Authors: Michel Laub
The lights at night are blurred and you walk along talking to yourself. It’s almost a joy to do that, knowing that no one is listening. One block before you reach a park. The damp, muggy air and the bus fumes. Fresh mud after the last rain shower. The scratched surface of a bench, no animals around, the results of my father’s tests in an envelope, just me and the silence, me lying down and the sense of imminent physical torpor, just relax and close your eyes and imagine some dark, isolated place and a warm, slow, constant rocking taking you nowhere.
I found out two years ago that my father had Alzheimer’s. One day, when he was driving just a few blocks away from our house, he suddenly felt lost and couldn’t think how to get home. It was a brief, isolated episode, but when he kept forgetting small things, where his keys were, a suit he’d sent to the dry cleaner’s, often enough for my mother to notice, she helped me persuade him to seek help. I had never before taken my father to the doctor, and, as far as I knew, he went for regular checkups for blood, heart and prostate.
Alzheimer’s is a disease whose mechanisms are not yet fully known, although two proteins have been linked to its appearance, tau and beta-amyloid, which are responsible for cell structure and for transporting fat to the nuclei of cells. In Alzheimer’s patients these
proteins deposit fat in and around the neurones, thus suffocating them. Age is one of the risk factors, but a healthy lifestyle associated with specific intellectual activities can help postpone its initial evolution.
I like talking and reading about medicine, although neurology has never been an area of particular interest to me. In recent years, I’ve had labyrinthitis, gastritis, conjunctivitis and sinusitis. I’ve also had a broken finger, sciatica, a sprained ankle, and a late case of chickenpox. As well as bouts of arrhythmia and what the doctors call presyncope, a minor heart problem for which there is little point taking any medication and whose symptoms are negligible, and for at least a year now I’ve been experiencing a recurrent cough and persistent tiredness, which could be attributed to stress, a sedentary job or alcohol abuse.
I started drinking when I was fourteen, after João and I changed schools. I’d had the occasional beer with my father and the occasional glass of wine at some grownup suppers at home, but the first time I got seriously drunk was at a party just after term started. I didn’t
go straight to the party, but to the house of a classmate whose parents were out and, when we left there, some of the boys were singing and talking loudly, and I climbed into the taxi clutching a plastic bottle cut in half. Someone had mixed
cachaça
and Coca-Cola, and you had to hold your breath every time you took a swig of it, and when I got out of the taxi, my legs felt hollow and by then everyone was laughing and it was easy enough to spend the rest of the night leaning against a wall next to a speaker. I mixed
cachaça
with vodka and with some cheap wine that stained your teeth purple, and by eleven o’clock I’d crawled out into the garden and found a dark corner where I sat, feeling rather weak, and where no one would find me once I’d slid helplessly to the ground, because I still didn’t really know any of my classmates.
It was a while before my classmates asked if I was Jewish, because identifying surnames is something that only older people and Jews in general do, and my name doesn’t end in
man
or
berg
or any of those other telltale suffixes that would have given a clue to anyone who didn’t know where I’d studied before. In the lessons at the new school, the Holocaust was
only mentioned in passing as an episode in the Second World War, and Hitler was analyzed through the historical lens of the Weimar Republic, the economic crisis of the 1930s, and the soaring inflation that obliged people to use wheelbarrows to carry their money back from the market, a story that aroused so much interest that you reached the final year of school knowing more about how quick shoppers had to be if they wanted to reach the cashier before the price of bread or milk went up again than about how prisoners were transported to the concentration camps. Not one of the teachers gave more than a cursory nod to Auschwitz. Not one of them said a word about
If This Is a Man
. Not one of them made the obvious calculation that a fourteen-year-old like me must have had a father or a grandfather or a great-grandfather or a cousin or a friend of a friend of a friend who had escaped the gas chambers.
I don’t know if my grandfather ever read
If This Is a Man
or if the fact of having actually lived through what Primo Levi wrote about would have made him read the book differently, whether what was a revelation to the ordinary reader, a detailed description of
the whole Auschwitz experience, would have been merely a process of recognition for my grandfather, a matter of checking to see whether or not the book corresponded to reality or to the reality of his memory, and I don’t know to what extent that somewhat distanced reading would reduce the book’s impact.
I don’t know how my grandfather used to react when he heard a joke about Jews, assuming anyone ever told such jokes to him, or if he, as the distracted guest at some cocktail party or supper or business meeting, was ever in a room where someone was telling them and where he might have heard a high-pitched giggle in response to the word
Jew
— or what his reaction would have been to knowing that this is what happened to me when I was fourteen, that this was the nickname that began to be used as soon as João mentioned our previous school with the little synagogue in the grounds and the seventh-grade students studying for their bar mitzvah, and that the nickname meant something different for me, that instead of feeling angry at an insult that ought to be confronted or indignant at the implied stereotype — the old men all in black and with vampire teeth and speaking in a foreign
accent who used to appear in films and TV soaps — I preferred not to say or do anything, at least initially.
It’s not difficult to explain that attitude: you just have to imagine changing schools, the passing of a few months during which someone does sit-ups and weight lifting and his voice breaks and he grows ten centimeters before he meets his new classmates, and all it takes in the first week is for one of those classmates to try and provoke João and for João to respond and for the classmate to raise his voice and for João to raise his voice too, and it’s as if we were back in the playground at the old school during the same break-time and with the same bullying classmate, except that João is taller and stronger now and knows he has little to lose apart from getting a warning or a trip to the first-aid room to have a Band-Aid applied to his head, and there I am watching João doing exactly what he should have done the year before, you only have to react once, you just have to close your eyes and launch yourself at the person provoking you and grab him by the throat or sink your teeth into him and tear a piece out of him if necessary, just once, and no one will ever again call you weak or scared or a goy or a Jewish son-of-a-bitch.
