With the widowed sister and her family moved in, the house was too crowded now for me to stay there. Anyway, I no longer spent much time in Delhi, but following the subject of my thesis, I traveled all over the country, to the places where she had escaped till brought back by her family. All she had wanted was to be in the company of some holy person, usually a dead one, in a tomb or in a sacred spot marked by a little whitewashed temple. And all I wanted was to be in her company; but, like her, I too was brought back—always by a telegram or trunk call from Susie. Once I was in what I thought must be the remotest part of a remote province, trying to decipher the inscription on a Sufi poet’s grave, when a horde of excited children descended on me, shouting, “Mem! Mem! Telephone!” They led me back in triumph to the telephone in the post office, which was only another village hut; and everyone, adults and children, stood around smiling and commenting while Susie called down the line to me to come soon, to come quickly because her bathroom ceiling had sprung a leak and she was too ill with nerves to deal with it. I laughed, was exasperated, yet I had to go back.
Susie never revealed her age, but by this time she must have been in her eighties. Physically she was marvelously well—of course she was very careful, taking regular massage and salads with no dressing—but her mind was more fragile. When it was no longer possible for her to live on her own, I had to move back in with her. It became impossible for me to leave New York. Besides the nursing arrangements for Susie, I had to make financial ones for both of us. There was still my tutoring job but since I had not yet managed to complete my PhD thesis, I couldn’t apply or hope for more. I sold some good pieces of furniture and silver, and in view of the sliding market, I had to learn about stocks and have meetings with our accountant and stockbroker. I discovered we owed back taxes as well as estate duties, and to pay them I had to sell more stock, more silver, and also some of Nina’s jewelry—this last with great caution, but Susie never noticed. She remained completely serene. Even when I could no longer afford the maintenance on our apartment and had to move us to a cheaper place, she maintained her daily routine of eating and napping, often humming to herself happily in a way she never had in younger days.
I had letters from India. Somnath wrote about his family, always beginning with the regular salutation, “We are all well and happy.” Occasionally I had no time to read further, so that I may have missed certain items of not so good news. I did read how his daughter Priti had gone away to marry her Christian boy friend—his feelings on the subject were confined to this simple statement of fact, followed by other facts such as the high price of staples and vegetables. I don’t remember any mention of his own illness. When I was too busy to read his letter to the end, I stuffed it in my pocket for later and then forgot about it and put it through the washing machine; so he may have somewhere mentioned the mysterious illness and the tests and the hospitals and the expense, the expense. By now I knew for myself what it was to be consumed by worries, eaten up by Life not in the radiant Nina-sense but as something insidious as a worm. Finally his eldest son wrote. The letter was dignified, calm, weary with acceptance the way Somnath himself had been. It might have been a fitting elegy if it hadn’t lacked that other element I knew to be his: that sudden leap of recognition—as when listening to poetry or music—that this is how life could be and maybe, somewhere else, really was.
Susie also died—or passed away, she would have said—as serene in her pastel nightie as she had been for the past two decades. By that time our money was gone, mostly on round-the-clock nursing for her. Fortunately I myself was an old woman by then and could draw my social security. It was not enough to live on in New York but would see me through a modest existence in India. I bought a one-way ticket to New Delhi where I have been ever since, first in the upstairs flat in the new colony with the landlords living downstairs. I’ve stopped traveling—I’m not planning to finish my thesis, for even if it were to be awarded the PhD degree, I’m too old to get a teaching appointment. But it’s all right, I don’t have to travel far now to be where my subject had been. Every Thursday evening I take a bus to Nizamuddin, to listen to the singers in the courtyard of the mausoleum compound. There is a wash of pink-tinted light over the white marble until the sun finally sets; then the sky, stretched between tombs and mosque, is a soft silk cloth with stars sewn into it—such a beautiful setting for the words of praise and longing so lustily sung for rupees by the muscular performers in shirtsleeves. One of them smiles and sways to the sounds he is squeezing out of the harmonium, and peace flows from the night and the music, soothing the madmen in their chains who have been brought here to benefit from the influence of the live music and the dead saint. Other evenings I take another bus, which deposits me near the river. Here I join a little group of women—most of them widows, all of them old—and they too are singing, in the same strain though to a different god or, in their case, gods. I sing along with them, while they laugh at my pronunciation and try to teach me better. They have no difficulty accepting my alien presence, for though my face is white, it is as wrinkled as theirs; I have taken to wearing a cotton sari, which is more convenient, especially to draw over one’s head as a protection against the hot sun. We are all singing the same songs and all enjoying the river when it is in spate or, when it is not, the liquid luminous sky flowing above the bed of dry mud.
