My Nine Lives (15 page)

A university press had commissioned me to bring out a volume of modern Hindi poetry. When I asked Muktesh if he had any poems for me to translate, he smiled and shook his head: what time did he have for poetry? Yes, sometimes on his way to a rally, he might compose a little couplet to liven up a speech. That wasn't poetry, he said, it was propaganda, not worth remembering. And there was nothing else, nothing of his own? He shrugged, he smiled—perhaps he might at some time, in the heat of the moment, have scribbled something of that kind, maybe in a letter long since destroyed.

I knew that the Begum had some of his poems addressed to my mother. On my return from Bikaner, when it was time for me to return to my teaching job in London, I asked her to let me take those poems with me. At first she hesitated—I knew that it wasn't because she was reluctant to part with them, but that she didn't want me to take them away to England, where they did not belong. I had heard some of what he called his “propaganda” verses—I had seen him write them, in a car while being driven from one election meeting to another. They were all poems with a social theme, humorous, sarcastic, homely, with a sudden twist at the end that drew amused appreciation from his audience. His poems to my mother were completely different, yet if you knew him—really knew him—it was recognizably he who breathed in them. And not only he but poets dead a thousand years, for he belonged to their tradition of Sanskrit love poetry
steeped in sensuality. As they did, he loved women—or rather, a woman: my mother, and with her the whole of life as he knew it, the whole of nature as he knew it, with its sights and smells of fruits and flowers. He wrote of the rumpled bedsheets from which she rose as the Sanskrit poet did of the bed of straw on which his mistress had made love; of the scent of her hair, the mango shape of her breasts. He longed to bed and to be embedded in her. His love was completely physical—to such an extent that it included the metaphysical without ever mentioning it, the way the sky is known to be above the earth even if you don't look up at it.

After his retirement, my father lived mostly in the country, and I joined him whenever I was free from my teaching assignments. It was there that I did most of my translations, and I was working on one of Muktesh's poems when the news of his assassination reached us. My father heard it on the little radio he kept in the kitchen. He came upstairs to my bedroom, which was also my study. He sat on my bed, holding his pipe though he had knocked out the ashes before coming upstairs. I turned around to look at him. At last he said, “Muktesh.” He was not looking back at me but out of my bedroom window. My father's eyes were of a very light blue that seemed to reflect the mild and pleasant place where he lived. Instinctively, I put my hand on Muktesh's poem. It was too alive and present with a passion I wanted to hide from my father, who had all my life hidden his knowledge of it from me.

My next visit to India coincided with the beginning of the trial of Muktesh's assassins, and every day the newspapers carried front-page stories of it, together with their photographs. Muktesh had been shot at the moment of leaving a function to commemorate the birth date of Mahatma Gandhi. Although one man had carried out the murder, it had been
planned by a group of conspirators, including two accomplices ready to do the deed if the first one failed. They were all very young men—the youngest seventeen, the eldest twenty-four—all of them religious fanatics with tousled pitch-black hair and staring pitch-black eyes. If they had been older, their views might have been less intransigent, might even have approached Muktesh's tolerance (for which they had killed him). And as I read about their lives—their impoverished youth, their impassioned studies, their wild ideas—I felt I could have been reading about the young Muktesh himself. And when I went to court to look at his assassins on trial for their lives, it could have been the young Muktesh standing there—as defiant as they, fierce and fervent in dedication to a cause.

But I knew there were other sides to him. I knew it from translating his poems, and also from his manner with me. He was as reticent about my singular appearance as the rest of my family. Yet sometimes he gazed into my face the same way my father did—I knew what for: for some trace, some echo of something lost and precious. He never found it, any more than did my father, but like him Muktesh showed no disappointment. Instead he smiled at me to show his pleasure in me, his approval, his acceptance, and his love, which was as deep in his way as my father's was in his, and the Begum's in hers.

