays at home, curled
up watching TV. Meanwhile, I’m going to take over the jungle, I’m going to
fight crocodiles . . . come on, you’re not going to tell me that you don’t fight
40 crocodiles.
They’re not crocodiles?
Come on. They’re crocodiles. When I was little, they told me all about it
in school; my mother used to tell me all the time when she put my bologna
sandwich in my lunch box; all the women I loved told me until I was sick of
hearing it. Of course, that was before. They’re crocodiles, and that’s that. If
I knew where she came from, maybe I would understand her. Or where she
goes. But, it’s too early.
Still too early.
 Yolanda Pallín

She thinks . . . well no . . . I pretend that . . . I do know . . . but I don’t

know. Don’t I wish. What do I wish? I’m not sure. And all of a sudden
comes the first anniversary, then comes the day when you have to carry
your first-born up to the altar for Communion . . . or worse than that. Then
comes the day and . . . what? What have you done? What’s happened?
Where did I leave my socks? Can you tell me where I’ve been all this time?
Can somebody tell me why?

The Cotton Test

She: Young man.

He: Who, me?

She: Yes, young man. You. May I. You see, it’s that I have a doubt, I doubt,
and if it’s not too much trouble . . . No? . . . Are you alone?

He: Now?

She: In life.

He: Well, yes. I’m alone in life.

I have a modest apartment that is about two-hundred square meters, a
loft, to be exact, with a view of the beach and the mountains. I’m a computer
engineer, specializing in high definition interstellar telecommunications.
I make about three trillion each quarter. But I do work on the side once a
while, which gives me extra income. I’m tall, as you can see yourself, and
I’m blond, obviously. In the winter, my skin is transparent and extremely
smooth, and in the summer, my skin turns a golden brown color that con-
trasts quite nicely with my greenish-blue eyes. I don’t wear glasses.
Of course. 41

I’ve never had a cavity. I don’t know the meaning of the word head-
ache. I can lift dumbbells with my pinky toe on my left foot. I don’t have a
mother, or a father, or siblings, so, when I say that I am alone in life, what
I’m really trying to say, what I’m saying, is that I’m not married.
I’m not married. I’m not married. I’m not married.

She: Do you snore?

 Yolanda Pallín

He: Not at all.

She: The thing is. . . .

He: Miss. You don’t know how happy I am that you came up to me. I’ve
had my eye on you for a while now, but my excellent manners keep me from
approaching such an attractive young lady like yourself without having been
introduced.

She: Do you think I’m hot? Be honest. I don’t want to be old-fashioned,

that’s why I’m here. But, I don’t want to be shameless either.

He: Oh stop. What is considered a lack of delicacy in a man can turn out to
be seductive in a woman or it can even be a turn-on.

She: Are you turned on? Do I turn you on?

He: Well the truth is, yes. A lot.

She: Are you sure? Am I sexy? Me?

He: Do you want to be my wife?

She: Me?
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He: Say yes.

She: It’s that, I am married.

He: Liar.
42
She: Don’t kid me. It’s obvious. Or isn’t it obvious? If it’s not obvious, then
this is a disaster, a trap. It’s not obvious about him either?

He: You make my heart pound, sweetheart.

She: Help. It has to be obvious. There has to be . . . a difference.

He: Don’t be scared. I know how to treat a princess. A queen. You want it
 Yolanda Pallín

just as bad as I do. You’re dying to. Tell me you’re dying to.

She: So, call me a nympho.

He: Your husband is watching you through a little hole. Your husband is
shaking with anger. Say hello to your husband who can’t seem to take his
eyes off you.

She: I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity to say hello to my

husband who’s watching me and by the way, remind him to take the pan off
the burner, the potatoes should be well done by now.

He: OK.

She: It’s that, when you’re in a hurry. . . .

He: Nympho, you’re more than a nympho.

She: Nothing, nothing’s obvious.

He: What do you like the most?

She: I like everything. Everything. Whatever you want. Whatever you feel
like. Me, I almost never care, all in all, if you like this, then this, and if you’d
rather have that, then that. I’m not picky. Whatever.

He: It’s your first time.

She: Am I making a fool out of myself?

He: Don’t worry. There’s a first time for everything. You picked a good one, 43
baby.

She: Really?

He: Do you doubt it?

She: Me? Me doubt? What a funny thing to say. Me, doubting. No. No way.
Doubts really damage your skin, and for all the trillions you make, you can’t
 Yolanda Pallín

afford moisturizers and facemasks and anti-aging creams and. . . . No. Come
on. It’s now or never.

He: Aren’t you gonna ask me something?

She: Do you like to travel?

He: Naturally. There’s nothing better than a cruise through the Greek
Islands to drive a woman crazy. Do you want us to go, the two of us? Now?

She: Why didn’t you ever get married?

He: It’s that I’m unfaithful.

She: I love you.

He: But you can’t. . . .

She: Another day?

He: Call me whenever you feel like it. I’ll be here at your disposal.

She: Sounds great, I’ll call you.

He: Hey, you forgot to get ham.

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She: Yeah. I just realized it.

This Cannot Be Happening To Me

44 He: My wife is what I love most in this life. So I married her. So that she
could be my wife. Not so that she could walk out of my life. If I catch my
wife with someone else, if I find out she is looking at someone else, if I find
out she is thinking about someone else. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know. I
don’t even want to imagine it.
It’s too soon. Women only do it out of boredom. That’s what they say.
It’s too soon. My wife spoils me. My wife loves me. I love my wife. My wife?
Yeah? What did I do? I did it.
Yes. I tell myself from time to time so that I don’t forget. My wife and I.
 Yolanda Pallín

My wife. She’s mine. Only mine. And me? I’m mine too.
Although, maybe they do it out of sheer spite. Where did I read that?
In which debate on TV did they say such a stupid thing? It was a mistake to
come home so early. But we are modern. The honeymoon is old and boring.
If I’m old and boring, my wife . . . no. Not now. Not yet.
She’s late, damn it, the nympho herself is late. The nympho herself isn’t
coming. The pig herself doesn’t even call me, or send me a telegram, or give
me an explanation. Not even a little lie. Is it raining?
We are civilized. She and I. A civilized marriage. Young. Attractive.
Healthy. We eat fruit. Was that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gusty Winds

He: Already?

She: It was closed.

He: What a pain.

She: I wasn’t gone long.

He: A little while.

She: Just a little.

He: Hardly at all.

She: I forgot to bring money.

He: I told you to.

45

She: And what’s even worse is that it started raining cats and dogs, and I just
got my hair done this morning.

He: I’m happy, sweetie. Really.

She: I’m not.

He: There’s a little melon left.

 Yolanda Pallín

She: Thank god.

He: Maybe another time.

She: You think so?

He: I’m a modern guy. Would you like a whiskey?

She: No, alcohol makes you gain weight. I’m stopping. I’m a modern
woman.

He: A coke?

She: Diet.

He: There’s none left. But don’t worry, I’ll go over to the neighbor’s
house—she always has some. I won’t be long.

She: Take an umbrella. Just in case.

He: Here we are already.

She: Here you are already.

He: I don’t understand you.

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She: Yes. You understand me. And I understand you. We understand each
other. Sure we do. We didn’t before.
Now you’ll see the difference. You won’t be long. And when you get
back, we’re going to go on our honeymoon like we’re supposed to. It will
46 never be how it was. Never ever.
The idea was both of ours. I already know that. But it was stupid, a fool-
ish idea that you get in your head. We both got it in our head. Nonsense.
Who would think of such a thing? If you say yes, then yes it is. For better or
for worse. If it’s old and boring, then it’s old and boring. If you get married,
you go on a honeymoon. You have kids. You buy stuff on the installment
plan. You go food shopping. But first comes the honeymoon.
 Yolanda Pallín

He: I’ll be right back, sweetie.

She: Sure you will, my love, sure you will. And you’ll see just how soon.

Balanced Diet

She: I don’t have anything against fruit. I find it quite healthy. Digestible.
Fruit is one of the few healthy things that doesn’t make you gain weight.
What could any normal person with a head on their shoulders have against
fruit. The thing is, it’s very expensive. I told my husband. Sweetie. Just buy a
little fruit. Don’t go buying fruit that later . . . and that’s how it is, because he
understands me, that’s why a girl gets married, just to establish that mysteri-
ous secret code that makes couples work and countries and galaxies, and all
the things that have to work, in one word and doing away with silly details.
My husband understands me. I understand my husband. Actually, I un-
derstand all men, with their needs, with their mean streaks, with their weird
habits . . . I used to understand them. Used to.
But all men, except my husband, can’t make a small, sincere effort to
comprehend and understand me. The butcher, for example. The butcher
doesn’t understand me. It’s as if he speaks a different language than I do,
with the same sounds, yeah, but different. That’s why I go home, to my little
nest, when what I’d really like to do is throw myself into the arms of the
butcher.
I tell you this because you understand it, because you’re not a typical
guy, you’re not like the other guys, you’re mine, mine, anyone can tell just
by looking at you, anyone can see it clearly, and you understand this magic
bond I have with my husband, which is you . . . even though you don’t
understand me. Deep down, I mean.
You don’t. You don’t understand me even if you try. You don’t under-
stand me even though you do understand me. Yeah. I already know that you
try but it’s that, it’s not that easy. No sir. And if you don’t believe me, ask 47

the butcher. That’s why I didn’t marry the butcher. That’s why I married you.
And even the butcher can see that. That’s why I pinch myself. So that I don’t
forget. That I’m married. To you.

Cotton Doesn’t Deceive (Happy End)

He: Do you come here often?

 Yolanda Pallín

She: It’s twenty thousand.

He: I think you’re wrong.

She: It’s thirty thousand.

He: No. You’ll see. I just want to chat. To tell you about my sadness and my
happiness. To share with you some small details about the life that my wife
wouldn’t understand.

She: Forty.

He: I agree. Yes. I just want sex.

She: That’s it. That’s much better.

He: Although there are more important things in life.

She: Right.

He: Understanding. Companionship, the caring spirit.

She: The Olympics.

He: Yeah. The Olympics.

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She: And what else?

He: We can share.

48 She: The Olympics?

He: If you want.

She: No. I don’t want to. Don’t be an idiot.

He: But, I can’t.

She: We’d have broken up.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: This has never happened to me. This is the first time that this has ever
happened to me. And that’s why I like you. Yeah, for sure. You’re very cute,
and you look sharp and cultured. Come on, enough for an exchange . . .
satisfactory. But when it’s no, it’s no. It should be . . . I don’t know . . . blood
pressure, yeah, that’s what it’ll be, I have to watch my blood pressure and
eat things without salt and more vegetables; that’s it, everything is the food’s
fault. Forget the cold cuts. We are what we eat. Nothing more, nothing less.

She: I accept Visa.

He: It’s better if I call you another day.

She: Recently married?

He: Me?

She: And for so long? Yeah? Incredible.

He: My wife cheats on me.

She: So soon.

He: I deserve it.

She: Oh go on. You started it. Tell me, tell me, let off some steam.

He: Don’t laugh. It’s not funny at all. It’s not funny to me.

She: No, it’s that I feel like I want to cry.

He: Don’t cry, beautiful. 49

She: It’s that my husband cheats on me too.

He: No he doesn’t silly. How could your husband cheat on you when you
are so beautiful? And so smart? And such a wild beast?

She: That’s what I’m saying. But you see, your wife cheats on you, and
you’re a sweetheart.
 Yolanda Pallín

He: It’s not the same.

She: Why?

He: I don’t know. We men are abject humans, true degenerates overpow-
ered by the lowest instincts. We don’t have reasoning. Everyone knows that.

She: You’re charming.

He: No. I am mean and rotten.

She: Your wife is an imbecile.

He: Do you think that I’ve lost her?

She: It doesn’t matter. Because with women, as you already know, when they
get off course, they fall hard. And then they do the opposite.

He: With all that I love her.

She: I love you too.

He: Still?

She: Much more than before. More than I did yesterday but less than I will
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tomorrow.

He: And the butcher?

She: Not at all. Impossible. He made me realize a lot of things. And your
50 secretary? And the woman from the supermarket? And Mariló?

He: Mariló?

She: Mariló is the woman from the third floor.

He: Well, there you see, I didn’t even realize it.

She: All you men are the same. Poor Mariló.

 Yolanda Pallín

He: You’re wonderful.

She: You are the one who’s wonderful.

He: You’re even more so.

She: Get going, go home because your wife is waiting for you.

He: My wife. I’m starting to realize, my love. How scary.

She: It scares me too. And if we’d gone on a trip?

He: A trip for our honeymoon?

She: No. That’s old and boring. Just a trip.

He: Yeah? Just like that? Nothing more nothing less? How could it be?

She: We’re married.

He: The two of us. To each other.

She: More you.

He: No, sweetie. The same.

She: Baby, look what I’ve found. There’s a gothic castle for rent in the
Hurdes.

He: Three hundred thousand square meters, air conditioning, a climate-con-

trolled swimming pool, five living rooms with microclimate chimneys. Neat 51
and practically impregnable.

She: No male neighbors.

He: No female neighbors. We’ll leave it in the lurch for uncertain family
matters. What are you saying?

She: That we have to live. We have to go on living. I really prefer New York.
 Yolanda Pallín

He: But everybody goes to live in New York.

She: Exactly, that’s why.

He: And a cruise through the Greek Islands?

She: New York.

He: We’ll go shopping. We’ll have to make a list.

She: Whatever you say, my love. But together.

He: Until death do us part.

She: It couldn’t happen to you either. Until the honeymoon is over.

He: We’ve fallen.

She: Like flies. From the streets into honey.

He: I’ve wanted to go to New York in the past.

She: That’s why I married you.

He: I know, my wild beast, I know.

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Translated from the Spanish by Katrina Emery

52
 Peter J. Caulfield

Dancing into the Bright Moonlight

T he snakes hid, but the men all knew they were around—under the
rocks, along the creek bed, in the trees overhead. They walked as quietly as
they could in the near darkness of the woods, an American squad, loaded
with weapons and gear, including a heavy radio. They made enough noise
to keep the snakes away. They counted on this as they crossed the creek and
pushed farther into the woods, farther away from the small company fire-
base. The men were on a listening patrol, their job to set up some distance
from the firebase, usually a thousand meters, or one klick, and listen all
night for sounds of enemy activity, each taking a shift while the others slept.
Tonight, though, they would go farther.
The four of them had pulled LP duty the first night of their platoon’s
one-week down time in the firebase. They weren’t happy. Sandy Williams,
a spec-four, and the senior man, was in charge. Just twenty and in country
for five months. Another guy, Riley, twenty-three and a college graduate,
joined the platoon three weeks ago, part of his head still back in the World.
He talked about muscle cars, hot summer nights on porches, and drive-in
restaurants.
Here it was always summer, always hot, but there were no porches, no
drive-ins to cruise. Once, though, Sandy had ridden through a village on
top of an armored personnel carrier north of Saigon on Highway 1 near the
coast. Though he saw no restaurants, Vietnamese women and men lined the
edges of the road, sitting in their ubiquitous black pajamas on woven mats
with food in front of them. Several of them had live lizards for sale, about
eight to ten inches long. All four of each lizard’s legs broken. They’d stay
put until sold, fresh for dinner. Some flipped onto their backs and wriggled,
desperate cripples in the hot dirt of the road.
The unit climbed the hill on the other side of the creek, crouching 53
under branches, heading toward the ridgeline. Fully dark now, no clouds
obscured the star-splashed sky. Sandy thought about the rest of the platoon
kicking back in the firebase, in the big tents with wooden floors and cots to
sleep on, each draped in its own mosquito netting hung from the roof of the
tent. They were drinking beer now, cold beer, and waiting for the movie to
start—tonight, The Valley of the Dolls projected on a white sheet hung on the
outside of one of the big tents. Sandy read the book a year ago, just after he
 Peter J. Caulfield

had flunked out of college, so he could imagine the movie. Girls and drugs
and Hollywood. The Dolls were not the girls, but pills, uppers and down-
ers. He thought about how a cold beer would feel in his hand, touching his
cheek, sliding down his throat.
They reached the ridge top. They planned to follow it north for about
three klicks, then drop down on the same side as t he firebase and set up for
the night. Listening. No real camp and definitely no fire. Just wrap them-
selves in their ponchos, use their helmets as pillows. They dropped just below
the ridgeline on the far side and bushwhacked north, parallel to the ridge.
Sandy knew it would be easier to walk the ridge but more dangerous.
Perrelli, a short, stocky Italian from New York City, walked point. Brad-
ley, black and from Chicago, trailed Perrelli. Bradley bragged he’d belonged
to a huge street gang back home called the Black P-Stone Nation, but Sandy
knew Vietnam still scared him. It scared all of them, especially at night,
out here, in the Central Highlands. Riley, the radioman, walked just ahead
of Sandy who brought up the rear. He needed to be able to grab the radio
receiver quickly off of Riley’s back if he had to.
They reached a clear space in the woods and crossed it as fast as they
could, heads twisting left and right in no kind of sync. Sandy heard a sound
behind him, and he spun around and walked backwards, stumbling slightly.
His right hand squeezed the pistol grip of his M-16, aiming the rifle back
at the dark shapes. His left hand cupped the plastic barrel cover, pushing it
slowly from side to side as he moved. One heel caught a root or a rock, and
he almost fell backwards, but turning, somehow kept on his feet. He looked
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up ahead to see the square of the radio enter the woods on the other side of
the clearing, and he ran for several seconds to close the gap that had opened
between Riley and him. His throat dry, he told himself he had just imagined
the sound, and the empty silence behind them helped calm him.
They pushed on through the trees until stopped by a thick tangle of
54 undergrowth. For a few moments, they huddled in a small, puzzled circle.
Riley looked at Sandy and tilted his head, raised his eyebrows in a question
up towards the ridgeline just ten feet or so above them. Perrelli and Bradley
looked at each other, then at Sandy. He glanced at the ridge, then down the
hill where he thought it seemed to open, to bend in a clearer space around
the thicket just below it, but he couldn’t be sure. Still, he pointed his rifle
in that direction, and Perrelli, without hesitating, began to move down hill.
Sandy was almost surprised when Bradley, and then Riley, followed. Before
 Peter J. Caulfield

moving himself, he turned and looked back behind him at the silent forest.
A white, three-quarter moon had just risen above a distant hill. Sandy slipped
quickly down the slope, staying close to the dark thicket, hugging it.
The moon proved him right, and soon they found a way through, a bit
below the thick tangle. The four of them walked on, Sandy grateful that a
thick canopy of trees mostly blocked the moonlight.
Insects talked bug talk in the humid night. Thin mosquito legs crawled
on his neck, and he tilted his head, hoping his collar would push the thing
away. He remembered his first few nights in the bush and his fresh meat
theory. The night he’d joined the platoon, just days after he’d left the States,
he had first guard. While the others settled into sleep, he stared terrified at
the black woods. For two-and-a-half hours, the mosquitoes gnawed at his face
and neck, his hands, his ankles. Though he wore jungle boots laced high,
thick fatigue socks, and long pants, he woke up the next morning with a
dozen bites on each ankle. Angry red welts also covered the exposed parts of
his body, but he was most surprised at how they’d gotten to his ankles. After
a few days, though, they seemed to leave him mostly alone. Fresh meat.

Again, they sounded like running, short quick steps, then silence.
They must know we’re here. They aren’t just moving through the area,
not like that. Several more steps, sustained this time, running right at
them. Sandy swallowed, his hands trembling, but still held fire.

Static crackled, breaking the night’s silence. All four of them fell to a
crouch, and Sandy scrambled, duck walking to Riley’s back, snatched the
volume button on the radio, and twisted it left. They all knew what had hap-
pened, but nobody spoke to Riley. He’d fucked up, forgetting to silence the
radio, but they would deal with him later. Now they listened, not moving,
for an answering sound, any sound. When none came after several minutes,
55
Perrelli stood up. Sandy looked up at him, then stood up himself. Bradley
and Riley rose together, Riley not meeting anyone’s eyes.
Sandy felt annoyed when Perrelli started forward again and the others
followed, not waiting for even a nod from him. He walked sullenly after
them, sliding in behind Riley again, thinking. Once during a battle, one of
the guys caught fire following an explosion. He rolled on the ground howling
for the medic, managing to put the fire out, but badly burned. The medic,
new, panicked. He ran to the guy and threw a poncho over him, thinking he
 Peter J. Caulfield

was in shock. In an instant, he realized his mistake: the plastic poncho would
stick to the burnt flesh. He snatched it away. The guy screamed in fresh
agony. Later that night, when the medic slept, he had visitors. A few of the
burn victim’s buddies threw a poncho over the young medic and beat him
with rifle butts, sticks, and other blunt instruments. Not enough to kill him,
just to warn him: be more careful.
They slipped around trees and down into a gully and back up again. The
moon flowed through gaps in the leaves and lit the odd bush or boulder.
The forest thinned again, and soon Perrelli stopped at another small clearing,
spotlighted by the moon. The others slipped to his left and right. Sandy saw
it near a fallen log on the far side of the clearing—a small stack of boxes. All
of them fixed on it. Sandy tapped Perrelli and whispered, “You and Bradley
check the left; we’ll go right.” He pushed the radio, and Riley moved right.
They scoped the arc of the clearing, checking the woods beyond. The four of
them met at the stacked wooden crates. Sandy bent and touched the Chi-
nese writing on the side of one. The boxes tied with rope, Sandy slipped his
bayonet off his belt and cut one open. Mortar rounds. He opened another.
More rounds.
He whispered to the others, “We better call it in.” Riley knelt down,
his back to Sandy. Bradley and Perrilli moved a few yards away in opposite
directions and watched the woods. Sandy eased up the volume of the radio
and breathed into the microphone at his cheek, “Six, this is Six-one Charlie.
Over.” He waited, uneasy under the bright moon, realizing his mistake too
late: they should have slipped back among the trees to do this. He wondered
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if Perrelli and Bradley thought he was too green to trust. The radio crackled
softly. A low voice. “Six-one Charlie, this is Six. What’s your sit-rep?”
Sandy pulled his plastic-covered top map from under his shirt and gave
the situation report, including the coordinances of the clearing, as close as he
could figure them. The lieutenant said they would send a full squad at day
56 break to get the ammo. He shut down the radio, and they hustled back into
the safe shadows of the trees.
In fifteen minutes, they climbed back up over the ridge and down the
hill on the same side as the firebase. Sandy looked for a place to set up for
the night, his nerves more jangled than usual. LP’s always made him anxious,
too few men, too little firepower. And tonight they were four klicks out, too
far to get help quickly if the shit began to fly. The lieutenant ordered them
out that far because Intelligence reported suspected NVA troop movement in
 Peter J. Caulfield

the area. That’s regular army gook troops, not ragtag VC. The cache they just
found supported those reports. Viet Cong traveled light, a few grenades and
a handful of rice. Maybe a rifle or two, a homemade mine. Not that kind of
firepower. Not boxes filled with mortar rounds. Sandy wished the night over,
willed himself back to the firebase, to the black coffee and powdered eggs
and the gray dawn.
The others glanced back at him every few minutes now, wondering when
they would stop. Set up. Make the best of it. Sandy wanted to stop, too. His
body ached, sweat crawled down his back, along his sides. He looked hard
all around as they walked. A low, curved hillock rose a few yards in front of a
rock face at the base of a large hillside.
He touched Riley’s shoulder, who tapped Bradley. Perrelli must have
sensed the others stopping and turned around. Sandy pointed to the spot;
they all moved gratefully toward it. They had been hiking through a broad
clearing, so this seemed perfect. Protection front and back, as well as a long
view in a wide arc. Sandy followed the others behind the low hill and began
to drop his gear. Nobody spoke. S.O.P. on a listening patrol. Besides, they
had all seen the stockpile of shells. Not a peep above the lowest whisper
passed among them.
Sandy offered to take first guard, and the others chose their slots. He
preferred last guard, watching the sun come up, feeling safer and safer as the
trees and bushes again assumed their true and detailed shapes. But as leader,
he thought he should make the sacrifice. The others settled in, and he soon
heard the deep breathing of sleep. Fatigue beating fear. Blessedly, nobody
snored.
He found a swale in the small hill near where it curved back toward the
rock face and laid his rifle in it. He leaned against the hill’s low curve and
made himself as comfortable as possible, stretching his right leg out, tuck-
ing his left under it. Sandy could see a good thirty yards across the clearing
in three directions. The moon still high, they hid in the deep shadow of hill 57

and rock—a double bonus.

The woods buzzed and rustled, and shadows seemed to grow and shift
and move. Sandy hated the night, especially when the blackness wrapped
itself like a dark shroud over everything, including his own hands, just a few
feet from his face. Tonight, at least, the moon and the stars were his friends,
even out here, far from the barbed wire and thick sandbags of the firebase.
Far from The Valley of the Dolls.
 Peter J. Caulfield

The night he left home for the last time before heading to the war, his
whole family had come with him to the airport. They arrived early so as to
have plenty of time to say goodbye and went to the near-empty restaurant,
situated with views of the runways on all sides. But darkness fell, and they
couldn’t see anything but the rows of blue lights stretching in all direc-
tions. Musak played from the sound system, and he danced with his three
sisters, one at a time, on the little ballroom floor while the rest of the family
watched.
His father was the last to hug him goodbye. He’d been 4-F during World
War II and, as far as Sandy knew, had never touched a gun in his life. Fiercely
protective of his family, though, his dad couldn’t sleep himself until the
last child arrived safely home and went to bed, even on prom night. Still, it
shocked Sandy when his dad began to clutch him and sob. He pulled away
finally, turned and headed through the tunnel to the plane, afraid to look
back.
A sound like a footstep. Sandy moved onto both knees, settling the stock
of his M-16 into his right cheek, his eyes scanning the wood line opposite
where he thought the sound had come from. Another step, this one clear,
breaking a branch. His thumb flicked off the safety, and, with his right leg, he
nudged Bradley, who opened his eyes. Several more steps, as if a short run of
ten yards or so, brought Bradley fully awake, and he crawled quickly to Per-
relli and Riley, shaking them and pointing towards the sounds.
The four of them lined the hillock now, rifles trained on the same vague
spot across the clearing. Sandy tapped Bradley’s shoulder and nodded to the
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others. Bradley signaled to Perrelli and Riley, and they all looked back at him.
He touched his rifle barrel, then his chest, then pointed toward them. He
hoped they would know what he meant: don’t fire until I do. He also hoped
a few more moments of listening would give them a better sense of how large
a squad was out in front of them, before giving away their position. For all
58 they knew, the enemy didn’t even suspect they were there. He heard steps
moving well to the right of where he’d heard them before, over across from
Riley’s end of the mound they hid behind. Again, they sounded like run-
ning, short quick steps, then silence. They must know we’re here. They aren’t
just moving through the area, not like that. Several more steps, sustained this
time, running right at them. Sandy swallowed, his hands trembling, but still
held fire. Then he saw them. Two legs moving. Then four. Into the clearing
now in full sight. A Bengal tiger. Enormous in the moonlight. Its muscled
 Peter J. Caulfield

legs churning toward them. The white breast grew larger and larger. Suddenly
it stopped, stared at them, magnificent head moving from left to right, nose
sniffing the hillock, perhaps confused by the several scents in front of it. Ri-
ley fired first on full automatic, mostly missing. A full clip, fourteen rounds.
One must have hit, though, because the cat spun round, clearly stung in
the hip. Then Bradley fired, more carefully, catching the animal once in the
stomach. It roared in pain, half threat, half whine. Finally Perrelli caught it in
its right shoulder, and the tiger dropped, not dead, but defeated. Still, Sandy
hadn’t fired.
In seconds, he had moved from terror to shock to relief to anger that
Riley ignored his order to hold fire. Now, they did stop shooting, all watch-
ing the agonized dying of the tiger. In one last move to charge or flee, the
animal pulled itself up onto its forepaws, exposing its broad white chest. The
three others looked at Sandy, as if to say, it’s your turn. Take your shot. Buy
your memory of this moment. He looked back at them. Then at the tiger. He
aimed straight for where he thought the heart should be and fired two shots.
The animal dropped immediately. It didn’t move again.

The tiger lay on its side in the noon sun in the middle of the firebase.
Shirtless G.I.’s, chests black or dark brown from months of Asian sun,
marveled at its size, four to five hundred pounds. One guy, a Mexican from
Detroit, reached forward and ran a hand along its muscled shoulder. “Jesus
Christ!” Another lifted its huge lifeless head with one hand on each ear while
his buddy took a picture with his cheap, white, Polaroid camera. A few sec-
onds later, they both grinned, the developed photo sliding slowly from the
mouth of the camera.
Riley stood off to the side telling Jimmy Dugan, a farm kid from Ohio
new to the platoon, the story of how he’d hit the cat first. Dugan’s face a
mixture of awe and envy. Sandy tried to hate Riley but wondered if he were
any better. If any of them were. They had cut a huge pole from a fallen 59

branch and tied the tiger to it. At dawn, the four of them had carried it, stop-
ping often, back to the firebase, arriving at mid-morning. Now they feasted
on their celebrity. A lifer, Staff Sergeant Bill Peterson, clapped Sandy’s shoul-
der. “Fucking-A, man! Fucking-A!” Sandy blushed, tried not to smile.
Peterson walked over to the tiger for a closer look. He stood, his legs
blocking the head for a moment, then moved along its body toward the tail.
The tiger, its eyes pinched shut, looked like a house cat, sleeping in the yard,
waiting for someone to come home.
 Andrei Voznesensky

The Nose
Our noses grow throughout our lives
—Scientific sources

Yesterday my doctor said:

“You may be a clever man
but you don’t know when
to come in from the cold—
your snout is frozen!”

Medical experts tell us that

noses grow triumphantly,
never pausing, relentless as clocks,
on me, on you, on Capuchin monks.

During the night the nose

of every citizen, high or low,
grows and grows.
The noses of janitors and ministers
hooting endlessly like owls,
chilly noses, noses out of joint,
noses bashed in by boxers
or caught in doors,
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and noses of our female neighbors

screwed like drills into keyholes.

Gogol, that restless, mystical soul,

sensed their role.
60 My friend George Buggs got drunk and in his dream
it seemed that, like a spire
breaking through sinks and chandeliers,
impaling ceilings
(awakened like receipts slammed onto a spike),
higher and higher above him
rose
his nose.
 Andrei Voznesensky

“What could it mean?” he wondered the next morning.

“A warning,” I said, “of Doomsday:
the tax man is going to audit you!”
Sure enough, on the thirtieth
they dragged poor Buggs to jail.

O Prime Mover of Noses!

Our noses grow longer as our lives grow shorter.
During the night those pallid lumps,
like birds of prey or pumps,
drain us dry.

They say that Eskimos

kiss with their noses. . .

but that has not caught on here in Russia.

Translated from the Russian by David Lee Garrison

61
 David Sahner

Epicurus Counsels the Moderns

“So long as we are here, death is not, and
when death is here, we are not.”
—Epicurus

Listen
To the call of the flesh
Plums
Milk
A fire’s heat
The needs we are born with

You my friend
A joyous accident
In a universe
As random as the fall

Of snow
You need to know that
And death has no grounds
For arrogance
For so long as we are here
Death is not
And when death is here
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We are not

Galaxies holding hands

Like boys and girls about
The Maypole
62
And just this once you raise
Your wet head from the womb
Embarrassed by your luck
As you should be

Let the waters

Bear you and bring
The gifts of happenstance
 Katharine Weber

Green Thumb

N o one at the hospice knows my real name, but a lot of them call me
the Plant Lady, and that’s how I think of myself sometimes. I wear my Plant
Lady apron with pockets for my pruners and scissors, and there’s a cunning
little loop on the right side for the plant misting bottle, which would be
perfect if I were right-handed. The apron isn’t really mine—it belongs to the
Brookfield Women’s Garden Club. It’s dark brown and much more mascu-
line than anything I might have picked for myself, but Elsie Edwards ordered
it from some catalogue and donated it when the Club voted to provide a
volunteer for the hospice, and she’s never been one for frilly florals. Her
living room, which I see periodically because our meetings take place once a
month in the homes of our members on a rotating basis (and as the Record-
ing Secretary I attend every meeting), is very matchy-datchy, all solid yellows
and blues.
I’ve never worn any kind of a uniform in my life, but there’s something
nice about getting out of my car every Wednesday and tying on the apron
and walking in there with a purpose that anyone can see just from looking at
me. I try to get there around eleven, so I’m not in the way of any doctors or
blood testing people, and I’m through before the lunch carts begin. I’m there
for less than an hour, really, but it has given me something in the middle of
my week to plan around.
I had a different routine when Duff was alive. I used to go nearly every
morning to the bookstore just a few blocks from my house, a pleasant walk,
really, past a small park. At the store no one ever said Duff wasn’t wel-
come, and he would sit beside me while I browsed and chose a category for
the morning. I liked to straighten up the shelves and help keep the books
organized, you see. I have no idea if the staff ever noticed the little jobs of
63
straightening and rearranging that I did for them. It’s a lovely store, with
old wooden floors and lots of books, and nobody minds if you browse for
hours, but I have to say it isn’t the tidiest bookstore I have ever seen. One
of the girls behind the counter would give Duff bites of her morning muf-
fin. I haven’t been back since, without him. I suppose there are books every
which way, especially in the gardening section where so many people seem to
browse without buying anything.
I agreed to keep up the club’s obligation at the hospice until spring,
 Katharine Weber

since most of the older members don’t like to go out on snowy days and I
don’t mind weather; living on my own, I’ve developed a lot of faith in front-
wheel drive.
I would gladly go there more often, but the hospice people requested
only one weekly visit, and the weekend nurses are supposed to water, though
they forget sometimes. Even though twice a week would probably be better
for the plants, once does seem to be sufficient. If a plant becomes sick or
dried-out between visits, it’s not very difficult to treat it. You can take your
time with sick plants. You can replace the dead ones.
No ficus that ever dropped dead has broken your heart, which is more
than I can say for every single cat or dog I have ever known. They all die on
you, one way or another. Or they disappear and you never know what hap-
pened. And which is worse, anyway, dragging a dying Portuguese Water Span-
iel that never harmed anybody off to chemotherapy week after week until the
poor thing is practically begging for a visit from Dr. Kevorkian or wondering
forever about an extremely affectionate Maine Coon cat who one day simply
stops showing up at the back porch for his supper?
I volunteered for the Garden Club job at the hospice after Duff died just
two months ago. He was a wise little Scottie, and he had been my compan-
ion for ten years when he sickened and then died very suddenly of a tumor
on his liver. Its size had doubled and doubled again in a matter of days and
had grown to the dimensions of a grapefruit, according to the veterinarian. I
haven’t been able to bring myself to eat a grapefruit since then.
Medical people always compare growths to foods, for some reason. Five
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years ago, when my gynecologist told me I needed a hysterectomy, he said I

had a scattering of fibroid tumors all through my uterus “like someone had
flung a handful of lentils in there.” It was a disturbing picture, and I didn’t
like to think of it. The pathology report, which Dr. Gilson offered me at
my follow-up visit and which I, for some unwise reason, read thoroughly,
64 described some of the larger fibroids as “bulging, whorled, and white,” as if
instead of the baby which at one time in my life I thought I would surely
have, I had produced some sort of tumorous law firm. Of course, I haven’t
eaten lentils since the operation.
I have developed a personal policy of avoidance of any detailed conver-
sations about other people’s insides, because inevitably someone will have
experienced a ghastly something the size of a walnut or a grape or a plum,
and it could be possible that someday I will end up on a diet restricted en-
 Katharine Weber

tirely to things too large to be used for comparative descriptions of diseased

body parts.

