Scribbles

“The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.”
– SS chief Heinrich Himmler, October 17, 1944

Steam hissed and billowed up into Ellen’s face as she finished preparing the tea, clouding her vision for a moment like smoke. She coughed and waved it away with a wrinkled hand. Ellen made her tea strong, brewing the leaves for six minutes before adding a half-teaspoon of sugar and a splash of cold cream. She used her pale green teakettle to boil the water, the one she’d brought over from Poland. It was old and chipped, with the faint swirls of flower stems pressed into the porcelain. They reminded her of the red poppy fields outside Warsaw in June, swelling gently over the hills and farmland. But they’d all been destroyed in the war.
Tea was a staple for Ellen, a daily ceremony that marked the steady passage of time. Continuity and habit, these were things that organized life, that gave order to the chaos lurking beneath the neatly folded tablecloth and the stacked sugar cubes. In Warsaw or Philadelphia, it was the same. Szklanka herbaty or tea. What a strange language, this English, she thought. So rough on the tongue. Not quite so much as German or Russian, but still rough.
The doorbell tinkled faintly from the front room. “Come in!” Ellen called. It would be her daughter Ania, a professor of biology at Drexel University. She didn’t visit often. Her research kept her in the lab until all hours of the night, checking test tubes and pouring over thick scientific manuals and papers.
“Hi Mom!” Ania swept in with a stream of cold air and bent to kiss Ellen on the cheek. “How are you doing?”
“Ah same as ever. How the university treat you, Ania? You sleep enough, yes?” Ellen poured a steaming cup of tea for her.
“Yes, Mom, I sleep. The school does pretty well for me. They gave me a bonus last week, actually.” Ania played with the cup and saucer, turning it left and right and making the tea slosh against the side of the cup.
“Ania, this is good news, I am proud for you. What will you do with the money?”
Her daughter stopped fiddling with the teacup. “I bought two plane tickets. To Warsaw.” She looked up through her bangs.
Ellen was silent, staring at the kettle, following the twisting floral patterns with her eyes. “Ach, I don’t know, Ania.” Her fingers traced looping circles into the tablecloth.
“Well, you don’t have to decide now. I’ll leave them here, and you think about it. I have to go, I’ve got work.” Ania patted her mother’s wandering hand and left, closing the door quietly behind her.
Ellen looked at the tickets, lying next to the sugar bowl. The crisp white envelope was jarring against the tablecloth’s dark weave. She pushed the kettle in front of them, blocking them from view, and finished her tea.

That night, Ellen lay in bed watching shadows play against the ceiling of her bedroom, drifting and morphing into the darkness like smoke in the sky. When she fell asleep, she dreamed of the spires of the Old Town before the war, the cobblestoned squares and palaces, the pealing cathedral bells. She walked through the streets, again a child of twelve, looking eagerly through the shop windows at muslin dresses and pastries flaked with sugar. A light breeze stirred the poppy flower pinned in her hair.
But the dream changed. Hulking men in uniforms stalked towards her, the thunder from their heavy black boots ricocheting off the buildings. Houses and shops blossomed in flames as they passed, some exploding in spectacular sprays of mortar and wood. Their guns showered fire.
Ellen ran, following the people fleeing the soldiers, gasping and ducking. She screamed and stumbled when a man in front of her fell, his back pierced by three bullets, blood streaming through his coat.
She couldn’t run fast enough. The soldiers were catching up. Smoke billowed through the street, blocking out the morning sunlight. Ellen ducked into an alley and hid crouching in the darkest corner, her dress torn, knees scraped. The building to her left was burning, the smoke filling her lungs, so she could barely breathe. She closed her eyes and opened them. In front of her was a pair of pitch-black boots.

Ellen woke with a gasp. Always the dream, she thought. It always came back. Tea. Tea would help. She shuffled into the kitchen and filled the kettle, then sat at the table in the dark. The plane tickets sat illuminated by the light from a streetlamp peeking between the curtains. Destination: Warsaw, they said in neat type. But it wasn’t really Warsaw. That city was destroyed long ago, burnt to the ground, invaded first by the Nazis and then the Soviets. They chased away or killed its people, tried to wipe it off the face of the earth, to crush it beneath the heels of their boots. And they did. They murdered her city, her friends, her family, her language. Ellen felt a surge of anger, so long buried, surge within her.
Her hands shook on the table, nails digging into the tablecloth. Steam spouted from the kettle with a keen piercing whistle, swelling into the air. Ellen moved the kettle off the stove, poured herself a cup of tea, and touched the tickets to the flame. They alighted like the flower baskets hanging from the windows had that day, flames curling up among the red poppies, smoke blooming in the sky.