She of course had her own manner of showing it. Ever since I was small, she insisted on going through my hair with a louse-comb. “Your mother used to come home every day from school with something,” she told me to explain this practice, which she extended right into my adult years. I think she just liked to do it, it made up for the other intimate gestures that she so disdained. My hair is coarse and deeply black, quite different from my mother's, so she said, which
had been silky like the Begum's own and with auburn lights in it (by this time the Begum's had turned almost red with constant dyeing). Sometimes, while wielding her louse-comb, she commented, “Who knows where you got this hair—it's certainly not ours.” After a while she said, “But who knows where anything comes from and who the hell cares.” Tossing the comb to Amma's granddaughter with instructions to wash it in disinfectant, she began on a story about her ex-husband's family. His mother, my great-grandmother, had for thirty years had a wonderful cook:

“A very lusty fellow from Bihar who made the most delicate rotis I've ever eaten. Which may have been the reason why my mother-in-law couldn't bear to be parted from him for a day.
May
have been—and anyway, who knows what goes on in those long hot afternoons when everyone is fast asleep.”

“Did this cook have hair like mine?”

“I couldn't tell you,” she said, “he always wore a cap.” She made a face and then she said, “Ridiculous,” dismissing the whole subject as unworthy of further discussion.

6

My Family

M
Y DAUGHTER
Debbie is a very boastful mother. She is proud of both her children and finds it difficult to accept that one should be doing better than the other. She thinks, or pretends to think, that it is Andrew's fault he is not as successful as his sister, and that if only he tried harder, he would catch up with her. Debbie sees it as her duty to make him try harder, just as she did when he was at school. Andrew never did well at school—to others Debbie asserted it was because he was too brilliant, but at home she gave him no peace. From early morning, even before she had had her coffee and when she is never at her best, she nagged him about his poor performance. This had the effect of making him stop going to school altogether, and for a period, when he was about fifteen or sixteen, no one knew where Andrew was, or with whom. It was also the period during which his tastes were formed, among the group of older men who took him along to their studios and favorite downtown bars and uptown gallery openings. In this milieu Andrew grew up quickly—fortunately with a basis of seriousness that made him recognize his need for education.

At around twenty he entered architecture school but soon turned to other arts, several of them. He wrote the libretto for an opera and also, during a time when his best friend was a dancer, he designed and painted the scenery for a ballet. His next best friend was a young Indian film-maker who introduced him to Indian music, and together they made
a documentary about a famous shehnai player. Debbie became very proud of him and her attitude to him changed completely. Now she would never appear before him in the morning the way she used to, shrew-like in curlers, but always careful to be her best, in appearance and manner. She even, when she remembered, developed a special way of speaking to him, more thoughtful and refined, with her lips slightly pursed. She soon reconciled herself to his homosexuality, confiding to her friends that it was inevitable among those of an artistic temperament. She also claimed that the frequency and strength of Andrew's passions came from her, and although I never contradicted her, I knew it was not so. In her relationships, Debbie has always managed to remain in control, of herself and of circumstances, indignation overcoming pain, and marital settlements compensating for unsatisfactory husbands. But nothing could compensate Andrew for what he suffered; and Debbie herself marveled at the all-consuming extent of his passionate relationships which obliterated everything else in his life, including whatever work he was engaged on.

His sister Veronica—fifteen years younger and from a different marriage—is the opposite. She is cool and detached in all her relations—part of the fascination that has made many people fall violently in love with her, and probably also the cause of her emotional pull with audiences. She is a film actress, at twenty-four already famous; whenever there are articles about a new generation of young stars, her name is prominent among them. She has beauty, of course, but she carries it lightly, as lightly as she moves, her long dress, which seems to be always the same, clinging to her like a length of cloth thrown carelessly over a classical statue, not to hide but to outline her figure. Her dark hair is long and free and sometimes she winds it into a knot to put it out of the way. But
I need hardly describe Veronica, her picture is often in magazines, and sometimes on billboards ten feet tall.

