Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  I couldn’t have been much more than two when we walked to the Kaisergarten, because there’s only thirteen months’ difference between my sister and me. From these thirteen months there are two photos in our family album. In the first, taken by my uncle, I’m sitting naked on a wicker chair in the sun, in the garden in Torre Pellice, in front of my maternal grandparents’ house. My whole face is convulsed in laughter, and my mother, behind the chair, leans over me, smiling. In the other, taken by a photographer, I’m standing, propped against my mother, who is kneeling, in a very loose-fitting dress. I have a small, serious face, small eyes, a small nose, and a small mouth, sparse smooth hair. On the back of the photograph my mother has written something, referring to me as Marinette. I have no memory of that pretty name. When I was little I was called Miki—a nickname given to me by my sister—and my maternal grandmother called me Mina, accentuating the final a in the French way.

  Maybe my love for the naked sun of fall and spring, when it seems to shine more brightly and boldly behind the trunks and the bare branches, belongs to the thirteen months that separate my birth from my sister’s. Then every time memories of events not lived or feelings not consciously felt try to take shape in me, I say: “That’s fine, I’m not afraid.” Or I say: “I am the way I am, and I want to enjoy it.”

  But mostly I seem to be somewhere else, taking someone else’s first steps.

  On the other hand I knew very early on where I was, even if my awareness was limited to place and time—my room, our street, the edge of the beach brushed by the sea—and ignorant of movements. In that place and that time, any gesture or word of mine was very important, decisive. I fixed events in a frame where I could immediately confront them—at first everything seemed frightening—and I was unaware that one could wait or postpone.

  So I had many fears—I was a coward, my mother said—in which people and places got confused: there were people who led me into difficult situations, places that evoked fearful presences. In every place and in every moment, however, I looked for the means, the act, or the word to resolve my fears by myself. I was also a liar, my mother said.

  I’m afraid of my mother, I’m afraid of her when she’s there, but I want her when she’s not there. They tell me that’s the love that all children feel for their mother. And their mother loves them because she suffered bringing them into the world. That I don’t understand, why she loves them because she suffered. But I understand very well why the mother makes children, and that she has to have her belly cut open in the hospital to let them out.

  When I was born, too, my mother went to the hospital. For weeks and weeks before I was born she vomited; she would stop behind a fence to vomit in peace. She stopped vomiting the night before I was born. I was born several weeks early. That should finally give me some points, but it doesn’t, because it was my mother who made me come out early, climbing up on a ladder to arrange some jars of jam in a cupboard.

  Then I always had green poop and I cried at night.

  I walked late and talked late; I seemed like an idiot, but the old njanja who played with me and sang me Russian songs when I woke up at night said I was very intelligent.

  Adults aren’t afraid, that’s the difference between them and me. I don’t know if they’re right not to be afraid: they walk on the ice on the lakes. The ice creaks; who can assure them it won’t break?

  They leave stoves lighted at night, which then burn down their houses—especially the workers’ houses on the outskirts—and the firemen have to rush to put out the fires.

  My uncle throws me up and catches me midair. He’s enjoying himself, but can he really catch me?

  And finally, didn’t the adults let even the Zeppelin fall, which one morning, all silvery in the sun, had passed right in front of our windows, facing the river Düna?

  I, too, will become an adult, but I can’t picture it to myself. It worries me—and I think about it often—that I will grow up suddenly, in a single night. How will I manage to find clothes the correct length right away, the next day? I’ll have to go and buy them myself, and the adults will make fun of me because I’m wearing child’s clothes that are too short.

  They’ll gladly make fun of me, and I hate being made fun of. In fact I hate anyone who makes fun of me.

  Walking, I turn around to look at the street we’ve taken so that I can return home by myself if I’m abandoned. Similarly, in case my mother doesn’t manage to get back on the train in time, I learn by heart the names of all the stations we pass through on the long, four-day journey that takes us to Italy in the summer: to Italy, to Torre Pellice. The first Italian name I learn is Garda, Lake Garda, and I see it through the train window just as I wake up one morning, a narrow strip of emerald-green water.

