Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy wrote an 850-page novel at the beginning of our century—the 21st, which did you think?—called Celestial Harmonies. That’s the English translation, the book was in part a tribute to his father who was a count by birth, member of a prominent Austro-Hungarian clan, a man stripped of everything by the new communist government at WWII’s end and forcefully relocated to the countryside. He stayed an aristocrat in spirit, and in his admiring son’s eyes. (‘My father never looked down on anyone, which is how he was an aristocrat. My grandfather looked down on everyone, which is how he was an aristocrat. As for me, I just keep blinking.’)

  Celestial Harmonies was divided in two. In Book One paternal ancestors spanning centuries were referred to as ‘my father’; in Book Two ‘my father’ was his actual biological father, Mátyás. The idea of Book One’s ‘my father’ including all the fathers of all the family’s sons—a conceit aided by the Esterházy clan’s fame but just as apt, I feel, for us dynastic pipsqueaks of no spectacular lineage—collided with the recent history of communist dictatorships sabotaging familial bonds. Lenin, Stalin, plus other minor Soviet bloc dictators whose inner workings I know less about, were heralded as their people’s true fathers (‘oh lord, You are our Father, we are the clay and You our potter’—that was the verbatim thrust of it, or verbatimish, in our godless lands). In our big father’s name we were supposed to be ready to denounce our little fathers and grandfathers. State trumped family. Family was treacherous. Who’s your daddy? Think before you answer.

  Almost by accident after his father’s death Esterházy discovered that Mátyás, a man presumed unmuddied by the regime’s filth, was in truth an informer. Never went beyond being an amateur informer, he developed no taste for it, no knack, but he clocked in regularly and, as Esterházy has remarked in one interview or another, it would be ethically vacuous to suppose the reports his father delivered to his handlers, usually during soccer matches the father attended with the son, times the son always regarded as their special time together, could ever be harmless. These things never were. How things turned for the son was he was writing another book, a thin one, about requesting the files to see who’d informed on his father—Mátyás with his blue blood seemed a sure target in communist Hungary—only to run into the names and lives of those his father informed on. Revised Edition never got translated into English. Not enough daughters and sons of the anglophone world discovering their parents were informers and notions they hold dear about their family and selves, along with a swag of childhood memories, are in need of revision? Who knows why Revised Edition didn’t make it to English. I read it in Russian. Gulped it down. Then I read a Russian critic, Grigory Dashevsky, describe the thing that Esterházy in black and red coloured type is doing:

  He is not dissociating himself from his father… He is expelling, virtually belching out his father from himself—and then he is attempting to reattach himself to his father in desperate or mocking comments addressed to him.

  Red for his father’s words in the reports to his handlers, black for Esterházy’s own reaction on reading them. Often his reactions are abbreviations, jottings: ‘tears’, ‘self-pity’, ‘i.o.t.m.’ (it occurs to me), ‘I imagine’. His is not a pushing away of a parent in shame and disgust followed by a pulling that body back, a pained, partial re-embracing. It is precisely belching out your father then re-submerging him inside yourself. We contain our parents just the same if they betray themselves or us.

  Tackling (someone has to) the dirty dishes pile I catch a talkback program about compulsive hoarding on the radio and a man rings in with a voice that could be in its forties, might be in its sixties: ‘I have my parents to thank for my compulsive hoarding. They survived the Depression and it was ingrained in them. And here I go too.’

  This is the story sentenced to constant retelling, about how people are born into things, and fate thinks intergenerationally. Parental pain, sadness, abuse (be it suffered or inflicted), indifference, withheld love, riding and exploding over children’s lives, like tanks.

  Borges’s Infinite Library of Larkin’s they-fuck-you-up-your-mum-and-dad fables.

  No subject’s more without an end than this. Us and our parents, it dogs us, even taking away the spectre of historical catastrophe or a private catastrophe, as if the catastrophe kinds can ever be mutually exclusive. Lush fog shrouds what gets passed on between parents and children. Fog of too much meaning, too many excavated parallels.

