Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (6 page)

When I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, I understood the world was rolling for me, asleep and awake. In its rolling, there was giving and there was taking. I was sure Anne-Marie would get back to me, philosopher or poet. Until then, I had a promise to keep.

The next day I read
Watership Down
, all 476 pages of it.

Chapter 6
The Only Balm to Sorrow

Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, every time. It was as if I were on my way back, on a return journey.

MIA COUTO,

Under the Frangipani

WHEN I RETURNED TO THE HOSPITAL AFTER GETTING THE CALL
that my sister had died, I found my father rocking back and forth on the couch in her hospital room, repeating over and over, “Three in one night.” I had no idea what those words meant, and when I asked Natasha about it later, she didn't know either. I wanted to ask my father, but at the same time I couldn't take any more sadness. Jack's sister Mary died in June after a long illness, and I felt as if I were underwater, drowning in tears. I couldn't go to Mary's funeral, terrified that I would submerge for good into grief and darkness. In July we scattered Anne-Marie's ashes in the ocean off Fire Island. In late September, we held her memorial service.

The service was held at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, in the grand rooms of its Millionaires' Row mansion on Fifth Avenue. Friends and family spoke; then Marvin ran a slide show of photos while a trio of cellist, pianist, and violinist played Beethoven. More friends spoke, and Marvin ended the service with his own memories from the life he shared with Anne-Marie.

Memories of Anne-Marie would be all we could have of her. We no longer had a future with her to look forward to. Sharing our recollections of time spent with Anne-Marie was part of keeping hold of her, although I didn't realize it at the time. I was there to celebrate her life that afternoon. I didn't understand the importance of ensuring her remembrance. I only realized three years later, when reading
The Book of Chameleons
by José Eduardo Agualusa, the significance of the sharing of memories. And the danger of not sharing memories at all.

In
The Book of Chameleons
, main character Felix Ventura's profession is to replace the memories of his clients with new memories. Most of his clients use their new memories to support an exalted identity. They are trying to get away from their pasts of poverty and inconsequence in order to move up in the world. Ventura has godlike gifts of re-creation. He molds around each client a new skin, unsheddable and opaque. But not all histories can be traded in and discarded. The past will rise up to be acknowledged: “The smell is still there, the sound of the child crying.”

A book of fiction,
The Book of Chameleons
is based on the very real atrocities committed in Angola's struggle for independence from Portugal. Agualusa imagines what would happen if victims and perpetrators sought to forget the horrors and uses his story to underscore the impossibility of such forgetting. By the end of the book, remembrance is the only pathway, painful as it is, to a settlement with the past: “I'm at peace at last. I fear nothing. I yearn for nothing.”

The day after reading Agualusa's book, I picked up another book translated from the Portuguese, Mia Couto's
Under the Frangipani
. Couto is a writer from Mozambique, a country, like Angola, brutally governed during its years as a Portuguese colony.
Under the Frangipani
tells the story of a murder investigation told from the point of view of a man who is dead but who has taken up residence in the body of the investigator. The dead man cares less about his own death than he does about “killing the world of the past.” He fears that the leaders of Mozambique, having fought for independence, no longer believe in the old African ways, the culture and traditions of their ancestors. Instead, they are rushing to catch up with the West, and allowing the past to be forgotten. They are becoming “people without a history, people who live by imitation.” In contrast, the dead man is regaining memories through the body of the inspector, and he is grateful: “Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, every time. It was as if I were on my way back, on a return journey.” He remembers the good and the bad, and finds validity for his own life in both. By taking that “return journey”—looking backward—he finds peace.

