The Journal I Did Not Keep

by Lore Segal

  There is to be no fudging of the blame. And David knows—as our modern politicos never know—how to say I am guilty before the Lord. I have sinned before Him!

  And Nathan said, The Lord has let your sin go by; you shall not die, but the son who will be born to you is going to die.

  And Nathan went home.

  And the Lord rejected the child…It became ill. David begged God for the little boy’s life and fasted and came home and slept the night on the floor. His chief servant, who had charge of his household, tried to raise him from the floor, but he would not be raised, and would not eat. On the seventh day the child died.

  David’s people were afraid to tell him and said, He wouldn’t listen to us when the child was alive, how can we tell him the child is dead? Who knows what he might do!

  David saw them whispering together and knew that the child was dead and said, Is the child dead?

  They said, It is dead. And David stood up, bathed, anointed himself, put on fresh clothes, and went into the house of the Lord and worshipped. Then he went home and asked for food and sat down and ate.

  Here the story, and rather transparently, makes itself a space to do some explaining.

  His man asked David, We don’t understand you. You fasted and wept while the child lived and now it is dead you get up, you eat your food!

  He said: While the child lived, I fasted and wept because I thought, Who knows! Perhaps the Lord might have pity on me and let the boy live. But now he is dead, I cannot bring him back again. The time will come when I will go where the child has gone, but the child will not come back to me.

  And David consoled his wife Bathsheba, and went in and lay with her and she bore a son and he called him Solomon.

  But about the Ewe Lamb story. What is the lesson it teaches King David and what are we to learn from it? King David has sinned against three of the ten commandments: he has coveted his neighbor’s wife, he has committed adultery, he has murdered, but that is not what the story takes him to task for. It has nothing to say about the taking of life, nor sexual impurity. Why does the Lord send David a story about a man who steals a lamb for a dinner party, because he doesn’t feel like killing his own?

  A favorite story in my family annals suggests the sort of thing I think the prophet Nathan means David to understand. My young mother used to go shopping with a neighboring mother, who came over, one evening, to borrow a cup of vinegar. My mother said, “But you bought your own bottle.” “I know,” said the neighbor, “but it seems a shame to open mine when yours is already open.” Surely a very minor sin, and a great shabbiness of soul.

  The story of the Ewe Lamb is about a minor wrongdoing because it isn’t interested in the doing of the wrong but in the grief the wrongdoing is going to cause.

  The law commands, You shall not steal; the story commands, Imagine the man from whom the stealing is being done. The story forces the king, and forces us, to imagine the feelings of the man’s loss of his pet lamb. Here’s none of that restraint we have noted in the Bible’s manner of telling. This story jerks a tear; it nudges the king to care. This is the man’s only lamb and the only lamb in the Bible we get to know personally—it is so little, so particular, brought up by hand, in the bosom, on the lap, sharing the bite out of that poor man’s mouth.

  Story has the power to manipulate imagination, and this story manipulates the king to imagine two different things. It makes him feel the feelings of a man in a situation and condition unlike himself as if that man were himself. And it teaches him to judge himself as if he were somebody else. Before the story David walks inside his sin like Peanuts Pig-Pen inside his cloud of wavy lines stinking to heaven and to everyone except himself. Those little black waves that emanate from ourselves are ourselves, smell like ourselves, look like ourselves. But story holds the mirror up to our moral nature in the critical moment before we know who that is walking toward us. Remember the witch in the fairy tale? She doesn’t recognize the account of her own evil doing and condemns the perpetrator to dance on the hot coals? David, enraged, says, “As the Lord lives, a man who can do such a thing deserves to die, even if he repays the value of the sheep four times over! He is a man without pity!”

  That’s when story and only story is able to make us understand: “It’s you.”

  When Hillel tells us not to do unto our neighbor what we don’t want our neighbor to do unto us, he commits us to a truism we tend not to believe—that our neighbor feels and minds the same things we feel and mind and to the same degree. We prefer Hillel’s other famous advice that we should look out for ourselves, for if we don’t nobody else will. It’s true. That’s the advice we follow feelingly. We can feel only our self feeling; but we do not, by definition, feel our neighbor’s feelings and consequently don’t, feelingly, believe that he has got any. It’s natural. We naturally feel ourselves to be the point of view; there is no way for us not to feel ourselves to be our own protagonist, until the creation of story. Story has the power to reverse nature. It surprises us into imagining our neighbor. Imagine if the rich man imagined being the poor! Would he keep taking from the man who has nothing even that which he has? Imagine something more: Imagine what we might do, and what we might not do, if we imagined the enemy, our cousin Ishmaelite, Amalekite, Ammonite, and Moabite. And now imagine if our enemy imagined us. It is against nature, but what if we told each other, what if we learned to hear, each other’s story?

  Translations from the Bible are my own from German and English sources.

  AFTERWORD TO THE 2018 UK EDITION OF OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES

  As a novelist writing autobiographically I get impatient with the reader who wants to know what “really” happened; as a reader I might ask something like the same question.

