Elements of time, colored by memory, become paintings. You can paint a life, try to give it form or content. You look at patterns, synchronicities; you imagine the discarded images — what might have been — questions of choice, or fate. Your life is no longer linear, but hangs before you like pictures in a museum: glimpsed, studied, observed. You can try to make sense of it in its museum form: yes, the characters portrayed are often the same — is there a story here, a plot? But why, always, the writer’s urge to shape, explain, order? A writer’s life has its own disordered logic: certain signs, often slow to emerge. Hidden by elements of time, revealed by memory. Images form, at best a story, at least an identity.
Sofia, Bulgaria, Summer 1978
I sit talking with the woman in her apartment, Komplex Lenin. She is my friend’s mother: she has a soft, sweet face, wears her treacle-colored hair in an old-fashioned chignon. I call her Mama Vesse, which is what her grandchildren call her. I would like to think of her as a motherly character in my life; my own mother died eleven years ago. She is telling me she always reads the letters I send to her daughter Christina. She enjoys these letters, a voice from the West, what she or her daughter might have written if they had lived elsewhere. She tells me I will be a writer some day. I laugh, disbelieve her, plead laziness and incompetence. She shakes her head at me, insisting.
Haskovo, Bulgaria, March 1975
All evening they have entertained me but I cannot stay. We will all get in trouble with the authorities: they have tried, and failed, to get me a certificate of lodging that would allow me to visit ‘legally.’ Haskovo is a sensitive area, too near the Turkish border. So I will tell the officers at the border, should they ask, that I was at a party until three in the morning. The party is small: my friend Krasimira, who has driven with me all the way from Switzerland, where we both live and study, and her cousins, and a handful of neighbors. One of the neighbors, an elegant woman with dark hair and gypsy eyes, reads my fortune in the filigree pattern left by the coffee in the bottom of my cup. There are darkly handsome men here, who will help you; you will pass this way often. On the way to the border I think of what she has foretold. I am alone on this dark March-frosted road, until I see in the rear-view mirror the dim shape of an old bus. It follows me, ghostly, without headlamps; I light the way in my small Volkswagen. It does not occur to me to be afraid: I am too young, and this is an adventure which nothing will spoil. But I feel a nervousness of not belonging, as if a strange warning has been beamed from the extinguished headlamps. A gypsy curse, perhaps, of wandering, belonging nowhere, searching. At the Turkish border I encounter a group of darkly handsome Iranian students, homeward bound in their British-registered Mercedes and Rovers. They invite me to Teheran; I cannot, I say, I am meeting friends in Greece after four days in Istanbul. They invite me instead to convoy with them as far as my friends’ house in Istanbul. I feel strangely protected now when I look in the rearview mirror, but this protection too is a constant reminder that I do not belong: a woman travelling alone.
Dogubayazit, Turkish-Iranian border, July 1986
We are camping on a hillside overlooking the mosque of Ali Pasha. In the valley to the east, the sand hills of Iran. I am with my English husband of six months and my seven-year-old daughter, Amy. Alan and I have been sick with some form of food poisoning — the pastirma we bought in Kayseri? The heat-curdled Irish Cream? — and we lie beneath an awning I have rigged with an old sarong from the car to the tent. The heat is metallic, crushing. Amy plays with the Turkish children in the house behind us. They have goats, dogs, cats, sheep, hens, rabbits. She is not afraid of not understanding their language; they find a language of play. For a short while longer there will be no question of belonging. When did I cease to belong? Was it in second grade, in New Haven, Connecticut, when I was sent to an exclusive private school that I immediately hated? Where I was the smallest, and skinniest, and smartest, and had a last name that rhymed with ‘dope?’ Was it when a freckle-faced redhead named Ellen Jenkins punched me in the stomach on the playground, as if to make me physically aware of my exclusion? One day I went up to the teacher and said, ‘I hate you.’ As if she were somehow responsible; as if she could take the blame.
Mazamet, France, Spring 1960
There is a strange and wonderful smell in this place. A smell of gutters or a stagnant river, repellant yet sweet at the same time. My mother and I are staying for a month with my older sister Mary Anna, who was married two years ago to a Swiss pastor she met in New Haven. Mazamet is his first parish. They have an infant son, Christopher. I am very proud to be an aunt at the age of nine. My sister scolds me when I drop a pebble from the window to the top of his pram in the courtyard three floors below. Yet I knew it would not hurt him; my aim is good, for dropping pebbles on prams. I eat my first yoghurts, rich and creamy with berry flavors. I play with the children from the apartment downstairs, the Cadier family. My mother tells me with a conspiratorial tone that they are Catholic: that is why there are twelve children. We play cards, I learn their names, but I am often frightened by their language in which they can hide and tease. My sister teaches me some card game words, c’est à toi, gagné, bataille. She buys me an elementary school history book that I find endlessly fascinating with its pictures of Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, the Revolution and its guillotine. I am frustrated that I cannot read the text; I want to know everything. There is a hill we climb to a crumbling medieval ruin, a castle called Hautpoul. I am drawn to its decay, its ancient stones: this is perhaps the first thing I have found in the outside world which fascinates and absorbs me. Until now I have always sought to escape from the real world, from classmates and adults, by entering an alternative world, in play with dolls, or in reading. They take me to Carcassonne, a whole medieval walled city, intact. It is beautiful, but too close to a world of fairy tales, for beautiful princesses. I prefer the broken grandeur of Hautpoul: its inexplicable demise, its haunted abandonment.
