Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  Because of the circumstances of my mother’s birth, Yom Hashoah, which is Holocaust Memorial Day, and my mother’s birthday are the only two holidays we celebrate in our house. It wasn’t until the second grade, when I met Amy, who is my oldest and only friend except for George Liddy (and maybe Mercedes, though that’s a whole other story), that I realized the Holocaust and Yom Hashoah are not really the focal points of Judaism. I didn’t even know that Judaism was a religion until I met Amy, and her parents invited me to temple. We never go to temple. We don’t celebrate Pesach or Yom Kippur or light the Sabbath candles, except on Yom Hashoah and on my mother’s birthday. I never knew about that stuff until I met Amy, but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Pribor and about the Six Million. I swear I knew about the Six Million before I could count. It was like the name of a familiar food—the Six Million.

  Both Yom Hashoah and my mother’s birthday are celebrated in the same way: We turn off all the heat in the house and open all the windows, and we have to wear shorts so that we’re really cold. Then we decorate the house with photographs of dead relatives and pictures that I drew of concentration camp life—black crayon on white typing paper. We still use the same pictures every year although it’s been about three years since I’ve drawn anything new. For twenty-four hours, we don’t eat anything except stale bread, which my mother chews first and then spits into our mouths. During my mother’s birthday celebration, just a week ago, I nearly vomited during that part, but I closed my eyes, swallowed quickly, and pretended I was eating my favorite dessert—these couscous biscuits topped with honey and nuts that my father makes on special occasions.

  For the feeding part of the ceremony, my father and I lie on the floor and close our eyes while my mother chews the bread and puts it into our mouths—first one piece for me, then one for my father, then one for me, then one for him, until we have each consumed one thin slice of stale bread. When I was young, I thought of the rituals as a kind of theater and wondered why my father and I always played the role of the newborn baby in our family drama. Finally, when I was in third grade, I asked my father why we didn’t feed my mother instead of the other way around. “It is a way for us to get closer to your mother” was his answer. “It is almost a way for us to become her.” After he told me that, I was afraid my father and I would actually turn into my mother. When it was my turn to be fed, I repeated my name in my head over and over again, to convince my own brain that I was not my mother and did not want to become her. I really thought that if I let it happen, I would actually be her—look like her, talk like her, that there would be two of her and none of me. I was worried about my father too, so I started watching my mother feeding my father when it was his turn. I thought that if something happened and my father started transforming before my eyes, I would be able to do something to stop it. By the time I got to middle school, it started making me feel weird to watch my mother feed my father, so I started keeping my eyes closed again.

  After this year’s feeding ceremony, I made the mistake of telling my mother that the whole bread thing was some sick version of taking the Eucharist, and that put my mother back into the depression she had already been in, off and on, since we came back from Madrid in August. I think my father thought the onset of our holiday would get her out of bed and back on track, but I ruined that hope. I’m not saying I don’t feel bad about what I said. I know it was cruel, but eating the prechewed bread is sick, and I don’t think I should have to deal with that kind of stuff anymore. If my father still wants to go along with it, then he can do it without me. He can lie there and become my mother or whatever it is he does. They can sit in their freezing cold bedroom stark naked for days for all I care, and they will have to do it all without music because I am not going to play for the ceremonies anymore.

  Since I started playing the cello in kindergarten, I’ve been in charge of the music for the ceremonies. Last year on Yom Hashoah, I refused to play the same Kaddish set to music by some obscure Israeli composer that I’ve been playing since I was seven. I decided to play the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony instead because I think it’s probably the most melancholy piece of classical music ever written. My mother doesn’t allow anything German or Austrian in the house, so she stormed upstairs and locked herself in her room, and my father had to spend most of the afternoon talking to her through the closed door before she would let him in, and neither of them emerged until the next morning, which was fine with me. Imagine how difficult it is to become an accomplished musician if you’re not allowed to play Mozart, or Bach, or Schubert, or Beethoven. Imagine explaining that to an Armenian cello teacher. Mrs. Abadjian had the strictest instructions from my mother to eliminate the German and Austrian composers from my musical education, and it took me until I was nine to convince her to go behind my mother’s back and teach me some Bach. Of course I had been playing all the illegal composers on the sly way before that, but I needed feedback, especially for Bach; it’s so hard to strike that balance between emotion and intellect with Bach. As soon as I saved up enough of my allowance, I would ride to the music store in Englewood to buy a new forbidden piece. Then I would ride my bicycle, with my cello strapped to my back, all the way up Clinton Avenue—about three miles uphill—to the Nature Center. I would carry my cello into the woods and off the trails (even though there were signs every few feet warning you not to leave the trails) and there, as far away from people as I could get, I would practice the forbidden masters. My mother used to get on my case about riding my bike with my cello, but my father always stuck up for me about that kind of thing. He never does any exercise himself except walk down to the post office to mail his letters. (My father still writes letters to his colleagues every day. Every morning from seven to nine, he works on his correspondence, and he has files and files of letters from his friends and colleagues, all neatly labeled and packed away for posterity in the basement.) Still, my father is a great admirer of the Greek practice of exercising the body as well as the mind and is always saying that he wishes he had made more of an effort to study Greek when he was in graduate school.

