Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (7 page)

My father doesn't know who answered the door to the partisans. I imagine my grandmother waking in her sickbed to hear footsteps, a loud stomping of many boots over floorboards. Even the straw laid out on the floor to catch the dirt couldn't muffle the sound of those steps. There were maybe four or five partisans in the house, all men. My grandmother heard harsh Russian voices shouting at her children. She couldn't hear the words of Boris, Sergei, and Antonina, only the murmurings of their replies. Then she heard sounds she could not understand, not at first, not until she heard the pleading of Antonina. She heard muffled words, a supplication, then crying. She heard more sounds she could not understand. And then my grandmother heard sounds she understood too well. She heard gunshots, and the sound of weights falling heavily, one after the other, onto the floor. She heard shallow gasping, and silence. Silence and then a sudden, violent breaking of plates, chairs, glasses. Angry voices. The retreating stomps of boots going away.

My grandmother was left alone. When she came out into the kitchen, there was no sign of her children, only bloodstains on the floor amid the pieces of broken glass and ceramic and wood. She never saw her three children again. That night she walked sixteen kilometers to the police station in the next village, but no one could help her. The bodies had been taken away by the partisans and were never recovered.

When my sister died, my father's repeated lamentation, “Three in one night, three in one night,” was his plea across the years to his mother. A plea of sympathy offered, a plea for help. My father just could not understand how my grandmother got through the next day, or the next, or the rest of her life after losing within minutes three entire lives of possibilities. My father couldn't understand how he would get through another day after losing his oldest daughter, one life still so full of things to do and to know. How could her life be over? How could his go on?

I tried to find my own understanding of how my grandmother managed to get through the day after her children were murdered, and the day after and the day after. How is it that she did not go mad? Knowing my father's story, knowing how his sister and brothers died, and how his mother, hiding in a room, had to listen to them die, unable to save them, I tried to understand the survival of those left alive. How is it that anyone can keep walking upright? How am I able to continue living, now that my sister is dead? The whole world should tremble and shake at every death, but if it did, we would never be still. The world would literally rock with death and sorrow. How is it that we hold on to the shell of the earth and of our lives, and go on?

After Anne-Marie died, sorrow became part of my life. I came slowly to realize that it was not going to go away. Sorrow is a violent smashing of reason, in that reason has no power over it. Everyone offering their palliatives—“She wouldn't want you to be sad” or “She lived a good life”—gave me sound reasons to stop my grieving, and yet I could not. Because how can anyone not rant and rave when the horror of death slams down?

But now, in reading my books of escape, I had found another way to respond. It was not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it. Through memory. While memory cannot take sorrow away or bring back the dead, remembering ensures that we always have the past with us, the bad moments but also the very, very good moments of laughter shared and meals eaten together and books discussed.

Remembering people who have died also gives dignity to the dead and respect to the lives they led. In
The Emigrants
, W. G. Sebald traces the lives of four men forced to emigrate from Germany because of economics or war. Sebald uses artifacts such as photographs, journals, letters, and notes of his visits with families and friends to present richly detailed and personal histories of alienation and struggle. Each man and each story is very different, but they share the same loss of identity: three of the men lost their German identity through the crimes of World War II, and one man lost his identity through sublimating his will to that of his employer. All the emigrants struggled to forge a new identity in their new land, but the displacement of self was just too much. As vividly as we see these men, thanks to Sebald's storytelling, they could not see themselves at all; they saw only ghosts, or shells, with nothing—or not enough—inside. Two finally chose suicide, another chose to annihilate himself through electroshock therapy, and a fourth is saved only by the painting he does in his studio in an abandoned warehouse, the dust of which eventually kills him with its toxicity.

The Emigrants
is not a happy book, but it is a book absolutely resounding with life. If I put my finger on any page of the book, I felt the pulsing heartbeat of the lives Sebald recorded. It is the heartbeat he gave back to them, making them real for me. “Remembrance” for me means remembering someone with love or with respect. Remembrance is acknowledging that a life was lived. Sebald's book is a remembrance of four lives.

