A TURUL BIRD FROM TEXAS
Our excuse for being there was so ho-hum that I don’t believe she even cared to know its details, but we proved ourselves worthy through our receptiveness to her story. She was sensible about it, got us off into a corner to talk, transparently needy. All the same, John was evidently on edge: it was not advice that she coveted. To know we were there was enough. While she gave us an account of herself, her blue eyes faded repugnantly in a glare of abstraction.
“I am a very conflicted person,” she said. Her conversation showed that. At the time, I did not know whether or not she was referring to the deep workings of her psyche, which many people used to consider it fashionable to brag about. They would blame some external thing for messing with their psyches, some traumatic experience or rapacious cousin or death in the family which by the merest chance had sent their whole lives off on a tangent. I held that there was really no such thing as a tangent in life, and human bodies were the only true frames, doing what came naturally to them by a kind of internal pattern made by matter over mind, and it was a trick of the mind that made people want to blame something else. I might be ungifted and untalented, but as long as I was a miner of frames, I’d be all right, I thought. I could not care less what people called the human psyche. Sure, it existed, but it was controlled by matter, as were the electric charges through the body that cybernetically caused the mind. Their psyches were nothing compared to their frames. I was a miner of frames, and I hewed away at the dirt on them.
During the sixties, Munich was a hotbed of rootless world travelers casting about for substance, complaining that life had mistreated them, that no one appreciated their talents. But it soon became clear that Magdalene had no pretensions to a damaged psyche. For this reason she became special to me, like a bulletin board bearing all the meaningful notices ever pinned. The more recent were the most obvious, of course, but by lifting a flap, I could read whatever I desired to know.
Magdalene was a blond giant of a woman, a Texas Brunhilde, an opera singer purportedly on vacation in Munich (from a three-year contract in Italy), to cure her “foreign-gitis.” That is what she told us, and it was as much of a lie as we were. The truth, I knew, would be much more interesting, so I let her bother me. John did not participate much after that first day.
“She’s utterly fucked up,” John warned. So what was new? Had she not said as much herself?
She talked a lot about her body, how real men went for it. She had somebody up there on the third floor every night at first, but that was also her grievance. She wanted to get serious about someone, have a baby while still young.
In my opinion, her body was not very sexy, but what did I know? She may have been a great lover, but she was too tall, big-boned, and her dresses were long, old-fashioned, stagey, compressing every additional mound she had accumulated in, say, the last ten years. She went bare-shouldered in all manner of Munich summer weather, and her flesh was starting to get flabby, with patches of pink on white from the sun. Her legs and arms were scarred and blotched, her fingers and toes strong and reddened.
Magdalene had a head like a pillar, the chin riveted to her neck with all the self-righteous austerity of revivalism’s purpose. With a big nose and a severe cast to her mouth, this pompous daughter of a southwestern missionary family would make a fair Brünhilde if she could really sing as well as she claimed. I had seen some pictures of strong female leads for the part that looked a lot like her. She also reminded me of the head of Athena etched on the contemporary Greek drachma.
Contrary to what one might expect of an opera singer, her mouth inspired no sense of a cavity — it was small and grim with many teeth. Her nose, enormously long and straight in profile, resembled many a boxer’s broken one; her eyes were square, time-glazed chunks of stoical fervor that did not glimmer or move, the pale blue of a sun-bleached sky, fading into the preeminence of her superb russet hair, a majestic thirst of tangled tumbling curls, the Grand Canyon touch, rugged, ambulant. Most incongruous in her face were the quick red eyebrows, pinched and sharp with enigmatic angularity.
Magdalene was ageless, exhibiting prepubescent sassiness mixed with septuagenarian sluggishness. Her neurotic anxiety at being single and childless, however, placed her somewhere in her thirties.
Neither by blood nor intimate neighborhood had she inherited the closely guided zeal of her Evangelical roots although by her mother’s missionary generation she was considered a Child of the Covenant. She attested boldly to the fact, and her mere presence in troubled Europe emanated American revivalist intervention. It was not clear from her ensuing harangue whether she had made any deep study of religiosity.
