A Good Death (16 page)

A pretty child with many sisters and brothers, all of whom look as wise and well brought up as she. Unlike the usual photo albums delineating the history of respectable families, this one contains no pictures of her sitting at a piano, or reciting poetry on a stage beside a cardboard tree. But there she is holding a rosary, kneeling before the statue of a Christ who seems to be bleeding profusely, or standing with a group of nuns. As she approaches adolescence there seem to be more and more Masses and religious ceremonies, she dressed in black and minus the daisies in her hair, her smile now little more than a thin line and the sparkle of her gaze hidden behind the veil of her eyelids, impenetrable barriers between herself and the camera that might otherwise have revealed her inner thoughts. Of course she makes no comment. She has gone into the kitchen to reheat the tourtière and mash the potatoes, to keep herself busy while the thread of her life unravels on the teak table. I’m the one trying to give some meaning to the photos, while Sam expresses disbelief about the ridiculous clothing people wore on whatever planet his grandmother grew up on. Sam, has no one ever told you at that school of yours that there was a time before digital cameras when photographs came in black and white and, before that, in sepia, and that in those days clothing wasn’t something designed to exhibit the belly buttons of ten-year-old girls? How old is she in this one? Sixteen, seventeen? Now even the thin line of her smile has disappeared, the left hand rests in the right just above the hip, and the eyes are looking at nothing, reduced as they are to dull pupils and irises. My grandfather, whom I never knew, is standing behind her with his large hands on her shoulders. He is staring intently at the camera, defying it to try stealing any part of himself, smiling paternally behind his Stalinesque moustache. Is it a smile or a rictus? Is that why some men, especially dictators, grow thick moustaches, so that they can do for the lips what eyelids do for the eyes? And here is my mother’s favourite brother, on the arm of a young woman who appears to have some class, as they say, and her older sister smiling at someone who seems to be a nice guy, a bit of a paunch, a tad dapper, with that handsome innocence that comes with baby fat. The more people there are around her, all smiling broadly, their dresses becoming lighter and lighter, some of the men wearing neither jackets nor ties, the more serious she herself looks. Yes, Sam, I am making this up, interpreting the photographs, trying to read past the outward signs, to see through the old clichés. Why don’t you just ask her? She wouldn’t answer. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I could never put these questions to her. A son who asks his mother about her love life is trying to undress her. Besides, the answers are right here in front of us, in these photos. Here’s a wedding picture. It was a big wedding. Look at this series taken from behind by someone with an automatic camera standing in the central aisle of the church. All those backs, and the priest standing in the middle speaking to a white back and a black back. Those are her curls, under that white pillbox hat with the flower stuck in it, fourth row on the right. And to her left a man whose back I don’t know. He towers head and shoulders above her. Here’s the same man looking at her, Mother hiding a smile with one hand while holding her hat on with the other. We can see how windy it is, because the man is trying to keep his Brylcreemed hair from flying about. He’s not smiling. He has a thin moustache that makes a black smudge under his aquiline nose. He seems out of place. That’s my father taking his first steps into the middle class. He looks cool, Sam exclaims, at least for those times. I hear my mother setting the table in the kitchen. How’s it going in there, children? We murmur fine, which she probably can’t hear. It’s always summer, always the same garden. The blacks and whites become better separated, show more detail. Kodak must have put a new generation of film on the market. The men in their stiff collars have not aged at all since the photo in which my mother was seven. They had already done their aging by then, and have remained obstinately the same age, as though they had been born as statues. They talk implacably, heedless of the changes taking place around them. My mother sitting on a see-saw, waiting for my father to send her up with a single, virile push. But he stands sti±y behind her, like a prisoner in his checked suit, as though trying to seem as old as the others and wondering if any display of enjoyment would upset the family he has just become a part of. Him, a product of diabetes, obesity, poverty and vulgarity.

Another wedding picture, this one also a classic. My father and mother’s official wedding portrait, the couple having just been united by God for better or for worse until they are dead, as they say of someone about to be hanged. A hundred people lined up on the steps in front of the church, like rows of onions. I put my finger on certain faces, for Sam. The great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, the uncles and aunts. The bourgeoisie and their offspring, united for a festive celebration that will not take place again. Of all these grey faces, my mother’s beams the most. My father wears a small smile, unless that’s just the effect of his moustache or the negative is blurred. And here’s me. I recognize this one, me in my mother’s arms. She’s still smiling. With each photo there are more of us, we surround her, multiple images of her with the same smile on her face, although it never seems forced. By the time colour film arrives there are five of us, a baby every eighteen months on average. After the sixth there is a photo that seems incongruous: a large yellowish fish on the kitchen table beside a trophy that has the figure of a fisherman making a shallow cast.

