Unmailed Letters, Three Rings, the Inheritance, and Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann — Alina Stefanescu

The one fallen, his mouth in the dust, was survived by me. It is not yet the moment to decide if I was the victim, or if I was the killer.
Benjamin Fondane, "A Few Wild Words," translated by Dan Solomon

My mother appeared as a bird in the story of where she had been. 

Then she appeared as a ring buried in each book I touched, the round glimmer of an unkept promise. Before appearing as bird and ring, my mother disappeared.

*** 

The gold-plated ruby ring on her finger is the relic that connects me to the woman in the photograph. She wore the ring when fleeing Ceausescu’s Romania, leaving her baby behind, balanced in the risk of political asylum, Cold War politics, terror, idealism, adrenaline. The woman, my mother, laughed with her eyes, the iced blue of glaciers, and promised the ring would be mine, one day. It would be my inheritance, as the tiny emerald would be my sister’s. 

My desire to find the ring causes me to see it everywhere. My disbelief that the ring could be missing warps my thinking. I fixate on the black, gold-plated ring the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova inherited from her Tatar grandmother. The black ring would protect the one who wore it, according to Anna’s grandmother. The fact that Anna wore the ring suggests she believed it had the power to protect her. One could say Anna believed her grandmother’s power accompanied her. One could say belief emerges naturally from trust, from the belief that others want the best for us. One could condemn those who relinquish their roots or ancestral connections.

When Anna Andreyevna Gorenko displayed an early interest in poetry, her father warned her not to dishonor the family name by becoming a “decadent poetess.” Obliged to find a pen name, Anna elected the surname of her maternal great-grandmother on the Tatar side. She reached into that history surrounded by the black ring, and found her persona in it. I begin to believe rings prepare us for the rebellion of existence. Desire and disbelief are baptismal emotions, I think to myself. The ring can re-name us in relation to our rebellions.

Ravenous for rings, I seek them in stanzas, palpate rubies for esoteric meaning, unearth minuatae in Paul Celan teaching someone how to peel chestnuts, in how he uses the word plunge to describe the motion of time. In his conversational topographies, lightning is the language of the gods and the vertebrae of poetry; night and humiliation are forms of witness; “taking on dread” becomes a rejection of dialogue in favor of a stance which engages the sky, for stones can fly if the die decides it, and branches grow upwards to get closer to moss. 

***

My mother, my desire, my disbelief . . . My disenchanted amusement when a letter from a former lover compares my nose to Akhmatova’s. It is, he qualifies, unfortunate that a nice face should be marred by a loud nose. 

The black ring reappears in February 1916, when a soldier-on-sojourn named Boris Vasilyevich Anrep ran into Anna Akhmatova at a friend’s poetry reading, and sat down beside her. White heat charged the air between them. As they listened, Anna  pressed her grandmother’s black ring into his hand. Love needs so little to stand on—a ring, a passion, a way of seeing and being seen—Boris said he planned to return to Russia, at some point. 

The day before Boris left, Anna sent him an inscribed copy of her book, Evening. In response, he sent her a poem of his own along with a wooden cross he’d taken from a church in the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia. Boris’ poem avoids a promise by foregrounding war, the power of war to alter how light relates to the horizon; a man offers his beloved a cross in lieu of a pledge. Two years later, Boris walked across the frozen Neva to see a surprised Anna. In his account of their meeting, the man reached down and lifted a chain from beneath his shirt, a necklace with her ring around his neck. He wore it as protection. Boris said Anna said wear it always. And he replied: always, it is sacred. 

After the October Revolution, Boris remained abroad. His correspondence with Anna ceased. Rumor had it that letters posted from abroad posed a risk to their recipients. Yet he continued to wear her ring around his neck (and he did try to send her some silk for a dress, and a coin stamped with the profile of Alexander the Great when he met Gumilyov on his visit in London). To replace the ring, Anna had a replica of Boris’ wooden cross sewn into a silk purse. 

In “The Tale of the Black Ring,” the poem’s speaker threw herself on the bed and “keened like a bird of prey” remembering how she pulled off the black ring and passed it to him “under the patterned tablecloth.” Akhmatova’s poem reads as an indictment of romance, or how a woman trades her inheritance for a cross pilfered by a soldier. To lose an inheritance is to be haunted by its absence. To give it up for love is to desecrate the dead. The most earnest part of me believes this. 

