The Tongue Set Free, page 8
I believed them and didn’t think about how far it would be. When the time came, I leaned way out of the nursery window, so far out that I had to be held fast from behind. I was told that the procession was just turning the corner of Burton Road into Barlowmore Road and then moving away from us towards the cemetery. I peered my eyes out and saw nothing. But they so clearly depicted what could be seen that I finally perceived a light fog in the given direction. That was it, they said, that was it. I was exhausted from the long struggle and I accepted the situation.
* * *
I was seven years old when my father died, and he wasn’t even thirty-one. There was a lot of discussion about it, he was supposed to have been in perfect health, he smoked a lot, but that was really all they could blame his sudden heart attack on. The English physician who examined him after his death found nothing. But the family didn’t much care for English doctors. It was the great age of Viennese medicine, and everyone had consulted a Viennese professor at some point or other. I was unaffected by these conversations, I could not recognize any cause for his death, and so it was better for me if none were found.
But, as the years went by, I kept questioning my mother about it. What I learned from her changed every few years; as I gradually got older, new things were added, and an earlier version proved to have been “solicitous” of my youth. Since nothing preoccupied me so much as this death, I lived full of trust at various stages. I finally settled into my mother’s last version, making myself at home in it, cleaving to every detail as though it came from a Bible, referring anything that happened in my environment to that version, simply everything that I read or thought. My father’s death was at the center of every world I found myself in. When I learned something new a few years later, the earlier world collapsed around me like a stage set, nothing held anymore, all conclusions were false, it was as though someone were wrenching me away from a faith, but the lies that this someone demonstrated and demolished were lies that he himself had told me with a clear conscience, in order to protect my youth. My mother always smiled when she suddenly said: “I only told you that at the time because you were too young. You couldn’t have understood.” I feared that smile, it was different from her usual smile, which I loved for its haughtiness, but also for its intelligence. She realized she was smashing me to bits when she told me anything new about my father’s death. She was cruel and she liked doing it, thereby getting back at me for the jealousy with which I made her life difficult.
My memory has stored up all the versions of that account, I can’t think of anything I have retained more faithfully. Perhaps some day I can write them all down completely. They would make a book, an entire book, but now I am following other trails.
I want to record what I heard at the time and also the final version, which I still believe today.
The Florentins spoke about a war having broken out, the Balkan War. It may not have been so important for the British; but I lived among people who all came from Balkan countries, for them it was a domestic war. Mr. Florentin, an earnest, thoughtful man, avoided talking about Father with me, but he did say one thing when we were alone. He said it as though it were something very important, I had the feeling he was confiding in me, because the women, there being several in the household, were not present. He told me that Father had been reading the newspaper at his last breakfast, and the headline had said that Montenegro had declared war on Turkey; he realized that this spelled the outbreak of the Balkan War and that many people would now have to die, and this news, said Mr. Florentin, had killed him. I recalled seeing the Manchester Guardian next to him on the floor. Whenever I found a newspaper anywhere in the house, he allowed me to read him the headlines, and now and then, if it wasn’t too difficult, he explained what they meant.
Mr. Florentin said there was nothing worse than war, and father had shared this opinion, they had often spoken about it. In England, all the people were against war, he went on, and there would never be another war here.
His words sank into me as though Father had spoken them personally. I kept them to myself, just as they had been spoken between us, as though they were a dangerous secret. In later years, whenever people spoke about how Father, who had been very young, in perfect health, with no disease, had suddenly died as though struck by lightning, I knew—and nothing could ever have gotten me to change my mind—that the lightning had been that dreadful news, the news about the outbreak of the war. There has been warfare in the world since then, and each war, wherever it was, and perhaps scarcely present in the consciousness of the people around me, has hit me with the force of that early loss, absorbing me as the most personal thing that could happen to me.
For my mother, however, the picture was quite different, and from her final and definitive version, which she revealed to me twenty-three years later under the impact of my first book, I learned that Father had not exchanged a word with her since the previous evening. She had felt very good in Reichenhall, where she had moved among her own kind, people with serious intellectual interests. Her physician spoke with her about Strindberg, and she began reading him too, she never stopped reading Strindberg after that. The physician asked her about these books, their conversations became more and more interesting, she started realizing that life in Manchester, among the semi-educated Sephardim, was not enough for her, perhaps that was her illness. She confessed this to the doctor, and he confessed his love for her. He proposed that she separate from my father and become his wife. Nothing, except in words, happened between them, nothing that she could reproach herself for, and she never for an instant thought seriously of leaving my father. But the conversations with the doctor meant more and more to her, and she did her best to prolong her stay in Reichenhall. She felt her health rapidly improving, which gave her a not dishonest reason for asking my father to let her continue her cure. But since she was very proud and didn’t care to lie, her letters also mentioned the fascinating conversations with the physician. Ultimately, she was grateful to Father when he forced her, by telegraph, to return immediately. She herself might not have had the strength to leave Reichenhall. She arrived in Manchester radiant and happy, and in order to placate my father and perhaps also a bit out of vanity, she told him the whole story and about rejecting the doctor’s offer to stay with him. Father couldn’t understand how the situation could have reached that point, he interrogated her, and every answer he received added to his jealousy. He insisted that she had made herself culpable, he refused to believe her and saw her answers as lies. Finally, he became so furious that he threatened not to speak another word with her until she confessed the whole truth. He spent the entire evening and the night in silence and without sleeping. She felt utterly sorry for him, even though he was tormenting her, but, unlike him, she was convinced that she had proved her love by returning, and she was not aware of having done anything wrong. She hadn’t even allowed the doctor to kiss her goodbye. She did all she could to get Father to talk, but since her hours of effort were to no avail, she grew angry and gave up, lapsing into silence herself.
