69. Poverty and Survival

 

In a town like the one where Vivian grew up, next to the sea, the houses of people—like her father –who’ve seen or will see no other place all have the bleached, splintered look of wood that washed up on the beach in some earlier winter. Even the houses that’ve just been sanded and painted seem like flotsam morphed into fixtures, and that is how you can tell them from the cottages of the people who spend a few weeks out of every year in such a town.

Likewise, true country houses—like the one in the countryside near the Rhine where Adam and some people he’d never seen before or would never see again huddled, curled or flopped through a harsh, endless winter—differ from the retreats of city people. The homes of peasants never shed their tattered shawls of autumnal dust and sunsets that abrade window frames before the season’s final rain.

And in a factory town, nothing is ever excavated from the layers of soot that settle on it.

On this block, the air is that of someone—mother, the lady whose name I never knew, any of the women who stayed—or something, like a worn winter coat, that’s survived another season, somehow. Leave for a while, come back, and those same people, their coats, their houses, are still there, looking more worn and a bit heavier, but not any older than you remember.

Survival into the next season. That’s all any of us do, whether we stay on this block or leave it. Survive: It’s the operative word of the uncertain, the desperate, the deprived, the poor. Every mother thought about it—for herself and her child—whenever she gave birth on this block. Mother’s even admitted that sometimes she wasn’t sure of how or if I or she would make it. To this day, I don’t know all of how or what she did. But in spite of the beatings and deaths I experienced here, I wouldn’t say I’ve had a particularly hard life. After all, in spite of everything, I don’t recall having gone hungry.

Still, I’ve always told—and convinced—whomever I’ve met that I was poor. I wasn’t looking for sympathy; I only found myself in situations where I needed to sum up my childhood in a word. And it fit.

Perhaps nobody would agree with it, but I’ve come up with a foolproof definition of poverty. It’s when nobody can give you—and you don’t have any—advice on how to live. All they can tell you about is survival. How they survived. How you’ll survive. How others didn’t survive. They can even tell you of “good” and “bad” ways to die and what’s worth dying for: love, country, god, whatever. But nobody knows how to live, or for what. That’s why one of the few books written by a male that seemed to me in any way truthful was Angela’s Ashes. The guy who wrote it grew up poor by anybody’s definition of the word—including mine. And, by the same token, a poor little prep school boy, Holden Caulfield, is equally impoverished. Only from deprivations like his, or Frank Mc Court’s, is a man capable of speaking the truth.

68. Their Stories

For all that I’m recalling now, there’s much I never could tell, even if somebody’d want to hear it, to hear me.

Not that I know so much, or more than anybody else in this room. Certainly not more than mother. For that matter, I’m not sure that what I know, what any of us has ever known, matters now. But, like this block, it’s all anybody really knows.

The man the cops found in the basement and tagged with my former name—that man confirmed what I’d suspected ever since the cops broke down Adam’s door too late to keep him from suffocating in gas fumes. The police report, and the stories I’d heard about Adam—and, for that matter, anything anybody might’ve said about me since I left this block—confirm one of the few iron-clad truths I’ve learned: When a man from this block dies, whether here or someplace else, nobody ever really knows the whole story about his death.

Sometimes you hear outright lies—like Adam was possessed by evil spirits. Or the man they found in the basement was me. Or that my former name was that of a sexual predator, who was killed in retribution (or retaliation, depending on who’s talking) for his preying on young boys. Or that it was done by someone he didn’t pay, or who didn’t pay him.

Mrs. Littington—who declared Adam one of the tuer Christ—said that her god had avenged himself on the people who killed his representative on earth. In the time she lived on this block, she never went to church, and I never heard her mention—except for what she said about Adam—deities or anything else that existed beyond her own life. I didn’t have the courage, or whatever, to point out this self-contradiction to her. For that matter, neither she nor anyone else ever explained what was going on when Jesus—sentenced to hang on a cross for a crime that would’ve gotten him community service in other places and times—rose from the dead three days after his death. If he was God in human form, how—why—could he die? Why would he deem such an improbable act necessary to atone for the alleged sins of people.

Why—from a God whose divine will brought Adam to Bergen Belsen and this block and me into the body of a man—were there so many?

None of it made sense; none of it could be pieced together, any more than the accounts of the men who managed to escape this block, however briefly. Nor did the stories of heroism or treason in the wars they fought, or the grotesque details of dismembered corpses found in the rivers, bas, oceans, lots, garages and other places near this block that are seen by nobody who’s from here.

Men have always lied, exaggerated, distorted, omitted and embellished when telling of each other’s deaths. It’s noting new, and it’s been called journalism, biography, history (especially military history) and psychology. My one and only disappointment with the female race, so far, if that so many of us have, for so long, simply echoed what we’ve heard.

67, Memory of a Season

 

It still amazes me how little’s changed here. Sure, the only people remaining from the block as I knew it are in this room now. If you’re one of those people who believes that any neighborhood is its people, then you’d think that the place I knew ceased to exist long ago, perhaps when I left this block. You’d be right, in a way, I guess.

When I think of change, I’m not thinking about which houses have disappeared and which ones have been built, or what stores opened and closed, or what kinds of cars are parked around here. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall many of the places, at least not exactly. I’m not completely sure—except for the house where Adam lived and the one where mother and I stayed—which ones were here and which weren’t. Maybe it’s just as well: I’ve never had attachments to rooms, furnishings or architectural details. Good thing, too: When you have to move from one place to another as often as I have, sentimental attachments are the spindly heels that can break under you as you step up onto a curb.

But then there’s something else I recognized as soon as I got here. Some may call it a “feeling in the air.” It has to do with the light, which is the only thing that truly defines any place. No matter where I’ve woken, I’ve always known where I was—or, at least, where I wasn’t—by the light of the place.

The light on this block, even though it changes through seasons, cannot be mistaken for any other. The kind I recall most clearly seems to’ve begun today, or within the past few days. The sky is overcast, but the air is not completely gray: It’s been tinged by shingles and painted wood that’ve just begun to show splinters that were hidden by summer shadows. The day is also tinged with flecks of rust escaping from crumbling bricks.

In other places, they call the season with this light “autumn,” and it’s pretty. Here, it’s fall and it’s not melancholy, not sad. It just is, and everybody knows that winter—with or without snow—follows. And the gray, the white, will fill the street, the alleyways and ground between the houses like ash. When it clears away, some of the people—the women—you saw during the fall will sit on stoops, or scrape and poke little patches of ground around their houses. And sunlight will glare off pores of skin—faces, then arms and sometimes legs—newly uncovered. For what seems a brief moment, the faded paint and flaking bricks fill your eyes with echoes of colors struggling to rise from gaps of soil between slabs of concrete.

This cycle of light, my most vivid recollection, is now the only reason I could ever have to return to this block after mother’s gone. And I’m sure it’ll never change.