I notice I’ve been using the present tense—as though all the above were the present. But it is not. If it were, I might have been able to end my days as serenely singing as Susie did hers. One day, while returning from an excursion to the river, maybe still singing and smiling to myself, I heard someone behind me in the bus line calling my name. “Is it you? Really you?” She embraced me as no one had done in a long time. It was Priti, Somnath’s daughter, though it took me some time to recognize her. I had last seen her when she was a student, in love, with a defiant short haircut and ideas to match. Now it was many years since her romantic elopement and she was almost middleaged. My bus arrived, and when that happens, there is no time to waste (more than once, unable to move fast enough, I’ve been knocked down in the rush to get on). I just managed to shout my address to her, and she came to see me the very next day. It was a holiday and she didn’t have to work. Yes, she had a job—not a good one, underpaid, in a travel agency run by a greedy and tyrannical woman; but the hours were good, so that she only needed part-time help at home. Fortunately, her children were bigger now—sixteen and seventeen—and her husband, thank heavens, no longer lived with her but was drinking himself to death in Bombay.
She came often; she said she loved to be with me and talk about the past. But it was mostly the present we talked of, her stressful present, which included a bad relationship with her brothers and sisters, all of whom had made conventional arranged marriages and felt themselves entitled to look down on her. (At that she proudly tossed her hair, still short, the way she used to.) She also loved, she said, to be with me in my cozy, comfortable little place—here her eyes roved around, in the slightly calculating way of women who have for years had to look out for themselves. I was surprised: “cozy and comfortable” were not words truly applicable to my little whitewashed room, at least not for anyone but me. I had a string bed with a mat beside it on which I slept more often than on the bed. The room was on the roof, so there was a lot of light—also heat, but I possessed a big black table fan that I had bought from my landlords when they installed their airconditioner. Priti said she felt more peaceful here than anywhere else. At home, the children brought back friends and played loud music, which was disturbing to her when she returned from work, often with a headache brought on by the stressful situation with her employer. How she would love to come and relax in a place like mine—although of course she didn’t want to disturb me in any way. I suggested that, if I gave her my key, she could just come and rest here for an hour or two when I was out. Well, I was always out at dusk when I went down to the river or, on Thursdays, to Nizamuddin. This worked out perfectly because t
hose were the same hours that Priti was finished for the day, and it was a great relief to her to have my quiet place to come to.
I began to suspect that she did not come there alone, but I didn’t mind. I even liked the idea of Priti bringing a friend. I knew she had had a bad marriage—she told me details that I didn’t want to hear—and I also knew that she was, like my mother, a person who thirsted for love. This too she often told me, and in any case, didn’t I remember her as a young girl defying her whole family and all her caste and traditions, for the sake of love? I began to stay out later than usual so as not to disturb her time together with her friend. By the time I arrived home she had gone, with everything as I had left it, except sometimes for a lingering smell of liquor and tobacco smoke.
But one night she was still there. She had locked up my place and was on the stairs, and so was my landlady. Their voices could be heard down the street, and some neighbors had also come out to listen. Fights were not uncommon in the neighborhood—if they were between men, they could turn violent and not long before there had been a murder, a brother mortally stabbing his sister’s alleged seducer. But women tended to confine themselves to deadly invective shouted out loud for everyone to hear. By the time I was walking up the stairs toward them, I had already understood what the fight was about. I realized that my landlady had misinterpreted the situation, and I tried to calm her by explaining that Priti was only using my room to entertain a personal friend. “One friend!” screamed my landlady. Then she turned on me—how I had fooled everyone, with my white hair and simple ways, insinuating myself into a respectable home to carry on my nefarious business. Of course I was not allowed to stay another minute but had to pack up there and then; Priti came back up with me and helped me. The only difficult part was to carry down my trunk—not that it had much in it, but it was one of those metal trunks they have in India as a precaution against rodents and destructive insects.
Priti very quickly found another place for me. This one is further out—since I first came here, Delhi has proliferated into widespread new suburbs and colonies—so that after work Priti has to hire a motorcycle rickshaw to bring her here. But she seems to think this expense worth her while. Her mood is altogether much better nowadays than when I first met her again. Her circumstances appear to have improved from that time; she often wears new clothes and her face too is smoother, brighter with more make-up. Far from borrowing money from me as she sometimes had to, she leaves little gifts for me, such as a picture framed from a calendar. Altogether she has tried to make my room more attractive and comfortable. I have a solid wooden double bed now instead of the narrow string cot I had in the other place; the new bed is really too big for the room and also for me, so I sleep on the mat, which has been changed and is very colorful. I don’t often meet Priti, for I try to stay out beyond the time that she is entertaining her friends. But sometimes she waits for me to come home, and then she is very nice to me and asks me whether I’m comfortable in this new place and not disturbed by the people living in the downstairs part of the house.
It is true that these tenants, who are all women, are noisy, especially at night when they entertain clients with music and dancing, and probably drinking too, for their voices and laughter become very loud. Sometimes there are fights, and once or twice the police have been called. I would have liked to make friends with my new neighbors, but I don’t often see them, for after their lively nights they like to sleep late into the day. However, we live together very amicably, and I’m glad to help them out with little household items, such as sugar for their tea. They like to sip it hot and sweet, while sitting on the steps leading up to my room—large, plump, youngish women in shiny satin saris and with cascades of jewelry.
