the call and response of the universe

The story of this week's reading begins with my dermatologist, an elderly Vietnamese man whose office is in a little vine covered house in my town.  I've been going to him for years and apart from the excellent treatment he provides, we often have good conversations.  We talk about the passage of time, or the necessity of living in the now. We've talked about a friend of his whose writing received international acclaim.  Once he told me he was completing a memoir and asked if I could help with proofreading or copy-editing.  Of course I said yes, but a year went by and I heard nothing more.

Then, a few weeks ago I went in for a check up and afterwards as we sat in his office I reminded him that he was going to send me his manuscript. He smiled and replied with his usual modesty, thanking me for my interest. Then we said goodbye.

I went to New York the following weekend, and when I returned I was surprised to discover that Dr Nguyen had at last sent me his book. "Thank you so much for accepting to review my manuscript," he wrote. "At your urging I was finally able to finish it and submit it to you."

Thus I began an amazing journey into the heart of an astonishing book.  It turns out Dr Nguyen's manuscript is not a memoir as such. It isn't about his life in Saigon or his passage to America. Nor does it concern his medical career.  Rather it is a survey of his spiritual journey - a journey touched by Hindu sayings,  Chinese medicine, physics and metaphysics, his knowledge of the nervous system and the Chakras, Love and a sense of awe.  He writes in detail about his daily meditations, the yin and the yang, the Bagua or the Eight Triagrams, the five elements of fire earth metal water and wood, his daily breathing techniques and how they correspond to these elements and to acupuncture points.

"One of the biggest impediments in the search to finding oneself," he writes "is the human need to be recognized, in the hope of finding acclaim, as this would give validation, confirm our existence and exalt that narrow concept of the self.  We need others as reference points to exist, but we also need to come to terms with a certain solitude if we want to find ourself."

I should mention here that for the last several years I have been going regularly to an acupuncturist as my primary care physician, and have been practicing Bikram yoga three or four times a week.  And over the past month, I've been meditating daily with Sacred Acoustics.  I have been on a kind of journey - and yes, coming to terms with a certain solitude.  So the idea that Dr Nguyen, who has been in my life for more than a decade would choose this moment to send me his manuscript rather than say, a year ago - tells me a lot about the call and response of the Universe.  It tells me that while growth and transitions are sometimes painful, if you listen, things can fall into place with astonishing synchronicity.

In talking with a friend I was recently using the analogy of a chrysalis - and how the larvae must enter a cocoon - there to transform into a butterfly. I was thinking that no matter how hard we might hold onto a chrysalis, the butterfly inside is going to develop, whether we want it to nor not.  My friend sent me a quotation from Anais Nin "Then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."  As I finished Dr Nguyen's manuscript this evening, I found myself reading the following passage:

"Qi Gong is not a temporary or occasional intellectual exercise, but a complete and permanent change of behavior and mind set.  It is the deconstruction of all our previous conditioning.  A point to stress is that I do not view the early conditioning as harmful or something to look down upon.  It comes naturally with life, as a necessity and means of survival.  It gives us our roots, our strength and our culture.  However, one needs to move on.  Deconstructing it is like the larva breaking out of the cocoon to be free and fulfill its potential.  It is about building and destroying, again and again, to be in sync with the eternal dance."

Here came a message to sustain me with my challenges.  I've noticed that messages from the Universe can often come in unexpected ways. But if we keep our hearts open, they can bless us on our journeys and through our transitions, helping us let go of even the most cherished expectations and teaching us how to trust.

visiting the tolstoys

Our Classic Book Discussion group has decided to tackle War and Peace.  I've arranged the reading schedule so that we'll have time to read over the next several months, since the books we're discussing in between will be shorter and less demanding.  I have attempted War and Peace before - but admittedly never got far, even though Anna Karenina is one of my favorite novels.   In my defense, I've heard it said that War and Peace is the kind of novel you appreciate most in middle age. So far so good because this time around I immersed myself in Part I, hardly coming up for air.

While reading, I found myself reflecting on the year I lived in Moscow. I was somehow back in that atmosphere - back in the Tolstoy houses which I had visited.

It was 1993, and my husband, a cultural attache at the American Embassy,  had been there for almost a year when I joined him, with three children in tow - including a six week old baby.  I struggled upon arrival - wondering how I'd make a life for myself beyond the American Embassy compound where we lived and the various embassy receptions.

The city beyond the compound seemed forbidding and another world entirely.  I needed to become confident enough to take myself into it and explore.  So I took more Russian lessons, got involved in charity work at a Russian Orphanage and also in a church and I made frequent tours with my baby in a Snugli, around the various historical sites.