  All of this clandestine activity made me appreciate the genius of the great German composers even more. It used to make me feel like Mozart himself, freezing cold, pumping up the hill, carrying the burden of my passion. I used to dream of being buried in a pauper’s cemetery just like Mozart was. Of course, now I play whatever and wherever I want, and my mother just ignores it. I started openly disobeying my mother’s rules about music on my fifteenth birthday. My mother shook her head sadly to make me feel guilty and went to her room crying, but I didn’t let it get to me. Then she got on an anti-rock ’n’ roll kick and tried to convince me not to listen to it anymore. She used to sit with me in my room and listen to CDs, pointing out all the repetitious chord progressions in rock music, and I would try to explain that a lot of great music, like salsa and Middle Eastern, is repetitious, that repetition gives music a hypnotic quality. I made her listen to all my CDs until she just gave up on me. I guess she figured I was the musician of the family and now she doesn’t bother me anymore about what music I play or listen to. But, to this day, when I’m feeling especially introverted, I still go to the Nature Center to play my cello.

  There are other times, though, especially when I’ve been working really hard on a piece of music and I feel like I’ve made a breakthrough, and I can play it over and over again without making a single mistake, that I need to get out of the house, distract myself a little. That’s when I like hanging out with Amy and her boyfriend, Josh. We go to the movies or drive around listening to the Cranberries. Amy and Josh like to smoke a little dope, which doesn’t bother me because then we can all space out and not talk. I don’t like to smoke because it gives me a stomachache. Sometimes we all take the bus into the city and walk around the Village. They’re really into weird clothes, so they go to all the secondhand places while I either browse through bookstores or sit in Washington S
quare Park and watch people. No one pays too much attention to me because I’m not that interesting looking—no pierced nose or lip, no spiked hair.

  When I was younger, in middle school especially, I used to wish Amy’s parents were mine. Her father is a big joker and they have really noisy dinners with Bruce Springsteen playing in the background. Amy’s parents are huge Bruce Springsteen fans and go to all his concerts when he plays at the Meadowlands. Sometimes they even drive all the way to Boston or Albany to see him play, and they take Amy and her brother with them. They invited me to go with them once when I was in seventh grade, but my parents didn’t let me. They said we wouldn’t get home until way after midnight and that people get trampled at rock and roll concerts. My parents always refer to rock music as rock and roll music.

  Back in middle school Amy and I would lie on the floor in her room for hours, listening to Bruce Springsteen CDs, and she had a big signed poster of him in her room. Her parents had one the size of a picture window over the couch in the living room, plus they had all his records, which they actually still listen to. Amy’s father won’t even buy CDs because he says the music sounds too far away on them, that records sound live, like you’re actually in the room with Bruce. He always calls Bruce Springsteen Bruce. Then a couple years ago, Amy took down her Bruce Springsteen poster and replaced Bruce with a life-size print of Monet’s Water Lilies, which she bought on one of our trips to the Metropolitan Museum. I tried to convince her to get something more interesting, Van Gogh at least, but she loved the Monet. “It’s just so pretty and peaceful,” she told me, and I said I wouldn’t be able to sleep with Monet’s pretty flowers in my room, and she told me I was weird. I wonder what it’s like to have parents who go to rock concerts and smoke pot. I guess it’s kind of like sleeping with Monet’s lovely Water Lilies.

  Even though Amy and I don’t have that much in common anymore and we haven’t seen that much of each other since I came back from Madrid, I know I am always welcome at her house. Amy’s mother even told me once that if things got rough, I could live with them. We’ve never actually talked about my mother’s illness, but Amy has told her mother some things over the years. When I first met Amy in the second grade, she used to come over to my house to play as often as I went to her house, but it was a long time before she ever got to even glimpse my mother because my mother was going through a particularly bad time the year I met Amy. When we played at my house, we usually did a lot of quiet things like drawing because my mother was in her room and I knew not to disturb her with loud games. One day while we were drawing pictures of sailboats on the patio with colored chalk, Amy asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  “In her room,” I said.

  “You know what I think?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I think you don’t really have a mother. I think your mother’s dead.” She didn’t say it in a mean or taunting way. It was just that she really wanted to know.

  “She’s not dead. She’s tired. Do you want to see her?” My father was in the middle of putting the screens back on the windows and had left the ladder right at my mother’s window.

  “Sure,” Amy said.

  “Go up and see for yourself.” I pointed to the ladder.

  “You go first,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything because I knew that if I waited without saying a thing, she would do it. She climbed up really slowly. When she was halfway up, she looked down at me, as if asking for my encouragement, and I nodded, so she kept going. When she got to the top of the ladder, she looked down again, and I nodded again, and then she got up really close to the window and looked in. After what seemed to be a very long time, I started getting nervous because she was so high up on the ladder and because my father might come out at any minute to check on us.

  “You’d better come down now,” I called up to her.

  “Just a minute,” she said.

