Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  My dry cleaner then showed me another photo, this one of the young couple clutching a colorfully wrapped package.

  “The captured dates and nuts are in there,” Mrs. Kahng explained. “They must eat those goodies on their wedding night, and then . . .” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Yes, I understood, even with no photo provided.

  Peter arrived early in the marriage, born just a few months after our first wedding anniversary. Michael came two years later, George three after that, and Martin three years after George. Not exactly boom-boom-boom, but close. If I had continued having children, I am sure I would have had more boys, although I’m not sure how many chopped dates made it onto my wedding-night salad so many years ago. I wanted a big family, having grown up reading about happy times shared by siblings in books like the Bobbsey Twins series (four kids in the family), All-of-a-Kind-Family by Sydney Taylor (five kids), The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (four kids), and, a much-reread favorite, Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (twelve kids, of course).

  I figured the number four was perfect, an even number for pairing and sharing, and no ganging-up, two on one. I would have enough time to share among four kids, and moments alone with each of them. I would be able to remember each name in the fury of yelling (I am embarrassed to admit that I have yelled out the cats’ names when truly angry), and I could gather all four in my arms at one time. I stopped at four, and I was home to take care of them, one after the other and all together.

  For twelve years, our time together was palmy as life with date-boys should be. The word palmy isn’t used much anymore, but it’s a good one. It derives from the benefits of dates, which come from palm trees, and means glorious, prosperous, flourishing. Four boys in tow, for years we flourished and prospered. Books were at the forefront of our activities, with regular visits to the library and to the bookstore. Books were used to soothe before bed, pacify at meals (a good book can distract a four-year-old from the fact that he is eating something green), and excite and inspire as needed. When the kids needed to run around and let off steam, I used music. The “William Tell Overture” could get us galloping through the kitchen within minutes, and Madonna and Prince were perfect for dancing on couches and tables.

  Lawless games of running, screaming, tagging, and hiding prevailed when we moved out of the city and found ourselves surrounded by space, indoors and out. Swings were hung from trees, bikes and scooters of all sizes piled up, and basketballs bounded about in various stages of deflation. Jack and I veered away from video games and gaming systems. Family screen time was spent on movies and old TV shows. And we always came back to books. Our bookcases overflowed with series like the Narnia books and Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, and all of the Hardy Boys, along with the Zack Files, the Time Warp Trio, Captain Underpants, and, of course, Harry Potter. Every day ended with books, and most days started with them, collections of FoxTrot, Calvin and Hobbes, and the Cartoon History of the Universe read beside bowls of cereal and glasses of juice.

  One of my favorite children’s books is The Seven Silly Eaters by Mary Ann Hoberman. The Seven Silly Eaters is about a cello-playing, book-reading, pear-shaped, wrinkled-shirt-wearing mom who delights in her children but becomes increasingly (and hilariously) careworn as she has more and more children. The kids pile up year after year, each one a more finicky eater than the last. The dad, handsome and rugged, stays in the background of the story, planting trees and lugging groceries.

  The book’s illustrations of a hand-hewed house on an island and filled with cats, kids, laundry, musical instruments, homemade crafts, and books, books, books were like a blueprint of my own home. Okay, we were not on an island; instead we found ourselves smack down in suburban Connecticut in a house constructed by nameless builders. But those were my kids, full of good intentions and love but also opinionated, noisy, and needy. That was my husband, handsome and supportive, willing to plant the trees but leaving all the picking to me. That was my family’s laundry, in piles waiting to be folded and all over the house, on the kitchen counter, the stairs, and the coffee table in front of the television. That was my unplayed cello (substitute a piano that I’ve been trying to learn to play for fifteen years), and those were my bookcases filled sideways and longways with books. Page after page, and day after day, of palmy days.

  The palmy days of my family fled the year my sister died. The boys were hit hard by death, one after another, over a period of just months. Three weeks after Anne-Marie died, one of my husband’s sisters died. Mary had been sick for years, but I always thought she would live on and on. She was a fighter, a hell-raiser, a bargain shopper, a doughnut baker, and a dream maker who put a ten-by-ten pool in her twelve-by-twelve backyard, the neighbors be damned. The first time she met me, she warned me away from the Menz family, pronouncing “Menz” in such a way as to raise many shadows of many doubts. When she saw that I was determined to stay in the clan, Mary took me in and held me close. I became an honorary sister, and when she died, I lost another sister. The boys lost another aunt.

  Just days later, a popular teacher from the middle school died. Then a local family lost their dad in a car accident. During the summer, our cat Milo disappeared while we were on vacation; in September, our other cat was hit by a car and died. The boys cried when we buried Coco in the backyard. The tears of my children seemed inexhaustible, and I was helpless against them.

  I remember that fall going out for a walk alone while the boys were at school. As I walked through the winding streets that surround my house, I slipped into a fantasy of imagining. I imagined what it would be like to walk back home again and find Anne-Marie there, waiting for me. I could actually feel the relief and the joy spilling through me as I imagined coming across the lawn and seeing her, wrapped up in a warm coat, her long, skinny legs coming out from underneath and her blond head shining in the sun. I smiled as I imagined her saying, “No, it didn’t all happen, my body is here still, look, I am here.” I hug her so hard, and we cry and laugh and look at each other. We look the same, me and my sister, no aging and no wear.

