Motherhood_A Novel

by Sheila Heti

  Should I begin to personify this demon that brings me bad dreams?

  yes

  Should I visualize a monster?

  no

  Should I visualize a human being?

  no

  Should I visualize a spirit or energy?

  no

  Should I visualize an inanimate object?

  yes

  A toaster?

  no

  A knife or hairdryer?

  yes

  Both?

  no

  A knife?

  yes

  I’m thinking of one—it has a black, hard, plastic handle. But it would be more fun to visualize a knife with a wooden handle. Should I switch?

  no

  Okay, so like the knife in my kitchen drawer. That is the demon that brings me bad dreams, and has, my whole life long. Should I bring it to my desk?

  no

  Should I take a photograph of it in the drawer?

  no

  Is it a knife because the demon wants to cut away what is hopeful and optimistic in me?

  yes

  Does it want to cut away my trust in the world?

  yes

  Does it have a good reason for doing this?

  yes

  Because it’s a servant of the devil?

  no

  Is it an angel, rather?

  yes

  Is it a situation like ‘Jacob Wrestling the Angel’?

  yes.

  JACOB WRESTLING THE ANGEL

  That night, Jacob got up and found his two wives, his two maidservants, and his eleven sons, and carried them across a river. After they were across, he sent his possessions over, too. Then Jacob was left alone, and a creature wrestled with him till daybreak. When the creature saw that he could not overpower Jacob, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip, so that his hip was wrenched. Then the creature said, Let me go, for it is daybreak. Jacob replied, I will not let you go until you bless me. The creature asked him, What is your name? Jacob replied, Jacob. The creature said, Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have wrestled with God and man, and you have overcome. Jacob said, Please tell me your name, but the creature said, Why do you ask my name? and blessed him there. Then Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, It is because here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared. The sun rose behind him as he left that place, limping because of his hip.

  So the point is not to strengthen oneself from the struggle, or to win, but to overcome?

  yes

  In the dream I had last night, Miles admitted that he was not sexually attracted to me. He said, You have a Robarts sort of energy, which is attractive, but you don’t have the sort of body a man would want to do anything with. I was so hurt by this—Robarts is a library!—and I realized I had to break up with him if he felt that way about my body; how could our sex life ever be any good? I told him he had to move his possessions out by the seventh. He protested and I gave him until the end of the month. Then I felt sad and lonely. When I woke up, Miles was in a good mood. I did not tell him my dream, because in the past, when I’ve dreamed about us breaking up, it hurt his feelings to hear it. I’m glad I did not tell him this dream, if it has no information about the real world, but only about the demon-angel, which must be overcome. In our dreams, does one see the face of the demon, its always-changing face?

  no

  Is it the face of the demon, its face which never changes?

  yes

  The static face of the demon, on which we confer meaning, images and story.

  Leloir

  Gauguin

  I’d like to know more about this demon—which I should personify as a knife, since it wants to cut away what is hopeful and optimistic in me, and wants to cut away my trust in the world, yet it is an angel. Have these creatures visited humans always?

  no

  Have they visited us since at least the biblical age?

  no

  Do we not know much about the frequency or scope of their visits?

  yes

  Is the way I will overcome the demon-angel the same method Jacob used?

  yes

  First he wrestles till daybreak. Then the creature touches the socket of Jacob’s hip, and it is wrenched. Then the demon-angel asks to be let go, but Jacob refuses. Jacob says he will not let it go until the creature blesses him, so the creature does. Then Jacob names the place where he is standing, a single word that indicates: Here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared. Then he limps away with the sun rising at his back. All the fighting takes place at night. That is the first thing I notice. Curiosity or politeness towards the demon-angel comes next. Then the angel gives Jacob a new name. The most important thing is that Jacob continues to fight, even after he is injured, and instead of fear or anger towards the demon-angel, he asks to be blessed. I think that is the most moving part. That opens up something inside me. I wonder what this tells me about the creature. Does the demon-angel want to be loved?

  no

  Respected?

  yes

  Can it bless us in ways nothing else can?

  yes

  Does it want to cut away our optimism, hope and faith, to make us work harder for the optimism, hope and faith we’ll need to replace it—the optimism, hope and faith that was taken away in the night?

  no

  Does it want us to accept God into our hearts, into the empty space where our optimism, faith and hope once lay, before the demon-angel cut it away?

  no

  Is it presumptuous of me to ask these questions?

  no

  Does it want to cut away our optimism, hope and faith so that we might humble ourselves, and humbling ourselves, ask to be blessed?

  yes

  Shall I ask for its blessing when I wake?

  yes

  Shall I ask for it in my dreaming?

  yes

  Should I visualize the knife when I’m asking for its blessings?

  yes

  Should I actually put the knife in my bedroom?

  yes

  When Miles asks about why there’s a knife in the bedroom, should I explain it to him very lightly, very generally, not really getting into it?

  yes

  Either of these could work. Should it be the knife on the right?

  yes

  Is this placement okay? I can see it from my bed this way, pretty easily, when I wake.

  no

  Should I put it here, then?

  yes

  Is this better still?

  yes

  Do you want me to go take a picture of it by the window, to see if that’s even better?

  yes

  Well?

  no

  So over by the mirror?

  yes.

