Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  After the war ends, Anton is taken in by relatives and goes back to school, eventually building a career and falling in love. Moments of happiness and even joy reemerge over his lifetime, as when he has a son, whom he names for his dead brother Peter. But still Anton searches for the full story of that one night, wondering why he survived and his family did not. Survival itself is a “complicated braiding of ripples,” the consequences of war being scars of loss and fear, anger and bewilderment. For Anton, the scars of war are his abiding pessimism and the haunting memory of that horrible night outside his house: “The world is hell. . . . Even if we had heaven on earth tomorrow, it couldn’t be perfect because of all that’s happened. Never again could things be set right.”

  For my father, the consequences of war brought him far from home, and eventually across an ocean, to start over in a new world. My parents tell me I was named after the members of the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi, most of whom were named Nina. They went to see a performance of the Bolshoi just days before I was born. But I also know that my name is another ripple effect of the war, coming from my father’s sister Antonina, who was murdered that night in 1943. Much as Anton took the name of his dead brother for his own son, my name is a remembrance of a life lost, of a sibling taken away.

  The final chapter of The Assault finds Anton, now middle-aged, being swept up in an antinuclear rally. The protesters march against a future war, the war of mutual nuclear destruction. But Anton is not optimistic that a nuclear battle can be stopped. He believes that “everything is forgotten in the end,” and he doesn’t mean forgotten as in forgiven, but forgotten as in no lessons learned. He believes the experience of war, in all its horrors, is doomed to be repeated over and over.

  Reading in my purple chair, I shrank from Anton’s conclusion. Is everything forgotten in the end? Are no lessons ever learned? I thought back to the first book I ever read about war, Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt. Across Five Aprils tells the story of the Creighton family from southern Illinois. The family is divided by the Civil War when one brother joins up with the Union army and another son goes south to fight with the Confederacy.

  I read the book in 1975, as part of my curriculum in middle school. Our country was coming out of the Vietnam War then, and yet our teacher failed to make the connection between what we were reading, with its descriptions of battles and injuries, families torn apart by war, and a country ravaged by dissension, and what we ourselves were living through. As eighth-graders born in 1962, our entire lives had played out under the shadow of the Vietnam War. We were ready to discuss the parallels between the conflicts of the 1860s and the conflicts of the 1960s and ’70s. We would have welcomed the chance to talk about war and make sense of it—or not. Instead our teacher taught Across Five Aprils as a historically placed novel that mirrored facts we were learning in social studies, facts we had to learn about for a test and could then forget.

  I remember going to church on a Sunday in the early 1970s, a few years before I would read Across Five Aprils. The priest gave a sermon condemning all the protests against the war in Vietnam.

  “We must give unwavering support to our nation’s war against communism and godlessness. I say to you, America, love it or leave it.”

  My mother tensed in the pew beside me, her breath suddenly sharp and ragged. When the service ended, she marched out of that church with her jaw trembling and her arms swinging. I don’t remember how she began her haranguing of the priest, but I do remember standing beside her on the sidewalk outside the church and hearing the rise and fall of her voice, how it choked with anger and then tears. I held on to her skirt and felt the swell of her conviction.

  “Democracy depends on the voices of its citizens, whether supportive or critical of the government! Leave America? No, I choose to try and make it a better country. A country that ends wars, not perpetuates them.”

  I felt her outrage that a man of God extolled the waging of war. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, describing his own World War II experiences, “War is murder,” and we better not forget it. The priest at Saint Athanasius had forgotten. My mother hadn’t forgotten, nor had my father. We never went back to that church again.

  I often find myself at dinner parties arguing over the altruism of human beings. One dinner stands out in my memory, a meal of lobster alongside a pool in East Hampton on a warm summer evening. At a table of eight, I found myself the only one willing to believe that humans are inherently cooperative and productive. I looked around the table at my dinner mates, all products of loving families, solid public educations, and open career opportunities. How could they not grasp that it was the goodness of humanity upon which all of their bounty was based? I laid claim to the fine meal, long-held friendships, and burgeoning families (babies were in tow) as proof of the big and small feats of goodness and selflessness that humans are capable of. But one of the women at the table raised what is always believed to be the trump card in any argument over mankind’s goodness:

  “What about war? If we’re so good, why do we go out and kill each other?”

  I couldn’t answer Liza. But now I know what I should have told her.

  “Read a book,” I should have said, “to find out why we go to war, to experience what it is that drives us to violence.”

  We weren’t going to resolve the question of mankind’s inherent goodness or evil sitting out on a deck on a summer night. But maybe, just maybe, if Liza took a book to bed and read it, really read it, she’d come closer to understanding our own closeted selves, our ambitions and our desires. And the impact that those desires have on our lives, for good and for bad.

