Winter Journal

by Paul Auster

  Christmas dinner in Northfield, Minnesota, every year from 1981 until your father-in-law’s death in 2004, after which the family house was sold, your mother-in-law moved to an apartment, and the tradition was altered to fit the new circumstances. But for close to a quarter century the meal was formalized down to the last detail, not one element different from the year before, and the table you first sat down to in 1981, which consisted of just seven people—your mother-in-law and father-in-law, your wife, her three sisters, and yourself—gradually expanded as one year melted into another and your wife’s younger sisters married and began having children of their own, so by the end of that quarter-century run, nineteen people were sitting around the table, including the very old and the old, the young and the very young. It is important to note that Christmas was celebrated on the night of the twenty-fourth, not on the morning and afternoon of the twenty-fifth, for even though your wife’s family lived in the American heartland, they were and are a Scandinavian family as well, a Norwegian family, and all Christmas protocols followed the conventions from that part of the world rather than this one. Your mother-in-law, born in the southernmost town of Norway in 1923, did not move across the Atlantic until she was thirty, and although her English is fluent, she continues to speak this second tongue with a pronounced Norwegian accent. She lived through the war and the German occupation as a young woman, was put in prison for nine days after participating in an early protest march against the Nazis when she was seventeen (if it had happened later in the war, she says, she would have been sent to a camp), and both of her older brothers were active members of the underground (one of them, after his cell was broken, skied to Sweden in order to escape the Gestapo). Your mother-in-law is an intelligent, well-read person, someone you greatly admire and feel much affection for, but her occasional struggles with the English language and American geography have produced some strange moments, none more hilarious, perhaps, than the night fifteen or sixteen years ago when the plane she and her husband were taking to Boston could not land because the airport was fogged in and consequently had to be rerouted to Albany, New York, and once they made it to Albany she called your wife and announced over the telephone: “We’re in Albania! We’re spending the night in Albania!” As for your father-in-law, he too was thoroughly Norwegian, even though he was a third-generation American, born in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in 1922, the last of the nineteenth-century prairie children, a farm boy raised in a log house without electricity or indoor plumbing, and the rural community where he lived was so isolated, so unanimously populated by Norwegian immigrants and their descendents, that much of his early life was transacted in Norwegian rather than in English, so that he retained an accent throughout his adulthood and old age: not a heavy accent like your mother-in-law’s but a soft musical brogue, an American English spoken in a way you have never heard from anyone else and which you always found highly pleasing to the ear. After the long interruption of the war, he finished college on the G.I. Bill, continued his studies through graduate school and a Fulbright year at the University of Oslo (where he and your mother-in-law met), and wound up as a professor of Norwegian language and literature. Your wife grew up in a Norwegian household, then, even if it happened to be located in Minnesota, and Christmas dinner was therefore strictly and resolutely Norwegian as well. In effect, it was a duplication of the Christmas dinners your mother-in-law ate with her own family as a child in southern Norway back in the 1920s and ’30s, a time far removed from our current age of opulence and plenty, of supermarkets stocked with two hundred kinds of breakfast cereal and eighty-four flavors of ice cream. The meal never varied, and in twenty-three years not one dish was ever added to the menu or subtracted from it. Not turkey or goose or ham, as one might suppose for the main course, but pork ribs, covered lightly in salt and pepper, baked in the oven, and served without sauce or condiments. Accompanied by boiled potatoes, cauliflower, red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, carrots, lingonberries, and rice pudding for desert. No meal could be simpler than this one, more defiantly at odds with contemporary American notions about what constitutes acceptable holiday fare, and yet when you polled the youngest of your nieces and nephews a couple of years ago (the tradition still carries on in New York), asking them if they liked Christmas dinner as it was or if they would prefer to see some changes, they all cried out: “No changes!” This is food as ritual, as continuity, as family cohesion—a symbolic anchor to prevent you from drifting out to sea. Such is the tribe you have married into. When she was around fifteen, your witty daughter came up with a new term to describe her background: Jew-wegian. You doubt there are many people who can lay claim to that particular brand of hyphenated identity, but this is America, after all, and yes, you and your wife are the parents of a Jew-wegian.