Just once, and in the weeks that follow everything changes, the first party, João and me in the middle of the small group who went to the classmate’s house whose parents were away, sixty guests at the party and our small group arriving slightly late, João ten centimeters taller now and with no trace of what happened to him in the previous year, the music, the dance floor, the girls, me and the ice chest and the plastic cup and the speaker, me drinking one cup after another while João was dancing as if he’d never eaten sand, going over to one of the girls, hands on hips, as if he’d never been buried in the sand, the way he turns his head, the words he whispers in her ear, João taking the girl by the hand as if he’d never fallen flat on his back at his own birthday party in front of his father and sixty other people who would never believe what I was seeing now, while I had already gone out into the garden, already found a dark corner, was already lying beneath a tree while the world was spinning and I could feel only the damp grass and my throat and my stomach as I watched João approach with the girl and lean her against the tree before leaning against her.
What can change in a matter of months? A ten-centimeter growth spurt. A deeper voice. An older face. When you’re fourteen, you can easily get strong doing push-ups and weight lifting, and that in itself gives you extra confidence if anyone should make a snide comment about you, and just the way you turn your head will determine whether what the person said will be passed off as a joke or never again repeated, and just the way you walk and lean casually on the speaker and behave with girls at a party will determine how the rest of your year will go, you who were in the majority at the school where you both studied before, you who had more friends at the school where you both studied before, who did what you liked throughout your years at the school where you both studied before,
Jew
, but if all that ends, you become the one dependent on your friend, the one who gets invited to a classmate’s house because of him, the one they put up with, and you have to accept the fact that they only talk to you because he does.
I doubt that João ever read
If This Is a Man
, and it’s possible that he would never have considered what an
Auschwitz survivor would say about being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, knowing that in a few years he would forget everything, childhood, school, the first time a neighbor was arrested, the first time a neighbor was sent to a concentration camp, the first time you heard the name Auschwitz and realized that it would stay with you for a very long time, your fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, the guards at Auschwitz, the people who died in Auschwitz, the meaning of that word disappearing into a limbo outside the eternal present that will gradually become your sole reality.
I was the one who told my father he had Alzheimer’s. I talked to him about the initial stages of the illness, about the long period of time that would pass before the symptoms got worse, and that was all I could do because in two clicks of a mouse my father had access to any website describing the condition in detail: photos of patients, always the same blank gaze and the sense that something is missing from the photo, the relatives out of sight, behind the camera in the hospital room or kilometers away if possible, in another city so as not to run the risk of having to make a Sunday visit and find their father reduced to a pair of blue
pajamas, a figure with short hair, a sheet and the gaze of someone who no longer knows what a camera or a photograph is, like a baby in front of a mirror with no notion yet that the reflection contains the image we have and will have of ourselves until everything begins to change.
The image I had of myself on the day I told my father he had Alzheimer’s was this: a man nearing forty, who had been reasonably successful in his career, who had published books that had enjoyed a reasonably warm critical reception, and who managed to get on reasonably well with the people to whom he was close, writers, publishers, translators, agents, journalists or friends he had lunch with twice a year but whose wife’s or children’s names he didn’t know, friends whose habits and plans and conversations had long since ceased to interest him.
At nearly forty, I was on my third marriage. The first lasted three years. I was twenty-one when we met and I made all the mistakes one would expect in that situation. It was a prolonged period of mutual incomprehension,
and now I feel neither regret nor pain nor tenderness when I think of that time.
The second marriage lasted even less time, two years out of a total of six years spent together, and which ended in more or less the same way, but afterward I would often remember the apartment we lived in, the trips we made, the friends we had in common, the things she would tell me about her work and that I would tell her about mine, the dinner parties we gave, the Sunday mornings spent reading the paper, me snuggled up close to her beneath the sheets one night when the hail was beating so hard against the shutters we thought the building was going to collapse, her family, her clothes, the films and books she liked, her voice, her hair, the shape of her fingers, the little groan she gave when she stretched, and all the infinite number of details that were lost because we never spoke to each other again.
None of the women I married knew anything about João. Once I grew up, I never talked about him or about my first weeks at the new school, the new
classmates who drank and smoked hash and sniffed glue and benzine, and went out in the late afternoon setting fire to litter bins and stealing tokens from public phone boxes. You have to rip the whole apparatus off the wall, leaving only a stub of cable, and you stand close by the classmate who’s doing this, then run off with him to a safe place where someone with a screwdriver and a hammer and a chisel breaks through the outer shell into the box containing a handful of tokens that will never be of any use, and although none of that should have struck me as new in relation to what I’d more or less experienced during the previous year, it did. The new school was a hostile environment in a different way, and that wasn’t just because of the way my classmates looked at me and talked to me, but also the way in which João dealt or appeared to deal with it.
João never talked to me in detail about the months that followed the fall. He forgave me so easily, became my friend so easily, accepted my decision to go with him to the new school, a thirteen-year-old saint who never expressed the least surprise at what I’d done and never told me what he really felt during that time: if he had dreams too, if he also relived the moment of the
fall each night, if the thud on the floor had sounded the same to him as to me, and if seeing the scene from below had the same effect — if, in his dream, the people at the party were wearing tallits and kippahs, like an army formed up around the throne of David, with me standing above the throne holding an open Torah, and it’s then that the door opens and João sees his father enter pushing a wheelchair, his father surrounded by nurses who all look at João and smile and put João in the wheelchair and the next scene is João in the classroom with his atrophied legs and his toes turned in and his arms grown strong from pushing the wheelchair back and forth.