Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  Of course, on the cusp of full masculinity, you can also imagine how hard it might have been for a young man like myself who already guessed what sacrificing to dedicated adult commitments might mean. Grow older and all branches become more singular. As if to become older means you start climbing an upside-down tree only to realize you now cling to one hefty trunk: the trunk has become your fate and only amor fati will be your limp consolation.

  So imagine how I was, still early in my climbing, on one of the branches of that upside-down tree, still foolish in feeling this branch could lead anywhere, much as one begins a document like this, something particular to both writing and life: one begins thinking the branches could lead anywhere only to find oneself on the trunk of a particular conclusion. I climbed since I was an ambitious corporal, to be sure, and I had a lover, older than I was, more experienced, not that her flesh was any the less supple, only that her experience was so much greater that I wanted to plant a flag in it. And she, too, wanted me as a conqueror, this woman who liked me to do her like a dog. Does this seem a quaint notion, now that people are into, as they say, so many different sorts of acrobatics? She needed me to yank her hair back and then murmur words from our former dictator, the one from whom publicly we were happy to be free but who still ruled our bedrooms.

  I do not mention this to make you wish to throw down this guide in disgust, though I begin to realize that this might not be a story I should follow to its logical conclusion. Again, it is merely that as a man of advancing years it has become incumbent upon me to share with you the wisdom I have collected, especially now that you might need some advice about parenting, one of the horrible new words to which my generation has had to accustom itself. We did not know about parenting, we just became whatever we were.

  Suffice it to say, of course, as I rose in the ranks, aspects of my position became distasteful. It was announced to me, for one thing, that I had to leave the older lover in the dirt, without ever seeing her again: she never believed that such injunction came from directly above and not from my own distaste for anything farther below, in other words, her age reeking a bit too much of the grave. Paradoxically, soon after the discharge of my lover it happened, as a condition of my administrative role, that I came to be in charge of how people disported themselves between the sheets. Of course we didn’t refer to the duty in this way. Rather, having ascended to a post in a cultured ministry, a post I had coveted, I found myself handling the question of nighttime behavior and was asked to come up with a new code of morals for the nation, something quick and slangy enough that people could recall it easily, something to use as a sort of dowsing rod when making a choice affecting our national hygiene, if you will, and so of course I said: Remember Our Traditions, since one of the first logos we had as a nation back when we were first forming ourselves in the more modern way was the man in his broad hat taking the woman by the waist, the woman in her peasant dress swung about. This man in his elegance, our fellow of the logo, looked as if he would have voiced our motto to sons preparing to leave for our factories and battlefields, heading out to storm the world, just as the woman, the mother of our nation, appeared with the cant of her head and outflung arm to have advised her daughters in similar fashion. Remember our traditions. What those traditions were does not, in truth, need much plummy articulation: enough to invoke this glorious house of the past in which we were not merely peasants married to the dirt but rather gallant wielders of tradition.

  And it is not just that this motto now appears on all our billboards and official correspondence, having been taken up with a spirit I could not have foreseen, even if there is that unfortunate resultant acronym, ROT, given the gothic cast the designer gave the first of each of the letters, so that we are ROTting away on every official communication and children see this ROT in their classrooms, but rather I see now that as a father I might tell you to follow this advice at least a bit more than you are presently: remember our traditions.

  A few years ago you began asking in a manner I can only describe as querulous about some inconvenience you felt in the fact that we maintained no photo albums of you in your early years, in contrast to the tottering weight of those we amassed ever since you were three.

  Every child feels the indignity of what a parent occludes, and what can I tell you, dear one? Your mother was a great one for amassing albums in general, to be sure. But what comes to mind is that you never asked about other items more relevant to your future, such as the case of Michael A., a man who showed the wrong kindness to a group of infidels in our government. What happened to poor Michael? He let dissidents dine at his table, his children play with theirs, and then one day, Michael failed to show up at his office. A hint of poisoned chicken was bandied about, a mention of foul play by a maid, and still one could find no trace of him, not the slightest whiff. What do you say about someone like this?

  He was duped into his end, a smokescreen which, thanks to the protection of our family’s tradition, you have never had to fear.

  As I consider it, our troubles, yours and mine, began recently on the day when you looked at me strangely during an official lunch, when you sprang the question on me like one of the feral cats your child self so pitied: What if I had never been your father? What kind of thing was this to say as I was about to ascend to my magisterial functions, soon to walk up stairs that wiggled so inopportunely, up to the podium where I would place a ceremonial wreath around the neck of a popinjay, of course, a strutting man whom it was hard for me to celebrate, whose tail feathers have always been too hefty for the scatter of thoughts in his vain little head. It occasionally falls upon me, however, that I must celebrate the undeserving.

  The opposite of such moments of unworthy celebration—and I could string a wreath with them—was always you. Do you know I could have had a birthday for you every day of every year we had together? Do you know all the times I held your head to my chest and stroked your hair? That I so painstakingly learned after your mother’s death to use my brute thumbs braiding your fine girl’s hair, no easy task for a man who, back in our darkest decade, had his hands hammered by unscrupulous interrogators?

