I imagine you before me
Embarrassed by my emotion
But things are quite decided
And not open to discussion.
I couldn’t resist it after all — I lapsed into poetry! Thank you thank you for Natasha’s photo. Kiss her from me.
5. Aleph and Where It Led Me
I am talking far too much about objects, and perhaps it is inevitable. The people I wrote this book for died long before I started writing it, and objects were the only permissible replacements. They are just as dear to me as some strangers in a photo album: a brooch with my great-grandmother’s monogram; my great-grandfather’s prayer shawl; and the armchairs that miraculously survived their owners, two centuries and two homes. Their promise of knowledge is a false one, but all the same they radiate the stove-warmth of uninterrupted time. Here I remember Aunt Galya with the stack of newspapers she couldn’t be parted from, and the piles of diaries, and I have the sudden realization that nothing can be preserved.
Tove Jansson has a story about a Fillyjonk who lives in continual fear of a terrible disaster. She arranges all her furniture and gets out the silver cream jug and the iced cakes, she even washes her best carpet in the sea, and she waits and waits, and is terrified she will lose it all. When the tornado comes (and they always do), it takes with it her house and all her knickknacks: tray cloths and photo frames and tea cozies and grandma’s silver cream jug. All the past is carried off into oblivion, and it leaves a clear space for the future. The Fillyjonk is left playing in the shallows with her carpet, finally happy, “Never in her life had she had such fun.”
I remembered Janet Malcolm and the house with the cluttered interior, the aleph of her book, when I was in Vienna, as there was something like it on every street corner. The building I stayed in was built in 1880 (and in the yard a smaller building, enwombed like a matryoshka dolclass="underline" a house with white shutters, built in 1905 when the family had grown up). The owner of the house, anywhere between seventy and ninety, had high cheekbones, architectural eyebrows, and a voice of otherworldly depth with which she told me, at the end of our conversation, that she’d always lived there — ever since returning in 1948. To read her history correctly I’d need to have known when she left the house, but our polite conversation didn’t stretch this far. A handsome family genealogy book, published in 1918, lay neglected by the TV remote control. She rented her apartment to me with its two hundred years of tat and old trinkets, with apparently barely a thought for the preservation of these things: porcelain objects crowded the shelves, as tightly packed as books; boxes were bent by their weight of silverware; oil paintings hung on the walls; and ancient matchboxes lay on the tables and coffee tables. Gift messages decorated the albums (a Christmas card from 1941, slipped between the pages of an album, made her family history a little clearer). This white, tall-windowed house with its grand staircases resembled a huge store cupboard where the odd rental tenant might go unnoticed. At night everything in the building creaked and groaned and twitched. I came to the conclusion that the owner had crammed it full with the layers of unwanted history that kept her from sleep — and then emigrated into her own life: the little house on the other side of the lawn, her medical practice and garden chairs.
I found out quite by chance — by flipping open a guidebook to a random page in a museum shop — that the oldest Jewish cemetery in Vienna was close to where I worked. The cemetery was first used in 1540 or thereabouts, and had been razed to the ground by the Nazis. Later, after some time had passed, the decision was taken to restore it. The gravestones hadn’t gone anywhere: they lay under the soil, they’d simply gone underground, so they were brought back to the light and arranged around the wide, grassy garden of an old people’s home that had sprung up in the cemetery’s absence.
There was a chill in the air that day, the sort that catches us unaware, a presentiment of winter. The street slowly narrowed; on its left-hand side the old people’s home: a two-story house of the sort you might see in London, perhaps adorned with a couple of blue plaques. But there were no plaques here, and no people on the street. It grew colder still, a few very frail old men stood in the entrance hall, sheltering from the wind. They must have been at least a hundred years old, I guessed, using my landlady’s appearance as a yardstick, and their emaciated forms gave them the appearance of happy, withered little shrimps. They inched about the hall in wheelchairs or on foot and held on to each other’s sharp elbows with trembling tenderness. When they approached the nurse it was with the same faint smile, looking up into her face to ask or answer a question. I approached her in turn, and she pointed out the way to me.
A long, wide balcony ran the length of the building and faced a walled garden. The ground was a few meters lower here and a fierce wind bent the grass flat. The balcony was kept at the height required for the present to be able to say with certainty that the past was past: it had been tamed, restored, and fenced off. It wasn’t even possible to enter the garden below, where the grass was being whipped by the wind. An unambiguous iron padlock hung on the door to a metal ladder descending from the balcony.
But there was something going on down in the garden. A tentlike awning with long green ramps hid the farthest part of the garden and two people were busying themselves around graves in the corner of the tent. The graves stood facing me, they were nothing like the cozy, almost armchair-like memorials I was used to. These were like gates, portals for transportations to the void — in some of them I could even sense the shape of an archway. In the cemetery in Würzburg, where my mother is buried, you can sometimes detect some little figurative elements, nods to the people left behind: a simple little emblem of a flame or two hands blessing the Star of David. Here, there was nothing of that sort, only letters, text. The cemetery could have been read like a book stitched from scattered sheets. On one stone the script rose in a crescent arc. A single decorative image, a horse that faintly resembled a hare, raced from right to left across the stone.
Meanwhile the old men had disappeared out of the frame of the lit glass, and I could see a girl in white carefully wiping the tables down in the dining hall. There was no one out here on the balcony with me, no one by the ashtray or by the muttering fountain a little farther on, where plastic ducks floated upside down in the black water. I’d read they’d found two or three hundred tombstones but it looked from here as if there were hardly any.
The grass was long, not like grass on city lawns, but the harsh grass of the plain, and the wind blew it into furious waves.
A few days later I was told about a very particular grave in the cemetery. My Viennese friend asked me whether I’d seen the fish: what looked like a heap of cobblestones was in fact a stone fish, coiled into a ring. There was a story attached to the fish: a man named Simeon bought himself a fish for supper and was about to prepare it for cooking when right there on the kitchen table, under the carving knife, the fish opened its mouth and spoke: “Shema Yisrael,” the words a Jew says before death, and it might have said something more, but it was too late, the knife came down and severed the fish’s head. The Rabbi said that the business smacked of a dybbuk, a wandering soul separated from its body, so they buried the fish just as they would a person in the cemetery. Sometimes I feel just like that fish, or the householder hiring men at the eleventh hour, or even like a conscript in the last wave of conscription at the height of war — managing to say and do what must be done, but only just, in the nick of time.