A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  When the summer of 1960 ended, I transferred to the university in Mannheim, an industrial city of half a million people next to Heidelberg, and a 3-hour train journey from Mainz. In that first year, I often came to Mainz on weekends. I had begun to write short stories in German and Eva, who had a gift for literature as also for painting, helped me polish them for publication in the Feuilleton section of the local newspaper. During these increasingly awkward visits we sat on her sofa, drinking tea and later in the evening, whisky, while we talked. Our embrace was self-consciously chaste when we parted. Gradually, after about a year of living apart in two different cities, the visits petered out. Eva married and I went on, with much more self-confidence, to other loves of my student years. None of them was as serious or as deep, though, as the one they replaced.

  The tragedy was that whereas the love affair was over for me, leaving behind an enormous tenderness towards her and, yes, gratefulness for an alchemy that I felt had refined my innermost substance, its roots had burrowed deep and began to spread underground as far as Eva was concerned. Over the years, they weakened the structures of other loves she tried to build for herself. In a letter before our planned meeting she asks whether our love

  has been a handicap in your life? Or, to put the question in another way: have you in the meantime gained a love more ‘lovely, dark and deep’? As for me, it was a handicap. It made me unable to have any real erotic interest. I tried and am sad about it but it was a thing I could not foresee . . . I want to see you, either to exorcize old ghosts, or? (let us hope you have become a fat, dull old monster).

  We finally made love at the end of April 1968, eight years after we had first met. This was our biggest mistake; the time for the consummation of young love was long gone. Not returning the love to a woman with whom I had sex, the sex revealed an aftertaste of regret and remorse. I should not have said ‘I love you’ when I held her, when the words should have been in the past tense. The next day, she sent me a short note with a poem of a woman rapturously in love. A day after that I received a frantic letter that her husband had found out we had been together, gone berserk, and had asked her to pack her things and leave their home within a fortnight; he would keep the custody of the daughter. Her parents had taken her husband’s side, her mother brutally telling her to go to ‘your Indian’.

  The story of the discovery of the unfaithful wife was an old one: an unwashed extra glass of wine, a clumsy lie easily exposed, and then the admission that the old lover against whose shadow the husband had always struggled had indeed been there in his absence. I quickly suppressed the thought that the discovery was perhaps intentional, even if unconsciously so, as unworthy of a love I idealized. Daily letters followed, in the beginning with hope. She was now free and we could be together, either in the US or in India. Then came the doubt. Had I ‘still not learnt that one should grasp what one wants to have?’ And then a mounting despair in pleas of ‘I need you, I want you,’ while I kept silent. I was as one paralysed. I could not write back ‘I love you,’ which was the only thing that she wanted or needed to hear. I could not also write that ‘I no longer love you,’ that ‘my love for you is now entombed in my memory, it is no longer alive.’ How to express that I was concerned, that I wanted to help, without my expression of empathy being misinterpreted as that of love? Perhaps underestimating her strength I took the coward’s way out. I wrote a ‘I am sorry to hear . . .’ kind of letter.

  She reacted bitterly. ‘So the romantic story has a banal ending, but not only the end; the whole, every spoken or written word which I remember now appears ridiculous.’

  I received a couple of letters next year when I was back in India: sad, accusing, but without the earlier desperation.

  A man bought a lottery ticket at the yearly market and won a cow. It was a beautiful cow, with a ‘bless’ on its forehead and moist, good-natured eyes. He led the cow home with a rope. While he was walking back along with the cow, he began to think: should I keep the cow or sell it? After he had tied the cow in his barn he had still not reached a conclusion: should I keep it or sell it? He deliberated for days, weeks, months. When one day he came to the barn, he saw the cow lying dead on the floor from starvation. He had not fed it as long as he did not know what he would do with it. The man began to laugh and jump for joy. ‘At last I am free from my worry. Who had thought that the problem was so easy to solve?’

