The Turk has gone crazy. That was the word around and the word would always reach me somehow, often in the gap under the door along with the smell of the disinfectant. He had smashed in the cheekbone of some other prisoner. Some said the prisoner had taunted him about his wife; others that he had just repeated something one of the guards had said. Some said the wife was sleeping with a lodger; others that she was sleeping with men for money. The Turk had been confined to his cell. It was for a week; it was for two weeks. Wherever the truth lay, Nazim the Turk’s wife was appearing less and less in the visit center.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch to the man inside.
9. “Then why doesn’t she come?”
“It’s not that she doesn’t care.”
“If she cared, she’d come.”
“It’s hard for her.”
“It’s harder for me.”
“She’ll never stop caring about you but . . .”
“She’s ashamed, isn’t she? Admit it, Dad, you both are. It’s obvious.”
“Well, I’d be lying to say we’re . . . proud. You always had to be . . . I mean we knew you were always different. You had to be different. I don’t know where it . . . certainly not from me. It’s very . . . the papers . . . the stories in the papers. It’s very hard for her. She has to . . . she hides from people she knows, hides in the supermarket when she sees someone she knows, goes from aisle to aisle. It’s very hard for her . . . and your brothers. They send you their . . . their kids have been teased, you know, at school.”
“Dad, the worst thing I did was to have an affair with a married woman. And not just any married woman. It was Anna. You both know her. You liked her. She asked me to pick up her son from school one day. The arrangements got confused, and the relationship was found out. She’s been unhappily married for years. End of story.”
“No. It’s not the end of the story. Do you think we’re idiots? Why won’t she admit it?”
“She should. I think she will.”
“Simon, are you crazy, stupid, or blind? It’s been months. She’s not going to admit anything. You always had ideas above your station.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Do you think she’s going to leave her husband for you? She didn’t want you back then.”
“Fuck you!”
“Yes, yes, that’s right. Fuck me, fuck everyone with a good job, with a marriage, with prospects. We never understood anything, did we? Only you did. You read poetry and looked down on the rest of the world, on your brothers and on me, and now look at you. You’ve made your bed—”
“I didn’t look down on Mum. I was the only one. Why won’t she come?”
“Your mother tried . . .”
“Tried what?”
“She tried to get Anna to tell them . . . what you want.”
“What did she do? What happened?”
“It wasn’t something she’d talked about, at least not with me. I don’t know where she got the idea . . . what put it in her head. She phoned there a couple of times. Must’ve looked up the number in the book. She said she knew the name from the newspaper reports. A woman answered, an older woman with an accent, a foreign accent. Well, your mother had to hang up each time. Hearing that woman’s voice just broke her up. She figured that it had to be the boy’s grandmother, Anna’s mother, and she started to imagine how it would feel, having your grandson kidnapped. I guess she would have put herself in that woman’s position, imagining it was one of her grandchildren, one of ours. I can imagine how it affected her, hearing the grandmother’s voice just saying hello. She didn’t give her a chance to say more than that before having to hang up.”
“She was empathizing with the housekeeper.”
“What?”
“Anna’s mother was born here. That was the housekeeper she was talking to.”
“Well, she didn’t know that. I don’t think we ever met them, did we?”
“I don’t think so . . . no, of course not.”
“We would have if you’d married her, I suppose.”
“So what happened?”
“She stopped calling. Didn’t want to be a nuisance.”
“That’s it? That’s what she did?”
“No, no . . . she did more than that. She got their address out of the phone book.”
“Oh my God.”
“She was thinking of you, Simon.”
“I know. There’s much to be thankful for.”
“Look, it was hard enough on her when that other little boy was taken—”
“What other little boy?”
“The other one, the Italian one.”
“Carlo?”
“The one you were supposed to be in charge of.”
“Carlo. His name was Carlo. I was his teacher.”
“Terrible business for her when that was in all the papers.”
“Yes, it must have been impossible for her.”
“That’s what you’re good for, isn’t it? Always been good for smart-ass remarks, sarcasm, and rudeness.”
“What happened?”
“She probably blames me.”
“No, I mean what did she do with their address? Did she go there?”
“Yes, she went there. Drove there herself. As I say, she didn’t say anything
to me about it. She would have looked up how to get there in the street directory, I suppose.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“She parked the car. It’s not far, really. Lovely house, she said. They’ve done well.”
“I know the house.”
“Yes. She went to the front door and rang the doorbell. She waited for a long time and nobody answered.”
“Maybe there was nobody home?”
“She said there was a car in the garage, the garage door had been left open and she could see—”
“What happened? Is that it?”
“She rang the doorbell again after a while.”
“You’re drawing this out. Why are you deliberately drawing this out?”
