Clara and Sofia were walking down the bombed streets back to their apartment with the collars of their black coats turned up. When they saw a group of Elysian citizens who were now dressed in the Enemy’s uniform, Clara stopped dead in her tracks and gave them a look of disgust that Sofia had never seen before. She took Sofia’s hand and turned in the opposite direction to take another street home.
“You’ll begin to see that people who had no purpose before and were losers and pests will rise up during the war. When a war begins, you see who is a partisan or a collaborator.”
“My teacher last year seemed like a collaborator.”
“Why would you say that?”
“He always sent girls to sit in the corner and wear the dunce cap. But you could tell he wished he could punish us harder.”
“We have a habit of sending failed philosophers off to teach children. It turns them into nihilists.”
“What happens to collaborators once the war is over?”
“Collaborators are hanged at the end of the war.”
“There’s no future in it, then?”
“They are worse than the Enemy.”
“I would like to be a member of the resistance, then.”
“You already are,” Clara said and looked down at her daughter. “I would never raise a collaborator. Of course you are part of the resistance.”
And Sofia was so pleased that her mother assumed she had inherited her fierce traits. They were members of the resistance! She thanked the war for a brief secret moment. Because before the war, she was certain her mother had often treated her as a collaborator, someone intent on destroying her freedom. Sofia reminisced on the awful way things used to be.
Her mother resented her for having been a baby. And she did not forgive Sofia for having been a difficult birth. “You took so long to come out of me. You didn’t put any effort into it. It was as though you couldn’t imagine there was a world out here. You just wanted to stay inside me for as long as possible. You have to make your own way in the world. You can’t live off someone else. It’s the definition of being a parasite.”
She said that having a baby had made her profoundly stupid. She said her intellect couldn’t possibly recover for another seven years. But she told Sofia that she should not under any circumstances feel guilty about it. Her mother was clear that guilt was the most useless of all emotions in a woman.
There was a story from Sofia’s infancy, from a time she herself could not remember, that Clara loved to tell. She once crawled into her mother’s office and destroyed all her papers. She knocked over a stack of papers and ripped them to pieces, sticking them into her mouth. She picked up a jar of ink from her mother’s desk and took a swig from it. She had to be rushed to the doctor at the time.
Sofia hated when her mother told this story. She felt she was blaming her for something Sofia had done when she was a baby. She did not like the memories her mother selected to keep for her. They made her seem as though she had been born dour and judgmental. It was hard not to feel that your personality was shaped by the memories your mother gave to you. And her mother was a writer. She could have presented Sofia with a personality that was luminous and pretty. Instead her mother had stuck her with a personality that wasn’t quite hers.
Clara Bottom liked to tell these stories about Sofia because she found them to be important for her image. Yes, she had become a mother. But she hadn’t become a sad, pathetic sack of a woman who allowed herself to regress in order to care for her baby. No. On the contrary, she had fought against the absurd tyranny of her baby. She, unlike other women, would not be outwitted by a child—she would not raise her child’s status above her own.
And what was a better metaphor for this than an image of baby Sofia eating Clara’s manuscript pages and drinking her mother’s ink?
She sometimes felt that black ink was still inside her, coursing through her veins. Especially when she was mad at her mother. She felt her heart pump black, inky blood through her body.
She felt she was physically distant from her mother. There were ways in which children were physically intimate with their mother’s bodies. Other children would climb on their mothers’ laps without permission and yell up at them while they were speaking to others. She had even watched children disappear under their mothers’ skirts. As though a mother’s private world were a circus tent for them to hide inside. Sofia would never have that audacity. She did not have that kind of access to her mother’s body. Although she would stand close to her, her mother kept her distance, as though they were strangers on a lift or the subway.
Sofia spent ample amounts of time in front of the mirror. She would stare at herself, trying to figure out whether there was a way to conceive of her own face as pretty. She could never figure out this riddle. She was often alarmed by how much time had passed while she was standing and staring at the mirror. It was as though she had disappeared into Narnia. She was mesmerized by the question of her own ugliness.
Once she noticed the sun had gone down while she was staring in the mirror. She pulled away from the glass. She had been staring at it so closely, she had blurred vision afterwards and lost all depth perception and walked into a wall.
She wished she had some manner by which to distinguish herself. She was neither ugly nor pretty. She was neither smart nor stupid. She was only smart enough to realize her lack of intelligence. She was profoundly aware of what she wasn’t. She wished she had a talent. She wished there was something special about her.