Top on my list were several residences of Russian writers - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin.  I remember Tolstoy's house in Moscow very well.  I also went to his estate Yasnaya Polyana, which was four hours drive from Moscow.

The Tolstoy home in Moscow was large and wooden with a huge garden behind it.  It was winter when I visited, again with my baby in a Snugli, meeting my tour guide at the gate and looking out onto the garden behind the house where the Tolstoy skating rink had once been, and also onto the trees where Tolstoy used to chop wood.

 We entered the house through the breakfast room with its old cuckoo clock, its table and chairs and  mahogany chest crammed with blue and white Ghell china.  It felt as though we were trespassing in a family home, because historical houses and museums in Moscow in 1993 didn't conform to western notions  - which is to say there were no roped off areas; there was little in the home that I could not touch; nor were there any other visitors that day.

I remember standing in the bedroom where Tolstoy's favorite son had died at the age of seven - the religious icons hanging in the corners. After that loss the Tostoys were never the same, I was told. A two day illness and then their perfect child was gone.

I was told a story about how Tolstoy got his character Anna Karenina.  It was when he saw Pushkin's daughter and she had a dark hair curling at the nape of her neck.  He saw that curl and said to himself, that will be my character,

Tolstoy's study was in the back of the house.  I also saw the boots he had made when he decided he wanted to be a shoemaker.  I saw his bicycle and his woolen socks.

There was an enormous taxidermy bear on the landing of the important front staircase (or was it a wooden bear - I can't remember - anyway - a bear!) , and upstairs a lavishly decorated living room - crammed with Victorian brick a brack - plush upholstered chairs and divans, heavy brocade curtains.  Two bored looking women in grey tunics sat on wooden chairs against the wall.  That was their job.  But they brightened like school girls when they saw they had visitors and then one of them went to the mantle piece and turned on a tape recorder.

Tolstoy's voice filled the room -  deep, clear and old fashioned. He was talking to children and warning them to do their studies and not to waste time in idleness.

Several months later, I went on a day trip, traveling out beyond Tula to the Tolstoy estate Yasnaya Polyana.  I brought along my eight  year old daughter and now one year old son - out of necessity more than anything else - for it was a four hour bus ride to get there and I didn't have anyone to watch them.  I remember we broke the journey in Tula for some rock hard cake that was evidently the specialty, a confection not to be missed!

Then at last we went on to the estate. It was only on the last leg of the journey that the tour guide informed us that the house itself was closed.  We would only be permitted to walk around the grounds that afternoon.

At first I was infuriated, although most of the other tourists seemed to take this news in stride. This was Moscow after all.  But, it had been a long journey with a little girl and infant son on my lap. Once we were out of the bus, however, we couldn't help our amazement  as we walked up the sweeping drive lined with silver birch trees and lakes.

Yasnaya Polyana with my children

We saw various farm laborers working the land - and I realized they were descended from the very workers who had cultivated Tolstoy's property. These were descendants of the ones he had so admired for their closeness to the land and nature.

We  wandered round the grounds for a couple of  hours, and even went onto the veranda of the house.  At Chekhov's Moscow residence, I had seen photographs of Tolstoy and Chekhov on this very veranda having tea.  In the photograph, Chekhov was laughing at some private story he was being told by Tolstoy.  And here I was, with my children on the same veranda and nobody else was around.  We were free to wander as we wished.

my children going up to Tolstoy's veranda

We walked down the paths - down to where Tolstoy was buried in a pauper's grave - a mound covered in grass.  I took a photograph there for Jim Randall - my mentor back at Emerson College, who had a collection of young writers at the graves of their favorite authors.

One of my favorite books about Tolstoy is William L Shirer's  Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy.  It was his last book and he wrote it well into his eighties.  It details the excruciating jealousy that plagued the Tolstoy marriage. Sonya transcribed all  of Tolstoy's work for him, but their marriage was tempestuous to say the least. It had been damaged beyond repair at the outset, when on their wedding night Lev insisted she read his private diaries which detailed his sexual transgressions and pecadillos.  The poor girl, who was only nineteen at the time, never quite recovered.

That book also tells the story of Tolstoy's final days-  and Sonya's jealous rage, how he tried to escape her by running away to the train station, how she begged to see him and was not permitted - and how he died there.    So much passion and intellectual richness.  So much life lived and suffered in these incredible homes.

scorched

For your reading pleasure, my short story Scorched which first appeared in the now defunct Our Stories magazine several years ago. I wrote about loss. 

