Chapter 1

The Window

When we have gone the stone will stop singing
— W.S. Merwin

I

If a photograph is like a time capsule, a tribute that one pays in the present to the future, then what you see before you is a capsule within a capsule. Standing, as if at the balcony of a first-floor apartment, a mother, her husband, and their two daughters preside over a small gathering. The woman’s eyes are cast downward, the white of her blouse drawing a neat line to its scintillating twin, the hat of a young girl, the object of her gaze. Her husband looks ahead, at the lens, at the viewer of this photograph months or years or decades hence. Four figures, below, look on with him. Something happening to the side has caught most of the other gazes, except two: one, the other woman in white, who also stares at the young girl; and two, toward the right-hand side, a woman who appears as if she is looking beyond the gathering, perhaps trying to envision a navigable passage between the group and the train.

Yes, this is a train. This is September 16, 1938, Vienna central station. And this is a family. The man to the far right is the brother of the woman with the downcast eyes. The man to the far left is the brother of her husband, whose hand grips the top of the window frame and whose armpit forms an alcove over his daughter’s head, the kind of space-making gesture that comes naturally to a parent. They are on a journey — north, as the sign below indicates — a journey that will take them out of Austria, annexed six months earlier by the Nazis, and toward Hamburg, where they will board a boat to take them far away. Their family, those on the ground, have decided to stay. This is the last photograph they’ll take all together. The three young girls in the photo — two sisters in the window and their cousin down below — look distractedly to the side, to what is not captured. Each of them has hold of something, the one gripping the window’s edge, the others holding some object or garment close to their chests.

They are separated by space and also by time. The girl below will be lost to those above for many war-stricken years. The old gentleman beside her, the father of the dark, bowtied husband in the window, will, not long after striking this stalwart pose, at the outbreak of war, die. (Across many generations in his family a rumour will persist that his sons poisoned him — secretly, sweetly — so as to spare him from being captured.) In fact, everyone down below, save four of them, would be dead by 1945. And those four who would make it would never be the same. A thick bar, set in rigid relief against the bolted tank-like metallic siding of the train, runs horizontally along this familial division. It says, “You must be this tall to ride.” Those above are called back by the black depth behind them, into which they will soon recede. Perhaps the window will go up, and this small unit of four will sit down and set their gazes in parallel with the train’s motion. Like the Voyager spacecraft, they will soon shoot down the long track and into the future, for the future.

But this capsule is different; time goes on within it. Perhaps the man takes out four sandwiches, prepared before the long ride. The woman might pull out a pen, some paper, and an envelope, setting down a message in German that she will send to her brother, on the far right, and his wife; a message that might fore-echo, like a premonition, what she would write to them at a later date, not long after arriving in Canada. What question, asked of her dozens, if not hundreds of times, might she so urgently need to attend to?

“Why did one leave? That is an impossible question,” she would write. “Note,” she continues, “not a question which is impossible to answer, but an impossible question. We will not leave. Or, leave what? Time is not locked to place, or not always. It has been cut loose. Sometimes, in order to keep up with time, in order to stay with it, you must run after it. If from under your feet you watch the world evacuate from itself, can you rightly say you haven’t moved at all, haven’t left?”

The rule of genealogical growth is the rule of the exponent. Here, it is just the opposite. Those in the window triangulate the greater number below into a pair: two young girls, the bottleneck through which the promise of these ghosts must one day pass if it is not to evaporate for good. One of those girls, the one who grips the window and directs her gaze somewhere beyond the frame, somewhere she is about to leave for a very long time, the one on the left — her name is Eva. She is my grandmother.

#

In his essay “Berlin Childhood around 1900,” Walter Benjamin devotes a portion of his attention to the loggias that lined the inside of Berlin’s many courtyards. He writes, “Later, from the perspective of the railroad embankment, I rediscovered the courtyards. When, on sultry summer afternoons, I gazed down on them from my compartment, the summer appeared to have parted from the landscape and locked itself in those courtyards.” Before his eyes, Benjamin sees a commonplace structure, a specific geometry whose configuration allows it to capture, maintain, and breathe life into that quivering, ephemeral, airy substance that has since past — summer. This, it seems to me, is a vision of history. The historian finds herself not only in the process of selection, but also of arrangement. She does not recreate the past, but rather arrays its delicate fragments, in the echo of an echo of Stonehenge, in such a way as to trap the right light, or to make the wind that winds through it whistle. And it is this wind, and this light, this ephemeral illumination of a constellation of meaning, this substance that is not proper to the historian’s arrangement, but that could not be called forth without it, that constitutes the coming-into-being of history.

