You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
Julia Hirsch’s Burned unfolds in the afterglow of survival. In postwar New York, a refugee sits at her cousin’s dinner table, haunted by memory, civility, and the scars of war. Between polite conversation and buried trauma, her past threatens to flare back into flame. Told with haunting restraint and formal precision, Burned is a story of class, endurance, and the uneasy grace of the living.
The haystack she slept under last night, an entire Citroen Traction Avanti just like her Uncle Jacque’s, turned into a sieve, splinters of windshield and windows scattered all over the road, everything reddish brown, fresh blood just hours ago, a twin-engine plane, its entire fuselage on fire, flames like arthritic fingers reaching to the bright blue sky, it’s July 3rd, 1940, she’s stuck in Portbou at the Spanish border with little Bellette and she’s ripped her stockings, her last pair. Oh my God, but no, she’s waiting in the anteroom outside Helen’s Park Avenue penthouse and the little black cloche with a whisper of veil she’s pulled out of her barely unpacked suitcase has settled on the rim of her left ear: at that address, the invitation can only have been for an elegant soiree.The door opens with the sound of water being sucked down a drain. “My poor darling- Jeanne– how- wonderful -to see- you – do- come- in,” Helen exclaims as warmly as she can even though she isn’t keen on those refugees who are oh so foreign, don’t you know, but she’s managed to pull her husband’s cousin who can’t be more than 35 to her 47, and her brat out of Europe just in time thanks to her uncle the financier with White House connections, and so she ushers Jeanne into her foyer crammed with original Mondrians. The sting of burned something makes Jeanne’s eyes tear and terror squeezes her chest as Helen, like a girl who’s messed up her first sauce bechamel, burbles, “Can you imagine, I scorched the soufflé Babs left for us, but it’ll be alright, just a nasty smell.” Brought back into the moment, barely grasping Helen’s words, Jeanne flares her nostrils, searching for a whiff of Fritzy’s Sobranies, but she’s lost the scent, he emigrated some twenty years ago, and now she’s a boarder in a West End Avenue apartment thanks again to Helen’s intervention, Bellete is in nursery school, her husband-of-the short-fat-fingers-nothing-like-Fritzy’s-long-slim-ones shot dead by a strafing Stuka somewherebetween L’Epinay and Frétancourt. “Do follow me,” Helen continues, as if addressing a new hire. “We’ll be in the kitchen, you won’t mind leftovers, will you, it’s just the two of us, Fred’s playing bridge with the Carlisles, it’s his Sunday night thing, I had him change from Fritzy a few years ago, didn’t want anyone to think he was a Kraut.” And then it dawns on Jeanne, it’s Helen’s crowd that voted in the quotas she needed help to get around. But once the shoe was on the other foot, well not exactly but something like it, sitting around the big table set with the best of everything on a Sunday afternoon in Antwerp, when Jeanne was a sixteen-year old kitten, and Fritzy, her 25 year-old letch of a cousin, put his hand on her knee under the table to begin his ascent, just as Helen, his American fiancée, rich as Croesus but with the face of dried prune and a figure to match, leaned down to pick up the lacy serviette that had slipped off her lap and under the table spots Fritzy’s hand spread across Jeanne’s thigh, Jeanne’s hand gripping his so hard her knuckles show white but they’re as cozy as a teddy-bear tea party. “Bitch,” Helen mutters , and Jeanne, taking the word for a sneeze, utters the sweetest “Bless you” in her best school-girl English. Fritzy, caught in the act, sputters a little cough. “It’s the Sobranies,” he says hoarsely, but no one pays attention, all the family cares about is that Fritzy, their favorite underachiever, has just come back from New York with a dried-prune-crossed -with – celery- root heiress to whom he has plighted his troth, assuring himself life insurance, as it were, and is about to go back to settle down. “And for your information,” Helen’s voice has turned school-smarmy as she walks over to the stove where the sunken soufflé languishes in a Pyrex dish, “you should have called the me, once you were settled in, that’s how we do things in the States, the newcomer takes the initiative.” Jeanne ignores the reproof. It’s Fritzy’s hand on her leg she’s thinking of, who ever heard of Fred but she doesn’t know if it’s the remembered pleasure she’s looking for or the tickly shame of having had that celery root find them out. Once again she’s on the road between here and there and all she’d going to get is reheated leftovers in the kitchen on a Sunday night and Fritzy who is now Fred is nowhere. Neither is she.
