by Tamas Dobozy
And sometime during the weeks it took me to realize that Mother’s home had been turned into its own kind of prison, I also realized the magic of the postcards: they reminded me of Father. Their profanity was a perfect realization of his own attitude toward Mother’s religion, such as the time he suggested she give up going to church for Lent. The argument had some logic to it, my father proposing that it was very easy for a devout Catholic—one who truly believed that God wanted her to make various kinds of sacrifices—to give up “run-of-the-mill” things, such as eating meat, for Lent. It was no sacrifice at all, my father would continue, if at the end of the day the reward for it was eternity in the company of God. Even martyrdom, in this regard, wouldn’t be enough, since it would just be trading something finite and disposable for something infinite and indispensable. No, there was only one sacrifice, as far as my father was concerned, equal to the bliss of heaven, and that was not to give up your life, but to give up your eternal life, to love God so much you’d even be willing to sacrifice your soul for him, for instance by not going to church anymore and damning yourself to Hell. “Now that,” he would say, “that’s a sacrifice!”
I would look at the postcards and remember his pseudo-theological arguments, and how my mother would respond by saying it wasn’t for us to “presume” what kind of sacrifices God did and didn’t require, and that we should have the humility to follow those practices sanctioned by Christ’s representative, the Pope, and not attempt to equate our efforts with God, since it was futile to do so anyhow. For his part, he would greet her counter-argument with the same exasperation with which she greeted his, though even these discussions would end the same way Sunday brunch did, with the two of them laughing at each other and themselves.
Of course, with my father’s death, everything changed. I hadn’t remembered us having so many icons in the house when I was kid, and, in those first weeks of being back at my mother’s, I attributed this change to the absence of my father, who wouldn’t have tolerated such stifling uniformity, though I was soon to realize that it was precisely because of my father that Mother had turned the house into a shrine. And it had nothing to do with trying to negotiate his soul out of Purgatory.
It started with my decision to move out. She was sitting in the living room that day, listening to some interminable radio broadcast of one or more of the several messages delivered by the Pope to celebrants in St. Peter’s Square, and I had to wait for forty minutes after she’d held up her finger, warning me not to interrupt. I sat there, listening to the weird delay between the Pope’s Italian or Polish or Latin or whatever it was and the overlaid voice of the English translator.
“Mother, I’m moving out,” I said, after she’d finally turned off the radio.
“I know,” she said, shaking her hair out of her eyes. And while I was expecting her to say something else, to ask where I planned to get the money, or to question me on why her place wasn’t good enough, what she ended up saying was only this: “I’m going to miss you. It’s been nice having you around.” But there was an edge to her regret, the feeling that I’d disappointed her, that she’d been waiting for me to do something other than sit with her through the radio broadcast, and her endless prayers, and the weekly round of masses, and I thought then, for some reason, about the postcards I’d stashed in the rain gutter, wondering if maybe the way I’d expected her to react to them was not how she would have reacted at all.
“Mother,” I said. “I know you would like me to stay. But I can’t spend my life keeping you company.”
She looked shocked. “Is that what you think I want, for you to stay here, in this house?” She said this as if she was thinking about what I’d just said, and, maybe for the first time in her life, conceding that there might be truths about herself she’d never considered. “Well,” she said, and then waited a moment, head tilted slightly to one side, working through what I’d proposed, though when she spoke next she seemed at a total loss, for she whispered, “Really, I don’t know what I was expecting. Not that, though.” She looked out the window. “It was something else.”
“Something what?” I asked.
“Oh,” she lifted a hand to her face and then let it drop, the years of tiredness, of self-denial, of single-minded devotion coming out in her face. “I don’t know.” And she drew her hand, very quickly, back to her eyes. “I guess it was resistance.”
I leaned forward. “Resistance? Mother, I’m moving out! Isn’t that resistance enough?”
And when she looked at me next, turning back from the window, I saw her panic for the first time. “No! That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what do you mean?” I was sitting there patiently, though for some reason I wanted to yell at her, demand that she start making sense. And when she said nothing I raised my voice a notch. “Listen, since I’ve been back here you and I have had not one single conversation. Not one! Every time I try and tell you what I want to do, what I need to be doing, you don’t listen. Or you’ve got all your answers prepared in advance!” I wrung my hands and looked around the room. “Just once I’d like to talk to you rather than to some reciter of …” I waved my hands around angrily, “catechisms and truisms and … bullshit!”
“It’s not bullshit,” she said, smiling and suddenly aglow, as if my rant, rather than confronting her with our relationship, had reinforced her beliefs. “It’s truth. You just don’t want to face it.”
“The truth?” I looked around the room, then jumped up. “The truth, Mother? All right. Hold on. I’ll be back with the truth.” By the time I’d returned she’d put some music on, Palestrina’s “The Assumption of Mary,” and it was blaring at such volume I winced as I walked over to turn down the knob. Then I dropped the envelope full of postcards into her lap.
