Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  In some places the lake is covered with water lilies. When you pick them—but it’s better not to, because they fade immediately—you hear a distant plop, down in the water, and the flower, smelling of dampness, rises obediently into your hand.

  Arndt’s father doesn’t speak, he holds his pipe tight between his teeth and every so often looks at us with his gray eyes. I like going out in the boat with him, especially because he doesn’t want anyone else to come on the outing. Only me. I’m sitting behind him and I’m not afraid: if I fell in the lake, he’d pull me out immediately. He’s very sad because he’s getting divorced, and I think I’d like to marry him. Too bad he’s so much older than I am; the hair at his temples is already gray.

  So one day, while we’re playing in the sand, I see that Arndt has a little sack in his underpants, right in front, between his legs.

  “Hey,” I say, “why did you put a bag of sand in your underpants?

  “It’s not a bag of sand,” he says, “I’ve always had it.”

  “Come on, you’ve always had it!”

  “I have, I’ve always had it, it’s skin, attached in front.”

  The liar. How is it possible? But he insists.

  So I propose that he should prove it that night. While our governesses were chatting as usual in the living room of the rented apartment where he was staying with his, we’d shut ourselves in the bedroom: I would pull down my underpants and he would, too, and so that famous sack of skin would be visible.

  At night, with the door closed, we get undressed in the room that’s gray in the summer night. I take off my underpants, but he hops up and down and with his hands tightens his around his waist. He even starts shouting when I get insistent.

  Our governesses knock at the door and he opens it. I just have time to put on my underpants when they burst in yelling. They dress us and I’m brought back to the hotel. I have to go to bed immediately. With the blanket up to my nose, I hear them talking about “shame.” But from time to time they laugh excitedly.

  I’m angry. With him, the coward, who didn’t keep his side of the bargain. Because he had nothing to show, of course! Then I begin to worry: I’m afraid that the next day the entire hotel will hear this story. And to think that I had gained a good reputation because I sometimes help take orders in the dining room and do the bills. I’m really good at doing the bills.

  And now it will all crumble because of the stupid business of taking off our underpants. An unstated rule. When my mother—traveling in Italy at the time—finds out, she, too, will say: “For shame!” Especially when she finds out it wasn’t him, it was me who persuaded him to show proof.

  The coward, I’ll never speak to him again.

  In the other room the governesses won’t stop chatting and laughing. Every so often they raise their voices and scold the air: “For shame!” But to tell the truth, I’m not at all ashamed; I’m just sorry, and bitterly, for my loss of prestige—that I do regret. But I’m not ashamed.

  The fact is, I’m right, too.

  It was true that my mother and the Spaniard with the lustrous hair talked softly on the green bench in the garden, even if that talk was only the core of a reality that I hadn’t known how to represent except as an imaginary sparkling precious object.

  Adults play a dishonest game: let’s see what you can guess. We won’t say “you’re getting warmer” or “colder”; the clues to the right path are hidden here and there in our conversations. It’s up to you to pick them up!

  But it’s a dangerous game; if I get too close, I risk falling into “shame,” like the blazing pyre of orange flames I fell into once in a dream trying to escape the usual black locomotive that was pursuing me. When I fell into the fire, fear was mixed with an astonishing pleasure, and the moment I woke the pyre was transformed through successive orange and yellow layers into my parents’ bedroom, or rather, into their bed, covered by an orange bedspread.

  In that bedroom my mother wore her nightgown and my father pajamas; not even adults could be naked together.

  Going around the house in pajamas wasn’t allowed either, even though my father did it, naturally. We wore pajamas because we were still children. As adults we would have long hair and would make babies because we were women.

  At the beach many people went swimming naked in the freezing-cold water. There was a schedule for it. We went to the beach during the time when you had to swim in a suit and during the time for nude women. My sister, sent one day to see if the nude hour was over, returned saying that she couldn’t tell if the people on the beach were men or women, since they were naked.