                                                                                                                 

SCORCHED

After the accident, Carla wanted a menial task in a place she’d never lived before; to be left alone and surrounded by people who didn’t expect too much of her. This is what you want when something terrible happens, Carla thought, because the accident that took Geoff away had taken everything from her, except for an odd kind of recklessness.

So when her friend Fiammetta, who worked for a small opera company in Florence, suggested a job ironing and altering costumes, nothing could stop her from taking the chance. She caught a train from Brussels Gare du Nord. There were rooms near the theatre she could use for a few months, overlooking a courtyard with a lemon tree. Schoolgirls in the courtyard below her window played hopscotch. Their voices rose up with the soothing illusion of eternity.

 As for the ironing, there was, quite literally, loads of it. There was something reassuring in a never-ending task, standing at the window pressing out the creases of other people’s lives. There was also an art to the collar and cuffs of a ruffled shirt, the band across the shoulders, the wide skirted pleats of a satin dress. 

Carla discovered another peculiar truth. Nobody bothers you when you are ironing. She could unravel and ravel up again those last moments in the car with Geoff, when the driver hit them on the Chaussee de Waterloo. Geoff in a split second change: a crunch of metal and glass, semi conscious moments in a crumpled car; paramedics shining flashlights into windows and police waving on a never-ending procession of traffic, as if there could be a destination beyond this. But there was a destination, because sure enough, here she was.

Some days she did nothing but watch Italian soap operas. The exaggerated stories took her out of herself. Afterwards, gazing down at the children in the courtyard, she found herself startled, almost appreciative.

She walked into shops on the Ponte Vecchio on her way to a wine bar. The streets had a faintly botanical smell, mingled with the aroma of garlic and coffee. People drove up on scooters and kissed the air at the side of each other’s faces.

She sat at the counter. Next to her a young man ordered a plate of cheese and sliced prosciutto.  And when she ordered the same, he turned towards her. “Where are you from?” he asked in English.

His name was Hamid, and he came from Palestine. He was in a summer art program, three weeks remaining.  She told him about her work at the opera company – how lucky she was to have such a job, and then he said he had an extra ticket to see the Boboli Gardens. “Perhaps you would like to join me.”

 His English was precise and pleasing. He had refined features and a straight narrow nose and the shaven skin of his face was the texture of fine sandpaper.

So they walked to the Medici palace and strolled in the Boboli Gardens, and sat underneath the orange blossoms between hedges. Conversation was stilted, until they walked back to the theatre. She showed him the collection of paper masks she’d found on a dusty shelf in the prop room. She tried them on, one after the other – the Marshall, the Prioress, King Ludwig and the Professor. They had tiny eyeholes and Hamid laughed freely before tucking his smile away, with what she thought of as charming and forced sobriety.

The following day at the Uffizi they stood together in front of a triptych of Adam and Eve, depicted like two spoiled courtiers, with childish, inexperienced faces.

“You see,” he said, “Their life was not perfect. It’s better to live by the sweat of your brow.”

They went to a rooftop café, with its view of the Duomo. Hamid reached for her hand, and before she could pull away she noticed the skin of his hand was very soft, nothing at all like Geoff’s. “I still cannot understand the full beauty of this town,” he continued. “It is all too squashed together. This cathedral, for example. It doesn’t have breathing room. It needs the space to breathe.”

A few days later, they took a bus to Fiesole in the shimmering heat. He wanted to see the ruins. Carla took off her shoes and felt the grass on the soles of her feet while Hamid stood by himself, looking at the view. “Here I feel more comfortable,” he said.

 “Do the hills remind you of home?”

“They remind me of the Palestine I carry in my soul.”

“In your soul?” she repeated, smiling. Then she realized he was serious.

“Many of our villages are gone forever,” he explained. “Now they exist only in memory.  So we tell the stories of our villages over and over again. And thus, Palestine, for the next generation, has become not a memory but a wish. A dream, perhaps. A story that we tell.”

They got onto politics, and his view of suicide bombers, and an experience that altered him forever: how he’d locked eyes with a suicide bomber seconds before he blew himself up. “That is how we live,” he said. “I am not a religious person.  And I don’t agree in principle, with violence. But I’ve heard it said that the suicides are cowardly. What is cowardly about dying for your beliefs?” he asked. “Only a lover would do such a thing. ‘I would die for you.’ Only a lover could utter such a phrase.”

 Carla thought of telling about Geoff. Then she changed her mind.

