When it comes to family memories, my inner eye – the one that takes pictures of what happened and then stores them for future reference – goes into soft focus. Everything becomes pink and hazy with the sound of children laughing, as if captured within the jumping, jagged movements of a home movie, lovingly spliced together.
Like a looking glass, the inner eye recalls children skipping through the rainbows formed by sprinklers gushing water onto lawns. Maybe my happiest inaccuracies lie predominantly among my family, even though we were and remain picture-book perfect. Happier and better adjusted and more in love with one another than all the sitcoms we grew up watching: The Brady Bunch, Eight Is Enough, even The Cosby Show.
Pnina is my pretty oldest sister. In childhood, I used to stare at her long chestnut hair while she lay sleeping, like a princess from a faraway land. I could stare at her undisturbed for hours, because we five children all slept in the same bedroom. It probably wasn’t for long that we shared, but it was so fabulous that the memory dominates my childhood recollections.
Mr Makepiece, the carpenter, had put together a wonderful assemblage of beds built within beds and cupboards hidden behind drawers, a spiralled maze of delight in which we explored, played and slept. This magical bed–cupboard system meant my sister Gigi’s head was positioned at my feet, and she used to make up stories with my toes. Each toe was given a name and had a character. Pnina told us stories about the nightly adventures of a funny little fellow named Sanna. He was the shadow cast by a torch after the lights had been turned out, and his adventures were predominantly mischievous.
Mr Makepiece was a grateful patient who paid my father with household construction and repairs for his psychiatric services. My father often worked on a kind of barter system so that, while cash didn’t abound, at times we’d have a surplus of crocheted blankets, chocolate cakes, even watches. All manner of people needed psychiatric care, and some of them couldn’t afford it.
Another patient of the barter system was Fernando, who had the biggest hands I’d ever seen. He could hold the world in them.
Every Pesach, the holiday when we Jews celebrate our release as slaves from Egypt with a rather sombre menu (lest, God forbid, we should forget our bitter tears), we eat unleavened bread. Every year of my childhood, at Pesach, Fernando arrived at the front door carrying cardboard boxes filled with groceries. Excited, we children would empty the boxes onto the dining-room table and find chocolates, bottles of sweet wine and matzos, all of it kosher for Passover.
Months later, on Rosh Hashanah, the holiday when we celebrate the coming of the New Year, the menu is a festive affair of round bread filled with raisins, and apples dipped in honey to symbolise the sweetness and roundness we anticipate for the New Year. (Religious symbolism is explained in the food, indicating the great priority food has in our lives.)
Fernando would again arrive, carrying large cardboard boxes filled with groceries in his Herculean hands. Delighted, we children would dig in and, again, out would spill chocolates, bottles of sweet wine and matzos, all of it kosher. It was a great mystery to us all – how did Fernando find Passover food six months after Passover?
In the Tuscan region of Campania there’s a medieval town called Pietrelcina. Living in the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo was a modest yet great monk. His name was Padre Pio, and he bore the stigmata. People came from all over Italy to seek solace and spiritual guidance from this humble man, who exuded serenity and endured the pains of his wounds and spontaneous bleeding with great courage. He inspired faith and tranquillity in his many followers.
Fernando’s parents were simple, good people. When their son was consumed by a strange illness, a dark madness they couldn’t understand, they went to see the Padre. He told Fernando’s parents that the family would journey to a land far away with a hot climate, where they would find a healer with a small, pretty wife who would have long black hair and look Italian. This healer would cure their son.
It was the 1950s, and my father had just qualified as a psychiatrist. He was doing his internship at Tara, the state-owned psychiatric hospital in Johannesburg. One Monday morning he was greeted by what must have appeared to be extras from a Fellini film. Sitting still and stiff-backed was a painfully thin man in a carefully darned evening suit; on his lap he clutched a faded black hat. A stout woman fidgeted nervously with a rosary. Between them slouched a large teenager, who seemed to have a shadow of sadness lurking over him. There was no problem with breaking the ice, or working through boundaries and trust issues, or any of the usual social awkwardness. Barely able to speak English, the couple greeted my father with a rehearsed barrage of questions:
Italian father: We would like to know, are you a married doctor?
Daddy: Yes, I am a married doctor.
Italian wife: Bene, bene, Doctor. This is a good sign.
Italian father: Your wife, she has pale hair or dark hair?
Daddy (taken aback but amused by the interest in his wife): My wife has long black hair.