***

“I must translate the photo of mom wearing the ring before she defected,” I tell S frantically. In the year of 2015, in the week after my mother died of a pulmonary embolism in Amsterdam, the photo became a bridge where I could meet her ghost. 

“Your mother wore the ruby when we ran,” my father reminds me. “She wore it at the sudden family dinner when we announced that we were running, that we were leaving in less than six hours. She held up her hand as her father protested…” The first part of their journey woven from lies began with the 10pm night train into Czechoslovakia. “She wore the bear coat and the ruby,” my father says, his words grinding like wheels over the same terrain. 

The wooden jewelry box contained all the family heirlooms from both sides—the cut hair, the baby teeth, wedding rings, grandparents’ lockets with portraits….I believed these things were worthless. Or, their value only existed in reference to family history. The box sat in the upper right corner of my mother’s closet. Behind a stack of wool sweaters. 

My parents divorced when I was in college. Both placed their gold wedding bands inside the jewelry box. “They are heirlooms now,” my mother said. The rings, like their marriage, were foreign, expired, forged in Ceausescu’s Romania. 

***

Days dragged their lines through my throat as various strangers came to pay their respects after my mother’s death. Her colleagues reached out with stories. “You have your mothers’ nose,” said an archaeologist. I smile. I smiled. I keep smiling as I scour my mother’s house for the ruby ring promised to me as a child. The ring resembles a small suitcase bearing the story of being carried across an ocean when my parents fled Romania and left me behind. The ring has been in the US longer than the I. 

Someone said a ring makes a monument of a relationship. Someone said grief marks its own time by revealing the limitations of temporality. June, July, August, September. . . boxes, shelves, desks, dressers, closets. 

The obsession is absurd, given my hatred for jewelry—my adamant refusal to accept an engagement ring, my fear of being marked by love or ornament. The holes in my ears have been empty for years. The $50 dollar wedding band on my left hand disgusts me. Its presence stands in tension with an inherited ring, a chink in the promise of protection. For what can a ring binding me to an American man protect of the sacred? What can it know of the Romanian intonations in which I know myself? 

***

. . . October, two inches past midnight. I stood in the moon-smothered yard and wept. When P found me, he tried to touch me. I despised him. I despised everyone who loved me in the moving shadow of my mother’s absence. He tried again. I ripped the wedding ring from my finger and threw it into a hundred-foot kudzu patch at the edge of the yard. Foxes gekkered from deep in the forest. P’s face was stricken by something wordless I didn’t want to see. I did not want to be what his ring made me. 

***

The day after P came home early and told me my mother had passed, I walked to her house and  positioned the chair in front of her closet, and then climbed on it to retrieve the box. But the spot between the sweaters was empty. Everything began with that. 

***

Ingeborg Bachmann first met Paul Celan in Austria on May 16, 1948. Four days later, their love affair began in Innsbruck—a space where Celan stays with Bachmann, a place to which she will return in her novel. On June 25, Celan celebrates her birthday with a gift: a book about Matisse, and the poem “In Egypt” inscribed as a dedication, the first two lines which Weiland Hoban translates:

Thou shalt say to the strange woman’s eye: be the water!
Thou shalt seek in the stranger’s eye those who thou knowest to be in the water.

Celan leaves for Paris by train and arrives by mid-July. These summer months extend into a relationship where Bachmann travels to visit him in Paris, where other signifiers and code-words are born. But the eyes have already been scripted. The water is there.

***

Surely carolers wandered near windows that Christmas of 1948, when Bachmann wrote to Celan: “It was so lovely—and so were the poems, and the poem we made together….” 

The most important thing about Bachmann’s Christmas letter is the fact that she never mailed it. 

***

In a letter dated June 27, 1951, after mentioning a mutual friend coming to Paris, Bachmann references supplemental enclosures, and tells Celan to “take the many letters I have written to you, the wrong ones and the right ones—I never had the courage to send them off.” It appears that this letter was never mailed either. The more I read their correspondence, the more provocative the patches of unsentness. 

There are things writers say to the world rather than to each other. There are poems who change titles en route to their reader. When speaking of shadows, it is easier for me to address an unknown audience than to try and confront the shadow, itself.

