The Tongue Set Free, page 29
Filled with the new prohibition, I went back home to Burton Road; I couldn’t ask Father anymore. But I did report to Mother what had happened; I associated the destruction of Sodom with the pork; she smiled when I declared that the bacon the governess ate at breakfast was prohibited to us; she merely nodded without contradicting me, and so I assumed that she, albeit a woman, did belong “to us,” as Mr. Duke would have put it.
Shortly thereafter, the three of us, Mother, the governess, and I, were having lunch in the dining room. There was a reddish meat that I didn’t recognize; it was very salty and tasted very good. I was encouraged to have another piece and I enjoyed eating it. Then, Mother said in an innocent tone of voice: “It tastes good, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, very good. Will we have some more soon?”
“That was pork,” she said. I thought she was making fun of me, but she was quite serious. I started feeling nauseated, I went out and vomited. Mother paid no attention. She didn’t care for what Mr. Duke had done, she was determined to break the taboo; it worked, I didn’t dare let him set eyes on me after what happened, and this form of religious instruction was done with.
Perhaps Mother wanted to be the sole authority, proclaiming shalts and shalt-nots. Having made up her mind to devote her life entirely to us and take full responsibility for us, she tolerated no other deep influence. From the writers whom she read, as others read the Bible, she drew the assurance that the individual development of the various religions didn’t matter. She felt one had to find what was common to all of them and go by that. She distrusted anything leading to the acute and bloody fight of religions against one another, and she believed that it diverted attention from the more important things that people had to master. She was convinced that people were capable of the worst things, and the fact that they still fought wars was an irrefutable proof of how greatly all religions had failed. A short while later, when clergymen of all faiths were parties to blessing the weapons with which people who had never before seen each other were battling one another, her repugnance grew so powerful that she couldn’t altogether hide it from me—even in the Vienna period.
She wanted to safeguard me against the influences of such authorities at any cost and she failed to realize that she thereby made herself the ultimate source of all proclamations. The force of supreme prohibitions was now with her. Never prey to the insanity of viewing herself as something godlike, she would have been very astonished had someone told her how outrageous her undertaking was. She had dealt swiftly with Mr. Duke’s wretched affectations of secrecy. But it was far more difficult holding her own against Grandfather. His authority was shaken by his curse, and the fact that it had worked, as he was forced to believe, robbed him of his assurance towards us. He truly felt guilty when he kissed me and he pitied me for being an orphan. The word struck me as awkward whenever he used it, for it sounded as if Mother weren’t still alive; however, he said it—which I didn’t realize—against himself, it was his way of throwing up his guilt at himself. His fight with Mother over us was only half-hearted, and if she herself hadn’t suffered from her own guilt she would have won the fight very easily. Both of them were weakened, but since his guilt was disproportionately greater, he got the worst of it.
All authority concentrated in her. I believed her blindly, it made me feel happy to believe her, and as soon as anything consequential and crucial was at stake, I awaited a pronouncement from her as others one from a god or his prophet. I was ten when she placed the second great taboo upon me, after that much earlier one against killing, which was imposed by Grandfather. Her taboo was against everything connected to sexual love: she wanted to keep it hidden from me as long as possible and convinced me that I wasn’t interested in it. I really wasn’t at the time, but her taboo kept its force during the entire Zurich period; I was almost sixteen and still refused to listen when other pupils spoke about the things that most preoccupied them. I wasn’t so much repelled—at most, occasionally and only in particularly drastic circumstances—I was “bored.” I, who had never known boredom, decided it was boring to talk about things that didn’t really exist; and at seventeen, in Frankfurt, I still could astonish a friend by claiming that love was an invention of poets, it didn’t exist, in reality everything was totally different. By that point, I had grown distrustful of the blank-verse poets, who had dominated my thoughts for so long, and I was, so to speak, extending Mother’s taboo by letting it include “high” love.
