American Windows
D.J. Huppatz
D.J. Huppatz
Untitled image, by Chris Briggs, digital photograph, 2022 (image courtesy of Unsplash)
Annika wanted to say goodbye to the Bean. Gloved hands clasped, we circled the great silver sculpture and laughed at ourselves into its mirrored surface, stretching and shrinking across the Chicago skyline.
“I’ll miss this giant jumping bean,” she said.
“It doesn’t jump,” I said. “See the two edges on the ground? They’re pseudopodia, ‘false feet’ that grip the ground and propel the cytoplasm forward.”
She laughed.
“Are you trying to tell me this is actually a one-hundred-ton amoeba?”
“I swear it used to be over there,” I pointed to the far side of the Plaza.
“Let’s race it,” she said as she pulled me onto the footbridge and into the Art Institute.
There’s a silence, like that of cathedrals and cemeteries, that shrouds art galleries. I’d never thought about it before, but the way Annika —maybe because she’s European — danced from painting to painting, enthusing about a jazzy pop-collage with her hands and hips, made me think about that reverent silence.
“Colors hit your eyes!” she’d say, “Absorb you before you can respond.”
She’d pivot, pause, and point.
“See? Only later do you realize that the street-sign, pear, and pipe are having a conversation!”
Tourists would stop and listen.
But yesterday she was subdued. She paused on the grand staircase to contemplate a marble bust on the landing before descending into a roomful of old paintings that we’d somehow missed previously. She stopped in front of a painting in a thick gold frame, hands in her back pockets, eyes circling.
“Apple-picking. What’s more American? Look at him. On his toes. Stretching towards the reddest apple on the highest branch.”
“Forever out of reach,” I added.
We’d explored these galleries a dozen times over the past six months but every time we’d finish up suspended in the luminous blue of Marc Chagall’s American Windows.
******
GREAT UNCLE PISSAREVSKY
In Vitebsk, a city of onion-domed churches and wooden synagogues, a wide-eyed, curly-haired boy and his mother sat at the table of Great Uncle Pissarevsky, a man — according to the boy’s father — “who read newspapers.” His mother, who’d heard that artists were drunks who went mad and died of consumption, had come to ask Great Uncle Pissarevsky’s advice. The old man looked at Móyshe.
The boy is a luftmensh.
He looked at the mother — stout, anxious, proud — and sighed.
“To lift himself from the depths, the worshipper cannot rely on prayer alone. Doesn’t the colorful mosaic on the temple floor elevate his soul? Don’t the carved ark and the painted windows express all the world’s joys and sorrows to him?”
Móyshe’s mother, who had never understood Great Uncle Pissarevsky, nonetheless took this as a positive response and promptly enrolled her boy in the local art school.
THE OLD WOMEN OF THE SHTETEL
“It looks as though he puts rouge on his cheeks.”
“What sort of husband will he make?”
“If only the boy was like his father. Hauling herring barrels is honest work.”
“He looks like a sad-eyed donkey. Who would allow their daughter to marry him?”
“I heard he asked Rosenfeld.”
“Berta Rosenfeld? The jeweler’s daughter?”
“Her father will never allow it.”
“Ah! She too, is a luftmensh.”
ALL EUROPE IS ACTING
I, Móyshe Shagal, have the impression that we are still wandering on the surface of matter, afraid to dive deep into the entropy below, afraid to shatter the crust beneath our feet and turn the world upside down.
Vitebsk, I am forsaking you. You can keep your herrings!
******
Ice crystals tumble from cloud to ground, zigzagging such that, with our poor mammalian eyesight, we only recognize them when they clump into flakes. Annika and I watch them expand and contract in the world outside my apartment window.
“You don’t have to go.”
Her silence is mine.
How the crystals form is curious. They begin as a perfectly symmetrical, hexagonal plate. Branches sprout from each of the six corners, but, as the plate tumbles through the clouds, each branch grows uniquely and the crystal loses its symmetry. No one knows why they stick together in flakes.
“Can’t you…”
I don’t finish the sentence. We stare out the window at the snowflakes dancing in gusts.
Though trained as a child to weep in private, water wells in my eyes until a drop forms on my right eyelid and rolls onto my cheek.
With a finger, she lifts it from my cheek and puts it to her lips.
“You taste salty,” she says, smiling.
