| CALISTHENTICS: 1950 BUCHAREST by Annie Dawid |
At dawn, the smoky gray of a Bucharest morning finds its way to the ground-level prison window no bigger than Berthold’s face. He breathes deeply, inhaling through the mouth, exhaling through the nose: ten, twenty, fifty controlled breaths serve to warm him, even when the cell is freezing. He sits on the edge of his cot, feet flat on the cold floor, shoulder bones like leaning tombstones; he clears his mind of everything but his parents' faces. This parental meditation begins each day, the days when he can rise without interference, though at first they would wake him at dawn, bring him to the interrogation room, and keep him there 24 hours. The days when he cannot summon the faces of Abraham and Rachel inevitably last longer. After meditation, he does the first of his three daily rounds of sit ups, jumping jacks, pushups and running in place. For each exercise, he summons a different image to accompany him. He begins with Freda, his closest sister, her intelligent face flashing as if in a newsreel, talking to him, though curiously the film is silent, and he can only watch as she smiles, or looks perplexed, or seems to propose and answer questions, forget things, remember them. She is like the comedian Charles Chaplin in her expressiveness, temple veins pulsing beneath the delicate skin of her forehead as if to demonstrate to others the brain power underneath. In his daily film, her age fluctuates: one minute she is a child in a schoolgirl frock and the next a Sorbonne intellectual with thick tortoise-shell glasses clutching a fat philosophy book; the next she is in the simple white gown for her marriage to Pierrot and the next she is an adolescent, the younger sister whose honor he attempted to shield but who needed no such protection, as she was a most capable girl, at the top of her class—smarter, academically, than he was, certainly, with her perfect Spanish and Italian, which she had tried and failed to teach him. He doesn't know if his prison imagination has somehow attributed to Freda characteristics which don't belong to her in "real" life, and he doesn't understand why she is silent while the other visions speak, but he enjoys her nonetheless, looking forward to her antics every morning. Next, with the jumping jacks, comes lovely Dora. All his friends wanted to date little Dora when they were in gymnasium, each one begging an entrée. Dora, the perfect image of their mother, manipulates her femininity to get whatever she wants, and she is good at it. Perfect, in fact. It is strange to him that Freda and Dora, so unlike, were the best of friends, or had been in their youth, which is the era of his Dora vision, when she rubs his shoulders with Chinese balm after his wrestling matches or cuts his hair so stylishly before his dates or selects his outfits with impeccable taste. That time of plenitude, in Czernowicz after Dresden’s financial crash, was the golden era, Berthold calls it, la belleépoque. With these daily visions to keep him sane, he wonders—he has only now, in his second year of incarceration, allowed himself to entertain this thought—if he were in love with Dora, and she with him. His other sisters he admired or had great affection for, respect and trust and brotherly attention, but with Dora, five years his junior, he at 18 and she 13, he can remember the way she brushed her growing breasts against his back when combing his hair or shaving him before the mirror, which she had begun to do when he finally allowed her, as she was deft with the razor, a perfect extension of her delicate fingers, while he was clumsy and often cut himself in his haste to go somewhere, to begin his day. Much of the Dora vision is an exchange observed in the oval looking glass, which one could tilt forward or backward. He even let her tweeze his eyebrows, once, and in her young girl's freshness and flirtation she always managed to touch certain parts of her body against him, always quickly, barely exerting pressure, and though they never spoke a word about any of it, he is convinced, only now, as a grown man with his own child, convinced she was testing herself on him, because he was safe. He was safe in a way that made his sister free to act however she pleased, to test her ripening powers of titillation, though surely, at 13 he thinks (huffing and puffing through jumping jacks) she did not consciously know how much she tempted him. Part of him had been tempted to return her gestures, but of course he never did. Perhaps his smiling in the mirror, his teasing caused her to tempt him, he using what he was coming to know as his own brand of charm— later so many girls and women would be drawn in by it—and it was