Mazamet, France, September 1986
We drive through, so quickly, stopping only at a bakery for some croissants. We have spent the last four months driving through quickly, from the north of England to the Turkish-Iranian border and back. What are we fleeing from? We drive through France with the urgency of refugees, looking for a place to settle. My French has been fluent since I moved to Switzerland at the age of sixteen; now my husband wants to learn French, and it seems sensible to find work in a place we like so that he can fulfill this project. I tell him I was here when I was nine years old. He does not seem to care; rather, he resents my memories. The miles through Greece, through Bulgaria, were planted with memories like land mines; I never knew when one might explode, spoil the day, destroy the illusion of newly-wed happiness. That dinner in the Plaka, at the foot of the Acropolis? Or the conversations with Christina and her husband in their flat in Sofia? I have learned to bury the past, deeper, to where it can not hurt us. It lies buried beneath Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, places we had planned to visit but did not, so raw was our anger with each other. So now I do not look for Hautpoul as we drive through Mazamet, do not tell Alan about the Cadier family and the card games and the taste of yogurt and the smell of the river. We go to Carcassonne, mingle, lose ourselves among the crowds of tourists. A fire-eater performing in a medieval square fascinates my daughter.
New Haven, Connecticut, 1964
I am in a private girls’ school, where I am a good student. I have been elected president of the ninth-grade class. I am not popular, merely neutral and respected. This is the first and last time I will hold office. Student council meetings seem, already, to be subtly political, a place for back-patting and showing off. I am bored by the tedium of it, but I do the job, without enthusiasm. My English teacher is an older white-haired woman, tall and gaunt, with an accent from elsewhere, perhaps British, and a stern, fair smile. We read Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, the Romantic poets. She likes me, encourages me, begs me to cut my bangs so she can see my face. She gives me in exchange the words to hide behind. On certain days — perhaps it has something to do with the weather — there is a smell from the gutters which reminds me of Mazamet.
Lausanne, Switzerland, 1969
This teacher is old and jowled and white-haired, and he does not have our respect. With the others in the class — all girls — we knit under the desks during his lectures. He drones; it is rumored that he has given the same lectures for fifty years, and he still has a strong Swiss-German accent. But in the drone there is a music, a faint melody I strain to hear, perhaps alone of all the busily knitting students. He is teaching us Russian history: the princes of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov. There is something wild and exotic and dangerous here. A classmate, aware of my interest, gives me a book of stories, in English, by Alexander Pushkin. It is a lovely book, illustrated, bound in red leather with gold leaf: her father works for the printer who made the book, and they don’t read English. I have never heard of Pushkin before, have grown up on a steady diet of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. I take the book home, read ‘The Captain’s Daughter’, ‘Dubrovsky.’ I borrow Russian operas from the library, ‘Boris Godunov’, ‘Evgeni Onegin,’ ‘Prince Igor.’ I read Tolstoy and Turgenev. I study Russian from an old textbook with yellowing Soviet paper. I try not to look at the photographs of Lenin, of smiling girls in kerchiefs on the seats of tractors, of cheering Pioneer children. The Soviet Union frightens as much as Russia fascinates.
Thomasville, North Carolina, 1961.
We are spending a year in the town where my father grew up. I love it here. We live in a log cabin by a pond; there are fields with horses, forests to explore. My classmates adopt me, even with my Yankee accent, which I quickly lose. We have a club, with dreadful initiation ceremonies involving blindfolds and cold spaghetti. I dance the twist, go to my first boy-girl birthday party, where spin-the-bottle replaces pin the tail on the donkey. I even kiss a boy. I have a new red dictionary for school. There is a word I want to look up, because I hear it often, on the radio, at school, and I don’t know what it means, really. It sounds like a disease, a plague, and people who have it should be exterminated, I understand. It is evil. I am so afraid of the word that I close the dictionary without looking. Communism.
Moscow, July 1972
We are in the green belt an hour from Moscow via metro, bus, hydrofoil, still within the limits of where I am allowed to travel. It is very warm; summer is generous here. We walk through green, fragrant fields; we stop and eat raw peas. There is a village, Aksakovo, with a derelict church. My friends are Sasha, Alyosha, Natasha; I stopped attending Russian class after my first week, after we met at an ice-cream stand. They are art students; they teach me Russian, they teach me something else, too, an incomparable art for living. Simplicity, humor, their melancholy tenderness. They have a guitar; we make a fire, eat a picnic of hot stew, drink insane quantities of vodka and samogon. We sleep in the field by the river under a thick canvas tarp. It is the hottest summer they can remember; peat-soil forests burn out of control. They teach me gypsy songs and poems by Sergei Esenin. (Do svidanya, drug moi, do svidanya…) They take me to the circus; they take me to see Rublev’s icons; they teach me the painting of Russia. The Tretyakov gallery becomes a place of recurring, familiar breathlessness. They take me to visit an old aunt who lives in an isba without running water or electricity. She fetches her water with a bucket slung over a pole; she remembers the tsar, she still admires Stalin, because he defeated the Germans. She makes us tea from a real samovar, using coals. The warm summer evenings, vodka-lengthened; there is some mischief here too, and furtive love-making, and at night the Italian students sing sweet, melancholy songs outside the windows of the dormitory, like lullabies.
Moscow, July 1976
The two summers merge, four years apart, yet divided irretrievably by time, weather, age. It is as cold and wet now as it was hot then. Our dorm and classes are miles from the center of town on a vast showplace campus for third-world students. Sasha is married now; when his wife is at work he takes me on picnics with their small daughter to parks where berries and mushrooms grow. He is, curiously, unemployed. We fall in love and nourish our sadness like a rare flower. ‘Nye grusti, Alisonchik,’ he says often. Don’t be sad. Yet he is the one who will stay behind. I will forget him too quickly. I will return to Greece, where I now live, teaching Russian to Bulgarian diplomats’ children who speak it better than I do; on the island of Samos I will listen to Russian folk songs for a time, then I will meet another man. I will forget Sasha as I must forget him: how much of the intensity of that short, melancholy love came from its finite nature, the knowledge that it could not follow me, that there could be no letters or phone calls? The double walls of his marriage and his country.
