Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  ‘Taking a picture,’ she says, ‘is always an act of violence. But I can live with it, it’s not all that bad, is it?’

  We are taking the now-dry photographs off the lines. ‘It’s not all that bad, is it?’ she repeats and holds one up in front of my eyes, of Moutet, whose peak I will ascend when I am older, I know I will return, ‘because you give it back, in concentrated form,’ she says.

  I can see that the Moutet I know is clearer in the photograph than in reality. I am taller than Jeanne, she reaches my armpit. I think it’s a load of pathetic drivel – nothing is damaged by being photographed.

  ‘It’s because we are leaving and saying goodbye to everything,’ Mother says. ‘It makes her soft-headed.’

  Jeanne comes back with us to New York after all. When she managed to rest a little, she realized it was too early to die. But I don’t want to go home. She has become an old French lady dressed in black, who sits with the other old ladies with swollen legs and observes life in the town from the benches surrounding the large tree on the square. ‘We’re still here,’ they say, ‘for a little while longer.’

  ‘You’re full of twaddle,’ Mother says and elbows Jeanne in the side.

  ‘Alright alright,’ Jeanne says, and starts to tell us about Balzac’s vague dread of Daguerreotypes, but Mother has no patience, no interest in what Jeanne has to say, she would rather just mock and laugh and nudge and tickle, that’s why I can’t remember what she said. Mother always wants to be the centre of things: yesterday when we sat eating, she purposefully knocked over a glass of water.

  Jeanne and I often bump into each other in the small space of the Dark Room, and one day, I am laughing so hard that I am sweating everywhere, because her breasts shoved me (they’re so big, right in front of me). It’s time to return to New York, because Father has written that Charles is out of the reformatory and needs a mother. Mother wants to try. But Father has managed to convince one of the Jaussauds to send him money, and Mother is furious all the way across the ocean.

  Narrator

  Maria and Viv and Jeanne travelled home aboard the world’s largest and fastest passenger ship: the SS Normandie. It didn’t last long. It was launched in 1935 and caught fire in 1942 when it was being refitted into a transport ship (witness, if you will, on YouTube, the blaze on the capsized mastodon). Charles stood on the quay and welcomed them, by his side stood son and brother Carl.

  Viv

  Carl was not wearing a collar, and Father was not holding a leash that was fastened to his neck, but when he delivered him to Mother it was as though that were the case. Eighteen years old. There were a lot of surprises. We learned about all of them right there on the quay. Father had been to Mexico and paid for a divorce, and had signed for Mother, since she wasn’t there to do it herself. And then he had got remarried to German Berta. Nana had found an apartment for us on 421 East 64th St where we were to live together, Mother, Charles and I.

  Two rooms with wallpaper smelling of smoke – Mother and I share one, and Charles has the second to himself. He would prefer to be called Carl, he is used to being called that by Grandma and Grandpa, but I divide him, calling him Charles in the room and Carl in the kitchen. He is not allowed to set foot in Mother’s room. He says she treats him like a lodger, not a son. (He says the word as though he doesn’t believe it himself). He asked one of his friends’ mothers to let him live with her, but it didn’t work out. He shows me a document from the prison which reads:

  ‘Parole rescheduled for August 1938. The inmate would likely have a better chance of making a successful adjustment if placed outside the immediate family circle.’

  That’s us. Mother and me. But it could also be Father and his German wife, who are the immediate family circle.

