The Underworld

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings

And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

(Piano- D.H. Lawrence)

-Are you writing about me?

-Yes mama. Do you mind?

-I’m not sure. What do you know about me? What if you get me wrong? And anyway, what is there to write about?

-Well, I want to write about my memories of you, of both of us.

-But Ronnie you have a terrible memory. You’ll make mistakes. Give me some paper and a pen and I shall do it for you. My memory is excellent. It has always been good. 

-Mama, you are dead. You need now to allow me to do the remembering.

-Ronnie, I want to know more about what you are reading; you know what I mean, the story about the book in the library, the book about everything?

-You mean “The Encyclopedia of the Dead”?

-Never mind the name, what about the book?

-Ah, the special and unique book in the library, The Encyclopedia of the Dead. It's in the imaginary library.

-Don’t be ridiculous, it's not imaginary. Not at all. It’s true, it’s real. So, tell me about the book. Go on. What information does it contain? What does the author write?

-He writes that  “...it records everything. Everything”

-See. That’s what I want you to do. Tell everything, and from the beginning. You must not leave anything out and for goodness sake get it in order. That’s what I want, a narrative, a story that is chronological. And, moreover, tell what happened objectively. I want you to describe everything. Yes, don’t leave anything out. Remember to record absolutely everything.

-No, I won’t do that, and indeed I can’t do that. To recount everything would involve pretending that there was no silence, no gaps, and more important, it presumes that everything is of equal value. It’s not that my memory is poor, but I do not think that way. I realize this now; I think in images and they are what I shall present. Yes, images, some static and some more dynamic. 

-Do it your way then. Images of me, of us?

-Yes, and of others?

-Who else?

-Your mother and granny.

-Are you crazy? You did not know my mother and your grandmother was a bitch! I do not want her in this story. How could you do this to me? What are you thinking of?  I do not want her around. I am not going to share this narrative space with her.

-Mama you all have something in common. You are all mothers and you were all deeply affected by the Holocaust. And of course, there is more. There are other similarities that I shall explore.

-But Ronnie I got out of Austria. I knew what was going to happen. 

-Yes, you did. So did granny, Blanka, but not your parents.

-I’m tired now. Do what you want. A book of images then?  Really? Are the images in some sort of order? 

-No, not really. They are in the order in which they come to me, or me to them. In which case the book is better thought of as an archive. Ideally you could approach the images in any order. I’m not sure that any image has precedence over another and so the first image is just the first one I dreamed of. For the images are similar to dreams and this is rather like a dream book. 

-Where do the dreams come from? Where do you meet the dreams?

-Hades, the underworld. That is where the dead reside. That is where you are, and that is where your mother and Blanka dwell. I suppose that that is where the dreams come from.

-Ronnie, now I am frightened. Where are you going with all of this?  I am worried about what you might find. Do I have any control over the images that come to you?

-Mama, I think you do. Paradoxically that control itself gives rise to images. Images of control. I am afraid you cannot escape the proliferation of images or fantasies or dreams that are connected to you, and that involve Blanka and your mother. They interconnect in ways that I do not know about yet.

-Ronnie where on earth are you going with all of this? You have not answered my question.

-I really do not know. I imagine I won’t know until I am there, wherever there is. Actually, there is where the images arise, where they come from. You were silent about so much and this is an attempt to fill in the silence, though not with a story so much as with scenes or pictures. I want to answer questions that I never formulated before. Silence, family silence stopped something from happening and I own my share of responsibility in that process. I often blamed you for not providing me with more information about your past.

-What questions? What are you talking about?

-Where do I come from? Who am I? Is there a familial line of which I am a part? Where is it? If I find it, where do I fit in? Where do I belong?  

-Ronnie how do dreams help answer these questions?

-I am not sure yet. What I sense is that they constitute a sort of accounting, a memoir that is part true and part not true. It is like an archive that contains an imaginative exploration of a generational past that was not talked about for most of my life. It was not talked about because you cut yourself off from your past in a way that involved a massive tear in a generational fabric. 

-I cut myself off because I started a new life. 

-Yes, I understand that. There were consequences for me. It was as if there was no beyond, no historic anterior to your own existence. To go there then is to imagine what might be there and to do that necessarily involves creating characters who occupy a real, historic role but in all other respects are fabricated. But then so much of memory is a fabrication so that one might well discriminate between degrees of untruth. 

There are people in this work who are imagined and become actors on a stage that I have created. They are in a drama, a tragedy that itself is real enough and they allow me to fill in a void. This emptiness was a space that I needed to populate, and I do so, aware that whoever I place there has a certain ambiguity. They are part of me and part of not-me. They have a particular real historic relationship to you mama, and, at the same time, they are imaginative constructs. They exist on the inside and the outside, and as projections they are generated from my imagination and they are extruded into images where, hopefully, they become characters, actors who take on a life of their own.

Kaddish

Can one die with civility?     

Well, granny for sure didn't. She shocked everyone.

My mother died peacefully. Yes, that is a cliché, and I need to put it differently, but I am not sure how. Peaceful is a curious descriptor in the circumstances. She made no demands towards her end and I somehow think that she did not know that death was imminent. That seems to have meant that she did not say goodbye. Rather the ending was something that she appeared to drift into.

 Not long before she died, I heard my mother call out to her mother. But I might have imagined it. What surprised me is that she did not call out to me. And now I think that she may well have called out to her mama. Why? For reparation of course. Was that needed? Yes! Because she had been so silent about her mother for most of her life, and mine.

We are intertwined in this. That is inevitable. I have my silences too. I remember her last breath. I remember my father's last breath. 