Athens, June 1978
In a friend’s guest room, the small test tube, the purple unbroken circle, telling me I am pregnant. I am neither ecstatic nor upset; perhaps bemused, wondering at this strange new turn my life has taken. I am not married, but the father, Antoni, the soldier I met on Samos and with whom I have lived on and off for two years — tempestuously, impossibly — has always said he would marry me if I were pregnant. A Catholic Greek from the island of Syros: for him, fertility in a woman is all. I have a sense of something coming to an end. This wild freedom to wander across Europe in search of love or belonging: perhaps I will find a place now, with this man and this child and this country that too is like a lover. But first I must travel again, one last time.
Zlatni Piassatsi, Bulgaria, July 1978
Christina has two children now; my child is a whisper in my belly, hardly disturbing me in my thoughts or body. With her husband Zdravko we have bounced across pot-holed roads to the seaside to join her in the town she has flown to with the children. They are small and querulous and she keeps a strict regime. On a day of clouds I escape the claustrophobia of family and come alone to the deserted beach. I sit on the cold sand and write to my sister that she is, at last, about to become an aunt. I am nervous, eager for her approval; I am not married, nor am I sure I will be. A small bird approaches, hopping across the sand. I stretch out my hand and the bird submits to my caress, confidently. This softness, the tiny head so light that pressure is meaningless. It seems a good omen.
Kaiafa, Peloponnese, August 1978
I am sitting alone in the dunes where Donald and I have been camping. Donald is the friend who will never be a lover: there is a freedom in our friendship which is at times more wonderful than love. I will ask him one day to marry me, mostly in jest, but I cannot think of another man I have liked more. We spend long hours at tavernas drinking Amstel or retsina and talking about love and Greeks and the meaning of life; we spend equally long hours in companionable silence, reading, sunbathing, sleeping chastely side by side, often on the beach. I tell him he looks like the wild man of Borneo when he emerges from his sleeping bag in the morning. Now I sit alone and watch the turquoise-mirrored sunset, and I feel the child inside me for the first time, not yet moving but as a presence, an incredibly strong force, an incredible source of strength and well-being to me. I know, too — a premonition — that when I return to Syros it will be finished with Antoni, that I will raise this child alone, that I may have to leave Greece altogether. If I am to stay here, I hope the child will be a boy; but already I am wishing, in a deeper, truer place, for a girl.
Kaiafa, Peloponnese, April 1986
We have two tents pitched among the pines by the railroad track. Gypsies have stolen my gold-framed eyeglasses; the Greek air force shaves the tops of trees with its fighter jets. With my English husband and half-Greek daughter we clean the beach of garbage — toxic cans meant for burial at sea wash up here to poison the villagers. It is Greek Easter but somnolent and marriage-tense we miss it. Chernobyl is spreading its cloud over us but we do not know that either; we have not seen a paper or heard the news since we arrived a week ago. We fight constantly, dark, brooding arguments. Sometimes, brief reprieves, we laugh and hold each other as we wash our dishes in the sand, in the polluted Ionian Sea. I should be happy, married at last at thirty-five. And this man loves me. Dare I even think that I miss Donald; and the sunset-hued symbiosis with my daughter, begun here eight years ago, has been broken by a man’s neediness, by my own greed for his attention. Other things are born here with the secret spreading cloud: guilt, resentment, a terrible self-censorship which will deny the past. Only now the writer retrieves the past; makes it whole, gives it life again. What we do to ourselves, to others, in the name of love. A belief system, a dogma, becoming tyrannical, in oneself, in the loved one, when one loves so badly. Writing is still years away from this beach at Kaiafa, but the need is slowly nourished, the answer to one’s loneliness not always to be found in other people.
Marina Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, July 1993
Alan, my English husband, has gone away for two weeks, helping deliver a boat to San Diego. I wake early, pick up the spiral notebook that has become a friend, a lover. I have begun work on a novel: my third attempt, but this time feels different. Is it because I am away from California, where we have lived for the last five years, and its overbearing influence, or is it because I feel myself to be on the edge of my marriage and there is such freedom in the space between the seed of the story and the pen on the page? The novel will be published, though of course I cannot know that now, cannot believe that the early morning dreams in Mexico will change my view of my place in the world, give me at last a curious sense of belonging. The novel will suffer as strange a fate as that of its heroine, Amelia Earhart; in publication I will lose innocence even where I gain identity. There is an intangible happiness in that innocence, like this life in Mexico, soon to vanish forever: palm fronds dipped in sunlight, distant strains of a mariachi band at sunset, first raindrops bringing a burning chill as they wake me where I lie, my face to the stars, beneath the open hatch of the sailboat that brought me to this place of dreams.
Off the coast of Monterey, California, November 1992
America is electing a new president but we have left behind all sense of belonging to a land-bound society with its laws and choices. Our 30-foot ketch Little Bit is our citadel, our only rampart against nature. Now we lie trembling on the floorboards, listening in fear to the rising, swelling waves as they bear down on our small wooden boat like shells upon a besieged city; we do not know if one of those huge waves will seize a decisive moment, cause the boat to founder, taking with it our dreams, perhaps our lives. I try to pray; although I am not a believer; I hold Alan’s hand; I hear the cockpit fill yet again, feel the boat skewer in the trough as she tries to keep her balance, hove-to with her wind-taught jib. There is nothing to be done but wait, cruelty made tangible in time beyond measurement, a space of fear, death whispering in the wings, life hovering in our shivering prayers. My daughter sleeps on, unaware, with the curious faith children have in their parents; the cat, closer to the elements, mews pitifully when we look at her. Thirty-six hours later we struggle into Monterey harbor, survival-high, sleep-deprived. All day we have heard voices, choruses, strange celestial radios as we beat up past Big Sur to return to civilization. The harbormaster laughs incredulously when we ask who won the presidential election; he fails to understand the existence of parallel worlds.
