My Nine Lives (4 page)

But one night she was still there. She had locked up my place and was on the stairs, and so was my landlady. Their voices could be heard down the street, and some neighbors had also come out to listen. Fights were not uncommon in the neighborhood—if they were between men, they could turn violent and not long before there had been a murder, a brother mortally stabbing his sister's alleged seducer. But women tended to confine themselves to deadly invective shouted out loud for everyone to hear. By the time I was walking up the stairs toward them, I had already understood what the fight was about. I realized that my landlady had misinterpreted the situation, and I tried to calm her by explaining that Priti was only using my room to entertain a personal friend. “
One
friend!” screamed my landlady. Then she turned on me—how I had fooled everyone, with my white hair and simple ways, insinuating myself into a respectable home to carry on my nefarious business. Of course I was not allowed to stay another minute but had to pack up there and then; Priti came back up with me and helped me. The only difficult part was
to carry down my trunk—not that it had much in it, but it was one of those metal trunks they have in India as a precaution against rodents and destructive insects.

Priti very quickly found another place for me. This one is further out—since I first came here, Delhi has proliferated into widespread new suburbs and colonies—so that after work Priti has to hire a motorcycle rickshaw to bring her here. But she seems to think this expense worth her while. Her mood is altogether much better nowadays than when I first met her again. Her circumstances appear to have improved from that time; she often wears new clothes and her face too is smoother, brighter with more make-up. Far from borrowing money from me as she sometimes had to, she leaves little gifts for me, such as a picture framed from a calendar. Altogether she has tried to make my room more attractive and comfortable. I have a solid wooden double bed now instead of the narrow string cot I had in the other place; the new bed is really too big for the room and also for me, so I sleep on the mat, which has been changed and is very colorful. I don't often meet Priti, for I try to stay out beyond the time that she is entertaining her friends. But sometimes she waits for me to come home, and then she is very nice to me and asks me whether I'm comfortable in this new place and not disturbed by the people living in the downstairs part of the house.

It is true that these tenants, who are all women, are noisy, especially at night when they entertain clients with music and dancing, and probably drinking too, for their voices and laughter become very loud. Sometimes there are fights, and once or twice the police have been called. I would have liked to make friends with my new neighbors, but I don't often see them, for after their lively nights they like to sleep
late into the day. However, we live together very amicably, and I'm glad to help them out with little household items, such as sugar for their tea. They like to sip it hot and sweet, while sitting on the steps leading up to my room—large, plump, youngish women in shiny satin saris and with cascades of jewelry.

I'm now too far from Nizamuddin and from the river to visit there as regularly as before. But there are always nice peaceful places to be found in India, even in the middle of a crowded city. On the outskirts of the new colony where I now live is a cluster of crumbling little pavilions; there are tombs inside them with inscriptions that have become indecipherable so that I have no idea who is buried here. I sit inside one of the pavilions by the tombs—there are three of them, side by side—waiting until I can go home without disturbing Priti. Although there is a hole in the roof, it is cool in here—anyway, cooler than outside where the sun beats down on the flat earth with only dry shrubs growing out of it and no trees. When the sun has set, the bats come out and cut into the soft skin of the darkened sky. When I first came here, I was completely alone and would squat on the stone floor, leaning against a tomb with a book, or with my unfinished thesis and the poetry quoted in it. Now other people have begun to join me. First there was an old man, a retired accountant, whose eyes were failing so that he asked me to read to him. Then more have come—mostly old people, but also one or two young clerks who love to hear or recite poetry in the way Somnath and his friends used to. One old lady has a very sweet voice and she knows all the songs of Mirabai, which she sings to us and encourages us to join in. When we are not singing or reciting, we talk together, often about the hardships in our lives: some suffer from their kidneys, others from bad daughters-in-law. I suppose it is a relief to be able
to talk of these matters with others. But sooner or later we are back singing again. Not that these songs are free from suffering; on the contrary, sometimes they sound like a cry of anguish—of desperate love for the Friend who will not come, who will not come, not even now at the end of our lives of unrequited longing.