As I write this my body tenses up and I can hear the silence. The silence of no breath. If she did indeed call out to her mother, what might she have imagined? What was the scene? Did she feel guilty? After all she, my mother, managed to escape. But she did not leave her guilt behind. She once said that when she arrived in England on the Kindertransport she felt so happy at being in a safe place and so sad at having to say goodbye to her mother, in particular. She was left with guilt.

No one was there to say Kaddish for her parents.

There is a photo of her holding me when I was a few months old. She looks very pretty and seems happy. Toward her end I wanted to hold her, but she snapped at me.

-What are you doing Ronnie? You woke me up!

Shadows

I wake up and I have a temperature. I don't know that, what I do know is that I have to get up and flee from the shadows. The shadows are so dangerous that if I don't escape them, I shall die. So I get out of bed and scream and scream and start talking but no one can understand what I am saying. It's so obvious to me but they, the others do not make sense of it. Why not? What is the matter with them?

I shout and then I burst into tears and remember moving towards a window and try to get out.

-Ronnie, Ronnie you are having a nightmare.

I continue screaming and run around my bedroom and after a while my mother or father manage to hold me. They put their arms around me and attempt to soothe me. 

-Darling it's alright. You are having a bad dream. Look no one is here. There is nothing to be frightened of. Darling we are here.

I am crying and can feel their warmth and am contained but at the same time I believe that I am at risk.

There is a danger, but they do not know what it is.

They put me back to bed and I go to sleep quickly. I then wake up and call out.

Daddy comes and I do not want him. I want mummy but I am not sure if I told him. Would that be terrible? Would he feel unappreciated if I did tell him?

-I want mummy. She is different to you.

-How is she different? Aren't I good enough?

-No daddy, you are not good enough. Not at night. You know that. During the day you are soft and gentle but at night I want mummy. I think she understands my terror.

-Why do you say that? How do you know?

-Because I have seen her tears. I have heard her crying. I think she knows about the shadows. We have not talked about them, but I think she knows. I have seen her jump at the slightest noise. When it is dark and I have had my dinner, she sits down and sometimes then she reads to me. That is before you come home. Often, I play, in the corner, with my small farm animals. Sometimes whilst playing I look at her. She sits in front of the heater. She is always cold, you know. And she often talks to herself. Hurriedly. Then, especially when it is windy outside, there are strange noises. She gasps or moves quickly and tells me everything is alright, but she does it in a way that suggests to me that she does not quite believe what she says.

When there is a storm, the branches of the tall tree outside the house strike the window. They want to come in. Mummy let them in.

-No, Ronnie, I need to wash you so that you go to bed clean. I need to clean you and the carpet and the shelves and the kitchen table and everything.

-Mummy you have already cleaned me. There is no more to clean. Why do you want to clean me so? 

-Because to be clean is to be pure and perfect.

-Are the shadows clean?

-I think the shadows are a reminder. A reminder of where I have come from. I think they are following me. When the shadows are present, I am sick with anxiety. I want to push them away. 

I think these shadows, masses of dark filigree patterns, sometimes changing their shapes, were transactional clouds. They were passed between us and there was always an attempt to disown them.

-That's not my shadow, mummy, it's yours.

-No, my darling. How could it by mine?

The point of sharing them and passing them between us was to lessen the anxiety. Our anxiety.

                              Shadows of identity

This archive of images is an attempt to remember and give voice to shadows. 
As a young child I was petrified of the dark. I remember being asked to empty a bin downstairs one evening and that meant I had to go outside. I cried and cried and my father, unusually for him, became angry and told me not to be so stupid and that no one was out there. But of course, there was someone there. They were in me and in a magical way they were also out there, even if, in reality, I could not see them. It was as if the intensity of the fear created beings of substance. Then too I filled in a void. When it was dark everywhere outside my home was threatening and dangerous. Now I am aware that of course some of this fear was fueled by books I read, and in addition I think it was also amplified by silence. That might seem far-fetched, but I do not think it is. Much was not spoken about and this creates what seems like a foundation, a base on which, and out of which, grow certain experiences. In my case what I think began to be amplified was shame and fear. And these affects gave rise to powerful internal images that easily allowed for the projection of demonic characters who, at night, were out to get me.

Now I wonder if they were threatening mummy as well. I do not know if she too was frightened of the dark, but I do know that much did frighten her. I want to fill in the much not with objects but a mood state that at times was particularly intense and powerful, a double act of stress and tension, allowing for the movement of this feeling state to pass between us. An infection? I think of an infection as jumping but this did not jump.

I want to give this a name, and I think what is most appropriate is anxiety. It is not that one of us gave it to the other, rather it was something that slithered between us or over us and organized whatever sits on or under anxiety. The point being that anxiety does not exist on its own. That might be relatively easy to deal with. One of the associations that comes to mind is that invariably anxiety was met with denial. It was as if the denial, a negative imperative, was underneath the anxiety.

-Ronnie what is the matter?

-Nothing. Leave me alone.

-Mummy what is wrong? 

-Nothing. leave me alone.

There are fixed rules in this ritual of rejection. The answer to the initial question is always a deflection and disavowal of what might be inferred. And then the response to the question was always one that was wrapped very tightly in irritation. Most important was the fact that the worry and tension were never never owned. Thus these affects spread and enveloped both of us and in so doing it was always difficult to ascertain who was anxious first. Of course, there is another possibility, namely that the world is an anxious place, that anxiety attaches to the world and in perceiving that constant state what is a defining characteristic of out there metamorphosed into something inside of me and to the inside of her. This becomes or is rather better thought of as extended anxiety. It is or was extended between my mother and me and between us and the outside world. That is a strange way of putting it but I think it is correct insofar as there was our world and the world outside of that. I felt safe in our space but at risk outside it. I have a sense of hanging on, holding on as if letting go was dangerous. I also think now that maybe it was similar for her. Who was holding on to whom? Two bodies wrapped around each other in order to ward off danger, in order to keep the world at bay, in order to make ourselves less accessible and maybe to exclude daddy. Daddy was not part of this; he was different, and he formed a different group where anxiety was no doubt present too but not so viscous.

