My Nine Lives Read online

  Ever since his last project—a semi-fictional documentary about a dancer who had died of Aids—failed to take off for lack of funds, Andrew has started nothing new. He has had projects fail before, in his various fields of interest, and usually, after a period of depression, has been ready to start on something new. It was always a pleasure to see Andrew with a new involvement, whether in work or love—and often the two coincided. Unlike Veronica, Andrew is short like the rest of us, and although he never played any sport, he used to have a firm, compact body like an athlete; for years he retained a boyish quality, as if he had only just started out and was unmarred by experience (this air of innocence remained even after his suicide attempt). But the other day I encountered him in the long corridor of my apartment when he was coming out of the toilet and zipping himself up. He wasn’t wearing a belt and his stomach, which had once been so flat, drooped over his pants; he was in slippers and was shuffling a bit and was suddenly—this seemingly perennial boy—a middleaged man.

  The reason he is staying with me is because of his mother. Debbie is the same with him now as when he wasn’t doing well at school and she thought she could improve him. And he reacts now as he did then, by running away: this time not into the world at large with strangers but home to my apartment, where he stays all day in the library with the door shut. When Debbie comes, and she comes all the time, he locks it while she stands outside and shouts at him through the door. He doesn’t answer and there is a terrible silence.

  I must have seen more than one production of The Seagull over the years, but I remember it chiefly from Andrew and Veronica’s readings, when she played Nina and he Konstantin the young poet. In the last scene of the last act Konstantin locks himself up in a room, and the last line of the play is “Konstantin has shot himself.” Not that Andrew has a gun, or would know what to do with it if he had one. But living alone with him, I’m in constant anxiety, which I dare not share with Debbie. She has high blood pressure, and when she gets worked up, her face swells under her golden hair and a pulse beats dangerously inside her rosy rouged cheek. After shouting at Andrew through the closed door, she turns on me: “What’s he doing in there?” she says, as though his locking himself away were my fault.

  Andrew was the person most strongly affected by my revelation that not Gerd but Hoch was his grandfather. When I look back, I realize that it is from that time—which was also the time of his last project—that Andrew seems to have lost heart. It is as if the shadow that great men tend to cast on their descendants has caught up with Andrew at the age of forty. He has been trying to read Hoch’s works; that is what he has been doing behind that closed library door. I have many editions of those works and in many languages; the English ones are mostly by myself, though I have not yet translated the last two volumes he published. They are impossibly difficult, for right till the end—even after his stroke—Hoch was penetrating into seemingly inaccessible areas of thought. Now a younger person than I will have to try and render them into English and so complete my life’s work. Hoch’s earlier phases have by now been absorbed into philosophical tradition and are thus accessible to those with the right training and background. But Andrew’s interests have always been in the arts, never—maybe in reaction to Gerd and myself—in philosophy; and without a thorough academic grounding in both Western and Eastern thought, Hoch cannot be understood. When Andrew and I are alone, he has sometimes asked me to explain, and this is not at all difficult because, like all truly universal thought, the gist of it is simple to formulate. But to follow the steps—the long ascent—by which this peak has been reached, is not possible without many years of study and discipline. I go into the library and I stand behind Andrew where he sits hunched over Hoch’s tome, which must seem like a tomb of cognition to him; he is running his hands through his sparse hair, and when I touch his shoulder, he looks up at me and his intelligent green eyes are dimmed with reading and incomprehension.

  When Debbie asks me what he is doing, I say, “He’s reading.”