Italian wife: Bene, bene, Doctor, this is good.
(The anxiety in the surgery was lifting considerably; this was developing into a very successful session.)
Italian father: Your dark wife, she is beautiful or ugly?
Daddy: She’s renowned for her great beauty!
Italian wife: Bene, bene, Doctor, this is good.
Italian father: She is small or she is large?
Daddy: She is petite.
Italian wife: Bene, bene, Doctor, this is good.
Italian father: Please, you must invite us to eat at your home tonight.
Unethical as it may have been to invite the first patients on a Monday morning into his home that evening, my father typically went along with the odd request. They were strangers in a strange land, and the son’s sad expression hadn’t altered at all during the animated exchange.
And so it was that my beautiful, dark, petite mother with her long black hair caught up in a Mediterranean-looking braid, wearing a Frida Kahlo skirt and carrying a baby on each hip, opened the front door to the Italian family. The wife took one look at her, fell to the ground and kissed the hem of my astonished mother’s skirt. The father wept and said, ‘You, Doctor, you will cure my son. We have come all the way to Africa for you to cure my son!’
The following morning Daddy returned to his office to make his tragic diagnosis. The boy Fernando was schizophrenic. Hardly a curable illness even today, but back in 1959 it was hopeless. Despite the predictions of the great Padre, my father couldn’t cure the boy, and after a while he was transferred to Sterkfontein, an institution for the severely mentally ill. There he was left to languish, catatonic and barely conscious, hopeless among other incurables, for a few years, till my father happened to be posted to Sterkfontein.
A drug company wanting to perform controlled drug tests on the schizophrenic patients approached Daddy. Twenty patients were given the new drug, and twenty were given a placebo. Neither doctor nor patient was allowed to know who was given the placebo and who was given the drug.
At the end of the trial, out of the forty patients, only one responded – Fernando. He emerged generous, expansive and light, constantly brimming with gratitude. Gratitude to my father, to the Padre, to Jesus, to the universe and to the miracle of each new day.
The funny thing was that, many years later, when all was said and done, when Padre Pio had been canonised and Fernando had had children and grandchildren of his own, the hospital records were disclosed and my father discovered that Fernando had been given the placebo.
To my childish eyes, Fernando exuded a magnificent glow. I think it was the glow of faith. Faith that there exist priests whose hands inexplicably bleed, faith that such a priest can miraculously predict an encounter in a faraway land with a doctor and his beautiful wife, faith that even the most godforsaken sicknesses can sometimes find cures.
All my life, Fernando seemed backlit. We’d open the front door to a man with a permanent smile on his face and the sun shining warm upon his back. The smell of grapes lingered around him as he hummed the romantic old tune ‘Mamma’, as sung by the tenor Beniamino Gigli. Of course Fernando could procure fresh matzos on Rosh Hashanah! Fields of sunflowers turned away from the sun to gaze at him. He could find that place somewhere over the rainbow where the bluebirds sing. He could do anything. People who have returned from the dark always can.
I adored both my funny, protective sisters, but my big brother David was my king. Why I couldn’t marry him when I grew up was a mystery to me. When it was time for David’s bar mitzvah, I made him a crown and mud cakes. He wore the crown for a little while before the party, but didn’t eat the cakes. Later in life he became a hippie. He had a mane of curly brown hair like Samson’s, and, like Samson, he refused to cut it short. He wore ripped jeans, played a lot of pinball and listened to rock music. He played the drums and the piano magnificently, and had inherited Daddy’s wicked sense of humour. Girls loved him passionately.
Then David became religious. He continued to listen to rock music, wear ripped jeans, and play the drums and piano. Girls continued to love him. I think he may have cut down on the pinball, though. But he dropped out of university, where he was studying social work, and went to a yeshiva to study. He met Evida, a gentle, soft-spoken, wise girl who understood not only him, but his whole daft family. They were married when she was eighteen and he was twenty.
Years later someone told me that the first time he saw David swaying backwards and forwards in devout meditative prayer in Synagogue, he’d assumed he must have been stoned off his head. But that wasn’t the case. David is that rare phenomenon, the real deal. He’s still the gentlest, most humane person I’ve ever known, incapable of malice. At the yeshiva, he studied to become a rabbi. When he and his friends came to visit us, they used to bring their own food and eat off paper plates, because our food wasn’t kosher. David constantly drummed, even with plastic utensils on the dining-room table.