This is a strange tale as at times anxiety, our anxiety was linked to magic. Well why not? After all magic makes the pain go away.

-Mummy my tummy hurts.

-Mummy my finger hurts.

-Ronnie, let me kiss it better. 

And I believed that. No matter how awful or terrible the pain, I believed it could disappear in a kiss. The kiss had to be well placed or else it would not work. 

The trouble with anxiety is that it has no locatable spot like bodily pain, in which case a different modality of touch is necessary.

-Mummy I'm frightened.

The response usually was a hug. Maybe that was enough, as if the hug was so powerful and reassuring that no words were needed. All of this became part of my assumptive world, and, I suspect, it was part of my mother's assumptive world. This needs to be unpacked.

It is as if from the beginning, my sense of the world was one of apprehension and anxiety. Do they go together? Maybe. What is becoming clearer as I write this is that I shared this with my mother.

When I was much older, I was aware that she was hyper-vigilant. She could not tolerate disagreement of any kind as she experienced any conflict as an attack and was ready to pounce on anyone whom she thought was patronizing her. It was as if out of anxiety she constructed a rule book that almost became sacred to her. Any infringement of this control was met by anger and sometimes rage. These responses were, I believe, implacably linked to a well of primordial anxiety.

There were mutual ritual moves that were an attempt to deal with the unease that is almost always a prelude to anxiety. These moves became so ingrained that sometimes they might be deployed even if there was no cause, but notwithstanding that, unease followed.

My mother for a short time was a salesperson for a brush company. They specialized in domestic brushes of various sizes. My mother was to go from door to door and I imagine she was on some sort of commission. I was three or four years old and she would take me with her. One of the complications of this job was that my mother was extremely ashamed of having to resort to knocking on doors and trying to sell things. She loathed doing it and bitterly resented it. She hated the fact that she had to do it as she had no other financial supports and she felt deeply embarrassed at having to take me with her. It was as if she was shamed by my seeing her in this role. 

-If you really understand what is going on here you will think the worst of me.

-Mummy it does not matter. You are doing this in order that we can both survive. I admire you for selling brushes, I really do.

-Don't be silly Ronnie. I think it's terribly demeaning. People will think I'm a nobody.

-Mummy what do you mean? How can you be a nobody? What they see is someone trying to make a living.

-You don't understand. You are too young.

She held my little hand very tight and carried the brushes in a large bag. She would ring the bell or knock on a door and push me forward so when people opened the door they might see me first.

-Oh, what a pretty child. What is your name?

-Ronnie.

-What can I do for you?

My mother would then push me aside and start her prepared speech. Often people would buy the brushes because they felt sorry for my mother and sometimes because they felt sad for me.

As we left a house my mother would hold my hand tight and each time we approached a front door she would push me in front of her.

There is something in this episode that became a sort of code. It might be expressed in a breath or a look or a particular movement of her shoulders and it lasted a lifetime. It had to do with shyness and how she or I or we presented to others. She might hold on to me tightly and in so doing protected herself. It sounds like in those moments I then became her protector, but I do not think it was quite like that. I think something else was going on. Skin is a boundary and a protective layer but it can also be very sensitive to a certain touch. There were occasions when I think her anxiety was almost out of control and then I somehow in closeness allowed her to breathe more slowly. If I pulled away she would try to stop me and very occasionally she might ask me to stay with her and in so doing would allow herself to momentarily become somewhat childlike.

                        Tears

I must have been outside her room, the bedroom. Maybe I was playing. What did I hear? Silence, something ominous. Maybe I heard her crying. 

Tears. Water on her cheeks. I have done something wrong. But what?

Why have I upset her? Did I say something she did not like?

I went into the bedroom. She was standing near the dressing table and was staring at a letter.

Why are you crying? Mummy why are you crying?

If the tears stop then everything will be all right. But what if they don't? And what if because of me this is happening? Kiss mummy better. Kiss Ronnie better. Kisses make the pain go away. But not always, but sometimes. The kisses did not make my chillblains go away. Not enough kisses. Too many? 

Mummy why are you crying?

Mummy why are you crying?

She looked at the letter and then turned to me.

Darling I am crying because my parents have died.

She put the letter away. In the pocket of her apron. A magic pocket.

A pocket for letters. A pocket for tears.

Parents. My mummy does not have parents. How can they have died? They don't exist. 

I am here. They are nowhere. 

Ronnie eat up your food. Eat up your food, and if you don't finish then I shall give your food to the starving children in Africa.

Who were they? Why are they starving? Maybe I should not finish my meal.

I think I cried, I wanted to cry because seeing mummy so upset gave me a pain in my tummy. And that made me cry, and I knew that the tummy pain was somehow connected to what was happening to my mother. But in that moment she seemed not at all interested or concerned about my tummy. So I had lost her. What seemed invariably a close bond with no shadows now had disintegrated. Shadows, she was a shadow. No that's not right.  I wanted to come in between her and her tears, it was as if the tears could form a wall and that somehow could be separate from her eyes. I imagine standing in that space and then maybe she could look at me and tell me what was going on for her. She could never do that without the other intruding. What was the other? 

