by
Helen DeWitt
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Also in the interests of sanity I have written nothing more for posterity in several days. I have been finding this rather depressing to write—writing of Mozart I thought suddenly of my mother blundering through the accompaniment to Schubert lieder with my Uncle Buddy, Jesus, Buddy, said my mother, what’s the matter, you sing like a Goddamned accountant, and slamming down the lid stormed out of my father’s latest half-finished motel & off down the highway while my Uncle Buddy softly whistled a little tune & said nothing much. What’s the use of remembering that?
I would like to watch the rest of the film, but there is Advanced Angling to consider. I tell L that I have to go downstairs & put the heater on to type, & that he will have to stay in bed and watch the video. Of course he instantly begs to come too. I say You don’t understand, we need £150 for the rent and £60 for the council tax, that alone is £210 and as you know I make £5.50 an hour before tax, 210 divided by 5.50 is approximately 40—
38.1818
38.1818, fine,
18181818181818
the point being
1818181818181818181818181818
that if I work 10 hours a day for the next 4 days I can get the disks in Monday, we’ll get the cheque on Friday, and we can pay two bills, and if we stretch out the £22.62 we now have in the house we can also buy food.
My mother’s father was a jeweler. He was a handsome, shrewd-looking man; he was an accomplished amateur musician. He spoke excellent English, but he could hear his own accent and he knew there was something comical about it.
Buddy said he did not want to be an accountant and his father told him he had no idea the amount of work it took to be a professional musician. Five years you studied the violin his father said and did you practice five minutes? Five years piano.
Something looked through my grandfather’s eyes and it said Werner and du and mein Kind in tones of tenderness and authority. Buddy could more or less understand what was being said but he could not argue back, he tried to think of something from Schubert lieder or Wagner but it all seemed too melodramatic. Something looked through my grandfather’s eyes. It said Being an accountant, it’s not the end of the world.
Something looked at my Uncle Danny. Something looked at my aunts and it said A secretary, is that so terrible?
Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible and already there was something about them, their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.
Doom. Doom. Doom.
My mother went to the piano and sat down. She had not practiced, but in the last week she had played Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 217 times. She began to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor for the 218th time that week, and for the first time the homely man looked up from his knee.
I have to practice, said my mother, and she went to the piano. The memory of her heavy arm, with the weighted hand stumbling over the keys, was still new. She put her hands on the keys and for an hour a terrible, jerking noise came from the front room. All of the children had played the piano attractively from the age of three; no Konigsberg had ever played a scale in living memory; my grandparents had never heard anything so horrible in all their lives.
My grandparents had previously thought that nothing could be worse than to hear Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 30 times a day. They now thought they should have known when they were lucky. My grandmother went so far as to say Why don’t you play that lovely piece you were playing the other day, Linda?
I am finding it rather hard to concentrate however so may salve conscience by just touching on highlights like Sound of Music cutting from Doe A Deer to seven-part harmony or heptaphony as some people (naming no names) would probably call it.
Four hours have gone by. We have taken the Circle Line around four times. We have been to the toilet twice; L has hopped the length of the platform at Mansion House on one foot and back on the other foot; we have left the train each time at Tower Hill to make faces at the video camera & watch ourselves making faces in the banks of TVs. Or rather—you see yourself in one TV. In the others you do not appear—they show sometimes an empty platform, sometimes a platform with a few people, sometimes a platform with a train pulling around a bend. I think these are images from cameras further down the platform, but they look like glimpses into possible worlds, worlds where the sun rises and the trains run without you. There are pushchairs to be pushed but not by you, bad memories to be dodged but not by you.
I looked up to see how L was getting on. Odyssey 13–24 was lying face down on the bench; L was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t remember when I had seen him last. I thought of going to look for him, but then this would mean leaving the one place he knew to look for me.
I looked at the Odyssey to see how far he had got. My chances of not teaching him Japanese did not look good. I began leafing idly through White Fang.
I am up to Odyssey 19.322. I have stopped making cards for all the words because there would be too much to carry around but I just make cards for words that look useful. Today we went to the museum and they have a picture of the Odyssey, it is supposed to show the Cyclops but you can’t actually see him. It is called Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus. There was a card on the wall saying you can see Polyphemus on the mountain but you can’t. I told the guard they should change it and he said it was not up to him. I asked who it was up to and he said maybe the head of the gallery. I tried to get Sibylla to take me to see the head but she said he was too busy and it would be more polite to write him a letter, she said I could write him a letter and practise my handwriting. I said why don’t you write a letter. She said he had probably never had a letter from a five-year-old before, if I wrote a letter and signed it Ludo Aged Five he would pay attention to it. I think this is stupid because anybody could sign a letter Aged Five. Sibylla said true, one look at your handwriting and he won’t believe you’re a day over two. She seemed to think this was hysterically funny.
17 days to my birthday. We rode the Circle Line today because we couldn’t go back to any museums. It was tedious in the extreme. One funny thing that happened is that a lady got into an argument with Sibylla about two men who were about to be flayed alive. Sibylla explained that one of the men dies of heart failure at time t and the other at time t + n after having someone peel off his skin with a knife for n seconds and the lady said pas dev and Sibylla said I should warn you that he speaks French. Then the lady said non um non avanty il ragatso and Sibylla said not forward the boy. Not forward the boy. Not. Forward. The boy. Hmmm. I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, you clearly have a command of Italian idiom which I cannot match and the lady said she thought it was not a suitable subject for discussion in the presence of a small child and Sibylla said oh I see, and that’s how you say it in Italian. Non avanty il ragatso. I must remember that. The lady said what kind of example do you think you are setting and Sibylla said would you mind if we continued this discussion in Italian, I feel that it is not a suitable subject for discussion in the presence of a small child or as they say in Italian non avanty il ragatso. After she got off the train Sibylla said she should not really have been so rude because we should be polite to people however provoking and I should not follow her example but learn to keep my inevitable reflections to myself. She said it was only because she was a bit tired because she had not been getting much sleep and otherwise she would never have been so rude. I am not so sure but I kept my inevitable reflections to myself.