What Belongs to You (10 page)

blokove
, I hadn’t seen any sign of it as I wandered, and it was as though something in me softened as I walked beside it. I felt grief more than anger now, though I wasn’t sure for what exactly, whether for myself or for K., or for the men I had known since him, none of whom I’d loved as fully, few of whom I’d loved at all; and finding it was for all of these things I turned my thoughts to the page that was coming apart as I gripped and regripped it. I thought of my father, old and sick, I imagined him bedridden and frail; I wanted to see if I felt grief for him, too, if my grief extended so far. Were they with him now, I wondered, had my sisters received a similar message, had they softened and gone to him, had G. softened and gone to him? I remembered how angry she had been that night in Mladost, when she told us the stories about my father that were also stories about herself, also stories about me. We had listened to her for a long time, my other sister and I; the last candles had finally gone out, though we could still see ourselves in the light from the street. G. was my father’s youngest child, his last child, who (perhaps he thought) finally loved him as he deserved to be loved, and he had told her stories about his childhood that I had never heard. His mother, she began, and then interrupted herself, as she would do often, saying Do you already know this? But my father’s past had always been opaque to me, he spoke of it so seldom and it seemed so complex, a tangle of half brothers and cousins, too many to track. And he didn’t speak to most of them; Bad blood, he would say whenever their names came up, cutting off any conversation. Do you know how young she was, my sister said, when our father was born she was still just a kid, only fourteen, can you imagine? When our father started school they rode the bus together, she for her final year and he for his first. There were other children too, three sons, and a daughter who died, none of them by the same father. She was a scandal, my sister said, can you imagine what it must have been like for her in that place? I couldn’t reconcile what G. said with the small woman I had known, always at a remove, who seemed so proper and content when we visited her once a year or so in the house she shared with a man I thought of as my grandfather, though I guess I knew he wasn’t, or not by blood, since my father only ever called him by his first name. My sister was right, she must have been a scandal in that town, and to her parents something worse than a scandal. They were the ones who took care of my father, especially his grandmother, who alone among his relations was spared his future scorn. He always called her Ma, the single syllable, and even now I have no other name for the woman I remember seeing only once, slight to the point of disappearance, with her beautiful white hair spread about her on the sheets in whatever hospital or facility she had been taken to to die in. I don’t remember what time of year it was, or how far we had traveled, or why I was alone with my father, who lifted me up to set me gingerly on the bed next to that woman who was impossibly old, older than anyone I had ever seen, and whose image, though so much else is lost, remains vivid to me as day. My father sat on the other side and fed her like a child, spooning food from a dish; he murmured words of encouragement or recrimination when she rejected the food, sealing her lips against it or spitting it back into the bowl. I hadn’t thought of her for years, the woman whose image returned to me so clearly, though my father spoke of her sometimes after she died, as he never spoke of his grandfather, who had died before I was born. Or never spoke of him to me, I should say, since my sister did know about him, and that night she told us what she knew. He was a hard man, my sister said, he tried to rein in his daughter, to discipline her and (perhaps he thought) to save her, and his violence, provoked and unprovoked, governed my father’s life. But then they were a constant provocation, his daughter and her multiplying sons, her string of men and the children they left; it must have made them the talk of the county, that bilious joyful talk of small places with little news. He terrorized them, my sister said, his daughter and her children, he threatened them, he beat them, he promised worse than beatings. Our father’s father was older than our grandmother, in his twenties when they met, and she had fallen in love with him; if she took up with other men as a way of defying her father, the first man wasn’t just that, G. said, she loved him, and the man loved her too. She was too young to be going with men, she knew her father would be angry, but she was in love, she slept with him, and then she was pregnant with my father. He killed him, my sister said then, before our father was born he killed him, and though to that point we had been silent my other sister and I both started at this, expressing our shock and disbelief. The story G. told us then was disjointed, handed down incomplete: it was winter when his grandfather understood what had happened, my sister said, there was a storm and he went out into the storm to find the man who had ruined his daughter, as he must have thought of it; and he killed the man—But how, I asked, interrupting her, and my sister couldn’t say, she only knew that he was found the next day frozen in his car. But that’s crazy, I blurted out, even in that place how could such things happen, or happen without consequences? And anyway our father loved to tell stories, I went on, he was always claiming outlandish things were true; surely this was one of his Southern Gothics, I said. But my sister insisted, something in how he told it convinced her it was true, or that he believed it was true. And after all, I thought, his belief was what mattered, and I wondered when he had been given this account of his father, of the absence of his father, whether he was still a child, and I wondered too how the absence had weighed on him, how he had explained it to himself until then. I wanted to know who had told him and why, whether his mother to make him angry or his grandfather to make him afraid. Besides, my sister said, it explains what happened to her, to my father’s mother, she meant, who seemed to seek out not just other men but the least acceptable men, as if she gave herself to them not just to defy her father but to injure him, and increasingly to injure herself. Often they were violent men, my sister said, repeating what she had been told; from as early as he could remember my father was scared of them, and he was frightened of his grandfather, too, who