by André Aciman
“I think one should always do what one wants,” I said, begrudging having been put in the father’s camp.
“So speaks the man who knows exactly what he wants, right?” was the ironic broadside coming from the daughter, who hadn’t forgotten our conversation on the train.
“How would you know whether I know or don’t know what I want?” I shot back.
She didn’t answer. She just looked at me and didn’t lower her eyes. She wasn’t playing my little cat-and-mouse game. “Because I’m the same way,” she finally said. She’d seen right through me. And she knew that I knew it. What she may not have guessed was that I loved our playful sparring and her unwillingness to let anything slip by if it came from me. It made me feel unusually important, as if we’d known each other forever and our familiarity in no way diminished our mutual regard. I needed to caress her, to put my arms around her.
“Today’s youth is too bright for the likes of us,” intervened the father.
“Neither of you knows the first thing about today’s youth” came the girl’s quick reply. Had I once again been inducted into her father’s nursing-home universe sooner than my age allowed?
“Well, then here is one more glass of wine for you, Pa. Because I love you. And more for you as well, Mr. S.”
“They don’t serve wine where I’m headed, my love, white or red, or even rosé, and frankly I want to down as much of it before they wheel away the gurney. Then I’ll sneak a bottle or two under the sheets so that when I finally get to meet His Lordship, I’ll say, ‘Here, see what goodies I brought you from confounded planet Earth.’”
She did not reply but returned to the kitchen to bring lunch to the dining room. But then she changed her mind and said it was warm enough for the three of us to eat on the veranda. We each took our glasses and our silverware and proceeded to the terrace. Meanwhile, she split open the branzini she had broiled in a cast-iron frying pan, removed their bones, and on a different plate came the spinach and old puntarelle, over which, once we were seated, she sprinkled oil and freshly grated parmesan.
“So tell us what you do,” said the father, turning to me.
I told them that I had just finished working on my book and would soon head back to Liguria, where I lived. I gave them a very hasty outline of my career as a professor of classics and of my current project on the tragic fall of Constantinople in 1453. I told them about my life a bit, about my ex-wife who lives in Milan now, about my son who has a rising career as a pianist, and then told them how much I miss waking up to the sea when I’m away.
The fall of Constantinople interested her father.
“Did the residents know their city was doomed?” asked the father.
“They knew.”
“So why didn’t more of them flee before it was sacked?”
“Ask the Jews of Germany!”
There was a moment of silence.
“You mean ask my parents and grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles whom I’ll soon encounter at the pearly gates?”
I was unable to tell whether Miranda’s father was administering a cold shower after what I’d just said, or whether this was just another not-so-veiled reference to his declining health. Either way, I wasn’t scoring points.
“Knowing that the end is near is one thing,” I added, trying to navigate a tactful course over the shoals, “but believing it is quite another. Tossing one’s entire life overboard to start from scratch in a foreign land may be a heroic act but it is totally reckless. Not many are capable of it. Where do you turn when you feel trapped and caught in a vise, when there is no exit and the house is on fire, and your window is on the fifth floor, so that plunging isn’t really an option? There is no other bank. Some people choose to take their own lives. Most, however, prefer to wear blinkers and live off hope. The streets of Constantinople overflowed with the blood of the hopeful once the Turks entered the city and sacked it clean. But I’m interested in the citizens of Constantinople who feared the end and fled, many to Venice.”
“Would you have left Berlin if you were living there in, say, 1936?” Miranda asked.
“I don’t know. But someone would have had to push me or threaten to leave me behind if I wasn’t ready to flee. I am reminded of a violinist who hid in his apartment in the Marais in Paris knowing that the police would come knocking at his door one night. And knock one night they did. He even managed to convince them to let him take his violin with him, and they did. But it was the first thing they took away from him. They killed him, but not in a gas chamber. Instead, in the camps, they beat him to death.”
“So your reading this evening will be about Constantinople?” she asked, almost with an incredulous inflection in her voice that made her sound disappointed. It was not clear whether she meant to trivialize my work by asking the sort of question I’d just asked about hers or whether she was filled with admiration, meaning How wonderful that this should be your life’s work! Which was why I ended up answering with a meek and evasive “That’s what I do. But there are days when I am able to see my vocation for what it is: desk work, just desk work. I’m not always proud of this.”
“So your life is not spent traipsing through the Aeolian Islands, then settling somewhere like Panarea, swimming at dawn, writing all day, eating from the sea, drinking Sicilian wine at night with someone half your age.”
Where was this coming from? And was she making fun of what every man my age dreams of?