2

Ménage

L
EONORA WAS
my mother, Kitty my aunt. Kitty had no children, she never married because Yakuv didn't believe in marriage, and once she met him, she never looked at anyone else. “He treats her like dirt,” my mother used to say, the corners of her mouth turned down—an expression I knew well, for it was often how she regarded me while telling me, “You'll end up like Kitty: a neurasthenic.” Physically, it would have been impossible for me to become either like my mother or my aunt. They were both tall, statuesque, whereas I have taken after my father who was a lot shorter than my mother. It's odd that both these sisters chose men who were short—though this was all that Yakuv and my father Rudy had in common.

Leonora dominated Rudy and he liked it. She was a wonderful manager of all practical details, but at that time I resented and perhaps rather despised her orderly bourgeois ways. I often took refuge with Kitty, who lived in three tiny rooms in a subdivided old brownstone. My parents had a large apartment in an expensive building on Central Park West, filled with some very fine furniture and pictures that had belonged to Rudy's family of prosperous Berlin publishers. Unlike Rudy and Leonora, who had funneled out his family money through Switzerland, Kitty had arrived here in 1937 with nothing—except of course my parents, who were a constant support to her.

Kitty's apartment was always in a mess, which for me
was part of its charm. I associated disorder with artistic creation, and there was usually some piece of work lying around. She had begun with etchings and woodcuts but later became a photographer; there were prints tacked up of her charming portraits of little girls picking flowers in a meadow. Kitty herself sat on the floor, her arms wrapping her knees and her long reddish hair trailing around her. If my mother was there—and Leonora often came to check up on her sister—she would be tidying panties off the floor, washing the dishes piled in the sink, while clicking her tongue in distress and disapproval. But that didn't bother Kitty at all, she continued sitting there talking to me about some artistic matter, even when Leonora found a broom and began to sweep around her.

My parents adored New York, were completely at home here, and continued to live the way they might have done if they had been allowed to stay in Berlin. They spoke only in English, though their heavy accents made it sound not unlike their native German. They had many social and cultural activities, mostly with other prosperous émigrés from various Central European countries. It was at one of these cultural events that Kitty first met Yakuv, who had been engaged to give a piano recital after a buffet supper at some rich person's house. The house was pointed out to me later, a rococo mansion at 90th and 5th, since pulled down. At this concert Kitty had behaved in a crazy way that was not uncharacteristic of her: the moment Yakuv had finished playing, she dashed up to the piano and, kneeling down, she kissed his hand. Leonora said she nearly died of shame, but Rudy was more tolerant of his sister-in-law's behavior, which he said was a tribute not to a person but to his art. As for Yakuv himself—I don't know how he took her gesture, but probably it was in his usual sardonic way.

On account of his art, my mother was prepared to forgive Yakuv for many things: among them, his background. He came from Eastern Europe, from what she assumed to be a tribe of pedlars and hawkers; the language they spoke was to her a debasement of the High German with which she had grown up. But this had nothing to do with Yakuv's art: “Even if his father peddled toilet brushes,” she explained, “an artist is born with his talent. It's a gift from the gods and comes from above.” His real background might have disturbed her more. His forefathers had been rabbinic scholars, but more recent generations had abandoned these studies in favor of Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Some of them had rotted for years in jail as political prisoners, and at the beginning of the last century an aunt had been executed for her part in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The glowering intensity that pervaded Yakuv's music, and our lives, must have been inherited from these revolutionaries. His looks were as fiery as his playing. He was very short but with broad shoulders and an exceptionally large head, which looked even larger because of his shock of black curly hair.

A year or two after his first meeting with her, Yakuv moved into the brownstone where Kitty lived. His rooms on the top floor were even smaller than hers on the second and just as untidy. But I have seen Yakuv get much angrier than my mother at the mess in Kitty's rooms, kicking things around the floor in a fury and sweeping crockery off her table. Then she would fly at him, and a dreadful quarrel break out. These were the first passionate fights I ever witnessed, for between my parents there was only a slight tightening of the lips to indicate one of their rare differences of opinion. Kitty's fights with Yakuv frightened and thrilled me by their violence. They always ended the same way, with Yakuv going upstairs to his own den as though nothing had happened—he might even
have been smiling—while she was left quivering, prostrate on the floor. But soon she would get up and rush to the door to scream up the stairs—uselessly, for by that time he was back at the piano and she could not be heard above his playing.