Although Veronica has received training from some notable acting coaches, including a famous and tyrannical eighty-year-old actress from Berlin, it was always, and still is, her brother to whom she turns for guidance. This began in her childhood, when she was six and Andrew twenty-one. Whatever he happened to be doing became her interest too—painting, poetry, even music, though she wasn't musical. Every morning he would assign a poem for her to learn, and when he came home—this might not be till next morning—she would be waiting to recite it for him; and however exhausted he might be (for God only knew where he had been all night), he would patiently listen to her recital; and then she waited, and when he said, “Very good,” she let out her breath as if she had been holding it in anticipation of that moment. When she discovered her talent for acting, he encouraged and began to train her. He introduced her to classical drama, and at sixteen she was declaiming Phèdre to him while he, book in hand, modulated her like an orchestral conductor. Sometimes, to raise her pitch of passion, he accompanied her with tremendous chords struck on the piano. Or later, when she had begun to act in summer stock, he would take the text and read it with her. One of their favorites was Chekhov, especially
The Seagull.
She was Nina—and who more apt to play that youthful bird of hope aspiring to art and greatness?—while he read the young poet already doomed to failure. Only at that time there did not seem to be a breath of failure on Andrew, no diminution of his brightness. Except for the thinning of his hair, he was the same he always had been, slender and quick, with quick green eyes.

Are suicidal tendencies hereditary? I know that from the 1890s onward they were almost endemic in many assimilated
German-Jewish families, including my own. Much later, I tried it too, and so did Andrew, who cut his wrists. Debbie found him and took him to the hospital, and afterward she kept him by her at home, nurturing him more than she had been able to when he was small and she had been going through her first divorce. The idea of someone relinquishing life has remained utterly incomprehensible to her. Although both I and my husband Gerd had come to New York as refugees, Debbie acquired all the attributes of a standard American optimism. She grew up in our West Side apartment, among our books of philosophy and theology, many of them in German, our collection of classical records, our copies of Renaissance sculptures and Impressionist paintings, as though it were a suburban villa with a two-car garage and breakfast of pancakes and orange juice. She was rosy and blonde, healthy and pretty, with a meticulous taste in bobby sox and saddle shoes and boys as popular as herself, whom she cheered at their football games. Now, in middle age, Debbie is still an all-American type. She has been married three times, divorced twice, and is in the process of another divorce. She lived for a while in California—this was when she was married to a studio executive—and now has moved back to New York on the Upper East Side, across the Park from my apartment. Through all her vicissitudes, she has retained her faith in her ideal, which is success in the sense of a complete development of one's human potential. Whether it is being the most popular girl in the class, or having the best decorated house, or the most highly promoted husband, she regards falling short of it as a sin of character that has to be atoned for and corrected by psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, medication, divorce, diet, or whatever else her friends have tried out and recommended.

“I'm not an intellectual,” she used to tell us. As a girl, this difference from her parents was a matter of pride to her; but
now, in view of how her children have turned out, she has become defensive about it. She still looks as far from an intellectual as she did as a bobby-soxer. She has remained blonde—though her hair is more a burnished gold now and built up to give her more height, for she has always been short. She has also tended to be plump, but since menopause she has had a real weight problem, compounded by what she calls her eating disorder, as a result of which she is always nibbling something. She has not changed much from when she was a little girl in short frocks with a frill at the hem. She is still wearing a version of those frocks, though a more expensive one, from Bergdorf's or Saks designer salon. However, she has now largely disowned her teenage tastes in favor of her children's. She has become interested in modern art and dance. She has also tried to read some of the books Andrew has bought for Veronica, and she likes to scatter them around where her friends can see them. These books, with their bright jackets and photographs of the author on the back, look more accessible and attractive than those she grew up with in our apartment, or saw at the Hochs.

Debbie did not know until she was middleaged that Gerd, my husband, was not her father. Although in earlier years he and I had discussed the pros and cons of enlightening her, we kept postponing it and finally I did not tell her till after he died. It had turned out to be impossible while he was still with us and so devoted to her. He had delighted in all her plump, blonde, feminine ways, had loved to watch her ice-skate and tap-dance and whiz around on roller-blades, as graceful and vivacious as he was slow. After being a wonderful father to Debbie, he became a devoted grandfather to her children, who often stayed with us, and for long periods of
time. Andrew and Gerd used to go for walks together by the river or sit in a park while Gerd told him about the planets and all the world's natural and architectural wonders. He took him to the Metropolitan museum and led him, week by week, month by month, from the Egyptians to Cézanne (which was as far as Gerd himself had got in the history of art). By the time Veronica arrived, fifteen years later, Gerd had had two of his many operations and was mostly in a wheelchair, so they sat together in what had been his study, he with a tartan blanket on his lap, and she on the carpet with her frock drawn over her knees, listening to the English children's classics he had already read first to her mother and then to Andrew. My apartment is full of photographs of Gerd with our two grandchildren.

