"Pictures of my mother show her always smoking,
though I never saw her smoke, nor empty an ashtray
without a show of disgust.
I came into her papers five years ago.
That's when I unwrapped the first of many portfolios
she'd been keeping under her bed.
I had never seen them, and she had shared everything with me,
I'd thought.
The only child, the late-born son,
the artistic and sensitive man in the family.
Some of these I had seen-- my grandparents sometimes
in the late '20's-- sometime in the late 20s,
at a resort in the mountains.
Taking the cure.
All those faces, relaxing, carefree, getting away
from business and the city and the nameless sickness that
seemed to be stalking them.
I look like my grandfather--
her genes won out.
The gene for baldness, carried through the mother.
The gene for Alzheimer's Disease--
who carries that?
My mother maintained a saving fiction all the years
that she was able, that her parents could have left Germany
in time, just as she had.
There was an uncle in Montreal who would sponsor them all,
but her father lost first the will,
then the sense of all urgency.
It was, in his case, a medical, not political problem.
'Who is this man?'
I asked her, and she pretended to look, and to smile.
"He's very handsome, mama.
Like a movie star."
Still no response.
The picture is sepia, faded, and extremely small.
If only it could be blown up, Jaeger and the touring-car,
the mountains and the forest in the background,
I might understand just a little more.
There are other pictures, equally small,
taken from upper windows, overlooking city squares.
Brno?
Bratislava?
Carlsbad?
Prague, perhaps, or the view from a Carpathian resort hotel.
Maybe Jurgen is standing at her side, whispering,
sehr schön.
'Jurgen Jaeger, mama.
Does it mean anything?'
She held her hand out to appease me,
her fingers now blue-edged tines, but she didn't look.
I read German, speak it enough.
Her old-style handwriting is difficult.
It says, I tell him he must do what he must do.
His father has interests in Germany.
They have relatives in Leipzig.
I read it out loud, looking at its author's face, which
gives back nothing.
She probably jotted down these notes in 10 seconds, 60,
70 years ago.
Now, the simplest resurrected fact of her life
embraces the world.
If I didn't take those box-- if I didn't take these boxes now,
they will be lost.
She is going away and won't be coming back,
and we have decided we must leave Canada.
She wrote, he says the Fuhrer may
be a little crude for your taste, but he's no fool.
He knows who makes money for him.
And with this Rosenfeld getting elected in America, well."
That was Roosevelt, I think a lot of people--
Germans thought he was [INAUDIBLE].
"This is another tiny, sepia street-scene.
It is the most precious picture in the box.
For an artist, my mother took terrible pictures.
A tram snakes off the top of the frame.
Half of a bundled Frau crosses the street.
Uniformed men-- police, army, Czech, or German--
fill the space at the corner, outside a coffee shop.
There seems to be an Apotheke next door,
cold-looking children play a sidewalk game using chalk just
outside the door.
You would miss it if you weren't looking for it.
The sign for corn struggling for attention against much larger
and fancier boards.
This is the picture to be enlarged, at any cost.
I palm it and slip it away, knowing I am taking her soul,
and fearing that something will slice
through all the blown cells in her brain and reach out for it,
and then destroy it.
Fly!
Go West and don't stop.
I tell you this as a friend, as someone who knows.
This on a worn sheet of air-mail paper,
initialled with what appears to be a double J inside a crest,
with a swastika hanging below it.
So strange to see, as it were, a sincere swastika and not
some gangland graffiti.
JJ, Visa Clerk, Leipzig.
Rice -- In my mother -- in my wife's culture,
Usha is called a cousin sister, which means any female relative
approximate in age.
Actually she is Anna's first cousin,
daughter of my father-in-law's oldest brother.
In the ancestral long-ago, they had
lived in the same Calcutta house, the Jatrabari, part
of a joint-family numbering 40.
She is married to Pramod, and both are physicists.
But instead of staying in the university world
and settling down on some Big Ten campus,
Pramod taken a position in Holland, setting up a lab,
and the Dutch government had recommended him
for similar work in Indonesia and Suriname
and before too many years, he had
found himself side-tracked into sophisticated, high
level nuclear management, the protocols of which
led, inevitably, to international agencies.
He is now with the UN's nuclear-monitoring agency
in Vienna, and Usha writes as a researcher--
works as a researcher for physics at the University.
