Dialogues
in Transit
I. On the Bus to
Charlottesville
A.
That child sure is loud; listen to
him natter on.
Now he’s taking to howlin’; I don’t
like the sound of it,
the way his breath catch at the end
of each wail. Kinda wheeze like.
Umm. Umm. You know what
I’m sayin’?
Why does she slap him like
that? In the midst of his carryin’ on, too.
It’s not right. I’ve a mind
to call Child Welfare Services.
Besides, I need to get to me some
sleep on this bus.
That damn dog at Mattie’s kept me
up all night. Crazy yappin’.
If it’s not one thing, it’s
another; ain’t that what I was just tellin’
Mattie last night? Puttin’ up
with Ms. Lizzie’s youngsters all these years;
it’s my time for some peace.
B.
Why can’t he be like other kids?
Why does he question, fight me at
every turn?
I told him he couldn’t have a snack
just now;
he had one twenty minutes
ago. I told him.
Good thing the licorice twists and
Skittles were on sale.
Don’t know what I would have done
if they weren’t.
He’d best stop with that howling;
he can’t fool me.
Crocodile tears if I ever did see
any.
Good thing there’s hardly anyone in
this bus;
I can’t take this anymore either,
and he’s mine!
II. At the Charlottesville
Station and on the Bus to Lynchburg
and Points
South and West
A.
My goodness. Look at that
child go. Round and round.
I swear I ain’t never seen anythin’
like it. Wanda, you just got to see this!
He’s runnin’ up and down the whole
station, now round and round.
She got him jacked up on speed or
somethin’.
Don’t she have some books for
him? Some toys?
She could get somethin’ at the Good
Will. This boy he just bored. Lord,
I sure hope they don’t get on the
transfer bus. Wanda, don’t you know it,
that’s exactly what they’re fixin’
to do. This bus is crowded. I’m gonna
put my things down next to me, make
sure they don’t sit here.
Oh good, there’s a nice young lady
comin’ on; I’ll move them for her.
Good Lord, it’s gonna be a long
road to Nashville, Wanda.
B.
Good thing he’s getting to blow off
some steam in this bus station.
Did I ever run like that? Doubt
it. Mama wouldn’t have let me.
If things were different, I could
ask her. If I hadn’t run away with Jamal
and produced this here “blue-eyed
child of dusk come of no good, come
to no good” (her words, I swear),
then … Well, then, I wouldn’t have
had those years with Jamal, good
and bad, until lately mostly bad with his
breath stinking of liquor and his
fists floating freely, I think I heard someone
say that once on Oprah. And I
wouldn’t be on this bus. Will someone please
give us a seat? I paid
for a seat. I’m going back to where it all started.
Will Mama will take me back?
I swear I’ll go to services this times.
Bobby, give your Mama some
sugar. Baby, you’re all I’ve got.
Dreams of Declamation:
an Invitation
(a screening of Night Train by Jerzy Kawalerowicz at the
National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
We chat in the ancestral tongue and await the curtains
parting on the film
in which, we will learn shortly, a character who eluded the
tentacles of
genocide, figures peripherally but critically. The series of masterworks
from the (New) Old Country, of which this film is a part,
has been curated
by an auteur known chiefly for unflinching visions of the
city. We’re keen
to see today’s offering, and how we will be changed. The light is already
dim, a transition into the study in shadow and dark soon to
unfold. We
expand into the cool of this crepuscule, vibrant with coils
of anticipation.
Suddenly a woman turns around and asks whether that’s Y
we’re speaking.
We assure her that it is indeed, granting her the stage to
launch into what
will surely follow (and does): how she was never taught Y,
how her parents
spoke X only when they wanted her not to understand, how the
sounds of Y
are familiar to her, how sometimes she almost thinks she
understands Y,
how she wishes X had been taught to her, and underlying it
all,
the unspoken refrain: how she really wishes it had all been
different
than it was and now can never be.
And then the lights darken entirely, and we are ushered onto
a train journey
dense with love impossible and ambition dashed and history
unbearable.
There are so many signs at play in this claustrophobic zone
moving, ever
moving. There is the
clang of wheels on tracks, and the trains coursing
through the proverbial tunnels. There are trees that flit
by—pines, birches,
and those that are only whirr. And there are branches of said trees
swaying against the heavens as the perpetrator is pursued by
passengers,
crushed by their zeal.
And then there is the passenger, noted above,
who remembers even more crowded trains some fifteen years or
so prior
and warrants this second mention. And I think back now to the woman
who turned to us, like untold others, in recognition
immediate but partial,
blurred really. She
who sat in the dark as sounds ricocheted around her, as
she was kept apart, made to embed in not-knowing. She who reached for
sleep, tossing and turning as partial comprehension pummeled
her dreams.