  Once when we were in the park with the governess, I walked off, silently offended by some observation, and went up over the top of the small artificial hill we were on to vent my bad mood. Suddenly some boys emerged from the shrubs scattered in the flower beds beside the downhill path and rushed toward me shouting loudly, “Pee.” I turned and began running up the path. I ran very fast with my long legs, and in a moment was at the top, my heart pounding in my chest. I slowed my pace on the way down and didn’t tell what had happened.

  But why “pee”? The dirty, incongruous word—did they want me to pee on the flower beds?—that the boys had shouted scared me and made me curious. But because in general I lived in a climate of ordeal, I glimpsed a divine judgment—I had been punished for my disobedience—in that event. Those divine judgments that struck every so often distracted and befuddled me, since all things forbidden were shameful and subject to punishment.

  We’re at the zoo, and in a loud voice I ask the governess what the little red carrot going back and forth on the chimpanzee’s lower belly is. I’m scolded for asking in such a loud voice, and the unreasonable violence of the scolding strikes me right away. Yet I don’t associate it with the chimpanzee’s absurd little carrot, especially since a little while earlier I’d provoked the derision of the onlookers by commenting on some birds of prey with completely mad expressions perched on the branches in the cages. Their necks are bare and bleeding, plucked, as if they’d torn off each other’s feathers. And wouldn’t they have pecked out our eyes as soon as they could? Look, this girl’s scared of everything! But what if a guard inadvertently left a cage open . . . !

  I never get it right.

  I’m never sure of my gestures: there’s no harmony between me and the space around me! When I move, I have to extricate myself from countless invisible knots. Once, our Polish driver—he’s Polish, they said at home, but he’s nice—teaches me to project shadow figures on a lighted wall, positioning his hands, pulled into fists, in different ways, a rabbit, a dog, a mouse, and even the head and arms of a puppet. The game enchants me so much that every night I practice making the figures; one night, lowering a finger, I see my rabbit lower his ear. For the first time I had managed to change with a gesture something outside of me, even if it was a shadow that couldn’t be touched.

  I have always loved the free movements of others, and yearned for them.

  A young priest walks with long, rapid strides at the head of a funeral procession. His black cassock flaps around his legs, which are hidden but still can be immediately imagined, nimble, impatient, ready for flight.

  In the courtyard at school some girls are doing calisthenics; one of them, a passive teenager with a slightly puffy, pale face, who sits in the last row in class, here in the blue uniform, is lithe. She extends one arm and follows the slow, harmonious movement with her gaze. She’s absorbed in her arm, she is her arm, entirely.

  With the same gaze a boy in a leather jacket is stopped at a street corner, legs astride the saddle of his motorbike, leaning with his head to one side to hear the motor roar. He has a faint, dreamy smile.

  I always remain inside myself; all I know is how to walk. From the height of the old mare they’ve put me on for a ramble in the woods, I look with nostalgia at the yellow grass just cleared of snow, which the wretched beast leans forward to taste, lowering its head, a last bulwark between me and the void. If o
nly I could walk by myself, choosing my own dry path amid the lingering patches of snow!

  I learn to blow my nose at around eight. I read Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and with the handkerchief I barely wipe off the dripping snot. I wouldn’t dream of blowing it out violently, with that horrible sound. And if my brains blew out at the same time, like young Werther’s?

  I am seldom free of my awkwardness.

  Late one afternoon during the summer at the lake, we were surprised by a storm when we were in the middle of the lake on the hotel’s big motorboat. We had gone with our father, who had come to visit, to the opposite shore, from which he would leave for Riga. Suddenly, on the way back, the sky turned black, the water rose up in a gigantic crest, and the rain crashed down on us, thundering through continual flashes of lightning.

  Someone started shouting, but after a moment of terror, as the storm increased in intensity, with the thunder and lightning amid gusts of wind, and I was streaming with water, I felt touched by an irresistible force that cancelled out my fear. I don’t remember who was with me—certainly my sister and the governess—I remember the lake and the rain. When we reached the shore, I ran to the hotel and, forgetting the clumsiness of my gestures, took off my shoes in the lobby.