I hold her tight. I imagine her shoulder blades are about to sprout wings.
******
BELLA IN PARIS
Immersed at last among artists living in the present, Móyshe Shagal from Pokrovska Street in faraway Vitebsk became Marc Chagall and Berta Rosenfeld became Bella Chagall.
My face, said Marc, is twisted upside-down with joy! It’s green because the rug is green and the tall, cracked mirror is green and the furniture reflected in the mirror is green as if grass were growing all over the house. Even the underground station is alive, Bella added, its walls melt like lava, its lamp-stalks sprout up like lilies!
Yes, said Marc, yes! Come Bella, put on these golden wings and we’ll return to Vitebsk.
Look below, the little houses are wrapped in snow as if they have on thick winter blankets. They’re so low it’s no wonder all the old people of Vitebsk are doubled over! How can anyone grow tall in such little houses? See how the snow’s blown onto the windows and filled all the cracks? That’s why the town is deaf. Only chimney smoke roams freely over the rooves like a drunken goy.
It’s Sabbath and sharp onion smells fill the house. Uncle Neuch is playing his violin like a shoemaker.
“Where are you Móyshka?” Father says. “Why are you always gaping around in all directions?”
Let’s keep flying, Bella, over the herring warehouses and into the mountains where we can found our own kingdom and we’ll drink our tea from a shiny brass samovar, not like those tarnished old samovars in the little houses of Vitebsk.
Bella smiled as she tapped her wooden spoon on edge of the cast-iron cooking pot.
“Herring head for our soup tonight, Marc. We must save the tail for tomorrow.”
Marc returned her smile.
“At least fewer lice visit us here than in Vitebsk.”
******
The first time we spoke, Annika was enveloped in the American Windows, three huge panels of stained glass that fill the surrounding space with blueness. Brushed and washed, its blues range from milky, mystic streaks to an inky indigo as deep as depression. A yellow sun dilates in one corner. A dusky pink bird flaps in the center. It can’t believe the effort it takes to fly! In the far panel, a man tumbles upside-down through the blue, arms outstretched over the jagged angles of a city skyline. It’s mesmerizing, but I was entranced by her dark eyes flickering across the panels then focused intensely when writing in her notebook.
I don’t know why I asked her a question.
She didn’t react and I thought that she’d not heard me. Then, with only a sideways glance, she replied. From her rolling “r” and long “e” sounds, I assumed she was Russian.
“Chagall described his stained-glass windows as ‘a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.’”
She turned to face me. Her pale face was a perfect oval punctuated by dark eyes. Her hair was tied back loosely. She wore a white knitted jumper, brown boots over blue jeans — an altogether ordinary appearance yet she seemed inexplicably vivid.
“Glass is hard, like a jewel,” she added. “But look at how thin Chagall’s partition is, how easily light penetrates it.”
She approached the middle window as she spoke and I followed her finger to a tree sprouting a human head, its leaves veined with thin lines.
“See how delicate his grisaille is?”
“His gris-what?”
“Grisaille. Grey lines. On uncolored glass. Developed in twelfth-century France.”
I scrambled for a foothold.
“Designed as stories for peasants who couldn’t read?”
“Right. But Chagall was modern, of course.”
“Sure. But prophetic too.”
She looked at me quizzically.
I had something.
“Because no one reads these days.”
She smiled, then returned to the Windows.
“It’s still very religious though,” I said, pointing at the angel trumpeting in yellow.
“Nietzsche had already declared God dead. This is the 20th century already.”
“If God is dead, doesn’t that leave Chagall’s angels rather exposed?” I asked.
She smiled again.
“Maybe they are spirits who watch over us? Or ghosts who whisper advice in our ears?”
“But without a clearly defined directive from above?”
“No. But they have skills. Singing. Counselling. Adoration.”
“Isn’t it a bit hard to make a living in adoration these days?”
“Perhaps journalism?”
Something came over me.
“Do you want to go get a coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” she replied.
“Oh,” I said.
“I will drink tea. First, we must see Chagall’s paintings.”
She closed her notebook and I followed her through the galleries.
******
ABSTRACT REALISM ARRIVES IN VITEBSK
A hunch-backed green-faced old man drives a donkey cart above the little village. He alights on a rooftop, descends the chimney, and drinks tea from his samovar as he whittles a wooden rattle.
