Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  My father disparaged the Italians and especially one of them—a certain Mussolini—who for a while I thought was also a track athlete. He disparaged the Soviets and the Germans as well. He tried to teach me a strange German—Yiddish—and was very amused when I pronounced it the way he did. Mamma got mad and said he had it in for the Germans because he couldn’t finish the university in Germany.

  But almost all his friends were German. “Worthless Germans,” said Mamma. One was a prison doctor, and his wife had come to our house one afternoon to protest, because Herr Gersoni was always persuading her husband to stay out all night. My father was amused to be setting a bad example. But that other, a “worthless German,” why did he agree?

  Our father did other things that fathers don’t do and shouldn’t do.

  Once he bought a bus. He took us to see it in the garage where it was parked.

  The bus’s seats were torn, and right away I wondered—but didn’t dare ask for confirmation—if we would be driving around in that bus instead of in the Diatto. I’d already had to travel in a sidecar that wobbled on the pavement beside the motorcycle. But luckily the bus was only a “deal” of my father’s. The Diatto was, too—in fact, for a while, two Diattos were—and perpetually awaiting a buyer.

  My father’s deals were those oddities—like his interest in sporting events—that occupied him instead of, Mamma said, his office. He was the Michelin representative for the Baltic countries.

  My dreams of Riga are exclusively about the street where his office was located. In the dreams the street is empty, with a buckling pavement bordered by tall houses that lean toward the street all together like the tops of an avenue of poplars in a stormy wind. It’s an anguished dream in which the pavement and the houses are black, and I’m running toward my father’s office and I want to find him. But I find—sitting in a chair one after the other, in a succession of very quick changes—unknown men with old faces and closed eyes. I wake up crying.

  On the way home after the visit to the bus, our father and mother fight.

  They don’t get along. It’s his fault, he shouts loudly, but doesn’t change his behavior. He doesn’t display the least goodwill, and Mamma has to work hard to pay all the bills. He goes to Paris twice a year “to have fun.”

  They don’t get along; they’ve never gotten along.

  When I find an old postcard written by my mother in which she tells her parents that I’m sitting in the high chair, and I look at them, Sammi and her, while they have lunch, it seems to me she’s talking about other people.

  Their not getting along is a daily fact that my sister, Sisi, and I talk about every so often. How can one get along with someone who goes to Paris twice a year to have fun? Who sleeps during the day, doesn’t pay the bills, and shouts? The cook says to the maid that he’s hit Mamma, but that I don’t believe; then when he starts shouting I’m afraid he will.

  Mamma is very brave. She stands up to him when he yells. She stands up to everyone, even the customs officials. While they rummage in our suitcases, she insults them.

  One spring morning we have to move. Every so often we move: the first house I remember was on the Düna, and from the windows we could see boats passing; then we lived on the other side of the river, and there was gym equipment hanging in the doorway between the dining room and the study. In another house, they let me arrange my doll furniture at the end of a small dead-end hallway. The apartments were always very large, and every room had a different smell.

  That spring morning we drive with our father and mother to Bienenhof, the property belonging to our grandfather on an island in the Düna. Besides the factory there’s also the house where our grandparents lived, along with our father and his first wife, before they came to Riga.

  Our father has proposed going to live in Bienenhof and Mamma is pleased; she likes the idea. I don’t remember anything about the trip except that my father and mother get along.

  It’s a sunny day, and the whole house is in the sun when we arrive. In front of the house is a giant white lilac that—our father recounts—was split by a grenade during the war and continued to bloom from the two trunks that grew out of the divide. My father lets me touch the trunk.

  Then we go to the house. The apartment is on the first floor. The windows are open and the sun lights up the rooms. The furniture is old and pale, and white dust covers sheathe the chairs. The floors are of waxed blond wood. There are a lot of rooms. My father and mother go from room to room; I can’t hear what they’re saying but I know they’re getting along.

  I look out the window into the grassy courtyard. I’m hungry and I’d like a sandwich. I play my game of smells; I walk with my eyes closed, differentiating the smells of the various rooms I pass through.