***

Supposedly written in Paris in 1949, Celan’s poem  “Auf Hohrer See / On the High Seas” contains a ring. This ring comes up in relation to Celan’s meeting Diet Kloos-Barend, a widow who had been active in the Dutch resistance. Their month-long Paris correspondence suggests a love affair, perhaps epistolary. Celan sent a copy of this poem to her, retitled as “Rauchtopas / Smoky Quartz,” referring to the smoky-quartz ring that Jan Kloos gave to Diet before he was tortured and murdered by Nazis in her presence—a ring she continued to wear. When sending the poem to Diet, Celan titled it after the ring. It remains unclear why the title of the poem was changed before publication, or why the reference to the ring as a frame was removed—and what, if anything, this means for the change in the valence of that “You” Celan extends in this poem as translated by Pierre Joris:

Paris, a tiny ship, lies at anchor in the glass:
and so I feast with you, drink to you.
I drink until my heart endarkens for you,
until Paris swims on its tear,
until it sets course for the distant veil
that shrouds the world for us, where every You is a branch,
from which I hang, a leaf, that in silence sways.

The poem’s speaker likens himself to a leaf which hangs on every You’s branch. 

But there is also a leaf which Celan put in a medallion which belonged to Bachmann before he left Vienna. There is the letter, dated January 26, 1949, in which Celan apologizes for his silence, asks Bachmann to write “to him who always thinks of you and who locked in your medallion the leaf you have now lost.” And there is Bachmann’s response in April, a few months later, which seeks to reassure him: “The leaf that you placed in my Medallion is not lost, even if it has long ceased to be inside it; I think of you, and I am still listening to you.”

And there is the smoky-quartz or topaz ring which hovers between poems, letters, sidewalks, and haunted survivors.

***

While sorting through multiple legal documents related to my mother’s estate, I found an insurance policy for the jewelry box. The items inside the box had been insured for $200,000. The inventory included pieces of great-grandparents. What my mother brought, kept, and held for us was worth more than I imagined. I debated whether to file an insurance claim, but my stepfather assured me that no one had stolen the jewelry. Only close friends and family had been in the home that day. And so I delayed filing the claim. Greed and idealism tangled: I reasoned that filing the claim would prove that box had been stolen by someone close to us. To do so would’ve meant, somehow, that it was possible for someone to have done this—if I filed a claim, the ring would be gone. 

***

In the next few days I plan to send you back the ring that you gave me last year; the only obstacle is that I do not yet know whether I can simply entrust it to the postal service, or, rather, wait until someone goes to Paris....... First I must tell you that I have finally had a chance to see Nani alone; so various things were mentioned, various things that were important for me to know.

This is how Ingeborg Bachmann begins a letter she wrote to Celan on September 25th, 1951. For half a year, this letter obsessed me. Never mailed, it remained in a box, consigned to the realm of the possible.

“Among those things, I was less surprised by your wish to have the ring back then by the memories you associate with it,” Bachmann continues. She would have understood if he’d stated that the ring was an important object of memory associated with his family. Instead, she “had to learn from Nani’s hints… that either you or I have been tarnished by the recollection of the preconditions for this ‘gift’.” Two days later, Bachmann is still reeling from “the suspicions” Celan hid in his “heart”; she uses the word monstrous. Her hands shake as she pleads: “Paul, do you really think that I could have accepted this ring, whose history I knew—and for all your accusations, you could not claim that this history was not sacred to me—on a whim, simply because I saw it and liked it?” 

The history of this ring is difficult to trace—it is, literally, his story to tell—and Bachmann alludes to it gingerly. Since there is no record that this letter was sent, and no record of Celan’s response to the unsent, I fumble in the dark, mesmerized as Bachmann’s tone sharpens indignantly: “I do not intend to justify myself to you, nor am I concerned with being right, where this is not about you and me, at least not for me.” The issue is whether she can “stand up to what this ring represents.” In this, she insists her “conscience in the face of the dead who wore this ring is clear.”  

***

“The house contained no one except for close friends and extended family,” the ring-zealot I’d become said to C. Those present were consumed by the unexpected horror of my mother’s sudden death. Platitudes strolled through rooms wearing their Sunday best. Family friends demanded a date for her homegoing celebration? 

Because my mother died suddenly in Amsterdam, she had to be repatriated in order to be buried. Stranded between countries, my mother’s body was being surveyed, expedited, examined, and processed by Dutch officials; her corpse dangled in limbo, awaiting its posthumous visa. What does it mean to go home when you are being shipped back to a land whose soil holds none of your ancestors or family?

