By Marco RothFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012“Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies,” wrote Auden. He explained: “To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer, but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past. More than any people, perhaps, the Americans obey the scriptural injunction ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’”When I first met Marco Roth, at Yale, he looked vaguely familiar, as if he came not from the US, but from Moscow, Vilnius, Prague or some other place with an equally tortuous and guilt-inducing history. He seemed as he walked around as if he were enclosed in his own space or in a transparent ball of ice from the Bosch painting of Eden (or was it Hell?). I remember running into Marco and his friend on a New Haven street and searching for something to say beyond a conventional greeting. Much as I wanted to start a conversation, nothing came to my mind. I was awkward, my English was bad, Marco and his friend seemed unapproachable. I had no idea about the reality of their lives. There is a word invented by Akhmatova: a non-meeting.Fifteen or so years after that non-meeting I read in the TLS that Marco Roth had published his memoir, The Scientists, in which he describes how, still a teenager, he watched his father, a microbiologist who had been infected by an accidental slip of a needle, die of AIDS. Growing up in Russia, I did not know anybody who was HIV positive. In fact, when we learned about AIDS in the late eighties, there was something almost mythical about it for us – certainly a Western, decadent virus, highly unlikely to occur anywhere in our midst.And yet Marco was somebody I had known. When I started reading his book, I had the feeling that I was reading a family member’s memoir. What is that bridge that connects a boy who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and watched his father die of an unspeakable disease with a girl who grew up in the capital of the Soviet Union and marched with the Young Pioneers? Why did his face look so familiar in New Haven? If I had spoken to him then, I might have known: we were both haunted by death.When I first learned about the possibility of life after death, I spoke about it excitedly to my father. “Who wouldn’t want to believe in life after death?” I asked. “It is also possible to live without any belief in the happy ever-after,” he answered. “That would mean to live your life as tragedy.” To a vivacious nine-year-old, this view seemed incredibly sad. On another occasion, I exclaimed: “Who would ever be stupid enough to kill himself?” I was cut again by my father: “There are certainly situations when death is preferable to life.”Yet my father was the soul of a circle of friends, a party-goer, somebody who always had an anecdote or a joke to tell. He used to boast that he managed to ruin his robust health by drinking. He wrote a funny story about a man who loved going to funerals. In conversations with his mother he used to kid that she would certainly survive him. Both his parents survived him: he died when I was twenty years old.Marco was in school when his family acquired that “non-human member”: “My microscopic sibling, HIV, must have arrived sometime when I was in second or third grade, but I didn’t hear about the creature until I was about to start high school.” The memory of the precise moment when his father told him about his disease escapes Marco: it might have happened when he was reading a description of two paintings by Greuze usually coupled under the name The Father’s Curse: a son rebels against his father by enlisting in the army and the father curses him; the son returns only to learn that he caused his father’s death. The atmosphere of those paintings chillingly finds its way into the memory of the moments just before Marco was about to learn about his father’s disease, when he was, in his own words, “fourteen and waiting in the air-conditioning to find out the horrible thing I must have done to make my father have an important talk with me.”Being an only child, like Marco, I remember having the same vague feeling, around the age of three or four, if the memory does not deceive me, when my parents quarreled about how to teach me letters (of all things) – a feeling that something was wrong, that I was not the center of the universe any longer, that there were other forces at play that I could not name. However, as soon as I sensed these forces pull those I loved away from me, I became convinced that I could overcome them. If only I would become a little more literate, a little more intelligent, or a little more loving, talking to me would certainly be more entertaining than quarrelling or hitting the bottle. I just have to keep my struggle secret for a while, only as long as I haven’t yet won.