The hospice is located at the edge of the highway in a converted ware-

house in a strange, uninhabited part of town known for concerns such as
ladder factories and printing companies. It’s very bright and airy inside, with
a lot of glass and very good light, which the plants appreciate. One reason I
volunteered for the job, frankly, was to get out of the house more, because
I was afraid that I was beginning to hallucinate. On too-quiet afternoons I
could hear the distinctive sleep-breathing sound of a Scottie in the corners
of my bedroom. I know I heard his tags jingling to the door to greet me
when I came in from grocery shopping one morning. There were too many
days when I glimpsed Duff for an instant—a sweater or my handbag, inevita-
bly—on the sofa, by the arm that is stained just where he used to rest his dear
little bearded snout. I couldn’t return to the bookstore because the people
there would expect to see Duff beside me, and I knew I couldn’t bear those
expectant glances, which would make me see, and then not see, my sweet
Duff all over again.

The pathology report, which Dr. Gilson offered me at

my follow-up visit and which I, for some unwise reason,
read thoroughly, described some of the larger fibroids as
“bulging, whorled, and white,” as if instead of the baby which
at one time in my life I thought I would surely have, I had
produced some sort of tumorous law firm.

The first time I walked into the hospice and saw the center atrium jungle
of potted palms and ferns and ficus arranged attractively with a few benches,
I thought it was like a very nice mall, only without fountains. Or shops,
65
of course. But then I saw some of the patients, the ones who could walk
around, and for a brief moment, it seemed like some sanitized, futuristic ver-
sion of Auschwitz, the people in pajamas were so silent and cadaverous.
Every one of them has AIDS. That’s entirely what this place is for. It’s
all government funding, and the patients are too poor to be anywhere else
or they wouldn’t be here, but it’s quite a nice facility, really. I’m happy to
think my tax dollars can do something good, and a place such as this really
does give me the hope to think that the New Deal hasn’t been completely
 Katharine Weber

dismantled.
Most of the patients are a good deal younger than I am, and it just about
breaks my heart to think about how it must be to face death in your twen-
ties. I simply can’t imagine it. But then, I can’t really imagine being poor or
a drug addict or a homosexual or a prostitute. Or black, for that matter. (Not
all blacks call themselves African-Americans these days. My friend Mae, the
woman who comes in and does things for me around my house twice a week,
always says: What’s Africa got to do with me who was born down in Vienna,
Georgia, that’s what I’d like to know?)
But I’m just there to tend to the plants, which I do briskly and efficient-
ly, snapping off dead fronds and leaves, digging around in the soil to test the
pH with a little kit, watering, and misting. I say hello to the patients—I know
some of their names. Hello, Plant Lady, they say back. I am supposed to wear
surgical gloves, which are available for the staff in boxes here and there and
everywhere, but sometimes I forget. I always feel that when I put those gloves
on I am insulting the patients, as if my wearing the gloves signifies that I
believe they are unclean. It’s silly, anyway, because according to the newspa-
per articles I have read, both the patients and I would have to be engaging in
extremely unsuitable behavior involving these plants in order for there to be
any risk of disease transmission.
It’s hard not to be self-conscious going through my routine because it’s
like a performance, as there are always patients watching me prune or pick
off dead leaves or remove gum wrappers from the pots. I’m perfectly good at
this. I have a green thumb, as they say, and plants grow for me. Sometimes
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some of the patients talk to me about the plants or about something on

television. I get the feeling that a lot of them don’t have any visitors except
for people who come to provide services one way or another. I hadn’t really
wanted to get to know any of the patients because I don’t want to become
attached to any of them.
66 Then last month, when I was just about finished with the usual business,
one of the patients asked me to do something for him. His name is Mike,
and he’s confused a lot of the time. His navigational skills are poor—I’ve seen
him wandering into different patient rooms while tugging at his drawstrings,
and it has made me nervous, as it seems evident at those moments that he’s
searching for the bathroom. He is always intercepted by one of the nurses
before something unfortunate occurs, at least that is the case when I’ve been
on the premises.
 Katharine Weber

Could you water my plants for me?

That’s what he said. He asked this in such a pleading tone that I couldn’t
just flat out refuse, though I confess that my first thought was that he was
requesting in some euphemistic way that I assist him on a bathroom mission.
Also, I wasn’t sure about the protocol of entering a patient’s room. I followed
him through a doorway, though, half expecting that we were wandering
randomly, but next to the bed there was a framed snapshot Mike had shown
me over and over my first day at the hospice, of a healthy-looking Mike, with
a mustache and a thick head of shoulder-length hair, grinning with a group of
men on a fishing boat, each of them wearing identical caps from a local tire
company.
Here are all of my plants, he said, enunciating slowly and awkwardly, as
if he had rehearsed the line. He waved an arm in the direction of his win-
dowsill. On the sill were a row of vases and baskets of dead flowers.
These are flowers, I said.
Will you water them, please?
I didn’t know what to say. At their best, these cut flowers had been the
terrible kind of ordered-over-the-telephone arrangements involving carna-
tions and chrysanthemums, all of which were now shriveled and black against
plastic-looking greens that had stayed bright.
There’s no point, I said. These aren’t plants. They’re flowers. I mean,
they used to be flowers, do you see? I pulled a handful of dead carnations on
very short stems out of an ineptly anchored block of green foam and held it
out towards Mike, who stepped back, shaking his head in refusal.
Man, those plants need watering real bad. That’s why I’m asking you.
Will you water my plants?
I can’t water these, Mike, they’re dead, I kept saying, as if we spoke the
same language. They’re dead flowers. Cut flowers. Don’t you understand?
Then I cleaned up. I dumped each of those fetid arrangements into the
trash, and I washed out the vases, which stank of halitosic flower-water. I 67

left the empty vases and innocuous woven baskets, the sort that are made in
China by unfortunate children earning pennies a day, on his windowsill.
Mike just sat on his bed staring at me. When I said goodbye, he didn’t
answer.

That night I dreamed about giant vines growing in my bedroom. (I am

sophisticated enough about such things to recognize the sexual elements of
 Katharine Weber

this dream.) I tried to cut them with my pruning shears (I think I was wearing
the Plant Lady apron but, embarrassingly, nothing else), but the vines were
too thick and tough, and they grew longer and thicker before my eyes, snak-
ing out the bedroom door and twining down and around the stair banisters.
I woke then, almost tasting the words of the veterinarian on my tongue: this
growth has doubled in size in a matter of days. I slept very badly the rest of
the night.
The next morning I went back to the hospice. I had never been there on
a Thursday before, and it felt strange. I wasn’t wearing my apron, of course,
and as I approached the nurses’ desk, I could tell that the two women who al-
ways greeted me warmly on Wednesdays didn’t recognize me without it. One
got up and walked away, adjusting her cardigan sweater over her shoulders
with that universal gesture of nurses, and the other one snapped her gum and
scowled down at paperwork.
I was carrying a Christmas cactus from my house, one that looked as if it
would be blooming very soon.
This is for Mike, I said, putting it on the counter.
Mike’s gone, the woman said without looking up.
I couldn’t believe it. My hands began to tremble.
What do you mean? I said finally, after a long silence that she didn’t
seem to notice or participate in.
He ain’t here. He’s gone, she said again.
What do you mean by gone? Did he—Did he—I couldn’t say it.
She looked up at me then and recognized me.
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Oh, it’s you. Hi. She looked puzzled. Mike ain’t here on Thursdays. He’s
never here. Thursdays are his rehab day. He goes with the van downtown to
the bottle place. He sorts. Seeing the series of looks that must have crossed
my face while she spoke, the nurse opened her eyes wide and nodded with
sudden comprehension.
68 Oh no, honey, you thought I meant he was gone, like really gone. She
snorted a brief, mirthless laugh. No, most everyone do go from this place,
but when they go, they don’t go in the rehab van, I can tell you that. Mike
and them will be back by four, she said.

I’m still the Plant Lady, but my heart has gone out of it. Mike loved the
cactus, he told me the following Wednesday, but he missed his flowers. He
looked wistfully towards the row of empty vases and baskets when he said
 Katharine Weber

this, and I was stung by his sweet forgiveness of my terrible mistake. The
Wednesday after that, he had developed pneumonia and was on oxygen and
couldn’t leave his bed, so we just waved and he pointed towards the sill at
the cactus, which had bloomed with one small red flower, and he gave me a
thumbs up.
The following Wednesday, after I had finished my routine, when I put
my head around Mike’s door the first thing I saw was a vase of withered
sweetheart roses and a small Chinese azalea plant in a plastic pot on the sill
instead of the cactus and the empty vases and baskets. Mike was sitting on
his bed with his back to me, but when he turned his head, he was a gaunt
young woman in a seersucker robe, tethered to an intravenous drip, her head
wrapped tightly in a scarf or a bandage, I’m not sure which. She turned her
head and looked at me over her shoulder, like the girl in the Vermeer paint-
ing, and I knew in that instant Mike was really gone.
I’ve told the Garden Club that someone else will have to take over for
me sooner than I thought, even before the weather gets milder. Elsie Edwards
has a Range Rover, after all. It’s not that I don’t like doing the work. I just
can’t bear to form any more attachments right now. Maybe, in a while, when
it warms up, I’ll think about a puppy.

69
 TRAUMA

Trauma is life-changing in terms of loss, love, and,

most especially, time. This issue of the Connecticut
Review features fiction, poetry, scholarly articles,
personal narratives, and an interview that conceive
of trauma consistent with Sigmund Freud’s original
conception of it in 1895. The pieces in this issue
represent trauma both in their content as well as in
their form: many, like the histories they detail, present
time as non-linear; they echo and repeat significant
moments via flashbacks; and they question the ability
of language to convey unimaginable events.
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70

Before and after photos of a two-story wood frame house about a

mile from an atomic blast. Both pictures were taken on May 5, 1955.
(Source: National Archives)
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

Trauma’s Time
“What I wanted to say just now was that there’s no way
we’re supposed to make it—you know that, don’t
you?—there’s no way we’re supposed to last.
It’s the final damage. It’s what always comes after.”
—R. Clifton Spargo, 2005

In his short story appearing in this special section of the Connecticut

Review, R. Clifton Spargo depicts lovers saying goodbye at the end of an af-
fair disrupted by rape. The rape, it seems, not only terrorized the protagonist,
Anne, when it happened, but it also somehow tainted the couple’s past, and
it prevented their future. As Anne sadly proclaims in the final pages: “there’s
no way we’re supposed to last. It’s the final damage.” And, with a striking ref-
erence to the future, Anne links the damage of the rape with time—with the
time of trauma: a time that is paradoxically not the moment itself, but “what
comes after,” what will always come after, the “afterwardsness” or belatedness
of trauma itself.
Entitled “Second Sorrow,” a self-conscious coda to Spargo’s 1999 “Anne,
Afterward,” this story seems to present a new understanding not simply of
the effects of rape, but of the problem of time that is inextricable from trau-
matic experience. The emphasis on the word “after” in each of these stories
refers not simply to how people cope physically or emotionally in the wake
of a traumatic experience, but to the psychic dimension as well: the repeti-
tion of the traumatic event in the mind of the survivor and the implications
this repetition has for those who love her. Spargo’s stories capture a very
precise understanding of “trauma,” one suggested by Sigmund Freud in 1895:
Trauma is not simply a horrific event, but it is also an event that misaligns
our perception of time. Such an event occurs too soon for consciousness to
process it during the moment in which it occurs, so that subsequent time
for the survivor turns on the repetition of the key aspects of the event—with
71
no beginning and no end—in search of that missed encounter with death.
Trauma theory, in this light, articulates what’s at stake when a witness or vic-
tim must confront her traumatic past endlessly, living day to day with a sense
of skewed temporality. After a traumatic event, there appears to be neither a
before nor after.
The time of trauma is what comes after. And before.
During a crucial moment in “Second Sorrow,” Anne suggests to her
long-time lover Carter how only an unfathomable event such as rape can
 Aimee L. Pozorski

simultaneously separate and unite them. In trying to represent traumatic mo-

ments such as an encounter with death and the ultimate rape as otherworldly,
“Anne, Afterward” links, on the one hand, Carter’s new understanding of
Anne as an angel following her miraculous survival, with, on the other hand,
the angels who hover above her during and after the event. “Second Sorrow,”
however, takes a different approach. Grounded in the quotidian details of
the couple and their lives together, the story takes an important turn when
Anne confesses: “I like it that every day we stay together after my rape is such
a long day. It’s an eternity to other people’s time, and even if I left tomor-
row we’d still be together because of everything we can’t forget.” The time of
trauma, as Anne crucially suggests here, never ends—not only for the survi-
vor, but also for her loved ones. In this rendition, the couple are bound not
by memories of the past, conjured at will, forgotten if necessary, as would be
the case with most couples, but rather by what cannot be forgotten, even if
one tried. They are bound by memories that do not fade with time, but that
repeat endlessly. Afterward.
Spargo’s emphasis on how trauma deforms the narratives of our lives
connects up with an important contemporary discourse around catastro-
phe. In her 1996 book, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,
for example, Cathy Caruth writes about the impact of trauma not only on
narrative, but on history as well. In her emphasis on time gone awry—on the
effects of a witness’s failure to claim a traumatic experience as it is happen-
ing—Caruth reveals a significant debt not only to Sigmund Freud, but also
addresses the more recent scholarship of trauma and its theoretical counter-
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parts as modeled by the work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. In theo-
rizing this “unclaimed experience,” Caruth addresses the endless repetition
of the traumatic event in the mind and life of the witness, as well as the sense
that this moment necessarily affects all other moments in time. The book
opens with the revelation that:
72 Freud wonders at the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way
in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for
those who have passed through them. In some cases, as Freud
points out, these repetitions are particularly striking because
they seem not to be initiated by the individual’s own acts but
rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of
fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected, and
which seem to be entirely outside of their wish or control. (1-2)
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

As Caruth points out here, what defines a traumatic event involves not
simply crucial and horrifying details of the event itself, but also the temporal
effects of that event—precisely, the haunting imposition of these events in the
lives of the survivors. Key words in this passage such as “uncanny,” “posses-
sion,” “subjected,” and “fate” emphasize the apparent agency of an event
as it becomes inextricable, and yet oddly separate, from consciousness. For
Caruth, it is as if the future—what always comes after—is as much at stake as
the present time. The trauma, in other words, lives in the present, and in the
future, as much as the past that carries with it the original event.
Looking back, it appears as if Freud’s own articulation of the displace-
ment of time and narrative was, on its own, not easy to integrate into cultural
consciousness. In other words, at the very moment that Freud posited his
radical and disorienting theory of trauma, the articulation of the theory
was as traumatic as the events he was trying to understand at the time: a
confrontation with sexual development, sexual assault, hysteria, and—later,
in his 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle—the effects of trench warfare during
World War I. Freud’s earliest theory, called Nachträglichkeit in Project for a
Scientific Psychology (1950[1895]) and developed through his correspondence
with friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess between 1887 and 1902, works
to distinguish between trauma and any other kind of event in a person’s
life, explaining that a “traumatic event” is not simply one that is difficult
to endure or even unimaginable. For Caruth, we can turn back again to
Freud’s own writing at the time to see that Freud, too, was unprepared for
what he encountered in his thoughts: “Freud suggests that he discovered this
patient, in whose symptoms he came to discover and develop some of his

73

Ruins seen from Circular Church, Charleston, SC, 1865.

(Source: National Archives)
 Aimee L. Pozorski

central traumatic concepts, in a trip in which he was attempting to forget the

neuroses—as if the theory emerged as itself the interruption of a forgetting.”
Indeed, the tradition in trauma—in the psychoanalytic works, the criticism,
but, most especially, the literary tradition–bears this out.
In my interview with Caruth in these pages, I ask why Freud’s theory of
time as it relates to trauma seems as traumatic as the events he is addressing
in his patients. I ask, in other words, why there appears to be a fifty-year gap
between the 1920 formal articulation of trauma, on the one hand, and its re-
turn after the Vietnam War, on the other hand, when trauma newly emerges
as a problem for psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sociology (Explorations in
Memory 3). After all, this event—namely, the emergence of trauma as a theo-
ry—appears to follow the same structure as the traumatic events it describes:
It was an event that came too soon, and was largely missed, only to return
to us repeatedly via literary representations, political studies, and historical
events thoughout the decades that we align with world-wide atrocity.
A recipient of the 1930 Goethe Prize, a prestigious German literary
award, Freud set in motion not simply a traumatic theory of trauma, but
several generations of writers within this traumatic history as well—all writers
who unwittingly happen upon repeated representations of traumatic events
even as we try to heal from them, or even forget. Literary events among
authors in this tradition betray a sense that they, too, are trying to come to
terms not only with Freud’s ideas, but also the implications of these ideas:
implications for understanding the alienating effects of trauma itself.
As is the case with many contemporary authors interested in exploring
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trauma and its effects, Spargo returns to the same moment of trauma—the
rape of a loved one—across several works. An exemplary case of how the
literary work itself enacts traumatic repetition, “Second Sorrow” is not only a
story about the repeated force of rape in the lives of its protagonists, but also
enacts, as a meta-fictional commentary, its own return to the missed moment
74 of a horrible rape, a moment missed not only by the woman who stares over
her own shoulder as she tries to remove herself from the situation, but also
by her partner, the man who thinks about her, not knowing her reality, as he
works late into the night.
This structural problem of time, as Freud hinted over 100 years ago,
is also a problem of history. It is the problem of survival and witness, the
problem of facing a horrible moment over and over, of facing the moments
of our loved ones, our neighbors, our ancestors. Our current moment indeed
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

appears as the time of trauma—as trauma’s time—not only with a new interest
in trauma and trauma studies, but also with the emergence of history itself.
With their grandparents passing on, the third generation after the Holocaust,
along with their parents, have come forward to articulate the haunting of a
genocidal past. Increasingly, the witnesses to September 11, 2001 have come
forward to tell their stories, along with the story of New York City. Every day,
media accounts detail the current and belated suffering of the soldiers and
the people in Iraq, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the cleanup efforts
following Hurricane Katrina. And the list goes on with each passing day—lists
filled with fragmented details involving cultural disasters, natural disasters,
historical disasters, and such personal disasters as rape, incest, murder, theft.
But the “time” in the time of trauma, as I have tried to articulate here, is not
simply one moment in history during which trauma appears prevalent. The
“time of trauma” or “trauma’s time” also refers to a radical change in the way
we understand the relationship between time and trauma, or, more precisely,
between time and consciousness, of its effects not only on the present, but
the past, and—most strikingly—the future.
In keeping with the dual understanding of trauma, this issue of the
Connecticut Review features fiction, poetry, scholarly articles, personal nar-
ratives, and an interview that conceive of trauma in its most traditional
sense—through repeated references to time. The pieces in this issue represent
trauma, then, both in their content as well as in their formal innovations:
many, like the histories they detail, are presented non-linearly; they echo
and repeat significant moments via flashbacks, and they question the ability
of language to convey such horrific events. In this way, Cathy Caruth writes
on Vietnam, R. Clifton Spargo on sexual assault, Pamela Leck on treating
survivors of 9-11 (in this case, a worker for the NYFD), Natalie Friedman
on the third generation following the Holocaust, and Stephanie Cherolis on
the surprising failure of language evident when Holocaust survivors try to
articulate their experiences for the Fortunoff Video Archive. In other words, 75

these selections view trauma as having reclaimed time to convey a compel-

ling history that remains with us. Cherolis, for example, suggests that viewers
of the Fortunoff videos “recognize that the Holocaust is not safely situated
in the past but still painfully exists for survivors in the present.” Friedman,
called as a witness to the Holocaust, opens her memorable essay with the
words, “I have nightmares about something that never happened to me.”
And Leck, in writing about a fireman who suffers from PTSD four years after
 Aimee L. Pozorski

the 9-11 attack, acknowledges “wounds that have been covered over, but are
still raw and unhealed.” The raw, unhealed wounds of history–both personal
and public–resonate equally forcefully in the poetry and short fiction of
Elizabeth England, Irene Sherlock, Jennifer Thompson, Nicole Cooley, and
Grace Cavalieri. Trauma, such authors as Martha Serpas, Nicole Simek, and J.
Karl Bell illustrate, is as inextricable from history as it is from human subjec-
tivity and the natural landscapes we too readily take for granted. The time of
trauma, they reveal, has necessarily lost its innocence.
As these selections make clear, in other words, trauma theory remains
increasingly pertinent as a way of addressing this loss. Trauma theory and
and the work of the writers published here provide a way of addressing the
unspeakable moments in our history and culture that refuses to reduce trau-
matic events to banal, redemptive, superficial, or flat statements about the
world. Perhaps most significantly, however, all of our contributions suggest
an ethical dimension to trauma and trauma studies—a dimension that begs
for a response that can only attempt to recognize suffering in the twentieth
century and beyond. According to Caruth, what is at stake here is a recogni-
tion of “the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the
trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to an en-
counter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to
another’s wounds” (Unclaimed 8). In this way, the important work of Caruth
in this field, like the work of her predecessors Felman and Laub, suggests that
an adequate witness to a traumatic event does not turn away. Building on
this notion of witnessing, the work that appears in this issue—the work of a
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newly emergent generation of writers in the tradition of trauma—reveals how

the time of trauma is what always comes after. In this paradoxical moment
simultaneously outside of time and eternally, disruptively, present within
it, what matters most, these writers say, is how we listen to the survivors of
traumatic events. Such survivors speak from within an alternative experience
76 of time, and what we do with their words reveals, if not understanding, then,
at the very least, a belated witness to their knowledge of trauma’s time, the
time which always comes after.

Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Spargo, Clifton R. “Anne, Afterward.” North Atlantic Review. 11(1999): 253-64; revised and
republished by The Voices and Faces Project at www.voicesandfaces.org.
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

An Interview with Trauma

Pioneer Cathy Caruth
During the mid 1990s, Cathy Caruth’s critical and theoretical work
on trauma made headlines, and not just among university departments in
the US where scholars were intellectually invested in the representation
of trauma in psychoanalysis, critical theory, and history. Her work also
generated excitement throughout the world, where people from all gen-
erations and cultures were looking for a way to understand the impact of
traumatic history and the “crises of witnessing” it produces. Looking back
over the last decade, it is not surprising that her eloquent discussions of
trauma’s centrality in the founding texts of psychoanalysis, contemporary
film, and theory resonated beyond the walls of the academy. Her sensi-
tive treatment of the apparently inexplicable—and recurring—effects of
historical and personal crises resulting from the Holocaust, the Vietnam
War and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to name only a few,
appears to have given literary critics and other academics a name for what
ordinary people have known for a long time–that traumatic experiences
implicate all of us by demanding an adequate, but simultaneously impos-
sible, response.

Pozorski: Sigmund Freud’s early thought on trauma—articulated as Nach-

träglichkeit in A Project for a Scientific Psychology [1950 (1895)]—suggests that a
traumatic event is not simply one that is, by definition, horrible to endure.
Rather, the idea of trauma comes more from a theory of time–a kind of
skewed temporality. That is, for an event to be called traumatic, it must be
experienced and, in a sense, take place belatedly. It is interesting that, in
1920 with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud himself returned to this idea, in
a somewhat different version from its original formulation, to help explain 77

what he was seeing in the veterans of World War I. However, in the United
States, it wasn’t until fifty years later, following the Vietnam War, that the
problem of trauma for psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sociology came into
broad cultural recognition. Would you say that there was a fifty-year gap
between the time that Freud conceived of trauma theory and the time when
trauma was considered something to be taken seriously? In a way, given the
re-emergence of trauma studies in the last two decades, is it fair to say that
 Aimee L. Pozorski

the birth of trauma was in itself traumatic as an event that came too soon,
and was largely missed, only to return to us repeatedly through the decades
that we align with world-wide atrocity?

Caruth: It is very interesting to connect the temporality of trauma as a

delayed or “missed” event to the temporality of its own history. That trauma
(as an experience and as a theory) has a history, that it appears on the scene,
disappears, returns, etc.–and perhaps changes in nature—is important to think
about and raises the question of which conceptual framework would be able
to account for such a history. Since the notion of trauma, as a delayed experi-
ence, is itself a rethinking of the relation between history and temporality,
it is quite possible that we could not understand the concept’s own vicis-
situdes without at the very least taking into account the framework provided
by trauma theory itself. As you seem to imply, this inquiry would involve
examining the history of trauma in (at least) two somewhat different ways:
on the one hand, in the context of various empirical, cultural, and ideologi-
cal events (such as wars, institutional histories within psychiatry, and chang-
ing ideological and cultural frameworks in Europe and the US) and, on the
other hand, as a conceptual event in itself, the shock to thinking occasioned
by the introduction of this strange notion of temporality that does not seem
integratable into traditional philosophical (or, for that matter, psychoana-
lytic) conceptions of time. The two dimensions are entangled; once the
notion of traumatic temporality has been introduced, it is no longer simply
possible to place this notion within a larger and more traditional temporal
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framework (i.e., to place the conceptual event of the theory of trauma within
the framework of the empirical, institutional, and cultural histories that are
its context), since that would disavow the central insight of the theory, which
suggests that our more traditional conceptual histories may have to be re-
thought. On the other hand, the theory of trauma is centered on the encoun-
78 ter between the mind and an event originating outside it, thus also suggesting
that we should examine carefully the relation between, for example, the
re-emergence of trauma theory in Freud (with Beyond the Pleasure Principle)
and the occurrence of war. Trauma is, after all, is an attempt to think dif-
ferently the relation between “event” and “mind,” in which the two are not
separable in the usual ways. (For instance, in the repetition compulsion the
mind seems to think less about history than to be its vehicle.) Or put some-
what differently: can we think the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

of war without trauma theory? And can we think trauma theory without the
history of war? Is the theory a conscious set of speculations about experience,
with its own separate theoretical history, or is it part of the actual events
upon which it speculates, as a form of memory, forgetting, and experience in
its own right?
(It should be noted that there are a number of people who have written
about the peculiar historical patterns of trauma conceptualization—Robert
Ostroff, for example, and perhaps most notably Judith Hermann—although
the full theorization of this history has not taken place. And there are a series
of emergences and recessions of the theory—after World War I, World War
II, within the context of incest and rape studies, etc.—as well as differences
between the history of the theory in Europe and the US. So the specificity of
these circumstances would need to be addressed.)
But the place to begin such a study would necessarily, I believe, be
Freud’s own writing, since he always gave his own theoretical texts on trauma
a self-reflective frame that carefully linked trauma as an object of study to
the nature of the study itself. Thus, for example, in his early “Katharina” case
study from Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud suggests that he discovered this
patient, in whose symptoms he came to discover and develop some of his
central traumatic concepts, during a trip in which he was attempting to forget
the neuroses—as if the theory itself emerged as the interruption of a forget-
ting. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as Jacques Derrida has noted, the struc-
ture of Freud’s own speculative remarks is linked to the structure of the game
of the child playing fort/da and which becomes one of the central objects
of his theorization. I have also noted that one cannot separate the “depar-
ture/return” game of the child from the actual structure of Freud’s argument
about the child at that point (moving from an interpretation of the game as
departure, as return, and then again as departure), and I believe that at this
moment in his text the child’s own language passes into Freud’s text. And in
Moses and Monotheism (1939) Freud carefully links the structure of the writing 79

of his text—which, as he notes, separates into several parts, is divided by a

gap, and repeats in the second part much of what is in the first part, etc.—to
the structure of the traumatic history that it theorizes. In every case, Freud
seems to suggest that trauma and its theorization cannot be separated and
that this is not a hindrance to, but at the very heart of, its insight. This would
also be the point of departure, then, I believe, for a study of the history of
trauma theory.
 Aimee L. Pozorski

Pozorski: I am curious about the place of psychoanalytic thought in your

own career as a scholar, and about how trauma theory came to you from
your readings of Freud, Lacan, de Man, Kant, and Wordsworth, among oth-
ers. Shoshana Felman has said that poetry is language that does not know
what it knows, which seems to come from a deconstructive tradition, but also
a psychoanalytic one: according to psychoanalysis, the analysand may not
know what she knows until she speaks it in analysis. This understanding of a
language that reveals something beyond itself, as if by accident, seems crucial
for the work you’ve done in trauma. It’s as if, as you say in Unclaimed Experi-
ence (1996), all we have are the words—unexpected, alienating, otherwordly–to
gesture toward a terrible and incomplete past. Could you talk about how this
awareness has grown out of your own particular intellectual background, as a
student of Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and also as the daughter of two
psychoanalysts?

Caruth: When I was working on Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud, who
were the authors I examined in my first book, I was looking at philosophical,
literary, and psychoanalytic stories of experience (or theories attempting to
account for experience). And what I found at the center of these texts were
encounters that were not, strictly speaking, experiential: death encounters
between parents and dead children or between children and dead parents. I
was interested in these non-phenomenal encounters that seemed somehow
central to what was otherwise an experience defined by perception or phe-
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nomenality, and that passed itself into these texts through certain aspects of
their figuration. I had planned to continue this work by writing on the figure
of the accident, when I came across the example of the traumatic accident in
Freud, which appears as the prime example of the event that causes trauma.
Trauma is itself an event that is in one sense the most immediate of experi-
80 ences and the least experiential, just as the flashbacks seem overwhelmingly
visual and yet cannot be described as traditionally perceptual or phenom-
enal. In Freud too, this encounter must be read in his text not only at the
level of the concept but also at the level of the figure—for example, as I have
suggested, in the figures of departure and awakening—and to this extent the
theory retains a literary element. So the link between trauma theory and Ro-
manticism for me is itself an entanglement of concept, figure, and accident.
There is certainly a resonance as well, for me, between the notion of
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

trauma as an event that returns as an interruption of consciousness, and the

theorization of reference as I have understood it, at least in part, in Paul de
Man. This is why I placed the chapter on de Man in the trauma book. De
Man’s writing on the way in which language produces and resists its own
theorization can be understood, I believe, in terms of a kind of interruption
that occurs in reading, the interruption of closed (formal or hermeneutic)
systems by linguistic elements not containable within them. I have under-
stood this as his way of rethinking reference as something that interrupts
rather than supports meaning. As Cynthia Chase has put it, we would need a
non-semantic notion of reference. This event of reality (or the imposition of
otherness) in reading, a reality that imposes itself even though it might not
be recognizable in any pre-conceived conceptual framework, can be thought
together with trauma theory, I believe, although I would never wish to reduce
one to the other. And again, I would point to the fact that both “theories,”
if we can call them that—de Man’s writing on reference and Freud’s writing
on trauma—cannot be closed off as conceptual or theoretical systems. For
example, I have suggested that de Man’s rethinking of reference in “The
Resistance to Theory,” “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” and his
essay on Kleist’s Marionettentheater must be read in part through the figure of
falling that weaves its way through these texts. Freud also links the figure of
the impact of trauma within the conceptual theory of his own writing to the
passage from the Unfall of the accident to the auffallen that is the striking of
the theoretical recognition of trauma. But, of course, one would not want to
equate one fall with another. . . .

Pozorski: What does your training as a Romanticist bring to your ideas

about trauma and trauma theory? I am thinking particularly about the place
of the child in your writing—on Locke, Wordsworth, Freud, Lacan—who
appears as invested with all of the characteristics of the Romantic subject. Is
there something about the representation of the child in Romanticism that 81

sheds light, for you, on what, precisely, is at stake in the game in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, the dream of the burning child in Freud’s The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams (1900), and Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
(1977)? Your later work, too, reveals a concern for, or interest in, the relation-
ship between children and trauma—the inner-city Atlanta teen who gives
up the clothing of a lost friend, the child who witnessed an avalanche of
sand. . . What is it about the place of the child that seems so fundamental to
 Aimee L. Pozorski

our theorizing trauma?

Caruth: It is true that I have written about the child in many texts—though
that happened by accident, not intentionally—and the child is perhaps a
figural connection between my essays on Enlightenment and Romantic texts
and the later twentieth-century trauma texts. In both cases, there seems to be
a link to death, or a death encounter, which remains resistant to full theoriza-
tion (it is a genuinely and obscurely figural moment in the philosophical,
literary, and narrative texts, and something I believe I cannot theorize com-
pletely). There is a kind of radical vulnerability to the child and an incom-
prehensibility of the child’s language that emerges in some of Freud’s and
Lacan’s writing on trauma, and that appears to place the child on the side of
death, or of dying—in Locke (the mother endlessly mourning her dead child
in the chapter on association) and in Freud and Lacan (in the dream of the
burning child) we can see this at work—and that remains unreachable, though
central, to the adult (or to the survival that is redefined around the relation
to this entity). But the child is also the one who seems to have a precocious
relation to death, as in Wordsworth or the child playing fort/da, and who is,
itself, defined in terms of this relation. As Robert Jay Lifton noted, trauma is
associated in the later Freud with adult experience, and the child’s game of
repetition is placed alongside that of soldiers going to the battlefield. That
juxtaposition of war and childhood is telling and may draw on an uncon-
scious history of sorts within the figure of the child.
But in Wordsworth and in Freud we also see a central link between the
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child and the development of language, and there is something both foun-
dational and non-integratable in the way in which the child and its language
enter the linguistic system. In Freud, as I have suggested, it is the child’s own
somewhat incomprehensible game of “o/a” (or perhaps it is just “o”), rein-
terpreted by Freud as “fort” and “da,” that, I believe, becomes the linguistic
82 foundation for the theory of trauma as an attempt to return to the moment
before the trauma that always departs again. Something incomprehensible
that Freud hears in the child’s just-forming language passes into the theory. I
believe that it is here that we might find a history stretching back to Roman-
ticism, a figural history that links trauma and literature around the child.

