The Amputated Memory. Marjolijn de Jager

to find out, and one fine morning, having done all of the housework beforehand, I followed him. Gracefully he went through the streets, greeting everyone with a kind word or a personal remark, the way he’d always done. He went straight to a garage in the valley section, where for hours on end I watched him take an old engine apart in the burning sun and then, with true zeal, put it back together again in the body of a different car.

      Why, then, was he so withdrawn when he came home? Did he feel some special resentment toward his family? What terrible things had we done to cause such a profound change in him the minute he returned?

      What did my father really want? He had explicitly wanted me with him as his daughter, and he had me there. To what end? I didn’t understand anything anymore, and a kind of mute rage began to beleaguer me.

      When my spirits were at their lowest, and I would begin to lament my lot, Grand Madja’s voice would come into my head to straighten me out: “Always feeling self-pity combined with negative thoughts about the rest of the world inevitably leads to holding others responsible for your own failures. In that state, it’s better to set your creative and inventive mind in motion and come up with an acceptable explanation for the behavior of those you incriminate. Promise me that you’ll at least try!”

      And of course I promised, but out of context words like these don’t contain any concrete reality. If you’re lucky, you might hear them surface again from the depths of your memory when you’re confronted with problems; only then do they reveal their full weight.

      Fortunately, I was that lucky, and because I heard them I was finally convinced that my father must be involved in ever more abstract and thorny battles, and that I couldn’t ask him to turn his attention away from those for the sake of my trivial desires. If I wanted to be worthy of him, I should be struggling as he did, silently and unobtrusively, and be as lighthearted as possible. True, I no longer had any clue about the stakes in his battles, but it was of the essence not to feel judgmental toward him anymore.

      “You don’t judge your parents. You should only get to know and accept them, for they will always be ours, just as they are, and there’s nothing you can do about that,” Grand Madja used to say.

      All I needed to do, then, was be patient until I understood what my father wanted, what was to become of us, and how we could improve if I myself participated in the effort.

      Thus I had to manage as many African children must—in other words, live like the birds scratching about left and right and being just as happy as King Solomon was, according to the Bible. At the market I bargained long and hard over the prices of every item. I endeared myself to some of the saleswomen, who started to save additional pieces for me out of kindness and friendship. This way I managed to obtain some solid discounts, and with my little savings I would buy the clothes I needed secondhand. My stepmother must have thought that my father was spoiling me, and my father that his wife was being very good to me. And because they never had any time to discuss it, they never knew the truth. I went on living without either my father or my stepmother ever buying me anything at all. After the constantly increasing recriminations from Mam Naja, I understood that “he spent all his money on his party and on parties with his friends and mistresses while she alone went out of her way to keep the household going.” I didn’t know whether she included me in this household for which she so exerted herself.

12

      Popular wisdom says that everything comes to those who wait. For some unknown reason, my father begins to show renewed interest in me, and although it takes a different form it’s better than nothing. He takes a growing pleasure in introducing me to his old highly placed or affluent friends, as a way to reinforce their relationship. I especially remember the first and last on the long list of these introductions, no doubt because each marked a critical turning point in my life. Because of the first one I began to judge my father, see him as a sick man; and the last one convinced me that it was my stepmother who was at the root of my father’s internal sickness. And so the first one signified a noteworthy evolution in my usual feelings of affection, tolerance, and incredible admiration, which I now attribute to my undue naiveté, my feelings, and my view of the world as inculcated by my grandmother’s teachings. The last one unleashed my first impulses toward rebellion and the desire to fight with all my might against what I thereafter saw as an obstacle, even if that meant forgetting my grandmother’s teachings, as long as I could change our life. The first to the last was merely a progressive, almost normal, and rather predictable development.

      First introduction: An old, very red-faced, freckled Swiss man. He was a planter with acres and acres of coffee and cocoa beans not far from the city, houses with several stories at the center of his plantations, electricity, and running water—the ultimate in luxury at the time.

      One night, invited by the old Swiss man to his very beautiful colonial house in town, my father takes me to dinner there. A red brick house with huge stones and a tile roof on a frame of rafters as massive as the trunks of young iroko trees. Here and there on the walls of the enormous living room are terrifying masks, hunting rifles, animal skins and heads, family photographs, and portraits of a young man in military uniform, probably the owner in his youth. There are also maps of Africa and Switzerland framed beneath glass, and beautifully dyed fabrics in heavy gilded frames, which in their own way tell the story of a man who has spent time in many places and knocked about a bit. All the furniture (armchairs, low tables, enormous armoires) are made of massive, slightly buffed and undecorated wood, giving the impression of power and weight and, at the same time, revealing that they have been handmade by people who like to do everything themselves.