Lili Comes to Herself (6)- Just Not Yet, Though

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Hanging in there, being strong, or acting decently are often goals that override our need to feel, and process our emotions. When the going gets even tougher, disconnecting ourselves from who we are and what we are going through seems the only way to weather the hardships and survive without collapsing — or so we believe.

I’m reading a book these days about the character arc. Any good story, it explains, is about the main character believing a Lie, being punished for it, then gradually seeing the Truth, until in the end, the hero(ine) dumps the Lie completely and chooses the Truth.

Lili, the character you’re reading about below¹, believes a terrible Lie: in order to get what I want, I must put away my inner life; in order to find myself and be fulfilled, I must remove myself from my reality. She believes the Lie because of a personal family trauma, but also under the pressure of an oppressive society, which pushes individuals into a flight mode that has become a way of being.

Although her story is set in the communist Romania of the 80s, the Lie she believes is quite common, beyond time and geographical borders. In the chapter below, she gets a first glimpse of the Truth: at her father’s funeral, she almost allows herself to inhabit her grief. But she shakes this momentary weakness off, and carries on hovering like a ghost.

It will take another two thirds of the story to commit herself to the Truth and choose to inhabit her body and her heart.

How can we be punished for believing such a Lie, do you think? What blows and hardships may be in store to shake us out of a zombie mode? What does it take to transform ourselves back into living human beings?

Everything had stood still when she heard the news, but then things started to race by.

Phone calls by Mother notifying the nearest family, bravely, almost neutrally, frozen as it were, lest she should break down.

Phone calls from distant family, or connections, who had heard about it and could not believe it — some had not even been aware that Professor Danes had been arrested.

Phone calls from the Physics Institute to express condolences.

Phone calls from Mother’s theatre to express condolences.

Rhetorical questions, can I do anything to help?

Some of the times, Lili happened to pick the calls. She did not know how to say it. You can only say what you know, what you have heard and possibly been exposed to, before. Otherwise you are at a loss for words. She did find some words eventually, but they had nothing to do with her father. With Mother. With their past. Nor with the present.

And then people inevitably sounded so stricken and compassionate, while Lili only felt dazed. She wasn’t about to break down, if that’s what they were expecting. She was just a ghost hovering quietly about the house, lighter than air, whiter than fog, so Mother might not worry about her on top of her own grief. Lili would have gladly imploded so she might occupy only negative space in this story, with no perceptions, just eyes closed, ears stoppered, jaws tight.

Aunts and uncles and cousins and many others she had never known started thronging into their house,  cooking the funeral meal, doing the house cleaning, counting the chairs and fetching more from the neighbours, rugs rolled up and furniture shoved aside to make room for the big chain of tables, uncountable amounts of pottery, cutlery, napkins, plastic cups and a huge cauldron to feed a platoon, all were pouring in, which was in a way refreshing, as there were people alive swarming about, voices, activity.

The tradition had it that the house should get full of people, relatives or not, and keep vigil for the dead before his final journey. The deceased one was not in the house, though, and nobody knew where he was, but the tradition had to be kept, as there was not much else left to keep. The night would be spent sitting and maybe talking about him, candles would be kept burning, while in the background the final preparations for the funeral meal would be carried out quietly: all the stuffed cabbage rolls rolled by hand and placed in the huge cauldron, the koliva to be boiled and portioned out in the saucers, the bowls, or together with the other dishes on the plates, all to be given as alms after the service.

The white Bacis’ Lada was busy carrying stuff and relatives, from authority offices to cemetery and to other relatives to get even more stuff. Vlad was wearing a particularly tight rictus across his face now, tighter than his inborn one, and eyed Lili with concern and commiseration, offering professional help from specialists his father knew, or various vitamins and tranquillisers in the form of capsules or vials. That he was taking so much trouble on her account went down on his tab, for sure. The tab lay somewhere on a shelf in her inner archive. Someday, everything will add to something that will count. But today was not that day.

Vlad drove her to the cemetery the next day, where, in the chapel, there was a coffin lying on a shabby black sheet, surrounded by flower wreaths with various condolence messages written on the ribbons. It was astonishing how many people had sent flowers, including the Institute, the Rectorate, the publisher who had rejected the Professor’s latest book, the Party office in the university, department colleagues, Mother’s colleagues, and so many more she could not take the time identifying.