  In my imagining, we go into the house, where I show her the books I’ve been reading and we wait for the kids to come home from school. “Oh, they are going to be so happy,” I say as we wait. The cats are there too, alive, and purring and rubbing against our legs. They understand Anne-Marie has come back as they have come back: to return us all to the old days. Anne-Marie sits at the table, chin in her hands, elbows on the table, looking almost bored. I know that pose so well. She is not bored, but she is off in another place, thinking. The kids come home, and we are all happy.

  Weeks pass, and we get used to having Anne-Marie back. Time passes on in my imagining. I take Anne-Marie for granted again, and it is wonderful. Because to take someone for granted is a luxury; to have her and not think about losing her or never seeing her again, that is a gift. But I came home from my walk and Anne-Marie was not there. I have lost, and even worse, my kids have lost, the innocence of believing no one they love will ever go away.

  In Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, Nicholas meets the Baron of Grogzwig, who recounts memories of happiness and fun, but then says, “Alas! The high and palmy days had taken boots to themselves, and were already walking off.” I could not let our palmy days walk away on the boots of death and leave us. I had to bring back joy enough to reignite belief in my children that the world is not about death and that living is not about waiting to die.

  And that is why I was here, in my kitchen with a pile of waiting books on the counter, and more books waiting on a shelf in the next room, and with George before me, asking me to read one of his favorites. I sent him up to bed, promising again that I would read Watership Down. “Along with three hundred and sixty-four other books,” I added.

  Two nights later I found myself downstairs at midnight, the only one in the house still awake, with that day’s book just finished and now closed in my lap. I had read Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark,
and I scribbled into its margins, for posting later, “This book is perfect, a genuine communication from the heart.” I sighed and leaned back against my old purple chair. I was getting used to this late-night reading. So much for the six hours between school buses, and my plan for getting my book read and my review written before the kids got home from school. The plan had changed, and now my days ended with a book in my lap. The experience of just me and my book under the light of one lamp was like sitting before a spotlighted stage in a dark theater. The whole performance went on just for me. No intermission, no interruptions, and every word illuminated.

  Man in the Dark is a novel that imagines another world mirroring our own. Two worlds coexisting: Auster uses the device to dig deeply into what keeps us going, what keeps us participating in the motions and the emotions of life. A man, his daughter, and his granddaughter are all facing their own private heartbreaks. They are unsure of how to go on and wavering as to the necessity of even trying to go on. Why bother? And then, in the prose of a lesser-known poet, they find a single sentence that makes perfect sense: “The weird world rolls on.”

  The world shifts, and lives change. Without warning or reason, someone who was healthy becomes sick and dies. An onslaught of sorrow, regret, anger, and fear buries those of us left behind. Hopelessness and helplessness follow. But then the world shifts again—rolling on as it does—and with it, lives change again. A new day comes, offering all kinds of possibilities. Even with the experience of pain and sorrow set deep within me and never to be forgotten, I recognize the potent offerings of my unknown future. I live in a “weird world,” shifting and unpredictable, but also bountiful and surprising. There is joy in acknowledging that both the weirdness and the world roll on, but even more, there is resilience.

  The night before Thanksgiving, I had a dream. I dreamed I was in Cambridge, England, walking through the Wren Library. I ran into Anne-Marie, alive and well.

  “I don’t know what to read now,” I said to her. “Should I read a sixteenth-century philosopher or the new edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that just came out? What do you think?” Just days before I’d read the deeply atmospheric and scary Man in the Picture by Susan Hill, set in Cambridge. It made sense I was dreaming about Cambridge. But where did the sixteenth-century philosopher come from? And why The Canterbury Tales?

  In my dream, the choices I offered didn’t puzzle my sister. They only made her smile.

  Giving me that look of hers—the one where she pursed her lips and drew in her eyebrows, signaling acute brain activity—Anne-Marie said to me, “I’ll have to think about that. I’ll get back to you.” She turned around and walked away. She was wearing her Yves Saint-Laurent trench coat from the ’80s, belted tightly around her middle. She turned to wave, and then she was gone.

  When I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, I understood the world was rolling for me, asleep and awake. In its rolling, there was giving and there was taking. I was sure Anne-Marie would get back to me, philosopher or poet. Until then, I had a promise to keep.

  The next day I read Watership Down, all 476 pages of it.

  Chapter 6

  The Only Balm to Sorrow

  Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, every time. It was as if I were on my way back, on a return journey.

  MIA COUTO,

  Under the Frangipani

  WHEN I RETURNED TO THE HOSPITAL AFTER GETTING THE CALL that my sister had died, I found my father rocking back and forth on the couch in her hospital room, repeating over and over, “Three in one night.” I had no idea what those words meant, and when I asked Natasha about it later, she didn’t know either. I wanted to ask my father, but at the same time I couldn’t take any more sadness. Jack’s sister Mary died in June after a long illness, and I felt as if I were underwater, drowning in tears. I couldn’t go to Mary’s funeral, terrified that I would submerge for good into grief and darkness. In July we scattered Anne-Marie’s ashes in the ocean off Fire Island. In late September, we held her memorial service.

