The Tattoo Artist: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  PART ONE - CITY OF COFFINS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO - GAN EDEN

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART THREE - BODY OF WORK

  PART FOUR - ON DISPLAY

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JILL CIMENT

  Copyright Page

  Acclaim for Jill Ciment’s

  THE TATTOO ARTIST

  “The clarity with which Ciment describes Sara’s illustrated body, tattoo by tattoo, is breathtaking—not a word is out of place.” — San Francisco Chronicle

  “There is nothing cliché; on the contrary . . . [Ciment’s] use of her tattoo story as an image for the processes of art is a success. That’s because it is more than an image.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Boldly conceived.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Art’s purpose and the relationships built around it are at the center of this sensual, exotic novel.” —The Miami Herald

  “A powerful allegory of the 20th century. . . . Ciment’s portrait of modernity is elegant, powerful and, ultimately, tragic.”

  —Newsday

  “A remarkable story with an artist’s touch. . . . Art history like no other.” —The Advocate

  “Ciment’s book is a frank and refreshing discourse on art and artifice, and the unexpected path of an authentic life.”

  —Colorado Springs Independent Review

  “A page turner. . . . One woman’s journey into the ‘heart of darkness’ and back, or perhaps beyond.” —Jerusalem Post

  “This is a beautifully written novel. Ciment transported me to another world where both art and dignity matter. Fantastic!”

  —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

  “Start to finish, The Tattoo Artist is rich in Ciment’s trademark wit, intelligence, and gorgeous prose. I shall not soon forget this story.” —Lynn Freed, author of The Curse of the Appropriate Man

  “Jill Ciment’s new novel, like her previous books, is beautifully written and reaches even beyond them as a stunning work of the imagination. I read The Tattoo Artist on one long plane ride, totally immersed and fascinated.” —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

  JILL CIMENT

  THE TATTOO ARTIST

  Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. Her books include two novels, Teeth of the Dog and The Law of Falling Bodies; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life. She has been awarded two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

  ALSO BY JILL CIMENT

  Teeth of the Dog

  Half a Life

  The Law of Falling Bodies

  Small Claims

  For Arnold

  PART ONE

  CITY OF COFFINS

  esterday, on the corner of Broadway and Fifty-seventh Street, a perfect stranger introduced himself to me and said, “I just want to tell you how very brave I think you are.” I was about to flee on foot (no small feat at my age), when the stranger qualified his statement, “I mean, you’ve done nothing to disguise yourself, you look just like your photograph in Life magazine. Desecrated.”

  Another time, another stranger came up to me in the lobby of my hotel and, without prelude or warning, touched my cheek. “How could you have done this to yourself?” the woman asked. “Please tell me it washes off.”

  The tattoos that most disturb people are the ones on my face. There’s no way of getting around them. There’s no way of asking me, “Ma’am, you think the Yankees will take the pennant?” or “Mrs. Ehrenreich, do you believe that Bauhaus furniture is coming back into fashion?” without the tattoos turning the cordial exchange into a mockery of chitchat.

  That is the point. That’s the reason for their existence.

  They begin on my cheeks and work their way down, covering every inch of me—my lips, tongue, throat, breasts, hips, thighs, even the soles of my feet. Though I didn’t actually do all the procedures myself (How could I have? The pain renders one insensible), I am responsible for their design; all except for the tattoos on my face. As for my facial tattoos, I am more than responsible; I am culpable. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and you don’t even know what my tattoos look like. They are not your usual crude sailor’s fare, though to give credit where credit is due, I did incorporate a certain garishness, a seaman’s vulgarity, into some of the imagery. Nor are my tattoos the intricately patterned signature of the Ta’un’uuans, the Michelangelos of South Sea tattooing, though once again, certain traditions have been alluded to. No, my tattoos, like all my art, are mine and mine alone, and herein lies my need to steel myself before revealing them to you. To have to endure one’s own art, to be covered by it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, seeing every flaw over and over again, or worse, every act of unnecessary bravado, is simply unbearable.

  My tattoos, like all the tattoos of my island, are a pictorial narrative, an illustrated personal history, though not necessarily a chronological one. Time as you know it, modern time with its clocks and calendars, has no place on my island. The location of each vignette is determined by the body, and how much pain a particular limb or bone or muscle can withstand, and how much agony, or pleasure, a particular event caused the subject. And this is where the true art of Ta’un’uu’s tattooing comes in. The artist must not only create a suitable image to embody a crucial ordeal, or victory, she must also find a suitable place for it on an ever changing, forever decaying canvas.

  To fully appreciate my story, you must view my tattoos in their entirety, front and back, every square inch of me at once, including the crumpled skin and sagging muscles upon which my tattoos are engraved. The islanders believe the way a body ages is as vital to the final design as the imagery. They believe that age is the final patina of art. This is why the modern world can’t bear to look at me. I mean, really look at me. They can ask, “Mrs. Ehrenreich, do you consider yourself a cargo cultist?” “Mrs. Ehrenreich, what does it feel like to be back in the modern world after thirty years as a castaway?” They can say, “Sara, we just want to tell you how very brave we think you are.”