Like lightning in the hands of a bored god or blunted poet, the vultures of closure descended. The cadres of planned obsolescence rushed in with their twelve-step recovery books. The American race to outrun one’s grief began. “It is selfish to focus on finding the ring when there are people who want to see your mother’s body, to say goodbye,” S scolded. 

I bleached my black hair and laughed. A part of me believed that non-acceptance would prevent my mother from being gone. My defiance could make her reappear; I wore her Magie Noire like an unceasing, perfumed libation. “There will be no open casket, no hovering over her corpse, no closure,” I snapped. Exposing this ravaged, formaldehyde-bulging idea of my dead mother to others seemed obscene. No one would see her. My sister and I refused that last vision even to ourselves.

“But no one is someone,” the ghost whispers. 

***

When the recurring nightmare began, I was reading Philip Boehm’s translation of Bachmann’s novel, Malina. Soon, insomnia was driven by the fear of dreaming, the fear of seeing Celan’s face again, consumed by shadows—the dread of words circling around the hand of the woman whose language he adopted in order to write poetry—the mother named Friederike Antschel, killed by Nazis in the snow her son escaped. The nightmare insists that it was his mother’s ring which Celan first gifted, and then took back. A part of me believes her. 

***

“I accepted it as a gift from you, and wore or kept it safe, always mindful of its significance,” Bachmann assures Celan in the unmailed September ring-letter. “I have no access to your suspicion-and will never understand it-I feel sorry for you because, in order to cope with a disappointment, you are compelled to destroy the other, the one who caused this disappointment, so thoroughly before your own eyes and those of the others,” Bachmann continues. She acknowledges that his paranoia has not killed her love for him, and that she may never find a way to cope with that. But she concludes by marking a difference between them. Unlike him, she won’t rub the eraser over his face, or “seek as you do to deal with you, forget you, or expel you from my heart in one way or another, with one accusation or another…” In refusing to occupy the symbol he made of her, Bachmann rebels against the facile reasoning. In a sense, she accuses him of choosing to forget, or electing to equivocate and accept the logic of doom—this is the crime of history. 

Because the rings connect everything, my obsession expands to include the unmailed letter which becomes, in my mind, the basis of Malina. Did Celan accuse Bachmann of wanting the ring for its prettiness? Did he imply she wanted to ornament herself in Jewish history to which she had no claim? At the time, he was still battling what can be written again, what to keep, what to sanctify, what can be said without theft.

In his Bremen speech of 1958, Celan alludes to Georg Büchner, a visionary 18th century poet who ended up going mad, and whose innovative novella, Lenz begins: “On the 20th of January Lenz walked through the mountains...only it sometimes troubled him that he could not walk on his head….” To this, Celan added: “Whoever walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, has heaven in an abyss beneath him.” In this same speech, Celan says language “gave me no words for what was happening,” language “went through” the “thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” Although the obscurity of language exists in relation to heaven’s abyss, dates matter. The time and the place mark the page and poem, as they mark the letter. In the same speech, Celan made a veiled reference to the Wannsee Conference breakfast of January 20, 1942, where the Nazi leaders decided to implement the Final Solution. “Perhaps one may say that every poem has its 20th of January inscribed?” Celan mused. “Perhaps what’s new for poems written today is just this: that here the attempt is clearest to remain mindful of such dates?”

Two years later, after winning the prestigious Büchner Prize, Celan gave his famous Meridian speech, which ends by telling the audience: “I find something that consoles me a little for having in your presence taken this impossible route, this route of the impossible. I find something–like language–immaterial, yet terrestrial, something circular that returns to itself across both poles while–cheerfully–even crossing the tropics: I find ... a meridian.”

Pierre Joris’ translations of the Meridian speech include drafts, or words cut from the final delivery. Perhaps a draft can be read as an unsent letter? “It is ... the second at the core and in the casing of your desperation.—”, Celan drafted, “It stands with you against infamy. It stands against Goebbels and Goll.—” The meridian he delivered is more abstract than the meridian which consumed him. 

***

Two years after Celan’s 1958 Bremen speech, Bachmann wrote her final Frankfurt lecture, “The Literature of Utopia.“ Meticulous in its uncertainties, stringent in its commitment to literature, the essay (among other things) engages Celan’s gesture towards utopia by offering the shared breath between the two—the You and the book—as the utopia, as the best of all possible worlds, one in which existence is engaged. Perhaps this resembles Celan’s breath turn, but Bachmann defines her message in relation to His. This, too, haunts Malina.