A few years ago, I travelled to Vienna to meet a distant relative of Eva’s. Toward the end of my stay, I received from her a large stack of photographs, letters, and miscellaneous documents belonging to the woman in the window — Anna Sternschuss, my great-grandmother — and her brother Max, on the far right. They had for decades been in the possession of Max’s widow, Risa, who stands just beside him.

Among these papers was the letter, quoted above, that Anna wrote to Max and his wife at some point after the moment captured by this photograph. Since my visit, I have slowly approached the task of going through these documents, translating them, and doing the constructive or reconstructive work that, it seemed to me, one’s family history demands. Vainly, I have tried not to write them into history, but rather to play with the many possible luminous arrangements of my family genealogy. In going through Anna’s documents and calling forth a life — a life that is not my own and yet is the absolute prerequisite to my own — there is no hope of reconstructing some historical truth or reality as it pertains to a family. One must look instead, as Benjamin did, for that brief bit of summer that, from time to time and in just the right spot, grazes the landscape of the present.

II

What is it that we can hope to capture, to make still, when putting a history together in this way? What does it mean to foreground patience and attention, to be like the fisherman who wants to see the fish on his line, to notice the way the light plays and cascades along its scales with every undulation of its struggle for breath, before returning it (always returning it) to the murky, impenetrable current, the only mark of its brief excursion being a small hole in its lip that will soon heal?

If we are not careful, the photograph of the Sternschuss family at the train station risks being implanted with significance. When the historian is rather like the real estate speculator, every artifact is evaluated as a plot of land, as a site with potential, upon which she can erect a definite structure of meaning. We have an idea, an existing narrative, of what 1938 was in Austria. We feel the tug of temptation, the itching desire to overlay our categories: the poor souls below are among “six million,” the lone four above, in the perfect quantitative reduction they represent, are counted among the “survivors.” The latter or those like them will be invited to synagogues and the lobbies of tree-planting funds to say prayers for the former. They or those like them will stand before the congregation as the rabbi intones, more or less, “Here is Eva Libman, née Sternschuss, and she is a survivor, though not a survivor like Ernst over there, whom we might say is in a rather different category. He was in Auschwitz.”

If we are not careful, we will say that the image of the train signifies the branching moment of survival, that if you look closely at its negative, you will see the swastika and all its entailments. This is the misstep we take when we stultify our historical arrangements; this is the error of trapping the past in the cage of its future. The challenge is to spring a leak in the dam of historical narrative, to empty it of its festering contents and to retrieve, from the bottom of its newly hollow distention, the moment as such. And yet this moment, frozen like a fly in amber by the photograph, cannot be penetrated nor accessed as it was. It is stubborn, and at best we cannot be sure of its capacity for speech. How to stop speaking to our artifacts, stop breaking the shell for the sake of the nut, and instead let them speak to and through us: that is the challenge.

“Dock kiss, 1925.” This is what’s written on the back of the photograph above. Anna sits between the legs of a man named Eugene, the same man pictured in the window of the train. His eyes are fixed on hers, perhaps on the bridge of her nose. She is so close to him that he goes cross-eyed trying to fix his gaze. Their cheekbones meet, and their mouths hover together within the space of an inch, the way that mouths that have kissed before, the one knowing the cracks and contours of the other, are wont to do. Anna looks on at something beyond the frame, or maybe at the crest of Eugene’s cheek. He embraces her with all four limbs, with the entirety of his body, like an ape, holding her shoulder with his left hand saddling her hip with his left leg. Their heads are dry, and yet the dock is covered with the watermark that footprints make on old wood. Perhaps they’ve gone in already and are being dried off by the sun, which imperfectly streaks the surface of the water behind them. Or maybe they’re waiting to warm up before taking the plunge, and Eugene will soon remove his dock shoes and step into the cool water.