  When I explain to my mother what I’m doing on the street, why I keep turning around during our walks, she’s very offended.

  But all I want is for her, finally, to praise me. Usually I let myself be carried from place to place like a package, and as soon as I arrive I hastily dig myself a den. I hate children’s parties where some adult disturbs me in my corner, offering me enormous, disgusting slices of a creamy cake and asking questions about what I like. Do you like sledding, or skating? Do you like chocolate? Do you like going to nursery school?

  Once, I’m taken to see a small baby, a newborn; we’re in the house of someone from the Dutch legation. I’ve found a sheltered place behind a big curtain, next to a window, and I’m looking at an illustrated book, reading the captions in capital letters. And here’s the usual adult flushing me out and taking me with the other children to see the newborn. The room with the cradle is brightly lit and full of people. There’s a smell of hot chocolate. The infant has bare legs and feet. He’s fat and pale. Everyone says “What a pretty baby,” but I feel like throwing up, maybe because of the smell of hot chocolate, maybe because I saw a hair wrapped around the child’s big toe.

  Every so often I throw up. I don’t like eating meat, and I can hold pellets of chewed meat, carefully placed in the corners of my mouth, unswallowed, for a whole afternoon. When my mother digs them out with her finger, she scolds me. She’s right, I ought to swallow them; if I don’t, I won’t grow.

  When I had whooping cough, she got oranges through the Italian legation. They cost a lot and are lined up on a high shelf. I eat them to make her happy, then throw up—expensive as they are—while my sister, who has whooping cough as well, manages to keep them down. My mother tells the story and laughs as she describes my sister, who quickly coughs, swallows again, and returns to her game, saying: “Done!”

  I don’t like eating; there are only a few foods I really love. Salmon, boiled or smoked. At night I go looking for it in the dark, pink and fragrant on the kitchen table, ready for the next day. I also like eating kissel (a sour berry dessert) and spaghettini in broth, and even würstel: we buy them in the German stations on our trips, served on a cardboard tray with mustard and a white roll. But all these foods have features unrelated to their taste that appeal to me: the beautiful pink of the salmon or the jellylike transparency of the kissel, the steamy smell of the würstel and the elegant shape of the white roll.

  On the other hand I don’t find cod-liver oil disgusting. There’s nothing food-like about it, in fact; it’s more like liquid glue. While my sister hides under the table and behind the sofa when the moment for the daily dose arrives, I sip it dutifully. Naturally I hope by this means to finally get some points, though the truth is it doesn’t cost me much. But perhaps my mother divines my repulsive dietary instincts; she seems almost disgusted by my obedience toward the cod-liver oil, sympathizing with my sister, if with a severe expression, as she drags her out from behind the sofa. What would she say if she knew that, shut in the bathroom, I regularly eat Nivea cream, then carefully lick the surface smooth?

  Every so often I have the impulse to tell her that I eat the Nivea cream in the bathroom; but what if instead of scolding me she started laughing? Or I’d like to tell her why
I stay so long in the small toilet off the kitchen. They’re always getting mad at me because I often sit in there, and to think that I’m not disturbing anyone; sitting on the toilet lid, I talk to the dog shut up in the lightbulb.

  Actually shut up inside the filament, and I talk to him, I feel sorry for him and I feel sorry for myself: “Dog,” I say to him, “you’re there, shut up, and I’m here, shut up, and when I come out they scold me and tomorrow morning they’ll give me a cold bath.” Also, I’ve discovered that when I have a cold I smell a disgusting odor inside my nose. “Dog, you don’t have a cold; you’re clean, odorless, and luminous in your filament.”

  But I don’t talk to my mother. My lack of points paralyzes me. When she looks me in the face, I feel that she’s looking into my depths. Useless to pretend, I’m worth nothing. If they’d at least feel sorry for me, but no one feels sorry for me. They don’t even feel sorry for me when I’m sick. I’m often sick, with stupid illnesses that are called “childhood.” When my sister was a few months old, she was so seriously ill she was in danger of dying. Then she was never sick again.