Pozorski: I wonder if you would be willing to talk for a bit about the ethical
dimensions of trauma. You speak in the “Traumatic Awakenings” chapter of
 Aimee L. Pozorski T R AU M A

Unclaimed Experience of an ethical imperative of an awakening that has yet

to occur (112), which suggests, on the one hand, that we must awaken to
the unspeakable, unspoken traumas of our collective histories. But this also
seems to be a very personal kind of ethics: one that demands we awaken to
the unexpected speakers—or even literary texts—before us. Is there a way in
which to conceive of trauma theory as a theory of ethics—of confronting the
alienating forms that we cannot master on a daily basis—so as not to under-
mine its major contributions to much larger scale historical events such as
the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam?

Caruth: The chapter in which I write about the imperative to awaken con-
cerns Lacan’s reading of the dream of the burning child, in which he reads
that dream in terms of his understanding of the unconscious as “ethical”
and in which he allows the dream to resonate (within the framework of the
seminar as a whole) with images of the Holocaust. The analysis is interesting
because it is intensely personal in a way—a father near his child’s dead body
confronted, in a dream, with the dying child’s words—but it clearly carries
with it larger resonances (Christian as well). This echoes Freud’s own tenden-
cy to move from the individual (for example, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle),
in which the trauma concerns, say, the nightmare of a soldier or the game of
a child, to something larger than the individual, such as the death drive or
the life drive. One way to understand that move is to suggest that the trauma
contains within it already a larger intergenerational or collective structure—
who could say, for example, that an experience that one does not fully pos-
sess is simply one’s own?—and that the very notion of trauma undoes some
of our general distinctions between individual and collective. Thus Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism can be read through each other,
around the figure of departure, although the individual/collective distinction
is not dissolved. The life drive in Beyond, I think, must be read in that text
(as I have argued in my essay “Parting Words”) through Freud’s own, very 83

specific language in that text, a language that gives testimony to, repeats and
parts from the language (in the game of the child playing fort/da) of the death
drive.
Lacan’s association of this awakening to ethics stems, I believe, from
the otherness and imperative quality of the child’s words, from the way in
which the traumatic awakening of the dream is not so much simply a matter
of what one can know as of how one must respond. (And how one must
 Aimee L. Pozorski

respond to a voice and an other that cannot be integrated conceptually.) This

response is also impossible, to some extent, because it is always too late—this
is Lacan’s rereading of the originary structure of the death drive, I think—but
precisely to that extent absolutely necessary. Because it is a rereading of the
death drive, Lacan’s analysis of the dream implicitly links the individual
response and a larger historical necessity, though obscurely.
I cannot answer the question you have asked fully, but I would point out
that the question of trauma and ethics as it emerges through the Freud/Lacan
pairing must always, I think, be linked to the notion of events, of occurrenc-
es. In Freud, trauma is about occurrence, about historicity. It is not about
a structure alone; the emergence of life is an event in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, and is structured by the shock of its own belatedness—it is always a
survival (though only potentially, in history, a trauma). Similarly, the child’s
voice in the dream of the burning child occurs in relation to an event, and
the awakening repeats (and testifies to) this event (though it may not always
be simple to identify the event). So we cannot simply assimilate trauma
theory to a philosophical ethical theory (for example, Levinas), because
there is this historical dimension that is crucial. Now, of course, one can ask
whether or not we might think of individual encounters as “events” and thus
extend the model beyond deaths, wars, etc. I would simply want to say here
that whether individual or collective, the awakening occurs in relation to and
as the passing-on of an event whose true impact lies in the future.
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84
 R. Clifton Spargo T R AU M A

Second Sorrow
I worry about it sometimes, that you didn’t know what you were getting
into. Do you think if you had it to do over again, knowing what you know
now, knowing all that was about to happen and the toll it would take, do you
think you’d still choose me?
Probably you would, you’re a good person. You might do it because you
thought you should help me. Do you ever wonder about that—about the
difference between loving somebody because you have to love them and be-
cause you want to love them? Sometimes I’m not sure which is which. When
you first met me, I’m pretty certain you’d have said, “I have to love her,” and
I liked it so very much that I was compelling to you, that you never felt as if
you could not choose me.

Carter, I don’t want you to feel obligated to me. I’m a strong person,
I know that about myself. Sometimes with you I’m weak, but that’s only
because I allow myself to be, because I love you enough to let you help me.
If you left right now, I’d pull through. Maybe I couldn’t have done it three
years ago, right after I was attacked, maybe not even last year, but now I
could. I don’t need you the same way I needed you even a year ago, and I
like it that I’m getting to a place where I might not need you at all. I’m grate-
ful for you, but I get tired of thinking I’ll always be in your debt.
You know that African tribal belief that when you save someone’s life
the person you saved belongs to you forever? It’s a beautiful idea, but so
burdensome. I’ve said this before and I believe it—that you helped save me,
that I was in the most impossible place. I needed someone who was differ-
ent from everybody else, who could be only for me, but maybe it’s been too
much for you.
I know this about you: you’d never leave until you were sure I was going 85
to be all right, and I’ve been thinking lately that in your mind you’ll never
really be sure. You’re always calling to check on me, to make sure I’m home
safely, because you know I could just be out walking again some night and
it could happen all over again. You think about that every day, don’t you? I
feel sorry for you sometimes. For a while I felt safer because you were always
worrying for me. It was like being protected. I was tired of worrying for
myself, and somebody did it for me. Do you remember how we would be
 R. Clifton Spargo

walking in Georgetown and I would let myself go, like a kid, ready to walk
off the curb into traffic? But you were always paying attention. Every time
you’d catch me by the arm and pull me out of harm’s way. For a while there
we started to count how many times you’d saved my life. We made a game of
it. It was funny. I was so accidental, it seems impossible to me now that I was
once like that.
After you’d saved my life, I could always laugh and be happy.
Whenever I was at home and depressed, physically unable to get out
of bed, I didn’t have to call you because you were so reliable, you were so
concerned. You’d call me and say, “Anne, are you sad again today?” and I’d
admit that I was, and then you would just talk to me and let me be sad.
It’s not that simple anymore, though. The world is hospitable to vio-
lence, to sorrow, I can see that clearly. I read the true crime books, I read
those stories of rape in which an armed man enters a house while a couple
is together and he holds the gun to the husband’s head and ties him up, and
then he rapes the woman in the other room or sometimes in the same room.
What could you do about that? If you tried to save me, he’d kill you; and
that’s the only thing that could possibly make it worse—watching you die.
The rape wouldn’t matter then, I wouldn’t even care. If we’re ever together
and we get attacked, I don’t want you to interfere. I can survive anything,
even another rape, as long as I know you’d still be alive. Promise me you
won’t do anything.

Shall I tell you something?

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Do you remember how I used to say that someday I would tell you
everything? How I was so mysterious about a part of me that was too painful
to share? Sometimes I can’t even remember what all my secrets were, what it
was that I thought was so awful that if you knew about it you couldn’t love
me anymore, why I had to let you see me only gradually, letting my flaws
86 become apparent only once you were already enamored of me in a thousand
ways.
What I wanted to say just now was that there’s no way we’re supposed
to make it—you know that, don’t you?—there’s no way we’re supposed to
last. It’s the final damage. It’s what always comes after, like when a couple
loses a child. Sooner or later their relationship is a casualty. Every day you
go forward, but you’re a constant reminder to one another of the awful thing
that you endured together. Even when you’re not thinking about it, you’re
 R. Clifton Spargo T R AU M A

still thinking about it.

I like it that every day we stay together after my rape is such a long day.
It’s an eternity to other people’s time, and even if I left tomorrow we’d still
be together because of everything we can’t forget.
Still, there’s part of me that wants to be done with it all, to close it off
from memory—God, how I wanted to shut down so many times after it first
happened. You stayed by my side and gave me a choice, and then one day I
decided I wouldn’t shut you out. We were on Hilton Head, and we couldn’t
go in the ocean because it was windy and never above sixty-two degrees, and
we played table tennis, read novels under blankets at the beach, and took
long afternoon naps. One morning I was terribly depressed, and I’d told you
over and over again that I wanted to die. But you didn’t badger me or barter
with me, you didn’t treat me like a child. You just said that you would never
be the same if I died. And I didn’t tell you—I couldn’t say it out loud just in
case I couldn’t keep my promise—but it was at that moment I promised not
to shut myself off from you.

Do you think if you had it to do over again, knowing

what you know now, knowing all that was about to happen
and the toll it would take, do you think you’d still choose me?

Tell me, did you think I was mysterious when you first met me? I some-
times wonder what you thought I might be hiding. What would you find
unacceptable? How much would it take to drive you away?
I was always so worried about our differences. “We are so different,” I
would remind myself, but then I couldn’t remember how, except that there
were things you wanted that didn’t require me. There were times after we first
met when I would talk myself into leaving you for your own good. I would
write notes to myself in my journal, “You must leave him so he can find 87
someone who will not be so troublesome, who will not get in the way of all
the things he wants to do.” I really hated my own neediness. And that was
all before I was attacked. Which goes to show that often what we think of as
need isn’t the real thing. After the rape, then I needed you.
Did you like being needed? I was pretty sure you did. Do you remem-
ber how, after you moved me into that very secure, high-rise apartment in
Arlington, immediately I began to hate the place? My god, it had no charac-
 R. Clifton Spargo

ter. Of course, I was also depressed, and probably would have been depressed
no matter where I was. I’d get myself back and forth to work each day, that
was all I could do. I couldn’t be bothered with hanging prints or cleaning
the apartment. For how long did I sleep on that ridiculous mattress on the
floor? It seemed entire days passed and I barely moved from that mattress.
You’d drive down for the weekends, and you’d find me in bed and you’d of-
fer to take me to dinner, only I refused to shower or take a bath because the
bathroom was dirty. So you scrubbed the bathroom, I can still picture you
down on your hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom for me. You’d call
me into the bathroom to see if it was passable yet, and I’d point out a hint of
mold under the faucet or soap scum on the shower curtain, and you’d walk
me back to bed and clean some more. Eventually the bathroom met my stan-
dards, and you drew me a bath and helped me get undressed. And afterward
when I was outside, for the first time all day in sunlight even though it was
already evening, I did feel better.

Do you ever wonder about that—about the difference

between loving somebody because you have to
love them and because you want to love them?

Most of the time I can’t remember anything of what it was like back
then. I can remember your kindness if I force myself, but the person I once
was is barely recognizable to me. If I saw a picture of her, if I saw a home
movie of a young woman who looked like me and was acting that way, I’d
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say, “Who is that? What’s wrong with her?”

I’m not that broken person anymore, and I know how much that pleases
you. I did it, I kept making myself better, but not without your help. I’m
your achievement. Yet the broken me is always there in your memory, like a
parent who fights with a grown child by remembering the rebellious teenager
88
in her, never the autonomous adult. With a parent, what you say can never
be judged solely for the pure truth or error in it. We’ve always had the most
interesting conversations—about whether F. Scott and Zelda ever really fell
out of love, about why the Boomtown Rats might be better than the Beatles,
about whether or not Bob Dylan is really a poet. Still, maybe there’s part
of you that handles me. You don’t mean to be condescending, maybe you
can’t even hear it when you are, but if you’ve seen someone when she’s truly
vulnerable maybe you can never get that idea of her out of your head. Do
 R. Clifton Spargo T R AU M A

you think that’s true?

Don’t become too attached, I feel like warning you, to the part of me
that has to get left behind.

There was a time when I would invent scenarios in which you wouldn’t
have loved me. I’d locate them before the rape, wondering if my life had
gone down a wrong path, if I were using lots of cocaine, sleeping with many
men at the same time, skipping from job to job, and we met under those
circumstances, could I still charm you? Would you be willing to risk it? The
person you love now would still be there buried inside and you’d see her,
maybe only for a flash, and long to be with her. If you saw me as already so
worn out by life, perhaps you’d think you could undo some of the damage.
Or, what if I’d been married and had three children, what if I’d stuck
with Sebastian, my college boyfriend? In my mind I’d put these challenges to
an imaginary you: if I were divorced or separated, and I’d fallen out of love
with my husband or maybe never loved him, would you start up with me?
I hate it that I can project my life along those lines and put myself in
those scenarios and see myself there, knowing I really could be those ways if
I hadn’t been so lucky and that, maybe under the wrong set of circumstances,
you wouldn’t love me. Everything seems so arbitrary. As if love is just a way
of deluding ourselves about the perfectly contingent details in the life of a
person we say we can’t live without. So much depends on getting to some-
one before her choices exclude you forever from central aspects of her life.
When I tried very hard and could really imagine myself in a dire parallel life,
I’d get angry with you for your inability to recognize me for who I really was.
I thought you of all people should find me, even if I hadn’t yet been brave
enough to let myself emerge.

Do you remember where we were when you first told me you loved me?
We had just met some friends for drinks at the Skydeck of the Sears Tower. 89

You were moving away to New Haven, and I didn’t yet have the job in DC.
We’d been together every free minute for the prior two weeks, and we didn’t
want the night to end so we sat on the steps beneath the Sears Tower and
suddenly you asked me, “Do you want me to love you?” I smiled and said,
“Why, do you?” That was what I wanted from you—the risk of it, with no
guarantees in advance. You didn’t miss a beat and you admitted, yes, you
loved me. Then I said that I very much liked the idea of you loving me.
 R. Clifton Spargo

I didn’t say “I love you” back. I hated the idea that my words might be
dependent on yours. I wanted them to be spontaneous and true, so I kept
them secret until I could choose the right time.
I worry that you can’t ever choose me now, and I hate that. Everything’s
been decided for us. We were already in love, but there was so much ahead of
us, so many choices to come. Then this happened, and the choice was made
for us. You’ve got no choice but to love me and stay with me until you’re
sure I’m all right, and if I were another woman maybe I could just rest in
that and allow myself to be taken care of. Only then I wouldn’t get to choose
either.
So instead I have to get to a place where I’m perfectly free to choose you
or leave you. In which case you can’t win—maybe I’ll change and become
easier to live with, but then I won’t be yours anymore. Probably you’ll never
be able to get over your attachment to that person I once was who absolutely
needed you, you’ll never learn to see me as I truly am or as I’m going to be.
And someday I’ll have to leave—just to prove I can do it. You won’t hate
me for it, will you?

What if what I was keeping from you when we first met, long before
the rape, was my knowledge of what was coming—my secret was what I
saw. It was as though my whole life had prepared me for it. I’d come out of
the worst childhood. I’d conquered growing up with an alcoholic father, a
susceptibility to violent boyfriends, an anxiety disorder. Even though all my
high school friends were fundamentalists, I broke free and learned to think
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outside the lines. I was a feminist, I read the books. I read Against Our Will:
Men, Women, and Rape, and I knew what could happen. Statistically, it was
even probable. I couldn’t tell you all of this. You would have thought I was
paranoid. But maybe I was just a woman who understood how things really
are. That’s what I couldn’t yet tell you.
90 I haven’t told you everything, Carter. I know now I never will. It’s im-
possible to tell another person everything about yourself. Maybe it’s impos-
sible ever truly to know another person, at least not in the way you know
yourself. Some people would say that’s obvious. Not if you believe in love,
though—then you want another person to see you in all the ways you are,
almost like God. You can’t keep anything hidden, and even if you could you
don’t necessarily want to.
When I feel that way, I start to resent it. I want my privacy. For me there
 R. Clifton Spargo T R AU M A

will always be a few things I want to keep hidden, even if I’m not sure in any
given moment what they are or whether they’re important. When I feel you
wanting to know everything about me, I tell myself, “He wants too much,”
like Daisy letting down Gatsby.
I worry we’re too intimate. We don’t keep anything from each other—our
flaws, moral or physical. I’m critical of you sometimes in a way I would only
be critical of myself. I want to know your anxieties, to feel privileged by my
knowledge of you. Maybe women like that sort of intimacy better than men
do, in which case men are lucky. You don’t have to worry about what to con-
fide because women want all your confidences. It might even be a maternal
thing, certainly by now it’s cultural. Think of how fathers cringe when they
learn about their daughters’ periods, when they imagine them as sexual be-
ings—but mothers, they’re not even horrified by wet-dreams.

I worry that you can’t ever choose

me now, and I hate that.

You’re different from most men, still maybe not different enough.
Maybe I should have told you less. Early on I had no choice because every-
thing in me wanted to confess to you; and then later after the rape I let it
all out, my defenses were down and you saw everything—all my fears and
vulnerabilities. I didn’t bother anymore. I let you scrub my bathroom, I let
you clean out my kitchen when there was rotting garbage in the sink and
every now and then the smell got so bad I wouldn’t even go to that side of
the apartment. All the things one keeps hidden from the rest of the world,
except maybe for the briefest glimpses, and I gave them away. Even marriages
are based on some deception—the things you don’t let the man learn about
you. When I was still at college I remember having drinks with this graduate
student after a summer advertising class, and he started to tell me about his
91
marriage. I asked how it was different—being in love versus being married—
and he said, “You know the honeymoon’s over when you’re in the shower
and your wife comes in to take a dump.” Well, it was crude of him to speak
about it that way, but in the back of my mind there was the secret thought,
What could she have been thinking?

Do you want to know what I now think my real secret was? The thing
that goes so far back I’d almost forgotten about it?
 R. Clifton Spargo

I’m afraid I chose you because I knew one day I would need you. I had
to make you love me. I told you only what I thought you could bear until
you could bear more, and I let you fall in love with the best parts of me first.
Yes, it was because I saw what would happen, because I knew bad things were
coming, and I needed you—someone who was loyal, who would know how
to love me when I was in a bad way. I loved you instinctively: you were that
person and I liked the way it made me feel. It was the survivor in me that
knew you right away, but I wonder now if maybe that was unfair.
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92

View of a V-1 rocket in flight over London

during the last days of World War II.
(Source: National Archives)
 Stephanie Cherolis T R AU M A

When Language Fails:

Witnessing Holocaust Testimony
“But somehow, we had a need for each other, because he
knew who I was. He was the only person who knew.
You know, you feel like you come from nothing, you
are nothing, nobody knows you—it’s a very strange
feeling. You need some contact, some connection,
and he was my connection. He knew who I was
and I knew who he was.”
—Helen K.

H elen K., a woman whose story is one of over 4,000 documented at the
Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, described before a video camera
in 1979 the foundation of her marriage to another survivor. Although she
describes that marriage as though it originated after the Holocaust—”you
know, you feel like you come from nothing, you are nothing, nobody knows
you”—the marriage, in fact, began before the war and continued after the
liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Her loneliness, what she describes as
knowing no one and no one knowing her, refers to the death of her mother,
father, two sisters, and younger brother. Her comments about needing a
connection, and having no one who “knows” but her husband, come during
an interview in which she is trying to communicate, or, more precisely, to
connect the pieces of this fragmented history for the generations who will
come after her. She understands the importance of forming connections, and
perhaps is aware that she must function as a connection between her own
history and the generations to come for whom she is an important link to a
past they would not otherwise know. But, the description of this connection
with her husband reveals that she must find a way to connect her experiences
with a language inadequate to convey them. For Helen K., the most reliable
connection is with her husband; for, when it comes to connecting traumatic
experience with a narrative, she is much less successful. It is precisely at the 93
moment she says during this interview that: “you need some contact, some
connection,” that the impossibility of forming a connection through narra-
tion becomes clear. Only her husband understands her traumatic loss. Yet it
is an understanding that comes not via language and a coherent narrative,
but through what he saw with his own eyes.
While Helen K. never directly mentions an inability to communicate her
experiences, the failure surfaces throughout her narrative. She was involved
 Stephanie Cherolis

with a rebellion group who famously resisted Nazis from within the ghetto,
and stories of this rebellion group make up a good portion of her testimony.
It soon becomes clear that she is more comfortable speaking about their
heroics—something she does with enthusiasm and grace—rather than her per-
sonal tragedies. When she reaches a point that requires her to broach more
painful events, for example, this articulate and strong resistor struggles to
find the right words. When discussing the death of her brother, her mother,
or her father, she flatly states that they disappeared. This is in the midst of
painstakingly detailed testimony concerning the actions of the rebel group,
the state of the ghetto, and tragic stories of death in the camps.
Perhaps the most telling example of the disconnect between language
and traumatic history emerges when Helen attempts to tell the story of her
father’s death. Helen recalls that her family was forced into the Warsaw
ghetto, and one night her father went out to a store in the ghetto and never
came back. Helen won’t elaborate, or can’t elaborate after that. The inter-
viewer questions her about this sudden ambiguity—up until this point Helen
has been incredibly detailed in her descriptions, after all—and Helen pauses.
She struggles to explain, stating that people were just picked up like dogs:
Helen: Well, he never came back so we assumed that. . .you know. . .
there were a lot of people. . . they were catching people like a dog catcher,
you know, when a dog catcher goes out he catches dogs, anybody they
saw on the street they picked up, so my father was picked up.
Interviewer: But you don’t know. . .you didn’t. . .
Helen: Oh, we know, we know he was picked up.
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Interviewer: Did anyone witness it?

Helen: Yeah, people told us [stutters] he went out and never came back.
She quickly moves on to the next event in her story. Helen knows what
happened to her father, but she cannot verbalize the truth. She tries to com-
municate the event, using the failed metaphor of a dogcatcher to express the
94
inhumanity of the experience. After trying and failing with another metaphor
to express this loss—she later compares the situation to Cambodia—Helen in
the end returns to the place where she began, with her general and evasive
statement: “He went out and never came back.” In the end, these are the
only words that seem to do justice to the last moment she knows her father
was alive, and yet, they seem spare and insufficient. As if she realizes the
failure of this moment, of this task of recalling her father’s last moments, she
gives up and moves on to another more cohesive piece of narrative.
 Stephanie Cherolis T R AU M A

Far from a failure to communicate, however, this telling moment is

perhaps the most successful in conveying that which cannot easily be com-
municated: the systematic loss of one’s entire family. In this moment when
her narrative breaks down, Helen exposes a kind of absence, indicating how
language cannot possibly encompass the enormity of such personal trauma.
Even when turning to metaphor—what one has come to think of as a suc-
cessful conveyor of emotion, the tool of highly articulate poets—Helen’s
discourse reveals that not even literary language can patch the holes of this
broken experience and the narrative that must carry it.
Affirming that such pain exists, rather than trying to gloss over it with
an imposed narrative structure, is a unique characteristic of these archive
testimonies—an archive that tells the story of the Holocaust in between the
gaps, slips, stutters, and silences of the survivors who tell their story on
behalf of history. The Fortunoff Video Archive is a project that began over
twenty years ago as an attempt to preserve survivor testimony for future
research. Today the archive has over 4,300 videotaped interviews with people
who experienced Nazi persecution first hand, totaling more than 10,000
recorded hours. The project’s goal is specifically to give voice to the victims
and thereby work against the rising tide of indifference, or worse, Holocaust
denial. Those who spearheaded the original effort—Laurel Valock, Dori Laub,
William Rosenburg, and Geoffrey Hartman—felt that the archive could offer
a new dimension to Holocaust studies. Indeed, the archive is matchless in its
minimalist approach to survivor narrative. As a result, viewers recognize that
the Holocaust is not safely situated in the past but still painfully exists for
survivors in the present.1
Helen’s testimony reveals how such ongoing struggles with memory
carry into the present for survivors. Here, while telling the story of her fam-
ily and her own survival, she also inadvertently tells the story of a failure
in language—itself a story without hope, understanding, or comfort. Helen
expresses the true alienation that results from unimaginable trauma and the 95

failure of language to encompass it. Her story is ultimately antireparative,

which is only reinforced by the medium through which she tells this story.
Filmed testimony allows for a focus on these failures in a way that would
be impossible in other media. Literature, personal interviews, and art often
use a kind of narrative structure—a cohesive representation of an event or
story in art—to cover over such breakdowns or to seal the traumatic wounds.
Video testimony stands in direct contrast with narrative in that it captures
 Stephanie Cherolis

these revealing slips and silences that occur when the speaker is struggling to
form a narrative. As a result of its refusal to provide a coherent picture of the
survivor’s history, the video testimony alienates its viewers in ways that other
forms try to resist. These other forms, by contrast, fail adequately to acknowl-
edge the crisis of witnessing that the survivors present, and therefore–despite
all of their coherence—do not tell the entire story of the Holocaust.
The power of these interviews lies in the opportunity for survivors to
narrate their experience, many for the first time, in their own words, and to
express their ongoing struggle to live with the traumatic past. The tapes best
reveal this, not so much through what is said, but rather through what is not
said—through the survivors’ inability to find words that accurately describe
the experience. As such, the tapes themselves capture an expression of the
struggle to witness, the impossibility of expressing trauma, and, in turn, the
failure of language. In this way, the viewer is forced to encounter the un-
speakable, to see and acknowledge the performative nature of speech. This is
precisely the tragedy that supervenes from the Holocaust survivors’ inability
to express their loss and the isolation felt when language fails.
In this way, film is able to document the Holocaust in an inimitable
and unsettling manner. It allows for a focus on the everyday that unearths
realities often overlooked or hidden from the naked eye. Testimony on film
becomes not just a narrated record of traumatic events, but also a record
of trauma’s effect on the familiar. Specifically, the camera reveals the act of
language—something generally overlooked or glossed over in other forms
of communication. In Helen’s narrative, this is revealed when she attempts
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to describe the disappearance of her mother. She painfully states, “This is

another one that is very hard. . . I want you to know my mother wasn’t even
forty years old.” At this point, the viewer can see her struggle to find words,
their inadequacy, and that ultimately Helen is creating and directing this
narrative. The pauses, the struggle to articulate, are documented and observ-
96 able. When participating in testimony, that is, when acting as a listener, one
is concerned with understanding the narrative, or focused on responding ap-
propriately to the speaker. While watching the speaker on film neither pres-
sure is present. A viewer of film is freed up to focus on the “hidden details of
familiar objects.”2
The most striking quality of the archive, beyond even the uncomfortable
moments the camera records, may be the stark simplicity and pliant structure
of the interviews. The unedited footage is of survivors telling their story while
 Stephanie Cherolis T R AU M A

the interviewers and cameraman focus on observing, listening, and docu-

menting. For the most part, the camera refrains from manipulating views and
the interviewers do not question the facts given by survivors.3
There is a general question to begin discussion, usually directing sur-
vivors to a time before the war. Interviewers play a very small role in the
testimony, generally only entering with questions when the survivor becomes
stuck, or is apparently struggling to continue his or her narrative. While in-
terviewers work to get the survivor through narrative breaks, these moments
mark an important aspect of video testimony. The unadorned presentation
highlights these pauses that might otherwise go unnoticed.
In these breaks, the contemporaneous struggle that exists for survivors
becomes clear. When the subject becomes distraught, or perhaps tries to skim
over events, the interviewer asks questions to encourage discussion of the elu-
sive details. As survivors are pushed to describe that which they were clearly
avoiding, the struggle to articulate the most traumatic and unspeakable
events is in full view. The power of film is that it presents these moments to
the spectator as well, conveying the radically alien notion that language is
not all we need to communicate, and that the story that this inadequacy of
language tells is a story of a history that remains wholly outside of commu-
nication. These moments appear as not only outside of history, then, but
also—and more crucially—outside of language as well.
Many times in these uncomfortable moments, a survivor might try
to reach for narrative conventions in order to make his or her story more
palatable, but, unlike the seemingly innate narrative structure of fiction, the
act of placing such conventions onto a narrative is clearly seen as coming
from without. In Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), Lawrence
Langer theorizes these narrative impositions as they contrast with the trou-
bling narrative breaks within these testimonies. In a chapter on what he refers
to as anguished memory, Langer notes that video of immediate testimony
allows for breaks in meaning that a fictional account told through literature 97

cannot. The interviewee does not have time to construct a proper narrative.
In other words, an interview takes place in the present; the questions posed
require immediate answers. The results are free from editing—the interviews
require a kind of spontaneity not seen in written works. The interviewee is
freed from, or, perhaps it is more proper to say, is unable to use the conven-
tions of literature to shape his or her answers. In discussing written Holo-
caust memoirs, Langer states, “such memoir still abides (some more con-
 Stephanie Cherolis

sciously than others) by certain literary conventions: chronology, description,

characterization, dialogue, and above all, perhaps, the invention of a narra-
tive voice” (41). But it is these conventions that detract from the real story
these survivors tell, the story not only of a past that cannot be articulated
via traditional standards, but also of their own confrontations with language,
memory, and loss.
The Fortunoff Video Archive, in both the nature of testimony, and in
a conscientious effort by organizers, seems to stand apart from these other
approaches that use identification, heroism, and responsibility to com-
municate the legacy of the Holocaust. As opposed to the comfort afforded
by understanding, the testimony presents only an unreachable struggle, an
unspeakable and continuous suffering. Whereas the alienating nature of the
failure of language, as expressed by videotaped testimony, refuses any sense
of reparation, other, more “traditional,” forms of Holocaust memorial, such
as museums and written accounts, seek to convey this uncertain history
through more comforting representations.
For example, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum encourages a kind
of identification with victims in order to create a personal connection for
visitors.4 Visitors are asked to wear ID tags recalling the practice of assigning
concentration camp numbers; children can explore exhibits on a child-vic-
tim of the Holocaust; and visitors walk down a path made of stones from
concentration camps. The identification, however, never dislocates the
events from history. Visitors emotionally connect with the artifacts—they can
learn about historical facts, after all—but this historical history comes at the
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expense of the most complicated and emotional effects of the trauma itself.
Identification within the safety of contemporary times invites the visitor to
sympathize with the victims and atrocities of the past, but visitors are never
asked to recognize or to confront a struggle in the present.5
More reparative modes of Holocaust representation reveal that narrative
98 helps communicate an experience by providing structure in a way that ap-
pears inherent to the event itself. A heroic narrative allows for positive affir-
mations—tales of insurmountable human spirit, the value of perseverance—in
the midst of tragedy. In Holocaust testimony, however, there are no heroes–a
truth noted by several survivors. Hanna F., another survivor who has contrib-
uted testimony to the Fortunoff archive, states: “And I am Jewish, all right. I
had determined already to survive, and you know what? It wasn’t luck. It was
stupidity. There was no guts. There were just sheer stupidity” (Greene 218).
 Stephanie Cherolis T R AU M A

In an example of humanity’s need to create a narrative that is both heroic

and familiar, the interviewer claims that Hanna is plucky and that is why she
survived. Hanna, however, is adamant that her survival was not heroic in na-
ture. Survivors rarely see themselves as special or different, but those outside
the event find it comforting to view them as such, thereby imposing structure
and meaning on an otherwise inconceivable event.
While the traditional heroic narrative can be found within Holocaust lit-
erature and art, more contemporary approaches to confronting the Holocaust
require viewers to take responsibility. More recent works, literary, artistic, and
beyond, have rejected a conventional approach that celebrates survival. Joan
Rosenbaum, in the director’s preface to Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent
Art, notes that contemporary artists addressing the Holocaust in their art
“dismiss classicism, edifices, and memorial rituals. They replace them with
a disquieting, demanding, and jolting approach” (vii). In other words, these
contemporary artists attempt to break free from conventional expression
and often use shock to communicate with the viewer. It’s hard to express the
feelings of disgust, directed at oneself, upon viewing Boris Lurie’s “Satura-
tion Paintings” (10) in Mirroring Evil, which juxtaposes historical footage of
Holocaust survivors with pornography. In orchestrating a jolting experience,
the artist relies upon our feelings of disgust to comment on a pornographic
fascination with the shock value of death instead of respecting the personal
tragedy involved.6

In this moment when her narrative breaks down, Helen

exposes a kind of absence, indicating how language cannot
possibly encompass the enormity of such personal trauma.

All three of these modes–identification, celebration of heroism, and calls

for responsibility–fail to have the alienating effect that is so powerful in the
99
video archive, because they refuse a consideration of the impact of the crisis
of witness, as articulated by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their book
Testimony; Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992).
This work expounds upon the central idea in trauma studies that a victim of
trauma suffers from a crisis of witnessing. Victims are forced to witness an
event that is outside of language and, therefore, outside of manageable hu-
man experience. According to Laub, for example, “the victim’s narrative—the
very process of bearing witness to massive trauma—does indeed begin with
 Stephanie Cherolis

someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into
existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality
of its occurrence” (57). Likewise, Cathy Caruth finds trauma to be an experi-
ence that defies articulation, as an event a survivor is forced to revisit without
the ability to assimilate it into his or her existence. The result is a victim
haunted by painful events, one who experiences extreme feelings of isolation,
because he or she is unable to communicate the struggle to anyone.
The true impact of the Holocaust is recorded inadvertently on video as
the failure of language, at the very moment when nothing can be expressed.
Many have attempted to commemorate the Holocaust, or memorialize it
in a way that both does justice to the survivors’ experience and somehow
passes on the legacy to future generations in hopes of preventing such atroci-
ties from occurring ever again. The archive has succeeded in capturing the
horror of the Holocaust—not simply by capturing the voices of the survivors
but, paradoxically, by witnessing their silences. These testimonies do not let
us look away from the moments of these struggles with language, and–as a
result–they do not let us look away from the effects of history itself. Herein
lies the success of the project, a project that reminds us that the effects of
Holocaust trauma are no longer, indeed, were never, safely in the past, and
that the enormity of the suffering can be best seen in the terrifying loss of
language. With this archive, then, we have access to the stories of over 4,300
individuals who all express the horror of the Holocaust in the very moment
that they are unable to use language. Like Helen, they all in some way tell the
story of the necessity to connect. The success of the archive, then, is connect-
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ing this story with the story of language, a story that implicates all of us.

