Granta 125: After the War

by John Freeman

  When my best friend came to say goodbye the day before I emigrated, as we embraced thinking we would never see each other again, because I would not be allowed back into the country and she would never be allowed out – as my friend was saying goodbye, we couldn’t tear ourselves apart. She went to the door three times and each time she came back. Only after the third time did she leave, walking in a steady rhythm the length of the road. It was a straight road, so I could see her bright jacket getting smaller and smaller, and strangely enough becoming more garish as she went into the distance. I don’t know, did the winter sun shine, it was February, did my eyes shine with tears, or did the material of her jacket gleam – one thing I do know: my eyes followed my friend and, as she walked away, her back shimmered like a silver spoon. So I was able to sum up our separation intuitively in two words. I called it silver spoon. And that was the simplest, most precise way to describe the whole event.

  I don’t trust language. At best I know from my own experience that, to be precise, it must always take something that doesn’t belong to it. I have no idea why verbal images are so light-fingered, why the most valid comparison steals qualities it’s not entitled to. The surprise comes about only through invention, and time and again it proves true that one gets close to the truth only with the invented surprise in the sentence. Only when one perception steals from another, one object seizes and uses the substance of another – only when that which is impossible in real life has become plausible in the sentence can the sentence hold its own before reality.

  My mother believed that in our family fate always intervened during winter. When she emigrated with me from Rumania it was winter, February. Twenty years ago.

  A couple of days before departure, one was allowed to send seventy kilos of luggage per person in advance from the customs post near the border. The luggage had to be packed in a large wooden crate with prescribed measurements. The village carpenter built it out of pale acacia wood.

  I had completely forgotten this emigration crate. I hadn’t given it a thought since 1987, since I got to Berlin. But then there came a time when I had to think about it for days on end, for it played an important role in world events. Our emigration crate made history, it was at the centre of world events, it had become a celebrity, was on television for days on end. What with one thing and another, when objects become independent, when in your head they slide for no reason whatsoever into other things, ever more into other things, the better your head knows that they have absolutely nothing to do with these other things: so I kept seeing our emigration crate on television because the Pope had died. His coffin looked just like the emigration crate. Then the whole emigration resurfaced.

  At four in the morning my mother and I left on a lorry with the emigration crate. The journey to the customs post was five or six hours. We sat on the floor of the trailer and sheltered behind the crate. The night was ice cold, the moon was rocking up and down, your eyeballs felt too bulky, like frozen fruit in your forehead. Blinking was painful, as if a dusting of frost were in your eyes. At first the rocking of the moon was mild and gently curved, then it got colder, it began to sting, had been sharpened to a point. The night was not dark, but transparent, the snow seemed like a reflection of daylight. It was too cold to talk on this journey. You don’t want to keep opening your mouth if your gums are freezing. I wasn’t about to breathe a word. And then I had to speak, because my mother, perhaps intending only to mutter to herself, said out loud:

  ‘It’s always the same snow.’

  She was referring to January 1945 and her deportation to the Soviet Union for forced labour. There were sixteen-year-olds on the Russians’ lists. Many people hid. My mother spent four days in a hole in the ground in the neighbour’s garden, behind the barn. Then the snow came. They couldn’t bring her food in secret any more, every step between house, barn and hole in the ground became visible. Throughout the village, the way to every hiding place could be seen in all that snow. Footsteps could be read in the garden. People were denounced by the snow. Not just my mother, many people had to abandon their hiding places voluntarily, forced out voluntarily by the snow. And that meant five years in the work camp. My mother never forgave the snow.

  Later, my grandmother said to me, ‘You can’t imitate freshly fallen snow, you can’t rearrange snow so it looks undisturbed. You can rearrange earth,’ she said, ‘sand, even grass, if you take the trouble, water rearranges itself because it swallows everything including itself and closes over once it has swallowed. And air,’ she said, ‘is always arranged, because you can’t even see it.’

