From La Folie Elisa

By Gwenaëlle Aubry and Translated by Wendeline A. Hardenberg

Room 2/1: Sarah

Second floor, at the other end of the hall, second door to the left past the stairs. A small attic room with white- and yellow-striped wall paper. On the floor, rust-colored wall-to-wall carpeting; in a corner, a chair with the hole in its woven seat covered by a dark yellow cushion; a school desk; on a cherry wood dresser, a mirror and a candle holder. Behind metal blinds, the transom looks out on the big linden tree at the entrance to the garden, reminding me to have it pruned before the sap rises. Sarah is sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in jean shorts and a black tank top that reveals her tattoos.

“Are you looking at them? It’s true, I didn’t have any at the time, what, fourteen years ago, is that right? Everything is written there: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Berlin, the men, the motions, and the rest—everything I’ve lived since. The olive tree on my right arm was the first, yes. Its outline is less sharp, and the black is turning green. I got it for my eighteenth birthday; my mother was furious, Why not your grandmother’s deportation number or the mark of Cain while you’re at it? This is my favorite one—look—the branches follow the contours of my scar, the pattern is so fine. Tattoos and dancing: my two rebirths. I signed up for Walt’s class right after physical therapy. I still couldn’t stretch out my arm. Knots everywhere inside me. I was in the large, windowless room, lit by fluorescent lights, with its upright piano, its wall of mirrors, my left hand on the barre to start pliés, and I heard that voice behind me saying, Now, enter your full body. He spoke very good Hebrew, but with an American accent as conspicuous as my own. Always in jeans and a black t-shirt, with a Chicago kid’s lean and responsive body, even though he’d long since grown too old for the stage. That’s what I learned with him: to enter my body. To enter my full body. And to tame the one that had taken up residence since the attack. At first, I clung to the bar like a drowning woman. When we moved to the center, I would forget the steps; I was incapable of linking them. I didn’t do the big leaps. I was afraid of the space opening up before me. I couldn’t stand to face the mirrors. I was afraid of seeing her suddenly appear again, in her striped dress and dark glasses, intact, gliding through their cloudy water to the same rhythm as me. Even so, at every class, something was mending itself. The words, to start, those French words I’d learned long ago in New York when I was taking my first lessons and which, at the time, named nothing but postures my child’s body submitted to, reluctant, awkward—each of those words gave me a key. Temps lié, for example—you know what that is, you did classical ballet, too, didn’t you? I saw a barre in the attic—temps lié, how many times have I repeated it to myself, in the street, at home, when the scene was replaying itself, catching hold of me, a siren, the muezzin, or even less than that, a figure, a slant of light identical to the one that day, and I would find myself at Lions’ Gate, watching her suddenly appear, silhouetted, dancing, in the shade of the arch, except it was me, here and now, who was exploding, incapable of getting up, of moving forward, riveted stupid in the middle of the street or my bed? Temps lié, I would hear Walt’s voice, and just like that I’d straighten up, move, carry on.

He’d also say that we shouldn’t resist gravity, that we had to let it work for us, surrender to it while hanging from it, go down and up in a single movement, When you plié, in classical ballet, it’s always to rise up, support the head, imagine, as Plato says, that you are a tree whose roots are planted in the sky, look for that, those two directions: the earth and the heavens. He would talk, and little by little I would feel it, the tree rising up, vertical and thick, inside of me, I knew, in the nape of my neck, the exact point where it takes root and from which you can support your head, another key word, that one, yet another talisman, support my head, I would say to myself, and differently than on a platter, I’m not John the Baptist or Salome or the girl who suddenly appeared at Lions’ Gate; find that point from which, no matter what happens and forevermore, you go through life upright, supple, and sovereign. Bit by bit, limb by limb, I rebuilt myself around that axis, I discovered in it my underpinnings—those buried muscles that support verticality, that central line the body wraps and unfolds itself around; yes, little by little I felt the tree growing inside me, solid, spreading, and even outside of me, I would arch myself over its branches when I did my cambré back, I would squeeze its trunk then gently let it go to move from first to second position. I was remastering my right arm, managing to stretch it into those exacting arabesques, geometrically pure, without lyrical inflections, that Walt was teaching us. The knots and cramps had disappeared, but also those phantom pains that radiated almost everywhere, the enlarged rings of an injured tree, far beyond the point of impact. I’d been lucky, they’ve told me often enough, to come through as I did: the girl was wearing a kilo of explosives on her belt without even counting the nails and screws, but she was the one who wouldn’t stop exploding inside me, her shattered body that mine sheltered.

Walt didn’t just demonstrate the movements: he explained them to us at length, even the simplest, he described their interior logic and pattern. For the en dehors, he would ask us to imagine, next to our knee, a phantom joint, for the port de bras, a spiral running between our elbow and our shoulder, an eye in the middle of our palm. These words and images sketched a new anatomy, birthed within us another body, quick, aerial, fluid—a body of nerves and ether. And I believe it is that phantom which chased away the other. Or, somehow, they mated.