  The main character in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter turns to books to understand war. Her first husband goes off to Europe in 1942 and is killed. Hannah marries again, and her second husband, Nathan, is drafted and sent to the Pacific theater. He comes back home having fought in the battle of Okinawa. He never talks to Hannah or anybody else about what he saw there. When he dies, decades later, Hannah finds herself filled with an urgent need to know about the battle, and she looks for answers in books: “I needed to know, but I am not glad to know.”

  What she finds out through her reading is that the horrors her husband lived through are unavoidable facts of war. War is “a human storm of explosions and quakes and fires, a man-made natural disaster gathering itself up over a long time out of ignorance and hatred, greed and pride, selfishness and a silly love of power . . . passing like a wind-driven fire over the quiet land and kind people.” Hannah tracks back the consequences of war not only for her husband, but for herself and for their children. She needs to know what his experience of war was to understand how he acted later, as both husband and father. She comes to see that he needed the quiet of their hometown and the encircling of their family and her love to keep his knowledge of war at bay: “He needed to know that he was here and I was here with him, that he had come back from the world of war, again, to this. Reassured, he would sleep again, and I too would sleep.”

  Books are the weapon against Anton’s lament that “everything is forgotten in the end.” Books allow experiences to be relived, and allow lessons to be learned. Anton’s frustration in watching the ripples left on a canal by a passing barge and not being able to “figure out exactly how it happened” is not my frustration. I understood the ripples and their impacts because The Assault traces back and exposes the links between that one horrible night and the lives of everyone there. Having read the book, I can imagine and I will never forget the costs of war. I have experienced what Anton experienced, and now I will always remember him.

  By reading The Assault and Hannah Coulter, I experienced—safely, yes, but still with sweat and with tears—war. Just as in other books, like Alice Fantastic and Family Happiness, I had experienced love and lust. The difference was that I had shied away from reading books about war, from having an experience that was scary and jarring and upsetting. And now I understood why it was important to read these books. Because being witn
ess to all types of human experience is important to understanding the world, but also to understanding myself. To define what is important to me, and who is important, and why.

  For Anton, war was proof of man’s inherent violence. For Nathan, Hannah Coulter’s second husband, that proof was tempered by what he knew of his own family, and of his own quiet place in the universe. My father, like Anton, suffered the loss of family during a murderous act of war. But he did not carry from his experience of war an abiding pessimism about the nature of mankind. He was more like Nathan, both in having witnessed war’s devastation and in how he turned inward after the war, building an existence of family and work that protected him. As Hannah describes it, “Our life in our place had been a benediction to him, but he had seen it always within a circle of fire that might have closed upon it.”

  I was, along with my mother and my sisters, my father’s shield against the past, a buffer zone between him and the pain he’d known. And even more than a protection, we were a promise of better things to come. Now that Anne-Marie had died, there was a rent in the shield, a rift in the buffer, a breaking of the promise. I could patch over the hole, but the bump of repair would always be there, a rough and uneven space marking her absence. As for the promise, I was doing what I could to recover it for everyone in my family. I was reading.

  And in reading, I discovered that the burden of living is the uneven and unlimited allotment of pain. Tragedy is conferred randomly and unfairly. Any promise of easy times to come is a false one. But I know I can survive the hard times, taking the worst of what happens to me as a burden but not as a noose. Books mirrored life—my life! And now I understood that all the bad and sad stuff that happens to me, and that happened to the people I was reading about, is both the cost and the proof of resilience.

  The value of experience, real or imagined, is that it shows us how to—or how not to—live. In reading about different characters and the consequences of their choices, I was finding myself changed. I was discovering new and distinct ways of undergoing life’s sorrows and joys. I could follow the example of my father, and hold my family closely around me, or I could pattern myself after Anton, and turn sour and dark over the nature of the world. I chose my father’s way.

  The Assault is about more than war. Hannah Coulter is about more than war. Those two books—and all the great books I was reading—were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books are experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. I had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

  Chapter 13

  Bound to the World

  I cried with joy when all the children began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language.

  CHRIS CLEAVE,

  Little Bee

  WHAT SERENDIPITY BROUGHT ME TO CHRIS CLEAVE’S Little Bee halfway through my year of reading? I had begun my year with The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and learned there my first lesson, to find the beauty and to hold on to it for a lifetime. And now I read Little Bee, where I learned that there is beauty in the affinity of found connection between me and the rest of the world. I, who often felt like an outsider, found myself to be fully a part of the world and not apart from it.

  Growing up in an immigrant household, I suppose it was natural to feel like an alien in my midwestern town. But the feeling persisted through college, law school, and even now as a mother in another suburban town. My children weren’t particularly sporty, and I wasn’t one for joining clubs, and so I felt left out of the flow of playdates, ball games, and cocktail parties that punctuated other families’ lives. When my sister died, the feeling of distance heightened. Everyone assured me that I would feel better soon, that grieving was a process and I would get through it. How did they know that? How could they know that about me? I felt as if no one really understood what I was going through.