In the morning, coming down to breakfast, he took his place at the table wordlessly and picked up the newspaper. When he collapsed, under the impact of the stroke, he hadn’t spoken a single word to her. First she thought he was trying to frighten her and punish her some more. She knelt down next to him on the floor and begged him, pleaded with him, more and more desperately, to talk to her. When she realized he was dead, she thought he had died because of his disappointment in her.
I know that Mother told me the truth that final time, the truth as she saw it. There had been long, heavy struggles between us, and she had often been on the verge of disowning me forever. But now, she said, she understood the struggle that I had waged for my freedom, now she acknowledged my right to this freedom, despite the great unhappiness that this struggle had brought upon her. The book, which she had read, was flesh of her flesh, she said, she recognized herself in me, she had always viewed people the way I depicted them, that was exactly how she would have wanted to write herself. Her forgiveness was not enough, she went on, she was bowing to me, she acknowledged me doubly as her son, I had become what she had most wanted me to be. She lived in Paris at this time, and she had written a similar letter to me in Vienna, before I visited her. I was very frightened by this letter; even in the days of our bitterest enmity, I had admired her most for her pride. The thought of her bowing to me because of this novel—important as the book may have been to me—was unendurable (her not bowing to anything made up my image of her). When I saw her again, she may have felt my shame, embarrassment, and disappointment, and to convince me that she was in earnest, she let herself go and finally told me the whole truth about my father’s death.
Despite her earlier versions, I had occasionally sensed the facts, but then always reproached myself that the distrust which I had inherited from her was leading me astray. To put my mind at ease, I had always repeated my father’s last words in the nursery. They were not the words of an angry or despairing man. Perhaps one may infer that after a dreadful and sleepless night, he was about to soften, and perhaps he would have spoken to her after all in the dining room, when his shock at the outbreak of war interfered and struck him down.
The Heavenly Jerusalem
After a few weeks, I moved from the Florentin home back to Burton Road with my mother. At night, I slept in my father’s bed, next to hers, and watched over her life. As long as I heard her crying, I didn’t fall asleep; when she had slept a bit and then awoke, her soft crying woke me up. I grew close to her during this period, our relationship was different, I became the eldest son not just nominally. She called me the eldest son and treated me accordingly, I felt she was relying on me, she spoke to me as to no other person, and although she never said anything to me about it, I sensed her despair and the danger she was in. I took it upon myself to get her through the night, I was the weight that hung to her when she could no longer stand her torment and wanted to cast away her life. It is very odd that in this way, I successively experienced death and then fear for a life menaced by death.
During the day, she kept a hold on herself, there was plenty for her to take care of, things she wasn’t accustomed to, and she did them all. In the evening, we had our little ritual meal, treating one another with a quiet sort of chivalry. I followed each of her movements and registered them, she cautiously interpreted for me what went on during the meal. Earlier, I had known her as impatient and autocratic, overbearing, impulsive; the movement I most clearly remembered was her ringing for the governess to get rid of us children. I had let her know in every way that I liked Father better, and when I was asked the question that so cruelly embarrasses children: “Who do you like better, Father or Mother?”, I didn’t try to wriggle out of it by saying “both the same,” I pointed, without fear or hesitation, at my father. Now, however, each of us was for the other what had remained of Father; without realizing it, we both played him, and it was his tenderness that we showed one another.
In these hours, I learned the stillness in which one gathers all mental powers. I needed them more at that time than at any other in my life, for the nights following these evenings were filled with terrible danger; I would be satisfied with myself if I had always stood my ground as well as then.
