by Marina Jarre
God won’t help me get rid of him; I have to do it by myself. God is in Heaven and only sometimes smiles at me in a childish song that goes: “Look how many clouds pass by in the big vault of the sky; look how many stars are in the big, big world. God, the Lord, has counted them, may he not miss even one.” In bed, pinching the hem of my pajama sleeve between two fingers, I repeat the song, and, thanks to God’s counting what is impossible to count—this I know—it submerges me like a certainty and I fall asleep. At the same time he falls asleep under my bed.
My Latvian grandfather and my Russian grandmother are Jewish. My Italian grandparents—who in fact are also part French—are Waldensian3. My mother is Waldensian. Some Latvians—the most stupid—are Catholics. But Aunt Jo is Catholic, and she isn’t in the least stupid. Petkevic, our driver, is also Catholic. The Poles are Catholics. The Russians are Orthodox, but my Russian grandmother is Jewish. On the other hand the Russians at the Soviet Embassy aren’t Orthodox. They’re like my father: they have no religion. They’re very mean and won’t let anyone pass on the sidewalk in front of their door. They could shoot you! They called Petersburg Leningrad and shot the tsar and his family. But the tsar was far from a saint and he in turn shot people who didn’t shout “Long live the tsar.” He was Orthodox; among all religions, the Orthodox is hardly a religion.
No one explains to me the difference between Jews and Christians. Again they’re names that I have to accept as they are. My father was brought up by a Lutheran pastor—as a child he was extremely lively, a rebel, said Grandfather, and Grandmother didn’t feel up to raising him, and so they sent him away, something he never forgave his parents for, said my mother—and he was as attached to that pastor as he could be, said my mother. Nevertheless he had made trouble for Mamma when she decided to send us to the German Lutheran school. He had said: “They’re Jewish, why are you sending them to the Lutheran school?”
He said it to annoy Mamma: we weren’t Jews, we had been baptized—I in Torre Pellice, at a year old (my father was in fact present at the ceremony), and my sister at four, in her pink silk dress, during a vacation at the Strand4. She had shaken the drops of water off her skirt with an impatient hand.
When you’re baptized you’re no longer a Jew: probably it’s a step forward.
I love my Latvian grandfather, Mosè, whom at home they called Moritz. Now when I talk about him I say “my little grandfather.” Mamma objected, saying that Grandfather wasn’t at all little; maybe he seemed small compared with my father.
Grandfather had very black eyes under bushy white eyebrows. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons we went to our grandparents’ house; we played in Grandfather’s study, under his desk. At night, when we stayed for dinner, there was an egg in the shell and Grandpa cut off the tip with a single swipe.
Grandfather told us the story of when he was young and wanted to marry Grandmother. He was very poor, she was rich and had studied at a boarding school for “aristocratic” girls in Vitebsk. In order to marry her Grandfather had gone to Siberia to become a fur trader; when he got rich, he had bought the tannery and married Grandmother.
One day Grandfather brings us a bag of many different-colored banknotes. “Play,” he tells us. And then he says that he keeps those beautiful bills in bags in the attic. It’s his savings in the tsar’s rubles, now worthless.
With Grandfather I play at counting; it amuses him to see me do sums so fast.
In school I’m by far the best in mathematics. When I raise my hand to answer, forty large, tall, blond German girls, my classmates, are sitting around me in silence. That repays me, at least a little, for my embarrassing failures on the Swedish ladder, where I stay stuck between the lower bars, surrounded by the same large, blond, stolid silence. It repays me only in a minimal way, because unfortunately being good at school is a duty. Mamma and my sister aren’t good at math, but being good at math doesn’t win you any points.
Whereas numbers send me into raptures—which is considered a little unheimlich (creepy)—and when I’m not reading or playing, I make increasingly long, increasingly difficult calculations. I’m not interested in the measurements of my room, but I make calculations that go beyond the stars, far beyond, maybe approaching close to him whom it’s more prudent not to name. My numbers are a ladder that ascends and has no end.