“I’m not doing any such thing. You’re so . . . quick to jump. You have to imagine how difficult this must have been for your mother. Eventually someone opened the door.”
“Probably the housekeeper.”
“No, it was a man. Your mother asked for Anna. He said she wasn’t there. It was the middle of the day. She said he looked terrible, unshaven, red eyes, still in his bathrobe.”
“She should’ve turned and run.”
“He asked if there was any message. She said no, there was no message. He was closing the door when she said she was Mrs. Heywood. He opened the door again, just to be polite, your mother says, because apparently he didn’t place the name immediately. She took a breath and repeated it. He asked if she had an appointment to see his wife and she told him, she had to tell him, that she was your mother. He looked at her and . . . you know what? . . . he invited her in. She walked into their house. How could you possibly doubt her feelings? He took her into the kitchen, and you know what he did?”
“No.”
“He offered her a cup of tea. She accepted. He made her a cup of tea and while he was making it she started to cry.”
“Oh my God.”
“She apologized to Anna’s husband. His name is Joe.”
“I know.”
“She apologized to him for . . . the whole mess. She said that she’d been very upset. She asked about his parents. His father is dead but his mother is alive. She doesn’t live far from them either.”
“Either what?”
“What?”
“You said, “ ‘She doesn’t live far from them either.’ ” What does that mean?”
“Don’t snap at me. That’s all I need. I meant . . . didn’t Anna’s parents live near there too?”
“Yes, they did.”
“Yes . . . y
ou see. Although this house . . . it’s in the ‘golden mile,’ isn’t it?”
“I know where it is. What happened?”
“He said his mother was very upset by what happened, said she’s very close to her grandson. Your mother looked around the room and complimented him on the house. She asked what he did for a living. He said he was a stockbroker. He said he was on leave. ‘Stress leave?’ she asked. He said it was something like that, and she apologized again. She tried to defend you. She told him, quite wrongly in my opinion, how close the two of you, you and Anna, had been when you were students. She told him how much we had liked Anna. She said that, wrong as it was, it was easy to imagine two people, ‘exes,’ meeting up somewhere by chance, and then something . . . developing. She said she wanted to apologize for the pain the two of you had caused. She told him that you say you had permission to take the boy.
“He stood up when she said this. She put her tea down. His tone had changed. She became a little afraid. I can’t believe she did this. She hadn’t intimated to me she was going to.”
“What happened?”
“Well, you can’t blame the man.”
“I can.”
“She comes into his house—”
“What happened?”
“He was angry, insulted no doubt. He told her that her son and the prostitute girlfriend had kidnapped his son and were going to demand a ransom. He told your mother that her son was depraved and that the whole family was going through hell. He took her to the door saying that he thought she should leave. He asked her if she’d come there wanting something from him. She said she hadn’t meant to offend him. At the door he said he didn’t have any money. She shouldn’t make assumptions about the house. All he had, he said, was his son. He told her to tell you that he hoped they throw the book at you.
“She was in a terrible way when she got home. She wasn’t even going to tell me she’d gone there but she was in such a state when I got home from golf, it all tumbled out.”
10. I remember growing up in my parents’ house being aware of all sorts of ornate, delicate stuff stacked or leaning on every conceivable surface—figurines, crockery, cake knives, lace tablecloths and lace napkins, silver sugar tongs, silver teapots, coffee plungers, and brocaded tea trays—none of which we ever used. They were for occasions, circumstances, modes of being that my family never seemed to encounter. From the earliest times I remember this stuff accumulating, congregating around us, crowding us. I remember it always being in the way of the things we actually used to prepare and serve the food we really ate. Reaching into the cupboard for a plate my mother had bought as part of a slightly damaged set from Dimmy’s, a set we were allowed to use, I had to crouch down and peer into the dark of the cupboard and be careful that my hand, my wrist, weaved between the vases, percolators, and Bodum coffee plungers that were kept for “company.” The decanters and smoked-glass cheese platters with their clear domed lids stood there in the dark, silently, stubbornly waiting for “company,” always threatening to be chipped or broken, the collateral damage of a processed-ham, processed-cheese, and processed-white-bread sandwich. The domestic consequences of chips, or worse, breakages, would persist insidiously long after the repair or replacement of these avatars of a longed-for but never enjoyed lifestyle. The mere presence of these things in our house promised my parents that one day they would, with practiced formality, be entertaining people who shared their aspirations, not the least of which was entertaining each other with practiced formality.
