Leavetaking (2 page)

This suspension of narrative norms extends deep into the structure of Weiss’s account, for though the events that take him from his earliest days to the emancipation augured in the title are narrated in essential sequence, they in no way correspond to expected proportions. Particular childhood moments distend into pockets of duration, requiring our close regard of the least granular detail. Events and transitions that would seem to demand extended exposition are sometimes accomplished within the space of a sentence, and as the sentences come to us in undifferentiated flow, the imagined import is radically reframed. Changes of country, whole years of immersed activity—as they used to say of those small highway-side towns (before the advent of the commercial strip), “If you blink, you’ll miss it.” What we experience is the absolutism of memory, memory given full editorial control, a project not unlike the one pursued by Virginia Woolf in her densely lyrical—and sometimes maddeningly intermittent—essays, like “A Sense of the Past.” The work is doing double duty, offering at once an exposure to the sensations and events of the life
and
a portrait of the mechanism of recollection itself. Welding the two together is a feeling, understood explicitly at the very end, that the whole presentation reveals the psychological stages of the narrator’s core formation, what he understands as his destiny as an artist and as a man.

The original ambush of recollection, which leads us back into the first stirrings of this formation, happens in the narrator’s parents’ house, where he and his siblings have gathered after the death of his father—the second of his parents to die—in order to bury him and divide up his possessions. The grim, affectless scene reveals straightaway that all members of the family are estranged and that emotional alienation is the banner under which they move. Weiss stands in the echoing space, looking out through the tinted panes of the glass door to the garden. He reflects:

The key signature has now been established. From here on the author carries us along through a subjective impressionism that is at once fluid in its feeling, rolling on and on through the long, unparagraphed sentences that are strikingly—vividly—particular in their detailing. As when he captures his early sense of his street, which “in the green twilight was full of the trundling
of drays laden high with barrels,” and where the “heavy, sweet smell swelled in waves from the breweries.”

Such a crowd of sensory recollections! Alongside these, gradually emerging like a photograph in a developing tray, is a portrait of the family: the distant mother; the overworked and submissive father; the siblings; and the strong counterbalancing presence of Augusta, cook and housekeeper. It is Augusta who takes the boy out on what is for him an epic exploration of the city; in her presence is the world made vivid and tactile, a complete contrast to his sense of the cold, quiet rooms at home.

In these opening pages, too, the narrator meets the neighbor boy, Friederle, a sadistic tormentor—every young life has one—who we will later learn, very obliquely, became an enthusiastic partisan of the Reich. The obliquity of the revelation matters here, for it is very much Weiss’s intent—even though his coming-of-age is contemporaneous with the rise of National Socialism and, later, the war—to have the focus reflect emphatically a young man’s nonpolitical self-absorption. We deduce the historical situation, and here and there get flashes of the temper of the times, but the intensities represented are nearly all interior and private. There is no question, though, that the unstated historical is present throughout—it saturates the pages with atmospheric dread; we feel it everywhere in the wings.

As the narrative progresses, Weiss plaits together various thematic strands. These can be itemized—named—but doing so suggests that they are separable, when in fact they are not. Sexuality, struggles for
autonomy within the family, the rearing up of a powerful expressive impulse—these and other forces are densely entangled here. Uncensored eruptions of adolescent lust veer toward the incestuous. Their repressed intensity underscores the guilt, rage, and isolation that have everything to do with the relations between father and son, and, too, with the boy’s need to paint images and, later, to begin writing.

To try to elicit a clear narrative or thematic sequence from a work that has evolved its uniquely expressive form precisely to convey the dense subjective interpenetration of event and implication seems a violation. Indeed, the point, manifest in the prose throughout, is that the business of formations, as experienced and as then later refracted through memory, is profoundly alchemical. We need only take tissue samples of the prose, and these can be taken anywhere.

Midway through the work, for instance, with a characteristic abruptness, we learn of his sister Margit’s mysterious, traumatic death. The event is unexpected, unprepared-for; it rears up with a frightening hallucinatory force. Weiss characterizes it as “the beginning of the break-up of our family,” intensifying all sorrow, heightening the already painful distances between the narrator and his parents, neither of whom have any way to integrate the loss. Here, as elsewhere, the movement of the prose showcases Weiss’s way of bending together exposition, confessionalism, and the wounding vibrancy of select details. He describes his own state of mind after Margit’s death:

We note the piling on of urgent analogies, the rhetorical repetitions of exposition (“they had given us …”), and then the insistent and tactile immediacy of the
mother’s coercions. The pressure builds as Weiss creates the picture, the inward accounting, of how it was, from earliest childhood constraints on through the long years of psychological entrapment, during which he worked in a reluctant servitude as his father’s assistant, all the while building what rocket engineers call the “exit velocity.”

