The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
desert, the one whose learning Augustine revered and said was not to be surpassed. “What Jerome is ignorant of, no man has ever known.” Actually he was neither prophet nor seer. He was simply a scholar who was as much at a loss as any of us to predict our Emma’s wild imaginings.
As patron saint of translators, Jerome was the one who got it all started, translating the stories, collecting the tales from all and sundry tongues into one coherent story, into the one true Vulgate Bible, written in the one dead tongue that no one questioned, not to mention, even spoke. Til centuries later, a monk equally penitent from a colder, more punishing climate would challenge it all again in theses nailed to a cathedral door, declaring the people’s need to know their God, to speak to him in their own tongue, to determine for themselves what they meant when they spoke about God.
And so in our unending quest to get to the bottom of the one who truly knew the answer, who after all declared himself our “alpha and omega, the beginning and end,” a grand unraveling proceeded through the centuries from the wizened old Jerome to the defiant young man Luther and now to poor hysterical Emma and the mystical incantations spreading like plague itself throughout Russia. And it didn’t end there, no, no. It would flare up throughout my lifetime in the pronouncements of the great philosopher, the aching predictions of my dear Professor and the ranting of the monster himself. Because the truth, unspeakable as it was, was that there was no ending, no beginning, and no one true truth that we could all know. (And what comfort could there possibly be in that?)
And what I remember about that afternoon was that everyone in that classroom, whether Orthodox, Lutheran or Roman, seemed to accept some part of Emma’s vision as true, that she saw what they could not—without so much as a grain of proof, simply because they needed to. They needed to believe in what we could not know. In sharp contrast to my stories, I might add, whose characters and plotlines always had more than a smidgen of truth, and whose ties to the world we know were as obvious as the light of day. Yet my tales, my “visions” of reality were subjected to the scrutiny and summary censorship accorded nothing less than a latter-day heretic.
And so Emma and her delusions were allowed to recede quite unnoticed into life in the countryside where she would bear several children, within the blinding isolation and rampant superstition of Russia’s white nights—open, empty. She did not find the eternity she had sought. But she did find drink, like others, to still her fears of that endless unknown.
“Russia is awash with holy men, surpassed only by its numbers of wanton women,” my mother used to say. “Our tsarina and her royal entourage lend their ears to the former, while our tsar and his archdukes lend their swords to the latter.”
My mother was no poet. Subtlety was never her forte. Mother never plumbed a deep inner meaning when she could pluck from within reach a sterling matter of fact. She was a willful practitioner who compromised means to a desired end. And she viewed her pact with Gillot as just that. Three more months—four at most—of private preparation for my confirmation was merely the means, the compromise, to the larger end of my de-Russification (my papers and release to study abroad) and, not coincidentally, as chaperone my mother would then be spared the dismal fate of inner exile to the Russian countryside.
Volga
Even from afar, it’s you I see. Even from afar, you who remain with me. Like a present that cannot dissipate, Like a landscape holding me in its embrace.
And had my feet never on your shores rested, I still think I would know your distances. As if each wave of all my dreams had crested on those unfathomable and lonely vistas.
Poetry is a wonderful thing. It says one, two and sometimes three things at the same time and still manages to pierce through the ambiguity to the heart of the matter. I wrote this poem, ostensibly to the Volga, the lifeblood of the Russian countryside. I barely traveled her expanses as a child but now on the cusp of leaving that childhood and my homeland behind, I wanted to claim that Russian soulfulness as my own.
The poem was for him, of course. The one who would immediately feel its dimensions. And that late afternoon just a week after his meeting with my mother, he closed the door of his garret study and clasped both my hands in his, saying, “Lou, dear Lou, you’re back, you’re back. We’re together.”
Gillot was looking a bit disheveled—hair askew, a tattered sweater—as if he had been sleeping in his clothes. He seemed slightly undone to me. Gone was the command of his pulpit and the tutorial magic I’d come to know. He paced distractedly, caged like one who would be here and there at the same time and did not know his own mind. His eyes finally met mine and rested with the look of a wincing pain.
Removing my cape, I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my pocket and said: “Pastor Gillot, Hendrik (the first time I had spoken his Christian name), I have written something here.” As he reached for his glasses I motioned to him: “No, you needn’t. Please let me speak it to you.”
I recited the lines by heart from my heart, and as he listened, the notes of my poem dropped like my own tears into his eyes. He pressed his lips to my cold hands and then let go in defeat. Composing himself he said in a steady tone: “Let’s sit down now, dear Lou, we must, and continue our lessons.”
Poetry does that. It promises life as it delivers endings. It can do no less. And so it was for us. I had arrived the year before with his summons crumpled in my hand, “We will discuss your dilemma,” and I returned that day with my own penned rendering of a much larger dilemma: the “unfathomable vistas” of our impending separation.
Acknowledging imminent endings has a way of putting all other things, all people, and all events into curious relief. Gillot’s imminent absence loomed large. I obsessed about it. It was almost palpable. Compared with this enormous reality before us, everything became very small and inert, like the dolls of my playhouse. And I felt small too, as if I had been reduced to a grain of sand in a huge hourglass whose sole function was to mark the moments toward a passage through which I would slip and beyond which time would literally stop.
There was something so stifling and joyless about those months I thought I must squeeze the heartbeat out of every moment. But where was that heartbeat? As we abandoned our tutorial pretense of my fantasy or his philosophy, the play of our relationship, which had made him at once the most divine and the most sensual of men, both teacher and lover, all but vanished. It was buried in what could now no longer be spoken.
The secret of us, if never spoken, might over time be forgotten, might become the lingering ache of some irretrievable yet undeniable loss. I worried the feeling had stopped. I worried because love, after all, like story and so much else, needs to be created, to play with what it is not, if it is to survive. Without love’s lie, its ruse, its cover, we were lost.
As everything around us became focused on the endpoint of my confirmation, I felt more vulnerable and oddly exposed as never before. Our lessons that had once been ignored were now subject to countless intrusions.
I’d hear a female voice in distressed heightened pitch from the parlor just off Gillot’s entryway as I was led up to his study. His daughters would arrive unannounced to fetch a book from their father’s study or to deliver an unexpected pot of tea. I was suffocating under the burden of palpable suspicion. My reaction was physical. I held things in, as if literally holding my breath; I began losing weight again and sank into lethargy. Mother viewed my sullen demeanor as proof of my chronic obstinate ingratitude.
Gillot responded by immersing himself more and more in detail. My part of the work completed, he would continue to refine his translation alone. We had covered the history of religion and the provocative flights of contemporary philosophers. Now we focused on the commandments, Psalms, Revelation and fashioning a program for my confirmation—no room for dream, and much worse no room for the fanciful embellishments of our unfolding story.
We sat together through those first sessions not questioning our conspicuous silence, not questioning the supplicant voice of Psalms or