  It takes a philosopher to define reality, and to differentiate between the concepts “fact” and “truth”; the novelist thinks by means of story:

  Take the ur story in which god walks in the cool of the evening to uncover what happened with the apple. I don’t believe in a factual Adam and Eve, but I believe that the first thing Adam said was “I didn’t do it, it was her fault,” and that Eve said, “It wasn’t me, it was the snake.” It doesn’t require “real” characters to enact the truth that we human beings can’t bear being in the wrong.

  Why did I choose to fictionalize my personal history? Because I experience and remember and understand like a story teller rather than a historian or a journalist. Story chooses me.

  Here are some facts: Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, four days, as it happened, after my tenth birthday on March 8. The British State Department organized the Kindertransport that was to rescue nearly ten thousand, mostly Jewish children from Nazi Europe and bring them to safety in England. Because my mother’s cousin Otto’s girlfriend worked for Vienna’s Jewish Community I got onto the first of the trains to leave from the West Bahnhof on December 10, 1938.

  In New York, three decades later, my friend Robert and I discovered that we had come on that same train except that mine had left on a Thursday while his had left on Saturday. Both of us knew what we knew and we argued.

  What really happened?

  I had been ten years old; Bob a more competent fourteen, and from an orthodox family for whom riding a train on the Sabbath had been traumatic. More simply, the calendar for the year 1938 bears him out.

  Ask me in the court of fact and I will confess that my memory must be in error, our train must have left on a Saturday, but my novel knows that the day I said goodbye to my appalled grandparents in the apartment in the Rotensterngasse, and my mother, my father, and I crossed the Donau Canal on the Stefanie Bridge for the last, time took place on my heart’s Thursday.

  * * *

  —

  The novelist’s truth can make a truer story. Nineteen forty was the year I went to live in the large house with my two elderly foster mothers. In my novel they are Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon. Miss Ellis and Miss Wallace were their real names. Looking back I understand what I di
d not see at the time, that Miss Wallace was Miss Ellis’s companion.

  This was also the year when my Jewish imagination was converted, temporarily, to Christianity. Other People’s Houses reports the weekly rabbi’s visit to Guildford. His mission was to educate the handful of Jewish refugee children in the Hebrew letters and the Jewish holidays that we were not going to celebrate with our Church of England foster families. Why, oh why did our rabbi not tell us our own fundamental, nourishing—our ur stories of Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake, and Noah, and the flood? Who was it who said that we need stories as we need our daily vitamins?

  In England, where there is no separation of church and state, my favorite class was Religious Instruction. The Jesus stories ensorcelled me. I got A on my essays.

  By the time Other People’s Houses was published in 1964, Miss Ellis had died and Miss Wallace wrote back kindly but said I was wrong in writing that they had tried to convert me.

  I wrote her back, You are right! You are absolutely right, but don’t you see that I call my book a novel? To explain conversion as the operation upon the mind of a set of ideas is the business of essay. Story understands what happens when one character acts upon another. It is why both the Old and the New Testament mean by means of stories.

  To Miss Wallace this may have been a lame explanation but she had always been tender with me. Once again, watch story-making at work: Because of her warmth, a softness of surface, my novel made Miss Wallace into a widowed “Mrs. Dillon,” so different from the distinguished, classy old angular “Miss Douglas.”

  * * *

  —

  The bitter sadness is that only some ten percent of the Kindertransport children ever saw their parents again. It has long been my assumption and my assertion that it was I who saved my parents.

  But what had really happened? I really had written those letters and miraculously, on my eleventh birthday on March 8, 1939 my father and mother turned up in Liverpool at the house of the Cohens (the novel calls them Levine), my first foster family. My parents left on the next day to travel south to Sevenoaks, Kent, to start their job as a “married couple,” meaning a cook and butler. It is eighty years too late to investigate just where my letters went. Who got my parents a visa and work and a permit?

  * * *

  —

  And here is a final curiosity about remembering and telling our childhood: Other People’s Houses describes the morning on which the boat that had brought us across the Channel docked in England. There were some five hundred children. We looked for what was still edible in the paper bags our mothers had packed for us. We queued endlessly to get to the ship’s red velvet salon to be processed. I remember the ladies sitting at a table, looking kindly at me. They asked me my name and handed me my document, I think, and told me I could go. Go? Go where?

  In the book I wrote:

  The boat seemed deserted. I walked up some stairs and through a door and came out into the open air onto a damp deck. There was a huge sky so low that it reached down to the ground in a drizzle as fine as mist. A wide wooden plank stretched between the boat and the wharf. There was no one around to tell me what to do so I walked up the plank.

  I stood on land that I presumed was England.

  In the course of researching Into the Arms of Strangers there turned up a picture of children nudging each other down a crowded gangplank. Each child wears the cardboard square with the number that had been assigned us in the Vienna Railroad station, on a shoestring around our neck, and there I am, number 152. (I have gifted the original cardboard number, with shoestring, to the Washington Holocaust Museum and there you can see it.)

  Myself, documented by photography in that crowd of children, is a fact obliterated by my clear recollection of being totally alone in this alien country and there being no grown-up to tell me where to go next.

  I believe that the act of remembering and telling the story of what we remember will always be to some extent fatal to the thing remembered.

  So what really happened?

