Axiomatic
Page 1
PRAISE FOR AXIOMATIC
“An explosion of a book. Plumbing the depths of injustice, trauma, prison, and the flaw of good intentions, Maria Tumarkin is an important voice on American shores. Her eye is razor-sharp, her writing unsparing.”
—Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore
“A stunning exploration of the ways grief and trauma live on inside both our communities and ourselves. Axiomatic seeks to explore how poorly equipped our self-made structures—both civic and emotional—are to deal with serious pain, and Tumarkin does so with a crystalline intelligence, submerging the reader into her own brightly lit consciousness.”
—Vanessa Martini, City Lights Books
“As brilliant and idiosyncratic as writing gets. The topics Tumarkin addresses serve to ask a larger question: as we move through the world, how do we address the effect we have on one another? Axiomatic feels like the best conversation you’ve ever had with the smartest person you’ve ever met.”
—Thomas Flynn, Volumes Bookcafe
“With penetrating sentences that feel as though they’ve each been sharpened to an individual point, Tumarkin excavates the origins of trauma in all its unknowable vastness and unwavering turpitude.”
—Justin Walls, Powell’s Books
“Tumarkin’s profiles of courage, justice, and history are bolstered by quotes and passages from writers as distinct as Raymond Carver, Wisława Szymborska, and Julia Kristeva. With their help she finds the fittest words to explore her subjects and excavate memories, ‘whole honeycombs of them.’”
—John Francisconi, Bank Square Books
“Axiomatic is a book I went into with high expectations that were absolutely met and surpassed on all levels.”
—Hans Weyandt, Milkweed Books
“Does time really heal all wounds or only pass them on? In a series of case studies that shift the focus from the motives and humanity of the rescuer to those of the people needing help, Tumarkin’s passionate and compassionate study of trauma explores what humans do with their pain and dramatically shows that there is no one-size-fits-all answer.”
—Laurie Greer, Politics and Prose
“A raw and honest look at trauma without any excuses or pleas for pity. Everyone should be required to read this book, if for no other reason than to better understand those around us.”
—Nick Buzanski, Book Culture
“The hybrid pieces—journalistic, essayistic, and autobiographical—in Tumarkin’s Axiomatic feel daring, unsettling, revelatory. Her writing—with intense empathy, disciplined cultural history, and up-to-the-moment analysis—brings us all closer to truth.”
—Arlo Klahr, Skylight Books
“Tumarkin shares with [Helen] Garner a gimlet eye for the flaws in official systems, along with a fascination for the narratives nested in everyday lives. Axiomatic’s symphonic structure, however, recalls Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist and Nobel Laureate. She is another for whom reality attracts like a magnet, who has made a career out of appropriating and braiding voices and documents, seeing the world as a chorus and a collage. With this remarkable, wild, risk-laden book, Tumarkin has earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as both of them.”
—The Saturday Paper
“Axiomatic is a series of open-ended essays about different people, as well as Tumarkin’s own intense experiences of love and friendship. Consoling pieties do not interest her. There is no resolution, no comfort. It is a bleak view of the world, but for many people, including Tumarkin’s friend Vera, ‘That’s how it goes.’ This happened. That happened. I am here. You are here. Lucky for us Tumarkin is here, too. Trying.”
—The Monthly
“Again and again in Axiomatic, Tumarkin confronts the meagreness of the written word in the face of trauma as she muses on her inability to write the text she had intended. Yet again and again, she herself demonstrates what literary prose can do.”
—Sydney Morning Herald
AXIOMATIC
AXIOMATIC
Maria Tumarkin
Published by Transit Books
2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612
www.transitbooks.org
Copyright © Maria Tumarkin, 2018
First US edition published by Transit Books in 2019
Excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Reproduced with permission of Penguin Random House. Copyright 2006.
Excerpt from Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy, translated by Judith Szollosy. Reproduced with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2004.
Excerpt from Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. Reproduced with permission of Penguin Random House. Copyright 1969.
Excerpt from Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press via Copyright Clearance Center.
Excerpt from “Elie Wiesel, The Art of Fiction No. 79” interview by John S. Friedman, originally published in The Paris Review ISSUE 91, SPRING 1984. Copyright © 1984 by The Paris Review, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
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CONTENTS
Time heals all wounds
Those who forget the past are condemned to re—
History repeats itself
Give me a child before the age of seven and I will show you the woman
You can’t enter the same river twice
Some names have been changed (Vanda’s clients in ‘History repeats itself’) or turned into initials (‘Time heals all wounds’) or removed altogether (‘Those who forget the past are condemned to re––––’). This was done for reasons of privacy and safety.
TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS
FOR FIVE YEARS everything Frances wrote was about her sister. Once she had been good at deadpan humour. Where’d that go, and the sarcasm? She was seventeen, Katie had been sixteen. Their mother used to deck them in matching clothes: denim dresses most often. People mistook them for twins.
In a Year 12 English assignment Frances wrote
when I walked into her room that morning I could sense something was terribly wrong. She was positioned awkwardly, defying gravity.