There is, of course, much that could be said about what happened next, the look in her eyes, the halting speech, the sudden spread of colour to her cheeks and forehead, and then, after that— in what now seems to me an entirely predictable event—the laughter, my mother shaking and shaking her head until the tears came, then rising off the couch to try and embrace me, saying I was so much like my father, so much the way he was, my mother saying it over and over and over while she shook her head and laughed.
And, oddly enough, I was less surprised at how happy she was than to find myself laughing right along with her, moving willingly into the embrace, the odd pagan moment of it all. For that is what it was, this ritual, this observance, this rite consecrated not to the salvation of our own souls—which is what I’d thought my mother had been doing all these years, trying to exorcise my father from the house in order to save herself—but to his memory, the two of us moving around the floor, turning circles as our laughter drowned out Palestrina. And I understood, now, that my mother’s mortifications, the rigidity with which she’d lived her life since Father’s death was her way of remaining faithful to him, sealing herself away from the profane until she was totally encompassed by it, held in its embrace, caressed on all sides—as if my father’s spirit could be kept alive by the rigour with which she guarded against it. And her eyes shone with the look she’d worn when we would return home from mass to find my father standing in the apron with a spatula in hand, as if all her church-going, her devotions and prayers, were enacted to give him this: his moment of mockery, when he was most fully himself, the person we remembered, even now, laughing with us.
Radio Blik
I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT before he died Leon Blik perfected the art of writing in ruins. The truth, however, is that he had no choice but to write as he did, each sentence demanded of him by the knowledge of his approaching death, at 57, from cancer. And, probably, my need to see his final journal as an intentional work— a product of wilful effort—is because I can’t bear the thought of what it must have been like, watching meaning disintegrate even as he scrawled it upon the page.
You see, I stole Blik’s final journal, along with one of the radios, from his cellar workshop, and drove fr
om his house to Holman’s Ridge, where I lay down in the back seat of my car and read it. It seems ridiculous to me now, hiding out like that, but at the time I was worried that Helena, having discovered what I’d done, might be angry enough to follow me up there and tear the journal from my hands, returning it to the man Blik had intended it for. As it was, Helena did find out I’d stolen it, though only much later, after I’d spent weeks and weeks poring over my friend’s last sentences, and holding the plug of the last radio he’d “repaired,” scared that if I put it into the socket I’d electrocute myself. And, anyway, Helena wasn’t even angry.
It is not easy, reading the journal of a dead friend, and even harder when it’s written in sentences that don’t ever come to an end, clause upon clause upon clause, until you lose all sense of what the writer is trying to say, until the writer himself seems so exasperated at his failure to communicate that he can’t, in good faith, put a period to anything. Having lost the way, or his point, Blik would turn the page when the sentence he’d been trying to complete ground to a halt, and begin an entirely new version. As a result, the journal read like someone trying to revise the same sentence over and over. But it was exactly this that kept me in suspense: would Blik, on the very final page, at last complete his thought?
Well, I never did close the book. I left it there in frustration, in the back seat of my car, open to that last sheet of lined paper, the words staring at the ceiling as if waiting for a drop of ink, aimed just right, to splash down and supply the missing period. And while I’ve gone back through that journal many times, checking out the words, copying out the phrases, even reading them aloud, when I’m done I always leave the spiral-ring binder as it was: open, its words exposed, lingering on the horizon of one last idea.
I suppose if I had to put the experience into words, I would say that reading Blik’s last journal is like standing in a vast field of stones and suddenly noticing that carved into each is a fragment of pattern—a rose, a fish, a cross—only to realize there are too many fragments, too many possible combinations, to ever connect them. And this is what makes me hang onto the journal, this feeling that the words have less to do with Blik’s father, or even about the kinds of expression trauma wrings from us, than with the fact that, in the effort to purify the writing, to arrive at a message from which all traces of the author—his longing, his inadequacy, his sentiment— had been stripped away, Blik accomplished the opposite. So that what reading produces is less a sense of Blik’s negation than the impossible distance between the two of you, which only makes you feel that he’s out there somewhere, vitally present, and your job is to somehow get back to him.
It is a book about distance, and, as such, it belongs to anyone. Apart from his writing, Blik’s other fascination was radio, though these two things were not mutually exclusive, as he explained that day in his basement when I first visited him. There were wide workbenches along every wall, and on these a tangle of wires and speakers and antennas and crystals, so much of it piled up, and so high, it was a wonder Blik could find a single thing he was looking for; or clear himself a space in which to work; or even move out of the room when he was finished for the day, when he’d successfully reassembled his radios, which sat in such numbers on the floor: tiny portables with wrist straps, kitchen-counter varieties, antique radios as tall as the average man.
In fact, what Blik did that first day was sidle and climb, moving nimbly for a man his age, until he reached the one vacant spot in the midst of all that clutter, where there was just room enough for his two feet to stand underneath a square foot of empty workbench. Along the way he’d turned on all the radios that worked, so that by the time he reached his destination it seemed as if Blik no more wanted to leave room for his body in the midst of all those spare parts than for his voice amidst the competing babble of static and music and announcements. He was yelling something above the roar of frequencies, opening his mouth and repeating the same phrase over and over. I cupped a hand to my ear and shook my head to indicate I couldn’t hear a word.
