A Woman on the Edge of Time (14 page)

Eleven

DESPITE HIS FOCUS
on the flaws in Hannah's personality, there is almost nothing in my grandfather's diaries about where these cracks might have come from, the influences, nature and nurture, that might have shaped her. It wasn't that these were matters beyond his understanding. He wrote knowledgeably about history, sociology, psychology. His wife was a devoted follower of Freud: Hannah was seen by a Freudian at the age of two. He was in psychoanalysis himself in the years after Hannah's death. He wrote both in an essay about his childhood and on several occasions in his diary about his own parents' influences on him. But with Hannah, I think it was territory he was simply unable to enter. It was burden enough to blame himself for failing her at the last; to imagine that he and my grandmother might have failed her as a child, that their own blood might have failed her, was more than he could allow himself to consider.

In all his diaries, there is only one moment when his mind leaps ahead of him through this forbidden door. In April 1970, four years after Hannah's death, news reached my grandparents of another sudden death in the family. My grandmother's younger sister, Zelda, had been suffering from bowel cancer, but seemed to have recovered after an operation when she was found dead. ‘There was a strong suspicion,' their sister-in-law Eva informed them from Israel, that she had ‘taken an overdose of sleeping pills with the intention of finishing it all'.

Zelda had returned to work, Eva wrote, but, while ‘physically she was much better', her ‘spirits were low and she kept on saying that she was terribly afraid of the whole thing starting all over again'. It must though have been ‘a very sudden decision, because she had many appointments and meetings for the next few days'. A note, ‘scribbled on an envelope in a large and hurried handwriting', said she had ‘bad pain and have taken something to sleep. Don't disturb me.' She had ‘enormous courage and tried her best to come back to life', Eva concluded. ‘But underneath it all there was a deep despair.'

‘How like Hannah,' my grandfather wrote in shocked recognition in his diary. ‘The sudden decision! While plans pending! The hurried note on an envelope! In large, untidy writing! I feel a sense of cold undermining.'

But as abruptly as the door opened, it seems to have closed again. Reading on in his diaries, I find nothing further about these parallels, no suggestion that they might hint at a family trait. If he was to imagine that Hannah might be like her aunt, then he might have to ask whether she might be like her father.

Zelda's story, which I haven't heard before, is a jolt to me, though. On its own, for all the similarities with Hannah, Zelda's death does not necessarily add up to anything. It wasn't clear that Zelda took a deliberate overdose; her death may have been accidental. But the same cannot be said for her sister, Ruth, who also had bowel cancer, a decade or so after Zelda, also went into hospital for an operation, in Johannesburg, where she lived, and though the operation was also successful, climbed out of her hospital bed a few days later, took the gun she had smuggled in out of her bag, and shot herself dead.

MY GRANDPARENTS NEVER SPOKE
to me about Ruth's death, and I learned her story only by chance. My grandfather had also stopped keeping a diary by the time Ruth died, in 1980, so there is no record of his thoughts about her death. Ruth's older daughter, Naomi, at whose wedding Hannah gurned at the camera, died from bowel cancer. But Ruth's younger daughter, Donna, lives in London.

I haven't seen Donna in a while, and when I call her and she invites me to her flat, I am taken aback to hear that she lives in Chalcot Square — where Anne Wicks's flat was. These past fifteen years I have lived myself only a couple of miles from here. My daughters went to nursery school a few streets away. One of my oldest friends lives almost around the corner. But it is only now, on the way to Donna's, that I go to see the house where my mother died.

In Hannah's time, this was a bohemian area, with most of the houses divided into inexpensive flats. But today it is one of the most expensive parts of north London, and Anne Wicks's address no longer exists. The basement flat she rented has been subsumed back into the grand mid-Victorian corner house, now a single family dwelling, with immaculate paintwork.

I stand at the glossy black railings and peer down at the basement windows. If Mr Popjoy, or one of his successors, was called to investigate a gas leak now, he wouldn't be able to get past the bars. I think about knocking on the front door, asking if I can have a look inside, but what would there be to see? And what would I say? Do the people who live here now want to hear about a young woman's suicide in their house?

INSTEAD I WALK
across the square and ring on Donna's bell.

Donna knows, she tells me, that Hannah died here, though she doesn't know in which house, has never tried to find out — has never, if she is to be honest, given it much thought. She met Hannah when she came to London for Naomi's wedding, but she was only a girl then, and by the time she came back to London as an adult, Hannah was dead and no one talked about her. It was ‘the great unsaid', she says, but then our family is ‘full of great unsaids'.

Donna's own great unsaid was that she grew up believing her father was her mother's first husband, rather than, as was actually the case, the second husband, with whom Ruth had a long affair before they eventually married. She didn't, Donna says, want anyone to know that Donna was ‘a bastard'.

It was only years later, in therapy in London, that Donna realised the truth. It was as if a ‘blindness' had lifted from her. She went back to South Africa to confront the second husband, who admitted he was her father, though he begged her not to tell Ruth that she had found out, and Donna never did. It is ‘the way we do things in our family', Donna says. Keep secrets, evade the truths we do not want to be true.

Donna was living in London when Ruth died, and though she was in her thirties by then, and was a mother herself, she was not told at first that Ruth had taken her own life. She was also persuaded not to return to South Africa for the funeral — something she has regretted ever since.

We talk about these evasions, Ruth's suicide, and Donna suggests that they are the same pattern of behaviour: a reluctance to deal with unpleasant things, whether the shame of infidelity or the indignities of cancer. Add to this a ruthlessness, too, perhaps, as my grandfather wrote of Hannah, a steeliness; for not every mother could keep up a lifelong lie to her daughter about her father, as not every seventy-year-old woman could take a gun into hospital and use it.

