When his legs healed he began to explore the house on foot. He discovered the room where we’d stored our possessions on returning from Lagos. Some he threw away, some he gave to the charity shop on Main Street. Most he carried up to the attic. He tipped their contents into a heap and began to sort through them, working hard, even frantically, but without method or conviction. The mouldy cricket gear, the pocket watch he had broken so many times but which continued to tick, the mappa mundi, the bronze pendant from Benin, letters, papers, the endless stubs of cigarettes and piles of ash, the moth-eaten books, the trunk in which Mother’s clothes lay, as well as old photographs, medals, pencils, lamps with torn shades – all these things made him seem detached and apart from life. As the years passed – and I grew into a monstrous solitary teenager, and in my fourteenth year left for boarding school in Edinburgh, about which the less said the better – I barely thought about him. Sometimes I arrived home for the weekend to discover that my father was missing. I would wander all over the house, calling his name and knocking on walls, until he emerged from under a table or bed; only to scurry back up to his perch beneath the eaves. I asked him why he spent so much time in the attic. Apparently he was more comfortable when closer to the clouds.
Enough! I am tired of this chapter. Thinking back to those years in Scotland, trying to relate the circumstances of my father’s madness and death, I can barely recover the memories. With the greatest effort I have managed to set something down. And yet I can’t help feeling that the process of remembering has hidden something, and that something the most important part. What is more, I’m exhausted by the labour, and in between writing I have lain on my mattress, immobile.
In the past, when I have been unable to go on, I would pick up one of the books – histories, pamphlets, novels, treatises, letters, the Encyclopaedia Britannica – from the pile in the attic and seek inspiration in its pages. I would find a sentence I liked and transcribe it on to my computer; even, at times, whole paragraphs. Or else I would copy out a description – a gesture, a landscape, more often an object – perhaps substituting a word here and there for one of my own, in order to smooth over false notes. Yes, that is something I have frequently resorted to, in the course of writing this history. At other times I was happy to exaggerate details of my past, details that were plausible, perhaps, but not indisputably true. I was like the unknown cartographer of the mappa mundi, he who when ignorant of lakes and towns sketched savage beasts and elephants, and in place of contour lines created improbable realms … and what kind of lunatic would use such a map to find her way? In short, I have been happy to tell stories. No longer. Now I would rather stay silent than risk telling a lie. Forward.
…
Boarding school. What is there to say? I was unhappy and confused. I recall the cherry blossoms on the front lawn, and Mrs Ling, my English teacher, an unconscious whistler. I recall being made to run through a field of nettles, a collective punishment. I recall the stationery cupboard in which I hid during PE lessons. I had few friends, was alienated from the other girls, who figured me as a freak. My ears had begun to grow at an extraordinary rate. Already large when I left Nigeria at the age of fourteen, by my fifteenth birthday they had begun to develop thick veins and pendulous lobes, and felt far too heavy for my head. Those organs of hearing which I had once prized, and put all my energies into developing, now felt alien, ineffectual, crude, a pair of outsize fungal-growths sprouting from my head.
It was during this period that my fascination with the mappa mundi began. When I returned for the holidays my father would sometimes call me up to the attic to sit with him, although he did not sit but paced in a state of constant agitation, shedding ash from his cigarettes (I felt that those flakes were shedding from him, and that with each cigarette, he was gradually diminishing). One afternoon, his pacing making me dizzy, I tried to fix my attention on to a point of stillness in the room. The mappa mundi. I came to study it more closely on subsequent visits. I felt an affinity with the monstrous races depicted on the map. I knew I was one of them.
When my schooling finished I took a job ushering in a theatre in Edinburgh. It was summer, the city was hot, loud, dense, vivid, carnal, and I became deeply involved in the life of the theatre. I worked hard. I listened to music. I felt free for the first time since leaving Nigeria. I even fell in love – with Damaris, an actress, a thin, beautiful creature who occupied all my thoughts and just about toppled my soul.