“My great granduncle foundated the Salvation Army in England,” she told us at our introductory meeting, “and his children foundated it in Germany and France and India and lordall over the world, which my great aunt was one of them. And my great aunt married a Quaker, which is just about the opposite of Evangelist as you can get, and my great uncle had two sons, which one was a playboy and the other was a serious worker, but he saw the Salvation Army passing by his house one day singing all their songs of the Cross and Glory and all, and he felt the call of God to go to France. And his father looked at him sadly and said, ‘Son, are you really sure that God has called thee?’ And my uncle said ‘yes,’ and my great uncle said, ‘Then thee shall go.’ So William left and his father was real heartbroken, but what really marked up his life and he never got over was my grandmother’s sister coming to my grandmother, and she told her that she wanted a child but couldn’t have one, but she knew her uncle had ten other children by other women, so couldn’t they arrange something somehow with him, and they could blindfold her eyes so maybe it wouldn’t be sinful.”
Magdalene’s story went on and on in what seemed like one great, breathless sentence, and she still had not arrived at the point where her illustrious family came to Texas, when John realized he had something to do and quickly excused himself. That made it harder for me to pull away, but it dawned on me gradually that she had had designs on John, and had been contemplating the blindfold scheme for some time when he suddenly quit the table. I was annoyed at both of them though I knew I had nothing to fear from her, but I was still too polite to leave so suddenly myself, so I endured another hour of her desperate presence. I stopped trying to unravel her genealogy, but I was interested in her anomalous lonely appearance in that place at that time.
It was the end of our second year in Europe, and John and I, still pretending to be married, were looking for jobs. Munich was the likeliest place to find employment, but it took us several more months of uncomfortable searching and forced dieting before we succeeded. We started out living in the pension where we met Magdalene. She had a whole apartment there while we had only a narrow room, but we arranged to move into her apartment when she went back to Italy, and when she returned unexpectedly, we both had jobs. First we moved back to a narrow room, and then we moved into the barracks at McGraw kaserne because John was working at the US military base there as a librarian, his specialty, and his name had been on the waiting list for a place to stay. When we moved out of the pension, I lost touch with Magdalene, but I was glad to get away from her by then.
Looking back, I can see why John wanted nothing more to do with Magdalene, even though he continued to try out other women from time to time. Magdalene was a scary proposition for men. She overwhelmed them with her big body, her big voice, her suffocating desire to have a child. She still was not desperate enough to do it out of wedlock, as we shall soon see, but she seemed to think a blindfold might be a good idea. But for whom? That was the question.
It was uncomfortable to be on the streets of Munich with Magdalene. She allegedly spoke fluent Italian but refused to speak a word of German. She insisted I go with her on visits to the clinic to see about her “foreign-gitis.” She always croaked a little and grabbed at her throat when she said the word so that people would know what she was referring to and understand that it was a professional ailment, which was preventing her from taking better parts in the Italian opera. In the clinic, we had to wait hours for a doctor who would see her and make a prescription. She was always cantankerous during these visits, but I admired the West German system of the sixties. You did not have to have medical insurance, and you could be seen and get prescriptions without much fuss or expense. France and other European countries were also like that. Socialized medicine. I never had to wait long, either. It was Magdalene who had the trouble. She spoke to people loudly, with an edge in her voice that could be construed as bossiness, so they were rude to her, and they were rude to me when I was with her.
If a Munich vendor did not understand her English, Magdalene would shout at him in Italian. When I urged her to use German words, she would shout even louder. I tried to teach her some useful things to say, but she would always forget them. Once she gravitated into a butcher shop, attracted by the bloody smell of raw meat. She pointed at the lean ground beef. The butcher measured out 500 grams and tore off a square of paper to wrap it in.
“No no!” said Magdalene, and held out her hand imperiously. “Put it here!”
The butcher gaped at her hand, then at her face, and then at me in bafflement. I shrugged my shoulders and Magdalene agitated her big hand, palm up. The butcher looked a little sick, but he put the chunk of burger into her bare hand. “She’s from Texas,” I explained to the butcher. He smiled but still looked shaken. On the way to the Englischer Garten, Magdalene ate her handful of raw meat, exclaiming about how much she had missed it. The people we passed stared at her aghast. When she saw an ice cream cart parked under a tree, she shouted at the vendor, “Due gelati, per favore,” and she held up two meat-stained fingers. Of course the man understood her. That’s not the point.
