More Than One Life
104
More Than One Life
104Hardcover(1)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810117051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/30/1999 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
I nearly said hello.
When I first noticed him, he walked using a cane, though still fully upright. Later on, his gait deteriorated. Occasionally I would see him on my way to work: As I hurried along the square, I would pass him struggling uphill in the opposite direction, each time stooping more than the last. But when he took his seat in the doctor's waiting room, he always held himself erect. He was tall and thin, with a gray goatee—he had probably had it forever; he didn't look like the type to follow fashion—and a pair of glasses perched atop a nice, full nose. Whenever Aunt Klára evaluated the men in our family, she described our dad as having the nose of a pharaoh crossed with an American Indian. That was just the sort of nose the elderly gentleman had.
Sometimes I wouldn't see him at all for long periods, and then nearly every day, when he came to the clinic for shots. He always brought along his German shepherd, and when they got to the clinic door he would stop and say: "I'm sorry, but you can't come in with me. Just wait here, all right?" Then he would give the dog a pat and let him off his leash.
The dog would wait patiently in the hallway, his handsome looks drawing the attention of patients and tenants alike. Although he didn't discriminate when it came to children, he was always particular about which adults he allowed to pet him. He would watch carefully, and if anyone dared to reach out a hand, he would emphatically take a step back—to the embarrassment of many, including myself. "So," I said, "not good enoughfor you, am I? That's a shame, because I like you, and your master too." And the dog came closer, and became warm and friendly.
I made the dog's acquaintance first. It took a long time before I was brave enough to approach the elderly gentleman, so I just went on watching. Sometimes I would pass the two of them on the street or on Kampa and overhear the man talking softly to the dog. In time I came to recognize them even from a distance. When his master spoke, the dog would respond with his tail and ears, often turning his head to listen as he padded alongside. In between he would go scampering off, but he was always quick to return so that he could report on where he had been and what he had seen. Sometimes his master would give him advice on what to visit—"How about Certovka, is the brook frozen over yet, are there children out on it?"—and the dog would eagerly run off to investigate and then return, exultant, once again.
One day some friends of mine lent me their children and I took them out for a riverboat ride on the Vltava. It was an early autumn afternoon and still chilly enough that Strelecký Island was deserted. But then suddenly I spotted the man and his dog sitting on a park bench, their backs to the river. They looked like one of those old married couples, the two of them seated so close together it was as if they were attached. To this day I can still see their backs. They appeared to be simply staring straight ahead, engaged in quiet conversation, when all at once the dog sprang to the alert, pricking up his ears. He swiveled his head back and forth several times, first to his master and then straight ahead; then he lifted his head, barked a few times, looked at the ground, and back up and down again—all in a state of extreme agitation. I drew it to the children's attention, and we too became upset. What was going on? Had he lost something? After a brief debate, we decided the elderly gentleman was probably just pointing out one of the branches swaying in the breeze and the shadows it cast on the ground in front of them.
I must have caught cold on that outing, because not long afterward my slipped disc began acting up dreadfully. And evidently the elderly gentleman ought not to have been sitting out on that bench either, because we both ended up going for shots for some time after the incident.
One day as the nurse was giving me my injection, the elderly gentleman was with Dr. Jílková in the next room and the door was open just a crack. "Next time you should send someone else to pick up your prescription so you won't have to climb that hill," I overheard the doctor say. But the elderly gentleman laughed: "Oh, I can still make it, and besides I don't have anyone."
I was struck by his tone of voice, admitting neither pity nor concern. Really? I wondered. Why is that? Did they all die on you? Did they leave the country? Or have they just forgotten you? You live all on your own? I can't believe it. You mean you never had a wife, not even before the war? I'll bet you were a looker, and judging from the silver cane handle, elegant ring, and sophisticated if well-worn suit, a wealthy man, too.
No, this was not some old retiree sitting on a park bench recounting everything about himself from five generations back. Quite the contrary. He was the sort whom others confided in while he sat, legs crossed, hands clasped over his cane handle, staring solemnly into the distance, so it was as though he didn't exist, as though he were only an ear, a horn on an antique phonograph. And as that ear vibrated, the nostrils quivered also in sympathy, and in that manner, without a word, the old gentleman would respond with active yet unobtrusive concern to each sentence uttered.
