A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (4 page)

She took to the native dialect again, though of course only in fun: she was a woman who had been
ABROAD
. Almost all her old girl friends had by then returned to their native village; they had made only brief excursions to the city or across the borders.

In this life, confined almost entirely to housekeeping and making ends meet, you didn’t confide in your friends; at the most, friendship meant familiarity. It was plain from the start that all had the same troubles—the only difference was that some took them more lightly than others, a matter of temperament.

In this section of the population, people without troubles were an oddity—freaks. Drunks didn’t get talkative, only more taciturn; they might bellow or brawl for a while, but then they sank back into themselves, until at closing time they would start sobbing for no known reason and hug or thrash whoever was nearest to them.

No one had anything to say about himself; even in church, at Easter confession, when at least once a year there was an opportunity to reveal something of oneself, there was only a mumbling of catchwords out of the catechism, and the word “I” seemed stranger to the speaker himself than a chunk out of the moon. If in talking about himself anyone went beyond relating some droll incident, he was said to be “peculiar.” Personal life, if it had ever developed a character of its own, was depersonalised except for dream tatters swallowed up by the rites of religion, custom, and good manners; little remained of the human individual, and indeed, the word “individual” was known only in pejorative combinations.

The sorrowful Rosary; the glorious Rosary; the harvest festival; the plebiscite celebration; ladies’ choice; the drinking of brotherhood; April Fools’ pranks; wakes; kisses on New Year’s Eve: in these rituals all private sorrow, ambition, hunger for communication, sense of the unique, wanderlust, sexual drive, and in general all reactions to a lopsided world in which the roles were
reversed, were projected outward, so that no one was a problem to himself.

All spontaneity—taking a walk on a weekday, falling in love a second time, or, if you were a woman, going to the tavern by yourself for a schnapps—was frowned upon; at a pinch you could ask someone to dance or join in a song “spontaneously”, but that was all. Cheated out of your own biography and feelings, you became “skittish”; you shied away from people, stopped talking, or, more seriously touched, went from house to house screaming.

The above-mentioned rites then functioned as a consolation. This consolation didn’t address itself to you as a person; it simply swallowed you up, so that in the end you as an individual were content to be nothing, or at least nothing much.

You lost interest in personal matters and stopped inquiring about them. All questions became empty phrases, and the answers were so stereotyped that there was no need to involve
people
in them;
objects
sufficed; the cool grave, the sweet heart of Jesus, the sweet Lady of Sorrows, became fetishes for the death wish that sweetened your daily afflictions; in the midst of these consoling fetishes, you ceased to exist. And because your days were spent in unchanging association with the same things, they became sacred to you; not leisure but work was sweet. Besides, there was nothing else.

You no longer had eyes for anything. “Curiosity” ceased to be a human characteristic and became a womanish vice.

But my mother was curious by nature and had no consoling fetishes. Instead of losing herself in her work, she took it in her stride; consequently she was discontented. The
Weltschmerz
of the Catholic religion was alien to her; she believed only in happiness in this world, and that was a matter of luck; she herself had had bad luck.

She’d still show them, though.

But how?

How she would have loved to be really frivolous! And then she actually did something frivolous: “I’ve been frivolous today, I’ve bought myself a blouse”. All the same, and that was a good deal in those surroundings, she took to smoking and even smoked in public.

Many of the local women were secret drinkers; their thick, twisted lips repelled her: that wasn’t the way to show them. At the most she would get tipsy, and then she would drink to lifelong friendship with everyone in sight, and soon she was on friendly terms with all the younger notables. Even in this little village there was a kind of “society”, consisting of the few who were somewhat better off than the rest, and she was welcome in their gatherings. Once, disguised as a Roman matron, she won first prize at a masked ball. At least in its merrymaking, country society thought of itself as classless—as long as you were
NEAT, CLEAN,
and
JOLLY
.
At home she was “Mother”; even her husband addressed her as “Mother” more often than by her first name. That was all right with her; for one thing, it corresponded to her feeling about her husband: she had never regarded him as anything resembling a sweetheart.

Now it was she who saved. Her saving, to be sure, could not, like her father’s, mean setting money aside. It was pure scrimping; you curtailed your needs to the point where they became vices, and then you curtailed them some more.

But even in this wretchedly narrow sphere, she comforted herself with the thought that she was at least imitating the
pattern
of middle-class life: ludicrous as it might seem, it was still possible to classify purchases as necessary, merely useful, and luxurious. Only food was necessary; winter fuel was useful; everything else was a luxury.

If only once a week, she derived a pleasurable feeling of pride from the fact that a little something was left over for luxury. “We’re still better off than the rest of them.”

She indulged in the following luxuries: a seat in the ninth row at the movies, followed by a glass of wine and soda water; a one or two-
schilling
bar of Bensdorp chocolate to give the children the next morning; once a year, a bottle of homemade eggnog; on occasional winter Sundays she would whip up the cream she had
saved during the week by keeping the milk pot between the two panes of the double windows overnight. “What a feast!” I would write if it were my own story; but it was only the slavish aping of an unattainable life style, a child’s game of earthly paradise.

Christmas: necessities were packaged as presents. We surprised each other with such necessities as underwear, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and the beneficiary said he had
WISHED
for just that! We pretended that just about everything that was given to us, except food, was a present; I was sincerely grateful for the most indispensable school materials and spread them out beside my bed like presents.

A budgeted life, determined by the hourly wages she totted up for her husband, always hoping to discover a forgotten half hour; dread of rainy spells, when the wages were next to nothing, which he passed in their little room talking to her or looking resentfully out the window.