Damaris wanted to know all about my father, his life, my relationship with him, and even his work in Nigeria, which I had figured as a cause of his madness. I told her what I knew: he was a broken man who had lost a great many illusions. What were these? He’d helped to build Lagos into a modern city; he’d brought to a peasant population the gift of city planning; he’d played a small part of the great enterprise of the British Empire. But really, I told her, he had done nothing more than project his own perverse fantasies on to Nigeria. All his life he’d believed in a kind of progress for humankind, and his work in Nigeria had been based on this idea. He believed Africa existed in a backward state of time, a wild and immature childhood which Empire would bring into the present age. It was a complete idea, I told her, blinding him to any other. But this idea of his hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped, and he – we – were forced to leave. Now he found himself without desires or energy. He’d lost his faith in Progress, I told her. (But I was wrong; my father had lost faith in Progress years before that, with my mother’s death and the birth of a daughter and not a son.) In Lagos, I told her, he had been able to escape into dreams of town planning, so that he did not have to know his malaise. Now he fled in the face of it up to the attic, like birds flocking to the tree tops before a storm.
‘He repulses me,’ I told her.
‘Why?’ she said, horrified.
‘He is a broken man. He brought it on himself with his bad faith in Empire.’
‘You’re a monster, Evie Steppman,’ she said.
But Damaris was not satisfied and set me a task. I was to find out one thing about my father’s life, something I didn’t know, a story. She gave me a tape recorder for my birthday and instructed me to record him.
…
I found him in the attic. His hair was no longer blond but silvery, and sallow from tobacco smoke.
‘Hello, Evie,’ he said and backed into the corner. I felt a kind of effusive kinship towards him. Not filial, I don’t want to suggest that. And yet it was a type of fondness, and for a moment I wanted to hold him in my arms. I shook out a rug, then laid it on a patch of floor and sat opposite him. We were silent for a while. Then I began to ask him questions about his past, his childhood. I knew that my father had been born in another country and had moved to Scotland as a child. But either sensing his own reticence, or from lack of interest, I had never asked more. Now, as I did, he started to speak, very softly, relating the events which saw him and his family undergo a change of nation, a change of name – in short, a turning away from his family’s past. I put the headphones over my ears, switched the tape recorder on and held the microphone close to his mouth. His voice, heard in this intimate way through the headphones, was not weak as I had expected from someone so thin and dishevelled, but low, cracked, oddly powerful. I had disliked its intonation when he talked during my gestation, and I disliked it still, the bass pitch, the barely distinguishable quality of the vowel-sounds. Nevertheless, that evening I captured the story my father told, which I will transcribe in the following chapter.
The next time I saw him, he was terrible to contemplate. Pale, wearing the purple dressing-gown, he sat rocking on his mattress, a glazed look in his eyes. His face seemed to lack coordination, the wet mouth undisciplined. I approached. He didn’t seem to see me. I remember very clearly. His inability to master his lips had spread to the whole of his face. After that he made almost no mark on the world, occasional moth-light footsteps perhaps, now and then a little noise, low nocturnal murmurings, whispers and interrupted crie
s, the sound of pacing and coaxing. He had withdrawn completely from practical affairs, and I felt that the objects in the midst of which he dwelt had taken the place of his personality, had come to represent him more truthfully than his presence in space. From that day on I gave my father up for lost. What still remained of him – the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities – would finally disappear one day, as unremarked as the grey heaps of ash beside his armchair, waiting to be blown away on the next windy day.
24
Jesus the Jew or How My Father Acquired His Name
In a moment I will transcribe my father’s story. The thought pleases me enormously. Not so much because I wish to reveal what my father told me that evening shortly before he died. No, my history is already overburdened with stories. It is the process that counts, the labour of transcribing his words. It is not a difficult process, although it is time-consuming, since the tape is damaged in places and, although my father talked at length, he didn’t always make sense. Nevertheless, I hope, with repeated listening, to make a coherent story. What a happy prospect to stop writing my own history and make use of another’s words!