 “So,” he said. “How long did Adam and Eve stare at that apple before they took a bite?”  He leaned towards her, looking at her mouth.

 Her room was flooded with the odor of honeysuckle.  She felt nothing so much as gratitude, sliding across the sheets. He knelt before her, proudly as a god. It had been such a very long time. He held her ankles to one of his shoulders, pressing, pressing as she drew him further in. She shifted position, wrapping her legs around his waist. She looked at the lattice of the windows, at the vines of honeysuckle clinging and blooming at once.  Is this what you want, closing her eyes. Until, at last he fell onto the sheets, laughing, exhausted.

He pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and she watched the shadow of her naked legs against the wall. How strange the distance between chaste and chastened.  She was chastened by his fervor, doused by it.

 He sat at her table smoking a cigarette, watching her wisely. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go out for dinner.”

 The banister rail smelled of furniture polish. The particles of dust spun in shafts of golden light, streaming between the window slats. The dust of Florence felt suddenly terminal, and the scooters outside were too noisy.

They wasted time looking for a restaurant she couldn’t find. “I’m sure it was here,”  as they walked the narrow streets. “Fiammetta brought me. And it was here. I know it was.”

At last they settled for a different cafe. A man played guitar, and for reasons she couldn’t explain Carla couldn’t stop laughing. She decided she must be happy, shockingly and amazingly happy.

The following afternoon, she spent time ironing costumes and then delivered them to the theatre. Hamid went down to the courtyard where boys were filling surgical gloves with water, and exploding them against a wall. He sat on a wrought iron chair, smoking. When Carla came back with another bag of wrinkled costumes, most of the children were gone. Hamid was helping a little boy make a funnel from paper. They were pouring sand into a rubber glove. She stood at the door watching, and something slipped inside her.  The sand-filled glove was heavy, a dead hand made of dust.  They had several already, piled like sandbags at the foot of his chair.  Hamid looked up and smiled, all his features softening.  She turned. The corners of her consciousness, plastered over with harmony, seemed to be flaking, lifting up from the surface of her mind.

They sat in the courtyard with a bottle of wine, as evening came down. The courtyard was empty and they ran out of words. Hamid walked across the terrace underneath the lemon tree, and looked back to where Carla sat in the twilight with her feet up. Their gaze strung between them like a ribbon of birds. “We are a danger to each other,” he said.  “Now I have this image of you I can’t get out of my mind. I play it in my mind, over and over again.”

He must have a woman, she thought to herself, another story, something like mine, that he never tells.

On their final night, Hamid lay with Carla scooped inside him, hollow and withdrawn. When they made love she cried. “I don’t know this one,” he said, stroking away her tears. “This weepy one,” as he held her close. She turned and touched the scar on his chest, a scar like an assault, thicker and creamier than the rest of his skin.  “Barbed wire,” he told her. “Once in Tel Aviv, several years ago, there was a barbed wire fence. I was crazy then. I could have died,” he said. “They were hunting me down like an animal. But fortunately, I escaped.”

They fell asleep. Carla woke to see him, without any pants on, in the thin light ironing his shirt. “I only wanted to try it,” he said, trying to press out wrinkles. 

His buttocks had a map shaped birthmark – a darkness under the skin. He was peaceful ironing his shirt. “This is a good iron,” he said. “It is very light, but it does the job.”

            She prepared coffee, then sat on a divan with her cup, underneath the window. His skin was brown and his bones were beautiful. She looked at his birthmark, his distinguishing characteristic, realizing she could make him hers if she wanted. I know his birthmark, she’d tell his woman. If there was a woman. If she really wanted him.

They walked to the train station. A distance and withdrawal sprouted between them. “Thank you,” he said, and when he kissed her she became a stranger.  Then she returned, to iron costumes and sew a few buttons. The smell of his aftershave lingered in the sheets of her bed. The courtyard below filled with the din of children let out from school. She finished a collar, pushing with her arm angrily backwards and forwards.

She crossed the room and turned on the television intending to watch an Italian soap opera but instead it was the news.  Confused people were running from the rubble with bloody hands covering their faces. The ruins of a pizza shop loomed in the background where someone had purposely blown himself up. “In diretta da Gerusalemme,” the caption said. Live from Jerusalem.

Carla sunk to the bed. Everything plummeted. All the resolve erected inside her crumbled like sand, leaving nothing but heaviness and a huge great emptiness above it. She wrapped her arms around her belly and rocked herself, sobbing as if she’d never stop. Then from beneath the abandoned iron behind her, the stench of scorching fabric filled the room.

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