At the beginning of the school year, when calling out the names in class, the teacher said, “You must be intelligent because of who your mother is. You’ll have to help the other girls out.” Sofia felt her cheeks suddenly catch fire. She knew she could never live up to these expectations. She thought the other girls in the classroom must hate her. They would all figure out she was not exceptional, and they would ridicule her for it. This was so unfair! None of the other girls had to prove they were exceptional. They were allowed to be ordinary. They all arrived in matching navy jackets with red piping along the hoods and berets tilted at exactly the same angle. And they all seemed content in a manner that perplexed Sofia.
She would seem like a complete idiot if she was compared to her mother. She did as little as possible to draw attention to herself. Once a ribbon fell from the end of her plait, and Sofia did not move an inch to retrieve it. She let the ribbon sit on the tip of her patent leather shoe. She managed to become invisible while still being in the classroom.
As an only child, she had an oddly formal way of acting. She had been to so many dinner parties where she was the sole child present. She was capable of niceties but had no idea how to express herself otherwise.
She was in the cafeteria and sat at a table next to a group of girls. “How are you today? Are you enjoying the pudding?” The girls all looked at her quizzically, then one of them said, “We are fine.”
For the rest of the lunch she said nothing at all, but sat at the edge of the table, too mortified to eat.
There was a poem about hares that they were forced to memorize. Each girl had to go to the front of the class and recite it. It wasn’t boring at all, though. They each made some sort of mistake in their recitation that caused all the other girls to jeer and call out. While the teacher banged her ruler on the table, demanding that they settle down. The hare in each girl’s mind was a slippery, elusive thing.
But when Sofia went up to the front of the class, she found herself unable to recite a word of the poem. The whole class became quiet looking at her. The girls were too embarrassed for her to bother uttering a sound. She made them cringe so hard, it felt as if they might disappear, leaving only the pile of their uniforms on the chairs, and stockings and shoes under the desks. They wished she wasn’t in their classroom. They didn’t like to be reminded that there were awkward and defective girls in the world. Ones like Sofia, who looked at the floor as tears dropped out of her eyes, for a hare she had no words to describe. And who didn’t know when she ought to return to her desk. Not when they were in school, learning to all be the same.
Sofia’s constant sense of shame was palpable. She knew it caused the other girls to keep their distance from her. Shame was considered contagious. At that age, children considered negative qualities to be catching. They didn’t want to spend time with her and afterwards find themselves horrified and humiliated by their own presence. So they kept their respectful distance.
Sofia brought her report card home for her mother to see. There wasn’t anything wrong with the marks. They were not extraordinary, but at the same time, she hadn’t done badly in any of her subjects. Her teacher wrote on her report card that she performed adequately. That word, “adequately,” had stoked her mother’s rage. Her mother thought you should be the best or the worst at something. Never simply adequate.
“It frustrates me every time I see your report cards. I never thought I would have a child who didn’t do well in school. I always had the highest marks in class. It was so easy for me. I loved doing better than all the boys. I suppose you inherited your father’s intellectual slowness. But nonetheless, it frustrates me that you can’t excel in a single thing.”
Sofia went to her room and sat on the side of her bed. She had no idea what it meant to excel in something, or even what she might excel in. Her mother had pronounced her ordinary. And being ordinary meant you did not stick out. And if you didn’t stick out, then you were invisible. And if you were invisible, could you really be said to exist?
Sofia was certain she had been made to feel worse than any of the other children in her class, even the ones who had failed their subjects. She thought her mother would have preferred that. Sofia knew her mother would have appreciated if she had come home with all Fs. That would be unusual. It would make for a delightful dinner party story—how the country’s leading intellectual had a child who couldn’t make heads or tails of grade school.
Sofia took up the clarinet in part because her mother, like many people in the country, had a fondness for the instrument. Some ten years before, a clarinet player from their country had gone to Europe and been declared the greatest clarinet player in the world by a newspaper in Belgium. It gave everyone in the country a whiff of pride, and they went out and bought his albums and made him a national hero. In high school, when it came to choosing an instrument, everyone wanted to play the clarinet.
But then Sofia came to really like playing the clarinet. There was something so melancholy about the song of the instrument. Its sound was not fancy or pretty, but sad in the loveliest way. She thought, This is how I would sing if I were a bird. She knew there were other children in her class who were more naturally talented than she was. But it didn’t mean she could not learn to play as well as she possibly could.
She spent an hour one night mastering a tune by a famed national composer, until her mother threw open the door of her bedroom. “For the love of God, will you stop massacring that piece? You’re giving me a migraine, and I will never be able to ever listen to it again.”
After that, Sofia felt like a loser whenever she picked up the clarinet and couldn’t wait for the day when she didn’t have to play it anymore.