by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com; Yoon Ha Lee; Meghan McCarron; Theodora Goss
Once, when she was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework, a man in a green plaid suit said to her, “You can’t go to medical school. You’re not qualified.”
She stared at his tie, which had a pattern of wheat sheaves and small tractors. His neck turned red. Above his mustache, his cheeks and nose also turned red.
“Why haven’t you joined the Party?” he asked with barely suppressed rage. She had not known that a question could sound so angry. She was afraid he was going to slap her.
After he disappeared, she could not think about her homework. Instead, she went out to the back garden and sat on the bricks, staring at the ivy that grew up the sides of the house. Sometimes sparrows built nests there, among the leaves, and in the mornings, especially, the ivy cheeped and stirred. Last spring, one of the stray cats had brought a baby sparrow in to breakfast and laid it down on the linoleum, like a gift.
At first she thought the stray cats were ghosts. They came in the evenings and sat on the bricks in the back garden. She would take them up to her bedroom. After they had stayed in her bedroom for three days, living on milk and chicken left over from the paprikás, they were allowed to stay.
Sometimes they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. These, she decided, where ghost cats from the streets of Budapest. But others stayed, and during her childhood there were more and more cats, sitting on the sofa, scratching the legs of the dining room table, curling beside her when she slept at night, one on her feet, one at her side, one with his chin on her shoulder, purring into her ear. In the middle of the night, he liked to pull her hair with his claws. She would wake up, and that was when, more often than not, she would see the ghosts.
At first, she thought the voice on the telephone was a ghost. “Traitor!” it said. “We’re coming to take your children. Why did you leave your parents? They miss you, your husband misses you. We’ll put you in prison, with rats, and sewer water seeping over the floor!”
Soon after, they moved to the country. Her brother began a series of collections: stones from the streambed, insects, a selection of rusted nails. He kept them in shoe boxes, in his closet. The insects crawled out. Spiders began to spin webs in the corners of his room. Sometimes they would eat dinner with fireflies crawling over the ceiling. The stray cats kept leaving half-eaten caterpillars on the stairs.
More than once, Ilona saw her grandmother, an old woman with short gray hair and delicate wrists. As a girl, she had studied art. Later, she had been forbidden to sell her paintings. They arrived at holidays wrapped around boxes of chocolates. Her mother hung them in every room of the house, even the bathroom. If you stood close, you could still see creases where her mother had ironed the folds.
She always appeared as a thin wash, like one of her watercolors of the light over Lake Balaton. Through her, Ilona could see the banister, the dining room table, the swing hanging from an oak tree in the garden.
Once, she thought she saw her father standing by the oak tree. He was wearing a uniform, like the train conductor but with a red star on his cap. She thought he looked handsome, but he vanished quickly.
There is something I have forgotten to tell you. When she was twelve and still living in Washington D.C., day after day for a period of three months she saw tanks driving down the streets. On her way to school, on her way to the dentist. During these months, she could not sleep. She threw up everything but a slice of birthday cake at a party for a girl from school. She lost weight and developed dark circles under her eyes. Her mother took her to the doctor. She began to believe she was turning into a ghost.
You are angry with me. You say, this is not a story. It is merely a series of scenes, and of manufactured scenes at that. Your name is not Ilona. You never saw your mother’s ghosts.
And of course you are right. When Ilona was seventeen, her mother died of breast cancer. After that, she never saw ghosts. Her brother grew up to be a famous entomologist. He is now a professor at Harvard. She grew up to be a writer, but not of stories. She writes about art, and sometimes architecture. She would never write this story, so I am writing it for her.
My mother did not die. Last year, she finished law school. My brother, a computer programmer, went to her graduation. They live by the ocean in California, where it is always sunny.
I rarely see them. I am haunted by ghosts, invisible, impalpable: the ghosts of silver spoons and margarine tubs, the smell of paprikás cooking on Sunday afternoons. The ghost of a country.
Sometimes, in my Boston apartment, I see her: the ghost of my mother, walking along the hallway, running her fingers over the piano. I see her from the back, wearing a dress with light blue and white checks. She made us both dresses out of that fabric, in Brussels. Once, a policeman stopped to ask me, with a wink, if I liked taking walks with my older sister.
When I see her, she is always walking away from me. And her back tells me, some things you can’t understand, even by writing about them.
Originally published in: The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories Small Beer Press, 2004
About the Author
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a PhD in English literature. Her short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, a poetry anthology and critical analysis, was published in 2008.