However, even attaining that is a fraught and long-term process. It requires that the young man get away, leave the country—there is a Hesse-like “master” he seeks out—but then, following a Beckettian script of enmeshment, he becomes entrapped again. He returns home and finds himself thrust back down into what feels like a timeless well of failure. It’s as if the terms of life are set in stone. But then at long last, and seemingly not because of anything he has done or prepared, but rather because something long in the maturing is finally ready, he does break free: he achieves his eponymous leavetaking. And this, when it comes—because of the prose—does not feel like a resolution from without, but very much an attainment from within, a moment destined from the start, its arrival encoded in his processing of every last twist and turn in his experience.

Interestingly, the time span of
Leavetaking
is an overview very similar to that of Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. It, too, launches from the sometimes dreamlike distensions and distortions of a young boy’s hyper-intense subjectivity, and ends in his assertive young manhood. Both books also end in what feels like a headlong rush of momentum: Joyce’s
Stephen Daedalus pitches forth with grandiose fanfare, fleeing the captivity of home to “forge the yet uncreated conscience of his race.” Weiss’s unparagraphed prose, meanwhile, compels a reader’s involvement, but also the breath-held sense of anticipated release. When that release—the white space—comes, it correlates utterly with the narrator’s final announcement: “I was on my way to look for a life of my own.”