Lausanne, Switzerland, December 1981 - January 1982
I draw closer to the hospital bed. He takes my hand, places my fingers against his upper arm. Metastases, he says, with a kind of pride, because it is all he can do, to thumb his nose at the disease — or is it to provoke me, because he senses my fear of death? The nodules on his arm are the size of cherries; he knows they will kill him a month from now; he knows this. He is my brother-in-law, the jovial, severe, life-loving and larger-than-life Swiss pastor who, together with my sister, has looked after me since my mother died, with fury, humor, compassion beyond all call of family duty. When I was seventeen and impossible, ringed by a self-absorption as unbroken as a wall of mirrors, he dared, only son of an autocratic, aristocratic Swiss family, to slap my face, shattering the barrier between myself and others, allowing me entry into a life where sharing was possible, where happiness could be sought and found in a mirrored exchange. Now the characteristic color is gone from his cheeks; he looks so much older than fifty. He both fights and accepts the disease, and has been on national television to talk about cancer, about knowledge and acceptance, about the need for honesty. I cannot believe he will die; I want to say to him, to my sister, to myself, that the doctors will save him, that there are miracles. I have been raised in a culture that both refuses and trivializes death: now he shows me another, perhaps the first, truth. He is stubborn, defiant in his acceptance, impatient of tears or grief. On the morning of his death, they call me; his sister Sylvie greets me at the house. I do not know yet that he has already died. When Sylvie says, C’est fini, I do not at first understand what she means, because I do not want to understand. Only the weeping, the embracing, the silence tell me what was too hard to put into words. I go into the bedroom: perhaps I touch his hand, defiance in the midst of my fear. Perhaps I merely whisper, Au revoir, and feel shame: all the things he has done for me, and I have never known how to show my gratitude. All morning I sit with my niece and nephew in a sort of silly stupor; we play cards, giggle disrespectfully. They cannot believe their father has died. Yet in our horrible laughter there is a kind of nervous release, a submission like that of fractious children to things too serious for them to understand. My daughter, two years old at the time, questions his absence. Il est où, Clem? she will ask, repeatedly. I do not remember what we tell her, how long it will be before she understands, or his face leaves her unformed memory.
Vaison-la-Romaine, France, Summer 1981
A dust-warm road leads through a grove of Mediterranean pines. Into a bright patch my small daughter runs, her sturdy brown legs coaxing sunlight. I stay behind in shade, and watch: her long brown hair braided and coiled above her cheeks, her little face a tease to beauty, to human tenderness before small, young lives. I feel a suffusion of light and love within me, despite shade, as if the promise of Kaiafa were ripening to burst in this perfect light. This perfect life.
Vaison-la-Romaine, France, Summer 1994
In the silent, unmoving portions of the warm days she is, I know, reading my unpublished novel, the one I began in Mexico. My older sister, long-time figure of authority, role model, successful wife, mother, journalist, author, career woman, writing teacher. Her children are grown, have children of their own; long-widowed she does not fear solitude, spends weeks at a time in her house in the deserted Provençal countryside, writing, reading, gardening, preparing perfect little meals. I admire her, have sometimes feared her; now she is reading my novel. It is a slow thing, the building of an audience, the only mark of a writer’s career. First, there is the immediate family: my husband, who has said he likes the book, has given some good criticism — would he dare to give negative criticism? Now my second reader, my sometimes brutally honest sister, will give her professional point of view. She does not gush or enthuse, states calmly what she likes, what works less. Thinks I might get it published, but cannot really judge the American market. Neither of us can imagine that a year from now she will be exclaiming to friends how her petite soeur has found a major New York publisher; or that two years from now she will listen to my tales of publishing lunches and the glib false promises made by editors, agents, publishers and publicists, will commiserate that my audience — now in the thousands — is easily swayed by marketing forces beyond an author’s control, forces that have nothing to do with talent or honesty or even perseverance. But this is in the future. In this warm innocent summer of 1994 she reads my novel while I knit and dream and absorb the smells and colors and light. I cannot write here; Provence is too lovely. I need opposition, deprivation, struggle, in order to write.
San Francisco, 1988
The office is shining, luxurious, expensive, typical of many such offices, but I have never worked in an office before. I have no window, no view; from his office the president sees the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, Coit Tower, the Golden Gate. They pay me well to answer phones, open mail, greet the people who arrive hasty and nervous — artists, doctors, teachers — to plead for funds from the legacy of a billionnaire. And in between, I am bored and unhappy. My life has not prepared me for this: five years studying French and Russian literature in Lausanne, two years of translation studies in Geneva. Nearly ten years of teaching English as a second language in Greece, Switzerland and France. But my diplomas are not recognized in the United States, my resume is too bizarre (Russian? Greece?), and I have been lucky to get even this job, because my former headmistress in New Haven is the mother of one of the program officers. I cannot keep doing this all my life; I’ll go mad. I will teach myself to use the computer. Slowly, when no one is looking, I begin to fill it with words: a translation, then a detective thriller I make up to placate my screaming brain. Over the years I will become expert at juggling the need to survive (rent, food, books and music) with my brain’s allergy to boredom. My words will fill many computers in San Francisco during lulls and lunchtime — stealthily, like children playing hide and seek. It is also my way of protesting against a society so relentlessly rooted in work. I will weave successive drafts of translations and novels — my best pleasure, ultimately my best work — into the hours I sacrifice to schools, corporations, insurance companies, law offices, medical associations, even foreign consulates. Sometimes I like to think we are numerous in our subversive activities, writers and poets of the switched screens, the hidden windows. Like revolutionaries plotting our liberation into creativity.