It was always a fantasy. It was never going to happen. When my parents die or are put in retirement homes, the stuff will be laid out in a long row and my brothers’ wives will stand in an otherwise empty room and squabble over the “choice bits” that they will mistakenly regard as valuable or as redolent of a time long ago that they do not realize they are still living through. The rest of it will be sent to charities for distribution among certain types of people we were never to have anything to do with because they were “different.” In this way will the only objective manifestation of that difference be as the difference always was, nonexistent. Risibly, my father’s insistence on the distinction between these people and us has been the closest thing he had ever had to a calling, to a religion. On her wedding day, my mother took a vow of silence in the service of this religion, and the silence has extended to watching as the family was sacrificed at its altar.
And yet, when I found myself living alone in an apartment in my late twenties and into my thirties without any stuff, I noticed its absence. I did not merely notice it; I found myself bothered by it. I became viscerally aware of the voracious accumulation of things by the people around me, other teachers I worked with, or their friends, friends who had sprouted into couples, women I went out with. I would find myself in their homes or see into my neighbors’ homes through their windows and notice the way people construct shrines from a whole variety of objects, shrines to some not otherwise articulated long-term view of themselves which it is their ambition to resemble.
It wasn’t so much their stuff per se that I envied; it was this long-term view of themselves of which it bespoke. As a child, and certainly as an adolescent, I had been ashamed of my parents’ stuff, ashamed of what it said about the future to which they aspired. Then, as an adult, I grew to be ashamed of my lack of stuff and, worse, ashamed of my lack of any discernible future.
Maybe my father recognized this? How had the youngest son come to have so questionable a future? Questions were an insult to him, an apostasy. Maybe that’s why he hated me? He had worked for the same bank all his working life. He had started as an office boy at fifteen, worked his way up to a teller and eventually to managing a local suburban branch. He never questioned bank policy or the implementation of initiative after initiative, reforms they termed them, that saw him lose staff as though bubonic plague was being pumped out of the air-conditioning vents. He never questioned head office when they shifted him from branch to branch. And when they told him there would be no more transfers anywhere, when they said no, he didn’t question their description of his downsizing as “retirement.”
“Write this down. Have you written this down?”
Alex wanted me to keep a journal and to fill it with as many of my thoughts and reminiscences as time would permit. It wasn’t my incarceration that made him suggest this. It was one of the things he said to me when I first went to him for help. He said everyone ought to keep a journal, that it was conducive to better mental health. I was unconvinced.
“Surely people’s incoherent, internally contradictory mental detritus is hardly worth chronicling. You’d have people less engaged in life and more engaged in the contemplation of their navels. Not only that, but it elevates egocentricity, the pursuit of the personal instead of the common good.”
“Is there any part of that you believe?” he had countered.
“I’m not really sure. What is there to recommend it?”
“Why do I recommend that you chronicle what you call your ‘mental detritus’?”
“Sorry, Alex, I know it’s your stock-in-trade, but—”
“Are you quite finished?”
“Sorry.”
“Writing things down often forces people to clarify their thoughts.”
“Really? You obviously don’t read contemporary literary fiction.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about, Simon.”
“Sorry. Please . . . I interrupted you.”
“Not always, but sometimes seeing one’s fears written down, seeing them articulated, can reduce their efficacy. I don’t mean that having them before you on a piece of paper causes them to evaporate, but it can lessen their potency. You can go back and see that something that worried you deeply six or twelve months ago turned out to be a trivial problem or no problem at all. You can see before your very eyes how often worry robbed you of the capacity to enjoy the good things in your life when, in retrospect, there was objectively nothing to worry about. And if you can see
that historically your fears were as a rule unwarranted, you can then extrapolate to the present and make the reasonable assumption that there’s a high probability that you’re unreasonably anxious now.”
“ ‘Auto-immunization against anxiety.’ It sounds like a good title for a self-help book.”
“That’s the other advantage of writing everything down. You can turn it into a book.”
“I’ll bet that’s not infrequent. What do you say about it promoting egocentricity, promoting the pursuit of the personal rather than the common good?”
“You’re kidding, right?” “Am I?”
“Let’s hope you are.”
“Okay. Why am I?”
“Simon, look at the world. Never in Western history has there been less emphasis on the common good. What did Margaret Thatcher say?”
“ ‘There’s no such thing as society.’ ”
“Right. I see it in health care. Neoclassical economics, that is, free trade and the rush to ever-cheaper labor, deregulation, privatization, the abandonment of government to the market—it’s now sold under the feel-good euphemism of globalization—has been rampant for the last twenty years. People not yet unemployed are shivering in their shoes from insecurity. They can’t plan for their retirement, they can’t plan for their children’s education, they can’t plan for next week. And all the while they and the untold numbers already unemployed are being made to feel inadequate because of it.”
“This is great, Alex. You sound like me.”
“Simon, you can’t for a moment think that this massive erosion of the common good can be blamed on people who keep journals.”
“Do you keep a journal?”
“Yes.”
“Not just for your professional notes; I mean a private journal, a personal record?”