OF ALL MY FATHERS

Translated by Robin Reza

Aren’t we all girls and women from Eastern Europe? All Nadia Comӑnecis, some with medals, some without, but all with a story? Life itself is a girl from Eastern Europe. We give better head; we have a third lip to suck the Western man’s penis bone-dry, as well as his bank account. We have a third breast, in case we become mothers, so we always have a nipple left for the Western man. We suck better, we swallow everything without pulling a face, we save up all his precious seeds, we swallow them and we don’t piss them out, we collect them, we’re the oyster and the precious seed is the pearl. We wear a little jacket with hardly anything underneath, you can take us anywhere and anytime, we’re always horny. We accept that men just want sex and that we exist only to serve men. We’re nicer than other women and we’re good company. What we won’t do for five hundred euros! Our orgasms aren’t fake, but we care more about the man’s orgasm, we’re ecstatic when we give the man an orgasm and the ecstasy we feel is our own orgasm, we’re filled with adoration and gratefulness; if you give us a chance you won’t need to go back to Thailand, the difference is that we are more often educated, sometimes we speak more languages, we are clean and obsessed with our appearance. You can ask us to do anything: to urinate, to drink our urine, to puke, to eat our puke, to stick a brush up our anus – or a bottle or our panties or even your underwear – to cut our vagina, to play with our menstruation, to suck dry a used tampon, to lick our feet. We take delight in anal sex. You can really have us do anything.

We have to choose between one or two or three options to get married, to have children, but we take the risk and dream of going to the Great Europe. Like that other gymnast who, after winning gold – years after Nadia Comӑneci – became a prostitute in the West, in a city in Germany and then somewhere in Switzerland. Life had nothing more in store for her. We do gymnastics from our first breath to our last. Some get gold, silver or bronze, some yield to Western dicks, but aren’t we all Nadia Comӑnecis, girls from Eastern Europe? And isn’t life in general an attempt to go to a Europe? And then, we go. What price we pay for it is a whole other story, the dizziness you feel in the Great Europe is worth it. You can make it if you can afford a small mortgage yourself. But it took years before I was able to keep my salivary glands in check in bakeries, I always spat into a napkin, because my craving had me churning out spit and because I wasn’t used to having and being allowed to eat all kinds of stuff. I had to strictly censure myself if I wasn’t to yank the pastry box out of my Dutch mother-in-law’s hands and press my head deep into the soft, sweet happiness until I was bursting with whipped cream. For three quarters of my life all I thought of was food, which is terribly tiring. WHAT WILL WE EAT? The communists are dead, at least on paper, but the question I most associate with communism will live forever. WHAT WILL WE EAT? Who will buy the food, and where, what kind of food and how much, what kind of sensations will the food bring about in my body, will it be enough, will my belly burst? Will blood gush from my throat or stomach if I throw up? Will I shit worms again, worms that find nothing to eat in my intestines and go hunting in the densely populated anus? What shall we eat? Will I go mad while cooking? Will I throw food around the house, or the frying pan? Will I pick the food up off the ground and put it in my mouth? Right after you have spooned the first bite into your mouth, will I be told: “It’s delicious, we’ve never had anything this good before, is it a recipe from your country?” Hold the food down in your stomach, don’t let it puke it up, and if you do puke it up, don’t go and fill your stomach again; drink a cup of tea, not two litres of wine per night after puking, the great hunger didn’t kill you, satiation is as bad as hunger, plunge your head into the stew until you’re bursting, find all the holes in your stomach and fill them with big chunks of chicken, big chunks of beef on the bone, while you eat stew think of the next stew you will start preparing when you leave the table, a hundred grams of meat per day is enough for adults and no meat every day, my husband said, that’s how he started ruining my sweet life in the West. Eat in moderation. No, eat till your body balloons up! You might just float up off the ground and see the Aleph[1], and it will be the only chance you get.