  The foods you loved as boy, from the time of your earliest memories to the threshold of puberty, and you wonder now how many thousands of forkfuls and spoonfuls went into you, how many bites and swallows, how many small sips and grand gulps, beginning with the myriad fruit juices you drank at various times during the day, orange juice in the morning, but also apple juice and grapefruit juice and tomato juice and pineapple juice, pineapple juice in a glass but also pineapple juice frozen in ice cube trays during the summer, which you and your sister referred to as “pineapple chunks,” along with the soft drinks you downed whenever you were permitted to (Coca-Cola, root beer, ginger ale, 7 Up, Orange Crush), and the milkshakes you adored, especially chocolate, but sometimes vanilla for a change of pace, or a combination of the two known as a black-and-white, and then, in the summer, the delirium of the root beer float, traditionally made with vanilla ice cream, but for you even more delicious if the flavor of the ice cream was coffee. On any given morning, you would begin with a first course of cold cereal (Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Shredded Wheat, Puffed Wheat, Puffed Rice, Cheerios—whatever happened to be in the kitchen cupboard), which you would pour into a bowl, douse with milk, and then coat with a tablespoon (or two tablespoons) of white refined sugar. Followed by a serving of eggs (scrambled mostly, but occasionally fried or soft-boiled) and two pieces of buttered toast (white, whole wheat, or rye), often accompanied by bacon, ham, or sausage, or else a platter of French toast (with maple syrup), or, rarely, but always most coveted, a stack of pancakes (also with maple syrup). Several hours later, lunch meats piled between two slices of bread, ham or salami, corned beef or bologna, sometimes ham and American cheese together, sometimes American cheese alone, or else one of your mother’s dependable tuna fish sandwiches. On cold days, cold winter days like this one, the sandwich was often preceded by a bowl of soup, which always came out of cans in the early fifties, your favorites being Campbell’s chicken noodle and Campbell’s tomato, which no doubt was the case with every other American child back then as well. Hamburgers and hot dogs, french fries and potato chips: once-a-week delicacies in the local malt shop known as the Cricklewood, where you and your school friends would eat lunch together every Thursday. (Your grammar school did not have a cafeteria. Everyone would go home for lunch, but starting when you were nine or ten, your mother and the mothers of your friends allowed you this treat: hamburgers and/or hot dogs at the Cricklewood every Thursday, which cost all of twenty-five or thirty cents.) The evening meal, interchangeably referred to as dinner or supper, was best if the main dish was lamb chops, but roast beef ran a close second, followed, in no particular order, by fried chicken, roast chicken, beef stew, pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, sautéed liver, and fried fish fillets smothered in ketchup. Potatoes were a constant, and however they were served (primarily baked or mashed), they never failed to offer profound satisfaction. Corn on the cob surpassed all other vegetables, but that delight was confined to the last months of summer, and therefore you happily wolfed down the peas or peas and carrots or green beans or beets you found on your plate. Popcorn, pistachio nuts, peanuts, marshmallows, piles of saltines smeared with grape jelly, and the frozen foods that began appearing late in your childhood, in particula
r chicken pot pie and Sara Lee’s pound cake. You have all but lost your taste for sweets at this point in your life, but when you look back on the distant days of your boyhood, you are staggered by how many sugary things you longed for and devoured. Ice cream most of all, for which you seemed to have an insatiable appetite, whether served up plain in a bowl or covered in chocolate sauce, whether presented in the form of a sundae or a float, ice cream on a stick (as in Good Humor bars and Creamsicles) as well as ice cream lurking inside spheres (Bon Bons), rectangles (Eskimo Pies), and domes (Baked Alaska). Ice cream was the tobacco of your youth, the addiction that slinked its way into your soul and endlessly seduced you with its charms, but you were also a pushover for cake (chocolate layer! angel food!) and every variety of cookie, from Vanilla Fingers to Burry’s Double Dip Chocolate, from Fig Newtons to Mallomars, from Oreos to Social Tea Biscuits, not to mention the hundreds if not thousands of candy bars you consumed before the age of twelve: Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, Chunkys, Charleston Chews, York Mints, Junior Mints, Mars bars, Snickers bars, Baby Ruths, Milk Duds, Chuckles, Goobers, Dots, Jujubes, Sugar Daddys, and God knows what else. How is it possible that you managed to stay thin during the years when you were ingesting all this sugar, that your body somehow continued to grow upward rather than outward as you veered toward adolescence? Thankfully, all that is behind you now, but every now and then, perhaps once every two or three years, while you are killing time in an airport before a long-distance flight (for some reason, this happens only in airports), if you should wander into the magazine shop to look for a newspaper, an ancient longing will suddenly take hold of you, and then you will cast your eyes down at the sweets on display below the cash register, and if they happen to have Chuckles in stock, you will buy them. Within ten minutes, all five of the jellied candies will be gone. Red, yellow, green, orange, and black.

  Joubert: The end of life is bitter. Less than a year after writing those words, at the age of sixty-one, which must have seemed considerably older in 1815 than it does today, he jotted down a different and far more challenging formulation about the end of life: One must die lovable (if one can). You are moved by this sentence, especially by the words in parentheses, which demonstrate a rare sensitivity of spirit, you feel, a hard-won understanding of how difficult it is to be lovable, especially for someone who is old, who is sinking into decrepitude and must be cared for by others. If one can. There is probably no greater human achievement than to be lovable at the end, whether that end is bitter or not. Fouling the deathbed with piss and shit and drool. We are all going there, you tell yourself, and the question is to what degree a person can remain human while hanging on in a state of helplessness and degradation. You cannot predict what will happen when the day comes for you to crawl into bed for the last time, but if you are not taken suddenly, as both of your parents were, you want to be lovable. If you can.