“Why is the old Jew green and the horse flying through the sky? Why?”
The questions from the Central Committee of Revolutionary Culture in Moscow grew ever more demanding. Professor Chagall, who, only the week before had half the children in the village helping him paint a mural in the square, reluctantly resigned.
Come Bella, we must wander again.
COMMUNIQUE FROM MUNICH
Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels described a series of paintings in which green, purple, and red Jews shoot out of the earth, fiddle on dissonant violins and fly through the air.
Such art, he said, represents an assault on Western civilization.
BELLA WRITES
It alights but doesn’t fold its wings. How wonderful it once was, the dream of gliding above the earth, seeing the world anew in the first mechanical flying machine. Now the sky is filled with a million flying things that spit fire to incinerate all the little houses of Europe.
Only his futile smile consoles me.
******
We left the Art Institute, crossed Michigan Avenue, and wandered a few blocks, stopping at a quiet café where a young woman spoke to her mother in an Eastern European language.
I looked at Annika.
“Polish,” she said.
“And you’re Russian, right?”
“Ukrainian,” she corrected. “But when I was born, Kyiv was part of the Soviet Union.”
The young woman set down a teacup in front of Annika, a coffee mug in front of me.
“So why Chagall?”
“His life and work intersect with the birth of modern art in Paris, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust. But my PhD — don’t worry, I won’t bore you — is about his angels.”
Over another tea, Annika asked about buffalos and prairie dogs, about which I had to admit, I know nothing. I recalled instead a childhood on pancake-flat farms and milk-carton cows. Then she told me more about Chagall, Jewish symbols, and angels. I was feeling out of my depth when I had an inspiration, a memory from a school field trip.
“Let’s go and see a store.”
“Now you’re going to take me shopping?” she frowned.
“It’s amazing, trust me, you’ll like it.”
I knew it was close by. Now a Target, it was formerly — I surreptitiously checked my phone — the Carson Pirie Scott department store, designed by architect Louis Sullivan. Wrapped around a corner, the store rises some twelve stories, but its two lower floors have large windows framed by deep green ornamental cast-iron.
“After the 1893 World's Fair,” I said as we crossed the street, “Chicago was crazy for classicism. Imagine then, the reaction, when Louis Sullivan created this.”
We stood in the entrance and lost ourselves in the interlaced foliage: stem-whorls and leaf-scrolls, ceaselessly turning ivy and mistletoe, oxidized into boundless ambiguity.
“Floral. To attract lady shoppers?” she smiled.
“OK, sure,” I hesitated, then went on. “But don’t you think that Sullivan gave the city a gift? A forest, dappled with sunlight!”
Annika turned to consider the street opposite: a sharp-angled row of skyscrapers, their blank windows embedded in concrete.
“Yes. Excuse my cynicism. Perhaps there’s art outside galleries.”
“That’s where the best art is! Have you tried deep dish pizza yet?”
“I’ve managed to avoid it so far.”
“C’mon, you’ll love it. It’s a real Chicago experience.”
We sat at a sports bar, all baseball caps and beer, where I showed her how to lift the slices slowly so as to stretch the cheese and let it hang at breaking point for the longest possible time. We spoke with the easy spontaneity of two people without the chance to curate themselves in the usual way.
Her mind seemed to be constantly processing everything around her. As she spoke, she looked out the window, as if reaching for something beyond this little Chicago bar, then she’d look directly into my eyes, penetrating deep within, absorbing me with inky irises.
From that night on, we were rarely apart.
******
JACOB ENCOUNTERS AN ANGEL
Jacob is on the run. Behind him, the father-in-law he has just robbed; ahead, the brother he tricked long ago. It’s night and he’s running through a dense forest when he encounters another being — apparently a man — with whom he wrestles. Neither gives way and they battle through the night. At dawn, Jacob limps away from the fight.
Only then, in the light, does he realize that his adversary is an angel.
******
It must have been a week or so later when we returned to the Polish café for breakfast. We’d slept late and I was floating high above the Loop in the mid-morning snow. Annika opened a book and turned the pages towards me.
“Here, you see. A room made for love. Chagall was a luftmensch. An air person.”
“Head in the clouds?”
“Right.”
