Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  I ask psychiatrist Paul Valent about the cross on the forehead. We’re meeting to talk about child Holocaust survivors, he is one himself—but the conversation’s duck-diving where it needs to dive to and I’m telling him about Lisa, Martin, David Vann.

  And Valent’s saying, ‘It applies to illness as well, people believing they have the illness their parent died from when they get to their parent’s age. Or them actually having it and dying at that age. Same happens,’ Valent says, ‘with older siblings dying and younger siblings reaching the age of their sibling’s death then having an accident.’ I read an interview with Robyn Davidson, an Australian writer, eleven when her mother killed herself; she did not dwell on it obsessively nor imagine herself fatally marked. ‘I don’t recall that I suffered any sort of guilt, or grief. Then when I hit forty-six, which was how old she was when she died, boy, I got the whammy.’ Decades of nothing then ambushed. An ambush rather than a hover. I speak to a woman who lost her sick mother as a child but marched herself through the rest of school, followed by university (first in her family to go), next a career in the public service, then she hit her mother’s age—a weakness she couldn’t shrug, undefinable by doctors, mystery affliction. She took months off work and lay in bed.

  ‘There is chronological time,’ Valent tells me, ‘and there is experiential, cyclical time. This time has an emotional meaning. Existential. It is like the way peasants think about harvest: time to reap and time to sow. Time to live and time to die.’

  At the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart I wait for people to go away and I stand in front of Anselm Kiefer’s Sternenfall/Shevirath ha Kelim—falling stars, the breaking of the vessels, it translates as. Most of the museum is without natural light. But the pavilion built to house this one sculpture of Kiefer’s has floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. A glass passage leads into it. More light. ‘Kiefer demands pavilions so he’s going to get his fucking pavilion,’ is MONA boss David Walsh’s attitude. The work is four spilling-out rows of giant books made of sheets of lead, and interspersed between lead pages are jagged glass panes that look like they may fall and shatter on the floor, where shards of glass already lie, surrounding everything, as if the falling and breaking of glass is unstopping, cannot stop. On some of the shards are engraved the long astronomical numbers NASA scientists give to stars.

  Breaking of the vessels is a concept from the Kabbalah. In the course of creation god poured divine light into ten vessels but the vessels proved not strong enough to contain the light and most shattered. Sparks of light were trapped in the vessels, countless fragments of which fell down into the realm of matter, which is how evil and discord entered our world which, said scholar and rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, is ‘the worst of all possible worlds in which there is still hope’. (Also: it is the best of possible worlds because it carries within itself the chance of repair and redemption.) As always with Kiefer, semi-recent history infuses his scene of mythical world-making. Oversized lead books that have the appearance of being made from ash—reminder of the burning of books; broken glass—Kristallnacht.

  For a few minutes no people are around. It is not my first time seeing the work. Won’t say I’m transfixed—too baroque—but I am something. I am rearranged. Kiefer’s words come into my head. ‘I am against the idea of the end, that everything culminates in paradise or judgment.’

  So this is how it is, I think. Stars rain from the sky like shards of glass. Time makes room for timelessness. Creation is always a catastrophe, a shattering. Everything has already happened. The past does not move through the present like a pointed finger or a shadowy confessor in a long cloak. The past is not told you so. Not this is how it all began. It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open the door and no one is there. You cannot tell yourself it must be those feral boys from the corner house because it is too late even for them, and no you could not have heard the knock in your sleep because you’ve been wide awake all night like a hermit crab. So this is how it is. Stars fall from the sky like shot baby sparrows in Mao’s China. Books are imperishable only because turning them to ash takes so little (it’s not like blowing up buildings); they are imperishable only because they are so ready to survive, dispersed across the world, as trails of dust, kernels, memories, shreds. As to us, me and you, oh it’s simple. We are the broken vessels containing, spilling all over the place, those who came before us.

  PART THREE

  In a Russian town situated——k’s outside Moscow some high school students found the diary of a young man from the generation of boys WWII mowed down. This same generation, born in the late 1910s, or early 1920s, dead by 1945, existed in most European countries but in the Soviet Union—‘Die but do not retreat’ (J. Stalin)—it left behind a demographic black hole. The students brought the diary to school. It had an aura, an authentic historical document, doubly compelling for being not ensconced in some library or archive. They’d rescued it from almost certain obscurity. That made them care more.

  The diary belonged to a young man who in 1937, the peak of the Great Terror, joined the NKVD ‘secret police’ school where elite cadres were trained to expose enemies of the Soviet state. A million and a half such enemies were arrested, more than 700,000 shot, and three months into his studies, undertaken with zeal, the young man’s parents got scooped up for being exactly the anti-Soviet elements their son was trained to eliminate: spies, terrorists, saboteurs. As befits the son of enemies of the people, the young man was promptly and without any unnecessary sensitivity expelled from the NKVD school. This was how it worked (the West learned it from The Gulag Archipelago): the nearest relatives of found enemies were not simply a pitiful handful of shocked family members, they were the wife of an enemy, mother of an enemy, child of an enemy, each in their own right enemies. The diary ended at WWII with the son doing the one thing he and his severely contaminated social DNA were still allowed to do: he died while defending his country.