  More echoes than in an echo chamber!

  More cause and effect than in a closed-loop electrical circuit!

  And that’s without touching on killing the father or marrying the mother and all the inexhaustible variations. This overproduction of meaning, the overdetermined feel of it, is I guess what Lorrie Moore objects to. She’s asking how much parents need to tell themselves they’re the potters and their children the clay. How else to sustain a lifetime of devotion and sacrifice if not through a self-seeding delusion of your importance? As for children aren’t they always on the lookout for alibis, and once they become parents, is it so inconceivable they’d get co-opted into the machinery of self-delusion? Philip Roth—Portnoy’s Complaint—

  The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the body of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE

  —writing specifically about Jewish parents’ hold over their children in post-WWII America, and writing not specifically at all.

  I have great parents. Great Jewish parents. My parents occupied a large space in my life growing up but they never loomed. I was reminded of this while reading Karl Ove Knausgaard describe the relationship with his father. His father who loomed. Whether he hit me or not made no difference. It wasn’t the pain I was afraid of, it was him, his voice, his face, his body, the fury it emitted, that was what I was afraid of, and the terror never let up, it was there for every single day of my entire childhood. I can remember no instance of being seriously frightened of my parents. Surely freedom from this fear is one of the most important facts about me and my life. Here is another. When we immigrated I was a teenager and never in danger of replicating, unwittingly or otherwise, my parents’ lives. The country we left collapsed shortly after and the one we found ourselves in showed little resemblance to anything my parents knew or had the paints to paint. So, free, that was me. Unlike many non-first world migrant parents pushing their children to succeed lest the children feel the shame of being nobodies in a land where they have zero social and emotional infrastructure—lest the children, too, be forced to in other words (not my parents’ words) eat shit—my parents stayed unwavering in respecting my autonomy. Without most likely realising it, they released me from serving the family’s need for self-affirmation and survival, each family consisting not only of the living but of its dead and its yet-to-be-born.

  They say you start noticing signs (i.e. of channelling your parents) once you have your own children but I had my first child by myself, and being a single parent, another experience foreign to my parents, in a country which worked by laws that to us still felt largely unfathomable, freed me again. Or maybe I was simply too young and full of self-devised commandments, very much ‘in my head’ about what kind of mother I was going to be, not worn out by life either and, also, grateful for my parents’ parenting and unhellbent on opposing them. (Knausgaard has four children—‘With them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father.’) Free from slavish re-enactment or repudiation of family scripts, I could observe myself being my parents’ daughter. Sometimes my parents would poke out of me like legs out of a pregnant belly. Sometimes they were white noise filling me from the inside and jamming all other sounds, making room for a disquieting silence. I don’t mean to make too much of my freedom. It’s always been provisional and partial. Still, the longer I live, which is to say the more arcs of other people’s lives I glimpse, the more astounding this freedom looks to me.


  One day I was talking to Lisa and all the way I had Katie and Bryn in my head then we moved on to families. Lisa said, ‘Suicide in a family is like a cross on your forehead,’ and I had no idea until that moment that both her father’s siblings committed suicide. For decades she believed that was going to be her too. Lisa was about the last person I expected to hear these words from. She seemed to me free of deep self-destructive urges, what would I know, turns out in her thirties Lisa would go to sleep with an image of blowing her head off. It came from outside of her. She could not make it go away. This story, its forcefield, was theirs, not hers, still something, a feeling like being marked maybe, stuck to her. Till it stopped eventually. It’s like she grew out of it.