  My mother recites my stupid illnesses like the rosary of her suffering; she worries when I get sick and stays home to take care of me. When I start to get better, every temperature check is a critical moment. Once, when the thermometer still says 37.5, not 36.8, she gets so angry that she throws it up in the air. Or she throws something else up in the air, I don’t remember what. “What did you do? Did you get up to go to the window? Did you not put on your slippers, did you jump on the bed?” I’m afraid of her, but I feel sorry for her: she’s right, she has to stay home to take care of me when she has so much work at the university.

  Whereas I am very happy to get sick. Precisely because she has to stay home to take care of me. Apart from the sticky yellow compresses for a sore throat and the spoon handle the doctor uses as a tongue depressor, I love all the ritual of illness. The pale soup in the bowl on the tray—the tray all for me, with a clean napkin—and, needless to say, the taste of the syrups. Every morning my mother washes me carefully and dusts me with talcum powder. Enveloped in the perfume of my ablutions, I stay in bed under the covers and watch the sun on the wallpaper. It, too, is all mine in its small square of light on the wall. I’m sheltered from every peril; I can rest from the labors of daily defense.

  I’m curled up like a spider in the middle of my life, weaving a web of protection all around myself. I can never leave my post, and I depend on myself, I can’t allow a moment’s distraction: I release as little of myself as possible into the hands of the others who are trying to destroy me bit by bit.

  With their questions, with their laughter: “Do you like to skate? Do you like going to nursery school, do you like chocolate?” Or: “Say this, say that, what do you say to the lady?”

  Whatever I say, they laugh.

  The efforts of my mother and grandfather to make me say merci, when Grandfather offered me a bunch of grapes under the hazelnut tree in the garden at Torre Pellice, were useless. My grandfather was—strangely—in his bathrobe. He was already very sick and spent most of the day in bed. That afternoon he had gone slowly out to the lawn to pick grapes. Now he was holding them in his hand, the beautiful gilded grapes, but I couldn’t open my mouth. My grandfather pressed his lips together, impatient and disappointed.

  A few months later we’re back in Riga, and one morning our governess takes us to Mamma’s room. She’s sitting on the bed in her slip, her arms bare, and she’s weeping, wrinkling her nose. Our grandfather in Italy has died.

  This time, too, I was silent, out of prudence, certainly, so as not to compromise myself. But still I was surprised: I had never seen my mother cry, and I didn’t understand why she was crying.

  It didn’t move me—adults didn’t move me, our dying dog moved me, as he vainly gasped for air with his sick muzzle. Rather, it seemed to me that she was no longer my mother (she was Grandfather’s daughter), and that made her so distant in her inexplicable emotion—weren’t we, my sister and I, the sole object of her feelings?—that she could no longer be feared.

  Besides, you’re not supposed to make a show of your feelings, those who do are surely putting on an act.

  The last time I saw my father—I was twelve, he and my mother were getting divorced, and he had come to see us for a few days in Torre Pellice, where we had been living with our grandmother for two years—we said goodbye in Vicolo Dagotti, the narrow street where my grandparents’ house was. Maybe I was on the way to school; I was alone, probably my sister had left before me. Just as I was about to turn onto the main street, my father, who had been standing at the corner, hurried after me and, catching up, lifted me in his arms and kissed me, weeping, on the mouth. That gesture—so alien to the habits of our relationship—stunned and repulsed me. When he put me down, I ran away without saying goodbye and left him there, on the street, tall in his dark overcoat.

  As I turned onto the main street, running, and wiped my mouth with my hand, I continued to wonder: What was he thinking? And at the same time I wondered: Who is he?

  My surprise, however, was the opposite of the surprise provoked by my mother’s crying. That had revealed her to me as alien, whereas my father’s sudden and unusual gesture—not rehearsed—had aimed at holding on to something in me. Something that wasn’t there, that was absent.