  Was the diary’s aura this, a young man’s universe of meaning, and his parents, both cancelled at a stroke? This young man who desired nothing more than to be the littlest cog in the system was crushed with categorical indifference by that system. How many true believers were swiped away this way and died in camps and in front of execution squads still shouting or whispering Comrade Stalin! or The Party! or Our Great Embattled Motherland! and other vintage true believer slogans? And many, many of them must have thought that the purges were a mistake, that the party was infiltrated by fascists, that the true ideals (worth dying with a song for) were being subverted. And in a sense even though he escaped both the camps and the firing squads (for that he would have, if he could have, had the war to thank) the young man was just another faceless, loyal child munched up with no second thought by his motherland.

  The students turned the diary into a play and staged it at their school. The spell was cast, particularly on the young man playing the main character, so enraptured was he that he wrote a paper about the diary and its author for a nationwide history competition instigated by Memorial, a human rights society. (Should the Memorial competition sound like one of those well-intentionedly meaningless civic initiatives to get schoolkids to care about something or other, keep in mind it has been going since 1999, is coordinated by Irina Sherbakova, a world-class historian of the Soviet twentieth century, and attracts three thousand papers annually and especially from the regions and provinces. Most submissions do the hard historical work of uncovering and piecing together, there’s little rehashing and reheating. It’s kind of beautiful.)

  While working on his research paper the young man of the present managed to obtain documents detailing the case against the arrested and subsequently executed parents of the young man of the past. Participants in the Memorial competition are encouraged to turn to eyewitnesses when they can be found and to archives where they’re accessible. The young man did all that and was diligently going through the documents when he noticed the name of the officer who interrogated the parents.
r />   Irina Sherbakova is telling this story to Natella Boltyanskaya in an interview on Echo of Moscow radio station (still independent, still going strong). It is at this point in her story that the historian pauses long enough for the journalist to exhale ‘oh god’ anticipating the next turn, hoping—you can hear it in her exhalation—that she is wrong. But no, Natella Boltyanskaya is right, it’s just as she thought: the interrogating officer and the young man of the present have the same surname. In small towns, the kind the two young men come from, certain surnames are claimed by families and clans, not by page after page of phonebooks. And now the young man of the present is beginning to unravel. Perhaps before he got hold of this diary and followed the young man of the past through the shock and shame of his grief and ostracism, the young man of the present would have been not nearly so devastated by the possibility of his grandfather working for the NKVD, but the young man of the past has done his work and now it matters enormously to the young man of the present which side of the interrogating table his grandfather once sat on. In imagining what his grandfather did and did not do, the young man of the present has to withstand a double blow (or, more precisely, suffer a double wound)—to himself as the inheritor of his family’s history, and to the young man of the past who has become like a ghostly brother to him.

  The young man of the present did not set out to dig up his family’s history. Suspecting nothing, he was on no mission to get to some buried truth. He was ambushed. He was tripped up. The past found him. It grabbed him through a complete stranger’s story and spun him into the vortex of his own family’s history. So much of the past works like that. It’s vortex-like. Doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It’s engine-like. At least in certain places it is like a criminal’s mark burned into your family’s skin (I got this image from the accidentally revealed fleur-de-lis on Milady’s shoulder in Dumas’s Three Musketeers). ‘The past shapes the present’—they teach people that in schools and universities. Shapes? Infiltrates more like, imbues, infuses, it is invisible this past, it is gas not solid, an odourless, colourless chemical agent bouncing around in the lungs, crackling in the spaces between us, in the air the culture breathes in, out.

  It transpired that the identical surname was a coincidence. But no relief flowed for the young man of the present. His grandfather, says Irina Sherbakova, turned out to be a much more monstrous man than the provincial interrogator his grandson briefly imagined him to be. ‘Oh no, oh god’ … I swear I can hear it in Natella Boltyanskaya’s voice—this will never end, this will go on forever. ‘But we should not be afraid of this stuff, we should not be afraid of the psychological shock suffered by this young man,’ says Sherbakova.

  Be afraid of its opposite—of the absence of shocks. Of bumping into no diaries and being waylaid by no surnames.

  GIVE ME A CHILD BEFORE THE AGE OF SEVEN AND I WILL SHOW YOU THE WOMAN

  PRE

  Once I was a young woman. Dyed my dark hair blonde and accidentally made it orange. We’d have been in Australia two years max. Put some grey dye on top of the orange to tame the orange. Still pretty bad but OK enough to leave the house. My dark roots started growing straight away. My eyebrows were dark. Men liked it. I got myself—don’t ask me how—into a broadcast journalism course. It was for Australia’s non-native sons and daughters—this is how—and there I met Nahji. Nahji Chu who would become misschu, trailblazing this and groundbreaking that, businesswoman of the year, food-fashion icon and then, mere minutes later, woman on the tip of losing it all rescued at the eleventh hour by the same guy, we’re told, who pulled Bevilles the jeweller and biscuit maker Unibic out of the abyss.

