I think artists have a strange sense of happiness. It’s always a little painful. There’s an ache to touch something untouchable, but when we do, it disrupts, shakes, the borders of what we’ve lived and where we are living, our memories and our realities. This ache is endless. It is never satisfied. And this ache does not center around finishing a manuscript, or looking for the next work that will strike us as significant. This is not about worldly achievements. I mean this ache is how the artist lives her or his life, oscillating between those worlds continually created and the uncertain futures that follow in the aftermath. Sometimes we learn how we come to live beside that aching, and not surrender to it completely. I am still learning.
When my uncle died during Aseret Yemei Teshuva, which I wrote about here, I didn’t know that those days that call for introspection and transformation would ask more of me this year than others.
I didn’t know that, days after he died, I would crouch before a fresh mound of dirt in La Feria, Texas–a small town in the Rio Grande Valley–and seek a forgiveness that could never be given. I rocked on my heels as my husband and my parents stood above me in the shade of a tree that protected us from the blaring daylight. I felt a great sense of shame I could not explain.
You saw him as much as you could while he was living, my mother said.
There’s no reason to feel shame, my father said.
There’s nothing to forgive, my mother added.
My husband crouched down beside me, and all three of them spoke to me with well-meaning assurances, but all I heard was: he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone that world that world that world your world entire is gone.
* * *
I am writing this because people I loved have died.
I am writing this because when I was young I was full of the
power of loving and now that power is dying. I do not want to die.
–Amos Oz, “My Michael”
Back when I lived in Jerusalem, there was a cheap hotel not too far from the heart of the midrahov, a pedestrian mall of cobblestone streets, where I’d stay after a fight with a girlfriend. It wasn’t too often, but often enough for the heavyset woman behind the front desk to recognize me. She’d always ask me if I had a reservation. I never did.
I never had any luggage either. I travel light, especially back then, especially in the aftermaths of those fights, which spread over several relationships and always happened at night, usually late at night, when I’d throw on enough clothes to get me out of there, gathering my journal and backpack which contained unhelpful unnecessities like coursework and books. Those university days I read and reread Amos Oz’s first novel My Michael, which was unpopular with my female mentors since critics like A.S. Byatt lauded him on having captured “the nature of women.” But I liked the protagonist, Hannah Gonen. I liked that she was difficult, that she dreamed, that the secret world she creates wins, even if it damns her reality. This is the book I had with me one particular night when I’d stormed out yet again, another woman left, for reasons I can no longer remember. What I remember is the night I spent in that hotel.
The heavyset woman was not alone; beside her an old man read a newspaper, smoking a cigarette. The old man looked up at me slowly as I approached the desk.
It’s late, he said, looking over his reading glasses.
I nodded.
You need a room?
I nodded again.
I know her, the woman said.
Anyone with you?
I shook my head.
Got anyone coming?
Enough, I know her, the woman said again.
Okay, he said, stubbing his cigarette in an ashtray. He asked for my ID card, and informed me that a remote for television would be an extra 50 NIS.
I remember my eyes started to water from the smoke. The air was caustic, with a searing stench of ammonia. The man repeated the price for the television remote. When I shook my head, he laughed, as if my refusal suggested something low in my character. He handed my back my ID, and looked at me with his head turned to the side, as if to say in the hotel’s better years, he would’ve refused me a room.
The woman chose a key from the wall behind her, and looked at the old man. He looked at her curiously, and then shrugged.
I paid up front and was given a room larger than I’d seen in that hotel. Instead of two twin beds pushed together, it had a queen. It also appeared to be a place long forgotten. The bedding hadn’t been changed in some time, smelling of other people’s sweat. The shower was a drain in the floor, without a curtain. I set my jacket on the back of an old wooden chair, walking around the large room, trying to shake the feeling that I’d just missed someone who’d been waiting for me.
* * *
The pope visited a prison in Philadelphia on that Sunday morning we left the Rio Grande Valley. We watched it on the television in a hotel. While one of my uncles had offered his house for our visit to the Valley, I declined. I didn’t feel like I deserved to stay with him and my aunt. I felt very strange and far from my family. Physical distance was not the problem. My father understood I was hurting, but told me again that I had done nothing wrong.
So why did I feel I had?
I sat on the bed watching the pope shake hands with the prisoners who say neatly in rows, unmanacled, clad in blue; by the end of the row, the men left stood up to embrace him. There had been a lot of media attention prior to the Pope visiting the Curran-Fromhold prison, since nearly 80% of the inmates were there because they could not pay bail and “have not yet been convicted of the crime with which they were charged” (Yuhas). My husband read this statistic aloud to me as I watched the Pope thank the men for the wooden chair they had carved for him. As he left the building, the media still filming, I watched as the prisoners sat calmly in their chairs, some still wiping tears from their faces. I dried my own with them. I am not Catholic. I am not Christian, and haven’t agreed with many of the papacy’s views over the years, especially on women. But at that moment I wanted for all those men a second chance; I wanted a clean slate for each other of them, to walk on the grass, breathe the air, see the sky, and help the rest of us remember all of these things are a blessing. I wanted them to come back, to come home, to make better, a more forgiving, less greedy, less belligerent world.
Such a desire overwhelmed me. Does it take a figure like the Pope to ask us what good comes from places like the prison system? Can only the Pope offer forgiveness of larger social implication? For those who were moved as I was, how long will that feeling last before surrendering to the already-in-place reality of the world? And if we surrender, does this mean we have stopped evolving, that humanity has gone as far as it can, that something better cannot come from us but must come after we are gone?