One month after our misfortune, people collected in our home for the memorial service. The male relatives and friends stood along the wall of the dining room, their hats on their heads, the prayerbooks in their hands. On a sofa against the narrow wall, facing the window, sat Grandfather and Grandmother Canetti, who had come from Bulgaria. I didn’t realize back then how guilty my grandfather felt. He had solemnly cursed my father when my father left him and Bulgaria; it very seldom happens that a pious Jew curses his son, no curse is more dangerous and no curse more feared. My father had stuck to his guns, and not much more than a year after arriving in England he was dead. I did hear my grandfather sob loudly in his prayers; he didn’t stop weeping, he couldn’t see me without hugging me with all his might, he scarcely let me go and he bathed me in tears. I took it for grief and found out only much later that it was the sense of his guilt far more than sorrow; he was convinced that his curse had killed my father. The events of this memorial service horrified me because Father was not present. I kept expecting him to suddenly turn up among us and say his prayers like the other men. I was fully aware that he hadn’t concealed himself; but wherever he was, his not coming now, when all the men were saying the memorial prayer for him, was something I couldn’t grasp. One of the mourners was Mr. Calderon, the man with the longest moustache, who was also known for laughing all the time. I expected the worst from him. Upon arriving, he spoke unabashedly to the men standing at his left and right, and suddenly he did what I had feared most, he laughed. I strode up to him angrily and asked: “Why are you laughing?” He couldn’t be put off and he laughed at me. I hated him for that, I wanted him to go away, I felt like hitting him. But I couldn’t have reached the smiling face, I was too little, I would have had to climb on a chair; and so I didn’t hit him. When it was over, and the men left the room, he tried to stroke my head, I knocked his hand away and turned my back on him, crying in rage.
Grandfather explained that I as the eldest son, would have to recite the kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Every day, on the anniversary, I would have to recite the kaddish. If ever I failed to do so, Father would feel deserted, as though he didn’t have a son. It was the greatest sin, said Grandfather, for a Jew not to say kaddish for his father. He explained it to me with sobs and sighs, I never saw him any different throughout the days of that visit. Mother, of course, as was customary among us, kissed his hand and reverentially called him “Señor Padre.” But she never mentioned him during our reticent evening talks, and I distinctly sensed that it wouldn’t be proper to ask about him. His incessant grief made a deep impression on me. But I had witnessed Mother’s dreadful outburst, and now I saw her crying night after night. I was worried about her, I merely watched him. He spoke to everyone, lamenting his misfortune. He lamented us too and called us “orphans.” But he sounded as if he were ashamed to have orphans for grandchildren, and I rebelled against that sense of shame. I was no orphan boy, I had Mother, and she had already entrusted me with the responsibility of my little brothers.
We did not stay in Burton Road for very long. That same winter, we moved in with her brother on Palatine Road. His mansion had many large rooms and more people. Miss Bray, the governess, and Edith, the housemaid, came along. The two households were combined for a couple of months, everything was twofold, there were many visitors. In the evening, I no longer ate with Mother, and at night I no longer slept in her room. Perhaps she felt better, perhaps the others considered it wiser not to entrust her to my oversight alone. They tried diverting her, friends came to the house or invited her over. She had resolved to settle in Vienna with the children; the house in Burton Road was sold, preparations had to be made for the move. Her efficient brother, whom she thought a great deal of, acted as her adviser. Being a child, I was excluded from these useful conversations. I went to school again, and Miss Lancashire did not treat me like an orphan at all. She showed me something like respect, and once she even told me that I was now the man in the family, and that was the best thing a person could be.
At home in Palatine Road, I was in the nursery again, a much bigger one than the earlier room with the live wallpaper. I didn’t miss the wallpaper, I had lost all interest in it under the impact of the recent events. Here I was again with my little brothers and the governess; and Edith, who had little to do, was usually also with us. The room was too large, something was lacking, it felt empty somehow, perhaps there should have been more people; Miss Bray, the governess, who came from Wales, populated it with a congregation. She sang English hymns with us, Edith sang along, a whole new period commenced for us, no sooner were we in the nursery than we launched into song. Miss Bray quickly accustomed us to singing, she was a different woman when she sang, no longer thin and sharp, her enthusiasm infected us children. We sang for all we were worth, even the youngest, two-year-old George, squawled along. There was one song in particular that we never got enough of. It was about the Heavenly Jerusalem. Miss Bray had convinced us that our father was now in the Heavenly Jerusalem, and if we sang the song properly, he would recognize our voices and delight in us. There was a wonderful line in it: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, hark how the angels sing!” And when we came to this line, I believed I could see my father and I sang so ardently that I thought I would burst. However, Miss Bray appeared to have qualms, she said we might disturb the other people in the house, and to make sure that no one interrupted our song, she locked the door. Many of the songs mentioned the Lord Jesus, she told us his story, I wanted to hear about him, I couldn’t get enough, and I couldn’t understand why the Jews had crucified him. I knew all about Judas instantly, he wore a long moustache and laughed rather than being ashamed of his evil.
Miss Bray, in all innocence, must have carefully selected the hours for her missionizing. We were undisturbed, and after listening attentively to the stories about the Lord Jesus, we could sing “Jerusalem” again, which we kept begging her for. It was all so splendid and glorious that we never said a word about it to anyone. These carryings-on went undiscovered for a long time; they must have continued through weeks and weeks, for I got so used to them that I thought about them even in school, there was nothing I looked forward to as much, even reading was no longer so important, and Mother became alien to me again because she kept conferring with the Napoleon uncle, and I, to punish her for the admiring way she spoke about him, withheld the secret of the hours with Jesus.