***

Look, it has always been about the book. The nightmare. The world of monuments erected by masculine violence—the story Bachmann used to write herself into a lake, the edge of all land, a secret epistolary. Others have called this novel “an imaginary autobiography,“ but this seems too settled, too whimsical for the furious reckoning of this epistolary confrontation, this cavalcade of unsent letters to Hims.  

First published in 1971, Malina was part of what Bachmann called a cycle of “deathstyles.” When asked what drove her writing, she asserted an unshakeable belief in a Utopia she knew was impossible and yet necessary. There was a world she needed, a world evoked in her correspondence with Celan as well as her novel—the princess who promises Ivan she will write a beautiful book. 

The book is narrated by a nameless Austrian blond woman. The time is today. The place is Vienna. The narrator remains nameless throughout the book. Immediately, time becomes a site of contention and conflict, as the narrator questions the staging: “Today,” itself, is unclean, complicated by the fact that mail cannot arrive “today”: This is the first hint of how much unaddressed mail will be hidden inside this novel. The narrator adds: “Whoever has composed an intensely fervent letter only to tear it to shreds and throw it away knows exactly what is meant by ‘today’.”

Time turns and returns and rejects linearity in this novel; memory is unreliable, the narrator’s memory is continuously undercut in dialogues with Malina, who determines what her anxiety means, and in so doing, shapes her access to memory. Bachmann’s depiction of interiorized violence and gendered erasure illuminates how invisible violence gives rise to ghosts.

The unnamed female protagonist cannot write letters. She announces this at the outset, blaming her bad relationship to time. Her letters are lost in the present tense, unable to connect with a You who exists in the future. 

***

Most of Malina had been written by the time Celan died; only the phantasmagorical Princess of Kagran sections were added the summer of 1970, after Celan’s death. There is no evidence that Celan ever read the draft manuscript. There is also no reason to believe he did so. But there are rings which taste like meridians.

And there is a date, September 19th, when Bachmann’s narrator throws a ring into the Danube, a ring which the narrator says a man brought to her in the beginning. “He put on a whole horrible show about this ring,” the narrator says, to the point where she “could hardly wear the damn ring anymore. And once the ring was said to have lost its validity I would have gladly thrown it in his face, since moreover he hadn’t really given it to me at all, not of his own free will, I had pressured him for some confirmation, because no sign ever came, because I wanted to sign, and in the end I received the ring he kept talking about.” Since she cannot really throw the ring in his face, or junk it by his feet, the narrator is stuck with the irresolution. She wants “to give the ring some meaning”: 

I stood for hours on the bridge over the Danube, in the first wind of winter, then I took the little ring box out of my coat pocket and took the ring out of the box..... it was the 19th of September and I threw it into the Danube on that cold afternoon, while it was still light.

Each artwork has its January 20, its historical reference point which creates a connection—but Malina’s speaker cannot conceive herself without Him. And there are multiple Hims. Malina, for example, is the author of “an Apocrypha no longer sold in stores.” And Ivan feels like Celan to me. I suspect this because Ivan is the intended recipient of the unmailed letters which Bachmann hid inside the manuscript. He is the future, the land and the sea, the one who has come “to unlock vowels to their full resounding and recreate connections long since disrupted.” Ivan is her lodestar, the one who inflects longing, or teaches her what to want—and they want, together, “resurrection and not destruction”; they don’t touch each other in public, they merely reach into each other’s eyes furtively, assuming the power of that connection: “Ivan must first wash my eyes with his own, removing the images that landed on my retina before his arrival.”

But there is something awful in the narrator’s eyes that Ivan rushes to cover with some bright image, there is something the narrator knows or fears in herself that she cannot escape. It is seared into the way she sees the world. It is memory, or that which she claims not to remember. Another story stitched beneath the eyelids.

***

Celan’s poem, “Erinnerung an Frankreich,” was initially inscribed to Edgar Jené. But Celan changed the inscription to “f. D.”, his notation for Bachmann.

The You of the poem does not designate the dedication. The year does not designate the dedicatee. So what is the purpose of dedication? Is it a way of addressing, or mailing the letter to a particular reader at a point in time in the hopes that they may see themselves in the open Du? 