  Otherwise I was oppressed by “good manners.”

  From a curtsey on the street to elbows drawn in alongside at the table. I couldn’t escape “good manners.”

  Once Sisi and I climb up on the windowsill of the game room and expose our bottoms to the really rude children of the Swedish ambassador opposite us. The women selling fish at the market usually did that to customers who didn’t appreciate their fish. “It’s not fresh? See if this seems fresher!”

  Someone comes from there to inform on us, and we’re scolded. We hadn’t displayed “good manners.” And to think that those loutish Swedes, full of themselves like all Swedes, were constantly provoking us.

  Who didn’t have “good manners”?

  Well, besides the fishmongers, the mailman, and the butcher, also the Russian coachmen who blew their noses with their fingers and the peasants of the Polish corridor you saw from the windows of the train in their filthy hovels. And the Russian priests who come out in solemn procession from their big church with the grand gilded cupolas, wearing purple vestments and gold embroidery, but who—“What a stink!”—never wash.

  I’m really interested in people who don’t have good manners. I don’t dare speak to them, but I try to understand how in the world they manage not to respect the rules. It seems to me that they live very well without rules. I don’t envy them, though: they’re poor and it’s terrible to be poor.

  The cook and the maid talk about the existence of God. The cook says that God is “only” pure spirit and isn’t interested in our doings. I’m gripped by panic, but naturally I can’t express it in questions or words.

  I wouldn’t know now if that distress was due to the term “spirit,” which at first seemed to me to evoke a ghost, or if it was instead the tiny nur (only) that chilled me: it put God at a distance with an unaffected serenity, the same with which the cook confidently took her famous strudel out of the oven. The same serenity as the driver’s when he tells me how, swerving too quickly on a stretch of gravel, he hurled a cousin of my father’s out of the car. Or how he arrived at the central station in Riga driving, again in our car, on the tracks. He was drunk—the Poles are often drunk—and he even admitted it. He laughed, saying that he was drunk and that my father had had to pay a big fine for the business of the central station; he also laughed when he repeated in his rather poor German—but he didn’t care about that—that the cousin had broken “only” a leg and an arm.

  One Saturday afternoon we go with our governess to help her mother, who had moved. We had to paste a pink-flowered wallpaper on the walls of a room that I found quite small. The mother of our governess was small, too, and fat and chatty. She was suspected of remote southern origins. Polish, in other words.

  There was warm paste in a basin. The small old woman chatted and laughed the whole time. She was happy with her flowered wallpaper.

  I was pleased: I helped stretch out the wallpaper and I liked seeing the wall get covered with flowers and become clean and happy. I would have liked to go every Saturday to paste wallpaper. I would have liked to have a small room all for myself, in which there was also, as here, a stove to cook on. Everything gathered around me, carefully put away, as I had put away in a metal box that could be closed with a hook the few things I wanted to take with me when I fled to Italy.

  We were Latvian because we were born in Riga. Even my mother, who was Italian, had a Latvian passport because she had married my father.

  We are registered on our mother’s Latvian passport, and in school in the Latvian class we learn the hymn God Save Latvia.

  For one night in November every year, a row of little lights are placed between the double panes of the windows: it’s Latvia’s independence celebration. The lights shine, spreading in the windows of the whole city. My father grumbles that Kārlis Ulmanis—the prime minister of Latvia—is a pig. My father doesn’t like premiers. In the meantime I’ve learned that Mussolini isn’t a runner but the prime minister of Italy. Mamma teaches us a song—whose words we don’t understand—that begins: Giovinezza, giovinezza . . . I like singing it because it’s an Italian song.

  The Latvian anthem is slow and solemn and difficult to sing by yourself. I like singing by myself, even if I can’t carry a tune like my sister. I sing when I’m playing and I sing when I’m walking in the park during our outings, if I’m sure no one can hear me. Singing on the street is extremely rude.