Sunil was walking down Delancey Street when he noticed the hat. It was propped up against the boarded up storefront of the old Brooklyn Bridge Café, its faded blue brim resting on the cracked and peeling paint. The hat had a simple black band and a few dents littering its sides, as if it had been battered and forgotten there on the sidewalk like some aging bum. Sunil picked it up, his long fingers brushing off the dirt, filling out the small concavities. It looked like something from the 20s or the 40s, worn once with a well-pressed suit at a smoky jazz club, tilted over one eye. He decided to take it home, twirling it on his fingers while he walked back to his apartment.
That night, Sunil wore the hat to a bar in Williamsburg. The place was loud and crowded, pulsing to the synthetic beat of the newest electronica band to come out of the borough. He ordered an Old-Fashioned and leant against a wall covered in layers of flyers and outdated music posters, pulling the hat down low over his eyes to block out the flashing strobe lights. A girl, whose identical PBR-soaked words slurred and slid down the front of her plaid shirt, asked him what thrift store he’d gotten it from. He shrugged. “Just found it on the street,” he answered, fingering the fraying blue fabric. She quickly lost interest.
These girls, this life, didn’t interest Sunil anymore. For a while he’d been caught up in the Brooklyn scene, stumbling through dive bars while espousing the values of urban gardening, Whole Foods, vinyl, artists’ collectives and warehouse parties. But it all amounted to nothing, really. There was no revolution, no real counterculture. Just empty beer cans and tired eyes trapped in the monthly ritual of scrambling for rent and wasting away at an accounting job he hated, shuttling back and forth through the subway to a cubicle in the depths of Midtown.
Sunil decided to go home, though it was still relatively early for a Friday night. He slipped through the crowd by the door and out into the cool night air, lit by a nearly full moon. The sky was clear, but he couldn’t see any stars, however long he stared into the blackness. Light pollution. There probably wasn’t any out West, far beyond the urban wasteland of the East Coast, beyond the cities and the smog. Sunil imagined the Rockies, or what he thought they were like: majestic, jagged peaks cutting the horizon, the air crisp and cold, silent but for the ringing cries of a soaring hawk. There would be pristine streams gurgling over mossy rocks, a black bear dipping one paw into the water for fish, untouched meadows of wildflowers and tall grasses ruffled by the wind. At night, owls would swoop low over the grass, wingtips brushing the ground, and coyotes would howl odes to the glittering constellations. There would be more stars than he could imagine, filling the sky with their light.
A sudden gust of wind knocked the hat off of Sunil’s head. It tumbled down the street, coming to rest against a pile of rags. As he jogged over to retrieve it, the pile moved. Sunil froze.
“This yours?” growled a low voice. An emaciated arm stretched out of the rags, holding the hat. The man’s long, tangled hair flapped in the wind, revealing a dirty, wrinkled face that looked as if it had been carved in wood a hundred years ago. “Mighty fine hat, that is.” The man smelled like Chinatown on a hot day. Sunil tried not to wrinkle his nose.
“Yes, sir,” Sunil said when he recovered from his surprise. He walked slowly forward and took the hat. “Thank you.” He looked at it for a moment, nervously turning it around in his hands, wondering what to do. He had to do something. The man was a wreck. He saw a Dunkin Donuts down the street. “Would you like a cup of coffee or something? A donut?”
The man nodded slowly. “The jelly kind. With icing. And pink sprinkles.”
Sunil walked over to the store and got the man a donut and two coffees. When he came back, he sat down next to the man on the sidewalk and handed him the food. The man took slow, measured bites, being careful not to lose any of the sprinkles. When he finished and started sipping the coffee, he started to talk.
“Thank you, you’re a good fellow. Not many would help me like you done. They just walk by, pretend they don’t see me. But I knows they do. Sometimes they’ll throw me a few quarters, and that’s nice. But this is better.”
“What’s your name?” Sunil asked.
“Robert. I come from Montana, damn near fifty years ago. Big Sky Country. Left the farm to come be a city boy, work in a factory. Married a beautiful woman, Isabel. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. Was all well and good until she got sick. Cancer. Not long after she died, I lost my job. Been on the streets since then.”
Sunil listened to Robert talk. He wanted to say something, I’m sorry, something empathetic. But what right did he have? What power did his words have in the face of suffering? Nothing he could say would change this man’s life.
“Here, Robert. I want you to have this.” Sunil gave him back the hat. “It’s not much, but it suits you.” Robert took the hat in his dirty fingers, considering it for a moment before pushing it down over his matted hair. Sunil imagined him as he must have been decades before, twirling his Isabel around to the tune of a soulful jazz band, hat tilted over one eye.
“Well, thank you, young man. God bless.”
Sunil stood up, nodded, and walked away. He could hear Robert whistle an old tune, his reedy notes carried out over the bay in the chill wind, flowing out to sea.