“Sam, that’s my walleye.”

Naturally he doesn’t understand.

The children behave like children and my mother looks radiant. In the shots in which there are nine of us, the Director has solved the problem of symmetry by placing the smallest in the front row, on their knees, my mother in the middle of the second row with two children on either side of her and the ninth, me, the eldest, standing behind her. Symmetry comes naturally to Dictators, since it both represents and perpetuates their view of the world. Long before his madness allowed him to imagine himself as führer, Hitler painted careful, meticulous watercolours, perfectly framed; he later ordered Speer, his favourite architect, to build fortifications scrupulously inspired by Greek symmetry; what he liked best about Leni Riefenstahl’s films was her geometric depiction of ceremony. When Stalin watched his people, which is to say his army, march before him, what did he see? Long rectangles, compact squares, composed of thousands upon thousands of identical figures with even the tips of their noses sighted along an imaginary line. It might be thought that my father’s subsequent passion for the home-movie camera would introduce an element of disorder, and therefore of realism, into the family photograph, which had hitherto existed as proof of our exemplary behaviour. Not so. Though armed with a tool capable of recording movement, my father persisted in filming still photographs. And when sound came on the scene he developed a sudden aversion for movie making altogether. Of course he could have simply ordered us to be silent and immobile and we would have obeyed, but there were birds, children shouting in the streets, ambulance sirens, chaos, real life, all destroying the symmetry of the image.

“Lunch is served.”

What are we meant to see in this photographic biography of my mother? What does she want us to discover there? Is she trying to show us that she’s happy? Why not just say it, Mother: I’m happy? I suppose mothers of her generation don’t say such things. They work through detours and allusions, they aren’t given to direct statements. When she wanted to know if I needed money, she would say something about my clothes. Was I wearing these faded old jeans because I liked them? And before I could answer she’d observe that the kind of people I hung out with seemed to just wear any old thing. But couldn’t I use a new pair? Unless I swallowed the hook whole and confessed that I could use a small loan, my last play hadn’t done that well and that very morning at 6:00 am the landlord had phoned to demand his pound of flesh. And as if by magic an envelope full of money would appear before me.

MY MOTHER IS
smiling the smile of the photos. And nibbling. Sam is wolfing. As for me, I’m waiting for some anodyne phrase to indicate the gentle road down which the conversation will unfold. At the moment she’s talking about chess, wondering if one can make a living at it, raise a family on the money a workforce of pawns could bring in. Sam hasn’t clued in that what she’s saying is that she wants him to study hard and go to university. He’s all excited, talking about the fabulous sums Fischer and Kasparov are raking in. But what if you’re not Bobby Fischer? Sam frowns slightly.

“Are you happy, Grandma? And is Grandpa?”

He has tossed in a grenade, like a terrorist who has given careful thought to the matter. His tone is even, no trace of emotion.

“Would you like some dessert?”

“No.”

“What about you?”

“Me neither.”

Mother is still smiling, but her eyes have become veiled and her eyelids flutter nervously.

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“Grandma, were you always as happy as you are in those photos?”

Grandmothers never lie to their grandchildren unless to protect them from life. And grandchildren believe less and less of what their grandmothers tell them. Life is handed to them in spades in their first school textbooks, which are about all the things their parents display and lug about in their permanent reality show. Parents don’t shield their children from their own unhappiness anymore. In my mother’s day, unhappiness was hidden, or rather never named. Unhappiness had no name, any more than happiness did. Happiness was duty, which was also unhappiness.

Mother looks down and sighs, the knife she’s holding in her left hand making tiny clink, clink, clinks on the edge of her plate. Her right hand reaches over and rests on the left, to stop its trembling. The knife is quiet. No, she has not always been as happy as that, but what’s more important, she says, is that she has no regrets. She is proud of her life. She rests her little bird’s head on her fragile shoulders and is Edith Piaf singing
Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien.

“So you wish to kill my husband because you think he’s not happy. Perhaps you should ask him what he thinks about that. We don’t kill the people we love without asking their permission, even if we think we’re doing them a favour.”

