Gael

by Mok, Judith;

  She could be modelled into a wine connoisseur, she could be a hostess. The raw material was there. She even managed to move her high-heeled boots from one canal-side cobblestone to the next with grace. Her family had provided her with some riches, at least. The rest was up to him. He would marry her without being over protective. She would have to work hard at her art. Everybody could be a good professor or a reasonable pianist like him, but her talent was an asset. An asset that could be pleasant when in the company of friends. She could travel and live her life freely. How good it would be to go to one of the great theatres and hear her excel with a famous orchestra.

  Her father was very consistent in his self-imposed duty to educate Loth about the city. Meanwhile he never stopped pointing out the light, the way the sun was setting, and the clouds. Jubilation. Sensations altogether not to be missed. Loth felt tired by their persistence in pointing to and recreating the world. If Loth saw perfection in a building or bubbling up in the bloody sky he wanted to be the master of his own discovery. Your daughter is a delight, he said to the old father. She is, and the phantom of it, was his reply.

  Loth was touched when her father asked him if he wanted to wash his hands before dinner. He did not know then that it was like a ritual that remained of a religious past. He had noticed that the same sort of thing seemed to happen with the bread; it had to be broken with two hands. Never cut. When they had visited a museum the whole family seemed to be totally au fait with the biblical subjects in the paintings. They were comfortable with lamenting old men with names such as Job or Jeremiah, the melancholy subjects of Rembrandt’s art. Or Susanna’s pale young body and a sneaky old David lusting after it.

  There were to be guests for dinner. Her student brother had taken over the kitchen and reproduced some of his cook’s favourite dishes. Loth had discussed them with him on their way back in the Citroen. His sister laughed and teased him about it. Medicine man was going to cook. Their parents laughed too, because, yes, he was a great cook but food was not so important. They had done without it for a while. Both grew silent at the same time. Her mother was driving. She was obviously the experienced one. Her husband pointed out some windmills along the road, quietly.

  He had been curious to know who was going to be there for dinner that night. Some painter and writer, arty-farty friends, she had answered in the same teasing tone she had used with her brother. She fumbled with his ear and babbled about food. She still had a lot to learn, Loth thought. She had not met his cook yet, with her extensive cookbook library and her biblical wine list. Not much food in the Old Testament as far as he knew. They, of course, took great pleasure in contradicting him. For the rest of the journey they enjoyed their new game: naming food from the Bible. It was a good game, and fun. They thanked him for it.

  But now his hands were clean. Clean enough, he hoped, for the famous guests who arrived dressed in vivid velvets and large hats. Loud greetings and embraces followed. He shook some firm hands and looked into faces he had regularly seen on television screens or in catalogues. They were friendly faces with the same inquisitive eyes as his lover’s father. He couldn’t help noticing their formidable noses. Two men and a woman.

  Her brother served his dishes with panache. They were greeted with enthusiasm but quickly forgotten. The conversation easily outshone the food. Daniel de Barrios had appeared as the groom in Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride since the painting had been cleaned. Nobody had known it was him, the Spanish poet who fled to Tobago and then to the North. He had been painted by the great master, who later changed the painting and uncovered his once-covered head. De Barrios? The large colourful woman writer screamed. They were all screaming. At the top of their voices they discussed de Barrios’ adoration of the False Messiah and his Turkish followers.

  He noticed her, his mistress, antique earrings dangling from her soft lobes, a woolly gold dress, slightly overdressed as seemed to be the norm here, eating with intense pleasure. She listened and interfered with dry comments. The Messiah’s Nordic followers, taking their ritual bath in the frozen canal? Meshuggas!

  How strangely modern the cutlery and porcelain were, the square-cut crystal and the candleholders.

  Would he convert to Islam or choose death by decapitation? The satisfied faces looked at him inquisitively, demanding an answer.

  ‘I am a man,’ he had started. They nodded, that much was clear. ‘So, it is of course an easier choice for me than for a woman.’ No answer, heads shaking. ‘Well, considering the cuisine of the Islamic Sultan...’– a slight disgust appeared on their faces – ‘the doctrine of Islam is worth studying before one dies.’ They started to laugh; was he a Jew, never to give a straight answer? They abandoned the seventeenth century to discuss present times. All seemed to be members of some foundation that took care of human rights. Even his lover lost some of her levity in the light of humanity and its more murderous aspects.

  ‘Some champagne?’ He had brought it from his own Paris cellars. They drank and took the bottle under their arms to climb the stairs to their host’s studio. The moment had come to inspect new work.

  5

  Please drive carefully, her mother had said when she kissed him on both cheeks. So he drove his lover back along the same easy roads, back to Paris. She had to tell him everything about her mother if she was not going to drive at all.

  ‘Forget everything you see, start with a clean slate, and just listen. My mother.’ Which part of her mother did he wish to discover? All sides, all parts, every adventure, every lover. You have four hours to fill with your mother’s life. Until they reached Paris the roads were only there to be covered in stories, histories.