Sea foam sprayed across his face, its salt seeping into his graying beard. He could feel it coating the follicles, clinging close to his skin. From where he stood below the lighthouse, just beyond the waves’ reach on the shoreline, he could see the coast curving away to the north. The waves crashed and broke against the craggy rocks, covering their cratered surfaces in flecks of white. A storm was coming from the north. He could feel its electricity in the air, feel the vibrations humming against his eardrums.
Jonah turned and stepped heavily down to the sand, favoring his right leg. It was never the same after Vietnam. He’d barely been involved in the fighting. He’d been lucky. But the war still changed things somehow, making it impossible to go back to his family’s home in Michigan, to the sunlit suburban streets of Ann Arbor. So he’d come here, to the tip of Maine, taken a job as a lighthouse warden, keeping the place in shape, oiling the cogs and wheels so the light spun on, guiding ships home through the bay. He knew every rock and sandbar, every nuance of coastline, the seasonal patterns of the waves. Fifty years spent watching the water shift and rise and fall back into itself, following the gulls’ flight across the sky, their wings tiny points against the clouds.
The walk down to the water was difficult. Jonah’s lungs constricted, his heart beating hard, each pulse pounding in his chest like the ocean’s waves dashing against the rocks. He leaned against the wooden doorframe, warped and cracked from years of standing in the humid air. His gnarled fingers felt the depressions in the wood, exploring its concavities, memorizing the wood’s geography. Jonah’s vision was darkening slowly, dimming like the sky before a storm approached. Touch, memory – these things were key.
A gust of cold wind smacked against the lighthouse, moaning through the rocks, whipping the tall yellow grass on the dunes. Clouds tinged with purple and green crowded in the sky, hanging low above the frothing whitecaps. Jonah locked the door and climbed upstairs, knees creaking, to turn on the beacon.
After eating a can of soup in his small room at the base of the lighthouse, he lay in bed while the storm crashed into the cove. The lighthouse seemed to shiver and groan, lashed by the rain and the waves’ dull roar.
Just like the storm that hit us off the coast of Vietnam, he thought. The thick air was stifling in the lungs, the wind too warm. Their boat couldn’t stand a hurricane, so they’d landed on the edge of a dense jungle, dark and shuddering under the pelting rain. After huddling under the brush for hours, waiting out the storm, a small group of Viet Cong, five young men in ragged olive uniforms, had found them. Jonah left with a bullet to the leg. He was luckier than the others.
It still ached in the night, throbbing dully on nights like this so he couldn’t sleep. Jonah sat up stiffly in the dark and slowly pulled on his beaten boots and parka. He fought his aging body, pushing it forward. The door stuck, its warped wood straining against the wind. With a shove from his bony shoulder, it opened into the storm, and Jonah stepped outside.
The wind drove rain into his eyes, almost blinding him. But Jonah didn’t need his failing eyes. Touch and memory. Bending into the wind, his back curved like a sickle, he began to walk forward. His feet sought the familiar path, shuffling down to the rocks. He moved like a badly contorted puppet, knees jerking, arms at stiff narrow angles to his wasted body. The spray flew up and around him, engulfing him in the ocean’s roiling water. And still he stepped forward, one foot at a time, until he stood at the edge of the water.
Eyes closed, smiling, Jonah reached out to the waves, and grasping them, took a last step into the sea.

