by Paul Auster
Thinking about the films again, I realize that I have another example to add to Katya’s list. I must remember to tell her first thing tomorrow morning—in the dining room over breakfast—since it’s bound to please her, and if I can manage to coax a smile out of that glum face of hers, I’ll consider it a worthy accomplishment.
The watch at the end of Tokyo Story. We saw the film a few days ago, the second time for both of us, but my first viewing goes decades back, the late sixties or early seventies, and other than remembering that I’d liked it, most of the story had vanished from my mind. Ozu, 1953, eight years after the Japanese defeat. A slow, stately film that tells the simplest of stories, but executed with such elegance and depth of feeling that I had tears in my eyes at the end. Some films are as good as books, as good as the best books (yes, Katya, I’ll grant you that), and this is one of them, no question about it, a work as subtle and moving as a Tolstoy novella.
An aging couple travels to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children: a struggling doctor with a wife and children of his own, a married hairdresser who runs a beauty salon, and a daughter-in-law who was married to another son killed in the war, a young widow who lives alone and works in an office. From the beginning, it’s clear that the son and daughter consider the presence of their old parents something of a burden, an inconvenience. They’re busy with their jobs, with their families, and they don’t have time to take proper care of them. Only the daughter-in-law goes out of her way to show them any kindness. Eventually, the parents leave Tokyo and return to the place where they live (never mentioned, I believe, or else I blinked and missed it), and some weeks after that, without warning, without any premonitory illness, the mother dies. The action of the film then shifts to the family house in that unnamed city or town. The grown-up children from Tokyo come for the funeral, along with the daughter-in-law, Norika or Noriko, I can’t remember, but let’s say Noriko and stick with that. Then a second son shows up from somewhere else, and finally there’s the youngest child of the group, who still lives at home, a woman in her early twenties who works as an elementary school teacher. One quickly understands that not only does she adore and admire Noriko, she prefers her to her own siblings. After the funeral, the family is sitting around a table eating lunch, and once again the son and daughter from Tokyo are busy, busy, busy, too wrapped up in their own preoccupations to offer their father much support. They begin looking at their watches and decide to return to Tokyo on the night express. The second brother decides to leave as well. There is nothing overtly cruel about their behavior—this should be emphasized; it’s in fact the essential point Ozu is making. They’re merely distracted, caught up in the business of their own lives, and other responsibilities are pulling them away. But the gentle Noriko stays on, not wanting to abandon her grieving father-inlaw (a walled-off, stone-faced grief, to be sure, but grief for all that), and on the last morning of her extended visit, she and the schoolteacher daughter have breakfast together.
The girl is still irritated by the hasty departure of her brothers and sister. She says they should have stayed longer and calls them selfish, but Noriko defends what they did (even if she would never do it herself), explaining that all children drift away from their parents in the end, that they have their own lives to look after. The girl insists that she’ll never be like that. What’s the point of a family if you act that way? she says. Noriko reiterates her previous comment, trying to comfort the girl by telling her that these things happen to children, that they can’t be helped. A long pause follows, and then the girl looks at her sister-in-law and says: Life is disappointing, isn’t it? Noriko looks back at the girl, and with a distant expression on her face, she answers: Yes, it is.
The teacher goes off to work, and Noriko begins straightening up the house (reminding me of the women in the other films Katya talked about tonight), and then comes the scene with the watch, the moment the entire film has been building up to. The old man walks into the house from the garden, and Noriko tells him she’s leaving on the afternoon train. They sit down and talk, and if I can more or less remember the gist and flow of their conversation, it’s because I asked Katya to play the scene again after the movie was finished. I was that impressed by it, and I wanted to study the dialogue more closely to see how Ozu managed to pull it off.
The old man begins by thanking her for everything she’s done, but Noriko shakes her head and says she hasn’t done anything. The old man presses on, telling her that she’s been a great help and that his wife had talked to him about how kind she’d been to her. Again, Noriko resists the compliment, shrugging off her actions as unimportant, negligible. Not to be deterred, the old man says that his wife told him that being with Noriko was the happiest time she had in Tokyo. She was so worried about your future, he continues. You can’t go on like this. You have to get married again. Forget about X (his son, her husband). He’s dead.
Noriko is too upset to respond, but the old man isn’t about to give up and let the conversation end. Referring to his wife again, he adds: She said you were the nicest woman she’d ever met. Noriko holds her ground, claiming that his wife overestimated her, but the old man bluntly tells her that she’s wrong. Noriko is beginning to grow unhinged. I’m not the nice woman you think I am, she says. Really, I’m quite selfish. And then she explains that she isn’t always thinking about the old man’s son, that days go by and he doesn’t even cross her mind once. After a little pause, she confesses how lonely she is and how, when she can’t sleep at night, she lies in bed wondering what will become of her. My heart seems to be waiting for something, she says. I’m selfish.
OLD MAN: No, you’re not.
NORIKO: Yes. I am.
OLD MAN: You’re a good woman. An honest woman.
NORIKO: Not at all.
At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry, sobbing into her hands as the floodgates open—this young woman who has suffered in silence for so long, this good woman who refuses to believe she’s good, for only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can’t forgive themselves.