  Every night he soaks dried apricots in a bowl of water in the hope of spending fewer hours out in the WC in the corridor, ‘You should eat prunes instead,’ Mother shouts when the neighbour pounds on the door of the WC that is shared by four apartments. He is big-boned like me, we placed our wrists side by side on the kitchen table. ‘Brother’ oh yes, but it goes quiet when we are alone, because can you relate to an eighteen-year-old brother when you are twelve? We are not good face-to-face, unfortunately. Flowers won’t grow on a dunghill – nonsense, they do exactly that: we ought to be friends. ‘You ought to be friends, so you have each other – in the middle of all this,’ Grandma said. Nana (who is Grandma’s best friend) pays the rent of $19.50, and gives us fifty dollars to live on every month, and then Father calls her a sanctimonious old hag. The reconciliations are worse than the arguments – we all sit around the table together, but they look in different directions. I feel like lying down on the floor. Everything always ends in shouting anyway. Mother is hurting all over, it’s impossible to say exactly where, but her heart is beating very fast. Working is ruled out. We eat food straight from the tin, something Charles learned at the reformatory where the families often sent them extra food, which they ate under the duvet. Nana also sent him food from the Vanderbilt residence in Palm Beach, we are proud of her. Charles shows me how ‘Vocational School’ on one of the palm tree postcards Nana sent him has become ‘Vacational School’ (she has never perfected her American even though she has been here since she was young, sometimes she spells wild with a ‘v’), but it was a tough place, not much of a holiday to it. He is six foot two, and I pray to God I do not grow quite so tall. Mother lies in the bed when she doesn’t go to the cinema in her tired fur, which she is considering spraying with hairspray because it sheds. One day when I come into the kitchen, the dishcloth is wrapped around the bread – not an embrace I feel like being a part of. When Father falls out with Berta, he comes home to stay with us until he falls out with Mother. I have seen him get washed down the stairs by waves of screaming and shouting. Carl (I call him Carl now, because he prefers that, and you have to use the name people prefer) is angry at Father because he tried to steal the life insurance Grandma had taken out for him, and he says it is Father’s fault that Grandpa worked himself to death because he didn’t contribute so much as a penny but bet everything at the race track. He still does. Brother shows me the death notices. There are two because they forgot me first time round. They had it corrected the next day, and there I was in the paper as the bereaved, the grandchild. I often sit on the chair in the kitchen. The tap drips. That’s life in the reeds. ‘Those aren’t reeds on the wallpaper, Vivian, they’re ears of corn.’ When Mother is upset at Carl, I am not allowed to speak to him. She speaks badly of him to the supervisor from prison, calls him an insane junkie. She says he steals. He also talks badly of her, says she is lazy and can’t be bothered to clean or do laundry or cook. That’s true enough. Nana has given Carl a new guitar so he can play down at the bar at night, he smokes hash cigarettes so that he can hear better, everything becomes Clear, maybe like crystal. I remain in my chair. Mother says that when she enters a room where I am, she can’t sense that I’m there, as though I were a thought instead of a body. There are three things Father and I like: dogs, the New York Times and the beach. He has two German Pinschers that scare the life out of people when they come bounding over. But they are as good as the day is long. Nana makes French food for the richest people in the country, and sometimes she sends some of the fine food that will last in a package with a lot of twine around it. I love her packages. I remove the twine – and her presence fills the kitchen. Then we stand eating foie gras with teaspoons, and Mother comes in, looking like an Asian troll with curled-up earlobes because she has been lying on them, bringing in the strong smell of sleep. Each apple is wrapped in tissue paper. ‘I’m so ill,’ she says, and the heart sinks again. If she dies, what will become of me? The tissue paper makes her both bitter and merry. She and Father both lived in the village’s largest houses; ‘You know Beauregard,’ she says, yes, of course I do. And I want to go back. Father’s family are butchers. But there is nobility in the blood from some time in the past, hence the von. Their house had previously been an evangeli
cal chapel – it had arches in the ceiling. They were something. Then they came to America, and suddenly they were nothing. The only one who has succeeded is Alma, who has married into Park Avenue. And it must be lovely to cook for the Vanderbilts. But even though Nana visits the grand households, she still belongs down in the kitchen. Carl has bought a padlock to keep Mother out of his room when he is not home – she goes looking for tobacco and money.

  Mother now wants to turn Carl back over to ‘his own’, but Father and Berta don’t want him, so he has to live with Grandma. The Germans who are interned on Ellis Island don’t want African cooks. The Africans aren’t to touch their food. Then I hate the Germans even more. I listen to the radio in order to get good at American again. Someone came by from the census office today. Mother wrote on the form that all four of us lived here, but it’s only her and me. It made no sense, but she said it looked more respectable. I am almost always in the kitchen now because of the radio and the unbearableness everywhere else, I have Carl’s room now, but the illnesses and the fury from Mother’s room flow in. In France, she loved me.

  Narrator

  Berta and Charles (or Charlie as Berta calls him when it’s cuddle-time) have had two of Berta’s nephews staying with them; one of them got so scared when Charles threatened Berta with a knife that he fled all the way to Germany, a path nobody would normally choose to take, and the other joined the army after Charles emptied his account. ‘Two jittery young men,’ Charles said. They aren’t going to have anyone else staying with them.

  Viv

  Sometimes Nana is also at Grandma’s when I visit, it’s peaceful there without Mother. The old ladies warm each other’s feet by rubbing them vigorously between their hands; it’s an exceptionally cold winter. I heard them say in the kitchen that Carl is twelve years old inside his head. But he earns five hundred dollars a month playing in a band and on the radio and then a little on top by offering tips at the race track. He takes six different types of drugs now. He tries to join the army in order to pull himself together, but they don’t want him. Then Pearl Harbour happens, he gets called up, and we send a silent secret thanks to the Japanese. They find out he is a drug addict, and he gets kicked out. He sits with his hands around his head at home with Grandma again and wails: ‘I have no control over myself.’