While this taboo soon crumbled in a natural way, the prohibition against killing remained unshaken. It was so greatly nourished by the experiences of an entire and conscious life, that I would be incapable of doubting its justification, even if I hadn’t already acquired it through my murder attempt at the age of five.
The Mouse Cure
At the sight of a mouse, Mother grew weak and lost all control. No sooner had she perceived some whooshing thing than she screamed, interrupted what she was doing (perhaps even dropping an object she was holding), and ran off with a shriek, whereby, probably in order to avoid the mouse, she moved in the strangest zigzags. I was used to this; I had experienced her carryings-on as far back as I could remember; but so long as Father was around, it didn’t affect me very deeply, he liked being her protector and knew how to calm her down. In the twinkling of an eye, he had driven out the mouse, he took Mother in his arms, picked her up, and carried her about the room like a child, and he found the right words to soothe her. While doing so, he made—I might almost say—two different faces: a serious one, to acknowledge and share her terror, and a merry one, promising to clear up the terror and perhaps also meant for us children. A new mousetrap was then positioned cautiously and ceremoniously, he first held it up before her eyes, praising its efficiency, lauding the irresistible piece of cheese in it, and giving several demonstrations of how securely it closed. Then, as swiftly as it had come, everything was over. Mother, standing on her own feet again, laughed and said: “What would I do without you, Jacques!” Another sigh came: “Ough! How stupid of me!” And once the “Ough!” had been emitted, we recognized her, and she was her normal self.
In Vienna, when no father was with us anymore, I tried to assume his role, but that was too difficult. I couldn’t take her in my arms, I was too small, I didn’t have his words, I didn’t have the same effect on the mouse as he, the mouse shot back and forth in the room for a fairly long time until I got rid of it. So first of all, I tried to shoo Mother into another room; my success hinged on her panic, which wasn’t always equally intense. Sometimes she was so panicky that she actually remained in the same room as the mouse, then I had an extremely difficult time of it, for her own zigzagging crossed that of the mouse, both scurried back and forth for a while, head on, as though they couldn’t stop frightening each other, in opposite directions, and then head on again, a senseless confusion. Fanny, already familiar with the screaming, came from the kitchen with a new mousetrap, that was her job, and it was actually Fanny who hit upon the effective words, which were always addressed to the mouse: “Here’s some bacon for you, you stupid animal! Now get caught!”
Instead of explanations, which I asked Mother for afterwards, I only got stories about her girlhood: how she used to jump on the table, refusing to come down; how she infected her two elder sisters with her fright, and how they used to run around the room and all three of them once even fled up on the same table, standing there together, while a brother said: “Should I join you up there too?” There was no explanation; she didn’t try to find one, she wanted to change back into the girl she used to be, and her only chance to do so was the appearance of a mouse.
Later, in Switzerland, whenever we moved into a hotel room, her first question to the chambermaid, whom she buzzed up for that very purpose, was whether there were any mice here. She was never satisfied with simple answers, and asked a few catch-questions to ferret out contradictions. She particularly had to know when the last mouse had been seen in the hotel, on what floor, in what room, how far away from our room, for it seemed inadmissible that any mouse had ever shown itself in this one. It was odd how this cross-examination put her mind at ease: no sooner was it done than she settled in and unpacked. She walked up and down the room a couple of times with an expert air, made her remarks about the furniture, then stepped out on the balcony and admired the view. She was once again sovereign and self-confident, just as I liked her.
