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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The darkly beautiful novelistic memoir of a childhood spent in the shadow of a domineering, abusive father This is a story she never wanted to tell, but in the end she had no choice. When her older sister dies at the age of sixty-nine, it brings back a past the author thought she had left behind. Incensed, she delves back into her childhood, recreating the abusive world that she grew up in, ruled over by her tyrannical father, The Minotaur. In a narrative by turns shockingly dark and strangely beautiful, she retraces her path through the phantasmogorical labyrinth, bringing a tale of silent trauma to a triumphant, raucous conclusion. Falling is Like Flying is an extraordinary novelistic memoir of abuse and resilience, a literary triumph that reminds us what language is capable of.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
For the dead
H.R.
E.U.
For the living
T.R., J.M.U., A.M.U., M.M.U., F.U.,
I.M.
Z.B.
And for the souls of
P.E.H.U.
A.U.S.
We must grasp things in the highest sense,
And let what may come, come, with confidence.
You’ve shown the highest courage once before.
So now too what is fearful, we must try it:
World, and posterity, will stubbornly deny it,
So pen it faithfully in your report.
Faust, Act 1, scene 3
CONTENTS
THE LONG WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
Reader,
I didn’t want to tell this story. For a long time I clung to the idea of my wondrous escape, my “quantum leap”, in the hope of living calmly and collectedly in a world of fiction. A world of my own making, one I could enter and leave at will.
As far back as my memory reaches, I have had a love of stories and a yearning for the telling of them with a hunger that went far beyond the normal, everyday, and with a special eye, ear and nose for tragedy. Pawing and chafing like a horse … inquisitive, eager. At last something was happening, at last things were being clarified! Bible stories, myths, sagas, gruesome fairy tales. They prodded my heart and prickled my senses. Look there, a hand pierced by nails, a child with a splinter of ice in his heart, a city destroyed for its transgressions. How hideous, how grave, how real.
I knew no greater desire than one day to be allowed to add something to this great edifice of human experience. But who can predict what will free itself from the darkness one day to chase us, like a frightened dog? 2
This love of stories that had warmed me till then, I lost in the winter of 2009, and in its place came restlessness.
It was shortly after the publication of a book in which I had portrayed friends, family and also my husband, Oleg. He had turned down flatly the role of muse, and we had entered into a deep crisis. During that same period my best friend let me know that he was incurably ill and that we would not be seeing each other often, and certainly not without worries.
Winter, in other words. Darkness was falling and I stood at the window of my office in the “cottage in the woods” where we had taken up temporary residence, a house for which Oleg had been hired to act as caretaker. An imbalanced and ugly building, lacking all personality, a cheap replacement for the farmhouse that had once marked the property (only the stables were left standing); you could rightly have claimed, therefore, that we were the only authentic objects in it.
Ever since my Shitty Book, my Mean Book, my Bad Book, my work “without morality or conscience”, I had hardly worked at all.
The weeks that went before had been harsh. With days on end of accusations, bitter silences, cruel comments and my crying fits, permeated with a stifling self-pity. After which I tried to heal myself by watching National Geographic documentaries and taking long walks in the snow, which had gone on falling profusely throughout that period. 3Bountiful, bountiful snow. In such huge quantities that I forgot what to do with it, once I had already made snowmen, stuck out my tongue to catch the flakes and watched our young tom, Yevgeni, retrace his own paw prints across the white field. Flake after flake after flake … drifted up into towers before the house. And no one to talk to since I had stopped writing, except for letters to my dying friend, but I talked to no one about those letters. One person at least who enjoys hearing from me and receiving reports from my Nova Zembla, I thought. For a Nova Zembla is what it was, and I was on rations almost too skimpy for sustenance. Oleg allowed me to share his bed, it’s true, but it was chilly as the tundra. I would leave it in the middle of the night and slip into the room across the hall. My study, haha, where I studied nothing at all, only sat on the pine-plank floor he had laid a few months earlier (when we still dreamt of what this place could be), snot and slime running from my nose, naked like a dwarf or an antique Chinese Buddha, tearing one page after another out of the book. Whole chapters I ripped from the little monster I had created myself, even clumps of hair from my own head, until my wrists throbbed with pain.