Are all Rumanians like you? he asked me. I hope not, many I know here had enough food, haven’t been sexually assaulted or molested, don’t know the great hunger, meet up, enjoy, are proud and eat in moderation. In the Netherlands I have always eaten twice the amount I actually needed. And I felt such a need to talk!  To talk about my village, about myself. About the fact that I had another name in my village – Ciuca Florilor, Flower Nut – that I did well in school, that I miss picking flowers, that I miss the fields, that I miss my teacher who thought Picasso was nothing but a brilliant salesman, that we didn’t have a burial ground in our village and that people had to walk four miles with their dead to be able to bury them and that I thought that was beautiful, that I can’t forget how my grandmother opened the canned pineapple I gave her as a present right before my eyes and gave me half back. That I used to have cousins somewhere in a village, cousins who died and whom I will never see again. I never saw them anyway, not because I was in the West, but I hadn’t seen them in such a long time because I went to a boarding school thirty miles away, and I didn’t go home anymore because my father didn’t like me very much, he wanted me at least to become a lady and that wasn’t possible at home, on that hill, becoming a lady. That there was nobody in my village who missed me, but that I missed everybody, even the boy with the long leg he kept tripping over, the one who grinned every time he saw me. And every time I asked Mum what was going on in the village, she said: “What do you care, you just mind your own business.” “My own business” meant the cupboard in which I kept my school uniform and my bra and some panties, and it meant learning. Learning went well and the cupboard is still alive, if it hasn’t rusted to death. My business was also all the hills covered with flowers, the wells and the trails which led to the fragrant gardens. The herds of sheep, the little lambs, the sparrows up in the air, the hot bus which drove the villagers to town and back four times a day, these things were my business. The dorms, and especially the sinister rooms I stayed in after boarding school, remained strange to me; after years had passed I was in the town where I had cried for six years for being kicked out of home, and again I felt I couldn’t breathe, that the air was thickening and blood was clotting in my veins. All of this I would have liked to talk about so much!

About that wonderful Rumanian poet who had passed away during my first year in the Netherlands. On my fourteenth birthday he had promised me – in the snow-buried town of my boarding school, which I had fled to go to a poetry conference, which nobody had shown up at except for the speaker and me due to the snowstorm – that I had a fantastic life ahead of me. In the empty room he asked me why I had come despite the storm, and I said: because it is my birthday and I wanted to give myself a present. We went to the café opposite the theatre in which the conference was supposed to take place, where he had a coffee and gave his recital. After that he wanted me to recite something too and I trembled with excitement in the three layers of clothing I had wrapped myself in against the cold. I have no idea what I spoke to him about, but he promised me I had a fantastic life ahead of me. It was just inevitable! I never forgot his words, or the droplets of coffee in his moustache and beard. He brought me to the boarding school entrance and advised me to tell the strict pedagogue that it was him who had invited me for my birthday, which should explain my running off. Everyone in town knew him so this meant I wouldn’t be punished.

One day – I was in a Dutch attic room in a house where even the domestic sounds were strange and Dutch – I found out he had committed suicide. He had violently stuck a knife into his heart. My life was far from fantastic and his life was over. I could still smell the coffee in his moustache in the Dutch attic where I prayed for his life on my knees. I would have loved to talk about him that day. But under the attic lived my mother-in-law, who had her own grievances and regularly wanted to know whether I was really a Christian, which led me to think that my stories about the cellars I had lived in and even about the fields full of flowers would have to wait a little longer for the right pair of ears. There was no point telling her about Dante either, since he was Catholic and she was Protestant. I often fantasized about which circle Dante might have put her in, and the better I got to know her, the easier it became for me to move her from one circle to the next in my head. With Dante miracles were possible, but not in real life. My mother-in-law wouldn’t have let Virgil look Christ in the eye for all the money in the world, as Dante did let him do – even Abel, Noah and Moses got this opportunity. What chance did I stand with my story about my village?

Little by little I came to understand that the wait for a fitting audience would take a little longer, because my story wasn’t much like that of other Rumanians. I’d long left my mother-in-law’s house – in the meantime I had learned to keep my salivary glands in check at the bakery with relative success – and it was dawning on me that my story was different. My story was intense, the papers had said when I made my Dutch debut, less appropriate for Dutch readers. But writing was working miracles, even writing in a new language, and I realized the time I spent writing was the only time I wasn’t a vulnerable girl or an immature woman. I was myself and when writing I didn’t hate myself, I wasn’t a good girl as usual, I didn’t seek protection or crave love.