lashed out at him and his brothers without warning. And they fought with one another, as kids and as adults, these boys with different fathers; one of them died a soldier before I was born and we hardly knew the others, we saw them so seldom. Two or three times when I was very young my father took us to a reunion, and each time there was a fight, a quick flare of violence that left one or more of them in the dirt. When they were children they felt no loyalty to one another, my father and his brothers; they shifted their allegiances whenever it suited, teaming up against one and then another, or making friends with one or another of the men who appeared as if from nowhere and never stayed for long. Most of all they courted their grandfather, whom they hated but needed, too, especially as their mother sought out more and more brutal men. It was like she wanted to be hurt by them, my sister said, and didn’t care what happened to her sons. One day, she went on, when our father was still a boy, maybe eight or nine, he heard his mother shouting and ran to find her standing with one of his brothers in a field. In front of them was the boy’s father, who was enraged past all restraint, my father realized; he wasn’t surprised when he struck their mother, first with his open hand and then with his fist. And not just the woman, he struck the child too, not once or twice but many times, with a ferocity that frightened my father, who ran for help to the garage where his grandfather was working, bent over the hood of their car. And the child who was my father yelled at him to come, that the man was hurting his mother and his brother, that he (my father) was frightened, and his grandfather grabbed one of the tools around him, a heavy wrench, my sister said, and set off to the field and approached the man and brought the wrench down on him, beating the man who had been beating his daughter, not furiously but with an eerie calm, repeatedly, as his daughter cried for him to stop and my father felt a different fear. So did he kill him too, my other sister asked, but G. couldn’t answer us; like all of her stories this one was patchworked and incomplete. But she did know that my father’s grandfather bore a mark from that day, that the palm of his hand was welted and scarred where he had gripped the wrench, which had been resting on the engine and was red-hot, she said. It didn’t even slow him down, she went on, can you imagine, for the rest of his life he was disfigured, the fingers on that hand were always a little bit curled, he couldn’t open them all the way. But when he grabbed it it didn’t even slow him down, he just took it in his hand like this—and here she raised her own hand, lifting it with her palm up and her fingers curled around an imaginary wrench, turning her wrist slightly as if it were dragged down by the weight of it. And though nothing in her story had been familiar to me I felt a sudden vertigo at the sight of it; I could see my father making that gesture, the very same, and I knew I must have heard the story before, that he must have told it to me when I was a child. It was my story too, I realized as my sister went on, and I wondered how much else I had forgotten about my father, how much I might still remember, how much was totally lost. As I sat by the water in Mladost, I held two images of my father in mind, weighing them against what I felt: in one he was a child, vulnerable and finally blameless as all children are blameless, and in the other he was old and in need and trying to repair what he had broken. I wanted to know what they could make me feel, these images, whether I could go to him as he had asked; but of all the images of that day these struck with the least force, my father as a child and my father dying, they struck with almost no force at all. I couldn’t hold on to them, they slipped away as I remembered instead another image of my father, from the time after K. put an end to our friendship, when my father, too, finally broke with me. It was the end of a long series of events in that large house where the atmosphere had become unbearable; my father and I hardly spoke to each other, maybe both of us afraid of what we might say. He was gone more often, he stayed later at work and took more trips away, on whatever pretext heading to Chicago or New York, leaving my stepmother with me and the older of my sisters, who was still just a toddler. I can see now how unhappy my stepmother was, how often my father abandoned her and how trapped she must have felt, and I can see that if she and I fought it was because for both of us the other was a safer target than my father. We attacked each other for the slightest reason, for no reason at all, raising our voices and slamming doors; and one night, after a particularly vicious argument, when I had crossed a line the nature of which I no longer remember, my stepmother ordered me out of the house. She locked the door leading from the basement stairs, ensuring that at some point I would have to leave, which I did quickly, without waiting her out, escaping as I always did through the garage. I was angry as I walked the two or so miles to my mother’s house, but I was satisfied, too; they punished me all the time but they had never kicked me out, and whatever I had done it didn’t warrant that. I thought my father would agree with me, I was sure he would tell my stepmother to let me back in. I walked quickly, eager to get to my mother’s house and call him; he was in New York, I had the number of the hotel where he always stayed. I visited my mother most weekends but I didn’t often show up unannounced, so she knew something must be wrong when she opened the door. She asked me what had happened but I didn’t answer. I need to call my father, I said, which was how we always referred to him in that house, my mother never called him by name. I dropped my bag by the door (I had brought my schoolbooks with me, a few overnight things) and went to the kitchen where the phone hung on the wall. My mother could see I was upset, she followed me and asked me again what was wrong, Tell me before you call him, she said, you need to calm down. But I didn’t want to calm down, I liked the indignation I felt and that I thought my father would share, I wanted to call him while it was still hot. I imagined him comforting me, telling me he would make things right, as he used to take it upon himself as a matter of course to do. But this confidence disappeared the instant he picked up, which he did too quickly, on the first ring. He was waiting for me to call, which meant that my stepmother had already spoken with him, and by the tone in his voice I knew he was convinced of her side