I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman

Author:Nadja Spiegelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

chapter seven

The plane hit the tarmac so smoothly that the cabin applauded. My stomach was a tight fist. From inside the taxi cab, I saw the Seine and then the Louvre, and my heart leapt despite myself. It usually made me feel French, to not love Paris, but right then I felt more American than I ever had. I leaned my phone against the window to take pictures, all blurry, all accidentally containing tourists taking pictures of their own.

In my parents’ studio apartment, in the perfect geographic center of the city, I was alone. I had never lived alone before. I struggled to find the quiet reassuring rather than unsettling. I unpacked my belongings. My mother’s collection of broken telephones, chargers that had long ago lost their appliances, mismatched sheet sets filled the closets. I moved them to the highest shelves.

I discovered that the apartment was filled with objects that had belonged to my grandfather, my mother’s share of what had been taken from his apartment after his death. There were Egyptian artifacts, hieroglyphs carved into pieces of stone, brown leather desk accessories. There was a box filled with the artifacts he’d kept of our lives: letters my mother had sent him, magazine articles with glossy photos of her, photos of my birth, two copies of the Teen People in which I’d modeled real jeans for real bodies. A stack of translucent pages proved to be the faxes I had sent him as a child. I could read the strain of forced cheeriness even in my childish scrawl. Sending you lots of kisses! I remembered writing these, how my mother stood over me at the kitchen table, dictating, correcting my French. Every word had felt like something ripped from me. I closed the box quickly and put it away.

In New York I had a solid gold compact mirror that had belonged to my father’s mother during her youth in Poland. His father had buried it, along with a gold cigarette case, at the start of the war and after miraculously surviving the concentration camps had risked his life to dig it up again. It was all that remained. Everything else, everyone else, was gone. My father had bestowed these objects upon my brother and me with gravitas. It terrified me, the power this mirror held. What if I broke it? What if I lost it? I’d opened it once and looked at my face inside. Then I buried it deep in my childhood bedroom.

The objects in the Paris apartment terrified me in a different way. I began shoving them into the boxes of stray electrical cords high in the closets. I all but threw an African fertility goddess into one of them, and at the sickening brittle crack of clay on clay felt a rush of petty vindication, as if perhaps I had broken these objects of some black enchantment. Then remorse set in. They were centuries old, these artifacts. They had seen far more than I had.

When my grandfather passed away, in the summer of 2007, a weight had lifted off me that I hadn’t known I was carrying.

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