Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  In between the photographs on the mantelpiece in my father’s study are some pine cones, an earthenware candlestick, fossils of fish embossed on two pink stones and a postcard of a sculpture of a majestic bronze couple, massive in an English landscape, on the back of which is inscribed Henry Moore, King and Queen and, in Grandpapa’s near illegible scrawl, the curious directive, ‘To John, read Father and Mother.’ The photograph has been taken from a low angle so that, despite their evident mass, the green- and grey-tinged regal couple, seen against a cloud-striated sky, appears to float above the moors, benevolent rulers of all it surveys. These are interspersed with out-of-date invitations to charity and university functions and brass medallions with famous philosophers’ profiles in relief on them. Above the mantelpiece and on the entirety of the facing wall above a Chesterfield sofa are butterfly display cases that add the only notes of colour to the room. The two alcoves on either side of the fireplace and one wall are taken up entirely with bookcases; on entering the room, one has to open the door wide to squeeze past the fitted bookcase. Opposite, a big bay window framed by dark floor-length curtains accommodates my father’s desk on which rest in- and out-trays and two framed pictures – not photographs of my mother, Cosmo or me but etchings of Plato and Descartes, angled not so that my father can contemplate them from behind his desk but so that casual visitors to the study cannot fail to notice them. Two Chesterfield armchairs on either side of the fireplace, on opposing ends of an oriental rug next to a hearth rug, two wicker chairs with embroidered cushions by the desk, a mahogany coffee table and a Turkish carpet beneath them complete my father’s study. He entertains his men friends here, fellow dons and postgraduate students who gather for warm beer in brown bottles, cigarettes, cigars, pipes and philosophical debate that grows more raucous with the lateness of the hour. My mother never enters it and he rarely enters her room (unless to poke his head around the door and summon her or me), which he had presented to her empty as his wedding gift. He refers to it condescendingly as her ‘parlour’ and gives the impression, whenever he says the word, of making a gift of it to her all over again. She has furnished it comfortably, with fewer books than my father’s study but with greater warmth, with several family photographs, with drapes over a settee and armchairs, with framed, colourful prints, including one each by Hokusai and Hiroshige, two by Picasso and two of Wagner’s Walküre, with old advent calendars that she liked too much to discard, with coloured glassware bought from charity shops or in car boot sales and with bowls of chocolates, confectionaries and other Süßigkeiten that both she and I know are all the sweeter for being looked upon with disapproval by my father.

  Having no communal room, my parents don’t entertain together. The family meets in the kitchen around a large pine table for breakfasts that are relatively leisurely given our short commuting times to school, office and college, and for dinners that are consumed hastily on those evenings in which my father anticipates visitors. The kitchen is always warm thanks to a cast-iron range cooker that is kept permanently on at low temperature and a deep, springy sofa with cushions and throws to get lost in. The kitchen is where Kuchen and Torte are baked and consumed daily, where I and then Cosmo took our first steps, from the soft sofa to our mother’s softer, cushioned welcoming bosom.

  My father dabs the corners of his mouth with his napkin, pats his hair and, with no small degree of self-righteousness, declines my mother’s offer of cake with his tea. Pushing the pine kitchen chair back, he pleads the pressure of work, the requirement for intellectual exactness, the need for untrammelled reflection, the demands of the philosophic activity that neither respects convention nor recognises the hour of the day, and makes for his study. I sense that my mother, too, is not unhappy when my father is out of the kitchen, when she can wash the dishes, bathe me and read to me before putting me to bed and writing to her parents, whom she misses.

  *

  Out of nowhere, at around the time my father considers it no longer inappropriate for me to enter his study when he is entertaining, on the pretext of bringing crisps or another glass or more beer, he begins to show great solicitude about my mother’s enforced solitude when he has visitors. I become proud of my promotion to male adult company and am pleased with my father’s sudden interest in showing me off, while he grows seemingly considerate of my mother and anxious to redress the neglect and loneliness he has exposed her to. He buys her evening concert tickets and signs her up for evening and weekend driving lessons, art classes, pottery courses and lectures and museum and city tours that consume her holidays. He presents them to her as birthday and Christmas gifts or spontaneous ones that express his love for her, so she can’t refuse them. After a while she begs him to allow her some evenings at home: she works full days and is too exhausted to be ruled by an evening as well as a diurnal clock. She wants to end each day at her leisure and put me to bed later than is ordinary in England, as is the European way; she suspects that, once my father’s gatherings are underway, my needs will be overlooked and she worries that if I wake with nightmares, my crying will not be heard above the animated discussion that takes place behind the closed study door. Finally, albeit timidly and apologetically, my mother puts her foot down and refuses to attend any more evening courses and concerts on her own; but this goes against the grain of her compliant personality and leaves her unhappier than before. Some months later, my father discovers what he refers to as ‘a hole in the family finances’ that it occurs to him my mother must fill by giving evening German lessons. My mother resigns herself to this; it makes her feel useful to be making a sacrifice and an important contribution to the good of the family. Besides, she is pregnant with Cosmo, another mouth to feed. By then, I am spending as many evenings with my father as I am with my mother – always with one or the other, never with both.