When I lose myself like that among the zeroes, I regret that it’s a duty to be good at school, that you get no credit for being able to rapidly multiply 2340 by 2500; on the other hand Mamma was also really good at school—if not in math, in all the rest—and her father, my Waldensian grandfather, who had a narrow, sculpted face with a straight nose and thin lips, harassed her about her grades because he was a teacher in the school she went to, the Collegio di Torre Pellice. When she’d go hiking in the mountains on Sunday, on Monday morning he interrogated her right away and was even stricter with her than with the others, who called him “the scourge.”
Mamma decided that she would never torment her daughters about grades. Never praise, either, of course. And she impartially applied the first rule to my sister, the second to me.
My grandfather Mosè praised me and I loved him, cautiously and without saying so, because Mamma didn’t love him at all, and that put a curtain between him and me, a curtain of questioning and checking on his actual feelings toward Mamma. I didn’t think he disliked her, as she said. Hadn’t I seen him one day stop our father in the doorway—we were all at our grandparents’—to keep him from running after Mamma, who had said something to him, then had rapidly run out of the house? Grandfather had put himself between him and the door and closed it behind Mamma. Then he had scolded our father in a loud, harsh voice. He wasn’t afraid of him.
Later, in Torre Pellice, my mother told me that Grandfather had testified against her in the divorce case because she was a Christian and “Jews are always in agreement against Christians.” That deeply distressed and grieved me: my memory of Grandfather—who died of an illness a few months after Grandmother, in 1940—emerged from it diminished, different from the way I held him in my secret affections. I knew that he was “just” in his heart and I wondered why he had been unfaithful to me.
Forty years later, reading for the first time my parents’ final divorce decree—a document that had been kept among my mother’s papers, which I was reorganizing—I found some information that consoled me: my grandparents, witnesses at the trial, had both stated that they considered it better for us to be handed over to our mother rather than to their son. So he was restored to me, although in the guise of the witness Mosè Gersoni, my dear grandfather.
When we sang our Lutheran hymns, he listened attentively. Once, suddenly raising his voice, he sided with me against my sister. I had sung that God was the one who helps, and Sisi that he was the one who saves; so Grandfather—brusque, raising his voice—had observed that God helps and doesn’t save.
Grandfather is the only adult who speaks to me about God.
Mamma forgot to prepare me for the religion exam for admission to the Lutheran school. I was eight. I was asked, “Who is God?” and, gripped by panic, I didn’t know how to answer. How could I not compromise myself?
God is just, Grandfather says, but we can’t understand his justice. I don’t like that, I ponder it, it’s sort of like the story of how the mother loves her children because she suffered bringing them into the world. It’s not at all rational.
But faith isn’t rational, they explain at school. So I do my own private test. On the way home one morning, I pick up a dead mouse in the snow. I keep it in the dresser drawer of my dollhouse. Every night I pray to make it come back to life. But it doesn’t come back to life, and when it turns soft I have to throw it away. And similarly, the opposite—despite my prayers, the stepmother of a classmate to whom I’d promised a miracle doesn’t die. (When you pray, you can safely name God.)
I don’t tell anyone about these experiments of mine; only my sister knows, she’s cynical but loyal. She informs me right away
that the mouse won’t come back to life and the stepmother won’t die, but she keeps the secret.
I don’t tell Grandfather: Grandfather doesn’t believe that a person can come back to life; I’m really sorry about it for him because he’s old and sick. Less for Grandmother, since no particular feeling binds me to her. I hardly ever see her, because she’s often out walking with Aunt Betty, our father’s sister; when she’s home, Grandfather says to her in a tender and worried tone: “Aren’t you tired, Anna, don’t you want to rest for a while?” Sometimes she gets out of bed and plays waltzes on the piano for us: Sisi and I dance around the room.
