White Oleander

And suddenly I felt panic. I'd made a mistake, like when I'd played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I'd made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn't afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn't want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn't need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath. "Listen, forget it. A deal's a deal. Let's leave it at that."

 

The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, I imagined I could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. I was afraid she hadn't heard me. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress. "I'll tell Susan," she said quietly. "To leave you alone."

 

I knew I had heard her but I didn't believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true.

 

My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. "If you could go back, even partway, I would give anything," she said into my ear.

 

Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

 

32

THE YEAR my mother's new trial was held, February was bitter cold. I was living in Berlin with Paul Trout, in a fourth-story flat in the old Eastern sector, a sublet of a sublet some friends found for us. It was crumbling and coal-heated, but we could afford it most of the time. Ever since Paul's graphic novels had become the codebook of a new secret society among European art students, we'd made friends in every city. They passed us along from squat to sublet to spare couch like torches in a relay race.

 

I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.

 

I had begun turning to sculpture, an outgrowth of my time with Rena Grushenka. I'd developed an obsessive fondness for scavenged materials, for flea markets and curbside treasures and haggling in six different languages. Over time, this flotsam worked its way into my art, along with bits of German and worship of the Real and twenty-four kinds of animal scat. At the Hochschule der Kiinste, our art student friends had a professor, Oskar Schein, who liked my work. He smuggled me into classes there as sort of a shadow student, and was lobbying for my acceptance as a bona fide scholar working toward a degree, but in a perverse way, my current status suited me. I was still a foster child. The Hochschule der Kiinste was Cal Arts in German, students with funny haircuts making ugly art, but I was developing a context, as my mother would have said. My classmates knew about Paul and me, we were the wild children with all the talent, living on my waitress tips and sidewalk sales of our handmade rearview-mirror ornaments. They wished they could be us. We are the free birds, I could still hear Rena say.

 

That year, I craved suitcases. I haunted the flea market near the Tiergarten, bargaining and trading for old-fashioned suitcases — there were thousands for sale now, since unification. Leather with yellow celluloid handles. Train cases and hatboxes. In the old Eastern sector, no one had ever thrown them out, because there had been nothing to replace them with. Now they sold cheap, the Easterners were buying the latest carry-ons, uprights with wheels. Along the flea market booths of the Strasse des 17 Juni, the dealers all knew me. Handkofferfrdulein, they called me. Suitcase girl.

 

I was making altars inside them. Secret, portable museums. Displacement being the modern condition, as Oskar Schein liked to say. He kept wanting to buy one, but I couldn't sell, though Paul and I were quite obviously broke. I needed them. Instead, I made Oskar one of his own for his birthday, with Louise Brooks as Lulu, and inflation marks in denominations of hundreds of thousands, toy train tracks like veins, and a black plastic clay swamp in the bottom printed with a giant bootprint that I'd filled with clear, green-tinted gel. Through the Lucite you could see the submerged likenesses of Goethe, Schiller, and Rilke.

 

All winter long I sat on the floor in the corner of the flat with my glue and my clay, resins and solvents and paint and thread and bags of scavenged materials, my coat still on, my fingerless gloves. I could never decide whether to work with the windows open to ventilate fumes, or closed to stay warm. It depended. Sometimes my sense of futurity was stronger, sometimes my sense there was only the past.