Lausanne, October 1970
I am about to start university. I am sitting in a small café across the street from the old building where my first classes will be held. This is the old town; the shadow of the cathedral spire falls upon the classrooms, spearing us with history. I am unaware of a dark-haired young woman watching me — I am writing something in a notebook, chronicling my romantic, hormonal longings, no doubt; she is fascinated by the ease with which I sit alone, in my own space, using my time for myself. I will never know whether this is an American faculty (particularly where women are concerned), some legacy of my strong, widowed grandmother, or some determination on the part of my university professor father that his daughters would be different. So this young woman watches me, and will tell me, much much later, how my quiet self-sufficiency impresses her. She is from Bulgaria; she feels her way nervously into the West, for so many reasons, not least of all that she is also a woman on her own. Later, when we first meet in Russian class, she will astound us, beginners all, with her fluency; she confuses the professor, who doesn’t quite know what to do with her. I am sorry when she leaves the class — she is exotic, intriguing (perhaps the next best thing to a real Russian, I might be thinking) — then pleased when I meet her again in my English class. Her English is even better than her Russian. She is drawn to me, the only American, as I am to her; we find friendship in this complementary opposition to the world where we grew up, in which we have often felt uncomfortable.
Karloukovo, Bulgaria, September 1974
Christina has been married for four months; her husband Zdravko is a doctor in this deserted village, where the only industry is a psychiatric hospital. The sun bakes the brown hills into a ceramic landscape, parched and dusty, unglazed. We spend our time talking, there is always so much to talk about. So much laughter here, too: the hardship of the regime breeds a special humor, for survival. Christina and Zdravko have a pet hedgehog, whose name is Esh. He eats lettuce; we eat green peppers charred and stuffed with eggs and feta cheese. I meet Ivan Grinin, one of the patients; he sings to me in French, proudly, all the French he knows: Tombe la neige, tu ne viendras pas ce soir. In the balmy evenings we go to the river; Christina catches fish by merely looking at the water, it seems. Zdravko is shamed by his failure to catch anything; he is a large curly-haired man with an awkward toddler’s gait and the perpetual melancholy of a Slavic opera singer. One evening they take me in the fading light to the dog hole. We gather stones on our way; it is a dark well where stray dogs were thrown, years ago; in blindness they breed and feed on each other or what the villagers happen to throw them in jest. We toss our stones into the pit; they resonate, meters into the earth, until the pitiful barking begins, a hollow, mournful plea. How memories — places in particular — stay with us. One day I will write an entire book based upon an afternoon’s chance visit in a dusty Bulgarian village. Life and words circling, spirals deepening as we understand. Growing older, too, we can weave fate with words, stitching the incidents of the past together, until the tapestry forms the image. The unseen dogs; our astonished faces; the fiction that arose, years later. Finding metaphors in our own lives.
Bansko, Bulgaria, January 1996
The cold is sharp and shining as a knife blade. Icicles hang from eaves and branches and the snow sparkles with a visual intensity, crystals crisping drily in my nostrils, my lungs. I cannot remember ever feeling such cold. It makes me miserable and yet, because I am in a strange place of still worse, relentless misery, the cold adds to my martyrdom and thereby offers a curious relief, vindication, distraction. Christina and her children have gone to the ski slopes, where the exercise will keep them warm. They are so healthy and active it puts me to shame; I have not skied since 1973, when an accident on the slopes left me scarred and wary. I envy the ease with which my friend can use and challenge her body, but have learned, for the most part, to place my own challenges elsewhere. But today every step is a challenge: I have been ill, and there is the cold, the apathy and depression which have caused me to lose twenty pounds in a month. My marriage has come to a sudden, brutal end: I have been pushed off a cliff into a void of feeling, of future, of belonging. I hardly know at times why I am here except to try to gain some strength: because Christina has also known this terrible state, and is proof that it does not last; because this journey might be a way of going back to the past, of re-creating certain links severed by marriage: independence, a fruitful solitude, the company of friends, the distraction of travel. For a month I have been peddling my misery all over Europe, to friends who will listen, commiserate, offer hope. But even hope flirts with me, sharpens cruelty; the break is not clean and my refusal to accept, my stubborn grasp on hope intensify the blackness, like this unrelenting cold. I am walking through the small town, each step a penance, dutiful. I must get out, defy this misery. Somewhere, a church bell has begun to ring, a deep, hoarse Slavic tolling, otherworldly. I turn, try to orient myself to the source of the ringing, pick my way carefully over frozen, slippery earth. In the distance is the bell tower; I can see the bells swinging. I follow the sound and it spreads through me, growing louder, a call and a promise. I find the church behind its high wall and enter the darkness. The void of sentiment is suddenly, inexplicably filled with the deep tolling, the comforting darkness of the church, its flickering candles, the stern and questioning faces of the icons. The cold, the longing, the ache have crystallized into something else, a promise of renewed possibility, a return to life. I light candles, obey a foolish ritual I have repeated many times, of bartering the light for the restoration of my marriage. But the essential is not there: it is in what happened when the music of the bell shattered the cold clear sky. Something both final and initial, like a call from life itself, a restoration to faith, a reassurance that life would look after me. In Bansko I will begin to write again. If I cannot ski, and can barely read, my thoughts too vivid and intrusive, then I must write. For weeks I have appeased misery by chronicling it in a diary, but in Bansko I will resume work on a novel. It will be a flawed, unhappy draft, but it will be like a daily call to prayer, a safe, strong ritual.