  That absence I felt immediately as guilt, long before I knew that I had left him in Vicolo Dagotti for the last time, tall in his dark overcoat, erect before the Germans who shot him in Riga in October or November of 19412.

  Guilt shared between him and me that we had been unable to know each other.

  I know almost nothing about him. I have only scattered childhood memories. I don’t know how he and my mother met, for a long time I didn’t know why they got married. I don’t know the date of his death. The date of his birth I dug up in the documents regarding the divorce between my mother and him.

  Before leaving for the last time, he had given me a watch. It was big, with an irregular rectangular shape and Roman numerals that I really didn’t like. Years before, he had given us a doll as tall as I was, which wouldn’t fit in any doll bed. He gave us one doll each time, without saying which of us it was for; he had brought a Negro doll from the exposition in Paris that my sister immediately took, though certainly when he bought it my father didn’t know who would get it. During one of the legally arranged visits he made in the last months we were in Latvia, he had given us—poor man—some immense white plush rabbits. Horrible, larger than life animals, which you couldn’t play with.

  He never sent me the dolls’ tea set I kept asking for in all the letters I wrote from Torre Pellice; the porcelain tea set, a gift from my mother, remained in our house, along with the toys, my books, and my dolls. We’d had to leave without taking anything, pretending to go to school one morning; instead we had gone to Mamma in the house where she lived after the separation.

  Every so often, even now, I dream that I have to pack my suitcase and can’t take what I need. Generally I dream of having to flee with my small children and having to choose what clothes of theirs to take. I have to collect blankets, too, in a hurry, before the imminent catastrophe.

  I wore the watch for a long time, and only many years after it broke did I decide to replace it with another, a very small one. I kept the large, cumbersome broken watch among my trinkets; then during a move I threw it away.

  I kept nothing else having to do with my father, not a photograph or a letter. Not even the last letter he wrote us, in 1941, right after the Germans occupied Riga. I can’t absolutely remember what happened to that letter, which for some years I kept among my papers; it was torn and creased, but I don’t know by whom. My grandmother hated our father and would certainly have been capable of getting rid of any trace of him. But it’s not impossible that it was I who threw away the letter in one of my cleaning operations.

  Of that letter, written in his illegible handwriting, I recall only one sentence, w
hich he had underlined: “. . . because, remember that you, too, are Jewish.”

  A phrase that I considered meaningless, as I couldn’t in the least understand the reason he asked us—I was sixteen and my sister fifteen—to get him out of Latvia by any means. How could we ever have managed that?

  There had been no intimacy between us: he was the only adult who not only didn’t embody rules but, rather, rejected them all.

  He lived like a stranger in our mother’s large, light, and orderly house. He was tall, dark, bald at the temples—he was almost forty when I was born—and probably very handsome. He looked like an “Arab prince,” said the cook.

  Our day didn’t coincide with his. Sometimes I ran into him when I went out in the morning to go to school on streets that were still dark, illuminated by streetlamps. He was coming in, a white silk scarf around his neck. When I got home at one I found him going through the rooms in slippers and bathrobe, with a terrible man’s odor about him. Or he was sunk in an armchair, reading his Russian newspapers, smoking fat cigars with a gold band that for fun I put on my finger like a ring. At lunch he ate jellied calves’ feet. He drank tea in a tall glass circled by a ring with a handle.

  One afternoon he went with us to the ballet, instead of Mamma, and fell asleep at the back of the box. He snored so loudly that you could hear him in the orchestra.

  Sometimes he took us to a sporting event. He was interested in sports and had been a coach in the Soviet Union. He said: “In 1918 I was in a boat on the Düna and they shot at me from the bridge.” That was why he had had to flee to the Soviet Union.

  I remember that when he told the story he imitated the whistling of the shots.

  Once we went with him to a track meet. A dark little bowlegged man, all sweaty, was walking very fast around a circular track. He was gesturing, speaking an incomprehensible language, and when he was given a glass of water he sipped it and then spit it out. I felt embarrassed because he was Italian and my mother was also Italian, like that comical, rude little man.