Brother in Ice

by Alicia Kopf

  It doesn’t strike me as terrifically prudent, but that’s how G’s plans are, and I want to see snow and mountains. Snow is always snow, and it’s a way to maintain a link to Arcticantarctic, that place I’m trying to circumscribe with text and whose center I hope to someday conquer. On the way there, we are stuffed into a little car that smells of dog, along with the dog who’s whimpering the whole time. The friend, who is also named R—I’ll hear his name throughout the entire trip, as if he weren’t only with me in my thoughts but also present in the words spoken around me—says that he works hand-polishing metals for prestigious jewelry makers. Now that everything is done by machine or in China, it hadn’t occurred to me that such a job existed and was done in artisans’ workshops in our country. The idea of polishing jewels is interesting, I think.

  “What do you do with the remaining scrap material?”

  “We have to give it back. Polishing is a type of erosion. They keep strict control over the weight of the precious materials, milligram by milligram.”

  I wonder if after all these years of study, work, and more or less failed relationships, I’ve been polishing myself or eroding myself. Is what’s left a gem, or a rock?

  I’m at my lowest weight. I’m back in a state of economic instability and I’m single. Right now, having a family seems remote. I may be wasting on a psychoanalyst the decent salary I’ve had recently, which has allowed me to finally rent an apartment in my own name and have four nice dresses. The psychoanalyst supplants the big question, the solution, to use his vocabulary, metonymically. I’ve reached the phase where I’ve structured my identity around “lack,” but how can I change that? That question finds a perpetual answer in continuing therapy, in digging deeper. The only thing that gives me strength is writing: constructing meaning. Is it possible I get myself into all these problems just so I can later write about them? Did I believe in a dubious relationship to see where it would lead me, as a narrative? Perhaps my writing was calling me back, and I unconsciously detonated everything when I reached my limit? Writing is the poison and the antidote. Or as Lispector says, writing is a curse, but a curse that saves us.

  At midnight we arrive at Bellver de Cerdanya and spend the first night at G’s family’s flat. The next day we have a bumpy ten kilometers to the Perafita Refuge, 2,500 meters above sea level. There we find ourselves at the finish line of a fifty-kilometer race through the mountains. We watch as the exhausted athletes arrive after ten hours on their feet. Our plan is a stroll. In mid-June, the day is overcast and showery, and amid the rocky masses and fir trees you can see the melting snow in its full spectrum of states: calm, stagnant, violent, transparent, clouded. Streams, waterfalls, small marshes camouflaged in the fluorescent green grass. A mountaineer tells us that we can drink the water but never when it’s stagnant. I take note of his words, in many senses. Fuchsia flowers among the grass. We hear the bubbling of a nearby cascade. I wanted to cry anyway. I am a zombie Werther, wandering amid the firs after having fallen in love and shooting himself four times.

  After an hour of ascent, we finally find the ultimate vestiges of the last snowfall of the season on the peak. That’s where the descent begins, now amid rocks and sand again. On the way down one of my knees starts to hurt. We only remember our dependence on the body when it’s not working. Luckily it’s nothing serious and we get past the most irregular stretches. At a certain height firs, grass and brooks reappear on every side. Wet feet. It starts to drizzle and it’s cold.

  We occasionally pass some of the participants in the race, headed in the opposite direction. They have been walking for about eight hours. They stop for a moment to chat with us and we offer them dried fruit. There is a special solidarity in the mountains. Because we are all more aware of our fragility. Some of those passing in the opposite direction look like professional athletes. I exchange a glance with one of them who looks about my age; he has a black, quick gaze, beneath wavy damp brown hair stuck to his forehead. After a little while I turn and I see that he’s turned too. Later we come across some other participants between fifty and sixty years old. Soon we can make out the roof of the refuge at the base of the valley, among the fir trees. It is one of the race’s control points. There is a small group of people and a thin stream of smoke emerges from the small chimney. Before we reach the shelter we go through a terrain where the grass hides swampy patches. That rules out even the slightest possibility of keeping our feet dry. Lake, brooks, melted snow. Drizzle. Our dog leaps blissfully, takes the lead and lopes back to us, happy to be nowhere near asphalt.

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  ‌Mountain Refuge

  We reach the refuge at four in the afternoon. We have five hours of daylight ahead of us, with absolutely nothing to do, unless we want to take a hike in the rain. The small hut is a cement square with metal bunk beds, an iron table in the middle, and a timid fireplace that struggles to stay lit with all the damp. The mystery of why the floor is soaking wet, despite the fire, is resolved with the discovery of a slow leak, with water snaking down right through the chimney. We will spend the night there, since we can’t go any further. As we stretch out on the metal beds, it becomes clear that there is no position that doesn’t lead to shoulder or hip pain, even with the mats.