My brother Jonty was a boy with a funny dance. He loved fast cars, but our family never had any. He was popular and funny. Jonty worked out at the gym and went to a lot of parties. Unlike me, he managed, with great exuberance, to crack the King David school social structure while remaining himself – a bit crazy and a lot funny.
If I needed help, a shoulder to cry on, a lift to a party or an account to be settled, he never failed to come through for me. But later he would consider my stoned, ethnic, politicised friends as strange as he thought me. My crazies were just too crazy. They baffled him and probably left him feeling confounded and powerless.
To the astonishment of the family and everyone who knew us, Jonty became a businessman. It was anathema to all of us. Journalist, art student, barmaid, rabbi, window cleaner, lumberjack, waitress, lecturer, shop assistant, human rights lawyer, nightclub hostess, outof-work teacher – at some time or another one of us was one of these things, and all of them were acceptable, even normal, pursuits. But the pursuit of money was entirely strange. However, Jonty was brilliant and showed flair, eventually confounding all of us by making a success of his career and his life.
Just in case my own family wasn’t large or expansive enough, I invented a whole new one to throw into the festivities: Tania and her family, a somewhat Bohemian band of gypsies. One day, when I was five, my nursery school teacher, Rosa Woolf, transcribed a conversation she had had with me about Tania. It went like this:
Rahla: When Tania and me were playing, we were pretending we heard an animal and we really did hear an animal and they were dogs. And when we were playing we asked our mom if we could dress up in her clothes because we wanted to do a play for my mother; we did Fair Rosy.
Rosa: Where does Tania live?
Rahla: She lives in the same world as us but on the other side. Tania’s mother is Janet. Do you want to know her surname?
Rosa: Yes.
Rahla, ignoring the teacher: We’re not friends any more and I thought she was on holiday. Tania’s brother is called Richard. The baby’s name is Anne; they live in a crabby place. The big boy puts the baby where the crabs can’t eat it.
I’ve always considered it perfectly ordinary to have an imaginary friend. My mother says Tania and her family were the easiest people she ever entertained. Clearly they were loyal and steadfast friends, but, most importantly, they required me to entertain them. They would sit in the garden and I would put on a show for them. I would dance and prance through Broadway number after Broadway number, both bold and whimsical, and they never tired of being my captivated, captivating audience.
Sometimes Daddy took us, one at a time, to tag along with him on his Sunday ward round. As he popped in on the psychiatrically unstable, we’d wait with pretty young nurses who apparently had nothing better to do than feed us scoops of vanilla ice cream and hospital jelly.
One Sunday, Daddy and I were driving to the clinic in his dashing navy-blue Peugeot. On a busy road he suddenly heard an alarming shriek erupt from the back seat. Swerving round to look at me, he screeched to a halt as I yelled, ‘Daddy, stop, you’re going to crash into Tania!’ On that occasion he was as mad as hell at me for nearly causing an accident, but my mother insisted it wasn’t my fault, as he should have just ignored me.
Tania remained my friend for years. She had alabaster skin and golden hair cascading all the way down, down, down to her bum, and she couldn’t be frightened off by oncoming traffic, nursery school or even – some of the time – laughing old men. She stuck by me, strong and bold as Queen Latifah, until I really needed her – until I went friendless and alone into the unwelcoming world of school.
After that, she and all her family vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. As I imagine did a part of me, and a part of every child, on that first day when we are marched off to school in shiny shoes, socks pulled up, teeth and faces lovingly polished, and that obstinate wayward curl combed down with water or a dollop of Mommy’s hair gel. But there it is – such is the way of the world. Tania could not have walked with me down the classroom aisle, to the chair directly in front of the teacher’s menacing glare any more than that obstinate curl could remain in place after first break.
Fortunately, I also had a real best friend, Brian. He lived across the road, and he felt more like a sibling than a friend. Brian was there all my life, like Fenster Number 6. When we were little, we weren’t allowed to cross the road to one another’s houses, and on some days, while waiting for an available grown-up to lead one of us across, that road felt like the forbidden staircase between downstairs and the surgery upstairs where Daddy worked all day, like the endless distance from birthday to birthday. Later the road got so narrow it seemed as if Brian’s bedroom was an extension of mine, and I’d hide from my dates inside his mother’s cupboards. Until one boy got smart and parked his car outside Brian’s house, knowing that I couldn’t survive the entire day without going over there.
