Dear Four Walls

Here's where, visiting my parents, I sat each evening to smoke and read a little, until it grew too dark and my cigarette could not keep the bugs away. I didn't have music with me. Dear A. had offered me his ipod, but as I was already carrying my expensive little camera, and more importantly, a laptop borrowed from the bookstore, I did not think I could be trusted with yet another toy to keep track of, and so I declined A.'s offer, and then regretted doing so rather bitterly.

When I still lived in my parents' house, music was where I went to be alone, to be happy, to get lost. Music, for the most part, for me then as now, was a solitary pleasure. (I can not make music, of any kind. Before my voice changed, I had a lovely, piping sound, but that was the last time I was able to make a consistently pretty noise. I never really learned to read music, or to play an instrument of any kind. I was sick the day we chose instruments in junior high, and so ended up with an oboe. I had some lessons, but the instructor, a sad, sweaty little man who drank, always forgot to buy new reeds, so often as not I just sat there doing the fingerings and making little soundless kisses.) The music I loved then, I still do. Mine was never a very thoughtful record collection; more an accumulation than a collection. Still is. But even then, I did not listen to or own much of the country music by which I was surrounded growing up, or the pop and rock favored by my contemporaries. Predictably enough, I listened to showtunes.

Then, when I was still just a kid, I was surprised one day to discover a collection of my father's old jazz LPs. Now, my father sang Hank Williams at the top of his voice when we delivered dog-food together in his old panel truck, watched "Hee Haw" every week, and loved The Grand Old Opry. Imagine my shock. Here was a whole other world of sophistication, and wit, and singers who pronounced the final "g" in verbs. I sat and listened and memorized those records. Dad never listened to anything like that anymore, but, bless him, he never threw anything away, either. Because of him, I found June Christy, Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, still my favorite voice in the history of recorded sound. Those records taught me how to listen, how to be happy to a beat, and how to hear a love song. From there, I discovered a whole world of jazz singers, lost my heart to the ladies who swung, and came to understand the little I do about what makes music.

I was late to serious music. Hardly heard it growing up, and did not have any education with which to address it. I came to it via radio, making cramped and embarrassingly phonetic note of what I could only hope was roughly the name of something I'd heard. Before the Internet, and once I was away in the world, I had to depend entirely, buying records, on the kindness of the queens who invariably staffed the classical counters in record stores. They helped me, not without condescension, to find the music I listen to now almost as often as I listen to jazz.

Sitting on that old busted chair, on the narrow porch at the back of my parents' little house, I would watch the summer sun fade to nothing behind the woods. Just about every night while I was out there, I sat and listened to the bugs and the frogs and the night birds as they woke up and started singing. More often than I can remember, and for no reason I could think of at the time, a song would drift into my mind, as I sat there. Not the sort of song one hums, or that I could ever sing, but always the same song. I couldn't quite remember just what it was, just the tune. It wasn't one of the jazz standards I usually hum at work, no doubt to the justified annoyance of my coworkers at the buying desk. This was a strange, lovely melody, barely remembered, and not at all the music I associate with being back in Pennsylvania, or with my childhood there. It was curious, but I didn't really question why or from where the song came to me, or what it might mean. I just listened to it in my head, while I sat outside and smoked.

And then, when it was truly dark, I occasionally watched my folks through the glass door, moving about their house. They'd be setting the kitchen table for the next day's breakfast, or just sitting in their matching recliners, reading the same newspaper for the third time, or watching TV, or dozing. My mother might be ironing a shirt by the kitchen table, or making us all popcorn with which to watch a movie. I saw her "taking her sugar," as she has to now many times a day, or preparing her insulin injections, which my father actually gives her, as she's still squeamish, after all these years, though "just of the needles." Dad had to learn how to do this for her, even though he obviously can't stand the idea that it hurts her even a little bit. She assures him it doesn't, but he thinks it must, and she always looks away when he uses the needle.

Seeing them together as they went about this unhappy business of injections, I would usually turn away too. It is an intimacy in which I have no proper place. Just once though, realizing that for a moment, they'd forgotten that I was sitting just on the other side of the glass, smoking in the dark, I did watch. I watched as my father took the syringe from my mother, watched as she pulled her nightshirt above her knee, and turned away. He rested one hand on the back of her neck, to steady himself, as his hands shake a bit now, and rested it there also I think to reassure her. When it's done, as I had noticed already, invariably, he gives her a kiss.

I watched them then, as they are most nights, when there's no one else in the house, when no one's visiting. It felt... comforting, to see how they still care for one another, every day. On reflection, I'm not unhappy at having seen them doing what they have to now, together. These are the people from whom I learned responsibility, tenderness, how to be in the world. I see now how they taught me.