I HAVE OFTEN TRIED TO COME TO AN understanding of the images of my father and my mother, to take bearings and steer a course between rebellion and submission. But I have never been able to grasp and interpret the essential being of these two figures standing at either side of the gateway of my life. Both died almost at the same time and it was then I saw how deeply estranged I was from them. The grief that overcame me was not for them, for I hardly knew them, the grief was for what had been missed, for the yawning emptiness that surrounded my childhood and youth. Grief sprang from the recognition that the attempt at togetherness in which the members of the family had persisted to the end for two whole decades had completely failed. My sorrow was for the sense of too-lateness that lay on us, brothers and sister, at the graveside, that afterward again drove us apart, each off into his own existence. After my mother’s death, my father, whose whole life had been given over to working tirelessly, once again tried to evoke the appearance of a fresh start. He set out on a trip to Belgium, to establish business connections there, as he said, but really to die like a wounded animal in its lair. He went as a broken man, able to move only with difficulty, helped by two
canes. When, after learning in Ghent of his death, I had landed at the Brussels airport, with heavy heart I retraced the long trek my father must have had to make, upstairs, downstairs, through hall and corridors on legs enfeebled by poor circulation. It was early March, clear sky, sharp sunlight, a cold wind over Ghent. I went along the street by the railroad embankment, on to the hospital and its chapel where my father had been laid out. Freight cars were being shunted on the tracks behind bare, lopped trees. The cars were rolling and clanking up on the embankment as I stood before the chapel, which looked like a garage, and whose double-door a nun opened for me. Inside, next to a coffin covered with flowers and wreaths, lay my father on a cloth-draped bier, dressed in a black suit now too large for him, in black socks, and with his arms folded across his chest, embracing the framed photograph of my mother. His gaunt face was relaxed, the thin hair, hardly gray at all, curling in one soft lock over his brow, and something of pride, boldness I had never noticed in him before stamped on his features. His hands were perfect, the fingernails symmetrical, bluishly shimmering mussel shells. I stroked the cold, yellowish, taut skin of his hands, while the Sister waited out in the sun a few steps behind me. I recalled my father as I had last seen him, lying on the living-room sofa under a blanket after my mother’s burial, his face gray and blurry, blotted out by tears, his mouth stammering and whispering the name of the deceased. I stood there frozen, felt the cold wind, heard the whistles and puffs of steam coming from the
railroad embankment, and there before me a life become a completely closed account, an enormous outlay of energy dissolved into nothingness. Before me lay the corpse of a man in an alien land, no longer reachable, a corpse in a shed by the railroad embankment, a man in whose life there had been office spaces and hotel rooms, and always large dwellings, big houses with many rooms filled with furniture, and in this man’s life there had always been the wife who waited for him in the house they shared, and there had been children in this man’s life, children whom he always shied away from and with whom he could never talk, but when he was away from the house he could perhaps feel tenderness for his children and longing for them, and always he carried pictures of them with him and certainly looked at them, all worn out, creased from so much handling, nights in hotel rooms when he was away on his trips, certainly believing that this time on his return he would find trust, but when he got back there was always disappointment and the impossibility of mutual understanding. In this man’s life there had been ceaseless effort to support home and family, amid worries and sickness, together with his wife, and he had stuck fast to owning his own home, without ever experiencing happiness in it. This man, who now lay lost before me, had never given up believing in the ideal of a permanent home, but he had suffered death far away from this home alone in a sickroom, and if at his last breath he had stretched out his hand to the bell, it would have been, perhaps, to call for something, for some kind of help, some kind of relief, in
the face of suddenly rising coldness and emptiness. I looked into my father’s face, I still alive and preserving within me the knowledge of my father’s existence, into a face in shadow grown strange to me. With an expression of contentment he lay in his remoteness, and somewhere his last large house was still standing, piled high with carpets, furniture, potted plants, and pictures, a home that could no longer breathe, a home that he had kept intact throughout the years of emigration, through the constant resettlements and difficulties in adapting to new environments and through the war. Later that day my father was laid in a plain brown coffin that I had bought at the undertaker’s and the nun took care that the picture of his wife stayed in his arms, and after the lid had been screwed tight two hospital porters to the accompaniment of continuous rumbling and clattering of freight trains carried the coffin to the hearse, which I followed in a hired car. Here and there at the side of the road to Brussels, farm laborers and workmen, lit up by the afternoon sun, took off their caps to the black car in which my father, for the last time, journeyed through a foreign country. The cemetery with the crematorium lay on a rise outside the city, and the gravestones and bare trees were besieged by a cold wind. In the circular chapel the coffin was placed on a pedestal, I stood next to it and waited, and at a harmonium in an alcove sat an elderly man with the face of a drinker playing a psalm tune, and then in the middle section of the wall a sliding door suddenly opened, and imperceptibly the pedestal with the coffin set itself in motion and slid slowly on
almost invisible rails sunk in the floor into the bare, rectangular chamber behind the door, which noiselessly shut again. Two hours later I collected the urn with the ashes of my father’s body. I carried the urn container, which had a crown on it and widened out at top, amid looks of consternation past hotel staff and guests up to my room, where I placed it first on the table, then on the windowsill, then on the floor, then on the dressing table, and finally in the wardrobe. I went down into town to buy paper and string in a department store, then wrapped the box in it and spent the night in the hotel with the remains of my father hidden in the wardrobe. Next day I reached my parents’ house, where my stepbrothers and their wives, my brother and his wife, my sister and her husband awaited me for the burial, the reading of the will, and the apportioning of property. In the days that followed, the final disintegration of the family was completed. A desecration and crushing underfoot took place, full of the undertones of envy and avarice, although outwardly we tried to preserve a friendly and considerate tone of cordial agreement. Even for us, although we had long since become alienated from them, all the articles collected there had their value, and suddenly a wealth of recollections attached itself to each item. The grandfather clock with the sun face had ticked its way into my earliest dreams, in the mirror of the huge wardrobe I had caught sight of myself in the moonlight during my nocturnal excursions, in the diagonal supports beneath the dining-room table I had built dens and dugouts, and had crept behind the