She turned a page so I could see another Chagall painting: two lovers embracing on a snow-covered street. Overhead, as if suspended from a nonexistent ceiling, was a large, bright lamp and, in one corner, an angel. The angel seemed oblivious to the lovers, and the angel and the lovers in turn seemed oblivious to the villagers milling in the bottom corner.
“Tell me more about the angels,” I asked.
“They’re always small. I think for Chagall, they’re not as important as humans,” she replied.
“But I’ve a more interesting idea.”
“Oh?”
“One rabbi says that angels are created not by God, but by humans. Every mitzvah that a person does is a concentrated sacred act that contains the essential component of an angel.”
She will be a wonderful professor.
“So, we humans can create angels from below, that we might send up into the sky?”
“Yes. I’d like to think that’s what Chagall’s doing, creating angels.”
She thought for a few moments before she continued.
“But that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because they exist in a form that humans can’t see.”
“What about in all those paintings of Jacob and the Angel? What was he wrestling?”
“Aha, true. Ordinary humans can’t see them.”
I smiled and thought about the future sprouting in our shared silence.
She was salting her eggs when Annika casually mentioned her fiancé.
“Next year, he’ll take over his father’s auction house in Berlin. His family owns several lithographs by Chagall,” and she trailed off when she noticed me staring out the window at someone shoveling the sidewalk, scraping at its cragged, frosty snow.
“Remainders,” I said at last. “Angels are all that’s left.”
We finished our food in silence. I still couldn’t face her as I wrapped myself in my coat and scarf.
She touched my arm as we stepped outside, gave me a sad smile and pointed up.
“The sky’s still blue for us.”
******
OCTOBER 8, 1941
A tall Jew, his face buried under hair, stands in the doorway of the little house like an exhausted messenger from afar. Black beard all tangled, forelocks reach down from under his cap and fall into his beard. His eyebrows, bristling and thick, overhang his deep, sunken eyes like a gabled roof. The rebbe murmurs a single word.
Again.
The old man’s brow is knitted as his head starts to sway and he begins to hum. Eyes close. All chant in one breath. Voice after voice, the melody swells. With closed eyes they sway and chant. They bang the table, as if trying to make the table itself sing, they sway as if to wrench themselves free from the earth. Some cry out in fear or sink into lamentation, still others weep. Hands stretched upwards; they implore the ceiling to open. At any moment the walls will crumble, a great hole will appear in the ceiling and Elijah the Prophet will fly down and rescue them.
The lamentation stops. The table is pushed to one side, the chairs kicked away. The tablecloth slips. Plates of cake, cutlery, and glasses crash to the floor. The walls themselves are swaying. The men begin to leap, stamp, turn the flaps of their coats, then form a dance circle. Shoulder to shoulder, hands interlocked, each one hangs on the other. They dare not let go.
******
Late sunshine seeps through the curtains, outlines her shoulder blades, then melts into the shadow of her curves. We’d spent six months swimming in our blue-tinted world — breakfast at the Polish café, circling the Bean, the Art Institute, a detour through Sullivan’s forest — and here in my apartment, lying together watching the snow stipple the landscape outside.
Now it’s spring, the cruelest season.
Outside, the rain has forgotten to stop. The windowpanes are lashed and splattered.
Glistening raindrops roll down in little tears.
******
LOVERS IN LILAC
Is a mind simultaneously capable of encompassing lovers embracing in the sky and lovers enveloped in a perfumed bed of lilac? Cemeteries below us, little houses blanketed in snow, your breath warm on my face. Up here, our spirits are dancing under the eaves of heaven, our stars shine like crystal chandeliers. Listen. It’s the whip-crack of the earthy green-faced old man on his sleigh. The horse’s black fat rump glistens like it’s been polished with wax. It steams, shakes its mane, and gallops over the little houses. Can’t you smell the onions that fill the house? Can’t you hear the hunchbacked fiddler? Come Bella, put on these golden wings and let’s make this starry night a room for us alone.
“I’ll miss this giant jumping bean,” she said.
“It doesn’t jump,” I said. “See the two edges on the ground? They’re pseudopodia, ‘false feet’ that grip the ground and propel the cytoplasm forward.”
She laughed.
“Are you trying to tell me this is actually a one-hundred-ton amoeba?”
“I swear it used to be over there,” I pointed to the far side of the Plaza.
