Love
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
Dear X,
It’s late at night, and I begin this letter by slipping into those moments right before I knew you. Thus I experience once again the mysterious shock of first seeing you. Later I will see the envelope and imagine its destination. It’s so rare to hold a letter these days! I hope you find the news important and good.
Earlier tonight I stood annually in C.’s kitchen, already dreading the solstice ritual where we’re supposed to read and then burn little scraps of paper on which we have written either the things we want or things we no longer need, I can never remember. Until this year it had never seemed to matter.
Last year I ended up standing before the fireplace holding two little pieces of napkin on which I had written these phrases: ‘stop subletting’ and ‘regulate feeling like panda feeling’. As my moment came closer I watched several people hold in their trembling hands the little bits of what they hoped for or hoped would no longer return before throwing them into the fire and crying.
Have you ever felt like an awful blue tuxedo someone rented because it seemed so hilarious at the time? How sad, now they have nothing else but you to wear to the celebration. That’s just one of the many feelings I’d like to be able to throw not into the fire but someplace just far enough from myself to forget it, and just close enough to instantly retrieve.
This year I found myself before the shelf upon which rests a collection of porcelain elves about the size of my thumb. Idly picking up one particular chipped figure I saw how eerily it resembled my high school geometry teacher. With a feeling of great excitement I turned, felt the sharp disappointment there was no one anywhere near me who cared, and caught or was caught by the sight of you sitting on a couch, holding a glass with a face painted on it.
I’m not what people would call a ‘visual person’. In fact, I’m one of those people who likes the names of flowers so much he can’t remember which ones they actually are. You were talking to someone who seemed to be but was not wearing a hat pulled down around his eyes, and as you turned slightly, below your short dark hair one side of your face was no longer shaded but lit pretty clearly by a lamp. I saw one tiny freckle just above the side of your mouth, which turned up just the slightest bit, I wouldn’t call it a smile.
I could see it so clearly. All last year I was an artificial lake! Sure I had the occasional requisite live electrical cable dropped into me, but mostly I sat in the sun, full of little nameless waves and cheerful paddle-boats. So many missed chances to blunder. My father told me the problem with us is we are in love with being in love with love. My sister insisted I will just like she and my brother one day eventually learn to follow that feeling of doubt wherever it leads. It’s a miracle our people have procreated at all. Yet we persist.
Then it was time to move into the living room. I kept pretending to look for something to write with, trying hard not to watch you laughing and passing a pen back and forth among your friends. When I looked down I saw one of those scraps of paper someone must have dropped. When my turn came I unfolded it and saw someone had written ‘I wish I could draw’; without thinking I said ‘I see need is no longer only for children’ and threw it into the fire.
Many things happened until we met, sort of, finally at the end of the night. You may remember me as tallish by the door. I made a vague motion with my hands like I had either released and immediately begun trying to retrieve something invisible and weightless, or had started to help you with your coat, which I did, clumsily looking down at you from what seemed like an exciting and terrifying altitude. You said your name and turned and did not see me write it on my hand.
A girl just walked down my hallway, singing. The radio mutters along about the president. Do you think he will for once at last defy his advisors and decide against the next war? Maybe by the time you have read and put down this letter we will already know, and we will attend instead of a demonstration a calm victory celebration that almost exactly resembles an ordinary evening, just a little more full of the great unguarded anonymous affection even the most selfish of us remain unexpectedly capable of.
Someone once said to give a gift is the most selfish act of all. That person was wise but not a great house guest. In the spirit of great beginnings I’d like to bring you something you never will need. Not even a potion that does nothing, nor a translucent umbrella you can carry to work on overcast days to protect your freckles from the clouds, nor a tiny golden talking boat, no bigger than the palm of your hand.
So besides the paper on which these words are written I humbly enclose nothing at all. Not even my great desire to see you. Just the feeling that remains after you are given the pleasure of being given nothing, along with the beautiful electric fear of choosing your own particular way of locating someone you so far know only a few things about, and of deciding those reasons are more than enough.