At the time we first knew him, in the early 1940s, there was a surfeit of talented refugee pianists, so Yakuv had to struggle to make ends meet. He played for a ballet class and gave piano lessons to untalented students, of whom I became one. At six, my eager parents had sent me for piano lessons to a little old Russian lady, who spent most of her time with me writing appeals for visas to consular officials. But when I was twelve, my parents decided that I should take lessons from Yakuv. I was very reluctant, for I had often seen his pupils coming down from their lessons in tears. I knew this would be my fate too—and deservedly, for he was a great musician and I had very little talent. He made no attempt to disguise his despair, putting his hands over his ears and imploring to be struck deaf. He begged me never to come back again, never to think of the piano again, and of course I would have liked nothing better; but however much we swore an eternal farewell when I left, I always returned on time for my next lesson. I knew—we all knew, including himself—that he needed the money, and since he had driven most other pupils away, it seemed up to me to stick it out, however painful this might be for both of us.

And actually, apart from my playing, I liked being with him. He had three little rooms, and the one in which he gave lessons was only just big enough to hold his piano. The window faced the back yard which was wild and overgrown since the first-floor tenant had no money to keep it up. At that time the mammoth apartment buildings had not yet been built, so the house was surrounded by other brownstones
with similarly untended gardens and trees growing tall enough to fill his window. Yakuv, in a shabby jacket and rimless glasses, filled the room with smoke from his little black cigars. A cup of coffee stood on the piano, and since I never saw him make a new one, it must have been stone cold; but he kept sipping at it, and dipping a doughnut into it. Although coffee, doughnuts, and cigars appeared to be all he lived on, he was full of energy. He roared, stamped, heaped me with his sarcasms. Sometimes I got so mad, I banged down the piano lid, and that always seemed to amuse him: “I see you have inherited your aunt's sweet temper.” But then he pinched my cheek, almost with affection, and walked me out the door with his arm around my shoulders.

I was not the only one in the family to take lessons from him. I don't know whether my father did this because he really wanted to learn or to contribute to Yakuv's income. He came not to play the piano but to sing Lieder; he loved music but was unfortunately as unmusical as I am. I have heard Yakuv tell Kitty that the entire neighborhood was trilling
Die Schöne Müllerin
while my father was still struggling with the first bars. Poor Rudy—he must have endured the same sarcasms as I did, but all he would say was that Yakuv had the typical artistic temperament. Then Kitty said: “So artistic temperament gives one the right to be a swine?” She spoke bitterly because he fought with her, wouldn't marry her, wouldn't let her have a child with him. This last always came up in their quarrels: “All right, so don't marry, leave it, forget it—but a child, why not a child!” He wouldn't hear of it; and it really was impossible to think of him as a father, a gentle comforting presence like Rudy.

Yet he and Kitty had their tender moments together. Sometimes on my visits to her I found them in bed together. They were not at all shy but invited me to sit on the side of
the bed. We played games of scissors, paper, stone, with the two of them quickly changing to scissors if they saw the other being paper; or he would teach us card games and didn't contradict when she told me that he could have made a living as a card sharper. “Better than the piano,” he said cheerfully. Without his glasses, he looked almost gentle, probably because he was so nearsighted; and it was always a surprise to see that his eyes were not dark but light grey.

Then there were the times when he was a guest at one of my parents' dinner parties. On those evenings Leonora sparkled in a low-cut evening gown and the sapphire and ruby necklace she had inherited from her mother-in-law. Her successful dinners were her personal triumph, so that she was entitled to the little glow that made two red patches of excitement appear on her cheeks. But at that time, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I was embarrassed by what I thought of as her smug materialism. It seemed to me that she cared only for appearances, for her silver, her crystal and china, and for nice behavior (she even tried to make me curtsey when I greeted her guests). She was in her middle thirties, in wonderful shape, radiant with health and the exercise and massage she regularly took: but I thought of her as sunk in hopeless middle age with no ideals left, if ever she had any, which I doubted.

