Authors: Michel Laub
The best way to judge my father is to think of him as he was after the fight, when I was thirteen, after he told me about my grandfather and the notebooks and stopped talking about what might happen in a school where there were no Jews. It’s odd that he should have spent so much time insisting on this while I was at the previous school, where there was no threat at all, and to have stopped doing so precisely when I started going to the new school, where it wasn’t uncommon for me to find a piece of paper in my backpack bearing a drawing of Hitler. It isn’t hard to draw Hitler, and if you were to compare the writing and drawing in the pieces of work we sometimes did in class, you might even find out who the artist was, although it may
be that there was more than one artist, because the mustache was sometimes a succession of parallel lines and sometimes a smudge of dots, and the cap might have a short peak or look more like a chef’s hat, and the swastika could have thick, painted arms or be more like the stick men drawn by a child, but it didn’t matter who the artist or artists were or if the artist or artists knew what the drawings meant because my one question was this: did João in some way know or participate or had he even been the brains behind the plan to give me those drawings?
The eighth grade ended in December, a month in which Porto Alegre is a swamp of heat and humidity, and then it’s straight into all the hype about Christmas and New Year, which we usually spent at the beach. I had already begun to drink secretly: on Fridays, my father and mother always went out for the evening together, and I would go to the cupboard, pour myself some whisky and then retreat to my bedroom to watch some trashy TV program until I fell asleep. It was more or less the same at the beach, except that I had a few summer friends, who at the time had got into the habit
of buying
cachaça
and mixing it with soda and orange Fanta, and I can remember walking through the center of town and seeing Uruguayans playing flutes, stalls selling fritters, or pot-bellied children selling handicrafts, ten o’clock at night and my skin still sticky with salt before going to the cinema to watch a double bill of kung fu and porn, a doorman who never asked how old we were and four hours spent in the dark watching a Chinaman defeating all his opponents one by one followed by a housewife who welcomed with open arms the postman and the gas delivery man and the swimming pool cleaner, the California sun and smiling California people preaching free love almost half a century after Auschwitz, and the fact that my father had never again mentioned Auschwitz meant that he understood this was something I had to go through alone, me at the cinema with my summer friends who, a few days later, would take me to a brothel where a lady bearing no resemblance to the California housewife welcomed us one by one, and I was the last, and the room was lit by a table lamp, and the air was hot and heavy with effort, and the lady asked me to take off my clothes and lie down beside her and she let me cover myself with the thin sheet that my summer friends had already used almost half
a century after Auschwitz, and I moved closer to the lady and tried not to think that this was another test, and that I had spent weeks preparing for it, and had drunk four glasses of
cachaça
because of it, and that from then on things might be different.
My father gave me money so that I could go to the brothel. He would join me and my mother at the beach on Fridays. During the week it was just me and her, and on Saturday mornings he liked to fish. I would wake at midday and by the time I found him, he already had a bucket full of catfish, which at best can be made into a rather gritty soup, or kingcroakers that you can cook over the fire, my father and me sitting by the barbecue listening to the crackle and spit from the coal and the firewood while he asked me questions, how things had gone at the brothel, how long I’d spent there, what the lady was like who saw us, and I realized that it didn’t matter what questions my father asked, it was the way he asked them, trying to involve himself in my fourteen-year-old life, a moment I stored away perhaps and that is far more evocative than any description of the breeze and the
toads croaking and our apparently deserted street, as it always is when I think of that house near the beach.
My relationship with my father changed the day after our fight, in the conversation we had about my grandfather, the notebooks and Auschwitz, during which I realized that I must never again poke fun at or make light of that subject. It was something I should respect as much as he respected my right to study at a new school, and after that tacit agreement the times I spent with him lingered in my memory in a different way: my first year at the new school, my first summer after entering the new school, my visit to the brothel and the night spent sitting by the barbecue and the fact that I felt older and confident enough to answer my father’s questions without hesitation and without feeling embarrassed about describing in detail the lobby or the toilets or the room itself and the way I managed to remain calm enough to cover myself with the sheet in front of the lady, and to move closer to her, nails, skin, perfume, and me taking a deep breath and just letting myself go until I fell back exhausted, my mind empty.
If I’d mentioned that conversation by the barbecue when I first learned that my father had Alzheimer’s, it’s possible that my father would have remembered it all. I could then have continued to use it as a kind of test, asking him to describe other details of the supper, the two of us sitting on plastic chairs, the sink next to the barbecue, the light above the sink, the low brick wall, my mother coming out to us carrying a plate of bread, my father standing with his back to her and her kissing him on the nape of his neck and asking how long before the food would be ready, and that continuous, systematic description could perhaps help reinforce my father’s memory, a preparation for the next test, with me asking the same thing again two months later, then six months, then a year, until in subsequent tests his answers began to grow more hesitant and progressively slower, and one day he would look at me as if surprised by what I was saying because it seemed to him a complete novelty or a lie and would remain a novelty or a lie to the end.
My father owned a house in Capão da Canoa, the beach in Rio Grande do Sul with the largest
concentration of Jews, including the families of my former classmates, to whom I never spoke again.
In Capão da Canoa I used to go to the cinema, to the amusement arcade, to the bar next to the arcade, where, in the summer between eighth grade and the first year of senior school, I started drinking every night, but none of those places exists today.
Almost all my friends in Capão da Canoa lived on my street, or within a radius of five blocks from my house, and we had met in the way you so often meet when you’re a child, a father introduces his son to the son of another father, and the two sons stand side by side not even daring to say hello, and one of the sons is usually brandishing a sword and playing with a castle or a plastic snake that seems to emerge alone from the depths of the sand, and the other son realizes that the sword is being used to stop the snake attacking the castle, and, at some point, he makes a gesture or says something as if inviting himself to join in the struggle, and from then on the two will be together every day every summer every year for as long as the house in
Capão da Canoa remains standing, but there’ll come a time when it will be knocked down and replaced by another building, and the friends’ respective parents will move to a different beach, and they’ll never hear from each other again.