I think, just sitting and observing my parents at home, all those nights together, I saw them again, better, even than when we were all in the house together. I'm glad of the chance.

It was only when I got back to Seattle, to my own music, that I remembered the song.

I have a friend who has been learning German and now regularly carries on conversations on the Internet in this language. I speak only the English I have. I envy anyone with more languages than the one, just as I envy any one who can make music. German was never a language my friend thought he would ever care to learn. He is Jewish, both his parents survived the Nazis, though not without a terrible, all but unspeakable, loss. My friend is a writer, and he followed the translation of his work the whole way to Germany, a place he never thought he would go, and eventually found himself not only in the very country he was raised to never mention without a curse, but in a language he has come to learn and love. Imagine that.*

I mention this last, because the music I heard on that back porch was a song with words I could not understand, until I read a translation online by Emily Ezust. Richard Strauss was not a composer I had even heard until I was no longer young. Then I discovered Naxos, the inexpensive line of classical recordings and became a little obsessed with lieder. Schubert, of course, was where I started, but eventually any and every composer of songs featured on that marvelous label fell into my greedy catch. Strauss has lately become something of a companion to me when I come downstairs at night to write and scribble. I haven't the vocabulary or experience to explain why, and while I've read a little on the composer's life and come to a tentative understanding of the man and his difficult compromises with the Nazis, I must admit I don't really think much about any of that, when I'm sitting here listening over and over again to Hedwig Fassbender, the bright young mezzo-soprano singing "Hoffen und wieder verzagen," or "Nebel," or the song, as it turned out, that drifted into my head again and again as I sat smoking and watching my parents at home, "Befriet." Her are the lyrics, by one Richard Dehmel:

Du wirst nicht weinen. Leise, leise
wirst du lächeln: und wie zur Reise
geb' ich dir Blick und Kuß zurück.
Unsre lieben vier Wände! Du hast sie bereitet,
ich habe sie dir zur Welt [geweitet]1 --
o Glück!

Dann wirst du heiß meine Hände fassen
und wirst mir deine Seele lassen,
läßt unsern Kindern mich zurück.
Du schenktest mir dein ganzes Leben,
ich will es ihnen wiedergeben --
o Glück!

Es wird sehr bald sein, wir wissen's beide,
wir haben einander befreit vom Leide;
so [geb']2 ich dich der Welt zurück.
Dann wirst du mir nur noch im Traum erscheinen
und mich segnen und [mit mir]3 weinen --
o Glück!

And here they are in Emily Ezust's translation:

Freed

You will not weep. Gently
you will smile, and as before a journey,
I will return your gaze and your kiss.
Our dear four walls you have helped build;
and I have now widened them for you into the world.
O joy!

Then you will warmly seize my hands
and you will leave me your soul,
leaving me behind for our children.
You gave me your entire life,
so I will give it again to them.
O joy!

It will be very soon, as we both know -
but we have freed each other from sorrow.
And so I return you to the world!
You will then appear to me only in dreams,
and bless me and weep with me.
O joy!

I can honestly say, only when I happened to listen to this song again tonight, and then listened to it again and again to be sure, did I really recognize what I had been hearing in my head back home. And only tonight, did I look up the lyrics online. I was shocked to see these words. I don't think I'd ever seen them before, as strange as that may be. I must have done, when I was doing my little researches on the composer, but the words seemed utterly new to me, reading them tonight. Made me shiver.

It's unlike me to think in this way, but I must say, I can't help but think that music, and the right music seems sometimes, often, to come when we need it. I recognize that the pleasure I took in observing unobserved my elderly parents -- this very year celebrating their 55th Anniversary together -- was not consciously tinged with such sentiments as expressed in these words, but at some level, Strauss's music was with me there, and was right, somehow. How? I don't begin to know. I don't know that I need to.

(I wonder, would the parents of my friend have heard this song? Would they have listened to the songs of Richard Strauss? Does my friend know this song? Strange, confusing, complicated thoughts.)

Neither of my parents will have ever heard this song. Neither, I fear would much care to. Listening to it again now, having recovered a little from the strangeness of the thought, I am more than a little in wonder. I've decided not to question it any further.

Instead, I close my eyes, and listen, and I see my mother ironing a shirt, my father reading his newspaper, my mother at the kitchen table, my father's hand resting on her neck, her hand on his. I wish them many, many more nights together, just themselves, in that little house. Whatever the difficulties of growing old, they are together. May they always be so.

When the day comes, as it must, when I am never again with them, in that place they widened for me into the world, I will always have them as they were, just on the other side of the glass. What a marvelous gift! When I close my eyes, when I hear Strauss, I will always have them with me.

Happy Anniversary, Mum, Dad.



I have written here before about my friend, Lev Raphael's book detailing this journey, My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped. I would encourage everyone to read this wonderful and moving memoir.