  There are fewer and fewer walkers from the race, until the sweeper car comes by and closes the control point. A foreign hiker couple arrives. As usual, G asks them a lot of questions, and they respond as best they can in basic, but well-intentioned English. They are Czech and are crossing the Pyrenees. They started at Cap de Creus and have been walking for a few weeks. He has a beard and long hair, she wears a handkerchief on her head. When she takes it off we realize they look alike: both of them have long blond hair, are of medium height, very thin and with very white skin. They must be in their thirties. They joke about how long it’s been since their last showers. They work three months out of the year harvesting fruit in Italy and spend the rest of their time traveling. They have worn clothes and old backpacks. They barely have any food, and are happy to accept what we offer them. When we give them a handful of extra energy bars, she says:

  “It’s like Christmas.”

  And she smiles sincerely.

  Shortly after we’ve tucked ourselves in we start to hear a stream of water falling directly from the center of the shelter’s ceiling and splashing against the iron table. The fire went out some time ago and with it the hope that our sneakers will dry by the next day. The small refuge where it rains on the inside makes me think of the cover of my first book, where drops of water form a small house. I started it when I finished school, when the recession of 2008 was beginning. It talked about getting “no” as an answer when you want to enter the adult world of work and love. The project was well-received because of its fresh treatment of the subject of young people scraping out a living during the recession. “Fresh” enough to reach a wide audience despite the fact that I wrote it in a state of desperation. Controlled desperation, of course. Because in order to be able to express your feelings you have to be willing to destroy them by subjecting them to the laws of form. And when I think about it, that was how I survived that period; because I worked on those obsessions until they were no longer mine, until they were nothing more than pure form that creates meaning and that ultimately, if you are both skilled enough and honest enough, forges a connection with others. The world was slamming doors in my face and I thought: I will call it out and I will laugh. I won’t cry and I won’t complain. I will keep drawing and writing. After all, I have no mortgage and I more or less have a roof over my head. But there were people who weren’t able to do that. Some threw themselves onto the tracks. There were those who said my project was ironic. But there is nothing more dangerous than irony in a state of emergency. Irony implies accepting the negativity of the situation itself, it implies incorporating the “lack.” It’s sketching a half-smile and staying out in the downpour. That is why institutions can’t accept irony in its most negative form, cynicism; nothing can be bui
lt under its banner. There can be no cynicism in a hero, a leader, or a family. As soon as there is, everything rots. An advertising agency selling a bank’s apartments copied the slightly naïf tone of that book’s texts and drawings from me. Apartments many people were evicted from, the apartments many people cannot enter. That is real cynicism.

  I hear the water falling in the middle of the little refuge. The Czech couple sleeps huddled together on an iron bed. Their sleep is sweet.

  We wake up with the sun, the couple has already left to continue their journey through the Pyrenees. The valley awakens beneath a transparent sky. The dawn’s slanted light lengthens the shadows of the rocks with an angle I’ve never seen before.

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  ‌Pills

  I don’t know if I should wait for the wound to scar up or simply take a mental holiday. I think about anti-depressants. It would be good to be happier.

  But, excluding serious pathologies, I have the feeling that a lot of people take pills to tolerate situations that are often largely not their responsibility, or at least not theirs alone but rather collective, social. Like being trapped in an alienating job with no way out … or on the dole with no way out … or in a family with no way out … or in a present with no future … or a victim of betrayal … or being made redundant … Those pills that numb the pain might also be staving off the collapse of the system. They keep people from going out onto the street and asking for help and placing blame, keep them from fighting, the pills avoid conflict, but maybe also avoid solutions. Because as soon as we ask others to smile, be happy, close that chapter, take pills, frigging keep calm and carry on, we are complicit in the situation. I won’t take them.

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  ‌Geyser

  I ask my mom if she can drive me to IKEA one day. She says that she’ll try to figure out a time. A week later she hasn’t said anything and I have no more days off before my trip. Finally I call her and she says that, yes, in the end she can come, but she doesn’t know what time and she doesn’t know how to get there, and she’s not sure about this or that. I say thanks, OK, I’ll figure out the route, but is it really necessary to keep me waiting so many days for something so simple. It’s been a year and a half since I moved to this apartment and no one in my family has yet asked me if I need anything. When she recently fixed up the country house, I spent a month painting walls. I gave her some furniture from the apartment I was leaving, I bought her curtains and some kitchen stuff for Christmas. I tell her I don’t understand that disparity, why she finds so many obstacles to helping me with something so simple. She says yes, she’s on her way and I shouldn’t complain. But the wait has set me off and I’m angry. I put off asking for help too long, and now I’m irritable. I ask her why I always have to beg for things that so many families offer easily. She repeats that she’s on her way, that I shouldn’t complain, that she had trouble arranging things at work to get away. I answer that it’s her own problem she prioritizes her work the way she always has, that it’s late July and most teachers aren’t anywhere near school. She gets mad and says that I shouldn’t criticize her work, that I don’t know what her obligations are, that she can’t just not show up, that she’s the director. I get tired of her not understanding the basis of my argument: it’s not about her coming now but that it hasn’t occurred to her that I might need help in the year and a half since I moved, and now she’s doing it with gritted teeth because I insisted. By this point I’m crying and I throw the telephone on the couch. She writes me a message:

  “I’m really sorry, sweetie! I told you on Monday I’m all yours. And maybe we haven’t done things the way we should have … In fact, today I’m very tired …”

  “I’m sorry I got mad but I feel like I have to beg for things that are easy in other families.”