I'm a sociable, talkative person. I would be all too happy to confide in someone. But who? Who would want to know and who would understand the long, tangled history that chafes at every edge of my soul?
After more than four hours of passionate debate—about fifteen of us were over at Eva's—I was tired; I lost track of the conversation, and after drifting around the room a while, my eyes dropped anchor at the Biedermeier cabinet I had loaned to Eva years earlier because it didn't fit in with our new apartment. I noticed it on every visit, but now all of a sudden it was like running into a relative in a foreign city.
I can't believe it, what brings you here? It's so nice to see you! Hello, hello, my compliments, old girl. We've known each other for years, but you still look as marvelous as ever. I see you've got new curtains: pretty. You only grow more beautiful with age, I suppose, just so long as no one does you any damage. And my goodness, that color of yours! That gorgeous yellow golden brown with a touch of red! I wonder, where did the cherry tree from which they made you grow?
It must have bloomed sometime in the days of Julien Sorel and Eugene Onegin; Napoleon himself may have slowed his horse down a step to pluck one of your blossoming branches after the Battle of Austerlitz. Except that was in December, so that can't be. Perhaps then it was one of his dashing officers, nursing his wounds till spring when he fell in love and inhaled your fragrance in a state of infatuation. Naturally you, my dear cabinet, were still but a glimmer in the carpenter's eye. And who knows how many months your timber still had to rest and ripen before he could set to work?
What is it, what's wrong? Are you homesick?
And yet you're so pretty—those graceful legs, those deep-bottomed drawers—oh, how well I know them!
And now you've got chestnut trees outside the window again, their green magic dancing across your glass.
And who was it that made those brass rings in the lions' mouths on the drawers? Probably some master metalsmith like our great-great-uncle Francek (the scoundrel who, spent after a bender, hid in a confessional during high mass and, after sleepily accepting an old granny's confession, did penance by walking to Rome, while his faithful wife, Apolenka, looked after the shop and their half-dozen children).
Who was that sighing, you or me? I suppose you wonder why you're here and you blame me somewhat for it, don't you?
How many of my ancestors' hands have touched you? They would have stored linen in your drawers, or perhaps doilies and tablecloths, since the shelves up above behind the glass were for china, a coffee set for special occasions most likely.
Silent witness, humble servant, you won't say a thing, I know, dear cabinet. But the going must have been rough in those days, as it was in the next ones and the next. Doubtless you were moved under some highly irregular circumstances, although entire years may have passed with nothing more dramatic than a slightly burned cake served on the cut-glass dish alongside the coffee cups.
I didn't know you as part of the family until you stood in Dad's room. That was around the time when our parents stopped using the big master bedroom because they said they had trouble sleeping in there. I remember how flattered I was when Mom consulted me on what to put in Dad's room. It was the quietest room in the house, right off the garden, beautiful beyond question. But when she and I showed him what we had done—a vase of cream-colored roses on the little table between the windows, beneath a watercolor by Mánes—he merely remarked that it seemed somehow sad. Then, noticing my disappointment, he hastened to add that it was probably just his imagination.
"It's getting dark out," he said. "All it needs is a little brightening up." He kept looking around the room until he spotted the cabinet. For some reason it bothered me that he was standing with his back to Mom, so I quickly stuttered out a few words and he turned to face us. He complimented us on the pleasant color scheme—the café au lait curtains, the soft pastel-brown Persian rug, the olive bedspread—and gave Mom a look, probably thinking: All these peaceful colors are supposed to calm my nerves. She must have read that somewhere, or perhaps the doctor suggested it. My favorite is red, but of course I'm not allowed to have that.
I wanted to leave but couldn't bring myself to walk through the space between my mom and dad—it was as if there were a mesh of live wires between them, woven out of their nerves—so I crawled under the table by the wall where Mom was standing.
"What on earth are you doing? You act like you're still a baby," she said, and the two of them burst out laughing.
One night just before bedtime, I went to see my dad in his room. As usual, however, the conversation faltered, so I sat down in the armchair by the cabinet and awkwardly played with the rings on the drawers.
"It is a nice cabinet, isn't it?"
"Yes, I like it."
"Me too. We used to have it in the dining room when we lived at the mill, and now here it is with me. Whenever I can't fall asleep, I sit up and talk to the cabinet about the way things used to be back home and the way things are now."