What had writing brought me (I asked myself) besides a loss of warmth, care and tenderness?
How hard I tried to defend myself!
Even the cartoonist who drew my portrait for a magazine had given me murky little eyes, no light in the pupils, 4as though I were some inhuman thing. And I felt nothing of love, not a morsel of pleasure for the pitiful little writer, not even enough money to get by.
And nothing left of the once-so-mesmerizing smell of books, of the pleasure and enjoyment of writing.
‘Per aspera ad astra … you’ve betrayed me, betrayed …’
Oleg’s words went on wrenching. You’re a cheat. You mingle with others, with your friends and family, but under your arm, or in a shadowy recess, crevice or crack, you’re hiding your ratty little notebook … Like some creepy-crawly, some über-bitch, you sneak through the corridors of the world we share. (There’s a killer on the road, his brain is squirmin’ like a toad.)
You see, I’d alienated everyone. And the ones who weren’t already alienated were dead.
Bereavement, in other words, and pain and self-castigation, and the intense ripping and shredding of the books. Thirty-two copies and one to go. With me feeling like one of Henry VIII’s condemned wives.
King Henry, to six wives
He was wedded.
One died,
One survived,
Two divorced,
Two beheaded.
5Lonely and bitter are the aggrieved.
The Sméagol-ish creature in that study? That was me, standing at the window on the final day of the year, looking out at the branches swaying on the trees and two dark figures. Oleg, slim and erect, planting the torches he’d made along both sides of the path, and my ten-year-older brother Max, poking a stick into the fire basket (delighted, as I always am too, to be close to the fire and see how it grew and wavered as it nibbled on itself).
Yes, restlessness, from the moment my youngest sister Libby called to say they wouldn’t be coming to celebrate New Year’s with us that evening; there had been an accident with the fireworks they’d bought, and she and her wife had to take their young son to the hospital. As she spoke, I listened to the ruffling of my heart at the start of what I now view as the long winter of our discontent. When all of us in the family became patients, suffering from vague disorders and complex symptoms. While I went on living in the house at the forest’s edge that was not a house at all, more like a hiding place, a refuge amid the trees, where I cowered the way the little rabbits did from Yevgeni the cat. But he flushed them effortlessly from the bushes. Through the cat flap he dragged them inside, gobbled them down calmly in the front hall and left the lucky rabbit’s foot for us. Or an inedible chunk of intestine. In the morning Oleg was the first to step on to the killing floor, and with the bottle of Cillit Bang did his best 6to make it look like the entrance to a home. But a home it was not, vide supra.
A time when all ties were sundered, all promises of loyalty broken. When Libby was on the pills (‘Slip me one little Diazepam, one more little Diazepam, oh!’) and her wife, Dana Kidd (who had lain in other beds, in other houses), sat at the table during Christmas dinner with a black eye.
And when my brother Max moved into my study, where he slept from New Year’s on in a narrow spare bed. After more than twenty-five years, he had been made redundant at work and in his marriage. His wife had traded him in for a dog-trainer.
He arrived on a Sunday evening, his face covered in the psoriasis which my mother’s genes had passed on with mathematical precision to her second, fourth and eighth children. A disorder that waned as the sun peeled off layer after layer, but that in times of adversity (‘Who would want me now …! I’m fifty-nine already!’) swelled glowingly into a scarlet mask with flakes of silver that sometimes blanketed even his eyelids and brought on nasty infections. Without complaint, he slid his briefcase (toothbrush, laptop, underwear) and telescope case up against the pitched wall and lay down on the cot.
