Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (13 page)

The value of experience, real or imagined, is that it shows us how to—or how
not
to—live. In reading about different characters and the consequences of their choices, I was finding myself changed. I was discovering new and distinct ways of undergoing life's sorrows and joys. I could follow the example of my father, and hold my family closely around me, or I could pattern myself after Anton, and turn sour and dark over the nature of the world. I chose my father's way.

The Assault
is about more than war.
Hannah Coulter
is about more than war. Those two books—and all the great books I was reading—were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books
are
experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. I had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

Chapter 13
Bound to the World

I cried with joy when all the children began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language.

CHRIS CLEAVE,

Little Bee

WHAT SERENDIPITY BROUGHT ME TO CHRIS CLEAVE'S
Little Bee
halfway through my year of reading? I had begun my year with
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
, and learned there my first lesson, to find the beauty and to hold on to it for a lifetime. And now I read
Little Bee
, where I learned that there is beauty in the affinity of found connection between me and the rest of the world. I, who often felt like an outsider, found myself to be fully a part of the world and not apart from it.

Growing up in an immigrant household, I suppose it was natural to feel like an alien in my midwestern town. But the feeling persisted through college, law school, and even now as a mother in another suburban town. My children weren't particularly sporty, and I wasn't one for joining clubs, and so I felt left out of the flow of playdates, ball games, and cocktail parties that punctuated other families' lives. When my sister died, the feeling of distance heightened. Everyone assured me that I would feel better soon, that grieving was a process and I would get through it. How did they know that? How could they know that about
me
? I felt as if no one really understood what I was going through.

But books were showing me that everyone suffers, at different times in their lives. And that yes, in fact, there were many people who knew exactly what I was going through. Now, through reading, I found that suffering and finding joy are universal experiences, and that those experiences are the connection between me and the rest of the world. My friends could have told me the same, I know, but with friends there are always barriers, hidden corners, and covered emotions. In books, the characters are made known to me, inside and out, and in knowing them, I know myself, and the real people who populate my world.

Little Bee
tells the story of a young woman (Little Bee is her nickname) who has fled her home country of Nigeria and come to England to seek out Andrew and Sarah, the couple who saved her once before. But Andrew has committed suicide, and Sarah is suffering from depression. Not only has the death of Sarah's husband left her questioning the meaning of her own life, but her son persists in behaving bizarrely, her lover irritates her, and her job as a journalist seems pointless. Little Bee tries to offer commiseration and understanding, and in turn Sarah reaches out to offer support to Little Bee. Little Bee witnessed the rape and murder of her sister and the pillaging and destruction of her village, and is struggling to find a place, within and without, where she feels safe. Her past haunts her through memories, and her present—living undocumented and unemployed—is unstable.

Sarah and Little Bee both feel like outsiders. Sarah sees everyone around her as functioning on a different level, one she can't reach or understand. Little Bee is both literally an alien, as an undocumented refugee, and a foreigner to all the English people around her. She is further set apart by the horror she has had to experience.

In my first year as a lawyer in the late 1980s, I took on the case of an immigrant seeking refuge in the United States. Like Little Bee, Kulwinder Singh had a horrible story of torture to tell. Picked up by the police in the Punjab state of India, Kulwinder was suspected of being a member of a militant group seeking an independent Sikh state. He was held by the police for weeks and tortured repeatedly, then released with a warning. He scrounged together money for a plane ticket and, with his family's blessings, fled India. Upon arrival at JFK Airport in New York, he requested asylum and was placed in a detention center in downtown Manhattan. The first time I met him, I was struck by how little he was. The regulation orange overalls he'd been given were many sizes too large, and he'd rolled up the sleeves and legs in an attempt to find a fit. His face, unshaven and tired looking, was as small as a child's. We sat together with a translator, a turbaned Sikh who made clear his disdain for Kulwinder's short hair. The translator explained to me later, with a sniff, that true Sikhs never cut their hair.

