By the Book

by Ramona Koval

  Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it did not come; then, at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.

  But Emma was also describing my own adolescent life. My mama guarded my social life and even shopped for my clothes. I was waiting for my own longboat or three-decked vessel to take me away. I imagined all kinds of futures for myself, as a noble and clever and virtuous woman making the world better. I assumed I’d have the love of my perfect man, who would be gifted and courageous. If my mother ever let me meet anyone. But, to her credit, Mama never restricted my reading life, and I was free to think about whatever I wanted, and imagine whatever story came to mind.

  CHAPTER 4

  Between knowing and telling

  How strange then, armed as I was with all this knowledge of what might happen if a girl with too much of an interest in books marries the wrong man, I found myself married and pregnant at twenty to a young doctor, my own version of Charles Bovary. I had read the books that people had been reading that first year of university in the early seventies—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, but I was deeply immersed by then in a science degree, and the warnings of Emma Bovary and the enticements of Colette were not at the front of my mind.

  The truth was that, during all those afternoons of repose on the couch, my mama’s reading under her blanket had masked her slow descent into illness. In my third year of university, she was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia, and there was no cure. My urgent impulse was to marry my boyfriend and present her with a grandchild, a naive defence against the inevitable. How could she die when there was a baby coming?

  In my honours year in microbiology, I went into labour at the age of twenty-one and two weeks. I must have been completely ignorant of what exactly was going to happen to me since I packed my thesis so I could write between the contractions and finish it between the feeds. My friend Sally, seven years older and a single mother of a seven-year-old boy, explained that short stories were all that new mothers ever got a chance to finish. She gave me a collection called The Little Disturbances of Man by the Jewish-American writer Grace Paley. Paley’s family had arrived from Ukraine at the beginning of the twentieth century, and she was a first-generation American gal, born in the Bronx, in New York. Her voice, formed in a family that spoke Russian and Yiddish, immediately resonated with me, making me laugh and cry. Her words seemed full of practical wisdom.

  ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’ is still my favourite, Paley’s first story. She wrote it in 1956, at the age of thirty-four, and it’s about an ageing woman reminiscing fondly about her youth and the love of her life (a womanising actor in the Yiddish theatre). It is a story we expect will end badly for her but, instead, it moves to an unexpectedly blissful conclusion. It begins like this:

  I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don’t notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary’s ear for thirty years…she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinks—poor Rosie…

  Poor Rosie! If there was more life in my little sister, she would know my heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that her whole married life is a kindergarten.

  I really want to read you the whole story—it is so lovely, so full of hope and grace. American novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates said, ‘How aptly named: Grace Paley. For “grace” is perhaps the most accurate, if somewhat poetic, term to employ in speaking of this gifted writer.’ And, speaking of this first book, Oates added that Paley ‘immediately drew an audience of readers who were not only admiring but loving’. And that she was a lyricist of the domestic life, writing of men and women, of children and parents and of politics. Paley was not a prolific writer. When asked why, she said, ‘For me there is a lot of time between knowing and telling.’ But why didn’t she attempt longer, more ambitious and technically challenging fiction? ‘Art is too long,’ she said, ‘and life is too short. There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.’

  ‘I was a woman’, Paley said on another occasion, ‘writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women’s movement. I didn’t know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.’

  Grace Paley was seventy-eight when I finally met her in New York in 2001, at the French Roast, a coffee shop on the corner of 11th Street and 6th Avenue. She was tiny and I towered over her to kiss her hello. She had a beautiful open face, with high cheekbones and widely spaced eyes. Her hair was unruly, curly like mine. It had been fair, but now it was grey. She was five years older than my mother would have been. But mama died at forty-nine years of age so it was hard to imagine her as an old lady in my mind’s eye.

  Later Grace would tell me about a friend of hers who had died.

  ‘Not like me,’ she said, ‘my friend was petite.’

  ‘And you’re not?’ I asked, laughing.

  ‘Petite in the garment industry but not in real life,’ she said. ‘I’m just short and fat.’

  We sat in the corner of the café, eating salad and drinking coffee, and talking about the new president (the ‘American coup’, she called it), the Russians, the stories of Isaac Babel, our daughters, her grandchildren, adoption, women who had given up their babies, and her trip to Arizona to an Indian reservation for a writers’ workshop.

  She asked me to walk with her. She needed to do some shopping and offered to show me her neighbourhood.

  ‘You know something about life?’ she said, as we stood up from the table.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘When you’re seventy-eight and you get up from sitting at a table for a long time, your joints hurt.’

