Devotion

by Patti Smith

There is blood everywhere, drained of its blood color,

The prospect of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

I imagine writing a story guided by the atmosphere conjured by the resonance of a particular human voice. Her voice. No plot in mind, just trailing her tones, timbres, and composing phrases, as if music, and superimposing them, transparent layers, over hers.

Why are you crying? Asks a voice. —I don’t know, I answer. Maybe because I’m happy.

Paris is a city one can read without a map.

A burgeoning routine. Awake at seven. Café de Flore at eight. Read until ten.

Slowing my breath, I unearth my pen and notebook from my sack, and begin scribbling, somewhat involuntarily.

It occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

Toward the back of a rather pedestrian garden I recognize a statue of Voltaire, the first thing I photographed in Paris.

For instance, a perfect plate of fried eggs was echoed in a round pond. I had drawn certain aspects of Simone’s countenance for Eugenia, my young heroine: her intellectual flexibility, strange gait, and innocent arrogance. Yet other aspects I reversed. Simone shuddered at the touch of another, while Eugenia blatantly craved it.

There was an absence of light, but not of love.

Fate has a hand but is not the hand. I was looking for something and found something else, the trailer of a film.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.

I let Devotion stand as written. You wrote it, I told myself, you can’t wash your hands of it like Pilate.

More than that, I suffered bouts of nostalgia, a yearning to be where I had been. Having morning coffee at Café de Flore, afternoons in the Gallimard garden, bursts of productivity on a moving train.

Silence. Passing cars. The rumble of the subway. Birds calling for dawn. I want to go home, I whimpered. But I already was.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve lost my home and haven’t found the new one

Though a star pupil, precocious in her studies, she was completely indifferent. She had mastered Latin at twelve, easily solved complex equations, and was more than capable of breaking down and reexamining the most ambiguous concepts. Her mind was a muscle of discontent. She had no intention of completing her studies, not now or ever; she was almost sixteen, finished with all that.

Her sole desire was to astonish, all else faded as she stepped upon the ice, feeling its surface through the blades into her calves.

her days flowed into one another.

She slept longer than usual and dawn was already breaking.

The unexpected gift suggested small hopes, a vague but promising human connection.

She lived only for skating, she told herself; there was no room for anything else. Not love, school, or scraping the walls of memory.

I am Eugenia, she said, to no one in particular.

Eugenia sat at the kitchen table and opened her journal. The first pages contained variations of the same set of lines, a poem of sorts, her loosely strung Siberian Flowers, written in the Estonian language of her mother and father, a language she had taught herself.

That spring my parents were separated and deported from their village in Estonia. My mother was sent to a Siberian work camp but nothing is known about what happened to my father.

Only when I found the secret pond did I understand why he had chosen this house. I was almost eleven. He must have known I would find it.

My heart was quite hard. I said nothing. Perhaps because I was afraid, for she is my only link with my family.

Don’t hate me, I did my best. I am already thirty-two; this is my chance to have something for myself.

I was born beautiful, she blurted, why should I have an ugly life?

no words…

And then she was gone. Like mother and father, like Martin, like the washing on the line.

She did not see him, but felt him, sensed he was drawing nearer, and then suddenly she saw his coat.

Languages are like chess. —And words are like moves?

Stirred by a chorus of sensations, she was at once liberated and trapped.

Today is my birthday, she said. I am sixteen.

This room will be yours, if you wish it.

You’re killing me, he said. —You’re killing me, she returned.

They were deported from Estonia in the spring to a Siberian work camp. —For what reason? —No reason is required for the herding of people like sheep. —A story full of holes.

you jealous of Irina? —Jealous? Why should I be jealous? Irina cannot skate.

He pondered this on an evening walk, stopping to flick his lit cigar into the fallen leaves.

She dreamed she was skating faster and faster, his voice whispering in her little shell ear. Philadelphia.

In late morning she returned to his apartment, and lay on the bed in her room, small with one window, but it was hers.

She dreamed of her guardian, who had asked for nothing. He was always kind. There was always food and flowers.

Our possessions cause us much pain, he replied.

Yes, Philadelphia, a hotbed of freedom, she said, pulling the trigger.

just pure female rage in all of its glory

At dawn they dug a hole and placed the body of Alexander Rifa into the earth with the rifle, his passport and the blood-spattered laces.

In Zurich she searched and found the grave of Martin Burkhart, who had treated her and Irina with such kindness, and laid flowers.

As she drew closer to home she vowed to never skate again. It was her penance, to deny herself the one thing she could not live without.

The text posed a philosophic examination of the question of suicide—Is life worth living? He had written in the margin that perhaps there existed a deeper question—Am I worthy of living? Five words that shook her entire being.

and leave it to him to carry the load. —The confession booth is not wide enough to hold my sins. It is but a small boat in the center of a terrible

The qualities that will help you get through life you have received from me. The qualities that will make you welcomed in heaven from your mother.