Notes
1
For a more detailed history of the archive see the background given by Geoffrey Hartman
at the end of Witness: Voices from the Holocaust.
2
The opportunity to perceive hidden realities through film is one predicted by Walter
100
Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this work Benjamin
discusses how technology is changing the experience of contemporary art. The importance of
an original work, or a piece handcrafted solely by the artist, is fading. Instead, photography
and film are creating a new dimension to art, new possibilities. To Benjamin, film allows us to
recognize “hidden details of familiar objects” (236).
3
This would be problematic in relation to the Wilkomirski debate. Disregarding historical
accuracy in favor of traumatic effect, according to critics like Gross and Hoffman, may support
false identification in what they refer to as a victim culture.
4
Alison Landsberg in “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward
 Stephanie Cherolis T R AU M A

a Radical Politics of Empathy” finds transference necessary for generations not directly con-
nected to the Holocaust. This transference is needed to remember and assign importance to
events with which they have no first hand experience.
5
This argument appears in a slightly varied form of the controversy over false identifica-
tion and the Wilkomirski case. Binjamin Wilkomirski supposedly wrote a Holocaust narrative
titled Fragments as a survivor, but, later, after much acclaim, it was discovered that Wilkomirski
had no connection at all to the events of the Holocaust other than through research. Wilkomir-
ski held fast to his identity as a survivor and many believe he convinced himself these facts were
true by connecting his real childhood trauma to the trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors.
Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman use this event to point out the dangers of victim iden-
tification in their article “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies in Light of the
Wilkomirski Debate.” They state that such respected institutions as the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum support this kind of false identification.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken Books, 1968.
. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 2002.
Dean, Carolyn J. “Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering.” Differences 14.1 (2003): 88-124.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, M.D. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, T. 152, Menachem S.
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, T. 58, Helen K.
Greene, Joshua M. and Shiva Kumar, eds. Witness: Voices from the Holocaust. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2000.
Gross, Andrew S., and Michael S. Hoffman. “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust
Studies in Light of the Wilkomirski Debate.” Biography 27.1 (2004): 25-48.
Landsberg, Alison. “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a
Radical Politics of Empathy.” New German Critique 71 (Spring-Summer 1997): 63-87.
Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.
Rosenbaum, Joan. Director’s Preface. Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. Ed. Norman L.
Kleeblatt. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002.

101
 Grace Cavalieri

The Heart For It

After New Orleans’ flood

In this plain box of a house,

the tiny dresses are lined up in case
I ever have another baby.
The rack goes from one end of the room
to the other, dozens of little outfits,
pink smocked dresses with green stitches,
a red and blue play dress with
bloomers to match,
the white sun suits, a yellow sun dress,
three ducks embroidered on the front,
and four dresses different sizes,
all exactly alike, all blue, so soft
I could not leave them in the store.
I just didn’t have the heart for it. After all
someday I might have another baby.
But now there is a warning.
In a land of empty houses, it’s
time to pick them up from their hangers
and carry them next door,
someone will need them.
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Oh. No one is there to collect them.

Perhaps every hour on the hour someone
will come. No lights are on. Who will I give them to,
little dresses hanging on hangers like dreams.
No one is home. What shall I do with
102 these beautiful things I’ve saved?
In this land where
no birds are singing, the only visitor is
my friend Jan, back
from the dead, carrying an empty
photo album for our future.
 CSU Art Award

103

Rolandas Kiaulevicius, The Dream

27 x 22 inches
oil on canvas
2005
 T R AU M A
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104

David Leeson, Battle for Al Kifl

digital original
digitally reproduced
Iraq, 2003
 T R AU M A

105

David Leeson, Barred Owl

digital original
digitally reproduced
Texas, 2003
 T R AU M A
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106

David Leeson, Sparrows in Snow

digital original
digitally reproduced
Texas, 2004
 T R AU M A

107

David Leeson, Storm

35mm film
digitally reproduced
Nebraska, 1998
 T R AU M A
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108

David Leeson, Shoreline

original 35 mm film
digitally reproduced
Lake Michigan, 1998
 T R AU M A

David Leeson, Iraqi Army Dead

digital original
digitally reproduced
Iraq, 2003
David Leeson, Dew on Grass
original 35 mm film
digitally reproduced
Texas, 1997

109
 T R AU M A
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110

David Leeson, Tears for a Comrade

digital original
digitally reproduced
Iraq, 2003
 Artist’s Statement T R AU M A

David Leeson
T he universal relationship of humankind with nature is one of both
solace and terror. It is a dichotomy in precarious balance.
The gentle breeze crossing a lake is a respite from the heat of a summer
day, yet it breeds a legion of mosquitoes carrying either obnoxious bite or
potentially deadly disease.
A thunderstorm brings drama to the skies and sustenance to the land,
while spawning flash floods and destructive lightning strikes. A heavy fog
brings mystery and wraps the world in a soothing shroud, but causes ships to
sink, cars to collide, and travelers to be lost.
It’s interesting that we seldom think of the harsh reality of nature when
we seek it. We become like forgiving parents, forever excusing the delinquent
behavior of a wayward child. We traipse gleefully into forests, fields, nooks,
and crannies with little thought that, at all times, danger is within easy reach.
But our fears are as fragile and displaced as our relationship with nature.
I suspect there are few who would deny the beauty of a flower, the glorious
setting of the sun, the majesty of an elder tree or the sanctity of a certain
solitude we seldom find anywhere but within hills, valleys, fields, and forests.
We fear what we choose not to trust. We trust things we should probably fear.
But the call of nature is infinitely more complex than this. In my own
life, nature has been a steadying force, always there even if I’m not exactly
sure where to find it. I know it is “out there,” somewhere, waiting to be per-
sonally discovered. I also know nature holds universal truths and a beguiling
sense of peace. Perhaps it is our sentient desire to name at least one thing,
whether it be God, nature, or stamp collecting as the pathway to something
more in our life, even when we have no genuine concept of what constitutes
“more.”
I know I found that “more” one day in Melange, Angola. I was photo- 111
graphing a soldier from the Angola army who was enraged. He had with him
a man he accused of committing adultery with his wife. His prisoner, bound
by wire, blood trickling down his bare, sweaty back, remained in humble
silence as the man screamed accusations to a gathering crowd. An execution
was drawing near and I approached with trepidation, somehow mustering the
courage to make photos of the scene.
Suddenly, the police, or perhaps the army, I have no idea, arrived and
 Artist’s Statement

the shooting began. People fled for cover, including myself. There was no
place to hide; there was no cover of tree, bush or building, so in desperation
I threw myself to the ground between the crossfire.
It was there that I found a single blade of grass before my eyes, and
I focused my mind on its simple beauty, oblivious to the trampling and
gunfire. Blow upon it and grass will bend. Storms may come and go but grass
remains. It was a simple beauty desperately needed in a desperate time. I lay
face to the ground, bullets flying overhead, with a blade of grass occupying
my mind, transporting me to somewhere else, though I knew not where.
Such is the beauty we seek to be take us from where we are. It is a
dichotomy defying description. We believe it is good to be led from travail
and trial. But the cliché, “from the frying pan to the fire” is befitting of our
course in life. We flee the pan without knowledge of the fire. If we could
only know the difference between the two we could achieve omniscience.
Would any of us truly wish this? I doubt it. I suspect, like me, it’s ultimately
good to be human.
Nature has been my friend even though I once lived in a house that
flooded eight times in three years. We had as much as three feet of water in
our home. I remember watching the water rise above the keys of a beloved
grand piano and how I later shoved and pushed it through the front door
of my home to the sidewalk in front for city workers to collect as trash. I
remember the tears I shed when I found a Bible, filled with personal notes
and reflections, destroyed by the murky waters, and I remember the stinking,
fetid muck I shoveled until I grew physically sick. Yet, I love the rain as much
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as any man.
Perhaps that is why my life of covering global conflicts as a photojour-
nalist is not as foreign to my journey as some might think. After all, I was
young, married, and a father to three beautiful children in those years. It was
no small price to pay to leave them and risk death. But, I knew it was my
112 path in life. How I knew is an answer that eludes me. It’s like asking how do
you know you are in “love?” Though–let’s be clear about something–I had
no love for conflict.
Somehow I also knew my life was bound to a love of nature. I have
always known that nature was filled with an infinite source of compassion
because my journey, yours too, is bound to a law. There is a constant in
the physics of the natural world. The cycle of life brings a measure of peace
simply because we accept it as a matter of fact. I can somehow know the un-
 Artist’s Statement T R AU M A

known simply by knowing it as “unknown.” I can rest in the knowledge that

the uncharted forest is like a journey into any new challenge. Death itself has
no sting if it is seen as discovery, yet one more step into the unknown–the
forest of our future.
But, here I am again caught in a fabulous memory, prone before a blade
of grass, as reverent in that moment as a devotee, marveling at pure beauty.
I can still see that single blade of grass in my mind. I can still smell the earth
and faintly hear the rapid fire of automatic weapons. I was as safe in my
shelter of thought as I have ever been in my life. I could sleep soundly in the
midst of such dichotomous wisdom found in a single blade of grass. “Lay
low,” she said. “The storm will pass and you will rise and feel the sun upon
your face.”

I survived. My fears subsided. I returned to Luanda the next day. I

was filled with relief to be safe from the chaos and uncertainty of war. As I
walked through the lobby of my hotel on my way to the reservation desk, I
felt a resounding pressure at my back and a millisecond later a loud crash at
my heel. I turned to see what had happened.
A four-foot by eight-foot sheet of mirrored glass had come loose from a
second story alcove above the lobby, just inside the entrance to the hotel. It
slid down the wall and struck the floor at the back of my feet. The glass had
dropped a full story before exploding into tiny fragments and gouging a one
quarter-inch deep, four-foot wide crease in the marble floor.
If I had been one-half second less arriving at the hotel my head would
have been split completely open. In other words, I would not be here to
write about it today. I had survived the crossfire, the frying pan, and narrowly
missed the fire. There was no way I could have anticipated my near death ex-
perience in a Luanda hotel, but a blade of grass held the message–the storm
passes and we rise to live.
Fear has little place in our lives. Wisdom matters. But ignoring danger 113

is foolishness. Standing in the middle of a busy highway is probably a bad

idea, but traveling in a car down the same road in spite of the fact that more
people will die in this nation from auto accidents than nearly every US death
from the thirteen-year war in Vietnam may be a reasonable risk depending
upon where you are going. A trip to a family reunion rates more than beating
traffic for a ten-percent-off sale at Ikea.
But how does it differ from a gentle hike through a flowered field?
 Artist’s Statement

There is no real difference in my opinion. A journey is a journey just as a

rose is a rose. Death is always within arm’s reach wherever we go. But, in
nature, I find spontaneous worship. It is that moment where everything
we are and everything we dream of comes together in a single moment of
understanding that we don’t need to understand anything except that we are
somehow. . . okay.
My eyes behold a glorious sunset, and somehow I know I will see tomor-
row. The sun sets, a volley of gunfire creases the sky in the same way a mirror
falls two stories creasing marble, while a single blade of grass, growing majes-
tically from parched earth, reminds me that I will see tomorrow.
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114
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

Inherited Trauma: A Member of

the Third Generation Speaks
I have nightmares about something that never happened to me. These
nightmares always start the same way: I can see myself lying quietly in my
bed, I can see my chest rise and fall with the easy, rhythmic breathing of
deep sleep. Then, in the midst of this peaceful, quiet dream, a sound like
gunshots comes out of nowhere: someone in my dream is banging on the
door. The banging is breaking the night in two. Suddenly, the dream fast-
forwards like a movie reel: I am standing bolt upright, and bright sunlight is
blinding me. Someone is threatening to shoot me, and I don’t know where
my family is anymore, I’ve lost track of everyone, I am alone and terrified.
At that moment, I awaken, my heart racing as I grab my blanket, feel the
warmth of my bed, reassure myself that it is only a dream.

I got an early education in horror stories, the kind that produce such
nightmares, and they didn’t come from books or movies. My lessons were
learned at a tea table; my grandmother was the professor. How to Survive a
Concentration Camp 101, or maybe the course should have been entitled
Stories to Pass Down for Generations.
Both sets of my grandparents survived Hitler’s concentration camps,
but it is my maternal grandmother who imbued me with a sense of constant
dread. Her stories of her life in the camps, her tales of family lost, retrieved,
burned, vanished, or damaged were her versions of nightmarish fairytales.
Ever since I was a little girl, I have visited my grandmother on Saturday
afternoons. Her apartment is small and overwarm and smells of mothballs.
Every week is like a holiday because she loves to bake, and her little tea table
is always covered with her superb Hungarian pastries. She stuffs me full of
food and stories on those afternoons; she talks about her Carpathian child- 115

hood, about her beloved brothers, about how chic she used to be, in the
1930s style. Often, she talks about what it was like to be in a ghetto. Usually,
she talks about being in Auschwitz.
I say “being” deliberately, because I don’t really know another verb for
it. One did not “live” in Auschwitz, one did not “stay” or “visit.” One was
interned, imprisoned, incarcerated, but I don’t like to use the passive voice. I
like to imagine my grandmother as a hardy little woman who would be wor-
 Natalie J. Friedman

thy of the active voice. She survived, after all. She existed. She was. She still
is. When I visit her nowadays, I am struck by her toughness, both physical
and mental. She is ninety-two, but acts and looks younger. Whenever I ring
her bell, she opens the door and stands in front of me, blocking the entrance
to her apartment with her small, stocky frame. She is not a tall woman, and
yet she can convey a certain hauteur.
My grandmother does not seem frail and broken, even in her worst mo-
ments of sadness. She is an intense, intelligent, curious, opinionated, driven,
meticulous, exacting, and often obnoxious nonagenarian. I figure that these
are the traits that must have helped her to survive not only the atrocities of
Hitler, but also the hardships of Stalin, her husband’s early death, and her
immigration to America. I watch her, pouring tea, and I wonder how she can
do it. How can she “be” after what she went through? I look at her body:
hands, skin, flesh, face, nose, ears, wrinkled throat. How did that body look
standing in the middle of a cold, snowy courtyard, naked, waiting to be
counted? How did it look marching in wooden shoes in the snow to Bergen
Belsen? How does she pour tea for herself now, how does she walk to the
supermarket, how did she even fly across the ocean to America anyway? How
did she do it all after “being” there?

Sometimes, when having coffee with a friend who

isn’t Jewish, I look at him or her and wonder, would
you hide me? Would you save me? Would you betray me?
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We speak in Yiddish; mine is like a rusty hinge, while hers is like the
clear, fluid rushing of a stream. The rules of our conversation are simple:
she speaks, I listen, without interrupting. Her conversation is wholly unpre-
dictable in the sweeps, turns, and digressions she might make. The seesaw
between despair and happiness, however, is a constant. No matter what she
116
chooses to discuss on any given day, she is sure to see the dark side of it,
and then just as quickly, she can turn around and smile or laugh. When she
makes these rhetorical moves, I have to stop myself from thinking, is she
mad? Did she lose her mind in the camps?
I don’t know what “normal” is, though–how could I compare her state
of mind to another old lady’s? Even if I compare her to other survivors
I know, I still can’t say that she is more or less psychologically damaged
than they are, because each one of them bears different psychic scars, and
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

each one deals with the pain differently. One relative has put the memories
behind her, and never talks about them; another one has become so silent
and secretive that no one knows anything about her past, not even the year
or the place she was born. Not all of them talk about death. Not all of them
spend their days mired in self-pity, locked in imaginary battles with long-
dead enemies.
Each time I visit her, I confront that eternal human problem: the prob-
lem of never really knowing someone else. It is impossible to inhabit anoth-
er’s consciousness, and we can only guess at the inner life of others. But my
grandmother is doubly, triply difficult to know. She is already distanced from
me by her age; she is already distanced from me by the fact of her foreign-
ness, her language, her birthplace; and she is distanced from me even more
because of the suffering she endured, a suffering that left few physical traces,
but too many emotional ones to count.
The weird thing is, I try, through my own mental exercises, to bridge that
gap between us. In fact, I don’t have to try very hard–a bridge does exist, one
that she and I built together though her talking and my listening. I try to put
myself in her place. I try to picture myself doing a simple household chore,
like taking out the garbage, and looking at the incinerator, and suddenly be-
ing reminded of another type of incinerator. Does the image ever grab her in
the middle of the day, as I allow it to grab me? I summon the image, I court
it, I want to see how she feels when she is doing mundane things but think-
ing about the horrible past. For example: looking at myself in the mirror in
the morning, I suddenly wonder what I would look like with my hair shorn.
Or, I look at my naked body and imagine its contours shriveled, its bones
protruding through grayish skin. The irrational idea that perhaps one day I’ll
find myself in a concentration camp springs on me as I watch the evening
news and see horrible images of Sudanese refugees. Sometimes, when having
coffee with a friend who isn’t Jewish, I look at him or her and wonder, would
you hide me? Would you save me? Would you betray me? 117

This obsession of mine with imagining her tragedy, her suffering, is a

strange result of hearing her stories over and over again. Her trauma becomes
my trauma; her stories become my stories. And yet, I know that I can never
quite understand what she went through. I can never experience her pain or
measure her loss. So I imagine it, I desire it, I want to be able to put myself
in her shoes and feel what she felt. I must sound like some paranoid with a
penchant for the macabre. I’m not, really. I go about my day like every other
 Natalie J. Friedman

young American. In fact, I am typically described as a very happy person. I

have every reason to be; my life is whole, not fractured and hastily patched
up like my grandmother’s. She betrays her cracks, leaks out her stories, then
tries to stanch the flow. I am not broken like my grandmother, and yet, I can
feel those cracks along my own body. I can also do something my grand-
mother cannot: I get angry. My grandmother cries when she remembers, but
I rail against history and the injustice of Fate. I even get angry with the dead:
Why didn’t they leave Europe when the war started? Why didn’t they see the
proverbial writing on the wall? Why didn’t they run away?
Then, when I have exhausted myself with such fruitless questions, I rail
against my grandmother: why does she have to talk about it all the time?
Can’t she stop herself, can’t she see that she can be mind-numbingly bor-
ing? Yes! See? I said it! I’m not ashamed to admit it: these ugly, lurid tales of
survival are both thrilling and boring, titillating in their evocation of death,
but also plagued by a sordid sameness. It might be anathema to even dare to
speak these words, but I can’t help it. It is not the fact of the Holocaust that
numbs me; it is the endless need I feel behind her stories, the pleading. It’s
as if she wants some response from me, from someone, anyone. But what
can I possibly do for the dead brother she grieves over, or for the murdered
nephew who was such a talented musician? How can I possibly return her
precious string of pearls to her, or her favorite books? Or her father?

I have nightmares about something

that never happened to me.
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I am caught in a sticky web of helplessness, feeling sick because I can’t

go back and undo what happened, and because I have to sit, like a trapped
animal, and listen patiently as my grandmother brings the camps to life in all
their vivid, gory detail: the smell of the burning bodies; the smoke obscuring
118
the sky; the parched, lice-ridden, exhausted women lying on the floor of the
barracks, begging for water.
The images won’t go away; they glue themselves into the photo album
of my memory. The stories my grandmother told me throughout my life
seem so much a part of me that I could almost believe that they were braided
into my hair and woven into the interlocking pores of my skin. I remem-
ber once being assigned to write a short story for homework in elementary
school. “Write what you know,” my teacher had suggested. I was ten years
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

old; whatever I knew came from books or television. I came home and
wracked my brains.
“I don’t know what to write about,” I lamented to my mother. “The
other girls are all writing about unicorns and fairies.”
I was not a reader of fantasy or science fiction or V.C. Andrews the way
my classmates were. I had been reading the mysteries of Agatha Christie, and
a book of O. Henry’s short stories over summer break; my head was filled
with murdered Englishmen and The Gift of the Magi. I knew I couldn’t write
a short story as clever as O’Henry’s or as convoluted a mystery as Christie’s.
What was I to do? What did I know? What could I possibly write about?
That’s when my mother suggested I write about my grandmother.
Inspired, I grabbed my pen and wrote a short story from the point of view of
a woman who is taken to the showers in a concentration camp, and whose
head is shaved, and her arm tattooed. The last line of the story–I remember
it even today–was “Her arm aching, her head shorn, she walked into the
harshly lit courtyard, and knew that this was the beginning of hell.”
Pleased with my efforts, blind to the awful clichés that littered my prose,
I turned it in and was gratified by the high grade my paper earned. “Very well
written!” my teacher wrote. “Mature and interesting! What a tough subject
to write about!” Looking back, I cannot imagine what my fifth grade teacher
thought when she came across my story; but as a teacher now myself, I can
see that her response was carefully worded and neutral. She could not have
written anything critical about my choice of subject, and she probably had
no idea what the appropriate response might be. She wisely chose to praise
me; had she used a red pen to correct me or upbraid me, she would have
crushed me and insulted my grandmother in the bargain, without even
knowing that my grandmother was a survivor, or that I even had a grand-
mother. Instead, she validated my innermost belief: my grandmother’s story
was remarkable, and I was remarkable for telling it.
As I grew older, I decided–smugly–that I was going to try to write my 119

grandmother’s life story. I would become her biographer. I bought a blank

journal and began writing down snippets of the tales she told me, or the
names of towns, places, people. I even scribbled some of my grandmother’s
favorite aphorisms or expressions into my notebook. But I couldn’t write
her stories down. I froze at the enormity of the task I had set myself. Could
I dare to chronicle of my grandmother’s life? Could I dare to try my hand
at novelizing it? It would make a great family saga–One Woman’s Courage in
 Natalie J. Friedman

the Face of Evil!–but would I be up to the task? And if I wrote it, how would
I handle the problem of capturing my grandmother’s voice, that voice with
its heartiness, its varying tones of softness, its occasionally grating urgency,
its cracking under the weight of emotion? Her voice was absent, and with-
out her words, without her gestures, without her pauses, sighs, and sharp
breaths punctuating her storytelling like music, the tales were hollow. They
were a bunch of facts written down baldly on paper. My grandmother was
taken to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Her entire family, save one sister,
survived. The stories sounded even worse if I tried to write them in the third
person, novel-style: “Margaret stood horrified and watched as the people
who had once been her neighbors kicked her father and tore out pieces of
his beard.” I would look at the words and feel nauseated by the corniness of
what I had written.
Furthermore, there was the issue of truth vs. fiction. I felt that I must
somehow write an oral history of my grandmother in order to remain as
close to the truth as possible. But I was removed from the “truth.” My grand-
mother’s memory was all I had to rely on, and writers will be the first to tell
you that memory is unreliable. Therefore, I could only write the “truth” as
my grandmother handed it down to me, and I was, as the translator, pressing
my own fingerprints into the stories like a potter shaping clay.
I could hear the sound of critics already. See? They would say, point-
ing fingers. This Friedman girl is making things up. She admits that her
grandmother’s memory can be faulty. So how can we believe any story she
tells is true? From there, the leap is not so far to the weird logic of Holocaust
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deniers–if this grandmother cannot be trusted as a storyteller, if these young

women cannot be trusted to write “the truth” down on paper, then how can
one prove that the Holocaust happened?
All of these issues strangled me, bound and gagged me. I could not write
anything with all these concerns weighing on me. The older I got and the
120 more I read, the more convinced I became that I could not tell my grand-
mother’s story lest someone accuse me of being presumptuous, superficial, or
untrue.
I was even more afraid of being called an opportunist. I felt that the
Holocaust was quickly becoming commodified. People in the book and
movie business were quick to recognize that Holocaust stories were worth
telling and, if told well, could actually earn fame or fortune. Many survivors
and their families cheered the efforts of the entertainment industry to bring
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

the Holocaust to the masses; others, however, voiced their concern that
the Holocaust was becoming overexposed, or worse, misrepresented for the
sheer benefit of personal gain. My grandmother was one of these dissenting
voices. “Look at Elie Wiesel,” she would say, pointing to the television screen
where he appeared, talking to Oprah, nodding in his wise way as the camera
zoomed in on his large, sad eyes, eyes that seemed to reflect an entire world
of pain. “There he is, talking about the Holocaust. He’s making money on
our suffering!”
“Elie Wiesel is a great writer,” I would argue. “He’s written many books.
He won a Nobel Prize.”
My grandmother shrugs. “So what? I could have written a book too. But
I didn’t. I respected the memory of my dead relatives. But he took the same
story I had and made money on it. How could he do that?” I look back on
that conversation and see hints of envy in my grandmother’s words. Was she
really angry with Wiesel or was she simply jealous that he had expressed all
of her own pent-up anger and sadness, and had been successful to boot?
Her words, easily dismissible as envious complaints, stayed with me,
haunted me, whenever I tried to write down a sentence or two about her life.
Was I merely trying to exploit my grandmother’s story for my own personal
gains? Norman Finkelstein, in his book The Holocaust Industry, criticizes what
he sees as the exploitation of the Holocaust by Jews to further various Jewish

121

Children waiting outside the wreckage that was their home.

(Source: National Archives)
 Natalie J. Friedman

interests, or to sell books and movies. “I sometimes think that American

Jewry ‘discovering’ the Nazi holocaust was worse than its having been forgot-
ten,” (6) he writes, and when I read those words, I felt a stab in my heart, as if
Finkelstein were accusing me and looking deep into my guilty soul.
I have, however, come to disagree with Finkelstein. Talking about the
Holocaust, writing about it, and learning from it, is not the same as exploit-
ing it. Exploitation comes out of a need to gratify some weird desire–in other
words, it’s exploitation if we tell Holocaust stories so that some freak with a
thirst for horror stories gets pleasure at the mention of gory, brutal details. I
knew the difference between my own desire to share my grandmother’s expe-
riences and exploitation, because I experienced the perverse desires of those
who feign interest, but who are really getting off on the bad stuff. I’ve had
those kinds of conversations with people: someone will ask me to describe
the physical horrors my grandmother lived through, saying things like, “Was
she ever beaten?” I always refuse to answer these questions, because behind
it I see a hunger for cheap thrills, a search for the satisfaction that a good
horror flick can bring. Once, in a college history class on World War II, I
happened to mention that my grandmother was able to survive the camps
partly because she worked as a cook and a domestic in the home of a wealthy
Bürgermiester outside Auschwitz. The class had recently viewed Schindler’s List,
in which a Jewish woman is forced to work in the home of a Nazi, where she
is regularly humiliated and molested. A member of the class asked me, “Was
your grandmother ever treated like the girl in the movie? Did her boss ever
try to rape her?”
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The older I got and the more I read, the more convinced I
became that I could not tell my grandmother’s story lest someone
accuse me of being presumptuous, superficial, or untrue.

122
My reaction to this vile, prurient question was to become angry to the
point of physical illness. My grandmother told me that the people she had
worked for had been very kind to her, had given her food and treated her
like a human being, quite unlike the Nazi officers in the camps, and here was
some brash American college kid, safe within his comfortable American Jew-
ishness, his safe family history, asking me questions that would fit in with his
own idea about the Holocaust. On the basis of one movie, he was assuming
that he knew what it must have been like to be a Häftling. He would not have
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

been interested to hear about the goodness of the few people my grandmoth-
er encountered who did not humiliate her; he wanted brutality, atrocity. Had
I been willing to entertain this line of questioning, and had I been willing
to turn my grandmother’s story into some kind of made-for-television soap
opera, then perhaps I would be exploiting her story.
But it would not be exploitation, however, if I felt compelled to add a
story to the canon of Holocaust writing, or to add another personal reflec-
tion to the growing mound of personal reflections. I felt a burning need to
try my hand at representing the unrepresentable, to express in words or im-
ages the pain reflected in my grandmother’s eyes.
As I entered graduate school and began teaching disaffected teenagers, I
also became afraid that once the generation of survivors would disappear, the
world would consign the Holocaust to the dustheap of history; that it would
become as distant and unreal as other wars have become; that students in
history classes would regard it with the same dispassionate stares they used
to examine something like the Revolutionary War. Some historians and
theorists have a name for this fear; they call it “Holocaust panic.” The word
“panic,” though, is freighted with notions of insanity, of mass hysteria, of a
mob mentality; when I hear it, I think of hundreds of other Jewish grandchil-
dren like me, running through the streets, their eyes darting, looking for the
next anti-Semitic attack, the next potential harm, the incident that smacks of
Jew-baiting.
My fear was not panic–it was more tempered. I feared that the Holocaust
would come under attack more frequently; revisionist historians and Holo-
caust deniers have made it their goal to rewrite the past, to cancel out the
survivors’ stories. I worried that when the last survivor dies, no one will keep
checks and balances on the lunatics who claim the Holocaust was a hoax.
Would the museums like the ones in Washington, New York, and Berlin be
the fortresses that guard against libelous and untruthful rhetoric? Could the
slim volumes of famous Holocaust stories–Elie Wiesel’s Night, Anne Frank’s 123

Diary–be dams against the tide of skepticism that will rush in to overwhelm
the validity of Holocaust suffering? Would it not be better for anyone–chil-
dren, grandchildren, descendants of survivors, and even perpetrators–to add
their voices? Weren’t those of us who knew survivors privileged in some
strange way to be the keepers of their memory, and therefore compelled to
write about it?
The urgency of writing down my own thoughts and feelings about be-
 Natalie J. Friedman

ing a grandchild of Holocaust survivors increased after September 11, 2001.

When terrorists devastated the World Trade Center, I watched with horror
from the safety of my apartment, but I was not shocked. The inevitable had
happened, and there I was, faced with the very dangers my grandmother
always warned me about, and I was utterly helpless. Almost immediately,
parallels and connections to the Holocaust surfaced: approximately 3,000
people died in the space of about an hour when the WTC collapsed, which
was about half the number of people killed each day by Zyklon-B at Aus-
chwitz. Human bodies were reduced to ash, most of which floated and sifted
until it settled like a fine dust all over New York’s downtown.
September 11 seemed to be the thing I had been waiting for and hoping
against. It was my grandmother’s dark prophecy come true.
I felt alone in my fear, as many people must have during those dark days
after the terrorist attack. It was not until much later that I learned of other
people–children of Holocaust survivors, like the writer Art Spiegelman–who
also found frightening parallels between the Holocaust and their current
lives. The childhood fears that slept within me–of Nazis hunting me down,
of my family disappearing–came flooding back from the distant corner of my
mind to which I had banished them.
I felt, somehow, that I must reach out and try to find like-minded
individuals, people like me who felt and thought as I did. If I could only get
people together, to unite them, we might begin to share our traumas with
each other, to confess our strangeness, to allow our inner catastrophists out
into the daylight, and maybe, just maybe, chain them up or cast them out.
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At the very least, if we could organize ourselves, we might be able to form

some kind of coalition. I wanted to make sure that I was not alone. There is
some strength in sharing the inheritance of trauma and tragedy.
For a model, I looked to the children of survivors, the Second Genera-
tion, who, at least in America, seemed organized; there were support groups
124 for them, and collections of writings by and about them. I began to see that
they were united, and had found ways to try to heal themselves and each
other. But no such network, no such help lines, existed for the Third Genera-
tion, for the grandchildren.
I wanted to establish some kind of connection among Third Generation
members, and I started locally, with my friends. I began talking about my
own feelings and thoughts about being a grandchild of survivors, and soon
found that there were other grandchildren who felt as I did. But now that I
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

had discovered these like-minded individuals, what could we do? Meet regu-
larly to discuss and compare our various neuroses? That hardly seemed like a
productive thing to do; it verged on the humorous, the satiric.
My misgivings about forming a coalition of Third Generation people
were reinforced by my discussions with my parents. They truly bore the
brunt of their parents’ nightmarish experiences, and they bore another bur-
den: they were born to “replace” those relatives lost in the Holocaust. There
were long shadows of history in my parents’ nursery rooms. Knowing that
my parents bear their own emotional scars, and that they have acted as im-
portant buffers between me and my family’s history, makes me feel as though
I have no right to feel that I, too, had somehow inherited my grandmother’s
traumas. Hadn’t my mother suffered for me?
My parents did not want to talk or write or reflect on the Holocaust. It
had shattered the world in a way that for them was irreparable, and they saw
no use in staring at and studying the fault lines. But as grandchildren, my sis-
ter and I had the privilege of being the recipients of our grandmother’s love.
She spoiled us; she showered us with her version of reserved, elaborately
mannered affection; she treated us in ways she had never treated our mother.
In some ways, we were better, more patient listeners than our beleaguered
mother.

Grandchildren of survivors began writing me

about their own set of strange experiences.

Therefore, I reasoned, if Second Generation children felt marked, set

apart, from the rest of the world, so did the Third Generation. We had just
as much right to speak about the inherited knowledge we possessed and the
ways in which it shaped us. I began gathering people’s stories, asking them to
write down what they were thinking, how they felt about being the inheritors
125
of their grandparents’ and parents’ histories. I decided that, if I could collect
enough of these reflections, I might actually put together a collection of es-
says for publication. I could make public the knowledge of the Third Genera-
tion. I sent out a call for papers over the Internet, and was wholly unprepared
for the deluge that followed.
Grandchildren of survivors began writing me about their own set of
strange experiences. One young woman e-mailed me to tell me that her
grandfather, the only living survivor she knew, never spoke of his experi-
 Natalie J. Friedman

ences, and that the family had been trying for years to pry them out of him.
His silence and emotional distance had made her parents’ lives, and her
life, almost unbearable. Another young woman wrote in to tell me that her
grandmother talked about her stories incessantly; like my grandmother, she
was a compulsive storyteller. But she never told her stories to her children,
the Second Generation–she reserved her tales for her grandchildren. She had
developed a completely different relationship with her grandchildren, even
going so far as to invite them on a trip to visit her old hometown in Poland,
but excluding her own children.
I began contacting these people, and I slowly began to piece together
a loose network of Third Generation members. One woman I contacted, a
fellow English professor, suggested we meet at the annual Modern Language
Association Conference, which was to be held in Washington, DC that year.
Her parents, it turned out, were survivors, but she considered herself a Third
Generation member because of her age–her parents had her late in life,
and she was only in her early thirties. Her father had a remarkable tale–he
had escaped from Europe to the Philippines, and was one of a small Jewish
community that survived the war in Manila. (He has recently written a book
about his experiences, called Escape to Manila). Family on both sides had
perished in Europe, and she spoke of her parents’ resulting ambivalence to
their Jewish heritage. “My parents are proudly Jewish,” she said. “But in the
most private way. When I was getting married, my husband and I wanted a
big hora, with lots of dancing–you know, big music, big circle. My mother
was horrified. She said to me, ‘But isn’t that too Jewish?’ And I didn’t say
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anything, but I thought, ‘Do you know in how many ways you just psycho-
logically messed me up by saying that?’” To deal with her inherited trauma,
she had decided to become an academic, to devote her life to scholarship,
especially on Jewish themes; she says such commitment to the life of the
mind helps to keep her sane, while she also grapples with issues of literary
126 anti-Semitism.
Shortly after I met her, another academic wrote to me to offer an essay.
She too was a professor, and she was interested in writing about biography.
Her connection to the Holocaust lay in the fact that her American grandfa-
ther had been an ambulance driver during World War II and had seen the
concentration camps upon liberation. He had written long letters to his wife
back home, letters that had ended up in the hands of his granddaughter. Her
essay was a wonderful exploration of the letters and the connection they gave
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

her to the Holocaust.