Avery’s tea was cold. The bag hung limply against the inside of the chipped blue mug, half-squashed by a tarnished silver spoon. He’d lost track of time, staring out through the kitchen window and across his unkempt backyard at the neighbors’ children playing some sort of cops and robbers game beyond the fence. Two boys ran around the swing-set, waving sticks through the air and shouting shrilly, while a brown-haired girl sat watching them on a swing, burrowing the tips of her red shoes into the mulch. Avery took a sip of tea.
He liked to watch the children playing in the afternoon when they came home from school. They reminded him of his own sons, long gone now from the small Maryland town where they’d grown up to live in Manhattan and Chicago. “This place is run down,” they’d told him. “It’s lonely. Sell it, move to Florida or Myrtle Beach, somewhere warm. There’s nothing to keep you here.” Nothing but worn shutter-boards with flaking faded paint, the rusting remains of the old silk factory, the wasted garden where he used to grow tomatoes. But still he stayed.
With a sudden loud thump a rubber ball smacked against the kitchen window and fell, making a muffled thud on the wooden porch. Avery’s mug clattered against the tabletop, leaving a puddle of brown tea against the //. He stood up heavily and walked to the patio door, looking outside at the yard. The boys watched him warily, thin shoulders tense beneath bright t-shirts, wondering how the old man would react, if they should climb the fence to get the ball or surrender it to ill luck with a shrug and start a new game.
Avery opened the door, his arthritic fingers struggling with the handle. He bent slowly, first from the knees, then the back, until he could grasp the ball. The children followed his slow movements with wide eyes, waiting on their tiptoes, hands on the fence. Avery unbent himself and walked over to them, carrying the ball before him like an offering.
The girl, whose attention has before been absorbed in deepening the holes she’d made in the dirt, joined her brothers at the fence. She too watched the old man, silent, her green eyes bright in the dying afternoon light, staring, measuring.
Those eyes, thought Avery. Helen’s eyes. The same sea green like the Pacific in sunlight, flecked with gold, glinting and changing like the tossing of waves.
He’d met her in California, an afternoon in late August, 1953. It wasn’t long after the war, and the golden prosperity of consumerism and hope still shone in peoples’ minds. Avery was walking on the beach with his dog Jazz, a brown and white mutt he’d found as a puppy on the streets. Helen had stopped to pet Jazz, and Avery looked past her sun-soaked auburn hair and into her eyes for the first time while she buried her hands in the dog’s silky fur.
The last time he’d seen her wasn’t so poetic. She’d had cancer. It moved quickly, tearing through her bloodstream to multiply and destroy organ after organ. When he’d said goodbye, the sea-green of her eyes had been clouded, the narcotics covering her irises like a vague and hazy storm before they finally closed, their light extinguished.
Avery stepped up to the fence and let the ball slip into the girl’s small hands. She smiled, eyes crinkling slightly, and turned to her brothers. The three ran back, already absorbed in their game. Avery walked slowly up the three steps to the porch and into the kitchen, pausing with his gnarled fingers against the doorframe as the evening breeze slipped by like the ghost of a caress.

I look for you in chords
of banjos and pianos,
trying to find the quick sharp movements
of your wrists and fingers
on the strings and keys.
Between the notes, a glimpse
of your nodding head, lowered eyes,
the slight rocking of your shoulders.
I would play arpeggios on your chest
and drum the rhythms with my fingers,
trace the contours of your stomach
into a melody, the theme
for this nocturne, pressed somewhere
between our bodies
and the twisted sheets.

Hard half-green tomatoes sink,
their lank vines bending low
beneath the sun’s harsh glare
that blazes against the red church tower
lying in the valley’s bottom.

The garden my grandfather tended
behind his muted yellow house 
has grown into the grass and shrubs,
creeping slowly up the mountain,
beyond his mottled fingers’ reach.
His spade lies on the peeling porch rails,
heating through the afternoon.

Today he sits inside and listens
to the slowly spinning fan,
watching the birds fly down
to plunge their tiny beaks
into the fruit’s young flesh.

Every dog has its night
to run free licking the juice
of bruised blackberries,
fallen in the dirt,
not heeding the mothers’ voices
calling their children home
through the dark,
or the soft mosquito whir
in the humid air.

At night I dream
of half-remembered roads
and the cadences
of another language
stopping and swaying
like the movement
of a metro car
in the dark
between stations.

I expect to wake
to the smell of bread
in city streets
and the cries
of the cheese man,
le fromager
(a word so much
more beautiful in French)
in morning sunlight.

But instead there are hills
upon hills and mountains
flowing past highway curves,
silent and cold.
I start at the sounds
of English and America,
the squealing SUV tires
and Hollywood TV,
at the way the colors
are different here, a shade
barely noticeable.
The differences surface slowly
in the winter air.

In the breeze I’ll imagine
the whisper of an accordion,
the smell of the Seine,
and hope that someday
I’ll hear again the music of Paris
when I wake in the morning.

Between the graves and falling snow
we climb through rows of stone
veiled and silent
except for the repeated cry
of a blackbird.

At Oscar Wilde’s tomb we stop
and press our chapped
and frozen lips, for a moment,
against the stone
and lipstick smears
and whisper our thanks
into the wind.

“Vous êtes tous exilés”
my professor said
in the darkened room
yesterday afternoon.

And I thought about how
there is no going back,
only going
into another exile
towards which
I’ll gladly run -
to be at once
of all lands
and no land.

I carry Paris with me
in photographs, caught
in the fibers of my clothes,
wedged in my shoes
with the dust and dirt
of cities I’ve seen.

If my end is my beginning,
like Eliot said,
the circle will stop
in an airport terminal
after dusk.

A legion of suitcase wheels
turning and bumping will echo
through narrow halls.

We’ll pull in the driveway after dark
under blinking Christmas lights,
and my cat will stare,
tail twitching against the carpet.

He will sniff my hands
with the tip of his pale
pink nose, and smell
a strange scent
and purr,
and I will know
I’m home.