  As soon as Lisa told me this my ears opened and I started hearing others speak of the cross on the forehead. Where was I, or it, before? Flicking the kitchen radio on one morning to keep me and the tabletop debris company, I listened to American writer David Vann talk, and never before had I heard anyone be so open about a parent’s suicide with strangers whose faces he couldn’t see. I got obsessed with Vann, read all he wrote, downloaded every interview I could find. He was thirteen when his father took his life. Ashamed of the truth he’d tell people his father died of cancer. And he burned with a feeling he would repeat his father’s fate. It would happen like this: he’d hit a low point and ‘suicide would just be waiting for me’. Vann said, ‘For twenty years I had a feeling of doom. That’s the only word for it. The full Anglo-Saxon meaning of it. Things would be bad, I would get depressed, and it would be unstoppable. I believed it.’

  Then he hit a low point. Things were bad enough he thought here it comes. And … he found he had no desire to kill himself, that’s what it took for him to finally be free. To get there and to see for himself.

  Twenty years—apparently psychologists and psychiatrists, I’ve asked a few, hear it a lot, a suicide in a family can open a door best left shut and then if the winds are strong enough and persistent enough the door may flap menacingly, invitingly, could be both. The flapping door, responsive to wind, is nothing like the fictitious ‘suicide gene’. When Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, killed himself that gene du jour did headline overtime in the dumber media outlets. And it is less bureaucratic feeling than ‘contagion’. Still I cringe. The straining, clumsy language at our disposal to encapsulate what a suicide may leave behind feels like a stand-in for the real language to come. We wait, twist our necks right and left, but the real language is not here.

  I want to know about the cross and the forehead. To be haunted and shaped by a parent’s anguish is one thing. To be doomed to repeat it no matter the life you have made for yourself? A vision of a child locked into a parent’s death won’t leave me alone. Something to do with the past asserting itself across generations as destiny, a choicelessness stemming not from the big geopolitical stuff of dispossession, persecution, trauma but from forces below skin no one has a grip on. The soul of another—its ills, its deepest needs. The webs families weave. (Plus genes.) Also the real possibility Heraclitus was more right than wrong in proposing ‘a man’s character is his fate’. In some interview—he’s done a gazillion—Knausgaard gets asked what he thinks of fate. He replies no one believes anymore in fate. It’s dead. An outdated concept. Yet aren’t we, he adds, the same human beings who were here ten generations ago? What happened to those things we knew to be true? Where’d they go?

  Nowhere. Inextinguishable—even in this world lit by the fires, or so we’ve been assuring ourselves, of our unassailable free will.

  I always thought, a commonplace thing to think, nothing could be worse than parents losing their children and now I’m slapped with children left behind by their parents. Left behind by. And with—this feeling, can’t be shaken off or willed away, of being bound to replicate their parent’s final act; don’t call it choice, it’s at least some of the time much more complicated than that.

  Amanda—we meet to talk about Stephen from Bryn’s school but the conversation goes where it needs to go—introduces me to Martin.

  Martin was twenty when his father killed himself. Now that he’s double that twenty feels young. It didn’t then. He thought he was old enough to cope: the second oldest, three sisters and him, four kids under five at one point. ‘Mum said Dad was OK when we were babies.’ By the time they were children then adolescents the dad was a long way from OK. Down and absent emotionally, he was also angry, paranoid. Also jealous of his wife especially if she was out with friends. Martin’s parents’ rows spilled out to the street. Loud, violent—everyone heard. Martin’s best friend could definitely hear. He lived next door. Martin boiled with shame at those times. But to hope his parents might split up? That would be worse than their marriage’s public unravelling. Martin tells me, ‘Mum used to come to me when I was eight or nine and say should I go back to him? I remember it clearly, her asking me. I didn’t want the shame of my parents splitting up. I would tell her to go back.’

  They lived in a small town in England’s north. When things got out of control the kids went to grandparents close by. After a few days they’d return and it’d be quiet. Devout Catholic family. The kids saw it this way: their mother, the most amazing mother in Martin’s eyes, was good, innocent and their father bad, the evil husband and dad. Martin was scared of him despite only being hit by him once or twice. ‘Much later I realised Mum was quite provocative. Spoiling for an argument. I’d wish she’d just keep quiet.’ Martin came to see his mother was not emotionally there for the kids, though she looked after their physical needs, and his father did love them and care for them in his way. He loved nature. Took them on fantastic holidays—luxury of luxuries, lots of Martin’s friends didn’t go anywhere ever.