Whereupon Blik reached up and hit a switch on the wall beside him, cutting all power to the room, leaving the two of us in a silence so sudden and dark the room was thick with it, and I had the sensation of not being able to move, or call out, of barely being able to breathe. It was as if the air around us had turned to amber.
“When I was a child,” said Blik, in his soft, unwavering monotone, “my father showed me how to build a crystal radio.” He paused. My eyes began to make out some of the shapes in the room. “He went away, you know,” continued Blik, “and I remember sitting there—oh, I must have been six or seven—tuning and tuning that radio, convinced that if I hit the right frequency I might find his voice revealing where he’d gone, or the directions to finding him. Maybe the time of his return. Though after a while all I expected were the reasons for why he’d left.”
As a child he was often amazed, Blik admitted, to find there were so many sources—almost infinite—transmitting information across the airwaves. In all that space there must have existed the possibility of tuning in to his father’s voice. Blik said he spent hours with that radio, lengthening the wire coil around the bleach bottle, creating more taps to tune into greater numbers of stations, adding to the length of his antenna every time he came upon suitable wire. “Oh, I know why he left,” said Blik. “I think I knew even then. It had to do with nerves. I remember coming upon him at times, angrily speaking to himself. A lot of people—a very few, I mean—they get trapped. They run out of help. But I did not want to think it was the effect my mother and us kids had upon him.”
It was still dark in Blik’s workshop, though I could now make out his shape against a wall of indiscernible tools, his hand on the switch, ready to turn the power on again, to drown his voice in a wail of radios, should anything he say betray him.
He paused, and then abruptly changed the subject. “Walter Benjamin. You’ve read ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’? He spoke of film. The thesis suggests it lends itself to certain … fascist effects. And, of course, much has been said about the way that Hitler and Mussolini used the radio to similar ends …” He trailed off, then laughed as he remembered something. “As a child I used to speak into the radio, imagining … as if my father was out there, listening, and he could hear me.” Blik cleared his throat. “But of course radios only transmit one way. They don’t care an iota for what you have to say. Information is theirs. And even when it isn’t … even their silence is an instruction, a command. Even then you are being told something that requires you not to respond, merely to receive, without acknowledgment or question.” And with this, Blik grimaced. I could see the light from outside glancing off his teeth. Then he flipped the switch again, and for several minutes I was blinded by the lights, deafened by the roar.
Holman’s Ridge is a two-hour drive from town—level ground of some four square miles a hundred feet above sea level, from the edges of which they launch hang-gliders and weather balloons. The drop is sheer. It is the place I drove to that Thanksgiving— rolling hills flecked red and gold, white clouds sharply defined, the daylit moon less a milestone than a reminder of what the infinite does to all measures. Standing on the edge, I turned around to get my fill of those distances, as if they might console me, or provide an antidote to that terrible claustrophobia we’d felt sitting by Blik’s bed in the intensive care ward, every rustle of the tubes and wires attached to his body affecting us like the thrashing of a torture victim beyond our aid, until his sister, Helena, leaned over and told Blik that his friends were all here, and that he’d fought for so long, and that he could go. Blik closed his eyes. “Thank you, thank you,” he whispered. The last words before he left.
As I said, it was at Holman’s Ridge that I first leafed through the final journal. I’d put it into my shirt minutes before the arrival of Blik’s two nephews, who’d been sent to gather up Blik’s writings and deliver them to the “distant relative”—Blik’s father—who’d shown up out
of the blue at the funeral, and who was as surprised as we were angered by the fact that Blik had bequeathed to him every last word he’d written. It had been a weird, sentimental gesture on Blik’s part, and had struck me, Helena, and all of Blik’s closest friends and relatives like an act of violence—as if a gift had been torn from us and given to a man wholly undeserving. I watched as the nephews kicked aside the radios littering the floor to get to the shelves and desk, which were wedged into a corner of the basement, where they roughly lifted the books and dumped them into several cardboard cartons, emptied the filing cabinet, reached up for the row of identical notebooks, their spines bound in red leather, that occupied an entire shelf above Blik’s desk, and from which I’d stolen the final volume just a moment before. I stood there, watching them, wishing I’d had more time to stuff my shirt full of books.
But the truth is, the final journal was the only work of Blik’s I wanted, having listened to Helena over the phone for too many nights during the final stages of his illness, listening to her complain about how “Leon [was] running himself down, just sitting in his room in front of that journal all night, writing the same line over and over.” There were scenes, I knew, during the final weeks of Blik’s illness, times when he’d lock himself in the workshop to concentrate unmolested on his sentence, Helena pounding at the door, “near hysterical,” as she admitted to me at Blik’s funeral, “knowing how little time we had left, and how Leon refused to share it.”