  The reason we couldn’t meet at her house, she said, was that her daughter Nora was not feeling well and had flown in from Vermont for a rest. Nora made her mother promise that she could have the house to herself.

  ‘How old is your daughter?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s a middle-aged woman. If she were younger, I’d know more how to handle her.’

  She said her children resented her sociability when they were growing up. The number of people dropping by the house all the time bothered them, and now, she thought, maybe she had overdone it.

  I was reminded of a story she had written called ‘The Long Distance Runner’:

  Near home, I ran through our park, where I had aired my children on weekends and late-summer afternoons. I stopped at the north-east playground, where I met a dozen young mothers intelligently handling their little ones. In order to prepare them, meaning no harm, I said, in fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything.

  We walked past her house on 11th Street and she pointed out the landmarks: the church, which was now a library, and the women’s prison, now a courtyard.

  ‘Is that where you were kept when you got arrested for your anti-nuclear protest?’ I asked. It was. She wrote a story about her character and alter ego, Faith, who had been arrested at a demonstration. Her cell was full of black women who were in for drugs, or violence, or prostitution. When Faith explains why she’s there, I vividly remember one of them shouting to the guards, ‘Get this housewif
e outta here!’

  We went to a hardware store to find some handles for an old chest of drawers. I asked, as we walked along the street, ‘How is it when your friends die?’

  ‘Terrible,’ she said, ‘and they go in batches.’

  We talked about the merits of having younger or older husbands. She said that friends who married younger men were always concerned that their husbands would leave them, especially as they got older.

  ‘They always think it’s the age,’ she said, ‘but it could be other things. I like my old man.’

  She stopped for a moment and smiled to me as she talked of her husband, Robert, who at eighty-two had started a new publishing venture with her in order to ‘publish books that lots of publishers have rejected’.

  ‘I like my old man but I wouldn’t want to be a younger woman married to an old man.’

  She kept pausing in the street to tell me things about life. ‘I had breast cancer last year. I had one breast removed but I’m fine now. I’m good.’

  As we parted we saw a professional dog-walker with five charges. He tied them to a fire hydrant and went into a shop. They all sniffed each other’s hindquarters and pissed on the hydrant. They looked just like a cartoon from the New Yorker.

  She showed me the way home, we kissed, and she walked slowly back to 11th Street, her bushy grey hair blowing in the February wind.

  As I watched her walking away, I thought that I could have been in a story by Paley. In many of them, the women simply go for long walks and talk. That day I had been given words of wisdom: a door had opened into her life and closed again as she walked away. I wished Mama had lived long enough to allow her to tell me things directly, like Grace did. But I suspect her secrecy was born of the years in which she acted a part to save her life, and couldn’t be tempered by simply growing older. I hoped to be a wise and clear old lady like Grace.

  She died in 2007 at the age of eighty-four. Jess Row wrote an obituary in Slate: ‘Like all the greatest masters of the short story—Chekhov, Hemingway, Sholom Aleichem, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel—Paley had an uncanny genius for containing a world within a sentence…Her stories are often described as having a spontaneous, performative quality, like dramatic monologues. But this is a carefully cultivated illusion—her language mimics colloquial speech but pares it down to nubbins of almost Beckett-like brevity.’

  Not only does art imitate life but life imitates art. Perhaps we not only learn about life from stories, perhaps we make our lives through the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us.

  We read to find out what the world is like, to experience lots of lives, not just the one that we live. If it is true that our lives are chaotic and we crave a shape, stories are the shapes that we put on experience, containing all the wisdom in the world. We can even choose what kind of wisdom suits us.

  ‘When people get old,’ Paley told the Paris Review in 1994, ‘they seem wise but it’s only because they’ve got a little more experience, that’s all. I’m not so wise. Two things happen when you get older. You have more experience, so you either seem wiser, or you get totally foolish. There are only those two options. You choose one, probably the wrong one.’

  Paley was petite in the garment industry but not in real life. In reality, she was a giant. I can’t walk with Paley in Greenwich Village any more but I can open her books and feel her there again, her hand on my hand, her smile across the table, her voice—or a voice like hers—saying, as she does in the opening line of one of her stories, ‘There were two husbands disappointed by eggs…’

  How could you do anything except see what happens next?

  When my mama died I was pregnant with my younger daughter. It was a bleak year as I cared for my younger sister, my two-year-old toddler and my mother at home until three days before she died. Both that year and the year after, when my second daughter was born, there wasn’t much time for reading. The days seemed grey and long, and I don’t even remember a spring or summer.

  But I did continue my interest in stories, and discovered Isaac Bashevis Singer. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978, the year of my second daughter’s birth, and new editions of his work were being published. His stories were precious for me as many of them were set in Jewish Poland before the war, and I thought they were a way for me to hold on to the connection with my mama, so cruelly severed by her death.