I lean over, place the cassette into the tape recorder, close the lid, put my headphones on, take a deep breath and press play. The reels turn, the tape shuttles through the mechanism, I hear the hiss of warm static, that pool of shifting quiet which is one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. Then, breaking the silence, as if coming to me from a great distance, I hear the sound of my father’s voice.
…
When I was five years old I left with my family for Scotland. It was the summer of 1923, and we travelled to Lublin on the banks of the River Vistula, about four hundred miles from our home town.
That is how the tape begins. From what I can gather from the tape my father’s father had been a doctor in a small town somewhere in North Poland. Because he was Jewish, he had been dismissed from his job and was unable to find work. Apparently in 1923 the government had passed a decree making it impossible for Jews to practise medicine. My father, bizarrely, and without saying how or why, says his parents had been promised the sale of a jam factory in Dundee, and took the decision to travel west, across Europe to Scotland.
The tape continues: There were three of us in the group that sat for three days and nights in a first-class carriage to Vienna, then Munich, Strasbourg and finally Calais, from where we took the boat to Dover. It was a strange route our broker had arranged. At the time I had no idea why we were moving to a different country. Nor do I remember much about the journey itself, only small glimpses snatched from the train window: the faces of peasants selling hot chestnuts, a team of horses which ran for a short while alongside our carriage, and the dawn, which I watched stealing across the panes of a station with an arched glass roof. It seems that, more vividly than the specific events of the journey, my father recalled the travelling itself. We were always moving, he says, if not overland or sea, then in our beds at station-side hotels, or else my hands were fidgeting in my pockets. In addition to the movement, he remembers this mood during the journey, which was of great anticipation, and strangely he wasn’t afraid. But even these memories shift in his mind, he says; which strikes me as entirely appropriate, for he was constantly moving, and what seemed half-erased to him in adulthood, was then too: the packed trains, the blurred scenery, the sleep that was always broken.
The tape continues: When we got to Dover the officer asked to see our papers. We had two or three surnames and, what is more, the official did not recognize my parents’ marriage certificate, so he wasn’t prepared to let us enter the country. My parents must have carried bribes, since we were allowed to enter. On our new papers our surnames had been cut short and changed, I have forgotten from what. And in fact it felt as if we had left our old life behind at the station in Lublin. It wasn’t until several years later, after an incident which altered the course of my life irrevocably, an incident which, though in the general sense was minor and insignificant, meant so extraordinarily much to me that even now, some fifty years later, I still burn with the memory of it, the shame and the sudden intrusion into my life that impelled me to renounce not only my parents, but also our religion.
We settled in a village called Newport, my father continues, which overlooks the Tay estuary. I still remember the view we had of the river, and of the railway bridge, which was the second on that site, since I learned that the first had collapsed in 1879, only two years after it had been built. I remember the sunsets, which were so dramatic one felt a pain as the red light died. My father bought the jam factory and put what was left of his life into the business. I seldom saw either him or my mother, both because they worked long hours and, since I was often unwell, and attended school only now and then, I was sent to a home for sick children, Comerton House, just a few miles outside Newport. By that time I was speaking English fluently, which even as a small child in Poland had come easily to me, and already I spoke it without an accent. The children at the home found it difficult to pronounce my name, Rechavam, so I became known, simply, as Rex.
I remember, my father says, my days at Comerton House more keenly than almost any other time in my life. There was a large garden which ran alongside the road and was separated from it by a wall. The garden itself was divided into two sections. In the fore-section, the smaller part nearest the house, the janitor, Mr Welsh, grew our vegetables. Further back, concealed from the house, was the larger, always slightly wild section. Nettles grew abundantly in summer, and, although Mr Welsh cut them back, they seemed to spring up all the taller. There were playthings in this back section, a set of swings, a crooked seesaw which gave you splinters and a roundabout on which we were not allowed to play. But best of all was a strange contraption called a Witch’s Hat. It was shaped just like that, a conical structure of metal rods with a wooden bench that ran around the lip. The whole thing was raised a yard or so off the ground by a central pole crowned by a ball bearing. This simple device allowed the Witch’s Hat to rotate from its tip. We sat on the bench and with our feet drove it around and around, and all of us, the thin, pale children, most of whom had ginger hair, liked it better than anything else at Comerton House. I remember the nights too, which I dreaded. In the library, a large pine-panelled room which was used also as the assembly hall, the gym in winter and for staging the Christmas play, there, among the poorly stocked shelves, was a book of ghost stories. I knew it would terrify me to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. I always regretted looking at that book, and I regretted my curiosity, and that the other children brought it out, others who, unlike me, seemed to enjoy their fear, and for whom darkness held a weird appeal.