  But look at me?

  No.

  CHAPTER ONE

  was born in 1902 on the Lower East Side, that open sore on the hip of Manhattan. My parents had immigrated to America the year before from a shtetl outside Warsaw. The Ta’un’uuans have taught me, however, that a journey never begins at the point of departure, but at the point of origin, and so I envision my parents, neither taller than five feet, my father’s face bewildered and terrified, my mother’s, arrogant and terrified, fleeing the pogroms of Russia for the pogroms of Rumania, Rumania for Budapest, Budapest for Warsaw, Warsaw for Antwerp, and finally arriving at a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. My parents were not only exhausted by the journey, they were stupefied. In the end, the only question that truly preoccupied them was one that, in my bohemian youth, I dismissed as greenhorn sentimentality, and now, in old age, is the only question I, myself,
ask: Where is home, and how do I get there?

  Like the children of most fresh-off-the-boat Jews, I attended the only school my parents could comprehend, let alone afford: a landsman’s quasi Hebrew school conducted in a cellar and lorded over by a succession of rod-wielding, self-appointed rabbis. My education consisted primarily of chanting Hebrew songs without having the least notion of, or reverence for, what I was singing.

  The islanders believe that language originates in song, and that the human throat is a musical instrument, a flute of flesh and blood, and that the breath reverberating through the flute is the soul, and that the music emerging from the flute is the spirit.

  Aside from a few deeply ingrained Hebrew songs, everything else has been lost to me from those years. I have, after all, been gone so long. The only keepsake I have is an ancient newspaper clipping, a gift from the archivist at the Yiddish Library who’d read about me in Life: it’s a 1916 “Bintel Brief,” the advice column of the Jewish Daily Forward, in which a letter of my father’s was printed.

  Dear Esteemed Editor,

  I hope you will advise me in my present difficulty. I come from a small town in Russia, where, until I was twenty, I studied the Torah, but when I came to America, I quickly changed. I was influenced by progressive newspapers, and became a freethinker and a socialist. But the nature of my feelings is remarkable.

  Listen to me: every year when the month of Elul rolls around, when the time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur approaches, a melancholy begins to eat at my heart, like rust eats iron. When I go past a synagogue during those days and hear the cantor singing, my yearning becomes so great I cannot endure it. I see before me the small town, the fields, the little pond, the yeshiva. I recall my childhood friends and our sweet childlike faith. My heart constricts, and I run like a madman till the tears stream from my eyes and I become calmer.

  Lately, I have returned to synagogue, despite the scorn of my freethinker daughter. I go not to pray to God, but to hear and refresh my aching soul with the cantor’s melodies. I forget my unhappy weekday life, the dirty shop, my boss, the bloodsucker. All of America with its hurry-up life is forgotten.

  What is your opinion of this? Are there others like me whose natures are such that memories of their childhood songs are sometimes stronger than their convictions? I await your answer.

  Respectfully yours,

  Benjamin Rabinowitz

  I offer you my father’s letter not to woo you with nostalgia, but because if there were an untouched square of skin left on my body, I would engrave it on my flesh.

  Jewish law forbids tattooing: Thou shall not make in thy flesh a scratch over the soul. But what if the Ta’un’uuans are right, and the soul is breath? Then aren’t the scratches left on my soul by my needles really just the moments when my breath caught, my voice cracked, unable to find song?

  By sixteen, I had become, in my father’s words, a freethinker, and by my own definition, a bohemian and an anarchist, a girl for whom religion and its trappings were irrelevant. To bring the point home to my parents, I would invariably light my after-dinner cigarette in the flame of the Sabbath candles.

  I was a seamstress by day, a waist maker, the eighteenth girl in a row of twenty at the windowless end of the warehouse. Shopgirls worked their way toward the light by seniority. By week’s end, my fingers would be so scratched and marred by the needles that one can’t attribute all the abrasions on my soul to the tattoos. But on Saturday nights, I’d don my shopgirl’s version of bohemian—a felt hat with purple plumage, a Gypsy skirt, and two immoral shanks of red stocking. My destination was Greenwich Village. The cultural gulf between the Lower East Side and Washington Square was probably greater than the one my parents had encountered when they left the steppes of Russia for Avenue D. At best, I’d covet a bench at the base of Stanford White’s arch, sharing cigarettes with versions of myself, gaudily feathered shopgirls in whose discontented stares one could just make out little compressed diamonds of ambition. At worst, I’d wander the square by myself, catching glimpses of what anyone could plainly see were the real bohemians— paint-splattered artists, mustachioed socialists, regal-necked poetesses arguing away while ash spilled from the gold tips of their cigarette holders. The schism between them and me in my red stockings and cheap plumage, seemed as impossible to surmount as that between the gods and man.