It is possible that my life in the West has in a strange way made me aware of my childhood misery. And instead of forgetting about it I have at times sadistically gone looking for answers. A friend from Rumania once told me the second part of my life would be fantastic, since the first had been so horrible, and after all, life is fair. He himself was a better example of his theory than me. In the first part of his life he had a loving family of the noble sort, he was married to someone who was also nobility and he was carefree. When he told me about his theory the second part had just started: he was in love with a prostitute, his wife had divorced him and his family had disowned him. He worked himself to death so that his girlfriend wouldn’t have to work anymore, was proud to be able to pay her dentist’s bills and hoped to marry her one day.

I wasn’t a huge fan of his theory; the numerous ghosts from the first part of my life wouldn’t really let me enjoy the second part. But in some ways he was right. I could try to enjoy what the second part had to offer. I taught Lectura Dantis at the University of Amsterdam and gave a seminar on world literature during which I was permitted to stand in front of a room filled with international students and lament: “Enkidu is dead, my friend who killed lions with me”[2]. In the Ceauşescu era, I dreamed with my eyes open of a Europe I was barred from. It turns out Europe only ever lived in our books. The Europe of my dreams showed itself to be a fata morgana. When I came to Europe, Europe was no longer what my books said it was. I had finally arrived in Europe, but Europe hadn’t waited for me. And Eastern Europe didn’t want more Europe, because for them that meant more Islam. We had forgotten how, during the dictatorships, our ancestors had emigrated in their dreams, and we didn’t want the refugees to have what those ancestors did. We, Eastern Europeans, brought the tragic history of Europe with us, but the West didn’t see it.

My first shock was the vague sense Western Europeans gave me that their culture wasn’t worth being saved. Europe seemed like a body without a soul. Little by little I discovered a new Europe, which wanted to expand to meet Iran. Europe looked like a terra incognita once again, I wanted to explore this new Europe. I met Moroccans, Iranians, Afghanis, and came to understand that the world is a lot bigger than I had learned at school. Rumanians and Hungarians were in agreement for the first time in history, both being convinced that the lights will go out in Europe faster than we had imagined. And that it will be the Muslims who put them out. But I wasn’t living in Rumania anymore and I knew better than anyone that you shouldn’t look at the future through your past. If you can manage.

It was becoming clear that the future would be very different from the past, at least for Europe. History was picking up speed. And everyone was paying the price. But it weren’t Western children or Eastern European ones washing up on Greek beaches. What world did these children come from? Who were their mothers? Roshanak? What might they have thought of Dante? I would have liked to take in such a mother and her child, in order to look at them: how they ate breakfast, how the child might play with our dog, how life would unfold before my eyes, powerful and marvellous. I might also have learned something from them, something about life that I had clearly lost. When I looked at them on TV, I was sure that I needed them more than they needed me or us. Their dramatic life disturbed this drowsy, Western, well-fed life. Were they the new Europe? They came with something new and fresh, raw and powerful, something that invited one to live, and they brought a new Europe along with them, one still hidden in a placenta, and I burned with curiosity to discover it. I felt my brain whirl like the topographies of the world’s beginnings, it stretched to look beyond the borders its own history had fixed for it. Was a new world about to begin? A world in which Cide Hamete Benegeli[3] wasn’t at all fictional. If he had existed for Cervantes, he existed for me too.

I dreamed of teaching Lectura Dantis in Florence, on Piazza Santa Croce, but I would also have liked to teach it in The Hague – in Schilderswijk – for free, and for a ten-euro entrance fee at the theatre. Or for free everywhere, as Lectura Dantis is taught in Milan. And, who knows, perhaps even at the asylum seekers centre, for the newcomers! I had prepared arguments, in case they should complain about Muhammad’s place and conditions in Hell. We shouldn’t forget Dante admired the Arab scholars, I would have said. Limbo – where there were a select number of people whose only sin was that they had been born before Christ – had Homer, Horatio, Ovid, Plato, Socrates and Heraclitus sit side by side with two medieval Muslim scholars: Avicenna and Averroes.[4] In Convivio he cited Alfraganus and and and … even I can’t say with certainty that Miguel Asin Palacios is a liar.

