by Susan Taubes
He made her laugh with his imitations of religious Jews in the rapture of prayer, and of different Hungarian types, people who thought themselves important—fops, dandies, hypocrites, and his crazy patients.
He addressed her the way the nobleman father and the peasant father would, all in proper Hungarian dialects; she was so enchanted she believed it. And when he became himself again—his face slackened with an expression of deprecation, almost disgust—he made what was noble appear ridiculous; it was such a disappointment. His impersonations were truly grand and he knew it. His final gesture of dropping the act, the mask softening into wistful irony, belonged to it. “I could have been a great actor,” he said, throwing away his opportunity for renown.
On Sundays he belonged to her; they did wonderful things together. Going on walks was what Sophie enjoyed most, more than going to the theater or the amusement park. She pulled him or stopped him. She marveled at her power over someone so much bigger, a man who earned money, owned a house—was this what the dog felt when she took him on walks?—this mad joy in running, jumping on and off all the ledges? Why couldn’t he run? The dog and she both went after his walking stick. They could ruffle him, they weren’t afraid. Could he make the dog behave at least? He made solemn and threatening faces, trying to get her to listen. He wanted to show her things, explain things. She wanted to play; she didn’t know what explanations did. He wanted to talk. She asked questions, why and what then and so what—made him grind out answers just to exercise power over him. Power and curiosity and wonder that this big man with a walking stick and bushy eyebrows who smoked cigarets could be pushed and pulled and made to talk and buy things for her, and she was happy till he spoiled it for her by putting it in words. “...why do you think I spend the one free afternoon of my week with you and buy you things, and why do you think I love you?” On and on about all that he did for her. And why? Why did he do all this for her? Because he was stupid. He put the words in her mouth. No, she only thought it and he said it. It was all right, he said and spoke about the laws of nature, the selfishness of children; they were all instruments of nature but he was resigned to it, he said, making it sound sad. Then she hopped and skipped and ran till she got rid of her anger.
Why did people really come to him, she asked; what was the matter with them, what did he do for them. She listened very carefully so she could avoid this happening to her. He told her about the sick people he treated: a man who hardly had any skin on his hands because he had to wash them every time he touched anything. Why did he have to? He explained but she still didn’t understand why he had to. She was only a little girl and there were many things she couldn’t do but there was nothing she couldn’t stop doing once she decided. He told her about a man who came to see him, his head wrapped in an enormous bandage, and when he took it off there was no wound. That made Sophie laugh. People came to him just to lie down on the couch and talk. They didn’t want to be seen by other sick people or anybody in the house—not even Sophie or the maid.
Each patient had his hour. They didn’t want anybody to know that they came to her father, so Papi never mentioned them by name. He talked of his ten o’clock patient. In the five minutes he left free between patients he’d talk to her.
The five o’clock patient was always late. This was very significant, Papi explained to her. There was a reason why she came late. Sophie wondered why the patient couldn’t stop being late—even if just to spite her father, as she herself would do, not to give him the opportunity to say, Ha! But perhaps the five o’clock patient didn’t realize that her father noted this against her, how her father kept score. Perhaps he was keeping her in ignorance just to test her, as he often did with Sophie.
The six o’clock patient always came early—sometimes an hour before he was supposed to come. Papi sometimes had to hide him or tell him to go for a walk so he wouldn’t collide with the five o’clock patient. He was a real problem. It would take seven years, Papi explained, before the patient could understand the reason he did this. Papi knew, but he couldn’t tell him because the patient wasn’t ready to accept her father’s reasons. Telling him would only make him more difficult.
The last patient came after supper at nine, always on the dot. Never a half a minute late or early. When it was almost nine o’clock Papi pulled out his gold watch and they both watched the second hand make the circle. When it skipped past the half mark he raised his finger; at the three-quarter mark they both took a deep breath and when the doorbell rang, with the minute hand on twelve or just a little before or after, his finger came down and they went into stitches of suppressed laughter.
People coming daily for years and years, some of them would still be coming in seven years—how awful! These people who came to her father and told him everything, they didn’t know one’s secret is the most important thing. They didn’t have a secret, that’s why they were so miserable and had to come back to her father. Maybe they lost it with her father. She was afraid her father did something to them that made them so helpless and will-less that they had to come to him; their thoughts and lives were no longer their own. Sophie would rather be dead or any old thing, a worm or a pebble, than one of Papi’s patients.