In the morning I woke him with a mug of instant coffee, and felt warm and motherly for a moment, but otherwise I never entered the room—even though, at first, I had enjoyed sitting in that sparingly lit space, which I had 7furnished with a dark wooden table on curved Louis Quinze legs (picked up at the Emmaus), with a white spotlight as reading lamp and an office chair from IKEA, looking out over the conifers on the patch of ground before the house. Delimited on one side and shut off from the world by the secondary road, over which the cars in late afternoon traced their red or amber streamers, tyres hissing when the asphalt was damp or wet; on the other side by the hedgerows and spruce trees that formed the entryway to the woods. And to feel calm, content or simply somewhat pleasantly lonesome. (Even though I wasn’t, at least not yet.)
A time when I didn’t write, yet felt the physical need to surround myself with books, ordered in large numbers from Amazon and Bol.com, while Oleg buckled down to making his own little greenhouse in which he raised chard (blitva), tomatoes, radishes and lettuce. And when Libby phoned and phoned. To say that this time her heart had really been used as kitty litter … Really nailed to the wall this time with a rusty spike …
In the course of which I kept on seeing the way she’d sat on the floor in the middle of our room after Christmas dinner, covered in the ashes of her wrecked marriage. Wringing her hands, her face hollow, her mouth the black hole of a Noh mask. In front of the dining table across which Oleg and I had tossed lit tea-warmers at each other, 8leaving teary welts across the scarlet distempered wall (ambiance!) and the two Japanese woodblock prints. ‘How could she, the conniving bitch! Lying and cheating on me, both at the same time!’
When I thought that none of it would ever change, Oleg snarling at me and Libby calling to say: ‘I actually saw her, Dana Kidd … at that house … her car, she was there, with that person.’ Or that my mobile phone would vibrate in the middle of the night: ‘I’ve been thinking about it; I don’t think she deserves to live …!’
When my good friend died, after which the game of chess he and Oleg had been playing remained unfinished atop the piano. And the tall grey wall cabinets, slapped together in a hurry, filled themselves with books, but I wrote nothing more, except (melodramatic) journal entries and Herring Songs, which I posted on Facebook.
Songs for Herring
Once upon a morning
a herring came along
silent, silken, shy
on to the shore it came
wearing a suitcase
tied around its slender waist
a sorrowful expression on its
9fishy face
something tender and
melancholic in its, yet manly,
gaze.
‘I seek for shelter,’ muttered he,
his voice sounding rather soft,
‘a house or an apartment, a
private space, a loft,
I am a wealthy fish and I am
willing to pay,
as long as you can offer me a
Safe & silent Place to stay.’
‘Well, come along,’ I said,
‘Come along with me,
if you are able, if you can,
I have been lonely and
for a while
I have been searching
for a man.’
‘I am no man, but fish,’ he said
in a friendly voice,
‘Well, in that case, you gentle
fish,
you leave me no other choice
You can be my tender dish,
and we’ll be intimate that way,
rest in my mouth, sweet fish.’10
Oh, he tasted good, he tasted,
humble and fertile
and oh, I had been lonely, I
had been lonely for a while …
He tasted true and good, and
I cried bitterly
when he was gone,
leaving only a salty aftertaste
on my tingling tongue
a faint and salty residue,
just like that of a gentle man …
and now it seemed a bitter waste,
that I had spent a good &
honest being
with my greedy haste & taste.
I had spent my fish
and now I walk
lonely to the shore
cause silver slender fish like
that come only once
and nevermore …
Yes, I should have known
much better
than to mistake him
for a dish
and I weep bitter, bitter tears
for my tender fish.
11So that, looking back on it now, it all seems to have played itself out in one long, single season in which each of us became harder, more stringent and less friendly, while the snow fell on us thick and bonded as dough and the Great Recession howled for our livers, kidneys and hearts.