with his sister that he practiced, he supposed, honing his art of playful seduction, the double entendre his best gift of all. (It is not so surprising, then, that the Communists think him a spy. If he were less soigné, less sophisticated with words, he is sure, like his cousin Hans, he would not be under suspicion, nor would he have lived the good life he had enjoyed as a Rolls Royce salesman, seller of automobiles to the king of Rumania, he, Berthold of the honeyed tongue.) Yes, he had his sister Dora to thank for the way he learned how to use what had been his finest and most dearly paid-for skill, the sweetness of his selling voice. Sometimes when he remembers the exchanges in the glass, feels the weight of her falling against his shoulders, grazing his cheeks, he begins to feel aroused, and wills himself to go limp, postponing the sexual fantasy for his vision of Charlotte, his prize vision, the one he allows himself only on certain days. He knows there is something untoward in allowing himself arousal over a memory of his sister, now a responsible mother, now the caretaker of his beloved parents; in his bleakest days, however, he wonders why it matters, and if he permits himself to think he will die in this prison—probably not soon but years from now, will it matter, then, that he was excited over the memory of Dora's almond-smelling hair falling in a curtain before his face as she leaned over to retrieve a fallen comb, dropped, deliberately perhaps, in his lap? Unlike his vision of Freda, whose mature face alternates with her childish one, his memories of Dora, though he has seen Dora much more recently and frequently than his other sisters, Dora remains in his daily visits with her at the sensual prime of budding adolescence. Why she is frozen in time that way, he doesn't understand. Indeed, he saw her the night before his internment, her face strained with fear, crying over her inability to make him flee from them all for his freedom. The police were watching the house, waiting. Ninety-nine, one hundred. Panting, he allows himself a moment to lean over, hands dangling close to his feet, pulse racing, before beginning the next set of exercises and visions. For pushups, he has to free himself from his beloveds and concentrate on a tableau, usually a landscape, something still and unchanging. Sometimes he meditates on paintings, Memling and Holbein portraits his favorite, part of a now discarded dream of becoming a collector; when he sold the Silver Cloud to the King, he could have bought that Holbein the Younger at Christie's that spring if he hadn't changed his mind at the last minute and bought Charlotte a fur instead, his orphan bride who had never been warm a day in her life till he met her, he twenty years her senior, the King's salesman and she the lowly file girl just in from the temporary agency. So he hadn't bought "Boy in the Red Hat" (though he remembered it well enough to focus on its colors for a week's worth of pushups.) Today he will think of the sea instead, the Black Sea off the eastern coast of Rumania where he and various women (though he'd never brought Charlotte, and now knows he never will) had spent weekends and holidays, broiling under the clean sun of summer skies—if he ever leaves this prison, he plans to take Charlotte to the equator, to stand on the belt of the earth and say, we have arrived. You will never be cold again. Poor Charlotte has never been as far south as the fine beaches of Mangalia, much less another continent. (Berthold thinks of his dour cousin, Hans, washed up on the shores of China in the first weeks of the war. Again Berthold replays his warning to Dora and the rest not to flee to Argentina on that swindler's boat, the Struma, which subsequently sank off the coast of Turkey, in the same warm waters which bathed Berthold and his many mistresses, now the grave of a thousand or more desperate Jews.) The smell of coconut oil always accompanies the picture of the beach, the ablutions he performed on the women's shapely arms and legs, those revealing bathing suits of the 1930s showing more and more of thigh, of plunging backs and décolletage. They were fine, those years, he thinks, sweating profusely through the last dozen pushups, which make him feel alive and strong, the fact that he, a man of 45, can daily exert himself in this fashion. But he concedes he was, in that era, a little dissolute—his mother's delicate word for what his father more openly described as wanton, though he never criticized with venom, only disappointment, for who would carry on the Solomon name if not Berthold, the only son? (It was true, cousin Hans also carried the Solomon genes and name, though at that time all thought him too