  The rooms in Bienenhof smell of sun, of dust covers, and naturally of honey. Biene in German is bee. They don’t smell of people.

  We didn’t go to live in Bienenhof, and our father and mother divorced.

  I don’t think I hoped to go and live in Bienenhof. I didn’t know the future, enclosed as I was in the lighted circle on my stage. My parents’ divorce was in that circle every day, there with the other fears.

  That morning in Bienenhof, the circle of light only expanded, expanded so that I could no longer see its edges, beyond the bright walls and out the open windows, beyond the grassy courtyard and the river that you crossed on a wooden bridge.

  I played the game of smells for the last time in Waltershof, the property belonging to German aristocrats where my mother hid us during the last months we spent in Latvia. Our father and mother were getting divorced—the case lasted for six years—and Mamma intended to take us illegally to Italy, afraid that the court wouldn’t give us to her. We were informed of all this by our governess Ingeborg—we called her Böggi—who had helped Mamma prepare for our flight and lived with us in Waltershof.

  To get to our room in a wing of the building, you crossed living rooms and small sitting rooms full of cabinets with gilded legs and chairs enveloped in dust covers. In a corner room whose windows were always closed there was from midnight till one a headless ghost that was connected—I no longer remember how—to an eighteenth-century grandfather clock given by Marie Antoinette to a goddaughter, a forebear of the house’s owner. I crossed that room with my eyes closed, sniffing the odor of ghost, a small, faint, gray smell that didn’t reach my nose but only the remote den in my head where I huddled.

  In this den I ceaselessly arrange what is happening.

  I can only side with my mother; I’ve always sided with my mother. From her come all the rules, and she’s the one I’ve been courting forever. Besides, she’s the one who loves me. Does my father love me?

  In the months spent in Waltershof I don’t dream. My day follows me even into sleep; sometimes I wake up in the morning and I’ve wet the bed. The fact is made public, and a young man—a Polish aristocrat who is getting agricultural experience on the farm and courting our governess—composes a poem; transcribed in graceful handwriting and decorated with a frame of little violet flowers, it’s read after lunch in front of everyone before being handed to me. I burst into tears, and he is bewildered and asks my pardon. But my suffering remains, so to speak, outside me. I don’t even hate the young man, I’m too worried about putting things in order inside my head.

  In the last days I was at home with my father I had to lie to him. Keep hidden from him our meeting with Mamma—the delicious odor of her fur rediscovered when she hugged me—and the arrangements made for joining her the morning of the last day of school before Christmas vacation. She was staying with friends very near our school, and we were supposed to enter the house by ourselves, go up the stairs, and tell the young man, the son of the owner, who would open the door, that we wanted Mamma. To allow him—I think—to testify that we had come of our own free will. I—who had been entrusted with the message—was so agitated I couldn’t say a word.

  I regret being silent with my father. While I play warily with m
y dolls in a room that’s been turned upside down—we’d taken advantage of our mother’s long absence to place our child’s desks on top of each other, making them into little houses—and my father eats jellied calves’ feet, sitting in his bathrobe at the dining room table, I feel that I pity him. I know it’s not reasonable, but pity hurts like a scratch that’s festering under the Band-Aid. Even when I wake in the night, pity is there, and it wakes with me.

  Sometimes—but only for very brief moments, from which my thought rises rapidly like a sparrow that, having thought it spied a crumb, rises from the ground without even touching down—it occurs to me to stay with my father.

  I feel pity for my mother, too, but the pity I feel for her is right because my mother is right. And that rightness is set solidly in my head, with well-defined corners, as hard as a block of wood. It governs my steps and my hands, and governs my tongue, too, when we’re summoned to declare before the lawyers whom we want to stay with, and I have to say in front of my father that I want to stay with Mamma. I say it and lunge forward, leaping blindly. The same blind leap with which I’ll lunge forward whenever in the course of my life I have to choose her, what’s right. Her, Mamma. Then I grope behind myself and can’t get to myself. I’m not patient; besides, I find that I’ve already done enough by choosing her, what’s right. I would like to be left in peace now with my dolls, my babies; I’d like to water the flowers, then go out at sunset and smell the summer fragrance of the hay far beyond the stony confines of the city. I’ll come home late and cook for my children. For my father.