“Let’s race it,” she said as she pulled me onto the footbridge and into the Art Institute.
There’s a silence, like that of cathedrals and cemeteries, that shrouds art galleries. I’d never thought about it before, but the way Annika —maybe because she’s European — danced from painting to painting, enthusing about a jazzy pop-collage with her hands and hips, made me think about that reverent silence.
“Colors hit your eyes!” she’d say, “Absorb you before you can respond.”
She’d pivot, pause, and point.
“See? Only later do you realize that the street-sign, pear, and pipe are having a conversation!”
Tourists would stop and listen.
But yesterday she was subdued. She paused on the grand staircase to contemplate a marble bust on the landing before descending into a roomful of old paintings that we’d somehow missed previously. She stopped in front of a painting in a thick gold frame, hands in her back pockets, eyes circling.
“Apple-picking. What’s more American? Look at him. On his toes. Stretching towards the reddest apple on the highest branch.”
“Forever out of reach,” I added.
We’d explored these galleries a dozen times over the past six months but every time we’d finish up suspended in the luminous blue of Marc Chagall’s American Windows.
******
GREAT UNCLE PISSAREVSKY
In Vitebsk, a city of onion-domed churches and wooden synagogues, a wide-eyed, curly-haired boy and his mother sat at the table of Great Uncle Pissarevsky, a man — according to the boy’s father — “who read newspapers.” His mother, who’d heard that artists were drunks who went mad and died of consumption, had come to ask Great Uncle Pissarevsky’s advice. The old man looked at Móyshe.
The boy is a luftmensh.
He looked at the mother — stout, anxious, proud — and sighed.
“To lift himself from the depths, the worshipper cannot rely on prayer alone. Doesn’t the colorful mosaic on the temple floor elevate his soul? Don’t the carved ark and the painted windows express all the world’s joys and sorrows to him?”
Móyshe’s mother, who had never understood Great Uncle Pissarevsky, nonetheless took this as a positive response and promptly enrolled her boy in the local art school.
THE OLD WOMEN OF THE SHTETEL
“It looks as though he puts rouge on his cheeks.”
“What sort of husband will he make?”
“If only the boy was like his father. Hauling herring barrels is honest work.”
“He looks like a sad-eyed donkey. Who would allow their daughter to marry him?”
“I heard he asked Rosenfeld.”
“Berta Rosenfeld? The jeweler’s daughter?”
“Her father will never allow it.”
“Ah! She too, is a luftmensh.”
ALL EUROPE IS ACTING
I, Móyshe Shagal, have the impression that we are still wandering on the surface of matter, afraid to dive deep into the entropy below, afraid to shatter the crust beneath our feet and turn the world upside down.
Vitebsk, I am forsaking you. You can keep your herrings!
******
Ice crystals tumble from cloud to ground, zigzagging such that, with our poor mammalian eyesight, we only recognize them when they clump into flakes. Annika and I watch them expand and contract in the world outside my apartment window.
“You don’t have to go.”
Her silence is mine.
How the crystals form is curious. They begin as a perfectly symmetrical, hexagonal plate. Branches sprout from each of the six corners, but, as the plate tumbles through the clouds, each branch grows uniquely and the crystal loses its symmetry. No one knows why they stick together in flakes.
“Can’t you…”
I don’t finish the sentence. We stare out the window at the snowflakes dancing in gusts.
Though trained as a child to weep in private, water wells in my eyes until a drop forms on my right eyelid and rolls onto my cheek.
With a finger, she lifts it from my cheek and puts it to her lips.
“You taste salty,” she says, smiling.
I hold her tight. I imagine her shoulder blades are about to sprout wings.
******
BELLA IN PARIS
Immersed at last among artists living in the present, Móyshe Shagal from Pokrovska Street in faraway Vitebsk became Marc Chagall and Berta Rosenfeld became Bella Chagall.
My face, said Marc, is twisted upside-down with joy! It’s green because the rug is green and the tall, cracked mirror is green and the furniture reflected in the mirror is green as if grass were growing all over the house. Even the underground station is alive, Bella added, its walls melt like lava, its lamp-stalks sprout up like lilies!
Yes, said Marc, yes! Come Bella, put on these golden wings and we’ll return to Vitebsk.
