Tableaux Vivants: Witness by Carol D. Marsh
Tableau vivant: French for “living picture;” an enactment, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, of historical moments, stories or paintings; a scene—sometimes elaborately staged—with one or more stationary, silent and costumed actors. Observers take in the tableau at leisure, assessing the entire scene while noting details and finding symbols as they become apparent.
Tableau Vivant One: The Offering
A man extends his hand toward two children and a woman.
Tableau Vivant Two: The Ceremony
A man holds aloft a cup brimming with dark liquid.
Tableau Vivant Three: The March
Marchers in ragged formation, five and six abreast.
Tableau Vivant Four: The Writer
A woman sits in a chair, typing on a laptop.
The Offering
The man is young and sturdy, he wears a soldier’s uniform. The children and woman are terribly thin, they’re dressed in rags.
The Ceremony
The figure holding the cup is the main celebrant in a ritual, his garments flowing around him, his pose imbued with spiritual power.
The March
The marchers are white men of varying ages. Weaponry is openly displayed, though it’s not cocked and ready.
The Writer
The woman is the daughter of the soldier in Tableau One: The Offering.
The Offering
My father holds out a chocolate bar to the two small children. They’re not reaching for it. Instead, they clutch at the woman who is their mother, arms entwined about her legs. She also does not reach for the chocolate bar. There are others, close and not so close, who silently look on through the chill, the grey, the rain and cloud.
The Ceremony
The celebrant is flanked by other men, acolytes dressed in ritual garb much like his, though not so dramatically elaborate. One has folded a cloth of gold over his arm, two others stand ready with silver implements required for other parts of the ritual. All eyes are fixed upon the upraised cup.
The March
Guns and ammo belts catch and cast the sunlight. Heavy boots seem to strike the ground forcefully. Masterfully. The men’s expressions are wary and defensive and they seem both aware and disdainful of the crowds lining their route.
The Writer
I sit in what I call my writing chair, an Ikea recliner that pushes back to just the right angle for ease of typing on my laptop. On a small table next to me are a cup of tea on a mug warmer, a ramekin containing a handful of mixed nuts, and a manila folder.
The Offering
The others in the scene might be skeletons except that eyes burn fiercely in sunken faces. They’re dressed in rough, striped uniforms that may or may not be complete because an extra-long shirt must do when one has not been issued pants. Some of them are lying on the ground, some are standing close by. All eyes, including those of the kids and their mother, are fixed upon the chocolate bar in my father’s hand.
The Ceremony
Everything about the ritual is meant to inspire awe and a feeling of transcendence. The congregants, clothing shabby in comparison to the celebrants’ robes, stand quietly, watching. They know this solemn ceremony. They, like the priest and his acolytes, closely watch the cup held aloft.
The March
In the otherwise uniform grouping, one man is notable. He’s older than many in the ranks, his thin face lined and hardened. Like the other men, he’s dressed in camouflage. Unlike the other men, his eyes dart behind narrowed lids, back and forth as though he’s on army patrol in dangerous enemy territory. The military fatigues he’s wearing, the boots on his feet, the gun he’s carrying and the ammo belt at his waist, all speak of a man certain of attack and well prepared for it.
The Writer
I can’t get the scene out of my head: my father, 21 years old, standing in the midst of horror unimaginable and the best he can think to do is give the kids some chocolate.
The Offering
My father was twelve when he fainted, tumbling from his seat in the church pew one hot and humid summer Sunday. His over-indulgent mother took him to their doctor, who said my father was too fat and must lose weight or risk damaging his heart. For the rest of that summer, Dad used to say, he ate only bread and water. Even if it were not only but mostly bread and water—or even bread and water for one meal a day—that summer inscribed its hunger into bone and sinew of the child he was and the man he became. As long as I knew him, he rarely sat down to a meal without his conversation including plans for the next.
And this is the man who reaches into his pocket to fish out the chocolate bar he’d made sure to save for later because he didn’t know when he’d have time for lunch. He offers his next meal to two desperate children, believing it to be an act of kindness.
The Ceremony
These participants believe the fluid in the cup has divine properties. They’re deemed worthy to drink of it in this ritual by virtue of their induction into the priestly class. The fluid represents blood.
The March
These marchers are convinced of their ultimate right to power, a divine right granted because of the color—or relative lack of it—of their skin. They’ve used this power to enslave, they’ve believed it permits them to hate, deride, and wish death upon others. And so the tableau representing Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2018 echoes with their chant: “Jews. Will not. Replace us.”
The Writer
My father never told me about his two trips to Buchenwald, both within a month of when it was first liberated by a division of the United States Sixth Army. The first time, he brought out the family of a Polish general. The second time, he took photographs and wrote a report on Ilse and Otto Koch, the fiends who ran the concentration camp. I found out about this several years after his death in 2006, when my sister told me she’d once read a story he’d written about that first trip. Since then, I’ve searched his files for what he wrote but have only found one manila folder containing notes in his nearly illegible handwriting, typed outlines of his memories and research, the first page of the story, and a few copies of letters asking various governmental departments for information about Buchenwald or reports he wrote.