  *

  The first present Miles gave me was a little knife on a chain. I remember so well the way he came into the kitchen, holding it in his hand, not in a box or anything, the chain hanging off his hand and his slightly bent posture, and how loose his jaw was at that moment. Did you dislike the first position, above the door, because that’s where one might put a cross—was it too religious?

  no

  Is it because I look in the mirror often, so I should put it there, reminding me, when I look, of my humility and my needing to be blessed?

  yes

  It’s nice to think that these nightmares are the face of the demon-angel, which must be overcome—but wait! What does overcome even mean? Does it mean that at a certain point it will just be so in me—this sense of my own humility, and my needing to be blessed—that the nightmares won’t need to visit me anymore?

  no

  I just read a commentary that suggests Jacob was wrestling with himself—with his new self, now that he is a successful man. As he limps away from the struggle, the physical and the spiritual are no longer at odds. Together, they accompany him every step of the way as he moves towards his destiny, albeit at a slower pace ph
ysically, but spiritually invigorated. Is what needs to be overcome the opposition between the spiritual and the physical?

  yes

  Is this related to our humility?

  yes

  Is Miles’s knife a symbol of our humility; the dependence of our love on the fates?

  no

  The dependence of our love on each other?

  no

  Our dependence on each other, flat out?

  yes

  Is that why we must be loving?

  no

  Can I change the topic?

  no

  Miles said early on that we must always put the other one first, and that if we both do this, everything will be fine. Then maybe it’s not such a risk to be dependent on him, because here he is—a strong, intelligent and loyal man—and I have put my dependence on him. But he is going to use his intelligence and love towards putting me first, and the same goes the other way. The risk of loving has never been so clear to me, and how awful it is without trust or faith, which I always find so hard. Will I be able to love him more easily if I accept that I’m dependent on him?

  yes

  I have never wanted to feel like I’m dependent on a man. I’ve done everything I could do to avoid it. Yet men are dependent on women, too, and all humans are dependent on things beyond the human. A large tree branch fell down in front of me the other day, as I was walking up the street, and I took it as a sign of good luck, for it could have come down right on my head. Is depending on bigger things part of reconciling the spiritual with the physical?

  yes

  Is the micro—someone else—easier to look at than bigger things, so we can use it as a model to teach us about the nature of our dependence on these bigger things?

  yes

  I would love to learn trust and faith in love, and to have this lead me towards having trust and faith in whatever the universe brings, and to recognize my dependence on Miles, and his dependence on me, and our mutual dependence on whatever we are all part of, which is so much bigger than us. These nightmares, which have brought an undercurrent of terror to my life—that I might, through wrestling with them, overcome my lack of trust and faith—which means reconciling the spiritual with the physical, which has to do with learning humility and asking to be blessed, just as my thoughts are humbled by the random throw of the coins, and my understanding is dependent on their verdict. Although in the end I will walk away hobbled—older and more physically feeble—I will hopefully emerge more spiritually strong.

  *

  I woke up this morning with such an abundant feeling of love in me. I felt so much love for the world and was just pulsing with love when I woke. I can’t remember ever feeling so great. I laughed in my dreams! They were simple—no nightmares. At one point I was in a car with Miles’s father and we were laughing happily together. Now there is the sound of church bells in the distance, which I haven’t heard from the apartment before.

  Coming out of the shower, Miles noticed the knife on the bedroom dresser. What is this for? he asked. I answered him sort of vaguely, Ah, it’s just for something I’m writing. He got a look, like he wanted to know more, but respected my right not to be asked. He said, Does it have to be that knife?

  I said, yes.

  My father’s mother drew closed the white curtains in her dining room window on Friday nights, even though she lived in a nice brick house in a middle-class neighborhood in Toronto. She did not want people to see her lighting the Sabbath candles and know she was a Jew. Her parents and brother had died in a concentration camp, while she spent the war hiding in Budapest, moving from one person’s apartment to another, every few days, before neighbours grew suspicious and started asking questions about her. The Germans took their lives and the Communists took their property, my father once told me, about his mother’s family. There was nothing left. Well … we were left.

  *

  When my mother’s mother, Magda, was twelve years old, both her parents died of influenza. They were in their early thirties, and poor—what little money they had was hardly enough to feed their four children. They had no money to visit a doctor, and so died without being seen.

  The four orphans were taken in by their mother’s cousin, who lived in the same small village as they did. Every morning before school, Magda had to stuff corn into the mouths of the geese, to fatten them for market. She hated doing this. She was constantly hungry through her childhood. She and her brothers would steal and eat the food left over from what was fed to the pigs in the backyard. Instead of going to high school, she went to work as a seamstress.