In fact, though, the whole country was on tenterhooks, shifting hither and thither. Grievances ignited quickly were shared hurriedly and en masse, then died away, leaving nothing on the surface but the red-paper tatters of fizzled-out fireworks, a great danger for those sifting the remains for that which had not yet been detonated. Some events caused a shudder, a communal moment of shock and worry, but those shocks too wore thin quickly enough, became tiring once the moment itself had passed. You grew used to it, while you shifted from one mood to the next and glared at each other, squinting like gunslingers, suspecting in the other a shrewdness you disowned in yourself.
The only distraction was an impromptu visit from our last remaining family friend, Sebastiaan the Silver Surfer (for whom no more room will be set aside here), elderly linguist emeritus, who came cycling out of the woods at a clip, bent low over the handlebars, preceded by his little heralds, the rabbits, racing off on either side of his tyres. He brought us a plastic bag filled with gifts. DVDs and self-published books of poetry and slender works of prose, which he 12handed me in courtly fashion, with both hands, and which I put aside unread and only came back to years later.
Excuse me for going on about myself for so long. I feel as though I need to tell you what I was and what I wanted to be, before descending step by step to the first place I ever lived. Of which I was reminded in those cheerless days when the beat of an old, familiar drum grew louder and louder.
Yes, turmoil, and alarum … and then ignition.
HENNE FIRE
On 13th November in the year 2015, Henne Fire fell down the stairs and died, a few hours before a group of young people, out on the town at the Bataclan in Paris, were permanently cut off from all further innocent outings.
Henne Fire was my sister. My mother’s firstborn.
She lay at the bottom of the stairs and refused the ambulance. This despite the urging of the doctor and paramedics to have herself admitted to the hospital, seeing as she was badly malnourished and dehydrated.
It had been years since I’d visited her, I didn’t even know her address. In my life she had become little more than a recurring moment of ridicule at our annual Family Day of the Dead. Just look at them: always with that grown-up son of hers in his chukka-chukka-whoo-whoo mobility cart. Mother and son, didn’t it remind you of some scene out of Psycho? What a bizarre, unbelievable pair!
Henne Fire was sixty-nine when she fell. No spring chicken and certainly not, in the words of my father (who had been dead for fourteen years by then), ‘in the full flush of youth’. Since the turn of the century she had led a shadowy existence in her newly built, grout-hazed, two-bedroom bungalow. Housing for seniors at the edge of Nieuwegein, a satellite community built once upon a time by way of dreamland. A suburban landscape where our mother took refuge (with us) in the mid-1970s, a place sans violence or pain, with lawns as green as those in Blue Velvet.
When I saw Henne after her hapless fall, she looked like a bird, her bony nose jutting up, her hands like claws. She was wearing a green dress.
My sister, I hasten to say, was of no economic importance and had not contributed to the national economy for years. Her legacy consisted of a bank account with a few hundred euros in it, some (dance) outfits, porcelain figurines, a smattering of furniture and an ashtray filled with Pall Mall and Belinda butts. The house was cleared in a morning. Even the physical space she occupied had been cut to a minimum.
In my youth, Henne Fire (sixteen years my senior) had been the consummate symbol of femininity. A magpie, mad about all that glistered, her bouffant hair decked out with headbands. Along with her sister Toddie (one year younger than she) and our mother, they formed a bastion: the Holy Trinity of Smoke. When we, the youngest children, came home from school we would find them ensconced in their palace of nicotine, while the back room swarmed with children of their own, our nephews and nieces. On days when we had school on Utrecht’s Schimmelplein, my younger brother Kaj and I would spend our lunch breaks at Henne’s. She made porridge for us. ‘Want an apple?’ she would say, poking one inflated cheek with her index finger. ‘Pop! There it goes!’
In the summer she wore her bikini as she made our sandwiches. When she was done, she would stretch out in an orange-canvas folding chair that barely fitted in the little mossy-, mouldy-smelling quadrangle, looking like an exile from Naples in this clammy land.