One afternoon Grandmother invites some heavily made-up and jeweled ladies for tea. Among them, I’m told, is our father’s first wife; when I pass by the table, she observes me attentively. I think it’s because of my hair; I’ve inherited from Grandmother Anna its dark blond color. Everyone else in the family has black hair.
Grandmother often repeats: my emeralds are for the little girls. I don’t remember having ever seen them, but I’m glad to inherit them along with the hair, even though according to the rules wearing too much jewelry is in bad taste. It’s also in bad taste for children to wear furs. Not even Jewish children had fur coats. And it was in bad taste to drive children to school; they had to learn to walk there by themselves.
My father’s relatives were in general people with bad taste. Uncle Talrose—Aunt Betty’s husband, whom Grandfather couldn’t bear—was a millionaire, and miserly. I knew that from their Christian maid Marta, whom they lent some days to my grandparents.
In their dark, dusty house, the maid Marta lived in a tiny room near the green-colored kitchen. Once I heard Grandfather observe about some misdeed of Marta’s that the poor girl was Christian and therefore crazy. Grandfather had used the Yiddish words goy and meschugge instead of the German that he usually spoke, probably so that I wouldn’t understand; but I understood perfectly well, and so I felt it my duty to demonstrate to Marta my Christian solidarity. I went to the kitchen and tried to converse with her in that greenish air. She kept repeating that the Jews are miserly and my aunt and uncle wouldn’t take care of her teeth. She said she wanted to return to the country and, patting her stomach, groaned in an unseemly way. She was a very unlikable Christian and certainly a bit meschugge. I went back to the dining room.
One day we went with our father to a party with his relatives. There was a very long table—maybe twenty people—it was either Passover or the wedding of my cousin Benno. All my father’s relatives with bad taste talked at the same time in loud voices. Someone sang. I was sitting with my elbows drawn in along my sides, and in that very small space I was left perfectly in peace; it was as if that place were mine anyway. I could have shifted my elbows and no one would have said anything.
There was stained glass in the windows. Was that good taste or bad?
I didn’t know any of my father’s relatives. I seldom saw them and, since I wasn’t at all interested in people’s doings—and didn’t much understand them—I never remembered whom they were married to or divorced from, whose children were whose, and barely what their jobs were. I remember distinctly only Aunt Betty, good-natured and jovial, and my two cousins Benno and Saul, who were much older than we were. Benno—he was kind and affectionate—for fun once stuck me in one of his boots; he was doing his military service. Saul offered me my first Turinese pastries in his room, I think in Via Garibaldi. He was studying medicine in Turin and would practice his profession in Latvia. I found the pastries ridiculously small, but much more suited to me than the gigantic pastries of Riga.
My cousins, my aunts and uncles, the others at the table didn’t survive 1941.
After my father and mother separated, I never saw my grandparents again, or any of our father’s family. Of that day of celebration I remember the strange impression made by hearing someone say of us: “Here are Sammy’s kids.” I wasn’t used to being attributed to our father, or at least to our father without our mother’s name being added.
In fact I wasn’t used to the idea of belonging to a family. I didn’t say “my parents,” but Vati and Mutt, and after their separation “my father” and “my mother.” Still remote from my feelings and my reflections was the meaning of the court’s assertion, while it gave custody to our mother, that both had treated us well, each contributing for his or her part to our well-being.
My only childhood bond was with my sister. Constant and unexamined. My family was her and me: I never wondered what she thought of me and even my jealousy toward her didn’t erode my attachment. That had to do with my mother. In the circle of light my sister was always with me, but I didn’t have to make any special mention of it.
She recalls different details of many of the episodes I’ve recounted, and of some, despite the common experience I’ve described, she has a completely opposite view.