A third woman wrote in to tell me about how her family fled to Argen-
tina; her grandmother had left behind sisters in Poland who perished in the
death camps. She now lived in Spain, where she was a graduate student. She
wrote an essay about how her family’s wandering nurtured her own wander-
lust, and influenced her vision of herself as a kind of Wandering Jew. In fact,
when I met this young woman later, it was in the United States; we met over
coffee, and she told me she was just visiting her father, who had moved to
California after living in Argentina. Her exotic, peripatetic life seemed, to
me, to be a strangely uplifting outcome to her family’s tragedy, but she did
not seem to agree. She seemed to be suffering a bit, because she saw her own
life’s movement as a chronic family problem, a permanent sense of exile and
displacement.
Other grandchildren had still other experiences to relate: one young man
wrote of his desire to become a great athlete and physically imposing person
so that he could clobber the Nazis or, at least, the tall, blond bullies who
lived down the block from him in his Minnesota hometown. Another young
man spoke of his dedication to Orthodox Judaism as a way to assert his
identity. Yet another young man wrote that he rejected his Judaism in favor
of secularism, having stopped believing in God after watching his grandfather
rail against the injustices of the Holocaust.
Most interesting, perhaps, were the few responses I received from grand-
children who were connected to the Holocaust through the perpetrators.
One afternoon, I got a phone call from a woman who revealed to me that
her grandfather had been a Nazi. She had a German last name, but she was
American-born. Since she had no real connection to her German grandfa-
ther, she felt that she could gain the necessary distance required to reflect on
what his history meant to her.
I found this woman incredibly compelling and brave. That she would
call me up and share this knowledge with me, without knowing what my re- 127

action might be, took guts. She had no way of knowing how I might respond
to a granddaughter of Nazis. In fact, I was shocked. I had never met anyone
who would have willingly shared such information. After all, she was also an
inheritor of trauma: the trauma of knowing that her grandfather was a war
criminal.
Unfortunately, a few weeks after our phone call, she called me again to
tell me that she could not go through with writing the essay. Her family had
 Natalie J. Friedman

begged her not to make public this terrible secret. Although I tried to talk her
into writing the essay anyway, even under an assumed name, she refused. I
eventually hung up, disappointed, but I understood. Her own inner cata-
strophist had pushed through to the surface; but unlike mine, which was al-
ways looking out for the next Nazi, her inner demon was afraid of exposure.
She obviously bore the scars of her grandfather’s past, and I had uncovered
them. I did not want to cause her any more pain.

September 11 seemed to be the thing I had

been waiting for and hoping against. It was my
grandmother’s dark prophecy come true.

The vast variety of answers I got made me believe ever more firmly that
there was power in the stories, and that they needed to be heard as much as
the survivors’ stories needed to be archived. I began sending query letters
to publishers, and each proposal came back to me with a resounding “no.”
Many editors simply claimed that the book idea was “not right for their
lists.” Some said that publishers were not interested in publishing collections
of essays, which rarely sell well. Others told me that the book was just not
that interesting because the authors were not survivors themselves, and the
general public was more interested in the voices of the survivors, or their
children–the grandchildren seemed too far removed from the trauma to
have anything relevant to say. Still other publishers revealed an even scarier
truth: the demand for Holocaust books was diminishing because a kind of
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“Holocaust overload” or ennui had set in. Many Jewish publishers even told
me that they were no longer going to accept proposals for Holocaust-related
material because of the wealth of books already out there.
These responses horrified me. How could someone say that there were
too many Holocaust stories? Even in my moments of anger and boredom,
128
listening to my grandmother drone on, I was able to recognize that her tales
were important and needed to be heard by someone. I knew, listening to her,
that the world would never hear all of the unique tales of loss and survival.
Even if thousands of these stories were published, there would never be
enough to represent the vast sea of personal history.
And here were publishers–Jewish publishers!–telling me that the Ho-
locaust’s moment of cultural hipness had passed, and that the world didn’t
need another Holocaust book.
 Natalie J. Friedman T R AU M A

I sought advice from various friends. One person suggested I contact a

Jewish organization like the UJA, a good idea that went nowhere. Another
publisher told me to find a source of funding, raise some money, and pay for
the book to be published myself. I cringed at the idea, thinking that such a
process would taint the book, making it look like a vanity piece, a self-indul-
gent little gambit.
I began to be discouraged by the project, but I have not given up hope
entirely. I have heard that some of the contributors to the book have found
homes for their essay, publishing them in various journals, so their stories are
being heard, though not in the form I envisioned. And I have not given up
the idea of writing about my grandmother; this very essay is an attempt to
do so. I firmly believe that the Third Generation has an imperative to impart
the terrible knowledge they possess, and whether we choose to do it through
reportage or fiction or poetry or academic criticism is a personal choice; what
matters most is the telling. Geoffrey Hartman, the famous literary critic, said
in a lecture he gave at Boston University in 2001 that as the survivors die
and their stories disappear with them, then it will be up to those of us who
feel like the elect witnesses to carry the memory torch. He even believes that
fictionalizing the Holocaust will not provide fodder or proof for Holocaust
deniers and revisionist historians that the Holocaust did not happen, or that
it was a made-up hoax; rather, he believes that writing and producing art
about the Holocaust will keep it alive in public memory. He is less afraid of
revisionist history than what he calls “anti-memory” or the public’s sudden
disenchantment with the Holocaust’s powerful emotional draw (10).
I agree with Hartman–stories about the Holocaust have the ability to
move people, to make them feel catharsis and pity like a Greek tragedy. In
connecting with people and making them feel, making them cry, aren’t those
of us who want to continue writing and talking about the Holocaust hoping
to stir them to action? To make them realize how these stories are recurring
today, in our world? In a sense, I want to continue the tradition of storytell- 129

ing begun by my grandmother, even if it is incomplete, somewhat inaccurate,

blended with my own visions and thoughts, even if what I say is sometimes
unpleasant, or even unbelievable.
Why do I worry about this now, when the world is burning with newer,
more pressing horrors, when the threat of terrorism makes all our lives
resemble my nightmares? So much is happening now that could obscure the
past; our own current fears of terrorism are, in a way, informed by World War
 Natalie J. Friedman

II and the Holocaust, and yet, the numerous pressures of adapting to life in
this new era are sure to overshadow that link. We are all of us–the victims
and the perpetrators of terror–inheritors of the evil lessons of the Holocaust,
but already, those lessons are being forgotten and warped. I see evidence of
this shift in the way that both terrorists and victims toss around the vocabu-
lary of the Holocaust without thinking. Arab youth call American soldiers
in Baghdad “Nazis”; American families who lost their sons and daughters in
battle call the American government “fascist”; Palestinians call Israeli soldiers
(whose grandparents might have been Holocaust survivors) “Hitler.” The
world does not stop for one moment to consider the danger in such loose
and thoughtless rhetoric. The world does not stop to consider how those
careless epithets, flung out of anger, can hurt not only innocent bystanders
who read them or hear them, but can also tear at the fragile fabric of inter-
personal and international relations that was woven after the Second World
War.
I feel that the past lives here in this present moment of conflict and
change. The Holocaust affects us all, and we must take care to learn what we
can from its painful lessons that seem, in some ways, far away from those be-
ing taught to our generation anew. And yet, there are the things we can glean
from history, signs we can watch for, hatreds we should extinguish, groups
of people we need to help, educate, and feed, so that they do not shapeshift
into enemies.

Works Cited
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Finkelstein, Norman. The Holocaust Industry. London: Verso, 2000.

Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1996.

130
 Pamela Leck T R AU M A

A Fireman Walks In
H e comes in and sits across from me. For a second we are just two
people sitting in comfortable chairs. Just sitting. Then, I can’t help but notice
how his body appears both exhausted and revved up, ready to go. It’s as
though he might pass out at any moment, yet at the same time he’s sweating
with anticipation of the next disaster. He’s perspiring. Sure it’s hot outside,
and there was a rush to get here for the first time, but the other guys in here
today weren’t sweating. Of course, they’ve been coming here for awhile now.
I know the script. I could recite it in my sleep, what I need to say at
this first meeting, about symptoms and treatment and confidentiality. What
keeps me on my toes is the significance of the pacing, the timing of the
lines, the tone of my voice, the look in my eyes. I’ve just met this man and I
already want to make sure he returns.
How are you doing?
Okay.
He’s “okay,” and I’m scared. I feel this familiar edginess that comes with
a new trauma patient. It’s an edginess I experience as though it is seeping out
of his pores over there in that chair and creeping into mine. It is like a special
adrenalin gas released into the room. I want to tell him to breathe, relax, take
a breath, but he’d think I was nuts, this woman telling him to breathe. So I
take a breath. I fleetingly imagine both of us standing to peer out the win-
dow, anticipating a bomb, a building falling, a pedestrian hitting the ground.
But we don’t. We stay seated. I breathe.
He tells me he’s okay.
Inside this cloud of edginess, this transmittal of energy resulting from
four years of poor sleep, and the steam seeping through from the images his
body is holding at bay, not ready to really look at them yet, at the core is
the awareness that something awful has happened. We are enveloped by this 131
electricity in the room, and at the same time I’m feeling frozen in time. I feel
myself frozen in time with him, as if a scene from a horror film, his horror
film, might suddenly take place in front of us, right now. Time is mixed up.
I know this feeling: something profound has happened. This man across
from me has been changed to his core, and by his coming to see me, this
first time, crossing the threshold into the psychologist’s office, I am the first
witness to this fact. For four years he’s been plowing ahead, hoping things
 Pamela Leck

would improve on their own. He is no longer the man he thought himself to

be, but he hasn’t told anyone yet. He hasn’t even deigned to think it quite
that way. He’s just noticing that life has not been the same since September
11, 2001. He hasn’t been the same. He can’t even put his finger on it.
He tells me he’s okay, that he’s working; he’s been promoted several
times in the past few years. I think of icing on cake. This thick layer of gloss
that has made the past four years livable, before it was time to stop, to look,
to listen, to speak about things that until now were too unbearable to con-
sider. He’s telling himself he’s okay, telling me he’s okay. I’m okay, doc, I’m
okay, and you can’t fuck with that. If I’m going to talk to you and by being
here admit that I’m not. . . , well, we have to agree on that, that I’m okay, I’m
still putting one foot in front of the other, still going to fires, still supporting
my family. I’m still me. I’m still a man.
And I know that at the end of 75 minutes we will shake hands and affirm
that he is indeed “okay” and that crossing this threshold doesn’t mean he
is a weak and shameful boy who never learned to suck it up and be big and
strong and brave. One does not trump the other. Strength and weakness,
muscle and tears, bravery and fear. These are all part of him.
It’s time to ask him about his symptoms. And they’re all there. He’s
been waking up three or four times a night for the past four years. He’s
quick to jump on his wife and kids. He hates himself for it. He has to be
careful watching TV because commercials make him cry. He is so ashamed.
He hasn’t talked to his best buddy’s wife since the funeral. He doesn’t care
if anything happens to him, he’s always been ready to die, but he’s worried
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about his kids, his wife. New York is a dangerous place. Talking about that
day doesn’t really bother him. He could talk about it again and again—there
are no feelings connected to it. And nothing is really fun. Not even playing
ball with the kids. But he does it, because he’s okay—he still knows what’s
important, what his responsibilities are. No nightmares, now—in the begin-
132 ning, but not now. The memories are sealed, underground. No need to revisit
them, doc. I’ve dealt with those. Not sure why I’m here. He’s “okay.” And
part of me really wants to send him off. “Keep truckin’,” my friend. And I tell
him he’s come to the right place. That his symptoms mean he has PTSD. I
know how to help. It takes work. He’ll feel better.
For this hour, I’m walking the tightrope between acknowledging his pain
without denying his strength. I tell him I can help without suggesting he is
weak. I convey that it’s not about me helping him, who is so used to being
 Pamela Leck T R AU M A

the one who helps, who saves lives. It’s not about one of us being better,
smarter, stronger, the other weak and timid and lost. I try to convey that it
is he and I in this room facing a reality that will not be laid to rest until it is
acknowledged. He has been affected by what he saw, what he did, and the
many he lost. And please, this doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means that you
and I are part of the same species and we care about what happens to us. If I
can pull this off this first session, there’s a better chance he’ll make it back.

He is no longer the man he thought himself

to be, but he hasn’t told anyone yet.

I tell him I know it is a big deal for him to come here, to have gotten
here this first time. And how important it is for him, for now at least, that no
one knows he is coming here. Not his wife or friends.
It is a tall order to make this worth his while. There are so many reasons
for him not to come back: that inscrutable whisper in the air that strong men
don’t need therapy; that talking to a shrink means you’re nuts at best, weak
at worst; the fear that sharing emotions is weak, and that this weakness will
demolish in a second any other signs, or proof, of strength; people can use
it against you, professionally, personally; he’s made it this long, why bother
getting help now; he’s a doer, not a talker. How is talking to a woman whose
read a lot of books but never fought a fire (at least not a literal one) going to
help? And of course, there is the fear, the knowledge that he will have to talk
about the very things he’s been trying to forget.
And on the side of making it back to my office: some would argue that
he will come back, because he knows his symptoms are only getting worse
without treatment, or because in this first session I explain PTSD to him in
a way that makes enough sense that he knows he needs treatment. That he
makes a rational choice. But I think it is something much more basic that
133
I have to appeal to: that human need for understanding, for speaking the
truth, for making sense out of what has happened. And not to do it alone.
So if I am up for it, and I always am, because it is what I know is at the
heart of this first encounter. I pull out all the stops and no matter what is
coming out of my mouth I am using all of my radar to give me clues on how
best to engage THIS man. I know I won’t be able to help if he doesn’t come
back, so that is all that matters this first time, getting him to return. And I
trust my instincts, because there is no time to logically and rationally sort
 Pamela Leck

through all of the information I am picking up. And if I am successful I relay

the message, in one of many possible ways, “You are strong, you are in pain,
what you are describing to me makes sense and it won’t be easy, but if you
come back we can start making things better.”
Oh, and things will get worse before they get better. That’s a tricky one
to say, with the right tone, the right cadence, at the right time. But I have to
say it, because I know that just making this first trip here, acknowledging just
this much to himself, will likely start his mind and body going. Everything
that has been held in and pushed down, those memories and feelings and
thoughts, it’s as though they can smell a therapist’s office, and they know it’s
time to start rising to the surface. What gives me my backbone, in asking him
to do something that will initially make things worse, is my knowing that it
works. The treatment works. If I can only get him engaged, give him a hint of
hope to hold on to.
I close the door, aware that next week will be an ounce easier, the initial
seduction a success. Next week we will have to begin charting this new ter-
ritory for him, allowing himself to fall apart a little, a lot, to clean out the
four-year-old wounds that have been covered over, remaining still raw and
unhealed. Allowing this strong man to lean on me a bit—letting him know
that it really is okay.
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134
 Martha Serpas T R AU M A

No Name Storm
The peacock that for months roamed
the green belt on River and Kenneth

blew over from the zoo without mention—

like the urban homeless perched

on the landmarks of our commutes—not

on platforms and doorways but on pine trees

and jacaranda, what we might acquaint

in ourselves divorced by the drive—

our morning-coffee travel cups, sidelong glances

over pursed, slurping lips as if cobalt plumes

and a fan of eyes were just another line

of palm trees, another plodding timeline.

The nameless storm brooded over the Gulf,

sucking water from inlets and rivers—

soggy frogs swapping duck calls,

banana leaves ripped to streamers,

ants clumped on the surface of rising

water, a rebellious yellow sky
135
against our faces like a darkened mirror,
an alchemized image no longer discernible,

only the plaintive scream of the peacock,

its unintelligible, unpronounceable refrain.
 Martha Serpas

The Boat Shed

Long after the salvage,
the boat shed covers the shadowed tide,
feeling the hull inside its shiplap
like a ghost limb, like a thought

inside a dream. So we named

the bar after its falling roof
and split sides, a crumbling
shelter for all we’ve lost—

rusty bow a few steps

from the door and a varnished
wheel running wild toward
closing time—shells

in the parking lot, more like white stones

in a field keeping watch.
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136
 Martha Serpas T R AU M A

A Future With Hope

In threads of moss and potato vines,
grimy sidewalks, chain-link fence,
a convincing dampness, on leaves,
on roots, under the eaves of houses.

Branches bar the black-oak sky.

Crows and grackles bear what
yellow light there is. Between
wrought iron gates, a slight wind.

Leave hope there where it belongs,

on the other side of the levee
where later it can be found easily,
its weight, bread crusts on water.

But here in the middle,

between the slow river
and cypress, stands a single blue
heron, barely moving. Watch.

137
 Through the Looking Glass

This photograph of the view through a sniper scope was taken by Rusten Currie
while he was stationed as a military intelligence officer in southern Baghdad.
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A woman in a two-piece suit comes up to me.

Am I Major Krompecher?
Reflexively, I reply: “Yes, Ma’am.”
She informs me that Dave is waiting for me in the cargo area.

138
What will I say to his wife Cindy when I meet her?
Words and thoughts swirl around my head, but I can’t locate anything.
All I feel is grief, and Cindy does not need me to cry on her shoulder.
There are no Army manuals to instruct me on what to do. I am at a loss.
I am the escort officer who is taking my fallen comrade home for the
last time.

–Maj. Zoltan Krompecher, from his poem

“Coming Home: A Soldier Returns from Iraq”
 Nicole Simek T R AU M A

Pierre Bourdieu & the Subject of Trauma

C ritical debate in trauma studies today focuses in large part on the
bodily or psychic mechanisms through which trauma is experienced and
remembered, and, more specifically, on the extent to which trauma can be
considered a discursive or extra-discursive event, registered either in con-
sciousness or directly in the body. Dominick LaCapra, for example, advises
the critic to avoid celebrating the sublimity or inaccessibility of the traumatic
event to the exclusion of historical explanations (when locatable, historical
events are in question) or any form of normativity (normativity, although
potentially open to reinterpretation, is indispensable, he argues, to ethico-
political judgments and action).1 In an attempt to recover the place of history
in trauma, I turn here to the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose
conceptualization of the subject (as an agent endowed with what he terms
habitus) and concern for the effects of violence on agents can contribute
much to the study of trauma and to processes of working through.

Between psychoanalysis and socioanalysis: the concept of habitus

Bourdieu’s sociology may at first seem an unlikely tool for an analysis of
trauma, a concept first developed within medicine and the emerging field of
psychoanalysis.2 Indeed, Bourdieu’s own pointed criticism of the discipline,
and his repeated emphasis on the primacy of social conditions in the process
of subject formation, have led some to view his methods as a form of social
reductivism, while his attention to subjectivity and use of psychoanalytic
terms (including, for example, denial, repression, sublimation, libido, and the
unconscious) have created confusion for others, pointing to an ambivalent
attitude toward the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches.3 In relation to
trauma studies more specifically, LaCapra has noted that Bourdieu’s work
veers at times toward “reductive contextualism,” one of two prevalent forms 139
of reductivism stemming from the conflation of transhistorical or structural
trauma (such as the traumas of originary mimesis, birth, or, in Lacanian
terms, the entry into the symbolic order; that is, non-event centered traumas
that are experienced universally and tend to involve existential absences) and
historical trauma (involving specific losses, events, and subject positions one
may occupy with relation to the events) (76-83). While the tendency to “gen-
eralize structural trauma so that it absorbs or subordinates the significance
 Nicole Simek

of historical trauma,” as LaCapra states, results in “rendering all references to

the latter merely illustrative, homogeneous, allusive, and perhaps equivocal”
(a tendency which can also dangerously dissolve distinctions between victims
and perpetrators), reductive contextualism “is typical of historians and soci-
ologists who attempt to explain, without significant residue, all anxiety or un-
settlement—as well as attendant forms of creativity—through specific contexts
or events” (82). Therefore what remains, he continues, as a goal of historical
analysis is an exploration of “the problematic relations between absence
and loss (or lack) as well as between structural and historical trauma without
simply collapsing the two or reducing one to the other” (84). This distinction
draws attention to the specificity of historical losses, and responses to these
losses, which cannot simply be explained in relation to pre-existing, anxiety-
producing conditions. Attending to this fundamental distinction also enables
the critic to understand better how traumas such as slavery problematically
become a “founding trauma,” one that comes to serve as “the basis for collec-
tive or personal identity, or both” (81).
Keeping in mind LaCapra’s important distinction, I would like to turn
now to a more productive use of Bourdieu for trauma theory. Bourdieu’s sus-
tained attention to symbolic violence—a form of violence distinguished from
brute force by the means through which it is exerted, the degree of complic-
ity on the part of the dominated groups that it involves, the efficiency with
which it achieves its effects, and its tendency to be lived unreflectively as
natural—is highly pertinent to understanding the workings of trauma. While
ostensibly removed from the concern for the markedly disruptive character
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of traumatic events and their aftermath, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic vio-

lence, along with his theorization of habitus (and its social correlate, field 4),
is not only useful to a discussion of trauma’s effects on the self, but also can
further elucidate the ways in which serialized or difficultly locatable historical
traumas (such as racism) operate and continue to exert effects across genera-
140 tions, precisely because of its social orientation and capacity, as a tool, for
dealing with naturalized behaviors and beliefs.
Examining habitus and the subtle workings of symbolic violence, the
ways in which harmful schemes of perception such as these are imposed on
subjects, can do much to counter the intergenerational transmission of anxi-
eties stemming from trauma (such as the anxiety experienced by oppressed
ethnic groups on a day-to-day basis) that are taken as a natural “part of life”
rather than an oppressive ideological force from which one has the right to
 Nicole Simek T R AU M A

be free. The notion of habitus is a key concept in Bourdieu’s analysis of sym-

bolic violence. It is most easily described as a set of dispositions or schemes
of perception that structure a subject’s (or agent’s, Bourdieu’s preferred term)
tastes and actions. Developed through experience and conservative in nature
(in that it tends through its anticipatory function to reproduce past actions,
and disposes an agent to seek out situations with which it is most familiar,
avoiding through self-censorship social spaces in which it does not feel “at
home”), the habitus is never, however, rigidly determined. Because the habitus
remains open to revision through new experiences and contact with chang-
ing social forces, the actions of an agent in a given situation can never be
reduced to, or predicted by, her class position or social status through any
strictly causal relationship, for example. Habitus as a principle accounts for
observed regularities in the conduct of individuals over a period of time—or
of groups whose individuals, as products of similar experiences, share similar
dispositions—without attributing these regularities to a rigid logic of “rules.”
Commenting on the formation of habitus, and the essentially practical logic
which governs its function, Bourdieu writes:
The conditions associated with a particular class of conditions
of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable
dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as
structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and
organize practices and representations that can be objectively
adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious
aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necess-
ary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’
without being in any way the product of obedience to rules,
they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product
of the organizing action of a conductor. (Logic 53; my emphasis)
Central to this definition is a concept of “practical sense,” an “approximate,
141
‘fuzzy’ logic” (Logic 87) or semi-conscious mode of behavior likened to that
of players in a game, whose anticipations of other players’ moves and ap-
propriate game strategies and moves to make are internalized to the point of
becoming more or less automatic. Not equivalent to either rational, calcula-
tive thought or pure reflex, practical sense is, “in the language of sport, a ‘feel
for the game’,” a “quasi-bodily involvement in the world” or:
an immanence in the world through which the world imposes
its imminence, things to be done or said, which directly govern
 Nicole Simek

speech and action. It orients ‘choices’ which, though not

deliberate, are no less systematic, and which, without being
ordered and organized in relation to an end, are none the
less charged with a kind of retrospective finality. (Logic 66)
Habitus is therefore an ontological structure (akin to Heidegger’s notion
of Dasein in that it is a structure rather than a substance), but an empty one
whose content is always historically contingent and specific. As such, it is a
useful analytical tool at both the micro and macro levels, that is, in the study
of individual subjects (understood, however, as always already the products,
and producers, of social relations) and sociological inquiries into larger
groups. As “an acquired system of generative schemes” that “makes pos-
sible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inher-
ent in the particular conditions of its production—and only those,” habitus,
endowed with an “infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity,” gives an
account of human agency intended to overcome the dichotomy between
structuralist and voluntarist theories of determinism and freedom (Logic 55).
This agency can also be described as “a spontaneity without consciousness or
will opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history
in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects ‘without
inertia’ in rationalist theories” (Logic 56). Habitus allows, then, for the infinite
variety of possible responses and actions an agent may deploy in the many
situations she encounters throughout her lifetime, while recognizing the
limiting effect of past experiences as conditioning factors influencing future
“choices” and tastes.
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Like Freudian models of childhood development, Bourdieu emphasizes

the influence of early social inculcation and the family as, generally, the
primary site of this inculcation, arguing that “[. . .] the anticipations of the
habitus, practical hypotheses based on past experience, give disproportion-
ate weight to early experiences” (Logic 54). This disproportionate influence
142 both creates and sustains the agent’s “inertia,” or conservative tendency to
reproduce past schemes of perception, by incorporating early on both the
“feel” for certain social spaces and an investment, lived as natural, in these
fields.5 The body, highly important to practice (habitus is a set of embodied
structures of social relations and history), is viewed in Bourdieu’s theory not
as a transcendent, biological “given,” but rather as a socially constructed site
of incorporated beliefs and practices. “Practical belief,” Bourdieu continues:
is not a ‘state of the mind’, still less a kind of arbitrary adher-
 Nicole Simek T R AU M A

ence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’),

but rather a state of the body. Doxa is the relationship of
immediate adherence that is established in practice between
a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal
taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense.
(Logic 68)
The structure of the habitus functions as a protective device, according to
a logic somewhat similar to that of Freud’s “protective shield” (an interpre-
tive filter that is both conservative and adaptable6). The habitus “tends to pro-
tect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu
to which it is as pre-adapted as possible,” avoiding anxiety and discomfort
by choosing social circles, careers, or activities, for example, “according to
concrete indices of the accessible and the inaccessible, of what is and is not
‘for us’” (Logic 61, 64). In other words, the habitus seeks out situations in
which it feels at ease, like “a fish in water,” to employ another of Bourdieu’s
metaphors. It is precisely this “taken-for-grantedness” of one’s involvement
in the world, this “feel” for the game, and unreflective capacity to generate
behaviors adjusted to social contexts that is disrupted by a traumatic event.
Distinguished from any discomfort-producing encounter with unfamiliar
fields or social milieus (such as that of being unexpectedly called upon to
give a public speech, to use a familiar example), trauma represents a limit-
case of defamiliarization, defined by the extreme urgency of the situation,
which requires immediate action on the part of the agent (as in a threat to
life, for example).
Such a model requires, however, that an event be recognized as traumat-
ic, i.e., as a threat, and, moreover, that the experience of trauma be inevitably
framed by the schemes of perception that structure the habitus. Such an assertion runs
counter to the recent, influential theory upheld by physician Bessel van der
Kolk and literary critic Cathy Caruth. Both advance a totalizing and absolute
dissociative model, one that claims that traumatic events are not registered 143

in either conscious or unconscious memory, but are, in a manner as yet

undetermined, literally inscribed in the agent, imprinted in the body (flash-
backs and nightmares, traumatic symptoms, are also held to be literal repeti-
tions of the event, unaltered by interpretation) and therefore utterly beyond
representation.7 As Bourdieu points out, however, “[s]timuli do not exist for
practice in their objective truth, as conditional, conventional triggers,” but
“[act] only on condition that they encounter agents conditioned to recog-
 Nicole Simek

nize them” (Logic 53). Recognition of stimuli (as something to be feared or

responded to) does not necessarily entail the internalization of a satisfactory
response to such stimuli; what marks the traumatic event is the breakdown
of practical logic, of unreflective action, and of the habitus’ capacity to make
the reasonable hypotheses on which it bases its actions. Whereas trauma
has traditionally been defined as inducing a “disorder of memory” (Leys
2), a model of trauma based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus may describe
traumatic symptoms as a breakdown or disruption of “practice,” stemming
from the failure of memory (of embodied dispositions) to reproduce actions
that, in the agent’s view, are useful, sensible (that is, lived as meaningful), and
appropriate to the situation (leading to the frequent description of traumatic
events as “incomprehensible,” “beyond belief,” or “senseless”). Trauma
reveals the instability and unpredictability of the social world that formerly
appeared stable and reliable. Such a disruption, which renders what is nor-
mally taken for granted explicit and no longer dependable or immediately
meaningful, means that the victim of trauma can no longer take her relation-
ship to her surroundings as natural and predictable, and may live in a state of
hyper-consciousness and constant vigilance, unable to “forget” the event or
experience it as past. Because of the habitus’ mutability, however, victims can
work through trauma, developing over time new practices and dispositions
that allow them to cope with their new sense of the world.

History, the unconscious, and recuperation

Intended to transcend the opposition between structuralist and vol-
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untarist conceptions of agency, the concept of habitus and its relation to

field is designed to go beyond what Bourdieu considers a critically reduc-
tive dichotomy between conscious (rational) and unconscious (mechanistic
and uncontrollable) thought and action. Pointing out that rational action
(i.e., conscious reflection and decision-making) can co-exist with an agent’s
144 dominant, practical mode of action (as long as rationality is not mistaken
for an impossible, total objectivity; Logic 53), it would seem to follow that
for Bourdieu, unconscious action can also co-exist with practical sense, as
a point at the end of a continuum between consciousness and the uncon-
scious—if, again, the unconscious is recognized not as a universal structure,
but as having been shaped by—and continually in a dialectic with—social
structures. This contention situates Bourdieu close to Lacan, who famously
argued that the unconscious is structured like a language (a symbolic, that is,
 Nicole Simek T R AU M A

social and historical, rather than essential, order). Since the habitus is “em-
bodied history” or “the active presence of the whole past of which it is the
product,” the “unconscious,” as Bourdieu puts it, “is never anything other
than the forgetting of history,” an amnesia of origins that takes place through
the habitus’ internalization of this history “as a second nature” (Logic 56). The
unconscious functions through misrecognition—that is, the misrecognition of
arbitrary, historically developed structures as natural or essential.
Misrecognition is key to the operation of symbolic violence, the vio-
lence inherent in schemes of perception that cause certain groups to remain
dominated by others through these groups’ own internalization of these
schemes and values. Misrecognizing sexual divisions of labor and spheres of
interest as based in a natural biology and ignoring the social construction of
gender, have led to the reproduction of social structures that hold women in
a dominated position; perceiving culturally and historically specific catego-
ries of race and standards of human worth to be universal and essentially
valid has produced debilitating feelings of inferiority and helped to maintain
social inequality in contemporary society, to take another example. What is
central to the persistence of this domination is the extent to which “blacks,”
“whites,” “women,” and “men” internalize these principles of division that
define them as groups, to begin with, seeing them as natural characteristics
and dispositions.8 Neither the complicity of the dominated group nor the ex-
ercise of power on the part of the dominators can be described as “bad faith,”
or as willful and consciously strategic, although the semi-conscious schemes
of perception underlying such divisions can be accompanied by strategic
acts or physical force intended to reinforce one’s position. To counter such
social structures, a process of anamnesis—a recuperation of the historical and
fundamentally arbitrary nature of categories of perception, and a method for
uncovering the ways in which such principles impose themselves—must be
established.
The task of historicization—or “thought about the social conditions of 145

thought”—that Bourdieu sets to social science “offers thought the possibility

of a genuine freedom with respect to those [social] conditions” (Meditations
118); ultimately, critical reflexivity can lead, through practical interven-
tions in the political field, to the implementation of a “Realpolitik of reason”
and a democratization of the field of power (126).9 As tools for reflexivity,
Bourdieu’s concepts are useful to trauma studies first as a means for dealing
with the disruptive effects locatable traumatic events can have on the self
 Nicole Simek

by stressing the importance of practice. Because of the habitus’ reliance on

experience and semi-conscious modes of behavior, recognition (or conscious
memory) of the traumatic event alone does not generally permit a sufficient
process of working through, but must be accompanied by a long process of
habitus reformation (not restoration, which would entail the full recovery of
the pre-traumatic self), that is, by the buildup, over time, of new, empower-
ing practices that allow the subject of trauma to function as much as possible
according to a practical logic once again.
Secondly, Bourdieu’s concepts and focus on historicization are perhaps
most useful, however, for dealing with traumas that are difficult to locate
and, in particular, historical traumas that function as structural ones. Study-
ing symbolic violence, its function through the imposition of complicit
schemes of perception on the part of the victim, and the liberating effects the
recuperation of the historical bases for these schemes can have when accom-
panied by a concrete rehabilitation of social structures and institutions over
time, can do much to counter the intergenerational transmission of anxieties
stemming from trauma (such as the anxiety experienced by oppressed ethnic
minorities or women on a day-to-day basis) that are taken as a natural “part
of life” rather than an oppressive ideological force from which one has the
right to be free.