“Writing My Mother’s Ghosts”
by Theodora Goss
This essay was presented as part of a panel called “Reeling Beyond Realism: But to Reel in What?” proposed by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn Publishing for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in New York City. I’m grateful to Rusty and Ken for proposing such a fantastic panel, and for inviting me to participate.
When Rusty and Ken asked me to be on this panel, for some reason I thought of a story I had written several years ago called “Her Mother’s Ghosts.” It begins,
Her name is Ilona. The other children at school call her Smellona.
The other children at school call her Smellona because the children at my school called me Snora. I spoke with an accent and wore hand-me-down clothes, which in elementary school are very good reasons for calling someone Snora. Ilona is a version of me. I even gave her my grandmother’s name. Before I tell you more about Ilona, I should tell you that I was born in Hungary in 1968. It is obvious, in my story, that Ilona was as well. I thought this presentation, short as it is, should have the dignity of a title, so I’m calling it “Writing My Mother’s Ghosts.”
This is my favorite part of the story:
In the kitchen drawer are silver spoons, smuggled in socks, the sleeves of pajamas. They are heavy, dulled with use. They are older than her mother, her grandmother. One is much worse for having slipped into the garbage disposal. In the kitchen cabinet are margarine tubs, more than ten, perhaps more than twenty, washed clean, ready in case the world runs out of margarine tubs. Don’t laugh. It could happen.
So far, I’m being a stark realist. My mother really did collect margarine tubs. Sometimes I thought they were going to take over the house. (There, you see, as soon as I begin to exaggerate, realism slips and the story turns fantastical, as in my vision of an apocalypse without margarine tubs.) But the next paragraph begins,
Since Ilona turned seven, she has been haunted by her mother’s ghosts.
And there I am, writing fantasy. Her mother’s ghosts are party officials, who threaten a
nd cajole her. Ilona’s father appears briefly, identifiable as a party official by the red star on his cap. (I made that up. I have no idea what sorts of uniforms party officials wore in Hungary at that time, or even if they wore uniforms. Sometimes it is when I seem most realistic that I’m fantasizing.)
Several years ago, soon after I set up a website, because I had been told that all writers needed websites, someone wrote to me. I think he was in the writing program at Boston University, where I teach. It is a prestigious writing program. But I don’t think it has much regard for the fantastical in literature. He said that he had read my biography.
The biography on my website begins with a description of growing up in Hungary, of living in an apartment building in Budapest that had probably once been the residence of an aristocratic family, but was now divided into small flats. (I think our apartment had once been a double parlor, because its two rooms are still connected by a large door with panes of glass.) We would fetch coal from the cellar to heat water. In the bathroom, there was an alcove where my mother and her sister could have hidden if, in 1956, the Russians had come into our apartment. That was good writing, he told me. Good enough for a prestigious literary magazine. But why, after describing how we left Hungary, with two suitcases and the equivalent of twenty-five dollars, did I talk about disappearing into books, and specifically fantasy books? I came to the United States and disappeared into Narnia and Middle Earth and Earthsea. I exchanged real for imaginary geography. Why? he asked me. He was not asking me why, as a child, I had escaped to imaginary countries, but why, as an adult, I remained there. Why I wrote fantasy when I could, evidently, write realism.
There, you see, I have used the dreaded word “escape.” I was an escapist. That was what, finally although implicitly, he was accusing me of. For a long time I felt vaguely ashamed of being an escapist. But recently I have decided to reclaim the word. I am not, after all, ashamed of being a feminist, which is also one of those words ending in —ist that has acquired, I’m not sure why, a negative connotation. But, you might say, an escapist is more passive than a feminist. A feminist chains herself to the White House gates. An escapist allows herself to be taken somewhere else, where political engagement is not necessary. That is certainly part of our definition of an escapist, but in reclaiming the word I want to redefine it. Think of how we define a capitalist, or a communist. One actively accumulates capital and attempts to create a world in which the accumulation of capital is possible; the other actively agitates for the collective ownership of capital. Both attempt to change the world. Think of a bicyclist. She bicycles, joins bicycling clubs, agitates for paths. Why, then, should an escapist be passive? I have decided that I am an active escapist, an advocate of escape. Remember that I was born in a country that one could not leave, that one could only escape from. Escaping was, in a sense, the first important act of my life.
Of course I didn’t think of all this back then, when I had someone to answer. I don’t remember what I wrote to him, but it was something vague and unsatisfying. I had not realized, then, that escape is my ideology. I believe that imaginative escape allows us to look back at the country we came from, whether it is a geographical country or the country of literary realism, and do what exiles have always done: offer a critique. That’s what I did in my story about Ilona, in which I say,
There is something I have forgotten to tell you. When she was twelve and still living in Washington D.C., day after day for a period of three months she saw tanks driving down the streets. On her way to school, on her way to the dentist. During these months, she could not sleep. She threw up everything but a slice of birthday cake at a party for a girl from school. She lost weight and developed dark circles under her eyes. Her mother took her to the doctor. She began to believe she was turning into a ghost.