They grab hold of their own shins, just beneath the knee, as if to keep this bodily arrangement — put together imperfectly but held at the joints by a desire that reveals itself in the slight tension of the fingers that grip and take hold — from coming apart, perhaps in time, perhaps only right there, on the dock that might cradle back and forth with the minor current of the lake beneath it.

Neither one of them seems keen on moving, and yet the posture of the embrace is taught and marked by the implicit knowledge that relaxation would be its undoing. Anna’s legs spill forward in a cross, out of the triangle of her lover’s lap. Physically, she must get up before he can, and for the moment her body gives no hints as to when that will be. The image tells us of the delicate tenderness of love, a bond that trembles into existence and always keeps its eye on its own extinction, lying just beyond the frame. She is summer, flowing idly like liquid through his courtyard.

Placed beside the image of the train, the two flicker like the embers of an exhausted fire being reignited by a lungful of air. In both, we see Eugene — Genek, as he was affectionately called — performing the architecture of love, ensconcing Anna (on the dock) and his daughter Ada (on the train) in an arrangement of limbs that is neither inhibitive nor unzealous. The hand that grips the window glows as the chiral image of that which grips the shin, a mark of the trusswork that bears the load of time, that allows the line of family to touch down periodically in a stabilized containment.

And yet, as we gently nudge these two moments together, it is the figure of Anna that smoulders and radiates most intensely. Ever the centripetal locus, the object of the viewer’s gaze, her eyes betray the fact that her mind wanders elsewhere. The lens and the occasion of the photograph seem not to register with her. She looks down, or beyond; her eyes track the world as it evacuates itself from beneath her feet, not only in times of war and trauma, but also in times of love, in times of summer; at all times. The world falls away like wet sand being drawn out into the rip current, the only mark of its receding force being the heels that have sunk deeper into the terrain upon which they meant only to tread.

In September 1964, Anna, sitting in her study in Montreal, will write to her sister-in-law: “The season is fading, the drudgery of work goes on. Summers here are brief and intense, and they call out their rapid descent into autumn with a single, cold day, usually in mid-August, the herald of what’s to come! It reminds me of those years in Vienna and with Genek. Everything seemed so good and bright. And they were. But the good makes one uneasy, and makes [one] feel rather like a decadent Roman jolted out of his daydream in the bathhouse by the call of a barbarian war horn … The presentiment of the bad creeps in. You sense that there will be arguments and tears right when things couldn’t be more splendid. Autumn is already in the summer! Though by no means does one sense how bad it could all become.”

III

“‘Having been there’ – both as a newcomer and a psychologist dedicated to the cause of uprooted people, I feel particularly obliged to write down my memories of the years mentioned above.” This is the first sentence of a letter entitled “A Backward Glance at the 1940ties,” which Anna sent to the rabbi of her Montreal synagogue, the Temple Emanu-El, sometime in the ’60s. Spurred, it seems, by the rabbi’s particularly edifying sermon given a few weeks earlier on the issue of the cultural integration of new immigrants, the aim of the letter is to expound on this topic from her first-hand perspective.

“During Eva and Ada’s first year of school here,” Anna writes, “they came home one day and began to perform a strange ritual, almost like a dance, which required the contortion of their arms into various sharp angles and the incantation of the phrases, ‘I’m a little teapot, I’m a little teapot. Here is my handle, and here is where the water comes out.’

“I had spent much time during our voyage to Canada worrying about the girls and their ability to integrate. But such is the sweetness of children that they assimilated more quickly than I did! – so quick, in fact, that I was completely bewildered by their little dance and didn’t know what to think!”

The letter goes on to enumerate Anna’s long journey toward what she calls cultural integration. In our family, we know this journey well: she earns her PhD in psychology; each of her daughters marries; she learns French and befriends Viktor Frankl, whose work she translates for the Université de Montréal; she and Genek buy a house in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a middle-class neighbourhood of the city; she more fully picks up English, her sixth or seventh language, and wields it confidently in many of her letters. “Although by no means immune to many of the troubles encountered by newcomers in Canada,” she adds, “I and my family were lucky to have certain educational and professional advantages, which made it a lot easier to cope with the difficulties inherent in the situation of ‘a stranger among strangers.’”