  Our father had found us in Waltershof after searching throughout Latvia. Our governess tells us that he searched for us to get revenge on Mamma, because she left him. He arrived unexpectedly in the car, when we were playing in the courtyard. We had to escape quickly into the house and shut ourselves in our room. My father knocked on the door and called. He called me by name. He called me because I was a coward and maybe I would open the door to him. But I didn’t, and in order to hold out I began to do calculations on a piece of paper: the numbers came out crooked because my hand was trembling. I watched it tremble and I was amazed because I wasn’t making it tremble and it was trembling just the same.

  Then my mother arrived—I heard her voice clearly behind the door—and we were called into that room to declare whom we wanted to live with.

  My father isn’t courageous. Only I know that one night he was awake in the living room, next to our bedroom, smoking. I was sitting behind the door watching through the keyhole the luminous tip of his cigar in the dark room. I sat on the floor until I got cold and too sleepy to keep it up and went back to bed. My father was awake because he was afraid: the next day he was going to the hospital to have an operation. My father is a coward like me. I feel sorry for him because he’s a coward.

  The night they told him on the phone—I don’t know if it was the lawyer, who remained just a name, or Mamma—that she wasn’t coming back, he began running through the rooms and looking out the windows, leaning his forehead against the glass. He leaned his forehead against the window and, looking into the street, cried, “I’ve lost you, Clarette, I’ve lost you forever!” That endearment I found ridiculous, unsuited to my mother.

  My sister and I stayed shut in our room, but he also came to us and shouted, his forehead against the window that faced directly onto the street. After everything he had done to her—he had even hit her, certainly!—now he was making these scenes and lamenting that she didn’t want him anymore.

  Nevertheless I felt sorry for him, precisely because he was playing a part. He was playing himself, he had to shout so that they would believe him. And no one believed him.

  And no one loved him. Not even I, who had to be loyal to my mother. I feel sorry for him because I don’t love him.

  I love my mother: she’s the one who’s always loved me and taken care of me.

  I say: when I grow up I’ll be a teacher like Mamma.

  When she went out to the university, my father’s office, the theater, a reception, in her wake wafted a breeze of cologne and soap. She not only teaches the rules but applies them all to herself. Naturally it takes effort and courage to apply the rules: the rules are harsh.

  Before going out she moves back and forth through the house, checks on our food, our conversations, our notebooks, our clothes, she corrects a word, cautions the governess.

  At Christmas, a few weeks after our flight, we’re hidden in a castle at the edge of a big forest. Afterward, we would go to Waltershof.

  Mamma has set up a tiny Christmas tree—at home the tree touched the ceiling—and under the tree, instead of the usual toys, we find the pajamas we need precisely because we fled without taking anything.

  The candles throw a yellowish light on the uneven walls, where you can make out the rough shape of the stone under the paint. I ate too much pâté at Christmas lunch. I adore pâté. I feel a little sick to my stomach and I feel sorry for my mother who had to give us pajamas instead of toys. I feel sorry for her because she’s brave.

  I try to be loyal to her and apply the rules. But I’m not very smart about applying the rules and I often make mistakes. Behind the principal rule there are unstated rules, and if you can’t get them right all together, the first goes wrong, too. Coming home and hurrying by, my mother scolds me.

  My sister is much less assiduous than I am about observing the rules, but she seems to have understood precisely those other, unexpressed rules, which end up, I don’t know how, being the most important.

  Once my mother meets a Gypsy who tells her: “You have two daughters. I see one of the two on the stage. She’ll bring you glory!”

  My mother tells the story: “Sisi walks so well on point—look how well she walks on point—maybe she’ll be a ballerina, or a singer. Hear how musically she sings.”

