The Siege

there is no return, it becomes plain that home has simply disappeared — been annihilated, swallowed up and gone. Without speech, the child can ask no questions, give no form to anxiety. No explanation can reach her, even if one should be offered. She has no hint that home still exists, that it was abandoned for a reason, that one day she will return there. A single inexplicable convulsion has overnight abolished her physical world. For, lacking words, remote from people, her world was above all the physically known — toys, furniture, houses, streets. When these disappeared, for all she knew for ever, who can know how much seemed to disappear with them? To what degree was her own frail selfhood locked into those vanished rooms? Did they express in space, in the only way she could appreciate, the sense of time, the continuity of personality, the past?

Such questions have no answers, and we never found out the nature of that unique illness. But if we had waited for sure knowledge to determine our actions with Elly, we would have never acted at all. In a few months we would be moving again, to yet another house; we would spend the summer in Austria before we made our way back to America to show Elly that home was not for ever lost. How could I prepare her? Though Elly was acquiring single words, little by little, as the months passed, they were all simple nouns. There were none in which I could discuss with her such subtleties as place and time and cause-no ‘when’, no ‘back’, ‘again’, or ‘soon’; no ‘go’, no ‘because’; no ‘Austria’, ‘England’, or ‘America’; not even ‘home’. Without words, how can one convey a shared recognition of what is not present to the senses? Does one discuss past and future with a cat?

It was at this time that I began to simmer in my mind the problem of giving Elly a usable memory.

The operative word was usable. We knew she had a memory, and no ordinary one. We had become accustomed to its prodigies. One day, when she was a little over two years old, without speech, without comprehension, with no apparent capacity to attend to her surroundings, she had disappeared. This was unprecedented. She was a baby; she had been walking only three months; she had never gone anywhere alone. Where to look, when no direction was more likely than another? Then I remembered that the day before I had taken her, in her stroller (she was not yet a steady walking companion), a new way downtown, via the parking lot near her father’s office. She had been so enchanted with the stripes and arrows painted on the surfacing that I had taken her out of the stroller and let her crawl about on them. It was a frail clue, but there was no other. Without expectations, I began by looking there. I found her absorbed, on hands and knees, circling the one-way arrow, her tiny body less conspicuous to an oncoming car than a dog’s would have been.

To reach that parking lot she had to cross three large backyards and two streets, to ignore two possible turnings and make a third. On foot, she had followed a route she had traversed only once before, and then not under her own power. She had moved fast; though it seemed longer, from the time I missed her to the time I found her was only a few minutes. A remarkable performance for any two-year-old; it is hard to convey its impact coming from a child who seems not to see, to hear, or to register impressions — who for days at a time shows none of the common signs of intelligence at all. I tested her. A mother with an abnormal baby is always testing. On our walks I would deliberately lag behind and let her lead me home. She never hesitated, never took a wrong turn. A single visit and her knowledge was infallible. What’s more, it needed no reinforcement; at three and a half she led me behind a screen of trees to find a house she had visited once only, and that six months before. After eight months, on her second visit to the Hampstead Clinic, she led us unerringly to Number 21 Maresfield Gardens, one of an endless row of identical houses — and those who know England know that row houses in England are more identical than anywhere else in the world. I had become so dulled to this capacity that only the most extraordinary instances startled me. I took it so much for granted that I was surprised when the bright, verbal children of my neighbour failed to remember the location of every room in my house. Elly needed no second lessons.

Elly knew the whereabouts of every cookie shelf in every supermarket in the North Berkshire area of Massachusetts. There was not a location, not an orientation in her world that she did not have memorized. I knew, then, that I would not have to create a memory. She remembered her room, her house, her neighbourhood, her town. The experiences I wanted to make available were not lost; inaccessible to words, they must be there.

How certain that sounds! The certainty is false. With Elly I was never sure even of what I knew I knew. That she remembered home might be an intellectual certainty, but the emotions counsel differently. These show you not the child you construct out of your rational knowledge of what she has occasionally done, sometimes seemed to know, but the child you see every day who does little and knows nothing. It is this child, wrapped in veils and mists, that one is working with; the mind inside it, however impressive it appears when all the instances are put together, seems at any given moment a figment, a creation of the wishes. The child has memories of home and we can unlock them? What optimism! The child is complete and untouchable, and has no past at all.