The Aegean, Lent, 1977
The ferry is crowded with Greeks headed to their islands for Easter. I am on my way to Syros to see my boyfriend, and am lucky to find a seat. I settle in, pull out a magazine in French. Next to me a young Greek woman sits reading a newspaper. We have not exchanged greetings, but now she sees my magazine and asks me if I am French. In her voice is the respectful and wishful curiosity of those who have their own reasons for hoping you are this, or that, and if you meet their expectations, hoping that something of you will rub off on them. I have my complicated answer ready, because this has happened before: no, I’m not French, I’m American, but I live in Switzerland, in the French-speaking part. Everything held in that little word but: an apology, a justification, perhaps even my own secret wish that I were Swiss or French? No, I am only American, I seem to be saying, signomi, excuse me; for Vietnam is still an open wound, the Greeks blame the CIA for the seven years of military dictatorship which have only recently ended, and they want the US bases out of the country. The girl gets up from her seat, leaves without saying a thing. Her departure from her precious seat indicates the degree of her indignation. I am shocked: I have been given an identity, through a lens of misperception, that I have not chosen. I never became Swiss, despite sixteen years spent there; I did not marry the Greek father of my daughter (nationality would have been automatic, there), nor did I become British, because we did not live in England. The Swiss think I’m Swiss, the French think I’m French; Americans often think I’m Canadian. Nationality confers identity through the eyes of the beholder, I have learned. And when you are not what people expect, you confuse them, disturb them in their easy tribal notions of where you belong. My early experience of not belonging, even in such a vast and diverse country, has stayed with me through most of my life. I have found roots in my uprootedness, my gypsy restlessness; I have found belonging in language.
Thomasville, North Carolina, summer 1961
I don’t think I like my life very much. A place of heat and boredom and grown-ups smoking and drinking too much and never having any time for me, unless I beg and wheedle them to take me to the toy store, buy some new clothes for my dolls, or a new Black Stallion book. I’ve found a secret way to escape my life. I invite new friends to visit at night, in the pages of my spiral notebooks. They are sisters, orphans, and they run a riding stable and have adventures on horseback. Horses are so much nicer than people. You always think something bad is going to happen to the sisters — that they’ll get hurt, or won’t win the blue ribbon at the horse show — but it never does. They have wonderful lives, and they take me with them. Even though I’m not really a very good rider, and I’m a little bit afraid of horses, with them I ride well and I’m never afraid.
Sifnos, Greece, Spring 1978
They sell lovely hardback notebooks here. You can imagine the Greek schoolchildren using them for their history classes. Pericles, Thermopylae, the Trojan War. Or learning Homer, better still. Writing verse in their looping Greek handwriting. I am trying, in this rooftop room rattled by wind, circled by sunlight, to be worthy of this notebook. I stare at the blue lines, the brown binding, the classical Greek warrior with his helmet, and wait. Surely I have so many stories to tell — where then is inspiration? Why this silence, only the rattling wind, the occasional braying of a mule? Or my reading: can’t that help? I read good books now, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Kazantzakis. The place, too, is so exceptionally beautiful, the most Cycladic of all Greek islands, unspoiled and vibrant with light and the harsh poetry of its villages, lace-draped over the terraced hillsides. But I cannot write. I stopped writing long ago, in school in Lausanne. Wrote only what had to be written: wrenching last-minute Sunday afternoon dissertations on Phèdre, on Rousseau. Or the final obligation, the long thesis devoted to Boris Pasternak for my degree. I’ve written nothing since, except effusions in diaries. I don’t know why I think that because I am in a rooftop room in a medieval Greek village I should “be a writer.” The wind drops, silence settles.
New Haven, Connecticut, summer 1967
My father has forbidden my brother Tony to come to the house to see either me or our mother. Goddamn it, Tony, I’ll disinherit you if you come anywhere near here. I have never seen such foolish anger. Nor do I know what my brother has done to deserve this. He is seven years older than I am. He is a student and wants to be a writer. He has already lived in Paris and Vienna. He sends us Le Nouvel Observateur (I read the funny page) and one year he sent us a Sachertorte in the mail: it was in a wooden box with “Sacher” in big letters, a strange cake with a thick chocolate crust like a shell, cracked and crazed by shipping but with the rich inner flavor of elsewhere intact. I have my driver’s license so I lie and take my parents’ car to the place where Tony is staying. We go on long secret drives and he tells me what music to listen to (Mahler, Fauré), and what books to read. He talks to me about France, about Gustave Flaubert and Jean-Paul Sartre, but mostly it’s over my head, I’m not that interested, but I like being with him. There is a passion, an intelligence here that I find nowhere else. And we are defying our father. We drive past places he has loved: the house where he grew up (I was too young to remember), the houses of friends, temples to mischief and first kisses. He speaks so vividly that I am moved to tears. He is a strange interruption in my adolescent life of Rolling Stone concerts and Yale mixers and the catty chatter of teenage girls. He seems to speak from a place that is grand and noble and true. Like a priest he confers a blessing on me. You’re going to be a writer someday, Ali. His words, later echoed by others, puzzle but go deep. There they will remain, buried but not forgotten, working their way slowly to the surface. Through the distractions of travel, the constraints of work and marriage, the peaceful completion of motherhood. Searching, still, for the heat-filled intensity of those summer afternoons, the sense of something vibrant, essential, true.