#

The file for the photograph above reads, “Grandpa and Granny, ’7?” For whom is that question mark given and underlined? To whom does this artifact pass, like a clue haunted by an imprecision, an approximation, a dot to be connected, the blank in a vast archive? Did Anna, who would die in 1982, write this to herself, hoping that in her final moments she might recall, as if by epiphany, how and where this piece of her puzzle falls into place? Or was it for Eugene, who would live another seven years, wanting more than anything in his loneliness to spend time with his grandchildren and to see the birth of his great-grandson, my brother Max?

As it turns out, the question mark was a computer error. It was the product of no one’s mind; the moment of the photograph — a fiftieth wedding anniversary party — is not a matter of uncertainty. And yet I cannot shake the question mark. It is as if, by way of a cosmological glitch, the typographical certainty by which we would normally stamp time with a date was obstructed. Maybe we retain the mark, not only here but everywhere we see an image. Maybe we refuse the imperative to find its answer and insist instead on its fundamental ambiguity, on its being and remaining a question. Perhaps the point is not to moor this or any moment in time, to scan for its place in the index of a life, but rather to let it float free, to let it emerge osmotically through the pores of the past.

How does this image shimmer, then?

The two are in the twilight of their years. Genek sits back, his lips curled over his teeth in a chuckle, his silver hair still full and combed past his ears in a controlled mane that tapers briefly like a comet, his paunch well-satisfied with years of plenty. His hands disappear from the frame, relaxed, no longer gripping. He stares off to the side, to something or likely someone beyond the frame soliciting his merriment.

Anna sits more upright; not tense, but attentive. Her hands, too, are invisible. They are covered by the odd arrangement of apples and wine on the table before them, a rectilinear still life that summons the memento mori inherent to the photograph, to any photograph. A large Magen David, painted or plated with gold, hangs from her neck, its weight accentuated by the acute ‘V’ that it coaxes from the thin chain on which it hangs. The scene, someone’s garden, is lush and verdant, dappled with a warm light that glistens smoothly on Genek’s forehead and kindles the faded red of Anna’s hair. They’ve been married fifty years, but the image resists our breathless catalogue of what they’ve ‘been through.’ We are called only to look, to be drawn toward the image’s well of gravity, steep and sudden like that of a dying star: Anna.

Her gaze is turned on us, but it is not finally so. Released from the narrative of history, which seeks the language of development and of culmination, she does not find us only now but has always already found us. It is not her gaze that has learned to look, over time and through trauma, at the stationary lens, but rather our own, which has learned to seek hers where it falls. Her eye is everywhere on time as it recedes into the past, beyond the dock, but also into the future, the young girl in the glowing hat. To meet her gaze, we need only complete the inaccessible task of leaving the lens and placing ourselves there, in the rip current of time. And this image, in beautiful colour that accelerates from a streak of blue into a blur of green, affirms this point emphatically, hauntingly. The chance meeting of the lens with Anna’s almond-brown eyes marks our perfect, circumstantial untimeliness, our view through the pipe of time and the many holes a stare can burn through it.

#

The day Anna died, May 9, 1982, was warm and bright. Sitting in her study, whose windows overlooked a calm, tree-lined street in N.D.G., she pulled from the typewriter the final page of her latest book, a sociological study of the cultural integration of Slavic Jews in Canada, and left it standing in the paper rail, the other two hundred or so sheets squared in a neat stack on the table. She rose, walked to the room’s threshold, announced to her husband down the hall that she was going out, and stepped outside for a stroll through the neighbourhood. The streets, no doubt, glittered in the sun. Great shafts of light licked at the parks, the playgrounds, the spiral staircases that snake up the façades of many Montreal apartments. The squirrels must have raced each other up each tree as she passed. I try to picture her, to place her. What was she thinking then? On what did she set her pensive gaze?

When she returned home, she set her things aside, shuffled into her study, and sank back into her chair. She closed her eyes and would never open them again.