  This is the sad story of the small train that fell in love with a big mountain. The story is sad and without an end: the mountain did not have a tunnel.

  Her last letter made me squirm. I flinched at her portrayal of me. Some of her descriptions may have been true of my youth, as for the youth of many other men, but I believed I had outgrown that stage and yet feared it might be still sticking to me, like afterbirth. Was it my bad breath area of which I was unaware?

  In 2007, almost forty years later, we saw each other again. Her closest friend from the university days had written to me after reading a couple of my books and suggested that the three of us meet, ‘as in the old days’, on my next trip to Germany. At the last moment, the friend could not come. Eva and I sat across each other on sofas in the foyer of a hotel in Schwabing where my German publisher always put me up on my visits to Munich. She was very thin. There were deeply etched lines around her mouth and a profusion of wrinkles on the papery skin of her face. She had aged, as had I, with my thinning grey hair and not the beginnings but the middle stages of a paunch. In the half hour we spent together, there was no small talk—with Eva there never had been any. She still wanted my version of the events, of the love that had died but had remained a troublesome ghost for her. I tried my best but am unsure whether I succeeded. Perhaps because I do not understand ghosts myself.

  I spent four years in Mannheim studying economics and industrial management. ‘Studying’ may be an exaggeration considering the minuscule amount of time I devoted to textbooks or attending lectures. In my youthful love affair with the world I needed passion and surprise and for me economics, like engineering before it, had neither. At the beginning of my stay in Mannheim, I made three very good friends, Gerhard or ‘Haik’—a high school teacher, Walter—a painter, and Lukas—a fellow student at the university. Twice a week, Walter taught an art class on portrait painting at the Volkshochschule, the Adult Education Centre. After the class, Walter, a couple of his students, Haik and I would get together in a tavern for beer and conversation. The evenings tended to extend well into the night. Often, after the others had left, Walter and I would be out on the streets of Mannheim looking for taverns that were still open in spite of the late hour. We generally ended up in one of the sleazy establishments near the wharves on the riverfront, where, bleary-eyed with alcohol and replete with talk, we would drink coffee in the company of incurious sailors and card-playing pimps waiting for their charges.

  Once in a while, we would go to the apartment of Haik’s brother-in-law and his attractive wife Maria who, too, loved to be up till early morning, talking and drinking. I now remember one such late night with a rueful smile though at the time I was acutely embarrassed and could not face the couple for more than a month. The first scene is of my talking to Maria across the table in the living room, our elbows on the table, heads close, both of us more than slightly drunk on many bottles of beer and I, at least, also high on a young man’s hormones. Everyone else has gone to bed. The next shot is of my chasing Maria around the room, both of us giggling. This is followed by the shot of Maria cornered under the table as I kneel on the floor, trying to pull her out, the chaser and the chased united in the moment, the difference only in the nature of their activity, not intention. There is a noise behind me and I look back. The camera pans to Maria’s husband standing at the open door to the bedroom. His hair is tousled from sleep, his eyes are squinting down on us. ‘Muss das sein—Must that be?’ he asks wearily.

  Given my nocturnal life, I normally woke up around lunchtime, walked to the university for the cheap lunch at the students’ c
afeteria, and could never turn up for any class that was scheduled before noon. The Western artist given to creative excesses rather than the contemplative Indian mystic had become my ideal, the hero of my personal myth.

  German universities were easy-going in those days. As long as you collected the required number of certificates in the subjects of your study—the Schein or the certificate being given for writing an essay at the end of the course—you could sit for your final examinations after a minimum of eight semesters or four years without, theoretically, having attended a single lecture. There was no upper limit to the number of years one could stay on at the university. My room-mate in the students’ hostel, for instance, was in his twenty-first semester, chiefly because he spent his winters as a ski instructor in Bavaria, returning every summer to Mannheim only to avail of the subsidized accommodation, travel and food and other concessions that were available to students.