Unlike Bachmann, Celan seems committed to revocation. He revokes things—he takes back the ring, for example. I read these revocations as part of his unstable poetics of dedication, often changing the name of the dedicated or sending the same poem to different people in a letter, allowing them to read themselves into it. 

If his Du is never present—if his You is always located in the future—then these shifts make sense, theoretically. If the ghost is louder than the living, the You destroys time to reach it. 

***

Malina has its nightmares as well. Nightmares feel natural as one reads the scene about the narrator’s Nazi father, and the grand opera he created and oversees. In this miserable opera, the narrator,  wearing a Jewish coat like all the others, seeks Ivan, who is also the stranger: 

Among the many barracks I find him in the very last room, where he is waiting for me, exhausted, a bouquet of Turk’s cap lilies is standing next to him in the empty room, he is lying on the floor in his sidereal mantle, blacker than black, in which I saw him several thousand years ago. He sits up sleepily, he’s aged a few years, and his fatigue is great. He says with his earliest voice: Ah, at last, at last you have come.

In his earliest voice, the stranger comforts her by telling her to “think of the Stadtpark, think about the leaf, think about the garden in Vienna, about our tree, the princess tree is blooming…” He calls her back, somehow, into a different story, the beautiful book she intended to write for Ivan.

As for the princess tree, it is the Paulownia tomentosa, a showy ornamental introduced from East Asia which grows rapidly in disturbed areas, including steep rocky slopes. It is not a native plant to Europe; it is a foreigner. It is one of the trees that fills the space under the dome of Jean Daive’s walks and conversation with Paul Celan in the last years of Celan’s life. The leaves of this tree are used by Celan to make analogies for wisdom, for eternality, and it is difficult to not imagine a bit of Bachmann in them, difficult not to read a trail inside the ellipses of avoidance, the silence implied by a raised right hand, the gestures which mark conversation when Celan speaks of Bachmann.

“I will lie down next to Ivan and say: if you really want I will write for you a book which doesn’t yet exist,” the female narrator says. Ivan seems interested, though he expresses a sort of condition, or what he hopes from the book, namely, that it has a happy ending. 

***

The 19th of September is a date for throwing the ring back into the water of the Danube, or returning it to Him. When the narrator suggests that she didn't take the ring off her finger, my mind returns the image of the women who have lost fingers alongside rings, waiting for a man. Malina probes this—he questions the narrator about the ring—but one gets the sense that Malina is Bachmann's foil, he is the tool she uses to tell the narrator's story, since only a man wanting to know things gives those things validity or value. She cannot speak unless asked.

Let’s say there was a letter buried inside a novel which was a story about unmailed letters and lost lands. Let’s say Malina asks the narrator why all the women in her father’s opera are missing rings and ring-fingers, or how the narrator could be missing a ring since she told Malina that she could not wear rings on her finger or even around her neck. Let’s say Celan called himself Bachmann’s “half-father” in a conversation with Jean Daive. I stare at my mother’s photo, the rings scalding my head like a fever. One can notice the coincidence and still accept: there is no way Celan read this manuscript to see what the fathers did to the daughters buried inside it. One can accept yet disbelieve. 

***

After the unmailed September ring letter, the next letter Bachmann mails is dated October 4, 1951—a brief note mentioning a recent publication of Celan’s poems, a curt, professional letter signed “with many warm regards.”

On 30 October 1951, Celan responded to Bachmann’s short letter (or the one we know she mailed) at length. The letter’s tone is mature: “My dear Inge, it seems that this life is a series of missed opportunities, and it is perhaps better not to puzzle over them for too long, otherwise no words would ever flow.” He urged her to let go of “the frantically probing finger” that appeared between them—as if she had been the one who first raised it. He asks for her forgiveness and welcomes their being able to finally speak to each other. He goes to recount recent poetry details, mentions being back in Paris and finding it lonely, unmoored—a “gloom” undertaken “in the service of literature.”

Celan continues: “Sometimes the poem seems like a mask that only exists because the others need something from time to time to hide their sanctified, grotesque everyday faces.” And then he mentions the twice-blooming chestnuts, a refrain which crosses his letters to various women across time. 

There isn’t space to list all the women who loved Celan lost in Paris’ autumn chestnut trees—all the correspondences and poems in which he tells a lover the chestnut trees were hers. The mystique of Celan, strolling through Paris, offering to teach Jean Daive how to peel a chestnut, and adding, with a grin: “All chestnut trees are on the same meridian.” 