  When Magda was twenty-one, she was deported to Auschwitz with her brothers. There, an older woman she had known from before the war was in the same barracks. This woman was sick, and Magda tried to make it easier for her to be in Auschwitz. One day, Magda found a large stone in the camp, and thought it might be nice for this older woman to use it as a pillow, so she took it and gave it to her. Later, however, Magda realized that the stone was perhaps already being used by somebody else as a pillow, and she felt guilty that she might have stolen it from someone.

  The older woman died in the camp. After the war, Magda married the woman’s son, George, who was kind to her surviving brothers, and they settled in Miskolc.

  *

  Magda and George were not an intellectual match. She wrote poetry and liked to talk with neighbors about political events and philosophical ideas. His main pleasures were a good meal and playing cards with his friends. They had one girl, who died as a baby. Then my mother was born.

  When my mother was in first grade, Magda returned to high school to get her diploma. There were many adults in her class, and she would sometimes tell her husband about this or that classmate who had decided to quit school. My mother, hearing these stories, often informed her mother that she wanted to quit school, too. Her mother would say, Okay, you go out to play. Then you can quit school tomorrow.

  Around this time, Magda was friends with an elderly woman without much money, and Magda wanted to help her financially. But this older woman was too proud to take charity, so Magda would ask her to come over and help with chores around the apartment. But before the woman came, Magda would do everything to tidy up, leaving only two plates in the sink for the woman to wash. Her friends were from all classes and corners of society: artists, grocers, policemen, clerks.

  After finishing high school, Magda attended university to become a lawyer. She was the only woman in her class. She wanted to defend child criminals, feeling that no child was intrinsically bad. My mother remembers her mother studying long into the night. She finished law school, and nearly graduated, but at the last moment the school did not let her, for George had done something illegal: he had smuggled sweaters from Hungary into Czechoslovakia to sell at a dry goods fair. Magda was furious. After that, she helped her husband with the business forever, but she was unhappy with her fate. Now she would never be a lawyer. She would sell sweaters the rest of her life.

  She insisted my mother become a professional; wanted her to get a good education, make something of her life, since Magda could not. So my mother dedicated herself to studying from the time she was a girl.

  All through my mother’s childhood and youth, she would wake up in the house all alone, her parents having risen before dawn to go sell clothes at a fair. My mother always woke in a dark, empty home. No one even opened the blinds. She would eat her breakfast alone and go to school, then come home again to an empty house. In the evening, her parents would return exhausted from the market, then go straight to bed.

  In school, the children sat in pairs, two desks pressed up one against the other, but my mother insisted on sitting alone. Sometimes when another child was home sick, if my mother liked that child’s seat-mate, she would go and temporarily sit with them. When Magda found out that her daughter was sitting alone, she told her to stop doing that. She went to the teacher and asked her to make my mother sit with another child. But the teacher defended my mothe
r, saying, No, let her.

  *

  My father left Budapest and came to Canada with his family when he was eleven years old. In his twenties, he met my mother, who was visiting family in Toronto. They were set up by a mutual friend. My father fell in love with my mother, and once she returned home, he sent her many love letters across the ocean. He was an appropriate suitor: a Hungarian Jew, a professional engineer, living in Canada.

  On his first visit to Magda’s house, Magda observed my father playing on the carpet with a cat, and she warned my studious mother: He will always be playing. Magda loved my father and wanted him to marry my mother. My mother wanted to marry him, too.

  At my parents’ wedding, Magda was suffering from cancer, and after the wedding, my mother felt reluctant to leave Hungary, fearing her mother’s illness might get worse. Her mother, however, pretended she was fine and encouraged my mother to leave. So my mother came to Canada with my dad.

  My mother hardly spoke any English. She had to learn a new language and repeat her medical training in this new country. A few months after they moved, my mother’s mother died. It was just before Christmas. Along with the terrible grief, my mother felt so guilty, as though by abandoning her mother, she was the murderer. Around this time, her nightmares about her mother began.

  On Christmas Day, two years later, when she was twenty-six, her first child, I, was born. All through my babyhood and childhood and youth, my mother slept in the room next to mine, dreaming nightly about her mother.

  *

  When my mother was a medical resident, she hated treating old ladies who came in to complain about their backaches, when her own mother had died of uterine cancer at the age of fifty-three. She could find no sympathy for these complaining old ladies, when her own mother never had the chance to get old. So my mother became a pathologist instead.

  She worked in a hospital in Toronto, doing autopsies and diagnosing specimens under a microscope to determine whether cells were malignant or benign. When she was doing her residency, my father and I would sometimes visit her on weekends, getting lunch with her in the cafeteria during one of her breaks. She once told me that she wanted to be a pathologist because of how beautiful cells look under a microscope—swirling patterns of purple and pink.