Toward a sociology of trauma

Bourdieu’s emphasis on the recuperation of history, which is a gesture
toward increased rationality rather than a presumption of total objectivity,
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runs counter to much Lacanian-inspired criticism focusing on trauma as a

sublime excess or irruption of the real, its inaccessibility, and the betrayal of
the real that results from attempts to narrate or recover trauma. The sociolog-
ical model discussed here, while compatible with many accounts of trauma
and its aftermath, is perhaps not sufficient for fully addressing the problem
146 of traumatic dissociation and amnesia on an individual level (a problem
central to trauma studies since its inception, and one which has given rise
to theories of the inaccessibility of traumatic memory). Bodily symptoms of
trauma cannot simply be explained through this model (just as they can-
not be satisfactorily explained, in my view, as situated entirely in the body
and untouched by representation or interpretation). This may be due to the
focus of Bourdieu’s research, oriented toward collective processes of change.10
More inquiry into the relation between practical sense and bodily memory
 Nicole Simek T R AU M A

is certainly a direction of research that needs to be taken. The usefulness of

Bourdieu’s theory for the problem of structural trauma and existential anxi-
ety needs to be addressed in much greater detail than space permits here as
well. What Bourdieu’s conception of subjectivity does suggest, however—with
important ramifications for understanding the relation between narrative
and identity—is that since individual subjects are always already the products
of social relations, the experience and representation of trauma is inevitably
framed by the schemes of perception that structure the habitus. Rather than
viewing this social determination as limiting or reductive, recognizing this
very determination, and the mutability of determining structures, is precisely
what makes social transformation and working through possible.11

Notes
1
Drawing on Freud, LaCapra defines “working through” in contrast to “acting out”: acting
out is linked to the repetition compulsion and describes the traumatized victim’s “tendency to
relive the past, to be haunted by ghosts or even to exist in the present as if one were still fully in
the past, with no distance from it,” while working through is defined as “a kind of countervailing
force (not a totally different process, not even something leading to a cure),” in which the victim
or the secondary witness (e.g., the psychoanalyst, historian, or literary critic) “tries to gain critical
distance on a problem and to distinguish between past, present, and future” (142-43). Although
LaCapra sees working through as a desirable process, the importance of the need to act out, he
states, should not be disregarded or depreciated.
2
As Ruth Leys recalls, the term trauma originally designated a “surgical wound, conceived
on the model of a rupture of the skin or protective envelope of the body resulting in a cata-
strophic global reaction in the entire organism” (19), while early studies of traumatic symptoms
attributed their cause to “shock or concussion of the spine” (3). The analogous conception of
trauma as a psychic shock produced by an incursion of external forces or events, although domi-
nant in modern definitions of trauma, has been complicated throughout the history of trauma
studies, and notably in Freud’s work, Leys argues, by the role attributed to latency and belated
memories in the production of traumatic symptoms.
3
See Jean-François Fourny, “Bourdieu’s Uneasy Psychoanalysis,” SubStance 29, no. 3
(2000): 103-112, for a discussion of the latter position.
4
Bourdieu uses the term field to designate (historically produced) social spaces that 147

function similarly to “games,” involving specific stakes and a belief (illusio) in the serious or
worthwhile character of the game. Unlike a game, however, “in the social fields, which are the
products of a long, slow process of autonomization, and are therefore, so to speak, games ‘in
themselves’ and not ‘for themselves,’ one does not embark on the game by a conscious act, one
is born into the game, with the game; and the relation of investment, illusio, is made more total
and unconditional by the fact that it is unaware of what it is” (The Logic of Practice [Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1990], 67). Moreover, the “rules” governing a field, which are never completely
explicit, are continually contested and subject to modification by its participants.
 Nicole Simek

5
Bourdieu uses the example of language acquisition to illustrate this point: “In the case
of primary learning, the child learns at the same time to speak the language (which is only ever
presented in action, in his own or other people’s speech) and to think in (rather than with) the
language. The earlier a player enters the game and the less he is aware of the associated learning
(the limiting case being, of course, that of someone born into, born with the game), the greater
is his ignorance of all that is tacitly granted through his investment in the field and his interest
in its very existence and perpetuation and in everything that is played for in it, and his unaware-
ness of the unthought presuppositions that the game produces and endlessly reproduces, thereby
reproducing the conditions of its own perpetuation” (Logic 67).
6
See Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey.  24 vols (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953-74), 3-64.
7
This view has come under sharp criticism; see Leys chapters 7 and 8 for a refutation of
van der Kolk and Caruth’s claim.
8
Incorporated practices of self-censorship can be highly persistent and also explain why so-
cial change cannot take place merely by declaration, as witnessed, for example, in the tendency
of women to abstain from voting or take part in political activities (viewed sometimes as superior
activities requiring an unachieved competence, but often simply as uninteresting or as “men’s
business”) even after the promulgation of suffrage laws authorizing such practices.
9
For a detailed discussion of these points, which can only be briefly summarized here, see
in particular Pascalian Meditations, chapter 3, “The Historicity of Reason.”
10
As Bourdieu states in The Weight of the World, “Sociology does not intend to substitute its
explanatory method for that of psychoanalysis; it only intends to construct in a different fashion
certain facts that the latter takes up as objects of inquiry, fixing on aspects of reality that psycho-
analysis dismisses as secondary or insignificant, or treats as screens to be traversed in order to
reach the essential” (quoted in Fourny 109).
11
I would like to thank Tom Trezise and Zahi Zalloua for their valuable insights into earlier
drafts of this article.
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Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1996.
148 Fourny, Jean-François. “Bourdieu’s Uneasy Psychoanalysis.” SubStance 29, no. 3 (2000): 103-112.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Volume 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth
Press, 1953-74. 3-64.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
 Elizabeth England T R AU M A

Settling Matters
“Mrs. Sanfield?”
It was the young man from the city morgue calling again. His voice was
all business this time, not as tender as yesterday, Myrna noticed, no chatty
questions about the deceased, no small talk about grief; it was as if overnight
he had grown impatient with the indecisive old widow.
“We’re running out of time, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry to be so blunt,
but we need an answer.”
“Answer?” Myrna said. The hard plastic of the phone, unused since
yesterday, was cool against her ear.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Our storage limit is two weeks.”
“Has it been that long?” Myrna said. “Two weeks?” She was sitting alone
in the wooden booth of her small kitchen watching the first snowflakes of
the year smash purposefully into the windows. Melting upon impact, these
intricate, one-of-a-kind kamikaze figures left no mark, no reminder on the
thick glass. “I thought I had longer,” Myrna said.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “You have until today. More precisely, until five
o’clock this afternoon. We called to find out what you’ve decided.”
“It’s not up to me, at least, not entirely,” Myrna said. “I need to find his
note.”
“His note?”
“That was his way,” Myrna said. “He was particular about certain things,
no rhyme or reason, mind you.” She saw eyeglasses on the shelf above the
sink, wedged discreetly between two coffee mugs. For days, her husband
Alexis had puzzled over where he had put them, and now they seemed so
obvious. “I just know he would have told me what to do. About something
like this.”
“In the interim, that is, until the note surfaces, perhaps there’s some- 149
one else I should talk to, a family member, a relative,” the young man said.
“Someone with the authority to make a decision.”
At first, Myrna thought the young man was irritated, his voice was so
firm, but then she realized that what she heard was simply youth, the ur-
gency to move on to the next thing.
“No,” she said. “There is no one, it was just us, Alexis and Myrna. The
Sanfields.”
 Elizabeth England

The young man paused politely before saying, “I’m sorry,” and then, “we
have until five o’clock to decide.”
“We?” Myrna said. It was the pronouns, the we’s and our’s, that were the
hardest to overlook, to let pass by without comment.
“I mean you,” he said. “We must know your decision by this afternoon,
Mrs. Sanfield.”
“When you called before you told me your name, but I’ve forgotten,
forgive me,” Myrna said.
“Billy,” the young man said, his voice softening, but not much, as if
reminding her that a name doesn’t offer connection. “And it was yesterday,”
he said, correcting her. “We called yesterday because of our urgency to know,
ma’am, how we should treat the body, that is, is it to be cremated or buried?”
His sentences were unequivocal, carrying with them such momentum, such
possibility of closure.
“What do you think, Billy?” Myrna said. “What is your preference?
Because, you see, I’m stuck.”
“Excuse me,” he said, breathing more deeply into Myrna’s ear. “I don’t
understand.”
“Which would you choose, cremation or burial?” Her fingers combed
and untangled the purple fringe of a worn placemat.
“It’s personal, ma’am,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” Myrna said. “But what if.” Still sitting in her booth,
Myrna lifted first her left thigh and then her right and swiveled her hips
around so that if she wanted to get up, to look at the list of things she had
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written down, matters that needed her attention, household chores she nor-
mally tackled without a reminder, with a dedication and interest that others,
friends of hers and even acquaintances, found remarkable, she was now in
the correct position.
“Cremation is more definitive,” Billy said. “The body is truly gone.”
150 “But I’ve heard it’s like incineration,” Myrna said. “Like what they do to
garbage.”
“I shouldn’t really be doing this, ma’am,” Billy said. “Offering opinions.
It’s not my area.”
“Area?”
“My job is storage and transport,” Billy said. “Nothing more.”
“But if it was your area,” Myrna said. She touched the half corn muffin,
buttered and toasted, in front of her. It was no longer warm. “What seems
 Elizabeth England T R AU M A

better, more respectful, more human?”

She could hear that Billy was fiddling, messing around with the supplies
on his desk, perhaps refilling a stapler or flipping the unnecessary pages of
his daily planner, Saturday and Sunday, the weekend days being so useless
to a workweek. Then he began picking at one thing in particular, Myrna
could sense the focus, his determination to unleash a linoleum desk cover, a
misplaced decorative sticker, something stuck askew on his faux maple civil
servant desk.
“There are advantages to both, I guess,” Billy said.
“Advantages,” Myrna said. “I can’t seem to see any.”
“Mrs. Sanfield,” he said, his accent, relaxed British or maybe even Bos-
ton, the two linked by short A’s and ancestral longing, grew stronger, more
formal, as he made his pitch: “We need to know sooner rather than later.”
“Yes, I know,” Myrna said.
“Do you?”

“Has anyone you loved ever died,” Myrna said, wandering

back to the kitchen. The journey between the two rooms, kitchen
to bathroom, bathroom to kitchen, was her daily pilgrimage.

“I think so.” Myrna found Billy’s pattern of inhalations and exhalations

nearly hopeful. She lifted herself up and walked the short distance from
the kitchen to the guest bathroom. In the rectangular mirror, she saw how
chapped her lips were, her face narrower than she had ever seen it, her hair
translucent, and her brown eyes receding into their sockets. “I’m disappear-
ing,” Myrna said.
“Ma’am?” Billy said. His voice, anticipating a conclusion to all this,
startled her.
“He just disappeared,” she said, turning on the cold water and then the
151
hot, just to hear the sound of something moving. “Alexis. One minute here
and then gone.”
“He didn’t disappear, ma’am,” Billy said.
Myrna said nothing and put the phone gently down on the sink rim.
She turned off the taps, squeezing each one forcefully to ensure its closure
and watched the skin on her hands whiten with the effort. When she picked
up the receiver, she said, “Billy? Are you there?”
“I’m still here,” Billy said, sounding a bit unsure why he was. There
 Elizabeth England

was no sound from his office, no street noises, no co-workers chatting, and
Myrna imagined him in the basement of a federal building on lower Broad-
way or Chambers Street, somewhere out of the way, yet official. “I know this
is hard, Mrs. Sanfield.”
When she found Alexis dead in his desk chair, his coffee mug over-
turned, his white shirt stained with brown dribbles, he had just been alive. It
was mid-afternoon on a sunny cold Sunday. There were no keyboard strokes
tapping like a metronome, keeping pace with her needlepoint, pull, pull,
push, pull, pull, push. It was probably an hour, Myrna guessed later when
asked by the EMT medic who responded as if it was an emergency, as if
there was someone to save. It was probably an hour, Myrna explained, before
she dropped a stitch and saw the hole in her needlework. “Alexis,” she had
called out, no longer hearing the tapping. “Alexis,” she said again. And then,
leisurely, she said to the medic, without any hurry, she walked into the study
and saw the coffee pooling by her husband’s foot, the sound of it soaking
into the thin Oriental rug seemed overwhelmingly loud. Piles of books were
on the floor, his leather chair needed emptying, Myrna remembered not-
ing, there were so many of Alexis’s clothes gathered there. “Alexis,” she said.
“Your coffee.” Slumped was the word she used to describe his body, though
the medic had looked at her quizzically, which made Myrna wonder if it
was a word, slumped, or if a better word choice would have been dead. He
looked dead, was probably what the medic wanted, but to Myrna, he was
still living at this point, he was just resting. Slumped. “Have you ever lost
anyone?” Myrna said.
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“Excuse me?” Billy said.

“Has anyone you loved ever died,” Myrna said, wandering back to the
kitchen. The journey between the two rooms, kitchen to bathroom, bath-
room to kitchen, was her daily pilgrimage. Standing in front of the stove,
she looked briefly at the unlit burners, covered with casseroles, pies, paper
152 plates of cookies with their small hand-written notes attached, the crusts and
sprinkles old and rigid, ready to be heaved not eaten. The snow had stopped
suddenly, and the sunlight made her arms and legs look checkered, awash in
black and white squares, reflections from outside that had no beginning or
end. She hadn’t talked to anyone for this long since Alexis died. “I have.”
“Yes, I know,” Billy said. “My grandmother died when I was little, but I
guess that doesn’t count since I don’t remember any of it.”
“It counts,” Myrna said. “What did you do with her?”
 Elizabeth England T R AU M A

“We buried her,” Billy said. “I remember that part.”

“Was it satisfying?” Myrna said.
“I was too young to know,” Billy said. Myrna could sense his drifting
back to his hometown, remembering an old tree behind his house perhaps
or the dinner bell from a neighbor pealing out the lateness of the day. She
traveled with him.
He said nothing for a few moments, and then with a salesman-like deci-
siveness, Billy said, “I assume it was in a way. Satisfying, that is.”
“He was a stress expert,” Myrna said. “Alexis. Isn’t that funny?”
“I have scientist written down,” Billy said.
“Of buildings,” Myrna said. “He was a scientist of buildings.”
“Then I would definitely opt for the burial ceremony,” Billy said. He was
chewing gum now, his teeth snapping the red or yellow or perhaps pepper-
mint-white stick against his molars rhythmically, sounding out the tempo of
imminent victory, a case closed.
“But you see,” Myrna said. “I’ve searched everywhere, overturned things,
thrown them upside down, shaken them, still, I haven’t found his note.” She
wandered down the hall towards their bedroom. “He would have told me
what he wanted. That was his way. Giving precise directions about the most
peculiar things, water plants to this line, throw away milk when there’s this
much left, never touch a dead battery. This would have been his domain,
death, bodies. It just would have been.”
“You’d be surprised,” Billy said, sounding much older than he was, “how
little we know about our loved ones.”
Myrna listened to the water leaking from the bathroom faucets and to
Billy’s rhythmical breathing, the gum tucked away inside his mouth.
“I just haven’t looked hard enough,” she said.
“It seems that, given your husband’s background, science and all, he
would prefer to be in the ground,” Billy said with an assumption that he
would get no argument from her. She wondered how long he would stay on 153

the phone to fill a quota.

“He wouldn’t leave the matter unsettled,” Myrna said. “Without telling
me what to do, how could I possibly decide for him? He just wouldn’t do
that.” How foolish she must have looked, a small-boned woman who despite
her white hair looked younger than sixty-three, looked positively good for
her age, for any age, really. How foolish she must have looked, shaking such
a big man, a dead man, in fact, urging him to wake up, practically lifting him
 Elizabeth England

out of the chair, she was, at one point, shaking him so hard. “Your coffee,”
she had said to him and then walked over and righted the cup and saw drool
leaking from his mouth. “Wake up,” she said or something like that, some-
thing just as silly, just as naive. How much drool, the medics asked. Not a lot,
she told them, just a little, enough to seem odd. His head was turned to the
side; his eyes were shut; miraculous, the medics had said, for his eyes to shut.
She took hours before calling the EMT. How many hours, they asked
her, why did you wait? Myrna didn’t know; she wasn’t aware of any time
passing at all. She found him and it was light out, the sun was shining off the
white buttons of Alexis’s shirt. When the medics arrived, they followed emer-
gency protocol. They ripped his shirt, those white buttons falling to the floor
like hail stones, and then they pulled him to the ground, felt for a pulse, a
heartbeat. They almost did CPR, but chose not to pretend any longer and
merely pronounced him dead of a massive coronary at 8:07 p.m. Sunday
night. How did she find him, they asked her, and she told them the story
of the coffee and the drool and the relentless shaking. She didn’t tell them
about how she waited for a fact, scientific evidence, physical proof, for his
skin to suddenly turn from warm to cool. A discernible sign of death, Alexis
whispered to her once in a movie, explaining a scene.
That happened after the sun had gone down. She was sitting on the
floor next to him, holding his hand, when she noticed the temperature of his
fingers had changed.
“It could be years before you find a note,” Billy said.
“Or moments,” Myrna said. She had competently filled out the papers
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permitting an autopsy, donating his organs and registering his body with
the morgue. They wanted to know where and when the deceased was found,
in what condition. In the Dead Condition she wrote. Dead, dead, dead.
Everything about him was gone, she continued writing in the report, without
response, inert, inactive, no longer smiling at her, his wife, his poupee, he
154 used to call her, his doll. “I just need more time.”
“I know this is hard,” Billy said. “Perhaps the hardest thing you’ll ever
do.”
“Compared to what?” Myrna said.
Billy was quiet. She imagined the phone stuck between his mid-twenties
clavicle and chin, his fingers busy erasing something or tuning in a pop sta-
tion on his radio, his mind imagining the woman he’s dating. He said finally,
quietly, “Compared to living.”
 Elizabeth England T R AU M A

Myrna squeezed a tissue from the arm of her cardigan and wiped her
eyes, her nose. “You’ve been very patient.” She alone had watched as they
pulled the sheet over Alexis’s head and prepared to transfer him. She had
listened to the small talk of the ER residents, talk of dinner plans, girlfriends,
lives in progress. She wanted to say “wait” in a voice both urgent and apolo-
getic. She wanted them to wait before pulling the sheet over his forehead, the
place she loved most to kiss, the place Alexis would point to, almost child-
like, waiting for her lips to touch him. But she said nothing. It wouldn’t be
the same, now, would it? Nothing’s the same, now, is it? “Let us know your
plans,” the medical examiner had told her, touching her hand with the cool-
ness of marble, of confidence, of attempted compassion. “I don’t make these
sorts of plans,” Myrna said. “He does.” The same examiner had smiled as if
she was joking.
“So we will hear from you later today?” Billy said. He stopped chewing
and picking. There was silence. Myrna could feel that he was poised, pencil
point waiting to circle an answer, a standardized test oval, the proper shading
of the blank space so crucial to the end result, the final score and the direc-
tion a life can take.
“I will look for the note right away,” Myrna said.
“Or we will have to give your husband the common city burial.”
As she listened to Billy resume his chewing, she longed for that sense
of relief, which he seemed to have just then, the relief of having something
nearly completed and far behind you. “Excuse me?” she said.
“A city burial,” he said. “You wouldn’t want that, Mrs. Sanfield, trust
me.”
“I will find something,” Myrna said, knowing that that was impossible,
that there was nothing to be found. But still she looked.
She hadn’t been in the bedroom during the day since Alexis died. Every-
where she looked, there were couplings: combs on the bureau, her lamp and
the old brass stand-up of Alexis’s, shoes thrown under the chair, some his 155

and others hers, hers and his, Alexis’s and Myrna’s. The streetlights were on
now, and it looked as if gray fabric had been pinned to every window.
Myrna turned on the light in Alexis’s closet.
She took out a few suits and stretched them carefully over the bed. He
had five good ones, Alexis would say, and three suits saved for sentimen-
tal reasons: his first, his marriage, and the one that belonged to his father.
Myrna just took the five good ones and then chose various shirts to go with
 Elizabeth England

each one. The blue button-down was more casual and went nicely with the
navy blue pinstripe; the flamingo pink plaid was racy and popped out of
the black double-breast; the rest of the shirts were starchy white with small
monograms on the chest pockets, and with their versatility, they looked fine
with the remaining brown tweed, green tweed, and summer seersucker.
If he was to be buried, he should look good, she thought. But if it was
cremation that he wanted, then it didn’t matter what she chose.
Although she had meticulously searched through everything of his, she
once again opened Alexis’s drawers. She took out underwear, socks, and
even the soft handkerchiefs that began their days pressed in Alexis’s jacket
and ended in a ball in his pants’ pocket. Though he rarely wore the suits
anymore, the handkerchiefs would always be in his pants when she checked
before laundering.

She was sitting on the floor next to him, holding his hand, when
she noticed the temperature of his fingers had changed.

She dumped every drawer and stripped every hanger and emptied duffel
bags of lost socks that Alexis believed, with a fervor that both frustrated and
intrigued Myrna, would return to their mates. Even when she had tipped
over every box, bin, tray, container that held anything of her husband’s, she
found, as she knew she would, nothing.
“Damn you,” she said to the suits, feeling something in her resist and
then finally cave as she said the two words again and again. How unlike
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herself she had become! She imagined Alexis watching her in her undershirt,
the cardigan removed, the skin on her upper arms and chest exposed for the
first time in days; she bent down to adjust a coat button or straighten an
arm. “Damn you,” she said, first to the pinstripe and then to the dull black
one that Alexis had begun to wear only to funerals of friends and colleagues.
156
She picked up the jackets and stuffed her hand in each pocket, even the tiny
breast ones inside the lapel that were designed only for pens.
She watched the spit spray out of her mouth as she cursed the tweed, her
saliva landing on the wool and beading there for a moment before sinking
in and vanishing completely. She searched the pockets of everything, pants,
sports jackets, the pea coat, the old jean jacket that never really fit properly,
and, of course, the sheepskin full-length coat they had bought on their trip
to New Zealand. She found only matchbooks, toothpicks, some in cello-
 Elizabeth England T R AU M A

phane, others worn down from use.

So, you old kook, she imagined Billy muttering under his breath while
waiting for her to call him back. You were wrong; he didn’t leave a note; he
left nothing; now, what do I do with the body?
“You were right,” Myrna said when Billy answered. “He wants to be
buried.”
“Did you find something then?” he said.
“Yes,” Myrna lied. “I was right about that.”
“My condolences, ma’am,” Billy said, “on your loss of Alexis.”
“Thank you, Billy,” Myrna said. “I know I was out of the ordinary for
you.”
“May he rest in peace, ma’am,” Billy said, neither agreeing nor protest-
ing.
“May he,” Myrna said.
Like a director who suddenly yells “Action,” Billy set in motion the
funeral production, and Myrna read her lines, accepted condolences from all
of Alexis’s school friends and his colleagues, men and women whom she had
never met, but had heard about for years. She performed her part and rode
with Alexis’s body as it traveled in a hearse through lower Manhattan, up the
west side highway towards the Catskill Mountains where Alexis was born.
There, she watched as two men dug a hole, a duet of dirt rising and then
falling, a sound as familiar to her as Alexis’s breathing, his body coiled in
sleep and his heart pumping tirelessly. They counted to three, heaved the
casket on their shoulders and then gently lowered Alexis down, using ropes
that seemed to Myrna so old and worn and archaic, nothing like Alexis when
she last heard him tapping at his desk. One of the men gave her a handful
of dirt and instead of throwing it into the hole and saying her good-byes,
Myrna quietly pocketed the mound, nodded to the men, signaling that she
was finished, and thought, this is what they’ll find in my clothes.
157
 Irene Sherlock

The Last Time I Saw My Brother Alive

The last time I saw my brother alive, he was straight,

I think: drug free, as they say, working long hours
on his coffee truck, a grown man with unsmooth hair
thinning but no longer trailing below his shoulders.
TV blared in his apartment, a background better
than the silence of his old drug. Wrapping sandwiches
at home to sell on his route, counting up receipts,
adding what he made, subtracting what he owed.

The last time I saw my brother alive, he came

to my house to refinish an old table, carried it alone
downstairs to the garage, confident, the way he was
when he carried his bat, pitched a ball fast and true.
Later, he worked construction, raising buildings.
This was before rehab, before the street.
My brother stripped the varnished table,
years of finish gone bad.

I had forgotten he could do things. The oak,

smooth as polished stone, glowing under the honey
stain, his delicate strokes. Later we sat on the porch,
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drinking coffee, talking about the heat, old summers,

how the days were even now growing short.
After a while, my brother put down his coffee cup,
went down to the garage, and this time worked
the fine steel wool, knuckles bare; he sanded
158
the fleshy wood, back bent, thin muscle
flexing, a whole rhythm to the work, the belly
of the table finally smooth. I wanted to ask
about the old hunger, if he felt the gnaw
of it now in this turning away.
But I didn’t, just watched the circular
path of his arm, scattering dust
the color of fruit trees.
 Jennifer J. Thompson T R AU M A

Hunger
Tadeusz’ once-robust form has dwindled
again
to bone, hide, teeth, hank of hair.
He signals urgently for help, I.V. rattling.
With the flourish of a mountebank
his son, Avi, offers juice, broth
and a congealed mass splattered on a gray tray
by indifferent hospital hands.
The old man refuses it.
He has transcended such slop
has been unworthy of it
since the frozen morning
when he crawled from a ditch, reborn
arms full of icy shards of soil and potato.
Upon emerging, he saw a Russian soldier
who transfixed him with a gaze
not with the sidearm held slack in one hand.
Tadeusz saw a cheap enamel hammer-and-sickle pin
mud-colored greatcoat, rough dun cap, gun
but feared the man
raw with youth and frankly afraid
of the shit-smeared forms clawing, squabbling, dead
around him.
The soldier’s gaze conjured up the prisoner
livid, scored skin
lice
and all
159
a figure for hunger
shame in human form.
This gaze taught Taudeusz in one stroke
what he had become.
This has been called “liberation.”
It is as if that very day
he reached his present age.
 Jennifer J. Thompson

For months now, he has been stripping away

the weight of the intervening years.

He struggles to prop himself up

jarring a flurry of nervous chirps
from the bank of machines by his bed.
The son surges up to help
cradles his shoulders
shifts the slight and raging burden up, back.
Tadeusz heaves, growls
nestles down again
among gray, flat pillows.
The son subsides into a chair
of molded plastic. It adds a trivial ache
to this vigil
this siege.
And so Avi feels a surge of rage so strong
that his breath tangles in his throat.
The wary arrogance, violence that history
has sown and cultivated in this
his bitter and beautiful native soil
all this bursts into flaming blossom and
he hates the terror and shame he reads
in his father’s every gesture
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his whole cringing attitude

his never-ending stance of refusal.
And so Avi pulls out a cell phone
quickly grows absorbed
in the simple but addictive game he found yesterday
160 on some sub-menu.

Pure American, his father thinks.

Shaved head
mirrored sunglasses
a black leather jacket so soft, so supple
that it’s hard to believe
it was once stripped from a cow’s carcass.
 Jennifer J. Thompson T R AU M A

But Tadeusz always knows

where things come from.
He thinks, We came to the Promised Land
learned to share one language—God’s.
We raised them as soldiers
they grew up to be producers
slipping out into the hall
when he thinks I’m asleep
yakking in English
into that fucking phone.
And Tadeusz knows: his son will never
taste the dirt and tubers
of that ditch in Auschwitz.
He’s shed Poland, Haifa, Lebanon
and New York like
successive skins
each time emerging brighter, harder
more closely scaled.
And he does not want to bequeath to Avi
a mouthful of rotten potatoes.

Avi feels his gaze, looks up.

“Dad, how many Freudian psychiatrists
does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
“You got that one from me,” he snaps.
Wheedling, Avi comes back
“I’ve got a new one
off the Internet
from Hollywood.”
Tadeusz concedes. 161

Inconsolable, he longs to be consoled.

His hands work at the blanket like
white spiders spinning.
“How many Surrealists does it take
to change a light bulb?
Three: one to put the fish in the bathtub
and two to throw the TV out the window.”
 Jennifer J. Thompson

His father’s eyes have wandered, though.

His every sense attends to this
his own, chosen death this
unnatural, absurd and protracted last act.
He feels worms growing
in his empty belly
already.
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162
 J. Karl Bell T R AU M A

Return of the White Plague

It should have been dead and buried; like Hitler, Pol Pot, and polio.
The unholy resurrection of tuberculosis is bad news indeed for an
embattled world already struggling with AIDS, unleashed hot-zone diseases,
and the threat of biological warfare. Allegedly snuffed out over the years or
at least reduced to a back-page statistic, TB has risen phoenix-like out of the
ashes of its drug-induced demise in a frighteningly resistant state. Like AIDS,
tuberculosis is rampant in poorer societies, but we have not been spared a
share of the contagion (nor are we exempt from global responsibility). With
the frequency of border crossings, both legal and otherwise, the white plague
is re-emerging as a fellow traveler capable of further darkening our domestic
picture. TB never has respected sovereign boundaries.
Before a “cure” was developed in the fifties, those unfortunate enough to
have contracted the disease were confined to tuberculosis sanatoriums: pri-
vate if you had money, public if you did not. These were often confused with
those other institutions of incarceration—sanitariums—adding to the shame
of the afflicted: bad enough to have contracted TB, worse to be tagged with
a mental disorder. At least visitors to the TB ward didn’t have to worry about
patients cavorting naked in the corridors or advancing on all fours to lick
their shoes. Still, most of those confined soon enough found their visits
from the outside world dwindling, especially if they were housed in one of
the public institutions, where cubicled wards replaced the neat little cottages
found in private establishments. An open ward of coughing “lungers” (the
horrid term some applied to the diseased) was enough to send the healthy
scurrying back out for fresh air.
In the early forties, I contracted tuberculosis from my father, who’d
suffered from it for ten years. I was seventeen. He succumbed shortly there-
after, at the age of forty-six, expiring in a state of delirium while housed in 163
a private sanatorium. His hatred and fear of the public TB wards had kept
him at home throughout most of his illness; when his doctor finally felt it
was imperative for him to be hospitalized again, he entered a costly private
institution. There, he said, he would find people of his own educational and
professional level: people of his class. When the disease finally deprived him
of breath, class had become irrelevant—he left us penniless. His only legacy
lay embedded in my chest.
 J. Karl Bell

The last place a tubercular patient should attempt a cure is at home,

where he becomes an inescapable source of infection. But my father scoffed
at this idea, willfully naive in his belief that one so afflicted would surely
recover more quickly if lodged in the bosom of his family. Ignored was the
reality of the awful contagion of TB, its ability to penetrate and infect even
the healthiest of lungs inhabiting the same household. His presence over the
years of his illness was announced like clockwork by his cough, reverberating
through our small apartment like a wet jackhammer. And with each cough
came the specter of the bacilli, infectious ghosts permeating the air, air to
be inhaled by us, my mother and I. We lived in an atmosphere dominated
by the smell of Lysol—undisguised by fragrance in those days and sold in a
bottle bearing a skull and crossbones—and steam, the result of my mother’s
daily scalding of my father’s dishes to the point that the delicate flowered
patterns eventually disappeared. All of these acts of purification were futile,
of course. You don’t contract TB from toilet seats and dishes. It’s in the
breath, as pervasive as oxygen.
Equally futile was one of the few “medical” techniques employed by the
doctors in their battle with the disease: a bag of BBs placed on my father’s
chest to hold down his breathing and give more rest to the lung. The supply
of BBs was kept in an old saucepan on the steps leading to the attic; it was
always blanketed with dead flies, a fatal attraction I never figured out.
At the public sanatorium where I was housed, there were patients who
took a perverse pride in the disease. They referred to themselves as lungers,
endlessly reminding newcomers that TB was chronic, a word implying to the
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novice, “forever.” Some could no longer imagine leaving the ward, no longer
even wanted to. They’d become afraid of the outside world. These fearful
souls developed imaginary chest pains, manufactured nonexistent coughs,
swooned weakly into their beds, all in an effort to convince the doctors to
hold them back.
164 “No cure for it, none,” I was told by one of these long-timers, speak-
ing with the authority of a third-year medical student. Unfortunately, if one
eliminated the remedy of bed rest, he was correct. The cynicism of the pa-
tients found its frightening affirmation when someone with “up time” (those
deemed sufficiently on the mend were granted a limited number of hours
on their feet each day) suffered a breakdown and was remanded back to bed
to start all over again. To the newly arrived, this presented a grim scenario.
Like the disquieting philosophy that would have us repeating some version
 J. Karl Bell T R AU M A

of our lives over and over for eternity, it portended an unwelcome future,
one dominated by the farcical cycle of pajamas to robe to street clothes and
back again. The final stop, the one we all dreaded, was the move to a private
room, one of the “white boxes” from which no one ever returned. On the
day a dignified elderly gentleman who had daily walking privileges was taken
to a white box, I was shocked, having so far equated up time with progress.
I’d failed, however, to attach any significance to the fact that as time passed,
the man was never moved forward to another level. I came to understand
that the doctors believed he would make no more progress and that walking
could do him no harm. He departed for the white box in a wheelchair, wav-
ing as if he were Franklin Roosevelt reviewing the troops.
At any sanatorium, public or private, physical activities for the com-
pletely bedridden were pretty much limited to reading, eating, and defecat-
ing (and, of course, especially for a teenager, the ever present consolation of
self-satisfaction). We weren’t residents of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain
hostelry, where drinking and cigar smoking aided the downcast spirit, if not
the tubercular cure. As in Mann, though, fresh air did play a part. One of
the buildings where I was housed had an open-air covered porch to which
patients could move if they so desired. I lived out there for a whole year,
wrapped in blankets, wearing a cap and heavy sweaters and gloves when it
was cold enough, watching birds perch at the foot of my bed in the spring.
The meal tray and the bedpan supported the consumption of food and
its later expulsion. In the public institutions, at least, they also provided op-
portunities for raunchy and disgruntled dialogue. There was certainly truth
to the ongoing negative commentary about the predictably terrible food,
though the phrasing of these critiques would have prohibited their inclu-
sion in the culinary columns of Good Housekeeping. The fare ran a consistent
course each day, from the paste-like cereal and not-quite-soft, not-quite-
hard-boiled eggs in the morning to aged mutton chops or odoriferous boiled
beef in the evening, the latter usually accompanied by a mélange of tangled, 165

unidentifiable greens. Was the food any better at the private sanatoriums?
Since quality and variety usually vary favorably with cost, I assumed it had
to be. I’d heard from my father that individual entrées brought to his private
room bore a silver cover to keep them warm. It’s doubtful that stringy corned
beef ever warranted such treatment.
Defecation on a grand scale took place each morning. A metal bedpan,
sometimes thoughtfully heated by the staff (depending upon who was on
 J. Karl Bell

duty), was placed on the bed. The patient mounted it by standing on a chair
next to the bed and sliding the receptacle under his buttocks. Although we
were spared the sight of all but our cubiclemate’s acrobatics, the sounds
and smells were free to float about the ward, where they mingled with the
constant coughing of the men. But the bedpan routine provided a platform
for those who wanted to address their compatriots face to face, as they stood,
now relieved, above their full receptacles. At all other times, engagement
with anyone but the patient who shared your cubicle was limited to the
auditory, the speaker seeming to address only the metal walls surrounding
him. Sometimes the voices were of a radical nature; at least they seemed so
to those of us who’d arrived from more sheltered environments. Coming
from a conservative Catholic family, I indiscriminately labeled all of these
men “Communists” and was frightened and disturbed when Marx and Lenin
intruded on my Hail Marys. (In later years, I would consider myself lucky to
have been exposed to this diversity while my psyche was still malleable.) One
of the Communists said that praying was like throwing pennies into a wish-
ing well. I’d never thrown a penny into a well, and at the time I found myself
wondering more about what happened to the pennies than about whether
any of the wishes came true. Would the successful wisher come back and try
to retrieve his lucky coins? Or would he simply continue throwing pennies
into the beneficent well? This was the kind of thing I had plenty of time to
think about in those days.
There was one event I did look forward to and that was the arrival of a
new corps of student nurses. These young women spent a couple of months
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at the sanatorium, rotating through the wards and up buildings. When word
was passed among the men that a new group had arrived, the anticipation
triggered a tangible sense of renewal. The bed bath drew the most atten-
tion. If there was any inclination on the part of a student nurse to pull the
covering bath blanket down below the navel during her soapy ministrations,
166 this was cause for rejoicing. If she accidentally bared a portion of pubic hair,
salvation seemed near at hand. Unfortunately, the excitement associated with
these baths often led to disappointment. The ultimate frustration was to be
wheeled into the bath area by a young goddess, your spirits soaring, only
to be turned over to a jaded nurse’s aide who bathed bodies as if she were
washing cars. This despair was heightened when the goddess reappeared with
a grinning fellow patient, whose dreams were brought to reality right before
your eyes. It was best not to look.
 J. Karl Bell T R AU M A

Self-styled experts on sanatorium behavior and habits held numerous

theories of recovery. One postulated that tubercular patients, subject as they
were to long periods of mandatory bed rest, had too much time to think. It
followed that, depending on the focus of these thoughts, those so confined
could either help or hinder their own progress in combating the disease. If
contemplation were too introspective, too directed toward self-pity, too con-
centrated on a dim and distant future, the healing process would be disrupt-
ed by agitation of the body and depression of the spirit. The same outcome
would prevail if the bedridden harbored constant anxiety about the fate of
his family, such as how they were faring without their breadwinner.