  How can you then turn to me and ask me such a question, at such an unwieldy moment?

  Do you know it was your question that pushed me off my balance? I aimed for equanimity but tripped on those stairs, and as I looked over my shoulder, you seemed to be choking down a giggle, your face a mirror of what I saw in the popinjay’s smirk.

  The next day, as you know, not satisfied with public humiliation, you came upon me in the kitchen where I was having the maid make the kind of soup you once loved, the one we made whenever you were sick. The one for which I had to go to the local butcher’s where he owes us some favors, his house having been passed over in many recent storms, for which he now bestows upon us massive bags of bones he promises come solely from grass-fed beasts of our plains, the bones with an architecture so large and misshapen, they are almost humanoid, truth be told, and now take up all the room in the freezer another fellow in our district gave us as a small gift at your last birthday.

  Is it true—you dared ask, as I was showing the maid how to stir the soup from the inside of the pot out toward the rim—was my mother one of the journalists who criticized you?

  The maid, an alley cat who speaks only the indigenous language, someone with whom I communicate in a pantomime, averted her eyes, sensing something disgraceful was transpiring.

  I should have asked you a more serious question: Do you enjoy defiling the memory of your actual mother this way? Or rather, can you guess how many have been destroyed by rumor-spreading carrion lit upon the remains of our nation’s hopes?

  Do you know how deep my heart is? I asked before turning back to the maid.

  The heart doesn’t kidnap you, you said too quickly.

  I have long believed every man has something to offer any scene of confrontation, yet it had not become clear to me what my donation might be.

  I don’t know what yo
u mean, I finally said.

  Love doesn’t hide or hurt you, it doesn’t lie to you all of your life, you said, love is something else.

  Brush your hair! I tried, posture stiffening. We’re going to be late.

  You then went into a vile recounting, lies you saved up for such a moment, saying we had killed so many subversives we might have murdered journalists you mistakenly believe are your real parents.

  You then pressed upon me a photo of two rebels you said you believed were your parents, given you by that awful friend of yours who likes to channel misinformation. How horrifying that you chose to believe such sources, when is it not ultimately a parent’s job to instruct a child?

  Real parents? I said, wishing instead that again I could hear you voicing with such sweetness those words from your past: autochthonic. Erumpent. We had that as a language, but what could I say back to you? Popinjay, miscellaneous, virulence. Mainly, I could not support any more vileness. I grabbed the soup ladle from the maid, gave the broth a determined stir and turned on you, my voice modulated to match our circumstances. You know, dear, I said, certain friends have given you the wrong ideas.

  At which it would be charitable to say that you flounced out of the room, leaving me with the maid turned back to her pot, making one of those horrifying aboriginal gestures that could mean benediction, protection, or curse.

  It was then natural for me to decide I could no longer stomach the official function to which we were meant to go and instead went to my room with its comforting morocco walls and gold-studded chairs, a room in which I could pore over a well-guarded black book, because of course there does exist one concerning you, its supporting documents neatly tabbed and placed in archival lamination. And so since one day you will find this secret black book, since I have not burnt it, an inhumane course of action, I thought it might behoove me to write you now, to help you understand some of the issues parents have.

  For one thing, as any parenting book will say, the one I intended to write at the outset of this branching narrative, parents must work to contain the emotions, violent or otherwise, of their children. Hence it falls to me to gently correct your version of events. Were I to abstain from such repair, you would not qualify as my daughter and I could not claim to be your father.

  To begin with, what you call kidnapping we call salvation, as in our saving a person from an unfortunate situation. What in your temporary blindness you call abusing power might also form a righting of collective wrongs. You might have had life in an orphanage, which then would have become your own upside-down tree trunk, all your possibilities narrowing, such little life cleaving to this trunk.

  Instead I gave you our life. And yet can also recognize the beautiful flash of anger in your eyes, one which can lead to justice or truth. You are too young to know how rarely they coincide. This document, then, shares with you some of what you wish to know. You have not spoken to me since our conversation, believing it an admirable use of your life energies to keep smoldering. If you still think you should call those two people your parents, I am sorry, as I happen to think every person ends up in a cage of beliefs. Still your words return like an unwelcome report. Why is there no birth announcement, you kept on, eyes black voids, your hair so similar to my late wife, your face so much mine. The maid might as well have not been there in the room with us. As you leaned toward me, I was all that mattered to you. And if I loved you with great heat in that moment, with something I have never been able to conquer rising up, it changed nothing, especially how you smelled then, such a clammy, dank girl, my daughter a girl so much of the grave, I had to repress my revulsion, the only word emerging on my lips being the one that made you leave for good, one which marked your first triumph: argillaceous.

  THE GOLDEN RULE; OR, I AM ONLY TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING

  They like him because he makes jokes, singing old war songs whenever they have to do something embarrassing like clean his soiled rear, patting him down just as if he were a baby getting whatever mama failed to give him. He lets them keep their dignity and they let him keep his magic hands: this became the basic bargain, especially after the first nurse started to fly.