By the time I was born, my mother Lviah had taken on the nickname Livicky, because my father used to serenade her, ‘Livicky my wife, the joy of my life.’ By then, the long tresses were long gone, and part of her no-nonsense look was a shock of short, punky, black hair. (This was before short, punky hair was a style.) She was a speech and drama teacher, and sometimes I’d make myself at home under the piano in the studio while she taught. I have a memory of her sitting in front of the fire night after night, sewing feathers onto a lilac peacock suit for me to wear in her production of The Tempest. I would wear that outfit day and night; I wore it until it literally fell off my body.
Livicky was small and pretty, quick as a whip and always laughing. She loved to laugh, and Daddy made her laugh. Quite striking with her pixie-like hair, she never wore a stitch of make-up. Naturally I always wanted a fashionable mother, one with long hair in styled flicks who wore lipliner and frothy dresses, but Livicky was utterly inept at any form of fashion, or sports for that matter.
But she was always wildly creative. Once she turned my birthday party into a ‘butterfly ball’. There were Chinese lanterns in the garden and pale, shiny worms made out of meringue, with liquorice feelers. Each of my siblings did different activities with the guests, and at the end Livicky and Daddy, all dressed up, danced a waltz together. Livicky was never the old woman who lived in a shoe; she always knew precisely what to do with her myriad children.
Writing about my mother is an intimidating task, particularly given the fact that she so expressly does not want to be written about. But this is a love story, and love stories are about lives costumed in romance and lit up by fantasy. I never took for granted the epic love my parents shared. It was always something rare and special, an inspiration, along with fairy tales and love songs.
Livicky’s own mother was a great music critic and impresario who travelled the world writing reviews of music concerts and glamorously entertaining musicians. Livicky’s father, serious and brilliant, had had to give up his dream career as a psychiatrist because of a hearing deficiency, becoming an ophthalmic surgeon instead. My grandparents lived in Port Elizabeth, a drowsy seaside town infamous for its windiness but famous for the friendliness of its inhabitants.
It was in that windy city that Daddy first met Livicky. At thirty-six, he was something of a confirmed bachelor, an almost pathologically bookish scholar, having pursued his studies for thirteen years. He’d grown up in Johannesburg, the metropolitan capital of South Africa, where his father had made his money in the unrefined business of motor spares.
In Livicky’s family of intellectuals, wealth was considered somewhat vulgar, a thing to be discreet, if not ashamed, about. But Daddy was irresistible: tall and charming, a medical student and a marvellous athlete. Most appealing was the fame he’d achieved for being funny; it was the stuff of which aphrodisiacs are made.
Daddy went to Port Elizabeth to visit his sister and saw Livicky acting in a play. He knew. Instantly, he just knew. The next day, he took her on a date. They walked along the promenade. And she knew. A gust of wind swept them both off their feet. He felt the earth move. He felt the clouds come tumbling down, tumbling down. When he dropped her off at home, to her horror he failed to propose. But she saw him the following day, and the day after that. On the fourth day, finally, he proposed.
Livicky used to tell us that as soon as she looked into his blue eyes, hooded under their great bushy brows, she knew one thing was as sure as her own mortality: this was the man who would always make her laugh.
Livicky’s mother, Millie, returned from a trip abroad. ‘Hello, dear, what have you been up to?’ she asked.
Confident as the sea is about its waves, Livicky responded: ‘I got engaged!’
Millie tried to maintain her sophisticated poise. ‘Oh, to whom?’
‘Gerald!’
‘Gerald who?’
‘I don’t know his surname. He’s just Gerald and I love him and we’re engaged to be married!’
Livicky’s father, Jacob, had always barred her from the kitchen, which he’d considered too dangerous an environment for his only child. For her, it was an uninviting, boring place. With marriage imminent, Jacob phoned Gerald and requested an urgent meeting. Gerald flew nervously to Port Elizabeth, where he and Jacob walked in awkward silence on the windy promenade. Eventually, with deep regret, Jacob blurted out, ‘She can’t cook; she’ll never cook.’
Daddy’s roar of unconcerned laughter was carried by the wind over the ocean and would echo through all the days of their glorious life together.
Within three months, they were married. They basked in the glory of a hurly-burly romance for nearly forty years. Every morning of our young lives, we were woken by the alarm clock of Livicky’s infectious laughter. Until I met Jason, I thought such epic romance existed only in fairy tales and under my parents’ roof.