  I can’t even skate. The skating rink where my sister flies, tracing beautiful figure eights, is one of the places I hate most: I drag myself to the edge with my ankles collapsing, and I’m cold. The others have fun. Lucky them.

  But skating is good for your health, sledding down steep hills is good, getting into freezing-cold water without complaining is good. Plus you have to do these things better than everybody else.

  Once (we’re already in Torre Pellice) my mother sends me in a letter a newspaper clipping with the photo of a classmate—one of those great big Germans my sister skated with—who’d won some competition. Under the photo she wrote: Look what Marlene was capable of!

  All I know how to do is read, I read all day. But reading isn’t a skill.

  Years later—I’m married and my four children are born—we’re all in the kitchen, my children, sitting at the table in their pajamas after their daily bath (first rule: be clean!), are waiting for me to finish making dinner. My mother, who has come to visit, as she does every evening, is telling my children about when, with my sister, I took the admissions test for middle school in Torre Pellice. We had learned Italian in eight months, and Sisi, a year younger than the required age, had to retake Italian and drawing in September. My mother says to my children: “They had to write a composition on the experience of elementary school, which Aunt Sisi and your mamma had attended only briefly. Miki, who was a liar, invented an entire story, Sisi, poor thing, who was so sincere, didn’t know what to write.”

  Other times she tells about when I pooped on the seat of a train; I was eleven months old, and she, pregnant with my sister, was traveling that time without a baby nurse. Or she tells about when, at only three, I pretended to have appendicitis.

  One afternoon, my youngest son—he was six—comes home from his grandmother’s house, where he’d gone for lunch, and asks me: “Mamma, why does Grandma always say bad things about you?”

  Applying the rules is of no use to me, the unexpressed ones that my sister relies on elude me: she shifts easily from one situation to another, she dares to speak to the mailman in slightly incorrect Latvian—I would never have dared to speak to the mail
man in Latvian, even slightly incorrectly—and walks down the hall at school arm in arm with other girls, giggling and eating tartine.

  My sister is dark, I’m blond—my mother is very proud of my hair; when she washes it, she rinses it with chamomile—and Sisi has a pink silk dress (which I remember very well); I have one of blue silk, in the same style (which I don’t remember at all).

  My mother likes my hair, she combs it, brushes it, admires it. She doesn’t praise anything particular about my sister, except that when Sisi and I are grown-up, I sometimes hear her praise my sister’s beauty: “She looked so beautiful in that white suit.”

  What’s beautiful makes my mother’s voice tender.

  We’re in Italy now, I’m more than ten years old. When Mamma joins us during vacations, she takes us on short “cultural” trips. She knows Italy perfectly, the geography, the cities, the streets, the museums, the idioms of the various regions. (At the age of eighty, bent over by an attack of arthritis, she comes to the door as I’m leaving for Pisa and urges me not to forget to “say hello to Santa Maria della Spina, that little jewel.”)

  During one of our educational excursions we’re in Genoa and, after visiting a museum, we take the tram. The tram goes up and down, pitches, I feel sick to my stomach, I’m about to throw up, we have to get off. My mother, furious, insults me: “Krepierling!” she says to me. “Jerk!” Her rolled r wounds me like a weapon, but above all I’m struck by the sensation of being restored to myself in my disgustingness: she doesn’t want me, she’s not the one who made me so wretched, it’s my fault, I’m a freak of nature.

  I didn’t think Sisi was pretty or prettier than I was. I was told that Mamma was beautiful and very elegant. I was enchanted—and I still remember it—by the clarity of her face, and when we were separated I thought of her in that clarity.

  I had a geometric idea of beauty; beauty is regularity. One day, in school, our homework assignment is to plan a design for a small tablecloth, and on a big sheet of graph paper—I adore graph paper and mathematics notebooks—I draw a square with a bouquet of flowers in the middle and four smaller bouquets, one in each corner. The colors, pink and green. Aren’t flowers pink and leaves green? When I’m embroidering the tablecloth I find it hideous—the ugliest in the class—but I can’t understand the reason.