  *

  The earliest distinction I can remember making is between my father’s lap and my mother’s. Hers: soft, luxurious and padded, as she bounces me up and down and recites a nursery rhyme to a climax. ‘Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter.Wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.Fällt er in den Graben, fressen ihn die Raben.Fällt er in den Sumpf, macht der Reiter, ‘Plumps’!’ His: bony, uncomfortable and unwelcoming as he jiggles me from knee to knee and exhorts me to ‘move up’ to find a position tolerable for both of us; his breath, heavy with eggs, beer and cigarettes, coming faster as he tires of me. When he’s not fussing over and petting me, an eye over his shoulder and a hand around my waist, he gives me books to read and then ignores me to the point of neglect. When my mother is absent, we spend our moments together between dinner and bedtime in silence, I in my wingback chair across the fireplace from his, the leather cool against my exposed legs that, too short to bend at the knee, stick straight out to either side like a doll’s. When I look up, he looks down. I struggle with the books he gives me and come to understand that he has purloined them from his sisters. The Twins at St Clare’s, Malory Towers and the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are all ‘girls’ books’, so they must do, and my mother tuts at my father’s inability to gauge the age of such books’ readers – all the while pleased that she has a reason to resume her teaching role, if only with me her only pupil. When she’s not immediately by my side assisting me with new words and long sentences and expressing an overt pleasure in the discovery of new stories and sharing my excitement about the heroines’ adventures, I like to call out to her.

  ‘Mama!’ I cry or, less frequently, when certain my father is out of earshot, ‘Mutti!’ He looks upon my use of ‘Mutti’ disapprovingly and will have neither my mother nor me refer to him as ‘Vati’ under any circumstances. My mother and he have settled on ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ so long as, in his case, ‘Papa’ is said with the short, punctuated call of a bugle on the first syllable and the stress on the second and not, as my father considers it, the American way, with the stress on the first. ‘Ma-ma!’ I repeat.

  ‘Yes, Liebchen, what is it?’

  It is nothing. I delight in the mastery of my mothe
r. One syllable, repeated once, and I have her full attention. It is only a little power, but it is mine and I relish it. ‘It is nothing, Mama, nothing,’ I say and resume reading and she talking.

  Mama busies herself about the kitchen and prattles on of things seemingly inconsequential that, nonetheless, lodge with me at an indiscernible level, her words washing over and buoying me like a warm tide. When Mama talks to me, I learn something about inner worlds, about myself, if only that I am loveable and desirable, and about her, about the good in her and the values I must adopt if I want to be like her. Her chatter is redolent of maternal love; Papa’s stinks of ulterior motive. A conversation with him is like a slow wade in an icy sea on a cloudless night, the subtext of his words submerged so deep that I am afraid to find it, sharp and jagged under my bare chilled feet. When he talks to me, it is to teach me about the outside world: table manners, formal means of address, famous philosophers, careers and butterflies; the longest conversations Papa has with me are about butterflies. I follow him on occasion to the greenhouse, which he refers to as his ‘pavilion’, that has been appended to the shed at the bottom of our garden. The whole forms one long, low apex-roofed bungalow that is the width of the garden, one third wood-panelled, with one solid beam spanning the central space, and two thirds single-pane glass and that, in spring and summer, is filled with hundreds of caterpillars, chrysalises and butterflies or, as I explain to my friends in a loud voice so that I can be sure my father hears me, larvae, pupae and Lepidoptera. Papa, who frets inordinately when Mama or I use inappropriate terminology, is strangely tolerant of my friends’ errors of nomenclature. He stands behind me and runs his fingers through my hair, from my crown to the back of my neck, his fingers evenly spaced, his finger nails dragging against my scalp; and always, when he ceases combing, bunches my hair into a ponytail upon which he gives a little downward tug and so lifts my chin a touch, saying, ‘I like your fair hair.’ This time, he adds, ‘We haven’t seen Eleanor and Deborah in a while. You should invite them more often.’

  Mie

  My chin cupped in my hands and my elbows on my bedroom window sill, I could look down on dozens of telephone cables and wires that streamed to and from the junction point on the telephone pole just outside my parents’ butcher’s shop. From my north-facing vantage point in Sangenjaya I would follow them meeting and multiplying, converging and diverging all the way to the horizon.

  Pushing myself up on my hands, tilting my head and crossing my eyes, I could manage the trick of moving one of the now two poles and one of the now two junction boxes closer to me, so close that I could imagine them emanating from my chest. I thus became wired to a web, hooked up to countless possibilities, plural lives and a multiplication of options. All I would have to do one day was to choose which telephone wires to follow and to decide where to have them take me.