Once, when my aunt was telling me about being in a car accident, she said, “I was so scared, almost as scared as I was in 1956.” In my family, everything, finally, goes back to tanks rolling down the street. My brother and I grew up haunted by the ghosts of tanks rolling down the streets of Washington D.C.
My mother had rejected communist ideology but had left it only imperfectly behind, in the way you reject, but never entirely leave behind, what you learned as a child. So communists and capitalists were both fantastical creatures. They might as well have had horns coming out of their heads, and tails. One would come in the night to take you away to prison, the other would corrupt your soul. Perhaps one reason I write fantasy is that I grew up in a fantastical reality. But didn’t we all? What fantasy allows us to escape from is, in part, the illusion that the world we live in is entirely real, when there are significant parts of it that are really make-believe. We are surrounded by unreality: parts of our political system, the stock market, the fashion industry. There are even people, like Princess Diana, who are partly make-believe.
I think what I’ve said, among the tanks and margarine tubs, is something like this. That I write fantasy because the reality I see around me is fantastical, so that fantasy becomes a new realism, representing our reality, the reality of the twenty-first century, more accurately than the old realism, which was formed in the nineteenth. That fantasy is important because it offers escape, which allows us to leave our countries, the countries where we are citizens and understand the language, to become at least temporary exiles. As exiles, we can look back at the countries we have left, to see them again more clearly. Literary realism is one of those countries. Escapist ideology allows me to see that realism is also an ideology, one that can obscure reality as much as it can illuminate it. It can also turn into escapism, the passive kind that allows us to evade reality without looking at it closely, without reflecting and critiquing.
“Her Mother’s Ghosts” ends by acknowledging that I am an escapist, that my story is fantasy, that the story I am telling is not my story:
When Ilona was seventeen, her mother died of breast cancer. After that, she never saw ghosts. Her brother grew up to be a famous entomologist. He is now a professor at Harvard. She grew up to be a writer, but not of stories. She writes about art, and sometimes architecture. She would never write this story, so I am writing it for her.
My mother did not die. Last year, she finished law school. My brother, a computer programmer, went to her graduation. They live by the ocean in California, where it is always sunny.
I rarely see them. I am haunted by ghosts, invisible, impalpable: the ghosts of silver spoons and margarine tubs, the smell of paprikás cooking on Sunday afternoons. The ghost of a country.
And there, although I am talking about ghosts, I am back to the starkest realism, because these are the things by which I really am haunted. But it is a different kind of realism, a truthfulness to psychological facts. That is what I mean, I think, when I talk about a new realism. All literature is a representation of reality, because we have nothing else. We have ourselves and the world around us, that is all. Fantasy represents that world, in a different way than literary realism, but it represents it nevertheless. It also, and this I have not said, allows us to imagine new possibilities that do not exist in our current reality. It is fantasy that allows us to imagine the world we want to create. Perhaps a world without tanks, which a realist might tell you is stark fantasy.
About the Author
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a PhD in English literature. Her short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of
Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, a poetry anthology and critical analysis, was published in 2008.
“An Interview with Gene Wolfe”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones
Gene Wolfe will tell you the truth, in conversation and in fiction, whether you want to hear it or not. He is perhaps best known for his novels set on Urth, including the four-part Book of the New Sun and the four part Book of the Long Sun. He writes fantasy and science fiction, and a grim blend of both that he insists is not horror.
Overall, he writes a story the way it needs to be written and he does so in rich, textured prose that delights on a first and rewards on a second reading.
“The high quality of Gene’s prose guaranteed him critical attention,” said David Drake, a long-time friend of Wolfe’s and author of The Lord of the Isles series and the Hammer Slammers series. “He’s also a commercial success, though, which is a very different thing. He’s seen enough of life to be able to write about hard places in a fashion to both [speak] to those who’ve been in them, and to make them vivid to luckier people who haven’t personally seen what Gene has.”
It’s those “hard places” and unacceptable truths that inform even the lightest of Wolfe’s narratives. His stories, long and short, can be relentless, brutal, grim, and, word for word, maddeningly beautiful.
I interviewed Wolfe while he was entrenched in the writing of An Evil Guest, which was released earlier this year.
What do you enjoy about writing?