In the early forties, I contracted tuberculosis from my father,

who’d suffered from it for ten years. I was seventeen.

But if a patient’s intellectual and emotional scope were broadened by

some positive influence from beyond the ward—by literature, for example—
this outward focus could produce a regenerative physical state. Dwelling
on a Shakespeare sonnet, or even a paperback mystery, would theoretically
provide better ground for a cure than staring glassy-eyed at cubicle walls,
pondering your fate. And while TB precluded excessive indulgence in many
diversions, reading was not one of them. As a result, there were a surprising
number of patients at the public institution who were extremely well read in
the classics, politics, and history. Pockets of the intelligentsia could be found
in all corners of the wards.
There were also those few who appeared to be simply reconciled to the
situation, although whether this serene state sprang from a deeply religious
nature or just plain simple-mindedness was sometimes hard to determine.
Regardless, these patients smiled a lot as they wove mats, crafted leather
billfolds, and fashioned the other rather pathetic products of the resigned
167
bedridden.
Religion in general played an erratic role at the sanatorium, and holidays
differed little from any other day. Christmas lacked both religious trappings
and Santa Claus, although a tree did appear in the dining room, where
patients with three or more hours of up time ate. Gifts that arrived with
family members were necessarily limited to items one could use or consume
in bed. Patients who wished to exchange gifts or cards purchased them from
“the Cart,” a miniature mobile store stocked with toilet articles and a few
 J. Karl Bell

magazines, which was wheeled through the wards once a week. At Christmas,
the cart was decked out with a wreath and red ribbon and carried a limited
selection of cards and those same toilet articles wrapped in holiday paper. It
was quite common for patients to receive cards and gifts identical to those
they’d given.
Suffice it to say that no miracles took place in the drab bed wards while I
was there, no precipitate disappearance of a cough, no “My God I can walk”
epiphany (this despite the sacred pictures taped to cold metal walls, Bibles
on bed stands, relics of saints pinned to cloth bedheads). Priests and pastors
visited regularly (there may have been rabbis, but my provincial sensibility
did not take note of them) to counsel, to hear confession, and to comfort the
diseased by reminding them that God has a reason for everything. I was once
privy to a rather vaudevillian exchange between an afflicted parishioner and
his pastor. “You must remember,” said the pastor, “God has a reason for your
being here.” “He does, I know,” replied the patient. “I have TB.” Humor,
however absurd or dark, was much needed here, where genuine laughter
could be rare.
Although faith in the Lord and myriad saints helped some through the
recovery ordeal (and no doubt assisted others who did not survive), many
patients found their faith tested for perhaps the first time. Some found it
wanting, not up to the task, despite whispered supplications, readings of the
Good Book, and recitations of the beads. This led to a depressed state, in
which the formerly devout patient refused to eat or to talk to anyone. More
severe reactions manifested themselves in fits of crying and bedwetting, and
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in the throwing of objects such as urinals and bedpans, which made a terrible
clanging noise when hitting the hard floor. Others of lost faith replaced the
Bible with Camus or Kant; the Hundred Great Books vied with comics and
pulp thrillers as solace. I found an additional escape when I achieved several
hours up—I became the DJ for the two music programs broadcast through-
168 out the sanatorium. A cramped little room in the basement served for both
record storage and the studio; an old record player set up on a small table
was used to test-play the 78 rpm discs before each program, to ensure that
cracks, scratches, or just plain wear would not materially impair the sound. I
was amazed as the surprisingly large library of records, which had decreased
as the brittle discs were broken or otherwise rendered unplayable, was broad-
ened as patients or friends of the sanatorium made donations. Thinking
ahead to the future, when I was well, I pictured the day when I might make a
 J. Karl Bell T R AU M A

generous donation myself.

The day I could say, “I’m going home,” came three years after I’d been
diagnosed with the dreaded white plague, three years after I’d been ordered
to bed—as in “Go directly to jail; do not pass Go.” The arrest of my disease
was achieved in increments; I cannot pinpoint a specific moment when
I knew I was well. Once improvement was confirmed in my x-ray, I was
granted a half-hour up, enough to relieve me of the bedpan and the urinal.
Additional time was granted in half-hour increments, assuming continued
improvement, and eventually my progress was deemed sufficient to allow
me three hours up and a move to one the large cottages, where I spent those
changing seasons on the open-air porch. Patients reaching ten hours up were
granted home leaves of approximately two days, a precursor to leaving the
sanatorium. But tuberculosis is a treacherous thing, and I suffered a relapse
after my escape to the world of the almost-healthy. What caused this setback?
No one knew. Had I taken too long a walk, read an over-stimulating book,
dwelled too long in a fantasy? Physicians treating tuberculosis may not have
been in possession of a cure, but they had observed the importance of the
mind’s effect on the disease. The only certainty was that relapses frequently
occurred, the only evidence a suspicious worsening of the x-ray. Eight long
months were added to my recovery before I finally found myself on the
homestretch. What allowed me to defeat TB while others died? The doctors
told us only that some bodies healed faster or were more effective in throw-
ing off the disease. The memories of those endless days in bed, surrounded
by the coughing and the dying, are with me still, however softened by time.
Life in the sanatorium had been a journey through a tunnel long enough to
make me think it was the real world. People lived out part of their lives there,
and sometimes, the rest of their lives. Although I would never have chosen
it, through hindsight I see some advantage to meeting a voracious enemy and
triumphing. I was, perhaps, better equipped to meet the parade of unforeseen
challenges to come. 169
 Nicole Cooley

The Shangrila Hotel

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

On the first step the mosquito coil glows

in the dark like a charm and I can go back

to the afternoons in the other stairwells, other hotels

where you and I kneel for our benediction:

the body of Christ, the bread of heaven, the square

of acid named windowpane. Your gift.

I touch my tongue to the face of the girl on the paper.

You drag your fingers up my back.

In the dark my school uniform is the color of a bruise.

I want to touch the lines on your wrist the knife

etched. You are thirteen and you want to die.

I want your burns marking my arm.

I want to try it out, bad luck, your grief–

my fear of being an ordinary child.
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The ceiling of the stairwell approaches my eyes,

the exit a slur of red. Listen. I don’t know

where you are now. The sheets of my childhood bed

170 still hold the shape of your body.

* * *
In this country all of the women are unlucky.

Outside our hotel window, the fast boat crawls over

the Mekong to the sea, bringing bar girls
from the provinces to the American men who pay
 Nicole Cooley T R AU M A

to touch a body worn by the pressure of bodies.

The girls wait beside the Museum of Crime,
the old high school, where walls of photographs offer

evidence of danger—the black shirt, the hair cut, the number

each child holds against the neck. The electric bed
lies empty in the cell, a cradle of notched wire.

Children’s bodies were broken here

and the guidebook does not describe forgiveness
or recovery or why all the prayers to the ancestors fail.

Now the soldiers tie thread from the temple

on each wrist, a blessing, and watch the girls wait
for the future. I am thinking of your eyes

as you lower the cigarette to your arm.

When I go back I have nothing to tell you
about suffering or faith. But I was your witness.

* * *
In the Shangrila Hotel, the windows are barred
and the generator fails each afternoon.
Under the mosquito net, our bed drifts in the darkness.
I cannot keep the man beside me safe

or take the blade from your hand.

I cannot stop the boats or the children
dragging baskets of rotting fruit to their families.
This man and I could have our own child
171

with her own desire to die, her own wish

for punishment. What I want are the words
that break from my throat and offer
no hope of rescue. What I remember is your gift:

You prepared my body for the future.

 Nicole Cooley

The Princess and the Pea

I. New Orleans, Royal Street

Past midnight the men are women tourists pay to watch—

platinum wig, nipples glittered under the red dress,
a lipstick kiss to no one—and I walk in your black suit,
my long hair folded in your hat.

In your clothes I am safe.

In your clothes I tell myself that I can live without you.

From the Paradise Club one of the queens whispers,

close your eyes and the Princess floats through the window
on a swing, plastic legs crossed and gleaming
above the neon landscape, above the crowd,
above the sheet stretched flat across the bed I won’t sleep in without you.

The Princess’s glass eyes never close to light.

Her unmarked body never knows the punishment.
The men who call to her never know
her voice or her embrace. In and out of our world
she swings on her chain forever, legs arcing over the men who watch her,
touching none of them, alone and free.
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Close your eyes, you’d tell me if you were here

and we’d rise out of the house, over the trees, out of this city,
to the other world where we are safe.
I walk to leave the bed’s cold rectangle of light where once I lay with you.
172
I walk to force myself to leave our life behind.

In your clothes I am safe.

No one on this street can touch me,
street of bottles exploded on the sidewalk, men in feather boas, street of
scars
marking the arm and the hope, unanswered, of the release from pain—
 Nicole Cooley T R AU M A

No, you’d say, this street is not the underworld.

II. Tuol Sleng Prison, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The underworld is the world you left me to find

where guards kept the prisoners awake all night.
You collect the documents, the stories, you translate the confessions:

the nights when the flashlight drills on the floor

and the prisoner, a number hung around her neck,
is photographed, hair chopped off, eyes blank with terror.

Write your life history, the soldier orders and chains her legs to the wall.

It will be impossible to prove her innocence.

She is the enemy. She is twelve years old.
What are the names of your mother and father?

The soldier ties her arms behind her back, covers her face
with a black cloth, black as his uniform, black
as the shoes cut from rubber tires, black as the chalkboard of prohibitions:
It is forbidden to say anything out loud.

Who is the enemy? Who speaks the truth the soldiers demand to hear?
The confession will not save anyone.
You know that seven men left this prison alive.

You study the photographs of the broken bodies, bruised, dark

with blood, and the lies the prisoners wrote, each in their own hand,
carefully recorded for the future. 173

In sleep, alone, for comfort, you force yourself back to the childhood
story.

You know what the rest of us never want to know.

 Nicole Cooley

III. Clean White Sheet

When you come back,

in bed each night I will ask you to repeat another story—

the princess waits in the doorway in a storm, white

nightgown soaked with rain, and the man’s punishment is thirty
mattresses,

thirty feather beds, a single pea that leaves her body

bruised and aching. Her pain will prove she is a real princess.

Before I met you the best I could hope for was to be absent from my
body.
I hoped to write my way out. I believed in escape.

I believed the enemy was my own body: I want to be a clean, white sheet.

All night, the girl swings, free and alone. The girl stands alone outside.
The girl lies on the prison floor. The girl knows fear.

Sleep, you will say, sleep and beside me your voice arcs
over the bed, the street, your voice saves me again.
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Before I met you, all of the men I have ever known want a woman
without a story. On the metal bed the girl cannot sleep.

You are the one who can show me the world outside my body, white
sheet
174 on this bed where I lie with you, white sheet of paper

on which I will write the history of the other women in the world.
 Nicole Cooley T R AU M A

To Have and Not to Have

Under Berlin’s cracked asphalt the train plunges to
the tunnel and inside we sit hip to hip,
our bodies as close as if we are alone in bed.

Above, a camera, tiny, unblinking eye, surveys the scene.

When we leave our seats, rise to the street
where rain slants on the sidewalk, on the barricade,

on the orange crane set to crack open the earth,

the eye is with us. I lead us toward my old trick from home:
transport, escape, relief from the pressure of the past.

You want to see it: searchlights trained in the faces

of the frightened men.

* * *
No. Step forward, jerk awake,
and walk with me to the Checkpoint Kino, basement theater
where the floor hums like a body, the voice of the train
is always there. When the house lights dim, you twist
my wedding ring around my finger. I slide my leg
through yours, and Lauren Bacall is dubbed in schoolgirl German,
a woman whose story we can read in her face–
the stillness when the man slaps her,
the expected flash of pain.

I want the film because I want

an unreal world: cigarette smoke, tissue roses, the Marquis hotel bar 175

where music glitters in the air all night. False world,

false wish, when I claimed I wanted nothing.

I wanted you. I want you now

on the cement floor where the rolls of film unwind like hair.

* * *
Stage-set of the city. Stage-set of the war.
 Nicole Cooley

We’re in Martinique, 1940, Vichy has forced France to fall,

and a cigarette is currency between a woman and a man.

Anybody got a match? She poses in the doorway
and smoke blooms like a rose. 1945 when the film was made,
and the war is over, the resistance has already failed.
“How Little We Know,” she sings, her black dress shining
in the heat. The resistance is simply local politics.

The long shots were done with a bucket of water, a miniature boat.

* * *
What about a body stretched to the breaking point?

What about the world outside the film where dead women’s hair fills
blue-ticked mattresses,
and ashes are scattered in the soldiers’ yards?

Which one of us would trade a wedding ring for a sip of water

after nine days in the shut car?

These are your questions neither of us can answer.

Board the train, I’ll go with you now.
The camera might pull back to watch us, hand in hand.
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* * *
The wheels of the train might be stuck, spinning in place in history.
A couple in love might be nothing but light

flickering on a screen. A painted sky. Another world.

176 Twist the ring along my finger. None of this belongs to us.

Not the museum model of the camp, in a darkened room, glowing

like a palace of ice. We study the underworld in miniature:

pearled searchlight, barbed wire fence. The disinfection hut.

When they arrived, the men and women were forced apart.
 Nicole Cooley T R AU M A

Here it is–the world reduced, the horror diminished, the tiny white dolls

without eyes or faces. None of you will come out alive.

The only way out is through the chimney.

Return to the train as the tracks narrow to stop:

Auschwitz station. This is the moment we want to understand,

why one soldier did not refuse the orders. The only way out
is through the chimney, above the pile of eyeglasses, blank and cracked

and seeing nothing. Oh, beam of light, strike through the screen.
Erase the voices. Make the train jump the tracks.

Tell me the bodies are not blown to ash against the sky–

177
 Mounting of the Heroes at the Vietnam Wall
(Photo by Joe Cantrell)

In 1984, when I decided it was time to come home to the US

from Asia, I came to Oregon, bought a 1977 Toyota, and drove in a
big figure 8 around the country. I went to the Vietnam Wall in Wash-
ington, DC, and happened to arrive the morning they were installing
the statue of three soldiers. You can see The Wall in the background.
I shot this with my Canon A1, 24mm f/1.4 lens, O11 filter, Tri-X
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film, and 1/125 at f/8. But a few minutes later, unaware that anything
unusual was going on, I ran into a good friend from Manila and
could not for the life of me remember ever having seen him before.
I developed the negatives, printed several from down in the
middle of the roll, but it was four years before I could comprehend
178
this image and print it. During that time, I kept picking up the nega-
tive sleeve and looking, but I simply could not see this frame, though
the feeling that it was there frequently regenerated the tears that had
been in my eyes when I shot it.
– Joe Cantrell
 Cathy Caruth T R AU M A

Confronting Political Trauma

This year marks the 25 th
anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal
from Vietnam. This was perhaps the first war in United States history in
1

which the veterans of the war demanded—through active political groups

such as Vietnam Vets Against the War, among others—that the citizens of our
country, as well as the politicians in our government, listen to the experi-
ences of soldiers at war and begin to see the war from the soldiers’ own
unique perspective. As Robert Lifton has noted, the returning veterans from
Vietnam were often, much like survivors of other catastrophes, compelled
by a mission to reveal a truth, a “truth-mission” that, in Lifton’s words,
suggests a kind of “prophetic element” to much of these soldiers’ words. To
listen to the soldiers’ voices and to see through their eyes is no simple task;
however, the truth to which they have asked us to listen concerns both the
horror of war—or, in particular, the horror of a war that has not been clearly
justified—and also the horror of betrayal, the betrayal of the public and of
the soldiers themselves by a government not willing to reveal either its own
motives for entering and escalating the war, or its intentions for remaining
there in a stalemate. It is in this context, I believe, that we should understand
the insistence of the Vietnam veterans by formally recognizing their trau-
matic symptoms, a recognition that occurred in 1980 with the introduction
of the term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” into the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This cat-
egory, which described the symptoms of flashbacks, numbing, and arousal
after catastrophic events, reflects fairly directly the repeated return of images
from the war and the shutting off of feeling in the minds of the soldiers who
suffered them. But, while the notion of PTSD describes individual mental
suffering, the context of its formal recognition did not only concern mental
disorder, but, I would argue, the veterans’ “truth mission” of making people 179
listen to the experience and sight of war and of the forms of political betrayal
behind it. PTSD thus emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century, as
Judith Herman has noted, not only in a psychiatric but in a specifically po-
litical context. I would propose that, while much of American foreign policy
and cultural production has been aimed at forgetting, erasing, or revising the
history of Vietnam, the current flourishing of the notion of PTSD and of
trauma in general in many fields (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, an-
 Cathy Caruth

thropology, literature, cultural studies, and the popular media) points toward
an unconscious meditation in America on the psychological, political, and
cultural effects of a war we have not fully grasped. What these flashbacks ask
us to see, that is, is not only the impact of war but of betrayal, and this com-
mand to see thus has political consequences that are yet to be understood.
It is important to note in this context that one of the most significant
acts of political resistance during the war, Daniel Ellsberg’s public revela-
tion in 1971 of the government’s top secret history of the war that came to
be known as the Pentagon Papers, was also framed not simply as a protest
against war as such but as the “making visible” of what hadn’t previously
been seen about presidential policy concerning decision-making in the war,
including the policy of deceiving the public. This decision-making process—a
process which involved remaining in and escalating a war that, according
to military advisors, was more or less unwinnable, at least with the methods
that were chosen to fight it—was, in Ellsberg’s terms, an “enigma,” and the
Pentagon Papers were intended, first of all, to reveal this enigma in its full
peculiarity, and, secondly, to show how this enigma might be explained. The
war, Ellsberg said, did not simply need to be resisted, but to be understood,
and thus the revelation of the Pentagon Papers was, in his terms, “an act of
resistance, but of a particular sort, aimed at a broader and ultimately better
understanding of the war process.”
The form of political resistance, in this case, was thus to make us see,
and, in particular, to make us see “an invisible War,” a war whose decision-
making process and actual carrying-out were hidden from the public. To see,
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in this case, thus means to see not only the war, “but the phenomenon of de-
ception”—both deception of the public by the government and the deception
of the government by itself, its eventual “loss of institutional memory” and
the “internal toll of secrecy” that such a loss took on the decision-making
process and on the government’s self-understanding. The political act of re-
180 sistance was thus to make us see, not only war, but blindness: to understand
the war by understanding the blindness to the war and to its very creation.
I would suggest that it is this seeing of blindness, of betrayal, that, to a
certain extent, can be said to lie at the heart of the traumatic responses—the
vivid, all-too-real seeing of the flashbacks and nightmares—that plague our
veterans and that fascinate our culture as a topic of understanding. For the
flashbacks and nightmares of war do not come so much as a kind of memory
or knowledge, but, as all the psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and personal ac-
 Cathy Caruth T R AU M A

counts repeatedly tell us, as a kind of persistent command to see, an uninte-

grated, not fully conscious insistence of sight against the will and conscious-
ness of the survivor. It is a command from within the nightmare, to wake
up to a truth that is not yet integrated–a truth that is not only surrounded
by blindness but also, perhaps, about blindness itself. If such a traumatic
command has, as Lifton says, a truth element to it, an element of “subversive
truth” that “reveals hidden secrets,” then this truth is not only moral (about
the atrocities of war) but political (about the potential blindness and betrayal
in the decision-making process surrounding war).
This complex relation between seeing and blindness that is passed on to
us by the traumatic symptom appears movingly in the dream of a Vietnam
veteran who has been haunted by a child he had killed while on patrol of
the perimeter of a camp, a child who had been armed and who the soldier
thought should be killed to protect his fellow soldiers, but whose death he
regretted as he watched, all night long, the child die before him. Forced to
lie just three feet from the child, staring into his eyes while the dying child
stared back at him, this man spent many years of his later life haunted by
this child and by his guilt over the child’s death. As the psychoanalyst Jacob
Lindy reports after his work with this veteran (whom he calls “Abraham”),
the vet had spent many years trying to ignore his memory of the child and
had nearly ruined his life as a result, being unable to relate to his family and
in particular to his own young son. But his work in psychoanalysis brought
him back repeatedly to this scene, and soon he was being haunted by images
of Vietnam. In one dream, we are told, “the Vietnamese boy tapped him gen-
tly on the shoulder, keeping Abraham awake when he wanted to go to sleep.”
What the veteran realizes is that the child is asking him to stay focused on
his traumatic experiences, not to fall asleep to them. The child asks that
Abraham keep looking him in the face, not to trap him in the scene of death
so that he can learn something for his own life.
This veteran’s dream, I would suggest, tells us something about a task 181

that we, as Americans, still have before us: to remain awake in the face of a
memory around which we’d rather fall asleep, to see not only the meaning
passed on by the eyes of the dying but the meaning of keeping our own eyes
open. In the introduction to his Papers on the War, Ellsberg suggests that he
wishes to help teach the government not only to learn about itself but also,
in fact, to learn how to learn, something that its own self-deception had de-
nied it. The lessons of PTSD and its centrality in our culture at this moment
 Cathy Caruth

should return us, at least in part, to the political lessons of those who helped
make it so central a diagnosis, to the veterans whose message is not only
about war but about blindness, not only about atrocity but about the nature
of decision-making in a crisis. Our subsequent involvements in international
conflicts have not reflected a direct confrontation with these issues and these
lessons, and it is my hope that the focus on trauma in our culture will lead us
back to a sustained vigilance on our own blindness and to the meaning and
impact—in the past and for the future—of what was both a moral and a politi-
cal trauma in our history.

Notes
1
This essay was first published in Japanese in Tokyo Shinbun (a Japanese newspaper pub-
lished in Tokyo) in July 2000, and reprinted in Japan’s Psiko Magazine for their Special Issue on
Trauma in the fall of 2000. It has never been published in English.

Works Cited
Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political
Terror. New York: Basic, 1992.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans. New York: Simon, 1973.
Lindy, Jacob. Vietnam: A Casebook. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1988.
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182
 Lorien Crow

CSU Fiction Award

Cowboys and Indians

Jack Wheat is the preacher at my Grandma Ellen’s funeral. The February
day feels like May, and the sand cliffs that rise in the distance radiate sun-
light. This was the backdrop of my Grandmother’s life: juniper and pinion,
red rock and mesa, sand in so many colors there aren’t enough crayons. Jack
Wheat talks of original sin and is dressed like a Quaker.
I keep my eyes occupied with one of the gravediggers, who stands off to
the side, his head bowed. He is brown-skinned and fierce, definitely Navajo.
I feel guilty for meeting his curious gaze while Jack Wheat croaks out a rusty
version of “The Old Rugged Cross.”
On our way to the cemetery this morning, the cars traveling in the op-
posite direction moved aside to let us pass. Men and boys on the sidewalk
removed baseball and cowboy hats to stand with heads bowed as we inched
by. There seems to be an innate respect for death out here, one I’ve never
experienced back East.
Days like this you wouldn’t mind if it rained. Gray would fit the mood
better. Out here, you can’t hide from the sun. It creeps into the cracks of
dark rooms, garish, invasive. On a cloudy day you could blend in better,
slink away to grieve unnoticed.
My aunts and I remove roses from the casket’s flower displays. We return
to the house to serve coffee and store-bought pastry to a procession of black-
clad mourners who linger like hungry crows, picking at remains, not wanting
to be first or last to leave. I’m old enough that I’m expected to replace plastic
utensils and thank people for attending, but I still feel like the teenager who
needs to escape. I call my cousin David, who arrives in the late afternoon to
rescue me.
David is six-foot-six, owns four motorcycles, and works for one of the 183

big oil companies: offshore drilling, somewhere in the seas that border South
Africa, one month on, one month off. He lives in a trailer up in Chama, a
tiny mountain town further north—more Colorado than New Mexico, and
right on the border. David screams rebellion, always has. As a kid, he embod-
ied to me all that was wild in the world.
Today he has the Ducati. It’s still too cold to go up to Navajo Lake,
our usual getaway spot. David asks me what I’d like to do, with that Native
 Lorien Crow

American twinge that sounds Canadian to my pale, untrained ear.

“Margaritas,” I say. We take off.
The air is dry and I’m breathing easier. There is something suffocating
about my grandmother’s house: the green shag carpet, my grandfather’s cor-
duroy chair. The relics of fifty-two years of life with another person, flanked
by black and white photos of kids and grandkids who’ve joined the Army.
My dad was one of those kids. So was David. He was one of the few soldiers
to see ground combat during the Gulf War. I remember writing to him then,
telling him about my fourteen-year-old life in Connecticut. He says this is
why I’m his favorite cousin, because I never felt bad for him.
“How about Applebee’s?” David asks me. We have stopped at our first
red light along the main strip, where teenagers still have drag races at twilight
on Saturday nights.
“Cousin,” I say, “can’t we go to a real bar?”
“Cousin,” says David, “you know what kinda people go to bars at 3:30
in the afternoon out here?”
Not sure if it’s a joke, I wait expectantly. The light turns green.
When I was little, my Uncle Dwayne took all of us cousins camping in
the mountains of southern Colorado. He wanted us to bond, being that we
hailed from so many different parts of the country, and so barely knew one
another. The first night, David told my younger cousin Edie and me a story
about a crazed Indian trapped in the body of a bear. The bear ate only little
girls, and could transform back and forth between bear and human at will.
I believed that story with my whole heart because David was adopted.
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He was wild and foreign, and I knew that if such a child-eating Indian bear
existed, David would know him.
At the next red light, David says “Shit cousin, even I don’t much go to
the ‘real’ bars out here. I don’t wanna have to kick some ass the day of my
grandma’s funeral. You know it’s still cowboys and Indians out here, right?”
184 He cranes his neck around. I stare at him resolutely. He grins and runs
the red light.
On the northwest outskirts of town the gaping silhouette of Shiprock be-
comes visible, ominous and prehistoric. David steers the motorcycle through
the back streets, quaint suburban houses giving way to ramshackle trailer
parks where laundry sways against red rocks in the distance. We pass the
Apache Queen Laundry with its fading façade of spearmint and seashell pink.
Powerful modern structures occasionally jut upward, dwarfing the crumbling
 Lorien Crow

adobe ones next to them. People used to run successful businesses out of
trailers with hand-painted signs out front. Now the monsters of progression
permanently divide the oil field town from its vanishing past.
The rich new settlers have built upward as well, claiming the high walls
of the canyon to the east. The outsides of the mansions look like adobe but
are actually made from more durable materials. Natural looking porches with
built-in electric fireplaces gaze out past the trailer parks, where the desert
recedes onto the Navajo Rez.
Don’t get stuck out on the Rez at night, my uncles tell me. They make
their own laws out there.
Scientists think that millions of years ago this land was at the bottom of
an ocean. It’s easy to picture that now, gliding past jagged rock formations,
buttes and mesas looming on the horizon. The landscape is strange and bar-
ren compared to New England. I know why cowboys felt like cowboys out
here.

One of them shakes a chubby brown finger at us. “The Navajo

women say this wind, it brings devil spirits with it.” Her eyes
twinkle. “This wind, it came with you! You devil spirits? Huh?”

Still the sun penetrates everything. The Aztec cultures that thrived here
worshipped the sun’s relentless omnipresence. It makes even the fiercest
rocks look warm and inviting, like they will always retain warmth, even in
winter; it tricks the eye, transforming sharp points into curving shoulders.
We pull off the road in front of Dean’s Shiprock Tavern. A faded sign
swings in the arid breeze. The brown paint is peeling. Three out of the four
cars in the parking lot are pickup trucks. At any moment I expect outlaws on
horseback to ride up, tie their horses out front and draw guns. David always
says he has outlaw blood running in him; that’s why he was given away as a
185
baby. Part outlaw, part Indian, he jokes; never had a chance.
Now he’s trying not to smile, wondering if I will ask him to take us
somewhere else. He’s daring me to back out, but knows I won’t. We are the
black sheep of the family, and we understand this about each other. Our
grandfather, the patriarch of the family, despised us both. Our grandmother
tried failingly to make up for it. Now they’re both dead, and we’re not really
sure where that leaves us.
The bar is dark and smoky, most of its windows boarded up. I’m the
 Lorien Crow

only female in the place. Any eyes momentarily raised are quickly lowered
when they encounter David. He makes an imposing impression on people.
We step up to the bar. David wears a shit-eating grin on his face. Just
loud enough for the whole bar to hear, he says “So cuz, still craving on a
margarita?”
This is supposed to make me look frilly, dare me to be tougher. Bars like
this don’t serve dainty pitchers of frothy drinks. The bartender smirks.
“Not if you’re buyin’,” I say. “Two shots of Patron Silver.”
The bartender is not as impressed as I hoped he’d be, but he stops smirk-
ing and pours. David raises his eyebrows. “I taught you well,” he says.
The bartender hands us our liquor with limes and salt, which I accept
and David does not. “To Grandma,” we toast.
After two more shots and a beer, I don’t care that David drives too fast.
We decide to do the sunset up on the bluffs. The sunset here is an event, a
time of day to which plans are assigned. If you have the afternoon free, you
drive to as remote a place as your vehicle can take you to and watch the sun
go down. The bluffs are to the north, toward Colorado and Highway 666.
Highway 666 has a bad reputation. Curvy narrow roads wind through
craggy outcroppings of rock, steep inclines alternating with flat desert.
That highway is the badlands personified, my Uncle Troy once told me.
Two years ago a Navajo woman was murdered out there. She was split
open from throat to sternum with a machete. Local legends hold that her
ghost haunts the road, luring truckers over the cliffs like some wicked desert
mermaid.
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We stake out our spot on a southern-most bluff. The rocks feel sturdy
and hot beneath my fingernails as we scale the sides. The day is still warm.
David lights a joint and we sink down onto the blazing rock. I should be
worrying about rattlesnakes, but when I’m with David I forget about worldly
dangers.
186 “I didn’t see her enough,” David says. “You live across the country and
you saw her more than I did. Grandpa’s been dead for twelve years. I should
have gone to see her more.”
I realize I am supposed to offer some sort of comfort, but I can’t. He’s
right. He should have gone to see her more. I exhale.
“It’s different for me though,” I say. “I’m a woman. It’s a different level
of respect, especially now that I’m older. . .”
As I’m saying it, I know he’s already tuned me out. I say it anyway. It
 Lorien Crow

needs to be said. I want to go on, but the divide is too great. I can’t express
to him how full Grandma’s life seemed to me. She bore seven kids and
raised the five that lived. For half of her life she cooked and cleaned without
electricity. She sewed quilts, spit-shined shoes, stroked her children’s hair,
cleaned rich people’s houses when she needed money, made perfect biscuits
and apricot jam, wrote me birthday cards every year and died with her cross
in her hands. I am frustrated with my inability to express the importance of
these things to David. He would never think of them as accomplishments;
he would never be expected to perform any of them, or even to try. It’s
expectation that’s so crushing sometimes, I think.
I say this out loud as the sun begins to sink more than shine. We are
bathed in sherbet colors.
David stares at me for a long time after I speak. I stretch out flat on my
back, trying to melt into the rock like ice cream, trying to mold myself into
something that retains warmth. I study my hands, which seem too soft, not
callused enough. No needle pricks or cast-iron burns, just ink spots and some
fading nail polish.
David finally kicks back, stretching out beside me. He is all muscle and
brawn and gruffness.
“I’ve seen the world,” he starts, “but I just can’t seem to get the fuck out
of here.”
Then we both just start laughing, laughing so loud it’s not even sound
anymore. Maybe we couldn’t quite feel the sadness deep enough, but the
laughter is resonant. It comes from the right place.
The last maroons and purples are lingering over the valley. Only the
highest cliffs still hold the tint of sunlight. Farmington is all dusk, the lights
slowly blinking on. In the dark it will look like a neon sea.
We’re both starving. We decide on green chicken chili and sopapillas
from the little takeout stand over on Bloomfield Highway. The wind has
picked up and it’s chilly on the bike now. I hunker down behind David as we 187

speed back toward civilization, the excitement of the town’s small rush hour
becoming palpable.
We are the only customers. Dust floats up from the bike as we saunter
over to the dingy window and place our order. Despite the impending dark-
ness and the chill in the air, two abuelitas are sitting in fraying lawn chairs
next to the stand, wrapped in Apache blankets. They study us expectantly,
smiles not on their mouths, but in the beautiful wrinkles at the corners of
 Lorien Crow

their eyes.
“Wind’s pickin’ up,” David says to them.
One of them shakes a chubby brown finger at us. “The Navajo women
say this wind, it brings devil spirits with it.” Her eyes twinkle. “This wind, it
came with you! You devil spirits? Huh?”
The other abuelita giggles with delight.
David shifts uncomfortably. I try to smile with my eyes as I say “No
Ma’am,” but it’s a trick I haven’t mastered yet, and the question hangs there,
and I don’t think she believes me.
We lean against the peeling red picnic table only long enough to spoon
down the chili, balancing the piquant spice with pillowy soft sopapillas
drizzled with honey. We share a Coke, but our cheeks are flushed and our
mouths still burn as we get back on the bike, pulling our helmets on.
“Don’t let those devil spirits catch you!” waves the grandmother, as her
silent friend dissolves into hysterics. David guns the engine and peels out of
the parking lot.
“See what I mean?” He asks.
I don’t reply. I can’t figure out why he is so spooked—they were just
having fun with us. Then I consider what the words might have meant if I’d
been considered an outlaw my whole life.
“Cowboys and Indians cuz, I told you.” David says. “Just the way it is
out here.”
It’s dark when we get back to grandma’s. Cars are still parked outside.
David, as usual, says he can’t deal with coming inside. I kiss him on the
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cheek and say I understand—what else is there to say? He winks, morphing

back into Wild Charming boy, and I back into Wise Ass East Coast Girl.
“Hope you make it back out this summer cuz, we can take the boat up
to Navajo.”
I nod and tell him to get the hell gone before the relatives stumble out
188 like zombies to claim him.
I turn from the Ducati’s dust to the well-lit house. Why is it that I can
do this, switch gears, when David cannot? I will recount my own memories
of my grandmother to drunken mourners, throw out paper plates, and clean
coffee cups, while David rides through the desert with devil spirits at his boot
heels.
Walking to the front door, all I can think is:
It’s not just here. It’s like this everywhere. Cowboys and Indians; that’s how it is.
 Meryl DePasquale