I have a cousin in prison. He got sixty years when he was eighteen for a murder he did commit, which in all candor never once interrupted my love for him. His troubled years occurred when I was in Jerusalem, as I grew fainter to him as I was no longer around to watch him grow up and become just as faint to our family. My cousin shares the name of my grandfather and my dearly departed uncle. He was that uncle’s grandson. I think of my cousin often. In his last letter I learned he wanted to convert to Islam, that he’d attempted suicide shortly after his sentencing by swallowing a bunch of pills and now his stomach wasn’t right, that it might not be quite right again. I think of him every day. I think of him every day. I don’t know why I stopped writing him so suddenly, only that as my uncle grew sicker, I felt our common world slipping away.
* * *
Back in Jerusalem, I left the room’s windows open, the noise from the street below filling the stuffy room with the raw humor of young soldiers, the smell of burnt food, a yowling catfight in a garbage bin. I opened my well-worn copy of My Michael, and read the following: “I have written somewhere in these pages: ‘There is an alchemy in things which is also the inner melody of of my life.’ I am inclined to reject this statement now because it is too high-flown…”
I was rewriting those words in my journal when there was a knock at the door. I tried to look through the door’s peephole, but it was so dirty I could only see a vague haze. There was a second knock, louder this time, and I opened it. It was the old man. He was smiling. He’d come to tidy up the room. Pushing his way inside, I watched him from the doorway, still dressed in my jeans and sweater, having not brought a change of clothes. With light, quick steps he mopped the floor, put a shower curtain through the rings on the mast, and changed the bedding, all without a word. He didn’t say a word to me until he gathered his supplies and looked me over once more.
This is our nicest room, he said.
I just stared at him.
Business has been bad, he went on, so we closed this one.
I nodded.
My wife, she wanted you to have this tonight, he added.
I nodded agin.
Sleep well, he said.
Then he slid past me. A strange feeling came over me. I went back inside and wrote: I’ve come to stay in a hotel in the very city in which I lived. And why? Because the next day, when I’d come home, I didn’t want to apologize. I didn’t want an apology either. I always said the same thing to all my exes: Forget what happened; let’s just move on. Because I knew inevitably I’d do the exact same thing again. Because I wasn’t willing to stay the night, to sleep close to someone seething with anger, with frustration. But as I reread what I’d wrote in my journal that night, I knew I didn’t want to live like that anymore. I wanted to forgive, be forgiven, and not just for that one night.
Early the next morning, I summoned the courage to thank the couple at the front desk. But when I entered the lobby and saw no one there, I lost my nerve and left. I never went back to that hotel. I knew then I wasn’t fighting with my lovers because I was unhappy with them. I was fighting because I didn’t want to live in Israel anymore. I was fighting the inevitable truth that I would one day pack up and leave. That I’d never felt at home there. I think I was looking for home in these relationships. Or a proof of absence. Even now I wonder if part of me is still there, and where I’m going to. I’m left with a strange sense of happiness of having lived there, having failed there, having found another life after. It stays with me, that aching to touch something untouchable in Jerusalem and that I never did.
That I still want to be forgiven for that truth.
* * *
In the cemetery in La Feria, my mother explained to my husband that in Judaism, it wasn’t customary to bring flowers, but rather to place a rock or blades of grass on the tombstone to show you’ve been there. I liked that my mother, rather than my father, explained this to him. It made me feel closer to her that day, my tough-as-nails mother.
It is also uncustomary in Judaism to visit graves often because one should not pray to the dead but to God. The grave itself should not become some sort of graven image or totem; it cannot replace a human life.
Do for people while they are living and not dead, my mother reminded me.
Writing these essays for The Kenyon Review have been cathartic; in email exchanges with the editors, especially editor and poet Adam Clay, I’ve discovered many things I didn’t consciously know were (still) a part of me. I’ve found solace in the compassion of other poets like Joe Pan, Darrel Alejandro Holnes and Ruben Quesada who understand that I cannot unlove my cousin for what he did or try to make sense of what happened through writing. Writing, to that end, will not offer answers. And had it not been for their support, I wouldn’t have been able to realize that this particular Aseret Yemei Teshuva would not end as Yom Kippur fell; its effects would become continuous and never-ending, a constant checking of behaviors and interactions with the world itself.
I know writing to my cousin in prison won’t bring back my uncle. Writing to him won’t take away the feelings of shame, remorse and regret because these feelings are there as a larger part of a worldly inner voice and all its contradictions and paradoxes.
The reason for why I write now has also undergone a transformation.
I write now because I am otherwise and only stranger, singular.
Writing to my cousin is the opposite of defeat.
Writing to him means I refuse to believe our bond died along with my uncle. I refuse to run away from the awkwardness that will follow in trying to explain why I haven’t written for so long, to tell him I have found love with someone who has fully embraced our family, who knows I probably will always carry that stranger in the midrahov, a wanderer in the place I once called home. That when I see him again, speak through a phone, the smudged pane of glass separating his hand from my own, I know we will be strangers at first. I know I will try to speak as if this is all normal, struggle to sort through what is right and what is too painful to speak straight from the heart. I want our meetings to lead somewhere outside the prison. Writing to him is hope adjacent, to those forgivenesses ungiven and never received.
Writing to my cousin means I can say and believe that I still have hope, that perhaps how I feel I have wronged has less to do with my own personal actions and more with being part of a society that transgresses. That I’m feeling a wrong much larger than myself, and that is perhaps a form of salvation and what will evolve us as a whole. Writing to my cousin means, as Oz’s Hannah says, “I do not want to die.”
When I say I do not want to die, I’m saying: stranger, I am you.