"How come grown-ups have trouble sleeping?"
"Well, not all grown-ups have trouble sleeping. It depends. But I think it's time for you to go beddy-bye. Run along now, the governess must be looking for you."
As the baby of the family, arriving nine years behind his siblings, my dad slept in his parents' room. In winter, so they would have more air, they kept the bedroom windows shut and left the door to the dining room open. Lying there in his little bed, the boy would peer up at the cabinet, especially the rings in the lions' mouths, which he had used to hold himself up as a toddler, just as his brothers and sisters and father had before him.
One Saturday night, after taking his bath—as the youngest in the family, he always went first—he climbed into bed all squeaky clean and nestled into the comforters up to his nose. But as he drifted off to sleep, from under his drooping eyelids he caught a glimpse of the rings in the lions' mouths glistening like gold in the room next door. But it was dark out! How could that be? What was going on? And he sat right up and took a look around.
Down to earth and into the dining room, the full moon beamed out its light, the hushed decibels of desire that have stirred every living creature since time immemorial.
It drew the boy out of bed, too. First he went to touch the rings in the lions' mouths and then he walked to the window. It had started to snow at the beginning of the week. Not much, just enough to coat the landscape with frosting. The temperature hadn't dropped to freezing yet, the snow was barely holding on, but then suddenly it had stopped snowing and a big freeze set in, so that everywhere you looked it was white. But the mill pond had frozen overnight, and now it was sparkling, dark and fantastic, in the moonlight.
You couldn't have found a better slide in Paradise itself!
The boy stared, transfixed. He wasn't the only one to fall under the spell, however. Perched on his hind legs on the pond's snowy edge was their black dog, Rex, snout upturned, barking and whining as if in song.
In the whole white world it was just the three of them: moon, dog, and boy. Everyone else was on some other planet, hastily finishing the evening chores and lining up for the bathtub.
All at once the boy tore himself away from the window and scampered as is, barefoot in his floppy white nightshirt, out of the room, down the stairs, across the yard, and out to the pond. He gave Rex a brief hello, then hop! sprang onto the smooth expanse of dark, shining ice. Crouching down nice and low on landing so as not to lose his balance, he made it as far as the middle of the pond before sliding to a stop. At first the dark gleam made Rex uneasy, but within a second he had joined the boy, licking at him as he ran alongside. When the boy stood back up, the soles of his feet stung so badly he hopped around groaning, "Ow, ow!" But he couldn't help it, it was as though he were possessed, and again hop! and again that heavenly slide, with the huffing and puffing Rex at his side.
Later that night, his mom went to peek in on her darling son and found him lovingly embracing the furry Rex beneath the striped comforters. The boy didn't even stir at her startled cry, and Rex just wagged his tail under the covers, then vanished like a shadow.
I assume the story had a happy ending, because Dad had no unpleasant memories of the incident, and he cherished the delight of that evening all his life.
"You know, children, today it seems strange that sliding was all I could think of, and yet I managed to see and take in so much. I can remember the freshly scrubbed stairs, the clean-swept yard, the grass still visible beneath the light snow, the white willow trees alongside the pond, and beyond it the meadow climbing up to the woods. And what I couldn't see, I knew and sensed: the carp below the ice, the squirrels, the deer, the rabbits in the woods, the bats in the attic, the chickens in the henhouse, the geese, the pigs, the sheep, the cows in the barn, the horses in the stable, and my momma and poppa and brothers and sisters in the warm, snow-covered house. I was aware of all that existed back there in the mill behind me, but everything here as well—above and below the ice, and in and around the woods, the grand music of silence, and touching it all was the light of the moon, and the light was like a living thing."
Dad's "heavenly moonlight slide," as it came to be called in his countless retellings, has become our inalienable birthright, and it is now being passed on to the next generations.
But what do Mojmír's children in Canada think when they hear it, or Libuše's grandchildren in Rome ? Those who have at least some memories of Grandpa and what we shared, and those who grew up far away from our family and all that was ours?
Some time later the cabinet was put in my room. By then it was known as the laundry chest, owing to Dad's use of the drawers for socks and underwear. I myself used it for all sorts of things but kept the laundry up on the shelves with the glass doors; that was probably when the cabinet got its first curtains, so you couldn't see inside. Dad had kept books up there.