Gerd and I had been fellow students at Freiburg, and when that was no longer possible, in New York. Indeed, we had known each other as children and had been brought to play together under the supervision of our nannies while our mothers went to their coffee parties and matinée concerts. Later we arrived about the same time in New York and joined the same course under the famous Professor Hoch. During the first year or two in New York we formed a small, rather inward-looking group with other refugee students. Although some of us came from Germany and others from France or Italy, we had more in common with each other than with the American students—if only that we were adrift from the solid land of our own background and social assumptions, and our language. None of us was entirely fluent in English, though we were determined to become so and spoke nothing else, in a variety of accents and sometimes with comical mistakes. (Gerd and I never spoke German together again, till Debbie came, and then only when we didn't want her to know something.) As children, Gerd and I had often played at weddings together, and although
later we did not speak about marrying, there remained an assumption between us. But it was a point of honor among all of us to leave each other perfectly free; we were quite smug about it. I know that Gerd never availed himself of this arrangement, not even during those times when I did—and there were occasions, before Professor Hoch, when I could not resist trying out an affair with another of our refugee friends. I was adventurous at the time, afraid of missing something, ready to be stimulated by others or to take the initiative myself. But I really liked Gerd better than any of the other students.

Gerd and I were married when I was six months pregnant with Debbie. We hosted a noisy, highspirited wedding lunch in our favorite Irish pub-style restaurant with a bar and checked tablecloths, and our friends' epithalamia made jocular reference to the maternity smock I was wearing. No one except Gerd and I knew that Debbie—only we thought she was a boy, to be called David—was not Gerd's child. Professor Hoch was not present; we all stood in too much awe of him to invite him to such an intimate occasion. It was very different with Gerd, when he in due course became a professor of philosophy and attended all his students' celebrations. Hoch never hid his low opinion of his students—donkeys he called most of them, always in German,
“Esel.”
But Gerd not only loved, he esteemed his young people. I have seen him with tears in his eyes over a paper he was marking, only to have a student get something right; and it was the student he praised and admired, taking no credit at all for his own part in this achievement.

I still live in the West Side apartment that the University allowed us to keep after Gerd's retirement and even after he died. It is an enormous, cavernous place, and our furniture is also dark, standing on claw feet and embellished with carved clusters of grapes. We had bought it all second-hand,
as soon as we could afford it, and in imitation of the furniture we had known in our childhood. On one of my birthdays Gerd gave me a chandelier. All through our years here we filled the place with friends and students. There were always house-guests, and people eating, either at impromptu meals or helping themselves out of our large ice-box. We also took every excuse for a party—New Year's Eve, birthdays and anniversaries, Easter and Passover, we didn't care what it was as long as people ate and drank and talked through the night. None of us was very tidy and there were books lying about, and records, used cups and glasses, and suitcases belonging to whoever happened to be staying. We often forgot to turn off the lights, so that lamps and the chandelier burned all through the day.

The Hoch family lived in an almost identical West Side apartment, and their furniture was as ponderous as ours. Only theirs was not second-hand, for though they were also émigrés, they were voluntary ones who had been able to bring their possessions with them. Professor Hoch left Germany with the first dismissal of his Jewish colleagues and in protest at everything that was happening there. In New York they continued to live in a solid bourgeois German way. Frau Professor Hoch—Hedda—ran a strict and orderly household, to the exclusion of all dust and noise. Their two sons—tall, tow-headed—were models of respect and good behavior. Students were not encouraged to visit, except once or twice a year when there was a gathering at which Hedda played Bach two-handed clavier with her son. Only the Professor's favorite students were invited; Hoch made no pretense of not having favorites. I was always included, Gerd only rarely.