< Apart From Love: Chapter 30 >

The Source of Trouble

Of one thing I am certain this time: The source of trouble between my father and me is nothing else but that book, or whatever he is calling that thing which he is trying so hard to put together. I can understand why you laugh. If someone said this to me I would laugh, too. Still, it is the one explanation that fits the string of events, and it makes increasingly more sense to me, the more I reflect on it. Which is what I have been doing ever since he threw me out. Yes, for once I am certain, and it took me four months of following him, and of being invisible.

For all his faults, I have never found reason to doubt how deeply my father loves me, which makes his anger so devastating now, and also, so puzzling to me—not just the anger itself, but the constancy of it, the fact that it would not relent, not even to let him answer my letters, which by now, I have stopped sending.

So every evening I find myself drawn back to that place. I pass through the back alley, wrapped in a knitted, black scarf all the way up to my ears. It is tied in a thick knot around my neck, cloaking me as if to ward off the cold.

I slip into the bushes at the side of the apartment building, behind the large garbage cans. This is where I take my time, to let my eyes grow used to the dusk. If the light comes on in his balcony—as it often does, around this hour—or, if the glass door suddenly squeals along its rail, I sink back into the darkest dark. Here I cast a quick glance around, to make certain no one is there to see me, or to sense the surge of my heart, and I wait to see him coming out.

Then, when at last my heartbeat grows calm, I draw near—but not too near, so there is no way for the old man to suspect that I am here, at such a close range, looking up at him. And even if he did, I trust that he is blinded by the light of the desk lamp, and cannot find me here, in the shadows. So I stand below his balcony for a long time, not a muscle stirring, and watch him.

I see the desk lamp flickering across his glasses. From time to time he pushes them, with one finger, up his nose. I see the reflection of his hands, large hands wearing fingerless leather gloves, going at the keyboard in spurts of punched sequences. His eyes shine then with inspiration. Other times—when he is betrayed by his muse—he stops typing altogether, and even curses himself out loud.

Then he scratches some corrections into the sheet of paper, and the creaking of his chair gets more frequent, more pronounced. After a while, a faint voice comes on. The first time I heard it—it was late December, I think—I found myself strangely moved. It compelled me to risk revealing myself.

Without taking a second to think, I clung to a drain pipe going up the next building, fumbled about, climbed onto a crack, or a nick, or maybe it was some missing brick in the wall, nearly faltered, and then—in one leap—flung myself up into a balcony, the one opposite his, which was, as luck would have it, empty.

From here I glanced back at him, afraid he might have detected the rattle of the railing, which was, unfortunately, still going on, vibrating in the air, even though I tried to make it stop already, by gripping the metal bars, bringing them to a freeze in my hands—but no: There he was, crossing something out, then crumpling his papers furiously and starting over, as if nothing else in the whole world mattered.

In the corner of the balcony I spotted a large clay pot, where dry geranium had withered, scenting the air. So I perched on its lip, expecting the neighbor to come out any minute and raise hell, but no; they must have fallen asleep, or something. And so, I was feeling unusually bold, as if I dared steal someone’s seat in a theater.

This, I thought, was the best place to watch the scene, and to gain clarity. At this height, I would enjoy an uninterrupted view of him. At this distance, I would examine my father’s actions in a cold, analytical manner, free of emotion. I would be able to pay closer attention to what I thought I heard, so I may remove from my mind any doubt about it.

“You must be careful,” said a voice.

There was a raspy quality to it, which startled me, because it sounded so vivid this time. As I had already suspected, it came not from inside his apartment—but rather from the top of his desk, from the tape recorder. It was a voice to which the old man listened obsessively.

Rewind, Play, Rewind, Play, he slapped one button, then another, alternating between them numerous times, leaning over closely, as if to register every nuance of the way Anita talks.

“You must be careful, Ben,” said her voice. And then again, a thousand times over, “The words you leave behind you, they ain’t yours no more.”

What surprised me was not merely the fact that my father had the nerve to listen in, to study her most intimate, secret moments. Simple curiosity would have explained that, and could, perhaps, have been forgiven. No! This was something completely different, something I could not put in words right away.

So I slipped off my perch, over the railing, down the pipe, around the bushes, and back into the alley, chased by confusion, before it hit me, all of a sudden, with sharp clarity: Her voice is his. So is mine. In the process of writing, he has crossed a line, crossed it into an altogether different reality, which is made up. He has come to consider us his characters, characters with no claim to privacy. In his mind, our thoughts are his for the taking.

That, I believe, is the only explanation to his tape collection, the voices he owns. As an author, he wishes to capture us—as genuinely as language can—in the most touching, most vulnerable of moments. He cannot help but invade our mind, our heart, our guts, because he needs to feel us inside, refine our voices, perhaps even guide us from one scene to the next. He aims to determine how our story would end. In his madness, he puts faith only in himself. He is God.

From time to time, in spite of himself, he welcomes our rebellious nature, because it offers him a new, unforeseen twist in his tale. Which is not to say he enjoys his power. Quite the opposite: I can tell you that as this long winter bores on, he seems to plunge deeper and deeper into despair—especially when hearing me, I mean, my ranting on tape.

Lately, his wrist seems to be painfully tired, because of the incessant typing, but somehow he presses on. Play. He listens to me—breath fluttering in his throat, as if to hold himself back from a fit of crying—then he takes a short pause, and Rewind, he listens again.

Meanwhile, immobile in the shadows, I cannot ask him to stop. I feel exhausted slouching here, motionless, against the bars. I cannot even bring myself to clap my hands over my ears. A thousand times over, here it comes, carried over by a light breeze. It is trembling with a rising inflection in the night air:

“And through the wall, the space, the wall,” says my voice again, “can Anita hear the pounding, the loud pounding of my heart? Can she feel me, breathing her name? Does she whisper back to me, Stop it, stop it right now?”

For the author in him, this should be considered pure gold. He must be terribly pleased at the opportunity to take what I said and mold it anew, reducing here, embellishing there, to shape every turn, every twist in the flow of my emotions—but then, for a man trying to reach out, to place his trust in the hands of those he holds dear, every word drives a dagger into his heart.

Nevertheless, he forces himself to listen, then to write. His paper version of me is given voice, which is drawn out of my throat. Every word makes me a touch weaker. Soon I will be completely drained of breath.

I look at my father across the divide, and for the first time in my life, I wish for uncertainty. I wish I would have a doubt left in me. If I did, I could still wonder if he might, one day, want me back.

It does not even matter that he cannot see me at this moment, because now, after so many Play, Play, Play repetitions, we both know—we cannot avoid knowing—that we are on opposite sides. We are rivals, regarding each other with deep suspicion, because we can no longer look into each other’s eyes.

I am waiting here, longing for my dad. He is waiting ever there, writing my voice.