Do you know the expression “You could hear a fly flying”? I can hear the fly. And it isn’t even flying, it’s walking. The silence is so heavy I can hear it chomping on the cheese we’re not eating. Everything depends on how it’s stated. So, you want to kill my husband. It makes us sound like assassins, or worse, like disrespectful children because we haven’t consulted with the victim. She’s right. We must ask him how he feels about all this. We’re talking about death here, no small thing. I try to imagine it. Dad, do you want to die? He chokes, nearly dies choking, and bursts out with a roar, No, turning beet red. Well, then, Dad, do you want to go on living like this for a long time? He doesn’t understand what “like this” means. Without being able to read? No. Without being able to eat what you like? No.

Without being able to speak? No. Without being able to live? He would probably say Yes. Bloody hell, Dad, do you know what you’re saying? You want to live without living? Yes, he says, as pigheaded as ever. He laughs. I’m bringing him into the discussion, but we’re not talking to each other. Why do you want to live? He laughs. Because. That’s exactly what he would say, I’m sure of it: Because. Which is the answer children give.

I’VE JUST HIT
my sister. Her bottom lip is bleeding slightly. I’m ten, she’s six. My father takes my arm and shakes me like a dishrag. Why did you hit her? I don’t like her. Why not? Because. He hits me, of course, and a lot harder than I hit my sister. But I clench my teeth and do not cry. Why? Because. Because I don’t want to say I don’t know, I don’t want to show my ignorance and confusion. Because.

BECAUSE I EXIST
and must go on existing, as Stalin and my father would answer. I’ll never ask my father if he wants to die. I listen to the fly walking across the sugar bowl. I take a deep breath, as William’s mother says, William who would rather be called Sam and who is thinking as he chews his fingernails.

“We were joking, Mother. Not joking exactly, but we were just talking off the tops of our heads. I’d had a lot to drink… and we were just wondering if Dad was getting any pleasure out of living, and whether—”

“Whether I wouldn’t be happier without him, as you would be, perhaps?”

“No, Grandma. We weren’t joking and we don’t want to kill Grandpa, we just want him to die. There’s a difference. We were saying that we had to help him. Not, like, push him down the stairs or anything, not kill him, Grandma, just, fuck, I don’t know how to put it, just… just help him leave.”

Words are a prison. If you want freedom, no responsibilities, don’t talk. I know that if it weren’t for Sam’s intervention I’d have found a way out of this, my mother and I would have entered a kind of shadow world where we could have gone on for a long time without evoking the dark thoughts that dwell within each of us. That’s how she and I have been living for a while now, in a sort of unspoken acceptance that we thought would slowly relax into forgetfulness. Now there is nothing holding us together, Sam, my mother and me. Sam loves his grandfather, and leading him joyously to his tomb is a kind of kiss on the forehead. Mother is long past the age of love. She accepts a destiny that dictates a duty, a destiny she has chosen and a duty that her faith demands. I do not love my father. I feel nothing for him but pity. Except that pity is not a feeling, it’s the complacency of the weak. I don’t want revenge, I’m past that. I only want him to disappear, for my mother’s sake, for the family’s sake, so that we can change the subject of all our conversations, so we can have Christmas dinner without rancour, so we no longer have to listen to him refuse to have an operation to prevent him from going blind. I envision a civilized death for him as a result of a superabundance of pleasure, from an embolism caused by cholesterol, or a tumble after drinking a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet. But I know it’s not for his sake I want him to end his days happily; it’s only out of laziness. I want to kill him without killing him. Above all, afraid of death as I am, I would like to give him the death I want for myself. Gentle, quick, painless. As for my mother, we can only imagine—no, invent how happy she would be without my father. There are two possible scenarios. In one, she’s exhausted, fed up with not being allowed to leave the house, terrified every time he falls because she cannot lift him on her own, wonders what he’ll be like when he’s blind, wonders even more what she’ll be like. That’s one way to interpret her words. But there’s another reading. That of the friend who has come to be both nurse and mother, the one who describes, sometimes wearily, the state of the patient. If she spares us no detail, it’s not because she’s complaining, she’s merely acting out of her sense of professionalism or duty. Maybe she’s telling us that this is her destiny, that she would prefer a gentler one, perhaps, but she accepts the hand she’s been dealt, and maybe playing it out has become her reason for living. Is that what she is telling us?