Except for me, everyone appreciated her dinner parties, including Yakuv whenever he was invited. In his crumpled, rumpled evening suit, he ate and drank like a person who is really hungry: which he probably was, and certainly Leonora's exquisite dishes must have been a wonderful change from his stale coffee and doughnuts. After dinner he was persuaded to sit down at the piano, and this my parents made out to be a special favor to them, though before he left Rudy's check had been tactfully slipped into his pocket. He played the way
he ate—voraciously, flinging himself all over the keys, swaying, even singing under his breath and sometimes cursing in Polish. All this made him perspire profusely, so that afterward he could hardly respond to the applause because he was so busy wiping his face and the back of his neck. The enthusiasm was genuine—even unmusical people realized that they were in the presence of a true artist; and I could well imagine how Kitty had been so carried away the first time she heard him that she knelt at his feet.

Kitty resented the fact that Yakuv performed for my parents' guests, that he had to do so in order to earn money; and also that he himself didn't resent it enough. He never complained, as she did constantly, about his lack of reputation and success. He probably didn't think it worth complaining about. A bitter sardonic person by nature, he expected nothing better from fate, which he accepted as being terrible for everyone. When Kitty tried to make him say that he only went to Leonora's parties because of Rudy's check, he said, “Oh no, I go for the food—where else would I get veal in a cream sauce like Leonora's?” And never losing an opportunity to provoke her, he added, “If only you learned to cook—just a few little dishes, one isn't even expecting miracles—”

“Oh yes, now you want me to be your cook-housekeeper! How you would hate it, hate it!”

He laughed and said that on the contrary, a cook-housekeeper was just what he needed; but we both knew that he didn't mean it because the three of us were on the same side—what I thought of as the artistic, the anti-bourgeois side.

This was the way things stood with us when I went away to college and then, two years later, on my own quest—which
I won't go into now except to say that I may have been influenced by Yakuv's view of life. I mean by his pessimism, his assumption that no hopes were ever fulfilled in this life; and while he left it at that, it may have been the reason why I, and others like myself, Jewish and secular, turned to Buddhism. For a while I wanted to be a Buddhist nun—it seemed a practical way out of the impasse of human life. But then I dropped the idea and got married instead.

With all this happening, I became detached from my family in New York. I skimmed through their letters only to satisfy myself that everything was as it always had been with them. It was difficult to tell my parents' letters apart: they had the same handwriting with traces of the spiky Germanic script in which they had first learned to write. The facts they presented were also the same—the concerts and plays they had liked or disliked, an additional maid to help Lina who had got old and suffered with her knees. Kitty in her scrawl did not report facts: only excitement at a painting or a flowering tree, anguished longing for a child, Yakuv's impossible behavior. He of course did not write to me. I don't suppose he wrote any letters; to whom would he write? Apart from our family, he seemed to have no personal connection with anyone.

The only change they reported was that the brownstone in which Kitty and Yakuv had been renting was torn down. That whole midtown area was being built up with apartment blocks where only people with substantial incomes could afford to live. Kitty gave me a new address, downtown and in a part of the city that had once been commercial but had been moribund for years. When I went to see her on my return to New York, I found the warehouses and workshops still boarded up; the streets were deserted except for a few bundled-up figures hurrying along close to the walls. This
made them look like conspirators, though they may only have been sheltering against the wind, which was blowing shreds of paper and other rubbish out of neglected trash cans. But some of the disused warehouses were in process of being revived, one floor at a time. In Kitty's building there were two such conversions, and to get to hers I had to operate the pulleys of an elevator designed for crates and other large objects. Kitty's loft, as she called it, seemed too large for domestic living though it had a makeshift kitchen with a sink and an old gas stove. Kitty's own few pieces of furniture looked forlorn in all this space; even Yakuv's piano—for his furniture too had come adrift here—seemed to be bobbing around as on an empty sea. He himself wasn't there; he was on tour, things were better for him now and he was getting engagements around the country. And Kitty's career also seemed to have taken off: she had rigged up a dark room in one corner of her space, and in the middle of the floor was a platform with two tree-stumps on it, surrounded by arc-lights and a camera on a tripod.