  It is not like the story will end here either.

  The journalism course where Nahji and I met was before all that. I liked her. She liked me. I was lying about my age (seventeen, pretending to be twenty-four). She had plenty of things she wasn’t telling, not about her age though, age wasn’t a problem. She was twenty, twenty-one, one of six, somewhere in the middle, the oldest daughter. Her family was Vietnamese. Escaping Laos by boat they’d got caught and spent three years in Thai refugee camps. She was nine when they reached Australia. At a dinner at my parents’ place (we didn’t do dinner parties) Nahji said all her family’s money was sewn inside a belt. We loved her unwishywashiness, how whole she felt.

  Next time I saw her was on Q&A on TV. How many years later? I am counting. Possibly even twenty. She was nearly the same, so assured, emitting power. Sheer voltage, that was the difference. No one is the same after twenty years. And a year or so after that, things were still on the up for her then, we met in Sydney where she lived ‘on the edges of Kings Cross’ (made me laugh) as one newspaper phrased it in her apartment I’d already seen photos of on websites, in fashion pages—yeah, it looked that good to me too except what you did not get from the photographs was a feeling of her standing apart from everyone else. Alone. Or maybe I got it wrong and that was just me coming at her from some pre-misschu past and making her remember something, the time, its passing, I felt it too. Her bulldog George—he got mentioned in almost every write-up—barked, jumped, ate sausage with conviction, peed outside. There we were. I liked her. She liked me.

  After a while you start noticing how much of their childhood is in people around you. In your twenties, thirties, teens definitely, the childhood stuff often feels like a cliché. Doesn’t seem the force it will show itself to be later. Even recently, I hear Ira Glass from This American Life radio show say there’s ‘always a story from childhood we have at the ready to explain to others who we are’ and I think how in America, America in particular, childhood has for so long been used as self-explanation, or some form of self-diagnosis, and how regularly this verges on a cop-out, personally, culturally, also how blinding such determinism can be, flattening too, like a life’s a by-the-numbers backstory in an undistinguished Hollywood movie. Yet I see as well—took me a while—that of a million things happening to us in babydom, toddlerhood, prepubescence, some are bound to turn into what Eva Hoffman calls ‘needles’. Needles that ‘pricked your flesh’ then ‘could never be extracted again’.

  I was standing in Nahji’s apartment, Nahji who in a short span of fame had put a thousand and one misschu quotes and quotelets out there but couldn’t be made fully bland even by the journos paid to dutifully banalify her. You still got a sense of her: an arrow midflight, deep inside her own trajectory, forensic about Point B. Nearly all the profiles retraced her route. From poverty-blasted refugee to multimillion-dollar entrepreneur, from escaping her past to embracing it, from shame to pride in her identity, from nothing to a something that felt nearly like everything—and the media especially dug the misfires. How she tried to sew, make films, act, go corporate, and when all the above got her nowhere Chu decided the only way forward was to play the cards she’d been dealt. The cards were these: Vietnamese, food, hard work, ingenuity, don’t expect anyone to give you anything, lucky to end up in Australia where most people are asleep at the wheel.

  Something bothered me, and it wasn’t the underplaying of the sheer wildness of her detours. Nahji had done so many things before misschu our journalism course did not get a mention. It was that the whole Cinderella Chu scenario allowed no glimpse of what she was actually up against. For instance: the world would be a different place if every seventeenth refugee with an alpha personality and a stomach for work could dream and build something deemed of lasting value. Easier instead for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The probability of Nahji attempting the peculiar thing that is misschu and succeeding in even an up, down, rich-then-not sort of way has always been minuscule. She borrowed zero money to get started or keep going (‘people in finance would forever put me down and say I should borrow’), didn’t have a marketing team, let her gut decide prices (‘I don’t need to weigh ingredients to work out what to charge’), undertook no market research, commissioned high-end experimental art projects, stuck to the same menu. Same menu why? �
��Easy to change a menu,’ she tells me, ‘hardest is to cook the same thing day in and out.’

  She said to her staff, ‘Imagine cooking the same dish all your life to perfection. That’s what I ask you to do. You should be able to meditate through work. Unless you can do that, you shouldn’t be working here.’

  Would you have your balls, Nahji, I ask her, if you did not have to grow them in refugee camps of Thailand and then in Australia, the coveted, plentiful Australia, which proved more of a camp than the actual camps? Would you have your commander-in-chief streak if you did not empirically discover early you could make your older siblings follow you, and other kids of varying ages and abilities followed you too, and you could lead your little armies and quench their little mutinies and give life to ideas that come specifically into your and no one else’s head? And you could do these things anywhere.

  The boat, belt, camp, no money, plenty of shame—they’re what shows up on the X-ray scan, right?

  Nahji has an unmuddled way of speaking. Gaps between her words are unsmudged even when she’s hesitating, or debating with herself. ‘Look at the six of us, in my family, we are all close in age, all thinking differently, living different lives. How many people come from war zones, from broken history, a broken family? Not everyone becomes an entrepreneur, not everyone is driven. If we were all sum totals of our histories there’d be a lot more competition for someone like me.’