Authors: Michel Laub
During the quarrel we had over the new school, I told my father that I didn’t give a toss about his arguments, that using Judaism as an argument for not changing schools was ridiculous. I said I didn’t give a toss about Judaism, still less about what had happened to my grandfather. It isn’t the same thing as saying out loud that you hate someone and wish them dead, but anyone who has a relative who spent time in Auschwitz can confirm the rule that, from childhood on, you know that you can speak lightly about anything but that, and so my father’s reaction to my remark was predictable enough, repeat what you just said, go on if you’re brave enough, and I looked him straight in the eye and said, very slowly this time, that he could stick Auschwitz and Nazism and my grandfather up his arse.
My father had never laid a hand on me before, and it may be that I was one of those children who had been spoiled by not having been brought up with strict enough boundaries, a rich little thirteen-year-old who
wasn’t used to being given a slap and to accepting that this was simply the way things are, and even if the slap hadn’t really hurt and I’d been tall enough or strong enough to inflict some damage on my father in any physical confrontation, the normal response would have been for me to recoil before that show of authority. But that isn’t what happened: he hurled himself upon me and I tried to extricate myself, then he got a firm hold on me and hit me several times, on the back, on the neck, until his anger passed and he slowly loosened his grip and lay me down on the ground, my ears burning, a breathing space before I could get to my feet, my whole body trembling, and finally pull myself together.
Even now I still wonder what would have happened if there had been no fight, if my father hadn’t changed as if overnight and stopped talking to me about my grandfather, as though the fight had created a tacit understanding, with him sensing that it wasn’t Nazism and Auschwitz that were at stake, because I knew very little about Nazism and Auschwitz, but whatever it was that I felt to be at the root of what had happened to João.
If I were to talk now to any of the classmates who were involved in João’s fall, it’s likely that none of them would remember the details of the party or the reasons that led us to hatch that plan, and that none of them would make the link between carrying it out and the fact that João was not a Jew, because social conventions and the rules of etiquette and the self-image that each would have constructed of himself over the ensuing years would have created defense mechanisms that prevented their memory from recording something like that.
It’s possible that the same applies to everyone who had anything to do with the school, classmates, parents of classmates, the staff–student coordinator, the teachers, they might even say that my version of the story was a distortion, a false memory influenced by my subsequent feelings, the trauma of spending a year dreaming over and over about João’s fall, because it’s ridiculous even to think that such a thing could happen in the 1980s in a Jewish school in Porto Alegre, a place attended by the sons of tradesmen and factory-owners and members of the liberal professions who
had always lived alongside non-Jews, and there’s no record of any discrimination against Jews in the Porto Alegre of the time, no club that excluded Jews, no politician who spoke ill of Jews, no one who in the presence of family or friends or customers would dare say anything against the Jews, so it simply doesn’t make sense to think that the opposite could also happen, and if, say, such a thing were said at some point as a joke at school, that was no reason for someone to get so upset that it would cause him to change the way he lived the rest of his life.
In the case of my father, I don’t know if he changed because of the fight itself and because he went to bed that night troubled by the fact of having attacked his thirteen-year-old son for the first time ever, a shock to the self-image he had created up until then, to his certain belief that he would never be capable of hurting his son, or because pushing me and grabbing me around the neck and punching me could not only have caused injury, it was also capable of provoking in me an entirely unforeseeable reaction — and so I don’t know whether he went to bed troubled by the fact of having attacked me or by that reaction.
Until João’s fall, I had never done anything like that either or even felt capable of it. My father was in the doorway staring at me perplexed, once I’d got to my feet after he stopped hitting me and I was aware of the pain and the possible bruises and an anger I had never felt before, and even today I can still remember the look of alarm on his face when I picked up the first thing at hand, one of those heavy Scotch tape dispensers with sharp enough edges to dent someone’s head or put out their eye, and at that moment it was as if I were taking my revenge for everything that had happened that year, my classmates, the staff–student coordinator, my father who seemed so vulnerable, and if he hadn’t managed to step out of the way or if I hadn’t miscalculated when I threw the tape dispenser or a combination of both those things, that could have been the second tragedy of the year.
The day after the fight, my father told me all the details of my grandfather’s story. I had spent the day in my room, and he knocked on the door and said we had to talk. He sat down on a stool by my bed and, after apologizing, he then politely told me off for what
I’d said and done, and asked that it never happen again because he was too old for that kind of thing and, besides, there was my mother to consider, and I could almost swear that in his voice there was not just guilt or sadness or disappointment, but an embarrassed kind of fear, as if he had found something out about me, a secret that had lain hidden for years, the threat inside his own house.
My father told me about my grandfather’s final days, and that was enough for me to understand that I should never again treat the matter lightly. I realized that this was something I should respect as much as my father respected my right to study at a new school and, after that tacit agreement, my relationship with him became quite different: on that day my anger vanished, and in the weeks that followed it was as if everything went back to how it used to be before João’s fall, family suppers, weekends, the conversations in which I said little and simply listened to what my father had to say, although he was no longer trying to convince me of anything or condemning me for wanting to take the entrance exams for a school where there were no Jews, and for being admitted into a school where
there were no Jews, and getting enrolled and waiting for the start of term at a school where I thought no one would ever even mention Jews, a story that could have remained frozen there, forgotten, if it hadn’t resurfaced decades later, when I was an adult and had left home, changed cities and become another person: João, my grandfather, Auschwitz and the notebooks, I only started thinking about all this again when I found out that my father was ill.