  But books were showing me that everyone suffers, at different times in their lives. And that yes, in fact, there were many people who knew exactly what I was going through. Now, through reading, I found that suffering and finding joy are universal experiences, and that those experiences are the connection between me and the rest of the world. My friends could have told me the same, I know, but with friends there are always barriers, hidden corners, and covered emotions. In books, the characters are made known to me, inside and out, and in knowing them, I know myself, and the real people who populate my world.

  Little Bee tells the story of a young woman (Little Bee is her nickname) who has fled her home country of Nigeria and come to England to seek out Andrew and Sarah, the couple who saved her once before. But Andrew has committed suicide, and Sarah is suffering from depression. Not only has the death of Sarah’s husband left her questioning the meaning of her own life, but her son persists in behaving bizarrely, her lover irritates her, and her job as a journalist seems pointless. Little Bee tries to offer commiseration and understanding, and in turn Sarah reaches out to offer support to Little Bee. Little Bee witnessed the rape and murder of her sister and the pillaging and destruction of her village, and is struggling to find a place, within and without, where she feels safe. Her past haunts her through memories, and her present—living undocumented and unemployed—is unstable.

  Sarah and Little Bee both feel like outsiders. Sarah sees everyone around her as functioning on a different level, one she can’t reach or understand. Little Bee is both literally an alien, as an undocumented refugee, and a foreigner to all the English people around her. She is further set apart by the horror she has had to experience.

  In my first year as a lawyer in the late 1980s, I took on the case of an immigrant seeking refuge in the United States. Like Little Bee, Kulwinder Singh had a horrible story of torture to tell. Picked up by the police in the Punjab state of India, Kulwinder was suspected of being a member of a militant group seeking an independent Sikh state. He was held by the police for weeks and tortured repeatedly, then released with a warning. He scrounged together money for a plane ticket and, with his family’s blessings, fled India. Upon arrival at JFK Airport in New York, he requested asylum and was placed in a detention center in downtown Manhattan. The first time I met him, I was struck by how little he was. The regulation orange overalls he’d been given were many sizes too large, and he’d rolled up the sleeves and legs in an attempt to find a fit. His face, unshaven and tired looking, was as small as a child’s. We sat together with a translator, a turbaned Sikh who made clear his disdain for Kulwinder’s short hair. The translator explained to me later, with a sniff, that true Sikhs never cut their hair.

  Long hair or short, Kulwinder had suffered for his cultural identity. Through the stumbling words of his soft and tentative voice, I learned the details of his arrest and torture. During our allotted time together, spent in the dusty visitors’ room of the detention center, I forced myself to study and document his scars. The back of his hands were marked with discolored and raised ridges of mottled skin, and on his palms I saw darkened circles where cigarettes had burned holes. The circular marks continued up along his arm, and when he pulled the legs of his overalls up, I could see more darkened dots on his thighs.

  With the documentation of his scars and the words of his testimony, we won our case before the immigration judge. Kulwinder was granted asylum. He now lives quietly and safely in New York State. The scars on his body are the closest to torture I have ever come, and I would never want to be any closer.

  I don’t believe that there is some grand karma, an invisible spirit or tether, that unites me with all other humans in the world
. I know by experience that a horrible, devastating event can occur, and I will remain unaware of it. I didn’t feel my sister’s last breath passing across my cheek to let me know she was gone. I don’t feel a rumble beneath my feet at the same time an earthquake strikes thousands of miles away or suffer sudden anguish when on the other side of the world genocide is being committed. I didn’t feel Kulwinder being burned with cigarettes on the palms of his hands.

  But even with all my ignorance, I know there are events in human experiences that I have been made to feel and to understand. It is done through the power of reading. How do books work their magic? How do writers bind their readers so tightly with their characters that we become those characters as we read? Even where—especially where—the characters and the plot are so different from our own lives?

  By recognizing what is universal. Little Bee says to Sarah one morning as they drive from the house to buy milk, “We are all trying to be happy in this world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You are happy because you can make your own choices.” Little Bee and Sarah see themselves in the hopes of the other, and they want to help each other fulfill those hopes. I saw myself in both characters. I saw outsiders trying to find answers. It was not the physical or historical resemblances that mattered. It is our common desire, shared beneath the skin.

  After the war, my father was a “displaced person,” a refugee without passport or country. After living in a refugee camp, and then as a worker on an American army base, he moved in with a German couple. The couple had lost all of their children—three sons—in the war. They were very kind to my father, feeding him with whatever food could be scrounged to get meat back on his skinny frame and inviting him to sit with them in the evening as a member of the family. What my father shared with the husband and wife was a desire for peace and security. Together, the three of them tried to rebuild normalcy after the horrors of war.