unpleasant ever to marry, and his uncle David and his wife had birthed one girl after the other, though it was rumored a boy had appeared in the end.) Just as he finishes his pushups, a knock sounds and a guard enters with the breakfast tray of coffee and a hard biscuit. "Here you go, Mister Rolls Royce. I bet you never ate so good as this in your fancy London hotels, eh?" The guard winks, then departs. This fellow was not as bad as some of the others, the real Communists who are convinced Berthold sold his country's secrets to the British. No, this chap is an ordinary man doing his job, who even has some sympathy for Berthold on occasion, bringing him an extra blanket last winter during a long freezing spell, an act for which he'd been reprimanded. Although Berthold wants to finish his morning round of exercises, he knows he should drink the coffee now, for it will be as cold as the cement floor if he lets it sit until he finishes running in place. Ugh! He spits it out. Freezing. The guard laughs outside the door, and then another joins in, then another. Evidently, the others had challenged him to perform the prank—perhaps to test his loyalty. Berthold hears one of them say, "serves him right, all those years living off the fat of people like us." Berthold counts his breaths. Whenever he feels angry, or sad, or simply at the end of his reserves, he counts and counts for as long as it takes the equilibrium to return. Charlotte had taught him this, after learning it herself in the Catholic orphanage where she grew up, a way to keep the nuns from breaking her spirit, which she believed at the time was their sole intent, though later she was to reconsider their harshness in light of their own impoverished lives. In a peculiar way, Charlotte, who ostensibly has nothing in common with her Jewish Rolls Royce salesman husband, has already lived this life—the life he is now enduring in prison. Only her experience, he feels, must have been worse: wrested at three from a teenaged mother whom she no longer remembers to spend her entire childhood in a hole of an orphanage on the outskirts of Bucharest, cared for—if one can honestly use that term—by nuns who, with few exceptions, despised their charges. His dear Charlotte, with no warm memories with which to feed herself, as he can nurture himself endlessly on his, the source of his stamina. How did she survive without such sustenance? And Berthold will, he assures himself, endure, not only for the sake of his sweet bride (and the child, who must now be over a year old, though he doesn't know that for sure) but for his beloved parents, and the sisters who rely on him, though of course Dora has her husband (a Communist—a former Communist by now) and is no longer the blushing girl of his morning visions. Charlotte had nothing to shield her from the terrible loneliness. Which was why Berthold felt compelled to marry her immediately, when, in their first conversation—regarding the unsweetened coffee she’d brought him—he understood she was not a woman he could make his mistress and drive to the Black Sea for coconut oil vacations, draping pearls around her neck in payment for the pleasure, with no obligation ensuing. He chews the hard biscuit slowly, elongating each mastication, each swallow, to make the meal (if one can call it a meal) seem longer, bigger, more filling. Hours will pass until lunch, which consists of a cup of thin soup and a hunk of bread, usually hard. Fortunately his teeth remain strong. For now, at any rate. He closes his eyes and thinks of other meals he has eaten, pretending the hard biscuit is a light croissant in a Paris hotel, where, in that other life of pre-war happiness, he had spent a weekend studying German portraiture in the Louvre, Freda and Bebe by his side, during an extended family visit in that lovely city on the Seine, his sisters spouting the language as if it were their birthright, he fumbling after them in German, reminding them that his English was as good as their French, for he was accustomed to being the best at everything, and they enjoyed their advantage to the fullest, ordering in the restaurant where he treated them to a spectacular dinner, replete with mounds of foie gras (his stomach rumbled), flush from another sale, another bonus. He remembers the three of them (Dora was home in Rumania, the dutiful daughter with the aging parents) living to the hilt on his expense account that weekend in Paris, rambling along the river for hours on end, stopping for a coffee or a glass of wine in a cafe on the Ile de la Cité, Bebe always humming the tune she was practicing for the next concert. (Though he has finished his biscuit, he has not yet finished the vision, and he likes to complete