Wartime lies - Louis Begley [83]
JM: You endow literary quotation with an almost liturgical effect. When you quote Catullus, it is as if you acknowledge the legitimacy of the wish and, to that extent at least, assuage the pain of its unfulfillment. Quotation as minor catharsis….
Hearing this regret about how little recompense your father had for his kindness puts me in mind of Tania’s grief when she learns that her father, Maciek’s grandfather, has been murdered. This was, Maciek says, “the worst day in our lives”.
Autobiographical fiction, on those rare occasions when one can see it from the inside, so often seems to work this way. What was in real life a son’s prayer for his father becomes in the novel a son’s prayer for himself. What was the grief of a son for his father becomes the grief of a daughter for hers, and so forth—all in service to the larger truth that the fiction attempts to convey.
One might well think, though, that the “worst day” would have been that last ghastly day in Warsaw—the gang rapes, the baby dropped down a manhole, the moment-to-moment terror. What is it that makes this one death worse still? Is it just that Tania loves her father so much? Earlier, Maciek says “she claimed she had always had a heart of stone except when it came to grandfather and me, and neither of us even knew she loved him.” Is it that at this moment Maciek discovers that, yes, Tania does at least truly love this one man? Or is it that Tania, so supremely adult on the surface, having sustained herself through everything by thinking of the father who would somehow be there to shelter and protect her after the war was over, now becomes something of a lost child herself? And is Maciek—weeping for grandfather, weeping in fear—weeping as well because he does not know whether Tania loves him as much as she loved grandfather? This is the boy, one remembers, who anxiously asked everyone, “Do you like me?” Finally, thinking of your first answer, above, is this the worst day of their lives because the grandfather has been killed by Pan Miska, his own former estate manager?
LB: The answer to each of these questions is yes. I might add another reason: the immense weight of wartime fatigue. Those two do not think they have enough strength—never mind hope—left to go on, to keep their bizarre and desperate show on the road.
Indeed, as you have doubtless noticed, soon afterward Tania makes her first big mistake. She permits herself to insult the black market operator Nowak, who promptly denounces them to the German police.
JM: “According to Tania, it’s just as well: Can you imagine her hand being kissed?”. Tania’s sardonic comment about Maciek’s new stepmother caught me in a surprise laugh, the only laugh in the book. It made me believe that Tania was going to be all right, after all. She may be one of those women who only love vertically: up to father or down to child. And yet, like her father (to her mother’s annoyance), she is vivacious, sexually unabashed, and still young. One does not imagine her, years hence, quoting Catullus, as “our man” does in the opening pages, or yearning for a healing that will not come. She is still herself, right?
LB: I am probably less optimistic about Tania. Of course, the damage to her will be different from the damage done to Maciek. She is a grown-up with a fully formed and strong personality. But memories like hers are corrosive. Also, she may never again have occasion to reach such heights of courage and resourcefulness. Will a more quiet life inevitably seem mediocre and insipid?
But that is speculation about matters that are outside my novel and I have no better information about them than you or any other of my readers.
JM: A somewhat similar moment—a moment of sudden vigor and freedom—comes for Maciek when he defeats his rebellious dog and, later, reacts with murderous anger as well as grief when the dog is run over. But in this revival, there is no flash of