A year later at uni
kneeling forward on her knees, incredibly still. I thought she had fallen asleep, obliquely…
Part way through an end-of-semester piece the following year
hair was falling over her face, shielding the truth. Her body was covered in prominent blue veins, gripping themselves over her youthful body.
After five years something shifted. Questions—why’d she call and ask me to wake her? why would she want me to find her? and the big one: did she mean it?—were no longer at Frances’s throat. Frances could imagine them turning into statements.
SHE WANTED ME TO FIND HER
SHE MEANT IT
Five more years and Frances doesn’t need to talk about it that much, maybe to some people, maybe once in a while. She knows what movies to avoid and with her sisters they don’t need to go over it. Maybe her father was wanting some family talk when he said ‘Cheers to Katie’ on the tenth anniversary and they all raised a glass? It’s possible. She’ll ask him.
I meet Frances as the shifting is beginning. Katie’s death doesn’t sit anymore on
her chest at all times, making her work for every breath, its knees pressed into her ribs. I was so lost when you met me, she’ll tell me later, so confused, and young, bound up all the way with her.
We meet and I ask Frances about casseroles. Everyone knows about casseroles. A person dies and people—close, dear people and virtual strangers, some signed up to a special roster—converge on the dead person’s house bearing casseroles. And the way the casseroles appear and just as suddenly disappear, weeks later, brings to mind, it is true, flocks of birds swooping down then taking off. Swish. For those weeks, sometimes—though not frequently—months, the family inside that house, whoever is there inside the house, is entombed in an intense concentration of throbbing, desperate human attention. Then it stops. Which is worse is hard to know although people I speak to before speaking to Frances—people who once found themselves on the receiving end of casseroles—seem to prefer the post-casserole. On a tram along Elizabeth Street we talk about the weeks after Katie’s death.
—What period? (she’s thrown by my accent; the tram is noisy)
—Casserole period.
—Oh, loved it. Wish it continued, went on much longer. I wish we had the casserole period now.
All those people in the house and no room left for flowers felt to Frances like the opposite of being scorchingly alone. ‘And then,’ she says, ‘the flowers died. And the people left. And there was nothing to fill the emptiness with.’
Frances’s Year 12 creative writing assignment, handed in twenty days after Katie’s suicide—
I will never forget the taste of her mouth. I can still taste her last breath.
Five hundred and fifty or so girls from prep to Year 12 is a small school. Ann taught there twenty-one years. She taught all four sisters. (There were four sisters once. ‘Four is special, three is ordinary,’ Frances says.) In a two-hour conversation Ann—composed, a teacher-teacher, tough, a mother of however many boys, retired now—gets visibly upset only once. Why can’t she claw back her tears when talk goes to that year’s creative writing assignments: the piece Frances wrote, and two pieces from other girls, one of them living in a psych unit, both in Frances’s class? ‘I suppose because I was privy to the truth. This is the stuff they don’t tell their parents. Or friends, shrinks. It’s stuff they only tell themselves.’
One of the things about coming to this world from the Eastern European elsewhere (not that it matters much which elsewhere the elsewhere is) is that words do not often feel powerful in the world of Australia we’ve come to. Which is fine really. We have made our peace with this, accepted it, with gratitude almost, because we judged the well-known (to us) alternative—a world in which poets and their families were persecuted and killed for their words mattering too much—to be an evil much greater. But perhaps I was wrong about this new world. Looking in all the wrong places perhaps. I wasn’t looking at girls and boys writing about what is innermost to them and what they have decided language cannot deal with and submitting their heartbeats as assignments, burying them among the mountains of straight, dashed-off bits of second-guessing fluff, this transaction bypassing the school economy of words-for-grades because what is being exchanged illicitly, covertly, are secrets and confidences and questions, and soul pain. And teachers carrying words by their students inside their chests—I was not looking at them. And no one else knows. Of course nobody knows. ‘You say to the Year 11 kids,’ says Ann, ‘if you have a special, special thing to write about save it till Year 12. Then when you write about a truth, it comes through. And they do save it, most of them.’
Ann is short so learned to wear bright clothes back when she was a teacher at a boys’ school. (‘They won’t see you, they’ll just knock you over.’) She learned to never teach sitting down. She learned that with certain kids you want to give them your mobile number no matter what the classroom protocols say; that you must take a student’s word for it, even if you’ll at times live to regret it; that—and this bit’s the tricky/obvious—you cannot be afraid of the kids.
Frances remembers none of her final-year classes except for English classes with Ann.
That year they were studying Look Both Ways, a movie about how to live is to stumble on death and grief, directed by the late (not late then) Sarah Watt and starring her husband William McInnes. Someone at the school knew McInnes so he was invited to chat to the Year 12s. Then Katie died and it was too late to change the curriculum; the following year, the turn of Katie’s year to do Year 12 English, they stayed right off Look Both Ways. After Katie’s death Frances’s class went silent. No one would discuss the movie. For the rest of that year Ann had to say all the words. She told Frances to leave class anytime she needed: get up, walk out, just stay on campus. But Frances would not leave. She would sit there, in front of Ann, tears pouring. Not moving. Ann would give her tissues. And keep teaching.
