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If I do finally write the history of that part of my life, my earliest years — the years people don’t talk about very much — the subject will not be short of interest. I knew perfectly well what was inside those cattle trains, exactly who was being taken where and for what purpose.
The poor Grossmans didn’t even have a grave and she was saving up for the Taj Mahal!
Injections, she maintained, were given only to make money, and stories of rabid foxes and cats were spread so that doctors could earn more.
I noted with a certain irony the enthusiasm with which she told stories of how geese, ducks and hens were drawn to her. It couldn’t have been easy to take your intimate friends, whom you had tamed so swiftly they would take the grain from your own mouth and leap up trustingly beside you on the lovers’ seat, and slit their throats when the time came to cook them.
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas.
I believe it was from this moment that Emerence truly loved me, loved me without reservation, gravely almost, like someone deeply conscious of the obligations of love, who knows it to be a dangerous passion, fraught with risk.
In Bluebeard’s Castle, the parts of the day were clearly defined; and Emerence too had claimed her eternal time of day on Earth.
I made no reply, but carried on banging at the typewriter, stunted embryos of meaningless sentences emerging under my exasperated fingers.
Writing
know now, what I didn’t then, that affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.
she came to accept as normal things which had once defied comprehension, such as an idle existence in which we might go half a day in silence, with one of us staring at the poplars at the bottom of the garden, doing nothing that the eye could see, while maintaining that this was work.
Writing isn’t an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true.
Books formed the basis of my world, my unit of measure was the printed word, but I didn’t think of it as the one salvation, as she considered her standard to be. Without consciously arriving at the concept herself, or being aware of and using the phrase “anti-intellectual”, she was the thing itself, an anti-intellectual.
she had no wish to cultivate or advance herself, or work for the collective good, whether by obeying directives or joining in campaigns. She made her own decisions about what steps she would take and why, how far she would take them, and for whom.
how the working class — her class, not mine
she hated the idle, lying gentry. Priests were liars; doctors ignorant and money-grabbing; lawyers didn’t care who they represented, victim or criminal; engineers calculated in advance how to keep back a pile of bricks for their own houses; and the huge plants, factories and institutes of learning were all filled with crooks.
Not only a recent sociopolitical phenomenon
she gave vent to her hatred of the written word.
On hearing the radio or television blaring out of people’s windows, if the tone was positive she immediately contradicted it, if negative, she praised it.
She’d shed a tear for all of them as soon as she could find the time.
Greek literature, which portrayed nothing but the passions: death and love and friendship, their hands joined together round a glittering axe.
every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable. It
how did a novel come into existence out of nothing, from mere words? I couldn’t explain to her the familiar, everyday magic of creation. There was no way of expressing how and from where the letters arrived on the empty page. I thought the process of film-making might be easier for her to understand, so when she began to take an interest in what was happening in the studio or on location, what it actually meant to make a film, I hoped I might draw her into my world, or at least its periphery.
If Emerence believed in any sort of force, it was time. In her private mythology, Time was like a miller, grinding his corn in an eternal mill, funnelling the events of your life into your personal sack when your turn came.
Emerence was a generous person, open-handed and essentially good. She refused to believe in God, but she honoured him with her actions. She was capable of sacrifice. Things I had to attend to consciously she did instinctively. It made no difference that she wasn’t aware of it — her goodness was innate, mine was the result of upbringing.
Emerence would be able to show me, without uttering a word, that what I consider religion is a sort of Buddhism, a mere respect for tradition, and that even my morality is just discipline, the result of training at home, in school and in my family, or self-imposed.
the black and gold vision of the Mozart Requiem.
How often would she be able to sit at home in peace, with her chores tugging at her from one breakfast time to the next?
If the fabric of her emotional life hadn’t been woven with a finer thread, and more sensitive strands, than mine, she might have refused the set; or asked us if we’d sweep the snow off the streets for her, or do her duty in the laundry, since by the time she’d be able to sit herself down on the lovers’ seat, Budapest would have stopped transmitting.
It was Christmas, and I too exchanged my usual taste for savoury and bitter things for something sweet — for that sweet, sad, lovely film, after all those grotesque, existentialist productions.
When you do something truly unforgivable, you don’t always realise it, but there is a certain inward suspicion of what you have done.
prize, I reflected bitterly, had already begun to work its influence. I had rushed off in a TV car towards its radiance, away from illness, old age, loneliness and incapacity.
I would have to work genuine magic, to rise above myself and persuade her that what had happened that afternoon was nothing more than a dream, it had all been simply a dream.
yet I knew it was better for them that they had vanished, that they were no longer there.
For whom?
It was the start of a national holiday weekend, and people wanted to get the visit over.
The neighbours went away rather offended that the old woman hadn’t even looked at them.
I kept looking at my watch to see how much longer I ha...
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Emerence no longer wished to live, because we’d destroyed the framework of her life and the legend attached to her name.
Emerence was pure and incorruptible, the better self that each and every one of us aspired to be.
behind every public achievement there was some unseen person without whom there would be no life’s work.
I should have been with her in the lion’s jaws, at her Golgotha, and I wasn’t, and she had had to stand alone and bear what was done to her.
My God, because of me, I told him. I failed her. It was a relief to pour out all the details of what had happened
I lay down for a few moments on the balcony, then leapt up, convinced that if I weren’t there to care for Emerence, she would die. I alone could protect her from the horror that had engulfed us both.
The hammering proclaimed a multiple burial: the death of a human life, the end of a home, the final chapter in the saga of Emerence.
I would never have thought that those people could have so much tact, and would sense with such precise mental antennae that in my absence Emerence had taken my measure and found me wanting, no-one understood exactly why, but there was no point in getting their knickers in a twist about it.
You were the only person on earth whose words would have induced her to open her door. You are her Judas. You betrayed her.”
She was expecting praise, and had probably earned it, but I said nothing. The whole neighbourhood had passed the test of honour, and of tact, but I stuck to my silence.
In this drama there’s only one protagonist, and it’s not you, it’s Emerence. It’s a one-woman show.
What does a dead person know, or see, or feel? It’s only you who imagine that they’ll be waiting for you up there, and that when Viola dies he’ll go there too, and your home and everything else will be just as it is now, an angel will bring you your typewriter and your grandfather’s desk, and things will continue. What a fool you are! To the dead, it’s all one. The dead person is a zero.
No afterlife
You know how to make grand statements, but to stay when you’re needed, when you’re saving my life, to cover my misery from the eyes of the world, no, you didn’t
as I’ve said, creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed — stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bitter-sweet excitement
What creativity needs