The older I grew, the more ashamed I was about her transformation when the fear of mice came over her. In the Yalta period, I made a carefully thought-out effort to cure her. She came to visit me twice a year and spent a few days in the Yalta. She was given a nice, large room on the second floor, and she never failed to put her questions to the Herder ladies, who didn’t have a totally clear conscience on this head; nor were they fit for cross-examination, they were evasive, humorous, and so unserious about the matter that Mother, in order to sleep peacefully, started in on me and interrogated me for something like an hour. This was a bad beginning, since I had so greatly looked forward to seeing her and there were so many things I wanted to talk about. Nor did I care for my mendacious replies, which served to calm her. As an early admirer of Odysseus, I did like completely invented stories in which someone turned into someone else and concealed himself, but I didn’t like short-winged lies, which demanded no creativity. So once, right after her arrival, I tackled the matter à la Odysseus and, making my mind up on the spot, I said I had seen something wonderful and just had to tell her about it: A gathering of mice had taken place up in my small garret. They had arrived in the light of the full moon, lots of them, at least a dozen, and they had moved about in a circle and danced. I had been able to observe them from my bed, I could see every detail, it was so bright, it had really been a dance, in a circle, and always in the same direction, not as fast as they usually moved, more of a slogging than a scurrying, and there had been a mouse mother, who had held her young in her mouth and joined in the dancing. It was hard to describe how dainty the little mouse had looked, sticking halfway out of her mouth, but I had had the impression, I said, that the mother’s circular motion with the others had not been pleasant for him, he had started squealing woefully, and since the mother was spellbound by the dancing and didn’t want to interrupt it, the young had kept squealing louder and louder, until the mother, hesitantly, perhaps even reluctantly, had stepped out of the circle and begun nursing the child, a bit away from the dancers, though still in the moonlight. It was too bad, I told my mother, that she hadn’t seen it herself, it was just like with human beings, the mother offers the baby her breast, I had forgotten that these were mice, they were so human, and it was only when my eyes fell on the dancers that I realized they were mice; but not even the dancing had had anything mouselike about it, it was too regular, too controlled.
Mother broke in and hastily asked whether I had spoken to anyone about it. No, of course not, you can’t tell people a thing like that, why, nobody would believe it, the tenants of the Yalta would think I had gone crazy, I would most certainly take care not to tell them. “Well, then you know how bizarre your tale sounds. You dreamt it.” But, despite the doubts she voiced, I noticed she would have preferred the story to be true. She was deeply affected by the suckling mouse-mother, she asked about details, over and over again; the more precisely I answered, the more I got the feeling that the thing was really true, even though I was quite aware that I had made the story up. She felt the same way, she warned me not to tell anyone else in the house about it; the harder I insisted that I hadn’t dreamt it, and the more evidence I cited, the more important it seemed to her that I shouldn’t say anything about it; she told me to wait until the next full moon and see what would happen. I had also described the dance as lasting until the moon had floated so far away that it no longer shone into my room. But the mouse-mother hadn’t rejoined the circle of dancers, she had been busy with her offspring for a long time, cleaning it, not with her little paws, but with her tongue. The instant the full moon had stopped pouring into the garret, all the mice had vanished. I had promptly switched on the light, I said, and carefully inspected the area on the floor, where I then found mouse droppings. That had disappointed me, I said, for the dance had been so solemn; human beings would certainly not simply let themselves go on such an occasion.
“You’re being unfair,” she said, “that’s just like you. You expect too much. Mice aren’t people, after all, even if they do have a kind of dancing.”
“But the way she nursed her young, that was human.”
“That’s true,” Mother said, “that’s true. I’m sure it wasn’t the nursing mother who let herself go.”
“No, it wasn’t her, the droppings were in other spots.” With these and similar details, I cemented her belief. We agreed to keep the matter to ourselves. She told me to be sure and report to her in Arosa at the next full moon.
That did away with my mother’s fear of mice. Even in later years, I was careful not to admit I had invented the whole thing. She tried to shake my story in many different ways, such as by mocking my imagination, which had fooled me, or by worrying about my mendacious character. But I stuck to my guns, insisting that I had seen exactly what I described, albeit only that one time. No full moon ever brought the mice back; perhaps they had felt spied upon in my garret and had moved their dance to a less vulnerable area.