Long hair or short, Kulwinder had suffered for his cultural identity. Through the stumbling words of his soft and tentative voice, I learned the details of his arrest and torture. During our allotted time together, spent in the dusty visitors' room of the detention center, I forced myself to study and document his scars. The back of his hands were marked with discolored and raised ridges of mottled skin, and on his palms I saw darkened circles where cigarettes had burned holes. The circular marks continued up along his arm, and when he pulled the legs of his overalls up, I could see more darkened dots on his thighs.

With the documentation of his scars and the words of his testimony, we won our case before the immigration judge. Kulwinder was granted asylum. He now lives quietly and safely in New York State. The scars on his body are the closest to torture I have ever come, and I would never want to be any closer.

I don't believe that there is some grand karma, an invisible spirit or tether, that unites me with all other humans in the world. I know by experience that a horrible, devastating event can occur, and I will remain unaware of it. I didn't feel my sister's last breath passing across my cheek to let me know she was gone. I don't feel a rumble beneath my feet at the same time an earthquake strikes thousands of miles away or suffer sudden anguish when on the other side of the world genocide is being committed. I didn't feel Kulwinder being burned with cigarettes on the palms of his hands.

But even with all my ignorance, I know there are events in human experiences that I have been made to feel and to understand. It is done through the power of reading. How do books work their magic? How do writers bind their readers so tightly with their characters that we become those characters as we read? Even where—
especially
where—the characters and the plot are so different from our own lives?

By recognizing what is universal. Little Bee says to Sarah one morning as they drive from the house to buy milk, “We are all trying to be happy in this world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You are happy because you can make your own choices.” Little Bee and Sarah see themselves in the hopes of the other, and they want to help each other fulfill those hopes. I saw myself in both characters. I saw outsiders trying to find answers. It was not the physical or historical resemblances that mattered. It is our common desire, shared beneath the skin.

After the war, my father was a “displaced person,” a refugee without passport or country. After living in a refugee camp, and then as a worker on an American army base, he moved in with a German couple. The couple had lost all of their children—three sons—in the war. They were very kind to my father, feeding him with whatever food could be scrounged to get meat back on his skinny frame and inviting him to sit with them in the evening as a member of the family. What my father shared with the husband and wife was a desire for peace and security. Together, the three of them tried to rebuild normalcy after the horrors of war.

Jack's father was stationed on an island in the Philippines after the war. He met Americans there who were charged with holding Japanese soldiers found guilty of war crimes and condemned to die. Somehow the American soldiers discovered that many of the Japanese prisoners were talented artists. The Americans showed the prisoners photos of their loved ones back in the States and asked the men to paint portraits from the photos. In exchange, the Americans gave the prisoners cigarettes and other luxuries to ease their last days. For the Americans, the exchange brought them closer to their families at home. For the Japanese, the exchange brought them recognition as talented and sharing human beings, not just animals caught up in the desecrations of war. The story reminds me of the line in
Hannah Coulter
, where even in the worst of the battle of Okinawa, there was “enormous pity that seemed to accumulate in the air.”

Earlier in April I'd read
Ruins
by Achy Obejas, the story of an impoverished Cuban man in his fifties. Usnavy works every day at a bodega, filling the ration cards of the people who line up for goods: “Soap was scarce, coffee rare; no one could remember the last time there was meat.” He lives in one room with his wife and daughter, a room without windows and where the floor is always damp from leaks. The communal bathroom of their tenement is enveloped in a constant swarm of flies, and the entire building is on the verge of collapse. Every day, Usnavy hears about more and more Cubans taking to the sea, escaping to America in search of better food, better housing, and a better future. Friends of Usnavy build themselves a flimsy raft, but he will not leave Cuba.