  “What’s he reading?” When I tell her, she snorts and says, “We’ve had enough of all that.” Secretly I agree with her. Although it has been my whole life, I don’t want it for Andrew any more than Debbie does. At least once a day she comes around to my apartment; she knocks on the study door in vain and then stands there and looks at me. She has always been jealous that Andrew should so often prefer to be with me, his grandmother, instead of with her, his mother. But now, standing outside the locked library door, we are united in our anxiety for him. I don’t tell her about The Seagull, but my fear is so great that I now confess to her a secret Andrew and I have shared for the last two years. Ever since my heart attack, I have been on strong medication; Andrew goes regularly to the pharmacy to have the prescription refilled and to get whatever else Dr. Stein has ordered for me. When Andrew returns from the pharmacy and gives me the pills, I thank him and wait till he is out of the room. Then I open my chest of drawers and add the new phial to my little collection, hidden at the back of a drawer under some clothing I no longer wear. Sometimes I take out one little phial after the other to read the labels. Once it happened that Andrew came back to tell me something, and when I turned around, I saw him standing in the doorway and looking at me with a grave expression in his eyes. I shut the drawer and he went away without saying anything. Now, when he brings my prescription, he hands it to me with that same grave expression and walks away quickly, respecting my secret.

  But now it is his secret too, and I have to tell Debbie about it. She does not reproach me—probably she will later, Debbie does not pass over one’s mistakes in silence. She accompanies me to my bedroom and, opening the drawer, takes out the pills. Together she and I carry them to the bathroom and flush the contents down the toilet. While we are doing this, she talks constantly—not about what we are doing and why, but about one of her favorite dreams that has never yet been fulfilled: she would like to go on a trip with Andrew, just the two of them, mother and handsome son. It doesn’t really matter where, although she would like it to be Italy, where she has already been twice with a party of her women friends. They had a good time, but none of them was very knowledgeable and the guides tended to rush them. But if she went with Andrew, he would explain everything so beautifully, the churches and the frescoes and the paintings, and they would live in a hotel in adjoining rooms, maybe with a shared balcony on which she would appear in the morning and call out to him.

  Andrew has been to Italy many times, but never with her. Last year he was there with Veronica, on one of her locations. Veronica too wants him with her as much as possible. She would like him to live with her in her house in Beverly Hills. Veronica has never changed toward her brother and refuses to see, or really does not see, that he has changed in himself. She will not accept any role unless he has first approved it; she won’t even read the script until he has recommended it. Only then will she sit down, usually on the floor with the script propped in her lap, winding a strand of her long hair around her fingers. Debbie is proud of this relationship between her children—Veronica’s continued dependence on him—but she is also irritated by it. “As if he’s got nothing better to do than read her silly scripts,” she grumbles to me (though to no one else). “That’s not what he went to Princeton for, and is this brilliant genius.” Last year, when he went to Italy, she protested that it was a waste of his time; and when he sent home picture postcards, she looked at them wistfully and said what a shame to be there with a film crew who spoil everything with their vulgarity.

  But now Debbie herself has sent Andrew away with Veronica. This is the way it happened. Veronica had been on a publicity tour for the film she had just finished and was about to start shooting the next one, again in Italy, in Florence. On her way, she touched down in New York for a day to persuade Andrew to go with her. She called Debbie from the airport—“Is he with you?” then switched off when she heard he wasn’t.

  Debbie was soon with me: “She’s back. She’s asking for him�
��of course not a word for me; no ‘How are you, Mummy? How have you been?’ Just ‘Where is he?’”

  Veronica was with us sooner than we expected. Andrew was asleep, or pretended to be. When she knocked on his bedroom door, he didn’t answer. Then she came to talk to me—all charm, all radiance; she perched on a footstool at my feet, her dress pulled over her knees the way she had done as a little girl. She gazed at me out of her dark blue eyes, clear under her high square forehead—Hoch’s lofty brow—her hair swept back and falling away from it, so that the steady gaze of those beautiful eyes gave an impression of serene sincerity. Her voice too was full of sincerity. She asked after my health, laying her hand on mine in deep concern, then laying it on her heart in anxiety: “Are you okay—here? You’re sure?” Naturally I lied, and she was glad to accept my lie. She hadn’t come here to talk about my health.

  She looked at her watch: “But where’s Andrew? We have to go.”