rotting velvet curtains to escape the savage pine marten, and many of the books on the high, wide bookshelves contained secret, forbidden things to read. We pushed and shoved around the chairs, sofas, and tables, violently we disrupted the order that had always been unassailable, and soon the house resembled a furniture warehouse and the objects that had been afforded a lifetime’s care and protection at my mother’s hand lay piled up in various rooms in five huge heaps, some to be taken away, some to be sold. The carpets were rolled up, the pictures lifted down from the walls, the curtains torn from the windows, the cupboards ransacked of crockery and clothes, and the women ran up and down between the attic and the cellar, seizing here an apron, there a wooden spoon, here a box with worn-out dusty shoes, there a coal bucket or a rake. The urns of Father and Mother stood side by side in wet, black cemetery earth, and we brothers and sisters crouched among the fragments of a dismembered home, we drained the bottles from my father’s wine cellar and broke open his bureau to sort out his correspondence and documents. In accordance with his last will, mountains of paper were piled up to be burned. Secretly I took some yellowed pages in my father’s hand and a few diaries with notes by my mother. The naked bulbs shone harshly in all the rooms and were reflected in the black windowpanes. I had a feeling that the door opened, that my mother had appeared, to stare open-mouthed at her children’s ghos tly activity. Something died in each of us during these days. Now, after the plundering, we saw that this
home from which we had been thrust out had nevertheless embodied a security for us, and that with its going the last symbol of our unity disappeared. At the deepest level of the changes this house had gone through lay rooms, spaces in which I had emerged from mythic darkness into first consciousness. I stood in the first-floor vestibule looking first through one of the red, then through one of the blue panes of the glass door into the garden, so making the bushes, the pear tree, the gravel path, the lawn, and the summer house appear first in a fiery glow and then in subdued, submarine tones. At the time of this viewing, my basic nature had already been formed, and only when the observing, controlling part of me wearies and my consciousness loses its hold do impulses arise in me out of my earliest life, and it is in half sleep, in dreams, in periods of depression that I re-experience the helplessness, the feeling of having been handed over and the blind rebellion of the time when strange hands tamed, kneaded, and did violence to my being. When my mother once told me the first words I ever said were What a nice life I have, what a nice life, in it I heard the ring of something that had been drummed into my head, parrot-taught, something with which I had wanted to amuse or mock those around me. Like an evil spirit I came into this house, lying in a tin box carried by my mother, received by wild tom-tom beats and my stepbrothers’ exorcismal cries. My mother had found me at the edge of a pond among the rushes and storks. The first house has large blind spots in it. I can’t find my way through this house, can only dimly
remember the steps of a staircase, the corner of a floor on which I built little red-brown houses with blocks grown greasy from so much handling and green redoubts, dimly recall a little toy truck filled with miniature boxes, and the thought of those boxes brings back a thick, heavy sensation in the roof of my mouth. I vaguely recall postage stamps spread out before me, rose-colored and light green stamps with the face of a king with twirled mustaches and my older brothers rushing in and shouting, and my mother sweeping the stamps together and throwing them into the stove. And there is the edge of a tiled stove and the arms of a sofa and I sit on one arm of the sofa and one of my brothers tickles me and I fall backward onto the edge of the stove and knock a hole into my head and some liquid is poured out of a bottle into the hole in my head and my head froths and all the sense runs out of my head. I see a room that is green, the floor green, the curtains green, the wallpaper green, and I am sitting on a raised porcelain vessel shaped like a guitar and my mother stands in back of me and shoves her forefinger into my bum just above the anus, and I push and she pushes and everything is green, and the street outside is green, and the street is called Green Street, the street in the green twilight was full of the trundling of drays laden high with barrels. The hoofs of the heavy shaggy horses struck sparks from the cobblestones, the coachmen clicked their tongues and cracked their whips and a heavy, sweet smell swelled in waves from the breweries. Our house, with its high gables on whose ridge I rode a race against the moon and
from whose chimney I sprang with a leap into the sky, lay narrow and squashed between warehouses and the wall of a factory yard. Once a man climbed over our roof, there was commotion in the streets and shots rang out, and my brothers stormed through the house and shouted that someone had fled onto our roof and men rushed in from the street into our house, and the men carried guns in their hands, and they all ran into the garden and switched on their flashlights and shot up at the roof and the wounded man fell from the roof down to the men in the garden below. The house remains strange to me, I cannot find my way around its interior, but I take the garden for my own, I lie stretched out on the ground under the bushes, feel the dry earth between my hands, put the earth into my mouth, crunch the earth between my teeth, feel the white, round pebbles, put the pebbles in my mouth, feel on my tongue their roundness and the warmth of the sun. Closeness, a shut-in feeling reigned in the house, and my senses were trapped. Here out of doors my senses could expand and when I entered the summer house I entered a kingdom that belonged only to me, my self-chosen place of exile. In the narrow bands of sunlight that slanted down through a high, ivy-mantled window, I steered my vehicle, a little handcart with its upright shaft, between stacked garden chairs, baskets, and tools, I drove with it, swam with it, flew with it, humming and murmuring to myself. This is like a picture from an old book of fairy tales; something sunken wells up out of the picture, something fraught with expectancy. The secluded and
the secretive, the hiding away with myself and my games, this is still with me and stirs at this very hour, it is to be felt every time I get lost in my work. I was my own master, I created the world for myself. But somewhere lurked the foresense of a calling out for me, of a call about to ring out, which would come rolling toward me across the garden. The anticipation of this summons was always lurking somewhere, to this very day the anticipation persists, to this day the fear that all can end suddenly. When it called for me the first time, I pretended to be deaf, I kept the calling at arms’ length, through being alone I had forgotten my name, I behaved as if it was not meant for me. But then the name was hurled into me again and again until it filled me completely, until I almost burst with it, and I had to answer, I had to confess that the name had found me. I often tried to call myself something else, but when the calling of my only true name whirred toward me, I started, it stuck into me like a harpoon, and I could not avoid it. In a whisper I call to myself with my own name, and frighten myself with it, as if the name came up to me from far outside me from a time in which I was still without form. And then I feel a raving, impotent rage, a storming against the impregnable, and then my stammering is stifled by an invisible hand. There is my mother’s face. I flew upward to this face, lifted by her arms, which could enfold all spaces. The face took me up and thrust me from itself. The large, warm mass of the face, with its dark eyes, suddenly became a wolfish grimace with menacing teeth. Out of the hot, white