He had researched the Arab sources of La Divina Commedia. He managed to find parallels between Islamic eschatological literature and La Divina Commedia, down to minute details. But even if we were to agree with Palacios, if we were to completely agree with Palacios, I would say: doesn’t Muhammad himself visit Hell with the angel Gabriel as a guide, long before Dante does?[5] The lack of recognition of Dante’s sources has more to do with Dante specialists than with Dante himself. Why would Muslims’ imaginations be less vivid than Europeans’? Besides, perhaps those Muslims, in their turn, had looked to other, older civilizations for inspiration.

What difference does it make where beauty comes from? If they had the patience I would show them that Dante and Muhammad hear the same “parole di dolore” when they approach Hell. Muhammad holds Gabriel’s hand tight, like Dante holds Beatrice’s. Both meet two women in heaven: Dante, Piccarda and Cunizza; Muhammad, Hamduna and Tawfiq.[6] The Arab sources show Muhammad being prepared to go to Heaven by Gabriel in Mecca. His chest is opened and his heart is removed and washed at the well of Zamzam.[7] Dante, on the other hand, opens up his stomach and forgets it in hell, but that’s just an image. Me, I have a damaged stomach, and I would much like to hold my intestines in my hands a couple of times a month to see what the problem is. Sometimes the pain in my stomach and intestines is so unbearable that I would like to destroy my intestines with a knife. The stomach ache makes me feel even what Muhammad felt, which makes me understand him, and that is yet another reason why we love Dante, I would say, and I’m sure they would understand that. We’re all human and Dante knew it. And that image in Hell is just an image, a very naturalistic image, but still: an image.

I wanted to reinterpret Dante in the light of Palacios’s book, for Muslims and non-Muslims. I was sure Dante would remain Dante despite his alleged unoriginality. At the end of the day, no one is original. Books arise from books. Some of us have our roots in Homer’s epics, some in the Mahabharata. Big history is absurd, we should read more books, we should all read Dante, only then might we find some peace in life.

So what was the problem?

The pain. Literature only protects you if you want to live.

At the end I wasn’t mourning Enkidu anymore, but myself. I grew increasingly impatient with the pain. I injured myself every day. A long time ago it started with pleasure, but it didn’t end there. I screamed more and more, I heard myself everywhere. I was acting in my own drama series. We threw all kinds of stuff at each other, we injured each other, we strangled each other. We held each other tight and cried. The dog came and sat next to us and yawned to get our attention. We should have laughed as always when he did that, but you told me you didn’t want me anymore. I wanted to say: and now you don’t want me anymore, now everything’s going to shit? To be honest, it didn’t come as a surprise, but it still hurt. As if I was desperately trying to swim across the Channel, and the realization I wouldn’t make it only dawned once I was miles out. Blood clotted in my veins. I tried to strangle myself with a scarf, but the scarf was too thick. You didn’t want to with me anymore, you actually said, and I thought the choice of preposition interesting, it made it seem like we were in a play and suddenly you didn’t want to act with me anymore. You didn’t say: I don’t want you anymore. If you had said that, would I have looked for a thinner scarf?

Why didn’t you say, when I was starting to shake and went looking for a scarf: Come on, silly, come over here! Shall we have a cup of tea? Shall we book a weekend in Florence? Shall we go get a cup of coffee on Santa Croce square? Why didn’t you say that? Because you didn’t want to with me anymore. I crumpled to the floor and thought you, like Dionysius, were “the most terrible and the sweetest”.[8] The most terrible. Sweet you hadn’t been for a long time. I have tried to set up a whole new life and have put my shoulder to the wheel, but look at me now, now I’m in some real hardship! All those things you said that just keep running through my head, those words that stuck. When you speak, you shoot with words, like loaded pistols. For weeks I went about as if I was carrying a bag of cement on my head. Suddenly, in the middle of a seminar, I didn’t know the Inferno’s Canto 18 by heart anymore: “There is a place in Hell called Malebolge,” “Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge,” then nothing.

When I died, I looked my husband straight in the eye. It could have been a verse from the Inferno.