When we were growing up, our parents told us bits and pieces about living through World War II in Europe. Our mother grew up in Antwerp and remembers the Germans invading Belgium in May of 1940. Her father was mobilized to fight the Germans, and the whole family moved with him to France, staying with French families, some welcoming and some not so welcoming. My mother remembers walking along a beach in Brittany with her sister when a troop of Germans on motorcycles came roaring through, separating the sisters and terrifying my mother. She remembers driving through bombed-out towns in northern France and stopping at a house in Abbeville that had lost its entire front facade to bombing. The rooms gaped open like a dollhouse, its occupants long gone, having fled to the countryside. My mother needed to use the bathroom, so her mother sent her in. My mother entered a pristine bathroom, lined along one wall with a neat row of freshly polished shoes left behind by the fleeing family. She stepped past the shoes primly and did her business, surrounded by walls on three sides but only the open air in front of her.

Belgium surrendered to Germany within weeks, and the family returned to occupied Antwerp. Food shortages began, along with heavy rationing. There were no eggs in the city, no butter, and little sugar. My grandmother made marzipan out of mashed potatoes and almond extract; oatmeal contained more husks than oats; bread was brown and stringy with fiber; and milk was so diluted with water it was blue. The baby of the family, my uncle Peter, got most of the milk, but my mother didn't mind. Never a picky eater, she doesn't remember being hungry in the war. She was satisfied to eat up whatever was on her plate and told us she was the only one in her family who actually gained weight during the war.

In 1942, the Allied troops began bombings of Belgium, and blackouts were instituted. The entire city went dark at night, with all windows covered and no streetlamps lit. During the day my mother still walked the twenty minutes back and forth to her school, but now she always wore a package suspended from a string around her neck. The package comprised a handkerchief tied around a whistle and two cubes of sugar. The idea was that in the event of a bombing that left my mother under a pile of rubble, alive but trapped, she would put the handkerchief over her mouth to avoid breathing in dust, suck on the sugar cubes to sustain her energy, and blow like hell on the whistle to get rescued. Eventually my mother was packed off with her sister and brother to live in the countryside with her grandmother. She remembers sitting in a country classroom counting the lice on the head of the boy in front of her.

We understood that life in Belgium, while hard under German occupation, was still easier than it had been for my father, living under a succession of occupying forces, all of them oppressive. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Under a secret pact signed with Russia, Poland was divided up and Russia took over Belarus. Two years later, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin, Germany marched east and took control of Belarus. When the tide turned against Germany in 1944, the Russians came swarming in again.

My father was a country boy, a farmer's child in a family of ten siblings. His father had fields of rye and wheat, and also orchard after orchard of cherries, pears, and apples. During the first winter of the first Soviet occupation, the coldest winter on record, the fruit trees all froze up and died. The years of Soviet occupation were hard, with the threats of deportation, collectivization, and starvation always hovering. My father continued to go to school and was now taught by Soviets. His schoolbooks were taken away one morning when the teachers realized the books contained photos of politicians, generals, and marshals who had since been executed by Stalin and removed from official Soviet history. The students spent fewer days in the classroom and more days engaged in hard labor, moving stones for roads and hauling lumber.

I remember that when I was still very young, my father often told me about when he saw his first airplane. It was a beautiful Sunday in June 1941, and my father lay out in a meadow, gazing up into the sky and daydreaming. All of a sudden he heard a roar. He sat up in disbelief as a silver plane screeched across the blue beyond. I was much older when my father explained to me that it was a German plane, and that the Germans were invading Belarus. The Red Army scrambled, trying to get out before the Germans arrived. An old Red Army officer, quoting a Russian proverb, warned my father: “The wolf will have to pay for the sheep's tears.” My father feared that once again the Belarusians would be the sheep. One week later the
Wehrmacht
arrived in the village.