  For shopgirls like me, East Side Jews who spoke with guttural accents, the only lifeline out of workaday hell was the Educational Alliance, the center of Yiddish intelligentsia, a curious mix of night school, public forum, gymnasium, and revolutionary cells. The center had been a gift from a few philanthropic German Jews to their hardscrabble East European brethren. Sunday afternoons, young Zionists who could barely remember to water their mothers’ rubber plants took to the stage to call for the transformation of an arid desert into a Jewish Eden. Ex-yeshiva shopboys, for whom the threading of a sewing machine was a daunting task, called for a futuristic mechanized utopia on earth.

  My union, the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, bought blocks of tickets for the Alliance’s Sunday night lecture series: “Jews and the Graven Image”; “Is Marxism Scientific?”; “Revolution: If Not Now, When? If Not Us, Who?”; “The Jewish Themes of Ibsen.”

  One evening, an artist, an American Jew who had been educated in Zurich and Berlin, who had lived in Paris and Moscow, who spoke with intimacy about Picasso, Freud, and Trotsky as I might gossip about the girl at the next sewing machine, addressed us waist makers, and the boys from the Buttonhole Makers’ and Collar Makers’ unions, on the twentieth-century collision between art, the subconscious, and revolution.

  A giant of a man, he had to stoop to reach the lectern. He had shoulder-length blond hair that he tossed to make his points. In a buckskin jacket and red silk vest, he dressed, to my mind at least, like a cross between Buffalo Bill and what I assumed was a Parisian painter. He told us that the art of the future would be made by the proletariat, workers just like us, then described the squalor of our shop life in enough glorious abstraction that it actually seemed possible. He explained how our subconscious, the antechamber of our unconscious, held within its misty foyer all the symbols we’d ever need. He urged us to have faith that art, with its noble and redemptive powers, would use those symbols to provide our beleaguered souls with the metaphors by which we could transform our misery into meaning. And when the time was right, he insisted that art would even spur us into revolution.

  Did I believe him? A ragtag army of seamstresses and ex-yeshiva buchers advancing on Park Avenue brandishing needles and Symbolist paintings? What was the alternative? Fifty more years at a sewing machine? A tiny air shaft apartment facing a teenier one, my only view my neighbor’s life? Whimpers, moans, hacks, grunts, fits of coughing, fits of prayer resounding through the thin walls? On the Lower East Side, the unconscious was not the symbol-laden fog of Freud and art. The unconscious was sleep or, if it lasted long enough, death.

  Whatever doubts I had about his lecture I quickly quashed, as one might instinctively step on a dark shape in the periphery of one’s vision.

  When he climbed off the podium, I and a dozen other shopgirls surrounded him. He glanced down at us with bemused curiosity and teased us that his lecture would be followed by an impromptu quiz. He reached into the fringed pocket of his jacket and plucked out a gold cigarette case. Tapping his thumbnail on the tooled casing, he asked if any of us ladies would like to try a French cigarette? I was the only one to accept. I leaned into his lit match as defiantly as I leaned into the Sabbath flame. The rumor was that when he’d lectured at the Alliance the year before, he’d bedded only the prettiest of his admirers, comely girls with dreams as fragile as soap bubbles, girls who giggled at his rarefied allusions as others might nervously guffaw at a funeral. I wasn’t particularly pretty, and I never giggled.

  It would be easy to pretend that after thirty years among the islanders with their forthright sexuality, their worship of the body, I’ve lost all tolerance for the cur
tsies and bows, the feints and feigns of Western courtship. But even as a young woman, I detested coyness. Suffice it to say, when the other girls dispersed, it was I who followed him home, and I who seduced Philip.

  His portrait graces my left breast. It is the first tattoo I engraved on myself. The portrait, however, in no way resembles the face I kissed that night; an unlined, untested face of cavalier certitude that the future would be as easy to read as a palm. The face on my left breast is desecrated, pillaged of all illusions, and though it breaks my heart to admit it, it is also the weakest part of my design—the point on my flesh where my emotions exceeded my skill—and no amount of virtuosity can disguise that weakness. The face on my left breast is a living death mask, as far removed from the young Philip as I am from the girl I was.

  He lived in a refurbished livery stable on Washington Mews, refurbished with Carrara marble, Art Nouveau windows, Persian carpets, a Brancusi bronze, a gilt-framed Gauguin, and a collection of South Pacific masks. I was so ill educated, I didn’t even know enough to be impressed. I thought the masks were examples of modern art. I walked up to the Gauguin and asked if Philip had painted it. When he laughed and shook his head, his hair whipped against his throat. I was too embarrassed to ask anything else. Just to end my ungainly silence, I unbuttoned my blouse and put my own collateral on display. I could see how amused he was by my brazenness. I was hardly amused; I was astounded by my daring. I let him finish the job, undoing the buttons, eyelets, hooks, and laces that confined me. I was and I wasn’t a virgin. I’d had rudimentary sex the month before with a buttonhole maker on the Alliance’s tar roof. Afterward, the boy and I declared ourselves freethinkers and never spoke to each other again.