  Hence every substance other than snow would have remained silent. And to this day my mother believes the thick snow was mainly responsible for her being carted off. She felt that the snow fell on the village as if it knew where it was, as if it were at home here. But then it behaved like a stranger, straight away at the service of the Russians. Snow is a white betrayal. That is exactly what my mother meant by her sentence: It’s always the same snow.

  My mother never said the word BETRAYAL, she didn’t need to. The word BETRAYAL was there because she didn’t say it. And the word BETRAYAL even grew over the years the more she told her story without using the word BETRAYAL, in repeated sentences always with the same formulations that had no need of the word BETRAYAL. Much later, when I had long known the stories of being carted off, it occurred to me that by dint of systematic avoidance the word BETRAYAL had become monstrous in the telling, in fact so fundamental that, had you wished, you could have summed up the entire story with the words SNOW BETRAYAL. The experience was so powerful that in the years to come perfectly common words were sufficient to tell the story, no abstractions, no exaggerations.

  SNOW BETRAYAL is my phrase, and it’s like SILVER SPOON. For long, complicated stories, a simple word contains so much that’s unspoken because it avoids all details. Countless possibilities stretch out in the listener’s imagination, because such words curtail the course of the action to a single point. A phrase such as SNOW BETRAYAL allows many comparisons, because none has been made. A phrase like that leaps out of the sentence, as if made of a different material. I call this material: the trick with language. I am always afraid of this trick with language, and yet it’s addictive. Afraid because, as I am engaged in the sleight of hand, I feel that if the trick succeeds, something beyond the words will become true. Because I am taken up for so long with succeeding, it is as if I wanted to prevent it. And because I know the gap between success and failure swings like a jump rope, I know that in this instance it is the temples and not the feet that are jumping. Invented by means of the trick, and therefore entirely artificially, a phrase like SNOW BETRAYAL resonates. The material it is made of changes and becomes no different from a natural physical sensation.

  I was responsible for the first betrayal I can remember: the betrayal with the calf. I had two calves in my head, and I measured one calf against the other, if not there would have been no betrayal. One calf was carried into the room, the other calf’s foot was broken. One calf was carried into the room shortly after it was born and placed on the sofa in front of my grandfather’s bed. My grandfather had lain paralysed in this bed for years. And for fully half an hour he looked at the newborn calf in total silence with piercing, greedy eyes. I sat on the sofa at the foot of the bed and at the foot of the calf. And I watched my grandfather. Sympathy for him almost broke my heart, just as I was repulsed by his gaze. It was a thieving gaze, aimed directly at the calf, it stretched tight like a glass string in the air between bed and calf. It was a look in which the pupils shone like freshly soldered metal droplets. An obscene, despairing admiration that consumed the calf with the eyes. My grandfather could only see the new calf, he couldn’t see me – thank God. For I could feel how all-consuming that gaze was, how shameless. What hunger in the eyes, I thought. Then HUNGER IN THE EYES was another phrase that kept coming into my head.

  That was one calf. The other calf had its foot broken with an axe just after it was bo
rn, so that we could slaughter it. Killing calves was forbidden. They had to be handed over to the state after a couple of weeks, once they had reached the right weight. Only in the case of an accident did the vet allow enforced slaughter, and then one was allowed to keep and eat the meat. When my father explained the accident with the calf to the vet, how the cow had placed its heavy foot on the calf, I shouted, ‘You’re lying, you did it yourself with the axe!’

  I was seven years old, I knew from my parents that one should never lie. But I also knew that the state is bad, and that it locked people up in prison because they told the truth. I knew too that the vet was a stranger in the village, against us and for the state. I almost caused my father to go to prison because he instinctively trusted me to distinguish between the lies that were not allowed at home and the white lies that were permitted because so much was forbidden. Once the vet had gone, after a hefty bribe, I understood, without knowing the word, what I had done, what betrayal is. I felt scorched. I felt sick from head to toe.