  Most of my education took place in the taverns in the evening, in animated discussions of politics but especially of literature and art. Haik and Walter were passionate left-leaning social democrats, in revolt against their parents’ generation who they held collectively responsible for the rise of Hitler and fascism. They enthusiastically embraced aspects of American culture—the Negermusik of the blues and jazz, the fiction of Hemingway and Steinbeck—even as they defended the communist regimes of East Germany and the Soviet Union. Bertolt Brecht was their literary hero as, for a while, he also became mine. In imitation of Haik, I gave up cigarettes and started smoking a pipe. I regretted that my eyesight was not weak enough for the horn-rimmed glasses that Haik sported. The pipe, glasses, long hair and jackets with leather-patched elbows were the outer markers of the German intellectual of the 1960s, just as the khadi kurta and the jhola were part of the uniform of the Indian intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s. Each April, we demonstrated our political commitment by taking part in the Easter March against atomic weapons. (The marches were also sites for meeting women in an atmosphere that was idealistic, exalted and intimate all at once.) One year we travelled in Haik’s Citroen, the cheap ‘deux cheveaux—two horses’, with a detachable canvas top whose speed dial indicated an optimistic maximum speed of 100 kilometres, to England to take part in the Easter March from Aldermaston, the site of Britain’s atomic weapons establishment, to London. We were unaware that these demonstrations were supported if not steered by the international communist movement. To us, the patronage of Bertrand Russell who addressed the tens of thousands gathered at Trafalgar Square guaranteed its ideological purity.

  More than shaping my political sensibility, the well-lubricated evening discussions, which could turn into heated arguments, gave me an unsystematic education in Western literature and art. Haik was not only a schoolteacher but also a book reviewer for the local newspaper, the Mannheimer Morgen. I not only read but learnt to speak intelligently about the literary cult figures of Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Witold Gombrowicz, besides the other well-known German and French writers whose work was part of every educated person’s intellectual library. Walter had studied a year with Oskar Kokoschka, the great Austrian portraitist, and I adopted Walter’s dismissive views of some well-known painters or even whole schools of painting—‘pretentious kitsch’ were his preferred words for the Abstractionists and all artists who were not figurative, with the sole exception of Paul Klee—as also his admiration for his favourites.

  I owed my entry into this provincial Bohemian world to a fortuitous meeting. In my first week in Mannheim, while I was cooking my staple dinner of rice and overspiced keema mattar in the kitchen of the students’ hostel, a tall lanky German approached me and shyly asked if I was from India. I said yes and offered to share my meal. There was more than enough for both of us since I normally cooked a large pot of keema that lasted me for about four days. I would return the pot to the refrigerator after I had scooped out the quantity I needed for my dinner for a particular evening, ignoring the expression of distaste of other students who wrinkled their noses at the smell each time they opened the refrigerator door. Over dinner, Lukas told me of his love for India and things Indian. Some days later I discovered the source of his fascination with India: his father was the famed Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, a friend of C.G. Jung and Thomas Mann who he had introduced to Indian thought and literature. Zimmer was already married when he met Mila, Lukas’s mother, with whom he had two children out of wedlock. Lukas did not know his father well. I wondered why Lukas was uninterested in books and intellectual life, preferring instead to tinker with the engines of cars. And this, in spite of inheriting a part of his father’s library and the bookcase of a grand-uncle, the famed classical historian Theodor Mommsen. I got the inklings of an answer when I met his mother, who lived in an isolated cottage, cluttered with books, small oil canvases and cats, in the forest of Odenwald beyond Heidelberg.

  Walter, Haik, Lukas and I visited Mila often. Mila had been a painter, a lover of Kandinsky and thus on the fringes of the Der Blaue Reiter—The Blue Rider group of artists that included Franz Marc, August Macke, Lionel Feininger and Paul Klee. She was in her late seventies at the time, her early beauty still visible through the ravages of age and two world wars. She loved to have visitors, chain-smoked unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes, and had a fund of anecdotes about artists and writers she had known in Munich before the First World War. Lukas was generally quiet while she talked, gesturing with her hands, the cigarette ash falling all over the shapeless crimson cardigan she favoured irrespective of the season. I sensed that though Lukas loved his mother deeply he had never approved of her ‘wild’ Bohemian ways and her circle of writers and painters in which he grew up and where his father was but a casual visitor.

