Читать книгу Then Again: Travels in search of my younger self - Irma Kurtz - Страница 5

One way or another, the journey will end where it began. If the last stop does not return the traveller to the start, if it strands her somewhere strange, the beginning will come looking for her. And it will find her, too: in dreams, in madness, in rogue memories that thunder out of the blue, and in things. Individual memory tends to be a self-aggrandising, over-edited branch of the human imagination; those of us existentialists, however, whose nature is to live hard and fast in the here and now, are afflicted with gaping forgetfulness, recollection sieved, chronology all to pot. A small compensation for bad memory is an acute sensitivity to things. The walls of my flat are albums; my wardrobe is an archive; a ticket stub at the bottom of an old suitcase can stop my heart. Things more than aid my memories; things contain them. A name and number scribbled in the margin of a yellowing page; a hotel bill from years ago marking my place in an abandoned book, bronze iris or moss roses from the past blooming in a current garden; music, measurable too after all and a kind of thing; scents and flavour: these and countless other objects of virtue can return me instantly to points along the journey and where it all began.

I came across the old notebook on my last trip home. It is curious, after so much water under the bridge and so many keys on the ring, still to call the place I left three-quarters of my life ago ‘home’. But home sticks to where the traveller leaves her mother and America must always be my homeland because it is my mother’s land. I had no say in the matter. Practically every morning of my school years I stood shoulder to shoulder with others in my class and pledged allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stood, flapping in the dank breeze off the New Jersey marshland where we first-and second-generation Americans were growing up. And some of us, not many of the girls, outgrowing that place too, faster than we outgrew our patent-leather shoes called ‘mary janes’, gleaming under us like the hooves of circus ponies. You don’t often see patent leather on the feet of children these days, only occasionally in Latin cities where families walk out together on Sundays; there are fewer and fewer of such cities and such families. Right, left-right, left: those shoes were made for skipping. In my case for skipping town. When the leather cracked over the toes it showed buckram underneath. What has become of buckram? And taffeta, and starched cotton and faille, and all the stiff fabrics of a post-war childhood? My old notebook too is not a thing found easily today. It has a hard cover bound in black library tape that has not yielded or split in the half-century since I bought it for a nickel. What a nickel bought in the early 1950s costs around $3 now. On the other hand, what was an hour then passes now in fifteen minutes: illogical sums of ageing that make old folks fumble at checkout counters and turn up way too early or too late for buses and trains.

Nearly thirty years ago, when my mother was almost the age I am now, my father twelve years older than she, they sold our holiday house in the country and the flat in Jersey City where my brother and I had grown up, and they moved to a sheltered community near Princeton, New Jersey. On one of my visits not long after they had settled in, my father strolled out with me to have a look around. Mother had long before stopped walking to no purpose or destination, but my father’s body was strong and had outlived the full vigour of his mind by a decade or so; it was just the two of us trudging along side by side, more attuned in silence than conversation. Streets of the gated square mile were empty as usual, more or less identical cottages were laid out along them like pieces on a board game for players with fixed incomes and shrunken ambition. A few cars passed, driven slowly by white-haired women on their way to the community clubhouse or the cottage hospital or the shop; they put on speed in shows of bravado whenever they saw us trying to cross a street ahead of them. A group of chattering dowagers in shell-suits came towards us, a few of them were swinging mallets, apparently heading to the croquet green.

My father gripped my arm. ‘Look, Irma, you see the kind of place this is,’ he whispered in a kind of panic, ‘only the men die here.’

It was the last walk he and I took together; not very long afterwards he went ahead to prove his point.

Once my mother arrived at an age when she could no longer reach or stoop to the top or bottom shelves of her cupboards, they remained crammed with things that provide poignant forage when I visit home. There is practically none of my father, no notes in his oddly dainty script, no letters, even the flyleaves have been torn out of books he inscribed to his then beloved when they were courting: The Thoughts of Epictetus, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. What mother has destroyed and thrown away, I imagine in a single vengeful frenzy, is evidence, too, of anger and disappointment as fierce as love. It was not a marriage made in heaven; it was made, in fact, in Indiana. They met there at university, the fatherless local girl and the handsome man from the east. A few photographs of him have escaped, but there are spaces, too, crusted with old library paste on the black pages of ancient albums where his image once was. Repudiated as husband, he incidentally became nobody’s father.