  The town of Frampol and its environs, where many of his stories are set, was a community of rabbis and shoemakers, of farmers and shop owners, of passions and cruelties and love and sacrifice. But this world had another side where imps and dybbuks, ghosts and devils, witches and fallen angels all conspired to meddle with the souls of the inhabitants.

  So even though I am immensely rational, I liked reading about the traps that the nether world set to test the purity and goodness of the characters, and it reminded me of the stories my mama would tell me about growing up in a family in which there were rules for every moment of the day—what you ate, what you wore, how you conducted yourself—and where there was superstition too. Whenever anyone told her what lovely daughters she had, she’d spit three times to avert the ‘evil eye’ and when she sewed a button on a shirt while we were wearing it, she made us hold a thread of red cotton in our mouths for the same reason.

  But Singer’s stories and novels were also full of desire and longing and sex and forbidden relationships and broken taboos. Of fools who triumph over those who jeer at them, of young women, like Yentl in his story ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’ from The Collected Stories, whose desire to study the Talmud and whose aversion to the drudgeries of a woman’s lot make her disguise herself as a young man called Anshel and go off to study in another town. In the study group, Anshel makes a wonderful friend of Avigdor, a young man who is in love with Hadass but unable to marry her, and the two ‘men’ fall in love without either of them being able to name the feelings. Anshel even marries Hadass, and manages to blood the sheets on the wedding night, and Hadass, the virgin, seems not to notice that Anshel is a girl. When Yentl finally shows Avigdor that she is a woman, she arranges to divorce Hadass who then is free to marry Avigdor, and the newly married couple name their first child Anshel, to the mystification of the local townsfolk.

  The story is operatic in its mistaken identities, but again it speaks of the lengths to which clever girls might go to have a life of their own choosing.

  It’s a tradition, when a Jewish person dies, to light a candle that will burn for twenty-four hours, and to say a prayer for the dead. Isaac Bashevis Singer died at the age of eighty-eight in 1991. That night I lit a candle in the lounge room, on a bookshelf that held copies of his books. It was winter, and I went to bed thinking of his tales of passion and mysteries and ghosts.

  In the middle of the night I heard glass smashing and voices calling and at first I thought I was dreaming, but when I went to the window of my room I saw flames pouring out of the house next door, a few feet away from me across the shared driveway.

  As I stood in the street, with my children and our neighbours, all in our dressing gowns, watching the fire brigade fight in vain to save the house, I thought of my candle still flickering on my bookshelf, as the smoke rose from the burning roof across the way, a story befitting the great master storyteller himself.

  CHAPTER 5

  What the guilty always say

  When the Camberwell bus librarian stamped the back page of Kafka’s The Trial and handed it to me I remember how seriously I carried it home. It was as if I held my adulthood in the palms of my hands. Franz Kafka. His very name spoke to me of things I could already understand: of otherness, of Europe, of the featherbedding we slept under (no woollen blankets like other school friends until Mama won ten pounds in Tatts one year), of schnitzel and of poppy-seed cake.

  What I remember from that first reading is a story of a legal system that is bewildering to Kafka’s protagonist, Josef K. He is sitting on his bed one morning, waiting for his breakfast to be delivered, when he
is disturbed by a stranger in a suit, who is there to arrest him for a crime of which he is ignorant.

  I understood Josef K. I found my childhood bewildering, and felt I had to seek out the meaning of the world independently from the explanations that were not forthcoming from my parents. When Josef K. says he is innocent of any crimes, his arrester says, ‘That’s what the guilty always say.’ I felt, as many children do, that the unhappiness of my parents was due to something I might have done. Did I have a legion of unnamed crimes of which I thought I was innocent, but may, indeed, have been guilty?

  Reading The Trial again, I am struck by how clearly and simply the story is told (in translation, of course) and by how much it has in common with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a dream where events are more or less lifelike, but don’t add up to anything sensible. But while Alice is in a world that is frustrating and bewildering, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwards’, Josef K. is seriously at risk.

  Kafka describes each step that Josef K. takes and why: how he is childlike in his analysis of the people around him and of the insane events that unfold, his assumptions about his rights and how the system would work for him. I had no experience of formal bureaucracies, but I must have intuited, from my experience of school or my parents’ experiences of factory life or of going to the bank for a loan, that he was heading for trouble.

  I wonder now if I equated the grownupness of being allowed to read the book with the grown-up world it described. Whatever the effect, Kafka gave me an early taste for both absurdity and European writing that has never left me.