  My mother, Anna Henriques.

  They had houses, they had servants, dogs, cats and a large wealthy family. When Anna was very small they had a carriage and stables for the horses. Her nanny, who she shared with her five brothers and sisters, used to steal her mother’s silk stockings and then beg the children to put them back. This was a routine that went on for a couple of years. Stealing was just a game, so the children thought. Her mother never noticed. Or so Anna believed. She was allowed to try on her mother’s hats and shoes and silk taffeta petticoats and dance with her sisters in front of the mirror singing her mummy’s favourite song: ‘whatever you do, be sure to marry a Jew’. Her mother was a well-known beauty in the capital and she loved to socialize. As soon as a child was out of nappies she would take him or her shopping and drink hot cocoa in one of the richly decorated Jugendstil cafés. And one day Anna realized that her mother was different. It was in just such a beautiful café. It rained small lights from the chandeliers and it was nice and warm with the winter dark outside on the tall windows. She was deeply involved in a piece of sachertorte and did not pay any attention to her mother’s richly dressed and perfumed friends. They were rather loud and the next thing was her mother towering above her – she could count the buttons on her bodice. She was standing on the café table amongst the porcelain and the cakes, talking about women’s rights. Shaking the feathers and plumes on her hat at some people, asking for votes for women and equality for the poor. Anna noticed that she was not wearing a silk petticoat but a simple white lace one. And she felt proud of her.

  That night Anna went to her parents’ bedroom and looked at the books on her mother’s bedside table. There were French novels and books on German philosophy. They were bound in leather and the pages were wafer-thin when she flipped through them. Silky like her underwear. She must have been about nine years old, old enough to understand that these were foreign languages. From places they had visited, such as Deauville in France and Vienna to visit Herr Mahler. In France her mother would laugh and drink with people who came from Russia like her ancestors, and her father, who had a beautiful tenor voice, would sing after dinner, just for fun. Her father was always away in countries like China or America. And when he returned he never came alone. The guests would stay for months sometimes. He would bring home lots of presents and china or precious linen. Her
father did not read much. He liked music and football.

  Once, in Vienna, they had to be very quiet in a big building and sit still for hours while her parent’s friend waved his arms in front of a lot of people with musical instruments. When it was over Herr Mahler came home with them.

  On a bad day, when she came home from school, she found that somebody had shot her dog. With her brothers she buried him and then went to sit in the dog’s basket in the kitchen. To cheer her up her mother gave her a book of poems. Her first. It gave her comfort that there seemed to be something outside the language she knew and used every day; another language lived. She started reading obsessively through her mother’s library. A lot of poems were learned by heart and spoken out loud on long walks or when she was bored in the company of friends. They started calling her eccentric.

  She grew up, and there was the girl’s gymnasium and the balls and parties and Madame Rausch for her evening gowns and Hirsch for her hats. The parties where the young Louis Armstrong would play with his band – all the way from America – for the jeunesse dorée, and she would flirt with her admirers. The boys in tuxedos. Everybody smoked, of course. Everybody made love, of course. A young baron got her pregnant, but he was an empty-headed beau so far as she was concerned. Her parents suggested marriage. But there was to be no wedding, just a visit to Switzerland to have an abortion.

  She continued to read (plays, poetry), until she went to see her father in his study to ask him if she could join the theatre.

  He was a mild man, totally devoid of religious feelings, but it so happened that he was glancing at the Torah that day and having a fit of morality. He was happy with his quiet afternoon in his warm house and here was his learned, beautiful daughter who wanted to go on stage. Had she lost her mind? He picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with England. She was to enter society over there and, it was hoped, meet a companion for life.

  She went for a walk with her mother along the empty beach. She was docile, she would go, the theatre could wait.

  On their way back from the beach they walked through the village. Boys shouted the usual insults at them.

  England suited her for a while. Being the well-bred yet glamorously rebellious one. Poking fun at little ladies in hideous hats during endless tea parties and picnics. There is a photograph of her in a short fur coat, radiant, having a picnic with her friends in the hilly fields. And there is a man sitting in the photograph, at a bit of a distance. It was their chauffeur. He also had to have lunch. Having the chauffeur in the photograph was a solecism, of course. But Anna had insisted.

  She became engaged to a well-behaved young man. He liked to read and was planning to turn the rest of their lives together into a comfortable journey. But she had to wear trousers and sing with jazzmen after hours. They wrote songs for her that we still hear. She perfected her English, fine-tuned her accent. The young man was too virginal to marry.

  There were a few years back at home, auditioning for the theatre after all, moving away from her safe society into bohemian circles. Pictures of her with a cigarette. Her slim body dressed in low-waisted silks, long necklaces. Attractive artists laughing at her side. Always laughing. Until her father was shot in Berlin on a business trip. He had been drinking with friends in a nightclub and had started singing a Yiddish version of the Song of Songs. Somebody in a brown shirt got up and shot him.