I could hardly imagine a person more unlike myself than Usnavy, and yet I identified with him. I sympathized with him and grieved with him. At the end, I found myself fervently hoping that his final wish could come true, to “die old and contented . . . in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.” Obejas made me feel that Usnavy was a part of my own self because she found what we shared in common: love, hope, faith. He loves his family, and I love mine. He has hope for his future, as I do for my own. He has faith in Castro's revolution; I have faith in the power of books. The focus of our faith differs, but the support our faith gives to our lives does not.

The main character in Philip Roth's
Indignation
, Marcus, is another character with whom I have little in common. He is a Jewish boy from Newark experiencing college in the 1950s. And yet we are alike in how we love our parents, and hope for our futures. Marcus, like me, feels the weight of the trust that others hold in him. After Anne-Marie died, I wanted to reassure my parents and my kids that I would stay healthy. I wanted Jack to feel safe and secure in our marriage and for Natasha to call on me whenever and however she needed me. I willingly took on the responsibility of trying to assuage the pain and fear felt by those around me.

But Marcus begins to feel overwhelmed by the ambitions that his parents have for him and by what his friends want from him. Filial duty, religious dictates, conventions of society, the rules at his college, the sexual demands of his fellow students: he cannot keep up with all that is expected of him, but he wants to, so much. In the end he rebels under the pressure, but his rebellion is his undoing. After he's followed the rules for so long, the one time he breaks all expectations brings the very worst outcome. He learns that sometimes our “most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.” I cried with the truth of that statement—life is so unfair—and with its consequences for Marcus.

I finished
Indignation
sitting beside a yellow stretch of forsythia bushes in full bloom. The bushes line the back of our yard where there used to be a tangled mess of dead leaves and brambles, the property line marked by poison ivy, oriental bittersweet vines growing over misshapen pear trees, and weeds the size of bushes.

The first spring after we moved in, I spent weeks raking out the leaves and weeds and clearing the patch of its choking brambles and vines. I pruned back the pear trees and tossed the bottles, butts, and cans I'd found scattered among the overgrown vegetation into a trash bucket. I dug up boulders the size of football helmets and used them to block off a space for bushes and flowers. Into the holes left behind by the boulders I planted tiny sprigs of forsythia, bargain buys from my local nursery. I planted bleeding hearts and daffodils. My arms became covered with the itchy rash of poison ivy. My knees were gray with dirt no matter how hard I scrubbed, and my back muscles ached at night in bed.

As that spring warmed to summer, the forsythia turned green and grew fat and tall. The pear trees still bent at a funny angle, but their branches grew thick with leaves. Each spring since that year the daffodils and the bleeding hearts have come out again, every year more of them, and the pear trees have borne frothy white blossoms. The forsythia bushes burst out in yellow, brighter and bigger than the year before. I rarely prune back the wild branching. I love the way the yellow sprays reach out any which way for light and toss around in the wind. It is as if the bushes are dancing along the patch of lime green spring grass.

Reading my book a day this year was clearing my brain the way my hard work had cleared the mess in my backyard. I had been caught in a bramble patch of sorrow and fear. My reading, sometimes painful and often exhausting, was pulling me out of the shadows and into the light. And I am not the only one clearing out weeds and poison ivy, or planting beauty, perennial flowers of hope. The world is full of us, digging and scraping, working for the day when the flowers come back like they are supposed to, blooming year after year.

At the end of
Little Bee
, Sarah and Little Bee are on a beach in Nigeria. Little Bee falls asleep in the sun. She dreams: “I traveled through my country and I listened to stories of all kinds. Not all of them were sad. There were many beautiful stories that I found. There was horror, yes, but there was joy in them too. The dreams of my country are no different from yours—they are as big as the human heart.”

Yes, Little Bee's heart was the same size as Sarah's. Just as my heart is the same size as the heart of Kulwinder Singh, and the heart of my father was the same size as the hearts of the couple in Regensburg who lost all their sons in the war. The hearts of the Japanese soldiers on the island in the Pacific were as big as the hearts of their captors. I am connected to the rest of humanity, not through a giant shared karma, but through our diverse experiences and yet communal emotions. By the size of our hearts.