Boarders in Frau Schmidt’s Pension on 33 Schillerstrasse got tired of listening to Magdalene practice her scales, so she knocked at my door one day, holding a pillow under each arm like the wings of an enormous bird. Her slowly blinking eyes, set back under her lids, had a raptor’s disapproving cast to them. Her nose had a peculiarly predatory look. She wanted to know if I would like to go up to the roof to work on our nonexistent tans. Not averse to exposing my pale skin to the sunlight (it was the sixties), I put on my bikini and climbed up through the attic with her.
It was not pleasant on that grimy, flat roof, and the sky glared white. The buildings around us were taller than ours. Anyone could look down and see us there on the tar and gravel, sitting ducks for a sniper bent on assassination, but I was not concerned about that until Magdalene started to sing. I had heard her sing “Danny Boy” once before. She belted it out with passion if not skill, and soon the window sashes were flying up all around. A hotel maid or hausfrau on our level in the next building yelled at her in screechy Bayerisch to shut up with the terrible singing, and Magdalene, perched on one of her pillows, yelled back in English, “Oh shut up, you ugly bitch! You sound like a fire siren,” which were exactly the words the woman was yelling in her language. They made quite a pair, screaming at each other. Then the woman’s window closed with a furious crash.
I was embarrassed because most Germans knew good opera when they heard it. Magdalene looked the part of a Brunhilde, even in her bathing suit, but she did not sound like one, I guess. “Danny Boy” was hardly Wagnerian, and on the roof that day such a plaintive song seemed more like an expression of her eternal wish than an Irish statement. I sat up on my pillow and did a careful 360˚ survey of windows, up and down, searching for snipers, who now had a reason to shoot. To her credit, Magdalene did not lose heart. She sang a few more songs and went through her scales for half an hour while I soaked up the mild June sunshine.
In the breakfast room, John did not always refuse to join us. There was a young Hungarian man staying at the pension, who went by the name of Erik, although he had other names. He was a good-looking dark-haired man in his early thirties with a smooth complexion, a nicely shaped face, heavy eyebrows, and haunted brown eyes. John liked his company, and so did Magdalene, so John put up with Magdalene when Erik was around.
One of the things that interested John about Erik was the man’s claim not to remember what it was he was supposed to be good at. He was waiting around in Munich to see if he could remember, and he did not want to go back to Budapest until he remembered, besides which the Soviets were still there.
John and I were in our twenties, but John was a very sociable person, and he got along with all ages and types of people. He wanted to be on hand when Erik finally had his brainstorm, and found it amusing to hear Erik say, in his heavily accented English, “Ven I vas getting ze brainvash.”
It appeared that Magdalene did not care about Erik’s past. She only wanted one thing. I imagined Erik’s short, compact body being able to cope with hers just fine. He was strong and very masculine. But he was obviously not in love with Magdalene. He seemed almost relieved to see John and me in the morning, when we all gathered for a continental breakfast of coffee and semmeln. John did enjoy talking with Erik. It was Erik who compared Magdalene to the great Turul birds of Hungarian mythology, who harbored the souls of children before they were born.
Magdalene was not sure this was a compliment and wanted to know more about Turul birds. Erik’s sensual lips would stretch into a rare smile, uncovering one gold tooth and a few of silver. “Ze Turul bird is ze great symbol for our Magyar people,” he would say. “Zey are elegant, fierce. We have ze statues, many statues of ze Turul birds with ze open beak. Go to Magyar, to Hungary, you vill see zem. I vill show you vun day, ven I can go back again.”
“Are you saying I’m elegant and fierce?” Magdalene persisted.
“Oh yes, like Brunhilde in ze opera you are. But also very powerful like ze Turul bird. You carry ze unborn souls of children.”
“All of them, or just the ones I want?” asked Magdalene, who was no stranger to prophecy. I could tell she was aroused.
“As a symbol, all of zem, but zere were ozer Turul birds. It is true you share zem. Zere are so many. But zis is Magyar mythology only. Don’t, how you say, take my vurd.”
“Don’t take my word for it,” John said, immensely enjoying Erik’s teasing, if that’s what it was. Magdalene took him seriously.
“Exactly. As you say,” said Erik. “Don’t take my vurd for it.” He sipped his American coffee, making a face. “Ecchh. I vill go to ze university today, look for ze job. I must recover my skill. I lost it ven I vas getting ze brainvash.”