CSU Essay Award

Butt-Antlers & Ignorant Suburban Trash

I have a tattoo. A tattoo that begins on my right hand, winds up my arm
and onto my right shoulder blade, stretches diagonally down my back, and
curls to a halt on my left hip. It’s big. And it is impossible to cover up en-
tirely. The tattoo is the product of countless drawing sessions with my fiancé,
Shawn, an illustrator and tattoo artist. We plotted out its colors, shape, and
placement on my body. I wanted it to look organic, like a vine, but also light,
like a thin stream of smoke. We finally settled on pale green, with subtle
yellow highlights and jagged edges. The tattooing itself took almost a year to
complete, done in two or three hour sittings about once a month. I would
never sit for longer than three hours because it hurt, and I am a baby. But the
pain was worthwhile; the finished tattoo is beautiful and a living representa-
tion of something we shaped together.
Afterwards, however, the tattoo began shaping me.
Getting this tattoo seemed to throw me into a different category of hu-
manity–the heavily tattooed. From my experience, to have an obvious tattoo
is to be always approachable: in the waiting room of the gynecologist’s office,
at my grandfather’s wake, wherever I go, whatever I am doing. Naturally,
people are curious, but they often act as if I don’t have boundaries. Many
who express an interest in the tattoo will expect me to pull back my clothing
so they can get a better look at it. This is where we run into difficulties; I am
very reluctant to lift up my shirt in order to satisfy a stranger’s curiosity. Roll-
ing back a long sleeve, no problem. Of course, even doing this much seems
to invite that stranger to trace the movement of the tattoo with his fingertips,
an opportunity men in particular will seize.
My sister Casey has a delicate black and gray back piece. In the tattoo
community, hers is called a ‘fine art piece,’ because it is a reproduction of a 189

classic work of art, transferred into the medium of tattooing. Casey’s is the
Nike or “winged victory” statue, which she saw in the Louvre on a trip to
Paris. The wings reach across her shoulders, and depending on the neckline
of her shirt, a little of it is usually visible. When she goes to a bar, it frequent-
ly happens that a guy will walk up behind her and pull open her shirt to peek
down her back. That’s an introduction. And every person in the place has a
ready-made conversation topic with which to approach her–the tattoo. I try
 Meryl DePasquale

not to go to bars.
Last year my stepsister Kendra was home for the holidays. We rarely
get to see each other and were, as usual, pressed for time, running various
errands while we talk and catch up. We went to the corporate grocery store to
gather a few vital ingredients for the festivities, forgotten in my two previous
trips. I loathe the corporate grocery store. I hate its bright lights and glaring
tile, but mostly the experience is odious to me because of the other shop-
pers–whom I have begun calling ‘ignorant suburban trash.’ They point, they
stare, they pull their children closer when I walk by, they whisper, or what’s
worse, many times they don’t bother to whisper at all. Oh my God, Jessie! Did
you see that girl?! Usually I cope by tuning them out, concentrating on what I
need to buy, and planning the most expedient way to extract myself from the
environment. Hey look, this check out lane’s open.
This day I don’t need to do these things because I have Kendra at my
elbow, and we are arguing passionately about politics. She is trying to push
my buttons, and it is a miracle that I manage to put one foot in front of the
other, never mind notice what’s going on around me. People clear the aisles,
moving out of our way. I am forming an ironclad argument to counter her
ridiculous assertions. Is that a snake? When I realize that we must have passed
the baking aisle. Is that a snake? No wait, not all of the nuts are kept in the
baking aisle. Kendra nudges me–I suddenly comprehend that about thirty
feet away, from behind the register at the doughnut counter, a woman has
been shouting to get my attention.
“Hey!” she calls again, “is that a snake?”
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“Er–no, it’s a vine.” My tattoo is commonly mistaken for a snake. I think

people have a hard time fitting it into their conception of what a tattoo is
supposed to be. The most frequent question I hear is Is that real? I’m not
exactly sure what the implied alternative here is. I doubt there is one; instead
Is that real? functions simply as an opening to more questions, such as What is
190 it? I usually tell people it’s a vine, although this is not really true. To try to ex-
plain to them that it is art, adornment, a design, but not any one identifiable
thing is time consuming and tiresome. Another common question is What
does it mean? Here I am even more in the red. The prevalence of memoriam
and commemoration tattoos for pets, relatives, and celebrities, combined
with the popularity of astrological symbols, kanji, and religious and patriotic
icons seems to lead people to believe that all tattoos should mean or repre-
sent something. The one popular question that I can always answer is Did
 Meryl DePasquale

that hurt? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Many people have asked what I expected when I got the tattoo in the
first place. I answer that I anticipated the attention, but I couldn’t really. I’m
rarely surprised by anything anyone has to say; I expected these kinds of
questions and scenarios. But I had no real idea what it would be like for me
day after day, week after week, as they repeat themselves.
A few months before I got the tattoo I was working as a nanny for a
woman in Glastonbury. She was in her forties and had young children from
her second marriage. Her hair, I think, would naturally be a light brown,
maybe even with some touches of gray. But she had wavy blond highlights
that bounced around her face. She went to a special salon that could dye her
eyelashes black so she wouldn’t have to bother with mascara. I doubt she’s
ever seen a painting or read a book that made her catch her breath. One
day we sat on the patio while her youngest played with his action figures. I
was telling her about my plans for the tattoo and she cut me off. Something
along the lines of–I just can’t understand why a pretty girl like you would want to
go and ruin it all and get some big, ugly tattoo. I smiled, but I knew then that I
didn’t really want her to think of me as a pretty girl. Our aesthetics held a lot
of weight. We were on different sides of the fence; it seemed better for both
of us if our outer appearances more accurately reflected our inner lives.
My decision to get the tattoo was a conscious lifestyle change. Of course
it will be visible when I wear my wedding dress, and I wouldn’t want anyone
to be in attendance at the ceremony who would find this disconcerting.
People who are that close-minded have not been a part of my life for a long
time now. Of course it will be visible at every job interview I ever have; I
don’t want a job that is incompatible with it. My tattoo is not separate from
who I am. It is not my little secret wild card that I pull out when it suits my
purposes and cover when it doesn’t. And this means dealing with the inva-
siveness of the general public every day. Because I do believe that it’s rude to
treat other people as if they exist for your own entertainment, whether you 191

are pointing them out and sniggering or pulling them aside to answer your
questions. I have things of my own to do.
Often I’ll be waiting for the train and some beefy guy will begin a con-
versation with me about my tattoo. The purpose of his questions is to get to
a point where he can show me his; he is falling over himself to do it. Here it
comes, it is on his shoulder, or maybe his calf. It is tiny and generic, picked
off the wall in some seedy tattoo shop while he was drunk and out with
 Meryl DePasquale

his buddies. He wants to be part of the club; after all we both have tattoos,
right? Not exactly. Among my friends we call these tattoos Butt-Smears, but
only among friends. Or maybe I’m in line at the bank and somebody’s mom
or somebody’s aunt is dying to tell me about her daughter, her niece, who
recently got one of those cute lower-back ornamental tattoos. Butt-Antlers.
At first the family was skeptical, but it really is quite pretty. I infer that, being
tattooed myself, I am supposed to find this interesting. I nod.
Not any one situation itself is unreasonable; it is the combined weight of
them all, happening relentlessly and redundantly again and again that grinds
my soul into the gravel. I have begun to think that it is a luxury to consider
all people to be different, unique. It is a luxury enjoyed by those who do not
have to endure the same conversations over and over. I need to find a better
way to deal with this onslaught, but one has yet to present itself. Casey cuts
the problem at the head. When asked Is that real? she snorts contemptuously
and says No, it’s a lick-and-stick. An old friend of mine would stare right into
the eyes of Did that hurt? and reply Just my feelings, every time someone asks. But
these clever retorts rarely produce the desired effect. A look of confusion will
sweep the offender’s face. So wait, did it hurt? Open derision is not my style,
and it won’t prevent the next person from asking the same thing tomorrow.
A couple weeks ago Shawn and I went to the aquarium. In line at the
ticket booth we stood behind an adorable nuclear family. Their girl is the
youngest, about six. I walk off to the soda machine, and on my way back
I watch the little girl ogling Shawn’s tattoos. Her eyes are round and blue;
she has turned all the way around in the line and is blatantly staring. Shawn
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doesn’t notice, and neither do her parents, so she keeps looking for the
length of time it takes me to reach them again, trying to engrave the spectacle
in her memory. It is more amazing to her than all the fish in the sea. When
we pass through the entranceway we are smacked with smooth, white beluga
whales swimming in an enormous tank. I am blown away. Shawn and I ap-
192 proach the glass alongside an older couple, tanned and short. I bet they travel
a lot, following the sun. The man shoots us a smoldering look and steers his
wife to another window. Clearly I must be a thug, here to steal whales; I am a
whale-stealer.
Is it any wonder that I find myself wearing combat boots and a scowl
more often than it is in my nature to do? I have become the kind of person
who makes up nasty names for whole groups of people. I have become the
kind of person who feels sympathy for celebrities when they complain about
 Meryl DePasquale

not being able to go out in public, being constantly plagued with requests for
their autographs. I know that you’re on vacation, but this is my life, do you under-
stand? I try to do most of my grocery shopping late at night; I avoid crowds
when I can. I bristle when I sense someone getting ready to speak to me,
hoping to deter her. Shawn and I are reluctant about travel, anticipating that
all of these problems will be magnified outside of our insular community.
I wrack my brain to try to understand what motivates people to abandon
cultural standards of decency in regard to me. Perhaps strange men think
they can touch me because of old stereotypes about tattooed women. We’re
all exhibitionists, right? Rock and roll. The only earthly reason I would have
gotten this artwork is to get attention. Or maybe it’s because I’ve abandoned
social norms to some extent, and therefore the same rules or protections
don’t apply to me. Then, perhaps because people with hidden, coverable tat-
toos seem so eager to show them (but if they weren’t, how would we know?)
I get lumped into the same category. It is likely that the truth lies in a combi-
nation of all of these, and some others that I haven’t thought of.
Some tattoo artists have referred to being heavily tattooed as an “ethnic-
ity,” and I think this is an interesting concept. In new, unfamiliar situations
I loosen my shoulders if I see another tattooed person in the room. In this
way, the presence of another member of my “ethnicity” insures that the oth-
ers in the group won’t single me out. And perhaps I’d even be more likely
to sit near the tattooed person, or talk to her, guessing that we’d have a little
more in common, and knowing at least that I won’t have to answer the same
questions again. However, I think we need to be careful about framing the
social issues that surround tattooing in this context. It seems problematic to
declare yourself part of an ethnicity on the basis of something you chose to
do. Choice, that’s the pivotal difference.
I am lost in my thoughts as I climb the stairs to class. The stairwell is
packed with bodies, entering, exiting; there are people on all sides of me. In
such situations I stick to my policy of focusing on the day ahead. I have two 193

assignments that I absolutely must get done tonight, and it would be good
if I started my reading for tomorrow’s class. If I pick up lettuce on my way
home I can make a salad with dinner. We have plenty of cucumbers and
tomatoes in the fridge. Two fingers press my forearm. Startled, I spin around
to face a skinny freshman. He looks embarrassed; he might be a sophomore.
“Hey,” he says, “is that real?”
“Yeah.” I am winding up the stairwell away from him. He must have
 Meryl DePasquale

class on the floor below me.

“Wow. That’s crazy.” I get this a lot; is it a compliment? Usually I don’t
think so; I take it to mean–I’ve never seen anything like that before and I’m not
sure how I feel about it. I smile.
“Thanks.”

CSU Art Award

Rolandas Kiaulevicius

Art for me starts with perception. I look for new forms, interesting tex-
tures, objects and patterns. In my art, I try to show what I hear, what I smell,
what I see, what I touch, what I taste–transformed by feelings and experi-
ences and translated into the artistic media to become something new, which
touches and moves others. In the process of creating art, I am transformed.
Art refines my perception and thinking; art helps me work on the questions
in my life, of the knowable and the unknowable, of the profound as well as
the trivial.
I started to draw when I was three and one-half. Since then, it has not
mattered where I was or with whom; I draw all the time. I think that I got
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this drive from my mother who draws very well. In fact, my whole family is
filled with artists; I have four uncles, six aunts and five cousins who are all
artists. My entire life, I have been surrounded by love and art. I think I start-
ed to feel like a true artist when I finished art school at seventeen years old. I
worked with fashion designs, did some illustrations for children’s books, and
194
I did some sculptures, drawing, printing, and painting in my native country.
Unfortunately, Lithuania is economically depressed so it is almost impossible
to make a living as an artist. I traveled to America from Lithuania in order to
find new opportunities for myself as an artist and to explore and to embrace
a new culture, new models, new patterns, and new approaches to art. In the
United States, I worked with wonderful American artists like Robert Reyn-
olds and Peter Nuhn. I have also worked with the Russian artist Alex Golub-
chik. These artists are role models for me. They help me to find a new way,
 Rolandas Kiaulevicius

and a new attitude, to transform myself into a better artist. They helped me
to understand the traditions and culture of American artists and art. I have
worked for more then two years with Robert Reynolds, and it is a pleasure to
work with him. His humor and the warmth of his art have surrounded me all
these years and have pushed me in good directions. He has not only guided
my thinking a great deal, he has also let me use his studio, enabling me to
work on larger pieces. I have done some prints, some paintings and have
worked a lot on a sculpture. From Robert, I learned how to use computer
programs like Corel Painter 8, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, and other programs as
new artistic tools.
I have come to see that art is everywhere, and one artist’s work is very
different from another. Art is always finding new power in new techniques,
new material, new shapes. All new artists must find their own way to creativ-
ity. I cannot say that I am working just with one material such as charcoal or
pencil. I try to experiment with all different materials and styles to see which
is best. Even as I listen for my own artistic voice, my work is quite varied:
abstract, surrealist, caricature. I particularly enjoy ornamental motifs and pat-
terns. You can see such decorative ornaments almost everywhere: on build-
ings, in parks, on the street, on clothes. I employ these a lot because they
give my drawings mood and energy.
Art for me is a powerful and mysterious companion. Art changes my
life. Without art, I can only imagine what my life would be: black, chaotic,
empty. Art changes my thinking, my understanding, my communication,
my teaching, even my expressions of love. Once you start thinking about art,
you cannot stop. It fills you up and consumes like a love affair or a sickness.
Yet, I feel lucky to have this beneficial sickness. My understanding of life,
about people and the things surrounding me, is forever changed by art. Art is
my companion. I work with art; art works with me. I feel my art is like music:
mysterious, powerful at times, coming from places deep inside my soul,
structured, yet unbounded, permeated with my love, with a sense of awe. Art 195

is total freedom, like a game, where I make the rules. With art, I can express
myself and communicate my vision. I dance to the music of life in my art.

Rolandas Kiaulevicius’ winning art piece, The Dream, can be found on page 103.
 Valerie B. McKee

Lee Connellan Prize

Heirloom
I never thought my grandmother’s hands
were ugly–I just knew they didn’t look
like any others I’d ever seen: pale
and knotted, knuckles like cauliflower
rooted to her bones, sprouting at every joint.
Yellowed fingernails had ridges deep
as the Smoky Mountains surrounding her house
and I wondered what beneath would make
them crack down to the surface. Her wedding
band hung at the base of her ring finger, placed
there on her wedding day and never removed–
stuck sliding back and forth like the ball
on an abacus. When she died, they had to cut it off

for me. I twist her ring, watch it dangle

on my bony digit, run my finger tip across
the patched slit in its back, remembering
my hand resting under hers on the church pew,
kneading dough for bread, dealing cards
for gin rummy, brushing hair into pigtails, scratching
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the soft spot behind Winston’s ears–never

see my hands as my own again.

196
 Chris Farrell

Leslie Leeds Prize

Cuatras Miradas (Four Looks)

My brother-in-law’s eyebrows raise,
Lips part just slightly,
Tongue caught by politeness,
Aching to tell my grandmother
“No entiendo.”

Mi cuñado, his brows furrow for a moment,

Wrinkling his forehead,
Before relaxing
As he lets my aunt–
So white she’s clear–
Try to tell him “Buenos noches.”

A light smile plays at his lips,

Previously chained tongue firing
palabras a mi porque yo puedo comprender.
He relaxes into a casual conversation with me,
Who understands.

His eyes dance over her face

And they share gentle whispers–
But it’s beyond language
When he is with my sister–
His always girl, he called her.
Su mujer para siempre.
197
 Charlotte Crowe

IMPAC-CSU Young Writers Awards - Prose

Korean Laundry
For my grandfather, a marine during the Korean War

It’s warm, almost stifling, and it’s only early morning. The sun is just
rising and we’re preparing for the day. I close my eyes and allow myself thirty
more seconds to wish for more sleep, to think fleetingly of home. Home.
My body aches. Quickly I push self-pity away. We haven’t endured much
fighting. We have a pretty stable camp set up. We’re staying in barracks, in a
camp surrounded by a fence. We’re more or less safe. I splash water on my
face. My stomach’s moaning for breakfast.
I pull a shirt from the pile of clean laundry beside me. It smells distinctly
of river. We have few clothes. I bring my soiled underwear and fatigues down
to the fence. The women from the local village greet us there in the morn-
ing. They collect our dirty clothes and deliver the ones they’ve washed for
us, folded into neat bundles. You can see them by the river, bending, white
cloth fanning out in the water around them. They scrub and beat, and lay
our clothes out to dry.
I take a deep breath and step out into the sun. It’s bright already, the
troops awake, and the men are already walking down to the fence. I can see
my woman, the woman who always washes my clothes. She’s hard to miss;
she’s large with child. She’s bigger by the day, her belly swelling out, out, out.
She kneels in the muddy water, scrubs methodically at the shirt resting on
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her bulging belly. She has the most beautiful hair. It’s fine and dark, knotted
at the back of her neck. She waits by the fence with my laundry, a miraculous
white, folded neatly. She smiles weakly as I approach, hands me the bundle
through the fence, pushes it between the slats. And I push my dirty laundry
towards her. Now the space, the moment of silence before I turn and hurry
198
back to breakfast. It’s an uncomfortable gap between us, this woman who
washes my sweat and blood into the river everyday and me. She wouldn’t
understand my thank you. So I nod, and push the guilt I feel deeper. She
looks so tired, so burdened. I smile and turn back towards the men. Earth
crumbles as I ascend. I press my hands against my spine and wonder what it
feels like to carry a child folded inside me. The breakfast bell sounds and her
image is gone. She’s forgotten until tomorrow.
 Charlotte Crowe

The sky is gray, the horizon smolders with the sunrise about to happen.
The other men are barely stirring. I won’t find sleep again. My eyes ache. My
skin is heavy. I smell of sweat. Quickly I roll out and let my clothes slip off
my lean body and onto the dirt floor. I take the clean laundry, the clean Ko-
rean laundry that smells like river, and I dress myself. I can picture my shirt,
my trousers, pressed up against her stomach, her pink flesh showing through
the white cotton now resting on my shoulders. I want today’s new laundry. I
want this day to begin. The gray sky is weighing me. The war is weighing me
down.
The other men have begun to wake, and I step outside. Some have even
started towards the fence. I follow with my few soiled garments. I look for
her, squint against the rising sun. I see no round woman, no bulging woman.
I blink. Where is she? I near the fence, my neck twisting for a glimpse of her.
Then I see an arm coming through the slats, a perfect bundle of bleached
white, in my direction. I take a few steps. There she is, her hair shining and
eyes dark. They remind me of wet stones. But, she’s not the same. There’s no
swelling, no bulge. She’s flat, slim, a river reed gesturing to me with cotton
folds. I’m breathless.
“Baby?” My hands form a belly with round hands motions. “Baby?” I
rock an imaginary new born in my arms, cradling, back and forth, back and
forth.
She smiles, nods. “Baby,” she repeats, rocking her own invisible baby.
I take my laundry from her hands. It’s spotless, flat, and neatly folded. I
wonder how this woman gave new life and still managed to clean my muddy
pants. I try not to think about all the blood that she washed out of her
sheets, washed beside my laundry into the river. I don’t give her my dirty
clothes. A day off from one man’s laundry is the largest gift I have to give.

199
 Jessica Roth

IMPAC-CSU Young Writers Awards - Poetry

Growing Citrus
I.
there is a tumor tucked
beneath my mother’s stomach
a lemon she keeps
as a reminder that sweet indulgences
turn sour and produce seeds,
smooth, but bitter–
sort of an organic inspiration, a neat and tidy saint
inside her to keep things in order,
or disorder
turning long seasons into a single creeping october;
leaves peeling themselves off of pale trees
one by one
 

II.
there is a lemon just outside of my mother’s belly
kept warm by the friction of body movements,
biological swaddling cloth, growing safe
where i imagine a figurative me might once have been.
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this lemon is an ambitious citrus–

dream of being orange, grapefruit,
dream of being florida.
generations of tart women in my family have been warned
do not grow too big for your britches; peels.
200 i worry about seams splitting and would not dare
to let my mother catch me with sticky fingers
and a soft, bruised tangerine behind my back.
 

III.
a lime is self-contained
pulp wrapped in white pith
 Jessica Roth

insulation borrowed from the sun

and from a fibrous green earth.
i remember thinking as a child
if only my skin were as dimpled
no one would dare sink their teeth in me
looking for sugar.

201
 Contributors’ Notes

Jim Barnes is a professor of English at Brigham Young University, the

founding editor of the Chariton Review Press, and editor of The Chariton
Review. He is also a contributing editor to the Pushcart Prize. He has pub-
lished over 500 poems in more than 100 journals. His new book of poetry is
Visiting Picasso (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Jack Bedell, poetry judge, teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University

where he serves as editor of Louisiana Literature. His first book, At the Bone-
house, won the 1997 Texas Review Prize, and his chapbook, What Passes for
Love, was the winner of the 2000 Texas Review Chapbook Competition. His
new book of poetry is Come Rain, Come Shine (Texas Review Press, 2006).

J. Karl Bell spent three of his teenage years confined to a public tuberculo-
sis sanatorium in the 1940s. Since retiring as a vice president at NBC, he has
completed a comic novel set in the 1950s and is currently working on a book
based on his time at the “san.”

Cathy Caruth is Emory University’s Winship Distinguished Research

Professor of Comparative Literature, and chair of Comparative Literature.
She is author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant,
Freud and of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. She has also
co-edited, with Deborah Esch, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in
Deconstructive Writing and has edited and introduced Trauma: Explorations in
CONNECTICUT REVIEW

Memory.

Peter J. Caulfield is a professor of literature and language at the Univer-

sity of North Carolina at Asheville. He has recently completed his second
novel, an historical work set in the 1920s in England and America.
202

Grace Cavalieri is the author of 14 books of poetry and 20 staged plays.

She produces “The Poet and the Poem at the Library of Congress” on Na-
tional Public Radio, which is entering its 29th year on air. She holds the Allen
Ginsberg Award for Poetry, the Pen-Syndicated Fiction Award, a Paterson
Prize, the Bordighera Award, and the Silver Medal from the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting.
Stephanie Cherolis received her master’s degree in English from Central
Connecticut State University in fall 2005. Her research interests include Vic-
torian literature and criminality, contemporary American literature, psycho-
analysis, trauma, and metaphors of illness. She recently published an article
on Philip Roth and hopes to begin a PhD program in fall 2006.

Robert Collins has appeared in Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, South-

ern Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. His chapbooks include The Glass Blower
(Pudding House) and Lives We Have Chosen (Poems & Plays), winner of the
Tennessee Chapbook Award. He teaches at University of Alabama where he
edits the Birmingham Poetry Review.

Nicole Cooley’s books of poetry include Resurrection (winner of the 1995

Walt Whitman Award) and The Afflicted Girls, both published by LSU Press.
Her novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love was published by Harper Collins in
1998. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Queens
College-The City University of New York.

Lorien Crow is the winner of the 2006 CSU fiction prize and a junior
of non-traditional age at Western Connecticut State University. She majors
in English literature with a minor in anthropology. Lorien plans to pursue
a career in travel writing. This story was written in memory of her paternal
grandmother, Ellen Crow.

Charlotte Crowe, winner of the 2006 IMPAC–CSU Young Writer’s

Competition in prose, is a junior at Canton High School. She attended the
Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts as a creative writer her freshman and
sophomore years and plans on returning this September. Charlotte wrote Ko-
rean Laundry in the spring of her freshman year and is grateful to Pit Pinegar
who guided the revision of the piece. 203

Rusten Currie served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq. In January

of 2006, he returned home to his family, his tour of duty completed. The
blog he kept while serving in Iraq, in addition to many photographs he took
while there, can be viewed at: http://currierd.typepad.com/centurion/.

Meryl DePasquale is the winner of the 2006 CSU essay prize and a
 recent graduate of Central Connecticut State University. She majored in Eng-
lish and minored in creative writing. In the fall she hopes to pursue graduate
study in fiction or poetry. Meryl and her fiancé, Shawn, an illustrator and
tattoo artist, will be married this May.

Katrina Emery translated Luna de miel as a project for her graduate degree
at Rutgers University. She received her master’s of Spanish in Translation and
Interpretation in October 2004. Currently, Katrina works as a Spanish teacher
for Cranford Public School District in Cranford, NJ.

Elizabeth England received a 1998 New York Foundation of the Arts Fic-
tion Fellowship, and her stories have appeared in the Nebraska Review, North
Atlantic Review and Berkshire Review. She won Inkwell Magazine’s short fiction
competition, and the winning story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Set-
tling Matters is dedicated to Fran Breuer.

Chris Farrell, winner of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, attended the Gun-
nery prepatory school in Washington, CT, where, upon graduation, he won
an award for excellence in Spanish, the Michael Post Award for Excellence
in English, Cum Laude Society honors, and graduated as Top Scholar. He
currently attends Western Connecticut State University, where he majors in
both English–creative writing and philosophy.

Natalie J. Friedman teaches writing at Vassar College, where she also

CONNECTICUT REVIEW

directs the writing center. Born and raised in New York City, she received her
PhD in American literature from New York University in 2001.

David Lee Garrison chairs the department of modern languages at

Wright State University. His co-edited anthology, O Taste and See: Food Poems,
204 won the American Poetry Anthology Prize for 2004. He acknowledges the
help of Dr. Xenia Bonch-Bruevich with his Voznesensky translation.

John Kane, art and photography judge, has been published in Cosmopoli-
tan, Better Homes and Gardens, Bon Appetit, House & Garden, Natural History
Magazine, and many more. His books include Twisted Yoga, Colors in Fashion
and the Human Alphabet. John has produced advertising for many Fortune
500 companies and some of the largest catalog companies.
Rolandas Kiaulevicius, winner of the CSU art award, was born in a
small village in Lithuania. He studied fine art and wood working at the Siau-
liai Pedagogical Institute and came to America after earning his BA, without
knowing any English. He attended Gateway Community College and Yale
University to learn English, then was accepted at Paier Art College. He will
graduate in May 2006 from Western Connecticut State University with an
MFA in illustration. He is currently working on the mural for Chapel Haven
in New Haven, CT.

Zoltan Krompecher has spent the last twenty years as both a Green Beret
and intelligence officer in the United States Army. In September of 2005, his
close friend Dave was killed instantly when his vehicle intercepted a suicide
bomber’s car. Zoltan had the honor of escorting Dave home for his funeral.
He wrote this poem while waiting in an airport terminal for him to arrive.
His poetry is forthcoming in Operation Homecoming, to be published in 2006
by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pamela Leck received her doctorate in clinical psychology from

Duquesne University. She currently works as a psychologist in the Program
for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Studies at Weill-Cornell Medical College in
New York City, where she works primarily with disaster workers.

David Leeson is known for covering major conflicts throughout the

world. He has been a senior staff photographer at The Dallas Morning News
since 1984, and his assignments have taken him to more than 60 countries
and 11 conflict zones in 20 years. Leeson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for
his coverage of the invasion of Iraq and has won two Robert F. Kennedy
Journalism Awards for Outstanding Coverage of the Problems of the Disad-
vantaged.
205

Valerie B. McKee, the 2006 winner of the Leo Connellan Poetry Prize,
is a graduate student at Southern Connecticut State University and a New
Haven public school teacher. She is a native Tennessean, but considers
herself an adopted child of New York City. Valerie is the 2005-2006 Southern
Connecticut State University Graduate Poet. Her work has recently appeared
in Caduceus and is forthcoming in Folio and Louisiana Literature.
 Yolanda Pallín (b. 1965) is among Spain’s most prominent contemporary
playwrights. Luna de miel, written in 2002, is one of her most recent works
that reveals real life concerns in modern day relationships. Pallín currently
resides in Madrid where she continues to write plays that are a reflection of
present society.

Robert Philen is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University

of West Florida. His research interests include the process and structure of
ethnographic narrative, gender, ethnicity and race, and socioeconomic class
and development.

Aimee L. Pozorski is an assistant professor of English at Central Con-

necticut State University, where she teaches twentieth-century American lit-
erature and theories of trauma and ethics. She has published essays on Philip
Roth, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, and Mina Loy. She is a regular
contributor to Cold Mountain Review, where she has reviewed the poetry of
Eavan Boland, Maxine Kumin, and Kathryn Kirkpatrick.

Daniel Asa Rose, fiction and essay judge, is a memoirist, novelist, story
writer, and essayist. An NEA Literary Fellow for 2006, he is currently the
editor of the international literary magazine The Reading Room and a regular
book reviewer for The New York Observer and New York Magazine.

Jessica Roth, winner of the 2005 IMPAC-CSU Young Writer’s Award in

CONNECTICUT REVIEW

poetry, is a poet and artist living in Granby, CT. Her travels have brought her
to a number of countries, most recently Chile, where she has found a second
home. She studied at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts.

Martha Serpas is a native of Galliano, LA. Her first collection, Côte

206 Blanche, was published by New Issues in spring 2002. Recent poems appear
in The New Yorker, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, and Passages North.
She teaches writing and religion and literature at the University of Tampa.

Irene Sherlock is associate director of publications and design at Western

Connecticut State University and an adjunct lecturer in the English depart-
ment. She holds an MA in English, an MFA in creative writing, and an MS
in marriage and family therapy. Her screenplay, “Fox’s Hardware,” was op-
tioned by Hearst Entertainment. Her poems and essays have been published
in Amaranth, Calyx, Cream City Review, Connecticut Review, The Fairfield Review,
Poem-memoir-story, Poetry Motel, Roux, Runes, Slipstream, Tar Wolf Review, The
New York Times, White Pelican Review and in several anthologies, including
“Single Woman of a Certain Age” from Inner Ocean Publishing. Her essays
can be heard on WSHU National Public Radio.

Nicole Simek is an assistant professor of French at Whitman College.

Specializing in French Caribbean literature, Simek is currently working on
the concept of literary commitment in the novels of Guadeloupean writer
Maryse Condé. She has also published articles on Baudelaire’s figuration of
the reader, female friendship in French literature, Caribbean women’s autobi-
ography, and history after globalization in Maryse Condé’s work.

R. Clifton Spargo is an associate professor of English at Marquette

University, formerly the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Center for Advanced Ho-
locaust Studies, and the author of The Ethics of Mourning (Johns Hopkins UP,
2004) and Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust
Death (Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). His short stories have appeared in journals
such as Glimmer Train, Fiction, SOMA, Green Mountains Review, and North
Atlantic Review.

Jennifer J. Thompson received her PhD in comparative literature from

the University of California at Irvine. She is currently assistant professor of
humanities at Embry-Riddle University, where she teaches creative writing,
Holocaust studies, and world literature.

Andrei Voznesensky is Russia’s foremost poet. He is known as an avant-

garde writer who constantly experiments with new rhythms, images, and
sounds, and who finds inspiration in commonplace things. “The Nose” is 207

from his book Antiworlds (Basic Books, 1996).

Katharine Weber is the author of the novels Triangle (2006), The Little
Women (2003), The Music Lesson (1999), and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than
They Appear (1995). Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, South-
west Review, Story, Redbook, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction writing at
Yale and the Paris Writers Workshop, and she is the Kratz Writer in Resi-
dence at Goucher College for spring 2006.
 Submitting Work to Connecticut Review
Connecticut Review is a semi-annual journal published since 1967 under
the auspices of the Board of Trustees for the Connecticut State University.
Connecticut Review invites submission of poetry, literary plays, short fiction,
translations, creative nonfiction, essays, interviews, academic articles of
general interest, artwork, and photography.
Editorial Policy: All work is read by our editors. Work may be addi-
tionally read by students and assistants as part of the journal’s educational
function. Most of the work published in the journal is unsolicited. Any work
solicited by one of our editors or submitted through the acquaintance of
one of our editors will be submitted by the other editors on the board for a
decision.

Submission Guidelines:
• Work should be 2,000 to 4,000 words.
• Submit two copies of each piece.
• The first page of each poem, story, essay or other should include the
name, address, phone number, and e-mail address in the upper left
corner.
• Poets should submit no more than five poems.
• Translated work must be accompanied by appropriate written permis
sions from author or publisher.
• Typed manuscripts should be on 8.5 x 11 paper in MLA style when
appropriate.
• Photography and artwork should be submitted as slides or transparen-
cies. The title, date of composition, size of original, medium, and name and
address of the artist should be indicated. Black and white photography and
CONNECTICUT REVIEW

artwork should be labeled in the same way. Work with vertical orientation is
preferred, and orientation should be indicated.
• Each submission must be accompanied by a brief autobiographical
statement.
• Send SASE for reply only. Manuscripts will be recycled. Mail without
208 a return address on the outside envelope will not be opened.
• Connecticut Review will return any work postmarked between May 15
and September 1.

Send all submissions labeled by genre to:

John Briggs, Senior Editor
Connecticut Review, Connecticut State University System
39 Woodland Street
Hartford, CT 06105-2337