I stop, support myself on the banisters, and wait for my heart rate to drop. “I believe we should eat soon.”
FAMILY
People think the dead are preserved somewhere. People think their traces are inscribed on the universe. But it’s not true. What’s gone is gone. What once was is forgotten, and what has been forgotten never returns. I have no memory of my father.
He wrote poems. I haven’t read any of them. He wrote them on scraps of paper, he wrote them at the bottom of menus, and on envelopes, casually, for pleasure. Some he took with him, others he left lying, he kept thinking up new ones, and he knew it was all just a beginning.
It was at the university that he first learned he was a Jew; until then he had thought that kind of thing was as meaningless as a horoscope sign. His mother was Jewish, although she was a nonbeliever. Her grandfather had been a long-bearded trader from Bukovina.
He never went to lectures. A girl he had met through mutual friends said she was prepared to marry him. One afternoon there was a crowd. Men waved flags and their fists, he wanted to get a closer look, but a fellow student pulled on his sleeve and said it would be a better idea to disappear. He thought this was ridiculous. His father had been killed in the war, he was the son of a hero, what could happen?
When I was born, he was working in a factory, he had been expelled from university. The factory made things out of metal; what they were used for, he had no idea. One time two workers took him aside: they knew he was a saboteur, they said, but there was no need for alarm, they would cover for him. When he replied in astonishment that he’d always worked the hardest he could in the factory, they laughed and said they didn’t believe a word, nobody could be that clumsy. On the way home that day, he composed a poem in his head about the droning propellers of a plane whose pilot has nodded off for a moment and is dreaming of an ant climbing a stalk that’s trembling in the wind, which still carries the distant echo of the droning of a plane. Not bad, he thought, it has a rhythm and a simplicity; if things keep on this way, I’ll soon be able to have something printed. When he got home an official letter was waiting for him, asking him coolly to present himself at the railroad station with a change of clothes and a blanket.
Better for you to head for Switzerland, he said to my mother, I’ll follow as soon as I can. There’s an official there who was an admirer of my grandfather’s, he saw him playing Laertes. He’ll help you.
At first she didn’t want to go, but he talked her into it. It couldn’t be all that bad. He’d always had luck until now.
I don’t know what he looked like. There is no photo of his face.
My father’s father wasn’t even twenty. He survived the first year of the war, thousands of hours in churned-up mud, barbed wire, grenades, the whistling in the air, the flying shrapnel. When he got leave from the front and saw his wife and tiny son, they seemed like strangers to him. He survived for another year. During that time he became so accustomed to the idea of his own death that he no longer believed it could actually happen. But then a bullet hit him, boots trampled on him, and out of sheer force of habit he wondered how he would get out of it this time. He suffocated in the filth and never came back.
My father’s grandfather lived for the theater and never got cast in the right roles. Never Hamlet, but Laertes, never Mark Antony, but Cicero, never Romeo, but Mercutio. He never stopped telling his two sons and his two daughters about the sacrifices that must be made for art, but none of the children had any talent. As the years passed, he hoped for King Lear and Prospero. His older son died of the Spanish flu, his younger son married a Jewish girl, which he didn’t like, but he didn’t have the strength to fight it. The older daughter married a teacher, the younger daughter stayed resentfully at home and cooked for him and his wife.
He saw his first film. Pale figures rushed around on a white screen. He didn’t understand what everyone was laughing at, all he saw was ghosts, and the thought that they would now be able to watch people throwing cakes at one another’s faces long after they were actually dead struck him as horrifying. A little man with a mustache, a huge fat man, and a clown with his mouth turned down grotesquely — it’s the end of the world, he thought. It may still seem to exist, but it’s all an illusion, like these images.
From that day forward he never got out of bed again. Even the outbreak of war left him indifferent. When his son came in uniform to say goodbye, he managed to look as dignified as the situation demanded. After all, he wasn’t an actor for nothing.
My father’s great-grandfather was a doctor, though not a good one. He had only studied medicine because his own father had been a doctor. He had a small practice, a lot of patients died on him, except for those his wife could handle; she was more intelligent than he was. She often knew which cures worked. Then she died on him too. To have someone to look after the children, he married again. The new wife made him sad, and even more patients died.
Whenever he had the opportunity, he told people that when he was a young man, he’d met Napoleon. Actually all he’d seen was a coat billowing out over the rump of a horse, and a hand in a white glove. When he was finally able to settle down again, it occurred to him that perhaps the great commander had killed fewer people than he himself, the bad doctor, had. Then his second wife died too. His final years were completely happy.
The doctor’s father, also a doctor, had the gift of being able to calm the sick while he talked to them. Mostly he could guess what they were suffering from. He busied himself with Mesmer’s experiments and learned how to put a suffering patient into a magnetized sleep. When his son also became a doctor, he was delighted. His daughter would also have liked to study, she was intelligent and gifted, but he had to forbid it. To even things out, he found her a good husband, who worked hard and didn’t hit her. At the age of sixty, he went to bed, breathed out, and never came back.
A bullet cost his father a hand. He was dark-skinned, no one knew why, his mother had brought him up in poverty somewhere, all on her own. He became a soldier, because the recruiters thought a black man would be stronger than a white man. He marched a lot, was sometimes promoted, sired three children along the way, all of them white. Finally a bullet struck him in the back, he choked on his own blood, and never came back.
His father had gone to England, having signed on as a cabin boy for the crossing. He saved a little, and tried his hand at being a trader but didn’t have much luck. Once he fell into conversation with a young Frenchman who was visiting the stock exchange in London in order to write about it. The man was puny and thin, but sly, with eyes that captured everything like lightning and an intellect more powerful than any he’d ever encountered before. If you were like that, he thought, you could do anything, things wouldn’t be so hard and the world so full of resistance. As they said goodbye, he asked the stranger his name. Arouet, he replied, and immediately went on his way, because the man had bored him.
He never got over this encounter. He was tired. He still managed to open a little shop near Fleet Street that sold pitchers, keys, and odds and ends, and marry a woman he didn’t like, and father a child; it seemed to him that the strength for this had not been his but had come from the son, who was striving so uncompromisingly to arrive in the world. When the boy was born, he had dark skin, but he himself was white as snow, and so was his wife, which meant she’d cheated on him. He screamed, she cried, he roared, she swore, he called out to God, she did too, and with the last of his strength he pushed her away. His stomach was already hurting badly as he did this, a month later he was dead and never came back.