“Are you going to the library?” John asked, getting up. We volunteered to accompany him. Magdalene did not go; she was not interested in universities.
In July, Magdalene returned to Italy, and John and I moved into her vacated apartment above the pension, which was really very nice. By this time it was clear that she was affiliated with some kind of traveling singing group connected to her Uncle William’s missionary work, which was doing Southern Italy and included Italians who had converted to Evangelism at some point. It was a far cry from Milan, but at least I could imagine Magdalene in a group like that, where she could even be a star. On the other hand, I suspected that her uncle might have sent her to Munich to have her off his hands for a while. I had a mental picture of her rolling through the male half of Italy like loose cannon.
Before the New Year, Magdalene was back in Munich, and she wanted her apartment back, so John and I returned to the narrow room, but we were spoiled now. We had jobs and friends. We started hunting for a better place to stay.
As a Berlitz teacher, I had joined the Deutsche-Amerikanische Freundschaft club, which had a lot of super-friendly young people anxious to meet each other. One of my students invited John and me to a Saturday night meeting, and the next week John couldn’t go, so I dragged Magdalene along. I regretted making the invitation as soon as it was out of my mouth, fearing it would be a mistake, and it was, but I could not retract it. My motive at the time was to get her interested in learning to speak German, but I should have known how futile that would be. John pointed out what a bad idea it was, but I already knew. What was done was done.
My ingenuous student at the Berlitz School of Languages, a novice travel agent named Heidi, brought her brother Siegfried along when I said I was bringing my friend. He was about twenty years old, a student at Ludwigs-Maximilians University. Siegfried was not especially good-looking, being somewhat flabby and unathletic, but he had a good attitude, tried his hardest to fit in. He and Magdalene got to talking, and they arranged to go to the movies together Monday night.
Jesus! Magdalene fell for him like a pallet of bricks. I had never seen her like this. She glowed all over. She claimed she wanted to marry this bookish man who was fifteen years younger and five inches shorter. It was all Siegfried this and Siegfried that. John thought it was funny, but I was terrified. I was afraid to face Heidi in class again.
The next day, Sunday, brought a crisis. Magdalene could not find her diaphragm. She hunted high and low for it. She called me up to help look. The apartment was already torn apart, so I helped her put it back together, figuring she would want to use it as the trysting spot. I was wondering how to ask delicately what kind of first date she expected to have, and what Evangelists from Texas generally did in the case of a lost diaphragm, but I wondered even more when she asked me to go out with her on a Sunday and scour the local economy for contraception. Privately, I felt that she had lost her diaphragm on purpose, driven by a glandular need to conceive, but I did not want poor Siegfried to sink any deeper than necessary, so I followed her mutely around to various pharmacies, not equipped to be her interpreter for this kind of emergency. Finally, she settled for a douche kit and some kind of spermicidal foam with an applicator. I allowed that the two in combination would probably work, if used at the right times. It was better than nothing.
On Monday afternoon she telephoned me to come up to her apartment on the third floor, which I did. Her joyous face greeted me at the door.
“I found my diaphragm!” she exulted.
“You did? Where?”
“I was wearing it all the time!”
So saying, she whipped it out of her bag and held it under my nose. It was her diaphragm, all right. I doubt she had cleaned it yet. A large round circle of latex, three inches or so in diameter, bulging downward from a stiff circular rim, it looked more like a lab culture, or the putrefying edge of a swamp, all green and brown bubbling mottled lumps advancing on a fleshy shore scalloped by the black wrinkles of time and tide. She had been wearing it ever since Italy.
Siegfried called up at the last moment and bravely cancelled their date, which was a big relief to me, since it meant that on Tuesday I would face an apologetic student instead of a betrayed one.
I do not know what fortune awaited Magdalene after John and I moved, but I am pretty sure she went Stateside after her stint in Southern Italy was over. I have not found out whether her dream of motherhood came true, nor whether she continued her career in singing. It has occurred to me that her ancestors, who still held a power over her, whether her religion did or not, may have been all that held her back. If she could stop listening to them, she would be free and clear.
I think back on Magdalene now, in my sober old age, as an honest woman of tangible conflicts, who only needed a husband so that she could have children. Unlike us, she knew what she wanted to do; unlike Erik, she knew what she was good at. She was a wholesome omen, full of promise, worthy of being made into a symbolic statue, a Turul bird from Texas.