They have been in Vienna for 15 years,
their children are European, they
own an apartment in the city and a garden-house
in Wiener-Neustadt.
It's a comfortable life in a country where
immigration and assimilation, as we know them, are impossible.
We are all together this night in Vienna,
enjoying a huge Bengali banquet, cooked
from locally-gathered fish and rice and vegetables,
simmered in spices brought back from frequent trips
to London and Bombay.
My son and I have our Eurail passes,
Anna will be with us only three days before going on to India
to visit her mother and sister.
It's this life we lead, I silently
explain to myself, and to the ghost of my mother.
Vienna was another of her cities, briefly.
The world has opened for us, no fears of the unknown.
My mother shrank from the very idea of India,
but tried to disguise it with images of Gandhi
and respect for ancient wisdom.
How under-defined I feel at 50, compared
to Pramod a father who has dabbled--
who has written some books, who teaches when he must,
who dabbles in cultures that have their hooks in him.
We are talking of Canada.
"They've become like the British,"
Anna says, spooning out rice to our son.
'Hateful little people.'
The Sens had visited Niagara Falls last summer,
and been turned away at the border for an afternoon's
visit.
For pleasure trips they use their Indian,
not their UN passports. 'He said things to us I wouldn't say
to a servant,' says Usha. 'How do I know you will leave when
you say?
How do I know you own a house as you say?
They are very suspicious about Indians, I must say.'
'I told him to go to hell,' says Jyoti, the Harvard boy.
'Who needs the hassle?
The Austrians are bad enough, but I always thought Canadians
were better.'
I remember when it wasn't so, in our cosmopolitan
refuge in Montreal, when my mother and I lived
like Alexandrenes in a large apartment Outremont,
after my father's death.
We had original paintings on our walls, French-Canadian artists
only.
My father was an old man even in my earliest memories,
a lawyer nearing retirement, than dead two months
after achieving it.
I remember the visits of his grown-up children
from an earlier marriage, of being
the same age as his grandchildren,
and wondering what, exactly, to call that relationship.
My son and Jyoti are, precisely, second cousins.
Usha is his first-cousin once-removed.
He calls her mashi, aunt.
'Have more rice, please.
There is plenty.'
'Mother, this isn't Calcutta,' says Tapati, the MIT daughter.
Everything this evening is exquisite.
There is no cuisine in the world that excites me like Indian,
no painting that thrills me like Moghul miniatures,
no city for better and worse, like Calcutta.
After India, Europe is a bore.
I'm staying back for my son's sake,
his ancient dream of being European.
Anna is explaining our move to the States.
'To be an Indian in Canada was be second class, no matter how
good you were, no matter how Canadian you tried to be.
At least if we're second class in the States we know
it's because we're just second rate.'
I wish I could sink into the rice,
the dimple topped pyramids of snowy rice
scooped out for fish and vegetables.
I want to grab handfuls of rice and smear them over my head
and rub them in my face.
I want to do something vulgar and extravagant
in this apartment of excellence, among these diligent
and exquisite people, out of my own shame, the accumulated
guilt and incomprehensions in my life.
Tapati is asking our son, 'Is there anything special
you want to see in Vienna?
I can take you there.'
They are amazed that for who he is
and what he represents to them--
America, after all, the place and people they most admire--
he speaks only English.
Usha's children have been raised in Europe,
but with Indian ways.
Each of them speaks eight languages,
but they have no country.
Jyoti writes rock lyrics in German,
plays in an Austrian band, studies economics at Harvard.
Tapati has a PhD and an MBA, and now interns at the World Bank.
Both are in America, but not of it--
too exquisite for the mall-culture America I know.
'Anything,' he says, 'it doesn't matter.'
'No, there must be something.'
He looks to me for help.
He wants Europe, he wants saturation, a way of entering.
He's been studying German in high school,
but it's the last thing in the world he'll admit here
to his second-cousins.
He doesn't trust himself to understand a single word.
He's heard Bengali all his life, but never thought of it
as part of himself.
He spent half his life in a French-speaking city
and did his French exercises perfectly, like history.
It's the legacy of the New World.
Jyoti has already told him, he'd trade it all-- the languages,
the sophistication that dazzles his Harvard friends--
for a simple work permit, for the chance to stay and work
the summer at Mr. Spud.
'And what about you, uncle?'"