one action before starting another, so he allows himself to continue this segment of memory, half real and half embellished by the brilliant sheen of nostalgia for pre-war times not only in Paris but everywhere.) He remembers the cafe where they drank a bottle of Bordeaux while eating a fresh pain de campagne and selecting the best from a tray of French cheeses. Again, his stomach growls. He isn't sure if he tortures himself with memories of food, or if, like his other memories, they sustain him, virtually feed him, keeping him from the starvation at least three other inmates succumbed to the first year—political inmates, of course. They fed the criminals nearly twice as much, he'd learned once from a guard who'd subsequently been let go. His nostrils curling with the smell of a pungent camembert, he remembers the fruity bite of the wine the waiter had recommended. In those early years, when his two sisters were students, they were unaccustomed to the luxuries of the anything-was-possible life Berthold had enjoyed since finding his calling as a salesman of the best, most beautiful, most expensive automobiles on earth. Running in place without a watch (one of the tortures of prison is never to know the time, and the tiny window affords only the slightest glimpse into a gray, nebulous sky) is the hardest part of the routine because of his feet. While Berthold has managed to keep himself more or less healthy, though he is terribly thin, having lost at least a dozen kilos since his arrival at the Communist Savoy, as he sometimes calls it, the bottoms of his feet have grown strange calluses from the bad shoes, usually too small or too big, which he must wear against the cold, without socks. Although he is young, his feet look like they belong to some ancient Eremite who has spent a lifetime barefoot, or to the Sherpa guides he has read of, climbing Himalayan peaks, who feel nothing—or is it everything?—through the rock-like hardness of their soles. Berthold begins slowly, timing himself by a systematic counting which he hopes approximates seconds: one my mother, one my father, one my sister, one my wife, one my child. On some days he'll use names instead of titles, and when he thinks of his bachelor life, "one my mistress," he'd have so many names to use he laughs, ruefully, at the thought that he would never run out. When the interrogators are shrieking at him, he'll think of all the women he wanted to know, before Charlotte, and sometimes he feels guilty, unfaithful to Charlotte—Mme. Iescu could have been her grandmother!—but he loved none of them as he loves her, and he believes she does not hold his past against him. Fifty counts facing the window, fifty facing what he thinks is the south wall, fifty facing the door, fifty facing the north wall, and then the same in reverse order. Because the running requires vigilance, because it is, for some reason, more taxing to his mind than the other exertions, he lets his memory roam, lets it drop into gullies and gutters, allows it the freedom of rain to descend where it will, over any topography, down the steep hill of Sichelstrasse, where, once upon a time in Dresden, he and his father sailed boats they had constructed together out of balsawood when he was a young boy, before the first war. His cousin, Hans, on a visit from Berlin, never wanted to play but always to read—even at five years old (was that possible?)—already a snob, an insupportable boor. The memory is transmuted to Hans as a bald man in his twenties rising from the seafoam on the shores of China, not Venus from her shell, as in the beautiful Botticelli, but like the detritus of the Titans, which Berthold suddenly recalls from early readings of Greek mythology. Hans had scorned him for liking "stories" instead of history, his only male cousin never allowing himself to become the brother Berthold wished he could be. He lets Hans in China fall away into the deep pond at the foot of Sichelstrasse, and remembers how a Gypsy family had once found its way to their steep street in Dresden, and a child—a toddler—had made its way into the suddenly deep pond after a storm and would have drowned if Berthold had not rescued him, though the child's mother had come screaming at him as if he had tried to hurt instead of save her little boy. She had ranted in her bizarre, beautiful language, the second language Berthold was to learn, Rumanian a strange and haunting tongue. In Rumania, though, the Solomons spoke German to one other at home, reserving Rumanian for the outside world. "Solomon, out!" The shout cuts through his reverie, and when Berthold stops running, he sees he is bleeding again, inside the shoe, from the corn on his left big toe. The only real