CARL-JOHAN VALLGREN
Translated by Sarah Death
Stockholm, 25 February 2007
Dear Mamma,
Two months ago, I invented a photograph of you, taken in 1942. I was one track short for the album I was recording; the working title of the record was Family Life and my idea was to use pop music to tell the story of the most recent period in my life: divorce from my previous wife; moving back to Sweden from Berlin after twelve years in voluntary exile; how I met my current partner; falling in love once more, against all the odds, in spite of all my bitterness, in spite of all the ingrained cynicism that afflicts divorced men of my age; and then the little miracle of becoming a father for the first time, at forty.
I had written songs about being in love again, about the pregnancy, about my daughter’s birth, about my relapse into doubt; I had written a bitter farewell ballad to my ex-wife, taken my leave of Berlin (which had given me so much, not least in artistic terms) but I was still missing a song that could plumb the family depths, cut across chronology to put me and my little family in our historical context. And that was how I came to create the song ‘The Photograph’, based on your tragic fate.
The lyrics have you standing on the quayside in Åbo harbour. You’re three years old, and there’s an address label hanging on a string round your neck. There are vague figures, Red Cross staff, in the background. Doctors, nurses. And children everywhere: thousands of Finnish refugee children waiting to be shipped across the Baltic. You’re amazingly like my daughter, your granddaughter. You’re both the same age. Both raven haired, with the same sensitive mouth. But in your look there is something I have never seen in hers: deep, existential terror.
There are appalling accounts of the transportation of refugee children from Finland to Sweden during the ‘Continuation War’ of 1941–44. Russian planes pursued the convoys out over the sea and attacked them with machine-guns. The children, many never to return to their families (you were one of them), were desperate. Your sister Ritva ought to have been with you. But she was two years older and realised intuitively that catastrophe lay ahead. Poor Ritva. She was supposed to be looking after you. Your father was at the front, your mother was seriously ill. The idea was for you both to be sent to the same host family in Sweden and then return safe and sound to Finland as soon as the war was over.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Minutes before the ship sailed, she wriggled out of a nurse’s grip and rushed back to the quay where your aunt was standing; she got down on her knees, they say, and begged to be allowed to stay. People have told me that the last they saw of you was a small figure, hand in hand with a Red Cross worker, swallowed up in a tide of children who were swarming like lemmings up the gangplank; you were too little to understand what was happening.
In one of my earliest memories, you are showing me some medals that you keep in a kitchen cupboard. ‘These are your grandpa’s bravery medals from the war,’ you say. I’m maybe seven. There are about fifteen metal plaques, fixed to a board; if I were to believe the evidence of my own eyes, my biological grandfather on my mother’s s
ide must have been awarded every honour that had existed in the Finnish army since the days of Runeberg. But when I ask to have a closer look, you put them back up in the cupboard with an expression as if to say: they’re not intended for children to look at. It’s only in adulthood that it begins to dawn on me: you were showing me your old sprinting medals from local athletics tournaments …
There was another time, during the summer holidays when I was about ten, when Swedish Television showed an old feature film about the Finnish Winter War. I think it must have been based on some of Väinö Linna’s novels, maybe The Unknown Soldier. In one key scene, Russian tanks advanced through a forest on the Karelian Isthmus; one incredibly brave Finnish soldier attacked a tank completely unaided, and managed to knock it out with a Molotov cocktail.
‘That character is based on my Pappa’s exploits,’ you said. ‘He stopped a tank like that, all on his own.’
As a child, of course, I felt mightily proud that my biological grandfather was a decorated Finnish war hero who had stopped tanks single-handed in the forests of Karelia; I told anyone who would listen about his martial prowess, oblivious in those days to the in-built racism of the Swedes towards their former colonial subjects to the east. The only thing this episode brought me was a new nickname: bloody Finn.
