Tell Me a Riddle (54 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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"Paul, Sammy, don't fight.
"Hannah, have I ten hands?
"How can I give it, Clara, how can I give it if I don't have?"
"You lie," he said sturdily, "there was joy too." Bitterly:
"Ah how cheap you speak of us at the last."
This short scene is, among other things, a small masterpiece of ironic humor; even this close to death, David and Eva talk
 
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in parallel monologues, their memories as unsynchronized as their lives in America have been.
What interests me most, though, is David's remark, ''I ask for stone; she gives me breadday-old." This is a witty reversal of the New Testament passage in which Jesus describes the mercy of God with this homely comparison: "Is there a man among you who would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread?" (Matt. 7:9).
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The reversals move in every direction. David asks not God or his father for sustenance, but rather his dying wife. He also reverses the usual connotations of bread and stone. The nourishment David asks for to feed his ravenous hunger is the stone of unshakeable faith in life rather than bread, which at best is perishable; day-old, it is a mark of poverty and defeat. Of course, David attributes Eva's refusal to give him the nourishment he needs to her contrariness. The fact is that she is not answering his questions at all, but following the associative drift of her own memories. What Olsen gives us is a picture of Eva's thoughts and a hint of her influence, finally, on David. Although Eva can articulate the link only in fragments, in her mind, the personal and the political are knitted together. In the early part of this scene, Eva will not let David rejoice in his own family's health and lose sight of the world's hungry children; here she will not let him take refuge in dreams of political change that do not encompass the often dreary realities of family life, where mothers must struggle alone to make ends meet.
That familiar split between the personal and political has no place in Olsen's writing. As Catharine Stimpson writes: "Given her sense of American politics, Olsen cannot show the achievement of the good dream, only its transformation into terror or its dissolution. When the dream is dissipated, as it is for the American-born children of Russian revolutionaries in 'Tell Me a Riddle,' its political contents, its sense of 'the flame of freedom, the light of knowledge,' are lost. Only its personal contents are gratified. Without the political, the personal is merely materialistic."
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I would add, however, that in Olsen's feminist vision, the reverse is also true: in patriarchal America, without the personal, and especially without a consideration of the lives of women and children, the political is
 
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empty theory, espousing equality on street corners or in labor halls while ignoring the deep ills of family life.
Just as the personal and the political, reality and idealism are fused in this scene, so are the images of bread and stone. If we read the rest of the story with this fusion in mind, earlier references to stone take on unexpected meanings. Two such references give insights into the marvels Eva's life can yield to the alert reader and the ways in which her life breaks out of the isolation of motherhood.
Early in the story, as part of his campaign to get Eva to move to the Haven, David shouts at her, ''You sit, you sitthere too you could sit like a stone." Critic Mary DeShazer says that this description, along with David's epithet, Mrs. Word Miser, turns Eva into a "silent, Sphinx-like hoarder of words" who, in struggling with the Sphinx's question, "What is Man?" finds both the question and the answer inadequate to human experience, and more specifically, to women's experience. As DeShazer writes, "Man has been too long the seeker of and answer to the riddle . . . ; woman too must identify the quest. Traditionally woman has been unable to riddle, for she has lacked the power to name her own experience."
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While David glibly matches his grandchildren riddle for riddle, the silent, searching Eva says she knows no riddles. It would be more accurate to say that she knows no answers to the riddles that torment her and certainly none that she could tell a child.
While this image of Eva as Sphinx is provocative, I think Olsen expects or, more realistically, hopes that her readers will also see in this woman sitting "like a stone" Rebecca Harding Davis's korl woman from
Life in the Iron Mills,
the book Olsen rescued from oblivion. The korl woman is rock hard, "crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning." She is hungry, her maker Hugh Wolfe says, not for meat but for "summat to make her live." Far from being inscrutable like the Sphinx, she has a "wild, eager face like that of a starving wolf's." She is the product not of an ancient civilization, but of American industrial society, carved from the waste material from the iron mill. Her maker is an illiterate miller who, with no hope of ever becoming any-
 
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thing better, is cursed or blessed with an artist's eye and hands and heart. The korl woman's form is ''muscular, grown coarse with labor"; one of the visitors to the mill, looking at the "bony wrist" and "the strained sinews of the instep," describes her as a "working woman,the very type of her class." The visitors see in her gesturing arms both "the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst" and "the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning." Finally, the sympathetic narrator of the story, who keeps the carving after Hugh Wolfe's suicide, says that the korl woman has "a wan, woeful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. 'Is this the End?' they say,'nothing beyond?no more?"
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These are Eva's questions. She asks them not only about her own life and the life of her son, Davy, who was killed in World War II, but also about all those lives wasted by war and by many kinds of starvation. In her delirium, she says: "Tell Sammy's boy, he who flies, tell him to go to Stuttgart and see where Davy has no grave. And what? . . . And what? where millions have no gravessave air." Her most tormenting questions are "when will it end?" and "Man ... we'll destroy ourselves?"
Whether as Sphinx or korl woman or both, after a lifetime of being bread, Eva has conspired with the circumstances of her life to change herself into stone. This becomes clear if we look at another important passage, shortly after she has refused to hold her newest grandson. She spends the afternoons shut in the closet in her daughter's home, trying to protect herself from her family and their needs. As her mind travels impressionistically from subject to subject, she repeats to herself her grandson Richard's lesson on rocks: "Of stones . . . there are three kinds: earth's fire jetting; rock of layered centuries; crucibled new out of old (igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic). But there was that otherfrozen to black glass, never to transform or hold the fossil memory . . . (let not my seed fall on stone). . . . (stone will perish, but the word remain). And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh." Shortly before this, Richard had given her two specimens to start her own

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