paranoia Berthold harbors is a dread of infection, of gangrene and subsequent amputation, and though he is firm in his desire to live, to rise above his Communist incarcerators, secure in his knowledge that he will laugh at them, later, secretly he worries they will glean his terror of infection and let him rot to death in his dark cell. As he steps into the hall, he wills away the pain. Today he is led to the prison’s nouveau riche interrogation room, Berthold calls it, where a new, young officer questions him, offering steaming coffee in a delicate cup and saucer, and a cigarette, which Berthold accepts, although he was never much of a smoker. Part of his survival strategy is to be friendly, agreeable, to accept anything offered in the best of spirits so that they do not brand him a troublemaker (the troublemakers are the first to be carted off, never seen or heard from again except via frightful rumors). The officer is perhaps 25, too young to be in charge of an investigation which will inevitably involve a period of many years in which the prisoner was supposedly spying, years during which the officer was perhaps occupying himself sailing boats on puddles. For all Berthold's strategizing, however, he has received no special treatment, no extra food—only the "bonus" of not being sent away from here, the known hell, to an unknown one. Yet this, he knows, is indeed a blessing, one he must make sure to be grateful for each morning he awakes, allowed to live another day. In the middle of a remark about the season, the kind of pap Berthold can spin for hours, the officer asks, in exactly the same tone he uses for a discussion of sport, if Mr. Solomon, agent of the Rolls Royce enterprise, had conspired with Sebastian, Titulescu and others in the plot of 1949 to overthrow the rightful Communist government. "No Sir," says Berthold politely. "I did not participate in any such plot." "And yet," says the officer equally politely, pulling open a desk drawer and removing a document, "we have witnesses who place you on the evening in question at the Cafe Bucharesti, where seven plotters and at least three others, including yourself, had been known to congregate, planning the return of the people's government to the so-called royal family and its capitalist allies." His voice hardens, ever so slightly. Berthold finishes his warm, deliciously sweetened, milky coffee, feels the ache in his foot for a moment, and steels himself for what is to follow, a routine he can now predict almost as accurately as he could once chart the course of a sale, pinpointed to the day and hour of its result. More than once, a customer had taken nine months—the same period of gestation to create a new life—from his first visit to the showroom to his last. Berthold does not permit himself to smile at his inner commentary, because to smile will signal an admission of guilt. They have no sense of humor, these Communists, Berthold thinks as he informs his questioner of his whereabouts on the night in question, his attendance at the symphony, where he sat in his customary box, where surely many others could testify to his rapt attention to…. He stops before he says the name of the composer, and says, instead, "the fine People's Orchestra." Although the composer was a Frenchman, Fauré, and approved of, evidently, at that particular moment by the Communist director of the symphony, it was possible that Fauré was no longer in favor, was too bourgeois or ornate or guilty of some other aesthetic sin. Berthold makes his answers as bland as possible. "Are you impugning the characters of the seven men who say, in writing, that you were there, among them, plotting the takeover?" The officer's voice shrills, usually the prelude to the shouting part of the interrogation. Berthold bows his head. "I cannot impugn their motives, officer. I do not know these men. I know only that on the night you ask me about, I was at the symphony. I knew nothing of the plans to overthrow the government—the People's government—and nothing of the failed overthrow until I was brought here the following week." The officer proceeds to read him the document, which specifies Berthold Solomon by age, occupation, even by what he wore (a tailored suit from Bond Street), what he drank (Scottish whiskey), what he ate (American steak). Berthold listens attentively, and when the officer finishes, he bows again and repeats his polite rebuttal. They continue in this fashion for three hours, during which Berthold's foot throbs unmercifully, and the coffee churns in his empty stomach, and he needs to urinate but will not ask to do so—this is a punishable offense—and it is day 555 in prison.
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