After I got married, I put the cabinet-cum-laundry chest in our bedroom. I would lie in bed and look at it, and when insomnia struck me also, I too began to talk to it.
So what secrets did Dad tell you? He complained about Mom and us, didn't he? Come on, you can tell me—on second thought, never mind, I've had enough of that already. All I want to know is, what do you do when your life doesn't work out the way you want it to? Surely by now you must have seen and heard it all; you've got experience. So don't just sit there, give me some advice!
When they locked me up, the only thing that Dad brought back to his place from my apartment was the old cabinet. Then, after my release, I put it in the kitchen next to the sink. It was an ugly apartment, but I tried to make it livable.
I didn't talk to the cabinet anymore, and I had completely forgotten about our former nighttime conversations. For one thing, despite all my trials and tribulations, things were getting better; and for another, although I am ashamed to admit it, I was happy. I only spoke to the cabinet once, when we were hammering nails for a towel rack into her comely side (the one facing the sink, which was hidden by a curtain). I apologized, patting the cabinet like a loyal horse: "Sorry, old girl, I know I shouldn't do this, but we live in turbulent times, you know. And besides, the more useful you are, the longer you'll be here with us. So tra-la-la-la-la, come on now, smile!"
Several years later I spotted a group of Americans at the Hermitage in Leningrad. They were examining a silver-plated door inlaid with tortoiseshell and pointing to an ugly tin strip with the inventory number attached to the work of art by a common nail. "I can understand," I said in English, but with a smile different from theirs. "In eventful times, all kinds of things are done 'temporarily' and then stay that way for a very long time." The Americans silently walked away.
But now it occurs to me: How was it, anyway, that you made the move from Dad's room to mine? We were living with Mom at Grandpa's, so it must have been after our parents got divorced. I can still see the shadows on your wood, the strange green reflections that flashed in your glass whenever a strong wind rocked the treetops outside the window. It's all so strange. I wonder how come Dad didn't keep you? He rescued you in the fifties, while I was in prison, which proves that he truly loved you.
At the time of the family disaster, all of us children were angry with Dad because he was the one who asked for the divorce and made Mom leave the house. ("My house," he called it, and yet it belonged to both of them.) She was seriously ill, so it seemed obvious to us that we should take her side.
I still don't how the cabinet ended up with me. Either my dad offered it to me and I didn't even notice that he was trying to do something nice—I barely thanked him, probably a nod and that was it; or else he was so downtrodden and bitter that he was already thinking of suicide. I just don't know. But however it happened, I'm afraid that I exhibited a sizable measure of rudeness and insensitivity. Whether I accepted the cabinet only because it was convenient—in terms of size, perhaps, or color—without any thought to how much it meant to him; or whether he himself didn't want it—our childhood years, both his and mine, were ancient history; either way, it still upsets me to remember it.
"Daddy, tell us what it was like when you were little," we would plead, and he was more than happy to talk. Of course that was when we were children. We loved him then. But when did we stop, and why?
"I know that you all find me boring and offensive. Do you think I don't notice how you avoid me? The way you disappear after dinner to study, and then when it's time for bed the governess finds you over at the caretaker's house."
He was right. It was always peaceful there. Mrs. Bylinková was a sweet woman, and besides, it was fun with Mr. Bylinka. They had a tomcat, and their son, Toník, went to school with us. We always tried to sneak up the stairs unnoticed when we came home, but our four pairs of scampering feet and whispered warnings—"Shhh, shhh, quiet!"—were louder than we thought. The door to the study would fly open, and Dad would lean out into the hall and yell, livid with rage, his deep, booming voice echoing down the stairs, pinning us where we stood.
Then sometimes Mom would come to the rescue. Suddenly the piano in the sunroom would stop short, and she would appear, pale and quiet, at the other end of the hall. "Please, Matouš, take it easy," she would say softly, solemnly, admonishingly. And Dad would disappear into his study. But sometimes afterward—and that was the worst—he would guiltily creep upstairs to apologize, explaining that our lack of love for him was due to a tremendous beating that none of us could remember. We dismissed his colorful account, with embarrassing new details each time, as exaggerated if not outright invented.