The old man stands up, and a few seconds later he returns with the watch, an old-fashioned timepiece with a metal cover protecting the face. It belonged to his wife, he tells Noriko, and he wants her to have it. Accept it for her sake, he says. I’m sure she’d be glad.
Moved by the gesture, Noriko thanks him as the tears continue to roll down her cheeks. The old man studies her with a thoughtful look on his face, but those thoughts are impenetrable to us, since all his emotions are hidden behind a mask of somber neutrality. Watching Noriko cry, he then makes a simple declaration, delivering his words in such a forthright, unsentimental manner that they cause her to collapse in a fresh outburst of sobbing—prolonged, wrenching sobs, a cry of misery so deep and painful, it’s as if the innermost core of her self has been cracked open.
I want you to be happy, the old man says.
One brief sentence, and Noriko falls apart, crushed by the weight of her own life. I want you to be happy. As she goes on crying, the father-in-law makes one more comment before the scene ends. It’s strange, he says, almost in disbelief. We have children of our own, and yet you’re the one who’s done the most for us.
Cut to the school. We hear children singing, and a moment later we are in the daughter’s classroom. The sound of a train is heard in the distance. The young woman looks at her watch and then walks to the window. A train roars by: the afternoon express, carrying her beloved sister-in-law back to Tokyo.
Cut to the train itself—and the thunderous noise of the wheels as they charge along the tracks. We are hurtling forward into the future.
A few moments after that, we are inside one of the carriages. Noriko is sitting alone, staring blankly into space, her mind elsewhere. Several more moments pass, and then she lifts her mother-in-law’s watch off her lap. She opens the c
over, and suddenly we can hear the second hand ticking around the dial. Noriko goes on examining the watch, the expression on her face at once sad and contemplative, and as we look at her with the watch in the palm of her hand, we feel that we are looking at time itself, time speeding ahead as the train speeds ahead, pushing us forward into life and then more life, but also time as the past, the dead mother-in-law’s past, Noriko’s past, the past that lives on in the present, the past we carry with us into the future.
The shriek of a train whistle resounds in our ears, a cruel and piercing noise. Life is disappointing, isn’t it?
I want you to be happy.
And then the scene abruptly ends.
Widows. Women living alone. An image of the sobbing Noriko in my head. Impossible not to think of my sister now—and the luckless hand she was dealt by marrying a man who died young. It’s been brewing in me ever since I started thinking about my civil war: the fact that in my own life I’ve been spared from all things military. An accident of birth, the fluke of entering the world in 1935, which made me too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, and then the further good fortune to have been rejected by the army when I was drafted in 1957. They said I had a heart murmur, which turned out not to be true, and classified me as 4-F. No wars, then, but the time I came closest to something that resembled one, I happened to be with Betty and her second husband, Gilbert Ross. It was 1967, exactly forty years ago this summer, and the three of us were having dinner together on the Upper East Side, Lexington Avenue I think it was, Sixty-sixth or Sixty-seventh Street, in a long-gone Chinese restaurant called Sun Luck. Sonia had gone off to France to visit her parents outside Lyon with the seven-year-old Miriam. I was supposed to join them later, but for the time being I was holed up in our shoe box of an apartment off Riverside Drive, sweating out a long piece for Harper’s on recent American poetry and fiction inspired by the Vietnam war—with no air conditioner, just a cheap plastic fan, scribbling and typing in my underwear as my pores gushed through another New York heat wave. Money was tight for us back then, but Betty was seven years older than I was and living comfortably, as they say, and therefore she was in a position to invite her kid brother out for a free dinner every now and then. After a bad first marriage that had lasted too long, she had married Gil about three years earlier. A wise choice, I felt—or at least it looked that way at the time. Gil earned his money as a labor lawyer and strike mediator, but he had also joined the Newark city government as corporation counsel in the early sixties, and when he and my sister came to New York that night forty years ago, he was driving a city car, which was equipped with a two-way radio. I can’t remember a thing about the dinner itself, but when we walked back to the car and Gil started up the engine to drive me home, frantic voices came pouring through the radio—police calls, I presume, reporting that the Central Ward of Newark was in chaos. Without bothering to go uptown to drop me at my apartment, Gil headed straight for the Lincoln Tunnel, and that was how I came to witness one of the worst race riots in American history. More than twenty people killed, more than seven hundred people injured, more than fifteen hundred people arrested, more than ten million dollars in property damage. I remember these numbers because when Katya was in high school a few years ago, she wrote a paper on racism for her American history class, and she interviewed me about the riot. Odd that those figures should have stuck, but with so many other things slipping away from me now, I cling to them as proof that I’m not quite finished.
Driving into Newark that night was like entering one of the lower circles of hell. Buildings in flames, hordes of men running wildly through the streets, the noise of shattering glass as one store window after another was broken, the noise of sirens, the noise of gunshots. Gil drove to City Hall, and once the three of us were inside the building, we went directly to the mayor’s office. Sitting at his desk was Hugh Addonizio, a bald, bulging, pear-shaped man in his mid-fifties, ex–war hero, six-time congressman, in his second term as mayor, and the big man was utterly lost, sitting at his desk with tears pouring down his face. What am I going to do? he said, looking up at Gil. What the hell am I going to do?