She asked her father if he ever had a patient who tried to kill him. When he answered her at length, she wondered if he read her thought behind the question: she imagined that if she were his patient that’s what she’d do. His face and tone betrayed no suspicion of her motives, but perhaps he was feigning, concealing. She listened to her father explain that his patients discussed this with him—they talked about their thoughts and urges instead of doing it because they really wanted to be stopped; he told her of a patient who wanted to assassinate Admiral Horthy, and another who wanted to blow up the Parliament. He was a brilliant chemist who worked in a laboratory and had the explosives all ready. “But I stopped him,” her father said with pride. She was weighing the issue, deciding how to feel about her father’s power and triumph. He went on talking about Matushka, who for years blew up trains before they caught him. Papi would have liked to have a talk with him, but he never had a chance. She wanted to know more about Matushka: What did he look like? How many trains did he blow up or derail? How was he caught? Where did he come from? Did he have parents? What did he act like when he was taken prisoner? Her father answered too briefly; he didn’t satisfy her curiosity, instead he explained that the dynamite and blowing up was something else—he talked about penis and orgasm, if Matushka had been his patient...She knew it was horrible to blow up a train full of people, still she admired Matushka. He laughed when he was captured. He didn’t care. Someone noticed him watching from nearby with dynamite sticking out from his pocket. Matushka didn’t know he was doing something horrible, he didn’t know what suffering he caused, and he wasn’t afraid to die. That made him like God; she couldn’t help loving him, especially since she imagined him young with raven-black hair, the face of a scoundrel, wearing his hat crooked.
She didn’t like to listen to Papi talk about his patients, except for the woman who came only once. That she remembered and asked him to tell to her again.
There were two women in the waiting room, her father told her, and when he asked which was the patient, one of them said, pointing to the other, “My sister thinks I am the patient.” But she was quite willing to talk to him and went with him into his office.
“Why does your sister think you ought to see me?” he asked her.
“I don’t understand it at all,” she said. “I don’t understand what makes people behave the way they do.”
He asked her to talk about the sort of thing that bothered her.
“Well,” she said, “it’s the same every day. I get up in the morning, wash, dress, and so forth, I come into the living room, my sister says ‘Good morning’ and I say ‘Good morning.’ She asks me how I am and I say fine, and I ask her how she is and she says fine. And it goes on and on and something. I put on my coat
, I go to work every day. ‘Good-bye,’ I say; ‘Good-bye,’ she says. If I meet someone I know on the street he says ‘How are you?’ and I say ‘How are you?’ and it goes on and on and something. I go into the building where I work, I meet people who work in the same office in the elevator, they greet me, I greet them and it goes on and on and something...”
Her father continued with the woman’s story. She was so right, Sophie thought. But what did she mean by the “and something”? “Ah!” he exclaimed; that was the crux of it. The secret, which it seems he couldn’t unravel. It was too complicated, he told Sophie. He couldn’t tell her the whole thing. The woman was incurable and he sent her home.
“And it goes on and on and something,” her father repeated the woman’s statement and for a while they walked in silence and she contemplated the words.
HER MOTHER was back from a trip. Sophie saw her roll up the shutters and stand in the window, but her mother couldn’t see her. She was in the garden, watching from behind the bushes. Later when she saw her mother coming down the stairs dressed to go out, she told her the German teacher wanted her to have a certain book. Her mother listened, laughing, her lids fluttering, her face very painted behind a veil full of velvet dots and a dress that was a coat with a fur stole in one piece. She asked her mother in a funny way, Sophie knew.
“You’re a funny little girl,” her mother said to her, as Sophie expected she would. She didn’t know how to be any other way with her mother.
She watched for her mother and when she saw her come out the front door, pretended she was playing and didn’t see her. She ran up and down the path, jumping and tossing her head with such abandon she couldn’t possibly see her mother or hear her calling her. But of course she was watching carefully and planning; just before her mother reached the seventh almond tree Sophie streaked across the path, startling her and blocking her way. She was such a funny little girl, if her mother wanted it that way. Sophie didn’t care as long as it was all right with her mother. And it seemed that way from her little laugh and winks of complicity.
The day before her German lesson she went to see if her mother was in the house. It was afternoon; her father was working, the door to her mother’s bedroom was closed. But she heard her moving about. She knocked. “Come in,” she heard her mother’s voice. She went in. Her mother lay on the blue divan in black satin pants and a Japanese kimono; she put aside the book she was reading, and stared at Sophie as if she didn’t believe her eyes. Was she expecting someone else?
Her amazement spread in a smile, she was seized by giggles before she could speak. “To what great event do I owe the honor of my only daughter’s visit?”
Her tone was not sarcastic and the expression of her face was so strange Sophie forgot about her book. Besides, her mother gave her no time as she continued wagging her finger and laughing mysteriously. “I think I know! I think I know! And if you’ll let me fix your hair, I’ll tell you.” Her fingers were undoing the braids the maid had braided at some aunt’s command, loosening and fluffing the strands while she murmured about little secrets between mother and daughter. Sophie took off her hand angrily. Her mother smiled knowingly. “Do you know why you don’t love me?” she began in an artificial tone of reflective serenity and looking witty, as if to announce something new that would amuse, edify, and reconcile them both. “I’ll tell you, it’s very simple.”
To say something to stop her mother from continuing, Sophie said, “Because you’re always away.” Now she was angry at herself. She heard that from others. She had no right to say it to her mother. She was glad when her mother was away.