A group of German officers on bicycles stopped at my grandfather's farm. One of the bikes needed repairing, and they'd heard that my grandfather had the tools necessary to fix it. My father was one of the few in his small village who spoke German, and so his father sent him out to help the officers. He stood out in the yard handing out tools and taking parts and bolts from the Germans as they dismantled the bike. Whatever had been wrong was fixed, and the Germans began to put the bike back together. But the bolts fastening one of the pedals in place were missing. The officers began scurrying through the yard, looking everywhere for the bolts. My father followed behind them, trying to help. But the bolts just could not be found. The officers finally shrugged off the loss, and mounted their bikes. As they rode away, one of the soldiers rode off-kilter, trying to keep up on his one-pedaled bike. Later that night my father found the bolts in his pocket, where he had put them and forgotten about them. He didn't know whether to cry at his close call with German discipline or to laugh with relief.

As we girls grew older and learned more about the war in school and in the books we read, we began to ask questions.
Did you know anyone who was taken by the Germans to a concentration camp? Were you ever actually in a bombing? Did you ever see a dead person?
My mother didn't know any families who were deported. One good friend who was Jewish went into hiding and survived the war. My mother was never caught in a bombing, but a school just outside Antwerp was bombed by the Allies in 1943. The target was a car factory being used by the Luftwaffe to repair planes, but the Allies missed the factory and hit St. Lutgardis School instead. More than two hundred children were killed; only eighteen survived. I wonder if those children had worn little handkerchief packages around their necks.

When I was in law school, the movie
Look and See
was released in the United States. Set in Belarus during the last years of World War II, it is the most painful movie about war I have ever seen. Against a background of green fields and towering birch trees, the characters—played by Belarusian actors who look like they could be my family—suffer through hunger, fear, and torture and fight helplessly against being corralled for death marches, burnings, and killings. I cried every night for weeks afterward, thinking about that movie. When I finally flat out asked my father about what he had experienced in the war, he told me halting half stories. He just couldn't talk about it.

It was not until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that my father began to share his stories of the war. Even then, he could not talk about his memories but instead committed them to words on paper. Working on an old typewriter that had been mine in high school, he began to type out the details of the horrors he had witnessed and heard about. He wrote about how his Jewish friends were kicked out of school once the Germans came and were made to wear yellow stars and work in the streets. Later they were taken to work camps. My father saw bodies lying on the street in a village. He saw a young man strung up to die. One day he walked past a field with a barn set at the end of the meadow. The barn was in flames and surrounded by German soldiers. Only when my father began to smell the roasting bodies did he understand that the barn was full of people, and that the doors had been barred closed against them. The smell made my father's knees buckle, and he stumbled to the ground, trying to get away. He had been studying ancient Rome in school, and the parallels between the atrocities committed by the ancient Romans against their enemies and what he saw in his own modern country horrified him.

My father wrote about how an uncle and aunt suspected of helping out Jewish friends were arrested by the occupying Germans and executed. Another uncle, suspected of being a Communist because he had taught in a Russian school, was taken away and never seen again.

We always knew that four of my father's ten siblings had died in World War II, but the details had been fuzzy. Only when my father began writing out his memories did we begin to learn more. My father's brother Peter was the first to die; he died in 1939 fighting the Germans after being drafted into the Polish army. And then, after my sister died, my father wrote about the horrible night in early December 1943 when three of his siblings died.
Three in one night
.

My father was away at school that night, in a town twenty-six kilometers from home. His brother George was there with him, having escaped from a German transport train that was taking him west to work in a German factory. The two brothers knew that Soviet partisans were roaming the countryside, staging sabotage maneuvers and planning attacks on the German armies, but they weren't worried. During the years of the Soviet occupation my grandfather, who owned a general store, managed to avoid deportation of the entire family to Siberia by keeping the local Russian officials well supplied with a private stock of good Polish vodka. Under the new occupation by the Germans, the family gave the Germans what they needed during the day, and the partisans came at night to take what they needed.

On that night in December, a group of partisans came to the farm, but my grandfather was away. My grandmother was there at home, sick with fever and chills. Boris, thirty-two years old, Antonina, twenty-three years old, and fifteen-year-old Sergei were also at home that night. While my grandmother rested in a room off the kitchen, Boris, Antonina, and Sergei stayed up talking.