Marco Roth’s secret was much more terrible. Had people known that his father had HIV, Eugene Roth might have lost his laboratory; the family might have become ostracized. Having to keep the secret, Marco experiences his first sense of alienation during a holiday, standing next to the broken-off Avignon bridge, listening to his friend’s plans for a happy life in high school, looking at the happy bathers and absorbed fishermen below. Hence, probably, my impression of him years later as being enclosed in his own transparent sphere: “I looked around at everyone as if I’d never come down from the cliff above the Avignon bridge.”“There you go,” a school friend said to Marco as he carried his secret with him, “being Jesus.” Later another friend, at the university, would ask him “Why do you want to get into that Oidipous Tyrannos shit?” Perhaps it was guilt (“…I cannot escape the wish to scribble in the margin of my consciousness that I was, as people say, a ‘wuss,’ that I failed to save my father”). Perhaps it was anger (the never-uttered: “Father, why have you abandoned me?” and the uttered: “Family, why have you deceived me?”). But guilt and anger never boil into open despair in this emotionally understated book, almost as if despair would be in bad taste, like a loud tie.And yet there is a desire to disappear, a willed numbness. As a teenager, Marco told his analyst that instead of going to college he’d like to move to some sort of agricultural community. Later, on a trip to Mexico when he was in college, the feeling – or fantasy – of having been erased came over him: “It’s a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing.” Going any further would mean for Marco a complete change of identity, class, occupation, like becoming a fisherman in the Pacific.I am familiar with that desire and that feeling. I carried it with me from Russia to Germany to the US to China to Thailand to Holland to Switzerland and back to the US, a desire that expressed itself in my email alter ego (disappearance) and in a blond double who wrote romantic novels in a foreign language and whose name was an English pun on my own.Yet what could be more diametrically opposite to erasure as the writing of a memoir? I wanted to exclaim: “Marco, write fiction instead! This is the way to become a fisherman in the Pacific. Or even a fishwife. Or a thief. Or a clock. Let us invent other worlds and other lives, let this burdensome I disappear, or at least be concealed behind masks and adventures!” But I have a suspicion that plots and adventures, characters and dialogues are just an attempt to dull the pain of being one’s self, and recognizing the impossibility of escaping one’s life story, since it always comes, as Brodsky said, “with a vague sense of illegality to your face in the [landlord’s] bathroom mirror – in short, with precisely what you wanted to shed: yourself.”Yet, if you do not manage to shed yourself, how do you avoid becoming, as Roth puts it, “a part of a story that’s never entirely yours,” dressing yourself “in the hand-me-downs of your ancestors”? This gave me pause. Maybe I, too, am my father who died. I am my grandfather, the writer. I am my Russian peasant grandmother who made gefilte fish when her Jewish ex-husband was coming to visit. She taught me to say “mazel tov” (“because it would make your granddad happy”). She taught me that unrequited love was the way to go, that there was always hope, even the hope to save the one you love from destruction. But I was no better at saving my father than Marco was at saving his. My father never took care of his health and never stopped drinking. When he suddenly died, I was abroad. Nobody had the courage to tell me that he was already dead when they phoned me. I flew home in the hope that, whatever may have happened to him, he would recover. I remember praying in the airplane, and being told, after landing, that he had been dead for two days.One of the rare times Marco Roth saw his father cry was when he walked in on him listening to Dido’s aria from the opera by Purcell’s:
When I am laid, am laid in earthMay my wrongs create no trouble, no trouble in thy breast.Remember me, remember me, but forget my fate.