Well, that is what this all about. One way of thinking about it is that the other was a permanent judge, a harsh judge a siamese twin harsh judge, a fixture, an inside and an outside judge. A severe and unapproachable judge. Oh yes, and jury.

A Nazi judge, or a fascist judge who predated those Nazis. By a long stretch.

To have that inside is to cut off contact with a loved one. What could be done?

These moments that were intermittent throughout her life were very frightening. Like her anger. 

Shadows too at times were scary. Following a shadow or the shadow following me and I seem to have no control. Mummy becomes a shadow, looking at me to see if anything is out of place. Come here Ronnie! I need to brush your hair. I can only go out if I look smart. Not dapper. Clean. Spotless.

But in the space of reading the letter all of this is forgotten. Like the time when my father was listening to the radio. The big radio. He was listening to music and singing. I did not understand what he was singing as it was in a foreign language. I wanted him to pay attention to me but he was somewhere else.  I was not frightened, not of him; I was disappointed. 

I think I cried. Suddenly I was alone. It's to do with mattering isn't it? A child does not think about mattering until something goes wrong. I want mummy and she is there. I want to tell daddy that mummy always shouts at me and he is there. And the shouting, the shouting at me, the anger, well, they all attest to mattering. But silence is different. Daddy listening to music and mummy ironing.

And silence. 

Silence is a cut, a slice, a turning of the back, fingers in ears, a refusal, a pushing away. A closing down or a closing out.

A moment, a micro moment. It would seem as if nothing much might happen in what is the briefest unit of time, felt time. But that is clearly not so. These moments had their history, namely what it was that lead up to them and, of course what followed from them.

I want to unfurl this moment as if it is a parchment, a banner, a manuscript that when opened up stretches back and forward, whilst, at the same time keeping the moment intact. That moment is a moment where something happened. It happened then, not before or after so the moment has its own singularity. But I recognize it retrospectively by the fact that for me there were other moments that were similar. Not the same but similar. The experience for me was a very difficult one. In the moment, that moment when I see her crying with a letter in her hand, she constructs a cordon sanitaire around her. This restricts entry and exit; from what? From her emotional space. There is a story, a narrative, a history that is encapsulated in an instant.  And that gives rise to what I call her flatness. 

Standing outside this boundary, this carapace, I have few options. What I can not do is probe, try to enter or move through the border. At that moment I am homeless and apologetic. The apology, my apology becomes ubiquitous. She is hurt, upset, tense, stressed, flurried; what do I do? I apologize. 

I'm sorry mummy. Can I make it better? Can't we return to how things were? Will you forgive me?

And what if she doesn't? Life is dependent on her absolution. But sometimes it is just not forthcoming. If I had known the word anxious then I would have told her that in the space and time of waiting for her forgiveness, irrespective of whether I was guilty or not, I experienced intense anxiety. 

Now I think again of the flatness. What is the contrary of depth of field? Surface of field? Shallowness of field? The trouble is that shallowness is suggestive of some depth, maybe not much but some. Shallow implies superficial and that's not quite right either.

Actually she was immensely powerful, most of the time. But not with granny. She and my father's mother disliked each other. Always. Each of them had power but not really over the other. The were, unsurprisingly, similar. My father married his mother. And he was always situated between them. A mediator who never managed to mediate.

Mummy cried in front of granny once. Daddy was sitting next to his mother and mummy was sitting opposite them in front of the electric heater.

Mummy and granny were arguing and mummy cried. She told my father that he never supported her. And I remember being very disoriented in that space. I hugged mummy. I tried to mother her but it did not really work. How could it? The tension lasted for a long time.

There were other tears. But they were different. It was strange, and I learnt something that was difficult to understand, then. There are tears of sadness, of regret, of unhappiness, loneliness, anger and shame. There might also be tears of frustration. We were in the kitchen and the table was covered in flour. My mother had pealed some apples and was rolling pastry. There was more going on than just putting something together, assembling something that would later be eaten. I think now that what she was doing then was moving to a strange spectral culinary space that was associated with her mother. 

Mummy why are you crying? 

She did not answer me but cried out again and again:

I am so stupid! I am an idiot! I just don't know how to do it! I am so stupid!

Something had rolled off the table and fallen on to the floor. It was a snake wrapped in flour. She picked up the snake and blew on it and put it on the table and continued with her work. Frowning. Muttering. Rolling out more snakes. Tears. She had forgotten what to do. How could she forget when she had spent a year off school and had watched her mother cooking the same food. 

She had one cookery book that was her bible. 

Now where is the recipe?

How do I measure this?

What do they mean? Why is it so unclear? And she would mutter something in a language I barely understood and continue with the labour.

I was there to contain something. I was a witness to a process that became more and more important to her. 

There was a before and after. The during seemed short-lived. The before involved cod liver oil and boiled fish. When I was sick I was given boiled fish. 

Mummy, mummy I hate the smell. I don't like it.

You've got to eat it. You are sick.

So sickness involved eating something that was a punishment. 

I must not get sick. Being ill is horrid. If I did not know I was sick, I was made aware of it by what I was given to eat.

Who were the flour snakes for? They were for daddy. 

She always seemed to be angry with me. She always spoke to me harshly.

Daddy washing me in the bath.

Daddy will you please tell mummy not to shout at me? She shouts at me all the time.

And now I heard her crying. Maybe daddy told her not to shout at me.

Herta why do you shout at Ronnie?

What do you mean?

He said that you shout at him all the time.

Gott du bist blöd!

And now tears. What if we drown? And now it is my fault. This was always my fear, that I would or could say something so terrible that she would break down. And then the tears would never stop. They would descend from her eyes gathering force as they moved away and they had the ability to suck me into the torrent. Whatever I had done or not done I had to prostrate myself before her.