  Because he has told them, they know that some seventy-six years earlier his mother asked him to lie in a cold Hungarian bed to warm bedsheets for her, that much he remembers, but there are a heap of other sentences into which he springs with a young man’s joy only to end up tangled, sentences tying him into lexical knots and an aspirated gargle of politeness as if his listeners needed help in parsing basic concepts, as if they had gotten confused. You were saying—?

  The person they are less sure what to do with is the wife, a tiny pert woman in a cherry tracksuit and a mostly upright derrière, all screaming her determination to cling to life and the forget-me-not possibility of dreamboats, her efficiency bespeaking the anxiety she has laid to rest like folded batwings in a closet before coming to check on how they’re treating her spouse. To the home she comes riding in her energy-efficient touch-sensitive car, equipped with demands, one of those women whose life of self-privation means she is doomed to present the outside world with her impenetrable front which friendlier acquaintances call glow and enemies call selfishness.

  Inside, the wife may have had some secret holy purpose, starving deep into the hollows of her cheekbones so she could be hungrier for exigencies, be a readier soldier when it came to fluttering in, indignant, her hummingbird voice and imperious manners ready to rally against all slights, imagined or not.

  Be that as it may—here they borrow the husband’s favorite phrase—they can’t tell. They do know the wife has a habit of raising her voice, as if all nurses were, upon receipt of the N after R, deaf; and her main talent during her visits seems not tenderness but rather the asking of certain pointed questions about how well her husband’s chart is being kept.

  One nurse saw that on the application the wife, in her former occupation, served as coordinator of the county’s social services. Some guessed they had on their hands a lady who had not achieved the status she imagined would be hers. Maybe on an unfrilled childhood bed she had twisted hair around fingers dreaming of winning elections, breaking important stories, being the first to split off from an immigrant family. Who knows. Maybe she had waltzed across a living room balancing books on her head. For some reason, she had to enunciate too clearly. With spouses, you could never tell. Could be that none of the woman’s family had attended a lick of college, or that wherever her home was, forgotten, kept alive only by the umbilicus of the occasional birthday phone call, she may have had sisters themselves nurses, women who made her feel guilty for having fled the calling of service. For whatever reason, the woman they started calling the Hummingbird, which caught on right away, could never show respect, treating the nurses as little more than detritus on a planet on which she merely deigned set foot.

  It could also be that the Hummingbird had gotten weighed down by degrees—you had to have a master’s, at least, to head social services, right?—and maybe her knack for having been a good student, notating telephone conversations and keeping pen cartridges well-organized in drawers with little hole reinforcements and everything one needs in the pursuit of truth, having others tell her that she was important for so long, had slotted her into her own little crypt: you could take her pert requests as last gasps. Perhaps she too knew what it meant to feel stuck as any of the rest of them, caught in a niche, whether you called it nursing, grant writing or public administration, a life of private calibrations and collective holidays, because who can tell where a life goes?

  Or maybe after each visit to the husband the hummingbird had to sneak into the wheelchair bathroom to relieve herself of some ache her husband had never fulfilled as she could not quit some habit of moving too fast.

  Be that as it may, they knew the hummingbird had been prompt in admitting their patient to the home. I am trying to do the right thing, she kept saying. She and her grown children wore the sacred masks people find at the ready, the equ
ivalent of old witch-doctor masks hanging in some basement, useful whenever someone has to stick a family member into what nurses called, never around a patient, the Crypt. Though the home was no more and no less than this: just one more place governed by the logic of financial realities, bedpans, germ control, efficiency, stray moments of humanity.

  And of course there had been the golden era, back in the seventies, when nursing care was called the great cash cow, the graying of the population meaning the greening of pockets, when people with big ideas had checked in, boom years for nurses and speed degrees, for senior developments all over. In certain counties the homes grew fast as prisons after an election: to such homes you could lure people via tribal affiliations, Seventh-Day Adventist or Zionist, Anglophilic, Pastoral Ecological, or you could also offer them one-size-fits-all, because what did people really need in the end of their days beyond pleasant activities such as you find in any smart-minded Montessori classroom, along with counseling, titrated meds, and the company of others actively monitored for vital signs?

  That golden age had passed. No longer was it the time when niches grew and quality slacked. Now in these dire times homes were forced to return to doldrum basics, old-time measures, ammonia and morphine, palliatives and hygiene, and even so, the husband’s new place was known for its undrool factor, especially its pleasant activities, as the wife explained to her unsmiling grown children, the inventive depth and reach of such activities, not the usual macramé and bingo, the small-motor-skill development of basket-weaving but also—she flapped like a wing the brochure on which were listed wheelchair folk music nights, gambling parties based on thumb cockfights, and vessel gamesmanship, which was really, as one of the nurses had explained, a PR euphemism for bedpan croquet. His new home; no one could help the irony. Say we were cavemen, the wife asked her children, trying to make the question rhetorical, what would we do?