I’m now too far from Nizamuddin and from the river to visit there as regularly as before. But there are always nice peaceful places to be found in India, even in the middle of a crowded city. On the outskirts of the new colony where I now live is a cluster of crumbling little pavilions; there are tombs inside them with inscriptions that have become indecipherable so that I have no idea who is buried here. I sit inside one of the pavilions by the tombs—there are three of them, side by side—waiting until I can go home without disturbing Priti. Although there is a hole in the roof, it is cool in here—anyway, cooler than outside where the sun beats down on the flat earth with only dry shrubs growing out of it and no trees. When the sun has set, the bats come out and cut into the soft skin of the darkened sky. When I first came here, I was completely alone and would squat on the stone floor, leaning against a tomb with a book, or with my unfinished thesis and the poetry quoted in it. Now other people have begun to join me. First there was an old man, a retired accountant, whose eyes were failing so that he asked me to read to him. Then more have come—mostly old people, but also one or two young clerks who love to hear or recite poetry in the way Somnath and his friends used to. One old lady has a very sweet voice and she knows all the songs of Mirabai, which she sings to us and encourages us to join in. When we are not singing or reciting, we talk together, often about the hardships in our lives: some suffer from their kidneys, others from bad daughters-in-law. I suppose it is a relief to be able to talk of these matters with others. But sooner or later we are back singing again. Not that these songs are free from suffering; on the contrary, sometimes they sound like a cry of anguish—of desperate love for the Friend who will not come, who will not come, not even now at the end of our lives of unrequited longing.
2
Ménage
LEONORA WAS my mother, Kitty my aunt. Kitty had no children, she never married because Yakuv didn’t believe in marriage, and once she met him, she never looked at anyone else. “He treats her like dirt,” my mother used to say, the corners of her mouth turned down—an expression I knew well, for it was often how she regarded me while telling me, “You’ll end up like Kitty: a neurasthenic.” Physically, it would have been impossible for me to become either like my mother or my aunt. They were both tall, statuesque, whereas I have taken after my father who was a lot shorter than my mother. It’s odd that both these sisters chose men who were short—though this was all that Yakuv and my father Rudy had in common.
Leonora dominated Rudy and he liked it. She was a wonderful manager of all practical details, but at that time I resented and perhaps rather despised her orderly bourgeois ways. I often took refuge with Kitty, who lived in three tiny rooms in a subdivided old brownstone. My parents had a large apartment in an expensive building on Central Park West, filled with some very fine furniture and pictures that had belonged to Rudy’s family of prosperous Berlin publishers. Unlike Rudy and Leonora, who had funneled out his family money through Switzerland, Kitty had arrived here in 1937 with nothing—except of course my parents, who were a constant support to her.
Kitty’s apartment was always in a mess, which for me was part of its charm. I associated disorder with artistic creation, and there was usually some piece of work lying around. She had begun with etchings and woodcuts but later became a photographer; there were prints tacked up of her charming portraits of little girls picking flowers in a meadow. Kitty herself sat on the floor, her arms wrapping her knees and her long reddish hair trailing around her. If my mother was there—and Leonora often came to check up on her sister—she would be tidying panties off the floor, washing the dishes piled in the sink, while clicking her tongue in distress and disapproval. But that didn’t bother Kitty at all, she continued sitting there talking to me about some artistic matter, even when Leonora found a broom and began to sweep around her.
My parents adored New York, were completely at home here, and continued to live the way they might have done if they had been allowed to stay in Berlin. They spoke only in English, though their heavy accents made it sound not unlike their native German. They had many social and cultural activities, mostly with other prosperous émigrés from various Central European countries. It was at one of these cultural events that Kitty first met Yakuv, who had been engaged to
give a piano recital after a buffet supper at some rich person’s house. The house was pointed out to me later, a rococo mansion at 90th and 5th, since pulled down. At this concert Kitty had behaved in a crazy way that was not uncharacteristic of her: the moment Yakuv had finished playing, she dashed up to the piano and, kneeling down, she kissed his hand. Leonora said she nearly died of shame, but Rudy was more tolerant of his sister-in-law’s behavior, which he said was a tribute not to a person but to his art. As for Yakuv himself—I don’t know how he took her gesture, but probably it was in his usual sardonic way.
On account of his art, my mother was prepared to forgive Yakuv for many things: among them, his background. He came from Eastern Europe, from what she assumed to be a tribe of pedlars and hawkers; the language they spoke was to her a debasement of the High German with which she had grown up. But this had nothing to do with Yakuv’s art: “Even if his father peddled toilet brushes,” she explained, “an artist is born with his talent. It’s a gift from the gods and comes from above.” His real background might have disturbed her more. His forefathers had been rabbinic scholars, but more recent generations had abandoned these studies in favor of Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Some of them had rotted for years in jail as political prisoners, and at the beginning of the last century an aunt had been executed for her part in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The glowering intensity that pervaded Yakuv’s music, and our lives, must have been inherited from these revolutionaries. His looks were as fiery as his playing. He was very short but with broad shoulders and an exceptionally large head, which looked even larger because of his shock of black curly hair.
My Nine Lives Page 3