  “No, babe, we love you very much in this family.” I’m intrigued by her use of the plural, the family is small and I’m not in touch with most of its members. I guess my brother loves me but I don’t have much empirical proof.

  “That doesn’t count if it’s just words.”

  “No, sweetie, we can’t compare ourselves to others, everyone has their own issues, and if you think about it when you’ve cooled off you’ll see we aren’t that bad. I’m so sorry you feel like this. I think maybe you are too alone.”

  “I’m not comparing, I’m just saying what I see.”

  “But you are just looking on the surface.”

  “Helping someone isn’t superficial at all. Loving from a distance and thinking that everybody else has to figure it all out on their own is the same as not loving them.”

  “Sweetie! That’s not true. You can come home whenever you want.”

  “I don’t want to come home because it’s not my home. My room is a dark hole, it’s the junk room. A room where you came in and out and changed the decoration whenever you felt like it. That’s why I left at seventeen.”

  “Honey, you know that isn’t true. I don’t know what you’re after with these false accusations that don’t get us anywhere. Oh, and I am who I am, and look, if I don’t have enough money to make you feel a little satisfied with life, I don’t know what to say. You should know that I’ve been working since I was eight, when I worked at home, to have what I have. I’m sorry but you’re going too far.”

  “I’m not talking about money. I’m not talking about how you are either. What I’m saying is that you haven’t offered me what you asked for in your house.”

  “Oh, and about M. He’s disabled, in case you’ve forgotten, and I’ve suffered with that for the last forty years and I don’t complain. And you were labeled highly gifted at the age of six.” Stupefaction. That’s new to me. “And you think that’s NOT enough in this life? Is that nothing? And parents who love you but aren’t perfect.” She must not remember that my father has barely spoken to me in the last ten years. “But you are perfect, right? Have you thought about that? Some of us have got through life with much less and look at us, we’re fine … because you have to look forward and be satisfied with what you have, otherwise it’s very hard to be a little happy. I only had my father and I haven’t spent my whole life complaining about that.”

  “So I see I have to pay for my brother and for your childhood. Thanks for everything you didn’t give me to compensate for everything I got without even knowing.”

  “Come on, you aren’t paying for anything, you’re just complaining. Don’t say such things. You have no idea what paying even is. And believe me, people have enough work with just staying afloat and they don’t think about all that stuff.”

  “Look, Mom, I don’t think I got most of the things other kids get: being picked up from school, not having to wander alone through the city at the age of eight to go to after-school activities. Having to go through my parents’ separation alone and without psychological support from my family or school, cooking since I was twelve for my nineteen-year-old brother, etc.”

  “And you are still talking nonsense. Have you stopped to look at people on the street, not the privileged, but the ones who struggle over things that you can’t even imagine?! Of course it’s easier to look in the mirror and compare yourself to people who are better off and start in with ‘oh, poor me!’ No, my dear, I realize you are going through a rough time, but believe me: you are wrong. Otherwise, I’ll have to think I raised a girl who is incapable of fighting and keeping her nose to the grindstone when things aren’t going well.”

  “I am fighting, but it’s you who doesn’t want to look in the mirror. Listen to what I’m telling you, instead of sweeping the crap under the rug. Then I’ll be better.”

  “Look, we all have bad days. If it makes you feel better to think that I’m a monster, and so is everyone around me, go right ahead. But believe me, when everyone is wrong except you, that’s a sign of a problem! That’s right! We’re all monsters and you’re an angel, sure!”

  “I didn’t say that, you prefer your misinterpretation over actually listening to me. All I’m saying is th
at you neglected me because of some supposed abilities of mine that somehow exempted you from responsibility. And I have to beg for normal things. Like you driving me to IKEA one day during the summer break.”

  I didn’t mean for it to go that far. I want to go to my studio.

  “No, that’s not it!! We figure that you are old enough and if you don’t ask for help it’s because you can do it on your own.” That plural is making me more and more uneasy, who is she referring to this time? Her boyfriend has an opinion about my possible needs? Why is it that our parents’ new partners always think we’re old enough to figure things out on our own? Haven’t I been doing that for years now? “Oh, and don’t start with this bull, I didn’t come to you talking about monsters and bad families. You are the one who comes up with these stories you know aren’t true. If you want to keep blaming everyone else for what’s happened to you, go right ahead … but it’s hard to be happy like that … You know that I’ll be there on Monday, that at the end of the day I’m your mother and I love you more than anyone. And if you need money, we’ll dig some up, don’t worry.”