Mummy, mummy I'm so sorry, really sorry, truly sorry, it won't happen again. I'm not sure where I learnt these words, but whilst they were meant to placate and return things to normal, I was very aware of something illusory in the process. I was caught, trapped and above all confused. 

Mummy are we friends? Can we be friends? I'm sorry, so sorry, Mummy don't be angry. Are you still angry with me? 

The intensity of these outpourings always staggered me. The intensity was a function of my experience of the bond as, in these moments, vulnerable and above all fragile. I was insecure and now I think now of what I call her flatness. After all what was I to appeal to? If there was no interior or something besides the external anger or rage, then that was all there was. A painful tautology. Therefore, I had to appeal to the very thing that was causing me anguish. 

Ronnie leave me alone. Just wait till your father comes home. I am so angry with you. Go to your room. 

Mummy I'm sorry. 

Anger

I want to explain and explore flatness, as much of this story is linked to it. But, for goodness sake, it is not an it. I shall link flatness somehow to the metaphor of desire lines. And I associate it with will and agency. Though, I am not sure that flatness as a particular behavioural mode is chosen; rather it is the consequence of much that is. Also, the consequence of much that isn't.  Flatness is a process and a way of being that appears to exclude reflection and reflexivity. 

Mummy why are you shouting at me?

I'm not. Stop complaining.

Mummy are you angry with me? What have I done?

Mummy I'm sorry for whatever I am supposed to have done. If you are angry with me then I am sorry that you are angry with me. And whatever the reason, I am sorry. Please let us be friends. Mummy I love you and, and, I get frightened when you speak to me in that way. All I can do is say sorry. Sorry sorry sorry.

This is where I was caught in a strange and bewildering space. A space or a non-space? Non-space as there was nowhere to go. Stuck in sorry. There always seemed to be no alternative. How can there be when the mummy cannot confront her moods. If mummy cannot own her own anger or resentment or envy or sadness or whatever then I am bound to carry something that is not mine.

It's yours. You take care of your feelings. They are yours to take care of. Don't put them on me. Now I am confused as I am not sure what is yours and what is mine. That's the trouble with this intensity between us. I hang on for my life lest something is broken. So of course, I apologise. There seems to be no alternative.

If I had said that to her, what then? Anger? More tears? Probably incomprehension. Or worse? Cutting off. That is what is most frightening. A sense that the bond, the link, the closeness, the touch, the hugs and kisses are no more.

There is no behind to her denial of harshness toward me, no possibility of movement there either for mummy or me. The behind which is a psychical space, an interiority that is extended between us in fact appears not to exist. What exists is the denial, that's all. So, I'm caught in a strange place. What are the options? I can believe her and think that it, whatever is going on, is my fault or maybe, just maybe that there might be something wrong with her. So, flatness is imperviousness to an alternative part of the self than the one on display. It is more than that. It is about the impossibility of negotiating some momentary fracture in the relationship. A course of action has been chosen and there is no deviation. There is nowhere else to go. This is her desire line. There are other routes that might have been taken. Some more direct. But she has chosen her own route that is off the beaten track and she has moved along this path so often that this defines it as her desire line.

This line a line of her desire was chosen by her when she was a little girl. Of that I am convinced.

Something does not quite make sense in what I have written above. How can there be an interiority on the outside that does not exist? How can this be thought of as experiential? Were I to ask my mother a question that could be taken as critical of her, critical of something she might have said or done, her immediate response would be to deny that she had ever said or done what I claimed. 

And if I stood my ground then she would accuse me of rudeness.

In which case I or rather we came to a wall. But the wall, the boundary was not inside her, it was between us. This wall was a language wall and a feeling wall. It was a boundary that seemed highly energised in its ability to push and pull. In its presence there was a choice.  I could ignore it and to do so was to incur terrible consequences, namely the feeling of loss of love. Alternatively, I learnt to move along this boundary in a way that did not weaken it in any way. 

Thus, love was not diminished. That was the fear but for me not for her. So I think. But maybe I am wrong. 

We lived in a basement, and granny lived above us. Mummy wanted me to herself and at times I was not quite sure if I was allowed to climb the stairs to granny. I called granny 'Mutti' and I think I may have wondered if she was my mummy. It was rather confusing. I also think that mummy and Mutti were competing for me, and it did not help that they both loathed each other. I have a vague memory that my mother may have told me not to go upstairs.

Mummy why not?

Because I told you so.

I disobeyed her. I went upstairs and after a while I heard my name shouted in anger. I rushed down to the basement.

Ronnie, I told you not to go upstairs to granny.

I wanted to see Mutti.

You must do as you are told.

A dance with just a few variations. What is forbidden suddenly becomes exciting. But dangerous. What is dangerous becomes exciting. What if I stay upstairs and never go downstairs again? Is Mutti better than mummy? Is she more fun? 

Did she give me sweets? I can't remember. For sure the atmosphere up there was different, and the difference was strange. It had to do with smells, with touch, skin, movement and more. Now I think of this in terms sexuality. Mutti was conspicuously sexual. She flaunted something; she was seductive. Mummy not at all. 

Going upstairs was perilous and exciting. There were other issues that divided them. Granny was the housekeeper and maybe lover of a very wealthy man who owned the house. My mother was extremely poor and dependent at that time on the woman she so disliked. I knew about the enmity between them and I sensed something like the envy that my mother had of the wealth that was beyond her at that time. 

These relationships developed their own rituals where often each of us would find ourselves in the middle as the instigators of damage or harm to one or the other. My father was rarely involved as he was away at work. 