Eventually our mom confirmed that there had in fact been a beating and that it had truly been awful. She said that she had been afraid he would kill us, and went to fetch Mr. Bylinka (of course she rang for the maid to fetch him; she wouldn't have left us alone). Everyone was there—the governess, the cook, the maid, the caretaker—my God! All four of us ended up coming down with a high fever. But Mom wouldn't tell us the whole story until we were adults, long after Dad had moved out of the house. When we were children, she always just changed the subject.
Dad went on being high-strung, but he never so much as laid a hand on us after that. Once his screaming ceased to terrify us, it was simply annoying. So far as we were concerned, that horrible beating had been nothing but a feverish nightmare.
Yes, a feverish nightmare. That must have been Mom's idea. I can hear her now, dismissing our childish questions with a smile: "Why, of course not, he never did anything of the sort. You were only sick with fever, and delirious. But you're well again now, and it's a sunny day!" Even if it wasn't, rain, sleet, or snow, she always managed to look on the bright side. "Now just go to sleep and clear all those nasty dreams from your heads!" The younger children accepted her interpretation as a matter of course, and the older ones were happy to do the same. Our mom's insistence convinced us that we were incapable of distinguishing dream from reality; that and the fact that, somewhere deep down, we loved our dad—although we came to forget that in the years to come.
After all, how could we not remember such a beating? The oldest one of us, at least, must have in school by then, right? But even that we can't be sure of, since we accepted our mom's story without question and never returned to the subject again, and now there is no one left to ask.
What was it like for our dad, though? To see those four little bodies—his own children!—shaking with delirious fever? Mom didn't blame him, but the unspeakable guilt he felt nevertheless must have been nerve-racking.
And what brought him to such a state? Why is it that no one ever talked about it?
We faulted him for being selfish (only in our minds or among ourselves at first, but eventually to his face), for always dwelling on his own troubles and not talking about anything but himself over and over. Because as hard as he hammered home how much he loved us, he still had to look in a notebook to see how old we were and which grade we were in (at least he didn't mix up our names—but he did!—oh, come on, don't try to tell me he didn't know what our names were!). And when he was in a sentimental mood and lifted one of us up on his lap, kind and gentle, saying, "So tell me something about yourself," before we could even finish a sentence, he would interrupt: "Oh, I know what that's like, oh boy, when I was your age ...," and once again we would have to sit and listen to him talk about himself.
Yes, all that was true, but after listening to him explain for the tenth or eleventh time that the reason we had stopped loving him was because of that beating, after which he would forgive us because he felt guilty, we would mumble an obligatory "Of course we love you! We don't remember that at all!" How come we always looked down at the ground when we said it? How come we didn't wrap our arms around his neck and just ask, at least once: "So what made you do it?"
We couldn't ask. It was too upsetting. We didn't want to imagine him beating small children like a madman—and maybe Mom as well, when she tried to protect us. The less we talked about it, the more we felt that his rage sprang from some sad secret between him and Mom. That was what we feared, and it hovered over us like a dark cloud all through our childhood.
Mom never even mentioned the secret until we were grown-ups, and even then very little. Still, I don't recall her ever telling us, "You're just children, mind your own business. Wait until you get older." She might have; but there was probably no need. For instance, the time we were having lunch and Dad started screaming that the soup was too salty, or not salty enough, and he hurled the bowl to the floor and Mom softly ordered us upstairs. So we ran off, hearing his furious voice all the way up the stairs until the governess closed the door behind us. Later Mom came up to see us, looking tired but steady. She asked how we were doing in school, and no one said a word about what had happened. We felt good with her, safe. With Mom around, the menacing cloud that haunted us even in sleep was nowhere to be seen.
Dad was incapable of that kind of self-discipline. He was convinced that whenever we were with Mom she would complain about him, slander him, try to turn us against him. So whenever he got us alone, he would justify and boast and accuse us and Mom of one thing or another, constantly summoning up that fearsome cloud. We were never safe with him; he would start screaming furiously out of the blue, or torment us with nonsense about Mom—and if we stood up for her, we ended up screaming, too. So we avoided him whenever possible, and when there was no way around it we were so careful to avoid the subject that we would become tangled up in a snarl of confusion, doubt, and fear, and not know what to talk about at all.
What is a man to do when he's alone in his own family? The hawk tells his woes to his own kind, they say, and so Dad told his woes to the cabinet.