“That was the command I, too, would obey,” says Roth. “Our tiny Carthage would go on.”“This is just a bad dream,” I though at my father’s funeral. “My life should go on.” I never lived in Russia again. A few months after losing my father, I fell madly and unrequitedly in love.For Marco Roth, after the horrifying end of his father’s life, there would be a search for new fathers and new places. Marco would study with Jacques Derrida in Paris and would be assigned to make a presentation on the biblical book of Jonah. Jonah, when told by the Lord to go to Nineveh and speak, promptly took a ship to Tarshish instead. Marco, perhaps unconsciously following Jonah’s example, would miss the day of his supposed talk by taking a train to Marseille. There would also be intimations of unfulfilled possibilities, those might-have-beens that haunt us throughout our lives: a girl in Paris to whom Marco never confessed his love; a boy in Morocco whom he didn’t follow in search for an amorous tryst. When I remember our encounter on that New Haven street, I have a vague sense of a shadowy might-have-been: we could have stopped and had a conversation, we could have talked about Proust, Buzzati, Freud, I could have introduced Marco and D to my friends. But, as I remind myself, a might-have-been is also called: no more, too late.In her memoir, 1185 Park Avenue, Marco aunt Anne Roiphe suggested that his father might have been secretly gay. Puzzled and disturbed by her suggestion, Marco decided to reread the books his father gave to him, searching for “encrypted messages.” It is a precarious idea: the messages might not be there. Two of these books turned out to be Russian: Oblomov and Fathers and Sons. I remember reading them as a child, recalling the pity that their doomed heroes called forth in me: the vulnerable, proud Bazarov, the tender Oblomov who was “ashamed to live in the world.” Maybe his father saw himself in Oblomov, muses Marco, since he carried around the same sense of “general inadequacy” as an “unloved offspring of an unloved marriage,” as his aunt depicted her brother’s childhood.I remember how my own father, sitting on the edge of my bed, jokingly complained about his father, my granddad. “You don’t love him?” my 10-year old self asked. “I do love him,” my father answered, “it’s he who doesn’t love me, that’s the problem.” A child who had not been loved remains a child even when he grows up. If he happens to be your father, you are bound to love him as if he were your son. My father’s fascination with jokes about death, with funerals, his relentless self-destruction by drinking despite his diseased liver, were frightening and incomprehensible—or maybe I, unlike Marco Roth, never had the courage to try to understand it. Marco, prompted by his aunt’s book, had to, in his own words, “consider the possibility that whatever my father sought, wherever he sought it, he wanted to be mortified, hurt. Somewhere in him, before the disease, was a craving to suffer that no mere change in social attitudes or emancipatory laws could take away.” I asked myself, when reading his book, did my father secretly want to die? And: if my love was not enough to stop him, what was my love worth?I open Anne Roiphe’s book and look at the photographs. Little Eugene Roth with big eyes and soft lips. The boy at the lake, at the swimming pool, the boy with braces. The boy who was given the same name as his egocentric father, “robbing him of his identity before he even had one.” The grown man whose eyes are smiling behind big glasses. The man who is ill, whose face is in the shadow, but whose lips are still – it seems to me – slightly parted in a gentle smile. Is it an expression of resignation? Or maybe scorn? (My grandmother, who survived her son by ten years, made an altar to him in her room, with fresh flowers always kept in front of his picture. When she died, a friend who did not know her said to me: “Well, she had a beautiful life.” In fact, she had the saddest life; and it would seem only fair if, after our lonely, exhausting, miserable lives, we would receive something better than death.)Marco’s father did not want the prayer for the dead to be said at his grave. “God, who didn’t exist, was not merciful, worth neither extolling nor sanctifying.”When his father was about to kill himself, Marco told him: “I’ll miss you.” His father responded: “I miss my mother every day.”When Marco later visited the cemetery, he sat down on a marble bench that bore the inscription Eros, “love” in Greek and somebody’s family name, as it turned out. The conventional sentiment of love unwittingly recorded by the stonecutter went beyond what Marco’s father chose to say to his son at the end of his life. Why could he say only “I miss my mother every day”? Maybe love does create an unbridgeable distance between two souls, and no meeting is possible in this human life, which is too filled with anger, rebellion, embarrassment, guilt, and all the other awkward forms our love takes in order not to choke on its own fullness.Excepting, maybe, that moment of sitting side-by-side with one’s father on the couch, when one is very young, when death is still but a word, and reading De Kruif’s The Microbe Hunters together: “Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man named Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious new world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings, some ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many of them more important to mankind than any continent or archipelago…”____Maria Rybakova is a Russian writer. She teaches Greek and Latin at San Diego State University.