My father gave me a tricycle when I was three, and the tricycle made the rattling sound you get when you tie the lid from a margarine carton to the rim of a bicycle wheel. The tricycle doubled as a truck and had a trailer too, into which I would put whatever I happened to find around the house, cushions, plates, towels, candles, a bottle of shampoo, and I would tell my father that I was delivering goods to various cities, and he would say, that’s more or less what your grandfather did when he first arrived in Brazil.
In every photo of my grandfather he’s wearing a suit and there’s no sign of the number tattooed on him at Auschwitz. My grandmother’s photographs were in frames on a shelf beside the table. All the furniture in my grandmother’s apartment was made of dark wood: chairs, a coffee table, a dressing table. Her bed was narrow and very soft, and it resembled my grandmother’s hair, almond brown and cotton white with a touch of purple, and after
lunch on a winter’s day I used to enjoy lying there, reading comics.
I learned to read before I went to school, and my father would practice with me, showing me words in the newspaper and saying, what letter is that, and they were printed letters, quite different from the ones I would learn in the primer that schools used at the time, the
a
has its tummy on this side, without a back it’s a
c
, and with its tummy on the other side it’s a
b
, the snake is an
s
, and the noise the snake makes before it attacks is
ssssss
but when it’s sleeping
zzzzzz
, and the first word I read was
house
, and fixed to the edge of the writing desk where my father would sit to read the newspaper was a pencil sharpener with a handle, I remember the pencil box, the sound of the blade cutting into the wood, the effort involved, the blister on my finger.
My father would explain to me how sewing machines worked, about the thread, the engine, the different sorts of needle for backstitch, buttons, synthetics, embroidery, leather, and the pieces of cloth I would hold in my hand, eyes closed, while my father asked me, what is it, and I would have to say it’s linen, silk, synthetic, and when I was about ten years old I went to the main shop in the center of town, and my father summoned one of the shop assistants and made
me repeat the experiment in front of him, and then the assistant took me out for an ice cream while my father stayed in the office, talking on the phone and endlessly tapping away on a calculator.
My father would come and pick me up from the rabbi’s house and he always asked, what did you learn today, and I would say, nothing, I just learned by heart a load of words I don’t even know the meaning of, and he would say, the rabbi should explain what those passages from the Torah mean. Every Saturday when someone is bar mitzvahed, a different text is read out, and it’s only at the actual ceremony that you touch the parchment itself, which is very white with the Hebrew characters printed or handwritten on it, with polished batons attached to the scrolls and a velvet cover to protect it from the light, and there you are in suit and shoes and a white tallit with a sky-blue pattern and a suede kippah with a gold sequin on top.
My school was on three floors and had a high wall around it and on the pavement outside there were flower planters on which the paint was almost concealed under a layer of dust, and which were, in fact, disguised steel blocks that reached two and a half meters down to protect the building against bomb attacks.
João always wore a crumpled plain T-shirt. I never saw him wearing one with a design on it. That was the present my mother bought for him, the fashion at the time was for surfing images, Rio de Janeiro landmarks, a seagull, a flash of lightning, a fishing pier.
The floor of the reception room where João’s birthday was held was tiled. He fell with a thud, which I heard because I was standing so close and because everyone had just finished shouting out
thirteen
, just a moment after the final syllable, which is usually more drawn out, either from enthusiasm or habit or perhaps anger.
When we left the party, we took a taxi. The taxis in Porto Alegre in the 1980s were rather drab, and the brake pedal made a noise like an old spring being released, which I suspect the drivers rather liked because they made a point of bringing up the pedal really quickly. The drivers sat on sheepskin seat covers in the cold weather and hung crab claws or images of saints on the rearview mirror.
While João was recovering I went to school and spent the morning alone, and during break I stayed in the classroom and ate a sandwich, because I’d started bringing my lunch from home, and sometimes the flask containing my cold drink would leak because
I hadn’t closed the lid properly, and the butter and cheese and lettuce would end up sodden and sweet.
I can’t remember if it was hot or cold on the day I apologized to João. The first time he dived into our swimming pool the weather was as stifling as if it were January. Whenever João came to my house, he would show me the exercises he was doing, three hundred push-ups with his arms spread wide, as well as sit-ups and stretches, the equipment in the fitness room at the school gym was rather antiquated, with free weights and no lumbar supports.
On the few occasions I went to the coordinator’s office, the photographs were always the same, her son wearing a pirate hat, her daughter in a ballet outfit, and the drawings on the wall didn’t change either: paper kites, mountains, houses with one window above the front door, a smiling sun with eyes and hair.
When you’re known as a snitch, people eye you scornfully, but that isn’t always evident in the look on their face or some movement of their mouth or eyebrows, because very few show their feelings so overtly, and still fewer say anything beyond what those involved had already said, the other four who came to speak to me one by one and called me a son-of-a-bitch.
The way my father immobilized me on the day of the fight: his right arm wrapped around my neck, while he used his left to hit me.
The dispenser I threw at him had a roll of Scotch tape in it at the time. The acrylic base was about twenty centimeters long, weighed maybe two kilos, and the cutting edge had small metal teeth.
When my father came to speak to me on the day after the fight, he knocked three times on my bedroom door. My father was never ill when I was a child. He was never ill when I was fifteen, eighteen or twenty-five, and I don’t remember him being ill when he was fifty, fifty-five, sixty.
When I found out about my father’s illness, it was three o’clock in the afternoon and I went into a bar and ordered a beer. I drank the beer and ordered a whisky. The whisky immediately warmed me up, ethanol on a sunny day at a bar with a few nibbles and a candy-vending machine.
I thought about my father while I drank the whisky. And I thought I really should stop drinking. And I ordered another whisky, and then another and another, and the hours passed and then a moment came when I remembered what had happened, and I couldn’t possibly go home in that state because I didn’t
want to explain and discuss the details of my father’s medical tests with anyone.