  HOW TO BE OLD

  Being Alive

  My husband, David, converted his fears into jokes. There was one about the head man on some distant planet who calls for his lieutenant and says to him, “I want you to go down to earth and check something out for me. I’ve been watching for eons and here’s what I don’t understand: It is clear to me that earthlings are born and know they are going to die. So how is it that they get up in the morning, get dressed, have breakfast, go to work…Go down there and see what gives.”

  Being Old

  My generation of friends confess to each other that we enjoy being alive. Ruth says what we enjoy is not being dead. But I think the pleasures are positive. Here are samples of my small, daily ones.

  How many people do you know who can lie in bed and watch the sun rise and, staying right where they are, watch it set, sometimes spectacularly, reflected in the back windows of the appropriately named West End Avenue?

  But I don’t, of course, stay in bed. Seven mornings a week the fellow up on David’s planet might observe me get up, get dressed, and go into the kitchen where I make myself an excellent cup of coffee, eat my buttered rye toast, and, having swallowed eight pills of the greatest variety of color, shape, and size, go to my computer. I write five hours a day, seven days a week, the way I imagine athletes run and swim and slalom, because that’s what we know how to do. What I know is how to find the words that give what I mean “a local habitation and a name” as Shakespeare said.

  On my walls, there are pictures of my favorite people, and the Austrian alps; there is Bastet the Egyptian Cat and some other essentials.

  I have my e-reader, with sympathetic apologies to the true-book people. For those of us who are losing our good sight, it is a first blessing. I carry Jane Austen, Kafka, the GrimMs. Proust, all of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Henry James, the King James Bible, and more, more—a library in my handbag. And when there is a word I want to get to know better, I put my finger on it, and the Oxford Dictionary comes right up and gives me its definition, its history!

  And there’s the TV. I lie on my bed and binge on the best junk.

  My children, the Brooklyn Segals and the ones from Harlem, will be here for dinner on Sunday. And there’s an ongoing half-a-century of conversation with the old friends.

  * * *

  —

  Yes, but let’s not kid ourselves. The common adage is true: Being old is not for sissies. Open heart surgery was followed by an ugly two weeks in rehab, and a lengthy recovery. Thinking that I was now repaired, I had forgotten the other body parts and the ways they have for going wrong. When, after my left hip needed replacement, and another rehab, my right knee began to hurt, it did for a long moment seem to me that not being alive was a desirable alternative. Except—and this is the trick—that I enjoyed the anesthesia. Here I was, lying on my back in the operating theater; then I was totally absent in a blackness blacker than I had ever imagined; and then—passing through a moment, an infinitesimal moment of euphoria such as I imagined I might, had I been braver, have experienced doing LSD—I felt myself returning to myself, lying on my back, in a different room, and I was glad. It was interesting.

  And it was interesting, when I fell down (“fell over” as my English friend says) outside my building, to recognize the instant in which I had already passed the upright after which there was no possibility that I was not going to hit the sidewalk. (I’ve used that in a story.)

  These days it is called “mindfulness” or “being in the moment”—the awareness of what happens around us, to us, in us. For the writer, the nastiest event carries with it a little thrill like the discovery of a vein of gold: I can use this in a story.

  Being Young

  I have wondered whether the reason for my being so good at being an old person is that I was so bad at being a young one.

  The daughter of a friend from my University of London days was visiting in New York and brought me an old snapshot of her mother a
nd me. Ingrid Bergman, in Vichy Casablanca, can wear a skirt and blouse and look like a million dollars. But in post-WWII London, the skirts of these two nineteen-year-olds hit at exactly the wrong place below their knees. They wear dreadful little white blouses and flat shoes. I’m the one with the glasses, and the ironic, embarrassed half smile; looking downward makes my long nose longer. I remember putting on lipstick. Looking in the mirror and seeing myself suddenly pretty, I wiped it off.

  And I remember having wet feet. Heating still rationed, the sixpenny gas-fire was not allowed to be on between nine a.m. and five p.m. It felt colder inside than out. I kept on my coat and gloves and wrote stories which I sent to Ann, my best friend from high school. Ann responded as circumspectly as she knew how: Did I think, her letter asked me, that there might be readers out in the world who would not be interested in a teenager’s disappointed yearnings? I agreed that, if I were a reader, I would certainly care nothing about them, and continued to write more stories. One was about one of those princesses who has to choose among the princes come from far and wide to ask for her hand in marriage by posing a puzzle. The prince who gives the wrong answer pays with his head. The princess in my story invented a puzzle so obscure that no one would ever be able to answer it because there was no answer; nor were there any princes come for her hand.

  Being Dead

  David died two weeks before his forty-first birthday in 1970. It is now 2018. “How brave of you to turn ninety in public!” says my friend Lotte when I call to invite her to my birthday party. Why, like Lotte, am I not appalled to be so old, or am I kidding myself that I don’t mind, that I am not afraid to know I will die within the next ten years? I think it’s that I don’t believe it. Like most of humankind, I am not able to imagine myself not being. But if in the middle of the night a bad guy infiltrates my room and points his gun, I will believe, and I will be afraid, and I think that I will mind with the sharpest regret.