Monique in another Melbourne school lost a Year 11 boy she had been teaching since Year 7. Frances and Monique do not know each other. Ann doesn’t know Monique. Monique didn’t find Bryn’s body. Another teacher rang to tell her. When that teacher rang again, seeking someone’s phone number, six years later, for the first time since that other time, Monique’s heart went straight to her throat. Ambushed by memory, that’s how it felt. This is what Monique tells me about Bryn—he was school captain in junior school, ‘pretty powerful individual’, an only child, only grandchild, spent the first part of his life in Thailand around Buddhist monks. So clever he managed to say his goodbyes to everybody and put together a playlist for his funeral.
‘Look at me, I’m in full school uniform’ was the last thing Bryn said to Monique. She hadn’t seen him in full uniform in three, four years. Not that Monique would care. But it was as if he had a things-to-do sheet. As if he was ticking things off. What was on the playlist? “Mad World”—Tears for Fears—
HELLO TEACHER TELL ME WHAT’S MY LESSON?
LOOK RIGHT THROUGH ME
I talk to Monique and she brings up casseroles. She says, I am a funeral director’s daughter, I should be one of those people who slip easily into death mode, I should be one of those people turning up at your house with casseroles. ‘You have to ask yourself,’ she says, ‘what happens when the casseroles are gone? People’s sympathy lasts two weeks, I reckon.’ The world stops holding its breath for you. They all start living again and you can’t. It should be obvious by now that Monique is not the casserole type. A couple of her friends lost family members and she sent flowers two weeks after everyone else.
Possible description of a human life: salad days at our peak, casserole days when it’s over. And for those we leave behind, the post-casserole eternity.
Monique likes teenagers’ company, their honesty. After Bryn’s death she stood before his classmates not quite able to adjust her eyes on their faces. ‘I cannot look at you because,’ she said, ‘I’ll cry. I am as lost as you are. One thing I want to say, when we’re at the funeral do not judge how other people react. Do not say they don’t know him so they cannot grieve. Do not say they don’t have a right to carry on.’
How hard it must be to grieve in a high school: everyone looking at everyone. Everyone, just about, is impossibly fragile. Friends hurt your heart more often and expertly than your enemies. Not inevitably, but pretty likely, there are cliques, hierarchies, inner circles, outer circles, circles within circles. A squabble broke out in Katie’s year over who owns Katie now that she’s dead, who has the right to be shattered in public. Also, who’s in charge of organising laser-printed silver pendants with Katie’s face on them from Chadstone shopping centre. And helium balloons, a letter strung to each, unloosed at a suburban beach. Frances remembers none of it. Has no memory of the funeral even, and she did get a high Year 12 score, that’s fact, but has no idea, she says, how except—wait, it’s not like it was yesterday she and you started talking (this book, your life: jinxed? a blowout?), think back.
A piece she wrote the year you met—
robots don’t procrasti
nate, they don’t have feelings, they are machines that are made to work.
‘Can you give me a pen?’ Frances’s writings are spread out around us. I hand her a pen. She wants to drive my pen through the school and university assignments she has dutifully printed out (every one of them about Katie) for me. Wants to cross things out. She wants me to know that she knows all of this is bad writing. ‘I am very aware of writing as a craft, I love technique, what works, what doesn’t work. And these poems are shocking.’
After ‘shocking’ she says ‘fake’. We get stuck into ‘fake’. Wrong word maybe. What she is saying is she needed to protect Katie. She could not let people think her sister was selfish, or indifferent to others’ suffering. Wanted them to know Katie was crushed by her boyfriend’s suicide and could not bear being blamed. I say:
—When you think of the book you’ll write one day, will it be non-fiction or will you fictionalise it?
—No, no, hate fiction. I got the worst marks in fiction. Lowest mark on my uni transcript. For me it’s non-fiction all the way. So it’s not simply a memoir I want to interweave deeper issues.
—Like?
—Like exploring the idea of family secrets. And relationships. How they change. I am interested in perspective shifts. Voice shifts. Third person. First person. I have the title already: What Katie Did Last.
For a while I tell her of books others have written about their lost sisters and brothers, friends, kids. When we first meet these books are rare, semi-submerged, you have to have heard about them from someone and they have the power of revelation—so there are non-medico words to describe this and it does happen to families (‘Looks like a functioning family, nice house, this is really strange,’ a cop said after Katie died) like them. And Charles D’Ambrosio keeps his brother Danny’s army surplus boots, the ones Danny died in, filled with rocks on his desk and John Niven, whose brother hanged himself, compares a suicide to a nuclear bomb because it ‘entrains a chain reaction with an incredibly powerful half-life’. Then the books multiply in the culture. Till they, stories of suicide, seem to be everywhere. And it’s in some ways good, some bad, and now Frances needs to protect herself—can’t be stepping on hot coals every time you go get chicken stock at a supermarket—and I quit with my literary outreach.