The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
why have you forsaken me?” and then simply died. Without an answer. He was the first great questioner of his faith and of his family and given my doubts about my own mother, I felt a kinship with this man Christ. Gillot was right. I wasn’t alone in my disbelief after all.
Gillot explained how the disciples bereft of their leader were driven in their grief to create a community of their own that would wait for their brother to be reborn and to return. That this hereafter—the belief in the resurrection—was the linchpin of faith. A wish born of our own mortality. A wish to know the future that we could not know. A wish to know that we would live in that future unfettered by pain and sickness and the losses of love. All very human, I thought.
But the reality of faith, Gillot went on, was something much more personal. Faith was now as it was back then, as our pietist faith instructed. Faith was not souls floating in a netherworld or a church, with the insurance of tithes and indulgences. “Faith is, my dear Lou, no more or no less than a hereafter of the heart.” A kind of memory, I thought, of what has passed, what happened, what died.... He said this looking distractedly out the window and his eyes seemed to well with water.
I didn’t quite connect with Gillot’s sadness at that moment. I didn’t want to. I was relieved just to know that my belief was not so far from the truth. But I found myself disturbed for reasons I couldn’t fathom to learn that there was no certain resurrection of the flesh.
The afterworld in which all wrongs were righted, all suffering redeemed ... no, that was a creation. Fiction. And like all good fictions it found acceptance in its written form—and became the lie that told a truth to so many people, including myself. A fiction we needed.
But in the end, in the end, all we had in Gillot’s gentle tentative words, as if spooning out a bitter medicine to me, was “the hereafter of the heart.” I thought of my long-dead crazy grandfather, of Evgeny who was ill, and of all the questions I could never answer. And I wondered how a father could not help a son crucified for unjust reasons and how another father generations later could take a knife to his son’s throat in the name of that original negligent father. All the suffering, all the human pain. Small wonder then that that first idea of a resurrection caught on so long ago. But no, “God is in us,” Gillot said almost inaudibly, “each and every one of us, and all we have for sure, all we were left with is the ‘hereafter of the heart.’” Even then I thought Gillot was telling me something else, something much more personal, not about God, but about us.
I was to understand those words with a loss, an eclipse of my heart, the first. That winter my father suffered a heart attack while taking the cadets through their early morning exercises in the large courtyard beside the Winter Palace. I imagined him in the full splendor of his uniform, performing his duties to the moment of death and then falling in a heap from his horse, his loyal Lipizzaner “Mir,” suddenly disoriented and loosed of the ballast of his secure weight. And then others whose names I would never know realizing what had happened rushing to hold the hand of this fine magisterial general in his final moment. “The hereafter of the heart ... ” I would whisper again and again, ever perplexed by its meaning.
With the funeral and its aftermath of family visits, I did not return to Gillot’s garret study for over a month. When I did that February afternoon, I was disconsolate. Gillot rocked me in his arms and I wailed like a keening peasant my loss that could no sooner be erased than the silence, the absence, my cries sought to fill.
As he placed another log on the hearth and stoked the fire, I watched as the birch bark peeled like the ancient scroll of an unread letter into the faint glow of the embers and finally dissolved in white ash. All the answers I would never have. I began to sob and confessed to him what I felt to be a betrayal. I had wished to tell my father of our “lessons”—but it was a wish that I could not fulfill without breaking my promise to him never again to upset my mother. It was a necessary betrayal in life, but in death, one I couldn’t bear.
Gillot cupped my hands in his, and then moving to his desk he dipped his pen in the inkwell and began to pen a note of introduction to my mother. I protested. He kissed my hand and said, “No, my dearest Lou. This is the only way. Now more than ever you must proceed with your initiation into Christ and go on with your studies. Your mother must know now that I am here to help you through your confirmation. We mustn’t forsake your father any longer. We’ll both feel redeemed in knowing that we have not betrayed your father’s trust—that he lives in the ‘hereafter of our hearts.’”
That phrase again. That damnable phrase I never understood. I couldn’t follow the direction of his words. I wanted everything to stop. I wanted to be held in his affection.
But Gillot sealed the note in wax and said with uncharacteristic assurance, as someone committed to a course: “Now, Lou, the father of your flesh is departed and it’s time for me to take up his mantle and become the father of your soul. Out there in the open.”
I could only imagine how my mother would greet Gillot’s proposition. Though as always I welcomed him as sire of my spirit, I wondered what was to become of the tender touch I’d come to depend on? And if my innocent flesh was not willing to give him up, what about him, this wiser more experienced believer? In silencing the torment in his heart, what was he doing, if not sacrificing our happiness and me?
3
An All-Too-Human Savior
I never learned to dance. I could never have mastered the steps. It wasn’t so much the rhythms that were as inscribed in my young mind’s catalogue of quadrilles, mazurkas and waltzes as the exquisite parquet pattern that glistened beneath my slippers. No, the worst was the music itself coursing my body and invading all the senses like a stealth fever that rages til it suddenly crests into a calm cold silence.
Music’s abandon—its commanding hold and release—simply scared me as if I were being thrown off a runaway horse. That harmony of body and soul whirling through the maze of the dance floor never quite whispered the ease of its flight to my feet. I was too grounded. Too confused by the noise. Too cerebrally stuck. I tripped but never the light fantastic. To my father’s dismay who was himself an unstoppable dancer.
I remember as a small child crouching beneath the piano as it hammered the frenzy of Chopin’s “Polonaise Fantasie” with all the guests transported in wonder and then, joined by deeper more soulful strings, the piano would swoon into the cradle of one of Strauss’s worn waltzes that sent them all and my father too, more frequently than not without my mother but with one of the unsuspecting ladies, careening out onto the ballroom floor. On one such evening, I squealed when ash from his cigar left precariously in an ashtray on the piano fell onto my arm. Spying me in my hideout, he pulled me out, covering my arm with kisses, and we floated out to the regal notes of a waltz. Giving in to his body’s rhythm, I could do it. I could do anything in my father’s embrace.
Imagining all the coy expectancy and dutifully joyful steps that had once graced this grand room, I stood there in the stillness, encircled by multiple gilded mirrors reflecting an infinity of absences with no true entrances or exits. I smiled to think of the dancers’ delusions of being everywhere one looked and their horror at never being able to leave. These balls, these dances could get out of hand, could last forever, far worse than my fantasies. But now all the mirth, the rogue life, and my father too had somehow found their way out of this room and moved on.
I was aware of the French silk curtains of old that no longer whispered in the breeze of imminent comings and goings but hung stiffly, drawn against buttoned-down pocket windows between the rose-veined marble columns that outlined the majestic perimeter of the room. The multitiered crystal chandelier, once illuminated like a birthday cake, hung like an exquisite ice sculpture, precariously suspended in the blue darkness of late afternoon.
Every object here stood in regal silent witness to those who had come and gone. Somehow now I was the only one left in the room—there as if awaiting a sentence. Too tall to hide under the concert grand, I moved toward the adjacent parlor