It was at the bottom of one of mother’s domestic oubliettes that I found my old notebook two years ago, languishing among curling papers and postcards in a cardboard box. The moment I saw it my breath caught and there I was again, eighteen, exultant and trembling on the deck of the Italian ship, Castel Felice, about to embark on a journey that was going to effect the romantic transformation of my life at last. Years earlier when I was ten or twelve I had started sometimes to feel a sense of something other ahead, something adventurous, something more than a future of prosperity, fidelity and motherhood for which I and every other girl in my class was being designed. It was no gift of birthright that animated my daydreams, I knew I was no changeling; I certainly had no outsized sense of self-importance. On the contrary, what excited me was the freedom that derives from knowing myself unimportant and without status: the freedom of invisibility. Perhaps my early diffidence is why age, which throws a shabby cloak over all women, has not descended on me as an ugly surprise. If anything, to know I am of no interest to those who interest me so I can see, unseen, has increased the fun of travelling. Occasionally, and never for long, I used to indulge in adolescent self-pity and pretend to envy Marie Caso, the fishmonger’s daughter, and the other playmates of my street who were free of responsibility, free of the possibilities, free of the freedom that I felt myself stuck with. By the time I turned seventeen and left for university, Marie and I lost touch; probably, she was already engaged to a nice Italian boy. And two years later, in the spring of 1954, when I bought the notebook in which to keep a journal of my first trip to Europe, it is a safe guess she was pregnant with the first of three, maybe four, lovely children.

I wish I could walk around myself as I was on the deck of the Castel Felice surrounded by college students from every state in America, hundreds of them, all on their dutiful six-week cultural European tours. My own group was called ‘Study Abroad’ and composed mainly of students from the Midwest and the east coast. I wish I could see the back of my head, watch it turn a face my way and hear my young voice answer when I ask her – you, myself – whether she suspects or hopes that she alone in the noisy crowd is bound to leave something of her very self on that other continent. And find something. And never quite come home again.

The journal of my first trip to Europe is a typical American kid’s notebook of a design that continues to be produced, though modern taste prefers the cover soft and its traditional mottled pattern seems to me over the years to have become increasingly white. The cover of my old notebook is mostly classic black, giving the effect of water seen from above on a moonlit night. I wonder if the word ‘Compositions’ is still being set in elegant typeface over a white rectangle on the front? Probably not. Nowadays, all but doodles are undertaken by keyboard. On the line below, in the space after ‘Name’ is my own, written proudly and carefully as I used to sign it when I was eighteen. By the time a body turns sixty or so, her signature is required increasingly seldom; all important deliveries have been made, their receipt acknowledged; contracts, last wills and testaments, births and marriages have been put in order, and someone else will sign the death certificate. Aged signatures become impatient and jagged with hardly any delineation between the central letters as if to say: if you don’t know who I am by this time, to hell with you. Besides, in modern life even the most intimate messages are sent electronically or by phone; not many cheques need to be filled in either, not since plastic came on the scene. The day lies not very far ahead when, as before the dawn of literacy, a thumbprint or an ‘X’ will see most people through a lifetime.

The way I wrote my name on the cover of the notebook, so dewy and guileless, makes my aged heart go out to the young me, unknowing of what an awful lot of promiscuous signing lay ahead of her, unaware that her virginal surname was bound to remain unchanged for ever. As I opened the old notebook and started to read, I wanted more than ever to go back and find her on deck among the other American youngsters outward bound for the first time.

