by Mok, Judith;
While our host showed us our rooms we could hear Samuel giggling downstairs where he’d stayed with the pipe-smoking man. A happy baby, our host muttered while he poked the fire of our bedroom stove. It was a cold room filled with antique furniture, a huge bed covered with a great white feathered cloud of an eiderdown. I was shallow enough to be completely satisfied with it all. I was a merry young mother, ready for a meal with old and new friends, a hilarious baby and dogs that found us truffles for the omelets truffee we were about to consume. I was back, back again in a country that I loved. That I loved so much I had even married it for a while, mistaking the country for the man and the man for the country. We would be in the company of writers and painters, and the conversations would be colourful. Everybody would have forgotten the beginning and lost the end, but the words in between would sound good.
The days were filled with long walks and large meals, followed by mad dancing.
Our favoured pop and soul icons would scream their lungs out through the muffled speakers of a ghetto blaster that stood in the corner of the kitchen covered in dust. Samuel slept soundly most of the time, and when not sleeping he practised his laughter on a two-year-old girl. We were getting ready to shed the old year and welcome the new one with great elan.
Champagne bottles were cooling outside the sliding doors of the vaulted hall. It was a converted forge with long wooden tables, a piano and a harpsichord snug in a corner, and some large sofas and chairs that had obviously been ordered from a designer catalogue. They were like drifting islands under the ancient arches. We sprawled on them and proceeded to party. Whenever the sliding doors opened a new set of stars would arrive, bringing the cold night with them. People dressed in capes and hats or woollen bonnets, immediately confusing us with foreign languages after introducing themselves in hesitant French. I hopped from one group to the next, using my skill as an interpreter and generally displaying the thing my husband most abhorred: charm.
During the meal the courses were interrupted by poems, music and speeches. I played some tune accompanied by a friend on the harpsichord, and after the clapping sat down next to red-headed Napoleon. A particular dish attracted my attention, but he warned me off it. The salad might be good but I had to be aware of the fact that the bowl it was made in had been used for emergency peeing up in the cold bedrooms at night. Of course it had been thoroughly cleaned and if I were a true soldier I wouldn’t mind. I had no talent for the army I assured him, and we drank to that.
The fireworks consisted of champagne corks sailing through the air at twelve o’clock. My husband, who had spent the evening twenty-five seats away from me in the company of some French mermaids, now needed saving. A Russian prince was on his knees in front of him and kept trying to kiss him passionately. He was crying drunken tears of gratitude, for my husband had just remembered, and had quoted, his favourite poem for him. Nothing missing, all sentences there, a saint, he is a saint, and I must kiss his lips. I dragged the prince over to the harpsichord and suggested he play. A storm of virtuoso notes blew over us. He bowed and again said he had played for my husband, for the poem. The object of his passion stood outside smoking a cigar. He couldn’t stand the sound of the harpsichord.
I went upstairs to see if my baby was all right. He was fast asleep, oblivious to the party. I walked through the room next door to look out of the window. It was an empty room with just one big iron bed in it. I saw the modest sparks of the village’s fireworks before I saw the snow-white cat. Napoleon was asleep on the bed, the cat asleep on his back. Of course his name wasn’t Napoleon, that was the cat’s name. He had come to claim it back for the new year. He opened his eyes and looked at me to make sure that I noticed that the name Napoleon had taken possession of its spotless fur body again.
On the first day of the new year we conquered a mountain with babies on our backs and watched the cities of the plain flooded by intense sunlight. Our breath was light in the winter air that smelled of wild herbs. I was happy.
On the third day of the new year we went back to our life in that Nordic city. My husband started working on a design job and I went to stay with my parents for a few days with baby Sam.
My father, sitting in his chair in the living room, started to sing when I came in. Did I know that song, he wanted to know? It was a song in Yiddish, a melancholy melody. It made him cry because it had been his sister’s favourite, and now he would have to go to the ruins of the camp to sing it for her because it was her birthday. I was stupefied. I had never heard of the song or the birthday; I had never seen the tears of the past.
He got up and embraced me. Had I noticed all these people in his studio? They were waiting for him. He could not go in there any more, his Muse had left to join them. His work was done. I looked at him, aged in his transparent frame, his head with the heavy crown of hair. My father had started the journey back to his sister, back to their songs.
That night I heard the wind pulling at the windows. I got up and saw it, black, pressing against the cold glass, waiting to come in and spread itself. There was nobody in his studio, they were not sitting on the bed. Maybe they were busy building a boat for him, I suddenly thought. Then one night I smelled timber, and the second I heard a saw with a singing blade, the third night Samuel woke because of the loud hammering on the window, it sounded like a storm. My father died in the storm. But in the morning the sky was blue and still, so he could sail.
I never saw him dead because of the one Jewish law he agreed with: nobody was allowed to see the body once the soul had begun its journey.