As she turns to us, this system of signs, at once a representation
of love and
a method of exclusion, hovers in ambivalence. Even more than the film,
I turn now to her, to usher her elsewhere, to say: Perhaps this won’t be
the Paradise of Knowledge envisioned as you lay rigid with
fury in your
girlbed. The going
will be staccato: the irrational gendering of the nouns,
the pesky adjectival endings, the word order. And the words themselves
thickened by a tongue that will (now) never be native. Yes, there were the
words of your parents and grandparents and of a ship journey
in steerage
and of aunts and uncles who never did flourish; yes, symbols
of not-quite-
ness, the cringe ongoing of being new and poor and still
unripe, di grine.
Yes, but also were there words of others who chronicled
dislocation, lyrics
that lead you to the time when our people formed battalions
against
bloodshed and organized against injustice pervasive in ways
wide-ranging
and unpredicatable, in rallies and picnics and lecture halls
and reading clubs.
And sang those verses at those events so that there was no
wall,
or even membrane between word and deed, song and action.
And all of this in sounds only whose outlines remain
familiar.
But also you, quietly, a place for you.
For here you are in a clearing, in late morning light,
under a hat wide-brimmed and burgundy-ribboned,
in an ivory linen sundress to which a lace collar has been
affixed.
And yes these details are crucial.
And here you are, I see you, as you touch that collar, as
you speak,
no recite, no declaim words from a small journal now
no longer forgotten, words that might have been whispered to
you
had fate willed it so,
had that constellation of family and history practices in
that home in
Great Neck, Long Island been otherwise.
Only you have chosen them now,
have found them, in your determination,
your will to be other than the woman
who happened to hear Y spoken in a gallery auditorium
but rather one who turned to establish a way station against
history’s demon of indifference.
Here is a place—an ashes-of-rose damask chaise lounge, in
fact—for you.
Here, let me remove your hat;
let me bequeath you this ticket pressed between crumbling
brown pages,
let me observe your travels from family to the cafes of the
Marais and
Union Square and Whitechapel and then back to the front
porch,
only now, your aunt and uncles (if not your parents) are
beaming with pride,
let me heed your declamations of fire,
let me weave these wild flowers through your summer morning
curls.
Love
in the Reign of Raining Rockets
As the rockets rained down over the
land,
as the bombs crashed into
buildings, kiosks, roads,
onto all that was animate and
equally onto all that was not,
as the sirens commenced their song
of terror,
as the world largely sided with the
other side,
as the neighbors scurried like
cockroaches into darkness,
(but never like sheep to the
slaughter,
as someone observed in the
descent),
as the population shifted into
horizontality when possible,
or hovered when not, as the parents
considered the care
of their children when they
themselves were underground or stranded,
someone suddenly suggested Madame
Shoshanah.
True, no one really knew from
whence she came or from what she had fled
or how she had become someone who
whispered to souls invisible to others.
And she was getting on in
years. But her person was still presentable,
with traces of refinement evident
in her dress and chignon.
As was her apartment, with quick
access to the ground below.
And when she was asked, she clapped
her hands in delight.
She was surprised to be remembered,
to be invited to contribute,
in however small a way, towards
mitigating the national crisis.
And so she became giddy in
response, to the consternation of the delegate
who was extending this offer
(request) with some reluctance.
And so the parents brought their
children to Madame, if not with ease of
mind, then at least with a
sense of having done the best that was possible.
But it turns out that she was outstanding
with children, especially the
younger ones who still knew not to
look askance upon her ways. She sang
to them songs from long ago, when
there was a unity of purpose in the
country, and also songs in
another language from a country far away,
passed on by her mother who
eluded somehow the rockets of her day and
was herself in conversations
with partners not visible to young Madame.
She played games with the children
from a time before toys were automated
and danced with them in circle
formations at once attainable and intricate.
Passersby marveled at the figure of
Madame sheperding her flock through
detritus and din
and dust to and fro shelter.
And Madame seemed to have found a
new calling.
In the deluge of rockets, in the
company of children of today,
with their urgency—Sarah needs
pee-pee, Uri lost his teddy bear—
Dafnah can’t eat nuts—she was able
to initiate new conversations.
No longer was she speaking
unrecognized to her mother in her final days,
no longer was she speaking to a
husband
who abandoned her before her son
was born,
trying to imagine reasons for that
abandonment,
trying to make herself more comely,
more appealing,
more adaptable to his ever-growing
list of demands.
Trying, trying, oh how Madame did
try.
But with her son himself, killed in
a raid of some sort—
she couldn’t take in the
details—she found she could suddenly converse.
After years of silence, she heard
the sound of his voice
as they sang together the songs of
her mother.
She remembered his touch, the
weight of him in her arms,
fatigued from a day of sand and sun
and sea. Madame Shoshanah
remembered how handsome, how sleepy
he was on the morning he left
for what was supposed to be a
routine mission. The invisible friends, to
whom she had of necessity turned,
who never condemned the longevity
of her grief, who never told her
the period of mourning was over,
smiled, waiting in the shadows of her apartment and her mind.
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