The Princess and the Mattress, the Journal, and Magic
Josie Martin -- April 27, 2009
I do my best writing in bed, not because I am a princess with a magical pea under the mattress, but because it is the only place where interruptions are kept at bay. And sometimes, not often, a magic appears on the page of my journal which is also my favorite book to write.
So, I've just returned from Yom Hashoah, one of the three annual Holocaust commemoration programs this week, and that's just in Santa Barbara! There may be a thousand all around the world. In Israel on Yom Hashoah, the entire country is brought to a three minute silent standstill at noon, even rap music stations! It's a solemn occasion.
As a Holocaust survivor myself, I always have to search to find words to to express this lamentable ineffability and my growing ambivalence about these commemorations. Why is it so hot ? It's only April. I get up to check the temperature. Turn on the fan. Back to bed.
Evil. Its unfathomable inexplicability. I hum to myself Ah black Mystery of Life... Wait, wasn't that old ballad's title Sweet mystery? How nice, a time when life's incomprehensibility seemed sweet. I need the dictionary to get grounded. Is ineffability only applied to the sacred? Look up the origin of the word Holocaust? Is genocide only a 20th Century phenomena?
I reach for my bedside Oxford American.
It isn't there!
Damn. "Who moved the dictionary?"
"The cleaning lady, that's who," says my husband. But I can't get mad at her. She's from El Salvador where she left four young children whom she hasn't seen in two years.... talk about lamentable. But why did she migrate my dictionary upstairs?
Stop it This is an essay on my conflicted relationship with Holocaust rituals. Don't digress. I climb the stairs with their colorful risers from Tecate... remember to look in the garage for that box of left-over tiles that Ed wants to craft into an outdoor table. Through the French doors of the study, the blue ocean waves at me to come out and play. Resolute, I make it across the room to Webster's Unabridged. Sorry ocean, you'll have to find another playmate.
The smaller Oxford American sits next to the computer screen... ah gee, lemme read just one e-mail, just one, like maybe from the editor of "Edible Ojai" sending an acceptance for my "Ladies Who Lunch" article? It would make my day!
The Post-Its pasted around my "official" writing desk are curling off like limp wood shavings in this stupid April heat. Who left the shade up on the east window for the sun to stream in its 91 degrees? Where's Alan's phone number at the Iowa Writer's Workshop? My favorite quotation has come unstuck. It's re- pasted itself onto the photograph of my dead grandmother who committed suicide thirty-eight years before I was born. Lucky in a way, she didn't have to suffer through the Holocaust like her brothers who perished at Therezienstadt in 1943.
I offer her yet another silent promise that I will write to the Buergemeister of Dillingen in Germany to help me research the tragedy that left her six small children semi-orphaned.
Her death, the great family secret. A schonde, a dark shame cast upon hapless children who were forbidden to speak her name ever again. My father, the youngest, never knew her. She put a bullet through her head a few weeks after he was born.
Why don't I just Google the town, Dillingen where it all happened....?
NO! You are in the middle of an essay on genocide, not suicide!
And that column for the Larchmont Chronicle is due TOMORROW! I know I'm in trouble when my conscience shrieks at me in capital letters. Another promise: Later, I mean it. Ed hollers from downstairs.
"Coffee's ready, want me to bring it?"
Ah, there's my exit strategy from the siren call of e-mails, from tomorrow's deadline, from vagrant Post-Its. I practically fly downstairs back to bed to write, and fresh coffee!
"Yea, bring it. No half and half, it'll go sour in this blasted heat." The coffee arrives on a small lacquer tray with a single lavender rose in a slender old glass bottle.
"Oh good, you found the Durand bottle!"
"What do you mean the Durand bottle?"
"We bought it at Will and Ariel Durand's garage sale when we lived in Beachwood Canyon for 75 cents. You were with me."
"I can't remember stuff like that." he replies.
Stuff like that is permanently posted in my brain. I remember even more vividly how I was too timid to go up to the great historians and say, "Hi Will and Ariel, my new husband has read your entire series, all 12 volumes. It's partly why I married him....and I wish you well at the Casa Dorinda, " or some such place that their children were moving them to. That was nearly 39 years ago! We were newly wed, newly housed, everything so new, I had to buy that streaked weathered rose glass bottle just for contrast, for balance.
Thirty-nine years ago, the word Holocaust had not yet been applied to six million Jews annihilated by the Nazis. Thirty-nine years ago it simply meant "complete destruction of people by fire," The Durands didn't call it the Holocaust, perhaps not even genocide. Did they just call it "the war?" Should I check it?
Another interruption.
Stop! Do not get out of that bed. Do not look it up. You'll never come back.
Where was I? I page through my marblized composition book, re-read the first four pages of the essay. Not bad, I reach for the red pencil to do some judicious editing, bend to smell the rose...and of course, the coffee spills all over the pale ivory sheets.
"UNCLE" I cry.
That's it for today.