Look below, the little houses are wrapped in snow as if they have on thick winter blankets. They’re so low it’s no wonder all the old people of Vitebsk are doubled over! How can anyone grow tall in such little houses? See how the snow’s blown onto the windows and filled all the cracks? That’s why the town is deaf. Only chimney smoke roams freely over the rooves like a drunken goy.
It’s Sabbath and sharp onion smells fill the house. Uncle Neuch is playing his violin like a shoemaker.
“Where are you Móyshka?” Father says. “Why are you always gaping around in all directions?”
Let’s keep flying, Bella, over the herring warehouses and into the mountains where we can found our own kingdom and we’ll drink our tea from a shiny brass samovar, not like those tarnished old samovars in the little houses of Vitebsk.
Bella smiled as she tapped her wooden spoon on edge of the cast-iron cooking pot.
“Herring head for our soup tonight, Marc. We must save the tail for tomorrow.”
Marc returned her smile.
“At least fewer lice visit us here than in Vitebsk.”
******
The first time we spoke, Annika was enveloped in the American Windows, three huge panels of stained glass that fill the surrounding space with blueness. Brushed and washed, its blues range from milky, mystic streaks to an inky indigo as deep as depression. A yellow sun dilates in one corner. A dusky pink bird flaps in the center. It can’t believe the effort it takes to fly! In the far panel, a man tumbles upside-down through the blue, arms outstretched over the jagged angles of a city skyline. It’s mesmerizing, but I was entranced by her dark eyes flickering across the panels then focused intensely when writing in her notebook.
I don’t know why I asked her a question.
She didn’t react and I thought that she’d not heard me. Then, with only a sideways glance, she replied. From her rolling “r” and long “e” sounds, I assumed she was Russian.
“Chagall described his stained-glass windows as ‘a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.’”
She turned to face me. Her pale face was a perfect oval punctuated by dark eyes. Her hair was tied back loosely. She wore a white knitted jumper, brown boots over blue jeans — an altogether ordinary appearance yet she seemed inexplicably vivid.
“Glass is hard, like a jewel,” she added. “But look at how thin Chagall’s partition is, how easily light penetrates it.”
She approached the middle window as she spoke and I followed her finger to a tree sprouting a human head, its leaves veined with thin lines.
“See how delicate his grisaille is?”
“His gris-what?”
“Grisaille. Grey lines. On uncolored glass. Developed in twelfth-century France.”
I scrambled for a foothold.
“Designed as stories for peasants who couldn’t read?”
“Right. But Chagall was modern, of course.”
“Sure. But prophetic too.”
She looked at me quizzically.
I had something.
“Because no one reads these days.”
She smiled, then returned to the Windows.
“It’s still very religious though,” I said, pointing at the angel trumpeting in yellow.
“Nietzsche had already declared God dead. This is the 20th century already.”
“If God is dead, doesn’t that leave Chagall’s angels rather exposed?” I asked.
She smiled again.
“Maybe they are spirits who watch over us? Or ghosts who whisper advice in our ears?”
“But without a clearly defined directive from above?”
“No. But they have skills. Singing. Counselling. Adoration.”
“Isn’t it a bit hard to make a living in adoration these days?”
“Perhaps journalism?”
Something came over me.
“Do you want to go get a coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” she replied.
“Oh,” I said.
“I will drink tea. First, we must see Chagall’s paintings.”
She closed her notebook and I followed her through the galleries.
******
ABSTRACT REALISM ARRIVES IN VITEBSK
A hunch-backed green-faced old man drives a donkey cart above the little village. He alights on a rooftop, descends the chimney, and drinks tea from his samovar as he whittles a wooden rattle.
“Why is the old Jew green and the horse flying through the sky? Why?”
The questions from the Central Committee of Revolutionary Culture in Moscow grew ever more demanding. Professor Chagall, who, only the week before had half the children in the village helping him paint a mural in the square, reluctantly resigned.
Come Bella, we must wander again.
COMMUNIQUE FROM MUNICH
Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels described a series of paintings in which green, purple, and red Jews shoot out of the earth, fiddle on dissonant violins and fly through the air.
Such art, he said, represents an assault on Western civilization.
BELLA WRITES
It alights but doesn’t fold its wings. How wonderful it once was, the dream of gliding above the earth, seeing the world anew in the first mechanical flying machine. Now the sky is filled with a million flying things that spit fire to incinerate all the little houses of Europe.