I was in my forties, reading in my purple chair. My father was in his eighties, and my sister was in the ocean, her ashes scattered there by all of us in swimsuits under a blue sky. And only now am I grasping the importance of looking backward. Of remembrance. My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction
is
truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

The only balm to sorrow is memory; the only salve for the pain of losing someone to death is acknowledging the life that existed before. Remembering someone won't literally bring them back, and for one who died too young, memories are not enough to make up for all the possibilities of life that they lost out on. But remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built. I think my father found an answer to how his mother continued on, and he found a way to go on himself. He wrote a history for me to read. Stories helped him, and stories were helping me, both the stories of my father and the stories in all the books I was reading.

The truth of living is proved not by the inevitability of death but by the wonder that we lived at all. Remembering lives from the past ratifies that truth, more and more so the older we get. When I was growing up, my father told me once, “Do not look for happiness; life itself is happiness.” It took me years to understand what he meant. The value of a life lived; the sheer value of living. As I struggled with the sadness of my sister's death, I came to see that I was facing the wrong way and looking at the end of my sister's life and not at the duration of it. I was not giving remembrance its due. It was time to turn myself around, to look backward. By looking backward, I would be able to move forward. Time to begin a return journey to my own life, carried in part by the remembered life of my sister.

Chapter 7
Looking for the Star

“May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?”

“Yes.”

“That we may forgive it.”

CHARLES DICKENS,

The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

THE HOLIDAYS ARE AN EXCELLENT TIME FOR LOOKING BACKWARD
. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on our golden couch (very modish in the 1960s) with my sisters beside me, while our father read to us from
The Christmas Story
.
The Christmas Story
was a book put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966, the text coming from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and the illustrations provided by paintings from the Met's own collections.

My father read in a singsong voice that laid heavy then soft emphasis on the words. Looking back, I would describe his delivery as reminiscent of southern preachers I'd seen on television, but with a strong Belarusian accent.

The story my father read to us was strange and intoxicating. I was moved by its images and ideas: swaddling clothes; shepherds abiding in the field; good tidings of great joy, peace, good will toward men; and “Lo, the star, which they saw in the East.” Long before I had children of my own and experienced the rush of absolute love and faith brought by a newborn, I understood how a helpless baby lying in straw could inspire selfless and unbounded love. I could picture the poor shepherds out there alone in the dark on a cold night. Suddenly they hear music, and they look up at the starlit sky. Angels fly above them, and a huge star beckons. They are filled with certainty: life can be good, and joyful, and peaceful. Love and hope are shared and by being shared, are spread. Peace on Earth brought by a child and signaled by a star.

It all made perfect sense to me as a child of the 1960s. I would listen to the story and then go outside and look for a huge star in the night sky. I was looking for a sign that war would be over, the Vietnam War and the Cold War and all the other wars that as a child I suspected were being fought all over, far from my own backyard but in the yards of children somewhere. Looking for the star in the sky became my own private Christmas ritual, my own search for peace.

My mother found peace in the crèche scene she created every year. Along with my father's reading and the play we girls put on every Christmas Eve, her five-story crèche was one of my favorite holiday traditions. She created her elaborate world of small figures in the built-in bookshelves that lined our fireplace in Evanston. Books would be turned on their sides to make valleys and stacked up high to make hills. My mother would lay white cloths over the books, creating rolling landscapes in snow. Boughs cut from the Christmas tree were placed in the background. The space was now ready to be populated, and my mother would bring out her
santons
.

Small clay statuettes painted in bright colors,
santons
(originally made in Provence) represented all characters from traditional village life. Everyone was there, from the local priest wiping his forehead with a handkerchief to a woman with a basket of fruit on her head, from a young mother on her way to go shopping with a hamper on her arm to a farmer boy with a pig under one arm. There were churches set up high in the hills made from books, and farms placed in the hollows, with haystacks and farm animals. There was even a monastery, built by me during seventh-grade woodshop and peopled by reformed women of the night, still dressed in flamboyant clothes but with reverence on their painted faces.

My mother created a stream running down one hillside out of silver Christmas tree icicles, and placed a fisherman on its banks. She made a pond out of a small mirror, with geese gathered at its edge. One year Anne-Marie brought home a painted metal figure of Sonja Henie to skate across the mirror pond.