Now, in retrospect, I imagine my mother as in despair with regard to her material circumstances. And yet again I am sure that shame was paramount. Except, yes, except she was not ashamed of me. Not then. But she was ashamed of what she had to do to fend for me in the way she wanted. She was ashamed of the fact that her husband was barely present and she was ashamed of being so beholden to her mother in law. And I think she might have been aware and thus ashamed as well of a class difference between her and Mutti. And furthermore their hopes and ambitions were markedly different. 

It seemed as if there were two homes for me, side by side, and in some way I belonged to both. But my mother wanted me to echew one that was no doubt familiar to her but a home that she regarded as increasingly foreign.

All of this becomes or rather became something like a dance. Over time I learnt the moves as did she. Only later I realized that the dance, the moves, were designed to maneuver each of us around shame. Desire lines around shame, paths that avoid what I suspect might have been a space of terror for my mother.

Shame has to be at the core of this story, for it is rather like the leading role in a play; a nodal point in a series of interlocking narratives that constitute her life and mine. 

The wall then becomes a protective layer, a defense against what is felt as unbearable. It appears to keep shame away, or rather it is locked up in a psychical vault that appears to be deep deep down somewhere in my mother's consciousness. Except that is a mirage. As is flatness as perceived as internal to her. For that would be a contradiction. Maybe it is better to speak of roles, or to use another idea that is central to this story, the idea of 'as if'. 

I noticed it early on when I was very young. She would cuddle me and I would cuddle her and we would speak a language of closeness and intimacy. But if someone entered this space such as a friend or neighbor, then something profound would change. She became different and the dance moves were altered. I might in this situation become an object and she might fret about my cleanliness in a way that somehow allowed a smidgen of shame to escape and attach itself to me. So in those moments I was the one who wanted or needed to hide.

There was her persona that showed itself when we were alone and a different one became public when there were intruders in our world and a different one again when daddy was home.

Touch

Mummy I love you.

I love you Ronnie. 

I would sit on her lap and we would hug each other. Tight. A safe place. I don't remember her reading to me though I am sure she did. The safe place then was a space of close physical contact. Daddy felt different. He had a different smell. Not unpleasant, different. What does stand out is the sense that I lived in my early years in a world dominated by my mother, and other women; my grandmother, my two aunts and two cousins of my mother.  

Hugging and kissing, in part, have to do with distance and of course, touch. My mother was tactile, my father much less so. Sometimes her touch seemed inappropriate. On occasion it seemed as if she was using touch as a way of circumventing something. Maybe it too was part of the flatness. As if a gentle touch, a caress on someone's arm might help prevent a move to a place she wanted or needed to avoid. A conversation might be moving in a certain direction, in a particular mood, and then with a momentary stroke on her interlocutor's arm the interaction would change. To her advantage.

Mummy wanted me to herself. Or did she? When daddy was home our mutual space changed. It became almost immediately less intimate. Whilst before distance between us was minimised, with daddy's presence a magical link was severed; but repaired when he was no longer home.

Now as I write this I think she changed in relation to me when others were present. I sense that she might have felt embarrassed or indeed ashamed. Of what? Her thoughts? The word possession comes to mind. I was her possession. She possessed me and in a way, I possessed her. But the meaning of possess here is different in each case, and that difference is not just a matter of ambiguity. Whatever else is involved, ownership and sexuality stand out as of prime importance, and I think, something else that seems to be rather incongruous. It is what Jungians term puella aeterna. My mother was never bound by the idea of age appropriate bearing or dress. As she aged this became more apparent. Not surprisingly this also affected her treatment of me. She wanted to appear young always. One way in which she instantiated this was to always have friends who were younger, as if the very idea of generations made no sense at all. Never mind that often the younger friend was a woman who sorely needed a mother figure. What mattered more was that my mother needed, later on, a daughter, a figure who made her feel young.

One way of telling this story is to explore the issues in a linear narrative that would begin at the beginning and end when my mother died. But that is not my way. 

When I was very young I remember lying in bed, at night or early in the morning and tracing a pattern on the sheet with my fingers. The design was a spiral or maybe it was of interlocking circles. It was a peaceful process and something that seemed congruent to the way I thought. 

 I went into the bedroom. She was standing near the dressing table and was staring at a letter.

Why are you crying? Mummy why are you crying?

If the tears stop then everything will be all right. But what if they don't? And what if because of me this is happening? Kiss mummy better. Kiss Ronnie better. Kisses make the pain go away. But not always, but sometimes. The kisses did not make my chillblains go away. Not enough kisses. Too many? 

Mummy why are you crying?

Mummy why are you crying?

She looked at the letter and then turned to me.

Darling I am crying because my parents have died.

She put the letter away. In the pocket of her apron. A magic pocket.

A pocket for letters. A pocket for tears.

Parents. My mummy does not have parents. How can they have died? They don't exist. 

I am here. They are nowhere. 

Ronnie eat up your food. Eat up your food, and if you don't finish then I shall give your food to the starving children in Africa.

Who were they? Why are they starving? Maybe I should not finish my meal.

I think I cried, I wanted to cry because seeing mummy so upset gave me a pain in my tummy. And that made me cry, and I knew that the tummy pain was somehow connected to what was happening to my mother. But in that moment she seemed not at all interested or concerned about my tummy. So I had lost her. What seemed invariably a close bond with no shadows now had disintegrated. Shadows, she was a shadow. No that's not right.  I wanted to come in between her and her tears, it was as if the tears could form a wall and that somehow could be separate from her eyes. I imagine standing in that space and then maybe she could look at me and tell me what was going on for her. She could never do that without the other intruding. What was the other? 