In the winter, when there was no building, her husband spent his unemployment benefits on drink. She went from tavern to tavern looking for him; with gleeful malice, he would show her what was left. She ducked to avoid his blows. She stopped talking to him. The children, repelled and frightened by her silence, clung to their contrite father. Witch! The children looked at her with hostility; she was so stern and unbending. They slept with pounding hearts when their parents were out
and pulled the blanket over their heads when toward morning the husband pushed the wife into the room. At every step she stopped until he pushed her. Both were obstinately mute. Then finally she opened her mouth and said what he had been waiting to hear: “You beast! You beast!” whereupon he was able to beat her in earnest. To every blow she responded with a short, crushing laugh.

They seldom looked at each other except in these moments of open hatred; then they looked deep and unflinchingly into each other’s eyes, he from below, she from above. The children under the blanket heard only the shoving and breathing, and occasionally the rattling of dishes in the cupboard. Next morning they made their own breakfast while husband and wife lay in bed, he dead to the world, she with her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. (Undoubtedly, this kind of account seems copied, borrowed from accounts of other incidents; an old story interchangeable with other old stories; unrelated to the time when it took place; in short, it smacks of the nineteenth century. But just that seems necessary, for at least in that part of the world and under the given economic conditions, such anachronistic, interchangeable nineteenth century happenings were still the rule. And even today the Town Hall bulletin board is taken up almost entirely by notices to the effect that So-and-so and So-and-so are forbidden to enter the taverns.)

She never ran away. She had learned her place. “I’m only waiting for the children to grow up.” A third abortion, this time followed by a severe haemorrhage. Shortly before she was forty, she became pregnant again. An abortion was no longer possible; the child was born.

The word “poverty” was a fine, somehow noble word. It evoked an image out of old schoolbooks: poor but clean. Cleanliness made the poor socially acceptable. Social progress meant teaching people to be clean; once the indigent had been cleaned up, “poverty” became a title of honour. Even in the eyes of the poor, the squalor of destitution applied only to the filthy riffraff of foreign countries.

“The tenant’s visiting card is his window-pane.”

And so the have-nots obediently bought soap with the money provided for that purpose by the progressive authorities. As paupers, they had shocked the official mind with repulsive, but for that very reason palpable, images; now, as a reclaimed and cleansed “poorer class”, their life became so unimaginably abstract that they could be forgotten. Squalid misery can be described in concrete terms; poverty can only be intimated in symbols.

Moreover, the graphic accounts of squalor were concerned only with its physically disgusting aspect; they
produced
disgust by the relish they took in it, so that
disgust, instead of being translated into action, merely became a reminder of the anal, shit-eating phase.

In certain households, for instance, there was only one bowl; at night it was used as a chamber-pot and by day for kneading bread dough. Undoubtedly the bowl was washed out with boiling water in between, so there was little harm done; the dual use of the bowl became disgusting only when it was
described
: “They relieve themselves in the same bowl they eat out of.”—“Ugh!” Words convey this sort of passive, complacent disgust much better than the sight of the phenomena they refer to. (A memory of my own: shuddering while describing spots of egg yolk on a dressing-gown.) Hence my distaste for descriptions of misery; for in hygienic, but equally miserable poverty, there is nothing to describe.

Accordingly, when the word “poverty” comes up, I always think: “once upon a time”; and, for the most part, one hears it in the mouth of persons who have gone through it in the past, a word connected with childhood; not “I was poor” but “I was the child of poor parents” (Maurice Chevalier): a quaint note to season memoirs with. But at the thought of my mother’s living conditions, I am unable to embroider on my memory. From the first, she was under pressure to keep up the forms: in country schools, the subject most stressed for girls was called “the outward form and appearance of written work”; in later life, this found its continuation in a woman’s obligation to put on a semblance of a
united family; not cheerful poverty but formally perfect squalor; and gradually, in its daily effort to keep up appearances, her face lost its soul.

Maybe we would have felt better in formless squalor; we might have achieved a degree of proletarian
class-consciousness
. But in that part of the world there was no proletariat, at most, beggars and tramps; no one fought or even talked back; the totally destitute were merely embarrassed; poverty was indeed a disgrace.

Nevertheless, my mother, who had not learned to take all this for granted, was humiliated by the eternal stringency. In symbolic terms: she was no longer a
NATIVE WHO HAD NEVER SEEN A WHITE MAN
; she was capable of imagining a life that was something more than lifelong housework. If someone had given her the slightest hint, she would have got the right idea.

What actually happened: a nature play with a human prop that was systematically dehumanised. Pleading with her brother not to dismiss her husband for drunkenness; pleading with the local radio spotter not to report her unregistered radio; pleading with the bank for a building loan, protesting that she was a good citizen and would prove worthy of it; from office to office for a certificate of indigence, which had to be renewed each year if her son, who was now at the university, was to obtain a scholarship; applications for sick relief, family allowances, reduction of church
taxes—most of which depended on the benevolent judgment of the authorities, but even if you had a legal right to something, you had to prove it over and over again in such detail that when the “Approved” stamp finally came, you received it with gratitude, as a favour.

No machines in the house; everything was still done by hand. Objects out of a past century, now generally transfigured with nostalgia: not only the coffee mill, which you had actually come to love as a toy—also the
GOOD OLD
ironing-board, the
COSY
hearth, the often-mended cooking pots, the
DANGEROUS
poker, the
STURDY
wheelbarrow, the
ENTERPRISING
weed cutter, the
SHINING BRIGHT
knives, which over the years had been ground to a vanishing narrowness by
BURLY
scissor-grinders
, the
FIENDISH
thimble, the
STUPID
darning egg, the
CLUMSY OLD
flat-iron, which provided variety by having to be put back on the stove every so often, and finally the
PRIZE PIECE
, the foot- and hand-operated Singer sewing-machine. But the golden haze is all in the manner of listing.