It was her second husband, Donna's father, who had given her the gun, Donna says. It was what everyone in South Africa had — affairs and guns.

A few days after Ruth's death, Donna received a letter from her. It had been written before she went into hospital, in case something happened in the operation room, or afterwards. ‘I have decided “no tears”,' Ruth wrote.

LATER, WHEN I TALK TO SUSIE
about my conversation with Donna, she suggests that Ruth's and Zelda's might not have been the only suicides in the family. Their mother — Hannah's grandmother — Rosie, had suffered badly from ‘melancholia'. She was in and out of sanatoriums, and was eventually sent to Switzerland, where she supposedly died of a heart attack while undergoing electro-convulsive therapy — though Susie thinks it is possible that she took her own life.

Rosie's husband, Nicolai, had no melancholy in his blood. He was known in South Africa, where he was chairman of the South Africa Zionist Federation, as Tsar Nicolai. After Rosie's death, Nicolai went to live in Israel where, according to an obituary, he spent the trial of Adolf Eichmann ‘parading the streets of Jerusalem bearing a placard urging that the Holy Land should not be defiled by having the body of this arch-murderer interred in it'.

But there is also a story about Nicolai's death. As an old man, he came to London to have his throat cancer treated by a doctor who was well known, Susie says, for ‘going to extra lengths'. According to the story, Nicolai instructed the doctor not to wake him from surgery if the cancer had spread. He died under the knife in July 1965, six months before Hannah.

THIS RELUCTANCE TO DEAL
with unpleasant things, to put up with indignities, even the streak of ruthlessness, or steeliness, is something I knew in my grandmother. Although she was caring and generous, she refused to go to funerals — including her own daughter's. She was a loyal and forgiving friend up to a point, but if someone went beyond that point she would cut them out of her life. ‘You are pushing me beyond my limit,' she would say about even small things.

She didn't commit suicide like her sisters, but she often talked about doing so when she got old or sick, and was for many years a member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. It wasn't death she feared, she would say, but the ‘sordid paraphernalia of dying', and it was perhaps only the dementia she had always dreaded that prevented her choosing her own moment to slip away.

Is that how it was with Hannah? That she was taken beyond her limit? That she was not willing to put up with the indignities of a failed marriage, being rejected by her lover? It explains, and it does not explain. Ruth, Zelda, Rosie, Nicolai, were old, or at least a lot older than Hannah, and suffering from horrible illnesses. Hannah was twenty-nine and in perfect health. It is one thing to chose one's moment to slip away; another, to cut short a life in youthful bloom.

IN THESE CONVERSATIONS
about family history, other matters come up, too. The proclivity for infidelity, for instance. Ruth, Zelda, Susie tells me — Nicolai, too, she thinks — all had extra-marital affairs. My grandfather's father, Berthold Feiwel, who has a street named after him in Tel Aviv for his contribution to Zionism, was also notorious for his philandering. My grandparents, too, had affairs: my grandmother with a man she would take up with when she visited South Africa, Susie tells me, and my grandfather when he was away in the war and on his travels. I remember myself walking with my grandparents in New York, and my grandfather, in his seventies by then, pointing to a hotel and asking mischievously whether he should tell my grandmother about the woman he had slept with there.

I laughed at the time, and it makes me smile now, but how much did Hannah know about her parents' affairs, her aunts', her grandfather's? Did it normalise infidelity for her? Influence her to embark on the affair that led to her death?

MY GRANDMOTHER EVEN HAD AN AFFAIR
, or at least a dalliance, not long after she was married, Susie says. She and my grandfather had gone on holiday with a poet friend and his wife to Yugoslavia, and after a couple of days my grandmother ran off with the poet. My grandfather's ‘gloominess' had got to her, she told him when she came back, and he promised to try to be more cheerful.

I had always thought of my grandfather's gloominess as a product of his daughter's suicide. But, reading his diaries, I have learned that it was in him long before Hannah's death. They record periods of gloom, depression, writer's block. ‘The long journey home,' he labelled his life during one episode.

In his essay on his childhood, he blamed his father's ‘constant amours', which left his mother ‘negative and nagging', and affected him in turn. But another source suggests that this gloominess may have been genetic. His parents were friends and colleagues of Chaim Weizmann in the early years of the Zionist movement, and there are dozens of references to them in Weizmann's published letters. These record that my grandfather's mother was a ‘terrible Grublergeist', or brooder, even before she met Berthold. And ‘Toldy', as Weizmann calls him, though ‘a wonderful man and so gifted', was prone to what looks to me suspiciously like depression. ‘Toldy is really terribly miserable,' reads a typical letter. He has ‘been in bed the whole day and has not said a word'.

Hannah was spared, it seems, the gloomy or Grublergeist genes. By all accounts, her nature was generally cheerful, positive, energetic. Nor, though it is easier to think that suicide is a product of mental illness, is there any evidence that she suffered from depression; there are no stories of her lying in bed all day, and no one has suggested she ever spent a day in silence. But family characteristics we escape genetically can still shape the environment in which we grow up.

When I remember them, in my teens and twenties, my grandparents weren't in conflict with each other. In time, Hannah's death seems to have drawn them together, made them content with less, with each other. I was conscious that a sadness wasn't far beneath the skin in both of them, but they were also funny together, teasing each other, finding humour in their differences. As grandparents, they were warm and generous, their grandparently love vital to both my brother and me. But I can imagine that they weren't always like this as parents.