  Aunt Maria Florentine is dead. We have lit candles for her. Now Beauregard is resoundingly empty. The German soldiers have long since eaten the sheep and maybe the horses too. Oh, the horses. Oh, Auntie. It makes Grandma think of a poor old woman she knew back home. A widow who lived alone at the edge of the woods, at her advanced age, with only a cat to keep her company. One day she had got help chopping firewood for the winter from some men from the village, and she had nothing other to give them than a hot meal before they had to leave. ‘Whatever kind of roast is this?’ And imagine, it was the cat she loved so much that she had served, because she had nothing else, and she could not let them leave with nothing. When I am with Carl, I sometimes think about what Mother said that hurt me and which I cannot forget. I can’t really sense him in the room, compared to the two grandmothers who have sturdy souls. It’s Sunday. We talk about when we think things have been best in our lives. Carl thinks that the time when he lived with Grandma and Grandpa and ran around with the boys on the streets in the Bronx was best. ‘Then why did you run away from home so often?’ Grandma asks. He continues talking about the boys and about being out in the open. He loves fresh air like me. Once he hitched all the way to California. Nana thinks her best years were those spent in the grand kitchens, when she was a chef and her recipes flourished on the serving platters, but it has had its toll on her – she looks as old as Grandma who is twenty years older. Grandma misses the fatherland, the woods of her homeland, but so many people have been shot between the tree trunks, two world wars, the camps, no, we must try to stop thinking about it. And me, I miss speeding off on my bicycle in Champsaur in the pack of other speedy cyclists, because eventually Philippe, Jean-Claude, Anna and Maryse also got bicycles.

  Narrator

  She was close to being suffocated at the factory where she worked for god-knows-how-long at some point in the 1940s, her big hands always wanted to get out, Viv and a sewing machine, she might as well have been an umbrella.

  Viv

  I was locked inside, behind doors with heavy bolts, resigned to be consumed by a lack of light and fresh air, it’s already dark when I finish work and, then I drift off to sleep and continue the next day, the next year until saving up enough money to die. But before that you are scrubbed in Life’s great tub. Maybe your shoes will fit another pair of feet that can continue walking in them, in my case a man.

  Father had his name in the paper for helping Ingrid Bergman past a curious crowd of onlookers standing outside the theatre, where his job is to make sure the air-conditioning works. I could have stood in that throng, Father too, we love celebrities. He should have got Ingrid Bergman’s autograph, but to have been so close to her (he can still catch the scent of her perfume if he closes his eyes and really concentrates, but it is difficult to say something rational about scents, he just says ‘it smelled of flowers,’ ‘but which flowers?’ I ask), it’s worth more than a thousand autographs, I’m not so sure about that. She let him take her by the arm. He helped her into the car. Her skin was pallid, and he felt her ribs through the coat when his elbow momentarily slid down her side. You’re never the same after that.

  What are we doing on the beach, Father and I, apart from brushing sand off each other? We are throwing large balls around, and the dogs, now wearing muzzles, leap around in the water as though jumping over obstacles! Carl isn’t swimming, he’s squirming on his striped towel with his femoral bones crossed. There are men lying in the parks in the stairwells on the sidewalks, all of whom could be my brother – weak dependent grubby men. Father stands in the waves holding a bottle of whiskey, rolling his German ‘r’s. There are things you don’t even say to yourself.

  He has no memory. I say: tell me about something from your childhood. But nothing happens. Everything I know I’ve got from Grandma or from Mother who also got it from Grandma.

  Something has happened. Nana and Grandma have sent Mother to a boarding house and found a guardian with an enormous bust who has moved in with me, money changed hands, Mother’s were filled – otherwise it would never have happened. It’s a different life now. We have put up wallpaper: there are blue roosters on the walls of the kitchen. I got someone to take a picture of us together on the beach, the two of us are like Laurel & Hardy – Emilie is short and fat. She has made life good. I am completing my schooling by correspondence now and the apartment is cluttered with books and magazines; we both love Life. Then I dream but I hardly dare say it aloud, of a life outdoors, full speed ahead, travelling, in danger, something along the lines of Robert Capa or W. Eugene Smith. I don’t want to spend my days in a dusty studio like Jeanne.

  Because I am going to remain untouched forever, I don’t need to waste time on bagatelles like hair or attire, I am someone who is going to See.

  Narrator

  Viv was surrounded by women who did well without men and marriage: Eugénie, Jeanne, Maria and Maria Florentine.

  For my part, I would like a lover with a mind like my dog, simple straightforward, so that there aren’t two minds, each like a six-lane freeway, uninterrupted rush hour, racing along, while the heads seemingly resting so sweetly side by side on the pillows – I once had a lover, and often the tumult, the loneliness, the weight became so overwhelming that I could not keep still, but pulled my head away from her head, oh if only it had been the gaze of a faithful dog that met mine, when I accidently woke her and she opened her eyes and let me stare into her bottomless blue human wells. She obviously considered it a victory if she could get me to lay my head back on the pillow. ‘The way the dead gauge the love of the bereaved according to the adornment on the graves,’ a voice inside of me said.