I dreaded the nights in Comerton House. By dinner time, two hours before curfew, I would start to shake and involuntarily wave my spoon. Eating had always been difficult for me, and fear of the approaching night intensified my distaste for food, especially meat, which I have always associated with murder, and it was during that period, the time of the great fear, that I became a vegetarian. At night I would wake into a foreign land. My shoulders shook uncontrollably, and I would draw my blankets over my head. I believed that unless every part of me was covered the banshee would be able to take me away, to where I did not know. There were two of us in the dorm who experienced acute fear at night. We had an agreement that if one needed to go to the bathroom we could wake the other. We would hold hands and advance half-running along the hall, all the while chanting, as loudly as we dared, We’re getting married, We’re getting married, not stopping as we passed water but only when we were back beneath the blankets. In fact the whole of Comerton House was filled with noise at night, for sick children away from home tend not to sleep, and when they do they almost always have nightmares. I’ve since learned that the home is now privately owned, and I often imagine the present occupants must be aware of the noise that by night filled Comerton House. For where have all those cries gone?
At this point on the tape my f
ather starts to ramble. I hear the fizz of matches as he lights his cigarettes. He goes on to talk more about his daily life at Comerton House, the lessons, fears, rituals, punishments and so on. But I am unable to arrange them into any kind of coherent order. No matter. For long stretches as I worked my father’s voice flowed effortlessly from the tape to my ears, from my ears to my fingers, from my fingers to the keyboard, and from there on to the screen. What a relief to forget my history and copy someone else’s words!
The tape continues: What I remember best of all is my dearest friend at the home. His name was Nicholas. Let me tell you how we met. Once after lunch Nicholas approached me in the corridor and said he had a secret to tell me, he said it was a serious matter which no one else knew about and would put both our lives in danger. I was to meet him at the Witch’s Hat later that afternoon. He was there when I arrived and invited me to sit. He looked me sternly in the eyes and told me that he was the son of the Devil. I believed him instantly. But to prove it he pulled up his shirt and showed me a birthmark on the left side of his chest. It seemed no more than a faint web of veins showing beneath the skin, but he told me to look harder and I saw it resembled a medallion, a small circle that enclosed a tiny crenulated shape, like a rose. Have you ever seen anything like it? Nicholas asked. Of course I had not. He said the secret of his ancestry had plagued him all his life, that he had never been at home in this world, and had felt condemned to wander. But since he had told me, Nicholas continued, he felt much better both about his sinister paternity and about things in general. He asked if I had any sweets, which I did, since my mother had only recently sent a package, and I offered to share them with him. But he told me he must have them all. He opened his large eyes very wide, and I gave him my sweets. On another occasion he stole my wooden train, I knew it was him, although I was unable to prove it. Nonetheless, we became friends. I learned that in fact he wasn’t the son of the Devil but of a widower. Shortly after this, Nicholas and I became inseparable. We did everything together. I remember we made declarations of love by the Witch’s Hat, and one evening cut small lesions in our wrists and mixed the blood. Yet there was a spiteful side to our relationship. I forgave him for tricking me into giving up my sweets, but I never forgot what he told me, and I think there lived in me an impression that he was somehow connected to dark forces. He was in my mind a golem, or a child-moloch to whom my love was sacrificed. There were times when I was afraid of him, when he looked at me intensely with those large dark-brown eyes, or when he told me he had been in contact with a banshee and had instructed her to take me away.
The Echo Chamber Page 25