  You mustn’t neglect to mention that you nearly choked to death on a fish bone in 1971 or that you narrowly escaped killing yourself in a dark hallway one night in 2006 when you smashed your forehead into a low door frame, stumbled backward, and then, trying to regain your balance, pitched forward, snagged your foot on the sill, and went flying face-first onto the floor of the apartment you had entered, the top of your head landing within inches of a thick table leg. Every day, in every country around the world, people die from falls like that one. Your friend’s uncle, for example, the same man you wrote about nineteen years ago (The Red Notebook, Story No. 3), who survived gunshot wounds and multiple dangers as a partisan resistance fighter against the Nazis in World War II, a young man who managed to escape certain death and/or mutilation with dumbfounding regularity, and then, having moved to Chicago after the war, living in the tranquility of peacetime America, far from the battlefields and flying bullets and exploding land mines of his youth, awoke one night to go to the bathroom, tripped over a piece of furniture in the darkened living room, and died when his head smashed into a thick table leg. An absurd death, a nonsensical death, a death that could have been yours five years ago if your head had landed just a few inches to the left, and when you think about the ridiculous ways in which people can meet their end—tumbling down flights of stairs, slipping off ladders, accidentally drowning, being run over by cars, shot by stray bullets, electrocuted by radios that fall into bathtubs—you can only conclude that every life is marked by a number of close calls, that everyone who manages to reach the age you have come to now has already wriggled out of a number of potentially absurd, nonsensical deaths. All in the course of what you would call ordinary life. Needless to say, millions of others have confronted far worse, have not had the luxury of leading an ordinary life, soldiers in combat, for example, civilian casualties in wars, the murdered victims of totalitarian governments, and the countless many who have perished in natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, typhoons, epidemics. But even those who manage to survive catastrophe are no less prey to the whims of daily existence than those of us who have been spared such horrors—as with your friend’s uncle, who eluded death in battle and died one night in a Chicago apartment on his way to the bathroom. In 1971, the fish bone lodged itself at the base of your throat. You were eating what you thought was a fillet of halibut, and for that reason you were not worried about encountering any bones, but suddenly you could no longer swallow without pain, something was in there, and none of the traditional remedies did the least bit of good: drinking water, eating bread, trying to pull the bone out with your fingers. The bone had traveled too far down your throat, and it was long enough and thick enough to have pierced the skin on both sides, and each time you made another attempt to cough it up, your saliva was mixed with blood. It was April or May, you had been living in Paris for two or two and a half months, and when it became clear that you would not be able to get rid of the bone yourself, you and your girlfriend left your apartment on the rue Jacques Mawas and walked to the nearest medical facility in the neighborhood, l’Hôpital Boucicaut. It was eight or nine o’clock in the evening, and the nurses had no idea what to do with you. They squirted a liquid numbing agent down your throat, they chatted with you, they laughed, but the stuck bone was inaccessible and therefore could not be extracted. Finally, at around eleven o’clock, the nighttime emergency doctor came on duty, a young man by the name of Meyer, yet one more Israelite in this neighborhood once inhabited by the blind piano tuner, and lo and behold, this young doctor, who couldn’t have been more than four or five years older than you were, turned out to be an ear, nose, and throat specialist. After you spat up some blood for him during the preliminary examination, he told you to follow him through the courtyard to his private office in another one of the hospital’s pavilions. You sat down in a chair, he sat down in a chair, and then he opened a large leather case filled with thirty or forty sets of tweezers, an impressive array of shining silver instruments, tweezers of every possible size and configuration, some with straight ends, some with curved ends, some with hooked ends, some with twisting ends, some with looping ends, some short and some long, some so intricate and bizarre-looking that you could not imagine how such things could travel down a person’s throat. He told you to open your mouth, and one by one he gently guided various sets of tweezers into and down your gullet—so far down that you gagged and spat up more blood each time he pulled another one out. Patience, he said to you, patience, we’re going to get it, and then, on the fifteenth try, using one of the largest pairs of tweezers, the grandfather pair with a grotesquely exaggerated scimitar of a hook at the end, he finally got a purchase on the bone, clamped down on it, wiggled it back and forth to free the points that were embedded in your flesh, and slowly lifted it up through the tunnel of your throat and out into the open air. He looked both pleased and astonished. Pleased by his success, but astonished by the size of the bone, which was a good three or four inches long. You were astonished as well. How could you have swallowed such a massive object? you asked yourself. It reminded you of an Eskimo sewing needle, a whalebone corset
stay, a poison dart. “You’re lucky,” Dr. Meyer said, still looking at the bone as he held it up in front of your face. “This one easily could have killed you.”