Regarding the episode of the stairs she recalls that she ate the top layer of a box of candied pineapple—so she was licking off sugar, not cream—and she recalls that on the top of the box was written “Göttingen.” And she claims that on the stairs she was yelling not with rage but with terror because Mamma was threatening her with life in prison. When we were in the castle at the edge of the forest, she rescued and brought inside no fewer than twenty-one birds of passage found stiff with cold and about to die on the road. Without the help of any prayer they thawed in the warmth and started flying away through the doors. She says also that she learned to swim with the other kids on the farm while I was in bed with scarlet fever. They swam in the clear, clean river that ran downhill from the farm and I, in bed, reread The Jungle Book for the fourth time. She maintained a certain Latvian patriotism and insists that I wouldn’t speak to the mailman because I was a snob. It seems, also, that I liked to go to parties, at one of which we were given little rings. I remember a certain disappointment because the stone was ruby red and not blue; the ring had been put on the handle of the spoon that went with the little cups on a long table.
As for our father, Sisi says that in the months when Mamma lived somewhere else he would take her out at night while I was already sleeping my Lutheran sleeps. So Sisi sat at Otto Schwarz, one of the famous pastry shops of Riga, and ate all the pastries she wanted; our father, meanwhile, played poker with his friends until two in the morning.
Talking over our childhood, I discovered that, in an unusual and nonliterary coincidence, we both remembered as the most beautiful moments our strolls along the seashore in summer sunsets, when we walked barefoot for miles, looking for bits of amber that could be found mixed in with the black debris of seaweed and driftwood deposited along the line of the waves: we went out in the extended, luminous evening that would never become night and the sand had the same silver-white color as the sky; it seemed that we would never have to turn back but would continue barefoot along the sea in whose calm you couldn’t distinguish even the lapping of the water when it reached the beach. Every so often we’d bend down to pick up a transparent orange fragment that we put in a matchbox.
We left Latvia one morning in July of 1935. Our departure had been delayed by an illness of mine, the usual stupid inconvenient childhood illness. I had caught scarlet fever after trying to hatch a goose egg for several days, in a bush behind the farm. I had attributed the chills of the fever to the usual divine punishment for an attempt I felt was vaguely sacrilegious. Mamma had taken care of me for the long weeks of bed rest that scarlet fever then required, and I had learned to read French from the magazines she was reading.
We had to leave from an outlying station because our father had private police watching the central station in Riga. We were loaded onto a farm cart with our baggage and we set out through the woods, the same where, a few nights earlier, on the eve of the feast of San Giovanni, from the window of my room I had seen the peasants’ torches disappear.
When we entered the wandering shadows of the forest, I saw next to the cart the goslings born two weeks earlier. They walked a few steps w
ith us, then stopped. I began to cry, a long desperate cry. I was leaving them in their soft yellow feathers and wouldn’t see them grow up and swim later in the stream.
Behind me, as in a game whose moves were now fixed forever, my childhood stopped with them, on the luminous edge of the woods.
2 The Germans occupied Riga in July of 1941. In late November and early December, most of the city’s Jews were shot; among these were Jarre’s father and his relatives, including a six-year-old daughter named Irene he had had with a German nurse.
3 The Waldensians were a Christian movement that arose in France in the twelfth century, joined the Reformation in the sixteenth, and over the centuries were persecuted, suppressed, and often forced into exile. They are now concentrated mainly in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont west of Turin.
4 The Strand, or Riga Strand, was a beach resort on the Baltic about fifteen miles west of Riga.
Pity and Anger
For Cecilia,
who knows true pity
In recent years, as the astonishment of discovering that I, too, am getting older sweeps over me, I continue to dream—almost in compensation—beautiful, bright-colored, uninterrupted dreams, as if instead of dreaming I were writing, and on one of those rare occasions when a page pleases me immediately. Then I wake up satisfied, or maybe rather than satisfied—the word could suggest a contentedness I don’t feel—I wake up soothed, since even awake I recall those dreams roaming freely inside me much more precisely than many real events; they have the mark of something completed, even, let’s say, irrevocable, stated not with regret but instead as one might say, That’s how it is, it can’t be otherwise, the circle is closed and within that circle your life stands still in all its colors, but not one more.