  For years we had faithfully handed over every calf to the state. Now we wanted to eat veal. That’s what it was about. But it was also about several principles, which got confused. Lies, truth and dignity. It was permissible to lie to the state whenever possible, because it was the only way to get your due, this I knew. My father’s lie was effective, it was flexible, and necessary too. So what was it that caused me to betray my father in front of this vet? I was thinking of the other calf in my paternal grandparents’ house, the one the selfsame father carried from the stall into the room in his arms and placed on the velvet sofa. The calf on the sofa was not beautiful, because a calf has no place on a sofa. It was ugly, the way it just lay there, even if it could do nothing about the fact that it was a calf on a velvet sofa, that it was being so spoiled. But the calf whose foot had been broken with the axe was beautiful. Not out of pity, because we wanted to slaughter it. If you want to eat meat, you have to slaughter – no, the calf was beautiful precisely because we couldn’t slaughter it but were obliged to put it on show and torment it. To my peasant eyes, that turned it into an impressive creature. Countless times every day I watched without the slightest problem as chickens, hares or goats were slaughtered. I knew how young cats were drowned, dogs slain, rats poisoned. But an unfamiliar feeling came over me because of the broken foot, I was taken by the natural beauty of the calf, its almost notoriously mawkish innocence, a kind of pain on witnessing the abuse. My father could have ended up in prison. Prison – the word struck me like a knife, in the emptiness of my betrayal my heart pounded up to my brow.

  That was a different betrayal to SNOW BETRAYAL.

  Perhaps I was reminded of the betrayal with the calf, with the two calves, because this night journey by lorry across the plain and the empty fields was as translucent as thin milk. Sitting in the slipstream of the emigration crate my mother had spoken only of SNOW BETRAYAL.

  Then she was travelling to the camp in a sealed cattle wagon, and now she was travelling with me in a lorry to the customs point. Then she was guarded by soldiers with guns, now only the moon was watching. Then she was locked in, now she was emigrating. Then she was seventeen, now she was over sixty.

  It was tough travelling on a lorry by moonlight through the February snow with sixty years and seventy kilos and an emigration crate, but it was nothing compared to 1945. After many years of harassment I wanted out of this country. Even if my nerves were shot, even if I had to do it to escape the Ceau6escu regime and its secret service, and so as not to lose my mind, STILL it was something I wanted to do, not had to do. I wanted to get out, and she wanted to because I wanted to. I had to say that to her on the lorry, even if my gums froze as I was talking. ‘Stop comparing, it’s not the snow’s fault,’ I had to say to my mother, ‘the snow didn’t force us out of our hiding place.’

  At that time I was not far from losing my mind. I was so exhausted my nerves were playing tricks on me, the fear I felt came through every pore and onto every object I tinkered with. They then tinkered with me. If you look just a little over the edge, manoeuvre just a little in that tiny space in your head between the abstruse and the normal, and if you watch yourself doing it, you have reached the farthest point of normality. Not much more can be added. One must keep an eye on oneself, try to separate thinking and feeling. One wants to absorb everything into the head as usual, but not into the heart. Inside yourself two versions stalk: one enlarged but totally strange, the other familiar but unrecognizably tiny and blurred. You feel yourself becoming increasingly unrecognizable, indistinct. This is a dangerous state to be in, however closely you pay attention you don’t know when it will topple over. Only that it will topple over if this shitty life doesn’t change.

  It wasn’t just that there was no hiding place in the snow, as I said to my mother, there was none in my head: it was clear to me I had to get away. I was at the end of my tether, for several months I had confused laughing and crying. I knew when not to cry, when not to laugh, but it was of no use. I knew what was right, and I did it all wrong. I was no longer able to keep to what I already knew. I laughed and I cried.

