As I’ve said elsewhere, my dad was a fairly quiet man. I associate him with silence, since that was the soundtrack of our lives together, whenever I wasn’t unspooling for him the tales of my schooldays in English he could only half understand. He wore a wool overcoat, and had iron-colored hair on his chest and back, and his beard was the same dark crimson color of the cherry juice he drank each day to ward off gout, and every once in a while, I threw back a glass of the same, wondering if it would thicken my own hair and make me hearty like him, capable of labor. Me, I was always getting sick.8
Dad was not cruel. He rarely scolded me. He never forced me to do anything, except for once. After that one time, he never directed or guided me at all, and in fact, he seemed to forget the conventions of fatherhood altogether. I missed the pedantic advice he used to give me when I was very little, when we were all together, in East Germany, the cautions, the slaps to the back of the leg, all of it. For all the grimness of our life in Dorchester, his outrage might have reassured me. But the anger in him disappeared as I grew up, and as it did, our history made less and less sense to me. Why had we gone to so much trouble to get here? And so when I say that silence makes me think of my father, maybe I mean silence in the sense of censored speech, censored memory, the static of erased tape.