  “Who’s we?” said Debbie.

  Veronica smiled into space. Then she consulted her watch again and began to tell us everything she had to do: fly to Florence, then back to L.A. for more interviews, then to London for some fittings—she made it all sound rushed, breathless. As usual, she stalked around restlessly—an anomalous presence in my living room with its furniture and rugs worn out by years of family use, and the old clock I always forget to wind, and the photographs of the children with Gerd.

  Andrew appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes and looking somewhat bedraggled—so he hadn’t been pretending, he really had been asleep. “What’s the time?” he said. Veronica replied: “It’s three o’clock. What are you doing sleeping in the middle of the afternoon?” He didn’t respond but sat down on the sofa, yawning, and rubbed his hands through his hair.

  “Naturally, he’s tired with all the reading and studying he’s been doing,” Debbie said. When he looked at her quizzically, she went on, “Well, what else is it you’re doing locked up in there with all those books?”

  “Oh those books: they’d make anyone fall asleep, they’re so damned erudite.” He smiled, and yawned again.

  I could see that he was making Debbie frantic with irritation and misery. But all she could think to say was, “You need a vacation.”

  “A vacation! How exciting! Is it you and I who are going?”

  Debbie’s lips trembled: “Yes, I could do with a change too.”

  But Veronica really had no time to waste: “You promised! Yes you did, when I phoned from L.A. you said you’d go with me.”

  “Where to? Are we going anywhere really adorable?”

  “What will be really adorable is to have you with me—one real person instead of all those creeps.” It was rare for the two of them to touch each other, but now she laid her hand on his shoulder: “I need you. You have to come.” She sounded desperate—of course, Veronica has been trained in all the emotions, but in relation to her brother, they may often have been real.

  “Andrew has to stay with Grandma,” Debbie said, “I don’t want her left alone.”

  “But Grandma’s fine!” Veronica cried. “She’s told me herself!”

  “Oh she’ll say she’s fine of course,” Debbie said. “She’ll never admit she needs a doctor or anyone else, not if it kills her.”

  “But I am fine,” I protested, looking at Andrew.

  He nodded, adding, “And in case of an emergency, you always have your pills.” The way he spoke, I realized he had already looked for them in their hiding place and found them missing.

  Probably Debbie realized it at the same moment; or else, what was it that suddenly changed her mind? She shrugged—an uncharacteristic gesture for someone with her strong opinions and feelings. “It’s a total waste of your time of course,” she said, “but if she’s giving you a free air ticket, you might as well go.”

  Andrew has seen Hoch only in published photographs. Besides the formal portrait used as a frontispiece to the collected works, there are those in the two biographies that have already been written about Hoch. These include early family photographs—for instance, his mother in 1895, as stern and stiff as Hedda and encased up to her jawline in a blouse like a breastplate; and of Hedda herself, and the two sons. The only mention of myself in these two biographies is as his translator; he never kept any of the letters I wrote to him. He was nervous about receiving them, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself, I had to write them; of course he wrote no letters to me. Yet for twenty years he and I led a secret life together—never here in New York but when he went away on one of his many conferences and symposia and allowed me to follow him. Somehow I scraped up the fare by giving tutorials, or secretly doing clerical work, addressing envelopes at so much an hour. Board and lodging were free, for I shared his hotel room, where I waited for him every night to return from whatever dinner or reception he had to attend. For the sake of appearances, I would slip out at dawn and walk around in the nearest park; this was all right in the summer, but less pleasant at conferences held in Sweden during his winter break. When he left the hotel for the day’s session, he gave orders at the desk for his secretary to be admitted, so I took the key and stayed in his room. He also left his breakfast tray for me with the remains of the English breakfast of bacon and eggs he had ordered, which would sustain me for most of the day. I was ready to be alone and wait all those hours since I knew that finally, however late, he would return to me. The first thing he did was to sit on the hotel bed and ease himself out of his big brown boots. This took some time because they were laced right up to the top, ending in a double knot that was difficult to untie. Next he took off his gold watch and chain and laid them on the bedside table, and after that he unbuttoned his waistcoat. It was only then that he turned to me and said, “Kiss me.” Although in the morning he had given himself a close shave with his open razor, by this time his cheeks were rough again with grey stubble: rough and manly.