  It was in this state that I arrived at the Langwasser transit hostel in Nuremberg. It was a tall tower block opposite the site of Hitler’s rallies. The block contained little boxes for sleeping in, corridors with no windows, neon light only, countless offices. On day one there was an interrogation by the German Counter-Intelligence Service. Then again on the second day, repeatedly, with breaks, and on the third, and on the fourth. I understood: the Securitate weren’t here with me in Nuremberg, only the German Counter-Intelligence Service. I was now where he was, but where was I, how the hell did I get here. Their interrogators were known as inspectors. The signs on the doors read Inspection Office A and Inspection Office B. Inspector A wanted to know if in fact I had ‘an assignment’. The word ‘spy’ didn’t come up, but they asked, ‘Did you have anything to do with the secret service there?’ ‘It did with me, there is a difference,’ I said. ‘I’ll be the judge of that, it’s what I’m paid for,’ he said. It was disgraceful. Inspector B then asked, ‘Did you want to overthrow the regime? You can admit it now. It’s yesterday’s snow.’

  Then it happened. I couldn’t stand it that some inspector was dismissing my life with a saying. I leapt up from the chair and said, far too loud, ‘It’s always the same snow.’

  I have never liked the saying ‘yesterday’s snow’, because it has no curiosity about what happened in the past. Now I knew clearly what it was I couldn’t abide about the saying, the snows of yesteryear. I couldn’t stand the meanness of it, the contempt. This expression must be very insecure to puff itself up like that, to appear so arrogant. We can gather from the expression that this snow was presumably important in the past, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it, wouldn’t be trying to rid ourselves of it today. What went through my head next I didn’t say to the inspector.

  In Rumanian there are two words for snow. One is the poetic word, nea. In Rumanian nea also means a man whom we know too well to address formally but not well enough to address familiarly. One might use the word UNCLE. Sometimes words determine their own uses. I had to defend myself against the inspector and against the suggestion in Rumanian that said to me, it’s always the same snow and always the same uncle.

  And something else happened when, newly arrived from the dictatorship to a Nuremberg transit hostel, I was being interrogated by a German Secret Service man. I’ve just been rescued, I thought, and I’m sitting here in the West like the calf on the sofa. Only when I saw the HUNGER IN THE EYES of the official did I understand that it was not only the tormented calf with the broken foot that had been abused, but also, every bit as much – only more insidiously – the spoiled calf on the sofa.

  Every winter the white seamstress came to our house. She stayed for two weeks, ate and slept with us. We called her white because she only sewed white things: shirts and undershirts and nightshirts and brassieres and suspenders and bedclothes. I spent
a lot of time near the sewing machine and watched the flow of the stitches, how they formed a seam. On her last evening in our house I said to her at dinner, ‘Sew something for me to play with.’

  She said, ‘What should I sew for you?’

  I said, ‘Sew a piece of bread for me.’

  She said, ‘Then you’ll have to eat everything you’ve played with.’

  Eat everything you’ve played with. You could also describe writing that way. Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me. The fact that I eat it doesn’t make it disappear. And the fact that it eats me doesn’t make me disappear. The same thing happens when words turn into something else as you write, to be precise, when objects proclaim their independence and verbal images steal what is not theirs. Especially when writing, when words become something different, to be precise, what is taking place is perhaps always the same snow and always the same uncle.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  1979

  Aminatta Forna

  * * *

  In the land of Ferdowsi, of Rumi and Omar Khayyam, Hafez and Scheherazade, in October of the year 1977, fifty-nine poets and writers assembled to read and recite for ten continuous nights. Ten thousand people gathered in the gardens and halls of the Goethe Institute in Tehran. The stories and poems were recorded and distributed to ten times ten thousand people. In the course of those nights, under the bright stars and moon of the city’s cloudless skies, the nation’s intellectuals joined chorus with peasants, workers and mullahs who raised their own voices in protest in towns and cities around the land. Two hundred and eighteen poems were read, and in the words they chose the poets spoke their anger to the Shah, to where he sat upon his Peacock Throne. The Shah’s anger grew and in the weeks that followed he tried to crush the people, but the people would not be crushed. And so he tried to appease them, he blamed his prime minister and sent him away, he repealed some laws and made new ones. But still, the people would not be appeased.