of things. I couldn’t expect any sympathy, he would make me apologize to her, I would have to apologize again and again until she was satisfied; it would be humiliating, I thought, and she would love it. I prepared for it as I began to tell my father how outrageously she had acted, It’s where I live, I said to him, she can’t just kick me out. I went on for some time and he listened without saying a word, so that I might almost have thought the line had been cut except that I could sense his presence so clearly. His silence made me feel I was being led somewhere other than I intended, as if I were digging my own grave; and so I stopped short and waited for him to speak, leaning into his silence. I waited for what seemed like a long time, until finally I spoke again. Tell her to let me back in the house, I said to my father, and if I used the imperative I spoke with a tone of defeat. I knew I was waiting for admonishment, but I took it for granted that once I had apologized enough they would let me back in; it was my home, and in the world I came from children weren’t simply turned out. Tell her to let me back in, I said, and here my father did make a sound. I heard him shifting his weight in his chair, and then he exhaled, it wasn’t quite a sigh, it wasn’t angry or sad but emotionless, and he spoke for the first time since his greeting. If, he said, staying just a moment longer the sentence he would pronounce, if what you say about yourself is true, you’re
not welcome in my house. It was my turn to be silent now, at first because I didn’t understand what he meant, and then because I did. I had a sense of something beginning, of a great weight dislodged and moving in the single direction it could. What are you talking about, I said finally, and my father answered, he told me that they had found, my stepmother and he, a notebook in my room. I knew the notebook he meant, a journal I had started keeping not long before, in which I had written about K. and what I had felt in his room, what I had learned about myself there. I had been careful to hide the journal; if they had come across it it was because they had searched, though my father gave no account or explanation of this. They had found it and seen what I had written, he said simply, they had read it weeks ago. What they learned about me had brought the two of them together, I realized, they were a united front, and I imagined they had spent weeks plotting how best to use what they knew. I was sure it was my stepmother who had searched my room, my father would never have bothered, and as he spoke I realized how entirely I had played into her hand. Is it true, he asked when he had finished speaking, giving me a choice, or the semblance of a choice. He presented it to me as if it were something that might be spoken away and made right, but I couldn’t speak it away, I realized; to speak it away would have been to speak myself away, what else could it have meant, and so Yes, I said, laying claim to myself, it is true, yes. My father exhaled again, sharply this time, so that even before he spoke I flinched, and I could see my mother stiffen as she watched me, standing at the sink with a cigarette in her hand. My father spoke in a different tone now, almost with a different voice, the voice of his own childhood, I thought, thick with the dirt he usually worked so hard to conceal. So you like the little boys, that voice said, the voice almost of instinct, the voice of the look he had given me once and of what had once fouled the air. As young as I was, I knew what he said was absurd, I was myself a little boy, what could he be accusing me of, though now I think it was his only understanding of what I could be, the person I was was lost in it. But it didn’t matter that it was absurd, I was already crying, I was a mess of tears, and when my mother started to come toward me I motioned her away, turning my back to her. I was ashamed of my tears, I could hardly breathe, and it was all I could do to say to him But I’m your son, which was my only appeal and the last thing I would say. He made a dismissive sound, almost a laugh, and then he spoke again, with a snarling voice I had never heard before, he said The hell you are. He went on, he spoke without stopping, A faggot, he said, if I had known you would never have been born. You disgust me, he said, do you know that, you disgust me, how could you be my son? As I listened to him say these things it was as though even as I laid claim to myself I found there was nothing to claim, nothing or next to nothing, as though I were dissolving and my tears were the outward sign of that dissolution. He was still speaking, there were still things he wanted to say, but I hung the phone back on the wall, holding it there a moment as if to clutch at something, as my mother crossed the room and put her hand on my back. I laid my head against the wall, hiding my face from her. I was still crying, but more than shock or grief I felt anger, more than anger, I was enraged, and rage filled me up with something that would not dissolve. What would I be without the anger I felt then, I wondered as I stood looking over the water, the anger I still feel, it ebbs or surges but is always there; whatever it has kept me from, without it I would have lost myself altogether. I lifted my hand. After so much time it was an effort to release my grip on the wadded page that was barely more than pulp now, but I let it fall into the stream and watched the water carry it away. I wouldn’t answer, I wouldn’t see my father again, I wouldn’t mourn him or pour earth on him. I stood watching the water for some time, I’m not sure how long, until I was startled by a distant noise that made its way over the sound of the water. It was an unmusical clanging that it took me a moment to recognize as a bell, a large bell as if from a tower, though I didn’t know of any such towers in Mladost, which was built by the Communists and so built free of churches; even now the only places of worship are little clapboard affairs, American missionaries in rented halls. I didn’t know of anything in Mladost that could make this sound, grand and unlovely, a single bell, ringing twice in quick succession with each pull of the rope (I imagined), so that its lopsided toll rolled out over the water and the trees. I walked toward it, and soon I could feel the ground getting smoother, becoming a path that led upward, until finally the uneven stones became brick. It was a lovely path, immaculate as few things are here, and on the right there was a low stone wall that as the path mounted joined with another wall, plaster and brilliantly white. It was a compound of some sort, tucked here behind the