A mourning ritual: three stages & an infinity sign

An excerpt from Yudit Kiss's, The Summer My Father Died, the book I am currently translating. This passage is from near the end of the book where the father has died and the daughter, Anna, is finding it hard to get over the grief.

Back in Switzerland where she lives and works she visits the family doctor who has suffered much worse family tragedies than her own. It's just a check-up but he can see something is wrong. She tells him about the death.

I quickly recounted the circumstances. He looked at me thoughtfully then suggested we arrange a brief ritual through which I could take leave of my father. I was a little taken aback by that but nodded automatically as I did to everything he suggested. Dr Vesely told me what should be done. The ritual would consist of three parts. In the first I would say out loud everything I loved about my father and our relationship. In the second I’d say what I didn’t like. In the third I would go through all that I had inherited from him, everything that, because, or in spite of him, had become part of my life. After this was done I should imagine an infinity sign, my father in one loop of it, myself in the other. Then I was to cut the link between them.

She returns some two weeks later and after some initial embarrassment she goes through with it.

But once I got through the agony of those first few minutes I was surprised how naturally one thing followed another. After a little while I felt as if my father were crouching in the dim yellow light, in the left hand corner of the surgery. He was there without his usual defences, more real than I had ever seen him. After the initial heart-in-the-mouth feeling I spoke to him without fear or discretion in a way I had never done before. In the torrent of liberated words and feelings there was a moment when I heard the shuffling of paper, and a gentle noise like a pen quickly passing over a smooth page. I think I must have realised that poor Dr Vesely might have had quite enough of this and was making his general medical notes. Perhaps it was a prescription he was writing, or an instruction that I should be removed immediately to the nearest locked cell. But then my thoughts returned to my father who was still squatting in the left hand corner of the room. We were at the third stage of the ritual now, where I was to say what mark my father had left on my life. Once I finished and listened in exhaustion Dr Vesely spoke again.

‘Now imagine the infinity sign with you in one loop and he in the other! Then cut the link between the loops.’

I saw the infinity sign with my father in one loop and a shape in the other that might have been me. I waited a while trying to understand what kind of arena we were occupying. When I looked over to him my father was still there, unmoving, his whole being clinging on to life. I waited a while then started speaking again. You can go now, I said. No one will threaten you there. There’ll be neither shame nor pain. You don’t need to fear anything any more. I spoke quietly, patiently, like someone persuading a child to put on his raincoat so he’d not be soaked to the skin. After a while I felt my father was no longer in the room. He hadn’t left, he had simply been slowly absorbed into the available space: he’d turned to water. I’ve no idea why specifically water, perhaps so that he might remain among us a little while longer because in our worldly lives we had always been sea monsters, always settling by the sea, always dreaming of the sea in summer. For a fortnight or so I continued to feel his presence in the lake then he vanished for good.

When, tearful and covered in perspiration I rose, dripping from the couch and tried to pull my body together, I saw Dr Vesely, perfectly politely sitting behind his desk. We looked at each other in silence for a while.

‘He didn’t want to go,’ I said at last.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘I had to persuade him.’

‘And then?’

‘Then he slowly dissolved in water’

‘What water?’

‘I don’t know. All kinds of water.’

I stood up, my muscles tense. There was no weight hanging over me now.

‘He has left this message for you,’ said Dr Vesely and gave me a scrawled prescription. My hands were shaking so much I couldn’t have read it even if his writing were more legible than usual.

Fascinating translating that because, in effect, by way of the imagination, the translator goes through a version of the psychological process of the character in the book. The process is very simple but the infinity sign is a fine touch. I don't suppose it was entirely Dr Vesely's invention.

Two 1965 pop videos where the women don't move

Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs: Wooly Bully (1965)



The Zombies: She's Not There (1965)

I remember both of these (just) but had forgotten the still women. In Wooly Bully they stand as if they were shop dummies while the woman in She's Not There lies on a chaise longue and looks confidently enigmatic. But she doesn't move either. Sam the Sham was an oddly memorable novelty song. The Zombies were genuinely original and haunting.

But why are the women still? I'm sure a feminist analysis would offer plenty of explanations. They are sexual objects. The have no freedom of action. They have no subjectivity. They activate the idea of feminine mystique at a safe distance. They are cardboard-cutout Muses. They are trophy girlfriends. They are wallpaper, decoration, status symbols. They are the lay figures of pop-surrealism, entirely passive subjects of the potentially sadistic male gaze.