Well, that is what this all about. One way of thinking about it is that the other was a permanent judge, a harsh judge a siamese twin harsh judge, a fixture, an inside and an outside judge. A severe and unapproachable judge. Oh yes, and jury.

A Nazi judge, or a fascist judge who predated those Nazis. By a long stretch.

To have that inside is to cut off contact with a loved one. What could be done?

These moments that were intermittent throughout her life were very frightening. Like her anger. 

Shadows too at times were scary. Following a shadow or the shadow following me and I seem to have no control. Mummy becomes a shadow, looking at me to see if anything is out of place. Come here Ronnie! I need to brush your hair. I can only go out if I look smart. Not dapper. Clean. Spotless.

But in the space of reading the letter all of this is forgotten. Like the time when my father was listening to the radio. The big radio. He was listening to music and singing. I did not understand what he was singing as it was in a foreign language. I wanted him to pay attention to me but he was somewhere else.  I was not frightened, not of him; I was disappointed. 

I think I cried. Suddenly I was alone. It's to do with mattering isn't it? A child does not think about mattering until something goes wrong. I want mummy and she is there. I want to tell daddy that mummy always shouts at me and he is there. And the shouting, the shouting at me, the anger, well, they all attest to mattering. But silence is different. Daddy listening to music and mummy ironing.

And silence. 

Silence is a cut, a slice, a turning of the back, fingers in ears, a refusal, a pushing away. A closing down or a closing out.

A moment, a micro moment. It would seem as if nothing much might happen in what is the briefest unit of time, felt time. But that is clearly not so. These moments had their history, namely what it was that lead up to them and, of course what followed from them.

I want to unfurl this moment as if it is a parchment, a banner, a manuscript that when opened up stretches back and forward, whilst, at the same time keeping the moment intact. That moment is a moment where something happened. It happened then, not before or after so the moment has its own singularity. But I recognize it retrospectively by the fact that for me there were other moments that were similar. Not the same but similar. The experience for me was a very difficult one. In the moment, that moment when I see her crying with a letter in her hand, she constructs a cordon sanitaire around her. This restricts entry and exit; from what? From her emotional space. There is a story, a narrative, a history that is encapsulated in an instant.  And that gives rise to what I call her flatness. 

Standing outside this boundary, this carapace, I have few options. What I can not do is probe, try to enter or move through the border. At that moment I am homeless and apologetic. The apology, my apology becomes ubiquitous. She is hurt, upset, tense, stressed, flurried; what do I do? I apologize. 

I'm sorry mummy. Can I make it better? Can't we return to how things were? Will you forgive me?

And what if she doesn't? Life is dependent on her absolution. But sometimes it is just not forthcoming. If I had known the word anxious then I would have told her that in the space and time of waiting for her forgiveness, irrespective of whether I was guilty or not, I experienced intense anxiety. 

Now I think again of the flatness. What is the contrary of depth of field? Surface of field? Shallowness of field? The trouble is that shallowness is suggestive of some depth, maybe not much but some. Shallow implies superficial and that's not quite right either.

Actually she was immensely powerful, most of the time. But not with granny. She and my father's mother disliked each other. Always. Each of them had power but not really over the other. The were, unsurprisingly, similar. My father married his mother. And he was always situated between them. A mediator who never managed to mediate.

Mummy cried in front of granny once. Daddy was sitting next to his mother and mummy was sitting opposite them in front of the electric heater.

Mummy and granny were arguing and mummy cried. She told my father that he never supported her. And I remember being very disoriented in that space. I hugged mummy. I tried to mother her but it did not really work. How could it? The tension lasted for a long time.

There were other tears. But they were different. It was strange, and I learnt something that was difficult to understand, then. There are tears of sadness, of regret, of unhappiness, loneliness, anger and shame. There might also be tears of frustration. We were in the kitchen and the table was covered in flour. My mother had pealed some apples and was rolling pastry. There was more going on than just putting something together, assembling something that would later be eaten. I think now that what she was doing then was moving to a strange spectral culinary space that was associated with her mother. 

Mummy why are you crying? 

She did not answer me but cried out again and again:

I am so stupid! I am an idiot! I just don't know how to do it! I am so stupid!

Something had rolled off the table and fallen on to the floor. It was a snake wrapped in flour. She picked up the snake and blew on it and put it on the table and continued with her work. Frowning. Muttering. Rolling out more snakes. Tears. She had forgotten what to do. How could she forget when she had spent a year off school and had watched her mother cooking the same food. 

She had one cookery book that was her bible. 

Now where is the recipe?

How do I measure this?

What do they mean? Why is it so unclear? And she would mutter something in a language I barely understood and continue with the labour.

I was there to contain something. I was a witness to a process that became more and more important to her. 

There was a before and after. The during seemed short-lived. The before involved cod liver oil and boiled fish. When I was sick I was given boiled fish. 

Mummy, mummy I hate the smell. I don't like it.

You've got to eat it. You are sick.

So sickness involved eating something that was a punishment. 

I must not get sick. Being ill is horrid. If I did not know I was sick, I was made aware of it by what I was given to eat.

Who were the flour snakes for? They were for daddy. 

When it was decided that she would stay home from school for a year she knew what she wanted to do. She would stay close to mama and help her in the kitchen and, when that work was done, she would go on long walks in and around the centre of Vienna.

Why are you putting so much paprika in the goulash soup?

Because that is the way papa likes it.

But mama I don't like it so hot and spicy.

Never mind. This is how papa likes it and so this is how it has to be done. It was not said with love but resignation. It was a duty to cook for papa, and cook food the way he wanted. The evening meal had to be ready at a certain time or else there would be rows.

