Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

I was the youngest child, the youngest of many – more than I care to remember – whom I tended from my earliest infancy, before, indeed, I had the power of speech myself and although my motor skills were by then scarcely developed, these, my many siblings, were put in my charge.

Backwards. The narrative right from the start seems almost defiantly false.

he assured me that the house, although storied and ancient, although once belonging to the distinguished leaders of the historic crusade against our forebears, nevertheless had all the modern conveniences.

I strove to understand as little as possible, even nothing, of what was said by my colleagues involved in the case. Word and word and word and word, they appeared on the page one after the other, accumulating fidelities, revealing sequence, producing clarity.

I learned early on that money could clean you up and make you anybody.

And so although I walked in the forest nearly every day of the year, I felt perpetually estranged from it, as indeed I had felt estranged from most of the settings in which I had found myself over the course of my life.

The outsider narrative

the other hand had been a dedicated and lifelong smoker, I loved nothing more than a smoke, it’s true, from the age of fourteen I could be found smoking on street corners and doorsteps, in alleyways and in stairwells, and yet I was a stationary smoker, never moved while smoking, hated the sensation of smoking while walking, and I walked plenty – if I had a second, not quite equal, love, it was walking, I spent entire days walking

Irony: smoking over time almost certainly makes walking harder.

Driving the town’s economy, my brother had given me to understand, was, or at least had been, a trade in tombstones, in which he himself naturally had a hand. The quarries still brought up stone for this purpose, a dwindling number of carvers still carved it, and the finished stones were sent to mark the resting places of the dead all across the country.

Irony that death is a source of revenue when the narrator's family members were killed there or taken away to be killed

The far-reaching and long-lasting influence of mid-century American road culture might be cited here, though it hardly needs explaining at this point in history, cultural imperialism, military imperialism, the long march of the American diner, its rise and fall, its rise again in the present age of nostalgia, when one finds oneself yearning for a landline, for a rotary dial, for the hard edges of a VHS cassette, for the smell of the video store on a Friday night, for the commercial life of another era when one knew slightly less, for one’s personal golden age, yes, yes.

skin. I wanted so badly to live in my life, wanted to meet it head on, wanted above all for something to happen, for this terrible yearning to be quenched.

I had found a way to serve the community, in silence and at a distance (for had not the sages said that good deeds are better done in anonymity, without gratitude?),

if I had felt the smallest temptation to withdraw my obedience, I knew that once again I had to gain mastery over myself, over the motions of my spirit, various and vain.

Obedience to whom?

The distinction between the two spheres, public and private, had been an insoluble problem over the course of my upbringing, particularly during my teenage years, but even before that, yes, much earlier than that. In my parents’ home – my home, after a fashion – I was always on view, my appearance much commented on, my state of disarray, physical or emotional, remarked on and discussed, any desires or proclivities I had thought secret were unearthed without difficulty and shared without scruple.

It was the late twentieth century. What did we have left? A prayer book, some scraps of song, a history lesson beginning with devastation.

I had always been susceptible to the desires of other people, any strong feeling experienced in close proximity to me I reflected, like the still surface of a pond at dawn, fathomless, untenanted, so often coming to live these feelings as though they were my own.

Anthropology had not been my area, the social sciences never of particular interest to me, and yet I sensed dimly the outlines of complex networks of exchange and relation that structured the society one lived in, structures that in certain cases required the presence, or more appropriately the exclusion, of a particular individual or object, to enable the cohesion of the whole.

So here it all was at last. I had come to this place, whence my ancestors had fled, out of what I recognised at last as an unkillable longing for self-annihilation, no more than I felt I deserved and, moreover, what I felt had been meant for me, the wayward child of a people whose only native merit was that they had survived.