And all this would be true, or might be true, some of it or all of it, and yet it isn't enough. Or if this more or less describes the truth then the truth is deeper and stranger and not quite at safe distance.

Apparent stillness is inanimation. The last stage of inanimation is death. In how many corny ghosts films have we seen the eyes of apparently inanimate portraits begin to move? (I think of The Cat and the Canary, for instance, a comedy based on such tropes). How often, for spooky effect, have statues that we have taken for inanimate stir and threaten. This may be taking things too far but there is something a little unheimlich about those beautiful unmoving female figures who are not altogether powerless, especially the one in The Zombies video, since, surely, she must be the woman who, according to the title, is - unsettlingly - 'not there.'

Hungary, The New Theatre, Letter in The Guardian / Roma film

The scene above is from the siege, last year, of the Roma community of Gyöngyöspata, a village in Hungary, and here a film, edited, with English subtitles, published today by The Guardian to accompany it.

The letter below is the complete text of the one published yesterday, also in The Guardian. It is an impressive collection of theatre people. I'm the bottom signatory.


Open, liberal theatre under fire in Hungary

We are alarmed by the imposition of a far-right director on one of Budapest's leading theatres, and call on our foreign secretary and the international community to put pressure on the Hungarian government to reverse the decision before 1 February, the day the theatre is scheduled to change hands. Following the election of the rightwing Fidesz party, the mayor of Budapest sacked the director of Új Színház (the New Theatre), and appointed actor György Dörner in his place. Dörner supports the anti-Roma, anti-gay and antisemitic party Jobbik. Jobbik has been forced to disband its militia, the Hungarian Guard, but its presidential candidate recently stated that Jews were "lice-infested dirty murderers". The party has 47 members of the Hungarian parliament.

Currently, the New Theatre presents both Hungarian plays and the international canon, from Schiller to Shakespeare. Dörner plans to reverse what he describes as a "degenerate, sick, liberal hegemony" in Hungary by stopping the production of "foreign garbage" and concentrating on Hungarian plays. These include the work of his friend and adviser István Csurka, an open antisemite, advocate of the Jewish conspiracy theory, and president of the Hungarian Justice and Life party. Several Hungarian writers have withdrawn their plays from the theatre in protest.

The change imposed on the New Theatre may not be the last. Jobbik and other extreme-right groups are campaigning and demonstrating against the Hungarian National Theatre, calling its work "obscene, pornographic, gay, anti-national and anti-Hungarian". The campaign against a liberal Hungarian theatre, open to the world, is part of a move in Hungary towards intolerance and against democracy. The historical parallels are obvious and chilling. We support Hungarian theatre-makers in opposing this appointment, and urge our government to demand that the Hungarian government overturn this decision.

Artistic directors:
Michael Attenborough
Michael Boyd
Dominic Cooke
Daniel Evans
Nicholas Hytner
David Lan
Nicolas Kent
Josie Rourke
Erica Whyman

Actors:
Rosalind Ayres
Eve Best
Simon Callow
Bertie Carvel
James Frain
Romola Garai
Gawn Grainger
Henry Goodman
Martin Jarvis
Toby Jones
Beverley Klein
Roger Lloyd Pack
James Purefoy
Antony Sher
Imelda Staunton
Dan Stevens
Janet Suzman
Harriet Walter
Zoë Wanamaker
Samuel West
Timothy West

Directors:
Neil Bartlett
Gregory Doran
Richard Eyre
Kevin Macdonald
Trevor Nunn
Indhu Rubasingham
Tim Supple

Playwrights:
Richard Bean
Howard Brenton
Moira Buffini
Caryl Churchill
April de Angelis
David Edgar
Michael Frayn
Lee Hall
David Hare
Terry Johnson
Mark Ravenhill
Laura Wade
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Arnold Wesker

and…
Bernie Corbett General secretary of the Writers' Guild
Christine Payne General secretary of Equity
Malcolm Sinclair President of Equity
Joan Bakewell
Don Black
Geraldine D'Amico Jewish Book Week
Jessica Duchen
Denise Epstein Daughter of Irène Némirovsky
Ruth Fainlight
Henrietta Foster
Michael Grade
Amanda Hopkinson PEN
Dennis Marks
Kate Pakenham
Sharif István Horthy
András Schiff
George Szirtes

Holocaust Day 3

Your material is your sense of the world as it impinges on your memory and imagination. I can never completely separate memory and imagination and doubt they can be separated, except in the most naked yet vital way through research and record. But since research inevitably includes memory we are aware that, on each successive level, the imagination adapts and rewrites it, until it becomes metaphor, since it is metaphor we are constantly seeking if for no other reason that it offers meaning, connection and end.