His body was burned, and we said and heard a few things about his soul at the ceremony. My husband found the right words to say in public about my father’s death. In private he was quiet and painted his painting for me, the painting of my father. It was good, in the end so good that he sold it for a lot of money.
I now want to play you this song, a Yiddish song. Yisgaddal. A prayer for the dead.
15
It was the portrait of my father that got him an invitation to come to New York, give a few talks about his work at Columbia University and live in an atelier cum apartment in the East Village for a month. He wanted me to come along and leave Samuel with my mother. She agreed and we brought our baby over to her house near the woods and the sea. My parents had moved there a few years before, back to the village where I was born. I liked the idea of Samuel and my mother making themselves popular with the locals. We left them with a lot of kisses and flew to the United States.
Without Samuel and the familiar walls of my own home, walking up and down the unknown, with the buildings leaning over me, I felt the death of my father far more acutely. While my husband was holding court with admirers and students I followed the streets of a city in turmoil, and kept hearing footsteps behind me. They were nearly inaudible, as if somebody was wearing socks over his shoes and stepping in exactly the same spot where I trod. All day long I hoped to hear breathing, a faint sign of life. There was nothing; all I knew was that my father was behind me. I was never the type to shed tears, but this feeling of his presence made me shaky. I trembled nervously under my skin. I made the tremble disappear in shops both big and small, where I enjoyed myself buying bags full of clothes for Sam. The poor child was going to have to change four times a day over the coming years. But then it came back: the tremble.
I sat down in Central Park and made drawings of the roller skaters. While I was drawing I started talking to my father who was sitting beside me. He seemed to like my work; his comments had always been dry and his compliments as scarce as snow in the desert. I wrote little stories beside my drawings for Samuel, for later. I was enjoying the wild gear the skaters were wearing and was irritated by my nervousness. I started speaking loudly.
I promise, I said, I promise I will look after mother. I know, I said, I know that you did not leave her anything. I will, I said, I will.
My mother had nothing but a meagre state pension. She could only continue to live in her house if her f
amily paid for everything. I never gave it a second thought; she would stay in her own house until she died. My brother did not agree. A rational man, he explained to me in the patient tone doctors use for eccentrics, marginal types and the obstinate like me, that the state could provide my mother with a room or a small flat, and that she could survive. This was not about survival, but, then again, a doctor wants people to survive. Besides, my brother and his wife had just acquired a second home and his wife had given up her job as an accountant to be with the children, so he had no spare money. Before he had finished his reasonable argument I had fallen asleep with my head on his scrubbed pine table.
I woke up from that sleep in Central Park with an apple-green bird skating right in front of me. My father had gone and I sat looking at my shoes. They weren’t sneakers, and without sneakers I was just a tourist, so I went in search of some. They were bright yellow and soft and I was able to make a bouncy entrance into the auditorium where my husband’s lecture was taking place. It was full of students, pimply, surly-faced, greasy-haired, uniformly dressed, not daring to show a glimpse of eagerness to learn.
My husband’s voice sounded lower than usual. I closed my eyes and listened with admiration. With love. Afterwards he had to be King and talk to the young people who had suddenly become animated. I sat in the back row and waited. A male student came up to me, excited about the fact that I was the painter’s wife. He wanted to know if I was also Irish. When I said no he turned abruptly and walked away.
Being Irish in America was different from being a Jew in America. If you were Irish you had a chance of becoming President; if you were Jewish you still had a chance, a small one, of being refused entrance to a club or a building where you wanted to rent or buy an apartment. My husband often forgot to introduce me to the people around him at exhibitions and parties. When I mentioned something about a drawing technique I used to a famous painter we had just met, my husband took me aside and said I had to understand that everything was about him now. So no talking about my drawings or, indeed, my fiddle work. After a week of this regime I decided to go home. I had hoped he would help me mourn but when I mentioned my father’s death he just said we all have to go some time or other. I talked to my mother on the phone and she persuaded me to stay and maybe do some auditions. I let my husband be and worked on some small paintings and a few violin concertos for auditions. An audition with The Great Conductor was arranged. But when the day came and I rang his doorbell, a dainty dandy opened the door and apologized for the Maestro: he was in bed with a terrible flu.
Play it for us then, the new painter friend of my husband said when I joined him for dinner at his house. So I played my life in New York and what was waiting for me at the other side of the ocean. If whales can hear each other from so far away, then my Samuel could hear me too.
The painter was silent afterwards. Then he told my husband how lucky he was, he said surely my husband asked me to play for him all the time, imagine such luxury, living with sublime music day and night.