Circles of animals surrounded the nativity scene. A fox, a bear, a family of mice, a lion, all sorts of cats, a porcupine: these animals and others approached Joseph, Mary, and little baby Jesus, lying in his manger, across puffs of white linen. My grandmother gave my parents the nativity starter kit when they married. The animals and the surrounding one hundred-plus
santon
figurines milling happily around, above and below the happy family, had been bought over the years.

Not only was earthly life represented in my mother's crèche scene but heaven and hell as well. Heaven was set up on the highest shelf, in an arch just below the ceiling. God reigned there, visible as a squat wooden figure painted in gold and blue, placed among all the singing angels. A full angel band played in the background. Cat angels, fat angels, and short and tall angels filled in the sides of the shelf. My mother put a figure representing Homer in one corner of heaven, and in the other corner, a glass man at a glass piano represented Mozart.

Hell took up the lowest bookshelf and spread along the floorboards. My mother started building hell only when we got a little older, but once started, hell took off. It soon became overpopulated with little red figures, including a red-sequined Mickey Mouse and tiny red devils made by Anne-Marie out of clay, their arms lifted in friendly waves and with the sweetest of smiles pricked into their chubby faces. Friends brought Day of the Dead figures from Mexico. A toy snake made its way into hell and never came out again.

I have never missed a Christmas with my parents, but Anne-Marie stayed away a few times, including the Christmas before she died. She and Marvin, along with two friends, went to India that year for three weeks of travel. The worst tsunami in history rolled through the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004. I knew Anne-Marie hadn't planned on going down to the beaches in southern India, but when for two days we hadn't heard from her, I began to fear the worst. What if they had changed their plans? What if they had gone to the beach and gotten caught up in one of the huge waves? When Anne-Marie finally called my parents, I felt relief, and stupidity for having worried. Twenty-one days later, back in New York, Anne-Marie felt a lump on her abdomen. We were hit with a tidal wave, but not the one I had worried about.

The Christmas after Anne-Marie died, my mother didn't want to put up her crèche scene. Natasha and I begged her to do it.

“Do it for the boys,” we said. “Do it for us.” Finally, she agreed to display her figures in their winter wonderland. The layout had changed since my parents' move to New York City, but it was as magnificent as ever. The
santons
spread in villages across the fireplace mantel, with the nativity scene to the left. New additions included a fox bringing an offering to the baby in his teeth, and a four-sided fountain for one of the village squares. Heaven reveled on a high chest to the side, and hell hunkered down in the open cavity of the nonworking fireplace. I brought my mother a figure of an angel with flowing hair resting on her stomach and reading a book. My mother placed her in heaven, beside Homer.

Jack and I had our own holiday Christmas traditions, going back to the first days of our relationship. We first kissed on New Year's Eve, and the following year, we bought our first Christmas tree together. The tree was small and skinny enough to carry home the thirty-plus blocks from Little Italy to West Twenty-first Street. We put twisty green wire with red berries on the ends onto the branches—our first ornaments—and when Jack's daughter, Meredith, and I baked Christmas cookies that turned out like lead, we painted them, drilled holes through the top, and hung them up too. Over the years the size of our trees went from smaller to bigger to smaller again, depending on the size of our living space.

The year Meredith moved into our two-bedroom apartment on West Eighty-first Street and began living with us full-time, we bought a very small tree. Jack and I had brought our bed into the living room to give his fourteen-year-old daughter her own bedroom, leaving three boys to share the other bedroom. There was no space for anything but a tabletop tree that year. Two years later, when we left that apartment for a town house with leaking walls, a partial roof, and no working kitchen, we bought a huge tree to reach the top of the parlor-floor ceiling.

Since we moved to the suburbs, our tree has been getting bigger and bigger. We went every year to a farm on the other side of town, with its acres and acres of white spruce, blue spruce, and Douglas fir. The fields of trees roll right alongside I-95, and this year we once again picked our tree against the roar of trucks. Maybe it was the trucks, maybe it was the cacophony of six different voices with six different opinions as to the right tree for us, maybe it was our crazy thirst for that great pine smell, but we'd long lost our ability to gauge what a tree in a field would look like when we brought it home to stand alone in our front hall.

“Are you sure?” the tree-farm volunteer asked us when we pointed out our chosen tree.

“Yes, definitely,” I said. Jack drove the car around while the volunteer hacked through the tree's ten-inch trunk. When it was finally on top of our car, sap dripping down the back, I saw what the young guy had been talking about. The branches of the tree drooped down over both sides, blocking the windows and the back doors.

