How to Smuggle a Treasure

MARTIN SHUSTER

We are everywhere surrounded by borders—invisible, invented, potentially dangerous, (yet) oftentimes malleable lines or limits. 

This is not a merely political point (although it is certainly and unavoidably one): we move between these borders constantly. From subject to object, noun to verb, mind to world, sleep to wakefulness, life to death. What I don’t want to say, however, is that our thoughts are a border, or at least not without some additional account of thinking or of borders. Think in this context of the great German philosopher, Hans Blumenberg, and his life work of developing a metaphorology: the idea that in exploring a theory of metaphors, we can, among many other things, show how there are “absolute” metaphors, metaphors that set the borders for what’s possible and impossible conceptually. Think here in this context of the claim, attributed to Jesus, that “the world is a bridge—pass over it, but do not build a house upon it.” What sort of world is this? What does it make possible and impossible? To register the force of these questions, just think of how this claim of the Jew, Jesus, comes to be filtered and modified through the centuries to the latter claim of another Jew, the 18th century Jewish mystic, Nachman of Braslav, who claims simply that, “the entire world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.”

In any case, I started thinking about borders when I learned of my mother’s diagnosis. I started to write—really, started trying to write—when she died. 

I write, but I feel like the writing itself is a border, lingering between the past and the present, its edges somehow sharp. That sharpness I think of as the future, but I worry that there’s no such thing, that it’s just the serrated edges of memory. I don’t really know how to finish the writing, or to think of what a finish would look like.

I am of course speaking of the borders between lives, the border between life (but there are also lives between borders, life between borders). 

The German Idealists, beginning most famously with Kant, distinguished between a boundary (Grenze) and a limit (Schranke), the former denoting something one can see past or even perhaps move past (as in a line between countries), the latter denoting something one cannot, a sort of limit that bars entry, a ceiling.

My bones were at first my mother’s bones. Separated only by time and space, they were at one point one—one organism, formed one from the other, bound to each other. That connection calls to each other still. But her diagnosis showed the limits of these claims: the bones couldn’t be further from each other even as her frail body pressed against mine, sagging with labored, cancerous air. Now it’s all a sort of phantom limb, ended, but incapable of being understood as ended, an annihilation surgical in its finality—almost divine—threatening to blot out all creation.

In Plato’s Apology, we are given access to some final thoughts on the final things by a remarkable mind. Socrates’s reflections on death, however, have puzzled commentators since antiquity. Faced with his death, Socrates claims that he has no fear of death because it is either like a dreamless sleep, in which case he embraces it (for who couldn’t use a good night of sleep?), or else it is a new adventure (and who wouldn’t want that?). Almost immediately, commentators point out that there are other options besides (not the least of which are the torments of an afterlife of punishment, quite familiar to the Greeks, who quite well knew Sisyphus and Prometheus).

I neither have an answer to this puzzle nor does the lack of such an answer worry me in the case of my mother. I am deeply suspicious that either this world or any world beyond operates according to something like the laws of algebra. If that were the case my mother would still be alive, while so many wicked and monstrous people would be a pile of ash. In another sense, though, the answer to this puzzle is quite simple: Socrates’s point is just a point about borders—either something’s there or something’s not, there’s something next or there isn’t. 

This most fundamental fact about borders presses down on all of us, at all times, in all places, without limit, an invisible force carrying the weight of the world, the universe—everything. The “possibility of impossibility,” in that clunky philosophical parlance from the black forest of Meßkirch. Each of us try to build something on this border: a small plot of land, a family, a dream, a life. But it’s a border unlike any border we have ever seen or will ever see—the only real border, or perhaps better: a border of only the real. I guess what I want to say is that what’s really at stake is not this border, which is indisputable, but the nature of this border. 

But this is an inquiry that’s easily avoidable, and perhaps unanswerable. In any case, maybe it’s the wrong kind of question, or not even an interesting kind. 

Perhaps to say it’s a question isn’t right either.

Nietzsche opens one of his most famous books by inviting his reader to “suppose that truth is a woman.” The line raises a range of questions, not the least of which revolve around Nietzsche’s alleged misogyny (I say “alleged” because there are scholars who claim that Nietzsche aimed exactly to draw attention to the misogyny of Western philosophy). I don’t have good answers to these scholarly questions either. Focus instead on the idea that Nietzsche is trying in his own way to ask the reader about their desires—or lack thereof—for truth. Put in this way, could the border between truth and lie be as serious as the one between life and death? 