Mealtimes in our house were loving and loud, happy and gregarious events. There were always so many children and friends and lovers. If you went to the telephone or the toilet, a sibling or a friend would sometimes hide your plate of food on your chair as a prank. But it was funny – everything was funny. Livicky laughed out loud all the time. Daddy made her laugh.
Both dominating and illuminating our small dining room was a large brass rococo clock. It was ornately decorated with birds, flowers and shells, and weighted down by two heavy, rather phallic-looking lead balances reluctantly swinging back and forth on heavy chains.
The clock tick-tocked away through all our laughter and tears, through the intimacy of all the Friday nights and the glamour of Sunday lunches, from all the great feasts to the mundane Thursday-night macaroni-and-cheese suppers. Even now I can still tick-tock myself effortlessly back in time to the witty Sunday lunches that began at noon and ended with cold soup and French loaves only at midnight.
The house was permeated with the velvety smell of cigars, as it was the late 1970s and people still smoked indoors. As always, my father effortlessly held court. Languidly the flow of anecdotes would go on, words dripping off his tongue like treacle.
‘I was escorting a disturbed patient out of South Africa,’ he would begin, ‘home to his native Belgium, because he’d been caught under the Immorality Act.’ (A time warp into past lunacy, the Immorality Act was one of the more immoral acts of the bizarre institution called apartheid. According to this law, it was illegal for a man and a woman of different races to engage in sexual relations, and the guilty white party would either be imprisoned or deported, were he or she a foreigner.) Daddy paused for effect, as the liberals around the table chuckled out loud. According to Daddy’s story, it had been decided by the mental-health authorities that the emotionally disturbed patient would be safer in Belgium than in South Africa, with its immoral laws.
To ease his own passage through bureaucracy, Daddy had written an official letter on his own behalf: ‘Dr Fenster is escorting a highly disturbed patient to his place of origin. Any help you can provide him with in this matter would be greatly appreciated. Signed, Dr Gerald Fenster.’
Armed with his patient, the letter and a medical kit of psychotropic paraphernalia, Daddy boarded the aeroplane, immediately administering a sleeping pill to both himself and his patient. But the patient didn’t succumb fast enough. With his last resource of wakeful energy, in the brief moment just after the aircraft took off and before the pill kicked in, the patient stood up and hollered: ‘We’ve now flown out of South Africa, and I will fuck whomever I please on this aeroplane!’
With which the great Casanova collapsed on top of my father, who was a little too out of it to notice that the seats around him were emptying in a hurry. A manicured red nail tapping urgently on his shoulder rudely woke him up. The air hostess, in a demure navy crimplene skirt and navy pillbox hat, said: ‘Dr Fenster, please guard your patient at all times. He has unsettled everyone, and you can’t afford to nod off on this journey.’
Thick-tongued and slurring, Daddy reassured her: ‘Not to worry, he’s as subdued as a lamb, fast asleep. As we should all be. Now, if you’ll excuse me …’
The air hostess returned with an irate captain. ‘Dr Fenster, the man next to you is a highly disturbed and clearly dangerous individual, as is specified in the official letter of warning you’re carrying. It’s imperative that you do not sleep on this flight.’
All night long the highly disturbed patient slept like a lamb, and all night long the officious air hostess trotted up and down the aisle delivering polystyrene cups of bitter instant coffee to my irascible father.
Landing exhausted in Belgium, he found no family members waiting to greet the highly disturbed but drowsy patient, so he hailed a taxi and delivered the patient to his family on their farm.
Driving back into town and finally half dozing off, Daddy vaguely heard the burble of the driver through the haze of the previous night’s sleeping pill. ‘Isn’t it a shame that they’re tearing down this old farmhouse to build a highway? Now the owners are selling everything and moving away.’ Alerted from his slumber by the words ‘old’ and ‘selling’, my father shouted to the driver to pull over.
There, in the rubble of a demolished Belgian farmhouse, he caught sight of a romantic dismantled clock. Suddenly convinced that he could communicate fluently in Flemish, Daddy greeted the farmer’s family and asked if he could buy the clock. By way of response, they laughed at him.
Cautiously, he named a price. They threw up their hands in mock-horror. Embarrassed, he hastily raised his price. At which they threw up their hands again and all started shouting at once. Humiliated, he raised his offer considerably. At which they threw up their hands, shouted, pointed at him and laughed out loud.