I’ve been living in São Paulo for fifteen years now, and it’s two years since I got the results of my father’s tests and slept in the park not just because I didn’t want to think about what I would say to him, but also because I couldn’t go home in that state. I’ve been married three times and was about to separate from my third wife and didn’t feel in the least inclined to have a conversation like that with her, because the last thing I needed was to mix up my father’s Alzheimer’s with our marital problems, at a time when I was doggedly sabotaging any attempt on her part to save me, so there I was lying on a park bench, helpless beneath the dark sky, and that moment was like a summation of everything I had lost since I was fourteen.
Telling this story is like describing the plot of a TV soap, comings and goings, fights and reconciliations
for reasons which now seem hard to believe, with me having completed eighth grade thinking that João was responsible for those pictures of Hitler, the drawing itself or the order given for someone else to do it or even a suggestion or a chuckle or a murmur of approval that had the effect of encouraging those who came up with the idea, and at the time I’d already done everything I could to make them stop, and not just by erasing my name chalked on the wall or ignoring them or even smiling benevolently when they mentioned Auschwitz for the first time in the changing room after PE, the first time someone said we’d better make sure it really was water coming out of the showerhead, or when I was in the canteen and they told me not to go too close to the oven, and that would all be quite funny and even a little ridiculous if it weren’t for the fact that it was less than a year since your father told you about your grandfather and showed you your grandfather’s notebooks, part of them anyway, a page, a line, a sentence was all it took.
It’s a little ridiculous to blame the notebooks for my spying on João and spending weeks trying to find some clue that he was the one behind the drawings,
a whispered conversation, doodling in class, a couple of occasions when he appeared to hang back at break-time, letting the room empty so that no one would see him slip a piece of paper into my backpack, just as ridiculous as me deciding to respond in kind, by touching him on a nerve as sensitive as the story of my grandfather, another tragedy, another family member, and I’m not proud of the fact that I typed out a few notes at home with precisely that aim, an innocent anonymous font on an innocent anonymous piece of paper that I would put inside João’s backpack as soon as I had the chance, just four words,
your mother is dead
, or six,
your mother is six feet under
, or thirteen,
the gravediggers open up your mother’s coffin every day and screw her skeleton
.
It isn’t the same thing as saying
son-of-a-bitch goy
because, as a curse, that has more to do with the person being attacked than with his mother, the equivalent of calling someone a fag or a queer or a buttfucker, even though the expression
son-of-a-bitch
is stronger than the word
goy
, as was not the case at my previous school.
The gravediggers open up your mother’s coffin every day and screw her skeleton
was quite
different, and I’m sure it was the first time anyone had said such a thing to João, his shock on discovering that someone was capable of thinking in those terms, and perhaps I should define those terms more clearly, this was someone saying to João that he knew about his mother’s death and didn’t care about his mother’s death and could even make a joke about his mother’s death, which was almost tantamount to feeling happy about it.
Was it the same as making a drawing of Hitler? After all, he was the man who ordered Auschwitz to be built and Auschwitz was the place that, according to my father, had destroyed my grandfather, so sending a note alluding to the subject was tantamount to saying that you knew and agreed and were even happy about the destruction of my grandfather, but obviously I still shouldn’t have responded as I did. First, because I wasn’t sure João was the person behind the drawings, and I still can’t be sure even now. I only found one of the drawings on the day when João was the last person to leave the classroom, a day on which I made a point of not getting in his way, going downstairs to the playground and, on my return, immediately hurrying over
to look in my backpack as if I wanted to find something, and what I found certainly didn’t disappoint me, perhaps the most perfect of the drawings anyone had made during the eighth grade, Hitler mounted on a pig, in fact, I even kept the drawing and admired the details of the scene, the feet, the tail, the Star of David around the pig’s snout, and, second, because João would be sure to react in the way I expected.
Maybe it was the same as with that classmate in the first week of term, maybe João saw in me an opportunity to assert himself now that he was stronger than me and had more friends and now that I was the only Jew in the building, and it would be easy enough to rally the whole of the eighth grade and the whole school to watch him drag me out into the middle of the playground, where there was a sandpit strategically located, in fact, I think it must be obligatory in any school to have a place where someone can be buried up to the neck, where one can trample and kick the fallen weakling who has long since abandoned any attempt to defend himself, but I wouldn’t expect João to react like that. I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t. I wrote those notes about his mother, one
by one, every day, for as long as was necessary, knowing that this was the outer limit, that he wouldn’t be prepared to accuse me and fight me over that, because that would mean having to talk about it and say it out loud and let everyone be a witness to it, to the word
mother
that I had never once heard on his lips.
It was his father who told me about João’s mother, during the conversation we had at their apartment, on the day when the two of us were left alone watching TV, that program whose audience was made up of transplants and crutches, and his father asked if I wasn’t sorry for what I’d done on his son’s birthday. João’s mother died before she was forty, when João was little more than a baby, of a cancer that began in her left breast and spread into her bones and chest, and in her final months she stayed at home almost all the time, because her father preferred that to keeping her in hospital, and after her death João’s father moved to a smaller apartment, taking none of the old furniture with him because everything reminded him of her, the bed where she had so often slept before she died, the table where she had so often eaten before she died, the dressing table where she used to sit to put
on her makeup and fix her hair and where she had so often asked João’s father if she looked pretty or like someone who was dying.