Mykonos, Greece, February 1996
My landlady brings me stews and spanakopita and sweet pickled fruit. Because it is winter, and tourists are rare. Her name is Maria and she dresses in black; she seems to have an instinctive understanding of this peculiar solitude of mine, despite the difference in our age and culture. I am here to write. I spend most of the day in the cold dim room, with its view on a stark hillside of flat-roofed white houses and dovecotes. I will finish the first draft of the novel I resumed in Bansko a month ago. The mornings are the best time, when I make a frothy nescafé, the way Donald and I used to, (first beating the powder with the sugar and a teaspoon of water into a paste), and eat thick honey-laced yoghurt. In this way I find small emblems of continuity, even if the rest, what I took for both an immediate and lasting reality, has been broken. In the afternoon I walk to the windmills, sit and look out over the Aegean — cold, wind-shirred — in the direction of Syros, where my daughter’s father lives, where I lived briefly. The ferry called there on its way to Mykonos. The city of Ermoupolis spread like vestments over a king’s knees (the Catholic church on one hilltop, the Orthodox on the other) and bathed in an apricot light between two rain-storms. And in this vision was my life coming full circle: when I had last seen this harbor one life was ending, another beginning, as I left Greece behind to return to Switzerland to have my child. Now my daughter was grown up. I wondered, briefly, if I should leave the ferry here, at Syros, and look for her father. But there was something in that apricot light, those houses peaceful in the winter air, that did not want to be disturbed. This generous view from the deck of the ferry was all that was needed, for now. A crystallization of time, sharp and brilliant, trenchant. I am joined at the windmill by an elderly man, burly and bearded, with thick glasses. He wears the fisherman’s cap, carries heavy amber worry beads. We exchange greetings, then he asks the requisite, Apo pou eisai? This typical Greek curiosity, wanting right away to know where I am from, my perceptible identity; this curiosity with which they will play, entering exchange. I feel confessional and tell him my current circumstances, my past life in Greece, briefly, with humor and a certain honesty. He could be my father. But I am not really surprised when, after some time, he offers to give me a filaki, a little kiss. I laugh and decline, gracefully, with a wealth of excuses. He wants to console me, he says. He tells me his name is Zorba. I don’t for a minute believe it is his real name; Zorba was from Macedonia. But like Zorba he has an image of himself which has not changed in fifty years: the young Greek god who seduces women, preferably blondes. The Swedes, he sighs, ah the Swedes. Don’t I want to take his picture, he urges. Don’t worry, I tell him, I‘ll take your picture, with words. I’ll write about you. But it’s not the same, he protests; he has been in many films, too. The women love him. And yes, I do love talking with him, admitting the strange magic of this encounter in the winter Cycladic light, the sun low on the water, a millennial chill in the air that breathes of a past before tourism, before Swedish girls and bared skin. Zorba is ingenuous, even in his old age. And he has the curiously Greek gift, or facility, of making even the most trivial concerns seem like a subject worthy of philosophy, an intense interest in, and understanding of the present moment. I wonder if he has a wife and children somewhere; I wonder at the curious Mykoniotis society, warped by the easy money and easy sex. That he has had to invent an identity for himself, undoubtedly for display only around foreign women, and to impress his mates, but how much of it lingers in his real life? He invites me to join him later, here at the windmills. He’ll bring a bottle of ouzo, and should he bring some condoms? By now I am cold, and just vaguely annoyed. I enjoy talking with him, that’s it. But the essential has been said; he no longer seems terribly funny, only sad, undignified. I wonder if I would feel the same if he were indeed twenty or thirty years younger. Our different solitudes have no common ground, no place where they might have met, to offer comfort.
Mill Valley, California, August 1996
He is holding my published book in his hands. He turns it over, opens it, looks at the photograph on the dust jacket. Closes it again and traces the letters on the cover with his finger. Then he looks at me mischievously and says my name, slowly, mysteriously, enunciating with his heavy Slavic accent. I had not shown him the novel; he did not know I was a writer. He is the refugee, and yet for weeks he has been my refuge, my way of finding myself again, of finding reality in the midst of the curious false excitement of publication, readings, reviews, radio interviews, celebration parties. His life is simple to a point of barrenness, with all that he has lost, and yet he is generous with his time, with his heart. Why have I shown him the book? Why break the spell? Because we have been so close, and I felt it was dishonest not to? Because in any true connection with other people we must bring all of who we are, even if, slowly, those realities destroy connection? He says my name again; I say his, in the same slow, teasing way. A same number of syllables. He restores this other, still new, identity to me. I cannot restore his. We change.
Trondheim, Norway, July 1971
The gray dawn that is, in fact, an absence of night. Time set on its ear, without darkness to order sleep. I am marching through the lush countryside by the fjord, it might be two or three in the morning. I am not sleepy, it is still light, so where is habit, or sense? Besides, this moment contains more than an abnormal light: deeper within me an answering darkness has begun to spread. I do not want to believe it, do not want to believe the words I heard. I see him still, back in his bedroom — the small wooden hut with its grass roof — rocking back and forth with a curious inner keening, telling me No, he had begun to love me but could not leave the girl he was with, could not hurt her; and his family and friends, his social group, what would they think? He is my step-brother, the son of the tall, giving divorcee my widowed father met in Spain. We have known each other for perhaps a month. This is the first time for me that the wild hope of love has spread so rapidly, like a bush-fire. I walk through the pewter light, through the tall grass by the fjord, oblivious, careless, perhaps somewhat drunk on alcohol or the bitter chemicals of disappointment. Suddenly the ground opens up before me and I slide downwards, land sitting up in a deep trench, stunned and silly, laughing, crying, grateful to nature for a diversion. Is it really so easy to survive? I had thought the heart was everything. What will be a lifetime of falling into holes, when I thought I could see. Men leaving for other women, men bound to other women or to their own sense of freedom. I have been looking, no doubt, in the wrong place, under an illusion that love would be its own light. This Norwegian man will nevertheless remain my friend. He will marry the girl and divorce quickly; he will visit me in Samos when I am not free. He will marry again; our daughters will share a fever at a New Year’s Eve party. He had dreams of travelling overland to Tibet when I first knew him, he taught me a mantra. Now he has worked for the same multi-national corporation for over twenty years. His wife is a banker. They live in a big fine house overlooking the Oslofjord, full of lovely antiques. Somewhere I still have the hand-painted wooden plates his mother gave me; he has the Seth Thomas clock that used to sit in the living room when I was a child. He sends photos sometimes, at Christmas. His hairline recedes gently; his daughters grow. Does he remember coming to me in the small kitchen of his mother’s house, where I was sitting at the table, and suddenly putting his hands on my shoulders, telling me he was falling in love with me? And I had been silent, told him nothing, because I thought, already, that it was hopeless. That first touch, his hands on my shoulders, and the grey light framed still in the window, promise of dawn or of darkness. Somewhere, in an attic or storage room, there are diaries, long unread. Telling how I would visit him, later, at his father’s house, and bring fresh strawberries from the market. How when he was not looking I wrote messages to him in his copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. How I gave him this love unconditionally, even when I knew he would not return it. Somewhere, there are diaries: perhaps it is in this recording that I began, really, to write.
