There is a story I tell on myself about a day in one of my college sections when I was so overloaded from assigned readings that I gave an example from the wrong book. Not just the wrong book for that class mind you - but an example from a Serbian novelist's book from another class that no one else there had read (Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis). I thought I was making my point masterfully, with a reference to a scene involving an outhouse no less, when I realized that the only students nodding along were the ones who never did the reading. Everyone else was looking at me like I'd lost my mind. My second confession is that I didn't finish reading Albert Memmi's Pillar of Salt that quarter and it has been with a guilty conscience that the battered copy with the USED sticker on its binding has been atop my bookshelf. It's moved with me several times since I finished by B.A. in 1999 and I finally, finally read it this year. I think I love the prologue best of all. Every time I picked it up to put it in the "sell" pile I would reread the prologue and shuffle it back in with the rest.
Prologue: "This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang. I washed my face with cold water, bathed my smarting eyes in my cupped hands, and was out of the house before the first streetcars came by full of sleepy grocers on their way to the central market. As I entered the examination hall, my name was called out, and I felt, as always, my heart beat faster. I took the seat that was marked with my name and made the acquaintance of my neighbors.
We are old hands in the game of being students, and to display any emotion now would be absurd, so much so that we even exhibit our disinterest in the tone of our conversation. My neighbor to the left is small and dark, with somber eyes set deep beneath jutting brows. His name is Bounin. Yes, he's a North African from Constantine, and already a teacher. He is taking the exam now just for sport. The degree might be useful, of course, but he is already too old to be tempted by considerations of vanity. My neighbor to the right is called Ducamps, and he affects an elegant disorder in his dress and manner, with his well cared for hair all rumpled. He is finishing the job of studying if only to have done with it all, and he detests teachers and the whole teaching profession: a fool's job hat reveals the nature of the men who choose it. Ducamps leans back in his chair, stares at us as if taunting us, and forces us to concede his complete detachment. In my turn I explain that I come from Tunis. no, Tunis has not been razed to the ground by the Germans. Have I gone through the whole reading list? No, indeed; not even the most important books, the required readings. What do I intend to do after the exams? I don't know. Bounin insists, with all of his anxiety: will I choose journalism or research? Frankly, I don't know, I no longer know.
Silence spreads from the back of the hall, hesitates, then soon dominates the anxious aisles. This is the solemn moment when the anonymous supervisors, their faces like masks, their gestures ritualistic, move in a wave along the rows of students, passing out the examination questions at the end of each table. The hands of the students feel these little squares of yellow paper, their eyes inspect them in flight. They have read the questions, and their heads rise again as they smile anxiously, though their words must remain detached. This easy banter is aimed against the future, the university, our own shameful weaknesses, and the watchful gaze of the supervisors. But we can only whisper, for silence has already triumphed. Silence. The huge hall and its hundreds of students no longer seem even to breathe. Each one of us has now identified himself with his own task, each is alone for the next seven hours.
In that moment, facing my blank sheet of white paper, I suddenly understand that these tasks no longer concern me. The spring that was taut within me is now completely released, my strength and my will power have abandoned me. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. How was I ever able to be so interested in these games that now seem so absurdly futile? Today, we are asked the following: "Analyze the influence of Condillac on John Stuart Mill."
I look around me at all my comrades. Their heads bent forward, their faces pale, their hair tangled beneath their nervous fingers, they all know what they want. All of them - the old students whose studies have been delayed by the war, and the younger whose luck has not yet run out - all are jealous of time. To gain time, to waste time. But what have I to lose? There is but one final stake for me to risk, and I perhaps have already lost it.
Bounin looks up, with a movement of his chin towards me, his fountain pen still moving, he asks: "How's it going?" Bounin's eyes are vague, he is already deep in his subject and he scarcely hears my answer. His lips sketch a smile and he bends his head again. Ducamps is examining the ceiling. he is one of those who pretend to reflect before they begin to write. I, too, appear to be thinking, but I'll not be working later. For the first time in my life I'm about to waste the time allotted to me for an exam. Within a few hours, I'll be wasting a whole year, in fact all of my life. But what have I done with my life up till now? I can no longer play this part that I've been acting.
No one looks up any more, all these backs are bent in the silent struggle. now, if I don't write, I'll attract the attention given to the defeated or the novice. I've allowed my eyes to wander all over the hall, to the painted panels of the ceiling, along the walls lined with books. I've counted the panes in the windows, the shelves of the bookcases, the aisles and bays of the hall. no, I'm not a novice and I don't want them to think that I am. I still have this absurd sense of shame, so I lower my head and pretend to write. I write anything that comes into my head, and the first hour goes by, as always, quite pleasantly.
This solace is a vice: this forgetting through writing, which is the only thing that gives me some peace of mind and distracts me from my world. I can no longer think of anything but myself. Perhaps I should begin by closing my own account. How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there's a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I'm a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself bankrupt.
To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen.
At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find my way out."
College-aged me underlined two passages midway through the novel despite being someone who almost never marks up books. I think it's because it was already so heavily highlighted before I bought it - with someone's system of "X"s and "O" as well - that I drew my own little horizontal line along the text and put my initials ek. The first is from a story the narrator tells of a summer camp that foreshadows his holocaust experience. In a letter home he begs his parents to take him home but it just becomes a family joke.
p. 54 "Do you remember the time you wrote to us: 'You must absolutely carry me up?'?" These jokes contributed to make me learn, the hard way, how personal one's anguish must always be, how difficult to communicate at all.
I think it was reminiscent of my own family. My father was not the kind who kept plans, "What do you want to do next weekend, sweetheart?" If I was lucky he would arrive on a weekend morning less than hungover and say, "Get in the truck." When I told my other family members that I was his "hostage of choice" it never occurred to me that they wouldn't know better than to let it get back to him. I still cringe a little at the acronym "HOC." The next passage reminds me of him to, although the narrator's father made leather harnesses in Tunis and mine had a sole practice law firm on Vashon Island.
p. 124 "At five, a European lady came in and made me spend two hours repairing her suitcase, as thought I were a luggage-merchant or a leather worker."
Like most artisans, he hated dealing with anything outside his own craft, and he refused to change a single detail of his technique.
"Then why did you do it?" my mother asked with an interest that was at least partly affected.
"How could I refuse? Besides," he admitted, "if she'd paid me decently, it wouldn't have been so bad. But what could I ask for the job? It takes a long time and isn't worth much. When her suitcase had been new, it wasn't worth two hundred francs. So I said: 'Pay me what you want." She gave me twenty francs - they're in my pocket. If it goes like this I'll close the shop."
He repeated this threat all his life. We didn't more than half believe him, but that was enough to keep us permanently anxious and unstable."
The last passage I'll ferret away here before I sell this book (or more likely donate it to the library for their booksale given the shape it's in) speaks to me about identity, journeys and sleeplessness:
p. 316 "Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains you own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, from somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take. refuge in sleep."
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