I doubt that I’ve done much better for myself, but I learned from living with him that a good story is a perfect remedy against loneliness or fear. Like the story of the anemone, Mother’s favorite flower. My father told it to me in front of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. On a hunting trip, Adonis, incestuous son of Myrrha and her father, is attacked by a wounded boar. Seeing him dead, Venus — who fell in love with him because Cupid mistakenly shot her with one of his arrows — sprinkles his blood with nectar and turns it into a red flower.
During their honeymoon, as they visited the Louvre, my mother got excited when she recognized the plant in the lower left corner of the painting.“As a little girl, they called her ‘the all-seeing eye,’” added my father, “because she never missed a thing. Like you.” I don’t know what surprised me more: that Mother had been observant like me, that Adonis was born from the myrrh-tree, or that the name of the flower he turned into described the airiness of its petals, since ánemos, in Greek, as I learned in front of Leonardo’s painting, means wind.
I wish someone would tell me a story like that now; perhaps it would distract me from death. Maybe the tumor would briefly stop its advance, like the curious museum visitors, and give some respite to my decrepit body. I haven’t looked in the mirror in days to avoid confronting a face that I don’t recognize anymore. As a boy, when one of my arms or legs would hurt for no apparent reason, they would tell me it was because my bones were going through a growth spurt. Now, after many years at a standstill, I have the feeling that they’re growing again, trying to make their way through the skin. It is hard to accept that there is no turning back. My doctor claims we die before our time when we have no reason to live. And he says it with such certainty that I don’t dare tell him that Alma died too soon with plenty of reasons not to, but what’s the point. When he talks to me, I don’t know how much is just naiveté and how much is a lecture on how I should be handling this better. He’s a good guy, but he doesn’t realize that there’s no need to insist on understanding any of it. My father died too slowly. Alma, too fast. My father knew what was happening to him. Alma didn’t. The rest is incomprehensible.
Of all the bad news I’ve had to deliver in my life, the worst was telling my father that nothing could be done.“So I’m not going to make it?” he asked me in a shaky voice.“No, you’re not. I’m sorry,” I answered. I still remember him staring at me for a few seconds. And the silence. Long and dense, as if no words could break through it. We didn’t talk about it again, but I know that I did what I had to. And, luckily, we had enough time so he could go without leaving anything undone. Or almost anything. When I think about Alma, on the other hand, I blame myself for everything I didn’t do and say. Early one morning, I walked Alma to the station and she got on the train and waved goodbye, just the way she had so many other times. She was nervous and absorbed, as she always was when starting rehearsals for a new play, but she hid it by constantly repeating everything I had to do in her absence. “Most of all, don’t forget the plants.” “Don’t let Rufus onto the bed, he covers it in hairs.” “Don’t paint all night long, if you can help it. You know it’s not good for you.” She wasn’t very bossy, or even particularly organized, but those details kept her mind occupied. And that evening I had to identify her body. All it took was a switchman’s oversight to make this world a less hospitable place. And none of the instructions Alma gave me helped to make it any more welcoming. When I weigh what it’s meant for me to live without her, I’m pleased to think that my disappearance won’t have any lasting effect on anyone.
Rain blurs the edges of things. Resting my forehead against the windowpane, I observe the puddles in the alley. I like watching how they change shape, and finding forms in them. During the war, to relieve the tedium of the trench, I would contemplate the clouds and the camouflage tarpaulins, searching for animals, objects, flowers, faces. . When she was bored, Alma would do the same thing, except with shadows. Even though we apparently had little in common, with every coincidence we established links between those parts of our lives we hadn’t lived through together. Every “me too”—like our passion for bridges or the songs of Kurt Weill — became a way to fill in the gaps. Despite everything, there is still so much I don’t know about Alma. I often think “Alma never told me what she did after. .” or “how did she meet so and so?” or “why didn’t she ever explain how. .?” Unfortunately, now all those questions I put off have been left unanswered. Yet, really, what do we ever learn about the people we’ve loved? All I know about Alma is what she wanted to share with me. The rest has been lost forever.
Alma was born in Prague. She didn’t talk much about her childhood. When she did mention it, she would inevitably end up saying,“Thank goodness for my mother. I don’t know what I would have done without her.” Even still, she wasn’t happy as a girl. Alma’s father was a distant, inflexible man who ruled over the family’s life with a bilious severity. His outbursts were so formidable that Alma made every effort to fade into the woodwork. Before starting school, her only pleasurable moments were her daily walks with her mother. No matter what the weather, they went out to wander around the city. When we traveled to Prague together, Alma wanted to visit her favorite spots: the Belvedere, the park on Sofia Island, and the Botanical Garden, where, during a music concert, while her mother was distracted, she got too close to the lake and fell in. I had never seen her so excited. Every place was the touchstone for some memory: the cross-eyed toll collector on the Kaiser Franz Bridge, a dog with a dead squirrel in its mouth, a woman chasing a hat blown by the wind, the nightmares caused by a story about the gargoyles on the cathedral, a dress smeared with cherry strudel. Crossing the Mánes Bridge, she explained that, when she was a girl, there was only an iron footbridge and that, early one winter day, she saw footsteps that disappeared over the snow-covered railing. For a long time, she was obsessed with imagining a man jumping into the river’s freezing waters.
I’ve thought about suicide too, to save myself from my fate, but I haven’t made up my mind to take that step because it would deprive Alma and my father from living to the end. And Erika and Konrad. And Professor Müller and Sergeant Forkel. I have the feeling that it’s only the memories — mine and others’— that keep me going now. And I don’t want to give them up any sooner than I have to.
To protect herself from her father, Alma would lock herself in her room and entertain herself watching the Moldava River pass by, or reading or dressing up in costumes. She wasn’t naive enough to think she could win him over, but she did think that if she changed her appearance her father would treat her differently. But it never worked. “I guess I still act out roles, looking for allies and understanding,” she would say. Everything was simpler with her mother, who defended her as best she could and, when Alma was older, kept everything that would have infuriated her father from him. They just had to keep their stories straight, with all the lies that became increasingly necessary as Alma got involved in artistic and literary circles and lived a life that collided with her father’s severe morality.“And thank goodness my mother acted as a lightning rod,” she said more than once. Yet despite all that, there were constant confrontations.
In some of the photographs that Alma was able to hold on to, the difference is clear: her father always has the same sullen, haughty bearing; her mother, on the other hand, is the very image of bonhomie. It wasn’t that she had no objections to her daughter’s behavior, but living with her husband, instead of daunting or embittering her, had made her a more tolerant person. At least tolerant enough to steel herself when Alma decided to devote herself to the theater, even though that wasn’t at all the world she would have chosen for her daughter.“She understood that my happiness couldn’t be a source of conflict,” she told me. Her father, on the other hand, never accepted that she wasn’t interested in living up to his expectations. In spite of everything, in high school, thanks to her mother acting as “a lightning rod,” he reluctantly allowed Alma to act in the school drama club. But when her “teenage flights of fancy”—as he liked to call it — became an insurmountable obstacle on the path that he had unilaterally carved out for her, he kicked her out of the house.