At this point the taxi driver intervened, alerting my father to the fact that his Flemish wasn’t up to the task, because the farmers were bargaining him down as he was bargaining them up. They were trying to explain to him that what they wanted was the price of a modern alarm clock. An outrageously unfair price was agreed upon, and they all sat down to drink yet another cup of coffee. Daddy, ever the guilty tourist, managed to slip a few dollars under his cake plate, and they all helped carry the clock, weights and all, to the taxi.
The practical difficulties involved in transporting such a clock home across the ocean didn’t occur to my father until he arrived back at his hotel. He was a fabulous father, a great psychiatrist, a witty raconteur, a devoted husband and many other things, but practical he was not.
This was the hottest summer Europe had had in decades, so Daddy stripped down to shorts, flip-flops and, inexplicably, a raincoat, then packed up and shipped all his clothes and toiletries back to South Africa. The cumbersome clock he managed to wedge inside the suitcase, but not the leaden weights. So he sat down to write another official letter: ‘Mr Fenster is suffering from a slipped cervical disc and must wear his weights at all times. Signed, Dr Fenster.’
Those solid lead weights were heavy, but he managed to hoist the chain over his neck and swing them on either side of his broad girth. His new ‘official’ letter got him out of Belgium, onto the aeroplane and into his seat. With a huge sigh of relief, he removed the weights, only to feel a familiar tapping on his shoulder. He looked up to be greeted by another crimplene skirt and navy pillbox hat. ‘Mr Fenster, if Dr Fenster says you wear your weights, you wear your weights!’
The aeroplane landed in Johannesburg two hours ahead of schedule. It was 6 a.m., early June 1969. In his travelling outfit of weights, shorts, raincoat and flip-flops, Dr Fenster disembarked from the aircraft in agony. The first blast of icy wind cutting painfully into his exposed calves alerted him to the obvious. If it was the hottest summer in Europe, it stood to reason that South Africa was enduring the coldest winter in decades. The country, famous for its cruel constitution and sunny skies, was experiencing snowfalls on the Highveld – an event so extraordinary it wouldn’t recur for nearly two decades.
Naturally, looking the way he did, Dr Fenster was stopped by customs officials. He was too exhausted to carry the weights for another minute, so with trembling hands he produced not the ‘slipped disc’ letter, but the ‘extremely disturbed’ one. Upon reading the letter, the Afrikaans customs official erupted with laughter, calling a colleague who resembled an ageing Truman Capote, and said, ‘Kom Piet, kom kyk na hierdie maljan.’ (Come Pete, come and look at this madman.)
They escorted my father to a private room, sat him down, removed the weights and his travel pouch, wrapped him in a blanket, and handed him a plate of cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a polystyrene cup of cheap coffee with heaps of extra sugar (because it is assumed that mad people are in a permanent state of shock and must be given extra sugar to soothe their frayed nerves).
From a safe distance the two customs officials sat watching the madman drink his coffee and eat his sandwiches, while outside security desperately paged the airport arrivals area. ‘Calling Dr Fenster, would Dr Fenster please report to customs immediately. Your patient urgently needs your assistance, Dr Fenster.’
Cautiously and from a safe distance the officials enquired in the gentle, patronising tone reserved for irate children and madmen, ‘Hey, mister, mister Fenster, what you got in your big suitcase?’ In his finest Queen’s English, with a deadpan expression, the madman responded, ‘Oh, that’s a grandfather clock,’ and carried on eating his sandwich as the officials continued to study the maljan and security tried to page Dr Fenster.
Eventually, taking a bold step forward, the Afrikaans customs officer said, ‘Hey, mister, why don’t you show us your grandfather clock?’ Placing his polystyrene cup of coffee on the chair in front of him, the maljan replied, ‘Yes, indeed, I do believe I shall.’ But of course the key for the lock of the suitcase was in the confiscated pouch awaiting the arrival of the elusive Dr Fenster.
It was at this point that Daddy, his coffee finished, his plate of sandwiches emptied, his body thawed and his spine mildly relieved, decided the charade was up and it was time to go home to his family. He stood up and said, ‘Now look here, there’s been a misunderstanding. I am Dr Fenster.’ At which the customs officials doubled up with laughter and the Capote lookalike said, ‘Ja, en ek is Napoleon.’ (Yes, and I am Napoleon.)
Daddy managed to convince them to retrieve his pouch with his passport to prove both his identity and his sanity. Almost satisfied, the customs officials demanded to see the contents of the case. Daddy opened the case to display the clock. The official asked sarcastically, ‘Why can’t a psychiatrist use an ordinary wristwatch?’