I don’t think any of your lies have been deliberately misleading. I know they spring from an old habit of trying to make life a little more beautiful, a little more adventurous, a little more bearable. I believe you started inventing life right from the age of three, as a survival strategy …
It’s not easy for me to write that I love you, Mamma. I have never said those words. Something stopped me when I was little, maybe that unreliability, those remarkable stories that later turned out to be fabricated, your wildly fluctuating moods and the recurrent crises in your life, your uncertainty about who you were and where you really belonged.
Your biological parents wanted you to go back after the war, but your step-parents refused; legal proceedings were begun, and in the end the authorities gave permission for adoption. On grounds of language, they said. By that time you had forgotten all your Finnish. Finnish and Swedish are two entirely different idioms, with entirely different roots: Swedish is Germanic; Finnish is Finno-Ugric, and thus not even related to Indo-European. You were said to have been fluent when you reached your new country at the age of three: perfect Finnish pronunciation and a wide vocabulary. In Sweden you became virtually deaf mute: you understood nothing, nor could you make yourself understood. Three years later, the situation was reversed.
I wish I could say I love you. But I can’t. It’s not that I don’t love you, because I genuinely do, in a way that’s so natural there’s no need even to formulate the feeling. I have no choice, so to speak: unlike you, I’ve never had two mothers to be torn between. The biological one, forced by the war to give you up, thinking you had better chances of survival in Sweden and would soon come back – and your step-mother, who became so attached to you that she insisted on adopting you.
It’s strange – or perhaps not so strange – that since I became the father of a daughter myself, you have triggered emotions in me that I didn’t know I was capable of. Terrible attacks of separation anxiety; manic retrospective looks at my own history and at your fate, which in a sense has moulded mine. And imagining myself in your biological parents’ situation plunges me into what I can only describe as clinical depression.
You were thirteen when you finally saw them again, very briefly. That was in 1952, during the Olympic Games in Helsinki. Your adoptive parents took you there so you could meet the two people who brought you into the world, but on neutral territory. They lived in the middle of Finland, in Jyväskylä I think. I’m told your adoptive parents wouldn’t let you stray more than a few metres from their side: they were petrified you might be kidnapped.
It may have been after this trip that you came up with the story of being related to the Romanov family. You told me on quite a few occasions, even when I was well into my teens, that an ancestor on your father’s side had supposedly been in service at the court at St Petersburg and become pregnant by one of the Tsars. When I double-checked the story with my father, he explained in a pitying tone that it was a story you had made up when you were a girl, to help you feel you were a cut above the average abandoned Finnish war child.
It all fits together, Mamma. ‘And I understand you much better now,’ as I sing in the chorus of my song. It’s all about blood, about blood being thicker than water. I really do love you. And that’s why, finally, I’m writing this, in a love letter you will never read. Paradoxically enough, doing it this way makes it all the more ‘true’, because I have nothing to gain.
So I write those incomparable words and let my readers bear witness: I love you, Mamma.
Your son, C-J
JOSEPH BOYDEN
New Orleans Times Picayune – Missing Persons Section
Online
September 1, 2005
If you have seen or know the whereabouts of Mrs. Geraldine Solomon, age 52, of 3682 S. Desire St., please contact NOPD, Times Picayune Missing Persons Bureau, or any official of Department of Homeland Security, New Orleans Bureau. Mrs. Solomon was last seen by her husband, Fred Solomon, August 30, approximately 7 a.m., during the levee breech. Mrs. Geraldine Solomon is African American female, 5′2″, 145 pounds, light complexion, freckled nose and forehead.
September 2, 2005
Missing, Mrs. Geraldine Solomon, age 52, of 3682 S. Desire St. since August 30, 2005, lower Ninth Ward. 5′2″ in height, approximately 145 pounds. Light complexion. Not a strong swimmer. If you know the whereabouts of this person, please contact NOPD, Times Picayune Missing Persons Bureau, or any official of Department of Homeland Security, New Orleans Bureau. Her husband, Fred Solomon, remains in New Orleans searching for her. I’m still here, Geraldine.