  Her mother died six months later, of grief it was said. They were the lucky ones.

  Let’s skip those years. Just to relate that her brothers were killed and her one remaining sister went insane.

  After that she was moved to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Too ill to live outside its walls, but well enough to read and start translating literature, and acquire a wide knowledge of modern art.

  When she was back on her own two feet and moving around her home city as elegantly as possible in her rags, she took to visiting galleries with those of her friends who were left. They were still wealthy. She had lost everything, her parents’ wealth confiscated by the Nazis, and she survived in her friends’ mansions, working as a translator.

  She left with the painter who became her husband, at the opening of his first postwar exhibition.

  Impressed by his talent, she recognized him as the young man who had helped his father out in a deli shop she used to visit with some friends after dances, after hours. While they sipped champagne she would joke with the old man, who turned out to be strangely erudite for a shopkeeper. She had hardly looked at the thin young man beside him.

  That was her as well: opinions about shopkeepers, shoes with wooden heels, people eating without napkins, wearing clothes that were not made to last, not made out of natural materials.

  Her children were brought up with strict codes of etiquette in their modest house. But it was impressed upon them with so much charm that the silks and Egyptian linens were acquired naturally, as naturally as the way their mother liked to mix several languages. Her stories about the diamonds that she swapped for food sounded like fairytales. They could not imagine the woman in the kitchen, singing and making a mess of the cooking, wearing a ball gown and a diamond necklace.

  Some of her friends were like that, though. Ladies in pearls who seemed to admire the work of her sadly not very well-to-do husband.

  She took the children to her friends’ houses and taught them to feel comfortable around them. Money was never mentioned, but bitterly missed. They met with royalty and Russian princes, ate piroshkis, stuffed cabbage sandwiches, and cried and partied with refugees from the Revolution. Much kissing and sobbing, loud talk and arguments were the lines along which their lives were mapped out. She was seldom sad. Her past was void, but at a mature age her future had been filled with two children and a husband who fascinated her. She never knew how to handle a household. Her family had shopped in the best places. She tried to do the same. The house overflowed with paintings and books. And then there would be the gaps, which could last a few months, when there was nothing left to live on. But she did not complain, though her mouth would tighten, her smile seem less generous.

  Her children were deprived of nothing: they had food, music lessons, clothes, and were driven around in the oldest of two CVs, enduring their parents’ endless songs. It was she who suffered deprivations at times. She loved to give, to present people with what they most wanted. These people were always articulate, of course. A foreign language had to be spoken perfectly. German writers were her favourite. She shared her husband’s views on Germany: a divided country with a lot to offer.

  Their sorrow was personal and seldom mentioned. When her children wanted to know where their grandparents, aunts or uncles were, she told them the truth: that they had all died.

  There was no room for death around her house. Active learning, music, joy. A stream of energy that made her regularly collapse into old war illnesses. Her husband had no patience with illness, and her children quarrelled with the housekeeper, coming to complain at her bedside, at home or in hospital. She always recovered, and turned into a healthy grande dame.

  That was the older woman she was now. The woman he would certainly meet again. They had reached Paris.

  When he parked the car she turned to him. Did he understand that she did question her parent’s life and possible lack of pragmatism? That she realised she had picked up the superficial joys of an acquired taste for material things? They lived with a pain they couldn’t share with her. She had arrived when the smashed pieces of their existence had been glued together to begin again. She could only try to help them reach the finishing line.

  6

  Before I left he wanted me to go to Ireland with him. Just for the week, he said. So I lied to my husband about a music trip, and he believed me because it suited him that way. I didn’t waste much thought on it. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  For some reason I flew to Dublin one day after my lover. He would be waiting for me at the airport. I looked down at the threatening waves and the threatening mountains be
fore a cloud devoured us and I saw no more of my future.

  The carpet at the airport was brownish in colour, with millions of dots, and it smelled. Just like the carpet at the airport in England. I had been told that there was nothing remotely similar between the two countries. I dragged my heavy bag along.

  He was not there in the hall as promised. I decided to go for a coffee.

  I asked for a cappuccino, and the waitress served me black water in a mug and planted a jug of cream beside it. Here you are now, she said. It lasted me long enough for him to appear. His face was swollen and he had a plaster over his nose. He handed me a rose wrapped in tinfoil. When he kissed me, he tasted of stale alcohol. Before I could say anything a long story was unfurling from his hungry mouth (I could smell his hangover stomach) about the night he’d spent with his friends and how he’d had a fight with a cupboard. Hence the nose. It was broken. He took a bit of the plaster off and showed it to me; it looked like a Greek ruin.

  He wanted me to buy him some breakfast. That would give him time to tell me about his adventures and how he had planned my stay in his homeland. While he worked his way through a plate full of greasy substances, he told me about the cottage he had rented for us in the countryside. His countryside, where his ancestors came from, princes and kings all, the original pirates and thieves of Ireland carrying his name, he said proudly, while he used his sleeve to wipe the last of the greasy food from his lips.