***

On November 10, Bachmann replies joyfully to Celan’s longer letter, to his openness, saying: “I do not know if you can sense that I have no one but you to strengthen my faith in the ’other,’ that my thoughts always search for you—not simply as the dearest person I have have, but also as the one who, no less lost than I, holds the fort in which we have hold ourselves up.” She goes on to describe her work at Rot-Weiss-Rot radio station—the room with its secretaries, the two old men, the chance to write her own radio show once in a while from the weekly reviews which come in. She is satisfied, and then she turns suddenly to face him: “Dear Paul,” she writes, “I know that you no longer love me today, that you no longer think about taking me in—and yet I cannot help still hoping, working with the hope of building a foundation for a life together with you, a foundation that could offer us a certain financial security, and that could make it possible for us to begin anew, whether over here or over there.” 

She is surprised by the enclosed poem (“Water and Fire”)—“you have overcome an associative compulsion and opened a new door. It may be your most beautiful poem.” She includes a Christmas parcel and an unmailed letter from November 3, 1951 in which she begs him to visit at Christmas and invites him to read for the spring conference of German Gruppe 47 in Germany. But this November of 1951 is the month when Celan meets Gisele de Lestrange, a French heiress and artist. There is no response to Bachmann in December from Celan.

***

As I draft the legal inventory of materials in my mother’s house, I do not pause before writing: “Box of heirlooms, human parts, and Romanian jewelry valued at $200,000….”

“I do not yet know whether I can simply entrust it to the postal service,” Bachmann told Celan in the unmailed ring letter….

“He is the only one I cannot kill, the only one,“ the female speaker says to Malina, when he tells her to let go of Ivan. “He is my life, my only joy, I can’t kill him…”

***

A different October—October 1957. After four years without contact, Celan and Bachmann bumped into each other at a conference in southern Austria. Everything resumed. He is married to Gisele; she is married to Hans Weigel. Despite his family, his commitments, her commitments, the world they can never quite inhabit together outside secrets, letters, poems, hotel rooms, the affair begins again. 

***

The final section of Malina begins with mail, with the mail delivery persons, with the narrator’s anticipation for letters withheld from her. The mailmen have done something terrible, or have failed to deliver something for which they are responsible—and they know this. “What we all owe these men remains to be said.” Describing what she calls the “Privacy of Mail,” the narrator confesses that she has been writing letters late at night without mailing these letters “which contained everything.” Although the letters are intended to stay quiet, the narrator sometimes reverts and leaves them where someone can see them out of “curiosity,” which she blames on her lack of consistency. 

The narrator admits the “inflammatory” quality of her letters—“this entire fire I have put on paper with my burned hand”—but water puts out fire. “Thou shalt seek in the stranger’s eye those who thou knowest to be in the water,” Celan wrote in the poem titled “In Egypt,” the one inscribed to Bachmann. 

When Malina asks if she doesn’t realize “how much trouble other people have often gone to because of you,” the narrator uses this idea of trouble—which exists in Celan’s letters to her—to address what he left out, to respond to Celan’s accusations, which she takes as his own invention of her: “They didn’t spare themselves the trouble of providing me with character traits either, they equipped me with stories, and even with money as well, so that I can run around and close and eat leftovers, so that I can continue to make do and so it won’t be too obvious how I am doing.”

“Who do you think stole the heirlooms?” my sister asks one night mid-pandemic, as the hospitals nearby swarm with sirens and patients. 

“How could I know for certain?” I reply. How could I prove any of this?

***

Scene after scene, room after room, dream after dream—I wake up drenched. I fall asleep covered in books, notebooks, failed explanations. There is the scene in Malina where the narrator and Ivan (or some stranger version of Ivan) meet in a bedroom; the conversation reads as if Bachmann is addressing Celan, recounting the edge of their conversations about monuments, and his fear of being held too high in her regard, only now it is Ivan who tells the narrator: “I can’t breathe where you place me, please not so high, don’t ever bring anyone else up here where the air is so thin, take my advice, learn your lesson!”

And it is the narrator who addresses Ivan in her mind, an unsent thought: “I didn’t say.: ….. who am I supposed to….But you can’t think that after you I’d..... I still prefer to learn every lesson for your sake. Not for anyone else.”