I got in the car and checked the view. “I can see clear out the front. Let's go, boys!” The boys climbed in over the front seat, and off we went. Getting the tree off the car when we got home wasn't easy. We pushed and pulled it down to the ground, and then dragged the tree over to the front door.

“Lift it,” Jack bellowed. “Don't drag it. Lift! Lift!”

Four of us shoved the tree up the front steps while Jack and Michael pulled from ahead. Accompanied not by carols but by swear words we'd vowed never to use around the boys but used every single Christmas at tree-getting time, we got the tree into the hallway. I placed the crowning decoration of a blond angel on the top branch (where did we get that hideous thing?), and we positioned ourselves to haul the tree upright. More pushing and pulling and more swearing, and we got it into the two-ton iron stand. The tree tottered, scraping the surrounding walls and ceiling and leaving long marks in green and brown.

“Is it scratching anywhere?” Jack asked from his position down by the stand.

“No, no,” I answered. “Everything's good up here.” The tree steadied and stood. Jack tightened the bolts along the trunk and moved away.

We had outdone ourselves, again. This year's tree was so tall that its top poked into the chandelier hanging from the second-floor ceiling. A light from the chandelier went right up the angel's skirts, illuminating her from a whole new angle. Branches of the tree spread out across the staircase and filled the front hallway, making passage up or across difficult. It was as if the tree had come first and we had arrived second, assembling ourselves, our house, and our lives around this overtall, overpowering tree. I had images of a squirrel poking its head out, just like in the movie
Christmas Vacation
. Where am I? the furry little creature wonders, just before he leaps onto my head.

I tracked strands of colored lights through the tree's branches, then let my kids loose with the ornaments. By nightfall our tree—our lodestar, our reason for the season—was back in full-reign mode. It was no longer too big. It was now just right. The cats took their places under the low branches, while we all moved to sit in the living room. We could get only a partial view; the tree was so big there was no place in the house to see it fully. All views were partial, shot through with sparkling color, blazing lights, and a background of deep green.

Over the next few days I brought out the old record albums,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
,
A Bing Crosby Christmas
, and excerpts from Handel's
Messiah.
I hauled down from the attic our crate of Christmas books and pawed through them, each book sparking a memory of past Christmases. We had plenty of children's books, and my favorites were well-worn, marked with sticky fingerprints and torn corners:
Peter Spier's Christmas
, drawings of one family's yearly rituals;
Christmas Without a Tree
by Elizabeth B. Rodger, about a generous little pig; and
The Christmas Crocodile
by Bonny Becker, illustrated by David Small, and used by me as a blueprint for what I wanted my house to look like during the holidays (
before
the crocodile ate everything). We also had classics like Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
and Lois Lenski's
Christmas Stories
—I still have the original copy that I'd received when I was ten. And I had our family's copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's
Christmas Story
, with its lovely words and beautiful paintings.

Most years I reread all of the books dragged down from the attic, from the simplest children's book to the
Ghost Stories of Christmas
collection. Not this year. I wouldn't have time this year, not with my book-a-day schedule. I was worried that I wouldn't have time for many of our Christmas rituals, what with my reading. But I made plans to do the things we really liked to do, and I figured the rest would get worked out as we went along.

I chose to read some new Christmas books—the terribly boring
Abbot's Ghost
by Louisa May Alcott; Jimmy Carter's endearingly boring
Christmas in Plains
; and
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
by Charles Dickens. The man in Dickens's story is haunted by memories of past wrongs done to him, and by past sufferings: “I see them in the fire, but now. They come back to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years.”

A ghost who appears to be the doppelgänger of the haunted man offers him a deal. The double offers to take away all bad memories, leaving a blank space. He promises a void where once there were shadows of the past. “Memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!” And so the haunted man makes the bargain. Out go all memories, and with them, all the man's capacity for tenderness, empathy, understanding, and caring. Our haunted man realizes too late that by giving up memories, he has become a hollow and miserable man, and a spreader of misery to all whom he touches. Because it is Christmas and because he is Dickens's creation, the haunted man gets a chance to renege on the bargain with the ghost, get back his memories, and spread holiday cheer.