‘If I could tell you,’ I would tell her, ‘for a start, you will not be especially lucky. Don’t count on anything heaven-sent to happen in your life. Expect no serious serendipity. No lottery wins for you, dear. In any case, as even the luckiest bastards grow old, serendipity gives way to mere coincidence. So expect only what you yourself make happen and allow. Nobody is going to do you any favours and in that way at least you’ll be lucky. Because favours are an anchor; favours are a drag. Favours are power; kindness is strength. Got that? Don’t do anyone any favours either, lest you bind him to you bitterly. Give and forget, no strings attached and nothing to call in. I wish you knew now, girl, how strong you are, so much stronger than you, or I, were led to believe. I wish you had the conviction of your courage. Are you listening to me? Time is short. Very, very short.

What more? Let’s see. Stay away from handsome men this time; easy conquests make them slack. And beware of childless women over forty; they take up residence in their empty nurseries and behave accordingly. Ride a low horse and stable it away from high ones: the higher the horse the more stupid its rider. Cut your hair before you’re forty. Any woman over thirty-five wearing a mane like yours is in trouble. Don’t smoke. Nobody is going to tell the public for another couple of decades, but smoking kills unduly. Do stand up straight, can’t you? There is much more, so much more! Oh, how I wish I could tell you. What can I tell you, after all? How can I tell you all you are going to forget? How can I tell you what I don’t remember? How can I tell you all that has happened to me and must happen to you? Watch closely. It starts happening here. Look! The second gangway is being raised and when the anchor is weighed at last, a long, long time must pass before you reach a harbour to call home. You are eighteen on your maiden voyage and, appropriately, a maiden; you will return in only six weeks, changed and knowing, a maiden still; but that’s a minor adjustment and it will take place on another journey out.’

Did it occur to you that half a century later you, as I, were going to study your primitive squiggles, looking for a map? Not a map ahead, oh no; ahead is all too clear at our age. The path behind is what I want from you, the one that finally led a girl from Jersey City into residence beside the Thames, where to this day she continues to survive on your nerve and wits. How it would have annoyed you to feel me breathing down your neck as you stood on the deck. What fantasy of her own, you would wonder, did this old madwoman believe you were acting out? Why was she ogling you like an owl a mouse and threatening to touch you? Ugh! You were never going to let yourself be like that, were you? Dried up and past desiring. You intended to die young; most of us who were reading Eng. Lit. at Barnard College in Columbia meant to die young. Like Keats. Ever since you or I can remember, even as a child, we have been regularly buttonholed for reminiscences or warnings by garrulous grown-ups in the street, on buses, at drugstore lunch counters; they took advantage of your curiosity, later mine, combined with the unnatural self-effacement that was drummed into us practically from birth. Already, you knew how to back off, how to free yourself politely from the old bat, soon forgotten in the bustle of departure. The next time we met face to face – she and I, me and I, you and I – was nearly fifty years later when I rediscovered the notebook.

‘Well, about time too,’ cried the notebook, leaping into my hand. ‘Fancy leaving me behind when you left! Letting them stash me here with worn shmottas and chipped cups, and crumbling paperbacks, and diplomas nobody has asked to see since the ink was dry! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? To forget about me! Me! Journal of your first trip to Europe, though sporadically kept, may I say, and puerile, and sloppily written back in the days when you were fool enough to think you could trust your memory. Daft child! She who did not intend to keep her journal should not have kept one in the first place. What for? “For posterity?” Honey, in case you ain’t noticed, a whole lot of your posterity is behind you. The pun implicit is all yours, by the by. I’ve had my fill of puns thanks to your precocious appetite for the damn things in your teens.’

Merely holding the journal in my hand, before I had read a word of it, brought a vivid memory back to me: the ship had started pulling away when I saw my father break free of the crowd on shore. Alone, he walked the length of the dock and stood for as long as I could see him, waving the ancient, perplexed farewell of parents to their departing children. Already he was barely in sight, a little figure at the perilous end of the pier. A boy leaning next to me on the sticky rail was whistling ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. And I was swept by a wild and paradoxical new feeling, comforting and scary, sweet and painful, thrilling and melancholy: I thought it must be loneliness. And I was right.