Only his futile smile consoles me.
******
We left the Art Institute, crossed Michigan Avenue, and wandered a few blocks, stopping at a quiet café where a young woman spoke to her mother in an Eastern European language.
I looked at Annika.
“Polish,” she said.
“And you’re Russian, right?”
“Ukrainian,” she corrected. “But when I was born, Kyiv was part of the Soviet Union.”
The young woman set down a teacup in front of Annika, a coffee mug in front of me.
“So why Chagall?”
“His life and work intersect with the birth of modern art in Paris, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust. But my PhD — don’t worry, I won’t bore you — is about his angels.”
Over another tea, Annika asked about buffalos and prairie dogs, about which I had to admit, I know nothing. I recalled instead a childhood on pancake-flat farms and milk-carton cows. Then she told me more about Chagall, Jewish symbols, and angels. I was feeling out of my depth when I had an inspiration, a memory from a school field trip.
“Let’s go and see a store.”
“Now you’re going to take me shopping?” she frowned.
“It’s amazing, trust me, you’ll like it.”
I knew it was close by. Now a Target, it was formerly — I surreptitiously checked my phone — the Carson Pirie Scott department store, designed by architect Louis Sullivan. Wrapped around a corner, the store rises some twelve stories, but its two lower floors have large windows framed by deep green ornamental cast-iron.
“After the 1893 World's Fair,” I said as we crossed the street, “Chicago was crazy for classicism. Imagine then, the reaction, when Louis Sullivan created this.”
We stood in the entrance and lost ourselves in the interlaced foliage: stem-whorls and leaf-scrolls, ceaselessly turning ivy and mistletoe, oxidized into boundless ambiguity.
“Floral. To attract lady shoppers?” she smiled.
“OK, sure,” I hesitated, then went on. “But don’t you think that Sullivan gave the city a gift? A forest, dappled with sunlight!”
Annika turned to consider the street opposite: a sharp-angled row of skyscrapers, their blank windows embedded in concrete.
“Yes. Excuse my cynicism. Perhaps there’s art outside galleries.”
“That’s where the best art is! Have you tried deep dish pizza yet?”
“I’ve managed to avoid it so far.”
“C’mon, you’ll love it. It’s a real Chicago experience.”
We sat at a sports bar, all baseball caps and beer, where I showed her how to lift the slices slowly so as to stretch the cheese and let it hang at breaking point for the longest possible time. We spoke with the easy spontaneity of two people without the chance to curate themselves in the usual way.
Her mind seemed to be constantly processing everything around her. As she spoke, she looked out the window, as if reaching for something beyond this little Chicago bar, then she’d look directly into my eyes, penetrating deep within, absorbing me with inky irises.
From that night on, we were rarely apart.
******
JACOB ENCOUNTERS AN ANGEL
Jacob is on the run. Behind him, the father-in-law he has just robbed; ahead, the brother he tricked long ago. It’s night and he’s running through a dense forest when he encounters another being — apparently a man — with whom he wrestles. Neither gives way and they battle through the night. At dawn, Jacob limps away from the fight.
Only then, in the light, does he realize that his adversary is an angel.
******
It must have been a week or so later when we returned to the Polish café for breakfast. We’d slept late and I was floating high above the Loop in the mid-morning snow. Annika opened a book and turned the pages towards me.
“Here, you see. A room made for love. Chagall was a luftmensch. An air person.”
“Head in the clouds?”
“Right.”
She turned a page so I could see another Chagall painting: two lovers embracing on a snow-covered street. Overhead, as if suspended from a nonexistent ceiling, was a large, bright lamp and, in one corner, an angel. The angel seemed oblivious to the lovers, and the angel and the lovers in turn seemed oblivious to the villagers milling in the bottom corner.
“Tell me more about the angels,” I asked.
“They’re always small. I think for Chagall, they’re not as important as humans,” she replied.
“But I’ve a more interesting idea.”
“Oh?”
“One rabbi says that angels are created not by God, but by humans. Every mitzvah that a person does is a concentrated sacred act that contains the essential component of an angel.”
She will be a wonderful professor.
“So, we humans can create angels from below, that we might send up into the sky?”
“Yes. I’d like to think that’s what Chagall’s doing, creating angels.”