  ‘I really withdrew in childhood, right into myself, had real problems relating to men, older men in particular.’ School was difficult. College was ‘three years of hell’. It never got easy. ‘I spent my whole life being a good boy, which is really hard to do. Because you can’t be good all the time. Every time I wasn’t good, in my eyes I was terrible.’ Wanting to be good also means you don’t get to find out who you really are. Martin still has problems finding work, staying in jobs. ‘I think if somebody’s angry they’re angry at me. I may have absolutely nothing to do with it but it feels personal.’ Living like that’s exhausting. There is only so much fear-produced adrenaline coursing through your body and head you can take. His dad died three or four months after Martin moved out to go to college. ‘Things turned really bad when I left. Mum moved into my bedroom then to a flat.’ Martin’s father went to live with his parents which was where he drowned himself. Martin’s sisters rang with the news.

  Martin got on the train, numb, no tears came. The funeral was terrible. His dad’s parents were blaming the wife and kids for their son’s death. ‘And we were with Mum’s side of the family who were going on about what a bad person Dad was. So you couldn’t really grieve.’ The funeral came, went and Martin still hadn’t cried. No one in his family made an outright agreement after that to not mention the suicide, it just happened that way. ‘You get quieter and quieter about it.’ It took years of telling no one and it doesn’t jump out of his mouth now but, when it’s right, he is OK with talking about it.

  He used to drive along wanting someone to crash into him. The option of suicide was already stolen by his dad. ‘How bad would I have to be to do to the people who love me what my father did to us?’ He doesn’t blame his father and as he gets older he’s understanding him more. ‘The greatest difficulty I have had is feeling I will inevitably fail at the same things.’ Same things include: being a husband, a father, reining anger in, finding a place for himself in the world, stopping shame and depression sucking life and hope out of relationships. He says ‘it’s the most fundamental thing in life, your parents’ and if they are there but not really there that’s the worst, because you keep coming to them for support, protection, acknowledgment then when it’s knocked back something in you re
coils further from the world. Each year even if this stuff is not explicitly in his head he gets morbid, and when he wonders why the world’s feeling that way sometimes it takes his wife to say, ‘It’s the anniversary of your dad’s death.’

  I ask about feeling bound, what that feeling feels like.

  ‘On occasions I have a fleeting sense I am him and I am seeing the world through his eyes. Sounds weird I know but his presence is impossible to avoid. I think it’s always going to be with me. I will never be over it. Something I’ve realised, or have realised I’d realised, or re-realised, is I look like my dad—I can see my dad out the corner of my eye if I catch my reflection. I couldn’t look in the mirror for years and years because of the resemblance. And I’m sure the shame… I think he was pretty ashamed as well. I only look in the mirror to do my shaving. There are always images in your head anyway of what you look like and how the world sees you and I’ve looked out imagining the world looking back at me as my dad… You find yourself trying to rearrange the way you’re looking. So people are not thinking you’re a threat.’

  The way he’s better now, freer, is this: he has had a child and is a good father to her although he needs to watch himself. His wife has stayed, even though they separated then got back together and it’s been touch and go many times and she is weary as hell. They love each other. She fought for him. Amanda is part of the fight. This repeating business is not written in some stars or on tablets alongside the commandments. It has taken him this long, the freedom he has scratched out for himself is this fragile, because the other thing is lodged that deep. Most likely his wife saved him. He no longer thinks he has no choice. And he does not want to die, his father’s way or any way. We say goodbye, rushing, he to his child and I to mine. I don’t have a feeling of a happy ending (though I know Martin alive, a father, a husband, is as happy as it gets) because it seems to me heartbreaking that a man should spend four decades of his life trying to pull himself apart from his father’s life then death.