I once spent half a year with my mother and father in Italy. Being political refugees, our path through the various borders involved was determined by the workings of the relief agencies involved: first, Austria, then Italy, then the United States. Before that, though, years of being hemmed in by the countless inner borders of the Soviet Union. Sponsored by a relief agency, my parents were left to fend for themselves in Italy, pushed to rent a place in the slums from the local mafia. 

Imagine that my mom is younger than I am now and forced to negotiate with the mafia. This memory is both mine and not mine, filtered as much by my mother’s retelling as my imagination and its limitations (gangster films, The Sopranos, and Dennis Lehane have set up tents on this border). 

My mom and the mafia are negotiating about the rent.

“You need to pay more.” I imagine this is said perhaps in English or some sort of slow Italian. In any case, my mother understands the point. My parents live on a fixed income. Paying more is impossible. My mom says so. 

There is a pause.

Then there’s the scene, true across all borders.

“We wouldn’t want anything to happen to your husband.” A knife is procured. 

What comes next, I have heard many times, and to imagine my mother, a petite woman in front of these gangsters is both easy and impossible.

“You do what you have to do, but even if you stab my husband, you won’t get any more, because we don’t have it. If we give you more, we won’t survive. And if you kill my husband, we also won’t survive. In either case, you’ll then get nothing, so just be happy with what you’re getting now.”

When she told this story, my mother always ended it with her commentary on it, which consisted of the Russian version of the expression that “you can’t get blood from a stone.” Note that a story is a border, and a commentary is a border around that. My sense is that the point of the commentary was always to show the necessity of some borders. My mom was not an idealist. She wasn’t going to drag anything out. She understood the mafia was going to be the mafia, but she wasn’t going to destroy herself or her family so that they could be a wealthier mafia. They may destroy her, but they’ll have to do that, and if they do, then they do. She drew a line, and forced them to draw a line.

That’s more than you can say for most people, at most times, across many borders. 

In my mother’s stories, truth was often a woman. 

The day is March 6, 1953. My mom is a little older than 3 years old. Stalin has just died. To register the full force of what’s happened, imagine the Soviet Union, a country wholly under the sway of communist propaganda, emerging ever slowly from the raw brutality of the Nazi onslaught, the war, genocide. Its great leader is dead. For most, it is something like the end of the world; black is everywhere, mourning is the law. Tears are omnipresent. But not in my great-grandmother’s house. My mom tells me that after my great-grandmother hears the news—and while others are weeping—she opens the drapes, sets the table with her fanciest white tablecloth, and prepares a feast. 

I had heard this story countless times from my mother. My mother’s admiration for my great-grandmother knew no boundaries. This sort of iconoclasm is something my mother embodied to her core. Note she remembered this scene even though she was scarcely over three. I think of it as some treasure that made its way from Romania to Poland to Ukraine to Austria to Italy to the United States. Its borders, aged by the brutality and genocide of world war, the terrors of the Soviet Union, the vicissitudes of emigration, and then the brutalities of American capitalism, nonetheless remained fixed even as all other borders shifted, realigned themselves. A treasure of infinite value, capable of crossing any border, destroying even the limitations of life in the face of death. 

Does it make sense to speak of my great-grandmother as having a desire for truth? Perhaps, especially if we set our sights on what’s false as a way of pointing towards what’s true. Think here of the way in which certain kinds of injustices give rise to forms of human suffering that suggest that the causes of those sufferings should not exist. My great-grandmother—like my mother—had a desire for the possibility of something more. 

That sensitivity towards injustice and the ability to speak truth to power was an irrevocable border for my mother. 

The Hebrew word for truth (אמת) comes from the root “aman”(אמן), meaning to stand or prop up (“amen” and its suggestion of “true” as the idea of confirmation of something here comes into focus). What’s striking is that some early uses of this root in Hebrew and in Near Eastern culture occur in a context where it means simply “to nurse” or “to parent.” There is here then the possible touch of a mother, a caress that builds, that forms, that nurtures something that will stand on its own, separate, but intimately related. Absent and present. From one thing, two—carried by a love that knows no boundaries or borders. 

Like a treasure smuggled across borders.