September 3, 2005
Mrs. Geraldine Solomon, last seen on the roof of her house on the morning of August 30, 2005, before being swept away by surging waters at approximately 7 a.m. in the lower Ninth Ward near the intersection of S. Desire and Marigny. Geraldine Solomon is approximately 5′2″ and 145 pounds, light complexion, green eyes, freckled nose and forehead. She is not a strong swimmer and is diabetic. Her husband Fred Solomon can be reached through NOPD, Times Picayune Missing Persons Bureau, or through any official with the Department of Homeland Security, New Orleans Bureau. I’m still here, Geraldine. I didn’t want to let go of your hand. I lost you, but I’m still here, baby. I know you’re still alive.
September 4, 2005
Missing: Mrs. Geraldine Solomon, age 52, 5′2″, 145 pounds. Heavyset woman. Last seen at 3682 S. Desire St, Lower Ninth Ward on the morning of August 30 by her loving husband Fred, who lost contact with her on the roof of their home during a flood surge at approximately 7 a.m. She has green eyes and freckles on her nose and forehead. Scar on her left arm. Geraldine is diabetic and not a strong swimmer. She needs insulin once daily. Baby, I’m still here. Why’d you tell me to let you go? Please tell me where you at. I need you. Your children need you. Your grandbabies need you.
September 5, 2005
If you know the whereabouts of Geraldine Solomon, age 52, 145 pound African American female, light complexion, heavyset, green eyes, last seen in Lower Ninth Ward at the intersection of S. Desire and Marigny, please contact NOPD, Times Picayune Missing Persons Bureau, or any official of Department of Homeland Security, New Orleans Bureau. Geraldine Solomon is a diabetic and needs daily insulin injections. Her husband, Fred Solomon, has been evacuated to Houston. National Guard made me go at gunpoint. They forced me to, Geraldine. I am in the Astrodome with Keysha and her two and we need you. Why’d you tell me to let go? Your man needs you. Your children and grandbabies need you. I couldn’t hold your hand longer. Her family searches for their mother/grandmother. She has beautiful green eyes that light up when she smiles and her freckles make her stand out in a crowd. She needs daily insulin injections
and can’t swim a stroke.
September 6, 2005
Geraldine Solomon. Your family needs you. Missing, Geraldine Solomon. Short and heavy-bodied. She has a freckled nose and light complexion with startling green eyes. She needs insulin once a day. She was swept away from the roof of her house on the morning of August 30. The Homeland Security and the NOPD say they know she is missing and they are doing everything they can to find her. Geraldine has three daughters, one son, and six grandchildren. Grandkids OK, Geraldine, but they need their grandma. Baby, I know you’re sick with your diabetes. Tell me someone’s helping you. Please, if you see her give her an insulin injection. If you know of the whereabouts of Geraldine Solomon please contact her husband Fred Solomon. Red Cross lady here tells me I can be reached at http//www.nolamissingpersons/katrina/
houstonastrodome.gov.org
September 7, 2005
Missing person named Geraldine Solomon is desperately needed. She can read but doesn’t have her glasses and so if you found a black woman, age 52, short and heavy build, freckle nose and forehead, beautiful green eyes. Please contact Fred Solomon at http//www.nolamissingpersons/katrina
/houstonastrodome.gov.org. She needs insulin and might be very delirious at this point, but she goes by Geraldine. Fred needs you, Geraldine. The grandkids need their mama. If you read this and found Geraldine, please give her some insulin. Department of Homeland Security says they know she is missing and is looking for her. But they won’t let me go back to look for her. So if you have come across Geraldine, please let her know that her husband Fred is coming soon as he can so please if you have found her, report her to a police officer or official. We are in Houston, Geraldine. I tried to keep looking for you but they made me go. Please let her know this. She is diabetic. Eyes no good without glasses. Freckle nose and light complexion for a black woman. Beautiful eyes.
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