It's curious that some of these memories are about noise and silence. They are not cancelling each other out, rather, each gives the other a certain valency.  They are concurrent, and the effects are similar. And, now, this is the trouble with what I call flatness. For there is no possibility of another variable, whether a cognition or affect providing some sort of recursive feedback loop to these concentrated moments. If there were such mechanisms in operation then of course my experience and that of my mother and our experience of each other would have been profoundly different.

But there weren't. 

Silence fascinates me in its multifarious possibilities. My father is listening to Wagner, an early broadcast performance of one of the operas. He is singing and my mother is ironing. As she folds the clothes and puts them in an appropriate pile she talks. There is then lots of noise but there is also lots of silence. My father is not just lost to me but also to mummy. And when she talks, no one responds. They are not communicating with each other and they are not communicating with me. But, of course, I might have got that wrong. Maybe there was something deep between them in those moments. I don't think so. In my memory is an image of the scene. My father sitting in an armchair and my mother standing by the ironing board and I am sitting on the floor. I'm playing with something and looking at my father and aware, becoming aware, of the sounds, foreign sounds coming from the radio. Now I believe my father was enraptured by what he heard and my mother not at all. In that relationship there is silence. What to me was cacophonous was an irritation to mummy. No, not the music, but the rapture. He was transported and that movement was away from her.

When she told me her parents had died I may have hugged her. I want to make it better. As if she had hurt her finger. We never spoke about this. She never mentioned receiving the letter again, and she virtually never spoke about her parents. Ever.

But there was that time. I was very young, holding her hand.

We were walking along side the big post office on the Ridgway. There was a very low wall along the length of the building and I used to walk on the wall, always holding her hand. I am very big and brave, and I must be careful not to wobble too much.

I don't remember what we had been talking about, but suddenly she turned to me and told me that I looked like her father.

We had moved from a basement apartment to an apartment on the third floor of a large Victorian house in the same street. I was particularly interested in a hall cupboard by the stairs in which there were bags, suitcases and photo albums.  I would sometimes go down the stairs to this cupboard, open it and look at these albums. Occasionally I would take them upstairs and ask my mother about the people in the photos.

She would answer my questions but in a curious way. 

On the earlier occasion when she cried and told me that her parents had died something happened to me. What?

I seized up.

I had approached a no-go area.

I needed to protect my mother from this terrible news.

I needed to protect myself from compounding the hurt by asking questions.

The result was that my natural curiosity was instantly quelled.

Something died in me. But I don't think it did in her.

There was something I wanted to know, but I am not sure what it was. When I heard that her parents had died, what mattered to me was her crying not the news. And what I was left with was an interdiction. An implicit demand or command to stay away, to keep clear. The result was an almost permanent cordon-sanitaire that acted as a boundary around several issues. I, of course did not know that at the time. Then I did not realise that something was being suppressed, that a considerable amount of information would have been gratefully received and that underlying all of this was shame. 

As I look back and try to think of my mother then, I imagine her as  a cartoon character. Not one with oversized shoes and a funny face and squeaky voice, but one that has a curious dimension. For this character is flat. It is as if the surface is the inside and the inside is the surface. There is then no depth of field. A slight gust of wind will topple this character. Only in this case it is not wind that topples it is something else.

What happened in the bedroom that time was that an extremely important part of her past was nullified. A vital part of her past was hidden from view. I believe it was hidden from the inside and the outside. Thus the flatness. The result was not transgenerational trauma, a problematic term, but an annulment that was passed on to me.  

It was as if my mother had no history prior to her arrival in England in November 1938. She spoke about the people she stayed with soon after she arrived and also told me stories about the family she subsequently worked for as cleaner and nanny. She loved them and it seemed as if they became a model for her. 

She wanted to blend in and she wanted her own family to blend in. What does that mean? 

I was invited to a birthday party and it was held somewhere down the hill. My friend Julian and I went together, accompanied by our mothers. I think this was the first birthday party I went to and I had no idea what to expect. In fact a lot that went on there was foreign to me. Before we left home mummy brushed my hair and cleaned my face and looked in my ears and checked that my shoes were shiny and my shirt was tucked in and that I had a clean hanky in my pocket and that there were no creases or stains in my short trousers and I am sure she told me to behave in a certain way.

Ronnie when you go into the house or garden you say how do you do and when they give you some cake you say thank you very much and you make sure that you wipe your shoes on the mat and you must not eat too much and never never speak with your mouth full of food because that is not polite and I want you to be the politest boy in the world. Do you understand?

Yes mummy.

It could not be otherwise. There was no gainsaying mummy then. Except in so far as I did not really understand what was going on for her until much later.  

I don't feel well mummy. I don't think I want to go to the party. What is a party? Why can't I just play with Julian here? 

I thought then that I did not want to share him with others. Anyway he was my friend. This was turning out to be a dangerous episode. 

We played in the garden, we played party games that were all new to me and I cried.  There were rules, of course, rules that the other children knew. So they knew about pinning a tail to a donkey with their eyes covered and they all seemed familiar with the other happenings at this party. I seem to remember that we were all given gifts. I don't know why. There were rules about that too. Mummy had stayed and watched what I was doing and told me to say thank you very much which I probably did and then burst into tears. What happened? It most likely was the fact that being in public was an enormous strain. She became my observing ego. It was not enough for her to be self consciously polite so as not to be taken for a foreigner. For, in part, the aim was to blend in, but, invariably, she did the opposite. And it was painful for me to witness this process.

There were a variety of ways in which blending in became standing out. Some had to do with voice, accent, emphasis on vowels in a way that was rather odd and some had to do with exaggerated politeness such as a tendency to apologize at times that were clearly inappropriate.