An indelible picture, undimmed after all these years: the sight of that pathetic figure paralyzed by the pressure of events, a man gone rigid with despair as the city exploded around him. Meanwhile, Gil calmly went about his business, calling the governor in Trenton, calling the chief of police, doing his best to get a grip on the situation. At one point, he and I left the room and went downstairs to the jail on the bottom floor of the building. The cells were crammed with prisoners, every one of them a black man, and at least half of them stood there with their clothes torn, blood trickling from their heads, their faces swollen. It wasn’t difficult to guess what had caused these wounds, but Gil asked the question anyway. Man by man, the answer never varied: each one had been beaten by the cops.
Not long after we returned to the mayor’s office, in walked a member of the New Jersey State Police, a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission. He shook hands with Addonizio, sat down in a chair, and then pronounced these words: We’re going to hunt down every black bastard in this city. I probably shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was. Not by the statement, perhaps, but by the chilling contempt of the voice that uttered it. Gil told him not to use that kind of language, but the colonel merely sighed and shook his head, dismissing my brother-in-law’s remark as if he considered him to be an ignorant fool.
That was my war. Not a real war, perhaps, but once you witness violence on that scale, it isn’t difficult to imagine something worse, and once your mind is capable of doing that, you understand that the worst possibilities of the imagination are the country you live in. Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
That fall, when Gil was put in the untenable position of having to defend the city of Newark against scores of lawsuits from shopkeepers whose businesses had been destroyed in the riot, he quit his post and never worked in government again. Fifteen years later, two months short of his fifty-third birthday, he was dead.
I want to think about Betty, but in order to do that I have to think about Gil, and to think about Gil I have to go back to the beginning. And yet, how much do I know? Not a lot, finally, no more than a few pertinent facts, gleaned from stories he and Betty told me. The first of three children born to a Newark saloonkeeper who supposedly could have passed as Babe Ruth’s double. At some point, Dutch Schultz muscled in on Gil’s father and stole the business, how or why I can’t say, and a few years after that his father dropped dead of a heart attack. Gil was eleven at the time, and since his father died broke, the only thing he inherited from him was chronic high blood pressure and heart disease—which was first diagnosed at age eighteen and then blossomed into a full-blown coronary when he was just thirty-four, followed by another one two years later. Gil was a tall, powerful man, but he spent his whole life with a death sentence circulating in his veins.
His mother remarried when he was thirteen, and while his stepfather had no objections to raising the two younger kids, he wanted no part of Gil and kicked him out of the house—with the mother’s consent. Talk about the unimaginable: to be exiled by your own mother and sent off to live with relatives in Florida for the rest of your childhood.
After high school, he came back north and started college at NYU, strapped for money, forced to work several part-time jobs to keep himself afloat. Once, when he was reminiscing about how hard up he was in those days, he described how he used to go to Ratner’s, the old Jewish dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side, sit down at a table, and tell the waiter that he was expecting his girlfriend to show up at any minute. One of the chief lures of the place was the celebrated Ratner’s dinner roll. The moment you took your seat, a waiter would come over and plunk down a basket of those rolls in front of you, accompanied by an ample supply of butter. Roll by buttered roll, Gil would
eat his way through the basket, glancing at his watch from time to time, pretending to be upset by the lateness of his nonexistent girlfriend. Once the first basket was empty, it would automatically be replaced by a second, and then the second by a third. Finally, the girlfriend would fail to appear, and Gil would leave the restaurant with a disappointed look on his face. After a while, the waiters caught on to the trick, but not before Gil achieved a personal record of twenty-seven free rolls consumed at a single sitting.
Law school, followed by the start of a successful practice and a growing involvement with the Democratic Party. Idealistic, left-wing liberalism, a supporter of Stevenson for the 1960 presidential nomination, Eleanor Roosevelt’s escort at the convention in Atlantic City, and later a photograph (which I’ve owned since Betty’s death) of Gil shaking hands with John F. Kennedy during a visit to Newark in 1962 or 1963 as Kennedy said to him: We’ve been hearing great things about you. But all that turned sour after the Newark disaster, and once Gil left politics, he and Betty packed it in and moved to California. I didn’t see much of them after that, but for the next six or seven years I gathered all was calm. Gil built up his law practice, my sister opened a store in Laguna Beach (kitchenware, table linens, top-quality grinders and gadgets), and even though Gil had to swallow more than twenty pills a day to keep himself alive, whenever they came east for family visits, he looked to be in good shape. Then his health turned. By the mid-seventies, a series of cardiac arrests and other debilitations made work all but impossible for him. I sent them whatever I could whenever I could, and with Betty working full-time to keep them going, Gil now spent most of his days alone in the house, reading books. My big sister and her dying husband, three thousand miles away from me. During those last years, Betty told me, Gil would plant love notes in the drawers of her bureau, hiding them among her bras and slips and panties, and every morning when she woke up and got dressed, she would find another billet-doux declaring that she was the most gorgeous woman in the world. Not bad, finally. Considering what they were up against, not bad at all.