  “I think I hear my father,” I said even though I didn’t.

  So she scrambled down the ladder as fast as she could and jumped to the ground from about the fourth rung, but she landed on her feet triumphantly.

  “Now you believe me?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “She wasn’t wearing anything, not even underwear,” Amy whispered as if it were a big secret.

  “So?” I said.

  “So nothing,” Amy said, grabbing the chalk from my hand and taking off with it. I chased her around the yard a few times, letting her keep ahead of me even though I could have caught her easily if I had wanted to. Then I just stopped running, but she kept running around the yard, not aware that I wasn’t chasing her anymore. It took her a long time to notice that I had gone back to our drawing and, when she finally realized that she wasn’t being pursued, she yelled, “I won!” putting her arms up in the air like an Olympic champion. “I won!” she said as she handed the chalk back to me, but I didn’t look at her. I took the chalk and started drawing and then she started drawing again too. Her mouth was loosely open and her tongue was sticking out the way it always did when she concentrated really hard.

  After that Amy didn’t want to play at our house anymore. She said it was boring, that all we could do was draw or play checkers and that there were never any snacks. So we just moved our activities over to Amy’s house. We would go there directly after school and her mother always had snacks ready for us—little boxes of raisins, an Oreo cookie each, and orange juice. At Amy’s house we could make as much noise as we wanted and watch television, which was always a treat for me since we didn’t have one, and, in the summer, Amy’s mother took us to the swim club.

  I can’t imagine moving in with Amy now even though I would have loved it at one time. She wouldn’t want me around all the time anyway because she has Josh and she would feel like she had to invite me to come along all the time and her mother would always be trying to cheer me up. At least here I get ignored most of the time whether my mother is going through a good or bad phase. When she’s up in her room all day like she is now, my father spends most of his free time in there trying to talk her through things, coax her back into the world, and when she’s feeling okay, my father spends all his free time working on his articles and my mother works as many hours as she can at the store.

  She works at a rug store called the Magic Carpet, which I think is a totally unoriginal name, but it seems to work. She’s a really good salesperson even though you wouldn’t think she would be. I’ve seen her, pointing out the richness in color and texture and the tight weave and assuring even the most skeptical that no enslaved children sweated for eighteen hours a day, eating only scraps from their masters’ tables like dogs, to make the rug that would fit so perfectly under the glass coffee table in their sunken living room.

  She got into Middle Eastern rugs while accompanying my father on his research trips to Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran. In fact, he’s one of the few Western scholars even allowed in Iran. He meets with renowned Mullahs and sifts through brittle manuscripts in ancient libraries while my mother bargains her way through the medinas, buying up rugs. She knows how to spend hours sitting on the floor in a rug shop, drinking tea, showing only a cursory interest in the carpets until the sun starts to set and the rug dealer wants to go home with a nice sale under his belt. Our whole house is filled with rugs. There are at least twenty rugs in the living room so that not an inch of floor is showing. My mother calls it the tent effect. At first she would just bring rugs back and sell them to Mrs. Kornfeld, the woman who owns the Magic Carpet, but a few years ago Mrs. Kornfeld got breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy, so my mother started helping her out at the store and she’s been there ever since even though Mrs. Kornfeld seems to be fully recovered. She is very understanding about my mother’s condition. Sometimes my mother has me call her to tell her that my mother will not be coming in for a while, and Mrs. Kornfeld ha
s told me at least ten times that, as a cancer survivor, she “knows what my mother is going through,” although if I were a cancer survivor, someone like my mother, who wasted half her precious life in bed, would make me angry. But I am not a cancer survivor, so it’s not really fair of me to say that. I guess my mother and what Mrs. Kornfeld calls my mother’s perfect eye have brought in quite a bit of business, so she is happy to have her. As for my mother, the job amuses her, gets her out of the house, and, as she is always reminding me, her earnings go to my college fund, so I can go to “the college of my choice.”

  Actually, I’m thinking about not going to college at all. With my cello, I can earn my own living. I could go to Europe when I finish high school and play my way around—spend a year in Budapest, maybe. I’ve always had this thing about Hungary. The summer before last I spent about three or four days a week playing my cello in front of Lincoln Center. Once a policeman told me that technically he should give me a ticket for soliciting without a license, but that was all the trouble I ever had. At first I was scared of the police all the time because these two Jamaican guys who play the steel drum told me to always be ready to pick up and beat it. I even practiced getting my cello and music into my case as fast as I could so I would be prepared, but then I realized that a cello-playing white girl doesn’t have to worry about being chased away by the police. On my last day I had planned to tell the police they were racist idiots, but I didn’t because I felt hypocritical enough as it was, and then I really felt like shit when one of the Jamaican drummers gave me fifty dollars because he knew it was my last day. “You keep playing that cello,” he said. My cello made me about a hundred dollars in five hours on average, and by the end of the summer, I was able to open up my own savings account, which no one knows about. If things get really bad, I figure I can use the money to get out of here. I could buy a plane ticket to Budapest, or I could buy a used car and move to someplace that is the total opposite of here—like Oklahoma.