Miranda put down her fork and lit a cigarette. I watched her shake the match with a decisive hand motion before dropping it into an ashtray. How strong and invulnerable she suddenly seemed. She was showing her other side, the one that sizes people up and makes hasty indictments, then shuts them off and never lets them back in except when she weakens, only to hold it against them that she did. Men were like matches: they caught fire and were shaken off and dropped in the first ashtray that came her way. I watched her take in her first puff. Yes, willful and unbending. Smoking with her face turned away from us made her look so distant and heartless. The type who always gets her way. Not exactly the good girl who doesn’t like to see people hurt.
I liked watching her smoke. She was beautiful and unreachable, and once again I held myself back from putting my arm around her and letting my lips touch her cheek, her neck, the back of her ear. Could she tell that wanting to hold her both stirred and dismayed me, because I knew there was no room for me in her world? She had invited me for her father’s sake.
What made her smoke, though?
Watching her hold her cigarette, I couldn’t stop from saying: “As a French poet once said, some people smoke to put nicotine in their veins, others to put a cloud between them and others.” But then thinking she’d interpret it as a caustic remark, I quickly turned the tables on myself. “We all have ways of putting up screens to keep life at bay. I use paper.”
“Do you think I keep life at bay?” Hers was a frank and hasty query, not a muffled quip asking for trouble.
“I don’t know. Perhaps going about one’s daily life with all its paltry joys and sorrows is the surest way of keeping true life at bay.”
“So there may be no such thing as real life. Only clumsy, ordinary, day-to-day stuff—is this what you think?”
I did not answer.
“I just hope there is more than the day-to-day stuff. But I never found it, maybe because finding it scares me.”
I did not reply to this either.
“I never speak to people about this.”
“I don’t either,” I replied.
“I wonder why neither of us does.”
This was the girl on the train speaking. Unbending and determined yet totally adrift.
We smiled feebly at each other. Then, sensing that the conversation was taking a strange and awkward turn: “He likes desk work too,” she threw in and motioned to her father.
Her father picked up his cue right away.
Great teamwork.
“I do like desk work. I was a go
od professor. Then about eight years ago, I retired. I help writers and young scholars. They give me their dissertations, and I edit them. It’s lonely work but it’s lovely and peaceful work. And I always learn so much. I spend long hours this way, sometimes from dawn to midnight. Then late at night I watch television to air out my thoughts a bit.”
“His problem is that he forgets to charge them.”
“Yes, but they love me and I’ve grown to love each one, we’re always exchanging e-mails. And frankly, I’m not doing it for the money.”
“Clearly!” retorted the daughter.
“What are you working on now?” I asked.
“It’s a very abstract dissertation about time. It starts with the story, or a parable as he likes to call it, of a young American World War II pilot. He was married to his high school sweetheart in the small town where they grew up. They spent about two weeks together in her parents’ home before he shipped off. A year and a day later his plane was shot down over Germany. His young wife received a letter telling her that he was presumed dead. There was no evidence of a crash nor had his remains been found. Not long afterward, his bride enrolled in a college where she eventually met a war veteran who looked like her husband. They were married and had five daughters. She died about a decade ago. A few years after her death, the site of the crash was located and her first husband’s dog tag and remains were finally recovered and confirmed through a DNA match with a very distant cousin who had never even heard of the pilot or his wife. Still, the cousin agreed to be tested. The sad part is that by the time the fragments of his body were shipped back to his hometown for proper burial, his wife, both her parents, and the pilot’s own parents and all their siblings had died. He had no one left, no family to remember, much less to mourn him. His wife herself had never mentioned him to her daughters. It was as though he had never existed. Except that one day the pilot’s wife had taken down an old box of scattered mementos that contained, among other things, the wallet the pilot had left behind. When her daughters asked whose it was, she went to the living room and took down a framed photograph of their father to reveal an old photo tucked right behind it. It was the face of her first husband. They had never known that their mother was married before. She herself never brought him up again.
“To me it proves that life and time are not in sync. It’s as if time was all wrong and the wife’s life was lived on the wrong bank of the river or, worse yet, on two banks, with neither being the right one. None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Because there is death. Because death, contrary to what everyone tells you, is not part of life. Death is God’s great blunder, and sunset and dawn are how he blushes for shame and asks our forgiveness each and every day. I know a thing or two on the subject.”
He grew silent. “I love this dissertation,” he finally said.
“You’ve been talking about it for months, Pa. Any idea when he’ll be done with it?”
“Well, I think the young man is having a hard time pulling it together, partly because he does not know how to conclude it. Which is why he keeps coming up with more examples. This one is about a married couple who fell into a crevasse in an alpine glacier in Switzerland in 1942 and froze to death. Their bodies were recovered seventy-five years later, along with their shoes, a book, a pocket watch, a backpack, and a bottle. They had seven children, all but two are still alive today. The tragic disappearance of both parents cast a dark, disturbing cloud over their children’s lives. Every year, on the anniversary of their parents’ disappearance, they would climb the glacier and offer a prayer in their memory. Their youngest daughter was four years old at the time of the disappearance. DNA testing confirmed her parents’ identities and provided some type of closure.”