  The service was held at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, in the grand rooms of its Millionaires’ Row mansion on Fifth Avenue. Friends and family spoke; then Marvin ran a slide show of photos while a trio of cellist, pianist, and violinist played Beethoven. More friends spoke, and Marvin ended the service with his own memories from the life he shared with Anne-Marie.

  Memories of Anne-Marie would be all we could have of her. We no longer had a future with her to look forward to. Sharing our recollections of time spent with Anne-Marie was part of keeping hold of her, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I was there to celebrate her life that afternoon. I didn’t understand the importance of ensuring her remembrance. I only realized three years later, when reading The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, the significance of the sharing of memories. And the danger of not sharing memories at all.

  In The Book of Chameleons, main character Felix Ventura’s profession is to replace the memories of his clients with new memories. Most of his clients use their new memories to support an exalted identity. They are trying to get away from their pasts of poverty and inconsequence in order to move up in the world. Ventura has godlike gifts of re-creation. He molds around each client a new skin, unsheddable and opaque. But not all histories can be traded in and discarded. The past will rise up to be acknowledged: “The smell is still there, the sound of the child crying.”

  A book of fiction, The Book of Chameleons is based on the very real atrocities committed in Angola’s struggle for independence from Portugal. Agualusa imagines what would happen if victims and perpetrators sought to forget the horrors and uses his story to underscore the impossibility of such forgetting. By the end of the book, remembrance is the only pathway, painful as it is, to a settlement with the past: “I’m at peace at last. I fear nothing. I yearn for nothing.”

  The day after reading Agualusa’s book, I picked up another book translated from the Portuguese, Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani. Couto is a writer from Mozambique, a country, like Angola, brutally governed during its years as a Portuguese colony. Under the Frangipani tells the story of a murder investigation told from the point of view of a man who is dead but who has taken up residence in the body of the investigator. The dead man cares less about his own death than he does about “killing the world of the past.” He fears that the leaders of Mozambique, having fought for independence, no longer believe in the old African ways, the culture and traditions of their ancestors. Instead, they are rushing to catch up with the West, and allowing the past to be forgotten. They are becoming “people without a history, people who live by imitation.” In contrast, the dead man is regaining memories through the body of the inspector, and he is grateful: “Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, every time. It was as if I were on my way back, on a return journey.” He remembers the good and the bad, and finds validity for his own life in both. By taking that “return journey”—looking backward—he finds peace.

  When we were growing up, our parents told us bits and pieces about living through World War II in Europe. Our mother grew up in Antwerp and remembers the Germans invading Belgium in May of 1940. Her father was mobilized to fight the Germans, and the whole family moved with him to France, staying with French families, some welcoming and some not so welcoming. My mother remembers walking along a beach in Brittany with her sister when a troop of Germans on motorcycles came roaring through, separating the sisters and terrifying my mother. She remembers driving through bombed-out towns in northern France and stopping at a house in Abbeville that had lost its entire front facade to bombing. The rooms gaped open like a dollhouse, its occupants long gone, having fled to the countryside. My mother needed to use the bathroom, so her mother sent her in. My mother entered a pristine bathroom, lined along one wall with a neat row of freshly polished shoes left behind by the fleeing family. She stepped past the shoes primly and did her business, su
rrounded by walls on three sides but only the open air in front of her.

  Belgium surrendered to Germany within weeks, and the family returned to occupied Antwerp. Food shortages began, along with heavy rationing. There were no eggs in the city, no butter, and little sugar. My grandmother made marzipan out of mashed potatoes and almond extract; oatmeal contained more husks than oats; bread was brown and stringy with fiber; and milk was so diluted with water it was blue. The baby of the family, my uncle Peter, got most of the milk, but my mother didn’t mind. Never a picky eater, she doesn’t remember being hungry in the war. She was satisfied to eat up whatever was on her plate and told us she was the only one in her family who actually gained weight during the war.

  In 1942, the Allied troops began bombings of Belgium, and blackouts were instituted. The entire city went dark at night, with all windows covered and no streetlamps lit. During the day my mother still walked the twenty minutes back and forth to her school, but now she always wore a package suspended from a string around her neck. The package comprised a handkerchief tied around a whistle and two cubes of sugar. The idea was that in the event of a bombing that left my mother under a pile of rubble, alive but trapped, she would put the handkerchief over her mouth to avoid breathing in dust, suck on the sugar cubes to sustain her energy, and blow like hell on the whistle to get rescued. Eventually my mother was packed off with her sister and brother to live in the countryside with her grandmother. She remembers sitting in a country classroom counting the lice on the head of the boy in front of her.

  We understood that life in Belgium, while hard under German occupation, was still easier than it had been for my father, living under a succession of occupying forces, all of them oppressive. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Under a secret pact signed with Russia, Poland was divided up and Russia took over Belarus. Two years later, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin, Germany marched east and took control of Belarus. When the tide turned against Germany in 1944, the Russians came swarming in again.