  Every morning at school, lined up by class in the big hall where at Christmas the sacred pageant of the birth of Christ was performed—I was always in the audience and never had the privilege even of being an angel, broad wings sprinkled with silver powder—we sang a chorale in chorus, after the prayer.

  I sang those chorales again in Torre Pellice—many were by Luther—following the stanzas in the book of texts I’d saved. Today I sing some of them at Christmas, when I’m alone in the house.

  Singing aloud together. If you’re not in tune the person next to you covers you with the correct note. Singing in a chorus, lined up, all in harmony.

  In class we usually sang old German songs: a young man is about to die in the red dawn, and another, young and bold, also dies, after “disloyally” abandoning father and mother.

  “Oh Strassburg, oh Strassburg”! Why do we die for you? And why then “disloyally”? And why doesn’t the soldier run away but stops to sing, asking his brave comrade if the bullet is coming toward him or toward the other?

  And yet even “not understanding” can be very satisfying if it’s accompanied by music. For example, the text of the chorale “A rosellino—a rose—has sprung up from a tender root . . . ” is really incomprehensible given what follows—among other things, who is Jesse?—not to mention that it should be una rosellina. Anyway it doesn’t matter, it’s lovely to sing, with the meaningless words reeling out one from the other, rising and then falling in cascades.

  Whereas the piano chords that breathlessly race after the father galloping with the sick child are grim and repeated. The elf king is hidden in the dark rustling around them. Might he be the alder king? Actually he has a name with a mysterious sound, halfway between elf and alder: Erlkönig. I’ve never seen an elf and maybe not an alder, but that sound with the hard r in the middle of the word evokes a spiteful “almost elf” that hidden among the leaves causes sick babies to die. The Erlkönig’s presence came from the piano chords and slowly pervaded the room, much more real than Prime Minister Ulmanis.

  And so, singing, I developed a nostalgia for escape that drew me away without a country (or rules) toward no goal, from under the linden tree into whose bark I’d carved names dear and unnamed.

  The unnamed names—like the sound of the piano and the held breath of the winter wind when it’s about to hurl itself,
whirling, across the snowy plain—attract me, submerge me in a secret expectation, more than the named names, which you always have to think about precisely.

  In fact there are many named names, and you have to know them all and keep them in order and never lose them. Like your passport. If you lose your passport, you go to prison.

  I’m Latvian and Christian, so they told me. I believe it, even though I have to hold these names tight in the palm of my hand like hard objects. It’s a burden that I have to carry along with the other rules. I’m Latvian, but I speak German and I don’t understand who Jesus Christ is. How he ended up on the cross right out of the nativity crèche, having grown up, like me, in a single night. As a child he has a mother, Mary, as an adult a father—not unnamed though better not to name—but who crucified him? Probably the other unnamable, “the spiteful enemy of man in ancient times.”

  One morning we enter the cathedral, where the darkness extends high over our heads. From the pulpit the priest speaks in a loud voice and pointing his finger scolds an old man in the middle of the crowd, right next to me, leaning on a stick and trembling. I’m torn between the fear of being confused with the old man—might the priest think we’re together?—and an immense pity for him. I don’t understand why the priest is mad at him, so old and trembling, and I want to leave.

  At night, the other unnamable “enemy of man” is hidden under my bed. I don’t believe he’s black and horned, as in the story of the “devil’s grandmother” that I saw performed in a show for the schools. I’ve also seen “Max and Moritz” come out flat, entirely flat, in the form of cookies on the rack of a huge oven, condemned to that fate by their repeated acts of disobedience. Everybody laughs, I don’t laugh: their squashed human form makes me shudder. I don’t even laugh when I see the devil’s grandmother pull a hair out of his beard while he sleeps. He isn’t like that. He doesn’t have horns and a tail but is much more frightening, coagulated into an irrational corporeality, like elves and fairies. He doesn’t come to punish me—for that, adults and my nightmares are sufficient—he comes because he has to find a place to exist. I can’t recall how long he’s been under my bed, maybe forever.