Huddled and weeping, I am underneath the piano in the corner of the parlor at our grandparents' house. I raise my head to look, as many feet engaged in giddy conversation make their way in from the hall, and notice my brother Mojmír right next to me, hiding under the same piano—could he be crying too? We are both embarrassed, but there is no time to be ashamed, because the sofa and armchairs on the other side of the room, where the company will be sitting, afford a wonderful view of the piano. It's time for a vanishing act, and fast. I'm closest to the door, so I go first.
Something bad had happened at home again before we left for Grandpa and Grandma's, and sitting in the carriage across from our parents was not the best way to forget it.
Another time I caught Libuše by surprise in the thick hedges along the garden wall, where we used to hide in times of trouble. We huddled together, arms clutched around each other's shoulders, watching with tears streaming down our faces as the guests settled in at the tables on the patio. All of the laughter and cheerful shouts! And no one but the children hidden in the jasmine noticed our parents' forced smiles and mournful eyes.
Years later, during a visit to some friends, Libuše and I went to take a walk through the June garden. We stopped at a blossoming bush of jasmine and stood there a while talking. My sister broke off a twig, lifted it over her head, and turned it over, chatting away as she studied the underside of the leaves and blossoms.
"Do you realize what you're doing?" I said, laughing. She looked up, surprised. "I only meant that I do the same. Jasmine in bloom always reminds me of how we used to meet crying our eyes out in the bushes." We looked at each other, then Libuše nodded, smiled, and we hugged.
So why was it that we didn't go to Mom with our pain, as we did with everything else? We felt bad for both of them, I think, and there were times when we didn't want to go to just one—and that means we loved them both. What Dad would have given for a sign of love like that!
Every time we visited him after he moved out, he would bring up "our problem." And we of course would stubbornly dodge and sidestep, keeping our mouths shut. He would go right on justifying and blaming, while we turned a deaf ear and waited distractedly for him to finish. He noticed, he could sense it, obviously, and it became almost a matter of life and death for him (but it was, it really was!), but he just went on ranting and raving, not wanting to stop, not able to stop, and then he would raise his voice and start to scream—there he goes again!—turning meaner and meaner by the minute, and we were too, until all of us felt sick to our stomachs and he was too drained to go on; after all, he was getting old. Then, eyes closed, he would fall back breathless in his chair, wishing he could die—and not one of us gave him so much as a pat on the back.
My brother Mojmír comes to mind. For thirty years now, he says, he has been peacefully at war with his wife. He even considered divorce, but then Helena said she loved him and begged him to stay. "Love me?" Mojmír said, amazed. "I was ready to leave because I was tired of not knowing whether you loved me or not. Usually I feel that I'm just getting on your nerves and bringing you down, that you're not happy with me."
As I recall, Mojmír didn't want to get married. God knows how it ever happened, but I do know that he didn't regret it afterward—in fact, he said that he only truly fell in love with Helena after they were married. Still—and it only occurs to me now, as I look at the cabinet; Mojmír probably hasn't thought of it yet—how many times has he hurt her, insulted her, humiliated her, frozen her feelings of warmth with neglect? And now Helena is not unlike Mojmír with Dad, knowing and feeling how he suffers as he waits for a single loving word. Mojmír wanted so badly to help, but couldn't manage those three words, or even a gesture requiring no words at all. It was all there inside of him, reserved for Dad alone, and even though he ached with the same pain as Dad, he couldn't bring himself to do it....
It's strange: I finally took a look at the holes the nails left in the side of the cabinet, and it truly is amazing how little they are. I suppose that wood's wounds heal faster than ours.
It all comes rushing in on me, as if someone had taken everything ever contained in the cabinet's drawers and shelves and dumped it out over my head, and now it's scattered everywhere and I'm sitting in the middle of the floor trying to make some sense out of it.
This is what I see on my first run-through.
We closed our eyes and were sucked into the misery. In our confusion we turned selfish, standing up only for our right to peace and quiet. And now that we are beginning to understand and figure things out, it's too late. But then again, maybe not. For history is the teacher of life in all things, great and small.
How many times did we listen to Dad thunder in that fire-and-brimstone voice which so unnerved us: "To hell with it all, I don't care about any of it. I just want to give you my experience, do you hear? My experience!" And we thought: What on earth is he so riled up for if he doesn't give a damn?
We failed to grasp that by "experience" he meant the knowledge he had gained through a mountain of suffering. That was what he wanted to spare us.