Michel Laub - Diary of the Fall

20.

My father met my mother when he was nineteen, at a dance at the Jewish club. In those days, men still wore ties and women waited to be invited to take the floor, and it’s always tempting to think about what might have been if something had gone wrong on that night, if something had interrupted the sequence of chance events that led to my birth. It’s always tempting to imagine what my father felt when I was born, how he communicated those feelings to my mother and whether or not this determined the way in which he related to me over the years. What child hasn’t felt the same curiosity? And then I imagine the impact my grandfather’s notebooks must have had on my father: it’s possible there to retrace a similar path, with my grandfather describing my grandmother’s pregnancy, what he referred to as the pregnant wife , the entry in which he writes that the wife should tell her husband about the pregnancy so that the husband can immediately take the necessary decision .

21.

It’s tempting to say that my father’s reaction to the notebooks influenced the way in which he dealt not only with Judaism but with everything else: his memory of my grandfather, his marriage to my mother, his way of relating to me at home, and since I never got to know another side to him, because he never showed me another side, it’s clear that I, too, became caught up in that story.

22.

For me, everything begins when I was thirteen, at João’s birthday party, when I let him fall. The head teacher summoned the parents of the boys who had been involved. The incident had occurred outside of school, but the staff — student coordinator nevertheless felt that it was within her jurisdiction. When my father asked me about it, he already knew that the other boys involved had told the coordinator it had been an accident, that we often played such pranks on each other and, up until then, no one had been hurt. My father was unconvinced by this explanation, he certainly didn’t treat the matter as a mere childish prank, nor did he speak to me in a jokey, confiding way or tell me about something similar that had happened to him in the past, and he made me promise never to allow such a thing to happen again, but after that he said no more about it. In the months that followed, he showed no more interest than usual in school, my behavior, my friends or João.

23.

At the time, he and João rarely met. In the afternoons, I would be left alone apart from the maid. João would arrive after lunch, it was exam month, and he was behind with his studies because of all the time he had spent recuperating. I helped him with Portuguese, maths and science, and although this required work and effort on my part, I continued to copy out my notes for him, to talk about the books we had to read at home, to repeat what we had been taught in class, because otherwise it would be impossible for him to do the exercises.

24.

At around four or five, the maid would bring us our afternoon snack. I usually had a toasted banana sandwich and a milkshake, and we would stop for a rest. Unlike my other classmates, João didn’t play video games. He had never used a videocassette player. He had never been in a house like mine, where, as soon as summer began, we could turn on the air conditioning, my room like an island where day by day, subject by subject, we worked our way through the study schedule, until the light changed and the temperature cooled and we could finally free ourselves from our textbooks and end the afternoon by the swimming pool.

25.

João did not belong to the same club as me, and had never jumped from a diving board like the one we had at my house, a wall that we would scale, putting our feet in the gaps between the bricks, and from which you had to jump, clearing the lawn and the plants and the stones and the tiles around the edge of the swimming pool, a jump I found relatively easy, but which it took João a while to screw up the necessary courage to make: the almost two-meter-high wall, the sun going down on the other side, the wind and the mosquitoes and the smell of cut grass after a long hot day, and me saying come on, it’s not that tricky, and him crouched, concentrated, eyes wide, calf muscles tensed, a leap into space as if there were no gravity and a fall into the void, taking care not to breathe out.

26.

Some people open their eyes underwater, others prefer not to, and I don’t know that it makes much difference when you’re plunging down to the bottom and you have to wait patiently until the impetus slows and you stop in the middle of all the bubbles and allow buoyancy to carry you back to the surface. You propel your body upward using long movements of the arms, and you’re very conscious of your legs and your stomach, and when you emerge into the light you look at the edge of the pool, and the colors have never seemed so bright, you’re intensely aware of the reflections on the water that shines and laps against the tiles and the slap of the waves and the taste of chlorine in your nose, and then the fear you’d been feeling all afternoon and all the previous afternoons ever since the day of the fall at the birthday party vanishes as if you had been born again.

27.

It would be hard to say why I became João’s friend. These things don’t happen because you feel sorry for someone, or because you’ve spent months tormented by the idea that you almost destroyed that person, although it might help to begin with, at least as an impulse when you first decide to approach him. If it wasn’t for that initial awkwardness, I wouldn’t have offered to help him with his studies. If it weren’t for those afternoons at my house, we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. And if we hadn’t done that, which happened in parallel with the whole recovery process, with his physiotherapy sessions, the exercises he did to strengthen his muscles, the press-ups and sit-ups and weight lifting, which he started doing almost obsessively, I wouldn’t have come to see what had previously seemed idiotic in João’s personality as a quality.

28.

At the time, I spoke very little to my father. He would arrive home from work at night, exhausted, and by then I would have had my supper and would usually already be in bed asleep. If I were to calculate the amount of time we spent together each week, it would only be a few hours, and since included in those hours were his speeches about the Jews who died in the 1972 Olympics, the Jews who died in PLO attacks, the Jews who would continue to die because of the neo-Nazis in Europe and the Soviet alliance with the Arabs and the ineffectual stance taken by the UN and the media’s negative attitude toward Israel, it’s possible that more than half the conversations he had with me turned on that one topic.

29.

As a child, I used to dream about those stories, the swastikas and the Cossack torches outside the window, as if someone in the street were about to put me in a pair of pajamas with a star on them and shove me onto a train headed for the chimneys, but this changed over the years. I realized that the stories kept being repeated, my father told them all in the same way, with the same intonation, and even today I can quote examples that would often cause his voice to break, the young girl who was imprisoned, the two brothers who were separated, the doctor and the teacher and the postman and the pregnant woman who crossed the whole of Poland only to be caught in an ambush in the forest. Something happens when you see your father repeating the same thing once, twice, five hundred times, and suddenly you can no longer sympathize or feel affected by something which, gradually, when you get to be thirteen, in Porto Alegre, living in a house with a swimming pool and having shown yourself capable of allowing a classmate to fall to the floor on his back at his birthday party — gradually, you realize that those stories bear very little relation to your own life.