Yet I began to think what I could do. Elly had a puzzle. It represented a large house, with four oversize windows in each of which a smaller puzzle could be assembled, the sub-puzzle showing four appropriate rooms and their furniture — kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath. Simple nursery ideas are hard to come by if you aren’t trained to the work. I had looked at that puzzle for weeks before it occurred to me: I would draw our house at home on a large sheet of paper, and see if through pictures I could bring Elly’s memories out where they could be shared.

Together, as so many times before, we sat on the floor. I drew the house. Elly watched with quiet attention; her empty stare was growing rarer now. It had not, of course, occurred to me to bring a photograph. Uncertainly I reconstructed the facade in my memory, so much less sure than Elly’s. What was the pitch of the roof? Should I make the chimney visible? What was the orientation of the windows and their relative size? While I thought, I had to be drawing, steadily and confidently even if incorrectly. Elly was watching and I must not dissipate her attention by fumbles. I had no time, even if I had had the skill, to make a convincing architectural rendering. I settled for a schematic roof and the right number of windows and put my best efforts on the porch, which I did remember. Three steps, two columns (Doric), a plain pediment, a door with four panels, a mail-basket. I drew the shrubs and flowers. I made it spring and drew daffodils, a word which Elly knew. Elly watched with noncommittal interest. Following the lead of her puzzle, I started to fill in the downstairs window with the furniture of our living room, coffee table, couch. The window grew crowded, perspective was abandoned. I didn’t know whether Elly saw picture-perspective anyhow. Why should she? People in the Middle Ages didn’t. At last, deep inside the room, floating above the other furniture, I drew the record-player — the sliding doors, the turntable, the tone-arm, the needle, the record itself. Now Elly was more than attentive. Tense and excited, she began to jump up and down, her sign for approval and delight. She got down again and put her finger on the crude circle that represented the turntable and moved it round and round. Then she began to sing. At first I scarcely recognized the song, it was so many months since I had heard it — the song ‘Instead Of’, from The Three-Penny Opera.

It was almost a year since Elly had heard that music. She had been obsessed with it; for two months and more she had asked for the record every day. Then, like so many other things, she had abandoned it altogether. No one had sung it since. We had left the record behind in America, and there it remained and the music with it, dissolved, extinguished, part of the irrecoverable past. But it was not wholly irrecoverable. We had recaptured a minute part of it. We could find more.

Many of the things I drew evoked no reaction. Oddly enough, Elly showed little interest in her crib, however lovingly detailed the drawing. Instead it was the rocking chair that excited her, and again it was music that let me know she shared my memory, for as I drew she began to sing the melody of ‘Rockabye Baby’, which she had first learned as I rocked her, so many times, in that very chair in her old room at home.

After that, I knew the way. Elly was happy when I drew a separate large rocker outside the house, and a mother with glasses to sit in it, and an Elly with straight hair and bangs to put in the mother’s arms. I would not only retrieve the house; I would try to put into it the human relationships, which Elly had tried so successfully to deny. I made crude portraits of the family, a face at each window, a figure standing at the door, and although Elly’s real interest was still in the house and furniture, the details of the bathtub and washbasin, she accepted the figures with placid attentiveness. We drew often, several times a week, and time passed.

We left England, put the Microbus and our eight selves (my mother had joined us) into the Channel plane, then into a train for Munich, then into the car for the ultimate destination, St Gilgen, an hour beyond Salzburg. Austria’s mountains and the unreal blue lakes were paradise for us after the flats of the English university town, but I had never seen any signs that Elly cared for scenery. How would the new upheaval affect her? As we settled into yet another orientation of rooms and fixtures, we watched Elly for any signs of shock. Would she be sick again? stop walking? refuse to go outside?

The day after we arrived I started drawing. I drew the house in England (prepared for this, I could do a reasonably accurate job). I drew the bus with our eight heads looking out. I made the little plane with its open