  How do swallows decide which telephone wires to sit on? They flock at sunset and darken the sky prematurely before settling on a small number, so that some wires have hundreds of swallows on them and others none. On one occasion, I saw a wire with just one bird on it and I thought, That’s me.

  Plane trails are visible in cloudless skies; unthinkingly, I would seek their parallels in the telephone cables and wires and always find one, one black cord among dozens, that was exactly parallel with the white jet stream above it.

  The telephone wires hummed with conversations and spoken lives. I listened at my open window in the hope of overhearing confessions and shared secrets; occasionally, cheek in palm, I came to with a start after having drifted into reverie, thinking I had heard something only to realise that indeed I had but it was only the chatter, the voices from the pavement immediately below. Leaning out over the wide sill, I could look down on the heads of the passers-by and of my parents’ customers. From directly above, they were distinguishable from one another only by virtue of a hat or umbrella. Stationary as they waited to cross the road, they seemed like bacteria in a Petri dish. In motion, they resembled amoebae under the microscope. My heart swelled with a sense of superiority; I could not conceive of any resemblance I may have had to them.

  When I raised my eyes, I would see, across the road from me, a baker’s shop. My mother turned her nose up at what she told me was reproduction Louis XVI furniture in the café section by the shop window and, after she had explained to me who Louis XVI was, she and my father would giggle about the sign over the shop front: Fresh Cakes. Since 1872. My friend Michi had the first-floor bedroom above the shop. Her father was the baker and her mother, as my mother would say ironically, the pâtissière. Michi would occasionally serve customers or take her turn behind the till. My parents suspected her of being the shop’s greatest source of leakage: she was as round as the pastries she packed into paper bags. On most days, Michi and I would wave to each other from our open bedroom windows. Next to Michi lived my other friend, Keiko, above her parents’ electrical supplies shop. She was tall for our age, and thin.

  Over a dinner of whatever meat my father had failed to sell that day, he would tease, once we had finished reviewing the day and I had recounted everything my friends had said and done, and say something like, ‘So, what do you think they say about you? That you’re as tender as Kobe beef? Or that you’re as red as a sirloin steak? Or that you’re a silly old moo?’ Then he would laugh heartily out of one side of his mouth – the other still chewing a wad of, more often than not, shabu shabu – before slowly wagging my cheek between thumb and forefinger. His hands smelled of disinfectant and were red and rough, but he was never anything other than gentle with me.

  My mother would smile and, anxious to assure me that my father was only jesting, would squeeze my arm with, ‘She’s as sweet as a lamb!’ or, ‘She has the heart of an ox!’

  She needn’t have worried.

  *

  One particularly hot summer, my parents took me to a swimming pool complex, having packed the picnic hamper we typically only used once a year for hanami, when we’d picnic under blooming cherry trees in the spring and remark on the intoxicating smell of the blossom, so sweet after the metallic odour of cold meat and bleach. We carried rice balls, pickles, fried chicken, and cucumber and egg sandwiches, green tea and fruit juices and our towels, swimming costumes, tanning lotion and, for my mother and me, inflatable rings and arm bands.

  We queued for the train and we queued for access to the swimming pool grounds. Tickets in hand, we stood in line for the changing rooms and then joined the mêlée for the swimming pool.

  The crowd had a mind of its own; we couldn’t fight it, we could only follow where it led, a succession of rubber rings and perspiring backs and shuffles of flip-flops under a sun unchallenged by any cloud. From a vantage point, we saw teeming people surrounding other people corralled in a rectangular space that, my father guessed, contained the principal swimming pool. We were three among thousands of identically dressed – or undressed – hot, thirsty, sticky bodies. By two in the afternoon I was crying with hunger and thirst and with shame at having wet myself, as, I guessed, others had too, perhaps counting, like me, on their urine mixing with the sweat and suntan lotion that ran down backs and stomachs into swimming trunks and down legs to form puddles around our feet. The smell was overpowering, especially to children, whose nostrils are that much closer to the ground and to crotch height; my eyes were level with sweaty navels and hairy backs, the sweat-saturated tops of swimming trunks and clutched inflatables and picnic lunches. I held my parents’ slippery hands tightly, terrified that in this nightmare throng they might mistake another child’s hand for mine.

  My parents’ hope of finding a patch of grass by a swimming pool had long evaporated but it wouldn’t do to turn back, not that one could. Slowly, the wide eddy we were in got caught up with the one comprising people leaving the main pool so that, without our realising it initially, we found ourselves drifting back to the changing rooms. Suddenly, we found ourselves traversing a paddling pool with no space for a toddler to sit in and I saw my relief r
eflected in other people’s smiles as, yes, we could indeed later tell our friends we had gone swimming and found a pool. The warm water lapped our ankles; lost flip-flops and discarded tissues and plastic bottles nuzzled and bumped our toes and heels.