“I hate that word: closure,” said Miranda.
“Maybe because you leave doors open everywhere,” snapped the father. He gave her a sidelong, ironic glance meant to say, You know exactly what I’m referring to.
She did not respond.
An uncomfortable silence sat between them.
I pretended to ignore it.
“Another tale in the dissertation,” continued her father, “touches on an Italian soldier who after being married for twelve days is sent away to the Russian front where he disappears and is listed as missing. In Russia, however, he doesn’t die and is rescued by a woman who bears him a child. Many years later, he’ll return to Italy to feel as rudderless in a homeland he can’t begin to recognize as he does in his adopted Russia, to which he eventually returns for want of a better home. You see, two lives, two lanes, two time zones, with neither being the right one.
“Then there’s the tale of a forty-year-old man who one day finally resolves to visit the tombstone of his father who died during the war shortly before his son’s birth. What strikes the son as he stands speechless before the dates on the tombstone is that his father died scarcely aged twenty—half the son’s current age—and that therefore the son is old enough to be his father’s father. Oddly, he can’t decide whether he is saddened because his father never got to see him, or because he himself never got to know his father, or because he is standing before the tombstone of someone who feels more like a dead son than a dead father.”
Neither of us attempted to lend a moral to this tale.
Said the father, “I find these tales very moving, but I still can’t tell why, except that I pick up a suggestion that, despite appearances, living and time are not aligned and have entirely different itineraries. And Miranda is right. Closure, if it exists at all, is either for the afterlife or for those who stay behind. Ultimately, it is the living who’ll close the ledger of my life, not I. We pass along our shadow selves and entrust what we’ve learned, lived, and known to afterpeople. What else can we give those we’ve loved after we die than pictures of who we were when we were children and had yet to become the fathers they grew up to know. I want those who outlive me to extend my life, not just to remember it.”
Catching the two of us silent, her father suddenly exclaimed, “Just bring the cake. Right now I want to put a cake between me and what awaits me. Maybe He’ll appreciate a cake also, don’t you think?”
“I bought a smaller cake because I knew you’d finish a larger one by the time I left on Sunday.”
“As you can see she wants me to stay alive. What for, I have no idea.”
“If not for yourself, then for me, old goon. Besides, don’t pretend: I’ve seen you look at women when we’re out walking the dog.”
“It’s true, I still turn around when I see a beautiful pair of legs. But to tell you the truth, I forget why.”
We all laughed.
“I’m sure those visiting nurses will help you remember.”
“I may not want to remember what I’m missing.”
“I hear there’s medication to remind you.”
I watched the mock squabbling between father and daughter. She left the table and went into the kitchen to bring more silverware.
“Do you think my health can afford a tiny cup of coffee?” he asked loudly enough for her to hear. “Maybe one for our guest as well?”
“Two hands, Pa, two hands,” she pretended to grumble, and moments later brought out the cake and three small dishes, which she left stacked on a stool before going back to the kitchen. We heard her tinker with the coffee maker then bang the re
sidual grinds from this morning’s coffee into the sink.
“Not in the sink,” he growled.
“Too late,” she responded.
The two of us stared at each other and smiled. I couldn’t help myself: “She loves you, doesn’t she?”
“She does, yes. But she shouldn’t. I’m lucky that way. Still, I think it’s not good at her age.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I think it’s going to be difficult for her. Plus it doesn’t take a genius to see I’m standing in the way.”
There was nothing to say to this.
We heard her placing the dirty dishes into the sink.
“What were the two of you whispering about?” she said when she stepped back onto the terrace with the coffee.
“Nothing,” said the father.
“Don’t lie.”
“We were talking about you,” I said.
“I knew it. He wants grandchildren, right?” she asked.
“I want you to be happy. At least happier—and with someone you love,” threw in the father. “And yes, I want grandchildren. It’s just the damned clock. Another one of those instances where life and time don’t jibe. And don’t tell me you don’t understand.”
She smiled, meaning she did.
“I’m knocking at death’s door, you know.”
“Did they answer yet?” she asked.
“Not yet. But I heard the old butler shout a drawn-out ‘Com-ing!’ and when I knocked again, he groaned, ‘I said I was coming, didn’t I?’ Before they unbolt the door to let me in, could you at least find someone you love.”
“I keep telling him there is nobody, but he doesn’t believe me,” she said, turning to me, as though I were mediating their discussion.
“How could there be nobody?” he replied, turning to me as well. “There is always someone. Every time I call there is someone.”
“And yet it is always no one. My father doesn’t understand,” she said, sensing I was more likely going to side with her. “What these men have to offer I already have. And everything they want they don’t deserve, or I may not have in me to give. That’s the sad part.”