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fall 2003 | The Culture Issue

Bereishit: In the Beginning

Leanne Trapedo Sims

Islands

Water holds my story together. Its seamless turquoise body. At the age of fifteen, we leave my birthplace in South Africa, a continent resplendent with turmoil, for the homogeneous milk-state of Wisconsin. This exile echoes my ancestors’ cartography: the flora-like expulsion from Lisbon to Holland to Lithuania. Beginnings are always entwined with ends, so it’s not at all strange that I too am anchored in Eastern Europe. Only for me, the East is no longer the East. The West has swallowed it like tiny amulets. Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts thrive alongside Prague’s historic Charles River and here, in Krakow, wooden Jewish dolls press their wiry beards and eagle noses against shop windows. The dolls are what remain of Poland’s Jews.

“Even in death, the Germans forbade the Jews to be called anything but figuren, the German word for puppet: a mute mannequin. For even their mutilated corpses held the power to witness.”

I decide to conduct my own cartography. On an overnight train to Krakow, a young American with muscles packed like corn-fed meats says, “Isn’t this awesome? Five days and five extermination camps. What a blast.”

Island One: South Africa, 1970: Aunt Beattie Mythologized

Aunt Beattie is my father’s great aunt and my grandmother Helen’s aunt through marriage. She loves to play the piano drunk. She is a proper British dame when sober. My way of greeting Aunt Beattie, who is perilously allergic to cats, is to conceal Toffee, my calico Persian cat with the demeanor of a dog, behind my back. And as Aunt Beattie’s goose-neck dips toward my cheek, I fling Tafita (we call her this on days when the smell of colonization sits fat on our blood like the tzeetzee fly) onto her geranium dress.

Entr’acte 

A name is just a thing. Or is it? In places of exile, “(dis)placed places,” a name is everything. We, as Jews, in loaned lands, wear our newly truncated names like masks. I think of Damien Hirst’s dead but tricky cows in a formaldehyde stew at The Brooklyn Museum. You, the visitor think you are getting only one cow, but as you traverse the length of the cow’s once body, you eat two heads with your quivering eye. And you know a dead cow, like a name, is more than a thing.

My father’s family changed their names from Shmulowitz to Sims. “Much more digestible,” said the brothers, who were all in the fruit storage business and went to their graves having not spoken each other’s names for half a century. Pa Sims sold eggs and lychees, gray crates of abundancy, which we captured with mulberry-stained knuckles from Nan’s garden in Greenside. There’s a Polaroid seventies-style photo of my sister Mandy and me in Nan’s garden. We’re wearing Chinese tamarind pants and hats with onyx Chinese braids that swing past our backs. I stand a remarkable foot over my eighteen-month-younger sister and we are both naked from the waist up. My breasts have begun to point forward like depleted Mister Frosty’s while Mandy is as flat as a breakfast pancake.

Island One: Aunt Beattie’s Homecoming

Aunt Beattie arrives at our house in St. Andrews in all her regalia. It’s seven thirty in the evening and she’s half an hour early. She’s decked like a rare jewel in her delicious chachkees. Beads drip around her crinkly neck and the edges of her taffeta dress cling to her baggy stockings stuffed into leather shoes. The doors slam upstairs. They crackle against each other. My father, “Yayafoof from Doburg,” (a staple in my Nan Helen’s story-lore) has been drinking again. So you got it—it’s me and Aunt Beattie. “Hello, Aunt Beattie,” I mouth at her legs level with my belly button. Aunt Beattie’s purple fedora hat with the rolling pink feathers and wide yellow sash waltzes by me. I watch the back seams of her stockings, the fine, delicate threads protrude like hedgehog pins. The view is better than the Friday night drive-in at the Rand Easter show.

Aunt Beattie and her gangster walk skulks on by towards the booze counter, a daily shrine in our house and Aunt Beattie’s habitual place on Sunday afternoons. Upstairs I can hear the muted moans of hissing doors. He’s been drinking again so he and Big Lil, my mother, are fighting again. Downstairs Aunt Beattie pours Daddy’s Johnny Walker into the largest glass she can find. Its golden body tickles the rim of her glass. Aunt Beattie draws the glass up to her mouth like a hunter in pursuit of vicious game. She gives her friend the Beattie bead eye. Oh, she’s chugging Daddy’s Johnny Walker. It flies down her goose throat. Pink feathers hit the floor. And so does Aunt Beattie.

Entr’acte

My father reads about Aunt Beattie. “Myth,” he sniffs down his hairy nostril. “Aunt Beattie despised drink!” A hirsute cavity gapes—he fails to mention his Johnny Walker habit. “Myth,” I retort. I think of the cows.

Island Two: South Africa Revisited 1996

I never cry when I enter this land. Below me is the bush, which Hemingway eulogizes in The Snows of Kiliminjaro. And whereas Harry’s corpse escapes death (in the realm of Dream), by soaring to the summit of Kiliminjaro, I plummet toward death when I re-enter my birthland. Through the porthole windows, I can almost lick the coarse air I know I shall breathe once on land. Below me is the veldt with no beginning nor end.