Later, arriving shivering but relieved at his own front door, Daddy was barred from entry by Pnina and David, who were adding the final touches to his ‘welcome-home’ posters. So he waited ten minutes in the freezing cold, with his suitcase and clock by his side. Kissing Livicky hello, he produced the clock and laid it out proudly on their bed. Livicky, pregnant with me, looked at it and said, ‘I don’t like it; it’s too ornate and kitsch. Take it back.’
Visions of having to put the weights back on, go through customs and be bullied by the crimplened air hostess again flashed through Daddy’s mind. The look of horror on his face made Livicky giggle. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll learn to like it. Get some rest.’
Ironically, three months later Daddy felt a stabbing pain shoot through his spine. ‘Gerald, you’ve got a slipped cervical disc,’ his doctor said. ‘I’m going to put you into traction, and you’ll have to wear heavy weights.’ Naturally Daddy didn’t comply; he wasn’t big on listening to doctors.
Family stories. It’s a funny thing about life – we never understand, or at least it takes us so long to understand one another properly. I think it happens in all families: the vulnerable ones are the strong ones, the wounded ones are those who live most fearlessly, and the damaged ones are often those who live most joyously. A family becomes a person, really.
I know growing up could not have been as entirely hunkyfucken-dory as I choose to remember it. Under hypnosis on a velvet chaise longue, I’m sure I’d find layers of the usual dysfunctional stuff in my family’s dynamics. It must have been unbalanced; the baby sister with so many needs must have drained some of the resources both financially and emotionally. No family sails through altogether untroubled waters, and a family with chemical disorders inevitably goes through tempests. I suspect Jonty struggled to understand why I constantly needed lifts from therapists to doctors to remedial teachers, none of whom succeeded in pacifying me. None of whom succeeded in normalising me.
And Daddy could fly into a purple rage most unexpectedly. Often I would be at the receiving end, maybe because subconsciously he saw too many similarities between us, or just because I was the most exasperating of all the children. But Gigi protected me from his anger, as she has tried to protect me all my life – from bullies in the playground, from financial blacklisting and negligent doctors, from overdoses and dinner parties I found myself incapable of hosting. She protected me from a world I often found too brittle to bear.
Family life was never dull. Pnina had lots of boyfriends. They were all drawn to her brilliance and beauty, her lush sexuality. One of the boyfriends, the smooth, sexy Conrad Cline, would take two headache pills before coming to dinner just to help him cope with the family’s boisterousness. Gigi, kind and clever, brought to the noisy table her impossibly tall Dutch husband and their two perfect children, Ruth and Hannah.
One night Daddy was feeling flush because he had just won a medical legal case. Livicky wasn’t aware of this, so she wasn’t feeling flush at all. Daddy scraped his food across his chipped plate, saying, ‘I don’t much like this old plate. I’ve never actually liked it. I’m going to smash it. Would anybody care to join me in the ceremonial smashing of tired old plates?’
Livicky went white, knowing he was irrepressible. Under his rebel influence, we were all irrepressible. Crash! Plates were smashing one by one; all the children were laughing and throwing their plates against the dining-room wall.
I never thought of Daddy as being ‘up’ or ‘down’. I know he was stupendous and effervescent, that he had insanely marvellous stories and that, unbelievably, they were all true. But as the Happy Potter doctor once told me, ‘The well bipolars rule the world.’ My father not only ruled the world, he rocked it!
Many people have an inner light – I’ve known people with a light so bright it dazzled, quite blinding me – but Daddy’s light was rare in that it illuminated our journeys. Searching for the elusive words for phenomena that have no name, trying to make sense of it all, of the world inside my head, a world sometimes gone quite mad, thinking of him, the clock story comes back to me. Other outrageous stories crop up before me and I think of a guiding light illuminating the path, not all the way, but just enough for me to take one faltering step at a time.
Looking back now, so much older and possibly more aware, I suppose his outbursts may have been chemically induced. I imagine he had periods of mania and then sank into periods of depression. But who could have known? He masked it well.
We were all so ignorant back then. And, of course, he self-medicated with sleeping pills and diet pills and I don’t really know what else. Whatever was or wasn’t wrong with him, he succeeded not only in coping with the ups and downs, but in gathering our daily lives up into a joyous, outlandish celebration that transformed what could otherwise have been a rather financially stretched childhood.