  Influenced by Haik and Walter, I wrote and published my first short stories in German. The writing of fiction was a welcome diversion from the conventions and demands of academic writing where I had to submit to the tyranny of the footnote. I remember that in one of my first essays required for a Schein in a course, I had written a paragraph on what I thought was a new idea. I was summoned to the professor’s office and asked to explain why I had not footnoted the offending paragraph.

  ‘This is my own idea,’ I explained with a mixture of pride and what I hoped was suitable modesty.

  ‘Herr Kakar,’ my professor said kindly but firmly, ‘if anyone believes he has an original idea, it only means he has forgotten its source. Please go to the library and find the source so that you can footnote it properly.’

  I was paid fifty Deutsche Marks for each story, a princely sum for me that afforded small luxuries such as buying of books and more than one outing to a restaurant to eat my favourite meal of Rumpsteak mit Zwiebeln und Bratkoffeln—steak with fried onions and potatoes. Looking back, I am not proud of these early literary efforts. Except for the fact that I wrote them in German. As they say in Russia, ‘It is not how well a bear dances, but that it dances at all.’ A couple of the stories are derivative. The plot of one is lifted from Premchand’s ‘The Chess Players’; in another I use the device—from a tale in One Thousand and One Nights—of the heroine receiving a book and being poisoned by licking the finger that turns over pages that are smeared with poison, a ploy I again used in a recent novel, The Crimson Throne. When I look at the yellowing newsprint of these early efforts, I am struck by their intensity of longing for the life of provincial Indian towns where I grew up. For though my head was filled with the intellectual excitement of the West, India was still an overpowering emotional presence and these stories, crude in many ways, convey a deep and persistent undercurrent of nostalgia, almost sensual in character, for the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of the country of my childhood. At the time, I had not attached any personal meaning to my asking my father to send me the Gita Press Hindi edition of all the puranas and the music of Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan and Pannalal Ghosh on 45 rpm discs in their green-and-white paper jackets (an exclusive devotion to Hindustani classical vocal music was to come later), believ
ing these requests merely signified an effort to reclaim my cultural heritage.

  What these literary forays did was to give me a reputation in the university as the Indian ‘who is not only Mannheim’s best table tennis player but also a published writer’. They also lent me a certain allure in the eyes of some women. The few relationships I had were neither casual nor especially deep. In Nabakov’s words, I was a ‘hundred different young men at once, all pursuing one changeful girl,’4 seeking to discover in the variety, my own erotic sameness, to become familiar with the mysteries of my sexual identity.

  The long summer vacations were devoted to earning money: working the night shift in the foundry of the machine shop of John Deere-Lanz tractor factory in Ludwigshafen (the pages of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers still carry the black smudges from the oily hands that turned them during the rest breaks), picking strawberries on a farm in Denmark. In the summer of 1963, on the recommendation of Walter who had been there the previous year, I was awarded a six-week residency at the Karolyi Foundation for Young Artists and Writers in the south of France. The foundation was set up by Countess Karolyi in memory of her husband, Mihail Karolyi, briefly the president of Hungary at the end of the First World War and his country’s ambassador to France in the short-lived government before the communist takeover of the country at the end of the Second World War. It was a 9-acre estate, with olive groves, idyllically located on a hillside west of Vence, a medieval walled village in the Mediterranean Alps between Nice and the perfume capital of France, Grasse. Besides the main house, the residence of Countess Karolyi, there were six stone cottages on the estate for the resident artists and writers. Mine was on a pine-covered hillside that dipped into a narrow valley and overlooked another thickly forested hill beyond which, on clear days, a sliver of the Mediterranean was visible.