Trondheim, Norway, Christmas 1973
I creep into the room of the Esso Motor Hotel where my father has moved in his drunken anger, and begin to go through his things, distastefully. He is probably in the bar, which avoids a confrontation. I feel like a thief, but I am reclaiming what is mine. In his briefcase, no longer used for anything else, I find what I am looking for: the bottle of Veuve-Clicquot I had bought at the duty free as a present for my stepmother. In his anger and drunkenness he was still lucid enough to embark all the potable alcohol in the house. I drive back to my stepmother’s house, deliver my trophy. She tells me, wearily, that I shouldn’t have bothered. Later he will call me a thief, tell me I betrayed him, threaten to disinherit me. There are scenes, nasty, ugly, like the ones I remember from childhood. Only for that first brief summer with its love and undying light: he wanted to remake his life, for this sweet, unsuspecting woman; he stopped drinking altogether and became a man who might be someone’s father, charming, witty, sensible. I cannot write the words to describe the man who was not a father. He will die four months from now, ravaged by the disease he had created in his loneliness. I will learn the news in the London Underground, at a station telephone where I call the friend I am staying with. Instead of telling me where we will meet for drinks, she will tell me my sister called from Switzerland with bad news. The white bathroom tiles of the Green Park Station, the crush of commuters, the old British callboxes where you frantically pushed the 10p pieces in at the pipping sound. Not as a decor to grief: I did not cry, but welcomed the anonymity of the crowd. Not grief but a sad relief, an awareness of suffering quelled, of a lost battle ended.
Arkadi, Crete, April 1975
On this hill, in this church of sand-frail stone, in 1866, hundreds of men and women and children sought refuge from the Sultan’s armies. Rather than be captured, when defeat was imminent, the Greeks died by their own hand, igniting the explosives stored in the neighboring powder magazine. Greece is a country of ghosts, where the past is neither distant nor crystallized. I have been learning this on my journey, from the Turkish border, across to Corfu, down to Athens, and on to Crete. I am on my own again, after two weeks with fellow students from Lausanne. On my way I have visited grander, more ancient sites: Meteora, Dodoni, Delphi, the Acropolis. But here I am totally alone, the only tourist staying in one of the two rooms in the small taverna. And nowhere has history seemed so close, as if the women’s voices were still keening with the wind against the mountain. I sit on the hillside overlooking the valley, the shrine at my back. The sun is setting, trailing a sharp wind and a dreary chill of winter. I should be sad, or nervous, to be travelling alone, but here at last on this hillside I can feel the throb of the land, hear the whisper of myths. I have never been so exposed in my sheltered, fortunate life; and yet this solitude brings with it a sudden gift, a raw, tear-bright intensity of feeling, of receptivity and communication, not unlike love.
Sofia, Bulgaria, December 1996
The walls are stripped, the floors are bare and marked, all the furniture is gone but it is the same room. A gray loam of time and decrepitude sticks to windowsills and doorframes, kitchen counters, the inside of drawers and cupboards. Outside the windows snow is falling. I sit stitching old sheets together over a mattress, to protect it from dust when it will be placed into storage. The task seems endless — there are two mattresses to do — as if with each stitch I must draw myself up on thread that is ten years long, from a dark place of hurt and memory defiled. Life has come unstitched, and I sit here ridiculously with my huge needle, counting inches in my strange task. Yet it is the same room, and there are whispers of other memories, and there is grief and sadness. This is Mama Vesse’s bedroom, in the now renamed Komplex Yavorov, where I sat with her in the summer eighteen years ago. She has died after a long spell of cancer, untreated due to the lack of facilities, because what treatment there is goes to the young. I find it hard to imagine her in this gloom, this decrepitude; I remember a woman still young and vibrant, girlish as she explained to me how she had travelled recently — under Communism — to Switzerland to have a beauty mark removed. Perhaps I think of that conversation we had that summer, perhaps I don’t, so absorbed am I in my present misery. Perhaps I am thinking that it is pointless to be a writer now, if it only brings such unhappiness. (There are friends, psychologists among them, who have pointed to the relevant coincidence of my professional success and my husband’s betrayal.) Perhaps what matters at this moment is that because I want my husband back, am I prepared to give up writing? Is real life, with love, not more important? Would I have sacrificed the novel to keep him, if such things were possible?
Pictures in a museum: glimpsed, studied, observed. Rooms toured, in an arbitrary fashion, in varying directions, sometimes the left side first, sometimes the right, and when there is no way out on the far side, clockwise or anti-clockwise? And what of all the paintings not shown? For all that, a pattern emerges. Certain images which remain, echoing vibrations of memory. Moments whose significance is grasped only years later. Now I look at the woman stitching sheets over a mattress in a snow-silent room and imagine another, unpainted picture. Imagine Mama Vesse sitting there with her, what she might have said, shaking her head in confirmation: ‘You see, you are a writer now, and that is something no one can take away from you. That is who you are.’
–Written in Nevada City, California, 1997