She thought for a few moments before she continued.
“But that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because they exist in a form that humans can’t see.”
“What about in all those paintings of Jacob and the Angel? What was he wrestling?”
“Aha, true. Ordinary humans can’t see them.”
I smiled and thought about the future sprouting in our shared silence.
She was salting her eggs when Annika casually mentioned her fiancé.
“Next year, he’ll take over his father’s auction house in Berlin. His family owns several lithographs by Chagall,” and she trailed off when she noticed me staring out the window at someone shoveling the sidewalk, scraping at its cragged, frosty snow.
“Remainders,” I said at last. “Angels are all that’s left.”
We finished our food in silence. I still couldn’t face her as I wrapped myself in my coat and scarf.
She touched my arm as we stepped outside, gave me a sad smile and pointed up.
“The sky’s still blue for us.”
******
OCTOBER 8, 1941
A tall Jew, his face buried under hair, stands in the doorway of the little house like an exhausted messenger from afar. Black beard all tangled, forelocks reach down from under his cap and fall into his beard. His eyebrows, bristling and thick, overhang his deep, sunken eyes like a gabled roof. The rebbe murmurs a single word.
Again.
The old man’s brow is knitted as his head starts to sway and he begins to hum. Eyes close. All chant in one breath. Voice after voice, the melody swells. With closed eyes they sway and chant. They bang the table, as if trying to make the table itself sing, they sway as if to wrench themselves free from the earth. Some cry out in fear or sink into lamentation, still others weep. Hands stretched upwards; they implore the ceiling to open. At any moment the walls will crumble, a great hole will appear in the ceiling and Elijah the Prophet will fly down and rescue them.
The lamentation stops. The table is pushed to one side, the chairs kicked away. The tablecloth slips. Plates of cake, cutlery, and glasses crash to the floor. The walls themselves are swaying. The men begin to leap, stamp, turn the flaps of their coats, then form a dance circle. Shoulder to shoulder, hands interlocked, each one hangs on the other. They dare not let go.
******
Late sunshine seeps through the curtains, outlines her shoulder blades, then melts into the shadow of her curves. We’d spent six months swimming in our blue-tinted world — breakfast at the Polish café, circling the Bean, the Art Institute, a detour through Sullivan’s forest — and here in my apartment, lying together watching the snow stipple the landscape outside.
Now it’s spring, the cruelest season.
Outside, the rain has forgotten to stop. The windowpanes are lashed and splattered.
Glistening raindrops roll down in little tears.
******
LOVERS IN LILAC
Is a mind simultaneously capable of encompassing lovers embracing in the sky and lovers enveloped in a perfumed bed of lilac? Cemeteries below us, little houses blanketed in snow, your breath warm on my face. Up here, our spirits are dancing under the eaves of heaven, our stars shine like crystal chandeliers. Listen. It’s the whip-crack of the earthy green-faced old man on his sleigh. The horse’s black fat rump glistens like it’s been polished with wax. It steams, shakes its mane, and gallops over the little houses. Can’t you smell the onions that fill the house? Can’t you hear the hunchbacked fiddler? Come Bella, put on these golden wings and let’s make this starry night a room for us alone.
About the Author
D.J. Huppatz lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of two poetry books, Happy Avatar (Puncher and Wattmann, 2015) and Astroturfing for Spring (Puncher and Wattmann, 2021).
About the Work
"The immersive experience of Marc Chagall’s American Windows at Chicago’s Art Institute was the starting point. The roughly chronological biographical sections about Marc and Bella Chagall are based on their own writings, biographies of Chagall, and imaginings from his paintings."
About the Author's Process
"My work is akin to archeology: piecing together fragments of history and the present, alternate worlds, affinities, and poetic allusions."
D.J. Huppatz lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of two poetry books, Happy Avatar (Puncher and Wattmann, 2015) and Astroturfing for Spring (Puncher and Wattmann, 2021).
About the Work
"The immersive experience of Marc Chagall’s American Windows at Chicago’s Art Institute was the starting point. The roughly chronological biographical sections about Marc and Bella Chagall are based on their own writings, biographies of Chagall, and imaginings from his paintings."
About the Author's Process
"My work is akin to archeology: piecing together fragments of history and the present, alternate worlds, affinities, and poetic allusions."
