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

strong enough to inflict some damage on my father in any physical confrontation, the normal response would have been for me to recoil before that show of authority. But that isn’t what happened: he hurled himself upon me and I tried to extricate myself, then he got a firm hold on me and hit me several times, on the back, on the neck, until his anger passed and he slowly loosened his grip and lay me down on the ground, my ears burning, a breathing space before I could get to my feet, my whole body trembling, and finally pull myself together.
25.
    Even now I still wonder what would have happened if there had been no fight, if my father hadn’t changed as if overnight and stopped talking to me about my grandfather, as though the fight had created a tacit understanding, with him sensing that it wasn’t Nazism and Auschwitz that were at stake, because I knew very little about Nazism and Auschwitz, but whatever it was that I felt to be at the root of what had happened to João.
26.
    If I were to talk now to any of the classmates who were involved in João’s fall, it’s likely that none of them would remember the details of the party or the reasons that led us to hatch that plan, and that none of them would make the link between carrying it out and the fact that João was not a Jew, because social conventions and the rules of etiquette and the self-image that each would have constructed of himself over the ensuing years would have created defense mechanisms that prevented their memory from recording something like that.
27.
    It’s possible that the same applies to everyone who had anything to do with the school, classmates, parents of classmates, the staff–student coordinator, the teachers, they might even say that my version of the story was a distortion, a false memory influenced by my subsequent feelings, the trauma of spending a year dreaming over and over about João’s fall, because it’s ridiculous even to think that such a thing could happen in the 1980s in a Jewish school in Porto Alegre, a place attended by the sons of tradesmen and factory-owners and members of the liberal professions whohad always lived alongside non-Jews, and there’s no record of any discrimination against Jews in the Porto Alegre of the time, no club that excluded Jews, no politician who spoke ill of Jews, no one who in the presence of family or friends or customers would dare say anything against the Jews, so it simply doesn’t make sense to think that the opposite could also happen, and if, say, such a thing were said at some point as a joke at school, that was no reason for someone to get so upset that it would cause him to change the way he lived the rest of his life.
28.
    In the case of my father, I don’t know if he changed because of the fight itself and because he went to bed that night troubled by the fact of having attacked his thirteen-year-old son for the first time ever, a shock to the self-image he had created up until then, to his certain belief that he would never be capable of hurting his son, or because pushing me and grabbing me around the neck and punching me could not only have caused injury, it was also capable of provoking in me an entirely unforeseeable reaction — and so I don’t know whether he went to bed troubled by the fact of having attacked me or by that reaction.
29.
    Until João’s fall, I had never done anything like that either or even felt capable of it. My father was in the doorway staring at me perplexed, once I’d got to my feet after he stopped hitting me and I was aware of the pain and the possible bruises and an anger I had never felt before, and even today I can still remember the look of alarm on his face when I picked up the first thing at hand, one of those heavy Scotch tape dispensers with sharp enough edges to dent someone’s head or put out their eye, and at that moment it was as if I were taking my revenge for everything that had happened that year, my classmates, the staff–student