There may be certain proprieties involved in the use of material. I have never written about conditions inside concentration camps. I don't feel I have at the right of appropriation. It could be argued that we do have such rights, and exercise them at each moment of our lives, but if I don't feel them I can't write out of them. Maybe my obligation to my parents prevents me. Maybe it is the sense of obligation to my mother that prevents me joining the rich seam of Jewish society that she rejected while being, in historical terms, part of it. I am certainly part of it. If this were 1944 it would be no use if my mother really were Lutheran, I'd be off on those cattle-wagons like the rest. Part yet not part.

In response to my poet friend who told me that the working class had suffered more than the Jews, I might have answered, 'It may be so, but no one has tried to wipe out the working class, to eradicate them entirely.' I didn't answer him then, being too taken aback, wondering if I had been guilty of something, making a false claim, 'playing the Holocaust card', turning to advantage a misfortune than was somehow, really, a kind of paradoxical fortune. And, most importantly, his idea that maybe that misfortune was nothing much after all. You're talking about my mum and her entire family there, I might have said. And didn't.

And maybe it isn't the great 'misfortune': no greater misfortune than that suffered by gypsies, gays, Armenians, and those innumerable tribes of people throughout the history of the world. The others were also mentioned and referred to at yesterday's event. It wasn't a Jewish love-in, the elevation, fetishisation and celebration of a victimhood with which Jews might blackmail the world into doing them special underhand favours. The fact was there were many present there who had lost people, were there because of lost people, or knew directly of lost people. No-one said - because this wasn't the occasion, because it never really is the occasion - that the Holocaust was not a single event in the lives of Jews, simply the biggest in a long series. Everyone there will have felt that deep in the bones, but no-one spoke of it. They don't. It's just a sense of the world.

Not even particularly a Jewish sense, by which I mean the sense born of an instinctive knowledge that one is fated to live in a constantly vulnerable minority that has survived on its wits. It may be just that Jews are likely to feel it at times like this. I mean the Elizabeth Bishop sense of the world as an icy sea in which knowledge is historical, flowing and flown. That sea freezes not only Jews. No-one survives in that sea. Jews are nothing special there.

In fact they're nothing special in the universe, the universe being the way it is. They are just like everyone else, only perhaps, at times, a little more so. The chief lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that it isn't a possession one can dispose of for credit, but a taste and an apprehension of the icy sea that washes at our shores every day of the year. This day we remember it, on other days we get on with the business of living.

Holocaust Day 2

I have often enough written that I was not brought up as a Jew. I mean in any way at all. I was led by my mother to believe that she was a Lutheran, and that therefore we, as her children, would be, officially, of Lutheran background. Not that we ever set foot in a Lutheran church. Both my parents were, at the time of my childhood, atheists. They did not worship any God, neither the Jewish one nor the Lutheran one. We never set foot in a Synagogue either and we kept no Jewish holidays. I knew nothing about them. I think my father would have kept them but my mother insisted on complete dissociation. It was only after her death that our suspicion that she was in fact Jewish was confirmed.

That left us - and now I must talk about myself alone - in a curious position. At some stage or other the question had to arise in the poetry because, however impersonal our subject, our sense of the world is, at least partly, determined by who and what we are. It took me three books to get to the point at which I felt it important to return to Hungary (and it was important, it utterly changed my life), and it was the fifth before the sense of the Holocaust and Jewishness emerged as something pressing. Even so, it was not pressing in my own immediate experience, but as a factor in the sense of sheer being. Budapest, that most beautiful of cities, presented itself physically as scarred memorial to a past of which I was a small part. I felt the bullet- and shell-pitted surface of the buildings at my fingertips: they felt like marks under my own skin, like marks of a realisation that said: 'This is what life is like, not just your life, but life itself'. The poetry then had to go forward, first as 1956, the year of the revolution, but later as 1944, the year of the transportations and vanishings.

When I think of the sense of history in a poet I think of the awareness , under the skin, of death as a presence, death as total indifference in a world of amusement and beauty. That is why Elizabeth Bishop's 'At the Fishhouses' means so much to me. The hand dipping in the icy sea where the seal appears so comically is one of those perfect emblems. The sea to Bishop was as the walls of Budapest were to me. One doesn't have to have direct experience of such things in order to sense them and I value most those who can sense them: not just the tragedy, but the humour and the indifference and the beauty.