One day, in center, I managed an adagio. Very simple, very bare-bones, I remember, something like (she gestures with her right hand): développé croisé devant, promenade en dehors, grand rond de jambe en dehors, arabesque, temps lié back–temps lié front, développé seconde, relevé demi-pointe, plié. It wasn’t just that, for once, I remembered the steps, linked them together without making a mistake or stopping, no, suddenly everything was easy, fluid, light, my body became a leaf, lifted by a breath, carried by a movement that exceeded it, circular, unceasing; I felt it going through me, from the soles of my feet to the roots of my hair, and extending well beyond me, a five-pointed star—Walt had often said that to us, Imagine your head, your limbs are a star pointing in five directions, tell yourself my head is leaving my neck, my arms are leaving my shoulders, my legs are leaving my pelvis, let them drift away… and I felt that, my body magnetized by a quintuple pole but without being torn apart, without dislocation, on the contrary, I’d never stood so firm, so well planted, solidly stuck to my own insides: an explosante-fixe.

That day when I danced for the first time, I believe the girl from Lions’ Gate danced with me. Together, we entered our full body. Or rather it took us in—a third body, supple and spacious, born from her shattered one and mine stiff with knots, an incorruptible, fluid body, where sap and fire flowed. I no longer feared the big leaps. I no longer feared the center. I no longer feared falling. And in the mirrors on the back wall, I sought her gaze. I leaned on her during preparation, her fleeting smile, her diagonal silhouette; after a series of pirouettes or chaînés, I faced her immediately and found her steady, radiant, scarcely out of breath.

The day I turned eighteen, for the first time since the attack, I returned to Lions’ Gate. I retraced my journey step by step, once again saw those places whose very names had become unbearable to me, Dung Gate, Golden Gate, the Muslim cemetery, The Mount of Olives. On arriving at the top of the slope, facing the open archway, I thought grand jeté

and I crossed the shadow.

That was the day I got the olive tree tattoo.

Afterwards it all happened quickly, everything following on, as soon as my Bagrut was over, I told my mother I was going to become a dancer and wouldn’t do my military service—you know all that already, don’t you? Victim of a kamikaze attack and refusenik, the press had a field day. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. During this whole period, Walt accompanied me. He knew my story, undoubtedly since the first class, but he never mentioned it. When I told him I was going to quit classical ballet for contemporary dance, he just said, With what you lived through, you can dance anything. It was also because he’d taught me everything, the basic grammar with which my body could tell any story. I’d logged fewer hours in the studio, in technique, and at the barre than the others, but I had something more, or less, perhaps. I say “I had” because, since Berlin, since Jan, I don’t know anymore. Maybe I’ve lost that, too, maybe I’ve also lost loss. But in those days, oh in those days, everything went in glissades and jumps: the world a stage, a set where I moved about by instinct, without doubts or hindrances. I was selected in Tel Aviv at the first audition. I changed my name: Zygalski is the name of one of my mother’s cousins, a Polish cryptologist, a family legend. Zygalski sheets—you know what that is?—no, of course not, it’s been forgotten; we only remember Turing, if that, but it was Henryk, the inventor of those perforated sheets, which, at the beginning of the war, before the Nazis changed keys, enabled decryption of the Enigma machine. I cut my hair very short. And got a tattoo of a five-pointed star on the nape of my neck. When I went to say goodbye to Walt, he just smiled: he understood that this symbol encoded my infinite gratitude. The others said to me, my mother first, not really in a joking manner, Don’t you think it’s missing a point? It is missing a point, yes, a pole, a branch, a letter forever absent, a girl of seventeen swallowed up by a shadowed arch. But it is this lack, it is with this lack, that I’ve always danced, endlessly varied, invisible pas de deux.

It’s getting late. The rest—Jan, Berlin, and this tattoo, here, on my lower back, the phosphorescent one, the blacklight one—I’ll tell you another night, don’t feel like talking about it, and Ariane is calling you. Do you hear her?

Gwenaelle Aubry, La Folie Elisa © Mercure de France, 2018



About the author and translator:

Gwenaëlle Aubry (b. 1971) is a prize-winning French philosopher and novelist whose writings are often adapted for the stage. She has worked as a Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2002. In 2009 she received the Prix Femina for her novel Personne, which has been translated into English as No One. Her most recent novel, La Folie Elisa, came out with Mercure de France in 2018.

Wendeline A. Hardenberg first became curious about translation as an undergrad at Smith College, where she ultimately translated part of a novel from French as a portion of her Honors Thesis in Comparative Literature. After a dual Masters degree in Comparative Literature (with a focus on translation) and Library Science at Indiana University-Bloomington, she has gone on to a dual career as a librarian and a translator. Her translation of Marie-Claire Bancquart’s volume of poetry _With Death, an Orange Segment Between the Teeth_ is forthcoming with Orison Books.