  I cannot say that these excursions were the happiest hours of my life, but they were certainly the most ecstatic. It is impossible to describe the bliss of being with him, this stolid Prussian professor thirty years older than I, who after making love at once turned over on his side and went to sleep, snoring tremendously. But he performed as a lover as he did everything: with all the force of his being—which was, after all, that of a man who had explored and conquered vast territories, impenetrable thickets of the mind. I adored him. But also, when he was not there and I was left alone all day in his hotel room, I shed bitter tears at the humiliating nature of the affair, and its futility.

  Before we left on our conference trips together, his wife would give me instructions. These were partly professional, for whereas I had translated the paper he was to present, it was she who had prepared the final typescript. After he had been diagnosed with high blood pressure, she would also instruct me about his diet and other precautions. Although she only did this when she knew our work for the day was finished, her intrusion irritated him. Ignoring his mood, she carried on in slow and meticulous detail, driving him mad, especially when she warned against the red meat and red wine for which he had such a huge appetite.

  “Yes yes yes, we know all about that,” he growled.

  She turned to me: “I rely on you.”

  He sneered at her: “Wouldn’t it be best to hire a nursemaid for me?”

  “We can’t afford one, let alone her fare. If we could, I’d come myself to make sure you don’t kill yourself.”

  She looked at him out of her flat, pale eyes that always seemed empty of expression to me; but not, it seemed, to him, for he looked away from her and muttered a curse in German. But I never had to remind him about her instructions; he followed them carefully, as though she were there with us.

  When I became pregnant with Debbie, he offered me money for an abortion. That was the only time he ever offered me money, and when I refused, he said no more about it and we continued our work. We did not mention the subject between us again, either then or subsequently. It happened to be a stressfu
l time, for we were working on an important paper he was about to publish. One day, a week after I told him my news, he became very impatient because I kept failing to get my translation right. This happened every time he made some further advance in his thought, since any new concept of his was impossibly difficult to grasp, and then to find English words in which to express it . . . I became desperate—because he was angry and because I was failing him. I was hampering his great work not only with my dull mind but now also with my body and its uncalled-for pregnancy. It was making me nauseous and causing pain in my breasts and other unworthy symptoms—unworthy, that is, of the work to which I was called.

  He was by nature an impatient, irascible man, especially when interrupted or obstructed in his train of thought. For me his wrath was like a storm at sea or a mountain avalanche, where I could only cower and pray—and on that day this is what I did, hiding my head in my arms. At the sound of his raging voice Hedda came bursting in, overcoming her own fear of the closed door and even without knocking. She was intent on a rescue mission—rescuing him, that is, from the storm of blood rushing into his brain (it is his high blood pressure that Debbie has inherited). She didn’t ask what had caused his outburst but said, with her heavy humor, that it couldn’t be all that bad, we’re not all going to be hanged, are we? So why not just sit down quietly and drink the cup of good coffee that she would make and bring for him. She called him by his first name, Helmut—the name I never used; for me the most intimate address was Hoch without the Professor, and that only when we were alone together in some place away from home. He was spluttering with fury but did what she said and sat down. I was still holding my head in my hands, but neither of them took any notice of me. When I looked up, I saw them together like that, husband and wife; she was caressing his sleeve, but at the same time her eyes swept over my sheets of translation spread over the desk. She wore the usual impassive expression she reserved for my work with him; it was the one task she had to delegate, for her English never became good enough for her to displace me. She waited for him to simmer down, then said she would make that cup of good coffee for him. She didn’t offer me any, and I saw it was time to leave them together.