The family was ordained to stand around the coffin during the service, and Vlad stood next to her at all times. The chapel was freezing and draughty. The walls looked as if they were made of stone turned black from the smoke of the countless funeral candles that must have been burnt here, and the priest’s chanting took shrill notes at times. The coffin was closed; it was just a wooden box with a ribbon folded around it, We will never be consoled —  your Maria and Lili.

The coffin was empty, everyone knew that. The body had not been found, and the prosecutor had preferred not to give pictorial descriptions of the circumstances of his passing away. Not that it mattered much at that moment; the coffin was there, and that was all that mattered.

She felt the lump that usually cringed in her chest move up to her throat, and a gush of water welled up to her eyes. She couldn’t make sense of what was going on in her body. Vlad’s hand gripped hers more tightly yet, as if saying hang on there, be brave, and Lili was brave; the water was dammed and sent back behind her eyes, and the lump was pushed down below awareness. The coffin was just an empty wooden box, this here was just a ritual, the flower wreaths a convention; one does that for funerals. The funeral was the only thing that continued to feel strange here, or not to feel at all, as Lili couldn’t allow herself to feel. She would not dwell on this cringe, she would not inhabit it, just as Father was not inhabiting that coffin, and Mother was not there either, except for some tears on her face, she was staring into the void, in fact nobody was here, apart from the audience who were watching an empty ritual unfold.

The amount of tears and of the colour black she could see around, including her own clothes, was getting unbearable. What were those black things doing there, what were they doing to her? She was like a shadow, like the ghost of her self, not for mourning, but for estrangement.

So that was the end of the family jokes re-playing the old Yimmi Papa refrains (come you’re a lovely Papa, oh, you’re such a clever Papa and such a good Papa, come Yimmi Papa just one more story, please, you know I love you Yimmi Papa);

and it was the end of the swinging up and down with the moods in the house,

no more risky, politically clumsy blunders,

no more being bookish and scholarly;

it was the end of something bigger still, something that had felt like a given, something there, like the gravitation law, beyond rolling eyes and making faces, beyond sulking and pulling back, screaming and kicking, beyond not finding words to say what one meant, or even finding the real feeling to put in words — was it anger was it doubt was it fear was it insecurity was it jealousy was it judgement was it — come show your face again, your real face, the one I know so well and love so dearly, what’s going on with us what are we doing to ourselves.

Something was hopefully going to end this service and the whole nightmare of accompanying the empty coffin to its grave, stopping the hearse at every cross-ways in the cemetery for some more chanting and wailing dust to dust, for a renewed chance for the audience to break down in tears.

But when they stopped by the grave there came the blow. 

Apart from the muddy hole that was gaping outrageously.

Lili suddenly opened her eyes to see the crowd. Behind the family, close or distant, faces familiar or barely known, behind the circumstantial friends or enemies, behind the clique around Bodu-Beran and other impostors, there was a compact crowd of young people holding a banner reading We are missing you, Professor! Their eyes were set on Lili, or so she felt, but were not commiserating. They were themselves in mourning. She almost had an impulse of reaching out to comfort them. The sadness in their eyes, the banner they held in a compelling picture of despair, there was nothing left of being brave, of staying away from pain. It was all about looking pain in the face, being real about it and committing oneself to it. No ritual, no pose, no being nice.

The students were missing their professor, their mentor, their model. Lili’s father.

Father.

Lili felt her knees go lifeless for a second. If she should break down now, she would be held by those young people’s strength. Dust to dust, pain to pain, coming out again at the other end. She could let herself go, on the awareness of what the Professor — Father — had meant to his fellow humans, and she could take it from there. She could just erase the details of the past years, dismiss the faces around and all their good intentions, and grieve.

Vlad’s arm held her tight, though, not letting her go. She cannot give in to it now. No show to put up.

Funerals are much more of a hell than death itself; you need to be tough enough to survive and carry on. Life after the funeral will take you back, an item lost and found. The critical moment of collapsing will have been bridged over.

1. Vlad Baci is Lili’s boyfriend; the only reason he’s around in her life is that she cannot connect with her own feelings to see that in fact she’s not in love with him.