The Marked Man
After supper, which we ate together at a long table on the lower floor of the house, I sneaked into the orchard. It lay off to the side, separated by a fence from the actual grounds of the Yalta; we only entered it as a group during the fruit harvest, otherwise it was forgotten. A rise in the ground concealed it from the eyes of the house tenants; no one suspected you were there, you weren’t looked for, even calls from the house sounded so muffled that you could ignore them. As soon as you had slipped unnoticed through the small opening in the fence, you found yourself alone in the evening twilight and you were open to any mute event. It was so nice sitting next to the cherry tree on a small rise in the grass. From here, you had a free view of the lake and you could follow the inexorable changes in its color.
One summer evening, an illuminated ship appeared; it moved so slowly that I thought it was standing still. I looked at it as though I had never seen a ship, it was the only one, there was nothing outside it. Near it, there was twilight and gradual darkness. It was radiant, its lights formed their own constellation, you could tell it was on water by the painless calm of its gliding. Its soundlessness spread out as expectation. It shone for a long time, without flickering, and took possession of me, as though I had come to the orchard for the sake of that ship. I had never seen it before, but I recognized it. It vanished in the full strength of its lights. I went into the house and talked to nobody; what could I have talked about?
I went to the orchard evening after evening and waited for the boat to come. I didn’t dare entrust it to time; I was hesitant to place it in the hands of the clock. I was certain it would reappear. But it changed its time and did not reappear, it did not repeat itself, remaining an innocent wonder.
* * *
A sinister figure among the teachers was Jules Vodoz, whom we had in French for a while. I noticed him even before he came to us: he wore a hat wherever he was, even in the hallways of the school, and he had a somber, frozen smile. I wondered who he was, but I was afraid to ask others about him. His face had no color, it looked prematurely aged, I never saw him talking to another teacher. He always seemed to be alone, not out of arrogance, not out of scorn, but in some dreadful remoteness, as though hearing and seeing nothing around him, as though somewhere far away. I called him “the mask,” but kept the nickname to myself, until he showed up in class one day, the hat on his head, our French teacher. He spoke—always smiling—softly, quickly, with a French accent, looked none of us in the face, and he now appeared to be listening hard into the distance. He paced nervously up and down, his hat made him look as if he were about to leave any minute. He stepped behind his desk, took off the hat, reemerged, and stood in front of the class. In the upper part of his forehead, he had a deep hole, which the hat normally covered. Now we knew why he always wore it and didn’t like removing it.
The interest of the class was aroused by that hole, and we soon ferreted out who Vodoz was and what the hole was all about. He knew nothing about our investigations, but he was marked, and since he no longer concealed the hole in his forehead, he must have assumed that we knew about his background. Many years ago, he and another teacher had taken a class on an outing in the mountains. An avalanche had plunged down and buried them. Nine pupils and the other teacher perished, the rest were dug out alive, Vodoz with a serious injury on his head; it was doubtful whether he would survive. The numbers may have changed in my memory, but there can be no question that it was the worst disaster ever to strike the school.
Vodoz lived on with that mark of Cain, teaching at the same school. How could he ever have dealt with the issue of responsibility? The hat, shielding him from curious gazes, did not shield him against himself. He never took it off for long, he would soon get it from his desk and put it on again and then go along his path of a driven man. The sentences he used for instruction were distinct from him, as though someone else were speaking them, his smile was his horror, that was he. I would think about him, he entered my dreams, I listened like him to the approach of the avalanche. We didn’t have him as a teacher for long, I was relieved when he left us. I think he often changed classes. Perhaps he couldn’t stand being with the same pupils too long, perhaps they all soon turned into victims for him. I sometimes met him in the hallways and I greeted him cautiously, he didn’t notice, he noticed nobody. None of my classmates ever spoke about him, he was the only teacher whom no one tried to mimic. I forgot him and never thought about him again; his image resurfaced before me only with the illuminated ship.