“Little liar. I was home all this week; did you come and say hello to me? Have you ever said a nice word to me? You come only if you want something.
That look...you should see the look in your eye...” Her laugh was taunting now and increasingly enraged as she carried on while Sophie stood still, her eyes nailed on the ground.
“...an unnatural child, from the day you were born. Already as a baby you pushed me away. All children are selfish, but it’s unnatural for a child not to love its mother...” She watched her mother as she paced, declaiming, reproaching, threatening; observed the faultless lacquered nails, the reddish face with bleached fuzz, the dry, blond curls. Her arm rose from the wide sleeve of the kimono and vanished. Now as the arm extended horizontally pointing at her, the blue parrot on the sleeve appeared long enough that she saw it whole, saw the different shades of blue, some green, a touch of orange—suddenly it split and vanished into wrinkles, her mother made a sudden gesture, taking a step toward her, her arms turning like those of a circus performer doing fancy figures with a whip. The spectacle was totally absorbing: her dramatic gestures, the changing line of her mouth, the pattern of her kimono showing different colors as the folds shifted, her slippered feet stamping—at moments all these details would converge in the overpowering sensation of her beauty, majesty, ugliness. One moment, beautiful—all of her had had the beauty of her porcelain hands; at another, all of her repulsive like a wounded animal. Sophie felt herself dissolving in the violence of these sensations. Of herself only a schematic outline remained and a painful awareness of the child in the room as someone else, an undefined mass, an empty outline. Parts of the child kept appearing, dissolving, reappearing—sudden, fragmented, irritating like false images: the feet shifting weight, the hot damp skin of a face with a bone, brains, jelly eyes and darkness behind the skin; no person in the darkness, shrugging shoulders. She took a step back, saw her ugly brown laced shoes. The phantom of a child rose up, angrily protesting a storm of accusations which were not true. A child trapped in a losing battle, her self-defense provoking a more horrible judgment: annihilating. A child before whom its mother was speechless, worse than bad, unnatural, scandalous, so outrageous it was unspeakable. “...any other parents would have beaten you to a pulp,” she was groaning out the words; “...it’s only because you have a father...a father who is the sweetest, kindest, most generous...he is too good, he lets you get away with...if it wasn’t for your father...” Sophie heard the words coming in small gasps and groans, as she stood frozen, her head bent, her back stiffened, as if anticipating a blow. She stood at once frozen and torn between fear and desire to be struck by this woman who dared not strike her only because of her father who was too good. She was at once troubled, and relieved that no injury was done to her flesh. But as the danger diminished, more troubled than relieved, because she couldn’t grasp what really held her mother back. Was it really her father, preoccupied with a patient in a room in another part of the house? She wanted to picture it as something solid. The invisible wall between herself and this woman, protecting her; the invisible leash holding Mother back, allowing her to claw and spring only so far and no further, troubled Sophie, forming pictures in her mind which didn’t apply.
Her mother stood by the dresser dabbing her eyes, still crying. Sophie waited till her sobs were subdued. It was hard for her not to feel sad for her mother. For now she was a very pitiful woman, crying, lost to her sadness, totally alone, oblivious of Sophie, her rage at Sophie quite forgotten. Her forlornness had both beauty and ugliness. Sophie couldn’t tell whether she was more beautiful or ugly, only that she was pitiful...Sometimes while she stood thus, waiting for her mother to collect herself, afraid simply to leave the room, she had time to ask herself a host of questions she couldn’t answer. Shouldn’t she comfort her mother? Why couldn’t she? How would she go about it if she could? But she didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. She didn’t comfort her mother. Whatever held her back said in her mustn’t when she felt very sorry; or said won’t or can’t when her mother’s head turned slightly and their eyes crossed; Sophie could not grasp it. It was what her mother had said of her, which was so terrifying her mother didn’t have a word for it. Heartless, inhuman, unnatural—these were the words grasped merely to express her incomprehension before what she saw in her child, whose reality only she
, Sophie, could grasp and feel because she embodied the unspeakable, incomprehensible evil. It didn’t feel like anything. It was the feeling of her body as a lot of bones, tubes, stomach, lungs, heart, intestines all packed together.
Her mother was seated before her dresser; she pulled out all the drawers searching for something with quick nervous movements, her look preoccupied. She didn’t find what she was looking for. She flung a scarf angrily on the floor.
“I am going out in the garden,” Sophie said, turning to go.
Her mother looked up, holding a bunch of tangled silk hose she had just lifted from the drawer, frozen midair.
“Didn’t you come to me because you wanted something—” Her voice was weighted with fatigue, indifference, only the suggestion of a taunt came through the rough edge of leftover rage.
She said the title of the book and went out.
SCHOOL gives childhood an unanticipated sanction and dignity. You enter a new existence—formal, public, regulated; here you will spend the next twelve years of your life, progressing from grade to grade. Here you wear a uniform, a sailor blouse over a pleated skirt, dark blue like all the girls of your class.