Sam was beginning to talk. And I was hanging out in strangely similar hotel rooms all over Europe. I was still not making enough money. I had enough to put a down payment on our house, enough to pay the girls who were taking care of Sam, but not enough for the clothes I could not resist. We’d all like something, was my husband’s comment every time I bought something that was not strictly necessary for survival. My husband did help to support my mother, but, of course, Sam spent a lot of time with her in the countryside, we had our bedroom in her house and we used her car whenever we needed it. There were advantages to helping my mother. She respected his work and liked their endless discussions about books and art. He sometimes bought her a book she really wanted, which she would gracefully thank him for. His hair turned grey and he let his tummy sag. But I liked a grey wolf with a full belly and a well-fed erection underneath. In between his exploratory walks through the city he would work at commercial design work but rarely at his own paintings. From the outside world there were messengers who came to him demanding paintings and public appearances, but he decided to ignore them. He had enough to furnish his cocoon: his son, his cats, his wife and his dreams of the future helped him exist through the icy winters.
I had another, small, exhibition of my New York drawings. The house, the chores, the students, the effort, the music, the growing fear and incertitude, the painting and the lack of means it brought, all hung in a bundle somewhere far away, on a giant crooked tree that grew out of our minds. We lived safely in its shadow and spoke about it in a warm and reasonable manner to lull it into a false feeling of security.
All that was real were the vineyards we saw from the windows of the old farmhouse we rented for a pittance from a Parisian fan of mine. A woman I had met in a swimming pool in Paris, her fat body spilling out of a minuscule bikini. From the edge of the pool she shrieked at me, saying how she admired my work, how she had been to my last concert. I stood dripping chlorine and water on her and asked her whether she knew about a house for rent in the South. She had several, she said. She said I could have the one that belonged to her uncle the Admiral who had died at Monte Cassino and had left her a big old farm. It lacked luxury, and in return the rent was negligible.
My husband had seen her and refused to meet her for cocktails. She was a dyed blonde, and therefore he would not go. I forced him to come and soon the martinis made him drool over the pictures of her uncle’s house.
We made it our own, made the cats climb the olive trees and sleep outside in nests of dried herbs, made the pump work to bring us clear water, and built a dam on the river to make it deeper. We saw them coming from the tower built in the thirteenth century: foreign cars, gleaming in the hot sun like insects from outer space, crawling along the path that led to the house.
I fed them all, our friends, from morning till night, and played with them in the water and on the mountains. Sam developed a love for horses and rode them whenever he could. My mother would spend weeks with us, teaching Sam how to dive, dancing until dawn on her sun-dried legs. She had met some old friends whom she’d known some sixty years or so ago, English boys who had settled in France in a valley of their own. Once she had knocked their straw hats off; now they knocked their old bones about and sang songs from their youth.
Every year my birthday was celebrated at the top of the highest mountain at midnight, with songs and poems and wine, sleeping under the same blanket of hot air and waking up with a wild horse breathing down my neck and a honey-brown chamois nibbling at my hair. My mother and one of her British friends would come up the mountain path on a tractor laden with birthday presents. The table on the mountain grass would be set with a damask tablecloth, imperial silver, Greek water jugs and a variety of chipped Rosenthal and Wedgwood porcelain. Wild lavender would be growing at our feet and Sam would be running towards me through the long grass; he was my husband’s finest gift to me.
We began to work through the year just so that we could return to this place. My painter husband lived and laughed and told his jokes. The money still went missing from my purse and my letters still got lost. As my concerts became more important he seemed less impressed.
There was a day in London when I had to perform at one of the top venues and I tried to use an ATM. It was the first day of a full week of rehearsals and there was not a penny coming out of the machine. We had a joint account, and when I rang he said he needed the cash, he had taken it, could I not eat in my hotel? Could I not walk to my rehearsal? Even if this gig was paying well, I did not have the goods yet, did I, so I had to try and survive. The hotel had no restaurant, so I munched sandwiches and spent every minute in between rehearsals in my room sorting out what I was doing wrong. Another great empty question was my answer. At night it materialised and threatened me.
At home again, with a good review in my pocket, I handed over the presents and we acted as if I had done well.
I painted my anger on my first big canvas and sold it to a museum, earning more than b
efore. But never more than him. And the rules remained: the person who brought in less money had to do more of the other, practical work: the chores. Even so, there was my very good madwoman, the cleaner.
There were still the summers with the siestas, when the three of us slept under the mulberry tree and nobody could touch us. Three bodies of love. Still the horses taking Sam for a ride and the rat in the well and the snake on the stairs and a loud song to scare it off, with the thunderstorms that flooded the kitchen and made us sing, and all our friends in the dark lit by candles.
While the fox played with the donkey, he said it to me. We sat on the terrace looking out over the valley in a glowing twilight and watched my mother and Sam race with the donkeys. Two friends of ours were in the kitchen cooking up some mysterious mushrooms and I was drinking Kir and eating pretzels. And when we saw the young fox play with the donkey, the scene turned Biblical. But then he said it: he wanted to move back to Ireland. He missed the strain of life, the rain, the deprivation.
Somehow I ate the mushrooms that tasted poisonous, Sam fell asleep on a couch with the dogs, my man got drunk, my mother was tired and I had to drive them home along narrow roads, the mountains standing in the pitch-dark like prehistoric shapes.
When we arrived I managed to open my car door and fall out in order to let the vomit flow.