Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub Read Free Book Online Page A

used to embrace their children before Auschwitz was opened, if my grandfather defended him as Jewish parents throughout history used to defend their children before Auschwitz was functioning at full capacity, because that is what a father does for a child, he protects and teaches and showers him with affection and with physical and material comforts, and the way in which my fatherdealt with the subject of Judaism and the concentration camps must, in some way, be connected to those memories — how he related what he saw and knew and felt about my grandfather with what he read and knew and felt about Auschwitz.
20.
    It’s difficult to say what my first memory of my father is. It’s possible that you associate a smell or a taste or a sensation of warmth with the evocation of something you would have no way of holding in your memory, as if you were looking at yourself from the outside, in a cradle beside your father’s bed, and you talk about it because it’s a relatively common scene, and innumerable emotional and cultural references mean that the initial relationship between father and baby should, in some way, be linked to that scene, the cradle and the blankets and the smile of someone whom you sense or know is as close to you as anyone can be.
21.
    I’m incapable of remembering what my father smelled like when I was a child. People’s smell changes with age, just as their skin and their voice change too, and when you speak of your childhood it may be that youassociate the image of your father then with the image you have of your father now. And so when I remember him bringing me a tricycle as a present, or showing me how a sewing machine works, or asking me to read out a few words from the newspaper, or talking to me about the things one talks about with a child of three, four, seven, thirteen, when I remember all those things the image I have of him is the image I have of him today, his hair and face, my father much thinner and wearier and more bent than he is in old photos that I’ve only ever seen at most five times in my life.
22.
    When I remember my father forbidding me to change schools, the voice I hear is his voice today, and I wonder if something similar is happening with him: if the memory he has of me at thirteen gets confused with the image he has of me now, after everything he has learned about me in the last almost three decades, an accumulation of facts that erase all the stumbling blocks along the road to here, and if what I experienced as a decisive chapter in my life, the argument we had over my wanting to change schools, might for him be merely a banal fact, one of the many things that happened at home and at work and in the life hehad with my mother and with the other people who were around during his son’s adolescence.
23.
    During the quarrel we had over the new school, I told my father that I didn’t give a toss about his arguments, that using Judaism as an argument for not changing schools was ridiculous. I said I didn’t give a toss about Judaism, still less about what had happened to my grandfather. It isn’t the same thing as saying out loud that you hate someone and wish them dead, but anyone who has a relative who spent time in Auschwitz can confirm the rule that, from childhood on, you know that you can speak lightly about anything but that, and so my father’s reaction to my remark was predictable enough, repeat what you just said, go on if you’re brave enough, and I looked him straight in the eye and said, very slowly this time, that he could stick Auschwitz and Nazism and my grandfather up his arse.
24.
    My father had never laid a hand on me before, and it may be that I was one of those children who had been spoiled by not having been brought up with strict enough boundaries, a rich little thirteen-year-old whowasn’t used to being given a slap and to accepting that this was simply the way things are, and even if the slap hadn’t really hurt and I’d been tall enough or