The Offering
What my father doesn’t know is the children and their mother have learned to fear uniformed men. His American military garb, usually a guarantee of respect and trust, looks no safer to their traumatized eyes than does a German one. What he doesn’t know is that German soldiers have used chocolate bars to lure Jews from home and family and into death, or, failing death, semi-starvation, disease and a living nightmare. So he’s perplexed they seem not to understand he’s there to save—to liberate—them. He wonders at their shrinking back from him and the candy. He wants to see them gleefully stuff the sweet into their mouths. He needs to feel he’s done something good by bringing chocolate into hell.
The Ceremony
The liquid in the priest’s cup is made from the cacao pod. It’s a powerfully bitter and mood-altering brew, which is why in Mesoamerica during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries it’s both currency and divinity. The ceremony includes brewing the chocolate beverage, pouring it into the cup, and, after offering it to the gods, its consumption by the human sacrifice just prior to death. What the priest doesn’t know is that hundreds of years later this bitter drink will be transformed by sugar and fat into a mouth-watering delicacy used to lure sacrificial lambs into the train cars that will take them to Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the mouth of Hades itself.
The March
What the marchers don’t know is that one of their ranks will drive his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring several and murdering Heather Heyer. They don’t know Heather, who is attending the counter-protest out of what her friends and family will later say is a passionate sense of justice and fairness. The marchers don’t know that Heather will be understood posthumously as having gladly become the sacrificial symbol of what confronting hatred might cost.
The Writer
Honestly, I don’t know what my father was thinking when he tried to get two kids to take a chocolate bar. I don’t actually know what was important to him in that moment. Maybe it wasn’t needing them to want the chocolate. Maybe he needed to gain some modicum of control in a situation shockingly out of his control. Certainly, what he saw, smelled and heard must have blasted from the core of his being any knowledge he thought he had about goodness in this world and God’s place in it. Although what certainty can I have? Perhaps most of what I write is what I would think, what I would want, what I would see, what I would feel had I been the one sent to Buchenwald to liberate a Polish mother and her children.
The Offering
If I were directing the staging of this tableau, I’d tell the actor playing my father to show many emotions on his face. Horrified pity for the emaciated figures before and about him. Anger at the camp’s architecture in all its unimaginable cruelty. Disbelief that any human would choose to treat other humans with such calculated abuse. Anguish because he’s walked past dead bodies stacked like cordwood to reach these innocents, he’s smelled burned human flesh in the air. I’d bathe the entire scene in bleakness. The lighting, the colors of the costumes, the skin hanging off bones, the stacked bodies, the run-down buildings, the ovens in which humans burned, and the sky above, all would be grey, grey and more grey.
The Ceremony
If I were directing the staging of this tableau, I’d find a tall, graceful man to play the main celebrant. His haughty face should barely register the existence of his fellow participants, let alone those in the congregation or the one to whom he’s about to offer chocolate and then kill. I’d tell this actor he must found his acting upon an unshakable certainty of divine right and infallibility. I’d remind him he has given himself the power to choose death for others and therefore believes he’s incorruptible, and the elite of his race to be one step below the gods. I’d light the scene brightly under a blue sky and a hot sun. No shadows. The colors would be so vivid as to hurt the eye.
The March
If I were directing the staging of this tableau, I’d concentrate on one marcher, the thin-faced man. He would be slightly isolated yet part of the mass, he would need to emit an aura of sinister calm. I’d tell the actor portraying him to assume an expression of arrogance, evidence of a sense of inherited superiority he refuses to doubt. I’d remind him he must act as though he either cares little about, believes fabricated, or celebrates the myriad stories, photographs, witness testimony, news articles, books, and letters from Nazi Germany and Holocaust survivors. I’d tell him to dig deep, method-acting style, to a very cold place in which he’s buried an existential insecurity so frightening he’s layered it over with decades of lies he’s told himself and sought from others. I’d tell him his greatest fear, unconscious though it may be, is that this insecurity will surface one day to betray all he believes. I’d recreate the light of an August day in Charlottesville, with marchers, onlookers, and watchful dead all together under a hot, indifferent sun.
The Writer
In my mind these tableaux exist as though they occurred simultaneously—my father’s futile offering to desperate children, a death ritual with chocolate as sacred purifier, marchers certain of their ordained rights, and me in despair—though of course they’re separated by centuries and lifetimes. Central in them all is my father, forever mute in this story except for the few pages I’ve found, and my visualization of him offering up his last hope for lunch in a moment of ridiculously inadequate sacrifice.
And so my beloved father offers a chocolate bar to a mother and her children who have lived too long in hell to recognize or trust their liberation when it stands before them. Chocolate, once again bathed in blood, the means to either tempt or free them. Or both. How do they know? Who can know when men have marched in what is believed to be righteous power but is, finally, indicative only of their own moral demise? How do we know, when one race’s moral demise is another’s destruction and terror? Who will take a drink and die?
Tableaux Vivants
Imagine: A soldier offers a chocolate bar to two starving children and their starving mother. Around them, the watchers: a ritual suspended; men halted mid-stride; a woman with hands poised above keyboard. Witnessing.
Carol D. Marsh’s essays have appeared in Vassar Review, LAR, River Teeth, Chautauqua Journal, and others. She’s won the New Millennium Writings Nonfiction Prize, and Tuscon Festival of Books Nonfiction Prize, and is currently seeking representation for her researched memoir about having vantage sensitivity—better known as being highly sensitive.
10 October 2024
Leave a Reply