There will be no answer to the what-ifs left open between them. The beautiful book he wanted has been replaced by the book she’s written—the one in which he is what is beautiful, and they go without “that word…” 

***

What does it mean to write? What do we risk exposing of others in saying, in creating, in dreaming? How does the expectation of a response alter the speech act? 

“I would like to keep and preserve the Privacy of Mail,” Malina’s narrator tells the attorney, “But I would also like to leave something behind.” In this desire to leave an inheritance, Bachmann brings the unmailed letters into the book, disguised as her confusion, buried beneath dialogues, alternate personas, borrowed fairy-tales, and misappropriations. She is arranging her papers with an attorney, and she elects “for some things to belong to a certain person forever: A blue glass cube, particularly a small coffee cup with a green edge and an old Chinese good luck charm which depicts the heavens, the Earth, the moon, and nothing more.” The name of the person is enclosed on a separate sheet of paper, but not disclosed in the book. This tension between the enclosed and the disclosed as a facet of letters and mail and communication, including Bachmann’s desire that Celan should be able to read between her lines in their correspondence, plays out as a conflict, an undercurrent of personal address, and dances with Celan’s You, the way it is revised and read through time. 

***

One late night, during the pandemic, as I devour ring-stories and collect details about the missing heirlooms, my father texts me: "Please call." Given that the metallurgist's tone rarely wanders into urgency, I call him immediately, notebooks and papers scattered across my lap. The conversation is brief. He tells me that he cannot believe someone would steal the box. The theft has lead him to consider inheritance more broadly—what does it mean to leave one's life in a country? To bequeath one's bones to the soil? He has finalized his last will and testament. After being cremated, his bodily ashes will be buried in a small cemetery in Dublin, Ohio, next to those of his wife. But he has set aside money to burn his heart apart from his body. The ashes of his heart will be flown to Bucharest, to rest with those of his parents in Belu Cemetery. "I need to know some part of me cannot be stolen, Alina." 

There are splotches of dissolved ink on the notebook page from that night when I wept quietly, realizing the disaster my questions created for those whom I loved most.

***

The final stanza of Celan’s first untitled poem, published in 1963, “There was earth inside them…”, as translated by Pierre Joris, reads:

O one, o no one, o noone, o you:
Where did it lead, as it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig myself toward you,
and on our finger the ring awakens

No one is someone, I fear. No one remains, near.

***

To make an accusation—to say that I believe I know who took the box—would be to invoke the very language this essay questions. And yet, there is an interlocutor; there is one person who knows. There is someone who left my mother’s house with a quickening breath, condolences staining their cheeks, the costume of shared grief pinkening with sweat. I believe that my sister and I cannot know why, or we cannot explain it entirely. No one killed my mother. But someone robbed her ghost. The writer cannot forget. The statute of limitations expired on the claim I did not submit. My eye seeks the eye of the thief in the bloodlessness of the missing ruby. The writer warns you, my Du, the curse is just beginning.

***

The author acknowledges her ongoing dialogue with the following books, poems, and prose pieces: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, edited by Roberta Reeder and translated by Judith Hemschemeyer; Anna of All the Russians: A Life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein; Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, as translated by Philip Boehm; Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan by Jean Daive, as translated by Rosmarie Waldrop; Correspondence: Paul Celan & Ingeborg Bachmann by Celan and Bachmann, as translated and annotated by Weiland Hoban; Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, A Bilingual Edition by Paul Celan, as translated and annotated by Pierre Joris; Paul Celan: The Romanian Dimension by Petre Solomon; Collected Prose by Paul Celan, as translated by Rosmarie Waldrop; Homage to Paul Celan, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and G. C. Waldrep; "In Egypt" by Paul Celan, as trans. by Weiland Hoban; "Auf Hoher See" by Paul Celan, as translated by Pierre Joris; "A Few Wild Words" by Benjamin Fondane, as translated by Dan Solomon; "Literature as Utopia" by Ingeborg Bachmann, as translated by Douglas Robertson; "There was earth inside them.." by Paul Celan, as translated by Pierro Joris; "The Tale of the Black Ring" by Anna Akhmatova, as translated by Judith Hemschemeyer; Pierre Joris' blog post, "4 Poems by Celan," alongside the world of his extraordinary translation notes; finally, countless poets, writers, translators and Celanians who encouraged me to ask difficult, unanswerable questions while bringing poetry's uncertainty to bear on what cannot be said.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.