Holocaust Day 1

Yesterday I took a train to London to read with Dannie Abse, Wanda Barford, Alan Brownjohn, and Lynne Hjelmsgaard for a Holocaust Memorial event. It's about three hours door to door either way so I had to leave during the interval to arrive home a little past midnight.

The reading was packed and good humoured though the underlying sense of tragedy was palpable. Wanda talked about personal experience, or rather that of her child cousins, who were murdered in Auschwitz. Dannie read from his own work as well as his powerful translation of Celan's Todesfuge, his whole voice changing as he read it. Alan read from his novel in which there is an encounter with a German Jewish optometrist and warned about developments in our own time, and Lynne, whom I didn't know, read a Karen Gershon and a Primo Levi as well as three short poems of her own. I was last and read four poems, the first parts of both Metro and of The Penig Film, adding Grandfather in Green and Children of The Ghetto. I was followed by a young violinist who played the first part of a Bach Partita, then brief coffee and away. The programme continued and by the time it ended I was well on my way to Cambridge.

I rarely read those poems in public though three of them deal with direct family experience of the Holocaust. Very briefly, my mother survived two concentration camps, Ravensbruck and Penig, despite her heart condition, and my father spent much of the war in labour brigades in the Ukraine where many died, and had he not escaped with two others on the route march back, he too would have died: the three of them were the only survivors of the brigade. On her realease my mother returned to her home in Transylvania to find her entire family wiped out and all their possessions vanished. My father's father vanished into Auschwitz. A few years ago I found some film records of the liberation of Penig on the web, which was the trigger for the writing of The Penig Film, which is primarily about the muse of history, Clio, as a film director.

I don't read these poems much in public, apart from on such occasions, because I am aware that some - an increasing number, of people, especially other poets (or so I guess) think of it as playing 'the Holocaust card' or 'the Jewish card', and, if not that, then at least a kind of privileged information, an 'advantage' in claiming attention. If something truly tragic occurred in your near proximity you should have the decency to shut up about it.

I am putting that far too strongly, possibly exaggerating. I may be describing an expectation rather than a fact, but I remember one poet describing how oddly funny it was that Jon Silkin would introduce himself by saying that he was a Jew. There was a suggestion that he was being a little overbearing, even something of a bore. I also recall another poet stressing to me, apropos of nothing, that the working class had suffered far more than the Jews. I hadn't mentioned Jews or Jewishness, but then I also recalled how he was ambivalent about Metro, which was my first venture into the area.

So the uncertainty worked on two levels: on that of taking the Holocaust as a subject at all and claiming part of it, and on that of the notion of personal advantage through the misfortunes of others close to you.

Hungary, an appeal

The signatories - György Dalos, Miklós Haraszti, György Konrád and László Rajk - of the letter, The decline of democracy – the rise of dictatorship: An appeal quoted from below, are some the leading figures of the underground before 1989 - in other words the people who took the risks of imprisonment and exclusion.


Excerpts:

The present government has snatched the democratic political tools from the hands of those who could use these tools to ameliorate their predicament. While chanting empty patriotic slogans, the government behaves in a most unpatriotic way by reducing its citizens to inactivity and impotence...

...Viktor Orbán's government is intent on destroying the democratic rule of law, removing checks and balances, and pursuing a systematic policy of closing all autonomous institutions, including those of civil society, with the potential to criticise its omnipotence...

...With the removal of the checks and balances, the whole Hungarian state has become subservient to the government, or rather to the prime minister...While local councils have lost the better part of their clout, semi-autonomous institutions such as the Court of Auditors, the Hungarian Press Agency, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Cultural Fund might well be regarded today as semi-governmental agencies. Arbitration committees, including the now defunct National Conciliation Council, have been disbanded...

...Fidesz now has the exclusive right to pass any bill into law and make decisions about any issue concerning parliamentary protocol, thus rendering the existence of opposition parties a mere formality. Bills are rushed through legislation with no debate worthy of mention...

...* While retirement age has been raised across the board, a significant proportion of leading judges has been forced into retirement. The judiciary has thus become existentially dependent.
* The Chief Prosecutor, who has the exclusive right to decide which case may be forwarded to the Court of Justice and which court should hear it, is a politician of the ruling party.
* In the future, suspects and the accused may be deprived of the opportunity to consult their solicitors.

This new system marks the end of independent jurisdiction in Hungary...

The appeal goes on to deal with executive power, jurisdiction, the media, and election law. I know this looks like dry stuff and nothing to do with you but it's vital and will impinge on Europe as a whole. I have said it before, but it seems very like a return to the 1930s.